Month: September 2009

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Entourage:2039 Chapter Nine: Remembrances of Vincent Chase’s Penis Past (Part two)

Vincent Chase’s blood ran cold. This fear was beyond the “crapping his pants” fear he had felt back in the street- it seemed like a hundred years ago now- when he’d come face to face with the first doppelganger. This was different, a thousand times worse. He wished he could crap his pants, but he wasn’t wearing pants, and his bowels felt frozen now, as if they would never move again.

He was lying under a blanket on a military-surplus cot in some kind of- basement apartment? Bunker? Torture chamber? – and he was looking at another replica of his younger self. But, the eyes. The eyes were the worst part. Like the blind guy in that Hallmark Hall of Fame movie he’d had to do when times got tough, but a thousand times more disturbing- and Turtle wasn’t here to snicker about it with and get him high back in his trailer. This was wrong; horribly wrong in some way Vince could never have described, but just knew, deep down in what was left of his soul.

The girl, Mary, looked at him. “Something wrong, honey?” Her smile did nothing to reassure Vince. “Don’t worry, it gets good in a second.”

Mary pressed another button on her remote and suddenly the Vince-double was… alive. Instantaneously, the dead eyes transformed into deep pools of sensitivity, sexuality, the seven-figure eyes of Vincent Chase, movie star.

The Vince-double turned to Mary, waiting.

“Get number two.”

He (it, whatever) walked across the room and pressed a button. Another compartment opened, just like the first. And inside was another dead-eyed Vince. The first Vince-double put its hand on the back of the neck of the second, and then they were both alive. Two Vinces. Three, if you counted the shell of a man cowering pantsless on the cot.

Mary’s mouth curled into a different kind of smile. “You ready, guys?” Both Vince-doubles smiled back at her. Cot-Vince knew that smile. They wanted her. Those bastards! Nobody got between him and a chick. He was Vincent Chase! Or at least, he was pretty sure he was.

But it was hard to be sure, with the surreal drama taking place before his eyes. Mary was sitting back in one of those spherical, padded chairs that hung from a chain on the ceiling. Vince-double #1 walked towards the second one, and then… #1 touched #2 on the shoulder, stroking him, and then lifted his tee shirt over his head.

It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be happening. This had to be some kind of nightmare. But it was happening. Both Vinces were topless now, and they were kissing each other. And this was no act either; they were into it.

Mary looks over at the real Vince. “You want to get in on this?” Vince is stricken: He cannot speak, or move, or look away. “I’m just kidding. I know you’re not… up to it.” Mary’s eyes sparkle on these last words- she’s enjoying this. Then, to the doppelgangers: “All right guys, I don’t have all night. Let’s cut to the chase.”

The scene unfolds, with the two Vince-doubles doing everything Mary tells them. Everything. Vince hears a low moan from Mary as she pleasures herself, unashamed, her hand in her unbuttoned fatigues. She never touches the Vinces, she just watches- but that seems to be more than enough for her. She seems to have forgotten the “real” Vince even exists.

And then this happens: The real Vincent Chase sees his own penis. Not his penis of course- not the one he sees every morning taking a piss, when he takes the trouble to shift his now-expansive gut out of the way. No, what he sees is the penis of the duplicate-Vince who has now had his pants removed by the other one. And it is a deeply moving experience. In that moment, Vince finds his own penis beautiful. In that moment, everything floods back to him- his potential, his youth, everything he could have been, was, never became. This was the feeling he had in the street, when he saw the first double, but multiplied by a thousand. Vince feels he is in heaven and hell both at once. Here on what’s left on Earth, he can barely breathe, he feels his heart may explode at any second. He wants to give his last will and testament, to make some final statement to the press, to give some explanation of what he has done and who he has been, before it’s too late.

But he can’t move. All he can do is watch.

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Entourage:2039, Chapter Eight: The Arms of the Prophet Joshua

It’s a hundred and thirty miles, give or take, from here to where the city of Los Angeles used to be.

The city is still there, sort of. Something of a skyline remains, blackened and battered but still standing. You could see if from here if the smoke ever cleared. Which it doesn’t. By day, an almost biblical plume half a mile high blocks all vision, and at night the lights of aircraft slicing through the dark red haze, and the occasional missile, give the impression of a nebula viewed from several light-years away.

Here in the desert it’s quieter. You get kind of a country vibe, even. Broken down muscle cars of 1960s vintage litter the ditches, and the restless ghost of Gram Parsons still haunts the little roadside motels, looking for good music and a cheap fix. Very little moves on the road at high noon except the lizards and the snakes.

The Mormon pilgrims of the 19th century named the cactus-like trees that dot the desert for their prophet: The trees, like Joshua, seemed to be extending their thorny arms heavenward in prayer. And now something else is moving along what was once the four-lane blacktop of the Twentynine Palms highway. A family of four, heads hidden under dark robes, backs bowed under the weight of a lifetime’s possessions. The mother holds an infant to be her breast, trying to shield him from the sun, and the father pulls a two-wheeled handcart lashed, oxen-like, to his shoulders.

Now there’s a noise behind them, the puttering of an ancient and underpowered gasoline engine. In an instant the trap is set: The father and the older son hide themselves in the scrub beside the road, while the mother and infant wait, centered on the cracked double yellow lines. The sidecar-ed motorcycle putters over the horizon, spots the woman and child, and stops. In less then a minute it’s over: the father slits the throat of the driver, while the son dispatches the passenger. The faith of these pilgrims lacks a prohibition against killing, or anything else. The family loads their gear onto the bike and putters away towards the horizon.

Four days of hard travel later, their water is almost gone. There hasn’t been a spring or a supply cache for two hundred miles. The family’s belief in their patriarch has always been unquestioned, but now they glance at him sideways as he uselessly wipes the sweat from his brow and studies the hand-drawn map one more time.

And then, as the sun sinks over the desert, they see it. Something metal reflects back at them. Approaching, they find a natural staircase wedged between two huge boulders. The air cools as they descend into a box canyon. No one would find this place in a thousand years, if they didn’t know where to look. But now a blonde-haired child, dressed in white, appears to them. Her smile shows a level of dental care that presumably no longer existed in this world- certainly there is no reasonable explanation for its existence here. And yet, she is not a hallucination. She speaks:

“You seek the Oracle?”

The man is too full of joy and exhaustion to speak, but he manages a nod. The child beckons for them to follow, and they move deeper into the canyon. Ten minutes later, they emerge from a series of switchbacks into an amphitheater. Ancient sandstone walls rise two hundred feet above, closing together as they do. Only a tiny sliver of sky is admitted into the Oracle’s chamber. There is a pool of cool fresh water here, more drinkable water than the family has seen in ten years. More blonde children frolic around it, each more perfect than the last. They splash each other without a care in the world, as if it were the pool at any middle-American motor inn. The armed guards don’t phase them a bit.

About those guards: They carry compact but deadly submachine guns, and their body armor is completed by their helmets, adorned with full faceshields, liberated from riot police of one of the region’s former cities. The ancient logo has been scrubbed away, and replaced by three crudely stenciled letters: “JDC.” Some who remember the ancient books, and the man for whom the desert trees are named, say it stands for “Joshua’s Dominion under Christ.” But the fact is, no one knows but the Oracle. And on this subject he is emphatically not talking.

But on other matters, to those of sufficient faith, the Oracle does speak. For there he sits, on his pedestal, face hidden under his black robe, his tall gaunt frame hunched over on his simple throne of wood. The father is afraid, but with the eyes of his wife and children on him, he walks eight trembling steps forward onto the wide mat of palm leaves, holding in his arms their humble offering.

He kneels.

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Hello.

Thanks for visiting! I publish a new chapter of “Entourage:2039” every Monday morning (on hiatus: returning soon), as well as other random stuff. Please let me know if you like (or hate) any of it. From the main page, you can use that little bubble at the upper right of the post to comment. Or there’s a comment box on the bottom of the individual post page. If you want to start at the beginning of the E:2039 story, chapter one is here.

My email is also over there on the right. If you’re interested you can follow me (@unicornrockstar), and/or @entourage2039 on twitter.

You people, the readers, you are the real heroes.

Ryan

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Entourage:2039, Chapter Seven: The Murphy Group, Mark II.

If you make it through the minefield, maybe you’ll find the entrance. Sometimes there are clues, in the remnants of the unlucky or clumsy. But the dogs take care of those soon enough.

The electronic eyes have seen you long before you get into the tunnel. Five hundred feet underground, if you make it past the razor wire and the auto-fire shotguns, you come to the entrance. A six-foot thick steel door, leading into a lead-lined bunker the size of a small town.

The guards watch through the peephole as you enter the combination. One mistake means painful death through a variety of means too gruesome to describe. Suffice it to say the guards do not lead exciting lives, and when they get a chance for action they like to make the most of it. But if you know the combination, and you make it past the guards, you pass through a series of six blast-doors, and there you find: the receptionist.

And then, if you’re on his calendar, and he’s having one of his good days, you just might get a meeting with Mr. Murphy.

His inner chamber is dark, with ceilings so high you can’t even see them. Mr. Murphy sits in a big black command chair, it’s towering two feet above his head. So you can’t even see him, from behind, but you sense his presence. You can feel the pure force of his will, directed at the bank of thirty monitors arrayed on the wall above him.

The immaculately clean flatscreens show all sorts of things – from the security feed immediately outside the door to hit chamber, to first-person-shooter point-of-views, in video-game green, of people or robots roaming the devastated streets of Hollywood, or the tunnels below it, to an aerial view of what was once the Hollywood Freeway, near the Gower exit. Ninety-nine screens are in constant motion. And yet, infallibly, the eye is drawn to one monitor, near the lower right of the wall. Here there is no video, only a montage of still photos, twenty-four hours a lightless day, seven days per incalculable underground week.

Every picture on this monitor is of a woman, dark-haired, olive-skinned, pretty, not beautiful, and yet there is something in her eyes, in her now-thirty-years-out-of-style clothes, something that could make a man fall in love with her, that could make her the Daisy to some latter-day Scorcese’s Gatsby. Only Nick Carraway is missing from the tableau. Nick Carraway is just now several miles away, self-soiled and unconscious on a military-surplus cot, with problems of his own.

But Gatsby is here. Because as we pan around the big chair, we see the man sitting in it, and we see his face. It’s disfigured, horrible. The left half is covered in some kind of stainless-steel mask, but even the exposed half is no picnic. The flesh seems to have been severely burnt, and scarred in other ways too numerous to count.

And yet. There is a lifeforce here that simply refuses to die. Because now he is watching that monitor in the lower right with as much intensity as man has ever put to screen. Because now the cracked, blasted lips part. Because how he speaks one word, just barely audible, even to the eye in the sky watching him from the ceiling.

“Sloan.”

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No, I will not read your trite blog entry about how you won’t read my screenplay.

Actually Mr. Olson:

You can read one of my scripts.

Maybe. If you ask nicely.

You see, I’m a writer, and you’re a writer. Fuck “aspiring.” You happen to have had some financial success at it, while I have not, yet. That is the only difference between us. People who sell Amway make a lot of money too.

In response to:
http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/why-he-will-not-read-your-fucking-script/

[To put my (lack of) money where my mouth is, anyone can read one of my feature scripts. Look over there on the right under downloads.]

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Entourage:2039, Chapter Six

Hey you guys!! Follow E:2039 on Twitter @entourage2039 ! And remember, new chapters are posted every Monday morning!

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Remembrances of Vincent Chase’s Penis Past (Part One)

Vincent Chase, sixty years old, stood on the cratered asphalt of Franklin Avenue, looking thirty years into the past. It was him.

The guy standing one hundred feet away from Vince was… Vince. “Queens Boulevard” Vince, to be exact. Old Vince would know that look anywhere. Looking back, he had always secretly considered that his peak- he had been young, beautiful, a huge success, every girl wanted him, but there was something else too- he had been doing good work. Billy Walsh had brought out the best in him the way no one else ever had before, or would again.

And this guy had it- the walk, the look in his eye, the unshakable knowledge that he was in exactly the right place, at the right time, doing what he was born to do. There had been a few impersonators on Hollyood Boulevard right after “Aquaman” – but those guys looked like sex offenders, and Drama and Turtle had thrown eggs at them while Vince laughed behind tinted glass in the back of the Bentley.

But this guy was good. Looking at him, it suddenly broke like a rogue wave over Vince- his golden youth, all of it, the enormity of what he had had, and lost. And he knew now that he had lost it a long time ago- long before he locked himself away in his penthouse. He wanted to cry.

He wanted to cry. But instead, Vincent Chase shit his pants in the middle of Franklin Avenue.

He wished he hadn’t, but the truth was it had been happening more and more. He wanted to ask the girl to bring him diapers, tell her it was for some kinky sex thing, but no. He couldn’t do it. He was sure she would know the truth.

Then something happened. As Vince stood there, silently enduring the worst moment of his life (so far), as he stood there in the middle of Franklin Avenue with his own excrement dripping slowly down the inside of his robe and into his four-hundred dollar designer sandal, the guy, the thing, the other Vince, whatever it was- it looked at him.

It was just a look, just one second of eye contact. But in that moment, old, pants-shitted Vince achieved enlightenment. Well, maybe not enlightenment exactly, but something like it. This guy, this younger self, saw straight into the gnarled depths of his tortured soul. Vince had spent his adult life trying not to be understood: Always he strove for mystery, to leave ’em wanting more, to get the girl out by morning with nothing but a story to tell her friends and a ride home in the Bentley from Turtle.

While the moment lasted – it was probably less than a second, but Vince found himself high on a hill, looking out at a 360 degree view. There was nothing but a sea of impossibly soft, white clouds anywhere as far as he could see, and he was at peace.

Then the earth shattered. Vince never heard the rocket coming until after it had impacted in the street, sending asphalt into the air like a fountain. The next thing he knew he was laying flat on his back, in a cloud of black smoke and dust, trying to breathe. Something deep down in his brain stem was telling him to move, to get up now, he had to find his double, talk to him, find out what it all meant. He might never get this chance again. Vince tried to will his legs to move, but they were emphatically not taking requests.

“It’s perfectly normal,” said a voice in the dark. It was a female voice, so that was something. Vince wondered if he was in Heaven. He flashed back to the scene that had filled his mind just before the rocket strike- that hilltop, those clouds. Maybe he had already been dead. If people were firing rockets, he could have been hit by something else just as easily.

“You must have crapped your pants when the rocket hit. It’s completely involuntary- happens to everybody.” Now Vince was fairly certain he was not, in fact, in Heaven, because even if it was possible to shit your pants in Heaven, he remembered a little bit from that church on Atlantic Avenue his mom used to drag him to, and he was pretty sure in Heaven they wouldn’t call attention to stuff like that, if there was a way to avoid it.

Experimentally, he opened an eye. It hurt, but eventually shapes started to form out of the white blurs. His focus pulled until he saw a room, and a girl. She was hot.

Her name was Mary, she told him later, after he felt good enough to sit up on the military-surplus green cot. He hadn’t looked under the blanket, but Vince was pretty sure he wasn’t wearing his crapped pants anymore. She must have helped him out of them. The room had no windows at all- were they underground? It felt like they were underground.

Vince checked Mary out from behind as she stood in the little kitchenette, boiling water. Her hair was black and short, Vince would usually have said too short, but there was something about the white skin of her neck. Moving downwards, he paused to take in her shoulders, feminine but rippling with muscles under her white tank top.

And then- she still had her back to him – making tea or something, so why not – down to her ass. It was toned and frankly spectacular.. She turned with the finished tea and brought him a cup. “Drink up, baby.” So it was “baby” already? Vince was starting to like her, dykey camouflage pants and all. She put her hand on his shoulder, just a touch, but he was shocked by how strong she was.

But then something else came into his mind, eclipsing even the urgings of his ageless libido.

Vince tried to talk, but found himself hoarse. His first attempt came out as a pathetic little croak that hurt him somewhere deep down in his chest. But he had to know. He tried again:

“That guy back there in the street…”

Mary smiled an innocent little half-smile. Or maybe not so innocent.

“What guy?”

“Right before the rocket hit. He looked… it was me. But young.”

“And who are you?”

Vince just cocked an eyebrow at her. He wasn’t hurt that bad.

“You really want to know, baby?”

Vince caught a different inflection in the word “baby” this time that hadn’t been there before. Or maybe he hadn’t been paying attention. It was a little harsh, a little condescending even. It cut into him. All at once he was acutely aware that he was thirty years older than this girl. At least.

“You want to see him again? You sure?”

Vince nodded. He was sure. He thought.

Mary stood up from where she’d been sitting by the cot. She went to a mirror that hung over a bare sink, right there in the open, and fixed her face a bit. When she was satisfied, she produced what looked like a tiny remote control, and pressed a button.

A hidden door in the wall slid open, revealing a cunningly concealed secret chamber. And there he was. For the second time that day, Vincent Chase looked into the eyes of his younger self. But this time, they were as black and lifeless as a dead sun.