Miss Wyoming

Chapter Fourteen

Making hit movies was one of the smaller problems in John's life. Ivan handled the workaday stuff like budgets and wind machines and union haggling. John's role was to walk into a room where nothing really existed except for a few money guys who wanted a bit of glamour, a good dollar return and a few cracks at some industry sweeties. John would conjure up a spell for these Don Duncans, Norm Numbnuts and Darrens-from-Citicorp. He had to cram his aura deep, deep, deep inside their guts, spin it around like a juicer's blade, then withdraw and watch the suits ejaculate dollars. «People, this isn't about cash, this is about the American soul — it's about locating that soul and ripping it out by its root. It's about taking that root and planting it deep into the director's warm beating heart, hot pulsing blood feeding the plant, nourishing it until it flowers and gives us roses and zinnias and orchids and heliotropes and even, fuck, I don't know,antlers. And we sit and watch the blooms and we've done our part. It's the only reason we're here. We're dirt. We're crap. We're shit. But we're good shit. We're nothing but soil for the director to grow a vision. And we should be proud of it.» Usually, John would climb right up onto the meeting desk for this portion of the event. People rarely wanted details. They wanted hocus-pocus and John gave it to them. John had good hunches and he acted on them quickly, with almost alien accuracy. He believed that most people had at least a few good ideas each day, but that they rarely used them. John had no brakes. There was no lag time between his idea and its implementation. He was a film commando. Sometimes it frightened him how easily people would follow somebody who conveyed the appearance of direction or will.

Bel Air PI was a reasonably low-budget buddy-cop film in which a has-been rust-belt homicide-detective-turned-PI partnered up with the mayor's daughter, a tawny renegade («Darling,» said Doris after reading the script, «your heroine is a tawny renegade. Whatever next! ») to establish a PI agency. Their first case was to search for the missing wife of a studio executive who was located in many KFC-sized pieces in an Imperial County lemon orchard. Drugs were involved. Betrayal. A final shoot-out and chase in which Cat and Dog stopped fighting each other to unite against the forces of evil and then Get It On.

The movie relaunched the career of a faded seventies rock star and gave steroids to a film genre then on the wane. Almost immediately Bel Air PI 2 (Bel Air π²) was in the works, and John had drugs and dollars and pussy hurled into his lap.

Bel Airπ² became a monster hit, bigger than the original, and was followed by an alien invasion thriller with a soundtrack that number one'd for five weeks, and a terrorists—occupy—Disneyland—style thriller that went ballistic in European and Japanese release but didn't work so well in North America, as copycat directors had glommed onto John's noisy, music-drenched formula. To John moviemaking wasn't formulaic. It was a way for him to create worlds wherein he could roam with infinite power far away from a personal history, free of childhood disease and phantom relatives.

Wherever John went, the volume was up full. Once, John and Ivan drove John's car-of-the-month, a Bentley «the color of Grace Kelly's neck,» down to La Quinta for a Polygram executives' weekend retreat. They left the car parked in the desert while they searched for pieces of cactus skeleton Nylla wanted for her flower arranging. Once they'd been in the sun a while, John went to the car and brought back to Ivan's rock perch an armload of items. First was a laminated menu stolen from a Denny's. He rolled it into a funnel, and used it to send item number two, a half bottle of tequila, down his throat. He then reached for the third item, a rifle. He used it to fire five volleys into the car's skin, turning it into a fast, expensive sieve. Ivan yelled, «Studly!» John promptly vomited, and stopped having cars-of-the-month after that, settling on the gunshot Bentley as his distinctive final choice. John had a reputation to keep, and when he entered rooms, success and decadence swarmed about him like juicy gossip.

John's one true friend across the years was Ivan. As an added bonus for Ivan, John came with a mother, Doris — a presence sorely missing in Ivan's life since his father got marriage out of his system just months after Ivan's birth. John and Doris had been living in the guesthouse for two weeks when Ivan was shipped home from an experimental boarding school near Big Sur. He'd been caught sniffing ether from an Orange Crush bottle. The ether had been stolen from the science lab by a student who traded it with Ivan for a set of puffy stereo headphones.

«Why were you sniffing ether?» John asked on their first meeting, in the front hallway of the main house, the floor's stone so smooth and shiny and hard-looking that John thought that anything that dropped on it would shatter — glass, metal, feathers and diamonds. Having never been to California before, he believed he could feel the heat mending his body.

«I was trying to get over something,» Ivan said.

«What?»

Ivan looked at this pale, scrawny, unfledged child, more ghost than body. Ivan decided from the start to take John into his confidence. He assumed that such an underdeveloped body could only harbor an overdeveloped mind. «I have this dopey paranoid fear about» — he paused — «the Ice Age.»

«The Ice Age?»

«Yeah.»

John could hear Doris and Angus sitting in the living room, laughing away.

Ivan went on. «I keep on seeing this picture. These pictures. A wall of ice like the white cliffs at Dover — scraping across Pasadena and then down Wilshire and crushing this house.»

«Who told you that? It's a crock of shit. That's not the way it works. First thing that happens is that it snows — but then that snow doesn't melt over the summer. And then the next winter it snows again, and that snow doesn't melt, either. And then it snows maybe a few feet each year, and none of that melts. After a thousand years — a blink in the scheme of things — you've got a slab of ice a mile thick. But you're long gone by then. And if you were smart, you'd have moved to the equator the first year, anyway.»

Ivan stood and smiled at John and from then on ceased worrying about the Ice Age. They turned and looked out at the flickering sprinklers in the yard through a small diamond-paned window. «What happened to you?» Ivan asked. «You look like you're dead or something. Like you're on a telethon.»

From that point, John's body metamorphosed. He grew tall, almost brawny, but good health arrived too late in his adolescence to entrance him with team sports. He only cared about solo activities in which he could claim pure victory without the ego dilution of teams. John also stopped watching TV, superstitiously equating it with illness.

John and Ivan aligned, making super-8 films as larks, the first of which was titled Doris's Saturday Night. It chronicled her cocktailed devolution from Delaware insecticide heiress elegantly tamping shreds of hard-boiled egg onto crustless toast triangles, loving the attention, then shamelessly hamming it up, becoming a haggard mal vivant gurgling fragments of sea shanties into the pipes beneath the kitchen sink.

Their second film was more mundane. Angus said they needed to learn about sequencing and editing, so John and Ivan followed Angus through a typical day of work at the studio — capturing his meetings, lunches, drives around the city and a screening at night. It was edited together and shown with goofy subtitles at Angus's fiftieth birthday party under the title Film Executive Secretly Wearing a Diaper Because It Makes Him Feel Naughty, and marked their debut into the filmgoing community.

John was a surprisingly confident young man, and a doer, not a thinker. This was an impulse Doris had encouraged him to hone. She didn't want John to be a Lodge in any way, and so fostered in him an enthusiasm for anything that went against the Delaware grain. She encouraged action, creativity and a strong dislike for the past. She had also talked Angus into removing Ivan from the private school system altogether, so both he and John could attend the local high school. Neither flourished, but both were happy enough there, and afterward both young men scraped their way through UCLA, spending the majority of their time making short films and chasing girls. John also experimented with cars. He bought the orange 260-Z from the proceeds of flipping successively more valuable cars, while Ivan drove a mint green Plymouth Scamp he bought from one of Angus's gardeners.

When they were both twenty-four, they founded Equator Pictures, using Ivan's connections and a small loan from Angus. They quickly had their hit with Bel Air PI, making them both independently wealthy, independently powerful as well as dependent on each other. John was the unstoppable freight train. Ivan ensured that the vegetables served by craft catering were fresh, and slipped $500 to a crotchety neighbor beside a location shoot who refused to turn off his Weedwacker.

One spring day, somewhere between Bel Air PI and Bel Air PI 2, John and Ivan were at an ARCO station filling up John's gunshot Bentley. 260-Z, his primary vehicle even though by now he owned the usual industry array of flash-trash cars. John said to Ivan, «I like to pump my own gas into my own car, Ivan. I always go to a self-service pump. Did I ever tell you why?»

«To connect with the man in the street?» Ivan laughed.

«No. Because I like to look at the numbers rev by on the gas pump. I like to pretend each number's a year. I like to watch history begin at Year Zero and clip up and up and up. Dark Ages … Renaissance … Vermeer … 1776 … Railways … Panama … zoom, zoom, zoom … the Depression … World War II … Suburbia … JFK … Vietnam … Disco … Mount St. Helens …Dynasty … and then,WHAM! We hit the wall. We hit the present.»

«So what?»

«This is what: there's this magic little bit of time, just a few numbers past the present year, whatever it is. Whenever I hit these years, then for maybe a fraction of a second, I can, if not see the future,feel it.»

«I'm listening,» Ivan said. He was so patient with John.

«It's like I get to be the first one there — in the future. I get to be first. A pioneer.»

«That's what you want to be — a pioneer?»

«Yes.»

Ivan paused and then, with some consideration, asked, «John-O, have you checked your tire pressure?»

«Nah.»

Ivan got out of the car, got a pressure gauge from the attendant, and came back and checked the pressure. «You've got to do the little things, too, John. It all counts, big and small.»