- Home
- Larry Beinhart
Wag the Dog Page 27
Wag the Dog Read online
Page 27
The rumors about their sex lives, accurate or not, are that specific and quick to circulate. Yet there’s not one word about what that picture might be.
Maggie’s left the door open. I take care not to look. As I get past, her voice caresses my back. “Wait for me. Please.” I don’t want to. Really, I don’t. But I stop. I don’t want to turn and look. Let me turn into a statue of salt if I look. Let one of us remain in hell forever if I look.
I don’t have to describe her in detail. You’ve seen her onscreen. If you haven’t, go rent a cassette. The vibrancy, they say, comes across on film—the curve of her back, how long her legs are—remember that long pan up her legs, seemed to take forever, when she played a call girl in that Burt Reynolds film—the shape of her breasts, even the texture of her nipples when they’re erect—the full-screen CU of one of them, and it really is her, she didn’t use a tit double, in White Lady—that is what it is I’m looking at. She’s got her shorts on. But she’s topless. She stands still long enough for me to look at her, then she turns her back, slips into her running bra and puts a shirt over it.
When we go out, I’m sullen and silent. We start. I have no intention of cutting her any slack. She’s quick. I can’t outsprint her. She’s light and lithe and I’m a truck. But I figure, over distance, I can grind her down some and keep going when she tires. I break a sweat after a mile. After two it starts to feel real good. I even zone Maggie out. The pictures begin to come. You have to remember that Vietnam wasn’t just war. It was Asia. Like in the movies I saw when I was a kid. Exotic. Especially for a kid from the Ohio Valley, didn’t know much but Slavs and Hunkies and Polacks, working the coal mines, working the mill, sooty and black and drinking a lot of cheap beer. Coming home drunk, whacking their families around. Waking up hurting. Them and their families both. Hungover. Joints all achin’—from lifting, loading, turning, shoveling, shoving, humping, grinding, holding, carrying, pouring, chipping, digging—from being a man. Wood-frame houses, tar-paper shingles, built on the hill.
There were some pretty girls. But not like the girls we saw in the movies. If we had the money to take them somewhere, where the hell would we take them? For a beer at the VFW hall or the corner bar. No. Backseat of a car, trying to get past girdles and the fear of getting pregnant. Belches tasting of beer and cheap whisky. My father takes me to a whore when I’m thirteen. Maybe twelve. Old enough to do it. Young enough I thought she was ugly. She’s upstairs from a bar called Swat Sullivan’s. My father’s downstairs drinking while I’m up there. He’s in a good mood. Buys a round for his buddies, to drink to his son, fucking his first whore upstairs. But he can’t afford both the whore and the round. So when she comes down with me to collect her pay, it’s gone to the bartender. They have a big fight.
Marines were a relief. The Marines were optimists compared to home. At least in Vietnam, we figured, you could go to glory.
Running with a full pack. Fifty-six pounds. With combat boots. With an M-16. Run past the hurt. Run till you’re numb. The blisters break. Heat rash in your pits. Pack scrapes your shoulders and your back. Rifle makes your arms ache, like to fall off. And it all felt so goddamn good. We were studs. Young studs. Harder than hard. Tougher than leather. Running, running, running.
Vietnam was beautiful. Exotic. Beautiful women. As beautiful as the women we saw on-screen back in the Ohio Valley. We called them slopes, zippers, gooks, and slants, bought ’em, whored ’em, raped ’em, killed ’em. They killed us. But if you stopped, stopped being part of that thing and just looked—there were beautiful women. Preston Griffith, he helped me stop being as dumb as a dumb jarhead is dumb. Through the smoke and lessons in war and night killing, he said, “They’re people, Joe. You think some blond round-eye is going to be better than the woman you got now? You’re a stupid fuck, Joe. Wake up and see what you got.” He loved the food, Griff did. Lemon grass. That’s the flavor of Vietnam. He smoked reefer to eat. Opium to sleep and to live. Street filled with soldiers and cripples and whores. “Can you imagine,” Preston says, sitting in the Café Gascon, a mural of D’Artagnan on the wall inside, painted by a Vietnamese, probably from a picture in a storybook, drinking café filtre, “can you imagine this without a war to fuck it up. Let’s go to Bangkok, or Rangoon. They’ll never find us.” Of course they would.
“War don’t fuck things up, Griff,” I say like the stud Marine I’m trained to be. “War is what makes it fun. Dying puts living in perspective.”
“Have you ever been in love?” Maggie asks, her voice cutting from somewhere else. From the present. The beach.
I don’t answer. I pick it up a notch. She stays with me.
“Have you?” About as much of a sentence as she can get out, breathing hard.
“’Sides you?”
“Do you love me?”
I run. What am I going to say to that? Of course. It’s obvious. No question. She owns me. “Fuck you, bitch.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. She falters a little. Slows down. I don’t. I keep on pushing. If she can’t keep up, she can’t keep up. I go back. Me and Griff, sitting in the café, like a couple of Frenchmen, watching la vie de la ville. Armed, of course. Café filtre, baguettes.
“What about Joey?” he says.
Joe and Joey. We joined the Marines together. I was sixteen. Joey was seventeen. Almost eighteen. We lied. They didn’t check. He died. I lived. “Fuck you, Griff.”
“What’s the problem, war lover?”
“You’re out of line.”
“No, I’m not I didn’t kill him.”
“I’m outta here,” I say.
“Don’t go, Joe.”
“Don’t talk about Joey.”
“Why not?”
“He’s family.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen your record. You have no family, Joseph Broz. That’s part of why we like you. So very much.”
“You’re becoming a dope fiend, Griff. A dope fiend.”
“Let’s go to Madame Thieu’s. She has some new girls. Sweet and happy girls all the way from Cambodia.”
“Why the hell would anyone run from Cambodia to Vietnam?”
“Why the hell would anyone sell Cambodian girls when there’s so many Vietnamese girls for sale? It’s not like they’re noticeably different. It’s not like she’s got some blond round-eyes. But there is a difference, Joe. Takes a connoisseur to tell, of course.”
“I thought you had a girlfriend. That reporter woman.”
“You know, I don’t think I can ever, ever go back to Western women. They’re all take. All fight. Eastern women, it’s Confucian, places a man above them. Now a Western woman would say that’s wrong. But a man, if he’s got a choice, between a woman who looks up to him as her lord and master or a woman who’s always trying to climb up just so she can look down on him, he’s crazy if he takes the woman always trying to look down on him. Mind you, I’m glad my sister was born in Boston and went to Radcliffe instead of being born in Danang and going to Madame Thieu’s. And if her husband doesn’t mind that she leaps up to take a shower immediately after having sex, like it should be washed away, that’s his affair, none of mine. May God bless and keep them.”
“We’re losing, aren’t we?”
“Shit, yeah. We’re motherfucking losing. You mother-fucking know that, don’t you. You motherfucking knew that when you were an FNG.88So what you wanna do about it, you wanna go out and kill some more people anyway?”
“That’s my job,” I say. “You got another job, maybe I’ll take that instead.”
“War a good job, Joe?”
“Yeah, the best, Griff.”
He throws some scrip on the table. The waiter’s been hoping for real money. Any kind, except scrip and Vietnamese. But he doesn’t say anything. “Come on, Madame Thieu’s. New Cambodian girls. Got no place to live anymore. Their home’s a bomb crater. They’re happy for the work. We’ll take two at a time. We’ll take four on the floor and swap ’em around. Come on, buddy.”
I think
about it. But I say, “No.”
“Gonna go see Dao?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“You’re missing your opportunities, Joe. You go back to the States, and you’re gonna go back to the States if you live, ‘cause we’re losing and they’re gonna kick our asses out of here, our motherfucking sorry white asses, you go out see some whore, your lady wife will take out a knife or call her attorney. Not Vietnamese women. They understand, a man’s a man, and a’ that.”
“I don’t know, Griff. I think Dao would hurt if I went to Madame Thieu’s instead of home.”
“Home, Joe, home? You’re starting to call something in Nam home? You’re going native, Joe? White man has to watch out for that, going native.”
For me, after about three miles, the machine kicks in. Now I’m below the bluff that marks six miles. I turn around to head back. About a half mile later I see Maggie, still running. Good for her. When we meet, I gesture for her to turn around, stay with me. She thinks about being stubborn, but it’s still going to be about five miles longer than she’s used to. She turns. I slow down a little bit, enough that she can run beside me. I’m not angry anymore. Sweated it out. We run in silence. No more questions. The place where we exist—where the lust and desire and whatever else is happening—is contained—rebuilds inside the steady rhythm.
Maggie begins to hurt. I don’t speak, I just try to hold her up with my running. Like we’re in the same platoon. It works. She goes away from the pain into the zone. Maybe she’s learning something. Maybe she already knows.
Maggie is a mystery to me. I don’t ask her many questions because there are no facts. I know nothing about her except her existence.
The house comes into view. With the goal in sight she comes out of the zone. Ideas about stopping, rest, tiredness, pain all enter her and it affects her running. “There is no end,” I tell her. “We won’t stop at the house.”
“OK,” she says and steadies.
As we get closer and closer, she begins to hope that I’m lying. That we will stop. She goes back and forth. When she thinks it’s the end, her running is ragged, when she thinks there is no end, it’s steady. When we do stop, right at the house, she’s exhilarated. She takes me by the arm and leans on me like she can’t walk. And by tomorrow she probably won’t be able to.
“Tell me,” she says. “I want you to tell me.”
“Yes.”
“Who was she?”
“Dao Thi Thai was her name.”
“Was?”
“Was.”
“I’m sorry, Joe.”
I shrug.
“What happened, Joe? What happened to her?”
“Friendly fire.”
“Friendly fire?”
“Enemy fire.”
“Enemy? What enemy?”
“Exactly. What enemy?”
“Don’t be cryptic.”
“Cryptic?”
“Don’t . . . just tell me so I can understand. Tell me once. I won’t ask again.”
“She got shot. In Hue. In our apartment. Where we lived together.”
“Who? Who shot her?”
“Friend or foe, I don’t know. It didn’t matter, did it? Friendly fire, enemy fire. It got to be all the same. Her people were my enemy. My people were her enemy. Is the enemy of my friend my enemy? Maybe it wasn’t even meant for her. We were there to kill. They were there to kill.”
“Did you love her very much, Joe?”
I go through the gate and head up the stairs into the house. To a shower. We have to get ready for this party. “Oh, Maggie,” I say, I guess because it has to be said to complete the story, “oh, Maggie—she was pregnant.”
The party is a Hollywood party. A lot of money is spent on the booze and the catering. There’s valet parking outside, five bartenders, and five circulating waitpersons inside. The valets, bartenders, and waitpersons are all better-looking than me, better-looking than 99.9 percent of the people that exist in real life. They all have perfect teeth. They look better than most of the guests, but are not in the same league as the best-looking of the guests. Like Maggie, Julia Roberts, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Jean-Claude Van Damme is there. He ripples and poses for Maggie—I think it’s for Maggie, not for me—when we’re introduced. She treats Van Damme like he looks like Tip O’Neill. Like I said, there is something very thoughtful and courteous about Maggie, even with the feeling that all life is a movie.
John Travolta is there in what I am told is a rare public appearance. His wife is home with their child. He greets Maggie with real warmth. I ask him if he minds talking about Scientology. He says he is glad to. “I got to ask you something,” I say. “Can Scientology cure homosexuality?”
It is a conversation stopper, apparently. John just looks at me. Maggie looks at me like I have committed a faux pas. “I don’t mean it’s a disease,” I say, “or like that. I mean, if someone who is homosexual doesn’t want to be, could it help them not be. Hey, guys, I’m asking because Bambi Ann Sligo wants to know.” What the hell, if I’m out of this life and back to the old life, I might as well score a few points with Mel Taylor’s secretary, because Mel is not going to be happy to see me.
Travolta says Scientology helps you become clear. Once you’re clear, a lot of important psychological and emotional things happen, almost anything you want, and you take control of your life because you’re clear. I figure I can tell Bambi Ann what she wants.
David Hartman arrives with Sakuro Juzo and two other Japanese martial-arts types with him. Someone tells me they are his bodyguards, that he no longer travels anywhere without them. Another person tells me how they are trained to kill with a touch. I get to see Van Damme introduced to Juzo. There’s a fight that I would pay to see.
Hartman greets me effusively. But then, even if he was planning to have Sakuro decapitate me, I don’t think he would be any different. I smile. He asks me how it’s going, if I’ve found anything for Maggie yet.
“A couple of things that are interesting,” I say.
“What?”
“I don’t know if I’m enough of a hustler for this business,” I say. “Now that you ask me, I find myself doubting myself. This is my first pitch meeting, isn’t it?”
Hartman laughs. Maggie hears him and comes over.
“What are you laughing at?”
“You know, he’s not as bad as I thought he was going to be. He’s got a nice approach,” he says to Maggie. “Go ahead. It’s a free practice session for you. If I like the material, I’ll help you with the pitch, I promise.”
“OK. Here goes. First one. Big picture. Historical. I know nobody likes costume epics anymore. But—Catherine the Great. Hear me out. There’s a new biography of her. I’m told it’s very twentieth-century in feeling. Also, think Russian-American coproduction. They’re desperate for hard currency. How much do you think it’ll cost to rent the Russian Army for a couple of days? They have crews and equipment and they’re pretty good. So I see high-production value for reasonable cost. Second, I just got a book about an out-of-work actress who gets a job as a detective. Part-time. Instead of parking cars or being a waitress. A New York film. It’s available. Nicely written.”
“Action film?”
“No,” I say. “It’s a character thing. It’s more about being an actress than a detective, plus it’s got this clash of cultures thing, kind of like Tootsie meets Someone to Watch Over Me.”
“What about the war story? Give that up?”
“I have yet to see anything good in a war story for a woman.”
Hartman looks around the room, waves at someone, and leads us over near the bar. “Barry, you already know Maggie, but you haven’t met Joe, Joe Broz. We’re teaching Joe how to pitch. Practice on Barry. Maggie and I will watch and critique.”
Now Maggie seems happy with me, but it’s pointless. It’s an act that can’t play much longer. I go on automatic pilot. Maybe that’s why Barry likes the pitch—I don’t sound like I care. I promise
to send over a copy of the book and the coverage in the morning.89I’m drinking bourbon. Slow and steady. It doesn’t seem to matter one way or the other. Our host has an eleven-year-old boy. He’s in black tie. It’s very cute. The bartenders won’t serve him. So when other people put their drinks down, he snatches them and dumps them in his glass of Coca-Cola. The drunker he gets, the more he stares at women’s breasts. Around midnight, distinctly glassy-eyed, he goes over to Michelle Pfeiffer and in a voice that has yet to change says, “Lemme touch ’em. Just lemme touch ’em one time.”
Clint Eastwood comes to her rescue and takes the kid away. He says, “Come on, son. Boys your age should be playing with guns.”
Maggie looks at Clint. “I hate him,” she says.
“Why?”
“You think anyone will want me to work when I’m his age?”
87 We remind the reader, and the attorneys, that Jacqueline Conroy is a fictional person. The suggestion that a famous person had, or has, fictional sex with a non-existent person should not, in the normal course of things, be libelous.