prompt: figure, title: "callbacks & turnarounds" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

There’s a line on Figure Eight by Elliott Smith, his spirit mentioned previous, that goes “Got a foot in the door, God knows what for”. When first I listened, I thought it just clever songwriting. These days, though, it’s like seeing my own ghost. Hearing it, anyway.

In the space between film school and time spent in Los Angeles, I was a production assistant on an independent, in hopes of getting experience on actual sets, not just as college kids pretending at it. One Thursday I busted my toe moving props over uneven ground, took a long weekend off and then returned to finish the job. I was twenty-two, even dumber than I am now, didn’t go to a doctor or anything. Ever since, once or twice a year the old wound flares and I will hobble as if a burning needle lodged in my toe. Professionals since told me it healed wrong, leaving symptoms similar to gout from time-to-time, I should have taken it as a sign. Naïve Parsifal with the Fisher King’s burning wound somehow at once, my father would’ve said.

On film sets, they’ll haze new assistants by sending them on imaginary errands, using industry terms-of-art novices didn’t know. “Go to Lowes, get me some callbacks.” “Hit the expendables shop, buy two turnarounds.” I never fell for those, of course, for I had fancy-pants book learning. I never bonded with them over prankings either, such are the cons of skipping steps because you thought yourself some prodigy.

“I want to pretend,” I told Frank the Yeti, “Yakov Smirnov said of his homeland’s film industry, In Soviet Russia, Door Gets Foot Into You! My father, well may he rest, would’ve said to say it anyway, if it makes a better story.”

When I worked in Hollywood, I was even dumber than I am now, I didn’t spend every waking moment trying to suck up and get in with people, did my job well as I could manage and hoped that’d get me somewhere. In off-hours, I didn’t mingle, I hung out with my girlfriend-at-the-time and my brother instead, because that made me happiest. I worked for folks I’d looked up to and raided the thrift stores of The Valley with my chosen tribe and God, was I content. Contentment and advancement so rarely bed-fellows, when things got rough, a lack of bridges-built made me an expendable myself and it broke my heart to fucking bits.

“When I brought that Chinese food to Warren,” Frank said, remember, Frank claims himself the inspiration for Werewolves of London, “I still remember my fortune: Confucius said, Man with Foot-In-Door Often Receives Broken Toe.”

“Did that really happen?” Frank just smiled. “Doesn’t it make a better story?”

That Smith lyric was from a song called “Stupidity Tries” but I didn’t mention that. I reckoned Frank would tell me not to push my luck with the creative embellishments. The truth is, though, that reality’s far more on-the-nose than fiction’s wildest dreams could ever conjure.

Last updated August 04, 2020