Extra Life (7 page)

“What’s that?” Bobby asked. “Another spec script?”

“I—uh—”

“Know how many of these I see in a week, Mike?”

“It’s Russ.”

“Whatever. I don’t actually read these things, but the producers do. Every single one of them’s got a sweet-ass storyline about my character earning acceptance for
who he is
. I’m sick of it. Want to guess why that gay plot twist crap ever got written into the show in the first place?”

“Social consciousness?” I ventured.

Bobby snorted. “
Because
,” he said, “my fat fascist father thought it would be hilarious to humiliate me. Show the world I’d do anything for a buck.”

“Being a huge TV star must be
incredibly
humbling,” Paige said, mostly to herself.

Bobby’s squint was so tight now I couldn’t tell if his eyes were even open.
Clink clink
went the lighter in his hand. He yanked the script out of my grasp and took a passing glance at the cover page.

“TV can go to hell,” he said. “You gotta spend half your time figuring out how to
say
this crap so you don’t sound special-needs. Show me some razor-sharp dialog in an actual
film,
and I’ll show y’all an Oscar nomination.”

Then he discarded my script on the counter. He popped another cigarette into his mouth. One scrape of the lighter’s starter wheel and an inch-long flame shot upward. I could hear the butane burning.

Of the many forces my best friend Connie feared in his life, close-range fire, especially the sizzling kind, was way up at the top of the list. I’d already pushed him to the point of hyperventilation. He was a slow gas leak, and here was the ignition. At the sight of Bobby’s lighter flame, Connie squawked and keeled over fast.

Paige and I sprang for him, but he sagged down past our reach. He dropped to the floor, wedged between two stools, with his arms viced on either side of his head. When Paige knelt beside him, he hunched against her, one hundred and seventy pounds of dead weight.

“Lord almighty!” Sally called from across the counter. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

“Well, it’s been real,” Bobby announced.

Who could blame him? Our meeting had escalated into an
incident
, something the gossip media could spin against him:
Bobby Keene-Parker threatens neurotic Cape Fear boy with lighter.
His best bet was to slip away and deny any knowledge. Even I knew that.

Bobby stepped over the odd pile of people on the floor. Savannah followed him, no big shocker. Her apologetic shrug wrung out my dishrag heart.

I watched the two of them get into the Aston Martin Rapide and speed off with a gut-punching engine roar. Her silken hair fluttered out the open passenger window like exit music before the fade to black.

Y
OU KNOW
that trick where a master magician yanks away the red tablecloth from under a fancy five-course meal, disturbing nothing? Well, I was an amateur. I had my Big Day on a silver platter, and I brought the whole damn thing crashing down.

The paramedics strapped Conrad to a gurney and carted him away.

All I wanted was to crack him out of his shell, give him something to boost his self-esteem, an acting gig that would dig down into his psyche. But I shoveled too deep. Worst of all, his nurse mother was on shift at New Hanover Hospital so she’d get the scoop the minute he rolled up. Given my contributions to Connie’s nervous breakdown, this was possibly bad enough for a permanent friendship boycott on the likes of Horace Vale.

Paige stormed off with hardly a word and zero footage on her camera. Slouching home by myself, I wished so bad that she would’ve torn me a new one. Because a lecture on what I did to Connie would mean I was forgivable. Instead, I got Paige’s silence. She was giving up on me—and this girl had a life mission to never give up on
anyone
, not even the tragic cases down at the women’s shelter where she worked. People who’d trashed their lives, or had their lives trashed for them. Let’s face it—everybody Paige met was a fresh chance for her to save her brother, in a sense.

Everybody now except me.

In all the chaos, Connie’s backpack got left behind at the diner. I took it home for safe keeping, weighted with books and binders and lost friendships and ruined chances and humiliation by a TV star and a throbbing pain in half my face. Not to mention my flame for Savannah Lark, engulfed in the inferno of Bobby Parker’s industrial strength lighter.

In my kitchen, on my mother’s white board calendar, a thick red line ran straight through the middle two weeks of April. It was under my name, headed by the big block-letter word: SUSPENDED. The verdict was in. Suspended, splendid. All my efforts to recast Horace Vale as a hero were lost—same little shit I’d always been, as far as friends and family were concerned.

Upstairs in my room, I made a valiant effort
not
to look inside Connie’s backpack. But then I did. Clusters of Dr. Who action figures, some Playstation games, folders full of homework and two massive novels by Neal Stephenson.

Then, I found my script. “Take The Leap,” the movie I meant to shoot at the Silver Bullet. Connie had gone through it and written in the margins the carefully-considered motivation behind each of his character’s lines. Notes about how to say a phrase, accent marks where he meant to emphasize words.

On one page he wrote:
like
the last time I said goodbye to Dad at the airport, trying to memorize his face.
I couldn’t take it. He’d been willing to use his personal pain for the sake of our dumb movie. His father, who did not die in a motorcycle stunt but even more nobly in a wartime helicopter crash. All of Connie’s fears and anxieties rising up from that wreckage.

My own parents were alive and well somewhere in the house. Dad sat wasting away in the attic. He could fill me with facts but teach me nothing about life. He’d never ignored a
no trespassing
sign, never climbed past the safety rails. Mom was the one who tossed me out of the nest—literally, one summer, on a zip-line thirty feet over the canopy of a Costa Rican cloud forest. That green and hazy rush of fear stuck with me ever since, drove me to stupid acts that ruined my mother’s trust. If she’d been warming back up to me during the last few months, the cold front had struck again.

So here I was: Dad unable and Mom unwilling.

There was nothing for me now. I wanted to go back to
before
, to kid memories that seemed just out of reach, like those weekends at the Pastime Playhouse theater with Dad. That early enchantment with the magic flicker on the screen.

So I left the house again without telling anyone. Walked down to Front Street, through the old cotton mill section along the river, restaurants and tourist shops now, a gentrified locale specially designed for
Cape Twilight Blues
and other shows to shoot their scenes.

In the midst of TV-land, I was a faceless, unnamed extra.

I came to my destination, an empty gap between two buildings—overgrown grass, broken bottles, and piles of rubble. A missing tooth in an otherwise pristine set of teeth. Five years ago a vintage movie house stood on this spot, the Pastime Playhouse, then burned to the ground.

Movie mogul Marv Parker (aka, Bobby-Daddy) bankrolled the place and kept it in business before it burned. The rumor mill speculated that after he started losing profits on the place, he torched this money pit himself for the insurance. You could still see the char on the walls of neighboring buildings.

Dad and I sometimes came here twice in a weekend, especially summers. This was before they installed the big multiplex farther up Market Street. We’d walk down to this theater, and all the discussions we had, anticipating and then critiquing—let’s just say we didn’t talk like that much anymore.

For a minute I stood where the ticket booth used to be and looked through the fake camera lens I made with my fingers. The empty lot worked as a perfect industrial wasteland backdrop, or a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Then I turned and saw the radio tower beacon flash its steady red pulse high above the buildings, and I knew the real reason I trekked out to this part of town, and it was not my distant past. It was my immediate future, and Connie wasn’t here to talk me down.

It was still daylight when I reached the headquarters of WCPF, Cape Fear’s most popular network station, and Mr. Yes’s former employer. The building was just a squat beige box beside the river, but for added flair, a nearby billboard supersized the grinning mugs of the news station’s lead anchors and weatherman.

Their steel radio tower loomed three hundred feet tall, tapered at the top. Almost a scale model of the Eiffel Tower. Its upper reaches were fitted with satellite and radar dishes. Below, gray electric boxes with shock danger decals buzzed a constant warning to
keep away
.

For further security a chain-link fence surrounded the tower with razor wire coiled around the top like a badass Slinky. That obstacle might’ve meant
game over
if the gate were actually padlocked shut like it was supposed to be. But somebody had left the chain and padlock dangling from the fence.

I took out my cell phone, aimed the lens at myself and tapped
record
. “Scaling the WCPF radio tower, because it was there, first and only take. Action.” All I had to do was lift the latch, push the gate, and I was in. Then I found the access ladder, and I started to climb.

I
CLUTCHED
the rungs of the radio tower high over the Cape Fear River. The red beacon blinked above, urging me to climb. The river below looked calm on the surface, but its undercurrent was known to swallow people stupid enough to take the plunge.

My attempted cell phone video recording was a flop. I needed two hands to climb so I held the phone between my lips, meaning I couldn’t run commentary, and my mouth was going numb, and I was probably fogging up the lens with my breath. At least I’d get a good panoramic shot when I reached the top. I’d have my proof.

Anyone watching from the windows of nearby warehouses or apartment buildings could’ve spotted me. And if they wanted to stop me, they’d call the police or at least yell out. I was prepared for that. Cops gathering around the tower, begging me to climb down—it would make better footage than the climb itself.

Truth is, heights freaked me out, especially when nothing but my balance kept me from a fast and fatal drop. But that’s exactly why I climbed, my knack for rushing blind into whatever scared me. It wasn’t the ascent. It was the after party, the hours of delicious adrenaline and the conquering spirit I’d be filled with.

Connie would’ve stopped me but Connie wasn’t here. The angel on my shoulder fluttered off. Finally I could hear my own will at work. I had to prove I could take the same crap I was always dishing out to Connie. Had to prove myself apart from everyone else. And if I got arrested, well, it would prove my point, wouldn’t it? I was already on the tower that would transmit my news across the Carolinas. I wanted Savannah to hear all about it.

Four stories up, I saw the hazy green outline of the Cape Fear Bridge. So far away, I could make it vanish under my thumb, but when I tried, a wave of vertigo made my palms go slick with sweat. I had to keep wiping them on my jeans, one at a time. Another twenty feet and the winds kicked up. The cars in the lot below were die-cast toys. My jaw ached with the strain of holding that phone, and it was slippery with spit. I’d drop it any second.