Sellevision - Augusten Burroughs [72]
“Okay . . . well, great, I guess. That’s really great that I come off good in person.”
“And I gotta also tell ya, I’m crazy about your story.”
“My . . . story?”
Leaning back in his chair and crossing his hands behind his back, Ed explained, “I like the whole ‘boy-next-door Sellevision host’ thing. It’s a great plot.”
“A plot?” Max watched as Ed became increasingly excited.
“Sure is. I can see the whole thing right now in my head. By the way, you gay, straight, or bi?”
Max shifted awkwardly on the sofa. “Well, I guess I’d be considered gay.”
“You guess? What does that mean? I’m asking ’cause I need to know what sort of films I’d put you in.”
“I’m sorry, no. What I meant was, or you know, what I mean is, that I’m gay, like all the way. I’m not into women, I’m into men. So, that’s kinda how. . .”
“No problem man, no problem—shit. I love gays; we do almost forty-seven percent of sales from the gay flicks.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, so sure, I think that’s fantastic. Helps me see a clearer picture: Home-Shopping Hunk. That’s the title right there.” He flicked his cigarette ash onto the floor.
“So you mean like a movie based on, like, me?”
“Not ‘you’ personally, but what you used to do. The whole TV thing, the whole shopping thing. It rocks.”
“Oh. Okay, I guess I know what you mean.”
“So here’s what the deal is in terms of next steps. If you’re interested, I’d like you to do a little screen test for me. Nothing major, just you and one of the fellas, see how well you perform on camera.”
“Oh, I’m very comfortable in front of the camera, more comfortable on camera than off, as a matter of fact,” Max said, smiling.
“That’s great, yeah, I’m sure you are. But I just want to see how comfortable your dick is on camera. Because you know, a lot of guys have trouble getting wood the minute the camera starts rolling.”
“Wood?” Max asked.
“Wood, you know, a hard-on.”
Well, Max thought, what did I expect? He was, after all, interviewing for a career in porno movies. He’d had to audition for the news anchor job, hadn’t he? This was the same thing, pretty much. “So when would you want to do this screen-test thing?”
Ed rose from his chair, dropped the cigarette on the floor, and squashed it with his foot. “We’re shooting a film right now, in the sound stage across the parking lot. We could just walk right on over and take care of it this minute.”
Part of Max felt paralyzed from the neck down. But another part of him felt like, sure. As if there were an internal audience in his head chanting, Go Ricki, go Ricki! “Sure, no problem.”
“Follow me, then.”
seventeen
By her third day at the Anne Sexton Center, Peggy Jean was no longer shaking or crouching over the toilet to vomit. The electroshock therapy sessions had ceased. And she was not on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch, which had been automatic, given the attempt she made on her life with her husband’s cordless shaver. She’d been told that the first three days of withdrawal were the most difficult, and it had been true. For the first two nights, she’d seen spiders creeping along the ceiling of her room, yet when she turned on the light, they were gone.
“Hallucinations are very common with alcoholics,” she’d been told by one of the chemical dependency counselors.
Alcoholics.
Peggy Jean had become an alcoholic. And a drug addict. At least that is what they told her.
“No, Mrs. Smythe. Kahula is not just like coffee and it does count.”
They’d even taken her Giorgio perfume away from her. “I’m sorry, but you’re not allowed anything containing alcohol.”
Did they really think she would drink her perfume?
“You’d be surprised,” one of the chemical dependency counselors had said.
When asked how much Valium she took, Peggy Jean replied, “Oh, just five or six little pills a few times a day.”
So here she was, in a hospital. A mental hospital. True, it was named after a poet, but it was just as much of a hospital as the one where Peggy Jean had held one of the AIDS babies she sponsored. Harsh, unflattering