The Star of Our Show

You witness wild eyes fall upon you through splayed fingers, bringing about a sense of eerie disassociation. A couple of eager, round-skulled photographers capture you along the carpet towards the Palace of Festivals. Distended and broken arms sway with cameras like gothic trees in a fairy tale wood. You look up with hesitation and regard them without a smile. You maneuver out of the limousine and into the chaos. 

Ladies and gentlemen—the star of our show! 

The voices activate a crescendo of anxiety that make the contents of your stomach turn. A French dish with a name you cannot pronounce coupled with Johnny Walker's black label curdles in your stomach. Benzos dissolved under your tongue were a poor choice as a palate cleanser, having left your tongue sour and thick. 

Your opaque eyes are guarded and weary as if a curtain has fallen behind your sharp glance. The paparazzi flashes and flees on soundless feet, moving on to another young actor introduced as the latest superhero. 

You wipe bloodshot eyes and look after them with a paranoid disdain. They seem like morbid freaks gathered to watch carnival folk, a string of alien beings dressed brightly as cut flowers. Flashes dilate your irises in the shimmering heat before their figures dissolve and linger on in the rest of the star-struck sea. 

You turn from the hype and select a reclusive landmark somewhere in the sorrowful Congresses of Cannes. You aggressively wheel away down the narrow crimson carpet like a forlorn derelict. The quarters you soon find are of people blind and deaf. Dark figures in floral and suited gowns drink martinis beneath the shadows of gold-laced wall sconces. A group of men in tailored Italian suits watch impassively. 

You reach into the left pocket of a double-breasted jacket stained with creme brûlée and pull out a paper grocery bag to place over your aching brain. Two holes have been jaggedly cut for your bloodshot eyeballs to look through. 

The flashing cameras splay into metallic lines shining so bright they pulse. The day veins with heat. Reporters clamor and follow you with their dark agate eyes staring at the paper bag on your head as if it contains some greater truth inside. 

Confused, you dip into your pocket like a desperate child and clench two friendly pills of Xanax. You reach beneath the bag and drop the pills into a wide and expectant mouth. 

You do not enter the theatre foyer like the others. Instead, you wander around the perimeter into a narrow alley and fall to your knees after lifting the paper bag from your head. Cameras continue to flash, a dull hammering both rhythmic and ceaseless in your ears. Nothing comes other than thin green bile. You angrily lift and raise your voice to the onlookers. 

Screw off! Nothing to see here. 

Your stomach contracts in dry and vicious spasms that rack and leave you sweating, shivering, and weak until they cease. Tears warp your sight as you look up at a small child with dazzling ribboned hair. She watches you from a hedge and sniffles. You nod at her, replace the bag over your head, and float back to the front, where the carpet cuts to the Palace foyer. You stagger towards the onlooking crowd as if your very existence among them was some sort of revenge. 

You stand in a state of torpor and let them observe the spectacle of you being there. Something all-too-human and honest in an industry that prides itself on the ability of one acting a part to which you are not. You think if you could buy them all for what they are worth and sell them for what they thought they were worth, you’d never have to act another day in your life. You chance a slotted eye through your fingers at the boiling sun. It begins to slouch beyond a picturesque horizon, not yet calm enough to settle. 

Start across the carpet and into open lots, moving carefully with thin Ferragamo shoes. This is a journey you hope that the others will not follow. You pause to rest from time to time, leaning forward with your hands upon bony and sharp knees. You squat on one heel and hold your head. You sweat through a pleated Armani shirt that stinks of whiskey. 

Ladies and gentlemen. 

Condescending laughter. Their world is volatile and unpredictable, incapable of being captured by the pictures they take. 

The star of our show! 

The salutation rings hollow, coming and going like veering telephone poles lit up drunkenly by somber headlights. Lose yourself after trying it all; drugs, booze, women—none of it works. After a while, you come out to another street adjacent to the crowds and theater and see a distant trolley crossing. 

I cannot go back to that. I can never go back. 

You set out across the lots again and go down alleys and fences, keeping your eyes poised on some unknown destination as flashing cameras still follow. 

Is there an escape from this Hollywood life? 

Everything looks and feels skewed so that the weight and plum of the world appear slightly off. The question becomes more existential. 

What is this life if not a grande movie playing for a sweltering sea of idiots? 

You cross through a row of backyards with battered cans of swill where clouds of fruit flies drown in tiny shadows through the wind, and dogs chained and slouched away. A man calls out behind you, but you do not look back. 

You cut down an alley and go past a row of coffee shops, restaurants, and bars, and at the end, you see the Congresses of Cannes once again. Beyond them are the trolley tracks merging towards a grande font sculpted in lightly tinged porcelain angels spewing water in a crossing direction. It carries the antiseptic smell of spotless tile in a tincture of chlorine. 

What if you go back now? 

Another rush of nausea washes over you. Stand slightly off-balanced and out of sync as if something needs to be adjusted half a turn somewhere. Your knees seem to fill with water, and you fall to the concrete. A hand stabs at the ground, reaching to catch your boneless weight. You rise and return to the red carpet, re-assuming an intimacy with the life you are not sure had existed before.