Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

“Yes. I would like to get off the road.”

“Good.”

He called the second unit cameraman and told him to meet him on the set with a 16mm camera and the sound man. Then he called the Mexican actor playing Pancho Villa and told him they were shooting the saloon scene and to be out there as well.

“But it is ten o’clock, Señor Hardin,” the actor said, his speech slowed by a combination of booze, Quaaludes, and sex.

“Bring her along, too,” Wesley said and hung up.

He pulled on whatever was closest — red sweat pants, maroon loafers, Hawaiian shirt.

“ Por los bandidos ,” he said, slipping a.38 revolver into his belt.

In the hotel lobby Wesley came across a few more actors and some of the crew and told them to hire taxis out to the set and the studio would pick up the tab. He said that if they wanted to bring anyone else out that would be okay too. Then he called the production manager and told him he was going to shoot a scene and to round up the usual suspects. The production manager said that Wesley was going too far, that he couldn’t cover for him in any way if he pulled a stunt like that. Chalmers had flown down from the studio three hours before and was already kicking everyone’s ass and he wanted a meeting with Wesley at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow to discuss the very real possibility that Wesley might not be in sufficient command of himself to go on and that they were fully prepared to send another director down and even had one picked out. Wesley said that he was open to discussing everything, that he felt in firm control, and that he was even considering the production manager as a possible coproducer for his next film which was going to take place in India and in view of the difficulties involved would really be more of a producer’s picture than a director’s.

In the El Presidente bar, Wesley and Evelyn had three quick shots of tequila with the prop man, who was sitting with an aspiring actress from Mexico City making ends meet, so to speak, as a paid weekend companion. He asked the prop man, an old-timer and a millionaire from all he had stolen from Wesley’s films, to meet him on the set with a case of booze and anything else that would encourage altered states of behavior. The prop man said with tears in his eyes that he would pull out all the props as this might be the last scene the “old man” would ever be allowed to shoot. Just to prove or to underline his gratitude and loyalty he pressed a silver bullet full of pharmaceutical cocaine into Wesley’s palm and kissed him on the lips.

On the street Wesley interrupted a four-man mariachi band serenading a Greyhound bus full of German tourists, offering them each one hundred dollars American to come out to the set and play.

“Say no more, jefe ,” said the trumpet player. “We are yours forever.”

Then Wesley and Evelyn and the two actors who had been in his suite for a wardrobe check drove north twenty miles to the set, a collection of nineteenth-century houses and false fronts lining both sides of a dusty main street complete with saloon, hotel, and jail. A few Mexican families lived in and maintained the town, moving from house to house as each movie company came through and tore apart and rebuilt everything according to the dictates of their script or the inclinations of the director.

A single streetlight was on when they drove up in front of the saloon, the guard waving a tired salute toward Wesley as he stepped out of the car.

“ Por la revolución ,” Wesley said, handing the guard a bottle of tequila and striding past him.

The saloon was half complete, being in the middle of a transformation from the lobby of a Mexico City whorehouse to a border town cantina with crude wooden tables, low smoke-blackened ceiling, and a bar where several jars held live tarantulas and the curled form of a diamondback rattlesnake. Wesley took a table at the far end, facing the swinging doors. Pouring half the pharmaceutical coke on the table, he fashioned six rough lines, snorting them up with a rolled peso note and handing the note to Evelyn.

“You are my life,” he whispered, kissing her on the ear.

“Is that why you are trying to end it?”

“Not end, precisely, to come to terms with, to slowly dissolve, perhaps.”

“Why not just cut to black,” she said, inhaling the rest of the coke.

“Why not, indeed.”

He peered at the two mountain men who had taken up positions at the end of the bar. “Good boys,” he said. “Solid boys who can hit the mark.”

“You intimidate me when you’re like this,” she said.

“I’ve never been like this,” he said, looking past her as the swinging doors opened and five of the crew came in, standing awkwardly just inside the door. The sound man walked over to find out what was going on.

“I’m going to try for another point of view,” Wesley said. “A Nagra would be best because I might want to drift around the room with the sixteen. If you can’t go small, then set up the best you can.”

“Is this a test?” the cameraman asked, sullen about the whole thing.

“It’s not a test,” Wesley said sharply, the sudden rush from the cocaine, a substance he rarely used, making him raw and impatient. “And it’s not a rehearsal. I just want to take a quick slant away from the story for a while. If that’s okay with you?”

“I don’t care one way or the other,” the sound man said and walked away.

“I’m going to get someone to drive me back to the hotel,” Evelyn said.

“Stay. Please ,” he implored her, motioning to a grip standing nearby.

“Set up a minimal amount of light,” he told the grip, swinging his attention back to Evelyn: “I want you to be in this.”

“In what?”

“This footage. Tonight.”

“Why?”

“Why? Do I have to know why? Because I need you to be here.”

She nodded, retreating into the refuge of her own silence, a gesture that in the first days of their relationship Wesley had been drawn to, even obsessed by, as if he had recognized in her sudden withdrawals the raw stoicism of his own family, the internal solitudes of that dark land he had run so far from and lately had felt such a pull toward. Only now he felt Evelyn’s silence as an abrupt refusal to comment or participate on any level and he took it as a rejection.

The prop man entered, followed by two Mexicans carrying a case of liquor and bags of potato chips and fried chicken. Behind them trailed three local whores dressed in brightly flowered print dresses, snapping their fingers and trying to get stoned or drunk as quickly as possible. Everything was flat and stale and awkward.

Wesley stood up and walked over to meet the second unit cameraman coming into the saloon with the mariachi band.

“Are you set up?” Wesley asked.

“I can shoot right now,” the cameraman said, setting down an equipment case and taking out a 16mm camera.

“I don’t want you to think about the script,” Wesley said.

“I would prefer that,” the cameraman said. He was young and unhealthy and obnoxiously alert, moving around in his safari jacket as if on a combat mission.

“Pan across the bar to my wife sitting at that back table,” Wesley directed. “Then move with me up to the table as I sit down, give me a brief two shot, and then it’s all on her, no matter what she says.”

As they moved toward the table, the mariachi band broke into “La Cama de Piedra” and one of the whores in a loud abrasive voice translated the lines to the prop man: “I have a stone bed and a stone pillow. The muchacho who lives with me has to be true. . ”

Evelyn watched them come, despair clouding her dark eyes.

“I don’t like this, Wesley,” she said as he slid into a chair beside her.