David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“So you must be what Nina keeps calling about?”

“She said you never got back to her, but I didn’t want you to miss out on an opportunity.”

“A big opportunity,” said Benji. He’d heard it all before.

“You know what they say: it’s not the size of the opportunity.” Sam winked. “I kid. I kid. But yes. Hell, yes, I have a big opportunity.” He clapped his hands together like a vacuum cleaner salesman revealing his latest wonder.

“I’m not looking for an opportunity. I like what I’m doing here,” Benji answered without elaborating.

“I can appreciate that,” Sam said, his eyes roving the grounds as if taking in the landscape of an inferior planet. The predominance of domestic cars and elastic pants. “Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. Just give me that.”

Benji looked over his shoulder, locating Cat as though touching a talisman, then returned the newsprint catalog to its folder and placed it on the red-hot roof of the car. “Go for it.”

“Okay. No beating around the bush. I’m just going to throw it out there.” He spoke with the smooth, smug arrogance of a world-class chef serving up his pièce de résistance, as if no one (not even those dismal vegans) could possibly turn down the prime cut of steak on offer. “We want you to do a show with us.”

The word exploded in Benji’s ears. Show? Show! He watched Sam’s mouth move, but he could no longer hear the words coming out of it. His ears rang as motes of bright light floated down from heaven.

“Hear me out,” Sam rushed to say. “It’s called The Comeback Kid . We originally wanted to go with just The Comeback . It’s cleaner, simpler. But Lisa Kudrow beat us to it. The cunt. I kid. I love Lisa. I do. But The Comeback Kid isn’t bad either. It may even be better because you were, you know, a kid when you were a star.”

“You want to do a show about me?”

“ About you. Starring you. You are the show.” Sam bulldozed Benji with his pitch. In a field ranged with heavy earth-moving equipment, he was the only one in action at the moment, moving ahead as if the only resistance in sight were a man-size bag of marshmallows. “You’re not afraid of being the show. You’ve been the show before. ‘That’s what you think’: that was all you. Let’s face it: you did it so well, you basically fucked yourself for life. Nobody could see you doing anything else. Happens all the time to child stars. The machine chews them up and spits them out. I don’t have to tell you. You’ve been hanging on to that horse for dear life since. Am I right? You’re a talented guy, Benji. And I’m not just blowing sunshine up your ass. Your comic timing. But what have you been doing for the last twenty years? I Love the Eighties .”

Benji grimaced. “Flatterer.”

Sam pulled the pocket square from his blazer and wiped his face vigorously. His smile was less shepherd than wolf. “I’m not trying to flatter you. I’m talking straight with you. Can we put the bullshit aside? I don’t know you, Benji. I don’t know what makes you tick, or what’s on your bucket list, but I’ll bet money you didn’t want to be doing Hamlet’s dad in a hundred-seat house that, if I had to guess, was never more than half full. You want something bigger. Am I right?” Sam spread his arms like an offering. “Well, it’s Christmas, my man. I’m here to give it to you. You just have to be smart enough to say yes.”

He reminded Benji that just because someone is out of the scene doesn’t mean someone is beyond the grapevine. Sam had heard about the drinking, about the drugs, about the dive from the bridge—“When you fall off a horse, you really fall off a horse!”—but that was the beauty of it. That was the comeback.

“I’m over those things. I’m sober now. Going on a year. So this one-man Celebrity Rehab is about eleven months too late.” Benji didn’t like this man. He hated the prep school blazer, the blotchy cheeks, the clear rivulets of sweat running to drip off the end of his pointy chin. But resistance was an act. If Sam had turned and walked away, Benji would have chased him down.

“First of all, no one’s really ever over those things, am I right? I know. I’m in recovery myself. Four years now.” Sam pumped a fist in the air and cheered, “Serenity now. But seriously, let me tell you, not a day goes by I wouldn’t kill my own mother for a dirty martini. But. You go on. It’s what we do. We go on. And we’d like to see you on that journey. Watch you, you know, climb out of that hole.”

“But I’m not in a hole.”

“You didn’t let me finish. We want to see you climb out of that hole and move on to the next great thing. Get back on that horse, so to speak. That’s what I’m talking about, Benji. We don’t just want to see where you’ve been. Although that’s definitely part of it. And we may want to re-create some of that stuff. The bridge, the drinking. Whatever. You know, to get the dramatic arc, but really we want to see where you’re going. What’s next. That’s the whole thrust of the show. Your next move. Your comeback!”

Benji hadn’t the wherewithal to admit that his next project sat on the roof of the car right behind him: sixty course credits heated to 120 degrees.

“We want to pave the way to that.”

“To what?”

“To your name in lights. We want to follow you on auditions. Land you a commercial that doesn’t make everybody think you’re one itchy bastard. Maybe a little stage work. We want to see you in rehearsals, see the process. A real insider’s view. But really it’s about setting you up for an audition with a major director on a major project. The comeback.”

“The comeback.” As Benji repeated it, the lights of the abandoned hotel started flickering back to life, one by one. Welcome to Vegas. “When you say major project? Like a movie?”

“Like a movie. Which is still up in the air. All of this is up in the air until we have you, of course. But — and you didn’t hear this from me — we’re approaching Darren Aronofsky.” Sam paused to let the name sink in, nodding in his smug, self-satisfied way. “Think about what he did for Mickey Rourke. Am I right? He picked him up out of a swamp”—here Sam’s eyes swept the surroundings, widening at the aptness of the metaphor—“and set him down in the Dolby Theatre. P.S., I love Sean Penn. The asshole. I do. But Mickey should have won that Oscar.” He leaned forward and slapped Benji on the shoulder. “Here’s hoping they won’t make that same mistake with you.”

Just then, as if in cosmic agreement with everything Sam had said, the crowd broke into energetic applause. With Cat having praised the obelisk, Claudia laying out the dream of the Village, three hundred hotdogs crammed into three hundred mouths, the people themselves were stuffed, spirited, satisfied. A few hoots and whistles greeted Nick, who, waving victoriously, stepped off the stage into a tiny throng of well-wishers. On cue, the same woman who’d set the festivities in motion untied an enormous plastic bag of red, white, and blue balloons and released them into the hot August sky. They swam upward through the air, this way and that, streaming ribbons beating after them like the tails of sperm as ABBA burst suddenly, joyfully, from a flank of enormous speakers.

“Benj?” Cat, as if teleported to his side, startled him. She rubbed his arm, smiling through a veil that wasn’t entirely victorious.

“Babe,” Benji said. He flashed a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, needing a minute to orient himself before making introductions. “Cat McCarthy. This is.”

“Sam. Sam Palin. No relation. I can’t see Alaska from my backyard.”