Kid 72 into my ear hisses, "Give me the pill."
Sheila standing, calling the bluff, waiting.
Dudes all waiting.
Next to me, another dude's voice says, "So, Mr. Bacardi, is that Demerol in your locket?" Here's the teddy-bear dude, number 137, saying, "Are you planning an encore performance with Miss Wright?"
Kid 72 says, "What's he mean?"
Dude 137 says, "Why not drug your son? You already drugged his mother…"
Player dude's strapping on a knockoff Rolex President. Out of his brown grocery bag, he's fishing a bad imitation of a Hugo Boss belt I got hanging in my closet back at my apartment.
Sheila looks our way, saying, "Number 72, if you'd care to join us?"
Kid 72 whispers, "What'll I do?"
I tell him, Fuck her.
And the teddy-bear dude says, "Obey your father."
Kid 72 says, "What's that mean?"
And I shrug.
The player dude's working his cufflinks, milking the job to take long as possible, his cuff links nothing better than nine-karat, even in this dim light.
Kid dude turns to the teddy-bear dude, sweat shining on the kid's face, his whites showing all around his eyes, and he says, "Give me a pill?"
Dude 137 gives the kid a long look, up and down.
Teddy-bear dude smiles and says, "What'll you pay for it?"
Kid says, "All I got is fifteen bucks in my wallet."
Still watching Sheila, her watching the player dude in their stalemate, I say money ain't what the teddy-bear dude is after. At least not fifteen bucks.
Kid says, "What, then?" He says, "Hurry."
I ask the kid if he knows the term "fluffer," what it means. I say that's what dude 137 wants.
Dude still smiling, holding his bear, says, "That's what I want."
Above us on the TVs, the camera comes in for a close-up penetration shot, and the wop dude's nut sack is pockmarked with botched electrolysis scars. Craters of the moon. Showing on a dozen TV screens, both his nuts pulled up tight under the exploded disaster of the dude's wrinkled red asshole.
The player dude ties his shoelaces.
And, still halfway up the stairs, Sheila yells, "Would everyone please pipe down. Just let me think. " She looks at her clipboard. Looks at kid 72. Looks at the player, dressed and ready to walk out. Sheila says, "Just this once…" She jerks her thumb at the player, saying, "Number 14, come with me." Pointing a finger at the kid, she says, "Number 72, stand down."
Dudes start back to talking, chewing their taco chips, taking leaks and not flushing the toilet. Their fingers come uncrossed. On the TVs, the ugly wop dude's sweating so hard his bronzer rolls down his cheeks in brown zebra stripes, showing the dry, flaky, fried skin underneath. To no dude in particular, pointing up at the television wop dude, I go, "Dudes, do me a favor?" I go, "Kill me if I ever look that bad."
Beside me, standing a little behind me, dude 137 says, "That was a close call…"
The kid, dude 72 says, "What's a fluffer?"
And Cord Cuervo says, "Dude, what are you saying?" He makes a fist and gives me a little sock in the shoulder. His bronzer glues tight to my bronzer, so he has to peel his knuckles off my shoulder skin, and Cord says, "On the TV? That is you, dude. From, like, five years ago."
18. Mr. 72
Mr. Bacardi stares up at the TVs they have hanging from the ceiling, showing porno, and he keeps saying, "No… no fucking way…"
Mr. Bacardi just stands in one place, staring up at the TVs, maybe using two fingers to pinch the loose skin under his jaw, pull it tight, and let go. He's staring at the movie on TV, running his fingers over his cheeks, stretching the skin back toward his ears so his wrinkles around his lips disappear, saying, "Fucking camera dude, he made me look like shit." His skin in some spots as wrinkled as my pink plastic sex surrogate, Mr. Bacardi keeps saying, "No way I look that trashed. Fucking lighting dudes.»
Guy 137, who used to be Dan Banyan, he holds up his autograph hound, staring it straight in the button eyes, and says, "Somebody's in denial…"
The headlines on those newspapers they sell at the grocery-store checkout counter, they're true. The gossip stuff about why Dan Banyan got his TV series took off the air. That gossip they printed was real.
"I was starving. I was a starving actor," says guy 137, his head tipped back but not looking at the TVs. Instead, he's grinning at the ceiling. Laughing at the nothing there. And he says, "If anybody can identify with how Cassie Wright feels at this moment, that person is me.»
Above us, on the TVs, my mom's starring in The Italian Hand Job, where she plays an international mystery woman looking to steal the crown jewels of some place.
Mr. Bacardi sucks in his stomach and stands taller, saying, "The cheap-ass video like this, the resolution is crap." He says, "They might as well have shot this from a damned satellite."
Anger, guy 137 calls it.
"I was your age," the 137 Dan Banyan guy says and looks at me. He takes a big breath and lets it out, slow. His shoulders shrug up, high to his ears, and he says, "The finance company kept phoning me about repossessing my car. A couple late payments on my credit cards, and they jacked the interest rate up to thirty percent." His shoulders drop so his hands sag almost to his knees, and he says, "Thirty percent! On a balance of twenty-five grand, that looked like the rest of my life to pay off."
So he made a porn movie, he says. "It can only take a moment," the 137 guy says, "to waste the rest of your life…"
He asks did I know a movie called Three Days of the Condom. He says, "Well, it paid off my car. Didn't touch the principal on my credit card, but I got to keep my car."
He didn't figure anyone would ever see it. At the time, his acting was going nowhere. It was ten years before he got his big break in Dan Banyan, Private Detective.
That condom movie's been hanging over his head ever since.
"Doing an all-male gay gang-bang movie is an act of resignation," he says and waves one hand, his eyes sweeping over half the room. He says, "You and every man in here, no matter what you do up in that room, whether you tell Cassie Wright you love her, or you fuck her, or you do both—don't expect you'll ever get confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court."
Porn, he says, is a job you only take after you abandon all hope.
The Dan Banyan guy says half the guys here were sent by their agents to rack up some face time. He says the entire entertainment industry expects Cassie Wright to die today, and every would-be actor in town is wanting to springboard off the controversy.
"Just between you and me, kid," he says, pointing at me, then pointing at his own chest, "when your agent sends you on a look-see to fuck a dead woman, you know your career's in the toilet."
A little ways off, Mr. Bacardi digs his fingertips into the skin of his stomach, saying, "You think, if I did more hanging knee raises?" He opens both hands, turning them and looking at both sides, and says, "They have that microdermabrasion to give you young skin again." Grabbing a handful of skin above one hipbone, he says, "Maybe liposuction isn't out of the question. Calf implants. Maybe those pec implants."
The Dan Banyan guy holds up his dog, looking eye-to-eye at it, and says, "Bargaining."
On the TV screens, it's some old scene of Mr. Bacardi ramming my mom from behind. Every draw back, when he shoves his wiener in, his saggy old-man balls swing to spank my mom on her shaved taint. That no-man's-land dividing her snatch and ass.