“How do I do it?” Haverty asked her with a snort. He was responding to Lyndsay’s question, asked in the last take, about how he could see things like what they had seen today and not go crazy. He hefted up his glass, showing it to her. “This stuff helps a lot, even though it screws up the rest of your life. That’s a start. That’s why so many of us are alcoholics, or pill poppers, or both. It’s a crutch and most of us seem to need a crutch to do what we do every day.”
Lyndsay nodded, taking a drink out of her own glass. “I think I understand that now,” she said quietly.
“But that’s not the real trick to surviving this job,” Haverty said.
“What’s the real trick?” she asked.
“The real trick is to just not give a fuck,” he said. “To realize that nothing matters anyway. None of this shit. The world is a fucked-up place and we’re all just here to do the best we can to keep it from spinning completely out of control.”
Lyndsay was shaking her head. “I can’t accept that,” she said. “That girl today, she mattered, Frank! She was pregnant. Her baby mattered. And that asshole, the man who put that baby in her, shot her in the fucking chest because they were arguing over the TV! And she and her baby died right in front of us! Now he’ll go to prison for the rest of his life and she and the baby are dead. She was only nineteen, Frank! He was only twenty-one! Three lives were destroyed tonight in less than ten seconds. How can you possibly say that doesn’t matter?”
“Because it doesn’t,” he said softly. “Not to me, not to the world. You’re sitting there talking like they were taxpaying citizens and the world is going to be missing out on some fucking future Nobel Laurette or something. They were welfare scum, Lyndsay, three or more generations in and none of them had any hope in life. That girl was a high school dropout working in a mini-mart to pay for her vodka and cigarettes. That baby daddy was on parole for selling meth and was tweaking all over the place when we arrested him. That baby was going to be born into a fucked-up existence and grow up to be just like mommy or just like baby-daddy. Why in the fuck should I give a shit about what happened to them? Why should I let that shitshow get into my head and drive me crazy? Keep me up at night? What good does that do? It doesn’t make any of this shit go away, does it?”
“No,” she said quietly. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“And that’s how you do it,” Frank said. “You tell yourself it doesn’t matter, you learn to believe it, to know it, and you drown any doubts with alcohol if they try to surface. That’s the secret to surviving on the streets. It’s more important than that gun I carry or that vest I wear. It’s more important than all that training they give us, than remembering not to stand in doorways or how to walk up on a car you just pulled over. Three times as many cops have been killed by putting their own guns in their mouths because they couldn’t handle the job than have ever been cut down by some asshole on the streets.” He tapped his temple with his finger. “Survival starts here, Lyndsay, with learning not to give a shit about this fucked-up world and the fucked-up people in it.”
She looked at him across her glass for a moment and then shook her head. “I could never let myself get that cold,” she finally said.
He nodded. “That’s what makes you one of them, hon, and not one of us.”
Another nod. “I guess it is,” she said. She then finished off the rest of her drink and set the glass down.
Frank finished his as well. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here while we can both still walk.”
“All right,” she said. “That’s probably a good idea.”
They both paused, continuing to look at each other across the table, remaining in character. They’d reached the end of the scene, but the cameras were still rolling. Had they really just gone through it successfully?
“And ... cut!” Fletch called out.
The cameras were turned off. The extras stopped moving about. Greg and Mindy let their faces return to neutral expressions. They looked over at the director.
“That was good, guys,” he told them, giving a thumbs up. “Good expression, good delivery for both of you. We’ll see how it looks when I review the dailies tomorrow, but I think we got a wrap on this scene.”
Mindy smiled and stood up. “Fuckin’ fab,” she declared, holding out her palm to Greg.
He high-fived her enthusiastically. “Nailed it that time,” he said. “I was so into character there that I almost feel drunk and pissed off at the world.”
“Me too,” Mindy said. “I was totally Lyndsay there. Feeling pity for you, sadness for the mother, fear for my own sanity. We really do have some chemistry, Greg!”
“Agree,” he said, nodding. “We were clicking really well.”
“That was a good flow on the take,” Fletch agreed. “Hopefully, that click holds for the parking lot scene tonight.”
“We’re still on for filming that tonight?” asked Greg, part of him nervous about the idea, part of him looking forward to it. The parking lot scene was to be the beginning of the first sex scene. Linearly, it would take place immediately after the scene they had just filmed, out in the parking lot of the Star Lounge (though they would actually be filming it in a closed off parking lot of a strip mall out in Oak Park) after Haverty saw Lyndsay safely to her car. They would stand beside it for a moment, telling each other goodbye for the evening, and then they would share a simple hug. The hug would turn passionate and lead to the two of them kissing and pawing each other before making the decision to return to Lyndsay’s condo on the lake and have sex. It would be the first truly intimate contact that the two actors would share.
“Tonight’s a perfect night for it,” Fletch said. “It’s a weekday, so everything will be closed early at the site. Oak Park PD has agreed to seal off the block for us if we give them three hours of warning time. It’s a clear night without much moonlight to interfere with the lighting.”
“Sounds good, Fletch,” Mindy said. “What time?”
“Sunset is 8:20 tonight,” he said. “We’ll need it to be completely dark for the shoot, so I’m thinking that 9:30 action would be about right. That means you two need to report for makeup and wardrobe at 8:30, here at the soundstage. We’ll have you go through the readings and then drive you out there in the limo. The auxiliary makeup and wardrobe trailer will be at the site for touchups. If it goes well, hopefully we’ll be back at the hotel before midnight.”
“Hopefully,” Greg said, pondering the thought of spending two hours or so hugging, groping, and kissing Mindy Snow under studio lights next to a car in a parking lot. It was not exactly an unpleasant pondering. It’s not like I’ll be cheating on Celia or anything, he thought. It’s my job. And it’s just make believe anyway. We’ll just be moving our mouths together and acting like we’re kissing passionately.
“Be sure to put those wardrobe items on hangers and keep them out,” said Lane Casper, the script supervisor. “It is imperative that you wear the same clothing for the parking lot scene as you did for the bar scene.”
“Understood, Lane,” Mindy told her. She then turned to Greg and smiled at him. “Looks like the fun’s about to really start, huh?”
Greg wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that. But he agreed anyway.
The temperature dropped into the low sixties after sunset, but the humidity held steady in the high eighties. It was muggy, with almost no wind coming off the lake, and there were mosquitos and gnats cruising around, occasionally lighting on skin for a quick bite. The parking lot of the closed down strip mall had been transformed by the crew. Oak Park police cruisers had sealed off the block and were keeping all traffic and all pedestrians out of the area. Special lighting towers had been placed around a thirty-foot square in the center of the lot and were providing an artificial brightness that would be damped down by camera settings, giving the illusion of a poorly lit locale. A leased BMW 5 series sedan—the car Lyndsay Brown drove—was parked in a slot in the middle of the square. Several other vehicles, all belonging to locally hired crew members, none of them as nice as the Beemer, were parked on either side to make the parking lot look occupied. The boom microphone stretched out and hung just over the BMW’s driver’s side, where the scene would take place. Two cameras were set up, one to catch a side angle of Haverty and Lyndsay, the other to catch an oblique angle. Behind the cameras were the director’s chair and the rest of the crew. Greg and Mindy, now dressed back in the same clothes they had worn earlier, their hair styled exactly the way it had been when they had filmed the end of the bar scene, slowly got into position for the first take.