Miss Wyoming Miss Wyoming Miss Wyoming

by Douglas Coupland

  “It’s not, is it?”

  “No. You’re also going to call me up whenever you need to, and we can talk about Susan.”

  “Do you have any idea how fucking psycho that sounds, Ryan?”

  “Psycho or not, I mean it. Other people aren’t going to understand this when it breaks out. And it will. Not from me, but from you, because you’re in love so you have a need to blab everything. Other people won’t get it.”

  John laughed. “Okay, Ryan, you win. When my heart gets ready to sing, you can be my Yoko Ono.”

  “Good luck, Mr. Johnson.”

  John gave the thumbs-up and drove immediately to 3184 Prestwick, parked across the street and looked at Susan’s small blue Cape Cod house surrounded by overgrown ornamental shrubs. A porch light was on, but otherwise it was dark. An hour crept by, and the only activity John noticed was a dog walker and three cars driving by. He gave up, and late in the night he drove back to the guesthouse. The streets were surprisingly empty, and at Highland and Sunset he noticed a fog, but then realized it couldn’t be because Los Angeles almost never had fog. His cell phone rang, but the caller hung up. John conceded that something must be on fire.

  That night John didn’t sleep. He read Ryan’s script and drank raspberry juice cut with stinging nettle and mango. He looked at his cordless phone wondering what might be a remotely plausible time to call Susan. Seven-thirty? Too early. Eight? Yes. No. He’d look desperate. Eight-thirty? Uh, hello, Susan—yes, I know it’s kinda early. . . . Nine? Yes—but how to get there through the ink and murk and smothering slowness of night?

  By six o’clock the sky was lightening and a few doves skittered about in the shrubs. He put down Ryan’s script, “Tungaska.” It was good. A Texas woman inherits a strange metal hoop from her father, which looks like an unjeweled crown or a creweling hoop. She holds it up to the light from a TV set for a better look and suddenly licorice-whip tornadoes descend from the sky, smashing her Galveston subdivision into a landfill of cracked plywood, broken furniture, branches, toys and cars and clothing. Only the room in which she’s sitting is spared. It turns out the hoop is a portal that converts human psychic energy into nuclear energy.

  John heard a hum up the hill—Ivan’s treadmill buzzing to life at its usual six-thirty time slot. Company! He walked up to Ivan, who was also watching the morning news on an ancient 14-inch TV placed on its usual perch on a lawn chair. “John-O.”

  “Ivan.”

  “You look like shit. Up all night?” Ivan’s treadmill was on 3 out of a possible 10.

  “Yeah.” This was not uncommon.

  “Watch anything good?”

  “Actually, no. I read something.”

  “You read?”

  “A script, actually.”

  “My, my. High School Graduates Eat Steak. When was the last time you even touched a script?”

  John had to think. “Yeah, yeah. Whenever.”

  “Something we can use?”

  “I think so. It’s okay.”

  “Okay good, or okay crap?”

  “Okay good. Okay great, actually.”

  “Spiel forth, pardner.”

  John started to describe the film.

  “What happens after the Galveston blowup?” Ivan was hooked.

  “We go back in time—to the famous Tungaska ‘meteor explosion’ of 1909.”

  “Isn’t that the one where half the trees in Siberia got knocked down?”

  “That’s it—except it turns out it wasn’t a meteorite explosion. It was this hoop thing.”

  “Not aliens, I hope. The market’s supersaturated with alien shit.” Ivan timed some sort of pulse or throbbing in his body with his stopwatch.

  “Not aliens. The hoop is from Switzerland. From Bern, Switzerland. It’s from 1905, and it was made by a voluptuous Russian Jew down the hall from Einstein’s apartment. That was the year he discovered the Theory of Relativity.”

  “Voluptuous? What kind of word is that? Where are we, John-O—1962?”

  “Okay okay. But she’s hot.”

  “She’s hot? Are we in 1988 now?”

  “God, Ivan. She’s hot in a cold kind of way. Her parents died and she had to go back to Siberia from Bern. But when she’s there, there’s the accident—the Tungaska explosion.”

  “What kind of psychic energy creates an explosion that levels half of Siberia?”

  “The woman’s first orgasm accidentally funneled through an amplifier ring within the hoop.”

  “Jawohl.”

  “Anyhow, she’s at the center of the explosion, so she’s safe. That’s part of the deal. Imagine the special effects on this one, Ivan. Anyhow, by now the bad guys know all about this hoop.”

  “Who are the bad guys?”

  “A Swiss banking consortium just before WWII. The guys who were about to rake gold fillings out of the death camps.”

  “Go on.”

  “These banking guys want it. All of the governments want it, but she keeps both herself and her hoop hidden until 1939 and the war. She’s sent to a death camp and the Nazis get the hoop. Then the Americans steal it from the Germans, and the Americans use it to nuke Japan. And after that the hoop moves to Nevada, where they suck in the gambling energy and the desperation energy from Las Vegas to do their nuclear tests. But then the woman’s son, a ballistics scientist working there at the Nevada test site, makes these connections and realizes what the hoop is really about—and also that it belongs to him.

  “So he manages to swipe it—that’s when the nuclear testing stops—in the eighties—and he smuggles himself and the hoop down to Galveston. But he has a stroke. His daughter, played by the same actress, puts the hoop into a luggage closet. It’s when she’s cleaning out the closet that she has the accident with the hoop up against the TV set. The tornado alerts the bad guys, and so there’s this chase and it ends with a hurricane of blood. Fish turn inside out. Roses bloom at midnight. It’s Revelations. At the end the woman takes the hoop to Hawaii and throws it into one of the live volcanoes on Oahu. Whaddya think?”

  Ivan was measuring his breath as his treadmill kicked into a hill simulation. “Sounds to me like there’s lots of debris flying around in it.”

  “Debris? What? Yeah—I guess so.”

  “I was meeting with these nerds at ILM and SGI up in San Francisco before I went to Scotland. Their computers can do perfect flying debris and litter now. They’re looking for a showcase for their new techniques and this sounds like just the thing. Story needs some work, though. Who’s the writer?”

  “One of these young turks—Ryan Something. He’s boiling hot right now.”

  “I haven’t heard his name. Is there an auction on it?”

  “We have the option to make a preemptive bid.”

  “How much you think?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Make it three. You feel good about this?”

  “First script in years to give my brain a hard-on.”

  “It’s the first script you’ve read in years.”

  A bell rang, announcing somebody at the front gate. Ivan switched off the treadmill. “Come on, John-O, let’s see who’s here.” They walked around the patio, which was dripping with flowers and lush branches. Out front a police car was at the gate, one officer standing beside the car manning the intercom, another in the passenger seat. Ivan buzzed them in with a remote. The four of them formed a congress on the front steps.

  “Officers?” Ivan said.

  “Hello, Mr. McClintock,” the tall one said. “And you, too, Mr. Johnson. Do you have a moment, Mr. McClintock?”

  “Call me Ivan. Of course. What’s this regarding?”

  “Doing a check. Do you own a white Chrysler sedan, license number 2LM 3496T?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you driving the car last night around two A.M. in Benedict Canyon?”

  “That was me,” John said.

  “Could you tell us where you were last night, Mr. Johnson?”

  “Ea
sy. I was getting tapes at West—West—West Side Video on Santa Monica.”

  “What tapes?”

  “About ten of them. Susan Colgate stuff—Meet the Blooms, and some cheesy B flick.”

  The policeman shared a flickering meaningful glance. “What time would that have been, Mr. Johnson?”

  “The guy was just closing the shop. Around one A.M., I guess.”

  “What then?”

  “Then I—went and parked in front of Susan Colgate’s house. For about an hour.”

  “Why was that, Mr. Johnson?”

  “Is something wrong? What’s going on here?” John was getting edgy.

  “It’s a routine check, sir. Why were you parked outside her house?”

  “John-O,” said Ivan. “Just talk, okay? We’re not cutting a distribution deal here.”

  “She didn’t answer my phone message. Susan Colgate. I thought she might be coming home late.”

  “You live here, Mr. Johnson?” asked the shorter officer.

  “In the house down there. With my mother.” The police looked down at the guesthouse, almost unchanged since the day John first saw it. “I lost my old Bel-Air tree-fort last year. You probably read about that in People.”

  “You didn’t lose it, John,” said Ivan, “you gave it away.”

  “To the IRS. That’s not me giving. That’s them taking.”

  “Is that the Chrysler down there?” asked the tall cop.

  “That’s it,” John said, his stomach turning to slime as he remembered the shrine still in the back seat. “There’s a—oh fuck. You’ll see.”

  The four walked down the hill, the police clicking into almost paramilitary action as they discovered the shrine in the back. One called HQ requesting something technical immediately. The other blocked John from the car.

  “Am I under arrest? Do you have a warrant?” John asked.

  “No. And we don’t have to go through that if you agree.”

  “John, it’s my property,” said Ivan. “Go right ahead, guys.” He looked in the back seat. The white towel around his neck dropped onto the gravel driveway and he didn’t pick it up. “John-O, there’s a goddam Susan Colgate parade float in the back seat of the car—you made this?”

  “Did you make the shrine in the back seat?” the cop asked.

  “No. I bought it from the kid at West Side Video. I think it’s one of those campy queer things.”

  At this point Doris came out of the house, cloaked in shawls, her bunned gray hair a porcupine of flyaway hairs. “Oh Christ—it’s my mother.”

  “Morning, darlings. Oh my—the fuzz.”

  “The fuzz?” said John.

  “I’m merely trying to be contemporary, darling. Officers—has there been a crime?”

  There was mild confusion. A police photographer and forensics expert went over to the car. Ivan went back up to his treadmill and John phoned Adam Norwitz. “What the fuck is going on, Adam?”

  “Susan’s gone AWOL. She had a six A.M. makeup call for a Showtime Channel kiddy movie and she didn’t show up. So the producer phones and screams at me, and I go racing from my gym straight to her house and the doors are all open. There’s nobody there, but her car’s still out front. The coffeepot was still on, but the coffee was like tar, like it’d been on for twenty-four hours. So I called the cops. You tell me what’s going on. I nearly had to donate my left nut to science to get her that stupid part on Showtime, and she fucks it up.”

  “Compassion, Adam.”

  “Yeah, right. Is she doing a project with you? Is she jumping into a bigger pond now—no more time for the little fish?”

  “How can you make this woman’s disappearance about you, Adam?”

  “Spare me the melodrama.”

  “Did you call the hospitals or anything?”

  “That’s the cops’ job.”

  Adam knew nothing. The police knew next to nothing. John refused to panic. Susan could be out on a tequila jag or maybe she was whipping one of those creepy Brit directors with birch fronds. She’s not that type, he thought. He sucked in a breath, then phoned Ryan to buy the script.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Their first flop was a love story: The Other Side of Hate. Nothing about it came easily. To begin with, Angus, in the final depressing stretch of prostate cancer, told him the title was wrong. “John, ‘hate’ is a downer word, and it doesn’t matter if you make Citizen Kane, a title like The Other Side of Hate is box office poison from the word go.”

  Doris had other concerns. “A love story? You, darling? Just keep making things that go bang and you’ll be hunky-dory.”

  “You don’t think I can do a love story?”

  “That’s not it, darling. Love stories need to be made by . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, I have put my foot in it, haven’t I?”

  “Love stories need to be made by . . .?”

  “They need to be made by somebody who’s actually been in love, darling, and I think I’d better have something very bubbly very quickly.” Over the years Doris’s life had devolved into a pleasant timeless succession of sunny days, clay modeling, bursts of watercolor enthusiasm, gossip with a small clique of “card fiends,” and a well-worn path between her front door and the Liquor Barn a few miles away. John saw her twice a week and she remained a close confidante.

  “I’ve been in love before.”

  “With whom?”

  “With . . .”

  “Really, darling, it’s okay, and doubtless you’ll one day find some lucky young starlet who’ll sweep you right off your feet. And until then, keep blowing things up in Technicolor.”

  “Technicolor? I think I hear Bing Crosby ringing the doorbell.”

  But John wondered why he hadn’t fallen in love. He’d been in lust and in like countless times, but not something that made him feel like a part of something bigger. The energy from his filmmaking—as well as filmmaking’s rewards, the delirium of excess—it all conspired to mask this one simple hole in his life.

  It seemed to John that people in love stopped having the personality they had before love arrived. They morphed into generic “in-love units.” John saw both love and long-term relationships as booby traps that would not only strip him of his identity but would take out the will to continue moving on.

  But then again, to find somebody who’d be his partner on the ride—someone to push him further. That’s what he’d held out for. And as the years went on, the holding out got sadder and more solitary. He began to hang out with people younger than he as older friends drifted away. But even then he sensed the younger crew were contemptuous—That fucked-up old wank who can’t even get himself a girlfriend. He lives in a house like a nuclear breeder facility. Sure, he has hits, but he always takes his mom to the premieres.

  Ivan was less doubtful than Doris about the fate of The Other Side of Hate, but during the production cycle he was sidetracked by an onslaught of collapsing real estate deals in Riverside County, and wasn’t able to assign himself fully to his usual preproduction grind of rewrites, casting changes, and cleaning up John’s well-intended messes. The director and the lead actress discovered they were sleeping with the same script girl and subsequently refused to listen to each other. The male lead tested positive for HIV two weeks before shooting and arrived on the set with a new and medicated personality greatly at odds with the cavalier froth demanded by the thirteenth and final script rewrite. The grimness continued through the dailies, through the storm that bulldozed a third of the Big Bear location set and through John’s initiation into the world of crystal meth on the eleventh day of shooting.

  After a profoundly dismal test screening in Woodland Hills, Melody said to John, “John, I know you meant well by this film, but if you want to do the right thing, go out and buy a can of glue and stick it onto the back of the negative and sell the whole thing as packing tape.”

  “Mel!”

  “Johnny, don’t be a retard. It’s crap. Burn it.”

&nb
sp; “But it’s tender—lovely . . .”

  “Please. Don’t even put it on video. Don’t even dub it into Urdu. Burn it.”

  Angus died shortly thereafter and Doris came unglued. They hadn’t been lovers for decades, but he’d been her good friend. She lapsed into a cloudy fugue. Ivan inherited the estate and Doris stayed in the house.

  The Other Side of Hate was released after John ignored what proved to be sound advice from Melody. The film was violently thrashed by media organs with the glee of vultures who have long awaited the giant’s first fall. It died on opening weekend, taking in just under 300K, close to the amount John spent on under-the-counter pharmaceuticals in any given year. There were the inevitable industry backlash rumors that the golden days of Equator Films were over. Some viewed the film as a burp, others a death cry. John and Ivan were unable to rustle up even the faintest, most vaguely kind word from a 200-watt radio station in the middle of Iowa. (“Slightly amusing!” KDXM, La Grange, Iowa.) Nothing was salvageable.

  All eyes were on the next film, The Wild Land, a historical saga set in early-twentieth-century Wyoming. The script was adapted from a best-selling novel by a two-time Academy Award–winning screenwriter. The cast was six of filmdom’s most in-demand stars, all of whom got along famously with the Palme d’Or director. It came in on budget, with a sweeping musical score, and when it came out in theatrical release, it . . . flat-lined. It garnered none of the venom and acid of The Other Side of Hate. The film simply vanished, a response more deeply wounding than any of Hate’s hatchets and chain saws.

  After The Wild Land, John and Ivan had a dozen films in development. Time passed. Studios mutated and merged and vanished and some were born. Japan entered the arena. Tastes changed. New audiences evolved. The men had lost their footing.

  John completed construction of his high-tech fuck-hut, which had been ongoing for five years. He tried to clean up his substance act, and lost entire years at a time in the effort, the very name Johnson becoming industry shorthand for slipping and lapsing and falling. He lost interest in making movies. His world narrowed and his circle shrank. John began to feel like some old mirrors he’d seen in Europe, at the once-grand old palaces, the glass that had slowly, fleck by fleck, over the years shed the flecks of silver that had made them originally reflective.