Wag the Dog (23 page)

Reality was a rhythm as slow as baseball. Even stillness was action. Especially stillness was action. Because waiting was a massing of power or it's dissipation.

“You got another one of those St. Louis Cokes?” Tubby asked.

 

 

 

⁴³
She started in film, but the role that made her famous was the MOW (movie of the week, made-for-TV movie) and subsequent TV series
Woman Undercover,
almost universally referred to as
Dick Chicly.
The series was short-lived, probably because it was terrible. But it did produce that famous poster of Jackie, standing, back to camera, filling the foreground the length of the right-hand side of the shot, her hip cocked to the side, smoking gun in hand, burning automobile in the background to the left, the flames creating a very dramatic halo effect. There was something about the length of her legs combined with the attitude with which she cocked her hip, and the shape of her butt and waist inside the very tailored police uniform, that made her an instant erotic icon. A feature career ensued. Her credits include
Swimsuit, Never So Dead, L'Affaire Fatale, Very Last Love, Murphy Was Wrong,
and
Cinderella 2000.

⁴⁴
According to an article in
Millimeter
(3/87), an industry publication, “It's been an informal Beagle family tradition for generations to give male children a president's name as a middle name. There have been Beagles named Joshua Fillmore, Stuart Cleveland, Victor Van Buren, Gerald Polk. John Lincoln's brother's name is Kenneth Buchanan Beagle, and family lore claims that there was once a Taylor Tyler Beagle.”

⁴⁵
There actually are Coca-Cola aficionados, and while they don't have vintages, they do claim to detect differences based on where the beverage is bottled. St. Louis is considered the best, its bottles treasured in Coke cellars and served on special occasions.

I
T
'
S LIKE
P
RETTY
W
OMAN
. Except I'm playing Julia Roberts and Maggie's playing Richard Gere. We start at ten in the morning. By noon I'm ready to quit. She's enjoying herself more than I've ever seen, girlish and carefree. She tells every salesperson that I'm her very own GI Joe doll. Except I'm a special issue for girls because I can be dressed up. This, I swear, makes me blush. I protest, but Maggie does this number about I'm so manly I can be secure in my manhood and I should indulge her because she's a little girl at heart. Which may or may not be bullshit. But it's a whole lot sweeter and more digestible than her saying it's her money and if I want to be seen with her I better look right. She doesn't say that at all. So it's OK and I let her pick out clothes and I let a series of strange salespersons, virtually all with accents from places that don't quite exist, eye me and measure me and use their very best imagination to discern what would flatter and suit me.

Camouflage and an M-16. A blue suit from Sears that wears for ten years, with a white shirt and cop shoes. A pair of sweats, loose and comfortable for sitting in a Ford all day watching someone do nothing. That's what suits me.

Point of fact, I'm grumbling because I think it's expected of me. Point of fact, I'm flattered.

We grab a light lunch at one of those places that you have to call two, three months in advance for. Unless you're Magdalena Lazlo or Gena Rowlands or David Hartman. Then you
just walk right in, and somehow they just knew you were coming and a table's waiting. I get a sandwich. I recognize it as tuna on white with mayo, lettuce, and tomato, though every one of those items has a different and more expensive name. We have an eight-dollar bottle of water with lunch.

After lunch Maggie takes me to Yamato's for Men on Rodeo. She leaves me with Ito, a tall, slender, stylish Japanese salesperson-artist. He's done several of the pieces hanging on the wall as well as designing many of the jackets. Yamato of Tokyo has a philosophy: “We are art. Each and every person. For me to match a human being with his clothing is an act of creation as deeply moving and sometimes more important than putting paint to canvas.” All Yamato salespeople must be trained in the psychology of colors and fabrics and must have produced artwork worthy of exhibit. Prices are not marked.

Ito places me in proximity to a variety of jackets. Many of them are made out of things I have never heard of. He has a set of color cards, and he wants me to rank them in order of preference.

I turn around. There's Jack Cushing. He's with Tom Berenger. They're looking at jackets also. They're with two salespersons, Hiro and Nikio. Hiro throws pots. Niko does sculptures in plastic. Ito claims it is a very angry medium.

Jack and I see each other at the same time.

This is about sixty hours after I punched him out and dumped him on the pavement beside his car. We look at each other. One beat. Two. He smiles. Big-time. And marches over to me. Hand out. I take it. I shake it.

“Sorry, old man,” he says. “About the other night—I didn't know. About you and Maggie.”

“That's OK,” I say graciously. “We didn't know either. Not till right then.”

“It happens that way sometimes, doesn't it. Sometimes that's the best way.”

“It hits hard and it hits fast,” I say.

“So do you,” he says. And we both smile. The amazing thing is, that his seems sincere. “Hey, do you know Tom?”

Of course, I don't. He calls Tom's name and gestures him
over. “There's someone I want you to meet,” he says to Berenger. “This is Joe Broz—am I saying it right?”

“Yeah.”

“Joe and Magdalena Lazlo are . . .” He searches for the right word.

“In love,” I say.

“That's what I heard,” Jack says. “But I hate to repeat gossip. Joe is in the security business,” he says to Berenger.

“Nice to meet you,” Berenger says like he could give a shit.

“Good to meet you,” I say. And like a hick I add, “Loved you in
Platoon
.”
⁴⁶
This definitely was his best picture. In my opinion. Love him or hate him, Oliver Stone gets performances from his actors.

“Thanks,” he says absently. Then he looks at me. Registers my age. And my haircut, probably. “You were there. Right?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I was there.”

“Decorated too. Weren't you?”

This is amazing. I'm new to this world so I'm not used to it. Two days after the thing with Maggie and I begins, these people know who I am, the business I'm in, that I'm a vet, and that I can pin medals on my chest if I want to. In my world, at the office, a guy gets divorced and maybe nobody notices for a couple of years.

“You know Stone? You gotta meet Stone,” Berenger says. “He's still into that Nam shit. So you liked me in
Platoon
.”

“I thought you were terrific.”

“You were there. So you thought it was accurate? It was right on? Man, I worked at making that right. But of course my knowledge is secondhand, so I had to depend on other people to tell me.”

“Yeah, I thought it was pretty right on. Everybody's Vietnam was different.”

“I like playing characters with an edge to them,” he says. “There's more grit in that. More out there, you know.”

“Hey,” I say, starting to build my own legend, “I didn't think of your character as out there. Not at all.”

“No?”

“No. You were the guy I identified with.”

“Ah,” Ito says, “I have it! This”—he holds up a jacket—“A blend: sixty percent silk, thirty-three percent viscose, seven percent wool.”

We get home with a carload of boxes. Mostly for me: socks, boxer and bikini underwear, ties, handkerchiefs, six pairs of shoes, hats, belts, dress shirts, T-shirts, sweatshirts. More will follow, after alterations. CDs, including k. d. lang, Ray Charles, and Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline—country music for people who don't like country. Maggie starts tearing through the packages like they're hers, as happy as a four-year-old at a birthday party. In five minutes the living room is littered with bags, boxes, packing material, designer-label tissue paper, and several thousand dollars worth of fabric and leather.

“Let me see this on you, Joe . . . Now that tie, with that shirt . . . This tie with that belt and that shirt. Just hold the tie up and put the belt on without putting it through the loops . . . Oh, you look so—manly and fierce. Come on, smile. This is fun . . . I want to see you in the bikini underwear. The silk ones. Don't blush. Don't make homophobic statements. There are many heterosexual men who wear silk underwear . . . OK, if you won't dress up, then I will.” She starts to pull off her shirt. “Cover your eyes. You're peeking.” I am. She snakes out of her jeans. “Turn around.” I do. She's humming to herself. “OK,” she says, “you can turn around.” I do. She's like a little girl playing dress-up in Daddy's clothes. A pair of boxer shorts, a dress shirt, a tie, a belt, her hair tucked up under a Borsalino, and a pair of Bally dress shoes on her feet. Of course, she's not a little girl, and while some of it is cute and comic, like the oversize shoes and the baggy shorts, it's also sexy as hell.

She goes to the mirror and draws a mustache on her face.
A pencil-thin mustache. “What do you think people are saying, Joe?”

“If you keep buying me stuff, they'll say I'm using you. You can't keep buying me things.”

“If you had the money, you'd buy me things all day long. Wouldn't you? Smother me in diamonds, cover me in minks, cover me in diamonds, smother me in minks.”
⁴⁷

“That's different and you damn well know it.”

“Is it, Joe? What is money? A sign of virtue? Of masculinity? Of cleverness?”

“Where I come from . . .”

“Joe, where you come from doesn't exist anymore. Money comes by accident. Like freeway collisions. Why do you think we're all so frantic? Because we know it's all an accident. The face, the body, the way I come across on camera—accidents. Oh, I work at it. Acting classes, acting coaches, exercise, skin care, this hairdresser, that makeup person, trying to make it better, trying to keep it. But fifteen plastic surgeons doing the surgical version of the home show couldn't put one Magdalena Lazlo together. You can go in and get Barbara Hershey's lips, one of Lee Grant's noses, Melanie's tits, Cher's butt, and walk out and you're still nothing. All the desperate wannabes in all the desperate acting classes can't learn how to do whatever the hell it is that the people who pay me a million-plus dollars a picture think I do. It's a goddamn accident. Like winning the lottery or getting hit by a bus and suing the city. So if I want to spend my accident money, dressing you up because it's fun, I'll do it.”

“There's a name for men who take money from women,” I say.

“There's a name for women who take money from men,” she says.

“It's different.”

“Hey, Joe, you got twenty dollars on you?”

“I got a hundred or so,” I say.

“Just give me a twenty,” she says.

I reach in my wallet, I give her a twenty. She reaches through the fly of the boxer shorts she's wearing. She's got her own underwear on beneath mine. She folds the bill neatly and sticks it under the elastic. “What's the name for women who take money from men, Joe?”

“I got problems with some of your games, Maggie.”

“What's the name, Joe?”

“Whore, Maggie. They call them whores. Is that what you want me to say?”

“That's what I want you to say. I took your money, now I can say I'm your whore.”

I don't know how she does it. Whether it's a thing with her face and her posture or some more subtle trick of acting, or a thing with her soul, but in spite of the comical way she's dressed—the man's hat and shoes that are too big, the boxer shorts with hearts on them, the Hopalong Cassidy hand-painted tie from 1952, and the eyebrow-pencil mustache—she changes from cute and girlish into something kinky and sluttish.