Teddy Ray Fletcher
“A tusk?” he repeated, just to make sure he’d heard right.
“A wooden tusk,” the voice clarified. Teddy heard the whoosh of traffic and the sound of a car door closing. Why was it that managers and agents were always going places when they called? Did they save all their phone calls for their commutes?
“Three broken arms, two broken legs, and five concussions between the four of them,” Steph D’Arezzo finished over the hum of an accelerating car.
Teddy looked down at his desk, an acrylic thing his ex-wife had gotten him from IKEA before the divorce.
A very stressful production schedule looked back up at him.
He looked away from it, trying to focus on the picture of his two kids grinning from within his arms, their tiny hands clutching the tiny pumpkins he’d bought for them at the pumpkin patch that day. They used to be so little. And so inexpensive.
“Okay, so you’re telling me that my entire costume and hair team went into the desert and stood under a wooden tusk, which then collapsed on top of them. And now they can’t work on the movie, which starts tomorrow.”
“Costume team, hair team, and your gaffer, Teddy. And there’s no need to sound so judgmental about the wooden tusk. It was on a giant wooden walrus sculpture, after all. Don’t you know anything about festivals? Haven’t you been to Burning Man?”
Teddy squinted at the far wall in his tiny office, trying to imagine the fast-talking, suit-wearing, phone-addicted Steph D’Arezzo doing drugs in the desert. “Have you been to Burning Man?”
“We were all in our twenties once. No, don’t take the five right now, are you even looking at your GPS?”
Teddy assumed she was talking to an Uber driver and ignored the last comment. “So they were at Burning Man?”
“No, this was better than Burning Man,” she said. “It was UnFestival in Terlingua.”
“UnFestival? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Of course you haven’t,” Steph said dismissively. “It’s exclusive.”
“Ah,” he said. “Invite only.”
“No, Teddy, it’s uninvite only.”
“Okay. Uninvite only to UnFestival. Where a wooden walrus fell on my crew.”
“Just the tusk,” she clarified. “Will it stop dinging at me if I put on my seat belt? Oh good. And the walrus was part of the Alice in Wonderland theme, Teddy. It wasn’t just a random wooden walrus out on a mesa.”
She scoffed as if that would be bananas.
“And how do you know all this before I do?” he asked.
“Ah, well, about that,” Steph said, and it was in that brisk I have some bad news voice that all managers seemed to have.
Teddy’s butthole clenched.
“I heard because it came bundled with another thing. I got a call from Winnie’s agent, and she’s going to call you later tonight when she knows more, but she wanted to put me and your male lead in the know, in case the story broke over social media before then. Winnie’s in the hospital right now.”
Shit.
Winnie Baker was a wholesome child star turned wholesome made-for-TV-movie actress, and she was going to be one of the leads in his first-ever Christmas movie production. More importantly, she was the star his director had specifically chosen to work with to make her directorial debut, and Teddy had to keep his director happy, because she made the Hope Channel happy.
And getting Duke the Halls distributed by Hope—and their new streaming platform Hopeflix—was the only thing that could turn Teddy’s desperate Christmas movie gamble into real money. God knew his day job making cheap pornography wasn’t paying for his son’s art school tuition or his daughter’s startup making carbon-neutral sex toys.
And Christmas movies couldn’t be that hard to make, right? They were almost like porn. The scripts were on the flimsy side and the production times were shorter than a community college wintermester.
But now the wooden tusk. Now no Winnie Baker.
But Teddy wasn’t a total asshole, so the first question he asked was “Is Winnie okay?”
“She’ll be fiiiine,” Steph said, in a voice that clearly conveyed how much she cared. “The word is that it was an ayahuasca ceremony gone wrong—also at UnFestival. Do you know how easy it is to get dehydrated on the mesa? Even before you start shitting yourself? Anyway, she’s in the hospital now and hooked up to all sorts of IVs. Her agent thinks another few days and then a discharge with strict instructions to rest.”
“So no movie for her,” Teddy said numbly.
“No movie for her. By the way, if anyone asks, she’s being treated for exhaustion. Not for puking in a tent full of vegans and DJs.”
Right. No one would want sweet Winnie Baker’s reputation tarnished—and Teddy definitely didn’t want the movie tarnished by association. No, he needed his new production company to appear five thousand percent aboveboard, so that no one would dig too hard and find out that Teddy Ray Fletcher was the same man who owned Uncle Ray-Ray’s, a porn studio specializing in—well, less stuff than it used to, now that his daughter was in her twenties and spent every family meal lecturing him about creating ethical mission statements. Last Thanksgiving, she and his son made him identify Uncle Ray-Ray’s core values.
Core. Values.
“So if I were you,” Steph went on, “I’d round up your director and get that shit recast ASAP. Sweet baby Jesus, did you see that? And on a unicycle! Only in Silver Lake, am I right?”
Assuming that Steph was talking to her Uber driver again, Teddy wisely chose not to answer, already stuffing everything on his desk related to Duke the Halls into his briefcase—another present from his ex-wife.
He was going to fix this. He was going to juggle Fletcher Productions and Uncle Ray-Ray’s so smoothly that no one from the Christmas movie would ever, ever know about his career making porn. He had not figured out how to make separate IMDb accounts (and how to furtively use his great aunt Phyllis’s address for a new LLC) for nothing!
I can fix this, he told himself as he forced the briefcase closed and bolted for the door. I can still make this work.
After all, how hard could it be to keep his two worlds separate?
Three hours later, Teddy was sitting across from his director in an airport Chili’s Too glowing with chili pepper string lights and mini Christmas trees at every table. He was trying to pull folders out of his briefcase while also choking down a molten-hot mozzarella stick.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’re flushed.”
Teddy fumbled some folders on the table and then dabbed at his forehead with his napkin, hoping he wasn’t sweating too much. His pale complexion showed every degree of flush and every stipple of sweat. It made him self-conscious.
“This is stressful stuff, but nothing we can’t handle,” he said, trying to sound smooth and in control. He’d dealt with any number of porn catastrophes in his day, but unfortunately, the stakes were a bit higher here than having to recast a performer with hemorrhoids. “Obviously, it’s less than ideal having to make this decision in the airport right before your plane leaves for Vermont, but ayahuasca is unpredictable.”
“Words to live by.” The director sighed. She was already pulling his folders across the table over to her side. Even as she sat in a booth made of vinyl and old crumbs, there was no hiding that indefinable celebrity aura she gave off. Gretchen Young had high cheekbones, flashing eyes, and warm medium brown skin—all of it finished off by long, waist-length twists, a nose piercing, and casual overalls that had probably cost as much as his watch.
“And how hard do you think it will be to get someone else to Vermont in time?” she asked, spreading the headshots across the table. “There were a few other women whom I liked at the audition, but with the shoot happening over the holidays and the short notice . . .”
“We’ll make it work,” Teddy said with a confidence he absolutely did not have. For one thing, the turnarounds on these Christmas movies were tight. Two weeks—three at the most. And with the actual filming set to begin in two days, he’d have to get their new actress out to Vermont by tomorrow, or the day after at the latest. While Duke the Halls wasn’t exactly written in iambic pentameter, he assumed Winnie’s replacement would want a day or so to read over the script and familiarize herself with the story.
And for another, worse thing, the little Vermont town where Gretchen wanted to shoot the movie—Christmas Notch—had only one opening in its little Vermont schedule: during the actual, literal Christmas season. And while they wouldn’t be shooting on the twenty-fifth, they’d be right back to work on the twenty-sixth, meaning that whoever took Winnie’s role would have to be okay with potentially missing Christmas at home.
Jesus. He needed another mozzarella stick. He shoved the breaded lava into his mouth and tried to remember that thing his son had told him about mindful breathing.
“Fuck,” Gretchen breathed suddenly. “Who is she? We didn’t see her at the audition, did we?”
“Uh,” Teddy said through his mouthful of food, racking his brain.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a headshot with nipples before,” Gretchen added thoughtfully.
The horror slid through him in slow motion, as hot and gooey as the burning mozzarella lodged in his throat. He lowered his eyes to the table and saw what Gretchen was looking at: a picture that had most definitely not come from the Duke the Halls folder. He mentally rewound to three hours ago, when he had been shoving any and all folder-like objects into his briefcase, flustered and hurrying like hell so he could catch Gretchen before her flight.
And now here he was, looking at a still from Uncle Ray-Ray’s latest porn shoot and not a headshot for Duke the Halls.
Gretchen traced a long finger over the woman’s face. “She definitely wasn’t at the audition. I’d remember her. Who is she?”
Teddy tried to put his hand over the rest of the folder—if she kept going through these pictures, she was going to see more than just nipples—and sound completely and totally nonchalant. Like this was no big deal. Like Gretchen didn’t have her finger on a picture of one of the hottest alt-porn stars of their time.
“She’s very talented,” Teddy said, the nonchalance difficult to muster as he coughed down some stubborn mozzarella. “But she normally does edgier stuff. You know”—he cast around for the right nonporn word—“provocative. Artistic risks and stuff. Not really Hopeflix fare.”
“She’s exactly what I want,” Gretchen said, still looking at the photo. “She’s perfect for the part of Felicity.”
“Uh . . .”
“I want her,” Gretchen repeated, looking up at Teddy. “I want her in my movie. What’s her name?”
He almost said her stage name and then caught himself at the last moment. “Bee Hobbes. But you haven’t even seen her act yet,” he protested weakly.
“Do you think she has a reel up on her website?” Gretchen asked. “I’ll Google her.”
Teddy had a sudden, queasy vision of her Googling Bee Hobbes and somehow landing upon Bianca von Honey. And Uncle Ray-Ray’s.
“No need to Google,” he said quickly. “I’ve worked with her before and she’s brilliant. But maybe we should have some other backup options, in case she can’t . . .”
“No, it needs to be her,” Gretchen said, shaking her head, looking down at the picture again. “I want a degree of edginess; I want there to be something dangerous in the way the actors play Pearl’s script.”
Pearl Purkiss was the screenwriter for Duke the Halls—and Gretchen Young’s girlfriend—and was in Christmas Notch now, preparing for a movie that didn’t currently have a female lead. “We could find another edgy person,” Teddy attempted valiantly, “if we just take a quick look at the other folder—”
“I hope,” Gretchen said coolly, “that you’re not balking because she’s plus-size?”
“What? No!” Teddy worked with Bee all the time! She was gorgeous and filthy and great for business! But she couldn’t be in a chaste-as-hell Christmas movie. For the flipping Hope Channel. What if she was recognized? What if Teddy Ray Fletcher was revealed to be a purveyor of porn and then poof went this fledgling Hopeflix partnership and his son the artist had to be a barista two years too early?
“I just think that we should maybe pick some alternates in case she’s . . . busy,” Teddy finally said.
“If we don’t get her, then I don’t even know,” Gretchen said, closing her eyes in a way that sent alarm bells ringing through him. Alarm bells that shrieked, Keep Gretchen happy so you can keep Hopeflix interested. “I already lost Winnie. Another disappointment so soon . . .”
The alarm bells got louder.
Would it really be so bad? Teddy asked himself desperately. Would it really be so dangerous to have Bee in the movie?
She’d been begging him to cast her in something ever since he dreamed up this Christmas studio scheme last year, and she would have just as much to lose if her porn career came back to haunt her. And besides, how much did Hopeflix’s audience really overlap with the feminist porn watchers? What tattooed, fair trade coffee drinkers with their body-safe silicone toys were also tuning in to sexless holiday schmaltz?
It might be okay, it really might. And if it was okay, if this did work, then perhaps he’d just stumbled upon an easy solution for any future casting problems. It was already giving him ideas for how to fill the holes in his production team created by the rogue wooden tusk.
“I’ll reach out to her tonight,” Teddy promised. “Why don’t you, um, keep this folder here”—he carefully pushed the real Duke the Halls folder under her fingertips—“in case she can’t.”
“I hope she can,” said Gretchen. “I get a really good energy from her picture. Very open, you know?”
Teddy stopped himself from making the obvious very open joke, stress ate another mozzarella stick, and then gestured for the check.
Finally, out in the airport parking lot, he set his briefcase in the passenger seat of his minivan, did some mindful breathing that didn’t help, and dialed Bee as he stared at a stray cat licking its paws on top of a Tesla.
“Hello?” answered Bee.
“I hope you’re sitting down right now,” Teddy said.
I know I am, he thought grimly.
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