Miss Wyoming Miss Wyoming Miss Wyoming

by Douglas Coupland

  Bel Air PI was a reasonably low-budget buddy-cop film in which a has-been rust-belt homicide-detective-turned-PI partnered up with the mayor’s daughter, a tawny renegade (“Darling,” said Doris after reading the script, “your heroine is a tawny renegade. Whatever next!”) to establish a PI agency. Their first case was to search for the missing wife of a studio executive who was located in many KFC-sized pieces in an Imperial County lemon orchard. Drugs were involved. Betrayal. A final shoot-out and chase in which Cat and Dog stopped fighting each other to unite against the forces of evil and then Get It On.

  The movie relaunched the career of a faded seventies rock star and gave steroids to a film genre then on the wane. Almost immediately Bel Air PI 2 (Bel Air π2) was in the works, and John had drugs and dollars and pussy hurled into his lap.

  Bel Air π2 became a monster hit, bigger than the original, and was followed by an alien invasion thriller with a soundtrack that number one’d for five weeks, and a terrorists–occupy–Disneyland–style thriller that went ballistic in European and Japanese release but didn’t work so well in North America, as copycat directors had glommed onto John’s noisy, music-drenched formula. To John moviemaking wasn’t formulaic. It was a way for him to create worlds wherein he could roam with infinite power far away from a personal history, free of childhood disease and phantom relatives.

  Wherever John went, the volume was up full. Once, John and Ivan drove John’s car-of-the-month, a Bentley “the color of Grace Kelly’s neck,” down to La Quinta for a Polygram executives’ weekend retreat. They left the car parked in the desert while they searched for pieces of cactus skeleton Nylla wanted for her flower arranging. Once they’d been in the sun a while, John went to the car and brought back to Ivan’s rock perch an armload of items. First was a laminated menu stolen from a Denny’s. He rolled it into a funnel, and used it to send item number two, a half bottle of tequila, down his throat. He then reached for the third item, a rifle. He used it to fire five volleys into the car’s skin, turning it into a fast, expensive sieve. Ivan yelled, “Studly!” John promptly vomited, and stopped having cars-of-the-month after that, settling on the gunshot Bentley as his distinctive final choice. John had a reputation to keep, and when he entered rooms, success and decadence swarmed about him like juicy gossip.

  John’s one true friend across the years was Ivan. As an added bonus for Ivan, John came with a mother, Doris—a presence sorely missing in Ivan’s life since his father got marriage out of his system just months after Ivan’s birth. John and Doris had been living in the guesthouse for two weeks when Ivan was shipped home from an experimental boarding school near Big Sur. He’d been caught sniffing ether from an Orange Crush bottle. The ether had been stolen from the science lab by a student who traded it with Ivan for a set of puffy stereo headphones.

  “Why were you sniffing ether?” John asked on their first meeting, in the front hallway of the main house, the floor’s stone so smooth and shiny and hard-looking that John thought that anything that dropped on it would shatter—glass, metal, feathers and diamonds. Having never been to California before, he believed he could feel the heat mending his body.

  “I was trying to get over something,” Ivan said.

  “What?”

  Ivan looked at this pale, scrawny, unfledged child, more ghost than body. Ivan decided from the start to take John into his confidence. He assumed that such an underdeveloped body could only harbor an overdeveloped mind. “I have this dopey paranoid fear about”—he paused—“the Ice Age.”

  “The Ice Age?”

  “Yeah.”

  John could hear Doris and Angus sitting in the living room, laughing away.

  Ivan went on. “I keep on seeing this picture. These pictures. A wall of ice like the white cliffs at Dover—scraping across Pasadena and then down Wilshire and crushing this house.”

  “Who told you that? It’s a crock of shit. That’s not the way it works. First thing that happens is that it snows—but then that snow doesn’t melt over the summer. And then the next winter it snows again, and that snow doesn’t melt, either. And then it snows maybe a few feet each year, and none of that melts. After a thousand years—a blink in the scheme of things—you’ve got a slab of ice a mile thick. But you’re long gone by then. And if you were smart, you’d have moved to the equator the first year, anyway.”

  Ivan stood and smiled at John and from then on ceased worrying about the Ice Age. They turned and looked out at the flickering sprinklers in the yard through a small diamond-paned window. “What happened to you?” Ivan asked. “You look like you’re dead or something. Like you’re on a telethon.”

  From that point, John’s body metamorphosed. He grew tall, almost brawny, but good health arrived too late in his adolescence to entrance him with team sports. He only cared about solo activities in which he could claim pure victory without the ego dilution of teams. John also stopped watching TV, superstitiously equating it with illness.

  John and Ivan aligned, making super-8 films as larks, the first of which was titled Doris’s Saturday Night. It chronicled her cocktailed devolution from Delaware insecticide heiress elegantly tamping shreds of hard-boiled egg onto crustless toast triangles, loving the attention, then shamelessly hamming it up, becoming a haggard mal vivant gurgling fragments of sea shanties into the pipes beneath the kitchen sink.

  Their second film was more mundane. Angus said they needed to learn about sequencing and editing, so John and Ivan followed Angus through a typical day of work at the studio—capturing his meetings, lunches, drives around the city and a screening at night. It was edited together and shown with goofy subtitles at Angus’s fiftieth birthday party under the title Film Executive Secretly Wearing a Diaper Because It Makes Him Feel Naughty, and marked their debut into the filmgoing community.

  John was a surprisingly confident young man, and a doer, not a thinker. This was an impulse Doris had encouraged him to hone. She didn’t want John to be a Lodge in any way, and so fostered in him an enthusiasm for anything that went against the Delaware grain. She encouraged action, creativity and a strong dislike for the past. She had also talked Angus into removing Ivan from the private school system altogether, so both he and John could attend the local high school. Neither flourished, but both were happy enough there, and afterward both young men scraped their way through UCLA, spending the majority of their time making short films and chasing girls. John also experimented with cars. He bought the orange 260-Z from the proceeds of flipping successively more valuable cars, while Ivan drove a mint green Plymouth Scamp he bought from one of Angus’s gardeners.

  When they were both twenty-four, they founded Equator Pictures, using Ivan’s connections and a small loan from Angus. They quickly had their hit with Bel Air PI, making them both independently wealthy, independently powerful as well as dependent on each other. John was the unstoppable freight train. Ivan ensured that the vegetables served by craft catering were fresh, and slipped $500 to a crotchety neighbor beside a location shoot who refused to turn off his Weedwacker.

  One spring day, somewhere between Bel Air PI and Bel Air PI 2, John and Ivan were at an ARCO station filling up John’s gunshot Bentley. 260-Z, his primary vehicle even though by now he owned the usual industry array of flash-trash cars. John said to Ivan, “I like to pump my own gas into my own car, Ivan. I always go to a self-service pump. Did I ever tell you why?”

  “To connect with the man in the street?” Ivan laughed.

  “No. Because I like to look at the numbers rev by on the gas pump. I like to pretend each number’s a year. I like to watch history begin at Year Zero and clip up and up and up. Dark Ages . . . Renaissance . . . Vermeer . . . 1776 . . . Railways . . . Panama . . . zoom, zoom, zoom . . . the Depression . . . World War II . . . Suburbia . . . JFK . . . Vietnam . . . Disco . . . Mount St. Helens . . . Dynasty . . . and then, WHAM! We hit the wall. We hit the present.”

  “So what?”

  “This is what: there’s this magic little bit of time, ju
st a few numbers past the present year, whatever it is. Whenever I hit these years, then for maybe a fraction of a second, I can, if not see the future, feel it.”

  “I’m listening,” Ivan said. He was so patient with John.

  “It’s like I get to be the first one there—in the future. I get to be first. A pioneer.”

  “That’s what you want to be—a pioneer?”

  “Yes.”

  Ivan paused and then, with some consideration, asked, “John-O, have you checked your tire pressure?”

  “Nah.”

  Ivan got out of the car, got a pressure gauge from the attendant, and came back and checked the pressure. “You’ve got to do the little things, too, John. It all counts, big and small.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  John finished dinner with Ivan and Nylla, then went down to the guesthouse. Doris, having declined dinner with crack baby MacKenzie, was asleep. For the first time since his return from his botched walkout he didn’t feel cold dark steel down his spine. He thought back to the women he’d been with briefly during that walkout, then he thought of Susan. Turning the front door knob, it came to him that maybe he could sponge away the look of loneliness that he’d seen in Susan’s eyes—and John was now pretty sure it was loneliness he’d seen, despite the smiles and the confidences. If he’d learned one thing while he’d been away, it was that loneliness and the open discussion of loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room. Susan could be more to him than his latest box-office ranking. With Susan he might actually help for once, might actually raise something better out of himself than a hot pitch for a pointless film. Something moral and fine inside each of them might sprout and grow.

  He phoned and got her answering machine again. He hung up. He felt sixteen.

  When Susan didn’t respond within an hour, John found his heart racing, his concentration shot. By midnight he was as buggy as he’d ever been on drugs, but without the distractions. He decided to forward his phone messages to his cell phone, then go rent tapes starring Susan. He wanted to see if the lonely look in her eye had always been there or if it was something new. He also just wanted to see her face. This is how fans feel about stars, he thought. So this is what it’s like. To John, stars were just part of the flow of people through the house, like the maids, the agents and the caterers. But tonight he understood the allure of the tabloids and the fanzines.

  He drove Ivan’s Chrysler sedan down into West Hollywood. Ivan and Nylla preferred the sedan because of its anonymity. It didn’t look like a rental car, and it didn’t look, as Doris had said, “ethnic or frightened middle class.”

  Traffic was tolerable; the night’s darkness still felt clean. He found a rental place, West Side Video. On entering he saw it was the kind of shop where the manager asserts personality by laser-printing signs highlighting EVIL MOTHERS, CUTE & DUMB, and arcane subcategories like GORE FESTS and LEMONS, where John was genuinely amused to see his old turkeys, The Wild Land and The Other Side of Hate.

  He realized he had no idea what movies Susan had been in. He asked the clerk, name-tagged RYAN, if he had anything starring Susan Colgate, and the clerk squeaked with pleasure. “Meese Colllllllgate? I should think so. Right this way.” He led John to an old magazine rack filled with sun-faded tape boxes. Above the rack was a laser-printed sign reading ST. SUSAN THE DIVINE. The top of the rack was camped up with altarlike candles and sacrificial offerings—Japanese candy bars, prescription bottles, a model Airbus 340 with a missing wing, and a mosaic of head shots of Susan culled from a wide array of print media. Ryan stood patiently, waiting for John’s reaction, but John was silent, the inside of his brain firing Roman candles. He felt a sexual need to own the altar.

  “She’s something, isn’t she?” Ryan asked.

  “You did this?” John asked, looking at Ryan, a Gap clone—khakis, white T-shirt with flannel shirt on top. A pleasant Brady Bunch face. Like a gag writer at Fox.

  “With tender loving care.”

  “I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it, right now.”

  Ryan was taken aback. “Mr. Johnson—I’m sorry, but I can’t pretend I don’t know who you are—this is my shrine. It’s not like I can just give it away like that.”

  “Five hundred, but throw in the movies.”

  “Mr. Johnson. I made it. It’s not like a joke or something. Well, maybe a bit of a joke. But I’ve been saving these clippings for years.”

  “Nine hundred. Half of what I’ve got. It’s my last money. Everybody knows I’m broke. Even with Mega Force—that’s in a trust.”

  “Don’t tell me this! Too much information, Mr. Johnson!”

  “John.”

  “Too much information, John.” Ryan put his hands on his hips and watched as John scanned the titles on the boxes’ spines. The store was empty. They could speak loudly. “John, I’m a stranger to you, but let me ask you something.”

  “Welcome to detox. Ask away.”

  “Are you, how shall I say, in love with Miss Colgate?”

  “What?” John was shocked, not by Ryan’s forthrightness, but by the same sort of ping he used to get when he discovered whodunit in an Agatha Christie mystery. “Love? I—”

  “Go no further. It’s okay. I work for the forces of good. And it doesn’t surprise me, you know.”

  “What doesn’t? I never said I was in love.”

  “Psh. You’re like the old RKO Radio tower shooting out bolts of Susan.”

  “You’re a ballsy little shit.”

  “Now, now.” Ryan could see John didn’t mind. In fact, quite the opposite. “I mean, both of you have done disappearing acts. Her after the plane crash three years ago, and you earlier this year.”

  John wasn’t going to fight it. “Go on. What’s your point?”

  Ryan rubbed his chin and became professorial. “Well, this would have to be a new thing, wouldn’t it? Because if it was even slightly old, you’d already have seen all her old videos by now.”

  “Bingo, Dr. Einstein.”

  “When did you meet?”

  “Today. At lunch. At the Ivy.”

  Ryan whistled, then relaxed his posture. “Tell you what, John. Rent all the videos and I’ll report them as lost or stolen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. And don’t waste your last money. I’ll throw in the altar, but there’s a catch.”

  “It wouldn’t be life on earth if there weren’t a catch. “Qu’est-ce-que c’est, Ryan?” John found himself greatly liking this strange young man.

  “You have to answer a series of skill-testing questions after reading a script I wrote.”

  “Fair enough. Deal.”

  “Good. I’ll lock up and we can scan these tapes out of the system and load this stuff into your car.”

  The two men carried the shrine by its ends over to the counter, where Ryan began to laser-scan the tapes’ bar codes. John gave Ryan the address of the guesthouse, as well as his phone number. “Give these out to anybody and you’re mulch. And let me ask you something, Ryan—why’d you make a shrine? You’re not a stalker, because they don’t make shrines—they stalk. What’s your deal?”

  Ryan looked up from the till, was about to say one thing and then visibly stopped and began to say something else. “Oh, you know, we all need an obsession, and mine’s La Colgate: 3184 Prestwick Drive, Benedict Canyon, Wyoming driver’s license 3352511, phone unlisted but messages can be left with Adam Norwitz, the IPD Agency.”

  John stared at Ryan.

  “She rents stuff here.”

  John looked down at the tapes, some episodes of Meet the Blooms, Dynamite Bay and Thraice’s Faces—On Tour with Steel Mountain. Crap. “There’s another reason you like Susan Colgate. Mind telling me?”

  “Fair enough. An LAPD guy told me I was the last person to ever leave a message on her phone line before her plane crashed—a few years ago. I can’t explain it. And now here you are tonight.
So I’m bonding with her again.”

  The shrine fit neatly in the car’s back seat. The air outside was surprisingly cold and John’s skin felt clammy. “Here’s the script,” said Ryan.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said John, grabbing it.

  “John—listen to me.” John stopped—he was unused to being addressed like this but didn’t mind. “You’re going to read this script and then you’re going to get back to me right away. But that’s not all.”