B008J4PNHE EBOK (41 page)

“Yes,” said Booth. “I see.”

“So she’s been calling all morning, nonstop.”

From Main Street, they passed into a series of sharply rising and dipping streets, shouldered tight with large, peeling houses that served as off-campus housing for SUNY-Hasbrouck students. After a few blocks, the road flattened and they were in the countryside. Sunken fields of browning vegetation filled the spaces between the occasional house, barn, or trailer.

“I see. This woman is menacing you. It doesn’t happen often that one is menaced by an attractive woman.” Booth gave an orotund chuckle. “But it can flattering and exciting. They go one way, you go the other, you want to be left alone, they want to know why you want to be alone, but how can you possibly explain it, and then someone tackles someone, and you end up rolling around on the floor. Sandra once buttonholed me into the restroom of a fast-food establishment, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Sam. “I’d rather I didn’t.”

“It was a Burger King. I can still picture, vividly, the wall above the
toilet: painted on the tile was a sandwich dressed in king’s garb—the crown and the jeweled mantle and so on—and how his visage glared upon me as I glanced over Sandra’s shoulder. A stern burger emperor with a french-fry scepter.” The reminiscence seemed to please Booth enormously; he spoke the words “stern burger emperor” with a zest that other men reserved for “ten-pound bass” or “blackjack.”

“That’s a wonderful story, Booth. Thank you.”

“But you know,” the old man continued, paying no attention to his son’s sarcasm, “I’ve always felt that sex is a little pathetic if you take it too seriously.”

Sam could grant that was not an unreasonable position. It was true that no one who had seen the satyr make sweet, steady love to an elm tree’s knothole could ever again approach sex with complete sobriety, but he didn’t think it made him a prude to not want to hear that from Booth. He had screwed around on Sam’s mother. For that matter, he had screwed Sam’s mother. It was creepy and too close.

“In fact,” Booth wound up, “it’s possible that everything is a little pathetic if you take it too seriously.”

The wipers started to squeak. Sam switched them off. The rain had stopped again. The phone vibrated some more, beeped another missed call.

Five or so miles out of town, at a right-hand cut marked by two boulders, Booth said it was the place. The gravel lane rattled through the floor of the car. A few hundred yards in, they arrived at a farmhouse, painted red, with several smaller outbuildings of the same color and style huddled around it like offspring. Sam parked the rental in the small paved lot and turned off the engine.

“Did that come off sounding like an excuse?” his father asked. “What I just said?”

Sam was taken aback; self-awareness wasn’t a trait he associated with Booth. “Maybe” was the cautious answer he settled on after a moment.

“I’m sorry, then. Again. Because I have no excuse. I made a joke out of too many things when you were young, and that is undoubtedly putting it far too gently. I was careless. Selfish. Stupid.” The old man shook his head. He opened the passenger-side door but didn’t get out. “I tried to resist saying something like that. It seems to me that it would be
awfully greedy to go asking you for forgiveness now. I just—I need you to know that I feel sick when I think about that night you called me and I didn’t call you back. Sick, just sick.”

The glance he threw his son was hooded, his beard closed over his grimacing mouth. Was this what shame looked like on Booth’s face? Sam couldn’t remember ever having seen it in life—or on film, for that matter. It was shocking.

“Forward, Booth. Let’s just keep things going forward.” The words were ineffectual, almost desperate-sounding, but they were all he could find to say.

“I’m just glad to have a little time with you,” said his father.

Sam rubbed a knuckle against his cheek and squinted at the dashboard.

The cell phone rattled. Fresh air blew in through the open door.

“Should you get that?”

“Yeah,” said Sam.

Celebrity Treasures was the name of the Santa Monica–based memorabilia company with whom Booth had signed an exclusive contract. Along with a number of other B-movie veterans and television personalities, Booth autographed posters and movie stills for them to sell, and he licensed his image for other items such as T-shirts and coffee mugs. It was a typical enough arrangement for old semi-famous movie types and a decent source of income. What had turned out to be an especially lucrative sideline for Booth was his more interactive work for Celebrity Treasures—specifically, the recording of personalized messages.

For a fee, fans could have a celebrity from the Celebrity Treasures roster record a message. Each personality offered a list of messages based on lines or catchphrases uttered by characters they had played in movies or shows. Booth’s messaging services were apparently in high demand, a popularity that was easy to understand for at least two reasons: one, the arresting quality of his voice—or rather, his Voice; and two, he had said a lot of crazy shit in his movies.

Take, as an example, the script for the scene in the original
Hellhole
where Professor Graham Hawking Gould, Booth’s renowned satanologist, sacrifices himself (though not permanently—Professor Gould is reincarnated for both
Hellhole II: Wake the Devil
and
Hellhole III: Endless Hell
) in order to destroy Satan’s monkey, Anton.

EXT. NEAR THE PIT—BLOOD-RED TWILIGHT

Professor Gould grapples with the devil monkey, mere feet from the black chasm. The monkey SCREECHES and snaps at him and LASHES its hideous black snake’s tongue.

ANTON

I’ll bite your balls off! I’m the familiar of the Prince of Darkness!

PROF. GOULD

I don’t care whose monkey you are! I’ll be damned to hell before you use that tone with me!

The satanologist clutches the hateful primate to his chest and leaps into the impenetrable darkness of the hellhole.

When producing an answering-machine message for Joe Somebody, Booth adapted his immortal riposte to “I don’t care whose monkey you are! You’ll be damned to hell if you don’t leave Joe a message!”

Inside the red farmhouse, Christine, the fortyish woman who ran the recording studio out of her home, gave Booth a hug and Sam a chuck under the chin. “Love the cape,” she said to the old man.

“My daughter made it for me,” said Booth.

“Aw, that’s sweet.” Christine winked at Sam. “You know your father’s the Olivier of answering-machine messages.”

Booth waved this away. “She’s being facetious, Samuel. I’ll never cease to hone my craft. The art of messages is a lifetime pursuit.”

She inquired after Tom. “Is he lean and rugged?”

“Yes. The son of a bitch is as trim as a snake and as rich as Croesus and only a year younger than I am, though you’d never know it.”

“Tom and Booth are besties,” Christine informed Sam. Her
bracelets jingled and clacked as she led the way to the control room. “Which makes it awkward that they’re both so smitten with me.”

The engineer pointed Sam to a leather couch against the back wall. There were silks tacked to the ceiling, and a stick of lavender incense was burning. The vibe was clichéd, but Sam liked it. Christine’s daughter, introduced as Logan, a five-year-old ruddy-cheeked version of her mother, was huddled at one end of the couch in deep communion with a stuffed bunny.

On the opposite side of the soundproof window, Booth settled into a straight-backed chair with his cane across his knees. Pushed to the edges of the recording room were various off-duty musical instruments. Booth held a sheaf of scripts. The arm of a microphone stand was angled to a spot just in front of his face.

The first message was for a man named Alan. Speakers in the corners of the control room’s ceiling reproduced Sam’s father’s voice in crisp stereo.

“It so happens that Alan, after a great deal of study—and a long sojourn in the deepest jungles of South America, where monkeys speak and where the wisest of men walk on their hands”—Booth paused for a couple of beats, his eyes widening clownishly and his cheeks swelling with malevolent mirth, so that through the soundproof glass, Sam saw an aged Horsefeathers Law flicker briefly into view—“
is still not home yet
!” He coughed. “Leave a message.”

“Got it,” said Christine into the intercom.

“No, no,” said Booth, and he did a second take, and didn’t cough, and it was better.

Sam’s father performed twenty or so messages. The majority of these were adapted from the
Hellhole
trilogy, but there were others scattered across Booth’s career. On behalf of someone named Pat, Dog, the sagacious cloud from
Buffalo Roam,
told a caller, “You must get right, my friend, and get along, and get yourself in the celestial way,
and
—get ready to leave Pat a message.” Don Griese, Booth’s mumble-mouthed, car-wash-obsessed mafia don in
Hard Mommies,
was more concise: “Vanessa’s machine. After the beep, ya picaroon, youse.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

It was odd for Sam to see his father express these different voices, inhabiting characters from obscure twenty- and thirty-year-old films. While the abrupt switches from voice to voice were unnerving, they were
undeniably impressive. It was as though all of the characters lived inside his father, inhabiting some remote room of his mind. Sam imagined them in comfy compartments set into a wall, like upholstered morgue drawers. Whenever Booth wanted one, he could descend to this storage area, slide the character out, slap the dust off its shoulders, and pull the string that made it talk.

The old man was totally professional, requesting playbacks, ad-libbing multiple takes if he didn’t feel like the message was punchy enough, redoing any stumble or slip. Probably this shouldn’t have surprised Sam; it was, after all, the man’s business. But what seemed remarkable to Sam was there was no sign that Booth considered the work beneath him. This didn’t seem possible, that he should be able to approach the recording of joke answering-machine messages without giving away at least a hint of boredom, yet Booth seemed totally focused on the task. His son found his humility baffling—and interesting.

His father’s movies ought to have been so much fun, all the mugging, the scares that weren’t scary, the abundance of cheesecake, the papier-mâché sets, the stoned extras peering off in the wrong directions—and they were for other people, just not Sam. He had long understood that he was the exception, the grouch who refused to see past the boom in the corner of the frame, the spoilsport who couldn’t find it in himself to care one way or another if a werewolf killed a bunch of Romans living in villas with grandfather clocks and speaking with Valley accents.

In the past it had dawned on Sam that in some cosmic sense, if you considered how many viewers had attended Booth’s films, been relaxed and amused by them, and gone home to perform acts of procreation, there was an ontological argument (of a fairly undergraduate nature, but still) to be made for his father as the patriarch of thousands. While such a notion undoubtedly would have sent Polly into an uproar—Sam could hear her insisting that he needed to see a shrink, and in the next breath demanding that he tell her
more, more, more
—it left Sam feeling melancholy and reflective.

What had never occurred to him until this moment on this Friday was that Booth had gone to work on these movies like anyone else working on any other set on a “serious” movie. Had Sam thought that Booth went skipping onto soundstages, that he acted drunk? Sam didn’t know. He supposed he hadn’t ever dug that deep.

Out in the car, Booth had seemed sincere. Sam didn’t know what to make of that, either, or what he wanted to do with it. The day had started dire and turned hazy. Sam sat on the couch and crossed his leg over his knee and observed his father’s transformations.

 ■ ■ ■ 

When the day’s docket of messages was accomplished, Booth recorded a pitch for a local deli:

“My name is Booth Dolan, and although I’m known as an actor, my first love is eating. And let me tell you, I’ve eaten a few sandwiches! Oh, yes! Torpedoes, heroes, subs, pitas—I’ve devoured scores of them!

“But something unprecedented happened to me the other day, at Bill’s Bomb Shop on Route Seven in Devering. I met my match. I was humbled. By a sandwich! The mouthwatering, stomach-stretching Megaton Meatball proved too much even for me. Heavens! I had to take half of it home!

“My friends, at Bill’s Bomb Shop, hunger is no obstacle. Visit us on Route Seven in Devering, directly opposite Lowe’s.”

Christine wolf-whistled into the intercom. “First take! First take!”

The actor was unmoved. He shook his head, shifted around on his chair. The creaking echoed in the control room. Booth puckered his lips and stared at the script.

Logan, still poised over her bunny, dabbed the stuffed animal’s mouth with a strawberry. “Eat,” she whispered, “please eat.”

Christine shushed her daughter and ran a playback.

“What do you think, Samuel?” asked Booth.

Sam had thought it was shouty, one-note. He shrugged, told Christine to tell Booth it was fine, but the old man knew he was holding out. “Cough it up!” His father’s voice bounced off the control room walls.

Sam sighed and pushed himself up. He went to the board, bent down to the intercom. “You could give a pause at ‘by a sandwich.’ Go softer, maybe. Like, you’ve had all these adventures or whatever in your films, but this amazing sandwich, it’s—you know, it’s bested you, sent you home on your shield, and you can’t quite believe it.”

His father nodded. “By a sandwich,” he said. The profound hush of his delivery indicated shades of awe and incredulity; this sandwich was unlike any other sandwich, was somehow more than a sandwich.

The next take was better, and the third take was best.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Before they left, Booth requested a private conference with Logan. Propped by his cane, he leaned over her corner of the couch, and they exchanged whispers. The child did most of the talking. Booth gave the occasional nod. His expression was sober.