Hal Ackerman - Stein,stoned

“You’re David Hart, the photographer,” Stein declared. “I’ve seen your work.”

Hart replied a suspicious but flattered, “Really?”

“You shot the Espe box?”

“Yes,” David replied, puffing up.

“And no,” Vane added.

“But mostly yes,” David insisted. “Uncredited and unheralded. And of course unpaid.”

Lila poked Stein in the neck. “I’m still here by the way. In case you were wondering.”

Paul Vane told an extraordinary tale, the gist of it being that marketing strategy for “New Millennium” would feature a new face, one who would replace Nicholette Bradley. Of course that created a tremendous buzz. Thousands of girls were interviewed. And finally-

“Don’t tell me,” Stein interjected. “Is her name Alex?”

Lila hooted at him, “Stein, you don’t know anything about that.”

“How did you know?” Vane marveled.

“You mean he’s right? ” Lila spent the next ten minutes wondering how that could possibly be.

Vane went on. “They tried to keep it hush hush. They began shooting the national ad campaign last summer. Print ads. Billboards. TV spots. But of course no secret is safe in the ad business. Once it leaked that Alex was the next big thing, clients were lining up to hire her after her exclusive with Espe expired. Twin Peaks, the sports bra company, won the bidding. They paid her a million dollars, and the deal was she had to shave her head.”

Stein remembered he had seen those pictures. His mind, which did strange things like this, presented the proof sheet he had seen in Nicholette’s bedroom. “So she must have known she was being replaced.

“Nikki’s a darling. She helped find Alex.”

“She wasn’t irked about being replaced?”

“It’s show biz. Everyone replaces somebody.”

“Do you think you can get to the part about me before the dinner break?” David Hart pouted.

Vane smiled at his lover, who did not smile back. “Alex’s last contractual obligation to Espe was for the shoot that would create the package. Ray Ramos was the photographer. It was there that I set eyes on Ray Ramos’s magnificent, young, overworked, under-appreciated assistant for the first time.” Here Vane bowed in David Hart’s direction.

“At last.” Hart fumed.

“It was the assistant’s job to do everything. Make coffee. Load cameras. Set the lights. Process the film. After the last shot was done, Alex came to my salon. She had agreed to the deal with Twin Peaks and wanted her head shaved immediately because if she let herself think about it too long she knew she’d back out. I had just finished doing her when my darling David (of course he wasn’t my darling yet!) came bursting in. His face was the color of blanched mushrooms. He had screwed up all fifteen rolls of film that Ray Ramos had shot. The negatives were ruined. There was no shot for the box, nor for the billboard. It was a disaster of global proportion.

“David’s plan was that he would reshoot the Ray Ramos session and substitute his film for Ramos’s without anyone knowing. He knew the entire lighting setup and all the lenses and angles that Ramos had used. He had never shot before but he was sure he could do it. All I had to do was to get the world’s new top model to agree to work with an unknown photographer when all that was at stake was her entire career and the success of a ten million dollar ad campaign.

“He swore he would do anything for me in return which was a very tempting offer. And then he saw my wicker basket filled with her shorn auburn hair. I thought he was going to stroke out on the spot. His jaw froze. His eyes fluttered. He lost the power of speech. He grabbed me around the neck and begged me to perform a miracle, to make a wig out of Alex’s hair.”

“Don’t embellish,” David complained. “You always embellish.”

“My darling, I am nothing but embellishment.”

Stein stepped in to short-circuit the domestic spat. “So you made a wig for Alex out of her own hair that you had just cut off her? Is that what happened?”

“It’s technically called a fall, not a wig, because it’s her own hair, but yes. And David did the reshoot and it came out brilliantly.” Vane bowed to his protege. “More brilliantly than the original, I’m sure.”

“And then everyone started proclaiming Ray Ramos a photographic genius,” David sulked.

“Yes,” Paul Vane commiserated. “The injustice.”

The picture began to coalesce in Stein’s mind. “So you gents decided to start your own underground distribution arm? You whipped up your own private batch? You enlisted the girl at the warehouse to distract Morty Greene and diverted a few shipments of Espe bottles… How am I doing so far?”

“Stein, all this talk is getting me hungry,” Lila pouted.

“We’re done here in a second. As soon as they tell me which of them wrote the extortion letters.”

“What letters?” Vane blurted before he could stop himself.

It became clear in a flash that the extortion letters had not been part of the plan the two had agreed upon and that David Hart had written them without Vane’s approval or knowledge. The Fall of the House of Espe. Stein got the joke now. Hart knew that the hair on the label was not real. The truth-in-advertising laws were very clear now that beauty products had to be accurately represented. The notes were thinly veiled threats that Hart would blow the lid off the campaign. The lid of the Espe box was where the false hair fell. Of course David Hart knew that. He had shot the damn thing.

“Oh my God,” Paul Vane cried. “We’re going to jail and I look ghastly in orange.”

“Nobody is going to jail,” Stein assured him. “If you do exactly what I tell you to do.” Stein’s patience was losing its patience. “You’re going to pay for a truck and return all their bottles along with an apology. And then you are going to leave Espe Shampoo alone. Is that cool with everybody?”

It was so cool with Paul Vane that he practically fell into Stein’s arms. Hart was a line drawing of disappointment. “Why don’t you just roll me over and fuck me missionary style,” he groused. “What do I get?”

“How about for openers you get not to go to jail,” Stein said, “And your partner gets not to go to jail.”

“He promised to take care of me,” David wheedled. “In perpetuity.”

Stein envisioned how he would take care of the little weasel in perpetuity. It involved carpet tacks and his eyeballs. He addressed Paul. “Last question and I’m done with you. How did you get the bottles here?” At that moment the sound of the service elevator clanged to life. Summoned from above, it began its labored ascent. “Ah. Perhaps this is the answer to my question,” Stein observed. He began his own laborious climb to the surface.

“Stein, wait.” Lila pulled her shoe on and hurried after him.

In the hour they had spent indoors, winter evening had fallen and life on the street had undergone a radical transformation. The main strip through town, which earlier had been about as lively as a doily, now had become a teeming, volcanic landscape of college students on winter break. Boys leaned out of their cars, hooting mating calls at the constellations of girls, whose every movement of torso and limb released crackling trails of pheromones. The flash of an incongruous image on the far side of the road caught Stein’s eye-a truck carrying a load of hay. It was only a glimpse but its afterglow remained printed on his retina as it moved through the parting crowd of pedestrians, and disappeared. He was certain that it was Morty Greene’s truck or a reasonably close hallucination. “Wait here,” he instructed Lila.

“Stop saying that.”

She clutched his arm and together they serpentined through the moving maze of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. “I hope you appreciate that I’m running,” Lila gasped. “The only thing I ever ran for is secretary of my stock club.” They crossed on a long diagonal to the other side. An unbroken protoplasm of humanity flowed along the sidewalk. Stein stopped for a moment to scan the terrain. But the red pickup truck was nowhere in sight.