Hollywood Ends

Scene I

Got in the bad for watching a movie during work today.

Spring Break?

Stalag 17?

Billy Holden, man.

Fuckin’ A.

Scene II

Rox teetering on a golf cart and Rox in Roman Holiday sandals. Joe driving. Black, bubble gum wheels popping off the hot sidewalk like sweaty backs off tile.

Stop.

Rox crying.

Joe dumping boxes, churning lips, half-hugging, more boxes, jumping back on, snailing up the way to me.

“Hey, Frank.”

“‘Sup.”

On his face a stupid Charles Laughton, Captain Bligh smile. And man-titties, jiggling away.

Scene III

We talked movies. All the time. All the way down to the office that day.

“Casino, baby!”

“No way. Ben Hur all the way.”

“You’d pick a Christ tale over the classic with the best blowjob scene ever?”

“What?”

“Sharon Stone, remember?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“Casino, hands down.”

“You’re the boss, Rox.”

“Shh. Just be a minute.”

Wide to slit to closed door.

Sec hands me a mag with Sec’s glittery, Vienna sausage fingers. Sec’s frothy hairdo. Sec patting her choked, wrinkled, baby-butt bosom sprinkled in silver. A wannabe, Tex-Mex Norma Desmond spit out through an insignificant vulva far from Sunset Boulevard.

Life changer on page four, Sec tells me.

Page ten instead.

Joe hulks out of his hole with a Doyle Lonnegan limp (where’d he get it?) and Sec hands him glittery keys. Rox right behind him.

Sec reaches in her toga of a dress and Sec pulls out a nicotine Muse. Sec shuffles close. Sec stares at me with drive-inn eyes.

“What’s going on, mijo?”

Heavy, me. Not staying for the encore. Thinking I’ll Bogart out the door. Staggering out the door instead.

Scene IV

Everyone, everything, all of us rotting in stagnant traffic like Fitzgerald’s cupolas.

Sweat licking my back…the Silverado beside me gurgling with “Stanky Legg” and cool, motorized air inside fogged, tinted windows…a bit further away sun-slapped, hard-hat men tear down the superstore inside a cloud of dust…the bum on the corner, the Pretty Woman Happy Man, still as a monument to filth this one, his cardboard titulus in grimy hands reading ‘I NEED A BEER’, proclaiming to me in silence: “What’s your dream? What’s your dream?”

Light, green.

But rotting, still.

Scene V

“Hey, Frank.”

Joe’s man-titties lie still on his belly, slope and poke hard beneath his polo. His layered chins hold up his face, bounce his jaw back up to form sounds and words.

“Frank. You know, I’ve noticed a difference in you ever since –”

The walls gleam white. On a dusty bookshelf, a chalky, ivy-crowned bust of a Roman, Cincinnatus, to me just Marlon Brando’s Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, 1953. A dust cloud forms in my stare as the clichéd, B-movie bad monologue continues.

“– Roxanne was let go. As your superior it would be unethical to talk about what happened with her but I want you to know that –”

And I don’t know why. I decide to dish them out. All of them. All the ones I remember using with her.

“– we value you as an employee. We have rules, though. No games and no movies, okay?”

I straighten up into my Poitier stance. I sack up like Heston, like Cooper. I give Joe my best Holden stare and then— “‘They call me MISTER Tibbs!’”

“I beg your pardon?”

“‘No! I warn you! I tell you the day Rome falls there will be a shout of freedom such as the world has never heard before!’”

“What?”

“‘Droppen Sie dead!’”

“Frank? Are you okay?”

“Schweinhund! Schweinhund! Schweinhund!”

Joe laughs. TCM shocked, I know. His gynecomastic pair bobs in unison off his wide chest, and he’ll change the channel soon.

But it’s too late for him. Too late for me. I’m way past the Stalag 17 barracks already. Me and Rox and Dunbar and Sefton. Past the cold, muddy perimeter. We’re done cutting through the wire fence and into a freedom. A freedom. And far away, the bells in the cupolas toll.

____________________________________

Robert Paul Moreira lives and writes in South Texas.  His written works have appeared or are forthcoming in Storyglossia, Bartleby Snopes, Breakwater Review, Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, Interstice, The Quay, and The Acentos Review.