Vineland (44 page)

 

The Tube

 

Oh . . . the . . . Tube!

It's poi-soning your brain!

Oh, yes. . . .

It's dri-ving you, insane!

It's shoot-ing rays, at you,

Over ev'ry-thing ya do,

It sees you in your bedroom,

And—on th' toi-let too!

 

Yoo Hoo! The

Tube. . . .

It knows, your ev'ry thought,

Hey, Boob, you thought you would-

T'n get caught—

While you were sittin' there, starin' at “The

Brady Bunch,”

Big fat computer jus'

Had you for lunch, now Th'

Tube—

It's plugged right in, to you!

 

All he had for hope—how he fingered it, obsessively, like a Miraculous Medal—was a typed copy, signed by Hector, Ernie Triggerman, and his partner, Sid Liftoff, of an agreement on this movie deal, or, as Ernie liked to say, film project, now stained with coffee and burger grease and withered from handling. Despite his personal savagery, which no one at the 'Tox chose to acknowledge, let alone touch, Hector in these show-biz matters registered as fatally innocent, just a guy from the wrong side of the box office, offering Ernie and Sid and their friends a million cues he wasn't even aware of, terms used wrong, references uncaught, details of haircut or necktie that condemned him irrevocably to viewer, that is, brain-defective, status. Could he, with all the Tube he did, even help himself? Sitting in those breezy, easygoing offices up in Laurel Canyon with the hanging plants and palm-filtered light, everybody smiling, long-legged little
bizcochos
in leather miniskirts coming in and out with coffee and beers and joints that they lit for you, and coke that they held the
spoon
for you and shit? was he supposed to sit there like some Florsheim-shoed street narc, taking names down in a daybook? Why not join in the fun?

The deal was that Sid Liftoff in his vintage T-Bird had been stopped one recent night on Sunset out west of Doheny, where the cops lurk up the canyon roads waiting to swoop down on targets selected from all the promising machinery exceeding the posted limits below, only to be found, aha! with a lizard-skin etui stuffed with nasal goods under the seat on the passenger side, which to this day he swore had been planted there, probably by an agent of one of his ex-wives. Lawyers arranged for Sid to work off the beef with community service, namely by using his great talents and influence to make an antidrug movie, preferably full-length and for theatrical release. Hector, then attached to the Regional Intelligence Unit of the DEA office in Los Angeles, was assigned as liaison, though RIU work was understood to be punishment for 1811's with dappled histories, and this Hollywood posting, Hector was required to appreciate, was a favor, to be returned one of these nights and in a manner unspecified.

But soon enough, Hector's thoughts grew vertiginous, and he began to believe he'd been duked in to some deal, less and less willing to say when, or whether, he acted at the behest of DEA and when not, and neither Ernie nor Sid could quite decide how to ask. “The fucker,” Sid told Ernie, at poolside, in confidence, “wants to be the Popeye Doyle of the eighties. Not just the movie, but
Hector II
, then the network series.”

“Who, Hector? Nah, just a kid at the video arcade.” They discussed the degree of Hector's purity, as then defined in the business, and ended up making a small wager, dinner at Ma Maison. Ernie lost. Sid started with the duck-liver pâté.

What Hector thought was his edge came about courtesy ot an old colleague in the arts of foot-assisted entry, Roy Ibble, now a GS-16 with a yen for regional directorship, who called in from Las Vegas with word that Frenesi and Flash had shown up in town. Without even thinking about it Hector obtained a confiscated Toronado and went ripping all night across the Mojave toward the heavenly city, denial of desert, realm of excess. In the movie it would be a Ferrari, and Hector would be wearing a carefully distressed Nino Cerruti suit and some hyper-cherry A.T.M. Stacey Adams
zapos.
Liftoff and Triggerman would see to that. Yeah, those guys would get him just about anything these days. He cackled out loud. These days it was Hector who wasn't answering no phone calls,
ése.

For according to a rumor sweeping the film community, a federal grand jury was convening to inquire into drug abuse in the picture business. A sudden monster surge of toilet flushing threatened water pressure in the city mains, and a great bloom of cold air spread over Hollywood as others ran to open their refrigerator doors more or less all at once, producing this gigantic fog bank in which traffic feared even to creep and pedestrians went walking into the sides of various buildings. Hector assumed parallels were being drawn to back in '51, when HUAC came to town, and the years of blacklist and the long games of spiritual Monopoly that had followed. Did he give a shit? Communists then, dopers now, tomorrow, who knew, maybe the faggots, so what, it was all the same beef, wasn't it? Anybody looking like a normal American but living a secret life was always good for a pop if times got slow—easy and cost-effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101. But why right now? What did it have to do with Brock Vond running around Vineland like he was? and all these other weird vibrations in the air lately, like even some non-born-agains showing up at work with these little crosses, these red Christer pins, in their lapels, and long lines of civilians at the gun shops too, and the pawnshops, and all the military traffic on the freeways, more than Hector could ever remember, headlights on in the daytime, troops in full battle gear, and that queer moment the other night around 3:00 or 4:00
A.M.
, right in the middle of watching Sean Connery in
The G. Gordon Liddy Story
, when he saw the screen go blank, bright and prickly, and then heard voices hard, flat, echoing.

“But we don't actually have the orders yet,” somebody said.

“It's only a detail,” the other voice with a familiar weary edge, a service voice, “just like getting a search warrant.” Onto the screen came some Anglo in fatigues, about Hector's age, sitting at a desk against a pale green wall under fluorescent light. He kept looking over to the side, off-camera.

“My name is—what should I say, just name and rank?”

“No names,” the other advised.

The man was handed two pieces of paper clipped together, and he read it to the camera. “As commanding officer of state defense forces in this sector, pursuant to the President's NSDD #52 of 6 April 1984 as amended, I am authorized—what?” He started up, sat back down, went in some agitation for the desk drawer, which stuck, or had been locked. Which is when the movie came back on, and continued with no further military interruptions.

There was a weirdness here that Hector recognized, like right before a big drug bust, yes, but even more like the weeks running up to the Bay of Pigs in '61. Was Reagan about to invade Nicaragua at last, getting the home front all nailed down, ready to process folks by the tens of thousands into detention, arm local “Defense Forces,” fire everybody in the Army and then deputize them in order to get around the Posse Comitatus Act? Copies of these contingency plans had been circulating all summer, it wasn't much of a secret. Hector knew the classic chill, the extra receptors up and humming, gathering in the signs, channels suddenly shutting down, traffic scrambled and jammed, phone trouble, faces in lobbies warning you that you don't know them. Could it be that some silly-ass national-emergency exercise was finally coming true? As if the Tube were suddenly to stop showing pictures and instead announce, “From now on, I'm watching you.”

He deliberately dragged his feet on it but at last did Ernie and Sid the favor of taking a meeting. He found the mood in Holmby Hills a little more depressed than the last time he'd been up, the play areas empty of starlets now, the pool gathering leaves and algae, an autumnal string quartet on the audio instead of the usual K-tel party albums, and the only recreational drug inside the property line a case of Bud Light, which was disappearing fast, often without Ernie or Sid even waiting for it to get cold in the tiny patio fridge. Both men were nervous wrecks, covered with a sweatlike film of desperation to ingratiate themselves with the antidrug-hysteria leadership, suddenly perceived as the cutting edge of hip. Sid Liftoff, having owed much of his matey and vivacious public image to chemical intervention, often on an hourly basis, now, absent a host of illicit molecules in his blood, was changing, like Larry Talbot, into the wild animal at the base of his character, solitary, misanthropic, more than ready to lift his throat in desolate, transpersonal cry. Ernie, meanwhile, sat in a glazed silence that would have suggested his return, in this time of crisis, to his childhood religion, Soto Zen, except for the way he was unable to keep from handling his nose, with agitated fussing movements, as if trying to primp it into shape like a hairdo.

The pair, trembling and tense, had been exchanging remarks as Hector approached, calling, “Hi, guys,” his shoes flashing in the sun. Sid took a very professional beat and a half before leaping up violently, knocking over his custom deck chair, running to Hector, falling on his knees, and crying, “Fifty percent of producer's net! That's out of our own profits, isn't that right, Ernie?”

“Uh-huh,” Ernie on some dreamy internal delay, through which Sid continued,” 'Course you appreciate that won't happen till we get to the break-even point—”

“Do me a favor,” Hector struggling to get loose of the importunate Sid, dragging him a step at a time toward the pool, “and please,
mis cortinas
, man—take that producer's net, use it to chase butterflies, around the grounds, of whatever institution deals with people who think I'm about to settle, for anythín short of gross participation here,
me entiendes como te digo?
”

Sid went flat on his face and burst into tears, kicking his feet up and down. “Hector! Amigo!”—further blowing it by most injudiciously reaching for Hector's shoes, whose finish the world knew, or ought to know, that Hector had long entertained homicide among his options in defending. But now he skipped backward, reminding himself the man was distraught, mumbling courteously, “Sid, you might want to, ahm, you know, check yourself out. . . .”

Sid fell silent and presently got to his feet, wiping his nose on his forearm, rearranging his hair and neck vertebrae. “You're right of course, frightfully immature of me Hector, I do apologize—for my outburst and also for my shortcomings as a host. . . please, here, a Bud Light? Not exactly
bien fría
, but the warmer temperature brings out more of the flavor, don't you think.”

Graciously nodding, taking a beer, “Is that I would rather not hear no more about some ‘break-even,' please, save that for Saturday morning, with the Smurfs and the Care Bears and them, OK?”

The two movie guys cried in unison, “Maybe a rolling gross?”

“La, la, la-lalla la,” Hector pointedly singing the Smurf theme at them, “La, la-lalla laahh. . . .”

“Just tell us then,” Sid pleaded. “Anything!”

How he had dreamed of this moment. He knew his mustache was perfect, he could feel where every hair was. “OK, a million in front, plus half of the gross receipts after gross equals 2.71828 times the negative cost.”

Sid's tan faded to a kind of fragile bisque. “Strange multiple,” he choked.

“Sounds real natural to me,” Ernie twisting his nose back and forth. They screamed and yelled for the rest of the day till they had a document they could all live with, though Hector much more comfortably than the others, even imposing upon the project his own idea of a zippy working title, “Drugs—Sacrament of the Sixties, Evil of the Eighties.” The story hit the trades just about the time the grand-jury scare was cresting, so it got banner treatment and even a ten-second mention on “Entertainment Tonight”—no doubt about it, Ernie and Sid, first out of the chute into the antidrug arena, were making the town look good. Day after day skywriters billowed
BLESS YOU ERNIE AND SID
and
DRUG FREE AMERICA
in red, white, and blue over Sherman Oaks, though soon guerrilla elements were launching skyrockets charged to explode in the shape of a letter s and aimed at the space right after the word
DRUG
, changing the message some. Ernie and Sid found themselves allowed back into places like the Polo Lounge, where right after Sid's bust he'd been if not 86'd, then at least, say, 43'd. And then Reagan's people got wind of it and the two started hearing their names in campaign speeches. “Well . . . all I can say iss . . . ,” with the practiced shy head-toss of an eternal colt, “if theere'd been moore Sid Liftoffs and Ernie Triggermans in Hollywood, when I worked theere . . . we might not've had . . . soo minny cahmmunists in the unionss . . . and my jahb might've been a lot eassier . . . ,” twinkle. Die-hard industry lefties wrote in to publications to denounce Sid and Ernie as finks, Nazi collaborators, and neo-McCarthyite stooges, all of which was true but wouldn't deflect them an inch from making the picture, which they must have thought, dope-clouded fools, would purchase them immunity from the long era of darkness they saw lying just ahead. The town attended, now wistful, now cruelly amused, depending how hysterical the news was that day, to the boys out running point for the rest of them. Go, fellas, go.

Above-the-line checks started clearing the bank, motel rooms were booked, weather maps consulted, and crews assembled, and nobody had the least idea of what the movie, in fact, was supposed to be. Sid and Ernie, by now both deeply afraid of Hector, dared not ask, stuck with only vague assurances that the star element would be Frenesi Gates. Frenesi, working in Las Vegas one on and one off at a minor establishment on the wrong side of the Interstate, Chuck's Superslab of Love Motor Inn and Casino, cocktail-waitressing, had no inkling of the madness developing in her name till Hector showed up in town. Just before he called, she saw from the corner of her eye the snarled telephone lead, all by itself, like a snake in its sleep, give a slow loose shiver.