The Actress

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I screamed.

I filled my lungs with the stale, coffee-smelling air of the dungeon and let out a ragged howl that ricocheted off the cold walls. I closed my eyes and screamed again as every cell in my body writhed in a futile attempt to deny the horror that was being inflicted on me by the guy in glasses holding a small cardboard box that said DEATH.

The guy, who had introduced himself as Ned, stood to the side and brandished the box in his freckled hands. I decided to scream once more, this one a sharp, convulsive type of cry.

"Okay," said the casting director, a thin black woman with expressive hands named M’kenge. "Okay, Rita, please do it again, only"—she cupped her hands as if to suppress a flower growing—"this time don’t shrink down. Get all taut and tall, like you’re going to break out of your skin." Upward release of hands.

I did so. I stood at attention, remembering I was supposed to be tied to a pole, put my hands behind my back—behind my butt, actually, which looks more like natural bondage because your shoulders aren’t all hiked up—and arched my neck like Joan of Arc at the stake. Ned shook the box at me and I screamed.

When you take a breath to do a scream, you don’t just grab a gulp of air and let go. You need to take the time to load your lungs all the way to the bottom. You need to pull all the slack from your diaphragm like you’d pull a bowstring in archery, and then and only then do you unleash that scream to its target, which is the red beating heart of every human within four miles.

I screamed, and it felt good. I was screaming well today. I ululated in the middle of this one—nothing fancy, just another jolt of emotion, just another ripple in the violent fabric of my horror. I’d warmed up carefully.

This was a job I wanted. A job I needed. This was Evan Granger Jackson’s new teensploitation movie, Fingershredder II, sequel to Fingershredder, the low-budget instant-cult terror film you doubtless heard about or saw. If you’re a male age 13-17, you’ve seen it three times.

The role I was trying out for was Student Teacher Who Gets Her Fingers Shredded Halfway Through the Script by the Evil But Understandably So Because of Childhood Abuse Sadistic Killer. The fingershredder.

So I screamed. I screamed my ass off, discharging the screams through relaxed vocal cords but tight external throat muscles as Sam Wojczyk had taught me in his acting class at UCLA.

I was lucky to have Ned standing there holding the cardboard box, because at least he was human. In case you’ve never auditioned for pictures like this in Hollywood, you often don’t have anybody playing opposite you. You’re just there all alone in front of the casting director, maybe possibly a producer, an assistant with the clipboard who might also be running the video camera, and the empty coffee cups and scone wrappers of the day.

The cardboard box was a stand-in for the fingershredder device audiences came to know and love so well in the original. See, the fingershredding guy figures out pretty early in his career that paper shredders don’t work well on fingers: they jam quickly, even the heavy-duty, government models. Plus he likes to shred other body parts too, then eventually the victim bleeds to death in terrible pain. So he invents this gadget using parts from a vacuum cleaner, a Cuisinart, and a walkie-talkie. Works great on the screen. A fiendish device, of course you’ve seen stills of it in People and Teen and such. I’m surprised they didn’t license miniatures of it for inclusion in Happy Meals.

"Okay, stop," said M’kenge. I had not met M’kenge before today’s audition, but I’d carefully learned her name because that’s what a professional actress does. I feel unusual names are more important to remember than ordinary names, because people with unusual names have a bigger burden in life than the rest of us, in a small but important to them way.

An unusual name practically invites you to forget it. M’kenge pronounced her name Em-ken-gay. On the page M’kenge looks as if it might be pronounced Ma-keng-ee, which would make it sound Scots, which her parents surely could not have intended.

So M’kenge said stop. I looked at her attentively. She blew a breath down at the tabletop, then ran two fingers along the side of her skull as if trying to unzip a headache and let it out. Her head was one of those beautiful short-cropped African heritage ones, large smooth cranium, narrow jaw. She did not bother to smile. She was looking at me with intensity and thrilling dissatisfaction. Thrilling because she clearly wanted to help me get it right.

I so wanted to get it right.

"Rita, can you do it again, this time full-face to me. I know in this scene you’re supposed to be watching your student Melissa’s fingers getting shredded, and then her tongue and all that, but now I’d like you to scream as if your fingers were getting shredded. You were given pages for that scene, so let’s try it, just the screaming part." She clenched one hand on her stomach and reached skyward with the other. "Bring it up from your gut, but not totally from there. Give me some highness, I guess what I’m trying to say is can you make it more piercing?"

Piercing.

"Yes," I said, my heart singing because she didn’t say Thank you, next! If they ask you to do it different ways, they think you might be able to deliver exactly what they want.

"Make the hair on the back of my neck stand up."

"Yes."

I thought of the most horrifying thing in the world to me right then, which was getting my credit card declined again at the grocery store, which would mean I would have to sell Gramma Gladys’s diamond brooch to buy cereal and juice boxes for Petey, and to prevent the landlord from evicting us.

So I imagined walking into Adil’s Pawn America with that diamond-and-sapphire brooch, and all that it meant, and I felt not only frightened but angry, and I set my heels into the carpet of the soundproof audition room which was doubling today as a bloody dungeon, and I screamed and screamed again.

Plus usually for a film role you’re doing it in somebody’s office, not a casting studio, which are the cattle chutes between the herd of actors out there and the yearned-for slaughterhouse of TV commercials. The company that made the Fingershredder movies, Half Fast Pictures, however, rented studio space for these auditions because everybody in the offices would have gone insane listening to people screaming for days on end. Evan Granger Jackson liked to have lots of first audition tapes to look at.

We had already done an earlier scene with dialogue in it, not that there was lots in those movies. Which is what makes horror movies so much like pornos. There’s not that much difference between "Please don’t! Stop!" and "Please don’t stop!" The scripts are interchangeable, it’s only the action that’s different. Really, just listen sometime.

"Thank you," said M’kenge with finality in her voice, and I could tell she was disappointed. She crunched up one cheek wistfully. To me, an acting professional, it was the worst kind of disappointment, that tone that says, Man, this one just missed. Missed by that much. Next!

Of course they rarely say anything at the moment, they leave that for your agent. But I was experienced enough to know that tone; I’d heard it so often.

Was my life’s ambition to play supporting roles in teen horror flicks? No. But give me credit for not having stooped to doing porn, not that I have the body porn requires anyway—the Macy’s parade tits, the lion’s mane hair. I’d had breast augmentation, but only one cup size, up to C from my God-given B, which I felt was necessary for the movies, but no way could I ever compete in porn.

I was a serious actress, and I’d long known acting was the best path in life for me. But time had become my enemy: at this point I was 29 and grimly fighting the concept of 30. Thirty is what you never want to turn in Hollywood, let alone forty or worse. Time, frankly, was running out. My agent was getting me lots of auditions, because she still believed in me. But if you could convert auditions into car payments what a butt-sassy world Los Angeles would be.

I thanked Ned, I thanked M’kenge, I thanked Ellen the coffee-stained assistant. Thank you, thank you, they thanked me back and Ellen flipped my head shot to the bottom of the stack. I caught a glimpse of my face, spritely and wholesome above the collar of my crisp white blouse, then—flip—there was the next actress’s face, spritely and wholesome, possibly just what they were looking for.

I passed her on the way out. Her head was high, shoulders back, confident smile ready. We exchanged friendly glances, because you never know who you might be asking for a job someday.

That night Petey and I ate the last can of Campbell’s tomato soup and the last of the rice which came to three-fourths of a cup before cooking. I mixed it all together, put salt and pepper on it, and called it Spider-Man’s Mom’s Special. God bless my boy, he was so hungry he ate it.

Petey was a Spider-Man maniac. He was four now. When he was three he was a Curious George maniac. When he was two he was a hit-the-rainbow-xylophone-until-Mommy’s-ears-pour-blood maniac. I watched him eat and wondered what five would bring.

Precious boy. I saw his father’s face in his miniature one: there were Jeff’s gorgeous marine-blue eyes, Jeff’s touchingly dimpled cheeks, Jeff’s contemptuous upper lip. Would he take after his dad? Marry the cute girl next door, move to California for a dull job and start drinking a fifth a day and slapping her around?

I asked Petey that question with my eyes. He looked at me, swallowed a mouthful of the disgusting dinner I had prepared, and answered, "Noah at school? He pooped on the piano."

I hugged him. It was a quiet night.

FIRST CHAPTERS AND EXCERPTS:

Craft of Writing

• You've Got a Book in You
  

The Rita Farmer Mysteries

1. The Actress
   
2. The Extra
   
3. On Location
   

The Lillian Byrd Crime Series

1. Holy Hell
   
2. Damn Straight
   
3. Lucky Stiff
   
4. Easy Street
   
5. Left Field
   

Short Stories

• Untold Riches