I'm supposed to strangle this beautiful young woman today but my heart's not in it.  Toni, my girlfriend, tells me I should be used to it by now, I've murdered so many women.  But that's the problem: I'm tired of being the heavy.  Just once I'd like to be somebody's sidekick or the nice guy whose untimely death makes the audience sob with regret.  Listen, I'm realistic.  I'm not asking for a big piece, just a different angle, a character I can like for once.  Because, honest to God, I'm starting to get nightmares about these things, finding myself really killing people on the set but not meaning to--losing my touch.  When I wake up, I can still see the crew's terrified faces, their fingers aimed at me: "Christopher, what have you done?" I hear them crying. 

Back in the fifties, when I started out, it was much easier.  I was an ape then.  There were only two or three top apes in town at the time and, though they had studied apes plenty in an amateur way, I was something of an expert, having taken two years of primate biology at U.C.L.A.  I was planning on being a researcher, maybe going on for my Ph.D., but I got side-tracked after answering a call for "apemen" put out by a low-budget studio. They made a very forgettable picture about radiation turning some Pacific islanders into gorillas and I got to parade around as their king.  I was that good.  Though the suit was poorly ventilated and very heavy (75 pounds), the play-acting was a lot of fun--I could hardly believe I was getting paid for it.  After the shoot, the director asked me if I'd like to do another gorilla part. To continue working, I had to join the union.  I did the second picture, then I started getting enough calls to make me think I didn't need school, the money was so good.

"What am I supposed to tell my customers?" my father asked me.  He was a barber downtown.  "My son quit U.C.L.A. to become a Hollywood ape?"  My mother told him not to worry, it was only a phase.  "Sure," he said, "my son's ape phase."  He pointed his scissors at me: "You'll regret this, Christopher.  How long you think you can wear that costume before you lose your mind?"

Since I'm an L.A. kid born and bred, I didn't think Hollywood could make me dizzy with ambition.  But it did.  I wanted to be the best ape ever. The advantage I had over the other apes was my youth.  I was only twenty-one, and I had a good build because I'd been a shot putter on the U.C.L.A. track team.  To do the ape right, you have to have some weight and girth. I made a point of working out long before working out became fashionable, and it paid off until I started getting injured.

Had I been allowed to be an ape and only an ape, one that pounds its chest to startle a safari, say, or one that lurches around in a cage at a circus, I might not have hurt myself.  But, in Hollywood, an ape's never just an ape--he's always running amok, strangling somebody or slinging a screaming girl over his shoulder or clambering across a steep rooftop before jumping the hero.  The Hollywood ape is always fighting and always getting killed--falling from a tree, a rooftop, a mountain. 

So very quickly I learned how to be a stunt man, doing whatever the director told me to do, because I really didn't know any better.  It didn't occur to me that I had any choice in the matter.  After all, I prided myself on being what they called a "reasonable" actor, which meant that I never said no.  Sometimes I got hurt so badly I'd lay immobilized all weekend, popping aspirin every hour, just so I could make the call on Monday.  I managed to stay away from the pills that started showing up on the set in the sixties: I thought liquor was just as good an anesthetic. 

Drinking cost me two marriages and some good work and I can only remember half of what I did from '67 to '72.

My "big break" came in 1964 when I played a zombie strangler.  It was my first role out of costume (by this time I'd had three gorilla suits custom-made): the camera showed my face, and from then on playing apes was only a sideline.  I became a "killer" of every kind: werewolf, vampire, space invader, mutant, zombie, ghoul, ghost, body snatcher, psychopath....  Now, instead of the weighty costume, I was wearing all sorts of rubber pieces and patches on my face.  Prosthetics, they call it nowadays.  Back then we just called it glove rubber.  It ruined my skin, the latex heated up so badly.  I've got pores the size of pencil pricks in a peach, which would have spoiled me for close-ups had I been anything but a monster.  It affected my eyes too.  Gave me recurring bacterial buildup on my lids--called blepharitis--which makes me bloodshot half the time.

"You shouldn't ever give up hope," Toni tells me.  "You could become another Nightmare Eddie."

She means the guy who's made nine slasher pictures that have a big cult following.  Nightmare Eddie even has a doll out now that his kiddy fans carry around: it spits "blood."   

I say, "Toni, I couldn't sleep at night knowing I'm that kind of memory for children."

Toni's young enough to be the daughter I never had.  I met her last year when one of the security guards was trying to throw her off the set of a picture I was working.  "She's with me," I told the guy.  She was snapping photos of the actors' hands and feet.  That's her thing.  She's got her first show coming out in a little West Hollywood gallery soon.  Nothing but hands and feet of actors, some real famous, some not famous at all, like me.  I've got wide stubby-fingered hands which she finds especially sexy, she says.

I let Toni move in the first week we were together.  At my age, I try not to be overcautious because I've already made so many mistakes one more won't matter.  Compared to my two ex-wives, Toni's a welcome change, because she's got no plans for me.  We're just "cruising," as she puts it.  She's a tall, bony girl with a helmet haircut and a pale complexion. She dresses like most young women nowadays, wearing men's clothes half the time, baggy shirts and work boots, and either too much makeup or none at all.

She says she likes me for my experience, which is a nice way of saying I don't slobber all over her like the twenty-year-olds she's used to "seeing."  And she truly worries that I worry too much about my career.  I've got another good ten years or so left on the set and I'd like to make them count.  Toni says whatever I do will count because I'm good.  "It's not the part," she says, a true coach at heart, "it's how you play it, right? Nobody kills as good as you do, Chris.  Give yourself some credit."

But killing's not what it used to be, I tell her.  Together we watch super eights from my private collection and I show her how it was done "in the old days." Tasteful, I tell her.  "It was more effect than special effect, if you know what I mean."

"You mean no blood and guts," she says.

Nowadays a big-screen killing's rarely clean because the special effects crews have taken over.  They're just kids, most of them, and they make themselves giddy with the mechanicals, trying to outdo whatever trick they most admired in a competitor's sequence.  In the picture I'm doing now, I'm supposed to strangle the girl so badly her head falls off.  It sounds stupid, I know, but that's the state of the "art" nowadays.

Toni always goes with me for moral support, which I've really needed lately.  I don't know what would've happened to me this last year if she hadn't been around, because work's been pretty tough.  I haven't been sleeping as well as I'd like.  All those bad dreams.

The truth is, Toni could do better than me, though maybe I should give her more credit for knowing what she's into. After all, she's already used to rubbing me down when my back's in spasms and icing my ankles after a hard day. 

A couple months ago I took her out to the field to show her how I used to throw shot.  I guess, like any infatuated fifty-five-year-old, I felt I had something to prove.  I told Toni I was going to start working with my shot again to help keep down my paunch.  I don't think she cared one way or the other.  "You're a big guy," she said, "you should have some paunch." As I circled for my put, I pictured that iron ball sailing fifty feet in a lovely arc over the field.  I got only one chance to try, however, because the throw pulled a muscle below my right clavicle, which took two weeks to heal.  I was in such pain I couldn't even raise my arm, and Toni had to carry the shot back--it hadn't traveled more than ten feet. 

For the picture I'm doing now my face is pretty clean.  All they've stuck me with is some purple lumps on my head, which I had to shave for the part.  Make-up's made me greenish-white, my eyes awfully deep-set.  I'm supposed to be a man who's gone mad from eating too much junk food.  A "cereal killer," the crew jokes.  I'm just one of several beserks in the picture, but my sequence is the longest and most complicated.  I am the old pro, after all.

I've already done the junk food takes, so now it's the finale, after which I'll be killed off, as usual.  I can't tell you how many times I've been killed.  That's the only thing I  envy of Nightmare Eddie's pictures--he never dies.  Dying used to be hard for me because it made me think of my parents and how close they are to their end.  And getting closer every day.  I know, we're all supposed to be grown-up about Death, accept the inevitable and all that.  But I worry.  And now, for the first time in my life, I've started worrying about my own end.   I might have welcomed death years ago, when I was living low, but now things are just starting to get good for me.   With Toni, I think I've finally got a stab at happiness. 

"Trained" actors, I've heard, can "distance" themselves from the emotional weight of a death scene, but I've never learned this trick.  It'd be easier for me if I didn't always play such horrible characters.  I mean, I've committed so many truly terrible acts, maiming and mutilating so many people, that when it comes time to die all I want is a chance to make restitution.  Hey, I can make good! I want to tell the hero as he corners me. Give me another chance!

I phoned my agent recently and told him I'd like to try something different.  I said, "Give me something lighter, Hal.  I could be somebody's kindly, retarded uncle."

"What're you saying, Chris?" I pictured him at his table with glossy 5 X 10's scattered before him like trading cards.  "You're getting bigger roles than you ever have."

"Bloodier roles, Hal, uglier roles.  This is not what I got into pictures for, is it?"

"You're asking me?" he said.  "You've got a good rep, Chris, my friend.  You kill good, you die good.  You do stunts.  Why do you want more?"

"I want something likeable, Hal."

"Oh, please, Chris, what is this, Mr. Sensitive week?"

"Hal, I'm serious."

"I like you, Chris.  The studios like you.  I don't understand.  Are you going through some male menopausal thing or what?"

"Can you help me or not, Hal?"

I didn't want to threaten him but I think he got the message: either he'd help me or I'd get another agent.  So he said he'd see what he could do.  That was three months ago.  So far he hasn't offered me anything except an audition for the Chichimanga Chicken spot in a local ad campaign. 

"Don't scoff," he told me.  "This is a talking part, it shows your face, and if this chain does well, it could go national."

He was right, it wasn't so bad.  But I just couldn't put myself in another animal suit.

The Director of my current shoot is a kid who's no more than thirty but already he's made big bucks and a name for himself as a horror king.  The Prince of Darkness, the trades call him.  As I walk onto the set he says, "Christopher, your last takes were fly, pal, in the pocket.  You up for the big one?"

"Lead the way," I tell him.  I glance around for Toni, who's standing next to the best boy.  She nods encouragement, as if to say, This'll be a good one, I just know it.  She's dressed like an extra, wearing a polka-dotted jumper and yellow rubber wellingtons, her hair knotted in a single sprout at the top of her head. 

I think I love her.

The actress I'm supposed to kill is a pretty blonde named Carla, who can't be more than seventeen.  She looks like she's done some modeling before getting this break.  She's so eager for approval, she hardly listens to what the Director's saying. 

She's staring at me like I scare her. 

She says, "You'll be careful with those big hands of yours, won't you, Chris?"

I smile politely: "They haven't failed me yet, Carla." If only she knew how little I trust them today, how many times they've betrayed me in my dreams. 

As the soundman angles the boom and the cameras roll up, I notice that I'm surrounded by youngsters: except for one cameraman, everybody here looks under forty.  Where have all the oldsters gone?

The Director calls "action" and I stumble into the frame, doing a kind of zombie walk that I've nearly made famous, my spastic arms clawing the air.  I work fast, and the camera crew is good, so it doesn't take us long to get the several shots we need to introduce me in the sequence. 

Then it's time for the kill.

As usual, the victim stumbles, this time over a kitchen chair, and I catch her while she's down.  Then we cut to some head shots to show my menace and her horror.  And finally I get to put my paws around Carla's lovely neck.  It makes me a little giddy to hold her that way, because for the moment, she's all mine, no more than a mannequin, really.  To keep herself steady, she holds onto my shirt front while I pretend to squeeze the life out of her.  She's gasping.  I'm gurgling with perverse delight.  I can feel the pulse of her jugular against the fingers of my right hand.  The nape of her neck is sweaty.  A bit of saliva rolls from her mouth--she's better than I thought she'd be--and her eyes roll to show whites only. 

I've done this so many times, it feels very natural, very real.  The girl garbles a final gasp, then her head rolls back and her arms drop, the weight of her now freely in my hands.  It gives me a shiver to watch her die like that, and for a terrible moment I think maybe I've really killed her, she's now so limp.  Suddenly I want to release her to see if she's okay, but I can't break the scene because I know it's a real good one.  It may be my best strangle yet.  CPR, I'm thinking, could rouse her.  It's not too late.  I shake her one last time, roughly, in hopes that her eyelids will flutter.

Then the Director shouts, "Cut!" And the girl is abruptly disengaging herself from my grip.  "Thanks," she says.  She steps back to let the dresser fix her hair. 

The Director says, "Chris, I liked how you shook her once at the end.  We'll see if we can keep that."

I'm pleased to hear a compliment, and I turn to share my smile with Toni, who fingers a V for victory.  Then I see her snap a shot of a boom-girl's hand. 

It wasn't so bad, I'm thinking.  Really, it wasn't so bad.  And I did good, didn't I? The Director makes us do two more takes for insurance.  Then Carla disappears and the effects crew comes in with doll that looks just like her.  It's made of wax, rubber, and God knows what else.  Her face shows a wide-eyed, open-mouthed gag of horror.  I point out to the Director that when I strangled the girl her eyes were not staring at me like this.  He tells me not to worry, the continuity people will handle it.  One of the effects kids, a boy who's trying to grow a goatee, explains to me how to mangle the doll so the head wrenches off and the blood starts spurting.

When I begin to strangle the thing, I tell myself it's just a piece of wax and plastic, even though the effects kids are pumping air into it to make the thing jerk and flinch like a real person.  It gives me the creeps and I'm hoping the disgust I feel doesn't show in the shot.  I'm wrenching the neck and wrenching it, gasping with effort--I imagine the screams the sound people will dub in later--then suddenly the head tears away from the neck, the girl's eyes bulging, blood seeping from the ears: purple and scarlet veins are spewing blood.  And the bone, I didn't imagine there'd be bone, but now I see the spinal column attached to the dangling head, the blood pouring, pouring forth, a ridiculously hideous show that nearly makes me retch.  Behind me I hear somebody gasp.  The Director says, calmly, "Cut.  Good take.  Let's see what we've got."

While he watches the playback, I stand there with the doll, which is still leaking syrupy blood at my feet.  "Don't move, Chris," the Director tells me.  Already the syrup is drying on my hands, a sticky scarlet goop that makes me wonder, Is real blood like this? The effects kids probably know.  They've probably experimented.

When I look to the shadows off-camera I expect to see Toni nodding to me, as if to say, "You're doing good, Chris." But she's talking to one of the crew.

The effects kids bring out another dummy identical to the other. 

"The take no good?" I ask.

he Director pauses to lift and resettle his Angels cap on his head.  He says, "There wasn't enough emotion, Christopher.  I need more from you."

Assistants are cleaning me up, wiping my hands.  Somebody's dabbing my face with make-up.

No, passion--I guess that's the word." The Director glances down at the floor, where the cleanups are mopping away the blood syrup.  Wearing jeans and a "DO IT!" t-shirt, he's a tall, gawky guy, the kind of kid I might've picked on in high school.  "Yeah," he says, looking at me again, "I think passion is the thing." He narrows his eyes: "Strangle her, Chris, like you love her."

I'm nodding "yes, yes, of course," like I understand, but it's just reflex.  I don't really understand.  I can't tell you how many times I've been in this situation, where I have no idea what the director's asking for.   As usual, I'll improvise, doing whatever seems right as the scene unfolds, then I'll pretend that this is exactly what the director has called for.  Most of them, especially the younger ones, don't know the difference. 

We set up the shot again, the doll in my grasp, her startled face glaring up at me.  I think of the real girl, Carla, who modeled this expression, of all the hope she has for her life: only seventeen and all those roles waiting, all those possibilities beckoning. 

Twenty, ten, even two, years ago I would've told her it isn't her we want, it's only her graceful neck, say, or her eyes, which are suitable for close-ups, or the way her mouth looks when she screams, but it isn't her, so she should stop dreaming of a great future as an actress, stop thinking of herself as special.  When I was at my lowest, it didn't seem I was anything more than a convenience on the set: big enough to play the part and not so handsome that I couldn't be made to look hideous. 

When Toni came along, though, it was difficult to be that cynical, because she's hardly twenty-one and already her career's taken off.   Would I tell her she didn't stand a chance?

"You got more hope than you let on," she said.  She was right.   So here's something I've never admitted: I'd like to play one part my parents might enjoy.  One picture they could walk away from smiling. 

"Ready, Christopher?" I hear the Director call.

"Roll it."

I hear the scene-board clap.  And we're on.  We? Just me and the dummy of the girl.  "A nice girl," I hear my mother saying.  "Why would anyone want to harm a nice girl like that?" "And nice hair too," my father says.  "She takes good care.  Look how shiny.  You got to like somebody with good grooming."

The girl/dummy's eyes bulge as I wrench her neck.

I have a fear that I'll wake up one night to discover I've strangled Toni.  "Talk about bringing your work home with you!" Toni jokes. 

I hear my father's words, see him shaking his scissors at me, twenty-some years ago: "How long you think you can wear that costume before you lose your mind?"

Carla's father will see his girl decapitated on the big screen.  Why shouldn't that make him crazy too?

But what if, at the critical moment, just as it seems that I have all but strangled the life from her slender body, just as I am about to rip off her lovely head, what if I relented?

What if at this moment I touched the girl's cheek with one finger to wipe away the tears--my tears, the monster weeping over her in remorse--and uttered the first words I've uttered in years?

I feel my mouth working up the words as if they were gobs of fat stuck in my throat.  I'm choking with a need to speak.

I hear a growl.  Is that what comes out finally?

"A monster is like a cat," Toni told me recently.  "He kills anything he comes upon, anything that moves, anything small that catches his attention.  He can't help himself--it's just the way he is.  So don't fight it, Chris, just be who you are."

I'm sorry.  That's what I wanted to say.  I'm sorry.  But it doesn't come.   And already the girl's dying, her last terror-filled glare a kind of vengenful promise of the hauntings her killer will endure. 

A monster never relents, it seems. 

Now, the job finished, the girl draped over my arm like a wet overcoat, I sense the excitement on the set, the spectators all but breathless--tempted to applaud as soon as the Director gives the word.  And I wait for it, breathless myself.   This may be my best strangle yet.