Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

As if the filmmakers were trying to tell him

Yes! Even though domestic hell is your world, the only one you know, the only one you will ever know, take

! Because all of Hell belongs to no one man or boy, it belongs to the world at large, not just the pukey smallness of your world within the bigger pukey world, but to the Universe & infinitude of undiscovered universes beyond, each mirroring the hell of the other

As if to say ——

this “entertainment” was concocted to show you there are infinitudes of mirrored, shitty Hells you will be forced to visit should you ever break free of

this

one, that which resides in the creepy stink-den where you wallow, friendless, unpopcorned, watching the Hell of your own reflection thrown back from the screen… your hero Antwone portrays you! He got out, yes! He escaped from the carcasstink rot of the borrowed living room couch, from the mouth of the caretaker, to the carcasstink rot of onscreen Hell you now see him cavort in on the Samsungscreen one hellboy watching another, until over it starts again, on some stained stinky shitty couch, in some other universe. . . . . . . . . . . . …

Rikki gettin hella hyphy! He be swisher trippin ——

He saw Antwone Fisher countless times tho only recently made the connection that not only was the film ’d in but directed by Denzel — Rikki wanted to be like those men, the creators , the doers , the actors & activists, if he tried hard enough he thought he maybe could, knew he could, he wanted to be like Denzel w/a Best Actor, Denz knew how to direct too, how the fuck could he do all that shit, he could do anything & could just go & do whatever he wanted, if it popped into his head he could just go mutherfuckin do it; he wanted to be like Jamie Foxx collabin’ with the players, w/Ye&Ludakris&big boi, you know, Jamie could sing, Jamie was funny , he fuckin created In Living Color , & Jamie had his own Best Actor just like Denzel, Rikki wanted to be out there being somebody, like all “Lil Wayne featuring Jamie Foxx, Rikki, Drake, Nicki and whomever,” Rikki wanted to be like Don Cheadle, like Will Smith, like Wesley, like Affion, like Tyler, the Creator ————

————hey don’t be greedy dude, don’t get sacrilege. You know the true one to aspire to, that’s your real shot, more than anybody, & that’s still Fish (he needed to aspire to be his own version of Fish, because he had to keep his individuality) — Antwone Fisher, stalwart unflashy boy of ambition ( just like me ), boy who broke free, boy become a man, a manchild who wrote & directed, wrote books too, dignified man & boychild who could do it all.

He never told Tom-Tom about any of that, never told anyone, because a person didn’t have to share everything.

. .

She put him in the shower, dressed him in levi’s & a t-shirt that said YSL, they did more coke, swallowed some roxys & were good to go. Tom-Tom stood behind the camera, she’d moved the whole operation to the bathroom which had a tiny skylight & told Rikki to begin by giving his name, age, what school he went to, how he was in a few school plays/productions like Rent & House of Blue Leaves . (All bullshit) She thought it was a good idea to prompt him by asking questions O.C. She got to the meat of it right away because she knew he had to get their attention, about 10,000 other vids were probably being uploaded right now so his audition needed to stand out from the gate .

She made Rikki introduce himself, the key factoid being that in real life he actually was a foster child (just like Antwone F & the boy pretending to be the child soldier in the movie), but who differs from that character because of his very loving relationship with his fosterparents & their imminent plans to legally adopt him, a ceremony that was mere months away. Tom-Tom had concerns that whoever was watching the tape might think he was making this part up, so she took pains to have Rikki dwell on it, to inform directly to the camera that he would be doing some improvising but the shit he said about his upcoming adoption was not a part of it. That shit was true. Occasionally, when he froze up or got self-conscious, Tom-Tom turned off the camera to loosen him up, maybe give him more blow, tiny bit of H, once she even brained him which for some reason made him laugh inside while she was doing it, tripping on how she could really suck a dick straight up, deepthroating till his balls disappeared in her mouth, that’s why they call him gutsy. When Tom-Tom turned the camera back on, she did some off-cam freestylin herself, like reading some of the dialog of a socialite in the movie who gets duped into believing the runaway’s story of ex-childsoldierdom, the Miami Beach toryburch of her being titillated to the core whilst in the presence of this very attractive negro monster/killing machine who laid claim to being redeemed viz the help of loving dad Fishburne & intrepid U.N. worker-turned-NGO founder Douglas, parts of the script reminding Tom-Tom of that movie where Will Smith pretends to be Sidney Poitier’s son. She’d have shown it to Rikki but they didn’t have time.

He soon found his own cadence. He talked about being a student at John Crowe Ransom Middleschool, ordinary kid who did ordinary stuff, even mentioned his g.f. Reeyonna, Tom-Tom thought that was tight. In one part of the charming (she hoped) “novelty interview,” she even had him lay out the strange co-inky-dink of Ishmael Beah coming to speak at his school assembly last year, it was too karmic not to mention, plus how A Long Way Gone had been on Rikki’s iPod for like, a year already. Co-inky-dink? I think not. She was beguiled/captivated just filming/watching Rikki glide from middleschool plainspeak to cagey hustler to ruminatively remorseful, childsoldier-Beahspeak, patois-riffing freestylin monologues off the e-purloined script. She hoped the producers wouldn’t take offense, because the screenplay wasn’t supposed to be out there , tho Tom-Tom was 100 % certain the prod co had already just shrugged its shoulders, everyone knew you couldn’t keep anything off the internet, the world as we know it was now pure LeakiLeaks, all leaks all the time, & no one expected the genie to ever get back in the bottle. Tom-Tom was certain too that Rikki wouldn’t be the only auditioner openly using it as source.

Then Tom-Tom said (prearranged), “I understand you & Ishmael were friends,” so as to trigger/cue Rikki to rev up his patois freestylin & Rikki said

Yes… tiss is true. We trahvill’d to-get-hur in duh teek [thick] forest, duh moon was hangin like a bloody banahna in duh black saffire pool of duh sky. Dat day I saw duh rebels snatch duh imam from deh mosk & tie heem to a pole & set heem on fie-uhr… we covered r ears from duh screemin. Duh rebels made me & Ishmael do many terrible tings, you know, like chop off duh arms & legs of duh moms & dads and duh cats & dogs [Tom-Tom almost lost it right there]. Dere were many daze when we hodd to go wid-out duh use of anti-perspirant. Sum times, before day sent me & Ishmael out to rape and to pillage duh village, duh nasty-ass rebels day feed us speedy dope & to make us angry, day force us to watch duh Justin Beeber cone-surt feelm ———

Tom-Tom laughed, wondering if Rikki went too far. She decided it was perfect. I mean hey! it’s a frickin comedy, right?