How's it feel seeing your dick and balls, or your clit and cunt flaps, cloned a zillion times and sitting on the shelf behind some gum-chewing porn-store clerk? Or, worse, your most private bits heaped in some bargain bin, strangers lifting, squeezing, pinching, and rejecting them the way they would avocados at the supermarket?
But, again, this dialogue just does not read.
One could attempt a funny anecdote, a true story about a dear friend. Carl. A huge fan of the Branch Bacardi Super Deluxe. How one morning Carl looked in the toilet and saw thin pink squiggles in his bowel movement. Worms. Ghastly pinworms. But when he carried in a cardboard sample-box of his shit for testing, the lab results came back negative. The pink threads weren't parasites. They were rubber. The pink rubber foreskin of his Super Deluxe had begun to degrade and flake apart. When Carl's proctologist used the word, that's exactly how Carl felt: Flaky. Degrading. Degraded.
One could risk sharing the story about how Carl hooked up with a trick—oh, years ago. And the two men went home together, only to discover they were both big passive bottoms. To satisfy everyone, they shared a two-headed Branch Bacardi special. This happy bumping of sphincters worked fine until—wouldn't you know it—Carl felt his paramour du jour was enjoying more than his allotted half. What had started as a casual, anonymous encounter turned into a savage butt-sex tug-of-war, only with no knot in the rope, no flag to keep one partner from gobbling down all the shared real estate. A greed guard. No Berlin Wall of silicone rubber to keep everyone honest.
Yes, a person might risk such a story, but the last fact a celebrity cocksman like Branch Bacardi wants to hear is that his product is defective.
And God forbid Bacardi think I'm Carl. That I've invented a friend to hide behind.
Under my arm, I'm pitted out so badly that sweat's soaked into Mr. Toto's canvas skin, bleaching out Bette Midler's message—"Let's Always Stay Best Friends! Love, Bette" — leaving the words just a blotched blue smudge. Whether it's from the blue pills or feeling nervous, I've sweated out Carol Channing and Barbra Streisand. "Our Weekend in Paris Was Heaven. Yours Always, Barbra."
This actor 72, shifting his bouquet from one arm to the other, he looks at Mr. Toto and says, "What's Goldie Hawn like?"
One can't truly cry, because the Bette Midler was a fake. So was the Carol Channing. And the Jane Fonda. Okay, the truth is, they're all fake. I wrote them all myself, in different handwritings and different colors of ink.
One just cannot approach a star like Cassie Wright with an empty autograph hound. I wanted her to sign her own name among a galaxy of stars. As if we were all close friends.
The truth is, I haven't met any of these women.
After Miss Wright signs, I plan to copy her handwriting and add, "Thanks for the Fuck of a Lifetime!"
One just can't ask a big star like Cassie Wright for that kind of personal inscription. Especially if it's a lie.
And you can't tell an actor like Branch Bacardi that, thanks to his Super Deluxe, you have a callus on your prostate. Even if it's the truth.
His nipple must've scabbed over, because Bacardi's stopped blotting it with the toilet paper. Instead, he's fingering a necklace. A pendant. Some small gold something hanging from a chain around his neck. Using both hands, he holds the pendant with only his fingertips. Picking with a fingernail, he pops the pendant open and looks inside. It's a locket or a box. No doubt, hidden inside is a little portrait or a lock of hair.
Another form of immortality.
The next time he looks over, if Mr. 600 does approach, perhaps I could tell him about the Vatican, how, if you ask politely, the curators will pull out drawer after drawer to show you the relics within. According to Carl, nested inside some drawers are carved marble dicks. Penises. In alabaster, onyx, obsidian. Row after row, drawer after drawer of ancient pricks, each one numbered, keyed to some masterpiece left castrated. This collection of hundreds of numbered dicks, they were all chiseled off Greek and Roman statues, Egyptian and Byzantine, and replaced with pasted-on plaster fig leaves.
Bronze Minoan pricks, hacked off, small as bullets. Etruscan terra-cotta pricks, crumbling to dust. These priceless wieners, they're nothing the righteous want you to see, but they're still too important to discard.
The same as, inside all those nightstands and glove compartments, all those Branch Bacardi dildos and Cassie Wright vaginas.
I could tell Bacardi that the electric vibrator was first marketed in the 1890s. The first household appliances to be electrified were the sewing machine, the fan, and the vibrator. Americans enjoyed electric vibrators ten years before electric vacuum cleaners and irons. Twenty years before electric frying pans were brought to the market.
To hell with housework, our top priority has always been between our legs.
The talent wrangler walks past me, carrying a potato-chip bag stuffed full of bloody paper napkins from the actor with the split lip. Red blood and orange barbecue flavoring smeared into the white paper. At Branch Bacardi, the young lady stops a moment and he drops his toilet paper spotted with nipple blood into her bag.
Watching the young lady, the boy with his flowers, actor 72, says, "I hate her," his grip crackling, crushing, crumpling the clear plastic funnel holding his roses. His fists squeeze, tighter and tighter, until the thorns poke through.
Watching the talent wrangler, actor 72 says, "How much you want to bet that bitch trashes every letter anybody sends to Cassie Wright, no matter how important what's inside or how much a guy really just wants to tell Cassie how much she means to him?"
If he comes over, that's what I'll tell Bacardi about: those Vatican curators with their dusty drawers full of priceless, faceless, numbered dicks.
Inside his necklace is something no one else can see, but Branch Bacardi looks at it for a long time. Measured by the movies playing overhead, he looks at his secret for a three-way. two blow jobs. and one clitoral orgasm.
Wouldn't you know it, then Bacardi looks up, at me. And he snaps his locket shut.
8. Sheila
During my initial pitch meeting with Ms. Wright, I asked her what she could tell me about a Roman empress named Messalina.
Our pitch meeting, our first face-to-face, we met in a coffee bar, drinking cappuccinos and bumping knees under a dinky marble-topped table. Ms. Wright sat twisted to look out the window. Legs crossed at the knee, the way that's supposed to give you veins. Eyes not following anyone walking past. Not watching the dogs on leashes or the babies in strollers. Not looking at me, Ms. Wright asked had I ever heard of an actress named Norma Talmadge?
Or Vilma Banky? John Gilbert? Karl Dane or Emil Jannings?
Her false eyelashes made bigger with mascara, not blinking, Ms. Wright said Norma Talmadge had been a star in silent movies. The number-one box-office draw in 1923. Got three thousand fan letters every week. In 1927, it was this Norma person who by accident stepped into a patch of wet cement in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and started all the movie stars' leaving their hand- and footprints.
A couple of years after the concrete, Hollywood started shooting sound movies. Despite a year working with a voice coach, Norma Talmadge opened her yap and out comes a shrill Brooklyn squeal. Hollywood's top male star, John Gilbert, piped his lines high-pitched as a canary. Mary Pickford, who played girls and young women, barked deep as a truck driver. Vilma Banky's dialogue was lost in her Hungarian accent. Emil Jannings', in his German accent. Karl Dane's were drowned in his thick Danish accent.
Low clouds kept it dark outside. The awning over the window didn't help. Ms. Wright sat, focused on her own reflection, her eyes and lips reflected on the inside of the coffee-shop window, and said, "John Gilbert, he never made another picture. Boozed himself to death by age thirty-seven. Karl Dane shot himself."