Popcorn

Chapter Eleven

There was a crowd of people round Bruce now, sensing scandal. Some kind of critic guy was in his face, a big noise, art editor on the LA Times , or maybe gardening editor, something he was pretty proud of anyway. Great Caesar’s tits, the man was a pompous little pecker.

‘I must say,’ the pecker said, ‘I found Ordinary Americans a wonderfully seductive piece of film entertainment.’

‘Film entertainment’. What a phrase! Not ‘work of art’, not ‘cultural benchmark’, not ‘celluloid reflection of the spirit of the age’, but ‘film entertainment’. As if Bruce made daytime soap or something.

Bruce did not consider himself conceited about his work. He was the first to admit that it was popcorn – but only if other popular and corny works like Romeo and Juliet and Beethoven’s Fifth were popcorn too.

‘And I will go to the wall,’ the pecker continued, as Bruce’s eyes glazed over, ‘to defend your right to kill as many people as you like in your movies. The only question I ask is – that ageold bugbear – is it art?’

‘Is it art?’ said Bruce. ‘Well, let me see now. That’s a tricky one. Is shooting a whole bunch of people in a movie art? I think the best way I can answer that is to ask you not to be such a complete fucking jerk.’ Not brilliant, perhaps, but it got the pecker to go away.

It brought Bruce no relief, though. One jerk was replaced by another. At least this time it was a lovely young actress. Lovely to look at, that is, not to listen to. She was a whiner, a spoilt brat. Her conversation had a banal selfassertiveness which was the result of rarely being contradicted, on account of the fact that she rarely spoke to anyone who wasn’t trying to sleep with her. Bruce did not want to sleep with her and so listened to the young woman’s conversation with a less indulgent ear than she was used to.

‘No, actually, as a matter of fact I don’t think I was emotionally abused as a child,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Well, I think I would know… Really? Is that so?’

According to the young woman, it was not necessarily the case at all that a person would be aware of having been emotionally abused. She herself had been blissfully ignorant of the appalling truth until it was uncovered via hypnotherapy.

‘And what did he say to that?’

It was the following morning and the girl (whose name was Dove) was recounting the story of her party encounter with Bruce to Oliver and Dale on Coffee Time USA, the events of Oscars night having by that time turned anyone who had been with Bruce during the previous twentyfour hours into an important character witness and a soughtafter celebrity. All across the air waves, hatcheck girls and drinks waiters were offering their opinion on Bruce’s state of mind during the five or six seconds they had spent with him ‘one on one’.

‘He said that I must be very relieved,’ Dove replied, looking beautifully earnest and careworn.

‘Hang on, let me get this straight here,’ said Oliver, putting on his glasses. Oliver’s glasses did not actually have any lenses, because if they had they would have reflected his autocue. Nevertheless he always kept them close by and put them on whenever he felt it necessary to make it clear that he was feeling deeply sympathetic and extremely concerned.

‘Bruce Delamitri said you must be relieved to have uncovered hidden memories of emotional abuse?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘How d’ya like that guy!’

‘He said that it meant I was off the hook. That I could do what I liked – take drugs, sleep around, steal stuff, be a total loser – and none of it would be my fault because some hypnotherapist had granted me victim status. Can you believe somebody would say that? I cried all night.’

Dove twisted a handkerchief between her dainty fingers in anguish at this painful memory.

‘Camera Four.’ Deep within the control suite the editor issued his instructions. ‘Extreme closeup on Dove’s hands.’

Dale saw the shot cut up on her monitor and put her hand on top of Dove’s.

‘You’re saying that Delamitri didn’t believe your very real heartache was anything more than a ploy?’

‘That’s right. He asked me how much I’d paid my hypnotherapist and when I told him three thousand dollars he said it was peanuts.’

‘Peanuts? Three thousand dollars?’ said Oliver, who earned eight million a year. ‘Well, I guess those Hollywood types never pretended to live down here in the real world with us ordinary folk, did they?’

‘He said that a hundred thousand dollars would have been cheap. He said what price could you put on getting an excuse to screw up your life.’

‘These guys just don’t think the rules of common decency and good manners count for them, do they?’

‘I guess not.’

‘So what did you say?’

‘I told him I had uncovered a deep and painful wound.’

‘Way to go, Dove. Feisty stuff,’ said Oliver. ‘We’ll be hearing more about Dove’s deep and painful wound and millionaire Delamitri’s cold indifference to her suffering after these messages.’

‘Excess wind can blight your life,’ said the sweet old lady standing in the park with her dogs.

‘I have uncovered a deep and painful wound,’ Dove said, attempting to fight her corner but making a pouty, sulky hash of it. She felt exposed and out of her depth. She did not really know how to handle men when they were not trying to sleep with her. Bruce just laughed. People were listening now but he didn’t care. Having personally spouted bullshit to a billion people earlier in the evening, he was not going to put up with it from anyone else.

‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘A deep and painful wound, but not quite deep and painful enough for you to notice until you paid some guy thousands of dollars to point it out.’

‘He didn’t say that!’ Dale said as Dove relived her terrible experience on the following morning.

‘He did say it,’ Dove protested. ‘Everybody heard.’

‘Let me get this straight here.’ Oliver adjusted his glasses and peered at the imaginary notes he’d been making. ‘He utterly denied the validity of the terrible emotional abuse you’d suffered? He accused you of making it up?’

‘Yes, he did, Oliver.’

‘Is that legal? I’m not sure that’s even legal.’ Oliver glanced about a bit. He liked to give the impression that behind the camera was a crack team of lawyers and researchers who would leap into action at the merest nod from the great man. In fact, behind the camera were a woman holding a powder brush and a woman holding a plastic cup full of water.

‘So what did you do?’ asked Dale. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said, “Mr Delamitri, just because you have made a lot of money exploiting the pain and suffering of others, that does not give you the right to exploit mine.” ’

‘Way to go, girlfriend,’ said Dale.

‘Right on, sister,’ said Oliver. ‘We’ll be back after this.’

‘As a woman you have a right to firm, uplifted breasts, no matter what your age.’

Dove lied on Coffee Time. In reality she had not been so courageous. Actually she had just stood there, tears of confusion forming in her eyes, wondering why this man was being so mean.

‘Anyway, what’s a little pain?’ Bruce said. ‘I mean, what would you be without that pain?’

‘Excuse me?’ Dove sniffed.

‘I’ll tell you. You’d be the same pointless and self-indulgent idiot that God made you, but you wouldn’t have anyone to blame it on.’

Dove was fighting back the tears now. What had gone wrong? People were supposed to cluck sympathetically when you told them about your emotional abuse, not emotionally abuse you.

‘Take it easy, Bruce. You’ve had a couple.’ An old friend of Bruce’s tried to lead him away, having decided that both Bruce and the company that distributed his movies might regret this behaviour in the morning.

‘And I shall tell you why I’ve had a couple,’ Bruce answered triumphantly. ‘Because I have an addictive personality, that’s why. You know how I know? A court told me so. Oh yes it did, when I got busted for drinkdriving. That was my plea. That’s what I said. Not “I’m sorry your honour, I’m an irresponsible shit” but “I can’t help it. I have an addictive personality”. I drank the booze, I drove the car but it wasn’t my fault! I had a problem you see and it saved me a prison term… Hey, Michael!’

A huge movie star was passing. He turned at Bruce’s call, delighted to be hailed by someone of equal celebrity.

‘Getting any at the moment?’ Bruce enquired.

It was a cheap shot and it touched a nerve. The star had recently been exposed in the press as a serial adulterer. He turned away without further acknowledging Bruce.

‘Addicted to sex,’ Bruce explained to Dove. ‘Did you read that? He said it to Vanity Fair after being caught in bed with various ladies to whom he was not married. He said he was addicted to sex. Not just a gutless, cheating little fuckrat, you notice. No. A sex addict. He had a problem, so it was not his fault.’

A little crowd had gathered by now, which was a considerable relief to Dove. She was extremely pleased no longer to be the sole target of Bruce’s anger.

‘Nothing is anybody’s fault. We don’t do wrong, we have problems. We’re victims, alcoholics, sexaholics. Do you know you can be a shopaholic? That’s right. People aren’t greedy any more, oh no. They’re shopaholics, victims of commercialism. Victims! People don’t fail any more. They experience negative success. We are building a culture of gutless, spineless, selfrighteous, whining crybabies who have an excuse for everything and take responsibility for nothing…’

‘He mentioned shopaholics?’ Oliver asked on the following morning. ‘Do you think that possibly, in some weird, uncanny, unconscious way, he was connecting there with the Mall Murderers? After all, what are malls full of? Shops, right?’

‘Right,’ said Dove, but slightly hesitantly.

‘And what are shops full of? Shopaholics!’

‘And murderers,’ Dale added helpfully.

‘Exactly,’ said Oliver. ‘Maybe, in some weird, uncanny, unconscious way, Bruce Delamitri knew what was coming.’

‘I am threatened by your attitude,’ said Dove.

She could not have said a worse thing.

‘Threatened? My God! So what? Who cares? I’m crying here. We all feel threatened, babe. You should be threatened with a baseball bat sometime and get things into perspective. There was a time when if someone said something you didn’t like you told them to shove it. Now you go to court and say you’ve been conversationally harassed.’

‘Bruce, please.’ His friend was still trying to calm him down, but Bruce wasn’t talking to him, or to Dove. He was talking to Professor Chambers and Dale and Oliver and the MAD mothers and the two mad psychos who were out there somewhere, stealing his plots.

‘Victims! Everyone is a fucking victim these days, and we’ve all got our victimsupport groups. Blacks, whites, old, young, men, women, gays, straights. Everybody looking for an excuse to fail. Well, it’ll kill us all, that’s what it’ll do. A society which defines its component groups by their weaknesses is going to die. We are losing more kids a year to violence than we did in the Vietnam war. But do we blame the violent people? No, we blame my fucking movies!’

‘Go home, Bruce,’ said his friend.

People were already drifting away. Dove had turned on her heel in disgust. His friend was right. It was Bruce’s night but he’d spoilt it. He was bored and boring. He decided he should go.

Then he saw Brooke.

Through the glittering hordes, way, way out across the bosom shelf he saw her: Brooke Daniels. Coincidence or what? Synchronisity surely. Everybody has some special fantasy figure, a particular pop singer or actor that comes number one in the ‘if you could have anyone for a night who would you have?’ party game. Up until a couple of days before Bruce would probably have answered Michelle Pfiefer in her Batwoman costume. Then he had happened to be glancing through a copy of Playboy Magazine at his agents office. Brooke had leapt instantly to the top of Bruce’s league. And now here she was, in the flesh, looking even better without the creases and the staples.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to anybody who cared to hear it, and plunged into the crowd, pushing his way through to where the woman of some of his more recent dreams was talking to a small man in a hired tuxedo.

‘Hi, pardon me for butting in but I won “Best Picture”, so I can do what the hell I like.’ All Bruce’s angry petulance disappeared instantly and was replaced by his more familiar charm.

‘Not at all, Mr Delamitri, and congratulations. I’m Brooke Daniels.’ Brooke smiled, pulling back her shoulders the tiniest fraction in order to add further lift to her magnificent figure.

‘I know who you are. I saw the Playboy spread – it was wonderful.’

‘Thank you. I don’t seem to be able to get away from that. I do acting too, you know.’

The little fellow in the borrowed tux shifted from one leg to the other, which was not a long journey.

Brooke remembered her manners. ‘This is… I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Kevin.’

‘Oh yes, of course, Kevin. This is Kevin. He’s from Wales, in England. This is Bruce Delamitri, Kevin.’

‘I know,’ said Kevin. ‘I saw Ordinary Americans. Bloody hell, I’m glad I didn’t take my gran.’

There didn’t seem to be an obvious answer to this, so Bruce didn’t offer one. Brooke hastened to fill the silence that followed, feeling for some reason that the responsibilities of playing hostess lay with her.

‘Kevin’s a winner too, Bruce. “Best Foreign Animated Short”. It’s about a boy called Midget-’

‘Widget,’ Kevin corrected her.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Brooke. ‘And he has a pair of magic Yfronts. What are Yfronts, Kevin?’

‘Underpants. They’re called Yfronts because they have an inverted Y on the front, which provides an orifice through which a bloke can poke his old fella.’ Kevin hoped she’d find his British bluntness charming.

‘Oh, I see.’ It didn’t look as if she did.

Bruce decided it was time to get rid of the Welshman. ‘Wait a minute, you mean you’re Kevin?’ he said, light apparently suddenly dawning. ‘The guy that makes the animated shorts? Jesus, are you a lucky guy! Sharon Stone is looking for you… Yes, that’s right, she wants to talk about your Widget… No I’m not kidding… I don’t know, maybe she likes Welsh guys, but she told me that when she saw your movie it made her nipples hard… That is what she said, word for word: it made her nipples hard… You’d better go talk to her.’

In a pub back home Kevin might have spotted that he was the victim of a less than elaborate hoax, but at the Governor’s party? Talking to Bruce Delamitri? He had just won an Oscar, after all, so surely anything was possible, even the notion that the work of the Welsh Cartoon Collective (in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain, Channel Four Wales and some high street bank’s Youth Initiative) could make Sharon Stone’s nipples go hard. He thanked Bruce for the tip and scurried off.

‘That was a little cruel, wasn’t it?’ Brooke enquired.

‘No way. How many guys get to spend five minutes of their life believing Sharon Stone is interested in them?’

Bruce felt much better already. ‘Great dress,’ he volunteered, and of course what he meant was great body, the dress, such as it was, being merely what might be called garnish, or figuredressing.

‘Thanks. Bold, I’ll admit, but it’s tough to make an impact these days. Did you see the Baywatch Babes make an entrance? It was like silicone valley in earthquake season. It’s getting so that the only women who get noticed are the tattooed lesbians from New Zealand.’

A little later they danced. It caused quite a stir, Bruce being nearly at the end of a very public divorce.

‘Can I say something embarrassing?’ Brooke asked.

‘Sure.’ Bruce hoped desperately she wasn’t going to comment on the fact that he had been pushing his erection against her stomach for the past five minutes.

‘I didn’t see your picture. The one you got the Oscar for, Ordinary Americans.’

For some reason Bruce was pleased. ‘That’s OK, I don’t insist. It’s probably just as well, anyway. Maybe you’d have gone out and shot up a shopping mall.’

For a moment the bitter memory of his speech intruded on Bruce’s burgeoning seduction. He forced such unhappy thoughts from his mind and concentrated on the extraordinary body he held in his arms.

For her own part, Brooke seemed to feel that some apology was called for. ‘I can’t imagine how I didn’t get to see it.’

‘Well, I guess you just never visited a movie theatre when it was playing…’

They danced for a moment in silence. Bruce had a thought. It was so long since he’d asked a girl to leave a party with him he’d been wondering how to broach the subject. Now Brooke had offered him the perfect opening.

‘Maybe you’d like to see it now?’

‘Now?’

‘Sure. I have a print at the studio. We could grab some beers and dumb bits of cracker with blobs of caviare on them and go watch it on my editing machine.’

‘My God, I’ve had guys ask me to the movies before, but this is the first time the guy with the Oscar offered me a private view. Quite a date.’

‘So you’ll come?’

‘No, I have netball practice. Of course I’ll come, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Great. I think you’ll like the picture. One word of warning though: it does contain scenes of graphic violence.’