 
HOLLYWOOD WORM CHRONICLES

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2019 Lorraine Ray

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CHAPTER 1

Estee's Overture

In this life, we all start out as assholey worms. Please don't dismiss my statement as just another jaded observation of a Hollywood insider—hear me out; what I'm saying is based on science. Early on, after a human sperm and an egg combine, we all take the shape of a teeny ring of flesh that drifts around in our mother's womb. A little while later, this minute ring turns itself inside out and begins growing into a chubby worm. The worm forms our intestines. And the original ring portion? It becomes our asshole for the rest of our lives! Which is extremely weird, am I right?

I learned this piece of biological worm wackiness years ago from an annoying executive named Otto Ranken who worked at a studio called Marathon Pictures, an old place that burned down (I believe it was an unsolved arson) and that has long since vanished into Hollywood obscurity; I imagine you've never heard of it. I find the worm part oddly connected to me because my biggest personal success in the movie industry happened to be the Hercules worm man movie, parts of which I directed at Marathon. During filming, I got pregnant with my son, and, coincidentally, he must have been going through this worm/asshole stage at the time!

This Hercules worm thing I filmed could be classified as one of the peplum movies or a sword and sandal saga. They call these movies peplum, after the pepla, which is a short skirt the he-men wear in most of those films. Peplum movies made a killing in the drive-in theaters across America and around the world at the time. I filmed that particular turkey in 1964 in the hills south of Mexicali, Mexico which is on the other side of the border from Calexico, California. For a while, I believe, the studio called the movie Worm Men Versus Hercules, and then Hercules and the Worm Men from Planet 9, and finally Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below.

The Hercules movie was not an artistic success in the sense that anyone would want to examine it for interesting movie-making ideas; a few things were done well, but most were shoddy. For example, I very much like the shot of the sun in the first appearance of the worm men. I set that up, so, no wonder I like it. Some Claymation techniques were groundbreaking I'll admit. And the script? Well, a nightmare aptly describes it. It happened to be one of the worst scripts I've ever read, and I've read some real doozies. And it debuted as a commercial disaster, showing well only in Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay, but then it began taking off in drive-ins and small theaters in America, though that's not the best way to judge success as a director or a human. Notice I don't put humans and directors in the same category. This is a good distinction to keep in mind.

So why do I consider that ridiculous movie a success for me? Primarily because while I worked in Mexicali, I figured out what really matters in life. Personally, and artistically, I had a vision come to me. I realized that for me conceiving my son Artis began the most significant portion of my life. It's as simple as that. It's not some corny thing about women belonging in the home and all that crap; I don't wish I'd never been a movie director. But I did get an understanding of the primitive drive to reproduce ourselves. And conception became an artistic vision as well as a personal one because all my movies have reproduction as a secret motif. You'll find it in a cursory inspection. Since you say you might be interested in writing an article about my movies, you might want to take note of that. And I really can't tell you much about the whole Hercules movie, since I was only hired at the end.

If a vision comes to you, respect for that gift should be axiomatic. I don't think a person gets very many moments in their lives when they perceive the world with a special vision. It's a privilege to get such an inspiration and you must try to respect the moment and the place where it arrived. Therefore, I have never forgotten Mexicali. Or Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below.

But I can tell you are still a little dubious and curious about how a movie of such low quality—okay, sword and sandal movies were on their way out even then, replaced by motorcycle dramas which were replaced by spaghetti westerns shortly after I got the assignment—could possibly be my favorite, and the key for understanding the entire body of my work. Frankly, it takes some explaining. I can try and put the whole thing in context for you if you please.

At the time they hired me for my first movie, I had already kicked around the studios unsuccessfully for years. Nobody wanted a female director. Surprise, surprise! I couldn't get an offer to direct my own funeral. My name, Estee St. Germaine, would sometimes make them think me male, which was good until someone from the studios phoned and I spoke, thus revealing my sex, and of course then all bets were off and so was the offer. Or they believed I was French; I am, by ancestry, but I kicked around the Western U.S. for years until a grandfather died and left me enough money to attend U.S.C. film school. I love French cinema of the 1950s, and that may be part of the reason I'm a director, but I'm definitely not French. They never directly got beyond the woman thing to the French deal, though they sometimes asked, "What are you besides a girl? French, or something?"

But I had not yet been a mother, and, in my story, this point is crucial.

I lived in an apartment in Mar Vista after graduation from USC. If you are not familiar with Los Angeles, especially the west side, Mar Vista would not be what you would describe as a glamorous neighborhood of that sprawling city.

I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a courtyard complex, one of those odd little sunny courts which Los Angeles abounds in. I believe all the apartments were yellow or green with a dry fountain in the center of the courtyard that only ever contained old yellowing newspapers. Five years after I graduated from film school, and frankly, I barely made a living.

But all that changed when I ran into Otis at a grocery in Mar Vista. We hit it off immediately, and I told him I hoped to get work in the industry. Movies, that is.

It turned out he worked as a bit player in movies as a he-man. He was a tall handsome gentleman, as black as South Carolina at midnight, which was where he was from, by the way. Spartanburg to be precise. Yes, the irony of a body builder from Spartanburg is humungous, but it explains why he became a he-man. He got curious about the Spartan lifestyle because of the name of his town and decided to make his body a sculpture in the old Charles Atlas style of body building. He blundered upon a muscle magazine in a basket of periodicals at a local barbershop and some neighborhood men assisted him to begin bulking up as a teen.

Otis got me my job on the Worm Man movie. He had already been in several sword and sandal movies himself, and he mentioned me when the director of the Worm Man movie, Leonid Sanodrov, had problems and they needed an assistant down there immediately. He knew the animation director from a Jason and the Argonauts film and, Mantis, Man of a Million Muscles. The connection to Otis got me the job.

He mentioned me as a trained and available assistant director who had already shot several scenes for the TV show Riflesmoke. For some reason, they took his recommendation and phoned me with the offer to be an assistant on the Hercules movie in the hills of Northern Mexico. They promised to have a crack animation team in Hollywood build clay monsters for the various Special Effects parts of the film.

Otis had gotten his start in movies when they wanted the requisite black gladiator, who usually lost to the white man, by the way. They always shot a scene where the black fighter died in some dramatic fashion after battling angrily with the white hero. The way they used those black guys in death scenes, jabbing them with tridents and throwing nets around their heads, sickened me. Occasionally they let the white hero have a black side-kick as the Civil Rights Movement gained speed—I think you might detect that in Hercules Unchained and the Men from Mars— but by then the genre began fading from the cinemas. They never let the black men win, except for a few counter culture movies, which did poorly in the box office and showed the winners starting a colony of escaped slaves on the Island of Lost Martian Slaves. A lot of scantily clad women were in that flop, as I recall, most in leopard-skin costumes. Snakes, lions and other assorted monsters attacked the colony. The women tripped on rocks over and over. Goodness, there were a lot of rocks to trip over on that island of lost slaves. Otis had a major part in that movie in which he battled a sea monster while wearing a leopard's pelt diaper. The monster had one big head, which the Claymation animator had trouble keeping on so you could see some supporting wires if you stopped a frame. I remember laughing at that with Artis when it came out on VHS. We used to stop it to find the wires poking out of the clay. It was a thing in those movies. They were also bringing in martial arts, as you will see in my Worm Man movie to your great amusement, I am sure. Yes, that movie had martial arts and classic Greek figures and worms from below who arrived in a spaceship. Isn't Hollywood wonderful? Well, anyway, Otis had interested himself in muscle building and jujitsu and hung out at the beach in Venice where he lived in a small apartment above a garage. A producer in need of a black body builder for the sword and sandal movie, Titan Trouble, discovered him doing stretches in the hot sand one crowded Saturday afternoon. Otis stood only an inch taller than me (and I'm a short woman) and he had these intensely blue bug-eyes. He liked to smoke cigars from Cuba which he bought in Tijuana. There the producer stood on the beach in Venice staring at my hunky boyfriend-to-be. Suddenly he says, "You are the perfect specimen!" My boyfriend said he did not take to that man right away, and ignored him in favor of the Pacific Ocean and his side stretches, sliding his arm down his leg with his legs out. Then he started deep knee bends alternating with a jump for agility and flexibility in ham strings and Achilles tendon. "Listen, my black friend there. Sir! I'm a producer. My name is Sergio Fanconi. I'm making a movie in Italy. One of these old Greek muscle-man stories and what we need right away is a good-looking muscly black man who can speak English. Just watching you right now makes me realize you're perfect! Do you hear me?" My boyfriend grunted. He said it was hard to tell if it was the deep-knee bends making him grunt or an affirmative to the offer. "Listen, I'm willing to fly you to Europe! Let me take you to the studio tomorrow and do some test shots. If they pan out, you'll be it. Whatdoya think? Do you want the part? And do you have a passport?" Well, how could he resist? And he did happen to have a passport.

After that, the money flowed nicely. He'd never imagined himself as a movie star, but there you are. He flew to Ravenna, Italy for the filming. This was in the early era when the sword and sandal genre began to dominate the drive-in movie theaters around the country and went on to sweep world cinema. He liked to recite some of the goofier lines from his movies such as: "Men of muscle, let us ford this forbidding river of fire to the forge of the fire god!" And "To the gods belong the fate of mighty Hercules! Question not the fate of our future!"

I felt so drawn to him right from the start because of the way he spoke and acted around tomatoes. Yes, tomatoes! I recall him in his hat, one of those super cool, "boss" Homburg types which was blue plaid, with his horn-rimmed glasses and fantastic physic in a tight Madras shirt. I responded immediately to his body, his bodily presence. But I remember his finger caressed the tomatoes, looking for the best one on the display. I know! Ripe tomatoes! Crazy, huh? We were drawn to each other in that casual, gentle way. I describe it as a spontaneous love affair; we both admired each other. Being so into him, I didn't worry about birth control or the fact that it failed once while we made love in my hotel room in Calexico. Then nine months later I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.

Neither of my parents approved. Yeah, the racial thing explains it. They hadn't approved of the film school idea, either, to give them the benefit there. My mother planned my future along the lines of a nurse or nutritionist at a hospital. She even went so far as to study the local college catalogue trying to decide which medical career would be best. My father planned along the lines of just getting me the hell out of the house and cutting his expenses. They couldn't understand where they had failed when I decided to study film. Having a biracial baby was also not in their plans for me.

By the time Artis came along his father specialized in martial arts movies and flew out to location on a continuous basis. It seemed that several movies were being shot in Hong Kong about that time and he fit the bill for the required black martial arts performance. He finally married a woman from Hong Kong, but they split up about ten years ago. Later he returned to Spartanburg, but it turned out that town was not a great place for a black man and a Chinese woman to live together. Having a biracial relationship or child made a bit of a statement in those days. We might have been interested in short term pleasure at the expensive of long-term commitments. Not that Otis has been negligent, he hasn't once refused to take Artis when he could. But he decided to move from Spartanburg to Atlanta and open a weight-lifting gym.

Having Artis created one bad aspect in my life. Once I'd played the role of mother, which is played by most women in their lifetimes, I started imagining all humans as babies, dependent, grasping, fondling the breast at night in bed with tiny waving fingers and peering, peering with shining eyes searching for the reassuring, angelic face of their mother, always their mother. It's the curse of mothers to have made the observation of universal babyhood, for even lusty, virile men have reminders of an earlier, babyish stage and at times it's rather off-putting in sexual matters, if I may be so indiscrete and mention this. Yes, you can be climaxing only to gaze into the big baby blue eyes of your husband and gasp at the reminder of the way your child looked. Not that my boyfriend and I broke up for this reason. I did not have a chance to observe this for several months because he busied himself with his extra girlfriend, a hairdresser in Culver City. Rather like insects, we humans have our discarded husks, our prior lifecycles, which we appear to slip on occasionally, like extras for bit parts filming one Saturday. The way I once slipped on big buggy sunglasses on the way to Burbank Airport to pick up Otis and his new Chinese girlfriend.

On the set of Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below I had this interesting and odd factoid driven home daily. When they called me, Estee St. Germaine, to assist the director, they mentioned Leonid Sanodrov had suffered a mild nervous attack on location on a ranch in Northern Mexico and because of some temporary upswing in the industry, another male director couldn't be found for this very interesting worm movie, a movie with classical themes developed along with the worms, even if it did have a rather ridiculous Italian actor playing Hercules. An incredibly poor actor, I might add who spent most of his time eating ham sandwiches. Paulo Ponce, the director of photography, while not happy to have a woman direct, nevertheless welcomed my help with the rigors of filming on location in a sweltering Mexican valley. Simply too many directors were making Pearl Harbors, jungle adventures, and dinosaur attacks to be brought to help out with a low-budget sword and sandal movie. Especially when those epics were going out. The studio had invested ahead in Claymation of the half man/half worm scenes and hoped to make the money back through release in small countries. Help was needed on location or the whole movie would have to be scrapped at a great loss to Marathon Pictures and the production team. Of course, when I realized I was being chosen I was ecstatic, low budget production or not, a release in South America only, or not. Northern Mexico or wherever I arrived pleased someone like me who was so desperate. All my years of preparation for the director role finally paid off.

When I got my second picture offer, I agreed to be an assistant director without once remembering my motherhood! Later that night my sister reminded me that she could not agree to take Artis for the three weeks they needed me. My relationship with a new man was beginning to flounder due to evidence of infidelity, and therefore he was no help, thus began my one and only foray into directing while taking care of my son on my own. Luckily, Artis was the least obstinate and the best behaved of my three sons. And something about having him there helped me to focus on generative powers, which you might notice in my second movie. It would not be true to say that Artis created my chance at fame. Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below was not destined for notoriety except in the realm of most thoroughly screwed up set and cast. I, Estee St. Germaine, was not a big part of that failure, but I am happy to claim Artis is a big part of my later success!

Marty Frobisher on the Ropes

"Marty!" yelped a man seated at a small wooden table in the Roosevelt Hotel dining room when a tanned distinguished-looking man in his early fifties wearing a slightly out-of-fashion brown Herringbone suit stepped through the door and stood beside the maître d scanning the lunch crowd. "Over here, baby! Over here. Come on over...it's fabulous to meet with you again, my friend."

Marty barreled toward the agent. "There you are," he said in a slightly irked voice.

"Sit right here! Don't you look fabulous crossing the parquet floor. We don't want that fabulous face of yours just any old place, do we? No, sit there, where everyone in this joint can see you. I don't know why this place isn't jumping up to mob you. Let me take a look, huh?" The agent bobbed his head around Marty, checking his famous profile. "Golly! Are you a movie star, or what?"

"Golly, yourself." Marty did smile briefly at the compliment.

"You're looking better every day. Leading man looks in that mellow kind of ageless marvelousness only the English can manage with their old-world charm and savoir faire. An old-fashioned matinee idol, that's you. That fits you to a tee. You, you, English devil!" The agent thumped Marty Frobisher's shoulder and remembered that type of herringbone suit had gone out of fashion years ago.

"Get me a bloody cocktail, damn you, and quit the kiss-up. And not so much of the old-world, mellow, agelessness, please." Marty scooted his chair closer to the table and glanced around. "Anybody famous here today? Besides me?"

The agent ignored his question and asked a passing waiter for two Martinis, pronto.

"And this better be good," said Marty, folding his hands together on one knee. He still scanned the restaurant. Some claimed Taylor and Burton often dined here on a Saturday night. He'd give up almost anything to be able to say he'd joined Taylor and Burton in a dining room.

"It is good! Oh, golly, it is so very good. I have the best opportunity for you, Marty, my friend. It's a pivotal role. Didn't I tell you when I called...I mean rang? I can't keep that English lingo of yours straight. Yeah..." The agent smiled at Marty with that empty, aimless gaze of the truly unconnected.

"Okay, let me hear about it this pivotal part. Don't keep me waiting. My cocktail's here. Let's hear all about it." A waiter had barely whisked a Martini in front of Marty before he snatched it up and began downing it urgently.

"First, let me assure you from the highest high ups at the studio: this movie would only be your start with the studio. Just your barest start. There are big things in plans for you, my friend."

"I don't like the sound of that. Start? What studio am I about to link arms with?"

The agent paused. He glanced up at the hotel's famous ornate ceiling with its recessed alcoves almost as though he were seeking divine help. "What a ceiling, huh? It's like that crazy Sistine place in Italy." He tentatively sipped at the edge of his drink and glanced around nervously before answering. "Marathon Pictures," he said, dropping his voice.

"Marathon? They're broke!" Marty thundered.

"Marty, shush. Don't say that. Don't say it. Don't doubt me."

"I bloody well doubt you!"

"That is all an evil rumor started by their competitors. There's nothing to it. They have never been more profitable. I wish I had more opportunities for my clients to work for them."

"Don't bullshit me!"

"Oh Marty. Let's start at the beginning again, shall we? Let's wind this conversation back. Start right back where we began. We've gotten off on the wrong foot somehow here. I dunno know...first, the movie is only your beginning with them and they're guaranteeing, and I mean absolutely, guaranteeing another film. Second, if you do this movie and it's a flop, the next one, the one they're planning now, has you guaranteed a part and it's gonna be a goddamned blockbuster. They've got a great creative team working there."

"Sheesh. Of course. The next one is guaranteed! What's my part in this current fiasco?"

"Oh, don't say fiasco like that, Marty. Don't go there. Gee. Your part would be fabulous. And they really want you. They're begging for you."

"To play what?"

The agent took another slow sip. "A wizard."

"Shit! A wizard? What, like in a bloody Christmas Panto or something? Is that the fantastic part you got me?" Marty's eyes bugged and his drink came down on the table with a bang. "I knew it! I knew this meeting was going to be a waste of time!"

"Now wait, Marty. Let's wind it all back here again. Start this whole thing over until we get it right."

"Notice we keep having to start over? I'm getting the feeling that we shouldn't start at all. You, sir, are bullshitting me."

"Let me tell you. What this studio is offering is way, way too much money for the size of your part. That's telling me they really want you."

Marty struck his forehead. "Now you're saying the part is small? May I remind you that you began this conversation by saying the part you were offering me was pivotal!"

"Pivotal, but taciturn. What you're gonna be Marty.... what you're gonna be is... a very quiet, but important, wizard."

"But I mean, shit! A wizard! This will ruin me."

"Don't be so negative."

"Oh, I don't know why I'm negative, oh, maybe it's because I'm going to be ruined!" After Marty had his say, he sunk his head in his hand and began massaging his tanned brow. White wrinkles crisscrossed his forehead so that as he worked his skin, lightning appeared to flash across his face.

The agent noticed the wrinkles. He grimaced to himself. This guy's productive years were less than the fingers on one hand. "Listen, Marty. I have assurances that the part would involve a great deal of makeup. No one could possibly recognize you under all the whiskers and robes they're planning to deck you out in. Let's face it, you aren't as young as you once were. And remember the theme is classical. It has Hercules in it."

"Oh shit! Hercules and a wizard!" Marty stopped massaging his brow long enough to say that. Then he went back to the self-soothing gesture. "And so much for my agelessness."

"Remember you said you needed the money. The money is... the money I have gotten you... is very, very good. I have also negotiated a deal to make the type of your name very small in the credits, so that very few people would be able to read it."

"You have managed to get my name to be very, very small?"

"Well, that's the way I protect my client. We take the money and forget about the credit."

"Oh, bloody hell!"

"It's a fill-in job, Marty. A job between better jobs, that's all. And it's a beginning!"

"This is what you want me to agree to?" Marty sighed.

"Let me assure you, the director, Leonid Sanodrov, is going to be so, so big in this town. Bigger than big. And, and, listen you'll be put up in an historic hotel, Hotel De Anza. It's a fabulous, marvelous place that has been photographed in some of the nation's most famous travel magazines. Full page spreads, Marty. The stars are flocking down there. All the big names, Marty. The biggest of the big! Top notch accommodations and all the extras. Live like a king for a month. Who's gonna get hurt? It'll knock your socks off when you get down there! First class accommodations. A pool, tons of palm trees, the works. If you like it, maybe you can fly your mother out from England and have her stay with you. Won't that be something? Or your friend. What's his name? Norbert? Nobby?"

Bobby Arrives in Hollywood

Bobby Rimes arrived on his first day in Hollywood very late in the afternoon on a Friday.

From his seat in a Greyhound bus his view of the city disappointed, due to the fact that the brown smog obscured the entire place. Somewhere above and beyond that brown cloud, he knew Marathon Pictures lurked, veiled in soot and smoke, but when he arrived in Hollywood itself, not a glimmer of neon showed the magnificent edifice he knew was there. Bobby stood on a concrete bridge over a dry canyon for a long time gazing into the dark hills above him, hoping for a glimpse of his future place of employment.

Then he went on to find a hotel for the night.

The night clerk in the first hotel he encountered (quite a run-down ruin and still in existence!) was awake, and though the clerk could not provide a room, he was upset by the late and unexpected arrival of someone who might actually have money.

"My Uncle Otto works in Marathon Pictures," Bobby said proudly, wondering the instant that brag left his mouth if he ought to have blurted it out to a complete stranger in a tough-looking hotel.

"I've got nothing for you. The place is full. But for ten dollars you can sleep on the lobby couch," offered the clerk. It was kind of him to let Bobby sleep on a side sofa in the lobby for a small backhander. Bobby accepted the offer and pulled out his entire wad of money. An enormous wad. They don't make people as stupid as this much anymore.

Some strange street characters, wearing fringed leather, chains and bandoliers, almost like members of a fugitive army, were sitting at a coffee table around something that looked suspiciously like a bong, something Bobby had never experienced in any hotel he'd visited and which he didn't know how to use, and he certainly didn't want to talk or smoke weed after crossing the country by bus. Therefore, after untying the sleeping bag from his backpack, he lay down on the sofa with his head on the pack beside the hotel's big front window. It was a hot corner, the smokers were quiet, and, letting his weary eyes stray over them he opened the flap of his sleeping bag slightly and soon fell asleep.

But very shortly after, he awoke. A young man dressed like a street urchin/Hell's Angel, with odd, bushy eyebrows and loose sideburns, his eyes small and his face strangely marked with paint, stood over him. The smokers were still in the room, and a few had turned their chairs around so as to watch better. This young man apologized very courteously for having awakened Bobby, introduced himself as an out-of-work actor named Schultzer, and then said: "Hey man, be cool, this hotel belongs to us, the actors, and whoever lives here or passes the night here does so, if you can dig it, with the actors' blessing. Nobody may do that without the actors' nod. But you have no such permission, or if you've got it, now's the time to cough it up."

Bobby had half raised himself, smoothing down his light blonde hair and looking up at the man, he said: "Hey man, what is this? What's going on? This isn't groovy."

"What's going on is you're not wanted here," replied the young man slowly, while here and there a head shook over Bobby's ignorance, "Is that clear?"

"You're saying I gotta have your permission to sleep here?" asked Bobby, as if he wished to assure himself that what he had heard was not a figment of his imagination.

"Yeah, man, you must have our permission," was the reply, and there was a contempt for Bobby in the young man's gesture as he stretched out his arm and appealed to the others, "What says the peanut gallery?"

"No narcs!" called the group of vagrants around the bong.

"Narc! If you call me names then I'll have to go," said Bobby, tossing open the flap of his sleeping bag angrily as if to get out.

"And where to, man? To the fuzz?" asked another of the young men sitting around the table.

"Up the hill," said Bobby, sitting up, "to another hotel. What's it to you?"

"Another hotel room this late at night!" cried the young man, stepping back a pace, pretending to be shocked. The rest of the group sniggered.

"Is that impossible?" inquired Bobby coolly. "Then why did you wake me?"

At this the young man flew into a passion. "None of your Squaresville logic!" he cried. "I insist on respect for the actor's authority! I woke you up to inform you that you must quit the hotel at once. No narcs are tolerated in this pad, man! Orders of us all!"

"Enough of this fooling around," said Bobby in a markedly quiet voice, laying himself down again on his open sleeping bag. "You're going a little too far, man, calling me a narc, and I'll have something to say tomorrow about your attitude. I am an advanced graduate and black belt of the Muncie Academy of Martial Arts, but I don't suppose any of you know what that means. The hotel clerk here and those other people will bear me out if necessary that I gave him money to sleep here. Let me tell you that I am the nephew whom one of the heads of Marathon Pictures is expecting. I'm going to try to get work from him. I did not want to miss the chance to stroll the streets of Hollywood in the daytime, but unfortunately lost my way several times so I arrived very late. That it was too late to present myself at the Studio I know very well before you saw fit to inform me. That is why I have made shift with this bed for the night, where, to put it mildly, you have had the discourtesy to disturb me. That is all I have to say. Good night, brother. Find the strength of character to be cool." And Bobby turned over on his side toward the window.

"Oh, far out, man! He's a graduate of a martial arts school! And he knows someone big in Marathon Pictures!" Bobby heard the mocking tone behind his back, and then everyone laughed, except for the Schultzer character near him. But the young man soon recovered his assurance and, lowering his voice sufficiently to appear considerate of Bobby's sleep while yet speaking loud enough to be clearly heard, said to the hotel clerk: "What we have here is the nephew of a studio head." So, Bobby worried, were they planning to kidnap him? They had every indication of being a rough sort, a gang of dangerous people. He had fallen into a den of thieves and ruffians! The particular threat surprised Bobby, who had met some tough characters drifting through Indiana, and had been alarmed once or twice on the bus out to California, but on the whole he felt equal to it due to (1) his excellent karate experience, (2) some cool new karate moves he had studied from book descriptions and (3) a childhood spent planting and tending green beans under the Indiana sun. It appeared that the door to the kitchen opened fairly near his head, and in his drowsy state he had overlooked it. Certainly, he might escape through that door. If this Schultzer man should attack him, from the look of his body that guy could not, even with the best help, overcome Bobby! The only question was whether Bobby would allow him to do so: he decided not to allow it. In that case, however, there was no sense in pretending to sleep, and so he turned on his back again. He could watch the actors putting their head together; the arrival of a nephew of someone in the studio was no small event. The door into the hotel kitchen had been opened, and blocking the whole doorway stood the imposing figure of a large Mexican female chef in a flowery mu-mu, to whom the hotel clerk advanced on tiptoe in order to tell her what was happening. And now the conversation began on the far side of the room. It seemed the head honcho of the gang slept upstairs, but one of the under honchos heard that they had Bobby, a square-looking man in his teens, sleeping calmly on the lobby sofa with a backpack for a pillow and knotty stick within reach. The under honcho knew that Schultzer had roused the man, questioned him, and duly warned him off the territory, all of which Bobby had taken with ill grace, perhaps with some justification, as it eventually turned out, for he claimed to be the nephew of someone in Marathon Pictures. Of course, to say the least of it, that was a statement which required confirmation, and so Schultzer begged the head honcho to make him produce the letter at once.

Then there was a silence while the under honcho was making inquiries up there and Schultzer waited for the answer. Bobby did not change his position, did not even once turn around, seemed quite indifferent, and stared into space. Schultzer's report, in its combination of malice and prudence, gave him an idea of the measure of diplomacy in which even underlings in the hotel, like Schultzer, were versed. Nor were they remiss in industry: the hotel had a night Service. And apparently answered questions quickly, too, for someone already replied. His reply seemed brief enough, for Schultzer hung up the receiver immediately, crying, angrily: "Just what I said! No one believes what he says. A common, lying narc, and probably worse." For a moment Bobby believed that all of them—Schultzer, the smokers, the chef and the clerk—were going to fall upon him in a body, and to escape at least the first shock of their assault he crawled right underneath the sleeping bag. But the telephone rang again, and with a special insistence, it seemed to Bobby. Slowly, he put out his head. Although it was improbable that this message also concerned Bobby, they all stopped short and Schultzer took up the receiver once more. He listened to a fairly long statement, and then said in a low voice: "A mistake, is it? I'm sorry to hear that. The head honcho said so? Very queer, very queer. How am I to explain it to him?"

Bobby pricked up his ears. Apparently, the head honcho had recognized him as someone important. That was unlucky for him. On the one hand, for it meant that the head honcho was interested in him. Having estimated all the probable chances, Bobby was taking up the challenge with a smile. On the other hand, however, it was quite lucky, for if his interpretation was correct, they had underestimated his strength, from working on the farm and watching karate, and he would have more freedom of action than he had dared to hope. And if they expected to cow him by their dangerous superiority in recognizing him as a nephew of someone in the Studio, they were mistaken; it made his skin prickle a little, that was all.

He waved off Schultzer, who timidly approached him. And magnanimously accepted from the clerk an urgent invitation to transfer himself and his belongings into one of the hotel's rooms; he also accepted a drink on the house, and from the chef a bowl of chili. He did not have to ask that the lobby should be cleared, for all the scruffy actors/motorcycle gangsters flocked out with averted faces lest he should recognize them again the next day, no doubt. The room he was taken to wasn't much to look at, but Bobby was too tired to care. He turned out the light and was left in peace at last. He slept deeply until morning, scarcely disturbed by the streetcar rattling by the window once or twice, a tightness on his torso, and some scampering once near his head which sounded like rats. Maybe this dilapidated Los Angeles hotel room wasn't completely clean.

Bobby woke in the same room he'd fallen asleep in. It was shadowed in a way that indicated it was past noon. Was it already the next day! Within seconds he felt the ropes—tying him up!

CHAPTER 2

What's Our Title Today?

"My god, son, whatever your name is, it's just great that I'm going to get help on this damn mess," said Otto Kranken, discussing Worm Men from Mars Versus Hercules with his new assistant. The two of them stood in the cramped office beside an open window that spilled forth cool Pacific Ocean fog mixed with a generous helping of car exhaust. He'd only just met the young man and was so relieved to be getting any assistant, no matter how incompetent he might be, that he'd begun blurting out his true opinion of the dismal state of affairs at the studio.

"Sir, maybe we shouldn't call it that. I mean a mess, sir," pointed out the assistant. This young man cupped his hands under his elbows as though he doubted their durability. One hand flew to his collar several times to determine if his beige sweater had bucked up peculiarly behind his neck in the way it had when he wore it during a recent visit to the city zoo with his girlfriend.

"Ah...maybe we shouldn't. Standing up for the old studio, eh? You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Well, let's mosey down the hall, shall we? Some other fellows... helping me out down here in a little room we keep them in. I call them the Little Room Guys. This group phones the hotel in Calexico where everybody pre-production is staying. They're strategizing the heck outta things down there. We phone in every morning for an update on the situation on location."

"Ah huh," nodded the intern. He gulped several times and nodded at Otto's frazzled secretary as they passed her.

Otto paused at several doors before he mumbled "oh yes" and rapped his knuckles on Room 54. He twisted the knob and swung the door open rapidly.

Two young men sat at a long rickety table in front of a brown phone. One picked his nose and the other one slept on his folded arms.

"Are we ready here?" Otto bleated in a loud, semi-strangled voice.

"Uh...oh!" said the sleeper sitting up dizzily.

"Did you call Calexico?" demanded Otto.

"Yup," said the sleeper.

"The situation is, we have active opposition," offered the nose-picker.

"There's an actual opposition to the title change!" Otto almost screeched.

"Yes," said the nose-picker warily. He glanced at his companion for corroboration.

"No," yelped the sleeper, "are you sure? I understood it to be an active opposition to the title not changing."

"So... if I understand this correctly, you believe they actively oppose the current title," Otto relaxed. He hated the current title, unless he had misunderstood the current title. Why was his secretary so useless? Why didn't she ever remember the current title of this damn Calexico movie?

"Is that the current title this week, or last week? How current are we talking?" asked the sleeper urgently.

"Did we change the title last week? Is that what you mean by current?" Otto floundered.

"Let me check that," said the nose-picker, picking up the telephone receiver. "They're probably all still at the meeting."

"Damn!" said Otto as he and the intern fled back to his office.

Schultzer Makes Out Like a Bandit

"In life, kid, we all start off as assholes. Worm-like little assholes. It's a little-known fact. A fact of our human existence on this peculiar planet." Otto Ranken leaned back in his chair and planted his feet on his desk as he spoke to his newly arrived nephew. Otto glimpse a fog-shrouded traffic light changing to green.

"Fascinating man, but don't call me kid," said the dark-haired young fellow in the shabby suit. He sat on a chair beside Otto's desk exposing his rabbit-like overbite and dirty fingernails to a man who had many delicate feelings toward family and therefore this newly arrived wife's nephew, although generally the prior nephews had been better-looking than this specimen who had shown up in his office minutes before the beginning of Otto's first afternoon nap.

"What are you—an expert in Biology or something? I heard you were a retired director," said Otto's guest.

Otto sighed deeply. He figured he may as well relax by giving this nephew some of his wisdom before the afternoon meetings which were going to be a stressful and no one else in the studio would listen to him pontificate for more than three minutes. Even his secretary, sitting outside his open door, started filing her nails and yawning whenever Otto spoke. "Well, you might say that about me. I once shot a science documentary and the whole thing about us being assholes was explained to me by this batty professor up at Berkeley who starred in the film. A ring of pink flesh which becomes our asshole is the first part of us formed in our mother's womb. Then we turn ourselves inside out and become fat worms. I tell everybody I meet this story." To illustrate the stout, imaginary worm all humans began as, Otto waggled one finger. Otto then twisted his foot, trying to relieve a cramp in his leg. His shoe knocked over the photo of his wife and two sons (the two assholey worms he'd bestowed on the world) and Otto catapulted himself forward in the chair and dove at the falling frame before it hit the floor. He tried to set it back up, but the stand at the back of the frame didn't bend correctly after the way he'd caught it. What had his mother paid for that piece of junk frame? And the shipping from Chicago. He should send her less money so she'd stop buying him junk like that to litter the top of his desk. Otto sighed and laid the frame flat; it was one of his favorite pictures. He reflected happily that this newly arrived nephew did not look much like his own handsome sons whom he planned to spend more time with as soon as the studio's problems were sorted out. "This Berkeley fellow was real nuts, let me tell you. UFOs and powdered soy milk. That kind of a nut. They took him off the moonshot program. He was the only nut actually taken off that program. He gave me an article he wrote in Lesser Known Science called 'Pine Needles: The Miracle Cure for Athlete's Foot.' But he knew a lot about us starting life as assholes. I've born it in mind ever since, especially since I've been employed at Marathon Pictures."

"Crazy daddy-o, so you're saying you work with assholes?" His fingers, with those horribly dirty nails, tapped the chair arm impatiently. This nephew seemed to have hacked his black hair off himself; it was a deranged cut, the cut of a pixie who had smoked those funny cigarettes that kids at Venice Beach liked. Otto caught a whiff of that off this nephew's clothes. The kid probably camped out in one of those cheap high rises off Wilshire where you shared a grimy bath. A good shampoo and this young man were complete strangers. Otto knew he was the type of kid you could be brutally frank with, though.

"Yes. Now, as to you, you happen to be a particularly unattractive grown-up asshole. Even for one of my wife's nephews from Indiana. This is, honestly, what I'm thinking."

The kid glared at him and then shrugged resignedly. "Something along these lines has been said before. By my old man."

"Okay. He has more sense than I thought. Now, hear me out. I have an opportunity in mind for you, but first, has your mother told you the position of Marathon Pictures?"

"No, man. I don't see her. Much."

"Didn't you just come from Muncie?" said Otto in shock.

"Well..." the evasive young man examined his nails carefully and avoided Otto's eyes, "we never discussed it, man."

"Then, Bobby, let me tell you our position in the industry is mighty precarious. Mighty difficult. You have come out here to Los Angeles leaving Muncie, Indiana and you are probably thinking you've got it made because you know an uncle in pictures and you're going to make your fortune, but I'm telling you the movie industry just sucks people in, like you and me, and spits us out. We get spit out all torn up inside. It's a tough industry, son. We have three films upcoming and none of them appear to be particularly successful. And failure, well, it's kind of an orphan, you know, Bobby. The box office numbers keep plummeting and our expenses rise. Now we're shooting a muscle man movie in the lines of classical Greek gods in Calexico. You don't know where it is? No one does. It's a town on the border with Mexico. This movie is very low budget because, frankly Bobby, we're broke. It's a Science Fiction movie, also, and that means it has Science Fiction aspects and that means Special Effects which we can barely afford because we're broke. Let's just say, the Special Effects won't be very special. There is some chance it will be a limited success in South America, so say the financial types. Apparently, without our realizing it, the sword and sandal movies are currently about to fail in American theaters! We did not anticipate this coming six months ago. Oh, to see the future, Bobby! We must think of another line for our studio or the entire place will be bankrupt! What to do is our question. Do we go with the old gangster theme, or westerns, or a gritty modern job with switchblades and crass women? My job is on the line. I'm working very hard just to cover my ass here, son. Bobby, we're really in a hole!"

"This film your making is like classical Greek? Like Zeus and all that stuff?"

"Yes," Otto replied, "but with worm aliens, too."

"That world is dead, man. D-e-a-d, dead. The reason you can't interest anyone in that world is that it's a stupid world. You're just digging up Deadsville, U.S.A. I know the type of movie you should be making."

"Yes? I'm all ears. What do you have in mind, Bobby?"

"The movie you should make would be one with motorcycles!"

"Motorcycles? How extremely peculiar. I don't know anything about them. Do you have a story in mind?" Otto felt strangely intrigued. He had been imagining himself on a motorcycle once a few months ago when he had pulled alongside one while coming to work from Pasadena. The young man on that cycle had really looked dangerous and Otto liked the idea of riding around the hills on a thing like that. Devil may care. Wind in his hair, well, what remained of his hair. He really needed to get an appointment with that man whom the makeup people recommended. A special salve and an herbal tea from China made with monkey (ick!) glands...

"Yes, well, no, man, just dig it with me for a second, you take any plot and put it on motorcycles and you'll sell millions of tickets to the drive-in shows. Motorcycles are every man's dream. Something hot and powerful between their legs."

"Ahhh," said Otto. "Mining the old sex angle vein! Is that it, Bobby?"

"There's that. Sure. You can dig it. And there's the feel of cylinders and freedom. Freedom, man. The open road. Man has got to be free. And we put hot chicks in the movie. They can be on the back of the cycles. Don't put em on the front of the motorcycles because, hey shit, they don't drive good."

"Are you serious though?"

"Of course."

"Say... there might be something to that! I never imagined one of my wife's nephews would be of any use to me. You fellows keep coming out here asking for jobs. My wife has so many damn sisters in Indiana. Excuse me for saying that, Bobby. None of them every amounted to anything. They all came out expecting to make their fortunes in six months and when that didn't happen, and they were propositioned by a director, they went back to Indiana. Now you come along with a great idea. I see it! No other damn studio is doing a damn motorcycle movie. Motorcycle Madness! We film it out in the desert! We could get that in the can quickly enough. Say, I think it's great. I think it works!"

"You are right. Uncle...Otto. I say go with motorcycles. I know a group of motorcycle enthusiasts."

"You do? But I understood you just moved here?"

"I ... I just met them. A whole bunch of motorcycle enthusiasts. It's wild!"

"Can you get yourself or these motorcycle enthusiasts to Calexico before Tuesday?"

"I don't know, man? What's in it for me?"

"Parts in a movie for now. I can always use more worms."

"Worms?"

"The worms are the bad guys in this film we're shooting. Hercules and a wizard battle them."

"Groovy. I can be a worm."

"If you can get yourself down there, right now, right away to the Hotel De Anza in Calexico I'll see to it that you are a worm in Worm Men from Space. It's got Hercules in it. We hired an Italian to do it. A muscle man from Italy. Hercules and the Worms from Planet 9. I think that's what we're calling it."

"Far out!"

"But I'll discuss with the higher ups your idea for a motorcycle movie! I'll definitely tout it, but we need the director, Bobby. We need the man who is out there in the desert! We need him critically! He's our key because we can't afford anyone else and he can shoot something really spectacular. He's got all the skills. We've got to sell the studio on your motorcycle idea somehow and get that darn talented director!"

The Agent's Tale

Sometimes people ask me how I came to represent the three biggest stars in the movie making business. Shultzer, Bobby Rimes and Little Frankie. I always look them in the face, you know, totally deadpan and say "Well, let me tell you, it all started with some worms."

Which it did! Late one Friday afternoon about a month after I'd accepted a job at Marathon Studios, the smog had backed up so thickly that you could barely make out the grimy sidewalks on Glower Street near the studio, and by that time of day, when the fog and the smog rolled in thick, I should have already ridden the bus home to the apartment I shared with my sister, but Moe, my boss at the time, barged in the door to my office and said I was needed for last minute help on a movie. And the movie was this ridiculous worm man flick. Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below I think was what they called it then. There were about ten working titles during the time they were filming that dud and they finally settled on another for the U.S. release. I believe it's considered a classic camp film now. Don't quote me on that.

Marathon Pictures had only managed to put about two days of film in the can down in Calexico. I was employed to repair scripts, but I did all kinds of odd jobs here and there for them. Prior to this dumb worm film, Marathon had made three He-Men pictures with aliens and sorcerers, I didn't know it, but these things were such trash, because much later I began chatting to the accountants every day at lunch (I did so much chatting that one of them eventually became my lover, but that's another story), and the studio hovered months away from a complete collapse, though I hadn't known that at the time or I probably would never have agreed to work for them. Yeah, Marathon Pictures was on the slide toward total ruin but I didn't have a clue. I tried to be particularly helpful and cheerful, like most eager, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young men. That's why, though I was hired to repair scripts, and was actually planning to open my own talent agency, when Moe told me to make an emergency visit to a lithography shop, I hopped to it. Merely by accident, I got involved in the project that made me the agent of today's biggest talent in movies.

So, as I said, I was the employee from Marathon Pictures tasked with hiring Custom Lithography to design a movie poster on a late Friday afternoon in 1964. I climbed up some iron stairs to the design office and stopped briefly to look out a window. Seven floors down, the bleating traffic of Olympic Boulevard fumed toward the Pacific Ocean, and a vista of dozens of fog and smog-smeared traffic lights stretched toward the sun which was a few hours from disappearing into that glittering ocean on the far edge of the United States. I sighed, wishing I sipped a cup of tea at my own kitchen table, but I went boldly up and tapped on the open door. The man in the room when I entered sounded so bored it made me snap back at him: "Be sure you get everything I say down. We've gotta get it right."

My nasal voice must have vibrated loudly because the employee tugged his ear. "Uh-huh," he replied, trying to sound interested. I sensed this fellow didn't hold Marathon Pictures or me in much esteem, nevertheless he prepared to jot down what I said on a notepad. I still have one of their ball point pens. It's emblazoned with the slogan "Custom Lithography: We Make It All Come Alive." This guy had a slanting drawing table which held a cup crammed with those pens as did one other drawing table where a young man worked and I remember some gray cabinets with shallow drawers. But the fantastic thing was the walls. Above the two men the flyspecked walls of the office swarmed with these huge, huge old movie posters. The posters had sea monsters plunging to fathomless depths and barrage balloons threatening village greens; spies stabbing shrieking young women, and massive bears grappling with Tyrolean hikers. Oh, come to think of it I'd probably already dealt with Custom Lithography twice over the prior month.

"Ready?" I said.

"Sure."

"The first line reads: a hero without fear."

"I got it," he said, "And?"

"Line two. A tortured past, plagued by lost romance," I read this slowly in a stilted manner. I stumbled slightly over tortured and plagued, but emphasized the lost romance bit. I was a sentimentalist by disposition, but Hollywood and chronic indigestion knocked that out of me in two months' time.

"Just a sec." The man scribbled the phrase quickly. "Gotcha."

"Line three. A burning saga that's just begun. That's three lines. Now, please read it all back to me."

"Okay. What I got was: a hero without fear, um, a tortured past plagued by a lost romance, and a burning saga that's just begun." The man read through it as though he were working at a deli counter and calling out an order of egg salad on rye with mayo and no mustard.

"That's it. And you make us a big picture of Hercules. He's wearing one of those short he-man skirts, make it a leopard skin. Leonid Sanodrov directs a Moe Weinman production and then the title all at the top, but fit those three lines, the ones I just gave you, on his chest. He's got to have a huge, muscly chest, understand, and we want the worm men sneaking up on him over on the side of the poster. They're coming over the top of a cliff, okay? And there are rays shooting at Hercules from all these outer space stunt guns."

A slight pause ensued. "Do you mean stun guns?" he growled.

He took me for a total fool. "Oh gee! Whaddysay? Sure. I'm so darned confused. I only got the instructions a few minutes ago. Sheesh, they can't even bother with stuff. Late on a Friday. I mean, sheesh. Rush order and everything."

"I gotcha. Worm men, now I remember this job. They're shooting Hercules with rays. Somebody at your studio showed me a sketch last April. I remember it. What about the colors on those uniforms the worms are wearing?"

"Doesn't matter about the color. We're gonna react to what you do. Doesn't have to match the costumes in the movie. And in the sky, you need a UFO in flames."

"Gotcha. One UFO in the sky. Lotsa flames. Cigar shaped or saucer shaped U.F.O?"

"Moe said nothing about that! Heavens! I guess the standard saucer shape will do. The studio wants to have the mock up by next Friday. Have a mock-up brought to Promotions. We need it in Spanish, too. Suitable for Argentina, maybe Brazil, so maybe if you can get somebody to translate it into Portuguese."

"Sure. Spanish, too. Maybe Portuguese. I'll bring it next Friday."

The man didn't usher me out and as I swung the door to the partially open position, I overheard them.

"Bingo, we got another job," said the man I'd dealt with.

"Which one's that?" asked the bored young man at the other drawing table without looking up from a drawing of an exploding Sherman tank.

The man tapped his notes as he read: "Marathon Pictures presents: Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below!"

"Oh gee," said the young man, "a muscle man/science fiction movie! Sounds groovy. But I think those things are kinda yesterday. Nobody but me would be caught dead watching one of those."

"Ah, yeah. You're right. Marathon Studios is on the slide. Everybody says they got creamed with Mantis, Man of a Million Muscles. God only knows why they're doing another he-man picture. But a job's a job. We need a drawing of Hercules. Pronto. And some worm men holding ray guns. They're shooting Hercules. And a flying saucer in flames. I want the whole poster in flames. Go heavy with the flames. They always like that."

The young man sat back from his current drawing. "Hey, whatta we doing here? Worm men with hands? Doesn't that seem...I dunno... kinda peculiar?"

I was dumbfounded; how had I missed the stupidity of the movie's premise? When I hit the pavement I couldda shot myself with a stunt gun for the crime of extreme idiocy. Yeah, worm men with hands holding guns! That was the movie I worked on. I trudged home to my apartment without much hope of thriving in the movie making world.

A month later I was sent down to assist in production and I happened to meet all three of the martial arts sensations the night before filming. I must have impressed them, because a few years later I signed them as talent in my new job as an agent!

CHAPTER 4

Disgusted in Calexico

Marty Frobisher couldn't believe the absolutely disgusting desolation and dirt to be found stretching in every bloody direction from the location of this new, outrageously horrid Hercules movie he'd regrettably agreed to star in. As a wizard. It was all to be shot in the boonies outside this most out-of-the-way puddle of mud called Calexico, California or actually south of south of the border on a ranch in the countryside south of Mexicali, Mexico which was actually worse than Calexico! It seemed impossible to find any place worse than Calexico, but it was truly possible. They had found a worse location to film in than the filthy hellhole he had been sentenced to stay in!

His agent had met with him a month earlier and explained that nothing else appeared available right then in any of the studios. Marty's agent denied the rumor that was going around that Marathon Pictures was in trouble, and their last picture was less than spectacular, something with millions of muscles in the title, and he claimed that Marathon Pictures was about as sound as you could get in this town and the pay was absolutely guaranteed and frankly excessive in Marty's agent's opinion. Marty's agents assured him that he would be relaxing in great comfort and plied with bottomless drinks in a really impressive old hotel while in a beautiful desert community. Marty had been gullible enough to swallow all the bullshit that guy sold about the beauty of the desert location and the wonderful cast and crew of the movie, especially some terribly about-to-be-famous director. By the time his agent got around to telling him the ridiculous name of the movie—Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below—he was almost sold on the deal. That damn agent. He did nothing, less than nothing!

Marty held that this Calexico hellhole happened to be the kind of name you'd expect from a thoroughly despicable place like America. Can you imagine what an amalgamated town formed from California and Mexico would look like, he asked his mother when he rang Broadstairs, England long distance. What could you make of a town that named itself for an American state and another country? It resembled some hideous, deformed hybrid insect or a writhing chimera. What had his agent talked him into? He would have to have a talk with that gentleman when he got back to Los Angeles. This hotel positively overflowed with the ugliest, clunkiest old Spanish Inquisition furniture and the whole town rested in a state of vast disrepair and disrepute! And it stunk of cow manure! You couldn't escape the smell! Feed lots surrounded the place! Marty had been thinking along the lines of glamour and instead he had landed in one of the most disgusting, fetid places on earth. Los Angeles, well, frankly in more than a few places that town reeked, positively reeked of refuse and the streets were never cleaned and of course it didn't rain much. And more of those blasted palm trees. A real impressive-looking tree had leaves and branches like those in England. Mind you, some people believed palms were beautiful but Marty knew these weren't any different than the ones you might find in the Mediterranean which he had tried to climb many times as a boy on vacation with his parents. They loved the Italian Rivera. They hated palms, though. But this hellhole, Calexico, existed on another higher (or was it deeper?) level of filth and depravity. Perhaps it was a good place to represent Greece, come to think of it; he'd never admired that cradle of civilization which Marty felt actually resembled an enormous pile of rubbish. But he had to admit the paycheck he was promised seemed rather scrumptious.

But this place where they sent him lazed out in a hot, dusty part of California, even filthier than he could have imagined in such a filthy country. A part of America where they grew lettuce and crops like watermelon and ugly misshapen courgettes, which they gave the absurd name "zucchinis", and such, for god's sake, the most god forsaken place he'd ever visited in this absolutely, positively retarded country. There were dates growing everywhere. Yuck! Who could imagine anything as boring as a date-growing region? The whole situation was bonkers!

They had a weak signal on the television in the hotel; every one of his favorite TV personalities appeared like ghosts prancing around in snow. He couldn't watch a thing and barely hear the dialog! Then he discovered a strange character ranting and raving like an idiot. He called himself Joe Payne, and he had a show Marty unfortunately could pick up quite well with very little static, and this show had everyone a-buzz in this God-forsaken place. That show was the most common discussion in the coffee shops in this pitiful, absurd town. All mad opinions about communists and foreign invasions! Who would bother invading such a despicable place?

Outside the hotel he'd skirted the bodies of a dozen smashed insects of the most horrid dimensions and colors, simply appalling things which he couldn't even glance at. Were they crickets once?

And the hotel! He didn't even want to get started about that. Was this America's idea of a grand old hotel? Gadzooks, it stunk of manure! Truly excellent towels were unheard of in this place. The hot water went in and out and sometimes the ice water shot out in a highly discolored state, the color of water from a fetid pool. The furniture barely could be described as old and faded. With beetles eating them! Air conditioning merely sputtered out of the vents. He feared using the water to shave because of what it might do to his skin, which had always been sensitive since he was a tiny baby. And the dead insects right in front of the place. God only knew what they looked like alive; he certainly didn't want to encounter them. Absolutely enormous soot-covered trucks jammed full of disgusting misshapen "zucchinis" and lettuce and melons kept rumbling through the town, possibly on their way to Los Angeles or some other place where they would eat such oversized and obviously under-flavored vegetables, most inferior. These trucks traveled directly under his window at around four in the morning! Didn't anyone in this stupid country realize that a large vegetable was an inferior vegetable? He got up at night and glared down at the trucks passing by as they disturbed his sleep. Filled with enormous vegetables!

Maintaining the lifestyle of a major American star might just entail acting in this horrid movie, however. The American movie watching public had appalling taste, but look at the benefits! And now if he acted in this hideous movie about outer space worms and Hercules, he might very well be given a better part in the director's next movie. The movie appalled him, but it might be lucrative in the long run! Marty had been wined and dined and eventually talked into this job with the promise of money and a chance to work for the famous director. But where was the director? He never came out of his hotel room and the rumor circulated about depression. Marty felt he should give the director the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was a genius who had trouble dealing with people. The people who hired Marty described the director as a genius. Frankly, Marty hadn't bothered to attend any of his previous films so he wasn't sure if the guy really was what they were saying. He had a reputation in Hollywood. Marty even knew a few British actors who had worked for him before. Maybe it was going to be a good thing for his career, and one could always drop this movie from his list of works if it turned out truly awful. Maybe no one would really know anything about it; his agent had made a point of asking that he have a small tribute in the credits at the end of the movie. He certainly didn't want his name splashed across the screen. And they said the movie would not run in American movie theaters or in England. And it came with a reasonable paycheck. Actually, an enormous paycheck. He just hoped he would actually get that paycheck. Well, he was staying in a hotel. He was being fed. Maybe his wants were becoming small living out here in Western America, though the concept appalled him. He'd kill for a cream tea. That wouldn't do his expanding waistline any good, as his mum in Broadstairs liked to point out so frequently. No, he wasn't planning to fly her out!

And the lines in this movie. Marty had never read such stupid dialog. He didn't know if the people writing it were drunk or what! They seemed to write the most ridiculous words that were also hard to say! They had tried to sound classical, but the result was horridly amusing. Marty believed this movie would be very cheesy; this dumb movie had better show in South America only as his agent had promised, because Marty certainly didn't want a soul in Hollywood watching him as a wizard. The image of some people in Hollywood attending the movie made Marty shiver. He'd be ruined! He ought to walk out on the whole thing but the damn money enticed him. But did he have to go through with it? Maybe, if some disasters happened, he could get out of his contract? He felt like a school boy trying to scarper from the school theater production!

Miss Roux

"I suppose you'll work wonders for us! By the way, Miss Roux, do you happen to be French?" asked Moe Weinam's assistant.

"Of French extraction," said the woman being interviewed. She dressed kinda clunky and had a slight suggestion of a moustache.

"Extraction? Heavens! That sounds...wonderful or maybe I mean terrible. You must say that you are of French origin, my dear, when you're down in Calexico. When anyone asks you."

"I'm only French on my father's side. Poor papa. We haven't heard from him in a hellava, I mean, ... an awfully, awfully long time. Maybe he went back to France. Do you think a girl should hope?"

"Possibly. I dunno. Well, okay. Anyway, the French know a lot about making great cinema. And I need someone who can blend in on this set with a director who is a crazy nut for French cinema. Do you get what I'm saying? Do you know any French cinema crap?"

Miss Roux screwed up her face in a terrible fashion. "Hmmm," she said. She chewed a fingernail. "Nope."

"Oh, that's too bad. I hoped you would."

"Well, I almost bought a French purse last week in Henshey's Department Store, if that's any help."

"I don't suppose it would be. Okay, well, lemme tell you about the whole Calexico thing and get you up to speed. We're making a Hercules movie down there with a lot of worm men."

"Worm men?" Miss Roux asked suspiciously.

"It's a crazy plot. Boy, real crazy. I guess you could say it's a sort of follow-on film in the lines of Jason and the Argonuts except in our movie the foes are worm men and they land from outer space!"

"Oh, I get it!" she lied.

"The important movie though," he continued, "is really the next one we're making, not the current schlock down there. The assistant director we hired can probably film this one and we're planning to release it in the small South American markets and such. We'll make good money no matter what. We just need a finished product. This kind of movie is going out of style. It won't even show up here; that's how out of style it is. I don't even know why we're making this, like I said. What we really, really want the director for is this big film we're planning. It's the next big thing I tell you and we think he can really make it sensational for us! The big guys in the front offices are figuring out what it's gonna be. But he's got to get okay. We gotta cheer him up in time for him to make the next film and be okay!"

"Sure, I get it."

"This is where you come in, Miss Roux. Suppose ... let's just suppose we gave you some topics and specific lines to say to him about French cinema. Some things to say about how he related to French cinema? Do you think you could do it? Could you say some things? To the director."

"If you read my resume, you'll find I did help along those lines on Dark Vengeance at Dawn. The studio said I was indispensable in getting the Hungarian director happy by talking about Hungarian theater."

"Right! We hear through the industry grapevine that you helped out on that situation. And you showed a lot of discretion. We hear that Park Pictures were very pleased with how things turned out."

"And well they should have been. I fixed everything for them." Miss Roux pulled herself up pridefully.

"Okay."

"That's right. That's why they hired me. I put the whole man back together. It was like stitching a monster together, but I did it. He acted like a baby. All he did was cry."

"I respect that. I wanna cry all the time. I gotta figure out how to get this guy ready to make movies again and it makes me wanna cry all the time. Anyway, what we know is he's a nut for French cinema so we were thinking maybe you can help us."

"I understand!" Miss Roux said ecstatically.

"We'll give you the script, some French cinema crap. You memorize it and we bring you into his hotel room and you say it to him. Can you get a ride to Calexico? With a girlfriend or something? We won't pay expenses for her." Moe's assistant did not want to imagine what kind of pile driver or riveter this broad might have befriended in a cheap apartment house off Wilshire Boulevard.

In fact, she lived in a small rented bungalow with her younger sister named Myrtle who worked as a fry cook and collected loud crazy girlfriends. They all got together in Miss Roux's apartment and shrieked with laughter over scotch on the rocks. Miss Roux had started staying out late to avoid them, but she'd sickened of that routine.

Bobby Still Imprisoned

"You don't know it," Bobby bellowed, "but I happen to know karate!" He hollered this once, loudly, and waited.

In response he heard absolutely nothing bar the traffic on the street below.

Bobby's father had served in the Army in Korea and the elder Rimes had come back with knowledge he'd acquired on the Korean peninsula of jujutsu and judo. Bobby's father also brought back several martial arts books, translated ones he bought from other G.I.s, which Bobby began studying when he was eleven. Once, when he visited Chicago, age thirteen, he'd found several other books on the various martial arts, and he was able to buy them and take them home to Indiana. He set up training for himself and made his body more fit. The Muncie library was not very helpful. They only had books by Jack LaLanne about bulking up, and though that was helpful, Bobby wanted more. He ate as much as he could and did calisthenics. But what he really wanted was advice about moves and countermoves, though, and that would involve finding someone versed in the art. He arranged to travel to Chicago again for that, staying with an aunt and joining the studio of a judo instructor.

Bobby was thinking about his training as he struggled with his constraints. Sometimes he had to arch his back to get his mouth off the bed because they'd left him face down. Part of the rope looped over the bedstead making it impossible for him to flip over.

But now something urgent affected him; he felt himself wanting to use the bathroom. It might be possible to get off the bed. He tried to kick his legs, which were bound together. No luck. Shit, his mouth tasted strange. That drink the hotel clerk brought him the night before must have been doctored! A knock out drink! That's what those rotten finks had plied him with! The dirty scheming rats! Bobby supposed even in Indiana there'd been cases like this. Even in Terre Haute! A drink of water would help the strange taste in his mouth.

If he ever saw that Schultzer fellow again, Bobby vowed he would get his vengeance on him in the best way possible! That fellow hadn't even given Bobby a chance to get out of the hotel, which was all he'd wanted, after all. Bobby had no intention of staying in a place where he wasn't wanted. Bobby knew what hospitality was like!

But all of what he was thinking was wrong! Judo was not intended to be used to seek vengeance, but he wanted to beat the life out of that fink! How could he treat a fellow human thus? How could he be in peace and have a peaceful mind with a jerk like that in his head? That guy had really caused Bobby a lot of problems. Bobby remembered again that judo and karate weren't to be used the way he wanted to—for an attack, but he really wanted to attack that Schultzer fellow. How was he going to get over his fuming anger? Maybe he should focus instead on how he could escape the situation he was currently in. Surely judo would respect escape from captivity? That would be acceptable to the judo community. He wouldn't really be attacking someone who was at peace. He would be attacking the situation that had him bound up on a bed! That seemed sensible. He would have to think about the Schultzer fellow later. If he ever got to the movie-set, he'd make sure that guy knew he was no one to be messed with.

"I'm telling you I know karate! I am a black belt if you know what that means! You have tied up a black belt in karate! I am a graduate of the Muncie Academy of Martial Arts!" He was lying. He didn't have a black belt, though he'd read about them. There was no Muncie Academy of Martial Arts though he'd imagined starting one. He arched his spine and tilted his head to bring both ears off the bed. He listened for any reaction. Maybe he did hear a door close somewhere near.

Then he tried the more plaintive approach: "Does anyone know...does anyone out there hear me and know that I know karate?" The idea of earning an ally was a good one. Use someone to help him. He wished it would work.

He kept this up for several more minutes.

Finally, someone fumbled at the door with a key. The door opened and Bobby looked expectantly at the threshold.

It was the large Mexican cook wearing the same mu-mu from the night before. Her huge face was fierce and glistening, probably from the heat of the kitchen. She resembled an Aztec warrior with a spatula in her hand. As she spoke, she shook her spatula at him.

"Listen here, Senor Buster Brown, we can hear you shouting in the kitchen below. You're gonna be free soon so shut your trap or we might just knife you and throw you in the lake at Echo Park or something. I will make you a sandwich in a while if you will kindly shut your trap. Otherwise, no sandwich, comprende hombre?"

"All right. Thank you for all your tremendous, tremendous kindness."

This warrior woman shook the spatula harder at him. "Sarcasm will get you to the bottom of the Santa Monica Bay quicker."

"So sorry. Would you please tell someone that I need to use the bathroom?"

"I will relay the request. Now, shut yourself up!" She closed the door with a bang.

Frankie on Her Own

Little Frankie Fairweeks awoke in the motel room in Calexico, and immediately she knew they'd gone.

It'd been something she been expecting. Well, that is, if you could ever really expect to be abandoned, for ever since her mother found that new boyfriend, Morton Dombrowski, Frankie had been the odd one out. They'd looked at her almost with loathing. She half expected the boyfriend to take her out to the desert and shoot her, but surprisingly they were kinder than that because they only left her in the motel room in Calexico and took off.

She never really expected them to keep her and take her all the way to San Francisco with them; that'd been a bunch of hooey to fool the old lady, Frankie's grandma. They told Frankie's grandma a fib in order to get the dough from her and Frankie went along with them, and then they hadn't taken her to San Francisco. They'd left her in the motel room with about five dollars and some change out of the hundred and fifty Grandma had given them to keep for Frankie. Grandma was a chump to believe they were going to use that money on a kid.

Frankie planned what she was going to do as soon as the police put her in the orphanage. It was obvious to Frankie that she wasn't going to stay there, but it wasn't obvious to her what she was actually going to do instead.

Turned out it was easy enough to get out of that orphanage place. Most of the windows opened, the screens weren't fastened and the drop to the ground was only about eight feet. She'd hopped over walls that were taller than that in Kentucky.

First thing when she got out of the orphanage, she wandered around the streets a lot and looked for things to do. Her favorite thing she'd done in Kentucky was starting fires. Suppose someone careless tossed a matchbook on the sidewalk or she saw a box of match books near a shop door. She'd slip that little book of matches in her pocket and then search for some really dry paper. Next, a place that had no one near would be the ideal spot in which to set the most wonderful, crackling fire. She started about ten of them (in a school, a feed bin, a dress shop and an auto repair shop) and never got caught even once, not even close to being caught, therefore she started doing that in Calexico and Mexicali, across the border. It was easy enough to start a fire and when the commotion came, it was also easy to steal stuff from nearby stores. She got food and clothes that way. Then she went back to the orphanage using a ladder she'd hidden. Nobody even caught on.

Although fires were good enough things, Little Frankie had bigger plans. She needed opportunities and was always on the lookout for a new, better idea.

CHAPTER 5

Otto Promotes Motorcycles

"I've had a vision, Don. I real honest-to-goodness vision just this afternoon," Otto set himself beside his boss and made sure to lean forward so his boss could feel his enthusiasm when he touted this new movie-making idea.

"Okay." Don Davis made himself pretend to be interested. He was planning to quit Marathon in the next month. The studio was heading down and nothing would revive it. All these plans for movies were exhausting him, but he had to pretend to be motivated until he got a new job.

"It's a possible movie. You're gonna love this. Now, hear me out. Don't jump down my throat or anything until you hear me out."

"Okay. Let's hear it," said Don, giving an almost imperceptible shrug.

"I'm thinking—motorcycles."

"Motorcycles?"

"Motorcycles."

"Doing...?" Don asked helpfully.

"Think motorcycles! They're every American man's dream. They're the new American steed—that means a horse."

"Yes, Otto, I knew that," said Don, allowing a hint of irritation to enter his voice.

"Just picture the opening scene. Motorcycles racing across the screen, racing across sand maybe or sandy roads. Shoot them at a low angle on the sand dunes. Shoot them from underneath flying up ramps and gunning their engines through flames. Racing bikes. Bikes with tough guys on them and they're racing around all over the place. Tough girls on the back of the motorcycles, too."

"Whadda they doing? What's it that they're doing with all this racing?"

"Well, let's say they're battling. That's it. Swirling around in battles and races. And fist fights. Real big battles. And dames. They can fight, too. Sure, big piles of dames falling on each other. In the blowing sand. Lots of white sand and motorcycles."

"Okay. Sure." Don shrugged. Agreeing was a lot easier than disagreeing.

"Picture this. We have a roadhouse consumed by flames! The motorcycles race away. People are screaming. That's the beginning. Maybe the opening scene. The viewer wonders what's happening. And we don't tell them. It's a big mystery. Wowie! Did the motorcyclist set the fire? Are they evil or good?"

"So... what's the answer?" said Don in a state of utter boredom.

"The answer is... we make up the answer later. That's the answer for now."

"Nobody's doing one... a picture with motorcycles, huh?" asked Don, rousing himself momentarily.

"That's right."

"But there have been ones before?"

"Sure."

"And they did well, right?"

"Yeah. They did. They did okay. We never made one. Not Marathon. We never did a motorcycle pic."

"Hmmm."

"Am I onto something? Whaddoya think?"

"You might be...you could be!" Don actually knew Marathon was as likely to make it big with motorcycles as he was to bed Elizabeth Taylor.

"I might be? I am!"

"You might be. Say...maybe we could hire a big new star. A star that's just at the beginning of his career. Like that Henry Bel Delve! He'd be great. Get somebody looking into it, will you? I've got a good feeling about this one. I wonder... can we afford him?"

Bobby Clued In

Still tied to the bed, Bobby pricked up his ears. He'd gotten used to listening to what was going on in the next room (which turned out to be the head honcho's room) while he was held in this despicable captivity. A lot of what he heard was an eye-opener even for a kid from Muncie, Indiana who'd taken karate! The depravity of this gang astonished poor Bobby.

"A manicure, huh? You're spoiled," screeched some cackling guy.

"Sure. Why not? I want the best," replied the boss.

"Schultzer certainly made out good getting that worm movie part," the screeching voice said.

"Yeah. I wish him well. Maybe he can check out the action in those tunnels under Mexicali for us."

To Bobby's horror, it sounded like that horrible Schultzer fellow had left the gang and gotten himself into a movie! No doubt he'd taken the job Bobby would've had if only he could have interviewed with his Uncle Otto. Apparently, the job was down in a place called Calexico on the border with Mexico. If he ever got a hold of that dirty rat fink, boy, he would serve him well. That fellow would discover what it was like to meet someone who really knew their karate moves. Bobby would be just the fellow to teach him a thing or two. If that fellow imagined he could beat Bobby in a fair battle, when he wasn't drugged, that Schultzer fellow was going to find out different!

Someone, perhaps Schultzer, apparently was also about to go to the film location in Calexico in order to talk the director into making a motorcycle movie out in the desert! The reason they wanted to make the movie was two-fold. The out of work actors in their gang would find work as motorcycle riders and the gang would have a way to steal money more massively if they were involved in the next movie in even a larger capacity.

The head honcho spoke: "I like this. If we get into movies, we're gonna make some real dough. All we gotta do is get an in with the movie people. He's my best guy for making a good impression."

"Believe me, he'll double cross us," promised the screeching fellow.

"He'll play his part, man, and play it good," the boss replied, "Then we'll make sure the motorcycle movie is decided on. That's the key. We get to be in a movie and we get to get that director doing the next movie and make it be a motorcycle movie. Then we get a lot of parts in that movie and BAM! our tentacles are in the place. We've already got another guy in the studio. Next, we got a financial expert in the right spot to do us some good. He's working at siphoning money off to us so the studio is ruined. Maybe a little insurance fraud at the end to polish it off. Fire and fini, and that means burned up and finished, and we've got a ton of moolah out of it. Everybody profits off the place. That's my attitude. That's gonna happen pretty fast at the rate we're going. Pretty soon we'll own the whole thing and what's left will collapse. Same as we own the all the businesses we've already got. We're gonna place people all over that studio until it's ours. This motorcycle movie is the beginning. It's what we want to have on the big screen, too, and we can make a killing on it."

"Sure," said the screecher, "it's a gravy train. A motorcycle gravy train. Hey, ain't that kinda weird?"

The head honcho glared at the screechy guy for a moment. "My guys are gonna love the parts. We're gonna get our financial guys busy figuring out ways to make more dough off the operation. There's got to be angles. That's what I want you to do. You phone up here as soon as you've got anything of interest about hiring, banking especially, and we want to know some account information and wiring details and tell me what the likely angles are to make more big dough off of that dumb Marathon Pictures while they're making these pictures. If you tell me how the set-up goes down there then, our financial guy in the studio can work his part and between the two of you, we're gonna have a better handle on how to make some dough. We can execute some sneaky transfers if we've got information about the paydays and the bank they're using. Got it?"

"Sure, boss. Well, not exactly, but what you's saying is I need paydays and the banking info?"

"That's it. The theaters pay to put on the movie, like. That gives us another source of fraud. We can figure out how the theaters get money. Or we get money from the actors. Well, that seems unlikely..."

Of all the sneaking double-crossing scoundrels in the world this group had to be the sneakiest! Here Bobby was tied up and unable to save the studio his uncle had worked at for years. This group was planning to execute a bunch of shyster moves so that the gang would be paid instead of the people who'd worked on the movie! And what could he do? Bobby just knew he had to escape! He wished he'd watched those martial arts movies more closely for tips on how to shed ropes like Houdini or something. Eventually an answer would come to him. It just had to!

Our Hercules

Biagio Di Assi posed and primped under the canopy of a large date palm while his chest, back, and legs were methodically coated with oil by the makeup team. Muscles, it was believed, showed up better on film when made ultra-glossy. The two women who'd already painted a bloody scar (slashing one cheek using a set of small brushes dipped in garish red) told Biagio to not touch it while it dried. This scar was supposed to match the slash delivered during a battle with a Minotaur in a scene which had been filmed two days earlier, however that wound should have been on the other side of his face. Marathon Pictures could not afford an employee dedicated to scene continuity. As a consequence, a lot of scars on the actors traveled around and peplums were buckled on one side and then the other, sometimes changing in the middle of a dialog filmed over two days.

"How do I look? Spectacular, no?" asked Biagio of the women.

Mrs. Hall, the senior and very elderly makeup lady who spent an inordinate amount of her day downing cans of Old Wisconsin Premium Lager, grunted. "Sure, you're a picture of masculine splendor, Mr. Di Assi. Turn slightly please. I wanna do your side right here." She slapped his ribs as though he were a side of beef. Only a very old woman could touch a muscly man like that and get such a docile reaction; Biagio turned as commanded and she continued coating him with oil. The effort of rubbing his body made her sway violently. "I wish I had something to steady my nervous condition. I get this terrible nervous condition in the morning. It's like I'm falling apart in chunks. The doc says it might be my heart. I'm going to have to have pills pretty soon, but my son and daughter both don't believe it. No, no, it's all in Mother's head."

"A beer, perhaps?" suggested the star, knowing this old woman's much-discussed foible. "I might have one in my trailer." Other actors on the set complained that her drunken makeup work was often less than realistic.

"Bingo, Biagio. You and I think alike," said the ancient woman. "It'll steady me. I gotta do the makeup for that snotty English wizard next and I need all the help I can get!"

"A small beer and a ham sandwich would suit me right now as well." He looked around and found a man approaching him with an open script. "There is a food truck coming, perhaps?" Biagio asked.

"I guess they haven't come out here yet. At nine a.m. they won't be serving lunch for two hours. Listen, we need to hear the lines again," said the man. He'd folded part of the script back and held his thumb on Biagio's opening line. "Let me hear it again the way it's supposed to sound."

"I shall say it this way: 'Let these worm men find their fate at the end of my sword!' And I think that sounds more better than what is now in the script as writing...written. I work on it myself last night." Biagio beamed.

"Did you get that approved from the writers?" demanded the man.

"No," Biagio shrugged, "but I think it's more better."

"Well, okay. I think you oughtta get it approved. They yelled at me non-stop yesterday because you were changing the words in the cave with the Minotaur."

"My words were very pretty. I did it better than they wrote. More better. It's going to be dubbed anyway. Into Spanish."

"Arms up, please," squawked Mrs. Hall. Biagio raised his hefty arms in the air as though he were being robbed.

"Let's work on your reaction when you confront the worm men. How will you look?"

"Surprised. Like this!" Biagio mimed a look of horror and stumbled backward a step.

"Don't move like that," complained Mrs. Hall. "You're setting off my nerves and spilling the oil!"

"So sorry," said Biagio to the old woman. "They'll be coming down from the hills. Aren't the worms coming down the rocks, from above? I crouch at the end. I think that would be best."

"Yes. I hope this is a close up. You can turn your head and react to the sight of the first worm man falling on you."

"Something like this!" Biagio did a head jerk and a shout. He fell back in a startled fashion and pretended to support himself with the rock behind him.

"Hey," protested Mrs. Hall, "Watch it! You're going to get oil on that leather armband and ruin it!"

"Oh, sorry," said the gentle giant. "Now I'll stay still."

"And the next line," prompted the script coach.

Biagio frowned. "Don't tell me."

The coach groaned.

"Don't tell me," warned Biagio. "Prepare to die?" he asked.

"No! 'These worm men do not think like man.'"

"Look! These worm men do not think!"

"Like man!"

"Like man. Do not think like man."

"Like a man," said the coach.

"Like man. I said that before."

CHAPTER 6

Terminal Action

At the Greyhound bus terminal in Downtown Los Angeles, Misty Keen posed on a counter stool in a tight turquoise suit and green high heels. She pretended to be about to daub Maurice of Paris' Royal Red Paw-Paw Lipstick on her top lip.

"Smile Miss Keen," said the photographer. She smiled and a flash bulb popped.

"Thanks!" The photographer unscrewed the bulb and dropped it into a garbage can at the end of the counter. "So, the copy's gonna read: 'Miss Keen repairs her lipstick before leaving for filming in Calexico. Good luck!' I hope the movie's a success."

"I hope so too. Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below. It's a title and a half!"

"You said it! Where do they get these ideas?"

"Yes," Miss Keen smiled wanly. The photographer strolled out and Misty resumed eating a dry turkey on whole wheat sandwich and sipping the last of the weakest black coffee she'd ever bought. A lot of expensive lipstick pressed into the wheat bread. When she was done with the coffee, it was all she could do to keep the cup—with more lipstick smears—from clattering onto its matching saucer. Eight o'clock was far too early for Misty; she was a night owl. She closed her eyes, checked and smoothed her platinum hair at the bun at her neck, then retrieved the purse that resembled like an ammunition case from the back of her stool. She rooted in it for her bus ticket. That gave her the opportunity to make a quick sideways glance at the young woman gaping at Misty from the stool beside her. While the young woman stared at Misty, she also arranged the placement of a sandwich she'd purchased and had wrapped in wax paper inside a miniature, mirrored suitcase. A quick glance showed Misty that the mirrored suitcase was crammed to overflow with cosmetics bottles and clothing, neatly folded. The young woman kept almost closing the case lid and then reconsidering the move right before the sandwich would be flattened.

"Hey, are you sorta famous?" the young woman asked finally. "I eavesdropped and heard you getting interviewed. Gee, it was great!"

"Well, thanks, but no. I'm not really famous. I'm trying though."

"Gee, that's great. Where do you work?"

"I'm contracted for a picture for Marathon Studio."

"Are you going south? I heard you were going to Calexico. That's south, isn't it?"

"Uh huh. It is."

"Bus #43 to San Diego! Now boarding!" the dispatcher cried.

"Hey, that's me!" The young woman slammed the case shut and pressed the brass locks into their slots. "Let's sit together! I'm going back to San Clemente," she confided to Misty. Misty tried to slide off the stool and step away. The young woman hooked arms. "I got to visit my parents up here. Finally! He finally let me. My husband, that is. I guess I'll be down there about ten or ten-thirty. Ten-ish at least. Doesn't that seem right?"

"Oh! I suppose," Misty replied noncommittally.

"San Clemente. Doesn't that sound like a dream? 'When I married, I moved to San Clemente.' It sounds like a dream or something, doesn't it? It doesn't sound as good to say 'When I married, I moved to Oxnard.' No, no one would even care if you said that. Oxnard sounds very ... I don't know, very low class, or no class, I guess. Now listen to San Clemente. Doesn't that sound like a dream? San Clemente just sounds so wonderful. Of course, we don't have a house yet. We're living in a converted garage, well, not exactly converted, we have to share a bathroom in the house, the landlord's house, which is so awkward. He always manages to take a peek at me when I'm in my unmentionables. If I get up to take a tinkle in the night, who do you think I meet in the hallway on his way to do a tinkle too? I don't dare tell my husband, though. We have to keep our little secrets from the big babies, don't we? I don't want to think about what my Willard would do to the landlord if he knew our landlord was looking at me in my unmentionables. My landlord never got around to converting the garage. And the sea air. I tell you, the sea air leaks in under the garage door something chronic. I asked the landlord if we could stuff some rags under it and around the edges. He said no because the neighbors would get offended. Well, I do believe they know we're living in there, because they're always staring at us in a bad way. But anyway, our place is in San Clemente and that's about the same as a house if you think about it. I mean in the sense that we live somewhere and the important thing that Willard always says is we have our own place and we have each other. Isn't that sweet?"

"Sweet. Sounds like you're a happily married couple."

The young woman reached down and grabbed an elbow, practically hauling Misty up the steps behind her. "Oh, we are. I'm only gonna divorce him next week. Only kidding! Hey, what about you? Where are you going to stay, if I may be so bold as to inquire?"

"I have a room at the Hotel De Anza in Calexico."

"Oh! How exotic that sounds! What is that? I never heard of that place."

"It's an old hotel. I only hope it's good. Being on the border."

"These seats look okay, don't they? Oh golly! Slide right in with me. This is fun! What do you do in the movie? What's your part?"

"I'll be acting as a slave girl. A slave to Hercules. I've never been one of those before."

"Oh, I that's funny. Never been a slave girl. To Hercules. I haven't been one either... although come to think of it, sometimes I've felt like one living with Willard."

"Uh huh."

"You know, when I first saw you, I thought you might be a working woman. From the expression on your face. Working girls always get that professional look on their faces. No nonsense. Not that we housewives aren't busy."

"You've got that garage to clean."

"Huh? Oh, you're funny! Converted garage to clean! Well, not converted yet!"

"At least you've got the sea air."

"Hah! Funny! Sea air, yes. Plenty of that! I just mean housewives look a little more feminine in the face. But sillier."

"I can't say I've noticed."

"Hmmm. So, what part will you do?"

"As I said, I'm in the movie as a slave."

"Oh yeah! You said that! Slaves! I just adore the movies with slaves. You aren't familiar with anyone in casting, are you? Tell me you've got friends in casting."

"No. I don't."

"Darn. Makeup?"

"Nope."

"Costumes?"

"Naw."

"Help me! I can't think of anything else..."

"I told you. I'm a small-time actress."

"Oh, sheesh. But you got interviewed!" Misty's companion complained, "So, what's the plot. Of the movie."

"It's really not an important movie. Some silly mannish movie! With he-men characters? You know the type with all Greek gods and battles and voyages?"

"Oh. You mean like Sinbad?"

"Yeah. Well, Hercules is this one."

"That's not bad, though. He-men! Good looking men! And maybe you'll move up to something better like a major role. Hey, maybe you'll meet a handsome He-man and be married just like me."

"Sure." Misty smiled at her. Oh yes, she believed He-men were going to marry Misty. Yikes, this dame was a moron. Wouldn't it be Misty's luck to have to ride all the way to San Diego with this chattering nutcase at her side?

Misty closed her eyes and tried not to listen to the woman's extremely detailed description of her wedding bouquet.

"I had the littlest, littlest roses. They were so sweet. And the color! The color of rosy morning blush, you know, the color of the sky at dawn? Everybody said it was the most perfect color to match my hair and compliment my skin tone. It's important to compliment your skin tone, you know when you're picking your wedding bouquet..."

"Oh," said Misty morosely.

"Hey," said the chatty woman, "just take a gander at that tough-looking guy on the motorcycle. Just passing us." Misty glanced out at a strange man in suede with a cheese cutter hat and big motorcycle boots. He wore sunglasses, but it was easy to tell he was pretty handsome in a sort of loose fashion.

"On my, isn't he a tough hombre." The young woman was staring at him intently. "I believe he might be nice!"

"Sure, he thinks so. He thinks he's pretty great. I can tell. He's not tough, though," Misty explained.

"Why you don't think he's tough?"

"I've met plenty of these tough guys who are big pansies when it comes to facing real trouble."

"Do you think so?"

"Sure. They just melt."

"I don't know. He looks unlikely to melt. What a terrible haircut."

"Not married. A woman would fix a haircut like that."

"Why look! A big white truck is coming up so fast. It's barreling along toward a little pickup full of women. Gee whiz!"

"What?" asked Misty, turning around.

"Oh golly! The truck went sailing right off the side of the—!"

Misty strained to get a look behind them. "Oh, my goodness! It's crashed!"

Bobby Attempts an Escape...

"Okay. Don't try anything funny." The hotel clerk gingerly approached the twin bed with the figure of bound Bobby on it. The clerk hesitated just outside the distance in which Bobby could conceivably thrust himself at him in his tied-up state. He placed his hands on his hips, then in his pockets, then laid them on his thighs.

"I won't do anything," said Bobby. "I promise. I have to pee bad. I'm not gonna mess up my chance to pee."

"Well ... okay, but I mean it. None of that karate you were yelling about," said the hotel clerk. He moved one hand closer to the rope at the bottom of the bed.

"I won't move," Bobby repeated. "I gotta pee so bad."

"Okay. I'm going to help you to the bathroom. Don't do anything unless I tell you to." The clerk fumbled with the knot at Bobby's feet. Bobby tried to sneak a look at where the knot was located. Eventually the knot undid and the clerk grabbed Bobby's legs, sliding his fingers under the robes, and tried to drag Bobby's legs off the bed covers. Unfortunately, the scrawny clerk was even weaker than he looked and the attempt to drag Bobby resulted in failure. He succeeded in pulling the bedspread off the bed and Bobby slid to the floor while the hotel clerk jumped back.

"Hell," said Bobby when he hit the floor. "Did you have to do it that way?"

"Shoot, I'm sorry," said the skinny man. "You were a lot heavier than you looked."

"That's because I work out. Karate has built my body into a vault of muscularity. I have studied it for two whole years reading some old books my dad got in Korea. I watched a lot of movies, too."

"Hip, hip hooray for you," said the clerk sarcastically. He helped flip Bobby over and yanked him to his feet. Bobby teetered in his bound-up state.

"You'll have to hop," ordered the clerk.

"Can't you untie me a little?"

"Nope. I don't think it's wise. I'm supposed to keep you here for at least two days. I heard you saying you were a karate expert. That was kinda dumb of you to say that, you know. I'm just telling you the truth."

Bobby fumed at himself. Why had he bragged about knowing karate? All it'd gotten him was trouble! Every time he opened his big mouth all he got was trouble. When was he going to learn to shut his damn trap? "Come on. How can I eat? How can I use the toilet?"

Bobby was hoping the clerk would be stupid enough to untie him. It would only take the littlest loosening before he could spring forward and get that damn clerk. He'd fall upon him and make him pay for imprisoning Bobby like this; he knew some moves that would pay this scrawny guy back for leaving him tied up like this for a whole day. But he was going to have to convince the guy that he was harmless, though. All that bragging, where'd it gotten him? In trouble.

Bobby hopped twice. He barely made any progress forward and the clerk had to come and stabilize him or he was in danger of falling over. Bobby glanced out the street at Hollywood Boulevard below. He wished to God they could hear him hollering down there but there was no use.

"Try again," said the clerk.

Bobby hopped twice again. He was making better progress across the snagged and dusty rug toward a filthy bathroom.

"Whoa. Whoa," said the clerk when Bobby hopped forward smashed into the bathroom door and ricocheted into the threshold. Bobby was wobbling around still.

He crashed his back into the bathroom door and sunk down a bit.

"Come on. Be reasonable. I can't pee tied up like this," Bobby pleaded.

"Okay. Okay. Maybe I'll loosen those ropes on your hands a little. And around your knees."

When the clerk leaned over, Bobby knew this was his chance. He waited until the ropes felt loose and then he attacked in all directions. He used his opponent's position against him, as advised in the Judo books he'd read. He'd try to throw the clerk off balance.

"Help!" screamed the clerk as he went off-balance.

"Take that!" yelled Bobby, body-slamming the clerk into the bathroom sink.

"You liar! You lied!" cried the little man as though an accusation would accomplish a lot with someone as maddened by his imprisonment as Bobby.

"A man who helps kidnap others does not deserve the truth," Bobby shouted back. "You deserve everything you get!" Bobby strained to loosen the ropes more while trying to flail himself against the clerk. The clerk was far too fast, though. He jumped up onto the edge of the tub just out of Bobby's reach.

"I'm from Indiana and I know both judo and karate!" yelled Bobby.

"I knew I shouldn't trust you!" yelled the clerk back at him uselessly.

"Ahhh!" screamed Bobby running toward the tub at his nemesis. Bobby missed and nearly fell headlong into the tiles of the bathtub. He tried to right himself. With only partial freedom of his arms, he had little sense of balance. He reeled around in the tiny bathroom, smashing into towel racks and the sink.

The wild-eyed clerk watched Bobby bash into things and then decided to jump onto his back. As soon as he got on him, the clerk grabbed a rope that he'd left dangling. The clerk rode him like a monkey. Bobby tried to wiggle him off and then tried to peel him off by crashing into things. The clerk finally grasped the rope tightly and cinched it tightly with a quick jerk. Bobby felt his freedom of movement suddenly curtailed.

"Oh damn!" Bobby shouted. "Damn, damn!"

"Not so smart now, are you?" taunted his guard coming down off Bobby's back.

"At least let me pee!" Bobby begged. "I'll wet the bed!"

"Okay, pee. But I won't loosen these again until I get the okay to release you! I realize now that you can't be trusted."

"I'm sorry. Imprisonment doesn't suit Robert G. Rimes." Bobby worked a hand over and unzipped his fly. He hopped twice to the toilet.

"Lift the lid, will you?" Bobby asked. The clerk obliged him.

"As soon as I get the word, you're free. But that was really dumb, man. Really dumb. Now I hafta tell them. You might pay for that!"

"Don't tell them." Bobby groaned to empty his bladder.

"Why not tell them? What's in it for me if I don't tell them?"

"I'll give you money."

The hotel clerk laughed.

"I have money," Bobby said.

"Not anymore," replied the clerk knowingly.

"I've been robbed?"

"Sure."

"I have a bank account and as soon as I say the word it's transferred."

"It's as simple as that?"

"Yes! Tell me, why are they doing this?"

"I don't know."

"What's it all about?"

"Search me."

Bobby stood in front of the toilet, fuming. "Help me zip up, please."

Hopping back to the bed pained Bobby. He felt he might have strained his left leg and shoulder. He had a cut on his forehead from smashing into the door.

"I'll bring a sandwich and some water up later. The cook said she'd make you something if you were quiet. I'll help you eat."

"Thank you."

Bobby spent the entire afternoon planning methods of escape. He examined the room carefully with his eyes and looked for the tiniest thing that might aid him in making a breakout. The effort of the attack though eventually put him to sleep.

When Bobby woke, it was the next day and everything had changed. A decision had been made by the gang, and after being threatened, Bobby was told he was no longer going to be held, and he was getting his money back.

After a small breakfast, which, according to the clerk, was to be paid for by the head honcho, together with all the other expenses of his board and lodging, he prepared to go out immediately to the studio. But as the hotel clerk, to whom he'd been very curt because of his behavior the preceding night, kept circling around him in dumb entreaty, he took pity on the man and asked him to sit down for a while.

"I haven't met my uncle yet," said Bobby, "but he can promote people for good work. When a young man like me travels so far from home, he needs to arrive with something in his pocket."

Bobby thrust his hand into the zippered pocket of his backpack in order to read the clerk the letter his mother had written.

"There's nothing in here!" Bobby exclaimed.

"Check again."

"Nothing! Shit! Now my letter of introduction is missing!"

Of course, Bobby realized, that must have been how that Schultzer jerk stole Bobby's movie opportunity. As much as he hated these people, and wanted to see them all arrested, he realized he would be smart to get out of there and down to Calexico as soon as possible. And that's exactly what he did.

Frankie Finds La Chinesca in Mexicali

"If you go under there, little girl, you get to a wonderful part of Mexicali." The old Chinese man who spoke to her from his spot beside a pile of rotting zucchinis and paper towels had a hacking cough and a coat that smelled as though he'd dipped it in the stinking canal behind him. He waved in the direction of a collapsed wall. From where Frankie stood, she could not perceive anything special about the spot the old man pointed to.

"What did you say?" Frankie didn't like talking to old fools like him, but sometimes, she'd learned after a few months on the street, the old fools knew things. Secrets like where you could get food for free and how to find discarded clothes.

"It takes you to Chinatown," he smiled. Frankie could tell the idea brought him pleasure.

"So what?" said Frankie.

"So maybe you want to go there."

"I don't think so. Why would I want to go there?"

The old man shrugged. "Go, and you will find out."

"Well, maybe I will, you old coot!"

Twice she turned back to look at the man, but he gestured her on with a shooing hand and a cackle. Still she couldn't detect anything special about that wall where he pointed.

But once she got closer to the collapsed wall, she found the secret entrance. First, she could feel cool air flowing out of a certain dark spot. Then, when she curled her spine down to get in there, she could see an opening. After ducking down and walking in the dark for a descending block, she emerged into a warren of rooms and shops. This was the secret underground Chinese part of Mexicali called La Chinesca.

She was surprised to discover she could get into an underground world that way. And it turned out that was a fun place to visit and she could wander around without any problem. Her money lasted a lot longer in that underworld, too.

She came up near a studio for men studying Chinese calligraphy and art. Frankie wasn't interested in fancy writing with brushes, or art, but she became wild about walking underground in an entire underground city. While she walked, she was watched, but not hurt.

Moe in Charge

"Get this down," Moe Weinman ordered.

"Yes, sir." His secretary flipped back the cover of her stenographer's notebook and yanked her pencil from the notebook's spine. She posed the pencil lead on the line and looked up at her boss.

"The word from casting is worms. More worms," said Moe. As he finished this pronouncement, both his forearms dropped on his chair and he rocked backwards.

"More worms from castings," she repeated and began writing her squiggly serpentine shorthand across the page. "More worms—castings," she muttered, frowning slightly and suppressing an involuntary shudder.

Dinner and the Movie

"Come on over and join us! Bruce is it?"

Phillip, the newest writer, slid into the booth at Harold's Fine Diner of Calexico with the producer and an assistant producer.

"Have some lunch with us. We'll kill a couple birds in the bushes. Whaddidya say, huh? Get the meatloaf. It's a killer meatloaf," said the producer, Moe Weinman. He'd just driven in from Los Angeles in his red corvette.

"Meatloaf," said the writer to the waitress when she arrived.

"Mashed potatoes or green beans?"

"Get the green beans. They're killer green beans," said the producer.

"Mashed potatoes. I'm sensitive to green beans."

"Okay, he's sensitive. Listen, Bruce. I'm gonna put my ducks in order here. I know you joined our little project out here in the desert thinking it's only a dumb worm movie. You're disappointed it's not something special, not some really worthwhile, some famous type of movie, and real important. Now, wait, I know I'm right here so hear me out. Sure, what's there to like about a worm movie? Blech! And Hercules, bah! He's not so great. I know how you young intellectual guys think. Sure, I can dig it, you know. I'm hip. But for a minute I want you to imagine this movie meaning quite a bit more." Moe waxed earnest and thoughtful whenever he met someone new on location and he could broach his favorite topic which was the place of Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below in future cinematic history. The new screenwriter twitched watching the producer as he stirred the neat semi-hemisphere of his cottage cheese into a pool of glistening yellow applesauce. Then the large oatmeal cookie, dunked into the mixture, fed Moe in huge crumbling, drippy mouthfuls.

"And how do I do that?" asked Phillip.

"Listen, well, I mean, you've got to get on top of the eight ball! It takes creative imagination, I tell you. A vision of this movie's place in the scheme of ancient theater, world cinema, and the current American television milieu. I need more applesauce here, Bruce. Try to signal the waitress. I hate it when my applesauce runs out before my cottage cheese! Anyway, where was I, um, such a vision, such a vision is necessarily transformative! Envision, if you will, this Hercules saga we're telling not as simply a movie, but as an analogy of man's lengthy progress on earth."

Phillip beckoned the waitress.

"Yes?"

"More applesauce, please."

"Sure."

"Mankind," Moe continued, "and by that, I mean mankind and womankind, in their primitive forms are the worms. What are they? They're small, insignificant and basically always underfoot, right? Now this worm image is important in several early works especially Faust in which the worm appears over and over to contrast with man. You must understand that the worm has quite a tradition in literature. One might say early literature is crawling with them! Think of Poe and the Conqueror Worm. Across the globe, you'll notice that worms aren't going anywhere. No nobility. Now, contrast that, hah hah, with fully formed man in the corpus delicto of our friend Hercules! Brave, upright, forthright. Wowie! That's cinema! Cinema brings out the contrasts in the world in the most vivid medium. Men versus worms. The primitive battle of good and evil, advancement and primitivism. It's a battle between man's competing natures—good and evil, with good, of course, being triumphant!"

"Hercules is man fully developed then? That's the angle? That's what we're peddling?" asked the assistant producer. He looked at his dinner companions with his fork held loosely and pointing down at his salad.

"Yes, that's it! Hercules is man perfected!" replied Moe.

"But Moe, that's it exactly! That's what has me worried. If your over-arching concept is Hercules as man perfected, you have to notice in this movie that Hercules has some really stupid lines. He talks like a half-baked idiot. Honestly, I'm certain the worm leader has better lines. Hell, the two lines of the minor worms, the side-kick worms, are better than anything Hercules says in the movie! Most of the time he seems to communicate with arm flops and eyebrows," said the assistant producer.

"Well, that's the prior script writer's fault! That's why we fired him! If words could talk, you know? That guy was a dope, A Real A Number One Dope. What was his other movie? Some damn female jail movie with a bunch of ugly dames going wild and wrestling each other. Inmates of the Asylum of Mars. That was the name of that darn thing. What a dud. This dumb colony of inmate female astronauts who've gone insane. Because there are no men! There was a ten-minute scene of women wrestling each other! He wanted ten minutes of women wrestling. He didn't write any damn dialogue to speak of in that dumb movie. Why did the studio give me such an oaf to work with?"

"I knew him at school," said Phillip.

"Did you, Bruce? Was he an oaf then?"

"Yeah. He was. Thank you," Phillip said to the waitress who shoved a plate of applesauce at them.

"I wanted Hercules to have better lines. I lobbied for it from the start. I begged the first screenwriter to work on it, but did he come up with anything decent? Nope! I hope the director hasn't read the existing script in detail. I don't think he has. When he does, he's going to blow up. He might even quit!" Moe said.

"Is that a bad thing?" asked Phillip.

"Yes, I'm telling you Leonid Sanodrov is real old Hollywood talent! His next movie might be for us and it might be a motorcycle drama with Henry Bel Delve!"

"Aww, he isn't much. I don't think this director is a big shot. Besides, all he does is lie in bed," replied the assistant producer.

"You are wrong! He's planning!" Moe offered.

"Planning to actually do something eventually?" asked the assistant producer.

"Listen, the guy has real troubles, too," said Moe cryptically.

"What kind of troubles?" asked the assistant producer.

"I'm not at liberty to tell, but I can assure you it's real trouble. It's personal and really terrible. You should hope you never have bad luck like his," Moe explained.

"Oh yeah? Real trouble? I bet the trouble is he doesn't want to do anything. And Hercules says some really idiotic stuff. That's all I'm trying to say. I want you do know that some of it is really idiotic in my opinion."

"Okay, okay. We can give him better lines. That's why he's here. Bruce, here," Moe clapped Phillip on the back once.

"But let's face it, the actor they hired is a boob. Biagio De Assi. An Italian doofus, a nice guy, but all he's got is big muscles and no brains. I doubt he can say good lines even if you write them. Anybody can write him some better lines with a little effort, but can he act them? Maybe we better get a couple more emergency script writers down here. We're gonna need them pretty soon if I'm thinking right. I know some good guys," said the assistant producer.

"Are you trying to get friends of yours on this project? We can't cheat accounts like that. Their sent an accountant out here last week," Moe remarked.

"We'll tell him to lay off us," the assistant producer replied.

"A lady accountant!" Moe exclaimed.

"Shit!" cried the assistant producer.

"The point is that the symbolism of the movie is apparent to you, Bruce. Especially before you meet the director. He is very interested in the symbolism. He only wants to do this movie if it has a greater meaning. Actually, you should be happy to do this movie because with the classical content it will really pad your resume. Yer got yer minotaur and you got yer monsters. Hercules, he's about as classical a guy as you get in the classical line of guys," Moe attested.

"I get it," Phillip said.

"He's a really deep thinker," Moe promised.

"Okay. I'm biting on the worm theme," said Phillip. There was something terrible wrong with that mixed metaphor. However, it was missed by everyone at the table.

"I just mean you're gonna be very happy to see the effect this will have on your career. The future is going to going places, you know? This director knows everybody. Everybody. He can get you onto great sets. He's buddies with a lot of the big, really big producers. Boy, ever hear of Green Hornet Meets the Chinese Assassin?"

"Can't say that I have."

"Well, he's planning on doing that with a really big producer now. How'dya like to visit Hong Kong?"

"Sure. That would be good. But I don't know if my wife would let me," said Phillip.

"Shoot, don't ask her, tell her you're doing it! This director can get you jobs like that. In a snap. Just get yourself on top of the old eight ball." Moe poured the new plateful of applesauce atop his cottage cheese.

CHAPTER 7

Worm Heads

You ought to have experienced the incredible effect of our beauties on people! You wouldn't have believed the great job my wife and I did on those masks in that Hercules worm man movie. They were so darn realistic. Luckily, I took pictures and my wife and I can look back at those to remember how the masks turned out, but we don't want to remember. It's too painful!

Yes, we put some real efforts into making those masks. They were quite a challenge, and it was our first job for Hollywood, and then it was our last. When they were gone, it put us out of the mask business and we've never gotten back in. We hadn't bought business insurance. Frankly, we teetered on the edge financially when we entered into that first contract. We sunk a lot of ourselves and our capital into those things. Maybe we never should have taken the job. But still, they were beauties!

How did we decide to make the masks? It is a fact that I came from a family that worked on masks and pinatas. I don't know what you would call us in English, but in Spanish we were Pinata Makers. My grandfather made pinatas in Caborca, Mexico and let me tell you that shop of his at the end of a street was a wonder to behold. I spent a lot of school holidays in there. He had pinatas made like white ostriches and pink elephants, big scary polar bears and ridiculous green monkeys. There wasn't an animal he hadn't built, I think, over all the years he ran that place. He probably did do a worm, though I don't specifically remember one. Caborca didn't have a better pinata shop. I spent so many hours around him and his pinata shop enjoying the process of building pinatas that I wanted to do something like it myself when I was older and he'd died and left me a little legacy of money. I found the idea of making masks for movies and I was encouraged by my wife. She'd been employed in a mask manufacturing plant once. She had many ideas of how to make better masks and heads. She encouraged me to start my own business with the little nest egg we'd inherited.

If you could have been with me when I lifted the first worm costume head and set it "ta-da" on its stand! The pride I felt at a job well done spread over my face. It was like a baby I'd created. Yes, really! My own little worm head mask. And my wife helped a lot.

I don't want to tell you this story about how things ended. Well, I was ruined by that dumb movie. That's Hollywood for you, or maybe I should say that's business for you or even that's life for you. Sometimes you're ahead, and other times you get taken down pretty darn fast. It comes with the territory of trying to expand your horizons. Something a businessman gets used to, even if your business is worm heads.

But if you'd have experienced them! I need to get those snapshots out so I can show people. What faces I made for that movie; you wouldn't believe the expressions they wore. Lots of different worm faces. You would have sworn it was a worm man army from outer space. Just what'd been ordered. I worked over every winkle and worried about the width between the eyes and the size and shape of the nose holes. I spent hours figuring out the right color to paint them and devising how the top of the head should look. I gave each worm its own expression. My wife helped in that because she could look at the basic worm head and suddenly, she'd get inspired and say "it's a suspicious worm!" She'd work and work on the thing and when she'd finished making the wrinkles around the eyes and the mouth you could have sworn you were looking at a suspicious worm! One worm was a little chubbier than the other and she said that one was self-satisfied. It went on like that, with her seeing laughing worms, and angry worms, etc. She was doing the best job she could do for our business and the movie. My wife was a great deal of help at that time. One big problem I had was the problem about what shape was best for the top of the worm heads. I ended up going kind of 50-50 between a pointy tip and making it round. The heads tapered to a point which was round at the end. I put some lovely wrinkles on the tip. Or I should say my wife did. She was the worm wrinkle expert!

Then for the color. That was hard. I picked a salmon color with a hint of tan for the flesh. That looked best in the photos I took. I put a lot of effort into the color of the worm skin. I even had friends come over and vote for the best colored worm head.

All that work and worry. At the end, the face looking back at me was made of rubber and had wrinkled brow and cheeks with a slit for a mouth and dark eyes. The worm head, as ordered!

I was so satisfied with my job. It was my first really big job for a studio and I was bursting with pride at how it had turned out.

My wife helped me place them carefully in the truck. I used wig stands and I figured out a way to attach them together in fours. I'd borrowed the truck from a friend of mine. I needed it to get the worm heads down to Calexico the next day before five a.m. Twenty-five of them in all. They had some head dimensions they gave me to work with. Every worm had to have a head. They had to be light enough and people had to breathe in them. The people inside had to be able to look out well enough to move the way they needed to and pretend to fire these guns. Then the special effects department were going to make rays coming out of the guns later.

My wife and I set all the heads carefully on their stands. Then we carried the stands I'd made with the worm heads on them into the back of the truck.

You wouldn't have believed how good they looked sitting there.

Finally, my days as a waiter might be over. I was looking forward to my success.

I kissed my wife goodbye. We gazed proudly at our collection. I closed the door and gave it a good luck pat.

An hour later I was making fantastic time outside Los Angeles with my truck filled with the heads. Okay, I admit I was driving way too fast due to pent up excitement and emotions. I really wanted to get those beautiful things down there in time. I was hyper! I was driving like there was no tomorrow, heading for Calexico.

Up ahead, I saw a Greyhound bus, two motorcycles, and this speeding pickup filled with a lot of crazy ladies. The ladies in the truck were laughing and screaming. I remember that very well. How can I ever forget it!

I don't know what it was, maybe staying up all night drinking coffee to finish the worm heads or maybe something else made me do it, but I drove faster and faster and drove myself straight toward the big wreck without once putting my foot on the brake. I just plowed right ahead until I almost drove my truck right up to the back of the little truck full of laughing women and then I veered and headed off the side of the road! Well, thank goodness I swerved at the last minute before I reached the motorcycles and the crazy ladies in the pickup. Thank goodness, because I wouldn't want to have the deaths of motorcyclists or ladies on my head. The truck I drove flew off the road into the center medium. It flipped on its side and I struck my head. I wasn't knocked out, though, luckily.

The motorcycle cop explained it as: I got too close to the bus and the speeding pickup. When I realized this, I tried to slow down. The wind made the truck whip and I was too inexperienced with trucks to know how to stop the wobble. I lost control and flew off the highway. The truck was damaged by a small pole and the gas tank ripped open. Then wouldn't you know it— the fuel spilled out!

With quite a lot of wiggling, I free of the seat belt and out of the truck. At that point, I ran. When I was a little ways away, however, I reconsidered and I decided I could try and save the heads so I ran back in time to open the back of the truck and find that the rubber worm mask had been chopped up pretty badly by the collision, but maybe salvageable, but just as I was about to save them, the whole truck went on fire due to the spilled fuel! I had to back off or risk roasting to death. Someone in the crowd pulled me away partially. I was screaming, "My heads!"

People imagined I was talking about my own head, and they told the ambulance drivers I had a concussion. It was hard convincing them I was talking about the rubber masks I'd built which were in the back of the crashed and burning truck.

I didn't have an extinguisher with me. My friend never kept one with his truck.

Then the fire truck arrived. When the flames were out and the truck stopped spraying, I found the masks thoroughly chopped up and smashed like the ingredients of a hasty, burnt fricassee, roasted to oblivion, maybe beyond oblivion. Black ash and a few withered faces were all that remained of months of my wife's tedious work on those worm expressions!

Turned out, the guy I borrowed the truck from didn't have insurance so we owed him for the truck's total destruction. We didn't have the heart to sue anybody for our own loss of the worm heads.

The truck was a total loss and with no insurance we owed my friend the price of the truck. The little leftover capital we had was gone paying him off.

We'll never try the movie business again. We'll be lucky to get out of debt before we're fifty!

Fist Lessons

See the flickering light. See the beam of the projector. A cone traveling to a small screen across a dark room.

"Watch and learn," said the mysterious master to his pupils. There were only three of them in the room then. He was not famous at that time. His pupils were poor and barely able to pay him. They were two Chinese men and one half-Chinese, half-Mexican man.

Young men also standing in lines on a shaky black and white film. Taking the stance. Making the thrust of an open hand. Kicking the air.

Frankie imitated them. Stance. Thrust. Kick.

She crossed the border every day after that and watched the man teaching for months before she had the courage to come a little early and enter the door to his studio to ask to join the line to learn from such a master. The flickering movie show Chinese men fighting. Every day the master showed this movie and Frankie studied how they stood and what they did with different weapons. She realized she could get good at this if she tried. Battling back at the world was what she needed.

The owner eventually let her join in. It seemed he was philosophical about this girl learning the secret arts of open hand fighting.

It wasn't a problem for Frankie to get away every day and appear on the Mexicali side. No one in the Chinese area cared about a small girl who was walking along confidently as though she worked for someone on that side. No one questioned her or challenged her because she'd learned to exude confidence. No one at the orphanage cared because she was not one of their favorites. She was big and rather unpleasant. They knew they would never place her in a home, and she knew it too.

Well, you're right to be impressed. The most famous moment in Hollywood history. That was how Little Frankie, world famous after her role in Fists of Fortune, really began her career in movies. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Desperation

"Listen, I wish I was going with you," said the bus companion to Misty, suddenly. She had a kind of wild-eyed abandon in her eyes.

"What? I got the impression you loved San Clemente!" exclaimed Misty. "What's made you change your mind?"

"Forget all that, forget what I said. I was covering up for things. My husband is really, really terrible. I wanna leave him. I had to beg to be able to come up to see my folks. He wouldn't let me for the longest time. It's awful, my marriage I mean. I'm really getting a divorce."

"That's terrible!" Misty exclaimed.

"No, not really. I made a big mistake. I gotta get out now and do something different."

Misty nodded. It was her luck that she had to sit next to someone having a large crisis in their life.

"Anyway, I can't stay with them, my parents. And I can't stay with him. And that landlord always looking at me is creepy. I'm awfully afraid he wants me to stay with him."

"Uh huh."

"Are they giving you a room down there in Calexico in this old hotel? A room to yourself?"

"Yes."

"Well, what if you had a helper? With wardrobe and rehearsing and stuff. All I'd want is to sleep on the floor. I won't make trouble, I promise. I have a hundred dollars that my parents gave me. That will pay for food. I'm gonna call Willard as soon as I get to Calexico with you and tell him it's over. We parted badly, so he won't be the least bit surprised. I've been delaying and delaying going back to San Clemente. The last time we spoke he said he figured I'd be getting a divorce. I'll phone him up and tell him the divorce is on! What do you think?"

"Well, if I really get promoted the way they say I will, I might need somebody—"

"Sure! You need me! I'll be your special assistant!"

Misty Arrives

Belching black fumes from its tailpipe, the blue and silver bus #43 from San Diego coasted around the corner of Zapata Avenue and Hoff Street and roared toward the low green building that was the Calexico bus depot. Behind the depot, a truck full of squash reclined in abandoned confusion. Crickets hopped out in various directions.

A small group of people stood around idly waiting to collect their friends and family at the bus depot.

They stared at a tire store where an enormous fire was raging. Several fire trucks had just pulled up and were attaching hoses to the hydrants.

"There sure has been a lot of fires around Calexico this summer," said an old man in a rusty black suit. "Might be the apocalypse next week." He spit on the sidewalk and walked away with a zucchini in his hand.

One of the people gathered at the depot was a large girl in a blue dress that was way too small for her and red Mary Jane shoes with blue anklets. This girl's name was Frankie Fairweeks and six months earlier her parents drove off and left her sleeping in the El Rancho Motor Court Inn in Calexico, California. After days of searching for the parents, she was taken to the orphanage. After a few weeks the orphanage manager decided it was best to let Frankie escape the orphanage nightly in order that she would not burn it down. So far, their strategy had worked and the old orphanage was still standing, though there'd been a number of unsolved fires near the border.

Frankie had dark skin and hair and a sharp face with small ears. Her favorite thing to do besides setting fires was to bother people and find ways to get money from them. She was saving the money for her first car. Usually they paid her to go away if she pestered them enough. Sometimes she tried to stand in their photographs and they paid her to go away. She was getting good at getting money from people that way. She went around in an old blue dress with a white ruffle at the bottom. People told her that dress made her look cute. It hadn't been washed in a long time and someone at school told her she smelled like their dog's poop. Later, when Miss Dore left her alone in the room, she broke all that kid's pencils and tore up their homework and stuffed it in the top of a pole on the playground.

Frankie saw a lady wearing a fancy suit who clutched a square purse. This lady was walking toward the big hotel. It was kind of obvious which people would head for the hotel.

Frankie followed at a discrete distance and then went right up behind her at the next street corner. Frankie wasn't worried about hanging around the hotel. She'd done it plenty of times and the authorities never said anything or brought her back to the orphanage.

When Frankie got to the hotel, the pretty lady went right in and Frankie didn't get a chance to rob her of her purse. Instead, she saw a young man with shaggy black hair.

"You're about the handsomest man I've ever seen." Frankie tried to flutter her eyes at the man.

"Do you want something, kid?" asked Schultzer.

"Are you one of the picture people?"

"Not really, I'm a worm. In the movie they're filming here."

"I wanna be in pictures," she said this as though it were an original idea with her.

"Crazy, keep that as your goal," said Schultzer, trying to get away.

"No, well, I don't mean in the far-off future, I mean now!"

"Don't you have school to attend?"

"They want me out of there." This was no lie.

"What about your old man and woman?"

"I'm an orphan!"

"Oh, my goodness! That's terrible. Where do you stay?"

"In the orphanage. Do you need an assistant?"

"No kiddo. I'm not anyone special. I don't get an assistant."

"Then you need one," Frankie brightened up considerably.

"No, no."

"Why not? Don't you want an orphan around?"

"It's not that ... it's just," began Schultzer.

"Tomorrow's Saturday. I'll come by the hotel early and if you're filming, I'll be your assistant!"

"Well, all right. I doubt they'll let you on set."

"It's a deal," said Frankie, not listening.

Replacement Heads

Vianney Lopez made a living designing and building piñata bodies for a business she owned with her husband, Gonzaga. Bountiful Piñata of Mexicali, Sonora made papier mache and rubber novelty items for stores along the border, and these constructions depicted interesting subjects. A doleful clown grasping an enormous handful of balloons was a current best seller which she subcontracted to a small woman named Lupita who'd been forming doleful clowns since last November. A happy child going to their first day of school with an apple Vianney formed herself. Gonzaga made religious figures.

It was in her capacity as a rubber expert that she was hired on an emergency basis to build a worm masks for the extras in the movie Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below. It was going to tax all her creative powers; nobody gave her much to go by.

Vianney did not like worms especially. It would be honest to say she felt downhearted about the last-minute commission she'd received. Why couldn't she have gotten a better assignment for her big breakthrough, if this really was her big breakthrough? If only she'd been asked to make a mask of a beaver. She'd already done one of those and people who came into the piñata shop commented favorably on the authentic-looking beaver mask hanging above her cash register. Someone even rented it once for a Halloween costume. She could do a beaver or even a fox. How about a cat? She was certain a cat would be more within her abilities. Any of those would have been easier and more fun. Making the worm mask made her depressed. A worm was not the kind of animal she responded to. And Vianney had found that if you didn't respond to an animal the task of building its head for a mask would be difficult.

This type of movie didn't appeal to her either. A movie with a macho man displaying his large muscles, even in his legs, embarrassed her. That was a crude thing to show on the screen. And these plots with monsters and bulls! Why did they have to show such babyish things? Why did the movie she got a commission from have to be one of those ridiculous movies popular in the drive-ins rather than the indoor theaters? She never went to watch those muscle men movies. She liked movies with circuses or trains crashing; those were good movies. Movies with witty people in beautiful clothing exchanging comments over dinner were actually her favorite. And movies with beautiful costumes thrilled her. Something with class and people wearing nice clothing always attracted her. And that was another thing; the men in these types of movies wore those short robes that looked so ridiculous. How could any man look good in a short robe? He seemed like a lady who got cut off. It might be successful in South America; they said these movies were. Well, that was something, but not very interesting to her. She'd never been to those places. Weren't people getting tired of these muscle men movies in America? Wouldn't they get tired of them in South America? Everybody knew the pictures of them holding rocks and tossing them around were simply special effects with Styrofoam boulders! Even little kids knew those films were fake.

Her beliefs about the movie were now thoroughly morose and, in that mood, she went about the task of forming the mold to be injected with rubber. She left an opening for the worm mouth and tried to locate the eyes. Worms didn't have eyes, but the man who'd commissioned the heads said the director wanted eyes on these worms. Vianney was trying to think of which eyes would be best. She had an assortment of them in plastic trays and she ran her eyes over them several times. She selected one brown eye and tried it in various spots. She would put them far back on the head so the worm would be about the way the man who'd ordered it drew the various worm heads. The first one she made was not successful in the opinion of her best friend, her husband.

"That is more like an elephant about to grow a trunk than a worm. I don't know if we should have taken this job. It's holding us up. It's too big for us. What were we thinking? Ay, we're going to lose big on this thing. I was a fool. Why did I even listen when I got that guy coming in here? I should have sent him away. Why didn't he have it made in Hollywood? They have professional factories there. This is some kind of tiny studio, that's what's going on. They probably won't even pay us for all this work. We'll be cheated again!" They'd been cheated on several orders for piñatas. Once a man had ordered a special duck and never came to pick it up. Another person had ordered two clown heads, but they never returned and their check bounced. After that they never started a special-order piñata or a mask until the check cleared.

"You're always in a panic. You don't need to panic about this job. I've got it in hand," said Vianney. "But that's not going to be good enough. Why is the neck all wrinkly?"

"Don't you remember? Remember what that man told us? When he came here? They wanted folds on the neck. I don't think that is ever going to look right. A worm doesn't have folds along its neck. I should have spoken up. Let's call him and ask for help. All I have to go by is this rotten pencil sketch. I think the mouth is the problem. It looks like the worm is pleading for help. Aren't the worms attacking Hercules? Why would they look so weak? If they attack Hercules, they need to look stronger. We need a worm face that shows power," said Gonzaga.

"Exactly. They need to look fierce. This worm looks defeated already. We need strong worm faces on these things. Something scary and fierce," said Vianney.

"That's really hard to get on a worm. Maybe if their arms are doing something?" Gonzaga suggested.

"Well, try it on and come toward me like you mean to kill me," said Vianney.

"Okay."

Her husband lowered the mask carefully. He put his arms out in front of him and crept toward his wife and their one worker in the piñata factory.

"Still looks defeated. The worm looks like it's ready to give up," said the lady they employed.

"Let's just call the guy. He left the number at the motel," Gonzaga said from inside the worm head.

"No! No! We're going to lose the job if we call! Let me look at that sketch again. I'll have to improvise the look fast. I hope this is going to turn out okay," said Vianney.

"Well," said her one employee, "to me they look crushed."

CHAPTER 8

Bobby on Set and Looking for Trouble

"Hey," Bobby signaled one of the set guards who looked like he might be a local. "Hey, buddy, come here, will you?"

"What?" The skinny young man moseyed up rather reluctantly. He shoved his hands in his pockets and glanced around to check if anyone was watching him visiting while on the job.

"Do you happen to know the names of any of those worm men? I mean the actors playing the worm aliens?" Bobby spoke urgently and rather wildly. He had come down to Calexico and now to this set in Mexicali and his pupils were dilated with excitement, and it was all he could do to restrain his speech from rushing ahead forcefully.

"Nope. I don't."

"What? Not one of them? A guy named Schultzer."

"No, sir. Never heard of him. The actors are all unknown to me. This movie isn't using any locals for actors as far as I can tell. I only know the locals actually. They're using a few of us from Calexico as security. Hey, who are you anyway?" The guard's voice rose until he practically squeaked the last question.

"It's got to be one of them... when I find out which one of them is that damn rat fink who tied me up in Hollywood..." Bobby stared into space as he slammed his fist into his other hand, "Bam!"

"I'm afraid, sir, that you cannot be allowed around the set. You seem to be talking about hurting someone and you've got a grudge.... Hey! Hey! You're not supposed to go there!" The guard half-heartedly chased Bobby for about a hundred feet before giving up.

Menacing Swarm

It was decided that the worm men were going to lose their weapons and resort to hand to hand combat with Hercules. The idea of worm men engaging in hand to hand combat didn't seem to bother the writers or anyone else on the set and I had to keep from bursting out laughing when I first heard this suggestion made. What did they believe the audience would think of worm men starting to fight? And then it became the case that the worm men would be martial arts experts. The masks were switched to some of the men who were hired in Los Angeles who knew jujitsu and karate. They later became big stars and they were Bobby Rimes and Schultzer and that creepy Little Frankie kid. We filmed the worm men attacking Hercules from all side with jujitsu kicks. Hercules threw them every which way and we filmed them jumping into the mattresses with wild abandon. It looked as though they were tossed in the air by Hercules' great arms. We shot closeups of worm arms delivering karate chops to parts of Hercules' chest, torso, legs and feet. The worms were attacking and then slowly sunk to the ground in a squirm.

"For God's sake," screamed the stunt coordinator, "can't you sink to the ground!"

"Sink! Sink! Slowly!" cried the acting coach, "Try it again. You're all sinking too fast. You have to make it look as if you are in agony from the strength of Hercules' kicks. Remember his feet are weapons!"

"Now give us a good sinking," the assistant director ordered.

"You can do it!" said the assistant stunt coordinator.

The worms attempted to fall to the ground. Several collapsed in a sudden heap.

"I just give up. Let's go on," said the stunt coordinator.

"Scene #32! I need the following worms only: Gustavo Fernandez, Alex Velazquez, and Jerome Hernandez-Sanchez."

Three worms approached. They lift their masks off and propped the worm heads against their sides. It appeared as though the depressed worm faces sprouted from their hips.

"Now," sighed the stunt coordinator, "you're flying through the air after Hercules has punched you. You must look as if you have been propelled by the force of his fist against your head."

"Let's try it. Maybe two and then one," he added. "Hercules? Where did he go?"

After we rounded up Hercules, we also filmed Hercules stabbing some of the worm men with a sword.

"Stab! Stab! Stab! Very good work, men. Very good dying!" the assistant stunt coordinator said.

The worm men trudged back into the cave for another practice take of the rock attack. Some of them climbed the rocks, one ripped his costume bending over to climb. When the assistant director called "action," five of them approached Hercules directly with their guns extended toward him in a menacing swarm.

"You are a menacing swarm!" shouted the assistant director.

"Bend your knees." His voice boomed in the megaphone. "Yes, that's it, you on the left you're doing a wonderful job. It makes you look more menacing that way. Everyone follows his lead, please."

"That's it. Slowly. Slowly. Creep up on Hercules. Forward slowly. Now, freeze! You don't want Hercules to look around and notice you come up on him. Hercules doesn't know you are there. Hercules, don't look around. Now, worm men, look at each other once or twice as though you are exchanging signals of how your attack will proceed. Then I want the tall worm to signal to go forward with an arm chop. That's it! Good job. We'll film it like that!"

Hollywood Drug Culture

I had one experience with the Hollywood drug culture and that was a Hercules worm man movie called Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below.

The hotel I stayed at was built as a long low line of two-story suites with a main lobby near the highway. The lobby had sweeping buttresses which the automobiles had to drive under to reach the courtyard of bungalows. A low table ran along a huge plate glass window with stylish magazine on hand sewn pillows. If trucks went by, the plate glass rattled. The hotel was surrounded by old buildings. From the hotel you could pick out the rocks in Mexico where the movie was filming and you could also smell the feedlots. At midday the heat from the window broiled the pillows and magazines. All the woodwork and window trim on the bungalows were painted pink. The center of the patio had a pool and a large number of flowering shrubs.

We'd taken over the entire hotel and another smaller one further along the highway in the direction of the film location. By we, I mean us movie people.

One day I saw a troop of small children skipped across the lawn to the director's door. The door was open and the children went in.

My curiosity about the director's condition, why he never left his suite, got the best of me several days later and I decided to make some casual enquiries around the sets. I couldn't understand why he wouldn't leave his suite or even, it appeared, his bed. I'd also discovered that he was receiving visits from a strange man who gave the appearance of being a doctor, but he wasn't. He arrived with a black bag; the type that visiting doctors often carried. I was certain I was looking at a doctor making a visit. Then, one day, I heard him referred to as Doctor Fernandez. It happened when the owner of the motel emerged from the lobby door and called to him as he was approaching the director's door. He had a call at the front desk. Then I knew for sure that it was a doctor visiting the director. This Doctor Fernandez always knocked on the director's suite and then went in. I'd met him twice in a week. I started by asking someone minor, a makeup artist, a direct question. They were not informed about the director's problems. They also did not know anyone who knew what the director's problems were, but the rumors were that it was his kidneys and he'd destroyed them with drink or with drugs he took when he was a body builder. Then I remembered that the director was said to have been a body builder in his early life and reached a high level in weight lifting and muscle man contests. He'd grown up in lumbering community in Russia, though I never heard what city it was. The muscle man contests attracted him to build himself up and certainly I'd heard of men taking injections in order to build muscles. The man who was playing Hercules in this movie seemed young to have built himself to such an extent. His shoulder muscles were massive and his back and chest bristling with bound muscles. He reminded me of some of the fairway muscle men that were displayed as freaks when I was young. He may very well have taken injections. Wasn't Mexico also a place where such injections wouldn't be monitored as well as it was in the United States? I'd heard of clinics offering health injections which promised many results, and those had unsafe reputations. Perhaps the director was really ill and needed some injections just to keep himself well enough to meet with the people who were filming his movie in his absence. I never knew the answer. Drugs? In my experience, Hollywood is rife with them.

Bobby's Revenge

"I know you! You dirty rat fink! I've found you at last! You're gonna pay for tying me up and keeping me in that hotel for two days!" Bobby ran pell-mell toward Schultzer. Schultzer was standing for a moment underneath a tree with his worm man head off. There was no one else near him when Bobby charged in his direction, so that made it obvious that this maniac had Schultzer in mind. But just to make sure Schultzer glanced around to verify that this person wasn't yelling at someone else.

"Hey, what the—?" Schultzer stumbled backwards against the tree trunk. Bobby was running at him so fast Schultzer had no time to figure out who he was or what he wanted.

Schultzer could only get those few words out before he was attacked in a fierce karate battle by the blonde-haired foe. Bobby adopted several good methods of attack which he'd read about in library books and practiced in Muncie. He leaned in the way he needed to. He used his opponents move to enable him to land blows. His hands were held correctly as he dropped to the position he needed for kicks and punches to land. He tried to distribute his weight over his knees the way he'd copied from the movies he watched carefully.

Frankie watched what was happening to Schultzer. It was terrible. A horrible blonde-haired young man was fighting him in a terrible Kung Fu-like style. It was executed horribly. Frankie raced forward yelling, "You fight all wrong. And you're going to lose!"

"Get out, kid!" Bobby yelled. "What's wrong with you?"

Schultzer tried to fend off the attack with kicks and wild punches. He hopped backwards, yelling and shrieking. He ran a little way and threw his worm mask at the attacker. The worm head missed Bobby and slammed into a bush where it stuck, looking strangely lost. But Bobby didn't stop coming at him! Nothing seemed to stop the onslaught of this madman!

"What the—who are you?" Schultzer it seems did so many things wrong to so many people that a few days later he'd forgotten most of them.

A little girl ran in and screamed "Leave my boss alone!"

"You tied me up in Hollywood, remember? In that damn hotel," said Bobby to Schultzer between vicious chops of his hand. He was using some of the best moves he'd imagined teaching in the Muncie Academy of Martial Arts. He'd also studied carefully some of the moves in recent Kung-Fu movies. He knew he had most of them down pat, but this little girl was amazing. She really knew how to hold a position. She must have learned from a real master! As soon as the battle was over, he vowed he would ask this girl who her master was.

Meanwhile, the peripheral vision of the assistant director was attracted by the movement behind the camera. Estee St. Germain searched behind her for a moment and then realized she was staring at two flailing fighters. She watched them with fine appraisal, not of their ability to fight, but how they would look on camera. "Say, look at those two guys fighting a little kid over there. That's what we need! Who are those guys? And that girl kid?" she asked finally.

"I don't know them. Looks like at least one of them is playing the part of a worm man. He just threw his worm head."

"That's the kind of action we need in this movie! Where's my stunt coordinator when I need him. Those fellows are really giving it a go!"

"That's a real fight! They're really fighting each other!"

"Sure, it's real. A real damn fight! And that's exactly what this movie needs. Find out their names. We've got to use them to fight Hercules. Somebody needs to ask them to step over here in a few minutes. We'll film them. The blonde kid is great. Look at him battle. Woo!"

"That isn't real karate. He's just flailing around a lot. I know something about karate and that is definitely not it. Only the little girl is doing real stuff the right way. I saw this movie about The Boss Man."

"I don't care what it is! What does it matter if the form is perfect? At least he looks genuinely ready to battle. Our battles look too phony on this film. We have to start some real action going."

"Ma'am, are we going to shoot this?"

"Sure."

"Go talk to them," said Assistant #1.

The assistant stunt coach strolled over to Bobby and Schultzer. "Hey! You guys! Knock it off. Knock it off. Hey, guys, listen, listen, the assistant director is impressed with you," the man called while clapping his hands like a teacher on the schoolyard.

"What?"

"Stop fighting a minute and listen."

"What do you want?"

"The assistant director likes the way you guys are going after each other. She finds it very impressive."

"Oh yeah," said Bobby massaging his jaw. Schultzer had landed a glancing punch on his jawline.

"She wonders if we can work this into the movie. Maybe have the two of you attack Hercules together like you did? Then the kid comes in and defends him against you!"

Neither Bobby nor Schultzer replied. "Together," added Estee.

Bobby and Schultzer stood breathing hard with their hands on their hips. The sweat was pouring off of both their foreheads. Frankie spoke up, "Aw, I can beat that Hercules guy any day."

The assistant acting coach stood for a moment. "Two worm men attacking Hercules. Then the kid comes in and fights with Hercules against you guys. The way you guys just fought each other. Do you think you can do it again on camera?"

"Maybe," said Bobby sullenly.

"Sure," said Schultzer with a shrug.

"Absolutely!" shouted Frankie.

"Okay! I'll tell the director. We'll call you over in an hour. Meantime, we'll get the kid a Greek costume. Just remember what you did!"

CHAPTER 9

The Director and His Fan

Envision a grownup asshole ushered into a bedroom at midnight. The director of photography, Paulo Ponce, headed in to meet the director, Leonid Sanodrov, who'd centered himself in a king-sized bed in the largest room of his suite, keeping the hotel bedcovers, a gory orange sunset, pulled up to his chin. From his position in the bed, he stared up at the ceiling. It was the best hotel in Calexico, but from what Paulo could tell on approach, the ceiling had nothing special to commend it. "Don't talk unless he talks," said the script supervisor. "And first make sure he's actually talking to you."

"I'm Miss Roux," said a woman coming into the hotel room behind Paulo and hurriedly offering her hand to the script supervisor as she was skirting a monstrous Mexican table. Mr. Ponce had gone into the suite slightly ahead of her. A dark Naugahyde sofa displayed a variety of small bright silk pillows in geometric shapes. Some of these had migrated to a pile at one end of the sofa as though they were pebbles in a stream.

Miss Roux, in a hurry in a tight skirt, tried to trot her handshake toward the script supervisor. The gloomy walls of the suite had been hung with large oil paintings of a village fete and women drawing water. These women seemed to be whispering something to each other and it distracted Miss Roux. Luckily her heels were low and practical or she could have hurt herself badly just then when she banged one shin on an edge of the big coffee table. Advantages accrued to women who knew how to shut men off, not that high-heels would have done much to distract from her moustache.

"We know who you are," said the script supervisor. "He wants to hear about how his last movie was loved in France by real French movie-loving people."

"Sure. They gave me my lines. I practiced them all the way here."

"The French movie lines are the reason you're here. We're about to go over tomorrow's work," the script supervisor explained.

"I understand." She didn't understand a thing.

The large tan man in the bed blinked when they walked in. They saw his chest rising and falling under the sunset bedcover. From that angle, she could detect a great deal of nose hairs spilling out of his nostrils, though the top of his head was bald. Even though he was famous, she didn't believe she'd ever looked at a picture of him or met him at a party. Maybe she wasn't rising enough in Hollywood to be going to parties where people of his caliber should show up, which made the fact that he hadn't been around less mysterious. Nobody she knew had ever met him. Doubly strange. Oh course, she really didn't know anyone.

"Oh hello. I called you, didn't I?" Leonid said.

"Yes," replied Paulo.

"I wanted to go over the battle scene," said Leonid.

"Of course."

"But I don't believe I want to now. Are the extras ready?"

The costume coordinator, who stood in a corner of the room, placed his hands on his hips. "The new masks are here. We might look at those..."

"Help yourself to coffee," said Leonid to Miss Roux. He turned to the costume coordinator. "Bring one of them in for me to inspect."

"Of course, but we're shooting at six."

Miss Roux walked to a carafe set and poured himself a cup of coffee. She saw Paulo's reflection in the dresser mirror and he looked disgusted by the change in plans. Apparently, he wanted to discuss the battle scene.

"Doesn't matter. I'll be awake," said Leonid to no one and everyone.

An arm emerged from under the cover. It conveyed a walkie-talkie to Leonid's mouth. "Set an alarm for five-thirty," he intoned weirdly.

"The light's important," Leonid began. "It must be exactly as we discussed. You can tell her, Miss Germaine, about it later tonight. I want to enhance the shadows of the rocks. The sky must be filmed as we discussed yesterday. It was yesterday when we met?"

"Done," said a voice in the walkie-talkie.

"Yes. That's right," said the production coordinator.

"Thank you," said Leonid into his walkie-talkie. "Skies set the mood. I am a great proponent of the sky. Perhaps God is a greater proponent of skies in the actual world." Leonid chuckled at his own witticism. Paulo managed a sick smile. "If you read the Odyssey you will notice how important skies are in stories. I have been rereading him tonight. I put the book in with Gideon's Bible. Open it up there. The drawer." The production coordinator slid the side dresser drawer open and pulled out a well-worn paperback book. "Read one of the marked passages aloud to me." Leonid pursed his lips in expectation.

Miss Roux noticed the director hadn't yet moved. Perhaps the answer to the secret was that he was disabled? Could he be handicapped? Or very ill?

"Odysseys rowed..." began the production coordinator.

"Excellent," Leonid interrupted. "Homer colors his skies rose-hued in the morning. We must make that our ideal sky in order to suggest the Ionian Peninsula. Did you understand that I've changed my mind about the costume? I want to inspect one tonight. Call the costumer now to come up here with what he's got. Use this phone. What room is he in?"

"I don't know...maybe ten," said the costume coordinator who was on the phone.

"Call him. The man at the desk, Mr. Onate, will connect you."

"Now, what's your name?" asked Leonid. "Come sit here."

Miss Roux stared at him and realized he was talking to her. He was suggesting she sit in a chair beside the bed on the other side from the phone. The costume coordinator had managed to dial the wrong room, but it wasn't a big problem because the movie people had taken the whole hotel, and the person he woke up knew what room the costumer had. The coordinator pressed the button to hang up and spun the dial to talk to the front desk again.

"Come and tell me about what they are saying in France about me."

"Ah...first, you should understand that they are all loving all of your so, so fabulous movies. I had many students...eh...when I was in Paris saying they saw your movie about the divorce..." Miss Roux began.

"Wretched Excess?"

"Yes!" she exclaimed.

"Or Plenty?"

"The excess one."

"What did they say? Exactly?"

"That they admired it tremendously. That it paired perfectly with the French cinema movement of the very best French directors. It should be paired with The Babysitter and The Wild Sea for its maturity and its discussion of the state of man's relationship with nature and the many scenes of man's utmost humiliation and yet, his manifest nobility. They thought you were very important on the theme of humiliation."

"When did they say this?"

"At all the parties I attended."

"Wow, I didn't know that! You don't know how happy that makes me. It's wonderful."

He sounded a little less like a zombie when he said that. Then there was a knock on the door.

"Go let him in," said the script supervisor.

"You don't know how happy this is making me," said the director.

The production coordinator hustled her out of the crowded bedroom. "Good job," he whispered.

"Is that it?" said Miss Roux in shock. "I didn't say half my lines!"

Sad Worms

The script supervisor opened Leonid's door and confronted an emaciated man with a handlebar moustache and gray skin who propped a full worm head mask on his hip. Miss Roux scurried nervously around this man and his mask.

The mask was taller than a man's real head and had a much thicker neck. It was formed of pink painted rubber and depicted the head of a worm, something like an earthworm, perhaps, except with a strange mouth. The mouth had a downturned, forlorn expression as though it anticipated being squashed soon. The wrinkles of the worm mask around the neck made it appear that the worm men were wearing turtleneck sweaters.

"The director wants to see this?" said the man. He carried the mask stiffly at his side then held it out as though to pass it on.

"Is that the worm mask?" called Leonid from the bedroom.

"Yes."

"Bring him in. Tell him to put the mask on. I want to look at it on someone."

"Really?"

"That's what he said."

"Aw, but I'm not an actor," complained the man. "They just told me to bring this to the room."

"Just try it on. Humor us. He wants to check the effect of what it looks like on a person. That's all," the costume coordinator whispered.

The man sighed. He lifted the mask above him and lowered it slowly over his head. With the mask on, he tried to step, but he staggered forward into the doorframe and promptly smashed into the threshold with his shoulder and the side of the mask. He held his head for a moment. "Ow. Damn, that hurt. The inside of this thing ain't all that smooth," said the muffled voice.

"I'll lead you in," the costume coordinator promised.

"Well, okay," the man agreed.

"Here we go," said the costume coordinator. "Around this coffee table. Shuffle to your right a bit. That's it."

The man with the worm head mask was led forward in the dark.

"Here we are!" The costume coordinator brought the worm man into the director's bedroom.

"Wow!" said the costume coordinator. "Just wow! Get a load of this guy!"

"What do you think?" asked the script supervisor. "Great, huh?"

Paulo Ponce applauded as the Worm Man entered.

The room got quiet.

"Wow," said the costume coordinator. "Just wow."

"Well, what's your opinion?" asked the production coordinator.

"I dunno. What's it looking like on camera?" said Paulo.

"We'll film it tomorrow," said the chief cameraman, who had remained silent in a corner for hours. "It'll be great."

"The color's off," said Leonid.

"Sure, it's off," said Paulo.

"Okay. I want to put it on film. I can't decide until I film it. Maybe with the right sky, huh? What do you think?" said Leonid.

The despondent worm turned toward Paulo.

"Sure, the sky is the answer," said Paulo.

From Afar

They were making a B-movie of the sword and sandal genre, also known as pepla. The proposed title of the movie was Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Outer Space, but some of the promotional men in the studio were lobbying for the shorter title of Hercules and the Worm Men.

This title issue received an enormous amount of attention from the studio. An entire office had begun analyzing the title and its effect on viewers. A focus group had been tested and questioned extensively. No one on the set seemed the least bit interested in the title, however. They kept telling the studio to change the title of the film to anything they deemed fit. They didn't care what title it had. Even the director of photography told me the director had no interest in the film title and was happy with everything they proposed. But the studio was convinced there was opposition on the set. Apparently, an office was keeping themselves employed by feigning opposition to title changes; people on location were said to be angry and frustrated at the idea that the title would be changed. But soon someone high in Marathon Studios would demand a change and that would mean a visit from someone in the studio to smooth out the situation. Someone was always reporting an active opposition to the proposed title change. We kept getting letters addressing the ongoing turmoil regarding the title of the movie, when there was no turmoil anywhere that we knew of. Every afternoon a man named Richard J. Bean phoned us collect from the studio in Hollywood to argue with the writers, or whoever he got hold of, about the movie title; generally, he told us the opinions of various studio big-wigs whom he'd met during lunch daily! They were having an amazing number of lunch meetings over this. This Richard J. Bean wanted to know what the current opinion was about the current working title. He wanted feedback from the set about the proposed title, but none of us knew that there was a new proposed title. These titles were being called and cabled to the director who was ignoring the whole issue. These big wigs, the prior day, appeared to discuss nothing except the title of the film. They worried the title like terriers with a smelly sock. They had worked through the idea that worms came from below and it'd occurred to them that the title might contain redundancies because of the overall opinion that worms would be found below. What, would worms be expected to drop on Hercules from above? How absurd! Why hit the audience over the head with the idea that these worms came from below? Surely the studio could do better. Richard J. Bean urged us to discuss this with the director. No one had the courage to discuss it. I'd no idea whether the director was also receiving these calls about the movie title. Of course, there was a lot wrong with the movie other than the title, such as possibly the worst script I'd ever had the misfortune to read, but the studio appeared to fixate on the titling of the film. Some days Mr. Bean would phone us with urgent results of surveys about the title and what prospective viewers believed the title implied. The director had made no accommodation for viewer input. Wouldn't the viewer be expected to know that worms came from below? Weren't we insulting the movie goer by assuming he didn't know where worms came from? Maybe shrews would be better in the title? They would work up something and get back with us on the shrew title. Meanwhile we should discuss the shrew title among ourselves and get back to them with the consensus on location. We, of course, never discussed the title that had to do with shrews.

Meanwhile another office spent a huge amount of time building up a series of posters. They were trying to figure out what kind of posters did well in South America and Central America. They decided a picture of Hercules battling the Harpies and Hercules with the worm headed men were the best at attracting attention as movie posters. We pointed out the Hercules never battled the Harpies in our movie, or in classical myths, but no one was too interested in the factual points of the actual movie. This poster was printed in neon reds, yellows and greens and shipped to Mexicali by a courier messenger on a motorcycle. One night we were summoned in with the director again and showed the three posters. The director glared at them for ten minutes before he dismissed them all as inadequate. Hercules must have a much larger chest and a white peplum.

Misty and the Midnight Lettuce

That night, after the first shot of the battle between Hercules and the shrews, Misty woke with a splitting headache and found it impossible to sleep again afterwards. She kept waking over and over, tossing and turning. Finally, she got up and went out her door. Her new assistant from San Clemente stayed asleep in the room. Everyone else was sound asleep in the hotel, and she found herself walking toward the hotel patio to study the pool under the starlight. It was beautiful to watch the reflected shrubs moving within moonlit waters. The swings on the playset creaked quietly; the chains cast long strange wiggly shadows across a small lawn.

After a while, Misty became aware of lights and movement in what she knew to be the director's suite, that was, the real director, Leonid Sanodrov, not that Estee St. Germain. With it being so late at night, Misty wondered what could be happening there! She'd never dreamed of snooping around outside the director's bungalow, but curiosity overcame her reluctance to intrude.

Misty began skulking closer to the suite of rooms. Suddenly, the hideous Chihuahua dog of the motel owner barked in the window of a room right next to her, and Misty froze with her heart pounding. Luckily, that dog couldn't concentrate on anything for long and within a minutes, it'd ducked out of the window and trotted away.

Misty crept closer to the lights, still conscious that she didn't want to be snooping.

But to her surprise, as she got closer, she glimpsed a person moving inside the suite. The person was tall, pale and had bulging eyes and bushy hair. His shoulders stooped, and he rocked on his heels and chanted. All the time while he hovered above a bed, he seemed to be reading from a large tattered book. Misty didn't know enough Spanish to be able to tell what he was yammering about.

This person was making strange sweeping movements over the bed in which the director was stretched!

This figure of the chanting man was dressed as a gypsy or a witchdoctor, and he was evidently performing a strange ritual behind the curtain in the bungalow!

What in the world was going on?

This peculiar doctor put the book on a side table and returned to stand over the bed in which the director lay. His hands were raised to the sky, then he was lowering something. Misty hoped it wasn't going to be anything awful! Maybe the director was really sick and trying all kinds of horrible remedies like blood from an animal! Misty felt herself stiffen, and she wanted to leave. It was all she could do to keep herself there, but she had to know what was happening! Silently, she drew closer to the curtained window.

The strange figure brought the thing down from above his head and placed it on the director's bare stomach.

Misty blinked and looked in again. She couldn't believe her eyes! The director held a large lettuce balanced on his diaphragm! What kind of crazy rite from Mexico was this? What in the world was happening? How could a lettuce on someone's stomach cure anything?

It seemed as though a demon was being exorcised with the strange priest in charge of the ceremony. While the lettuce rested on the director's tummy, this priest was talking and sprinkling him with water. She couldn't tell what he was saying or even get an idea of what they were talking about, but after seeing the weird lettuce ritual, she scuttled back to her hotel room, pronto.

CHAPTER 10

Bobby and Schultzer Together

"Listen," Schultzer began, "I'm sorry about what happened back in Los Angeles and I want you to forgive me. I know I did you wrong." Schultzer spoke to Bobby under a tree at the side of the shoot. They were filming a few close ups of the battles between Hercules and Bobby and Schultzer.

"I don't think that's a real apology," said Bobby, squinting in Schultzer's direction.

"It is a real apology, man. I'm really sorry. Can you dig that I'm sorry?" Schultzer said.

"I don't accept your apology. I don't want to hear any more apologies from you." Bobby stood staring at Schultzer with his fists clenched at his sides.

Schultzer glanced away from Bobby. "Are you still holding it against me?"

"You could say that, yes," said Bobby, nodding and smiling.

"Aww, why don't you just forget about it? Be cool, man," Schultzer requested.

Bobby blew his breath out. "I tell you what. You stay away from me on this set and I just might consider not attacking you next time I meet you."

"It's a deal," said Schultzer, choosing another tree to stand under.

Hercules Practices More Lines

Biagio Di Assi floated in the tank on a raft. He was laying on his back, chewing an excellent pastrami on rye sandwich and staring at an extremely small cloud in the sky above Northern Mexico.

"Now, let me explain the scene to you," said the acting coach. The coach let his arms with the script hang at his side. Working with this actor had been some of the most tiring and trying moments in his forty years in the industry.

"I understand the scene. You don't have to explain nothing," said Biagio blandly.

"Still, I know, but let me explain. You're lost at sea, okay? You haven't had water in days and you've got to say these lines about adventure. You are contemplating your lost love. This is important. During all of this, they want you to be contemplating your lost love, okay?"

"Okay, I know the lines. About the lost love." Biagio rotated his wrist in the air, waving away the bother of this low-energy coach.

"What's your first line?"

"She will never leave me. My mind is full of her." Biagio spoke it with the sandwich in his mouth.

"Say it like you mean it."

Biagio swallowed. "She will never leave me and my mind is full of her."

"Without the 'and'."

"She will leave me. My mind is full."

"Now wait. You changed something there again. Of her. Never! Never leave me."

"Yes, of her."

"Say it again."

"She will never, never leave me. My mind is full."

"One never. Only one never and then 'of her' at the end."

"Of her at the end," Biagio repeated.

"You can't leave off those last words. You understand? Those are important."

Biagio nodded.

"Try it again."

"She will one never leave me. My mind is full. Of her at the end." Biagio belched. "It's okay, right?"

Mere Physical Injury

"I wanted to be peaceful! Karate is about peacefulness. And I have practiced it to learn how to be peaceful. That is the whole point of it," Bobby claimed. He found Schultzer sitting near the pool at the hotel.

"You could have fooled me," Schultzer said. He was reading a motorcycle magazine, and he turned the pages angrily as Bobby stood there.

"You made me attack you that way!" Bobby exclaimed.

"Hey, man, you're nuts! I didn't make you do any such thing. I tried to apologize yesterday."

"It was because of the way you treated me at that hotel! You abused me! That's what you did. You robbed me. Now I have used karate in the wrong mindset and attacked a person. The punishment I feel inside is terrible. It has given me psychic punishment which I cannot get out of my head! I feel so awful about using karate in the wrong way! How am I going to make this right? How?" Bobby shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

"Man, don't bug me about your problems. Just get over it. You feel awful? Crazy, man. What about all the kicks I received? Is that unimportant? I feel awful because you wrenched my neck and scratched my arms. I have a sore knee, too." Now Schultzer was whipping the magazine pages, nearly tearing some of them out.

"That is nothing compared to the agony I feel in understanding that I resorted to using karate in an inappropriate fashion. I have sullied my training. I spent years studying this. What about that?" Bobby voice almost broke with disappointment.

"Ho hum, what's that when compared with being actually injured?"

"I can tell you, buddy. Psychic pain is much, much worse than mere physical pain."

"Says the nutcase!" Schultzer tossed this out accompanied with a snort.

"Nutcase?"

Schultzer looked up from his magazine with disgust. "Why did you even come in here?"

"To give you a chance to apologize again."

"Hah! I already tried."

"Well, are you going to again?"

"No. No way."

"You are cursed, man!" Bobby shouted. He stormed away from the pool and toward his hotel room. Schultzer laughed at his retreating back.

Film in the Can!

I was the stunt coordinator on that Hercules movie about worm aliens. On the morning I remember best, our assignment was to film small groupings of the worm men shaking different weapons against the morning sky, the sky as Homer would have wanted it, rose-hued. That was the director's dumb obsession. The worm men would be standing on the cave structure and shaking their weapons at the direction of Hercules and the Argonauts and a wizard. Don't ask me. But the sky had to be just right. All the day's rushes had to be shown to the director that night and if the sky wasn't right, we were going to have to reshoot the groups the next day.

"Shake your trident! Higher! Extend your arm fully now! Turn quickly as though you've been surprised by a sound at your right! The right!" I coached the worms.

"Move the club up and down! Now wave it side-to-side slowly! Slowly!" I ordered.

The worm masks had been manufactured in the town of Mexicali for the movie with very little time. The original masks were destroyed in a terrible accident on the highway outside Calexico. A piñata factory had been able to make the twenty masks we needed in the desired shade of pink with small wrinkles and thick necks. Unfortunately, the worm mouth gaped in such a way that they looked hungry or maybe sad. The eye holes were small and in the neck of the mask, but there was little in the way of peripheral vision when the mask was lowered over their head, so we had a lot of accidents. All the extras wore a pink nylon body suit that zipped in the back. They had arms in order to hold their weapons. Apparently, they were only worm headed men; the rest of their bodies were human!

Sure enough, the director stared at the rushes despondently and then ordered the whole thing reshot the next morning because the weather forecast appeared to be especially promising for a rose-hued sky. The sky the morning we shot did not have the correct level of pink in it and the director did not want to use any filters. He wanted the real sky to appear to be perfect for the worm men to stand against. I felt they were in too much silhouette, but I didn't dare comment on that or I'm sure I would have been only making a bad thing worse. In that light, the worm man faces had the effect of crying, which I found disturbing. Also, the actors could not manage their weapons well with the large masks covering all of their heads. We had to have people who helped the worm men move because their vision was so restricted by the mask that they were constantly tripping after the scenes were shot. Even during the scenes, they often looked dizzy because of the heavy masks and the shaking of their weapons made them sway a lot on film. We never had a successful shoot and most of it ended up on the cutting room floor when the editor got hold of the footage.

We had a driver ready to take the film to Hollywood. He drove a big Plymouth Belvedere, the type used by cops in a lot of southern states. He told me in some stretches he was reaching one hundred and ten miles per hour on his way to Los Angeles or back out to us with the film after it had been developed, though I have my doubts. He was a big braggart about car speeds.

The day came to film the battle between the worm men and Hercules, which was the climax of the movie, though we were shooting it out of sequence because our Hercules had another movie to make. He would be leaving to make a western in Italy. The rest of the crew was terribly jealous of him and kept trying to work their way into the conversation with him to drop hints that they would be willing to work on such a film. Of course, he left without taking anyone with him. He was highly concerned about the camera angle because he'd worked out his best side and was adamant that he was to be filmed only on that side. The battle had Hercules surrounded by a gang of worm men who jabbered at him and jabbed their weapons at his stomach as he jumped backward. We also took several shots of him spinning around to confront the worm men who were creeping down on him from the rocks above. A stunt worm man fell from a rock, shrieking in a very un-wormlike fashion as he fell onto the collection of mattresses. The director didn't like the sky again so we re-shot it for three more days until this falling stunt man dislocated his shoulder and we had to quit.

CHAPTER 11

Things Thaw

Bobby and Schultzer stood beside each other and the air around them, which had always before fairly prickled with anger, was almost friendly. From the assistant director they were hearing the verdict of whether their scene of fighting would stay in the film.

The battle between Bobby and Schultzer versus Hercules and Frankie looked good on the film when it was reviewed the prior night. The action with the worm men was some of the best in the film so far, in fact. On the basis of that Bobby and Schultzer were told they could expect to be in the upcoming motorcycle movie. The two of them, upon being told the news, smiled and blushed. They shared a beer together that night in Calexico. Bobby had almost forgiven Schultzer for what he'd done in Hollywood. Bobby had a slight suspicion that his friend did not always have good judgement, but he decided Schultzer had been a victim of his own poor decision making. Bobby could probably help him along those lines.

"Why did you join that gang of no-good monsters in L.A. anyway?" Bobby asked Schultzer. Since they'd become friends, that question had bothered him. He hadn't had the courage to ask it outright until that moment. It was obvious Schultzer was a bad judge of character and did not seem to fully comprehend the consequences of his actions, but that wasn't much of an excuse for treating a fellow the way Bobby had been treated. "If you wanted to get a job as an actor that was probably a bad move."

"Oh, I don't know. Guess I needed some adventure, man. Then I got a job and it seemed impossible to quit. That group wasn't exactly friendly to the idea of people going away."

"Oh, I wouldn't be surprised."

"No. And I have no family."

"Well, yes, you said that."

"I didn't want to threaten you."

"Were you the one who tied me up?" asked Bobby.

"No."

"And you didn't steal my money or my letter to the studio?"

"Someone gave me the letter. The boss believed I was the most likely one to get a movie part. The other fellows were always too stoned," Schultzer explained.

And certainly, the crowd of men around that bong had looked stoned out of their gourds. Bobby supposed if he'd been alone in Los Angeles without friends or family, he might have fallen in with a band of bad guys like that.

Bobby briefly clasped Schultzer's shoulder in a sign of final forgiveness. "After this movie and the motorcycle one, someone ought to make a movie about karate. The martial arts. There could be fights staged and filmed. People would really like that kind of entertainment. Whenever we have open meets in Indiana, the public just flocked to watch us fighting. Why wouldn't they like a movie of it?" Bobby suggested.

"Maybe you've got something there. I've never thought of a movie with fighting, but we've had plenty of chase movies. After you've taught me more judo and karate, I'll decide whether it would be suitable for a movie plot. Maybe we could be the first people to make one."

"Or at least be in one of them, because some other people are planning along the same lines as I am. I fairly certain of it. If only I knew the studios and the directors, I could find out for us which one is most likely to make that kind of film."

"This is bitchin' man," said Schultzer.

"I forgive you, Schultzer," said Bobby.

More About the Director

"I want to rest my heels for a moment before we go over tomorrow's shoot," the production coordinator said. "How's the coffee?"

"Excellent. Help yourself to a cup. There's a carafe on the table. We're going to send down for some more maybe, huh?" the set coordinator replied. Several people sat on couches in the hotel room. The general mood of despondency was brightened by a sense of overarching doom.

"Exactly what goes with the director? Where's he at?" asked the production man in a whisper.

After he said this, several people in the room got up and changed seats. He realized that this move meant something. "Well? What's the big secret?" he asked.

"He needs bed rest. He's in bed," someone said.

"Is it something serious?" the production man asked.

"No," they said vaguely as a whole.

"Are we looking at having to transport him back to Los Angeles?" the production man asked.

"No, probably not." The set coordinator volunteered this.

"Well, is someone going to have to take over completely?"

The men in the room looked at the floor, the ceiling, each other. No one looked at the questioner. "No, it's not that serious," said a script writer finally.

"Did a doctor order bed rest?" the production coordinator asked

"No, not exactly," the writer explained.

"What do you mean?"

"It's not really a doctor issue for him, exactly," said one of the director's assistants.

"What do you mean?"

"Well—" began the script supervisor.

"Okay, listen. You have to keep this hush-hush. Nobody knows but a few of us, okay?" the director's assistant began.

"What!?" the production man asked.

"The poor guy's wife is trying to have a baby. Nothing's working. Nothing," the script writer replied.

"The poor guy cannot make a kid, okay?" said the director's assistant.

"Infertility is stopping the movie? I've heard of alcoholism and drug use, but never infertility. Where's the wife?" the production man asked.

"That's just it. She took off. She's over in San Diego visiting a doc to find out if she's pregnant. Again. We gotta wait for the results. Sweat it out. We've been here in pre-production for two months. But he won't film anything meanwhile. The crew is standing around. We lost three actors yesterday. And god help us if she isn't pregnant. Maybe she'll be back tomorrow. Let's hope. Meantime the whole movie is waiting, so we hired you. He's willing to discuss the scenes with you before we film them." The set man explained.

"It got to him. I tell you it ruined him. Mentally. When I guy can't make his wife pregnant it gets to him. Have a little sympathy. And we don't want this all over the set so it's hush-hush, understand. And he was a body builder himself. I mean, it's no fun. He took to his bed out of depression and nobody can get him to show up on set. Besides, they're giving him shots. It's a whole regimen of shots." This from the writer.

"Shots?" the production coordinator asked.

"Monkey bladder hormones," offered the set coordinator.

"What?" the newcomer asked.

"That's what I heard," said the script supervisor.

"Poor sucker," said the production coordinator.

"Let's just hope the rabbit dies soon," said the set coordinator. "He's trying all kinds of crazy folk remedies for infertility."

"He's got kids on the brain," the script supervisor agreed.

"It happens when you can't have them," said one of the writers knowingly. "My wife went about bonkers before our little Margaret was born."

"He wants to touch the hair of the kid. He has this crazy idea that kids will be lucky for him. Like having kids around will make him able to have his own kids. Stupid, huh?" said the set coordinator.

"I've heard crazier things," the production guy said.

"He's getting sentimental," said the writer.

"He wants to touch their heads," complained the set coordinator, "for luck. We gotta stop him cuz he'd doing it all over Calexico and Mexicali and the people don't like it. We go into a restaurant and he sees a kid and starts crying and wants to pet the little kids' head. We're gonna get arrested or something if he doesn't stop!"

Re-writer-ville

The door banged open and in charged the script coordinator who'd just met with the director. "We need an all new script for tomorrow! Tear it up! Throw it out! I want the whole thing destroyed and begun again! There is no worthwhile art without destruction! You guys need to learn that. I told you we wanted you to make Hercules seem vulnerable. I wanted the audience to discover his softer side. Right after he fights the lion, his softer side emerges!"

"But let me remind you," the chief writer began, "we're committed to shooting this scene, the romantic scene, tomorrow. It's already one am. The light has to be perfect in the mouth of the cave, you said that yourself, and you said we'd begin at five am. Everything is set!"

"I don't care. Call down at the front desk for more coffee if you need it. Just get it done," ordered the coordinator to the three men.

"They went home! There's no one at the front desk. This two-bit town has shut down! All Northern Mexico may have shut down for all I can tell! It shuts down at eight, I guess," the chief writer spoke over him.

"Make instant coffee then. I don't care. Don't bother me about such trivialities!"

The writers watched the script coordinator storm out of the room.

Beside the chief writer, Phillip's face turned ashen. "Did we even get two pages written?"

"We have one and a half," said the other writer, a little nervously.

Phillip groaned.

Someone tapped at the door. Since it was past one a.m., everyone froze and no one wanted to answer.

Eventually, Phillip went the door and spoke. "Who is it?" He quietly flipped the lock.

"Listen, is there any chance that I could get a better part if I slept with you or someone?" whispered a girl's voice.

"No!" called one of the writers from the couch.

"Why not?" asked the unseen voice.

"Because there are no better parts," said Phillip, supplying the obvious answer.

"All the parts in this movie are equally stupid," said the chief writer on the couch, adding his two bits.

"Oh, come on," the voice whined. "You must be pulling my leg. Listen, I'm not a virgin." The voice whispered this solemnly as though she were indeed a virgin.

Flopping back on the couch, Phillip rolled his eyes. "Get lost, okay?" he yelled at the door.

"Okay. I will. At least it was worth a try." They listened hearing faint footsteps retreat down the carpeted hall.

"Don't throw the script in the wastebasket!" said the chief writer urgently, "He tells us to destroy the script and then he tells us to use the one we just had. Don't throw it in the wastebasket! Put it behind the script we write in the next hour and be ready if he wants to bring the old one back. We go through these stupid cycles of destruction on every one of his damn movies. I don't know how he has the great reputation he has. He's a god of the B-movie. Apparently. In his mind at least, he's a god."

On Set: Not Enough Shrews

Paulo Ponce, director of photography, examined the primitive village through the lens. He scanned the brush huts and the hillside, then he glowered at the location manager. He put his eye back to the lens long enough to stare at clumps of low bushes and some tall, shady trees. "Hmmm, you believe this will be like the light in Greece? But obviously, it's too bright. Everybody's going to guess: Mexico, that's Mexico. Don't you know? I look at this and I perceive my pretty Mexican countryside! I know it well."

"Of course, you do," explained the production assistant, butting in, "you know it, so therefore you see it. That is the reality of personage seeping into the unreality of scene due to the viewer's inability to juxtapose the contradictions of the two states. De Jonas in his seminal work Man and Movie Mobility refers to this as the god complex of the morally bankrupt viewer."

"Really? How peculiar. Didn't he kill himself? I seem to remember that in film history class," replied Paulo, his jaw jutting out.

"I don't believe that's pertinent," said the locations manager, blanching momentarily. He felt another locations change was coming, but he rather hoped he was wrong.

"Hah! Did he?" Paulo pounced.

"After he won at Cannes? He said that after he won?" asked the second production assistant who was also listening in.

"No, before," explained the locations manager.

"I'm right, aren't I?" Paulo turned to the original production assistant. "It looks like Mexico, not Greece."

"Nah, these he-man movies, the audience is a bunch of dummies. You don't try to cater to them. That would be a mistake," a set man dismissed his concern.

"What do you believe, Bernie? Bernie, what's your take on this?" asked Paulo.

Bernie was a money guy, a line operator, but no one knew why he was on set. Some people thought he brought a lady accountant with him, and some people thought the rumor of a lady accountant was entirely made up. "It's like Greece. The monsters are what matter. The monsters have to be really big. And they're all that matters," Bernie assured everyone, allowing a hint of command to enter his voice.

"Monsters. Huh. Well, what about the albino shrew men?" Paulo asked.

"Personally, I have my doubts about them. We can't photograph them correctly. From afar they look like marshmallows on horseback," the production assistant complained.

"Why don't we have a decent costume manager?" Paulo asked.

"I've got my doubts about the albino shrews," said the locations man, for what it was worth.

"Okay, what doubts?" asked Bernie.

"We can't get enough men. We tried but nobody wants to be extras," offered the production assistant.

"What! In all of the god-forsaken place nobody wants to get on the silver screen?" asked Bernie.

"Apparently not," the production assistant said.

"Offer them more," said the assistant director, chiming in.

"We don't have the budget. I tell you the budget is strained as it is. We can't pay more for shrews. There's too many of them already," Bernie complained.

"Then cut down the number," offered the locations man.

"It isn't going to look right. We skimp and we skimp and what does it get us? Skimped! The film looks skimped. That's what!" Paulo exploded.

Nearby, a man under a tree had a strange vacant smile on his face and appeared to be listening to all they were saying.

"Who is that creep?" Paulo finally asked the group standing around.

"I dunno some village nut. Ignore him," said Bernie.

Paulo glanced over at the tree. "He keeps smiling at us."

The man strolled toward them where they drank coffee near the cameras.

"Some of the shrew men, your shrew men, they can be women, you know..." the little man suggested this brightly, happily, with a small smile on his face, a smile of satisfaction that he was providing help for the movie. He'd worked it out all on his own, and he beamed at them as though he hoped he would be rewarded immediately.

"Who told you that we needed shrews?" Paulo demanded.

"No one told me. I just knew it. If you don't have enough men for the parts, use women. We can ask around and maybe some of them can ride horses. Maybe not. We can hire them cheaper. They're gonna be easier to hire. They do what you tell them, also, the women."

"What about that? Hey, did we try to hire women to be shrews?" Bernie inquired.

"Yep. They're not interested. No men. No women," said the production assistant.

"I can get them for you," promised the odd man. His arms were crossed on his chest and he had a strange way of squinting in their direction. At this point, they were all becoming vulnerable to suggestions. It didn't matter if the ideas made much sense either.

He began to explain in a humble manner that he knew a lot about a certain nearby factory which canned zucchinis, and it had suddenly laid off a lot of workers. This factory however was run by one of the most powerful families in the area and the family was not pleased by the idea of their workers appearing in a movie instead of manufacturing cans of squash. Thus, they were on the wrong side of a dangerous family without realizing it. He could put them on the right side. Provided he got quite a bit of cash in unmarked bills by tomorrow night.

"You're saying there are all these unemployed workers we can get and most of them can probably fight Kung Fu style," Bernie recapped.

"Yes, most of them certainly," the strange man agreed.

"Most! We need all of them! What we're filming is a whole mob of people who attack the hero. Do you get that?" Paulo fumed.

"Bueno."

"Bueno what?" Paulo moaned.

"We can get the mob."

"And you're sure they are willing?" asked the production assistant.

"Yeah, unemployed. And willing. If I say so."

"When? When can they get here?" asked Paulo.

"Next Monday."

"That's too damn late! The sets are shut down by Saturday!" cried the production assistant.

"I can't do nothing any sooner. So sorry."

"It's too late! Get him out of here. Sheesh. Who let him on the set?" Paulo appealed to a guard who happened to be strolling by.

Before he could even protest, the peculiar man felt the security guard grab his elbow and collar and escort him away.

"We're attracting every kind of nut in the business. This movie is like a corpse and all these jackals and bugs are after it. The problem is this town is so damn isolated! Everybody in Mexicali is busy or uninterested. How can so many people be uninterested in movies! People in America are dying to get into the movies. They're breaking my damn door down to get into my movies. Here we are in Mexico and we have to rely on crap like this. Workers from a squash canning factory. Females! Costuming to look like males, shrews! We just can't rely on this crap. I'm calling quits on this crap," raged the production assistant.

"Can't we bus in some folks who are dying to be in movies? From Tijuana?" asked Bernie.

"This is shit! I tell you, it's shit! I'm leaving because to not leave would mean to lose my mind!" Paulo cried.

"You can't leave. You don't have the fare back to Tijuana," said Bernie.

"Shut up. I will get out of this movie if it's the last thing I do because I tell you I am not going to let my name be on the screen connected with this monstrosity," fumed Paulo. "This is not going to look like Greece. I see Mexico! Everyone who watches this movie will see Mexico!"

CHAPTER 12

More Costume Damage

The assistant costume designer, dangling the caved-in head of a bull in one hand, surged to the front of the lunching crowd, an expression of extreme wrath spreading over his pudgy face. A pair of dark glasses perched on his balding head and beet-red coloring suffused his cheeks. "Alright. Which one of you dummies messed with the head of the Minotaur?" he seethed.

A bored crowd mutely munched their egg salad sandwiches while posed on various boulders near the canyon shoot.

"I mean it. I'm not kidding. I wanna know who messed with this," he repeated.

A few wrappers crinkled quietly; somewhere far off in a zucchini field a crow cawed raucously.

"People! Wake up! We've got a caved-in eye socket here," he proclaimed, brandishing the mask and shaking it. "I think I deserve an explanation."

A few extras in the crowd craned their necks, dispassionately inspecting the crumpled bull's head.

"Okay, whoever it was needs to know that they damaged irreplaceable studio property," he said threateningly.

Eyebrows lifted.

"The head of the Minotaur is fatally damaged!" he screeched in exasperation.

"Tape it from behind," someone in the back of the crowd offered half-heartedly.

"It really doesn't look all that bad," added another in a dismissive tone.

The costumer slowly lifted the Minotaur mask over his head and placed it onto his shoulders. Where the eye socket should have been, a massive hole gaped. One horn then dipped and dropped to the gravel at his feet. "Oh, it's perfect! Absolutely perfect!" he shrieked from inside the mask.

Biagio and the Boy

Step by step, the little boy clambered up the ladder holding the big funny man's hand and the railing. At the top rung, he appraised the water gleeful. Immediately, he wanted to swim in the tank.

"Let the kid swimming. I want the kid to!" Biagio enthused. "If he wants," he added.

"I want this!" the boy cried.

Consequently, the whole set stood around watching a four-year-old dog-paddling in the tank which represented the Mediterranean Sea. The actor who played Hercules clapped his huge hands and waded alongside the little swimmer.

"You're doing so good!" Biagio exclaimed.

"We have no time to let him swim even if he wants to swim," argued the camera operator to the director of photography. "We need this retake! This is our last shot of the whole damn picture and we're hours late already!"

"Oh my god," sighed Estee St. Germain. "We'll have to wait a while anyway. The light could be better."

"I want to swim all afternoon!" cried the boy. "All the day!"

The boom operator groaned at assistant cameraman #1 who groaned at assistant cameraman #2.

Biagio kept clapping. "I want the kid be happy. Be happy, go ahead! All the day!"

Bobby and Schultzer Make Friends

"You know, you aren't half bad as a friend," said Schultzer at nearly two a.m. to Bobby. They'd filmed their last scene that morning, when Hercules was held down by two Kung Fu warriors and then escaped with the aid of a wizard, and they were discussing the luck they'd had in getting actual lengthy talking roles in the next Marathon movie, a motorcycle saga. Schultzer and Bobby both had speaking roles that could be described, in a stretch, as actual supporting actor parts. Their luck had changed and they both were doing well. Schultzer didn't care about the gang back in Hollywood; he wouldn't ever meet them again. Los Angeles was a big city and if he avoided that hotel, he'd probably never encounter them again. "You've been a great compadre on the set, man."

"Well, come to think of it, I feel the same way about you, Schultzer. It comes as a great surprise to me, actually. I didn't like you at first when I thought it was you who tied me up and I knew you worked for that rat fink gang at the hotel." Bobby expected himself to feel angry about what'd happened to him at the hotel, but because he'd made a friend of Schultzer the whole thing seemed like some big joke. Like an initiation ritual for finding your first best friend.

"I don't blame you for hating me. That was a rotten thing to do to a fellow," offered Schultzer.

"This next movie about the motorcycles is going to be way better with you in it. I'm going to enjoy it a lot more. The making of it, I mean." Bobby put his hands on the arm rests of the folding aluminum patio chair and examined the sky for some of his favorite stars. He was very fond of the Dog Star, since he had found it, and the North Star, of course. That was one of the best stars out there.

"Sure. We get along," said Schultzer after a while. "I never had a truer friend. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I formed many friendships. In fact, contemplating it, I happen to now know I never had a friend! You're my first real friend, man! Can you dig it?"

Bobby himself had tried to have a friend once in Indiana, but that boy had only wanted to jack off into the Wabash while on a canoe. He had some kind of thing, an obsession about jacking off on the water. Probably due to the movement of the canoe or something. Bobby found jacking off continuously a little creepy and boring. It was hard to get rid of that kid, and Bobby had tried all kinds of excuses until he'd finally had to come out and tell him that jacking off non-stop was rather tiring and monotonous in Bobby's opinion. This kid had tried to argue the point.

"True. We get along," Bobby replied. "I want you to teach me all you know about motorcycles and I can fill you in on a thing or two about karate. Does that seem like a fair trade between us? Does that seem on the up and up to you?"

"Sure. You can ride my bike. I don't let very many people do that."

"Oh gee, that's great, Schultzer. Maybe I can save up and you can go with me to buy a bike. We're both gonna get paid more on this next film. We'll be earning real money for once. And the hotels are free and we'll get some free food, too. These lunch trucks are pretty good."

"Well, they're okay. But, go buy a motorcycle with you? That I will do. That I will. I can look through what they've got to offer and find you a steal. Out here in the desert the prices will be low. You won't have to take a bus out here again. Hey, the prices to live oughta be cheaper out here than in L.A. That just stands to reason. We might get you something really cool!" Schultzer was starting to worry a little about the gang back at the hotel. Hopefully, they would forget about him.

"Do you suppose this next movie is going to be as good as this one?" asked Bobby, staring off into deep space.

Schultzer rubbed his chin which was sprouting a stubble. He hoped he might look better in the motorcycle movie with a slight stubble and he was letting his develop, but it was itchier than hell. "No. This one would be awfully hard to top."

They sat there together and then they both laughed. They laughed and laughed and Bobby's arms whipped the aluminum arms of his folding chairs and Schultzer whipped his own knees and they set side by side in a place where they could view the desert night stars together, laughing for a long time. Whenever one of them stopped the other one would stop, but then one of them would chuckle and they'd both start in again. There was peace in having a buddy for once and in the knowledge that they would act in a motorcycle movie together. During the filming of this next movie, they probably could sit out in the night and watch the moon and the stars out near Joshua Tree Monument. Their time together would be fun and they would ride motorcycles. Bobby looked forward to learning all there was to know about a motorcycle as taught to him by his new buddy Schultzer. Motorcycles went along well with martial arts, Bobby figured.

Schultzer, for his part, found he didn't mind Bobby at all. He was much more fun than the gang of actors in Hollywood, and not at all prissy, as he'd first imagined. As soon as this next movie was filmed, he and Schultzer would probably be able to make a living by filming martial arts movies in places all over the globe. They would have to find out about such opportunities from that weird Italian guy who played Hercules. And remembering that made Schultzer extremely happy. Now they had another connection in the industry.

Marty's Horrid News

"Say, Marty, I witnessed the oddest thing yesterday," began one of Marty Frobisher's oldest ex-pat friends as they dined and drank at the Beverly Hills Hotel. "I simply must tell you."

The expansive of green lawn and the cluster of quaint pink and green buildings of that venerable hotel always soothed Marty Frobisher when no movie offers had come in for several weeks ... or had it been a month? He would have to ring up his agent when he got back to his flat. Surely something had come in for him in the last few days! Surely! If not, it was high time he took that agent down a peg. He certainly wasn't earning his keep. The fool never could find a decent movie for Marty, and he kept mentioned how "mature" Marty looked, as though a few years more under the ax explained it! That wasn't the problem at all as far as Marty could tell. The issue was a thorough-going lack of promotion and forethought on the agent's part. That agent wasn't worth hiring! He wasn't up to snuff in the old agent-y business in Hollywood, this dismal, two-faced, tinsel town. That agent was all washed up and unfortunately Marty had fallen in with him right when he'd become a washed-up has-been. It was abominable luck! If he didn't have bad luck, he wouldn't have no gosh-darn luck at all, or something like that from a song he remembered hearing once, one of these ridiculous American folk songs, an old plaintive thing from the goofy American steamboat era.

"What's your odd news, old chap?" Marty rejoined languidly while observing a woman in dark glasses pulling a teeny white snarling poodle along the sidewalk past a leaning palm. It was one of those poodles with lines of reddish fur under their eyes like they'd cried rust or blood. But never mind the poodle, he kept hoping he would see Taylor or Burton coming out of a bungalow, but no such luck so far.

Marty's friend continued. "Well, I hesitate to tell you this, but I saw the title of that awful movie you made on a movie theater marquee in Pacifica. I mean the film you made in that out-of-the-way horror house of a town..."

"Calexico?" asked Marty with alarm rising in his voice. He nearly spilled his fresh G and T on his newest slacks. His eyes bugged, he blanched and leaned forward in astonishment.

"Yes, that was it. On the marquee. It said Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below. That was the name of it, wasn't it, my old pal? That horrid movie you made out there in the Western wilds without me?"

"Bloody hell! They promised me that detestable movie would never rear its hideous hide in America! Are you absolutely certain, Norbert? You know you sometimes imagine things when you're tipsy." Marty couldn't wipe the look of absolute horror and shock from off his face.

"Yes, I'm jolly well certain of what I saw. And I wasn't the least bit tipsy. Then I checked the Times this morning. The film is also showing in several other towns. Reseda, Inglewood, and Santa Monica, as I recall. And it is apparently drawing people! Ask yourself this—how could a chap get a cheesy movie title like that wrong? Who would ever forget it! Well, it's here. In small theaters, mind you. I don't suppose anyone important goes to those out-of-the-way theaters."

"Bloody hell! I was promised! That whole studio was massively incompetent! They were more incompetent people on that set than I would believe America capable of producing when it is perhaps the most incompetent country in the history of this entire, bleeding incompetent world! There wasn't a director who could direct or a scriptwriter who could write on the set. Why is this god-forsaken, utterly ridiculous place the center of the movie industry? Why?"

"Why indeed! Are you going to go see it? Shall I go with you?" Nobby enjoyed riling his friend with this comment. He dropped his chin and snickered surreptitiously into his G and T.

Marty paused and coldly assessed his friend. "I shall die and be sent to hell, Nobby, before I will set foot in a movie theater showing that monstrosity of a cinematic experiment! No, Norbert, you and I will not be viewing it. The entire movie was hijacked by a couple of low-life clowns who pretended they knew martial arts. They were throwing their bodies around like there was no tomorrow. And there was this awful, dreadful little grease spot of a girl who was actually from an orphanage. Can you believe it? A destitute nobody! I don't know where they picked her up from, but she was the most awful little fighter. The two men battled Hercules in ridiculous fashion and the little girl was on Hercules' side with me. I actually had to speak lines to her, if you can imagine anything so absurd. I couldn't look her in the eye and speak lines because she was too absurd. And far too short."

Marty's eyes bulged at the idea of that movie showing anywhere near him. He fumed and fulminated several times into his drink. Then he shot dark and dangerous wishes toward Norbert for teasing him about that movie. These evil wishes involved mysterious Hollywood murders and bodies buried in the canyons and Norbert begging, begging Marty on bended knee to take pity on him when he, Marty, was about to strangle him. Yes, that was the thing he wanted to imagine.

The truth was, Norbert was becoming rather difficult to spend time with because of all his little snide comments and witty asides. Marty had just about had enough of him giggling about the movies Marty had to take. When had Norbert ever made a movie? Marty ought to cast him aside as a friend and replace him with a better class of people who were much more up-and-coming. The only problem was Marty hadn't made many other friends in this town. Up-and-coming or not-up-and-coming, he barely knew anyone! Blast all their mangy hides!

Di Assi to Star in Motorcycle Helladrome

"Hush-hush news for those lucky ones of us among the Hollywood insiders from a certain famous Hollywood agent has it that the sweetest star in Hollywood, Biagio Di Assi, agreed to film the newest Marathon pic Motorcycle Helladrome with the understanding that he could eat a steak dinner every night he films. The steak will be flown in from a ranch in Wyoming expressly for Mr. Di Assi. Word is he's also been promised some other food-related perks. We love you, Biagio!"

And in the End

Several nights later, when rain from a Pacific storm pelted Los Angeles and the Friday late show had nearly started, a mysterious character enveloped in a black cape leapt out of a yellow cab, slapped down ninety-three cents at the theater kiosk, and snuck hurriedly toward the entrance of the Royal Showtime Cinema in Pacifica, California.

"Popcorn!" cried a wizened old man at the concession stand when the cloaked figure handed his ticket to the attendant and slunk through the lobby. "Any delicious hot buttered popcorn, sir, for your movie viewing pleasure on such a cold and rainy night?"

"Keep your ruddy corn," muttered the muffled man irritably. He dismissed the cheerful offer with the wave of one hand and jerked the theater door open with the other.

"Batter fried zucchinis then?" the old man offered.

The cloaked figure paused. "Courgettes, my fine sir, they are always referred to as courgettes!"

"Courgettes?" said the old man, stirring the popcorn in shock. "The kooks are out tonight!"

Seconds later, a large lady exclaimed, "Well! Some people!" when she was sent reeling by a rude encounter with the mysterious cloaked figure who had charged up the theater's center aisle and knocked her aside.

"If there's one thing I hate it's that ruddy nauseating and greasy American popped corn," the weird figure grumbled, ignoring the lady he'd nearly knocked over. "And batter-fried courgettes!"

Then, realizing how jammed the theater was, this clandestine figure rushed about the aisles stepping on toes in search of a seat. He had a hard time finding one even in the last row of the most remote corner!

"My roommate told me this movie is an underground sensation," whispered someone in the row in front of the one in which the cloaked figure eventually settled.

His companion agreed. "It's so camp! It's going to be great with that Schultzer guy doing karate." This theater goer tossed gobs of popcorn in the general direction of his mouth. Some of it missed and bounced off his duffle coat toward his pockets and the floor.

"And the kid," replied the first man, "don't forget that Frankie kid."

The pair flinched when the strange man seated behind them let out a long peculiar hiss rather like an enraged goose.

The previews shown before Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below celebrated coming attractions such as the agonies suffered during the sinking of an American battle ship, filmed in glorious Technicolor, and the adventures of a sleuthing Greyhound named Biffy Bimester. The muffled figure grunted at these offerings: "Classic American cinema." Then he snarled in a darkly threatening tone at nothing in particular.

The main feature commenced shortly thereafter.

Halfway through the movie, a couple sitting beside the swathed gentleman had to ask him to stop moaning so loudly. And when the ending credits scrolled by, the audience saw in extremely large letters "MARTY FROBISHER STARRING AS THE WIZARD OF PLANET 9."

The swathed gentleman, at this juncture, leapt to his feet, shouting a string of obscenities involving blood and hell. He tore at his hair before he fled, pell-mell, out of the darkened theater, through the lobby, and onto the soggy streets of Pacifica.

"I'm completely bloody ruined!" was what the neighbors of the cinema reportedly heard shrieked that night. The accent was strange. Decidedly foreign.

Trio to Star

"The critics panned it, but audiences can't get enough of Hercules Meets the Worm Men from Below! This martial arts fest created a sensation at the box office this weekend with its witty and wild trio of stars. No doubt the sword and sandal genre has recently taken a hit, but the sensational Bobby Rimes, Schultzer and the wonder kid Frankie have all of Hollywood thrilled to the gills. The only pitiful performance in this movie is turned in by English has-been and supremely stuck-up toff Mr. Marty Frobisher as a Hercules side-kick. Can you believe him as a wacky wizard? Marty, be a wizard and disappear from Hollywood! Those of us in the know are looking forward to the death-defying motorcycle epic, Motorcycle Helladrome, with these three new stars in major roles as well as the sensational Biagio Di Assi. It's currently filming for release in early 1965! Chinese bare-knuckle battles and massive motorcycle mayhem, what more could American cinema fans desire!"

THE END

MEET THE AUTHOR

You can download more of Lorraine's works from her author's page at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LoRay

Read Lorraine's interview at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/LoRay

Find Lorraine on Wattpad.

Do you enjoy having books read to you? During the summer of 2019, more of Lorraine's books will be available as audiobooks and podcasts.

Connect at lorraine.ray00@gmail.com

