by Nick Cole
Fight the Rooster
By Nick Cole
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Fight the Rooster
Chapter Two: The Great Director Meets Death
Chapter Three: The Great Director Meets Death: Director’s Cut
Chapter Four: Non-Fat Decaf Therapuccino
Chapter Five: WildBill
Chapter Six: I Heart Coveting
Chapter Seven: If
Chapter Eight: The Executive VP
Chapter Nine: Kip Jameson
Chapter Ten: The Pretzel of Doom
Chapter Eleven: The Great Road
Chapter Twelve: The Table Read
Chapter Thirteen: The Fox
Chapter Fourteen: The Great Goreitsky
Chapter Fifteen: The Hotel Roger
Chapter Sixteen: Sign and Countersign
Chapter Seventeen: The Last Hand
Chapter Eighteen: The Death of Bones Wilson
Chapter Nineteen: But It Was Not Okay
Chapter Twenty: The Fox Opens Up
Chapter Twenty-One: Warbirds of Doubt
Chapter Twenty-Two: Sunday Night
Chapter Twenty-Three: Mutiny
Chapter Twenty-Four: Night of the Fox
Chapter Twenty-Five: What’s It All About?
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Space Motel
Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Place of Statements
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Full Retreat
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Great Director Goes Straight to Hell
Chapter Thirty: The Wrong Side of the Tracks, in Hell or Things You Do Repeatedly, Expecting Different Results Each Time, in Hell or Farther Down the Rabbit Hole, in Hell
Chapter Thirty-One: The End of the Whole Mess
Chapter Thirty-Two: East of Sunset Boulevard
Chapter Thirty-Three: The Ugly Cat
Chapter Thirty-Four: We’ll Fix It in Post
Chapter Thirty-Five: Flight of the Mini-Valkyrie
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Life Before Death
Chapter One
Fight the Rooster
Out of the steel blue mountains and down the sweaty black river of chrome and metal echoing and bubbling with the sounds of horns, car radios, and the occasional long, high-pitched whine of a brake needing attention, he drove.
He drove past the sleepy little towns of white stucco, disappearing orange groves, and shrinking strawberry fields. He drove south onto the windy heights that overlook Old San Diego. That beautiful and ageless city. A city like a lady who loves the new man of the hour. But in the quiet afternoons, she thinks of the love of her youth and calls for another sangria and for the mariachis to play the same song, the old song, the song that makes her look south once again toward her true love, Mexico.
He wants to light a cigarette. Instead, he lowers the window of his car. The myth of air-conditioning is quickly dispelled as the warm, late-spring afternoon rushes in to begin a swirling investigation of the contracts and assorted papers he’s brought with him. The interior swells in a chaotic profusion of magnolia, cocoa butter, and the heavy scent of road tar. He pins the papers temporarily with his jacket and then finally his briefcase.
He had wanted to smoke for a long time, months even, but never as bad as the night before, after the Head Man from New York called with the news. Right then and there he wanted to run down to the liquor store and buy a pack. He saw himself fumbling with the first cigarette as he stood just outside the front entrance of some hole in the wall that sold lottery ticket dreams and the quick burning liquor that helped pass the time while you waited for them to come true. Then he would light the cigarette against the Technicolor sunset beneath multicolored humming neon tubes that called out in a monotone to all passersby. His first smoky exhalation would be in triumph.
He did not go to the liquor store. Instead he went for a swim. When he was finished he made dinner for his wife, who would be home shortly, and waited. He did not allow himself the mental holiday of drag and exhale. He waited.
She finally came home, and as they were sitting down to dinner, he poured two glasses of a Sonoma zin and took a drink, letting the wine slip smoothly over his tongue and down his throat.
“I have to go to Mexico tomorrow,” he said, smiling through the warmth of the wine.
“The Fat Man?” she asked through a mouthful of linguini and mussels fra diavolo, his specialty. A brief look of doubt flickered across eyes he’d once likened to a summer storm in a poem he’d written for her a long time ago.
“He’s ready to talk.”
The eyes above the wide rim of stemware were far away and someplace future perfect.
***
They stayed up all that night talking and thinking of possibilities. She of stocks, shopping, a better home on the north side of Sunset Boulevard, even kids.
He had only one thought. Executive Vice President. He’d schemed long and maneuvered decisively with an eye any Baptist preacher wouldn’t have hesitated, in the space between “Git” and “behind me Satan,” to indict as covetous. Now his coveted prize was within reach.
Executive Vice President.
Could there be any brass ring shinier, any height loftier?
They played old CDs and drank more zin, eventually moving into their reserve of Pinots, talking all the while. They talked mostly of the road traveled while each secretly considered private thoughts of the road ahead. Seldom did the concerns of price and the cost that must be paid for the journey to come cross the wine-scape of their dreams. Seldom did they think the Fat Man must surely require a toll to cross his bridge into their promised land.
For everything there is a season.
He didn’t smoke last night. He waited. Not even after they made love in the quiet hours of the night, or even once again in the morning before he left his wife waving from the doorstep, disappearing forever into the early morning fog-shrouded streets he was leaving behind. He waited. He waited, though he caught his secretary smoking alone in the big office. Alone on a Sunday morning as she waited for him to pick up blank contracts. Waited as any squire might near the field of battle with shield and sword for the knight going forth, perhaps never to return from slaying the dragon.
On the road and heading south, he gives up with a heavy sigh that seems to expel all the years of saying “No” since he quit the coffin nails. He pulls the car off the freeway and into the small seaside village of San Clemente. In a rundown liquor store, a museum to beer poster ads of the last twenty years, he purchases a pack of cigarettes and a hangover-sized Diet Coke. He pulls the cellophane off the pack, noticing his lack of coordination with the once unconsciously familiar action performed at the professional level ad nauseam. He surveys the two-decade retrospective of bikini-clad girls adorning the faux wood paneled walls of the liquor store. He wonders where they are now, or what the funhouse mirror of time has done to them. He taps the pack absently and walks back to his car, but still—he does not smoke. He drives on, getting closer mile by mile to the Fat Man.
A legend not just in literature, the Fat Man was once the brightest dark horse of Hollywood, and if you knew your stuff, even further back to the last days of radio, he was there too. He’d once been physically beautiful; never vacuous though. No, even in the old glossy black and white photos the Hollywood studio system had so carefully manufactured, even then there had been something extra. There was always in him a sublime sense of secret knowing. A knowing of the dark parts of a man’s soul, reminding us in the animals, villains, brutes, heroes, and losers he portrayed that this thing we watched with our mouths agape in the dark beneath the flickering
light… this beast was also us. To have watched him act on that shimmering, silvery screen was to have met the Devil in the dead of night on a forest path far from home.
You were forever changed.
One sunny Hollywood day, the Fat Man left forever. He slipped out the garden door of Elliot Gould’s Malibu beach house and vanished amid a haze of incense and flesh. No one was watching anymore as he disappeared south into the alleys of Mexico. People were too busy inhaling freshly chopped dust from the surfaces of tiny mirrors, searching for the reflection of a soul beneath the powder, and finding nothing.
South the Fat Man went, and for a while was silent. Then the books started coming. Skullduggery, The Bar at the End of the Road, and Shotgun Hero. Strange and bizarre wanderings. Tales of the damned and the dying with titles that shouted pulp fiction impressions of splatter drop paintings. At first these offerings were received as the fancies of an artist who’d lost the ability to create in his primary form. But it was different for the generation with no future: the Stop, Drop, and Rollers; the Children of the Atomic Bomb and the Wasteland to Come; the ones who grew up seeing no future because death was just forty-five minutes away, as our fourth grade teacher used to recite. Forty–five minutes of flight time between a Siberian launch and an arrival point just above our heads as we stop, drop, and roll beneath the gum-encrusted desks of our schools. These children who knew to seek cover when the doomsday song was sung by a distant siren, these children now young adults, at last discovered the Fat Man.
He became their mad prophet.
Live fast, live large, live long enough to get your share. That was the message of the Fat Man. In his novels the antihero raged against the expected, defiantly refusing to believe in the fragility of this thing we call a life. “Damn the torpedoes!” these characters would scream at the cards they’d been dealt as the lost chips of the last hand were raked back to the embrace of a winner who’d never known loss. “Swing round and prepare to fire again. Sure the ship is sinking, but I haven’t yet begun to have fun!” These characters of the Fat Man fought the inevitable until they themselves were inevitably consumed and destroyed, their endings of honky-tonk cataclysm making them finally whole and somehow complete. This was the message received by the children of the bomb. The Stop, Drop, and Rollers.
Time passed and early critics, quick to deride the efforts of a “once-was” screen legend’s attempt at “literary legitimacy,” imploded in critical reversal as the shockwave of the Fat Man’s success swept coffeehouses nationwide, leaving a trail of dog-eared, well-thumbed paperbacks and the echo of late night debate hanging in the air. In the end, the books became movies, the movies became money, and the Fat Man became something more than just a silver screen “once-was.” He became a voice in the wilderness for a generation that had never perished amid the nuclear fire and doomsday cry they’d been so diligently promised.
The Studio Head got word from the Greek Lawyer who worked for the Fat Man that a new novel was available for purchase. So the Head Man from New York called the Smoker Who Didn’t and authorized whatever funds were necessary to go south and purchase the movie rights to the book. If the Smoker Who Didn’t was successful and secured said rights to the aforementioned book, he would return home a hero, to receive the remembrances of a Head Man from New York.
The “if not” was ominously omitted.
At just this side of the US–Mexico border, the facts of this case as outlined here resolved themselves beneath the urgent red and absolute black warnings of the last border crossing.
It wasn’t that there was no going back; it was that there was no “back” to go to. Everything in the life of the Smoker Who Didn’t was a journey toward a promised land. Where he came from ceased to exist the moment he’d passed from its borders.
The Smoker Who Didn’t raises the lighter to a point just beyond the clean white cylinder of the cigarette. Then, producing a generous flame with a deft flick of the newly purchased lighter, he inhales.
The cigarette has always been there, waiting for him to return, and now accelerating forward into Mexico, he has returned.
Windows up.
Doors locked.
Engine ready.
Here, south of the US border, the women are dragging doe-eyed children while hefting large bags of groceries. Other women move gracefully about in small groups that never seem to land in any one place for too long. The men move quickly nowhere, always with the restrained, nervous smile and the furtive machine-gun laughter of someone who thinks the grass is greener somewhere else. The thin young men seem on the verge of sudden actionable moments. The older men remain thick and seeming a part of the architecture in their stillness and refusal. The colors of the clothing, the sway of the dresses against the paint of the advertisements on the walls of the buildings, spin-cycle with a thousand different radios tuned to the same overly triumphant station. Some radios are loud, some small, some noisier than the rest, but abiding in all is a song of people and motion.
The Smoker Who Didn’t stopped at an indecipherable traffic light guarding an indifferent intersection of no apparent logic.
There is always a moment when the gringo goes to Mexico for the first time. A moment when one hears the whisper of the temptation to just slip away. To shed the old ways. To give up the struggle and blend in. It’s so easy: you buy a shirt, call your boss, and say goodbye. Tell him you heard a song you didn’t understand on a street with a strange name, and yes, it sounds crazy, but you are starting over. Then you buy a churro from a vendor and as you walk and eat, you feel that old way, that old life slipping away, slipping into the whispering gutters of Mexico.
Not today. There is no time for Chiclets or cheap tequila. Thoughts of the Executive Vice Presidency drive the Smoker Who Didn’t beyond the sirens and the songs of the Mexican streets. Soon he takes the road south to Rosarito Beach and then pushes on another hour to the quiet seaside village of Playa Del Azul. The lair of the Fat Man.
It is a town of pink and blue adobe shacks, dirt streets, and pigpens. Here, all the people are busy doing nothing, or the appearance of nothing. There is no need to take part in the struggle for a bigger slice of the pie because the Fat Man cuts the pie and everyone gets a slice. Out to sea, cumulus clouds build up and roll forward, on fire at the base, roiling upward in expansive gray and white explosions toward a decorated crown, adorned in purple and, finally, gold.
The Smoker Who Didn’t stopped outside a low, flat, brick building which had given up the effort of retaining plaster long ago. A faded red arch announced the entrance to the inner courtyard, and above the arch, written in chipped rusty brown script, were the words Amiga Del Diablo. Long ago, the soft drink company Fanta had paid to have their name decorate the side of the building in flowing orange script.
The people inside would probably know how to get to the estate of the Fat Man, reasoned the Smoker Who Didn’t.
He parked his car and stretched loudly; perhaps too loudly.
He went through the arch and into a shaded courtyard dotted with chairs and tables, no two the same, all different colors, some red, some yellow, a few aqua and one or two indigos. At one of the tables, a young man worked hungrily at a tin pie plate of beans and rice. He shoveled huge scoops of crimson-colored beans into his mouth, eating fast, remaining oblivious as the Smoker Who Didn’t approached him.
“Excuse me…” he started in slow, too loud Mexlish. “Yo quiero El Grande…”
“Of course you do,” said the Mexican in perfect English. “Take the road out of town and turn left at the pigpen. Take that road up into the hills and you’ll be there shortly.” With bitter sarcasm he added, “Señor.” The Mexican gathered his plate and utensil and disappeared into the darkness behind the bar.
Back in the Saab and after the left at the pigpen, the Smoker Who Didn’t maneuvered along a dirt track made more for carts than cars. Trees closed in on both sides and shortly began
to scrape at the car, clawing and clutching in wicked hisses. He persevered, knowing the first thing to go, upon completing this deal and receiving such remembrances as the Studio Head might choose to reward him with, would be this car.
He smiled, hearing an unusually harsh scrape.
Then for a brief moment, he felt as though the trees were literally attempting to prevent his passage as the branches clutched at the body of the car. Above him, the canopy closed ranks, allowing only hints and rumors of the light above, creating a hillside cavern and bathing it in an eerie green wash of cold darkness.
He accelerated forward, feeling strangely relieved when the car broke free of the grasping limbs.
Soon he was out of the greedy undergrowth. The road ahead lay paved with uneven flagstones as it wound its way toward a clearing atop a small hill upon which a slowly turning windmill perched. A large, flat hacienda spread away beneath, its opened windows dark within as red tattered curtains danced at the behest of an approaching storm. A silent fountain provided a resting place for a sleeping black pig.
He exited the car and put on his business jacket. It was quiet up here on the hill and only the sound of the breeze coming from offshore, moving through the trees, provided any respite from the cemetery music of the place. In the village below, sudden lights came on, speaking of the life there. He heard a woman’s lonely voice call out a name—then after a too long silence, she called again with what seemed even more hopelessness.
He locked the car and scanned the surrounding forest. Then he turned and walked toward the front door, his steps making a sandy scrape as he passed.
The portal, a massive, oily behemoth with dark iron-worked hinges and a similarly made knocker in the shape of a fist, rose above the Smoker Who Didn’t. And as he drew near, the door swung open, grinding against the sandstone step.
Before him was the Fat Man.
He was older and definitely rounder. The baldness of his pate did not stop strands of wild white hair from escaping down the sides of his large jowly head. The Fat Man was dressed in tattered white pants and a faded gray poncho stitched with dirty red stripes. His massive face was brown and etched in dark lines, the kind you might find in a boy’s well-used baseball glove or in the face and hands of a man who works far beneath the surface of the earth. He was barefoot and smiling, his white hair dancing wildly in the sudden wind.