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Stalker, Three O’Clock

Posted on August 29, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

She had a lot of men in her life and she hated every one of them. Maybe because they were around for some of the most embarrassing moments of her life.

That time she ended up drunkenly making out in the backseat of a car with the mother of two she had met just that night, they were there. The afternoon her loser boyfriend decided to come clean about having cheated on her with a chorus line of girls (and boys), they were there. The morning she found out she didn’t get a major awards nomination, they were there.

Every morning, the movie star who could still remember her days of trying to score a fake ID, wished she could go just one day without being stalked by the paparazzi.

Her name was Candy Lee and she was the object of obsession, desire and even inspiration for a couple of generations, male and female. She had already made enough of a name for herself in motion pictures and on television that others tried to piggyback on her fame to make their own breakthrough in the cutthroat world of big media whoring.

Case in point, the boyfriend who established his credentials as a bad boy by crushing her heart in full view of hungry cameras and Secret Service-grade surveillance equipment. Up until that day, celebrities had merely assumed that their actions were under scrutiny. When enhanced audio of Zach telling her they were through because she couldn’t give head like a guy turned up on a million blogs, a hundred A-list PR representatives groaned in unison. They would henceforth be required to come up with convincing-sounding spins on the double whammy of their clients’ actions and words betraying them as living, breathing human beings.

It was a dark day in Hollywood. One that no one assumed had come about by chance but it still helped the ex-boyfriend make a name for himself. People went to watch the two-bit film he was in so they could hate on him and several girls ended up returning with a serious crush and thoughts of sex, with him or boys like him. Turned out the boy could act, on screen and off. And he sparked off a riot of bad boy imitators in middle schools across the nation without half the charm of their big screen mentor.

It depressed Candy to think that she had somehow caused this, especially when she read about the fourteen-year-old who tried to commit suicide after being dumped by a Zach-alike. Her own career was not heating up as fast as she would like and while kids half her age were portraying a variety of characters in a string of big ticket movies, she was finding herself increasingly typecast as the cute/hot blonde with little to do other than arch her back and make all her woman parts look appealing.

Noel was one of the men assigned to the Candy Lee beat and his day consisted of hanging around nail bars, spas, music video and movie sets and the everyday raucous Hollywood party where little happened that was truly out of the ordinary. He had logged so many hours watching the still-young star through the unblinking eye of his camera that he dreamt about her nearly every night. Not in a perverted way. More like the residual image that remains after a person who had been staring at something for way too long finally decided to close his eyes. He could see her even when she wasn’t around. And he had noticed that something was not right.

For one thing, there was the boydguard. A big black dude in manpris and white t-shirts that seemed to glow in contrast to his dark skin. He didn’t look like he was packing but Noel would not have put it past the six foot five behemoth to have found a way to hide a gun in plain sight. He was always taking Candy’s hand and helping her across puddles by the side of the road and through crowds waiting to enter nightclubs. One of the photos Noel had taken turned up in a supermarket tabloid under the headline, ‘Is this (finally) man enough for Candy?’ He had been disgusted by the idea but he also knew that it was shit like that that people wanted and as somebody once said, “What the people want is what the people get.”

Still Noel thought it was curious that Candy had a bodyguard. She hadn’t been in any kind of fracas with her stalkers-in-plain-sight so it wasn’t like she needed the extra protection. Not from them at least. First thought that most of the paprazzi had was that she was pregnant and the big hulk was hired to ensure that she didn’t trip and lose the baby. Which then begged the question, why would a girl, not properly into her twenties risk her career by having a baby. The stalkers-for-hire had come up with several ideas including (but not limited to):

• The father was rich, old, and this was his only chance to father a child
• It was a mobster’s baby
• She was hell-bent on career suicide like a certain head-shaving, blonde baby machine

Noel didn’t think it was something as mundane as that. And he should know since he could tell what she was thinking on most days almost before she knew it. He called it, ‘the benefit of a powerful zoom lens.’

One sunny morning, like all the other mornings in the Hollywood neighbourhoods, Candy was on her way out of a coffee shop when a movement just off her right shoulder caught Noel’s eye. The other paparazzi were content to capture the usual sequence of shots showing her walking out in snug orange tee and short shorts that showed off her tan and the musculature she was developing from working out. Nobody seemed to have noticed the odd movement.

The bodyguard looked bored. He had been on duty for four weeks and all he had done was stand outside her trailer and look mean while she enjoyed a couple of exultant on-set booty calls. He looked like he would have been happier hanging out with a rapper or a volatile male movie star with a penchant for guns and punching people. The chick was hot but he didn’t see himself being able to hang around conversations about nails, hair, fashion and the star of some new TV show who was ‘totally gay’ much longer. He was so bored he didn’t see the bleached blonde kid scoot towards them under the cover of parked cars.

Noel checked his frame again and just as he was about to fire off his own set of shots capturing Candy’s signature rolling hips walk he spied the top of the blonde kid’s head. That and the glint off something metallic. He raised his eyes above the camera and saw the boy.

When he was using just his eyes to view the whole scene the frame made a lot more sense.

Not that it added up to anything good.

He fired off a quick shot of the bodyguard’s bored visage and then he reframed to capture the star and her stalker in the same frame. He switched focus so that he had her, and then him, clearly committed to pixel memory. He waited to see what would happen next because the kid could very easily have been just an autograph seeker. But then he raised the shiny object in his hand and made a dash for Candy and Noel knew without the shadow of a doubt that he was no ordinary celebrity stalker, content with a smile and a picture. This guy meant business.

Noel fired off a series of shots recording the boy’s advance and when he had that covered he went wide enough to record the bodyguard’s apathy.

The final shot that Noel fired however, was the one that made him a star. He wasn’t sure whether the world had slowed down or whether he had discovered a secret superpower because he managed to cap his lens, unsheathe his pistol and fire off the single round it took to stop Candy’s attacker in less time than it took some of his colleagues to figure out what kind of shot they were going for.

Noel used to practice at a range as a way of keeping his eye focused and true. He got the stalker in the upper thigh and though he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life there had been no permanent damage. The twelve-inch hunting knife in his hands told all the story needed to back up Noel’s actions.

For his troubles Noel earned the never-ending gratitude of Candy Lee and the grudging respect of tinsel town’s other inhabitants. He also lost the ability to continue to ply his trade in anonymity.

So he did the next best thing. He sold the movie rights and moved to Europe.

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