The Devil_s Workshop

Chapter 48

You make movies about milking cows and picking flowers and I'll make movies about fucking and getting loaded and we'll see who puts more asses on theater seats," Buddy growled at Alicia Profit from the motor home's command chair.

She had been talking about a movie she loved, made by some fruity Italian director. The flick had died in the art houses, and Alicia's enthusiasm for it pissed Buddy off. He demanded a little more allegiance from a Brazil Nut. Still, Alicia, who Buddy thought was too pretty and too young to be as smart and self-assured as she was, didn't back down.

"Is it just about money, Buddy? You've got money. Is it just about seeing how high you can pile the greenbacks? How many Testarossas can you drive at once? I don't know why you never made The Prospector. That could have been a beautiful movie- a man's search for himself before death. It was full of pathos and humanity. You shoulda fought for it."

"Pathos? What's that, a Mexican restaurant? That script was a boring piece of shit. An old guy who's dying? Who the fuck cares? What kinda rock 'n' roll score you gonna put under that snore?"

In fact, Buddy had loved the story, but had been talked out of it by the studio after he signed his new big deal. They wanted six high-budget kick-ass movies. The press release on the deal called it "The Buddy Brazil Action Pack." Buddy still pulled out the script of The Prospector and read it occasionally. Why the hell hadn't he fought for it?

"I think it would have made a difference in the way people perceive you," Alicia defended, "like after Spielberg did Schindler's List He reinvented himself with that movie."

They were rolling through Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. John Little Bear was driving the big blue-and-white coach. Billy Seal was sitting with Alicia and Rayce at the fold-out table. Buddy could feel both a heavy weight on his shoulders and a tired weight on his eyes. He knew it was the beginning of a bout of depression. He had snorted a few more lines to try to stave it off, but his body was burning the coke like factory furnace fuel. He was going deeper and deeper into a funk, and it wasn't helped by this conversation with Alicia, and the fact that they were in Gettysburg.

The last time he'd been here he was only twenty-two years old, just out of film school and full of great ideas for redesigning the film business. He'd been in this historic town which had hosted the turning point of the Civil War, shooting a documentary, using five thousand dollars he'd saved up from summer jobs. It was every cent he had, but he had thrived on the challenge. The film was called The Two Hawks of Gettysburg and was about the Civil War, then and now, dealing with the socioeconomic and racial factors of American life one hundred years after the battle. He had tracked the lives of two people in the film: a black Union soldier named Evan Hawk, who died protecting a dream that was meager but filled with hope, and the black Union soldier's great-grandson, Reuben Hawk, a current Gettysburg factory worker. Reuben's life had fulfilled none of the hopes of his great-grandfather. "Seventeen minutes of pretty remarkable filmmaking," Sid Sheinberg had called it, comparing the work to Amblin, the film he'd seen by Steven Spielberg, which Sheinberg had loved and which had gotten Spielberg his first directing jobs in television. But Buddy had been afraid to ever direct again. It was his first bad Hollywood compromise, choosing instead to produce. Somehow, even at twenty-six, he had already started playing safe.

Producing a big studio hit was still a huge long shot, but Buddy found he liked not having to take the full responsibility for what he made. When you were a director, if a movie failed it was "on you." When you were a producer, there were plenty of people to put the blame on. The writer was always the best and easiest target. Buddy had fucked over more writers than Kirkus Reviews. Of course, the director was easy to pin it on, or the studio, although that was trickier politically. Sometimes on his flops, Buddy was so busy running around behind the scenes making shit fall on colleagues that he felt like the Wizard of Beverly Hills, pulling levers behind a big velvet curtain.

Slowly, over the years, he had slipped into the outlaw Buddy thing, with the black outfits and pimp accessories, his "McDaddy props," as Jack Nicholson called the hookers from Heidi's stable. There had been the endless stream of beautiful MAWs, who styled and profiled in his Malibu house. Munchable, long-stemmed wannabes: Models, Actresses, Whatevers, who perched on his sofa with their shoulders back, smiling, flirting, hoping for stardom. He had sampled these pleasures abundantly, but almost always felt horrible afterward, as if in all this luscious beauty there was also some hidden contamination, unrecognizable in its soul-destroying depravity.

All of these feelings confused him, so he did more lines and shot more drugs and tried to make any painful introspection go away in a haze of lost weekends. He had left the twenty-two-year-old filmmaker with a camera and a dream way back there on the side of the rocky Hollywood road.

Jack Nicholson, whom Buddy more or less idolized, called him "the Werewolf" because of Buddy's dark looks and nocturnal habits. In fact, Buddy was not much of a werewolf. Inside, he was more of a lost child, and in the moments before his depressions hit, he could see it all very clearly, could read his own uselessness like tea leaves in a Gypsy's cup. He knew that he was heading nowhere and accomplishing nothing. His mega-hits would not be watched by anybody when the cutting-edge sound-track music and trendy clothes were no longer popular. Like the Bee Gees and bell-bottom trousers, his material was caught in the moment in a way that defined him as temporary and unimportant.

"Alicia, crank me up," he shouted, and out came her little compact. The lines were chopped and Hoovered up by Buddy, then the little black plastic emergency kit was returned to Alicia Profit's purse. Buddy never carried his own drugs. He couldn't take another possession bust.

"Turn on the TV," he ordered, to change the subject and the memory. Buddy knew he was never going to make The Prospector, as much as he loved it, because he was afraid it wouldn't make any money. He couldn't stand the idea of producing a flop. Buddy was about flash, about winning. He was an end-zone dancer in a black shirt and vest, with three-inch-heeled ostrich cowboy boots. He was an outlaw.

"The bodies inside Fort Detrick have yet to be identified," a beautiful news anchor said, her dyed blond hair cut to helmet length. "But early reports say that the individuals who were shot apparently infiltrated the Army medical base by riding on a supply train. What they were doing in the lab of Building 1666 is still a mystery to the doctors there, but sources close to the investigation say that Army scientists are trying to reconstruct the reason from the chemicals and products used in the lab. The intruders killed two soldiers and left four accomplices dead before they stole a jeep and crashed out through the main gate of Fort Detrick. The Army still runs a medical facility at the Fort, but most of the property was decommissioned ten years ago…"

Buddy stared at the TV screen, and the depth of his depression grew. He felt like a man with a hundred-pound sack on his back. Were Cris and Stacy among the dead? Was the whole thing up to him now? He had made a promise to himself that he would not quit, and that promise was still driving him, but he had made a career out of shirking and ducking and claiming credit that was not his. Now he was pitted against a formidable enemy. Not just film critics with their angry, sarcastic jibes, but crazy fanatics with bio-weapons and automatic rifles. Buddy felt skewered by events, like a rotisserie chicken turning over a slow-burning fire, dripping fat and getting smaller by the moment.

"We're leaving Gettysburg. We'll be in Harrisburg in about half an hour," Rayce said softly.

Buddy wasn't listening.

"Where to then? You still want to go to the rail yards, like you said?" Rayce persisted.

Buddy was thinking about Cris and Stacy: brave, committed, and maybe dead.

"How 'bout it?" Rayce said.

"Huh?"

"I said, do you still want to go to the rail yard in Harrisburg?"

Buddy looked at the rugged stuntman, then around the motor home at the rest of his Brazil Nuts. Their faces showed a strange lack of commitment. He knew that most of them thought this was just another Buddy fantasy, a paintball fight that would make Buddy feel tough, but was not really dangerous. Their expressions told him they doubted they were ever going to find Kincaid, that Buddy didn't want any trouble, he only wanted to look tough… only wanted to be able to brag about it in Hollywood afterward: " 'Member that time we were locked and loaded, goin' after that crazy motherfucker? That gonzo preacher? He's lucky I never got close enough to light him up, the fuck."

"Harrisburg switching yard, Mr. B.?" Alicia repeated, looking at him and seeing a strange lost-child expression she had never seen before.

"I guess so," Buddy answered weakly.

Rayce nodded at John Little Bear, who shifted into overdrive. They passed out of Gettysburg, heading toward Harrisburg, and Buddy's strange collision course with destiny.