Squirrel Eyes (15 page)

28

      Butters might as well have been Burt Reynolds; we reached the donut joint in a hair-raisingly few seconds, but he was solidly in control of the vehicle at all times. Or at least that's what I kept telling myself.

Inside, Butters overwhelmed the tiny table;
The Amazing Colossal Man
on his coffee break. He had already stuffed down five glazed when I was halfway through my second. Admittedly, I would've gone for five if there had been any chance of cramming that many into my gut – the pillowy darlings were still hot, practically melting as you bit into them. Best of all, the big man's funky odor was beaten into submission by the delicious smell in the place.

Butters's scabbed hand dipped into the box containing what remained of the dozen, daintily plucking another. "That's my six," he said, taking out half the donut in one bite. "You'd better get to eating." 

I finished off the one I was working on, luxuriating in the way the sugary glaze dissolved on my tongue. "One more," I mumbled, mouth full. "Then I'm going to have to induce vomiting."

I had never seen Butters
eat
before, and the experience was fascinating. While he certainly pounded it down by the truckload, he did so with unexpected grace: not even the tiniest morsel clung to his chin, not a flake of pastry lost on a gargantuan fingertip. And believe me, I kept my eyes peeled every time he delved into the box of donuts, planning to avoid the ones his foul and unwieldy mitts brushed against. He touched only those he took. I had expected
Animal House
; what I saw was a mother gorilla gently tending her child. Only, you know –
eating
it. Hell, I was a far bigger pig.

"We didn't get to talk much on the plane, you getting sick like you did," Butters said, dabbing his already-spotless face with his napkin. "What's in LA for you?"

I wasn't sure I wanted to have this conversation, not with Butters. But while the pain had eased considerably, my foot was throbbing like a beating heart held in an Aztec's fist and the thought of returning to painting bumper posts (especially with the sun moving ever closer to the gas station's parking lot as the morning wore on) made me feel like the time was right for some gettin'-to-know-you talk.

      "Not much anymore," I said. "I was trying to make movies. And there used to be a girl."

      "Aw shit." Butters reached into the donut box again, going for number seven. "I'm gonna eat one of yours if we're going to talk about girls."

      "We don't
have
to talk about her."

      "You're not getting this donut back."

      Butters went for a slightly smaller bite this time, apparently wearing down. Chewing, he gestured for me to speak.

"There's not much to tell," I said. "We were happy, things were great, then she found somebody better."

"Ah-ah," Butters admonished, holding up a Ball Park Frank of a finger. "
Different
. She found somebody different."

"In that he was better," I said.

"Do you know that for certain?"

"It's hard to imagine he
couldn't
be." 

Taking a long, thoughtful drag of oxygen, Butters placed the remaining portion of his donut on the table and wiped his hands. "Did you treat her badly?"

I stared at him for a second. "Jesus," I said. 

"Sorry," Butters said. "I don't mean to grill you, I just wonder why you're so sure this new guy is better than you."

"He's better
looking
."

"You've seen him?"

"At a party, a few weeks before we broke up. They work together."

Butters popped the last piece of donut in his mouth, staring at me as he chewed. After swallowing, he gulped a long, whistling breath. "Better-looking doesn't mean shit," he said. "How long were you together?"

"About two years."

"You were good-looking enough for her
then
, right?"

"I don't know, maybe not," I said, realizing I really
didn't
want to talk about this stuff, especially since I was busy puzzling over whether or not I
had
treated Alison badly. Oh, I don't mean to imply I was slapping her around or verbally abusing her – far from it. But maybe I was bad to her in a less-aggressive manner, simply by being so driven by the Hollywood bullshit, the dream of making movies. I certainly used that as an excuse to avoid nailing down a solid day job, although I wasn't thinking of it in those terms at the time. I honestly believed then that I could find work writing and directing, even if it was on incredibly low-budget movies, and I was so determined to do so that I never bothered to go out and find an actual paying job.

Which is not to say that Alison wasn't cool about the movie thing; she was the best – completely supportive, even when I was at my most miserable and convinced that the only future I had in the movie business was selling popcorn to teenagers on Friday nights. But Creenus or whatever the fuck – besides being better looking (and I can assure you he was) – almost certainly offered more stability in the day-to-day, paying-the-bills kind of way. There were many nights I'd lie awake with fantasies of movie premieres or celebrity-packed parties trailing fairy-glamour through my head, thinking I'd one day reward Alison's support by introducing her to Adam Sandler or George Clooney, when I should've been out mopping floors somewhere so I could pitch in towards the electric bill.

I suddenly developed the same gnarled feeling in my guts that I had whenever I was around my brother. 

"Guess we'd better get back to the station," I said, staring down at my hands. I nervously rolled the wadded wrapper from my straw between my fingers. My foot was pulsing with steady jabs of pain.

Butters emitted a quiet wheeze. I didn't know why I should feel so sheepish and ashamed around him, but when my eyes flicked up, I was expecting that same irritated expression Daniel always wore. Instead, Butters was staring at the ball of paper I was worrying, an apprehensive look on his face. 

      "Didn't mean to stir up any hurt," he muttered.

      For a second, I felt like hugging the smelly son-of-a-bitch. "Naw," I said, just wanting to move on. "Thanks for the donuts." 

29

      And this is where it all went to hell. 

Butters and I finished the day without further incident, wrapping up at the gas station shortly after four o'clock. Somewhere around two, the big man had begun talking about Bruce Lee. This continued throughout the remainder of the workday and occupied the entire drive back to my mom's house, interrupted only by wheezing gulps of oxygen. It was like listening to an overly excited books-on-tape version of Lee's biography.

With freedom came pain: while I finally escaped the story of the Little Dragon, I was forced to once again plant my throbbing foot on pavement and hobble my way into Mom's house. I waved to Butters as I shuffled up the agonizing slope of the driveway. He gave the horn a couple quick bleats and drove away, yelling that I should call him soon. 

      Inside, I found Mom with her outstretched arm wedged through a narrow space between teetering piles of fabric, futilely grasping at something just beyond her reach, like a jailed outlaw in a western movie struggling to snatch the keys as the deputy slept. 

      "Somebody called for you today," she said, grunting slightly as she delved deeper behind the stacks of cloth. 

      "What are you after?"

      "Cigarettes. Here, you've got long arms – help me out."

      She withdrew her arm and stepped back. I peered through the space. Back there in the dark was a small rack of plastic drawers, the space-saver kind of things you find at Wal-Mart.

      "They're in the bottom drawer," Mom said, a frantic twinge in her voice.

      I stuck my arm through the gap and fished around. "Why'd you bury your stash like this, the way you smoke?" My fingertips fell upon the drawer pull and I tugged it open.

      "I thought I'd have this fabric put away before I smoked up the rest of the pack I was on. It's your fault, anyway, taking over my sewing room."

      Tugging two packs from the carton, I handed them to Mom. "I left the drawer open so you can reach it," I told her. She was already tearing the plastic from one of the packs, gleeful as a small child with a box of Milk Duds. "So who called?"

      Her face froze as she stuck a cigarette between her lips. It was an expression I'd seen many times; for some reason, Mom was wholly incapable of remembering any information given her over the phone. 

"Arthur?" she tried, lighting her smoke.

      "I don't know any Arthur."

      She dragged on the cigarette, thinking. "Oh – oh – Walter?"

      Strike two. "Did you write it down?"

      She handed me a Post-It note with something written on it that might've been the mutant offspring of Arthur and Walter, accompanied by an LA phone number. 

      "Why are you limping?" Mom asked, I think in large part to steer the conversation away from her crummy memory. 

I told her about my work-related injury, the break we took at the donut joint, and the attention to detail required when one is painting metal posts for the express purpose of trying to warn people away from driving their cars into those metal posts.

"I wish you'd brought me some donuts," Mom said.

After much consideration, I realized the mysterious name written on the Post-It note was actually
Richard
, that friend-of-a-friend who worked at the film lab in Hollywood.

      So I called him.

      "Best I can do is ten bucks a roll, plus a break on processing," Richard whispered. "I'm not supposed to offer you
that
much. My boss is a real asshole – doesn't give a shit about the plight of the independent filmmaker – but I can sneak a few rolls by him, I think."

My heart sank. Thanking him, I said I'd get back to him and hung up. 

Sweet Jesus, was Super-8 film expensive anymore. Even with Richard's duplicitous discount, that meant significantly more than ten bucks for every three-and-a-half minutes of film. It might as well have been the budget of
Terminator 2
, for all the cash I had to blow on this thing.

As much as I hated to even consider it, the only option was to shoot on video. And the only person I knew who owned a video camera was my fucking brother.

Figuring I'd better run this problem past my producer, I fretted until it was time for Kelli to be home from work, then dialed her number. She sounded distracted when she answered, and when I told her who it was, I knew I was in trouble: you only hear that fierce exhalation through the nostrils when you're about to be told something bad about yourself. 

"What's wrong?" I meekly asked, hoping it would only be that Lydia was being a pain.

"You really are an idiot, aren't you?" Kelli said, cutting the legs from beneath that whole Lydia thing. 

"Look, I know I was an asshole at Jiggy's – " 

"That's not even the half of it, Alvin. You show up after fourteen years thinking you can drown your sorrows in my vagina" – I heard Lydia squeal with naughty laughter at this point – "which is bad enough on its own, but the really sad part is, you don't even have a fucking clue how much you hurt me when you just faded into the woodwork."

Admittedly, that was true. I never even thought about it, particularly since I had no idea Kelli had liked me enough to be hurt. I started to voice this, but she didn't give me the chance.

"I know you were totally wrecked when your dad died, but that's when I wanted to be with you the most. I couldn't stand the thought of you just turning your back on everything and having to deal with that by yourself." 

Seeing as how she had just co-opted my number one excuse – the dead dad is always good for putting the brakes to someone – and spun it back in my direction, I was left a bit unprepared. 

"I was in love with you, you prick, and you turned into a fucking ghost."

      Okay,
unprepared
was nothing compared to what I felt now. 

"You ... I didn't even know," was all I could come up with.

      "That's because you're an idiot," she said.

      I dug around for something, anything, that might be comforting, despite my uncertainty that comfort was what Kelli was looking for. 

"Maybe we should get together and talk – "

      "About what? A teenage girl in love with a dumbass fourteen years ago? It's a little late, and trust me, Alvin, I'm more than over it." 

      Thank Christ I had the sense not to say the words that popped into my head:
It doesn't sound like it to me
. And I didn't need to, anyway – that thought must've sprung into Kelli's head at the same moment.

      "It's just been hard, you showing up out of the blue with your sick little idea about changing your life ..." She sniffed wetly. 

I was flummoxed. Even when we were dating, I had thought about Kelli only as
The Girl I Was Seeing At That Time
, a sort of fleshy, exciting way station along the road to
The Girl I Would Eventually Be With For Keeps
. It never occurred to me that Kelli might've had other ideas. I felt queasy when I realized Alison might have applied that same scenario to
our
relationship.

"I'm sorry, Kelli. I really am." 

She was silent for a very long time.

"Don't call me again, okay?" 

It didn't really sound like a question. I didn't argue.

30

      I lay sprawled on the couch, watching
Diagnosis: Murder
and trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do, but the stinky second-hand death rising from the end of Mom's cigarette was driving me to distraction. No matter what direction I aimed myself, the smoke inexplicably knew where my nostrils were. Giving up, I went out back.

      It was the time of evening filmmakers call
Magic Hour
; the disappearing sun casting a golden glow across the landscape. I found the dismembered Real Hair Joe and sat him on the stump of the old cottonwood tree, then lay down in the grass alongside him, resting my head on my folded arms. Even now, I couldn't fight the movie-making sickness: I shut one eye, framing the silhouetted Joe against the toasted-honey sky, a plastic, mangled Martin Sheen in my own little
Apocalypse Now
.

      Something was riled up inside me. I felt awful about Kelli, of course (and that had quickly become part of my daily routine, it seemed), but this was different. I had gone into
The Blue Man
only because Kelli had promised to fuck me, but I realized now that I actually
wanted
to make
the damn thing – and now that I had managed to rope other people into it, the thought of giving it up (for the second time) was really pissing me off. I was angry at myself, as well – I had done a fine job of turning into a pathetic, whining little shithook. And fuck Daniel for being such a worthless asshole of a brother that I didn't feel like I could ask him for something as minor as the loan of his goddamn video camera.

      I opened my eye again and Real Hair Joe sprang into 3-D glory, filling me with a swell of heroic defiance. Damn it, I
needed
this stupid movie. I couldn't go back to LA like this – hell, I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to LA at all, but certainly not with one more loser notch in my already overly notched belt. 

      There had to be some way to get
The Blue Man
off the critical list, back on his muddy, combat-blistered feet – it'd just take a little finagling, and brother, I'd finagled the shit out of plenty of people in my life. The big question was: Could I finagle that son-of-a-bitch Daniel?  

I was halfway to some sort of scheme when a large insect joined me inside my shirt, sending me fleeing back into the house.