I walk over to the back of the studio where there’s a table with bottles upon bottles of the s
I walk over to the back of the studio where there’s a table with bottles upon bottles of the stuff all neatly lined up, although you can tell from the arrangement of the rows that there are six missing. I grab a seventh, and am already standing back next to Mike by the time he turns to me to say, “Hey, can we get the kid another one? He’s – oh. Cool.” He takes the bottle from me and hands it to his assistant, who runs up to where the model’s sitting and switches it out for the empty. The poor kid looks down at it like he really doesn’t need his seventh bottle in two hours, but Mike tells him to come on, and so he opens it and starts taking a swig – the things twenty year-olds will get over for money – as Mike starts shooting again.Mike’s a friend, yeah, but he’s also good at his job. We’ve worked together before, on a bunch of stuff, some commercial, some editorial, some – okay, most – commertorial. He’s worked with them before, too – we met when he did the stills for the very first Kluggoth & Sanderson campaign – which makes it easier all around, considering. In fact, I’ve hired him to shoot the cast next week for the lead up to the reunion special. Although, truth be told, even though Mike is gonna be around for that I’m not looking forward to it: fame’s made Clark Jeffries, the then-unknown actor the network had tapped to play the hotshot rookie detective Brock Sanderson, into a self-entitled prick.Which is nothing like he was when they started shooting the show, back in the day. Normally marketing wouldn’t have needed to be involved until there was actually something to, you know, market, but they hadn’t done a lot of TV yet (this was fifteen years ago, when I was fresh out of B-school), and they were nervous. And, in some ways, the process of making the thing and the fact of the thing being made (it was the first prime-time drama featuring a ceph lead) was as much the product they wanted to sell as the show itself. So I was there on the first day of shooting – not a lot of other people would touch their accounts back then, but I was just as young and hungry as Jeffries – and I remember him walking out of his dressing room and onto the set, and I remember the look in his eyes when he first saw the ceph they’d selected to play Kluggoth, and I remember how he swallowed his pride, walked over, and reached out to shake his hand.Like I say, the things twenty year-olds will get over for money.It’s a cycle, I guess, from fear to fascination, with money (and marketing) in between to grease the skids. Thirty-odd years in – I was five when they arrived, when I heard my mom scream from the kitchen and I ran in from the back yard to see her pointing to the TV, where the new episode of The Love Boat had been preempted for the image of their ships, mottled and green and ovoid, hovering over New York and Moscow and Beijing – and they’ve gone from being terrifying to being trendy, kids in the Midwest who’ve never seen a ceph in their life talking like they just got back from Pacific Colony. And, judging from the preliminary production numbers I’ve heard, they expect Brine™ to ride the wave of that trendiness, the wave that I’ll help orchestrate: I do my job right, and a year from now Brine’s special saline formula will be the cool – sorry, the surd – new drink, the only way for athletic young men (between the ages of 18-35, with income in the appropriate brackets) to hydrate.They might want to go easy on all that salt, though; the kid looks like he’s starting to feel it, dripping sweat under all those lights and all that promotional Brine gear. Sweat, and – well, I mean the bulge in his shorts when Mike calls a break and he stands unsteadily to his feet suggests that the puddle he’s left where he was sitting isn’t all sweat. Mike and his assistant exchange glances, and then go back to changing lenses, and so the kid comes over to me.“How’re you doing, Peter?”“Okay,” he says. I frown, and he smiles gamely, and wanly. “No, I mean I’m good. It’s just – I mean, it’s hot in here, right?” He reaches up and wipes his slick forehead with the back of his hand, shaking his head like he’s trying to clear it.I give him a commiserating smile and lean in. “I know. But we’ve gotta give the clients” – here I jerk my head to the far, dark corner of the studio – “what they want, and one of the things they want is a constant seventy-eight degrees! Here.” I grab a towel off my chair and hand it to him. “Why don’t you go freshen up a little?” He takes the towel, but he looks at it, and at me, with unfocused eyes, like he’s forgotten what it’s used for. Like he never knew. I give him clearer, more explicit directions, pointing toward the small bathroom in the back, and shake my head as I watch him walk unsteadily toward it.By the time the bathroom door closes, Gridditch is out of the shadows and by my side.“There is no label?” he asks, and gestures toward the bottle Peter left up front, now lying empty on the floor.“Mike wanted it clean in the shot, to show the color.” He nods. Sure, it’s also true that we don’t have the label design finalized, but he doesn’t need to know that.“The model. He is alright?”“Yeah,” I shrug. “The lights are hot, is all.” He nods again – we both know what’s what – and I offer him a Brine from the table, and he takes it up delicately and precisely. He suggests I have one, and I have to pause a minute before I realize he’s joking; even though we worked together for years on Octo-Rangers – “teaching kids about fun, friendship, and counting in base 8!” – I’m always surprised by just how sharp and pointed his sense of humor can be. No, of course I’m not going to have one, and we’re both still laughing at the idea when Peter comes back out of the bathroom.He looks even worse; we all heard the sound of his piss against porcelain go on for far longer than it had any right to, and he’s still covered in a thin sheen of sweat, his eyes and cheeks sunken from the loss of so many fluids. He’s also still hard, impossibly hard, and I’m sure he’d have tried to get it to go down if he had the energy or will. He certainly didn’t have either: there’s a string of pre that must have dripped out through the leg of his shorts, and it’s still there, plastered to his thigh, to his calf, gleaming and tacky in the blue light. He shuffles over to us, Gridditch turns, and Mike and I share a glance. He whispers something to his assistant, and they set down their cameras and leave the room quietly.“Peter,” I say, “I’d like you to meet the clients’ representative. Peter Thompson, this is Gridditch; Gridditch, Peter Thompson.” Peter stands stilly, dumbly; he’s had enough Brine that he needs to be told what to do. “Shake his hand, Peter.”He blinks his dry, bleary eyes and holds out a weak hand – poor boy’s about to fall over, but this is his big break, and muscle memory is helping. Gridditch takes it, wrapping a strong, thick tentacle around Peter’s thinly muscled wrist. He shakes it and Peter’s whole body sways gently with the motion, and then a second tentacle joins the first, and then a third, and then others, but elsewhere, and I step backwards, into the shadows, and you can hardly hear the moaning over the sound of wet, smacking flesh. -- source link