Popcorn

Chapter Eight

Dusk had fallen.

The searchlights that explored the sky above the theatre could be seen from miles away. The crowd was getting thicker and Bruce’s limo slowed down. It’s a funny thing about stretch limos: you can usually hire them for no more than twice or three times what an ordinary cab would cost and yet they remain a potent symbol of colossal wealth and celebrity. It crossed Bruce’s mind that he ought to be able to extrapolate some great truth from this observation, but he couldn’t think what it was.

The great car crawled forwards a few yards, clinging to the number plate in front, a pink number plate which read STAR. Bruce smiled. If there was one thing he knew about stardom, it was that if you had to stick it on your fender you hadn’t got it.

A limousine jam. Only in Hollywood could you have a genuine limousine jam. An entire traffic snarl made up exclusively of stretch limos. Here was another observation from which a pithy and illuminating irony could surely be gleaned. No matter how long your car is, in traffic they’re all the same length: they stretch from the one stuck in front of you to the one stuck behind. Not bad, Bruce mused. He might trot it out to the press tonight to show that he still had his feet on the ground despite being so very special.

The car stopped altogether.

Bruce leant back in the babysoft black leather, his wrapround Rays between him and the world, a drink in his hand and an Oscar very nearly in his pocket.

His mind began to dwell on a particularly gruesome and pointless murder that he was planning. He had it in his head pretty clearly now. A rundown Korean drug store in the Valley. Two white kids enter the store. White trash kids. Better still, middleclass white kids pretending to be trash. Talking dudespeak, of course, or whatever other hellish dialect the generation with no brain affected these days. (‘Generation X? Generation Xtremely fucking stupid,’ Bruce would say at parties.) The two kids approach the counter and ask for a quarter of Jack plus some Pepsi Max to mix. But the old Korean lady knows the law and doesn’t want to lose her liquor licence, so she asks for some ID.

‘Here’s my ID, bitch,’ says one of the boys and hauls out a machete. Not some stupid little knife, but a machete. Obviously the old lady tells the kids to forget about the ID, in fact she reaches down a whole pint of bourbon and offers it to them on the house. But it’s too late. She has crossed the line with these kids. She has ‘dissed’ them. They have been pushed too far and they ain’t gonna take it any more because, quite frankly, they are sick of the bullshit. So the boy swings his weapon towards the terrified woman in a huge arc and cuts her head off. Blood starts spurting out of the dead woman’s neck, which so excites the two kids that they hop over the counter and hack her up into a million pieces.

Bruce would do the whole thing to music, heavyduty rock ‘n’ roll perhaps, or maybe something witty and ironic like ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ or ‘All You Need is Love’. He would make it look like a pop video. Maybe he could have a TV on in the background, with a Tom and Jerry cartoon showing. That way, while the two kids were slicing up the old Korean woman, Jerry could be ironing Tom with a steam iron, or dicing him in the lawnmower.

‘What were you trying to tell us by juxtaposing your brutal murder with cartoon mayhem?’ assholes like Professor Chambers would ask.

‘I was telling you that the Korean woman had Tom and Jerry showing on her TV,’ he would reply enigmatically, and hundreds of film students would write essays about irony.

‘Bruce Delamitri is trying to tell us that America is now starring in its own animation,’ they would write. ‘We are all Tom, we are all Jerry, locked in a perpetual cycle of almost surreal violence.’

The limo driver barged in on Bruce’s thoughts. ‘There’s a hell of a queue to drop, Mr Delamitri. We’re going to be stalled for a while here.’

A limo jam. A jam of stretch limousines. It was faintly embarrassing.

Outside there were thousands of people, all staring. Faces everywhere, a wall of them. Bruce peered through the darkness of his shades and tried to focus on a pretty one but was disappointed. Despite their excitement, they all seemed drab and sad. Trash. Poor white, black, brown and yellow trash.

He glanced at the locks on the car doors. It was not that he thought he was in any danger – the crowd was well ordered and the cops were keeping it firmly behind barriers – but you could not help but feel a little exposed. All those people wanting something they would never get.

Maybe one day they would just grab it anyway. It crossed Bruce’s mind that the princes of old Russia must have stared out of their carriages at faces much like these just before their world got torn to bits in 1917.

But what did they want, craning their necks by the side of the street like that? It certainly wasn’t peace, bread and freedom. So what? They couldn’t see anything: all the limos had mirrored windows, so all they could see was themselves. Another irony; Bruce was full of them today. The harder those people tried to look into his world the more intensely they saw their own images staring back at them. That was it! The whole truth in one startling image. Why were Bruce’s movies so successful? Because people saw themselves reflected in them. Maybe betterlooking and a little cooler but none the less themselves, with their fears, their lusts, their most secret desires and fantasies. That damned professor had been wrong and he, Bruce, had been right. He was a mirror. He did not create a world for people to watch; they created a world for him to film.

They were his muse, these lumpen gawpers, staring at his car, trying to guess who might be inside it. Pointing, pointing their fingers and yet all they could see was their own images, pointing right back at them.

‘That’s right, point,’ Bruce said aloud. ‘Point the finger, accuse yourselves, because you and you alone are responsible for what you see. For what you are. For what you do.’

Up ahead the starlet in the purple dress had done her twirls, making the most of her thighs and her nipples.

Then it was his turn on the red carpet.

He stepped out of his limo intending scarcely to acknowledge the crowd, merely to stroll languidly into the theatre as if he was entering a bar. Perhaps he would allow a brief, cool nod towards the throng, but certainly no more than that. The sort of stroll and nod that said, ‘Am I the only person here who realizes that this is all bullshit?’ That was what he had intended, but instead Doctor Showbiz appeared as if from nowhere and gave him a shot in the arm. The crowd cheered and he couldn’t resist a stolen moment luxuriating in their attention. He turned, he waved, he checked his bowtie, he tugged charmingly at his earlobe.

‘Love me you bastards,’ he thought. ‘Look! Look! This is my night. I am the greatest director in the world and yet I have the grace to pretend I’m just an ordinary guy.’

‘Why, he’s just an ordinary guy,’ thought the crowd and the cheering redoubled. Except, of course, for the pickets. They did not cheer – well, why would they? As far as they were concerned, Bruce had murdered their children.

Their banners said, ‘MAD (Mothers Against Death)’. It was extraordinary the lengths people would go to to come up with a suitable acronym, the tortuous linguistic paths they were prepared to navigate in order to arrive at something they imagined sounded neat. These mothers weren’t against death, they were against violence and murder. But that would have spelt MAVAM which was not neat, so they had had to become Mothers Against Death (by violence and murder), or MAD. Bruce knew some of them by sight. They had been with him for months, these mothers whose sons and daughters he was supposed to have killed.

‘ Hollywood glorifies murder’, said their placards. ‘Bring back family entertainment’.

‘Like incest,’ Bruce thought, but fortunately he did not say it. Even cool mavericks in pointytoed boots had to recognize the limits.

‘Mr Delamitri,’ shouted one of the MAD mothers, ‘my son was murdered. An innocent boy, gunned down on the streets. In your last picture there were seventeen murders.’

‘Yeah, and there was plenty of sex in my movie too, but I bet you haven’t had any for a while.’ Again he thought it but didn’t say it.

These people were beyond rational argument. Bruce turned away from them and waved at the rest of the crowd.

‘Where’s the old lady?’ one tasteless wag shouted.

Funny how some people seem to think it’s perfectly all right to be rude to the rich and famous, as if having a lot of money meant that breaking up with your wife was not a painful experience. Bruce had not got married in public, and he certainly wasn’t getting divorced in public, but the whole messy business was none the less public property.

‘Where are your manners, you pathetic little nolife?’ was what Bruce wanted to reply, but he didn’t, of course. He merely smiled a ‘what can I tell ya?’ sort of smile and for this small capitulation he was rewarded with a thumbs up from his interrogator and another ragged cheer.

The mirror Bruce held up was a twoway thing. Occasionally he caught his own reflection in it. He wanted that crowd to love him, to appreciate him. So he smiled and waved and in their faces were reflected his weakness and his dishonesty.

It began to rain. A summer storm was coming in. Bruce hurried up the red carpet and into the theatre. He was wearing the genuine original tux that had been worn by Bogart in Casablanca , but it was only borrowed and he didn’t want it to get wet.

North of LA the storm had already broken. The highway shone like black patent leather, the lights of the traffic shimmering on its surface.

Inside the 1957 Chevrolet the young man and the even younger woman peered out at the road as the ancient wiper blades struggled with the downpour.

‘Ya gotta sacrifice comfort for style,’ the man had said, explaining his choice of which car to steal. ‘Even broke down and with its engine up on blocks, this car is a better car than every heap of foreign tin between here and Los Angeles.’

‘Leastways the radio works,’ the girl said, and found a hardrock station. Personally, she liked her music a little softer and sweeter, but she knew his tastes. Besides, what she liked to hear was the news. She liked being famous.

‘Latter day desperados… Bonnie and Clyde for the millennium… a Mexican chambermaid found dead in a chalet room, clutching clean towels and soap…’ The girl thought how strange it had been, watching movies all that time with the dead maid lying there in front of the TV.

‘… motel shortorder cook shot fourteen times…’

She should never have told him about that guy flirting. She’d known what would happen and it had.

The radio moved on to showbiz news.

‘… live from outside the Oscars… I see Bruce Delamitri acknowledging the crowd.’

‘Way to go,’ murmured the man as he peered into the rain. ‘You make sure you win, now, Bruce. Just you make damn sure you win.’