Donald Westlake - Sacred Monster

At the far end of the set, he brought up against the interior door, which was not in fact a working door at all, so that he didn’t pass through it but merely brought up hard against it, with force enough to make the whole set tremble. Recoiling from this encounter, he reeled back through his previous carnage to the middle of the set, where at last he managed to come to something like a stop; though he trembled all over, like a race horse after the meet.

And he wasn’t quite finished yet. Turning to say something to the director, raising one expressive hand, index finger upthrust, he lost his balance yet again. This time, he tottered backward, feet fumbling and stumbling with the shards and shreds of his previous passage, until he reached the wall of the set. Here he flung his arms out to the sides as though crucified and leaned back against the wall, which gave way, the whole canvas rear wall of the set slowly falling over, Jack riding it down backward, arms outspread, an expression of harried but mild surprise on his face as he and the wall went completely over and landed with a mighty whoosh and great puffs of dust.

No one said a word. A final clink was heard from somewhere. The dust slowly settled. And then the director spoke. “Cut,” he said.

“But I didn’t care, not then. As long as I was drunk, I just thought life was one big party.”

Another transformation had come to the living room of the house in Malibu. The books and bookcases were gone, as though they had never been. The furniture, pushed back against the walls, was scruffier, showing signs of hard wear. Five television sets in various parts of the room were all switched on, but the sounds they might have been making were impossible to hear because the room was jammed with partygoers: a young and hedonistic crowd, laughing and shouting, scoffing down the bottomless supply of liquor and the endlessly refilled side table of finger foods. Jack reeled among his guests, a glazed look in his eyes and a glazed smile on his face. He held a quart bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label by the neck and paused from time to time to knock back a slug.

Buddy moved toward Jack through the partygoers. He was sober, neatly dressed in pale sports jacket and open-necked shirt, and in his eyes was a faint expression of disapproval of the scene swirling around him. That expression disappeared when he reached the sozzled Jack, to be replaced by his usual look of aggressive and self-confident comradeship. Never had the familial similarity between these two been less noticeable;.Buddy was trim and neat, clearly in good physical shape, while Jack was getting jowly, his body sagging within his rumpled clothing. The parallels between them had become obscured by their very different ways of caring for themselves.

“ Hey, Buddy!” Jack called, seeing his oldest friend, turning to stagger toward him. “ Hey, my Buddy!”

“Listen, Dad,” Buddy said, low and confidential, “could I have the car?”

“ Sure, Buddy.” Jack frisked himself with uncertain gestures, switching the bottle from hand to hand, until he found a set of car keys, which he handed over.

Buddy nodded, pocketing the keys, but said, “No, Dad, I meant could I have the car .”

“Whuzza?”

Buddy brought out of his inside jacket pocket automotive sale documents and a pen. Leading Jack to a nearby table, spreading the papers on it, handing Jack the pen, he said, “Just sign here, Dad. You see, I got a little something to take care of south of the border.”

“Oh, sure, Buddy,” Jack said. An amiable drunk, he put the bottle down, scrawled his name with a flourish, dropped the pen, picked the bottle up, and drank.

Buddy retrieved documents and pen. “Thanks, Dad,” he said, patted Jack on the shoulder, and left.

A girl who’d been sitting on the sofa beside the table grinned up at Jack and said, “Hey, baby. You got a car for me?

“That’s my oldest friend in all the world,” Jack told her.

“Yeah?” the girl said. “He doesn’t look that old.”

Jack thought about that, nodding, smiling in a distracted way, and then he got it, and it broke him up . His eyes came to life! His smile beamed like the sun! His arms shot up! He slopped Tennessee sour mash whiskey all over the place! He yelled, “Oh, wow! Holy — oh, gee!”

“It wasn’t that good,” the girl said, beginning to get worried.

“Wasn’t — Comere! Comere!”

Jack dragged the girl up off the sofa and threw his arm around her shoulders. While she held her head drawn as far as possible away from him, looking sideways at his manic profile with only semicomic revulsion and alarm, he dragged her toward the hot center of the party, crying, “Hey, come here! Hey, listen to this! Wit? Holy shit!”

“But it all came to a head the night I won my Academy Award.”

“And now, to present the award for Best Actor, Dori Lunsford! ”

The band played. The audience applauded. The billions watching on television all around the world watched Dori Lunsford approach the lectern. A big-boned, good-looking blonde, Dori Lunsford was the sex symbol of the moment, a big girl whose stock in trade was giggly little-girl movements, as though she didn’t know she was voluptuous. Tonight she wore an extremely low-cut white gown, the hot television lights gleaming on the upper hemispheres of her breasts.

At the lectern, she bowed slightly, presenting those breasts to the world, or at least the half of the world watching her on television. The plain forgettable man from Price Waterhouse — rather like Michael O’Connor he was, in fact — came out and handed Dori Lunsford the envelope and went away again, immediately forgotten.

“Oh, I’m so excited!” Dori told the billions, and jiggled a little. (She was having her period, which always made her breasts swell.) Tearing open the envelope with a pleasing clumsiness, she said, “And the winner isssss...” She pulled the card most of the way from the envelope, and squealed . “EEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Jack Pine! ”

In the audience, as it burst into applause, competing with the band’s breaking into the theme music of the film for which Jack was getting his award, Buddy poked at Jack, who was sound asleep in the aisle seat beside him. Knowing he was on television, Buddy did his poking with a good-natured grin on his lips, as though congratulating his pal rather than waking him, but his knuckles were hard and sharp, digging into Jack’s ribs, yanking him unpleasurably up from alcoholic stupor.

Jack roused himself, hearing the confused noises, seeing the lights, feeling Buddy’s sharp fists prod him up out of the seat and into the aisle. “Go on, Dad!” Buddy yelled, through the music and applause. “Go get it!”

Befuddled but moving, Jack made his way down the aisle. Like a rat in a maze, he was constricted to this route by the applauding hands and beaming faces on both sides. Sensing the urgency all around him, he broke into a shambling trot, found himself abruptly in front of steps, and ran up them only because the alternative would have been to sprawl across them in a painful heap.

At the top of the stairs, Jack hesitated for just a second, unsure what he was supposed to do next, having not the slightest idea what was going on. Several tuxedoed and gowned people behind a curtain, within his line of sight but out of camera range, stopped applauding to wave at him frantically to hang a left and get going . He hung a left. He got going.

And here was Dori Lunsford. And here was some sort of elbow-height piece of furniture to lean on. Feeling an intense need to lean on something, Jack approached that piece of furniture, but before he could get his body on it Dori Lunsford smiled like the sun in Bangkok and handed him something. Jack grasped at it, whatever it was, and Dori kissed his cheek, pressing her great globes against his arm and chest.