→ Chapter 1 - Mr. 600
One dude stood all afternoon at the buffet wearing just his boxers, licking the orange dust off barbecued potato chips. Next to him, a dude was scooping into the onion dip and licking the dip off the chip. The same soggy chip, scoop after scoop. Dudes have a million ways of peeing on what they claim as just their own.
For craft services, we’re talking two folding tables piled with open bags of store-brand corn chips and canned sodas. Dudes getting called back to do their bit—the wrangler announces their numbers, and these performers stroll back for their money shot still chewing a mouthful of caramel corn, their fingers burning with garlic salt and sticky with the frosting from maple bars.
→ Chapter 2 - Mr. 72
It was a lamebrain plan, bringing roses. I don’t know. The first step inside the door, they give you a brown paper shopping bag with a number written on the side, some number between one and six hundred. They say, “Put your clothes in here, kid.” And they give you a wood clothespin with the same number in black pen. They say, “Clip it to your shorts. Don’t lose it or you won’t get your stuff back.” The crew girl, she wears a stopwatch on a cord, hanging on her chest where her heart would be.
→ Chapter 3 - Mr. 137
You know those days at the gym when you’re bench-pressing six plates or you’re one-arming your body weight in preacher curls, and one rep you’re pumped and stoked, split-setting cable rows with wide-grip pull-downs, you’re knocking out reps and sets fast as you can rack the plates—but then, the next set, you’re toast. Wasted. Every curl or press is just more effort. Instead of powering through, you’re counting, sweating. Panting.
→ Chapter 4 - Sheila
Sweat collects.
Sweat pools as pale blisters inside my two layers of latex gloves. Borrowed an old precaution from gay porn: you wear a blue condom inside a regular pink condom, that way, if the dick turns blue in the middle of anal sex, you know the outside rubber’s busted. A failsafe. True fact. Wearing pink gloves on top of blue gloves, my fingers feel hot, pulsing with my every single heartbeat; sweat collects in bubbles that rove just underneath my latex skin, merging with other blisters of sweat, melting together. Growing. Bulges of sweat swell in fat pads across my palm. Sweat squirts past my knuckles, inside the latex, to balloon my fingertips, swollen and soft. Numb.
→ Chapter 5 - Mr. 600
No shit, I told kid 72 a lie about the uniforms, how they was shooting us out of order since they only rented the three Gestapo getups. The kid’s watching the movies we got playing overhead. For the movie, we’re talking On Golden Blonde. His eyes squirming with twin reflections of Cassie Wright, same as two tiny video monitors, his jaw hung wide open, the kid don’t give a rat’s ass what I got to say.
I tell the kid, “Don’t expect she’s going to look that good ...”
Kid 72’s eyes—light brown, same as mine used to look.
→ Chapter 6 - Mr. 72
A guy eating potato chips at the buffet they laid out, a second guy steps up next to him. The second guy, across his back is the number “206,” not only felt-penned, but tattooed in thorny, fat blue letters, the two on one shoulder blade, the zero on his spine, the six on his other shoulder. The guy cramming his mouth with potato chips, chewing and swallowing as his hand brings up more from the buffet table, a steady crunch-crunch loud as somebody walking on gravel, his arm lifting chips has “206” scribbled down the bicep.
→ Chapter 7 - Mr. 137
Some humongous Mexican bitch-slaps this fat slob at the craft-services table, and then actor number 72, holding the bouquet of dead flowers, walks over and begins to explain the attack to me. The fight has something to do with model-train sets and the city of Seattle. The Mexican mafia and the Vatican. Rattling on, number 72 tells me, “Sorry.”
I tell him not to mention it.
“I mean, about your TV series getting canned,” he says.
I tell him to never mind.
“I mean, about all those gossip magazines,” he says, “trashing you.”
I tell him to forget it.
And this actor 72 says, “What are you doing, I mean, here?”
→ Chapter 8 - Sheila
During my initial pitch meeting with Ms. Wright, I asked her what she could tell me about a Roman empress named Messalina.
Our pitch meeting, our first face-to-face, we met in a coffee bar, drinking cappuccinos and bumping knees under a dinky marble-topped table. Ms. Wright sat twisted to look out the window. Legs crossed at the knee, the way that’s supposed to give you veins. Eyes not following anyone walking past. Not watching the dogs on leashes or the babies in strollers. Not looking at me, Ms. Wright asked had I ever heard of an actress named Norma Talmadge?
Or Vilma Banky? John Gilbert? Karl Dane or Emil Jannings?
→ Chapter 9 - Mr. 600
Kid 72 is easy enough to find, now that his bunch of roses start coming apart, dropping a trail of wilted flower petals to follow him around the room. Dude 72, the kid, his white rose petals follow him as he dogs Sheila around, asking her, “Can I go soon?” Looking at the flowers in his hands, he goes, “Is it true?” He goes, “You think she’s going to die?”
Dude 137, the television dude, goes, “Yes, young lady, when might we view the body?”
Kid 72 goes, “You ain’t funny.”
And the Sheila babe says, “Why would Ms. Wright want to die?”
→ Chapter 10 - Mr. 72
I tell those guys, “Porn babies.” Shaking my roses at the 137 guy and Branch Bacardi, I say, “They exist.” Petals fluttering everywhere, I say, “There are kids who get conceived during adult movies. I mean, when those movies get made.”
Mr. Bacardi shakes his head, saying, “Urban legend.”
Guy 137 says, “Love child.”
“That’s a stretch,” Mr. Bacardi says, “to call anything conceived during an all-leather backdoor dog-pile gang-bang video a ‘love child.’”
And I tell them that’s not funny.
→ Chapter 11 - Mr. 137
Wouldn’t you know it? It’s the damned shampoo. That “100 Strokes” crap Cassie Wright launched. So what if the bottle’s the perfect shape for . . . But wash, rinse, and repeat for a couple days, and you’ll go bald. All this damage just so maybe Miss Wright will smell it in my hair and consider it a compliment.
Not that she could smell anything. The place reeks like a stockyard.
→ Chapter 12 - Sheila
Ms. Wright jogs along a sidewalk, her knees pumping waist-high in front of her, thighs stretched tight inside black bicycle shorts. Breasts bouncing, swinging side to side, strapped inside a white sports bra. Elbows bent L-shaped, hands limp and flapping loose at each wrist. Feet slapping the concrete sidewalk in tennis shoes.
Her stomach skin, tight and tan. No stretch marks. Nothing to show for being a mother.
At her crotch, the black spandex stretches to cover a small bulge. Bigger than camel toe. Swelling bigger than moose knuckle. Way bigger than a clit. Ms. Wright’s crotch swells, bulges, bounces. Another stride, her foot stamping concrete, and the bump inside her bicycle shorts starts to inch down one spandex leg.
→ Chapter 13 - Mr. 600
The Sheila babe yells for everybody to shut up. She checks the call sheets and says, “Number 21 ... I need number 21.”
We’re all not breathing, fingers crossed, ears pointed to hear our number.
Checking her clipboard, Sheila goes, “Number 283 and number 544.” One hand, she waves for dudes to follow her onto the set, saying, “Right this way, gentlemen.”
On the monitors, we’re looking at Cassie Wright wearing a white slip, playing a frustrated Southern belle desperate to fit into her husband dude’s rich plan-ration family.
→ Chapter 14 - Mr. 72
How I told it to Mr. Bacardi, that wasn’t the whole deal. Not even half the story. When I first downloaded clips of Cassie Wright, I wanted to see her maybe knitting a regular ordinary thing, I don’t know, out of yarn. Or I wanted to watch her cooking a pan of something on a stove. Just, I guess, reading a book in a chair next to a lamp in a nice room without gallons of hot jizz all over her.
On bulletin boards, online message boards, where fans post details about every mole and eyelash Cassie Wright has, every color lipstick she’s wore, guys dissect every blow job, I don’t know, like it was for college-homework extra credit. Cassie Wright was born in Missoula, Montana. Her parents are Alvin and Lenni Wright. They live in Great Falls these days. And, yes, Cassie Wright had a baby she gave up nineteen years ago.
→ Chapter 15 - Mr. 137
First opportunity, I sidle up and ask the talent wrangler how it is she knows so much about vaginal embolisms. Almost a thousand women dead every year? Killed by carrots and batteries forcing air inside them? That seems like a remarkably rarefied set of facts for anyone to reference offhand. “Sorry,” I tell her, “I couldn’t help overhearing.” Holding one end of a ballpoint pen, the wrangler taps it like a wand in the direction of each man still here. Her lips silent, making the shape of each number— 27 . . . 28 . . . 29—she writes something on her clipboard, at the same time saying, “That’s why Ms. Wright pays me the big bucks.”
→ Chapter 16 - Sheila
Valeria Messalina, a descendant of Caesar Augustus, was born twenty years after the birth of Christ and raised in the court of the Emperor Caligula, who—as a practical joke—forced her to marry her second cousin, Claudius, a dimwit thirty years her senior. At their marriage, Messalina was eighteen, her groom forty-eight. Three years later, Caligula was assassinated, and Claudius ascended to the throne.
Once she became empress, according to the historian Tacitus, Messalina fucked gladiators, dancers, soldiers—and anyone who refused her, she had them executed for treason. Slaves or senators, married or single, if Messalina said you were hot—you had to put out.
→ Chapter 17 - Mr. 600
Player dude’s yakking on his cell phone when he goes ballistic. Player dude with his black hair combed, stretched back, and gelled to cover his bald spot, to show a forever space of tall, white forehead, he’s yakking stock options and sell prices and reserve margins when Sheila looks up from her clipboard she’s holding.
Sheila shepherds the crew of us and yells, “Gentlemen.” She yells, “Listen for your number, please. I need ...”
→ Chapter 18 - Mr. 72
Mr. Bacardi stares up at the TVs they have hanging from the ceiling, showing porno, and he keeps saying, “No ... no fucking way ...”
Mr. Bacardi just stands in one place, staring up at the TVs, maybe using two fingers to pinch the loose skin under his jaw, pull it tight, and let go. He’s staring at the movie on TV, running his fingers over his cheeks, stretching the skin back toward his ears so his wrinkles around his lips disappear, saying, “Fucking camera dude, he made me look like shit.” His skin in some spots as wrinkled as my pink plastic sex surrogate, Mr. Bacardi keeps saying, “No way I look that trashed. Fucking lighting dudes . . .”
→ Chapter 19 - Mr. 137
The last time I saw Oklahoma is the last time I ever want to see Oklahoma. Picture that big circle of blue sky meeting dirt, wrapped all the way around you. Dirt and rocks stretched from you to the horizon. Dirt and rocks, and that sun always up high, the noon whistle blasting at the volunteer fire department. Dirt and rocks, and my dear, simple, good-hearted father waiting to see me off on the Greyhound bus bound for the temptations of the big, wicked city.
→ Chapter 20 - Sheila
In 1944, while she was filming the movie Kismet, Marlene Dietrich bronzed her legs with copper paint. Lead-based copper-colored paint. The lead leached into her skin. Almost poisoned her to death. Ms. Wright tells me this while I stir the wax melting in a double boiler.
Ms. Wright, she’s shucking off her long-sleeved top, her jeans and panties. Naked, Ms. Wright bends to spread a bath towel across the top of her kitchen table. Her two-room apartment, the bare walls busy with nail holes. Not a stick of furniture except a soiled white sofa that folds out to make a bed. Two kitchen chairs bent out of chrome, and a table to match. Ms. Wright spreads a second and third towel across the table. Spreads another until the towels add up to a thick pad.
→ Chapter 21 - Mr. 600
Teddy-bear dude and Sheila look thick together. Cozy. Dude’s touching her tits and hair. Sheila talking shit to him about me. Both of them looking at me. Pointing fingers at me. Talking their shit.
Television dude keeps touching his own head, shedding hairs. The blood veins ballooning on his face, all branchy, red and shit. His eyeballs all pug-dogged, bulging and ready to roll down his cheeks. His eyes looking red with blood veins, blinking with water. Sweat washing his hairline, flat against his neck and forehead.
→ Chapter 22 - Mr. 72
The girl with the stopwatch keeps calling the Dan Banyan guy until he comes out the bathroom door with water running down his face, soap foaming along his hairline, with what’s left of his hair pasted down flat to the sides of his head. The clipboard girl’s standing at the top of the stairs, outlined against the open door. Those lights on the set too bright to look straight at. From behind her, the light’s dancing around her dark shape. The girl keeps calling for Dan Banyan by his number, 137, until he starts up the stairs, still scrubbing wads of wet paper towel against his forehead.
→ Chapter 23 - Mr. 137
The talent wrangler does her best to show me the door. A couple laughs, not two puffs on a cigarette after I ejaculate across Cassie Wright’s lovely breasts, my sperm still warm and crawling around, and the wrangler’s shoving a paper bag full of clothes into my arms. She’s telling me to get dressed. Me, I’m telling Ms. Wright how moved I was by her performance as a struggling, unstoppable teacher yearning to make a difference among the disadvantaged students of a gritty inner-city school. She was inspired. Just inspired. Her character’s vulnerability and determination, she was the best part of watching The Asshole Jungle.
→ Chapter 24 - Sheila
Leaning over Ms. Wright, my fingers pinching a pair of chrome tweezers, I’m squeezing the sharp points together around a single eyebrow hair. Biting my own tongue. Shutting my eyes when I yank the hair. Squeezing the tweezers tight around another stray hair.
Ms. Wright, she doesn’t blink. Doesn’t flinch or lean back in her chair to get away. Says how somebody named Rudolph Valentino, when he died of his appendix, two women in Japan jumped into a live volcano. This Valentino hoagie-honker, he was a star in silent pictures, and when he died in 1926 a girl in London poisoned herself on top a collection of his pictures. An elevator boy at the Ritz Hotel in Paris poisoned himself on a bed spread with a similar collection. In New York, two women stood outside the Polyclinic Hospital, where Valentino died, and cut their wrists. At his funeral, a mob of a hundred thousand rioted and collapsed the mortuary’s front windows, trashing the wreaths and sprays of funeral flowers.
→ Chapter 25 - Mr. 600
Teddy-bear dude turns sideways to me, twisting his head to the other side. Dude’s thinking I can’t see, but from between his lipsticked lips he pulls a chewed-up, used rubber. Some old rubber he wore or one he’s found on the set, I don’t want to know. After watching my share of faggot porn flicks, it’s no surprise they get off on eating their own jizz. Eating anybody’s.
The kid’s showing him both pills, the wood pill and the cyanide.
→ Chapter 26 - Mr. 72
The stopwatch girl lets me come back, on account of I have to give Mr. Bacardi something important. She leads me back down the stairs, to the waiting basement. The smell of baby oil and cheese crackers.
The minute Mr. Bacardi sees me, he presses his cell phone to his chest and says, “You kill her?”
The Dan Banyan guy says, “Or, worse . . . did you say you loved her?”
And the stopwatch girl says, “Gentlemen, may I have your attention ...”
→ Chapter 27 - Mr. 137
Wouldn’t you know it? I’m not even married to Cassie Wright and already I’m about to become a widower. To the young actor 72, I say, Please. Please tell me that was merely an M&M candy he gave Bacardi.
“Potassium cyanide,” says the talent wrangler as she leans over to pick up a paper napkin off the floor. “Found naturally in the cassava or manioc roots native to Africa, used to tint architectural blueprints in the form of the deep-blue pigment known as Prussian blue. Hence the shade ‘cyan’ blue ...”
→ Chapter 28 - Sheila
Maybe one cigarette before I bring in Branch Bacardi, our anchorman, Ms. Wright points a fingernail at her cup of orange juice. Hooks her finger for me to bring her the cup. Waves one, two, three quick waves for me to bring her over the juice, fast.
The cup with the straw, I bring it. Bend the straw to the level of her mouth.
→ Chapter 29 - Mr. 72
The stopwatch girl steps her feet left, then right, then left down the stairs, the fingers of both hands cupped over her mouth. Overlapping each other, tight, like to keep something inside her mouth. Her eyes go big around and forget to blink, so dry they don’t shine except the little bit that glass might shine. The glass in her hanging stopwatch. Her fingers pressed until the skin’s gone white, any blood pressed out of the skin of her fingers and face as she steps down, left then right, each foot lower.
→ Chapter 30 - Mr. 137
The head of casting for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rejected Roy Fitzgerald three times. The actor stumbled when asked to walk around her office, stumbled so often she worried he’d break her glass coffee table. Fitzgerald, a former navy sailor turned Teamster, who now worked delivering frozen carrots, showed too much gum line when he smiled. Worst of all, he giggled. Fitzgerald spoke with the squeal of a teenage girl, and every time he tripped and stumbled over his own feet he’d giggle.
→ Chapter 31 - Sheila
Ms. Wright knew.
All along, the woman knew who I was. Who she really was. She played along, knowing she would die. Cassie Wright would willingly fuck six hundred pud-pullers to make me rich.
True fact. Another last thing today comes down to is reality.
→ Chapter 32 - Mr. 600
On the TVs, they’re playing the first movie Cassie ever appeared in. Shot on video, maybe one step better than some security camera at the corner quick-stop grocery. On the TVs is her and me, young as Sheila and the kid 72. Cassie’s eyes are rolled up to show only white, her arms flopping loose at her sides, her head rolling around on her neck so far the pull opens her mouth, drool sliding out the corner of her lips.
Slack as a blow-up sex-doll version of herself.
If you want to know, that first film I did with Cassie Wright, I slipped her a diet soda mixed with beta-ketamine and Demerol. With the camera set up on a tripod next to the mattress, I fucked her everywhere my dick would fit.
→ Chapter 33 - Mr. 72
We’re afterward now. We’re standing in the alley, after the paramedics asked Sheila was there any next-of-kin? Any family to be notified?
This is after Sheila shook her head no. White flakes drifting off her hair, small as ashes from a fire, and she told them, “Nobody. The pig had no one.”
Mr. Bacardi had nobody.
→ Chapter 34 - Mr. 137
On the film set, the emergency paramedics pound on the shaved chest of Branch Bacardi, the latex of their gloves sticking, then peeling off with a tearing sound, their latex palms stained brown with bronzer, revealing Bacardi’s dead blue skin. Their hands punching and pumping Bacardi’s chest, his red, dark-red nipple blood spots their gloves. The razor cut, his shaved-off nipple no longer leaking blood.
With the cameraman leaning close, the paramedics sweating, the sides of their shirts, from sleeve to belt, their white uniforms soaked dark gray with sweat, Cassie Wright says, “Are you getting this?” The production stills-photographer shooting coverage, flash after flash from every angle, washing everything in bursts of strobe that leave us blind. Blinking. Breathing the hot air, heavy with sweat and perfume and sperm.
→ Chapter 35 - Sheila
Cardiac defibrillators set above 450 joules will leave contact burns. The paddles can scorch a patient’s chest. Any metal jewelry can arc, blazing hot for an instant. Earrings or necklaces. On Branch Bacardi’s sagging pecs, the two round red welts from the paddles could be cartoon nipples. Shiny new aureolas scarred into his chest. Ms. Wright’s heart-shaped locket so hot it’s burned into her chest. Branded Ms. Wright with a tiny heart. Both Bacardi’s new nipples and Ms. Wright’s heart still smoking. The locket’s sprung open, the gold turned black, the baby picture, inside, curled and charred in a puff of smoke.
