Popcorn

‘There’ll be roadblocks,’ he’d said, swinging the big, saggy old car on to a gravel road, ‘and we ain’t gettin’ caught till we’re good and ready.’

‘Ready to be saved?’ she’d asked eagerly.

‘That’s right, baby, ready to be saved.’

She slid across the big bench seat and put her head on his shoulder. The vast redwoods slid past the windows, and for a while she indulged in the fantasy of staying in the forest for ever. The trees looked so thick and friendly in the Chevy’s lights that she thought maybe they could build a secret cabin among them and live off berries and venison.

It was a delicious thought, and as she peered out through the wet windscreen and deep into the dark shadows she could almost see the two of them, standing in the doorway of their little fairytale home, he with an axe in his hand, she with a tray of freshbaked fruit scones. All alone in the world.

When the caravan park hove into view it seemed to her that perhaps they had chanced upon a halfway point between fantasy and reality.

‘Let’s rent a trailer, baby,’ she’d pleaded. ‘We could stay a few days. I’ll bet they haven’t even heard of us out here.’

For a moment the trees and the night and the smell of the rain had tricked her into imagining that she lived in some other age, one when people still hid out in woods, when you could still run and hide. When a person could still start again.

‘Honey, we ain’t more’n fifteen miles from the Interstate. You think they don’t have TV and a phone?’ her boyfriend said. ‘Besides, everybody in the whole United States has heard of us.’

‘Well, couldn’t we just stay one night? Y’know, like a holiday?’

‘Tonight ain’t jus’ any of night, hon. Tonight is the night. Shit or bust. We’ll just pick up some stuff and move on.’

So they had pulled in off the gravel road and forced the old storekeeper to open up his shop. They should have been out again in a couple of minutes. It should have been the simplest thing in the world. After all, they had turned over country stores a hundred times before.

But this time the robbery was going wrong. This time there was a problem.

The storekeeper had no Twinkies.

No Twinkles? Every store had Twinkies.

‘I want some Twinkies’ the girl said, and she actually stamped her foot. ‘You said I’d get some.’

‘I know, I know, baby, but I can’t just make ‘em up outa dog food, can I?’

The sound of television commercials could be heard from the back room. The storekeeper had been watching TV when the robbery began.

‘You’re a modern girl. You know what you want and you want it now!’

‘Don’t take no for an answer.’

‘Why wait, when you can have it all today?’

They could have been ads for anything. Even Twinkies.

‘You get everything you want!’ the girl shouted. ‘Whiskey and pretzels and cigarettes and I don’t even get no Twinkies!’

‘I know that, honey, but what can I do? I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t shoot me, please.’ The storekeeper could scarcely speak for fear.

‘For me, freedom is about doing what I like to do when I like to do it’ said the TV in the back room.

‘What d’you say?’ the young man asked the storekeeper.

‘I… I said please don’t shoot me… I just ran out yesterday. We’re a small business. We can’t carry no huge stock.’

‘You think I’d shoot a guy for not having Twinkies?’

‘I… I have Pop Tarts.’

‘For Christ’s sake, what kind of person do you think I am?’ The young man was so offended that he shot the storekeeper anyway.

‘C’mon, honey. We’ll stop by a 711 when we hit LA.’

Chapter Eleven

There was a crowd of people round Bruce now, sensing scandal. Some kind of critic guy was in his face, a big noise, art editor on the LA Times , or maybe gardening editor, something he was pretty proud of anyway. Great Caesar’s tits, the man was a pompous little pecker.

‘I must say,’ the pecker said, ‘I found Ordinary Americans a wonderfully seductive piece of film entertainment.’

‘Film entertainment’. What a phrase! Not ‘work of art’, not ‘cultural benchmark’, not ‘celluloid reflection of the spirit of the age’, but ‘film entertainment’. As if Bruce made daytime soap or something.

Bruce did not consider himself conceited about his work. He was the first to admit that it was popcorn – but only if other popular and corny works like Romeo and Juliet and Beethoven’s Fifth were popcorn too.

‘And I will go to the wall,’ the pecker continued, as Bruce’s eyes glazed over, ‘to defend your right to kill as many people as you like in your movies. The only question I ask is – that ageold bugbear – is it art?’

‘Is it art?’ said Bruce. ‘Well, let me see now. That’s a tricky one. Is shooting a whole bunch of people in a movie art? I think the best way I can answer that is to ask you not to be such a complete fucking jerk.’ Not brilliant, perhaps, but it got the pecker to go away.

It brought Bruce no relief, though. One jerk was replaced by another. At least this time it was a lovely young actress. Lovely to look at, that is, not to listen to. She was a whiner, a spoilt brat. Her conversation had a banal selfassertiveness which was the result of rarely being contradicted, on account of the fact that she rarely spoke to anyone who wasn’t trying to sleep with her. Bruce did not want to sleep with her and so listened to the young woman’s conversation with a less indulgent ear than she was used to.

‘No, actually, as a matter of fact I don’t think I was emotionally abused as a child,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Well, I think I would know… Really? Is that so?’

According to the young woman, it was not necessarily the case at all that a person would be aware of having been emotionally abused. She herself had been blissfully ignorant of the appalling truth until it was uncovered via hypnotherapy.

*

‘And what did he say to that?’

It was the following morning and the girl (whose name was Dove) was recounting the story of her party encounter with Bruce to Oliver and Dale on Coffee Time USA, the events of Oscars night having by that time turned anyone who had been with Bruce during the previous twentyfour hours into an important character witness and a soughtafter celebrity. All across the air waves, hatcheck girls and drinks waiters were offering their opinion on Bruce’s state of mind during the five or six seconds they had spent with him ‘one on one’.

‘He said that I must be very relieved,’ Dove replied, looking beautifully earnest and careworn.

‘Hang on, let me get this straight here,’ said Oliver, putting on his glasses. Oliver’s glasses did not actually have any lenses, because if they had they would have reflected his autocue. Nevertheless he always kept them close by and put them on whenever he felt it necessary to make it clear that he was feeling deeply sympathetic and extremely concerned.

‘Bruce Delamitri said you must be relieved to have uncovered hidden memories of emotional abuse?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘How d’ya like that guy!’