Haunted

  Not looking up from his version of the truth, the Earl nods, yes.

  “So—tell us a story,” Mr. Whittier says. “Come back to the fire,” he says, and, with a twist of his trembling hand, “Please.”

  And the Earl of Slander smiles. He flips to the next clean page in his notepad and caps his pen. Looking up, he says, “Does anybody remember that old TV show Danny-Next-Door?” Making his voice slow and rumbling-deep, he says, “One day . . .” He says, “One day, my dog ate some garbage wrapped in aluminum foil . . .”

  Trade Secrets

  A Poem About the Earl of Slander

  “Those people in line,” the Earl says, “a week early for the opening of some movie . . .”

  Those people are paid to wait in line.

  The Earl of Slander onstage, he stands with one hand raised, holding a sheet of paper,

  the white paper, blocking his face.

  The rest of him in a blue suit, a red necktie. Buffed brown shoes.

  On the wrist of his raised hand, a gold watch,

  engraved with: “Congratulations”

  Onstage, instead of a spotlight, instead of a face,

  projected on the paper is the 72-point headline:

  Local Reporter Wins Pulitzer Prize

  Behind this headline, the Earl says, “Those people live their lives standing in line . . .”

  For one summer blockbuster after another.

  The movie studios bus those supposed fan-kids from town to town.

  From sci-fi film to superhero fantasy.

  Each week, a new town, a new motel, a new PG-13 to pretend they adore.

  Those cardboard and tinfoil costumes, so obviously homemade,

  the Wardrobe Department makes them and ships them ahead.

  All this effort to fool the local media into running a real news story, for free publicity.

  To build a credible buzz about how much folks will love this film.

  All this time and money, it's called “seeding the audience.”

  In his shirt pocket blinks the small red light of a tape recorder taking down every word.

  As the Earl asks, “Who's the bigger fool?”

  The reporter who refuses to invent a meaning for life?

  Or the reader who wants it?

  And stands ready to accept this meaning presented in the words of a stranger?

  His voice from behind the paper, the Earl of Slander says, “A journalist has a right . . .

  . . . and a duty, to destroy

  those golden calves he helps create.”

  Swan Song

  A Story by the Earl of Slander

  One day, my dog eats some garbage wrapped in aluminum foil and has to get a thousand bucks' worth of X-rays. The yard behind my apartment building is full of garbage and broken glass. Where people park their cars, puddles of antifreeze wait to poison any dog or cat.

  Even with a bald head, the veterinarian looks like some old best friend. Like a kid I grew up with. A smile I saw every day of my childhood. The dimple in his chin and every freckle on his nose, I know them all. The gap between his two front teeth, I know how he could use it to whistle.

  Here and now, he's giving my dog an injection. Standing at a silvery steel table in a cold, white tile room, holding the dog by the skin of its neck, he says something about heartworm.

  In the phone book, when I found him, I was blind with crying, afraid my dog might die. Still, there was his listing: Kenneth Wilcox, D.V.M. A name I loved, somehow. For some reason. My savior.

  Now, pulling back each of the dog's ears and looking inside, he says something about distemper. Embroidered on the chest pocket of his white coat, it says “Dr. Ken.”

  Even the sound of his voice echoes from a long time back. I've heard him sing “Happy Birthday.” Shouting “Strike one!” at baseball games.

  This is him, some old friend of mine, but too tall, the skin of his eyelids baggy-dark and hanging down. Too fleshy under his chin. His teeth look a little yellow, and his eyes aren't as bright blue as they should be. He says, “She looks good.”

  I say, Who does?

  “Your dog,” he says.

  Still looking at him, his bald head and blue eyes, I ask, “Where did you go to school?”

  He says some college in California. Someplace I never heard of.

  He was little when I was little, and somehow we grew up together. He had a dog named Skip and walked around barefoot all summer, always going fishing or building a tree house. Looking at him, I can picture one cold afternoon building the perfect snowman while his grandma watches from the kitchen window. I say, “Danny?”

  And he laughs.

  That same week, I'm pitching a story about him to an editor. About how I found him, found little Kenny Wilcox, the child actor who played Danny on the television show Danny-Next-Door a million years ago. Little Danny, the kid we all grew up with, he's a vet now. He lives in a tract house in some suburban development. Mows his own lawn. This is him, bald and middle-aged, a little fat and ignored.

  This faded star. He's happy and living in a two-bedroom house. Branching out from each eye, he has laugh lines. He takes pills to control his cholesterol. He's the first to admit, after those years as the center of attention, he's a bit of a loner. But he's happy.

  What's important is, Dr. Ken has agreed. Sure, he'll do an interview. A little profile for the Sunday Entertainment Section of the newspaper.

  The editor I'm pitching to, he twists the end of a ballpoint pen in his ear, digging out wax. Looking worse than bored.

  This editor tells me readers don't want a story about somebody born cute and talented, getting paid a fortune to appear on television, then living happily ever after.

  No, people don't want a happy ending.

  People want to read about Rusty Hamer, the little boy on Make Room for Daddy who shot himself. Or Trent Lehman, the cute kid from Nanny and the Professor who hanged himself on a playground fence. Little Anissa Jones, who played Buffy on Family Affair, clutching a doll named Mrs. Beasley, then swallowing the biggest overdose of barbiturates in the history of Los Angeles County.

  This is what people want. The same reason we go to racetracks to watch the cars crash. Why the Germans say, “Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.” Our purest joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy. The joy you feel when a limousine turns the wrong way down a one-way street.

  Or when Jay Smith, the “Little Rascal” known as Pinky, was found stabbed to death in the desert outside Las Vegas.

  It's the kind of joy we felt when Dana Plato, the little girl on Diff'rent Strokes, got arrested, posed naked in Playboy, and took too many sleeping pills.

  People standing in line at the supermarket, clipping coupons, getting old, those are the headlines that sell these people a newspaper.

  Most people, they want to read about Lani O'Grady, the pretty daughter on Eight Is Enough, found dead in a trailer house with her belly full of Vicodin and Prozac.

  No crack-up, the editor tells me, no story.

  Happy Kenny Wilcox with his laugh lines, he wouldn't sell.

  The editor tells me, “Find Wilcox with kiddie porn on his computer. Find him with dead bodies under his house. Then you got a story.”

  This editor says, “Better yet, find him with all the above, but find him dead.”

  The next week, my dog drinks a puddle of antifreeze. My dog's named Skip after the dog on Danny-Next-Door, the dog little Danny used to have. My Skip, my baby's white with big black spots and a red collar just like on television.

  The only cure for antifreeze is to pump the dog's stomach. Then fill her tummy with activated charcoal. Find a vein and start the dog on an ethanol drip. Pure grain alcohol to flush out the kidneys. To save my dog, my baby, I need to get her dead drunk. This means another trip to see Dr. Ken, who says, Sure, next week is fine for an interview. But he warns me, his life's not very exciting.

  I tell him, Trust me. Good writing means you take the reg
ular facts and deliver them in a sexy way. Don't worry about your life story, I tell him, that's my job.

  These days, I could use a good story assignment. Me, I've been writing freelance for a couple years. Since I got canned from doing entertainment features. That was good money, the press-junket stuff, puffing up quotes for movie launches, sharing a movie star with a tableful of media people for ten minutes, all of them trying not to yawn.

  Movie premiers. Album releases. Book launches. It was a steady stream of work, but give the wrong opinion and you're off the gravy train. A movie studio threatens to pull their retail display advertising, and—abracadabra—your byline disappears.

  Me, I'm broke because one time I tried to warn people. One movie, I wrote that people might do better to spend their money somewhere else, and since then I'm out of the loop. Just one summer slasher movie and the power behind it, and I'm begging to write obituaries. To write photo captions. Anything.

  It's a bald cheat, building a house of cards you don't get to knock down. You spend all those years piling up nothing, creating an illusion. Turning a human being into a movie star. Your real payday is at the back end of the deal. Then you get to pull out the rug. Knock down the cards. Show the handsome ladies' man cramming a gerbil up his ass. Reveal the girl-next-door shoplifting and stoned on painkillers. The goddess beating her kids with a wire hanger.

  The editor's right. So is Ken Wilcox. His life is an interview no one will ever buy.

  For prep, the whole week before we talk, I surf the Internet. I download files from the former Soviet Union. Here's a different kind of child star: Russian schoolboys without pubic hair, sucking off fat old men. Czech girls still waiting for their first period, getting butt-fucked by monkeys. I save all these files to one thin compact disk.

  Another night, I clip a leash on Skip and risk a long walk through my neighborhood. Coming back to my apartment, my pockets are stuffed with plastic sandwich bags and little paper envelopes. Squares of folded aluminum foil. Percodans. OxyContins. Vicodins. Glass vials of crack and heroin.

  The interview, I write all fourteen thousand words before Ken Wilcox even opens his mouth. Before we even sit down together.

  Still, to keep up appearances, I bring my tape recorder. I bring a notepad and pretend to take notes with a couple dried-out pens. I bring a bottle of red wine spiked with Vicodin and Prozac.

  At Ken's little house in the suburbs, you'd expect a glass case crammed with dusty trophies, glossy photos, civic awards. A memorial to his childhood. There's nothing like that. Any money he's got, it's in the bank, drawing interest. His house is just brown rugs and painted walls, striped curtains on each window. A bathroom with pink tile.

  I pour him red wine and just let him talk. I ask him to pause, then act like I'm getting every quote perfect.

  And he's right. His life is more boring than a black-and-white summer rerun.

  On the other hand, the story I already wrote is great. My version is all about little Kenny's long slide from the spotlight to the autopsy table. How he lost his innocence to a long list of network executives in his campaign to become Danny. To keep the sponsors happy, he was farmed out as a sexual plaything. He took drugs to stay thin. To delay the onset of puberty. To stay up all night, shooting scene after scene. No one, not even his friends and family, nobody knew the depths of his drug habit and perverted need for attention. Even after his career collapsed. Even becoming a D.V.M. was just to get access to good drugs and sex with small animals.

  The more wine Ken Wilcox drinks, the more he says his life didn't start until Danny-Next-Door was canceled. Being little Danny Bright for eight seasons, that's only real the way your memories of second grade might seem real. Only blurry moments not connected. Each day, each line of dialogue was just something you learned long enough to pass a test. The pretty farmhouse in Heartland, Iowa, was just a false front. Inside the windows, behind the lace curtains, was bare dirt scattered with cigarette butts. The actor who played Danny's grandma, if they were speaking in the same shot, she used to spray spit. Her spit sterilized: more gin than saliva.

  Sipping red wine, Ken Wilcox says his life now is so much more important. Healing animals. Saving dogs. With every swallow, his talking breaks up into single words spread wider and wider apart. Just before his eyes close, he asks how Skip is doing.

  My dog, Skip.

  And I tell him, Good, Skip is doing great.

  And Kenny Wilcox, he says, “Good. I'm happy to hear it . . .”

  He's asleep, still smiling, when I slip the gun into his mouth.

  “Happy” doesn't do anybody any good.

  A gun not registered to anybody. My hand in a glove, the gun in his mouth with his finger wrapped around the trigger. Little Kenny's on his sofa, stripped of his clothes, his dick smeared with cooking grease, and a video of his old show playing on the television. The real clincher is the kiddie porn downloaded to his computer hard drive. The hard-copy pictures of kids getting screwed, they're printed and taped to the walls of his bedroom.

  The bags of painkillers are stashed under his bed. The heroin and crack buried in his sugar canister.

  Inside of one day, the world will go from loving Kenny Wilcox to hating him. Little Danny-Next-Door will go from a childhood icon to a monster.

  In my version of that last evening, Kenneth Wilcox waved the gun around. He bellowed about how no one cared. The world had used and rejected him. He drank and popped pills all evening and said he wasn't afraid to die. In my version, he died after I'd gone home.

  That next week, I sold the story. The last interview with a child star loved by millions of people all over the world. An interview done just hours before his neighbor found him dead, the victim of suicide.

  The week after, I'm nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

  A few weeks later, I win. That's only two thousand dollars, but the real payoff is long-term. Anymore, not a day goes by when I'm not turning work down. When my agent's fielding offers for me. No, I only do high-profile, big-money work. Big magazine cover stories. National audiences.

  Anymore, my name means Quality. My byline means The Truth.

  You look in my address book, and it's all names you know from movie posters. Rock stars. Best-selling authors. Everything I touch, I turn to Famous. I move from my apartment to a house with a yard for Skip to run around. We have a garden and a swimming pool. A tennis court. Cable television. We pay off the thousand-plus bucks we owe for the X-rays and the activated charcoal.

  Of course, you can still turn on some cable network and see Kenneth Wilcox, the little boy he used to be, whistling and pitching baseballs, before he turned into a monster with gin spit on his face. Little Danny and his dog, walking barefoot through Heartland, Iowa. His syndicated ghost keeps my story alive, the contrast. People love knowing my truth about that little boy who seemed so happy.

  “Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.”

  This week, my dog digs up an onion and eats it.

  Me, I'm calling vet after vet, trying to find someone who'll save her. At this point, money's no problem. I can pay anything.

  Me and my dog, we have a great life. We're so happy. It's while I'm still on the phone, flipping through the telephone book, when my Skip, my baby, she stops breathing.

  6

  “Let's start with the end,” Mr. Whittier would say.

  He'd say, “Let's start with a plot spoiler.”

  The meaning of life. A unified field theory. The big reason why.

  We'd all be sitting in the Arabian Nights gallery, sitting cross-legged on silk pillows and cushions stained with spots of mildew. Chairs and sofas that stunk of dirty laundry when you sat down and pushed the air out of them. There, under the high-up, echoing dome, painted in jewel colors that would never see daylight, never fade, among the brass lamps hanging down, each with a red or blue or orange lightbulb shining through the cage of patterns cut out of the brass, Mr. Whittier would sit there, eating dried something in crunching handfuls from a Myla
r bag.

  He'd say, “Let's get the big, big surprise over and done with.”

  The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth.

  Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes around. We're the rocks. And what happens to us—the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse—why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright.

  That's what Mr. Whittier would tell you.

  Smooth as glass, that's our Mr. Whittier. Buffed by pain. Polished and shining.

  That's why we love conflict, he says. We love to hate. To stop a war, we declare war on it. We must wipe out poverty. We must fight hunger. We campaign and challenge and defeat and destroy.

  As human beings, our first commandment is:

  Something needs to happen.

  Mr. Whittier had no idea he was so right.

  The more Mrs. Clark talked, the more we could see this wouldn't be the Villa Diodati. The babe who wrote Frankenstein, she was the kid of two writers: professors famous for think-tank books called Political Justice and A Vindication of the Rights of Women. They had famous smart people crashing at their house all the time.

  We were no summer-house party of brainy bookworms.

  No, the best story we'd bring out of this building would be just how we survived. How crazy Lady Baglady died cradled in our weeping arms. Still, that story would have to be good enough. Exciting enough. Scary and dangerous enough. We'd have to make sure it was.

  Mr. Whittier and Mrs. Clark were too busy droning on. We needed them to get rough with us. Our story needed them to flog and beat us.

  Not bore us to death.

  “Any call for world peace,” Mr. Whittier would say, “is a lie. A pretty, pretty lie.” Just another excuse to fight.

  No, we love war.