Passing Through the Flame (55 page)

He pressed his face into the soft warmth of her breasts, grateful for the arms holding him, letting himself crack for a moment and face the pain inside, the utter despair of watching the only chance he was ever likely to have to prove himself as a filmmaker turn into the tombstone of a career he would never have. And it’s not my fault! It’s really not my fault!

“That cocksucker Beck!” he cried. “Why is he doing this to me?”

Sandy’s breath caught for a beat; her body stiffened against him.

“Do you know something I don’t?” he said, lifting his head from her chest and peering at her dim face in the darkness.

“Would I hold it back from you?” she said in a hurt voice. “Do you think I’d stand by and let Jango fuck you over like this if there was anything I could do about it?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just—”

“I know, love, I know.” She cupped his face in her nands and gave him a gentle kiss on the lips.

He relaxed his head back onto her breasts and just lay there in the silent darkness feeling sorry for himself. Letting self-pity wash over him and through him until he was wallowing in it, until he was drowning in it, until he was loathing himself for it, until that loathing kicked his adrenals over into anger. He rolled off her and sat up against the headboard.

“What’s the matter?” Sandy said softly. Then ironically: “That was a stupid question.”

“If there was only something I could
do.
Some way I could act to make things even a little better instead of just being washed over by the situation. Goddamn it, I feel so helpless, it’s infuriating me, it’s making me mad at myself.”

Sandy sat up beside him. In the dark, he could just make out the phosphorescent sheen of the surface of her eyeballs, giving her face locus but no expression. “There
is
something I’ve been meaning to ask you to do,” she said, “but I haven’t quite had the nerve to say it.... You know what the underground press has been saying about the whole project....”

“Yeah, I’ve seen some of that stuff... it’s beginning to seem pretty accurate.”

“You know it’s starting to rub off on you....”

“Yeah,” he said. I don’t have enough to worry about, he thought, I’ve got to worry about my image in the underground press?

“Well, I thought maybe if you did a TV interview....”

“After that last damned press conference?” Paul snapped, remembering how she had humiliated him, how Barry Stein had come close to goading him into a fistfight.

“This would be different, love,” she said. “What I’ve got in mind is Elliot Dana’s
Groove Tube
show. You’d do about ten minutes with Elliot. Elliot’s totally innocuous, and he owes Jango—”

“Please! I don’t want to hear what Dana owes Beck. Let me stay a virgin in at least one orifice.” But Paul had to admit to himself that it didn’t seem like a bad idea.
Groove Tube
was a kind of low-budget local version of the
Merv Griffin Show
: second-rate rock groups alternating with innocuous babble with rock show biz personalities. Dana himself was an aging flower child with about as much bite as Mike Douglas or Griffin himself. Nobody ever got hurt on
Groove Tube
, unless a bouquet was thrown a little too hard. “You’re telling me this is a setup?” he said.

“You’re learning, love, you’re learning.”

“I still don’t quite see what purpose this is supposed to serve....”

Her body slumped against his. She put her head on his shoulder, and her hair fanned across his chest. “It’s all I know how to do for you,” she said. “You’re in a bad situation, and I’d like to do more, but this all I know how to do, to try and make
you
look a little better than the project, so that when... so that.... Let me do this for you, love, okay? Let me do
something.
”

The tone of her voice moved him deeply. She really
does
want to help, and there’s nothing she can do but watch me slowly go down with the ship. So okay, why not, at least it’ll make her feel better. At least one of us can be a bit less than totally futile.

“Okay, Sandy, I’ll give it a try. For you.”

“Let’s just say we’re doing it for each other.”

So this is what it’s like to be on the inside looking out, Paul thought, sitting on a high-backed stool under the hot television lights with Elliot Dana, peered at by the blind eye of the camera, hovered over by the camerman and crew, caught in a circle of light so bright that the small studio audience beyond the set was only a vague blur of faces in the contrasting gloom of normal lighting.

It was certainly a weird reversal, coming straight from a set where you were the director to a set where you were meat. It made him feel diminished, but at the same time there was something relaxing about being simply a bit player in someone else’s reality for a change.

“Our next guest, Paul Conrad, is directing the film that’s going to be shot at next month’s Sunset City festival,” Elliot Dana said, in his wispy guru’s voice. “Sunset City is certainly shaping up as
the
heavy event of the year, isn’t it?”

Dana was a slender man with a twenty-five-dollar Beatle haircut and tender brown cocker-spaniel eyes. He wore an embroidered dashiki, jeans, and beads. He looked twenty-nine and had probably looked that age for ten years. He was soft and nonthreatening, and this slot was scheduled to last only eight minutes. Sandy was right; this appearance couldn’t be any worse than harmless.

“It sure is the big event of
my
life,” Paul said. “My first opportunity to make a major feature. So naturally, I’m the most excited guy around....”

Dana smiled wistfully. “Sunset City is going to be the biggest gathering of the tribes since Woodstock,” he said. “I thought
Woodstock,
the film, really captured the spirit of Woodstock, the vibrations of love that were there. Have you seen it, Paul?”

“Sure. I think it was the best film of its kind ever made. But what we’re doing is going to be a little different—”

“So was Altamont!”
a loud voice called from the audience. Dana turned, blinked as he stared through the lights, turned back to Paul with a rueful little smile. “You were saying?”

“I was saying that we’re not going to be doing a straight documentary,” Paul said nervously. “We’re shooting a love story against the background of—”

“Power to the people!” someone shouted. Almost immediately, the whole audience seemed to be clapping and stamping rhythmically and chanting, “POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!”

“Cut!” someone shouted. “Stop the fucking tape!”

The houselights came on, and Paul saw that about two-thirds of the audience was clapping and stamping in what looked like a carefully orchestrated manner. “POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!” Leading the chanting from a standing position in the front row was a theatrical-looking figure with long blond hair, wearing patched jeans, red boots, and a red, white, and blue T-shirt done up as a peace sign in star-spangled bunting.

“POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!”

“Ivan!” Dana screamed. “What the fuck are you doing? We’ve got a show to tape!”

The star-spangled asshole held up his hand, and on cue the chanting stopped. He turned and bounded toward the set, giving Paul a better look. It was Ivan Blue, so-called Movement leader. Paul remembered seeing him making a fool of himself on some television show once.

“What is this?” Dana said plaintively. “Why are you making my life miserable, Ivan?”

“We demand that a representative of the people participate in this interview,” Blue chanted in a singsong cadence. “We demand that a representative of the people be allowed to question the man who is going to be making a film about the people because the people have a right to know what kind of film they are making possible. This interview will not be allowed to proceed without a representative of the people. Power to the people!”

“POWERS TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!”

Dana turned to Paul, his puppy-dog eyes imploring him for aid. Beyond the camera, a fat balding man—apparently the director—seemed in danger of having a stroke.

Blue held up his hand again and stopped the chanting. “Are you afraid to let the people talk with this guest, Elliot?” he said. “Have you sold out to Jango Beck?” He screwed his face up into a hideous parody of a pig and began to oink.

A moment later, the whole audience seemed to be oinking and snorting.

Jesus Christ, what a gang of schmucks! Paul thought. This is like a Marx Brothers movie.

Once again, Dana turned to him. “Uh... would you mind if...”

Paul pondered the ludicrously snorting audience. He looked at Ivan Blue, who was now camping around the set bent over so that his knuckles scraped the floor, rooting and snorting like a demented cartoon character. If I can’t handle this asshole, he thought, it’s time to hang it up.

“I’ve always wanted to be interviewed by Porky Pig,” he said. “Get him a stool.”

Dana sighed gratefully, nodded to Blue, who quieted the pigpen and stepped up onto the set. A stagehand placed another stool between Dana and Paul, and Ivan Blue perched atop it. The house lights went off, the crew settled down, and Blue went through an abrupt transformation. He was no longer the clown; his eyes became shrewd and intelligent, his expression hard and even commanding.

“At least you’ve got balls, Conrad,” he said coldly. Jesus Christy Paul thought, have I mousetrapped myself?

“Okay, rolling tape, let’s go!” the director shouted.

“Our next guests,” Dana said with a sweet smile painted across his face, “are Paul Conrad and Ivan Blue. Paul is directing the film that’s going to be shot at next month’s Sunset City festival, and Ivan is the well-known star of stage, screen, and street demonstrations. Ivan would like to ask a few questions about Paul’s film, isn’t that right, Ivan?”

“Right,” Blue said, looking straight at the camera. “Since the people themselves are going to be the real star of this film, we thought it only fair that a representative of the people should be here to ask the director a few questions. After all, you’re going to be using a quarter of a million of us as extras, aren’t you, Paul?”

“I suppose you could put it that way,” Paul admitted.

“That’s a quarter of a million
free extras,
isn’t it?” Blue said. “Or have I got it wrong? Are you going to pay the people for appearing?”

“Well, I understand that admission to the festival will be free, that there’ll be free entertainment, and cheap food and drink, so you could say it’s gonna be value given for value received.”

“That’s an old motto, isn’t it?” Blue said. “An old
capitalist
motto, right?” He leaned forward toward the camera, pulsing with animal energy. For no rational reason, Paul found himself
liking the
son of a bitch.

“Like another old capitalist motto—never give a sucker an even break. Remember that one? I wonder which one applies. I mean, it seems to me that maybe there’s going to be a quarter of a million suckers at Jango Beck’s three-ring circus. They come there for a free show, but it turns out
they’re
the big show, like a
freak show,
man. Jango Beck suckers us into playing freak for him with a free show that consists of twenty recording sessions of groups he and Mike Taub have under contract, and then he suckers
you
into making some dumb exploitation film to sell the albums. Then he rents out exhibition space to pig outfits like Dow and Coca-Cola, and he sells the film, and the albums, and ends up exploiting everyone for mucho millions of dollars. Is that your idea of value given for value received?”

Paul found himself reeling at Blue’s rap. This guy is no schmuck, he suckered me, he’s
good.
He could be murder! I sure don’t want this to turn into a confrontation between him and me, with me defending that fucker Beck! “Look,” he said, “I don’t have anything to do with staging the festival; all I’m doing is making a film. So let’s talk about the film, okay?”

Blue seemed to calm down a little, to deflate, even to become a little friendly. He even smiled at Paul. “Sure,” he said slowly, “let’s talk about your movie. Okay, let’s assume that Beck makes his pile off this thing, off the people. Now I might be willing to admit that that would be okay, if the people got something in return. I mean, if your film turns out to be a beautiful celebration of the life-style of the people, a love trip, that shows the world just how sweet and peaceful and loving a huge gathering of the tribes can be, why, then we can really say, value given for value received, can’t we?”

“I’d say so....” Paul answered nervously.

“But on the other hand, if your film turns out to be an ugly, cynical exploitation of the people, a put-down of the counterculture, a giant nasty freak show, then the people have been
ripped off
, right?”

“I’m really not into politics...” Paul said uneasily. And I’m certainly not stupid enough to argue politics with
you.
Especially, he thought, when everything you say about how Jango Beck is going to make a mint off this stinking thing is probably true.

“Let’s just talk about the film, okay?” Dana said unhappily. Ivan Blue grinned genially, “That’s what I’m doing, Elliot,” he said. “I’m sure all your viewers are interested in knowing what the film they’re going to be in is
about.
That’s all that I’m trying to find out. What’s your movie going to be
about
, Paul?”

“Well... it’s a kind of crosscultural love story. A girl from a small town in the Midwest wins a trip to Sunset City, where she meets a cynical reporter from New York, and in this place which is as strange to both of them as they are to each other, they fall in love and.... But that would be giving away the ending.”

“It sounds like a mahvelous vehicle for Sally Fields and Laurence Harvey,” Blue said, in a thin, nasal Rona Barrett voice. A few laughs trickled from the audience, and Paul himself choked on a giggle. He’s got the whole stupid thing pegged right, he thought. What can I say?

“But you don’t have Sally Fields and Laurence Harvey, do you?” Blue said in his own voice. “You’ve got two people called Rick Gentry and Velva Leecock. I’m sure Elliot’s audience would like to hear something about your stars, Paul....”