Seeing Red, page 18
He sounded wrong. A sickening realization came home.
Except for Brock deSade's glitter-eyed enthusiasm (and the absence of a fingerprinty glass of bourbon) the whole scene was straight out of Chandler. Writer at Work. Too stylized.
Brock deSade looked and sounded like a tyro.
Sitting before me was everything those Writer's Digest bromides told me was amateur. The guy with the great novel in his head and no time to type it. The guy with the corduroy jacket. Elbow patches optional. Pipe in one pocket. A. Author, Esq. Hollywoodus Bigmouthus. Which meant—
"Give that to me," I said. "Where are you?"
"Fight scene. Chapter two."
I grabbed his short stack of finished copy. It took about five minutes to scan front to back.
It was not precisely disastrous.
Throughout my oppressively silent read-through I could feel him watching me. He tried to pounce every time I made a noise. When I leafed up the final page, he tailgated right in: "Well? Is that a fresh perspective or what?"
"Oh, it's fresh all right. Like fresh roadkill. It still stinks."
He got reactionary, defensive. "What's wrong with it?"
"Just look at it." I pulled a sheet at random and quoted. "He pulled the door to up in the jamb because on the outside it was raining down wetly. Apart from this chainsaw massacre of prepositions and the fact that rain at least on this planet, rarely goes any direction other than down and is almost always wet, rain never just rains in this sort of book. It drives down mercilessly, it patters mournfully, it sheets earthward in an icy torrent, it pounds the streets and sinuses of the city into waterlogged submission beneath an unsympathetic sky of darkest gunmetal gray! To write Brock deSade you've got to hammerlock your adjectives, maximize your verbiage, kick the reader in the teeth with the Spy Crusher's cocky, smartass hipper-than-thou-ness. The Brock deSade on these pages couldn't intimidate a librarian! The plotting is verveless preschool junk! The bible specifies a 'crisp, page-turner mystery-action' style! What you have here would put a proofreader to sleep!"
The face of Brock deSade, Spy Crusher, drooped. He resembled a Saint Bernard puppy caught with a Gucci slipper in his mush and a gallon of piddle on the Kashian. For the quarter second before his eyes resumed their accustomed steeliness, they looked about to start leaking bright tears. Had I actually hurt the feelings of a fictional being?
"So that's your professional opinion, is it?" His timbre of authority quavered, just noticeably.
I never thought I'd feel sorry for a quote, "repellent fascist asshole."
But shit can become New York steak or vice versa, depending on the alimentary direction you take, so I backpedaled. Maybe I could salvage enough of his ego to keep him from decking me with a wheel kick.
"Look, look. Your perspective is good." I realized I sounded like a no-talent Fiction 101 instructor. "But your execution strangles it. This string of prose couldn't hook your own mother." (Oops. Did Brock deSade have a mommy? Did I give him a mommy?) "This stuff about pole-vaulting the Red Wall into the dogs and barbed wire, now that has the ring of experience. It's just outrageous enough to be convincing. It's so weird it probably would go down that way, exactly."
"You have your profession," he said, trying to look tough. "I have mine."
It crashed home: I had made Brock deSade a front-rank Spy Crusher, but not a good writer. I hadn't even made him a good typist.
"That's it! Because of who you are you know just what a bullet zipping past your ear sounds like! You've been tortured by experts! Bones busted! Kicked in the balls!"
"Don't forget hit on the head."
"You've made love to women so pneumatic they could only exist in violence fiction! You know everything about computers, flying planes, politics, spy gimmicks, foreign protocol! For you to exist at all, you have to be an authority on all of that—" I groped for the right word. "All of that bullshit!"
He got sullen. "But all that considered, you're still more important to the series than I am. Is that what you're saying?"
"Quiet!" I pushed past him to get at the shuffled-together drafts on the coffee table. "I think I've just figured out a way for you to do what you want without cutting me out of a job." I retrieved Rocko's dogeared deSade bible. My heart was pounding louder than a landlord on a locked door.
The phone rang, breaking up that golden moment of inspiration.
"That'll probably be Tania again. It's 5:25 in New York and she wants to get in one last stab before she catches her train to Long Island. Unplug her."
In a fast fifteen minutes I reeled out two solid pages of inserts for the bible, drowned in enough pretensions to literary excellence that even the ghost of Papa Hemingway would have emitted a macho little choke. Brock deSade ate it up avidly, even the part about his ability to type a hundred and seventy five words per minute with no errors. I stapled the new material, pages 21-A and 21-B, into the bible between the passages of hard-sell barf describing Brock deSade's "scholarly activism shoulder to shoulder with Vietnam Vets Against the War" and the tear-jerking tragedy of his late spouse, "the most beautiful woman Brock had ever known, accidentally killed by a bomb in the ladies' room of a Belfast department store."
When he read the new stuff, the first thing he did was to offer to run back to the Alpha Beta to get us some champagne for celebration purposes. Now he was behaving like a writer.
I agreed enthusiastically, clapping him on the back. Comrades in conspiracy.
As soon as he was out the door I grabbed the bible and my trusty bottle of white-out. Most of the gunk I had just typed was padding. I found the most disposable paragraph of it and nimbly obliterated it with the correction fluid to give me new writing room. Then I performed a careful bit of surgery, unbending and extracting the staples. They would have to line up perfectly when I reassembled the bible or the tampering would be noticed. The white-out was old and took nearly five minutes to dry completely, but it finally stopped reflecting the desk light.
Some of my most inspired ideas come in last-minute line revisions. Such as:
Brock deSade's most salient characteristic, however, is a fierce, nearly Sicilian loyalty regarding friendship and those who are his allies. For this elite inner circle of staunch confidants, no request is too large to serve his overdeveloped sense of honor. Those who take advantage or exploit his friendship are ruthlessly eliminated, but for those who aid him in his quest for truth and justice, nothing is too much to ask of him.
I had a sound business proposition for the version of Brock deSade that returned from the store.
He never read the revisions. He figured he knew his own bible by heart already.
Tensor forwards Spy Crusher mail by the sack these days. I framed the very first fan letter over my work area, next to the Perma-Plaque of Shayne Byrne's yellowed memo.
7/13/81
Dear Mr. Gunn:
I have never written a letter like this to any author before, but felt I might take some of your valuable time to compliment you on your Brock deSade which I've been a fan for quite some time. Since Bangkok Blowaway (15 books ago, as you know), the series has assumed dimensions of authenticity hitherto uncommon to your "normal" spy rampages.
Having worked in both foreign and domestic CIA posts in addition to some a la carte gigs in Africa and El Salvador, I'm convinced you must have seen similar action firsthand. Nobody who wasn't there could know, buddy, and your unerring eye for gritty detail satisfies someone like me. Yet Brock deSade has also grown—to become multidimensional, unique, even sensitive. A human man instead of a caricature. It's nice to know somebody out there knows whereof he writes.
Well, I don't have anything else to tell you but thanks for all the hours of reading pleasure. As Pendleton used to say, live large and stay hard!
Yours sincerely,
Jefferson "Big Zack" Trumbull (Major, USAF, Ret.)
Tania tends to send us multibook contracts and checks together lately. Apart from that, we don't hear from her much. Tensor, thanks to the success of the revamped Spy Crusher line, has launched Scimitar Books (action paperback originals) and Aardvark, a quality-reprint line.
Principal photography on the second Brock deSade movie just wrapped in West Germany. Paramount. Thirty-million-dollar production floor.
My work center absorbs an entire room of my cottage. I have multi-readout screens—one for each project—and unlimited memory. Unless I want to, I never have to even look at Brock deSade. He lives on the far side of the Rocky Mountain tract, a hundred acres away from me.
I'm his employee. Sort of. I sit on the board of directors of his corporation. After all, he is an independent, untaxed millionaire.
I've agreed to hang around here on what Brock calls the "farm" until one hundred Spy Crushers are in print. Past that point, the series can be farmed out. It'll renew itself via reprints and films. It'll gain a life of its own . . . so to speak.
Oliver Lowenbruck is the only person who does Spy Crusher, and Brock deSade sure as hell can't do the autograph sessions, the New York meetings, the interviews. Which is why Brock deSade can't dump me in the Colorado River wearing stone loafers.
Past Spy Crusher #100, we've agreed to dissolve our partnership amicably. I have an ironclad contract. I wrote it.
He sends over the pages, I tinker here and there, put my cover sheet on it, and off it goes. Tania Krebs and her troll brigade never noticed the style switch; they were too dazzled by the sales figures. Brock deSade's plots make absolutely no sense to me, but as he says, the military sales trend steadily upward. Some nosy newspaper found a Spy Crusher novel on the President's nightstand last week.
Besides, I don't have much time to devote to that sort of writing anymore. Brock deSade got what he wanted. So did I.
I'm editing a "classics" series for Aardvark, and have two original novels in galleys at Scimitar. And a hardcover. At last. From Viking next October, a prestige Christmas release.
With my real name on the spine.
We just turned in #47: Den of Reivers, so I'm halfway home and still reasonably young.
There's only a single dark note I can think of.
When the new, improved Spy Crusher really blasted off, good old Rocko Stovington tried to steal the series back for himself. Tania Krebs showed him the OUT door after his last book, Lucy, the Moist, bombed. He got so obnoxious that Shayne Byrne dumped him as a client. And his personal life got so decrepit that his lover shot him in the face with a target pistol during a quarrel over who was sleeping with whom.
Her name was Corinne, I think.
COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU
Jonathan Daniel Stoner recognized the dude inside the Hollywood Magic Shoppe, the fellow poring over the display plaque of artificial eyeballs. He was from the Omicron Cinema; one of the employees.
Always having five minutes to squander, Jack (as Jonathan had been dubbed in the Nam by the few comrades possessing enough intellectual candlepower to add his first and middle names into the sum of a tepid joke hey there's another blood here named Richard Whiskey but we call him Dick Liquor yock yock yock) pulled in. He saw the fake eyeballs were pretty damned authentic. Nested in felt, they had been glossed with some special shellac that made them gleam like real, living, wet eyes. Artificial substitutes, he thought, and his missing right leg sent a wholly imaginary local wince up to his brain.
"Say hey."
The dude from the Omicron looked up. As his face was hit by the combination of the sputtering fluorescents above and the dirty gray daylight sneaking in off Hollywood Boulevard, Jack thought maybe the guy had mononucleosis or something. Superficially he was mere hippie fallout, a decade out of step with the real world and then some, but close up Jack could see his face was the color of a kitchen sink stained by coffee grounds. It was stiff and haunted. Above it was hair skewed in a dozen directions, matted, unwashed; below, a physique withered by hard weather or drugs or both. The eyes were sunken and glazed with the slightly stoned expression Jack had learned from the perimeter snipers at Nest Kilo—burned-out Qui Nohn alumni who just didn't give a shit anymore. The hippie image was jelled by the overpowering miasma (no, stink, call it what it fucking is) of patchouli oil wafting from every pore. To Jack it was like mustard gas. God, he hated that stuff.
The dude had not yet responded or connected. He appeared to be waiting for better input.
"I come to the Omicron all the time," Jack prompted. "Last week it was Dial M for Murder and House of Wax. The two-way 3D glasses were a neat idea." Some management genius had stamped out dual lenses that were red-green for the black-and-white feature, and flipped to polarized lenses for color. The two-dollar matinee had been packed.
It seemed to take the entire geologic ages for the dude to react. "Oh yeah." His voice was arid, rasping. "I seen you . . . lotsa times. Remember your walking stick. Yeah." He turned back to his tray of eyeballs.
Jack shifted his weight from his government-issue cane to his real leg, leaning closer to recapture the dude's notice despite the eye-watering, minty stench. "Uh—what's next?"
Again the slow shift, as though the dude was crippled in a way Jack could not see. Always say handicapped, not crippled, Compton, the XO at Firebase Gloria, had advised with shit-eating sincerity before pitching Jack back in the world. Jack's leg was still missing in action somewhere north of Di An and south of Luke's Castle. At least you've fought your last battle, soldier. Compton was a supreme rectal-cranial inversion.
The dude arm-wrestled his own memory to a draw. "What's next Bloody Mama. Bonnie and Clyde. That ends Crime Week. For the weekend . . . we got Black Moon. And . . ." He plucked a jade green eyeball from the tray and inspected it through a nonexistent loupe, turning it as you would a jewel. "Some other Louis Malle film." His voice remained strep-throat dry, sounding like a bad parody of the Man With No Name. "My Dinner with André. Maybe."
"Or Atlantic City?" Jack was hoping.
The dude nodded as though it hurt. "I will look for you." He extended his free hand and Jack found himself receiving his first power-to-the-people handshake in ten years. The dude's yogurt pallor was easy to dismiss as the price of toiling in the eternal darkness of a movie theatre, but the papery texture of his flesh made Jack think he was clasping a mummy's hand. The brittle skin seemed to crackle in his grip, the bones beneath rearranging themselves arthritically like dried voodoo talismans. Up-down, once-twice, zomboid and mechanical. Jack remembered the rack of artificial steel and vinyl arms stored near the shelf from which the medicos picked a leg to replace his lost one. It had been like a tombful of dismembered mannequins; limbs and parts devoid of viscera. Hollow, lifeless surrogates. The Omicron dude's dead grasp was what Jack thought shaking with one of those plastic-coated hooks would feel like.
The dude unclasped, then produced from his pocket a slim card in a cashier's-check pattern of waffled green lines, with Good for One Free Admission stamped on front. "Yours," he said. "Got to keep our regulars satisfied."
"Hey, thanks." Abruptly Jack felt like a heel for mentally bumming the dude.
"See you there." He sought the mate for the single glass eye he balanced in his palm, like pairing clearies for luck in marbles.
Jack executed his stiff, clockwork one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and left the store, the thump-click of his workboot and cane in concert barely audible. He practiced to make it unobtrusive; he hated it when newly introduced people gawked at his right leg before looking at his face. He thought he could sympathize with the way women felt about their breasts.
On the Boulevard, somebody had pried out the bronze disk of Rhonda Fleming's sidewalk star, stolen it, leaving a crater. A muscle-bound black superstar, towering above the pedestrians on a hyperthyroidal pair of roller skates with Day-Glo orange wheels, swerved to miss the crater and nearly centerpunched Jack. He and the cacophony of his gigantic ghetto blaster blended into the Friday swarm of walkers before anyone could swear. He'd been wearing an army fatigue shirt with the sleeves ripped off.
Jack steadied himself against the display window of the Hollywood Magic Shoppe and allowed himself ten seconds of hemlock-pure racism. It primed him, erasing the good feeling of copping a free pass to the Omicron and, as he walked through the grimy, humid smog and the abrasive tide of Boulevard flotsam, escalated his irritation into unfocused, hair-trigger anger. Everyone around him on the street was loping along, trying to look badder than everyone else.
Jack's cane attracted no notice on the Boulevard. He was a mundane diversion in the midst of the jarhead Marines on leave, the slutty preteen heartbreakers leaning on the bus-stop posts, the meandering gaggles of Japanese tourists, the smug pairings of smartly leathered punks and overconfident faggots, the Hollywood vets with their straight-ahead stares (the better to avoid the pushy Scientologists just this side of Las Palmas), the garbage-pickers and shopping-bag loonies. The Walk of the Stars seemed perpetually encrusted with a gummy vomit of spilled drinks and litter, like the sticky floor of a porno theatre. The step-in eateries along the maze of blaring rock noise and Iranian jewelry shops display-cased steaming, colorless greasy triangles of pizza, or the oily components hero sandwiches, or peculiar platefuls of what looked like Korean food, varnished for presentation, reminding him of those eyes—preserved, fakely realistic surrogates. The lavender spire of Frederick's pierced the waistline of the Boulevard somewhere behind him, a centerpiece to the whole tacky, vulgar carnival.
You've fought your last battle, crip.
The words fried into Jack's brain, spoken too many times in too many subtle ways. The sentiment ate into his calm like fluoric acid into the fuse of a beer-bottle bomb. This place could really drag you down.
He decided the Omicron pass was not snotty charity, and then forgot about it, feeling a little better.
His grimace in the mirror told him he should pay more attention to his hair. But what the hell—he wouldn't care so much half an hour from now.
