Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy

by David Gatewood (ed)

  “I slept with his wife,” I mumbled to get Arturo to drive faster. “He’s had it out for me for a very long time.”

  I licked the joint and cast a fugitive eye at Arturo. A warning. “He’d kill you just for fun if he found you with me.” Then I added, “And it wouldn’t be pretty.”

  It was at that point that Arturo lost control of the vehicle, swiped some large yellow safety barrels near the onramp to the 405, crossed to the other side of the road underneath the bridge, drove up the embankment, and started to head straight for the bottom of the bridge above us. I sensed him letting off the gas and screamed, “No! You idiot! Give it all you’ve got and turn!”

  In hindsight, I’ll admit I was wrong about that piece of advice.

  There was a small throbbing vein in Arturo my lawyer’s forehead. I notice details in moments of extreme crisis. It’s a trait. A gift, even.

  He mashed the accelerator and jerked the wheel to the left. Then he slammed on the brake, which I’d never said anything about him doing. Then the almost new, butterscotch Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra rolled once, twice, and landed back on the street right-side up, now pointed in the opposite direction heading back into Santa Monica.

  As the quiet settled over the aftermath of our two-revolution roll down the embankment, I realized I’d somehow lost the joint in all the chaos.

  A moment later I spotted it lying in the middle of the street, and for at least one full minute after that, I tried to conceive how it could have gone from between my fingers to lying in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard at eleven-thirty at night. Then I realized it wasn’t important. I got out and retrieved the drug and brought it back to the battered Butterscotch Bomber. Arturo remained staring at the road ahead. The road leading back to the contract killer in Santa Monica. He had the same look as a chopper pilot I’d once known who’d had a horrible crash and nightmare survival situation deep inside Sandinista country. The pilot had been shot down above the Nicaraguan jungles and auto-rotated into some heavy canopy only to be stuck for two weeks straight in trees filled with hanging vipers. I lit the joint and stuck it between his lips.

  He involuntarily pulled.

  Now I knew. My lawyer, Arturo Chung, was a dangerous lunatic. A craven drug fiend. The action was automatic and instinctual.

  I took it and inhaled.

  “All right,” I exhaled. “Let’s go meet this Nadia.”

  * * *

  Melrose. Midnight. The streets are wet and blue and there’s an orange fog made such by the lights along the street. We’re outside a bar called the Snake Pit. There’s no one along the street. The front doors are wide open and we walk inside.

  It’s dark. Dark tables. Tiny red hurricane lamps. A large bartender in the shadows who has either played a Hell’s Angel on television or been one at Altamont back in ’68. It’s a toss-up.

  Nadia is wearing a red beret and standing over a kid who’s setting up a projector pointed at a large empty canvas. Like something a crazy Spaniard or Jackson Pollack would lay on the ground and splash paint all over and charge you a million bucks for so they could spend it on booze and hookers.

  “Nadia?”

  She turns. Her lips are full red. Her skin pale. The features, Eastern European. She raises a long, delicately curved eyebrow.

  I lay some Russkie on her and she just stares back at me.

  Then I say, “Josh said you could tell us about Mark-Paul Gosselaar.”

  “You are like… bull,” she says softly.

  “I am?”

  “Yes. You are. One that is wrecking china shop.”

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a china shop in years. Were china shops going out of business? When was the last time I’d actually had a meal on bone china? There was a time, lost days long gone now, when you’d eat on china as a family gathered around a table. Special occasions, Sunday dinners. Grateful for food and freedom and America. Not anymore. It was just another thing that was gone now.

  Just like the America I’d once known.

  “What did Josh tell you?” asked Nadia.

  “Some actor sold his soul to the dark prince for fame, fortune, and a better parking place. The usual. The kind of thing that either happens all the time, or never. Or maybe just a little,” I added.

  I was still kinda stoned.

  “It only happens once. Once at a time. And then, even… maybe not at all.” Her accent became thicker. The orange fog gathered beyond the windows as the long shadows deepened in the cracks and alleyways. It was strangely quiet out. Then, maybe because I was already beginning to feel the first waves of the anxiety and paranoia that would consume me in the days to come, I reminded myself it was a Sunday night, as some kind of explanation for the absence of life on the street. Like decent people were somehow home and in bed and not out prowling the night. It was just after midnight. The cold beer the bartender had placed in front of me at the tiny table we were seated around tasted good.

  “There are rumors,” began Nadia. “Very small ones… you know… how is the word… tiny.”

  “I get it.”

  “Small. No one talks about them. But I know people, and we are waiting for something to happen soon. Something very evil. So we watch… and we wait.”

  “What’re you waiting for?” whispered Arturo, who was both poorly dressed and still suffering from the effects of our rollover car wreck.

  The projectionist approached Nadia and whispered something in her ear. She murmured, “Da” while staring directly at me. Then the guy left to walk back to his equipment. There were only a few couples, seated within the dark of their deep banquettes. Their faces were shadowed, their voices murmuring. Then the film began to reel toward the empty spool, sending empty white frames across a canvas Picasso would never paint on. The clickety-clack seemed at once abrupt and constant, as though it had always been there. Even though it hadn’t been.

  “We are waiting for the Black Hand,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide. She even looked around like she was worried someone would overhear us.

  On screen, an old cartoon of Mickey Mouse—a very, very early version—began to run. But even from the get-go I could tell something wasn’t right with it. I’d always been a Popeye man, but I knew enough to see that this Mickey was skewed. Off.

  Mickey was merely walking past a series of repeating buildings, but it all seemed odd. Not so cheery. Sublimely torturous and with an innate sense of ennui. As though Disney’s usually optimistic and plucky little mouse was grim, determined, or just deep in some unexpressed thought.

  “A friend once told me,” Nadia continued above the film’s bland soundtrack, “that there is always one actor out of every generation who becomes devil’s friend of Hollywood. They get fame, but only for a time. It may even seem like they are some sort of has-been. But if you really watch them closely, you will find they are always there. Always on the fringes. Always at the right parties. They have all the benefits without ever really having to work again. Some say they become the real power in Tinseltown. Some say no deal gets made unless they say so. Even though you might think of them as, say, how do they say… a used-to-be?”

  “But this kid’s the biggest star in TV right now,” I objected. “Aren’t little girls in malls all across this nation screaming to rip him to shreds or run off to a pony farm with him?”

  Nadia watched the film. Studying it for a second.

  “Now, yes,” she said distractedly. “But soon it will all begin to fade… If the rumors are to be believed, it will all seem to end very soon. And yet, he will not change. He will barely age, and he will still be here for many years to come. Which, if you know how Hollywood really works my friend Bull, is something. Do you want some coke? The movie is about to reveal if it is fake… or if it is real. The coke helps.”

  “Sure.” I was always up for cocaine.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Arturo?”

  Lunatic test.

  He declined in a clever effort to outwit me. Which of course meant I had to
go ahead and snort four lines of cocaine off Nadia’s tiny little mirror.

  “The coke is good?” asked Nadia.

  “Da,” I replied. “The coke is good.”

  “The same guy sells to personal assistants of Al Pacino and De Niro, along with all other personal assistants of really big stars. Or so he tells me. I don’t care. You want to watch movie. Is about Devil.”

  Suddenly the room was plunged into darkness. The film had abruptly ended.

  “We have to wait now.” I could hear Nadia’s thickly accented voice in the darkness. “There is a just… nothing… now in these frames for next few minutes of movie,” she explained. “At six-minute mark we may begin to see what hell looks like. That is, if the film is real thing.”

  I could still hear the film threading its way through the projector in the darkness of the bar. In fact, the light in the projector was still pointing at the screen. But the canvas was completely dark.

  My ears were buzzing from the coke, and I could sense Arturo’s tension next to me.

  “I want to know why people think Mark-Paul Gosselaar sold his soul to the devil. For instance, are there any pictures of the actual event?” I asked Nadia.

  “Do you know the legend of Suicide Mouse, Mr. Bull?”

  I’d wondered if there would be pictures. But what else could there be? What exactly would be the proof that someone had sold their soul to the devil?

  “No,” I replied. “No, I don’t know the legend of Suicide Mouse.”

  “Suicide Mouse,” she said, indicating the darkness on the screen, “is urban legend. Some say it never was. Some say Walt Disney made it. Some say Walt Disney made deal with Devil too. It is normal cartoon until the darkness we are now watching. For many years, people thought it was just some early Disney test footage. Nothing special. When the film turned to black they thought there was nothing more to be seen. But a historian noticed the film was actually much longer. So he decided to watch the entire reel before archiving it. Do you know what he found, Mr. Bull?”

  “The missing frames from the Zapruder film showing the three Chinese gunmen on the grassy knoll?”

  “No. Not at all. That would not be interesting. Who would want to see that?”

  I would.

  “No,” continued Nadia. “After the darkness… the cartoon began again. Except… it was not same cartoon. Colors and technology that weren’t available at the time began to show up within the frames. And the little mouse seemed… tormented. Almost lunatic, and even insane. The images eventually became so disturbing that the historian asked his assistant to finish watching and record what he saw, while the historian stepped outside to take a break from the troubling things he was witnessing.”

  She paused.

  “A few minutes later, a guard down the hall heard screaming coming from within the projection room. When the guard arrived at the door, the assistant ran from the room muttering incoherently. He wrestled with the guard, grabbed the gun from the guard’s belt, and killed himself.”

  The filmstrip was still dark. It had been at least three minutes now.

  “Before the man killed himself, he told the guard that the cartoon contained a vision of hell.”

  Arturo Chung cleared his throat.

  “In just a few minutes, Mr. Bull, we will find out if this cartoon is the real… how do you say… the real McCoy. There have been many fakes.”

  I waited. I polished off the draft beer.

  Then, because I cannot let things lie, “So let me get this straight. If it’s real, this cartoon, then you’ll know because you’ll all kill yourselves. Right?”

  Nadia smiled. “Probably not.”

  “Then how will you know if it’s real?”

  “I just will, Mr. Bull. I just will.”

  “So there are no pictures of this deal with the devil and the kid from Late for School?”

  “No,” replied Nadia calmly. “There are no pictures.”

  “And the only evidence is circumstantial hearsay, as in: he’s unexplainably successful, good-looking, and rich… therefore, he has to have sold his soul to the devil? Hard work, talent, and genetics don’t really matter.”

  “Yes. The evidence is mostly circumstantial. But there may be some ‘hard’ evidence. Other evidence that he made deal with Devil. Hard-to-find evidence.”

  Suddenly, the cartoon began again. Now there was a weird Mickey. Not so jolly. Stoop-shouldered. And yes, even deranged. Demented. Tormented was the word Nadia had used.

  “What evidence, and where can I find it?” I asked.

  “Chad Dakota.”

  “What’s a Chad Dakota?”

  “Chad Dakota not a what,” replied Nadia with a dry sneer. “Chad Dakota is who. Before Mark-Paul was king of Saturday morning TV and the big man on campus at Bayside High, he was in another show. Good Morning, Miss Bliss. On that show, Mark-Paul is very bad student. Always getting into trouble. Not very popular. Not much ladies' man. But show gets canceled. Then comes back the next year as Saved by the Bell. Is “big hit.” Show now set in California. Before, it was in Midwest somewhere. Show was about teacher. Now is all about Mark-Paul. Now Mark-Paul all the things we know him as now. Mark-Paul Goesselar is now very famous. But before, when it was other show, not so much.”

  There was a low gurgling sound coming from the projector. An almost inhuman muttering. I felt the cold feet of a rat with the flu walking up the back of my neck.

  “So what’s a Chad Dakota?” I was trying to ignore the creepy cartoon.

  “More coke?” offered Nadia.

  “I don’t wanna watch anymore,” chattered Arturo beyond my vision. “Can I wait in the car?”

  An obvious ploy to avoid the free cocaine.

  We did another bump.

  I wiped my nose, inhaled the cold chill of the night, and felt my eyes peg a redlining tachometer somewhere in the back of my brain.

  But I was clear.

  Crystal clear.

  Or so I thought.

  On the cartoon’s soundtrack, someone was screaming as a drunken pianist banged out an unsettling melody over and over, again and again.

  “What’s a Dakota Chad?”

  I was leaning in now. I wanted to know, because somehow I sensed this was the dark tributary I would go upriver on. Past the neon lights and into the jungle, deep and dark.

  I was an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill. For me, there was no other calling.

  Nadia was touching up her lipstick and watching the film. Her pupils caught the hellish colors on the screen and shone in the dark. I had to admit, what I could see of the film out of the corner of my eye was disturbing, and the soundtrack wasn’t helping matters. I knew I had maybe thirty seconds left before I freaked out. Big time.

  “What’s a—”

  “Chad Dakota was child actor. He’s disappeared now. Gone. Same age as Zack… I mean Mark-Paul Gosselaar. Handsome. Cute. The boy every young girl would want to fall in love with. They say, late at night when no one is listening, that he would’ve taken over the show.”

  “Saved by the Bell?”

  “No. Our Miss Bliss. There never would have been Saved by the Bell. Chad was brought in for Episode 13. An episode no one ever saw. A make-or-break episode for the show. After he disappeared, they filmed a different Episode 13 that everyone saw.”

  “Missing?”

  “Disappeared. A dead man who was once my lover told me Mark and his agent sacrificed little boy to Devil in exchange for stardom.”

  “And what happened to this missing episode?”

  “No one knows. It is as gone as Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa and the Jamestown settlement. I know people who say they know people who worked on it. But you know how that is.”

  “I do.”

  I didn’t want to do this anymore. I wanted to ride in a car with a sunroof through the neon night and blast Zeppelin so loud people call the cops. I wanted a chopper and a machine gun and a mission. I wanted life. The talk of death was chill
ing. And rather boring. Yet, there was a shudder about it all that I couldn’t ignore. A shiver that would not leave.

  I stood up from the tiny table. My lawyer was already at the door that would take us away from the Snake Pit forever.

  Then I had a tingle. A tingle deep inside the jungle of me. And it was the tingle that scared me the most. It should’ve warned me that I was racing toward a place I couldn’t come back from. Maybe it wasn’t cartoon Mickey’s hell. Maybe it was worse. Maybe it was real. And before that… was the place of going Roman. And once I’d gone there… all bets would be off. The consequences could not be measured. Not then. Not yet. Everything was possible and nothing would be left off the table in the wager.

  I could even take down the Clintons.

  But I progress well ahead of the story.

  “What’s the evidence, Nadia?”

  The screaming coming from the filmstrip was hideous. The mouse’s eyes had melted in his skull. I turned toward the door and could barely hear Nadia’s reply as I walked away toward the exit, leaving it all behind.

  “I told you, Mr. Bull… find Chad Dakota. Then you’ll know,” she shouted at me above the screaming.

  Outside, I lit a cigarette and watched the door. Arturo had gone into the alley to bring the Cutlass Sierra around. I was alone on an empty street, far from home. It felt like Moscow ’83, sometime in the winter.

  Back in the car, we turned up the heat and pointed toward Sunset Boulevard and our motel. When we passed an all-night body shop, I suddenly reached over and pushed hard on the steering wheel in Arturo’s hands and we did a wide U-turn across the empty night-laden street. He screamed like a girl.

  The boy was in the early stages of shell shock. He’d need confrontation therapy. I was sure of it. I upgraded firearms training to “imminent.”

  “Pull in there, please,” I said, indicating the body shop. Two pale-lit bays were hidden in a sea of shadowy wrecks.

  I gave the guys working in the shop a twenty for fifteen minutes with their power saw. Ten minutes later, I’d made all the necessary cuts and we lifted the top off the Cutlass Sierra “convertible.”

  We drove into the night, and I rolled a joint so big it could’ve been dropped on Mao Tse-tung by a B-52 Stratofortress. We smoked it, and I ordered Arturo into the Hollywood hills, where we drove quiet, tiny lanes past sleeping block glass mansions in the fog, listening to Zeppelin on the eleven setting. I thought of the Clintons, Mays, the DNC, and a little boy with big dreams of being a star.