The Sirena Quest (6 page)

Chapter Twelve

An hour north of Springfield, Illinois, Lou pulled off I-55 for gas. He was cleaning the windshield with the squeegee when Ray came back out carrying two cans of Coke. He handed one to Lou.

Lou popped the tab and took a sip. “Did you ever reach Gordie?”

Ray leaned back against the side of the van. “Tried again this afternoon. He was in a meeting. Had his secretary put me in his voice mail. Told him where to meet us tomorrow morning.”

Lou dropped the squeegee back in the water bucket by the pump and turned to Ray. “When's the last time you saw Gordie?”

“Let's see…not for at least six years. He was still in California. Renting that crappy little studio apartment near the beach in Venice. Haven't seen him since he moved back. You?”

“About two years ago. I was up in Chicago for some depositions. We met for dinner.”

“What about Bronco?”

Lou shook his head. “Not for a long time.”

“Is he really a school teacher?”

“Middle school, I think. Spanish.”

“Teaching Spanish to seventh graders.” Ray shook his head. “Didn't he want to become Secretary of State?”

Lou smiled. “Yeah.”

“Remember that humongous pile of
Foreign Affairs
stacked on his desk?”

Lou nodded.

Ray took another sip of his Coke. “A school teacher? After all he's been through?”

Lou said, “Nowhere near as wacky as you becoming the Mall Maven.”

“Hey, I wasn't the guy with a poster of William Kunstler taped over my desk.”

Lou shrugged. “Times change.”

“Don't knock it. It's a living.”

“I guess. But it ought to be more than that.”

Ray groaned. “Oh, God. Not you, too.”

“Not me what?”

“As in what's wrong with our generation? Who said your job is supposed to be your life? My old man worked in a steel mill. His whole life. Even died in there, for chrissakes. You think he ever wondered whether he was self-actualizing in there? ‘Tapping into his inner child?' Shit, man, he was bringing home a paycheck, putting food on the table, paying the mortgage. That's what counts. Everything else is bullshit.”

“You're not your father.”

“That doesn't mean I'm looking for salvation in shopping malls, either. It's a job, Lou. A means to an end. Period.”

The gas station was just off the highway overpass. A convoy of three trucks rumbled by heading north. Lou watched the red taillights fade into the distance.

“Still,” Lou said, looking over at Ray, “shopping malls? You?”

“Pushing drugs, pushing merchandise.” Ray shrugged. “Just trading one addiction for another. Profit margin is smaller, but there are upsides. The only government agents you have to worry about are those four-eyed fucks from the IRS.”

Lou smiled. “I wasn't talking about your drug days. I meant before that. Back in college. We thought you were going to become one of the Philosopher Kings.”

Ray laughed. “No way.”

“So why'd you go?”

“Go?”

“To the University of Chicago. The graduate program in philosophy.”

Ray considered the question. “Fame, I guess.”

“In philosophy?”

Ray chuckled. “Sounds pretty lame now. But damn, Lou, I could pick that shit apart.”

Lou thought back to the required humanities seminar freshman year, to the week they were assigned Plato's
Symposium
. Professor Milton Beckmann, chair of the department, came in that week to teach the class. For almost the entire hour, Ray went one-on-one with that arrogant old bastard and fought him to a draw.

“And that's how you'd become famous?”

Ray looked over at Lou with a sheepish grin. “Youth, eh? I was going to be a celebrity professor—one of those guys who packs the lecture halls, gets interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS, gets called to Washington to advise the President.”

“So what happened?” Lou asked.

Ray stared into the darkness.

“What happened,” he finally said, “was a dead guy named Benjamin Clark.”

“Who's he?”

Ray turned to Lou. “That's my point.”

“What do you mean?”

“You never heard of him.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a war hero.”

“Which war?”

“Civil.”

Lou frowned. “I'm not following you.”

Ray turned toward the darkness again. “My ex-wife grew up in a small town in upper state New York. Near Lake George. Nice area. After my first year at the U of C, we drove up there to visit her folks.”

He paused to take a sip of his Coke.

“I headed out for a drive one afternoon—just smoking a joint and cruising along this two-lane road that cut through the woods. Passed a sign for a hiking path. It was a pretty day and I had nothing better to do, so I decided what the fuck.”

He finished the Coke and tossed the can into the trash bin.

The path meandered through the woods, he explained. A brook on the right, a hill rising on the left. About a mile down the path he came upon a half-rotted wooden sign that read, CIVIL WAR MEMORIAL. The arrow on the sign pointed to the left, where the main path branched off into an overgrown trail up the hill through the trees. Kind of curious and kind of stoned, he decided to check it out. The trail wound back and forth up the hill and leveled off in a small clearing.

“And there it was,” Ray said. “The memorial for Lieutenant Benjamin Clark.”

Your basic Civil War monument gone to ruin, he explained. Granite obelisk, twenty feet tall, leaning to one side, scraggly vines circling halfway up. Surrounded by rusted cannon balls and enclosed by a rusted iron picket fence, the black paint flaking off. A tarnished plaque near the base of the obelisk, barely legible, honored Lieutenant Benjamin Clark, a hometown hero who'd fought and died at Gettysburg at the age of twenty-three.

Ray paused and shook his head. “It blew me away.”

“How so?”

“I was twenty-three, too. Here's this guy—fought in the most important battle in the most important war of his time. Maybe of all time. Died a hero. At my age. A real hero, too. Not some
People
magazine puffball.”

Ray looked up at the night sky for a moment and then looked at Lou.

“I could picture the scene. Body brought home in a wagon draped in black crepe. Laid to rest with a hero's funeral. Brass band, patriotic eulogies, twenty-one gun salutes, pretty girls crying, grown men fighting back tears, women wringing their hands.”

He paused, replaying the scene in his mind as he stared up at the stars. Lou waited.

Ray shook his head. “So they built that monument on the hill overlooking the town. I bet you could see that obelisk from miles away. And there I stood, a century later, and the town is gone, the memorial is overgrown with weeds, and the monument stands—or leans, if it hasn't fallen over by now—in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere. No one remembers the poor bastard. I mean no one. I've tried to find him in the books. Most of the stories on the Battle of Gettysburg don't even mention his name, and those that do don't say anything about him. Just list him as one of the dead Union officers.”

Ray looked over at Lou and shook his head. “Anyway, there I was, staring at that forgotten monument to a forgotten hero, and it suddenly dawned on me: the whole fame thing is nothing but a meaningless crap shoot. Here's a guy who got famous for all the right reasons, and a hundred years later he's a nobody while yahoos like Sylvester Stallone and Pamela Anderson are living legends. Christ, Willard Scott is more famous than Thomas Hobbes.”

He smiled, eyes distant.

“So I said to myself, ‘Get real, douche bag.' I dropped out of school that fall. Never looked back.”

Lou said, “And you became famous anyway.”

“Isn't that a pisser?” Ray snorted. “Guy dies a hero at Gettysburg fighting to free the slaves and no one remembers his fucking name. I give the world another crappy Foot Locker opening onto another crappy food court with a piped-in Muzak version of ‘Brown Sugar' and they put my face on the cover of a national magazine.”

They stood side by side, leaning back against the van, staring in silence into the night sky beyond the halos of the arc lights. Lou thought of the image of that decaying monument in the middle of the dark forest.

A distant air horn caught his attention. The entrance ramp to I-55 sloped down as if it were a path along a river bank. The passing headlights illuminated its surface. The river image held—as if the highway were a giant river cutting through the cornfields. He checked his watch. Time to get back on that river.

He turned to Ray. “Shall we?”

Ray winked at Lou. “She's out there waiting for us, Lou.”

Lou smiled as he reached for the door handle. “Watch out, Willard Scott, here we come.”

Chapter Thirteen

When Ray had called Gordie that afternoon, his secretary told him that Mr. Cohen was in conference and couldn't be disturbed. She was just following orders: hold all calls—no ifs, ands, or buts.

She attributed that instruction to the Klassy Kat Kitty Litter account. The entire Klassy Kat marketing team was flying in from Louisville next week for the big presentation, and thus she assumed that Gordie was holed up in his office working on storyboards for the new commercial—the so-called Black Pussy Special, a thirty-second spot built around two “singing” black cats, one with Aretha Franklin's voice and the other with Louis Armstrong's voice.

She was wrong. Although Gordie was definitely hard at work in there, his goal was somewhat higher than deodorized cat feces.

He was writing The Great American Screenplay.

He'd been working on it for fourteen years now.

He was up to page four.

The script had been longer, of course. Eleven years ago—back when he was still in Venice, California—Draft One of The Great American Screenplay had reached page 392 before Gordie junked it. Weighing in at close to five pounds, it made
The Sorrow and the Pity
seem like an episode of
The Young and the Restless
.

And it was with some sorrow and much pity that Gordie torched it in his backyard hibachi. But in typical Southern California style, what began as a funeral pyre morphed into something far more surreal. In his memory it played, complete with screenplay directions:

EXTERIOR—NIGHT—GORDIE'S TINY BACKYARD

Full moon overhead. Gordie has on just boxer shorts and sandals. He stands before the hibachi, smoking a joint as he watches 392 pages crackle and curl and blacken.

Gradually, he becomes aware of a strange mechanical FARTING NOISE. A car with a broken muffler? A motorcycle in need of a tune-up? The NOISE grows LOUDER. A large shadow glides across the backyard. Startled, Gordie looks up.

CUT TO:

EXTERIOR—NIGHT SKY

The Goodyear Blimp is directly overhead, cruising south along the shoreline. Its electronic advertising board flashes the Coca-Cola mantra: IT'S THE REAL THING!

CUT TO:

EXTERIOR—NIGHT—GORDIE'S TINY BACKYARD

Gordie stands there, head tilted back, spellbound, the screenplay CRACKLING at his feet, the advertising lights flashing on his face. A revelatory moment. The Goodyear Epiphany.

When he awoke the next morning, the Goodyear Epiphany had been shrink-wrapped into just another L.A. scene. That was the thing about L.A. The town generated one scene after another, each one weird and incandescent and unforgettable.

Such as
Death In The Afternoon:
waiting at a traffic light along Sunset Boulevard one brilliant October morning, glancing to his left and there, squatting in the shade, was an enormous emerald-green iguana tied to a palm tree, a diamond-studded leash around its neck, the lizard motionless, eyes inert, the only movement the thrashing brown legs of a toad clamped in its mouth.

Or
Bonanza in Outer Space:
peering out the window on a back-lot office at Universal, waiting for the assistant producer to get off the phone, when Lorne Green—yep, Pa Cartwright himself—strolls past, dressed in a space costume—black tights, green storm trooper boots, plastic ray gun in a rubber holster—puffing on a cigar and leafing through a Jacuzzi catalog.

And so on and so on. A slide show of the apocalypse, and Gordie struggling to crack the code, wondering whether there was a code, whether it was all just static. He'd stuck it out for fourteen years, but after the Jim Nabors debacle, he packed his bags and returned to Chicago and the world of advertising.

And to The Great American Screenplay.

Draft Two reached page 179 before he gave up. One late night last winter he'd fed it, page by page, into the mailroom paper shredder.

But Draft Three was off to a promising start. High school prom night. Seemed the perfect way to open a movie that would tell the story of four young men coming of age during their freshman year at Barrett College. The image of a white prom dress was a powerful opener, echoed several scenes later with that nameless girl in white from the Hampton College mixer—the one who'd haunted him ever since.

The new approach came to him that night last winter as he stood by the window in his condo watching the snowflakes float past. Maybe it was all that whiteness that triggered the memories, made him wonder whatever happened to Sherry Goldfarb, his prom date senior year at Niles East High School, the memories still vivid almost two decades later. White had been the color theme that night—her prom dress, his tuxedo jacket, her corsage, his starched shirt, her frilly panties and, alas, the spray of semen that ruined her dress, her evening, and their relationship, all in one shot, as it were.

He'd drafted the opening scene that same winter night, writing into the wee hours as the snow fell outside.

Four pages.

He'd been polishing it ever since. Best writing he'd done. The scene almost worked.

Almost.

It was that gap—between the experiences and the words—that obsessed him. He knew there was a story there, and a powerful one, and if he could tell it right, he might finally have something to point to in his life besides a thirty-second television commercial featuring a Siamese cat dressed in full opera gear (including breastplate and helmet) singing Wagner to a sack of kitty litter.

And thus, when Ray Gorman called that afternoon, Gordie was not there. Although seated behind a desk high above North Michigan Avenue on a sunny day in June of 1994, the window behind him displaying a dramatic view of Lake Michigan and the scalloped beaches on Chicago's north side, Gordie was back in Skokie on a moonless night in the spring of 1970. Specifically, according to the lines immediately below the words FADE IN, he was in the front seat of his father's Ford Fairlane, the Fifth Dimension's “Age of Aquarius” on the car radio, the windows fogged, receiving a clumsy but earnest hand-job from Sherry Goldfarb.

The moment was so vivid that when his secretary knocked on his office door, he realized that he had a throbbing erection—a predicament made all the more awkward by his glass-top desk. If she noticed, she didn't let on. She placed a stack of inter-office memos in his in-box and turned to leave.

“Any calls?” he asked, aiming for a calm tone.

“Mr. Richards wants to know if you can move tomorrow's meeting back to 3:30. Mr. Moran called about lunch. And a Mr. Gorman just called.”

“
Ray
Gorman?”

She paused at the door and frowned. “I think that's his first name.”

“What did he want?”

“I don't know. He told me to put him into your voice mail.”

After she left, Gordie turned his chair toward the window, rapping a pencil against his knee.

Ray Gorman.

Other than that conference call last winter when Ray made them all take the reunion pledge, he hadn't heard from his freshman year roommate in years. His smile faded as he recalled reading in Bryce Wharton's goofy column in the alumni magazine that Ray was now a big-time real estate developer somewhere out west. Even got his face on the cover of some national magazine. No doubt a millionaire, life a bowl of cherries.

He glanced over at the phone, at the blinking red message light. After a moment, he lifted the receiver and pressed the message button.

“One new message,” the automated female voice announced. “Received today at five-eleven p.m.”

A pause, and then: “Hey, Cohen, it's Gorman. Your secretary claims you're busy. Yeah, right. Put your dick back in your pants and grab a pencil. Lou and I are driving up to Chicago tonight. We're staying at the Palmer House. We're in the hunt, dude. And so are you. Fill you in tomorrow morning. Meet us in the hotel restaurant at eight. No excuses. None. See you tomorrow.”

Gordie placed the receiver back in the cradle.

After a moment, he turned toward his screenplay.

Draft Three.

The Great American Screenplay

Nearly twenty years in the making.

All four pages of it.

He sighed and shook his head.