by Bruce Wagner
“So another eight or nine months pass—eight or nine months!—and the thing’s fucking with me, mentally. I wasn’t working so I’ve got way too much time on my hands, all right? He’s got me turning into Lenny Bruce! I’m actually starting to get paranoid. I was on all this medication—lithium and shit—these were the pioneer days of bipolar!—but I’d stopped taking it for the reasons you always do and I started to drug a bit. That’s the cycle. OK? And I’m getting more and more fixated on this fucker. We’re getting closer to the legal endgame—is this not fantastic?—where the court’s gonna have to rule against the tinkerer’s appeal. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing all this reading—about stalkers and assassins. I’m not even sure how I got into that. But one of the books says sometimes the snapping point for these freaks is when they’re humiliated by the court system. Like if a wife gets a restraining order against her husband and he kills her when he probably wouldn’t have if she hadn’t taken that final step, hadn’t publicly confronted. I start to think (I’m also doing crystal meth, which isn’t exactly helping my thought processes): what if this guy guns me down? Right at the courthouse? I mean, I’m a semipublic figure—I wasn’t as known then as I am now . . . probably not too hard to find, though, right? You could spit Off-Broadway and find me in some equity waiver. What if this guy does a Stephen King—what was that movie with Jimmy Caan and Kathy Bates?—what if he kidnaps me and performs a little genital surgery? Or buries me alive in some sub-basement? This is what’s going through my head, Bertie! So I go nuts a few weeks, looking over my shoulder, checking phone messages—then I start to think, enough already. We had a court date scheduled. Now, I wasn’t sure if he was going to show, which at this point would have been worse for me, psychologically. He was probably out of options. Couldn’t maneuver anymore. I do some serious thinking, and here’s what I come up with: I’m gonna call the guy. That’s right. I’m gonna call the bogeyman on the phone. Preempt him. I must have done a shitload of coke and scotch and I don’t even want to think what. And I finally call him up at like midnight—remember, by now, in my head, he’s Arthur Bremer!—and I leave this message on his machine. He doesn’t pick up. I’m relieved—sort of. Though part of me actually wouldn’t have minded talking. So I say, See you in court. But nonconfrontational. I tell him I want to work something out—I’m talking to the machine—because I’m tired. I want to resolve it, peaceably. Totally whacked but trying to make sure my voice is friendly even though in the back of my head I’m worried he’ll pick up in the middle and say, ‘I’m gonna cut your dick off, stuff it in your mouth, and set you on fire! Put that in your time machine!’ This is how psychotic I’ve become.
“We show up in court. And there he is, King Nerd—a white, worried, harmless guy. We both sign some document saying we’re going to work it out. He writes me a check for two hundred fifty dollars. And I don’t give a shit. Fuck the money. And he’s apologetic. Had this battered briefcase. Like me! A schlemiel. I actually felt sorry for him. Then I get this brilliant idea. I’ll ask if he can sell me the time machine I saw on his shelf the day I first walked in. I don’t even care if it’s finished! I’ll buy it, as is—for the thirty-five hundred I already gave him. But first, I need to ask if he still has it. I do and he says, Yeah. So fuck it, I’ll get the sample. It won’t all have been in vain. It’ll even be funny, a kind of symbol of the folly of my great quest. So I say, Can I have that? For the two-fifty? It’s actually thirty-five hundred but I say two-fifty. Then ‘we’ll be even.’ And he says, No! Now, it wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to sell it that riled me—I mean, it was that too!—but I’m remembering the way he said it, like I was some rube who walked into Cartier to bargain them down over a necklace in the window. He was actually being smug! So I get this little smile on my face—at this point, I don’t even want to ask why he won’t sell it because the whole thing is like so piled sky-high with psychotic bullshit. Then send me a Polaroid. That’s what I tell him—but still friendly, like, OK, you win. Right? I mean, it’s so tragically risible that I thought a Polaroid would be a fitting souvenir. I asked if he’d take a snapshot—and all he had to say was yes, even if he never planned to—you know, my way of giving him a way out—and he says, No. Again! He actually said that he couldn’t. In the same smug way: like I’m a tourist being reprimanded by a guard for touching the Rodin.
“On the way home from court, I wondered if the time machine I’d seen two years earlier had been a quickie mock-up, a cardboard plant, to lure me in. I mean, more and more the guy was like someone Ricky Jay would play in a Mamet flick. But to what end? What was the big score here? Thirty-five hundred dollars and a Small Claims hassle?
“A week or so later, I was recounting the story to Clea—this is a long time ago, we’d just started seeing each other—and I have this ecstatic revelation. Almost like a religious experience. I realize this man, this tinkerer, wasn’t human. The motherfucker wasn’t real. This wasn’t my medication—or lack of it—talking. I came to the conclusion it was some kind of entity that was trying to tell me something. What it was trying to say was, you can’t go backward—and you can’t go forward, either. This . . . this schleppy thing was illuminating the arrogance of my aspirations, and the pain and suffering it had caused. I became absolutely convinced that if I tried calling the man’s number again, there’d be a recording. That I misdialed—or it didn’t exist. Not ‘disconnected’ but nonexistent. And if I visited where he lived, the little workshop would be shuttered or razed. You know, where you see the postman and he says, ‘That place has been vacant for thirty years.’ And I knew there’d be no record of our time in court—no paper trail. I didn’t even want to look into it. I knew it all—and oh shit! That was another thing: I lost the check. For two-fifty. Never found the check. It fucking vanished. And to this day, Bertram, I’m a thousand percent certain my theory is sound. It’s a Twilight Zone episode, OK? With a Zen twist. You believe in this kind of shit, don’t you? How can you not? And it turns out—the moral of it—is one of the most beautiful things life ever taught me.” He paused, then said, “Do you understand, Bertie?”
I nodded.
He looked out the cold, dirty window into the dark.
“The week after we built our time machine, Jeremy went off to Capri to join my father. And that was where he drowned.”
* * *
1 OK, it was hard to stay mad at him. So I’m an enabler, I’ll admit. Feel better?
WHEN THAD SUGGESTED we find a way to occupy ourselves in quaint San Rafael during Clea’s gig, she wouldn’t hear of it.
She insisted on our presence in the auditorium during the tried-and-true cabaret-style tragicomic monologue that she performed prior to autographing photos, posters, and miscellanea, both Roos-and Clea-related, offered up by rabid fans. There must have been over 2,000 folks converging from God knows where (three of Roos Chandler’s most famous films plus two obscure ones plus a rare home-movie clip were being screened) and I marveled at the organized industry of it. Clea’s share of the take was a flat $35,000. The promoters couldn’t have been happier with the bonus burger of her unexpected companion, Thad Michelet. In short time, the faithful flock miraculously handed over effluvia for signing—stills from The Jetsons and Quixote, that sort of thing. He was remarkably good-humored about it, I suppose still redeeming himself for his bad behavior of the night before.
We were back in L.A. around 10:00 P.M. The car dropped me off before ferrying them back to the Chateau.
AFTER HEARING ABOUT THAD’S BROTHER up close and personal, it seemed a morbid coincidence that Ensign Rattweil had been assigned a perversely devoted twin who’d remained behind with the Vorbalidian parents. The monstrous Prince Morloch was jockeying for the throne; for reasons of arcane galactic law which only the writers understood, Rattweil had been forcibly summoned from self-exile to bear witness to the royal succession. I should add that I made it a point to quiz the staff—had they been aware of the biographical detail of twinhood before crafting the telepl
ay? They swore they had not.
So it was with an air of bizarre anticipation that on Monday morning I found myself, along with Thad, Captain Laughton, X-Ray, and the android Cabott 7, loitering amid a barren landscape strewn with formidable-sized boulders—Soundstage 11’s all-purpose blue screen wilderness. Cabott was compelled, in typically droll fashion, to inform us that instead of landing within the coordinates guaranteeing our arrival at the official Vorbalidian seat, we had instead corporealized in a wasteland, an error he attributed to the “most peculiar” qualities of radiation emitted by the Great Dome. We’d overshot the government enclave which, owing to its configuration when scanned from the ship, had the shape of a large white flower. As the Demeter’s resident wag and Earth world history buff, I—Commander Karp, rather—dubbed the buildings the Chrysanthemum Palace.
“Cabott,” said the captain. “By your reckoning, how far are we from city center?”
The android glanced at a handheld device. “Around twenty thousand miles, sir.”
“Pity,” said Dr. Chaldorer. “I didn’t pack my hiking boots.”
Thad clocked the landscape with a dull shock of recognition. “I know this place—it’s the Fellcrum Outback.” When the captain asked him to explain, he informed it was ancient fighting ground. “Vorbalidian nobles often used blood sport to settle disputes.”
“Curious,” said Cabott, wrinkling his nose. “One of the most advanced of all known civilizations, engaged in gladiatorial combat.”
He requested permission to reconnoiter soil samples. Laughton told me to accompany the major but remain within shouting distance. We exited camera right. The good doctor lazily positioned himself against a papier-mâché rock, of which there was a great profusion. I watched from the wings.
“What exactly happened between you and your family?” probed the captain.
“I’d rather not discuss it, sir.”
“I’m ordering you, Ensign. By concealing your true identity, you’ve endangered a starship and her crew.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Thad, subtly flinching. “I never imagined they would—”
“I am not assigning blame. All the same, I expect some answers.”
“I suppose . . . I never belonged.” He plunged in without fanfare, delivering potential laugh lines as if abruptly from the analyst’s couch—an unvarnished, marvelous choice that made him as watchable as it did vulnerable. “As the king’s son, tremendous pressures are exerted. There are expectations. Responsibilities . . .”
“We all have responsibilities, yeoman,” said the captain, tough yet avuncular. “Mine is the Demeter and her crew. That’s what it means to be a grown-up.”
“You couldn’t understand,” said Thad, wandering toward a clump of lime green stalactites. A touch of Monty Clift savvily crept into the stutter of sturm und drang. “There was no privacy—to study the things I cared for. No time to be myself.” A smile graced the captain with the realization he had engaged an exotic, overgrown adolescent. “The days and nights were empty, filled with mindless pomp and circumstance.”
“I assume there are necessary evils to growing up as you did . . . though I have a hard time imagining ‘pomp and circumstance’ high on that list. May not a prince be able to choose how he spends his day?” asked the captain, slipping into the manneredly aggressive mode that had become a veritable staple of Mad TV parody. “He has merely to assert, to demand—”
“I am not my brother! He revels in the trappings of palace, the glory of his subjects. My father always said he was a throwback to olden times. Morloch is a warrior—his whole life has been a rehearsal for kingship.”
“But how,” said the captain, with the sensual, stammering breathiness that was his hallmark, “did you come to leave a world that was your home? To give up your birthright as prince . . . for the corridors and engine rooms of a Legion starship?”
“I—I ran away,” said the ensign, sadly. His father’s shame was such that the royal court was forced to tell the people he had perished “while on what we call a Kuzda: a spiritual rite of passage endured by Vorbalidian males similar to the ‘vision quest’ of your American Indians.”
Suddenly, the captain had newfound admiration, impressed by the “moral ferocity” it took for the ensign to give up family and monarchal inheritance in order to live as a free man.
“That,” he said, “is true warriorship.”
“I’ve had time to think about it, sir.” Thad grew pensive, readying himself to walk the plank of one of those lowbrow-highbrow Starwatch soliloquies. “I’ve concluded it was fear that exiled me—fear that banished me from the kingdom of my life. You see, Captain, I was in love with a woman, and ran away under the cloak of ‘integrity.’ I was afraid I would abdicate and bring her disgrace. You cannot imagine what it’s like to be born a prince yet know in your heart you are not that. Rather, you are a foot soldier of mediocre stamina, little ambition, and less vision: in a word, an ensign.” Pause. “And that I have become.”
“True,” said Laughton, in full-bore Emmy throttle. (A few writers had converged just out of eye line to behold the harvesting of the fruits of their labors.) “I cannot. Nor can you imagine what it is like to awaken each morning a foolish, frightened boy who must convince himself—and his crew—that he is captain of a starship.” At “Cut!” the crew applauded both men. We broke for lunch.
I ate barbecued chicken with a cute little gaffer. Upon finishing, I noticed a production assistant loading up a tray with assorted desserts. I assumed correctly they were destined for Mr. Michelet and told the P.A. I’d bring them to the trailer myself.
As I stepped into sunlight with my clumsy burden of sweets, Clea intercepted, steering me toward makeup. They were redoing Thad for the scenes featuring his twin—Morloch was to have a slightly harder, “Brechtian” edge. They held him captive in a big barber’s chair while a rash of newfangled skinware was applied. His hair acquired extensions, some wrapped in the same aluminum foil that covered the peach cobbler and melting vanilla ice cream; he looked like something out of Ed Wood. The guest star was allowed a moment’s respite so Clea could insert a spoonful of pie into his mouth before the gals went back to the surgical task at hand. An assistant director knocked at the door: he was needed on set. Another five minutes passed while cosmetic snake charmers called forth the cobra Morloch, then ten, then fifteen, the mood typically urgent, sweaty, and airless as walkies crackled outside and the nervous messenger hovered, fearing he’d be shot for the delay. Finally, the dark prince was released. Clea and I walked him to the soundstage, preceded by the A.D. as if by royal retinue. Occasionally, a bustling carpenter or grip whistled or shouted approbation of the ensign’s charismatically toxic transformation.
Thad strolled abstracted to his off-camera mark.
Clea and I had a few minutes to catch up before shooting began. She said Miriam called with good news: Mordecai Klotcher had expressed interest in The Soft Sea Horse, and wanted to “get Thad in a room” with some hot young director. Clea delighted in adding that there was a nice response to the Children of the Famous idea when her agent floated it past a certain Showtime exec. More importantly, things had been going well with the couple since the big upset—the San Rafael excursion had worked wonders. (She thanked me again for coming.) I told her Dad wanted to throw a soirée for them at the house on Friday night, and was particularly looking forward to meeting Thad.
An A.D. shouted imperiously.
We scrambled to our positions. A makeup girl gave my boots a sheen of Fellcrum fairy dust.
The director called “Action!”
I entered frame, out of breath, followed by the android.
“A landing party, Captain,” I said. “Headed this way.”
“How many?” he asked.
“Two,” said Cabott. “A male and a female.”
A beat later, Morloch arrived accompanied by his consort, Ambassador Trothex. With glistening cobalt blue hair and tackily resplendent jewel-woven bodice (native to th
is far-flung quadrant), Clea looked breathtaking—and astonishingly like her mother.1
After introducing himself, the flamboyant prince apologized for our awkward arrival, noting “how even Vorbalidian technology could not circumvent the devilish molecular tricks played by the magnetic properties of our Great Dome.” The captain didn’t buy it, going on record that our forced visit flew in the face of established Jano-Kryag Convention accords.
Morloch approached the ensign. (Actually the script supervisor. Thad would shoot the opposing part later in the week, the two images ultimately spliced together.)
“How soft you’ve gotten,” said Morloch.
“How hard you’ve remained,” said the script supervisor. “What is the state of Father’s health?”
“Your arrival will most likely finish him,” said Morloch, wonderfully witchy.
“And—Mother?”
“A shadow. A wraith. A phantom,” said the twin, gleefully chewing the blue screenery. It was fun as hell to watch.
As the scene continued I noticed Thad’s features, even beneath the shell of appliances, weirdly soften. Then, as if in a dream, he stepped languorously off his mark.
“O graceful moon, I remember, upon this hill I would come full of anguish to look at you . . . and you hung over that wood as now you do, lighting it all . . . and yet it helps me to remember, and to count the age of my pain—”