It could have been handled with far fewer personnel, but somebody—DL could guess who—had determined to give the neighbors a show. In front of Ditzah’s garage, on the cement, conical black heaps smoked, glowed, flared here and there into visible fire. Metal reels and plastic cores were scattered all over, and besides all the unspooled film burning there was a lot of paper, typed pages mostly, any scraps that temporarily escaped, spinning in eddies from the updraft, sent back into the flames by a sweeping crew. None of those observing the fire seemed to be civilians—the neighbors must have all been scared indoors. She noticed that the windows of the house had all been broken, the car trashed, trees in the yard taken down with chain saws and youthful muscle—she assumed it was the juvies in the buses who’d done all the physical work.
“How about Ditzah?”
“Still with her friends, hiding out. She’s OK, but she’s scared.”
Well so was Prairie. She had no choice but to stick with these two, and was only marginally reassured by the $135,000 manufacturer’s suggested retail price of the ride they took to Vineland, the ultimate four-wheeling rig, a Lamborghini LM002, with a V-12 engine that put out 450 horsepower, custom armed, wired and dialed to the hubcaps. It was like being taken off in a UFO. “Sometimes,” she’d told Ché, “when I get very weird, I go into this alternate-universe idea, and wonder if there isn’t a parallel world where she decided to have the abortion, get rid of me, and what’s really happening is is that I’m looking for her so I can haunt her like a ghost.” The closer they got to Shade Creek, the more intense this feeling grew. The speakers were all one cross-spectrum massive chord of discontent and longing by the time they reached the WPA bridge and began to thread the complex obstacle course into town.
Takeshi and DL had long been set up in a restored Vicky dating from Little Gold Rush days, when it had been an inn and brothel. They found a crowd of Thanatoids on the porch when they got there, and an atmosphere of civic crisis. CAMP search-and-destroy missions by now were coming over on a daily schedule. Brock Vond and his army, bivouacked down by the Vineland airport, had begun sending long-range patrols up Seventh River and out into some of the creek valleys, including Shade Creek. And now there was a full-size movie crew up here, based out of Vineland but apt to show up just about anyplace, prominent among whom, and already generating notable Thanatoid distress, was this clearly insane Mexican DEA guy, not only dropping but also picking up, dribbling, and scoring three-pointers with the name of Frenesi Gates.
“See?” DL nudged Prairie, whose mouth was ajar and abdomen tingling with fear, “what’d we tell you?”
They’d only missed Hector by about twenty minutes—he was headed for the Vineland nightlife, looking to see who else he could inveigle into his project, driving a muscular ’62 Bonneville he’d borrowed, or, OK, commandeered, from his brother-in-law Felipe in South Pasadena. In the back seat, on loud and bright, was a portable Tube, which Hector had angled the rearview mirror at so he could see, for the highway was a lonely place, and a man needed company. He’d stolen the set the last time he’d broken out of the Tubaldetox, this time, he swore, for good. Scientists. What did any of them know? The theory, when Hector was first admitted, had been homeopathic—put him on a retinal diet of scientifically calculated short video clips of what in full dosage would, according to theory, have destroyed his sanity, thus summoning and rallying his mind’s own natural defenses. But because of his dangerous demeanor, which the doctors only found out later was his everyday personality, they rushed him into therapy without the full set of workups, and misjudged his dosage. Who could have foreseen that Hector would have such an abnormally sensitive mentality that scarcely an hour of low-toxicity programming a day would be more than enough to jolt it into a desperate craving for more? He crept out of his ward at night to lurk anywhere Tubes might be glowing, to bathe in rays, lap and suck at the flow of image, more out of control than ever before in his life, arranging clandestine meets in the shadows of secluded gazebos and window reveals with dishonest Tubaldetox attendants who would produce from beneath their browns tiny illicit LCD units smuggled from the outside, which they charged exorbitant rent for and came at dawn to take back. After lights out, all the detoxees who could afford to would settle down beneath their blankets with prime-time through-the-air programming, all networks plus the four L.A. independents. By the time Hector ran out of money, the homeopaths were in disgrace and young Doc Deeply, at the head of his phalanx of New Agers all armored in the invincible smugness of their own persuasion, had beamed into power, proclaiming a new policy of letting everybody watch as much as they wanted of whatever they felt like seeing, the aim being Transcendence Through Saturation. For a few weeks, it was like a mob storming a palace. Schedules were abolished, the cafeteria stayed open around the clock, inmates who had OD’d wandered everywhere like zombies in the movies, humming theme songs from favorite shows, doing imitations of TV greats, some of them quite obscure indeed, getting into violent disputes over television trivia. “Amazing,” Dennis Deeply was surprised to find himself thinking out loud, “the place is like a nuthouse.”
After a lifetime of kicking other people around, Hector was suddenly here put down among the administered, judged as impaired, sick, and so, somehow, expendable. Time was he’d have blown people away for frustrating him less than this. What was happening to him? He had to believe that he was different, even as months began to creep by—that his release really was in the pipeline, that he really wouldn’t be inside for the rest of his life, here along these ever-lengthening, newly branching corridors, with progressively obsolete wall maps of the traffic system posted beneath lights he knew, though staff never admitted it, were being replaced each time with lower-wattage bulbs. As his program went on and his need for video images only deepened, he gathered a charge of anxiety that one day, as he looked in the mirror, discharged in a timeless crystalline episode in which both man and image understood that the only thing in the pipeline anymore was Hector—heading straight down it with only the one, call it less than one, degree of freedom, and no way to get out. But headed where? What kind of “outside world” could they be rehabilitating him for? “You’ll like it, Hector,” they kept assuring him, even when he didn’t ask. Every evening before they got to sit down and eat supper, everybody, holding their mess trays, had to sing the house hymn.
The Tube
Oh . . . the . . . Tube!
It’s poi-soning your brain!
Oh, yes. . . .
It’s dri-ving you, insane!
It’s shoot-ing rays, at you,
Over ev’ry-thing ya do,
It sees you in your bedroom,
And—on th’ toi-let too!
Yoo Hoo! The
Tube. . . .
It knows, your ev’ry thought,
Hey, Boob, you thought you would-
T’n get caught—
While you were sittin’ there, starin’ at “The
Brady Bunch,”
Big fat computer jus’
Had you for lunch, now Th’
Tube—
It’s plugged right in, to you!
All he had for hope—how he fingered it, obsessively, like a Miraculous Medal—was a typed copy, signed by Hector, Ernie Triggerman, and his partner, Sid Liftoff, of an agreement on this movie deal, or, as Ernie liked to say, film project, now stained with coffee and burger grease and withered from handling. Despite his personal savagery, which no one at the ’Tox chose to acknowledge, let alone touch, Hector in these show-biz matters registered as fatally innocent, just a guy from the wrong side of the box office, offering Ernie and Sid and their friends a million cues he wasn’t even aware of, terms used wrong, references uncaught, details of haircut or necktie that condemned him irrevocably to viewer, that is, brain-defective, status. Could he, with all the Tube he did, even help himself? Sitting in those breezy, easygoing offic
es up in Laurel Canyon with the hanging plants and palm-filtered light, everybody smiling, long-legged little bizcochos in leather miniskirts coming in and out with coffee and beers and joints that they lit for you, and coke that they held the spoon for you and shit? was he supposed to sit there like some Florsheim-shoed street narc, taking names down in a daybook? Why not join in the fun?
The deal was that Sid Liftoff in his vintage T-Bird had been stopped one recent night on Sunset out west of Doheny, where the cops lurk up the canyon roads waiting to swoop down on targets selected from all the promising machinery exceeding the posted limits below, only to be found, aha! with a lizard-skin etui stuffed with nasal goods under the seat on the passenger side, which to this day he swore had been planted there, probably by an agent of one of his ex-wives. Lawyers arranged for Sid to work off the beef with community service, namely by using his great talents and influence to make an antidrug movie, preferably full-length and for theatrical release. Hector, then attached to the Regional Intelligence Unit of the DEA office in Los Angeles, was assigned as liaison, though RIU work was understood to be punishment for 1811’s with dappled histories, and this Hollywood posting, Hector was required to appreciate, was a favor, to be returned one of these nights and in a manner unspecified.
But soon enough, Hector’s thoughts grew vertiginous, and he began to believe he’d been duked in to some deal, less and less willing to say when, or whether, he acted at the behest of DEA and when not, and neither Ernie nor Sid could quite decide how to ask. “The fucker,” Sid told Ernie, at poolside, in confidence, “wants to be the Popeye Doyle of the eighties. Not just the movie, but Hector II, then the network series.”
“Who, Hector? Nah, just a kid at the video arcade.” They discussed the degree of Hector’s purity, as then defined in the business, and ended up making a small wager, dinner at Ma Maison. Ernie lost. Sid started with the duck-liver pâté.
What Hector thought was his edge came about courtesy ot an old colleague in the arts of foot-assisted entry, Roy Ibble, now a GS-16 with a yen for regional directorship, who called in from Las Vegas with word that Frenesi and Flash had shown up in town. Without even thinking about it Hector obtained a confiscated Toronado and went ripping all night across the Mojave toward the heavenly city, denial of desert, realm of excess. In the movie it would be a Ferrari, and Hector would be wearing a carefully distressed Nino Cerruti suit and some hyper-cherry A.T.M. Stacey Adams zapos. Liftoff and Triggerman would see to that. Yeah, those guys would get him just about anything these days. He cackled out loud. These days it was Hector who wasn’t answering no phone calls, ése.
For according to a rumor sweeping the film community, a federal grand jury was convening to inquire into drug abuse in the picture business. A sudden monster surge of toilet flushing threatened water pressure in the city mains, and a great bloom of cold air spread over Hollywood as others ran to open their refrigerator doors more or less all at once, producing this gigantic fog bank in which traffic feared even to creep and pedestrians went walking into the sides of various buildings. Hector assumed parallels were being drawn to back in ’51, when HUAC came to town, and the years of blacklist and the long games of spiritual Monopoly that had followed. Did he give a shit? Communists then, dopers now, tomorrow, who knew, maybe the faggots, so what, it was all the same beef, wasn’t it? Anybody looking like a normal American but living a secret life was always good for a pop if times got slow—easy and cost-effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101. But why right now? What did it have to do with Brock Vond running around Vineland like he was? and all these other weird vibrations in the air lately, like even some non-born-agains showing up at work with these little crosses, these red Christer pins, in their lapels, and long lines of civilians at the gun shops too, and the pawnshops, and all the military traffic on the freeways, more than Hector could ever remember, headlights on in the daytime, troops in full battle gear, and that queer moment the other night around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., right in the middle of watching Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy Story, when he saw the screen go blank, bright and prickly, and then heard voices hard, flat, echoing.
“But we don’t actually have the orders yet,” somebody said.
“It’s only a detail,” the other voice with a familiar weary edge, a service voice, “just like getting a search warrant.” Onto the screen came some Anglo in fatigues, about Hector’s age, sitting at a desk against a pale green wall under fluorescent light. He kept looking over to the side, off-camera.
“My name is—what should I say, just name and rank?”
“No names,” the other advised.
The man was handed two pieces of paper clipped together, and he read it to the camera. “As commanding officer of state defense forces in this sector, pursuant to the President’s NSDD #52 of 6 April 1984 as amended, I am authorized—what?” He started up, sat back down, went in some agitation for the desk drawer, which stuck, or had been locked. Which is when the movie came back on, and continued with no further military interruptions.
There was a weirdness here that Hector recognized, like right before a big drug bust, yes, but even more like the weeks running up to the Bay of Pigs in ’61. Was Reagan about to invade Nicaragua at last, getting the home front all nailed down, ready to process folks by the tens of thousands into detention, arm local “Defense Forces,” fire everybody in the Army and then deputize them in order to get around the Posse Comitatus Act? Copies of these contingency plans had been circulating all summer, it wasn’t much of a secret. Hector knew the classic chill, the extra receptors up and humming, gathering in the signs, channels suddenly shutting down, traffic scrambled and jammed, phone trouble, faces in lobbies warning you that you don’t know them. Could it be that some silly-ass national-emergency exercise was finally coming true? As if the Tube were suddenly to stop showing pictures and instead announce, “From now on, I’m watching you.”
He deliberately dragged his feet on it but at last did Ernie and Sid the favor of taking a meeting. He found the mood in Holmby Hills a little more depressed than the last time he’d been up, the play areas empty of starlets now, the pool gathering leaves and algae, an autumnal string quartet on the audio instead of the usual K-tel party albums, and the only recreational drug inside the property line a case of Bud Light, which was disappearing fast, often without Ernie or Sid even waiting for it to get cold in the tiny patio fridge. Both men were nervous wrecks, covered with a sweatlike film of desperation to ingratiate themselves with the antidrug-hysteria leadership, suddenly perceived as the cutting edge of hip. Sid Liftoff, having owed much of his matey and vivacious public image to chemical intervention, often on an hourly basis, now, absent a host of illicit molecules in his blood, was changing, like Larry Talbot, into the wild animal at the base of his character, solitary, misanthropic, more than ready to lift his throat in desolate, transpersonal cry. Ernie, meanwhile, sat in a glazed silence that would have suggested his return, in this time of crisis, to his childhood religion, Soto Zen, except for the way he was unable to keep from handling his nose, with agitated fussing movements, as if trying to primp it into shape like a hairdo.
The pair, trembling and tense, had been exchanging remarks as Hector approached, calling, “Hi, guys,” his shoes flashing in the sun. Sid took a very professional beat and a half before leaping up violently, knocking over his custom deck chair, running to Hector, falling on his knees, and crying, “Fifty percent of producer’s net! That’s out of our own profits, isn’t that right, Ernie?”
“Uh-huh,” Ernie on some dreamy internal delay, through which Sid continued,” ’Course you appreciate that won’t happen till we get to the break-even point—”
“Do me a favor,” Hector struggling to get loose of the importunate Sid, dragging him a step at a time toward the pool, “and please, mis cortinas, man—take that producer’s net, use it to chase butterflies, around the grounds, of whatever institution deals with people who think I�
��m about to settle, for anythín short of gross participation here, me entiendes como te digo?”
Sid went flat on his face and burst into tears, kicking his feet up and down. “Hector! Amigo!”—further blowing it by most injudiciously reaching for Hector’s shoes, whose finish the world knew, or ought to know, that Hector had long entertained homicide among his options in defending. But now he skipped backward, reminding himself the man was distraught, mumbling courteously, “Sid, you might want to, ahm, you know, check yourself out. . . .”
Sid fell silent and presently got to his feet, wiping his nose on his forearm, rearranging his hair and neck vertebrae. “You’re right of course, frightfully immature of me Hector, I do apologize—for my outburst and also for my shortcomings as a host. . . please, here, a Bud Light? Not exactly bien fría, but the warmer temperature brings out more of the flavor, don’t you think.”
Graciously nodding, taking a beer, “Is that I would rather not hear no more about some ‘break-even,’ please, save that for Saturday morning, with the Smurfs and the Care Bears and them, OK?”
The two movie guys cried in unison, “Maybe a rolling gross?”
“La, la, la-lalla la,” Hector pointedly singing the Smurf theme at them, “La, la-lalla laahh. . . .”
“Just tell us then,” Sid pleaded. “Anything!”
How he had dreamed of this moment. He knew his mustache was perfect, he could feel where every hair was. “OK, a million in front, plus half of the gross receipts after gross equals 2.71828 times the negative cost.”
Sid’s tan faded to a kind of fragile bisque. “Strange multiple,” he choked.
“Sounds real natural to me,” Ernie twisting his nose back and forth. They screamed and yelled for the rest of the day till they had a document they could all live with, though Hector much more comfortably than the others, even imposing upon the project his own idea of a zippy working title, “Drugs—Sacrament of the Sixties, Evil of the Eighties.” The story hit the trades just about the time the grand-jury scare was cresting, so it got banner treatment and even a ten-second mention on “Entertainment Tonight”—no doubt about it, Ernie and Sid, first out of the chute into the antidrug arena, were making the town look good. Day after day skywriters billowed BLESS YOU ERNIE AND SID and DRUG FREE AMERICA in red, white, and blue over Sherman Oaks, though soon guerrilla elements were launching skyrockets charged to explode in the shape of a letter s and aimed at the space right after the word DRUG, changing the message some. Ernie and Sid found themselves allowed back into places like the Polo Lounge, where right after Sid’s bust he’d been if not 86’d, then at least, say, 43’d. And then Reagan’s people got wind of it and the two started hearing their names in campaign speeches. “Well . . . all I can say iss . . . ,” with the practiced shy head-toss of an eternal colt, “if theere’d been moore Sid Liftoffs and Ernie Triggermans in Hollywood, when I worked theere . . . we might not’ve had . . . soo minny cahmmunists in the unionss . . . and my jahb might’ve been a lot eassier . . . ,” twinkle. Die-hard industry lefties wrote in to publications to denounce Sid and Ernie as finks, Nazi collaborators, and neo-McCarthyite stooges, all of which was true but wouldn’t deflect them an inch from making the picture, which they must have thought, dope-clouded fools, would purchase them immunity from the long era of darkness they saw lying just ahead. The town attended, now wistful, now cruelly amused, depending how hysterical the news was that day, to the boys out running point for the rest of them. Go, fellas, go.
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