8763 Wonderland

“The movie is an all-around piece of crap,” Trace told his friend. “If you were paid for directing it you should be ashamed of yourself.”

“You have to fix it for me.”

Trace laughed long and hard into the telephone handset. “Do you have any idea how bad it is?”

“Fuck you. I know that,” Norman growled. “I asked if you can fix it.”

“Why would you want to change anything? It is what it is, a bad gonzo movie.”

Norman began badgering his old friend, a technique that usually worked after Trace had his requisite temper tantrum.

“C’mon, Trace, it’ll take you all of fifteen minutes and you’ll earn a quick four hundred dollars.”

Trace took a deep breath and silently counted to five before answering.

“Do you know what they say about a sow’s ear and a silk purse?”

“I don’t want to turn it into a silk purse. I just want it to be better!”

“It can’t be better, Norman. The movie is garbage. The whole genre is garbage. Look, there’s a reason I was never associated with these kind of movies when I was writing porn.”

“Oh bullshit,” Norman shot back, “you wrote gonzo.”

“Okay. Fine. I did. But you can count on one hand how many I did. And they were very theme specific. This movie isn’t.”

“It’s anal!” Norman shouted over the line.

“That’s not a theme. It’s an orifice.”

After ten more minutes of debate, the lure of the quick payday compelled Trace to take the job.

After writing more than 200 screenplays for adult films and videos in the 90s, the field was as stale and moldy to him as a two-week old loaf of bread. He had no fresh ideas for porn.

Trace slid the VHS screener of the rough cut of “Anal Exxxplosion” into the VCR and watched once more in horror.

“They’re both butt ugly!” Trace had complained to Norman over the phone about the two porn stars selected to host the wrap-around segments that were sandwiched between the sex scenes.

“Yes, but they’re two of the hottest girls in the business right now.”

“You’re kidding me,” Trace said slowly. “Jesus Christ. What happened to the ones who actually looked like models?”

“That’s so 90s,” Norman replied.

It was the wrap-arounds that needed repair. The actresses had flubbed their dialogue repeatedly and somehow forgot to look into the camera during most of their line recitals. It reminded Trace of watching a hostage video on CNN. The girls had that same furtive sideways glance thing going on.

Norman had given Trace a two-day deadline. By the eleventh hour of the second day he still had not written a word. He spent an hour on the phone with Norman trying to convince him to simply release the movie as it was.

“It’s gonzo,” Trace complained. “Who’s going to notice whether the wrap-arounds are good or bad?”

“The cable companies will,” Norman said. “I need a cable sale.”

With forty-five minutes remaining in the eleventh hour, Trace tired of staring at the keyboard and tried some avoidance techniques to limber up his creative capacity. He washed his dishes in the hotel bathtub. He grabbed a plastic trash bag and began collecting the garbage neatly piled in a corner in smaller plastic trash bags.

Thirty minutes remaining before the deadline and Trace was toting the trash bag down the hotel hallway. He was less than four feet away from the plastic garbage bin when the bag inexplicably broke open and regurgitated its contents onto the carpet. He stood there in stunned disbelief amid a trash heap of wet coffee grounds, empty beer cans and a wine bottle, cigarette butts, and greasy hamburger wrappers from various fast food joints.

“For fuck sake!” he shouted. As he ducked down the adjoining hallway that led to back to his room, Trace saw a man and woman toting luggage down the hallway. They paused to consider the pile of offensive garbage in their path.

“I told you this place was a dump,” the man told the woman.

Back in his room, Trace flattened the cardboard wrapper from a Budweiser 12-pack and raced back down the hall. He used the Bud box as a dust pan and scooped every last beer can and cigarette butt into the trash can. The pile of coffee grounds he left for the housekeeping staff to contend with.

In the fifteen minutes remaining on his deadline Trace sat down and pounded out a five-page script without thinking.

“Monkeys and typewriters,” he muttered as he hit the send button to e-mail the script to Norman.