Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  “And then you write how Wood doesn’t remember Janis Joplin being all that good-looking, but she was limber as hell, and she tasted, sweetly, of lilacs. That’s the way you write it, just like that, ‘she tasted, sweetly, of lilacs.’ And you write how Lee Remick was just one of the great beauties of her time, a real presence, how she was into some real wild shit, how, after a while, the three of them talked themselves into this car just for laughs, you know, just because it was there, because it was Durango. But then one of them looked up, probably it was Lee Remick, yeah, definitely Lee Remick, and realized they’d fitted themselves in too tightly. It was all just a little too cozy, and they couldn’t pull themselves out, not without help or external lubrication, certainly not without a clear head.

  “It slowly occured to them there was nothing to do but start screaming until help arrived, only the problem with this was that it was, like, two o’clock in the morning, and there was no one around. They ended up spending the night in this way, amazingly, or at least a couple hours, long hours, and the screaming was kind of half-hearted, but still.

  “Along the way, Wood remembers having to take a leak. Jesus it was bad. He even remembers mentioning this to Lee Remick, who was awake most of the night and who thought it was one of the funniest fucking things she’d ever heard. Joplin was out cold by this time, but Remick was up—fuckin’-A she was up—and she kept telling Wood to just let it go, let it go, he was among friends. Soon she started saying she had to go too—she’s got a pee coming on is how she put it—and after a while, with the way she was just laughing and laughing, hard, she started to stream against the cold metal of the car. Even then, Wood couldn’t bring himself to go. He just couldn’t. The thought of sitting in a puddle of his own piss with a sleeping Janis Joplin and a stoned-out-of-her-mind Lee Remick was an execration to the great Terence Wood, even as the noise of Lee Remick’s pissing put him in pretty much the same position, biologically, psychologically. Practically.

  “Anyway, pissed, they sat awake a couple hours. They’d run out of screaming and laughing and fondling. They didn’t have it in them to try to squiggle free. It was warm enough with all that flesh pressed tightly together, and all that was left was to sit and wait for the early crew to start its shift and get things ready for the day’s shooting. Finally, one of the technicians came by and noticed the trouble these three stars had gotten into, this laughable trouble, and he set about finding someone to help him hoist them out of the car and back into their clothes.

  “Then you write that, before it was over, Richard Widmark came by to take pictures. Richard Widmark, this is the kicker to the whole deal. Someone woke Richard Widmark up at the hotel in town, and he came down to take pictures. For the rest of his life, Wood was after him to make copies; it was like a running thing between them, but he’d never seen copies. Then you write that he knows that somewhere out there, somewhere there are copies of Widmark’s photographs of the three of them, Wood and Lee Remick and Janis Joplin, all fried and naked and tripping and stuffed uncomfortably into a mining car on the set of this otherwise forgettable picture. You write that his secret hope, Wood’s abiding hope, is that they turn up, these Richard Widmark shots, not in the Enquirer or the Star or on one of those ridiculous tabloid television shows, but out there on the Web for the whole world to see on someone’s homepage, where they can be downloaded and hard copied into every fucking home on the planet because this, to Wood, is what celebrity is all about. This is the point of the whole fucking anecdote. Hell, it might as well be the theme of your whole fucking book, if you ever manage to write it. To be photographed by Richard Widmark, naked and stoned and tired and sitting in a puddle of Lee Remick’s piss, with Janis Joplin along for the ride and unable to keep up, this is the essence of what it means to move about in the strange light of Hollywood, to be above the laws of human nature and polite society. This is what it means to be Terence Wood. This is what you write about. This is your now what.”

  Pimletz can’t get over it. He doesn’t know whether to ask Hamlin to start in again, slowly this time, so he can get it all down, or to stand up and applaud. He doesn’t know whether Hamlin was yanking him or taking him to someplace he might need to find again. “Just like that?” he asks.

  “Just like that.”

  “But it never happened!”

  “Everyone’s dead,” Hamlin says, turning back to his own work. “Who cares it never happened? Write it and it might as well have.”

  Pimletz thinks about this for longer than he needs to. “You can do this? It’s ethical?”

  “Fuck ethical. It’s celebrity pap. It’s ghostwritten celebrity pap. Legal is all you need to worry about.”

  “Okay, so what about legal?” Pimletz wants to know. “Can’t the estate be sued?”

  “What estate, doughboy? You. Read your contract. No one’s suing the estate of Terence Wood without dragging your ass into it.”

  Damn. “But there’s insurance. Someone said something about author’s insurance.”

  Hamlin usually relished in confusing his usually confused friend, but he was on deadline and didn’t have the time. “Yes, there’s insurance,” he finally said, typing underneath his dismissal. “Probably there’s insurance, but who’s gonna sue? Everyone’s dead, asshole. You can’t libel the dead. Journalism 101.”

  Pimletz all but groans in relief. He hadn’t yet committed anything to paper—Jesus, he hadn’t even committed it to memory—but he was relieved just the same. This meant it was a whole new enterprise, a whole new book deal. Trouble no more. Anything was possible. “So, like, I can use that?” he asked, begging permission, wanting, at least, a place to start. “There’s no problem with me using that?” It sounded good, this naked assessment of the convoluted values of Terence Wood’s world; it sounded like something the great man would write, like it would kill a few pages, maybe lead to a few more. Plus, in an unbelievable way, it struck Pimletz as moderately believable. Shit, he bought it, and he’s not as naive as Hamlin would have him think.

  “What?” Hamlin sends back, no longer paying attention.

  “You know, Lee Remick? Durango, Colorado.”

  “Fuck do I care? Go. Use it. Have a party.” He was three paragraphs into his lead on his own piece, had the rest of it pretty much written in his head. Today’s business: a mini-scandal surrounding a State House official caught high-ending it at the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime. If it weren’t for Pimletz, he’d be on to the next thing.

  “Great,” Pimletz says, trying to remember Hamlin’s exaggeration. “Good. Thanks.” Janis Joplin, he prompted himself. Don’t forget the part about Janis Joplin. That’s key. And the piss. And the Richard Widmark thing with the photos, with what it all means. He looked on at his typing friend and marveled once again at Hamlin’s ability to fill an empty page, to think on the fly. To do, write, be. Pimletz wished he could be so effortless, so completely without fear or hesitation. He wished he could open those same valves and have the work flow out of him and have it not be shit.

  His admiration might have been transparent if Hamlin had cared to look.

  “Tell me, Hamlin,” Pimletz said, tentatively, not wanting his esteem to show any more than it has, “how do you do it?”

  “What?” Already, Hamlin’s piece was about to be zapped to the copy desk.

  “You know, think. Come up with that shit. Have it pour out of you on deadline.”

  Fucker makes it sound like diarrhea, Hamlin thought. He tapped out a final, flashy keystroke for significance, sent his copy on down the line, and, done, swiveled back to Pimletz to rub his nose in it. “Axel,” he said, shaking his head, “you can’t imagine.”

  No, he can’t. Or at least he hasn’t been able to. Yet. But he means to get there. And soon.

  He sits at his makeshift desk in Terence Wood’s hearth and tallies his next moves. There’s the cut-and-paste job to be done on the stack of cheapie star bios piled on the bottom steps of the spiral staircase leading up to the loft, anecdotes
to be culled from the Record-Transcript clip file and from an Internet search, but these are only filler. The real work will come in fabricating for Wood the kind of storiedfrenziedtortured existence that readers have come to expect from their celebrated auto-biographers. They don’t want the raw honesty; they just want the raw, and it is up to Pimletz to give it to them.

  Happily, for Pimletz, his dilemma has become a showcase for the turbo-imaginings of his friend Hamlin. Better, a parlor game. In the months since Hamlin’s effortless recounting of the Durango myth, Pimletz has reached out for more of the same, and Hamlin has obliged: a three-way with Lucy and Desi, an aborted child with Natalie Wood, a quashed breaking-and-entering charge with RFK. Lately, Hamlin has become so amused by the possibilities that he sends them, unsolicited, by fax or e-mail. Pimletz never knows what he might find. Just today, he booted up the laptop and was greeted with an elaborate compound regarding Howard Hughes and a former child actress from the old Our Gang series.

  Hamlin’s stories remind Pimletz of the game he used to make of his father’s leaving back when he was a kid—the at-home version of the game he used to spin at work writing off Rose Kennedy. His father, though, that was a whole other muddle. The asshole was gone pretty much at conception, far as Pimletz could ever determine. His mother used to say he was killed in a car accident, but, to Pimletz, he always was kidnapped by aliens, drawn and quartered by horse thieves, thrown from a speeding train by Russian spies. Even after he learned the truth, that his old man was just a shit, Pimletz couldn’t keep from imagining a different twist: food-poisoned at his own sister’s wedding, felled by a Sears air conditioner, struck dead by a Frank Malzone liner to the owner’s box at Fenway.

  It’s the same thing with Hamlin. Pimletz doesn’t know what to do with the windfall of stories, but he is determined to make them all fit. They are instantly a part of the Terence Wood legacy, as told to Axel Pimletz. They belong as surely as if they had actually happened. Anyway, he’s got nothing else to go on, and a bunch of pages to fill, and a deadline to meet, so he’s hit on the not-too-original literary device of mixing them together in a loose, internal monologue, the whole business linked with self-aggrandizing and grade school punctuation. Probably, there are more ellipses in Pimletz’s thirty-seven pages than there on the New Releases: Nonfiction table at Barnes and Noble—and, thanks to Hamlin, more irrefutable bullshit.

  The bleep of Wood’s remote phone echoes up the stone flue like a high-tech fart. There’s even an echo as the ring runs up the chimney so that it comes back again and again, sounding like the fart-around-the-campfire scene in Blazing Saddles, acted by droids. This is how it strikes the unimaginative Pimletz, and, for some reason, perhaps because he hasn’t been out of the cabin much, past couple weeks, perhaps because, developmentally, he’s moored back in junior high school, the connection strikes him funny. He covers his nose to amuse himself further.

  “Yeah,” he says, the phone to his ear, his hands now away from his nose. “Pimletz.” He answers like he’s still in the newsroom, like that’s where he belongs.

  “Axel,” he hears. “Good. I’m glad I got you.”

  Pimletz is glad to be got.

  Okay, so maybe Terence Wood wasn’t built to paint houses or fish commercially or work construction. He was built, that’s for fucking sure, but not for much. Hard labor and him, they don’t get along; hard living is about where it ends for him. And heavy lifting he can just forget about. For a while, just after his not entirely thought-out exit, his Polar heart rate monitor cast off into the sea with the rest of his Pathfindered belongings, he not-entirely thought through the idea of starting his own moving company, leasing a couple trucks, and hiring local college kids to do the jobs, but Grace talked him out of it. There’s not much in the way of coming and going up here in Maine, she convinced him, and, anyway, the folks who do move tend to move themselves.

  About the only job left to him, at least the only one that didn’t have him exerting himself too terribly much or asking customers if they wanted fries with that, was this right here (and an acting job, to boot!): inhabiting the character costumes at Maritime Merrytime, the theme park by the sea. The people who run the place actually have gone and trademarked the tag line, “the theme park by the sea.” There’s a little TM trademark thingy on all the T-shirts and tote bags and signage, and it always strikes Wood as ludicrous every time he sees it. He gets this picture in his head of a team of Down East lawyers dressed in unnatural fibers discussing over some lunch counter how people would be climbing all over themselves to use a tag line like this one, how it would be smart to tie it up while they could. “The theme park by the sea”; that’ll be in play before you know it.

  Funny, how things work out. This is what he did, and now this is what he does, and here he is, acting, ludicrous or no, dressed as Larry Lobster, posing for pictures with the thinned winter crowd of Merrytime visitors, trying to sign autographs with the foam rubber claws they’ve given him for hands. When he started out as Crabapple Jack, the cantankerous old fisherman with the corncob pipe, he didn’t have this trouble with the autographs; his hands were his own, but he worried people would recognize him underneath his flap-eared yellow rain cap. In the beginning, he worried constantly that he would be found out, but here especially. Everywhere else, he could fuse into the background, but at Maritime Merrytime, as Crabapple Jack, he was calling a little too much attention to himself. True, no one would have believed that an Academy Award-winning actor would willingly dress up in flea-infested costumes and greet tourists for six dollars an hour—forget a dead Academy Award-winning actor—but Wood couldn’t be too sure. Plus, he didn’t like the way the little kids always ran from him in terror, the way the bigger ones kicked him in the shins or asked him when it was he last had a bath, the way the parents pretty much ignored him. He wasn’t used to playing secondary characters, and he wasn’t about to start. Fuck, it just about killed him when he was asked to do it for real, in pictures.

  He’s since put on about twenty pounds and nurtured a full growth of beard, which has come in a lot grayer than he hoped, almost white. There’s no way anyone would spot him for who he was, but he’s more comfortable draped in red polyster. He’s come to cherish the anonymity of the lobster suit. And it’s not just the anonymity that’s got him. Larry’s the character he was born to play. He’s the Mickey Mouse of shell fish, the star of the whole show, and Wood sometimes thinks his Larry Lobster is the best acting of his career. He believes this wholeheartedly, actually puts what he’s doing in context, compares it to the work he did under Kazan and Peckinpah, sees the connection he makes with the runny-nosed kids as a pure and wonderful and immediate thing, unlike any connection he’d ever made with any other audience, anywhere. It’s all so . . . right here. And now.

  He wonders what that fucker Strasberg would have made of a gig like this. What freedom! What drama! Every day, it’s a full-bodied, fully realized performance, one that permeates his entire being when he’s out there. Inside that lobster suit, he is Larry. It’s not so much acting as reacting, he presumes, better, interacting. He’s constantly evolving, expressing emotions he never knew were available to him through nothing more than cloaked hand gestures and body language; he becomes a part of his environment and lets the environment claim a piece of him in return, and he does all of this without speaking a word.

  It didn’t start out this way. For a while, after Crabapple Jack, they had Wood working the Libby Lobster suit (Larry’s girlfriend), and then he subbed a couple times for the guy who wears Crusty Crustacean. Once they even let him try out his own character, Scrod, the nebulous sea creature of uncertain form, although, it turned out, the Merrytime children preferred their villains to be somewhat more discernible. Scrod never made it past the few complaints it generated down at Guest Relations.

  But Larry suits him. He’s on all the T-shirts and shorts and the pennants, and there are Larry Lobster hats with wiry tentacles and shit. There’s even an interactive CD-ROM piece of
crap, and Wood looks on at all the preexisting merchandise and sees himself. He is at the core of this particular universe, precisely where he belongs.

  Maritime Merrytime is not much in the way of a winter attraction. On a scale of county fair to Disneyland, it barely registers, but it’s all they’ve got up here, and Wood can’t blame the owners for trying. They’ve got a pretty spot, hard by the national park and right on the water. The real estate must’ve cost them, and they’ve put some money into it. They’ve got a world-class rollercoaster, the Typhoon. They’ve got a local cable show, live action, featuring Larry and his pals, and they’re working on a syndication deal, but what they haven’t got is the weather. There’s not much of a pull during winter. Place is only open weekends from Labor Day to Memorial Day, and, if it’s particularly cold or if they’re expecting snow, they don’t open at all. It’s not worth it. Most of the outdoor rides—the Typhoon, Twister, the Wave, the Water Snake—are shut down for the season. All that’s left are the indoor arcade and the carousel and the live shows, the chance for kids to greet their favorite Merrytime characters without the hassle of the summer crowds. The real attractions for parents are the Lobster Pounds sprinkled throughout the park, serving enormous lobster rolls and lobster salad platters and lobster claws at enormously reasonable prices.

  And, as ever, there is the Catch of the Day, also trademarked, the Merrytime ritual wherein one unsuspecting young guest is scooped up in a big fishing net and placed in a giant lobster trap by the Dancing Waters fountain at the main entrance to the park. The idea is that the sea-dwelling characters are turning the tables on their land-dwelling friends. Get it? (It took Wood a while.) If people can go fishing, there’s no reason Larry and his pals can’t go “peopling.” There’s even a song to signal the charade: “We’re a-goin’ peopling, a-peopling, a-peopling. We’re a-goin’ peopling, a-peopling today.”