“You made your calls,” I said, snatching the phone back before delivering bad news. “But I have my own problems, and if Big Brother’s after you, Jay, there’s nothing I can do.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he conceded, even while deflating before my eyes.
Pity the poor bastard for pinning his hopes on me. I’ve failed everyone who ever needed me, right? Just ask my family or any ex-girlfriend.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Be true, Tim.” With that, Jay turned and started down the stairs.
“Good luck.” I should have quizzed him about what was on his film, but no matter. I’d have fresher ideas than whatever Jay claimed about Area 51 or George W. plotting 9/11 with his Saudi paymasters.
Back inside, I considered jotting some notes, but I was tired and the soft mattress beckoned. Let the encounter percolate, I decided, and had just hit the sack when I remembered my Mustang.
Dashing back out to the patio, I saw that the car was untouched, but Jay was lingering below, over by the hedge bordering the driveway. Jesus, I help the guy out and he repays me by pissing on my doorstep?
“Hey!” I shouted. “Get moving or I’ll call the cops!”
Jay fled up the block, started across the street toward the Nap Time Inn. Suddenly a cop car and a black sedan squealed up, converging on him from opposite directions. He didn’t resist as a beefy cop threw him into the sedan, which sped away as I watched, agog.
Beefy Cop surveyed the area. I ducked inside before he turned my way and stood with my back to the door, heart racing. Jay had found the cops, all right, but it wasn’t his pal from Boston.
What if Camera Guy really was a terrorist, some sun-addled So Cal Unabomber? Gripped by the notion, I raced to the computer. A quick Google established the existence of a Marshall clan in Boston, brought to these shores in 1710 by a Welsh merchant, whose son made a fortune slave-trading and later signed the Declaration of Independence. The current patriarch, Regis Welbourne Marshall, had indeed been CIA back in the ’sixties. And yes, a Jay Maxwell Marshall was grudgingly acknowledged, a stunted limb on a family tree of go-getters. Jay had been a news photographer for Reuters in the early ‘nineties, before quitting and dropping out of sight.
This was it, I realized excitedly, the rich seed of a story I’d been rooting for these long, fallow months. Two pots of coffee and a pack of Marlboros later, I’d hammered out twenty pages of character notes, plot ideas, questions begging answers, like just who Jay Max was running from. Jihadist sleeper cells or soulless corporate assassins?
I’d need input from Sal. It was his job to know what baddies were in vogue, but I figured Camera Guy could be tarted up any way the suits wanted, because the soul of the thing felt real and righteous.
It would be the saga of a wilted Flower Child, the last innocent, who stumbled across Hard Truth and is compelled to shout it to the world. Of course, the Powers That Be then move to crush him because the last thing they want trumpeted on CNN 24/7 is the goddamned truth.
Hours flew by as I synched with my muse in the white-hot act of creation. Finally taking a break around eight, I went out for some Jack Daniels, which, coupled with the last of the coke I’d been hoarding, kept me writing until two A.M. Staggering to bed, I dropped into the deep, contented sleep of an artist inspired.
Up at noon, I refueled on java and red-penciled last night’s output. As expected, two of every three pages were dross — unraveling plot threads, pulpy dialogue, cardboard supporting characters. Birthing art is a painful, messy business, and I soldiered on undeterred, separating the pages into a big stack for the dumpster and twelve precious pages of the good stuff.
I left a message for Sal, then my growling stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. Totino’s party pizza in the oven, I grabbed the Union Trib off the porch and settled on the couch. Normally, the short item in the Metro section wouldn’t have rated a glance, but I’d already crossed some unmapped border, leaving normal far behind.
San Diego police report the hit-and-run death of an unidentified man in Mission Valley. The apparently homeless victim, estimated between 45 and 60 years old, was killed late last night while attempting to cross I-8.
The paper slipped from my grasp as I was struck by the awful feeling that the dead man was Jay. I knew him to be enjoying the hospitality of San Diego’s finest, but a sense of certainty washed over me like a voodoo tide.
“No,” I muttered, “I don’t believe in psychic flashes.” Only one way to find out. I called the cops and posed as Jay’s brother, inquiring about bail, then spent ten minutes on hold before the desk sergeant informed me that there was no arrest record for a Jay Maxwell Marshall.
Stunned, I blurted out that Jay might be their hit-and-run victim. At this, the cop perked up and started quizzing me.
I banged the phone down and marched to the kitchen to down the last blast of whiskey. It restored my reason. Odd, intuitive insights are part of life; only the superstitious read them as bulletins from above. Yet wasn’t such a reading just what the script needed? Only if I could capture Jay’s madness, distill it down to its essence, would Camera Guy become something special.
I wrote all afternoon, words rushing forth from some place beyond me — more stenography than straining after art. I time-lined the history of my fictive Marshall clan; conjured femmes fatales to tempt Jay, villains to bedevil him.
Finally taking a break at five-thirty, I went out for cigs and whiskey, then it was time to eat again. Ramen noodles, with local TV news on the side. A vacuous blonde reported an updated death toll from the St. Louis bombing, then her Ken-doll cohort had news of our hit-and-run.
“...Jay Maxwell, fifty-two, son of wealthy Boston philanthropist Regis Maxwell.”
Shit.
I upped the volume, but the anchors were now chuckling over a snowboarding cat. Clicking off the tube, I rubbed my throbbing temples and puzzled over my prophetic flash.
Think, Tim! Sketch scenarios but stick to reality. After grilling him, the cops must have released him to wander to his doom out on the freeway. Sure, that had to be it.
The phone rang, further jangling my nerves. I grabbed it and barked hello, but there was nothing but a dial tone. Jay claimed the bad guys tapped his every call, and he’d used my phone twice, so if they’d been monitoring him...
“No,” I said with deliberate calm, “there isn’t any they. Jay was a kook, probably wanted for scrawling graffiti with his own shit.”
He was also dead now, leaving me to turn his life into fiction. That was reality, and I refused to be spooked by a strange coincidence or a dial tone. Still, I’d been cooped up for days, and needed light and space before disappearing up my own rectum.
I put the Mustang’s top down and headed to the beach, the cool breeze quickly clearing my head. A little panic attack was a good thing. It suited the material. To capture Jay, I had to walk a mile in his orange Converses. Artists should flirt with madness, just don’t invite it to sleep over.
Everything came into focus as I reached OB: Teenage Wasteland had been a smash indie hit because audiences are suckers for unvarnished truth, and that was the exact element all my work since had lacked. I’d unconsciously yoked myself to an assembly line as rigid as any in the Rust Belt, churning out popcorn instead of daring the high wire of genuine art. The suits aren’t the only ones hypnotized by dollar signs.