Dead Lines, A Novel of Life... After Death

  No, yes she is, Carla Wyss, and yes. She can't find work, not the kind she wants.

  Nor the men, I'llbet, Helen said. But you'll do in a pinch.

  Peter needed to stay on good terms with Helen. She seldom showed outright anger, but she could withhold that which was not hers to withholdsometimes for months. He had long ago learned that where he was concerned, Helen preferred her negative opinions, and confirming those opinions in any small way humored her.

  He gave her a deliberately sappy, little-boy smile. I yam what I yam, he said.

  Helen surprised him. She looked down at the tile floor and said, You're being helpful. I'm sorry. I have no right. I am just so nervous.

  It's nothing. Bring Lindsey by. Nine tonight, right?

  She's going through a rough time. No surprise. I can't always cut it. She needs a father, Helen said, still looking at the tile.

  They both turned at the sound of a delivery truck pulling up the driveway. Helens car was blocked for the moment. She watched Peter sign for a package from Marin. That reminded him. He pulled Weinsteins check from his wallet and dangled it in front of her.

  Real work, he said. She made a surprised, approving face.

  I'm impressed, she said.

  I'llwrite it over to you, Peter said. Take out the next two months for Lindsey. Bring me back the rest.

  It might take a week to clear. I don't have enough in my account to cover it.

  I'llsurvive. He signed the check over to her. Then, feeling generous, he held up a finger for her to wait a sec and retrieved a Trans from the box in the hall. Pour vous, he said. Free talk, from anywhere, to anywhere on Earth.

  Whats the gimmick? Helen asked.

  It only lasts a year. Then, if you're nice to me, maybe you'll get another.

  Helen looked at the unit, but did not take it from his hand. Very pretty, she said. But I don't like strings.

  No strings. Big promotional rollout. Only the best people are getting them.

  She twitched her lip, took the unit, and slipped it into her purse. Walking through the door and across the porch, she called over her shoulder, Congratulations on the job. But remember. Lindsey. Your daughter. Nine P.M.

  Peter watched her go. Helens car now carried a bumper sticker proclaiming that in choosing between men and dogs, she preferred dogs. Peter refused to believe that he had done that to her; he was pretty certain that despite everything, as far as male company went, he was still the best thing that had ever happened to her.

  And, of course, he was the father of her children.

  Child.

  He ripped open the package and stared at the contents: thick contract on top, letters from Arpad and Stanley, a clipped batch of sketchesof the prison offices, the gas chamber, smiling men and women using Trans. Someone had scribbled professionally drawn banners in silver marker across three renderings of the gas chamber, making a sequence. The banners read: A FEW YEARS AGO, TELECOMS WERE EXECUTED BY WALL STREET. / NOW, THEYRE BACK FROM THE DEAD AND READY TO WORK FOR YOU! / TRANS

  Peter scanned the sequence several times, aghast.

  Stanleys note said, We have engaged Throughput, a great agency in Palo Alto. Theyll work with you on video design, layout and such, content and script to be mutually decided. Were very excited.

  Arpad had written, I am handing it all over to Stanley and you. Glitches with the system absorb my time. These sketches are just some ideas. Bad ones, I think.

  No shit, Peter said. On every project, there came a time when you were painfully deflowered. He wondered how much Throughput was going to be paid to bugger him.

  Well, maybe he could turn that around. Anything he came up with had to be better. Arpad seemed sensible, even creative; he knew bad from good. Suddenly and perversely, Peter felt reenergized. This was just like the movie business: piling up the manure until a flower popped out.

  He was back in the game.

  CHAPTER 20

  HE TOOK A brass key black with age and unlocked the door to his basement office. The floor and part of a wall at the back of the basement oozed moisture sometimes after a hard rain and he had covered them with plastic. The duct tape holding the plastic to the concrete had failed and the sheet curled sadly. Water had stained a box filled with old newspapers. Back then, Peter had been a pack rat, keeping everythingmagazines, newspapers, hoping to search and clip them and put quotes and quips and philosophy into a long-planned collection. That had stopped two years ago.

  He hadnt entered his office in a year.

  A big metal war-surplus desk filled the corner of the office. On it perched an old IBM computer and an Olivetti portable typewriter, stacks of paper covered with more plastic sheets. Behind the desk rose a warped wooden bookcase filled with paperbacks, some of them bulging with moisture. The room smelled damp. He opened a window high on the north wall to let in some air.

  Against the south wall, his huge drafting table still held a pasteup for a photo comic he had been working on. Dialog labels had come loose and slipped to the metal catch-strip on the front of the table. They made amusing juxtapositions: Hey, this ones on fire//With all the passion// a boiled onion.

  You look like//screaming metal on the highway.

  Don't worry, bub//drop your Hs.

  Peter stared down at the old work. Ancient history. He knew he had a pad of television-style storyboard paper around somewhere, out-of-date for sure but still usable. He pawed through musty tablets and blocks of watercolor paper, found the tablet he was looking for, and then cleared the drafting table, scooping the loose dialog labels into a little bag. He slipped the unfinished page into a tall metal blueprint file cabinet in the corner. He switched on the overhead light and the light over the drafting table.

  At sixteen, he had fled from Buffalo, New York, away from the horrors of home and high school, to San Francisco. There, he had witnessed the seamy heyday of Haight-Ashbury. The wonder and druggy awfulnessand the sexhad impressed him mightily, teaching basic survival skills that had served him well ever since.

  Running out of money, and with his father refusing to take collect phone calls that in any case he was reluctant to make, Peter had dropped his already bogus student deferment and showed up at the Selective Service Office one drizzling November day in 1966. He had been shipped to boot camp at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. With typical army economy, he had then been returned to California to spend two and a half years at Fort Hunter Liggett. A relatively intelligent sergeant who had shared Peters taste for comics had enrolled him in the School of History and Journalism, a small program designed to create writers who would counter the cultural poison of hippie protesters.

  Peter had found himself surrounded for the most part by the spoiled sons of middle-class eastern Democrats, mostly from New York. Far from considering hippies to be poison, Peter had spent all of his leave time in Berkeley and Oakland. There, he had avoided drugs heavier than beer and pot and had lived with a succession of confused, artistic-minded women in their late twenties. The woman who had sold him his first cameraa used Nikon body with two beat-up lenseshad tutored him in both health food and cunnilingus. The camera had belonged to her fianca photojournalist killed in Mexico. Peter had paid her twenty dollars for it.

  He still had that camera somewhere.

  In an old apartment in Oakland, in front of a large bay window, she had posed on a couch, an unlikely beautylithe, classy, a pale patrician face, large, deep black eyes, frizzy auburn hair, a body somewhere between Klimt and bulimia. Peters photos had made her look haunting and luscious.

  He had discovered a knack. Soon, he had packed away a hundred pages from his first novel and started submitting photo layouts. The woman, impressed by Peters artistry, his ability to turn a thin old broad into a classic wet dream, as she had put it, had brought in a trio of female friends curious about artful photography. She had encouraged Peter to practice both photography and lovemaking on them all.

  Amazing woman. Amazing time.

  She had died in a traffic accident
in 1969. That year, out of the army, out of work, and now out of a house, he had wandered into a clandestine movie studio in a Tenderloin warehouse, a windy cavern of darkness and dust interrupted by movie lights. Actors naked beneath open robes, wearing bath slippers and smoking hand-rolled reefers, had wandered through dirty passages between flats shoved together to make crummy sets.

  It had been day two of a cheap nudie. For the first time, while the photographer sat wasted and despondent in a corner, Peter had peered through the viewfinder of a sixteen millimeter Arriflex. He had offered to load film, claiming that he had shot movies in the army. He hadnt. The producera small, thin dude who wore a Stetson and called himself Brock Wersthad broken off from a fit of monotonous cursing and coughing and suggested, with not a hint of irony, that maybe Peter could become a grip, maybe he could become a focus puller, maybe he could become a cameraman, how about director of photography.

  The next day, the director had been a no-show. Peter had taken on that task, as well. Coming down from a cocaine binge, stanching a perennial bloody nose, Werst had handed over the ten-page script as well.

  That night, sitting in a tiny hotel room on Shattuck Avenue, Peter had ballooned the script into thirty pages and sketched storyboards on a Walter T. Foster art pad. He had reported to the warehouse the next day wearing a white baseball cap on which he had scrawled, in Magic Marker, Direct This above the brim and Shove Film across the back. The actors had loved it, and Werst had laughed and proclaimed, Shit, you're the man.

  The picture had been releasedescaped, some claimedas directed by Regent King. His next film, shot the following week, had been credited to King Regent.

  Those had been bad times for erotic cinema, legally speaking, and things would only get worse, but there was money to be made, pretty women to take to bed, exciting times moving actors around under hot lights, and of course, that perennial flower in Hollywood, dreams of bigger things.

  Peter had made twenty-one films between 1969 and 1983, fifteen of them under his own name. During the same period, he had sold over a hundred photo layouts, beginning with basement mens magazines like GRR and Tuff. Then had come a spread in Rogue. In 1972, two layouts in Oui had followed. Those sales, and three films paid for in cash and released in one month, had helped buy him his used Porsche and the Glendale hills house.

  Big-busted and leggy women had arrived in Peters life, more than even he could imagine dealing with, attracted to power, any power, and desperate for anything resembling charm. But compared with Peters dreams, it had all seemed small potatoes.

  Then had come his three months with Sascha and, coincidentally, felony obscenity charges in LA County Superior Court. That had forced Peter to realize that his wave was breaking. He was little more than a grunion snatched off the local beach to serve as an example to deepwater sharks. Hard core was beginning to dominate the skin-flick industry, bringing with it sharp but futile jabs of legal repression and a pall of mob activity.

  Eventually, Peter had sold five cartoons to Playboy. But every novel and story he had submittedwritten on sets during downtime and at homehad been rejected. Finally, with too much energy and too many bills to pay, he had taken on a novelization, writing a book based on a popular TV show, Canine Planet.

  On Canine Planet, dogs rule and men are slaves . . .

  That, at least, had come out under his own name.

  He dusted off the drafting stool and sat on it with a sigh. The storyboard sat blank and silly before him, with it's rows of old-fashioned TV-screen templates.

  He tried to conjure up some way to begin a spot about Trans: a film, a video, anything. Thought of Carlas dream. Sketched frames of people dragging word-balloon voices behind them, leaving trails of talk.

  Doing the human thing. To talk is human. To listen is divine. To do it on the cheap is just good business.

  He smiled, shook out his hand, and quickly sketched a Phil cartoon of a nebbishy guy with a big silly smile clutching a stack of word balloons and handing them out to people, boarding taxis, subways, on bicycles, men and women chatting away with big smiles, swapping word balloons. He and Phil could trade styles when they wanted to, and now a Phil guy seemed the better choice.

  Talk is what we do. Reach out. Touch them with your voice before it's too late. Talk to your mother, your father, your friends . . .

  Before they're gone.

  That stopped him. He stared down at the Phil guy: long nose, big sloppy grin, slyly handing out word balloons. Free talk.

  Peter spent ten minutes dotting a circle on the border of the paper, then looked up at the basement window, listening to birds in the backyard. An hour went by. With a short, grunting hum, he stepped off the stool and lay down the pencil.

  He did not know where to begin. It had been decades. These ideas were nothing like the films he used to make. If they wanted the old Russell, edgy-cheesy, he was failing miserably. That man was long gone.

  Peter shook his head and climbed the stairs. In the kitchen, the answering machine was flashing a big red 2. In the basement, he had not heard the phone ring. He pulled up a stool, a little out of breath, and pushed the playback button.

  Mr. Russell, this is Detective Scragg, LAPD. Something got me thinking about you and Mrs. Russell. We havent talked in a while. Ive been going through some paperwork here and I thought Id find out hows it going. Nothing new, Ive just been thinking over details, have some more questions. We should touch base. I'm calling from

  Peter closed his eyes and pushed the stop button. The next message was also from Scragg. They had last spoken six months earlier, and there had been nothing new at that time. A dead-end case. Peter did not want to think any more negative thoughts. He erased both messages, then backed away, as if the old kitchen phone might be tainted. He picked up the Trans and punched in a standard phone number. He hoped the number was still good.

  He hadnt spoken to Karl Pfeil in years.

  CHAPTER 21

  PFEIL STOOD SIX-FEET-THREE-INCHES tall inliterallyhis stocking feet. His long blond hair swayed forward over his eyes as he leaned across the swoop of glass-topped desk to clasp Peters hand.

  Eight years! I looked it up. We havent talked in eight years, Karl said. How the time shrieks by.

  The walls of Karls long, windowless office were covered with framed posters, photos, and three big plasma screens, two turned off, one still exhibiting rough animaticscomputer graphics loops of lizardlike characters walking.

  Youve done great, Peter said with genuine admiration.

  Don't look, Karl warned cheerfully, and punched a button on the desk to turn off the screen. Jim Camerons new movie. Well, maybe. Top secret. What brings you to Santa Monica?

  I'm old, Peter said.

  Karl made a face. Bullshit.

  Ive been out of the business so long, I don't know a lens from a pixel. I need professional advice.

  Karl sat and leaned his elbows on his desk. If I can return any favors . . .

  As a green kid, Karl had worked on Peters final picture, Q.T., the Sextraterrestrial, putting together two stop-motion sequences. Karl had animatedfor almost no moneyan anatomically correct monster alien rampaging through a college campus, chasing coeds who had taken one too many tabs of LSD.

  Now Karl was in charge of one of the best computer graphics studios on the West Coast.

  Ive got a commission, Peter said.

  Karl looked tan and buff and wore a silk shirt and linen pants, his geeky hair and face now part of a stylish personal signature. Peters chest suddenly felt cold.

  I presume I'm going to shoot HD video, he continued, his tongue gluey. Ive never used a Betacam, or whatever it is now. Id like to see some of the equipment, just to know what to rent.

  Karl shrugged. Hell, with whats in Circuit City right now, you might as well buy. Only cost you a couple of grand for something pretty terrific.

  Peter shook his head. This is professional, Karl.

  Thats what I'm saying, Peter. Something the size of your hand, locked o
nto a hundred-dollar tripod, will give you great results. What kind of budget?

  Hasnt been set, but it's promoting a telecom startup.

  Karl worked to keep a straight face. Are they actually going for psychotronic? he asked with a speculative squint.

  Probably, Peter said.

  Ah. Then theyll want a film look, bad color correction. Scratches and blotches. Just like the old days. Ive got a terrific Arri Super 16 gathering dust in my attic. Yours for the asking.

  Peter nodded his thanks and walked around the room, studying the posters. I saw your last picture. Beautiful work.

  Not much of a challenge, Karl confessed. We turned Robin Williams into a talking elephant. Did you know he's a fan of yours?

  Peter laughed.

  No, really, Karl insisted. He quoted me some lines from Q.T.

  I didnt know that, Peter said.

  Karl pushed back his chair and stood. Come on. I'llshow you something. CGI is about to put all your pretty ladies out of business.

  KARL GAVE PETER a tour. They walked down a hallway lined with more posters and passed a fifty-seat viewing theater. Karl opened a heavy white metal door and they stepped into a quiet, shaded room filled with long rows of cubicles.

  Our genies, Karl said.

  Weinstein had been rightthere was little difference between a cubicle and a prison cell. Inside each cubicle was a desk holding a twenty-one-inch monitor, a trackball, and a keyboard. Shelves were filled with books and manuals and plastic toys. A young woman in jeans and a T-shirt sat manipulating blocks of color around a plain-vanilla human figure. She grabbed a limb and positioned it to her liking, then swiveled on her chair and leaned back to smile toothily at Karl.

  Karl benevolently returned her smile, boss to wage slave. Tracy, this is Peter, an old friend.

  Good to meet you, Tracy said. Her eyes were glazed. She yawned and stretched. Sorry. Ive been working here since four in the morning.

  Take a break.

  I'm fine, Tracy said, returning with fated slowness to her screen. She made the animated figure grimace.