Extra Life by Derek Nikitas Read Free Book Online Page B

page he wrote: like the last time I said goodbye to Dad at the airport, trying to memorize his face. I couldn’t take it. He’d been willing to use his personal pain for the sake of our dumb movie. His father, who did not die in a motorcycle stunt but even more nobly in a wartime helicopter crash. All of Connie’s fears and anxieties rising up from that wreckage.
    My own parents were alive and well somewhere in the house. Dad sat wasting away in the attic. He could fill me with facts but teach me nothing about life. He’d never ignored a no trespassing sign, never climbed past the safety rails. Mom was the one who tossed me out of the nest—literally, one summer, on a zip-line thirty feet over the canopy of a Costa Rican cloud forest. That green and hazy rush of fear stuck with me ever since, drove me to stupid acts that ruined my mother’s trust. If she’d been warming back up to me during the last few months, the cold front had struck again.
    So here I was: Dad unable and Mom unwilling.
    There was nothing for me now. I wanted to go back to before , to kid memories that seemed just out of reach, like those weekends at the Pastime Playhouse theater with Dad. That early enchantment with the magic flicker on the screen.
    So I left the house again without telling anyone. Walked down to Front Street, through the old cotton mill section along the river, restaurants and tourist shops now, a gentrified locale specially designed for Cape Twilight Blues and other shows to shoot their scenes.
    In the midst of TV-land, I was a faceless, unnamed extra.
    I came to my destination, an empty gap between two buildings—overgrown grass, broken bottles, and piles of rubble. A missing tooth in an otherwise pristine set of teeth. Five years ago a vintage movie house stood on this spot, the Pastime Playhouse, then burned to the ground.
    Movie mogul Marv Parker (aka, Bobby-Daddy) bankrolled the place and kept it in business before it burned. The rumor mill speculated that after he started losing profits on the place, he torched this money pit himself for the insurance. You could still see the char on the walls of neighboring buildings.
    Dad and I sometimes came here twice in a weekend, especially summers. This was before they installed the big multiplex farther up Market Street. We’d walk down to this theater, and all the discussions we had, anticipating and then critiquing—let’s just say we didn’t talk like that much anymore.
    For a minute I stood where the ticket booth used to be and looked through the fake camera lens I made with my fingers. The empty lot worked as a perfect industrial wasteland backdrop, or a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
    Then I turned and saw the radio tower beacon flash its steady red pulse high above the buildings, and I knew the real reason I trekked out to this part of town, and it was not my distant past. It was my immediate future, and Connie wasn’t here to talk me down.
    It was still daylight when I reached the headquarters of WCPF, Cape Fear’s most popular network station, and Mr. Yes’s former employer. The building was just a squat beige box beside the river, but for added flair, a nearby billboard supersized the grinning mugs of the news station’s lead anchors and weatherman.
    Their steel radio tower loomed three hundred feet tall, tapered at the top. Almost a scale model of the Eiffel Tower. Its upper reaches were fitted with satellite and radar dishes. Below, gray electric boxes with shock danger decals buzzed a constant warning to keep away .
    For further security a chain-link fence surrounded the tower with razor wire coiled around the top like a badass Slinky. That obstacle might’ve meant game over if the gate were actually padlocked shut like it was supposed to be. But somebody had left the chain and padlock dangling from the fence.
    I took out my cell phone, aimed the lens at myself and tapped record . “Scaling the WCPF radio tower, because it was there, first and only take.