Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy

by David Gatewood (ed)

  But that’d have to wait for Bill and Hillary Clinton to finish wrecking everything.

  The high-water mark and the death of the right-wing dream of America the Conquering was all I could think about at two a.m. in a lounge chair. On a deck. Looking out at Burbank in the night.

  “No, I’m working on a book about the devil and Hollywood.”

  Mays sat up.

  “That’s coming back, y’know. People always get interested in the devil every so often. I should know, I publish gossip.”

  “The porn star?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a shame he didn’t bother to hide. “There was a chance she might show. I took it.”

  He picked up a bottle of gin he had concealed in the darkness like the sniveling left-wing nutjob I knew he was. Now that he sensed I might be part of the problem, a journalist, he offered me a pull. We were bottle-hitting by the side of an incredibly tiny pool at three a.m. It was dark and very quiet out.

  I must make a confession now.

  I must tell you that for a moment I became so weak, so disillusioned by the fall of Reagan, that I toyed with, felt, molested the thought of becoming one of the enemy. I asked myself: What if I just make all the right liberal noises and join the tribe of crazy? Maybe there’s a secret club. A job. A porn star for me if I make their liberal sounds and join their party of nothing. What if?

  Then Mays made a disparaging crack about Casper Weinberger and I decided he was chum and I was the shark. I was going to go Roman on him. If not now, if not tomorrow, then at some point I would go Roman just for the crack. Gin does that to me.

  Nota bene.

  It also does something else.

  It makes me crafty.

  It makes me English.

  Pat once told me, “Never trust the English. They’re mad dogs.”

  Pat the Wise.

  Pat Buchanan.

  I hit the bottle of gin hard and said, “Listen, it’s 3:45 in the a.m. Let’s go find a diner and get some breakfast and I’ll tell you a story I once heard about some star kid who sold his soul to the devil for everything.”

  To his credit, Mays didn’t ask for the details. That told me he’d been a card-carrying DNC operative his entire miserable existence, his excuse for a life. Operators don’t ask for the details. Regardless of which side they’re on. They just make the play.

  We were blasting down Ventura Boulevard when the sun began to come up. Juice Newton was singing “Queen of Hearts.” It was great, and if Mays hadn’t been the enemy, he could’ve been a friend.

  When we were finally eating Moon over My Hammy’s at a Denny’s, I told him the rumor Josh had related. I added details. I embellished. I ended with, “I know it’s not counting bodies on the Cambodian border, or Beirut ’86, but it’s gossip and I’ll do it for some quick cash.”

  Mays set his coffee down and picked it up again. I had him, and he knew I had him.

  I told him, “Even if it’s not true, you can print it. This Saved by the Bell is big, right?”

  “Yeah, of course we can. Kid’s hot right now.”

  That’s when I struck.

  “Well then, I’ll need an expense account and a condo while I write the story. Something on the west side. Near Venice preferably.”

  In hindsight, I may have struck a tad too early.

  I checked my watch and signaled the waitress. It was just after six a.m. and we could order booze. I ordered a double mint julep and was told Denny’s didn’t have mint and they didn’t “julep.” I settled for a draft and shouted “amateurs” as she walked away with a demeanor I felt didn’t necessarily embody the Denny’s corporate experience as outlined in some handbook somewhere. I was tempted to burn the place down later if things went sideways in LA, or write a letter to Mr. Denny. I wasn’t sure which.

  “Yeah, Doc…” said Mays. I’d told him that was what everybody called me. Might’ve been the first time I’d ever used it. He continued, “We don’t do expense accounts and condos for out-of-town stringers. Hell, we don’t even do them for ourselves. I pay fifty bucks a story. Two hundred and fifty words.”

  The Grey Lady the Hollywood Scene Beat was not.

  But I could work with this.

  “You got a lawyer?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes and swallowed badly. He had a lawyer and probably an ulcer.

  “Because I don’t want to go down for libel or slander,” I continued. “My source tells me this is some really messed-up stuff the kid’s gotten himself into.”

  Mays raised an eye.

  He was hooked.

  “You ever hear of Bohemian Grove?” I spooned up some hammy with lots of moon. I chewed and imagined that beer I was going to get and down in one go, then send the failed-actress-now-waitress back for another, just to teach someone a lesson about customer service. She could learn a lot from the barman at the Polo Lounge in Kinshasa. A lot.

  “Yeah,” muttered Mays like he was cagey. “Lot of establishment types go there and play dress-up. Weird frat-boy stuff.”

  The beer arrived and I polished it in one go. I held one hand up as I did, indicating she should wait. Then I slammed it down and told her to be quicker with the next round.

  I’d either pushed it too far with Mays, or it was right where it was supposed to be pushed to. The jury was still out. I had high hopes for a condo because I wanted to sleep for days.

  He pushed his plate back. I could sense he was pushing me back, filing me under “dangerous lunatic” in the not-to-be-trusted file. The drinking was to show him I was one of those hard-as-nails type journalists that thought Murrow was a prep school pansy.

  And I was thirsty because of the hash.

  “Yeah,” I burped. “Here’s the thing. It’s totally John Birch. Right-wing weirdos. Kid’s in thick with ’em. One day he could be the next Reagan. If he didn’t sell his soul to the devil, then he might as well have if he’s hanging out with those creeps. Know what I mean? George Bush is the Grand Poobah there. Creepy.”

  The trap was set. I hated myself for laughing, but I had to, to sell it.

  I waited.

  For the beer, which I was sure would have failed actress spit in it, and for Mays to swallow the bait.

  Mays picked up his coffee.

  “Yeah,” he said after a sip. There were bags under his tired eyes. But the eyes themselves were alive with good old-fashioned DNC hatred and bile. Bagging the next Reagan was as close to shooting a rare white albino right through the eyes as a peace-loving liberal would ever come.

  “Yeah, we’ve got a lawyer. I’ll give you five hundred dollars for expenses, and if you get any photos of the kid with any of those jerks… I’ll pay double for each shot. I don’t care if he waxes the devil’s car on Sundays, but get some pics of him and some Republicans playing Frat Boy and you’ve got gold.”

  I had him.

  We went back to the sleazy offices of the Hollywood Scene Beat and I got the five hundred in cash. I headed by bus over to the lawyer’s office off Victory Boulevard. It was behind some warehouses in a badly built strip mall.

  I convinced the lawyer—Wally Kasternick, Esquire—that I’d need a junior associate to act as my legal representative, because the bulk of my devil-worshipper-slash-right-wing-fratboy cult story involved a lot of records-crawling and I expected some heavy resistance from the county commissioner, who I took a shot in the dark and slandered as a “right-winger.” I told him the retainer would be paid by the publisher. He was the only lawyer, so he offered me a part-time temp paralegal by the name of Arturo Chung.

  They called Chung, and an hour later he showed up in some sort of car I’d never bothered to learn the name of. It was Asian, it was lowered, and it had tinted windows. I informed my new lawyer-slash-paralegal we wouldn’t be driving that and made him drive me to the local Hertz rent-a-car out at the Burbank Airport, where we drove away with an American butterscotch Olds Cutlass Sierra thing. It was huge. I’d negotiated, intensely, for a convertible of some sort, but the jac
k-booted fascist at the rental desk was toeing the “no fun for you” party line. I added this up as yet one more injustice and tallied it under the things I’d need access to when, not if, it was time to go Roman.

  Lieutenant Colonel North had taught me that trick.

  I’ll never forget it.

  Keep a deposit book of wrongs for the time when going Roman comes. That’s what crazy people do.

  We drove off into the hot Burbank afternoon, and it took only a few moments of thinking and trying to find a decent soft rock station before I realized I suspected Arturo Chung of being a dangerous lunatic.

  My first clue was that he was dressed like one. He had on a short-sleeved button-up shirt with a tie. I didn’t even know those were still available anymore. He must’ve had some relative who’d been a slide rule geek at NASA back in the sixties when NASA was putting men into space every other week. Was he raiding that relative’s closet? He was sick, obviously. He was Mexican-Chinese and he spoke politely and kept referring to me as “sir.” Obviously he was dangerous. I was convinced of that and vowed to keep an eye on him.

  I asked him where we could score some drugs, as a test, and he seemed taken aback. But I knew this was an act on his part. He lied and told me he had no idea where we could get illegal drugs.

  Our first stop in the “Mark-Paul Gosselaar parties with the devil” story, as I was calling it at that moment, was to secure a base from which to operate. We drove down to Sunset Boulevard, cruised the Tower Records parking lot looking for chicks, and finally settled on a low-priced but strangely clean motel down along a quieter part of the strip. We checked in after two and I ordered my lawyer to get me a bucket of ice after, emphasis on “after,” obtaining some mint for my Clevinger’s bourbon, if that was at all possible.

  He objected, and I told him we’d be living together for the next week and that he’d be on twenty-four-hour retainer if he was able to keep me happy.

  “Why?” objected my suspected lunatic paralegal lawyer, adding, “And I’m not actually a lawyer.”

  “Son,” I replied, feeling very Lyndon Baines Johnson, as I was much taller than Arturo. I dropped the English accent in favor of a slight Texas drawl. “Son, we’re confronting the very forces of darkness. Evil itself. And you know what…” Dramatic pause. “Evil never sleeps.”

  He looked down at the floor and his cheap shoes on the threadbare carpet. Creepers.

  “I’d better let you know now,” I continued. “As my lawyer, I may need you to do some highly illegal things in the name of law and order. As a representative of the court, you may be called upon to break some laws in order to save a human life. Are you willing to do that, Arturo? Are you?”

  I waited. It was silent in the hot little out-of-date postmodern motel room. I could see tiny painted white rocks on the flat roofs surrounding the blistering parking lot.

  “Or are you a communist?”

  He mumbled something about not actually being a lawyer, took the twenty I’d stuffed in his shirt pocket, and left in search of mint.

  I waited, made some phone calls, and tried not to think about the Clintons ruining all our plans for ruining the Chinese’s plans. It was hard.

  Missed opportunities.

  When Arturo got back an hour later he seemed dejected. He dropped a bag on his bed, the one nearest the door, and turned on some afternoon TV.

  I made us drinks and sat down on the bed beside him.

  “So what’s this story you’re working on?” he asked, hitting the bourbon like it was a soda pop. He made a face and switched to sipping. Clevinger’s isn’t for the weak.

  “You ever heard of Saved by the Bell? It’s a TV show.”

  He nodded. His little sister watched it.

  “Right, well we’re trying to dig up some dirt on one of the stars. Some really dark stuff.”

  I filled Arturo in on the details. The few I could remember from Josh’s story. The hash may have caused some lag drop on the more salient points.

  * * *

  Our first order of business was to find a Nadia who drove a taxi. So we went downtown and had a three-hour breakfast at The Pantry. While I read all the papers, scanning for any Mark-Paul Gosselaar news and seething about Hillary’s plans for redesigning the West Wing and government-funded health care, Arturo went around to all the downtown cab companies in search of our Nadia. I told him to look for an artsy type. She probably wore a beret and went in heavy on the lipstick. When he came back, he told me he’d located three “Nadias” who drove taxis and may have been artsy types. All of them worked the night shift. Then we drove out to Santa Anita and did some off-track betting. I lost a hundred on a nag named American Spirit, but the beer was cheap and the air was hot and hazy. I felt, sitting in the empty stands, listening to the announcer call some race somewhere else, that I was a character in a Hemingway novel. Or a short story at the least. “Hills Like White Elephants” or some such ex-pat nonsense.

  It was that kind of day.

  We made it back downtown just in time for traffic and parked in back of Philippe’s, a place that boasted being the home of the French Dip sandwich. It was okay, but I’d had better at an O club in ’Nam I was never officially at. Afterwards, we called in for a ride from each Nadia. One by one they picked us up in their cabs and took us three blocks down to the train station.

  None of them was the Nadia we needed. None of them had heard of Mark-Paul Gosselaar. All of them were shocked that he worshipped the devil.

  We were parked in front of a liquor store, and the operation, or “story,” as journalists like to term such things, seemed at that moment dead in the water. I was toying with the idea of splitting with what was left of the five hundred and heading down to San Diego and probably then on into Mexico. Maybe I’d write that bullfighting novel I’d told so many women throughout the years I was working on.

  But the last Nadia knew of the Nadia we were seeking. Or at least, it sounded to that Nadia like we were looking for a Nadia who was quite knowledgeable of all things Hollywood. This Nadia was known to the other Nadia. This other Nadia liked the dark and dirty stuff about Hollywood, according to the Nadia in the cab.

  The other Nadia drove a limo for Capitol Records.

  The other Nadia was also screening a film on Melrose after midnight, that night in fact. We got the location, tipped well and expansively, then got dropped off back at Phillipe’s. I had another triple-dipped French Dip and watched the afternoon news on a mounted TV above the sawdust-covered floor. It occurred to me that I should at least watch one episode of Saved by the Bell, if only just to see what this little devil-worshipper actually looked like. We had five hours to kill, so I asked Arturo about some drugs again. As a test.

  I suspected that the hopelessness he’d experienced at all the cab lots, combined with the heavy sandwich, had weakened him to the point where his true self would finally bleed through and he’d reveal himself to be the lunatic I was convinced he was.

  He said he had a connection for weed, but it was way out near Santa Monica. Too far to be convenient. I overruled that, so we drove down the 10 and picked up the weed in Venice. As I rolled a joint, I told Arturo about my plan to take control of Venice and turn it into a right-wing power base smack-dab in the belly of the beast. The People’s Republik of California.

  He’d already smoked some of the joint, and now he was unsuccessfully fishing around for a Zeppelin tape, typical of the amateur drug offender and yet indicative of a trail I was sure would lead deep into a heart of darkness. I filed that away in the case I was building against my lawyer re: him being a dangerous lunatic. Arturo had turned morose with the cannabis and the onset of early evening. If he was a dangerous lunatic it would come out soon. I was sure of it. The drugs were just to vet him. To draw the poison out, as it were. I sensed this operation, this story, was going deep. Up some very dark alleys where a biker might just chain-whip you to see if you had what it took to walk through the front door of the worst club this side of Colombia. I need
ed to make sure my wingman was, if not entirely stable, ready to roll when, not if, but when it was time to go Roman. If he didn’t freak out on all the drugs I was planning to test him with, then I’d upgrade him to firearms training. It would pay to have an armed man on my six if I was going to do some hard-hitting background investigative journalism on a devil-worshipping celebrity.

  I felt it all coming at me like a storm on the horizon, late in the night. Something you couldn’t avoid even if you drove as fast as you could in any direction.

  So the drugs were a test. That’s all.

  We ate well at the pricey Pacific Dining Car, one of LA’s only five star twenty-four-hour restaurants, and skipped out on the bill. Arturo wasn’t in on the “skipping out” plan. He was merely following orders to bring the car around, which didn’t even really make him a “wheelman” in the strictest version of the handbook the CIA never published each year on how to rob foreign banks.

  I counted to a hundred and eighty and launched myself at the front door like a man who would be imminently sick, scooping up a fistful of mints at the host station while filling two pockets with all the matchbooks they could contain.

  “Go!” I screamed at my lawyer once I was inside the Cutlass. “Now! Go fast, you simpleton!”

  “Why, what’s wrong?” he screamed. His eyes rolled like an escaped fugitive hearing the working dogs in the distance.

  “I thought I saw a contract killer in there,” I lied. “A real sociopath I knew from my days with the Company. If it is that guy in there, people are gonna die in large doses. He’s an indiscriminate mad dog killer.”

  Arturo mashed the accelerator to the floor and we headed back toward downtown LA. I rolled a joint beneath the passing streetlights that whipped by in sudden washes of orange light.

  “Was he your friend?” asked my lawyer. He had an agile legal mind, even though he was a crazed lunatic. He was attempting to establish relationship and motive like the professional I’d been telling everyone he was.