"Uh, guys, stop what you're doing and come have a look at this,” he said. "But try to keep the hub-bub to a minimum.”
They came as quietly as possible, which for them still rated a high decibel level, but it didn't really matter, for on the ground, next to Lips and the movie camera, was Cleo, calm, cool and coiled, holding in her mouth a small clapboard, the origin of which remained, and remains, a mystery to all onlookers.
"That is the weirdest fucking sight I have ever seen," said Guru-Vy, rubbing his eyes and wondering whether he should have taken more acid or less. "I'm speechless."
"I'm not,” said Judy/SnakeWoman, as she gave Cleo an encouraging pat. "And you just used a contraction."
“I didn’t! I mean, I most certainly did not! Uh, I couldn’t have! No, what I mean is, it's not possible!"
As a now thoroughly addled Guru-Vy contemplated this suddenly strange state of grammatical affairs, Judy/SnakeWoman leaned down to pick up the movie camera, she handed it to an ever more addled Guru-Vy, and in a voice that combined authority, diffidence and a touch of venom, yelled "ACTION," while the others fell into their places as though they’d been rehearsing for weeks...
NOW
Rita awoke with a start, and for a brief interval was not at all sure where she was, or why she was there, wherever ‘there’ happened to be. Sitting up tentatively, and glancing around the darkened room, it was not until she saw the familiar wall paper (fading flowers that, when she first moved in years ago, seemed to almost bloom from the walls but now, while they retained their same basic shape, were harder and harder to see due to the general watering of time combined with the spatters of this, that and a lot of the other, and that as she aged she hoped more and more were not serving as a metaphor for her life), objects (glass bottles of various colors, stereo, clothes, books, musical paraphernalia, stuffed animals whose names she kept changing in futile attempts to distance herself from the juvenile but in fact very real attachment she felt towards each and every one, dog toys), and Eleanor Rigby herself lying in a tousled heap at her feet, that her brain relayed the “you’re at home in your own bed, idiot, where else would you be at this hour?” message that served to help her focus, and, in spite of her best intentions, wake up.
As she lay there, trying to decide whether 3:30 a.m. was in fact too early to get up, knowing in fact that it was indeed, but also knowing the unlikelihood of her being able to get back to sleep once she actually found herself wondering if she would be able to get back to sleep, a familiar mage flashed in her mind: she was walking through a house with many different rooms, most of them occupied by bizarre but friendly creatures, unable to find her way out but at the same time knowing she was somehow safe. What is this place, and why do I keep seeing it. Is it someplace I actually know? If not, why do I visualize every detail so completely? Am I talking out loud to myself again?
“Another fabulous dream experience,” Rita pronounced to Eleanor Rigby, who by this point was also awake and trying desperately to discern a signal from her owner that grass (the kind on the ground) and food (pretty much any kind) were in her immediate future. They weren’t.
For years, Rita had been keeping a dream journal, trying to make sense of the tangled and perplexing images that rumbled around her brain during the just-on-the-other-side-of conscious state that had always passed for sleep in her experience, hoping that the combined entries would add up to a kind of roadmap of her REM state (complete with rest stops). But page after page contained tangible evidence of the fragmentary nature of her night life, the most recent entries reading, “desert, umbrella” and, “17 birds with typewriters,” each with no corresponding hint of recognition, and Rita was now convinced that, at least in her case and science be damned, REM in fact stood for Really Early Mornings.
The closest she’d come lately to having anything near a narrative type of experience was a dream in which she’d auditioned for and been accepted by The Superlatives, a girl group par excellence currently in need of someone new owing to the fact that one of its members, Tina “Lucky” Murnow, had recently died from cigarettes, when a delivery truck filled with cartons of Nic Lites hit a pothole, jumped the curb, and overturned on those who at the moment immediately before impact had been enjoying a quiet lunch at the Come & Get it Café’s posh sidewalk tables.
Tina’s manager, when asked for a comment by the news media, said that he was going to quit smoking in his late client’s honor. And although he tried, he was not able to go longer than a week without lighting up, but he never did eat a meal outdoors again.
Despite her ambivalence in using another’s misfortune to make her way to fame and fortune, Rita wanted desperately to fit in, rehearsing long and hard for her upcoming debut as the newest voice in the group that had given the world “I’m a Two Pillow, One Man Woman,” and other gigantic hits.
The crucial night arrived, and The Superlatives gathered backstage in preparation of their entrance. As they were being introduced, Deborah “Sweetie Pie” Fitch turned to Rita and said, “Good luck, hon, and remember: if you forget the words, you can always fake it with a couple of la las or woo woos, but whatever you do, don’t forget the moves.”
Rita stopped moving. Up to this point, nothing had been further from her mind than forgetting the moves, she’d not even really thought about the moves, but now she wasn’t sure she could even remember what the word moves meant, much less what the moves were, and how can I stop the word moves from appearing in every thought I seem to be having, she wondered, as she haltingly began to move forward past the curtain into the glaring light of center stage.
The music began, and before she was conscious of the fact, they were in the middle of the song. Things must be going okay, she thought, they hadn’t stopped, no one was yelling at her, the audience seemed to be enjoying it, I don’t even have to look to make sure that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, but maybe I’ll move my head slightly to make sure I am doing what I’m supposed to be doing, hey, they’re all stepping forward and I seem to be stepping backward, but I’m sure that we’re supposed to be stepping backward when the guitar comes back in, or wait, was it forward when the guitar comes back in and backward when we do the a cappella part, yeah, that must be it, because now we’re in the a cappella part and everyone is moving backward but now I seem to be stepping forward, why is it that I’m stepping forward when I’m now sure that it’s backward in the a cappella part, oh, shit, is this song ever going to end, where am I supposed to go now, hey, they all have their arms up and waving, oh yeah, this is the arms up and waving part, are they all glaring at me, how is it possible to sing so well together and still glare that effectively, I’m going to ask them to teach me to do that if this fucking song ever ends, oh no, I just bumped in to something and I don’t remember learning a bumping into something move, is it possible I just forgot and did it correctly instinctively or is it more likely that the fact that the singing is now turning into yelling is a clear indication that I’m not doing the right thing, I seem to be losing my balance a bit, wait a minute, am I holding a piece of silver shirt, that’s wrong, I’m sure of it, and the piece I’m holding pretty much corresponds to the hole in the back of Deborah’s shirt, that definitely isn’t good, why is the audience laughing and why has the music stopped and why does everything look so big all of a sudden, oh shit, it’s because I’ve fallen down and seem to have taken another large piece of silver shirt from someone, they don’t make these very well, do they, wait a minute, now someone is falling on top of me and I can’t really see anything or even breathe that well for that matter, oh oh, the curtain is closing, that can’t be good, I wish I could get up and that loud shouting would stop, I didn’t realize that backup singer was a contact sport, I’m not sure what’s going to happen next but it’s got to be better than having three large black women on top of me, although I’m sure that that is someone’s dream, wait, dream, this is a dream, I can get out of this by waking up, that’s what I need to do, wake up, Rita, yeah, let’s go, it’s time to…and she woke up, the taste of satin still clinging to the roof of her mouth.
Well, it could be worse, she thought to herself. At least no one has died lately, despite their best efforts in that direction. And no sooner had that thought completed itself, providing some comfort as she imagined again the more serious possible outcomes of her father’s recent car accident, than the phone rang.
“I’ll kill him if he’s dead,” Rita said out loud, terrified that this indeed was the news just milliseconds away, phone calls coming in at 3:30 a.m. very rarely bearing the tidings of awards won, money to be expected, jobs secured or other tidings of great joy.
Picking up the phone, Rita held it several inches from her right ear, as if that would somehow lessen the negative impact of the information she fully expected to hear, not realizing that the same gesture would actually have the beneficial effect of serving to soften the decibel level of the very loud sound that now came through the receiver.
“I’VE GOT IT!,” screeched, despite its pitch, an obviously male voice.
“I don’t want it,” said Rita, somewhat instinctively, not having the slightest idea who she was talking to or what they were talking about.
“Who is this?,” asked the voice, in a significantly more subdued tone.
“You called me, and it’s 3:30 a.m., so I think that is actually my question to ask,” Rita said, now relieved to know that the worst she feared was not yet at her doorstep, but, that being the case, annoyed too, for in the best of all possible worlds she would have been awakened from a very deep and sound sleep were she in fact capable of entering into such a pursuit.
“Isn’t this Pam?,” wondered the voice.
“Does what I just said sound like something that Pam would say?,” asked Rita.
“Not really,” said the voice.
“Then what’s your best guess?,” Rita asked. “One, this is Pam, in which case you don’t know her as well as you think you do and should start paying a lot more attention, or B, this is not Pam, and the longer this conversation continues the more likely you are to wish you’d never dialed this number?”
“I’m going to have to go with door number two,” said the voice. “And, in light of the extreme likelihood that now exists that this is not Pam, I’m also going to offer my sincere apologies. It’s really late, isn’t it?”
There’s something about this voice that’s familiar, thought Rita, although she couldn’t imagine who it was or that she could actually know someone who was this irritating.
“Alright,” she said. “Let’s cut to the chase. Who is this, why are you calling me, and who is this Pam person when she’s at home?”
“I’m going to take those in the order asked,” said the voice. “My name is Agee, I’m confused about why I’m calling you as I meant to call Pam, which brings us to the third question, the answer to which is that Pam is my agent. And I guess the fourth question is: Are you still there?”
For a brief second, Rita wasn’t sure if she actually was. Agee? The screenwriter of “Zombie Golf Pro II: Par For The Corpse,”? Who’d been hanging around the set for weeks and who looked away quickly in that “I wasn’t really staring at you, you just happened to see me glance in your direction as you looked at me” way every time she looked at him? At 3:30 in the fucking morning? By mistake? Hmm…
“You’re not having this call traced, are you,” Agee asked.
Ooh, a little paranoid. I like that in a guy, Rita thought.
“I’m not usually paranoid” (Had she said it out loud?, Rita wondered silently, she hoped), “but your side of the conversation got awfully quiet there, and I thought either you fell asleep, which would certainly be understandable, or maybe you weren’t talking so the call could be traced, although now that I say it, I don’t seem to recall from any movie I’ve seen where a call is being traced that being quiet is a necessary element of having it traced. Am I making any sense at all?”
“I’m not sure,” said Rita. “I was having the call traced, and not really listening.”
“You’re joking,” said Agee, quietly opening the blinds covering the window in front of this desk, not really expecting to see flashing red lights but…
“As a matter of fact, I am,” said Rita.
Ooh, a sense of humor in the wee hours of the morning, I like that in a girl, Agee thought, lowering the blinds and at the same time trying to figure out why the voice on the other end of the phone sounded so familiar to him.
“Let’s back up a bit,” said Rita, now fairly certain that this was indeed the Agee who had written the movie she was in, and who had been watching her, and who had it seemed with a touch of “Fate deals its hand” called her inadvertently in the middle of the night. “What exactly is it that you’ve got, and do you know yet if it’s contagious?”
My God, it’s Rita, thought Agee, just realizing who he was talking to, and the strange coincidence of his having dialed her number when he didn’t even know what it was. Has she seen me looking at her on the set? No, I’ve been pretty subtle, I think. But how weird is it that I called her? Have I said anything for the past five minutes?
“No, nothing like that,” he said. “I actually intended to call Pam to let her know that I’ve finally come up with what I think would make a pretty good subject for my next documentary, and a title to go with it.”
So he makes movies as well as writes them, hm?, thought Rita. A triple hyphenate: screenwriter-director-stalker. Be careful.
“And 3:30 a.m. would, in the give and take that exists between the two of you, pass for an appropriate time to impart this news?” And is she really just your agent? she found she couldn’t help but wonder.
“Actually, it would,” Agee said. “Pam told me to call her whenever I settled on the idea, no matter what time of day or night it was.”
“And you’ve come up with it.”
“Yes,” said the voice now known but not yet revealed as Agee.
“Well, what is this great idea that can’t wait to be revealed,” Rita asked.
“You’ll have to wait to find out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, Pam is my agent, and I promised I’d tell her first,” the voice said.
“Then why did you call me?”
“I didn’t mean to, I meant to call her.”
“Ah, but did you,” asked Rita.
“What do you mean?”
“Let me remind you what the father of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, said.
“Things go better with coke?”, said the voice, hoping that a more playful tone would make an increasingly weird situation a little less so.
“No, and don’t take that playful tone with me,” said Rita, in reality and for some reason not at all unhappy with the way this increasingly weird conversation was going. “What he said that would pertain particularly to the question currently under discussion is, ‘there are no accidents.”
“I peed my pants once when I couldn’t get to a bathroom in time.”
“A little too much information, I think, so early in our relationship,” said Rita. “And I’m sure Freud’s meaning was on a higher plane.”
“That’s right,” said the voice. “I was on a plane, and people just wouldn’t get out of the bathrooms.”
“Let’s move on,” said Rita. “The underlying gist here is that I think you wanted to try this potentially brilliant but currently unknown idea on someone else before you ran it by the currently sound asleep Pam.”
“But I don’t even know you.”
“Ah, are you sure of that,” Rita asked, tired, and tired of, the charade.
“No, actually; how ya doing Rita?” the voice said.
“So, you do know me after all, Agee,” said Rita.
“I suspected it was you early on, but didn’t want to say anything”
“Why not?” Rita asked.
“I was sort of worried that you would hang up once you discovered it was me,” he said.
“But I did know it was you, and didn’t hang up.”
“But I didn’t know that,” said Agee.
‘ “You didn’t know I didn’t hang up?” asked Rita, knowing this was not what he meant but getting back into the spirit of the conversation.
“No, I didn’t know you knew it was me.”
“Ah, well, if you weren’t going to reveal yourself, how did you expect the conversation to end?”
“Something like, ‘I apologize again, this is the best wrong number call I’ve ever had, but gotta go.’"
“That wouldn’t really have worked, would it,” said Rita.
“No, I suppose not, but I wouldn’t have been lying about the best wrong number part.”
“That’s very sweet. Now what is this idea you’re talking about?
“Sorry, I really can’t tell you first. It’s an idea for Pam”
“And you’re really expecting her to take a call at any time of the day or night just to hear whatever it is.”
“She suggested it,” said Agee.
“I don’t care,” countered Rita, “that’s exploitation.”
A slightly longer silence than might be expected from the other side of the conversation, then, “What did you say?”
“I said,” Rita said, “that’s exploitation. Taking advantage of someone’s good will and bending it to your own selfish purposes.”
“Oh my god, that’s right,” Agee yelled, sounding a little spooked. “But how could you possible know that?”
“It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain,” said Rita. “I mean expecting someone to stop whatever they’re doing, just to…”
“No, I mean how could you know that that is the idea?”
“What’s the idea?
“What you said.”
“What did I say?”
“What the idea is.”
“But how could I, if I don’t know what it is?,” Rita asked, now not so sure she liked what he was saying, even if she didn’t really have a clue what that really was. “I don’t, do I?”
“You obviously do,” said Agee, sounding more sure of himself.
“OK, let’s review,” said Rita.
“You’re telling me that sometime during this conversation, initiated by you in the middle of the night, I have managed to suss out the very brilliant idea that you called to tell me that you can’t tell me?”
“That about sums it up,” said Agee, impressed with Rita’s ability to make what was an increasingly bizarre turn of events sound a little less bizarre.
“Alright, if I know it, tell me what it is.”
“I don’t have to, you said it.”
“I said the idea,” said Rita.
“Yes,” said Agee.
“Then confirm it for me.”
“That’s exploitation.”
“No, it fucking is not, don’t start throwing my argument back at me,” Rita yelled back at him.
“No, no,” Agee said. “The idea is “That’s Exploitation,” a documentary about horror movies.
“That’s the brilliant idea?” shouted Rita. “A stupid documentary about stupid films that has been done a million stupid times before?”
“Don’t hold back what you’re really thinking,” said Agee. “It’s not just the subject, it’s the way that it will be done.”
“OK, said Rita. “And how would that be?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Don’t use that phrase, or anything that means the same thing, ever again with me!”, Rita yelled.
“But I told you already that Pam needs to hear it first.”
“Let me tell you a little secret,” Rita said. “That ship has sailed.”
“Shit,” said Agee.
Continued on...Pages To Be Written...