Popcorn Read online

  Intoxicated by the heady atmosphere of sex and success, Bruce forgot his private sense of failure. Everybody made awful speeches at the Oscars: it was a tradition.

  Sure.

  Absolutely.

  In a way it was cool to be kitsch. Look at Elvis.

  Right.

  Buoyed up by this thought, Bruce waded into the sea of bosoms.

  “Thank you, thank you very much,” he heard himself saying over and over again, struggling to address his remarks to faces not bosoms. Cleavage etiquette was something he had never been able to work out. Clearly, a woman who was presenting her tits like the centrepiece in some glorious bouquet would be saddened to think that nobody had noticed them. On the other hand, if you did stare appreciatively it looked a bit tacky. Bruce thought about putting on his shades, but decided against it. Instead he concentrated on being magnanimous in victory.

  “Personally, I thought so and so should have got it,” he lied. Personally, he thought so and so’s movie had been an over-sentimental piece of crap which nobody would have looked at twice if so and so hadn’t been a woman. But he was trying to be nice.

  “No, really, I think she deserved it more than I did.” Like hell.

  “I’m just happy if someone goes to see my picture.” Like double hell with mashed potatoes.

  “Great to see you, pal.” Bruce pumped some handsome star’s hand fervently. “I loved that cop thing you did. We should meet. I’d like that. That would be fun.”

  “Did you see the cop thing he did?” Bruce confided to another firm-chinned wonder. “Directed by a moron, performed by a retard. I’m trying to be nice here, but the guy has had a total talent transplant.”

  More bosoms. More congratulations. A couple of drinks.

  “I’m just glad for the cast, that’s all. It’s really their movie…I just thought up the idea, raised the money, wrote the script, cast it, directed it and told everybody involved exactly what to do.”

  More drinks. More bosoms. He was happy to address them directly now.

  “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.”

  Bruce’s voice wafted through the trees. The young couple were lying on a blanket spread on the wet ground. They had just made love in the warm but drenching rain.

  “Quiet, honey,” said the man, and he held his finger to his lover’s lips.

  “Surely the most controversial Oscar choice in recent times,” the radio said, “particularly in the light of yet another irrational murder thought to have been perpetrated by the notorious copycat killers known as the Mall Murderers.”

  The girl giggled with nervous excitement. “Notorious!” she whispered into her boyfriend’s ear.

  “That’s right, honey. No-fuckin’—torious.”

  She lay back on the sopping rug and the rain splashed down on her fragile-looking body, forming shining beads on her white skin.

  Notorious.

  They laughed together at this reminder of their infamy. He ran his hand across her stomach and on to her breasts, collecting a ridge of water as he did so. Then they made love again, while the radio pumped twenty minutes of advert-free rock through the dripping trees. No chit-chat, no hard sell, just pure one hundred per cent heavy-duty rock cumminrightatcha!

  “Well,” said the man, when they had finished for a second time, as he got up and pulled on his jeans, “I guess the engine’ll be cool by now. We’d best be moving on. We have some stuff to do.”

  Bruce was drinking and he’d stopped trying to be nice. Although he was something of a style junkie, the abstinence thing was one Hollywood fashion Bruce had never cottoned to. He was one of the new breed of “Hey, I smoke — you gonna call the cops?” hard guys.

  “I like to drink,” he would say. “I like the taste and I like the packaging. It is an indisputable fact, aesthetically speaking, that a bottle of Jack or Jim on a dinner-table looks considerably more pleasing than a bottle of Évian. Trust me, I’m a movie director.”

  Under normal circumstances Bruce was a happy drinker, not one of those sad Jekyll and Hyde characters who turn into social psychopaths with the third glass. But on this night, although (or perhaps because) it was supposed to be the biggest night of his life, the bourbon was not giving him that familiar warm glow.

  It was all the people in his face.

  His face was completely full of people — friends, admirers, job-seekers, gold-diggers — and yet suddenly, all he actually wanted was to be alone. He would have liked nothing more than to lean against a wall in solitary, half-drunk splendour, watch the bosoms and forget about himself. But he couldn’t because people kept coming up and talking to him. Congratulations would have been fine, but they always wanted to justify their gushing praise with a conversation. Why couldn’t they just tell him he was great and fuck off? Instead he had to be nice to them. He didn’t want to be nice. He’d been nice on the podium, nice enough for a lifetime. That was enough nice; he was niced out. He should not be expected to spend the whole evening, his evening being nice.

  “Thank you, that’s kind, thank you. Well you know that’s very kind.”

  It couldn’t go on for ever and it didn’t.

  “Look, I just made a movie. I didn’t find the cure for cancer!” That shut them up.

  “This Oscar means nothing,” he added grandly, warming to his theme.

  “It’s a tainted trinket.”…“A statue without status.”…“A bauble with no balls.”…Bruce loved that last one.

  “Take a look at it.” He held up his Oscar, waving it about and pointing at the golden sword which coyly covered the relevant part of its anatomy. “It’s a bauble with no balls.”

  People laughed — but nervously. You didn’t come to the Governor’s Ball and take the piss out of the Oscar statuette. It was like going to church and sneering at the cross. The Oscar was the most coveted glittering prize of them all, potent symbol of the greatest entertainment industry on earth. Cynicism was not only bad form, but utterly deceitful. Everybody knew that, balls or no balls, the Oscar was the ultimate goal and Bruce had wanted it like life itself. To grab it and then try to be smart after the event was appalling behaviour. Bruce knew this too, but he didn’t care. Having failed to speak his mind in his speech, he was making up for lost time.

  “Look, if a picture’s good it does not require the approbation of a twelve-inch eunuch to legitimize it!”

  It was the memory of the faces in the mirror pointing their accusing fingers at him. It was the dreadful, deluded MAD mothers with their sad stories of loved ones lost. It was Oliver and Dale and that smug little professor.

  All of them lingered in the back of his mind, niggling away, trying to call him to account, to spoil his fun. Apparently it wasn’t enough to make cool, slick, exciting movies that people got off on. No, he was also expected to try and second-guess some unknowable repercussions that his work might or might not have.

  Absurd. Puerile.

  Yet he’d had his chance to speak out and had said nothing. Worse, he’d made out that everything was fine. He felt such a hypocrite himself that he saw hypocrisy in everybody else. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that any of the gushing praise people kept heaping upon him was sincere. Why should they be telling the truth? He hadn’t. He’d cravenly failed to use the platform that the Oscars had given him to take on the censorship debate. To nail, publicly, all the dangerous, reactionary talk of copycat killings, protecting kids from themselves and whatever happened to Andy Hardy. He’d had the chance to take that famed twelve-inch golden statuette and shove it right up the collective ass of Professor Chambers, the Senate Committee on Taste and Decency, the Concerned Mothers of American Dimwits and every other God-bothering, mealy-mouthed, Moral Majority moron in the USA. He’d had the chance, but he’d blown it.

  “Legs of fire”, for Christ’s sake!

  “Give me another Jack Daniels.”

  “Give me another Jack Daniels.
”

  The terrified shopkeeper reached down a second bottle of whiskey and added it to the box of booze and provisions that stood on the counter. The scrawny girl watched proudly as the pathetic man leapt to do exactly what her boyfriend ordered. Her boyfriend had such natural authority and command. She loved that about him. She felt that, even without the Uzi machine-pistol with which he was threatening the storekeeper, his commands would still have been obeyed.

  They were in the process of robbing the store of a small country caravan park, which they had stumbled across after leaving the main highway.

  “There’ll be road-blocks,” he’d said, swinging the big, saggy old car on to a gravel road, “and we ain’t gettin’ caught till we’re good and ready.”

  “Ready to be saved?” she’d asked eagerly.

  “That’s right, baby, ready to be saved.”

  She slid across the big bench seat and put her head on his shoulder. The vast redwoods slid past the windows, and for a while she indulged in the fantasy of staying in the forest for ever. The trees looked so thick and friendly in the Chevy’s lights that she thought maybe they could build a secret cabin among them and live off berries and venison.

  It was a delicious thought, and as she peered out through the wet windscreen and deep into the dark shadows she could almost see the two of them, standing in the doorway of their little fairy-tale home, he with an axe in his hand, she with a tray of fresh-baked fruit scones. All alone in the world.

  When the caravan park hove into view it seemed to her that perhaps they had chanced upon a halfway point between fantasy and reality.

  “Let’s rent a trailer, baby,” she’d pleaded. “We could stay a few days. I’ll bet they haven’t even heard of us out here.”

  For a moment the trees and the night and the smell of the rain had tricked her into imagining that she lived in some other age, one when people still hid out in woods, when you could still run and hide. When a person could still start again.

  “Honey, we ain’t more’n fifteen miles from the Interstate. You think they don’t have TV and a phone?” her boyfriend said. “Besides, everybody in the whole United States has heard of us.”

  “Well, couldn’t we just stay one night? Y’know, like a holiday?”

  “Tonight ain’t jus’ any of night, hon. Tonight is the night. Shit or bust. We’ll just pick up some stuff and move on.”

  So they had pulled in off the gravel road and forced the old storekeeper to open up his shop. They should have been out again in a couple of minutes. It should have been the simplest thing in the world. After all, they had turned over country stores a hundred times before.

  But this time the robbery was going wrong. This time there was a problem.

  The storekeeper had no Twinkies.

  No Twinkles? Every store had Twinkies.

  “I want some Twinkies.” the girl said, and she actually stamped her foot. “You said I’d get some.”

  “I know, I know, baby, but I can’t just make ‘em up outa dog food, can I?”

  The sound of television commercials could be heard from the back room. The storekeeper had been watching TV when the robbery began.

  “You’re a modern girl. You know what you want and you want it now!”

  “Don’t take no for an answer.”

  “Why wait, when you can have it all today?”

  They could have been ads for anything. Even Twinkies.

  “You get everything you want!” the girl shouted. “Whiskey and pretzels and cigarettes and I don’t even get no Twinkies!”

  “I know that, honey, but what can I do? I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t shoot me, please.” The storekeeper could scarcely speak for fear.

  “For me, freedom is about doing what I like to do when I like to do it.” said the TV in the back room.

  “What d’you say?” the young man asked the storekeeper.

  “I…I said please don’t shoot me…I just ran out yesterday. We’re a small business. We can’t carry no huge stock.”

  “You think I’d shoot a guy for not having Twinkies?”

  “I…I have Pop Tarts.”

  “For Christ’s sake, what kind of person do you think I am?” The young man was so offended that he shot the storekeeper anyway.

  “C’mon, honey. We’ll stop by a 7-11 when we hit LA.”

  ELEVEN

  There was a crowd of people round Bruce now, sensing scandal. Some kind of critic guy was in his face, a big noise, art editor on the LA Times, or maybe gardening editor, something he was pretty proud of anyway. Great Caesar’s tits, the man was a pompous little pecker.

  “I must say,” the pecker said, “I found Ordinary Americans a wonderfully seductive piece of film entertainment.”

  ‘Film entertainment’. What a phrase! Not ‘work of art’, not ‘cultural benchmark’, not ‘celluloid reflection of the spirit of the age’, but ‘film entertainment’. As if Bruce made daytime soap or something.

  Bruce did not consider himself conceited about his work. He was the first to admit that it was popcorn — but only if other popular and corny works like Romeo and Juliet and Beethoven’s Fifth were popcorn too.

  “And I will go to the wall,” the pecker continued, as Bruce’s eyes glazed over, “to defend your right to kill as many people as you like in your movies. The only question I ask is — that age-old bugbear — is it art?”

  “Is it art?” said Bruce. “Well, let me see now. That’s a tricky one. Is shooting a whole bunch of people in a movie art? I think the best way I can answer that is to ask you not to be such a complete fucking jerk.” Not brilliant, perhaps, but it got the pecker to go away.

  It brought Bruce no relief, though. One jerk was replaced by another. At least this time it was a lovely young actress. Lovely to look at, that is, not to listen to. She was a whiner, a spoilt brat. Her conversation had a banal self-assertiveness which was the result of rarely being contradicted, on account of the fact that she rarely spoke to anyone who wasn’t trying to sleep with her. Bruce did not want to sleep with her and so listened to the young woman’s conversation with a less indulgent ear than she was used to.

  “No, actually, as a matter of fact I don’t think I was emotionally abused as a child,” he said through gritted teeth. “Well, I think I would know…Really? Is that so?”

  According to the young woman, it was not necessarily the case at all that a person would be aware of having been emotionally abused. She herself had been blissfully ignorant of the appalling truth until it was uncovered via hypnotherapy.

  “And what did he say to that?”

  It was the following morning and the girl (whose name was Dove) was recounting the story of her party encounter with Bruce to Oliver and Dale on Coffee Time USA, the events of Oscars night having by that time turned anyone who had been with Bruce during the previous twenty-four hours into an important character witness and a sought-after celebrity. All across the air waves, hat-check girls and drinks waiters were offering their opinion on Bruce’s state of mind during the five or six seconds they had spent with him ‘one on one’.

  “He said that I must be very relieved,” Dove replied, looking beautifully earnest and careworn.

  “Hang on, let me get this straight here,” said Oliver, putting on his glasses. Oliver’s glasses did not actually have any lenses, because if they had they would have reflected his autocue. Nevertheless he always kept them close by and put them on whenever he felt it necessary to make it clear that he was feeling deeply sympathetic and extremely concerned.

  “Bruce Delamitri said you must be relieved to have uncovered hidden memories of emotional abuse?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “How d’ya like that guy!”

  “He said that it meant I was off the hook. That I could do what I liked — take drugs, sleep around, steal stuff, be a total loser — and none of it would be my fault because some hypnotherapist had granted me victim status. Can you believe somebody would say that? I cried all n
ight.”

  Dove twisted a handkerchief between her dainty fingers in anguish at this painful memory.

  “Camera Four.” Deep within the control suite the editor issued his instructions. “Extreme close-up on Dove’s hands.”

  Dale saw the shot cut up on her monitor and put her hand on top of Dove’s.

  “You’re saying that Delamitri didn’t believe your very real heartache was anything more than a ploy?”

  “That’s right. He asked me how much I’d paid my hypnotherapist and when I told him three thousand dollars he said it was peanuts.”

  “Peanuts? Three thousand dollars?” said Oliver, who earned eight million a year. “Well, I guess those Hollywood types never pretended to live down here in the real world with us ordinary folk, did they?”

  “He said that a hundred thousand dollars would have been cheap. He said what price could you put on getting an excuse to screw up your life.”

  “These guys just don’t think the rules of common decency and good manners count for them, do they?”

  “I guess not.”

  “So what did you say?”

  “I told him I had uncovered a deep and painful wound.”

  “Way to go, Dove. Feisty stuff,” said Oliver. “We’ll be hearing more about Dove’s deep and painful wound and millionaire Delamitri’s cold indifference to her suffering after these messages.”

  “Excess wind can blight your life,” said the sweet old lady standing in the park with her dogs.

  “I have uncovered a deep and painful wound,” Dove said, attempting to fight her corner but making a pouty, sulky hash of it. She felt exposed and out of her depth. She did not really know how to handle men when they were not trying to sleep with her. Bruce just laughed. People were listening now but he didn’t care. Having personally spouted bullshit to a billion people earlier in the evening, he was not going to put up with it from anyone else.