Read An Accidental Affair Online
Authors: Eric Jerome Dickey
An Accidental Affair
Also by Eric Jerome Dickey
Tempted by Trouble
Resurrecting Midnight
(Gideon series)
Dying for Revenge
(Gideon series)
Pleasure
Waking with Enemies
(Gideon series)
Sleeping with Strangers
(Gideon series)
Chasing Destiny
Genevieve
Drive Me Crazy
Naughty or Nice
The Other Woman
Thieves’ Paradise
Between Lovers
Liar’s Game
Cheaters
Milk in My Coffee
Friends and Lovers
Sister, Sister
Anthologies
Voices from the Other Side: Dark Dreams II
Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing
Mothers & Sons
Got to Be Real
River Crossings: Voices of the Diaspora
Griots Beneath the Baobab: Tales from Los Angeles
Black Silk: A Collection of African American Erotica
Movie—Original Story
Cappuccino
Graphic Novels
Storm
(six-issue miniseries, Marvel Entertainment)
DICKEY
N
A
CCIDENTAL
A
FFAIR
DUTTON
For Dominique
DUTTON
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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, April 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2012 by Eric Jerome Dickey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dickey, Eric Jerome.
An accidental affair / Eric Jerome Dickey.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-56178-2
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Screenwriters—Fiction. 3. Motion picture
actors and actresses—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.I319A65 2012
813′.54—dc23
2011035177
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Janson Text Lt Std 55 Roman
Designed by Leonard Telesca
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
¡Bienvenidos a los reconocimientos de este libro!
Regina Baptiste interview.
Vanity Fair.
“Attack every role, whether you’re playing fragile or fearless, good or evil, you attack it, you let go, you live it, or you walk away and let a better actor have the part. I know that sounds silly and childish, because after all we’re in the business of make-believe. We have to sell it to ourselves first, then, as in make-believe, we make you believe. How does it feel when the camera is on? The camera is on and you’re a tool. A tool of the writer. A tool of the director. A tool of the cameraman. A tool of the guy who is in charge of lighting. And a tool of your own needs as an actor. We have to make it real. The competition? Many want you to succeed, but more than a few want you to fail. The pressure is ridiculous and every great acting career comes to an end, and for the performer oftentimes too soon. Norma Desmond? Well, yeah. A lot of us end up like Norma Desmond. You move from being a working actress to a celebrity who used to work. You move from being a grand movie star who has steady work to barely being able to secure a special guest spot on television. You have a star on the Walk of Fame, which to me is funny…a star on the ground…no one should be able to step on a star and leave it all dull and smudgy. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I want one. And this girl from Montana wants one badly. But, as I was saying. It’s strange. The Hollywood Walk of Fame. You’re walked all over by the public, all shapes and sizes of shoes stepping on your name, most of the public never looking down, so many names, so many people forgotten and yet trampled on daily, which I guess is symbolic, for some, not all, of the way most feel that they are treated in Hollywood. Women, we sacrifice our unborn babies, give up motherhood to
become stars. Does having to compete for so few roles and being a woman in Hollywood scare me? It terrifies me. Norma Desmond was washed up before she was fifty. Time is not on a woman’s side in Hollywood. It’s our enemy. Clint Eastwood, Cary Grant, Peter Sellers, Morgan Freeman, all are or were in demand way beyond their half-century mark, and always paired up with female leads pretty much half or a third of their ages. Women have to do twice as much as men in half as much time.”
“That’s one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.”
—Raymond Chandler
“Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as it they go along.”
—Sunset Boulevard, 1950
“Its [Hollywood’s] big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment.”
—Raymond Chandler
“A celebrity is one who is known to many persons [that] he is glad he doesn’t know.”
—H. L. Mencken, US editor (1880–1956)
News for Johnny Bergs
| msnbc.com | Superstar Johnny “Handsome” Bergs |
| 8 hours ago | |
| Rumors are circulating that actor Johnny Bergs has joined the Celebrity Sex Tape Club. But this is not a normal homemade sex tape with an unknown woman as his costar. Details are sketchy at this moment but the sex tape is said to be hotter than Japan’s nuclear reactor and involves Golden Globe–nominated actress Regina Baptiste. Apparently the tape was professionally filmed during production of their up-and-coming movie, and the clip is said to show how up-and-coming Johnny Bergs was on set. Regina Baptiste was only coming. Baptiste is married to writer James Thicke. Johnny Bergs is married to the business of Hollywood. | |
| CLICK HERE FOR OTHER CELEBRITY SEX TAPES | |
| Los Angeles Times (blog) —(500) related articles. |
I dropped the .38 on the passenger seat, then sped down a damp Sunset Boulevard. Johnny Handsome was bleeding, limping, running, fleeing, his trek looking like a scene from a horror film. He saw my car coming and stumbled out of the street before I could mow him down.
My anger wanted to chase him. But I was done with Johnny Handsome. For now, I was done with him. I had to get to my home in Los Feliz and kill Regina Baptiste. As I changed lanes like a madman, as I ran traffic lights, as I passed by the proliferation of homoerotic male pinups advertising every product from Calvin Klein underwear to aftershave, as I passed by ads touting female models with bodies so perfect as to make ordinary women feel inferior, I knew that by the end of the night my wife would be dead and I’d be holding a smoking gun and trembling.
Soon I would have to speed-dial a dream team of well-dressed and overpriced attorneys.
Traffic became as brutal as the beating that I had given America’s favorite actor. Rain came from the dark sky so fast that my windshield wipers lost the battle with the storm. Most of the surface streets that led into the homes below Griffith Park had a poor drainage system, so by the time I made it back to my zip code, the roads that flowed into 90027 were flooded and it looked like traffic was backed up for miles. Angry brake lights screamed in my face.