Chapter 3: And While Nobody Was Looking
Continued from Chapter 2
Willie Vance loved smashing the headlights himself. Nothing like a good heavy sledgehammer shattering glass and chrome to help you forget about the lawyers.
“Hey! Turn down that fucking boom box,” he shouted between swings, “What, are you people deaf?” Noise swarmed thick as a sandstorm inside the cinderblock garage that housed Finesse Auto Body.
While Willie took care of the headlights, three mechanics—specialists—prepared a 2001 Ford Taurus for the arrival of Allstate’s claims inspector.
Bernard, the Finesse safety specialist, was taking a crowbar to the driver’s side rearview mirror. Scat, the Finesse cooling system specialist, was on his knees, poking holes in the car’s radiator with the greasy shaft of a Philips-head screwdriver. Chic, shop foreman, had already flattened the Ford’s left forward hubcap and began stomping on the right one. Like Willie always said: These little fender-benders can do a lot more damage than people think.
When the car had been towed in an hour earlier, having had a blowout on Utopia Parkway and sustained a flat tire and bent front rim, Willie asked the owner, a perfectly middle-aged woman with an Eastern European accent, “So, you took pictures at the scene right?”
“Oh God, No. I should have?
Of course, she should have. But of course, they never took pictures. If they did, Willie wouldn’t be in this business. Replacing a bent rim is chump change compared to what you can soak insurance for a whole new front end. And luckily, with these small dings, nobody ever thought to call the police. And no-fault covered it. And who ever really read those 10-page insurance settlements? Especially when English was their second language, barely.
But occasionally, some eagle-eyed big shot noticed the difference between the damage he brought in and what Finesse eventually billed to insurance. That’s when the fraud lawyers popped up. And that’s when Willie’s attorney, Tony Skelza, stepped in. It paid to stay in touch with friends from the old neighborhood.
“I’m so sorry for the red tape, miss.” Willie spoke to the Ford’s owner like an empathetic emergency room doctor, “But we have everything we need now. Why don’t you go home, have a nice diner, call the grandkids, and let us take care of this for you? You’ll be back on the road before you know it. How about some coffee before you go?”
They never wanted coffee. They just wanted to get out of there. Finesse didn’t even have a coffee machine. Five minutes after the client left, the sledgehammers came out.
When the “prep work” was finished, Willie turned up the boom box. As usual they were listening to 1010 WINS: “All News All The Time.” Willie remembered his brother Malcolm calling it NEWZAK, a mind-numbingly repetitive background-news version of the elevator music, MUZAK. Every once in a while Fatboy came out with something funny.
Right now WINS was doing a little Hollywood filler about this Hedd guy from those sci-fi movies. He was hiding out somewhere. “Rumors about a little R & R,” the newscaster said. “Meanwhile, the Iraqi insurgency…”
As if it wasn’t enough he had to look at this homo’s hairless chest twelve times a day, at every newsstand he passed. He had to listen about him too?
“Hey Scat. How many cars you bet that douche bag’s got?” Willie yelled over from his oil-stained paperwork.
“What do think a Maserati windshield goes for?”
Chapter 2: Meanwhile, At The Betty Crocker Clinic
Continued from Chapter One
YOU COULD HAVE HEARD A PIN DROP in the therapy room, if patients were allowed to carry pins. Or sharp instruments of any kind.
“Okay,” Dr. Fleming said, “Stevon asked us a question. I think it’s a very brave thing to ask, don’t you? Would anyone like to answer him?”
Stevon twisted his Sikh bracelet and looked from face to face to face to face. The bracelet was given to him by Ben Kingsley’s personal assistant on the set of “Kim: Jungle Boy,” a budget-busting adaptation of the classic novel by Rudyard Kipling. During his spot on Leno, Stevon had referred to the author as “Damon Runyon,” but the flub only served to make the beautiful one more charming, especially when, after Jay corrected him, he smiled sheepishly into the camera and said, “Oops.” and shook the shoulder-length black mane he’d grown for the part. Six million viewers ate it up. The camera ate it up. Jay looked annoyed.
“Kim” was Stevon’s first bona fide hit and it planted him firmly in good earth of fame, thonged starlets, thronged groupies and E! Channel host-ettes: “Great interview. Feel like going more in-depth sometime?”
When it came to serious reviews, Stevon’s agent told him, by cell phone, email and car-fax, to ignore the critics. They were just jealous.
“So…anybody?” Dr. Fleming asked the group. “Stevon wants to know. Is he the kind of guy you’d have a beer with?” The therapist wanted to hear the answer himself. His 15-year-old daughter had spent all week begging him to get Stevon’s autograph.
“Or, you know, I don’t know…” Stevon groped and engaged his hands by ruffling the pages of a dog-eared paperback he’d been carrying everywhere for the past few days, “…have lunch with, or go to a Lakers game with.”
Patrick, the group smart aleck, stage-whispered to his neighbor, “Depends, Stev-ON. Who’s paying?” A ripple of giggles and elbow poking raced around the circle of folding chairs.
Encouraged, he continued, “Hey if you’ve got a spare Lakers ticket to give me,” and paused before the punch line, “could I just sell it and you go alone?”
Dr. Fleming let it go. He would step in if it looked like Stevon was going to cry again. It wasn’t always easy to get his patients talking, and he felt like they were on the verge of a primitive exchange. Anything was better than the silence, or another one of Hedd’s scenery-chewing monologues, after which the doctor half-expected the actor to bow his head, close his eyes and say: “And…Scene. Thank you all.”
The West Anaheim Center for the Treatment of Compulsive Disorders—known disparagingly in the neighborhood as either WACT or, because of its preponderance of eating-disorder bellyachers, “The Betty Crocker Clinic”—didn’t get many clients like Stevon, who thrived on public displays of emotion; who in fact couldn’t get enough of other people staring at him. Most of Dr. Fleming’s patients were more comfortable in solitary, dark kitchens, late at night, hunched in the light of an open refrigerator while the rest of the house was asleep; or in a bar, alone, after the amateurs had caved in and gone home to their families.
About the only public speaking this group ever did was in traffic court. Not so with Stevon Hedd. He never shut up. Unless he was thinking, like he was now. You could see it a mile away when Stevon was arranging his thoughts. The doctor found this even more disturbing than the talking. It meant he was about to open his mouth again.
“Okay, let’s get serious,” Dr. Fleming said, “who has…”
“I am being serious.” Patrick said, “He can buy me lunch as long as he doesn’t sit at my table.”
Patrick, who at 43 still cut his sleeves off all the way to the shoulder, was a WACT regular. When he filled out his daily menu choices, “Paddy-to-my-friends” ignored the check boxes and scribbled “the usual” across the top of the card. The kitchen knew what he meant.
“You want an answer, Stev-ON?” He always said it that way; long after the scorn had worn thin. “I’ll give you an answer.”
“Good,” Dr. Fleming said, “Now we’re getting somewhere,” knowing they weren’t.
“No. I’d never want to have a beer with you. And I’ll drink—used to—drink beer out of a toilet.”
Dr. Fleming checked Stevon’s reaction. No tears yet, but there was the agonizingly slow rearrangement of features. The tan brow, furrowed. The full lips, tight. The ice-blue eyes, searching, searching, searching. Stevon was processing what Paddy, this regular guy, this bartender’s pal, was telling him. He was looking for a clue, looking for his lost inner “commonality,” a word Stevon had redefined at unnecessary length during his first session and refused to drop no matter how many times he was told it was “stupid.”
The reason Stevon was searching so hard for his “regularity” (another Hedd reinvention which, mercifully, he soon abandoned) was because he’d alienated his fans, his audience, his followers. Alienating an audience like Stevon Hedd’s was like Jesus alienating the Apostles. You had to mess up pretty bad.
Stevon had messed up pretty bad. With a musical named P&B!—his first crack at a producer-writer-director-composer-star project.
“But what about The Wiz?” he’d asked everyone on his first day at WACT, beginning with the guy who opened the limo door for him, “That was huge. Rockized Musical? White flick with black actors? It’s the same thing only the other way around.”
Only it wasn’t. P&B! was Stevon’s all-white production of “Porgy and Bess.” Not the same thing at all. But Mr. Hedd’s people had let him get away with it. They got paid no matter what. And they understood that humiliating failures set the stage for a miraculous comebacks. And Stevon wasn’t even twenty-five yet. He’d get over it.
The P&B! bomb blasted the actor into three weeks of binge drinking, eating and sex that anyone else at WACT would have given a right arm for. But Stevon had put on eleven carbo-pounds, had stopped meditating, and had cancelled four appointments with his trainer. He recognized a romantic self destructive slippery slope when he saw one and told his agent to find him someplace to de-tox. Someplace small-scale, out-of-the-way, anonymous. A retreat where he wouldn’t be tripping over all the other celebrity wrecks pulling themselves together. He red-lighted the Betty Ford Clinic for obvious reasons. He needed someplace where he’d be breathing the same recycled air as his fans. Good, thick, working class air. Someplace where he could re-connect with his roots and, possibly, begin work on a new project.
His agent had scrambled and dug up WACT, a low-rent cinderblock clinic that catered to unknowns like Paddy and the seven other real people surrounding him here on the linoleum floor of “Talk Hall.” Where suddenly a buzzing came from Stevon’s direction.
“What’s THAT?” A woman across the circle snapped her head up and slapped her knees together simultaneously. She was a sun-dried, sun-dressed 30-to-50-year-old named Storm, who had yet to disclose the compulsion that brought her here. “What’s THAT?” were the first words anyone had ever heard her say.
It was the cell phone in Stevon’s pocket, set to vibrate.
“Stevon?” Dr. Fleming asked.
“Yeah. No. Obviously. I’ll call back.” Stevon chewed on a fingernail before fishing the phone out, flipping it open and flipping it closed. The buzzing stopped.
“Unfuckingbelievable,” Paddy said.
The previous week, Stevon’s first group therapy session had been interrupted by three calls he had to take.
“Sorry man, last one.” But when he held up one finger, hold-that-thought-style, and after five minutes of listening, still holding up the finger, said into the phone, “no, it’s cool…talk. What else?” Dr. Fleming told him to disconnect and forbade him to bring the phone to group again.
“There’s a sign right there,” Paddy said, and everybody turned around to verify that indeed there was a sign right above the door, same as always: “Please, no phones in this room during session.” It even had a drawing of a finger pressed against a pair of nurse’s lips.
“Stevon?” Dr. Fleming repeated, “Was there a special reason you brought your phone with you today?”
Stevon ruffled the pages of his book. “I was expecting an important call.”
“It couldn’t wait?”
“No, yeah, it could wait. I guess.”
“Then, why…?”
Stevon shook the paperback, “This is only half a book,” he said. “Why do you have half-books in the reading room, anyway? Seems like it’s asking for trouble with, you know, guys like us.”
“Guys like us” didn’t go over well with the rest of the group.
“So I had one of my peop…I asked a friend to find me a new copy. I thought that call might be him.”
“One of his people,” Paddy said. “Maybe I’ll get one of my people to gas up my Hummer. Oh, wait. I don’t have people. Oh, wait. I don’t have a Hummer.”
“Okay, time out,” Dr. Fleming said, “Let’s call it a day. Enjoy your lunch. See you all tomorrow.” These people were always happy to cut out early, thank God. All except for Stevon. He’d plumb his depths all day if you let him.
So after Talk Hall cleared out, Fleming wasn’t surprised to find Stevon lingering in the corridor right outside the door.
“Okay, maybe this is weird? You know, or not appropriate?” Stevon said, “But I heard you mention a daughter? I thought maybe she’d like this? Maybe it’ll be worth something someday?”
He handed the doctor the title page from “Blood Is Sicker Than Water,” the half-a-book he’d been carrying around. “I don’t know what kind of books she’s into but…whatever.” he said and walked away.
Fleming read the handwritten message: “Just between u and me, I’m your dad’s biggest fan. Chill, Stevon Hedd.” A smile was drawn in the “O.” He looked up in time to catch the actor fishing out his cell phone and disappearing around a corner at the end of the ward hallway.
Stevon headed for the WACT cafeteria, speaking quickly into his phone. Mike Orleans had come through for him. A new copy of the book was on its way.
“Sicker,” as he’d come to call it, had fallen right into Stevon’s lap under the dayroom bookshelves. He’d already tried four books on addiction and recovery from the “Self Help—Help Yourself (Please don’t take these home)” section, but they all bored and/or depressed him.
This one looked interesting, though. Nice title, familiar but different. Judging by its cover—a blue steel automatic pumping bullets through two gold wedding bands, while a dove and a vulture fought to the death in the sky-blue background —it looked like his kind of book. And the way it fell right off the top shelf and into his life? You don’t ask questions when something like that happens. You don’t look fate in the mouth.
But the whole second half of the novel was gone. It ended at page 435, right in the middle of Wally’s kidnapping. Stevon figured the book was split pretty much in half by the way the title on the spine was chopped right through the center.
Stevon grabbed some fries at the food line. With its long parallel rows of aluminum tables, the place looked enough like a prison cafeteria to be kind of cool. It reminded him of that old Elvis movie, Jailhouse Rock. During his first few days at WACT, Stevon toyed with the idea of a remake. Him and his band, WonderBelly, in the slammer. It would combine all his passions, drama, music … it would combine both his passions. But that was before “Sicker” appeared out of nowhere.
He found a corner seat, flipped open the book, pulled out his post-it notepad and continued making lists:
Morton: Me
Timmy: David Strathhairn? Chris Cooper? Woody Allen?
Rene: Streep. Too old?
Liz: Portman? Def Natalie Portman.
Wally:?
Chapter 1: Buh Loop
THE FIRST EMAIL ARRIVED with an electronic Buh Loop— the sound a goldfish might make when it surfaces to gulp a shrimp flake.
Malcolm told Teddy to read it later.
Malcolm Vance spoke over his shoulder. Turning around completely to look at Teddy would have required an awkward and inconvenient redistribution of weight, because Malcolm’s 420 pounds were not so much sitting in his chair as they were merged with it. Like Michelangelo’s Pieta or the Iwo Jima War Memorial, Malcolm and his cushiony base described a sculptural triangle, a bottom-heavy and untippable monument. Under the strain of all that mass, the chair’s armrests pulled inward while its claw-feet splayed outward, like the spindly legs of a loyal but exhausted cartoon pack mule.
The apartment in which the first email would be read later was the home-office and shipping hub of Malcolm and Teddy’s new internet store, FantiqueShop.com, whose 6,300-item inventory had been hauled up recently from the old brick-and-mortar Fantiques Shop storefront downstairs. Teddy did the hauling.
Squatting under the Myrtle Avenue El, on the treeless corner of Palmetto Street and Cypress Avenue, the old store had never done any real walk-in business. Most people in the Brooklyn-Queens border town of Ridgewood weren’t interested in what Fantiques had to offer. It sold no clothing or food for the adults; no candy, comic books or PS2s for the kids; and for the teenagers, no pornography or rolling paper. The store carried merchandise that nobody in the neighborhood could use or, in some cases, pronounce. It sold Memorabilia. Old stuff. Junk. And not banged-up tools or toasters that could be tinkered back to life, but the most useless junk of all. Movie junk. TV junk. Showbiz junk: Shirley Temple dolls, Hop-Along Cassidy wristwatches, ray guns, ViewMaster slides, super-8 movies, Roy Roger lariats, holsters, hats, T-shirts, Beavis & Butthead junk, Star Wars, Star Trek and Matrix I, II and III junk.
Maybe this kind of store would fly with the collectors and cinephiles in Manhattan. but here on Palmetto and Seneca, nobody was spending good money on a chipped Howdy Doody cookie jar from 1958—from back when Malcolm and Teddy were kids.
Among all this moldy memorabilia was one item that could technically be considered memorabilia only to Malcolm and Teddy themselves, because only they remembered it. Five bookcases facing the cash register sagged under 2,500 copies of Malcolm’s 15-year-old, self-published, undistributed, unread novel, Blood Is Sicker Than Water. And while the stickers on everything else in the store were scribbled over with steadily deflating prices, Malcolm’s novel was never discounted. The original $12.95 tag never budged and neither did a single copy.
For a while, Fantiques had been kept out of the red—if not in the pink—because endless Jaws, Star Wars and Rambo sequels had disgorged enough merchandise to attract enough kids who had enough money to buy enough “vintage” light sabers to keep the doors open.
McDonald’s hadn’t hurt in the staying-afloat department, either. Their movie tie-in giveaways enabled to further stuff its shelves without spending a penny, as long as 45-year-old Teddy didn’t mind ordering himself a kid’s Happy Meal whenever he picked up a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal for Malcolm. And Teddy didn’t mind at all. A Happy Meal was plenty for him. If his mother were still around, she’d still be calling him String Bean. And she’d still be looking at Malcolm and shaking her head. Malcolm Vance was a whole different story.
Eventually the combination of a bad location, location, location, and Malcolm’s tendency to verbally abuse and physically threaten prepubescent customers who insisted on calling the place “Fatman’s,” motivated Teddy to suggest they go for a broader market from a safer distance, over the World Wide Web. And so FantiqueShop.com was born and Teddy dragged the junk upstairs into Malcolm’s apartment.
When the email buh-looped into his life, Malcolm told Teddy to “read it later” because it was time for the eleven o’clock news and a snack. They had eaten dinner a couple of hours ago, but that was a couple of hours ago. So Teddy prepared the bouquet of rippled chips in the gap.) He unfolded Malcolm’s TV tray and set it up before finally grabbing the remote and switching on the television.
Teddy nibbled his own sandwich by the computer on the kitchen table behind Malcolm’s big easy chair, and now that everything was in order, he checked the email that had popped up earlier.
From: j.posner@caa.com. Subject: Urgent need.
Urgent need? Teddy thought that had to mean porn and was ready to hit delete, when Malcolm exploded in front of the television.
“Groundhog day?” he hollered. “Children are performing oral sex acts on each other in elementary school bathrooms. Terrorists are drinking arsenic and urinating in our reservoirs. Museums are shutting down. Nobody reads anymore. Nobody can read anymore. Everyone, from the President to the postman, is full of…full of… it’s outrageous. And you spend five minutes on Puxatauney Phil? This is insanity. Teddy, listen to this. Five minutes on a rodent? These, these scoundrels are…are…” When Malcolm got worked up, his language became as archaic as Fantiques’ inventory. As though he dragged his words out of an old trunk.
He was having his nightly argument with the nightly news, concerning the shallow grave being dug for modern society.
Which is why Teddy prepared for the worst when the next news segment featured Stevon Hedd, that pretty-boy actor from PowerGrid, and PowerGrid II: Overload. The clip showed Stevon fronting his band, “WonderBelly” at last year’s Oscars ceremony. Malcolm’s wrath was about to reach new heights. Teddy decided to retreat to his computer monitor.
Buh-loop.
Another email popped up, just like the first: j.posner@caa.com. This time, when he read the subject line, Teddy double-clicked it, triple-clicked it, quadruple clicked it.
When he was done reading, and about to tap Malcolm on the shoulder, Teddy saw a very tan man on TV saying his client Stevon Hedd was taking the recent setbacks in stride. Because of Malcolm’s constant interruptions, Teddy had a hard time follow everything, but he picked up “much needed rest…rehab…resting up… new projects.” The man speaking was identified along the bottom of the screen in large white type as Michael Orleans, Celebrity Artists Agency.
Teddy looked back at the email.
From: j.posner@caa.com
CC: m.orleans@caa.com, shedd@wonderbelly.com
Subject: Blood Is Sicker Than Water
Dear Fantique Shop:
I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour and there’s a time element here. You don’t have an express delivery option on your site and I need to order a rush copy of item number 0001BISTW, “Blood Is Sicker Than Water” by Malcolm Vance.
Our client is laid up in the hospital for a while and would love to have this novel to help him through the difficult time. Would you please FedEx Priority Overnight a the book to the address below? Any extra charges incurred are not a problem.
Thanks in advance.
He can hardly wait.
This was followed by shipping, contact and billing information for Celebrity Artists Agency in Hollywood, California. Teddy looked at the TV again: Michael Orleans, Celebrity Artists Agency. For good measure, he reread the email’s cc line: m.orleans@caa.com, shedd@wonderbelly.com. Then, while the news cut back to Stevon Hedd shirtlessly blatting into a harmonica in front of WonderBelly, Teddy cleared his throat and tapped Malcolm on the shoulder.
“Uh, Malcolm?” Teddy said. “Look at this.”
