Wag the Dog (14 page)

“Thank you,” I say, unable to reject the gift even if I have other editions of the same book.

He knocks back the rest of the beer in one long swallow. He stares at me as if I am a disrespectful guest until I too have
finished my bottle. He takes it from me and then puts both aside to collect the deposit later. That done, we go back into the dojo.

Kim claps his hands. Everyone turns and looks. He gestures to a tall, skinny black man with a shaven head. I know him slightly. He calls himself Hawk. Just like the TV show. In fact, he claims that the TV character is modeled after him. I don't think that's true.

“Hawk. Give Joe match. Light contact. Only.” Kim says.

Hawk gives me a “bad” look. I turn to Kim. I'm not ready for this. I have a belly full of beer.

“Yo, bro,” Hawk says, “we gonna get to it, or you want me hit you in the back of the head.”

I turn around. We find a place on the mat. The others automatically give way to us. We bow to each other. The beer sloshes internally. We take our positions. We begin.

Hawk strikes first. It is instantly clear that he is my superior. He is quicker and stronger and more skillful. Tae kwan do uses a lot of kicks and special techniques to generate a lot of power in the kicks. To execute them properly requires great flexibility. By body type alone he is ahead of me. Very soon he is striking almost at will.

I block as best I can, letting him hit my forearms, shoulders, thighs, but trying to protect my vulnerable points: eyes, throat, groin, knees. One solid kick gets through and hits me in me stomach. I step back as I taste beer coming back up.

Light contact is not that light.

Martial-arts instructors believe in pain as a teacher. So do Marine drill instructors. And many parents. I have to admit that even as I am taking this measured beating I am becoming more centered and awake. I begin to see Hawk more clearly. I become certain that at some point, when he thinks he has a clear shot, he's going to deliver one of his crippling blows at full power. He is not going to be content with a demonstration. There is a kind of rage in him. And arrogance.

I attempt an attack. He blocks and snaps back with a left hand strike at my neck. I miss my block. His strike has more snap than it should. I back up, hurt. He follows with a kick aimed at my groin.

This is his move. This is full force.

I get my thigh in the way. It's a powerful blow, momentarily numbing. He knows it. I'm even slower now than when we started.

He follows it up. A variation on the same sequence. A hand strike, this time at my eyes, to back me up and position me for the kick that will follow. This time, I feel with certainty, it will be at my knee—these thoughts are not in words. By the time words could form, the actions would be long over. They are instant thoughts, vivid and clear, though I can't say what they are if they're not words.

If he strikes my knee, he will injure it. Either a little or a lot. That will end the match. Afterward, he will offer a formal but insincere apology.

Instead of flinching back to protect my eyes, I step into the hand strike with the intent of taking the blow on the top of my forehead. This is dangerous for both of us. If my timing is not good enough, or his adjustment is too good, I'm going to get hit in the eye. At the same time, the skull is a very hard piece of bone very close to the surface. It is very dangerous to hit people in the head with a fist or fingers. If he strikes full-force and makes no adjustment, he is likely to break something.

He adjusts. But not enough. His stiffened fingers hit the bone just above the eye. The skin beneath my eyebrow splits. Blood starts to flow. It looks dramatic but it means nothing. Kim does not stop the bout. In fact, I think I hear him giggle. Though I'm too concentrated to be sure.

Hawk has hurt his hand. His rhythm is broken. And I am not the one set up.

This turns his ambush into my ambush. But he doesn't understand that yet. Perhaps distracted by the gaudiness of my blood.

Because he doesn't understand that, he continues with what he planned, the kick to my knee. But I'm already too close to him and I keep moving in. Instead of his foot striking my knee, I bring my knee up to meet his knee and join with it. I turn, joining my force to the force he has committed. I drop down, going to the mat, and throw him over me. I follow him
down, fast as I can. I thud down on him with my knees. With my hand in a tiger claw I slash at his face and touch my fingers to his eyelids.

Kim claps to end the bout.

We get up. We bow to each other. I'm bleeding. Hawk's hand is starting to hurt him. Kim walks away. He has other business. I am supposed to have learned something from this. Or from the book. Or from his story. Or from all of it. If I have not, the fault is in the student, not the teacher, and the teacher, rightly, has no more to say. Or maybe he was just pissed at me for asking dumb questions and the lesson was to shut up and not bother him. All of these are possible.

“You think you a mean motherfuck, don't you,” Hawk says.

“Mean enough,” I say.

“You not as mean as me,” he says. “If it was my fingers in your eyes, you would have felt the Hawk before he let you rise.”

“Probably,” I say.

He suddenly grins. He has a wide mouth and large teeth. It makes his smile very big and friendly-looking. “Fuck you, Joe, you all right,” he says and starts one of those old-fashioned soul-brother handshakes with fist tapping, elbow banging, forearm sliding, and thumb rolls. I was in Nam. All the brothers did it. My version is outdated but so, I guess, is Hawk's. Nowadays they just make finger gestures, gang signs. You know, you've seen it in the movies.

I go back to the house.

Maggie is getting ready to go to an Important Party.

It's hosted by Jon Peters. Who has recently been hired by Sony to become head of Columbia Pictures.
²³
His salary is reported to be $2.7 million plus a piece of the profits plus Hollywood perks. There are thousands of people in Hollywood who can say “No.” There are several hundred who can say “I'm onboard” or “I approve” and it will likely go. But there are only a handful that can actually say “Go” and the twenty or thirty or
forty million dollars will be committed and spent and the motion picture made. Maybe there are five or ten or fifteen. Whatever the number, most of them will be there tonight.

Maggie has her hairdresser over. His name is Fredo. I watch him work for a few minutes. Neither of them notice me. He's chattering about the sex lives of stars. He actually mentions the gerbil story again. He swears that his boyfriend cuts the hair of the doctor who removed the beast.

“Fredo, just shut up and make me beautiful,” Maggie snaps. As if she's not, and it suddenly frightens her.

I look at her facing her fear in the mirror, then I leave the room.

Later, Maggie comes downstairs. She is devastating. Hair, makeup, clothes, shoes—the whole package. I don't know about clothes, but I can tell this dress is very expensive, the material is something special and it is custom-made for her. Whoever has made it is very clever because it looks simple but it keeps molding itself to her, changing as she moves. One moment I'm aware of her breasts, then the length of her legs, then I'm staring at the shape of her mound. Then it disappears.

I, on the other hand, do not look my best. I have a butterfly bandage on my eyebrow, discoloration around the eye, and I'm limping. When she sees me, she looks concerned. Then, afraid to ask about it with the listeners listening, she turns the CD on. She asks if I'm alright. I say yes. I don't even try to explain about the dojo. I still haven't figured out if Kim is going alcoholic or if something happened.
A strategy of positioning evades Reality and confronts through Illusion
means?

“I wish you looked more presentable,” she says.

“Hey, I'm your bodyguard. This is a good look for a bodyguard.”

“It's not funny, Joe.”

“Sure it is.”

“I could put makeup on that. Cover it up.”

“Maggie, you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. You look fine.”

“Do I look like a goddess?” she says. “That's the real question. Beautiful isn't enough. I remember the first casting
director who said that to me. ‘Beautiful isn't enough, babe. Beautiful is a dime a dozen. Hey, listen,' he said, ‘you got a bod and I can get you some nude work.' I said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.' He said, ‘Don't be so high and mighty, babe. It was good enough for Marilyn, it was good enough for Basinger—trust me, it's more than good enough for you.' Then he said, ‘You'll be back. Six months, a year or two, and you'll take it off. See you later.' Do you believe that anyone could be that crude, that much of a cliché?”

“Did you go back?”

“No. I never will, I swear it.”

“Why should you?”

“Do I look like millions of people will pay for the privilege of peeping at me? To gaze at the shape of my titties? Which have not yet been surgically altered, which means that they can not compete with Melanie Griffith's. Do I look like the person you want to invest millions of dollars in? Do I look that hot?”

“Oh,” I say. “That's the question. I should have known.”

“Fuck you, Joe,” she says, but she smiles.

It's like
Upstairs, Downstairs.

We, the chauffeurs, are in a section set aside for visiting servants. There's a lot of gossip. That's my job. Since it's his party and he's the new power in town, everyone wants to talk about Peters. It's mostly old gossip. How he was the model for the Warren Beatty character in
Shampoo,
the very heterosexual hairdresser who slept with everyone in L.A., including Nancy Reagan.
²⁴
Several of the chauffeurs are women. One of them says, “Poor Lesley Ann Warren, that's who I'm sorry for. It's one thing that she was married to this pig who's porking everyone in town, but when they make a movie out of it, does she get to play herself? No. Goldie Hawn gets the Lesley Ann Warren part.” They go on with the legend of Peters screwing
his way to the top, meeting Streisand, who made him her record producer and then her film producer.
²⁵

I try to steer the conversation to the mysterious Mr. Beagle. I hear several rumors, including two that I haven't heard before. One is that he has a colon disease, odors leak from his body, which is why he doesn't want to go out in public. The other, that he is working on a top-secret project for the Japanese to develop Japanese TV shows that will compete with American shows, that the purchase of Columbia by Sony is an elaborate charade so that we won't notice what the Japanese are really doing.

I also hear stories I have heard before: the AIDS rumor and that he is working for the Japanese on production technology for HDTV that will make nonelectronic production obsolete within one or two years.

The party is both indoors and out. We are situated in such a way that we can see part of what goes on in the backyard. From time to time, I glimpse Maggie. She appears, from this distance, to be both very enticing and very flirtatious. I feel that if I were one of the men she is talking to, I would think she was coming on to me. Several times I see men touching her. What we used to call in junior high, copping a feel. Pisses me off. Of course, she can handle it.

One of the chauffeurs sidles over to me.

“You have an interest in Lincoln Beagle,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, like an old-time con from a Cagney prison picture or a dastardly spy out of early Hitchcock.

“I'm just a fan,” I say. “I love his work.”

“Uh-huh,” the guy says.

“Do you know what he's up to?”

“I know him.” He winks. “What if I were to tell you,” he says, “that Lincoln Beagle is working on . . . Are you ready for this? . . . Are you?”

“I think so.”

“You won't be. But I'll tell you anyway. Because it's so incredible. He is working on the reincarnation of John Wayne.”

“It makes sense to me,” I say. “We could use him.”

“You have to understand,” he says, “the Age of Aquarius is over.”

“Yeah, I knew that,” I say.

“That was the age of the spiritual. We are now in the age of Neo-Science. New Science which is beyond science. Where art and spirituality and technology and biogenetics are all going to meet in a new synthesis. These people who are talking about HDTV, that's nothing. Talk about virtual reality. That's something. Walk into living dreams and have them talk back to you and touch you. Hollywood has always taken ordinary people and made them into stars, with training and publicity and plastic surgery and hair experts and makeup. But it's so hit or miss. Very wasteful. They're going to go to the source. They're going to take the remains of the best of the old stars and, using genetics and microsciences, re-create them. And that's what Beagle is really working on—the reincarnation of John Wayne. The rest—a smoke screen.”

 

 

 

¹⁹
Huey: Bell's UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, armed with two 7.62-mm machine guns and rockets.