Passing Through the Flame (71 page)

Paul smiled at him sweetly, looking right through him. “Cut,” he said.

“Sunset City
, Scene forty-one-A, take four.”

“Speed.”

“Action.”

Gentry strode into the crowd, his body tensed into a musculature of belligerence, his face impassive over the anger he feared to show.

“Where can a guy get a drink around here?” he said in a flat, neutral voice that came off arrogantly challenging.

“Hey, man, this is getting lame!”

“Where can a guy get his ass kicked around here?”

“Somebody get the dude stoned!”

They were crowding around Gentry, and he seemed on the verge of flaring, of answering them back. But instead, he whirled on Paul. “How long are you going to force this farce to continue?” he snapped shrilly.

“Until we get it right.”

Close, but no cigar. Maybe the next take will redirect that anger.

“Sunset City
, Scene forty-one-A, take five.”

“Speed.”

“Action.”

Gentry fairly swaggered out of the Poster Palace and into the crowd. His eyes darted from face to face, challenging now. The eyes that glared back were charged with annoyance, even open hostility. There was electricity in the air.

“Where can a guy get a drink around here?” Gentry said. This time it came out sardonically. It was Doug Winter.

“Man, you’re really a juicer, aren’t you?”

“Why don’t you cut this shit out?”

“Shoot him up with some meth.”

Gentry was surrounded by hostile faces now; they were jeering him with their eyes, taunting him with their posture, daring this invader to confront their reality.

“Why are you all so damned hostile?” Gentry shrieked. “What’s the matter with you people anyway? Why won’t you let us shoot this miserable scene?”

“Cut!” Paul yelled.

“Why don’t you take a look at your filthy selves? Why—”

“Cut, cut!” Paul shouted, dashing forward, grabbing Gentry by the arm, and dragging him away toward the entrance to the Poster Palace. “Shoot this next take,” Paul whispered to Fritz Nagy
en passant.
We’ve almost got it now.

“It’s getting better, Rick,” he said. “Maybe we can finish this mess on the next take. Try to control yourself. Don’t let these dirty hippies get the best of you. Remember, you’re Doug Winter, you’re their intellectual superior, you’re
in control.”

Gentry glared at Paul. Then he pulled away angrily. “Ready when you are, C.B.,” he said viciously. Paul crossed his fingers behind his back. It looked as if this might work.

“Sunset City
, Scene forty-one-A, take six.”

“Speed.”

Paul exhaled, held his breath. “And... action!” he said.

Rick Gentry walked out of the Poster Palace, tension in every move he made, but his face frozen into a glacial calm. He was acting now, he was determined, but underneath he was seething, and the combination played perfectly, investing his persona with static electricity that set the teeth of the crowd on edge, that made them track him warily with their eyes. Gentry played a dozen little eye-contact games with people in the crowd, as if trying to find a human face in a mass of what he regarded as subhuman barbarians. It was beautiful; it was Winter; it was working!

He walked up to a thin bare-chested man of about twenty-eight, really wasted-looking, with a dirty headband holding back greasy hair, a psychedelic caricature of a young Bowery bum. “Where can a guy get a drink around here?”

“That stuff’ll rot your brain,” the thin man said.

“Yeah, look what a mess you are already!”

“Turn you into a faggot.”

“And you people are an example of how dope gives you a sound mind in a healthy body?” Gentry snapped. It was a controlled quip, angry, but honed and aimed like a sharp weapon.

“Try some,” a voice shouted, and a hairy hand shoved a burning joint in his face. Gentry snatched the joint, took a puff, spit out a plume of smoke, and the marijuana cigarette along with it.

“Revolting,” he said. “Turns you into a vegetable.”

A guttural rumble escaped from the crowd, like the lowing of a ground-pawing bull. Paul shuddered, but Gentry seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the ugly mood that was starting to build.

“Oh, now I’ve offended your religion, have I?” he said, projecting his words at the crowd at large. “I thought you were all supposed to be full of love. Where’s your love for me?”

“Up your ass!” someone yelled.

“Go home, you goddamn pig!”

Something had crystallized in the mood of the crowd, and now they were shouting, their faces contorted, and the whole mass of people seemed to sway ominously toward Gentry.

“Who needs this shit?”

“Pigs, go home!
Pigs, go home!
PIGS, GO HOME!” Someone shouted it, and then someone else picked it up, and then scores of people were chanting it. “PIGS, GO HOME! PIGS, GO HOME! PIGS, GO HOME!” Gentry’s face showed fear now, but so might Doug Winter’s.

“What’s going on here? Break this up! Move it along!”

Six of Jango Beck’s rentacops, puffy and sweaty in their heavy brown uniforms, broke through the crowd, brandishing long, heavy billies, and looking all too eager to use them. Relief showed on Gentry’s face, then a certain grim satisfaction as the crowd immediately shifted its attention to the security guards, pushing, shoving, and cursing as the guards formed themselves into a line and began herding them away from the entrance to the Poster Palace with their clubs.

Paul made sure he got enough covering footage and then shouted, “Cut!”

Gentry broke and dashed for the entrance to the Poster Palace behind the cordon of security police. The crowd surged and muttered, but seemed disinclined to try violence.

Still, the situation looked definitely ugly, and Paul hustled himself and the crew inside almost as fast as Gentry.

“I could’ve been torn apart out there!” Gentry screamed at Paul.

“Don’t worry,” Paul said. “If you are, I’ll be sure to get your good side.”

“You have a revolting sense of humor!”

“We got the shot, didn’t we?” Paul said mildly. “We got what we needed and nobody got hurt.”

“Better luck next time,” Gentry said, nodding toward the en trance way. Outside, the crowd was pushing and shoving against a barricade of billy clubs as more security guards, short-tempered and surly in the hot sun, arrived on the scene.

Paul found himself feeling a bit unclean. And wondering if the movie really was the most important thing, the only thing that mattered. I’ve done a lousy thing to Gentry, and I wasn’t so nice to those people either. He wanted to say something to Gentry to make up for it, to acknowledge the humanity he had mistreated. But he couldn’t think of what to say.

And he couldn’t swear to himself that should it become necessary, he wouldn’t do the same kind of thing again.

“And the Velvet Cloud will make their first appearance about seven thirty,” Sandra Bayne said, sipping at a can of Coke. “Followed by Enterprise, Sotweed Factor, and Dr. What, plus maybe a few surprises.” Under her loose pale-blue dress, her body was damp with sweat, and her skin felt as if it were frying in the merciless afternoon sun, even under her tan. Must be ninety-five out here.

She rested her back against one of the girders supporting the stage. The metal was hard and hot. Her feet hurt, too. And her ears welcomed this break between performances—the sound level around the stage area approximated that of Blue Cheer’s amps in a small club like the Whisky A Go Go. When a band into blasting out volume, like Ripper, was on, it actually got physically painful.

“What kind of surprise?” the guy from
Rolling Stone
asked.

Sandra forced a professional smile. “If I told you, they wouldn’t be surprises,” she said.

“Is John Lennon supposed to show up?” asked a girl in a miniskirted suit who looked too old to be covering this thing. From
Cosmo
or someplace like that.

“I’ve heard the rumor,” Sandy said. No point in squashing it.

“Is it true or not?”

“Obviously one or the other, but I don’t know which.”

“Are you Sandra Bayne?” A security guard with a heavy five o’clock shadow, looking like a gorilla stuffed into a bellhop’s uniform, had appeared at her elbow.

“At last a question I can answer,” she said. “Yes, I’m Sandra Bayne.”

The guard nodded toward the gate in the fence, where two other security guards with long billies and conspicuous pistols were watching three men she couldn’t make out who had their noses pressed against the chain-link gridwork like the proverbial one-eyed cats peeping in a seafood store. “Three people want to come in here to talk to Mr. Beck, say they’re some kind of People’s Action Delegation. Artie Dugan—”

“He’s on the press list.”

“Barry Stein and Ivan Blue.”

“Oh-oh,” Sandra muttered. Stein and Blue are definitely on Jango’s shit list. But on the other hand, Stein is Dugan’s boss, we can’t let Artie in and keep him out, and it would be deadly PR to bar Artie Dugan. I’d better dump this one in the Great Man’s lap.

“We’d better go see Mr. Beck about this,” she said. “See you around,” she told the reporters. “I’ll be running around this squirrel cage for the next four days; you can’t miss me.”

She led the guard about sixty degrees around the bottom of the circular stage to the entrance to the recording shack built into the base of the stage tower. The last she had seen of Jango, he was in there with Mike Taub watching them record Thunderball. There were two mean-looking and very alert guards at the door to the recording shack. They had the most important security job of all—guarding the master tapes of the live performances—and they looked the part. They recognized Sandra, nodded, and passed the two of them inside.

The shack was crammed with recording consoles, half a dozen technicians, and neatly stacked cans of tape all over the place like piles of giant poker chips. Hanks of wire and cables ran every which way, crisscrossing, and exiting through half a dozen little hatches in the sheet metal ceiling. An air conditioner was groaning in one of the four windows in the corrugated walls, but it still must have been eighty-five degrees inside.

Jango was leaning over a console watching a technician rewind some tape. He looked preternaturally cool in his black velvet pants, with his furry chest showing through the matching open vest. Beside him, Mike Taub was sweating like a pig in one of his trendy suits, this one a pinstripe job with wide lapels, and a big paisley tie that must have been choking him to death in this heat.

“Hello, Sandy,” Jango said, putting an affectionate hand on her ass, teasing the crack of her buttocks with his middle finger, sending a shiver of annoyed pleasure through her. “What’s happening?”

“Some kind of delegation wants to see you.”

Taub looked nervous. But Jango laughed. “I expected something like this,” he said. “A lot of high-velocity egos are ricochetting around here.”

“It’s Artie Dugan—”

“Artie Dugan?”
Taub said. “That freeloader’s been signed, sealed, and delivered for years. Tell him to piss off, or we’ll cut him off our T-shirt list.”

“Barry Stein and Ivan Blue are with him,” Sandy said. “That’s why I didn’t know whether to let them in or not.”

“I see,” Jango said. “Well, who am I to refuse to see the representatives of the people? I’m only running this show, right?” There was an edge in Jango’s voice that made Sandra quiver, that brought a thin smile to Mike Taub’s lips.

Jango turned to the guard and spoke to him in deceptively gentle tones, all the while favoring him with a one-of-the-boys look, a hardness around the eyes. “Bring them here,” he said. “Have two more men help you out. We wouldn’t want to make them feel lonely, would we? I want them to have that secure feeling that comes from being well guarded.” The guard smiled, nodded, and left.

A few minutes later, he returned with Ivan Blue, Barry Stein, and Artie Dugan. There were two other guards with them, both wearing pistols and carrying clubs. Blue looked indignant, Stein as angry as nervous, and Dugan, of course, thoroughly terrified.

“Nice little Gestapo you have here,” Blue said.

Jango shrugged. “I make do,” he said genially. “Now what was it you had in mind?” His voice was open and nonthreatening, even while the guards stood there, one of them rubbing his billy club against the leg of his pants. Jango was playing one of his horrible little games.

Barry Stein stepped to the forefront of the little group and handed Jango a sheet of yellow paper as if it were a contract or a treaty. He turned his face into that of a Western Union messenger, and when he spoke, he sounded like a Disneyland robot delivering a canned recording.

“We represent the People’s Action Coalition. The People’s Action Coalition represents all Movement groups at Sunset City and speaks for the three hundred thousand brothers and sisters who are making this whole festival possible. This is a list of demands drawn up by the People’s Action Coalition.”

Jango sat down on the edge of a recording console. Slowly but perceptibly, his eyes hardened into two black and impenetrable ball bearings. Stein’s composure seemed to crack slightly at the sight of this subtle vibrational transformation. “Suppose you tell me what it says,” Jango said softly. “I’m a slow reader.”

“We want this disruptive filming to stop,” Stein said. “The people don’t want to be extras in your cheap exploitation film.” He hesitated, waiting for a reaction from Jango. No reaction came. “We... ah... object to the interruption of Mountain High’s performance... we demand an immediate apology....”

Jango continued to stare at Stein. Nothing changed but his posture as he slowly straightened his spine, stiffening like a limp dick engorging itself with blood. Something about it was very ominous. Mike Taub began to look uncomfortable. Stein started to falter as if realizing how impotent he sounded. Even Ivan Blue was beginning to get nervous.

“We demand that you stop filming your exploitation film,” Stein finally went on. “We... ah... demand that the film equipment be put at the disposal of the People’s Action Coalition so that... the... uh... people can create their own record of this... uh... revolutionary event....”