30. Mr. 137
The head of casting for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rejected Roy Fitzgerald three times. The actor stumbled when asked to walk around her office, stumbled so often she worried he'd break her glass coffee table. Fitzgerald, a former navy sailor turned Teamster, who now worked delivering frozen carrots, showed too much gum line when he smiled. Worst of all, he giggled. Fitzgerald spoke with the squeal of a teenage girl, and every time he tripped and stumbled over his own feet he'd giggle.
Nobody would cast the big sissy until his agent, Henry Willson, taught him to press his lips to his teeth as he smiled. Willson exposed Fitzgerald to an actor suffering from strep throat. Once Fitzgerald was infected and his throat fully inflamed, the agent ordered him to scream and shout until his vocal cords were scarred. After that, the actor's voice was lower, a deep, gravelly growl. A man's voice. And his name was changed to Rock Hudson.
I love that Cassie Wright knew that bit of Hollywood history. The fact that we both knew so much of the same trivia—about Tallulah drinking crushed eggshells and Lucy stretching her face back—that made me fall in love with her. Most marriages are based on a lot less.
Cassie knew about Marilyn Monroe cutting one high heel shorter than the other so her ass would truly roll as she walked. Cassie knew that Marilyn's lifetime of pneumonia and bronchitis was most likely caused by her habit of burying herself in a bathtub of crushed ice before any appearance in film or public. Lying naked, drugged to escape the pain, buried in ice for hours, gave Monroe the solid stand-up tits and ass she wanted for the day's work.
Wouldn't you know it?
Cassie knew Marilyn's secret name, the person Monroe dreamed of being. Not the baby-talking, hip-swinging blonde. Monroe dreamed of being respected, an intellectual like Arthur Miller, a respected, Stanislavsky-trained actor. A dignified human being. That's who Monroe would become as she traveled without makeup, without designer clothes borrowed from a movie studio, with her famous hair tied under a scarf, hiding behind horn-rimmed reading glasses. It was that plain, intelligent, educated actress who called herself Zelda Zonk. When she booked airplane tickets or registered in hotels. Zelda Zonk. Who read books. Who collected art. That was who Marilyn Monroe, the blonde sex goddess, dreamed of being.
31. Sheila
Ms. Wright knew.
All along, the woman knew who I was. Who she really was. She played along, knowing she would die. Cassie Wright would willingly fuck six hundred pud-pullers to make me rich.
True fact. Another last thing today comes down to is reality.
What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to be wrong?
That bitch.
32. Mr. 600
On the TVs, they're playing the first movie Cassie ever appeared in. Shot on video, maybe one step better than some security camera at the corner quick-stop grocery. On the TVs is her and me, young as Sheila and the kid 72. Cassie's eyes are rolled up to show only white, her arms flopping loose at her sides, her head rolling around on her neck so far the pull opens her mouth, drool sliding out the corner of her lips.
Slack as a blow-up sex-doll version of herself.
If you want to know, that first film I did with Cassie Wright, I slipped her a diet soda mixed with beta-ketamine and Demerol. With the camera set up on a tripod next to the mattress, I fucked her everywhere my dick would fit.
Because I loved her so much.
That first movie was called Frisky Business. After she got famous, the distributor recut it and released the movie as Lay Misty for Me. Recut as World Whore One.
If you got to know, Cassie never planned to make that first movie.
That movie's playing to the empty basement.
The kid's in the John, scrubbing any poison off his gonads, scrubbing the way the teddy-bear dude scrubbed his forehead.
Sheila comes down the stairs, blubbering. Dragging her sleeves of her sweater across her eyes, smearing snot and whatnot sideways to her ears, her top teeth meeting her bottom teeth on edge, and her jaw bunched with muscle at the corners. She's saying, «Fucker.» Sheila wings the clipboard across the room, where it hits the wall to explode in paper names and numbers. A fluttering cloud of fifty- and twenty-dollar bills that Sheila took as bribe money.
The kid comes out the bathroom door saying, "Don't cry." Saying, "It's what Miss Wright wanted…"
Just graduated from Missoula High School, Cassie had this big plan to go to drama school. She planned to live at home and study to be an actor or a movie star—either way, so long as she was in show business. Either way, she didn't want to marry me. How she told me was her grades were too good. Cassie said maybe if she was stupid and desperate, really clutching at straws and emotionally needy, utterly destroyed, she'd accept my proposal—so I figured there was still hope.
Trouble was, her folks had poisoned her against me with all this self-esteem crap.
The Friday night Cassie told me, I said I understood.
I said I wanted her to live the full, rich life's dream she cherished. And I asked, did she want a diet soda?
The closest thing that comes to how today felt is when you wipe back to front. You're on the toilet. You're not thinking, and you smear shit on the back of your hanging-down wrinkled ball skin. The more you try to wipe it clean, the skin stretches, and the mess keeps getting bigger. The thin layer of shit spreads into the hair and down your thighs. That's how a day like this, how it felt.
Later, Cassie told me the drugs, the beta-ketamine and Demerol, stopped her heart. Her brain cooled, and she rose up out of her body, hovering near the ceiling, looking down, her and the video camera watching my ass clench and relax, clench and relax, as I fucked her until her heart started back to pump. Fucked her to death, then back to life. Humping her dead body around that mattress, I ended the old life she had, wanting to act, and gave her a new life.
Sex reincarnated that good, pure girl, but as something else.
Cassie hovering, watching the action same as I'm doing now.
Behind Sheila, the teddy-bear dude comes down the stairs into the basement. Both his hands clutching the rail at one side.
Sheila yanks the stopwatch, snapping the cord around her neck, and pitches the watch against the concrete wall. Another little explosion.
Another step down, and Sheila says, "The pig took the pill himself."
The kid crosses to his brown paper bag, pulls out tennis shoes, jeans, a T-shirt. A belt. Stepping into his socks, he says, "Who?"
Sheila folds her arms. Looking up at a TV, at me humping Cassie Wright's limp body, she says, "My father."
The teddy-bear dude says, "Who?"
Branch Bacardi.
Me. Dead and hovering, the way Cassie floated up after her heart stopped.
Six hundred dudes. One gal. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.
Didn't one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie. That's a lie.
If you imagined I was alive, that's another. I took the pill.
Buttoning his shirt, the kid says, "Is Mr. Bacardi dead?"
And Sheila says it's hard to tell. She says, "With his tan, and all the bronzer he has on, he looks healthier and more alive than any of us."
My daughter.
On the TVs, I'm popping my load deep inside Cassie's dead snatch, pumping her back to life. A decent money shot wasted, worthless for nothing except making some kid. Sheila. Stupid, stupid me.
33. Mr. 72