Fiction by Zach Vasquez

Derelict on All Fours

Back where you started.

Hands and knees. Gotta crawl before you walk. How it is for everyone. Only you’re not a kid anymore. You’re an old man, if not so old as you look. Staring in the mirror, Christ, it’s like Peepaw staring back at you. A preacher by trade, taught you the good word and how to testify to it. He made it to how old before a stroke finished him off? Can’t remember exactly, but older than you by a considerable goddamn number and already you’ve had two yourself. And but how old are you, exactly? You’re not so drunk, tell me you’re not so goddamn drunk, Jack, can’t even remember how old you are. Old enough to know you got no business being on your hands and knees in the can in this Pasadena flop.

Pasadena, Christ. Talk about back where you started, 25 years and however many spills ago. A kid off a bus didn’t know shit from Shinola, Pasadena might as well have been Hollywood Blvd far you were concerned. Might as well have been the center of the universe. To you it was the center of the universe, at least until you learned there ain’t no center of the universe when the bottom fell out from under you. No center, nothing to hold onto.

But don’t you go blaming the universe for that, Jack. Even there was a something to hold onto you wouldn’t have been able to hold on to it because you never been able to hold onto anything—not family, not a woman, not sobriety, not your so-called career. Can’t even hold onto three lines in a teenybopper horror flick, one day on set before they cut you loose because you’re too goddamn drunk to stand up let alone deliver your three lines. Can’t hold onto your room at The Hollywood Historic, 10 years you’ve been there, because finally after all that time you tie one on so bad you decide to empty your pistol into the TV set because goddamn Sam Donaldson won’t stop yapping at you from inside it. You miss The Hollywood Historic, sure, but Sam Donaldson. Christ, what else could you do?

Yeah, but so now look at you—practically derelict living if you can call it that in the worst flop on the worst block in the worst stretch of Pasadena, on your hands and knees next to the toilet because you couldn’t even hold onto the sink.

Derelict on All Fours. Good name for the movie. Have to mention that to Leo when you see him later.

Except, no, you already saw Leo. You just now come from seeing Leo and Katy, were just talking to them over coffee and hash at Shaker’s. So what are you doing on the floor then? How’d you get from there to here?

Seriously, Jack: how did you get here?

Think hard. Katy and Leo. Shaker’s Coffee Shop. Katy’s jaw on the floor soon as you walked in.

Oh Jack, what’s happened now?

It’s nothing, just a little bruise.

Little? Little, Jack? Have you even looked in the mirror? There’s a half-moon floating over the entire right side of your face.

Leave off, will you? It’s not all that bad.

What’d you do, Jack, walk into the wall?

No. I did not walk into the goddamn wall. I got hit.

You got hit? Someone hit you?

That’s what I said.

Who? Who hit you, Jack?

Think now. Try to remember. It was the middle of the day. Bright summer day. Your angel of a mother puts a penny in your palm, tells you go get yourself an ice cream, baby. You kiss her on the cheek and dart off down the street. That street is your entire world. It and you are one and the same so what need is there to look both ways when crossing? Don’t see the car until it’s right there, right on top of you. Next you know, you’re stuck inside the wheel well listening to your mother screaming your name. Never heard her scream before. That scares you more than the pain. You want to tell her it's alright, that you still have the penny, it’s still in your hand, that you held onto it…

You’re mixing things up again, Jack. That was a different time, a different hit. First of fucking many. Three months in a neck brace, young and strong enough to recover though your back never fully healed. Muscle seizures come and go by their leave like the fist of God with no warning reaching down and clenching you by the spine. Lays you up for days on end. Only kid in grade school with a bad back. See, Jack—you were never not old.

So much for ever playing high school football like the old man or big brother Bill. That’s alright, gotta be other ways to score. Grok the flyer they got posted on the school bulletin board, couple cute girls jotting their names down on the sign-up sheet.

Spring Production: Auditions Now Open

Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.

We live inside a dream. Old Bill Shakespeare knew this. David knows this. Shakespeare and David, two most important men in your artistic life. Years between meeting them you come to know it too only you had to go and wake up.

Those first five years out of school it was all dream. Dream and love and art and sex and possibility and play. The theater first, then Catherine. A mountain of a woman, tall and strong like one of those Valkyries your forebears used to do the five-knuckle shuffle to. Nicest pair of knockers you ever seen on a woman. Not the biggest, mind you, but the nicest; supple, soft, but firm. Kinda like Catherine herself. She loved showing them off, too, to everyone and anyone. Part of her maternal nature, what attracted you to her but made you two such a poor fit. But poor fit or no, you were inevitable, like Benedick and Beatrice or Katherina (ha!) and Petruchio. Circling one another for weeks, never speaking until finally after one of The Company’s performances, night you took the lead in the big production (It is not true that drink alters a man’s character…it may reveal it more fully), after the afterparty and you too drunk to make it home, about to crash out on someone’s couch when suddenly there she is, Catherine, big as life standing over you. Lording over you.

You’re Jack, right? I’ve been wanting to meet you.

You stare up at her and pull back the blanket.

Get in.

Anyways, that’s how you remember it. She tells it different but then she always had her version of things. Like in the divorce complaint: mental and physical cruelty. And you’re not saying there wasn’t any truth to that, but who between the two of you gave it and got it worse? Who come out with more scars? Like that time on set with David and crew, shooting in front of those stables, Catherine jumping down your throat all day and past wrapping, wouldn’t let up, Christ, until finally you snapped at her: Hey! Horseface! Get. In. The. Barn.

Next you know you’re flat on your ass, another big hit, blood pumping out from your nose not only where she busted it with her damned uppercut but from where she sliced open the right nostril with her wedding band (poetic, you gotta admit).

David helping you up tells you, You’re in such bad shape, Jack. You’d be real easy to kill, you know that?

You tell him that’s nothing. Played a dead man on stage one time for a show that ran three days straight, the whole time not counting bathroom breaks you up there lying completely still in a pine box. To this day your greatest and truest performance.

Not the one you’ll be remembered for though, if they remember you at all (big if). That would be David’s movie, his first, his baby—The Baby, as you’ve taken to calling it. Glorified student film or so you think when Catherine first tells you about it. Ready to give up on acting altogether at this point—Sixties are over, scene’s dead, everyone you know from The Company strung out or washed up, yourself included, or else waiting tables to make ends meet like Catherine. You tried the movies but missed out on your big break. Big breaks, the hits this time coming in a one-two combination. Up for the lead in the one about the lost college kid (You’re trying to seduce me…), but they give it to that short hotshot Hoffman. Say you’re too dark, too brooding, too angry. No time to mourn before you’re up for the next big role, real-deal cold-blooded killer. (I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat.) Even better a part, one you know you got what it takes to play, all the requisite darkness and brooding and anger, until they go and give that one to another pipsqueak, Bobby Blake, though granted he was probably even more right for it than you. Strange guy, Bobby. You and him, it's like looking through a mirror darkly as the book says, only it’s hard to tell in this case which side is more smudged. Hard to tell, too, whose career took a bigger shit over the years. And but now you’re both in David’s new picture, his Road Movie, only Bobby has the bigger part, some kind of strange phantom dressed all in black and caked in Kabuki makeup. He’s good in it too, you seen the assembly cut. (In the east, the far east, when a person is sentenced to death, they’re sent to a place where they can’t escape, never knowing when an executioner may step up behind them and fire a bullet into the back of their head…)

Not that you’re complaining about the size of your part, funny little grease monkey with a taste for jazz music. You come to appreciate playing these fringe figures. They after all are your people. Someone needs to speak for them.

And but by the time you first meet David you still think of yourself as a Great Actor and Leading Man and if Hollywood don’t see that then to hell with the whole crooked damned enterprise. There’s a correspondent’s class for hotel management you’re eyeing. Pass it you can land a steady paycheck, $150 a week plus room and board.

Just go talk to him Catherine pesters you until finally you agree just to get her off your back. That first meeting with David goes over about as well as a fart at a funeral, you thinking the whole time this Eagle Scout don’t know the first thing about directing, him probably smelling the previous night’s booze still on you. Tells you about this picture he wants to make but damned if you can make heads or tails of it. Wants you to play a guy with giant hair saddled with some mutant baby. You fall in love with a moonfaced woman lives inside your radiator and sings to you nightly (In heaven, everything is fine…). In the end, they lop off your head and use it to make pencil erasers. Whole thing’s to be shot in black and white like an old movie, like the one told by the ghost of a Hollywood hack about the washed-up actress driven to madness and murder. (I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.)

At meeting’s end you and David say goodbye, no expectations on either end you’ll meet again until walking him out to his ’68 Volkswagen you mention something about how you like the rack he’s got set up on its roof, 4x8 and sturdy, boy, made from real strong cherry oak. Ask him where he bought it and offended-like he tells you he built it himself with materials scavenged from an abandoned construction site he happened upon back in Philly where he just come from. You yourself are an okay handyman, shop being the only class you ever paid any attention to in school save drama and an ace dumpster diver to boot which gets you two talking, really talking, and next you know its four years later and you’re still shooting David’s Baby, you and David and Catherine who he puts behind the camera, and also Spike, which is the name you give the baby within The Baby, the most wondrously disgusting thing you’ve ever seen, this slick spermatozoa-looking monstrosity that David in his usual strange fashion refuses to confide in you as to how he made it. Rumors amongst the crew say it’s a skinned lamb fetus he’s been keeping on ice. Seems like bullshit to you but with David you never can tell. Like the time he tells you he happened upon–or rescued, how he put it–these five Woody Woodpecker dolls at some gas station in the middle a nowhere, brought them home and gave them each their own name (Chuko, Buster, Pete and Bob) until one day they started, as he phrased it, showing off traits that weren’t so nice so he had to get rid of them. David, ever the dreamer. 

And but now it’s going on four years of you and Catherine and David pinching every penny and squirreling away every spare dime, all of it going to David’s Baby save for what you double-secret squirrel away and put towards drink. Four years you have to keep your hair in this ridiculous square afro, everywhere you go people gawking at you. Look like a clown who’s off the clock. One day, Jack, David assures you, people are going to pay good money to get their hair like that. Yeah, you tell him, at which time I’m leaving the goddamn country.

That cut never did catch on, but David’s Baby surely did. Adopted straight away by a cult of heads and midnight movie freaks. David all of a sudden a hot commodity, Hollywood calling. Tried to bring you along for the ride, wanted you to play the lead in his next picture, British tearjerker about a real-life sideshow freak, part-man, part-pachyderm. (I am not an animal! I am a human being!) Studio execs of course wouldn’t hear of it. Back to bit parts for you, Jack.

Back to the pits and all alone this time, Catherine long gone by now not that you blame her. And but here’s where the drinking goes from bad to something beyond. Waking up in strange places all the time now, vacant lots and park benches and back alleys all across the city, Sunset and Doheny and Santa Monica and Santa Fe, until one day you wake up in your own bed thank Christ but in the worst pain you ever felt in your life up to that point and with your belly ballooning like you’re with child. All those years Catherine praying for a kid and nothing doing, but now this? What is this, God? you ask. A miracle or just some kind of sick joke? Or is there a difference? Call up David who drives you to City General where the first thing they ask is when was your last drink? The fucking nerve of them. They ask you again and David tells you to tell them so you do.

David on the car ride home tells you what they told him: Your friend is an alcoholic. He is 34 with the body of a 50-year-old. He has liver spots. He is going to keep drinking until he dies or he decides he wants to change. We’re giving him pain pills which he’ll probably try to take all at once. That’s just the way it is.

The way it is for another five years, that whole slice of time one big amniotic blur of late-night boozing. You work as a hotel security guard for your liquor money, taking whatever measly roles come your way maybe two-three times a year. David gives you work in his next two pictures, one a big budget outer space soap opera (Father, the sleeper has awakened!) which comes out dead on arrival and nearly kills his career, the next his comeback and breakthrough, a real-deal masterpiece of suburban fear and menace. (You know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet from a fucking gun, fucker!)

It’s on this picture you meet D-Man, legendary wildchild of Tinsel Town whose own drunken antics make you look like a temperance teetotaler. But this is D-Man newly and against all odds sober. Back from oblivion and obscurity, giving the greatest performance of his life. You get to work alongside him several scenes. It’s an honor and a revelation and you can’t help but wonder what could be if you were ever to dry out. Never too late, Jack, D-Man tells you between takes. You’re serious about quitting drinking, you just give me a call. Man, if I can change anyone can change.

And but then one night you decide to call his bluff. Comes up to your hotel, finds you standing on a chair in the center of the room, one side of the noose looped around the ceiling fan, the other around your neck. Lightning storm raging outside. You think I won’t do it? Hang up on me Jack and just see if I don’t.

No. That’s not right. That was a different room, a different night.

Not a noose but an open window, five stories up. Hanging halfway out, empty bottle in one paw you let drop, count how long it takes to hit the ground. You’re a fair bit heavier, so you’ll be quicker. Or slower? How’s that work exactly, gravity?

D-Man inside trying to coax you back from the ledge. Back to what? No more booze inside the room and all the stores are closed.

Let me take you somewhere to dry out, Jack.

           Fuck that, D-Man. I’m thirsty. I’m so fucking thirsty I might as well jump.

Jack, place I want to take you, man, like, they don’t make you go cold turkey. They wean you, man. Wean you off the stuff, little-by-little, you dig?

Saying I go with you, they’ll give me a drink?

            Wouldn’t lie to you, Jack. They’ll get you wet, man, before they get you right. I promise. Scout’s fucking honor.

And stupid you, you believe him.

I just want to change or die.

How she puts it in group the night you meet her. Kelly Jean. Of all the hits yet, you can already tell this one’s gonna hurt the most.

But you get seven years sober and two of them good. First five it’s just like they drill into you in group: ODAAT. The future ain’t real, the past is where you left it. Just got to take things One Day At A Time.

One Day At A Time means saying no to things come your way that you want but can’t afford. A good role in a good picture, end of the world picture set in your stomping grounds of the Miracle Mile. (I think this is it for us. I think it’s the insects' turn.) They ask for you, Jack, by name, don’t even got to read for the part but you tell them you want to read anyway, set it up only so’s you can explain to them, face-to-face, that you can’t take the part because you just got hired on at The Valley Inn as night manager and the shoot will interfere with your work schedule. Look on their faces it’s like someone just took a shit in their cereal. They say they understand but you can tell they don’t.

And but then here’s David calling. Jack, we’re moving to television, come with, be a part of The Show. (She’s dead, wrapped in plastic…) This one you can’t say no to because you can never say no to David. Not only that—this is recurring, assuming the show gets picked up, a big if, not your first dalliance with the boob tube but then next you know not only is it picked up it’s a hit, more than a hit, it’s a rocket ship. Ratings through the roof. Magazine covers. People stopping you in the street to ask for autographs. Family members previously wanted nothing to do with you, disinvite you from Christmas dinner, suddenly calling you up begging you to come to little Timmy’s 10th birthday party. Your brother Bill who never turned his back on you no matter how many times you called at two in the a.m. to come pick you up from the drunk tank tells you to tell them to stick it where the sun don’t shine. But no, you miss them, the family. Always that was a comfort to you and no matter their reasons if they want you back in the fold you want it too.

David brings Catherine along too and in front of the camera this time. You and her, famous at last. Almost two years since last you seen one another. First day on set she knocks on your trailer door.

It’s good to see you, Jack.

Catherine, you’re gonna haunt me ‘till the day I die, aren’t you?

But now that day for the first time in a long time seems a long ways off. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You and Kelly Jean. Knockout Kelly Jean, type of woman you’d see hanging off the arm of all those young hotshots at the top of the call sheets. An actor herself come from a line of Hollywood royalty but fallen on hard times which you selfishly are glad for because it’s the only way you ever would have met her, but like you she’s on the wagon now taking the straight and narrow. Your success is her success which is only right since you are engaged to be man and wife. You must have fallen asleep, Jack, because it’s all dream again. And but this time you know better than to wake up.

Except it’s not up to you, Jack. The dreamer don’t choose when the dream ends nor how long it lasts. And somewhere within this golden dream there is something coming, a shadow, shadow of some sudden violence on just the other side of the horizon which like the sun in the morning ain’t nothing you nor anyone else can do to stop.

Troubling rumblings behind the scenes of The Show. Empty suits at the studio start sending in their damned notes. Ratings aren’t what they were. David away most the second season shooting a new picture. Brings you onboard for one scene (My dog barks, some. Mentally you picture my dog, but I have not told you the type o' dog which I have. Perhaps you might even picture Toto from The Wizard of Oz. But I can tell you, my dog is always with me…) but back at The Show his absence is felt. And Kelly Jean is drinking again.

Tries to hide it at first, but there’s no fooling an addict of your vintage. Tells you it’s nothing serious just a nip here and there to take the edge off things. We’re not all big TV stars like you, Jack. Some of us gotta face the facts of our failure every time we lay our head to pillow at night and lift it in the morning and that as you know is much easier a prospect with a drink or two or ten in you.

And but you tell her you understand, trust me my love, more than anyone. You were not a 1-stepper who never backslid. You had your relapses, especially early on. Know how hard it is and don’t expect perfection from anyone let alone her with whom you exchanged the vow in sickness and in health and meant it. But you got questions. Questions such as where did those track marks on your arm come from? And those—are those hickeys? There, right there, on the nape of your neck and just above the left nipple and all along the inside of your right fucking thigh. No I am not crazy. No I am not jealous. I am merely asking what if not hickeys are they? And why is it we haven’t made love in two weeks? Don’t give me you don’t feel like it, it’s obvious, dear, very obvious, that you’re waiting for something. Something like what? Like, I’m just going to say it, like a test result, maybe. Oh don’t you go acting all offended. David told me how you and your floozy friend were conducting yourselves at the holiday party, I step outside for a smoke or to go hit the head and suddenly you’d be all over some other guy. And now I’m hearing…I can’t even repeat it…I’m hearing about some movies you’ve been making. No, I did not say that. I did not use that word, accuse you of that, not that, my God, I’m just telling you what I heard from someone who heard from someone else and well how the hell do you expect me to act when I hear shit like that? If you’d just tell me the truth for once goddamnit in your life because babe, I gotta tell you, if this is the best acting you can muster then I can see why the only movies anyone’s willing to put in are the kind where all they want you to do is suck and fuck.

And but now you’re in the right hotel room, light inside the room flickering even as outside its raging, giant bolts of blue electricity stabbing at the black sheet of night from every angle. Thunder and rain too, a torrent like from out Genesis, chapters 6-9. (Everything on earth shall perish…) Middle of the night, middle of nowhere. Past three weeks spent lakeside shooting this summer camp romp. (Another panty raid, Trip?) The Show over, canceled. Kelly Jean back home no longer even trying, no longer bothering to pretend, drunk or high or both every time you two talk over the phone. You know it’s over even if you can’t bring yourself to say it. Still love her, still want her, God, want her like you didn’t know it was possible to want anyone or anything other than a drink. And like a drink the thought of going without makes you feel like you might just die even as you know that taking it means you’ll die for sure and sooner rather than later. But death isn’t your play. It's hers.

If this is quits, Jack, just say so. Stop being such a fucking coward and say it.

           That’s enough, Kelly Jean.

           I swear you’ll be sorry. I’ll fucking kill you, Jack, if you leave me.

           I told you before Kelly Jean, I won’t talk to you when you’re like this. I’ll call you in the morning.

           What, you think I’ll be sober in the morning? You’re a fool, Jack.

           Goodnight, Kelly Jean.

No. No, I won’t kill you, Jack. I’ll kill myself.

           Kelly—

           I’ll kill myself, Jack. I mean it. You know I mean it.

You do know it too, can hear it in her voice, that resolve that no matter how stoned or juiced she is cannot and will not be broken. The most stubborn and in some ways honest woman you’ve ever known.

I’ve got rope, Jack. Did you know that? I went out and bought a single piece of rope, just long enough to do it. I measured and everything. So if you’ve made up your mind, if you’ve decided—

Stop this, Kelly Jean. Nothing’s decided. I just can’t talk to you when you’re like this, that’s all. Let’s please just talk in the morning.

I don’t want to talk in the morning you asshole! I want to talk now!

           Please, Kelly Jean, I can’t—

           You think I won’t do it? Hang up on me Jack and just see if I don’t.

Something in her voice. That resolve. You believe her. You do. You try to tell her as much only you can’t because the second after she airs the threat, less than a second, a millisecond, a microsecond, a measure of time so small as to be incalculable a bolt of lightning hits a power grid so that all the electricity not just in the building but the entire town including the phone lines cuts dead.

You stare dumbstruck at the receiver for you don’t know how long. It don’t matter. Time you manage to stand up and walk out your room, walk three doors down the hall and knock on Bob the director’s door and tell him what’s happened you’re sure she’s already swinging. Time it takes you and Bob to find a working phone at a police station three towns over, driving through those long winding snow-slicked mountain roads through this squall it’s some kind of miracle (or just another sick joke?) you two don’t crash and snap your own necks, only settles the knowledge in your guts like swallowed gum. It’s another two hours before the lone deputy on duty hears back from the L.A. cops who confirm it: She’s gone.

Next morning back at the hotel, before one of the P.A.s ferries you back to Los Angeles and the rest of your life which to hell with ODAAT you can’t help but picture as a void, a giant gaping black ice cold nothing, someone knocks on your door. Open it and there’s Bob not four hours since last you saw him looking tired and sick and scared. Takes him a minute to say what he’s come to say. Think he’s about to cut you from the picture even though you told him you only need a few days to get things in order and then you’ll be back. But that’s not why he’s come.

Jack, you got some guns with you, I’m told.

           Yeah.

           I’m a friend, Jack. Let me have the guns.

           It’s all you can do to shake your head. The guns. Jeez, now why didn’t you think of that?

Who hit you, Jack? 

Let me think, goddamnit. It’s all scrambled up. Kelly Jean—no, she wasn’t the one who done it. Gone now five years. Her and the kid both. Didn’t know about the kid at the time. Don’t know if she knew. Don’t know if it was yours or not. Probably she didn’t know that either. Well, you’ve heard worse excuses to drink but still you managed to abstain for another year or so, right up until one morning you open your eyes and you just know. Know there is not a thing on God’s green earth can stop you from taking a drink. 

The timing for once worked out well. Rolling blackouts coming on regular now and not always during a drunk. Black out sober or close to it in front of Katy one afternoon. She drives you over to the hospital where the doctors run their tests, scan your brain, surprise surprise, they find a clot. Nothing for you to do but wait around for it to do what it was put there to do. Might as well have another drink. 

And but it’s surprising what-all you can lose even when you think you got nothing left to lose. Your place, your latest job, this friend who you come at with a fork, this other friend you make a fool of yourself declaring your love for. Time. Lose track of time all the time now, drinking or no. 

Only thing left is the creative spark although spark is maybe too strong a word. Embers, more like. Katy’s idea. You should write your own movie, Jack. You and Leo together. Movie about your life.

God, but wouldn’t that make for a depressing picture.

           It wouldn’t have to, Jack. You could always give it a happy ending.

           Katy, my girl, I don’t know the first thing about science fiction.

Alright, smart-ass, don’t give it a happy ending then. Give it the biggest bummer ending anyone’s ever seen. It would still make for an interesting story.

You grouse some more but don’t nix it outright. Movie about your life. Not the worst idea you ever heard. Couldn’t be worse than a couple of ones you made already. Leo helping to write it, David to produce, Bob maybe to direct? Not the worst idea, no siree.

And but who would play you, Jack?

Why, you’d play yourself, of course.

Yeah, but only if you manage to live long enough.

You don’t think we could?

At the rate we’re going?

Well, that cuts it. You’ve decided: you will live long enough to see this thing through.

That means getting well, Jack. Means drying out.

Done it before. And anyway, would just need to dry out long enough for this one last performance. Your greatest performance, the one they’ll remember you for. Hey, how’s this for a title? Derelict on All Fours.

It’s not bad, Jack. Where’d you get it from?

Can’t remember exactly, it just come to you all of a sudden. But that’s it. That’s the title. Have to mention it to Leo and Katy when you see them later today.

Alright then, Jack. It’s settled. This calls for a celebration. This calls for a drink.

Yeah. One last drink.

---

Zach Vasquez is a writer based in Los Angeles. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, Noir City, Crime Reads, Fangoria and more. His fiction has appeared in Tough, Mystery Tribune, Close to the Bone, Revolution John, and Vautrin Literary Journal.