Winter 2007 (14 page)

The phone rings, and he
picks it up, grateful for the interruption. His agent’s mellow tenor brings all
the infectious banality of SoCal to his ear. After an exchange of pleasantries,
his agent says, “Listen, Cliff. I was in New York last week. I had this crazy
idea and you know me, what the hell, I pitched it to a couple of publishers. I said,
What if Cliff Coria wrote a book, a memoir, about his life in the movies. This
guy’s acted all over, I told them. Spain, Southeast Asia, Czechoslovakia. You
name it. And he’s smart. And he’s seen celebrities in unguarded moments. He’s
kind of an insider-slash-outsider. He can give you a view from the fringes of
Hollywood, and maybe that’s the clearest view of all.”

“I don’t know, Mark.”

“Don’t you want to hear how
they reacted?”

“Yeah.”

“They were excited, Cliff.
There could be serious money for you in this. And if the book does what I think
it will, it’ll generate significant heat out here.”

The Celeste’s Vacancy sign
switches on in the twilight, seeming like a glowing blue accusation. Cliff
lowers the Venetian blinds.

“I believe there’ll be
interest in you as a character actor,” Mark goes on. “Not just cheesy parts. I
think I’d be able to get you serious work. I know you can do this, Cliff.
Remember those letters you used to send me? Like the one about Nicholson’s ass
hanging out of the car when he was banging that bit player? That was fucking
hilarious! Come on! All I need is a few chapters and a rough outline.”

Cliff assures his agent
that he’ll give it a try. He leaves a note for Jerry, saying he’s going to take
a few days off to deal with some personal problems, and then heads for Marley’s
place. Crossing the Main Street Bridge over the Halifax River, which bisects
Daytona, he sees several old men fishing off the bridge, half in silhouette,
motionless, with buckets at their feet, the corpses of blowfish and sting rays
bloodily strewn along the walkway, and thinks that if he were ever to take up
fishing, this is where he’d like to drop his line. The idea of joining those
sentinel figures appeals to him, as does the thought of hauling up little
monsters from the deep.

At the apartment Cliff pours
a vodka from a bottle chilled in the freezer, turns on the TV, and pops
Sword
Of The Black Demon
into the DVD player. While the opening credits roll, he
calls Marley and tells her he’s coming up to the Surfside sometime between nine
and ten. He fast-forwards through the movie until he finds the entrance of the
witch queen and her chunky blue retinue; then he sits on the edge of the bed,
sipping vodka, watching Isabel Yahya and the other women attending a ceremony
in a torchlit cave made of acrylic fiber painted to look like rock—it
involves the queen choosing a new fuck toy, a young Filipino youth with oiled
muscles. She leads him to the royal chamber, where a bed with blue satin sheets
awaits, screws his brains out and, while he’s helpless, limp and nearly
unconscious from her amorous assault, she drains him of his soul, laughing as
she coaxes it forth by means of a lascivious dance. The soul resembles a stream
of pale smoke from which faces surface. Cliff assumes them to be the youth’s
memories. The smoke dwindles to a trickle and at long last, after much eye-rolling
and twitching, the youth dies.

In another scene, Ricky
Sintara, a striking young man with even larger muscles, also oiled, and Dak
Windsor enter the cave, seeking to capture the queen and persuade her to
divulge the whereabouts of the wizard who has loosed the black demon; but they
are themselves captured by the royal guard. The queen drags Ricky off to suffer
the same fate as the youth, but once in the sack, Ricky proves to be no
ordinary man—his incomparable lovemaking renders the queen
hors de
combat.
This is all shown tastefully—no actual penetration; only full
frontal female nudity—and dredges up a chuckle from Cliff, because Ricky,
a fine fellow and terrific drinking companion, would on occasion wear women’s
clothing when relaxing during the shoot and had a boyfriend who was prettier than
the majority of the actresses.

Meanwhile, in another part
of the cave, Dak is chained to the wall and Isabel is preparing to scourge him
with an S&M dream of whip whose lashes appear to be fashioned of live
scorpions. He takes a few strokes, writhes in pain, calls out to God for
assistance, using a specific phrase that causes Isabel to realize that he is
the son of the doctor who saved her village from a cholera outbreak years
before—she was a little girl at the time, but developed a crush on the
teenage Dak that lasts to this day. Turned aside from the path of evil by the
power of love, she frees Dak and they kiss, a miracle of osculation that
changes her skin from blue back to a pleasing caramel, and together, along with
Ricky, they flee the cave, carrying with them the comatose queen.

Lashed to a bed in Ricky’s
shack (the hero has hewed to his humble village origins), the queen strains
mightily against her ropes, mimicking her earlier struggles in the act of love,
breasts heaving, hips thrusting, tormented by Ricky’s questions, and eventually
she yields up her secrets. But that night, while Dak and Ricky are
reconnoitering the wizard’s lair, she calls out to Isabel, whom she still
controls to an extent. By means of her occult powers and a cross-eyed, beetling
stare, she coerces Isabel into untying her bonds. She then knocks her to the
ground and stands over her, waggling her fingers and projecting dire energies
from their tips, bursts of blue light that cause her former minion to shrivel,
to grow desiccated and wrinkled, dying of old age in a matter of seconds.

Is that, Cliff asks
himself, what Shalin wants him to believe may be in store for him? He recalls
her talk about Isabel’s premature aging, her comment regarding a karmic agency
being involved in all of this—a sudden withering would be an apt
punishment according to karmic law. But he refuses to believe Shalin capable of
doling out such a punishment.

He goes to the
refrigerator, pours another vodka, and watches the rest of the movie. The queen
escapes through the surrounding jungle, but is killed by Ricky, who throws his
magical dagger at her. It tumbles end over end, traveling hundreds of yards
through the darkness, swerving around clumps of bamboo, tree trunks, bushes,
and impales the fleeing queen through her malignant heart. Dak grieves for
Isabel, but is bucked up by Ricky and rises to the moment with renewed zeal.
With the help of a friendly shaman, they plot the attack: Dak will lead the
simple villagers (there are always simple villagers in Filipino fantasy movies)
in an assault on the wizard’s palace, distracting the evil one so that Ricky
can sneak inside and do him in.

The battle goes badly for
Dak at first. The villagers are being hacked to pieces by the wizard’s guard.
All seems lost, but the ghost of Isabel appears, wreathed in swirling mist to
disguise the fact the actress is no longer Isabel (a love scene between her
ghost and Dak was intended for the night before the battle, but she vanished
from the project and a rewrite was necessary), and she inspires him with a
message of undying love and tells him of a secret tunnel into which they can
lure the guard and fight them in a narrow confine, thus neutralizing their
superior numbers. As this is happening, the Black Demon accosts Ricky outside
the palace and all, again, seems lost. Not even he can defeat a giant. But the
ancient gods, played by white-bearded men wearing silk robes and several busty
Filipina babes in brocaded halters, intervene. They whisk Ricky and the Black
Demon away to a cosmic platform surrounded by a profusion of stars and clouds
of nebular gas (glowing, Cliff notices, rose and purple, green and white, like
the lights he saw outside his cottage), shrink them to almost equal size (the
demon still has a considerable advantage), and let them fight. Fending off
blows with a magic bracelet given him by his dying father, a silvery circlet
wrought from the stuff of a dying star, Ricky bests the demon and takes his
sword—it is, by chance, the only weapon that can slay the wizard. He is
returned to planet Earth where, after a torrid chase, the wizard changes into a
huge serpent that Ricky chops into snake sushi.

In the final scene, also
rewritten late in the game, a big celebration, Ricky wanders about the village,
a girl on each arm, searching for his pal. Following an intuition, he divests
himself of the ladies and enters the local temple, where he finds Dak on his
knees, praying for the soul of Isabel at an altar surmounted by her portrait.
He puts his hand on Dak’s shoulder. The two men exchange sober glances. Then
Ricky kneels beside him and adopts a prayerful attitude. Solemn music rises,
changing to a bouncy disco theme as the screen darkens and the end credits
roll.

Cliff thinks now that the
last scene might have been intentionally ironic. He recalls that the director
dogged Isabel throughout the shoot and seemed miffed when she got together with
Cliff. He may have fired her because she wouldn’t sleep with him and rewrote
the scene to make a point. Not that this bears upon anything relevant to his
current problem. He drains his vodka, idly gazing at the credits, puzzling over
the film, wondering what Shalin wanted him to take from it. Maybe nothing.
Maybe she just wanted him to endure the pain of watching it again. And then he
spots something. A name. It flips past too quickly and he’s not sure he saw it.
He hits reverse on the remote, plays it forward, and there it is, the logical
explanation he’s been seeking, the answer to everything:

Special Effects: Bazit
Palaniappan

He knew it! They’ve been
trying to gaslight him the whole time. He remembers the F/X guy, a thin man in
his fifties with graying hair who bore a passing resemblance to the owner of
the Celeste. He must be Bazit the elder’s son and dropped the Jr. after his
father died. Why didn’t he mention the connection? Surely he would have, unless
he was too excited at seeing Dak Windsor. No, he would have mentioned it.
Unless he had a reason to keep quiet about it…which he did. It occurs to Cliff
that Bazit might be one of those soul transfers such as she claimed to have
undergone, but he’s not buying that. With knowledge gained from his father,
Bazit tricked up the dunes around Cliff’s cottage and put on a show. Shalin
must have assumed that he wouldn’t watch the end credits.

Exhilarated, Cliff starts
to pour another drink, then decides he’ll have that drink with Marley. She gets
off at ten—he’ll take her out for a late supper, somewhere nicer than the
Surfside, and they’ll celebrate. She won’t know what they’re celebrating, but
he’s glad now that he didn’t burden her with any of this. He trots down the
stairs and out into the warm, windless night, into squeals and honks and
machine gun fire from the arcades, happy shouts from the Ferris wheel, now lit
up and spinning, and the lights on the miniature golf course glossing over its
dilapidation, providing a suitable setting for the family groups clumped about
the greens. The bright souvenir shops selling painted sand dollars and polished
driftwood, funny hats and sawfish snouts, and the sand drifting up onto the
asphalt from The World’s Most Famous Be-atch (as an oft-seen t-shirt design
proclaims), and the flashing neon signs above strip clubs and tourist bars
along Main Street, the din of calliope music, stripper music, tavern music, and
voices, voices, voices, the vocal exhaust of vacationland America, exclamations
and giggles, drunken curses and yelps and unenlightened commentary—it’s
all familiar, overly familiar, tedious and unrelentingly ordinary, yet tonight
its colors are sharper, its sounds more vivid, emblematic of the world of fresh
possibility that Cliff is suddenly eager to engage.

Chapter Nine

It’s a good week for Cliff
and Marley, a very good week. There is no recurrence of demons, no witches, no
bumps in the night. Jerry is furious with him, naturally, and threatens to fire
him, but he has no leverage—the job is merely a pastime for Cliff and he
tells Jerry to go ahead, fire him, he’ll find some other way to occupy his idle
hours. He works on the book and is surprised how easily it flows. He hasn’t
settled on a title yet, but anecdotal material streams out of him and he’s
amazed by how funny it is—it didn’t seem that funny at the time; and,
though he’s aware that he has a lot of cleaning up to do on the prose, he’s startled
by the sense of bittersweet poignancy that seems to rise from his words, even
from the uproarious bits. It’s as if in California, those years of struggle and
fuck-ups, he realized that the dream he was shooting for was played-out, that
the world of celebrity with its Bel Air mansions and stretch limos and personal
chefs masked a terrible malformation that he hated, that he denied yet knew was
there all along, that he didn’t want badly enough because, basically, he never
wanted it at all.

The relationship, too,
flows. Cliff has his concerns, particularly about their ages, but he’s
more-or-less convinced himself that it’s all right; he’s neither conning Marley
nor himself. He can hope for ten good years, fifteen at the outside, but that’s
a lifetime. After that, well, whatever comes will come. It’s not that he feels
young again. His back’s still sore, he’s beginning to recognize that he needs
more than reading glasses, but he no longer feels as empty as he did and he
thinks that Marley was spot-on in her diagnosis: he was lonely.

They make love, they go to
the movies, they walk on the beach, and they talk about everything: about
global warming, the NBA (Marley’s a Magic fan, Cliff roots for the Lakers),
about religion and ghosts and salsa, about dogs versus cats as potential pets,
about fashion trends and why he never married, and veterinary school. Cliff
offers to help with the tuition and, though reluctant at first, Marley says
there’s a well-regarded school in Orlando and she’s been accepted, but doesn’t
know if she’ll have enough saved to go for the fall term. Cliff has major
problems with Orlando. There’s no beach, no ocean breeze to break the summer
heat, and he dreads being in such close proximity to the Mouse and the hordes
of tourists who pollute the environment. Rednecks of every stamp, the blighted
of the earth, so desperate in their search for fun that they make pilgrimages
to Disneyworld and commingle with one another in a stew of ill-feeling that
frequently results in knuckle-dragging fights between hairy, overweight men and
face-offs between grim-lipped parents and their whiny kids. But he says, “Okay.
Let’s do it.”