Walter Williams: The Picture Business

Paulie was in one of the safest lines of work available, criminally speaking.

So as he drove to the club he wondered if he was getting mobbed up with Helio, and if that was the right thing to do.

But if Helio could solve his problem with Little Joe, then maybe it was a good idea to get tight with him.

Maybe.

Paulie knew how everyone would behave at the club—which was make a lot of noise and spend a lot of money and eventually go home with a girl. Paulie used to enjoy this sort of thing when he was younger, but now he just went through the motions because it was what was expected. His girl was named Sondra, and she was a model-slash-actress who was woi’king temporarily at the cosmetics counter of a pharmacy. He didn’t want to bring her home, so instead he drove her to her apartment. She kept asking him questions about her appearance: “Do you like my hair?” “Do you like my dress?” “Do you like my shoes?” And when he said “Yes,” which was expected of him, it led her into a long conversation about how she had chosen, say, this particular hairstyle, and a description of the other hairstyles she had considered and rejected, and how this particular hairstyle should help out at the next audition.

This pattern of question, answer, and elaboration went on before, during, and after sex, depriving Pauhe of the time after orgasm that he hked to spend by himself, floating—in fact, she wanted him to spend that time looking at her modehng portfolio. He glanced at some of the pictures out of politeness, and Sondra told him all about the different hairstyles and fashion choices and so on involved in each picture, and he figured he had been polite long enough. He told her he had an early day tomorrow and had to leave.

“I’ll call you,” he said as he headed for the door.

Sondra closed her portfolio and looked sullen. “No, you won’t,” she said.

He thought about it for a second. “You’re right,” he said.

And left.

Next morning he answered the phone, and a seductive voice said, “Hello, big man. It’s your lucky day.”

“Hi, Gloria,” he said. He was surprised to discover that he was glad to hear her voice.

“I’m going to be in your neighborhood today. You want to get together?”

“When?”

“Well, I’ve got an appointment for a facial in Malibu at 11:30, and then I’ve got a date in the canyon at 1:30. Say 2:30?”

“Your 1:30 will be finished that soon?”

“Oh yeah.”

Gloria seemed confident on the matter.

“Okay,” Paulie said. “I’ll be here.”

Paulie spent the intervening time on the DEC. He had decided to delete any of the files that might embarrass him in front of company, but in order to do that he had to figure out how the unit worked. Loading or deleting files wasn’t difficult, not to anyone with basic computer skills, but there were hundreds and hundreds of files, not all of which had obvious names like Marilyn’s Humpday Surprise, so he had to load each one to see what it was before he could decide whether to delete it or not.

And so he found out how it was that Norman earned his living.

Norman acquired ordinary porn films, some of them pretty old, then digitized the faces and sometimes the bodies of famous actors onto the images of the porn actors. Apparently there was a demand for this sort of thing, and Paulie also found patches of porn intended to be inserted into famous movies. There was Clark Gable carrying Vivien Leigh up the staircase, ripping off her clothes, and fucking her silly to the romantic strains of a full orchestra, obviously intended to be spliced into someone’s home version of Gone with the Wind. There was Cary Grant and Eva Marie Sainte screwing in a train compartment in North by Northwest, and Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, and even William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy indulging in some stately futuristic buggery. Some of the clips were done better than others, with the famous actors’ faces and bodies fading seamlessly into those of the porn actors, and even characteristic facial expressions didged into the mix; while others were done poorly, the heads stuck on any old how, with a clear dividing line between one image and the other, and no attention paid to matching skin tones, amounts of body hair, and even body type. Paulie concluded that Norman did just as much work on any one job as he was paid to do.

As for the porn itself, it was porn. As was usual with porn, Paulie found it sort of interesting for the first ten minutes, and then it started to lose its charm. He found himself paying more attention to the didge work, how the famous faces were superimposed on the anonymous porn actors, precisely how the matching was done. He ended up saving some of the well-done bits, and erased everything that was second-rate.

There were entire films in the files that seemed to have nothing to do with Norman’s work. Maybe, Paulie figured, they were the ones he watched for his own entertainment, or maybe they just came with the mediatron.

One of them, he noticed, was Public Enemy. Paulie had sometimes watched pictures about the kind of guys he knew, and he’d always been disappointed because they’d never really told the truth. But since he was tired of looking at porn, and because Gloria hadn’t turned up yet, he told the mediatron to run the file.

It was sort of interesting. The characters were just ordinary people who happened to get into the bootleg line, which strained Paulie’s credibility until he realized that this was about how gangsters got invented, it was about the very first people in his world. He had never seen James Cagney before, and he liked both the actor and his portrayal. He knew people just like Cagney’s character.

He watched until he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard a voice. “Hello, big man.”

He turned his chair around to look at her. She had shucked out of her conservative business suit and stood in the black lace teddy she wore underneath.

“Hi there, Gloria,” he said. “Your 1:30 finished already?”

She slid onto his lap. “I’m late,” she said. “I’m disappointed you didn’t notice.”

“I was watching a movie.”

“I can give you something better to do with your time.”

Paulie reached past Gloria to the mediatron console and paused the movie.

“You bet,” he said.

Paulie floated, rising slowly to the surface of the world. He opened his eyes, saw Gloria sitting quietly in a chair, watching him.

“You’re not on the phone drumming up business?” he asked.

“Nope. I already called everyone in the neighborhood. I don’t have a date till 6:30.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

She shrugged. “Find someplace to hang out, I guess.”

Paulie sat up, swung his legs out of bed, and reached for his shirt.

“Wanna watch a movie?” he asked.

Paulie found himself squirming during the last part of Public Enemy. After it was over, he snapped off the mediatron with a grunt of annoyance.

Gloria looked at him. “Something wrong?”

“What a chump,” Paulie said.

“You didn’t hke the ending?”

“I thought Cagney was supposed to be a bright guy. Here he is, inventing how to be a gangster and everything, and he just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get the picture.”

“Well, yeah, some other gangsters kill him.”

“It’s not that he gets killed.”

Lots of people Paulie knew got killed. Getting killed was nothing.

“It’s the way he—it’s how he—” Words failed him. The movie just wasn’t right, and the mistakes were so basic that he had trouble working out just what they were.

“Okay,” trying again. “He’s part of this outfit, and this other outfit comes into town and starts giving him trouble, right? So does Cagney’s outfit give the other guy’s outfit trouble?”