Stuart Kaminsky - Show Business is Murder

He’d finished the casting for Goin’ West . Corey Dunn was doing the picture, and on the phone just now Kreuger had been ecstatic to hear it. “You’re the best, Arthur,” he’d said. “What would I do without you?”

Arthur tossed the butt and watched it trail away into the night.

“Oh, you’d get by,” he’d said. “You’d get by.”

HE WOKE UPwith sweat washing over his body in tight chilly shimmers and the paddles of the fan whirring above him like a copter. He jerked out of bed and ran both hands over his face, top to bottom, then down around the back of his neck. They slid on the moistness of his skin, and he felt something less than human. Reptilian.

Crossing the tiny square that passed for his bedroom, he pulled the metal folding chair away from the stack of empty fruit crates. He sank into the chair and faced the small Smith Corona typewriter that sat on a slight angle atop the highest box. BURSTIN’ ORANGE. FLORIDA’S BEST! the crate proclaimed.

He laid the pads of his fingers gently on top of the keys and slid them in the rounded grooves. It was “a laying on of hands,” as his father used to say when he spoke of New Testament tales when there still had been a New Testament or an Old. He felt the power contained in his eight little fingers perched on the starting blocks of eight little keys. A big door. It had always been. Trouble was you couldn’t control what flew out when you opened it. The moon slid into view in the edge of the window as the earth continued its tedious rotation, and the straw-colored light fell patterned across his bare mattress. A big fucking door. He opened it.

It was the summer of the year and every year and yet there were no seasons, just time awash with a blend of the four. It was sometime in the sixties but then time never held when you were really alive or really dead and for the sixteen months of my tour I was both.

He stopped. “I am Janson Tanker,” he said softly to the four walls that he could all but touch from his seat at the makeshift desk. He looked around the room, noticing the spill of the moonlight turned metallic as it passed through the small window splattered with rain and neon. He had New York on his windows, and the rain couldn’t wash them clean of it any more than he could wash the New York from his body with the small sink in the corner.

Do I really want to do this? he thought. It’s not much. God knows it’s not much, but at least it’s familiar . He raised the heel of his hand to his eye and rubbed, his eyelid pulling down in a droop.

We came over in units, but one by one, and we left all together. We left in a big mess-a human meat pie-with the leftovers of all our lives molded together until we could no longer separate whose limbs were whose. They always said that you come out a man, and I supposed that was true, but I never anticipated coming out as bits and pieces of a bunch of men which may or may not have added up to one of whatever I was before. You heard echoes and voices of all the men and you remembered them so clearly you couldn’t distinguish their stories from your memories. And Tom from Minnesota with the girl he’d asked to marry dressed up like Santa Claus (“me not her”) and Jimmie Jankens from Baltimore who had a burn mark on the side of his face from a car engine exploding in tenth-grade shop (“already had a tour once, I told ’em, first when I walk in, and their mouths all drop not knowing my tour was through the shit engine block of a ’62 Chevy”) and Jessie who used to bite the skin off his knuckles when we’d wait in the leaves and you could barely hear his teeth clicking underneath the hammering rain. And which were their lives, their voices, their clicking teeth in the dark and which your own? Couldn’t really tell then, let alone now.

And so I went into the jungle in a season of a year, and I left in a season of another year.

Janson paused for a minute, his fingers straining at the bit. Then the warm, warm rain brought back Henry Wilder running through the wet, and Janson’s head dropped to the edge of the crate. He could close the door if he strained with all his might, if he bent all his energy to ignoring the searing pain it sent through his back. But it was a heavy door in a strong wind; once it opened, even a crack, everything outside fought and clawed to invade the warmth on the other side. And there wasn’t much warmth to spare.

He had let the first breath of air get through, he had let in Jimmie Jankens from Baltimore and the long, ebbless tide of the hours and days, and he knew he couldn’t go on. They were pooling at his feet and rising to his knees, and there was even less space in his mind than in the room. Slowly, he felt the panic gripping his heart with iron fingers again and again, like those decades spent on evening lookouts that still came to him in harsh whispers and the whirring, the incessant whirring of the blades of the helicopter as it moved ahead and out of the world.

He felt the tears pressing beneath the line of his cheekbones and his nose, and then he felt them spill over and down his cheek, but he couldn’t feel the crying, only the moisture. He still wasn’t used to the crying-he had not cried, not once, for the entire sixteen months of his tour or the empty box of the eleven years to follow, but after that he had started and then he didn’t know what it was, much less how to stop it. And so, with the flashing beer signs outside illuminating his room like blinks of a neon eye, with the slow rotation of the haunting fan above, with his forehead pressed tightly to the top of a BURSTIN’ ORANGE fruit crate, Janson Tanker cried more tears of penance for the years when he could not.

“I’M TELLING YOU,we got him. This guy’s fucking unbelievable-he’s like from a time warp,” Adam Diamond said, as he slid back from his large glass desk and clicked the fourth red button in from the left.

He tucked the phone against his neck, covering the mouthpiece momentarily. “Janice. Double cap, dry-and I mean fucking dry. If I wanted a latte I’d order one.”

With a deft movement of his shoulder, Adam brought the phone back up and against his ear. “Stable, not stable, who gives a fuck? He’s brilliant. No, of course I haven’t read him. Scott checked him out. Said he’s like Faulkner and-I know, I know. So Faulkner was a failed screenwriter, but Scott’s Ivy. What do you expect? It’s his way of saying he thinks he’s good.”

Adam listened for a while, working a set of jade duo balls back and forth in the palm of his right hand. They clicked now and again, but rarely touched, even when he rested his elbow on the table and raised them in his hand up next to his ear. His eyes didn’t flicker when Janice came in and left his cappuccino on the desk next to a stack of phone messages.

“I’m not talking David Rabe. David Rabe was shit-for Christ’s sake, who the fuck casts Michael J. Fox as a lead? I know… I know, Harvey. No one wants to see another Vietnam film, but I’m telling you I’ve got a longer line of thumbs up than a San Francisco bathhouse. We’re talking Platoon here, Harvey. Okay, I know. But we’ll check him out, get some raw material, see where we can run with it. Rules ofEngagement used Vietnam… Yes, yes it did. I don’t care if it wasn’t the primary line, it was in there and what’d that gross?” He whistled. “Holy fuck. And we’re just talking domestic.

“Where’d we get him? We found him, Harvey. We found him. One of Scott’s friends from his New Haven days runs a soup kitchen lower West Side. Regular guy comes in, always asks for a couple sheets of paper towel from the kitchen. Turns out-this is beautiful, Harvey-turns out he’s been writing on them. Both sides, ink bleeding through and all.