Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 15

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Come Back, Shane, Mother Wants You.
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Part 15 of the 30 part series

Updated 08/30/2017
Created 12/16/2014
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Shane and Carmen: The Novelization

Chapter 15 Come Back Shane, Mother Wants You

On the alternate weekends that they were in town and at home, Shane and Carmen attended the Sunday morning brunch services at The Planet, the one time during the week when all the Friends gathered together in fellowship to share gossip, catch up with each other, commiserate, trade fashion advice, news and tips, comfort each other (as necessary), and discuss sex, life, love and women in all their many forms and ramifications. When Carmen had been with Jenny she had attended these church services and became acquainted with the liturgy and all the celebrants at the table. Now that she lived with Shane as her partner and lover, she was a fully vested member of the choir. She not only loved each and every member of the group as they loved her in return, she fit in extraordinarily well. She was kind, polite, well-spoken, funny, playful, smart, compassionate, plain-speaking. She had no pretense about her, never played mind games, and was never bitchy or catty. She was cheerful, enthusiastic, exuberant, supportive. She was wonderful company, a good talker and a better listener. No one doubted she was the best thing that had ever happened to Shane. She was a Boy Scout with a vagina.

Without actually comparing notes and without having any appreciation of Carmen's sexual skills, tastes and abilities, both Tina and Alice came independently to the same conclusion, that Carmen was the single-most-perfect lesbian ever created. Be that as it may, in the beginning nobody in the group -- except Shane, who never considered the question -- thought Carmen would last a month, and when she was gone they knew they'd miss her. Amazingly, she had already lasted three months with Shane, with no signs of trouble on the horizon. Alice had Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not on speed-dial.

"Hey, guys, there you are!" Alice greeted the happy couple as they walked into The Planet late one Sunday morning. Alice, Dana, Tina and Bette were already seated around "their" table, the one Kit kept reserved for them no matter what.

Kit came over and insisted on giving them hugs. "My sugah sugahs," she said happily. "Okay, everybody's here now around my table, Mama's happy all her precious daughters are here! Sunday services can now begin! Please turn to page 147 in your menus and we'll all sing the opening appetizer."

"So how was Santa Barbara?" Tina asked, knowing that's where Shane and Carmen had spent the previous weekend.

"It was great," Carmen said. "We stayed at this terrific bed-and-breakfast." She described their romantic weekend being tourists and visiting antique stores and vintage clothing shops. Shane sat back in her chair. Her eyes were half-closed (for she was not fully awake yet, it only being 11 a.m.), and she basked in the company of those she loved, listening to Carmen tell her tale.

"I'm so jealous of your getaway trips," Tina said. "Santa Barbara. Catalina, San Diego, uh ... ."

"Hearst Castle," Shane said. "Big Bear Lake."

"I'm telling you, you guys are like the Traveling Wilburys," Alice said.

"Well, we have so much fun on these trips," Carmen said. "You guys should come with us."

"We would, if we could get away," Tina said. "And now we've got Angelica. I'm not sure what kind of romantic weekend it'd be, two couples and a baby. It'd cramp your style."

"I'm stuck here, in training and then going off on tournaments," Dana said.

"I know," Alice said, mournfully. "But hey, tell us," -- she lowered her voice conspiratorially -- "how many times do you guys have hot monkey sex on these romantic weekend trips? How many orgasms?"

Carmen and Shane looked at each other for a moment, and Shane shrugged. "You talking about vaginal, or just clitoral?"

Everyone laughed.

"But to answer your question, Alice," Shane continued, "I'd say 'Not very often.' We're usually too busy sight-seeing and stuff. What would you say, Car? Once in the morning, before breakfast. One after, if the weather's bad."

"One right after lunch," Carmen picked up with a straight face. "Then a long nap. Another one again right before cocktails. That one's usually in the shower before we dress for dinner. Then, what? Twice after dinner."

"Sounds right," Shane said.

"One in the surf, and once up on the beach, naked, in the moonlight."

"One in the shower back in our room, washing the sand off."

"Plus the goodnight fuck."

"Oh, right, absolutely. The goodnight fuck. That's always one of the best."

Alice shook her head as Dana leaned forward and deliberately banged her head on the edge of the table half a dozen times, and everybody laughed.

"So," Tina said. "Sounds like you guys are slowing down, then, am I right? Because at the beginning, there, you were going at it hot-and-heavy."

"Oh, I'll say," Bette added. "We had to call the cops on them three times that first week after Carmen moved in. There were screams coming from next door all night long. I thought it was the Tate-LaBianca Murders all over again. It sounded like Charles Manson was slaughtering somebody over there." Everyone laughed, including Shane and Carmen, who actually blushed.

"One night I said to Tina, 'Listen, what's that sound?' It's 11:30 at night. It sounded like waves pounding on the rocks during a storm. We go to the kitchen and look out the back window at the pool, and there's these massive two-foot, three-foot waves lapping out of our pool all over the deck. It's these two, fucking in our pool. Out of the darkness I hear Carmen yell, 'Surf's up!' and then this one" -- she gestured with her thumb at Shane -- "this one yells out, 'Thar she blows!' It was like Jaws was back there bumfucking Shamu."

Everyone was laughing so hard Kit came out of the kitchen to see what she'd missed.

"Bette," Shane said when she could talk, "if you thought you saw a whale's spout back there, I can promise you that was no whale spout!"

Everyone howled, and Carmen turned to Shane and wacked her on the arm. "Shane!" she said, "I can't help it if you make me squirt!"

Laughing and fanning herself with a menu, Kit went back into the kitchen murmuring, "Oh, my, oh my, oh my."

***

Later, when things had settled down and their sandwiches and salads had arrived, Tina said, "Shane, I've been meaning to tell you. The film school at the California University is having a film festival in a couple of weeks. The theme is on classic western movies, and they're going to be showing Shane."

"I'm sure Shane has seen it a hundred times, until she's sick of it," Dana said.

"Actually, I never have seen it," Shane said, sipping her soda. "Didn't want to."

Carmen's head snapped around and her jaw dropped. "Really? Shane, are you kidding me? You've never seen Shane? That's incredible. That movie is probably your namesake. I never knew you'd never seen it!"

"Nope. Never have."

"Shane, we have got to go! That's what we'll do for our getaway, we'll go to the film festival at Cal U. Shane, that's like one of the best cowboy flicks of all time. I can't believe you never saw it. I know you've heard that line, right? 'Come back, Shane, come back! Mother wants you.'"

"Yeah, sure, I've heard it all my life. And I don't especially like it. That's why I never saw the movie."

"Okay, I can get that," Carmen said. "But still, you've got to see this movie, and I'm going to take you. Shane, it's one of my all-time favorite movies, and I have this special connection to it. There's this little boy in it named Joey, played by Brandon De Wilde. He's the one who is shouting at Shane to come back. And he's was so cute and so precious and he was only nine years old when they filmed it, and he got a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for this part."

Shane was laughing. "All right, Carmen, all right! Jesus. What's your special connection?"

Carmen turned somber. "Brandon De Wilde died when he was only thirty years old. He was in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, driving his motorcycle at three in the afternoon, in a rainstorm. They were installing a new guard rail around a curve, and the installation truck was stopped in the road. Going around the curve in the rainstorm Brandon hit the guard rail, and then hit the tractor trailer truck. He was trapped in the wreckage for a couple hours before they could get him out. He died that night in the hospital. At the time of the accident he was on his way to that hospital to visit his wife. They'd only been married for three months."

Nobody said anything.

"My dad also died in a motorcycle accident, on his way to the hospital to visit my mom," Carmen continued. "He was coming home from work, in a rainstorm, on the outskirts of Cancun. His bike went off the road and into the jungle, and they didn't find him for two days. Like Brandon De Wilde, my dad was thirty years old when he died."

"Brandon's father," Carmen said, trying hard to control her voice, "was also an actor, but mostly he was a stage manager, on Broadway. His name was Frederick De Wilde, and he was stage manager for a lot of famous plays and musicals you'd all have heard of. Bus Stop. A Man for All Seasons. Come Blow Your Horn. I guess you could say he did a lot of production assistant work, kinda like I do. At any rate, Brandon's father died in 1980. So did my father, also in 1980, a few months before I was born."

Carmen sniffled, and dried her eyes with a paper napkin.

"Okay," Shane said quietly, rubbing her hand on Carmen's back. "I'll go see your movie."

***

The film festival was being held from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon in the Peggy Peabody Auditorium at Cal U. and was administered by the university's film school, which had chosen westerns as the theme for the festival that year, having done drama, comedy and science-fiction film festivals the previous years. One aspect of the festival was that it encouraged the audience to come dressed in costume appropriate to that year's theme, so Carmen used her movie studio connections to borrow ten-gallon Stetson hats and fringed, traditional cowboy shirts for Shane and herself. Shane thought it was a little corny, but went along with it for Carmen's sake. During the week before the festival Carmen went online on her laptop and did some research on the movie Shane, just for her own curiosity. Every now and then she'd tell Shane some factoid about the movie.

"Did you ever watch The Waltons TV show when you were a kid?" she asked Shane one evening. "Everybody says goodnight to everybody else, 'Good night, John-Boy,' all that."

"Yeah, I guess I saw some," Shane said. "Why?"

"Remember Grandma Walton? She was played by Ellen Corby, who was a famous character actress. Well, in Shane she plays Mrs. Torrey, the wife of Elisha Cook, Jr."

"Who?"

"Elisha Cook, Jr. He was the gunsel Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon," Carmen said. "Remember? We watched it one night, with Jenny and Mark. He was the young punk following Bogart around and wanting to kill him. Bogie took his guns away from him and humiliated him."

"Okay, I remember him, I think."

"He has kind of an historic role in the movie," Carmen said.

"What's that?"

"Well, Shane is one of the very first movies to use hidden wires to pull on an actor when the actor gets shot. When he gets hit, they yank on the wire and the jerk pulls him backward or forward, and it looks like he was really shot. The director, George Stevens, had seen combat in World War II, and he knew what it really looked like when somebody got shot. He also knew what real, authentic gunfire sounded like, and Shane is one of the very first movies where they really tried hard to get the sound of gunfire right. In a lot of earlier movies it just sounds like somebody's cap gun. In Shane they got it right."

"Wow, I'm really amazed you know all this stuff," Shane said. "I mean, I realize you're a production assistant and you already know a lot about the behind-the-scenes stuff, but you really are amazing."

Carmen blushed. "That's why nobody will ever play me in Trivial Pursuit."

"I know you know a tremendous amount about songs and music and record history," Shane said, "but you also know about television and movies."

Carmen shrugged. "I just like studying those things."

Shane remembered the evenings she had spent being tutored by Harvey in all things musical, but she didn't say anything. She still had never talked about Harvey to Carmen, or about any of the other things that happened to her back then. Never tell your story, never let them tell you theirs.

***

The festival screened The Searchers on Friday night as the lead-off presentation. Before the movie started there was a brief panel discussion of film experts who talked about it but in a way that didn't spoil the movie for anyone who hadn't seen it yet. As it turned out Shane was the only person in the entire theater who hadn't seen it, but no one but Carmen knew that.

In the morning the festival showed McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a famous film directed by Robert Altman, a director Carmen idolized and once had lunch with on the set of a Richard Gere movie. Shane was the first of two films to be shown in the afternoon right after the lunch break. Shane and Carmen were sitting on the aisle halfway back, and were joined by Alice, Tina and Bette, all wearing cowboy shirts and jeans.

"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls," said Sheila Murray, the woman who was the main festival coordinator and mistress of ceremonies. "I hope you all had a good lunch, but not so good that you fall asleep in the middle of our next film, but I don't think you will. Before we show it, though, I have an unfortunate announcement. As you know if you've read your festival programs, we had scheduled Mr. Barry Williamson, who is a film historian and expert commentator on Shane, to be here today to give you all a brief talk before the movie, and then to do a question-and-answer session afterward. Well, I just got a call from Barry during lunch. His car broke down on the way here, and he's stuck on the 405 waiting for a tow truck to come get him. So unfortunately, he'll either be here very late or not at all, so we're just going to show the movie without any expert introduction and commentary, that is, unless there's any other Shane experts in the theater--"

Shane's hand shot up. "I know an expert on this movie," she called out to the woman on stage. "She's right here." She held her arm up but gestured toward Carmen, sitting next to her.

"Shannnne," Carmen hissed to her. "Nooooo!"

"Aw, come on, Carm, you know this stuff inside out," Shane whispered. She was actually quite proud of Carmen's knowledge. "Do it. You'll be great."

From the stage Sheila Murray said, "Really? Miss, would you like to come up here and be our expert commentator? We'd all be really honored if you would."

"Come on, Carmen," Alice said, and Tina urged her on, too.

"Go, Carmen. You'll be great," she said.

Reluctantly Carmen got up and walked to the side of the auditorium to the steps leading up to the stage. Carmen was wearing a red, fringed cowboy shirt with white piping, cowboy boots, and her Stetson hat pushed back on her head. She looked adorable. She went to the podium on the side of the stage where Sheila Murray waited for her as the audience applauded politely.

"Hi, I'm Sheila Murray," she said, shaking Carmen's hand.

"Carmen Morales," Carmen said, smiling warmly and shaking her hand.

"Here, let me adjust this for you." Sheila sat her hand-held mic down and adjusted the fixed microphone attached to the podium. She lowered the microphone down. Whoever the speaker was, he was a tall man, and Carmen was only 5' 3", and was almost hidden by the podium.

"I've got a better idea," Sheila said. "Here, you take the hand mic and stand to the side here where people can see you, and I'll use the podium mic." They switched places. "Now, just in case the audience didn't hear you, your name is?"

"Carmen de la Pica Morales."

"Great, thanks for coming up, Carmen, we really appreciate it. Where are you from?"

"Right here in LA. Born and bred. I'm a true, blue Angelino."

Sheila and the audience chuckled. "And what do you do for a living? Are you a film historian?"

"Oh, no, I'm just a movie buff, that's all. I actually have two careers. By day I'm a freelance contract production assistant. I hire on to do production work on movies, TV shows, and I do work on a lot of song videos productions."

"And would we know any of your work?"

"Oh, absolutely," Carmen said. "Do any of you guys ever watch Arianna Huffington's politics talk show? You know how she always has a paper cup full of coffee, and all the panelists have paper cups of coffee? Well, Arianna's is actually a soy latte. So who do you think fetched all those soy lattes and double frappachinos and black coffees and put them on that table?" Carmen pointed proudly at herself. The audience laughed and applauded, and Carmen took a theatrical bow.

"So you're Arianna's barista?" Sheila said, and Carmen curtsied again, which made everybody laugh. "I always wondered. Okay, what else have you done?"

"I did most of the production stuff on the latest Fisherspooner video called Odyssey. I've worked for Robert Morfitt a couple of times, there's an Indie group called The Organ, I did their video on their song called Brother, which we filmed in a church. Let's see, I've been a script girl a couple of times, I've done continuity, I've done sound boards. I worked with Robert Altman on a Richard Gere movie. I think I'm a member of, like, four different trade unions."

"You're beautiful enough to be on the other side of the camera," Sheila Murray said. "Have you done any acting? I can't believe no one in this town hasn't discovered you by now."

Carmen blushed again. "No, I like to stay behind the camera."

"You said you had two careers. What's the other one?"

"I'm a DJ. I do weddings, bar mitzvahs and bas mitvahs, quincineras, oldies nights, senior citizens events, parties, receptions, conventions, dances, you name it, DJ La Pica is your gal. I DJ at Little Temple every Friday and I do MRX every other Wednesday. I've got a standing gig at this really great place calledThe Planet. And I'm on the Internet at LaPica dot com, if you ever want to check my schedule or book me for an event."

Sheila laughed and the audience applauded, while Shane, Alice, Tina and Bette did the Arsenio woot, woot call.

"Nice shameless plug, Carmen. And it sounds like you brought your own cheering section," Sheila Murray said. Everyone laughed, Shane hooted again, and Carmen waved at her, laughing.

"Okay," Sheila Murray said, "let's talk about this afternoon's film, Shane. I take it you're a fan?"

"Yes, I am. I'm a big fan of westerns in general, and a very big fan of this one, in part, I suppose because I feel I have a special connection to it. A few years ago the American Film Institute put out a list of the one hundred best movies of all time, and they ranked Shane as number sixty-nine, and then in another list they ranked the character Shane himself as the 16th best movie hero, and among cowboy heroes only Gary Cooper in High Noon was above him, so Shane was the second-favorite cowboy hero of all time. And they ranked the famous line, "Come back, Shane," as the number 49th best quote in all of film. They haven't done a list yet for just the best all-time westerns, but if they did, I think Shane would certainly be in the top five, maybe as high as number three."

"What would you rank ahead of it?"

"I don't think there's any question that The Searchers would be the number one best western of all time, and High Noon would be number two. If it was me, I'd rank Shane as third best, but right about here the competition gets really tight. You could make arguments for Stagecoach, Butch Cassidy, Unforgiven, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Red River. The Magnificent Seven. I just love the John Ford Cavalry Trilogy, so I'd want them ranked right close to the top, too. I think it would be really, really hard to rank that whole group. I'd just call it a nine-way tie for fourth place."