Chapter 11
The cheering begins as we drive around the block to the red carpet that’s been laid out.
Juniper and I emerge, and I can hear people shouting my name, so I try to look and wave at the folks calling to me, but there are so many people.
They’re pressed against a barricade, and cops are stationed every few feet to make sure the barricades don’t fall.
Juniper walks over and starts taking selfies with fans, and I do the same for a while, and someone shouts, “I love you Kai Laramie,” so I shout back, “I love you too,” which I guess I kind of do.
Movies need fans, and I’m grateful that we have so many for this one.
I’ve gotten almost accustomed to the sound when Matthew arrives behind us, gets out of the car with his bodyguards, and the cacophony really begins, with people screaming for pictures and autographs.
Matthew just waves and shouts, “I love you, Paris! Je t’aime! Je t’aime!”
I make my way to the red carpet with the step-and-repeat behind me featuring the movie’s logo.
I stand there in my suit as a dozen photographers shout at me to look this way and now here and chin down please.
I don’t know what to do with my hands. After a minute, Juniper shows up and we take some pictures together, and then I make way for her to do her solo shots.
Ellen brings me back to the carpet when Matthew arrives, and he’s got his arm around both Juniper and me and without breaking his smile says, “Just let ’em turn you into an object. ”
Farther down the carpet, cameras are set up to do interviews.
It’s hard to tell what anyone is saying to me in the interviews because of their accents and the noise behind us, but I struggle through.
Ellen’s behind me, just off camera. I think about how Ellen’s dress is meant to make her disappear into the background, while my suit is made to pop.
An interviewer asks me how I’m finding Paris and I say, “It’s lovely.
I want to move here,” even though all I’ve seen is the Eiffel Tower and the insides of hotel rooms. I take a step down the carpet and another interviewer is there and asks, “Juniper just said she loves you. Do you also love her?”
Juniper jumps in then, her arms around me, and says, “Yeah, Kai, do you?” I’m surprised by her presence on my back. Touch without warning always makes me anxious. I’m looking at the interviewer, and then at the camera lens, and then back at the interviewer. “I am a little overwhelmed right now.”
Ellen grabs me. “You’re starting to look panicked,” and I say, “Yeah,” and she says, “You know what, let’s skip the rest of the interviews and get you inside.”
_____
Inside the theater: Red carpet on the floor.
Arches above. Painted ceiling. This is a classy movie palace, probably from the early twentieth century.
I tell myself all the things I’m supposed to when I get scared: Come into your body.
Notice whatever there is to notice. Your feet are on the floor, in Prada shoes that are a bit too tight.
You can hear the noise outside, but it’s at least a little deadened.
Smell the popcorn. How is the air on your skin?
Stale, slightly warm. Where are you? Paris.
Are you with someone you love? Yes. Okay.
Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
I can’t stop sweating. Hate sweating. It reminds me that my body is mammalian.
There’s a concession counter up ahead with prepackaged containers of popcorn.
Ellen grabs one, asks me if I want a drink, and I say Do they have whiskey, and she says For the star of the movie they do, and a minute later she appears with a plastic glass full of whiskey and ice.
I’m calming down. I know I shouldn’t use alcohol this way, but it does the job.
The thing about alcohol is it quells my anxiety in the short run and worsens my anxiety in the long run.
This is also the thing about weed, and the thing about Instagram.
I take a long drink. It burns my throat going down. “We can go to our seats,” she says.
I find the seat marked Kai Laramie, next to the one marked Juniper Castillo. Juniper shows up a few minutes later and sits down next to me, and just the smell of her calms me down. “You’re stunning,” I tell her, and she blushes.
The theater fills with people—hundreds of them. We’re in the sixth row, and so almost everyone is behind us, but people keep coming up and congratulating us, wanting to shake our hands.
Matthew stands at the front of the theater, his shadow double his size, crawling up the screen.
He thanks everyone for coming. “I was in Portugal last year,” he says, “and I visited an old ossuary—a place where the bones of the dead are stored. They were stacked high, room after room full of our ancestors. And in one room an inscription on a small tablet read, ‘These are the bones that wait for your bones.’ Warhol’s bones wait for ours, but he is also with us, now, more than ever, in an image-saturated world.
I’m so proud of this film, and especially of the brilliant young people at its heart—Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo.
I love them, and after watching this film, I know you will, too. ”
The applause begins as the credits start to roll. There’s especially loud clapping for Matthew, of course, but both Juniper and I get some as well when our names flash up on the screen.
I’m not so much watching the movie as I am listening to hundreds of people watch it; the way the energy shifts in the room during the nightclub scene where Juniper’s bleeding all over me, the way people laugh at Andy’s dry humor, and especially the weeping as Warhol dies and the news reaches us.
When the Lou Reed song that Juniper hates plays, the whole place is crying, including me, and then the movie ends and everyone immediately stands up and starts applauding.
Juniper is still holding my hand even though it’s sweaty, and she pulls me up with her to wave at the crowd, and then we go up to the front and sit between Kathryn and Matthew and answer some British reality TV star’s questions about the movie, and then I take a shot of whiskey backstage from a flask that Matthew’s handing around because my brain is flooded with all kinds of chemicals I’ve never felt before, and then Juniper and I are in a hotel room, taking very nice clothes off each other.
_____
Juniper and I end the night by closing down the hotel’s rooftop bar.
It’s warm in Paris, and we’ve got a hell of a view of the city.
She tells me about being a kid, about the little pool in her LA apartment complex, and how there would always be other kids swimming in the pool who were also in town for pilot season.
She tells me that her mom would get so drunk at the pool that Juniper worried she would drown, and I tell her that she really didn’t get a chance to be a kid at all, and she says that we’re still just kids.
I tell her about growing up in Indianapolis, how I did summer stock at Butler University and only felt like I was myself onstage or on the field. Had to be playing.
Talking to Juniper is the opposite of talking to a reporter.
_____
On the plane the next morning I can’t sleep.
I don’t know exactly what I’m feeling, but I’m feeling a lot of it.
I’m trying to watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the little screen.
The flight attendant keeps filling my wineglass with cabernet, and I keep drinking it.
Across the aisle from me, I can see Juniper sleeping.
I want to sleep with her again, but I also don’t.
The thought of having sex again kind of submerges me.
Sex is so physical, so organism-y, so base.
I think about how she told me once that after men have you, they don’t want you anymore.
I don’t want to be that kind of man, but I’m terrified I’m going to be.
I always recoil in the face of actual intimacy.
It is so easy to say I love you, and so hard to let myself feel it.
Finally I fall asleep. I wake up vaguely hungover as we’re descending.
_____
“You’ll have two hours at the hotel.” Ellen is talking at me on the drive to the Mandarin Oriental.
“Hair and makeup will come at two p.m., then you are in the car by four, then we walk the carpet. Screening starts at six and then the panel will be at 8:05. Then there’s the party, and you can leave that whenever you want and then, my friend, you are free.
You have one night at the hotel to do with as you please, and then you are no longer my ward and we just wait to see if anyone actually shows up to see this movie. ”
Ellen’s always talking logistics, and it occurs to me that I haven’t really had freedom of movement since that week between the audition and the junket, that I’ve been on someone else’s schedule the whole time. But it’s crazy to complain about my job. Shameful, even.
Anyway, all that’s going through my head when we arrive at the Mandarin Oriental and Juniper texts me my place or yours, and I go to her room and we have sex and then call for room service.
“You okay?” Juniper asks while her head is against my fast-beating chest.
“Yeah,” I say, although during the sex I’d been stuck in my head.
“Our movie is premiering tonight,” she says. “People will see it starting Friday. We fucking did it.”