The disinterested actor finally looked up from his copy ofSuperman Unchainedand cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Put the damn book down and concentrate! I need a hard-onright now!” Allen bellowed.
Meanwhile, Ebenezer was off on a rant, tearing around the set, fully out of control. “I’ll bet nobody treats Ryan Reynolds or Hugh Jackman this way! Nobody pulls Denzel Washington out of the room like a bad schoolboy to take a lecture!” He picked up a plaster cast of some Greek sculpture and threw it, smashing it against the wall dividing the bedroom set from the kitchen set and leaving a big hole between the two. “Nobody tells Brad Pitt the problems on set are all his fault!”
Ebenezer picked up another plaster doodad and flung it, narrowly missing Allen’s head.
“Ebbie! Get yourself under control! Nobody said everything is your fault. We’ll dub in another guy’s cock, like I said. And the next scene is you fucking his ass, and we don’t even need to show his face for that! Come on, Ebbie! Be reasonable!” Allen begged. “It’s almost Christmas!”
“No. I will not be treated this way anymore! I quit! Do you hear me? I quit. This picture, this industry, and this fucking holiday! I retire!”
With that, Ebenezer spun around and marched off the set and out of the hangar, fully expecting someone to try to stop him.
But nobody did. Not that he noticed. At least, not yet.
The bite of a cold wind couldn’t even break through his hot rage to remind Ebenezer that he was running outside with only a very short robe on — one that didn’t cover his dangly bits.
He stalked through the parking lot, got to his car, and only then when he went to check his pockets for his keys, did he discover he didn’t have any pocketsorkeys — and that he realized he was half naked.
It dawned on him then that he would need to skulk back to the set to retrieve his clothes, shoes, and keys. It was mortifying, but he’d show them how good an actor he was by walking in with his head held high and ignoring their whispers. Let them talk. Let them bitch. Allen would be on the phone before sunset, begging him to come back.
He hurried the way he’d come, much more aware of the wind’s bite and his exposed bits and pieces on the way in than he’d been on the way out. That’s what they got for filming in Canada, where it was less expensive than Hollywood — cold dicks and frozen asses. Although he admitted he’d done movies in the U.S. where the sets were so cheaply designed they probably could’ve filmed in the bathroom of a 7-Eleven and still got the same quality shot. The business was the business, he thought, no matter where they filmed. That’s what you got with Allen’s company — either better quality and a frozen cock, or terrible quality and possibly hepatitis.
Maybe he wouldn’t even come back when Allen called. Maybe he’d go rogue. Get an agent. Make movies you could take your grandma to see.
Oh, no fucking way. I’m not starting all over again. I didn’t work all these years to end up playing a corpse on CSI.
Taking a deep breath, he centered himself, then lifted his chin and stalked inside the hangar.
Where nobody noticed him at all.
They’d gotten the fluffer to take his place as Santa.
Thefluffer.
And what was even worse, they’d traded out the straight guy they’d hired to play the college boy with one of the cameramen, who was having the time of his fucking life. His cock looked hard enough to split a coconut. The fluffer must’ve chosen the right internship after all.
The speed at which they’d replaced him gave him pause and doused his rage. In its place rose a thick plume of regret.
The scene was underway, and everyone’s attention was on the action happening on the bed. Nobody even noticed he’d returned.
He quietly crept into his dressing room, feeling like an impostor, and gathered his things. He threw on a pair of pants, a T-shirt, his coat, and sneakers. He stuffed the rest into a duffle bag, which he carried out with him.
Refusing to look back at the set where the action was going hot and heavy, he walked steadily out of the hangar again and never looked back.
Chapter 2
Gorg found himself facing an important decision. One that would impact his entire trip, and possibly decide the future of his home movie screening parties.
He could turn right and head into the Andromeda Galaxy, or left, into the Milky Way Galaxy. There wasn’t much to do ineitherGalaxy that he knew of, but he’d been to Andromeda a couple of times already on school trips. It was quite beautiful but so boring one would want to bash one’s own head in with a mallet after a week or two.
He decided to go left to the Milky Way. He’d learned in his Astronomy 101 class back in his University days that it had one hundred billion planets and four hundred billion stars. That should keep him busy for a while.
And that was the sole purpose of this trip after all — to find something interesting to do. He was bored; bored with his job, bored with his planet, his friends, his family, and his lifein general. Nothing ever varied. One day was as dull as the one before it and the promise of the one after was just as tedious.
Every day when the three suns rose in the morning, he’d get up out of his bed, eat breakfast — if he was fast enough and interested enough to catch it — shower, dress, and go to work at his job where he would stare at a screen all day looking for anomalies in numbers that were never there. He’d never caught an error, not once in all the moon cycles he’d worked there. The data entry people were too damn efficient, in his opinion. Would it kill them to throw him a bone once in a while and make a mistake?
But they never did, and life went on with its boring parade of monotony. Hence why he decided to go on this little trip to a different galaxy instead of taking part in his family’s usual vacation trek to the shores of the Great Purple Inland Sea.
