"Coldheart Canyon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

PART TWO. THE HEART-THROB

ONE

There's a premiere in Los Angeles tonight, at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The Chinese has been housing such events since 1923, but of course the crowds were much larger back then, tens of thousands of people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, would block Hollywood Boulevard in their hunger to see the star of the moment. Tonight's event is nowhere near that scale. Though the studio publicists' will massage the numbers for tomorrow's Variety and Hollywood Reporter, claiming that a crowd of four thousand people waited in the chilly evening air for the appearance of the star of tonight's movie, Todd Pickett, the true numbers are in fact less than half that.

Still, a third of the Boulevard is barricaded off, and there are a few cop cars in evidence, just to give the whole event more drama.

As the limos approach the red carpet, and the ushers, who are dressed in the black leather costumes of the villains in the movie, step forward to open the doors a few 'screamers', paid and planted in the crowd by the studio publicity people to get a little excitement going, start to do their job, yelling even before the face of the limo's passenger has been seen. There's a large contingent of A-list names on tonight's guest-list, and plenty of faces that elicit screams as they appear. Cruise isn't here, but Nicole Kidman is; so is Schwarzenegger, who has a small role in the picture as the retiring Gallows, a vengeful, mythological character whom our hero, played by Todd Pickett, must either choose to embody when his time comes round, or -- should he refuse -- be pursued by the ghosts of several generations of former incarnations of the character, to persuade him otherwise. Sigourney Weaver plays the woman who has broken the curse of Gallows once before, to whom Pickett's character must go when the phantom pursuers are almost upon him. Her arrival at Grauman's is greeted by a genuine roar of approval from the fans, who are devoted to her. She waves, smiles, allows a barrage of photographs to be taken, but she doesn't go near the crowd. She's had experiences with overly-possessive fans before: she walks straight down the middle of the red carpet, where she's out of reach of their fingers. Still they shout, 'We love you Ripley!', which is the character she plays in the Alien movies, and with which she will be identified until the day she dies. She waves, even when they call the name Ripley, but her eyes never focus on anybody in the crowd for more than a moment.

The next limo in the line contains the bright new star of Gallows, Suzie Henstell, named by this month's Vanity Fair one of the Ten Hottest Names in Hollywood. She is petite (though you'd never know it on the screen), blonde and giggly; she's shared a little marijuana with her boyfriend in the limo, and it was a bad move. She stumbles a little as she steps onto the red carpet, but the crowd has been prepped, thanks to several months of puff pieces and photo-spreads and in-depth interviews, to think of this woman as a full-blown star, even though they have yet to see more than a few frames of her acting ability from the trailer for Gallows. So what do they care if she looks a little out of it? Unlike Ms. Weaver, who wisely chooses to be elusive, allowing the photographers just a minute or two to catch her, the new girl is still hungry for adulation. She goes straight to the barricades, where a number of young women with souvenir programs for Gallows are waving them around. She signs a few, giving her boyfriend, who is a six-foot Calvin Klein model hunk, a goofy 'gee-I-must-be-famous!' look. The model looks back vacantly, which is the only look in his repertoire. He can give it to you vacantly with a semi hard-on in his jeans, or vacantly with his ass hanging out of his Y-fronts. Either way, it is heart-achingly beautiful; almost troublingly so.

The wind comes in gusts along Hollywood Boulevard, and the security men start to look a little worried. It was some bright publicist's idea to build two gallows, as a kind of gateway through which the audience for the premiere will need to come. Not, it now seems, a clever notion. The gallows are made to be trashed tomorrow morning, so they're made of light timber and foam-core. The wind is threatening to topple them; or worse, pick then up entirely and deposit them on top of the crowd. Light though they are, they could do some serious damage if they fell.

Four of the ushers from inside the theatre are summoned from their duties and told to go and stand beside the gallows, two on either side, holding on to them as casually as possible. Security is told that the publicity people only need five more minutes. As soon as Suzie Henslett can be persuaded to move on up the carpet and into the building (which at present she is showing no desire to do), the director's, Rob Neiderman's, limo can be brought to the carpet, followed by the last and most important of the bunch, Todd Pickett.

The wind is getting worse; the gallows sway giddily. An executive decision is made to bring Neiderman's limo in, and if Suzie's screaming fans are visible waving like lunatics behind Neiderman in his press pictures, so be it. This isn't a perfect world. It's already 8:13pm. At this rate the picture won't be able to begin until half past the hour, which wouldn't be a problem if the damn thing weren't so long, but Neiderman's cut came in at two hours and forty-three minutes, and though the studio appealed to Pickett to get him to shave the thing down to a tight two hours, Todd came back saying he liked the picture pretty much as it was, so only four minutes were going out of it. That means it'll be past eleven before the picture's finished, and almost midnight by the time everybody's assembled at the party venue. It's going to be a long night.

Neiderman has persuaded the easily-distracted Miss Henslett away from her fans and down the carpet to the door. The big moment is at hand. The ushers cling to the gallows, their jobs depending on the perpendicularity of their charges. The largest of the limos comes up to the curb. Even before the door has opened, the fans -- especially the women -- are in a state of ecstasy, shrieking at the top of their voices.

"Todd! Todd! Oh God! Todd!"

The cameras start to flash, as though the incomprehensible semaphore of their flashes is going to summon the man in the limo.

And out comes Todd Pickett, the star of Gallows, the reason why ninety-five percent of its audience will be there when it opens next Friday (it is now Monday); Todd Pickett, one of the three biggest male action-movie-stars in the history of cinema. Todd Pickett, the boy from Cincinnati who failed in all his grades but ended up the King of Hollywood.

He raises his hands like a presidential candidate, to acknowledge the shouts of the crowd. Then he reaches back into the limo to catch hold of the hand of his date for the night, Wilhemina Bosch, a waitress-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-model again, with whom he has been seen at parties and premieres for the past four months, though neither will say anything about the relationship than that they're good friends.

He gathers Wilhemina to him, so that the photographers can get pictures of them together. Then arm in arm, through the blizzard of rights and the barrage of We love you, Todd coming at them from every side, the pair make their way to the cinema doors, which -- having gathered their most important guests into the fold, then close rather defiantly, as if to divide the important from the unimportant, the stable and the solid from those who are simply objects of the night's wind.

Gallows is an irredeemable piece of shit, of course, and everyone involved with it, from the executives who green-lit it (at a cost of some ninety-million dollars, before prints and advertising costs add another thirty-seven to the bill) to the humblest publicist, knows.

It is, in the words of Corliss's review in Time, 'an old fashioned, action-horror picture which lacks the full-bone theatrics of grand guignol, and the savvy, John Woo-style action piece audiences have come to expect. One minute Schwarzenegger is camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling successor, is playing his scenes as though he's Hamlet on a particularly dreary night in Denmark. From beginning to end, Gallows is bad noose.'

Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already knows what Time is going to say; Corliss had made his contempt for the picture very plain in a piece about the state of action movies he wrote two weeks before. Nor does it take an oracle to predict that there will be others who will not like the picture. But the extent of vitriol will prove astonishing, even to those who expected the worst. In the next forty-eight hours, Gallows will garner some of the most negative reviews of the last twelve months, the vehemence of the early news reviewers empowering minor names to pull out the stops. Besides the incomprehensible script, everyone agrees, there is a lackluster quality to the picture that betrays the cast's indifference to the entire project. Performances aren't simply uneven, they seemed designed for entirely different movies: a hopeless mismatch of styles. The worst culprit in this regard? There is no question about that. All the reviewers will agree that the most inadequate performance comes from its star, Todd Pickett.

People writes that: "Mr. Pickett is plenty old enough to know better. Thirty-something-year-olds don't act the way Mr. Pickett acts here: his trademark 'young man with a chip on his shoulder and a thousand-watt smile,' which was looking stale the second (all right, the third) time he did it, seems particularly out-of-place here. Though it seems incredible that time has passed so fast since America first swooned to the charms of Mr. Pickett -- he's now simply too old to play the twenty-something Vincent. Only Wilhemina Bosch, as Vincent's Prozac-chewing sister, comes out of this mess with any credibility. She has an elegant, beautifully-proportioned face, and she can turn a line with the snappy, East-coast smarts of a young Katherine Hepburn. She's wasted here. Or, more correctly, our time would be wasted here were she not in the movie."

The premiere audience didn't seem to mind it. On occasion there were audible gasps and loud laughter (perhaps in truth a little over-loud, a little fake) for the jokes, but there were several long stretches in the Second Act, when the movie seemed to lose their interest. Even in the Third Act, when the action relocates to the orbiting space station, and the special effects budget soared, there was very little real enthusiasm. A few scattered whoops of nihilistic delight when the villain's planet-destroying weapon actually went off, against expectation, and Washington DC is fried to a crisp. But then, as the smoke cleared and Todd, as the new Gallows, proceeded to finish off the bad guys, the audience became restless again.

About fifteen minutes before the end credits rolled a member of the audience got up from his seat on the aisle and went to the bathroom. A few people caught a look at the man's face as he looked back at the screen. It was Todd Pickett, lit by the light of his own face. Nobody got up to ask for his autograph.

Pickett stared at the screen for a moment only, then he turned his back on it and trudged up and out of the cinema. He didn't go to the restroom. Instead he asked one of the ushers if he could be allowed out of the back of the building. The usher explained that the area around the back had no security.

"I just want a quiet smoke with nobody watching me," Todd explained.

The usher said, sure, why not, and led Todd down a passageway that ran behind the screen. Todd looked up at his reversed image on the screen. All he could remember about the scene that was playing was how damn uncomfortable his costume had been.

"Here you go," the usher said, unlocking the doors at the end of the corridor, and letting Todd out into an area lit only by the ambient light from the Boulevard.

"Thanks," Todd said, giving him a twenty-buck bill. "I'll be back out front by the time the credits roll."

The usher thanked him for the twenty-note and left him to himself. Todd took out a cigarette, but it never got to his lips. A wave of nausea overtook him, so powerful and so sudden that it was all he could do not to puke down his own tuxedo. Up came the scotches he'd had in the limo as he drove on down to the premiere, and the pepperoni pizza, with three cheeses and extra anchovies, he'd had to add ballast. With the first heave over (something told him there were more to come) he had the presence of mind to look around, and confirm that this nasty little scene was not being spied on, or worse, photographed. Luckily, he was alone. All he had for company back here was the detritus of premieres past; piles of standees and gaudy scenery pieces designed to advertise movies gone by: Mel Gibson against an eruption of lurid flame; Godzilla's eye; the bottom half of a girl in a very short dress. He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head. Behind him, through the still-open door, he could hear the sound of gunfire, and the muted sound of his own voice:

"Come on out, you sonofabitch," he was yelling to somebody. By now, if the movie had been working, the audience would have been yelling and screaming, wild with blood-lust. But despite the over-amped soundtrack, nobody was yelling, because nobody gave a damn. The movie was dying on its feet.

Another wave of nausea rose up in him. He reached out to catch hold of something so that he didn't fall down and his outstretched hand knocked over a cardboard cut-out of Tom Cruise, which toppled backwards and hit a cardboard Titanic, which in turn crashed against a cardboard Mighty Joe Young, and so on and so forth, like a row of candy-colored dominoes, stars falling against ships falling against monsters, all toppling back into a darkness so deep they were an indistinguishable heap.

Luckily, the noise of his vomiting was covered by the din of his own movie. He puked again, twice, until his stomach had nothing left to give up. Then he turned his back on the vomit and the toppled idols, and stepped away to find a lungful of dean air to inhale. The worst was over. He lit his cigarette, which helped settle his stomach, and rather than returning inside, where the picture was two minutes from finishing, he walked along side of the building until he found a patch of street-light where he could assess himself. He was lucky. His suit was unspattered. There was a spot of vomit on his shoes, but he cleaned it off with his handkerchief (which he tossed away) and then sprayed his tongue and throat with wintergreen breath-cleanser. His hair was cropped short (that was the way it was in the movie, and he'd kept the style for public appearances), so he had no fear that it was out of place. He probably looked a little pale, but what the hell? Pale was in.

There was a gate close to the front of the building, guarded by a security officer. She recognized Todd immediately, and unlocked the gate.

"Getting out before it gets too crazy?" she said to him. He smiled and nodded. "You want an escort to your car?"

"Yeah, thanks."

One of the executive producers, an over-eager Englishman called George Dipper, with whom Todd had never worked before, was standing on the red carpet, his presence ignored by the press, who were standing around chatting to one another, or checking their cameras before the luminaries reappeared. George caught Todd's eye, and hurried over, dragging on his own cigarette as though his life depended on its nicotine content.

There was scattered applause from inside, which quickly died away.

The picture was over.

"I think it played brilliantly," George said, his eyes begging for a syllable of agreement. "They were with us all the way. Don't you think so?"

"It was fine," Todd said, without commitment.

"Forty million, the first weekend."

"Don't get your hopes up."

"You don't think we'll do forty?"

"I think it'll do fine."

George's face lit up. Todd Pickett, the man he'd paid twenty million dollars to (plus a sizable portion of the back-end) was declaring it fine. God was in His Heaven. For a terrible moment Todd thought the man was going to weep with relief.

"At least there's nothing big opening against it," Todd said, "So we've got one weekend clear."

"And your fans are loyal," George said. Again, the desperation in the eyes.

Todd couldn't bear to look at him any longer.

"I'm just goin' to make a quick getaway," Todd said, glancing towards the theater doors.

The first of the crowd were emerging. If the expressions on the first five faces he scanned were an omen, his instincts were right: they did not have a hit. He turned his back on the crowd, telling George he'd see him later.

"You are coming to the party?" George said, hanging on to him as he headed down the carpet.

Where was Marco? Todd thought. Trusty Marco, who was always there when he was needed. "Yes, I'll pop in later," he said, glancing back over his shoulder at George to reassure him.

In the seconds since he'd turned away the audience spilling from the theatre door had jumped from five to a hundred. Half of them saw him. In just a few seconds they'd be surrounding him, yelling his name, telling him they loved this and they hated that, touching him, pulling on him --

"Here, boss!"

Marco called to him from the curb. The limo door was open. God bless him! Todd raced down the carpet as people behind him started to call his name; cameras started to flash. Into the limo. Marco slammed the door. Todd locked it. Then Marco dashed around to the driver's seat with a remarkable turn of speed given his poundage, and got in.

"Where to?"

"Mulholland."

Mulholland Drive winds through the city like a lazy serpent for many miles; but Marco didn't need to know where along its length his boss wanted to be taken. There was a spot close to Coldwater Canyon, where the undulating drive offers a picture-perfect view of the San Fernando Valley, as far as the mountains. By day it can be a smog-befouled spectacle, brown and gray. But by night, especially in the summer, it is a place of particular enchantment: the cities of Burbank, North Hollywood and Pasadena laid out in a matrix of amber lights, receding to the dark wall of the mountains. And moving against the darkness, the lights of planes circling as they await their instruction to land at Burbank Airport, or the police helicopters passing over the city, spitting a beam of white light.

Often there were sightseers parked at the spot, enjoying the scene. But tonight, thank God, there were none. Marco parked the car and Todd got out, wandering to the cliff-edge to look at the scene before him.

Marco got out too, and occupied his time with wiping the windshield of the limo. He was a big man with the bearded face of a bear recently woken from hibernation, and he possessed a curious mixture of talents: a sometime wrestler and ju-jitsu black belt, he was also a trained Cordon Bleu cook (not that Todd's taste called for any great culinary sophistication) and a twice-divorced father of three with an encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Wagner. More importantly, he was Todd's right-hand man; loyal to a fault. There was no part of Todd's existence Marco Caputo did not have some part of. He took care of the hiring and firing of domestic staff and gardeners, the buying and the driving of cars, and of course all the security duties.

"The movie's shit, huh?" he said matter-of-factly.

"Worse than."

"Sorry 'bout that."

"Not your fault. I should never have done it. Shit script. Shit movie."

"You want to give the party a miss?"

"Nah. I gotta go. I promised Wilhemina. And George."

"You got something going with her?"

"Wilhemina? Yeah. I got something. I just don't know whether I want to. Plus she's got an English boyfriend."

"The English are all fags."

"Yeah."

"You want me to swing by the party and bring her back up to the house for you?"

"Suppose she says no?"

"Oh come on. When did any girl say no to you?"

Todd said nothing. He just stared out over the vista of lights. The wind came up out of the valley, smelling of gas fumes and Chinese food. The Santa Anas, hot off the Mojave, gusted against his face. He closed his eyes to enjoy the moment, but what came into his head was an image of himself: a still from the movie he'd fled from tonight. He studied the face in his mind's eye for a moment.

Then he said: "I look tired."

TWO

Todd Picket had made two of his three most successful pictures under the aegis of a producer by the name of Keever Smotherman. The first of them was called Gunner; the kind of high concept, testosterone-marinated picture Smotherman had been renowned for making. It had made Todd -- who was then an unknown from Ohio -- a bona-fide movie-star, if not overnight then certainly within a matter of weeks. He hadn't been required to turn in a performance. Smotherman didn't make movies that required actors, only breath-taking physical specimens. And Todd was certainly that. Every time he stepped before the cameras, whether he was sharing the scene with a girl or a fighter-plane, he was all the eye wanted to watch. The camera worked some kind of alchemy upon him; and he worked the same magic on celluloid.

In life, he was good-looking, but flawed. He was a little on the short side, with broad hips; he was also conspicuously bandy. But on the screen, all these flaws disappeared. He became gleaming, studly perfection, his jaw-line heroic, his gaze crystalline, his mouth an uncommon mingling of the sensual and the severe. His particular beauty had suited the taste of the times, and by the end of that first, extraordinary summer of coming-to-fame his image, dressed in an immaculate white uniform which made poetry of his buttocks, had become an indelible piece of cinema iconography.

Over the years, other stars had risen just as high, of course, and many just as quickly. But few were quite as ready for their ascent as Todd Pickett. This was what he'd been polishing himself for since the moment his mother, Patricia Donna Pickett, had first taken him into a cinema in downtown Cincinnati. Looking up at the screen, watching the parade of faces pass before him, he'd known instinctively (at least so he later claimed) that he belonged up there with those stars, and that if he willed it hard enough, willed and worked for it, then it was merely a matter of time before he joined the parade.

After the success of Gunner, he fell effortlessly into the labors of being a movie star. In interviews he was courteous, funny and self-effacing, playing the interviewers so easily that all but the most cynical swooned. He was confident about his charms, but he wasn't cocky; loyal to his Mid-Western roots and boyishly devoted to his mother. Most attractive of all, he was honest about his shortcomings as an actor. There was a refreshing lack of pretension about the Pickett persona.

The year after Gunner, he made two pictures back to back. Another action blockbuster for Smotherman, called Lightning Rod, which was released on Independence Day and blew all former box-office records to smithereens, and then, for the Christmas market, Life Lessons. The latter was a sweetly sentimental slip of a story, in which Todd played opposite Sharon Campbell, a Playboy model turned actress who had been tabloid fodder at the time thanks to her recent divorce from an alcoholic and abusive husband. The pairing of Pickett and Campbell had worked like a charm, and the reviews for Todd's performance were especially kind. While he was still relying on his physical gifts, the critics observed, there were definitely signs that he was taking on the full responsibilities of an actor, digging deeper into himself to engage his audience. Nor was he afraid to show weakness; twice in Life Lessons he was required to sob like a baby, and he did so very convincingly. The picture was a huge hit, meaning that both of the big money-makers of the year had Todd's name above the title. He was officially box-office gold.

For most of the following decade he could do no wrong. Inevitably, some of his pictures performed better than others, but even the disappointments were triumphs by comparison with the fumbling labors of most of his contemporaries.

Of course, he wasn't making the choice of material on his own. From the beginning he'd had a close relationship with his manager, Maxine Frizelle, a short, sharp bitch of a woman in her mid-forties who'd once been voted the Most Despised Person in Hollywood, and had asked, when the news had reached her, if the awards ceremony was full evening dress. Though she'd been representing other agents when she first took Todd on, she'd let them all go once his career began to demand her complete attention. Thereafter she lived and breathed the Pickett business, control-ring every element of his life, private and professional. The price she asked studios for his services rapidly rose to unheard of heights, and she drove the deal home every single time. She had an opinion about everything: rewrites, casting, the hiring of directors, art-directors, costume designers and directors of photographers. Her only concern were the best interests of her wonder-boy. In the language of an older but similarly feudal system, she was the power behind the throne; and everyone who worked with Todd, from the heads of studios to humble hair-stylists, had some encounter with her to relate, some scar to show.

Needless to say, the Pickett magic couldn't remain unchallenged forever. There were always new stars in the ascendancy, new faces with the new smiles appearing on the screen every season, and after ten years of devotion the audience that had doted on Todd in the mid-to-late eighties began to look elsewhere for its heroes. It wasn't that his pictures performed less well, but that others performed even better. A new definition of a blockbuster had appeared; money-machines like Independence Day and Titanic, which earned so much so quickly that pictures which would once have been called major hits were now in contrast simply modest successes.

Anxious to regain the ground he was losing, Todd decided to go back into business with Smotherman, who was just as eager to return to their glory days together. The project they'd elected to do together was a movie called Warrior, a piece of high concept junk about a street-fighter from Brooklyn who is brought through time to champion a future earth in a battle against marauding aliens. The script was a ludicrous concoction of clich#233;s pulled from every cheesy science-fiction B-movies of the fifties, and an early budget had put the picture somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars simply to get it on screen, but Smotherman was confident that he could persuade either Fox or Paramount to green-light it. The show had everything, he said: an easily-grasped idea (primitive fighting man outwits hyper-intelligent intergalactic empire, using cunning and brute force); a dozen action sequences which called for state-of-the-art effects, and the kind of hero Todd could perform in his sleep: an ordinary man put in an extraordinary situation. It was a no-brainer, all 'round. The studios would be fools not to green-light it; it had all the marks of a massive hit.

He was nothing if not persuasive. In person, Smotherman was almost a parody of a high-voltage salesman: fast-talking, short-tempered and over-sexed. There was never an absence of 'babes', as he still called them, in his immediate vicinity; all were promised leading roles when they'd performed adequately for Smotherman in private, and all, of course, were discarded the instant he tired of them.

Preparations for Warrior were proceeding nicely. Then the unthinkable happened. A week shy of his forty-fourth birthday, Smotherman died. He'd always been a man of legendary excess, a bottom-feeder happiest in the gamier part of any city. The circumstances of his death were perfectly consistent with this reputation: he'd died sitting at a table in a private club in New York, watching a lesbian sex show, the coronary that had felled him so massive and so sudden he had apparently been overtaken by it before he could even cry out for help. He was face down in a pile of cocaine when he was found, a drug he'd continued to consume in heroic quantities long after his contemporaries had cleaned up their acts and had their sinuses surgically reconstructed. It was one of the thirty-five illegal substances found in his system at the autopsy.

He was buried in Las Vegas, according to the instructions in his will. He's been happiest there, he'd always said, with everything to win and everything to lose.

This remark was twice quoted at the memorial service, and hearing it, Todd felt a cold trickle of apprehension pass down his spine. What Smotherman had known, and been at peace with, was the fact that all of Tinseltown was a game -- and it could be lost in a heartbeat. Smotherman had been a gambling man. He'd taken pleasure in the possibility of failure and it had sweetened his success. Todd, on the other hand, had never even played the slots, much less a game of poker or roulette. Sitting there listening to the hypocrites -- most of whom had despised Smotherman -- stand up and extol the dead man, he realized that Keever's passing cast a pall over his future. The golden days were over. His place in the sun would very soon belong to others; if it didn't already.

The day after the memorial service he poured his fears out to Maxine. She was all reassurance.

"Smotherman was a dinosaur," she said as she sipped her vodka. "The only reason people put up with his bullshit all those years was because he made everybody a lot of money. But let's be honest: he was a low-life. You're a class act. You've got nothing to worry about."

"I don't know," Todd said, his head throbbing from one too many drinks. "I look at myself sometimes ... "

"And what?"

"I'm not the guy I was when I made Gunner."

"Damn right you're not. You were nobody then. Now you're one of the most successful actors in history."

"There's others coming up."

"So what?" Maxine said, waving his concerns away.

"Don't do that!" Todd said, slamming his palm down on the table. "Don't try and placate me! Okay? We have a problem. Smotherman was going to put me back on top, and now the son of a bitch is dead!"

"All right. Calm down. All I'm saying is that we don't need Smotherman. We'll hire somebody to rework the script, if that's what you want. Then we'll find somebody hip to direct it. Somebody with a contemporary style. Smotherman was an old-fashioned guy. Everything had to be big. Big explosion. Big tits. Big guns. Audiences don't care about any of that any more. You need to be part of what's coming up, not what happened yesterday. You know, I hate to say it, but perhaps Keever's dying is the best thing that could have happened. We need a new look for you. A new Todd Pickett."

"You think it's as simple as that?" Todd said. He wanted so much to believed that Maxine had the problem solved.

"How difficult can it be?" Maxine said. "You're a great star. We just need to get people focused on you again." She pondered for a moment. "You know what? We should set up a lunch with Gary Eppstadt."

"Oh Jesus, why? You know how I hate that ugly little fuck."

"An ugly little fuck he may be. But he is going to pay for Warrior. And if he's going put twenty million and a slice of the back-end on the table for your services to art, you can make nice with the son of a bitch for an hour."

THREE

It wasn't simply personal antipathy that had made Todd refer to Eppstadt so unflatteringly. It was the unvarnished truth. Eppstadt was the ugliest man in Los Angeles. Charitably, his eyes might have been called reptilian, his lips unkissable. His mother, in a fit of blind affection, might have noted that he was disproportioned. All this said, the man was still a narcissist of the first rank. He hung only the most expensive suits on his unfortunate carcass: his fingernails were manicured with obsessive precision; his personal barber trimmed his dyed hair every morning, having shaved him first with a straight razor.

There had been countless prayers offered up to that razor over the years, entreating it to slip! But Eppstadt seemed to live a charmed life. He'd gone from strength to strength as he moved around the studios, claiming the paternity of every success, and blaming the failures on those who stood immediately behind him on the ladder, whom he promptly fired. It was the oldest trick in the book, but it had worked flawlessly. In an age in which corporations increasingly had the power, and studios were run by committees of business-school graduates and lawyers with an itch to have their fingers in the creative pie, Eppstadt was one of the old school. A powermonger, happiest in the company of somebody who needed his patronage, whom he could then abuse in a hundred subtle ways. That was his pleasure, and his revenge. What did he need beauty for, when he could make it tremble with a smiling maybe!

He was in a fine mood when he and Todd, with Maxine in attendance, met for lunch on Monday. Paramount had carried the weekend with a brutal revenge picture that Eppstadt had taken a hand in making, firing the director off the project after two unpromising preview screenings, and hiring somebody else to shoot a rape scene and a new ending, in which the violated woman terrorized and eventually dispatched her attacker with a hedge-cutter.

"Thirty-two point six million dollars in three days," he preened. "In January. That's a hit. And you know what? There's nobody in the picture. Just a couple no-name TV stars. It was all marketing."

"Is the picture any good?" Todd asked.

"Yeah, it's fucking Hamlet," Eppstadt said, without missing a beat. "You're looking weary, my friend," he went on. "You need a vacation. I've been taking time at this monastery -- "

"Monastery?"

"Sounds crazy, right? But you feel the peace. You feel the tranquility. And they take Jews. Actually, I've seen more Jews there than at my nephew's Bar Mitzvah. You should try it. Take a rest."

"I don't want to rest. I want to work. We need to set a start-date for Warrior."

Eppstadt's enthusiastic expression dimmed. "Oh, Christ. Is that what this little lunch is all about, Maxine?"

"Are you making it or not?" Todd pressed. "Because there's plenty of other people who will if you won't."

"So maybe you should take it to one of them," Eppstadt said, his gaze hooded. "You can have it in turnaround, if that's what you want. I'll get business affairs on it this afternoon."

"So you're really ready to let it go?" Maxine said, putting on an air of indifference.

"Perfectly ready, if that's what Todd wants. I'm not going to stand in the way of you getting the picture made. You look surprised, Maxine."

"I am surprised. A package like that ... it's a huge summer movie for Paramount."

"Frankly I'm not sure this is the right time for the company to be making that kind of picture, Maxine. It's a very hard market to read right now. And these expensive pictures. I mean, this is going to come in at well north of a hundred thirty million by the time we've paid for prints and advertising. I'm not sure that makes solid fiscal sense." He tried a smile; it was lupine. "Look, Todd: I want to be in business with you. Paramount wants to be in business with you. Christ, you've been a gold-mine for us over the years. But there's a generation coming up -- and you know the demographics as well as I do -- these kids filling up the multiplexes, they don't have any loyalty to the past."

Eppstadt knew what effect his words were having, and he was savoring every last drop of it.

"You see, in the good old days, the studios were able to carry stars through a weak patch. You had a star on a seven-year contract. He was being paid a weekly wage. You could afford a year or two of poor performance. But you're expensive, Todd. You're crucifyingly expensive. And I've got Viacom's shareholders to answer to. I'm not sure they'd want to see me pay you twenty million dollars for a picture that might only gross ... what did your last picture do? Forty-one domestic? And change?"

Maxine sighed, a little theatrically. "I'm sorry to hear that, Gary."

"Look, Maxine, I'm sorry to be having to say it. Really I am. But numbers are numbers. If I don't believe I can make a profit, what am I doing making the movie? You see where I'm coming from? That simply doesn't make sense."

Maxine got up from the table. "Will you excuse me a minute? I've got to make a call."

Eppstadt caught the fire in Maxine's voice.

"No lawyers, Maxine. Please? We can do this in a civilized manner." Maxine didn't reply. She simply stalked off between tables, snarling at a waiter who got in her way. Eppstadt ate a couple of mouthfuls of rare tuna, then put down his fork. "It's times like this I wish I still smoked." He sat back in his chair and looked hard at Todd. "Don't let her start a pissing competition, Todd, because if I'm cornered I'm going to have to stand up and tell it like it is. And then we'll all have a mess on our hands."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning ... " Eppstadt looked pained; as though his proctologist was at work on him under the chair. "You can't keep massaging numbers so your price looks justified when we all know it isn't."

"You were saying I'd been a gold-mine for Paramount. Just two minutes ago you said that."

"That was then. This is now. That was Keever Smotherman, this is post-Keever Smotherman. He was the last of his breed."

"So what are you saying?"

"Well ... let me tell you what I'm not saying," Eppstadt replied, his tone silky. "I'm not saying you don't have a career."

"Well that's nice to hear." Todd said sharply.

"I want to find something we can do together.

"But ... "

"But?"

Eppstadt seemed to be genuinely considering his reply before he spoke. Finally, he said: "You've got talent, Todd. And you've obviously built a loyal fan-base over the years. What you don't have is the drawing power you had back in the old days. It's the same with all of you really expensive boys. Cruise. Costner. Stallone." He took a moment, then leaned closer to Todd, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "You want the truth? You look weary. I mean, deep down weary." Todd said nothing. Eppstadt's observation was like being doused in ice-cold water. "Sorry to be blunt. It's not like I'm telling you something you don't already know."

Todd was staring at his hand, wondering what it would feel like to make a fist and beat it against Eppstadt's face; over and over and over.

"Of course, you can have these things fixed," Gary went on chattily. "I know a couple of guys older than you who went to see Bruce Burrows and looked ten years younger when he was finished working on them."

Still idly contemplating his hand, Todd said: "Who's Bruce Burrows?"

"Well, in many people's opinion he's the best cosmetic surgeon in the country. He's got an office on Wilshire. Very private. Very expensive. But you can afford it. He does it all. Collagen replacements, lifts, peels, lipo-sculpture ... "

"Who went to see him?"

"Oh, just about everybody. There's nothing to be ashamed of: it's a fact of life. At a certain age it's harder to get the lovehandles to melt. You get laugh-lines, you get frown lines, you get those little grooves around your mouth."

"I haven't got grooves around my mouth."

"Give it time," Eppstadt said, a touch avuncular now.

"How long does it take?"

"I don't know. I've never had any of it done. If I went in there, I'd never get out again."

"Too much to fix."

"I think it's bad taste to jump on somebody else's self-deprecation, Todd. But I forgive you. I know it hurts to hear this. The fact is, I don't have to have my face out there fifty feet high. You do. That's what they're paying for." He pointed at Todd. "That face."

"If I was to get something done ... " Todd said tentatively, "about the lines, I mean?"

"Yes?"

"Would you make Warrior then?"

He had opened the door to Eppstadt's favorite word: "Maybe. I don't know. We'd have to see. But the way I look at it, you haven't got much to lose getting the work done anyway. You're a heart-throb. An old-fashioned heart-throb. They want to see you kick the shit out of the bad guy and get the girl. And they want their heart-throb perfect." He stared at Todd. "You need to be perfect. Burrows can do that for you. He can make you perfect again. Then you get back to being King of the Hill. Which is what you want, I presume."

Todd admitted it with a little nod, as though it were a private vice.

"Look, I sympathize," Eppstadt went on, "I've seen a lot of people just fold up when they lose their public. They come apart at the seams. You haven't done that. At least not yet." He laid a hand on Todd's arm. "You go have a word with Doctor Burrows. See what he can do for you. Six months. Then we'll talk again."

Todd didn't mention his discussion about Doctor Burrows to Maxine. He didn't want the decision process muddied by her opinion. This was something he wanted to think through for himself.

Though he didn't remember having heard of Burrows before, he was perfectly aware he was riving in the cosmetic surgery capitol of the world. Noses were fixed, lips made fuller, crow's feet erased, ears pinned back, laugh-lines smoothed, guts tucked, butts lifted, breasts enhanced. Just about any piece of the anatomy which gave its owner ego problems could be improved, sometimes out of all recognition. Traditionally of course, it had been women who were the eager and grateful recipients of such handiwork, but that had changed. One of the eighties muscle-men, who'd made a fortune parading a body of superhuman proportions some years before, but had begun to lose it to gravity, had returned to the screen last year looking more pumped than ever, his perfect abdominals and swelling pectorals -- even his sculpted calf muscles-surgically implanted. The healing had taken a little while, given the extensiveness of the remodeling. He'd been out of commission for five months -- hiding in Tuscany, the gossip went -- while he mended. But it had worked. He'd left the screen looking like a beaten-up catcher's mitt, and come back spanking new.

Todd began by making some very circuitous inquiries, the sort of questions which he hoped would not arouse suspicion. The word came back that the procedures were far from painless. Even legendary tough guys had ended up wishing they'd never invited the doctors to mess with them, the process had been so agonizing. And of course once you began, if you didn't like what you saw you had to let Burrows make some more fixes; wounds on wounds, pain on pain.

But Todd wasn't discouraged by the news. In fact in a curious way it made the idea of undergoing the procedures more palatable to him, playing as it did both into his machismo side and a deep, unexplored vein of masochism.

Besides, was there any pain on God's green earth as agonizing as reading Daily Variety and finding that once again you weren't in its pages? That other actors -- names sometimes you'd never heard of -- were getting the scripts, the parts and the deals that would once have dropped into your lap as a matter of course? There was no pain as sharp or as deep as the news of somebody else's success. If it was an actor older than himself that was bad enough. But if it was a contemporary -- or worse, somebody younger, somebody prettier -- it made him so crazy he'd have to go pop a tranquilizer or three to stop himself getting morose and foul-tempered. And even the happy pills didn't work the way they had in the old days. He'd taken too many; his body was too used to them.

So: what to do, what to do?

Should he sit on his slowly-expanding ass and start to avoid the mirror, or take the bull by the horns and get an appointment with Doctor Burrows?

He remained undecided for about a week. And then one evening, sitting at home alone nursing a drink and flipping the channels of his sixty-inch TV, he came upon a segment from the telecast of last year's Oscar ceremony. A young actor, whom he knew for a fact was not one of the smartest bunnies in town, was receiving his third Oscar of the night, for a picture he had -- at least according to the credits -- written, directed and starred in. The latter? Well there was no disputing that. He was in every other frame of the damn picture, back-lit and golden. He was playing a stuttering, mentally unstable poor boy from the Deep South, a role which he claimed he had based on the life of his father's brother, who had died tragically at the hands of a lynch mob that had mistaken him for a rapist. It was all perfect Oscar-fodder: the ambitious young artist bucking the star system to tell a tale of the human spirit, rooted in his own family history.

Except that the truth was neither so moving nor so magical. Far from having been lynched, the 'dead' uncle was still very much alive, (or so gossip around town went) having spent twenty-two years in jail for a rape that he did not to this day contest. He had received a healthy pay-back from the studio that released the picture to stay conveniently quiet, so that his story could be told the Hollywood way, leaving the Golden Boy with his ten-thousand-watt smile to walk off with three Oscars for his mantelpiece. Todd had it on good authority that his directorial skills extended no further than knowing where his Winnebago was parked.

He wasn't the only one aspiring to snatch Todd's throne. There were plenty of others, chirpy little cock-suckers swarming out of the woodwork to play the King of Hollywood, when Todd had yet to vacate the role.

Well fuck 'em. He'd knock them off their stolen pedestals, the sons of bitches. He'd have the limelight back in a heartbeat -- all that glory, all that love -- and they'd be back on the casting couch in a week with their fannies in the air.

So what if it cost him a few weeks of discomfort? It would be worth it just to see the expressions on their pretty little faces when they realized they'd got greedy a decade too early.

Contrary to recent opinions, the King of the Heart-throbs was not dead. He was coming home, and he was going to look like a million dollars.

FOUR

On the day Todd had booked to see Burrows for a first consultation, he had to cancel at the last minute.

"You're not going to believe my excuse," he told the receptionist, "But I swear it's the truth."

"Go on."

"My dog's sick."

"Well that's not one we hear very often. So, gold star for originality."

The fact was that Dempsey, his mutt, was not looking too good that morning; he'd got up to go out into the back yard for his morning piss and he'd stumbled, as though one of his legs was numb. Todd went down to see if he was okay. He wasn't. Though he still put on a happy face for his boss, his expression looked strangely dislocated, as though he was having difficulty focusing on Todd.

"What's wrong with you, boy?"

Todd went down on his haunches in front of the dog, and stroked his ears. Dempsey growled appreciatively. But he felt unsteady in Todd's arms; as though at any moment he might keel over.

Todd called Maxine and told her he'd be at the vet's for the next few hours.

"Something wrong with that flatulent old dog of yours?"

"You'll be flatulent when you get to his age," Todd said. "And yeah. There is something wrong. He keeps falling over."

He'd had Dempsey eleven years. He'd bought the dog as a pup just before he'd started to shoot Gunner. As a consequence the dog's first real experience of life beyond his mother's teat was being carried around a movie studio by his owner and adored; all of which he thereafter took as his God-given right. Dempsey had been with Todd on every set since; the two were inseparable. Todd and Dempsey; Dempsey and Todd. Thanks to those early experiences of universal affection he was a confident dog; afraid of nobody, and -- unless somebody was afraid of him -- predisposed to be friendly.

The vet's name was Doctor Spenser; an ebullient black woman who'd been looking after Dempsey since puppyhood. She did a few tests and told Todd that yes, there were definitive signs that Dempsey was having cognitive difficulties.

"How old is he now?"

"He'll be twelve next March."

"Oh that's right -- we didn't know his birthday so we said -- "

" -- Oscar Night."

"What's wrong, boy?" Doctor Spenser said to Dempsey, ruffling him under the chin. "He's certainly not his usual happy self, is he?"

"Nope."

"Well, I'd like to keep him in here for a few tests."

"I brought a stool sample like you asked."

"Thanks."

Todd produced a small Tupperware container of dog poop. "Well we'll have that analyzed. You want the container back? Just kidding. Don't look so grim, Todd -- "

"I don't like seeing him like this."

"It's probably a virus he's picked up. We'll give him a few antibiotics and he'll be good as new."

"But there's something weird about his eyes. Look. He's not even focusing on us."

Dempsey had raised his head, knowing full well he was being talked about, but plainly he was having some difficulty fixing his gaze on whoever was doing the talking.

"This couldn't just be old age, could it?"

"I doubt it. He's been a very healthy dog so far, and it's my experience that a mutt like Dempsey is going to last a lot longer than some over-bred hound. You leave him with me. Check in with me at the end of the day."

Todd did that. The news was there was no news. The stool sample had gone to the lab to be analyzed, and meanwhile Dempsey was looking weak, perhaps a little disorientated, but there'd been no noticeable deterioration in his condition.

"You can either take him home tonight or leave him here. He'll be perfectly fine here. We don't actually have anybody monitoring the dogs from eleven pm till six in the morning, but the chances of -- "

"I'm going to come and collect him."

Despite Spenser's reassurances that there had been no deterioration, Todd disagreed. Usually when he arrived at the vet's after Dempsey had stayed in for a couple of hours, either for a shot, or his six-month checkup, he was greeted by the dog in crazy mode, yapping his delight at seeing his boss again, and ready to be out of the door before they could stick another damn needle in his backside. But today, when Dempsey came round the corner it seemed to take a moment before the dog even realized it was his master at the door, calling to him. And when he came, though some of his old enthusiasm returned, he was a shadow of his former self. Doctor Spenser had already gone off-duty for the night. Todd asked if he could have her home number, but there were some things, it seemed, even being Todd Pickett couldn't get you.

"She's got kids to take care of," the male nurse said. "She likes to keep this place and her home-life very separate."

"But if there's an emergency?"

"I'd recommend going to the twenty-four-hour animal hospital on Sepulveda. There'll be doctors there all night if anything were to happen. But honestly, I think it's some virus he's picked up out at the dog park, and it'll just take a course of antibiotics."

"Well can I take some antibiotics then?" Todd said, getting a little irritated with the casual way Dempsey's case was being treated.

"Doctor Spenser doesn't want to give Dempsey anything till she's got some results from the stool sample, so I'm afraid there'll be no drugs for Dempsey until tomorrow."

Dempsey didn't eat. He just looked at the bowl of food Marco had prepared for him, and turned up his nose at it.

Then he went to lie on the back step and stayed there for the rest of the evening.

In the middle of the night Todd was woken by what sounded like the effects track from The Exorcist, a stomach-wrenching series of mumblings and eruptions. He switched on the bedroom light to find Dempsey at the bottom of his bed, standing in a pool of bright yellow puke. He looked horribly ashamed of having made a mess, and at first wouldn't come to Todd to be petted, but when he did -- and Todd had his arms around the dog -- it was clear he was in a bad way. Dempsey's whole body was cold, and he was trembling violently.

"Come on, m'man," he said. "We're gonna take you to get some proper doctoring."

The noise had woken Marco, who got dressed to drive while Todd held onto Dempsey, who was wrapped in his favorite comforter, a quilt Todd's grandmother had made for her grandson. The dog lay sprawled over Todd's knee, all one hundred pounds of him, while Marco drove through the almost empty streets to Sepulveda.

It was five minutes after five in the morning when they arrived at the animal hospital, and there were just two people waiting with their pets to be helped. Even so it took twenty-five minutes before a doctor could be freed up to see Dempsey, during which time it seemed to Todd that Dempsey's condition worsened. His shaking became more violent than ever, and in the midst of one of his spasms, he convulsively shat brown gruel, mostly on the floor, but on Todd's leg and shoe too.

"Well now," said the night doctor brightly, "what seems to be the trouble?"

Todd gave him an exhaustive run-down on the events of the last day. He then asked Todd to pick Dempsey up and put him on the examination table -- choosing this particular instant to remark what a fan of Todd's he was, as though Todd could have given a damn at that moment.

Then he examined the dog, in a good and thorough manner, but making asides throughout as to which movies of Todd's he and his wife had particularly enjoyed and which they hadn't. After about five minutes of this, seeing the expression of despair and anger on Todd's face, Marco quietly mentioned that Mr. Pickett was really only interested right now in the health of his dog. The doctor's mouth tightened, as though he'd just been badly offended, and his handling of Dempsey (at least to Todd's eyes) seemed to become a little more brusque.

"Well, you have a very sick dog," he said at the end of the examination, not even looking at Todd but talking to Marco. He was plainly embarrassed by his earlier show of fanboy enthusiasm, and was now over-compensating for it wildly.

Todd went to sit on the examination table to cradle Dempsey, which put him right in the doctor's line of sight.

"Look," he said quietly, "I'm sorry if I'm not being quite as appreciative of ... your support of my pictures as I would normally be, Doc. It's nothing personal. I'm sure we could have a great conversation about it under different circumstances. But I'd like Dempsey comfortable first. He's sick and I want him better."

Finally the doctor managed a little smile, and when he spoke his voice had also quieted, matching Todd's. "I'm going to put Dempsey on a saline drip, because he's obviously lost a lot of fluids in the last twelve to twenty-four hours. That should make him feel a whole lot happier. Meanwhile, you said Dr. Spencer over at Robertson VGA was doing stool checks?"

"She said it could be a virus."

"Well ... maybe. But looking at his eyes, it seems more systemic to me. If he were a younger dog I'd say parvo or heartworm, which is a parasite. But again, we commonly see toxo in pound dogs or strays, and I'm sure he's had his heartworm medications. Anyway, we'll see from the stool results tomorrow."

"Wait, wait. You're saying it could be parvo or heartworm, but you don't really think it's either of these?"

"No."

"So what do you think it is?"

The doctor shook his head. "I'd say there's a better than fifty-fifty chance he's got some kind of tumor. On the brain or on the brain-stem."

"And if he has?"

"Well, it's like a human being. You can sometimes fix these things -- "

At this juncture, as though to demonstrate that things were not in a very fixable state right now, Dempsey started to shudder in Todd's arms, his claws scrabbling against the metal table as he tried to stay upright.

"It's okay, boy! It's okay!"

The doctor went for a nurse, and came back with an injection.

"What's that for?"

"Just to calm him down a little, so he can get some sleep."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. It's a mild tranquilizer. If you don't want me to give it to the dog, Mr. Pickett ... "

"Yes. Yes, give it to him."

The injection did indeed subdue Dempsey's little fit. They wheeled him away into another room to be given an intravenous infusion, leaving Todd with the quilt.

"Damn dog," he said, now Dempsey was out of earshot, "More trouble than he's worth." Tears very close.

"Why don't we get a cup of coffee?" Marco suggested, "And we can talk to the doctor more when we get back?"

There was a little donut shop in the mini-mall at the top of Sepulveda, and it had just opened. They were the first customers of the day. Todd knew the instant he walked in that both the women serving recognized him, so he turned round and walked out again rather than risking getting caught in a conversation: Marco brought out two coffees and two Bear Claws in greaseproof paper, still warm from the oven. Though he hadn't thought he had an appetite, the pastry was too good not to be eaten; so he ate. Then, coffee in hand, they walked down to the hospital, the eyes of the women in the donut shop glued to Todd until he had disappeared from sight.

They said nothing as they walked. The day was getting underway; the traffic on Sepulveda backing up as it waited to take its turn to get onto the freeway. These were people with two-hour commutes ahead of them before they got to their place of work; people with jobs they hated, houses they hated, and a paycheck at the end of the month that wouldn't even cover the cost of the mortgage, the car payments, the insurance.

"Right now," Todd said, "I'd give my eye teeth to be one of them, instead of having to go back in there."

"I can go in for you."

"No."

"Dempsey trusts me," Marco said.

"I know. But he's my dog."

FIVE

Again, there was no news. Dempsey had been hooked up to a saline drip, and looked as though the tranquilizer had taken its effect. He wasn't quite asleep, but he was dazy.

"We'll do an X-ray today, and see how he looks." The doctor said, "We should have the results back by the end of the day. So why don't you two go home, we'll keep Dempsey here and see what we can do to get him well?"

"I want to stay."

"Well that's going to be very uncomfortable for you, Mr. Pickett. We don't have a room we can put you in, and frankly you both look as though you didn't get a full night's sleep. Dempsey's mildly sedated, and we'll probably keep him that way. But it's going to be six or seven hours before we get any answers for you. We share our X-ray technician with our hospital in Santa Monica, so she won't even be in to look at Dempsey until eleven at the earliest."

"I still want to stay. You've got a bench out there. You're not going to throw me out if I sit on that are you?"

"No. Of course not."

"Then that's where I'll be."

The doctor looked at his watch. "I'll be out of here in half an hour and the day-doctor, Doctor Otis, will be taking over Dempsey's case. I will of course bring him up to speed with everything we've done so far and if she feels there's something else she wants to try -- "

"She'll know where to find me."

"Right."

The doctor gave up a wan smile, his second and last of the night. "Well, I sincerely hope you have good news with Dempsey, and that by the time I come in again tonight you've both gone home happy."

Todd would not be dissuaded from staying on the bench, even though it was situated a few steps away from the front counter, next to the soda machine, and would leave him in full view of everyone who came through the next few hours. Marco said that he would come back with a Thermos of good coffee and something to eat, and left Todd there.

The parade of the needy began early. About two minutes after Marco had gone a distraught woman came in saying that she'd struck a cat with her car, and the victim was now in her car, alive, but terrified and badly hurt. Two nurses went out with well-used pairs of leather gloves and a syringe of tranquilizer to subdue the victim. They came back with a weeping woman and a corpse. The animal's panicked self-defenses had apparently used up what little energies its broken body had possessed. The woman was inconsolable. She tried to thank the nurses for their help but all she could do was cry. There were six more accidents that rush hour, two of them fatalities. Todd watched all this in a dazed state. Lack of sleep was beginning to catch up with him. Every now and then his eyes would flicker closed for a few seconds, and the scene in front of him would jump, like a piece of film which had had a few seconds' worth of action removed and then been spliced back together again. People moved abruptly from one place to another. One moment somebody was coming in, the next they were engaged in conversation (often tearful, sometimes accusatory, always intense), with one of the nurses; the next they'd gone, or they were on their way out.

Much to his surprise, nobody gave him more than a cursory glance. Perhaps, they thought, that can't possibly be Todd Pickett, sitting on a broken-down old bench next to a broken down old soda machine in a twenty-four-hour animal hospital. Or perhaps it was just that they saw him, recognized him, and didn't care. They had other things to think about right now, more pressing than the peculiar presence of a weary-looking movie star on a broken down bench. They had a rat with an abscess, a cat that had had six kittens but had got the seventh stuck, a guinea pig in a shoe box that was dead when the box was opened; a poodle that kept biting itself; a problem with fleas, a problem with mange, two canaries that hated one another, and so on and so forth.

Marco came back with coffee and sandwiches. Todd drank some coffee, which perked him up.

He went to the front desk and asked, not for the first time, to see the day-doctor. This time, he got lucky. Doctor Otis, a pale and slight young woman who looked no more than eighteen, and refused to look Todd in the face (though this, he realized was her general practice: she was the same with Marco and with the nurses, eyes constantly averted), appeared and said that there was nothing to report except that Dempsey would be going for X-rays in about half an hour, and they would be available for viewing tomorrow. At this point, Todd lost his temper. It happened rarely, but when it did it was an impressive spectacle. His neck became blotchy-red, and the muscles of his face churned; his eyes went to ice-water.

"I brought my dog in here at five o'clock this morning. I've been waiting here -- sitting on that bench -- that bench right there, you see it? Do you see that bench?"

"Yes, I -- "

"That's where I've been since six o'clock. It is now almost eleven o'clock. I've asked on several occasions for you to have the common decency to come out and tell me what's happening to my dog. Always politely. And I've been told, over and over again, that you're very busy."

"It's been a crazy morning, Mr -- ?"

"Pickett is my name."

"Well, Mr. Pickett, I'm afraid I can't -- "

"Stop right there. Don't say you can't get the X-rays until tomorrow because you can. You will. I want my dog looked after and if you won't do it I'll take him some place where he can be taken care of and I'll make sure every damn newspaper in the State of California -- "

At this moment an older woman, obviously the hospital manager, stepped into view and took Todd's hand, shaking it. "Mr. Pickett. My name's Cordelia Simpson. It's all right, Andrea, I'll take care of Mr. Pickett from here."

The young woman doctor retreated. She was two shades whiter than she'd been at the beginning of the conversation.

"I heard most of what you were telling Andrea -- "

"Look, I'm sorry. That's not my style. I don't like losing my temper, but -- "

"No, it's okay. I understand. You're tired and you're concerned about -- ?"

"Dempsey."

"Dempsey. Right."

"I was told he'd be X-rayed today and we'd have the results back this afternoon."

"Well, the speed of these things all depends on the volume of work, Mr. Pickett," Cordelia said. She was English, and had the face and manner of a woman who would not be pleasant if she were riled, but was doing her best right now to put on a gentler face. "I read a piece about you in the LA Times last year. You were on the cover with Dempsey, as I remember. Clearly you're very close to your dog. Here's what I'm going to do." She consulted her watch. "Dempsey is being seen by the radiographer right now, and I guarantee that we'll have the results back by ... six. It might be earlier but I think six we can guarantee."

"So how long before I can take him home?"

"You want to take him now?"

"Yes."

"You'll find him rather dopey. I'm not sure he could walk."

"I can carry him."

Cordelia nodded. She knew an immovable object when she saw one. "Well I'll have one of the nurses come fetch you when he's ready. Is that his?"

She pointed to the quilt on the bench. Quite unconsciously, Todd had been nursing it while he waited. No wonder people had kept their distance.

"Yes."

"Do you want me to have him wrapped up in it?"

"Thank you."

Cordelia picked up the quilt. "And my apologies, Mr. Pickett, for any difficulties you may have had. Our doctors are horribly overworked. And, I'm afraid to say, often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings."

Ten minutes later a burly Latino appeared with a sleepy-eyed Dempsey, wrapped in his quilt. His ears pricked up just a little at the sight of Todd, enough for Todd to know that his holding the dog, and whispering to him, meant something.

"We're going home, old guy," Todd murmured to him, as he carried him down the steps into the street and round to the little parking lot behind the building, where Marco was backing out the car. "I know you didn't like it in there. All those people you didn't know with needles and shit. Well, fuck them." He put his nose into the cushion of baby fur behind Dempsey's ear, which always smelled sweetest. "We're going home."

For the next few hours Dempsey slept in the quilt, which Todd had put on his big bed. Todd stayed beside him, though the need for sleep caught up with him several times, and he'd slide away into a few minutes of dreamland: fragments of things he'd seen from his bench in the waiting room, mostly. The box containing the dead guinea pig, that absurd poo#173;dle, nipping its own backside bloody; all just pieces of the day, coming and going. Then he'd wake and stroke Dempsey for a little while, talk to him, tell him everything was going to be okay.

There was a sudden rally in Dempsey's energies about four o'clock, which was when he was usually fed, so Todd had Marco prepare a sick-bed version of his usual meal, with chicken instead of the chopped horse-flesh or whatever the hell it was in the cans, and some good gravy. Dempsey ate it all, though he had to be held up to do so, since his legs were unreliable. He then drank a full bowl of water.

"Good, good," Todd said.

Dempsey attempted to wag his tail, but it had no more power in it than his legs had.

Todd carried him outside so he could shit and piss. A slight drizzle was coming down; not cool, but refreshing. He held onto the dog, waiting for the urge to take Dempsey, and he turned his face up to the rain, offering a quiet little prayer.

"Please don't take him from me. He's just a smelly old dog. You don't need him and I do. Do you hear me? Please ... hear me. Don't take him."

He looked back at Dempsey to find that the dog was looking back at him, apparently paying attention to every word. His ears were half-pricked, his eyes half-open.

"Do you think anyone's listening?" Todd said.

By way of reply, Dempsey looked away from him, his head bobbing uneasily on his neck. Then he made a nasty sound deep in his belly and his whole body convulsed. Todd had never seen the term projectile vomit displayed with such force. A stream of chewed chicken, dog mix and water squirted out. As soon as it stopped, the dog began to make little whining sounds. Then ten seconds later, Dempsey repeated the whole spectacle, until every piece of nourishment and every drop of water he'd been given had been comprehensively ejected.

After the second burst of vomiting he didn't even have the strength to whine. Todd wrapped the quilt around him and carried him back into the house. He had Marco bring some towels and dried him off where the rain had caught him.

"I don't suppose you care what's been going on all day, do you?" Marco said.

"Anything important?"

"Great foreign numbers on Gallows, particularly in France. Huge hit in France, apparently. Maxine wants to know if you'd like to do a piece about Dempsey's health crisis for one of the woman's magazines."

"No."

"That's what I told her. She said they'd eat it up, but I said -- "

"No! Fuck. Will these people never stop? No!"

"You got a call from Walter at Dreamworks about some charity thing he's arranging, I told him you'd be back in circulation tomorrow."

"That's the phone."

"Yeah. It is."

Marco went to the nearest phone, which was in the master bathroom, while Todd went back to finish drying the dog.

"It's Andrea Otis. From the hospital. I think it's the nervous young woman you saw this morning."

"Stay with him," Todd said to Marco.

He went into the bathroom, which was cold. Picked up the phone.

"Mr. Pickett?"

"Yes."

"First, I want to say I owe you an apology for this morning -- "

"No that's fine."

"I knew who you were and that threw me off -- "

"Dempsey."

" -- a little. I'm sorry."

"Dempsey."

"Yes. Well, we've got the X-ray results back and ... I'm afraid the news isn't very good."

"Why not? What's wrong with him?"

"He is riddled with cancer."

Todd took a long moment to digest this unwelcome news. Then he said: "That's impossible."

"It's in his spine. It's in his colon -- "

"But that can't be."

"And it's now spreading to his brain, which is why we've only just discovered it. These motor and perception problems he's having are all part of the same thing. The tumor's spreading into his skull, and pushing on his brain."

"Oh God."

"So ... I don't know what you want to do."

"I want this not to be happening."

"Well yes. But I'm afraid it is."

"How long has he got?"

"His present condition is really as good as things are going to get for him." She spoke as though she was reading the words from an idiot-board, careful to leave exactly the same amount of space between each one. "All that is really at issue is how quickly Dempsey becomes incapacitated."

Todd looked through the open door at the pitiful shape shuddering beneath the quilt. It was obvious that Dempsey had already reached that point. Todd could be absurdly optimistic at times, but this wasn't one of them.

"Is he in pain?" he asked the doctor.

"Well, I'd say it's not so much pain we're dealing with as anxiety. He doesn't know what's happening to him. And he doesn't know why it's happening. He's just suffering, Mr. Pickett. And it's just going to get worse."

"So you're saying I should have him put down?"

"It's not my place to tell you what to do with your dog, Mr. Pickett."

"But if he was your dog."

"If he was my dog, and I loved him as you obviously love Dempsey, I wouldn't want him suffering ... Mr. Pickett, are you there?"

"Here," Todd said, trying to keep the sound of tears out of his voice.

"So really it's up to you."

Todd looked at Dempsey again, who was making a mournful sound in his sleep.

"If I bring him back over to the hospital?"

"Yes?"

"Would there be somebody there to put him to sleep?"

"Yes, of course. I'll be here."

"Then that's what I want to do."

"I'm so very sorry, Mr. Pickett."

"It's not your fault."

Dempsey roused himself a little when Todd went back to bed, but it was barely more than a sniff and a half-hearted wag.

"Come on, you," he said, wrapping Dempsey tightly in the quilt, and lifting him up, "the sooner this is done the sooner you're not an unhappy hound. Will you drive, Marco?"

It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and though the drizzle had ceased, die traffic was still horrendous. It took them fifty-five minutes to get down to the hospital, but this time -- perhaps to make up for her unavailability the last time he'd been there -- Doctor Otis was at the counter waiting for him. She opened the side door, to let him into die non-public area.

"You want me to come in, boss?" Marco asked.

"Nah, it's okay. We'll be fine."

"He looks really out of it," the doctor remarked.

Dempsey had barely opened his eyes at the sound of Todd's voice. "You know, I realize this may seem like a strange thing to say, but in a way we're lucky that this caught him so fast. With some dogs it takes weeks and months ... "

"In here?" Todd said.

"Yes."

The doctor had opened a door into a room not more than eight by eight, painted in what was intended to be a soothing green. On one wall was a Monet reproduction and on another a piece of poetry that Todd couldn't read through his assembling tears.

"I'll just give you two some time," Doctor Otis said. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

Todd sat down with Dempsey in his arms. "Damn," he said softly. "This isn't fair."

Dempsey had opened his eyes fully for the first time in several hours, probably because he'd heard the sound of Todd crying, which had always made him very attentive, even if the crying was fake. Todd could be rehearsing a sad scene from a picture, memorizing lines, and as soon as the first note of sadness crept into his voice Dempsey would be there, his paws on Todd's knees, ready to give comfort. But this time the animal didn't have the strength to help make the boss feel better. All he could do was stare up at Todd with a slight look of puzzlement on his face.

"Oh God, I hope I'm doing the right thing. I wish you could just tell me that this is what you want." Todd kissed the dog, tears falling in Dempsey's fur. "I know if I was you I wouldn't want to be shitting everywhere and not able to stand up. That's no life, huh?" He buried his face in the smell of the animal. For eleven years -- whether Todd had had female company or not -- Dempsey had slept on his bed; and more often than not been the one to wake him up, pressing his cold nose against Todd's face, rubbing his neck on Todd's chest.

"I love you, dog," he said. "And I want you to be there when I get to heaven, okay? I want you to be keeping a place for me. Will you do that? Will you keep a place for me?"

There was a discreet knock on the door, and Todd's stomach turned. "Time's up, buddy," he said, kissing Dempsey's burning hot snout. Even now, he thought, I could say no, I don't want you to do this. He could take Dempsey home for one more night in the big bed. But that was just selfishness. The dog had had enough, that was plain. He could barely raise his head. It was time to go. "Come in." he said.

The doctor came in, meeting Todd's gaze for the first time. "I know how hard this is," she said. "I have dogs myself, all mutts like Dempsey."

"Dempsey, did you hear that?" Todd said, the tears refusing to abate. "She called you a mutt."

"They're the best."

"Yeah. They are."

"Are you ready?"

Todd nodded, at which point she instantly transferred her loving attention to the dog. She lifted Dempsey out from Todd's arms and put him on the steel table in the corner of the room, talking to him all the while, "Hey there, Dempsey. This isn't going to hurt at all. Just a little prick -- "

She pulled a syringe out of her pocket, and exposed the needle. At the back of Todd's head that same irrational voice was screaming: "Tell her no! Knock it out of her hand! Quickly! Quickly!" He pushed the thoughts away, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, because he didn't want to be blinded by them when this happened. He wanted to see it all, even if it hurt like a knife. He owed that to Dempsey. He put his hand on Dempsey's neck and rubbed his favorite place. The syringe went into Dempsey's leg. He made a tiny little grunt of complaint.

"Good boy," Doctor Otis said. "There. That wasn't so bad now, was it?"

Todd kept rubbing Dempsey's neck.

The doctor put the top back on the syringe and pocketed it. "It's all right," she said. "You can stop rubbing. He's gone."

So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at the body on the table. Dempsey's eye was still half-open, but it didn't look back at him any longer. Where there'd been a sliver of bright life, where there'd been mischief and shared rituals -- where, in short, there'd been Dempsey -- there was nothing.

"I'm very sorry, Mr. Pickett," the doctor said, "I'm sure you loved him very much and speaking as a doctor, I know you did the right thing for him."

Todd sniffed hard, and reached over to pluck a clump of paper handkerchiefs from the box. "What does that say?" he said, pointing to the framed poster on the wall. His tears made it incomprehensible.

"It's a quote by Robert Louis Stevenson," Andrea said, "You know, who wrote Treasure Island?"

"Yeah, I know ... "

"It says: 'Do you think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.'"

SIX

He waited until he got home, and he'd governed his tears, to make arrangements for Dempsey's cremation. He left a message with a firm that was recommended by the Animal Hospital for their discreet handling of these matters. They would pick Dempsey's body up from the Hospital Mortuary, cremate him and transfer his ashes, guaranteeing that there was no mingling of 'cremains' -- as they described them -- but that the ashes they delivered to the owner would be those of their pet. In other words they weren't putting canaries, parrots, rats, dogs and guinea-pigs in the oven for one big bonfire and dividing up the 'cremains' (the word revolted Todd) in what looked to be the appropriate amounts. He also called his accountant at home and made arrangements for a ten thousand dollar donation to the Hospital, the only attendant request being that five hundred of that money be spent on putting in a more comfortable bench for people to sit on while they waited.

He slept very well with the aid of several Ambien and a large scotch, until about four thirty in the morning when he woke up and felt Dempsey moving around at the bottom of the bed. The drugs made his thought processes muddy. It took him a few seconds of leaning over and putting the coverlet at the bottom of the bed to bring his consciousness up to speed. Dempsey wasn't there.

Yet he'd felt the dog, he would have sworn to it on a stack of Bibles, getting up and walking around and around on the same spot, padding down the bed until it was comfortable for him.

He lay back on the pillow and drifted back to sleep, but it wasn't a healthy sleep thereafter. He kept half-waking, and staring down at the darkness of the bottom of the bed, wondering if Dempsey was a ghost now, and would haunt his heels until the dog had the sense to go on his way to heaven.

He slept in until ten, when Marco brought him the phone with a woman called Rosalie from the Pet Cremation Service. She was pleasant in her no-nonsense way; no doubt she often had people in near hysteria at the other end of the telephone, so a little professional distance was necessary. She had already been in contact with the Hospital this morning, she said, and they had informed her that Dempsey had a collar and quilt with him. Did Todd want these items returned, or were they to be cremated with his pet?

"They were his," Todd said, "so they should go with him."

"Fine." said Rosalie. "Then the only other question is the matter of the urn. We have three varieties -- "

"Just the best you've got."

"That would be our Bronze Grecian Style."

"That sounds fine."

"All I need now is your credit card number."

"I'll pass you back to my assistant. He can help you with all that."

"Just one other question?"

"Yes."

"Are you ... the Todd Pickett?"

Yes, of course, he was the real Todd Pickett. But he didn't feel like the real thing; more like a badly bruised lookalike. Things like this didn't happen to the real Todd Pickett. He had a way with life that always made it show the bright side.

He went back to sleep until noon then got up and ate some lunch, his body aching as though he was catching a heavy dose of the flu. His food unfinished he sat in the breakfast nook, staring blankly at the potted plants artfully arranged on the patio; plants he'd never persuaded Dempsey not to cock his leg against every time he passed.

"I'm going back to bed," he told Marco.

"You don't want to put a holding call into Maxine? She's called nine times this morning. She says she has news about a foreign buyer for Warrior."

"Did you tell her what happened to Dempsey?"

"Yes."

"What did she say?"

"She said: oh. Then she went back to talking about the buyer."

Todd sighed, defeated by the woman's incomprehension. "Maybe it's time I got out of this fucking business," he said to Marco. "I don't have the balls for it any longer. Or the energy."

Marco put up no protest at this. He hated everything about the business, except Todd, and always had. "Why don't we go down to Key West like we always promised ourselves? Open a bar. Get fat and drunk -- "

" -- and die of heart attacks at fifty."

"You're feeling morbid right now."

"A little."

"Well it won't last forever. And one of these days, we'll have to honour Dempsey and get another dog."

"That wouldn't be honouring him, that'd be replacing him. And he was irreplaceable. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Because he was there when I was nobody."

"You were pups together."

This got a smile out of Todd; the first in forty-eight hours. "Yeah ... " he said, his voice close to breaking again. "We were pups together." He tried to hold back the tears, but they came anyway. "What is wrong with me?" he said. "He was a dog. I mean ... come on. Tell me honestly, do you think Tom Cruise cries for a day if one of his dogs dies?"

"I don't think he's got dogs."

"Or Brad Pitt?"

"I don't know. Ask 'em. Next time you see 'em, ask 'em."

"Oh sure, that's going to make a dandy little scene. Todd Pickett and Brad Pitt: 'Tell me, Brad, when your dog died did you wail like a girl for two days?'"

Now it was Marco who laughed. "Wail like a girl?"

"That's how I feel. I feel like I'm in the middle of some stupid weepie."

"Maybe you should call Wilhemina over and fuck her."

"Wilhemina doesn't do fucks. She does lovemaking with candles and a lot of wash-clothes. I swear she thinks I'm going to give her something."

"Fleas?"

"Yeah. Fleas. You know, as a last act of rebellion on behalf of Dempsey and myself I'd like to give fleas to Wilhemina, Maxine and -- "

"Gary Eppstadt."

Both men were laughing now, curing the hurt the only way it could be cured, by being included in the nature of things.

Speaking of inclusion, he got a call from his mother, about six o'clock. She was at home in Cambridge Massachusetts, but sounded ready to jump the first plane and come visit. She was in one of her 'I've a funny feeling' moods.'

"What's going on?"

"Nothing."

"Yes there is."

She was inevitably right; she could predict with startling accuracy the times she needed to call her famous son and the times when she should keep her distance. Sometimes he could lie to her, and get away with it. But today wasn't one of those days. What was the point?

"Dempsey's dead."

"That old mutt of yours."

"He was not an old mutt and if you talk about him like that then this conversation ends right here."

"How old was he?" Patricia asked.

"Eleven, going on twelve."

"That's a decent age."

"Not for a dog like him."

"What kind of dog would that be?"

"You know -- "

"A mutt. Mutt's always live longer than thoroughbreds. That's a fact of life."

"Well, mine didn't."

"Too much rich food. You used to spoil that dog -- "

"Is there anything else you want besides lecturing me about how I killed my dog with kindness?"

"No. I was just wanting to chat, but obviously you're in no mood to chat."

"I loved Dempsey, Mom. You understand what I'm saying?"

"If you don't mind me observing something -- "

"Could I stop you?"

" -- it's sad that the only serious relationship you've had is with a dog. It's time you grew up, Todd. You're not getting any younger, you know. You think about the way your father aged."

"I don't want to talk about this right now, okay."

"Listen to me."

"Mom. I don't -- "

"You've got his genes, so listen for once will you? He was a good-looking man your father, till he was about thirty-four, thirty-five. Now granted he didn't take care of himself and you do -- I mean he smoked and he drank a lot more than was good for him. But his looks went practically overnight."

"Overnight? That's is ridiculous. Nobody's looks go -- "

"All right, it wasn't overnight. But I was there. I saw. Believe me, it was quick. Five, six months and all his looks had gone."

Even though this was an absurd exaggeration, there was an element of truth in what Patricia Pickett was saying. Todd's father had indeed lost his looks with remarkable speed. It would not have been the kind of thing a son would have noticed, necessarily, but Todd had a second point-of-view on his father's sudden deterioration: his best friend Danny had been raised by a single mother who'd several times made her feelings for Merrick Pickett known to her son. The rumors had reached Todd, of course. Indeed they'd become practically weekly reports, as Danny's mother's plans to seduce the unwitting subject of her desires were laid (and failed) and re-laid.

All this came back to Todd as his mother went on chatting. Eventually, he said, "Mom, I've got to go. I've got to make some decisions about the cremation."

"Oh, Lord, I hope you're keeping this quiet. The media would have a party with this: you and your dog."

"Well all the more reason for you to clam up about it," he warned. "If anybody calls, saying they want a quote."

"I know nothing."

"You know nothing."

"I know the routine by now, honey. Don't worry, your secret's safe with me."

"Don't even tell the neighbours."

"Fine! I won't."

"Bye, Mom."

"I'm sorry about Brewster."

"Dempsey."

"Whatever."

It was true; when Todd gave the subject some serious thought: Merrick Pickett had indeed lost his looks with startling speed. One day he'd been the best looking insurance agent in the city of Cincinnati, the next (it seemed) Danny's mother wouldn't look twice at him. Suppose this was hereditary? Suppose fifty percent of it was hereditary?

He called Eppstadt's office. It took the sonofabitch forty-eight minutes to return the call and when he did his manner was brusque.

"I hope this isn't about Warrior?"

"It isn't."

"We're not going to do it, Todd."

"I get it, Gary. Is your assistant listening in on this conversation?"

"No. What do you want?"

"When we had lunch you recommended a guy who'd done some work for a few famous names."

"Bruce Burrows?"

"How do I get hold of him? He's not in the book."

"Don't worry. I'll hook you up."

"Thanks."

"You're making a good call, Todd. I hope we can get back in business as soon as you're healed."

Once he had the number, Todd didn't leave himself further room for hesitation. He called Burrows, booked the consultation, and tentatively chatted over some dates for the operation.

There was one of piece outstanding business before he could move on: the disposal of Dempsey's ashes. Despite the reassurances of Robert Louis Stevenson, Todd did not have any clear idea as to the permanence of any soul, whether animal or human. He only knew that he wanted Dempsey's mortal remains to be placed where the dog had been most happy. There was no doubt about where that was: the backyard of the Bel Air house, which had been, since his puppyhood, Dempsey's unchallenged territory: his stalking ground, his schoolyard when it came to learning new tricks. And it was there, the evening before Todd put himself into the hands of Bruce Burrows, that he took the bronzed plastic urn provided by the Cremation Company out into the yard. The urn contained a plastic bag, which in turn contained Dempsey's ashes. There were a lot of them; but then he'd been a big dog.

Todd sat down in the middle of the yard, where he and Dempsey had so often sat and watched the sky together, and poured some of the ashes into the palm of his hand. What part of this grey sand was his tail, he wondered, and which his snout? Which part the place behind his ear he'd love you forever if you rubbed? Or didn't it matter? Was that the point about scattering ashes: that in the end they looked the same? Not just the snout and the tail, but a dog's ashes and a man's ashes. All reducible, with the addition of a little flame, to this mottled dust? He put his lips to it, once, to kiss him goodbye. In his head he could hear his mother telling him that it was a gross, unhealthy thing to do, so he kissed them again, just to spite her. Then he stood up and cast Dempsey's ashes around, like a farmer sewing seeds. There was no wind. The ash fell where he threw it, evenly distributed over the mutt's dominion.

"See you, dog," he said, and went back into the house to get himself a large bourbon.