The Misfits

It was a cold and cloudy spring afternoon in Los Angeles. Trace sat in a hard wood deck chair in the back yard of the mansion, bored and listless as twenty-something porn starlets cavorted on the lawn of the four-acre backyard. There was a yellow pad in his lap and he scratched out a series of notes with his right hand while holding steady to his cane with his left hand.

The oddly disaffected voice of a young woman broke his languid concentration.

“I’ll bet the handle of that cane perfectly matches your hand,” the voice observed.

Trace slowly turned his gaze toward the girl who was standing at the edge of the deck chair. She stood before him as naked as the day she was born. The top and bottom of her damp sky blue bikini was clutched in her hand. She had long and lustrous red hair that cascaded down to her trim behind and a full and wispy bush of red public hair. Her legs were long and slender, her stomach, abs, and breasts as flat and tight as a young boy’s. Trace figured her to be loitering in the vicinity of twenty-two years old.

“Let me see your hand,” she said, taking Trace’s hand into her own before he could say no. She held her own palm flat against his. “See? We have the same size hands.”

She then reached for Trace’s cane and spidered her palm across the artificial alabaster handle.

“Yep,” she observed. “It’s perfectly molded to fit your hand.”

Trace waited for her to ask why he walked with the assistance of a cane – many people did, much to his amusement and annoyance – but instead she simply and abruptly ended the puzzling conversation and returned to the baronial estate.

The house was one of those faux colonial mansions in Encino, tucked away on a quiet side street north of Ventura Boulevard. It was, in fact, one of the originals from the 1930s when stars like Gable and Lombard built sprawling homes in what was then nothing but orange groves a stone’s throw from Hollywood.

The owner of this house – a Georgian colonial – made a decent living renting out the home and the grounds to Hollywood studios and production companies for location filming. The movie that Trace was shooting that afternoon, a one-day affair, was a nightmarishly simple product for Pay Per View cable broadcast, an all-nude, one-hour special called The Ultimate Spring Break Wet T-Shirt Contest. The “contestants” were supposed to be college co-eds recruited from local campuses but they were in reality a clutch of young up and coming porn stars hired to play the part by Norman, Trace’s director, co-producer and sometimes his best friend.

“It’s American Idol with wet T-shirts,” Trace concluded when he was hired to conceive, write and co-produce the show. The New York-based broadcaster only had four non-negotiable requirements, written over and over again in production memos to Trace and Norman: Lots of tits. Lots of nudity. Lots of wet T-shirts. Lots of fun. There was to be absolutely “no pink”, meaning no photography of open orifices and no overtly sexual activity on-camera. Other than that, it was a walk in the park for very little money and even less prestige.

When it came time to shoot The Quick and the Wet Fast Draw Competition, Trace dragged his chair to the edge of the lawn where the filming was taking place. The concept was simple: Eight girls in flimsy T-shirts and little else squared off in groups of two for a gunfight with water-filled Super Soakers. Filmed in high-definition video by two cameras for full coverage.

Less than twenty seconds into the first round of competition, one of the young blue movie starlets slipped on the wet grass and came down with one slender leg making uncomfortable contact with a barbeque pit constructed of jagged stones. The immediate scene almost made Trace double over with laughter: naked porn stars sitting on the sidelines, rushing out onto the grass to help their fallen comrade. It was a bad gash, to be sure, and all the production personnel scrambled to their grip trucks and personal vehicles for First Aid kits, the next best thing to non-existent Worker’s Compensation in that shoddy industry where performers are only so much chattel.

“How are you feeling? Do you have anything to take?” Trace asked the injured participant fifteen minutes after the literal slip-up. She had hobbled to a deck chair next to Trace’s, her leg expertly bandaged by one of the crew, and lit up one of Trace’s cigarettes after asking permission.

“You mean do I have anything to take for the pain? Yeah, I have some Vicodin in my bag. I just need to rest first and then I’ll go grab one.”

Her name, Trace learned, was Leanna. He did not know if that was her real name or her porn monicker. Either way, it didn’t matter to Trace. She appeared to be no older than nineteen, the professionally-applied pancake make-up masking acne scars and a fresh crop of pimples erupting on her forehead. She was attractive as far as post-pubescent teens go, which made Trace momentarily consider what kind of waking nightmare it would be to get sexually and romantically involved with a girl that young and immature; after all, the girl sitting next to him was completely nude, save for the bandage on her gashed leg.

“I have all kinds of meds,” she continued. “I have anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, all kinds of them. I have these really bad anxiety attacks. Have you ever had one?”

Trace laid his book aside. He had been reading Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

“When I was your age,” he said, feeling like an old man suddenly, “I used to get them all the time.”

“The whole thing? Having to breathe into a paper bag and all?”

“The whole nine yards. I used to call hospital emergency rooms, convinced I was having a heart attack and they would tell me to go breathe into a bag and call them back in ten minutes if it didn’t stop.”

“I can’t control my anxiety attacks,” Leanna said. “And I don’t know what starts them. Sometimes I’ll just be sitting there in a restaurant and there will be a spot on a fork or something and then all of a sudden I feel my breath is like trapped in my chest and then it starts. It really freaks out my boyfriend because he’s never been with anyone who has anxiety attacks.”

“Uh-huh.” Trace shook a smoke loose from the pack at the side of the chair and lit it.

“I had one on-set the other day and that was really embarrassing.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I was doing this bondage thing and they had me tied up and they had these electric clamps attached to my nipples –”

“You do bondage movies?”

“Just this one.” She flipped a stray strand of wet blonde hair off her forehead. “My agent got it for me but I told him never again. They told me they were going to shock my nipples and I didn’t have a problem with that but then they turned up to a Six, instead of a Four and I fucking freaked out.”

“If I was a performer,” Trace said for lack of anything else to say, “I would draw the line at movies like that.”

“Like I said, it was a one-time thing only and I told my agent I don’t want to do anymore of those scenes.”

Throughout the afternoon, Leanna’s friends would stop by her chair and coo words of concern about her injury and offer tips on how to properly care for her wound once she got home.

“This is nothing,” she repeatedly said. “I have a three-year old at home so trust me, I know how to treat injuries.”

But toward the end of the day, once her Vicodin kicked in, there came further embellishment to the story about the three-year old at home in dire need of emergency treatment.

“Make sure you treat that with hydrogen peroxide and a good topical antibiotic,” one of the cameramen lectured Leanna.

“This is nothing. I have a three-year old at home. You know how many times we’ve had to take him to the emergency room? Jeez. He always comes tearing through the living room and hitting his head on the edge of the glass coffee table. It’s happened three times now.”

Leanna then turned to Bette, the girl who earlier had admired the way Trace’s hand perfectly fit the handle of his cane.

“You just gonna hang out at home after this?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I come with you? Maybe we can smoke a blunt or two? I’m feeling like shit.”

“Sure, honey.”

Trace picked up the book he was reading and pretended to have not heard the conversation. He took cold comfort in remembering that he had a bottle of Vicodin and at least three fingers of Kentucky bourbon awaiting him at home.