It's four in the morning and Sherry Audé's aging Pekinese is pacing back and forth across the tiled floor of her living room in Lancaster, California, a place that proudly bills itself as the "Poppy Capital of California."

The dog looks quizzically at Sherry as the woman carefully places a couple of envelopes -- one a sappy Hallmark card from her, the other a handwritten note from Missy -- inside a dog-eared paperback copy of Stephen King's The Stand.

chapter continues

advertisement

"I'd like you to take this with you," she says, as she gingerly wraps the book in small down comforter. It smells vaguely of her perfume. "I want him to feel my arms around him."

I don't know what to say to that, so I glance around the room. There's the poster from Planet of the Apes. That's one of Sherry's proudest achievements. She spent weeks lining up thousands of extras for the final climactic battle scene. There's a lobby card from Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me, and another from Moulin Rouge.

And there's the picture of her youngest son, Erik. It is a classic Hollywood beefcake photo blown up to monumental proportions and hung prominently on the living room wall. Strong jaw. Piercing eyes. He's hoisting himself out of a pool. Drops of water cascade from his jet-black hair onto his bare shoulders.

That's the Erik Audé people have been describing to me for two full days, a 21-year-old kid who was just starting to make serious dent in the business with good (but not great) roles in Dude, Where's My Car? and National Lampoon's Van Wilder and a few significant guest shots on television shows.

That's the kid who cruised around North Hollywood with a backseat full of young starlets in the cherry red, classic '56 Chevy with no heat that he had been building since he was 12 years old.

It's the same kid who used to toss himself down flights of stairs for the amusement of his buddies and once launched himself into exaggerated spastic convulsions on the dance floor at a Hollywood party to take the focus off of a mentally disabled and thoroughly uncoordinated white kid who was making everyone else at the party feel uneasy.

This is the Erik Audé who once worked three minimum-wage jobs between acting gigs so he could buy a hot tub to impress the girls, only to find that the damned thing was too big to fit through his bedroom door.

This is the face of the kid who walked into the audition for Van Wilder and took an unprotected header onto a real brick, earning himself a bloody gash on his scalp, the undying respect of the film's stunt coordinator and about 15 seconds of screen time.

I try to picture him as he is now. Huddled in the corner of a Pakistani prison cell, watching through a wire mesh window as convicted drug dealers are led to the gallows in the prison courtyard. Crying into a ragged old blanket when the trap door falls, while thousands of other inmates cheer.

"Does that look like the face of a drug smuggler?" Sherry asks.

I don't know what to say to that either, so I tuck the perfumed blanket roll in my duffle bag.

"I'll see that he gets it," I say.