September 14, 2009
Final Boarding Call
Of all the dumb luck Gunner Thompson had to kick the bucket Monday morning. They wanted me to write a press release for the media. God damn it! It had been years since I had to put out copy that crappy. Wasn't I senior staff for shit's sake? What was I supposed to write? Gunner Thompson was the best? Gunner Thompson had class? Those were the good old days before the age of character assassination? Before hacks like me came along and ruined it all? Before the 24-7 news cycle when gentlemen were still gentlemen and ladies were still ladies and everyone had white picket fences and bought soda pop at the pharmacy? Well screw that!
So what if purple prose is my particular style. I'm a proud industry hack. No one ever wrote a finer run-on sentence than I did, except maybe Lautremont. I mean the dude got the prize. The guy could go on for pages. But, what of it? Everyone new he was psycho, certifiably nuts, crazy, not to mention soft in the head! I am more like Mitch Courtney from The Space Merchants -- "copysmith star class". The shit I put out is top-of-the-line, number one, best in the biz. Maybe I don't have the jingle-jangle , elastic-band discipline, tight as a Kinks song, like others, but I have a flair for the epic, the grandiose, life under The Big Tent. No one can match me for my exploitation of pathos. If there is a heart-wrenching storyline I get it. When you read my stuff and the subject takes a spill and skins his chin, I want you to feel the sting and taste the dirt and blood in your mouth like it was you who just fell on your face.
"Old geezer died in his sleep" was simply not going to cut it. High drama was called for -- operatic drama that would make your hairs all stand on end like you just got a little electric shock. I was thinking something along the lines of the JFK assassination scenario the protagonist comes up with in Terry Southern's short story "The Blood of the Wig". Nothing so totally creepy as the paranoid schizophrenic hallucination he comes up with, though we don't really know what it was, except that it was in really bad taste. No, if I had to do this, I was going to go for something even more sensational and over the top.
All I knew about the man was that he was as old as the hills, maybe older. Gunner Thompson was one of McCarthy's oldest friends and political allies. He got where he got by throwing his competition under the bus. All I knew was all I heard, and all I ever heard was how those guys and gals were so God-dam famous for their dignity and grace despite what everyone said about them. Well check this! I've never checked a fact in my whole entire life. Story is legend. How am I supposed to check if Gunner Thompson's mother actually said "It was like he was trying to prove that you could live by eating snot alone", there was no way to know for sure if he was really ever put into shop class because he tried to burn down his high-school, or later in life if he was ever actually over-heard to scream in a private bathhouse stall: "Suck it hippie, suck it!"
Fact checking can go to hell for all I care. I mean this guy was like the no-good, low-life punk in Freaks and Geeks who, when pressed to answer a question on a math test he was accused of cheating on, doodles for his answer: "'Zepelin' Rules!"
Everyone knew Gunner Thompson was the biggest boozer and sexaholic in the county. Everyone knew he practically single handedly kept the industrial pharmaceutical giants in business, and from what I heard he generally taught the legendary Shakes-the-Clown every act of perversion the sad sack ever engaged in. How am I supposed to fact check that little bit of information? It's not like it's just sitting there in some arcane database waiting for me to figure out the correct search terms. Let's face it, all I really knew about the man was that he had a bad porn name, the kind network Weather Reporters these days have in the local news, like Dallas Rains and Johnny Thunder, but not even that good because the old fart's name sounded so God-awfully out of date by today's standards, like it was the pseudonym of a men's magazine writer from the late Fifties or early Sixties.
For the sake of full-disclosure the last time I even saw the chicken-hawk weasel was at a Christmas Pool Party up in the Hills about ten years ago. I only remember because my boss asked me if I was going to let Gunner drive home drunk. "What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Tie him up and throw him over the saddle of my horse? Put him in a flowery dress?"
Chuck Barris already clamed he was a game-show pioneer by day and a CIA agent by night in his 1984 autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. So the spy thriller angle was tired. I mean the guy was the lowest form of human filth whose best idea of dignity was rampaging around like a maniac, destroying everything he came into contact with, like the kabala-inspired zombie in The Golem. I briefly entertained the idea I could make him out as some kind of avenging Jewish angel made of dirt, but I tried to picture a hulking mud Gunner Thompson squishing phantom-like through the halls of Hollywood High, scaring all the little kids half to death, and I couldn't quite make it work. For starters, he was a big sporty blonde guy.
Dream sequences are generally frowned upon, especially if the story ends: "And then he (or she) woke up." But if you start right off with a dark anxiety fantasy you can get away with a bit more poetic license because there's the added advantage of foreshadowing the inner turmoil of the character. Despite the pleas from my boss to just get the damn thing out the door, I adamantly believed we had to get inside the head of this guy, or failing that, get inside the inner-life of some guy, try and come up with some kind of believable motivation. I mean besides the simple fact that Gunner Thompson was the worst kind of slob. Dreams are good mood setters and they can go a long way to establish a salable temperament where otherwise there was none.
So Gunner Thompson was on the run. "Robot grasshoppers chased him through the ghost town. Tinny silver-alloy bodies bound across empty streets, past Jack-O'-Lantern houses -- windows and doors all boarded up -- set loose to hunt him down." In constructing the surreal Gothic necropolis of male fantasy the sky is the limit, nothing is too far fetched, you can exaggerate every detail like a mad German Expressionist.
"Spindly steely police bugs clicked and clattered as they chased him down the empty streets with tiny spotlights mounted on their bug-skulls, each aimed at his heels, miniature video cameras for eyes that zoomed in and out." I emphasized how steely the machines were. How they all did the job they were supposed to do, without question, like good robots do. I even indulged in a little comic relief as I elaborated about how the first wave of police drones were followed by more sophisticated robots, one for every task imaginable. I wanted to create the feeling of a deadly urban theme park and there has to be something funny about that.
"Some police robots dug up the ground to analyze soil samples for signs of life. Others were robot trackers, robot archeologists, robot sociologists, robot historians, robot shrinks, robot prospectors, robot whores, robot addicts"... anything I could think up... you name it, it just poured out like brain-vomit from my cracked skull. But what I most wanted the reader to feel was the thing that scared Gunner Thompson more than the robot lawmen and their robot bugs, more than anything else; namely, himself.
"When Gunner Thompson opened his eyes, this time with a start, his heart was in his mouth and he was out of breath. All around him metallic grasshoppers glinted, and their mechanical mandibles clicked at his feet with robot malice."
A sense of dread and powerlessness was what I was after. "Gunner Thompson lay on his back and squinted up at the officer in charge. As the man came closer he was struck dumb with fear. The man who approached him was his exact double. It was like the moment in the 1978 remake of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers where the lead character, confronted with his inhuman double, hesitates for a moment at the prospect of pitch forking it to death."
My main point was not to imply a difference between the two, but to show how similar they were. "His nose bled," I wrote, "The nose of his double bled." I wanted the reader to understand Gunner Thompson's anger at seeing his own ugly mug, I mean really seeing it for the first time. He wants to scratch out the eyes of his double. Looking at himself in the face of his twin he imagines he claws and claws at the reflection, but it is hopeless. "No matter how deep his fingernails dug into the skin of his reflection there was nothing but makeup." I turned it up a notch. "He wanted to obliterate the hideous image of his double, but the deeper he imagined he dug his fingernails into its face the less there was to claw at, until there was almost nothing left of the putty face that stared back down at him but a messy stump of concave flesh."
Arlington Road made the most sense to me as an inspiration for the world Gunner Thompson woke up to the next morning. A kind of neo-realist suburban sprawl is depicted in the movie, not quite with the kind of fake documentary style fashionable these days, but definitely favoring some hard-to-define uncanny notion of hyper-clarity. An anarchist terrorist is bent on the destruction of the country. A college professor is obsessed with conspiracy theories ever since his FBI wife was gunned down in a raid gone awry on a well-armed cult enclave. Faraday does his best to foil a terrorist attack on The Hoover Building only to test the limits of his own sanity. In the end he realizes he was the dupe all along, set up by puppet masters he was totally unaware were pulling the strings.
Not that Gunner Thompson is any smarter than Faraday. If you haven't figured it out yet, the guy was a dope. Faraday is obviously supposed to be smart. He is a college professor, after all, and what makes the picture move at the clip it does is that he holds fast to his personal and intellectual ideals right till the bitter end when he and everyone else discover the explosives they are all looking for are packed in the trunk of his car and its too late, the bomb is about to go off. I can't stress it enough. Gunner Thompson was a total and complete moron -- way too stupid and rudderless to stick to anyone else's game plan. Faraday's undoing is that he is selflessly driven by good intentions. Megalomania was more Gunner Thompson's trip. His own ass came first and last and always. In many ways it was even better than Faraday's personality flaw. How tragic is the man who only cares about #1? Given the right set of circumstances, you could snap such an ego between your fingers like a greasy chicken bone. I'm all for the story that overtakes the story, and if Gunner Thompson never had a conscience to speak of, by golly I was going to furnish him with one.
There's something implicitly dreamy about strict factual accounts, especially if they are momentum driven. All I really needed was an event to jolt the big lug out of his meat-headed complacency, the more theatrical the better. Dress up some local talent and give them a little direction, was all I needed to do, nothing too hard to remember. And I got a gift in the form of a ripe news item. Several days ago a prominent member of the company's board of trustees was reported as missing under "mysterious circumstances". The man has since been found pant-less and sleeping off a drunk in a dyke near the Sultan Sea. Gunner Thompson, though, could never have known that the board member was discovered a couple of days later a little scruffy and worse for wear, but perky and even surprisingly vital as evidenced by the footage of him smiling for the camera and giving a thumbs-up sign.
The office digs were thoroughly modern -- all steel, marble, and glass -- designed to let the light in, an architectural Baroque wet dream of unexpected lines of sight and distorted reflections. Gunner Thompson would have awakened from one dream-space into another. Los Angeles Plays Itself is Thom Andersen's tribute to LA. He puts together a history of the city based on how Hollywood has used and abused the local landscape as a backdrop for some of its most famous pictures. Among the many insights is the way modern architecture, including folks like Frank Lloyd Wright, is generally used by the film industry as the domicile locations for arch-villains, with the noted if ambiguous exception of the Mayan House interiors in Blade Runner, left open to question only because it is ultimately unclear if the main character is human or machine.
There is an argument to be made that our consciousness can only expand so far without experiencing serious trauma. I tend to doubt it, but what I can't take away from the flick is the point that Hollywood has always seen through the cultural optimism of modernity to its darker side. The Renaissance scribbler Leon Alberti never imagined a world where there could be so many windows. Poor Gunner Thompson. The man may have taken every conceivable advantage of his station in life, but he was definitely not a modern man. All the geometric angles and the harsh daylight pouring in every-which-way would have likely confused him upon waking, not to mention all the electronic windows that pulsed around him, like the array of oversized computer and video monitors on his wall. For a split second he might actually have thought he was still dreaming.
"Gunmen climbed the stares," I pressed on. "Gunner Thompson saw two of them round the corner with automatic weapons and ducked under his desk. Two more advanced from the back."
In reality Gunner would probably have gone out to greet them. When it came to spontaneous interviews the man was the king of drunken rambling. In an instant he could forget the mental calculus required to keep all his romantic affairs in order, and shove the microphone in your face with the hot shiny eyes of a boozehound. There was never a let down in his enthusiasm. Big story or little story he always gave it his incoherent all. After watching a televised red carpet event, my friend's eight-year-old once parodied his buoyant hyperbolic style by saying, "He poured the water onto the dirt. And look -- mud!" Even if the man didn't have an interview lined up there was always the priceless commentary you could expect from the sidelines.
What would Gunner Thompson have said about the gunmen? He would probably have reached into his glad-bag and pulled out something like a Cruising reference. A cop goes undercover to solve a murder in what the promotional material for the movie described as New York City's "sleazy gay underground". Gunner Thompson wouldn't have missed a beat. The gunmen who entered the building had their weapons drawn, but they were all wrong from the point of view of a Great Generation army veteran. For him it would have been genuinely surprising that the contemporary American fascist esthetic, whether for cops or the armed forces, was so close to gay S&M drag. I had to move the story along before the ornery bastard said: "Get a load of these guys, folks, they look like fags!"
The challenge was to convince him that what he saw first-hand was the assassination of the board member. "When he made it safely down to the causeway," I wrote, "he took a knee behind a large protruding block of concrete. The sun was bright overhead, but when he squinted he could see above him. And on the roof of the structure he'd just escaped, stood a single gunman with a long black rifle. When he saw the puff of smoke and heard the loud report, his eyes instinctively slid down the trajectory of the barrel to try and see the target. A body lay prone in the parking lot two stories down, but his view of it was partially blocked by a large tree." If I could only plant a seed of doubt in his head I could maybe hope to convince him that he was witness to the board member's murder. Gunner Thompson resisted the suggestion more vigorously than I thought he would, but he finally gave into the fact he had just seen someone wasted, that much seemed real, anyway, and it could very well have been a prominent member of the corporation.
I left well enough alone. If the old man was seriously convinced he saw a killing, I could very probably persuade him of just about anything. And if I wanted to make him think he was in some way responsible for the assassination I had to come up with a reporter who would tell the story I wanted told. The shrinking violet Anna Winter came to mind readily. She was made up and dressed like the famous Vogue editor by the same name and quickly dispatched to cover the story of a growing crowd of mourners outside company headquarters. They were gathered outside our metropolitan offices peering over the yellow police tape at the chalk outline on the ground. The well-wishers looked a bit stone-faced to me, like they were blankly staring at the building, but Anna Winter jumped in at exactly the right moment with her pronouncement that the board member was "beloved by all!"
"Gunner Thompson made his way to the bathroom." I felt confident enough at this point to slip in the phrase: "Something nagged at him." Everyone who ever met the cretin knew full well the man had no scruples. But there he was staring into a toilet bowl with his brand-name poise in shambles, wondering if this time he had really been party to more than just the usual character assassination.
I sent in the jack-boots to collect him as fast as possible. The old man was pulled from the bathroom kicking and screaming, babbling the kind of shit any sane person would describe as paranoid delusion. My nefarious agents had a heck of a time restraining him until they got him to the airport terminal. It took a while, but eventually Gunner Thompson resigned himself to his fate. This airplane ride would be his last. There was no doubt of that. His destination was his death, and maybe that's what he deserved. Maybe he'd been a real asshole and a creep all his life, like everyone said, the kind of swine who trashed other people's lives, but never considered his own role in the destruction of reputations and all the countless many nervous breakdowns he had no doubt helped to trigger with his revealing insult-comic-style profiles. Maybe it was time to finally look hard into his own soul, and maybe what he saw was an ugly monster -- it sure looked that way to the rest of us!
The final boarding call eventually got him out of his seat. Four agents accompanied him. Two went ahead and two followed behind in case he made any last minute attempt to run, but he didn't. Gunner Thompson looked around to the small flock of fans that reached out to him with mementos they wanted autographed and said his last good-buys.
***
There was a little more to the dream I left out earlier. Gunner Thompson's double is standing over him. "Metal alloy machines tested their own equipment, flexed, started, stopped, extended and retracted electric organs, pirouetted, swung axe blades and wielded other brutal implements. His double in the black military uniform spit. Gunner Thompson was dragged to a field behind a shed by a machine that looked something like the Mars Rover, except without the solar panels which were in any case useless in a dark necropolis. 'Shit-for-brains,' the officer grunted. 'Say yer prayers.' A magnificent cacophony of gears and hydraulics and belts filled the night. His double watched with sinister glee as the shiny robots did their work. 'So long, Gunner Thompson,' he said, and pulled his night-vision goggles down over his eyes." I changed the line after to read, "What happened next was pretty unclear," and sent it on its merry way.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2009
