by John Warner
I can hear Gord’s wheels turning over the phone. “But isn’t a saga supposed to be about heroic deeds done in far off lands?”
“I think I’ve done my share of pillaging. I possess some spoils.”
“But if it’s fiction, how are we going to trade on the whole behind-the-scenes true-story angle?”
“Wink and nudge, wink and nudge, say no more,” I say. “You say it’s all made up, but everyone will know it isn’t. Or that it doesn’t really matter because no one will ever know the truth.”
“It could work, I guess,” he replies. “People seem to like that kind of thing. Let me put out some feelers.”
“No time for feelers, put it out there and take the first decent offer. I need some dough. I’m willing to sacrifice royalties for a bigger front end. If you can sell it inside of two weeks, I’ll give you an extra five percent commission.” These are magic words.
“Consider it done,” Gord says.
There is a silence on both ends of the line that I fill. “I guess that’s it, then,” I say. “Drop me a line when you have an offer for me.” I go to hang up when Gord interrupts.
“Wait,” he says. “In the book, what am I like?”
“You’re the same soul-sucking bastard you are in real life,” I say with all due affection before hanging up.
Technically, this would be my second published book. You can still find the first with my name on it on the shelves, but I didn’t write it. I’ve never even read it. I can’t even entirely remember what it was about. It was one of the many things my name was added to with my permission but without my knowledge. It did well, making its own little pile of money. Now that I am writing a book for real I’ve found it to be rewarding, though difficult. It’s pleasing to do something that is entirely my own, a rarity in the entertainment world. Even my trial is not so much mine, as Barry’s and the prosecutor’s and the judge’s and all the people watching and waiting to hear my fate. My life is the fuel for that machine, an indispensable part, but one of many.
The goal, as far as I can see it, is to make the book as true as possible, as faithful to one’s experience as you can get, but I’ve found this often entails straying from the precise way events may have unfolded since the memory falls short of the truth of the matter. Perhaps this is one of those truths, that we fall short.
And of course there are the things that happened that no one would believe—stranger than fiction is the term—and so I’m going to leave them out of what I will share with the rest of the world, but in leaving them out that does not mean they didn’t happen or aren’t going to happen in the future.
25
WHAT IS THERE to say about the sequel? Does it help to catalog all of the ill-conceived or even non-conceived moves?
1. The funny man was to be the film’s director, but he had no idea how to direct a film.
2. The script that he approved when he thought the whole thing was a hoax was actually a thinly veiled rewrite of a classic episode of a legendary television show involving pies and a conveyor belt that everyone would recognize as being ripped off and would for sure bring a massive lawsuit, so it had to be ditched entirely.
3. With no time (nor idea how) to write a new script, the funny man decides that they will simply improvise the entire movie over a loose structure.
4. When this proves a failure, he then decides to shift gears and make the movie about a guy trying and failing to make a sequel to a successful movie. He does this by bringing various figures from the movie into his production trailer and then encouraging them to tell him the “truth” about their feelings regarding the other participants in the movie. He claims that everything is confidential, that it is all “just between them,” but the funny man, of course, secretly films everything.
5. Most damagingly, at no point does the funny man put his entire hand in his mouth. All of the other bad moves were forgivable if he had simply done this, but he would not.
The funny man amasses nearly six hundred hours of footage, which he trims to a svelte 420-minute rough cut before slicing to the absolute bone for a 232-minute final product. Fully under the sway of his increasingly complicated cocktail of pills as well as his belief in his own genius, the funny man is immensely proud of the movie. He believes it reveals something deeply true about life and humanity and making movies, namely that it’s all total bullshit. He forbids anyone else from seeing the movie, which he refers to as “the film.” The funny man is done with mere “movies.” With nothing to work from, marketing settles on this tagline as the sales hook: You liked it before. See it again, only a little bit different. This is terribly false advertising (and will in fact result in lawsuits), but they did the best they could under the circumstances. Millions are spent promoting something that no one is even sure exists.
But the funny man is supremely confident. He’s forgotten what it might be like to be wrong. He has broken new ground with this film. No one before has trod where he is now treading. Other footprints are neither in front of nor behind him. It is like the poem about Jesus where supposedly Jesus is always there, but when the guy looks back in the sand he sees only one set of footprints and the guy says “what the fuck, Jesus, where were you during those times?” and Jesus says, “step off, motherfucker, where you see one set of footprints, that’s me carrying your weak ass,” only in this case, it’s the funny man carrying the rest of the moribund entertainment industry.
It will be nearly impossible to outdo the original, box office—wise. The funny man knows this, but that’s not what this film is about. Trying to do that is a mug’s game, a sucker bet, so he has savvily gone the other way. This film is about how that can’t be done, so you’ve got to do something else. The lack of box office will actually strengthen the overall indictment at the core of the film. He imagines it will earn him a whole new level of respect from the people who previously have seen him as that dumb guy with the stupid thing. The off-Broadway play may not be necessary after all.
Rampant speculation about the film flies through the entertaino-sphere, but all of it is wrong, which hugely pleases the funny man. He refuses to do any publicity, save a single interview with the male cohost of the leading morning show that he likes to watch. The morning show is thrilled with this exclusive arrangement and given the near total lack of confirmable information about the sequel, there is a tremendous amount of anticipation for the appearance. The morning show will receive its highest ratings ever even though no actual news will be broken.
The camera light goes on and the stagehand points at the set where the funny man sits facing the morning-show television host, two pals in easy chairs that just happen to be hanging out in front of a camera. The morning-show television host tells the funny man how good it is to see him and looks at the funny man with moist and friendly eyes that seem to indicate sincerity. This endears the morning-show television host to his audience. It makes him seem human.
The morning-show television host looks at an index card on his lap and says, “This has been a really big year for you. So, tell me, what’s the biggest thing that has changed?”
The funny man could give a true answer. He could spill his guts to the morning-show host, tell him things he will not even share with his therapist. How when he was nearly killed in a bar in what he’s pretty sure was Ft. Worth, as his vision closed down to a pinpoint, he was visited by a spirit that he’s not calling God, but others grounded in the Judeo-Christian faith might, and this God spoke to him in the voice of a woman and what she said was, “Whatever you do is the right thing because you did it.” And from this moment the funny man understood himself to be divinely inspired, which is what is behind the film he has come to not talk about.
Or the funny man could talk about the more than occasional surge of power he feels as he walks the streets and sees people noticing him, how he imagines that he may be able to knock a building to the ground using only the powerful fists of this powerful man.
Instead, he looks at the morning te
levision-show host, flicks at the crease in his slacks and says, “Well, if I had to pick just the one thing, it’d have to be …” Here the funny man looks around the morning television show studio, as though he’s delivering a big secret. (This is known as “timing.”)
“… better hookers,” he says. Stagehands laugh, and the host hides his smile behind an index card.
“Oops, can I say that?” the funny man says, looking fake sheepish. “Is this live?” Of course he knows that it is live and that it will get him talked about, which is what he really wants. “They can just edit that out, can’t they?” The stagehands and the host laugh harder. The funny man wonders if he should stand on the chair arms and pretend to look around for the people who are laughing.
The host collects himself and asks the funny man what he hopes the audience gets out of the new production, what his desired reaction might be. The funny man considers telling the truth, which would be this: “I hope, that when the credits roll, each member of the audience turns to their neighbor and gives into the urge to tear each other into teeny-tiny little pieces that will scatter the theater floor, pieces that we would sweep up and drop as confetti on the next audience at the next showing and over and over again. People would wonder why every show is sold out, yet no one ever leaves the theater.”
Instead, he says, “We just want the kids to have a good time. We’re all about the good time.”
When the interview ends and the morning-show television host breaks to commercial, he leans over to the funny man and says, “Look, maybe after this last cooking segment you’d like to go grab a beer.”
“It’s nine o’clock in the morning,” the funny man replies.
“Exactly,” the morning show host says. “Quitting time.”
THE FUNNY MAN’S near-death experience has ended his fascination with his people, so the morning-show host suggests they go back to his place for “a few.” The morning-show host is an interesting specimen to the funny man. He is quite famous himself, far more famous than most of the people he is tasked with interviewing. (Not more famous than the funny man, though.) For years the morning-show host was just a weekend, substitute morning-show host until all of the sudden people recognized his talent and next thing you know they were nudging the chair of the female morning-show host over to make some extra room.
The morning-show host has also reaped some of the spoils of fame, including a marriage to a Chilean supermodel that was often reported as troubled and recently ended in divorce. The funny man has seen pictures of the morning-show host in the tabloids with two mocha-skinned children with dark eyes and perfect faces. They always seem to be eating ice cream together, the cones melting down the children’s knuckles. The funny man suspects these are staged in order to demonstrate that even though he is married to a psychotic ex-model harpy, the morning show host is a generous and tolerant father …
… with a kick-ass bachelor pad in a high-rise almost directly across the park from the funny man’s new place. Unlike the funny man, who decided to outfit his apartment with furniture and appliances and stuff like that, the morning-show host has instead installed a regulation-sized batting cage. But this is not just any batting cage. Unlike other batting cages where the pitching machine is two oppositely rotating wheels that squeeze the ball between them, firing it at the designated MPH, this pitching machine features a video screen on which the greatest pitchers of all time are projected at actual size, and as they wind up and throw, it looks as though they are actually hurling the ball. With a press of a button you can be taking cuts at Clemens’s heater, Koufax’s curve, or Niekro’s knuckler.
“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” the funny man says. “I know, right?” the morning-show host replies, tugging his tie down and shrugging off his suit coat. He pulls a beer out of the refrigerator, the only other piece of equipment visible, and tosses it to the funny man. “Go ahead,” he says. “Give it a shot.”
Though years of Little League established that he is terrible at it, the funny man loves baseball. He puts on a padded batting helmet and stands in the cage. He dials up Clemens and the big man seems to be looming over him from sixty feet, six inches away. Every seven seconds the virtual Clemens rocks into his full windup and throws. The pitches seem fast as bullets and the funny man swings comically late at every one of them. He dials the speed down to Maddux but still can’t even manage a foul tip. Each cut with the bat is vicious, all of his strength behind it and soon he is winded and staggers out of the cage, leaning on the bat for support. Maybe it’s not as cool as he initially figured.
“Let me show you how it’s done,” the morning-show host says, grabbing up the helmet and bat. In the cage, while the pitches continue to whistle past, he strips down to a tank-style undershirt, revealing a physique the funny man wouldn’t mind for himself. Gripping the bat, he begins lacing line drives back at the screen, the crack of bat against ball like gunshots.
“Whoa,” the funny man says.
The morning-show host grins and drops the bat. “That’s nothing, watch this.” He takes a series of in-and-out deep breaths that remind the funny man of Lamaze class before standing astride home plate and taking 95 mph of hard cheese right in the stomach.
“Haaaahhhhhhhh!” the morning-show host screams. The next pitch drills him in the same spot. “Haaaaahhhhhhhh!” For the next one, he takes off the helmet and squats down and points his face at Clemens. The ball impacts square on the morning-show host’s award-winning nose and ricochets off his face as if he was protected by a force field. He flicks the machine off, steps out and drains the rest of his beer in three long pulls.
“Holy shit,” the funny man says. “How’d you do that?” He had had some beers and some pills before the interview, of course, so maybe he wasn’t fully facultied, but he was not hallucinating. This was not elephants playing jazz through their trumpets, surely not. “Learned it at a magical place, my friend. If you put mind over matter, then nothing matters.”
The funny man had been feeling powerful, but now he feels weak and puny next to this specimen. This is unacceptable. “Let me try,” they funny man says.
“I don’t know, man, it’s not as easy as I make it look,” the morning-show host replies.
But the funny man isn’t listening. He is tugging on his beer and then getting in the cage and cranking up the machine. He chooses Bob Gibson from the menu. Gibson retired before the advent of radar guns, but it is widely held that he threw the hardest ball in the history of baseball. The pitches whiz by the funny man and smack the tarpaulin backstop with menacing force, thunderclaps. The funny man tries breathing just like the morning-show host and counts to three in his head and straddles the plate.
The pitch from virtual Bob Gibson is a direct hit.
To the funny man’s balls.
Clemens was a notoriously high ball pitcher, but Gibson, you see, liked to work low in the zone.
Upon impact, the alcohol and anything else that was with it in the funny man’s stomach spews forth, nailing the screen a full sixty feet, six inches away. The funny man crumples to the ground even as Gibson goes into another windup. The pitches continue to zip by, just over his head, pinning him down like mortar fire, not that he could’ve gotten up anyway because he has no feeling in any of his extremities.
The funny man’s organs seem to think that a small nuclear device has been detonated in his abdomen and are busy banging into each other, rearranging themselves in the wrong spots, pancreas and spleen swapped, duodenum wondering if it’s time to retire. Breathing is out of the question, which in combination with his instantly accelerated heart rate puts him in a genuinely dangerous medical situation. For several seconds the adrenaline keeps the pain away, but once it fully floods this system, all that is left is the ache. The funny man moans like a ghost.
The morning-show host is laughing uncontrollably because the funny man has just executed the oldest and most enduring comedy routine there is. Shakespeare has no fewer than forty-nine direct o
r indirect references to characters getting “struck in his majesty’s kingdom.” When archeologists first uncovered the storyglyphs in the ancient pyramids they discovered drawings of one man being kicked in the balls underneath those little skirts dudes wore back then, while others stood on laughing. There are cave etchings where a hunter-gatherer is shown getting a wayward spear to the balls. Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s funny because it’s true. It’s true because it’s funny.
Getting it together, the morning-show host enters the cage and turns the pitching machine off and hands the funny man a fresh, cold beer. “Here, dude, use this.”
The funny man cradles the beer to his testicles and this helps some. He can now conceive that this is not necessarily death that has come to visit him. Very close to death for the second time, recently, but not death. There have been no visits from spirits this time, though, just the ache, the ache, the ache.
After ten or so minutes he is actually able to stand, albeit hunched like a dowager, and gimp over and collapse against a column in the morning-show host’s living room. The beer is warm now and he drinks it.
Every time the morning-show host looks at the funny man, he cracks up into a fresh round of giggles. He waves his hand in apology. “Sorry, sorry, dude, honestly, I’m sorry,” but he just can’t keep it together. Ultimately he is overcome with hiccups and the funny man smells the vaporized beer fill the room.
“Holy shit, dude,” the morning-show host says. “You are one funny mofo. I can’t wait to see that movie.”