From Oscarpocalypse Now by Blush Gentry (p.1)
Don’t call me a movie star. I’m not, not anymore. I’m a certified gemologist these days. If I’m offered roles, it’s not for my acting acumen. The last parts I want to play are the sort of freak show cameos that Patty Hearst got duped into.
No, what really excites me is chromium diopside. My company has controlling interest over the largest deposit of chromium diopside in Siberia. More Emerald than Emeralds, that’s our slogan. What we mean is chromium diopside is a deeper green than most emeralds. My entire line is showcased on the Blush Gentry Hollywood Crown Jewels Hour on GemStoneTV.
My son, his name is Lawton, he’s eleven. My husband, he’s still in the industry but not in front of the camera. He works in postproduction, post-postproduction, like deep postproduction. And he’s a little bit of a workaholic. He tells me, “Blush, my work is my church.”
And, no. We didn’t know anything about any grisly killings, at least not at the time they were being committed.
Whatever magic Robb worked, it got Foster sprung. From the airport he drove Foster to a diner. They took a booth near a woman wearing oversized sunglasses who pushed a package across her table toward a man who pushed it back. Anonymous behind her dark lenses, the woman fiddled with her phone. She clicked a pen and jotted something into a notebook.
The waitress hadn’t brought out their eggs before Robb covered his face with both hands and burst into tears. “It’s Mai,” he sobbed, his words muffled behind his fingers. “It’s everything.” Customers turned to stare.
His wife, Mai, had left him after their baby’s awful death. Foster had heard the story often enough at the support group.
Robb opened his jacket to reveal a shoulder holster, a gun snugged flat against his ribs. He wiped his face with a paper napkin. His other hand fumbled a buckle and snaps until the holster came loose, and he placed it and the gun on the table between them. “I can’t have it right now. I can’t say what will happen if I walk out of here with this…” He pushed it toward Foster.
Foster slid the gun back. Heavy steel against laminated plastic, the sliding sounded big. Like static. Like something grinding in a room where everyone present had gone silent.
They were two men sitting in a diner. One man crying, a gun resting between them, people stared. The woman wearing sunglasses stared.
“Please,” Robb begged. “Just for now, you take it.”
After the airport, Foster owed the man a favor. So Foster took the gun.
Mitzi arrived at the diner. The booth near the back. The usual arrangement. A producer, Schlo, sat waiting. With two projects backlogged, it wasn’t as if she needed the work. But Schlo was like family. Besides, this being Hollywood, who didn’t want to play the hero? Mitzi slipped into the booth and asked, “You already tried Industrial Light and Magic?”
The guy didn’t answer, not right away. That was Schlo all over. The speech pattern of someone who lived on his mobile phone. A man who left a wide margin around each statement to allow for the satellite delay. He said, “Industrial Light and Magic’s not you.”
Even in person, sitting across the table, Schlo was loud. Like he spent his life yelling at the hands-free phone in his car.
Big Schlo lifted a hand to stroke the stubble on his cheek, clearly watching his reflection in her sunglasses. They gave her away, sunglasses, indoors. “Hang one on, last night?” he asked. “Xanax bars.” He leveled a thick finger at her. His wrist sparkled with a ruby cuff link. “I’m maybe going to send you over some.”
That, that she wouldn’t dignify with a response.
“If it’s magnesium you’re not getting, Brazil nuts are your answer.” He cupped a hand next to his mouth and whispered, “You know, back in my day we used to call them ‘African American Toes’?” He hissed wetly, snickering at his own joke.
Mitzi lifted her glasses to glower at him, but the fluorescent lights stabbed her eyes.
He reached a hairy, meaty hand across the table. “You take after your mother. Such a person of goodness she was.” His fingertips stroked her cheek. “You’re not your father, you aren’t. A bigger prick I never met than your father.”
She slapped the hand away. The headache drove down her neck, across her shoulders and onward down her spine.
She’d only suggested Industrial Light & Magic to make a point. She was baiting the guy. Only Mitzi was Mitzi. She dodged eye contact. Signaled a waitress. Said, “Call Jenkins, she’s good.”
After the pause, Schlo said, “Jenkins won’t touch this one.” Again, too loud.
Mitzi set her phone on the table. She uncoiled a pair of earbuds and plugged them into the phone, saying, “I want you should hear a new scream.”
Big Schlo waved off the pitch. To him a scream was a scream.
People, Mitzi asked herself, what do they know? They think they know the sound of a bone breaking, when all they know is celery. Frozen celery wrapped in chamois and snapped in half. How they think a skull sounds when someone jumps off a skyscraper and slams headfirst on the sidewalk, that’s just a double layer of soda crackers glued to a watermelon and smacked with a baseball bat.
Your average moviegoer thought all knives made the same noise going in. The poor innocents wouldn’t know the true sound of arterial spray until it was their own head-on car accident.
Schlo lifted a thick express-mail packet from the seat next to him. Handed it across the table. A sticky shadow of glue showed where an address label had been peeled off.
Mitzi lifted the flap. Her thumb riffed the stack of bills on top. All hundreds. Stacks and stacks. The scene in question must really stink.
Something popped. Gum popped. A gum-chewing server had stepped to their table. An orange-stained Los Angelina she wasn’t. Not yet another bimbo beat hard with the blonde stick.
The waitress looked at Schlo too long. Then looked away too fast. She’d pegged him. Her spine straightened. She pushed out her chest and raised her chin. Turned her head in both directions for no reason except perhaps to display each profile. She asked, “What can I get you guys?” No longer a waitress, now she was an actor playing a waitress. With a tiny gulp she swallowed her chewing gum.
She started into reciting the specials. Delivered each word like here was an audition.
Mitzi cut her off. “Just coffee.” She added, “Please.”
When the server was gone, Schlo tried a new strategy. Said, “I love your work.” He said, “That picture in release last month, the one where the kid gets tripped at the top of the stairs and busts his noggin open on the stone floor…that was yours, right?”
A kid, some actor played a teenager stalked by a haunted doll. The doll was a computer model. The actor was almost middle-aged. What tumbled down the flight of stairs was a lifelike dummy with an articulated skeleton inside. What made all this make-believe garbage real was the sound. The smack of somebody’s skull splitting open on a stone floor and the perfect squash of the brains inside. That sound was the money shot that sold the scene.
Mitzi said, “A head of lettuce, frozen, and dropped to land next to the mic.”
Schlo shook his oversized noggin. “This town knows a head of lettuce when they hear one.” Insiders knew plywood strips soaked in water to dissolve the glue, then dried in the sun and snapped in half to dub a shattered femur.