Devilcountry (3 page)

She heard about what had happened between
me and Rachel
and took sympathy.   “I saw her do
that to two other guys before you.  You should have talked to me before.
 I heard she tried dating a basketball player after you, just for the
hands.  She had to be hospitalized. She’s weird.  Listen, if you need
a job I can get you in as an office p.a. for the production company I work at.”
 

On the job Jennifer was what I call
“Jewish-sexy”: Not a hair out of place, ever, gorgeous legs, perfectly dressed,
always in short skirts, and her ass was the most amazing piece of art to which
I had ever bore witness.   To me, Jennifer was walking, talking,
living, and breathing Art.  If it were up to me I would put her on display
in the Smithsonian.  Coat her in some type of breathable Lucite, cater to
her every whim and just make her stand there. That would be her job.
 Generations of tourists and explorers would benefit from her sacrifice.
 

The production company specialized in TV movies
based on Joseph Wambaugh novels, usually starring Richard Crenna; movies that
were flipped through with your remote late at night, registering only in the
subconscious, a strong alternative to watching knife infomercials.  Movies
nobody ever gave a shit about but
were
always on, and
somehow somebody always got rich making them.  A movie about
roller skating
and incest starring Patty Duke. A movie
starring Blair Underwood and Shannon Tweed called
O.J. and Nicole – A
Love Story.  
And one of my favorites,
Mr. Kerrigan goes to Sydney
– A Story of Transsexual Olympic Hopes.  
I delivered a strap-on
to the set to be worn by a young Hilary Swank.  It was never aired.
  

The office was plush modern dentist-colonial,
without the drill noises.  
Plenty of fluorescent lights,
which is a no-no in showbiz (anyone worth their SAG card knew that).
 Plastic trees, farmer’s tan carpet, fold-out chairs behind ugly Office
Depot desks, and a copy machine that kept begging me to copy my ass and send it
around as a headshot.  A stunning eight by ten glossy of Assy McRectalberg
made its way around every A-list management company and Actor’s agency on the
grid and eventually made its way onto a few studio lots.  Assy is
currently up for a pilot on Fox, I am told.

I got yogurt for one of the owners, filled up
the tank for the other, and always had to get pizza for the Iceman.
  Iceman was pure slime.  
Mid-fifties
gray-black hair, gym membership, Jaguar, jogging suits, jewelry, box seats, two
failed marriages, and five kids.
 He had made his bones being in
the room when Larry Hagman had made some kind of groundbreaking syndication
deal and he’s ridden the coattails ever since.  They brought him on board
so he could stir up some business, but it wasn’t happening.  So the Iceman
picked on people.  
Anyone, really.
“This pizza’s
too cold!”  “I don’t want a latte!” “Sandra Bullock can eat my balls!”

On my last day of employment I stood alone in
the Iceman’s office waiting for him to give me his food order, as he violated
an actress on the phone.  He sat behind his mother of pearl-inlayed,
antique mahogany pedestal desk dating from the Edwardian period.  It was
an overpriced, tree-killing, fuck desk he had bought off eBay and had the legs
re-fitted to support added weight, so he could do it doggy-style with ease and
efficiency. “So, exactly how would you play the scene if we cast Sean Penn as
the heavy?  He’s a government agent and he thinks you’re dirty.  Very
dirty…it’s midday in a gulag somewhere in Russia.  He’s sticking two
fingers inside you like a gun…” He winks at me as if I’m a fan of what he’s up
to. “Yeah, that’s good, baby, real good…lemme hear more from the throat.
 You’ve been going to those acting classes I paid for, right?  Jesus,
that’s good.”  Another wink to me, I look down at my pencil and paper,
hoping he’ll just say pizza, so I can leave.  Perhaps he would inject it
into the Sean Penn fantasy and I could be on my way.  I was to wait until
he was off of the phone.  That was the rule.  Never interrupt him
when he’s with a client.

A vision came.

The Iceman behind his desk on
the phone, myself standing in front of him.
 The walls of the eighth floor office fall away and we are both on a
glacier peak thousands of feet in the air.  A giant rat-like serpent flies
by.  The inertia from its wings
fan
a hot,
ghostly wind.  It heads south.  The glacier is soft and sleek, like
his Lexus parked eight stories beneath us.   The sky becomes blood
red, with streaks of orange and yellow.  Thunder booms.  The drop is
straight down.  The Iceman is alone on his Masada, talking dirty to a
concubine.  The ice under his desk begins to break away and crumble.
 He doesn’t notice.  He falls into the canyon beneath, the phone
still at his ear.  “I think we can get you a speaking
rooooooole……”
The serpent returned grabbing him up in its beak.  Crunching down hard on
his ribs and pelvis. Stomaching its prey quickly, blood spurting everywhere.
 A slight muted shriek followed by a deathly silence and a breeze.
 The orange sky stays with me.  

I was back in his office, standing there.
 I couldn’t be around him for another second.  Sometimes the visions
are a bullet between my eyes, ripping clear all that stands in its way.
 Iceman lived on an icy pillar.  
A pillar that was
now crumbling as he phone-sexed his way to his next divorce.
  Somewhere, long ago, the Iceman was decent.  Maybe back in
college when he was just a bartender in love with the waitress who would later
become his first ex-wife. But a hundred shitty TV movies later, he was lost.

I walked out.  His eyes bulged out at my
premature evacuation.  He wanted me there at attention to bear witness to
his phone rape.  I wasn’t going through with it.  He slammed the
phone down and came after me as I made it into the hallway.  “Don’t you
ever leave before I am done!
”
 
He looked hurt. Like it was his
basketball and now he was going home because he was losing.

“I’m done,” I said.

“You’re not done till I’m done!”

“You’ve been done for a long time, Iceman.
 Think I’m gonna stand there and watch while you harass someone?”

“Damn right you are!”

“Fuck you, Iceman.  Sorry to use language
that you can’t say on TV.  Your life is a crumbling glacier with a
solar-flared sun melting it down.   Built on ego, low self-esteem,
and infidelity.  You sit atop a fiery Mount Rushmore carved out of blood
and the sweat of others.  Your world is evil, your career is trivial at
best and you are lost.  I’ll have no part of it.” ” I turned to Jennifer
whom Iceman had grabbed at more than once.  I realized I was saying this
for her.
 
She knew I was right, but
she looked angry, like I was making her look bad.  She pointed to the
door.

“We’ll mail you your check.  Just go.”
 She was calm.  I walked the eight floors down to the lobby.
 Each floor crumbling quietly behind me, as an imposing glacier made its
way tectonically snapping back into its place.  I made it to my shit car,
which had been sandwiched in by two black Mercedes Benz 750s.  I squeezed
between them and slammed open my door, dinging the car to my left.

I
was
four parking floors down, at least 150 feet below the surface, deep
in the bowels of an underground parking garage
.  Life was
perversely still.  Should a massive earthquake be triggered by the
always unstable
San Andreas Fault I would be encapsulated in
an eerie sarcophagus, the lone human remnant of a cavern that housed every high-end
automobile ever created.   Millions of dollars lay parked around me,
with the only human specimen encased inside a crappy 1980 Honda Accord
hatchback, both hands on the wheel, an old Johnny Cash “Best Of” tape still in
the deck.   My head looking up, stuck in a teary gaze twelve stories
beneath Jennifer’s perfect bottom, a glacierized tear coming down my cheek.

HOW I GOT THE TV

It
was the only thing I owned.  Maybe that’s why I listened so close.  I
had grown up in this room.  
In this house.
 
In this valley.
 
This hot, stinking
valley.
 
This porn-filled swill pit.
 My valley.  My home. My parents had moved here before I was born.
 I had no choice.  Thirty minutes north of the city none of it was
mine, except the TV.

 
         
 
Bury me with it.  Submerged beneath
Mother Earth, together, wrapped around each other like entwined lovers never to
be uncoiled.  Spinning a web of love, tenderness and transistor wire,
unhindered by life.  

I bought it while working at Jerry’s Famous Deli
in Studio City.   The one where all the out of work TV actors hung
out.  They were all TV people.  There were never movie people in
there.  I guess they hung out somewhere else.

 
         
 
“Excuse me? Are you in possession of any
sitcom that has gone south?  Just answer the question…TV movies? Starring
Lynda Carter, Bess Armstrong, Sela Ward?  Well, that’s a bit dated, don’t
you think?  You had two lines in
The Kid with the 200 I.Q.
starring
Gary Coleman? WOW! Look at you over here!  Commercials?  
Dog food, deodorant or douchebag?
 If you would kindly
step over to the right, place your hands over your head, empty out your
syndication rights and try not to loiter too much in the parking lot.
 Jerry’s…home of the
half-way-there-but-I-just-need-one-more-season-out-of-this-pile-of-shit-that-I’m-on-so-it-can-be-syndicated-and-I’m-in-the-green-for-a-long-long-time-but-its-not-about-the-money-its-about-the-art-man-you-know
-
?-
Cool!

THIS IS THY HANGOUT

YOUR PATRONED SAINT IS MICHAEL LANDON.  HE
WATCHES OVER YOU AND BLESSES YOU WITH HAIR DYE PURCHASED AT COST AND DECENT
CALL TIMES…

WELCOME.

Jerry’s was the only place I delivered where I
filled out a timecard.  After my time at Mariano’s and the agency I
decided to go corporate.  I was on the books.  It was my brief stint
as a legitimate money earner.  
My descent into the
swirling, plummeting coalmine known as legitimacy.
 The only shot I
had at bringing my nose up out of the depths of backdoor living and it rose
against me and struck me down with its poison.  It left me alone, afraid,
angst-ridden, angry, and those are just the A’s.  By my departure I was
fully-disillusioned
by the seductive world of corporate-backed,
family style, unkosher Jewish deli food dispensation.

 
  
        
I bought the TV at
Circuit City after a particularly horrible shift that had resulted in my
rightful termination.  It was the only soothing grace I could offer
myself. I was assisted in the purchase by a politically correct minority, who
had gone sober after having a rock and roll journey as a stand-in for an A-List
celebrity during the shooting of an unsuccessful action-adventure vehicle that
was geared toward the twenty and thirty-something crowd.  His tale was tall
and tragic and fell upon my sympathetic lobes.  He’d hung out with a
pre-Jesusy Stephen Baldwin, orgies with Vern Troyer, a rap album with Claire
Danes.  Only now it was all gone.

 
         
 
“This fucken Magnavox is the shit, G.
 I’ll throw in a two-year warranty and some shots of Yasmine Bleeth’s
snatch, just take it off my hands, G.”  The TV cost two hundred and twenty
bucks, tax included.  Bleeth’s quim was stunning.

 
         
 
When I was a kid I used to call it Stereo
Time.  My parents would come home from their respective jobs, yell at me
and go off to their separate rooms and watch the same channel.  I would be
in the middle room between them, trying so hard just to exist, and Mary Hart
would storm into my room and sodomize my ears about Connie Selleca’s wedding
plans with John Tesh.  Like I give a fuck they
would
 honeymoon
in Aruba.  What’s Aruba?  I’m twelve.  I
want to discover myself, clean up and fall asleep.

 
         
 
Fourteen years later, still at home, I
entered the same ring of fire.  
TV under my arm.
 Feeling good. Feeling dirty.  Most important, I felt legitimate.
 
Like one of them.
 Legitimacy.
 There’s a concept.  We all want it.  That blue chip stamp of
approval from those we love.  I love my mommy and daddy so much.
 Their approval means everything.  Without it I am lost.  But
it’s a fleeting feeling.  A drug the worker bee gets hooked on through
every netted paycheck.  
Every chat at the watercooler.
 
Every quip about the boss’s bad tie.
 Every
emotional bond formed with another person while on the job.  It all
becomes elixir shucked down the throat of all who fall prey.  
Like the word itself.
 Ten letters stuck together like
old socks covering up the holes in a given reality.