Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy

by David Gatewood (ed)

  I should have known then that everything ends. The death of the American dream was coming, and I should have seen it from far off. Our fall from grace would be great, very great indeed, because we’d climbed so high. Who would’ve ever imagined then that someday Bill Clinton would jog through the streets of a city of monuments like he was the king of the world? Whoever would have imagined this king of the world could come from Arkansas? Who would ever have imagined that he could do everything wrong and still smile that Bill Clinton smile?

  The devil was a king too. Once.

  I should have known better all along.

  We all should have known better. Nothing lasts.

  Exit into the west.

  I headed into the sunset on a jet airliner after having mustered out of government and closed my bank accounts. I spent prodigiously on a brand-new nickel-plated twelve-inch-barrel .44 Magnum that I’d managed to bring onboard the flight using my expired State Department credentials. A leather travel bag. A portable Selectric and a case of duty-free bourbon.

  Only savages drink whiskey. Note that for the record. Nota bene, as the Romans used to say before they went Roman on someone.

  I was done. I was dead. I was a shell of the savvy inside operator I’d once been. I donned the aviator shades, bought a pair of used combat boots. Found some long khaki shorts made from silk that I thought of as “jungle issue,” threw on a T-shirt that said “Actual Rap Star” I’d picked up from some Armenian-guy-run store that sold leather jackets, studded and inscribed with the names of record companies passing themselves off as the band of the ages, and capped it all off with a tan canvas big-game hunter hat. Later, on Sunset Boulevard, on the night my lawyer who was really just a paralegal and I got hammered on the bourbon and beat up some drunken marines who asked us where Don Johnson’s house was, I added a gray flannel bathrobe that I wore like a cape because we’d won in our brief skirmish against the marines. Barely. And every imperator must have his cape. It’s what they bury you in when they pull your dead body off the field of battle.

  In other words, I reinvented myself.

  The blazer, tan slacks, oxblood loafers, and JFK tie were probably still in the bathroom back at Dulles. The big show in DC was done with me, and I was done with them. I’d become a Hollywood reporter. I’d cover movie stars and maybe meet an actress who’d never make it because she was too good-looking and too kind. In time, I’d become the mayor of Venice, running on an extensive and much needed right-wing power agenda that fearmongered the environmental nuts as card-carrying communists in league with the General Mills Food Corporation and hell-bent on ruining the freak flavor of the boardwalk in favor of micro-condominium student housing complexes. I’d loosely sketched out an election plan on the back of a cocktail napkin aboard a Delta flight, in coach, while working on my third bourbon.

  A bourbon for which I’d had to recite Shakespeare in order to prove to the stewardess I wasn’t as drunk as my fellow galley slaves were intimating I might be. Suffice it to say, I got the bourbon and we touched down at LAX.

  Later, after baggage claim and the hot Santa Anas and the departing jets and a couple of bourbons in the Sky Lounge above LAX while I waited for a few calls to come in at the bar from old Company contacts who’d moved out to LA to prosper in filmmaking, or its ever-present underbelly, I finally hooked up with Rios. I’d told the bartender I was a producer looking to make the next Bruce Willis Die Hard train wreck right there at the airport. He of course informed me that he was an actor, as I knew he would, and allowed me to make as many calls as I liked from the bar phone on the off chance that I actually might be a producer of Bruce’s level and that I might remember him come First Shot for the part of Bernard Fife, Bruce’s sidekick who gets killed but has a few good career-making lines. I may have told him he’d be perfect for this imaginary job. I may have intimated that he could lease a BMW based on my complete assurance he’d have a part should the Bruce Gig go down at LAX. I even told him the story, or “plotline” as they call it out there. Basically, I just substituted all the known NSA details of the Israeli raid on Entebbe. He didn’t know Entebbe from the Battle of the Ardennes, and it’s not like I cared if it actually was an NSA national secret, which a few of the choicer details are. My clearances had been suspended after a run-in with Bush ’41. I’d asked him if he felt like betting on the Tour de France as we made our way to a state dinner in Tokyo. My clearance probably didn’t get wood-chipped because of that. That was the Tokyo dinner Bush hurled at. Everybody got wood-chipped after that one; I was just a casualty. In Pat’s defense, the big man went to the carpet for me. Told me so when he was golfing in Palm Springs with O.J.

  Rios was a South American mechanic. Not the car kind of mechanic. The other kind. The murder kind. He’d been out of the Company and in rehab for years. Couldn’t get over some high school sweetheart that left him while he was back in ’Nam. But he was doing good, at that moment, driving away from the flying saucer bar and restaurant that loomed over LAX. He was working as a line producer in charge of budget on a few of the Corey films. Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. “The Corey films” he told me over the bar phone was what everyone in the biz called these B-movie straight-to-Cinemax epics.

  It was Friday night, and Rios was, in fact, going to a party out in the Valley. Some porn star was supposed to be there. I gathered that this was a pretty big deal to him. The porn star part. I hadn’t yet figured out my whole plan on how I was going to survive in LA and not dip into my buried treasure. The majority of my savings had been converted into Krugerrands all through the eighties. Gold coins waiting in a Swiss bank deposit box for me to come get someday when I wasn’t so desperate. Until then, I was getting by on my last State Department check. Meaning: I hadn’t yet figured out which Hollywood tabloid would be my first step toward leading Venice Beach into becoming a bastion of right-wing, gun nut, booze-loving America. I knew that part. I just hadn’t figured out all the parts in between.

  Rios swung by the Sky Lounge and I fell into a blue Mazda Miata with noticeable right-side damage. Rios explained that the Corey Films weren’t real big in the scheme of things re: Hollywood. I assured him that I knew this based on my cover as a producer for the next Die Hard starring The Bruce Willis.

  I figured I’d let that ride and see how long it played in Peoria.

  Rios said nothing and maneuvered into late Friday afternoon traffic. We took the 405, smoked a joint Rios found between the seats, and made the Mulholland pass at a crawl. When we let down into the Valley, it was twilight and the air was warm and all the success and runaway excess of Reagan-Bush, and the fear and loathing of killer Bill Clinton, slipped away. I let the coups, power grabs, secret South American wars no one and everyone knew about, Arab Princes of Cocaine, big cars, free booze, and hot women slip away. All of it. That show was over, and I’d found myself here at world’s end.

  This was the new “now.”

  I asked Rios how rehab was going, and he told me he was “out,” so we picked up a bottle of super-wrong top shelf tequila with my last fifty bucks. We wanted to be sociable when we arrived at the Porn Star Party, as Rios was now calling it, his eyes far away with each mention of the event. By the time we reached Burbank and wound our way up into the hills, it was full dark and the stars were coming out above a valley of broken dreams.

  Suffice it to say, it was not a porn star party. And it was. It was “not” in that no porn stars actually showed up, even though the lady in reference was constantly heralded as impending throughout the night. But it was a porn star party in actuality, as everyone tried to be blasé about the latest deal, or possibility, in their career as they cast their eyes toward the door, hoping their porn star would appear at any moment and brighten their lives and hopes. They took large gulps of our super-wrong tequila as they assured us that they had it on good authority they’d be in, or part of, Bruce’s next film. Everyone called him either “Bruce” or “Willis” and managed to make it sound as though they were close enough to don
ate a kidney one way or the other. Everyone also knew Bruce was shooting next month in some foreign part of the world.

  The super-wrong tequila was getting to me. Meaning I was getting mean. The host’s bourbon was really whiskey, so I stuck to the crazy juice and cut it with Sprite and a lime while affecting a British accent I’d switched to mid-party. Something Haldeman taught me to do in Beirut to mess with the French embassy. As whatever low-list actors, dancers, or weather persons passed in front of me, assuring me that their script, part, or relationship with some closely connected Bruce-person placed them somewhere along the legendary Trough of Success that was Bruce’s next film; as they waved, gesticulated and gulped, their faces turning bright red, their eyes involuntarily casting about for the pornographic performer who would be at this party surely at any moment, I devolved further and further into my role as a charmingly bitter Englishman.

  It was my way of having fun.

  A point of note here. I wasn’t exactly clear what the porn star would be doing once she got to the party. And as the evening progressed, I was convinced that she’d need to put on some sort of show to meet these people’s increasingly high expectations of her.

  As they talked, waved, and gesticulated some more, I waited, lying in the bush like a team of Soviet Spetznaz. When the time was right I’d let them know, offhand, “matter of fact by the by old chap,” or in character as they say out there, that I was Bruce’s producer on the next Die Hard and that I could assure them wholeheartedly that we wouldn’t be doing that film in a foreign place next month. We’d be at LAX. I didn’t even say “Bruce.” I didn’t need to. It would have been wrong of me to.

  Later, on toward eleven, I became really drunk and the party had reached that morose moment when the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack isn’t matching the level of deeply intense artistic discussion taking place on a filmic deconstruction of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. People were drunkenly, and with the conviction of a pandemic bacteriologist addressing the UN, arguing over the nature of the briefcase, daring listeners to disagree with them, as surely it meant pistols at dawn. I was tempted to disagree just because I knew I could take any of them with a pistol at dawn.

  That’s when I knew I was drunk. Because “pistols at dawn” sounded like fun to me. It was time to back off. Splash some cold water on my face and get some other poison besides the super-wrong tequila.

  I made my way to the back of the narrow, built-on-the-side-of-a-hill house, searching for a restroom. While I was staring in the mirror, after washing my hands, trying to find the man who’d once briefed the Gipper on the effectiveness of the F-111 strike on Libya, I heard low, disembodied voices talking in the room beyond the wall. I also heard bongo drums slapping out a distant hypnotic beat.

  I went looking, figuring I’d find some drugs to take the edge off the super-wrong tequila. Instead I found Josh. Josh was mid-pull on some high-grade hash he swore was straight out of Cambodia. We split the joint, tuned into the bongos, and I told him all about what Cambodia was really like in ’75. He slapped an unamplified bass and listened to everything I could remember about that waking hell. He was a good listener. It was as though he was upriver with me and the crazies. He dug it all. He had a goatee and a shaved head, and when he talked he was suddenly, violently, intensely passionate, as though he was acutely aware of every wrong the entire world had ever made and that nothing, absolutely nothing, had managed to slip past either of us. Then he’d bliss out and return to the near-silent slapping twang of the unamplified bass. Eyes closed.

  I finished telling him about the time we traded Pol Pot an Alfa Romeo sports car and an autographed publicity shot of Goldie Hawn for a cross-border incursion into Vietnam for a little off-book payback. We were doing that well into ’81. Then the Gip told us we had bigger fish to fry and pointed at Moscow on a map. He knew. Even back then. He knew he was gonna ice the Kremlin with the biggest lie in the world.

  He knew.

  And I loved him for it.

  “Crazy,” mumbled Josh. “Pure crazy.”

  He slapped out some funk, and I promised Pat Buchanan I’d avenge his death. That’s how far upriver I was on the hash. I’d gone all “Kurtz” in my head.

  “Pol Pot’s got nothing on Hollywood.”

  That’s what Josh said. He had no idea. People who’ve never been anywhere have no idea what real evil is. Pol Pot was real evil. I stood up and began to brush the ashes from my bathrobe when he said, “No, I’m serious, man. There are dark people in Hollywood. People who can make you, and break you. You ought to hear Nadia talk. She knows. She says the devil lives here. Makes deals. Makes famous people famous.”

  Hollywood talk.

  “That’s how some people, hell, all the people here make it.” Josh looked at me like I needed to believe him so he could go on living.

  If you’ve studied enough history, and especially classical music, you’ll find that’s a common refrain. If anyone is too talented, the mid-level socialistas who engage in art because they don’t like hard labor—you know, the talentless ones who can’t accept that they’re not all Mozart—they’ll usually libel the gifted as having sold their soul to the devil. Liszt. Robert Johnson. Fran Tarkington.

  I turned to leave Josh to his bass and bongos.

  “Here’s the crazy thing…” said shut-eyed, bass-slapping, blissed-to-the-fifth-dimension Josh, my boon companion up the muddy tributaries of Cambodia ’75 remembered. “The crazy thing is… he lets you know what he’s doing right in front of your eyes, man. The devil loves allegory, dude. Loves it. Is allegory the right word?”

  “Depends on what you’re trying to say.”

  “Like when he tries to show you the whole thing but he uses a story.”

  “Example.”

  Josh paused. Thinking.

  “Like when a kid from the wrong side of the tracks gets beat up playing street basketball and he ends up in a mansion in Bel Air and it’s all fish out of water. But really it isn’t about all that. Really it’s about death and the afterlife. Is that an allegory?”

  “Yes. Symbolism, maybe.” The hash was messing with my head. It was hot in the tiny back bedroom. I sat down on one of Josh’s beds. He had two.

  “It would be an allegory if it meant something else,” I said. “If basketball was a symbol for life or something. If Bel Air was a symbol for the afterlife.”

  Josh stopped slapping his bass. He opened his brown eyes. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He turned to look at me.

  “Fresh Prince, man.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Y’know… Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This girl… this taxi driver. Nadia. She told me all about it once. Told me that the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air is really all about heaven and hell. That the kid really died in a drive-by, or gang violence, in the opening credits. Tells you so in the song. That he got killed in some kind of drive-by shooting. Then suddenly he ends up in “Heaven.” In Bel Air. In some rich cat’s house. What most poor people would think Heaven might be like.”

  I was thirsty for the tequila.

  “See, that’s what el Diablo does. He tells you the game and then watches you play it, you not really ever knowing what the rules are all about, or that it was stacked against you the entire time.”

  “You believe that stuff? You really believe in the devil?”

  Josh laughed and picked up his bass.

  “Nah,” he snorted. “Not at all.” He started to slap his bass and then stopped. “But, y’know the rumor about Zack from Saved by the Bell?”

  “TV show?”

  Josh laughed.

  “The rumor is that the actor, the star who plays Zack, well the rumor is that he sold his soul to the devil to get famous.”

  I sighed and rose. “Like I said, they say that about a lot of people.”

  I thought about leaving, which presented its own problems. Rios was gone. He’d left with some “actress” who’d just arrived in Hollywood by bus. I wouldn’t
see Rios again for another three years. When I went back out to the block and glass front room, someone had put on an old Rolling Stones album. A couple was making out in the kitchen. Most everyone else was gone. I found a beer and wandered out into the back yard. A couple of beautiful young kids were making out in a Jacuzzi. The water was red. Someone must’ve changed the light bulb. It looked like they were being boiled alive and they didn’t mind. I wandered toward the back fence and a few lounge chairs on a raised wooden deck. That was when I ran into Mays.

  We talked. He introduced himself as a publisher and editor-in-chief. I told him that was odd, as I’d been a reporter for the AP wire service all through the eighties. A stringer. I used words I’d learned from real pool reporters back in ’86 when it looked like things were about to get all crossfire hurricane in Beirut.

  He asked me what I was doing in LA.

  I drank the beer and watched the gems sparkle down on the valley floor.

  “Working on a book.”

  “Ah, the great American novel.” He sighed longingly.

  “Not so much.” I finished the beer and tossed it off the balcony into the failed dreams below. The weight of all my failures, like some giant phantom of my entire past, was catching up with me. Like it had pursued me across the continent and finally cornered me here at the not-porn star party that was all about a porn star who’d never show. I thought it would be hilarious if she walked in at that very moment. At two a.m. with just me, Mays, the two momentarily in love couples, and Josh, whoever the hell he was, in the back of the house slapping away at his unpowered bass.

  Pat would enjoy a story like that if we ever got the old gang back together again. If someone else gave it a shot again. If Dole ever made it to the top, we’d finish off the Chinese. That was the plan all along. First the Russkies, then the ChiComs.