#03 HOLLYWOOD EXTINCTION EVENT

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I requested Corso again as a favorite driver and he accepted. So, even though he had forced me to get out of his car, I guess we were friends again, sort of. My latest trip for work was to Vancouver. Indie feature to direct. Only ten shoot days, if I stayed on schedule. Paid nearly nothing, but it was a movie.

As I stood waiting for Corso, I thought about how movies are for voyeurs. People watching other people’s business. Directors, especially the men, became highbrow Peeping Toms, watching women. It corrupted those men: Seeing women as visuals to enjoy on a big screen. Even Hitchcock could give Jimmy Stewart binoculars and turn him into a perv. Take a look at Rear Window; you’ll see what I mean.

I didn’t share this highbrow stuff with Corso, but I had watched the The Blob since we last rode together, and I understood more. It signified the existential threats of the era. Communists. Atom bombs. So maybe I was the highbrow asshole and he saw things more clearly.

I changed my mind about that just a few minutes after I got in the car.

“Take this.” He handed me a digital recorder, reaching over the seat. “I recorded people who rode with me. A baby-ass screenwriter. A development exec. An agent and a personal manager. Listen to them. They’re all on the card.”

“Did you get consent to record these conversations?”

“No,” he answered, “of course not.”

I humphed and threw up my hands. “That’s a felony in California. Recording without consent.”

“Actually, it can be a misdemeanor or a felony at the discretion of the prosecutor. But I don’t care. I’m going to find the turn-off. I can feel it.”

He went into a monologue, saying that all the drivers were talking about this “turn-off.” You had to get the right passenger and take the right road. Then you would drive into an alternative history of Hollywood.

I was fairly certain that he had lost his mind. He had driven right off some kind of mental cliff. Too many hours behind the wheel, something like that.

In the rearview, he read my eyes perfectly. “Okay, you think I’m crazy. But the drivers are talking about this. Too many of them are all telling the same story for it not to be true.”

I didn’t know what to say. I still held his audio recorder in my hand. It was a top-of-the-line Zoom H6. “This is a nice recorder.” My words sounded hollow.

“Don’t worry about me and don’t pity me. I’ll be okay after the turn-off,” he said. “Time will be on an alternative track. An alternative history of Hollywood! I’m hoping for the 1970s, but with the studios majority female-owned, plenty of jobs for female directors, and more people of color getting to tell their stories.”

I still didn’t know what to say. “Have you been watching too much Star Trek?”

It was a stupid remark I’d made. Racist, sexist, both.

Corso closed down and his eyes went cold and flicked away from me. He focused on the road.

I tried to reach him again. “When will you know when you’ve found the turn-off?”

“I won’t. I’ll just be gone,” he said without eye contact. “I’ll probably disappear from the app.”

There was silence. Teslas drive quiet. “What airline?” he asked.

“Air Canada,” I answered.

After I got out with my carry-on bag, he leaned across the front seat and the passenger side window went down. He caught my eye and said, “Listen to those conversations.”

I nodded and walked away. I didn’t understand what had just happened. I might never see Corso again. Something was in my eye. I wiped away the moisture.

TO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT STORY. SUBSCRIBE