These days, I could use a good story assignment. Me, I've been writing freelance for a couple years. Since I got canned from doing entertainment features. That was good money, the press-junket stuff, puffing up quotes for movie launches, sharing a movie star with a tableful of media people for ten minutes, all of them trying not to yawn.
Movie premiers. Album releases. Book launches. It was a steady stream of work, but give the wrong opinion and you're off the gravy train. A movie studio threatens to pull their retail display advertising, and—abracadabra—your byline disappears.
Me, I'm broke because one time I tried to warn people. One movie, I wrote that people might do better to spend their money somewhere else, and since then I'm out of the loop. Just one summer slasher movie and the power behind it, and I'm begging to write obituaries. To write photo captions. Anything.
It's a bald cheat, building a house of cards you don't get to knock down. You spend all those years piling up nothing, creating an illusion. Turning a human being into a movie star. Your real payday is at the back end of the deal. Then you get to pull out the rug. Knock down the cards. Show the handsome ladies' man cramming a gerbil up his ass. Reveal the girl-next-door shoplifting and stoned on painkillers. The goddess beating her kids with a wire hanger.
The editor's right. So is Ken Wilcox. His life is an interview no one will ever buy.
For prep, the whole week before we talk, I surf the Internet. I download files from the former Soviet Union. Here's a different kind of child star: Russian schoolboys without pubic hair, sucking off fat old men. Czech girls still waiting for their first period, getting butt-fucked by monkeys. I save all these files to one thin compact disk.
Another night, I clip a leash on Skip and risk a long walk through my neighborhood. Coming back to my apartment, my pockets are stuffed with plastic sandwich bags and little paper envelopes. Squares of folded aluminum foil. Percodans. OxyContins. Vicodins. Glass vials of crack and heroin.
The interview, I write all fourteen thousand words before Ken Wilcox even opens his mouth. Before we even sit down together.
Still, to keep up appearances, I bring my tape recorder. I bring a notepad and pretend to take notes with a couple dried-out pens. I bring a bottle of red wine spiked with Vicodin and Prozac.
At Ken's little house in the suburbs, you'd expect a glass case crammed with dusty trophies, glossy photos, civic awards. A memorial to his childhood. There's nothing like that. Any money he's got, it's in the bank, drawing interest. His house is just brown rugs and painted walls, striped curtains on each window. A bathroom with pink tile.
I pour him red wine and just let him talk. I ask him to pause, then act like I'm getting every quote perfect.
And he's right. His life is more boring than a black-and-white summer rerun.
On the other hand, the story I already wrote is great. My version is all about little Kenny's long slide from the spotlight to the autopsy table. How he lost his innocence to a long list of network executives in his campaign to become Danny. To keep the sponsors happy, he was farmed out as a sexual plaything. He took drugs to stay thin. To delay the onset of puberty. To stay up all night, shooting scene after scene. No one, not even his friends and family, nobody knew the depths of his drug habit and perverted need for attention. Even after his career collapsed. Even becoming a D.V.M. was just to get access to good drugs and sex with small animals.
The more wine Ken Wilcox drinks, the more he says his life didn't start until Danny-Next-Door was canceled. Being little Danny Bright for eight seasons, that's only real the way your memories of second grade might seem real. Only blurry moments not connected. Each day, each line of dialogue was just something you learned long enough to pass a test. The pretty farmhouse in Heartland, Iowa, was just a false front. Inside the windows, behind the lace curtains, was bare dirt scattered with cigarette butts. The actor who played Danny's grandma, if they were speaking in the same shot, she used to spray spit. Her spit sterilized: more gin than saliva.
Sipping red wine, Ken Wilcox says his life now is so much more important. Healing animals. Saving dogs. With every swallow, his talking breaks up into single words spread wider and wider apart. Just before his eyes close, he asks how Skip is doing.
My dog, Skip.
And I tell him, Good, Skip is doing great.
And Kenny Wilcox, he says, “Good. I'm happy to hear it . . .”
He's asleep, still smiling, when I slip the gun into his mouth.
“Happy” doesn't do anybody any good.
A gun not registered to anybody. My hand in a glove, the gun in his mouth with his finger wrapped around the trigger. Little Kenny's on his sofa, stripped of his clothes, his dick smeared with cooking grease, and a video of his old show playing on the television. The real clincher is the kiddie porn downloaded to his computer hard drive. The hard-copy pictures of kids getting screwed, they're printed and taped to the walls of his bedroom.
The bags of painkillers are stashed under his bed. The heroin and crack buried in his sugar canister.
Inside of one day, the world will go from loving Kenny Wilcox to hating him. Little Danny-Next-Door will go from a childhood icon to a monster.
In my version of that last evening, Kenneth Wilcox waved the gun around. He bellowed about how no one cared. The world had used and rejected him. He drank and popped pills all evening and said he wasn't afraid to die. In my version, he
