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<< back to INT. RUDY'S APARTMENT | from THE CLEAN-OUT, draft 3, pages 58-61
INT. KOVACS HOUSE - GARAGE - DAY Fresno in August. A hundred and six outside and not much less in here. A single bulb. Forty years of a man's life in cardboard boxes, stacked to the rafters, every one labeled in the same square carpenter's capitals. MIKE KOVACS (38, sunburned, sensible, the one who stayed) tapes a box shut. He writes GOODWILL on it with a marker and adds it to a stack. DANNY KOVACS (33, a black T-shirt that was a mistake in this heat, the one who left) stands in front of a box on a high shelf. It is labeled DANNY - DON'T OPEN. Mike. (not looking) Mike looks up. Sees it. Something crosses his face and is gone.There's a box with my name on it. Then I guess it's a "you want it." It says don't open. Danny pulls the box down. It's heavier than he expected. He sets it on the workbench, among the coffee cans full of screws, and pulls the tape.He also said he'd fix the swamp cooler in 1987. INSIDE: newspaper clippings. Dozens. Hundreds. The Fresno paper, the high school paper, a church bulletin. All carefully cut out, all in order. Danny picks one up. Reads. He goes through them faster. Sixteen. Seventeen. A photo from a school play. And then, near the bottom, a folded theater program, from Los Angeles. A small theater. His name on the cast list, circled in pen."Kovacs Takes Fourth in Valley Cross-Country." I was fifteen. Danny stops. This was '95. This is the play I did in North Hollywood. Yeah. Mike puts down the tape gun.He wasn't there. He drove down on a Saturday. Four hours. Sat in the back row. Drove home that night. He never said. A long beat. Danny looks at the program in his hands. The circle around his name. The pen went around twice.He told me not to tell you. He said he'd make it weird. (quiet) Danny laughs. It turns into something else halfway. He sits down on an overturned bucket.Oh, so weird. Mike crosses to him. Stands there, not sure what to do with his hands. Finally he sits down on the floor of the garage next to the bucket, on the oil stain their father always yelled at them about, and he doesn't say anything.He should have made it weird. After a while, Danny hands him a clipping. Mike reads it. Snorts. You were a terrible shepherd. They go through the box together. The bulb buzzes. Outside, a sprinkler ticks across a dead lawn.I was eight. I was a great shepherd. Rudy's note: People ask if this is about my dad. My dad is alive and well and lives in Fresno and reads this page, so: hi, Pop. No. It's about somebody else's dad. Mostly. [email protected] © 1999 Rudy Kasparian · Last updated September 24, 1999 · DONUT KING · front page · next: LAST STOP, BARSTOW |