TAR (CH 2) - patrickbrehenyfiction
CHAPTER TWO
At Phoenix, Highway 10 changes direction and goes south to Tucson. He was in Tucson at twenty minutes to ten. Morrissey had flown in in the early evening and would be waiting for him. By the time Damien found the address, it was after ten. That’s how the time seems to go when you’re driving a truck. Stop for gas and you lose a half hour. Park for coffee, forty five minutes.
Morrissey’s house was on a narrow paved country lane lined with wooden stake fences around the yards to keep the horses in. The white fences reflected the light of a three quarter moon that revealed the yards to be desert, with scrub no horse would eat, so the enclosures were for containment and space to move, not for grazing. This house was modest compared to Morrissey’s Mullholland digs, though definitely not a cabin or a trailer. It was a two story house, three bedrooms Damien guessed from the outside, a wooden A frame building in suburban Tucson, if Tucson could be said to be urban.
Actually, he knew it was Morrissey’s house BEFORE he saw the address, because his help was waiting. There were three of them, not one, three scruffy white guys in
jeans and sneakers and boots, one with a cowboy hat, passing a bottle of wine. They were waiting in front of the garage beside the house, where a bold spotlight had captured them in a circle of illumination, not, Damien thought, by accident. Even from a distance, he could see they had ground at least half a pack of cigarette butts into the white gravel stones on the dirt driveway.
Watching them from behind a fence in the yard, where the light from the spot was a decreasing spill, was a creature Damien had never seen before. About five feet high, It looked like it had been drawn with a pencil, all black lines in the darkness, something resembling the skeleton of an ostrich, and it began walking to take them in, bending its thin legs at exaggerated angles as if being manipulated by puppet stings. Yet, as it moved, it kept its head straight and high in a dignified manner, as if to say it might look and walk funny, but it was keeping its cool, and don’t you dare mess with it. It looked like it was from another planet, and in its demeanor was the implied potential menace of something you have no experience with and don’t understand.
Like his waiting crew. Damien was still in the cab of the truck. As if also sensing the unpredictability of drunken people, the thing in the yard turned and strutted way from them, crossing the yard with that crazy long legged gait, out of the residual light from the driveway and into shadowy moonlight.
As Damien got down from the cab, Morrissey came from the house to meet him. Damien wanted to ask him what it was, and if it was a pet of some kind, or just got into the yard by itself, but his drunken potential helpers approached too, shouting welcomes.
He responded by saying, “I only asked for one guy.”
“Just pay for one. We’ll all work,” the one presently holding the bottle slurred. “Save you money.” He smiled to convey I Come In Peace, revealing that he was missing a few front teeth. Damien also noticed he had a deep scar under his chin. Probably not always such a diplomat.
Damien said to Morrissey, “It’s been a long ride. Can I use the head?”
The trio from the casual labor office became very animated at that. If they had been drinking as long as their cigarette butts indicated, they must have been urinating somewhere too. Damien was pretty sure Morrissey didn’t want them in his house. So how could they be his movers? They couldn’t. It was out of the question. They’d just damage Morrissey’s expensive furniture.
“Me first, guys. Wait here.”
He let Morrissey show him into the house, to the living room, and once the door was closed, he said, “I don’t need the bathroom. I have to get rid of those guys.”
“Yes, you do.”
“But I don’t know where I’ll get a helper tonight. I might have to unload in the morning.”
“No good. I have a 7:00 AM flight to L.A.”
“I can’t use any of them. They’ll break everything.”
“I’ll help you.”
“No…” But who else was there? “Are you sure?”
“I’ll help you.”
Despite his age, Morrissey played sports and looked like he still lifted some extreme weight in the gym, so he should be in condition for this, but he could turn out to be a very expensive helper if it meant he’d want to renegotiate the bill. Damien was still feeling tender in the area of the tow charge.
“I usually pay a helper ten dollars an hour.”
Once he’d said that, to this producer, it sounded ridiculous, but on the other hand, Morrissey would figure a buck was a buck.
Morrissey said, “Don’t worry about it. Just take your time getting rid of those bums out there. They’re driving that jalopy out on the street. I’m calling the police so they don’t kill somebody in it.”
Damien nodded and went back outside to appease and stall his labor crew. As he walked to them, one hurriedly finished relieving himself beside the garage.
“We asked,” he explained as he zipped up.
“Yeah. It’s getting too late to unload tonight, guys.”
The former diplomat grumbled, “What about our time, our gas money?”
“A short dog, too,” the fly tugger added.
Damien knew a “short dog” is a small bottle of rotgut port wine. He knew that from his authority on such street jargon, Jerry, the balding middle aged manager of his apartment building and prolifically self proclaimed recovering alcoholic.
He noticed a dilapidated brown van now under a street light on the other side of the road. It was in front of somebody else’s house, which was why he didn’t register it when he first arrived. It had curtains in the windows like somebody was living in it, maybe all of them.
“So what would be fair?”, Damien asked them.
At that, they huddled and consulted with their backs to him. If they didn’t ask for something ridiculous, maybe he’d give it to them. He didn’t have to pay a helper now. At least he hoped he didn’t.
They came out of conference, and the guy with the missing teeth, who was becoming apparent as their spokesman, said,
“We’ve been here two hours. What about ten dollars?”
“You haven’t been here two hours.”
“Close.”
“No you haven’t. Too much for doing nothing. How about three?”
“Each?”
“NO!”
They all laughed, and the statesman said, “Nah, we mean between us. Doesn’t hurt to try. But three? Hey, come on.”
Damien had bills in his pocket, but he didn’t know if he’d delayed them long enough. He said, “Wait here.”
He went back to the door, rang the bell, and Morrissey let him in.
“There’s a police car on the street watching the van. They’re waiting for them to try driving it.”
Damien was beginning not to like that he was part of this, and thought about warning them. They could walk away. But they’d probably come back later for the van, just as drunk. And it they knew Morrissey had called the police on them, they might be bent towards retaliation. Nick was living vulnerably here among the locals, unlike at his L.A. crib. Nick, after all, just didn’t want them wiping somebody out on the highway.
“How’d they take getting fired?” he asked Damien.
“They want money. They think three dollars isn’t enough.”
“You gonna ask me to split it with you?”
Nick was helping him unload for free, so Damien could afford a chuckle with him. He said, “I can stiff them, but you’ll have to go out there and help me face them down.”
“I’m always ready for some action. The cops are here.”
”I led them to believe they’d get something.”
“It’s your money.”
Damien was beginning to realize Nick was one of those people who could keep you wondering if he was joking or not. When he went back outside, he did think about not giving them anything. What had they done? Pissed, drank wine and stomped on cigarette butts. And there was that police cruiser out on the street. Give them a kick in the ass goodbye.
In deference to Morrissey’s well being, he took three dollars from his pocket.
“This is all I can do, guys”
“The money man says that?” the chief groused.
“I say that.”
There were more mumbles and gripes, but the ringleader reached for the bills.
“Let’s get out of here”, he said to the others, disdain in his voce for “here”, this well-to-do, upper middle class neighborhood.
They left and went out to the van. The one who’d done all the talking got into the driver’s seat. The old starter was a scraping intrusion on the quiet street. The motor shuddered and grumbled and needed to warm up, but the van started off anyway.
They had gone no more than ten feet when it stalled out, but they weren’t going any further. A Tucson police car sailed smoothly behind them, its roof lamp churning out arcs of flowing red and orange light like a UFO into the cool desert night, buzzing with the complaints of insects..
While the police were detaining them, Morrissey came out again, and said, “Let’s get this shit off the truck so I can go to bed.”
They started to unload. The police didn’t arrest them, but Damien saw the honcho hand over the keys, and the police send them walking in the direction of downtown with final instructions to get the keys back tomorrow sober and move the van, or lose it to the tow yard.
Morrissey was as good a helper as he looked to be (though he was no Ken his first time out) and they had everything off the truck in a couple of hours. Jeannie was in Tucson too, and provided cheese and crackers and iced decaf as he settled the bill in the dining room with Mister M. The total had been agreed to before the job, so it was just a matter of writing a check for $1400, unless Nick started negotiating.
The check Nick handed Damien was for $1500, and it wasn’t a mistake. When Damien glanced at him, Nick nodded. He was paying for the tow, all of it.
“That’s for your temperament,” he told him. “It could have got ugly. With me on Mulholland, with the winos here. You have a level head.”
Not so level , Damien thought., but he felt better about this job and Nick Morrissey now.
The Morrisseys had a guest house in the back, and insisted he stay there instead of at a hotel. Jeannie even made him a reservation for the same flight back to L.A. with Nick in the morning.
He took the truck downtown to a Load 'n Drive office and dropped the keys in the night slot. The charges would be entered in the computer in the morning and deducted from his deposit in Hollywood. He’d had Nick sign a statement that there was no visible damage to the truck to cover himself in case of any allegations like that.
After he dropped the truck off, he took a taxi back to their house from the rental agency, and when he got there, all the lights in the front house were out. They had given him a key to the rear house, he’d already left his backpack in there, and there was a globe lit over the door for him.
As he walked up the driveway, his heels crunched on the stones and crusted dirt. He looked over the white fence’s triangular stake tops into the yard beside the main house, wondering if the creature was still around. Bright moonlight and a dazzling canopy of stars were generating eerie shapes and shadows, but he didn’t see anything like that on its legs. It could be lying on the ground somewhere. How did it sleep? Did it fold that angled body up somehow like a sectioned yardstick? He sensed the desert was full of things he didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand---rattlesnakes, spiders, killer heat, cactus with needles that stabbed and marvels like the ostrich skeleton that he couldn't identify. It was a forbidding and mysterious place, and yet at this cool time of year, in the night under flashing galaxies, it was undeniably beautiful.
He went into the bungalow, which was one room with a good sized up and down window and a bathroom. He turned off the outside light, but didn’t turn any on inside. The shade was down on the window and he raised it. There was no need for a light in the room then. He lay down on the made bed with his clothes on, head on the pillow, and listened to his own breathing. It was astonishing how deeply he could fill his lungs, and how effortlessly. In L.A., he always seemed to be gasping, sucking the air in, and could only take shallow breaths. He felt a peacefulness from the simple realization of life and health, and from where he was lying, watched the celestial light show. He felt so alive, he couldn’t sleep. And yet it didn’t matter. He was resting, he was regenerating, in a way he never could in the smog. The desert, as ominous and unforgiving as it could be, was also a healer.
He didn’t know how long he lied there grateful to be alive, it seemed like a very long time, but he knew he fell asleep eventually because the stars had been replaced by a bright dawn that woke him up, the consequential side of leaving a shade up all night. It was time to get up anyway. Nick knocked on the door within a few minutes, and told him to come up to the house for a quick cup of coffee, and then they’d have to go to the airport.
They went by taxi to Tucson Airport, Damien and Nick, Jeannie staying behind for reasons not divulged to their furniture mover. Their flight was at seven, and at seven forty five they were circling the Burbank Airport. Damien was sitting at the window, Nick on the aisle, with a vacant seat between them. As they got ready to land, Nick kept glancing at Damien. Damien knew it wasn’t a come-on, and it didn’t make him uncomfortable, but Nick seemed to be making an evaluation of some sort that he tried to cover now with small talk.
He said, “It looks like the Santa Anas are blowing.”
True enough, it did. Instead of being obscured by the usual haze, Burbank strutted hues and contrasts and grooved detail, its brown hills of chaparral now lush, even olive in places, in the clear, clean airbrushed terrain below them. They had brought the desert back with them. Damien was about to say that, but instead asked, “What, Nick?
Nick seemed confused and also said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
Maybe it was just Damien’s imagination, or the producer’s idiiosyncratic way of observing people, but he hadn’t noticed it before. And then Nick said, “Sorry”, and though they continued to talk and make eye contact, he stopped scrutinizing.
When the plane landed, they got off, shook hands and went their separate ways..
It was still morning when Damien got back to his apartment building on the residential part of Hollywood Boulevard at Poinsettia Avenue where he and Allison lived
in 109 at the rear of the building. Jerry the manager was vacuuming the rust orange carpet., and with the overhead dim-when-they-were-on-anyway neon lights off in the daytime, the beige walls hovered in almost colorless shadows. Damien nodded to Jerry as he went back to his apartment. If he didn’t know exactly where the door key went, he might have had trouble fitting it in the lock in that light
Once inside, he didn’t need light. In the living room, the Venetian blinds were open, and the white transparent curtains allowed the bright day in from the street.
Bright was not what he wanted, however. In the bedroom, the blinds were still shut, the room in darkness. Allison, hurrying to work, had left the bed invitingly unmade. Though he’d felt he was rejuvenating lying awake last night in that guest house with the desert for a back yard, he had in reality not had much sleep Also, back in Hollywood, even with the air clean today from the winds, he felt heavy and tired.
Allison was teaching school and wouldn’t be home for several hours. So why not take a nap? The answering machine was clear, which meant Allison had checked the messages and called any current or prospective customers back. He could do likewise if anyone called while he was sleeping. Sure, you can lose jobs that way, no doubt about it, but at the moment he didn’t care. He pined for that delicious decadent irresponsibility of daytime sleeping, the I’m-a-night-person-because-I-don’t-have-a-life abandon he used to know so well. He could still indulge once in a while. Today. Now.
He got in the bed, closed his eyes, and parachuted down to slumber. When he woke up two hours later, he could only vaguely remember a dream where he was driving his truck around some place like Tucson, but couldn’t get clearance to go in. That’s what he needed, clearance, so he had to keep circling the perimeter, and an alarm bell kept ringing.
The alarm was really the telephone, the telephone in Allison’s name, the one they used as a personal phone that wasn’t at the moment set for an answering machine to pick up. Allison’s phone was in the bedroom, so its ringing had jarred him from his exile in a truck along roads on the edge of someplace. Sodden with drowsiness, still in a dream trance, with a mouth as dry as sagebrush, he picked up the phone and tried to talk. His parched tongue managed to approximate the pronunciation of “Hello”
“Is Damien there?
“Sss Damien.”
“It doesn’t sound like Damien.”
Damien recognized the voice now. It was Nick Morrissey. Nick had the home number because he’d complained about getting the answering machine when he wanted to talk to someone NOW.
“I was ‘sleep, Nick,” he confessed, and wondered if Morrissey could even relate to such sloth.
“Well have some coffee and call me back. I want you to be awake.”
“Okay.”
But he didn’t get up immediately. First he lied there and thought about the concept of making coffee. He had to prepare psychologically for the action of putting his feet on the ground and physically moving into the kitchen
Allison had left her trace in the bed. Her scent, memory prints of her were in the loose but cozy pouch between the sheets, had warmed and consoled him as he slept.
She’d grown up in Canbury, a suburban Connecticut town just a few miles north of New York City.. Her mother had been a high school English teacher (like mother, like daughter to that extent), then a principal, now Assistant Supervisor on the Board of Education. Her father was a banker. Not bad doing for an American G.I. and a Korean bar maid in Seoul, which is what they were respectively when they met, shortly before Allison came along. Ah, but they weren’t just any G.I. and bar girl. They were Allison’s parents. Her father was the youngest sargeant .in the U.S. Army, and made all the duty assignment for new troop arrivals. The colonel who officially assigned soldiers simply wrote his signature on the forms that were handed to him. He recommended her father for Officers Candidate School when his Korean tour was up. That was in 1975. Allison’s mother had finished high school, and even then, spoke English well enough to pass proficiency exams. With the help of Allison’s father, she enrolled in an American university that offered classes on the army post. That was the beginning of her advanced education, which now included two master’s degrees
Damien thought again of his dream about being held outside a town indefinitely in the limbo of a rental truck cab, but that association with sleeping made him drowsy again, a little nostalgic for blooey, and he had to wake up and call Nick back.
He pushed the dream away and thought instead about his life here and how he came to be in L.A. What he did to survive was anarchistic, had an element of thrill because it was illegal and he had to always be on guard. The enterprise and logistics of renting trucks, hiring crews, meeting them at rendezvous and avoiding capture by the P.U.C. kept his adrenaline surging and almost obscured a realization that without those aspects his business might be pretty mundane. .Likewise, reluctant as he was to consider it, and as incredible and splendid as the match was, without their intensity of passion, he and Allison’s lives could also be viewed as very ordinary.
He had never set out to be a mover. Damien Rennard was born in Montreal, the third of five children in a French Canadian family, stuck in the middle agewise, getting a little less attention than the older two, a little less sympathy than the babies. He was only born in Montreal, barely ever lived there. His father was in construction, an iron worker who walked the high girders, and moved his family around a like a carload of tinkers and a trailer, following tall building rises from Toronto to Detroit to Chicago to New York.
When Damien was seventeen, they lived in The Bronx, and his father went to work one day in Manhattan and never came home. He was killed in an accident, the kind of accident you might expect in his line of work, forty stories up on a windy day. Damien’s way of dealing with the horror he knew was lurking below his awareness was to not talk about it, to not think about it.
The family had been living in the northwest Bronx, the Mosholu Parkway-Bainbridge section, on Valentine Avenue at 201st Street, and there they stayed, at 2775 Valentine in Apartment 5E (yes, on the fifth floor of a walk-up)., mostly because Damien’s mother went into a permanent state of grief and shock, and it fell to Damien’s older brother and sister to take care of the family, not economically but emotionally and logistically. (The financial part was taken care of by insurance and a settlement with the construction firm.) Damien, a senior at St. Matthew’s, the neighborhood Catholic high school, finished and graduated in June, three months later. He found himself in a position then like his elder siblings, that of not having a green card, and therefore being ineligible to work legally in the U.S.
He found work through older Irish friends he met in the bars (though he was not old enough to drink in bars yet). He’d known lots of Irish Americans at St. Matt’s High School, they had given him his unshakable Bronx nickname “Frenchy”, but the Irish he began to hang around with in the bars were immigrants, overstaying visas and working illegally. Donny, his brother, had introduced him to a lot of them..
Though most were educated, the work they got for him was free lance carpentry, construction (no high girder walking for him), bartending, moving furniture. Because their incomes were limited, the illegals often had a lot of people living together, and Damien began to hear resentment expressed toward them, comments about them sleeping in shifts and taking jobs away form everybody else. Regardless of nationality, “Frenchy” was one of them, and knew the attitudes were directed as much at him as them.
The younger kids managed to grow up, Damien’s older sister Michelle married an American and became a U.S. citizen and big bro’ Donny went back to Toronto. Damien eventually got a B.A..from Hunter College, taking classes sometimes full time, sometimes part time while he lived at home and got by on cash employment..
Once he was a college grad, he wasn’t doing any more manual labor. (Ha-ha; at least not for a while.) He found an employer who didn’t care about a green card, a rep who was recruiting in New York for teachers to go to the Korean countryside and teach English as a language.
He did it for a year, then homesick for the place he’d spent his teens and early twenties, the place he knew best and where his family and friends were, he went back to New York. (That he had been in Korea and that Allison was half Korean American were mere coincidences, or seemed to him to be.)
Back in NYC, he was confronted by the same restrictions on his employment prospects. He had a friend, Frank Larkin, who had gone to L.A. Frank was one of the illegals, and said L.A. was better for work, there was less municipal oversight and fewer restrictions on everything, and invited him to go out there. He could stay with Frank until he got settled.
Damien went. Frank was in Primal Therapy, with the screaming meemies as Damien thought of them now, living in Santa Monica, L..A.’s beach, which was the primal therapy center of the planet, a magnet for Europeans and Canadians seeking that particular treatment. None of them could work legally, and they had started underground businesses, in particular moving companies because, well, for a while you could get away with that. Before going on his own, Damien had slaved for a German screamer in Venice whose operation he carefully observed and then used as the paradigm for his own business.
That was three years ago. Now, like everyone else in Hollywood, he was stuck in tar. Tar is the thing that holds people in L.A., mires them, will not release them. His business was tar. His apartment was tar. .Even Allison, though he had no objection to it, was tar.
What is tar? Just south of Hollywood, at Wilshire Boulevard, in a section of the city called Hancock Park, in the park itself, are the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, ponds of water above soft asphalt deposits that long ago trapped giant animals in the muck and held them until their recent discovery in the present age.. It is a great North American fossil site, where the remains of mammoths, saber tooth tigers, wolves and large birds with enormous wing spans--- mammals dating from the last Ice Age--- have been found and reconstructed in spectacular exhibits in the adjacent Page Museum. Where bones were missing, prosthetics were substituted in the displays
To Damien, the tar pits were L.A. The first big critters, the mammoths and the others from the last Ice Age, must have ventured onto trick ground, terrain that appeared firm to them beneath the ice, and the species from later periods were perhaps getting a drink or a bath in water that sits deceptively above the pitch today. All were just passing through L.A. or where L.A. is now, then sank into a pond with a tar bottom, became stuck in the mire, and either died of suffocation, starvation or the attacks of predators that also came unwittingly to stay
There is a later arrival too, a woman from the Stone Age, who ended up there by other means. She was killed by a blow on the head, and one would assume, dumped in. Though her actual bones are not used in the display, she is replicated to approximate size and features in the museum inside a glass case, a short, petite fragile looking woman who appears to be Native American or Asian or Hispanic, with a pretty face and a startlingly contemporary braided hairstyle. Except that Allison is taller with long legs, the lifelike figure reminded Damien of her, and on the tour he was on, the museum guide jolted him by describing her, with the cynical humor of a contemporary American big city dweller, as the Wilshire district’s first unsolved homicide.
So L.A. was the pits. L.A. sucks (you in). L.A. was tar. The Eagles called it the Hotel California.. L.A. claims as prey all who dare to venture on its ground. Shake loose and slide down from somewhere for a while, and you can’t get out.
And he and Allison? Their relationship seemed destined, as though it were somehow ordained that they be together here now in this time and place, because they were. If tar had kept them here, maybe some tar was good. Dare he be so capricious about his lot as to allow the next association that came to him: Holy tar? Best discarded from his simile immediately.
When it came to Allison his memory was fallible and inadequate. Memory could only hint at the surge of love and lust he felt in her presence. Thought was too abstract, too vapid, to conjure her spirit or vibrancy or beauty. Only SHE could do her justice. And yet., she was not extraordinarily beautiful. Pretty, yes, with a pixyish face and that limber, exercised dancer’s body. But her appearance could not account for her affect upon him, nor could their rapport. What he felt for her resulted from something even more intangible, from that thing the songs call “chemistry”, a blending of attractions, scents, needs, shapes, fantasies, something operating invisibly beyond sensory perception like radar or television waves, only transmittable to a compatible receptor (like a radar screen or a TV set or another human being).
Some might call it addiction, but where was the research on that? Where was the secret mission to harness it? Therein lay control of the world. “Love Potion Number 9”. Did the CIA have a handle on it?
The phone was ringing again. Nick getting impatient, Damien was sure, thinking Damien should have finished that coffee by now.
He picked it up on the third ring. “Hello”
It was Nick. “Are you awake now?
“I’m awake.”
“I’ll get to the point,” Nick said, but then didn’t. He paused (Damien thought, for some reason, as though trying to carefully script his next phrase). When it came at last, it was a question: “Have you ever done any acting?”
Hadn’t everybody in L.A.? Damien had taken a few classes. He’d been in two stage plays. He’d never spent money for pictures, never saw casting directors, never taken it seriously. He almost thought of it as a hobby..
This was Nick Morrissey asking him if he’d ever done any acting! Damien saw again, like an instant video replay on his inner screen, Nick observing him on the plane.
He knew his pause was too long when Nick asked, to see if he was still there or had passed out, “Hello?”
“I’m here. A little, Nick. Not much.”
“”Do you have an agent? Are you in the unions?
“No. Neither.”
“It doesn’t matter. I just need to know. Can you come in tomorrow for an interview?”
“Yeah…What for?”
“You’re the character I’m looking for. I just need to have you read a few lines of script and put you on tape for the client.”
“Okay. Are you going to tell me what this is about? Maybe I can prepare.”
“I don’t want you to prepare. .I’m where I am in this business because my intuition never fails me, and I’m going to direct.you. But I’ll tell you what it’s about.”
And he did.
The Base Camp, which could best be called a new clothing store chain with an upscale grunge line, needed a spokesman. They wanted an unknown, who would become identified solely with their stores, some tall, lanky, ruggedly handsome outback sort of bloke with an Aussie or Kiwi or even South African accent, to sound a little Brit-tinged exotic to Americans. Damien knew he fit the physical mould Nick was talking about, spent just enough time outdoors still for the buffalo hide complexion, moved enough furniture for muscular definition, and at a wiry 6’1” and 185 pounds, had the rough Calgary cowboy good looks even if he was from Detroit and Toronto and New York. And hell, he would put a little English on those Canadian inflections of his that always used to have New Yorkers asking him where he was from, some thinking it was from “the old country”, by which they meant Ireland. His mother was half Welsh, so he had the Gaullic dark hair with blue eyes and a fair complexion. It was a features color combination a lot of the Irish sported, so he could see why Irish Americans who didn’t know him, didn’t know he was “Frenchy”, could hear him speak and mistake him for one of their own.
Nick Morrissey was a TV and film producer and didn’t usually make commercials, so this was hybridding or crossing over, or however Damien would like to describe it, but he was casting and shooting this series of commercials because The Base Camp was buying space from the network on his big hit TV show The Family Way, a “Truman Show” imitation, but a fictional comedy, about a very dysfunctional family that didn’t know its life was being taped and shown every week. The Base Camp was willing to spend mega-bucks to have Nick Morrissey produce the commercials also, with them becoming the show’s exclusive sponsor when hiatus ended next month.
Nick told him to relax, go back to sleep, don’t get stressed. It was as good as done. Taping him tomorrow was a formality. The casting would be Nick’s decision. The client would defer to him. They just wanted to FEEL they’d been involved. .Damien was perfect as their spokesman.
They agreed on Damien’s appointment for 11:00 the next morning, and Nick gave him the address in Hollywood. Then he was off the line, gone, and Damien sat on the bed holding the phone, gripping it tightly and looking at it to confirm its true existence. This phone call HAD taken place. Incredibly, he did feel sleepy again. He felt exhausted, as if he had moved furniture for twelve hours. He found himself taking Nick’s advice. He went back to sleep.
About four o’clock (he knew because that’s when Allison came home), he heard the key turning the lock., then the door opening and shutting. She came in with a sigh, and that meant it had been a long day in a substitute classroom without air conditioning. (No L.A. schools had air conditioner costs in their budgets since Proposition 13, though the schools were operating year round.) And she hadn’t fixed the air conditioner in the car because the weather wasn’t hot until today. He heard her drop her beige canvas book bag with the apples stencilled on it, then knew she’d seen his backpack on the floor when she said, “Oh, you’re back. How was Tucson? Are you up, Damien?”
. .And he was totally, instantly awake, energized by the memory, which had never left as he’d slept, the recollection of his unbelievable phone call from Nick.
He got up and went toward her, reaching the doorway of the bedroom at the same time she did from the hall. He said, “Oh, sweetheart” and pulled her into his arms. The back of her cotton turquoise blouse was damp where she'd sat against the cloth seat
cover over the vinyl upholstery in the car. Under his hand, her ribs expanded with her breath. Now, yes, they loved each other intensely, yet except for Damien’s infrequent of-of town moving jobs, the saw each other every day, and Damien had only been gone overnight. They hugged when they saw each other, but Allison was just a bit bewildered by this sudden passionate embrace, as though he’d been gone six months.
“Damien? What?”
:””I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
:”Eedee-wha” (“Come here” in Korean) That was part of the limited Korean vocabulary they sometimes used. Though Allison was born there, she’d left as a baby, and her mother rarely used Korean at home. As with this relationship, her father had been the one who sometimes used it for effect, or (not like this relationship) an attempt at clarification. Though she knew a little of the language (jo-kume), she was learning phrases from Damien.
She was laughing now, a kid getting a surprise present, but not sure there isn’t a joke somewhere. He took her hand, led her back into the living room, sat her on the sofa., then knelt in front of her.
“You know I love you?”
“Nothing I would take for granted, but you’ve told me."
When he didn’t continue right way, she misinterpreted his pause and smiled. “Of course, honey. But I want to take a shower and have a salad first. For energy.”
“No, no, I don’t pester you for that.”
“You don’t have to. What’s my surprise, Damien?”
Then she seemed to see, for the first time, that he was on one knee beside her. He realized, at the same moment, what was formulating in her mind. He had knelt to tell her about the Base Camp, but in the traditional position of proposal for marriage. He thought suddenly, It was a mistake to tell her like this, she thinks I’m proposing, then thought, No it’s not a mistake, I am proposing, I just didn’t realize I was going to.
She said, “You know the answer to anything you ask me is always “yes””
“And I’m going to ask you. I just have something to tell you first.”
“What, Damien? Tell me.”
“Nick Morrissey offered me a commercial. A spokesman. I have to read for it tomorrow.”
“What? How?
Her confusion was genuine and understandable. Damien wasn’t an actor. That wasn’t how things were done.. He hoped she wouldn’t feel cheated. Allison was the one in show biz. She did have head shots. She was in the unions. She did read for minor roles occasionally, and sometimes even got them, those rare calls when they were looking for an Asian actress or a generic dancer.
He said, “I don’t know how. I guess because I moved his furniture.”
Allison laughed, and he knew that as always she was on his side.
“You see him tomorrow?”
“To put me on tape. He says it’s locked up.”
“What kind of commercial?”
He filled her in on all the details Nick had given him about The Family Way, the Base Camp, and the unprepared reading in the morning. She said, “That’s fantastic. INCREDIBLE and fantastic. And I know it will happen… Now, Damien, not to change the subject, but what’s that question you were going to ask me?”
He took her hand in both of his and looked into her eyes, the way he imagined it should be done.
“Allison, will you…”
“Yes.”
“Will you…”
“Yes.”
“Will you let me finish?”
“I will.”
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes, Damien, I will.”
She said she would marry him, and she gave her support one hundred percent to his interview with Nick. He had no doubt about her love, but she was only human and he could not let anything taint this moment. He had to know her true sentiments.
“Allison, I don’t really know if I’ll get this thing tomorrow.”
“You’ll get it. I feel it.”
&ld