Wag the Dog (26 page)

T
AYLOR WANTS TO
make me wait. I look out the window. The smog is particularly thick. From the forty-third floor you can look down on it. It's a very strange effect. There are a few office buildings that stick up above it. They look like computer-designed island modules sticking up out of a gray-brown sea. Planes fly above the muck, dive into it and disappear.

I turn around. Mel's secretary is gazing at me with stars in her eyes. Her name is Bambi Ann Sligo. She looks a bit like Maggie Thatcher, iron-helmet hair and too tough to fuck.
Everybody calls her Mrs. Sligo. Even Mel. She's in her late forties, but so is Cher. This is that other kind of late forties, that entered middle age at twenty-nine, headed straight for the Barbara Bush look, and made it by thirty-six.

I smile at her.

“Oh, Mr. Broz,” she sighs.

I nod, what you call condescendingly. Like I'm a star and she's one of the little people that make it all possible. So I say, “Hi, Bambi, how you doing today?”

“Oh, Mr. Broz,” she says. Like I'm one of her favorite movie stars. “I told Mr. Taylor that you were here and he will be right with you. I promise.”

“Thanks, Bambi.” Big smile.

She blushes. I sit down and open up one of the trades. Not
Police
&
Security News—Hollywood Reporter.
Bambi Ann pretends to do things on her desk while she makes covert glances at me. Do I have charisma by association? Mrs. Sligo has seen me pretty regularly for about twelve years now. She has never once acted like I made a blip on her radar screen. Now she needs to know: what does a person look like whose penis has been inside a real movie star?

Mr. Taylor finally gets tired of pretending he has important things to do and buzzes Mrs. Sligo to let her know that he can spare two minutes for Joe. She tells me I can go right in. I get up. She watches me for the whole time like she's dying to ask me a question. So I stop as I pass her desk and say, “What is it, Bambi?”

“Is it true?” she gushes. She's got Sherie's column hidden under some business files on her desk.

I look her in the eyes. I take her hand. “It's true. All true.” It's as if she wants to faint. But there's something more she wants to know. “Go on,” I say indulgently. “Ask.”

“Do you”—she hesitates, looks away, gets it together, then gets it out—“do Scientology?”

“No,” I tell her. But without disrespect.

“Oh,” she says, as if she has learned something important.

I know that Mel hates me. Which, if you know all the facts, is stupid. I probably
saved
his life; I didn't
ruin
it. And
taught him something about reality as it's practiced in wartime. He tries to mask it, or pretends to mask it, but we both know. Now it's gone onto a different level. I can see the tapes of Maggie and me all over his face. He hates me more because he thinks I'm getting something that he's not getting. He has an officer mentality. He actually thinks officers are a superior breed and that they deserve more money, better food, fancier clubs, more expensive liquor, classier pussy, and that the purpose of having lower ranks is to assure the higher ranks that they are better than someone.

“I want a leave of absence.”

“Why don't you just quit. I mean, you're a hotshot now.”

I don't want to just quit. Maybe I want Maggie and me to be in love. But I have not yet lost my grip on reality. I know that I am playing a game. I remember that the tape recordings are fake. I don't really expect to become her advisor and executive producer, the new wannabe Jon Peters. “I want a leave of absence, Mel.”

“It's not company policy. Except in cases of illness or maternity.”

“It is company policy to grant leaves as a matter of management discretion.” Usually they grant it—actually insist on it—because it's in U. Sec's interests. Like when they want you to do a job that they don't want to be associated with. I have done that and I have been on LoAs, so I feel like I'm entitled to one now, when I want it for my own reasons.

“Well, Joe, I'm willing to consider it. Why don't you put it in writing. I'll consult with Chicago and get back to you,” he says. He means I'm going to jerk you around, make you ask me about it five or six times, put you off with bullshit excuses, and then, when I feel the time is most appropriate, I'll say no.

“I'd like to settle it now, Mel. I have things to do.”

“I'm sure you do,” he says. “But that's not how we do things. We have channels. We have procedures.”

“Mel, do you want to go for a showdown over this, right now?”

“I just want you to do things the proper way. Through
channels. And goddamm it, as long as I'm in charge of this office, that's how it's going to be done.”

Now I have aces I can throw on the table and probably top anything he's got in his hand. If we go to war, maybe I win, maybe we both lose. But how would a wannabe Jon Peters, lover-producer, diamond-in-the-rough smoothie handle this? “I'll tell you what, Mel baby. I see where you're coming from and I respect you for it. I really do. A company has to be run in an orderly way. Just like an army. Believe me, the last thing in the world I want to do is cause disruption. I have a thought here. I'd kind of forgotten, in the ecstasy of the moment as it were, that I got a heap of vacation time. A whole heap of it coming. There's at least eight, nine . . . ten weeks. Just from the last three years. Maybe more. Also, I've got at least three months of sick leave due me.”

“This is a private-sector company,” Mel snaps. “We do not treat sick leave as pseudovacation time. Sick leave is for the ill and the injured not the lazy and
that is
company policy.”

“Mel, what I'm trying to do here, I'm trying to make things easy and nonconfrontational for everyone. What I'm gonna do is put in my request for a leave in writing, just like you asked. And I bet you can get it approved in a week, ten days at the outside. Long before my vacation time is up—”

“Who the fuck said you could take vacation now?”

“I'm entitled to it. I'm taking it,” I say very calmly.

“You're on assignment. You stay on assignment.”

“I'm done with that assignment. Thank you, Mel.”

“I don't care if Magdalena Lazlo is sucking your dick. That doesn't make you something special in my book. Don't forget, I know about you. I know the real you.”

“Mel, that was rude.” I still stay calm. This is a game, not the street. “You've insulted the woman I love. You've insulted a client of this company. I don't want you to do that. I don't want this to become an exchange of insults or foul remarks about each other or anyone else. I don't want this to become a physical confrontation.” Which is not true. I would love it. But the company tape machines may be rolling and I know the recorder in my pocket is certainly on. “So what I suggest is,
don't disapprove my vacation request. Meantime, I'll put in my request for a leave. Just like you asked.”

“What's the problem, lover,” he says. “You afraid she's gonna dump you in a couple of weeks for a better fucker?”

“Excuse me, Mel. Are you trying to provoke me to violence? This crudeness is unacceptable. If I were recording this, I think your job would be in jeopardy.” Of course, he realizes that I am recording it.

“You were a problem in Nam. You're a problem here. You think you can do things your own way. Not when I'm in charge. Not anymore.”

“Mel, I'm offering you a reasonable way to handle things.”

“Just get out of here,” he says.

I stand up. I lean on his desk. I look down at him. “Mel. You're out of line.”

“You roll in shit and you come up with roses. I got your number, Broz.”

“This is personal with you,” I say.
Come on, put it on tape, Mel.

“I can be just as cool as you are.”

“Good. Do it.”

“Now get out of here. I still have a job.”

“Expedite the paperwork, Mel.”

When I walk out Bambi, who before this day has never said a personal word to me, beyond “Good morning—smoggy day, isn't it?” says, “I'm so sorry. He shouldn't be rude like that.”

I go back downstairs. I put in for the vacation time. I drive over to Sunset Boulevard. That's where my new office is. I grabbed the lease from a producer who finally ran out of development deals and was three months behind on his rent. Times are tough for indies. Maggie hated the place on sight. But once I promised her she could redecorate it, she said it was alright. I like it because even though it's a small building, there are four possible exits. Hard to watch. I need a place away from Maggie's house. We still have to pretend that we don't suspect the LDs at her place. But with a new place I don't have to call in Matusow. I can sweep the place myself. I'm not setting up as
a P.I. I'm setting up as—what should I call it? Maggie's advisor? Lover? Producer? We're going to get her her own development deal. Find properties that are right for her. Match them with the right director, writer, costar. That's what it's all about. Packages. We'll take a lunch with Hartman, have him put it to the studios. Whoever finances her gets first look at what we develop. If nobody offers the right setup, we go it alone. That's the advice I've given her. You can't sit back in this business and wait for them to come to you. Because they'll only come to you with what's good for them. That's so clear, it's glass. None of them care about her or what's right for her. Except herself and—me. That's what I told her and it very much matched with her own thinking.

I now know how fast word gets around in this town. And how hard everyone hustles. So I'm not surprised when the phone rings. Even though there's been no announcement, nothing official, and I'm not yet open for business. Even though there's no furniture and the phone is sitting on the floor. I figure it's someone with a script to push, a deal they want Maggie for, a job as a reader, something like that.

What surprises me is that the first call I get in my new office, in a sense, it's from Vietnam.

B
EAGLE SAT ALONE
in the dark.

In front of him was a touch-sensitive computer screen. With it he could call up images or run entire films on any one of or all of ten Musashi G-4 HDTV screens set into the curved front wall of his video room.

The screens were arranged in two rows of five. They were flat screens and mounted flush to the wall. They had an aspect ratio of 2.4 to 1, wide enough to accommodate the full images of those films shot in the glory days of wide-screen formats like Todd-AO, Ultra-Panavision 70, and CinemaScope. When they displayed a picture from a less horizontal source, they automatically generated a flat black matte into the blank areas of the screens. The walls were painted to exactly match that black. The Center Screen of the top row was larger than the rest.

Having viewed thousands of hours of film and tape, Beagle had selected what he thought somehow defined the essence of America's sense of itself at war. From the chosen images he had composed something that was between a history and mythology. A high-tech ten-screen version of an American
Iliad.
Now he was going to play that story for an audience of one, himself, in the belief that it would make him understand what sort of war he would have to direct to make his country happy.

Center Screen.
Tearing Down the Spanish Flag.
Just an image. A leitmotif. A trumpet call from a distant silence to start the epoch.