CHARMED LIFE by Mark Baechtel
Johnetta floats in the pool, her hair spread in a fan, the water a clipped frame of film in which she hangs: Nude Victory in a perfect moment of flight or of falling. I hold my hands up to form a box around her – left index finger to right thumb, right index finger to left thumb – the way Carlton used to, blocking scenes in Howard’s Home Town like he was D. W. Griffith in black jeans, humming to himself while the cast stood looking on. That’s how he wanted it: we who would be watched, watching him.
Johnetta turns over, swims a few strokes toward me. I track her with my hands.
“Plotting a blue movie are we?”
“In case Dangerous Waves doesn’t come through. Interested?”
“Yeah,” she says. She holds onto the pool’s lip, tips her head back to soak her hair smooth. “I’ll play the dominatrix.” She pushes off again and floats, treading water. Refracted beneath the rippling surface, her body is a distorted cartoon of itself – Rabelaisian, then anorectic. She looks at me, quirking her eyebrows, going for the laugh, but I don’t laugh. My arms are still held out, and I keep squinting at her through my hands. She dips her face, blows bubbles, looks at me again.
“Billy, it’ll come through.”
I drop my hands, go back to walking the pool’s concrete apron, listening for the call. Today, Chavitz said.
“You shouldn’t stay in too long,” I say.
My publicist says the tabloids have gotten wind of the pilot. They like the angle: former child star, original poster boy for wholesomeness, a radical jink in his career. Boy-Hero Howard: “I Want to Play A Killer Now.” They want interviews, and the glam shows too – Entertainment Tonight, Hard Copy, Premiere TV, Eye on Hollywood, even The Playboy Channel. They want me to explain, but I won’t. My silence is making my publicist nervous.
“No more of this ‘I prefer to remain an enigma’ routine,” she said last night on the phone. “This isn’t helping you. If you don’t say something soon they’ll talk amongst themselves. They’ll start nipping and that’s how it’ll go bad. It’ll turn into a feeding frenzy.”
“A ‘feeding frenzy’,” I said.
“Don’t break my balls. I’m trying to help you here.”
“Ovaries.”
“What?”
“You have ovaries.”
Let them talk. It’s good even when it’s bad. She should know that.
Boy-Hero. It’s been years since cancellation, years since syndication petered out, and they still call me that. I’ve had a dozen lives since Howard: I’ve been the pre-pubescent detective; I’ve been the teenaged prodigy scientist; I’ve been the bookish cattle drover; the earnest young public defender; the thief with a fond heart; even – wearing latex wrinkles – an elderly Howard in a not-too-distant future, in a Movie of the Week project two years ago. There were others, too: summer replacements that never got broadcast, monstrosities that went direct-to-video and are now mercifully untalked-about, projects shelved in studio vaults somewhere, flaking quietly off to colored dust. A few years back, when Howard popped up again on Nick at Night, his Awwww, Dewey! became an ironic expression of frustration among pop-culture cognoscenti. That finally faded out too.
Sometimes when a job has taken me back close to the lot where we used to shoot, I have strolled around in what’s left of Wheaton – ersatz town where Howard roved at large in the golden haze of his celebrity-within-celebrity, the favorite son in America’s favorite town. The set – the few facades left of it – is like a played-out mining camp where I expect to meet the shades of Barbara Billingsley, Donna Reed, Robert Young, the young Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffith, walking abroad, gibbering and squeaking. I walk, remembering when I was still surprised to be there, picked from among the crowd of other possibles because of my smile. I’ve seen the casting director’s notes: Good bones; smile good. Could be taller. I remember I smiled that day at her prompting until my face ached.
When they decided I was their Howard, I went home to my mother’s place in Tarzana. I had left that morning on a city bus; I came back that afternoon in a limo. They made their decision that quickly. I came through the door into the apartment’s living room; the light was pale amber through the sheers that hung limp in the windows, and she was sitting in a straight-backed chair, no radio on, no TV, smoking, waiting. I walked to her chair and looked down into her face, and her expression as she looked up at me was a compound of shame and hope. I smiled and she put her arms around me, and wept.
With the first two months’ checks we bought – I bought – a couch, a hi-fi and a bedroom suite that were like prizes taken from the set of a game show. The brand new appliances came when Westinghouse became a sponsor. Then I bought the apartment building. God, the pride in that: See? We don’t need him. Then the house for her out in Westwood, the apartment building and the one beside it kept as investments. As souvenirs.
I’ll give him this: he never showed up again, never tried to get a piece of Howard for himself. And I never looked for him – the donor of my facial bones, my height, my breadth of shoulder. My Magwich.
Rings spread outward from Johnetta’s languid movement.
“You’re wearing sunblock, right?”
“No.”
I make a wry face.
“Oh, give it a rest.”
I gnaw on my thumb’s edge, worrying a hangnail. Why should I bother her? She’s peaceful. My tension is only an irritant. That’s why, of course. I’m not the center of the Universe. A capital offense. Agitated, I must agitate.
She aims a small splash at me, and I skip out of the way. Ripples hit the pool’s edge, reflect back toward her, crossing with others.
Inside the house there are two bookcases filled with my ripples – tapes that show my mouth wide in moments of laughter, my eyes soft and vague with first love, my arms raised in triumph, my shoulders rounded in defeat, blood spreading in the dust like a halo around my head, my fists cocked and defiance hanging on my face like a flag. Familiar gestures I learned by watching movies and TV, then took back to the set. Sometimes I watch, sitting on the couch: the mirror gazing into the mirror so it creates an endless hallway, a throat ribbed and bottomless. First Cause, the Prime Mover, I use the remote – forward fast, pause, rewind – to leaf through the catalog of my effects.
The only sound is the bees working invisibly in the bougainvillea, and the distant, eternal white noise that lifts like a sigh above the freeway. The sounds are effects, but not the causes – the causes being: a hive, traffic – themselves effects whose causes are obscured.
I yawn, turn and walk back down the concrete again, stepping along the double-helix mosaic I had put there the season I played the scientist on Charmed Life. What moves the bees, the traffic, all the other frantic motion bounded by this place’s sea, its ochre mountains? Once I was sitting at the pool’s edge when a small temblor hit, and the ripples danced in a strange harmonic, standing like the combed sand in a Zen garden.
Johnetta moves her arm slowly through the water over her head, a wave like a magician’s gesture, and her arm’s outline spreads, expands, loses itself. Her name is not her fault. Her parents picked it: her father was John, so she’s Johnetta. When she moved here she didn’t drop it off like an exhausted Okie car junked at the city limits, in the time-honored initiation rite of immigrant Angelenos. She wouldn’t change. That’s my name. Deal with it. She said that to me that first day when I stood smirking at her I. D. tag in the studio commissary. Later, when we knew each other, she said softer: A name shouldn’t be a fashion accessory. She has a half-dozen scripts she’s circulating among the lower-echelon hustlers who’ll look at unsolicited work. She’s hopeful, but pragmatic. She knows the fact she’s good is no guarantee she’ll sell anything. Endurance is everything, she says. She lives by this. She runs the dusty hills in the evening, logging an Olympian’s miles. She manages her diet like a Navy engineer would manage fuel for a nuclear sub.
When she’s not in her regulation studio tour guide outfit, she dresses like a Shaker woman, wears clip-on earrings and gathers her brown hair back in an onyx clasp. There are no statements tattooed on Johnetta’s skin, no piercings. Naked she is smooth and plain, exotic here as a daisy among orchids – a purity so strange to me at first that it seemed an affectation.
She’s bold, wears honesty like an armor, refuses to entertain illusions. Ophelia, if she had been wise as well as true, if she had been able to look Hamlet in the eye and say: Of course Claudius killed your father. Come on, are you really surprised? You know how royalty operates. Screw him and Gertrude, screw Elsinore, screw the ghost. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to Norway and join up with Fortinbras.
A year ago we went to Dublin together, when we were brand-new. We retraced Bloom’s path and pub-crawled. When the crowds got old, we rented a car and drove to the western coast. We motored from far north to final south, staying in B&Bs, eating in bars, nearly anonymous. There’s a picture of her on my desk in the den: she stands Chaplinesque, splay-footed in black leggings and a pea coat, pulling a face atop one of the stones of the Giant’s Causeway. On the trip, I watched her face as much as I watched anything we saw: seeing by watching her see, her surprise and glee a kind of permission for me, a freedom. Otherwise, places have become locations to me. When I’m on a shoot, the hotel where they put us up is so much like every other hotel in every other locale that it might as well have been trucked in with all the other equipment. The catered meals mostly the same; the same trailer to retreat to. Landscapes are backdrops for the next shot; the world is a scrim. In Ireland, though, I saw it in her face: the world is real.
Things she can’t hide: the shy excitement she feels when we are out and she recognizes someone, image becoming flesh in a restaurant booth; her girlish laughter when she talks to her parents on the phone; the hope she would conceal, but can’t, when she hands me something she’s done, saying: Here. Read this. I eat that hope like food.
She turns over, swims slowly back to the pool’s edge, puts her arms one on top of the other on the coping. She makes a fist with one hand and props her chin on it, watching me.
“Even if Waves doesn’t work out . . . ”
“This is coming from the vast storehouse of your experience?” It’s out before I can stop it. “Achh. Do you want a soda? Anything?”
“No. I want you to sit down. Read something, for God’s sake. Take a nap. You’re going to walk the soles out of your shoes.”
“No can do.” I start walking again, my feet on the twisted rungs of the helix’s ladder.
She flips her hands up in resignation and pushes off, moving backward into the center of the pool again. She thinks ambition is a knife – that its edge can be perfected, used to cut through any resistance. As though she originated the concept of wanting hard and fiercely. Though I keep my mouth shut about it, I know the limits of patience, of endurance. Good luck and bad luck are dual train wrecks, are the finger of God that writes, and having writ, moves on. That’s what I’m waiting for, pacing this way. The writing.
You can persuade yourself it’s fate if you want; you can say in high moments, after the casting call you’re sure was a lock: I was born for this. You can stand up from the keyboard of the computer, the words of the treatment you’re writing glowing before you, convincing as scripture. But something will happen. The story will be good, but not what’s wanted this year. For no good reason, another face – not yours – will float to the top of the stack of faces on the Important Desk. The production company’s money will not materialize, or will disappear, mismanaged into a dozen illicit pockets. An earthquake crack will appear in a load-bearing wall. There will be a pileup in the fog on the PCH, a crazy in a convenience store. An ancient blight is loose among the roses: good is not always prospered, bad is not always punished, despite anything The Business says about The Product.
It’s begun to happen again as it has before: the lightning storm of strobes when I leave a car at a restaurant, the camera-wielding shadows waiting for me at the end of the driveway – first one of them, then three, now five. If I don’t get the part, the negatives will end up on some floor someplace, or in a file with my name on it, held like bullion against the day they might be required, when word comes about a scandal at the Viper Room, another comeback, an obituary.
I eat my meals under scrutiny, and they report on what I eat, what I leave untouched. Through the years they have been more anxious about me than my mother ever was while she was still alive – worrying over what company I keep, speculating about my future, exaggerating the things I say to them. I have appeared and disappeared, again and again. I have been like Krishna among the milkmaids, my moves from woman to woman chronicled in pictures and column-inches. If Johnetta leaves me to dwindle in the twilight, if I disappear, if I move to a cabin, if I check myself into a private clinic, if I die, they will say what they will say. As though they had the most reliable source. As though I had told them.
The fencing in interviews: How much can I find out? they think, while I think How much can I keep to myself? The game of earnest-seeming questions, earnest-seeming answers, on their side concealing avarice, on mine, sometimes complicity, sometimes amusement, sometimes disgust. The smart ones have watched my old videos, or they want to watch me work. Hoping for revelations – glimpses which appear as I move through my scenes: memory, they think, feeding the rictus on my face, the tremor in my hands. The ghost that inhabits the machine. But I could tell them something I learned on Charmed Life from the physics professor we used as a technical advisor: observation changes the thing observed, making measurement unreliable. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But examined by whom?
Sometimes I think what it would be like to ask the questions. I think of following them home and waiting in the bushes outside their front window with an expensive camera, taking pictures of them while they channel surf, while they eat from a plate they hold in their hand so they don’t spill crumbs in their lap; while they flip, bored, through a book (on whose title I will zoom with my telephoto lens, registering their taste or lack of it); while they carry their colicky baby, bump, bump, bump, in circles in their wee-hours living room. I would publish the pictures in a tabloid, captioned breathlessly, the red headline: Celebrity Stalker’s Evening at Home. Malice makes me think this, yes, but this too: the idea of standing hidden as I never have been, watching a life that has no thought of observation, naked in its normalcy, happening without rehearsal.
Johnetta floats in the center of the pool again, her hair waving around her head, a strand across her eyes. I think up a spreading stain, a gun on the bottom, its image fractured by ripples, then I push the image away. I have noire plot lines in place of an imagination, sitcom laugh tracks echoing in my head. You could make money with it all. I am spoiled. Not like a child; like meat.
I’ve been printing out her scripts on the sly, dropping them on the inner-circle desks I can still sometimes gain access to. Carlton’s not the only worm that knows its way around the apple’s heart. I’ll read it, Billy, sure I will, I have been assured. Some of them aren’t lying.
She doesn’t want my help. She knows this is the grease on which things slide here, she’s just not reconciled to it, not yet. Maybe she’ll forgive me if the call comes and it’s for her; maybe not. That, also, is the way things work.
I have left three times: once for a ranch in Idaho, once for a Zen monastery in New York, once to teach at a small college beside the ocean in Maine. Looking for a purity, a silence, a furious vastness, that could blot me out. Each time, yanked back by offers too good to pass up, by the gravity a terrible mass produces. That too is conventional: Los Angeles as forbidden planet, Los Angeles as an avatar both loathsome and glamorous – evil stepmother who beats me and jerks me off, who gives me astonishing gifts of cash and attention, then leaves me marooned for years in places like these: poolside in a Brentwood split-level, in an Echo Park bungalow, a condo aery high in a canyon, the money ticking away a dollar, two dollars, five dollars a minute until she delivers the next chance, the next flickering body I can occupy.
Each time I return, the smiles float toward me at parties, at premieres, in the eateries where appearances are expected: Ha, ha, Billy; I knew it couldn’t last. I have given up being surprised that they are right. I have stopped believing things will go according to any plan of mine. I watch what happens with the interest of a spectator at the orchestra pit’s railing. Watching my own life.
It is a life of repeated gestures, characters’ ticks. I fall down laughing, I wail brokenheartedly, I ask questions with a particular tilt of my head. I bellow like a bull, I die like a man or like a coward – outlines, outfits into which I step, as changeless as the masks of Noh. Thirty years. Like the others: clean boys with clean faces, growing into clean young men, then beginning the long swoon down, age peeling us away from our utility. When I started: surfer haircuts, chinos, madras button-down shirts. The vogue has turned again and again since then – a widening gyre. Now heros smell of cordite, of the abattoir. They are shirtless, weary and weighed down with fate. They are martial artists with torsos out of Gray’s Anatomy. They long for rest but they have a job to do.
I move with the times. Last year I hired a trainer, emptied my closets and filled them again, cut my hair brutally, started shaving only twice a week. I have the walk I will use on Dangerous Waves: like Peter Falk as Columbo, but I will be sleek, not rumpled. The eyes held exhausted which have seen too much. Beneath a calm exterior, a heart beating raggedly. I will be splendid with menace.
The phone rings and I walk off the helix to the table beside the sliding glass doors. I stoop to pick it up, looking at my reflection.
“Hello.”
“Billy!”
“Yeah. Carlton. How are you?” I straighten again. My reflection is grimacing.
“My question for you.”
“No word yet.”
“That could be good. That could be very good.”
I ball my fist in a pocket of my khakis. “Or bad. Or indifferent. That covers our choices.”
“Billy, Billy. I told you, Chavitz is a friend of mine. He’s intrigued. Casting against type, etcetera, etcetera. It would be good for the buzz; he knows that.”
“Against type. What type am I, Carlton?”
“Billy, this is me. Howard made you. Don’t be ungrateful.”
A bit more talk, Carlton soothing, ending with Keep the faith, baby. My stomach swirls with nausea: a bromide meant to soothe a clichéd fear. I put the phone back in its charger. My reflection wears a dark look, difficult to read.
A writer friend says: You should never use a mirror to describe a character. Too obvious. But mirrors are construction sites here, where serious work goes on, where we piece together the architecture of personality, trying to build a steady foundation in a place that shakes wildly, tears things down. Our mirrors are oracles, are mediums. We approach them, not to commune with the dead, but to ask: Am I dead yet?
Carlton calls often, no more retired than a vampire can be retired. He bullies me into lunches, dinners. A smooth and furious androgyne manipulator, sylph sired by Caliban out of Ariel, his reddened face a corrupt moon above the glistening radicchio and endive. Always, he buys; he talks and I listen. I’m disinterested, he’ll say, hand batting vaguely backward in a gesture suave and practiced, Eton meets Brooklyn. I just want to help you out. Still in the Great and Only Game, enriched by it, now enriching, energized by the challenge I present, teetering as I am on the edge of has-been-hood and oblivion. Call me a sap, he says. I launched your career, I just can’t watch you throw it in the toilet. He offers connections, offers to pull the strings – conferences with producers, seats in private screening rooms, chance encounters on squash courts, in bleeding-edge restaurants, at times so overcome with enthusiasm that his hand trembles on my knee. He passes numbers, engraved invitations, scripts, his face vivid with prurience. I have always promised to follow up, but have never really needed to. Until now.
Three weeks ago we went to lunch at The Pierced Peach. This time he had just the thing: a hot production company looking to cast the lead in a new series: A Navy SEAL turned cop in the Florida Keys. He had put in the word for me; it was nearly a sure thing.
Come on, son, Carlton said. You’ve been laying around long enough. You’re starting to look like a corpse. Corpses stink, and people in this town have delicate noses.
I read the script and the call went well – the SEAL’s soliloquy when he caught his former commander in a drug-runner’s boat. I chatted a bit with the producer after, measuring the time he gave me: seven minutes – neither great nor poor. Using our parting handshake the way a douser uses a divining rod, I read my chances as middling.
The soft sound of weeping comes from next door. Johnetta is in a chaise now, sunning. She’s listening to her iPod and is oblivious. The neighbors are new, Asian; in the six months they’ve been here I still haven’t met them. I listen to the high, choking sound that floats over the wall, and the vague disgust is automatic: exposure is weakness, and the loathing I feel is a species of sympathy. A blown cover is unforgivable. It is not compassionate to witness someone’s pain; if one has any compassion one looks away until the weakness is hidden again. Nothing is as naked, as personal, as misery.
Is there a self as real as bedrock – something that can’t be resurfaced, recycled, remanufactured? A question no one seems to ask, not here. In secret, sometimes I cut myself. Nowhere that would show, not deep, never deep. Nothing that would leave scars. Just a little, to let some blood out. The blood is real, warm, salty when I taste it. My body makes it; it wells up from the marrow of my bones, and this amazes me – like opening a secret room in the house where you live; a room you never knew was there, where someone lives and works who is completely without vanity, without pretense, who never worries about money or keeping a face in circulation, or the almighty Buzz. Alone.
Bleeding used to be considered therapeutic. Doctors did it – draining off bad humors, restoring some sort of balance they believed had been lost. They did it with lancets, with leeches, with little vacuum jars. It seems ridiculous now, of course, with what we know. But I wonder whether it didn’t start when someone stood puzzling over someone they wanted to help, or when someone stood looking into a mirror, trying to see past the skin to the thing that was buried and struggling beneath. So they cut, thinking: Well. Look at that.
This is crazy thinking, I know. It’s mawkish and worse, certifiable – or at least classifiable. The shrink I went to for a while looked worried when I confessed this behavior to her. Later, I glimpsed my insurance records on her secretary’s desk: Self-mutilating behavior. Borderline Personality. What border, I wonder, are we talking about here? And on which side of it do I stand?
Last night Johnetta asked to see the first episode of Howard’s Home Town. She wasn’t born yet when the series began. She’s seen other episodes, but never the first one. For some reason it’s quite rare.
I took the DVD off the shelf – seventh in the chronology of my appearances, right after the Pepsodent commercial that brought me to the studio’s attention. I turned the lights down and put it into the machine, then sat down beside Johnetta on the screening room’s leather couch. She sat with her legs tucked under her, her head on my shoulder, her hand on my knee. She squeezed when the music came up – the sentimental anthem which actually made the charts that first year – and squeezed again when the dollying shot found me kneeling with a wrench beside the Huffy bike, the grease-smudge on my face, grinning at the first of the seven boxer dogs that followed me through Wheaton’s streets during the series’ run. Champ, this one’s name was. In the series he was always Jack Dempsey.
The show ran an hour. God, we had such a long time in those days to tell a story. It was a Saturday. Howard ate breakfast with his family, bantered with his father about the Dodgers, then met his friend Dewey, to go fishing in Lake Wheaton. Walking down Main Street with their poles on their shoulders, they met Ted the cop; Wilbur, the Ichabod Crane doppelganger who ran the hardware store; Louise the Postmistress; the Jackson twins who followed Howard and Dewey longingly with their eyes. As they walked, Howard and Dewey talked about courage – what it was, and how it was expressed. Dewey was sure he could be brave if he needed to, but Howard was worried. Gee, I don’t know, he said. Dewey put a hand on his shoulder. They bought licorice whips from Steve at the drug store – the soda jerk Howard’s older sister Darla was in love with. Mr. MacReady – Howard’s Yoda – was waiting on his bench outside the store to dole his bit of wisdom: Being brave doesn’t mean not being afraid. Mulling this, the boys walked on. The sun shone, glittering on the polished flanks of the cars, glinting from the gilt-lettered shop windows.
“God, this is slow,” Johnetta said beside me.
“Yeah,” I said. “No extra-terrestrials, no serial killers, no beautiful ambitious lawyers with questionable ethics, no martial arts or gunfire, no drunken baby-raping fathers. None of the staples.” I reached for the remote to shut it off.
“No, wait,” she said.
Arrived at the lake, Howard and Dewey pulled their raft out of the weeds and paddled to the lake’s center. The camera cut to a picnic site on the lake’s far side: the mayor and his young, pretty wife, barbecuing chicken and eating potato salad. A spark from their coals started a brushfire, and while they were beating this out with their plaid blanket, their toddler opened the door of their car and crawled in. He bounced on the seat, tapping the horn once before bumping the handbrake off. The Roadmaster rolled backward down the slope toward the water. The Mayor and his wife, preoccupied, didn’t see until the car was nearly at the water’s edge. Jack Dempsey barked, tugged Howard’s pants cuff. Howard and Dewey, floating on their raft, looked up from their fishing poles to see the car hit the water.
Johnetta’s hand tightened on my knee and she murmured, “Oh no.” She moved in closer to me.
It went on: Howard and Dewey paddling, Howard in the water, Howard swimming to the sinking car, snatching the screaming baby out. Howard wading ashore to put the baby in the grateful couple’s arms.
“A star is born,” I said. Fifteen more minutes remained – the parade Wheaton gave in Howard’s honor, his medal on the steps of City Hall. I got up and turned on the lights. Johnetta rubbed her eyes, stretched and smiled. When I shut off the set she didn’t object.
How is a brave boy brave? I remember Carlton on the shore of Mono Lake – the stand-in for Lake Wheaton where we shot the rescue scene that was the first thing committed to film. I remember him stooping, setting his Aqua Velva-smelling hands on either side of my face, squeezing. You ready to roll, buddy? Ready to be a big star? Ready to make us all rich? A pat on each cheek, a kiss on the forehead, letting me go.
A launch took us out to the raft – Frankie Hughes, who played Dewey for three seasons, and me. We climbed out onto the faux logs, and I remember the lurch as the cable grew taut that drew the raft through the water while we pretended to paddle. I remember Carlton screaming at the technician operating the winch: Slower, goddamnit! Do you think two eight-year-olds could raise a bow-wave with a couple of lousy paddles? I remember the divers the studio posted beneath us because they were taking no chances. I could see them, great black frogs holding on beneath us as we came toward the cameras, Carlton screaming at us: Guys! Look up! Look determined! You’re saving a baby, for chrissakes! I remember Frankie repeating his line over and over to himself under his breath because he had muffed it in three takes: Howard, I can’t swim. You have to help them.
I remember how Carlton choreographed the parade when we got back to the lot – Wheaton celebrating its young hero with a marching band Carlton had hooked from some local high school; a Cadillac convertible from the motor pool for me to ride in. I sat on the seat back, watching the crowd of extras who were bored and milling one minute, formed up, shouting and waving at me the next. Up and down, up and down: the marching that lasted all of half-a-block and the curious collapse of the festivities at the end when Carlton called it a wrap and the cameras shut down. I remember how quickly the street emptied out then, became silent. The strange loneliness of it.
Strange, but soon enough mundane to me. I got used to the articles of my education – the daily spinning-out of fictions, the truth’s impoverishment in comparison. The faces that turned to follow, always, wherever I went. Him just a kid, his life in front of him, and look what he’s got already. Envy an alembic in which I grew, understood before I understood anything else: compound of hunger and hope and loss; desire more constant and more sure than love. Each day, innocence like a shirt I put on, a part of the costume my role required. Each day – my breathing and my moving, my gestures – my translation into light.
I miss the old screening rooms – the projector whirring as we watched what we had done. The rattling of the film over the sprockets, the light we had trapped in the cels released in its flood again, shooting out from the little window behind us. Sometimes I would sit with my head tipped back, watching the beams flicker out in an undulating bundle of bright shafts. I watched the play of dust motes in them: tiny worlds, bombarded with the photons that made up my body, rushing to the white wall before us. I would look down again and there I was. I think about that often now. I feel that dust circulating in my body like blood.
There is another reel of film somewhere. Though I have never been able to find it, I’m certain it exists – forgotten in a drawer, a vault, a filing cabinet, a shelf in some archive: what I was before the change. This is what I would show Johnetta if I could: the test I had on audition day. Me sitting at the set’s kitchen table, toying with the silver before I knew the camera was on. I knock a knife to the floor, pick it up quickly, my eyes shifting. A voice, echoey with the size of the set, with its distance from the boom mike above my head, comes from off camera:
“Billy? We’re ready for you now. Remember what we said?”
I look up, and I am a child, nodding. My mother is waiting in the subaqueous light of our living room, with everything that is to come pooling in her eyes like ink. The off-camera voice begins again – not Carlton; some second assistant whose name I long ago forgot – making a joke whose ending is cut off as a grip taping down a cable accidentally disconnects the mike. The camera keeps rolling anyway, and as I laugh my eyes lose their fear, warming because the man thought to tell me something funny, just to relax me. Before the acting begins, the camera’s silent focus tightens, tightens and holds: real boy, real face, actual smile.
Mark Baechtel has published a story in Sou’wester, and book reviews and features in The Washington Post. His poems have appeared in American Literary, Lip Service, Poet Lore, and the anthologies Open Door: 1980–1996 and Baltimore: Poems About A City.