Short story: Perfect

Hi everyone,

I just submitted this short story to a few literary magazines, got rejected and am collecting a new round of targets, but in the meantime, I figured I'd post it to get feedback from all y'all, and to ask that if you know anyone in the short story/publishing community, or even just know of a good short story magazine, let me know!!

If you need any further convincing to read it, check out a review I got from a random reader: "'Perfect' is, if not perfect, a damned fine piece of writing."


***

"Perfect"
by Carrick Bartle

A bunch of extras had piled into the van, stickying up the air with their sweat, when a lanky PA, complete with headset and clipboard, ordered everyone out. The extras groaned and did so. I thought nothing of it, as orders were changed and people were shuffled around all the time—when Eric Hanford jumped into the backseat.

Now, Eric Hanford wasn’t even close to being a respectable actor in my book. So I was annoyed to find that I was nervous—the same sort of nervousness I would have gotten around someone I truly idolized, like Robert DeNiro. I quickly rationalized that it was unusual to see any star in real life—even in LA, weirdly enough. And I felt that awkward clash between the illusion of feeling as thought I knew him intimately, having watched him in movies for years, and the fact that he was seeing me only for the first time.

I pulled away from the crowd of confused extras and drove in silence. I wanted to ask why the hell he was in my van instead of the limo he was no doubt accustomed to being escorted around in, but doing something like that was STRICTLY VERBOTEN. On your first day on set as a mere peon—an extra, a PA, a driver—the assistant director gives the lot of you this big lecture on proper conduct on the set, a main bullet point of which is, regarding the stars of the production: “DON’T BUG THEM.” No autographs, no photographs, no questions. So even though it was a reasonable question that I would have asked a normal person, asking him would have clearly meant I was a crazed stalker.

But I couldn’t help but glance at him in the rear-view mirror. It seemed safe to do so anyway: he was dozing, his head slumped back over the back of his seat.

I pulled up to the drop-off point, and he groggily got out, slammed the door, and joined the black-garbed PA who had been waiting to escort him back to his trailer.

I turned the van around to go back where I came.

***

When I showed up for work the next day, some PA came up to me. “Hey, Rick,” he said, and then promptly stiffened and stared off into space.

I waited. I’d already experienced PA’s abruptly stopping conversations to listen to the voice in their earpieces, but it still weirded me out. It was as if they were drones in the Borg collective and had suddenly been frozen in stasis to receive a message from their queen.

“Okay,” he replied to the collective, and then turned back to me. “So, you’re driving Eric Hanford today,” he said, snapping back to his clipboard.

“Again? Why?” I exclaimed.

The PA shrugged. “He liked the van better than the car. Bigger or something.”

How environmentally conscious of him. “Okay, whatever,” I said.

This new assignment consisted of a lot more waiting around than the other one. While there were always truckloads of extras and crew to escort, Eric Hanford only needed to go back and forth between set and base camp a few times day. You’d think it would have been a bit more cost effective to have me transport everyone else while Eric Hanford relaxed in his trailer, but the van and its driver had to be immediately accessible at all times.

I cursed Eric Hanford for not at least warning me to bring a book or something. A group of bored extras were lounging around in camping chairs, reading magazines and chatting. Grips and gaffers, who looked like battle-scarred carnies, strode by, hauling one apparatus or another. I tried out my pathetic Spanish on the caterers. They laughed at me.

Finally, it was crisis time. Eric Hanford was on the move. When I saw him walking to the van, his cell phone to his ear, I jumped up from my plastic chair. I wondered if I was supposed to open the door for him, but no; it was a fucking van, and I wasn’t his fucking chauffeur.

“Going to set?” I asked in my most professional, not-bugging-him voice.

“Yeah, dude, that was crazy,” he chuckled into his phone, and swung open the door to the back seats.

The back seats. Whenever there was only one extra or crew member to drive, they ALWAYS sat in the front with me to minimize the chauffeur effect. So by going into the back seat, Eric Hanford had CLEARLY delineated the situation. I got it. I was his fucking chauffeur.

When I got into the driver’s seat, he was stretched out not in the seat right behind the driver, but rather the very back row of the cavernous four-row van, as if specifically to get as far away from me as possible. He had hooked his knees over the back of the seat in front of him. As I drove to set, he kept chit-chatting his inane conversation on his cell.

What I thought was going to be just a one-day anomaly turned out to be the MO for the rest of the shoot. I would wait around reading plays with roles I would never get, that day’s sides, and, when times got really tough, Sports Illustrated. And I’d spend a few minutes of each day watching Eric Hanford lounge over the full breadth of a seat.

I would marvel over how we were literally just two guys sitting in a car yet inhabited such different universes. To be sitting where I was and to be sitting where he was wasn’t just a matter of seven feet; it was the result of years and years of different series of different happenstances. And even though we were about the same height, same weight, and the same degree of intelligence as far as I could tell, he was in a caste so far above my own. Of course, he was more attractive than me; while most people have a blob of a face, his looked sculpted. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that only a plastic surgeon could have molded such perfect, waxy cheeks.

The other major difference between us was that he was dating Amy Parker. My god, to act in the leading role of a major motion picture all day and then go home and fuck Amy Parker.

***

“Hey, are we going to the park or the baseball field?”

My eyes, having finally gotten permission, flicked to his in the mirror.

“The park.”

And back to silence.

“So how’s the driving going?”

“Pretty boring,” I said.

“Yeah, I feel ya.”

I felt the floodgates to my questions weaken and shake under the strain. What was it like to work with Al Pacino? What’s it like to be insanely successful? What’s it like to actually achieve your dreams? How did he just magically, automatically know how to act? Had he REALLY never taken acting classes before, or was that just what his publicity agent told him to say because it’d be more impressive? I would have felt completely natural asking something like “How’s Amy doing?” as if we’d been buddies for years, but that option was clearly out.

I allowed only the most innocuous: “How’s filming going?”

“Good. I’m Eric, by the way,” he said, as if I didn’t already know.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

I was left only with the usual small talk options, like “nice weather we’re having”, but that seemed way too unimpressive.

“It’s so nice out today,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I had to find some way to tell him I was an actor. Not to ask for a role or something, but just to raise myself above the level of “driver”. I was “talent” just like him.

“So have you seen I Speak of Evil yet?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, staring at the passing strip malls of LA outside the window.

“Like it?”

Eric scrunched up his beautiful, beautiful face. “It was all right.”

“Yeah, same here. But Michael Caine is, like, amazing.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty awesome.”

“My acting teacher always talks about his work,” I deftly segued.

His eyes shifted to mine in the rearview mirror, actually looking pleasantly surprised. I’d actually half-expected him to roll his eyes, as if to say “oh god, not another one,” as if actors came up to him all the time brandishing their headshots. Instead, it was almost as if I’d revealed we were long-lost brothers. “You’re an actor?” he asked, seeming surprised.

I smiled the requisite embarrassed smile. “Yeah.”

“Sweet,” he said. “What have you been in?”

“Uhh…” I was actually surprised that he asked that; it was something only a lay-person would ask, but which we actors knew not to act each other, since most of us would only be able to answer by blushing and stammering that just because we’d been paid to act only twice in our lives didn’t mean we weren’t actors. But then I realized that he had never learned not to ask that question: most actors he had ever met had probably gladly rattled off their extensive filmographies.

I whipped out my padded resume answer: “A guest spot on CSI”— featured extra, actually—“a few short films”—undergrad student films—“a couple commercials”—you know those local commercials shot on video with a guy yelling in front of panning shots of used cars?

“Cool,” he said.

I don’t know what I expected—I guess, in all honesty, I had expected that we would launch into a full-blown discussion of acting in which he would impart astounding words of wisdom to me, but instead the great oracle fell silent, and we pulled up to set.

***

I leaned against the side of the van, squinting in the sweltering sun, reading a shitty original play I had an audition for that weekend. PAs scurried in and out of the house they were filming in with bottles of water and whatnot, and trunks of equipment waited listlessly in the front yard. And inside, Eric Hanford was working his magical wonders.

I found myself walking toward the house. If anyone noticed me, I would have been thrown out or even fired, but I didn’t care. I had to see what I had been pursuing for almost my entire life but which life had perversely denied me. My legs walked up the wooden stairs. A PA glanced at me, but bustled on up ahead. I grabbed the nearest thing to me—an apple box—to use as an excuse, as though someone had asked me to bring it in.

Turned out I didn’t need it. Everyone was so focused on their job or I was dressed so much like them—in a natty, faded T-shirt and jeans—or I looked just familiar enough that no one gave me more than a glance. It gave me the peculiar sense that I was allowed to be there, that they had accepted me—that I truly was part of the crew.

And there was the locus of filming, the queen bee of the hive. The dinginess of the rest of the room was blotted out in this corner, illumined magnificently where all lights were focused, as if a stage on Broadway. The camera stood at the outer ring of light, with a couple of guys tending to it. Only one person stood in the sphere of light, illumined in his seat at a table. It was clearly Eric’s stand-in. You could tell because he was about Eric’s same height, same weight, and same hair color, but was much, much uglier.

I finally spotted Eric himself, in the shadows, drinking from a water bottle as some make-up girl adjusted his collar. His huge blue eyes stared into space as the light from the set touched the curves of his face. Someone said something to him, and he and his ugly stand-in swapped places. He smiled and said hello to a woman—some actress who looked vaguely familiar—who sat just out of the light across the table, and she said something quietly that made him laugh.

Someone—probably the AD, but who knows—yelled, “Okay, picture’s up, quiet on the set!” an announcement that echoed into the distance by PA’s like the baying of wolves. A sound guy hoisted a boom up onto his shoulders.

Then someone said, “Action.” It was so weird that they actually said that.

There was absolute silence. Eric showed no perceptible change, as if he hadn’t heard them call action. I looked at the video monitors that were a few feet away, which were facing a couple director’s chairs. In one of the chairs, some guy—ostensibly the director—with huge headphones on was watching the flickering screen with his chin in his hands. The monitor magnified the change in Eric’s eyes like a microscope: they were filling up with tears.

I looked back at him in reality. It made me feel like I was in acting class, as if I could evaluate his acting more effectively that way. He started talking to the actress—some cheesy as hell dialogue, but what he was saying didn’t even matter. He cried, he laughed, he was unsure of himself… I mean, I happened to wander into the middle of the fucking Oscar clip. He looked at the actress with such passion and hope that I felt my own eyes tearing up and my heart surging with profound remorse.

Someone said, “Cut.” Eric stood, his face drawn as if still immersed in the intensity of the moment, and took a bottle of water from a PA.

I staggered out of the house.

***

That night, when I drove Eric back to base camp after they had wrapped him, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. He was a composer of symphonies while I could barely play the chopsticks. It sucked that now I’d have to defend him whenever my friends bagged on his acting.

It was his last day of filming. When I’d heard that that morning, I had been somewhat dismayed that I’d be back to less reading and more driving—driving crazy extras no less—but now I felt like a privilege was being ripped away from me. I had been driving a very force of nature, a snow white Bengal tiger among hyenas, and now was being thrown back to the great unwashed.

He wasn’t even in the very back seat this time, but instead in the one right behind me. “Hey, so it was nice meeting you,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, you too,” I said.

“Hey, if you’re not doing anything tonight,” he said, “me and a few buddies are going out to a bar around here.”

That had me, annoyingly, shocked and quivering with flattery. He still wasn’t my favorite actor by far, but still: Eric Hanford wanted to hang out with me. Maybe he just wanted to enlist me for his entourage, but even so, at this point I considered even that an honor.

He added: “And then you can drive me home afterwards. I wanna get trashed.”

Fuckin’ A. He really did think of me as his fucking chauffeur.

“One last drive, huh?” he goaded.

“All right, sure,” I said.

That night I was wrapped many hours after he did, but I was able to catch up with him and his entourage. We sat in a freakin’ VIP section of a club—a club I surely would never have been able to get into in my life, let alone the VIP section. The members of his entourage were predictably rambunctious. I recognized a couple of them as those actors you always see in supporting roles. I just sat there as they caroused. I just wasn’t one of them. They regaled each other with the most mundane shit, yet managed to make it sound cool, while the only thoughts that came to my mind seemed dry and factual in comparison, so I withheld them for fear of going against their jovial grain. The focus of the gathering, however, was clearly Eric. Even though he was sitting off to the side, not even saying a whole lot, everyone’s energy was somehow directed towards him, like rubies complementing an enormous diamond. It occurred to me that if this was the charisma that it took to be a star, it was no wonder I’d gotten nowhere.

As we approached closing time, the entourage dispersed, and I ended up sitting next to Eric alone on the couch.

He was resting his elbows on his knees, fingering his drink.

“I think I’m gonna ask Amy to marry me,” he said pensively.

That was weird. When the hell did I become his BFF? “That’s cool,” I said.

He smiled fondly. “Yeah. She’s great.”

“Yep,” I said. God knows, I would have loved to talk about Amy Parker all night, but probably not in the way he’d want to hear. Besides, I was never going to see him again; I had to pry open that head and find out his fucking secret.

“I caught one of the scenes you guys shot today,” I said.

“Yeah? How’d it look?”

“Really great,” I said in total honesty—in fact, even trying to water down my now freakishly fervent admiration for him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Can I ask you, like, an acting question?” I asked.

His eyebrows jerked in surprise, but he said, “Shoot.”

“Well...what’s your technique?”

His smiled, almost rolling his eyes; I realized that he must have been asked this a million times. “I don’t have one.”

“I mean, seriously. Honestly. I’m not gonna, like, run out to the tabloids and divulge your tricks of the trade. Frankly, they’re probably a lot more interested in what’s going on between you and Amy than your skill as an actor.”

“Seriously, I don’t have a technique.”

“Well, then what’s your thinking process? When you get a script...what do you do?”

“Uhh...I read through it.”

“Right, yeah.”

“And then...I just get ideas about it.”

“Like what?”

“Well...like the scene you just saw today. After reading through it a little, I realized that my character was sad.”

“Right, so...you decided to just...be sad?”

“Yeah.”

“But... you can’t play emotions. You’re supposed to think about objectives and all that crap.”

“Well, I guess that happens subconsciously or something.”

“So, what, the material just subconsciously connects with something sad that happened to you?”

“Like what?”

“Well, I don’t know your life. Like a dead dog or something.”

“I never had a dead dog.”

“Well, you know what I mean. A dead anything. Anything sad.”

His sapphire eyes narrowed in thought. “Give me another example.”

I started laughing, but he only looked at me in confusion. I stopped laughing. I thought he had been playing dumb, but it was clear now that he wasn’t. “You can’t think of anything sad that’s ever happened to you? I could probably name you ten sad things that happened to me TODAY!”

He shrugged, seeming only mildly amused at my shock, as if he hadn’t revealed the most fucked-up thing in the world.

I just looked at him. He could have been lying, but why would he? I would have hidden such a bizarre, psychotic fact.

“Are you okay? Do you have amnesia or something?”

“No.”

“So, what about when you didn’t get the Academy Award? Didn’t that make you upset?”

“Are you kidding? It’s a meaningless popularity contest. Even Citizen Kane didn’t win Best Picture.”

“Well, have you ever been turned down for a role?”

“Yeah, but that was usually because it wasn’t the right fit, and I shouldn’t have done it anyway.”

So he was either insane or incredibly well-adjusted. “But what about girls? Haven’t you ever been dumped, or had a girl not love you back or something?”

He thought for a moment, as though running through all his romantic dalliances. “No,” he concluded, as if he’d never realized that before.

“What?!” I shouted. “Well...hasn’t there EVER been ANYTHING you’ve really really wanted, but then failed to get???”

“I don’t think so.”

My eyes narrowed in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”

He shrugged.

“But even when kids get anything they want,” I continued, “they still find things to get upset about, even more so than completely deprived kids. Movie stars get upset when they don’t get the right kind of Perrier!”

“Yeah....”

“So, if you don’t get the right kind of Perrier...what do you do?”

“I wouldn’t ask for Perrier.”

“You know what I mean. Okay, I’m a PA. Sir, what kind of water would you like?”

“Uh...Evian.”

“I’m sorry, we don’t have any Evian. We only have this Aquafina shit.”

“Okay.”

“That’s what you'd say? ‘Okay’?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure because it’s never happened to me.”

I sighed in exasperation. “I don’t mean exactly that scenario. I mean things like it.”

“Yeah, I know. Never happened. I’d just get the Evian.”

I looked at him in incomprehensible shock. This wasn’t actually, physically possible, was it? “So...what are you, just this…magical Golden Boy?”

“I guess.” He looked at me somewhat bemused to see what to him was a simple fact about his life having an effect on me.

“But…if nothing bad ever happens, aren’t you just completely bored all the time?”

“No, it’s not like I don’t have emotions. Like, I can be happy.”

“But how do you know what happiness truly is without anger or sadness to contrast it with?"

“I dunno, it’s just what I feel.”

“So...you’re just happy. All the time.”

“No, not just happy. Interested, excited, thoughtful...”

The illogic of it all suddenly struck me. “But you’re a fucking actor! You have to have experienced all emotions in order to act properly! It’s like you’re playing a violin with missing strings!”

“Does it seem like it?”

“Well, no, but then how does it WORK? How are you able to cry in scenes?”

“I dunno, I’ve seen people cry before, so I just do what they do.”

“So...you’re like this robot that records human behavior and then just duplicates it?”

“Isn’t that basically what acting is?”

I looked at him; he was partly right. “So you’re an outside-in actor,” I answered wryly.

“I guess so,” he said.

“What about when you’re imitating someone crying: do you experience sadness then?”

“I don’t know.” He thought for a moment. “I guess it just feels like I’m concentrating on what I’m doing.”

“My god,” I breathed. “But…aren’t you missing out on basic human experiences—even part of what makes us human?!”

“Well, maybe. But from what I’ve heard, it doesn’t seem like I’m missing much.”

“From what you’ve heard?!” I slapped my hand to my forehead. “From what you’ve HEARD; that’s fantastic!”

I wanted to yell at him, call him an emotionally stunted lobotomy victim—but what I really wanted to do was punch him in the face, yelling, “I’ll show you what sad is!” But I found myself unable to. Even as implacable ire rose inside me, I couldn’t imagine smashing that beautiful face up. I liked the bastard. That fucking, unfeeling, friendly, wonderful bastard. And I began to suspect how it was that he had been exempt from experiencing anything horrible.

So I just looked at him.

He took a swig of his beer.

***

I drove him to his place as we had agreed. He even sat in front right next to me.

To get to his house—in the mountains above Beverly Hills—you had to punch numbers into a gate and go up a long, winding driveway that led to a spectacular two-story, like, villa. I was sure it was only one of many such properties of his around the world.

“Thanks, man,” he said casually. It was obviously of absolutely no consequence to him that this would probably be the last time we’d see each other in our entire lives.

“No problem,” I said, feigning the same. I felt a sudden pang of remorse. I had probably grilled him too hard, and he’d been taken aback by my overly persistent inquiry into his fucked-up perfect life. I felt like an idiot. Who knows, if I’d played my cards right, I could have been admitted into his entourage, but instead had lost the most amazing person I had ever met because of my usual retarded social bungling.

He slammed the door shut and walked into the house. I just sat in the car. I couldn’t bring myself to drive off.

I realized that Amy Parker herself might have been within a hundred yards from me, waiting for Eric—if she wasn’t somewhere in the world on location. I leaned over to look at the house through my windshield. A huge window on the second floor revealed a blue expanse of the living room ceiling, illuminated by the shifting light of a TV set. And then Amy Parker stood up into the blue. From my angle, I could only see the soft underside her jaw and part of her profile, but it was unmistakably Amy Parker’s profile. She was smiling, speaking to someone—most likely Eric. I watched their silent world through the glass of the window.

Then Eric appeared. He kissed Amy hello and dropped out of view, presumably having flopped down on the couch, having a completely normal evening being Eric Hanford with Amy Parker. She moved away from the window disappeared as well.

I drove away.