Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (2 page)

Tommy John wasn't boastful beyond the normal parameters of American youth and had gone no further than to shout his involvement in the Pepsi bears campaign from the rooftops and websites and several nationally syndicated New York based TV talk shows. He had become an overnight wunderkind and a big shot in Café Veg at Columbia University, where his feet could be seen kicked up on the tabletops for the undergrads to read his sneaker brand. He got a sapphire stud in his nose and forgot he had stolen the Pepsi bear idea from his half novel about Nike bears, forgotten the idea of a stencilled wild animal was ironic and supposed to illuminate the merciless, rapacious nature of Man!! He accepted the accolades and juggled the offers. He took
to waggling his eyebrows in contempt at his American Lit lecturers as they spoke of Poe and Whitman.

Then the kid was eaten and it took about half a day for the world to reason that Tommy John had virtually put out a contract on him. Ruined the bear and ruined the boy. To sell a pop drink. What kind of man would corrupt a species and murder a lad to sell soda pop?

Tommy John became infamous overnight. Himself a talisman for the rapacious nature of Man!! At university a first-year student of Female Studies got herself some vigilante status by setting his hair alight in Café Veg at lunchtime. She glided up behind him and held a Bic lighter to his frizz and it flared and crackled while he leapt around screaming, ‘Fire!! Like … fire,' and flapping at it with his hands. It went out of its own accord, leaving one side of his fro looking as if it had been stove in by vandals. Tommy John stood hunched ready to spring, staring through grit teeth at the Female Studies vigilante with his head smouldering. She was not abashed. She shouted, ‘I did that for the bear. The bear … Not the boy.' Vegetarians cheered and clapped.

The sound of vegetarians in tumult took the fight out of Tommy John. He rose out of his crouch and laid his splayed hands on his cheeks. If vegetarians were applauding him in flames then love was going to be hard to find. Maybe he needed a bodyguard.

Still, Tommy John is not defeated. He knows enough of history to know it is as easy to change as a lie is to tell. He gets proactive with the spin. He rings the internationally syndicated
Andrew Fifferman Hour
and offers himself as a guest. Then rings Oprah and offers himself to her, before getting Jay Leno on the line. He starts a bidding war between them. And it's fierce, because right at this moment he's a big name. Right at this moment Tommy John is a dude pushing Bin Laden to the number two slot on Worst Person in History polls. A glittering, star-quality scumbag. Fifferman's people win the bidding war and are over the moon.

As Tommy John walks on set the audience begins to jeer and boo because employees of the show are holding up signs saying JEER AND BOO off camera. ‘Hey, hey, hey,' Fifferman warns the audience through white teeth. ‘Hey, now. Hey, people, give the kid a break, he's been brave enough to come in here today.' If anyone is going to butcher this little freak it is Fifferman himself.

They sit. They sip. They shake and small-talk before Fifferman's first joke. ‘Tommy, I just took a call from Spielberg. He heard you were on the show. He wants to hire you, dude. Says Nazis have lost their mojo and he wants to know if you're free to star as the asshole in his next Indiana Jones movie.'

Tommy John begins to explain himself. The Pepsi bears thing was meant to be ironic. A joke. An absurdity to show that advertising and capitalism and industry, when it goes too far, might be wrong, man. Evil, stupid, destructive.

JEER AND BOO.

‘Hey, hey. Come on, now. Hear the kid out.'

‘I didn't for a moment believe those ad guys would go ahead with it, Andrew. I was thinking they'd logo about five bears, you know. Before the outcry kicked in and everyone saw the bears had been objectified and commodified and, well, goddamn it, enslaved. And I know that's horrible language and I apologise, but, I feel strongly about this.'

‘But they painted all the bears?' Fifferman nods sadly. ‘That's where your plan to save them fell down?'

‘Well, yeah. They hired these ex-con dudes, like, totally wired on amphetamines. They could work around the clock, no probs. They didn't care. Do twenty bears, pop a pill, do twenty more bears.'

‘Tell us what happened to your hair there.' Fifferman points at Tommy John's dented fro. ‘I heard a rumour.'

‘An enlightened co-ed set fire to me. Columbia have, to date, taken no disciplinary action.'

‘Some girl set fire to you?'

‘A green nut who was too blind to see what I was trying to do. Couldn't see I was trying to save the bears.'

‘Wow. Life on campus has sure changed since I was there in the days of peace and love.'

‘Well … there's ignorant people on campus these days, Andrew.'

‘What about the kid, Tommy John?' Fifferman asks gently.

‘The kid? What kid?'

‘Sebastian Bernieres, I think his name was. The hockey kid. What would you like to say to his folks?'

‘Ohh … the hockey kid. I mean, there wouldn't be anyone who doesn't think that's a tragedy. I suppose, if we're searching for an upside, which, just maybe, his parents can, like, hang on to … then at least he highlighted the plight of the bears. He and I did, anyway.'

‘Are you aware, Tommy John, that scientists out of Montreal University think this episode, the migrations and the understandable backlash from Coke and the hockey leagues, may have brought about what they call a “dodoesque slamdunk” in the existing population of polar bears that could lead to the extinction of the bear in the wild?'

‘Well …' Tommy John rubs his neck. Jesus. There's no way Oprah or Jay would've ambushed him with this
dodoesque slamdunk
crap. ‘Well, I hadn't heard that. But, you know, I'll continue to work for the bears.'

‘Which, if they're right – the people at Montreal University – would make you the only known individual to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?'

‘Oh, Andrew …' Tommy John shakes his head and looks to the ceiling. ‘Did you even research that question at all?
Only known individual responsible for the extinction of a species?
Do you just get these questions handed to you as you walk on set, man? Haven't you heard of Lord Cunningham and the European beaver?'

‘Lord Cunningham and the European beaver? No. I haven't heard of him, or them. I will have words with my research department. But all right, anyway, okay, take your word for it, Lord C did the Eurobeaver. Which puts you right up there with the aristocracy.'

Tommy John is livid. He didn't come on this show to be accused of genocide. Fifferman's people had told him it was going to be a love-fest. Andrew will feed you these ten questions here and you bat them away and make your case, they'd said. Make your sorrow for the bears evident to the masses. If you can cry … cry. Andrew will lean over and offer his hanky. Everyone comes out of it smelling roses. Leave the ad dudes holding the can. And if any of those ad dudes drive European sports cars … don't be afraid to mention that, man.

But now this. Fifferman's rapping on me with
dodesque slamdunks
and
Eurobeavers
and I'm coming off like some real asshole. Forget the bear, my whole future's at risk here.

Tommy John begins speaking very slowly, controlling himself, ‘Andrew, no one laments the passing of the polar bear more than me. It is a sorrow … I will carry … around my neck … like an albatross.'

He stands and leans toward Fifferman and starts ticking points off on his fingers. ‘But, man, I've got half a novel that's now up in smoke.' He takes hold of his index finger. ‘And I've got a batch of six-figure offers from advertising companies … all retracted.' He takes hold of his middle finger. His speech is speeding up, getting louder. ‘And vegans are torching my fro, Fifferman.' He grabs his ring finger in his fist. He is shouting now. ‘I know the bear's gone, man. And I hate that. But, like, I'm the poster boy for collateral damage here.' He bangs his chest with both hands. ‘I am the fucking Eurobeaver, Fifferman.'

Fifferman looks away from Tommy John down the camera to the millions and blinks once slowly. Inside he is a tumult of joy. This ranks up there with the most spectacular harakiri ever committed by a guest on a talk show. A jewel in the highlights package for the Christmas Special. Fifferman blinks again, sadly, at the camera.

(Pepsi bears, Part II)

T
ommy John invented the Eurobeaver. There never was such a beast. But on the
Andrew Fifferman Hour
, with accusations being thrown at him, Tommy John had felt lonely as the only individual in the history of man's rapine to trash a whole species singlehandedly. So he panicked and invented Lord Cunningham, scourge of the Eurobeaver.

Straight off, people were outraged by Lord Cunningham's treatment of the Eurobeaver. Until they Googled and Wikied and could find no historical trace of the tragedy. Then they were outraged at having expended precious compassion on the plight of a Eurobeaver that never was. Several existent Lord Cunninghams vented a desire to sue and Johnnie Cochran took up a class
action against Tommy John on their behalf.

Many people around the world were saddened that the Eurobeaver had never existed. They seemed to suffer a sense of loss greater than they felt at its existence and subsequent extinction. Its debunking left a sort of Santa-sized hole in their panoply of kindly critters.

People who wished the Eurobeaver had existed set up websites and began to speculate as to what the furry little fellow might have looked like. Anatomical suggestions were batted back and forth. Artists swapped impressions. Liquored-up naturalists invented cutesy traits and a folklore of honourable behaviour for the little fellow. Thousands began to log on to see how the creature was shaping up, what new direction its morphology and character had taken.

The Eurobeaver was invented by the desire of the masses. And it was, to be sure, a lovely creature. It kissed its young with audible smackers like a fat nanny. It was a new animal, evolved on the internet by mankind's desire, made of equal parts hope and an optimism that fresh life could bloom in this tiring world.

Thus the Cult of the Eurobeaver was born. Its members were nature-lovers who had chosen this animal to be their talisman, to represent all the defeated and lamented species and suggest they could rise again. The devil, in their world, was Tommy John Noble, who had engineered the demise of two distinct species: the white bear of the north and the rainbow-pelted beaver of Europe.

The Cult of the Eurobeaver put out a fatwa on Tommy
John Noble. His face appeared on t-shirts quartered by the cross-hairs of a telescopic sight. The FBI made the Cult of the Eurobeaver retract their fatwa under threat of an indictment for Soliciting Assassination. Which the cult did, apologising to Tommy John and announcing themselves as a pacifist organisation.

Too late. The fatwa had caught fire. Nutty ultra-greens who truly believed the Eurobeaver was once a living, breathing, semi-aquatic rodent akin to a punting Cambridge undergraduate, and that Tommy John had ripped it from this exalted life, began to hunt him down to avenge its demise. A survivalist hippy narrowly missed him with a poison dart in a Wal-Mart in Brooklyn; the missile ricocheted off a paint can and felled a seeing-eye labrador in its traces, leaving its mistress hauling on its handle, poking it with her toe and hissing at it, ‘Get up, Bootsy. You're embarrassing me. Get up.'

And when, a week later, Tommy John was chased through a Hoboken shopping mall by a field trip of med students, their leader brandishing a high-voltage defibrillator, the FBI called time-out.

Tommy John disappears. Just disappears. Is whisked away by the CIA to Australia on a flight that doesn't exist in a plane that never was. In Australia he is lodged in a safe house with another man in hiding from an enraged-ism. Each has his own bodyguard, but they share a cook.

Tommy John is shy about meeting his fellow resident, a man whose name, he has been told, is Leo. It seems so intimate, this burden they share. It's as if they
have suddenly discovered they have a common parent, or both suffer a rare disease; their extraordinary predicament, their fate. They are the only two of their kind and as such Tommy John feels a kinship. He suspects they might become intimate, brotherly. Two exiled princes.

They meet in the living room of the safe house. A low-ceilinged space of Baltic pine floorboards set about with acrylic rugs and IKEA sofas and a large window with a view of the beach curving away and the township of X rising above it. They are introduced by their bodyguards, Tommy John by his new name of ‘Byron' and the other man as ‘Leo'. After they've shaken hands Tommy John stops and looks at the guy. He is disappointed in his fellow exile at first. The man is much older than expected. A grandly professorial sub-continental with hooded eyes and slow smile. To Tommy John he looks like the kind of guy who would've banged a lot of women a lot younger than himself. Then he recognises him.

‘Hey … I know you.'

‘
Of
me.'

‘Wow, man … I'm … I'm a novelist myself. I wrote half a novel about …' Tommy John lays his hand on his chest. ‘I'm … listen, I can't call you Leo, man. When I know your real name. My name's Tommy John, you should call me that.' He puts his hand out and they shake again, using their real names.

‘The green people have a contract out on you for offences committed with a polar bear? Is that right?'

‘Yeah, well, so they say. And a Eurobeaver. ‘

‘A Eurobeaver? Well, anyway, welcome to fatwa.'

‘Mine's supposed to be withdrawn, but it's a genie they don't seem to be able to get back in the bottle.'

‘Alas, the fatwa is a dogged beast. We're both in quite a pickle, aren't we?'

‘We are,' Tommy says happily. ‘Man, I can't believe we're room-mates. I mean … novel of the century, for mine,
Midnight's Children
. I'm honoured.'

‘We are not room-mates, Tommy John. We are refugees. Me from the Stone Age hex of an intellectually barren regime. And you from … well … acts with animals.'

‘You don't mind if I call you Salman?'

‘Please do. Leo hasn't caught on as they'd hoped it might.' Salman runs his fingertips through his goatee. ‘And you're a writer, you said?'

‘Half a novel …'

‘Would make you a novella-ist.'

‘Well, sure. But it was really half a novel. Not a whole novella.' Salman nods and smiles, thinking even a man who has been exiled as long as himself might find this young American hard to take.

He is wrong. Salman becomes an uncle to Tommy John. Alone together as they are, with their bodyguards lifting ever greater weights in the basement and their cook in the kitchen suffering a Jekyll and Hyde metamorphosis between cheeseburgers and the multi-fanged cuisine of the Hindu Kush. They begin to discuss literature and to tell each other of stories they plan to write. Each steals ideas from the other, though Tommy John is
at a disadvantage in this. Being awestruck by the great man he tends to squirrel away any spitball tosh Salman utters as if it were gold. Salman guesses Tommy John is stealing his stuff and begins to feed him stream-of-consciousness nonsense, tales so uninteresting he puts himself to sleep in the telling.

Later in the day when he retires to the privacy of his bulletproof room to write, Tommy John scribbles them down in his journal, figuring he will be out of here first, he will publish first, he will be a big, big hit using Salman's gold. And knowing all writers are liars and thieves and shitbags, Tommy John doesn't even feel bad stealing Salman's stuff because he figures Salman is just as likely in his bulletproof room right now copying down the stories Tommy John told him.

But stories don't come easily to Tommy John. Lately, after Salman has delivered some wan rave and asked Tommy John to reciprocate with a story of his own, he has begun to steal the work of Cervantes, to tell tales of Don Quixote as if they were from his own half novel in which the Nike bears first appeared.

One day they are sunning themselves, nude on their towels on the beach beneath their safe house on the outskirts of the town of X. Norfolk pines dot the shore, for those who must have detail. Salman has been telling a story which veered dangerously toward eroticism until he remembered they were both men nude in public, whereupon he nipped this excitement in the bud with a car crash. Lying there on his stomach he says sleepily into his armpit, ‘Go on, Tommy John, it's
your turn. Give me more from your half-novel. Semi-regale me.'

‘Okay.' Tommy John wracks his brain for a snippet of Cervantes. ‘Okay. In Pennsylvania there was this Amish hog farmer named Nevetus Levitus. And Nevetus Levitus was in love with a non-Amish girl, Betsy. Now, the non-Amish girl, Betsy, was the daughter of a rich electrician and the rich electrician …'

‘If you tell the story this way, Tommy John, repeating everything you say twice, we'll be here forever. Tell it to me like I'm a man with a normal lifespan, not a bloody immortal.' Salman has been coaching Tommy John in the art of storytelling, though he knows lately all his stories are stolen from Cervantes.

‘But this is how they tell stories in the Amish tradition.'

‘All right, tell it the long way. As fate has trapped me in this godforsaken fatwa with you, I suppose I must endure it.'

‘Okay. Cool. So, this Nevetus Levitus was in love with this Betsy. And she was fat and slutty and looked like a dude because she had a little moustache.'

‘Do you have any stories containing attractive women?'

‘Salman, we are two men in exile, nude on a beach. The women in my stories are going to be pigs. Okay?'

‘Okay.'

‘Anyway, while Nevetus Levitus loved Betsy she ignored him and ran around with other guys and treated him like shit. Naturally enough, after months of
this, and with the whole Amish community talking her down, his love died and he began to hate her. Well as soon as he began to hate Betsy she fell head-over-heels for him, though she only ever considered him a shocking dweeb when he loved her.'

‘Mmm, good,' murmurs Salman. ‘Just like a woman. They despise the man who loves them and love the man who despises them. Go on.'

‘So Nevetus Levitus is herding his hogs from one Amish community to the next and he gets to this river he has to cross and he sees Betsy coming up the road behind him and she's all made up and in a miniskirt with her cleavage showing, holding a bottle of Champagne. Trouble with a capital T. On the hunt for Nevetus Levitus. The ferry across the river is so small only one person and one hog can fit in. So he gets in and ferries across one hog. Then he comes back and ferries across another hog. Then he comes back and ferries across another hog. You keep count of the hogs he ferries, Salman. It's important. So he comes back for another hog and another, all the while Betsy is getting closer. He comes back for another …'

‘Just say he ferried them all or the fucking fatwa will expire before he gets them across.'

‘How many have gone across so far?' Tommy John asks.

‘Jesus. How do I know?'

‘I told you to keep count, Salman. Shit, I thought you Indians were supreme mathematicians. Well … the story's buggered. There's no way I can tell it now.'

‘How can it be buggered? Is it so important to keep exact count of this idiot's hogs?'

‘I can't go on. When I asked you how many hogs and you said you didn't know I forgot the rest of the story. But I'll tell you what, it was suspenseful and riveting, that much I do remember.'

‘But now it's finished?' Salman props himself up on his elbows, squinting at Tommy John.

‘As finished as the Eurobeaver,' says Tommy John.

‘Well, to tell you the truth, that's one of the stupidest stories I ever heard. But from a lad who's always boasting about his half novel I suppose I should have been prepared for half a story. Indeed, why did I expect a denouement? What on earth made me think there might be a climax?'

‘Hey, Salman. You fucked it up by not counting the hogs.'

‘I don't believe you had an ending. Not one that was riveting and suspenseful.'

‘Oh, I did. Resonant.'

You see, their arguments have become as familiar and mundane as those of a lighthouse-keeper and his wife. But Salman has begun to worry about Tommy John. Fatwa isn't unbearable for Salman, at his age and wealth. He can helicopter golden-haired strumpets and silver-tongued friends like Amis and Hitchens and McEwan in to visit and talk and play poker and drink
Beaujolais and strip off their clothes. (The golden-haired strumpets, this last, not the silver-tongued friends.) But Tommy John is deeper in exile than this. He does not have the means to bring his friends and family to him. And a man of twenty has more to grieve over in a lost world than a man of fifty. A man of fifty might be done with nightclubs and music and dancing and drugs and learning and love and a career and the hundred gilded paths life could lead him down. But a man of twenty is not done with such things. He shouldn't be interred here in fatwa like a mammoth in a tar pit.

Tommy John is brave, but at times Salman watches him staring out across the Bay of X. Out there in the green waters Tommy John sees the many, many glories, both imagined and real, of the people and world he has known. Tommy John can't take much more fatwa, much more exile, Salman believes.