HOLLYWOOD STUNT MAN by Joe Moler

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I've got a lot of competition; hired labor costs money; and birds, man, they eat up twenty percent of the harvest! I don't even know why I even bother talking about it."
Then Charlie paused, dragged deeply on his Winston, and exhaled like an industrial smoke stack without changing the expression on his face, which showed neither joy nor sadness, yet perhaps weary contemplation of something that, as it stood, was not exceptionally important, but had absolutely no chance of coming to fruition. He dragged once more on his cigarette, emptied his glass of rakija and continued speaking without taking a breath:
"You know, I was thinking about finally going back to the old country, but those people over there, the ones I used to know — I wouldn't even recognize them now. I wrote a letter to Milovan, a relative of my ex-wife, Zivana, and I earnestly entreated him to take a look and see whether there were any good, big fields for sale (one that was next to a river) because I would be willing to buy it and devote myself to agriculture. Joe, I'd turn that into such a big agribusiness concern that all of Pomoravlje would stand there awe-struck. It would be the kind of farm that would command respect. And he writes back, this guy Zivanin, my distant relative, and he tells me: ‘Hey, Charlie, you used to be a Hollywood star, a famous stuntman, and you had a flower shop in the middle of Manhattan, and you live in a hotel like a movie star. Do you mean to tell me that a guy like you, who had articles written about him in Ilustrovana Politika and Vecernje Novosti, is going to come to Buljane to till a field next to the river? Oh, my dear Charlie, you are behaving like a child, not to mention ... Look, man, open up a business center or an auto repair shop next to a highway or maybe a gas station. But no, you want to plant tomatoes and cucumbers. What will Charles Bronson and Doris Day, who had their pictures taken with you, have to say about all this? Thirty years ago you wrote us in your letters that you knew them personally. And what do you think people are going to say here in your neck of the woods? I bought cucumbers and green peppers for pickling from that movie star who came from America. Oh, come on! Radunovic, don't embarrass us by doing that! How did it happen that Charlie, who came from a country as wealthy as the US of A and even had newspapers articles written about him, is now, in the latest episode, planting cucumbers and peppers?' ... Well, I read this letter of his, so then I called him up on the phone, and he started singing the same old song. Hey, Joe! What happened to the folks back home? They ain't normal villagers like the ones I left behind thirty-five years ago. They're some new kind of people. Layabouts and smooth operators. A person who likes farming actually bothers them. They're ashamed of it. Hey, man, farming is a great business. It's honest work; it's clean; and, if you will allow me to say so, you can't live without it. But those folks over there, they are now in love with all those things a man can do without, like washing other people's cars and pumping gas ... or am I going to stay here and to die among all these damn skyscrapers like Charlie the movie star, Charlie the stunt man, Charlie the screen double who dove into shit instead of Charles Bronson, and fell from horses, broke ribs on five different occasions, and cracked his skull twice, fractured his pelvic bone and spent six months complaining about it through a hole in his body cast — instead of Charles Bronson.