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Authors: Stuart Archer Cohen

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BOOK: This Is How It Really Sounds
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Mitch finished for him. “He races avalanches and he goes off fifty-foot cliffs and he makes it look beautiful. It's like ballet at seventy miles an hour. If you can capture that, you're going to have a best-of-class talent that blows people away. It's a hell of a lot more interesting than watching a guy go around a track in a Formula One car.”

They watched the VHS tape that Mitch had put together from a couple of movies he'd been in. There were some runs from Chamonix, and a clip from Alaska where he'd dropped five thousand vertical feet in a minute and a half. He looked good in that one, disappearing into a cloud of his own slough and then reemerging just when it seemed like he was gone forever.

“Holy shit,” the agent said. “You were inside an avalanche! What's that like?”

Harry felt like saying it wasn't a full-on avalanche, just some slough, but that would take too much explaining. “It's all white. You're pretty much blind, so you just go by feel and try to straight-line out of it.”

The man seemed to have suddenly figured out where it all fit. “You know, I've got a client who's working on the screenplay of the next Bond movie. A sequence like that would be a great opening.” He looked at Harry. “Think you could be James Bond's stunt double?”

Harry was too surprised to answer at first. “Not a problem.” He grinned. “Do I get the girl?”

Mitch went over the products they could promote with his skiing, and how well the sport lent itself to television commercials, and the agent added a few ideas of his own, and then they left with a handshake and a smile. Like all the meetings, it always felt exciting and positive to Harry. It was only afterward that Mitch would comment on how it had really gone, that such and such person hadn't really been interested, but that another had implied that there was a chance for synergy with his other clients. “What he said about James Bond was good,” Mitch strategized afterward. “His brother-in-law works for the producers that do the Bond movies, so he's not just blowing smoke.” Harry didn't understand any of it, but he sensed that he was on the verge of breaking through to something big and unexpected, like when the wind shifts and a massive new mountain appears out of the clouds.

They went out to dinner every night. Mitch took him to one restaurant that was particularly hot. “Last week Mick Jagger came in with Jerry Hall and sat right over
there
.” He had to take that on faith: he hadn't seen a star since he'd arrived in Hollywood, though he kept expecting to. Mitch picked up the tab, as he did at the bar they went to afterward, where they drank cocktails Harry had never heard of before. Mitch had a lot of friends there, and he always introduced Harry as “the best extreme skier in the world,” and then he'd add: “In the
world
! He's from
Alaska
!” People were impressed, though none of them knew what extreme skiing was. They kept asking him if he'd won a medal in the Olympics. He'd gotten tired of explaining what he did, because his descriptions had started to sound shallow and phony. How do you explain about rock and snow and air and speed and having serious pain, or death, right at your elbow, and you don't even know exactly why you do it? He could talk about snow with another skier for hours: corn snow, blower pow, crust, graupel, mashed potatoes, boilerplate, surface hoar, wind pack, sastrugi—a patchwork of constantly changing surfaces all over the mountain, and every change affecting your speed, your ability to turn away from a cliff edge. The vocabulary of terrain was equally wide: there were roll-overs and wind lips, bowls and chutes, cliff bands, pillows, spines, gullies, kickers, rollers. Even avalanches were specific: slab avalanches and powder avalanches, sloughs and glide cracks, crowns and beds, ski cuts, run-outs, and terrain traps. But there wasn't much to say to these people, all smooth, sophisticated people with good haircuts and jobs in the industry that enabled them to have long, intense discussions about points and back-end deals and syndication—stuff he didn't understand but that he figured was their version of talking about snow.

Mitch created the tiny bubble of Harry's glory in Los Angeles. He treated him like you'd treat the world's best at something, and years later, he still appreciated it. On the last night, when Harry joked he hadn't gotten to meet anyone famous, Mitch thought about it for a minute. “Okay.” He made a call and they climbed back into his Jaguar. He wouldn't say where they were going, except that they were visiting a friend.

“Is this someone I've heard of?” Harry asked.

“Most definitely.”

“Man or woman?”

“You'll see.”

“But I'll recognize them.”

“Oh, you'll recognize them. No question about it.”

“Come on! I don't want to end up standing there with my mouth hanging open.”

Mitch just smiled. “C'mon, man. You're the greatest extreme skier on the planet. What do you have to be shy about?” He pulled out a joint from under the dashboard and they smoked it as they rode down Sunset Boulevard, which was as L.A. as you could get, in Harry's mind. It was his last night there and a couple of the agents had already called back. The James Bond guy had asked for a bio and a copy of his video footage, which Mitch said was a
very
good thing. They passed several bars with people milling around under the brightly lit awnings of Whisky a Go Go and The Roxy.

“This is the Sunset Strip,” Mitch said. “Heard of that?”

Harry thought,
I'm riding past the Sunset Strip
, and his own life was suddenly completely marvelous to him. They turned left and began squirming up a canyon, and in the harsh pink lights above the road Harry could see the dry, sparse landscape interrupted by the irrigated gardens of the houses. As they climbed, the road got twistier and the houses got farther apart, their long brick or iron fences clawing down over the steep terrain.

They reached the top of the canyon and Mitch pulled up to a metal gate and leaned out to an intercom next to his window. A woman's voice came out. It was a drunk-without-any-clothes-on voice.
“Hey, there!”

“It's Mitch. Pete told me to come by.”

“Hold on.
Pete?

There was a silence, then the gate swung open. Harry felt a very pleasant sense of expectancy: he was in L.A., it was night, he'd had a couple of beers, he was about to meet someone famous. Everything was lined up perfectly, as if he'd dropped into a hidden line of untouched powder, and all he had to do was lean in and enjoy it.

The door was opened by a girl with long dark-brown hair wearing cutoff blue jeans and no shirt. It was as if her nipples were staring at him, and he had to force himself to look up at her eyes. Much later, when he barely remembered her face, he'd still have a clear image of her pear-shaped breasts and how they'd hung. Her skin was moist and glistening and gave off a sense of sex as a very common, easy event. “I'm Holly!” she announced, and she gave his hand a comically exaggerated shake. He couldn't think of anything to say. Of course she was Holly: this was Holly-
wood,
a place named after a woman who came to the door dripping and half-naked. He wished all of a sudden that he and Mitch hadn't smoked so much weed a few minutes ago. “Everybody's in the hot tub.”

They followed her through the living room, in which all sorts of musical instruments were scattered among a couple of big, overstuffed couches and a coffee table covered with abandoned beer bottles. An electric guitar leaned against the wall, and huge black stereo speakers sat in the corners, putting out a steady empty hiss. The place smelled like stale bong water and cigarette smoke. Shirts and pants were laid over the backs of chairs or in piles on the floor. A sliding glass door on the far side of the room was open. He squared up his shoulders as she led them through it. People considered him the best extreme skier in the world; that had to count for something.

The porch was lit with several hanging lamps, and off to the side, where it was darker, a cluster of people were sitting in a cedar hot tub. When he got closer a voice came from the group, an easygoing, uncaring voice. “Mitch, my man!”

Mitch leaned over the tub to shake hands, and Harry couldn't believe it was him at first: the long spirals of white-blond hair, the handsome, square jaw. He'd seen the face on posters and album covers and magazine stands. He'd seen him in music videos dancing across the stage or propped against his guitarist as they leaned into a harmony. It was Pete Harrington.

Everything felt instantly unreal, and he watched in amazement as the rock star and Mitch exchanged words that suddenly seemed hyper-real.

“Pete! How goes it? I saw the new video!”

“What'd you think?”

“That's it, man. It's Pete Harrington! Nothing else need be said!”

Harry knew, like everyone, that Pete Harrington had just come out with a solo album after leaving the DreamKrushers, and he'd heard the lead song all winter long on the radio in Denver, Salt Lake, Taos, and even Chamonix. “Wreckage.” He couldn't believe Pete Harrington was sitting six feet away from him without any clothes on. Naked girls were sitting on either side of him, and though the bubbly water made it hard to tell, it seemed like one of the girls was reaching between the singer's legs. He stretched his hand toward Harry. “I'm Pete.”

The others in the tub were all watching them, except for a couple that was making out. Harry touched the wet wrinkled fingers. He thought of telling him his whole name, but it would sound stupid. “I'm Harry,” he said.

“Pete, this man is the best extreme skier
in the world
! He's from
Alaska
!”

“Cool,” Harrington said. “What's an extreme skier?”

“Well…” Harry wanted to explain, but then he got stuck. The singer's reality seemed to far outstrip his own, and he stood there looking into that dream face, holding his hot damp hand and saying nothing at all. This was Pete Harrington!

The singer tried to help him out. “Were you in the Olympics?”

But he was just lost, buried under the weight of all the images of this man, and all the times he'd heard his voice, a voice that had been magnified across the globe at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars by radio stations and satellites and television. He felt like his sense of self was being sucked, whirling, end over end, into the black hole of the other man's fame.

Mitch jumped in. “No, Pete. It's not a race. You climb up to the top of the biggest, scariest slope around and you go down one at a time, going over cliffs, doing flips and helicopters, and whoever does the best line in the best style wins.”

The star was intrigued, nodded his head gently. Even in the tub, every curl on his head seemed perfectly placed. “Right on, man.” His hand disappeared beneath the surface of the bubbly water and he turned to the girl. “Not now, honey. I'm trying to have a conversation.” He looked back at Harry. “It sounds dangerous.”

What could he say?
I cracked a vertebra dropping a sixty-foot cliff? A powder avalanche can move at a hundred-twenty miles an hour?
He cleared his throat. “Can be.”

Pete Harrington was still looking up at him, waiting for more, but Harry couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't be like boasting. In the face of the singer's deafening reputation, his own life had been reduced to silence.

“He's the best in the world,” Mitch was saying. “He's won every event he's competed in for the last five years. It's not even close. And you should see his movies.”

“Cool,” the singer said. “What's it like? Describe it for me.”

“Well,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other as he looked down at the ground next to him, then looked back into that perfect television face. He was acutely aware that everyone in the hot tub was listening to him. “For instance, the last competition was at Mammoth.” He told them about the run he'd made, from the tight near-vertical chute at the top to his forty-foot jump from one narrow spine down to another, where a mistake would mean landing in a jumble of boulders at sixty miles an hour. He described how he'd been surprised by the crustiness of the snow on the lower spine, and how he'd had to fight to keep from sliding over the edge, then he'd clipped his ski on a rock, and he'd briefly been on one leg before he got control again, and somehow got down the spine and onto the easier part of the run. “So”—he cleared his throat again. They were all looking at him. “It's kind of like that.”

Harrington broke the silence. “I'd be shitting bricks.”

“Well, we're even then, because I'd be shitting bricks if I had to stand up in front of twenty thousand people and sing.”

“No, man, you'd be laughing your ass off. It's a trip! You should come backstage sometime and check it out. You know, I'm a skier, too.”

“You are?”

“Yeah, I'm from Seattle. When I was a kid, I was up at Crystal Mountain every weekend. When I got a car I started hitting Mount Baker.”

“Baker! You've gotta be a tree skier.”

“I'm known to ski the occasional tree run.”

They talked about Alaska. Harrington's band had toured Anchorage and Fairbanks before they'd been signed, and they put it together and realized they'd both been in Chilkoot Charlie's in Anchorage on the exact same night in 1988.

“Yeah, I really like Alaska. I want to have igloo sex, man. That's one of my dreams.” One of the girls beside him laughed. “No, really, think about it: You're in that igloo inside a pile of furs. It's fifty below outside and the wind's howling. There's just the light from an oil lamp, and you're with some babe. That's like …
yeah!

“Sounds like a song!” someone said.

Harrington wrinkled his eyebrows in concentration, singing, “
Ice Queen! Unfreeze my dick. Ice Queen! Come bury my pick!
You ever have igloo sex, Harry? Tell me the truth.”

BOOK: This Is How It Really Sounds
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