Passing Through the Flame (49 page)

But there are times, gray fog rolling in

When my life seems trapped in the prison of my skin....

Her controlled, quavering voice told him of how she had suffered, imprisoned in the Susan his ego had tried to maintain against the weight of overwhelming karma. And she was telling him in the words that he himself had put in her mouth. He was singing through her, and she was singing through him; together they were the Velvet Cloud at last centering its own being.

And the stars are like holes in the tinfoil of the sky

And it seems like such an effort just not to die

And I cannot breathe without knowing why! why! why!

Oh, yeah, baby, that’s where I put you, that’s where we’ve been! And he had known it all along, he had written it, and only now, through her voice, had he found the way to tell it to her and to himself. He glided his guitar around her, telling her he was sorry, that nothing could be more wrong than to be the dimming of your lover’s light.

Lazy Saint! Lazy Saint!

Well, sometimes you got it, baby, sometimes you ain’t!

As the music bridged into the next verse, she could feel the light within her, the energy sparking from her fingertips, kindling flames of that same eternal magic in the souls of the audience.

You can ride the fire, baby, you can ride the cloud

You can be the phoenix, lover, you can live out loud

You can ride the bird of night to the mountains of the sun

You can be anything as long as you don’t run, run, run....

The music ascended in a pounding soaring run to a tranquil upland plateau where everything seemed to stretch on forever in every direction, and she felt she had reached the place she was meant to be, far beyond the bounds of self and separation, where the even drone of organ and guitar mirrored the evenness of the natural soul.

As long as you don’t try to grab the water in your outstretched hand

As long as you can’t turn it off or try to understand

As long as you remember, baby, that you are not the One....

In the breath of the people, in Bill’s loving guitar, in the love at her core, in the communion of souls, in the joy of riding the crest of the wave as it passed through her, she tasted the cool spring waters of the everlasting all.

That effort is illusion, baby, that the night of might is done

That all that shit is maya, flyer, and you are just a dream

That life is such illusion, daddy, that you’re just what you seem....

The funky blues chant of the band was just right, a reminder of that other universe, of the world where she was just Susan.

Lazy Saint! Lazy Saint!

She slid gratefully back down into that quieter reality, refreshed and renewed. She laughed the last line of the song, and it came out as a lovingly ironic humble affirmation.

Well, sometimes you got it, baby, sometimes you ain’t!

In the moment of silence between the last note and the applause, she saw Jango Beck’s face smiling up at her just in front of the stage, a knowing, smiling Buddha mask with the eyes of a jungle cat.

“WOULD you tell your slavering fans how it feels to be walking into the first day’s shooting of your first feature, Mr. Conrad?” Sandy said, sticking her balled fist in Paul’s face like a microphone as they double-timed toward Soundstage Four in the chilling early-morning mist.

Unbidden, a parody of the arrogant, epicene voice of Rick Gentry emerged from the twanging snarl of clashing energies vibrating in Paul’s head. “I feel a bit nauseous, perhaps somewhat unmotivated, if you know what I mean. But don’t get me wrong, darling, I love Hollywood.”

Sandy laughed a bit too dutifully, and Paul shared in her rueful grimace, and in that sharing found a moment of calm in the eye of his storm. In the last two weeks, I’ve got myself a sort of old lady, and I’ve met the monster Jango has thrown me into the arena with, and here I am walking into the moment I’ve always dreamed of, not knowing whether to be happy or terrified. How could Beck
do
a thing like this to me, to his own picture? And why? Why on earth why?

A breeze blew around the corner of a big sound stage, chilling Paul’s bones for a short flash, bringing him back to the cold ache he had felt at his first sight of Rick Gentry. His first thirty-second close-up of his leading man had given him a sure preview of the whole hassle-to-come.

The setting had been Jango Beck’s office at the studio, a standard studio office that Beck had turned into an Arabian Nights fantasy. He had cleared out all the studio furniture and erected a sultan’s tent inside the shell of the office out of antique Persian tapestries. The furniture was all low Arabian court tables and pillows, except for a kind of brass desert chieftain’s stool which Beck reserved for himself. He kept a huge brass brazier of coals going at all times, on which he periodically strewed powered incense, and occasionally broiled tiny skewers of meat and vegetables. The air conditioner worked overtime to compensate for all the heat and smoke. There were huge hookahs all over the place stuffed with enormous lumps of hashish, though no one ever lit them. More than an ego trip, it seemed to Paul that this setup was Beck’s gesture of contempt for the studio and all that it represented. Jango was parodying Cecil B. DeMille in a Biblical epic about himself.

Jango was sitting on his little throne with a graceful-looking man coiled on a cushion by his feet like a pet leopard. He rose as Paul entered the room; Paul saw that he was about six feet tall and looked as if he had preserved a good portion of his adolescent willowiness by hard and continuous exercise. His face too had an aging youthfulness, maintained by sun lamps and face creams, but more obviously by a powerful, controlled mania that showed in his gray-green eyes. His brittle, hard, narcissistic, desperate face seared into Paul’s gut like a dagger of ice.

“Paul, this is Rick Gentry,” said Jango Beck. “Rick, this is your director, Paul Conrad.”

Gentry smiled a big stage smile, but something in his eyes went through to another level of reality that made Paul wince. “I’m pleased to meet you,” Gentry said in a smooth actor’s tenor. “I’m sure we’ll work well together. I judge a man by his vibrations, and I like yours.”

“I’m sure your experience will be an asset to the production,” Paul said, determined not to let his visceral reaction show. I’ve got to work with this guy, I can’t afford to prejudge him.

“Yes, I understand that this is your first major feature,” Gentry said. “You must be awfully excited and awfully nervous. You may certainly feel free to consult me about any aspect of the production where you feel my greater experience might be of value to you.” Paul looked Gentry in the eyes for an extended moment. “That’s very comforting,” he said. Gentry looked evenly back.

“Ah, I
knew
you two would be a creative combination!” Jango Beck said, laughing silently at some internal punch line.

“You’ve written quite a nice little script, considering the circumstances and your level of experience,” Gentry said. “There seem to be a few small problems, but nothing that we can’t work out in rehearsals, I’m sure.”

Gentry’s attitude seemed almost paternal, but Paul knew right then that he was going to be in for it from Rick Gentry.

“Well, here you are, love,” Sandy said, kissing him on the lips as they stood outside the fading yellow bulk of Sound Stage Four. “I’m off to see the Great Man about a press release. He’s finally convinced the Velvet Cloud to appear at Sunset City, and he wants to crow about it to the world.”

She turned, walked half a dozen steps, looked over her shoulder, blew him a kiss, waved, and then she was gone around the corner of the sound stage and Paul was alone at the entrance to the little universe in which he was expected to play God.

He opened the door and stepped into a vast, quiet enclosed space, a huge cavern whose ceiling faded away into a maze of pipes, struts, catwalks, wiring, hanging lights and shadows. The floor of the sound stage gave the same feeling of endless amorphous clutter. Along one wall, a row of dressing rooms had been set up, temporary cubicles looking for all the world like a tiny indoor trailer camp. Near the center of the sound stage, two sets had been erected: a plush New York magazine office and a large modern farmhouse kitchen.

The flats and furniture, the overhead and standing lights, the big dolly-mounted camera, the recording equipment and the cranelike boom mikes, the chairs and consoles—all seemed dwarfed in the center of the huge sound stage, two small oases of purposeful equipment in a dark and shadowy attic cluttered with old flats, stored equipment, stacks of foldingchairs, tables, benches, and just plain junk. To Paul, it seemed to epitomize the studio—a vast dark storeroom of old equipment and old ways of doing things gathering dust in the gloom of disuse, with what purposeful activity there was standing out like a flickering lantern in a crumbling Victorian mansion. I’d love to use that shot in a movie sometime, he thought as he walked toward his sets and the people who huddled around them as if for warmth.

“Hello, Paul,” Velva Leecock said, getting out of her chair to greet him with a peck of a kiss on the cheek. “Isn’t this wonderful? Isn’t this exciting?”

Paul smiled a cold, distant smile. “Yeah,” he said. Then Sally Golden, the cute, dark little script girl: “Where’s Rick Gentry?”

“Still in his dressing room, I think.”

Paul turned to Emmett Francis, the assistant producer, a gentle, middle-aged noncompetitive guy who reminded Velva a little of her favorite uncle, Henry, a tanned, tranquil, settled sort of man. “Would you please summon our star, Emmett?”

“Don’t worry, Paul, I’ll get him out here without rustling his pinfeathers,” Emmett said in his mellow, rolling farmer’s voice. “Don’t let him throw you off now, y’hear.” And he loped off toward the row of dressing rooms like Uncle Henry walking across a wheatfield toward the barn.

“Rick Gentry certainly is being a cunt, isn’t he?” Velva said.

Paul’s eyes met hers in a moment of rueful agreement, and for that moment things seemed to be what they had been at the start. It was
their
movie, the mission they had gone to Jango Beck’s crazy party to accomplish, and magically here they were, about to realize their shared midnight dreams. But only for a moment; then shades came down in Paul’s eyes, and he was the distant professional again, uptight and nervous, and he was into balling someone else.

“Let’s try not to let personalities get in the way of making this film, okay, Velva? We both have too much at stake.”

Rick Gentry came back from the dressing room with Emmett, wearing the rakishly mod black suit and yellow shirt that were his costume for the magazine office scene. Velva’s stomach began to churn at the sight of him. Gentry was the kind of faggot that made her furious: not exactly swish, not rough trade either, but something obnoxiously in between.

“Hello, Paul,” Gentry said in his buttery voice. “I’m ready to begin when you are.” Such a smooth smile, and he practically batted his eyelashes at Paul. Oooh, he’s so repulsive!

“That’s fine, Rick. Emmett, you want to call everybody together. I thought we’d have a little huddle.”

“Hello, Velva,” Gentry said, giving her a frog smile. “How does it feel to be acting in your first film?”

“I’ve been in films before.”

“Ah, yes,” Gentry said with a smutty sneer in his voice. “So you have.”

“
Recently
, too,” Velva said, leering back.

“Cool it, shall we?” Paul said softly, but with tension twanging in his voice.

“Of course, Paul,” Gentry said. “We shouldn’t allow ourselves to become unprofessional. It’s just first-day jitters, I’ve been through it many times. It will pass, never fear.” And he retreated into that smug, snotty shell he had maintained through all those awful rehearsals.

Just thinking about the rehearsals gave Velva an icky taste in her mouth as if from giving a blow job to some greasy fuck-film producer. She had balled some pretty crummy guys and sucked some unwholesome cocks in the course of a day’s work before the camera, but nothing she had ever done had made her feel unclean outside and violated inside the way Gentry’s touch on her flesh did. The way he played the love scenes to Paul! It was hideous; it was disgusting. And he was a lousy actor, too.

And that was the only thought that brightened Velva’s horizon as Emmett assembled the crew around Paul. At least there was no doubt about who the star of
Sunset City
was going to be. Gentry is terrible. He’s repulsive, he’s disgusting, he can’t act, and he’s a sexual turn-off. He’s got all the star quality of a closet queen. Which he is. This is my big chance: I’m the star, I’ll bet I still turn Paul on, and the leading man is awful.
I’m
going to make it in this movie, and no no-talent faggot is going to stop me!

Paul Conrad stood in the pool of light at the center of the gloomy, cavernous sound stage surveying the crew and cast gathered around him, feeling not so much like the all-powerful
auteur as
a bug under a microscope. The order of magnitude of the jump from fuck films to a major studio feature hit him with full terrifying force.

A fuck-film crew at its most lavish might consist of a camerman, an assistant cameraman, a sound man, a lighting man, and a couple of all-purpose grips. On
Down Under the Ground
, he had been his own cameraman, and his crew had consisted of an assistant cameraman, a sound man, and Arnie, who did everything else.

Here he was a general in charge of a goddamned army. He had a cameraman and two assistant cameramen and four sound men and six lighting men with their own pecking order and a dozen grips and a wardrobe department and a makeup department and a script girl and two assistant directors—and thank God an assistant producer named Emmett Francis who had major-domoed this kind of ridiculous circus for twenty years. Nothing Paul had ever done had required him to command a tenth as many people as this; never had filmmaking seemed such a logistical complexity. And the interiors of
Sunset City
could be more comfortably shot with a crew half this size. But this was what he was stuck with. Thus spake the unions.