41

Sharp-eyed readers will remember Stacy from earlier in the story, and may even remember past references to She's The Sheriff. It was actually on the set of She's The Sheriff that Stacy had stumbled upon the events which would change her life.

"Okay," said Chet the gofer. "Episode five, in which Sheriff Morgan finds a stray cat and tries to keep it in a box under her desk without Sheriff Bob finding out." He clacked the clacker.

The director put his finger to his lips in a SHHH gesture. It was redundant and silly but something of a trademark. This was a guest director. David Deet. Sharp-eyed readers may wonder when in the course of Deet's illustrious career he would have stooped to direct an episode of fleeting trash such as She's The Sheriff.

Well, there was a time when he was. At the time, he was happy to be even getting his chance and was working for exposure as much as money. To find an incarnation of David Deet with those kinds of humble priorities, you have to go back quite a ways. To 1955, in fact.

Sharp-eyed readers may wonder whether or not Deet's life and career are a little bit anachronistic, jumbled and at odds. They are asked to refer to chapter 60, which actually features Sharp-Eyed Readers in a starring role, playing their music at Sloan's mandated rock club, "The Club."

In the meantime, indulgence is sought of all readers, the sharp and the flat, the striking and the plain and the just right, as Deet knows his own career a little bit better than you do, and he presumably wouldn't get it wrong.

"Places, please!" Deet squeaked. Stacy stood with character actor Abe Vigoda, and they scowled loudly at Deet.

"Who are you even TALKING to?" Stacy said. Deet put his hand over his mouth apologetically.

It was 1955, kind of, sort of, and Deet was only 12 years old. His experience to date was twofold. He had directed a commercial for an RV lot called Camino Camper. And he had made some short films on Super-8 in his back yard, to an audience of squirrels and chirping birds.

Stacy, Vigoda and others were perplexed as to why lead director Al Alberts had even given this much authority to a 12-year-old kid, but apparently Alberts saw something in Deet that the others had yet to see.

"Kid," Alberts said, "Let me ask you something. Why are you calling for 'places' after the clacker has been clacked and the cameras are rolling?"

Deet gestured for Alberts to come closer.

Looking pissed, Alberts walked over anyway. Deet whispered something in Alberts' ear.

Alberts remained pissed for the first thirty seconds, and then his expression changed. He brightened, smiled and then laughed, muffling his laughter in his fist, slapping his knee with his hand as he hunched over to Deet's diminuitive height of five feet.

Alberts briefly whispered back. Then they broke off and Alberts said, "Heh! Bear with him everybody, please! Try to remember that he is only 12."

Deet momentarily looked annoyed - he wasn't thrilled that Alberts was calling attention to his tender age - but the flare passed.

Stacy scowled.

Alberts stepped back across the green electrical tape that marked off the perimeter of the low budget studio from the rest of the warehouse space, which was also leased to a notary and a family of ducks.

"Places please," Deet said. He clacked his clacker and put his finger to his lips in a SHHH gesture.

Someday, fans would pay $100 just for a glimpse of his fabled SHHH, but at the moment it was just an annoyance. After fifteen seconds, Sun went to say her first line.

And Alberts' cel phone went off.

Stacy freaked. "Can't I have some PEACE AND QUIET!"

Deet raised the finger, and the cast listened and even Sun settled down and waited.

Alberts could be overheard discussing a stock called Amalgamated Beebees on the phone, maybe with his broker, maybe not. It got to the point where the cast was just waiting for Alberts to be quiet.

"Okay Faye! Ha ha ha! I know, Faye, I know! Awww- -- that's neat. All right, I'll talk to you later, Faye, bye bye!"

"Oh Al dear," said Stacy in a singsong voice,

"What's that, Stacy," said Al.

"You know, we love you like a brother, Al,"

"Yer breaking my heart here, Stace," said Al, playing the broken patchwork of an inside joke with Sun.

Half the jokes were elided.

"But would you please get your ass off of my set??!?" Alberts busted up, slapping his knees and all. He skee-daddled off the set, laughing.

"Okay, people," said Deet out of one side of his mouth as he fiddled with a couple of lenses.

"Let's everyone just count to ten, take your time, we gotta lot of scenes to go through before sunset so if you'll please just watch the birdie." He held up a finger, signifying SHHH.

He clacked the clacker.

Sun put on a methodically sad face.

"Oh sheriff Bob! Are you saying I have other things on my mind than protecting our citizens?"

"Now just hold on, Morgan," said Vigoda, playing Bob.

The hidden cat, played by voice actor Chris Xanthan, gave a high-pitched yip, right on cue.

"Meeeeow?"

There was a real kitten on the set, who appeared in the following scene but was currently off in a corner playing with the baby ducks. The real kitten heard Chris and gave a piercing series of cries in response.

"Meoww! Meow! Myoww!"

Vigoda cracked up. To him, it was all in a day's work to laugh good-naturedly through bloopers.

"It's what got me through ten seasons of Barney Miller and Fish," he once told Debbie Nixon, when she interviewed him for Rolling Stone.

Debbie had jotted a note in the margin: "Be sure to talk about shorn head!"

It was true Vigoda had a shorn head. Or was he just bald? Debbie briefly toyed with the idea of trying to interest her editor in a little sidebar about Vigoda's shorn head.

He'll never go for it, she thought. Err, he might, but I better just concentrate on getting my main story done! I can think about sidebars later, depending on how much time I have left over!

Debbie had learned over the course of her journalism experiences that there were three stages of writing on a deadline.

Number one was Shit, I'm not going to make it.

Number two, I will barely make it.

And number three, I'm going to make it, and have time left over to slip in something personal or cool.

She could think a lot better when editor Aubrey Bombarde - he went by the name "Jim" - wasn't lurching down her throat, which is why she dreaded the gurgling electronic fishies that suddenly signified her cel phone going off.

"Hello?" she said, feeling like she was on a roller coaster.

"Bombarde," said her editor, clipped and emotionless.

"Oh, hi Jim."

"Where's Vigoda?"

"He's right here."

"How much you got?"

"Fifty or sixty." Jim and Debbie both thought in terms of column inches, the common unit of measure for newspaper articles.

"Look, Debbie, we're holding the big city manager story another day, so I need 100 inches on Vigoda."

"A HUNNdred?"

"Yeah, yeah." Jim was from the south, the islands, San Francisco, Sloan City and Pacifica, all at the same time. He was a drunk.

"You know why the journalists all have square bottles of booze," he had once asked Debbie.

"Why's that, Jim?"

"So that when they kick it under their desk to get it out of sight, it won't roll away."

Debbie had also heard that the reason so many journalists were drunks is that they had to work all evening, and when they got out of work the only thing still open was the bar.

"There's some truth in that," said Debbie's mentor, Nora Bronsky. "But it's really just a big cop-out. Hell, at the Star, we used to just sneak in the library."

"Sneak in the library?" Debbie asked in disbelief.

"Sure," Nora said. "They usually leave their skylight open. It fogs up the windows too much otherwise. At least that's how they used to do it. A whole gaggle of us, fresh from writing about corrupt city managers, we'd go down to the library in our pickup truck, fire off a big crossbow bolt with a long, heavy rope attached. The bolt lands on the roof and it's heavy enough to stay put. Or it catches on something. Then we'd all rappel up the library walls, slip in the skylight and read our little hearts out until at least dawn."

Debbie thought to herself that you don't really rappel up things, but she kept quiet and asked instead, "What would you read?"

"Mm, 'Does a Bee Care?', for one. I remember reading 'Does A Bee Care?' by Asimov, there in the library after deadline. I don't know, I read a lot of science fiction. Delany. I read Dhalgren at the library after deadline.

"Chuck Main - he was our sports editor - and he read a lot of Louis L'Amour. Mostly I just wanted to read anything except the news. It was like escapism for us."

"Were you trying to escape from the bar scene?"

"Mm, not really. Some of us, we had alcoholism in our families so we were a little paranoid. But mostly we just wanted to read. You know, that's how I first got introduced to Ned. I read his book!"

Debbie gave a respectful whistle. And the whistle snapped her out of her daydream and back to the set where they were shooting She's The Sheriff.

She had actually just come in to get a document notarized, and to feed the ducks, but when she spied Abe Vigoda, she decided to hang back until the end of the scene and say hello.

She finished her respectful whistle and when she saw the twenty-five pairs of eyes looking at her, some amused, most angry, it dawned on her that she had interrupted shooting.

"Ummm ... sorry?" she asked.

"This ... is .... driving ... me ... nuts!" hollered Stacy. Momentarily, Debbie thought she saw an additional pair of eyes continuing to look right at her as the music of dreaming subsides and you bolt forward in stark water and the clock ticks and you say "Ummm ... sorry?"

From dreaming --- from a dream of falling down a hole, of shapeless fears and anxieties, she thought she saw a cartoon face on the poster of the eighties movie Electric Dreams, a digital face with pointed teeth, a long devil tail and a sinister expression, which was way too stylized and discrete to be real, but which she couldn't seem to shake off.

Sun looked her right in the eye. "Who are you!"

"I ... sorry, I saw Abe, I was just ... going to say hello ... I ..."

"If you're going to be on my set -- you stay quiet!" Debbie noticed Deet and Al, grinning like the cheshire cat. Stacy picked up on it.

"You!" she shouted at Deet. "You had something to do with this!"

Deet waited until Stacy was finished. He waited for silence, standing with a little smirk. Stacy got in close. She was in Deet's face, with burgeoning hostility, waiting for an answer.

"Roll. Roll film! Please!!" Deet said, almost breaking up with laughter. He clacked his clacker. He made a gesture, by putting his finger to his lips quick and ragged, signifying SHHH.

Stacy was livid but some internal drive kicked in. When the director rolls and asks you to act, you act.

Sun got right up against Vigoda's face instead of Deet's.

"Look here, you son of a bitch!" she said.

Deet looked at Alberts, who was raising his eyebrows in a smile-cringe.

"Are you trying to say I have other things on my mind than the safety of the citizens of Sloan City? Are you trying to say I have to pay money to get the legal right to display the image of a man who's been dead for over a century? You trying to say I'm a bad father? Is that it? You trying to say I don't know if I left my own office window closed? You trying to say I'm a fraud, like a charlatan? Is that it?"

Vigoda tried to jump on the improvisational train.

"But ... but Morgan ..."

"I'm not finished" Sun cried. "You calling me a hack? Cause I never been called a hack actress and I been acting a long goddamn time."

The veins on her neck were standing out and her eyes were almost bugging out of her head.

"You saying I don't know the meaning of the word 'slide'? I personally cannot believe my ears -- the you would have the ... the gall ... to stand here and suggest that I didn't see three people, viciously butchered ... when I saw it with my own eyes! You just tell me, which one of us gets stuck running to the store for beer? You're changing your name to what? You know? If you're SAYING, sheriff, that I've got something up my sleeve? Or that I'm ... concealing something from you --- well --- I'm sorry!"

Off a cliff of pregnant air flew everyone in the room for a good ten seconds before bursting into a standing ovation. The room exploded. Stacy collapsed in a heap. She looked miserable. Over the cheers and cries, Al thumped Deet on the back.

"You, kid, have a calling!"

Deet smiled confidently. "I think I got about eight seconds I can use for Sheriff," he said. "But what an eight seconds, eh?"

As Stacy's friends and co-workers scrambled around to help her, a corrugated metal box went unnoticed.

She's perfect right now, the box thought. This could be my in.