Wag the Dog (63 page)

W
HERE TO BEGIN.
Now that we're at the end.

It began for me on a particularly dark night. I live at the end of a dead-end road. A dirt road with no name and no sign posted in a semirural area in Upstate New York. It was raining, a quiet steady drizzle with a thick and heavy overcast. In New York City, where I used to live, it never gets dark. But in the country when the clouds block the moon and the stars it produces a true blindman's black.

I was working.

I have a studio. It's a wood-brown building in the woods about 500 yards from my house. Except in the dead of winter when the trees are bare and there's snow on the roof marking lines that are too geometrical for nature, it's virtually invisible. So it scared the shit out of me when there was a knock on the door. I have a family but they don't come out here. There's a sign out front: “No women, no one under four feet allowed.” That's a feeble family joke, about a real issue, not interrupting the writer-breadwinner. They're good about it. If they want to talk to me, they call. Well, the kids come out sometimes, but not after dark. Nobody comes and knocks on my door.

I opened up. There was a man standing there that I'd never seen.

“You're Larry Beinhart,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Joe Broz,” he said. “We spoke once, on the phone.”

I noticed that he had a satchel. I looked over his shoulder to my house. Where my family was.

“I didn't disturb them,” he said. “I'd like to talk to you.”

“You're not selling anything, are you?”

“Just a story. You're in that business, right? And good at it. Don't you remember? I called you about one of your books once.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. Though I tend to unremember the names of people who come up with deals and offers that don't happen. They recede into the ranks of the great whatsisname that didn't buy it that time. “Come on in,” I said, because I didn't know what else to say. Frankly I was a little irritated. At that time I had written three mysteries, with a “series” character. Although they had—where the hell are you going to find a writer to refrain from saying this—
great critical success,
they had not been nearly as popular as I thought they ought to be. I was in search of the formula for greater commercial success. The problem with the ones I had already written, I surmised, by comparison with my financial betters, was that my books were too off center. I resolved to do two things—get away from the series and become more centrist. Less humorous. Less cynical. Less thoughtful. Less intelligent. There speaks ego, excusing failure with the most pathetic of all extenuations,
I was too good for them.

In any case, I had determined to write a book about the place where I now live, a semirural county with one small city where white people who have been in America for several generations are firmly in the majority. In order to tune in and turn on to the local culture, in its criminal aspect at least, I offered my services to the local weekly, judging, once I heard what they paid, that they would, of necessity, let anyone work for them. I became a journalist. Irrespective of the quality of my work the local crime industry pretty much welcomed me with open arms. I refer, primarily, to the law enforcement side of the business, which is the steadier and more lucrative side. I was working very hard to collect enough understanding and enough characters and find the right seed of a story to go from three-page clunks of nonfiction to the full-size novel with
which I would pay the mortgage and medical insurance and all the rest.

It was slow going. Very slow. The slower it went, the harder I pushed. And my family, as families do, when fully 50 percent of their membership is under four years of age, seemed to need lots of time as well. Minutes had become more valuable than I could ever have imagined in a previously Bohemian existence.

So, no, I didn't really want to talk to the guy. But I let him in. He sat down in the ugly green padded rocker that my wife bought me for $5 at the same garage sale where she bought the original oil painting of one of the recent popes for $3. I said, “One second,” while I picked up the phone and called. My wife answered. I said, “I just called to see how you and the kids are doing.” I didn't say,
I just called to see if you're still alive to make sure this weird fucking stranger didn't just do something weird and horrible in the middle of the dark woods in the night.
Apparently he hadn't, everyone was fine.

By then, he'd taken a bottle out of the bag. Whiskey. “I got a story for you,” he said.

“I got two stories lined up for the paper,” I said. “And a book I'm trying to get to.”

He even had his own paper cups. He offered me a drink. I turned it down. I am not a drinker and I don't understand the impulse. Drinking is one of the hardest things for me to deal with in my writing, especially since most of my work is in a hard-drinking genre. “You should give me a listen. It's a good story,” he said.

“Is it a short story?” I said, trying to smile. Make light of it.

He took a sip of his whiskey and then he started in like a whiskey-drinking storyteller should. What he said was: “I'm an authentic American hero. Really. That's what I am. First, you start out with that I'm basically a little guy. I don't mean that I'm lacking in physical stature or I'm inadequate. I mean I'm kind of a regular guy . . .”

It was a performance like something out of O'Neil or Saroyan, a real bar-stool rap. I've never been able to stand being in a bar for very long because I don't drink, which has always
made me feel like I'm missing out on a real easy source of great material.

“. . . So there I am, a regular guy. Not out to change the world. Not out to be some kind of big shot. I got no ax to grind. I'm just a guy with a job to do and I try my best to do it. Well, what the job is, that's something else of course. I'm a dick. A gumshoe. A P.I. The stuff that dreams are made of. Books, TV, movies. What I'm trying to say, in a word, is—marketable. Get me?”

So I listened. And to make my part of the story short, I listened for three days while Joe talked his head off. Part of the reason that I listened to him, to tell the absolute truth, was that he intimidated me. He was very physically imposing. There are guys where you touch their arm and suddenly you realize there's a tree in there. I remember once, working on
Lords of Flatbush
as a gaffer—lifting and carrying and rigging all day—so I was pretty strong myself at the time, Sylvester Stallone, casually, and without meanness, pushing me out of his way, and it was clear that this was a much stronger guy than a regular human being. Joe was a bit like that, without being sculpted. So I was too scared of this alcoholic muscle man who carried guns—two of them, one in a shoulder holster, one in the satchel—and drank nonstop, to throw him out.
That's the truth.

He told me the story that you've read till here. He told it to me in the first person. From his point of view. And I must say he was very meticulous, or seemed to be, about what he knew and what he guessed and what he supposed and why. And he did strike me as a “trained observer.” Incidentally he was much more detailed about weapons and gear and martial arts than I could genuinely follow or than I cared about. He realized that very quickly—drunk or sober he picked up on stuff very fast—and modified his way of speaking about those things.

Obviously, if he stayed here for that long, he met my family. Anyone who has young children is very likely, as I am, to judge people by how they treat those children and by what the children think of them. There seems to be a lot of fiction in which people judge character by how a dog reacts. I've never
known a canine to have a sense of innate human worth, but my daughter, three years old at the time, has always had that ability. It is profound and I trust it. Anna approved of him. My son, a bit over a year then, and just starting to talk, was more thing and less person oriented. Joe played with him with the right degree of tolerance and affection, without any of the peculiar notes in his voice or touch that make all of media-traumatized American parents think that one in seven adults is a child molester and that each molester molests at least four hundred children in a lifetime.

Also he looked at them with a certain longing. He said, “You got it made here. You're lucky you can watch your children grow up.” Which, of course, I agree with. Except when I wish I was rich and could afford a nanny.

He wanted me to tape what he was saying. But I'm not really set up for that and we ran out of tape almost at once. It was long past store closings by then. So I took notes. Which I thought was good practice for me. The next day I got some tapes.

But then the batteries died. My tape recorder took AAAA, and oddly enough every store in town was out of AAAA, never a popular size anyway. So I went back to taking notes. And I asked questions. One of the first questions I asked was why me? What was he doing here, instead of L.A.?

“The best way to answer that,” he said, “is to take the story a little further.”

W
E GO TO
Maggie's house and I get Maggie back.

You probably want to know what made her scream. A stiff wire under her fingernails. There's no permanent damage and, as Maggie herself notes, no visible scars. Just like the movies, the good guys walk away.

I give David the memo.

Steve Weston. We go and get the body and bring it back to L.A. It's important that the body be found for the sake of his family, for his pension and social security. When the cops find the body they label it as drug-related. Short for male, black, cause of death: gunshot wound. Maggie and I go to the funeral.

I got two promises to keep. One to Steve. One to his son. I'll get to that in a minute or two.

You asked me, did I make a copy of the memo, before I gave it to Hartman? Yes. I did. But I don't have it.

I call C. H. Bunker. He loves secrets, believes in them. He has two favorite war stories, the Battle of Midway and the Tet Offensive. I offer it to him, in return for peace. I tell him again, “C. H. I kept the secrets, I've always kept the secrets.”

And I kept them all. All of them. Until now. Even now I'm not telling you a lot of the things we done.

C. H. shakes my right hand and takes the memo with his left. “Alright, son,” he says.

So what is the first picture deal that Hartman comes up with?
American Ninja.
The movie that Sakuro Juzo is supposed to
do, that he can't because he's dead. They do a quick rewrite and give Maggie the lead, Sakuro's part. It's projected as the first in a series. It has a james Bond level of artistic complexity. Roger Moore jokes that all he ever has to say is, “My name is Bond, James Bond.” Maggie jokes that she has twice as much to say, two lines: “Yes, there are American Ninja,” and “The female
is
deadlier than the male.” On the other hand, it's got a James Bond level of production, it's a lot of money up front plus gross points with a good definition. It's got a ten- to twelve-week shooting schedule, Toronto, Japan, Mexico, and I think it's a good idea to get out of town. Let people forget a little bit.

Two weeks later, we're on location.

It's the first time I ever see a big movie made. It is almost as insane as war. I can see how someone can go from making a movie to making a war. Maybe Atwater, Hartman, Beagle, they understood that. There are deaths every year making movies: stunt people, helicopter pilots, cameramen, sometimes even an actor or two.

It seems like Maggie and I are totally happy. We joke about it from both sides. On the one hand she talks about how she's tricking me into making her pregnant so that we'll have to have a shotgun wedding. Once or twice she warns me that she's an actress, a creature of emotion, historically fickle, faithful only to the dramatic moment.

It's July in Mexico. It's hot. But we're by the water, the Pacific coast, and we're having a good time.

We're hanging out with Catherine Held, Maggie's stunt double, and Tommy Tommassino, the key grip, her boyfriend. They're in love. We're in love. Tommy was in 'Nam. We decide that we're all taking off when we finish shooting, which is scheduled for the first, maybe the second of August. Disappear for a week or two or whatever. Party. Swim. Pretend we're not in the movie business.