Miss Wyoming (10 page)

Making hit movies was one of the smaller problems in John's life. Ivan handled the workaday stuff like budgets and wind machines and union haggling. John's role was to walk into a room where nothing really existed except for a few money guys who wanted a bit of glamour, a good dollar return and a few cracks at some industry sweeties. John would conjure up a spell for these Don Duncans, Norm Numbnuts and Darrens-from-Citicorp. He had to cram his aura deep, deep, deep inside their guts, spin it around like a juicer's blade, then withdraw and watch the suits ejaculate dollars. «People, this isn't about cash, this is about the American
soul
— it's about locating that soul and ripping it out by its root. It's about taking that root and planting it deep into the director's warm beating heart, hot pulsing blood feeding the plant, nourishing it until it flowers and gives us roses and zinnias and orchids and heliotropes and even, fuck, I don't know,
antlers.
And we sit and watch the blooms and we've done our part. It's the only reason we're here. We're dirt. We're crap. We're shit. But we're
good
shit. We're nothing but soil for the director to grow a vision. And we should be
proud
of it.» Usually, John would climb right up onto the meeting desk for this portion of the event. People rarely wanted details. They wanted hocus-pocus and John gave it to them. John had good hunches and he acted on them quickly, with almost alien accuracy. He believed that most people had at least a few good ideas each day, but that they rarely used them. John had no brakes. There was no lag time between his idea and its implementation. He was a film commando. Sometimes it frightened him how easily people would follow somebody who conveyed the appearance of direction or will.

Bel Air PI
was a reasonably low-budget buddy-cop film in which a has-been rust-belt homicide-detective-turned-PI partnered up with the mayor's daughter, a tawny renegade («Darling,» said Doris after reading the script, «your heroine is a tawny renegade. Whatever
next!
») to establish a PI agency. Their first case was to search for the missing wife of a studio executive who was located in many KFC-sized pieces in an Imperial County lemon orchard. Drugs were involved. Betrayal. A final shoot-out and chase in which Cat and Dog stopped fighting each other to unite against the forces of evil and then Get It On.

The movie relaunched the career of a faded seventies rock star and gave steroids to a film genre then on the wane. Almost immediately
Bel Air PI 2 (Bel Air
π²) was in the works, and John had drugs and dollars and pussy hurled into his lap.

Bel Air
π² became a monster hit, bigger than the original, and was followed by an alien invasion thriller with a soundtrack that number one'd for five weeks, and a terrorists—occupy—Disneyland—style thriller that went ballistic in European and Japanese release but didn't work so well in North America, as copycat directors had glommed onto John's noisy, music-drenched formula. To John moviemaking wasn't formulaic. It was a way for him to create worlds wherein he could roam with infinite power far away from a personal history, free of childhood disease and phantom relatives.

Wherever John went, the volume was up full. Once, John and Ivan drove John's car-of-the-month, a Bentley «the color of Grace Kelly's neck,» down to La Quinta for a Polygram executives' weekend retreat. They left the car parked in the desert while they searched for pieces of cactus skeleton Nylla wanted for her flower arranging. Once they'd been in the sun a while, John went to the car and brought back to Ivan's rock perch an armload of items. First was a laminated menu stolen from a Denny's. He rolled it into a funnel, and used it to send item number two, a half bottle of tequila, down his throat. He then reached for the third item, a rifle. He used it to fire five volleys into the car's skin, turning it into a fast, expensive sieve. Ivan yelled, «Studly!» John promptly vomited, and stopped having cars-of-the-month after that, settling on the gunshot Bentley as his distinctive final choice. John had a reputation to keep, and when he entered rooms, success and decadence swarmed about him like juicy gossip.

John's one true friend across the years was Ivan. As an added bonus for Ivan, John came with a mother, Doris — a presence sorely missing in Ivan's life since his father got marriage out of his system just months after Ivan's birth. John and Doris had been living in the guesthouse for two weeks when Ivan was shipped home from an experimental boarding school near Big Sur. He'd been caught sniffing ether from an Orange Crush bottle. The ether had been stolen from the science lab by a student who traded it with Ivan for a set of puffy stereo headphones.

«Why were you sniffing ether?» John asked on their first meeting, in the front hallway of the main house, the floor's stone so smooth and shiny and hard-looking that John thought that anything that dropped on it would shatter — glass, metal, feathers and diamonds. Having never been to California before, he believed he could feel the heat mending his body.

«I was trying to get over something,» Ivan said.

«What?»

Ivan looked at this pale, scrawny, unfledged child, more ghost than body. Ivan decided from the start to take John into his confidence. He assumed that such an underdeveloped body could only harbor an overdeveloped mind. «I have this dopey paranoid fear about» — he paused — «the Ice Age.»

«The
Ice
Age?»

«Yeah.»

John could hear Doris and Angus sitting in the living room, laughing away.

Ivan went on. «I keep on seeing this picture. These pictures. A wall of ice like the white cliffs at Dover — scraping across Pasadena and then down Wilshire and crushing this house.»

«Who told you that? It's a crock of shit. That's not the way it works. First thing that happens is that it snows — but then that snow doesn't melt over the summer. And then the next winter it snows again, and
that
snow doesn't melt, either. And then it snows maybe a few feet each year, and none of that melts. After a thousand years — a blink in the scheme of things — you've got a slab of ice a mile thick. But you're long gone by then. And if you were smart, you'd have moved to the equator the first year, anyway.»

Ivan stood and smiled at John and from then on ceased worrying about the Ice Age. They turned and looked out at the flickering sprinklers in the yard through a small diamond-paned window. «What happened to you?» Ivan asked. «You look like you're dead or something. Like you're on a telethon.»

From that point, John's body metamorphosed. He grew tall, almost brawny, but good health arrived too late in his adolescence to entrance him with team sports. He only cared about solo activities in which he could claim pure victory without the ego dilution of teams. John also stopped watching TV, superstitiously equating it with illness.

John and Ivan aligned, making super-8 films as larks, the first of which was titled
Doris's Saturday Night.
It chronicled her cocktailed devolution from Delaware insecticide heiress elegantly tamping shreds of hard-boiled egg onto crustless toast triangles, loving the attention, then shamelessly hamming it up, becoming a haggard
mal vivant
gurgling fragments of sea shanties into the pipes beneath the kitchen sink.

Their second film was more mundane. Angus said they needed to learn about sequencing and editing, so John and Ivan followed Angus through a typical day of work at the studio — capturing his meetings, lunches, drives around the city and a screening at night. It was edited together and shown with goofy subtitles at Angus's fiftieth birthday party under the title
Film Executive Secretly Wearing a Diaper Because It Makes Him Feel Naughty,
and marked their debut into the filmgoing community.

John was a surprisingly confident young man, and a doer, not a thinker. This was an impulse Doris had encouraged him to hone. She didn't want John to be a Lodge in any way, and so fostered in him an enthusiasm for anything that went against the Delaware grain. She encouraged action, creativity and a strong dislike for the past. She had also talked Angus into removing Ivan from the private school system altogether, so both he and John could attend the local high school. Neither flourished, but both were happy enough there, and afterward both young men scraped their way through UCLA, spending the majority of their time making short films and chasing girls. John also experimented with cars. He bought the orange 260-Z from the proceeds of flipping successively more valuable cars, while Ivan drove a mint green Plymouth Scamp he bought from one of Angus's gardeners.

When they were both twenty-four, they founded Equator Pictures, using Ivan's connections and a small loan from Angus. They quickly had their hit with
Bel Air PI,
making them both independently wealthy, independently powerful as well as dependent on each other. John was the unstoppable freight train. Ivan ensured that the vegetables served by craft catering were fresh, and slipped $500 to a crotchety neighbor beside a location shoot who refused to turn off his Weedwacker.

One spring day, somewhere between
Bel Air PI
and
Bel Air PI 2,
John and Ivan were at an ARCO station filling up John's gunshot Bentley. 260-Z, his primary vehicle even though by now he owned the usual industry array of flash-trash cars. John said to Ivan, «I like to pump my own gas into my own car, Ivan. I always go to a self-service pump. Did I ever tell you why?»

«To connect with the man in the street?» Ivan laughed.

«No. Because I like to look at the numbers rev by on the gas pump. I like to pretend each number's a year. I like to watch history begin at Year Zero and clip up and up and up. Dark Ages … Renaissance … Vermeer … 1776 … Railways … Panama … zoom, zoom, zoom … the Depression … World War II … Suburbia … JFK … Vietnam … Disco … Mount St. Helens …
Dynasty
… and then,
WHAM!
We hit the wall. We hit the present.»

«So what?»

«
This
is what: there's this magic little bit of time, just a few numbers past the present year, whatever it is. Whenever I hit these years, then for maybe a fraction of a second, I can, if not
see
the future,
feel
it.»

«I'm listening,» Ivan said. He was so patient with John.

«It's like I get to be the first one there — in the future. I get to be first. A pioneer.»

«That's what you want to be — a pioneer?»

«Yes.»

Ivan paused and then, with some consideration, asked, «John-O, have you checked your tire pressure?»

«Nah.»

Ivan got out of the car, got a pressure gauge from the attendant, and came back and checked the pressure. «You've got to do the little things, too, John. It all counts, big and small.»

John finished dinner with Ivan and Nylla, then went down to the guesthouse. Doris, having declined dinner with crack baby MacKenzie, was asleep. For the first time since his return from his botched walkout he didn't feel cold dark steel down his spine. He thought back to the women he'd been with briefly during that walkout, then he thought of Susan. Turning the front door knob, it came to him that maybe
he
could sponge away the look of loneliness that he'd seen in Susan's eyes — and John was now pretty sure it was loneliness he'd seen, despite the smiles and the confidences. If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness and the open discussion of loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure.
Loneliness
is what clears out a room. Susan could be more to him than his latest box-office ranking. With Susan he might actually help for once, might actually raise something better out of himself than a hot pitch for a pointless film. Something moral and fine inside each of them might sprout and grow.

He phoned and got her answering machine again. He hung up. He felt sixteen.

When Susan didn't respond within an hour, John found his heart racing, his concentration shot. By midnight he was as buggy as he'd ever been on drugs, but without the distractions. He decided to forward his phone messages to his cell phone, then go rent tapes starring Susan. He wanted to see if the lonely look in her eye had always been there or if it was something new. He also just wanted to see her face.
This is how fans feel about stars,
he thought.
So this is what it's like.
To John, stars were just part of the flow of people through the house, like the maids, the agents and the caterers. But tonight he understood the allure of the tabloids and the fanzines.

He drove Ivan's Chrysler sedan down into West Hollywood. Ivan and Nylla preferred the sedan because of its anonymity. It didn't look like a rental car, and it didn't look, as Doris had said, «ethnic or frightened middle class.»

Traffic was tolerable; the night's darkness still felt clean. He found a rental place, West Side Video. On entering he saw it was the kind of shop where the manager asserts personality by laser-printing signs highlightingEVIL MOTHERS ,CUTE & DUMB , and arcane subcategories likeGORE FESTS andLEMONS , where John was genuinely amused to see his old turkeys,
The Wild Land
and
The Other Side of Hate.

He realized he had no idea what movies Susan had been in. He asked the clerk, name-taggedRYAN , if he had anything starring Susan Colgate, and the clerk squeaked with pleasure. «Meese
Colllllll
gate? I should think
so.
Right this way.» He led John to an old magazine rack filled with sun-faded tape boxes. Above the rack was a laser-printed sign readingST .SUSAN THE DIVINE . The top of the rack was camped up with altarlike candles and sacrificial offerings — Japanese candy bars, prescription bottles, a model Airbus 340 with a missing wing, and a mosaic of head shots of Susan culled from a wide array of print media. Ryan stood patiently, waiting for John's reaction, but John was silent, the inside of his brain firing Roman candles. He felt a sexual need to own the altar.

«She's something, isn't she?» Ryan asked.

«You did this?» John asked, looking at Ryan, a Gap clone — khakis, white T-shirt with flannel shirt on top. A pleasant Brady Bunch face. Like a gag writer at Fox.

«With tender loving care.»

«I'll give you a hundred bucks for it, right now.»

Ryan was taken aback. «Mr. Johnson — I'm sorry, but I can't pretend I don't know who you are — this is
my
shrine. It's not like I can just give it away like that.»

«Five hundred, but throw in the movies.»

«Mr.
Johnson.
I
made
it. It's not like a joke or something. Well, maybe a
bit
of a joke. But I've been saving these clippings for years.»

«Nine hundred. Half of what I've got. It's my last money. Everybody knows I'm broke. Even with
Mega Force
— that's in a trust.»

«Don't tell me this! Too much information, Mr. Johnson!»

«John.»

«Too much information, John.» Ryan put his hands on his hips and watched as John scanned the titles on the boxes' spines. The store was empty. They could speak loudly. «
John,
I'm a stranger to you, but let me ask you something.»

«Welcome to detox. Ask away.»

«Are you, how shall I say, in
love
with Miss Colgate?»

«What?» John was shocked, not by Ryan's forthrightness, but by the same sort of
ping
he used to get when he discovered whodunit in an Agatha Christie mystery. «Love? I — »

«Go no further. It's okay. I work for the forces of good. And it doesn't surprise me, you know.»

«What doesn't? I never said I was in love.»

«Psh. You're like the old RKO Radio tower shooting out bolts of Susan.»

«You're a ballsy little shit.»

«Now, now.» Ryan could see John didn't mind. In fact, quite the opposite. «I mean, both of you have done disappearing acts. Her after the plane crash three years ago, and you earlier this year.»

John wasn't going to fight it. «Go on. What's your point?»

Ryan rubbed his chin and became professorial. «Well, this would have to be a
new
thing, wouldn't it? Because if it was even slightly old, you'd already have seen all her old videos by now.»

«Bingo, Dr. Einstein.»

«When did you meet?»

«Today. At lunch. At the Ivy.»

Ryan whistled, then relaxed his posture. «Tell you what, John. Rent all the videos and I'll report them as lost or stolen.»

«Yeah?»

«Yeah. And don't waste your last money. I'll throw in the altar, but there's a catch.»

«It wouldn't be life on earth if there weren't a catch. «
Qu'est-ce-que c'est,
Ryan?» John found himself greatly liking this strange young man.

«You have to answer a series of skill-testing questions after reading a script I wrote.»

«Fair enough. Deal.»

«Good. I'll lock up and we can scan these tapes out of the system and load this stuff into your car.»

The two men carried the shrine by its ends over to the counter, where Ryan began to laser-scan the tapes' bar codes. John gave Ryan the address of the guesthouse, as well as his phone number. «Give these out to anybody and you're mulch. And let me ask
you
something, Ryan — why'd
you
make a shrine? You're not a stalker, because they don't make shrines — they stalk. What's
your
deal?»

Ryan looked up from the till, was about to say one thing and then visibly stopped and began to say something else. «Oh, you know, we all need an obsession, and mine's La Colgate: 3184 Prestwick Drive, Benedict Canyon, Wyoming driver's license 3352511, phone unlisted but messages can be left with Adam Norwitz, the IPD Agency.»

John stared at Ryan.

«She rents stuff here.»

John looked down at the tapes, some episodes of
Meet the Blooms, Dynamite Bay
and
Thraice's Faces — On Tour with Steel Mountain.
Crap. «There's another reason you like Susan Colgate. Mind telling me?»

«Fair enough. An LAPD guy told me I was the last person to ever leave a message on her phone line before her plane crashed — a few years ago. I can't explain it. And now here you are tonight. So I'm bonding with her again.»

The shrine fit neatly in the car's back seat. The air outside was surprisingly cold and John's skin felt clammy. «Here's the script,» said Ryan.

«Yeah, yeah,» said John, grabbing it.

«John — listen to me.» John stopped — he was unused to being addressed like this but didn't mind. «You're going to read this script and then you're going to get back to me right away. But that's not all.»

«It's not, is it?»

«No. You're also going to call me up whenever you need to, and we can talk about Susan.»

«Do you have any idea how fucking psycho that sounds, Ryan?»

«Psycho or not, I mean it. Other people aren't going to understand this when it breaks out. And it will. Not from me, but from you, because you're in love so you have a need to blab everything. Other people won't get it.»

John laughed. «Okay, Ryan, you win. When my heart gets ready to sing, you can be my Yoko Ono.»

«Good luck, Mr. Johnson.»

John gave the thumbs-up and drove immediately to 3184 Prestwick, parked across the street and looked at Susan's small blue Cape Cod house surrounded by overgrown ornamental shrubs. A porch light was on, but otherwise it was dark. An hour crept by, and the only activity John noticed was a dog walker and three cars driving by. He gave up, and late in the night he drove back to the guesthouse. The streets were surprisingly empty, and at Highland and Sunset he noticed a fog, but then realized it couldn't be because Los Angeles almost never had fog. His cell phone rang, but the caller hung up. John conceded that something must be on fire.

That night John didn't sleep. He read Ryan's script and drank raspberry juice cut with stinging nettle and mango. He looked at his cordless phone wondering what might be a remotely plausible time to call Susan. Seven-thirty? Too early. Eight? Yes. No. He'd look desperate. Eight-thirty?
Uh, hello, Susan — yes, I know it's kinda early… .
Nine? Yes — but how to get there through the ink and murk and smothering slowness of night?

By six o'clock the sky was lightening and a few doves skittered about in the shrubs. He put down Ryan's script, «Tungaska.» It was good. A Texas woman inherits a strange metal hoop from her father, which looks like an unjeweled crown or a creweling hoop. She holds it up to the light from a TV set for a better look and suddenly licorice-whip tornadoes descend from the sky, smashing her Galveston subdivision into a landfill of cracked plywood, broken furniture, branches, toys and cars and clothing. Only the room in which she's sitting is spared. It turns out the hoop is a portal that converts human psychic energy into nuclear energy.

John heard a hum up the hill — Ivan's treadmill buzzing to life at its usual six-thirty time slot. Company! He walked up to Ivan, who was also watching the morning news on an ancient 14-inch TV placed on its usual perch on a lawn chair. «John-O.»

«Ivan.»

«You look like shit. Up all night?» Ivan's treadmill was on 3 out of a possible 10.

«Yeah.» This was not uncommon.

«Watch anything good?»

«Actually, no. I read something.»

«You
read
?»

«A script, actually.»

«My,
my.
High School Graduates Eat Steak. When was the last time you even touched a script?»

John had to think. «Yeah, yeah. Whenever.»

«Something we can use?»

«I think so. It's okay.»

«Okay good, or okay crap?»

«Okay good. Okay
great,
actually.»

«Spiel forth, pardner.»

John started to describe the film.

«What happens after the Galveston blowup?» Ivan was hooked.

«We go back in time — to the famous Tungaska “meteor explosion” of 1909.»

«Isn't that the one where half the trees in Siberia got knocked down?»

«That's it — except it turns out it wasn't a meteorite explosion. It was this hoop thing.»

«Not aliens, I hope. The market's supersaturated with alien shit.» Ivan timed some sort of pulse or throbbing in his body with his stopwatch.

«Not aliens. The hoop is from Switzerland. From Bern, Switzerland. It's from 1905, and it was made by a voluptuous Russian Jew down the hall from Einstein's apartment. That was the year he discovered the Theory of Relativity.»

«Vol
up
tuous? What kind of word is that? Where are we, John-O — 1962?»

«Okay okay. But she's hot.»

«She's
hot
? Are we in 1988 now?»

«God, Ivan. She's hot in a cold kind of way. Her parents died and she had to go back to Siberia from Bern. But when she's there, there's the accident — the Tungaska explosion.»

«What kind of psychic energy creates an explosion that levels half of Siberia?»

«The woman's first orgasm accidentally funneled through an amplifier ring within the hoop.»

«Jawohl.»

«Anyhow, she's at the center of the explosion, so she's safe. That's part of the deal. Imagine the special effects on this one, Ivan. Anyhow, by now the bad guys know all about this hoop.»

«Who are the bad guys?»

«A Swiss banking consortium just before WWII. The guys who were about to rake gold fillings out of the death camps.»

«Go on.»

«These banking guys want it. All of the governments want it, but she keeps both herself and her hoop hidden until 1939 and the war. She's sent to a death camp and the Nazis get the hoop. Then the Americans steal it from the Germans, and the Americans use it to nuke Japan. And after that the hoop moves to Nevada, where they suck in the gambling energy and the desperation energy from Las Vegas to do their nuclear tests. But then the woman's son, a ballistics scientist working there at the Nevada test site, makes these connections and realizes what the hoop is really about — and also that it belongs to
him.

«So he manages to swipe it — that's when the nuclear testing stops — in the eighties — and he smuggles himself and the hoop down to Galveston. But he has a stroke. His daughter, played by the same actress, puts the hoop into a luggage closet. It's when she's cleaning out the closet that she has the accident with the hoop up against the TV set. The tornado alerts the bad guys, and so there's this chase and it ends with a hurricane of blood. Fish turn inside out. Roses bloom at midnight. It's Revelations. At the end the woman takes the hoop to Hawaii and throws it into one of the live volcanoes on Oahu. Whaddya think?»

Ivan was measuring his breath as his treadmill kicked into a hill simulation. «Sounds to me like there's lots of debris flying around in it.»

«Debris? What? Yeah — I guess so.»

«I was meeting with these nerds at ILM and SGI up in San Francisco before I went to Scotland. Their computers can do perfect flying debris and litter now. They're looking for a showcase for their new techniques and this sounds like just the thing. Story needs some work, though. Who's the writer?»