The humidity was felt everywhere; there was no escape from it. Not inside the room, even naked. Not in a cold shower, or the pool. Brandon lay in his hotel bed, staring at the air conditioning unit. Ignoring what felt like tiny scalpels digging up from under his skin, he focused his energy on the air conditioner, glaring at it, fantasizing that the dial went higher.
He didn’t know the town well enough to score on his own, but he thought about calling his cousin, who was local and had no idea Brandon was in town. What a pleasant surprise it’d be for him, he rationalized. Ricky would knock on the door and hug Brandon’s sweaty body, and in the embrace he’d feel the twitching from under the skin. Good God, Son, you are ill!, he’d say, And off they’d go. Brandon could go completely underground for a few days, then maybe grab his guitar and play a show with some bar’s shitty house band. With name recognition, he’d make a couple-hundred bucks, or a grand, and live in the Hilton. Maybe he could make it last for the rest of his life with no one noticing.
Lou is no doubt blowing up Brandon’s silent cell at this very moment, two missed calls away from dialing Inside Edition.
Being an agent is probably the worst job in the world, and only dickheads like Lou are qualified. Brandon has not made Lou any money in some months, since agreeing to do the commercial for a discontinued Japanese energy drink called Wa Pow![tm], a name which was neither Japanese or English, but sounded vaguely like it could be both. The room at the Memphis Hilton in which Brandon is now staying is being paid for with the check from the Wa Pow! commercial.
If you did not know for sure, you would say that the room was trashed on purpose. There were burger wrappers and makeshift ashtrays and a malicious smell. Vomit was on the walls and prescription bottles littered the nightstand and the floor beneath, sad and empty, arranged like bowling pins. The room was in disarray roughly 10 minutes after Brandon checked in. Anyone who caught a glimpse of it would think it used up and abandoned – the ghetto of the Memphis Hilton.
You would think a public figure would be getting calls to the room. No one he knew had any clue where he was, but celebrities – including Brandon, in his heyday – often get borderline harassing calls from the front desk. Do you need anything? Towels? A refilled refrigerator? Would you sign a DVD for my niece? He was never annoyed by the calls, and extremely depressed at the silence.
Of course, he had silenced his own phone, at which he could not bear to look. At least a hundred calls from Lou, a few from a publicist handpicked by Lou and whose name always escaped Brandon (he was entered in the phone simply as “pub”), and the nightly calls from various L.A. scene kids he gave his number to while he was stoned.
The silence swirled. It hovered around the oscillating fan Brandon grabbed from a convenience store.
He had never watched the celebrity infotainment shows when he was a legitimate celebrity. They do not report on celebrities’ personal lives, they report on celebrities’ personas. Brandon had no problem with this. There is no such thing as the celebrity invasion of privacy – every interview a famous person gives, every “candid” with a paparazzo, every scandal was crafted by either a rival publicist, or the celebrity themselves. Extramarital affairs exist, but with the consent of the “jilted” spouse. Living this dream theater was amusing to Brandon, until The National Enquirer started printing very true things about Brandon’s personal life.
Brandon Bennett the actor has a drug problem and so does Brandon Bennett the man.
Persona-less and mortal Brandon Bennett, snapped in rehab looking bloated and decidedly unattractive. Sold out by a real person.
And so the television was on for about five minutes, enough time to catch an update on one of those infotainment shows about Brandon Bennett the actor escaping rehab, scaling the wall in a dramatic fashion, mimicking one of his dead grunge heroes. He could have simply signed himself out, But Brandon the Actor wasn’t done playing with them yet. When it was time to say goodbye to Brandon the Actor, there would be no more media trickery. He would be dead or working in a factory or bar--dead to the West Coast and alive to real people. Everything about both Brandons was pathologically narcissistic in that way, exaggerating their importance or notoriety. L.A. incubates this mental illness. It’s what has kept the city from falling in on itself, like the worst kind of alcoholic sorority slut.
He was not surprised to find his socialite “girlfriend” speaking to the nondescript blonde reporter-slash-underwear model and former beauty queen.
The Socialite was pleading for Brandon The Actor’s safe return, that where ever you may be, Brandon, please don’t use and tell us where you are. Like totally. I just want to know that you are safe.
As soon as the Socialite finished speaking on television, there was a dainty knock on Brandon’s door.
“No more towels, thank you.”
“It’s me, you fucking idiot.” The Socialite.
“…The fuck is ‘me’?” He knew.
“Shut up.”
Brandon checked his greasy hair, took off his shirt and flexed, then went to the door.
The Socialite stood there, gaunt, blonde, with a pouty scowl, wearing sunglasses that were way too big and probably way too expensive.
“You look like shit,” she said.
“Please, come in,” he said, grinning. “Can I offer you a cigarette?” She accepted it. The hotel, which belonged to a chain owned by her family, had a strict no-smoking policy. “How did you get in without being recognized?”
“I’m in Memphis, you hick,” she snapped. “Can I ask what the fuck you’re doing here?”
“You can,” Brandon said calmly. “What might you be doing here?”
“I’m saving your ass, is what I’m doing.”
“Okay.” Brandon laid back and grabbed his crotch suggestively. “You know what to do.”
The Socialite laughed. “Take a shower, get your shit, we’re leaving.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
This went on for about ten minutes, with The Socialite and Brandon Bennett the Man arguing, each speaking in a different language, The Socialite getting lost in translation. She reasoned that not only was he fucking up his career, she was being fucked over by him. If they broke up, what would become of him? A child star following the beaten path, a fucking loser. She was his way back up and she came all the way to bum fuck Memphis, after all, are you kidding me, Brandon? My body is rejecting this place as we speak. This in itself is a sacrifice.
Brandon the Actor coaxed The Socialite into giving up her cocaine by leading her to believe he would be leaving with her. He stuck the baggie down the front of his jeans, and stalled for a little while.
Then he threw her out.
He got out his laptop and started typing what started out as a joke. Celebrity suicides are no joke, as they make Hollywood journalists and hangers-on a lot of money and pretty much mold their careers from clay.
The first ever mass e-mailed suicide note.
So he looked at his cell phone for the first time in two days, to find Lou’s e-mail address. He found it and a few others’ and then crushed the cell phone under his hiking boot.
By the time the suicide note was read by the first set of eyes, Brandon Bennett had already left the hotel and re-gifted his Porsche to a nearby ditch. He was not inside on impact.
He took the Amtrak to the closest small town with a depot, picked up a penny saver paper, and used half of his remaining cash to buy a used white Bronco off some guy’s lawn. Brandon Bennett the Man headed to Southwest Missouri.
He stopped at the Wal-Mart just outside Hawthorn to pick up some essentials: A quart of orange juice, a bottle of cherry cough syrup, condoms, a toothbrush. The checkout girl was eyeing him in a strange way, presumably because of the condoms. It was not a sexual glare or especially intruding, but it occurred to Brandon that he should address it.
“How ya??
? doin’,“ he said, nodding.
“You don’t remember me,” the checkout girl said flatly. Brandon frantically went through many subconscious filing cabinets. “It’s okay, it’s been awhile. You’ve seen much more excitement than memory serves, I’m sure.”
Brandon extended his hand. “Brandon Bennett.”
“Wendy Lewis.” She fidgeted inside a shopping bag, and shook hands with Brandon Bennett the Actor.
“Home Room, Eighth Grade.”
“Right.”
“You look a lot like your brother,” Wendy said.
“I’m the oldest! He looks like me.”
Wendy’s courtesy laugh.
“So, Wendy, you got a break coming up?”
“Nope. I’m off in fifteen minutes.”
At the end of Wendy’s shift, Brandon drove to the outskirts of the parking lot and fucked Wendy in his white Bronco. He drove her home, and ended up staying the night.
When he left at about noon, she asked for his number, and he told her the truth, that his phone broke. She didn’t believe him, but she didn’t seem too upset about it. When he saw that she didn’t care, he wrote down his number anyway, and placed it in her jewelry box while she wasn’t looking.
He arrived at his parents’ farm in Hawthorn at about 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. As he got out of his Bronco, he studied the landscape. Everything was the same. Same old manure smell, same huge, boxy house. Same Ten Commandments display out front. The grass was grotesquely green. Everything was bright, clean and perfect. The cedar siding had fresh stain on it, the decorations were strategically placed around the yard, and not one of them was crooked, not even slightly purposely skewed.
He had always felt like this place was cut off from the rest of the world. This place was too sanitized to house actual human beings. It always reminded him of those classic family sitcoms he was forced to sit through as a kid. It seemed almost like this place had been preserved in a giant, air-tight Tupperware bowl. Everything is controlled. People need a little misery in their lives.
That’s what Brandon thinks, anyway.
From the looks of the driveway, people besides Brandon were staying at the house. That made him nervous. He didn’t want to go in. He stood on the top wooden step about six inches from the door, giving it that spacey gaze he gets when he’s deep in thought, which happens less with each passing year.
Finally, he knocked on the painted steel three times. He waited for what seemed like five minutes for someone to answer. He knew better than to just go inside. He wasn’t a part of this household anymore; In fact, he was supposed to be dead.
The door swung open and his mom, who at fifty still looked thirty-five, stood before him. Her auburn hair was curled and sprayed to a stiff, perfect mold. She had an expression that was somewhere between a grin and a grimace. Whatever it was, it looked weird and forced.
“Brandon,” She said in typical dramatic fashion, trailing off before fainting.
His father told Brandon to stay put while they brought his mother to, right before he shut the door in his face. He heard them speaking quietly, calmly, reasoning, but couldn’t figure out what they were saying.
Finally, the door opened.
The inside of the home was completely different than it was three years ago. It was spotless, as always. But the walls were a different color, and the country bumpkin knick- knacks had all been changed.
Brandon focused on the walls, on the windows, and avoided eye contact with anyone. He was uncomfortable beyond words. His mother put her hand across his back, onto his shoulder, and without words, gently guided him to the den.
“Brandon, you remember Aunt Vida, Uncle Peter,” She said with wide eyes.
“Of course. How are you?” Brandon said in a monotone voice.
“Oh honey, I’m doin’ all right for an old woman,” She said. She seemed barely awake, and definitely ancient. Brandon’s generally accurate guess was ninety years old. Maybe older. Her blank look suggested she had never heard of him or his movie career.
“Where’s Chris?” Brandon asked his mother.
“He’s at work,” She said in a forced, spirited, hopeful voice.
She looked at Brandon with awe, as if she could not believe he was there. It confused him, as he was certain that even if his fake death had been posted on the internet (and it would not get past Lou and his band of minions for days), his family would probably be the last people on Earth who would see it.
Out of touch as she seemed to be, Brandon’s mother had a lot to do with his success as an actor, and some have suggested, his subsequent problems. As a baby, she started him out on the Tennessee pageant circuit. A former pageant girl, she behaved as expected of a woman in middle age who just nicked the corner of show business in her prime.
When there was a casting call for a local business’s commercial, Sandy was there with Brandon. When a country artist needed a weeping child for their music video, Sandy was there with Brandon. When Lou called Sandy one day and told her that he would be interested in representing Brandon, she saw her own name in lights.
After years as a commercial actor, Brandon Bennett landed his career-starter as the subversive sidekick to kids’ network star Toby Westwood on the sitcom “[title]”, a title that Brandon could never explain in interviews. On the show, he was normally dressed in dark clothing and presented as a teen badass, and stole many scenes from Toby, as well as priceless exposure on teenybopper magazines. Toby Westwood, a round-faced queen, a more established star and bigger diva, did not like this. He tried to get Brandon fired several times for pulling humiliating practical jokes on him, and for speaking to Perez Hilton (as “A source”) on numerous occasions regarding Toby’s sexuality. Lou saved him several times, but could not keep him out of trouble forever, and Brandon was written off the series one season before it was cancelled.
At the end of their final episode together, Brandon and Toby had to hug. On the last take, Brandon grabbed Toby’s ass and yelled to the cast and crew, “Toby’s got a big boner!” Toby locked himself in his dressing room and refused to come out.
Cut to Summer 2010, and Brandon is giving the closeted director/producer of a comic book franchise adaptation an awkward lap dance for the role of a floating head in a comic book adaptation, with no speaking parts. Toby Westwood was the youngest person nominated for an Oscar this season.
Sandy’s words approached Brandon softly.
“What…I just have to ask. Being your mother makes this question seem cruel.”
Brandon’s eyes glazed over.
“Why are you here?”
He wasn’t sure who she was speaking to – Brandon Bennett the Man, or the Actor. What did she mean, exactly?
Did she mean: Why are you here, after two years of silence? Or did she mean: Why are you here, and not in the hospital, where Lou assured me you were after I saw an E! News segment talking about your figurative swan dive off a Malibu Bluff?
Or did she mean: Why are you here, a cardboard cutout of a person, replacing my Son, claiming to be him?
Brandon’s response was a shrug.
“Well, Chris will be here soon. He’s bringing dinner home. He’s also bringing his girlfriend for the first time, so I guess your timing is perfect!” Sandy was demented with forced glee.
Chris was not ecstatic to see Brandon. They greeted and hugged, but there were no smiles, no chuckles, no playful shoves to the shoulder. Chris looks like Brandon, only slightly healthier.
Mother didn’t have much to offer the boys in their reunion. She was preoccupied. “Where’s your girlfriend? I thought she was coming…Oh, that must be her…Oh, you’re pretty! It’s so nice to finally meet you!”
Wendy walked in with a Cheshire cat grin. Sandra immediately started clanging pots and pans, leaving the boys, and Wendy, to stare at each other.
The dinner table was wrecked with gravy and brown flaky cuts of meat and greens soaked in leftover grease, and silen
ce. Topics of discussion ranged from weather to this year’s crop, to cruise discounts to Brandon Bennett the Actor, to Chris’s wonderful miraculous relationship. But no more than twenty words were spoken in thirty minutes. Wendy brought up a party at her coworker’s house to interrupt the clanging of forks, and Chris immediately invited Brandon.
“Oh, I don’t…”
“Cut the crap, Brandon.”
“I’m kinda tired, and…”
“Everyone will love it.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Sigh. “Okay.”
The drive to the party wasn’t really that awkward. Back at the house, Brandon poured his cough syrup into a “World’s Best Dad” travel coffee mug and mixed it with Diet Coke. On the road, he sipped it through a stir stick and looked out the window at the big blur of corn stalks. The windows were down, and he meditated on the humidity and imagined it was bathwater. Chills don’t exist. Drugs don’t exist. California’s dead. History doesn’t matter. Wendy, sitting “Bitch”, would occasionally break the silence by mimicking along to her Depeche Mode mix tape and looking at the boys to see their reaction (they did not react). Chris, a country music fan to the core, ejected the cassette after “Goodnight Lovers” finished playing, without giving Wendy so much as a warning glance. She grimaced and positioned her torso to face Brandon.
The house loomed larger than it was. The windows glowed, two yellowish-white devil eyes, hungrily beaming Brandon in. The situation they had there was a short fuse; nothing good was going to happen in that house. A sweaty, bearded man stumbled out onto the porch wearing a beer bong helmet. “Hey, Wendy!” He called out across the yard. “Who are those two handsome stallions in yer’ company tonight?”
“Shut up, Keller,” Chris said, putting a lip of tobacco in. Trailing behind the couple, Brandon saw Chris animatedly whispering to Wendy.
It was a dim, dingy farmhouse inside, converted into a dimmer, dingier bachelor pad. There were shamefully hot high school girls, their teachers, probably their parents, college students, and pretty much everyone Brandon had left behind, but a bit aged. Brandon Bennett the Actor was approached several times by horny high school students, elated to be meeting the kids’ network rebel they masturbated to as tweens, stealing cell phone pictures and pecks on the cheek. It did not matter that he was dirty, or that he was impossibly thin, or that he was wilting with cravings for narcotics, subsisting on cherry cough syrup, slowly starving to death. It didn’t matter, because with his presence, he validated those girls’ entire lives. They’d go to school and be meaner to the goth girls, they’d play the outgoing messages he was asked to record on their phones, they’d show everyone the pictures, talk about how Brandon Bennett looks like shit but he’s still hotter than any dude at this school, and a much better lay, etc.
Brandon Bennett the Actor was not dead yet, just dying a tad slower than expected.
In the midst of this bored and noisy scene, Brandon heard Wendy yelling, heard things crashing, and the slapping of skin. “You fuck! I fucking hate you! Go fuck her skanky ass, you drunk stupid fuck! Fuck!” She was throwing Keller’s knick knacks indirectly at Chris, slapping his shoulders and the back of his head. Chris covered his face and curled up to deflect the attack.
Brandon approached the couple and grabbed Chris’s arm to guide him away. Wendy shoved Brandon into the kitchen counter and tried to kiss him. He resisted and shoved her away. “Oh, what? Don’t want an audience?” She removed a slip of paper from her cleavage and threw it at Chris. Verging on tears, he started to bend over to pick it up. “Go on,” Wendy said. “Read it and weep, you fuck.” Before he could read it, Brandon grabbed Chris, who by now was nearly a puddle. He put his arm around him and headed toward the door.
“Find your own way home, Wendy,” Brandon said solemnly. Wendy dramatically fell backward and pretended to be drunker than she actually was, but Keller caught her and held her as she cried, smiling over her shoulder at one of his buddies.
Brandon didn’t speak to Chris as he drove; he gave him a sympathetic glance throughout the drive. Chris, glazed over, sweet, stupid Chris, with his head against the window, pouting like a child. Times like these, Brandon adored this man-child, who shared his DNA and his parents and his home for several years. What they didn’t share—Brandon’s wanderlust, Chris’s boyish fragility of spirit—was appreciated.
Even though they had not spoken in three years, Brandon thought of Chris often. He wondered if following through with his promise to hire Chris to come to Los Angeles and be his personal assistant would have toughened his brother up and leaned his soft midsection; he wondered if Chris’s face, a reminder of home, would have kept him out of the skank of Skid Row, off of TMZ, from the kids’ network sitcom to the steady, respectable income of an entertainment entrepreneur-slash-performer that you must become to stay in the Hills. He wondered if his roots, the most vanilla of clichés, worked anywhere near as well as methadone. If there was anyone on Earth whose spirit was capable of resisting the soullessness of L.A., it was Chris.
When they got home they lit a fire pit, and they talked. They talked for a long time but it wasn’t about much. Chris asked a few things about what it was like on the West, and, for example, what the difference between a producer and a director was, if Brandon had ever met any of his favorite actresses (he had, in fact, slept with many of them).
Brandon wanted to say that famous people don’t look as good as they do in photographs and in movies, that interviews are their biggest performances, that Tom Cruise is actually the least crazy person in the whole goddamn town, but he wanted to protect him from the truth.
(When the men were boys, it had been Chris’s own brother that ruined Santa Claus for him, and Brandon freely admitted as a teenager that he didn’t believe in Jesus. The way Chris looked at his brother after both bombshells were dropped never left him. He got a dull ache in his chest when his mother told Brandon that Chris came to her in tears, afraid that he wasn’t “going to make it to Heaven”.)
When the liquor wore off and fatigue sat in, Brandon got up, patted Chris on the shoulder and suggested they go to bed.
“Would you like to ride with us to the Christmas Tree Farm?” Brandon’s mother asked him after the dishes and the guests were clear, except for a few. “It’s your grandmother’s thing. We started doing it a few years ago. She didn’t make dinner yesterday, so it’d be nice if you could go with us.”
He definitely did not want to go. He had no idea what a Christmas tree farm was, but it sounded dreadful.
“Sure,” He said.
“Is he going, or not?” Aunt Vida balked across the room.
“Yes, Vida, Brandon’s going.”
“Who?”
“Brandon, Vida.” She over-enunciated.
“Who’s Brandon?”
The drive to the Christmas Tree Farm was pretty short, but dangerous. Brandon did in fact have to drive, and no one felt inclined to warn him that the dirt road to get from the highway to the place—winding and uphill—had no barrier to keep the car from crashing into the descending bank of trees on each side.
“You can drive in that L.A. mess and you can’t handle a ride to the Christmas Tree Farm?” His father laughed from the back seat. He didn’t answer, partly because he hadn’t driven in L.A. in at least a year.
Once there, Brandon’s family got their picture taken with the bejeweled Santa robot on a bench on the front porch waving his hands.
“God,” Brandon murmured. Aunt Vida shot him a glassy look and said, “Wouldn’t you like to wait in the car?”
“Vida,” Sandy snapped. Vida moseyed into the cabin.
“You boys look so cute, all bundled up,” Sandy marveled. “ Get next to the gaudy Santa. I’ll take your picture.”
She directed them on each side, squinting at the hung over and opiate thirsty brothers through her disposable camera’s viewfinder. Upon the click, Chris mumbled some
thing about a bathroom and stumbled off.
Brandon’s mother was a terrible photographer. But she got that picture perfectly, and it went on their mantle that Christmas, the centerpiece to her collection of awful knick knacks.
What made Brandon return Lou’s million phone calls was not an effort to return to his despondent career. It was not an escape from Hawthorn, as his mother saw it so many years ago. It was defeat. There was no escape from L.A. and Brandon Benett the Autonomous Man was now relegated to the back, screaming and clawing at the lobotomized actor in front until he was out of air, once and for all.
One phone call. Turn on the fucking lights. Deaden my eyes again. Let me hit my fucking mark.
He took the BART to Lambert International, with Chris accompanying him. At the gate, the boys hugged. Knowing Brandon’s fate, Dead Fish Chris could not manage a grip worth shit. Brandon Bennett the Man pecked his brother on the cheek and headed toward the terminal, surrounded by a sea of oblivious drone travelers. Brandon didn’t say a word; he just left again.
MayDay