Popcorn

Chapter Nine

‘Bruce Delamitri! Yeah, way to go! All right!’ the impossibly cute blonde modelturnedactress almost shouted, making the most of her last syllable in the spotlight.

On the whole the people brought on to do the presenting at awards ceremonies are divided into two groups, the big names and the small. The big names are those who have been nominated for an award themselves and have been persuaded to muck in elsewhere during the evening to help things swing. They do not want to do this of course, since it considerably lessens a star’s impact when they finally appear themselves as a recipient if they have only recently been welcomed on stage to give some nobody or other the gong for ‘Best ForeignLanguage Lyric’. Nevertheless, big stars often agree to do the required chore because they are unable to avoid the tiny, unworthy suspicion that a refusal might somehow affect their own chances. Traditionally, big names who have not been nominated refuse requests to present. They are happy to turn up, of course, and sit in the stalls observing proceedings with a bemused tolerance, but they are not prepared to play John the Baptist to some hated rival’s Messiah. Which means that the organizers of these events are forced to fall back on the second group: small names, people who have been around for either a very short time or a very long time. The former are not yet famous enough to cause much excitement, and the latter are destined to provoke excitement only once more in their lives and that, paradoxically, will be when they die. It is these people who fill the gaps between the genuinely important names.

Bruce scored a notyetfamousenough.

It should not have been that way, of course. ‘Best Director’ is one of the jewels in the Academy’s crown, and under normal circumstances one of the pressganged biggies would have presented Bruce with his statuette. But Hollywood is a scared town. Nobody wants to be connected with any controversy, and with his placard-waving band of MAD camp followers Bruce was highly controversial. His presence on the list of nominees had been enough to cause all the glittering superstars originally approached to get headaches.

‘Bruce Delamitri! Yeah, way to go! All right!’

Bruce leapt out his seat like an eager puppy at the sound of his name. He had intended to arch his eyebrows in surprise and then rise slowly and rather reluctantly. Instead it looked as if his backside was springloaded. Recovering slightly, but still grinning like a lunatic, he set off towards the podium. Behind him a tuxedoed extra slipped into his place; the Oscars ceremony is, when all is said and done, a television programme, and no seating gaps are allowed to mar the perfect picture.

The cute starlet beamed at Bruce as he approached her. Held firmly in her grip and pressed hard against her impossibly, absurdly perfect body was the twelveinch golden icon. If Bruce’s mouth hadn’t been so dry he would probably have dribbled. This felt good. All through the interminable earlier part of the proceedings his mind had been a jumble of possible things to say. He would speak out against the New Right and its creeping censorship, condemn the way hysterical outrage had replaced reasoned debate, call for freedom of speech, proclaim the sacred individuality of the artist in a democracy. Basically, just be a complete and utter hero.

In front of a billion people.

That was what he had been told: a billion people were watching. A billion. On the long walk up the aisle towards the beaming starlet, he tried to conjure up some kind of image of what that meant. He thought of all the faces outside the theatre, the ones staring into his limousine; he imagined the whole sky filled with those faces, a big sky, a desert sky, filled with gawping faces from one horizon to the other, all staring at him. He couldn’t do it. It didn’t mean anything. A hundred people, a billion people – either way it was a lot of people if they were all staring at you.

Now Bruce was on the stage, standing alone in a single spotlight, the Oscar in his hand.

Now was his chance. To tell it like it was. To rise above the sanctimonious emotional manipulation that had characterized the evening thus far. Like the ‘Best Actor’, who had won his award for playing a person with brain damage and who had actually carried a braindamaged child on to the stage and presented her with his award. Or the ‘Best Actress’, who had won so many hearts by accepting her award dressed in a gown designed in the shape of an enormous Aidsawareness ribbon. Like the ‘Best Supporting Actor’, who had pointed out that Hollywood’s duty was the ‘inspirationalization’ of the world; and the ‘Best Supporting Actress’, who had made an emotional appeal from the podium for more understanding of everything. The endless list of thanks to Mom, Dad, ‘my creative team’, ‘the many, many people whose dedicated work goes into enabling me to be me’, God and America.

Now it was Bruce’s turn. To tell it like it really was.

‘I stand here on legs of fire.’

Legs of fire?

It just came out. Despite his best noble intentions to say what he really felt, the awesome scale of the event possessed him. The billion people in the mirror possessed him. Suddenly he was no longer his own man. He had become an automaton, an unwilling conduit for mawkish, sentimental drivel.

‘I want to thank you. Each and every person in this room. Each and every person in this industry. You nourished me and helped me to touch the stars…’

What could he do? He could not rain on the parade. Nobody loves a griper, particularly if that griper is holding in his firm, manly grasp the one thing that everybody in the whole room covets the most. Look at Brando. He wasn’t the only person who was sorry for the Indians or Native Americans or whatever they were called. Everybody felt bad about them, but bringing them up at the Oscars? It just looked smug and rude. Besides, the people who were outside protesting had lost loved ones. Nothing to do with him, of course, but nevertheless it ill behoved a man of his splendid achievement to piss on the bereaved from the Olympian heights of the Oscars ceremony.

‘… You are the wind beneath my wings and I flap for you. God bless you all. God bless America. God bless the world as well. Thank you.’

The room erupted into rapturous applause. It was an ovation of relief. Bruce Delamitri had acted like a grownup. When his name was announced, many people had wondered whether he would seize the opportunity to be rude and controversial. Bruce did, after all, represent the young, thrusting, cool, cynical Hollywood which simply did not give a fuck. It had been eminently possible – indeed probable – that he would seek unworthy notoriety by being unpleasant and abrasive. A few of the more timid souls feared he might even mention those dreadful pickets outside the theatre who were trying to spoil everybody’s big night. But what a pleasant surprise. Bruce’s speech had been a model of Oscarsnight grace and good manners. Textbook stuff: sincere, selfeffacing, patriotic and very, very moving.

Hollywood welcomed one of its own into the fold. Bruce walked from the podium and into the welcoming arms of the upper echelons of the entertainment establishment.

Back up the coastal highway, they were finally clearing away the bodies of the Mexican maid and the shortorder chef, two people who had come into contact with a moral vacuum and who had paid the price. The State Troopers shook their heads. The detectives shook their heads.

‘Jerry made me a steak only this morning,’ said one Trooper as the trolley upon which Jerry’s corpse lay was wheeled out into the parking lot. From the front Jerry had still looked like Jerry. He had taken any number of bullets, but modern highvelocity weapons make very neat entry wounds. Not so the exit wounds. Each bullet pushes an expanding cone of flesh in front of it on its journey through the body, and when it blasts its way out the damage is horrific. From the front Jerry was merely slightly perforated; from the back he was just so much pulp.

The maid had been strangled.

‘Why’d they do that?’ the Trooper wondered. ‘I mean, why the fuck did those bastards have to do that? Weren’t no call. No money nor nothing. So why’d they do that?’

Contrary to popular mythology, American police officers do not spend all day every day scraping corpses off walls and floors. Perhaps the Washington DC Homicide Department do, but not the average cop. Death is not uncommon in their job but it is not the norm either, and the two State Troopers weren’t so familiar with murder as to be indifferent to it.

‘Ain’t no reason why,’ one of the detectives answered. ‘These kids are just doing it for kicks. Maybe they was high on drugs, listening to some damn Satanic heavymetal music, or else maybe they just watched another movie.’

There were still a few news reporters left on the scene.

‘So you definitely think this is another copycat killing, chief?’ one said eagerly. ‘It’s got to be the Mall Murderers, hasn’t it?’

‘Well, this ain’t no mall, is it? Although, hell, those psychotic bastards ain’t particularly choosy where they perpetrate their mayhem. I don’t know, you tell me. Maybe they was copying something they saw, maybe it was two other fuckups copying them.’

‘A copycat copycat?’ asked the reporter, scribbling furiously.

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s a copycat, copycat, copycat. All I know is that two innocent, ordinary Americans are dead.’

‘And that’s the point isn’t it?’ said the reporter, seizing on the detective’s words like a dog with a bone. ‘That’s what this is, just one more ordinary story of Ordinary Americans.’

‘Well, I don’t know what you’d call ordinary,’ the cop replied. ‘I’ve been coming to this diner for over thirty years now and nobody ever got shot here before.’

But the reporter had stopped scribbling.