Squirrel Eyes Read online

  Kelli looked like Santa had just come down the chimney and set her Christmas tree on fire – but only after urinating on the presents beneath it. Her expression – and my own sorry emotional state – prompted me to give her a friendly little smooch. It wasn't awkward, or untoward, or overly sloppy; it was just nice.

  So I kissed her again, a little longer this time. To my delight, her lips parted slightly for a tentative bout of tongue entangling, and I slid a hand across her belly to rest on her hip.

  Then she pulled back.

  "This is weird," she said, her big, soft, stuffed-animal eyes dropping to her lap.

  That's when the facade I was struggling to maintain deteriorated completely. "But doesn't it feel right?" I leaned in for more, ready to close the deal and set my life on the proper course (and was obviously willing to say the stupidest damn shit in order to make it so).

  She held me back with both hands. "It feels weird, Alvin."

  I didn't make her fight me off – not physically, anyway – but I was determined to argue my way into her underpants.

  "Don't you get it, Kelli – we should've done it when we were teenagers – "

  "Done it?" she repeated, scornful of my schoolyard turn-of-phrase.

  "Well – yeah! Don't you feel like it's something that was meant to be, like – like – Nelson Mandela becoming President of South Africa or man walking on the moon...." I could tell by her puzzled, slightly offended expression that I was losing her with that line of reasoning. "I mean, we've waited all this time, it's only right that we finally reach the next level...." I was digging those holes in my mom's backyard all over again, only this time I was burying myself in the resulting pit.

  "Next level?" Kelli shook her head, incredulous. "We weren't waiting, Alvin – I wanted to fuck you like crazy and you never did anything about it. I used to cry myself to sleep at night worrying that I wasn't pretty enough. And then you blew me off for that stupid record-store girl, remember? That's why we never reached the next level!" She stood, moving away from the couch – and me. "Is that why you called me – you thought I'd be an easy lay?"

  "Of course not." I hoped she didn't notice the way I cringed as the lie exploded from my mouth. "It goes way beyond that."

  It was a poor choice of words, I admit.

  "Well, that's good to hear," she snapped.

  And so I tried to explain. I told her about Alison – the way everything had been so perfect between us, and how it had come crashing down when the new fella insinuated himself into her affections; about the resulting heartbreak, and how miserable – near-suicidal, even – I'd become; and how my Hollywood career had only grown more soul-crushing as it limped closer to death, as if my lifelong dream – hell, my whole damn life – had turned into an endless nightmare of broken promises and missed opportunities.

  As bad as all that was, I might have been okay had I managed to stop there.

  Unfortunately, however, I proceeded to tell her about my Grand Plan. How it was born of despair and drunkenness but was forged from good intentions and the desire to correct a mistake made many years ago. How sleeping with her would correct that mistake, send my life careening off down the path it was intended to follow.

  And as the words left my mouth, I realized that Taylor was right: it was foul. I was foul. I would've given anything to take it all back.

  Kelli stared at me as one might stare at an accused rapist, those normally gentle eyes disemboweling me. "So what," she finally said, her voice brittle. "You fuck me, then lie back and wait for the horrible grinding noise as the Earth rights itself on its axis and suddenly your life is rosy and fresh?" Her eyes moistened. "That's a nice plan, Alvin, and I'm glad you think so much of my vagina, but what about me? What's supposed to make my life okay?"

  I couldn't think of anything to say. I'm sorry seemed pretty trite at the moment, but probably would've been a good start.

  "Go fuck the record-store girl," Kelli said calmly. "I understand her pussy's handing out winning lottery numbers."

  Standing, I trotted out a mumbled apology. Kelli just choked up a sound of disgust.

  I went home, back to my mom's house, back to my old bedroom, and stared at the ceiling until sleep swallowed me.

  13

  My mom woke me up at 8:30 the next morning, banging on the bedroom wall. "Alvin! You have a phone call!" she barked. "It's a girl."

  Smacking my lips at the taste of dead animal that filled my mouth, I shambled to the phone and picked it up.

  It was Kelli.

  "Finish The Blue Man," she said, all business.

  "What?" I groaned.

  "Finish The Blue Man and I'll sleep with you."

  She hung up.

  I held the phone to my ear for a long moment, my mind still clouded from sleep.

  The Blue Man. Jesus Christ.

  14

  Imagine you’re a plumber: somebody calls you and says he wants to replumb his house, but he’s not sure you’re the right guy for the job, so maybe you can just replace the bathroom faucets to give him an idea of your approach. You do as he requests (you don’t get paid for this, of course), then after a couple weeks (or more), the guy calls you back and says he likes what you’ve done, but thinks that if the bathtub were replaced, it would tie the room together better. After several months of this, he finally tells you he’s decided to go with someone who uses PVC instead of copper, and you never make a dime for all that work.

  Welcome to the world of screenwriting.

  In Hollywood, this is that thing called development. Most of the time, you're the plumber who didn't get the job; The Drop was a rare exception, but either way, it always involves writing endless variations of a treatment, which you’re expected to perform (because no development exec can be bothered to actually read your 7-or-8-page epic) in what's called a pitch meeting. After these pitches, you’ll be given meaningless notes such as “it needs a stronger story engine” or, in the case of adapting a novel or short story, “your central theme doesn’t work,” (despite the fact that it was the central theme of said novel or short story – which, by the way, was never read by the development exec). My most recent pitch meeting (with an exec I had met while I still had an agent, so he was only marginally hesitant to see me rather than downright hostile) was an attempt to sell an idea I'd come up with for an action flick. The guy kept interrupting my pitch to tell me he wanted it to be more like the Steven Seagal movie that had scored a big opening weekend a couple months earlier. I twirled myself into knots trying to reassure him that this thing would be Steven-Seagal-and-a-half before he finally told me he never actually saw the Seagal flick in question because he'd heard it was so bad.

  To be fair, there are a few cool, smart development execs who will give you intelligent notes and recognize that yes, those are your ribs poking through your shirt and buy you a meal; these people will soon be fired.

  I could tell you a hundred stories of the evil of Hollywood; not one would compare to the tragedy of The Blue Man.

  To the casual observer, Kelli's offer to sleep with me must seem remarkably generous in light of my behavior of the night before. Kelli knew better, however. What she had done was throw down the gauntlet, propose a test of my resolve. She knew that if I was willing to tackle The Blue Man, then sleeping with her was indeed the finest of prizes.

  The Blue Man sprang from what I'm sure must be the ultimate sign of pure geekiness: whenever I laid my pubescent hands on an issue of Playboy, the first thing I turned to was the movie reviews. In one particular issue, there had been a glowing review of a low-rent action movie that Taylor and I had despised. It violated all our rules of good crap cinema: no nudity, no fistfight between the hero and the bad guy, and it worked way too hard trying to establish the main character as some kind of misunderstood rogue, rather than the righteous heel he should've been. In short, it didn't deliver the groceries. Taylor and I decided to make our own action flick, and do it right – sort of the Super-8mm equivalent of a hip-hop answe
r song. We'd do our best to not only deliver those groceries, but put them away and cook up a fabulous dinner (all on a budget of about 20 bucks, not including film stock and processing). Of course, our vile little epic would only run about 15 minutes long, but we were certain it would kick ass.

  We based the movie on a comic strip Taylor had drawn a few years earlier, a post-apocalyptic adventure story involving a heroic bastard, sexy girls, mutants, and plenty of bloodshed. The hero never spoke, and his eyes, damaged by the irradiated atmosphere of his violent world, were incredibly sensitive to color; because of this, he dressed only in muted blues. The mutants he fought knew him as The Blue Man.

  When you're nineteen and not getting laid, all that shit sounds pretty cool.

  We wrote the script together, and I was tapped as director – we took turns performing the task on our short films, and my number was up. Taylor would play the title role, because he'd been working out and actually had a pretty good build (although I wouldn't have put it that way back then; he would've beat me up for coming on to him). We'd use whatever friends we could wangle into it to fill the other roles, and I would play the lead mutant. Although I was dating Kelli at the time, I wanted the (now-infamous) "record-store girl" to play the role of The Blue Man's Woman (female empowerment didn't figure into this project). Her name was Yvette, and I had met her only a couple weeks earlier. She was way out of my league but liked my taste in music and was friendly whenever I showed up at the store, so I thought asking her to be in the movie would be my opportunity to show her that I was more than just another nerd (obviously, logical thinking was never my strong suit). To my surprise, Yvette agreed to do it.

  Finding it difficult to focus on anything but the thought that I'd soon be seeing Yvette in too-small cut-off jeans and a miniscule shredded T-shirt (in keeping with the genius of our movie, the apocalypse left little to the imagination), I managed to slather a dollop of liquid latex rubber into my left eye while working on my mutant costume. Despite the embarrassment of having what appeared to be a swollen, furiously red Easter egg stuffed into my eye socket, I felt the injury would only enhance my performance as an evil deviant.

  It was the first in a long list of mishaps that would befall The Blue Man, and the only one that would actually work in favor of the movie.

  Our plan was to meet in the parking lot of the Safeway on the first day of shooting, where Taylor, Mike Penn, his 14-year-old brother Davey (both playing bad guys), Yvette and myself would all pile into one car and head out to Albuquerque's West Mesa – our post-nuclear desert landscape. We were two hours late getting started, because Yvette never showed up and I had to call Kelli and beg her to take over the role – and trust me, I had to eat a lot of shit to make that happen.

  (Yvette's failure to appear didn't sway me from the unhealthy obsession I harbored for the girl; her excuse that she "forgot" only seemed endearing to me, and I had plenty of foolishness left in me where she was concerned. I once walked to her house in the middle of winter with a bouquet of flowers, planning to profess my love; her football-player boyfriend answered the door, and the flowers were freeze-dried by then anyway. Eventually I got tired and gave up, but not until I had lost my collection of KISS 8-tracks to the pursuit and, as I had only recently discovered, hurt Kelli as well. I suppose plenty of guys have done stupider things, but what kind of defense is that?).

  With our new female lead tucked safely in the back seat, we finally set out for the location. As frustrated as I was by Yvette's no-show, I couldn't help but enjoy the sight of Kelli in her costume – she had improved on our concept by donning a pair of combat boots and a little wife-beater T-shirt knotted below her breasts. Her black bra drove Davey Penn to distraction – unable to control himself, he snapped one of the enticing straps, prompting Kelli to punch him in the stomach. He puked his entire breakfast onto the floor of my mom's '67 Pontiac Catalina, and Mike made him use his own shirt to clean up the mess. The stink of recycled bacon and eggs haunted the car for months afterward.

  Upon reaching the West Mesa, we left the main road and drove out into the desert, where numerous extinct volcanoes provided the perfect atomic wasteland. As we set up for the first shot (the Blue Man pursued by a couple of food raiders, who meet a bloody death at the hands of a hideous mutant), a pair of dirt-bikers roared over a hill. Clad as we were in our goofy futuristic costumes, the thrill-seekers intimidated us nerds in the same manner that jocks in the school cafeteria used to — that is, without even doing anything. Kelli, however, was intrigued by the pair of colorfully jumpsuited bikers, who themselves weren't too unhappy to find a scantily clad teenage girl in the middle of nowhere.

  One of the bikers made some wiseass remark at our expense, eliciting a fit of giggling from his friend. This didn't sit well with Mike Penn, whose short fuse had landed him in the principal's office more times than I can count. Within about thirty seconds, Mike was brawling in the dirt with the biker while Kelli egged him on. The rest of us stood around watching stupidly as Mike pounded on the guy's helmeted head, tearing most of the skin off both hands as he beat on the hard plastic. The second biker spun a big donut on his bike, flinging a shower of dirt across the combatants and breaking them up, spluttering and coughing. Threatening revenge, the bikers raced away in a cacophony of two-stroke fury.

  I was already beginning to think the project was cursed.

  We spent the rest of the day worrying about being attacked, but the bikers didn't bother us again, and once we recovered from the excitement we managed to nail some pretty solid footage. Mike and Davey were slaughtered in fine fashion by the evil mutant; Mike's head torn from his body and hurled aside while Davey's face was clawed open, his eyeball bursting from the socket to dangle loosely upon his cheek (courtesy of my own makeup effects, which, half-assed as they were, were nonetheless on a par with the gore in H.G. Lewis' Blood Feast). Meanwhile, the Blue Man rescued Kelli from the hideous creature's lair and the two made their escape, not realizing that the mutant and his horde of aberrations (actually just Mike and Davey again, in assorted costumes and makeup) would hunt them to the ends of the nuclear-fried Earth.

  The only other mishap that first day involved my mutant costume (this is where my baseball glove wound up, by the way); the twisted flesh, built up with latex and cotton on an old thermal undershirt, ripped at the armpit as I lunged for Mike's head. It was the easiest problem we'd be faced with.

  Pleased with the work we'd done, the five of us rode home excited and giddy, certain we were on our way to a masterpiece. That was the night Kelli allowed me to top her nipples with Reddi-Whip (as much as it pains me to admit considering my advanced age at the time, it was my introduction to bare tit – but talk about jumping in with both feet!); however, when she tried to move the action a little further down, I found myself doing anything I could think of to delay the removal of anybody's pants. I don't know how to explain it – it's a vague sense of dread that overcomes me even to this day whenever I know I'm about to get laid. I wouldn't call it performance anxiety, really; the only thing I can think of that comes close is the feeling I had when I was thirteen and preparing to jump my bike off the roof of my house (Knievelation, you might call it).

  Eventually, it was time to take Kelli home, and I spent a few tortured hours staring at the ceiling and cursing myself for blowing yet another opportunity.

  The second day of shooting began flawlessly – everybody showed up on time, there was no vomiting or fist fighting, and I very nearly had Kelli talked into doing a topless scene, which I was planning to shoot at the end of the day. I should've done it first.

  During a simple sequence wherein Taylor was to scramble nimbly down a hillside as a mutant flung hatchets at him, fate intervened, costing us our nude scene. I was hunkered down for a low-angle shot of the Blue Man running directly over the camera. Taylor, coming at me full-tilt-boogie, hit a loose chunk of lava rock and went airborne. His tumbling body slammed into me and we continued downward in a tangle of limbs. When we hit bott
om, Taylor's ankle was broken and I had blown out my knee (an injury which still plagues me today). Needless to say, we shot no more footage that day, and before we could get back to work on the movie, Kelli changed her mind about doffing her shirt in the name of trash cinema.

  Since we had the footage of him falling down the hill, we wrote Taylor's busted pin into the movie, disguising his cast with strips of cloth and duct tape. My own limp, unlike my inflamed eyeball, worked against me, especially in the action scenes. At the slightest pressure, my knee felt like it was on fire and I took to hopping around on one leg when I wasn't on camera. With both of us hobbled, we undertook the most elaborate fight sequence we'd ever attempted (which isn't saying much, really). We were forced to rework the script a little bit to give Kelli more of the action, but she was glad to do something besides stand around being shapely, and Mike and Davey were both overjoyed at the prospect of tussling around in the dirt with her.

  The Blue Man and his Woman were to make a daring daylight raid on the mutant camp, inflicting copious amounts of blood-spewing damage. We arrived at the location earlier than usual in order to build the set. Kelli was grumpy as hell about getting up early and gave everybody plenty of grief, but we stuffed her full of donuts and told her how great she was going to be in the scene, and she settled down.

  After some initial bumbling, the set went up fairly quickly, and was surprisingly cool, considering it was the first we had ever built for one of our movies. Three lean-tos constructed from broom handles, sticks, table legs and blankets – anything you might find lying around after the average nuclear holocaust – surrounded a large campfire, over which roasted a human leg on a spit. I was especially proud of my work on the crispy, golden-brown and delicious skin of the leg.