Get Real

29

WHEN THEY FIRST started to do the camera thing, Dortmunder found himself, to his surprise, itching all over. That was completely unexpected, the idea that all of a sudden he’d be feeling this great need to scratch, all different parts of his body. He didn’t want to scratch, he just felt compelled to scratch, but he fought it off, because he was damned if he was going to stand there and look like an idiot, scratching himself like a dog with fleas in front of a bunch of cameras.

And the cameras themselves were intrusive in ways he hadn’t guessed. They were like those barely seen creatures in horror movies, the ones just leaving the doorway or disappearing up the stairs. Except that the cameras weren’t disappearing. They were there, just incessantly there, at the edge of your peripheral vision, their heads turning slightly, polite, silent, very curious, and big. Big.

Between the nudging presence of the cameras and the maddening need to scratch all these itches, Dortmunder found himself tightening into knots, his movements as stiff as the Tin Woodman’s before he gets the oil. I’m supposed to act natural, he told himself, but this isn’t natural. I’m lumbering around like Frankenstein’s monster. I feel like I’ve been filled up with itchy cement.

Roy Ombelen had them go through the scene, and Dortmunder thought it went along pretty good, except for the stiffness and the need to scratch, but then Roy said, “Cut,” and then he said, “Guys, let me make one other thing clear here. We know we don’t want the cameras to look at your faces, but the other part of that, we don’t want you to look at the cameras. You’re in a conversation, so be in the conversation. Look at the people you’re talking to. There are no cameras here, okay?”

Okay, they said, and Roy started the scene again, and they all caught on to that part pretty quick, all of them. In fact, Dortmunder noticed, once he wasn’t thinking about the cameras, the itches started to fade. Another plus.

But then Roy cut them again and said, “Doug, I think we need the girlfriend in on this. Give the cameras something else to look at.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Doug said.

So Darlene came over from the sofa where she’d been reading a People magazine, and Marcy told her who she was and what was motivating her and gave her a couple of things she might want to say. The idea was, she came to the bar with her boyfriend Ray, but then she would wait in the bar while the others went to the back room to talk business. Also, because she wasn’t part of the robbery story, the cameras wouldn’t mind looking at her, which everybody thought was okay.

They rehearsed it the new way, with Darlene, and people were getting more relaxed, more into the flow of things. Gradually, Dortmunder grew less stiff and itchy, and it was even becoming kind of fun, sitting around, pretending to be tough guys in a tough bar talking tough to each other. It was very different, this new OJ, not having the regulars around to sing a cappella.

They did it three times, all the way through, with the cameras on, and it all seemed to go very smoothly. Between takes Marcy would suggest small changes in what people would say, and after a while it all got to be so easy and natural that Dortmunder found he was actually enjoying himself, as though he were really in a real bar having a real conversation with a real bartender.

It was a short scene, which was probably a good thing for those members of the cast not used to this sort of activity. It opened with Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny and the kid sitting at the bar, talking with Rodney, ordering drinks—somehow they all seemed to be drinking Budweiser beer—and then Ray Harbach came in with Darlene. Marcy gave Kelp a couple of flirty things to say to Darlene, which he did mostly as though he was trying to lift her spirits rather than put the moves on her, which was just as well, because Marcy hadn’t given Darlene any reaction instructions, so Darlene just stood there with a vacant smile on her face while Kelp’s witticisms wandered off away from the set.

On the one hand, Darlene didn’t add much to the occasion, basically having not been given anybody to be or any reason to exist, but on the other hand her presence did completely change the dynamic and everybody felt it. The gang became more confident, somehow, and more united. The same things said by the same people in the same way became more interesting.

After the third taped run-through of the bar scene, Roy Ombelen told Darlene and Rodney the barman they were finished for the day and they’d be getting a callback when they were next needed, which would be sometime after tomorrow. They left, and when the receding elevator racket finished, Ombelen led his five players and his camerapeople and two other guys who had something to do with light and sound and his producer to the hall set with the fake restrooms.

And now there was a delay because the lighting was all wrong and something was screwed up with the sound, so the reality stars of tomorrow were told they could go back and lounge on the OJ set while the hall was being perfected.

Once away from the cameras and the role-playing, Dortmunder found himself returning to his right mind, and he wished he could talk with the others, or at least with Kelp, about this situation, but of course he couldn’t, not with Harbach here. So he sat in silence, telling himself the things he would have been telling Kelp, things he already knew, until he couldn’t stand it any more, and that’s when he stood and said, “Andy, let’s walk a little.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Kelp said.

Harbach looked briefly as though he might volunteer to walk with them, but the kid, recognizing what Dortmunder was up to, chose that moment to say, “Ray, I keep thinking you look familiar somehow. Would there be any television shows I might’ve seen you on?”

“Well,” Harbach said, “I don’t suppose you’ve watched a lot of soap operas,” by which time Dortmunder and Kelp were already on their feet and out of the OJ set, so that danger was averted.

This was still a pretty big building, and there was still a lot of underused floor space away from the three sets. Dortmunder and Kelp strolled through this, and Dortmunder said, “What are we gonna do here?”

“Well,” Kelp said, “we still got the problem of the tenant.”

“I know that. We gotta come back tonight and see if he’s still there. And this time, I gotta come along, because if we can go in, I wanna be there.”

“Okay, sure. But what if he’s still there?”

“I dunno about this TV thing,” Dortmunder said. “I mean, it wasn’t too bad after a while—”

“Once you got used to the cameras. And the guy carrying the microphone in the air over your head.”

“He didn’t bother me so much,” Dortmunder said, because he’d barely noticed that guy. “But, Andy, this isn’t what we do. What we do is, we go in, we pick up what we pick up, we go out. One, two, it’s done. This thing, they rehearse it over and over.”

“Maybe,” Kelp said, “the guy will be gone tonight. And we can give up our TV career.”

“Hey, Andy! Hey, John!”

It was Doug, over by the sets, waving to them, so they went over there and Kelp said, “Are we ready for my close-up?” which Dortmunder didn’t get, but which apparently Doug did, because he laughed and said, “Just about, Norma. I wanted to tell you guys, when they’re done taping today, I’d like you to stick around a little. Babe’s coming back downtown, and he thinks he might have the solution to our problem.”

Kelp said, sounding as enthusiastic as though he actually intended to go through with this reality thing, “That’s great, Doug. I figured we could count on Babe.”

“Oh, yeah,” Doug said. “Babe’s been around the block a couple times. He knows what’s what. You’re not gonna put anything over on Babe.”

“That’s great news,” Dortmunder said.

The taping in the hallway, once they got their technical problems out of the way, didn’t take long at all. Two of the cameras were used, both behind the group, one high and one low, panning forward as the group moved.

Even being wider than the hallway in the original OJ, this one was still not wide enough for all five to walk abreast, so they proceeded in a little cluster, telling each other the made-up stuff they’d been given by Marcy, about how they hadn’t seen one another in a while, and how it was good to get the gang working together again, and how they couldn’t wait to hear Ray’s news.

Three times they did this, walking down the same hall to the same doorway to nowhere, the cameras trailing like large black dogs, and the third time, when Ombelen called, “Cut!” Dortmunder turned around and looked back there, and saw, just beyond the cameras and the camerapersons and the soundman with the long sound boom and Ombelen and Doug, there was Babe Tuck. And standing beside Babe Tuck was a very rigid-looking guy, balding, spectacled, in a three-piece black suit and pale blue shirt and dark blue tie.

Beside Dortmunder, Kelp coughed a little, putting his hand up to his mouth. Behind that hand, “Zeitung,” he muttered.