The Iceman Cometh

It was cold outside, the hard cold of shotgun steel against your cheek, with wind like a broad, flat knife that...had been laying next to the shotgun, wherever it had been, you know, to get so cold. Charles Bronson was sitting on the stoop of one of the rowhouses on the set, lost in a fog of fatigue, steam from his coffee, and the smoke of the day's first cigarette...these 4 a.m. shoots were getting to be too much; he made a mental note to look for scripts that mostly took place in the daytime from now on, or inside maybe.

One of the caterers wandered over and shyly asked him for an autograph. She handed over a Sharpie and an 8X10" glossy that turned out to be a promotional still from "Big House, U.S.A."...Bronson gazed at the youthful face in the picture for a long minute, idly wondering both how this woman had come to be in possession of the print, and what his character's name had been in the picture. He gave up both pursuits at roughly the same instant and signed (as he always did) only his name, in a quaintly elegant and readable script that clashed more grotesquely every day with his craggy and careworn face.

He was tired...tired of being typecast, tired of everyone thinking of him as this old tough bastard who was too famous to be approached, too self-important to be funny. His mind spun back briefly to some of the times they had had on the set of "Big House"...he had always kept most of the crew in stitches, back then; what the hell had happened to him? When was the last time he had done something really CRAZY like that, something that made people realize that he wasn't someone they could just stick labels on?

Bronson stood and stretched his arms above his head, slowly, but inside his emotions were completely awhirl. He let his eyes play around the set, not searching for anything in particular, just sort of casting about. They fell on a prop shovel (leaning in the alley across the street for all the world as if left there by accident) that he would be using in one of the fight scenes this morning against some of the bad guy's henchmen. Jesus, this script...he made a mental note to talk to his agent about this whole macho man bullshit, then abandoned it as inspiration suddenly struck.

Within fifteen seconds, Charles Bronson emerged from the alley with the prop shovel whirling impressively at arms' length. whoosh...whoosh - it sure sounded like a real shovel, and it was definitely having the desired effect on all the nearby members of the crew. Most were standing completely still now, with their mouths agape; a few spoke with a noticeable degree of panic into walkie-talkies or started moving his direction uncertainly.

"I AM THE GREAT CHARLES BRONSON, AND I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS CRUEL, CRUEL WORLD!!!!!! ROLL FILM, YOU DEMON GODS OF HOLLYWOOD, AND RECORD THE END OF YET ANOTHER LIFE YOU HAVE DESTROYED!" The words just came to him, he wasn't sure from where, but the glee coursing through his veins intensified as the eyes only got wider, the jaws only further dropped open. He stopped the shovel's arc directly in front of his body, lowered its spoonlike end to the ground, and, amidst cries of, "Chuck, for God's sake!!!", hammered it upward with all of his might into a seemingly devastating arc that ended at his own forehead.

Later, in the hospital, the phrase, "That's NOT the prop shovel!!!" slowly wormed its way into his consciousness.