"Next Stop: Dean Town." announced the miserable bus driver after dropping off the dozen or so passengers at the Barstow stop. He put the bus in high gear and powered the rest of them through what remained of the Nevada desert. The bus was no better than Harry told him it'd be. He's the bastard who got him in this mess to begin. It didn't look like a mess, but it surely felt like it for him.
The him I'm talkin' about, of course, is Finn. Another unjustified husk of a man; a bag of skin and bone, chock full of youthful spunk and age-born virility.
He was sitting by the window of the bus.To his left, that old crone hag. She may not have been one, but she certainly looked like it. Wrinkled skin; like melting vanilla ice cream, dripping, oozing oodles of milky white drops. She wasn't dressed any better, either. Might've been the blazing heat of the Mojave, or maybe the fact that they were so goddamned close together. She smelled like cat-shit wrapped in dog-shit, with a sprinkling of deer piss. Finn couldn't stand the proximity. His eyes and nostrils would sooner burn off from the noxious miasma.
She stared at him as he stared at her. But no, this wasn't no communion of flirty banter. Neither he or she were falling for another. The one time he can't hold eye contact with a 'woman'. No less uncomfortable than being face-first with a cross-country relative with opposing political views. He realized far too late that she'd be his sitting partner. He didn't even know that she'd come and sat her horizontally lengthy body next to him. He also hadn't picked up the smell since he was too busy sniffing his own arm-pit, hoping that his deodorant cream hadn't worn off. The last thing he wanted before his big interview for his big break was to have a raunchy, funky aura around. And certainly not the James Brown kind of funk.
All he could think about was the interview.
An old friend of his – Petey Simpson – told Finn he wouldn't find any fame in Vegas. Told him to try his luck somewhere else. When he asked him, Petey Simpson would dance around in circles like a badger; avoiding, evading and dodging every question and holding every useful answer close to his skinny little chest. After some beers and trading stories about odd-acting jobs, Finn managed to find out where Pete would go to do improv-theater; it was somewhere by the Strip.
It turned out that Pete wasn't such a bad actor after all. The only reason for that is 'cause Pete got his floozy mother to arrive at the end of the sentimental journey with a bunch of highfalutin' producers that came over on the weekends from Hollywood. Sin City was his initial goal, but after running some math, he figured the bus ride to Dean Town would be cheaper. That's the place Petey told him to go to if he wanted to take the shortcut to where he got now.
Shamelessly, he got jealous of the man. How the hell could Petey make it to the holy land of filmdom, and Finn has to scrape by, doing goddamned porno shoots? Now Pete's apparently got a movie shoot in Utah of all places, filming some horror movie at Cow Beach in Edgartown, the bastard.
But he knew that the second he'd got to Dean Town, it'd all be clear. He'd finally make it big. He knew he'd win the producers over. Pete told him to find some man by the name of Fairfax; owned a production company that was the main attraction in the town itself. Said Fairfax would find him to be his golden boy. He had all the faith in the world.
He was dropped off at the bus stop among the sandy buildings. The bus hurried off in a gear he didn't know it had. The polluting smoke storm enveloped Finn's meager form. Finn powered the traveling fatigue and emerged bleakly from the cloud of grey. Dean Town was no bigger than he thought it would be. It was a town. It looked normal on the outside and he was hoping the same would be true for its insides. Its guttural intestines. The beating heart of this machine. He hoped it would start singing to him, singing sweet lullabies that would charm him in, filling his mind with pleasant thoughts, his mouth with sweetness and his eyes with pretty colors.
Bummer for him that all he could hear was the hustle of the town. It was just sometime after the noon atmosphere had gone over and the heat began to die down, saving him the trouble of having to fork over hard cash for a new suit. The same suit he'd hoped he'd impress Fairfax with. The brown and gold was something that his below-average, shallow and superficial girlfriend recommended; "It looks grand and groovy, baby." He remembered her saying– he'd hoped she'd know much about style, seeing as he'd have to hear about her disco friends, day in, day out, like she was some grand show-woman, constantly thrashing about in nightclubs and what she'd call a 'soirée out with friends'. Little did Finn know, she was too busy spending her time letting other guys try her out for size.
He navigated through the streets, in a haze of confusion and delirium. The sounds of the cars blaring like bomb-sirens. High pitched and screeching. Staring around like some geeky moron with his brown jacket and pants on. Not to mention the golden shirt; he really thought he was doin' something there. Maybe that was the main reason hippies and folks in monkey-suits were givin' him the stink eye. Maybe that or the fact that he was starin' – I hadn't seen folk dressed like this in Vegas; it was a sight to take in.
The smell was also full of funk. The good kind of funk. The kind of funk you'd smell visiting grandma who was just about done fixing up a nice plate of chocolate chip cookies. It also smelled like strawberries and vanilla. Something magical; something out of this world. And every street he went through, on his way to Fairfax's office, smelled the same. The same familiar cocktail of aroma's that were just out of that world, that he felt a great deal of regret knowing that he couldn't truly have a taste. Not even a nibble.
His sadness was short-lived, seeing as something else would be quick to steal his attention. Like a careening Lamborghini Countach LP400, going a hundred and sixty miles per hour through the U.S route 20. Blasting through those three-thousand something miles like a bat out of hell, upon wings of fury, wreathed in an ageless storm. So devilishly quick that he could almost feel the whiplash splitting his spine in half and—yeah, you get the idea.
It was a sign. A big sign. A real big, real bright sign. It was one of those neon signs. Large and imposing, it spelled out the letters in the order that he was looking for. Immense and hot pink, like a haze in the desert. A well for the thirsty. He didn't realize 'till then how long he'd been searching for it. FAIRFAX PROD_CTIONS. Curiously enough, the U was missing. Or at least its lighting fixture was, seeing as he had to squint to even notice the darkened, unlit silhouette of the posted letter.
Under the beautiful sign was a wooden door with golden filigree, even the handle was golden. Though, as he got closer and stared with scrutiny, he noticed a few blunt abrasions and rust-colored gashes across the door handle. It was one of the longer ones, not the knobs. I guess you'd call it a lever handle since you had to leverage your weight down on the handle, pulling it downward and pulling the damn door clean off. That's how he'd have done it, if he had that grim desire, but he wanted more out of this door. He wanted what was behind this door. The man himself, Fairfax, and some more.
He knocked once, twice and thrice again. Waiting impatiently as the sun fell down the other side of the horizon and the sky became a tender shade of lavender, dotted with the sprinkling stars, a rare sight to lay one's peepers on. Especially if those peepers have gotten used to the hum and drone of the Strip. This was a nice shift of pace and the senses.
But soon before he could doze off at the facade of the office, bathed in the faint pink glow of the neon sign above him, the door creaked open and a woman dressed in a shirt and stared at him, cigarette in her right hand as the other held the door open just enough for him to see her torso. She had darker skin and one of these big puffs of hair; he heard they called them afro's now.
"You got an appointment or somethin'?" she said as she loudly chewed a piece of gum.
"I'm here for Mr. Fairfax, I was told I could find him here." I looked behind me to see some of the restaurants and businesses enjoying rush hour. "The main man in Dean Town?" he said, tryin' a little too hard to sound like Burt Reynolds in 'The Longest Yard.'
She nodded and sized him up. "You're mister Faraday?" hhe asked the question as if she was expecting more. Disappointment dripped from her tongue like venom. Maybe she was waiting for him to start his song and dance routine. Hopping all over the damn place like some court jester. She looked madly disappointed. Like she paid a hundred for a hot dog at the stand in Times Square.
Yet after all, she still led him up a spire of stairs which he thought would never end. They almost didn't. Hung on the spiraling wall were a bunch of portraits; actors that he felt he should've heard of but haven't quite, though he was a self-proclaimed cinephile. He spent the whole walk up thinking 'Who the hell is Clement Caulder?' He'd never heard of him but apparently he was posted up on the wall. He had one of those weird faces, too. The kind that make you confused about whether they're super sexy smokin' or uglier than a northbound south-facing truck.
Though he couldn't ponder the matter any longer. The lady finally brought him to the final door. It looked the same as the one that was outside. While he was gasping for air with a gaping maw, she stood with her hands behind her back, silently sulking and seemingly serious. He couldn't blame her. I could tell she was used to this.
"Do you need a drink?" she said, "you look thirsty, mister Faraday."
"Oh, sure." he said, finally reaching a resting state. "Do you have some sparkling water?"
"No." she said as she revealed something from behind her back. She held a glass of a rainbow drink in her hands. "We have something better. Something to fix that thirst of yours, mister Faraday." she said so in a friendly tone. With a smile this time. No neutral faces or odd smirks. Her voice went from the grating dredge to a silky smooth hymn.
Without question, the fool took that damn drink and swallowed it whole, leaving the glass drier than the desert around that Town. He felt re-energized. Fueled by the most powerful of human traits. Determination. He really felt whatever gumbo-juice-water-sparkling cocktail that coursed through his system like a fuel to an engine, fairy dust to a fairy. He could see things much more clearly. No longer was he consumed by the thirst and fatigue that the Town had brought unto him. Without another word, he handed the glass back to the lady and barged into the room, proclaiming; "I'm here to do some business, mister Fairfax!"
Before him was a man sitting on a chair and staring out of the window that looked over the Town. He was dressed in a vibrant yellow Hawaiian shirt with little palm trees all over it. He also had a bucket-hat on. It looked too small for his head but he seemed to make it work. Finn could see a faint vapor of smoke or whatever it might have been, wisping off from his left side. One could assume it was a cigarette, and Finn did.