“Oh my God, that chase,” says Cela. “That was so amazing.”
“Like Steve McQueen!” says Kit. “What that movie? Bullitt.”
“Burke is gonna have a flying shitfit,” she says, slightly paranoid. “He’s gonna kick our ass.”
“I will motherfucking kick his fucking ass!” shouts Kit.
Cela shushes his too public swagger. “Can you please, like, lower the volume?”
“Oh shit, man! I am fucking hungry.”
“OK, Bullitt, what do you want to eat?”
Pause. Then: “Everybody!”
They laugh. A gawking schoolgirl approaches.
“Excuse me, but are you Kit Lightfoot?”
“Steve McQueen!” says Kit.
She turns to Cela while her friends hover nearby.
Awkwardly: “Is he Kit Lightfoot?”
“Yeah,” offers Kit as Cela nods. “The one and only.”
“Oh my God!” says the girl, taking a few steps back. “It is him, it’s him…”
The clique rushes over in pleated parochial school uniforms, waists turned faddishly down to show hipbone. Tula puffs up, bodyguardlike. Needless but endearing — still in hero mode.
“Can we get an autograph?”
“Do you have a pen?” asks Cela.
They dip into North Face — Powerpuff backpacks.
“He can sign my arm,” says the girl, proffering a Sharpie.
“He can sign my leg!” says another.
“Is he retarded?” asks one of Cela.
“Girls,” Cela cautions. “Be nice.”
Kit signs an arm while saying, “Not retarded. Just a little… fucked up.”
“He sounds retarded,” says a girl, not quite sotto.
Her friend examines the signature like it’s a rash and says, “Oh my God, what does it say?”
The other takes a look and says: “It’s like a scrawl—”
“I said, Be fuckin nice,” says Cela. “You’re being rude.”
The girls say reprimanded thank-yous, then dash off. When they’re far enough away, they break into laughter.
“Little cunts,” says Cela.
“It’s OK,” says Kit thoughtfully. Then, with a nasty-assed grin: “They make me horny.”
• • •
INSIDE BLOCKBUSTER NOW.
Rushing down aisles, exhilarated, nature boy in the video forest. (A very strange enchanted boy.) Touching the hard, hollow, garish boxes, wide-eyed, tactile, inhaling collective memory of film. The store is huge and empty, except for clerks, discursively restocking.
“I was a movie star!” he shouts, thumping his chest like Tarzan.
“You still are,” says Cela. “You’re still the biggest star on the planet, OK?”
He ponders then says, matter-of-fact, “OK.” The effect is unintendedly droll. “We should get popcorn.” They walk past the new releases wall. (Like a 99 cent store display.) He asks, “What movies was I in?”
Before she can answer, a Norman Rockwell geek with chin acne enters their frame.
“Excuse me — are you Kit Lightfoot?”
(Cela braces herself. Tula puffs up.)
“Yes, I am!”
“I knew it! I put on World”—there, suddenly, it is, on all hanging monitors, World Without End, the famous scene at Children’s Hospital where Kit and Cameron Diaz erupt in dance, the crippled kids following suit, to Supertramp’s “Logical Song”—“and I just wanted to tell you what a great — how amazing I think you are as an actor and as a person.”
(Cela sighs with audible relief.)
“Thank you.”
“And what an honor it is to have you in our store.”
“Thank you.” A daub of Elvis again: “Thankyouverymuch.”
A little daub’ll do ya—
“I just want you to know that everyone in Riverside, everyone in the world is pulling for you.”
(Cela, nearly in tears. On her period. Quick to cry.)
“Thankyouverymuch.”
“May I show you the Kit Lightfoot section?” he asks, as if coaxing a girl at cotillion to dance. (Includes the others in what he says next.)
“We have a whole Kit Lightfoot section — I organized it myself.”
“I would like some popcorn.”
“You can have all the popcorn you like, sir!”
By now, a few other employees curiously make their way toward the little group.
The clerk turns to Cela.
“Think he’d mind signing a a few posters?”
“Ask him,” says Cela, proudly. Feeling like the missus.
True Confessions
MOTHER AND CHILD dropped in unannounced to the Sunset Boulevard penthouse suite.
Lisanne felt bad because she never thanked her old boss for his kindnesses in those first few months she and Siddhama were home alone. (He had continued to pay her salary.) In fact, she’d never thanked him at all — through the years, he’d been stand-up and generous to a fault. It was true she had made herself indispensable, but it was Reggie, with his sunny, contagious confidence, who, long ago, had so generously opened the door, helping Lisanne to overcome her initial insecurities. He was startled by the hidden pregnancy but, like a true gentleman, withheld judgment. She would have been lost without his emotional support after her baby came into the world.
They hadn’t spoken since she moved to Rustic Canyon, and the fact that the life-saving arrangement with Philip came about under the auspices of Tiff, Reggie’s client, made it even worse. She felt so ungrateful, but nothing could have been further from the truth — now was the time to face him, to reveal all. Reggie Marck, if anyone, should be privy to the certain details of the child’s parentage.
He held the baby in his arms.
She said: “I wanted to tell you that this is the son of Kit Lightfoot.”
“OK,” he said, smiling. Waiting for the punch line.
“And I wanted to give you the supramundane Secret Thatness offerings.” She knelt upon the ground and opened her blouse. He stood there holding the child, looking down at her. “Here is my mustard seed, my scoops of barley and clarified buttered bread, here are my nipples large as the purplebruised toes of homeless children. I, Vajrayogini, generate the celestial mansion with this wide and brazen cunt. Look! at the cervical fire of my stink-necklace, looped through 700 dew-fresh skulls. O, I am asking you to disarm! For these are the weapons of mass instruction. I am the blue dakini, door of membranes and remembrance, the green PHA
HA
. Let us kneel on the carpet of the cathedral like pilgrims humbled by disaster — O Reggie, join me now! Offer and observe the materials to be burned in bodhi-wood! OM OM OM SARVA PHA PHA PHA SWAHA — Reggie, please — OM NAMO BHAGAWATI VAJRAVARAHI — Reggie! — BAM HU HU—why oh why Reggie is everything so wrong? — PHA OM NAMO ARYA APARAJITE HU HU PHA—”
A Disturbing Call
WHEN BECCA ARRIVED at her Six Feet Under gig, they said there was some kind of fuckup. Her services weren’t needed until later that week.
She’d already given Viv the trusted alibi — caretaking moribund Mom — this time even going slightly overboard in the drama department because of what she felt to be the necessity of washing the taste of a certain recent rooftop encounter out of her employer’s mouth. (Becca said the Dunsmores were crazy and she’d only met them once or maybe twice and didn’t want anything to do with them. Fortunately, Viv dismissed the whole incident with a kind of blithe, disgusted wave of the hand.) Instead of going back to Venice, she went shopping on Third. She phoned Dixie on the cell to say hi, in a cheap attempt to mitigate her guilt over the creepy cancer cover story.