Passing Through the Flame (2 page)

“Okay, fine, enough, cut!” Farber said.

Deliberately, Velva continued to move—long enough for Conrad to look up from the camera and watch her with his naked eyes for a few seconds. Long enough for his eyes to meet hers and seem to ask the question, for her to answer with a slightly wider stare. He gave her a little smile, then a strange rueful shake of his head as he turned away.

“Okay, Kalif, on the bed. One good long sequence with Velva on top, and we can wrap it up for today. You don’t even have to come; Paul’s gonna hold a medium shot on Velva.”

Kalif got out of his chair and flopped on his back on the water bed next to Velva. He was about thirty or so, had a hairy nondescript body, medium-length black hair, long razor-edge sideburns, and a ratty little mustache. A younger and greasier Cesar Romero, Velva thought—the type turned her off.

Apparently the feeling was mutual at the moment.

“Well?”
Farber said in his grating voice.

Kalif gave a shrug. “It’s been a long day,” he said. “I’m no Cuban Superman.”

“Jesus H. Christ! Do you think you’re being paid for your
acting talent
? Think about something that turns you on, you lox.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, fer chrissakes, Velva, get him up!”

Grimacing, Velva wet her right forefinger, then touched it to the tip of Kalif’s nonfunctional organ, ran it slowly down the length of the shaft and into the crack between his buttocks. A twitch and a throb showed some progress. She reversed the procedure, and things became a bit firmer.

“Quit horsing around. We don’t have all day.”

In that moment, Farber’s voice sent a small needle of pain through Velva’s innards. It was the same pain that she had felt several times in Nebraska, when a guy she was out with who didn’t turn her on but who had some kind of power told her to ball him in that same rotten assured tone of voice. “You’re beautiful, baby,” a slimy theater owner had told her as he pressed her head between his legs, and the next afternoon she won a beauty contest. That pain then, that pain now.

She flashed Farber a look of pure poison, thinking, I’m no cheap whore, you lousy loser, I’m
Velva Leecock
, I’m gonna be a star; two years from now you’ll have to wait six months for an appointment to kiss my feet. But she knew better than to spit out her rage. Instead, she obeyed that mangy, cheap voice; she closed her eyes and went to work, quickly, savagely, until Kalif grunted and came up hard.

She spat him out like a peach pit, and, looking up, her eyes met Paul Conrad’s. The cameraman’s hands were balled into tight fists, and his lean body was hunched slightly forward at the shoulders. Velva was dead certain that he had shared that needle pain. She went soft inside. He understood; they were traveling in the same direction, up out of this muck. They were both going to be stars. They shared that, and they shared that pain in the gut, and they shared the rage.

And quite suddenly, the pain was gone. Velva smiled. Paul’s eyebrows relaxed upward, and shaking his head, he laughed softly.

“All right, that’ll have to do. Get in position. Paul, you got a fresh magazine in the camera? We got—”

“I told you I know my business,” Conrad snarled. “I’ve made whole films with less Mickey Mouse than this.”

“I’m getting tired of your lip, Conrad. Any more mouth and—”

“Don’t say it: ‘You’ll never work in this town again!’ It’s been a long hard day, Larry. We’re all getting a little antsy.”

Farber smiled. “Okay, so let’s wrap it up and go home and get laid.” Kalif, the setup man, Farber’s chick, and even Paul managed pale laughs. Only Velva didn’t think it was funny.

Kalif stretched out on his back with his head on the pillow, and Velva mounted him easily, facing the camera so that his head and upper torso were completely blocked by her body, so that all she saw of him were his hairy legs projecting straight out between hers as she straddled him. Out of sight, out of mind, as they said. “Fine. Good position. Action. Let ‘er roll.”

Velva began a deliberate rocking motion, lifting her body with her thighs and knee joints, bringing it down with a rolling twist of her hips. She arched her back as far as it would go, bringing her breasts up and out with each upstroke, wetting her lips occasionally with a languid sweep of her tongue.

Up, around, down, up, around, down.... It was like riding a wooden horse on the merry-go-round at the State Fair or the calisthenics she did each morning and night to keep her body in professional shape. She felt the mechanical friction of Kalif within her, but sex with the man who happened to be inside her was about the farthest thing from her mind.

“More feeling!” Farber shouted. “Let’s see some passion!” She increased the tempo of her rhythm.

“I said
feeling, passion
, not another thousand rpm.”

How am I supposed to feel passion riding this greasy merry-go-round horse? Velva thought. She could feel Kalif slowly losing it. She wanted nothing more than to get this damn take over with, get out of this crummy place, and....

Her eyes fixed on Paul Conrad, watching her through the viewfinder of the camera.

Yes, she thought, that’s who I want inside me right now. Somebody young and strong who’s going up from the bottom of Hollywood, not sinking back further into the muck. Somebody a star could feel good balling, who could feel good balling a star.

Up, around, and down.... Velva kept her eyes fixed on the camera lens, filled her mind’s eye with the image of the man watching her through it. Standing there in tight blue Levis, legs slightly spread, doing competent things with his camera, his attention on her body as it went up, around, and down.

As she rode the merry-go-round, she turned her performance into a kind of dance for Paul Conrad. Arching her breasts toward him, she ran her tongue around her lips in a rhythm far more sensual than what was dimly taking place below and stared into the camera lens, trying to make her eyes say, “For you! For you!”

“Good, good, much better!” Farber said. “Now you’re getting into it!”

Up, around, and down.... She moved her hips mechanically, while the rest of her body danced for Paul, for the camera’s eye, for the thousands, the millions, who would see this performance, see Velva Leecock up there on a huge white screen in the darkness, like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Raquel Welch, a star ten times larger than life. She felt that power fill her body, inflating it like a balloon. She felt herself glowing, radiating. So what if this was a cheap fuck film? She
was
a star because she felt like a star and because Paul Conrad was capturing all this on film. When the film was shown, what she felt would come across because she was a star inside. A real star was a star before she happened to be discovered. That’s why she inevitably
would
be discovered.

“That’s it!” Farber shouted. “Now let’s have a come. If you can’t make it, fake it.”

I’ll do a come for
you
, Paul, Velva thought. I’ll show you what it’s going to be like. She knew that she could ride the merry-go-round like this for a thousand years and never have an orgasm. So this was an opportunity to really
act.

She held her head stiffly in position while moving her body and arms more wildly, so that she looked straight into the lens of the camera even as she appeared to lose herself in sexual frenzy, playing the scene directly to the man behind it and through him to the thousands watching in the private darkness.

She began moaning more loudly. Finally, she gave one last exaggerated downward thrust and a piercing, high-pitched shriek.

“We got it, cut,” Farber said, an edge of annoyance in his voice.

Immediately, Velva let Kalif slip out of her, bounded off the water bed, and with a few quick steps was standing squarely in front of Paul Conrad, filmed with sweat, looking straight into the depths of his eyes.

“Did you like my performance?” she said.

Conrad cracked that sly little-boy smile.

“I liked the dialogue,” he said.

“I like the way you hold your camera.”

“I like the way you like the way I hold my camera.”

“I’d like to ball you.”

He gave that strange rueful shake of his head. His eyes flickered over the set—the water bed where Kalif was wiping himself off with a towel, Larry Farber staring sourly at the two of them, the setup man taking things down, the peeling paint on the ceiling—then returned to hers, a degree harder.

She reached out and ran one finger lightly up the zipper of his Levis, feeling him throb suddenly beneath her.

He shuddered, shrugged, smiled. “Lady, I guess you talked me into it,” he said.

“What, you may ask,” said Paul Conrad, “is a nice boy like me doing in a place like this?” Beside him, Velva Leecock’s perfect face was as blank as a can of raw film; the line had simply blown past her. Almost a year and half out here, Paul thought, and I’m still not used to the
slowness.

It had taken months for him to get it through his head that the slower pace of the Californian mind was not stupidity, that in fact
he
was the freak, his mind still twanging double time to the frantic rhythms of Manhattan. Still, it could drive him up the wall when someone like Larry Farber seemed to dick around for centuries doing something that should be polished off in five minutes. But I suppose in Farber’s case, it’s sheer incompetence. In New York, he’d probably move faster and screw up more often.

Velva now—Velva was something else again.

Velva tweaked his nipple, sending a small tremor traveling the length of his naked body. “Sometimes you seem to be talking to yourself, Paul,” she said. “I don’t know whether you’re putting me on or whether you’re just crazy.”

Paul smiled at her. He liked Velva Leecock. She was...
nice.

Nice,
now there’s a weird way to feel about a girl who stars in fuck films; who’d cheerfully ball anyone who might advance her career a millimeter. But Velva
did
have niceness, that Midwestern openness about everything she did. Velva was up-front, transparent, and she believed in herself with an unwavering clarity. Your New York girl pursuing the goals that Velva was pursuing, doing the things that Velva did, would have a head full of decayed angleworms. Velva, however, somehow managed to stay nice. Niceness must be an intrinsic quality like innocence or sensuality, he thought. There’s a movie in there somewhere....

“What are you thinking about now?” she asked earnestly. She really did seem interested in what went on in his mind.

“Oh, I was just thinking about a movie I might make someday, around a character something like you....”

It had the effect he knew it would have. Her eyes lit up, she propped herself up against the walnut veneer headboard, and suddenly talk became more exciting to her than sex. “I’d
love to
be in a movie you made,” she said.

“I’d love to be able to put you in a movie,” he said, meaning: I’d love to get to make a movie of any kind as long as it wasn’t more dumb low porn.

“I hope you remember that when the time comes.”

He found himself staring at the cracked cream-colored paint of his bedroom ceiling. For some reason, this perspective made the room seem even smaller and dingier than it was. How big this apartment had seemed a year and a half ago: a full-sized living room, a dining-room-kitchenette, a bedroom, and a second bedroom for the 16mm movie equipment he had brought from New York. In New York, he had paid a higher rent for a ratty little loft with hot and cold running roaches. How wonderfully Californian it had all seemed then! Four rooms in Hollywood, in fact three blocks from Hollywood Boulevard itself, plenty of parking spaces, wall-to-wall carpeting, walnut veneer and vinyl furniture, the little breakfast bar, a built-in garbage disposal, theatrically beautiful women walking all over the place. The Golden West, where everything was open and friendly, so sunny, spacious, and wide!

A year and a half later he was living in a four-room plastic furnished apartment on a seedy street in downtown Hollywood, struggling to meet rent he couldn’t really afford, to keep his Rambler alive, and doing this by working in so many porn films for so little money that he hadn’t been able to do anything of his own since he came out here.

And nothing had changed but the camera angle he saw things through.

“When the time comes,” he repeated bleakly.

“You’ve got to believe in yourself, Paul.”

“Oh, I believe in myself,” he said. “I can write, direct, shoot, and edit a film better than most of the stumblebums in this town. I’ve got boxes of trophies and a medal or two from colleges and cinema magazines and two-bit festivals and the print of the world’s best unreleasable feature film to prove it. What I don’t believe in is this lousy town. Thousands of television hacks driving down to pick up food stamps in their Porsches, and you’ve just about got to ball George Meany to get in a union, and even then the initiation fee would be more money than I could raise. The studios are dying, and if anyone without a track record tries to raise the money for an independent production, they come after him with butterfly nets. But don’t get me wrong, I love show business!”

Paul was startled by the anger which had suddenly boiled over. I guess I hadn’t ever faced the hopelessness dead on before. To get to direct or write a movie, you have to have directed or written a movie before. To even get in the front door, you need an agent. To get an agent, you need a track record. Catch-22 wherever you turn.

“If you’ve got star quality, sooner or later that big break will come,” Velva said, her violet eyes all earnest. “And when it does come, you’ll make the most of it, because what’s inside you will shine through and everyone will see it. I’ve got that star quality, I can feel it all through me: and you’ve got it too, Paul. When you’re a star inside, you
know
it. Can’t you feel it pulsing out of you?” She gave him a savage hug.

Paul felt a queasy emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Christ, what pathetic stuff her poor head was filled with! The crazy certainty that she had “star quality,” whatever that was, and the awful reality that she had no more real talent than any one of a million other beautiful women who came to Hollywood thinking that stardom was a certainty. How long would she continue to smash that beautiful face and body of hers against the reality of the town and her own limitations? Would she end as a high-priced hooker or luck out and marry some fat TV producer with a cigar bigger than his dong? Or would she end it all in an ocean of reds?