Role Play

Fiction

Alonzo Skelton

Credit: Commons Wikimedia.org Filming of Top Gun Movie 1985

I laid still on a cheap, hard mattress while cameras, microphone booms, and the studio’s crew and a few investors swarmed the room.

“Just play dead,” Al Brenson, the director instructed.

Anyone who has ever tried to play dead with the buzz of fourteen people around your allegedly dead, dying body knows the iron willpower required. The slightest tic can ruin the shot. Even breathing must be controlled so that it is undetectable on screen.

“Quiet. Shooting,” someone shouted, and the room fell silent.

“Action!”

Deborah Cheznik, the love interest, cried real tears over me. I kept my face slack, inert- a feature augmented by the makeup department.

This was the third time we’ve shot this scene. The first was scrapped for the flutter of an eyelid. The second was when the sound team picked up a suppressed cough.

“Think dead,” Al said as the clapboard came down.

Acting has been good to me. I’m no matinee idol, but the work in bit parts and secondary characters keeps me in food and rent and a few guilty pleasures. I know how to prepare for a role, and moviemakers love me for it.

Early in my career, it took me a full day or more to get into character. Now, I can do it in the time it takes to sit quietly for a moment to think about my connection to the character.

I saw myself in a vast black nothingness. No, not nothing; my mind still occupied the emptiness. I suppressed all bodily sensations, but my thoughts were still there. I silenced the voice in my head, a talent I developed from years of yoga meditation. A low hum filled my space, not a sound but a feeling in the gut. I floated in the infinite nothing, wondering if my awareness of my situation would continue to exist in the passing of my awareness. Can nothing exist? If it can, then isn’t it something?

Ms. Cheznik wailed at the injustice of my untimely death. The camera lowered to hold my still profile in the scene between her and the camera. It takes tremendous discipline to still the mind and body in a long camera shoot like that.

“Cut!”

Life returned to the room. Everyone congratulated Deborah on her heartfelt performance of grief over my death. I stood and offered my hand and my congratulations.

“That’s a wrap,” Al said. Just in time. Another studio on the lot is auditioning with script reading for the role of a psychopathic killer.

“Please take a seat and fill out this form,” the receptionist at Studio D said.

I completed the form and waited.

Psychopathic killer. Get into the role, Sam. What’s your connection?

Oh, this is an easy one.

I remembered the evening I rode my bicycle with my beloved dog Ernie running along behind me. His short legs beat a staccato rhyme, his slipstream pinned his ears back He ran with joyous abandon. Our bicycle time was his favorite part of the day.

Anyone who has loved and been loved by a dog can understand the relationship between me and Ernie. We watched TV together and slept together with his head resting on my arm. His buggy eyes looked at me, and took me in, with uncompromising adoration. Ernie was my connection to a life beyond the boredom of bachelorhood. Every moment with him was a moment lived.

A vehicle came up behind us, headlights illuminated the road ahead of me. I signaled for Ernie to get over to the sidewalk. The headlights swerved to my right. I knew in an instant what was happening. The son of a bitch was running down my dog. I heard the “thunk” of impact. Headlights swung back onto the road and a white van drove past me. I got a few digits of the license plate and rushed back to find Ernie huffing in short panting breaths, his bug eyes pleaded with me to answer: Why? He had the look of finality. He knew what was happening to him, and the expression he showed to me was forgiveness.

I don’t blame you, it said.

Rage swept over me. I ranted against the evil that haunts this world. I cursed the God who would permit his kind of barbarous cruelty in His creation. I wrapped Ernie in my windbreaker and took him home to bury him in an unmarked grave in the backyard of my rented house. I knew that someday I would leave this house and leave Ernie in the ground there. I wept over that.

It took three years to track down Ernie’s killers from those scraps of license plate digits — I learned there were two men in the van that evening. They were returning from a freelance painting job and were angry that the client was not happy with the job, though he paid for it, anyway. They took their anger out on Ernie.

I acquired some illegal weaponry, a ski mask, and gloves, and found the accomplice at a run-down rental house in my neighborhood. I silently thanked him for making it easy for me.

Three days passed before the opportunity presented itself. He wheeled trash cans into the alley where I waited. I stepped out of the shrubbery and pointed the gun with its deadly-looking silencer at his midsection.

“What the fuck,” he said.

“You don’t know me. I’m the guy on the bicycle when you and your low-life buddy killed my dog.” I didn’t wait for an answer. I shot out his kneecaps. Both of them. I crammed a filthy rag in his mouth and explained in detail what was going to happen to him. “You’re going to die here, tonight,” I said. “But first, I want to see you suffer.”

And suffer he did.

The driver took even more patience to isolate. His house was a party center. Every night a group of men gathered there with the occasional girlfriend, wife, or prostitute in attendance. Every night, beer and whiskey bottles and the refuse of drug use accumulated in his overflowing trash cans. Weeks passed.

Finally, one day in the early spring, he cleaned up the mess in his backyard in preparation for a weekend party. A banged-up barbeque grill and beer coolers came out of the garage. He threw a tarp over a picnic table and mowed the lawn. I watched from the cover of shrubbery in the alley.

When he took the trash cans to the alley, I stuffed his body parts in them and went home to bury the gun, silencer, mask, and machete next to Ernie’s grave.

The receptionist entered the waiting room.

“Mr. Reynolds will now see all of you who are waiting to read for movie parts,” she said.

Psycho killer? Yeah, I was made for this part.

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A Righteous Man

 

Photo by john crozier on Unsplash

Mary Koch studied the pregnancy test strip for the long minute that it took to process its consequences.

Pregnant. But how?

This was the third time. The first had given birth to Marla, her four-year-old daughter. The second one ended with an abortion.

Why aren’t the God damned pills working? She wondered.

She sunk into a depression. She would have to travel to New Mexico for an abortion that she could not afford. Trying to raise another child on the pay of a server in a bowling alley cocktail lounge was not an option.

She took a mental inventory: time off work, travel, the gynecologist’s fee. The cost was overwhelming. Her depression deepened.

During her second pregnancy, she had complained to the pharmacist who sold her birth control pills. The pharmacist assured her that the Food and Drug Administration evaluated and certified the pill under conditions required by the US government.

“Some women have a genetic resistance to the drug’s ingredients, but if you feel something is wrong with the pills, here are some people you can contact about the problem,” he said.

He handed to her brochures from the US Food and Drug Administration and the Pharmaceutical company. Both said the same thing: her complaint about the effectiveness of the pill was one of the pill’s failures against millions of successes. Sorry.

She turned to one of the Highway Bowl Lounge’s regular customers. Leon Marshall was known as a streetwise homeboy with a hand in everything from drugs to gambling to the sale of illicit firearms. Leon gave her a number for a back-street midwife who performed illegal abortions in one of the fiercest anti-abortion states in the country. Mary borrowed money from Robert, the bar manager, and met the midwife, who three days later performed the procedure in Mary’s apartment.

Minor complications set in — bleeding and a low-level infection. She missed days off work. Leon gave her a loan to help her get through the ordeal, and she was soon back to work and able to pay Leon, then Marla’s babysitter, then Robert, the bar manager. Leo first because of his reputation as an underworld figure.

An investigation into the midwife’s activities had turned up a list of women she had served. The state rounded up and jailed all of them pending trial.

People from the state’s attorney general entered the cocktail lounge, put Mary in handcuffs, and took her to the county jail.

Mary had no money for bail. A state judge found her guilty of securing an abortion in defiance of state law and with the aid of an unlicensed midwife. The court turned her daughter over to state custody and Mary went to prison in a remote part of the state, where she committed suicide by sawing through a vein in her wrist with a plastic butter knife.

Evan Leland, the pharmacist, read about the event in the Morning News and for a moment felt pity for the poor woman. He took no pleasure in knowing she was in hell, though he knew his role in the affair guaranteed his place in heaven.

#

 

Soft Hands

 

Photo by Redicul Pict on Unsplash

Trinh Hua was an elderly and frail Vietnamese woman from a village north of Saigon. She wore a nón lá, a conical straw hat, to protect her from the fierce Texas sun and a Mao-style jacket to warm her in the winter. She longed for her home country. She wanted to be buried there, in the land of her husband and son, but her doctor had forbidden her to travel. To return to her village would mean thirteen hours of blood-clotting time in the air, and more hours of bouncing her frail body over rutted roads. She will die, sadly, in her adopted country. She did not want to be buried here in this dry dusty soil, but in the damp earth of home.

Each day, she walked to her job as cook in a Vietnamese restaurant a mile distant from what she called her “little American House” deep in a Dallas barrio. On arriving home on a hot August day, she saw a burly man pace the sidewalk in front of her home. He scowled at her as she approached him. He had a two-day beard and wore a baseball hat and a t-shirt that displayed a Military-style rifle over an American flag. When she came abreast of him, he glared at her.

“Asian bitch,” he said.

The remark stunned her. What did he say? She looked at him in expectation of an elaboration on the comment that would reveal her ancient ears had misheard him. As she met his eyes the world exploded in a sea of flashing lights. Pain exploded from a punch to her face that broke teeth. She fell onto the hot sidewalk. The man knelt over her. He hit her again. Again. And again. He kicked her, breaking a couple of ribs. Then he walked away.

The brain could not handle the agonizing pain. She passed out.

Roberto Salazar stepped out onto his porch to retrieve the daily mail. Glancing up the street he saw a woman lying on the sidewalk and a man with a thick middle and a baseball hat walk briskly away. Roberto stepped down to ground level and rushed to the street.

“Hey!” he called to the retreating figure.

The man ignored him, got into a car at the end of the block and sped away. Roberto called the police. An ambulance arrived a few minutes after the arrival of four police squad cars. A young officer questioned Roberto and the occupants of houses on both sides of the street. Only Roberto had seen any of the event. The Texas heat had driven the street’s residents into the depths of their homes. The ambulance sped away. The young officer passed out calling cards to nearby residents. “Call this number if you think of anything you might have seen or heard,” he said, repeating the line like a mantra.at each doorway.

Then, the police departed, leaving nothing but blood stains on the sidewalk to tell the story of Trinh Hua’s ordeal.

Trinh Hua fled her village more than half-a-century earlier, after the Americans had destroyed it with their helicopters and artillery and the villagers lived among the crumbling walls of their homes, sleeping under tarps and cooking over open fires. When the Yankees left, the Viet Cong came in to kill those who had cooperated with the Americans. Her husband was implicated in an anti-Communist plot by a jealous neighbor and taken away. Trinh did not hear from him again.

With her only son, she escaped to Saigon and the protection of the Americans. That protection did not last, though. The Americans left and the army of the north swept into the city with their automatic weapons and their political officers to interrogate the inhabitants for confessions of anti-socialist behavior. A military officer rounded up a group of men and paraded them to a square, where she was forced to watch as her beautiful son was pressed down to his knees and was sent to his death by a bullet behind his ear for no better reason than that he wore glasses and had soft hands.

“There is no room,” the officer said, “in the new Vietnam for intellectual parasites. Labor will be honored. Those who do not labor will die.” Her son collapsed to the ground as the sound of the shot reached her. She wailed, broken by the brutality of it as he fell.

After the murders of her family, she gave all the money she had and all she could borrow to a smuggler and escaped in a leaky boat, sailing across a vast ocean, unlikely to survive, to America. She learned the strange language spoken in her adopted country. She adapted to her new homeland, living at the edge of a Mexican barrio in the Southwest, and grew old there. The government in Vietnam loosened its authoritarian hold on its people, but Trinh did not trust them. She remained in the barrio, among alien people who spoke an alien language. She did not like the dry heat, the traffic, the Yankees with their fine clothes and their big cars, and the haste of life in their sprawling cities, but there was freedom there in the barrio.

Roberto visited Trinh at the hospital whenever he could take the time. “The poor woman has no one,” he said to his wife when she complained about his time away from home. “I hope that, if some gringo thug attacks any one of the lonely abuelas on our street, someone will show her care.” He paused. “Would you want to know la anciana lies in her hospital bed with no visitor, no one to care?”

“All right,” she said. “Go care for her, but don’t stay long. The gringo that tried to kill her might have a similar opinion about Latina women whose husbands are away.”

On her release from the sprawling medical complex nearby, Roberto drove her to her “little American house.” Scarred, limping, and short of breath, she called her employer to report that she had chosen to retire. The beating, the pain, and the long recuperation had made her fearful of the streets, of strangers, and above all, cowardly men who beat old women for no better reason than that they looked “different.”

Following her return home, Roberto drove her to her medical appointments and to buy groceries and pharmaceuticals. He walked down the street, past the blood-stained sidewalk, to visit her once or twice weekly to look in on her and let her know someone cared. Latinos, even those who have adapted to the customs of another land, honor their abuelas — their grandmothers. He sometimes takes spicy quesadillas or menudo to her. She laughs at the richness of it and offers a dish of Pho to him.

When he leaves at the end of the day, Trinh stands in the front yard of her house to admire her little American home, for just a moment. “Home is not in the land that abandons you, but in the one that shelters you,” she says to her long-dead husband and son. Then, she goes inside, into the cool air, and locks the door behind her.

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