Wag the Dog (19 page)

Mama-san rushed to hand him his brandy. He slurped it down, felt the burn, and lay back with his head on the pillow. The sheet beneath him was clean and crisp and just about body temperature.

“Oh, you are very strong today, Captain Taylor. Very powerful,” the daughter said. He'd been ROTC, entered the Army as a lieutenant, then rose to the rank of captain in Vietnam.

“Oh my, yes. You are a giant,” the mother said.

“I am afraid to touch it,” the daughter said. It was obviously fake whore talk. But fake was not the issue, was it? The issue was whether a woman wanted a man to feel good, to feel strong and manly. To feel respected and powerful.

“Do not be afraid,” the mother said. “Come, I will show you.”

She took her daughter's hands and placed them on the stiff penis.

At the first touch, much to the surprise of all three of them, it began to ejaculate.

Always before, by design, it had taken a full hour. And then, when it did, it spurted hugely, in a high and perfect arc, like the arc of urine of an undiapered infant boy lying on his back, reaching at least as far as Taylor's own chest, sometimes as far as his head. An ejaculation of power and grandeur.

But this. This just spilled. It spilled out the tip and dripped down and kept on spilling in small, powerless pulses until he was empty. It was a dribble. It didn't even feel like an orgasm. The big ejaculations felt like something. You bet they did. They were timeless, wordless screams of ecstasy. This was nothing. He'd received greater sensation and achieved more release from taking a plain old piss than from this.

Taylor was angry. He felt ripped off. “You fucked up,” he snarled to the women. “
You
fucked up.”

They said something in Vietnamese. And giggled. Taylor
found the giggles, in this situation, to be entirely without charm. In fact, the laughter was infuriating. They were laughing at him. Laughing at an American. He hopped off the table and loomed over them. “Goddamn you, you bitches, you fucked up.” The mama-san started to apologize, but Taylor said, “If you think I'm going to pay you for this, you're out of your fucking mind.”

This started an argument as to whether he was paying by the hour or per ejaculation. There was justice to both sides of the case, and an outside arbitrator certainly could have settled it rapidly and even with good feeling all around: “Girls, do 'em again, and Mel, tip 'em an extra fifty.” But their giggles and his threat not to pay had pushed each other's fear and anger buttons. Each immediately brought baggage to the conflict. It was no longer Mel against the girls; it had become customer versus whore, male versus female, Caucasian versus Asian, America versus Vietnam.

It got loud fast and promised to become violent almost as fast. But a slim young Vietnamese male stepped through the door. He had a large, dramatic scar on his face and a pair of nun-chucks in his hand. Gangster, pimp, enforcer, husband, or brother, Taylor had no way of knowing. But that was not the point. The point was pay and leave quietly.

Normally, Taylor paid on his Visa card, which showed up on his monthly statement as a reasonably respectable restaurant bill. In his house the man paid the bills so there was no reason for his wife to ask him why he spent two hundred dollars every week at the same Vietnamese restaurant. But if she ever did, Mel had rehearsed an answer. He would say that he and a bunch of old Army buddies met once a week to reminisce, everybody chipped in cash, and Mel put it on his card. Then he would explain that by doing that he got a free thirty-day ride on the money, pull out his calculator, and befuddle Silvia with dazzling fiscal footwork.

Taylor was not about to stand there with his own ejaculate turning cold and drying around his pubic hair while some scarred-up Vietnamese thug ran his Wells Fargo Visa through a credit-card machine and the automatic telephone dialer to
register electronic approval and record the transaction. Nor was he going to pay the full amount, if he could help it. So he stomped into his clothes and grabbed for his cash. He crumpled up a bunch of twenties, flung them on the ground, and made for the door. The younger woman picked them up quicker than a snake, flattened and counted them. The kid gangster barred the door. There was only eighty bucks. They all made noises at him. He dragged out some more money. The mama-san snatched it from his hand before he could crumple it and throw it down. It was another four twenties, all he had except for five singles and some silver. Apparently, it was enough, because they stepped aside and let him go.

I
T JUST SEEMED
simpler for the president to give him the memo. If Hartman had taken notes, then there would have been two documents to worry about. He probably could have committed it to memory, but memory is a trickster and a traitor. Besides,
Air Force One
was ready to depart.

Frankly, George Bush was glad to be rid of it. It was like an imp in his pocket, a fairy-tale creature of great potential mischief who always seemed to be tugging at the presidential awareness, asking to be let loose. OK, now it was loose and somebody else's problem. Hartman could either tame it and make it useful or Bush could simply forget it ever existed. There was just the one piece of paper. Nobody could even prove that Bush had ever seen it. Or for that matter, that Lee Atwater had actually written it.

Hartman knew it was the biggest opportunity of his life.

He cleared an entire day. No meetings. No calls. No conferences. No letters. No contracts. No interruptions. No lawyers. No reading. No nothing.

Perhaps the only way to convey what a profound gesture that was is to say that he had no intention of clearing an entire day to die. That if he were a woman, he would not have cleared an entire day to give birth.

He began the day by going to the dojo at dawn. There he practiced kendo, first in early-morning class and then alone with the sensei, Sakuro Juzo, to quiet his body and empty his mind. That much physical concentration and effort created pain. Hartman
loved the pain. Only when he had forgotten everything except the pain, gone through the pain, and
transcended
it, did he return to his office, remove the memo from the safe for the first time since the night he had received it, read it, and contemplate what he had to do.

He knew that this was not a done deal. Far from it. He now had to go back to the president and say, “This is how it can be executed.” The last thing in the world that Hartman was afraid of was pitch meetings. And really, that's all that it was. Except that most of the time, if Columbia didn't buy it, he'd take it to MCA, and if they didn't like it, he'd go to Paramount or MGM or Disney. This time, there was only one place to go.

Or maybe there were other places to go. He put that thought into a box, closed the lid tight, locked it and stored it back in the cabinet that he visualized as being in the upper-left rear quadrant of his brain.

He ruminated, he sketched out ideas on paper—which he would shred before he left the office—he meditated on the nature of war. Like Atwater and Sakuro Juzo, he was a follower of Sun Tzu. The phrase that came into his mind was “War is nothing but lies,”
³⁶
and this made him chuckle to himself

It seemed to him that there were four areas in which he had to act. They were all overlapping and interlocked: pick a director, maintain secrecy, handle the media, deal with the money.

Picking a director was the most straightforward of the four. Preferably a director-writer. That would eliminate one person with a need to
know.
The director would have to develop a vision, a scenario, in treatment
³⁷
form initially, with which Hartman would pitch the president.

He would have to come up with a plan to maintain secrecy. Under normal circumstances whenever Hartman was dealing with something major, he assembled a team. They batted things around. Criticized each other's ideas. Brainstormed. Explored potential consequences. But Hartman felt that secrecy was so essential to this affair, the first rule of the whole enterprise was that no one should know anything more than they absolutely needed to know.

As soon as one other person knew, security arrangements would have to go into effect. That person would have to be watched and monitored. His or her associates, friends, lovers, family too. The more people who knew, the more watchers would be needed. Hartman had spied on people in the past, including of course his own staff All the major agencies, and even the minor ones, were created by agents going independent and taking clients with them. That is, by stealing. Hartman, who had founded RepCo precisely that way, was determined that it would never happen to him. Whenever an agent got hot enough that he was likely to get ideas, his calls were monitored and his movements checked. If surveillance indicated that the agent harbored traitorous thoughts, action was taken. Sometimes the action was benign—a raise, a new car, a bonus, some demonstration of the rewards of loyalty. Sometimes it was malignant—abrupt dismissal, with the suggestion to any possible clients that the would-be traitor had been dismissed for dipping his beak, in one sense or the other, plus notification that if they went with him, they would never, ever, participate in a project over which RepCo had influence. The point being that Hartman had a very clear understanding of what surveillance and security cost—a lot.

Hartman had a rule: Never put money into a movie. It was an explicit part of the corporate culture at RepCo: if an agent hears himself say the words “I believe in this so much that I'm going to develop it myself,” he'd better be lying. Once it's his own money—coming or going—fear and greed, doubt and delusion, all enter the mind, and objectivity and balance are lost.

Yet perhaps it was time for a change. This might be a necessary
part of the Next Step. The warrior strove to be calm at the center, but how profound was clarity from the bleachers above the battle? How difficult to achieve if you collected your 10 percent, win, lose, or draw? How did you even know if you were a warrior—that ultimate male creature—unless you were tested in the arena?

Upon more reflection, however, he decided that the true test of himself as a creative person—the proof that he was better than other people—would be to do it all with
Other People's Money.
³⁸

He was going to need—a lot. A million here, a couple of million there—Jesus Christ, he could visualize situations in which he would need billions. This was to be the biggest motion picture ever made. If it were made. There would be hundreds of billions spent. Could the federal government handle that? Probably not, he thought, they were so bad at handling money. The next level would be figuring out for them how to do their part. Never trust the client to be competent.

Deep Throat said, “Follow the money.”
³⁹

Hartman was determined that this would not be another Watergate. That no one would be able to track the cash flow. The politicians had learned. They'd proved that in the Iran-contra affair, which demonstrated that a little obfuscation and lots of denial went a long way. People were still asking “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Although the answer was obvious and incontrovertible: he knew as much as he wanted to, whenever he wanted to. Which was probably all of it and as soon as he got up from his nap. Then Vice President Bush didn't nap, so he probably knew it sooner.

They'd gotten away with it, but they hadn't gotten away clean. Bottom line: it reinforced Hartman's basic thinking—that he himself could find better ways to clandestinely move billions out of the federal government and keep the media from ever figuring it out than the government itself could.

Hartman also had a gut feeling that handling the media might not be a major problem.

But he also knew that this would be what the president and his people would be most afraid of. Obviously, they were drawing on different reservoirs of experience. In the Industry the media was totally pussy-whipped. Nobody was afraid of television or the press. If a reporter didn't mind his manners, he was cut out of the loop. If he truly offended, he was fired.
⁴⁰
Yet politicians saw the press as carnivores: jackals and wolverines who, if they hunted in a pack, were capable of bringing down moose and elk and even elephants.

If he could understand why the Industry experienced the media so differently from politicians, then he could develop a plan to handle the media. What if you took a Hollywood press agent and put him in Washington? A kind of
Northern Exposure
thing. Like
Doc Hollywood, The Hard Way,
⁴¹
a fish-in-different-water thing.