by John Shannon
‘Let me ask one more question and then I’ll answer anything. What do you know about the Sandstone Retreat?’
‘Oh, Christ.’
1 This TV series, shown on CBS in the late 1950s but shot in England and produced by a company partially funded by the American Communist Party, became famous, sub rosa, for employing blacklisted writers like Ring Lardner, Jr., Waldo Salt and Adrian Scott (under pseudonyms, of course). Steal from the rich, give to the poor, after all.
2 Scores of disowned films have come out under Mr Smithee’s aegis since the name was invented to resolve a dispute over the movie Death of a Gunfighter in 1969. This name was long used by directors including those of Cool Hand Luke, Ronin, and a hatchet-like TV recut of the brilliant Oscar-nominated The Insider, that was actually directed by Michael Mann. But the name is becoming too well-known now after writer-producer Joe Eszterhas ruined it by making the horrible mess An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn – and doubly ironically making the real director Arthur Hiller take his name off it.
THREE
A Failed Experiment
I sit in the saggy Danish chair in the motel room and I take the rubber band off my delaminating paperback copy of If He Hollers and open to a dog-eared page. I’ve read the book six or seven times.
‘What makes me so mad,’ Johnson said, ‘is the white folks got it on you at the start, so why do they have to give you any crap on top of it? That’s what makes me so mad.’
I can’t tear myself away from those words. I can hear Skinnies mutter and confide, but all off camera, so to speak. There are whole types and species of them, to suit any kind of sadness or embarrassment or fear I have to endure.
They tell me their flowery names like T.S. Eliot’s cats, but I refuse to remember them. Should I meet my hallucinations half way? Nobody in Parade magazine tells you the answers to questions like that. Boy, I need my meds. Lacking them, my only real option tonight is to drink myself to sleep.
Rolf looked about sixty now, but Jack Liffey could imagine a fit and handsome thirty-year-old, obviously desirable traits at a round-robin sex club.
The man handed Jack Liffey a bottle of sparkling water and they settled into canvas sling chairs suspended from the living room ceiling.
A big-head black pony looked in through the open French window from the paddock and whinnied, as if unhappy about being left out in the dark. The bungalow was a single big room, probably a converted barn.
‘Jack, meet Enrique. He’s a Peruvian Paso. One of the few naturally gaited horses in the world,’ he said. ‘He’s small but he’s got a sense of mischief.’
‘Hi, Henry,’ Jack Liffey said dubiously.
The pony flapped his lips and withdrew.
‘Sandstone,’ Jack Liffey reminded the man.
‘It wasn’t like one of those nudist ranches. Or The Swingers Club down in the Valley. Most of those places banned open sex. At Sandstone, sex was the name of the game. Upstairs, earnest lectures about its healing powers. Downstairs was what was called the ball-room.’ His laugh honked a little unpleasantly. ‘A big open place with a lot of mattresses. You’d go down there weekends and see bare butts hoiking up and down everywhere. There was a raised platform where somebody’d be laying and half a dozen folks would be rubbing them with oil. Lots of grunts and squeals.
‘John Williamson and his wife were messiahs about how sex would liberate the world. Some folks came to get liberated. Some just came to get laid, and that was OK with John, too. Lots of celebrities. Sammy Davis, Orson Bean, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, before they stole the Pentagon Papers. Hell, I remember Bobby Darrin and Peter Lawford, I think Dean Martin. The memory grows a little dim.’
He urged his suspended chair into a light swing.
‘The big crowd would blow in on Friday night and fill up the dirt lot next door with cars. It was this weird thing John called “open weekends”. There were lectures and events for the visitors. Maybe twenty of us actually lived there full time. We did gardening and construction and I guess absorbed it all. The celebrities just popped in for curiosity or for sex and sometimes stayed the weekend. It wasn’t a cult. Nobody had to do anything.’
He told Jack Liffey that he’d taught French Lit at UCLA until he’d got caught up heavily in the anti-war movement. A girl from a march had taken him to Sandstone.
‘Timothy Leary,’ he said abruptly. ‘I remember him one weekend. Self-important as shit. Maybe I’m too cynical. Male celebrities were allowed to pay a weekend fee and come in without a partner, but ordinary guys had to have a woman in tow.
‘I’m still ambivalent. Maybe there really is something liberating about trying to get yourself past jealousy and possessiveness. But I think the place hurt a lot of people – maybe even damaged them permanently. It shook me up.’
Enrique poked his head in again and Rolf Fuchs levered himself up to give the pony a couple of carrots from a big plastic bag against the wall.
‘Truth is I didn’t recover from Sandstone for a long time. I married the girl who took me, on a whim, but she left with someone else. Williamson himself got bored and left, and another guy took over, some ex-Marine who wasn’t as hang-loose.’
Dark had fallen completely, and the only light in the room was a kerosene lamp on the kitchen sink.
‘I thought I might go back to college in history. I read up on free-love places. There’s been a whole lot of them. Especially in the sixties after that book The Harrad Experiment. But you can go back a century to Oneida and Nashoba. Did you know Hieronymus Bosch ran a free-love collective in fifteenth-century Holland?’ He honked his odd laugh. ‘The Inquisition came down on them like a ton of iron bibles.’
Jack Liffey had let him run because the man had a strange manic undertow that interested him, but he hadn’t got what he wanted.
‘It’s seven, my adult beverage time,’ Fuchs said. ‘Can I offer you a glass of cabernet?’
‘No thanks.’
‘A.A.?’
‘I’m just proving something to myself. What do you do now, since you quit teaching?’
On a kitchen counter, the man fought open a bottle of wine and poured some into an ordinary tumbler. He dipped a carrot in the red wine and held it far out the window. Somewhere out in the dark the carrot apparently vanished. ‘Clear weeds. And there’s a third-rate private school up here called Village and Country where I teach French to spoiled not-very-bright kids. V and C gets me cheap. No credential.’
‘No dreams for something else?’
The man dialed up the kerosene lamp and it threw a remarkable amount of light across the room. His eyes were fixed and expressionless. ‘Dreams? Sure. To be able to play In a Silent Way like Miles Davis.’ He choked off a laugh. ‘No, Jack, to be honest, I think Sandstone killed my dream capacity. Drained me right down dry like unplugging a sump.’
He raised his glass in a pointless toast.
‘Sex is too powerful to play with like we did.’
The horse whinnied outside, as if agreeing.
‘You can’t let yourself act out your deepest fantasies, man,’ he went on. ‘Trust me. It burns away something you best keep inside.’
‘Are you OK?’ Jack Liffey asked, suddenly a little worried about the man.
‘Oh, yeah. I’m fine. Absolutely. No question. I can get along without fantasies. I could even sing it for you.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘You asked me about Tyrone Bird. How does he figure in this?’
‘Has he come to see you?’
‘No.’
‘He will. Bird was conceived at Sandstone – at least he thinks so. His mom was white as rice, so it’s a pretty good bet his dad was black. How many blacks hung out there?’
Rolf Fuchs thought about that for a while. ‘Not many. Have you got a photo of this guy?’
Meier Reston had given Jack Liffey a publicity composite, an unwieldy eight by ten with Bird in a half dozen costumes and poses. He’d done his best to fold it along the photo borders,
and he brought it to Fuchs at the kitchen counter.
The man uncreased it flat. ‘I’ve seen him. Can’t remember the movies. Handsome bugger, isn’t he? Like Paul Newman, dipped. Who was his mom?’
‘I don’t have a picture. Melanie Bird. She was never famous.’
‘I don’t remember a Melanie. When you get a picture of her, you show me. I can give you two names now; black guys who obviously hung out to hit on the white girls, but where they are now is anybody’s guess.
‘Donnie Spencer – he was an actor, student of acting, I don’t know anything else about him. And the other’s only a first name. Stoney. Maybe a nickname. Sorry. Wait. Stoney was some kind of intellectual, a show-off about it, a little older. This kid may be all wrong.’
Enrique put his big head inside again, and Jack Liffey got up and scratched between his ears for a moment.
‘Bird will find you,’ Jack Liffey predicted. ‘Would you give him my card and tell him I’m on his side?’
‘Are you?’
‘I find missing kids, but I never take them home if they don’t want to go.’
Rolf left the business card on his countertop and breathed softly into the horse’s nose. ‘Everybody’s luck runs out sometime, doesn’t it, Jack?’
It was time to leave. Rolf Fuchs’ emotional life seemed like some kind of failed experiment, as if he’d been warned but gone ahead and sipped the forbidden brew.
Gloria parked about a block up the Oildale street from the house and exhaled very slowly. She should still be on the way to Fresno for the police DNA conference. It was late, dark already.
Jack was the best – she couldn’t hope for better, really. Was she throwing him away? Yet, how did you walk away from a vibe that tingled this deep? An ex-cop with a grin, an honest one no less, who’d been fired for his honesty in the Deep South, clever and funny and hard, a guy who knew most of the same things she did. No civilian, not even Jack, would ever have that.
All they’d really done was hold hands briefly. But what a surge of electricity she’d felt – hunkered down in the midst of a police shoot-out. She recalled the shivering urges she’d had for Sonny Theroux ever since, and his pleas, notes, e-mails, even covert phone calls. Just one test, he insisted – they owed themselves one night to find out.
She let up on the brake and allowed her RAV-4 to idle slowly down the block to the ugly little ante-bellum slave manor somebody before Sonny Theroux had built there, almost as a parody of Gone With the Wind’s Tara, on the totally inauspicious no-sidewalk block of working class tarpaper bungalows in Oildale, across the trickle of the Kern River from Bakersfield. As her car drifted in front of the house and she finally braked to a stop, a bright lamp came on above the silly columned rotunda, flooding the front grass with light, probably a motion sensor.
She’d never been a coward, and she took the keys and walked straight up to the house.
‘Gloria,’ he said, pretending only mild surprise when he opened up. He was wearing his absurd satin smoking jacket, too effete to appeal to her deeper urges, but still.
‘Sonny. It’s been six months and thirteen days since we touched.’
She didn’t really have to say anything more.
He nodded. ‘I kept the bed warm.’
The UCLA administration had given Maeve a parking spot in lot eleven off Sunset Boulevard, which was a twenty minute walk from her anthropology classes at Haines Hall. In fact, they hadn’t given her anything. The lot assignment was a hunting permit for a small quadrangle of asphalt large enough to park her Echo, and it had cost her almost two hundred dollars for the quarter. The decal was useless after about eight forty-five a.m., by which time every slot would be taken.
She was beginning to dislike her primary professor, Dr Clydesson-Browne, already. He rattled on and on about his own work on kinship systems among the Yao in central Africa. That had been fifty years ago.
What had interested her about anthropology – or so she’d thought – was how the modern world had evolved out of these older societies, what this prehistoric world said about being human, and what in that transition had brought about, or preserved, all the rivalries, distrust and wars. She didn’t give a damn about how a second cousin felt about a mother’s brother in Yaoland in 1966 – or 1066. What did their customs say about the position of women now? What did they say about who was in charge of the body politic and why? She wondered if she should have been in sociology or political science instead.
In the cavernous arena of the freshman auditorium, a boy she’d noticed before with an attractive dark forelock bobbing over his eyes leaned toward her and whispered, ‘Is this as tedious to you as it is to me?’
‘I hoped it would mean something,’ Maeve whispered back.
The professor wore a radio mike and his voice boomed forth on the sound system, dry and practiced, the intonations falling in odd places, as if he’d learned English somewhere in Sweden.
The professor turned away from them to scribble on the giant whiteboard:
In some instances, the sister’s son has special rights over the property of his mother’s brother. A vestige of a matrilineal society?
Before Clydesson-Browne could boost the movable portion of the whiteboard upward into better sight for notetaking, the boy beside her gave a sigh of discontent and slipped down the row and out of the hall. Without quite knowing what she was doing, Maeve grabbed up her notebooks and followed.
He was lighting a cigarette on a bench a few feet away. ‘I’m Chad,’ he said.
‘Chad? You should have been knocked off a ballot card ages ago in Florida.’
He smiled dutifully. ‘The many cousins of my mother’s brother, I guess.’
‘My name’s Maeve. No backstory to speak of.’ That was a lie.
He offered the pack of American Spirits, and she hesitated, then took one. Why not? Just one, she thought. Though it did violate her healthy principles. College was for new experiences, even if she’d pretty much had all the new experiences she would need for a full lifetime before getting here: pushing her near-dead father through a riot on a wheelbarrow to save his life; being held prisoner by a band of dim-witted motorcyclists, etc., etc. She hadn’t yet been abducted by a flying saucer.
As he lit the cigarette for her, Chad said, ‘I’ll tell you my real name if you promise not to laugh.’
‘How can anybody promise that – it might be Whoop-de-doo – but if I do laugh, I promise to do it with respect.’ She just barely beat back a gust of coughing as the cigarette smoke burned down her gullet. It was actually her first tobacco cigarette. Only the experience of marijuana had prepared her for the raw rasp of smoke down her throat.
‘My folks named me Templeton,’ he said ruefully.
She smiled, then suppressed it hard. ‘The fussy trouble-making rat in Charlotte’s Web.’
‘Can you believe they’d never read the book?’
‘Then maybe you were named after their butler.’
‘Nobody has a butler,’ he said indignantly. ‘We did have a cook, but her name was Marisol. I don’t know where my name came from. But when I was thirteen, I told them I was going to stop answering to Templeton. I just dead refused. I told them my new name was Chad.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘It seemed normal. I don’t know.’ He puffed heavily on the cigarette. ‘That lecture, man – you know, last year I worked the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland.’
‘“And now, the most dangerous part of the journey,”’ they both recited in unison, ‘“the return to civilization.”’
‘Yuk,’ he added dully. ‘The only good part was when I got to shoot blanks at the big fake hippo. Now and again tour guys would vary the spiel and get fired for it. My pal Otis said, ‘“Oh, look, Uncle Walt’s ass is rising out of the river!”’
Chuckling, she puffed cautiously, trying not to inhale.
‘Off the port bow, ladies and germs, up on the cliff, the little mechanical monkey in back can be seen to be masturbating.’
<
br /> ‘Are you an anthro major?’ she asked.
‘Organic chem,’ he said. ‘This is my general sci course.’
‘I’ve heard organic’s the hardest subject in college,’ Maeve offered.
He raised one eyebrow. ‘Lots of memory-work. What drew you to anthro?’
She shook her head. ‘The average undergraduate doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing,’ Maeve said. ‘That’s me.’
‘The average human being is utterly blind to beauty. You’re really, truly beautiful, Maeve. Want to hook up?’
‘That’s way too sudden, Chad. Be cool. When you see me again, ask me out to dinner.’
Slowly, waking and letting my eyes zig-zag across the mess on the floor, I remember drinking myself into alcohol-drenched sleep from a goofy little six-pack of fifty mil Chivas bottles, airplane bottles, bought from behind locked glass from a disapproving old woman at a drugstore. Now a whole platoon of little dead soldiers is lying on the beige carpet. I half expect one of the Skinnies to come into view, peer inside a tiny bottle and make a big O of his/her lips before winking at me in that snarky way they have. But remarkably, they’re allowing me some morning peace.
Luckily I don’t get physical hangovers. When I drink too much, I just wake with baffling anxieties – like somebody who’s being followed by a tragedy that’s too hard to face. Amazing that I once thought money could take care of all my worries. I knew quite a few people, rich as sin, who were worried to death about what their money meant, as if it might just evaporate on them, or turn on them and exact vengeance for some great crime, but that wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t born with money, so enough had always been enough.
If only some over-the-counter drug could help with the rest. I’d walk across to the Rite Aid and buy some acetaminophen or Dimetapp. But the meds I really need are in Brentwood, in a carved soapstone box in the bedroom. Paulita standing guard like a banshee.
Then, all of a sudden, there’s a banging at the motel door. I grab at my wristwatch on the bedside table, a plain Rolex Oyster, and find out it’s just after eight.