The school? I mean, they were only too happy, once Production started handing out checks. They loved our hottie too. They set her up with the coach, full access, and our babe did her homework. She got her stretch, she walked the talk, all the way out to the edge.
What? What, older—no no no. She didn’t want to play older. The woman knows our thing better than that. She wanted to play lesbian. That could be the career, right there, the Lesbian in a Leading Role. Especially when, this time, the Satan who strolls into the locker room has to be a girl herself.
I mean, once again, we’ve got the pieces in place. We’ve got the scene on the shower-room floor, the coach in her practice shorts and sports bra, the final smackdown with the lady Satan. We’ve got the turnaround money. And then there was the ensemble. Unknowns, those girls, naturals. There were these two in particular, recruited from gymnastics, here on student visas. Out of, what was it, Burkina Faso? I know we called them the Rubber Band and the Square Knot. And girls like that, they gave us a strong secondary arc, see. They gave us fresh black faces in Wonder Bread country. You see that arc? We got Rubber Band married to the local minister at the Church of the Eternal Abortion Ban, I mean, talk about a strong second line. We got this super-athletic missionary housewife in her spandex spraying stain remover on a piece of laundry and shouting, “Begone, Demon! I command thee!”
So. We’ve got ignition, we’ve got liftoff—but. Suddenly out there in Bullet Hole, Oklahoma, where the story of the last winning season had long since passed into legend—you see where I’m going with this, don’t you? See it all in hideous slow motion. An eleven-game winning streak, and then the playoffs, five more. Our little band of hicks, they sweep to the district title, the division championship. All of a sudden we’re not the only camera crew on campus. All of a sudden it’s another story entirely, it’s Cinderella, and meantime we’re back to the proctologist. Worse, while we’re face down with our butt in the air, everyone else is high on a happy ending. Everyone in town has got a smile for us, a smile and a cheerful word: “Can’t wait for the movie!”
Still, we’re catching the games like everyone else. I mean, if we’re out in the roadhouse, we’re not there for the Possum Tortilla. We’re there for strong rye and satellite reception. I mean, how else could we ever hope to catch a break, a fresh something or other? I mean, isn’t it about faith, my brother? Faith, that’s always got to be a part of this business, even when the ball starts taking those funny bounces.
Tomorrow, you know, I’m going to walk in there and pitch this project again. I watched all the games, I saw all the funny bounces, and tomorrow I’m going to walk that talk again. I just wonder how I didn’t pick up on what was happening when I saw it on the widescreen. One of us should’ve picked up on it, somewhere during that craziness—how we were getting messed with.
But. Along about the Final Four, what we began to pick up, it was another vibe. It was the excitement every time those twin forwards out of Rwanda or somewhere came onscreen. You don’t need me to tell you. You’ve developed the same nervous system. What we picked up was the rumble of a big narrative on the move—this could work—and we called LA. We called New York. Coast to coast, they were all saying the same, namely that those two girls ate the screen. They covered the court and ate the screen. Two fine young sistahs, their unis drenched with sweat and their hair gone nappy, and they were already under contract with Production. Then on our side, the creative, we knew what we had to do. We had to get out of town. Way out of town and over to Africa.
Our project, I’m saying, it was too real to die. Every time we moved, I mean, weren’t we that much closer? All we needed was the least little bit of traction.
Of course this was all before we learned we were getting messed with. But, I’m saying—we thought America was the problem. America, land of damn opportunity, the goddamn national anthem itself all about a spangled show in the dark. A fresh fairy tale every time the ball’s in play. And if the laws of probability are out the window, how can anyone make a movie? Your audience needs to recognize the Lord of Darkness at the first glimpse of smoke. They need to recognize winning or losing as it takes shape out beyond the second plot twist. After that they look forward to a comforting ascent, or a descent if you can find someone to bankroll a downer—anyway they count on it as soon as they see it coming on. The stages of grief or dying or lying or marriage or man or whatever. How else can you ever bring a bunch of strangers together in the dark?
The dark, like right there out the window, the dark. Right there’s your Cineplex. Haw, a little irony, brother. But even out there, you set up the good probabilities, and the story fills even those seats.
So. Our project, this is how we came to see it—our project needed another country. A place where the wretched stay wretched. At the same time, though, we had to keep our talent in place. I’m talking about the leading lady here, the woman we referred to privately as our Check Magnet. Along about the Final Four, you can imagine, she’d been ready to bail. She’d been thinking, same as the rest of us, this’ll never happen in America. But as soon as she heard the new mantra, location location location, she was back on board. She’s, I can tell you this much—she’s white. And she wants that edge, that stretch, right? So what could be better than Sistahs Without Bawdahs, plus some international pro bono? And I do mean Bono.
Capital B, haw, yeah. A little irony. It’s just, that guy, he’s always over in Africa, isn’t he, and so the photo ops, they couldn’t’ve been easier.
In the meantime, in the movie, our babe switched over to the super-athletic missionary wife. The role she was born to play. The scene where she condemns genital mutilation and then shows the African girls how to masturbate—that was genius, pure physical acting. That’s going to show up on her cable bio some day.
But. But. Do I even need to say it? Out between the white lines there was never anything but craziness and funny bounces. We started out with basketball, maybe in Benin, maybe in Togo. But it was an Olympic year. And you know what the doctor says, while he’s snapping on the gloves—just try and relax. The Benin Eleven, or was it the Togo Twelve, they took home the gold and we snuck out of town. We moved over to Burundi and field hockey. I mean in Burundi, forget about hockey, they don’t even have fields. But, next thing you know, those girls are running around screaming after the last match for the World Cup. They’re wrapping themselves in a Burundian flag three and four at a time and tumbling together to the ground. Made a great shot, these wriggling parti-color squealing happy choruses of many-headed human striving—but it wasn’t a movie. Then next we thought we’d finally got it with Sudanese water polo, but I know you’ve heard about that one. Bono arranges to have a competition-sized pool put in (Bono, yeah, he always had the wrong end of the stick on our project), and after that, there’s no story bigger than “the girls from Kurdufan.”
Our Actress in a Leading Role, I’ll tell you, I think it broke her. Our Project of the Dead, staggering from turnaround to turnaround, I think it sent her permanently back to music. Then again, this new CD of hers, it could be that she felt she owed it to the musicians. She’d brought some studio rats in on the project, pasty white LA creatures. It could be she felt she owed them, after all the time they lost working out first the school songs, then the National Anthems. No sooner did they get one down than they had to learn another.