The Last Projector Read online

  “Let’s follow him.”

  Larry had been directing hardcore pornographic features for nearly a decade, never quite getting enough commercial work on the side to leave it behind completely, never convincing anyone with clout to read one of his “real” scripts. Although he’d earned some AVN awards along the way, he couldn’t bear the idea of hitting the Vegas ceremonies to accept one in person, not since he discovered his then-future wife was nominated for the industry’s coveted Noble Piece Prize. He promised his producer, Damon, he’d attend the next year’s awards since the summer of ‘84 marked the five-year anniversary from when Adult Video News first started pretending this business was something respectable. Supposedly, there was going to be some sort of Lifetime Achievement Award handed out to him and a couple other grizzled vets, and he would have to pretend it was both a surprise and anything but an embarrassment. He couldn’t think of anything worse.

  “Larry” had been directing under his fake name since 1979, for fear that it would keep him from more legitimate work when he finally, inevitably, blew up.

  He was 47 years old.

  As he lurched from light to light, driving as low in the seat as he could while still seeing the horizon, he thought of everything he should have told the Virgin Mary’s red-faced grandson:

  How he’s sorry, but he’s out the door in the morning too fast to spit in a sink like a normal person. How if he tries to spit while cruising more than 15 miles an hour, it will mist back through the window all over his mug. How spitting away from the Virgin Mary’s house and out his passenger window would look like he was aiming for that park, as if he was trying to hose down those kids laying lime on the ball diamond every morning. Or scare those two girls always balancing on the seesaw. Seriously, did the Virgin Mary want him spitting at freakin’ kids on a playground? Seemed like the surest way to end up on a sex offenders’ registry.

  He simply had no choice to do what he did if he was going to stick to his obsessive routine of swishing that mouthwash in each individual cheek precisely fifty times (twice as many as recommended on the bottle), originally a way to appease his wife that it would kill any “AIDS juice” he carried home from a shoot. But still he swore he’d never mourn the countless opportunities for conversation he was missing in the world, specifically in his own parking lot, for example, because of this compulsion, not the least of which was a new girl in his apartment building who’d tried to talk to him but hurried past when he smiled too wide and started drooling and leaking from the alcohol burn. To be honest, he’d considered breaking his routine the next time he saw the new girl, and would probably swallow if he got the chance again. Swallowing would be a small price to pay.

  “Is the Virgin Mary that fucking stupid?” Larry didn’t say when he had the chance. “Didn’t she notice my spit was coming out in colors not found in nature? Hell, my spit’s purple some days after those big-ass gumballs…”

  “Purple, eh?” Mary’s grandson might have shrugged in response, likely fascinated with spit and big bubbles. “Let’s watch yours turn red!”

  Bloosh. Fist like a canned ham. Arm like a freight train. Right in the goddamn grill.

  Larry drove on. And when he finally found the morning’s clandestine set at the sound guy’s stepdad’s brother’s beach house, it felt like a party he was crashing (sometimes they put a blue balloon on the mailbox to signify a “blue movie,” a heads-up for late crew additions or an emergency location switch, and today there was a big birthday bunch of them chasing each other around in the breeze). But all four of his actors were already restless. Four was usually the magic number for these fly-by-night features, but this quartet was loitering around in robes like royalty, slamming doors, slamming coffee, power drinks, milk, and tequila.

  No, not tequila, Larry remembered. The gold bottle one of the girls was recklessly spinning around her palms was empty, now just a prop being refilled with apple juice. She was trying to imitate newbie sensation Tom Cruise from Cocktail, which was still “Coming soon to a theater near you!” even though it had been pushed back indefinitely due to the death of a stunt bartender. But the poster action was all they needed to ape to make it the newest movie to get the porn parody treatment from every studio (or more likely imitating Tom Cooze from Cock Tales [the first copycat to hit the shelves], a dexterous actor who was actually much better at spinning bottles than fucking). Larry made a mental note to retrieve the bottle before she broke it and went over budget.

  “When he pours, he reigns!” was the tagline for the real movie. They didn’t even need to change that for a porn version.

  Larry slumped into his director’s chair, one he’d stolen from a previous campsite shoot because of its long foot rest and cup holder, not because it was painted like an American flag (missing about five stars), and he sighed loud enough for everyone to hear. He was already tired and not one foot of film was in the can. He looked around the set, trying to get into the scene, already changing things up in his head to make the movie better. The day before, he’d insisted the patio furniture be dragged into the living room and covered with Visqueen and sheets, giving it the look of a crime scene. Like in a movie. Larry was always thinking.

  A crime scene? And a tequila bottle? Hmm. Inspiration was now tickling his head like raindrops. This would be a great opportunity to make the film more of a…

  “Dyed your beard, eh, boss? Looks good!”

  It was Glengarry, half of his two-man crew (not counting “talent,” of course), greeting him with a huge tangle of electrical cords over his shoulder like a fireman hauling hoses. Older than everybody, Glengarry’s given name was “Glen,” making his nickname actually more cumbersome than the real thing, but Larry had anointed him, mostly because he couldn’t stop talking about the David Mamet play he’d caught last time he was in New York, how much it reminded him of the “weight of his own job,” how it “shook him to his very soul.” Also because he had a bit part in Larry’s Death of a Salesman meets Caligula epic Glen, Gary, Glen, and Ross.

  Today, Glengarry was moving faster than usual, only stopping to chalk the name of this week’s movie onto the clapperboard that he balanced on his knee. Even though they’d always done shit so cheap that Larry claimed they were one disappointing turnaround from making porn with flip cartoons in the corners of TV Guides, Larry insisted on starting with the “clap” every time. Mostly because of the easy jokes.

  “Where do you need me, Redbeard?”

  Larry just ignored him. Taking the hint, Glengarry started to turn away, and Larry stopped him with a police hold on his upper arm meat to spin him back around. He took the clapper away to read it. On the slate, his perfect movie title, the one he’d spent a good 45 minutes thinking up in the shower, had been changed into something artless and ugly:

  “Fuck Your Mother.”

  “Get Damon on the phone,” Larry sighed, then mumbled, “Fuck your mother?”

  “Come on, boss. It doesn’t matter what it’s called. We recycle half these scenes anyway.”

  “‘Come on’ nothing. That is the worst title of all time. It sounds like someone’s gonna be fucking their own mother.”

  “No, boss, it’s like the insult, you know? Mom jokes. You know, like, ‘Fuck your mother!’”

  Larry had argued hard to get the name he wanted for this flick. Dr. Strange Gloves he’d called it, the story of an obsessive compulsive cured through intercourse. And their latest producer, an uninspiring car dealer from the Valley with the unlikely name of Damon Gold, mercifully got the joke at first. But Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove had that colon in the title. And they started fighting over what came after their colon during a particularly heated bout of Marco Polo at one of the pool parties Damon loved to throw for his underlings.

  “Came after the colon?!” Damon cackled. So many jokes.

  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blondes was what Larry had been dead set on for the subtitle because it was so close to the original. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Lov
e the Twat was the car dealer’s unfortunate brainstorm.

  During their heated debate in the pool (also heated), Mr. Gold had pushed Larry around like a rubber ducky, verbally and physically. He was a small man, but seemingly super-powered ever since he’d moved out west from Denver, where, in a cruel second-act twist, he now suffered from sleep apnea due to the high altitude. But Larry thought he might as well have come from Krypton the way he dominated any room below sea level with sheer force of will. And in a piss-warm swimming pool? Forget about it. Motherfucker dunked people two at a time until they raised the white flag in surrender. Or at least agreed with him. Sometimes, he’d use his free hand to play Solitaire with floating, plastic-coated playing cards.

  In the end, Larry had to stay underwater for three minutes with Mr. Gold palming his head in order to impress him enough to cut a deal. The super-powered car dealer had laughed and pointed out his accomplishment to everyone, “Yep, he held his breath till he got his way, just like a fuckin’ baby in the bathtub!”

  “Listen, G.G.,” Larry said, squeezing Glengarry’s upper arm less affectionately than his boss had squeezed his head. “I know what that half-ass title’s supposed to mean, but…”

  “Dude, you should be honored!” Glengarry squawked. “He just wants to make the most money we can. It’s because Damon loved the script that he changed it, man, especially this scene. This is gonna be a good scene.”

  No one had to tell Larry this was gonna be a good scene. He fuckin’ knew it was a good scene. That’s the one thing that kept him going, besides dreams of one day directing commercials full-time. Knowing he could always squeeze in just one… good… scene. It’s what kept him sane while he squandered his talent, the knowledge that just one of the scenes in his movie would be so good that the viewer might forget they were jerking off for half a second and actually start caring about a character.

  Glengarry waited patiently, spinning two bulbs in his palms and singing a Peter Gabriel song that wasn’t even out yet, but still somehow getting the lyrics wrong.

  “I hold the light… I hold the light…”

  This particular scene depicted an eager young man, “Bobby Bee Jay,” knocking on the door of the requisite bored housewife, informing her that the stall in the boys’ bathroom at the high school was sporting some new graffiti that advertised, “For a good time, call T.J.’s mom.” The twist, of course, what had always previously been perceived as an insult, was actually put there by T.J.’s mom.

  “Genius!” Damon Gold had thundered when he first read it.

  And to make the point that this wasn’t a coincidence, the subsequent scene would then cut to a shot next door, where another lucky teen (hopefully not conspicuously tattooed and in his early 30’s) would be looking for the author of “For a good time, call Bobby’s mom” at the exact same time. Then T.J. and Bobby would both ride these “moms” (no choice but for the moms to be in their late teens/early ‘20s tops) all the way out the back door, where they would then be horrified to see each other... and then all decide to finish each other off in the pool anyway. Now that was some twists!

  “You’re like Hitchcock up in this bitch!” Glengarry had positively squealed as he stole a shot of apple juice. Larry let him get away with a lot more than the other guys on the set after Glengarry had moonlighted months earlier on Larry’s “real” movie without getting paid one red cent.

  A real movie. Yes, Larry was trying his hand at a real movie on the sly. It had a name that sounded like porn, but it was as real as movies get. And as of last weekend, all edited and ready to roll. Not that there was anywhere to roll. But that was another story altogether. Today, he was making adult films, and he was taking it seriously.

  Larry was proud of Strange Gloves, he couldn’t lie. Even if he hadn’t thought of a way to force a doctor, or gloves, into the damn thing yet, if he could make one person release their grip and think back to the graffiti on their own high-school restroom walls with longing, he’d done his job. A man’s job. An artist’s job!

  He sighed and plucked the script out of Glengarry’s back pocket, then let him scurry away. As he thumbed through the screenplay (all fifteen pages of it, his longest yet), he found the guts of his story missing, the touching fable of a boy suffering from OCD and the Isotoners that stopped him from touching, “really touching,” another human being.

  “Are you kidding me?” Larry said to no one as he read.

  “Yeah, Damon did some edits,” Glengarry shouted back as he whipped his extension cords to shake the knots out. Then he stopped, and ran back to Larry, ducking in close and spitting on his fingers as he reached for Larry’s beard like a mother working her kid’s cowlick at the bus stop.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Larry jerked away.

  “You really don’t want to be Captain Redbeard, man,” he whispered. “You ever read that comic strip? He loses every time!”

  Larry moved away, nervously tugging his beard, then his nose. Then he scratched his elbow. He was wound up. Way up. He felt like today was gonna be the day for something, anything. Maybe a bunch of anythings. Battles brewing around every corner, but he didn’t know which one to choose. Oh, well, Damon once said you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. But he also said things like, “You can’t have ‘popcorn’ without ‘cop porn’!” Which was ridiculous.

  “Come on, boss. Please! We don’t have this house very long!”

  Larry closed his eyes, scratching one elbow, then the other, until his fingernails almost flipped back. Then he scratched himself all over like mad. His hives were back, and his arms itched like a motherfucker. Sometimes it was so bad he would scratch the buttons right off his sleeves so they’d flap around with his frustration to ensure people took him even less seriously.

  You can’t be around them that long, his ex-wife had warned him once. You’re gonna catch something.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?!” Larry screamed, spiking the script like a rotten football.

  The explosion of paper was entirely too small to satisfy anyone.

  The first time Billy saw Bully was about three fake names ago for both of them. She was with her boyfriend, and he really didn’t think twice about her. The second time he saw her, she was sitting with her bare feet in a fountain at a dog park, wearing a tight black T-shirt (tight and black was always his weakness), with the telephone number for a no-kill dog shelter stretched across her chest. In that moment, Billy thought she could have a Slaughterhouse Help Wanted sandwich board over her body and still receive the same fawning looks from the passers-by. Something about black eyes nested in black curls that just sucked you in. She asked Billy to help her out of the fountain, and when he grabbed her hand, she started thumb-wresting him instead.

  He obsessed about that thumb for a good 48 hours.

  The third time he saw her was at the local poetry slams she hosted, where she sat directly across from Billy at a long table, complaining loudly about how her dogs hated, hated, her boyfriend. She failed to notice Billy’s hand on her chair leg, pulling her away from this kid and closer to himself inch by inch. But the boyfriend did. He told her they were going home, and he used a name that confused Billy, seeing how he’d lifted her wallet an hour earlier.

  The new name on Bully’s fake I.D. was “Amber,” but for the first fake license Bully ever got, she’d tried naming herself “Any Luck.” Most people misread it and called her “Amy” anyway, and even after Billy and Bully carefully picked their latest names based on the abduction lingo of “Code Adams” and “Amber Alerts,” out of habit, she still worked hard to get everyone to call her “Any.”

  “You know, like when someone stumbles onto you working on a lost cause?” she’d explain. “Like you’re trying to unplug a toilet, and they go, ‘Any luck?!’”

  But even weirder than all this was her real name, “Tully,” which was Irish as fuck but only lasted until she was five and started to speak. And because she’d started so late, she skipped baby talk altogether
and jumped headfirst into profanity, where she’d since happily remained.

  One time, Bully’s little brother revealed that her nickname was a mispronunciation of “Boli,” which was short for “Bolita,” which was Spanish for “Little Ball,” which was something her grandma called her. Her little brother paid for that with a cracked tooth.

  Whatever her name was that week, did Billy have any luck with Any Luck? No, he had about as much luck with her as she had making her favorite names stick. But it didn’t matter. He would keep on trying, and calling her “Bully.” Everyone called her “Bully” now, and that name rose right to the top. And really, Billy couldn’t imagine calling her anything but. She was the smallest bully he’d ever met, but he loved it when she pushed him around.

  The third, fourth, and fifth time Billy saw her was with her boyfriend at the slams. The sixth time Billy saw her was when his first real progress was made, at the last slam of the semester, when Billy brought T-shirts for everybody. It was something else to do instead of secretly tugging on her chair when no one was looking. Billy even got one for her boyfriend, and this battery-powered shirt was the impetus of a strange arms race at the readings that expedited the demise of the group.

  This particular shirt he’d purchased for Bully’s boyfriend, some smug, spiky-haired hipster who refused to make eye contact, had been advertised online as a “Me-Qualizer,” and it had an LED display of an American flag across the chest that rose and fell to the music or, he hoped, would display the ferocity of her dogs’ contempt for the kid when they were at her apartment and Spike was making his moves. Billy tried to be subtle, getting the more innocent spin-off “Bee-Qualizer” T-shirts for everybody else in the group, shirts with a happy swirl of bumblebees dancing to ambient sounds (one of hundreds of variations in the popular line of patented See-Qualizer Wear, a name Billy thought was kind of idiotic since you could “see” a normal equalizer, whether you were wearing it or not). The shirts were a huge hit. It made the normally shouty-but-morose poets step it up a bit, cracking smiles when the loud response of the crowd lit up their chests instead of their faces.