CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The Gremlin

It was somewhere near Salinas, cruising up the highway that split acres of lettuce stretching to the horizon on either side of him in perfect rows like a green picket fence lying on the ground, that Nate felt the nervous energy from what he was about to do. He had the next scene for his life in his head now.

By late November the boy was convinced it wasn’t just the memory of the girl he was in love with. He was in love with the woman she had become.

And he was desperate.

Sabotage.

The boy was about to become a Man of Action.

And Nate hoped to hell he could pull it off without Julie wanting to kill him.

He was driving home in a 1972 Gremlin he found on craigslist and bought from a guy in Flagstaff, Arizona, as one more step in recreating his life. It was a two-door hatchback just like the one he drove his senior year. Like Nate, the little Gremlin was rusty around the edges, didn’t do hills very well, had trouble starting in the morning and an occasional exhaust problem. It was prettier and more reliable than the one he bought back in school with money saved up from summers spent cutting, boxing and hauling apricots along with the rest of the teenage labor at the orchards that covered the east foothills of the valley. He loved that first car. It wasn’t much, but it was worth every nick from his paring knife, every splinter from the wooden trays he had to carry to the drying sheds and every sweaty hour under the summer sun running buckets full of apricots from the pickers to the pickups parked on the dirt road just beyond the trees.

Julie was on his mind on the Southwest flight down to Arizona. She had recovered from whatever it was that kept her from work on the Friday after he bombed using Eppie’s direct approach and let her know exactly how he felt about her. He was convinced it was Nate flu because she refused to talk to him for nearly a week, and even then, not until the campus was deserted and they could meet in the open quad near the library, giving them privacy to talk in the protection of a public space. He sat on the waist high ledge that formed the base of the library building. She stood, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, close enough for intimate talk but maintaining an arm’s length between them.

“I really like you, Nate, you know that,” she said. “But let’s not let things get out of hand.” He nodded and parsed every word. She spoke softly, haltingly, and maybe it was just his imagination that she spoke without conviction. How much did she care for the fiancé? She never said, which left him to speculate that it could be a lot, maybe just enough that she didn’t want to second-guess her decision to marry him, or somewhere in between. As much as he wanted to, he definitely could rule out “not at all.”

As she talked, Nate decided “Friends” was not an option. He’d slink back to L.A. and love her from more than just an emotional distance before he would sit and watch her every day with that guy.

“Things will look different, you’ll see.” She was certain he’d find somebody else. “That’s what you need. You’ll find the right woman for you.”

A replacement? A diversion? Someone who would make him forget Jules? Seriously?

That was the first tickle to his imagination on how to fix his Julie issue. After closing the deal on the Gremlin in Flagstaff, he spent the night in a Motel 6 munching on take-out pizza, sipping bottled water, and noodling over various scenarios ranging from logical but likely ineffective, to absurd and likely to lay waste to any chance he had of winning her back.

Sabotage. That theme nagged him worse than if his mother caught him with the mouthful of double meat pizza he was chewing. He wasn’t the one who needed to find an alternative to love. Festerhaven was the one who needed an alternative to Julie, a distraction that would take him out of the picture. He thought about Seth Naylor’s problem. The poor guy was still paralyzed by the thought of meeting Angel Strings in person. Nate had continued to woo her in Seth’s name, and it was obvious that he had her falling in love with the guy—the version of Seth that Nate created. If he could work that kind of magic for one, could he possibly do it again? Staring at the ceiling, boxed in by the pea green walls of a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere, Nate decided that moment that he was going to try.

“You clearly haven’t thought this through.” Jack Hewitt said. He watched his barking rat-like terrier straining at the leash raise his leg and take a leak on a small cactus. Nate was exhausted and his agent’s comment had him feeling pissed upon just like that plant the pooch watered. Jack had the dog’s leash in one hand and a cigar the size of sub sandwich in the other.

They stood on the sidewalk outside Jack’s condo on Van Ness Avenue under a palm tree that sprouted in a tiny rock garden between two concrete and stone staircases in front of the building. Nate spent seven hours and fifty-five minutes of the eight-hour drive from Flagstaff to L.A. thinking about his plot to win Julie back. He pulled in to a truck stop in Barstow for chicken fried steak at the five-hour mark and spent two more hours jotting a list of pros and cons, developing a plan of action before he called his agent and hit the road to Los Angeles. Even though it was Saturday, Jack said he could give him some time before he headed out to a “Grip and Grin” session at the opening of an artsy-fartsy movie. It was the kind that would draw some big players from the industry who liked to be seen in public supporting highbrow flicks they wouldn’t waste a nickel on producing.

“The way I see it, you’ve got us to the mid-point in the second act, and…so what? We’ve stalled out. Something’s going to happen now, right?”

“Sure.” If his life really was a movie he now had a plot twist. He liked the irony of that. Nate shaded his eyes. The sun was going down behind the drab, milk chocolate stucco condominium Jack lived in. It was only two stories, but it was the largest building tucked between rows of narrow adobe duplexes with their front doors facing each other, a side wall facing the street, and separated only by concrete walkways as they stretched to the back of the lot. Jack’s building was kept up well, but looked every bit its fifty years and not the glamorous kind of place people imagine when they think of Hollywood. It was in a pedestrian, low rent neighborhood that backed up to Paramount Studios.

“The story has some workable parts but I’m not sold on it.”

“What do you like so far?”

Jack looked off and sucked on his cigar for what seemed like an eternity. “Well, act one, for instance. The hero going back to high school to win over the girl he lost forever ago will tap a few nostalgic hot buttons. Not original but who the hell wants anything really original these days? Too much risk. Then in act two we find out she’s getting married, ala My Best Friend’s Wedding. That’s the crisis, not unexpected, but a comfortable turn of events that has us rooting for them as a couple. Mostly, though, I love the way you wrote the gal, Julie, is it? She’s conflicted about the hero and in self-denial about the cheating asshole. She’s a great character the way you’ve written her. I can see the audience relating to her, though I never pegged you for a guy who’d write a chick-flick like this.”

That stopped Nate, wounded and badly misunderstood. “It’s not a chick-flick.” He thought for a moment. “Yeah, it’s got rom-com appeal, but it’s about the guy. It’s his redemption I’m getting at.”

“Uhm, I’m not seeing that. Feels like a chick flick. Where’s my Man of Action you wrote on page twelve that stands up to the goon and getting beat up for it in the bar scene? Fifty pages in and all we got is this Nat guy, a pussy in love who doesn’t do anything after the Julie character shuts him down.”

There was that word again. Eppie’s word. Pussy, she called him, and accused Nate of lacking a certain part of the male anatomy for not putting up much of a fight. “Normally, I’m on board with when a woman says no it means no,” she told Nate after Julie sent him to “Friends” detention. “But in this case? I’m not convinced. You’re giving up too easily,” she said.

“I like the way you’ve built the parallel stories with the guy—wasting his life away because he’s a passive slacker just taking whatever shit life hands him,” Jack was telling him now.

“Parallel to the girl’s backstory,” Nate said. “The single mom who is so devoted to her kids that she sacrifices her individuality to the point she’s lost sight of the person she thought she would be.”

“Right. And now their worlds collide after all these years. I’ll buy that because the audience will buy it. But the way I see it, fifty minutes in you’ve got a serviceable setup and conflict, so do something that’s gonna make this all worth the price of admission.”

“That’s not the point.”

“No? Then why are you wasting my time?” Jack jerked the dog leash, pulling the mutt to a sitting position at his feet.

“Never mind.”

Sure, Nate would kill to turn this escapade into something that would knock Hollywood on its collective ass, but how could he explain to Jack that was secondary to using the script to get his shit together? Nobody’s going to buy the story—they never do—so sending pages to Jack was like working on a deadline. It forced him to keep moving his life forward.

“The way I see it, this guy either mans up and does something spectacularly risky or you’re just wasting everybody’s time. So what have you got for me? You got to have something, some cool twist in mind, right?” Jack stared at him, expecting an answer.

“You ever hear of Cyrano de Bergerac?”

The agent squinted, and it made the heavy bags under his eyes more pronounced. “Uh, the schmuck with the big nose? Something about pretending to be his best friend who was having trouble getting laid. I think Bill Murray did a rip off of it years ago.”

“It was Steve Martin. But imagine: Cyrano de Bergerac meets The Sting.”

“The Sting? Bob Redford and Paul Newman The Sting? Love that old movie.”

Then Nate laid out how he was going to win Julie over or go down in flames trying. “I’ve already written it out,” he lied.

Jack said, “The Sting. A bit intriguing. Who knows these days? Send me something clean. No promises. And, seriously, think chick-flick. I can sell that.”

He tugged on the terrier’s leash and turned toward the stone stairs leading to a second floor entrance over the condo’s gated parking garage. He paused next to Nate’s car in front of the gate so the dog could mark its territory on the Gremlin’s front tire.

“Nice ride,” Jack said. “Classic. Maybe you should think about putting it in the story too.”

Nate spent that night at Woody’s. By the third and final shot of tequila sitting across from each other in the living room, Woody started to accept that Nate had come up with the best possible solution to a rotten situation, even if he still thought it was too passive-aggressive.

“I can’t sabotage them by ratting the fink out,” Nate said while he sucked on a lime wedge. “Even if that works, nobody, especially Julie, is going to love the rat who does the finking even when he is finking out a rat.”

“Damned straight there. She’d hate you because it’s none of your bees wax.” Woody scratched a spot on his recliner chair’s arm like a bothersome itch in the vinyl. “Better if I really did know a hit man like Guido. But y’all know the Peckerheads will go up there, hold the guy down for you while you take a Louisville Slugger to his kneecap. If that’d do you right.”

“No you wouldn’t. But thanks for offering.”

By their fourth and final shot, the idea sounded better. By their fifth and final final shot, it was awesome, couldn’t miss and settled. Woody stopped on his way to bed, staring at Nate and grinning.

“What?”

“I am more impressed with you every day, Bud. First you whack a military dude with a golf club and now this. But I swear, never, ever in my life would I have figured you grow up to be a pimp.”

“A pimp? Is that what I am? Nah. I’m a love facilitator.”

“Is there gonna be sex involved?”

The answer made Nate uncomfortable. “I hope everything’s resolved before it goes that far. That’s the plan. But I can’t rule out sex.”

“Sure as shit sounds like you’re pimping to me.”

He waved at his mother stirring a pot on the kitchen stove when he got home a little after noon and ignored her greeting as he headed for his bedroom. Nate flipped the cardboard sign hanging from a hook on the door to the side that said NO TRESPASSING. Not that it mattered; the reverse side said KEEP OUT except that his dad had run a marker through it and scrawled FUCK OFF with a smiley face.

He reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a snack pack of Doritos from under the stash of Playboy magazines. He munched and thought, and spent the afternoon scouring the Internet for advice and tips, adding to everything he had learned when Seth and the Stanford compatibility computer introduced him to digital dating. After a scrumptious dinner of his mother’s eggplant root, kale and tofu stew, Nate set up a new account on Wink Connection.

Vintage Rascal. He liked that screen name.

Vintage was a wink to his age and Rascal was an inspired choice because it was the kind of name women were intrigued by, or so he read in research from dating advice sites all afternoon. He was particularly drawn to one advice site by a Dr. Rachel somebody or other. He consulted the yellow pad next to his computer with keywords and hot-button phrases based on all the advice that he planned to put into his Vintage Rascal profile.

He posted a picture of himself with Festerhaven that Julie had taken after their big softball victory, hoping prospective dates would be lured into learning more. One expert advised surrounding yourself with “beautiful people” in profile pictures, leading prospective dates to feel beautiful by association. He hoped ladies might see Festerhaven as a handsome, fun sidekick, suitable for dating in his own right. The profile? That was all Festerhaven. Nate spun his personality in a way he hoped would attract a Stanford-rated ten, AAA, five-star perfect woman. Then all he had to do was convince the principal to go with a bird in the bush instead of the fiancée in his hand. It was dangerous territory. If it blew up in his face, there could be hell to pay. If Festerhaven behaved the way he should, and couldn’t be tempted, then Nate would give him due credit and walk away without another word.

He let his imagination run to shape Vintage Rascal. Even though it was supposed to be Nate’s profile, everything was in the mold of Festerhaven. Unreliable mood swings were now part of FesterPrinceCharming’s interesting character. He wasn’t competitive to a fault, just driven to succeed. He wasn’t self-centered, but seldom let others distract him from achieving his goal. He wasn’t oversexed—he was intensely romantic.

It was so much fiction, the kind of bullshit Nate wrote so beautifully, and he was so engrossed in typing, deleting and editing, he barely heard the first raps on his bedroom door. He lowered the screen on his laptop like a teenager hiding an Internet porn site from view. Shaking loose of such a knee-jerk guilty reflex was hard when you lived with your parents no matter your age. He waved his father into the room.

Charlie cocked his head, chewed on his upper lip and scratched a spot behind his right ear. He gave Nate a low grunt.

“We need to have a little talk.”

Nate nodded. “Sure.”

“Your mother thought this would be a good idea.”

“Okay. I won’t blame you. Go on.”

“Your mother’s a bit concerned about you dating again now.”

“I don’t know why. It was her idea.”

“I mean, she’s happy about it, of course, but she thinks we need to get a few things out in the open, in case you find yourself in a situation that, well, that you’re not quite ready for. ’Cause when a boy and a girl, a man and a woman get together, things happen.”

Nate turned from the desk, knocking a stack of essay papers to the floor, and sat up wide-eyed. “You mean sex?” He laughed so hard he started choking.

“You’re not making this any easier.”

Nate wiped a tear from his eye. If nothing good came out of his return home and the remainder of the school year to come, this one moment was worth it. “I can’t help it. Don’t you think I’m a little old for the birds and the bees talk? You missed out on that a long, long time ago.”

“Do you mind? Let me finish. I’ve got things to do.”

Nate apologized again.

“Look, sooner or later you’re going to be alone with a girl and you’re going to want to do it. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all been there. But it isn’t anything to be afraid of, not really. I want you to know how to handle it when the time comes. You can avoid a lot of embarrassment if you know what to do and do it right. Understand?”

So that was the point of The Big Talk. It was the Trojan Talk. Condoms. V.D. and all manners of The Clap. Oh, poor Charlie, Nate thought.

“I… Oh, hell. Here.”

His father pulled a folded brochure from his back pocket and flipped it onto the bed. It landed upside down in front of Nate. “I want you to read that. And then if you have any questions, you can come to me and your mom. We’ll answer them for you, okay?”

Nate bottled up his laughter until after Charlie shuffled from the bedroom and closed the door with a definitive thump. He was touched as much as he was amused to think his parents were so concerned about his sex life. He kept chuckling right up to the point he took the brochure and opened it.

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