Chapter 12: It’s Only Make Believe

Coos Bay, Oregon

July 20, 1995

It was another beautiful coastal Oregon summer morning. The sky was clear over the beaches, with the marine layer staying several miles offshore. The temperature was in the high fifties and the offshore breeze was light and gentle as the sun was just barely above the eastern horizon and had not yet had time to heat up the land and draw the cooler ocean air ashore. The tide was currently out, leaving the beaches around KVA’s cliffside house open and accessible. As was usually their habit when staying in town to record, Jake and Celia were making their morning run together on the beach route.

After reaching the state park to the south of them, they went up the stairs back to the roadway, the most difficult part of the run. Jake had been exercising regularly of late, having found a few trails near his Oceano home that led down to the sand dunes of Pismo Beach, so he took the stairs easily. Celia, on the other hand, had been a bit deficient in keeping up with her aerobic level exercise until coming to Coos Bay two weeks ago, and she was still sucking wind pretty good on the stair portion. Three quarters of the way up, she had to pause and rest to catch her breath. Jake stopped with her and patted her shoulder companionably.

“You’re getting better,” he told her. “You almost made it all the way up today.”

She nodded, her breath tearing in and out of her lungs, her face red and sweaty, her white t-shirt soaked with exertional sweat both on the back and the front. Even her legs, bare in her black running shorts, were glistening with a sheen of perspiration. She took a drink of water, swallowed it, and then panted for a few more breaths before answering. “I’m going all the way up this thing tomorrow,” she said. “Even if it kills me.”

“Hey,” Jake said lightly. “No dying until we at least get your basic vocal tracks down. That way the rest of us can finish your CD and cash in on you posthumously.”

She barked out a little laugh and shook her head. “Your concern for my welfare is moving,” she told him.

He put his hand between her shoulder blades and rubbed a little. His hand came away wet. “The show must go on,” he said.

“The show must go on,” she agreed. “Come on. Let’s get to the top of this perra.”

“Let’s do it,” he said.

They walked the rest of the way up. Celia was still sucking pretty good wind at the top, so, instead of resuming their jogging pace, they kept up a steady walk back toward the house to let her recover a bit. Gradually, her breathing became normal and she was able to speak a full sentence without gasping.

“Well,” she said, “at least this will get me back into shape for touring. As it stands right now, I don’t think I’d be able to last through a ninety-minute show.”

“What about two and a half hours?” Jake asked.

“Two and a half hours?” she asked. “What the hell?”

“Do you think you could work your way up to that?” he asked. “There would be a twenty-minute intermission about an hour ten in.”

“Jake, what are you talking about?”

“A little idea that Paulie and Obie planted in my head the other night,” he said. “Apparently this is the up-and-coming thing for A-list musical acts. Two to three hour sets and no opening band. Just the headliner. The Eagles are doing it, Rush is doing it, U2, Metallica, the Rolling Stones.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Really,” he confirmed. “Paulie asked me to talk to you about the possibility.”

“That’s a really long set,” she said doubtfully. “And I don’t think I’m quite in the same league with those other acts.”

“You’re not,” Jake said. “You’re in a higher league. You’ve sold more CDs in the past two years than all of them combined. You’re hot commodity. I would say—and Paulie agrees—that you are at the very top of the A-list as far as musical acts go.”

She smiled, pleased with his praise, but she was still doubtful about the idea. “What is the point of the longer set?” she wanted to know.

“You’ll have a chance to perform pretty much all of your material,” Jake explained. “All of the hits from the first two albums, all of the future hits from the new album, and as many La Dif songs as you want. You could perform all the La Difs that you wrote and maybe even throw in I Love to Dance for nostalgia purposes. The fans get to hear it all and we don’t get complaints about how you didn’t perform this song or that song.”

“Then it’s to give the people what they want?” she asked. “That sounds rather selfless of us.”

“Well ... it’s not entirely without a profit-oriented angle,” Jake admitted.

“What do you mean?”

“People are more willing to pay triple digit ticket prices for longer shows with more material being presented. Especially once the word of mouth about the set list starts to spread. That translates into increased tour revenue. And, as you know, we cleaned up pretty nicely on your last tour when we went with the higher prices. We’ll be able to rake in even more with the extended set.”

“How much more?” she wanted to know.

“Pauline and Jill put their heads together on this one,” he said. “They estimate we’ll be able to charge seventy dollars minimum for the worst seats in the house, one-twenty-five for the lower-level bleachers, and up to one-seventy-five for the front floor levels.”

Celia whispered appreciably. “That’s quite a lot,” she said.

“The theory is that people will be willing to pay that for an extended Celia Valdez set. Assuming sold out houses across the board—like you did on the last tour—we’re talking about a quarter million or so in profit from each show. And that’s just ticket revenue. That doesn’t even include the merchandising.”

Celia nodded thoughtfully. “A quarter of a million, huh?”

“That’s just a loose average,” Jake said. “It’ll be a little less at some of the smaller venues, a little more at some of the larger ones.”

“Is that KVA’s share of the profit, or the total of all profit?”

“The total,” Jake said. “Assuming we have our MD&P provider finance the tour like they did before, they will logically want to share in that profit, just like on the last tour.”

“Naturally,” she said. “So ... fifty-fifty split, like before?”

He nodded. “I don’t think either KVA or whatever record company we end up with would accept anything less than that.”

“I suppose that’s fair,” she allowed. “Although you know they’ll want to try to negotiate it anyway.”

“Undoubtedly,” he agreed. “But that’s another discussion for another day.”

“I guess so,” she said. “Well ... sign me up. If people really want to see me step up there and sing and play for two and a half hours, and they’re willing to pay for it, I guess I can do it. I have enough material now.”

“All right then,” Jake said with a smile. “I let Paulie know you’re aboard and we’ll start thinking tour once we get masters in hand.”

“Sounds good,” she said. She looked over at him meaningfully. “Why did she task you with asking me about this? Paulie’s never been squeamish about talking business with me before.”

Jake thought about giving her a bullshit answer for a moment then decided against it. “Well ... it seems that she feels you’ve been ... uh ... a little testy of late.”

“Testy?” she asked, frowning.

He gave a half shrug. “You know? Kind of flying off the handle at times, getting disproportionately upset over little things, being uncommunicative. That sort of thing.”

“She says I’ve been doing that?” she barked, a touch of anger in her voice.

“You kind of have been doing that, C,” he said. “You’ve got everyone walking on eggshells around you since we got here.”

She took a deep breath, as if she were about to start shouting at him, and then let it out slowly, her face softening. “I guess I have been a little bitchy lately, haven’t I?”

Jake held his thumb and index finger about half an inch apart. “Just a bit,” he confirmed. “Anything you want to talk about?”

She shrugged. “It’s just a little marital stress, that’s all. It’ll pass. I’m sorry I’ve been letting it out around people who don’t have anything to do with the problem. I’ll try to watch myself from here on out.”

“We appreciate that in advance,” Jake said. He thought about letting it drop here but decided to push just a bit further. “Is it the Greg and Mindy show that’s bothering you?”

She looked over at him, her eyes daggers for a moment, but then they softened. “Yeah,” she said. “What else?”

“What’s the issue?” he asked. “All that clusterfuck over Mindy’s ex doing his little interview has already come and gone, right? The reporters have stopped calling. You’re no longer the lead story on ER every night.”

“That was just a minor league annoyance,” she said. “They had nothing substantial to report except groundless inuendo.”

“Did something new happen? Greg’s been going on about how professional and straightforward Mindy is, hasn’t he?”

“He has,” she said. “That’s what’s bothering me. He tells me she’s playing no games with him, is nothing but the constant professional actress, dedicated to portraying the role she’s been cast in.”

Jake nodded his head thoughtfully. “I will say that Mindy always did take her profession seriously,” he said. “She is a great actress, and she does dedicate herself fully to her work when it’s in progress, just like Greg does.”

This earned Jake another sharp look. “You’re defending Mindy Snow?” she asked.

“Not at all,” he replied. “I’m just stating a fact. Mindy is a lying, cheating, backbiting snake in the grass who will do anything or hurt anyone to further even a minor cause that she’s involved in. There is nothing short of murder she wouldn’t do to gain an advantage, and I’m not even sure about that. But she is a dedicated and professional actress.”

“I think that’s what is troubling me,” Celia said.

“That she’s a good actress?”

“No. That I know what she is capable of, that she will lie, cheat, steal, and hurt anyone she needs to hurt, but that, so far, she is showing no signs that anything like that is going on. According to Greg, she’s this wonderful, delightful girl he gets to work with every day. He even told me they’ve developed a certain chemistry between them that will enhance the scenes they do.”

Jake raised his eyebrows a bit. “Are you worried that he’s getting a little infatuated with her?

“I’m beyond worrying about that,” Celia said sourly. “It’s quite clear when I talk to him that it has happened. I can almost hear him glowing when we talk on the phone and he tells me about the latest scenes they filmed, about how great the interaction between the two of them was.”

“Wow,” Jake said. “You don’t think that they’re ... you know...”

“Tuning each other’s instruments?” Celia asked, using a Jake-ism. “No. I don’t think he’d be able to talk so casually to me if that were going on. And I like to think he learned his lesson after the little makeup girl incident in Alaska.”

“He bought himself a whole lot of silent treatment after that one,” Jake recalled.

“He did,” she said. “And I’m sure he possesses the understanding that if anything like that happens again, it’s the end. I don’t think he would actually do anything with her if she offered, I’m just uncomfortable with this happy, respectful, relationship he’s formed with her. Everything he talks about is ‘Mindy this’ and ‘Mindy that’ and ‘Did I tell you what Mindy said?’.”

“Does he know that this is bothering you?” Jake asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I keep up my happy voice when I’m talking to him; and Greg is sometimes annoyingly oblivious when he’s being offensive to someone.”

“That is true,” Jake agreed. He had been on the receiving end of that particular Greg Oldfellow personality flaw on multiple occasions. “How much longer will they be filming? They’ve been at it for a few months now.”

“At least another month of principal photography,” she said. “And ... well ... they’re getting ready to start filming the...” She trailed off to an incomprehensible mutter.

“The what?”

“The sex scenes,” she said.

“I see,” Jake said slowly. “And when they do that, they’re going to be like ... naked, right?”

“Well, their genitals will be covered since they’re not doing hardcore, but yeah. Pretty much naked. Bare asses, bare tits. The scenes are going to be a hard R rating. I read the script. They’re going to be putting their mouths together. Her boobs are going to be squished all over his chest. His hands are going to be feeling those tits up and squeezing her ass. At one point, he’s supposed to suck on her nipple while she bounces on top of him.”

“No shit?” Jake said, remembering for a brief moment what it had felt like to have Mindy Snow’s nipple in his mouth while she bounced on top of him. “They actually write out how the scene is going to go?”

“Of course,” she said. “Did you think they just threw them naked into bed and told them to improvise?”

“I guess I never really thought much about how a sex scene is filmed,” he said. “I’m assuming this is kind of bothersome to you?”

She frowned. “I didn’t think it would be at first,” she said. “I mean, I was never thrilled about the thought of my husband getting naked and rubbing against Mindy Snow, but I know it’s just acting and that they’re not really doing what they seem to be doing on the screen. He’s done scenes like that before—in So Others May Live and even The Northern Jungle—although those scenes were not quite as graphic. That never bothered me. Truth be told, it always got me a little hot to watch those scenes and I would always ... you know ... get aggressive with him after we would watch it. I thought I’d feel the same about these scenes with Mindy Snow too. And I did at first, but after all the listening to him talk about how wonderful and professional Mindy is and about this fucking chemistry they share ... it’s nagging at me now. I’m getting stressed out thinking about what they’ll be doing and how much that chemistry is going to come into play.”

“I can see where you’re coming from,” Jake said. “Kind of anyway. This is really a bizarre thing to have to deal with.”

“It is,” she agreed. “Something that normal married couples don’t have to go through.” She shrugged. “The life we choose, right?”

“The life we choose,” he agreed.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s pick up the pace or we’ll be late for breakfast.”

“All right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

They started running again, settling in on an eight-minute mile pace. It was easy to do as it was mostly downhill from this point.

In Chicago, it was another hot and muggy summer day. All of the daytime exterior scenes for Us and Them had already been filmed, so the cast and crew were now spending their days on a rented soundstage just east of the Loop filming the inside scenes that did not take place in the police station or Frank Haverty’s home. For the past three days now, the soundstage had been built up into the set of The Star Lounge, which was the fictional cop bar where the fictional Haverty and his fictional fellow patrol officers liked to hang out and drink after work. The production team and the actors methodically worked their way through each scene that took place in the bar, starting with the scene where Haverty gets drunk before going home and having the argument with his wife and culminating with the scene in which Lyndsay joins Haverty there after an emotional shift that involved watching a young pregnant woman die right in front of them after being shot by her psycho boyfriend. A slew of extras and supporting cast members were floated in and out of the set for each particular scene so that the bar always had different people in it.

At four o’clock in the afternoon they were almost done with the last bar scene. It was the one where Haverty and Lyndsay got drunk together after the pregnant woman call. It was this scene that would lead to the first of the sex scenes between the two of them and where the chemistry between the two actors was particularly important.

Greg and Mindy sat at a small cocktail table on the set, the primary camera looking at them in profile with the bar and the extras sitting at it in the background. Secondary cameras pointed at each of their faces. A boom microphone was over their heads, just out of the eye of the primary camera. Greg was dressed in blue jeans and a long t-shirt, green in color, that hung over his belt. He had Sergeant Mackle’s empty pistol holstered to the belt and covered by the shirt. Before him was a glass of ice water with a touch of brown food coloring in it that was supposed to be a scotch on the rocks. Mindy was wearing black slacks and a button-up white blouse. Her hair was now down (an earlier part of the scene involved her unpinning that hair after the emotional day) and she had a glass of plain water in a martini glass with an olive on a stick in it. The script supervisor had already made careful notes on the clothing they wore, their hair styles, and the level of liquid in each of their glasses so there would be no inconsistencies when the various takes of the scene were edited together, and so their clothing would be correct when it was stripped off for the first sex scene later.

“All right, people,” said Georgie Fletcher from the director’s chair just adjacent to the cameras. “Let’s try this last one again. I’d really like to wrap up these bar scenes so we can get a little rest before tonight’s fun, okay?”

Greg and Mindy nodded at him but did not speak. They were on the seventh take of the final three minutes of the last bar scene. It was a section where both Haverty and Lyndsay had to spew out a fairly lengthy bit of dark and meaningful dialogue. Greg had screwed up the first two takes by flubbing his lines. Mindy had screwed up two more. One of the extras over at the bar had screwed up another by tripping and knocking over a stool. Fletch himself had put the kibosh on what everyone else had deemed a good take just because he hadn’t thought it good enough.

“Greg, Mindy, you two dialed in?” Fletch asked.

“Tight as a nun,” Mindy assured him.

Greg simply gave him a thumbs up.

“Okay,” he said. “All you in the back, let’s do it just like before, without any tripping or dropping if you please.”

A chorus of agreement noises and thumbs up came back at him.

“Okay, let’s do it then,” Fletch said.

The camera assistant stepped forward with a digital clapperboard and held it up where all three cameras could read it. The readout denoted the name of the film, the scene number, and the take number. The operator read this information aloud and then clapped the top down so the beginning of the take would be marked for later editing (assuming this take was even used). He then backed quickly away, out of the camera eye.

“Action,” said Fletch.

At the bar, the extras began to sip from their near-beers or their colored water drinks. A female carrying a tray of drinks walked slowly through. A bartender began to mix things up while talking softly with two extras before him. Greg, who was no longer Greg, but Frank Haverty after three stiff drinks, slowly took a sip from his drink and then looked up at Mindy, who was no longer Mindy, but Lyndsay Brown, left-leaning, cop-hating reporter who had just spent a month getting educated in the real world.

“How do I do it?” Haverty asked her with a snort. He was responding to Lyndsay’s question, asked in the last take, about how he could see things like what they had seen today and not go crazy. He hefted up his glass, showing it to her. “This stuff helps a lot, even though it screws up the rest of your life. That’s a start. That’s why so many of us are alcoholics, or pill poppers, or both. It’s a crutch and most of us seem to need a crutch to do what we do every day.”

Lyndsay nodded, taking a drink out of her own glass. “I think I understand that now,” she said quietly.

“But that’s not the real trick to surviving this job,” Haverty said.

“What’s the real trick?” she asked.

“The real trick is to just not give a fuck,” he said. “To realize that nothing matters anyway. None of this shit. The world is a fucked-up place and we’re all just here to do the best we can to keep it from spinning completely out of control.”

Lyndsay was shaking her head. “I can’t accept that,” she said. “That girl today, she mattered, Frank! She was pregnant. Her baby mattered. And that asshole, the man who put that baby in her, shot her in the fucking chest because they were arguing over the TV! And she and her baby died right in front of us! Now he’ll go to prison for the rest of his life and she and the baby are dead. She was only nineteen, Frank! He was only twenty-one! Three lives were destroyed tonight in less than ten seconds. How can you possibly say that doesn’t matter?”

“Because it doesn’t,” he said softly. “Not to me, not to the world. You’re sitting there talking like they were taxpaying citizens and the world is going to be missing out on some fucking future Nobel Laurette or something. They were welfare scum, Lyndsay, three or more generations in and none of them had any hope in life. That girl was a high school dropout working in a mini-mart to pay for her vodka and cigarettes. That baby daddy was on parole for selling meth and was tweaking all over the place when we arrested him. That baby was going to be born into a fucked-up existence and grow up to be just like mommy or just like baby-daddy. Why in the fuck should I give a shit about what happened to them? Why should I let that shitshow get into my head and drive me crazy? Keep me up at night? What good does that do? It doesn’t make any of this shit go away, does it?”

“No,” she said quietly. “I guess it doesn’t.”

“And that’s how you do it,” Frank said. “You tell yourself it doesn’t matter, you learn to believe it, to know it, and you drown any doubts with alcohol if they try to surface. That’s the secret to surviving on the streets. It’s more important than that gun I carry or that vest I wear. It’s more important than all that training they give us, than remembering not to stand in doorways or how to walk up on a car you just pulled over. Three times as many cops have been killed by putting their own guns in their mouths because they couldn’t handle the job than have ever been cut down by some asshole on the streets.” He tapped his temple with his finger. “Survival starts here, Lyndsay, with learning not to give a shit about this fucked-up world and the fucked-up people in it.”

She looked at him across her glass for a moment and then shook her head. “I could never let myself get that cold,” she finally said.

He nodded. “That’s what makes you one of them, hon, and not one of us.”

Another nod. “I guess it is,” she said. She then finished off the rest of her drink and set the glass down.

Frank finished his as well. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here while we can both still walk.”

“All right,” she said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

They both paused, continuing to look at each other across the table, remaining in character. They’d reached the end of the scene, but the cameras were still rolling. Had they really just gone through it successfully?

“And ... cut!” Fletch called out.

The cameras were turned off. The extras stopped moving about. Greg and Mindy let their faces return to neutral expressions. They looked over at the director.

“That was good, guys,” he told them, giving a thumbs up. “Good expression, good delivery for both of you. We’ll see how it looks when I review the dailies tomorrow, but I think we got a wrap on this scene.”

Mindy smiled and stood up. “Fuckin’ fab,” she declared, holding out her palm to Greg.

He high-fived her enthusiastically. “Nailed it that time,” he said. “I was so into character there that I almost feel drunk and pissed off at the world.”

“Me too,” Mindy said. “I was totally Lyndsay there. Feeling pity for you, sadness for the mother, fear for my own sanity. We really do have some chemistry, Greg!”

“Agree,” he said, nodding. “We were clicking really well.”

“That was a good flow on the take,” Fletch agreed. “Hopefully, that click holds for the parking lot scene tonight.”

“We’re still on for filming that tonight?” asked Greg, part of him nervous about the idea, part of him looking forward to it. The parking lot scene was to be the beginning of the first sex scene. Linearly, it would take place immediately after the scene they had just filmed, out in the parking lot of the Star Lounge (though they would actually be filming it in a closed off parking lot of a strip mall out in Oak Park) after Haverty saw Lyndsay safely to her car. They would stand beside it for a moment, telling each other goodbye for the evening, and then they would share a simple hug. The hug would turn passionate and lead to the two of them kissing and pawing each other before making the decision to return to Lyndsay’s condo on the lake and have sex. It would be the first truly intimate contact that the two actors would share.

“Tonight’s a perfect night for it,” Fletch said. “It’s a weekday, so everything will be closed early at the site. Oak Park PD has agreed to seal off the block for us if we give them three hours of warning time. It’s a clear night without much moonlight to interfere with the lighting.”

“Sounds good, Fletch,” Mindy said. “What time?”

“Sunset is 8:20 tonight,” he said. “We’ll need it to be completely dark for the shoot, so I’m thinking that 9:30 action would be about right. That means you two need to report for makeup and wardrobe at 8:30, here at the soundstage. We’ll have you go through the readings and then drive you out there in the limo. The auxiliary makeup and wardrobe trailer will be at the site for touchups. If it goes well, hopefully we’ll be back at the hotel before midnight.”

“Hopefully,” Greg said, pondering the thought of spending two hours or so hugging, groping, and kissing Mindy Snow under studio lights next to a car in a parking lot. It was not exactly an unpleasant pondering. It’s not like I’ll be cheating on Celia or anything, he thought. It’s my job. And it’s just make believe anyway. We’ll just be moving our mouths together and acting like we’re kissing passionately.

“Be sure to put those wardrobe items on hangers and keep them out,” said Lane Casper, the script supervisor. “It is imperative that you wear the same clothing for the parking lot scene as you did for the bar scene.”

“Understood, Lane,” Mindy told her. She then turned to Greg and smiled at him. “Looks like the fun’s about to really start, huh?”

Greg wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that. But he agreed anyway.

The temperature dropped into the low sixties after sunset, but the humidity held steady in the high eighties. It was muggy, with almost no wind coming off the lake, and there were mosquitos and gnats cruising around, occasionally lighting on skin for a quick bite. The parking lot of the closed down strip mall had been transformed by the crew. Oak Park police cruisers had sealed off the block and were keeping all traffic and all pedestrians out of the area. Special lighting towers had been placed around a thirty-foot square in the center of the lot and were providing an artificial brightness that would be damped down by camera settings, giving the illusion of a poorly lit locale. A leased BMW 5 series sedan—the car Lyndsay Brown drove—was parked in a slot in the middle of the square. Several other vehicles, all belonging to locally hired crew members, none of them as nice as the Beemer, were parked on either side to make the parking lot look occupied. The boom microphone stretched out and hung just over the BMW’s driver’s side, where the scene would take place. Two cameras were set up, one to catch a side angle of Haverty and Lyndsay, the other to catch an oblique angle. Behind the cameras were the director’s chair and the rest of the crew. Greg and Mindy, now dressed back in the same clothes they had worn earlier, their hair styled exactly the way it had been when they had filmed the end of the bar scene, slowly got into position for the first take.

The scripting called for the scene to go as such: Haverty walks Lyndsay to her car and they pause there at the driver’s door to exchange a few last words of farewell. She thanks him for taking her to the bar and talking her through her emotional ordeal as best he could. He tells her to go home and get some sleep and that if she does not show up for any more shifts, he understands. She assures him that she’ll be back for the next scheduled shift in three days. He smiles and nods and then, just before she can open the door, he steps forward and gives her a hug that starts out friendly. She returns the embrace in that vein for a few moments but then, as they hold each other, the sexual tension, which had been building in them for the previous six or seven scenes, comes to a head. They gaze into each other’s eyes for a moment and then suddenly they are kissing.

Fletch wanted to capture this entire first part of the scene in one take. From there, they could cut for later print and then move onto the next take, which would involve the progression of the embrace from just kissing to groping and raw passion. The third take would be their breathless discussion in which they decide that Haverty will follow her back to her condo.