Popcorn (5 page)

EIGHT

D
usk had fallen.

The searchlights that explored the sky above the theatre could be seen from miles away. The crowd was getting thicker and Bruce’s limo slowed down. It’s a funny thing about stretch limos: you can usually hire them for no more than twice or three times what an ordinary cab would cost and yet they remain a potent symbol of colossal wealth and celebrity. It crossed Bruce’s mind that he ought to be able to extrapolate some great truth from this observation, but he couldn’t think what it was.

The great car crawled forwards a few yards, clinging to the number plate in front, a pink number plate which read STAR. Bruce smiled. If there was one thing he knew about stardom, it was that if you had to stick it on your fender you hadn’t got it.

A limousine jam. Only in Hollywood could you have a genuine limousine jam. An entire traffic snarl made up exclusively of stretch limos. Here was another observation from which a pithy and illuminating irony could surely be gleaned. No matter how long your car is, in traffic they’re all the same length: they stretch from the one stuck in front of you to the one stuck behind. Not bad, Bruce mused. He might trot it out to the press tonight to show that he still had his feet on the ground despite being so very special.

The car stopped altogether.

Bruce leant back in the baby-soft black leather, his wrap-round Rays between him and the world, a drink in his hand and an Oscar very nearly in his pocket.

His mind began to dwell on a particularly gruesome and pointless murder that he was planning. He had it in his head pretty clearly now. A run-down Korean drug store in the Valley. Two white kids enter the store. White trash kids. Better still, middle-class white kids pretending to be trash. Talking dudespeak, of course, or whatever other hellish dialect the generation with no brain affected these days. (“Generation X? Generation X-tremely fucking stupid,” Bruce would say at parties.) The two kids approach the counter and ask for a quarter of Jack plus some Pepsi Max to mix. But the old Korean lady knows the law and doesn’t want to lose her liquor licence, so she asks for some ID.

“Here’s my ID, bitch,” says one of the boys and hauls out a machete. Not some stupid little knife, but a
machete
. Obviously the old lady tells the kids to forget about the ID, in fact she reaches down a whole pint of bourbon and offers it to them on the house. But it’s too late. She has crossed the line with these kids. She has ‘dissed’ them. They have been pushed too far and they ain’t gonna take it any more because, quite frankly, they are sick of the bullshit. So the boy swings his weapon towards the terrified woman in a huge arc and cuts her head off. Blood starts spurting out of the dead woman’s neck, which so excites the two kids that they hop over the counter and hack her up into a million pieces.

Bruce would do the whole thing to music, heavy-duty rock ‘n’ roll perhaps, or maybe something witty and ironic like ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ or ‘All You Need is Love’. He would make it look like a pop video. Maybe he could have a TV on in the background, with a Tom and Jerry cartoon showing. That way, while the two kids were slicing up the old Korean woman, Jerry could be ironing Tom with a steam iron, or dicing him in the lawn-mower.

“What were you trying to tell us by juxtaposing your brutal murder with cartoon mayhem?” assholes like Professor Chambers would ask.

“I was telling you that the Korean woman had Tom and Jerry showing on her TV,” he would reply enigmatically, and hundreds of film students would write essays about irony.

“Bruce Delamitri is trying to tell us that America is now starring in its own animation,” they would write. “We are all Tom, we are all Jerry, locked in a perpetual cycle of almost surreal violence.”

The limo driver barged in on Bruce’s thoughts. “There’s a hell of a queue to drop, Mr Delamitri. We’re going to be stalled for a while here.”

A limo jam. A jam of stretch limousines. It was faintly embarrassing.

Outside there were thousands of people, all staring. Faces everywhere, a wall of them. Bruce peered through the darkness of his shades and tried to focus on a pretty one but was disappointed. Despite their excitement, they all seemed drab and sad. Trash. Poor white, black, brown and yellow trash.

He glanced at the locks on the car doors. It was not that he thought he was in any danger — the crowd was well ordered and the cops were keeping it firmly behind barriers — but you could not help but feel a little exposed. All those people wanting something they would never get.

Maybe one day they would just grab it anyway. It crossed Bruce’s mind that the princes of old Russia must have stared out of their carriages at faces much like these just before their world got torn to bits in 1917.

But what did they want, craning their necks by the side of the street like that? It certainly wasn’t peace, bread and freedom. So what? They couldn’t see anything: all the limos had mirrored windows, so all they could see was themselves. Another irony; Bruce was full of them today. The harder those people tried to look into his world the more intensely they saw their own images staring back at them. That was it! The whole truth in one startling image. Why were Bruce’s movies so successful? Because people saw themselves reflected in them. Maybe better-looking and a little cooler but none the less themselves, with their fears, their lusts, their most secret desires and fantasies. That damned professor had been wrong and he, Bruce, had been right. He was a mirror. He did not create a world for people to watch; they created a world for him to film.

They were his muse, these
lumpen
gawpers, staring at his car, trying to guess who might be inside it. Pointing, pointing their fingers and yet all they could see was their own images, pointing right back at them.

“That’s right, point,” Bruce said aloud. “Point the finger, accuse yourselves, because you and you alone are responsible for what you see. For what you are. For what you do.”

Up ahead the starlet in the purple dress had done her twirls, making the most of her thighs and her nipples.

Then it was his turn on the red carpet.

He stepped out of his limo intending scarcely to acknowledge the crowd, merely to stroll languidly into the theatre as if he was entering a bar. Perhaps he would allow a brief, cool nod towards the throng, but certainly no more than that. The sort of stroll and nod that said, “Am I the
only
person here who realizes that this is all bullshit?” That was what he had intended, but instead Doctor Showbiz appeared as if from nowhere and gave him a shot in the arm. The crowd cheered and he couldn’t resist a stolen moment luxuriating in their attention. He turned, he waved, he checked his bow-tie, he tugged charmingly at his ear-lobe.

“Love me you bastards,” he thought. “Look! Look! This is my night. I am the greatest director in the world and yet I have the grace to pretend I’m just an ordinary guy.”

“Why, he’s just an ordinary guy,” thought the crowd and the cheering redoubled. Except, of course, for the pickets. They did not cheer — well, why would they? As far as they were concerned, Bruce had murdered their children.

Their banners said, “MAD (Mothers Against Death”). It was extraordinary the lengths people would go to to come up with a suitable acronym, the tortuous linguistic paths they were prepared to navigate in order to arrive at something they imagined sounded neat. These mothers weren’t against death, they were against violence and murder. But that would have spelt MAVAM which was not neat, so they had had to become Mothers Against Death (by violence and murder), or MAD. Bruce knew some of them by sight. They had been with him for months, these mothers whose sons and daughters he was supposed to have killed.

“Hollywood glorifies murder” said their placards. “Bring back family entertainment.”

“Like incest,” Bruce thought, but fortunately he did not say it. Even cool mavericks in pointy-toed boots had to recognize the limits.

“Mr Delamitri,” shouted one of the MAD mothers, “my son was murdered. An innocent boy, gunned down on the streets. In your last picture there were seventeen murders.”

“Yeah, and there was plenty of sex in my movie too, but I bet you haven’t had any for a while.” Again he thought it but didn’t say it.

These people were beyond rational argument. Bruce turned away from them and waved at the rest of the crowd.

“Where’s the old lady?” one tasteless wag shouted.

Funny how some people seem to think it’s perfectly all right to be rude to the rich and famous, as if having a lot of money meant that breaking up with your wife was not a painful experience. Bruce had not got married in public, and he certainly wasn’t getting divorced in public, but the whole messy business was none the less public property.

“Where are your manners, you pathetic little no-life?” was what Bruce wanted to reply, but he didn’t, of course. He merely smiled a ‘what can I tell ya?’ sort of smile and for this small capitulation he was rewarded with a thumbs up from his interrogator and another ragged cheer.

The mirror Bruce held up was a two-way thing. Occasionally he caught his own reflection in it. He wanted that crowd to love him, to appreciate him. So he smiled and waved and in their faces were reflected his weakness and his dishonesty.

It began to rain. A summer storm was coming in. Bruce hurried up the red carpet and into the theatre. He was wearing the genuine original tux that had been worn by Bogart in
Casablanca
, but it was only borrowed and he didn’t want it to get wet.

North of LA the storm had already broken. The highway shone like black patent leather, the lights of the traffic shimmering on its surface.

Inside the 1957 Chevrolet the young man and the even younger woman peered out at the road as the ancient wiper blades struggled with the downpour.

“Ya gotta sacrifice comfort for style,” the man had said, explaining his choice of which car to steal. “Even broke down and with its engine up on blocks, this car is a better car than every heap of foreign tin between here and Los Angeles.”

“Leastways the radio works,” the girl said, and found a hard-rock station. Personally, she liked her music a little softer and sweeter, but she knew his tastes. Besides, what she liked to hear was the news. She liked being famous.

“Latter day desperados…Bonnie and Clyde for the millennium…a Mexican chambermaid found dead in a chalet room, clutching clean towels and soap…” The girl thought how strange it had been, watching movies all that time with the dead maid lying there in front of the TV.

“…motel short-order cook shot fourteen times…”

She should never have told him about that guy flirting. She’d known what would happen and it had.

The radio moved on to showbiz news.

“…live from outside the Oscars…I see Bruce Delamitri acknowledging the crowd.”

“Way to go,” murmured the man as he peered into the rain. “You make sure you win, now, Bruce. Just you make damn sure you win.”

NINE

B
ruce Delamitri! Yeah, way to go! All
right
!” the impossibly cute blonde model-turned-actress almost shouted, making the most of her last syllable in the spotlight.

On the whole the people brought on to do the presenting at awards ceremonies are divided into two groups, the big names and the small. The big names are those who have been nominated for an award themselves and have been persuaded to muck in elsewhere during the evening to help things swing. They do not want to do this of course, since it considerably lessens a star’s impact when they finally appear themselves as a recipient if they have only recently been welcomed on stage to give some nobody or other the gong for ‘Best Foreign-Language Lyric’. Nevertheless, big stars often agree to do the required chore because they are unable to avoid the tiny, unworthy suspicion that a refusal might somehow affect their own chances. Traditionally, big names who have not been nominated refuse requests to present. They are happy to turn up, of course, and sit in the stalls observing proceedings with a bemused tolerance, but they are not prepared to play John the Baptist to some hated rival’s Messiah. Which means that the organizers of these events are forced to fall back on the second group: small names, people who have been around for either a very short time or a very long time. The former are not yet famous enough to cause much excitement, and the latter are destined to provoke excitement only once more in their lives and that, paradoxically, will be when they die. It is these people who fill the gaps between the genuinely important names.

Bruce scored a not-yet-famous-enough.

It should not have been that way, of course. ‘Best Director’ is one of the jewels in the Academy’s crown, and under normal circumstances one of the press-ganged biggies would have presented Bruce with his statuette. But Hollywood is a scared town. Nobody wants to be connected with any controversy, and with his placard-waving band of MAD camp followers Bruce was highly controversial. His presence on the list of nominees had been enough to cause all the glittering superstars originally approached to get headaches.

“Bruce Delamitri! Yeah, way to go! All
right
!”

Bruce leapt out his seat like an eager puppy at the sound of his name. He had intended to arch his eyebrows in surprise and then rise slowly and rather reluctantly. Instead it looked as if his backside was spring-loaded. Recovering slightly, but still grinning like a lunatic, he set off towards the podium. Behind him a tuxedoed extra slipped into his place; the Oscars ceremony is, when all is said and done, a television programme, and no seating gaps are allowed to mar the perfect picture.

The cute starlet beamed at Bruce as he approached her. Held firmly in her grip and pressed hard against her impossibly, absurdly perfect body was the twelve-inch golden icon. If Bruce’s mouth hadn’t been so dry he would probably have dribbled. This felt good. All through the interminable earlier part of the proceedings his mind had been a jumble of possible things to say. He would speak out against the New Right and its creeping censorship, condemn the way hysterical outrage had replaced reasoned debate, call for freedom of speech, proclaim the sacred individuality of the artist in a democracy. Basically, just be a complete and utter hero.

In front of a billion people.

That was what he had been told: a billion people were watching. A
billion
. On the long walk up the aisle towards the beaming starlet, he tried to conjure up some kind of image of what that meant. He thought of all the faces outside the theatre, the ones staring into his limousine; he imagined the whole sky filled with those faces, a big sky, a desert sky, filled with gawping faces from one horizon to the other, all staring at him. He couldn’t do it. It didn’t mean anything. A hundred people, a billion people — either way it was a lot of people if they were all staring at you.

Now Bruce was on the stage, standing alone in a single spotlight, the Oscar in his hand.

Now was his chance. To tell it like it was. To rise above the sanctimonious emotional manipulation that had characterized the evening thus far. Like the ‘Best Actor’, who had won his award for playing a person with brain damage and who had actually carried a brain-damaged child on to the stage and presented her with his award. Or the ‘Best Actress’, who had won so many hearts by accepting her award dressed in a gown designed in the shape of an enormous Aids-awareness ribbon. Like the ‘Best Supporting Actor’, who had pointed out that Hollywood’s duty was the ‘inspirationalization’ of the world; and the ‘Best Supporting Actress’, who had made an emotional appeal from the podium for more understanding of everything. The endless list of thanks to Mom, Dad, ‘my creative team’, ‘the many, many people whose dedicated work goes into enabling me to be me’, God and America.

Now it was Bruce’s turn. To tell it like it really was.

“I stand here on legs of fire.”

Legs of fire?

It just came out. Despite his best noble intentions to say what he really felt, the awesome scale of the event possessed him. The billion people in the mirror possessed him. Suddenly he was no longer his own man. He had become an automaton, an unwilling conduit for mawkish, sentimental drivel.

“I want to thank you. Each and every person in this room. Each and every person in this industry. You nourished me and helped me to touch the stars…”

What could he do? He could not rain on the parade. Nobody loves a griper, particularly if that griper is holding in his firm, manly grasp the one thing that everybody in the whole room covets the most. Look at Brando. He wasn’t the only person who was sorry for the Indians or Native Americans or whatever they were called. Everybody felt bad about them, but bringing them up at the Oscars? It just looked smug and rude. Besides, the people who were outside protesting had lost loved ones. Nothing to do with him, of course, but nevertheless it ill behoved a man of his splendid achievement to piss on the bereaved from the Olympian heights of the Oscars ceremony.

“…You are the wind beneath my wings and I flap for you. God bless you all. God bless America. God bless the world as well. Thank you.”

The room erupted into rapturous applause. It was an ovation of relief. Bruce Delamitri had acted like a grown-up. When his name was announced, many people had wondered whether he would seize the opportunity to be rude and controversial. Bruce did, after all, represent the young, thrusting, cool, cynical Hollywood which simply did not
give
a fuck. It had been eminently possible — indeed probable — that he would seek unworthy notoriety by being unpleasant and abrasive. A few of the more timid souls feared he might even mention those dreadful pickets outside the theatre who were trying to spoil everybody’s big night. But what a pleasant surprise. Bruce’s speech had been a model of Oscars-night grace and good manners. Textbook stuff: sincere, self-effacing, patriotic and very, very moving.

Hollywood welcomed one of its own into the fold. Bruce walked from the podium and into the welcoming arms of the upper echelons of the entertainment establishment.

Back up the coastal highway, they were finally clearing away the bodies of the Mexican maid and the short-order chef, two people who had come into contact with a moral vacuum and who had paid the price. The State Troopers shook their heads. The detectives shook their heads.

“Jerry made me a steak only this morning,” said one Trooper as the trolley upon which Jerry’s corpse lay was wheeled out into the parking lot. From the front Jerry had still looked like Jerry. He had taken any number of bullets, but modern high-velocity weapons make very neat entry wounds. Not so the exit wounds. Each bullet pushes an expanding cone of flesh in front of it on its journey through the body, and when it blasts its way out the damage is horrific. From the front Jerry was merely slightly perforated; from the back he was just so much pulp.

The maid had been strangled.

“Why’d they do that?” the Trooper wondered. “I mean, why the fuck did those bastards have to do that? Weren’t no call. No money nor nothing. So why’d they do that?”

Contrary to popular mythology, American police officers do not spend all day every day scraping corpses off walls and floors. Perhaps the Washington DC Homicide Department do, but not the average cop. Death is not uncommon in their job but it is not the norm either, and the two State Troopers weren’t so familiar with murder as to be indifferent to it.

“Ain’t no reason why,” one of the detectives answered. “These kids are just doing it for kicks. Maybe they was high on drugs, listening to some damn Satanic heavy-metal music, or else maybe they just watched another movie.”

There were still a few news reporters left on the scene.

“So you definitely think this is another copycat killing, chief?” one said eagerly. “It’s got to be the Mall Murderers, hasn’t it?”

“Well, this ain’t no mall, is it? Although, hell, those psychotic bastards ain’t particularly choosy where they perpetrate their mayhem. I don’t know, you tell me. Maybe they was copying something they saw, maybe it was two other fuck-ups copying them.”

“A copycat copycat?” asked the reporter, scribbling furiously.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a copycat, copycat, copycat. All I know is that two innocent, ordinary Americans are dead.”

“And that’s the point isn’t it?” said the reporter, seizing on the detective’s words like a dog with a bone. “That’s what this is, just one more ordinary story of
Ordinary Americans
.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’d call ordinary,” the cop replied. “I’ve been coming to this diner for over thirty years now and nobody ever got shot here before.”

But the reporter had stopped scribbling.