Walter Williams - The Picture Business

He spent money on Gloria, because that’s what you were supposed to do with girlfriends. He took her to boutiques and bought her a lot of clothing and jewelry that she could wear in front of Helio and his crew. Sometimes he even spent his own money instead of using hot Kash Kards. They went on trips together, like to Grand Cayman, where they both had money they were keeping away from the IRS. Paulie stole Gloria a Porsche convertible, and had its color changed from silver to red in a chopshop that Helio had an interest in, then gave it to her with a big blue bow around it.

He put How Gangsters Got Invented on several boards for downloads, and it even got some good reviews in online publications like Pirate Media, which meant that people paid to download it and he got some of the money to buy some more mutual funds.

But he spent almost all his free time at the DEC. Images continually floated through his mind, a continuous blur of faces, angles, movement. Sometimes a new approach, or a new image, would flashthrough his thoughts in his sleep, or while he was talking to Helio or Gloria, and then he couldn’t wait to get back to the mediatron and see it blossom before his eyes in its full digital majesty.

Once, in Toronto, Paulie almost messed up a job because he kept looking at it as a movie director would, wondering how he would shoot the picture, what angles to use, what lighting. He had to stab the guy twice, because his mind wasn’t on the first thrust. He hadn’t had to stab someone twice in years.

People got ribs, he admonished himself.

It took him eleven months, but finally he had his movie finished. He decided to call it Nick Starts Over, because Nick was the name of the main character and starting over was what he did. He did the titles himself, but he knew he didn’t know enough about music to score the thing, and so did a httle job in New Orleans so that he could afford to pay a specialist to add the music to the movie. He never met the man, who lived in Kinshasa, only communicated with him on the net—he, like Norman, didged movies for a commission.

Finally he called Heho and his crew and invited them over for a Friday Girlfriend Night.

“So we thought about alligator and rattlesnake,” Raimundo said, “but we thought the Gila monster pattern, with all the red and black beading, would go best with Sondra’s new Vasquez catsuit.”

“Nice boots,” said Pauhe.

“You like the red earrings?” Raimundo said. “They’re designed by Croissant. They match the red of the boots exactly.”

“Nice,” said Pauhe. “Can I get you a drink?”

“Got any of that coke you had last time?” Sondra said.

“You bet. Silver bowl. Bathroom.”

Sondra rocketed off toward the toot, with Raimundo trailing behind.

After they were out of earshot, Gloria murmured in Paulie’s ear, “Don’t you think Raimundo’s a httle old to be playing with Barbies?”

Paulie had to turn his head away to keep Raimundo from seeing him laugh.

The mediatron and its multiple screens had been wheeled out into the parlor, where Pauhe had also set up comfortable chairs and a buffet. After thanking everyone for coming, Paulie told the mediatron to play Nick Starts Over.

The movie started off fast, with the donut shop scene close to the beginning. The scene was played to loud shouts of approval from Heho and his crew, though a couple of the girlfriends turned their heads away at the sight of death by hot grease. There followed the scene where Young Mike tried to assassinate Nick, and Nick turned the tables on the killers and made his escape from Philadelphia to the City of Angels, a scene that was greeted with cheers.

“Great stuff, Pauhe!” said Leo.

“You got a winner here!” Marcio said.

“Your dead people sure look dead,” Sondra complained.

As the movie went on, Paulie began to sense a loss of enthusiasm on the part of his audience. He saw Helio leaning forward, looking thoughtfully at the screen while fingering his chin. Occasionally he would exchange a glance with his brother Raimundo. Leo and Marcio continued to respond enthusiastically, but they sensed the more somber mood of the older men and their response grew more muted as the film approached its conclusion.

Paulie felt anxiety gnaw at him. The big climax was building, the scene where Nick fixed everyone’s problems, and nobody seemed to be enjoying it.

“This is the best part, ” he said hopefully, but no one responded.

Nick shot, stabbed, and blasted his way to stardom, but to a baffling lack of reaction from his audience. Feeling a knot in his belly, Paulie turned on the lights. The somber faces of the other men looked at him from their seats.

“Paulie?” Helio said. “Can we talk to you in the other room for a minute?”

“Sure,” Paulie said. He looked at Gloria. “Can you entertain the ladies till I get back?”

He took Helio and the others into the office. There was a big hole in the room arrangement where the mediatron had been. “What’s the problem?” he said. “You didn’t like the movie?”

“It was a good movie.” Helio gave a slow, sage nod. “It was a really good movie.”

“You got the talent, all right,” Raimundo said.

“Maybe too much talent,” Helio said. “Because, Paulie, you got to change this movie.”

“Change the movie?” Paulie looked from one grave face to the next. “What do you mean, change the movie?”

“It’ll bring heat on us,” Helio said. “Everything you had in there, it all happened.”

“No, it didn’t,” Paulie protested. “I made it all up.”

“It’s you,” Helio said. “Nick is you.”

“No, he’s not!” Paulie insisted. “I got the face out of freeware!”

Helio spoke patiently. “Changing Big Joe’s name to Big Mike, changing Little Joe to Young Mike, moving things from Providence to Philadelphia, that doesn’t alter the fact that it’s about the Big Joe situation.”

Marcio spoke up, a big grin on his face. “Did you really kill Big Joe in a donut shop, Paulie?”

“No!” Paulie shouted. “Big Joe died in back of his garage! I made the whole donut scene up!”

“You see the problem,” Helio said. “Anyone who knows anything about us, he’s going to know right away who all the characters are, and what really happened to some people. Maybe, hke Marcio, he’ll think Big Joe died in a donut shop instead of a garage, but he’ll still know that Big Joe died, and now if he sees the movie he’ll know who did it. And that’s going to bring us too much attention.”

“It’s a movie! Who’s gonna know?”

“The cops, the feds,” Heho said, “they don’t go to movies?”

“And the Vitaho situation,” Raimundo added, “it’s all there, it’s in the movie.”

“It’s not!” Pauhe said. “The guys Nick works for, I made them Latins.”

“We’re Brazilians,” Heho said. “Brazilians are Latin.”

Pauhe was taken aback. “You are?” he said.

“Sure. What did you think?”

“You’re not Spanish Latin,” Pauhe said.

“It’s still too close,” said Heho.

“But it’s not! The cause of your problem with Vitalio, that had to do with the bet on that horse race that he fucked with. But with the guy in the movie, I made it a situation in a card game in Vegas.”

He was particularly proud of the digitized Caesar’s Palace that he’d found on the net.

Raimundo was red in the face. “What does that matter? Nobody cares how the Vitalio thing got started! But you got everything else! You’ve got every situation, every problem, every solution!”

Helio put a soothing hand on Paulie’s arm. “We’re only asking you to change a few things, Pauhe.”