The Perils of Praline (12 page)

It was a good episode, too—one of his favorites from last season. Natalie decided that she shouldn’t choose between Dr. Love and Dr. Do-Me at all. Instead she’d have a lesbian affair with Dr. Courtney Dale. Dr. Dale was an andrologist—a doctor who specializes in men’s health, in particular men’s hormonal health. The writers seemed to enjoy the irony of a lesbian choosing this specialty since they kept mentioning it
,
or maybe it was foreshadowing to the later episode where Dr. Dale dumps Natalie (and her sexuality) and tries to steal Dr. Do-Me.

All tolled, Praline counted six sexual encounters during the hour-long episode. Since it had taken him a whole twenty-four hours to have four such encounters, he felt like a total slouch. He glanced over at Jason, wondering if the show had turned him on. It seemed not to have.

“How about I take you out to West Hollywood tomorrow night to celebrate your job?” Jason suggested.

“That sounds great. But I can’t tomorrow,” said Praline. “I have an audition.”

“Audition? You’re an actor now?”

“No. I found an audition that Dave G. would be perfect for, and since he’s an actor it’s possible he might be there. So I’m going.”

Jason studied him, and said, “Look, if you do find this guy, don’t tell him that you flew all the way out here and you’ve been doing everything you can to find him because you’re in love with him and expect to live happily ever after. He might find it a little, well, off-putting.”

Praline considered this. “It’s because y’all have such a different idea about what constitutes stalking, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, go with that,” Jason said and then announced it was time for bed. Praline followed him out of the living room and down the short hallway.

Jason’s bedroom
was
decorated, or rather not decorated, in the manner of the living room. A mattress on the floor, an inexpensive Indian print bedspread, bookshelves made of raw pine planks laid on cement blocks. When they got into the room, Jason turned and looked at Praline.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“You said it was time for bed.”

“For me.”

“Oh, well where am I going to sleep?” asked Praline.

“On the couch,” Jason said pointedly.

Back in the living room, trying to make himself comfortable on the lumpy tangerine sofa, Praline decided he had to have been wrong. It wasn’t possible that Jason liked him. Still, as he fell asleep, pulling a nubby micro-fiber yellow throw up to his chin, he committed himself to putting an end to Jason’s ill-advised bout of celibacy—as an act of charity if nothing else.

The next morning, Praline went to work with Jason. They walked out of The Pagoda and found Jason’s car parked on the street. It was a mint-colored Civic with an ugly footprint-size dent in the middle of its hood. Praline cringed a little inside. “What happed to your car?” he asked as blandly as possible.

“I don’t know. It was just like that when I went to work yesterday.” The tone of his voice though suggested he had suspicions. During the short ride to Box Studios, Praline chattered about his favorite TV shows in order to avoid further discussion of the dented hood, which was all too visible to both young men.

Internal Casting was located
in
a short, squat building just outside the main Box Studios lot. Tucked in a corner of the third floor, the department consisted of four offices
,
the largest belong
ing
to Madison Harvey, Director, Television Casting
;
two medium-sized offices were used by visiting casting directors and currently empty, while the remaining office was used for interns and/or temps. Jason occupied a workstation outside Madison’s office.

“She won’t be here until around ten,” Jason told Praline. “So I’ll give you a tour. Even though the department is called casting, we don’t actually cast. Basically, Madison hires casting directors for the shows and they cast. Still, we receive hundreds of resumes every week. Which is where you come in. You’re going to divide the resumes into stacks of male and female and then put them in alphabetical order. Once you’ve done that you’re going to bring them into…” At this point Jason opened the door to what Praline had assumed was a closet, but was instead an enormous file room filled with row after row of filing cabinets. “…the filing room. Where you file them. The men are on the east side and the women on the west. When you get to this point, you need to check to see if we already have an actor’s resume. If we do, you need to see which resume is more current and put the most current in front and staple it to the other resumes we have for that actor. Don’t ever throw a resume away, Madison will have a fit.”

Jason walked over to a short filing cabinet with an empty in-box on top of it. “This is where people put their requests for resumes. There’s a special form they have to fill out and those are right over here.” Jason pointed at a stack of forms.

“You get a ton of requests, huh?” Praline said, imagining himself running back and forth all day making sure actor’s resumes
went
to all the amazing places they needed to go.

“Pretty much never, to be honest.”

“Then why do you do all this?” asked a confused Praline.

Jason studied him and asked, “You’ve never worked in a corporation, have you?”

Praline shook his head.

“Yeah, well, just to make matters worse, we’ve been meeting with IT to develop a database for the whole thing. It’s going to cost millions.”

“That’s crazy,” Praline stated the obvious.

“I know, but don’t tell anyone. I’m getting a promotion out of it.”

Praline went into what was now his office. It was filled with unfiled resumes; stacks of them covered the desk and credenza; boxes of them on the floor.  He began to separate actors’ resumes by sex. Male. Male. Female. Male. Female. Female. He really wanted to call his mother and tell her that he had his own office with a window and everything, but he didn’t want to seem to be goofing off—at least not until later in the day. Female. Male. Male. Within a few minutes, he could tell that one of the big challenges in this job would be staying awake.

Madison Harvey walked into the office at nearly ten
-
thirty. She was a tall woman, or seemed so as she teetered on five-inch platform heels. Her stunning black business suit had been tailored to within an inch of its life: the skirt hemmed short, barely managing to cover Madison’s panties, the jacket with a large button pulling it together just below her breasts—pushing them upward and forward in case the push-up bra she wore suddenly gave way. Her hair was clipped short
;
a stylist would call it fresh and perky though it was really more severe and over-cropped. She breezed by Praline’s office and he heard her snarl at Jason, “Let’s roll calls.” Praline had no idea what that meant, though it sounded impressive.

Around twelve
-
thirty, Praline became bored with dividing resumes by sex, picked up a large stack of actors’ photos and headed to the file room. Inside the room, he looked at the top resume, RIK GIBBONS. He walked around the corner
,
heading for the male drawer labeled GA-GO, and found himself staring at an overweight, middle-aged man in a food-stained tracksuit pulling resumes out of the female drawer labeled BO-CE.

“Can I help you?” Praline asked.

“Oh. Hey. I’m Tuck Roberts.” He stood up, his track pants tenting with a semi hard-on. Praline kept his eyes focused on Tuck’s beady little eyes. In a conspiratorial whisper, Tuck added, “Madison knows I’m in here.”

Praline nodded, but remembered Jason had said they should never throw a resume away. So, was it okay for this guy to take a whole stack? Would he be bringing them back? Should Praline at least check them out?

“Are you a casting director?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.
Time Tripper
.” Tuck went back to what he was doing, adding two more blondes to his growing stack.

Praline tried to remember what
Time Tripper
was about. It was opposite
Forensic Victims Unit
so he’d never seen it, but from the previews it seemed to be about an FBI agent sent back to the civil war by a secret government agency to do, well, something but, instead he changes history in a really bad way and not only do the Confederates win the war but the time travel machine itself disappears and the agent is bounced around through a revisionist history of the United States.

“Um, didn’t that get cancelled?” Praline asked.

“It did, yeah,” Tuck pulled out a couple more resumes. “A tragedy really. Great show. Sort of. Look, Madison and I are old friends. She thought it might cheer me up to do some meet and greets.” He raised an eyebrow at Praline and showed him a resume shot of a blonde with preternaturally large breasts. “Not bad, huh?” Tuck asked.

“Not my type,” Praline said honestly. Then he smiled and walked out of the file room directly over to Jason’s workstation. “There’s a guy in the file room taking resumes. He’s a little…”

“Creepy, sleazy, predatory?” suggested Jason.

“Yeah, all of those.”

Jason shrugged. “Welcome to casting. You want to go to lunch?”

At the studio commissary, Praline put aside thoughts of the silicon-filled blondes who would soon meet and greet the slovenly Tuck Roberts hoping to get jobs he couldn’t give them, and focused instead on Jason
,
who’d revealed a few things about himself. Like that he’d grown up in “The Industry” with a mother who was an actress of limited success, and a dad who had directed a couple of films in the late eighties but ruined his career with various drug addictions and multiple bad marriages.

“By the time I was ready for college he was pretty broke, which made film school at USC out of the question.”

“Did you go somewhere else?” Praline asked, nibbling on the Pita Hayworth sandwich he’d ordered. He considered just ordering a couple desserts, but Jason had frowned at him when he said so.

“Yeah, but a film degree from Cal State Fox Hills doesn’t have the same cache.” There was only a trace of bitterness in Jason’s voice. “My father did get me my job with Box Studios. He made all his films with them—someone threw him a bone and they hired me as a temp when I got out of college. I worked all over the studio until I settled with Madison.”

“If you could do anything in the world for a job, what would it be?” Praline asked.

“I’d be a director,” Jason said, blushing a bit when he admitted it.

“Just like your dad.”

“Oh God no! I’ve seen my father’s movies. If I was going to be a director I’d want to make good movies.”

“Have I ever heard of your dad’s movies?” Praline asked, curious.

“Mostly he made action movies,
Tighter Spot
with Keen Rivers,
Black Noon
with Tadd Matthers. The only ones I like at all are the ones he made when things were going down the toilet.
The Mammaries That Mauled Manhattan
and
The Boobies That Bit Boston
. They’re sort of Sci-Fi sexploitation flicks. He almost created his own genre for awhile there.”

Praline had to admit that he’d only seen
Tighter Spot
and
Black Noon
, both of which he’d liked though it seemed impolite to say so to Jason.

“So what are you doing about becoming a movie director?” Praline asked him.

“Nothing. I’m content to work my way up at the studio. I’ve been with Madison for nearly two years. Like I said, I’m getting a promotion. Any day now.”

“I think people should follow their dreams no matter the cost,” said Praline sincerely. Not following your dreams was almost as bad as being celibate. Jason really needed help.

After lunch, Jason sent Praline to Human Resources
,
where he was given a booklet about as thick as the novel
Gone With The Wind
that outlined Praline’s benefits package as an employee of Box Studios. He was also asked to sign a ream of important looking papers, none of which he was given time to read—though after squinting at some of the fine print, Praline doubted it could be understood by anyone who didn’t speak Legalese. Unfortunately, Legalese didn’t fulfill the language requirement at Laccacoochee Technical College
,
so Praline only spoke a bit of incomprehensible French.

Back in his office, he studied the laminated identification card they’d given him. His photo was good. With very rare exceptions, Praline always took a good photo. Suddenly, his desk phone buzzed insistently. He hit buttons until Madison came on the line and asked him to come into her office. 

The corner office was large, with windows on two sides. The walls were a particularly bold shade of lime green. The desk a large, thick pane of glass balanced on two inverted metal pyramids. In front of the desk were two chairs made of leather strips. On the far side of the room was a black leather sofa with a glass coffee table in front of it.

Around the room, on the desk, the coffee table and wherever else they could be housed
,
lay Madison’s collection of balls. She collected porcelain balls, straw balls, marble balls, rubber balls, glass balls, brass balls, and any other kind of ball you can think of. For some reason, the collection made him uncomfortable.

After she’d finished looking him up and down thoroughly, Madison said, “We haven’t officially met. I’m Madison. Jason tells me you want to be in show business.”

“I guess so…” She was so formidable, he decided not to mention his aspiration to be a same-sex celebrity spouse. Though technically celebrity spouses are in show business.  “Um, yes ma’am. I was a communications major at Laccacoochee Technical College. I graduated cum laude.”

Cum laude sound
ed
important but his school actually gave out the distinction to anyone who graduated. Praline knew it was supposed to impress people, but felt like he was
saying something filthy
every time he mentioned it—as though he’d just said, “come loudly.”

“Mmmmm, good for you,” she said, seeming a bit distracted.
Well, she is a busy woman
, thought Praline. “Fetching color blue,” she added with a glance toward his hair and then went back to reading the trades. “That’s all. Thank you.”