Black Evening (28 page)

It was Wes's idea to have the character renew his fascination with motorcycles. I have to admit that the notion had commercial value, given Wes's well-known passion for motorcycle racing. But I also felt apprehensive, especially when he insisted on doing his own stunts.

I couldn't talk him out of it. As if his model behavior on the first two pictures had been too great a strain on him, he snapped to the opposite extreme — showing up late, drinking on the set, playing expensive pranks. One joke involving fire crackers started a blaze in the costume trailer.

It all had the makings of a death wish. His absolute identification with Deacon was leading him to the ultimate parallel.

And just like Deacon in his final picture, Wes began to look wasted. Hollow-cheeked, squinty, stooped from lack of food and sleep. His dailies were shameful.

"How the hell are we supposed to ask an audience to pay to see this shit?" the studio VP asked.

"I'll have to shoot around him. Cut to reaction shots from the characters he's talking to." My heart lurched.

"That sounds familiar," Jill said beside me.

I knew what she meant. I'd become the director I'd criticized on
Broken Promises
.

"Well, can't you control him?" the VP asked.

"It's hard. He's not quite himself these days."

"Dammit, if you can't, maybe another director can. This garbage is costing us forty million bucks."

The threat made me seeth. I almost told him to take his forty million bucks and…

Abruptly I understood the leverage he'd given me. I straightened. "Relax. Just let me have a week. If he hasn't improved by then, I'll back out gladly."

"Witnesses heard you say it. One week, pal, or else."

In the morning, I waited for Wes in his trailer when as usual he showed up late for his first shot.

At the open trailer door, he had trouble focusing on me. "If it isn't teach." He shook his head. "No, wrong. It's me who's supposed to play the teach in — what's the name of this garbage we're making?"

"Wes, I want to talk to you."

"Hey, funny thing. The same goes for me with you. Just give me a chance to grab a beer, okay?" Fumbling, he shut the trailer door behind him and lurched through shadows toward the miniature fridge.

"Try to keep your head clear. This is important," I said.

"Right. Sure." He popped the tab on a beer can and left the fridge door open while he drank. He wiped his mouth. "But first I want a favor."

"That depends."

"I don't have to ask, you know. I can just go ahead and do it. I'm trying to be polite."

"What is it?"

"Monday's my birthday. I want the day off. There's a motorcyle race near Sonora. I want to make a long weekend out of it." He drank more beer.

"We had an agreement once."

He scowled. Beer dribbled down his chin.

"I write and direct. You star. Both of us, or none."

"Yeah. So? I've kept the bargain."

"The studio's given me a week. To shape you up. If not, I'm out of the project."

He sneered. "I'll tell them I don't work if you don't."

"Not that simple, Wes. At the moment, they're not that eager to do what you want. You're losing your clout. Remember why you liked us as a team?"

He wavered blearily.

"Because you wanted a friend. To keep you from making what you called the same mistakes again. To keep you from fucking up. Well, Wes, that's what you're doing. Fucking up."

He finished his beer and crumbled the can. He curled his lips, angry. "Because I want a day off on my birthday?"

"No, because you're getting your roles confused. You're not James Deacon. But you've convinced yourself that you are, and Monday you'll die in a crash."

He blinked. Then he sneered. "So what are you, a fortune teller now?"

"A half-baked psychiatrist. Unconsciously you want to complete the legend. The way you've been acting, the parallel's too exact."

"I told you the first time we met — I don't like bullshit!"

"Then prove it. Monday, you don't go near a motorcycle, a car, hell even a go-cart. You come to the studio sober. You do your work as well as you know how. I drive you over to my place. We have a private party. You and me and Jill. She promises to make your favorite meal: T-bones, baked beans, steamed corn. Homemade birthday cake. Chocolate. Again, your favorite. The works. You stay the night. In the morning, we put James Deacon behind us and…"

"Yeah? What?"

"You achieve the career Deacon never had."

His eyes looked uncertain.

"Or you go to the race and destroy yourself and break the promise you made. You and me together. A team. Don't back out of our bargain."

He shuddered as if he was going to crack.

In a movie, that would have been the climax — how he didn't race on his birthday, how we had the private party and he hardly said a word and went to sleep in our guest room.

And survived.

But this is what happened. On the Tuesday after his birthday, he couldn't remember his lines. He couldn't play to the camera. He couldn't control his voice. Wednesday was worse.

But I'll say this. On his birthday, the anniversary of Deacon's death, when Wes showed up sober and treated our bargain with honor, he did the most brilliant acting of his career. A zenith of tradecraft. I often watch the video of those scenes with profound respect.

And the dailies were so truly brilliant that the studio VP let me finish the picture.

But the VP never knew how I faked the rest of it. Overnight, Wes had totally lost his technique. I had enough in the can to deliver a print — with a lot of fancy editing and some uncredited but very expensive help from Donald Porter. He dubbed most of Wes's final dialogue.

"I told you. Horoscopes. Astrology," Donald said.

I didn't believe him until I took four scenes to an audio expert I know. He specializes in putting voices through a computer and making visual graphs of them.

He spread the charts in front of me. "Somebody played a joke on you. Or else you're playing one on me."

I felt so unsteady that I had to press my hands on his desk when I asked him, "How?"

"Using this first film, Deacon's scene from
The Prodigal Son
as the standard, this second film is close. But this third one doesn't have any resemblance."

"So where's the joke?"

"In the fourth. It matches perfectly. Who's kidding who?"

Deacon had been the voice on the first. Donald Porter had been the voice on the second. Close to Deacon's, dubbing for Wes in
Rampage
. Wes himself had been the voice on the third — the dialogue in
Rampage
that I couldn't use because Wes's technique had gone to hell.

And the fourth clip? The voice that was identical to Deacon's, authenticated, verifiable. Wes again. His screen test. The imitated scene from
The Prodigal Son
.

***

Wes dropped out of sight. For sure, his technique had collapsed so badly he would never again be a shining star. I kept phoning him, but I never got an answer. So, for what turned out to be the second-last time, I drove out to his dingy place near the desert. The Manson lookalikes were gone. Only one motorcycle stood outside. I climbed the steps to the sun porch, knocked, received no answer, and opened the door.

The blinds were closed. The place was in shadow. I went down a hall and heard strained breathing. Turned to the right. And entered a room.

The breathing was louder, more strident and forced.

"Wes?"

"Don't turn on the light."

"I've been worried about you, friend."

"Don't…"

But I did turn on the light. And what I saw made me swallow vomit.

He was slumped in a chair. Seeping into it would be more accurate. Rotting. Decomposing. His cheeks had holes that showed his teeth. A pool that stank of decaying vegetables spread on the floor around him.

"I should have gone racing on my birthday, huh?" His voice whistled through the gaping flesh in his throat.

"Oh, shit, friend." I started to cry. "Jesus Christ, I should have let you."

"Do me a favor, huh? Turn off the light now. Let me finish this in peace."

I had so much to say to him. But I couldn't. My heart broke. I turned off the light.

"And buddy," he said, "I think we'd better forget about our bargain. We won't be working together anymore."

"What can I do to help? There must be something I can — "

"Yeah, let me end this the way I need to."

"Listen, I — "

"Leave," Wes said. "It hurts me too much to have you here, to listen to the pity in your voice."

"But I care about you. I'm your friend. I — "

"That's why I know you'll do what I ask" — the hole in his throat made another whistling sound — "and leave."

I stood in the darkness, listening to other sounds he made: liquid rotting sounds. "A doctor. There must be something a doctor can — "

"Been there. Done that. What's wrong with me no doctor's going to cure. Now if you don't mind…"

"What?"

"You weren't invited. Get out."

I waited another long moment. "… Sure."

"Love you, man," he said.

"… love you."

Dazed, I stumbled outside. Down the steps. Across the sand. Blinded by the sun, unable to clear my nostrils of the stench in that room, I threw up beside the car.

The next day, I drove out again. The last time. Jill went with me. He'd moved. I never learned where.

And this is how it ended, the final dregs of his career. His talent was gone, but how his determination lingered.

Movies. Immortality.

See, special effects are expensive. Studios will grasp at any means to cut the cost.

He'd told me, "Forget about our bargain." I later discovered what he meant — he worked without me in one final feature. He wasn't listed in the credits, though.
Zombies from Hell
. Remember how awful Bela Lugosi looked in his last exploitation movie before they buried him in his Dracula cape?

Bela looked great compared to Wes. I saw the Zombie movie in an eight-plex out in the Valley. It did great business. Jill and I almost didn't get a seat.

Jill wept as I did.

This fucking town. Nobody cares how it's done, as long as it packs them in.

The audience cheered when Wes stalked toward the leading lady.

And his jaw fell off.

 

In 1986, a year after the previous story was published, I made a decision that surprised me as much as it did anyone else. Since 1970, I had been teaching American literature at the University of Iowa. I had risen through the ranks, gaining tenure and a full professorship. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching. It was a delight to be around young people eager to learn. The stimulation of the university environment and of my colleague friends had been a constant in my life for sixteen years.

Then I woke up one morning and recognized that I didn't have the energy to devote myself to two full-time professions any longer. I had been working seven days a week for as long as I could remember. Balancing my teaching responsibilities with my writing needs had often required me to get up before dawn and to stay awake after my family went to sleep. The idea of a day off or of a free weekend wasn't in my universe. But while teaching was my love, writing was my passion, and when the burden of fatigue finally overwhelmed me, there wasn't any doubt what "the mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions," as one critic called me, would do. In the fall of 1986, I resigned from the university.

The adjustment was painful. After all, academia had been a crucial part of my life for even longer than my years at Iowa — all the way back to 1966 when I'd entered graduate school at Penn State. Although I now had the luxury to write full time, I continued to feel the tug of the classroom. Often I reconsidered my decision. But in a matter of months, neither writing nor teaching mattered any longer.

In January of 1987, my son was diagnosed with bone cancer. From then until his death in June, the nightmarish rollercoaster of emotions and pain through which Matt suffered made me fear for my sanity. This can't be happening, I told myself. It isn't real. But despairingly it was, and I found myself wanting to escape from reality. While sitting in Mart's intensive-care room, watching his septic-shock-ravaged, comatose body, I was surprised to discover that the novel I was holding was by Stephen King. Stephen is a friend. He knew Matt and kindly sent him letters along with rock tapes to try to distract him from his ordeal. Even so, it seemed odd to me that in the midst of real-life horror, I was reading made-up horror. Then it occurred to me that the made-up horror was paradoxically providing a barrier from real-life horror. I recalled how fans often wrote to me, describing disasters in their lives — deaths, marriage breakups, lost jobs, fires, floods, car accidents — telling me that a book of mine had helped them make it through the night. As the subject of my doctoral dissertation, John Barth, once said, "Reality is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there."

While these thoughts went through my mind, another friend, Douglas Winter, a multiple talent fiction writer/critic/anthologist/attorney asked if I would contribute to an anthology he was putting together,
Prime Evil
. Writing was the last thing I wanted to do, and yet, with Doug's encouragement, when I wasn't visiting Matt in the hospital, I wrote the following novella which was suggested by my fascination with the paintings of Van Gogh. A tale about insanity, it helped to keep me sane. It received the Horror Writers Association award for the best novella of 1988.

 

 

Van Dorn's work was controversial, of course. The scandal his paintings caused among Parisian artists in the late 1800s provided the stuff of legend. Disdaining conventions, thrusting beyond accepted theories, Van Dorn seized upon the essentials of the craft to which he'd devoted his soul. Color, design, and texture. With those principles in mind, he created portraits and landscapes so different, so innovative, that their subjects seemed merely an excuse for Van Dorn to put paint onto canvas. His brilliant colors, applied in passionate splotches and swirls, often so thick that they projected an eighth of an inch from the canvas in the manner of a bas-relief, so dominated the viewer's perception that the person or scene depicted seemed secondary to technique.