HOLLYWOOD STUNT MAN by Joe Moler

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He revisited his cinematic memories while he lying flat on his back, exhausted, covered with bruises and scratches, bone fractures, and a constant pain in his head and a ringing in his ears, recovering in his room, which was plastered with pictures of movie star heroes from the days of his youth.
Yes, we used to see each other, my fellow Serbian immigrant, the former stunt double for Charles Bronson, a man who in his youth had fallen in love with the great Cinemascope screen in the Avala and Jadran movie theatres in Paracin. We used to see one another only during the major holidays, and, of course, we talked (what else could we have done?) about days gone by, about films, about our jobs, and about all the things that were happening in life that either hit us or missed us.
However, in the last years of the twentieth century, he was no longer the cheerful and well-disposed Milan Radunovic we all knew: Milan Bronson, Charlie Radunovic or Milan the Good-for-Nothing, as we had still called him during the time he ran a nice little flower shop in the park on Herald Square at Thirty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.
"Hey, Charlie, how are you? What are you doing? How are your children? What are you up to now...?" I'd begin, as usual, with ten questions at once so that Charlie most often replied with a single answer, giving a clear and vivid answer about what was giving him a hard time and what was making him happy at that moment in his life in Manhattan. I wanted to ask him everything all at once, as it happens when people don't see one another for long periods of time, and then have only a little time to relate the stories of sad or happy events from their lives.
"Thank God, we're all still alive. As usual, I'm still renting that big field down in South Jersey. I brought a mobile trailer home down there and I'm planting fruits and vegetables. I really like it. For some reason, I'm drawn to it more than I am to anything else. I'm thinking about the agriculture business, you see? This year tomatoes were two dollars apiece, and they were as big as soccer balls: red, fragrant, and sweet; and my onions were as big as tennis balls. And bigger. And green peppers the size of soccer shoes, and they're so green and red that, man, it just makes you feel sorry to eat them. And I sell all the produce at a stand I've got on Seventy-Second Street. It's not bad. My harvest is good, but they're hitting me up for taxes and a booth in the market, and this, that and the other thing ... a little while ago they fined me because I wasn't wearing clean clothes, and they said that I wasn't fulfilling minimum hygienic requirements, but my peppers and tomatoes don't have any pesticides, and Milan Radunovic ain't poisoning anybody. That's what it's all about, but you know how things go here. Nobody pays any attention to that. They look at the surface of things... And they say: ‘You have to keep yourself clean, sir. You are selling food, not used cars.' So I paid the fine. What else was I gonna do? It wasn't the best of all possible outcomes, but I had no other choice.