C Reiss - Spin

“Thank you,” I said.

“My pleasure.” He let go of my hand.

The space where he’d touched felt like a missed opportunity, and I went to the bathroom to return my souvenir.

After I’d kicked Daniel out of my loft, Katrina moved in. Living alone had thrust me hip deep into depression, and her things around the house changed my feeling of complete emptiness into a feeling that something was right even when everything was wrong.

For her part, she was dealing with a career that had crashed and burned when she filed a lawsuit against the studio that had funded her Oscar-nominated movie. She said there were profits she was entitled to share; they insisted the production operated at a loss. Fancy, indefensible, and legal accounting proved them right, leaving her bank account empty and her career in tatters.

She and I were cars passing on opposite sides of the freeway. As a nearly-but-not-quite-famous director, she was on set at odd hours, and when she wasn’t, she was trying to hold her production together with spit and chewing gum. She couldn’t pay much, so her crew left for scale-paying gigs and had to be replaced, or they dropped out of a day’s shooting with grave apologies but no replacement. Set designers, assistant camera people, gaffers did it for love and opportunity. Production assistants, also called PAs, were the unskilled and barely paid necessities on set, and most likely to drop out.

Her script supervisor, the person responsible for the continuity of the shots, couldn’t work nights or weekends. After Katrina fired her line producer, who was in charge of keeping ducks in rows, she discovered he hadn’t hired a second script supervisor. She shrugged it off as the risk one takes in “the business,” then segued into a long pitch about my attention to detail, my love of consistency and order, and my eagle eye for continuity. She’d asked—no, begged—me to step in for evenings and weekends.

I met her on set under a viaduct downtown at six a.m. The food truck was set up, and the gaffers and grips were just arriving.

“Let’s face it, Tee Dray,” she said, pointing the straw of her Big Gulp at me, “it’s not like they gave me enough money to pay union for weekend calls.” She wore a baseball cap over a tight black pixie cut that only she could pull off. A Vietnamese Mexican with an athletic build, she carried herself as if she owned the joint. Every joint. When we were at Carlton Prep together, she was a bossy outcast and the most interesting person at school.

“You’re paying me on the back end,” I said.

“Sure,” she said with a strong smile. “Forty percent, but I keep the books.”

We hovered over the coffee and fruit. It was still dark, the ambient hiss of the freeway above as low as it would ever be.

“You know what to do?” she asked.

“I have the binder from last time. Track shots, cuts, who’s wearing what, where their hands are, off-book dialogue, et cetera.”

“I really appreciate this,” she said.

“You deserve a comeback. I’d finance the whole thing, you know.”

“Then I’d feel obligated to sleep with you.” She winked. A flirtatious bisexual, she’d offered herself to me more than once, joking, then not, then joking again.

“I think I’m getting to the point I’d take you up on it,” I joked back.

We’d lost touch during college then reconnected when she got representation at WDE, where I ran the client accounting department. She had directed an action movie with heart and suspense that filled theaters for months. It was in the lexicon of greats, nominated for awards, watched and rewatched years after release. When she’d lost her contract with Overland Studios because of her lawsuit, I knew all the intimate fiscal details because I worked for her agent. She could cry on my shoulder or vent her frustration without explaining the nuances of studio math, or as she called it, ass-rape on a ledger.

A studio like Overland loaned a production company money to make a film then billed themselves interest. The interest compounded for the months of production then into the years following release until a blockbuster like Katrina’s wound up with no profits. No amount of litigation could erase the foul and totally legal practice.

Her current self-made episodic piece, to be shot in diners and under viaducts, was financed through a tiny holding in Qatar. Written, directed, and produced by Katrina Ip, it could put her back on the map. I couldn’t have rooted harder for anyone’s success.

“You need a man,” she said. “A rebound cock to fuck the sad right out of you.”

“Nice way to talk.”

“The truth isn’t always nice. Let me set you up with my brother, and you can set me up with yours.”

“You don’t have a brother.”

“Can’t blame a girl for trying. What about Michael?” She raised an eyebrow, tilting her head. The lead actor in the production had made it clear he was interested in me and a couple of other attractive women on set. He was a man whore, but a nice one.

“I’m not ready,” I said.

“I know, sweetheart. It’ll come back. Some time.”

I pressed my lips together, and though the sun was just peeking over the skyline, it was light enough for her to see the prickly heat brush my cheeks.

“Theresa,” she said, “call is in four minutes. I’m going to have no time to talk. So tell me now. And fast.”

It was a miracle we’d even had time to talk already. Directing a movie was like having a wedding every day for four months. You threw the party but couldn’t enjoy it.

“I went out with Jonathan last night, and there was a guy. A man. I had toilet paper on my shoe and—”

“You? Miss Perfect?”

“Yes. I was so embarrassed.” I dropped my voice to a near whisper when Edgar, her assistant director, approached with a clipboard and a problem. “He was breathtaking.”

She leaned on one hip. “Los Angeles is wall-to-wall breathtaking.”

“He was different. When he touched me—”

“He touched you?”

“Just my wrist. But it was like sex. I swear I’ve never felt anything like that.”

“You tell me this now?”

Edgar got within earshot, and I dropped my eyes. Even thinking about that man in range of a stranger made me feel shameful.

“Kat,” Edgar spoke fast, “honey, the LAPD—”

“Give them the forms,” she shot back.

“But they—”

“Can wait five minutes.” She pulled me behind a trailer. The hum of the generator almost drowned her out. “You cried on my lap for hours over Danny Dickhead. Now you have a hundred-twenty seconds to tell me about this new one.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“I will cut you.” She didn’t mean it, of course. Even coming from the wrong side of Pico Boulevard, her threats were all affect.

“Brown eyes. Black hair.”

“You must be off blonds since Dickerino Boy.”

“Six feet. Built. My god, his hands. They weren’t narrow or soft. They were wide, and... I’m not making any sense. But when he looked at me, my skin went hot. All I could think about was… you know.”

“You got a number?”

“Not even a name.”

Her phone dinged, and three people approached at once. Her day had begun. She turned away from me but flipped her head back. “You just got woken up.”

Ten years ago, I couldn’t have gotten a donut three blocks away from my loft without getting jacked. In Los Angeles at the turn of the second millennium, the wealthy moved from the city’s perimeter back to the center. And if anyone was “the wealthy,” it was me.

We lived in an old corset and girdle factory. It had been abandoned in the sixties, used as a warehouse by a stonecutter and cabinet maker, then expanded and converted into lofts just before the Great Recession. The units had gone at fire sale prices. I could afford whatever I needed, but Daniel had insisted on paying half, and the recession hit him hard. So a short sale downtown loft at a million and change it was.

And I was stuck with it. He moved to Mar Vista after I kicked him out, and I commuted across town to Beverly Hills to run client accounting at WDE.

Studios did not cut checks to talent; they cut checks to their agents. The agents deducted their ten percent fee and sent the client the rest. Thus, Hollywood agencies were the beating heart of the industry, the nexus through which all money circulated.

And most of them were still cutting paper checks.

I’d been hired to move the company from paper to wire transfer, and I’d done it. I’d convinced old guard agents, grizzled actors, below the line talent, banks, and business managers to get into the twenty-first century. Many of our clients still insisted on bike-messengered and armored-trucked paper checks, but they were more and more the minority. New clients weren’t given a paper option.

I was still necessary to manage the rest of the paper trail, chase studios for payment, and run the department, but I felt my job was done. The only thing worse than the idea of living with my job was the idea of living without it, of drifting into a life without purpose. My sister Fiona had made an art form of it in her youth, and I’d watched her slip into debauchery. I’d do anything to not be her.

But there I was, closing my eyes and seeing those hated checks. I heard the tones of my follow-up call to the messenger service, the tip tap as Pam logged them in one by one, and I thought, I want to burn it all and then slip into oblivion. I never did. I dreamed about it sometimes while I spaced off looking at the numbers or listening to one of the agents throw his anxiety on the table when a client’s check was a day late.