SERIAL: Fear of the Unknown and Self-Loathing in Hollywood or Doctor Midnite and The Great White Whale Hunt of ’93

A Serial in Three Parts

            My one and only article as a legit journalist, post the Company and Pat Buchanan’s fall from the long table at the West Wing, was never actually published by the Hollywood Scene Beat. Buchanan’s fall from the White House had managed to drag me down like some latter-day spear-carrier for the Roman imperator of the moment, who happened to be on the wrong end of the long knives as ’92 wound down. Even though the article was never published for the Hollywood Scene Beat, it took me right to the very gates of hell, up close, where I could look in through the bars and see the horror.

            “Too controversial,” said Mays, the editor of the Beat.

Too controversial? Since that last Tuesday when he bailed me out of studio jail and we walked off the lot at NBC into the afternoon Burbank traffic, I’ve dedicated one day out of every year to making Mays’s life a living nightmare via the interwebz. On that day, I sign him up for all kinds of hardcore gun-nut periodicals, right-wing newsletters, build-your-own-compound-slash-bomb-bunker online chatboards, darknet Eastern European dating sites, and a Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal daily inspirational email, along with a series of very small donations to various Tea Party candidates. That’ll teach him to stick me with the “too controversial” bumper sticker. You see, Mays is a life-long bagman for the DNC. He knows where the bodies are buried. I’ll bet he’s paid off Jerry Brown’s pharmacists and niche escort service providers in Chuck E. Cheese parking lots all up and down the central valley.

I’m almost sure of it. I would bet Mom’s grandfather’s pile of cash on it before I’d ever bet another horse.

            But Mays did bail me out of studio jail when it looked like I might spend some survivor time in real jail—down at LA County.

            He also drove away in the Butterscotch Bomber, a rented Cutlass Sierra I’d illegally “sunroofed” late one night in Hollywood. He never said anything about the dangerous pharmaceuticals in the trunk. But he probably didn’t know about them, so that’s a wash regarding his account balance with the Not So Friendly Savings and Revenge Company I run once a year.

            One day a year is enough to dedicate to someone’s personal ruin for not publishing my hard-hitting deep-cover investigation of Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s rise to the top of Saturday morning sitcoms somewhere around 1993.

            One day is enough.

            I have other enemies. Everyone gets their day, center mass, inside the scope mounted to the payback rifle I aim at them from the various rooftops of the interwebz.

            Like I said, I’d been kicked out and cast west. West out of Sodom. West from DC. The Reagan years were over and the think tanks were self-destructing with the new Democrat optimism centered on alleged-adulterer-slash-accused-rapist Bill Clinton. Alleged. The rape, that is.

            Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” was still ringing in everyone’s ears. People are easily misled that way by mere minstrels. Ask that village that lost all its children to the guy who played the flute and promised to get rid of the rats. That’s the dark side of the fairy tale, and no one really remembers that part.

            You can call someone an alleged rapist. It’s one of the great things about America.

            People do it all the time.

            But back then, when they were still selling the Bill and Hillary love story while trying to cover up Paula, Juanita, Kathleen, Gennifer, and the rest, the Reagan-Bush era of real-world big-boy groupthink was ending. We weren’t playing to win anymore; as a nation, that is. It was the season to feel good and Rock the Vote. It was time to vote for sex. Lilith Fair was on the horizon like a Twister making a beeline for the nearest trailer park. The once-favored were falling out of favor. The exodus of sober, conservative thinking had begun in full. And when they ejected Buchanan, I knew my days were short. If I was honest with myself, truthful in that way one can only be on the back side of a three-day Clevinger’s binge, then I had known all along it would have to end, eventually. Sumptuous retreats in the deserts of Saudi Arabia as a guest of the Arab Prince of Cocaine were over. I’m talking an actual member of the royal family. A lunatic coked to the gills reveling in the night as we tried to sell him bulk farm equipment the House of Saud would never, ever, need. I use the word “reveling” not lightly, but knowingly on scales of galactic magnitude. Reveling in George Lucas’s 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special as the Prince consumed Al Pacino levels of cocaine, talking crazy like the Che Guevara of the Rebel Alliance.

I should have known then that everything ends. The death of the American dream was coming, and I should have seen it from far off. Our fall from grace would be great, very great indeed, because we’d climbed so high. Who would’ve ever imagined then that someday Bill Clinton would jog through the streets of a city of monuments like he was the king of the world? Whoever would have imagined this king of the world could come from Arkansas? Who would ever have imagined that he could do everything wrong and still smile that Bill Clinton smile?

            The devil was a king too. Once.

            I should have known better all along.

            We all should have known better. Nothing lasts.

            Exit into the west.

I headed into the sunset on a jet airliner after having mustered out of government and closed my bank accounts. I spent prodigiously on a brand-new nickel-plated twelve-inch barrel .44 Magnum that I’d managed to bring onboard the flight using my expired State Department credentials. A leather travel bag. A portable Selectric and a case of duty-free bourbon.

            Only savages drink whiskey. Note that for the record. Nota bene, as the Romans used to say before they went Roman on someone.

            I was done. I was dead. I was a shell of the savvy inside operator I’d once been. I donned the aviator shades, bought a pair of used combat boots. Found some long khaki shorts made from silk that I thought of as “jungle issue,” threw on a T-shirt that said “Actual Rap Star” I’d picked up from some Armenian-guy-run store that sold leather jackets, studded and inscribed with the names of record companies passing themselves off as the band of the ages, and capped it all off with a tan canvas big-game hunter hat. Later, on Sunset Boulevard, on the night my lawyer who was really just a paralegal and I got hammered on the bourbon and beat up some drunken marines who asked us where Don Johnson’s house was, I added a gray flannel bathrobe that I wore like a cape because we’d won in our brief skirmish against the marines. Barely. And every imperator must have his cape. It’s what they bury you in when they pull your dead body off the field of battle.

            In other words, I reinvented myself.

            The blazer, tan slacks, oxblood loafers, and JFK tie were probably still in the bathroom back at Dulles. The big show in DC was done with me, and I was done with them. I’d become a Hollywood reporter. I’d cover movie stars and maybe meet an actress who’d never make it because she was too good-looking and too kind. In time, I’d become the mayor of Venice, running on an extensive and much needed right-wing power agenda that fearmongered the environmental nuts as card-carrying communists in league with the General Mills Food Corporation and hell-bent on ruining the freak flavor of the boardwalk in favor of micro-condominium student housing complexes. I’d loosely sketched out an election plan on the back of a cocktail napkin aboard a Delta flight, in coach, while working on my third bourbon.

            A bourbon for which I’d had to recite Shakespeare in order to prove to the stewardess I wasn’t as drunk as my fellow galley slaves were intimating I might be. Suffice it to say, I got the bourbon and we touched down at LAX.

            Later, after baggage claim and the hot Santa Anas and the departing jets and a couple of bourbons in the Sky Lounge above LAX while I waited for a few calls to come in at the bar from old Company contacts who’d moved out to LA to prosper in filmmaking, or its ever-present underbelly, I finally hooked up with Rios. I’d told the bartender I was a producer looking to make the next Bruce Willis Die Hard train wreck right there at the airport. He of course informed me that he was an actor, as I knew he would, and allowed me to make as many calls as I liked from the bar phone on the off chance that I actually might be a producer of Bruce’s level and that I might remember him come First Shot for the part of Bernard Fife, Bruce’s sidekick who gets killed but has a few good career-making lines. I may have told him he’d be perfect for this imaginary job. I may have intimated that he could lease a BMW based on my complete assurance he’d have a part should the Bruce Gig go down at LAX. I even told him the story, or “plotline” as they call it out there. Basically, I just substituted all the known NSA details of the Israeli raid on Entebbe. He didn’t know Entebbe from the Battle of the Ardennes, and it’s not like I cared if it actually was an NSA national secret, which a few of the choicer details are. My clearances had been suspended after a run-in with Bush ’41. I’d asked him if he felt like betting on the Tour de France as we made our way to a state dinner in Tokyo. My clearance probably didn’t get wood-chipped because of that. That was the Tokyo dinner Bush hurled at. Everybody got wood-chipped after that one; I was just a casualty. In Pat’s defense, the big man went to the carpet for me. Told me so when he was golfing in Palm Springs with O.J.

            Rios was a South American mechanic. Not the car kind of mechanic. The other kind. The murder kind. He’d been out of the Company and in rehab for years. Couldn’t get over some high school sweetheart that left him while he was back in ’Nam. But he was doing good, at that moment, driving away from the flying saucer bar and restaurant that loomed over LAX. He was working as a line producer in charge of budget on a few of the Corey films. Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. “The Corey films” he told me over the bar phone was what everyone in the biz called these B-movie straight-to-Cinemax epics.

It was Friday night, and Rios was, in fact, going to a party out in the Valley. Some porn star was supposed to be there. I gathered that this was a pretty big deal to him. The porn star part. I hadn’t yet figured out my whole plan on how I was going to survive in LA and not dip into my buried treasure. The majority of my savings had been converted into Krugerrands all through the eighties. Gold coins waiting in a Swiss bank deposit box for me to come get someday when I wasn’t so desperate. Until then, I was getting by on my last State Department check. Meaning: I hadn’t yet figured out which Hollywood tabloid would be my first step toward leading Venice Beach into becoming a bastion of right-wing, gun nut, booze-loving America. I knew that part. I just hadn’t figured out all the parts in between.

            Rios swung by the Sky Lounge and I fell into a blue Mazda Miata with noticeable right-side damage. Rios explained that the Corey Films weren’t real big in the scheme of things re: Hollywood. I assured him that I knew this based on my cover as a producer for the next Die Hard starring The Bruce Willis.

            I figured I’d let that ride and see how long it played in Peoria.

            Rios said nothing and maneuvered into late Friday afternoon traffic. We took the 405, smoked a joint Rios found between the seats, and made the Mulholland pass at a crawl. When we let down into the Valley, it was twilight and the air was warm and all the success and runaway excess of Reagan-Bush, and the fear and loathing of killer Bill Clinton, slipped away. I let the coups, power grabs, secret South American wars no one and everyone knew about, Arab Princes of Cocaine, big cars, free booze, and hot women slip away. All of it. That show was over, and I’d found myself here at world’s end.

            This was the new “now.”

            I asked Rios how rehab was going, and he told me he was “out,” so we picked up a bottle of super-wrong top shelf tequila with my last fifty bucks. We wanted to be sociable when we arrived at the Porn Star Party, as Rios was now calling it, his eyes far away with each mention of the event. By the time we reached Burbank and wound our way up into the hills, it was full dark and the stars were coming out above a valley of broken dreams.

            Suffice it to say, it was not a porn star party. And it was. It was “not” in that no porn stars actually showed up, even though the lady in reference was constantly heralded as impending throughout the night. But it was a porn star party in actuality, as everyone tried to be blasé about the latest deal, or possibility, in their career as they cast their eyes toward the door, hoping their porn star would appear at any moment and brighten their lives and hopes. They took large gulps of our super-wrong tequila as they assured us that they had it on good authority they’d be in, or part of, Bruce’s next film. Everyone called him either “Bruce” or “Willis” and managed to make it sound as though they were close enough to donate a kidney one way or the other. Everyone also knew Bruce was shooting next month in some foreign part of the world.

The super-wrong tequila was getting to me. Meaning I was getting mean. The host’s bourbon was really whiskey, so I stuck to the crazy juice and cut it with Sprite and a lime while affecting a British accent I’d switched to mid-party. Something Haldeman taught me to do in Beirut to mess with the French embassy. As whatever low-list actors, dancers, or weather persons passed in front of me, assuring me that their script, part, or relationship with some closely connected Bruce-person placed them somewhere along the legendary Trough of Success that was Bruce’s next film; as they waved, gesticulated and gulped, their faces turning bright red, their eyes involuntarily casting about for the pornographic performer who would be at this party surely at any moment, I devolved further and further into my role as a charmingly bitter Englishman.

It was my way of having fun.

A point of note here. I wasn’t exactly clear what the porn star would be doing once she got to the party. And as the evening progressed, I was convinced that she’d need to put on some sort of show to meet these people’s increasingly high expectations of her.

As they talked, waved, and gesticulated some more, I waited, lying in the bush like a team of Soviet Spetznaz. When the time was right I’d let them know, offhand, “matter of fact by the by old chap,” or in character as they say out there, that I was Bruce’s producer on the next Die Hard and that I could assure them wholeheartedly that we wouldn’t be doing that film in a foreign place next month. We’d be at LAX. I didn’t even say “Bruce.” I didn’t need to. It would have been wrong of me to.

            Later, on toward eleven, I became really drunk and the party had reached that morose moment when the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack isn’t matching the level of deeply intense artistic discussion taking place on a filmic deconstruction of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. People were drunkenly, and with the conviction of a pandemic bacteriologist addressing the UN, arguing over the nature of the briefcase, daring listeners to disagree with them, as surely it meant pistols at dawn. I was tempted to disagree just because I knew I could take any of them with a pistol at dawn.

            That’s when I knew I was drunk. Because “pistols at dawn” sounded like fun to me. It was time to back off. Splash some cold water on my face and get some other poison besides the super-wrong tequila.

            I made my way to the back of the narrow, built-on-the-side-of-a-hill house, searching for a restroom. While I was staring in the mirror, after washing my hands, trying to find the man who’d once briefed the Gipper on the effectiveness of the F-111 strike on Libya, I heard low, disembodied voices talking in the room beyond the wall. I also heard bongo drums slapping out a distant hypnotic beat.

            I went looking, figuring I’d find some drugs to take the edge off the super-wrong tequila. Instead I found Josh. Josh was mid-pull on some high-grade hash he swore was straight out of Cambodia. We split the joint, tuned into the bongos, and I told him all about what Cambodia was really like in ’75. He slapped an unamplified bass and listened to everything I could remember about that waking hell. He was a good listener. It was as though he was upriver with me and the crazies. He dug it all. He had a goatee and a shaved head, and when he talked he was suddenly, violently, intensely passionate, as though he was acutely aware of every wrong the entire world had ever made and that nothing, absolutely nothing, had managed to slip past either of us. Then he’d bliss out and return to the near-silent slapping twang of the unamplified bass. Eyes closed.

I finished telling him about the time we traded Pol Pot an Alfa Romeo sports car and an autographed publicity shot of Goldie Hawn for a cross-border incursion into Vietnam for a little off-book payback. We were doing that well into ’81. Then the Gip told us we had bigger fish to fry and pointed at Moscow on a map. He knew. Even back then. He knew he was gonna ice the Kremlin with the biggest lie in the world.

            He knew.

            And I loved him for it.

            “Crazy,” mumbled Josh. “Pure crazy.”

            He slapped out some funk, and I promised Pat Buchanan I’d avenge his death. That’s how far upriver I was on the hash. I’d gone all “Kurtz” in my head.

            “Pol Pot’s got nothing on Hollywood.”

            That’s what Josh said. He had no idea. People who’ve never been anywhere have no idea what real evil is. Pol Pot was real evil. I stood up and began to brush the ashes from my bathrobe when he said, “No, I’m serious, man. There are dark people in Hollywood. People who can make you, and break you. You ought to hear Nadia talk. She knows. She says the devil lives here. Makes deals. Makes famous people famous.”

            Hollywood talk.

            “That’s how some people, hell, all the people here make it.” Josh looked at me like I needed to believe him so he could go on living.

            If you’ve studied enough history, and especially classical music, you’ll find that’s a common refrain. If anyone is too talented, the mid-level socialistas who engage in art because they don’t like hard labor—you know, the talentless ones who can’t accept that they’re not all Mozart—they’ll usually libel the gifted as having sold their soul to the devil. Liszt. Robert Johnson. Fran Tarkington.

            I turned to leave Josh to his bass and bongos.

            “Here’s the crazy thing...” said shut-eyed, bass-slapping, blissed-to-the-fifth-dimension Josh, my boon companion up the muddy tributaries of Cambodia ’75 remembered. “The crazy thing is... he lets you know what he’s doing right in front of your eyes, man. The devil loves allegory, dude. Loves it. Is allegory the right word?”

            “Depends on what you’re trying to say.”

            “Like when he tries to show you the whole thing but he uses a story.”

            “Example.”

            Josh paused. Thinking.

            “Like when a kid from the wrong side of the tracks gets beat up playing street basketball and he ends up in a mansion in Bel Air and it’s all fish out of water. But really it isn’t about all that. Really it’s about death and the afterlife. Is that an allegory?”

            “Yes. Symbolism, maybe.” The hash was messing with my head. It was hot in the tiny back bedroom. I sat down on one of Josh’s beds. He had two.

            “It would be an allegory if it meant something else,” I said. “If basketball was a symbol for life or something. If Bel Air was a symbol for the afterlife.”

            Josh stopped slapping his bass. He opened his brown eyes. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He turned to look at me.

            “Fresh Prince, man.”

            I had no idea what he was talking about.

            “Y’know... Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This girl... this taxi driver. Nadia. She told me all about it once. Told me that the TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air is really all about heaven and hell. That the kid really died in a drive-by, or gang violence, in the opening credits. Tells you so in the song. That he got killed in some kind of drive-by shooting. Then suddenly he ends up in “Heaven.” In Bel Air. In some rich cat’s house. What most poor people would think Heaven might be like.”

            I was thirsty for the tequila.

            “See, that’s what el Diablo does. He tells you the game and then watches you play it, you not really ever knowing what the rules are all about, or that it was stacked against you the entire time.”

            “You believe that stuff? You really believe in the devil?”

            Josh laughed and picked up his bass.

            “Nah,” he snorted. “Not at all.” He started to slap his bass and then stopped. “But, y’know the rumor about Zack from Saved by the Bell?”

            “TV show?”

            Josh laughed.

            “The rumor is that the actor, the star who plays Zack, well the rumor is that he sold his soul to the devil to get famous.”

            I sighed and rose. “Like I said, they say that about a lot of people.”

            I thought about leaving, which presented its own problems. Rios was gone. He’d left with some “actress” who’d just arrived in Hollywood by bus. I wouldn’t see Rios again for another three years. When I went back out to the block and glass front room, someone had put on an old Rolling Stones album. A couple was making out in the kitchen. Most everyone else was gone. I found a beer and wandered out into the back yard. A couple of beautiful young kids were making out in a Jacuzzi. The water was red. Someone must’ve changed the light bulb. It looked like they were being boiled alive and they didn’t mind. I wandered toward the back fence and a few lounge chairs on a raised wooden deck. That was when I ran into Mays.

            We talked. He introduced himself as a publisher and editor-in-chief. I told him that was odd, as I’d been a reporter for the AP wire service all through the eighties. A stringer. I used words I’d learned from real pool reporters back in ’86 when it looked like things were about to get all crossfire hurricane in Beirut.

            He asked me what I was doing in LA.

            I drank the beer and watched the gems sparkle down on the valley floor.

            “Working on a book.”

            “Ah, the great American novel.” He sighed longingly.

            “Not so much.” I finished the beer and tossed it off the balcony into the failed dreams below. The weight of all my failures, like some giant phantom of my entire past, was catching up with me. Like it had pursued me across the continent and finally cornered me here at the not-porn star party that was all about a porn star who’d never show. I thought it would be hilarious if she walked in at that very moment. At two a.m. with just me, Mays, the two momentarily in love couples, and Josh, whoever the hell he was, in the back of the house slapping away at his unpowered bass.

            Pat would enjoy a story like that if we ever got the old gang back together again. If someone else gave it a shot again. If Dole ever made it to the top, we’d finish off the Chinese. That was the plan all along. First the Russkies, then the ChiComs.

            But that’d have to wait for Bill and Hillary Clinton to finish wrecking everything.

            The high-water mark and the death of the right-wing dream of America the Conquering was all I could think about at two a.m. in a lounge chair. On a deck. Looking out at Burbank in the night.

            “No, I’m working on a book about the devil and Hollywood.”

            Mays sat up.

            “That’s coming back, y’know. People always get interested in the devil every so often. I should know, I publish gossip.”

            “The porn star?”

            “Yeah,” he said with a shame he didn’t bother to hide. “There was a chance she might show. I took it.”

            He picked up a bottle of gin he had concealed in the darkness like the sniveling left-wing nutjob I knew he was. Now that he sensed I might be part of the problem, a journalist, he offered me a pull. We were bottle-hitting by the side of an incredibly tiny pool at three a.m. It was dark and very quiet out.

            I must make a confession now.

            I must tell you that for a moment I became so weak, so disillusioned by the fall of Reagan, that I toyed with, felt, molested the thought of becoming one of the enemy. I asked myself: What if I just make all the right liberal noises and join the tribe of crazy? Maybe there’s a secret club. A job. A porn star for me if I make their liberal sounds and join their party of nothing. What if?

            Then Mays made a disparaging crack about Casper Weinberger and I decided he was chum and I was the shark. I was going to go Roman on him. If not now, if not tomorrow, then at some point I would go Roman just for the crack. Gin does that to me.

Nota bene.

            It also does something else.

            It makes me crafty.

            It makes me English.

            Pat once told me, “Never trust the English. They’re mad dogs.”

            Pat the Wise.

            Pat Buchanan.

            I hit the bottle of gin hard and said, “Listen, it’s 3:45 in the a.m. Let’s go find a diner and get some breakfast and I’ll tell you a story I once heard about some star kid who sold his soul to the devil for everything.”

            To his credit, Mays didn’t ask for the details. That told me he’d been a card-carrying DNC operative his entire miserable existence, his excuse for a life. Operators don’t ask for the details. Regardless of which side they’re on. They just make the play.

            We were blasting down Ventura Boulevard when the sun began to come up. Juice Newton was singing “Queen of Hearts.” It was great, and if Mays hadn’t been the enemy, he could’ve been a friend.

            When we were finally eating Moon over My Hammy’s at a Denny’s, I told him the rumor Josh had related. I added details. I embellished. I ended with, “I know it’s not counting bodies on the Cambodian border, or Beirut ’86, but it’s gossip and I’ll do it for some quick cash.”

            Mays set his coffee down and picked it up again. I had him, and he knew I had him.

            I told him, “Even if it’s not true, you can print it. This Saved by the Bell is big, right?”

            “Yeah, of course we can. Kid’s hot right now.”

            That’s when I struck.

            “Well then, I’ll need an expense account and a condo while I write the story. Something on the west side. Near Venice preferably.”

            In hindsight, I may have struck a tad too early.

            I checked my watch and signaled the waitress. It was just after six a.m. and we could order booze. I ordered a double mint julep and was told Denny’s didn’t have mint and they didn’t “julep.” I settled for a draft and shouted “amateurs” as she walked away with a demeanor I felt didn’t necessarily embody the Denny’s corporate experience as outlined in some handbook somewhere. I was tempted to burn the place down later if things went sideways in LA, or write a letter to Mr. Denny. I wasn’t sure which.

            “Yeah, Doc…” said Mays. I’d told him that was what everybody called me. Might’ve been the first time I’d ever used it. He continued, “We don’t do expense accounts and condos for out-of-town stringers. Hell, we don’t even do them for ourselves. I pay fifty bucks a story. Two hundred and fifty words.”

            The Grey Lady the Hollywood Scene Beat was not.

            But I could work with this.

            “You got a lawyer?” I asked.

            He rolled his eyes and swallowed badly. He had a lawyer and probably an ulcer.

            “Because I don’t want to go down for libel or slander,” I continued. “My source tells me this is some really messed-up stuff the kid’s gotten himself into.”

            Mays raised an eye.

            He was hooked.

            “You ever hear of Bohemian Grove?” I spooned up some hammy with lots of moon. I chewed and imagined that beer I was going to get and down in one go, then send the failed-actress-now-waitress back for another, just to teach someone a lesson about customer service. She could learn a lot from the barman at the Polo Lounge in Kinshasa. A lot.

            “Yeah,” muttered Mays like he was cagey. “Lot of establishment types go there and play dress-up. Weird frat-boy stuff.”

            The beer arrived and I polished it in one go. I held one hand up as I did, indicating she should wait. Then I slammed it down and told her to be quicker with the next round.

            I’d either pushed it too far with Mays, or it was right where it was supposed to be pushed to. The jury was still out. I had high hopes for a condo because I wanted to sleep for days.

            He pushed his plate back. I could sense he was pushing me back, filing me under “dangerous lunatic” in the not-to-be-trusted file. The drinking was to show him I was one of those hard-as-nails type journalists that thought Murrow was a prep school pansy.

And I was thirsty because of the hash.

            “Yeah,” I burped. “Here’s the thing. It’s totally John Birch. Right-wing weirdos. Kid’s in thick with ’em. One day he could be the next Reagan. If he didn’t sell his soul to the devil, then he might as well have if he’s hanging out with those creeps. Know what I mean? George Bush is the Grand Poobah there. Creepy.”

            The trap was set. I hated myself for laughing, but I had to, to sell it.

            I waited.

            For the beer, which I was sure would have failed actress spit in it, and for Mays to swallow the bait.

            Mays picked up his coffee.

            “Yeah,” he said after a sip. There were bags under his tired eyes. But the eyes themselves were alive with good old-fashioned DNC hatred and bile. Bagging the next Reagan was as close to shooting a rare white albino right through the eyes as a peace-loving liberal would ever come.

“Yeah, we’ve got a lawyer. I’ll give you five hundred dollars for expenses, and if you get any photos of the kid with any of those jerks… I’ll pay double for each shot. I don’t care if he waxes the devil’s car on Sundays, but get some pics of him and some Republicans playing Frat Boy and you’ve got gold.”

            I had him.

            We went back to the sleazy offices of the Hollywood Scene Beat and I got the five hundred in cash. I headed by bus over to the lawyer’s office off Victory Boulevard. It was behind some warehouses in a badly built strip mall.

            I convinced the lawyer—Wally Kasternick, Esquire—that I’d need a junior associate to act as my legal representative, because the bulk of my devil-worshipper-slash-right-wing-fratboy cult story involved a lot of records-crawling and I expected some heavy resistance from the county commissioner, who I took a shot in the dark and slandered as a “right-winger.” I told him the retainer would be paid by the publisher. He was the only lawyer, so he offered me a part-time temp paralegal by the name of Arturo Chung.

            They called Chung, and an hour later he showed up in some sort of car I’d never bothered to learn the name of. It was Asian, it was lowered, and it had tinted windows. I informed my new lawyer-slash-paralegal we wouldn’t be driving that and made him drive me to the local Hertz rent-a-car out at the Burbank Airport, where we drove away with an American butterscotch Olds Cutlass Sierra thing. It was huge. I’d negotiated, intensely, for a convertible of some sort, but the jack-booted fascist at the rental desk was toeing the “no fun for you” party line. I added this up as yet one more injustice and tallied it under the things I’d need access to when, not if, it was time to go Roman.

            Lieutenant-Colonel North had taught me that trick.

            I’ll never forget it.

            Keep a deposit book of wrongs for the time when going Roman comes. That’s what crazy people do.

            We drove off into the hot Burbank afternoon, and it took only a few moments of thinking and trying to find a decent soft rock station before I realized I suspected Arturo Chung of being a dangerous lunatic.

            My first clue was that he was dressed like one. He had on a short-sleeved button-up shirt with a tie. I didn’t even know those were still available anymore. He must’ve had some relative who’d been a slide rule geek at NASA back in the sixties when NASA was putting men into space every other week. Was he raiding that relative’s closet? He was sick, obviously. He was Mexican-Chinese and he spoke politely and kept referring to me as “sir.” Obviously he was dangerous. I was convinced of that and vowed to keep an eye on him.

            I asked him where we could score some drugs, as a test, and he seemed taken aback. But I knew this was an act on his part. He lied and told me he had no idea where we could get illegal drugs.

            Our first stop in the “Mark-Paul Gosselaar parties with the Devil” story, as I was calling it at that moment, was to secure a base from which to operate. We drove down to Sunset Boulevard, cruised the Tower Records parking lot looking for chicks, and finally settled on a low-priced but strangely clean motel down along a quieter part of the strip. We checked in after two and I ordered my lawyer to get me a bucket of ice after, emphasis on “after,” obtaining some mint for my Clevinger’s bourbon, if that was at all possible.

            He objected, and I told him we’d be living together for the next week and that he’d be on twenty-four-hour retainer if he was able to keep me happy.

            “Why?” objected my suspected lunatic paralegal lawyer, adding, “And I’m not actually a lawyer.”

            “Son,” I replied, feeling very Lyndon Baines Johnson, as I was much taller than Arturo. I dropped the English accent in favor of a slight Texas drawl. “Son, we’re confronting the very forces of darkness. Evil itself. And you know what…” Dramatic pause. “Evil never sleeps.”

            He looked down at the floor and his cheap shoes on the threadbare carpet. Creepers.

            “I’d better let you know now,” I continued. “As my lawyer, I may need you to do some highly illegal things in the name of law and order. As a representative of the court, you may be called upon to break some laws in order to save a human life. Are you willing to do that, Arturo? Are you?”

            I waited. It was silent in the hot little out-of-date postmodern motel room. I could see tiny painted white rocks on the flat roofs surrounding the blistering parking lot.

            “Or are you a communist?”

            He mumbled something about not actually being a lawyer, took the twenty I’d stuffed in his shirt pocket, and left in search of mint.

            I waited, made some phone calls, and tried not to think about the Clintons ruining all our plans for ruining the Chinese’s plans. It was hard.

            Missed opportunities.

            When Arturo got back an hour later he seemed dejected. He dropped a bag on his bed, the one nearest the door, and turned on some afternoon TV.

            I made us drinks and sat down on the bed beside him.

            “So what’s this story you’re working on?” he asked, hitting the bourbon like it was a soda pop. He made a face and switched to sipping. Clevinger’s isn’t for the weak.

            “You ever heard of Saved by the Bell? It’s a TV show.”

            He nodded. His little sister watched it.

            “Right, well we’re trying to dig up some dirt on one of the stars. Some really dark stuff.”

            I filled Arturo in on the details. The few I could remember from Josh’s story. The hash may have caused some lag drop on the more salient points.

* * *

            Our first order of business was to find a Nadia who drove a taxi. So we went downtown and had a three-hour breakfast at The Pantry. While I read all the papers, scanning for any Mark-Paul Gosselaar news and seething about Hillary’s plans for redesigning the West Wing and government-funded health care, Arturo went around to all the downtown cab companies in search of our Nadia. I told him to look for an artsy type. She probably wore a beret and went in heavy on the lipstick. When he came back, he told me he’d located three “Nadias” who drove taxis and may have been artsy types. All of them worked the night shift. Then we drove out to Santa Anita and did some off-track betting. I lost a hundred on a nag named American Spirit, but the beer was cheap and the air was hot and hazy. I felt, sitting in the empty stands, listening to the announcer call some race somewhere else, that I was a character in a Hemingway novel. Or a short story at the least. “Hills Like White Elephants” or some such ex-pat nonsense.

            It was that kind of day.

            We made it back downtown just in time for traffic and parked in back of Philippe’s, a place that boasted being the home of the French Dip sandwich. It was okay, but I’d had better at an O club in ’Nam I was never officially at. Afterwards, we called in for a ride from each Nadia. One by one they picked us up in their cabs and took us three blocks down to the train station.

            None of them was the Nadia we needed. None of them had heard of Mark-Paul Gosselaar. All of them were shocked that he worshipped the devil.

            We were parked in front of a liquor store, and the operation, or “story,” as journalists like to term such things, seemed at that moment dead in the water. I was toying with the idea of splitting with what was left of the five hundred and heading down to San Diego and probably then on into Mexico. Maybe I’d write that bullfighting novel I’d told so many women throughout the years I was working on.

            But the last Nadia knew of the Nadia we were seeking. Or at least, it sounded to that Nadia like we were looking for a Nadia who was quite knowledgeable of all things Hollywood. This Nadia was known to the other Nadia. This other Nadia liked the dark and dirty stuff about Hollywood, according to the Nadia in the cab.

            The other Nadia drove a limo for Capitol Records.

            The other Nadia was also screening a film on Melrose after midnight, that night in fact. We got the location, tipped well and expansively, then got dropped off back at Phillipe’s. I had another triple-dipped French Dip and watched the afternoon news on a mounted TV above the sawdust-covered floor. It occurred to me that I should at least watch one episode of Saved by the Bell, if only just to see what this little devil-worshipper actually looked like. We had five hours to kill, so I asked Arturo about some drugs again. As a test.

            I suspected that the hopelessness he’d experienced at all the cab lots, combined with the heavy sandwich, had weakened him to the point where his true self would finally bleed through and he’d reveal himself to be the lunatic I was convinced he was.

            He said he had a connection for weed, but it was way out near Santa Monica. Too far to be convenient. I overruled that, so we drove down the 10 and picked up the weed in Venice. As I rolled a joint, I told Arturo about my plan to take control of Venice and turn it into a right-wing power base smack-dab in the belly of the beast. The People’s Republik of California.

            He’d already smoked some of the joint, and now he was unsuccessfully fishing around for a Zeppelin tape, typical of the amateur drug offender and yet indicative of a trail I was sure would lead deep into a heart of darkness. I filed that away in the case I was building against my lawyer re: him being a dangerous lunatic. Arturo had turned morose with the cannabis and the onset of early evening. If he was a dangerous lunatic it would come out soon. I was sure of it. The drugs were just to vet him. To draw the poison out, as it were. I sensed this operation, this story, was going deep. Up some very dark alleys where a biker might just chain-whip you to see if you had what it took to walk through the front door of the worst club this side of Colombia. I needed to make sure my wingman was, if not entirely stable, ready to roll when, not if, but when it was time to go Roman. If he didn’t freak out on all the drugs I was planning to test him with, then I’d upgrade him to firearms training. It would pay to have an armed man on my six if I was going to do some hard-hitting background investigative journalism on a devil-worshipping celebrity.

I felt it all coming at me like a storm on the horizon, late in the night. Something you couldn’t avoid even if you drove as fast as you could in any direction.

So the drugs were a test. That’s all.

We ate well at the pricey Pacific Dining Car, one of LA’s only five star twenty-four-hour restaurants, and skipped out on the bill. Arturo wasn’t in on the “skipping out” plan. He was merely following orders to bring the car around, which didn’t even really make him a “wheelman” in the strictest version of the handbook the CIA never published each year on how to rob foreign banks.

I counted to a hundred and eighty and launched myself at the front door like a man who would be imminently sick, scooping up a fistful of mints at the host station while filling two pockets with all the matchbooks they could contain.

“Go!” I screamed at my lawyer once I was inside the Cutlass. “Now! Go fast, you simpleton!”

“Why, what’s wrong?” he screamed. His eyes rolled like an escaped fugitive hearing the working dogs in the distance.

“I thought I saw a contract killer in there,” I lied. “A real sociopath I knew from my days with the Company. If it is that guy in there, people are gonna die in large doses. He’s an indiscriminate mad dog killer.”

Arturo mashed the accelerator to the floor and we headed back toward downtown LA. I rolled a joint beneath the passing streetlights that whipped by in sudden washes of orange light.

“Was he your friend?” asked my lawyer. He had an agile legal mind, even though he was a crazed lunatic. He was attempting to establish relationship and motive like the professional I’d been telling everyone he was.

“I slept with his wife,” I mumbled to get Arturo to drive faster. “He’s had it out for me for a very long time.”

I licked the joint and cast a fugitive eye at Arturo. A warning. “He’d kill you just for fun if he found you with me.” Then I added, “And it wouldn’t be pretty.”

It was at that point that Arturo lost control of the vehicle, swiped some large yellow safety barrels near the onramp to the 405, crossed to the other side of the road underneath the bridge, drove up the embankment, and started to head straight for the bottom of the bridge above us. I sensed him letting off the gas and screamed, “No! You idiot! Give it all you’ve got and turn!”

In hindsight, I’ll admit I was wrong about that piece of advice.

There was a small throbbing vein in Arturo my lawyer’s forehead. I notice details in moments of extreme crisis. It’s a trait. A gift, even.

He mashed the accelerator and jerked the wheel to the left. Then he slammed on the brake, which I’d never said anything about him doing. Then the almost new, butterscotch Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra rolled once, twice, and landed back on the street right-side up, now pointed in the opposite direction heading back into Santa Monica.

As the quiet settled over the aftermath of our two-revolution roll down the embankment, I realized I’d somehow lost the joint in all the chaos.

A moment later I spotted it lying in the middle of the street, and for at least one full minute after that, I tried to conceive how it could have gone from between my fingers to lying in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard at eleven-thirty at night. Then I realized it wasn’t important. I got out and retrieved the drug and brought it back to the battered Butterscotch Bomber. Arturo remained staring at the road ahead. The road leading back to the contract killer in Santa Monica. He had the same look as a chopper pilot I’d once known who’d had a horrible crash and nightmare survival situation deep inside Sandinista country. The pilot had been shot down above the Nicaraguan jungles and auto-rotated into some heavy canopy only to be stuck for two weeks straight in trees filled with hanging vipers. I lit the joint and stuck it between his lips.

He involuntarily pulled.

Now I knew. My lawyer, Arturo Chung, was a dangerous lunatic. A craven drug fiend. The action was automatic and instinctual.

I took it and inhaled.

“All right,” I exhaled. “Let’s go meet this Nadia.”

Back tomorrow with Part 2 of Fear of the Unknown and Self-Loathing in Hollywood

or

Doctor Midnite

and

The Great White Whale Hunt of ’93

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