Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  He had a few problems with impulse control. With eating, of course, maintaining his weight an issue all his life, but also with everything else, a general impetuosity, unable to contain himself, his mind and body always revving, never able to sit still. An image consultant had once told him that to perfect the art of cool, he had to stop gesturing and moving around so much, not be so twitchy. Yet it was precisely this adrenalized intensity that was his sine qua non. He was a rainmaker, a go-getter. He needed that jack, that juice. While he was utterly terrified of failure, he was, paradoxically, at his best on the brink, on the precipice. It was the only way he knew how to live.

  Walking out of the trattoria, he felt good, fairly relaxed, indeed almost as if he were on a vacation. On the sidewalk, he tucked his headset over his ear and phoned the office.

  “You’re not really going to fire me, are you?” Roland asked.

  “I called for a temp. She should be there any minute. Give her the keys and the alarm code and all your passwords.”

  “Woody, let’s not do this.”

  “And the key card for the garage.”

  “Let’s make up.”

  “I wouldn’t put me down as a reference, if I were you.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  Woody, restraining a laugh—he was the master of the universe, the king of cunning—waited a full five seconds before speaking. “Are you?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. You were right, I was wrong.”

  Woody waited another five seconds, then said, “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  He told Roland to hire a private investigator in Manhattan to find out everything possible about Kyle Thorneberry of White Plains, New York.

  “You know it’s after five in New York.”

  “Do PIs only work nine-to-five?”

  “It might be hard to find one, that’s all I’m saying, especially on—”

  “Yeah, yeah, Labor Day weekend.” He could hear computer keys clicking on the other end—Roland most likely checking his e-mail. “When you find one—a good one, Roland, not some drunk hack—call me.”

  “Who is this guy Thorneberry?”

  “He was my best friend. He killed himself.”

  The typing stopped. “Oh, Woody, I’m sorry. Why didn’t you just say so?”

  Sympathy. What an odd sensation it was, to be on the receiving end of it. Woody couldn’t remember the last time anyone had felt sorry for him—genuinely sorry, without an accompanying tinge of shame. After the indictment, he had been shunned by everyone he knew—his friends, his colleagues—a pariah. Only his mother would talk to him. His father, at least he still deigned to see him. But Lyndon, so cold and self-righteous, had abandoned him completely. His own brother, his only sibling.

  Woody moved from Boston to L.A., city of Annulment and Angulation. Everyone had some sort of a scheme there, an angle, a gimmick or hustle, a can’t-miss racket to hit the big time. One’s past did not matter. You could erase history, reinvent it. Second acts were not only possible in L.A., but celebrated. The deeper you hit bottom, in fact, the better. Self-destruction, addiction, sorrow, pain, misery, practically any malfeasance short of pederasty was okay, it could be forgiven, if you were willing to work hard and persevere and single-mindedly apply yourself to The Dream. Everyone loved a good comeback story. With some luck and plenty of guile, you could get those vectors of fortune to realign themselves and intersect in a wondrous new confabulation of status and achievement.

  Not that it had been easy for Woody, not that he hadn’t wanted, many a time, to drive somewhere, a parking lot beside the ocean, say, at the end of the continent, and shoot himself in the head, or take the sweeping elevated ramp that connected the Santa Monica Freeway to 405 North and turn the wheel just a hair to punch through the guardrail, the lights of the city before him, and fly into the relief of nothingness. He’d had plenty of those moments, all right, feelings of hopelessness and utter despair, while he lived in an SRO in Korea Town with a filthy, disgusting bathroom down the hall and worked in a liquor store; while he peddled stereos at the Crenshaw Wal-Mart and used cars in Gardena; while he sold pirated DVDs and VCDs from Hong Kong in Santee Alley. He didn’t know how he would ever be able to repair his life, be anything but destitute, banished to this pathetic, anonymous life working retail. He was a Harvard graduate, for God’s sake!—although he never put that down anymore on his many job application forms, since it would only guarantee that he would not get the job, the manager thinking Woody was lying, embellishing, there was something seriously smelly here, really Woody would have had a better chance saying he was a graduate of Lompoc Correctional.

  It was ludicrous, this consignment into ruin. Here he was—after making two hundred large a year and owning a house in Lexington and being engaged to a gorgeous PR flack who would have made an ideal trophy wife—now living among bums, wetbacks, winos, junkies and whores, Jesus freaks, wiggers, pimps, boojies, and bhindus—the scum, the dregs, the bottom of the barrel. And then there were the nitwits who came to Hollywood believing they could be stars, and the dipshits with their fast-buck infomercial fantasies, and the numbnuts with their conspiracy theories, and the chuckleheads with their sunny, feel-good, self-help prescriptions for alternative health and twelve-step programs. Pathetic losers, all of them, and Woody was, unbelievably, one of them, a retail clerk, destined to rot in this dismal menial existence, so very small-time. He could not abide such mediocrity.

  He bought a gun, a Saturday night special called a Bryco Model 38, for seventy-five dollars off a tong gangbanger. He took it out every night and stared at it. It was comforting to see it there, to know that if things became truly unbearable, he had an out. He learned how to do it properly. Sticking the barrel in his mouth and angling it too high might mean blasting away his sinus cavities and eyes and frontal lobe but leaving him alive—blind, without a face, lobotomized. Temple shots had the same potential for error. Pointing the gun too low in his mouth might miss the brain stem and hit his spinal cord, rendering him a quadriplegic. The best bet was just behind or directly in one ear, aimed at the other. The bullet would obliterate all the vital parts of his brain and he wouldn’t hear or feel a thing.

  He wondered what Kyle had done. What kind of gun, ammo, had he used? Hollow points? Hollow points would have been prudent.

  Woody’s therapist, Dan, was a smart guy, but every now and then he said some incredibly moronic things. One time, when Woody had been anxious about a particular project, Dan, trying to reassure him, had asked, “Well, what’s the worst that could happen if this doesn’t work out?” What was the worst that could happen? He could lose everything—again. Everyone could desert him—again. He could be out on the streets—again. It’d happened once before, there was nothing to say it couldn’t all happen again. He couldn’t afford to start over a second time. Maybe once he could manage it, maybe while he was still in his early thirties, he could recover as he had, talking his way from hawking bootleg DVDs to importing them, from distributing Hong Kong theatrical releases to brokering remake options. Maybe once, but not twice. Not at this point in his life, not at this stage. If the worst happened, he’d have no choice but to do what Kyle Thorneberry had done, load the brand-new Glock 17 that was nestled in the drawer of Woody’s nightstand in L.A. and level the muzzle in his ear and pull the trigger.

  That was why he was willing to do whatever it took to keep this film he was producing afloat. Sure, he knew now that it probably wouldn’t be the artistic gem he’d hoped for, but with Dalton Lee directing, it wouldn’t be a complete turkey, either, and it would still make a profit, which Woody had ensured with his presales of foreign distribution and ancillary rights. Yet his own compensation package wouldn’t begin kicking in until principal photography, and he wouldn’t see any real money until well after the film was out. As a first-time producer, he wasn’t going to get first-dollar gross receipts, he was going to have to wait for net-profit participation, and
this meant, for the moment, that he was dangerously leveraged, both personally and with his company, especially now that the remake business was drying up.

  All of which justified in his mind what he was doing now, driving past a tract of model homes, past dirt contours of a golf course, past a fountain with a statue of a Trojan soldier that was, strangely, being watched by an armed security guard, past a row of parked cardinal-red SUVs with gold trim, almost all of them garnished with splotches of pastel paint, up the sweeping curve of a driveway to a massive hotel under construction, perched grandly on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

  Woody got out of his car and walked toward the hulking structure, which was bustling with construction workers moving I-beams and bolting prefab panels into the façade. The hotel was fronted by three long tiers of arches and columns, an architectural flourish that was aggressively out of place in the seaside landscape. Woody was trying to decide what it reminded him of, and just as he heard someone say, “Heads up,” he’d determined that the exterior was modeled after the Colosseum in Rome.

  He turned around and saw a football silhouetted against the gray sky, spiraling through the air and gaining speed as it arced down toward his face. Reflexively he raised his arms, and the ball bounced hard off his hands. He had never been much of an athlete, despite his resolves, many times during his youth, to become one, someone with easy grace and effortless coordination, someone like Ed Kitchell, who jogged over to Woody, swept up the football from the ground with one hand, and, still running, flipped it behind his back and caught it in front of him, seemingly without looking.

  He shook Woody’s hand, crushing his fingers. Despite the cool weather, he wasn’t wearing a jacket or sweater, and his big muscular physique was apparent in his tight red polo shirt. He was around Woody’s age, and had a youthful, handsome countenance—jutting square jaw, blond hair, a classic Californian. “So what do you think of the place?” he asked. “Pretty fucking spectacular, isn’t it?”

  “Incredible.”

  “You should see the layout of the course. You play golf?”

  “No,” Woody told him. “I’ve gone out a few times, but I was pretty awful.”

  “Well, it doesn’t happen overnight, you know. It takes patience. Did you take lessons?”

  “A couple.”

  “You see, that’s the problem. You can’t have some half-assed club pro giving you a few perfunctory tips and then letting you loose on the course. It’s like anything else. You need to build on the fundamentals and get a good foundation down. Those fundamentals will extrapolate into everything you do thereafter. Like when I tossed you the ball. Your hands weren’t right. To catch a ball above the waist, your index fingers and thumbs should be in a triangle, like this, right in front of your face. Try it out.”

  Just from this small speech, Woody gleaned a lot about Kitchell. He was presumptuous, peremptory, a man who always thought he knew better, who liked to tell people what to do, and even though Woody resented his condescension—he wasn’t a complete geek, he knew how to catch a damn football, he’d been caught by surprise, that was all—he was willing to indulge him, putting his index fingers and thumbs together.

  “Keep your elbows slightly bent, fingers spread out,” Kitchell said. “You see, you’ve formed a target with your triangle. Catch the nose of the ball in the target. Just watch the tip of the ball all the way in, and when you catch it, absorb the force by bringing your hands and arms into your body, and tuck it in tight.” He backed up. “Ready?”

  Woody nodded, thinking, Just throw the fucking thing already. He wasn’t here to play games.

  Kitchell chucked the football, and Woody caught it snugly in his triangled hands. “That was a perfect catch, chief,” Kitchell told him, and Woody, despite himself, felt pleased. He threw the ball back to Kitchell, who said, “Hey, got some zip there. You work out?”

  “When I can,” Woody said.

  They tossed the football back and forth a few more times.

  “This is what they’re supposed to teach kids in Pee Wee,” Kitchell said, “but some of these coaches these days, I don’t know where they find them, they don’t know shit, and as a consequence we get these punks on the team now, they’re gifted, athletically they’re in the absolute nth-teenth percentile, the stratosphere, but they think they can shake and bake and juke and high-step like it’s hip-hop on the field. They’re more worried about style points than just catching the fucking ball and tucking it in. Drives me fucking insane.”

  They kept passing the football, finding a nice rhythm. Woody hated to admit it, but he was enjoying himself. It reminded him of college, whiling away late afternoons along the Charles River with Kyle, tossing a Frisbee.

  “Now you got it,” Kitchell said. “Now you’re cooking.”

  Woody smiled. He knew precisely what was going on here, what Kitchell’s use of profanity, his rants about the sorry state of sports instruction, were all about. There were so many subtleties in the dynamics of male socialization, but Woody, if anything, had an astute understanding of human behavior, which was the key to his Machiavellian success in the art of negotiation. Subconsciously or not, Kitchell, in pointing out Woody’s athletic deficiencies, had established his position at the top of the dominance hierarchy as the alpha dog, and now, after chipping away at his ego, in effect emasculating him, he was giving Woody positive reinforcement to bond them in a mentor-protégé relationship, make Woody feel grateful for the attention and guidance, solidifying Kitchell’s standing as a leader to follow and trust.

  If that was what Kitchell needed, he would give it to him. He didn’t mind pretending to accede, because, really, when it came down to it, Kitchell was a simplistic oaf, just another pushy dunderheaded jock, and as long as he was under the illusion that he was in control, he would be easy to manipulate. “You must have played college ball,” Woody said. He could tell by the expression on Kitchell’s face—pride mixed with regret—that this had been precisely the right thing to posit.

  “I was supposed to,” Kitchell said. “I had a scholarship to USC all lined up, and then I blew out my ACL. I was a pretty fucking good wideout, if I do say so myself. I was an absolute specimen then.”

  “Looks like you could still take the field today,” Woody said, pupil honoring master.

  Kitchell said, “Well, I don’t know about that,” but clearly he agreed. “So I did what I could to support the team. I became a Yell Leader. My last two years, I was Tommy Trojan.”

  “Jesus, you got to hang out with those cheerleaders?”

  “We called them Song Girls back then. Now—another inane victim of political correctness—they’re called Song Leaders. But yeah, we got to travel with the girls, if you know what I mean.”

  “God, those sweaters and little skirts, they get me every time. Year in and year out, they’re the hottest squad out there.”

  “You have no idea how hot,” Kitchell said, and winked.

  This was another pattern in the ritual of male bonding: after admiring each other’s physical attributes, you had to engage in some gratuitous braggadocio about pussy, lest anyone get confused by the homosexual overtones of the conversation.

  They repaired to the main office trailer, the siding of which was melted and blackened, as if from a small fire.

  “Accident?” Woody asked.

  “Not an accident,” Kitchell said. “Just the latest handiwork of a nutjob terrorist who’s been having a lot of yucks at our expense. Very probably your brother.”

  Inside, besides the expected desks, laptops, whiteboards, hard hats, walkie-talkies, and blueprints, the trailer was festooned with USC regalia: pennants, posters, framed photos of Kitchell as Tommy Trojan with his band of Yell Leaders, umbrellas wrapped in cellophane, stacks of baseball caps, mugs, a row of miniature helmets.

  “Looks like a campus store,” Woody said.

  “We don’t like visitors to leave empty-handed. Where’d you go to school?”

  “Cambridge,” Woody said.
>
  “Cambridge. As in Cambridge, England? Oxbridge?”

  “Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

  “Oh, Harvard,” Kitchell said. “It’s interesting how people from Harvard will never come straight out and say they went to Harvard, but somehow, within the first five minutes of meeting them, it’s worked into the conversation.”

  “It’s part of our noblesse oblige.”

  “Well, that’s very impressive,” Kitchell said. “No Division 1-A football, mind you, but an impressive school. And there’s the Harvard-Yale game.”

  “Always an occasion.”

  “Maybe I can convert you into a Trojan fan now that you’re on the West Coast. I’m going to the home opener tomorrow. You should make a point of catching it on TV. Here, take one of these.” He picked a USC baseball cap off a stack and gave it to Woody. “Just don’t let your brother see you with it. Had a chance to talk to him yet?”

  “He wasn’t very receptive to the subject.”

  “Oh, really? I’m surprised.”

  They sat down on opposite sides of a desk, and Woody filled Kitchell in on Lyndon’s financial situation, which he had ascertained this morning, snooping through his brother’s papers.

  Kitchell, after listening to Woody’s report, frowned. “Well, we know all of this already. They said you were close to him. You think you’ll be able to change his mind?”

  “I don’t know,” Woody said.

  SBK, the gigantic multinational conglomerate that owned The Centurion Group, also had a division that ran a subsidiary with a controlling share in a corporation that had a major stake in one of the foreign distributors that was partially bank-rolling Woody’s movie. It was pure chance that the link between the Song brothers had been discovered. SBK owned thousands of businesses, and usually its divisions, with so many diversified interests in so many different industries, were run independently of one another, but somehow, someone, while investigating Lyndon, had put it together, and a few weeks ago, the head of the German distribution company had met with Woody and asked him to do them a small favor, go up to Rosarita Bay and talk to his brother, see what his weaknesses were, how he might be influenced. The request hadn’t been presented as a direct quid pro quo, nothing as crass as that—the distribution deal, after all, had already been signed—but deals could be broken, of course. So Woody had agreed, and he had made some assurances he shouldn’t have made: that he and Lyndon were quite close, that Lyndon would listen to him.