Fiction: Little Holly Sunset

By Timothy Provenzano

 

 

 

TIME SQUARE’S WORLD-FAMOUS GLOBE THEATRE

TONIGHT MAY 14 LIVE AND IN PERSON

LITTLE HOLLY SUNSET IN

LAMPLIGHT LADY

1983’s HOTTTEST!

 

 

I shook the umbrella clear of the mist. Palmed my switchblade from my purse and raised it to the guard’s neck wattle before he had time to react. 

“Don’t even,” I said. 

“Holly. He’s security.” My bodyguard Ramón puffed as he caught up. He folded my arm down and away.  “We talked about the knives.” 

Ramón and I had walked from the 42nd street station to 46th Street and Sixth. I’d forgotten the umbrella and we were both drenched in the blue sheets of rain. This was the last premiere I’d ever take the fucking subway to. 

  The peepshows and adult bookstores of Times Square shone in the downpour, exhaust-dirty awnings sheltering the bums and junkies. I put my hands up in fake surrender, then spit in the guard’s face. He howled and tried to follow me down the theater hall, but Ramón held him back. 

The Globe had a decent backstage room—too small and stank of old champagne. I collapsed on the chair and stared at my face, the mirror strung with red bulbs. 

I looked good. My face: eyes not too close together or too far apart; long narrow nose; thin nostrils; cheekbones so high they bumped against my eyeballs. Razor jaw of a killer. Other girls have the tits, the ass, the legs. It was all face for me. Men go on about this part or that part, but when you see them slumped down in their chairs, jerking it with those last hysterical strokes:  it’s the lady’s face that pushes them over the edge. I could almost hear their thoughts pumping like blood: Tell me something sweet Holly, tell me I’m strong, tell me I’m hot, tell me you want me like I want you. 

“The star has arrived. An hour late and looking like a drowned dog. Someone clean her up please? We need a cast picture, ” said Brian.  

The scabby, beared,rich-kid executive producer of Lamplight Lady, he was scorching in his white Ray-bans and tennis shorts. This was my sixth film, and I’d gotten used to all the Brians that came along with it. His little entourage of disco dollies who’d never grow up. Not like I did three years ago in Dayton, When I stuck an x-acto knife in my brother’s ribs and left Dayton in the passenger seat of an 18-wheeler. 

And now it’s my name in lights. 

One of his girls gave me a quick hair and makeup refresher at the mirror. Then we got a photo with Henry John, the lead who I’d half-forgotten, and the sour brunette who played his angry wife. I ducked out of the theater for a smoke before the screening started. A black knit cap hid the peroxide wedge cut that framed my face just right. I took a quick walk around the front, loving the art-deco neon of the “GLOBE” above the sooty marquee. Bulging black garbage bags caged 42nd and Broadway like a wall. A couple pickets were stuffed between garbage bags, puncturing one and sending its rotten juice onto the sidewalk. 

PORN KILLS!

PORN IS A LIE!

The bulbs on the marquee’s underside burned like a K-mart Broadway, showing off NYC’s 1am shuffle of hustlers, johns, and dancers on their way to a score. Or maybe they just killed time, waiting for the debut screening of my film. Holly Sunset. I took the name just off the bus from Dayton. First director I met, Robby Chan, called me little to fuck with me, just because I’m 6’3.  My first roommate in the city, Vicki, never let me forget it. 

I headed back to the rats and the alley behind the theater, gasping for air. A bunch of people were about to watch me fuck on a forty-foot screen.  I wanted to puke. My face: that’s what I wanted to give them. That and nothing else. They would never touch me, like the money men would never touch me. Not my brother or foster dad or anyone. 

A man-made eye contact from the curb and came over. Last thing I needed was a fan, but this one was a hustler. He was made to wear his tight black pants, leather jacket with a yellow zipper, and the white Stetson pushed high on his forehead. The rain had picked up and streamed off his hat, trickled on his eyebrows and nose. Yeah, okay.

“Could I?” he asked. 

He had a deep voice, gold spoon on a full glass. Underneath the street scuzz, his face was pink and healthy. On his jacket he’d pinned a cheap neon rose, flashing on and off. I lit a smoke for him and handed it over. A cab without hubcaps roared off; he nodded like he was saying goodbye to it.

“You her? On the marquee?”

“Four days’ work,” I said. “Most of it in a burned-out walkup. East Village, Ave B and 3rd. Sound guy got shot in the chest, the last day.”

“That a fact?” 

“That’s a fact, Jack. But you know what? My next film’s gonna be in Venice. As in Italy.”

“Italy? Fancy.” He unpinned the neon rose and stuck it on my jacket that I only then realized was a perfect match. “You knew my name. It’s Jack Morgan. How’s that?”

I scoffed, mist beading on my lip. “Real smart.” 

He gave me a little smirk. “Hell of a night. No trade in this rain.”

“Out here long?” 

 “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

 “No. Out here. The fucking city.” 

He scoffed. “That obvious?”

“You look way too healthy to be a local.”

He streamed smoke through his nose and watched the street. 

“Half a year, maybe. I’m from Fort Lauderdale. Orange trees and sweat.”  He streamed smoke through his nose. “Ever been down there?”

I liked the way the fringe on his jacket bobbed up and down, as he hugged his ribs with his free arm. He was older than me, older than Henry even. But not old.  I liked his too-red lips. I liked waiting for the inevitable wind-up. What he’d ask for, how he’d put it. Even his corny put-on Southern twang. 

“You gotta come do the intro. Hyping you up front.” Ramón came puffing up again.

Jack flicked the cigarette into a pool in the alley, scattering his reflection. 

I barely remembered the corny patter I mumbled in the three-quarters full theater. Rows and rows of mustached, pockmarked faces. Some with brown-tinted glasses, nearly all held their mouths slightly open. If you put twenty people in a room, I’d be the one you’d come back to, sure; but their fascination was something else. 

Suze from my first movie, Bodies in Ecstasy, taught me about that. She was my first girl scene when I got to the city. Twenty, with men already telling me I was too old for the big money. Only got that gig after I’d sucked off three so-called producers. Their production amounted to dumping me in a little bathroom and telling me to get fuckable.

 I was shaking, cramps twisting my guts. Suze looked at me in my AC/DC cutoff and melted half-perm.

“You like girls?” she said, scratching my forearm with her long fake nails.

“Sure.”

 “Relax, babe. It don’t matter much what we do. To these guys, we’re gods. Until they come, anyway.” 

At the makeup desk, she painted me some nice arched eyebrows, applied burning red lip gloss. “It’s your mask, baby,” she said. “You’re gonna need it.”

We kissed so many times that afternoon the director threatened to send me back to Bumfuck Ohio. Suze told him to tuck his dick between his legs and he turned seagreen. God I loved that woman. A year later she was dead. Bad coke, her boyfriend told me. Fucking liar. Around that time I stopped having boyfriends myself.

I looked for Jack in the crowd, but he wasn’t there. “Happy jerking, fellas,” I said, and blew a kiss to my adoring audience, adding two middle fingers. “Uptight slut,” somebody shouted.

Plastic-wrapped roses and a little gold box with matching pumps waited for me in the dressing room. I swept it all off the table, catching the petals with my stilettos as I put my head down. Brian came in holding a couple glasses of champagne but backed out when he saw me. 

“How’d it go out there?” That voice from the doorway, a minute later. His Stetson was pulled over his forehead, still dark from the night’s rain. 

“Guess it wasn’t interesting enough for you to show up, anyway.”

He scoffed in that easy way again, like not a goddamn thing ever bothered him.

“Don’t be like that, Holly.” 

He put his hand on my neck, ruffled my short spikes. His fingers were soft like the fur of my cat Pringles, who purred me to sleep every night when I was six. 

Ramón came in and shouted for him to leave, but I waved him off.

“Christ’s sake. You’re gonna get yourself killed,” he said, and opened his umbrella. “I ain’t responsible for you getting home.”

Jack took hold of my arms and brought me to stand. I turned away so he wouldn’t see me smile. He gathered the rose and box under his arm and he smiled.

“Can I show you something?” he said.

                                               

He fucked me way past dawn in my sublet on Canal and Wooster, giving me the best head of my life—from a man anyway—on my butcher-block kitchen counter.  Even though he was a foot shorter, he got me an inch off the ground in the shower. Pushed so far inside me I felt dammed-up rivers burst all through my bloodstream. I saw tear-blurred stars from the edge of the world. But he took my hand in his before he fell asleep and that was when my heart seized up. Like it did when I saw something perfect and glowing that, when the shit hit the fan, could do nothing to help itself.

We listened to Brian’s message on the answering machine: You’ve got to behave at these things, Holly. Jack’s tongue ran over my thighs, taking a little too long to find my clit— but I didn’t mind, I was laughing too hard. We ran through the dusty pack of rubbers I’d brought home from the set. This kind of fucking wasn’t like my movies, where I wheezed and groaned like a whoopee cushion. Wasn’t like any of the other sullen shitheads I’d been with outside of the movies either. Just quiet bits of words and clear dizzying breaths.

“How many guys you fucked?” I asked him, once we finally wore ourselves out. The sweat from our bodies had mostly dried, replaced by gooseflesh rising on my arms and his thighs, under me.

“A gentleman never tells.” But his gentleman accent was gone. His voice was rougher now. 

“A hundred? Three?”

“Wondering if you just signed your death certificate, Holly? Why don’t you tell me about your whole history? We got all night, after all.”

“Fuck off.” 

Goddamn if I wasn’t thinking about my friend Karl, five months gone. He was the DP on the movie with Suze and a couple others. Visited him at Bellevue on New Years, the day before AIDS killed him. Only it wasn’t him on the dry little mattress. Just some purple flesh and the rotted shapes poking through where his chest and face should be. 

“Nobody cares, Holly,” was the last thing he said. I went out into the empty hall after he said that, and I kept going. And it’s a lucky night when I don’t wake up thinking about that

“I keep clean,” Jack said. 

“How’d you get into this scene, anyway? You’re money. You and your pink face. Tell me you’re not.” 

“ I don’t need a fucking shrink.” 

He pushed himself onto his side, dumping me off the couch onto the white fringe rug while he stood up and looked for his clothes.

“Okay. Let’s don’t talk then,” I said, grabbing at him. On my knees, I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around his thighs and turned his body toward me until his cock grazed my cheek. 

“Don’t talk,” I repeated, softly. 

I cupped his balls with my left hand, taking a pinch of skin at their bottom, pulling hard. 

 

He was gone in the morning. I had to meet my agent Roland, and didn’t think about Jack at all. But he was hanging out on the sidewalk when I got back home, with his sad eyes and smile that I knew was a bit, but one that worked. We watched Midnight Blue on Channel J. Art Goldstein was talking about Dexedrine with a topless brunette. My tits were a little smaller than hers, but rounder. Everyone on my sets said how soft and perfect they were to hold. 

“You take a couple of these Bennies, you feed the kids, you send the hubby off to work,” Art babbled. 

“I left my family,” Jack said. No color in his voice at all. “I have a wife named Georgia. My son is named Derek and my daughter is Emma. I own a two-story house in Colee Hammock, Fort Lauderdale. It has a garden where Emma, who is five, likes to plant carrots. Derek likes dinosaurs, but I think it’s because all the boys at preschool do, too.”

“What?” This story ran through me like the afterburn of a slap, and I wanted to hit him back. “You left them? You don’t care?”

“Some dago answers it every time I call,” he said. “She cashes the checks, though, believe me. At first, I said to myself—give them half. You owe them that. They’re used to what you made at the agency. When I got a clue out here, I sent more. Now it’s almost everything. You don’t want to see where I live, Holly. But I keep clean. I don’t pick up just anyone. They’ve got to be money, like you said about me.”

“Don’t bother confessing,” I said, backing down. “I ran out too. Dayton. Nineteen years old. I stuck my brother with a knife. I don’t even knew if it killed him.” I gasped for air. “I never told anybody about him before, you know that?” 

“What’d he do?” His voice was low, serious.

 I shook my head.

“What’s your name Holly? You told me all that but I don’t even know your name.”

 I laughed to make the seriousness go away and went over to the kitchen, pulled out two flutes. I poured Moet and sat next to him, running my hand over his chest.

“My name’s the actress who’s going to star in 1988’s top-grossing movie. Romantic comedy, like An Officer and a Gentleman or some shit. I figure I’ll get five million for it.”

He laughed into his glass.

“Hollywood. You want to go straight?”

“I’m selling with my body for now. But people are going to pay to see this face. Only this face. And I’m going to go right back to Dayton, and that face is going to spit on the whole place.”

“Nah, Holly. I been around bankers. You ain’t one. Just keep going like you are. Seems like more fun.” He propped himself on an elbow, watching me.

“Oh, so you think I’m a fuckup? This is all I can be?”

He scoffed and reached for a cigarette that I slapped out of his hand.

“Jesus Christ, Holly. Go be a star then. The fuck do I care? I just wanted to know your name.”

The smile again. Like the old paparazzi’s flashbulb. And that was it: why I’d lit his cigarette, fucked him, everything: his mouth reminded me of Walnut Hills Park in Dayton. I used to smoke dope there when I was 14. Get away from school, from the mound of shit calling itself my dad. Other boys used the faded, scratched-up basketball court to pull stunts on their skateboards. This one boy, taller than the others, didn’t skate, didn’t sketch my face. Didn’t do anything at all that I remember, but sometimes we’d look at each other. Always in the afternoon. Summer of ‘75, I masturbated for the first time, that mouth all over my mind.

We lay together on the couch as the sun rose over the dirty buildings. I watched his face for a long time, trying to fix what I saw there. Put it up on the little mantle in my head.

 

Two weeks and three days Jack stayed with me. I did promo for Lamplight Lady all over the boroughs then, so the fucking stopped. The Friday night before I was due to start filming, first week of June, I came back from the Korean greengrocer. Found a pair of jeans draped over my couch, three sizes larger than Jack wore. 

“Sold off some old clothes. They didn’t take that one,” he mumbled, stuffing the jeans into his beaten leather brown bag. I threw my gardenias against the wall as he winced but didn’t duck.

“Don’t fucking bring them here. I don’t care what you fuck, but I’m not paying rent on it.”

But the next night I took him to Spaggiano’s anyway. Dumb glitzy Italian place two blocks east of my place. The ladies there pissed me off with their Alaïa dresses and Guerlain lipstick. Stomachs that would always be flatter than mine, no matter how much I starved and binged. Their thin New England faces that I couldn’t match with all the trick camera shots and Vaseline in the world. He moped and sighed over his thirty-dollar linguine. His hair was gelled down over his forehead, Stetson at his feet.

“Could you pretend to enjoy it?” I said when the waiter had cleared everything and threw my heavy burgundy napkin in his face.

“I do, baby. I do. Better than heaven.” He put his hand over mine, paid attention and forced his face into a smile. I almost bought it before I saw his jaw muscles clench and his eyes narrow.

“I gotta say this, Jack. You know I’m out in Venice for a bit. I been thinking. Maybe you give up the trade for a while? The money’s good and it’s getting better.  We playhouse for a month or two. See how it goes.”

I was sure his face would light up like the neon rose, ‘cause that’s what it did for me. But he went pasty. His hair was slick with sweat and his forehead too. His eyes shone so bright but dark that they scared me. 

“Get through the filming, you know. You got a lot in your pocket right now.”

I half-laughed, and my mouth wouldn’t close.

“Un-fucking-belivable. So that john with the pants. His cock’s more interesting than what we got, huh?”

 “Holly. It’s our last night.”

I swung around to look at him one last time; he’d picked up the Stetson and covered his linguine with it. He didn’t look up, and his face had changed again. Something under his skin was wrong. By his throat the skin had swollen up like an adder. His neck burned with some kind of orange I’d never seen before. I almost came back to the table, but those jeans kept flashing in my eyes. I’d left the keys to my place under the mat, and I took them out and put them back three times before I finally left them there, with a silent prayer to Mary.

I left for the airport at five the next morning. Pan Am to Rome, then the TSR to Venice. First plane, first train I ever took. I was nervous as hell and lost my boarding pass. But the clerks made sure it got fixed. They knew who I was. First class all the way. 

I promised myself I wouldn’t call Jack like some clingy Dayton wife. And I fucking didn’t.

 

Holly’s Italian Sightseeing Tour was my big one. Four million in gross, domestic and international. Still paying for my shitty old walkup on 112th, ten years out of the industry. 

First day of shooting, the grip gave me a big blue pill with a smiley face imprinted:  called it Ecstasy. Said it was hot with all his NYC actress and musician friends. I wasn’t much for drugs then.  I saw what they did to the other girls, coke especially. But that warm, easy rush was the best thing I’d ever felt. I bought him out of everything he had. 

So, it’s Ecstasy I remember. Ecstasy and the island of Sant’Erasmo: the garden of Venice. 

How hot it was! Swampy grass sinking up to my knees, when I decided to picnic by myself on a day off. I swore at the clouds as the sweat beaded my face. A little old peddler told me about some band of vendors who sold oranges and grapefruits since knights or Jesus ran around the countryside.

 “Molto bello,” he kept yelling, pointing towards the little town center. But I only cared about the fruits of the day: the citrus trees, and the marsh water beyond them. The pulp from the oranges slid down my throat and mixed with my blood, humming with the spiraling strands of the drug. 

The drooping bright trees ended; red poppies and reeds climbed up my legs. Black bugs bit my ankles and writhed below. But I didn’t care— I needed to go deeper. My cheap cotton dress grew dark and heavy in the cloudy water as I descended. The ground kept receding under my sodden and disintegrating flats. The water stopped just above my shoulders. The faraway sun faded over the slope of a hill, where a half-dozen cows lounged. I stayed until it was dark and the bugs had made themselves my full-length stockings.

 I could have stayed there forever because I didn’t have anywhere else to stop. I was a good time for someone, that’s it. A few minutes on a screen, on a bed. I closed my eyes so that I didn’t see Jack in this blank spot. Cows mooed somewhere over the hill and I wanted to throw my arms around them and make their sound too.

           

When I got back to New York, after 14 hours of trying not to think about him, the key was still under the mat. I took a cab over to the Globe. Nobody had seen him, no one was looking. 

 

The rushes of Holly’s Italian Sightseeing Tour were hot with the money men. Roland booked me with a first-class ticket to Vegas on their say-so. I had to leave in three days. The first two days, I scoured SoHo, figuring that for his hunting grounds.  Canal to Bleecker, Watts to Broome. Nothing.

The last night before I left, I phoned my first New York roommate, Vicki. She was between modeling gigs and had a loser boyfriend to feed, so I threw her fifty bucks. She suggested we try Times Square again, so we spent the night lit by those same yellow peepshow signs, girls in windows, back-alley deals. But not him.

We went back to my place. Vicki massaged my shoulders while I cried and drank bad gin. The drink and the redhead and the past made me dizzy and we ended up naked.

 “I hope he’s dead,” I said, after she made me come the second time. My eyes burned a gin-drowned blue.

 “Jeez, Holly,” Vicki said. We kissed and combed each other’s hair and slept until noon, and I remembered Suze and the boy in Walnut Hill. I believed I’d forgotten what I wanted to.

 

Roland had to break into my apartment to get me into the plane the next morning. I was flying on Ecstasy and didn’t remember getting off the plane or anything after, until he sobered me up at the Starlight.

“Christ Holly,” he said, “Not sure what you’ve been on, but give it a rest.”

“Leave me alone,” I said. I couldn’t move my head more than an inch without roaring pain.

“I can’t, dear. You’re an award-winning actress now. Courtesy of these guys calling themselves Adult Video Network. Kind of our Oscars, so they say. They’re gonna put on an awards show tomorrow, at MGM Grand. They made you up a little kit, even.”

He passed over a long square envelope, but I let it drop.

“I never heard of these losers, Ro. What is it, some annual jackoff convention?”

His caterpillar mustache jumped a little with laughter. Twenty years later, he’d sell his baby, his cranberry Jaguar XJ6 to cover my bail. Blood cancer got him the year after, the sappy old bastard.

“They’re jackoffs, Holly, sure. But they got a dollar in their pockets.I called the Grand myself to make sure it’s real.”

“Don’t ask me to fuck any of those guys.”

 

At dinner, Mr. Giordano told us all about how his grandpa had invested in the company that’d come up with Chef Boyardee.

“There was a real Chef Boyardee,” he said. “He had this brick restaurant in Cleveland, smelled like gardenias. Folks said man, you gotta let New York taste this.”

“Sounds right,” I said. “Clevelanders always have eaten shit.”

“Holly.” Roland put his liver-spotted hand on mine.

“I gotta piss.” I walked out and caught a cab back to the hotel. There was a line at the concierge, so I went up to my room and called the desk.

“Send the White Pages for Fort Lauderdale to Room 443,” I told the guy. I heard him cup the receiver to his chest for a minute before he came back.

“But this is Las Vegas, ma’am.”

 “I am an award-winning fucking actress,” I screamed.

             An hour later, a bellhop knocked on the door with a beaten-up copy of the Fort Lauderdale White Pages. I’d taken another bump of Ecstasy and I was sure as god that I’d find Jack. I didn’t know his last name, but I knew Colee Hammock and Georgia. The second number I dialed picked up.

“Who is this?” the woman said. That lilt, the extra syllable to “is.” Homecoming queen, belle of the debutante ball. A Georgia alright.

“It’s Holly.”

“You’ve got the wrong number.”

“Wait! Is Jack there?”

“Jack?” 

Long pause. I thought she’d put the phone down. 

“Who the hell—”

“He’s there now, isn’t he? Came back for those oranges? You know I bought him a bag of the best oranges in the world and he didn’t even care.”

The woman breathed on the end of the line for a minute, and when she talked she tried not to cry.

“Just tell me he’s okay, for Christ’s sake.”

 Fear burned, red and blind, in my chest. I tried to slam the phone but missed the cradle. I ran the cord around my arm, tighter and tighter, before crashing the receiver against the tiny white tab on the cradle so many times I could be sure nothing else bad could come through it. 

I stared at the Strip until midnight. Outside my door, people laughed and cheered, and someone clicked a photo. I got up, the last of the tears drying. I pulled out that leather jacket that I’d somehow packed, complete with its blinking rose. I picked up the envelope Roland gave me, took the elevator down to the Starlight lobby, and made my entrance in the hot strip night. 

Glitter Gulch Vickie stretched her boot over the crowd. College kids lounged around a fountain ringed with red licorice lights. The Golden Nugget Casino’s burning yellow wall flared and disappeared, only to come back again. This was all mine. When the years to come were all pretty and spiraling up, up, up, like those voices I’d hear coming out of Trinity Chapel. 

I ripped open the envelope and pulled the thick square card out. A still from Lamplight Lady I hadn’t seen. A straight-on shot of me pouting for the camera. Each strand of my wedge cut pointed just right. My face was perfect. Underneath the image the caption:

 

For Your Consideration

Little Holly Sunset, 1983

 

The neon rose on my jacket blinked faster and faster, in time with the hoop of fire on top of the Grand.  Somehow, I let go of the photo and the next second it was gone, ground under a thousand heels as the whole Strip screamed and clapped at the noise from up the street.

 

 

 

 

 

Timothy Provenzano is a musician, librarian and writer based in Arizona. He earned his MFA in Writing (Fiction) from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Pink Disco Magazine, The Cold Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, and elsewhere. He is working on a novel of Phoenix subculture in the 1990s. Socials: Instagram / Substack