Punksitawny

A Story

Punksitawny isn’t good or sophisticated by accident. We made it that way, Foster Hearn and I and our crew of six, cast of two, and the rubber and fibreglass dolphin that cost my father’s Jaguar to build. The background players, population of the Maine town where we shot the thing and that I’m still not allowed to mention, sued the movie out of the four cinemas that were playing it in New York and Los Angeles before it was supposed to go a little wider. We never got a proper home video release, even after Hearn made the demanded cuts to the original reel.

         The lack of a release was eroded by VHS pirates and eventually eliminated by the internet. The cut scene is somehow back in there, the boy’s white back floating in that lake-playing-ocean, Foster himself in the dolphin rig swimming up to him. Foster burned the negative a long time ago, if we can believe the camcorder ritual that he sent to Entertainment Tonight, which didn’t air it, then grudgingly to a few cult horror film festivals that did.

Foster and I weren’t seeing each other at all by then. And hey, we’d never been dating or together, either, something I’ve never clarified over the years. The bitterness of the capsule essay I wrote back in the late 90s for that magazine probably cemented the dating rumours on the yes definitely side, because who else but a spurned bitch who went on to hidden success in a lowlight area of the industry would be that nasty to an old collaborator. I wrote it that way partially because it seemed like they wanted gossip, not any consideration of Punksitawny as an artwork, or even as the snuff film it’s wrongly remembered as. The movie was two children and a different career behind me, so I dashed something out in an hour after a hard day spent inserting jokes into an awful script I was punching up.

         Punksitawny (1984)

I can’t discuss one of Foster Hearn’s movies without talking about how ugly he was personally. Six foot four and always in blue, suit or denim. A tiny squirrely face with the smooth surface of a chestnut. Always tanned and always with something shitty to say about the woman he was talking to, or about the woman he was telling her that he had just slept with. We were all delighted when Hearn got fat. Not because none of us were, not because we were in the part of movie world that cared about that, but because we knew how much it bothered him. Fat guys who used to be thin either go for draping cloaks and mu-mus from the Welles-Brando collection, or they keep wearing the same sizes and styles for as long as physics allows. Hearn was one of the graceless ones, pushing his pants further and further down his ass and legs until he was belting his Levi’s below his pubic bone so his gut could be accommodated. He couldn’t sit in public if anyone was behind him during his descent to the chair; it would be obscene.

         Sheila Ransom got into his medicine cabinet once and gave us a full report. Even then we weren’t sorry for him. He makes that impossible.

         Punksitawny is a punk nostalgia movie from before punk had really entirely vanished, and Hearn made it in homage to David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a movie you’d think he wouldn’t be able to watch to the end, let alone obsess over. The dolphin is misleading aquatic icing, and you’re watching it wrong if you only focus on the faux-snuff and the camp. That’s okay, though. There’s something to be gained from watching it wrong, too. And that last hour that Foster always talks about when someone makes the mistake of interviewing him? It doesn’t exist.

Most of that is accurate, except the clearly made up Brief Encounter and punk nostalgia stuff. It’s a dolphin movie, definitely. It’s also something more, but I can’t tell you what, as it’s not my job. I produced, wrote, and co-starred in it, but that’s exactly what makes me an unqualified critic, correct? All I can do is tell you about it, and that time I did it badly. Re-reading the piece, I’m embarrassed by how glib the meanness is. Anyone reading it couldn’t possibly believe that it was Foster who was the cruel one after those paragraphs. That sting about the lost footage, especially, Foster’s last shot at legacy-extension: I said it exclusively to hurt him, but he died in the months between my submission and the issue going to print. An insult that doesn’t get a chance to land with its target lives longer; it just hangs there.

 I used my primitive email program to send the thing in and then got back to work. That meant inserting four more jokes, one physical (fridge door breaks off revealing a 50 / 50 split of free range and Creme Eggs and absolutely nothing else) and three spoken (two clean and one dirty, the last involving those Creme Eggs and a thong slingshot), into a dead scene before Bill picked me up from the little hut-office I had at the edge of our Arizona property. I always walked down with my coffee and let him pick me up when he got back from his office in Flagstaff, where he acted as a stockbroker for three old New York friends of his that I constantly expected to be arrested. I was still angry, sitting under the small overlip of slatted roof that projected over the door, when Bill pulled up on his ATV. I chose to yell at him for bringing that instead of the Tercel we buzzed around the property on in winter.

“But it’s nice out, Cassie,” Bill said, mystified and trying to hang on to his smile, “High July. I wanted to get us a good breezing out.”

“When it’s this dusty it might as well be winter for how nice it is sitting on that thing with the wind beltsanding my fucking face.” Bill kicked the four-wheeler into reverse for a few feet, angling it around and then speeding back up to the house. I walked the mile, as I deserved to, but the walk felt more like penance to Foster than to Bill. I decided it was easier to forget the email than withdraw it. I never have forgotten it.

Foster was as nasty as I said he was in my little screed. We did all glory in it when his body started to fail his vanity, and his health and motivation were in no place to put it all back together. Me, Doug, Ron, Govinda, Alec Abel, everyone still left over from the Punksitawny shoot, we still got back together. Not to talk about the movie or what happened, but about Foster and what was happening to him. And we were cruel about it, we laughed. Those exorcising sessions made it possible for us to be what he needed when we saw him individually, always individually, in his apartment near the Rainbow, a rent-controlled place big enough to fit his collectibles, of which he sold a few every month to pay for food. Food meaning alcohol and a couple of desserts a day. Sara Lee Cheesecakes or moon pies, cartons of ice cream that he’d unbuckle precisely so the maple walnut came out as a single brick that he’d eat out of a popcorn bowl in front of the TV. Govinda saw my article. He subscribed to the magazine like I did—called me the day it hit mailboxes and asked how I was, but made no reference to the piece. I knew why he was asking, but we didn’t talk about Foster until the end of the call.

         “If anything it just made it seem like you miss him, a lot,” Govinda said. “Made me surprised you skipped his memorial.”

         “I don’t miss him. And I don’t want to allow him to become a tragic man-artist-martyr. If I can help it with a minimum of effort.”

         “It’s passion of one kind or another, that’s what I’m saying. Hate is passion, right?”

         “Profound. I was in a bad mood and I wrote a nasty thing that a proper editor would have politely sent back.”

         “I believe that, too. Infuriating motherfucker.” Govinda owned two wineries in California and a ranch in Montana, which is where he was calling from. The money came from the five movies he’d made after Punksitawny, the first a moderate sci-fi success for adults and the next four a kids’ series it had spawned about an intergalactic tournament for boys and girls with telekinetic abilities. We’d made a deal to suppress any mention of Gov’s involvement with Punksitawny after he became a legitimate directorial success, and even Foster had stuck to it, despite his carnivorous jealousy of Gov’s money. If the movies had been good, or even decent, Foster wouldn’t have been able to take it. The fact that they were generic, ripoff pablum that even my surgical story editing and punch-up couldn’t elevate allowed Foster to live with it. That and the handouts that Gov and I sent every few months.

         Foster hadn’t taught me anything about my craft, except how valuable it could be to me if I used it far away from him. Bill’s family money and salary contributed to everything we have now, to the school we sent Madison and Lucia to as well, but without my doctoring of scripts that had been born dead or brutalized by endless notes until no one could remember what they used to be or why anyone thought to have faith in them, there’d be no ranch, no Teslas, no Manhattan pied-a-terre, no used Tercel for us to simulate rusticity in while we tool around our property.

Foster used words well as a salesman, but his scripts were bad when they came to me, for the same reason his relationships and judgment were bad. He couldn’t place words correctly, especially in the difficult scenes. That’s why he made movies. I know that’s annoyingly simplistic, and I’d change this little declamation to something more nuanced if this were for the screen. But it’s true. Foster needed the pictures to get his point across. His talking and writing problems weren’t mental illness or autism. If you wanted to, you could fairly call them privilege. When he saw that pictures could do for him exactly what he wanted to express, right after he made Gazellican when he was nineteen, he stopped making the effort to talk beyond selling. He pitched his projects, his dick, and his vaguer visions of success. That meant the closer you got to him, the less he talked to you—there was nothing left on the selling block. When he was confident in your loyalty, in your understanding, he stopped hawking, stopped speaking.

         That reason, along with the expected kind of shock, is why we were quiet when Foster rolled the dead boy off the boat and into the water. We understood, even if we didn’t agree, and Foster taking the suit off Govinda and putting it on was his side of the conversation, his acceptance of the moral load before he swam up next to the boy, who floated, just the way he was supposed to.

         It’s happened other times in my life, and in yours too, this how-could-I frisson. Talking about this, about the boy, V----- W-------- as the newspapers called him and Vee as his mother screamed and the rest of the town spoke, I want to emphasize that it has nothing to do with anyone but myself. Not Vee, not Foster, not anyone else in the crew. The central players are indifferent, dead, over it, or me.

         It was Foster who worked on the boy on the sand. He was the only one who was qualified, in the years before everyone seemed to have accidentally picked up CPR or at least said they knew it. He had two years as a lifeguard at Pan Pacific Park Pool, where he used to write scripts up in his high chair, balanced like a lanky toddler over the waders, aquafitters, and kid swimmers. He once fished Robert Loggia’s daughter out of the deep end, reattaching her water wings and wiping the snot off her face while assuring her and her nanny that she wasn’t dead. Foster worked on Vee for five full minutes, minutes I remember by the second because I was counting them off, distilling my function in the movie’s life to a pure one of timing, rhythm, organization, and tacit encouragement.  When the boy’s chest remained still, when that coolness and chapped-lip texture to his skin didn’t bloom into life, Foster still kept going. After the five minutes Foster gave it another one, but I don’t count that. The last minute was to make absolutely sure that Vee was dead.

 Foster grew up in Maine, in a trailer park near Portland. About two miles from the coastal vacation town where we wanted to shoot, the one that would eventually unite to suppress our film. He proposed the idea of a tourist-friendly riff on Jaws to the council when we arrived in the summer of 1983, the year after a vacation season that had withered and deprived the town of crucial economic juice. A string of near-fatal food poisonings in May at one of the hotels, caused by high school student temp hires who didn’t know the difference between good shellfish and pure poison.

“Andy Warhol’s Jaws,” he said, opening his folder to the full-colour reprints of the soup can and the Monroe portrait, before flipping the page to the shark, the logo, and the Jaws box office returns.

“We’re going for a blend of the spectacular and the everyday—exactly what anyone would want out of a family vacation. Cassie and I haven’t set up our family quite yet, couple years out from that, so I’ll let you moms and dads tell me: is a fun riff on excitement, a danger-free version of a resort where something that goes wrong is actually going right, isn’t that exactly what you want out of a couple of weeks off or a couple of hours in the movie theater? I’m not going to sell you some guff about this movie putting your town on the map, because you don’t need that—you’re already on the map, in a big way, despite being itty bitty. But just lately, you’re on the wrong sort of map: we aim to pull you back to where you belong, your leadership and your city, with a few simple whispers. This is a small movie, mind you, the way Mr. Warhol started small, with canvases hanging in a gallery or a home or two. But imagine the negative power of a whisper campaign channeled into positive adulation for a movie and the town that birthed it. That’s what I’m offering you.”

In the heat of a sale Foster didn’t expand—he was too big for that, at 6’ 6 in his boots and the width he had before muscle waste tapered in his shoulders. When he sold he shrank, became intimate, local, closer to the ground and the people he was talking to. Salt from the air and his sweat settled into his only two wrinkles, deep ones at the corner of each eye. They glistered during his pitches, creating this bizarre fairy effect that I’m sure he was aware of. You never saw his hands anywhere near his face when he was on a business trip or doing a shoot in Maine. I came with Foster on that trip, active as a scout and producer and passive in the important role of his fake wife, attending the meeting with council and about a dozen dinners paid for with the entirety of an NEA grant I’d gotten to translate an Argentinian novel, work I’d done in college and hadn’t been able to find a publisher for. I figured the grant was my way of getting something out of the labor, and it wasn’t quite a dishonest exchange.

Everyone I saw in that Maine town was white, except for a black person or two glimpsed through the swinging door of a kitchen, and me. I was supposed to act as California sunlight made flesh, a dazzle for the politicos and business movers who could both give and cheapen the permits we’d need for our shoot, something to impress the cannery owners, get them to rub their overalls under the table and eye me while they missed the vagueness of Foster’s plans.

I’m borrowing from Foster’s verbiage here, with all its inaccuracies and regional hatreds, the kind that only a man who’d grown up in a place and then come back to it could really feel. The councilmen and business people all wore suits, of course, even if a couple of them did have a little too much polyester in the weave to suit even that decade. The one who actually did own a cannery was a kind forty-five-year old pastor’s son who asked if I was comfortable twice during Foster’s first pitch, the second time nodding and making an open hand gesture that only I caught, an invitation to signal for help if I needed it. I don’t know whether to take credit for it as a compliment on how servile I could look in a mini-dress and a blank gaze, or if Foster really was that repulsive to men of a certain type of substance.

Foster’s gift of seeing was exclusive to shooting, and as we got closer to a movie taking shape, getting off the page and into the camera, his observational skills and sense of people turned to utter shit. He didn’t notice that with my black hair and the cycling range of grey sweaters that I kept in my big purse to slide over the dresses once introductions were over, I looked more New York than California to these East Coast men. And it didn’t occur to him that they weren’t dumb rubes, and that they were willing to gamble on him because he couldn’t take anything from them that they didn’t offer up freely to start with. He was cheaper to them than a two-inch print ad in Travel + Leisure. He was free of charge.

The island where it started to happen, eleven days into our shoot, was also where Foster and Ron, our leading man, said they brought women after the fake rock shows we staged in town on the second two days of shooting. Real bands, bad ones from New York, played two sets apiece for gas money, food, and one of the baggies of California weed that Govinda had brought over in a binoculars case tossed in with his camera rig on the plane. I’d gotten everyone in our small crew to agree to do nothing beyond flirting with locals; even in a bad season, there were enough bored vacationers to find their kind of fun with.

Ron had left with a tan girl in a Bowie t-shirt who was having no luck talking to the lead guitarist in the first awful band (credited as “The Gores” in the Punksitawny credits, the ones who walk into the surf with their instruments and turn into mannequins that are Frankensteined by the dolphin into King Morocco, the multi-limbed plasticene hippie that the heroic kids defeat in the third act).

I asked Ron about the Bowie girl when we landed our boat on the island. It wasn’t on the ocean, no: we did a lot of our shooting at a coastal beach, but it was too cold in June or likely in any other month to properly swim there. Day 1 was bikini day, shots on the beach of me and about seven tourists and eight locals (probably high-schoolers, but we didn’t ask, since they were covered up enough anyhow) playing beach volleyball before the dolphin first surfaces, repeatedly scaring our wading extras, who were standing with frozen ankles and calves in take after take of Govinda surfacing in his wetsuit and the blue contraption that encased the front half of his body, leaving him blind and miserable. 

“Last week? Nothing happened with her,” Ron said. “Not with Foster’s, either. Foster and I just got talking about the next day’s shots and I guess the girls took that as a cue to leave.”

“They were bored.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Not to be arrogant but the guy talent out here isn’t exactly stellar,” Ron said, doing a handspring flip on the beach in front of me, landing with a little tumble and starting to fleck sand into the Greek-Italian mop on his chest, which he’d definitively wax off before the end of the decade. 

“Don’t play in the sand too much,” I called after Ron, who was doing his pre-shoot calisthenics interspersed with quick sprints, getting his blood going and a quick pump in all of his display muscles. “It’s poison.” This island was a false sandbar layered over decades-old garbage, supposedly toxic past a digging depth of 14 inches.

“Not toxic-toxic,” Foster said, already setting up the first shot on the list with Alec the DoP and Doug the lighting guy. “We used to swim out to here when we were kids all the time. Dares in elementary school and bonfires in high school. I used to spend whole days out here, even slept over, and I’m fine. No deformities.”

“Why d’you think you’re so tall?” Doug asked, sinking a lightstand into the beach and planting sandbags around each leg. “That’s not handsome-tall, it’s monster-tall. This shit seeped up through your feet and mutated your legs, zero doubt.”

It was sunny but too cold to laugh, so we kept working, and we all kept our shoes on. The two children turned up about an hour later, swimming up a little after Govinda buzzed over in the little boat with the outboard that Pearl Schiff, the ancient Development Officer of the town who’d worn a red or grey vest in each of our four visits, had lent us. “My son-in-law’s, but he stopped using it after his fishing accident,” she said, leaving it at that. We could have played that up more in the aftermath, a city official sticking us with a cursed boat.

 The kids who swam in after the boat were small boys, one Hispanic-looking and the other your standard model East Coast white, a little Tom Sawyer minus overalls. They went to the other side of the garbage island almost right away, barely looking at the lighting rig and not asking anything about the camera or the beached fiberglass dolphin. I remember thinking this was so weird, these two boys having zero movie curiosity, being from where they were. It’s not like they had their schoolbus delayed by CHiPs or Cagney & Lacey doing pick-up shots on the street every day in rural Maine. I was piqued by it, I don’t know. I was wearing the same red denim dress with the four pockets that I wore on every utility day of shooting, when I didn’t have to be in the scene, wrangle crowds or talk to anyone important. I’d already died in the movie by then, and since Foster had accepted my insistence that I rewrite the script in such a way that much of it could be shot in sequence, I was finished on camera. I fished around in the lower left pocket for the little info-card souvenir we’d made with the Punksitawny logo on it, the one that I handed out to lookie-loos who needed a silent push along. But the kids didn’t even ask for it or anything else we might have had when they came out of the water. Looking away without looking away on purpose, they got their legs back under them on the beach, the bigger browner one pretending he wasn’t winded and striding up and across the beach alongside his Coppertone pal.

I can’t detail the drowning, because I didn’t see it. That’s when kids drown, with no one watching. Doug and Alec Abel were doing all the establishing shots and had just started to shoot a couple of medium and close shots with Ron. The night before Ron had eaten three slices of cheesecake and drunk a six pack then stuck his finger down his throat, coming up from a parking lot pool of vomit to pat his six pack while the rest of us gagged in the back of Govinda’s Ford. Ron Zeiss went on to cash huge cheques from his Cerebral Commander role in Govinda’s space kid psychic movies, and now has a comfy role as an Admiral on a Napoleonic Wars show where he barely has to get out of a chair but still gets a solid 8 pages a week.

“Stop,” I said to Alec, pointing to Ron’s eyes, which were red and sunken a bit by the darkness under them, accented further by the angle of the sun. I got Visine and a foundation kit out of my bag and gestured Ron over. He lay down on the sand and shut his eyes for the first part, professional, unspeaking, easy to work on because of all the angles in his face. The living boy yelled right as I was starting with the eyedrops.

It was Foster who fished the Vee out of the ocean, too, before the CPR. He had his lips on the kid and his hands on his chest and back within two minutes of hearing that scream. Foster Hearn in lifeguard mode, with me calling the count. The other boy, whose name, Gus Salazar, I’m allowed to write in full, cried less, not more, the clearer it became that his friend was dead. We put Gus in blankets and sent him back on the first boat with our gear and Doug, who had a son and knew how to talk to or be silent with kids.

The rest of us carried the dead boy back to the beach. I can’t remember who it was exactly who held him as we walked to the small loaner boat we’d taken from Pearl Schiff, just that it wasn’t Foster or me. It was collective, probably, a couple of us taking turns. He was still Sawyer-like in death, sweet and American. The skin on his left ankle was torn up, pink and white gaps rimmed with red but not dripping. He’d gotten caught in a tow rope or in a metal hoop underwater. That’s not just what we guessed at the time, it’s what they officially figured out, once the Portland pathologist decided that the wound wasn’t post-mortem, that we weren’t responsible for it.

The little boat was too small for all of us: Ron, Govinda, Alec Abel, me, Foster, and the boy. Foster loaded him in, I remember that clearly. Tall and stiff like a Universal Monster in a tender moment, laying the kid lengthwise in the boat while we stood around and measured the space mentally, for how it could work. I was the strongest swimmer and had been eyeballing the distance to the shore since we’d arrived on the island, had told myself a few times that I could do it before any of this happened.

“I’ll swim and one other person should too. To make room.”

“Goddamn Doug left the dolphin rig behind, man,” said Govinda.

“So swim it back,” Foster said. “The gas tank is full on the motor, that’ll give you a boost.”

         “I’m not doing that,” Govinda said.

         “Yes, you are,” Foster said, looking away from the dead boy for the first time. The men were relieved at the prospect of a shoving fight, something to distract from the unstoppable realness of the dead boy in the boat, and their hope made me sicker than the prospect of violence.

         “No one’s hitting anyone,” I said. “Got that?” I pulled off the denim dress and threw it in back of the boat, walking into the cold water in bikini top and shorts, keeping going until I felt braced and numb instead of just freezing. I only hesitated when the water came over my collarbones and lapped at my neck veins, stopping blood traffic both ways for an imagined moment. When I looked back Govinda was putting on the parts of the dolphin rig that could be fitted on the shore, accepting assistance from Alec. Foster had vanished into the boat, and Ron was pushing it out. I started to swim, and when Foster tossed a lifejacket to me, I buckled it on while lying on my back and kicking my legs, hearing the whine of the dolphin engine start up a second before the small outboard of the boat did.

         They were all a good 30 feet ahead of me when they started to make the change. At first I thought Foster was jumping in to help Govinda with something, but in a few seconds that stupid, too-blue dorsal fin was off and floating, and the front straps of the rig unbuckled, the dolphin head immediately flipping up to face snout-first to the sun. Foster would have pulled him into the boat if they were going to fight, so seeing Govinda haul himself into the boat wasn’t a relief, just odd.

         Foster was still putting the dolphin head on when Alec slipped the dead boy off the boat, with gentleness, lowering him in without a splash. I’d gained on them by then, so I saw his Achilles grip on the kid let go, the boy floating and in Foster’s grip in another second. Govinda had the camera out and running, the sound of the 16MM camera or the illusion that I could hear it from my distance, locking a soundtrack that spoke of excitement and companionable work into the scene ahead of me.

I gained on Foster and the dead boy as the shot was half-finished, Foster nosing the corpse with the snout, but being careful not to roll the kid over. The body still looked white against the water, but if you looked close, his skin had gone the translucent blue of crystallized sulfur between the yolk and white of an overboiled egg. I pulled myself onto the back of the boat, rocking it and ruining Govinda’s steady hands but not his grip on the camera: he sat back hard to protect it from bucking it out of his hands and into the lake. Whatever I was screaming activated Ron too, and we got to see a preview of his Ron Zeiss A-list action persona that day. He knifed into the water and gripped the dead boy gently, then one-armed Vee’s entire weight into my hands. Alec and Govinda didn’t do anything. The boy’s eyes had opened, staring green. Something red was visible behind his teeth, either his tongue or blood. I pulled him into the bottom of the boat and closed his mouth. Waited for Foster to come back into the boat with excuses or to opt for the silence that Alec Abel and Govinda had chosen. We tied a rope to the dolphin rig while Foster climbed in.

The police didn’t have questions for us when we arrived, only a collection of blankets and a small roped-off section that we owed to Doug’s forerunning arrival with the other boy, Gus, who told his story to Doug, then to several police officers, then to the paper and a few weeks later on the radio.

“We swam around there all the time. Vee liked staying down the longest, like because we were pretending to be pearl divers. Sometimes he’d come up with stuff. Coke cans, forks. This time he didn’t come up after way too long. I saw his hair under me in the water so I pulled it, not even too hard, and he came up. He just came up like there wasn’t anything holding him there.”

Alec Abel has been in England for about twenty years now, mostly directing TV. It took longer for he and I to start talking again after the shoot. With Govinda I couldn’t be mad because I knew how pliable he was, at least before Punksitawny and up to that day on the water. That’s why Foster hired him: it was like growing an extra set of limbs and skills to carry out exactly what Foster wanted to do. Govinda was “just a big dumb organic camera,” Foster would say, often to him or in front of him while he talked to financiers or audiences.

Alec was a jobber, a talented one, but his very lack of investment in Foster’s films meant that he should have been the one to stop what happened. We had coffee in Mayfair a few months after 9-11, and that’s when I really asked him about it. Alec was still skinny and had always been grey, so it looked like he hadn’t aged at all when really he’d just gotten a head start on all of us by looking 45 when he was 22.

   “A disbelief thing,” Alec said, chewing on the lemon slice that had been floating on top of his tea. “That and I wasn’t needed for the shot. It was something that I was tacitly supposed to sit out, to watch. I’ve thought about it, a lot, and that’s what I think happened in me.”

“I guess that could work,” I said. My husband Bill was at the British Museum, pretending to research something or other for a book that he was also pretending to write at that time, and I wish I’d thought to ask him to be here with me when I talked to Alec, so I would never have brought Vee up.

“You’re doing a bit of excising yourself, Cass. It wasn’t the shot of the boy in the ocean that everyone was so exercised over. It was your little resurrection idea.”

“That was a real live actor-boy, Alec. It’s the dead kid that got us shit. Not the one we paid fifteen bucks to get fake CPR and play beach volleyball under a Kinks ripoff.”

“You never read that interview with the mother,” Alec put down the lemon slice and leaned back from the table, undoing a shirt button and massaging a spot on his bare chest with his right index finger. I hoped for a moment that a cancerous mole was itching him. It was blazing hot that day, right it the center of July, and the weight and thickness of my hair was an intolerable drag on my scalp and upper spine. I raked my fingers through it, deciding between a ponytail and pulling hard enough to uproot the whole works.

“I read everything I had to for the case.”

“This was after. Vee’s mum only realized that it was her son in the water scene when she saw our lookalike. He was in the same grade as her son, and the mothers were always making swinger jokes about Vee’s father and this boy’s, because the resemblance was very close. Closer than we intended. She came out to the weeklong launch run in their shitty little cinema before the New York and LA bookings. Sat in the 7 o’clock show, probably to punish herself, then noticed the resemblance in the resurrection boy. She stayed for the 9 so she could rewatch Punky prodding the floating boy in the water. Saw her son’s birthmark, and that was that.”

I must have known that before, but I’d stopped knowing it. My appetite, even for liquids, left me, and Alec noticed. He begged off, inventing a meeting he had to go to, and then did something truly kind: he eased two Valium out of a fold in his wallet and made some crack about how hard it was to get decent tranqs across the Atlantic. I wrapped the pills in a napkin and took them to the hotel room I was sharing with Bill, who shook me with an increasing sense of panic an hour later when he got back from the Museum, before I slurred awake and told him to fuck off back to his homework. When I woke up properly I apologized and asked about his day, handling his xeroxes and notes with something close to the care he’d gone to in assembling them.

         Foster refused to cut Vee’s scene out of the final edit, especially when we developed the reels and he saw how great it looked. We were doing the developing ourselves after 10 every night, set up in a printing shop on the town’s main street that was charging us by the hour to use their stuff. When we had the reels back in Foster’s motel room, Govinda silent in the corner and Ron out at the bars, I had to agree.

         “There’s something here,” I said to Ron. “I wish we’d never shot it, but we need it.” Ron, sitting on one of the beds but bent forward to stretch out his spine, grunted. He answered something, probably, but I was fixated on the projection, a quarter of which was bouncing off the wall mirror.

There was an authentic weight to the body on the waves that wasn’t offset by the ridiculous dolphin rig and the prodding of the fibreglass bottlenose: the plasticity and tackiness of Punky underlined how real and how dead the boy was, how fatal the placid chopless lakewater that filled the rest of the frame was. I’ve never seen anything like it, and will never write anything as good. Back then, I tried to, with that scene that Alec was talking about: bringing the boy back to life, having Govinda drag the underwater rig we’d devised for the camera against the bottom of the lake to capture the still float of our kid actor. On the shore we made it a prayer group scene, a gang of violent greasers stopping their verbal assault on some churchy teens to hold hands in a circle and pray around the dead boy until he became a living boy. I told Foster I’d quit him entirely unless that scene made final cut. He didn’t know as I did that it was over anyway for us, for all of us: that we could never make a movie again under his leadership, at least, and that all of our scattered collaborations afterewards would have a tinge of penance to them, even if that only meant that we were doing work we hated.

          I stopped visiting Foster a couple of years before Bill and I left LA for Arizona, partly because I couldn’t bear to go to his apartment, where the smells of pee and dust acquired new force with every visit. The last time I saw him, he was sitting by the pool at the Hollywood Hills Hotel, clean and wearing one of the hotel’s robes. I’d gotten a room for the week to do some undisturbed writing after a visit with a producer whose stalker-patient-serial-killer-doctor script I was fixing. When I saw Foster, I knew I’d be checking out right after lunch. I went up to him first.

         “You’re looking good,” I said.

         “Shouldn’t I be?” Foster was in a reclined pool chair, his big feet and skinny ankles hanging off the bottom into oblivion. His extended tallness flattened out the bulges he was so conscious of, enough that he didn’t want to prop up to shake my hand or kiss my cheek.

         “Of course you should be. Got a meeting here?”

         “No,” Foster said, preparing to lie, then giving up. I saw the brief play on his face and felt proud for not laughing. “Not anymore, I mean. This film studies guy out of USC wants Punksitawny stuff for a history of snuff doc he’s involved in. Went really far out of his way in to talk about how he doesn’t think we killed the kid or anything, but that it’s still a landmark in the ‘history of American screening and tape-trading of real death.’”

         “You didn’t tell him to fuck off?”

         “I sold him what’s left of the negative. I did tell him that he’d do well to watch the whole movie instead of just theorizing to death over one goddamn scene.”

         “It is the best part of the movie,” I said. “It just doesn’t stand alone.” He grunted and eyed my beer: a cold, full bottle of Beck’s, sweating against my hand. I handed it over.

         “Comforting me?”

         “I wouldn’t do that,” I said. It would have been a good time to make an exit, but I wanted the rest of my beer after his sip, and there was more to talk about. I forget the rest of what we said to each other, just that it was conclusive. And that Foster kept tight hold of the bottle in his left hand, the one furthest from me, opening his mouth wide when he took sips, so I could see the yellow ruins of his teeth and the slow red tongue behind them.