Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

MICK GARRIS Starfucker

I was the bastard son of Art and Commerce. Hollywood chewed me up and swallowed me whole, and when it had digested me, evacuated me like watery excreta from its overloaded bowels.

You’ll have to excuse the unlovely imagery; I have no reason to be bitter. Everything that happened was my own damned fault.

It wasn’t just the studio system. The independent world is almost as dire; it’s just a smaller list of talentless moneychangers who have to justify their existence. The only reason you don’t get rewritten by a list of hacks is not because of some kind of integrity inherent in the scruffy independent system; it’s because they’d rather not pay all those dogs to piddle on your papers

Well, there’s no Movie Police forcing you to lie down and spread ‘em for Hollywood. You don’t like it, go back to the night shift at Vidiots.

There are many reasons to love an industry unburdened by morality. Primary amongst them is Forgiveness. A Hit forgives us all our trespasses, in fact, rewards us for them. OneTitanic and you’re allowed to scream and rant and fire and pull guns and fuck anybody who’ll prance to the crook of your finger. And they forget all about Piranha II: The Spawning.

I had my big shot, my X-wing Fighter to Alderaan, my major studio break… and I bombed out big-time. It wasn’t big-budget, but it was high profile. The trades were filled with the saga of the film school prodigy who jumped right out of the gate and into studio features, even without a load of music video shit on his resume. And how that first-time Hollywood Helmer never even finished the movie. The studio wouldn’t even Alan Smithee the damned thing; they just flushed their investment away… and I followed it down the drain.

I learned a big lesson, and I’m ready to share it with you, free of charge.

Never work with puppies, kids or mutant babies.

My own mutant kept me underground, feeding off my bodily fluids like Bernie Brillstein before meeting its untimely end as In-Sink-Erator chum for the Studio City sewer gators. As Asta’s grue spattered the rusted porcelain of my kitchen sink, so did I. But I got over it. I even began to bathe again.

And work.

Well, when I say work, you won’t find it on my resume.

I wrote and wrote and wrote some more. And when I finished, I wrote some more. But the padlock had rusted shut. Nobody wanted to buy the stories I had to tell. Fair enough. Again, nobody’s forcing me here. I serve of my own accord. So I wrote and wrote and wrote some more.

But I never sold any of it. And I can’t blame anyone but myself. I thought that my experience had deepened me, and that my writing had matured, and reflected new reaches of insight into the human psyche. In truth, I was just jacking off.

But between then and now, Idid shoot another feature length film, though I haven’t told my new best friends at CAA. And it made a fortune, though not for me. I say film, but it was shot on MiniDV video, for a Valley company called Vivid. The San Fernando Valley is the red-rimmed sphincter of ‘Adult Entertainment’, and for a shining moment — though I hadn’t sported an erection in close to two years — I was its king. If you’ve spent way too many nights alone with your VCR and your left hand, you may be intimate with my timeless classic, Gulp! Yes, the exclamation mark is part of the title, your guarantee of artistic merit.

The two-day shoot had only one real disaster, though ‘disaster’ is a subjective term. Patty Petty had just been implanted eight days before the shoot with massive bags of mammarian come-hither, topping her slender frame with enormous globes that stretched her fine alabaster skin so tight that, during a particularly energetic (and award-winning) coupling that involved five men, two women, and one excessively randy orangutan, her breasts just split right open, dropping the silicone bags to the floor like unwanted Gerber’s from a baby’s mouth.

It was beautifully lit, and the camera was in the perfect position to see it all. It may be my most memorable scene.

With an investment of eight thousand dollars — and one thousand of those crispy green boys were all mine — Gulp! has grossed close to eight million dollars. Thank God for insurance. It swept the Adult Film Awards (Best Feature shot on Video, Best External Orgasm, Most Orifi Filled, and a host of others) and almost made me wish I’d used my own name on the damned thing. Almost.

Gulp Two! was a certainty. But I left that to other hands. Been there, porked that.

It’s funny, if not really all that amusing, how one thing leads to another in this berg. In the afterglow of Gulp!’s transcendental performance, Patty was cast as a Wise-Beyond-Her-Years Stripper, a featured role that required Tasteful Nudity in an otherwise unmemorable Artistic Endeavour known as the Untitled Independent Feature. The Sterling Stripper Story crashed and burned before the first week was in the can, but pretty, petty Patty introduced me to its producer, who had actually seen and enjoyed Words Without Voices, and he hired me to write his Magnum Opus… for the princely sum of two thousand American dollars. That was exactly double my Gulp fee, so I wrote my little telltale heart out. It was a grim, violent, Urban Drama, spattered with Red Humour and Brotherly Love. Well, our Masterwork of Renegade American Cinema stepped into mucky post-Columbine legal entanglements that kept it from even being midwifed on video.

But two years after it was collecting dust on the Payment Due shelf at the lab, Mr Producer hijacked his finest hour (and forty minutes) and managed to book it illegally into the Slamdunk Festival. For the uninitiated, Slamdunk is the scruffy alternative to Sundance and Slamdance. where loft-living men in black get their tawdry little celluloid stories that no legitimate human will have anything to do with projected onto the big screen once before being consigned to a K-mart video transfer with felt marker labels that sit with pride on the apple crate next to the dying Korean TVCR and the Tarantino collection.

Luckily, Sundance stank on ice that January. People had grown tired of the sensitive as well as the insensitive. Cinematographic ennui blanketed Park City with eleven inches of dull snow. And, with a bit of help from unnamed sources, word began to creep out about the lesbian nipple-tonguing scene in our Masterwork. It is said in the Bible of American Independent Cinema that if you blanket raw Eros in artful light and gorgeous surroundings, they will come. Give them guilt-free art-house erotica, wanking material for the intelligentsia, and the kilos to the kingdom are yours.

We played to a fall house, breaking the legal logjam, and leading to an eleven-week run at the Nuart. It’s still running midnights at the Angelika Center, even though it’s been on video for months. Sure, most of the attention went to the snotty little auteur in the backwards cap and the baggy Hilfigers, but you know, somebody writes this shit. And this time, that somebody was me, and that shit was mine.

So now I’m working again.

I mean, I’m not Kevin Williamson, but I’m doctoring a couple of Gramercy scripts at ten grand a week, sold a spec to Fox Searchlight for the low six figures, and made an overall with Bob and Harvey over at Miramax that includes directing my third script for them. If and when.

But I’ve been through this before, and if you can’t learn from experience, you are less than human, and consigned to a life as detritus. You exist to fail and provide an example to those who can learn from your mistakes.

So… no Porsche and big house for me. I’m driving a TT, with a condo at the Marina City Club. Leave the pretensions to the backwards cap crowd. I’m letting my hair grow out brown.

There’s even been a rebound in the social world. Invitations to screenings and parties are ubiquitous, and I don’t bother to RSVP. I haven’t paid for a meal since Slamdunk. And that was a year and a half ago.

I wasn’t even going to bother with the American Cinemateque opening party, except that I’d never seen DeMille’s silent Ten Commandments before. Hell, I’d never seen any silent film before… or any DeMille, either, for that matter. But I’d heard about the grand old Egyptian Theatre, and there was a live orchestra, and my tickets were free, but they’d have cost you a hundred bucks apiece… if you could get them. I was at a meeting at Paramount in the neighbourhood anyway, and it was better than fighting traffic to the Marina. Well, the Cinemateque completely ruined Hollywood’s first and greatest movie palace, cramming a hideously ugly high-tech architectural disaster into its beautiful shell, and I slept through the dusty old harridan of a movie.

But the party afterwards made the evening more than worthwhile.

Oh, it was littered with the usual suits and poseurs and perfect specimens at both ends of the Hollywood rectum spectrum. There were the witty and famous, the witless and gorgeous, the rich and the stitched, the sparkled and the spackled, the cream and its curdle. Milling about the cramped, crimson lobby were Golden Age Movie Star lookalikes serving drinks and the latest trendy Biblical edibles from Along Came Mary. It was mildly clever. They did, however, manage to find some pretty good doubles: a Gable and a Lombard, a magnificent Monroe, a mammarian Mansfield. There was a remarkably unhaltered Harlow sheered in a Platinum Blonde satin gown that chilled and hugged her alabaster breasts with static electricity that made her nipples point shamelessly all the way to Heaven.

It was almost enough to make me give a shit about Old Hollywood. It was fully enough to feel my first post-Asta stirrings Down There.

The tight marcel of her white-hot hair, the anachronistic, unathletic voluptuousness of her unfettered hips, the sea-bottom near translucence of her milky — no, creamy — skin enraptured me in unexpected ways. Everything old was new again. My fascination did not go unnoticed. A publicist for the Cinemateque, ever alert to the needs of Her People, smiled at my obvious rapture, sidled up to me and gripped my elbow with her manicured claw, sipping champagne from a plastic flute from the other. Her lipstick smeared the rim a muddy, dried-blood colour.

‘Pretty, isn’t she?’

Pretty. Meg Ryan is pretty. A nice day is pretty. A fucking nose is pretty. Harlow II was something way beyond that. I don’t know that they’ve even got a word yet for what she was. Really, it’s been a couple of years since I last gave a shit about sex. I mean, it was ruined for me, I thought, for good. And Madame Publicite only bittered the batter. Though her high, domed forehead was stretched tight and shiny, her telltale hands were creepy and crepey. Her thinning hair was course and wiry, her collagen lips bloated like a flounder’s, her eager eyes trapped in a look of constant surprise. She was the sexual Antichrist.

But what the Antichrist taketh away, Harlow II gave back a thousandfold. Hallelujah, I am reborn.

The publicity monster stroked the inside of my arm with her talons and released a string of intimate words in my ear in a voice I know she felt was sultry, but to me was a gaseous nicotine croak.

‘You can have her, you know,’ she exhaled, wilting the rented flowers around us. ‘Let me introduce you.’ And the Publicity Pimp, gripping me so tight I feared blood loss, led me to the Goddess.

Well, suddenly realising the woman was a professional wilted me a bit… until we were face to face. It turned out I was the proverbial man who needed no introduction. She knew who I was, had seen the Masterwork during its Nuart run, even bought the video, though it still hasn’t come out at sell-through. She even knew about Words Without Voices.

Had to be an actress. Damn it.

But who else works these Hollywood gigs? Professional servers? Beautiful People entirely uninterested in the performing arts? What the fuck did I expect? It was a disappointment, though it did nothing to fade her glory. She was magnificent, one of a kind. And the wattage from her smile could run a thirty-plex projection booth for a year and a half.

The Pimp winked and left us, with a smutty exit line that dangled huskily in the air of her wake: ‘If you need a third party, you know who to call.’ I’d rather lick Michael Jackson’s star on the Walk of Fame clean.

When the tendrils of her reeking Giorgio finally receded and I could draw the semblance of a breath, I laughed uncomfortably. ‘Seen any good movies lately?’

Her smile never broke, even with her simple answer. ‘No.’

I was falling hard. They haven’t made a good film in years. All they make are Crybaby Movies, no real guts or glory. Tobe Hooper can’t get a studio picture set up. Gus Van Sant reshot fucking Psycho. It’s all crybaby shit or comedies that aren’t funny or send-ups. There hasn’t been a real movie in the ‘90s, and the new Millennium seems just as bleak.

But she had an addendum: ‘Not since your picture at the Nuart.’ And then her smile went sideways with the extra-added attraction. She whispered, ‘Gulp.’ Not like a title, or anything. Just the word. Gulp. Without the exclamation point. Just to let me know that she knew. And still, she never lost her smile.

I could only stare at her in admiration. ‘Same to you, but more of it.’ It was a lame retort, I know, but I had to say something. And she laughed, a tinkling shower of delight that prickled the hair on the back of my neck. Gulp, indeed.

‘If you weren’t an actress, I’d ask you to marry me.’ Chicks dig that.

‘If you weren’t a director, I’d slap you for that.’ But I was, so she didn’t. ‘I like directors… especially the young, talented ones.’

‘If I meet one I’ll be sure to introduce you.’ The self-deprecating stuff always hooks them. And I wanted her hooked. Gaffed. Boned.

‘Oh, we’ve already met.’

Her wet, crimson lips glistened, and I watched them stick together and peel apart as the ‘m’ made its way through her mouth in slow motion.

‘Will you be at the after-party?’ she asked. After-party? What after-party? Was that on my invitation?

‘Will you?’

‘I have to be.’

‘Then so do I. When and where?’

‘It’s a secret.’ And then she leaned close, offering a bud-tipped alabaster view, and shared her secret with me.

The rain was Biblical, but the directions very specific. The little roadster and I headed up Laurel Canyon, past Joel Silver’s Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece on Hollywood Boulevard, turned left on Wonderland and slid through an aquarium of eely estuaries and sobbing oaks. We groped through the rare midnight storm, ever upwards, evading the cracks of lightning that drew closer as we drove higher. At the applause of a particularly splendiferous hand of electrical fingers in the sky, I turned to look down at the Basin below and behind, just in time to see its voracious maw go dark.

It made little difference to my slithering drive. Here in the jungle of the Hollywood Hills, there were no streetlights. The moonlight was my guide. I was so close to my destination. I could not give up my quest, even if the party was called off when the lights went out.

So I continued, the heart of Indiana Jones beating within my chest.

At last I emerged at the crest of the mountain, and I saw Xanadu. Not the Olivia Newton-John bowl-filler, but the Orson Welles original, done Southern California-style. It was vast and pink and Spanish-tiled, probably built in the twenties when this acreage could be had for pocket change. And though the dozens of windows were dark, red-vested car chimps were jockeying the Benzes and Beemers into place. I parked the TT myself, and let the rain submerge me as I walked to the door.

Cool.

Security was tight, but I didn’t need a ticket. The enormous Polynesian totem at the door let me right in without even a word passing between us. Either a fan or he’d been primed.

I walked inside this Old Hollywood mansion, and found myself submerged in darkness. I squinted through the twisting hallway, choking on the musk of history, and stepped into the spider’s parlour. It opened up into a giant room filled with overstuffed furnishings and the glow of pale candlelight. It was a step into another era, one you only see on the screen, and even then only in black-and-white. This place was an education in early cinema, the kind I flunked out in at film school: an education I did not want, but could not avoid. The whole house was dressed in the elegance of a Hollywood long gone, like an Ernst Lubitsch drawing room comedy, dressed by William Cameron Menzies. The ceilings were high and scalloped, the maroon velvet draperies belted into place by gold ropes. It all looked so wrong in colour.

This was a Hollywood for which I had no nostalgia. It had grown long in the tooth on quaintness and manners and dust and censorship. It was far removed from real life: cornball artifice with heavy make-up and jerky special effects. It looked like Cary Grant should step in and offer me a drink.

Which is exactly what happened.

His black hair oiled into a perfect, shining part, a pearly grin that rounded the dimpled chin into an undersized apple, he poured me champagne and wished me well before disappearing into the candlelit gloom.

As my pupils adjusted to the light, I realised that I stood in a room filled with perfect specimens of an age gone by. Elegant in their evening clothes, many of them had been at the Cinemateque gala. But none of the icons from the fifties or beyond were here. These replicants were strictly of pre-war vintage. Most of these had not served at the Egyptian; they were special: the very most beautiful recreations of Hollywood’s so-called Golden Era. Not really being a student of celluloid history, there were a lot of lookalikes I didn’t recognise at the time. You know, if a movie was made before the birth of Michael Bay, I wasn’t interested. But some of them you just couldn’t avoid, so great was their status as pop culture icons.

Even the new generation of filmmakers that comes after me would have recognised the young John Wayne, that woman with the big monkey in King Kong, Kate Hepburn, Jimmy Cagney, Jimmy Stewart, Lana Turner in a bright red sweater, that woman who always had her blonde hair hanging over one eye, that Thin Man guy with the moustache, the old lady from Big Valley, who was a lot better-looking young, but still no babe. Except for Lana’s show-off sweater, all of them were in the most elegant evening clothes of the era: white tie and tails, satin gowns, real classy stuff.

But what really looked out of place, even more than seeing these facsimiles in full, living colour, was watching what they were doing. The place was foetid with body heat. Those elegant clothes slid off of bare shoulders and dropped into elegant little pools of silk at the feet of the guests being serviced. I mean, it wasn’t like everybody was whanging and banging in the middle of the room or anything; it was a little subtler than that.

But the Hollywood Hills were alive with coupling. Each massive easy chair, divan or settee was occupied with at least one gorgeous specimen treating the guests to a taste of Old Hollywood. A hand cupped a puddle of breast here; a flesh probe reached between tight buttocks there. Lips met teats and groins lubricated to the gentle strains of the string section in the other room. This glamorous repast of bodies on bodies was still elegant, passionate yet ethereal. It was my first appreciation of Hollywood Past.

I felt out of place, like a child, apart from the party, a guest but not a participant… until tapered porcelain fingers rested on my shoulders from behind. I turned, and joined the celebration. Harlow II touched her scarlet lips to my cheek and gently slid her fingers between mine. ‘I was waiting for you.’

Jesus!

The words eased over me on her gentle breath, and every body hair prickled to attention. In the candlelight, she was even more luminous, practically digitally enhanced. Her fingers wrapped around mine, and it was as if we had melted together at the hand.

‘Nice party,’ I managed, but my voice cracked the ‘nice’ into two syllables. I couldn’t imagine a modern woman as beautiful as my Jean… and I told her so.

‘You should see me on a weekday.’

I shuddered. The veil of imagination lifted for a moment, and for just a slice of that moment I could see past the platinum hair and the period lipstick, and saw her as just another beautiful actress in LA. Everything suddenly darkened in a crash of artifice, and my pulse dropped. The arousal waned, and I struggled it back in time, but without success. Jean was a working girl, another gorgeous face in the Academy Players Directory, with a wannabe resume and an attraction to randy directors. I went limp.

She noticed.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. I just imagined you without the wig, having lunch with your agent at the Ivy and checking your pages every hour on your cell phone. In the real world.’

She looked at me, figuring me out. ‘This is my real world. Here. Now. With you. This is no wig; go ahead, feel it.’

I did. I ran my fingers through the curling-iron waves, and she closed her eyes, enjoying the journey. ‘Pull on it.’ I gave it a little tug, and her lips parted, releasing that intoxicating breath. It was not a wig.

‘I don’t have an agent, I eat lunch at Musso and Frank’s every day, and I hate cell phones. In fact, that’s how I tell good people from evil people. If you talk on a cell phone in a restaurant, you’re evil. Period. No way around it, no second chance. One strike and you’re out. Cell phones in restaurants or talking in a movie theatre: the true signs of human slime.’ I hoped nobody would choose this moment to reach out and touch me via the PacBell digital in my coat pocket. ‘This is me, the real me, the ever me. Just a little less dressy on weekdays. So mind your manners, or you’ll have to be spanked.’

Oh, please, not that. I apologised, and she forgave me.

‘What would you like?’

‘Are you kidding?’ Uncharacteristically, her face flushed and she looked shyly down under my hungry gaze.

‘You want something to drink?’

‘Cary Grant gave me champagne, which I don’t drink. I’ll take a Coke, if you’ve got it. But I just want to be with you.’

She smiled at me, all girlish and genuine. ‘That’s so sweet.’ And she led me by the hand. We walked through dim caverns of candlelight, each containing bodies in rhythmic heat. I was not startled to see Cary lying beneath an energetically hyperventilating Madame Publicist, her eyes rolled back in her head in ecstasy, her nails gouging red rivers down Cary’s chest. I tried to sneak past, but her eyes found me, and she gave me a yellow wink. Her words reached me on a wave of dragon breath: ‘Have a nice time…’ And then she came. Loudly. Ugh.

Other couplings were more visually appealing. There were fantasies fulfilled throughout the house, animus cloaked in an historic glamour. Dead movie stars brought back to life by the vigour of our desire. I can’t tell you how exciting these violations of the Hays Code were to watch.

Laid out in the elegance of the location, the perfect grooming and formal wear intensified the heat to an amazing degree. The power may have been off, but the house was filled with electricity. I had always seen that Old Hollywood shit as dull and historic and musty and grampy. But now it was making me sprout wood.

I’m a director, so I observe. I felt no guilt staring at the couplings as Jean led me through them. It was a symphony of flesh, and each of the players was first chair. And I was being led to the podium to conduct a little ditty of my own.

I couldn’t believe that the dark room she eased me into was anchored by a heart-shaped bed. That image would have worn a beard even in one of those old thirties movies. But it did, and the bed was made up in pink satin, as if art-directed to set off Harlow II’s peach gown. The high-ceilinged room was lit only by a shaft of blue moonlight through a curtain of rain. The chill of the moonlight was tempered by the heat of our bodies. When she slid lightly onto the corner of the bed, tiny arcs of static electricity crackled between her and the sheet. As she sat in the shaft, highlighted by the moon, I could only gasp. She lifted her arms to me, and I dropped down next to her. I knew this had to go slow. It had to be drawn out. This might only happen once.

She stroked my face with her delicate fingertips, a Mona Lisa grin tugging at her scarlet lips. Those lips moved slowly in, and I wanted them to just devour me: wrap around my head and work their way down to my toes until I was dinner. Instead, they eased against my cheek, pausing there before peeling wetly away and leaving their crimson imprint. She grinned at the lipstick she’d left on my face, and lunged in to lick it off in a swift wipe of her tongue. Then she laughed.

I put my hands up and gently held her face in them, as if it might shatter. Her skin was as smooth and white as an egg. She let me draw her face close to mine, and finally we kissed. No suction, no open mouths, just our lips touching each other, gently at first, breathing each other’s breath. I kissed her upper lip, her lower lip, then tilted my head to kiss them both at a vertical angle. Then I got hungry. I started to pull her lower lip into my mouth, nursing on it. Soon, the tiny pink tip of her tongue ventured into my mouth, tracing my teeth and gums. There was the faintest taste of chocolate on her tongue, and I savoured it. I wrapped my mouth around her tongue, and she slid it deeper inside, soon moving it to a samba rhythm. Then she took my tongue and nursed on it. I’m sure my eyes rolled back in my head in idiot abandon.

When finally we broke for air, we just looked unbelievingly into each other’s eyes and breathed. And then we both just broke into laughter with the delight of it all. She nestled into the base of my neck, kissing it wet and warm, and I carefully lowered the satin strap that held in Nirvana. But I wasn’t about to go right for the good stuff. I wouldn’t be the pig with the hands that only wanted to grasp the tits and the clutch. For the first time in my life, I pleasured in the getting there. I felt the rich gloss of her neck and shoulders, stroked the clean, perfect whiteness of her deliriously long back. I kissed down her neck, tasted her wrists, even lifted her arm to cradle my head under it and kiss her pit. I tasted the slightest hint of salt and loved it. There wasn’t even a trace of stubble.

And she, too, was happy to take her time with me. Her lips brushed lightly over my neck as she unbuttoned my shirt. I could feel the heat of her breath as she nuzzled my chest, her teeth lightly tugging on the hair around my nipples. She sucked easily on mine as I wanted hers. But I’d get there soon enough.

My hands went all exploratory, gently excavating the secrets of her body. I eased the satin down off of her breasts, and there were little sparkles of static electricity introducing them in a fanfare of tiny fireworks. Her happy little breasts were as white as the rest of her body, not surgically enhanced, and capped with tiny pink roses that almost disappeared in the moonlight. I first felt their heft with a light stroke of the underside with the back of my hand. I slowly closed in, palming them, holding them, clutching them. I nuzzled them, but that was it. Soon I had drawn them hungrily into my mouth, and I wanted to feed off of her: milk, blood, anything. I just wanted to swallow her fluids.

At that point, it wasn’t long before I was atop her, the globes of her ass clutched tightly in my hands. Her legs scissored me tightly as she chewed voraciously on my earlobe. And as her body was wracked in orgasm, I was pumping two years of dormant seed endlessly into her. I thought it would never stop… but finally it did.

When the new sun peered into the bedroom window, the old movie was over. Jean was gliding into jeans and a T-shirt, and brushing her hair out of her eyes. She wasn’t Jean any more. I bet she lived in the Valley. I heard the leaden thump-thump of techno-disco booming through the old house, and a ripple of nausea curdled me. It took me a while to come to. The 2000s had fully replaced the 1930s. And I didn’t like it.

I watched the muscles of her chest heave as she brushed her platinum hair and tried to figure out what came next. ‘Um… what do I owe you?’

‘Don’t worry about it. Last night was all taken care of.’

Nice party.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, and she winked at me in the mirror.

‘When can I see you again?’

She turned to me. ‘Anytime you’ve got fifteen hundred bucks. Or a part you might think I’m right for. I’m a very versatile actress.’

I tried to smile back, but I’m sure she saw my face crash. Jean was gone. This stranger gave me a mock pout. ‘Aw, baby misses Jean Harlow, doesn’t he? I can be Jean anytime you can afford it.’ And she handed me a business card with her pager number on it. She kissed me hard on the lips and toodled.

What a crash. I don’t know why I felt so devastated, so abandoned, so cheated. But here I was, hollow and deflated, still sticky from last night, inside and out. All I had left was the drive home.

Home.

I stared out at the sewage bobbing along the beach from my tenth floor condo. I hated the present. A second-stage smog alert hung heavy over the effluent, and the traffic on the boulevard below was blocked like a bowel. I had the Criterion Armageddon on the DVD player, enveloping me in full Dolby Digital surround, but even that couldn’t bring me out of it. Normally its twenty-cuts-a-minute exhilarated me; today it merely enervated me. It just felt like a bunch of frantic, noisy crap, a cinematic nagging mother-in-law, screeching in my ear. I missed the past… and I’d never even been there.

So I decided to visit.

I made a sojourn to the dreaded San Fernando Valley to Dave’s Video, a beacon in the midnight of Ventura Boulevard. I loaded up on every black-and-white DVD made before the Great War and charged it to my Gramercy account. Research, you know. Let them pay for my education in the classics.

I lugged the tonnage of my cinema booty back to the Marina, and vegetated in front of the new HD screen from the Good Guys. Tendrils of beard sprouted as I reached back into the ghosts of the past. First, I made my way through every Jean Harlow film I could find, fromHell’s Angels through Saratoga. She’d made a couple dozen pictures in the course of a half-dozen years, then up and died. But Jesus, what a legacy she left! Through Harlow, I discovered Howard Hawks, William Wellman and Victor Fleming. The movies spoke to me in an eloquence I’d never known before. They just plain spoke! The words sparkled, the scenes played out without cuts, the camera observed, rather than led the characters! What a revelation!

I worked my way through the Harlow collection, hungering for her crumpled little expression, lusting after her pale, ever-braless form. Dinner at Eight led me to George Cukor; Cukor led me to Ernst Lubitsch, who led me to Preston Sturges, who led me to John Sturges, who led to me John Ford, on to Hitchcock and Huston, David Lean and Frank Capra, Tod Browning and James Whale. And through the filmmakers I met some new dead friends: Jimmy Stewart, Robert Donat, Gene Tierney, Donna Reed, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Jean Simmons, Glenn Ford, Ann Savage, Veronica Lake, Boris Karloff, Fay Wray.

Who knew these creaky old grinders would be so filled with wit and beauty and humour and tension and revelation? Who knew that a film could be more than a barrage of flash-cut imagery, digital animation, and DTS explosions?

Maybe you did, but I didn’t.

I know, I’m sounding like some old fart film instructor who can’t let go of a past that’s practically been buried alive, but it’s true. I don’t mean to preach here — I really don’t — but I was born again. I guess I’d only seen the old shit. I didn’t find the jewels. That would be like judging today’s movies by the latest Adam Sandler.

The best of the old stuff was elegant and smart and breezy and entertaining and, well, engaging. And the worst of it was… well, the worst of it was like most of the movies today. Bankrupt and boring.

I got it.

Bleary-eyed and exhausted, but also wonderfully recharged after a dozen weeks of nonstop watching, I turned off the set. I’d forgotten the world was in colour, and it startled me. The cleaning lady had vacuumed around me for the last couple of months, and thrown out all the food delivery cartons, but the place was still a litter of videos and detritus. As I stood, my head reeled. My eyes had stared at a fixed focus for so long that they found it difficult to hone in on anything else. My hair was a couple inches longer, and I had the semblance of a Fu Manchu beard tickling my chin.

I slid the glass door to the balcony open and stepped out onto the cusp of the real world, and let it breathe on me. It was noisy and argumentative and its breath stank. I liked the movies better. Reality bathed me in ugliness, and I shivered. It reeled around me and my mind drifted away to beauty.

I remembered what brought this on in the first place. I opened up my wallet, and pulled out her card. It didn’t have a name on it, just a number. I dialled it, got the system’s nervous beep-beep-beep, punched in my number and waited. This time, as I looked out into the vast Pacific, I couldn’t discern the turds floating out there. Maybe they cleaned them out again; maybe they were just hiding. But the sea was as blue as the veins on Cher’s forehead. If only the sky matched. Instead, it was congealing into a disgusting mauve solidity.

Her call booted me out of my coastal reverie. She knew who it was from just my ‘hello’. She was good. I needed to see her. I wanted to share what I had found with her, and needed to siphon some of it off of her, so I invited her over. She came.

By the time she called up from the lobby, I was showered and shaved and reborn. My eyes could focus near and far again, and my breath was kissing sweet. My expectant erection tugged me like a divining rod to the door at the sound of her gentle rap. Oh, my lovely embodiment of the past, my alabaster testimony to all that once was beautiful and elegant and witty and desirable. My link to another, better world, the only world that mattered, a world without corruption or darkness or despair.

My Jean.

I pulled the door open… and wanted to cry.

This was not my Jean. This was that girl in the Jeans and the T-shirt and the Reeboks and the backwards Nike cap, fresh from the gym. This was all the girls I’d read and dated and sampled and discarded and been discarded by. This was now, and I wanted — needed — then.

She saw it and knew. She lifted a shopping bag from Trader Joe’s and pulled out a bottle of wine. ‘I brought wine.’ I tried not to look so let down, and she dug deeper in the bag. ‘And Jean.’

She held up the peach satin gown with a twinkling little smile that did its best to win me over. ‘Which way to the bathroom?’

Unable to speak, I merely pointed, and she scurried through the condo and locked herself in. No matter what she looked like when she emerged, I had seen behind the facade. I knew it was fake now, and that it wasn’t going to work. It was so perfect, that night at the Cinemateque, until the fateful morning after. I wouldn’t see Jean any more, merely the actor playing her. It wasn’t the same thing.

Still, when she emerged, the gown clinging to her like hot breath, she was stunning. The lips were sanguine, the hips unfettered, the breasts at full attention. But now, having experienced the real Jean Harlow in every one of her films — even the one with Laurel and Hardy — I realised she didn’t really look all that much like Harlow. Beautiful, desirable, yes. Harlow, no.

‘Forget about that girl at the door,’ she told me. ‘I sent her away. I want you all to myself.’ She gave me a sharp little bite on the lip. I tasted my own blood.

She stepped into the middle of the living room and appraised the place, knowing I would appraise her in the light of the picture windows. The room basically consisted of open space, the giant TV system and a view of the murky Marina. And now, her. She startled me with a sudden squeal of delight. ‘Look!’ she said as she knelt at the pile of silver discs littering the floor. ‘You’ve got all my movies! Let’s watch one!’ She picked up a copy of Red Dust and held it out to me in front of the stack of electronic hardware. Then, in a baby-doll voice: ‘How do you work this thing?’

I popped the disc into the machine and fired up the monitor, filling it with the true Harlow and Clark Gable.

‘Do you have any popcorn, Clark?’ she asked me. I had to disappoint her, but she was goodnatured about it all and pulled me into a pile of pillows with her. It was a strange experience looking from the screen to the siren curled in my lap. She mouthed all the dialogue that Harlow spoke as the sun outside sank into the Marina.

As the movie continued, she slid up against me like a cat, and the contact was all warm and comfy and even arousing… but that’s not what I wanted. I wanted the woman on the screen. The Jean in my lap started to purr, her engine ignited and accelerating. She pushed me back into the pillows and climbed atop me, I drowned in her body.

Her skin as smooth as the discarded satin gown, she flowed against me like butter on a frying pan, melting on me. Her talents spread throughout her body, but mine resisted. I tried closing my eyes, but could not keep the girl at the door out of my home. She drew me into her and we coupled ferociously, but it was nothing like that night. And I know it wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t help but focus on the tiny red pimple sprouting on her chin. The real Harlow would never be so blemished. We united wetly and energetically, and our mutual release finally jettisoned enough unspilled juice to cramp my sphincter. But I was not satisfied, and she knew it.

‘You know, I try my best to be her for you, but I can’t really be her.’

I couldn’t say anything. I was spent and sweating, and just couldn’t come up with an answer. I felt like the king of movie geeks, pining for a movie star who died before my parents were even conceived. What a fucking goober.

She just watched me, her mind working, and I felt like a twelve-year-old. My heart had been broken by an image on television. Her gaze just embarrassed me. Mama, make it stop. She just kept looking at me, judging me, shrinking me with her eyes. Meanwhile, the movie had come to an end.

Without saying anything, she walked across the room, still spectacularly naked, and picked up the phone. Her eyes still pinning me to the floor like a butterfly specimen, she started dialling and walked into the kitchen. I heard her dulcet, off-screen voice, but not the words. I heard her sign off before she re-entered the room and cradled the phone, shameless in her sheath of flawless ivory flesh. She gently took me by the hand and took me to the glass doors overlooking the water. She stared out for long silent minutes before speaking.

‘How much would you pay to spend the night with Harlow?’

I figured it was time to pay up. I guess fifteen hundred wasn’t a lot to pay to discover what a retard I was.

‘I’ll get your money.’

I went to the desk and brought her the cash.

‘I didn’t mean me,’ she said as she took the bills and folded them into her dainty Bakelite purse. ‘I meant Harlow.’

‘I think you’re as close as I’m ever going to get.’

That made her laugh. ‘I’m not.’

I was sick of her laughing at me. Think again about me casting you in anything, I thought.

‘I mean Harlow, Jean Harlow, exactly who we were watching on the screen.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t want to play this game.

‘What would you pay for a night of connubial bliss with Jean Harlow?’

‘The real Jean Harlow? If it were possible?’

‘If it were possible.’

‘I don’t know. I can’t go that far into the abstract.’

‘Come on, think about it. If you could have one night with her, how much would it be worth to you?’

I thought about it. ‘Fifteen hundred?’ I thought it would compliment her.

‘Shit, you can get me for fifteen hundred. Come on, for real. An entire night with Jean Harlow, exactly as you’ve seen her in the movies. How much?’

‘I don’t know… ten thousand dollars?’

‘Cheapskate.’

‘Twenty.’

‘Jesus.’

I gave up ‘Then let’s stop doing this. I couldn’t fuck Jean Harlow for all the money in the world, so let’s just stop this. She’s been rotting since 1937.’

She just smiled sweetly and shook her marcelled little head. ‘I don’t think so…’

Where the fuck was this going? ‘Well, if she’s a hundred years old and living in Argentina or something, I don’t think I want a piece of her.’

That fucking smile again.

‘Would you pay a hundred grand to spend the night with the Jean Harlow of your dreams? The 1937 Jean Harlow? If you could. For real.’

Just for the hell of it, I thought about it. Would I? The decision was a bit more difficult in the wake of the powerful orgasm I’d just experienced minutes ago. But with the Gramercy and Miramax deals set in hard copies, I had some disposable income. Is that how I’d dispose it? A hundred grand? Hell, I could spec out a script in a month for double that. So that’s like two weeks’ pay. Of course, you can’t crank out a dozen scripts a year, but Jesus, even if it’s a couple months’ pay… would it be worth it? I didn’t have a wife or kids or anything: just me and my TT. I’d pay a hundred thousand dollars to sleep with Harlow.

If it were possible.

So I said yeah.

And she said really? And I said yeah, I think I would. And she said that was interesting and slid into her jeans and that fucking T-shirt again, kissed me goodbye, and fluttered away.

It was another week before she called me back. I was immersed in Saratoga when the machine picked up. I never answer the phone, especially not when I’m viewing, and especially not when it’s Jean onscreen. But it was her voice: ‘Are you there? It’s Jean.’

The voice, I had to admit, was perfect. I picked up. ‘Hi.’

She giggled, sounding like New York in the thirties. ‘Go to the bank,’ she whispered.

‘What for?’

‘It’s time.’

‘Time for what?’

‘You know. Hundred-thousand-dollar time. Cash or traveller’s cheques.’

Well, you and I both know what that meant. But what it meant was impossible. I didn’t know how to respond to her, and just sat there with that porcelain face basting my brain, probably breathing fanny.

‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Can you get to the bank today? And meet me at Union Station tonight at eleven?’

I didn’t understand. ‘I don’t understand,’ I told her.

‘Like heck you don’t.’ And then, with another tinkling little titter, she hung up, as the real Jean smiled at me from my 62-inch Pioneer, enhanced for sixteen-by-nine.

I’d spent a couple of nights sharing skin with this phenomenal creature, reaching a Nirvana Kurt Cobain never dreamed of, but what did I really know about her? That she could set me to palpitating was a given… but what kind of idiot would go to the bank, pull out a hundred grand, and meet this angel in the middle of the night at a train station in the cesspool of downtown Los Angeles? Surely this was a set-up; obviously this, well, I’ll say it, this prostitute had found a malleable mark, a sucker just dying to toss off his ill-gotten gains. She and her pierced and tattooed cohorts would beat me up and take my cash. You would never have gone for a crack-brained scenario like this one, and I would never have dared writing such a silly plotline. If I’d turned it in to Sid Fields, I’d have flunked Screenwriting 101.

But, you know, I did have a hundred grand. It was pretty much all I had at the moment, but, you know, I had more coming in. And I was unburdened by investments. What was the worst that could happen to me? Other than having my money stolen and my throat slashed, what did I have to lose? My soul? Yeah… that’s worth a lot.

Was it really that preposterous to think that I might be able to have .. Jean?

Well, the answer was obvious, but I sped down to Washington Mutual anyway.

Still grand but ageing and missing a few teeth, Union Station reached coldly into the scuffed, blue-brown night sky. Mine was the only car in the desolate lot and I parked as far as I could from the three creased, ruddy faces sharing hits off a bottle of violet rotgut. The sound of their retching was a perfect contemporary counterpoint to the timeless architectural elegance that reached out to embrace me. I was, as usual, anally punctual. Eleven distant chimes hung sweating in the muggy night air.

As I stepped into the empty vastness of the old dowager, it was like stepping into an evacuated Capra epic. I could imagine the post-war homecomings, the reunited sweethearts spotting one another through the teeming masses of humanity, the brass-band sendoffs to the senator’s last hurrah. But the monochrome crowd evaporated and the cracked leather seats and the gang-gouged woodwork brought me back home. It was an empty Art Deco barn strangling on its memories. I would be one of them.

Then the tip-tap tip-tap of high heels echoed around me, and I turned just as an unmistakable silhouette rounded the corner. She stepped into a shaft of light, and its reflection off of her platinum hair ignited the room in yellow fire. She stood there, letting the spotlight caress her perfection. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi back.’

I walked to her, my heart suddenly racing in anticipation, the cash in a shoulder bag, suddenly weighing a hundred pounds. What the fuck was I doing here?

‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ I asked her.

‘Dreaming. Give me your keys.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Heaven.’

I followed her out of the cavernous, empty building and back to my car, unable to pull my eyes from the lift and ripple of the perfect globes of her rear as she walked.

The thick summer night laid on us like an oil change, even with the top down. She caromed through the dank darkness, the empty downtown Los Angeles streets choking on their past. Broadway was a desiccated corpse, the klieg lights of the grand Million Dollar, United Artists, and Los Angeles Theaters long extinguished. A handful of zombies lumbered like cancerous cells through her clogged artery. We were on our own Fantastic Voyage through Innerspace when Jean suddenly pulled off behind the old Times Mirror building and guided us down a long, dark, seemingly endless alley.

That alley led to the decaying backside of a once-grand edifice, a cracked granite frown slowly settling into the sinking subway horizon. She pulled us into its gaping, festering maw, and kept driving like a drill into the ground. The corkscrew drive was seemingly Hellhound as it dug us deeper into a quakephobe’s sweatiest nightmare. But as we plunged down beneath the city, lit only by headlights and the dim, browning sconces that studded the concrete wall, the temperature grew much cooler.

In moments, my grinning little TT peered into a grand open lobby, its flawless white-veined black marble gleaming in the shine of its headlights. A giant stone Thinker sat contemplating us in the middle of the vast room as Jean killed the engine and tip-tapped across the gleaming mirror of marble floor to the centre pair of sculptured brass doors. The elegance of the lobby was impressive, and of another world: overstuffed leather and cherry sofas and chairs, vast WPA murals of noble working people on the job, a heavy walnut reception desk the size of a Beverly Center screen. It had all of the chi-chi quiet snootery of a Beverly Hills face-tightening clinic.

Jean said ‘I’m here’ to nobody and nothing in particular, and the giant, wizard doors opened up to Oz.

The hallway was of impressive length and faded grandeur, lit by the dull Cocteau glow of faux lantern sconces. It was a soft, warm, but dim light… and in it, Harlow II was even more ravishing. She led me down the length of the hallway, and as we reached its end, the dark wood double doors opened up to us, revealing the Man Behind the Curtain.

The man was tiny, certainly not over five feet, with a venerable, dried-apple countenance tightly sheltered with a thick, pomaded landing strip of artificially boot-blacked hair. A ghost of cataract and eyelids that drooped like sagging breasts almost hid the sparkle of his rheumy grey eyes, and his osteoporosis curled him into a tiny question mark. He looked up at Jean, apparently unwilling to make eye contact with me until getting her approval.

‘He’s good,’ she told him, and the little lawn gnome finally looked up at me, manufacturing a smile that revealed perfectly straight white teeth that were way too big for his crepe-paper mouth. He reached out his right hand — which was missing the thumb — and I shook it. I don’t know if you’ve ever shaken hands with a guy without a thumb, but it just doesn’t feel right. His other hand was tucked out of sight in his pocket, and I wondered if the little gremlin was born without opposable thumbs at all.

After I shook his hand, he kept it reaching out at me. I thought he was stuck on pause or something until I realised that he was waiting for me to hand over the shoulder bag with the cash in it.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, and he looked back up at Jean, who turned to me with a smile.

‘No names.’

That made the little homunculus grin, and his smile, even in the dim light, was blinding. I handed over the bag to PeeWee, who zipped it open and started carefully counting the bills. This was going to take a while. Jean leaned in to stick a kiss on my cheek.

‘Have a great night.’ And she turned back down that long, lonesome hallway.

‘Wait.’ She turned back with an expectant look. ‘Can this guy even talk?’

That made the withered little manikin testy. I thought he was going to bite my kneecap. ‘Of course I can talk! Oh, shit, I’ve lost count!’ And he started over. From one.

With a ‘Nighty-bye,’ Harlow II was down the hall and out the door, leaving me with my own private Dr Loveless. I waited in the doorway while he counted it all out: one hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.

Eventually satisfied that I wasn’t a piker, Mr Subspecies turned and led me down the newly revealed corridor. I had to move slowly to keep from overtaking his baby steps.

We took another turn and he reached up on tippy-toes to flip a light switch, revealing a long, antiquated chamber that opened out onto several apartments. Each of them had a large picture window that looked into the central chamber, and each window was draped with ornate wine velvet curtains on the inside. Most of the curtains were closed, but not all of them. As I followed in my Munchkin’s eensy steps, I was able to see into a drape that lolled lazily open. Inside was an ornate bedroom, decorated as if by Menzies: heavy wood pieces, a high moulded ceiling, and a vast silk-sheeted bed against the wall. The only light was cast by the dim chamber sconce, but even in the shadows I could see that the bed was unmade.

Just as we passed the window to the clip-clop of teeny feet echoing through the otherwise silent chamber, a face suddenly appeared like a spotlight in the opening of the curtains. I jumped, I admit it, startled by its abrupt appearance, and the golden halo that surrounded her familiar face in the struggling, limp light reflected off her bottle blondness. But most unnerving of all was how her eyes were locked on mine, just a foot or so away from me. This was most definitely not Jean.

The face was enormous, a round, fleshy visage under a marigold mane, exquisitely painted in white-hot Helena Rubinstein beauty. The eyes, though — they were huge and liquid pale, drilling right into my own. But the spark was out behind them; they were gorgeous but empty, lifeless, shining husks of eyes. I wasn’t sure she could even see me through them.

But boy, could I see her.

Striking in her red satin wrapper, she was an uncaged housefire. That huge moon of a face rose over an alarmingly ample décolletage and a waspy little waist I could circle in two hands. This was a woman you could only see in colour: the red of her lips, the electric gold of her hair, the flamingo pink of her tongue, and — even though bound behind the thin red wrapper — the evident, nursed-dark muddy brown howdies of her vast, reaching nipples.

The Little Man gripped my hand in his gnarly, four-fingered tug, trying to pull me down the hall, but I couldn’t move, not now that I recognised her. This incendiary explosion of boobs and blondness had been immortalised most spectacularly by Frank Tashlin in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? but that’s not how I recognised her.

No. The little relentlessly yipping dog at her feet was a clue, but what finally led me to put it all together were the tiny, nearly invisible tell-tale sutures that circled her neck.

I was eyelocked with Jayne Mansfield.

Obviously, some assembly had been required, since she was decapitated in a car wreck in 1967. But that was Jayne. The real deal. Alive. Breathing. Her impressive water wings heaving with each breath. I could barely even blink as I riveted into her glassy, vacant orbs. She didn’t blink at all, not once. It was unsettling, at the very least. I’d only seen eyes like that once before, and I didn’t want to remember it, but now she made me.

When I was five years old, my dad was teaching me how to ride a bike without training wheels for the first time. He’d just taken them off without even telling me, and I was roaring down the street, oblivious to my new mastery of two-wheeled travel, when he shouted out for me to look that I was riding without training wheels. I looked down, saw that it was true, and panicked. The handlebars shimmied and I lost control. Dad came running to help me, just as an ancient, wheezing Impala roared around the corner on a tail of grey exhaust, and slammed him into the phone pole. I skinned my knee through my jeans as I fell off the bike and ran to see my father, who was shattered and pinned between the empty grin of the Impala’s grille and the cracked Phone Pole Tower of Pisa. Our eyes were cinched as his life beat away with his slowing heart, leaving the flesh husk and the glazed, sightless eyes reflecting my own. I could see, even then, when his life had left him and his eyes gone blind.

And now Jayne gave me the same vacancy sign before pulling the curtain shut.

‘Come on,’ the tugging little gnome croaked as I allowed him to pull me from the blockaded showroom. ‘She’s not for you.’

‘Was that Jayne Mansfield?’ I asked him.

‘No, it was Jane Pauley. What the fuck do you think?’

‘You’re a cranky old asshole, aren’t you?’

‘I’m actually very sweet once you get to know me.’

I didn’t believe him. But I followed him down the seemingly endless chamber anyway.

He stopped me at the very last room.

‘You didn’t bring flowers, did you,’ he said in a judgmental sneer. ‘She likes flowers.’

‘Nobody told me.’

‘It’s breeding, common decency to bring a woman flowers. Now… you know the rules.’

I looked at him. How should I know the rules? ‘Not really.’

‘Just be gentle. Thoughtful. And no rough-housing.’

And then he was off, no doubt back to his place behind the curtain. His walk took him forever.

I gently rapped on the ornate door and waited, my heart trying to climb up my throat. I kept waiting, the mystery and marvel and anticipation shrivelling my nerve as well as my manhood. I felt like a turtle pulled back in its shell. When it became evident that no one was coming to answer my knock, I reached out and gripped the doorknob. It was greasy with palm-sweat, but wasn’t locked. It opened, and I entered in quiet, tiny steps.

The room was hushed and dark, but so were my desires, I guess. But the dim light from the candle guttering on the nightstand couldn’t extinguish the glow that Jean Harlow — the real Jean Harlow, alive and in full living breathing colour — cast. She sat on the edge of the peach satin bed, draped in shadow and a fine silk chemise. She turned to face me, but the curtain of shadow blacked out her features. I was frozen in place, my mouth gawping; I hadn’t the strength to take a breath. The hairs at the nape of my neck curdled and a shimmer of gooseflesh traversed my body. Jean. Jean. Roses are red. And all of my guts have gone green.

After a big slice of eternity, I made the next move, taking a step towards her and the bed. Jean glided back a few inches on the satin quilt, lifting her face into the warm, gentle caress of the candlelight. It was at that moment that it became obvious that Harlow II looked nothing like my Jean, the real Jean. The faux Harlow had been sandblasted by modernity, corrupted by the modern age, while Jean — milky, creamy, elegant Jean — was above all that passage-of-time nonsense. I don’t know how she was here sitting on this bed in this room with me after dying in 1937, but she was. This was no imposter. Somehow, she had been rescued from the ravages of death, had earned a station in eternity, and for a hundred thousand dollars I had bought a share of that station. A night with my forever Jean. A taste of eternity. Whatever science or magic made it possible, I was its slave.

And Jean’s.

Unlocking the invisible shackles that bolted me to the floor, I moved to the bed and looked down at her longingly. She looked up into my eyes and gently patted the space on the bed next to her with her palm, once, silently inviting me to sit. Her eyes, though pure and startlingly blue, were ringed in black mascara, and as vacant and unblinking as Jayne’s, though larger and more inviting. Her mouth was painted in a rose red so dark it was almost black, and it shone in the pale candlelight. Her lips eased open, just a sticky little fraction of an inch, releasing the softest, curious sound from within. She was purring a constant, sensual little rumble, her own internal combustion engine.

‘Jean?’

Without blinking or moving her eyes from me, she nodded. I sat next to her and took her pale ice cream hand in mine. The hand was cool and soft, limp, barely motivated, and I drew it to my face. I touched the back of her hand with my lips, I couldn’t help it, and she let me. Her skin tasted like vanilla and fresh hand soap. She watched me kiss her hand through barren, staring eyes, and I laid my hand on her cheek and turned her face towards me. Her eyes turned sluggishly to mine, and we were face to face. Her purr was more distinct now, though no less sensuous. I could feel her breath stroke my face in cool even waves. Its scent was a bit pungent, but no more than it might be after a plate, of penne arrabiatta. But it sure didn’t smell like vanilla.

She neither resisted nor encouraged me, so I bent in and kissed her. She kissed me back, and my eyes closed in exultation. Her full, soft lips parted, and her chilly pink tongue sought mine. She sucked it into her mouth and began to nurse off of it, and there’s no way I was going to stop her. I sneaked a peek as she milked my tongue, and her eyes were wide open, still unblinking, her mouth sucking mechanically, almost painfully, on my tongue.

I pulled away to look at her, and she looked back, gorgeous but empty. No resistance, no encouragement.

‘What would you like?’ I asked her. She just looked back at me. No words. Never any words. I knew the lights were out, but it didn’t keep my libido from raging. My fear was that, presented with a dream, my physiognomy might recede and that junior might chicken out, but au contraire, mon ami, au contraire. The passive, alabaster icon on the bed with me ignited my hormones and overcame my stupefaction. The ample voluptuousness of one of Hollywood’s greatest stars awaited me; the dream of a lifetime was at my fingertips, and if it wouldn’t come to life to a symphony of Preston Sturges dialogue, if it would instead be my own personal silent epic, well, shit, so be it.

I reached out and gently lifted the strap of her chemise from her shoulder and let it drop, revealing the delicate sundae of her breast to me. Her eyes locked shamelessly on mine, and I reached over to cup it in my palm. As her feline engine accelerated, I bent down and took her breast in my mouth. It yielded, its cool marshmallow vanilla a creamy treat. The nipple stayed relaxed, unresponsive, never flexing to attention. Her arms curled about me and limply came to rest on my shoulders. I looked up from her breast and she watched me nursing on her with those clear blue unblinking eyes. It stopped me. I raised my face to hers, tried to see beyond the pupils, but was blocked by absence.

She moved, in, eyes still wide open, and kissed my mouth. The hum from within was soothing and welcoming. I let her kiss me, closed my eyes, and ran my fingers through the tight marcels of her platinum hair. Her hair felt like weaves of satin, glossy and slippery, and my fingers got lost in it. My thumb tangled in one of her waves, and I gently tugged it free.

Her breath caught in a gasp and I opened my eyes, afraid I had hurt her. Her eyes were even wider now as I lifted my hand from her hair… pulling a patch of it away with my thumb! There was a clot of greyish reddish brownish skin at the base of the tangle of spun gold wrapped around my thumb, and she reached for it, unable to take it in her own sleeping fingers.

’Oh, God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!’ I tried to calm her, but she just kept quietly and unsuccessfully reaching for her curls. There was a dark brown square on her scalp where the patch had pulled free, and a few drops of a dark fluid that could only have been blood wept to the surface.

’Are you okay?’ She didn’t answer me, of course. She had given up trying to retrieve her hair and was suddenly reaching for my groin with curious, less-than-dexterous fingers. I couldn’t help it; the boy had a mind of his own. As she fumbled to release me, I helped her with the zipper, quickly forgetting about our little experience with the hair. The same mouth that had locked so successfully to my tongue now found succor in the netherworld.

The suction was remarkable considering the fragility of her other movements. I had never felt anything like the cool, muscular, rhythmic suction her mouth incurred. I couldn’t help but grip her hair in my hands as I approached a bucking, uncontrollable orgasm that jolted through my body, emptying me of weeks of celibacy.

I jerked violently in fulfilment, and her head bobbed off and back onto my convulsing tissue. It was irresistible impulse; I didn’t mean to pull away the handfuls of flaxen hair and grey, preserved flesh. And when she screamed — the first vocalising she’d released since I entered her room — I looked down to see that one of those fragile, ice blue, vacuous eyes had been punctured, and wept a clear tide of thick tears.

Her inhuman screech echoed through the silence and in moments the little gnome was charging into the room in hunched-over horror. ’Jeeeeeaaaaaammnnnnn!’ he howled. It was the longest single-syllable word I’d ever heard. He yanked me away from her in an incredibly powerful four-fingered grip, and in a cloak of guilt I climbed back into my khakis.

The little professor tended Jean with incredible gentleness, his own eyes going glassy as he dabbed her leaking eye socket with his hanky. ‘I said no rough-housing!’ he told me as he soothed her delicate body. ’You’d better get out of here.’

I agreed. As I made my way to the door, I heard his plaintive, melancholy words evaporate into the velvet night: ‘Daddy fix, Baby. Daddy fix again.’ My hundred-thousand-dollar half-hour was over.

I’ve tried several times to return to the House of Harlow, but it is long gone, and without a trace. I’ve called and called Pseudo-Jean, but that number is no longer in service, and there is no new number. Now all I have to remember Jean are her movies. I’ve seen them so often that I know them all by heart, but it isn’t just the movies themselves that so entrance me. It’s the time long past, the dream long remembered. And I had a piece of that before I put its eye out.