Refilling the Well
Damian
“You’re losing it,” Danna says as I pour my fourth glass of milk.
I know I’m not the first adult who tries to find comfort at the bottom of a homemade chocolate milk glass, but that particular escape can be somewhat hard to hide.
“You didn’t see them,” I tell her. “They honestly couldn’t give a shit that I was in the room. Even the woman I talked to that recognized me just called me ‘that actor guy’ and did everything she could to pry herself out of our conversation.”
“The problem,” Danna says, “is that you’re just a great big pussy.”
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“I know that’s not the answer you were looking for,” she says, “but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
Danna’s been staying with me for the last six months. She’s been getting run down a lot lately, but with her here, at least I can try to get her to slow down.
When I told Emma that family’s important, I meant it.
If there’s one way in which I’m boringly normal, it’s my attachment to my twin.
“You know,” I tell her, “keep talking to me like that and I’m going to have to ask you to start pitching in around here.”
“What are you talking about?” Danna asks. “I’m the only one that ever does shit around here. You just pop by every once in a while to check your bank account and make life difficult for me. If anything, you should start pitching in around here.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” I tell her, “but this is my house.”
“Whatever,” she says. “Look, people are not going to be interested in you every moment of every day you’re an actor. This sort of thing ebbs and flows. After your movie comes out, I bet that you’re going to be swamped with people trying to get close to you. We both knew that taking that extra time between movies was going to make things dip for a little while, but you’re already filming. You just need to get over it. I’ll make a couple of calls and get you set up with a couple of feel-good gigs to get you back in the public eye, since it’s so fucking crucial for you to feel that salty stare moving over your body at all times. Maybe you can christen a boat or something.”
Danna, apart from being my sister, is also my agent.
“I’m telling you, Danna,” I answer, “this wasn’t just ‘we haven’t seen you in a while,’ this was ‘oh hey, you’re that guy who used to be famous.’ I really think my career’s on its way down.”
“Oh, we’re years from that,” Danna says. “With my skills, I should have you working well into your late 30s, possibly your 40s.”
“Thanks,” I tell her. “You’re really giving me a long career to look forward to.”
“Well, I hear that a lot of women go through menopause in their 40s, and I think it wouldn’t be fair to you to make you work during the big change,” she says.
“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to process when a woman calls a man a woman?” I ask. “You’re using your own gender as something derogatory.”
“Don’t care,” Danna says. “What you need to do is quit being scared of every little thing. This is going to be Emma Roxy’s breakout movie, and I know how you pout when you’re not the big dick on campus—”
“Seriously?” I interrupt.
“Don’t worry about that, though,” she says. “You should be able to ride her coattails all the way to your next film.”
“You’re not helping,” I tell her.
“I didn’t think I was,” she says. “I was just trying to get through your little bitch session so we could get back to more important things.”
“You’re my agent,” I tell her. “What am I supposed to do?”
She says, “If it was something we could do anything about—even if it was something we couldn’t change, but was an actual problem—I would jump right in and cheer you up, but you’re throwing a fit because people who were at a TV station for someone other than you didn’t immediately drop their drawers when you came into the room. I’m just trying to decide whether it’s more annoying or more pathetic.”
As twins, Danna and I have always been close, but we’ve never been the ones that make up their own language or wash each other’s hair or anything like that.
For all intents and purposes, Danna is just another sibling trying to tell me how to run my career.
Okay, she’s also my agent, and thus actually has the right and responsibility to do that, but still, it gets frustrating.
“I’m going to go grab the mail,” she says. “You stay in here and think of ways to hide the fact that you’ve got a big vagina or turn it into a promotional thing.”
She leaves the room, and I’m just irritated.
I got Nick the autographs, but the confusion and hesitantly uttered thank you hardly brightened my mood at all.
I can see the end coming, but I don’t know when or how it’s going to happen.
There was never any misconception on my part that I’d end up one of those lifelong actors who’s doing their thing on the screen until they’re dead. No, unless I die in the next few years, I’m going to live a good portion of the rest of my life as an ex-celebrity.
I just don’t have the drive anymore for things to end any other way.
Even knowing that, though, doesn’t make that downward tilt any easier to accept.
“Damian?” Danna calls as she opens the front door.
“What?” I call back.
“You need to see this and I need to call the police,” she says.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, and make my way into the other room to meet her.
She’s standing in the doorway, holding a letter, her eyes moving back and forth as she reads over it.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s not good,” she says.
“Let me see it,” I tell her, and she hands it over to me.
She’s pulling her phone out of her pocket and walking into the other room as I read over the first words of the letter.
“Dami,” the letter starts, “I know that you’ve never seen me, but I’ve been watching you for so long now. I know you in ways that I don’t even know myself. So much of my life, I’ve wanted to write this letter, to tell you how much I love you now and how much I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you on Kids’ Quests. You’ve turned into quite a handsome man and a remarkable actor. I think it’s time that you know who I am, because one day, I know that you’re going to be asking me to be your wife.
Yours always and forever,
Rita”
“What?” I ask. “It’s a love letter. I get those all the time.”
“You used to get them all the time,” Danna says, “but this isn’t a love letter. This is the first stage of a manifesto.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask. “She came on pretty strong, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yeah, this is a little more than coming on a bit strong,” Danna says. “You didn’t see the package outside.”
“There’s a package?” I ask.
“That’s the only thing I know to call it,” Danna says, and then presses the phone harder against her ear. “Yeah, I’m at 28153 South Willow Banks with Damian Jones and he just received a threat.”
“Oh, it’s not a threat,” I tell her.
She mouthes the words, “Look outside,” and then turns and walks deeper into the house.
The letter was a bit creepy, but not everyone knows how to best put their thoughts and feelings down on paper. Rita, whoever she is, probably just got so nervous writing me that she forgot to leave out the crazy in the letter.
It happens all the time.
I’d rather have it be an adoring fan who just isn’t that great with words than a psycho for obvious reasons, but I’m not going to deny the ego boost I’m really hoping to hold onto here.
I’ve got a lot of justifications running through my head until I walk out the front door and see what Danna was talking about.
Sitting just outside my front door is a black garbage bag full of something I can’t see, though the top is open. Around the bottom of the bag is a dark red liquid that I’m really hoping isn’t what it so very clearly is.
I take a few steps toward the bag and almost choke from the stench.
Whatever’s in the bag, it’s dead.
That’s not the most comforting thought as I move forward and nudge one side of the bag over to expose the contents inside.
* * *
“No,” I tell the officer, “I don’t know anyone named Rita. When are you going to be able to tell me what’s in the bag?”
“We’ve got to run some tests,” the officer says dismissively. “Have you recently made enemies with anyone?”
“No more than usual,” I tell him.
“What does that mean?” he asks.
“Just bad reviews in the press,” I tell him. “Nothing I’d really worry about.”
“Were any of them threatening, violent?” the officer asks.
“Nothing like that,” I tell him.
There was one op-ed that called for my crucifixion because, in my last movie, my character wore a hat with a star on it the writer of the piece apparently mistook for a symbol of Baphomet, and she thought that I was trying to send a secret message that children should start worshipping Satan.
One of the many gripes I have with the whole “hidden messages” conspiracy nonsense is where exactly do these people think kids learn these secret codes it would take to interpret the messages they’re accusing me of hiding in my performances?
If I’m wearing a star on my hat, hell, it could be a hat sporting the goat’s head in the middle of the inverted pentagram with the Hebrew letters for Leviathan around the edges and I’m willing to bet you a million dollars that not one single kid would see that and think it’s time to take up Satanism.
How many kids did they really think were playing Judas Priest albums backward to look for secret commands, and even if they put the words “do it” backward in a song, just how the fuck would kids know what it was they were supposed to do?
Idiots!
Sorry. It’s a pet peeve of mine.
Anyway, I’m not worried that the woman that wrote the article is plotting to kill me or even go any farther than she did in the article.
“All right,” the officer questioning me says, “well, I’ll give you over to Detective Tompkins here. He’s got a few more questions for you.”
I answer everything the man asks, but there’s nothing I can really give him to point him in the right direction.
You know, as I think about it, being stalked, especially by someone who’s this willing to get right in there close—I mean, she got past my gate with a bag full of what looked like chopped up meat, after all—is kind of its own form of adulation.
“Sir?” the detective asks.
“Yeah,” I answer, shaking myself out of my thoughts.
“Was it you that found the bag or did someone else find it?” the detective asks.
“My sister,” I tell him, “Danna. She’s the one that found it.”
“All right,” he says. “We’ll give you a call when we find out more. Until then,” he reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a business card, “give me a call if you can think of anything else that might be relevant or if you receive anything else from this individual.”
I take the card and say, “Thank you. By the way,” I add. “Nobody calls me Dami. I mean absolutely nobody I know has ever called me that.”
“We’ll keep you posted,” the detective nods, and walks away.
Danna’s on the other side of the driveway, talking to another cop when the detective walks up to her, and I’m starting to think I’ve jumped ship and lost my mind: I actually find it kind of flattering that I have a stalker.
I’ve really got to start dating again.