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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