Legs

by Steve Gergley

On the set of What Ever Happened to Wendy Miller?!, during the production of episode three of season four, Ken sat in a corner booth of a fake coffee shop and pantomimed a silent conversation with a guy he’d never met. Wearing a red plaid button-up and stonewashed blue jeans, the guy stared at Ken with fervid concentration and flapped his lips as if repeating the words WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW over and over. Gleaming strings of sweat nosed down the guy’s forehead. Needles of bronze hair clung to his moist temples. His fists squeezed into blocky stones and pressed against the table. Between takes Ken leaned in and tried to tell the guy to relax his face and to nod and smile as if they were having a real conversation, but the guy glared down at his hands and shook his head.

“No, no, no. That’s not right,” the guy said to himself in a hissing whisper. “That’s not how the professionals do things around here.”

For the next thirty minutes Ken kept quiet and tried to ignore the guy. During each take, Ken nodded, smiled, and stared at the point of the guy’s stubble-dusted chin. He raised his empty coffee mug to his mouth and pretended to take a drink. He glanced at the table to his right and silently begged his friend Darrell to shoot him in the head.

***

A few hours later, once shooting had wrapped for the day, Ken and Darrell went out for drinks with their friend Pete. The three men had moved to L.A. from different parts of the country four years ago, and after running into each other so many times while working as extras on commercials and sitcoms, they eventually became close friends.

At the bar, the three men slipped into a booth and ordered some drinks: a screwdriver for Ken, a whiskey sour for Pete, and a single malt scotch for Darrell.

Moments after the waitress walked away, Darrell looked at Ken.

“We have to be at the site by seven forty-five tomorrow morning,” Darrell said.

“I’m aware,” Ken said. “I’m the one who made the sale. Before I talked to her, she thought putting solar panels on her roof would be an intergalactic homing beacon to lizard aliens.”

“I hate my agent,” Pete said, melting into the scrunching vinyl of the booth. “I’m ninety-seven percent positive she actively wants me killed.”

“Just making sure you remember what day it is,” Darrell said to Ken.

“I know what day it is,” Ken said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m not going to call out because of one drink. I’ll pick you up at the normal time. I just had a day. I need this.”

“I need a bullet-proof vest,” Pete said, scratching furiously at the top of his head. “But that wouldn’t help anyway. In that case she’d just hire someone to poison me in my sleep and stuff a bottle of pills in my hand to make it look like a suicide. And then, when the cops find me lying dead on the floor of my bathroom, they’ll laugh at me for dying in my spotless bullet-proof vest.”

“Don’t call out,” Darrell said to Ken.

“I won’t,” Ken said. “I just—”

“Don’t,” Darrell said, unlocking the screen of his phone.

“Alright, fine, Jesus,” Ken said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I won’t call out.”

“Good,” Darrell said.

“You know, back when I first signed with my agent, she told me she’d been doing this for more than twenty-nine years,” Pete said, darting his gaze back and forth between Ken and Darrell. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I now know that those are the most ominous words ever spoken in the history of mankind. Because think about it. How many other actors do you think she has killed over the years? How many fools like me have died penniless and alone in an alleyway because of her? It has to be in the hundreds by now.”

“She’s not trying to kill you,” Darrell said, looking up from his phone and winking at a waitress on the other side of the room. “You don’t make her any money, so she doesn’t care about you. Until you get the leg-lengthening procedure I told you about, you’re never going to book a speaking role. And stop scratching your head like that. It’s going to create a bald spot.”

“Oh God,” Pete said, holding his face in his hands and resting his head on the table. “Of course it would come back to this. All the suffering in my life always comes back to this.”

“It’s not that bad,” Ken said, patting Pete on the shoulder. “You’ve got great screen presence. And your face is very expressive. It’s authentic.”

“Yeah, authentically tiny,” Pete said, shrugging Ken’s hand away.

“Sorry, man,” Darrell said, “but that’s science. It’s programmed into the human brain at birth. It’s just not possible for any real person to believe that a sixty-five inch man could save the world. Or be of any value to society at all for that matter.”

“So instead of wanting me killed, God just wants to torture me for the rest of my pathetic life,” Pete said, his voice muffled behind his hands.

“That’s why you need the procedure,” Darrell said, putting down his phone and stretching his long, basketball-player’s arms across the table.

Pete sat up and looked at Darrell. Smears of red flesh ringed his watery eyes.

“Can you lend me a hundred grand?” Pete said.

“What about Tom Cruise?” Ken said, glancing up at the Lakers game playing on the flat screen hanging in the corner of the room. “Isn’t he only five-six or something like that?”

“Tom Cruise doesn’t count,” Darrell said.

“Hello! Am I deaf and invisible? I’m experiencing a major crisis right now,” Pete said, smacking his palms against the table.

“You’re not deaf,” Darrell said, looking at something over Ken’s right shoulder. “And no, I’m not giving you a hundred grand. Just get it from your parents.”

“I haven’t talked to them in two years,” Pete said. “And there’s no way they’d lend me a hundred grand to get taller. My mom is four-ten and my dad is five-four. They already think I’m a giant.”

“Tom Cruise is five-six,” Ken said, staring down at his phone. “I just looked it up. Google says he’s five-eight, so he’s five-six at most.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t count,” Darrell said.

“My mother is four feet, ten inches tall,” Pete said. “Just think about that for a minute.”

“Why doesn’t Tom Cruise count?” Ken said, trying to distract himself from his shitty day and his shitty life and his shitty career by googling the heights of Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, and Leo DiCaprio.

“Because of Scientology,” Darrell said. “That negates everything.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Ken said, half-listening.

“I’m reading an article right now about a guy who got the procedure,” Pete said, staring at his lap. The sharp white glow of his phone illuminated his tomato-colored face. “He’s an actor too. He says it was the most painful thing he’s ever experienced. The doctors broke his legs above the knee and inserted steel rods with special magnets inside. The magnets extended the rods one millimeter per day while the bones grew back and filled in the empty space. After that he had to do six months of rest and rehab to relearn how to walk. And it was a full year before he could move normally and play sports and get the rods removed. But at the end of the article he says it was the best thing he’s ever done in his life. He says he doesn’t regret it for a second.”

“Where are our drinks?” Ken said, looking around the room.

“How tall is he now?” Darrell said to Pete.

“He’s five-eight now. He was five-five before the procedure,” Pete said, showing Darrell a picture of the guy from the article.

“And what procedure is that?” a man said from behind.

Swiveling around in his seat, Ken looked up and saw his scene partner from earlier in the day, the guy in the red plaid button-up and stonewashed jeans. The guy held a pitcher of beer in one hand and four empty glasses in the other.

“Your drinks, gentlemen,” the guy said, grinning down at Ken.

“Those aren’t our drinks,” Pete said.

“Oh, hey, how’s it going?” Ken said, forcing a phony smile onto his face. For the next seven seconds Ken tried very hard to climb inside the mindspace of a character who would somehow be happy to randomly run into this guy again. To do this, Ken made up a fictional backstory of this guy being his former college roommate. In the imaginary backstory, Ken and the guy had had a number of wild experiences together during college, but shortly after graduation, they lost touch with each other because the guy enlisted in the army and Ken married into a strict, fundamentalist Christian family that seriously frowned upon the hedonism and freedom he had so enjoyed in college.

To Ken’s surprise, this backstory seemed to work. His tense body relaxed, and his tight, anxious expression softened into a genuine smile of friendship. But before Ken could say another word to the guy, Pete waved his hand above his head.

“Hey! Did you hear me? I specifically told your waitress I wanted a whiskey sour.”

“And I’ll have your best single malt scotch with a splash of water,” Darrell said, staring at his phone and tapping his thumbs against the screen.

The guy plunked the four glasses on the table and started filling them with beer.

“Excellent choices all, gentlemen, but I canceled those orders,” the guy said, continuing to pour the beer each time he switched to a new glass. By the time he put down the pitcher and slipped into the booth beside Ken, a shallow puddle of pale gold liquid quivered in the center of the table. “A close friend of my father owns this bar, and he lets me and my friends drink here for free.”

Darrell winced at his froth-stitched glass.

“Then why did you cancel our orders? Why couldn’t you—”

“It’s only light beer,” the guy said. “Me and my friends can drink as much as we want for free, but it has to be light beer. That’s the deal.”

“That’s a horrendous deal,” Pete said, shaking his head. Moments later he picked up his glass and gulped down the entire thing in ten seconds. “It’s nothing but empty calories.”

Ken ignored Pete and tried to keep up the exercise of pretending this weird guy was a cherished friend from the past. Since he’d be scrabbling around on random people’s roofs, installing solar panels with Darrell for the next week, right now was his only chance to get in some acting practice.

So Ken picked up his beer, saluted the guy, and took a long drink. It was very cold, and surprisingly, pretty good.

“Well, I’m thankful,” Ken said, smacking his lips and returning his glass to the wet wood.

“I aim to please,” the guy said. After taking a tiny sip of his own beer, the guy pointed at Ken. “Now I already know that you, Kenneth, are a fellow practitioner of the emotive arts.”

“His name’s not Kenneth,” Pete said, pouring himself a second glass of beer.

“And I know that you, sir, are also an actor,” the guy said, pointing at Darrell. “I saw you on set these past three days.”

“Mmm,” Darrell said, staring at his phone and frowning.

“But what about you, friend?” The guy said, shifting his gaze to Pete. “Are you also a practitioner of the emotive arts?”

Pete drank half of his second beer and squinted at the guy in confusion.

“What’s the emotional arts?” Pete said.

“He’s asking if you’re an actor,” Darrell said, without looking up from his phone.

Pete slid backward into the creaking vinyl and scoffed.

“Me?” Pete said, with bitter sarcasm and self-pity. “No way. I’m nothing. I’m a reeking mound of ground beef. I’m an incorporeal being. I’m a speck of cow dung stuck to the toe pad of a three-legged cat. You shouldn’t even be here right now. You’ll probably be killed just for talking to me.”

The guy in the red plaid button-up watched Pete for a long time.

“I see,” the guy said, with a slow nod. “And what is your name, sir?”

Pete gulped down the remainder of his second beer and let out a small burp.

“Eh, what the hell. It’s not like I’m going to live long enough to ever see you again after today,” he said, leaning forward and reaching across the table for a handshake. “I’m Pete. Not Peter or anything else, just Pete. And don’t even think about asking me for my last name. I don’t give that information to anyone. Not even my ex-wife.”

The guy stared into Pete’s eyes and gripped his hand.

“I’m Eugene,” the guy said, “and you, sir, are an inspiration.”

“I am?” Pete said, sliding to the end of his seat and sitting up straight. His lips sliced into a confused, hopeful grin.

“He is?” Ken said, feeling a sudden, unexpected sting of jealousy.

“Indeed. In all my years, I’ve never met anyone who possesses such a powerful line of communication with the primordial human emotions that fuel us all. Now tell me,” Eugene said, releasing Pete’s hand and resting his forearms on the wet table, “what was the precise moment you realized you were an actor?”

“Oh wow, I . . . hmm,” Pete said, scratching his right cheekbone with his left thumb. “Well, as a kid, I was obsessed with puddles because I thought that if I jumped into the right puddle with enough force, I would break through the pavement and fall into an alternate universe where I could lift weights with Arnold Schwarzenegger and become strong enough to fight off my dad the next time he got too drunk and tried to beat up my mom. You see, my mom is only four feet, ten inches tall, so legally, she’s very short. My dad is short as well, but he’s still taller than her, so that led to him taking out all his height-related anger on the only person in his life who was even shorter and weaker than him. He’s been sober almost twenty years now so things are better, but he’s still an asswipe. Despite all this, my mom stayed with him the entire time. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the money. My dad owns eleven barbeque sauce production plants, so there’s that. But I haven’t spoken to either of my parents in over two years, so maybe things have changed. I try not to think about it too often.”

“Jesus Christ, man,” Darrell said, looking up from his phone and turning to Pete. “How come you never told us that?”

Pete cocked his head to the side and stared at Darrell.

“What are you talking about?” he said, with a laugh. “I’ve told you guys that story ninety-one thousand times.”

Ken studied Pete’s face and then glanced at Eugene. Fat tears crawled down Eugene’s cheeks. He stared at Pete in awe and admiration. He whispered to himself very softly.

“Yes, that’s it,” Eugene said, nodding. “The pain is where it comes from.”

***

Three days later, while sitting in the driver’s seat of his work truck and munching on the bitter spinach leaves of his dressing-free lunch salad, Ken received an email on his phone. But since he didn’t want to dirty up his hands by touching his filthy phone in the middle of his meal, he ignored the email.

A few minutes later Darrell jogged up to Ken’s truck and stuck his hand through the open window.

“Can you believe this shit?” Darrell said, holding up his phone.

Ken squinted at the four paragraphs of tiny text on Darrell’s phone and then back at Darrell.

“What happened?”

“This,” Darrell said, shaking his phone. “Didn’t you get Pete’s email?”

“I got an email,” Ken said, gently pushing Darrell’s arm out of the window and raising the glass. He snapped the lid onto his half-eaten salad and climbed out of his truck. “What does it say? Is he okay?”

“He flew out to some special clinic in Miami to get the leg-lengthening procedure,” Darrell said, staring down at his phone. “He’s there now. They’re doing the procedure tomorrow morning.”

“Wow,” Ken said. He clicked his tongue and shaded his eyes from the searing glare of the mid-April sun. For the second time in four days, he felt a strange, inexplicable stab of jealousy. “So he finally caved and asked his parents for the money?”

“That’s the craziest part of the whole thing,” Darrell said. “According to the email, that weird guy we met at the bar last week paid for it. Straight up. In cash.”

“Jesus,” Ken said, slipping his phone from his pocket and skimming the email. All of a sudden he felt very fat and ugly and untalented. But these fears faded when he realized their lunch break had ended ten minutes ago. If they wanted to finish this job today, his crew needed to get back to work ASAP. So he slid his phone into his pocket and walked to the back of his truck. Just before he got there, he stopped and squinted at Darrell. “Why the hell did he have to fly all the way out to Miami for the procedure?”

***

Later that night, Ken sat down at his computer and read Pete’s email in full. In the first few sentences, Pete said that he had stumbled upon the opportunity of a lifetime, and that he couldn’t pass up the chance to take both his life, and his career, to the next level.

The second paragraph of the email heaped huge amounts of praise upon a doctor named Howard Oliver. The third paragraph introduced Eugene, who in the past three days had become Pete’s new agent and professional manager. In the next paragraph, Pete outlined Eugene’s life-changing offer to pay for both the total cost of the leg-lengthening procedure, and the six months of rehab to follow directly after. Then, at the end of the email, Pete signed off with a brand-new stage name: Peter Ridley.

Once finished with the email, Ken opened a new tab on his internet browser. A quick Google search of Dr. Howard Oliver revealed that the man owned and operated a Miami-based clinic specializing in cutting-edge cosmetic procedures such as buccal fat removal, chin implants, Brazilian butt lifts, and limb-lengthening surgeries. A few more clicks of the mouse and Ken discovered that Dr. Howard Oliver had a thirty-eight year-old son named Eugene Stone who resided in Los Angeles, California.

Absorbing all this, Ken slumped back in his creaking computer chair and chuckled to himself. Same old Pete. Always trying to change his life without doing any of the hard work that might advance his career. But after reading the email a second time, Ken felt that strange mix of jealousy and concern yet again. Because what if Eugene and his father were just stringing Pete along to gain access to his family’s barbeque sauce fortune? What if they were simply using him as a guinea pig to test a dangerous new version of one of their weird-ass plastic surgeries? What if they were planning on using him as a proof-of-concept for their clinic, in order to attract richer, more high profile clients in the future?

With these thoughts in mind, Ken grabbed his phone off the desk and called Pete. Three rings later, an unfamiliar voice answered.

“Kenneth, hello,” the strange voice said. “How nice of you to phone.”

“Who’s this? Where’s Pete?” Ken said, checking the screen of his phone to make sure he hadn’t called the wrong contact by accident. He hadn’t.

“This is Eugene Stone, but I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake. Nobody by the name of Pete is associated with this number.”

“What are you talking about? I just checked, and this is his—” Ken said, squeezing his phone in anger. Moments later he remembered the new stage name Pete had used at the bottom of his email. “Oh for Christ’s sake—I’m calling for Peter. Can I please speak to Peter . . . ” Ken spun around and tabbed back to Pete’s email. “Ridley? It’s very important. Just put him on, please.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Eugene said, chuckling. “And what business do you have with my client?”

Ken looked up at the popcorn ceiling of his shitty apartment and shook his head in exasperation.

“I have to talk to him right now. It’s very import—”

“Yes, I believe you mentioned that,” Eugene said. “But I’m inquiring about the subject of your call, not your personal severity of need.”

“I told you he never listens,” Pete said, his voice tiny and faint in the background of the call. “Just tell him I’m not here.”

Moments later Eugene started speaking again.

“Yes, I’m sorry Kenneth, but Peter is indisposed at the—”

“I can hear him talking to you right now, just put him on. It’s very important,” Ken said.

“That was the television,” Eugene said. “My client is not available for comment at this time.”

Ken punched his bed and switched his phone to his opposite ear.

“Alright, listen up, dickhead,” Ken said, his voice trembling with anger. “I know who you are, and I know exactly what you’re trying to do, and I’m telling you right now, it’s not going to work. Because eventually, I’m going to get through to Pete when you’re not there, and I’m going to tell him all about that scam you and your daddy are running out of your shady little clinic down there in Miami. And when that happens, Pete’s going to call the police, and they’re going to take you and your scumbag father to prison. So think about that, fuckstick.”

Eugene breathed heavily into the phone.

“Yes, that’s it,” Eugene said, his voice dropping to a raspy grumble. “Give me the rage. Salt the earth beneath me. Destroy my soul with a hammer. Slice open my skin and wear me like a bathrobe.”

“What? I . . . Jesus Christ,” Ken said, shaking his head in revulsion. In an instant, Eugene’s disturbing behavior had drained away all his righteous anger. Now he simply felt exhausted by this whole affair. “You know what? Whatever, man.”

“Hmm,” Eugene said, his voice returning to normal. “That’s very disappointing. It appears I misjudged your passion for the craft.”

“Wait, what?”

“Anyway,” Eugene said, “now that we’ve cleared up the most pressing issues at hand, is there anything else you’d like to discuss?”

Ken sighed. He thought about his shitty apartment, his shitty job, his shitty career as an extra. All the gross-ass salads he choked down every day. All the booze he didn’t allow himself to drink in order to save calories. Then he remembered Pete. In his mind, Ken saw the new, taller Pete sprinting across a post-apocalyptic landscape alongside Tom Cruise, the two men fighting through hordes of CG aliens on a mission to save the world.

With these images in mind, Ken shook his head. He winced in shame. He tried to force himself to stay quiet, but he couldn’t.

“Uhh, yeah, I guess I have one more question.”

“Yes?”

Ken cleared his throat and pressed his eyes closed. “Are you . . . accepting new clients?”

Eugene kept silent for a few moments.

“I’m sorry, Kenneth, but my roster is full at this time. You’re welcome to query me again next year, however. Would you like my contact information for business-related matters?”

Ken swallowed a ball of sticky saliva and nodded to himself.

“Uhh, yeah, I guess I could get that from you now, you know, just in case something opens up in the meantime.”

______

Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at his website. He's also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.

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