David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

"See, you're mad."

"But it's OK. How you doing over there, Tom?"

"He's trying to sleep."

"I can't sleep, I hate these fucking things," Tom says. The inside of his head has been a disappointing view. "They're too big outside, too small inside. Hard to even breathe." He lights a 100 and holds the long thing way away from D.L., for whom smoke is antimatter.

"Like to take something?" Mark asks him.

"Something?"

"For tranquility, I mean. D.L's not taking anything, because of the baby, but she's got everything from chloral hydrate to Dalmane fifteens," Mark says.

"We'll see. I don't think I want to be stumbling around O'Hare, when we land. It's probably a fuck of a hike to the LordAloft gates. I hate airports maybe even worse than planes. They're all the same." He closes both eyes.

D.L. to Mark: "I took something, darling. I'll say I'm sorry. I promised, then I went and took something. That Nine of Swords. ."

"I know you took something."

"How do you know? You didn't either know. I took them in the lavatory."

"You took thirty milligrams of chloral hydrate and a Dalmane fifteen. It's in the way your head is wobbling."

What's contemporarily tragic about Sternberg is that he has a fatal physical flaw. One of his eyes is turned completely around in his head. From the front it looks like a boiled egg. It won't come back around straight. It's like an injury. It's incredibly bad for his ambitions as a commercial actor. He doesn't talk about what the backward eye sees. He's offended that D.L. in person asked him right off the bat.

He has other flaws, too.

"I'm bad at will, Mark, I've admitted."

"And then you drank a screwdriver. Right now the little miracle is probably rolling around in there totally stoned. It probably has no idea where it is or what's going on."

"You are mad."

"I'm not mad."

"But if you're mad just say so. Just express it. Don't be all anal all the time. Even Ambrose would express it."

"Why don't you just get some sleep, since you and the baby took something."

"There's a word for people like you, Mark. 'Minimal.' You never really react to things. Even art. You hardly ever give me feedback, even."

"I feed back, Drew. I gave you feedback just yesterday. I said I liked the ambiguousness of that 'FIRM DOCTORS TELEPHONE POLES' title. Why you're pissed is that I only said I thought a twenty-page poem that's all punctuation wouldn't be much fun for anybody to actually read. That's feedback. It's just not the reaction you want to hear."

"You persistently confuse reaction with this antiquated insistence that…"

Sternberg whimpers, pulls from his back slacks pocket a seat-warm Reunion brochure and unfolds the square it's in. The brochure is screamingly colored, high-tech, glossy except where it's faded from being folded into a square. It details the attractions and itinerary of the Reunion of everybody who's ever represented McDonald's.

HOW THEY ALL KNOW EACH OTHER

Sternberg out of Boston and D.L. out of Hunt Valley were both in the same McDonald's commercial on the McDonald's-site-turned-set in Collision, Ill., in 1970. They were small children in 1970. They've corresponded since around puberty. So Mark and Sternberg are connected through D.L.

WHERE THEY LIVE NOW

Tom Sternberg lives with his parents in Boston's Back Bay while he attends cattle calls and pesters agents and tries to break into the adult commercial industry. Mark and D.L live in an airy and utterly Yupster Baltimore condo complex, in a spacious suite D.L. has fashioned into as close to a squalid garret as circumstances permit (given that their housekeeper's a Philistine).

WHY D.L. AND TOM HAVE NEVER ONCE GONE HUNGRY

AT MEALTIME

Not well known is the fact that anyone who has ever appeared in a McDonald's commercial receives a never-expiring coupon entitling them to unlimited free hamburgers at any McDonald's franchise, anywhere, anytime. It is a fringe benefit bestowed on commercial alumni by J.D. Steelritter Advertising in a stroke of sheer marketing genius. It allows McDonald's to proclaim, beneath each set of golden arches, exactly how many billions and billions and billions of hamburgers have been "served" so far. Of course the franchise is under no FCC or FTC obligation to mention that a decent percentage of these served burgers are in fact not paid for. The higher numbers breed higher numbers. Consumers are impressed, naturally, by the inflated number of items consumed, and consume even more. Actors are digestively secure, and so McDonald's gigs are regarded in the industry as plums. And the enormous (partly free) volume of service actually conduces to what microeconomists call economies of scale: the flesh is shipped from Argentina by the megaton and cooked, turned, and served according to timers. The food is the same from Coast to Coast. Dependable. Soothing. It's that rarest of transactions: everybody wins. We regard the How-Many-Served sign as just what our interpretation makes it: the sign of the world's community restaurant. It was J.D. Steelritter's second-greatest stroke of marketing genius. After the Reunion and Reunion commercial it will be his third-greatest.

* * *

For Tom Sternberg, airports are not fun. They blur and do not hold his eye. Central Illinois Airport is no exception. For the contemporarily tragic, all airports are the same: orange-faced blondes, slit-skirted stewardesses with luggage they can pull, college boys with Nazi cheekbones, the inevitable green vest of the airport-lounge bartender. Black-haired women in yellow. P.A. announcers just one mouth-marble short of incomprehensible. Blankly harried junior-executive types, the kind who are made by their employers to travel, hauling complicated cases and what look like over-the-shoulder body bags for their identical shiny-seated uniforms. College girls, with cheekbones, in gym shorts with Greek letters on the ass. Crowds, people hugging. Ashtrays beneath No Smoking signs. A rabbi runs for a missed connection. A pale woman totes a limp infant. A lone and disoriented Oriental's black bangs ride his forehead, fencelike. Latino men in bell-bottoms walk in conspiratorial two's, one holding a metal suitcase.

"Can't say as I like the look of that suitcase," he tells Mark, who is pacing tiptoed in the C.I. Airport commuter terminal, waiting for D.L. to take aspirin and wash her post-tranquil face in the women's room. She's had sleep, though, at least. Said it just made her more tired.

They're late, and so no Ronald or coincident Personnel to meet them as foretold in brochure. Sternberg is now officially sleep-deprived. For him this is not fun, either. It affects his vision. The morning colors have the over-bright primacy of movies filmed pre-Panavision. Fluttery hallucinations dance in his outward eye's periphery. An armless statue on a skateboard. A Cyprus swamp, milky water swirling in pockets, drooling over exposed roots. A rainbow snapping like a whip. Except it turns out they're not even real hallucinations; they're posters: "Visit This Art Gallery"; "Explore Louisiana"; "Buy a Lawnchair at This Store and Get Ready to Check Out a Genuine Midwestern Thunderstorm." And so on. Not real. The closure of Sternberg's reversed eye tickles — eyelashes against raw nerves. A high pitch sounds in his skull — a sleep-dep test pattern, something persistent and shrill in a very small box.

"Is that all corn?" Mark asks, pointing past the terminal window.

"Sure as fuck green, isn't it."

"It's all there is. It's all you can see. I've never seen so much of anything."

"This is farm country, man. Serious farmers. D.L. and I were here as kids, for the commercial. Then it was white. Mom brought me back for an audition the next summer, though. Still has nightmares about all the corn. She wakes up, sometimes."