“You’re the bird?” I ask.
“I prefer misunderstood velociraptor on Ozempic,” Teddy says. “We’re living in PC times now, Barry.”
“So you did make a decision?” she asks me, raising a dark brow.
“Undecided,” I repeat.
I toss her my cell and jump into the pool.
I stop outside the saloon in the middle of the dusty, narrow street in Pioneertown. I skew my eyes on the swinging doors, half expecting a drunken, crooked sheriff in a ten-gallon hat and curled moustache to stumble out and challenge me to a quick-draw duel.
But this morning, Pioneertown is a ghost town.
The once-vibrant real-life movie set—founded in 1946 by a group of Hollywood investors with dreams of creating an 1870s frontier town with facades like saloons and jails for filming movie and TV Westerns—has been nothing but dust since the days Roy Rogers and Gene Autry rode on horses down these same dusty trails. Today, it is a tourist destination for Palm Springs locals heading to Joshua Tree National Park to hike. Soon, however, Pioneertown will serve as the Ozarks setting forBilly’s Back, where many of the movie’s key scenes will be filmed.
I can see signs of life already: Trailers—filled with equipment, soon to be homes to actors, ground zero for the crew and caterers—line the periphery. Cranes sway in the gusts that blow through the mountain pass of the high desert, the wind whistling like a passing train.
A few years back, I was hired to do a commercial in Pioneertown for Desert Kia. My role was that of a rugged cowboy, and I was in a duel to the death with high auto prices. I, of course, came out victorious in the commercial but left feeling as if my long-suffering career had finally taken a shot to the heart.
I did my own makeup for the commercial. The “director” was the car dealer’s twenty-year-old daughter who used her cell phone because she said she wanted the commercial to feel “gritty and real” and not because the total budget for the shoot—including my salary and lunch of McNuggets for the “crew” of three—was less than five hundred dollars.
I move into the middle of the street to reenact the scene.
“Now,” I say to myself in a low, menacing growl, “it is time for you to die, high prices!”
I drag the toe of my shoe through the dirt to make a line, step on one side of it and take ten paces, counting off as I go:
“One, two, three...”
I spin, and when I yell, “Ten!” I turn.
The saloon doors swing open.
Kyle appears in tight jeans and an even tighter T-shirt. He lifts his right hand and makes a gun with his fingers.
“Bang!” he yells.
I act as if I have been shot. I stagger backward, dust billowing around my feet.
Kyle races toward me and grabs me before I collapse to the ground.
“I win,” he says. “Again.”
He takes me into his arms and leans me back as if I weigh little more than a feather. Kyle looks into my eyes.
“One final kiss before you die.”
Kyle’s dimples flash, and my legs grow weak. I suddenly feel like every female costar, every fan—gay or straight—who has dreamed Kyle Moses would be staring deep into their eyes, uttering those same words.
His lips are on mine, and I am no longer on this earth, but floating somewhere high above the high desert.
Kyle pulls me to my feet.
“I saved you,” he says. “Now you owe me your life.”
My life? Is that the price I will pay for selling myself to do this movie?
I search Kyle’s eyes.
