Wag the Dog (21 page)

“Wow. Cool,” said John Lincoln Beagle. He was capable of writing great dialogue, but he didn't speak it.

B
EAGLE HAD A
box for the baseball game.

He didn't want to be in it. There were two reasons. The first was that he had yet to come close to solving the problem, which is how Beagle thought of movies, as problems. It was strange—when he first got a project, there was a great and happy excitement. The happy part disappeared instantly. It was followed by another process of trying to figure out how the raw materials could be handled, shaped, discarded, kept, whatever, in order to produce a successful film.

Except for his very first student film, which seemed to spill out of him, he always went through an intensive research phase. He always
knew
that it was totally necessary—it was where all the real work was done. He sometimes
suspected
that it was a way of stalling, procrastinating, avoiding that irrevocable moment when the camera was there and loaded, the actors were there and ready, and a hundred-odd people looked to him to say “Action” while another hundred—or so it seemed—peered over his shoulder fearful of how their millions were being spent and he had to know what every damn body was supposed to do and that when he was done it would look right, sound right, cut right, and sell right.

He thought of his mind as a sausage maker. A big open funnel at the top. Pour everything in. Turn the handle. Grind it up together. Something happened inside. Out came sausage. The image, of course, suggested something else. A giant mouth,
grazing, nibbling, noshing, gorging, devouring, ingesting mass consumables, down the esophagus to a gross and wobbling belly which, because he'd got it wrong, produced nothing but shit—stinking, reeking, fly-catching, sausage-shaped shit.

Someday it was going to happen to him.

It scared him—dare he pun it; yes, but not in public—shitless. He loved his fear, adored his panic, hoped it would keep him shit-free, a pure and stinkless sausage maker. But he knew it wouldn't. There was always failure. Spielberg had
1941.
Coppola had
Finian's Rainbow.
John Huston did
Victory.
John Ford did
This Is Korea.

He felt it—the certainty that he was failing—every time. Every single time. He wondered if the feeling of failure would feel different the time that he actually did fail.

He understood that the first principle of all fine art is plagiarism and that the first principle of all commercial art is theft. No artist, craftsman, or thief works in a vacuum. Every artist is a jazz musician, running new riffs on old tunes because old tunes are icons, references, cultural understandings—they are the language of the people of his world. Since the moment he saw the memo, Beagle had been gorging on war films: documentaries, features, foreign films, short films, training and recruiting films, cartoons, raw footage, news film.

The problem was, he wasn't there yet. If he had to turn the handle, he knew that all that would come out the other end was shit, was failure, and he was scared. He had to keep gorging until somehow, some catalytic ingredient, an enzyme perhaps, entered the stewing mass inside him, finally, and started the process that made it come out as something that did not stink. Or maybe what he was waiting for was to be stuffed so full that the internal pressure forced the creative organ, whatever it was, to finally function and make something with form and shape and color and light and meaning.

So his actual preference was to be back at his studio, watching images, organizing images, on his ten HDTV screens with their thirty possible source machines all interfaced with a virtual supercomputer capable of controlling all of it while
converting every image that passed through it into digital form and keeping it that way in memory.

The other reason was that Beagle had a massive indifference to baseball. He understood its place as fable and parable in the canons of American mythology and had even included baseball shtick in several of his films, but its lethargic pace and the arrhythmic structure of what little action it had left him baffled.

His wife, Jacqueline Conroy,
⁴³
and their son, one-year-and-eight-month-old Dylan Kennedy
⁴⁴
Beagle were with him. It was Jacqueline's idea. She felt Beagle had been neglecting his family—true—and that they should do a wholesome family thing so that Dylan might learn to recognize his father.

Beagle called Hartman, who got the Disney reserved box for them. John and Jackie's cook had packed them an “all-American repast”: sliced-turkey sandwiches with goat cheese, sun-dried tomato bits, and homemade mayonnaise on Sacramento sourdough white bread; munchies of fried pork rinds and beef jerky; potato salad with roasted garlic bits; sparkling water from Idaho; and four bottles of Coca-Cola bottled in St. Louis.
⁴⁵

Dylan didn't like baseball either. It wasn't that he had an active distaste for the game in any particular way. The idea that there were people who did not exist to play
with
him but to play
for
him was as yet an incomprehensible abstraction. Worse, it apparently required sitting still while in a waking state.

Beagle had hoped that Fernando Valenzuela would be pitching because he would have recognized the name. But Valenzuela had pitched himself out or gotten old or maybe injured, one of those things that make ball players disappear. The Dodgers were playing Cincinnati. Beagle was glad that Cincinnati still existed.

He sat Dylan down beside him. He was aware of his wife watching the way he handled his son so that she could tell him the
right way
to handle his son. He truly didn't understand whether maternal instincts were powerful and difficult things to live with or whether she was just a compulsive bitch and it didn't matter a good goddamn if she had a child or was a virgin. He began to explain the game to his son. Dylan said something that his father heard as “aH wuss,” then reached out and grabbed a pen from his father's pocket. It was a monogrammed platinum fountain pen, the one that's advertised as both decadent and overpriced. It had been a gift from some studio chief. Beagle couldn't remember the name, so he didn't know if the guy had been fired yet. He just remembered that the guy was the kind of guy who checked up on his gifts. A terrible habit and very burdensome for the recipient. He tried to get the pen back.

Beagle got the top. Dylan kept the rest.

Dylan had a very masculine concept of objects. It appeared to be genetic. No one had to show him what a hammer was for or that many, many objects could be used for hammering. The first time he got a stick in his hand, he conceived of the sword. When he got a little older and could walk and got hold of a bigger stick, he thought of the spear. He was very cute walking around the yard holding his stick high overhead and flinging it at things. He had sword fights with the bushes. Flailing at them with a twig. The bushes frequently won, catching the stick and forcing their young opponent to overbalance. But he always got back up off his diaper, dragged
his stick out of the tangle, and returned to the attack as valiant and beautiful as Errol Flynn had ever been. It made Papa Beagle proud.

So he should not have been surprised, or taken it at all personally, when his son slashed at him with the pen. Got him, too. Not only did the nib almost break his skin—and Beagle was sensitive to physical assault even from very small people—the pen splashed ink across his shirt. It was made of one of the more expensive mystery fabrics, dyed with the soft yet vibrant southwestern desert colors that he had lately come to favor. It wasn't the money. What did $480 matter to John Lincoln Beagle? It was what? The beauty of the object? Having to walk around all day with ink blots where style had so recently been? Having to shop to replace it? It was that Kids Have to Learn.

The obvious thing to do was whack the kid. Not maliciously, but like the papa bear gives the baby bear a cuff now and again to remind him who's the papa bear and who's the baby bear.

That was a bit from an animated feature that Beagle had been working on shortly after Dylan was born, an adaptation of Goldilocks as told from the ursine side. John Lincoln had been certain that being a parent would add the dimension to his talent that would enable him to do for the children of America what Walt Disney himself had done—while maintaining his touch for adult cinema, of course. He and Belinda Faith, the animator he'd been working with, had story-boarded out several sequences. In one of them Baby Bear had annoyed Papa Bear when he was having his after-porridge pipe and Papa had just knocked him across the room. Baby Bear went rolling across the kitchen and up the wall and out the window. It was quite humorous and Baby Bear didn't mind at all.

There were a lot of people around. Modern pedagogy, he knew, frowned on whacking kids in public. Even if that's what one did in cartoons. Also, his wife was watching. She'd love to have that on him. And finally, and in truth, Beagle didn't hit his son because he understood with that part of his mind that was firmly rooted in reality that his son was not a Toon and that hitting kids wasn't nice.

There was really only one way he could release the reflexive anger and irritation he felt. He addressed it to his wife. “Jesus, Jackie! Could you goddamn hold him for one minute.”

“Could
you
hold him for one minute is more like it,” Jackie said. Her voice extremely calm and ever so much more cutting for its serenity. “You have a real problem if you can't be with your child for more than one hundred and twenty seconds without help.”

Dylan was still on the attack, the pen a tiny saber. Beagle would have looked at his wife, glaring daggers of hate, but he was forced to keep his eye on his son who, at this point, had to be considered armed and dangerous. John Lincoln snatched at the pen. Dylan was too quick for him and managed to mar his father's summer cream trousers with black blotch and splatter.

“Dammit, Jackie, is that washable ink?”

“How would I know? It's your pen.”

The fact that she was absolutely and irrefutably correct brought him to the decision that he would divorce her as soon as he had a week free. He'd been divorced before and he knew you couldn't knock it off in a day. Not that he had even a day. What he had was the biggest project of his life. What he had was pressure. And he didn't need this shit.

He captured the pen. Getting splats on his palm and on his cuff in the process. Now he couldn't find the cap. His wife was smiling. Pleasantly. Of course she was. She was happy to see him in a state of incompetence and frustration. It proved something. He didn't know what. But he didn't like it. “Where's the cap, where's the cap of the pen?”

“I'm sure
I
don't know,” Jackie said. Even calmer than before. “Why don't you look for it.”

“A score,” he said to her. “You got a chance to score. Good for you.” There was an absentminded-professor aspect to Beagle. He lived a great deal of his life inside the movies in his head, not in the neurotic or psychotic sense but in a creative person's preoccupied way. He frequently did not know where things were, unless, of course he was using them to make a movie. Then he could keep track of thousands of items. In
normal life, however, the more common the article, the less he could perceive it. In the initial stages of a romance with him, women often felt like they were with a character in some old film or novel, probably an English one, and his idiosyncrasy lent him a certain musty yet antic charm. Eventually, it drove them insane. In order to get to the ballpark he had asked his wife if she knew where the car keys were, then the tickets, the directions, his favorite shoes (she'd said, “Learn to dress yourself, dear”), the lunch basket, and some office notes he had hoped to read while they watched the game.

“I'm not trying to score,” his wife said. A small lie, but so monumentally obvious, it was impossible to believe that she didn't recognize it as a total untruth. But she didn't. “I'm trying to help you.” She believed that too. “You need to be more aware.”

“I don't need to be more aware. I don't need to be here. I don't need to be with
you.”

Dylan had grabbed hold of the lunch basket and tipped it over. Everything fell out and this made him very happy indeed. Now he could play with the sandwiches and bottles and glasses—their cook had packed crystal glasses; who wants to drink Coca-Cola, especially a bottle bottled in St. Louis, out of a paper cup.