Earlier tonight at the hotel 1960, Ben sympathetically mentioned his mother’s death and his fourth Jack Daniel’s. George, taking a sip, conceded the possibility of a connection. If nothing else, it was a comfortable one-night pretext.
“I thought I recognized you at the casino,” the blonde tells George. “It’s Sandra. You helped me out when you were here in January?”
George stares stupidly.
“No, I’ve never been to the Venetian before.”
The woman turns up her smile, which now seems potentially insane. “No! At NATPE!” she says. “Sandra Bemis? Sandi. Timmy introduced us.”
Featherstone’s backup girlfriend, the dog aromatherapist to the stars. His disappointment (She isn’t coming on to me) is transient, entirely washed away by his surge of relief (She isn’t a stalker, or an actress). “Of course. You have a new look. I didn’t recognize you.”
“That’s cool. No prob whatsoever!” Another adult who talks like a teenager. But maybe doxies always have.
“You’re here on … vacation?” he says.
She glances at her friend and her smile turns a little wary and wry, as if he’s made some subtle private joke. “Right,” she says.
And into the party they go. All the Barbies and Kens seem to be here, and each smiling Ken has unbuttoned his tuxedo shirt and loosened his black bow tie. An E!2 video crew helps power up the ambient snap and crackle of collective party vainglory, a fever of self-importance that spikes twice, once when Phil Spector arrives accompanied by Nicole Kidman and a pair of seven-foot-tall bodyguards, and then when Bucky Lopez arrives with his full Secret Service detail. Penn and Teller arrive. George sees smiling John McLaughlin stride in and head for Bucky Lopez. Even the celebrities in Las Vegas seem arbitrary.
Ben has personally taken control of the music, George realizes: a Frank Zappa song is playing over the din, “Weasels Ripped My Flesh.” Again: weasels. Pattern amid the random, signal buried within the noise. Meaningless pattern, pointless signal, but you take what you can get. He should remember to tell Lizzie.
He’s suddenly surrounded, and as he whips around to see who’s grabbing his arm, he spills a fresh drink on Ben.
“George Mactier, I’d like you to meet Buckingham Lopez.”
Are the Secret Service men eyeing George because he’s drunk, or because they’re Secret Service agents? In fact, every time George is in the presence of a presidential candidate, he imagines assassinating him. It first happened when he was making a home movie of Nixon campaigning in Minneapolis, in 1967, before candidates had Secret Service protection, and he stuck his Super-8 camera right in Nixon’s face, inches away. It happened again in 1972 when he was president of Twin Cities Teens for McGovern and met the candidate. It happened again and again at Newsweek and ABC. It always occurs, automatically, compulsively—Mondale, Hart, Dukakis, Dole, Jesse Jackson, Steve Forbes, even Lamar Alexander—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, a dozen or more times by now. He wonders again, hearing the Zappa, if this is a generational neurosis, Mid-Sixties Tourette’s Syndrome, Virtual—John Hinckley Disorder—or just his own strange, laughing-in-church tic.
“George used to be a journalist,” Ben says, as Lopez, simultaneously shaking George’s hand and sticking a little BUCKY? YES, BUCKY! flag in George’s jacket pocket. “But now he does real work. The TV show NARCS, about the war on drugs? That’s his.”
“The entertainment business, huh?” Lopez says. “Well, that is one hell of a wealth-creation engine. Congratulations!” And then he is off, presumably to tell Sandi Bemis that pet aromatherapy has the potential to become one hell of a wealth-creation engine, and to assure the frenzied busboy in the gondolier costume that stacking greasy, empty wineglasses and half-eaten hors d’oeuvres is also one hell of a wealth-creation engine.
Whenever George becomes fully drunk, he stops drinking. He has stopped drinking. He’s sitting on the longest freestanding couch he has ever seen. People are leaving. A woman sits down next to him, right next to him. She’s hot—sexy, but also palpably radiating heat. Ah: Sandi Bemis.
“Hi,” she says. “Can I make a weird request?”
“About your dog thing? I know, I’ve been away from New York for a week; I haven’t talked to Angela. But I will, Sandi, I promise.”
He looks her in the face for the first time since she sat down, and realizes that the woman next to him is wearing pigtails, has brown hair, not blond, and is ten years younger than Sandi Bemis. Her silky synthetic top is loose and low-cut.
“Ah! Oh! Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“I’m not Sandi, I’m Shawna.” She holds out her hand, which George shakes. “I noticed you over at the BarbieWorld? I play one of the Staceys on the hair-play mezzanine. I’m a model.” In one of his Manhattan street censuses, she would be an easy yes, in all neighborhoods and moods. “I’ve done a lot of catalogue in L.A. But I’m also an actress.”
She wants a job. “Right.”
“So, if this freaks you out just tell me, but—can I … I’d like to feel your hand, where your hand was? The residual limb? It’s really weird, I know, but, I think it’s really kind of … sexy? You think I’m a pervert, don’t you?”
Yes. All the more so since she used the PC phrase for stump. He bends his left arm and holds the forearm straight up. “Feel away.”
She puts her hand over his wrist as if it’s a stick shift she’s gently polishing. This is going nowhere. This is just a gothic Las Vegas moment. He’ll tell Lizzie about it in the morning. He suddenly does, however, have a full-bore erection.
“It’s so smooth,” she says. “Gosh! The tip is really hard.” Could this be more squalid? A girl who plays Barbie’s pal Stacey phallicizing his stump in public in an ersatz palazzo in Las Vegas—maybe it wouldn’t really be adultery at all, more like a parody of adultery, some kind of permissible performance-art pastiche of adulterous fantasies. He’s not serious; he doesn’t think he’s serious. She makes a little circle around his wrist with her index finger, and stops. Then, looking straight at him very intently, she lifts his arm with one hand and with the other flicks at its tip with one of her pigtails. He smiles. She smiles back, then looks at him hard again, no longer smiling. She leans her head and shoulders toward him a little awkwardly, and with both hands brings the tip of his arm to the tops of her breasts, and slides it slowly all the way down between them. She smiles, and then rearranges herself, twisting her back toward him. Now she is slouching on him like a girlfriend against a boyfriend, holding his arm inside her shirt between her warm breasts, stroking it through her shirt.
“My daddy’s was all kind of bony and rough and bumpylike.”
Sick? Very sick. “Your father lost a hand?”
“His whole arm, his right one, up almost to the shoulder. And his right leg to the knee. It happened in Vietnam. In Tay Ninh. During the Vietnam War? The country of Vietnam? That’s why my middle name is Cindy.”
“I know about the war in Vietnam. But I don’t get the name.”
“Because Daddy’s fire-support base was called Cindy. FSB Cindy. He named me after it. He used to say if I’d been a boy he would have named me First Cav.” She softly rubs the tip of George’s arm through her shirt with two fingers. “Where were you in Nam?”
Exceptionally sick. “I wasn’t. I’m a little too young. I lost the hand in Nicaragua.”
“Nicaragua? That’s in Florida, right?”
Exceptionally sick and exceptionally stupid. “Around there.” George’s erection surrenders. He feels fortunate. Time to go.
“Is Angela your wife?”
“No. Angela Janeway, the actress on TV?” No sign of recognition. “I produce a television show called NARCS?”
“Oh, you mean Jennie O’Donnell! I love Jennie!” She scoots even closer to George, so close her buttocks rise onto his thigh. “You’re a producer? Can I be on NARCS?” Her tone is matter-of-fact. “I’d love to be on NARCS. Then I could get my SAG card. Which would be so fantastic.” George is spee
chless. Her manner is friendly and forthright but nothing special, as if she’s asked to borrow a pen, and it doesn’t change as she adds, “I could like come back to your room with you tonight. I know it’s bad to brag, but Donny, my manager, says I give the best head in Vegas. Seriously.”
“No …”
“Or whatever.”
“No,” George says.
Only now does she lower her voice a little. “You could do me with, you know, your hand. Your arm, I mean. Up my ass, or wherever, I’d be cool with.” She’s still being disconcertingly casual, no more salacious than a waitress reciting dessert specials.
“Sorry,” he says, and with some effort stands. “Bye.” To create the illusion of purpose, he walks briskly and starts looking from room to room.
If she hadn’t mentioned the father? If she hadn’t mentioned “Donny”? If she wasn’t such a moron? If she was a nine instead of a seven and a half? If she wasn’t so transparent, so weird, so Planet of the Zombie Whores? No, please, God, he hopes not. He has too much invested in his sense of personal virtue. He has too much invested in fidelity—twelve unblemished years but for the asterisk of New Orleans. For New Orleans he forgives himself now as an oafish error, end-of-the-eighties acting-out, premarital cold feet, treacherous learning experience. But this, tonight, Shawna, would have reversed Marx—history repeating itself, the first time as farce and the second time as tragedy. Farcical tragedy.
“George, you dog! You okay? You want to come back to my private lair for a nightcap?”
“Where’d Bucky boy go? Down to create some wealth at the blackjack table?”
“You’re still pissed over the real-marble bet, aren’t you?”
“What is this wealth-creation-engine bullshit? I thought he was supposed to be smart.”
“Hey! Honest is what I said he is. Come on. Let’s go. Unless you and your little friend on the couch aren’t through.”
When they finally get to Ben’s personal suite at the opposite corner of the floor, the quiet and perfect hotel tidiness is a relief, like slipping into a clean, cool pool. The light is dim. Three open laptops sit on a desk, one of them on, the screen full of numbers. A breeze flicks at the flimsy pages of a stock prospectus. As Ben goes to get drinks, George steps out onto the terrace. Sixteen floors down in the dark, the Grand Canal and its gondolas sparkle, hallucinatory and spectacular, transcending their own kitsch absurdity. Like the real Venice, George thinks.
“This is the business we have chosen, Michael.”
Ben has stepped out next to George. George doesn’t turn around.
“If that’s supposed to be Brando, you suck.”
“Lee Strasberg. Why’d you have such a hard-on for Bucky tonight? He’s an okay guy. I thought we were supposed to like mavericks and long shots.”
“It’s this ‘wealth creation’ bullshit, Benny,” George says, calling Ben by his old nickname. “It’s stupid and dangerous.”
“Dangerous? Dangerous? Are you going left-wing on me, George? You know, we’re all free marketeers now. It’s required.”
“Okay, irresponsible. Undiscriminating. Sloppy. It’s Tony Robbins infomercial talk. You know? ‘Wealth creation.’ Come on.”
“Can we talk about something else? Did I tell you about my plan to buy Aqueduct and turn it into the only NASCAR track in the civilized world?”
“No.”
“Oh, he’s moping. Okay, there’s a lot of sizzle with the steak out there. Too much. Point taken.”
“ ‘Wealth creation’ treats some bogus stock that’s, like, quindoubled in two weeks as the equivalent of real earnings at General Motors. It’s like Tinkerbell, the miracle happens because we clap our hands and”—George puts on a silly Romper Room grin—“believe.”
“Yeah, but Tinkerbell can actually fly. She’s actually magic. We’re right to believe. By the way, can you tell me how to quindouble some of my positions?”
George stares off at a plane landing, gliding down, out of sight.
“You’ll be pleased to know,” Ben says, trying to change the subject again, “that we told Pat Buchanan’s people they couldn’t hold some family-values photo op at BarbieWorld tomorrow.”
“I sort of like Pat Buchanan.”
Ben looks at him. “You are just determined to be the orneriest asshole you possibly can be tonight, aren’t you? Maybe you should’ve fucked that girl. Something.”
George shuts his eyes. “Do you have any seltzer?”
“Seltzer?” says Ben, suddenly excited, ducking back in ahead of George through the terrace door, moving like an overwound mechanical doll. “I’ve got Pellegrino literally on tap in here.”
As Ben skitters into his kitchen to push the Pellegrino button—hotel room kitchens: the ultimate useless dacha luxury, DIY on an expense account—George flops down on a big, cartoonishly asymmetrical burgundy couch, so soft and oversize it’s more an homage to a settee than a settee. The glow of the laptop screen illuminates his face.
“Did you see your pal Buchanan on the news today?” Ben shouts.
“He disagrees. He believes things. What happened today? Some slur about the Arab League millennium boycott?” Since late last year, the Arab countries have made a great show of being aggrieved about the worldwide hoopla over the two thousandth anniversary of Christ’s birth. One of the mainline Moslem groups called the American TV networks’ live broadcasts of colorful “millennium celebrations” in Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Morocco “grotesque and imperialistic anti-Islamic fabrications.” And they have a point, George figures, even though it’s been hard to argue the case since the suicide bombing of CNN’s Cairo bureau in January.
“No. Buchanan claims Panama is funding the Zapatistas. And he stands up in San Diego, right on the border, and says if even a single rebel platoon is spotted within a hundred miles of ‘the Canal Zone’—he still calls it that, I guess it’s this year’s ‘Nationalist China’—we should invade. He actually called a retaking of the canal ‘America’s right of return.’ The guy is just unbelievable.” Ben arrives with the Pellegrinos, which he sets down, and a bucket-size can of macadamias, which he opens with a bass whoosh. What a good sound. “Panama has only had the canal for two months, and already we’re trying to steal it back.”
George is stretched out on his back, arms behind his head, eyes closed. “What are we, Ben?”
“Uh-oh. Time for bed.”
George opens his eyes. “No, I mean, we’re not liberals, are we? But we’re not conservatives. Are we?”
His mouth full of macadamias, Ben asks George, “Invade Mexico: pro or con?”
“What, we’re playing the McLaughlin Group home game now? Against. But I guess I can imagine circumstances where we might have to do something.”
The two main guerilla groups in southern Mexico jointly launched their “New Millennium offensive” a little over two months ago, on January first. It was the sixth anniversary of the Zapatistas’ first big action, when they seized six towns in Chiapas in 1994. The guerillas’ brilliant timing impressed George back then. The North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect that day, New Year’s is always a news vacuum, and the first of the year fell on a Saturday, guaranteeing maximum play on the Sunday morning news shows and in the Sunday Times and The Washington Post. Not that their media savvy generated any enduring interest—the half-life of the story in the States was about two weeks. This year, though, now that the insurrection was starting to get some traction, the guerillas’ New Year’s timing worked well. The first of January once again fell on Saturday. Coming directly off the interminable syrupy wallow of millennium coverage, the TV news shows and papers and weekly magazines couldn’t have been happier: better than Y2K snafus, Mexico was providing unembarrassing, unequivocal, old-fashioned hard news, week after week, pitting have-nots against haves right here in our hemisphere. Mortar attacks on hydroelectric facilities, shaky videos inside secret guerilla bases, revolutionaries with American mothers and brothers to interview in East L.A.
and Phoenix, army officers smashing video cameras on camera. And plenty of three-hour nonstop flights to Mexico City. Last year’s big rebel offensive started during George’s final week at ABC, and it made him the most excited he’d been about his job in years. He had to remind the on-air people not to sound gleeful when they used phrases like “large Zapatista deployment in the dense Lacandon rain forest” and “the U.S.-supplied Huey gunships based just across the border in Guatemala’s Petén jungle.”
“Waiting for that trumped-up Gulf of Veracruz incident, are you?” Ben asks George with a smile. “You sound like Al Gore.”
“Why do you still give money away to the Democrats, Ben?”
“I don’t give money only to candidates.”
“I know, I know. You’re sending everyone at P.S. 148 to Wharton. You got Def Ex investment-banked.” Def Ex is the new, black-owned overnight-delivery company that serves only the twenty largest cities in America.
“Excuse me for caring. Just because you won’t give a dime to anybody, don’t—”
“Ben, I can’t. I couldn’t. Journalists can’t. But really, Benny, why do you give money to the Democrats qua Democrats? Abortion is not going to be outlawed. Old people are not going to be impoverished.”
“It’s my religion. I’ll always be a Democrat. And I tell you, the more money I make, the stronger I feel that. I know there are Republicans who agree with us on every issue; most of the guys I do business with are like that. But those kinds of Republicans can’t be elected to anything in a zip code that begins with a number higher than two. I’d rather be in a party where the wingnuts are multiculti union crazies than one with racist anti-Semite antiabortion crazies.”
Turn of the Century Page 25