Читать книгу Candy Everybody Wants - Josh Kilmer-Purcell - Страница 9

‘Where’s the booze?’ Tara asked, slipping through the torn screen on the sliding glass door. Jayson was just pulling out the seventh cookie sheet of Gino’s Pizza Rolls from the oven. He’d set up the kitchen island with assorted frozen appetizers, having read in Parade magazine about the lavish displays of food supplied by ‘Craft Services’ for Hollywood movie shoots. Jayson also happened to know that Gino’s were Trey’s favorite snack.

Trey picked up one of the pizza rolls that had just come out of the oven and tossed it into the air. It arced perfectly and plummeted square into his open mouth. Jayson had been practicing that trick for years with an appalling success rate. Trey seemed to master everything he tried.

‘Holy fuck!’ Trey yelped, opening his mouth–half spitting and half dribbling the steaming saucy puff out of his mouth onto the floor. ‘These things are like a million degrees!’

‘I just took them out of the oven,’ Jayson apologized, suddenly worried that Trey might have burned his lips. Trey and he had four kissing scenes to film.

‘What’s in the bag? Bibles?’ Jayson joked, nodding at the heavy case Trey had slung over his shoulder.

‘Check this out.’ Trey swung the case down onto the floor. Unzipping it, he pulled out his father’s unwieldy new beta camcorder.

‘Ohmigod!’ Jayson squealed, instantly very conscious of the fact he was squealing. ‘How’d you get that out of the house?’

‘He snuck it,’ Tara explained. Jayson had originally wanted to tape the entire series on the Wernermeiers’ new beta camcorder since it could also record sound. But Tom Wernermeier felt that the tapes were too expensive to use for ‘playing around.’

‘I can’t believe it! This is so perfect. I’m going to go change into costume. Who has the script? What am I wearing?’

‘Worst things first, JayJay,’ Tara said randomly opening the cupboards next to the pantry. ‘Where’s Toni keep the booze?’

Jayson opened the cabinet behind him.

‘Bourbon or scotch?’ he asked.

‘Mix mine together,’ Tara said.

‘Me too.’ Trey answered.

Jayson poured each of them a full, tall McDonald’s glass with no ice. Jayson took every opportunity to display to the world that he’d ‘collected all six’ McDonaldland glasses.

‘To being famous!’ Jayson raised his Hamburglar glass. Tara’s and Trey’s Grimace and Mayor McCheese glasses clinked against his.

‘And rich!’ Trey confirmed.

‘And bombed!’ Tara chimed in.

Even at such an early age, it was easy to distinguish between their goals in life. Tara would forever be satisfied with simply having a good time, no matter where she was or whom she was with. Jayson pictured her future as one long keg party like the ones the highschoolers held out by Highway 16. Trey would always be happy as long as he had whatever the latest toy was–the latest Atari game. Or a windsurfer. Jayson predicted that as Trey aged, he would start collecting bigger toys like Corvettes and stereo systems.

Jayson’s only goal, of course, was to be on TV. His first brush with fame was in kindergarten, when a traveling Frisbee troupe made up of ex-hippies came to his elementary school. During their hour-long extravaganza Jayson sat Indian-style on the gymnasium floor, enthralled by watching them use their flying discs to illustrate the safest way to cross a street and how to avoid creepy old men. This troupe of itinerant and somewhat hygienically challenged minstrels seemed to lead a far more exciting life than anyone else Jayson had ever met. Traveling around the country. Performing in front of mobs of cheering kids. For the first time Jayson felt he was a part of a ‘live studio audience’ and it awoke in him an all-encompassing yearning to be clapped at himself. After the show, Jayson was the only kid to hang behind and ask for the groups’ autographs. He stuck around after school to wave goodbye as they drove on to the next school district in their battered VW van.

Jayson, Tara, and Trey each took a long swig of the bourbon/scotch mixture. It was vaguely sweet, and mostly bitter, like sucking on a butterscotch hard candy that had a lighter fluid center. The trio had drunk Toni’s booze before, but always in furtive little sips straight from the bottle while Toni was working in her studio. Tara and Trey’s parents didn’t drink, of course.

Now the trio had an endless open bar weekend in front of them.

‘That’s good stuff,’ Tara gasped, gravel-voiced after her first swallow.

‘You sound like Helen Lawson on Match Game 76,’ Jayson giggled.

‘Let’s start shooting before it gets dark,’ Trey said, hoisting the bulky camcorder with his free hand. He’d been trying since Christmas to get his father to let him play with the camera, and now that he had it he wasn’t going to waste a minute–even if it meant kissing Jayson again.

‘As you’ve read, the Martini Shot–that means “final shot” in Hollywood terms,’ Jayson explained, ‘is a catfight between Amethyst Carrington and Christina.’ Both roles were played by Jayson, so it would be a complicated effort. Without any editing facilities, the scene was a technical nightmare–requiring multiple costume changes, extreme close-ups, and body doubles played by Tara. ‘I’ll go get the costumes.’

Tara and Trey went out into the backyard to pick the location, and Jayson went through the upstairs walk-in closet pulling out his dead grandmother’s mink coat and a taupe ultrasuede wrap dress which Toni once wore to a singles mixer at the V.F.W. From the top shelf, Jayson pulled down Toni’s old platinum Lite n’ Airy Eva Gabor wig, and an even older Milady II brunette cropped wig.

Stopping in the bathroom on his way back downstairs, he scooped up a handful of eyeliner pencils, compacts, and lipsticks from the pickup stick-like tangle on the back of the toilet. Now that Toni was single again, the makeup supplies had reappeared.

‘You okay Willie boy?’ he shouted as he passed Willie’s locked bedroom door.

‘Yeah. I need a snack,’ came the voice from the other side, barely audible over the canned laughter of a Love Boat episode.

‘No snacks after six, buddy,’ Jayson replied. ‘I’m sorry. We’ll have a nice breakfast tomorrow. I promise, buddy.’

‘Okay,’ came the sullen reply from the other side of the door.

Tara and Trey were studying the buttons on the camera when Jayson appeared at the sliding glass door in the mink coat and Milady II wig.

‘I’m going to begin the scene over here,’ Jayson said, stepping into the puddle of remaining sunlight by the edge of the rusty swing set. ‘Shoot me from below.’

Trey knelt in the muddy patch at the bottom of the slide. ‘Okay. Ready when you are.’

‘And…action!’ Jayson called, instantly slipping into Amethyst Carrington’s cold character.

AMETHYST CARRINGTON: Miss Belle, there’s no way in HELL that you’re going to poison J.B. against me and our son! I’m not leaving NorthFork Farms until I’m CARRIED OUT IN A COFFIN!

Trey clicked the camera off after Jayson finished his line. Jayson had to quickly change into Miss Belle’s costume. Filming the dialogue between two different characters who were both played by Jayson would be a miracle of cinematography–if they could pull it off. Jayson rushed over to the swing set where he’d stashed Miss Belle’s costume and began switching into the platinum wig and taupe wrap dress. There was no time to change makeup in this scene. The viewing public would just have to accept that Miss Belle and Amethyst Carrington had similar tastes in cosmetics.

Jayson rushed back to his mark. The sun was slipping fast.

MISS BELLE: Well then, call up the funeral home. Amethyst Carrington, ’cause you need to get measured! Take this!

Jayson threw the tumbler of Tab he was holding ‘off screen’ at the invisible Amethyst Carrington. This was meant to instigate the catfight between the two characters Jayson was playing.

With all the complications, the entire scene took nearly an hour and a half to shoot as Jayson repeatedly changed back and forth between Amethyst Carrington and Miss Belle. Sometimes Tara–shot from the back–acted as a stunt double for the actual catfighting. It was exhausting, and by the time Jayson yelled his penultimate Cut!, the sun was slipping down over the lake and fireflies had begun sparkling in the background.

‘We have to hurry to get the last scene,’ Jayson shouted, running across the yard to the back door that led into the garage. The season’s cliffhanger was to end with Trey and Jayson, as J.B. and Amethyst Carrington respectively, kissing in front of a sunset. The drama would come from Tara (Patricia) bursting out of the house with a gun aimed at one of them. A shot would ring out. Would they live? Would they die? Lorimar/CBS would have to shell out big bucks for another season of scripts to find out the answer to that one.

But first, Jayson had to find a prop that resembled a gun before he ran out of sunlight.

The garage, which doubled as Toni’s studio, was dimly lit and filthy. Jayson frantically rooted around the piles of melted bridal toile and boxes of bride and groom cake decorations for something, anything, with which Tara could take aim and fire. She would be relatively far in the background, probably even a little blurry, so the gun didn’t need to be that terribly realistic. Even the spray nozzle off a garden hose would work. In the dark he finally felt something hoselike and followed it along to the end. As hard as he twisted the nozzle wouldn’t come loose, and given the dim lighting it was impossible to determine why. So he stepped down on the hose with one foot and yanked as hard as he could on the nozzle, breaking it free and nearly knocking himself over into a pile of flea market wedding dresses.

After feeling his way back to the door, he emerged from the garage, quickly passing the nozzle to Tara and running back to take his mark next to Trey. This would be his second love scene with Trey, and as much as he tried to convince himself that he was merely excited for the final scene, Jayson knew that much of his anxiety came from the anticipation of kissing Trey.

Trey propped up the camera on a splintered Teeter Totter in the overgrown grass.

‘Go?’ Trey asked.

‘The word is “action,”’ Jayson clarified. ‘And the director says it.’

‘So say it, motherfucker,’ Tara shouted drunkenly from across the yard. ‘My ass is glempty.’ She held up her glass and tipped it upside down to illustrate her obvious point.

Jason looked through the site on the camera to be certain Tara was in frame in the background, yelled Action, pressed the record button, and ran to his mark in front of Trey.

‘Though you may be a common gigolo,’ Jayson recited staring up into Trey’s blue eyes, ‘I will always be yours.’

With all the hurrying to finish before the sun went down, Jayson had broken out into a sweat. He could feel a trickle run under his wig and down the back of his neck. The lake mosquitos were out in full summer force and quickly zeroed in on the heat he was giving off. It felt like a dozen of them were plunging their hypodermic bloodsuckers just below his hairline all at the same moment. He resolved not to flinch. Or swat. This was the biggest moment of the whole series. The whole summer, really.

‘And I will always be there for you, Amethyst Carrington,’ Trey replied. Jayson looked deep into Trey’s eyes, searching for some sign that Trey might not merely be acting. He rose up on his tiptoes and pulled the back of Trey’s head down to his own. Trey hesitated for a moment before finally giving in to the inevitable. Their lips met, both warm from the hurrying about and the bourbon/scotch cocktail. As they kissed, Jayson moved his head from side to side as he’d seen all the best romantic actresses do. It was a good kiss, Jayson thought. He hoped it would read as well on screen as it was playing out in his head. And it was long.

Too long.

Where was Tara’s entrance?

‘The worst thing that could happen right now,’ Trey said, pulling his face away from Jayson’s, ‘would be for Pamela to burst out of the house right now and shoot one of us.’

Jayson had to admit it was pretty good adlibbing on Trey’s part. He stole a glance to the side and saw no sign of the homicidal ‘Pamela.’ He didn’t know what to do. They needed the murder for the cliffhanger. At a loss for what to do next, he pulled Trey’s face back toward his own and resumed kissing. To step it up a notch for the audience, Jayson decided to use his tongue. He hoped it would clear the censors. His tongue finally found Trey’s and the two made their introductions. He was frenching, Jayson realized. Honest-to-God frenching.

‘Heya, fellas!!’

It was Tara, stumbling through the sliding glass door. Finally.

‘Sorry for the delay,’ she continued, off script. ‘But I had to get a refill. See?’ She held up the bottle of bourbon she’d brought outside to the camera to prove her accomplishment. ‘Now I guess I may as well get on to killin’ one of yas.’

Finally, she was back on script.

‘No! Don’t shoot!’ Jayson yelled, pulling himself closer to Trey. ‘You have a beef with both of us, but I happen to know that there’s only one bullet in that gun!’ Perhaps the script was a bit expository, but as Aaron Spelling told TV Guide, you should never overestimate the intelligence of your audience.

‘Well then, for one of you, it’s your lucky day!’ Tara yelled back. She leaned down slowly to put the bourbon bottle down on the deck, nearly losing her balance. ‘Whoopsie,’ she giggled before standing upright again and drawing aim at the two of them with the hose nozzle Jason had given her.

‘Prepare to meet your maker!’

WHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMPPPPHHH!

First came a blinding orange flash. Then the ground under their bodies bucked like a car hitting a speed bump at fifty miles an hour.

Jayson landed about ten feet from where he’d been standing. A bicycle tire pump with its plastic handle in flames came crashing down into the grass next to his head. His bicycle pump. From the garage.

‘JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!’ Tara was screaming from somewhere at least fifty feet west of where he’d last seen her. All of the lights in the house had gone out, but luckily, Jayson noticed, someone had helpfully lit hundreds of little candles all across the backyard.

Jayson sat up, and looked around for Trey.

‘Trey?’ he called into the darkness. ‘You okay?’

‘I’m under the seesaw,’ came the response. ‘You okay?’

‘I don’t know. What happened?’

The back porch lights at the Wernermeiers’ clicked on, flooding both backyards. The hundreds of candles in Jayson’s yard weren’t candles at all but flaming debris, being systematically doused as they fell into the dewy, overgrown weeds–flaming debris that looked suspiciously like items from Toni’s garage/studio.

The garage/studio that–in the light from the Wernermeiers’ porch lamps–wasn’t a garage/studio at all anymore.

It was nothing.

It was an empty space, through which the trio could now see clear across the street to the moonlit lake. One by one lights up and down the backyards in both directions clicked on, like a synchronized strand of Christmas lights.

‘Are you okay?! Who’s hurt!? Oh God, Where are you two?!’ Terri Wernermeier was now running across the backyards, dressed in an oversized bra and baggy cotton panties. As soon as Tara spotted her mother racing toward them, she spun around like an Olympic discus thrower and hurled the bourbon bottle in a high arc clear over the backyard, landing two yards away in the Weimhardts’ pool.

Jayson kept staring at where the garage had been, trying to figure out where it had gone. From the looks of the floating pieces of fire still drifting down from the sky, it had gone, in some instances, down to the far end of Lac LaBelle Drive.

‘Jayson? Are you out there?’

The voice was soft. Calm. Jayson could barely hear it through the persistent ringing in his ears. It was Willie, leaning on his elbows on the sill of his bedroom window. He was neither frightened, nor confused. Willie couldn’t see the garage, or lack of garage, from his window. To him, it had just been a loud noise, some shaking, and his bedroom light and TV show shutting off.

He sounded simply curious. Intrigued.

‘Yeah, I’m here, buddy.’ Jayson said, waving up at him. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah.’ Pause. ‘I need a snack.’

‘No snacks after six, pal,’ Jayson said.

Jayson picked himself up from the wet grass and made his way over to Teeter Totter where Terri was hugging both Trey and Tara.

‘You evil devil child,’ Terri hissed at Jayson. ‘Jesus hates you!’

‘Well, I’ve never been that fond of him either,’ Jayson replied, kneeling down and feeling around under their feet for the camera. He finally found it lodged next to the pile of garden gnomes that Toni had stolen from neighbors’ yards over the years. She felt they were offensive to midgets.

Jayson picked up the camera and held it to his ear. It was still whirring somewhere inside its casing. Thank God. It was all on tape: the kiss, Tara’s entrance, the explosion. Maybe Jesus did love him after all.

The network suits are gonna love this, Jayson thought to himself. He pressed the Off button and whispered ‘Cut!’