Camera Guy scared me, both Jay’s reality and my fiction, but maybe fear was the only inoculation against hackdom...
A wailing siren behind me scattered my thoughts. Shit, I was fifteen over the limit, with a cop car growing in the rearview. Don’t hit the brakes, just ease off the gas and be cool. Yet my whiskey breath would be reason enough to spirit me away, like Jay, and what if he’d fingered me? The cops would never buy my ignorance; their unanswered questions would eventually be punctuated by rabbit punches and the rubber hose. Maybe a cheap flight to Guantanamo.
Sorry, Mom. I was going to come and get you soon. Really.
The cop blew by without a glance. Laughing hysterically, I pulled over and sparked a cig with trembling hands. Jay, you really got under my skin.
I’d planned to stroll on the beach, but after parking in the lot by the sea wall, I beelined up Newport Avenue to the Black Cat Lounge. I ordered a whiskey and absently studied the twenty-something tourists telling too-loud jokes and eyeing potential hookups with desire.
My desire, I realized, was to get back to work. On my way out of the bar, I noticed an older, crew-cut ex-jock hunkered in a booth by the door. He followed me out of the bar and stayed half a block behind, glancing in shop windows, eyeing girls, conspicuously not seeming to follow me, which made me suspect that he was.
At the parking lot, I passed by my Mustang and sat on the sea wall. Crewcut was in the same lot. He climbed into a black sedan and motored away.
Coincidence, had to be. I refused to check the rearview all the way home. I wrote until midnight, then drank myself to sleep and was back at work when Sal called around noon with a job offer.
“Fifty K, Tim-boy, if you can inject some yucks into Deuce Bigalow 4 — Bangkok Pool Boy.”
My refusal left Sal speechless, and I used that rare silence to pitch Camera Guy. Waxing eloquent, I convinced him that this was the project to jump-start my career. He wanted a synopsis by Friday and promised to fast-track a pitch meeting if the pages captured the passion I’d just poured into his ear.
With fresh enthusiasm, I returned to the keyboard and... nothing. Jay’s story must end with him broken on the freeway, but where to begin? After twenty minutes staring at a blank screen, I headed out for a stroll, brainstorming into my mini-recorder.
“Camera Guy, scene one. We open with...”
Halfway down the stairs, my eyes tracked to a black sedan parked directly across the street. I hesitated only an instant before marching boldly down the driveway.
The sedan sped away.
I lifted the recorder, shaking as I dictated. “Opening shot, exterior: black car outside the beachfront youth hostel where Jay’s staying. He emerges holding hands with Maria — Latin, busty, half his age — and we hear click, click, click as they’re photographed from the car.”
Words lie, pictures tell the truth. Once upon a time, my pictures did, in newspapers worldwide. Then infotainment ate the news biz and I quit looking for truth through a viewfinder. All I wanted that sunny San Diego day was to get to know Maria, but old, ugly truths were about to come looking for me.
Yes, my opening! I raced back upstairs, back to work. Maria ditches Jay for a surfer. Back at the hostel, a note slipped under Jay’s door alludes to an Iraqi village, a place he could never forget, no matter how deep the bottle.
Montage of stills: Jay snapping pix in desert fatigues and gas mask; stark B&W shots of corpses frozen in bloated agony, victims of an unknown biochemical horror.
During the Gulf War, I was among a handful of reporters who slipped away from their handlers and went out hunting the real story. I never learned the name of that village, which, officially, never existed.
Quick scenes: Jay flagging down an American patrol; overnighting his film to Reuters; buttonholing various brass and getting the brushoff. When his pix haven’t hit the wire in forty-eight hours, Jay calls his editor and learns the film never arrived. “This one,” the normally fearless editor whispers, “this one we have to let go.”
So Camera Guy quits. Snippets of Jay slugging booze in Kuwait City, burning his press credentials, pitching his camera off a hotel balcony.
Jesus, this is good...
Damn, the phone again. Ignore it. No, it might be Sal. I marched out and snatched the receiver. “Yeah?”
Dead air, not even a dial tone this time.
Cursing, I went to peek out the front door. No black sedans, just a Pac Bell truck across the street. That made sense. Trouble on the line, so they were here to fix it. If anyone was screwing with my phone, they wouldn’t advertise it so blatantly.
Unless they — they didn’t exist, of course, this was Jay’s POV — wanted me to know I was under the microscope. Turn up the heat and perhaps I’d bolt, leading them to whatever they feared Jay had handed off to me before they snatched him.
Good script element, but of course I knew nothing, had done nothing wrong. But then neither had the Iraqis in that village.
I worked till dusk, then swilled enough hooch to nod off in the living room as Warren Zevon howled from my ancient turntable about lawyers, guns, and money.
The week passed in a blur, most waking hours spent polishing the synopsis and blasting through a first draft of the script. Jay’s note-under-the-door pen pal is revealed as ex-spook Sophia Summers — hot but mature, a Michelle Pfeiffer or Sigourney Weaver — who’d been in Iraq in ‘91 and was likewise haunted by the dead village that didn’t exist.
They join forces on a frantic cross-country odyssey for evidence, falling for each other while remaining one step ahead of the baddies.
When I finished the day’s writing, I’d hit the bottle and let my subconscious take over, jotting paranoid notes and bloody parables as they popped into my head, straining to reach further in my pursuit of Jay.
My work was interrupted by sudden, at-any-hour racket from the new tenant downstairs: power tools whining, inane sitcoms blaring, weird squeals of electronic feedback.
Other strange happenings: All my houseplants wilted one night, perhaps shriveled by the ear-piercing feedback. The phantom phone calls continued sporadically, until I finally unplugged the phone.
Then last night, returning from a booze run, I sensed that something was off as soon as I walked in. Nothing was missing, nothing out of place, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been in the apartment.
Well, screw ’em, so long as they didn’t impede the work.
Sal loved the synopsis and, true to his word, had three pitches scheduled for next week, so I’d drive up to L.A. on Monday.
Knowing Camera Guy was the best thing I’d ever done kept me content. Drinking like a fish, hardly eating, worried that I’d either been infected by Jay’s madness or really was under surveillance, but content nonetheless. Finishing the script would exorcise both Jay’s ghost and my three years of Hollywood exile.
Such was my upbeat mood this bright Saturday morning. I had finished the script last night. My Jay Max was real, his story compelling, and while it lacked some still-elusive something that would lift it from cash-register-jingling commerce to lasting art, I knew the missing ingredient would come.
Neither Jay nor I would settle for less.