The Masked Man: A Memoir And Fantasy Of Hollywood

by Tom Wilson

  "It's the most popular of the three in France" I said.

  I don't know if rolling his eyes was meant for the sequel or the French.

  He rolled over on the sofa, grabbing his boots. "Who made those pictures?" he asked.

  "Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. They wrote it."

  "Good scripts," he said, "and who's the head honcho?"

  "Bob Zemeckis was the director."

  "Who produced it?"

  "I forget."

  "You forget the producer?"

  "It was a long time ago."

  "Come on, who ran the show?"

  "Who cares? I forget."

  He grunted, pulling on a boot. "No, you don't."

  "I forget his name!"

  "You're not being honest, are you?"

  "It was an Amblin movie," I said.

  "A what?"

  "The production company. Steven Spielberg's company," I said, "You've heard of him, right?"

  "Of course I have," he said, "He's big medicine, as they say on the reservation."

  "He's a whole bottle of aspirin, buddy."

  "How would I go about talking with him?" he asked, standing up.

  "You wouldn't," I said, "Knock it off."

  "Somebody has got to talk to this man about you. I made a promise and I'll keep it."

  "You made a promise to who?" I said.

  "I made a promise to you!"

  "That's the promise?"

  "I'm a man of my word."

  "Please stop talking, Ranger. Don't even think about it."

  "You've got it, Mister. Enough talk. Somebody has to show the man what you can do."

  "I'll talk to him myself then, " I said.

  "You're not going to talk to him, Tom," the Ranger said, "After all, you can't even remember his name."

  He insisted on taking us all out and paying for dinner, so as Caroline called the kids with the change of plans, I drove past the local deli, where we knew most of the staff too well to bring in a large cowboy, since I'd already eaten there with too many neurotic standup comics who shout when they should whisper and bolt out of their chairs to put the finishing touch on a good story. "How are you paying for dinner anyway?" I asked, parking outside "Rosie's Rack," a barbecue place that seemed western enough that the hat and guns might attract less attention than the sushi place on the opposite side of the mini-mall.

  He smiled. "The One Ranger never tells his secrets."

  "Did you get a paper route or something?"

  "No, but I sure delivered some news today, didn't I?"

  Caroline turned to him. "What news was that?"

  "Never quit!" he said, glowing.

  I swept open the oak door and a cloud of mesquite smoke enveloped us, red heat lamps and wood paneling casting a honey glow on the padded booths. "Perfect," the Ranger smiled, "It's perfect."

  Two teenagers, a hostess and a waitress stood at the podium made out of an old barrel, both squinting a confused welcome as we walked in. The waitress shook her head for a moment, then looked at the hostess. There was a moment of stillness as they made eye contact, and then an explosion of laughter that popped a wad of gum out of one of their mouths and into the fishbowl of business cards that promised a drawing for free ribs.

  "There will be seven of us, Ma'am," the Ranger said.

  "Seven of you?" the hostess chortled, peering into the fishbowl for lost gum.

  "Yes, seven," he said, "And if I may ask, please make sure that the check comes to me.

  "You got it, Tex," she said.

  "Ranger, please."

  "Huh?"

  "I am The One Ranger."

  "Yeah, whatever. This way."

  He sucked some air through his teeth. "Fine then."

  She led us to a giant booth in the families section, with birthday celebrations full of tables with children pointing index fingers at the Ranger and yelling "Pow!" across the salad bar. And I've got to say, after every shot from every single four year old, the Ranger pretended to be shot, grabbing his gut and moaning loudly. He never got tired of it. "Ahhh! You got me!" he said over and over, collapsing into our leather booth with his last bit of strength.

  The kids finally found our table, all four of them draped with sweatshirts and headphone cords, hungry and curious.

  "What's the occasion?" Katie asked, sliding across the vinyl to make room in the semi-circle.

  "The occasion is a combination of two things!" the Ranger said, "Our friendship and our hunger. Now I want you to order whatever you like."

  He was interrupted at the end with another "Pow" from another table. He grabbed his shoulder as if the kid had grazed him, pointing a black leather finger over the back of his bench and firing back. "Pow yourself, outlaw!"

  The child's mother wasn't remotely entertained by it. "Tyler, sit back down here!" she said, "No guns! No!"

  The Ranger blushed and took his hat off, dropping it onto the bench to decrease target size, and stared at me.

  "Sorry," Caroline said to him, "I guess some people don't like guns."

  "I understand that," he said, "I don't like them either."

  Sarah gestured to his waist. "What are those?"

  "They're real, in case you didn't know," Danny said, emptying a sugar packet and pouring it into his mouth.

  "I don't like guns. I respect them and I wear them."

  "Can I have one?" Danny said.

  "Oh, I don't think that would go over too well with Mom!" he said, "Isn't that right, Mom?"

  Caroline was looking at the menu and trying to stop Ellie from taking cel phone pictures of the Ranger, which she was forwarding to a long list of friends. "Hmm?" she said, "Oh, no guns, Danny. No math homework? No guns."

  Ellie stared at the tiny screen in front of her, and then at the Ranger. "They let you have guns in …um, I mean, wherever you're from do they have guns?" she said.

  "No sense beating around the bush," he said, "It's heaven."

  Nobody moved for a few seconds, and only Caroline looked up from her lap to look at me.

  "It is?" Ellie said.

  He blushed a little bit and winked at a fourth grader sitting across from us.

  "Yes it 'tis," he said. "Seriously," Sarah said.

  "Bingo."

  "Okay…let's say you're kidding here," I said.

  "I'm not."

  "The internet was right! I knew it!" Ellie said."

  "Knew what? What's going on?" Katie said.

  Danny put a tablespoon in his mouth and used it as a tongue depressor. "El tinks he's dead. I tink she's dead, but only mental." He said.

  "What?" Katie said.

  "He thezz da guns are real, though."

  "You really are Clayton Moore?" Caroline said.

  He laughed and unfurled his napkin. "Of course I am!"

  "But you…you're not alive now, it said on the thing."

  "People say a lot of things," he said.

  "So…okay, they have guns there?" Sarah asked, "Isn't that against the whole deal? I mean, isn't there a code or something?"

  He leaned across the table and whispered. "Okay, you got me. Here's another thing that's true. You don't need guns in heaven."

  "Yeah, that's what I thought."

  We ordered ribs and beans, and I ordered root beer instead of a beer, since I didn't want him to react like he did with "hell."

  "Do you know why I use silver bullets?"

  "Pow!" a kid said from the other side of the restaurant, which he pretended not to hear.

  "To always remember the value of a life," he said, "Silver is a precious metal, and every life on God's green earth is far more precious than that. If you're ever going to pull the trigger of a gun, that's what you should be thinking about. The cost of what you're doing."

  I was almost swept away, believing that I was eating barbecue with my wife, kids, and Buffalo Bill himself, almost asking about Billy the Kid and the O.K. Corral before remembering that he was as much a gunslinger as I was a Union soldier in the television movie "And
ersonville." I wasn't. I dressed up like a Union soldier, pretended I was one, and ate at the Chick-Fil-A across the highway from our hotel every night. I leaned back into the bench and played with a pile of Moist-Wipe towelettes.

  "You've never shot anybody, have you?"

  "Of course not!" he said, "I don't have real bullets in these! Never have. It's pretend."

  "Why aren't you allowed to wear them in heaven then?"

  "I didn't say you weren't allowed, I said you don't need them."

  He winked at us as a rack of beef ribs covered in sizzling sauce slid onto the table in front of us.

  Gnawing on good barbecue, we were silent for several minutes, interrupted a couple of times for the Ranger to mumble "Uunnhh…good."

  He took a break as I cut another rib from the slab.

  "Do you know what the head honchos did when the Lone Ranger T.V. show became a hit?" he asked, wiping his fingers with a towelette.

  "What was that?"

  "Do you think they paid me more and bought me a car?"

  "Did they?" Danny asked, "Cool!"

  "Do you think that Hollywood is any different today than it was then?" he chuckled to me, "As soon as the show became a hit, they made the mask bigger."

  "They what?" I asked, sipping root beer from a mug shaped like a barrel.

  "They made the mask bigger. They wanted to cover more of my face in case I asked for a raise and they had to fire me."

  "You're kidding," I said

  "Nope. No joke," he said, "And the show did become a big hit and I did ask for that raise."

  "And what happened?" Caroline asked.

  "They fired me," he said, stretching his arms up and linking his fingers behind his head.

  "They did not." I said, "Everybody knows you're the Lone Ranger."

  "I'm the One Ranger, remember? John Hart replaced me as the Lone Ranger in 52 pictures in the fifties. How about them apples?"

  "Seriously?"

  He pulled out his wallet and showed me a photograph of the actor John Hart in an identical costume to the one he was wearing. "Notice anything peculiar?" he said.

  I did. The mask that John Hart was wearing was huge, covering most of the top half of his face, with a black mesh material that veiled his nose and mouth all the way down to his chin.

  "That's the Lone Ranger?"

  "It is 52 times!" he said, "In all fairness, John's a good man and we got along well. It was a tough situation to be in, replacing me only to have the costume people put a black feedbag on your face.

  "They fired Crispin Glover from Back To The Future Two and Three!" I said.

  "Who's that?"

  "The guy who played George McFly. The Dad?"

  "Oh, he was very good."

  "Yeah! They got rid of him! They hired another guy that looked kind of like him and put a mask on him!"

  "A big feedbag looking thing like they did to John Hart?"

  "No, they had makeup people make a face out of latex that made him look exactly like Crispin."

  "Why did they do that?"

  "Because they hated each other, and he cut his hair in the middle of a scene, and he asked for a million dollars or something, and trust me, if you weren't in the DeLorean when it went to the future, you didn't make close to a million dollars."

  "Oh."

  "And he called them bad names."

  "He what?"

  "I heard him. He went off on them."

  "He probably shouldn't have done that."

  "Yeah, that's probably why things didn't work out."

  "They got rid of a guy and put a big mask on the new guy's face," the Ranger said, "What a coincidence."

  By the time we'd chewed the ribs into a pile of clean bones, every employee had walked by our table, rounding the corner to our remote booth by the window, pretending to check on their cars in the parking lot and solidly locking eyes with all of us before jogging back to the group at the hostess stand, nodding their heads.

  The hostess herself came over with the check. "Thanks for coming in, folks," she said, snapping one of her suspenders with a name tag pin, "My name is Gina and I'm the manager here. I was wondering if you could settle a little bet for us."

  The Ranger and I looked at each other, both veterans of restaurant recognition.

  "Do you know who this is?" the Ranger said, pointing at me.

  "No, she said, "but are you the Lone Ranger?"

  "No, I'm not," he said.

  "You're not?"

  "No."

  "Why are you wearing that outfit then if you're not the Lone Ranger?"

  "I'm the One Ranger."

  "The Lone Ranger."

  "One," he said.

  "He's the One Ranger he said!" Danny said, "Can I have more soda?"

  "You look exactly like the Lone Ranger," she said.

  "Take out the L," he said, gesturing to me, "Do you know who this is?"

  "Are you the guy from Police Academy? That's what Jen said."

  "No," I said, "That's an actor named David Graf."

  "You're not him?"

  "No. Unfortunately, he passed away."

  "Who's passed away?" the Ranger said.

  "No! Not you, I think. Right? Or what?"

  "Who died?" the girl said.

  "Him, apparently," Katie said, pointing across the table.

  "No, David," I said, "He was a great guy."

  "God rest his soul," the Ranger said.

  "But he's not dead or anything, so don't even look him up on the internet," I said, pointing at the Ranger.

  Ellie held up her cel phone to show another obituary before Caroline took it from her.

  "He was Biff on Back In The Future!" the Ranger beamed.

  "No he wasn't," she said to him.

  "Would you like his autograph?" the Ranger said.

  "No, you're right, he wasn't," Sarah said, "Let's go!"

  "Can I have your autograph?" she asked him.

  "Sure, but what about Tom?" he said.

  "Okay, whatever."

  He signed autographs on the pad of dinner checks for the hostess, every waitress, the cook, and a bartender just starting his shift, finally slapping a twenty dollar bill onto the table for the meal. She scooped up the twenty and the check. "Do you want some change with this - oh, wait," she said, blushing and putting it down, "It's 57.95 That's a twenty."

  His mouth dropped open and his cheeks blushed redder than hers.

  "Tom," he said, "May I borrow some money?"

  "No rush," she said, walking back to the cash register.

  I turned to pull my wallet out of a back pocket and turned back to find an empty seat across from the table. The Ranger had disappeared. He was smiling at the kids in one instant, and vanished in the next.

  "He disappears when the check gets here?" I mumbled to myself, "Too perfect."

  I shook my head and chuckled until I saw his boots on the floor near the edge of the booth, with his legs still in them, stone still and lying on the floor. Did he fall? A seizure? Is it possible for a phantom from the netherworld to have a medical emergency?

  "Did you drop something?" Katie said.

  Danny took the spoon out of his mouth to look under the table, and Ellie tapped on her phone. "Did he die?" she asked.

  We leaned over the table and he looked up at us, signaling quiet with a finger over his lips. He wasn't ill and he hadn't fallen down, he was hiding. Hiding? Telling us to "shush?" I was ready to pick up the check and go, and he was--

  "Nobody move!" a voice boomed from somewhere near the kitchen. "Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt!"

  The screams of shocked patrons overlapped with the threats as they got louder. "You move, you die!" Two men had burst through the kitchen, and both were carrying guns, one with a black hand gun and the other a sawed-off shot gun, rusted brown and duct taped at the butt. "Sawed-off" pushed a cook out of the way with the rifle barrel and stomped to the register, yelling "Shut up!" at a crying lady, as "pistol" screamed "On the ground!" Waitresses a
nd patrons hit the greasy carpet, face down into the orange and avocado swirls.

  "Daddy," Ellie said.

  "Dad, is this fake?" Danny said.

  I looked at the Ranger, then at Caroline. The Ranger was already down, his legs drawn up to his chest under two tables to stay completely out of sight.

  "Okay, guys, let's do what they say. Take it easy," I said, "Everything will be fine."

  The kids started pulling themselves out of the booth, but I stopped them and signaled under the big table. "Get under there. Now." They squeezed under the thick slab of wood as I slid off my chair to the floor, looking over at the Ranger. He held a hand up to his face, moved it around to signal in some way, and pointed at a side door. I tried to make my eyes say "What?" but he repeated the signaled command, spinning his hand and pointing at the side door.

  I rolled across the carpet toward him as an older couple at the booth next to ours struggled to reach the ground with arthritic limbs and fear for their lives. "ON-THE-FLOOR!!" Shotgun said, pulling thin stacks of ones and fives out of the register.

  "What is this? What - this is all you got?" he spat.

  "What are you saying?" I whispered, wiggling closer to the Ranger.

  "Side door," he said, "Go out the side door and trap them. I'll take the front. They haven't seen it yet. Go!"

  "No!"

  "Come on," he hissed, "They can't shoot those pop guns. Go!"

  "I'm not leaving the kids!"

  "HEY! SHUT UP OVER THERE!" the pistol guy said. He pushed our waitress the rest of the way to the ground as she shrieked in fear.

  "Right. Don't go now," the Ranger whispered, "Wait. Stand up when I tell you to."

  "What? He just said to—"

  "Stand up when I tell you."

  "He's got a g—"

  "Dad!" Danny whispered across the carpet, "…Trust him!"

  The pistol guy stomped over bodies laying in every direction, headed toward our table. He stepped across an elderly couple, catching his boot on the woman's purse and kicking it aside.

  "Who's under that table? Get out here!" he bellowed. Katie and Sarah were hugging Ellie and Danny's heads close to them, and Caroline was looking at the creep with the gun, blocking his aim, and burning a stare through the back of his head.

  "Get out from under there!" The Ranger signaled at me and I stood up, staring down the barrel of a gun, held in complete hatred and murderous greed.