by Steve Hely
“Anyway, just seeing the cops he was a blubbery mess, gave the whole thing up in about a minute and half, said the wife paid him. She’s got a smart lawyer, still awaiting trial. But when they showed her the shotgun receipt, she muttered under her breath about ‘that stupid little shit.’ Like I said: you start with the wife.”
Then Pamela finished her drink.
“So, are we doing this?” she said.
That’s how I ended up fornicating in the W Hotel and then feeling my wang bump against my jeans in the elevator.
On the W elevator I did wonder if maybe, if I’d played it right, Pamela would’ve invited me to Bellissima Haven. But other than that I was pretty pleased with myself.
The Next Morning
On Sunday the Convention Center had a picked-over look. Copies of the New York Times Book Review, fliers about new titles, and catalogs were scattered around on the floor, like popcorn boxes and peanut shells on the ground at a closing carnival.
Outside I found a cart selling coffee and breakfast burritos, and I headed up the escalator to find a place to sit and eat. In the smaller conference rooms, they were still holding panels. Through an open door I saw one that was nearly deserted, so I settled down to breakfast in the back.
Onstage a man who looked like seventy-year-old retired Charlie Brown was softly answering the questions of a few gathered readers.
“Literature is important. It matters. It sounds a bit corny, perhaps, but I believe that.”
Jesus, this guy sounds like a Nick Boyle character, I thought, as I unwrapped damp tinfoil.
“You have to get it right, or you shouldn’t do it at all. When I was younger, of course, I wanted to be a novelist, you know, Hemingway, all that. So I decided: I’ll write one million words. That seemed like the number I should write before I tried publishing any. It took me thirty years.”
A jet of grease shot me on the thigh as I took a bite of my burrito. These were my only nice pants for the whole trip, so I left the burrito on my seat, slunk out, got some paper towels from the bathroom, and did a quick mop-up.
When I slid back in again Old Man Charlie Brown was still talking.
“… so I was in China, in the Foreign Service—this was 1980 or so—and I think I started making my notes then,” he was saying.
“And I started thinking, and working them through, more as a hobby than anything else. It’s slow. You have to be very careful, and very slow. I find, anyway. But slowly, it started to take a bit of shape. Then I retired, and my wife, God bless her, she said ‘you waited thirty years to be a writer. Give it a good try.’ She made me sit down and write every morning.”
I’d sort of gotten a sense of the burrito’s landscape now, so I could eat while watching Old Man Charlie Brown talk.
“It’s funny,” he continued. “I was writing, here, about paleontology, excavations, digs. And that’s what writing a novel is. People think of it as slapping words down on paper, the stack of sheets and a pile of cigarettes and so forth. Or conjuring things up, closing your eyes and seeing it in a flash, or something.”
There was too much egg in this burrito.
“… but, excavating. That’s a much better metaphor, I think. You peel back layers, slowly, and brush off the dirt, and gradually, very gradually, it becomes clear to you. You see more and more of it.”
Abandoning half the burrito I sipped my coffee as he kept going.
“And it is careful work. Tedious work. And, just like with a dig, if you try and go too fast you’ll ruin the thing. You can’t rush it. You might dig for a day, and just find a tiny piece of pottery, or what have you. Just learn one small thing about one of your characters. But that’s the only way to do it, slowly. So it’s slow work, down in the dirt there, but if you do it well, then hopefully you’ll uncover something—that’s really the word, you uncover a novel I suppose—you’ll uncover something that’s worthwhile.”
Yikes, I thought, this guy is working too hard.
“So, I suppose I’ll go at it again, get in the dirt again, because I do enjoy it. That gradual—gradual discovery. And if you do it well, I think, then you almost don’t feel you have any part in it. Any more part in making it than a paleontologist has in making a fossil.”
I could see why they saved this guy for Sunday. Old Man Charlie Brown shuffled offstage as the audience clapped politely.
As we were leaving I asked a besweatered spectator who that had been, talking.
“Bill Lattimore,” he said.
“Bill Lattimore … what did he write?”
“He wrote a novel called Peking.”
“Oh right, right. Thanks.” Peking, Lucy’s favorite book, which at that moment was doubtless being used as a trivet for Hobart’s lunchtime mashed potatoes.
I made a note to tell Lucy to tell Bill Lattimore to stop knocking himself out “excavating” and just crank out a book with a murder and some Christmas stuff.
With a few hours to kill before my flight, I wandered around downstairs. A few booths were still up, and a few stragglers poked about. At the Ortolan table, I picked up a copy of The Tornado Ashes Club and flipped through it. I read sentences at random. The gold light seeped between the cracks in the peaks, pouring through in heavy streams, the heat of it popping and melting the snow along the rims of rock. Or, Silas, the taste of old beer still plastering his mouth, looked down into the white checkermallow and the greasewood, and saw how the earth rebuilds itself.
I could still hear Nick Boyle thundering about “men and arms,” and Pamela pointing out on a cocktail napkin where the Pittsburgh cops had found brain splatter. At the very least, those two seemed like they meant what they wrote. I was having trouble finding a single sentence in my book that I’d truly believed. But hey—I’d pulled it off, right?
There was a woman near me, thirty-five maybe, looking at another copy of my book.
“That’s a pretty good book,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I had to read it in my book club. I didn’t finish it. Couldn’t really get into it, you know?”
“Oh. Well I thought it was pretty good.”
“Yeah, it just seemed like one of those books that’s trying to pack too much in. I got about halfway and decided, meh.”
“What about the language?” I asked. “Didn’t you think the language was lyrical?”
“I guess, but, you know, at a certain point, it’s just—you know—words.”
“Huh. I’m sure people said that to Faulkner.” This came out pissier than I’d intended.
“I love Faulkner, actually. I wrote my master’s thesis on the theme of race in The Sound and the Fury.”
She continued looking at my book as though it were a catalog for clothes she didn’t like.
“You know, I wrote that book.”
She looked up at me, and then down at the cover, maybe checking to see if the name matched the face.
“Hey, when the police think Silas killed his boss, why doesn’t he just wait and explain what happened?”
“Well … Silas is confused, and he’s a timid soul, of course—”
“I mean, I’m sure if he explained himself they’d figure it out. Wouldn’t that make more sense than running all over the country? Because then he really seems guilty.”
Angry blood rushed about my body. But I kept my cool, turned on my writer voice: patient, pedantic.
“These characters take shape on the page. All I do is observe, and record. I wait for the story to tell itself to me.”
“Mmm,” she said.
“I excavate,” I said. “I’m like a paleontologist. I get in the dirt, and I dig. This book, really, is just a dinosaur bone I uncovered.”
She put my book back on the stack. “Maybe it just, you know, wasn’t for me.” She gave me a schoolteachery smile. Super condescending.
“Do you know Pamela McLaughlin?”
“Pamela McLaughlin—she writes those mystery books? Yeah I’ve heard of her.”
“Well I had sex w
ith her last night.”
“Um, that’s great.” She backed away, looking for exits.
“And I talked about boats with Nick Boyle. Higgins boats. Ike said those boats won the war.”
“That’s great. Congratulations.”
“So I think I know a thing or two about writing.”
I’d won the exchange. That dumb-ass woman with her master’s thesis. “Race in The Sound and the Fury”? Real original theme. I would’ve pointed that out if I didn’t have to catch a flight.
She wouldn’t have been so cocky if she’d known I was flying to Los Angeles to talk about The Tornado Ashes Club movie.
14
INT. POE’S APARTMENT - THAT NIGHT
The place looks like Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, transplanted to the basement of a Brooklyn brownstone. Strewn sweatshirts, old towels, Chinese food boxes that have been there since the Clinton Administration. Rush Chronicles plays on a beat-up stereo. Dead center, on fruit crates, is the chessboard.
CLOSE ON POE, crouched over the board—black side, pieces unmoved.
POE
How’d you do it, you bastard?
A POUND comes on the door. Poe doesn’t move.
ANGLE ON the door. Another POUND, and the door bursts open. SERGEI enters. He’s followed by YEGOR—built like a brick shithouse, two-fifty, easy, and with arms that could crush a skull like a Fuji apple.
SERGEI
You shouldn’t leave door unlocked. Not
such a safe neighborhood.
He smiles. A smile you don’t want to see. Only then does Poe look up.
POE
I don’t have it.
SERGEI
You don’t have what?
POE
The money.
SERGEI
Money, money, Americans always
rushing to the money. “Show me the
money,” ah? Maybe we just come by to
see you practice.
POE
It’s gone.
SERGEI
Maybe we come by, I show my friend how you play your game.
Yegor crosses, and looms over Poe from the opposite side of the board.
SERGEI (CONT’D)
Maybe we play social call.
POE
Well then, I’m sorry I don’t have any
chardonnay and brie.
Suddenly Sergei reaches out and smacks Poe across the face. Poe reels, then jerks back, nose bloodied. Sergei takes a gun out of his pocket. He puts it in the middle of the chessboard.
SERGEI
Or maybe we play this game.
Sergei crouches in front of Poe.
SERGEI (CONT’D)
You are not so smart.
Sergei picks up a pawn from the board, and stands up.
SERGEI (CONT’D)
This one is called in English, pawn, yes?
Pawn is very easy to give up. To give up a
pawn is nothing.
POE
(Nursing his nose) You know a lot about chess.
SERGEI
I played chess, when I was boy.
POE
Ever hear of Garry Kasparov?
Sergei stands.
POE (CONT’D)
Once Kasparov played Bela Nadosy, the
Hungarian champion. Nadosy was
white, Kasparov was black. The first
three moves went like this.
Rapid-fire, Poe makes six moves—pawns, knights, rooks. None of the moves touch the gun. One of the pawns lands in the trigger hole.
POE (CONT’D)
Three moves. That’s it. And Nadosy said,
“You’ve beaten me.” These aren’t very
dramatic moves—nothing a good amateur
would’ve thought of. But Nadosy knew
he was beaten. Do you know why?
SERGEI
Tell me why.
POE
Because he could feel Kasparov’s confidence. He could see it in the way he played. And he knew he could never beat a man that confident.
SERGEI
And Kasparov became world champion.
Wonderful story.
POE
And Nadosy—
Poe reaches across the board—right under Yegor’s chin—and tips over the white king.
POE (CONT’D)
Nadosy drowned himself in the Black Sea.
Poe stands up.
POE (CONT’D)
You’re white. You just made your first move.
Suddenly Poe pulls a Tec-9 out from under the chessboard. Before the Russians can react, he has it on Sergei’s forehead.
POE (CONT’D)
Do I seem confident to you?
—excerpt from the unproduced screenplay “Black/White” by Miller Westly
I’ll tell you the Marlon Brando story. Actually, more of an Elia Kazan story. They’re filming On the Waterfront, the scene in the hold of the ship, where the squealer’s just had a crate dropped on him, and Karl Malden shows up, and all the longshoremen are looking at him. So Kazan sets up the shot, gets everybody in place. And then he goes around, starting with the extras first, and gives them backstory: motivation, fleshing out every man there into a full character. ‘You’re a Czech. You don’t speak English that well. You know these guys resent you, but you’re lucky to be on this crew, and you’re saving money to bring your wife over.’ ‘You were a smart kid, teachers told you to apply to college. Your dad encouraged you, said he’d figure out a way to pay for it. But then he busted his leg. Nobody helped him, and you had to start working.’ Stuff like that. Kazan goes through every actor, fifty, sixty guys, and gives them each something. Starting with guys who don’t have lines, extras. He finally gets through all of them, and the minor characters. Then he talks to Karl Malden for twenty minutes, walking him through everything: how he should be thinking, how he’s never seen a body this bad before, what he ate that day, everything.
“Then, when he’s finally done with Karl Malden, Kazan says, ‘Okay, we’re ready, shoot it.’
“And Brando, who’s been standing there watching this for three hours, says, ‘Hey, Elia, you never said anything to me.’
“And Kazan wheels on him. Points at him. In front of everybody.
“And says, ‘You just stand there and say your fucking lines.’”
Miller Westly has only one level of intensity. The whole time he was telling me this, he chopped his hands through the air as though he were smashing a series of invisible boxes that flew at his face.
“That’s how you make a movie!”
The Standard Hotel in Hollywood seems like a joke. The upside-down sign seems like a joke, the shag carpeting seems like a joke, the 2001-style pod chairs that hang from the ceiling seem like a joke, and the constant thumping Euro-infused trip-house seems like a joke. The pool looks like a retro-cool ’70s über-designer’s joke of a pool. But everybody acts like it’s totally serious: the Swedish-haircut guy behind the desk acts like it’s serious, and so does the model dressed as a mermaid posing in a giant fluorescent fish tank.
Miller Westly certainly seemed to take it seriously. At 3:13 P.M. he swooped in, and from a black ceramic bowl on the lobby table, he scooped up some wasabi peas. Without apology he told me he might smell a little bad because he’d been with his trainer that morning, “An Israeli guy who will kick your ass and make you like it.”
We sat down poolside, and he told me he’d been drinking a lot of mojitos lately with Appleton rum, asked a waitress if she had Appleton rum, made her promise that the mint was fresh, and ordered two mojitos and a Negro Modelo. As the waitress walked away, he made a study of her ass, the way a botanist might look at a rare orchid.
“That is exquisite. It is primal. Primal reaction. One of the core principles I’m always keeping in mind in my writing is that men are primal, visceral animals. Wrap it up in all the bows and fifteen-hundred dollar Savile Row suits with silk pocket squares from Milan, but there is a primal animal at the core.
Given the chance he will act and behave like an animal. If you keep coming back to that basic fact you will never run out of stories.”
This was all said with incredible velocity. Miller talked as though he were reading off ideas that were racing past his brain on an electric ticker. Only hours later, replaying the tape in my head at half speed, could I reconstruct it.
“Look at Brando,” he said. “For my money, the best actor, period. Just on a pure, raw, visceral level. No one touches him. I would give both my nuts and three inches of cock length to have him for one scene. I’ve written entire screenplays just as an exercise, just so I could think about how Brando would say it. And I’ve spent months working out problems in screenplays that Brando could solve just by standing there. He seizes the screen. Eats it. Fucks it. The screen begs Brando to fuck it. And here’s why. He’s always playing that tension, the exact line between a man in society and just a raw animal. You can feel it. You can feel him restraining himself. You’ve seen Streetcar?”
“Yeah.”
“The first time Brando met Tennessee Williams, he took off his fucking shirt and fixed Tennessee’s toilet. And Williams called Kazan, who was directing, and said, ‘This is the guy. This is Stanley Kowalski. The guy’s got grease on his hands and he’s fixing my toilet.’ Primal.”
Then the mojitos came and Miller told me the Brando story.
I’d been sent to Los Angeles to meet Miller Westly because he was interested in writing and directing the movie version of The Tornado Ashes Club. I’d read up on him to prepare and concluded he was a great man for the job. In the men’s bathroom at the 2000 Oscars, Miller Westly allegedly tried to stab Russell Crowe. Westly had just lost the Best Adapted Screenplay award; he wrote that biopic of Ethel Merman that Renee Zellwegger won the Oscar for.
Then he and Russell Crowe got into an argument— apparently, if the Internet is to be trusted—about Crowe backing out of Westly’s next project. It was an updated version of The Merchant of Venice set over a Super Bowl weekend in Las Vegas. Crowe allegedly called the screenplay “a hundred pages of coke-addled bullshit,” and Westly took a swing at him with a Bowie knife he had in his cumberbund. Westly was wrestled to the ground by Harvey Weinstein, Ian McKellen, or Kathy Bates, depending on which story you believe. After that, Westly disappeared for two years and went to live in Japan.