by Lee Goldberg
The Korean tenants were scavenging what they could, despite the strong possibility the building could collapse right on top of them. Four bloodied tenants struggled to heft a dented Kenmore dishwasher out of a ground floor apartment. Other tenants carefully carted out computers, stereo systems, and TVs, gathering it all on the sidewalk under the guard of family members.
It didn’t matter that these goodies were useless to them now, that they wouldn’t keep them alive, warm, and healthy for another day. What was important is what they’d once cost. A can of corn and the water it was packed with was only worth sixty-five cents, a dishwasher was worth three hundred dollars. At that price, who cared if the machine worked or if you’d live to use it again?
Yet even as Marty watched them, shaking his head with disdain, he found himself wondering if Beth managed to retrieve his laptop and their new TiVo. Before he could berate himself, they reached Western Avenue, which looked like it had been plowed up the center by an enormous hoe. Cars, buses and telephone poles were scattered everywhere, overturned by the uplifted roadway.
The street was filled with people, mostly Koreans, treating their wounds, embracing each other, or staring in dazed disbelief at the destruction. Marty hardly noticed; the scene had become the only familiar site in this transformed city, the new standard of normalcy. The only people who caught Marty’s attention were the ones holding AK-47s, standing in front of their slumped storefronts and flattened mini-malls, just waiting for the looting hordes to arrive.
Marty looked over at Buck, worried that the Neanderthal psycho might do something. “Don’t do anything stupid, Buck. Let’s just walk through here as quietly and as inconspicuously as we can. We don’t want trouble.”
“What the fuck are you afraid I’m going to do?”
“I don’t know, but these people are very nervous and the slightest thing might set them off.”
“They don’t look nervous to me.”
“Then why are they holding automatic weapons?”
“So you’ll be nervous,” Buck waved to the nearest armed Korean. “Yang chow, amigo-san.”
Marty averted his gaze and hurried along as fast as he could. He didn’t want to be too close when the Korean gunned down Buck.
Koreatown was nothing like the one Marty remembered from LA Seoul, which was claustrophobic, humid, and dark, the air thick with incense and opium and dangerous men in Manchu jackets. Nor, much to Marty’s surprise, was this Koreatown packaged for tourists yet, the entire country and culture synthesized into Disneyfied pagodas and imitation silk robes with catchy slogans.
The only thing Marty could see that set this bland retail strip apart from any other were the services offered-acupuncture, aromatherapy, Shiatsu massage? and the plethora of signs, all written in bright, red Korean calligraphy with English translations in tiny print underneath.
Shong Hack Dong’s Permanent Make-up. Jang Soo Bakery. Myung Ga Massage. Yum Park Sa Ne Restaurant. Yeh’s Tailor. Myong Dong Natural Herbs. Kentucky Fried Chicken.
That stopped Marty.
There, unscathed and resplendent amidst the destruction, the smiling caricature of Colonel Sanders smiled down at Marty from atop a sleek building comprised of metal cubes, aerodynamic fins, and steel vents. It looked like the Colonel just returned from outer space with an emergency bucket of extra crispy chicken.
“Good idea, Marty,” Buck said. “I was feeling a little hungry myself.”
“I don’t think it’s open.”
“Don’t worry, the maitre’d knows me.” Buck headed for the restaurant.
That’s when they heard the shriek of rubber against asphalt. Marty and Buck turned to see a truck, its tires spinning and smoking, pulling a set of chains attached to an ATM machine in the wall of a bank. The front of the truck bucked like a horse, its front tires lifting off the ground; then it landed hard and jumped forward, tearing the ATM out and dragging it a few feet before stopping in a cloud of stucco and loose cash.
Two Mexicans piled out of the truck, grabbed bags from the back of the bed, and started scooping up the cash while a third man watched, a shotgun in his arms.
Marty glanced at the Koreans. They weren’t doing anything, even though they had the Mexican out-gunned a hundred to one. They were just standing there, watching. They didn’t seem to care at all, which was a great relief to Marty, who didn’t want to die in a shootout, but he was curious why they weren’t interested.
Then he saw the Wells Fargo sign and understood. It wasn’t their bank. Even so, Marty wanted to get going in case they changed their minds. He was about to tell Buck just that when the bounty hunter drew his gun and smiled.
“This will only take a minute,” Buck started towards the men.
Marty grabbed him. “What the hell are you doing?”
But Marty already knew, because it was what the moment demanded, playing out just like those $800-a-weekend screenwriting courses and countless action movies said it should. It was the inevitable scene when the hero proves what a wild, dangerous man he is by stumbling into a hold-up, a hostage situation, a guy attempting suicide, or a creative combination of all three.
But this wasn’t a movie.
“They’re robbing a bank.” Buck let his arm hang straight, hiding the weapon behind his leg. “That’s a no-no.”
“Who gives a shit?” Marty said. “We just had an earthquake. The city has been leveled. The money doesn’t matter.”
“It will.”
Buck shook free of Marty and marched across the street towards the Mexican with the shotgun, who didn’t seem to notice him.
Buck yelled: “Hey, Taco Bell!”
Now the Mexican did. He pointed the shotgun at Buck.
“Yeah, you,” Buck kept coming. “You think you’re slick?”
The self-anointed screenwriting gurus called this the defining moment, or more pompously, “the essential re-stating of the mythic-hero paradigm,” and Marty hated it every time he saw it. The moment was false, formulaic, and creatively bankrupt. Yet, Marty demanded that writers give it to him in the first five minutes of the first episode of every cop show on his network. And if they argued with him about doing it, he fired them and brought in a writer who would. Now Marty was being forced by fate, or some cosmic guardian of the Writers Guild of America, to live the scene. Or die from it.
The two unarmed Mexicans stopping shoving cash into their bags and rose to their feet, shared a worried look, and faced Buck. They didn’t know what to make of this guy. One of them said something threatening to him in Spanish.
“No habla bullshit, Dorrito,” Buck continued to advance on the shooter, who shifted his weight nervously, looking to his friends for guidance and not getting any.
“Fuck off,” the shooter told Buck. “Or I shoot.”
Buck shook his head and turned to the two unarmed men. “Where’d you guys find this moron?” He motioned to the shooter, and they looked, which distracted them from seeing his gun as he passed by. “Taco Bell doesn’t know shit and I can prove it.”
The shooter raised his shotgun level with Buck’s chest. “I blow your balls off you don’t stop.”
“Not with the safety on, dipshit.”
The shooter glanced down at shotgun. In that instant of inattention, Buck jammed his gun into the man’s groin with one hand and swatted the shotgun aside with the other.
Buck leaned into his face so their noses were almost touching. “If your friends don’t sit the fuck down and do exactly what they’re told, you’ll be a Ken doll.”
The shooter was either stupidly defiant or simply unfamiliar with what Barbie wanted from a man, because he didn’t say a word. So Buck cocked the trigger and pushed the gun into him. “How about this? They sit or Taco Bell is gonna be Tinker Bell.”
The point, if not the allusion, got through to the Shooter, who immediately told his friends to sit. They did.
Marty looked at the Koreans. They were smiling. The scene worked every time. It didn’t make it any less stupi
d. Now that the situation seemed to be under control, Marty marched over to Buck and said: “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Stop whining and take away Taco Bell’s shotgun.”
Marty took it from the shooter’s hand, examined it, then tossed it into the truck bed. “The safety wasn’t on.”
Buck grinned at the glowering Mexican. “Oops.”
B uck was still grinning after he and Marty finished tying the three Mexicans to a telephone pole. It only made Marty angrier.
“You think it’s funny, Buck? You could have gotten killed. And for what?”
“A big, fat paycheck.” Buck stuck one of his business cards into in the shirt pocket of each of his prisoners. “When the cops show up, they’ll know who caught these dipshits. And so will the bank. I should get a couple grand out of this. You know, this earthquake could be real good for my business.”
“Do me a favor, Buck. Take the rest of the day off.”
Marty walked away, weaving through the small crowd of Koreans who gathered to watch Buck at work. Buck tipped an imaginary hat at the smiling Koreans and joined Marty.
“What the fuck are you so angry about?”
“Because you could have started a shoot-out back there,” Marty replied. “And if one of the Koreans got hit, they’d have started shooting too, and it would have been a bloodbath.”
“Bullshit,” Buck smiled and pointed an accusatory finger at Marty. “You were worried about me.”
“I was afraid I’d get killed and wouldn’t make it home to my wife.”
“See? It’s happening already. You’re rooting for me. I told you I was a great fucking character,” Buck clapped Marty on the back. “I’m even willing to consider a black sidekick, as long as it’s not Arsenio Hall.”
Years from now, this was the anecdote Marty would tell at parties or network events. How in the middle of the Big One, climbing through the ruins of LA to get back home, he was pursued by a crazy bounty hunter trying to pitch him a series.
Was that what the big stunt at the bank was all about? Part of the pitch? Whether it was or not, it would be when Marty told the story.
But the story would soon be coming to an end. It was a little after six. Another mile or two, they’d be in Hollywood. Buck would go home, disappearing from his life forever, and Marty would continue over the Cahuenga Pass, arriving in the San Fernando Valley just as night fell. The rest of the trip would be a straight shot down Ventura Boulevard to Calabasas.
Nice and easy. Maybe there would even be a Starbucks open for business. With so many of them in the valley, statistically it just wasn’t possible that the Big One had leveled them all.
That pleasant thought occupied Marty for the next half hour as they climbed over rubble and moved through the injured, the lost, and the hopeless.
Marty tried to imagine how Beth would look, how happy she would be to see him. In his mind, there wasn’t a scratch on her, she was as he left her that morning in the kitchen. Only the coldness would be gone, because he knew if he could walk across this decimated city to her, then traveling the distance in their marriage wouldn’t seem so hard anymore.
To make that journey, he’d have to start almost two years ago. They weren’t living in the Calabasas house then; they were still in the ranch-style place in Reseda. They were “north of the boulevard,” the demarcation line across the valley separating those who’d “made it” and were living in the foothills above Ventura Boulevard from those still trying to and living in the flatlands below.
Marty was in his home office, stuck on page 138 of his second, unfinished novel. Shortly after he got his network job, he set aside his unfinished scripts, rationalizing his failure to complete a screenplay was the price he paid for being too damn good at his job. He spent his days developing other people’s scripts, criticizing draft after draft until the writers got the story and the characters as good as their limited skills would allow. The problem was when Marty sat down to write himself at night, he couldn’t stop being a network executive. He couldn’t write a line without giving himself notes before he was even done typing it.
So Marty switched to novels, knowing that would free him up creatively to be the inventive, insightful, prolific writer he knew he was.
Or would be… if he could just get past page 138.
It wasn’t so much that the stories petered out, which they did, but that none of the characters ever seemed to come to life. They were just game pieces, moving around the plot, performing their story function without ever breathing. He was always dragging them across the page, pushing them into situations, forcing them to speak, and then agonizing over each word they said.
Just once, Marty wanted a character to take over, to say things that surprised him, to take the story in new directions he hadn’t thought of until he was actually writing them.
He was in one of those frustrating moments, staring hatefully at his laptop, at that 26,962nd word on the 138th page, when Beth came up behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. She meant to be affectionate and considerate, to disturb him as gently as possible, but the truth was he loathed the interruption no matter how nicely it was done, even when it wasn’t interrupting anything.
In fact, especially when it wasn’t.
“In two months, we’ll have been married three years,” Beth said softly.
“I haven’t forgotten our anniversary yet, but I appreciate the reminder.”
Marty regretted the tone of his voice right away and knew he’d hurt her by the way she let her hand drop off his shoulder. But Beth didn’t leave, she just dropped onto his ratty couch, the $200 Levitz special he’d been dragging from one house to another since college, and waited for him to turn around.
He did, and saw her snuggled into one corner, her knees drawn up to her chest, which he knew meant that a serious conversation was coming, and whatever it was, he’d just made it worse. Damage control time.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You caught me at a really bad moment. I’m in a difficult place in my book. The truth is, I’m stuck.”
“So am I,” she said. “I spend my days either going to auditions or playing bit parts, and my nights studying for them.”
“You’re an actress, that’s what you’ve got to do. The performance is what it’s all about.” He wondered what this was leading to, what this had to do with being married for three years, and why she had to bring it up now, on page 138.
“Tomorrow I’m playing a reporter who can’t get laid because she’s got bad breath but finds the man of her dreams once she starts using an amazing new mouthwash with an incredible, minty taste.”
Marty smiled. “It’s a beginning. You’re working towards something.”
“But I’m not getting there,” Beth glanced at his laptop. “Neither of us is.”
That was the most devastating, hurtful thing she’d ever said to him, even more so because she threw it off so casually, like it was an obvious truth. Which Marty supposed it was, he just had no idea she knew. And now it was out there, the unsaid said. He wasn’t a writer.
“You never wanted me to,” Marty said. “You were the one who pushed me to take a development job.”
“I didn’t have to push very hard.”
“Is that why you came in here, to tell me I can’t write or that you can’t act?”
It was what Marty always did when she attacked, strike back even harder. He knew this about himself, and yet he couldn’t stop doing it.
She studied her knees, which was a much safer place to be looking right now than at her husband. “No,” she replied softly.
That was Beth, winning by not upping the ante. She could get away with being cruel because he always fired back even harder, and then she’d acquiesce. And then he’d feel guilty, and he’d be the one to apologize. Even if he didn’t, she still occupied the higher ground. It was a constant, repeated pattern in their conflicts; they both knew it, and neither one seemed able to break it.
The dog came bounding in
ready to play, drool-soaked ball in his mouth, but even his dog brain was sophisticated enough to read the vibes in the room. He dropped his ball and slinked right out again.
“Why are we trying so hard?” she asked. “You working all day at the network and then trying to write all night. Me, going after as many parts as I can, taking anything that I’m offered?”
“Because that’s what you have to do to make it, to achieve your goals.”
“So that’s what we are, two people trying to achieve their goals.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s not enough.”
He knew what was missing. What he didn’t say. But it wasn’t too late to correct the mistake.
“We’re also two people who love each other very much.” Sometimes the right line came to him in life but rarely in fiction. For most writers, it was the other way around, but he didn’t consider himself fortunate.
She smiled, acknowledging his effort. “Two people who love each other but spend every moment in their separate worlds, obsessed with achieving their dreams. And for what?”
“To be who we want to be.”
“If that’s all it is, then it’s selfish and it’s empty and it’s lonely. We should be working for something, something shared.”
“Your success will make me as happy as it makes you,” he said. “Maybe more so, because I want it so badly for you. That makes it shared.”
“That’s sweet, and probably the perfect thing to say, but it doesn’t change anything. The fact is we’re doing it for ourselves. Not for us, not for our marriage, not for our family. If it was, then it would be worth it.”
Our family? What family?
And then he knew what this was all about, a long-winded, philosophical way of saying what could be expressed directly in four words. So he said them.
“You want a baby.”
She shook her head. “I want a family.”
Marty turned back to his laptop, giving himself some space to think. If he couldn’t write now, how much easier would it be with a wailing baby in the house? Forget the sleep deprivation, the noise, the demands on his time. What about the responsibility of having a child? The terror alone was enough to smother what little creative impulses he had left.