Free Long Shot by Paul Monette Page A

in motion all the while Jasper was stationed in Thailand, refining his taste to higher and higher grades of hash. The three of them had made their deal the night they graduated college: They would make a star of Jasper Cokes. They had their contacts all set up. It seemed what Jasper mostly had to do was let it happen.
    There were two things on their side. They had no contingency plan at all, in case they didn’t strike gold. They’d left fate no alternative. And they weren’t too proud to do shit-work, either, if that was the only way. The rest was purely matters of timing. You had Vietnam on the one side, the desireless life of the street on the other, and so, for a brief time, every displaced adolescent didn’t burn to be a movie star. Jasper and his cronies were the sort of investors who meant to get rich quick in the classic way. With the market down, they bought in big.
    They gave the people the same old thing, but more so. In a year that was frantic for any diversion, Jasper scored in a part nobody wanted. It was a werewolf picture unredeemed by fear. The monsters looked benign as pandas. But every fifteen minutes, Jasper Cokes took his shirt off. Just at the climax, water swamped his yellow rubber rescue craft. For half a minute, he wore a pair of khaki pants onscreen, all wringing wet and steamy. It was clear he hadn’t a thing on underneath. You could practically tell he wasn’t circumcised. A blushing nun with nothing to compare it to would have had to admit it was awfully big.
    On the strength of bookings in Southern drive-ins alone, Carl got a foot in at every studio—billing Jasper as the athlete type, but neglecting to mention the sport. It didn’t much matter. To put his first million in the bank, Jasper squirmed in and out of half a dozen uniforms. He was linebacker, shortstop, three-meter diver, and middleweight champ. With an obligatory scene in the showers every time he came off the field. Conventional wisdom had it that you could only get away with khaki pants the first time. After Night of the Howling Teens —which the industry privately called the first mass-distributed six-inch tool—nobody ever got another chance to check out Jasper’s best equipment. From that point on, they kept the focus mainly on his face. The rest of him was more or less a dream.
    For three days after he died, Jasper was all the local news that mattered. It was rumored that he left a hundred million—in itself a lot to reckon with—but what was more, the press had found out how it divvied up. By the terms of the ancient contract, twenty percent had always gone to Carl. Five more went to Artie. All the rest was Jasper’s. It stayed that way through eight long years of paperwork. There were pitchmen who swore they could make him better money, if he’d only get rid of his old school ties. But the terms remained as immutable as the set of relations among them. The roles they played for the media seemed like they were written in according to the percentages. Any star worth his salt required a fast-talk front man, as well as a dumb palooka to shoulder the way through crowds. In any case, death didn’t change the cut of the money. Carl and Artie got twenty and five of every dollar that Jasper left.
    The human-interest angle, meanwhile, did not hesitate to go baroque. A has-been starlet, Jenny Sutton, swore she talked to Jasper just before he died. He was woozy with barbiturates, all right, but he didn’t sound anywhere near the edge. She further seemed to intimate that she and Jasper were getting it on, but then, she hadn’t had a part in years. In another late development, the Miami-based Legion of Fans was suing, though it wasn’t certain whom. They had information that an unidentified wino was shipped from the city morgue to the crematorium—where he showed up a few hours later as Jasper Cokes’s ashes. Jasper’s body, the rumor went, had been