Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy

by David Gatewood (ed)

  Let me just say this…

  I had some really weird dreams while falling asleep to that show. At times, it was like I went to the fictional high school that never was and knew everyone who never really existed. After a while it was broiling my brain. How did Brando sum it up in Apocalypse Now when he was upriver too long and crazy by half?

  “The horror…”

  Yeah, that’s about right.

  It was messing with my head. As was Wiggles, whose optimistic hope, lifelong dream, and career goal, was that she one day might meet this “Slater” and have his baby. Her optimism made Don Quixote look like a sane and rational insurance adjuster with a mean streak for pessimism.

  We fled south from LA, chased by an unexplainable anxiety that I told everyone must be the forces of darkness aligning against us. My heart was racing dangerously fast and I’d ceased to sweat at some point. It could have been the medications. But it was probably the fear of the unknown we were heading rapidly into. We would review Wiggles’s videotape collection and make our plan to finally confront the kid. I’d decided—and Arturo had silently agreed through the drug and alcohol stupor I was keeping him in as a control and training technique—that somewhere in those tapes we’d find our clue.

  The Butterscotch Bomber plowed through the heat and traffic of LA and took us down onto the Orange County Coast. Once ensconced at the rent-by-the-month domicile of Speaker City’s Employee of the Year, Randy, we availed ourselves of his large collection of chilled rosés and the marijuana he kept in bulk thanks to a connected coworker.

  And we sat down to begin our survey of the American Train Wreck that was Saved by the Bell. By Thursday night, just before I would tip off the cops the next morning that my lawyer might be, in actuality but not really, the Back Door Burglar, which he wasn’t in case this should be needed as a legal document in trial court one day. We were almost finished. We drank and smoked all day, every day. We occasionally took forays down to the nearby beach to allow the spray and wind to drive away the horror of Bayside High that had been burned into our brains via the ocular nerves. By Thursday there was only one season left.

  I had to finish it alone.

  On Sunday night I knew I needed to confront “Zack.” I was done calling Adonis “Mark-Paul Gosselaar.” He was my White Whale now. He was Zack.

  Randy the stereo salesman had been gone all weekend in Vegas at a bachelor party. I cleaned his apartment and tried to get the ash and bong-water stains out of the carpet, but let’s be honest, it was nigh impossible. I drove north with the Sunday evening traffic through the soft warm pink of early twilight. I put on the radio and let the wind and Karen Carpenter bathe my mind in six-hundred-thread-count nothingness. I was getting to the Zero-Dark-Thirty of Going Roman. I heard myself tell me to let it all go. But then there would be no justice for little Chad Dakota. The powerful and greedy would always win if I did.

  I heard myself say all those things inside a head that was as big as a cavern, or a theater, or the silence that precedes a hanging. I heard myself tell me that I couldn’t let it go. That I wasn’t made to do that. That I’d lost too much already. That the next loss might be the last. Maybe I couldn’t bring down China like we’d all planned to with the Gip and Bush back in days that seemed like another life lived by a hero who only sorta used to look like me. Maybe I couldn’t bring down the Clintons like no one had ever planned to, because no one had ever planned for those two hillbilly sociopaths to crawl out from under wherever it was they’d slithered out from under. Maybe I couldn’t even write an article for a third-rate paper no one but down-and-out actors ever read for anything but ads. I’d placed “funds request” calls several times to Mays. But he was no longer returning them.

  Maybe I couldn’t do any of those things.

  But I could at least confront this little TV star punk and ask him to give me the truth, no matter what came after that. I knew no one would ever listen to me. I knew he was so powerful he could—or so I’d begun to imagine extensively in the quiet of the afternoons between episodes—tell me where they’d walled up the corpse of little Chad Dakota. And when my White Whale did tell me, knowing he’d gotten away with everything, I knew he’d smile that Zack Morris, King of Bayside High, smile. Maybe.

  Or maybe he’d just order a beatdown by his security entourage.

  But at least I could try.

  I could do that for little Chad Dakota, who’d had big star dreams out in the dying town of Yucca Flats. Maybe it was dying because he was dead. Maybe it would disappear because he had disappeared.

  By Sunday night I was all out of tricks. And tricks are for kids. The money was gone. My lawyer was gone too, and no one cared if I wrote, or didn’t write, the story no one would ever read. I didn’t even have the money to pay the cover to get into the club where Wiggles danced. She came out into the parking lot behind the club in a kimono and took the cardboard box full of her prized collection from me. She had hate and mistrust in her cat’s eyes. It felt like an East German prisoner swap. I told her I was sorry for taking her stuff. I told her I really loved the show. Maybe even as much as she did.

  She was so angry. So hurt. Probably more than just at me for taking her most prized possession in pursuit of an unsolved murder. Maybe she knew the Slater of her dreams would never walk into that club and carry her out the front door for all to see. Maybe she knew, right there at that very moment as a massive 747 coming in from Hong Kong roared over the top of our heads while the bouncers watched us like they’d seen scenes like this play out a thousand sad times, maybe she knew this was the shape of all her days to come.

  There were a lot of maybes and very few answers.

  “What?” she screeched over the jet engines’ roar. Her voice naturally tended to screech.

  “I said,” I shouted, “I love the show too!”

  And her face changed. Like… like she’d just received some unexpected gift she’d never imagined possible. Like life wasn’t so bad. Like somewhere in the world there was someone who got her because they liked something she liked. Like maybe, just maybe, there could be something between us.

  Which had been my plan all along. I had nowhere else to go. No one to turn to. I was using a classic reverse counterespionage technique to infiltrate my White Whale’s inner circle, and even get a warm bed for the night. I needed one last night and her entertainment connections to get close to my prey. Close enough to my White Whale to confront him with the buried, or walled-up, I wasn’t sure which, truth. I was obsessing over the fact that Zack and his agent had probably walled up little Chad Dakota in some sort of Poe-esque demonic ritual. I don’t know why, it just felt right to me.

  Wiggles, whose real name was Heather, paid my cover and bought me a beer. I waited through her shift near the back of the bar that night, and after it ended early because it was slow, we drove back to her place. We stopped first and got Chinese food. Just a few blocks from her house, she put her tiny cold hand into mine.

  For at least tonight, I would be her Slater. “Night Moves” by Bob Seger was playing as the cold and the wind buffeted the Butterscotch Bomber in the night. I squeezed her tiny cold hand.

  We ate Chinese and I told her my plan. I needed to get onto the set of Saved by the Bell. She made a call to a skeezy background casting director she knew and got me a slot for the shoot tomorrow morning. It was on the NBC lot. I’d need to be there at 7:30 a.m. It was a high school dance of some sort. I’d be playing a teacher.

  We watched the last episode she’d taped. Then we went to her bed and made love. Maybe she thought she was making love to someone who’d be near her star, her idea of Prince Charming, in the morning. Her dream. Maybe I was just doing it so I didn’t have to spend the night in back of the Butterscotch Bomber, freezing in the darkness, mugged and beaten by callous youths. Maybe.

  But it was nice, and for a little while I forgot about the Clintons.

  In the morning I arrived at the front gate, showed some ID, and was told to report to wardrobe
without fanfare. I’d hidden the .44 Magnum inside one of my changes of clothing. If the little devil-worshipping Moriarty didn’t take the easy way and confess to sacrificing his rival for fame and fortune in front of the entire crew, then I’d shove my gun in his face and convince him the other way. I wasn’t sure what would come after that. My plans never went much past going Roman. And going Roman wasn’t far away. I knew it. I felt it like a thing that could be felt. I was tired and my metaphors were starting to fade as an icy river of rage began to surge through my veins and we prepared to film a Saturday morning children’s TV show.

  I reported to wardrobe and was awarded with polyester pants and a dress shirt I wouldn’t dress Mondale’s bloated corpse in. I assumed I was playing the part of Bayside High’s science teacher. Mr. Lurcher. I didn’t really have a name. I mean, I wasn’t a name part. Whatever they call that. I was a galley slave part. So I awarded myself a name.

  We were waiting in a place some little cargo-short-wearing punk called “Holding” until it was time to film, or shoot, or whatever it was they did to suck the souls out of America’s preteens.

  I was seething with hatred. I could feel Lieutenant Colonel North and Pat at my side. Prompting me. Encouraging me to embrace what was surely coming. If I didn’t, ghost Pat Buchanan assured me I’d never make it through this one.

  The “stars” were all kept away from us, the great unwashed of the background talent. They only made brief appearances, and when they did deign to show up on the set, it was as though all my fellow galley slaves collectively held their breath. As though their obedience would be noted and they would be elevated to some sort of higher plane. Awarded a spot in the limo. Selected for passing pleasure. Smiled upon. Or so they hoped.

  We did a few scenes. Or, mainly we just crossed and re-crossed the set silently as the “stars” attempted to speak like actual people. I was tempted to confront Zack the White Whale right then and there and demand he tell us where the body of little Chad Dakota was. But the scenes were short, and once they were over, the kid would disappear into his trailer. At one point, the director came over to me and told me not to look directly at the “stars.” Apparently I was glaring at my prey with the zeal of a big-game hunter out on the African savannah, and it was making everyone nervous. Or, that’s how I interpreted the word “psychotic” as used by the director, a man not much more than a kid I could have broken in half and not broken a sweat in the process.

  At lunch, they told us to “walk away.” Which meant they weren’t feeding us. I hadn’t had much to eat for the last week, what with all the pot and cheap rosé down at Salesman of the Year Randy’s apartment by the beach. The Chinese food with Heather had been my last and only meal since the day I’d fingered Arturo for a serial criminal so our investigation could go on. I was hungry. I was cranky. And I knew things were heading toward a close.

  Or maybe I knew I couldn’t take much more.

  The cast and crew who were not galley slaves, or everybody else other than the “background” as they kept calling us, were partaking of all the sumptuousness of a Roman emperor on holiday. After gorging themselves, I literally saw food being thrown away in bulk as I watched from behind some star trailers, which was as close as the background was allowed to come to food and people that mattered.

  This is what little Chad Dakota could have had. All this. That’s what I kept thinking about. Turning a life imagined over and over in my head as I starved. Instead, he’d been robbed by Hollywood’s Alexander the Great. Zack Morris. Mark-Paul Gosselaar. My White Whale.

  Every day for the rest of his life, my White Whale would eat and be treated like the star he was. He would know luxury and excess beyond the dreams of avarice. And for what? What price did he pay to arrive on the other side of the fabled velvet rope, if there was such a thing? Had he earned it? Had he won wars, fought battles, or put a man on the moon? No. In my mind he had not done any of those things.

  Like some two-bit voodoo shaman from every tribe in man’s darkest past, he’d done his climbing over the corpses of his enemies.

  My stomach was churning with the acid of starvation. My mind was feverish. I was hungry, and not just for food, booze, and women. I was starving for justice.

  The Chinese…

  The Clintons…

  Zack…

  I was starving.

  I found a bathroom and pulled out the packet that contained the last of the biker speed from Yucca Flats. As I chopped it up on the porcelain sink, I reminded myself that there was a fine line between Travis Bickle the hero, and Travis Bickle the psychopath.

  A fine line. So fine you could have caught a fish with it. A whale even.

  Some song was running through my head.

  “Gimme Shelter.”

  And I felt like I was in the middle of a “crossfire hurricane.”

  I nailed the last of it all in one go, and I was crystal clear about what needed to be done next.

  I left the residue on the sink, went back, and fingered up some for my teeth. I folded the switch I’d been using to chop it up. A little water on what remained of the hair, and then I donned the aviator shades the fictitious “Mr. Lurcher” never would’ve worn. Yeah, I was still wearing the goofy science teacher costume, but it was the nickel-plated .44 in my hand that made the difference. That set it all off. I pulled out a matchstick and bit down as I headed for Zack the Great’s star trailer. As I chased my White Whale to the ends of the earth.

  I screamed at him, or rather at the flimsy door to his star trailer, about justice. About America. About Thomas Alva Edison and Dutch Reagan. I tallied up all the dead of the twentieth century and dared him to show his face and prove me wrong.

  I was aware, hyperaware in fact because of the speed, that the crew was running from the “scene of the crime,” as the police would later call it. But I didn’t care.

  I dared the lizard to come out and face my nickel-plated Excalibur.

  Security personnel were running in every direction.

  I knew I had seconds left to convince the little Satanist to repent. To confess. To put the balm of Gilead on his soul. I thundered loud invectives against the still-closed door. In my mind’s eye I could see him in there with some groupie, or starlet, or wannabe, looking at him in terror. I knew he’d be writhing on the cheap carpet, aware that he’d finally been run to ground. That the jig was up. That his chickens were coming home to roost. I knew that the words I was using about demons and sacrifice and the dark prince could never, ever go away. I knew the Studio Police were hearing them. His coworkers were hearing them. And yes, even his fans were hearing them, and they would go away from him because he was all these things I was saying. He would go away, never ever to return.

  “Tell me what you did with the body!” I screamed, and a tiny hot tear ran down my cheek as I thought of the cherubic face of little mulleted Chad Dakota in his acid-wash jean jacket.

  “I know who you are!” I screamed again.

  And then I was tackled. By a lot of people.

  I didn’t fight back. The gun wasn’t even loaded. I allowed myself to be dragged down by the mob. My work was done. The truth had been proclaimed in the open square.

  Later, in Studio Jail, they tried to tell me that my White Whale hadn’t even been in his trailer. That he’d gone to a meeting with some agents from ICM at a restaurant that didn’t let people like me pass by on the sidewalk outside. They tried to lie. They tried to forget. But how can you?

  I used Mays’s name, and also the casting director Wiggles had to promise to attend a pool party with, when they started talking about pressing charges and calling the “real police.” In the end they called Mays, and without a word he took possession of me, parting ways at the front gate. It was decent of him to at least do that. By four o’clock everything was just a dream. Even the speed was fading. I needed a drink.

  I walked into Burbank and found a bar. It was a real bar. Not the hip, trendy, “in” spot to sip a craft mojito. This was the no-window,
faux-rock-faced-front-at-the-end-of-a-strip-mall bar one passes and never enters. It was called the Tiki Lounge.

  Inside it was cool and quiet. Red leather and darkness. Bongo drums murmured, and I felt like I’d found an oasis I might never leave. I sat up to the bar and ordered a Clevinger’s neat. Wordlessly the bartender made my drink. Exactly how I like my bartenders to make my drink.

  The drums and the quiet and the mellow burn of the bourbon made everything stop. For once… it was just quiet.

  I sipped and thought about what to do next with my life. And I knew I couldn’t find that out until I’d made sense of everything.

  Did the devil really hide in plain sight?

  Did he make deals with young, beautiful people and promise to give them fame, fortune, and power?

  Did he make cheap allegory to entertain and taunt masses too dumb and brainwashed to pick up on the clues?

  And did they get away with it?

  Did they get away with murder?

  I sipped.

  The bongos tapped out their hypnotic beat.

  I sipped.

  Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe that wasn’t the truth. Maybe that was just an answer I’d need to accept in order to keep moving on. I’d gotten too close. I’d let my White Whale consume me.

  I patted my leg to make sure it was still there.

  The door opened and someone came in.

  He sat a little ways down the bar. I turned and nodded. Finally I’d seen my first real star in all my time in Hollywood, not some phony kid. Bob Denver. TV’s Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island. A star from when TV used to be something you could watch and not want to gouge your eyes out afterward. I raised my tumbler and he smiled back at me self-deprecatingly. Like some actor who used to be someone would understand how lost I felt at this very moment. The bartender placed a martini in front of him and turned on the TV above the bar. No sound.