You’ve been hunting Maura Tierney for so long that it has reduced you, like balsamic vinegar boiling, to a potent solution with a vigorous scent. And here she is in La Jolla, eating breakfast in front of you: poached egg and salmon over whole wheat toast.
Explain to her that she should kill you.
Ask her if her gun is loaded.
Tell her to tie you to the subway tracks.
Slide your cell phone across the table, already speed-dialed to the number that will explode the tiny bomb next to your heart.
“No,” she’ll say gently, and watch you sob.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Viggo Mortensen is one of the finest trained swordsmen in Hollywood.
“If not the Warren Beatty kind of swordsman,” he chuckles softly. “That’s who did this, though, isn’t it? Beatty?”
Rub the rope burns on your gasping throat and nod.
“Next time don’t mention Pat Buchanan.” Viggo Mortensen shrugs. “You couldn’t have known. But if you’re still breathing we must be only a few minutes behind him–did you see which way he went?”
Point. It doesn’t matter where.
Viggo Mortensen’s grin is a hungry teenage boy. “Not much longer, old man. Tally ho, Buckethead!”
Buckethead unsheathes his doubleneck and crows.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
“I was reduced to doing birthday parties for a while,” muses William Shatner. “Me. Five hundred dollars a pop.”
Shriek into the gag.
“I know,” he’ll say. “Canadian dollars.” He’ll spread a clanking roll of velvet on the stone beside you. Bloody your wrists against the ropes as he admires the light on surgical steel.
“I thought it was luck when things picked up again, until Nerine… poor Nerine.” He sighs. “I understood, then. Do you know the term ‘cult of celebrity?’”
Gurgle in the affirmative.
“Like any cult,” he’ll say, “it requires sacrifices,” and will begin to excise your liver.
Jodie Foster isn’t here to kill you.
“There is one thing everyone knows about my life,” she says, “and it’s not this: I speak French like a native. Four years of using it exclusively, in school, and I own a home dans la patrie. I recorded two singles there. I served on the jury at Cannes.”
Throw a pen at her. You’ll miss.
“But you’re going to do as I ask, in any language.” She slides around your desk with canine grace. “Aren’t you?”
Tremble.
“Cherchez la femme,” she whispers, holding the photo of Maura Tierney very close. “Cherchez la femme.“
“You got nothing on me,” says John Michael Montgomery.
Point out that you have witnesses. You have the guns he doublefisted across the border, and the Mexican orphans with bellies full of balloons.
“What that is, is covered,” he says. “I’m a celebrity. We can’t legally be prosecuted.”
Wasn’t Mel? Wasn’t Martha? Wasn’t he himself tried for multiple charges in 2006?
“No no.” He’ll snap his handcuffs easily. “That was for underdoing it. We were punished for the sin of daring too little.” Then he’ll reach forward, and break your neck like a string.
“And I,” he’ll smile, “learned my lesson.”
“People tend to confuse me,” sighs the woman next to you. Shit. What was her name? Not Helen Hunt. Laura… Laura Dern?
“I mean, not that they make me confused,” she laughs, “although they do. They mix me up with other, more well-known actresses.” Linney. Somebody Linney. Stretched out, lazy, toes hidden in the sheets. “And secretly? I use that to my advantage.”
Lean up on your elbow to look at her. Her straight razor is already dipping for your throat.
“Who will they arrest this time?” she muses, washing your lifeblood from her hands. “God, I hope it’s Streep.”
In 1988, Apollonia Kotero was elected Queen of Good Rats.
“Nothing to do with sewers or dumps,” she tells you, “we’re talking well-groomed rats here, show rats, community pillars.”
Remember how you fed your boa constrictor. Feel the spring of sweat.
“They bear you no grudge.” The rats are piling around her, white and gray, sleek as a polished tornado. “They understand that some lives must be given to feed the greater predator.”
Relief, but not for long: she’s a skeleton now, the frame of a frightening structure.
“They hope,” she murmures from within the compound beast, “you understand too.”
