Unbraiding

A story in three strands

Right Strand

Oracles turn and face the wall, uninvited to forecast his doom this time. Insurance agents shield their eyes. No one asked their permission, either. Children at home in separate rooms dreaming age-appropriate themes at thirteen, ten and seven. They were not disturbed from sleep by his near-miss number thirty-three.

Each time, the fall looked brilliant and effectively dangerous against the green screen, but he wasn’t satisfied until he stuck the landing and heard the rebound clap. Everyone from riggers to grips marked the occasion with good, honest cheers reverberating in the giant, hollow cube.

As both star and producer, he could keep them working endless disasters averted, perfectly or not. But his assistant gave him the chime: he has a 5AM appointment. That’s when he gave in and called it a wrap.

Rushing out from the soundstage at 4:43AM, he quickens his pace under inverted twilight, breathing in the pre-smog air of L.A. dawn. Punctuality’s embedded in his brand as much as his unrelenting drive and winning smile — but this extra effort to be on time arises from a deeper consideration. The women are waiting.

For them, this is overtime. Above and beyond their job description.

Lissa greets him warmly when he enters her domain at Hair & Makeup. He appreciates the way she pretends not to be drop-dead exhausted. He’s had her crew running graveyard shifts all week. Nights are not her thing.

“What’s this all about now,” she asks in her wavy London accent. “We’re supposed to teach you something, are we? You old dog.”

Three years senior, Lissa’s been constant since she smoothed paste through the untamable mane he had in his twenties. Hot out of a cannon with his first starring role a crowd-swelling blockbuster, he was blindingly bright and agitated in her chair. To this day he credits her with steering him away from becoming an intolerable prick.

In her space, she’s his chosen matriarch and bastion of stability.

“Have a seat,” she gestures for him to take the chair in front of her big mirror.

“Thank you for doing this. I know it’s a big ask, on short notice.”

“Anything for you, Love,” she doesn’t look happy, but she’s trying. “No reason, I’m sure, we could have done this another time. Perhaps, let’s say, after a beauty nap and light lunch?” He flashes a big grin. Offers no words. “That’s what I thought,” she winks and smiles right back.

“I really appreciate — ”

“Of course you do. Give me a minute. I’ll fetch the girls.”

Yes, he could have scheduled her later. Put Lissa on the books at a more reasonable hour when she hadn’t been on her feet all night.

But he has to squeeze this in now, at the end of his own thirteen-hour shift, so he can get home before the kids wake up and leave for school. It’s non-negotiable. The afternoon won’t work because he’ll need that time to practice before the kids come back. He intends to master it today so he can “crack right on” tomorrow.

He’s not going to show her dailies from the scene at home that spurred his urgent request for the lesson. The gut-wrenching, hour-long, inside-out wailing he couldn’t talk or sing or hug her out of when he tried yesterday and failed. She wasn’t sobbing because his braid was lame, but because her life was not the balanced sweetness she’d been promised. He has a lot of catching up to do.

Lissa returns with two women new to her crew. She introduces them without ceremony. Mei, a twenty-something gal from Vancouver, and Yola, a slightly older, much taller woman from Atlanta.

When he trips up and says, “Nice to meet you, Lola,” Lissa sharply corrects him.

“Yo,” she commands. “As in Yolanda, Doll. Not La-la-la-la-Lola. It’s Yoh-la.”

Meanwhile Mei’s leaning in, close to his face. “What color are they?”

He grins, “What color do you think?”

Banter swiftly elevates as they debate the color of his eyes. It’s not the first time people have disagreed on this point.

Lissa: (annoyed) Brown. They’ve always been brown.

Mei: (snaps back, laughing) No way. You don’t see it? Oolong tea. They’re so green.

Lissa: In twenty years, they’ve never strayed from brown, Doll. Keep your tea; my bet’s on coffee.

Yola: (taps fingertips one at a time against her thumb — 1–2–3–4–5 — in rounds, repeating)

Producer: What’s she doing? With her hands — what is that?

Mei: She’s counting.

Lissa: Syllables.

Mei: Everything’s Haiku with her — she’s writing, you know, on the side. It’s her gig. Five syllables. Two plus three. She’s obsessed.

Producer: No kidding! You just wrote a poem — about my eyes?

Yola: Just a line. (pauses, exudes confidence, then speaks softly with her eyes closed.) Hazel. Hazel are his eyes. (tapping again) His. eyes. bloom. Haze. El.

Mei: You should buy her book.

Producer: I will.

Mei: It’s new — you get it!

Lissa: (interrupting) Shall we? He’s here to learn a new trick, girls, not poetry.

He offers a sparse, unseasoned synopsis to satisfy unasked questions.

Since the divorce, he’s taking up slack. With her mother away, filming on location in Budapest, his daughter needs someone to braid her hair for school. They’re going to teach him how to stand up to that task.

Lissa has Mei trade places with him in the chair, then directs him to start braiding her hair. “Show me how pitiful you are, first, Love. So we know how low to go.”

Even though her own hair’s a more accurate match to his daughter’s weight and wave, she wants him to start with Mei so she can evaluate the skills he has, if any.

“I can handle the basics,” he says, separating Mei’s inky black hair into three strands. “But she’s seven.”

“Misses her mum.” Lissa knows the story.

“Mornings are — .” Failing to sum up eviscerating heartbreak, he weaves a few strands before trying to finish the sentence. “Mornings — especially school days — man, lately, they’re hard.”

“Divorce is hard,” Yola rounds it out, sounding experienced.

“The boys — they’re older, you know. And they’ve been through it before. With their mother, it’s different.”

“They all live with you?” Mei’s impressed. Or possibly, she doesn’t buy it.

He gets that a lot.

“Stick to the braid, girls. He’s not here for tea-chat and therapy.” Lissa won’t tolerate her crew getting personal with the talent. She knows he felt okay asking for help only because he trusts her not to dig or get inside his head.

“That’s good,” she stops his braid half-way. “We’re not starting from zero. You can let that unravel.”

Mei stands, loosens the amateur weave and combs it through.

“What do you think, Boss — show him the Dutch? More interesting than a boring French braid, right?”

Lissa slides into the chair, “No. Yola’s going to teach him something better.”

“Right,” Yola picks up the comb. “We’ll grasp the halo.”

Stepping into daylight an hour later, carrying practice wigs and styrofoam heads, he makes a quick call to his assistant. Magnanimous by nature, he tells her to order copies of Yolanda Somebody’s book for the entire production.

“I want everyone to have it. Give her a big damn audience.” It was the way she connected when he mentioned divorce.

“Are you sure?” She rarely questions his decisions. “Maybe — ?”

“You’re right,” he intuits her point. What if it’s a disaster? “Get a copy to me, then. Send it to the house.”

Center Strand

At home, he stashed the wigs in his office, woke the kids and bugged them until it was time to roll out. The days are long past when The Producer could drive carpool without rousing a menacing swarm of paparazzi.

The boys go together in a hired car, lunches packed to their liking by the overnight custodian. His daughter goes last, ferried in the backseat with her best friend beside her, her friend’s service dog riding shotgun in the front.

Carpool mom, Nadine, caters her lunch, a necessity for which he pays lavishly. She runs a local food co-op and can be trusted to avoid the long list of ingredients that could make his girl deathly ill.

As soon as the custodians are gone, he takes a long, dark shower hot enough to obscure the mirror, throws an oversized towel on the duvet and falls onto it soaking wet. He doesn’t like having housekeepers around when he’s home. Like Chagall darting naked between canvases in his sweaty Paris loft, The Producer prefers to live in his skin whenever possible.

They say Chagall did it to avoid ruining his clothes with paint, but he suspects their motives are more kindred. In his skin, alone with his thoughts and cells fully breathing, he can be sure he’s not being someone else.

Having not slept since nearly this time yesterday, he gives himself a full three hours before the next chime will sound. That should afford enough time to practice on the wigs, thumb through specs and make a few dozen calls before the kids return. He needs to master this braid by tomorrow morning. There’s only one day of school left this week to get this right.

Lissa never weighed in, but he noted the stifled eye-roll when he invited her to his second wedding. She’d spent a lot of time behind the chair with his co-star and had evolved an unspoken bleak assessment of her character.

His first wife, who co-owns the studio with him, didn’t keep silent, but begged him not to marry. When he confided that he’d gotten her pregnant, his ex ran straight to her cohort of oracles and had the tea leaves, bones and feathers read.

The oracles confirmed her dread, but it was too late.

The press had ferreted out the wedding plans and the baby, in secret, had revealed her gender. He was excited to have a girl.

That he lasted a full six years and three months before giving up. This he considers his most bitter success.

If the last three weekends are predictive, her mother won’t call ’til Monday. The director calling shots in Budapest has a motto about giving the crew “time to reset, get drunk, live a life between frames….” Which is why she screws the guy.

And why he fired the guy one week into the only production they ran together.

A man who thinks filmmaking is a drag you need to get away from — who can’t see it’s the peak of peak experiences… he can’t identify. Or respect.

It’s true, not everybody gets it — but some, well they just really don’t.

Why would you need a weekend to get off? Are you kidding? Making movies is so much better than sex. The arousal, being all in — there’s no cap to how turned on he gets without ever stooping to milk a stupid hard-on.

People outside the industry pruriently ask how he gets through sex scenes, nudity, baring it physically. They miss the point.

Sure, that takes some courage. But, man, it’s ALL like that.

Try crying in front of sixty-three people, most of whom are there to do jobs like lighting your face so the tears are in focus while the snot and spit fall behind — or surrounding you with mics to make sure the sound of your sobbing, disconsolate self falling apart is picked up cleanly, so you won’t have to dub over it in post six months later. That crew of people, expertly watching you turn feral with the grief that’s causing your character to make monumentally bad decisions leading to the epiphany that finally turns it around in the third act. Could anything be more naked, more intimate than tearing your soul inside out in service to the story?

It’s tantric.

Visceral.

That small man needs a weekend, to escape from peaks like that?

Outside of filming — and births of his children — the only time real life has gotten close to being compelling were the three weeks he spent in Hawaii with his first wife on the retreat she coerced him to take with that sex guru who’s since gone to jail for tax evasion. There were techniques he was supposed to perfect where the whole point is to almost get her off, for hours, without rushing, or checking out, or giving a damn about his own aching insanity. After marathons of pre-climax pleasure, coming was like paying the check at the end of a bacchanal. Disappointing denouement.

Making movies, the climax always pays in lasting waves of exhilaration.

What he feels when he’s flat out running through a city street at night, tearing around a corner where cops are lined up to keep the crowd hidden so the scene looks clear, organic to the panic his character is building.

Soles of his shoes, irrelevant because he taps power from the ground. Cementing passion down sidewalks grazed in a race to save the vulnerable, unsuspecting victims in the story, he pounds it, binding pure adrenal surges to the reality that he’s the one whose signature is on the dotted lines shuttling hundreds of thousands of dollars for permits, light crews and security, liability, feasibility underscoring the rental of a city block before the sun comes up.

They can own a goddamned city block — they get to do this stuff — and that guy thinks he needs a Friday and a Saturday and a whole Sunday to regain his pulse?

He needs to UN-wind from the greatest wind-up so he can taste food again and come like a man? How could he be so lax?

Every line of dialogue is a stroke arousing him. No erection, no cock-limited turn-on could compete with the non-sexual, perpetual climax of fleshing out stories to connect with and excite millions of fans who save up all week to spill their popcorn on that ride.

He breathes.

And shrugs.

The guy’s a director. He’s never acted. Not really. He’s important but he’s not inside the experience, being penetrated. By that omission, he can be forgiven for wanting to set aside frivolous time to screw the actress who is — was — The Producer’s wife.

Let down.

He turns over. Why is he letting these thoughts keep him awake?

Because she’s with him and there’s a little one at home who isn’t handling that so well.

Long breaks between contact with her mother’s voice has been a recurring source of weakly scripted gloom. An overripe distraction from her sweet, giddy disposition. If he can give his daughter something tangible to glow about with friends on Friday, that joy might extend a day or two, enough to be a preemptive remedy.

And so this afternoon he’ll practice. The halo.

He’ll master it the way he’s mastered jumping off of buildings, springing on the wire, testing the gods who soon applaud.

Last Strand

The halo braid’s a complicated feat. It crowns the head with strands circling and hovering above the surface rather than hiding, nested by the mane. When he worked with Lissa’s even tresses and the borrowed wigs of equal length and texture, every tendril tucked in neatly.

Things didn’t go as smoothly with his daughter’s hair at 7AM.

Loose, uneven strands kept slipping, drooping or darting out like spikes zapped with electrical charges. He stopped and started over three times before deciding to complete the circle first, then tend to her unruly strays.

For a girl her age, she was remarkably patient, letting him work in earnest while she focused on scenes from The Secret Garden.

By the time he finished, they had to hustle to get her teeth brushed and sequined sneakers tied, so it’s only now that The Producer is catching his breath.

Standing at the window, watching her walk out to the car, he appraises the halo as a thing of beauty, reflective of the girl it adorns.

Things were touch and go in her first weeks of life with multiple long stays in the ICU at Kaiser. Surgeries proceeded like hellish seasons for three years until they finally entered a clearing. He began to sleep in his own bed again, secure that she would make it through nights, dreaming safely on her own.

That was the point in his career when he decided to level up. It was time to shift from the one embodying mere lines to be the one running the world in which the scene took place.

She’s buckled in now, chatting with her friend in the back of the Lexus. He notices the service dog’s absent, which means her best friend won’t be at school today. And there’s something else — an awkward delay.

Nadine’s usually in a hurry to peel out so she can get to her store before the dawn shift clocks out. But her car’s in park and they’re not rolling.

From the kitchen window through jasmine and eucalyptus, it’s hard to see what’s happening. All he can be sure of when she finally puts the car in drive is that the halo has been taken down.

It will be many hours before Nadine decides to call.

“She loved it so, so much,” she’ll be apologetic. “It was so very pretty — but the pins you used to hold it together, well, she was in tears.” This pause will momentarily gut him. “See, she didn’t want to hurt your feelings. We had to take them out. They just were in too tight. You’d have to be a girl to understand.” How much she loved but could not bear the braid.

Minutes before she called, Yola’s book arrived by courier. He leafed through pages while Nadine went on about the bobby pins. Her script was overwritten.

The page he gazed into when they hung up revealed three lines which, in their pith at first discouraged him, then set him straight:

Petals peel open Nothing on the surface can Braid my heart to yours

He’d have to go deeper. Find another way to make it stick, apply a different form.

This was just one take. One of many takes gone wrong, poorly executed. The actor didn’t fully understand the scene. So this is when the production pivots and supports him, hones his skill, trusts compassion.

Oracles need not be consulted. This future win has roots far below the surface.

It may be days between takes, but he’ll get this part right — and prove her syllables wise, yet falsely certain.

Loosen.

Stretch.

Allow the strands room to lift and fly rather than tuck in, pinned down in service to a stiffened crown. Unravel. This impossible production he so lovingly green lighted.