Chapter

EIGHTEEN

BEAGLE HAD A box for the baseball game.

He didn’t want to be in it. There were two reasons. The first was that he had yet to come close to solving the problem, which is how Beagle thought of movies, as problems. It was strange—when he first got a project, there was a great and happy excitement. The happy part disappeared instantly. It was followed by another process of trying to figure out how the raw materials could be handled, shaped, discarded, kept, whatever, in order to produce a successful film.

Except for his very first student film, which seemed to spill out of him, he always went through an intensive research phase. He always knew that it was totally necessary—it was where all the real work was done. He sometimes suspected that it was a way of stalling, procrastinating, avoiding that irrevocable moment when the camera was there and loaded, the actors were there and ready, and a hundred-odd people looked to him to say “Action” while another hundred—or so it seemed—peered over his shoulder fearful of how their millions were being spent and he had to know what every damn body was supposed to do and that when he was done it would look right, sound right, cut right, and sell right.

He thought of his mind as a sausage maker. A big open funnel at the top. Pour everything in. Turn the handle. Grind it up together. Something happened inside. Out came sausage. The image, of course, suggested something else. A giant mouth, grazing, nibbling, noshing, gorging, devouring, ingesting mass consumables, down the esophagus to a gross and wobbling belly which, because he’d got it wrong, produced nothing but shit—stinking, reeking, fly-catching, sausage-shaped shit.

Someday it was going to happen to him.

It scared him—dare he pun it; yes, but not in public—shitless. He loved his fear, adored his panic, hoped it would keep him shit-free, a pure and stinkless sausage maker. But he knew it wouldn’t. There was always failure. Spielberg had 1941. Coppola had Finian’s Rainbow. John Huston did Victory. John Ford did This Is Korea.

He felt it—the certainty that he was failing—every time. Every single time. He wondered if the feeling of failure would feel different the time that he actually did fail.

He understood that the first principle of all fine art is plagiarism and that the first principle of all commercial art is theft. No artist, craftsman, or thief works in a vacuum. Every artist is a jazz musician, running new riffs on old tunes because old tunes are icons, references, cultural understandings—they are the language of the people of his world. Since the moment he saw the memo, Beagle had been gorging on war films: documentaries, features, foreign films, short films, training and recruiting films, cartoons, raw footage, news film.

The problem was, he wasn’t there yet. If he had to turn the handle, he knew that all that would come out the other end was shit, was failure, and he was scared. He had to keep gorging until somehow, some catalytic ingredient, an enzyme perhaps, entered the stewing mass inside him, finally, and started the process that made it come out as something that did not stink. Or maybe what he was waiting for was to be stuffed so full that the internal pressure forced the creative organ, whatever it was, to finally function and make something with form and shape and color and light and meaning.

So his actual preference was to be back at his studio, watching images, organizing images, on his ten HDTV screens with their thirty possible source machines all interfaced with a virtual supercomputer capable of controlling all of it while converting every image that passed through it into digital form and keeping it that way in memory.

The other reason was that Beagle had a massive indifference to baseball. He understood its place as fable and parable in the canons of American mythology and had even included baseball shtick in several of his films, but its lethargic pace and the arrhythmic structure of what little action it had left him baffled.

His wife, Jacqueline Conroy,43and their son, one-year-and-eight-month-old Dylan Kennedy⁴⁴Beagle were with him. It was Jacqueline’s idea. She felt Beagle had been neglecting his family—true—and that they should do a wholesome family thing so that Dylan might learn to recognize his father.

Beagle called Hartman, who got the Disney reserved box for them. John and Jackie’s cook had packed them an “all-American repast”: sliced-turkey sandwiches with goat cheese, sun-dried tomato bits, and homemade mayonnaise on Sacramento sourdough white bread; munchies of fried pork rinds and beef jerky; potato salad with roasted garlic bits; sparkling water from Idaho; and four bottles of Coca-Cola bottled in St. Louis.⁴⁵

Dylan didn’t like baseball either. It wasn’t that he had an active distaste for the game in any particular way. The idea that there were people who did not exist to play with him but to play for him was as yet an incomprehensible abstraction. Worse, it apparently required sitting still while in a waking state.

Beagle had hoped that Fernando Valenzuela would be pitching because he would have recognized the name. But Valenzuela had pitched himself out or gotten old or maybe injured, one of those things that make ball players disappear. The Dodgers were playing Cincinnati. Beagle was glad that Cincinnati still existed.

He sat Dylan down beside him. He was aware of his wife watching the way he handled his son so that she could tell him the right way to handle his son. He truly didn’t understand whether maternal instincts were powerful and difficult things to live with or whether she was just a compulsive bitch and it didn’t matter a good goddamn if she had a child or was a virgin. He began to explain the game to his son. Dylan said something that his father heard as “aH wuss,” then reached out and grabbed a pen from his father’s pocket. It was a monogrammed platinum fountain pen, the one that’s advertised as both decadent and overpriced. It had been a gift from some studio chief. Beagle couldn’t remember the name, so he didn’t know if the guy had been fired yet. He just remembered that the guy was the kind of guy who checked up on his gifts. A terrible habit and very burdensome for the recipient. He tried to get the pen back.

Beagle got the top. Dylan kept the rest.

Dylan had a very masculine concept of objects. It appeared to be genetic. No one had to show him what a hammer was for or that many, many objects could be used for hammering. The first time he got a stick in his hand, he conceived of the sword. When he got a little older and could walk and got hold of a bigger stick, he thought of the spear. He was very cute walking around the yard holding his stick high overhead and flinging it at things. He had sword fights with the bushes. Flailing at them with a twig. The bushes frequently won, catching the stick and forcing their young opponent to overbalance. But he always got back up off his diaper, dragged his stick out of the tangle, and returned to the attack as valiant and beautiful as Errol Flynn had ever been. It made Papa Beagle proud.

So he should not have been surprised, or taken it at all personally, when his son slashed at him with the pen. Got him, too. Not only did the nib almost break his skin—and Beagle was sensitive to physical assault even from very small people—the pen splashed ink across his shirt. It was made of one of the more expensive mystery fabrics, dyed with the soft yet vibrant southwestern desert colors that he had lately come to favor. It wasn’t the money. What did $480 matter to John Lincoln Beagle? It was what? The beauty of the object? Having to walk around all day with ink blots where style had so recently been? Having to shop to replace it? It was that Kids Have to Learn.

The obvious thing to do was whack the kid. Not maliciously, but like the papa bear gives the baby bear a cuff now and again to remind him who’s the papa bear and who’s the baby bear.

That was a bit from an animated feature that Beagle had been working on shortly after Dylan was born, an adaptation of Goldilocks as told from the ursine side. John Lincoln had been certain that being a parent would add the dimension to his talent that would enable him to do for the children of America what Walt Disney himself had done—while maintaining his touch for adult cinema, of course. He and Belinda Faith, the animator he’d been working with, had story-boarded out several sequences. In one of them Baby Bear had annoyed Papa Bear when he was having his after-porridge pipe and Papa had just knocked him across the room. Baby Bear went rolling across the kitchen and up the wall and out the window. It was quite humorous and Baby Bear didn’t mind at all.

There were a lot of people around. Modern pedagogy, he knew, frowned on whacking kids in public. Even if that’s what one did in cartoons. Also, his wife was watching. She’d love to have that on him. And finally, and in truth, Beagle didn’t hit his son because he understood with that part of his mind that was firmly rooted in reality that his son was not a Toon and that hitting kids wasn’t nice.

There was really only one way he could release the reflexive anger and irritation he felt. He addressed it to his wife. “Jesus, Jackie! Could you goddamn hold him for one minute.”

“Could you hold him for one minute is more like it,” Jackie said. Her voice extremely calm and ever so much more cutting for its serenity. “You have a real problem if you can’t be with your child for more than one hundred and twenty seconds without help.”

Dylan was still on the attack, the pen a tiny saber. Beagle would have looked at his wife, glaring daggers of hate, but he was forced to keep his eye on his son who, at this point, had to be considered armed and dangerous. John Lincoln snatched at the pen. Dylan was too quick for him and managed to mar his father’s summer cream trousers with black blotch and splatter.

“Dammit, Jackie, is that washable ink?”

“How would I know? It’s your pen.”

The fact that she was absolutely and irrefutably correct brought him to the decision that he would divorce her as soon as he had a week free. He’d been divorced before and he knew you couldn’t knock it off in a day. Not that he had even a day. What he had was the biggest project of his life. What he had was pressure. And he didn’t need this shit.

He captured the pen. Getting splats on his palm and on his cuff in the process. Now he couldn’t find the cap. His wife was smiling. Pleasantly. Of course she was. She was happy to see him in a state of incompetence and frustration. It proved something. He didn’t know what. But he didn’t like it. “Where’s the cap, where’s the cap of the pen?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Jackie said. Even calmer than before. “Why don’t you look for it.”

“A score,” he said to her. “You got a chance to score. Good for you.” There was an absentminded-professor aspect to Beagle. He lived a great deal of his life inside the movies in his head, not in the neurotic or psychotic sense but in a creative person’s preoccupied way. He frequently did not know where things were, unless, of course he was using them to make a movie. Then he could keep track of thousands of items. In normal life, however, the more common the article, the less he could perceive it. In the initial stages of a romance with him, women often felt like they were with a character in some old film or novel, probably an English one, and his idiosyncrasy lent him a certain musty yet antic charm. Eventually, it drove them insane. In order to get to the ballpark he had asked his wife if she knew where the car keys were, then the tickets, the directions, his favorite shoes (she’d said, “Learn to dress yourself, dear”), the lunch basket, and some office notes he had hoped to read while they watched the game.

“I’m not trying to score,” his wife said. A small lie, but so monumentally obvious, it was impossible to believe that she didn’t recognize it as a total untruth. But she didn’t. “I’m trying to help you.” She believed that too. “You need to be more aware.”

“I don’t need to be more aware. I don’t need to be here. I don’t need to be with you.”

Dylan had grabbed hold of the lunch basket and tipped it over. Everything fell out and this made him very happy indeed. Now he could play with the sandwiches and bottles and glasses—their cook had packed crystal glasses; who wants to drink Coca-Cola, especially a bottle bottled in St. Louis, out of a paper cup.

Jackie sat unresponsive to Dylan’s small disasters: it was her husband’s time to be a Real Human, not a Film Director. It was his time to deal with the Child. His Son. Whom she had borne the Pain of Bearing for Him.

Beagle wanted to respond. But he had a leaking pen in his hand with no cap. It was a gift from some goddamn studio head who would expect him, the next time he did a film with that goddamn studio head, if he still had a job, to sign the contract with the goddamn gift pen and say something inane like, “You gave me this pen. It’s my favorite and I want you to know that I’ve been saving it for a moment like this.” Inane, absolutely inane. But important. He knew that from his mother. He also knew, from life as well as from his mother, that wherever he put the pen, it would roll off, it would fall to the floor, keep rolling and disappear into a crack, drop to the bowels of the earth, and some janitor person would end up with an incredibly overpriced and decadent pen. Without the cap. He couldn’t put it in his pocket because he didn’t have the cap and the ink would just pour out of it, a spreading black stain, growing like the Blob. He still didn’t know if it was washable ink.

He looked at his wife in silent plea. He saw her face and saw all that she thought. Why had he married a movie star? Even one whose butt meant as much to the world of posters as Farrah Fawcett’s hair once had? Why not some placid, undemanding creature who cared about his needs. Who wanted nothing more than to make a home, care for the child, love her husband, have sex with him when he wanted the way he wanted.

Dylan had one hand on a sandwich, pulling at the wax paper. The cook was adamant about never using plastic wrap. Jamais. He had his other paw around one of the prize Cokes. It was one of the old-style bottles, with that curvy, womanish shape and the raised letters in the glass, a veritable icon of Americana. What a soft drink!

Beagle had only one hand. He did what he could. He wrapped his free hand, the left, around his son’s waist, and lifted him from the mess he was making. Dylan had a firm grip on the wax paper, which began to unfold. When he rose in the air, the paper completed its unfolding and the sandwich tumbled out. Sometimes the bread falls butter side up, sometimes it doesn’t. It didn’t. Turkey, goat cheese, sun-dried tomato bits, homemade mayo, all made intimate contact with the greasy, germy, gooey floor of the box reserved for Disney at Dodger Stadium.

Dylan wanted the sandwich. He began to wail.

It was good, Jackie thought, for her husband to once in a while go through what she had to go through all the time. She didn’t really have to go through it all the time. Just between the times when she had fired the nanny and before she had hired the new nanny. Not an infrequent occurrence because she only wanted the very best for her child. And sometimes it took as long as a week to find a new one.

Dylan had a distinct sense of proportion. A Coke bottle was not the right shape for a sword or spear. Too thick. Too squat. Definitely not in the stabbing or slashing category. It was, like hammers, clubs, and cups, in the banging class. While he wailed over his fallen food, he flailed the bottle, with a certain enthusiasm, at his dad’s head.

He missed. Much to his disappointment.

Beagle tried to grab the bottle without dropping the pen.

Jackie looked at the food on the floor with disgust and wondered if her husband would have sufficient awareness to pick it up before Dylan ate it. She bet herself a $7,800 dress that he wouldn’t. If he picked it up before she mentioned it, she would pay for the dress herself. Or forgo it.

Dylan, really pissed that he’d missed, flung the bottle at his father. Who ducked. Which was difficult since he was still holding Dylan and the pen. He stepped on the sandwich and slid. He loved the kid enough that his deeper instincts finally emerged and he let go of the pen, held Dylan, and did all he could to fall in such a way that he was the only one hurt. And he was hurt. Not permanently. But painfully and embarrassingly.

The bottle flew out of the box, onto the field, narrowly missing a bat boy dashing through foul territory for reasons that might be understood by baseball fans, but not by Beagle. The bat boy looked around to see from whence the dangerous projectile had been launched. Several of Beagle’s neighbors pointed at the Disney box, just as Beagle pulled himself to his feet.

“You stupid motherfucking cocksucking asshole drip! You’re the type of rich dumb fuck that should be banned from world-fucking existence. I hate your type. Your type should roll over and join the bronto-fucking-sauruses in ex-fucking-tinction. I ought to take this fucking bottle, climb up there, and shove it up your reamed-out asshole, Drip Face,” the bat boy said in the colorful way that we’ve come to associate with the American pastime. He raised the bottle threateningly. Then he saw it. “Wow!” he said. “St. fucking Louis! Wow. Chill dude. You must be really feely. Give my regards to your babe, dude. I got your Coke and I’m keeping it.”

Beagle addressed his wife. “This is your”—Beagle tried very hard not to curse in front of his child; he bit his lip—“fault,” he said. Without a single adjective.

“You can’t take care of your son without assistance for one minute and it’s my fault. I think you better look at yourself.” She nodded in that infuriating way. In another age, a more primitive and honest one, he would have killed her.

“This is your idea of a family outing. Thank you very much. It’s lots of fun,” he said in a little boy’s ugly, mocking voice. “Oh, boy. I take a day off to bring my son to something he has no idea what it is and that I don’t like. Another wonderful idea, brought to you by Mommy.”

“I was trying to help you,” she said. “To do something masculine in which you could bond with your son. Who is a very masculine person. You don’t do enough with him. If you don’t like what I suggest, why don’t you come up with something yourself? You should spend some time with your family.”

All this time, Dylan, still held by his father, was squirming to get down. “OK,” Beagle said, and put him down. Jackie watched him go right for the sandwich remnants, which now had not merely fallen on the floor but had been ground into the dirt when her husband stepped on them.

“You set things up,” Beagle said. “You set this up to be a disaster.”

“I didn’t set anything up,” Jackie said. Of course she hadn’t. She was doing what was best for everyone. Her husband needed a lesson in awareness. If he got one, it was obviously his own doing, and very much for the good.

“You don’t even fucking realize it—”

“Watch your mouth in front of the . . .”

“The . . .” he mocked her.

“You have a nasty streak,” she said.

Dylan peeled some turkey from the floor. It had attached itself to thick black goo that old soda often becomes. Chunks and flakes of indecipherable substances in various shades of brown and gray also adhered to it. There was a faint aroma of cleaning fluid as well. He put it toward his mouth with great anticipation.

“I knew it,” Jackie said, snatching the filth from her son’s mouth. “I knew you wouldn’t even think to clean that up.”

“Clean it up?”

“Yes. The sandwich. Am I your slave? Who is going to clean it up?’

Beagle, who felt he had barely survived his fall and his encounter with the bat boy, had yet to give the mashed sandwich much thought. “I . . . uh . . .” he said.

“Because I’m a woman and you’re a man. I make my own money, buster, and I don’t have to be a little Hausfrau for you.”

“What is going on?” he said.

“I’ll tell you what’s going on. Your son is eating filthy old shit, shit from the floor of a public stadium. It could be a public toilet and it wouldn’t be dirtier, and you don’t have enough awareness, awareness to do anything about it.”

“Jackie,” he said, “shut the fuck up.”

“I will not.”

“Of course you won’t. You don’t know how to shut the fuck up.”

“Why don’t you shut the . . .”

And, having degenerated into a kind of generic husband-wife exchange, it went on for a few more minutes with little to distinguish their celebrity ugliness from the common rancor and spite of people who have neither their glamour nor their riches. Finally, Jackie snatched up her son and the car keys and marched off, leaving Beagle, who had no desire to be there, there.

He was so relieved that she was gone that he decided to stay rather than go anywhere where they might meet by chance. What the hell, a ball game was supposed to be therapeutic. Or something.

It wasn’t. It was incomprehensible. He opened a sandwich that Dylan hadn’t dumped. It was weird but tasty. He looked around. Thousands of people were watching, with varying degrees of attention, but certainly staying and participating. The guy in the box next to him seemed to be—Beagle searched for a word—happy. That was it.

The guy was smoking a large cigar. And showing no shame about enjoying tobacco. Even though he was there at the game, he listened to it on the radio as well. His name was Tubby Bayless. He was an ex-DEA agent who’d made extra money dealing confiscated drugs and pocketing dealer money. He’d invested, rather blindly, but luckily, in some Hawaiian cane fields. A Japanese golf course developer had paid top dollar for the land because it formed the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and part of the seventh holes.

“Can I ask you something?” Beagle said.

“Shoot, buddy,” Tubby said.

What Beagle really wanted to ask him was the secret of happiness. But he didn’t. Instead, he asked, “How come people like baseball? What is it? I’m a film director. And I work very hard to make sure one of my films goes from action to action to action, always building. You know? With pace, with rhythm. Then this . . .” He pointed at the field. “I don’t get it.”

Tubby blew a couple of fat smoke rings. He looked philosophic and reflective, a carnal Buddha. Maybe sent here to give Beagle a message. “Ahh, baseball,” he said. “Baseball is not a game of action. It is a game of potential and possibility. I was a cop. Of sorts. When you’re a cop, you spend lots of time watching and waiting. Maneuvering ever so slightly, hoping your quarry finally gets in position for you to pounce. You ever go hunting?”

“No,” Beagle said.

“Well, you don’t look like the killing type. But you never know.” Tubby shrugged. “Anyway, the moment of the kill, if it’s game or busting through some spic’s door, guns drawn, there’s an adrenaline rush. A definite adrenaline rush. But that’s not what it’s about. Just like making love’s not about coming. I’m a regular philosopher, right? You want a cigar?”

“Uh, sure,” Beagle said. Not a smoker, he thought maybe tobacco was the secret of happiness, if the Buddha liked it and the Indians too.

Tubby took one out of his pocket and passed it over the rail to Beagle. “What it’s about is the potential. The potential for action. Is she gonna go out with you, is she gonna get a little tiddly or high or whatever her preference is. You’re moving, she’s moving . . .” He gestured with his hands, they circled each other, two plump predators dancing.

Beagle had the cellophane off the cigar. It was terrifically phallic. He admired it. He didn’t have a match.

Tubby popped a big kitchen match with a red and white tip out of his pocket. “Hate butane.” He flicked it with a nail. It flared and smelled of sulfur, good old-fashioned demon sulfur. He leaned over and gave Beagle a light. “That’s why people stop fucking the people they’re married to,” he said. “Because coming’s not what it’s about. It’s not about the rush. It’s about potential. Anticipation. Baseball is a game about potential and anticipation.”

Beagle took a puff. It was rich and slightly sordid at the same time. But it was the gesture—holding, taking the smoke in, exhaling it, watching it float away—rich in cinematic memories, that was really fulfilling. He began to relax and got a sense of male comradeship. See what the boys in the back room will have.

“This guy’s good,” Tubby said about the radio announcer and turned him up louder. “Listen.” There was a man on second—in scoring position—the man at bat was—the tying run is at the plate!—the count was two and one—he better not get behind the batter, if he stays ahead of the batter here, he’s got him, he’s that kind of pitcher.

Tubby blew a smoke ring. “You get it?”

Beagle, getting a little buzz from the tobacco now, tried a smoke ring too. It didn’t quite do it. “No,” he said.

“If the count gets to one and two, he can throw shit and the batter almost has to take a cut. He’s changed the potential. If the pitcher throws a ball, he’s behind. Now the batter can lay back—a little—and choose. And the pitcher has to throw something pretty decent or risk a walk. Changed the potentials, get it?”

“Yeah,” Beagle said. “I get it.” And he did. He nodded and began to see the action in the nonaction. He took another puff, the buzz got a bit buzzier, and suddenly he understood something very basic about directing reality. He remembered being in New York at the time the Mets were in the play-offs against the Houston Astros. There was one very long game that went on forever. It went on so long it totally defeated the schedules and expectations of normal life with the result that New Yorkers, all suddenly turned into fans, found themselves tracking the game in bits and pieces as they passed through their lives—watching a television in a store window or through the window of a limousine with a tiny TV playing in the backseat, asking freight-elevator operators—freight-elevator operators always have radios—or total strangers, “What’s the score? What’s happening?” It was like wartime. “What’s the news? What’s the news? Have you heard the latest?”

Reality was a rhythm as slow as baseball. Even stillness was action. Especially stillness was action. Because waiting was a massing of power or it’s dissipation.

“You got another one of those St. Louis Cokes?” Tubby asked.

 

 

 

43 She started in film, but the role that made her famous was the MOW (movie of the week, made-for-TV movie) and subsequent TV series Woman Undercover, almost universally referred to as Dick Chicly. The series was short-lived, probably because it was terrible. But it did produce that famous poster of Jackie, standing, back to camera, filling the foreground the length of the right-hand side of the shot, her hip cocked to the side, smoking gun in hand, burning automobile in the background to the left, the flames creating a very dramatic halo effect. There was something about the length of her legs combined with the attitude with which she cocked her hip, and the shape of her butt and waist inside the very tailored police uniform, that made her an instant erotic icon. A feature career ensued. Her credits include Swimsuit, Never So Dead, L’Affaire Fatale, Very Last Love, Murphy Was Wrong, and Cinderella 2000.

⁴⁴ According to an article in Millimeter (3/87), an industry publication, “It’s been an informal Beagle family tradition for generations to give male children a president’s name as a middle name. There have been Beagles named Joshua Fillmore, Stuart Cleveland, Victor Van Buren, Gerald Polk. John Lincoln’s brother’s name is Kenneth Buchanan Beagle, and family lore claims that there was once a Taylor Tyler Beagle.”

⁴⁵ There actually are Coca-Cola aficionados, and while they don’t have vintages, they do claim to detect differences based on where the beverage is bottled. St. Louis is considered the best, its bottles treasured in Coke cellars and served on special occasions.