Popcorn

their hair set in concrete and their brains sucked out along with their cellulite.’

It was scarcely a comment calculated to endear him to his media colleagues, but that was Bruce. Tough, sarcastic and a bit of a stirrer. If you wore a leather jacket and shades on TV at nine in the morning, you were almost dutybound to be abrasive. In fact, Bruce had guessed that Dale would not hear his answer anyway. He could see she was the type of interviewer who used her guests’ answers as quiet time in which to consider her next question.

‘Good, good, you should make that point on air,’ said Dale absently, checking her eyeliner.

‘Fifteen seconds on the break,’ said the floor manager. Four, three, two, one…

Oliver’s face lit up. ‘We’re talking to Bruce Delamitri, the hot tip for tonight’s “Best Director” Oscar. But amidst all the glory and the adulation there lurks very real controversy.’

Dale picked up the ball. ‘Bruce Delamitri’s movies are hard, tough, witty, sassy streetwise thrillers, where the life is low and the body count is high. Remind you of something?’

‘You tell me, Dale,’ said Ollie, deploying his serious and thoughtful face.

‘How about America ’s streets?’ said Dale, looking equally portentous. ‘That’s right, the streets of America, hard, tough and dangerous, where the kids grow up fast and dying is a way of life.’

‘You’re saying that the movies of Bruce Delamitri reflect the streets of America?’

‘Some say reflect, some say influence. America, it’s your call. We’ll be back after these messages.’

The studio lights dimmed again. Oliver and Dale went dark and shuffled their papers.

‘Do you have sensitive teeth? Does icecream make you go ow! when you should be going mmmmm?’

Chapter Two

On the morning after it all happened, a young woman, hardly more than a girl, stared across a bare formicatopped table at an interrogating police officer. She was being interviewed in the nextdoor room to the one in which Bruce was being questioned. Unlike Bruce, however, the young woman was considered highly dangerous and was therefore in chains, her thin wrists manacled to her almost equally thin ankles. In fact, so petite was she that it looked as if she could have slipped off the steel bracelets if she had wished and just floated away on the next breeze. She was indifferent to whether they chained her or not. She had nowhere to go anyway.

‘Name?’ said the policewoman.

*

On the previous morning, this same skinny creature had been asked the same question in the diner of a truckstop motel just off the Pacific Highway, about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles.

‘I been called a lotta things,’ she had replied.

The shortorder chef with whom she was conversing gave her a knowing wink. ‘I’ll bet one of them things wuz beautiful.’

The Chef was right. She was beautiful, with her big eyes and thin face. If ever Disney decided to do a stage version of Bambi they would be looking for a girl like her.

The young woman accepted the chef’s compliment with a giggle. ‘Are you flirting with me?’ she asked, twisting her purse in her hands like a nervous girl.

‘Ain’t nuthin wrong with talking to a pretty thing, is there?’ said the chef.

‘I guess not. ‘Cepting you’re lucky my boyfriend cain’t hear ya. On accounta he’s real mean when it comes to flirty guys. Specially Californian guys, who he reckons is just a bunch of nogood faggots.’ The young woman picked up her change, which was lying on the counter.

‘His name’ (pause) ‘is Bruce Delamitri.’

It was Oliver Martin’s voice. A TV hung from a bracket in the corner of the room, and the waitress had turned up the volume. She liked Coffee Time USA.

‘He is probably the most celebrated artist working in the motionpicture industry today. A great writer, a great director. Hollywood ’s golden boy.’

‘I heard he makes a great pasta sauce too.’

Oliver and Dale were working their morning magic. Their guest, Bruce Delamitri, smiled sardonically out of the TV set. The girl at the counter turned to look. For a moment she and Bruce stared into each other’s eyes. Much later, the girl would wonder whether she had felt something at this point.

The chef was not interested in Coffee Time USA. ‘You say your fuckin’ boyfriend says I’m a faggot?’

‘He don’t mean nuthin by it,’ the scrawny girl said apologetically as she gathered up her Cokes and burgers and fries and headed for the door. ‘It’s just he’s so tough and hard ‘n’ all that I guess pretty much everybody looks like a faggot to him.’

‘You come back soon, little girl. I’ll show you who’s a faggot,’ said the chef. ‘Bring your boyfriend.’

‘He’d kill ya,’ the girl remarked casually over her shoulder as the screen door slammed behind her.

‘Tonight is Oscars night,’ said the television set.

*

‘So tell us about last night,’ said the policewoman on the following morning.

‘Well, I guess he kinda got the idea when we was having breakfast and Bruce Delamitri was on Coffee Time with Oliver and Dale. We wuz in a motel, see. I like motels. They’re so clean and nice, and they give you soap and stuff. If I got the chance, that’s where I’d live all the time, motels.’

*

The girl walked across the parking lot from the diner to where the line of chalets stood. There had been a summer rain storm and she was barefoot. She sought out the puddles. Warm water on warm tarmac was a lovely sensation. She had very sensitive feet. Sometimes, if they were touched just right, it could make her entire body shiver. She was always trying to get her big tough boyfriend to give her feet a massage. She might as well have asked him to crochet a toiletroll cover.

‘I don’t believe in no New Age, faggot, hippy bullshit,’ he would say, ‘which in my opinion is eating away at the soul of this great nation and turning us all into old fuckin’ women. Now get me a beer.’

There were certain subjects on which he was entirely intractable, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t be tender and gentle when he wanted to be, and when he was, oh how she loved him.

She entered their little cabin with the food. He was lying on the bed where she had left him, a gun resting on his chest and another at his waist.

‘Here’s the food, honey. Seeing as how it’s breakfast, I got you a bacon burger. I told him to be sure to grill that bacon good. I know you don’t like eating no raw pig.’

‘Quiet now, honey. I’m watching TV here.’

On the television Bruce Delamitri was working on his indulgent smile. ‘Copycat killing? Purlease!’ he said. ‘I mean, come on! The whole thing’s a media beatup, the story du jour. Four networks in search of a controversy.’

Bruce could be his own worst enemy at times. You didn’t sneer at the presenters of Coffee Time. Not if you wanted to win the hearts and minds of Middle America, which was the purpose of Bruce’s appearance. Many of Coffee Time’s viewers saw Oliver and Dale as their closest and most loyal friends, and did not take kindly to cleverclever, sneery filmschool grads acting like these friends were dumb.

Oliver sensed the atmosphere of the interview souring. He knew that ‘atmospheres’ of any kind were not good morning TV, and he always desperately sought common ground with his guests.