Quinn
The last time I had been this nervous was when… I had never been this nervous.
I had gone to school for journalism but had ended up focusing on print. I wasn’t a documentary maker, but I knew how to cut clips together. It was only about half an hour’s worth. That wasn’t hard. It wasn’t a Scorsese or Coppola job, but it wasn’t meant to be. It just had to look presentable. The video editing software had been crashing my computer the entire time I was trying to put the shit together, it better look presentable. It would be like the Blair Witch Project, but about Dante.
I couldn’t stand hearing the sound of my narration. I should have gotten someone else to do it. That was a thing, though. Wasn’t it? The sound of your own voice was always annoying to you? I tried to keep my eyes on the screen, or on the ground. Anywhere but on Dante. I watched the Dante on the screen.
He had been all I had been able to think about. The documentary had been all I had been able to think about—and since the doc was about him, he had remained close, too. Surprisingly, it was not until just now, as the documentary was beginning, that I really thought about what it was he would feel watching it. I wasn’t going to chance watching him. I had seen it beginning to end so many times, but it was different seeing it again now.
Now I was finally going to show it to other people. It wasn’t going to be a piece that belonged to me anymore. Now it was for whoever was watching. It was for Dante.
There was tons of footage of Dante all over the Internet. I didn’t have to look far to get shots of him on the court, showing us all why he had been MVP for his team so many times. Everyone had seen that before. It wasn’t anything to see Dante play because everyone had seen Dante play.
Pamela Rock, Dante’s mother was the one with the real juice. Juice, in this case, being home videos. She might have lived in a million dollar house in Calabasas, but she still had a VCR—and she had given me boxes and boxes of home videos and told me to knock myself out. She said I could use any of the footage that I wanted, as long as I didn’t damage the original tapes. When I told her I was doing a documentary tribute for her son, she was all for it.
David, the guy in IT who I had asked to help me digitize some of the footage had laughed at me for about an hour before he finally did it. Dante, as it turned out was adorable as a kid. He was very small until puberty when he had shot up like two feet. I had the footage of him as a kid spliced in with footage of him now as a professional basketball player. I used some of the audio from our recorded interviews in with it. I even used the footage of him that I had taken, the footage where he was on the courts, or in the locker room, and the clip that had gotten me into trouble with him in the first place. The short clip of barely twenty seconds of him asleep in his bed in his home.
I wanted the whole story.
That meant going to the scene of the crime.
Dante hadn’t been kidding when he had said that the place he had grown up, Cavett, was in the middle of nowhere. I’d had to drive there using a rental from one of the larger surrounding towns and nearly missed it. You would if you blinked too long. Pamela had given me their old address. The house, there didn’t seem to be anyone living there anymore, was still standing.
There were a few people who remembered him from when he was a boy and who had agreed to interviews, including a woman who claimed to be his ex-girlfriend from middle school. They talked about him like they were proud just to have known who he was before he got famous.
All that, the travel and interviews in Ohio, had been the easy part. Showing the Dante Rock timeline became tricky because of what had been happening recently. The things I found out were even surprising to me. I had managed, after nearly begging to get the heads of various women's shelters around LA, to reveal Dante’s donation history. I had thought the million on the spot during the Inside the League interview had been a lot.
Nope.
The amounts that he had been donating since the beginning of his career came to close to two and a half million. He regularly funded drives to purchase women’s sanitary and health products for the shelters because homeless women and women in transitional housing had different needs than men. The thing was he had never ever done it in his own name. He had done it in his mother’s name every time.
I wanted to end with the thing that was most controversial. That, of course, was all the shit that had happened with Grace Whitley. Getting an interview with her had been exceedingly hard. I inserted audio from the phone conversation I’d had with her and then revealing the truth about her. You learned a lot when you did the right digging. Her real name wasn’t even Grace Whitley. It changed depending on where she went and who she was talking to.
As it turned out, she was a con woman. She used the fallacious claims that men in high places, athletes mostly, had assaulted her in order to secure large payouts from them. Dante had been a hard egg to crack and had basically given her a run for her money. She was intending on most likely coming after him again.
She wouldn’t be now.
It ended and the credits rolled.
I exhaled. It was over. I had watched the finished program over and over so many times while I was editing it down, but this was the first time that someone else besides Pamela had seen it. I spotted at least ten things that I wished I had changed for the final cut, but it was too late now. I didn’t want to look over at Dante, but right then I couldn’t resist. I looked. He was still watching the screen. His face was hard, but it was completely still. His eyes didn’t give away anything about what he was feeling.
He looked over at me, and it took everything I had not to look away. I had been wishing that he would look at me with something other than frigid indifference, and well, he was. He was looking at me with something. I didn’t know what. I didn’t know what to do because he wasn’t doing anything. Did he like it?
If he didn’t, that didn’t matter because he hated me already. He wasn’t really the person I was trying to impress, but his approval would have meant the world. I never wanted to misrepresent him, and a lot of what was in the film were things that nobody knew about him but himself, his mother, and me.
It was the Dante behind closed doors. It was the man who he didn’t let everyone see—and I had just shown everybody. The crowd was applauding.
I panicked when I saw him start walking. He started moving towards me, slowly, his eyes locked onto mine. My breathing slowed, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say when he got to me.
He stopped in front of me. I licked my lips and looked up at him.
“Dante—”
“Was it your idea?” he asked.
“I wanted something visual to accompany the stories,” I said meekly. God. That sounded so bad. It sounded like I just made the doc for my own career.
“Is that why you wanted that footage of me?”
“I had wanted it for me. I thought you looked peaceful. Putting it together… I wanted everyone to see it. Just a little bit of the man I know you are,” I said. He smiled down at me, leaning down to kiss me. He held me to him, pressing my body into his. The applause from the crowd was deafening. I mean, it must have been because I barely heard it. All I could feel was Dante. I felt the warmth and affection I had lacked from him for so long. He broke the kiss and pressed another to my forehead.
“Dante, did you know what was happening? Did you see this before we did?” a man asked. I didn’t even know who he was, a reporter or something. Dante ignored his question and wrapped his arms around me.
I heard shouts of “Who is she? Who is she?” from various people. Dante released me and took one of the mics that was being held out to him.
“She’s my girlfriend,” he said. “I love her.”