The Sirena Quest

by Michael A. Kahn

  As with so much of the music from his youth, the initial chords triggered a flashback. All the way back to the last time Lou had seen Ray at college, just two days before graduation. Their paths hadn’t crossed for more than a year, when Lou, strolling across the quad, came upon Ray seated beneath an oak tree, his back against the tree trunk, his unwashed black hair tied back in a ponytail, his skin pale, his T-shirt torn, his jeans filthy, his feet bare, his eyes dilated. Very dilated. Lou had said hello. Ray just grinned, his head lolling. Blaring from the speakers through an open window in one of the dorms facing the quad was “Run through the Jungle”:

  They told me, “Don’t go walkin’ slow

  ’Cause the Devil’s on the loose.

  Lou remembered the wave of sadness he’d felt as he walked past his freshman year roommate, so changed since then. Although Lou had wondered whether Ray would graduate, he did, and with honors in philosophy, earning an A+ on his senior thesis, a critique of William James’ pragmatism that he apparently wrote, from scratch, without notes, in forty-eight hours, fueled by amphetamines, Wild Turkey, and two dozen Hostess Twinkies.

  For the first decade after graduation, Lou kept track of Ray through the alumni gossip mill. Ray was in the philosophy graduate program at the University of Chicago, married a law student at Northwestern, spent a night in jail after a barroom brawl at Somebody Else’s Troubles on Lincoln Avenue, dropped out of the graduate program, drifted into the drug trade, got divorced. Someone heard that Ray was in Colorado, a rumor confirmed when their goofball class secretary Bryce Wharton III wrote in his alumni magazine column that classmate Chip Reynolds (a Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer) had run into Ray at a film festival in Telluride.

  “According to the Chipster,” Wharton wrote, “Ray’s present domicile is a commune on the outskirts of Telluride, where he shares space with a Brandeis grad named (I kid you not) Namas-te Abramovitz. Ahh-ooom! Ahh-ooom! A long way from the Pittsburgh steel mills, eh, Raymundo?”

  The next time Ray’s name appeared in Wharton’s column, he was living in a bungalow near the beach in San Diego. Only someone as credulous as Wharton would have reported that Ray was “now an independent sales rep for several South American pharmaceutical houses.”

  Ray went legit eight years ago, shortly after one of his cocaine customers, a La Jolla plastic surgeon, complained to Ray about his limited partnership investment in a strip shopping center south of downtown San Diego. The doc said the bank was hassling the partnership—something about loan ratios out of whack. Ray sensed an opportunity, since the bank’s loan officer happened to be another one of his customers. Ray gave him a nice discount on his next cocaine buy in return for a photocopy of the bank’s entire loan file on the project. When the bank foreclosed, Ray was ready. He bought the shopping center, refinanced it a year later, sold his drug business, and used the proceeds to buy a controlling interest in another strip center.

  He added his first mall two years later. His shopping center holdings expanded at the same pace as San Diego, which was then the fastest-growing city in America. By last fall, Ray was wealthy enough and respectable enough and Republican enough to be profiled in a cover story in Forbes magazine entitled: “The Shopping Center Czar of San Diego County.”

  Lou had seen that issue on an airport magazine rack. He’d stared at it, astounded. The Ray Gorman beaming at him from the magazine cover—clean-shaven, close-cropped, clear-eyed—was the Ray Gorman he hadn’t seen since freshman year. Later that fall, Lou was in Orange County on a deposition and drove down to San Diego to meet up with Ray at his home in La Jolla. He was delighted to discover the Ray Gorman from their James Gang days, including the membership in a bowling league (instead of a country club) and the addiction to crossword puzzles—that odd corner of the language inhabited by strange birds (the Moa and the Erne), odd coins (the Avo and the Obol), Charlie Chaplin’s daughter Oona, and an Oreo cookie in every puzzle. Of course, the effects of money were visible. Back at Barrett, Ray did the Times crossword in the back row of the lecture hall during Professor Barker’s Econ 101 lectures. Now he did it in the backseat of his BMW while his driver took him to his office.

  Lou pulled onto the highway just as the song reached the better-run-through-the-jungle chorus. He looked over at Ray, who was playing air guitar in the front seat and nodding his head to the beat. Ray grinned and gave him the thumbs-up.

  Chapter Twelve

  An hour north of Springfield, Illinois, Lou pulled off I-55 for gas. He was cleaning the windshield with the squeegee when Ray came back out carrying two cans of Coke. He handed one to Lou.

  Lou popped the tab and took a sip. “Did you ever reach Gordie?”

  Ray leaned back against the side of the van. “Tried again this afternoon. He was in a meeting. Had his secretary put me in his voice mail. Told him where to meet us tomorrow morning.”

  Lou dropped the squeegee back in the water bucket by the pump and turned to Ray. “When’s the last time you saw Gordie?”

  “Let’s see…not for at least six years. He was still in California. Renting that crappy little studio apartment near the beach in Venice. Haven’t seen him since he moved back. You?”

  “About two years ago. I was up in Chicago for some depositions. We met for dinner.”

  “What about Bronco?”

  Lou shook his head. “Not for a long time.”

  “Is he really a school teacher?”

  “Middle school, I think. Spanish.”

  “Teaching Spanish to seventh graders.” Ray shook his head. “Didn’t he want to become Secretary of State?”

  Lou smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Remember that humongous pile of Foreign Affairs stacked on his desk?”

  Lou nodded.

  Ray took another sip of his Coke. “A school teacher? After all he’s been through?”

  Lou said, “Nowhere near as wacky as you becoming the Mall Maven.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t the guy with a poster of William Kunstler taped over my desk.”

  Lou shrugged. “Times change.”

  “Don’t knock it. It’s a living.”

  “I guess. But it ought to be more than that.”

  Ray groaned. “Oh, God. Not you, too.”

  “Not me what?”

  “As in what’s wrong with our generation? Who said your job is supposed to be your life? My old man worked in a steel mill. His whole life. Even died in there, for chrissakes. You think he ever wondered whether he was self-actualizing in there? ‘Tapping into his inner child?’ Shit, man, he was bringing home a paycheck, putting food on the table, paying the mortgage. That’s what counts. Everything else is bullshit.”

  “You’re not your father.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m looking for salvation in shopping malls, either. It’s a job, Lou. A means to an end. Period.”

  The gas station was just off the highway overpass. A convoy of three trucks rumbled by heading north. Lou watched the red taillights fade into the distance.

  “Still,” Lou said, looking over at Ray, “shopping malls? You?”

  “Pushing drugs, pushing merchandise.” Ray shrugged. “Just trading one addiction for another. Profit margin is smaller, but there are upsides. The only government agents you have to worry about are those four-eyed fucks from the IRS.”

  Lou smiled. “I wasn’t talking about your drug days. I meant before that. Back in college. We thought you were going to become one of the Philosopher Kings.”

  Ray laughed. “No way.”

  “So why’d you go?”

  “Go?”

  “To the University of Chicago. The graduate program in philosophy.”

  Ray considered the question. “Fame, I guess.”

  “In philosophy?”

  Ray chuckled. “Sounds pretty lame now. But damn, Lou, I could pick that shit apart.”

  Lou thought back
to the required humanities seminar freshman year, to the week they were assigned Plato’s Symposium. Professor Milton Beckmann, chair of the department, came in that week to teach the class. For almost the entire hour, Ray went one-on-one with that arrogant old bastard and fought him to a draw.

  “And that’s how you’d become famous?”

  Ray looked over at Lou with a sheepish grin. “Youth, eh? I was going to be a celebrity professor—one of those guys who packs the lecture halls, gets interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS, gets called to Washington to advise the President.”

  “So what happened?” Lou asked.

  Ray stared into the darkness.

  “What happened,” he finally said, “was a dead guy named Benjamin Clark.”

  “Who’s he?”

  Ray turned to Lou. “That’s my point.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You never heard of him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a war hero.”

  “Which war?”

  “Civil.”

  Lou frowned. “I’m not following you.”

  Ray turned toward the darkness again. “My ex-wife grew up in a small town in upper state New York. Near Lake George. Nice area. After my first year at the U of C, we drove up there to visit her folks.”

  He paused to take a sip of his Coke.

  “I headed out for a drive one afternoon—just smoking a joint and cruising along this two-lane road that cut through the woods. Passed a sign for a hiking path. It was a pretty day and I had nothing better to do, so I decided what the fuck.”

  He finished the Coke and tossed the can into the trash bin.

  The path meandered through the woods, he explained. A brook on the right, a hill rising on the left. About a mile down the path he came upon a half-rotted wooden sign that read, CIVIL WAR MEMORIAL. The arrow on the sign pointed to the left, where the main path branched off into an overgrown trail up the hill through the trees. Kind of curious and kind of stoned, he decided to check it out. The trail wound back and forth up the hill and leveled off in a small clearing.

  “And there it was,” Ray said. “The memorial for Lieutenant Benjamin Clark.”

  Your basic Civil War monument gone to ruin, he explained. Granite obelisk, twenty feet tall, leaning to one side, scraggly vines circling halfway up. Surrounded by rusted cannon balls and enclosed by a rusted iron picket fence, the black paint flaking off. A tarnished plaque near the base of the obelisk, barely legible, honored Lieutenant Benjamin Clark, a hometown hero who’d fought and died at Gettysburg at the age of twenty-three.

  Ray paused and shook his head. “It blew me away.”

  “How so?”

  “I was twenty-three, too. Here’s this guy—fought in the most important battle in the most important war of his time. Maybe of all time. Died a hero. At my age. A real hero, too. Not some People magazine puffball.”

  Ray looked up at the night sky for a moment and then looked at Lou.

  “I could picture the scene. Body brought home in a wagon draped in black crepe. Laid to rest with a hero’s funeral. Brass band, patriotic eulogies, twenty-one gun salutes, pretty girls crying, grown men fighting back tears, women wringing their hands.”

  He paused, replaying the scene in his mind as he stared up at the stars. Lou waited.

  Ray shook his head. “So they built that monument on the hill overlooking the town. I bet you could see that obelisk from miles away. And there I stood, a century later, and the town is gone, the memorial is overgrown with weeds, and the monument stands—or leans, if it hasn’t fallen over by now—in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere. No one remembers the poor bastard. I mean no one. I’ve tried to find him in the books. Most of the stories on the Battle of Gettysburg don’t even mention his name, and those that do don’t say anything about him. Just list him as one of the dead Union officers.”

  Ray looked over at Lou and shook his head. “Anyway, there I was, staring at that forgotten monument to a forgotten hero, and it suddenly dawned on me: the whole fame thing is nothing but a meaningless crap shoot. Here’s a guy who got famous for all the right reasons, and a hundred years later he’s a nobody while yahoos like Sylvester Stallone and Pamela Anderson are living legends. Christ, Willard Scott is more famous than Thomas Hobbes.”

  He smiled, eyes distant.

  “So I said to myself, ‘Get real, douche bag.’ I dropped out of school that fall. Never looked back.”

  Lou said, “And you became famous anyway.”

  “Isn’t that a pisser?” Ray snorted. “Guy dies a hero at Gettysburg fighting to free the slaves and no one remembers his fucking name. I give the world another crappy Foot Locker opening onto another crappy food court with a piped-in Muzak version of ‘Brown Sugar’ and they put my face on the cover of a national magazine.”

  They stood side by side, leaning back against the van, staring in silence into the night sky beyond the halos of the arc lights. Lou thought of the image of that decaying monument in the middle of the dark forest.

  A distant air horn caught his attention. The entrance ramp to I-55 sloped down as if it were a path along a river bank. The passing headlights illuminated its surface. The river image held—as if the highway were a giant river cutting through the cornfields. He checked his watch. Time to get back on that river.

  He turned to Ray. “Shall we?”

  Ray winked at Lou. “She’s out there waiting for us, Lou.”

  Lou smiled as he reached for the door handle. “Watch out, Willard Scott, here we come.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  When Ray had called Gordie that afternoon, his secretary told him that Mr. Cohen was in conference and couldn’t be disturbed. She was just following orders: hold all calls—no ifs, ands, or buts.

  She attributed that instruction to the Klassy Kat Kitty Litter account. The entire Klassy Kat marketing team was flying in from Louisville next week for the big presentation, and thus she assumed that Gordie was holed up in his office working on storyboards for the new commercial—the so-called Black Pussy Special, a thirty-second spot built around two “singing” black cats, one with Aretha Franklin’s voice and the other with Louis Armstrong’s voice.

  She was wrong. Although Gordie was definitely hard at work in there, his goal was somewhat higher than deodorized cat feces.

  He was writing The Great American Screenplay.

  He’d been working on it for fourteen years now.

  He was up to page four.

  The script had been longer, of course. Eleven years ago—back when he was still in Venice, California—Draft One of The Great American Screenplay had reached page 392 before Gordie junked it. Weighing in at close to five pounds, it made The Sorrow and the Pity seem like an episode of The Young and the Restless.

  And it was with some sorrow and much pity that Gordie torched it in his backyard hibachi. But in typical Southern California style, what began as a funeral pyre morphed into something far more surreal. In his memory it played, complete with screenplay directions:

  EXTERIOR—NIGHT—GORDIE’S TINY BACKYARD

  Full moon overhead. Gordie has on just boxer shorts and sandals. He stands before the hibachi, smoking a joint as he watches 392 pages crackle and curl and blacken.

  Gradually, he becomes aware of a strange mechanical FARTING NOISE. A car with a broken muffler? A motorcycle in need of a tune-up? The NOISE grows LOUDER. A large shadow glides across the backyard. Startled, Gordie looks up.

  CUT TO:

  EXTERIOR—NIGHT SKY

  The Goodyear Blimp is directly overhead, cruising south along the shoreline. Its electronic advertising board flashes the Coca-Cola mantra: IT’S THE REAL THING!

  CUT TO:

  EXTERIOR—NIGHT—GORDIE’S TINY BACKYARD

  Gordie stands there, head tilted back, spellbound, the screen
play CRACKLING at his feet, the advertising lights flashing on his face. A revelatory moment. The Goodyear Epiphany.

  When he awoke the next morning, the Goodyear Epiphany had been shrink-wrapped into just another L.A. scene. That was the thing about L.A. The town generated one scene after another, each one weird and incandescent and unforgettable.

  Such as Death In The Afternoon: waiting at a traffic light along Sunset Boulevard one brilliant October morning, glancing to his left and there, squatting in the shade, was an enormous emerald-green iguana tied to a palm tree, a diamond-studded leash around its neck, the lizard motionless, eyes inert, the only movement the thrashing brown legs of a toad clamped in its mouth.

  Or Bonanza in Outer Space: peering out the window on a back-lot office at Universal, waiting for the assistant producer to get off the phone, when Lorne Green—yep, Pa Cartwright himself—strolls past, dressed in a space costume—black tights, green storm trooper boots, plastic ray gun in a rubber holster—puffing on a cigar and leafing through a Jacuzzi catalog.

  And so on and so on. A slide show of the apocalypse, and Gordie struggling to crack the code, wondering whether there was a code, whether it was all just static. He’d stuck it out for fourteen years, but after the Jim Nabors debacle, he packed his bags and returned to Chicago and the world of advertising.

  And to The Great American Screenplay.

  Draft Two reached page 179 before he gave up. One late night last winter he’d fed it, page by page, into the mailroom paper shredder.

  But Draft Three was off to a promising start. High school prom night. Seemed the perfect way to open a movie that would tell the story of four young men coming of age during their freshman year at Barrett College. The image of a white prom dress was a powerful opener, echoed several scenes later with that nameless girl in white from the Hampton College mixer—the one who’d haunted him ever since.

  The new approach came to him that night last winter as he stood by the window in his condo watching the snowflakes float past. Maybe it was all that whiteness that triggered the memories, made him wonder whatever happened to Sherry Goldfarb, his prom date senior year at Niles East High School, the memories still vivid almost two decades later. White had been the color theme that night—her prom dress, his tuxedo jacket, her corsage, his starched shirt, her frilly panties and, alas, the spray of semen that ruined her dress, her evening, and their relationship, all in one shot, as it were.