Category: fiction

Vincent Chase in Hollywood

Vincent Chase was hungry. He had eaten the last steak three days ago, cleaned the freezer of Sea Bass (possibly Chilean), and emptied the cupboard of canned Everything. He checked one more time, grunting with exertion as he stood on his tiptoes to finger the dark reaches of the top cabinet.

Nothing but dust and shadows. Vince slammed the cupboard door shut- hard. What a bunch of bullshit! For the first time in he couldn’t remember how long, he was angry. Really hot. Where the fuck was that girl? Vince didn’t know what day it was, but she should have been here by now. She always showed up just when he needed her.

Fuck it. He’d order in. He knew how to do that.

But where was the goddamn phone? He threw aside piles of ancient, yellowed magazines, throwing up fifteen years of neglect in a Dust Bowl-caliber cloud. Old scripts, some kind of award statue from some forgotten cable show, empty bottles, generations-old console gaming systems. Finally he found it, tucked in a corner behind a four-foot-high venom-green bong.

He blew off the dust, held it gingerly to his ear, and mashed down the “Talk” button with his thumb. It made some kind of noise he didn’t even recognize. What the fuck was this shit??

Before he even knew what he was doing he had thrown the phone to the ground and he was smashing it- first with his foot, then with his fist, with a vigor he hadn’t possessed in fifteen years. He was Vincent Chase. Vincent Chase couldn’t even get a simple fucking dial tone anymore??

When the rage cloud cleared from his mind, Vince became aware that 1) His fist was bloody and it  hurt, a lot, and 2) He was still very hungry. Well. He would just have to go out and get something, wouldn’t he?

In his closet, he found a collection of ever-so-carefully-hand-distressed jeans that failed to come within ten sizes of accommodating his current girth. Fuck it, he’d go out in the robe. The tabloids would have a field day, but it would blow over, like always.

Vince undid the locks and stood at the door for a long long time. His knees felt weak, he wanted to puke, but he made it out into the hall. Why the fuck was everything so dusty? And there were holes in the carpet, like animals had been chewing on it. He’d have to have somebody call the manager, but anyway he was making it, supporting himself against the wall, slowly down the long corridor.

When the elevator didn’t come, he took the stairs. In the lobby, a fallen chandelier blocked his way, but nothing was going to stop him now. He slouched up to the big heavy door, gold-handled and glass tinted against the prying eyes of the lesser people who might wander by, hoping for a glimpse of their idols.

Vince pushed hard, and he was outside.

What.

The.

Fuck.

Vince did a double-take, then a triple-take, then did them both again. Hollywood looked like it had been bombed. Great black dead hulks of buildings towered overhead. There were no lights on in any of them; no signs of life anywhere. The street was covered in broken glass. To the North, thick black smoke rose from the devastated but still familiar cylinder of the Capitol Records building. At Vince’s feet, the Walk of Fame had been plundered, every star smashed to gravel, or completely removed, leaving only a series of shallow five-pointed pits full of trash and urine.

A pane of broken glass fell from high on one of the desolate hulks, shattering fifty feet ahead, sending huge shards skating out across the desolate street. The night, if it was night, was lit only by a dull-red sky, as if something very large was burning just over the hill. The overall effect was of a painting of Hell by an artist Vincent Chase had almost certainly never heard of.

Vince shrugged inside his triple-XL bathrobe. So, the neighborhood had gone downhill a bit. Nobody was going to fuck with him. He had street cred. He was Queens Boulevard. Hoping he still looked a little like Billy Walsh’s erstwhile noir demigod, Vincent Chase walked north on Vine Street, alone, looking for someplace that was open late.

Turtle, Crawling Slowly Forward.

Turtle inched his way forward down the tunnel, one careful step at a time. If you didn’t know what you were doing you could find yourself neck deep in raw sewage real fast. Raw sewage if you were lucky. There were far worse things in the sinkholes, and some of them were alive. Another man might have been frightened, or at least grossed out. Not Turtle. He had been slogging through shit all his life, one way or another. He lived for this.

He froze. Something was out there. It was just a blip, a little orange flash way out there in his peripheral, but it was definitely there. The Big Boss didn’t shell out for these military-grade night vision goggles for nothing. Probably just a rat, but a careless soldier was a dead solider. He’d learned that a long time ago.

Turtle’s black-gloved left hand, acting independently, had shot up in the shape of a fist. Behind him, his squad was instantly on alert. They didn’t make a sound, but he knew they were there, locked and loaded. Turtle knew them because he was one of them- a solider since age 11 on Queens Boulevard. Every man who served under him would kill or die for him without a second thought.

Yeah. Just a rat. Before he could stop himself, Turtle had mentally clocked its weight: big boy, about a seven-pounder. That was from the dark years. He had sold rat meat when that was all there was, and yeah, he might have eaten it once or twice in his time. It didn’t taste any worse than some of the Gyro places back home. But those days were over now. He had his men, and he had the Big Boss, and most of all, he had The Group. The GPS told him they were close now. He took four deep breaths to calm himself, not that he really needed to. A few quick hand signals and his men fanned out behind him, ready for action. Turtle took the lead, like he always did. In 15 seconds flat, he was up the ladder and had the hatch open.

­

They emerged from the sewer into a sub-basement storeroom. Every available surface was piled six inches deep with- Turtle could barely believe the irony, but there they were, unmistakable – ancient movie scripts. Insides the once-glossy covers, each one held one hundred and ten pages, give or take a few, now yellowed and slowly disintegrating, never to be rewritten into their better or more profitable selves. Here they crumbled, their wonder and adventure imprisoned forever in the flat black and white of the Cole and Haag format. “To what base uses we may return,” quipped Turtle’s internal Voice-Over.

He picked one off the top of the pile, and almost smiled at the title: “Benji: Arctic Dog.”

TURTLE’S BRAIN (V.O.)
Alas poor Vincent..

No. No time for that shit now. He tossed the script aside and led his men out into the hall. The first guard’s body was halfway to the floor before he knew what had hit him. These guys talked a big game, put on a lot of glitz, but at the end of the day they were dilettantes: War just wasn’t their thing.

Exactly seven minutes later, Turtle and his men returned the way they came, a razor-thin 20 terabyte jet-black hard disc nestled securely in Turtle’s pack. All 12 people who had laid eyes on them were now dead.

Between the stiffening fingers of the biggest one, Turtle had left his calling card, as he always did: All black, with a white Death’s Head leering out at the world. And below it, in unmissable block letters:

THE MURPHY GROUP.

A new chapter is posted every Monday morning. If you want to start at the beginning, check out chapter one.

_ _ _ _ _

Chapter two: Vince’s Houseguest

“Won’t you come in?” said Vince, still doing his best to sound like his long-ago turn as Nick Caraway in Scorcese’s “Gatsby.” The girl came in, she always did. Vince watched her from behind as she put the bags down in the kitchen. Nice ass, he thought. Once upon a time he had thought it chivalrous to help them with carry the stuff in, but his back had been acting up, and the last thing he wanted to do was throw it out again. Not today. Besides, it was cooler this way. “Lay back and let her do the work, bro” – this was how Johnny would have wanted it.

The girl was almost done now – pulling cans and packages from the bags until Vince’s nearly bare freezer and cupboards were again stocked in neat rows with all his favorites. A strip steak, flown in overnight from his beloved New York, materialized from one of the bags. “Later,” he told it with his eyes. “Just you and me.”

She finished putting the stuff away, and turned to face him. They both knew what was coming now. Vince looked at her face – the hair, dark, short but not too short, framing an unblemished face that hadn’t aged a day since high school. She was perfect. They were always perfect.

Was it the same girl? Vince realized with a start that he didn’t know. She certainly seemed to know what he liked, but then Vince supposed that was still common knowledge out there in the 310 and 323, just as it had always been. The better parts of the 818, too. And he’d had a 562 once. Didn’t know where 562 was then, still didn’t now, but he’d wanted to add it to his list. Turtle hooked him up at some sneaker thing. Anyway, she looked like the girl from last week. She was dressed the same, in a little skirt that showed just enough leg, and a polo shirt with two buttons open and some kind of logo Vince didn’t recognize over her left tit. She needed some real clothes – maybe he could hook it up, take her to Sunset Plaza and drop the Black card, like old times. They would still know him. Wouldn’t they?

It didn’t matter now because the clothes were in a pile on the floor and she was stark naked on the bed, waiting for him. Shaved: nice.

Once Vince had been the master of a thousand exotic positions- there had even been some talk of putting him in a remake of “Kama Sutra,” until an ill-timed racial slur from Ari sent the New Delhi investors straight into Toby McGuire’s waiting arms. He didn’t remember quite when the change had come, but he preferred Missionary now. Nice, simple, clean, no twisting his body into positions it no longer snapped back from. And no memories, just sweet escape.

Seven minutes later, it was over. The girl tucked him into the big bed, gave him a tiny peck on the cheek. When she let herself out, Vincent Chase had already slipped into the blessed forgetfulness of a dreamless sleep, free for a few hours from the ghosts of his sun-dappled past and his long-lost brother, Johnny “Drama” Chase.

This is the debut of my new weekly feature, Entourage:2039. It’s a piece of speculative fiction about where the characters from HBO’s Entourage will be in 30 years. Entourage:2039 will be published every Monday. Eventually I will probably migrate it to its own blog, but for now it’s here. I think it goes without saying this is not endorsed by or associated with HBO or the producers of Entourage in any way.

Come back Monday for chapter two!

_ _ _ _ _

Chapter One: Vince.

Vincent Chase, at 60, is a disgrace.

Once this beautiful boy bestrode the Earth like Colossus of old. The foreign markets fell to his boyish grin and tangled hair as if he had been Caesar- and he could have been Caesar, too, if he hadn’t lost the lead in the $80 million dollar Roman epic when a bitter D-girl ex- of Eric’s screwed them over with the studio. But something else came up, there was always another role, the timing was infallible, like someone somewhere was pulling the strings to give Vince just what he needed just when he needed it – they started to joke about it after a while. But Vince starred in the biopic of Giorgio Armani and it was a hit and he walked out the other side bigger than ever, with all wrongs forgotten, having fucked his leading lady and both of her stand-ins. And he got a shitload of free suits, too.

The sun would always shine on Vinnie Chase, because someone was always reflecting it there.

But now. Now he was fat. His once beautiful hair, his pride and joy, hung dirty, unconditioned and untouched for years by hands of two-hundred-dollar stylist. Alone he sat, alone in the penthouse condo high above Vine Street. He’d paid 14 million dollars for the place when the building went up, paid it without batting an eyelash because he was Vincent Chase, often the biggest movie star in the world, and because from his immaculate terrace he could actually look down on the rooftop swimming pool of the W hotel on the next block.

It had been Turtle who had conceived and executed what came to be known among those lucky enough to be invited to Vincent Chase’s penthouse as simply The System. It was a thing of genius in its way. Without ever leaving the comfort of Vince’s bachelor pad, they would observe by high-powered telescope the nubile bikini-ed beauties at poolside. A bellman at the hotel was a weed contact of Turtle’s- a quick text message with a description of the women in question, a discreet message sent to poolside indicating the interest of the man who was either or would soon again be the World’s Biggest Movie Star, and the women (or girls: Turtle’s connection would check IDs when their target’s youthful appearances merited it), were on their way to Vince’s place and a story they could tell their grandkids.

Turtle. Vince tried to remember the last time he had seen his face. The least talented of his inner circle, but somehow the the most real. People always liked Turtle, because they could relate to him. Just a guy who got lucky. Vince sometimes used to wonder if he kept Turtle around as some kind of trophy of humility and authenticity- just to prove that he, Vince, was still just a guy from Queens, that being the world’s being movie star, then not, than the world’s biggest movie star again, and so on, hadn’t changed him, not really, not at his core.

No. He had never been that cynical. He loved Turtle, always had, always would. And Eric. And Drama, his own brother. They looked nothing alike, but Johnny had been his own flesh and blood, or half anyway. How long had Johnny been gone now? Ten years? More? Vince fingered the platinum locket with Johnny’s picture in it.

Later. The high persistent whine of the door buzzer brought him out of his reverie. How long had he been sitting there like that, staring into the bewildered eyes of his brother, Johnny- a man who had always been lost, in his way, but was now lost irrevocably. With an effort he stirred himself and went to the intercom. There were multiple layers of security in place to restrain unwanted guests and overenthusiastic fans, but Vince pressed the button without even bothering to ask who it was. He knew who it was. For years now, he had only had one visitor.

Two-and-a-half minutes later, Vince, affecting his best remaining approximation of perfect movie-star ease, unlocked the six locks and opened the door to his visitor. She smiled at him like he was the one person in the world she wanted to see more than she had ever wanted anything else.

But then, hadn’t they all?