Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

“I was a movie star!” he shouts, thumping his chest like Tarzan.

“You still are, ” says Cela. “You’re still the biggest star on the planet, OK?”

He ponders then says, matter-of-fact, “OK.” The effect is unintendedly droll. “We should get popcorn.” They walk past the new releases wall. (Like a 99 cent store display.) He asks, “What movies was I in?”

Before she can answer, a Norman Rockwell geek with chin acne enters their frame.

“Excuse me — are you Kit Lightfoot?”

(Cela braces herself. Tula puffs up.)

“Yes, I am!”

“I knew it! I put on World ”—there, suddenly, it is, on all hanging monitors, World Without End, the famous scene at Children’s Hospital where Kit and Cameron Diaz erupt in dance, the crippled kids following suit, to Supertramp’s “Logical Song”—“and I just wanted to tell you what a great — how amazing I think you are as an actor and as a person.”

(Cela sighs with audible relief.)

“Thank you.”

“And what an honor it is to have you in our store.”

“Thank you.” A daub of Elvis again: “ Thankyouverymuch. ”

A little daub’ll do ya—

“I just want you to know that everyone in Riverside, everyone in the world is pulling for you.”

(Cela, nearly in tears. On her period. Quick to cry.)

“Thankyouverymuch.”

“May I show you the Kit Lightfoot section?” he asks, as if coaxing a girl at cotillion to dance. (Includes the others in what he says next.)

“We have a whole Kit Lightfoot section — I organized it myself.”

“I would like some popcorn.”

“You can have all the popcorn you like, sir!”

By now, a few other employees curiously make their way toward the little group.

The clerk turns to Cela.

“Think he’d mind signing a a few posters?”

“Ask him,” says Cela, proudly. Feeling like the missus.

True Confessions

MOTHER AND CHILD dropped in unannounced to the Sunset Boulevard penthouse suite.

Lisanne felt bad because she never thanked her old boss for his kindnesses in those first few months she and Siddhama were home alone. (He had continued to pay her salary.) In fact, she’d never thanked him at all — through the years, he’d been stand-up and generous to a fault. It was true she had made herself indispensable, but it was Reggie, with his sunny, contagious confidence, who, long ago, had so generously opened the door, helping Lisanne to overcome her initial insecurities. He was startled by the hidden pregnancy but, like a true gentleman, withheld judgment. She would have been lost without his emotional support after her baby came into the world.

They hadn’t spoken since she moved to Rustic Canyon, and the fact that the life-saving arrangement with Philip came about under the auspices of Tiff, Reggie’s client, made it even worse. She felt so ungrateful, but nothing could have been further from the truth — now was the time to face him, to reveal all. Reggie Marck, if anyone, should be privy to the certain details of the child’s parentage.

He held the baby in his arms.

She said: “I wanted to tell you that this is the son of Kit Lightfoot.”

“OK,” he said, smiling. Waiting for the punch line.

“And I wanted to give you the supramundane Secret Thatness offerings.” She knelt upon the ground and opened her blouse. He stood there holding the child, looking down at her. “Here is my mustard seed, my scoops of barley and clarified buttered bread, here are my nipples large as the purplebruised toes of homeless children. I, Vajrayogini, generate the celestial mansion with this wide and brazen cunt. Look! at the cervical fire of my stink-necklace, looped through 700 dew-fresh skulls. O, I am asking you to disarm! For these are the weapons of mass instruction. I am the blue dakini, door of membranes and remembrance, the green PHA HA . Let us kneel on the carpet of the cathedral like pilgrims humbled by disaster — O Reggie, join me now! Offer and observe the materials to be burned in bodhi-wood! OM OM OM SARVA PHA PHA PHA SWAHA — Reggie, please — OM NAMO BHAGAWATI VAJRAVARAHI — Reggie! — BAM HU HU —why oh why Reggie is everything so wrong? — PHA OM NAMO ARYA APARAJITE HU HU PHA —”

A Disturbing Call

WHEN BECCA ARRIVED at her Six Feet Under gig, they said there was some kind of fuckup. Her services weren’t needed until later that week.

She’d already given Viv the trusted alibi — caretaking moribund Mom — this time even going slightly overboard in the drama department because of what she felt to be the necessity of washing the taste of a certain recent rooftop encounter out of her employer’s mouth. (Becca said the Dunsmores were crazy and she’d only met them once or maybe twice and didn’t want anything to do with them. Fortunately, Viv dismissed the whole incident with a kind of blithe, disgusted wave of the hand.) Instead of going back to Venice, she went shopping on Third. She phoned Dixie on the cell to say hi, in a cheap attempt to mitigate her guilt over the creepy cancer cover story.

She hooked up with Annie. They ate lunch at the Grove with Larry Levine then went to a movie.

Afterward, Larry split and the girls smoked weed and baked cookies at the apartment on Genesee, gossiping about their exes. At suppertime, they decided to go to Forty Deuce, but Becca was reluctant because she couldn’t reach Rusty to tell him.

“What is he, your fucking keeper?” said Annie.

The TV report caught Becca’s eye. “Oh my God! Turn it up!”

[STUDIO ANCHOR] Lots of excitement in Riverside today when a member of the paparazzi “flipped” for Kit Lightfoot. More now, from Macey Dolenz.

[OUTSIDE THE RIVERSIDE GALLERIA] That’s right, Raquel. The actor, who is still recovering from an assault last year in a West Hollywood liquor store that left him with extensive neurological damage, evidently went on an unscheduled outing this morning [FOOTAGE OF FLIPPED CAR] and was chased by Jimmy Newcombe, a freelance photographer. Newcombe was in hot pursuit of the reclusive superstar when he lost control of his car as Kit Lightfoot’s driver continued on. The photographer was briefly hospitalized before being released. Photos of the recovering actor, at a premium, are said to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on both domestic and world tabloid markets. [OLD FOOTAGE OF RIVERSIDE HOUSE] Lightfoot, who has not given any interviews since the tragic incident, has been sequestered at his boyhood home since his release last Christmas from Valle Verde Rehab Center in Valencia, where he spent a closely guarded six months. [BACK TO MALL; SCHOOLGIRLS/-BOYS IN B.G., JOCKEYING TO BE SEEN] But, today, it seems like he went on a field trip to the Riverside Galleria, where he cheerfully signed autographs for supportive fans. Macey Dolenz, for KTTL, in Riverside.