by Nick Cole
For a long moment, the phone was silent.
“Dr. Mandelbaum! Are you there?”
Mandelbaum jerked to life with disgust, realizing his slack-jawed mouth had actually hung dreamily agape directly onto the very public receiver of the very public telephone attached to the wall of the seediest all-night convenience store in town.
“Mandelbaum! Tell me what this means or I won’t help you!” demanded the Great Director.
Think, Mandelbaum, think! the doctor’s sleep-shrouded brain screamed.
“All right, the dream. Yes, that is a very telling dream.”
“It is?” cried the Great Director with an exuberance seldom expressed in hotel rooms located in the Central Valley at just after two o’clock in the morning.
“Yes. It is. I want you, though, to consider this…”
Mandelbaum’s mind scrambled frantically to find something for the Great Director to consider. If there was ever a time to hit one out of the park, thought Mandelbaum, it was right now. If he made one error. Gave the Great Director the wrong point to consider. If the Great Director caught him in another one of his evasions, he would be so angry he might not give poor Mandelbaum the money. For a brief moment, Mandelbaum was intensely angry with the Great Director for not giving him money. He wished the Great Director were here in this parking lot with him right now so he could hit him over the head with the end of the filthy receiver and strangle him until money came gushing out his ears like some sort of slot machine. Mandelbaum chuckled with satisfaction as he considered this vision.
The Great Director mistook the chuckling for Mandelbaum’s ease at understanding his complex and frightening dream. Dr. Mandelbaum, thought the Great Director, knows the answer. This is an easy one for him. Peace and contentment are just moments away.
“I want you to consider…” began Mandelbaum again.
What? his mind screamed as he repeated the phrase. What do you want this slob to consider? This guy had a dream. No surprise there. All crazy people have dreams. Big deal. So what?
“I want you to consider…” he stated for the third time, like a man drowning. Through the window of the convenience store, on the magazine rack, Mandelbaum saw the question, “Where Is He Coming From? Ten Things a Man Really Means When He Says He Loves You.” The words were printed in large red letters on a fashion magazine. On the cover a smoky-eyed blonde seemed to be standing in a wind tunnel. Mandelbaum was helplessly distracted by her at the very moment he searched frantically for the answer upon which his very life depended.
“Where you were coming from before the dream started!” he blurted out. He squeezed his eyes shut in anticipation of his failure, waiting for the Great Director to slam the phone down and thus effectively end Mandelbaum’s life.
There was a long pause. Then, “I don’t know,” said the awestruck Great Director.
“I think,” lied Mandelbaum, “that’s where we’re going to find the answers to your dream, and to your problems.” Mandelbaum beamed with unwarranted confidence. “If you have the same dream again, try to find out where you think you are coming from. It’s very important.”
“It is?”
“Yes. Very,” lied Mandelbaum. “And when we meet next week, we can discover what, exactly, it means.”
“We can?”
“Yes,” lied Mandelbaum. “Now, I can be at a place that accepts Western Union…”
***
A few minutes later, after Dr. Mandelbaum had given the wiring instructions for the sum of the debt twice, with an intensity and focus that amazed even the bad doctor, they hung up with a loose promise for a series of sessions over the course of the next few weeks.
Alone now, at two thirty in the morning, on the edge of a yellow and gold bedspread, the Great Director sat staring out the window, searching for some recollection in the dream as to where he and his mother had just come from. Maybe the clue lay in what was not there. His father? But he had the distinct impression his father was nearby. They were waiting for him because his mother was in the passenger seat. The car was running. Maybe his father had driven them to this place and just gotten out. He knew it had to be in Lake Tahoe, because that was where he’d been born. His father, a pilot for a small airline, and his mother, a stewardess for that same small airline, had met two years prior. After a romantic courtship ranging up and down the California coast, they married, and shortly thereafter, they produced him. They stayed in the Lake Tahoe area for just over two years before moving to the Bay Area. So, thought the Great Director, the dream must have taken place in Lake Tahoe, what with the pines and the snow.
After an hour of contemplation, he still had nothing.
He decided on a plan. At just around four thirty a.m., Tucson time, he would call his mother and ask her if she had any recollection of such an incident taking place.
He still had an hour to kill. He thought about sleep and the long day ahead. Suddenly, fear-stricken, he realized the production staff still awaited his next shooting destination. They had wrapped this location. Now it was time for the Great Director to reveal the mystery of the next location.
In fact, although the Great Director did not know it, the crew had set up a betting pool. Bets were placed with the names of possible locations ranging from the Redwoods to Crater Lake to a place called “The Nut Tree.” One of the camera assistants swore up and down that The Nut Tree was a real place and that people flew their private planes in and out of the small landing field next to it. He further went on to say that it was a sort of hidden and fantastic miniature Disneyland. That it had model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. The camera assistant’s fevered descriptions began to frighten the rest of the crew as he desperately described a dizzying rainbow of confected treats. Especially giant multi-colored suckers he could clearly remember holding in his tiny child hands long ago. Everybody laughed derisively at him behind his back, claiming he was the giant sucker, for no such place existed, as no one else had ever heard of it.
Now, at three thirty in the morning, the Great Director flung open every drawer in the hotel room, of which there were twelve. He found a Gideon Bible, a notepad embossed with the logo of the hotel, and a long faux ivory stylus of a pen. There were no “Places to Go and Things to Do” type brochures. There was also no telephone book, or for that matter, anything which might offer a hint of where the production might embark toward in the morning. Now just hours away.
Moments later, he was walking back down the hall to the elevator. All the rooms were now dark. No blue light from beneath the doors, just the sound of his feet on the hotel carpet. A quick ride down and a brisk walk back to the office, now darkened and silent, found him in front of a brochure rack. For the better part of an hour, he perused various locations, campgrounds, amusement parks, other hotels, faux Scandinavian villages, and ethnic communities that had managed to assemble a prospectus for the wanderers of this earth to peruse and consider in their never-ending quest to be entertained. He searched through all the pamphlets, and a manifesto or two, for any location where the production might shoot the next scene.
For a long while, he didn’t even consider the requirements of the next scene: a secluded location with a small community nearby. The scene was one in which the main characters would become involved in some surreal—and hopefully, as far as the studio was concerned, hilarious—hijinx. The Great Director decided it would help to narrow his choice if he kept in mind the parameters of the shooting script and the concerns of the location. Then he could choose the destination least likely to fill those needs.
He ended up choosing an amusement park called OperaLand, a theme park located in the wine country of Northern California. It featured such nonsensical rides as Rigoletto’s Revenge, a twisty three-story drop, and The Valkyrie Sky Tram, a rickety bucket-shaped cab in the form of the fabled battle maiden of Norse mythology, suspended on cables that crossed above the park while Wagner’s lege
ndary harmony warbled its way through aged speakers. And finally, there was Violetta’s Castle, the most prominent of the park’s structures. A fairy tale fortress worthy of the most ambitious of miniature golf course architects.
The Great Director strode back, once again, through the sleeping halls, no longer in fear of unknown dangers that might lurk, waiting to leap from shadowed sanctuaries and devour him whole. Never to be seen again. He felt confident this new location was the least likely to suit the needs of the production and the most likely to provide hours, if not days, of useless expense and unending dissatisfaction. He had high hopes this location might just be the answer to the abyss he had so long sought to cast his career into. With an exuberance and confidence not possessed by sober people at four thirty in the morning, he dialed his parents’ home number.
“Hello, Mom?”
“What are you doing up at this time of the morning?” His mother was instantly suspicious. She never missed an E! True Hollywood Story detailing the lurid excess of the “fast crowd,” as she called them. She was forever asking him if he was “tripping on DMX” or “doing lines” or some such other incarnation of getting stoned. She never missed a Dateline NBC either, and she accumulated drug references like some people collect baseball cards.
“Mom, I just wanted to know something.”
“It’s four o’clock in the morning.”
“It’s four thirty, Mom.”
“Yes, it is. But it’s still early. Have you been sleeping well? Did you get any sleep tonight?”
“Actually, no, I didn’t, but that’s not why—”
“Son, are you on the acid? You can tell me. I know it’s the shizzle.”
“Shizzle?”
“Yes. I know what’s going on. Are you ‘rolling’ with the ecstasy? Please! Stop right now before you end up like Sonny Hampton. He was such a fine actor and now he’s in prison for the next ten years of his life because he couldn’t say no to ‘riding the giant bird.’ Are you riding the giant bird?”
“Mom, listen, I’m not on drugs, I—”
“It’s okay, honey. Life is a hassle and the Man is always trying to come down on you. But ‘getting baked’ isn’t the answer.”
“I know it’s not, Mom. I’m just up and I have a serious question I wanted to ask you.”
“I hear you, son. But I want you to know that both I and your father love you. Turning on and dropping out isn’t the answer. Look at your life.” She paused for a moment. “Tell me where you’re at, son!”
“I’m in a motel.”
“A motel!” she shrieked as her worst imagined fears seemed to come true all at once. The Sonny Hampton E! True Hollywood Story had been rife with motels. “I can hear the pain in your voice. You’re shacked up in some sleazy crash pad, probably shooting smack. And who are you with? Biker babes? Strippers? Actresses looking for a player, a party boy. All of ’em Hollywood hanger-on-ers. Listen son, tell me where you’re at and I’ll come get you. Please just don’t do any more rails!”
“Mom. I’m working on a film. I’m at a motel the production is staying in. I just called to ask you a question about… it’s a point my therapist wants me to explore. But I need help remembering it, and I can’t. I think it’s from when I was an infant.”
“Oh, thank goodness you’re in therapy, son. That’s the first step, admitting you have a problem with the ‘ice’ or whatever your drug is, son. Now work this through. Don’t be afraid to get clean. Is it horse?”
“Mom, I’m clean. I just wanted to ask you a question.”
“I don’t have the answers you’re looking for, son.” She wailed in despair. “I don’t know why people like to turn on or ‘get small’ or ‘party’ for that matter. Your father and I never ‘smoked Mr. Brownshoes’ or ‘headed out into the black.’ We were too busy working and making a life for you to spike a vein.”
“I know, and I appreciate all that. But please, this will help me to get clean, Mom. Just tell me if you ever remember a night when I was an infant and we were parked in a car. It was snowing outside.”
“What kind of question is that? We lived in the snow. It was always snowing outside!” she shrieked again. “And when it’s snowing outside, you take a car, so we were always parked in a car and it was always snowing outside. You would know that if you weren’t so hopped up!” She paused for a moment. “Is this ‘therapist’ of yours a real psychologist, or is he some sort of Dr. Feelgood taking you on head trips? Is he prescribing anything? Funny little blue pills maybe? It’s not Darvocet, is it? Oh, please say it’s not Darvocet!” she shrieked for the third time.
“No.”
“Codeine? You’re allergic to codeine,” she lied.
“No.”
“Dilaudid?”
“No.”
“Prozac. Please not Prozac!”
“No.”
“Vicodin, Xanax, glue!”
“No, Mom. Glue?”
“St. John’s wort. That’s dangerous too. Just because its herbal doesn’t mean it’s harmless—it’ll give you a mild depression. You don’t have any firearms, rope, or poison in the room do you?”
“No, Mom, I’m in a motel. Mom, do you remember anything significant that may have occurred in any situation like the one I just asked you to remember? Please, it’s very important.”
“It was so long ago, son. And you’re sure it really happened? This isn’t something that happened when you were ‘tripping out’?”
“Mom!” he shouted. “I don’t do any drugs. I would take aspirin for what I suspect may be the early onset of heart disease from all the stress I have in my life, but I’m too afraid of damaging my liver. I don’t ‘freebase’ or ‘get lit’ or ‘see little Jimmy’ or whatever insane drug verbiage we as a collective society are currently using at this moment to indicate the consumption of narcotics. I am clean and have been clean for most of my life.”
“What about cracking the monkey?”
“No! And there’s no such thing.”
She paused and gulped. He knew she was praying for him.
“I know,” she said. “I just made that one up. It sounded like something.”
“Well, maybe someday, Mom.”
She paused and then laughed at herself. “The only thing that jumps to mind, and I don’t know how you could possibly remember this as you were maybe three days old, but after I delivered you, I went to the airport to pick up your father. I remember it was the worst snowstorm Lake Tahoe had experienced in twenty years. He couldn’t land; all the roads were closed. He had to wait three days to see you. But I was so proud to show you to him. So we just waited at the end of the ramp. I watched his plane land. After it was all closed up, he came tramping across the snow, and then, well, we were finally a family. You see, we weren’t a family yet. Not until we were all together in the car. Then we got a pizza and ate it on the way home because it smelled so good and it was so cold outside.”
“So we must have been at the hospital before that?” said the Great Director, his heart sinking at the dead end the hospital surely was, therapeutically speaking.
“Hospital?”
“Yeah, you know, where you delivered me. Where I was born.”
“You weren’t born in a hospital. That’s just where we picked up the birth certificate. I thought you knew where you were born.”
“I thought I was born in a hospital!”
“No. No, you were born at the Space Motel, or whatever it was called back then.” She paused for a moment. “The Astro Lodge. That’s it. That’s where we’d just come from. All the roads were closed. I couldn’t make it to the hospital. And you just showed up.”
The Great Director, standing at the foot of his bed, mouthed the words silently, their import dawning on him. Then he spoke them aloud.
“I was born in a place called the Astro Lodge?”
***
Mid-morning found the buses once again idling in the cold air. The last of the crew had been loaded. Only the Great Director and Kip, who was busy paying the manager, remained in the motel’s front office. Kip felt nervous fingers of anxiety tugging and kneading somewhere down near his ample stomach. For some reason, one he could not identify, he’d begun to fear paying bills. The production credit card he used always went through, but lately the bills had become so numerous and so large, he was sure that at some point the free ride would stop. A credit card would be declined, signaling the nearing end of it all. One day, he imagined, after one hundred and twenty-seven sandwiches from a roadside deli were completed, the card would simply not work. The deli would sadly pull all those bags of sandwiches back across the counter. Or perhaps at some gas station, or hotel… One day, the card would bear not one more charge, and it would capitulate, possibly bursting into flames right there on the spot.
Even Kip knew all things must have an end.
Kip felt a sick moment of joy as once again another charge ran the gauntlet of approval and escaped the DECLINED message. The production was allowed to spend another day.
The Great Director took one last look at the brochure for the Astro Lodge. This was their destination, and the Great Director had not stopped thinking about it since the knowledge of its existence had been revealed to him in the night morning by his mother.