T A B L E_T A L K I got off the road and stopped at ... Finish the story in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Letter from Jakarta: After the sky falls By Jeff Pulice When expats flee, foreign guys become very attractive -- and other bits of wisdom (06/11/98) Are we the world? By Andrew O'Hehir Despite our uneasy place on Planet Soccer, the United States will be one of 32 nations vying for glory as the globe's most passionately watched sporting event begins (06/10/98) The Internet comes to the Outback By Simon Winchester A 7-year-old boy's life changes forever (06/09/98) Mondo Weirdo Slow boat to Thailand Temptations and tribulations on the Mekong River (06/08/98) Ramadan By Mona Simpson Taking a lover: An erotic journey from Cairo to Alexandria (06/05/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER . | . PAGE 1, 2 Black Eyed Susan's on India Street serves a great breakfast. I sat at the counter next to this kid, a real Xer; he was unbelievably calm like all of them, and he was writing tiny script on a blue airmail letter-envelope. Later I observed another Xer at the hostel. He said the audience didn't react well to his short film, "Road Movie." It featured, according to the festival catalog, "Dorothea Lange-like shots of gorgeous, gothic America." This Young Director was way too unbelievably calm, considering his film bombed and he was staying at the hostel and nobody remembers Dorothea Lange. After breakfast I waited in line for "Hugo's Pool," directed by Robert Downey Jr.'s father, but it sold out. Then I met Heidi, an actress with bare midriff, permanent sunglasses and a 24-hour pose. It seemed she did a bit of everything: voice-overs for industrial training films, poetry, house painting, regional theater, astrological readings. Then I met her friend Meagan, some kind of line producer. She was full of marvy ideas and upper-class angst. I kept forgetting her name. Then everyone met Rosemary, a babe actress living in Manhattan, via Peabody or Worcester or some provincial burg in Massachusetts. So I told her this lie, shoot me, that I was a playwright looking to cast my one-woman thing about the life of Amelia Earhart. Her eyes bugged. She vibrated. If we weren't sitting under a 100-year-old chestnut tree outside the Methodist Church, I swear she would have recited from "Antigone," stuck her tongue down my throat or, worse, showed me her glossy. Our group took in a seminar on creating characters. I sat next to the dazzling Rosemary. She just couldn't stop networking with jerks, and then she Barney Googled Marla Maples two rows down. The girl was thin, twig thin, hospital thin, trying to rebuild her life after The Donald Dump. She sucked on bottled water, and I forgot Meagan's name again. And so on. On the third try I got into a movie, "Eye of God." Typical indie -- wonderful characters, visually striking, incredibly disturbing and absolutely no chance of connecting with a mainstream audience. Sponsored by Cape Cod Potato Chips. Then drinks, talk, schmoozing with Heidi & Co. Had I been to Sundance? Then another movie, "Star Maps," about a desperate young person trying to make it big in Hollywood against all odds. I could relate. It was also about Hispanic male prostitutes and a father pimping his son. I could not relate. More swishiness. More drinks, more debate, more half-true stories. Business cards spinning around till the wee hours, but I didn't hear much because I'm tall and I was standing in this really loud bar where the voice stream swirled at shoulder level. Nantucket is very nice. The place remains charming despite the tourist biz, no fast food is allowed, and it's too expensive for riffraff and gawkers from Ohio. The island is still mostly woods, containing the state's densest population of deer. I took a taxi full of drunks back to the hostel ghetto. Sunday morning I scrambled myself bodysurfing in huge waves at Surfside Beach. On the walk back I wandered onto someone's property. A fat and hairy man emerged and ordered me to turn around, use the goddamn public path. "You people are always doing this," he yelled, shaking his fist, and I was thinking, I would feel really foolish shaking my fist in anger. It's so clichéd. But then I'm a writer, minor league variety, and I'm always twice removed from experience -- once, observing what I'm doing; the second time, grading the quality of that observation -- and I was also kinda pleased to be part of the "you people" group. It felt nice to belong. Which is how I felt, but even more, a few hours later at Sunday's "Morning Coffee With ..." Robinson explained the talent bottleneck. A fat-cat entertainment lawyer named Harris Tulchin talked about financing small projects. He looked almost normal, like your Uncle Fred the insurance underwriter. And this writer named Dave, sitting next to me, said he had a script about cloning in his backpack. Good timing, I replied. "I write lots of 'em, but I don't sell 'em," he said. He said this without a trace of self-deprecation. Just fact. No sale. Was this pure stupidity? Ram your head against the wall over and over and over again. Or was it determination? "Relax," said Heidi on the other side of me. Whoa -- you talking to me? Hadn't I throttled down yet? No, I was still vibrating, and this vagabond vamp felt it like rain. Tulchin talked. "He's got the power," whispered Dave. That was the galling thing. It was all in plain sight. The rich, the powerful, the filmmakers practicing the dominant art of our time. And they're just like us. It was all in plain sight. We glimpsed the machinery behind the breezy summer curtain. And yet for 99 percent of the people assembled here, nice folk, really, for 99 percent of these overeducated souls who had crossed the very ocean to make this scene, success in movies would forever elude them. The ferry pulled away from Nantucket, the sky an endless screen of blue. I sat up top again, across from a lovely young woman in a yellow sundress. She stretched flat on a metal bench, eyes closed, not asleep. Her red, crinkled hair fell through the bench's slats, and she had a tattoo, some kind of rune or cross, on her right ankle. Her yappy dog looked like the old RCA mutt. Who was this woman? Actress, con-gal, waitress? Trust-fund muffin, film-school grad? Later, when she sat up and said hi, I made sure not to ask her. We will meet again, I will return to Nantucket every year and she will star in my first feature film. SALON | June 12, 1998 Hal LaCroix is a writer living in Belmont, Mass.