All This Heavenly Glory (3 page)

S
O THIS GUY CAME UP TO ME
as I was leaving work and he said,
My name is Howard Blab Blah Blab and I’m a filmmaker and I’d like you to be in my new film,
and I said,
Do I look like I was born yesterday?
Granted it probably wasn’t the best response I could have come up with considering I was twenty-four and I probably did look
like I was born a lot more recently than that guy, anyway. I don’t know if he thought I was from Iowa or what, my parents
were born there, it’s not a total stretch, but I’m a New Yorker, and creepy guys have been coming up to me on the street since
I was about eight, and I’ll tell you right now I would probably have said the same thing then. Ha.

So where was I.
The filmmaker
went on to tell me that he was in fact totally legitimate (his word) and handed me a piece of paper with his number and said
he guaranteed that the video store I just walked out of would have half a dozen of his films. Already I knew by the way he
kept using the word
film
about every nine seconds that he somehow thought that being a
filmmaker
entitled him to also be a pervert.

So anyway, I took his number, and he kept talking, and I was standing there like,
uh huh,
not saying much but trying to give him a look that said, “You don’t really think I’m
that
stupid,” while simultaneously, you know, not walking away. I wasn’t an actress. Well, I had thought about it briefly during
a rough spot in college. And I do impressions of people, but not for a career. Actually, I was working in the video store.
The filmmaker kept talking and
in
between elaborating on his legitimacy as a filmmaker he made a point of nodding at my limited responses with his eyelids
open really wide undoubtedly to convey his sensitive listening skills but which really only made him look like he just put
in eyedrops. So he got in a cab and I went back into the store and looked him up on the computer and it turned out that although
he was not a porn director, which is frankly what he looked like to me, not that I’d ever seen a porn director, but if I were
to come up with my best guess about what a porn director looked like, it could easily be a fat bald guy with a big scar on
one eyelid that makes him look like he’s perpetually leering, which I’m going to guess was fitting in his case, anyway, I
looked him up and there were a whole bunch of movies listed there, not in the porn section, none of which I’d ever seen although
I did remember hearing of a couple of them.

So I took home
Wolf Diaries
and
The Addict
and as it turned out I have to amend my comment about him not being a porn director because frankly, there were sex scenes
in both those films that were so vile I thought about telling my boss to put them in the back of the store. And both of them
featured this Howard guy which trust me is not something you should ever have to pay money to see. It became pretty clear,
watching these
films,
that Howard the filmmaker was both the wolf and the addict, and that he should also make a movie called
Denial
because the wolf and the addict are both played by the same very handsome quirky actor who in no way resembled Howard the
filmmaker. There are also sex scenes aplenty featuring the handsome quirky actor that aren’t any more palatable just because
the actors are better-looking. There’s not an awful lot of dialogue, and I haven’t seen a lot of porn but it seemed like only
the most marginal step up. These people were talking about their
feelings
and that sort of thing, as opposed to describing their boners or whatever, but really it still seemed like filler between
the sex scenes. But both the movies are cut in such a way as to give the appearance of making some
artistic statement,
and you just know Howard the filmmaker was simultaneously going to people, Hey,
look at me, look what I did with the lighting,
while thinking to himself,
That actress looks really hot with my dick
up
her ass.
Which, trust me, she really doesn’t.

Nevertheless I was possessed to call him for reasons I can’t entirely explain, although when he asked, I couldn’t really bring
myself to make any comment about his
work
that wouldn’t be completely rude, and he told me to meet him at the Pierre for lunch. I don’t know what I was thinking, really.
At that point, I was pretty much thinking “lunch.” I don’t really eat at places like the Pierre on a regular basis. I tried
to find something in my closet that someone would wear to the Pierre for lunch, which ended up being the itchy skirt from
a wool suit that my mother had bought me for interviews that I never went on and a pink-and-gray sweater that had a lot of
pills at that point and I ended up looking like, I don’t know what, someone who was neither me nor someone who goes to the
Pierre for lunch. I got there and he waved me over while he was talking on a telephone someone had obviously brought over
(which I gathered from the inane conversation was solely for the purpose of indicating to me that supposedly important filmmakers
take calls on phones that people bring over) and he was seriously saying to the person,
And what did you think of the part where he’s rubbing his penis against her ass crack?
Those were his actual words, he said
ass crack
like that right in front of me.
Did you find that believable?
he went on,
Did you find that to be arousing? And disturbing, good, good…,
and then he covered the phone and said to me,
I’ll be done in a second,
and then finished up his conversation about whoever’s penis and ass crack as though he was talking about some cereal he had
for breakfast or something. Then he told me to order whatever I wanted so I ordered filet mignon and then he took another
penis call and finally got off the phone for a full two minutes so he could tell me this long involved story about the wild
life he’d led back in the seventies living with some quarterback and having big druggy sex parties all the time which I gathered
anyone present was invited to participate in and I was sitting there nodding not enjoying my filet mignon as much as I could,
thinking of him in an orgy while also trying to act as unshocked as possible because it seemed obvious to me that that’s what
he was looking for. Either that or you know,
Whoop de do, let’s go get a
room. So then he took another phone call and this time he got up from the table and carried the phone away with him while
he was talking like he had something more private to say than
ass crack
and didn’t come back until I was almost finished with this very tall chocolate raspberry dessert and he said,
So what did you think of that story I told you?
To which I said,
You know, I’m not an actress, and therefore I am not interested in having sex with you.
Just like that, I said that, I really did. And he said, Oh,
no, that’s cool, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, I’m just really looking for someone who understands the
work,
someone who…you just strike me as having the intelligence that this character needs.
And then he told me that the same quirky actor I happened to love would be my costar. So then he’s mind-fucking me, right,
both because who wouldn’t want to co-star with that guy and also because he must have perceived, somehow, that this was my
weak spot, people thinking I’m stupid. Which I’m not. I didn’t go to Harvard like Howard the filmmaker, who at age like, fifty
or whatever he is, managed to remind me about six times that he went to Harvard while I was just thinking, Man, you were in
the class of ‘47 or something, give it a fucking rest. I work in a video store. Someone says he wants to put me in a movie
who actually makes movies, even if they are bad, you know, fine, put me in a movie. Anything would have been better than alphabetizing
gay porn. So he gave me a script and told me he wanted me to read for the part of Angeline but if I was more compelled by
another character he’d love to see what I did with that too.

So I went home and the script was about this good-looking young filmmaker, it was actually called
Henry the Filmmaker,
just in case old Howard hadn’t said that word enough times, who’s kind of hypersexed but of course really wants true love,
and he goes around trying to seduce all these women he sees on the street, while at the same time also pursuing the elusive
one he really cares about, who of course does have sex with him but that detached kind of sex where she’s not emotionally
involved with him at all which in my opinion was the real fantasy of Howard the filmmaker. And of course there’s the obligatory
cameo in which old Howard, something of a mentor to his younger alter ego, has sex with a young novice in a church basement
while Henry looks on taking notes or jerking off or something. What that has to do with filmmaking I’m not sure. The only
thing that’s even a little bit believable about this movie is that the young filmmaker is considerably more handsome than
Howard the old fat bald filmmaker and therefore you could see where maybe one or two random women who only just met him on
the street might ever want to have sex with him. Otherwise it veers off into some weird nether-world where the woman has this
compulsive gambling problem even though by day she’s a prim schoolteacher and she gets deeper and deeper into the debt of
the gambling problem until eventually the young filmmaker is the only person who can possibly help her or relate to her because
he obviously has this compulsion of his own, but then it’s still kind of a thing where in the end even though she’s shed a
very dramatic tear out of her left eye she’s still kind of detached which allows Henry the filmmaker to be left kind of perpetually
pursuing her which again is a very nice fantasy coming from a sex addict. He kind of gets to have it both ways.

Anyway there were all these small parts, and the one he wanted me to read for, Angeline, is this novice who the old wise filmmaker
has some really nasty sex with, to which I said one more time,
I’m not an actress.
I didn’t need to do shit like that for my art. I had no art. So I called him up and told him so, and I was thinking I could
write a better script than that in my sleep, but since the last thing I’d written was a fuck-off letter to my last boyfriend
a year before, I said,
I’ll read for the part of Marie,
this woman on a bus in a fur coat who tells the young filmmaker to go fuck himself after he asks if he can stick his fingers
inside her fur. So he said,
That’s fine, meet me in the lobby
of
the Pierre at 11:00.
At night.

I have no explanation for why I went except I wasn’t the least bit worried that I couldn’t kick his own ass crack if I needed
to. But then I got there and he said,
Come up to my
room, and I was like, one more time,
I’m not an actress, I’m not going to sleep with you
for
something I truly don’t care about.
Which I realize now might have given him the impression that I would have fucked him if he’d had something to offer that
I did care about. I didn’t say it right, but thankfully he didn’t come up with a counteroffer, he just said,
That’s fine, I really think you have an interesting quality that would translate well on film,
and I was just like, all right already, let’s get this over with, and we went up to this huge suite and he read the part
of the young filmmaker and said his icky line which truly wasn’t even necessary at that point in order for me to find the
motivation to tell him to fuck off, and he took a meaningful deep breath, trying to show me how impressed he was with my natural
acting talent. He said,
That was really powerful.
And I just thought, Oh please. Even though I know I was kind of convincing, he would have said that no matter what I did.
So anyway then he said some stuff about financing and locations and dropped some names and said they were just in the early
stages but he’d get in touch with me when they were ready to go into production even though he hadn’t taken my number and
I didn’t really want to give it to him anyway. I figured he knew where I worked and he could find me if he wanted to.