All of these stars, the most powerful actors in film, they were all gone in an instant.
True fact.
What sound movies did to their careers, Ms. Wright said, High Definition was doing the same to a new generation of actors. Delivering too much information. An overdose of truth. Stage makeup didn't look like skin, not anymore. Lipstick looked like red grease. Foundation, like a coat of stucco. Razor burn and ingrown hairs might as well be leprosy.
Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer… or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded—the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty.
True fact.
In the past year, Ms. Wright had only been offered one script. A low-budget musical, a fetish vehicle based on the Judy Garland-Vincent Minnelli classic about a sweet, innocent young woman who goes to the World's Fair and falls in love with a handsome young sadist. Called Beat Me in St. Louis.
She learned the songs and everything. Took dance lessons. Never got a second callback.
Looking out the window, her eyes fall shut long enough for her to sing, her voice almost a whisper, almost a lullaby. Her face tilts up a tad, as if to catch a spotlight, and Ms. Wright sings, "… I got bang, bang, banged on the trolley…"
Her eyes peel open, and her voice trails away. Ms. Wright swallows nothing. Slumps to one side, to reach a hand into her purse on the floor. Takes out a pair of black sunglasses.
Pries them open and slides them onto her face.
Still looking at nothing outside the coffee-shop windows, not the street full of cars driving by or the sidewalk where people walked. An endless stream of extras. No-name characters opening umbrellas or holding open newspapers to protect their hair. Not watching any of this, Ms. Wright says, "So what's your brainstorm?"
My pitch. How come I've been phoning her agent. Phoned every production company where she's done any work over the past five years. Written letters. Why I'd insisted I wasn't a stalker. Some pud-puller.
I asked, Did she know Adolf Hitler invented the blow-up sex doll?
And Ms. Wright's black sunglasses turned to look at me.
During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure, and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could go into wide distribution.
True fact.
Ms. Wright, her plucked eyebrows arch to show above her dark sunglasses. The black lenses reflect me. Reflect the paper rim of her coffee cup, smeared red with lipstick. Her lips say, "Do you know I'm a mom?"
Her sunglasses reflect me wearing a tweed suit, my fingers slipping the latch, opening my briefcase, leaning forward, my hair pulled back, twisted into a French knot.
For my pitch, I planned to develop a project based on that first sex doll. Work the Nazi angle. Work the history angle. Hammer together a story with genuine educational value.
Ms. Wright's lips say, "Yeah, I had my baby about the age you're at now."
Do this Hitler sex-doll project, do it the right way, I say how it will make a pile of money for that baby. Whoever that baby grew into, Ms. Wright can give him a college trust fund, the down payment on a house, seed money for a business. Wherever that baby has ended up, he'll just be forced to love her.
Ms. Wright turns her face to look at herself, reflected in the window. The reflections of her reflections of her reflections, between the window and her black sunglasses, all those Cassie Wrights shrinking smaller and smaller, until they disappear into infinity.
The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear. The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you'd be ruined. Overdosed on information.
True fact.
The wrong idea could take root and grow inside you.
Ms. Wright, her sunglasses showed me. Reflected me opening a folder. Taking out a contract. Pulling the cap off a pen and reaching it across the table. My face, flat and smooth with confidence. My own eyes, unblinking. My tweed suit.
Her lips said, "Is that 100 Strokes shampoo that I smell?" She smiled and said, "Now, who was that.?"
The Roman Empress Messalina.
"Messalina," Ms. Wright repeated, and she took the pen.
9. Mr. 600
Kid 72 is easy enough to find, now that his bunch of roses start coming apart, dropping a trail of wilted flower petals to follow him around the room. Dude 72, the kid, his white rose petals follow him as he dogs Sheila around, asking her, "Can I go soon?" Looking at the flowers in his hands, he goes, "Is it true?" He goes, "You think she's going to die?"
Dude 137, the television dude, goes, "Yes, young lady, when might we view the body?"
Kid 72 goes, "You ain't funny."
And the Sheila babe says, "Why would Ms. Wright want to die?"
Six hundred of us waiting in one room, we're breathing the same air for the third or fourth time. Almost no oxygen left, just the sweet stink of hairspray. Stetson cologne. Old Spice. Polo. The sour smoke of marijuana from little one-hitter pipes. Dudes stand at the buffet, scarfing down the candy smell of powdered doughnuts, chili-cheese nachos, peanut butter. Dudes swallowing and farting at the same time. Belching up gas bubbles of black coffee from their guts. Breathing out through wads of Juicy Fruit gum. Chewed mouthfuls of pink bubble gum or buttered popcorn. The chemical stink of Sheila's fat black felt pen. The what's-left smell of the kid's rose bunch.
The locker-room smell of some dude's bare feet, we breathe that smell like those cheeses from France that smell like your sneakers in high school that you'd wear in gym class all year without washing them.
Cuervo's laid on his bronzer so thick that his arms stick down the sides of his lats. His feet stick to the concrete floor. When Cuervo takes a step, his skin peels off the floor with the sound of somebody yanking off a bandage.
Our one bathroom we got for six hundred dudes to share, the floor's so wet with piss that dudes stand in the doorway and do their best to hit the sink or the toilet. The reek floating out of that doorway smells bad as any step you ever took when your foot slipped instead of landing, outdoors, slick enough you guess it's a mess before you catch a whiff of the dog turd you'll be digging out the tread of your shoe.
Cuervo lifts one arm, making that bandage sound as the skin peels apart, pasted down with bronzer. Cuervo lifts one elbow and ducks his head to sniff that armpit, going, "Should've brought along more Stetson."
Coming off kid 72, we got the green smell of deodorant soap. The mint tang of mouthwash.
To bait him, I ask dude 137, will this be his first time in front of a camera?
Dude 137 shakes his head, throwing off the smell of cigarettes, under that the smell of his stuffed teddy bear soaked in armpit sweat.
I tell him to go easy on the wood pills. Just now, watching him from across the room, dudes are taking bets on how fast he keels over from a stroke. Dude should see how red his face looks, the veins on his forehead standing out plain as lightning bolts. Either that, I say, or he should get in the pool, put some money down on a time. At least that way he'll make a few bucks when he overdoses.