by Bruce Wagner
Thad started to laugh. It was a dry laugh, nearly a retch.
“I’m a big fan of your films,” said one of the men. “But I have to say I wasn’t aware you wrote books. When I jumped on the Internet, I was very impressed. Now, I’m not exactly sure how many you’d have to sell to get on the Times list—”
“I’m having a paralegal research that.”
“It’s a bit of a labyrinthine process. I mean, they definitely have their own logic.”
“They have their own country over there!”
“But I think it’s actually doable.”
“Did he specify fiction or nonfiction?” said one to the other.
“Fiction—I believe.”
“It was definitely fiction,” said the one who referenced The Corrections.
“I don’t think it’s as high as you would imagine—in terms of sales.”
“To get on the list.”
“It’s definitely doable. God knows your dad was on that list enough—”
“Though not as much as a person might think. It’s not a cakewalk.”
“It was clearly his fervent wish that some of his good luck and good fortune rub off.”
Though after midnight on the East Coast, I phoned Miriam on the way home. She was enraged when I recounted what happened. She said Jack Michelet was a sadist who looked forward to striking yet another blow at his son—this one, from the grave. We didn’t talk very long because she wanted to call the Chateau and check up.
As I walked inside the house, my cell phone rang. Miriam had spoken to Clea (“Thank God she’s there”) and Thad was fast asleep—his traditional reaction to upsetting news. Luckily, he didn’t have to be at the studio until ten.
In the morning, I went for a jog on the beach. Black Jack’s ghoulish machinations put Dad in a better light. (No shit.) Perry had his callous side, to be sure, but was never willfully cruel, which I’ve always considered among the most deplorable of sins. I couldn’t conceive what it would be like to have a parent as full-time predator. It reminded me of someone who spoke at AA a few months ago, a man who trained attack dogs for a living. He said he wore protective gear but when the dog bit down it was important to keep your arm moving; that way, the animal tended to refocus and attack elsewhere. If you didn’t stay mobile, the teeth sank dangerously down, even through wadded layers—point being, it was a fair metaphor to describe growing up in an alcoholic household. I imagined Thad dodging and feinting, tooth and muzzle upon him year after year, still dodging, still feinting, reeling from roughhouse burnout, adrenals spent—taking the infernal, foul-breathed blows even after a gaggle of vets had supposedly put the miserable beast down.
* * *
1 In Hollywood, whenever agents or lawyers are late, they play the “emergency” card.
ON THE WAY TO WORK, I phoned the Chateau.
No answer in the room.
I tried Clea’s cell—10:00 A.M. on the dot—nothing.
I feared the worst.
This time, as I drove through the studio gates, she picked up. Boisterous laughter on the other end affronted my ear. They were in Thad’s trailer, having breakfast with some of the cast. I was ordered to join them, “warp speed.”
When I got there, Clea, Cabott, the captain, and X-Ray were enrapt by one of Thad’s gossipy pornographic anecdotes, this, regarding a Broadway diva of “uncertain age.” He looked cheerful and wide awake, eyes clear as bells. Just as the story ended, we heard the A.D. walkie—“OK, everyone, we are back”—and the raucous laughter continued in choppy waves while actors drifted out. Nick Sultan, tucked out of sight in the kitchen nook, was the last to leave. The director gave a thumb’s-up and smiled as he brushed past, heading for the set.
“Bertram!” said Thad, giving me his full, warm attention.
I was amazed by his powers of recovery. Though I wasn’t exactly Dr. Phil, it occurred to me his ebullience might have been masking a dangerous mania, soon to show a savage, darker side. Still, I clung to the possibility Thad’s lightness of mood was some indicator of mental health, say, the nimble instincts of a survivor that had allowed him to flourish, more or less, through the years of horrible abuse. At first, I thought the celebratory air was due to Clea’s earlier announcement he’d been “green lit” to adapt Chrysanthemum to film.
But that wasn’t it—that wasn’t it at all.
“Did you tell him?” he asked Clea.
She shook her head pridefully, like a child who’d kept the biggest secret in the world.
“Tell me what?”
“You will not believe how perfect this is!”
“It’s incredible,” said Clea. “And it was Miriam—Miriam’s idea! Miriam is a genius.”
“Tell me.” I was a child now too.
“Miriam is a genius,” said Thad, peremptorily.
“She called this morning with this amazing concept.”
“A brilliant fucking stratagem.”
“Bertie, you won’t believe it . . .”
“You guys are killing me—”
“Tell him,” said Thad, coolly delegating.
“She was up half the night—ohmygod, I love her! She was so pissed. Miriam really hated what Jack did—”
“Beware Miriam, when pissed,” Thad intoned. “There’s hell to pay!”
“—I mean, with the will.” Clea was loaded. Lag-timed.
“Total fucking warrior. A killing machine!”
“She kept thinking there was some way around it.”
“And she aced it! She totally fucking aced it.”
“But how?” I said, beaming—happy they were happy.
“She went online, right?” said Clea. “And looked up all the New York Times’ bestseller lists—for like the last ten years. And you know what’s there?”
“Can you guess?”
“What’s on the list?”
I shook my head, stumped.
“There are twelve Starwatch: The Navigators titles! Twelve!”
I wasn’t comprehending.
“Don’t you see?” said Clea. “The total genius of it? If Thad novelizes ‘Prodigal Son’—there’s no way they’re not going to let him—and if ‘Prodigal Son’ gets on the list . . .”
“Miriam found the cosmodemonic loophole, honeychile!” Thad jigged, arms akimbo, crooning: “Supercali-fraga-listic-expi-ali-doh-cious, pay-day on the Fell-crum Outback won’t be so a-tro-cious!”
“It’s the Vorbalidian Quick Pick! The Great Dome Super Lotto!”
“Wham! Bam! Thank you, Dad!”
“Bertie, can you believe? Can you believe how genius that is?”
“We’re in the money! We’re in the money!” He hooked his arm in hers as they polka’d round the cramped trailer, knocking into paper plates, sending breakfast burritos spilling to carpet, disgorging scrambled eggs and onions like the innards of a wormy piñata. “We’ve gotta lot of what it takes to get along!”
IT WAS THE END OF the second week. Five more (shooting) days, and we wrapped.
I had Friday off. I met a girl at the Wednesday night AA meeting in Brentwood (the supersized Pacific Group) and she invited me to Ojai, for pottery lessons. Sounded like fun but I declined, opting instead to hang with Mom, who by now was rightfully suspicious of my recent attentions. So be it—the Benedict house was conveniently located should I feel compelled to wander over to the studio after a visit, which I invariably did . . . 1
I stood in the soundstage’s cool, dark wings, watching the reunion scene between Thad and his parents. A great throne had been carried in by docile attendants with human bodies and canine heads; possessed of a shock of white hair and frail gait, the king still mustered regal authority. The wife entered on cue, pale and submissive, in blue toga-style robes. Thad still wore his ensign’s uniform. He stepped awkwardly—boyishly—forward. With intense effort the king stood and held out his arms. They embraced. The traumatized queen stared into the void.
“Welcome home.”
“Thank you, Father. Are
you in pain?”
“Not so bad today.” He steadied himself against the throne. “Your mother is grateful for your return. She will soon find words. It was a terrible blow when you left.”
“What?” said Thad, breaking character.
The actor who played the king was confused, repeating his last line as a cue.
“It was a terrible blow when—”
Thad frantically looked off camera.
“I’m not—where’s the script girl? What are the lines?”
Nick yelled “Cut it” and came over with the woman, who read from her thick leather binder the same line the king had given, followed by the ensign’s expected response.
“Was that a joke?” interrupted Thad, throwing the actor a resentful look.
Nick edged him away from the others.
“What’s going on, Thad?” he quietly asked.
I walked closer, in case I might be of any help.
“I heard him say it,” said Thad.
Nick told an A.D. to get the medic.
“No—wait a minute!” He shook off the director’s grip. “No memory of having starred atones for later disregard or keeps the end from being hard—”
“Thad? What’s going on?” I said, gingerly.
While puzzled to see me standing there in my civvies, Nick was clearly relieved to have an ally.
“Your friend is sick.”
I took Thad by the shoulders and asked if he was OK. In the most transient, intimate of moments, I watched him assess the terrifying enormity of what had just happened—being victimized by hallucination—then move to mentally tourniquet the event, laying the queasily idiopathic horror of it on that old saw “premigrainous condition.” He informed us that his “classically anomalous proclivity for visual and auditory ephemera” (a smoothly clinical, amazingly believable rap) had actually been studied in teaching hospitals and likened by “the headache boys” to petit mal seizure.
“Let’s get him to an ER,” said Nick, which I thought to his credit.
“No—no need, but thank you. I can give myself a shot.”
“Is that something you have with you?” asked the director.
“In the trailer. Really, Nickie—thank you but it’s not a problem.”
“Will it make you groggy?” wondered the solicitous actor-king. Politeness and hushed tones ruled, as if we had hastily gathered on a tarmac in the wake of a minor civic disaster.
“No! They’re vasoconstrictors. Let me go do my thing then we’ll finish the scene.”
I offered to walk him to the trailer but Nick held me back, sending the First in my place. The director desperately sought reassurance—as if I were the “brain man.” He asked if I thought Thad was going to be all right; I joked that we should arrange a consultation with X-Ray. Nick wasn’t amused. As I rushed to catch up, I heard one of the grips say, “Piece o’ fuckin work.” Another rejoined, “Guy’s nutsoid.”
When a very upset Clea arrived at the trailer, I told her that he gave himself an injection and we should probably let him sleep it off. Things were obviously running behind; the pressure to complete his scenes was only going to worsen.
“What exactly happened?” she said, softly stroking his forehead with the back of her hand. He snored like an elf who’d gorged in a mushroom patch.
“I don’t know. It’s like he heard something—something he thought the actor said.”
“Oh shit.”
“Part of the migraine thing?”
She shrugged her shoulders and I got the feeling Clea knew more than she let on. “He takes this other medicine,” she said. “Maybe he’s not taking his other medicine.”
They shot around him, so he’d have more time to recover. Thad refused any attempts by production to have him examined by a doctor. Clea and I were the only ones he allowed in his trailer. (I chose to stay away.) She gave out the occasional bulletins—he was resting, he was much better, he was going over his lines—that sort of thing. Meanwhile, Nick and his A.D. huddled over a folding board of colored strips, deciding which of Thad’s scenes might be shot after lunch. The actors were naturally concerned. They asked how he was and I did my best to downplay the trouble, becoming the de facto spokesman for that insidious nemesis, Migraine.
Thanks to the writers, the show went on. By now they’d contrived for the entire bridge to be jailed by Morloch—but that was only the half of it. The gravitational pull of the Great Dome had worked an outlandish effect upon our crew. Suddenly realizing he hadn’t yet had a single impulse to escape, the Demeter’s normally testosterone-charged captain came to the conclusion that he was losing his sap—and the will to command. Laughton complained of feeling “vulnerable,” holding our captors responsible for confounding new emotions that washed over him “as waves upon shifting sand.” His voice trembled, Hamlet-like and positively premenstrual; it was all he could do to keep from busting into tears.
The android was having problems himself. The unexpected incarceration (among other dilemmas) required urgent analysis yet Cabott had undergone a curious degradation of deductive powers. “In the past,” he said, clinging pitifully to the painted plastic bars of his cell, “I have enjoyed my solitary time by solving Holstrum’s Conundrum—visualizing the beauty of its axioms. Most peculiarly, I’ve been pondering the formula for days now, unable to make even the slightest headway . . . yet, somehow—the mere fact I am stymied seems to have caused me . . . irrepressible glee!” He shrieked and twittered like a hyped-up fembot.2 “A veil is lifting from my eyes,” said Cabott, seized by a mystical vision. “There’s so much in the universe to see—to touch, smell, hold, feel. When I think of all the time wasted on . . . mind games and logical one-upmanship—I want to live, not think. I hereby send Mr. Holstrum and his precious conundrum to hell!” He tossed back his head like an amateur-hour Nijinsky, throatily declaring. “Love is the glue of God, not logic, but love! Love! Love! Love!—”
I won’t bore you with further details. Suffice to say that my character, Commander Karp, disgusted and ashamed over past chauvinistic behavior, not only vowed celibacy but a lifelong penance wherein he promised to resign from his post on the Demeter in exchange for citizenship on a rough-hewn planet famously known for the asceticism of the religious order that had adopted its name. I turned to an adjacent cell in an attempt to engage Dr. Chaldorer; unfortunately, X-Ray was far too disturbed to take confession. Staring into space with dead, weepy eyes, he proclaimed he had never been a true healer—he was just a “mechanic” who knew “how to oil the parts” and nothing more. The diabolical Dome (and those devilish writers) had forced him to admit to something he’d never told a living soul: in his first year of practice, he lost a twenty-two-year-old woman on the table because of a dubious judgment call. “My arrogance killed that young girl—she had a husband and a little boy! How fitting: the Star Legion’s star butcher, finally behind bars where he belongs . . . where he should have been confined—long, long ago!” The oaths he uttered, which were more than Hippocratic, played havoc with his mascara.
I was glad the migraine, or whatever the hell it was, forced us to get those ludicrous set pieces out of the way. Thad and Clea’s scene was slated for late afternoon, a good thing because the medication had left him subdued; he turned in an adroitly skilled and elegiac performance, and Nick Sultan was a happy man. Directors can be nervous individuals; Nick must have spent the better part of lunch strategizing with his agent, various producers, and casting gals over worst-case scenarios. Of course, everyone knew the “situation” wasn’t Nick’s fault—but you know what they say about crimes being committed under one’s watch.
The thrones of king and queen were empty. Thad and Clea loitered in the palace hall, alone save for dog-headed sentinels in rigid attention. There came a moment of awkward intimacy when Trothex uncomfortably confessed that she and Morloch had been—were—a couple. As testimony to his skill as an actor, Thad’s very skin seemed to color with the crude complexities of what she had shared. Just then, Mo
rloch (a double whom Thad would later replace, digitally) entered with wolfish royal retinue.
“It is done!” the stand-in exclaimed triumphantly, referring to whatever internecine machinations. “The people demand it!”
With the rotten taste of a romance betrayed still in his mouth, the ensign selflessly switched gears. “I insist you release the others—at once!”
“All issues will be settled in the Outback.”
“I do not understand. . . .”
“Then I shall make it clear, brother dearest! We will fight with our hands3—in twenty-four of your precious Earth hours. Forewarned is forearmed!”
The stand-in for the demon prince froze as the camera pushed in on Mr. Rattweil. After what seemed an eternity, the director “cut”—evidently, Thad forgot his final line but Nick was thrilled nonetheless. They would do a pickup.
Camera reset.
The First ordered everyone to settle.
“And . . . action!”
Again, the lens pushed in on Thad as he peered off, his gaze lost in the tarry, starry depths of the Outback.
“I am home,” he said.
We wrapped the day.
* * *
1 An obsessive, repressed, dysfunctional threesome is more work than it seems. Trust me.
2 I should note our ensemble was giddy from stepping outside the box of their usual shtick, and that “Nickie” Sultan had no great desire, or ability, to rein them in. There was no shortage of Hamlet or ham.
3 In one of the writing staff’s aggravating Shakespearean asides, Thad interjected, “Forever a duo, we shall have a ‘duel’ death.”
MIRIAM SURPRISED US BY FLYING out early. She phoned on Friday evening to ask if I wanted to have a drink at the hotel; she was staying at Shutters for the weekend, “as a treat.” She would check into the Chateau on Monday.
