Candy Everybody Wants. Josh Kilmer-Purcell
a break…IN THE LAKE! (J.B. pushes Tara PATRICIA off the dock into the lake.)
AMETHYST CARRINGTON: Sayonara, bitch!
J.B. WRAPS HIS STRONG ARMS AROUND AMETHYST
CARRINGTON AND PULLS HIM HER AGAINST HIS HAIRY CHEST.
J.B.: I have wanted to do this ever since we got our last divorce.
J.B. KISSES AMETHYST CARRINGTON.
* Scene *
‘Do we have to kiss all the way?’ Trey asked Jayson, dangling his legs in the unseasonably cool lake while reading over Jayson’s script. The float diving dock bobbed lazily with each kick of Trey’s legs.
Jayson pulled at the top half of his mother’s Pucci knock-off bathing suit. Up until an hour ago it’d been a one-piece, but he’d had to cut it into two pieces in order to transform it into the ‘revealing string bikini’ called for in the script that he wrote earlier that afternoon.
His left water balloon tit had sprung a slow leak.
There was no time to waste on script revisions. They needed to begin shooting the scene now. The sun was going down and his boob was deflating at an alarming pace.
Jayson didn’t feel up to an extended debate with Trey on the mechanics of the scene. It had been a long shoot day, and he was getting tired. And mosquito-bitten. But he also didn’t want to risk pissing Trey off. With only himself and his neighbors–the twins Trey and Tara–playing all the roles, cast morale was of utmost importance.
Trey was always, historically, exceedingly patient with Jayson’s summer vacation ‘projects,’ but Dallasty!, was by far Jayson’s biggest and most complicated effort to date. A spinoff series that combined the families of the two most highly rated nighttime television dramas ever–Dallas and Dynasty. The networks loved spin-offs. And this was a spin-off squared. He and the twins had already filmed twelve of the thirteen episodes Jayson planned on sending ‘on spec’ to Lorimar Pictures c/o CBS Entertainment Networks. The scene they were about to film was the opening of the cliffhanger final episode of the season. If they could wrap up filming the entire episode this week, he could mail them all off to Lorimar, sign whatever contracts they came back with, and have Dallasty! on air as a mid-season replacement. If all went as planned, Jayson would begin his first year of high school as a celebrity–thus breaking the inexplicable curse of unpopularity he’d endured throughout middle school.
‘Let’s discuss this important scene,’ Jayson began calmly, putting his hand on Trey’s shoulder. The most important job of a director (according to what he’d read in a People Magazine profile of Steven Spielberg) was to keep the ‘talent’ relaxed and focused on their performance. ‘We’ve established that it’s a very dramatic moment with the cornfield a-blazing out at the ranch,’ Jayson explained gesturing across the water toward his fictional Ewing-Carrington Dairy Farm. ‘And all great TV shows mix romance with drama–Rockford Files. As the World Turns. The A-Team.’
Trey was silent.
‘Maybe I could just hug you instead,’ Trey asked.
Jayson set his jaw, stiffening his resolve to keep calm.
‘This isn’t a kids show we’re making,’ Jayson said through clenched teeth. He’d already been forced to rewrite the ending of the previous episode when Tara refused to ignite the gasoline that had been poured all over the pedal boat. It had been a long summer’s work. The cast was getting short tempered.
‘How about if Willie shoots it from behind so it looks like we’re kissing, but you can’t tell?’ Trey asked, grasping at straws.
‘Willie simply doesn’t have the cinematographical expertise to film such a complicated shot,’ Jayson explained. This was true. Willie, Jayson’s younger brother by two years, was retarded. And not ‘retarded’ in the eighth grade name-calling way. He was retarded retarded. Willie had Prader-Willi syndrome. Which meant that he was born with a defect in the hypothalamus part of his brain which resulted in a chronic feeling of being hungry. Starving, actually. Twenty-four hours a day. Willie’s ceaseless grazing, coupled with cognitive retardation and low overall muscle tone, gave Willie an appearance that many people confused with Down syndrome.
Willie’s Prader-Willi diagnosis wasn’t confirmed until a year after his birth. Their mother briefly considered changing William’s name to something slightly less similar to the name of his affliction, but in the end decided that it was charming in an odd way. ‘MY NAME IS WILLIE PRADER AND I HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THE HIPPOPOTAMUS IN MY HEAD!!!’ Willie had a habit of shouting this at complete strangers in the supermarket. ‘Don’t we all?’ Jayson’s mom would shrug before taking advantage of the resulting confusion to cut to the front of the checkout line.
‘It just seems really gay,’ Trey finally concluded.
Tara began giggling behind them. ‘Gay,’ she muttered under her breath. She was sitting on the opposite side of the floating dock with Willie, biting the toenails on her left foot.
‘Gay?’ Jayson repeated.
‘GAY!!!’ Willie added, eager to take part in whatever this repetition game was.
‘I would hope,’ Jayson began, trying to hold back his anger, ‘that you are not making a derogatory judgment on my sexual preference.’
Jayson had decided that he was homosexual while watching a Phil Donahue episode on the topic eight years earlier. He’d come home early from kindergarten that day because he’d gotten a stomach ache from worrying about whether his Hee Haw overalls were too outré for his peers. Jayson had been sent home from school fairly often over the years, including the first day of kindergarten when he’d become inconsolably agitated that the school wouldn’t change their spelling of his name from ‘Jason’ to ‘Jayson.’ He felt very strongly that he needed the extra flair to set himself apart from the other, obviously less special Jasons in the class.
The mustachioed men on the stage of the Donahue program fascinated Jayson. He wasn’t sure exactly why he felt such a kinship with them. Maybe it was how they deflected the barbs of angry audience members with jokes. Or maybe it was their outfits–no piece of which could be found in the Sears catalogs that Jayson was forced to shop from. Or maybe it was just that they were celebrities–put on stage in front of an audience–for no reason other than the fact that they existed. In the deepest corners of his soul, Jayson also knew that he deserved an audience. And it would be his lifetime mission to find one.
When the credits began rolling on that defining Donahue episode, the five-year-old Jayson had breathlessly shouted his revelation to his mother, Toni, who was out smoking on the back deck.
Ma! I’m a homosexual!
And precocious! Toni shouted back, smiling at him through the sliding glass door. I’m a precocious homosexual!!! Yes, you are, Butter Bean. Yes you are.
The many men who had played the role of Jayson’s stepfather during the last decade generally hadn’t been as accommodating about Jayson’s self-discovery. So Jayson agreed to a pact with Toni to keep this news on a need-to-know basis. She’d patiently explained to Jayson how others’ jealousy of his uniqueness might sometimes, perhaps, manifest itself as anger. And/or punching, spitting, and murder.
As a result of this conspiracy, Jayson could count on his fingers how many people had been informed of what Donahue called his ‘sexual preference.’ There was his mother, the twins’ parents, Willie, Phil Donahue himself (via an eloquent eight-page thank-you note), his elementary school principal, his middle school principal, a trucker he talked to once on a CB radio, the woman behind the pie counter at Pick N’ Save, and, of course, Trey and Tara. Jayson and the twins knew almost everything about each other, being born within a few months of each other, and having spent their entire lives divided only by a fifteen-foot-wide strip of driveway. At the urging of both sets of parents, the twins and Jayson