Beautiful Soon Enough

Small Craft

Small Craft He has an impressive collection of Mickey Mouse memorabilia, a lamp that dances and glows lowly in the dark. In the morning he is up and out jogging faster than Bugs Bunny. —You can have a quickie sauna before ya leave, he calls from the coffeemaker. He’s a baby-faced, six-foot blond, tight belt over a thin waist, small hands. She clocks how he scratches at his hands. Often. An early psoriasis . “Stand still like the hummingbird” —Henry Miller 52 berdeshevsky She has been lying in his ship-shaped bed, still, not yet able to move after he has risen. She’s counting, just how many Mickey mice. His coffee tastes like chocolate and cherry. At his garage door, he nods vaguely, finishing his juice. —It’s good for you, kid, this is a big town. You’re a little svelte part of it. She snaps a gardenia from his bush on the way to her car. Shakes it hard, to get rid of its tiny ants. Leaves it on her dashboard until it stinks. When he came late to their hookup at the old Brown Derby last night, the actress had been waiting for an hour. While being noticed. Only her pumping crossed leg, right knee crossed over left, and that leg pumping, pumping, pumping, showed the banal rage. Nervous, facing the room nearly expressionless and superbly dressed, sitting tight, she kept moving. He answered his calls first, table phone and waiter, both ready. Then he ordered oversized scampi and St. Emilion , a small left hand perching at her now unseen and now quieted knee, under the table; and a lazy invite to his Mulholland bedroom. Just follow him up the glittered drive. There are no small roles, only small actors, so they said; a given, of the art that makes stars and embers and coals, of starved-to-benoticed talents. She is un-discovered, she can cry on cue, and has memorized sonnets to prove her worth to gods. She tells no one how she devours bags of Mrs. Field’s cookies on freeway drives home from producers’ chairs; she looks good in denim shorts and high heels. Her agent compares her to a dark young Salomé when he sells her, one ’a the four great actresses in town, he says. She tries to be big about it, she is just not famous. —I have a date with a Mister Big, she had crowed two days ago, like her Santa Rosa uncle’s best fighting cock. And her agent rose from his facing black leather office couch. —Just be the best lay he’s ever had. And he patted her shorts. She wasn’t. It’s now a private conference. —Someday, darlin’, maybe think about a teeny lift? You have the legs. You look great, but hey. small craft 53 She didn’t. A pebble. A small craft in a nasty sea. She wants a win, before she hits twenty-five. She works out like a fighter. Memorizes and rehearses like an ancient orator: Demosthenes with little stones in her mouth. She refuses to be a lightweight. She wants to be an old-fashioned, new knockout. There is a very small role. A crazy-patient in a film-noir about locked-up visionaries. The lead is possessed by Blakeian angels, the script is a gem. Festivals. A guarantee. She is to sit on the floor of a hospital and draw with crayons, while the lead has one of her best scenes. There is to be a single closeup of her twisted soul which she has let show with all the veracity and intuition she has for madness. She is memorizing Ophelia now. What actress in town does not have frenzy and a twisted psyche to survive the black weather that comes in the sunshine. They are filming in an abandoned former mental hospital condemned for earthquake instabilities . The production has a special-use permit for six days before the bulldozers that will come to reshape Sepulveda. They have been shooting from every angle, cracking already fissured and grimed windows and shooting through the new fissures for effects, re-taking for low-flying planes that ruin the soundtracks, re-taking for the fragile lead’s upset stomach. Re-taking for unwanted shadows and lunch breaks. It is the long detail-ridden business of movie-making. The actress with her small role is piling...