Квентин Тарантино - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - The First Novel By Quentin Tarantino

When Rick heard the rush of his jacket going up in flames, his panic accelerated as much as the flammable costume. Immediately, he felt the flames going past his shoulders and licking and popping around his head. At that moment he was ready to do the very worst thing he could have done in that situation: take off running in a blind panic. But just before Rick could go apeshit, he heard Cliff Booth calmly say, “Rick, you’re standing in a puddle of water. Just fall down.”

Rick did just that, and shortly the flames were put out, before they had a chance to do any real damage. And that was when Rick and Cliff became the team of Rick and Cliff .

The other real cool cachet that Cliff Booth brought to the party: As well as being a good friend, a good stuntman, and a war hero, in this world of make-believe, Cliff was a real killer. Just on his television show alone, Rick killed something like two hundred and forty-two people. That’s not counting how many Indians and owl hoots he killed in his western movies or those hundred and fifty Nazis he killed in The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey . And, when he played the twisted black-leather-gloved psycho killer in Jigsaw Jane , he dispatched most of his victims with a shiny silver stiletto.

Rick remembers drinking booze and discussing his Jigsaw Jane character with his stunt double at the bar located inside the Smoke House, off of Riverside Drive. As they talked and drank, Rick asked Cliff, had he ever killed an enemy soldier with a knife?

“Plenty,” answered Cliff.

“ Plenty ?” Rick repeated, surprised. “How many is plenty ?”

“What?” Cliff asked. “You want me to sit here and count?”

“Well, yeah,” Rick said.

“Well, let’s see …” Cliff thought. He started counting silently to himself on his fingers, until he ran out of fingers and had to take another lap around the track, then he stopped and said, “Sixteen.”

If Rick’s whiskey sour had been in his mouth at the time, he’d have come close to doing a comedic spit take. “You’ve killed sixteen fuckin’ guys with a knife?” he asked incredulously.

“Japs in the war,” Cliff clarified. “Yeah.”

Rick got quiet, leaning forward and asking his buddy, “How’d you do it?”

“Do you mean how could I do it, mentally and emotionally?” Cliff asked. “Or how did I do it, physically and practically?”

Wow, good question , Rick thought.

“Well, I guess first, how did ya do it?”

“Well, not every time, but most of those times was me coming up behind some joker and taking them by surprise. A rock gets in some guy’s shoe. He straggles behind his company to take off the shoe, git rid of the rock. I come up behind him, stick a knife in his ribs, hold my hand over his mouth, and twist the knife till I feel him give up the ghost.”

FUCK , Rick thought.

“But,” Cliff said, holding up his index finger, “now I fer sure killed him. But did he die because of me , or did he die because he got a rock in his shoe?” Cliff philosophized.

“So let me get this straight,” Rick clarified. “You stick a blade in some Jap’s ribs, then you cup a hand over his mouth, squashing the scream, then hold him through the whole damn death rattle till he dies in your arms?”

Cliff took a swig from his highball glass filled with room-temperature Wild Turkey and said, “Yep.”

“Wow!” Rick exclaimed, as he knocked back some of his cold whiskey sour.

Cliff Booth smiled to himself as he watched his boss wrestle with this idea, then asked provocatively, “Wanna know what it feels like?”

Rick’s eyes moved up to Cliff’s face. “Whaddaya mean?”

Cliff repeated low, slow, and deliberate, “I said, would you like to know what it feels like?” Then added with a shoulder shrug, “You know, for your character.”

Rick didn’t say anything for a while. The bar seemed to get real quiet, then Rick Dalton let escape a very soft “Yeah.”

Cliff smiled at his friend and employer, took a big gulp of booze, laid the heavy glass down hard on the bar, and said with another shoulder shrug, “Kill a pig.”

What? Rick thought.

“What?” Rick said.

“Kill. A. Pig,” Cliff repeated sinisterly. After a beat of silence, where the words “kill a pig” hung in the air, Cliff continued to explain.

“Buy yourself some big fat hog. Take her home to your backyard. Then get on your knees next to her. Hold her, feel her, feel her life, smell her, hear her grunt and snort. Then, with the other arm, stick a butcher knife right into her side and hold on, brother.”

Rick on his barstool listened to Cliff, mesmerized.

“Now, she’s gonna scream like a son of a bitch and bleed like a bastard. And she’s gonna fight you. But you keep holding with one hand, while you keep sticking that blade inside of her with the other. And even though it’ll seem like an eternity, somewhere in the first minute you’ll feel her die in your arms. And that will be the moment you truly feel death. Life is a bleeding, screaming, violently jerking pig in your arms. And death is you holding a bunch of heavy unmoving meat.”

As Cliff described the entire step-by-step murder of the imaginary pig, Rick grew paler and paler, imagining himself acting out that scenario in his backyard.

Cliff realized he had his audience by the throat, so he swooped in for the kill. “So if you wanna experience what it’s like to kill a man , killing a pig is as legally close as you can get.”

Rick swallowed hard, as he grappled with whether he could do that.

Cliff added, “Then take that pig to a butcher and have him cut ’er up for ya. Bacon … pork chops … sausages … pork shoulder … pig’s feet. You consume that entire animal. And that will be you showing respect for the death of that beast.”

Rick swallowed down some more whiskey sour. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Oh, you can do it,” Cliff assured him. “You might not want to do it, but you can do it. In fact, a case could be made, if you can’t do it, you don’t deserve to eat pork.”

After a moment Rick slapped his hand on the bar and said, “Okay, goddammit, I’ll do it. Let’s get a pig.”

Now, of course, Rick never did it. There were enough moving parts to this experiment that it was easy for Rick to lose momentum. Where do I buy a pig? How do I clean up all that blood on my pool patio? How do I get that dead pig outta my backyard—she probably weighs a ton? What if the fucking thing bites me? But even though Rick never actually did it , he absolutely contemplated doing it. Which was its own form of calculated cold-blooded murder, similar to Jigsaw Jane ’s black-gloved killer.

Cliff drives Rick’s Cadillac up into its spot in Rick’s driveway in front of his house on Cielo Drive. Directly outside of the windshield, looming huge, is a giant oil painting of Rick wearing a cavalry uniform, grimacing, with a foot on his face. This is one section of a six-section outdoor billboard that advertised Comanche Uprising , the first feature film he headlined once Bounty Law made him a television star . The full billboard consisted of Rick Dalton as his character, Lieutenant Taylor Sullivan of the U.S. Cavalry, on the ground surrounded by (apparently) Comanches, with the chief placing a moccasined boot on the side of Sullivan’s face in a victory pose, pinning the angry, helpless Cavalry officer to the ground. An old friend of Rick’s found the section of billboard in an antiques store in Dallas, Texas. The friend bought it and sent it to Rick. Rick, however, never really cared for that poster, except for the fact it featured him and not top-billed Robert Taylor. Nor did he harbor any illusions that Comanche Uprising was anything other than what it was—a routine fifties’ Cavalry vs. Indians potboiler. Its virtues included working with salty-dog western-helmer R. G. Springsteen and how damn fancy Rick looked in his blue Cavalry officer’s uniform. But, other than that, the motion picture was unmemorable.