The Wheel of Fortune
Some call it chance. Some call it fate.
9
The Wheel of Fortune
Raymond Shepard did not sleep in warmth and comfort that night, overlooked by attentive eyes. He found an empty lifeguard’s station on the beach and huddled on its hard, splintery floor, curled up beneath an empty lifeguard’s chair, glad now he had his sweater, for when the sun went out in Los Angeles, the land reverted back to its origins as the western extension of the Mojave desert. All warmth was turned off, the willful Pacific would not hold on to it, and the wind that intermittently picked up off the water was a penetrating one.
Raymond would have slept longer had he not been shaken awake. He opened his eyes to find a man as red as a berry bending over him. “Get up, get up! Come on, Stretch, or you’ll miss breakfast, and if you miss breakfast (he started counting off on his fingers), you’ll miss the bus, and if you miss the bus, you won’t get paid, and if you don’t get paid, you can’t buy this beach from me. I’m letting it go for a million billion.”
Raymond just blinked back drowsily.
“Tell you what, Stretch.” The wild, energetic man wore a bright tropical shirt covered in large purple hibiscuses. It was unbuttoned, and the flower pattern framed a sunburnt chest. “I can see you’re one of the good’uns. I’ll let you have this whole beach … but wait, there’s more! I’ll throw in the Pacific ocean too! I’ll let you have it all, beach and ocean, miles and miles of it, for one hundred fifty bucks and a carton of smokes. Name’s Shane. Howdy do?” He took Raymond’s hand and shook it vigorously.
Was everybody crazy here? wondered Raymond. The vividly sunburnt man helped him to his feet and coaxed him down the steps. When they were on the sand the man pointed behind Raymond, and he turned sleepily. The eastern sky was yellowing. It was just about dawn.
“Hurry up or we’ll be at the back of the line… huh?…don’t look so dopey. The line! For breakfast, son. What? You never stopped over at the Mustard Seed Mission in your travels? Well, let me set you wise, Stretch. Keep up, keep up, you can listen and walk at the same time, can’t ya? Follow me.”
So clear a direction had power over Raymond, and he followed, compelled, without a quibble, as the man chattered on. The wild man had shaggy hair down to his shoulders. He didn’t look young, and he didn’t look old, he just looked weathered and creased from living outdoors. Still, his colorful Hawaiian shirt with the big hibiscuses all over it appeared recently laundered, and his mild stubble meant he had shaved at least yesterday.
“The Mustard Seed … they’re a bunch of Jesus shouters who put out a breakfast for all the worthless fucks in the area. They also take care of the likes of me and thee,” said Shane. “They’ll launder your clothes if you got a second pair. Let you shower and shave if ya cool, and at night they put twenty-five cots up for grabs. All the cots get scooped up by seven, so you gotta haul ass to the Mustard Seed early if you wanna crash there. Me, I don’t cotton to curfews. Me, I like the nightlife.” He smiled sappily. “Also them cots got cooties.”
It was a short walk to the mission, and the door was not yet opened. Shane and Raymond waited near the front of the line.
When they got in and were served their dollop of scrambled eggs, toast and juice, they sat at long tables while music about being lost and found and saved played over the one loudspeaker. Raymond picked at the food, finding it quite heavy, managing a bit of the toast, all of the juice, but only a bite of the scrambled eggs before he felt stuffed.
What fascinated him was the picture of the long-haired man above the speaker. It was molded in plastic, with the face dug into the molding, so that the eyes seemed to follow Raymond no matter how he shifted about trying to escape them. Under the image, which seemed to be pleading with him, were the words “Don’t Be Discouraged.”
“Let’s go,” said Shane when he had whipped through his breakfast. Dutifully, Raymond followed him to the line that was gathering in front of the church. “Try to look all pitiful,“ said Shane. “We wanna get in the movie.”
Shane’s unbuttoned shirt flopped about as he pressed and elbowed Raymond and himself forward through the line. “See,” explained the sunburnt guide when he had got them better situated, “there’s this bleeding-heart director that hires all these worthless jokers for extras. Some bullshit horror movie, but it’s good money. One hundred bucks at the end of the day. And they feed you. But you gotta look right. You gotta look like you screwed the buffalo on your last nickel. Here, bend down a bit, Stretch.”
When he did, Shane mussed up Raymond’s hair.
“And get rid of that college-boy sweater…right, the white t-shirt is … sorry, like you just bought it at Walmart’s. It’s gotta look like it came from the bottom of the mission bin.” He rubbed his wild, sea-blasted hair, then tried to rub some of the sandy grime down Raymond’s shirt. All the while Raymond stood mutely by. “That’s … well, the best Uncle Shane can do ya.”
A yellow school bus pulled up to the curb, and the men on line started to murmur. The ones in front of Shane and Raymond were messing their hair. Everyone had made a point of not showering or shaving this morning.
The bus doors wheezed open, and a young woman with a clipboard stepped out. She had a sharp schoolboy haircut that swept across her face on a diagonal, falling from a side part. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said brightly. The crowd grumbled a response.
Shane muttered to Raymond out of the side of his mouth. “I hate chicks with clipboards. Everybody in the world hates chicks with clipboards.”
The young woman walked slowly down the line, picking out men as she clicked a round metal device that kept the count. When she came to them, Shane was chosen, but Raymond was not. She moved on.
“Just keep ya yap shut,” rasped Shane, hooking Raymond’s arm. “She won’t remember who she picked, and who she didn’t.” Together they boarded the bus and took a seat at the rear.
After a while, the bus filled up. The young woman came on last and stood at the front, holding on to a pole. The doors wheezed shut, and the bus took off, leaving a mass of disgruntled men milling about in front of the church, passing below Raymond’s window.
“I see some new faces,” the young woman began, swaying a bit with the motion of the bus. “But most of you I recognize … Judd … Billy-Roy … there you are, Shane, and you have a newbie with you. What’s your name, new guy?”
“Um…” Raymond looked about cautiously. “Ray … mond,”
“Well, welcome Ray … mond,” she replied, imitating his hesitation with a little laugh. “Okay, here’s what your day will be like. We’re going down the coast a bit to a small beach town near Seal Beach. About an hour and 15 minutes away.”
She leaned into the pole as they passed over a bump. They were turning onto the Pacific Coast Highway. “When we arrive, I’ll take you to the high school gym to meet the assistant director. He’ll give you your assignments. Then you’ll go to makeup, that will be a tent in the parking lot. Most of you will work in your own clothes, but some will be sent to the wardrobe trailer. If you are, you’ll be given paperwork which you turn over to Becca, that’s our wardrobe lady, she’ll fetch the appropriate costume. You take your costume back to the gym. Rafe … he’ll be the big beefy guy sitting at the table at the back of the room. He’ll assign you a locker and give you a code for the lock … don’t lose that piece of paper! … let me repeat that … don’t lose your locker assignment and your code! You’ll need it to get your clothes back. In any case, we caution everyone: keep your wallets and valuables with you. Okay? Not too hard, right? At the end of the day, you’ll go to the paymaster … you’ll see the sign on the trailer. You’ll give him your voucher and—yes?”
A tentative hand had gone up a few rows down.
“I don’t got no Social Security number, Miss,” said a woebegone voice. “I mean, I lost it.”
“No worries. We know a lot of you gentlemen are going through a rough patch right now. You’ll be paid a hundred dollars in cash for the day’s work, no questions asked. As always, we break for lunch at one … and today I understand the chili is back. I know a lot of you guys look forward to that. Any questions?
“What kind of picture you putting me in,” demanded a cantankerous voice
“It’s sort of a horror comedy I guess is the best way to describe it.”
“What’s it called, girly.”
“Oh, didn’t I say? The title is Surf’s Up, Zombie!”
Shane gave Raymond a sidelong glance and out of the side of his mouth muttered “And guess who plays the zombies.”
Eden also woke early that first morning, but Tom was up before her. He gave her a cup of fresh-perked coffee, but she found it bitter. Orange juice was better, and then a bit of a blueberry muffin. He was preparing an omelet, but by the time it was set before her, she was full, couldn’t eat another thing. Tom had a wild thought. If she really were a movie character thrown into a three-dimensional world, the food here, like the air, would seem too heavy, too dense.
It was a perfectly fluffy cheese omelet, and so Tom ate it as they chatted at the kitchen table. She was feeling better, she said, much better. Dizziness gone … well, almost, but how could she feel bad on such a beautiful morning. She looked out from the kitchen to the sunken living room where sunlight streamed through the picture window, casting the couch and facing wall in a peachy glow. She felt alive again, she said, pushing back the sleeves of the droopy Parisian pajamas.
She wanted to go out on the terrace, so Tom took his coffee with him. She looked over Westwood as the sun rose behind the dark silhouette of high-rises. Somehow she had framed herself perfectly against the sky, presiding over the view like a pale barefoot goddess in his striped silk pajamas. With the sun on her face, she took a deep breath, which was a bit too ambitious because she gasped, coughing into the back of her hand. Regaining her composure, she made the mistake of looking down too quickly, and with a shudder, reared back from the looming drop.
“Heights frighten you?” he asked.
“Always,” she replied, spookily in character.
After she had bathed and fixed her hair up in the French swirl that was the movie Eden’s trademark, she joined him in the living room. Her own clothes needed to be cleaned so she wore one of the loose summer dresses his daughter had left behind. She picked the one decorated with lilacs, as if fated, for lavender was Madeleine Gray’s studio-created “favorite color,” and it brought out the same pastel shade in her eyes.
“I’m remembering things now,” she said with a grave look. She sat across from him, alone on the couch, looking stately and isolated. “I was in the Bay. It seems like years ago. I was waiting for something … something that was supposed to happen.” Her hand drifted up to her neck, her fingers poised delicately on her clavicle, a gesture Tom had observed several times in the theater when she became upset.
“Supposed to happen … but didn’t happen! I was drowning, and that was all wrong!” She tried to catch her breath. “I … began to struggle. I … sank faster. Everything turned black! I … tried to find the surface … the light on the water — up, down, all confused. And I was tumbling … falling … sinking faster, faster. Darkness in all directions.”
She spoke as Madeleine Gray would have, full of breathy hesitation as if at some profound level the actress doubted herself. It was a natural, if neurotic, way of speaking that the director Thorncraft has used to great effect in Fog.
“I must have … must have passed out then … yes, that must be what happened … because… When I opened my eyes, I was dry. I was in the middle of blackness … blackness everywhere. I cried out, but my cry didn’t carry. Silence pressed down on everything like a weight. I must have died … that’s what I thought … I must be dead. I was no longer in … the world. It must be a punishment for something I couldn’t remember. I was suspended. In a … a nowhere place … that’s what I called it. The Nowhere Place.”
Preview: The ancients called it the Underworld.
