Passing Through the Flame (86 page)

Muscles knotted into aches of tension, Paul Conrad stood beside his cameraman, his total consciousness funneled into the white cone of the shooting lights, hoping against all reason that this would be the take that would finally work.

“Isn’t it a wild night?” Velva said, putting it out with an intensity that made Paul twang inside, a star in the process of being born. “I feel like the Fourth of July!”

Behind her was a row of booths and stands painted in a crazy-quilt psychedelic jumble of garish greens, reds, yellows, purples: a tarot reader, a roach clip stand, a junk jeweler, a stall selling underground newspaper and comic books. Groups of people drifted through the camera frame, looking at the wares, peering into the camera, making fists. But it wasn’t blowing the shot because the camera was shallowly focused on Velva and Gentry as they ambled slowly along in front of this background, which appeared only as a vague, out-of-focus abstraction of bright colors and soft moving forms. If only Gentry weren’t being such a lox, the shot would be in the can already.

“And I feel like Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” Gentry said dully, his eyes as dead as two manhole covers. “Drunk as a skunk with a beautiful lady I met in the street.” He laughed, or at least made a croaking sound that approximated a laugh.

Velva laughed back as the script called for, a young girl’s after-sex laugh, sweet and erotic, pure and clean. She threw herself gayly around him from behind, rubbing her nipples into his back, biting the lobe of his ear. Gentry froze like a spinster who had just been goosed in a subway car-Awful! Pure fucking awful!

“Cut! Kill the lights! This is getting us nowhere.”

The shooting lights died, breaking the magic circle, and the world outside whooshea into the vacuum in Paul’s consciousness. The vague shapes drifting through the background of the shot resolved into human rapids streaming around the cordoned-off shooting area, foaming and breaking around the stalls and tents, the unreal faceted domes and comic book buildings that formed the shores of this river of stoned freaking humanity. It’s wild out here tonight, Paul thought. The air is full of craziness. A chanting group of Hare Krishna freaks, shaved heads and pale orange robes, danced by playing cymbals and drums, their eyes staring at the landscape of same other planet. Dozens of spaced-out kids followed their parade. Six young blacks with afros and angry eyes broke through them like a military formation. A fat girl walked bare-breasted and wild-eyed through the crowds giggling and waving a peacock feather. Weird and freaky, and the newsreel crews must be picking up great footage.

And I’m getting pure shit.

Velva walked toward him, bouyant, showing no sign of tension or fatigue, knowing she was working at a level she had never reached before, secure for the first time in what she was really doing. God, even mediocrity from Gentry would be good enough now, with the voltage she’s putting out! But mediocrity seemed beyond Gentry tonight. He stood alone in the place where the circle of shooting lights had been, peering nervously past the cordon of guards at the mad carnival, drawn into himself, feeling sorry for himself, a dead-ass loss.

“It isn’t me, is it?” Velva said casually, honestly. Yes, professionally. Balling her had made her a pleasure to work with, had given her a false security that made her put out on a level which made a genuine feeling of security justified. She was being the best Velva she could be, and that was proving to be much more than adequate. By balling my leading lady, I end up respecting her more, she ends up respecting herself more, and I’m getting great stuff out of her. That’s sure not the way they tell it in the movies!

“No, it isn’t you,” he said. He glanced at Gentry and caught him in the act of staring at them, angrily and sullenly. Gentry froze and pettishly stared Paul down. “I’d better pay some attention to problem number one,” he said, walking by Velva toward Gentry.

She kissed him moviestarishly on the mouth and brushed the back of her hand across his fly as their trajectories crossed. “Go ahead,” she said. “I feel well taken care of.”

Paul saw the gesture register as a hot flash of pain in Gentry’s eyes. There was no longer any way he could deny what was going on to himself. The reality of it was confronting him right here in the now.

“I see you two lovebirds are having a marvelous lime on the set,” Gentry said. “The director balling the leading lady in the bushes, and the leading lady feeling up the director in front of the crew. Right out of some tacky Harold Robbins novel.”

Paul flushed; angered, chagrined, and not knowing what to say.

Gentry’s anger broke; he shook his head. “Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I know I’m not doing very well. I’m just feeling so depressed tonight.” Paul couldn’t tell whether his bottom line was sincerity or not, with the slyness inside sincerity inside slyness he was putting out.
Now
he’s acting!

“How am I supposed to play a man who’s just been to bed with someone and enjoyed it when I’m feeling so depressed?” Gentry said. “There’s a limit to how far you can fudge with technique.”

“You haven’t been pressing that limit very hard tonight,” Paul said carefully. “All I’m asking for is a little professionalism.”

“All
I’m
asking for is a little understanding, Paul,” Gentry said. “A little help from my director. Is that so unreasonable?”

“No,” Paul said. Gentry is such a genius at making me feel like a shit, he thought. Velva drubbing it in his face, and I am letting her. I can’t let what’s between Velva and me make me ignore Gentry. That’s what I’ve been doing—he’s got a problem, and I’ve left him to deal with it by himself. Because the problem is me, and I haven’t been willing to face it. But this film isn’t going to go an inch further till I do face it, and deal with it once and for all.

“I think we ought to get out of this mob for five minutes and get this thing straightened out,” Paul said.

“So do I.”

“Take ten,” Paul called out, and he led Gentry past Harv Friedman, past Velva, who gave him an understanding look that made him shudder, and through the cordon into the maelstrom of the crowd.

Bodies surged past him, brushing up against him—a man’s thigh, a woman’s breast, an elbow, a knee, a buttock. Faces surrounded him—laughing, snarling, talking, staring, bearded, hairy, beautiful, ugly, and stoned. It was like rush hour on the New York subway, but with more variety and a feeling of random energy in the air that could explode at any time in any direction. Gentry clung close by his side, eyes rigidly ahead, body drawn in on itself, lacking that New York street sense, and clearly at least a little frightened.

Paul elbowed their way across the crowded avenue to the row of stalls and booths, then wormed between them and behind them, into
a
strange calm darkness behind the stage set of the People’s World’s Fair reality. Once they had gotten about twenty yards behind the hurly-burly of the midway, the dark dorsal sides of the booths and stalls blocked off the noise, bustle, and light of the promenade like a palisade of shadows. Back here, there was nothing but a seared meadow of dry rustly grass that rolled south in an empty expanse to the fence of the security compound, a barbed-wire-and-bright-lights concentration-camp vision far away at the bottom of a long shallow hill. From this perspective, the artificiality of the security compound, and the curving ribbon of light, noise, and people that was the People’s World’s Fair, stood out like unreal anachronisms in the darkness of the country night. The gentlest of breezes made the dry grass whoosh and surge in phantom breakers.

“We both know what this is all about, don’t we?” Paul said. “Tell me what it’s about, Paul,” Gentry said. “You’re the director.” He stood with one hand on a hip looking at Paul with bright animal eyes. Paul had to look past those eyes into the darkness of the night to maintain any composure.

“Why... why don’t you just come out and say it?”

“I have said it, remember? And you said no. And then you and Little Miss Sunshine proceeded to rub my face in it in front of everybody. How can you possibly expect me to play the lover of that creature for you, when the whole thing is driving me crazy?”

“You just have to apply some professionalism.”

“Professionalism! You’re screwing your female lead and letting her make it a public spectacle, and
you
are talking to
me
about professionalism? That’s professionalism?”

“It is, and it isn’t,” Paul said. “I mean it’s necessary to... I mean I...” Gentry smiled at him, at once a human and a vicious gesture, a smile of understanding and of gleaming triumph.

“You’re screwing her to keep her happy, but you don’t exactly consider it a sacrifice, is that it?” he said.

“You could say so,” Paul admitted. You could say I’m doing it for the film, and you could say I’m doing it for my own selfish pleasure and because I like her and feel better when she feels good, and you’d probably be right all around. “All you can do is play the hand you’ve been dealt.”

“Is that your professional advice as my director?”

“I guess it is.”

A spiral of wind swirled the grass around Gentry. “Okay,” he said softly. “The hand I’ve been dealt is that I’m crazy to get my mouth on your cock, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s not a rational thing, it’s a need, and until it’s satisfied, I’m just not going to be any good to you.” He looked Paul square in the eye, and behind the desperation was calculation, and behind the calculation, passionate need. “I guarantee it.”

Paul looked away from him into the darkness. “I believe you,” he said quietly.

“Then what are you going to do about it?”

Paul stood there in the strange calm twilight world just behind the flash and glitter of the People’s World’s Fair. He thought of how far he had come how fast from where, and of how easily he would fall back into that flatland Hollywood desperation nightmare if he didn’t bring this picture in, and of how final and permanent his second consignment to hell would be. And of how Velva had seen through to this moment and done what she could to absolve him in advance from what he was going to do. And of how he had really known this moment was coming all along, how he had seen past it only by willful ignorance. Of how his life had been torn from his control ever since he became involved with Jango Beck and this crazy project. Of how his life had become something larger and yet more terrifying than anything he had fantasized for himself. Of how little chance he had had to avoid this moment at all and of how the parameters of his fate had taken the decision from him as well.

And of what a puling excuse all that was.

Gentry walked toward him, a quantum of destiny moving on rails. He ran the tip of his tongue around the inside of his open mouth. Paul’s knees trembled. Gentry stopped in front of him, warmth in his smile, triumph in his eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said. “All you have to do is not stop me.”

He took the handle of the zipper of Paul’s fly gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. “You won’t stop me, will you, Paul?” he said.

Paul’s spine froze into a column of ice. The sound of the zipper parting seemed preternaturally loud and unreal. Paul stared unwaveringly ahead as Gentry’s face, glowing beatifically, mouth opening in languid softness, sank slowly from his field of vision like the conning tower of a submarine slipping slowly beneath the waves. In the space where Gentry’s head had been, he saw a breath of wind stir the dry grass like a phantom hand brushing velvet.

He focused his vision blindly on the middle distance, on the path of the wind through the velvet of the grass, as he felt the cold shock of hands drawing his limp flesh out into the secret night air.

He heard Gentry sigh; then he felt the soft wet touch of tongue and lips, memory images of a woman’s sweet mouth, Sandy’s mouth, Velva’s mouth, flashing from his loins to his mind’s eye and back again, completing the inexorable feedback circuit. He felt Gentry’s moan as a vibration of his own flesh as he felt himself come alive, as he felt his cock responding protoplasmically to that anonymous mouth like the grass moving to the wind, beyond his conscious control.

Nothing could stop the response of his flesh—not the focusing of his eyes on the waving grass and the pearly darkness of the sky, not the sounds of the People’s World’s Fair in the aural distance, not the self-loathing he felt as wave after wave of physical pleasure surged up his nerves and exploded like flares in the night sky of his brain. That mouth was expert, soft, knowing, gentle, and sure. The root of him throbbed and burned with an animal pleasure that he could finally no longer contain. Paul’s unwilling moan of pleasure escaped into the warm night air.

Gentry groaned in delighted response and thrust his mouth suddenly downward with a roll of his head, causing Paul to cry out again in physical ecstasy. Gentry sucked and licked and gulped in a growing frenzy, urging Paul’s flesh onward against the screaming protest of his mind. Images flashed through Paul’s brain—Sandra’s face in the morning, Velva’s understanding smile, Gentry’s triumphant eyes. He found his body moving in rhythm with that sweet wetness as if he were making love to a woman. You won’t stop me, will you Paul? Will you? Will you?

The pain of his mind fought the pleasure of his body, goading it, teasing it, whipping pain and pleasure into a blood-red froth of pure sensation. The tension of fighting it only added intensity to the physical pleasure, guilt only spiced it with a sickly sweet tension ache, until everything merged into one throbbing membrane of utter physical ecstasy, to which he finally surrendered, letting his body respond like a mindless thing of nerve and flesh to the rhythmic urgings of Rick Gentry’s mouth.

He screamed into the night and let it all explode through him, bolt after bolt of the body’s pleasure from the root of his protoplasmic being, spasm after spasm of released tension and self-disgust, wave front after wave front passing through him, finally leaving him wobbling at the knees, bent forward at the stomach, looking down at the top of Gentry’s rolling head, watching him tremble and gulp as if trying to drain the last drop of his substance.