Popcorn

the ‘Best Actress’, who had won so many hearts by accepting her award dressed in a gown designed in the shape of an enormous Aidsawareness ribbon. Like the ‘Best Supporting Actor’, who had pointed out that Hollywood’s duty was the ‘inspirationalization’ of the world; and the ‘Best Supporting Actress’, who had made an emotional appeal from the podium for more understanding of everything. The endless list of thanks to Mom, Dad, ‘my creative team’, ‘the many, many people whose dedicated work goes into enabling me to be me’, God and America.

Now it was Bruce’s turn. To tell it like it really was.

‘I stand here on legs of fire.’

Legs of fire?

It just came out. Despite his best noble intentions to say what he really felt, the awesome scale of the event possessed him. The billion people in the mirror possessed him. Suddenly he was no longer his own man. He had become an automaton, an unwilling conduit for mawkish, sentimental drivel.

‘I want to thank you. Each and every person in this room. Each and every person in this industry. You nourished me and helped me to touch the stars…’

What could he do? He could not rain on the parade. Nobody loves a griper, particularly if that griper is holding in his firm, manly grasp the one thing that everybody in the whole room covets the most. Look at Brando. He wasn’t the only person who was sorry for the Indians or Native Americans or whatever they were called. Everybody felt bad about them, but bringing them up at the Oscars? It just looked smug and rude. Besides, the people who were outside protesting had lost loved ones. Nothing to do with him, of course, but nevertheless it ill behoved a man of his splendid achievement to piss on the bereaved from the Olympian heights of the Oscars ceremony.

‘… You are the wind beneath my wings and I flap for you. God bless you all. God bless America. God bless the world as well. Thank you.’

The room erupted into rapturous applause. It was an ovation of relief. Bruce Delamitri had acted like a grownup. When his name was announced, many people had wondered whether he would seize the opportunity to be rude and controversial. Bruce did, after all, represent the young, thrusting, cool, cynical Hollywood which simply did not give a fuck. It had been eminently possible – indeed probable – that he would seek unworthy notoriety by being unpleasant and abrasive. A few of the more timid souls feared he might even mention those dreadful pickets outside the theatre who were trying to spoil everybody’s big night. But what a pleasant surprise. Bruce’s speech had been a model of Oscarsnight grace and good manners. Textbook stuff: sincere, selfeffacing, patriotic and very, very moving.

Hollywood welcomed one of its own into the fold. Bruce walked from the podium and into the welcoming arms of the upper echelons of the entertainment establishment.

*

Back up the coastal highway, they were finally clearing away the bodies of the Mexican maid and the shortorder chef, two people who had come into contact with a moral vacuum and who had paid the price. The State Troopers shook their heads. The detectives shook their heads.

‘Jerry made me a steak only this morning,’ said one Trooper as the trolley upon which Jerry’s corpse lay was wheeled out into the parking lot. From the front Jerry had still looked like Jerry. He had taken any number of bullets, but modern highvelocity weapons make very neat entry wounds. Not so the exit wounds. Each bullet pushes an expanding cone of flesh in front of it on its journey through the body, and when it blasts its way out the damage is horrific. From the front Jerry was merely slightly perforated; from the back he was just so much pulp.

The maid had been strangled.

‘Why’d they do that?’ the Trooper wondered. ‘I mean, why the fuck did those bastards have to do that? Weren’t no call. No money nor nothing. So why’d they do that?’

Contrary to popular mythology, American police officers do not spend all day every day scraping corpses off walls and floors. Perhaps the Washington DC Homicide Department do, but not the average cop. Death is not uncommon in their job but it is not the norm either, and the two State Troopers weren’t so familiar with murder as to be indifferent to it.

‘Ain’t no reason why,’ one of the detectives answered. ‘These kids are just doing it for kicks. Maybe they was high on drugs, listening to some damn Satanic heavymetal music, or else maybe they just watched another movie.’

There were still a few news reporters left on the scene.

‘So you definitely think this is another copycat killing, chief?’ one said eagerly. ‘It’s got to be the Mall Murderers, hasn’t it?’

‘Well, this ain’t no mall, is it? Although, hell, those psychotic bastards ain’t particularly choosy where they perpetrate their mayhem. I don’t know, you tell me. Maybe they was copying something they saw, maybe it was two other fuckups copying them.’

‘A copycat copycat?’ asked the reporter, scribbling furiously.

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s a copycat, copycat, copycat. All I know is that two innocent, ordinary Americans are dead.’

‘And that’s the point isn’t it?’ said the reporter, seizing on the detective’s words like a dog with a bone. ‘That’s what this is, just one more ordinary story of Ordinary Americans.’

‘Well, I don’t know what you’d call ordinary,’ the cop replied. ‘I’ve been coming to this diner for over thirty years now and nobody ever got shot here before.’

But the reporter had stopped scribbling.

Chapter Ten

The Governor’s Ball. The postOscars party. The glitter, the glamour, the bosoms! There were bosoms as far as the eye could see, a great soft undulating shelf of bosoms that stretched from one side of the vast ballroom to the other. If anything was going to snap Bruce out of the irrational but uneasy sense of failure that his speech had cast across his great triumph, it was the Bosom Ball.

He stood at the top of the stairs that led down to the dancefloor and wallowed in the glorious display. From his vantagepoint he could admire the thousand or so best cleavages in Hollywood, which of course meant the best in the world. What an admirable thought! Laid out before him were the planet’s two thousand top tits, creamy white, coffeebrown, sunkissed olive, all rising and falling to the rhythm of the night. The best that Mother Nature could build, the best that money could buy. Heaving against the silk and lurex and velvet and rubber of a thousand milliondollar dresses. Bosom upon bosom upon bosom, struggling to escape the surly confines of the gowns that bound them. For the second time that day Bruce felt the sap rise within his Calvins. Was that an Oscar in his pocket or was he just extremely bloody pleased with himself? The winner! The man of the hour. The best director in town.

Intoxicated by the heady atmosphere of sex and success, Bruce forgot his private sense of failure. Everybody made awful speeches at the Oscars: it was a tradition.

Sure.

Absolutely.

In a way it was cool to be kitsch. Look at Elvis.

Right.

Buoyed up by this thought, Bruce waded into the sea of bosoms.

‘Thank you, thank you very much,’ he heard himself saying over and over again, struggling to address his remarks to faces not bosoms. Cleavage etiquette was something he had never been able to work out. Clearly, a woman who was presenting her tits like the centrepiece in some glorious bouquet would be saddened to think that nobody had noticed them. On the other hand, if you did stare appreciatively it looked a bit tacky. Bruce thought about putting on his shades, but decided against it. Instead he concentrated on being magnanimous in