Seeing Red, page 17
Could Brock deSade have crept up from behind and captured my basic sanity while I was looking the other way, wondering whether my writing talent could withstand the stoop labor of Spy Crushing? Terrific. I'd spend the balance of my career in a foam closet, my thesaurus swollen up with drool, parroting synonyms for violent causation and excess of sensitiveness.
I pulled open my screen door. It hitched and hit me in the face, causing me to drop my keys in the dark. I cursed the lineage of my landlord for cheapskating on the courtyard lights.
Then I thought: Maybe the landlord didn't cut the lights, you fool. Instantly I regretted leaving the booze in the store, and by the time I got the door unlocked my imagination was in speeding gear:
Brock body-rolled, snapping shots at the silhouette in the doorframe. Whirling dum-dums smashed through the interloper's chest in a flopped-over vee shape that splattered his organs through the exploding picture window. Skull shrapnel flew south as his head disintegrated and his spasming corpse joined the spent brass on the floor. Through the choking cordite fumes, Brock said:
"Why don't you come the rest of the way inside, Mr. Lowenbruck, and close the door?"
His voice was a modulated baritone; the timbre of authority punctuated every—
After a good fifteen seconds of petrification my mind stumbled over the insane hope that this was just a burglar, and it was my turn to pay the poverty tax. I dropped my keys again.
No such good fortune.
"Please," the shadow figure said from the cluttered darkness of my studio. "I'm not a hallucination or a robber." My spider lamp clicked on to reveal him standing by my desk. "Why not let's you and I sit and talk like two rational men?"
I didn't have to squint at him; I'd thumbnailed his physical description so many times that recognition clicked in an instant, it was all outlined in the section of Rocko's Spy Crusher bible subheaded Brock deSade deFined.
He was wearing the buff-colored suit that was pro forma whenever the paperback cover art did not clothe him in night-fighting outfit of black Spandex. He was—undeniably—a Saxon White American Male Protestant. Light brown hair longish over dark brown eyes and every bit of the six-foot-two inches, thirty years, and a hundred and seventy trim fighting pounds Rocko had laid down in the bible, which outlined the parameters of the whole series.
His eyebrows were up. "Satisfied, Mr. Lowenbruck?" One elegantly tapered and veiny hand was poised by the lamp switch. I didn't recall anything from Rocko's bible about elegantly tapered and veiny hands, but there they were. He tilted the lamp hood in order to read the yellowing memo I'd received from Shayne Byrne ages ago.
I'd thumbtacked the memo above the typewriter because I believe in milking positive reinforcement for all the ego reinforcement coaxable. By staring at that memo for the past year I was maximizing editorial karma, bowing to my own Mecca. Its text was ingrained in my memory:
DATE: 7/2
FROM: SHAYNE
TO: OLLIE
SUBJECT: DEATH MONGERS
I never ever read this bilge, as you know, but I must say you've really left Rocko in your wake, writerly speaking. Your first ten pages hooked even me. B.dS. is less comic book, more flesh & blood. POV is realer. Aliver. Tensor will sign you for more in increments of two-book pacts. Herewith your executed contracts. Check to follow. So don't just sit there, start the next one!
- Shayne
The man at my desk mouthed the words as he read, his ninety-six-percent eidetic memory (that was in the bible, too) recording everything. Something that sounded like boy oh boy oh boy fell out of my mouth.
It was him. The guy from the book covers. The man I had spent more than a year hustling through eight kinds of screaming hell and Armageddon. Nine kinds, if you counted #21: Bangkok Blowa way, still in the works.
The man in my living/work/bedroom had a receding hairline. One of his front teeth overlapped the other by a scant millimeter or two. There was a hard little comma of pigment on his neck, like one of those pimples that never goes away by itself. Maybe he picked his nose, maybe he used Sweet 'n' Low, maybe those Italian designer shoes hurt his feet. He was out of Brock deSade's styrene mold, but with the imperfections any real human being would normally possess. He was the difference between pulp casserole fiction and the living, breathing, sweaty item.
"I expected to be blown away on my own doorstep," I choked out at last.
"Oh yes." He gave a dismissive wave of his hand. "All that his perforated corpse arched through the smoke nonsense. Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Lowenbruck, that a man bashed in the skull as many times as I have been over the course of twenty books would retain neither the presence of mind nor the equilibrium needed to accurately fire a handgun? Have you any genuine idea of how the kick of a .44 Magnum stings your shoulder socket, how the flash blinds you?" He stepped around one of my junk files on the bare wooden floor. "No. No, I'm not armed. Here. I've brought the Kahlua you abandoned at the store. Let's partake, shall we, and chat? We need to, desperately. It's time."
I couldn't stop staring, watching him as he puttered around performing maddeningly commonplace chores. The coffee was already on. He poured two cups and liberally spiked them with double hits. From the desk he exhumed the first hundred manuscript pages of Bangkok Blowaway. He sat. Sipped. Crossed his legs. Yawned. And pored quickly through his own yet-unpublished rampage.
He sneezed more than once. He seemed a bit allergic, perhaps to the dust in my quarters. I got him some toilet paper.
Up around page 100 I generally run afoul of a minor plot traffic jam. For the first half of the hook, you vamp crazily in whatever digressive direction will absorb another five pages. In so doing, you make a paragraph of off-the-cuff outline transmogrify into thirteen thousand real, whole words. At twenty-four bucks per page, give or take, you write for quantity, not quality. You only get one chance to mortar up the gaps that sprout in such high-speed story logic. All the Spy Crushers I'd ever done were deadlined so tightly that there was one draft—period. I literally made them up as I went along. Not everybody can do that and stay entertaining. But after page 100, the story material tended to expand to fit the page count, rather than the reverse.
Brock deSade dropped the manuscript on my pear-crate coffee-table substitute. It scattered like a fan of playing cards. He massaged the bridge of his nose.
"We have got a problem." His eyes accused the paper on the table. "How long did it take you to wri—er, produce that?"
I backtracked. Hard work. "I started the book last Sunday evening."
"Pretty cocky about freewheeling through my life for me, aren't you?" Inflection had drained away, leaving his voice emotionless and metallic. "What's your word rate? Ten thousand per day? How the devil am I supposed to gain any depth at ten thousand words a day? No wonder that last one, Nuke Psychos, was so stupid. Ten thousand words a day?"
I refused to be cowed just because he was getting pissed off. "Hey! Wait a second! That's not my fault. Tania Krebs picked that outline first. I put the damned things in numerical order; it was number six of six—the one I cobbled up after I'd used all the good ideas on the previous five. It's not easy trying to kick spice into your formula, you know. The same basics have already been rehashed five dozen times this season by all your competitors!"
Tania Krebs had letterheaded stationery that claimed she was a "senior editor" at Tensor. She had slithered up the ladder and now had her former boss's job. Spy Crusher was one of her babies. Her job was to ensure my contracts for Spy Crusher always arrived two days before deadline (so I'd sign just to get the overdue cash) and badger me on company time whenever the due dates loomed. I think we both knew we were generating our doles by robbing the grave of Uncle Ian Fleming; we sifted his ashes to finer and finer consistency with each new book, until there was nothing left to turn in that grave and give us spine chills of guilt when the latest two-hundred plus pages were expressed off to New York.
I think Brock deSade realized that, too. He backed down a little. "You're okay with plot and logic," he said. "You rarely leave loose ends hanging. What you're bad at is pacing." He riffled through Bangkok Blowaway again. "Here, look—you dicked around for eons in this chapter with a dumb flashback to childhood. You should have kept the focus on my escape from the cell." Whack—the paper met the table again. "What was the problem? Run short on coffee? Run out of booze?"
That smart line was from Corpse Gambit. Chapter Six. I had written it last year.
"I admit it was boring," I said. "That was a bricks-and-caulk chapter. Too early in the book. But you've got to build each violent scene or the violence becomes redundant too fast. Besides, I needed to lay in some exposition to set up the introduction of Chantelle D'Arcy, otherwise the readers won't realize—"
"That's another thing," he cut in. "Always with the centerfold girls. Long legs, tan thighs, British accents, mammoth boobs. Jesus. The only thing you ever change is their hair color."
"I didn't think you'd object to sleeping with a parade of gorgeous women" I said, hurt now.
"These aren't women, these are Cosmo airheads with Don Rickles' old sarcasm routines and terminal nymphomania. Why not once, just once, let me interface with a woman of personality, of intelligence, of substance. Somebody real."
"Real as you, huh? Don't blame me for the bimbettes, bucko, blame Tania Krebs. She's the one who keeps dunning me to make it rougher, make it rougher, sex and violence, MAKE IT ROUGHER! How do you think my manuscript for #18: The Red Route, turned into Grenade Brigade Raid?"
"You vas only following orders, is that it?"
"I was dancing for nickels, hero. The contract says Writer for Hire. So you and I are both mercenaries."
"Mercenary?" Brock deSade's face paled. "Me? I'm a loyal servant of my country, protecting the rights of—"
This time I cut him off. "Stow that in a cedar chest and maybe some of the stink'll go away. You murder people. You have a license to murder them. You blow off their arms and legs; you garrote, axe, decapitate, bludgeon. You wiretap and entrap, break and enter; you piss all over the Constitution every time you step out of your office. If Nixon had had ten of you, he'd've been a goddamned emperor by now!" I marched to the desk and yanked a drawer off its track. The ancient dado joints separated and the drawer sprang open like a flower. From the junk it dump-trucked on the floor I retrieved a yellow folder.
"This is Rocko's bible for you!" I yelled, flinging it. "Take a good, long look! You're an untaxed millionaire! You were deeded a hundred acres in the Rocky Mountains for free! An estate with solar power and windmills! A private airstrip, thirty automobiles, and a collection of original fucking Impressionist oils! What the hell would a person like that want with—"
"You didn't pay attention to the part about how Vietnam changed my consciousness," he said.
My face got livid. "You're one of the privileged, the super rich, the booted and horsed! If Reagan had somebody as wealthy as you're supposed to be as an ally, what is he doing by letting you risk your neck blowing banana dictators to smithereens? I mean, what the Christ do you pay somebody who has unlimited bread for doing that?"
It had always bugged me. It reminded me of the basic flaw in Mission: Impossible, the longest-running spy show on television. Forget about whether the ideology was right or wrong; old Mr. Phelps and Barney and the gang must have been undercovering for real coolie wages if they had to pull nine straight years of stunts and raids. Just once, I ached for the Impossible Missions Force to come back that stupid tape recorder with 'Forget that action; we might get killed! Besides, Willy has enough in the bank this month.' And the IMF didn't look like it was composed of millionaires.
And who would've gotten the assignments they turned down? I'm still wondering about that one.
Suddenly very much in character, Brock deSade said, "I wouldn't expect you to understand my ethics. Honor and loyalty aren't written into the standard contract. Right?"
I was worried about rubbing his sore spots when it hit me that I made up those sore spots for a living.
"Listen." I was mostly unafraid now. "In a ghost story, when a ghost makes a visitation, he comes for something he didn't get when he was alive. Vengeance, usually. Revenge is the gasoline that powers most of the sociopaths your series competes with. But what wrong have I done you? I've given you what life you've had for the past"—damn it that I had to stop and think! —". . . uh, nine books."
He sighed. "Oliver, it's a two-dimensional life." He clenched and unclenched his hands, working out how to express what he felt. "Damn it, all I do is fuck and kill and unload flinty one-liners on cardboard characters who are even less corporeal than me. It's not the writing, it's the approach I can't stand anymore. And no one, not even Brock deSade, can go on being clouted over the head eighteen times per book!"
"Eighteen?" I winced.
"That's the average"—he nodded gravely—"including knockouts. It's a violence device you don't seem able to resist."
He was right, of course. Brock deSade, out cold, was always a cliffhanging way to wind up a chapter. It was rougher; it kept Tania Krebs from caterwauling. But it was nothing more than a device: cheap, expedient, illogical. The hack's hallmark.
"So what's your reason for showing up here? Just to stop getting hit on the head in the name of Male Oriented Action Fiction?" I quoted the bible. Maybe the last sight of my life would be the bore of Brock deSade's legendary Magnum.
"Oh, I'll admit I thought about dusting you," he said. "If your headless body was found perched at a typewriter containing a note that you couldn't hack Spy Crusher anymore, there wouldn't even be an investigation. There'd be nine books of evidence that you were punch drunk from ultraviolence, crazy enough to blow your own brains out with a Magnum identical to that wielded by your protagonist. You'd be number one on the evening news, all right. The cops and the media just love it when creative types explode. It reaffirms their myth that artists are all dangerous whackos."
That was how I'd already figured it. Plotwise, I was still ahead of him, ghost or not.
"But, as I told you, Oliver, I'm unarmed. We have no cause to fear each other. I think it's reasonable to say we owe each other our lives. Or could you keep alive on those Kraft macaroni and cheese dinners? You could masturbate to the food spreads in Redbook?"
That was a weird image. I suppressed the urge to write it down for future use.
"Never fear," he said. "I have hit upon a solution to the drabness of your formula. And that's why I'm here."
"Hold it! Don't blame me for the dreck Rocko Stovington reeled off his platen; that's ancient history! I made you a hell of a lot more human than the repellent fascist asshole in that bible!"
The insult left him unfazed. "True. True. You seem to have made me whole enough. But you haven't energized the series with the same sort of drive that let you improve me as a character. You began to repeat your plots with the fourth book."
I fought not to scream. Brock deSade was telling the author of his own adventures that he was a sub-par writer. "Are you telling me I'm finished? If I'm finished, who's going to keep you alive?"
"You are."
"Then who's going to write the books, wiseass?"
He grinned and shot his bolt. "Me."
"Oliver? Tania Krebs."
It was as certain as the toast falling jelly-side down, her call. "Hello," I said. Reluctantly.
"Where's the manuscript?" This was Tania's special brand of subtlety; something to put her writers at ease and give them a sense of family, a comfortable part of give-and-take working relationship. It was easy to envision her phoning from a dungeon, receiver held in one leather-winged claw.
My answer was by rote, monosyllabic. The absolute extended deadline for Bangkok Blowaway was still a week distant.
"Oliver. We have schedules. We need the book now. Can you send the first hundred pages? I've got to see some product." She was a human answerphone; the same message tape every time in that nasty, nasal New Jersey twang.
"I'm still in final rewrite," I fibbed.
Across the room, Brock deSade, Spy Crusher, hunched over my typewriter, averaging about seven words a minute. His tan suit was balled into a makeshift pillow on the sofa. Near him amid the chaos on my desk, my coffeepot stood sentry, a silver ding in its side from when he returned the carriage on my Smith-Corona manual too vehemently and sent it flying. I could have sent Tania Krebs my original first hundred pages . . . but now they were stuck together with what would indubitably look like dried blood. Tap tap tap. His tongue was stuck out in concentration; the suggestion of brainpower was comic for the amount of paper actually being produced. Tap tap.
"Don't get so antsy, Tania, you'll have the book by"—I checked the red circles on my Texaco calendar—"the fifteenth. An original, complete, and finished work." I loved throwing her own all-encompassing contractese back at her. "Tania. Have I ever lied to you?"
"You never call," she whined. "I never know if you're making any progress."
"I just told you." Tap tap. Tap.
"Why can't you check with us, let us know where to send galleys, keep us updated? Not often. Say twice a week. So we're both current?" My stepmom used to address me in the same tone whenever she thought I wasn't paying attention. Down deep, she couldn't stand me any more than Tania Krebs.
"Sure thing, Tania," I lied pleasantly. "Listen, gotta run. On your behalf. The story is flowing and the machine is hot." I had a mini-flash of Rocko Stovington word-milling porn in just those terms, while a TV at his feet blared out commercials for Wendy's burgers. The hot and juicy kind.
"Just get it in on time, Oliver." Still the reproach, the patronizing superiority. Fuck her and her galleys.
"'Bye, Tania." Click. Tap tap.
"I got ten more pages while you were snoring through reruns of The Wild Wild West," Brock deSade said, not looking up from the machine. A smoldering cigarette hung from his lips; I hadn't noticed when it had replaced the protruding tongue. I hadn't known Brock deSade smoked. He flicked a long ash into my Dunes ashtray, where it spattered across some pennies. "I think this is, you know, beginning to assume some narrative coherency. I rewrote the outline I showed you yesterday." He sounded hopeful.
