3. Then The Pitch Part 1

In mid-April of 1993 Valentina left a message on my apartment's answering machine. We hadn't talked for almost two years. She got the phone number from my mother, who was awful free with those digits, if you ask me. Valentina said she had a proposition, laughed, apologized for laughing, and then she assured me the proposition was serious. How could I resist?

She and I didn't go to college together, but we'd met as undergrads. I bused tables and worked at Hugo's in Northampton, a bar that was close enough to campus that my shitbox car could survive the drive and far enough away that I wouldn't have to deal with every knucklehead who went to my school. One weeknight when the bar wasn't packed, I was stationed by the door and pretended to read a dog-eared copy of Naked Lunch (cut me some slack, Hugo's was that kind of place in that kind of town), and Valentina showed up with two friends. Her dark, curly hair hung over her eyes. She wore a too-big flannel shirt, the sleeves hiding her hands until she wanted to make a point, then she pointed and waved those hands around like they were on fire. She was short, even in her thick-heeled combat boots, but she had physical presence, gravitas; you knew when she entered or left the room. I checked her ID and made a clever quip about the whimsy of her exaggerated height on her government-issued identification card. She retaliated by snatching my book and chucking it into the street, which was fair. Later, she and I ended up playing pool, awkwardly made out in a dark corner, and exchanged phone numbers. We hung out a few times after that, but more often we'd run into each other as regulars at Hugo's. I was happy to be the weird guy ("Weird Guy" was what she called me) from the state school who occasionally entered her orbit. My comet-like appearances made me seem more interesting than I was. I graduated from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst with a communications degree and student loans that I would default on twice. She graduated from Amherst College—much more prestigious and expensive than Zoo Mass. Postgraduation, I'd figured our paths would never cross again.

When I returned Valentina's call, our chat was brief. She wouldn't tell me what the proposition was over the phone, so I agreed to meet her and her friend Cleo at a restaurant on Bridge Street in Providence that weekend. My car (the same beater I'd had in college) barely made the trip down from Quincy, Massachusetts. It had a standard transmission and when on the highway I'd have to hold the gear shift in fifth or it would pop out into neutral. On the ride back, I gave up and drove 70 in fourth gear. I miss that loyal little car.

A restaurant called the Fish Company overlooked the inky Providence River. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner, the place was more than half-empty on a cloudy but warm Sunday midafternoon. I was fifteen minutes late, but I had no problem finding Valentina and Cleo sitting outside, on the wooden dock patio, away from prying ears. They had an open binder on their table, pages filled with rough sketches boxed within long rectangles. I would learn later that Valentina had storyboarded the entire movie, shot by shot. Next to Cleo a paper grocery bag occupied an empty chair. Upon my approach, Cleo slid the chair closer to her, communicating that I wasn't to displace the bag. Valentina closed the binder and stashed it in an army-surplus backpack.

She greeted me with "What's up, Weird Guy?"

Aside from the beanie atop her curly hair, Valentina's appearance hadn't changed much at first blush. After a minute of catch-up chatter, it was clear she'd become an adult, or more adult than me, anyway. The twitchy glances, look-aways, and the we-don't-know-who-we-are-yet-but-I-hope-other-people-like-me half smiles we were all made of in college had hardened and sharpened into confidence of purpose but not yet disappointment. Maybe it was a mask. We all wear them. I got nervous because it appeared that whatever their proposition was must be a serious one. I wasn't prepared for serious.

Cleo was Valentina's friend from high school. She had long, red hair, big glasses, and a boisterous, infectious, at-the-edge-of-control laugh. When she wasn't laughing, there was a blank intensity to her gaze and the memory of her irrepressible laughter seemed an impossible one. Maybe I'm projecting now, all these years later, but she was the kind of person who wore sadness and a type of vulnerability that did not translate into her being a pushover. Far from it. She'd battled and battled hard. But if she wasn't broken yet, she would be, as the world breaks us all.

While we waited for our food Valentina explained that she and Cleo were making a movie; Valentina as director, Cleo as screenwriter, and both would be acting in the film as well. They had funding from a variety of local investors in addition to a modest grant from Rhode Island. It wasn't a lot of money, but they would make it work. They planned to begin production in a few months. They had a tight shooting window because one of their locations, an old, condemned school building, was going to be demolished in midsummer.

I was gobsmacked despite knowing Valentina had completed a film-studies minor as an undergraduate. I don't remember what her major was, but it was a course of study her parents had insisted upon so that she would be, in their eyes, employable. Her mother was a marketing director, and her father owned a local chain of combo car wash/gas stations. Because her parents were footing the entirety of the hefty tuition bill, they had insisted on having a say in what they called their "educational investment." Valentina was an only child, and when she talked about her parents, even in passing, it was with a crackling, bipolar mix of pride and seething resentment. Regardless of the major in which she'd earned her degree, film was her passion. When we were students, I was more obsessed with indie/underground music than film, though I'd spent enough hours as a lonely, brooding teen watching and rewatching movies on cable TV that I could hold on to the threads of her deeper film discourse by my fingertips. She and I had once attended a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and later at Hugo's she explained expressionism with the aid of scratchy sketches on bar napkins: the strange, moody, angularly distorted set design represented the interior reality of the story. I remember talking out of my ass, attempting to be smarter than I was by drawing parallels to the performative aspect of punk and art-rock bands from the '70s and '80s. To Valentina's credit, she didn't tell me I was full of shit and helped connect some of those musical dots with me. It was one of those absurd and perfect bar conversations that young, new friends have, portentously vibrating with perceived and real discovery. I can't decide if I'm now incapable of such a discussion because I know too much or because life has proven that none of us knows anything.

In response to their making-a-movie reveal, I said, "Wow" and "Sounds amazing" at least a dozen times because I didn't know what else to say until I worked up the courage to ask the obvious. "So why am I here?"

Valentina said, "Good question. Why is he here, Cleo?" She flailed her arms in the air, overdramatic, hammy. "Are we going to ask him?"

Cleo didn't smile or laugh at what I thought was a joke. That stare of hers. I can still feel it, crawling over, then under, my skin to knock on my bones; the look of a chess master surveying the board and all the possible moves and outcomes, and knowing no matter what she did, she was going to draw or lose.

She said, "Yeah, I guess we should."

"Great." Valentina clapped her hands together once. "So, we want you for one of the roles. One of the most important ones."

After asking them both multiple times if they were fucking with me, they assured me they were not. I told them I'd never acted before, not even in elementary school, which was mostly true, which means it was a lie. I'd taken a drama class my college sophomore year, and our final exam was a group-written and -performed sketch, neither aspect of which is worth detailing here. Suffice it to say, I did not take any more drama classes.

Valentina said, "That's not a problem. We'll get the performance we need out of you."

"That sounds like a threat." I laughed. They did not.

My legs twitched, eyes blinked, heart rate spiked, and I had to fight the urge to run. Instead, I curled into myself, picked at my beer-bottle label, which sloughed off in slashed, wet clumps. I said, "Oh, man, I don't know. You don't want my ugly mug on a screen." At this, Valentina rolled her eyes and waved a dismissive hand at my desperate self-deprecation. "And I'd be so nervous about memorizing lines and fumbling through them or sounding like a robot, unless you want me to play a robot, like the Terminator or something, but I'd have to be the fucked-up, failed prototype. The one Skynet wouldn't send out into the field, and maybe some human or mutant finds me in the trash, turns me on, and all I do is ask them if anyone wants to get a pizza or something. See, I'm already rambling. Is this my audition?"

Cleo laughed. "In a weird way, you're not that far off."

"That's Weird Guy for you," Valentina said. "Relax. It is a big role but it's a nonspeaking role. You'll be on-camera a lot, but you won't have any lines."

Even though there was no way I was doing this, I was disappointed that my role would have no lines. I felt it to be a judgment on my character.

Cleo said, "Well, he has one, maybe two lines in the beginning."

Valentina waved her hands again. "We could even have those read by someone else in post, if you're a complete disaster, but you won't be."

Cleo adjusted her glasses. She looked at me like something terrible was going to happen in my near future. Now I get that look a lot, or maybe I more easily recognize it. But then I'd never felt so watched, so observed, and her scrutiny was a horror initially. By the end of our meeting and meal, having that unvarnished attention paid to me when I'd been so used to hiding, even if it felt uncomfortable and intrusive, was intoxicating. That feeling was why I said yes without saying it. It felt like a chance to create another version of myself, one over which I'd have more control. Which, of course, was ludicrous and wildly wrong. I'd be changed, but would it be by my own hands? Fuck me, I sound like a pretentious actor.

There was something, many somethings, they weren't telling me. I blurted out, "Okay, so why me?"

"We need someone who is your size," Cleo said.

"Oh. So, I really am going to be a robot and I fit the suit?" I sat up straight and robot-chopped my arms up and down. "I hope it's not too heavy or too hot. I wore a full-body pizza slice costume once at a PawSox game. I smelled like a muppet with BO for a full day after."

"You're not playing a robot," Valentina said. "We need someone who is your height and build."

"My height and build?" My face flashed an instant embarrassed red. I noticed Cleo's face mirrored mine. I tried to joke, but I know I sounded hurt. "You mean, my lack of build? It takes a lot of work to maintain this physique." I flexed a nonexistent bicep.

Valentina said, "Oh stop, you look great. It's just the role requires a male who is tall and... lanky. Looks like he could still be in high school. And I mean the movie version of high school, which always shades a little older. Not as old as the teens in De Palma's Carrie. Fuck, some of those actors had crow's feet wrinkles when they smiled. And Cleo and I will be returning to the hell of high school with you. It'll be fun."

"Yeah, sounds so fun."

Cleo said, "Your name in the script is the Thin Kid." She smiled, winced, and said, "I'm sorry?" like a question.

Valentina lightly backhanded Cleo's shoulder and said, "Don't be sorry."

"Can't his name be the Tall Kid?" I asked.

"Another one, trying to rewrite the screenplay already," Valentina said. "You don't need to go on a diet per se, but if you want to go method, really dig into your character, you could go easy on the pizza and beer for the next two months, maybe even lose five or ten pounds, that would be ideal."

Cleo said, "Jesus, Valentina!"

"What? I'm just saying. Not the rest of his life, just for the shoot. The thinner the better for this role."

I'd had no idea what this meeting with Valentina would have wrought, but I'd not envisioned being asked to lose weight. I was 6"4" and 175 pounds, maybe, and I was self-conscious about how thin I was and always had been. "Self-conscious" isn't strong enough. I hated my body, how stubbornly underdeveloped it was. No need to rehash the bullying I'd endured in middle school and the variety of nicknames that I never had the choice to approve in high school. Seemed I was one of those people destined for nicknames, including Weird Guy. That one I enjoyed, but it was hard not to itemize and take them all personally. My character name wasn't exactly a nickname, but it might as well have been. It's how people knew me then and how they know me now.

I again wanted to get up from the table and run away and ignore any further calls from Valentina, maybe unplug my phone, move away, change my name and identity. I said, "But pizza is a food group."

"Do not listen to her," Cleo said. She sounded more horrified than I was.

"Hey, I'm just kidding," Valentina said in a way that I interpreted, correctly, as she wasn't kidding.

After a few beats of awkward silence, Valentina talked a bit more about the production and how I'd need to be available and on-set for four weeks, at the most six weeks if things didn't go to plan. She asked, "Will you be able to take leave from your job? Um, what are you doing now, anyway? Sorry, I guess I should've asked that earlier."

After graduation I had gone home to Beverly. My parents were separated, and that spring Mom had moved to an apartment on the other side of town. The house in which I grew up was a sad and angry place haunted by the arguments and recriminations that had intensified during my four-year absence. I needed to move out as soon as I could, and to do that I needed a job. I hadn't spent my last college semester writing a résumé and lining up interviews; consequently, I didn't have any leads or any idea what I wanted to do. No one was going to pay me to play Nintendo all day, which was a shame. I signed up with a temp agency, requesting manual-labor jobs, like the Shoe Factory packing and stacking work I'd done the previous four summers. I would've gone back if the factory hadn't closed. The temp agency assigned me to a grocery chain's warehouse, and the first week I unloaded hundred-pound slabs of frozen beef from trailers and stacked them onto pallets. I, or more specifically, my cranky lower back, wasn't up to the task. I got moved to picking orders for individual grocery stores, which was the worst job I've ever had without a close second. Order pickers weren't paid hourly. We were paid by the number of orders fulfilled. Pickers raced around and between a refrigerated maze of foods and goods riding battery-powered pallet jacks. If that sounds like fun, it wasn't. Like a reverse Jenga game, we hunted then stacked items on a wooden pallet, affixed the order labels, shrink-wrapped the quivering tower, moved the pallet into a delivery queue, and then it was on to the next order. It was ruthlessly competitive. You were allowed breaks, in theory, but you couldn't make money on break. The other pickers were older than I was; or if they weren't, they looked older. They didn't appreciate the skinny college guy bumbling through the stacks. Whenever I got in the way of another picker, which was too often, I could tell by their expression that they imagined my carcass impaled on their pneumatic forks. I lasted two more weeks in the warehouse, averaging less than minimum wage due to a combo of picking deficiency and class guilt, before I went back to the temp agency, took a typing test that I passed, and was assigned to a data-entry job inputting MLS numbers and other real estate info into a company's new database system. At the time of my first meeting with Valentina and Cleo, I had been working that data-entry job for about eighteen months. I was no longer a temp, but I hadn't been an official employee long enough to have earned a two-week vacation, never mind four to six weeks off.

I said, "I can ask for an extended leave. Or quit." This was where I said yes to being in the movie without ever saying yes.

Cleo said, "Are you sure? Oh, please don't quit because of this."

"Don't you want to know how much we'll pay you?" Valentina asked.

"Um, yeah, I would like to know."

"Two thousand five hundred dollars."

Valentina mentioned a percentage of something if/when they signed with a distributor, but I focused on the upfront, real money. That was a lot more than I would make at my data-entry job for four weeks. But was it enough to quit the job and have a financial cushion to pay rent while I searched for another job? Probably not. Back then I measured my future in weeks, and I assumed the far-future me would be a responsible and skilled adult who could figure a way out of any mess the now-me might make.

Valentina and Cleo talked, more to each other than to me, about the various settings they would use for the movie. It was nothing they said, but the oddness of the timing of their offer occurred to me. I said, "Not that it matters to me, but was I the first person you asked to play the Thin Kid?"

Valentina said, "No. You weren't. We held auditions a couple months ago and the guy we hired—let's just say we had a mutual parting of the ways."

"Can I ask why?"

Valentina and Cleo shared a look. That wasn't nice of them to not share with me. Then Valentina said, "It wasn't going to work out. There were—"

Cleo finished for her: "Creative differences."

Valentina said, "That's a polite way of putting it. I know Cleo and I are new at this, and we know the movie won't be for everyone, never mind be perfect. But this is our vision and we're committed to making it our way."

Cleo said, "He wanted to rewrite and change a bunch of his scenes. He wasn't... wasn't totally comfortable with the role or story."

Valentina rolled her eyes. "You're giving him too much credit. He wasn't comfortable with us, two women, running the show. He marked up Cleo's screenplay like he was an English teacher, and a shitty one at that."

"Yeah, that was a bit over the top," Cleo said. "I've read a ton of screenplays and I took screenwriting classes too. I'm not saying I'm an expert, only that I'm aware my screenplay is—unorthodox. Very unorthodox." She laughed, and so did I. "But the, um, strangeness of it is purposeful.

"Valentina and I have spent, what, almost two years thinking and talking about why I wrote this the way I did? We're trusting each other's instincts on this." Cleo alternated between holding strict, unwavering eye contact with me and eyeing her straw's balled-up paper wrapper. "I'm not saying every screenplay should be written the way I wrote this one. Definitely not. But for this story and how we want to tell it, it's the right way. Or the best way. Don't get us wrong, we're open to collaboration and ideas, especially when we get on-set. We explained this to the other actor, multiple times. For whatever reason he couldn't get his head around it."

I said, "Well, I don't think I've ever read a screenplay before, so I wouldn't know if it was, um, unorthodox anyway. Unless you wrote it in crayon or something."

Cleo said, "Great idea," and again shared that laugh of hers.

I asked if they were going to give me a copy to take home, and I promised I would read it ASAP.

Valentina said, "I'd prefer not to."

"Yeah, of course. What? No, wait. What does that mean?" I answered my own question, as though I'd been talking to myself, which I sort of was at that point. "You're not sure if you want me for the part and you'll decide after I leave?"

Valentina said, "We want you for the part. It's yours if you want it."

"I'm pretty sure I do. But—shouldn't I read the screenplay first, just in case? To be all official-like?" I sat nodding, my manic bird impression encouraging them to agree with something, anything, I'd said.

"If you insist on reading it before we start filming, of course we'll let you," Cleo said. "But Valentina has a cool idea about when and how you should read the screenplay."

Valentina explained that as a part of her plan to help get the performance they needed from me, an admitted newbie to acting, I would not know the whole story prior to shooting. They would parcel out the screenplay to me scene by scene. I would only read scenes the night before we were to shoot those scenes the following day. That way, I would be in the same boat, story-wise, as my character. I would be experiencing the story as my character did. As an actor, I wouldn't have the weight of foreknowledge—knowing where the story was going and where it would end—getting in the way of my performance, my relationship to the character. Having almost zero lines to memorize afforded me this opportunity. There wasn't a pressing or practical need for me to have the full screenplay beforehand. Valentina was convinced my performance would be enhanced if I trusted them and went along with their plan.

I said, "Okay, that makes sense. I think." I wasn't lying, and I was excited at the prospect. But this idea of not seeing the scenes until the night before I was to act in them made me uneasy. It was like I would be stumbling into the middle of a dark room I'd never been in before and then turning on the light.

I asked, "What kind of movie is it?"

Valentina said, "Horror movie."

Her concise answer shocked me. I figured she'd go on describing some arty, avant-garde non-genre piece.

"And that's the title," Cleo said. "For now, anyway."

The waiter came by with our food. I asked for another beer. I figured I'd walk it off after driving back to Quincy. With a mouthful of steaming-hot curly fries (I could never wait for food to cool off), I asked Cleo, "Can I ask what's in the paper bag?"

"That I can show you."