Here, now, the snaking two-lane road along Maine’s rocky coast seems covered with a custom length of satiny black tarpaulin. The sky has turned quickly from not-too-bad to an ominous dark gray (there’s even some fiery orange to it), and Terence Wood guesses the rest of his day has turned with it. Guy on the radio confirms this. Rog’ at Large tells Wood and whomever else is listening to hunker down, lock it up right and tight, there’s a full-blown, full-throttle storm warning in effect for the entire area. Get set, get warm, get toasty. (This is Rog’ talking.) Get rockin’ ready.
Wood—a hulking, tortured, celebrated presence, he fills the car like a deployed airbag—doesn’t register the warnings. He hears them, but he’s not listening. He’s driving, in no particular hurry, to one of his cabins to decompress, read a couple scripts, bathe himself in Wild Turkey, avoid the phone, and it doesn’t occur to him to cut his destination short until the storm does its business. It’s not a prospect. There’s another cabin in New Hampshire; he’d have to double back a couple hours, but it’s inland, in the mountains, and he’s already called ahead and had a caretaker lay in supplies at the house in Maine, so there’s no sense even thinking about it.
He’s just driving, moving forward, not really thinking beyond basic traffic safety, but even that doesn’t merit all that much attention. Passing scenery, passing thoughts barely enter one segment of his tortured brain before exiting another, as in a breezeway.
Already, the rain has started to fall sure and constant, like a good shower at a better hotel, the temperature dropped to where the water hugs the asphalt like a protective coating. Oh, it is nowhere near cold enough for ice, but the road is suddenly slick, and Terence Wood, even with his shift-on-the-fly four-wheel drive, even with the way he handles a car, is suddenly unsure. (There was that Le Mans movie he made, couple years back, did his own driving; nobody cared enough to go see it, but there it was.) He coasts through a still-fresh puddle, chassis-deep, and he instinctively stomps on his wet brakes to check that they are still working. They are, far as he can tell, but he pulls his black Pathfinder onto an insignificant tumor of road, which juts over the swelling sea like a diving board, and he stops there a moment, waiting for the hard rain to pass, making sure.
Car phone. The machine rings like a malfunction. He has to remind himself to answer it. Oh, yeah, this damn thing. Right. The radio mutes when Wood picks up the handset. His agent, out in Los Angeles. Something about a meeting at Paramount. The life of Vince Lombardi, the dead football coach. They want him for Lombardi, Wood learns through weather interference.
“What?” the agent mock-asks when Wood wonders about the part, “they want you for Bart Starr?” Then, in a swallowed aside, to no one else: “He’s sixty years old, my famous friend, he thinks he can still play fucking Bart Starr.” (Actually, he’s sixty-five.)
Last week, they wanted Wood for Bear Bryant in something else. Something else, but the same thing.
“Looks sweet, Terry,” his agent is saying. He hates it when they call him Terry. He hates it when they remind him he has a car phone. He hates it when they use words like sweet, or tasty, to talk about a deal. It’s like fruit, the movies, to these people.
“Send it to me,” Terence Wood says back, flat.
“You’ve had it two weeks.”
“Send it to me again.” Wood returns the handset to its sleek cradle and stares out across the swelling sea below. The phone makes an otherworldly beep to sound the end of the transmission, and Wood is still not enough used to the noise to keep from wondering about it. First he thinks there’s another call, then he remembers. Oh. Right. That. There are all these noises, so many noises, there’s no chance he could keep them all straight. He inventories his noises: the sick groan of his Hewlett Packard plain paper fax machine, the cartoon trombone of his Ungo Box car alarm, the steady bleat of the Polar heart rate monitor he wears strapped to his chest, even driving, even though his doctors say his heart’s fine. There. What else? Oh. Right. There’s this annoying chime thing going on—sometimes, when it wants—with his multi-function Timex Ironman watch. And, always, there is the blather of the Mmes. Wood—Elaine, Anita, Petra—the women to whom he was once (and, in the case of his Pet, technically still) married. He puts the three women at the top of his list.
The phone, on speaker now, retreats to static. He’s somehow knocked it loose trying to figure the thing back to its cradle, and the slip fills the car with a discordant hiss. Wood is not sure he minds the noise. It focuses him, but he doesn’t move to right it, not right away. Right away what he does is nothing. Right away he just sits there, the rain patting down on the tinted glass of his windshield, now fogged with his breath and the weather, and he lets the static from his phone duel it out with the sky.
Looks sweet.
He lapses from dead ahead into all over the place, then he sets himself straight again. There. This is where Terence Wood is right now, what he’s doing, and he’s determined that the white noise remind him of his place. Perfect, he thinks. If his life were a movie, and it might as well be a fucking movie, the static and the rain would swirl into some ponderous New Age background music, and Wood’s squinted reflection in the rectangle of rearview mirror would dissolve into a kind of static of its own. Instead what it does is glare back at him—empty, uncertain, tired—so he rewrites the scene in his head to conform with the one in the car. Here’s the way it is, adjusted: Terence Wood’s entire world, his very being, is inside this car, entombed in the cab of a Japanese import, and he is being kept here by everything going on outside. To him, now, the cellular phone is conspiring to keep him here, and it rings as both signal and testimony of his confinement.
He leans away from the mirror, pinch-rubs at the bridge of his nose, considers. Log of shit, he thinks. Spend enough time with these people and you start to think like them. And so, unlike them, he refashions his screen from the rectangle of tinted windshield—movie theater dimensions, just about—and this time he gets the big picture version. This time his point of view is through the glass across the horizon like he is at a drive-in, the world stretched out before him, for his amusement, just. The sky is darker than it was a few beats before, and Wood can’t figure whether what’s approaching will be like something out of a disaster movie, or nothing at all. The disaster movie part he gets from the weather and from too many years-ago breakfasts with Irwin Allen. (Remember, there was that story of the Hyatt Hotel fire, but it never got out of development.) The nothing at all he gets from everything else.
Wood cranks the defroster, adjusts the phone. He returns the machine to its cradle in time for it to ring again. It’s like the rest of the world has been waiting for Terence Wood to plug himself back in, and now that he has, it wants him. He lets his own air leak from his pressed lips—an exaggerated actor’s sigh. He also lets the phone ring, and ring, and ring, and with each pass, he tells himself he is getting more and more used to this new sound. It rings seven times, eight. It doesn’t matter who it is. It’s always someone.
Here, in what passes for the Record-Transcript newsroom, what passes for Axel Pimletz manages four column inches about a retired Brockton man—the self-celebrated “Prince of Mini Golf”—whose widow claimed he had played miniature golf courses in all fifty states, on four continents, and even once in Switzerland in the long shadows of the Matterhorn. Pimletz takes her at her word that there even is a miniature golf course in Switzerland in the long shadows of the Matterhorn. He’s got nothing else to go on.
Earlier, he filed another four column inches in memory of a Fenway Park usher, somebody Gundersen, whose seating career dated to the Red Sox’s glory, and who once, moonlighting, fetched a couple hot dogs for a bulging Babe Ruth during the slugger’s last regular season game at Braves Field. The Babe, the story grows, never reimbursed the usher for his eats, although he did tip his cap in gratitude, which was something. Gundersen, who came to be known as Old Gundy as he himself took on in years at Fenway, wound up with a once-in-a-lifetime story for his twenty cents, which was something again. Pimletz gets to the twenty cents because hot dogs, he’s told, were ten cents at Braves Field in 1935. He does the math himself. The research he leaves alone.
Pimletz, writing, rests his elbows on the arms of his ancient oak swivel chair, his wrists snapping up and down at his keyboard with each new thought. Sometimes, the entire chair snaps up and down with the same motion, the wheeze on the recline signaling his progress. When he gets going good, like he did late yesterday, reworking a wire service job on the Illinois woman who started the country’s first temporary secretary agency (Steno Gals), Pimletz’s fingers can flit across these keys like he is at a piano and knows how to play it, like the music is a part of him. Mostly, though, he just gets going, and he needs the empty clatter of his keys and the slow wheeze from his chair to remind himself he has something to do.
This last has become a theme for the recently fortied Pimletz—or, at least, a continuing concern. He needs something to do. He needs to feel like something, someone. He wants to matter. In fact, he wants to matter so much he tricks himself into believing he does. Sometimes, with no one on the other end, he’ll even sandwich the phone between his ear and shoulder, for appearances. He is so hungry for some urgent business even the charade of urgent business will do.
The afternoon edition of the Boston Record-Transcript, still warm, lays halved at the corner of Pimletz’s messed desk, a front-page editorial on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for 2000 who is sort of waffling on the abortion issue riding the paper’s curl. Next to it, in full view, a boxed photo of a young mother jogging along the Charles, her infant daughter in push, helmeted in a canopied runner’s stroller, underneath the headline A BREAK IN THE ACTION—which may or may not have had anything to do with the mother-helmeted-daughter-jogging picture at the time it was committed to newsprint, which, in turn, may or may not have had anything to do with George Jr.’s waffling.
Lately, Pimletz has been thinking in song titles, and, as long he’s on it, he wonders if maybe there’s a way to make some money from the habit. “Waffling on Abortion.” He’s useless when it comes to lyrics (and most else), but he imagines there’s a market for the kind of satire he spots in the paper every day and sets to music. Well, it’s not music exactly, it’s just song titles, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right? He’s not even sure it’s satire, but still. That guy on PBS, from Washington, stands by the piano in his bow-tie and sings his made-up political songs? It can’t be he writes all of them himself. It can’t be he’s so overflowing with creativity that the stuff just bubbles forth. Probably he could use a good song title to get him started. “Waffling on Abortion.” First it’s this; then it’s that; then it’s something else. Waffle, waffle, waffle. Dee diddle dee dum. Or, something. “Tax This.” “Put Away the Lox Spread, ’Cause Daddy’s Got a Job.” He’s got a few of them filed away.
Pimletz means to take today’s paper with him on his way to the Men’s, but he forgets about it until he is nearly there, and, by this time, it is too late. By this time, he has already troubled the out-in-the-hall receptionist from her second application of shocking pink nail polish for the also-shocking Record-Transcript newsstand newspaperweight, the length and heft of which suggest one of those supermarket check-out line dividers, which has here been cutely and blatantly enlisted as a bathroom key chain, and he does not now wish to reinforce his mission by doubling back to collect any reading matter, still warm or no. Last thing he needs is to advertise his intentions, the time on his hands.
Instead, Pimletz moves forward, fits the key into the Men’s lock, leans into the door, and heads for the middle stall, where he fists a couple coarse toilet paper squares and wipes down the chipped black seat. Another last thing he needs: a wet seat misted with whoknowswhat?
Sitting, his mind someplace else (or, more accurately, on nothing much at all), Pimletz finally notices his pants resting sadly in a small, clear puddle. Actually, it is just a section of pant doing this sad resting, and the garment is bunched now around Pimletz’s ankles to where he cannot even guess at the corresponding, in-use location of the puddled piece, but the effect on his already sagged spirits is as if both trouser legs (and crotch! and seat!) had been soaked through. His impulse is to lift himself from the puddle, but this does not happen easily. His weight, squatting, is mostly thrown down and also forward, his legs held together at the bunched-up ankles, and Pimletz has to kind of tilt back onto his ass cheeks and pivot in a tight ball, kicking out his held-together legs to dry tile. For a moment, frozen in this awkward motion, he gets a picture of himself, and he is reduced by what he must look like. Worse, he soon notices the couple coarse toilet paper squares he fisted in preparation for this seating were the last to be had, at least in this stall, and he curses himself for this too-predictable turn. “Fuck you, Axel,” he says, out loud, his voice reverberating off the also-chipped green tile walls, to where the small, empty room fairly echoes with his despair.
And so, in desperation, Pimletz considers his next move. First, he fits his gaze into the narrow opening by the stall’s door hinges. He wants to make certain there is no one else about to see what he is about to do. What he is about to do is slide his pants back up around his waist, unbelted, and scamper to the adjacent stall to hunt for some toilet paper. This is his plan, and after he determines the Men’s is otherwise empty, he pulls his pants up slowly, stops to notice the darkened wet spot which now alights at the back of his left thigh, and pinches his belt ends loosely together with his right hand. He peers out the stall door and makes for the safety of the one next to it, to his left, facing out. He does his scampering in a strange, low crouch, fearful of soiling his Looms, and hopeful the Groucho-like gait will somehow leave his ass cheeks sufficiently apart, or together, to keep his clothes sufficiently clean. This last is an afterthought to the scrambling Pimletz, but he puts it foremost. He tries to adjust himself accordingly, but he is not practiced enough at this, nor quick enough in a crisis, to know which way accordingly might be.
His plan works smoothly enough, except that the next stall turns up as empty as the one just abandoned, at least as far as coarse toilet paper squares are concerned. Pimletz, realizing, slams at the metal half-wall in frustration.
Stymied, he cranes his neck to the room’s up-high windows, on the sills of which he seems to recall there sometimes being toilet paper packages, stacked. Today, though, there is nothing. He leans his head out the stall door and reminds himself there has been no overnight paper towel delivery, no storage area he might have overlooked, no sudden shift in bathroom maintenance strategy, nothing to magically replace the ridiculous hot-air dryers he has suffered for the almost-twenty years the newspaper has suffered him. The only paper product in Pimletz’s limited view is yesterday’s Record-Transcript, which rests haphazardly, and perhaps also magically, around this third toilet’s stained porcelain base, most of it soaking in a sister to the clear puddle which had moments earlier claimed the back of his left pant thigh.
Pimletz stoops for the day-old paper—his salvation!—and it comes up heavier than he’s used to, weighted by the water. Some of the paper is dry enough toward its middle, and Pimletz fumbles through the center tabloid pages as he drops his pants and backs himself onto the toilet. He’s deep into the Classifieds (“Deep into Classified,” now there’s a song title), past Real Estate, approaching Weather. He’s going by feel here, and not by content; he doesn’t notice Weather turn to Around Town, doesn’t realize he’s torn a dry enough page from Obituaries and squared it to withstand a poke from his finger. It’s not until he turns back and sees a picture of the bicycling Roxbury teenager, Allison Detcliff, sent off by Pimletz’s own wooden prose after she was hit by an appliance store delivery truck driven by a guy blew two-point-something on his breathalizer, that he realizes what he’s done, what he’s doing: adding insult to insult, wiping himself not close to clean with what he does for a living.
Finished, he lets his mind return to its earlier wanderings. He doesn’t know what he’s got to think about, wonders where people come up with things to occupy their attentions. With Pimletz, it’s like he has to be entertained, distracted, coaxed. He needs an agenda. He needs the diversion from the radio or television, something to read or to look at, else he just lapses into a dead zone.
Axel Pimletz—forty-three, never married, freshly bathed—is the kind of guy who reads the fine print on the backs of ticket stubs and the suggested “other uses” recipes on the sides of cereal boxes. Books you can pretty much forget; he’s a whatever-is-lying-around kind of reader, whatever’s on top. He’s got no hobbies, no interests, no outside talents. His days are stuffed with too many minutes and not enough to fill the time. His mind, on its own, simply idles.
Squatting, Pimletz jump-starts himself with suggested topics. There’s the upcoming presidential election to figure, but Pimletz does not know what to make of that whole business. His own paper says Bush should stand up for what he believes, whatever he believes, instead of treating the nomination like an entitlement, but it seems to Pimletz a man should do whatever he can to get whatever he wants. He believes this rule applies to the general human condition, as well as to politics. There’s the economy, but that’s a little too much for him. There’s yesterday’s terrorist bombing of that U.S. base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, but he hasn’t yet read the still-warm newspaper left behind on a corner of his messed desk in the newsroom, so he doesn’t know what to think about this, either.
His mother. There’s always his mother. He’s supposed to help rearrange her furniture one night this week. Thursday, he thinks. She’s always rearranging her furniture. She doesn’t have the patience or the resources to move, so she just moves things around. It’s the very apartment Pimletz grew up in, and it hasn’t ever looked the same more than three months running. His mother has a word for what she’s got: schpilkas, which she tells her Axel is Yiddish for ants in her pants. Pimletz wonders what the Yiddish is for the opposite. Ants not in his pants.
From his mother, he somehow shifts onto the printer from Everett, the stamp collector from Beacon Hill, the Somerville lady known throughout her neighborhood for the elaborate Halloween decorations and spook effects she pulled every year. Ah. This is what Pimletz can think about, his fallen subjects. Morrison Gelb. Natick. Colon cancer. Eighty-six years old. (Song title: “Eighty-sixed at Eighty-Six!”) Leaves eleven grandchildren and a third-generation doll wig business. It never would have occurred to Pimletz that three generations of the same family could pulse to the making of Barbie’s hair, but to Morrison Gelb it was everything.
Pimletz sits in this way for a long time, wondering at other people’s choices, other people’s lives. He sits in this way long enough for his feet to turn to pins and needles. The dead numbness he likes—he even encourages it sometimes, with his not moving—but the pins and needles he can do without. They’re like a test, he thinks, a summons. He wills himself still, afraid to move, waiting for the pins and needles to disappear. When they pass, finally, he stands to leave. He looks at his hands, his fingertips rubbed black with yesterday’s wet newsprint. He reaches them to his nose, smells nothing but his primary hand smells.
Next he looks down at his shorts, which he is about to restore to their on position, and he notices his Groucho Marx impression was not nearly as successful as he had hoped. The pitiful ordeal of these last moments has left its mark, and still another last thing Pimletz wants is to sit around for the rest of the day in a pair of streaked underpants. He tugs at the already-started hole underneath the fraying label and rips at the fabric, which comes loose like he is tearing at an individually wrapped slice of cheese. This is the connection he makes. He’s ripping at his shorts, thinking of processed cheese. He pulls the material from its elastic band and lets it drop to the floor beneath his legs. Then he steps through the left-behind waistband, which he stretches over his pants and shoes, and stuffs what remains of his sorry-smelling garment into the already-crowded waste bin fitted into the green tile wall. He does this without a thought.
Wood moves slowly—thirty, thirty-five, nothing crazy. He’s trying to figure where he is, doesn’t recognize the dark landscape in his headlights. Visibility basically sucks, plus he can’t get his wipers going fast enough to do anything worthwhile with the hard rain, and his defroster hasn’t managed much more than a few clear portholes. He pinches some cuff from his sweater into his right palm and wipes at the window with the trapped piece at the wrist. He steers with his left. He wishes he were home, dry, in bed, unconscious.
Here’s what Vince Lombardi would do, now, driving: crack his window, let the cool, wet air help with the defrosting, slap himself awake. What would Lombardi care if he gets a little wet? Probably, he’d mutter something inspirational (“a quitter never wins, a winner never quits”) and, inspired, plod on. Probably, he’d switch his wipers to intermittent to make the game more exciting, maybe even step down a touch on the gas, see what this baby can do in the slick.
Here’s what Terence Wood does: he puddles his car into another one of these scenic lookout tumors, switches off the ignition, and leans back against his driver seat until it’s in full recline. Then he looks up at his felted roof and wonders at the other side. Not the rain, but everything else. He wonders what buttons are being pushed on his behalf, what decisions are being made for him. He wonders at the disasters combusting at the other end of his car phone, plugged in. He wonders what he is doing, where he is going, why he bothers. Now that he gets his mind on it, there is nothing left for him to do, see, no more places to go, movies to make, substances to abuse. Consider: he’s met everyone there is to meet—princes, Lakers, artists, first ladies, short track speed skaters, moguls. Models. Too many models. Lately, he meets a model and it doesn’t even occur to him to take her home. This is true. It simply doesn’t strike him. How can this be? When did this happen? Plumbing still works, it’s not that, but it rarely dawns on him to open the spigots.
Now there’s a solid blue-collar metaphor. He’s got metaphors on the brain. Transitions. Symbolism. Some nit convinced Wood he could make some quick cash scribbling his life story—all of “veteran” Hollywood trades in this particular commodity—only now that he’s pledged to do so, he can’t quite get to it. His loose pages are like overworked writing class assignments. He doesn’t know that he has anything to say. Publisher wants a laundry list of his conquests with locker room commentary, and, for this piece of gutless chauvinism, Wood will collect just over three million dollars, plus paperback and foreign. He’s already spent the million he received on signing, so there is some incentive for him to get it over with, but even this inducement hasn’t been enough to see him through. Either there’s too much to tell, or not enough, or maybe Wood just doesn’t have the stomach for the ordeal. True, there are enough compelling reasons to keep him from the writing, not the least of which is how dispiriting it has been to look over his shoulder at the life he has led, or is still attempting. He tries to remember when it was, precisely, he worked his way through all the people there were to fuck, where it was he lost his interest. He hasn’t lost his appreciation for women, just his appetite, but this is bad enough.
Another new thing, also unsettling, is what’s happened to his career, past four or five years, longer if he can be completely honest about it. Nothing, that’s what’s happened. Used to be he saw every script in town. Used to be he was right for everything, and if he wasn’t right it didn’t matter. They’d convince themselves he was right for it, or they’d make it right for him. Now all he’s right for is dead football coaches. Once in a while, his agent entertains an idea for a sitcom, usually as somebody’s grandfather, swaddled in domestic bliss and canned laughter, but these entertainments rarely live beyond a couple meetings and never beyond a development deal. Lately, he’s even done voice-overs (he’s the voice of the villain in an upcoming Disney project), and a Pizza Hut commercial.
When he really works, it’s usually for the money, just. Like with this latest piece of shit, this live-action Archie comic book movie. Everything’s Archie. What fuck talked him into that? Five million, plus points, to play Mr. Weatherbee, a fucking high school principal. Three scenes, three weeks, five million. The thing with Terence Wood is he’s tied up in divorce nonsense with wife number three, and her lawyers are looking to skin him. Even without the ugliness of this latest divorce, he burns money like fuel, so he let his agent and the money convince him this Archie role would be like Brando’s cameo in Superman or Nicholson’s turn in Batman, even though it played out to be neither and, in some ways, a parody of each. Producers had him wearing this ridiculous monocle, said to look at the comic book, the guy always wore a monocle. Plus, they had him on crutches the entire time on the set because it was decided this Weatherbee character would be suffering from gout, which Wood has since learned is common only to high school principals of the comic book variety. In two of the three scenes, the writers had it fixed where he had his crutches kicked out from under him and was made to spin on his good heel and shake his sticks at the movie’s madcap teens like an irascible codger, his monocle dangling from a cord around his neck like Harold Lloyd. Why, you crazy kids. . . .
The movie disappeared like something with Don Knotts in it, which Wood and the producers might have seen coming because, in fact, he was, in a small bit as the father of one of the story’s principal teens, Jughead Jones. The preproduction hype was giant, but the finished product was a load. The critics who even bothered with the movie were all over it, and mostly what they were all over was Wood, mostly for just taking part. The fat guy with the thumbs up and down in Chicago said that for the first time in Terence Wood’s fabled and sometimes brilliant career, the actor appeared irreversibly lost and without tether. His words. It has only been a few months, and Wood is not entirely sure what the words mean in this context, but he guesses they will stay with him, always. He makes noise about not reading his notices, good or bad, but this one caught up with him on the car radio, where in addition to confirming Wood’s own low opinion of himself and his life and his latest exertion, he also learned that the fat guy with the thumbs up and down seems to have found yet another outlet for his commentary, and that the only way he, Wood, will ever see his points is in video.
Wood, irreversibly lost and without tether, turns the key onto battery and reaches for the volume on the radio. He wants to distract himself from himself. He’s lost a half-dozen stations since he started out, partly to the weather, but mostly to the long drive, in and out of range. He’s anxious for some noise to clear his head. Anything. He hits the scan button and pulls the nearest signals through the other side of the Pathfinder’s felted roof. Michael Bolton. The 1910 Fruitgum Company. Weather. Rog’ at Large, with concert happenings. Dionne Warwick. Talk radio: a listener wanting to know if it’s safe to travel to Israel, you know, after what just happened in Saudi Arabia, if there’s any way to really know what’s going on in the Middle East. Garth Brooks. Wagner. The Doors. Up-to-the-minute stock reports. Hendrix. Some caller wanting to know about replacing radiator fluid. June Carter Cash. Clapton singing about his kid. Garth Brooks again, or still.
He locks back onto Hendrix—“Purple Haze”—and, right away, he is transported to 1967, summer, around Monterey. Before or after, he can’t remember, but the same time, place. The memories are like one long day. He sees himself sitting with Hendrix at the Mamas and the Papas’ place in Bel-Air, this kick-ass mansion, and Brian Jones is there, Sharon Tate, Steve McQueen, some guy from the Monkees, and they’re passing around a couple joints, dipping sliced apples into a shared jar of peanut butter, tabbing at some concoction called Owsley Purple, listening, probably, to the Beach Boys. Maybe Sgt. Pepper’s, although maybe it was too soon for Sgt. Pepper’s. Everyone is on the floor. (Fuck the furniture: everyone was always on the floor.) There’s a pool out back, but it’s limned with algae and no one’s in it. Peter Lawford is droning on about RFK, Mama Cass is splayed beneath a length of couch like a big-game throw rug, and John Phillips is nursing a bottle of Crown Royal. Someone’s watching the television news with the sound turned off.
The scene unfolds for Wood like he is still in its middle. He is trying to convince Brian Jones that the monsoon season in Vietnam is like a symbol for America’s involvement in the war. It is all so amazingly clear to him, he doesn’t get why no one sees it this way. “We’re like a fucking storm, man,” is how he puts things, “but all we do is water damage.” He remembers this like it was on video.
“Yeah,” a convinced Brian Jones manages. “Absolutely. A fucking storm.”
Hendrix, here, on the radio, brings it all back—“’s’cuse me, while I kiss the sky”—and it doesn’t take Wood more than a couple riffs to realize he has peopled his flashback with the dead and gone. More, the dead are still relevant, now that he thinks about it. Well, maybe not relevant, he weighs, underneath a mounting haze of his own, but at least they’re not redundant. They still matter, somewhere, to someone. Most of them, anyway. Sharon Tate. Peter Lawford. McQueen. Every one of them dead except for Papa John, and that guy from the Monkees, and me, maybe Glen Campbell was there too, and we might as well have checked out with the rest of them. No tether to those who haven’t mattered since.
The images resonate, and Wood gets to wondering what Hendrix’s life would have been like had he lived, and he pictures a sixty-year-old guy with a gut (and, perhaps, a still-wide bandanna), guesting on Will and Grace, running the Chicago Marathon with Oprah, picking up his guitar for the first time in fifteen years. Or, he’s got Hendrix sitting across the desk from Larry King on CNN, plugging a boxed CD retrospective, which includes, inexplicably, a medley of Cole Porter songs. Maybe he’s playing Atlantic City, or campaigning for Bill Bradley, or hawking Pepsi (“you’ve got the right one baby, uh-huh”), or laughing it up with Jay Leno. Maybe he’s writing his memoirs.
Wood steps out of the car. It is still raining, hard, but the air inside the Pathfinder has become oppressive. He needs to escape it before it chokes him. Standing, he rolls his neck to the dark clouds, and the rain hits him full and cold. He drinks it in. He is out of the car only a few beats before he is soaked through his clothes, his long mane of thinning gray hair pressed slick against his round head. “Excuse me,” he says, loud, nearly chanting, “while I kiss the sky.” It doesn’t sound at all like singing.
He struggles onto the hood of the car and manages to stand. The thin metal pops and sags with his weight, and when he is sure enough of his footing, he reaches out with both arms. He means to take it all in: the heavens, the rain, the choppy waters below. It’s a fucking monsoon, he thinks, but he defies it. He’s taken Hendrix at his word, he wants to embrace whatever epiphany he’s made for himself, hug it close enough so that it will never slip away again, not ever. He wants to defy Petra and her lawyers by not being on the other end of their phone calls. He wants to kiss the sky. He’s left the radio on and his nearly chanting nearly coincides with Hendrix’s. He reaches back to the vinyl roof and is surprised to feel the vibrations through his hand. The music pulses through him. It is as if in reaching back to the roof of the car, he is also reaching back over a quarter of a century to touch whatever it was he once had, whatever it was could still touch him. Or has. Or will.
“Hey, Axel,” Hamlin tries, hounding, “how’d’ja like my new headband?”
Pimletz is at his desk, leaned close enough to his display terminal for the receding hairs on his head to nearly respond to the static. He is lost in a game he sometimes plays to fill the time. About the only thing he is good at is finding ways to fill the time. He inches closer to the screen to determine the precise point of static exchange, and he tries to imagine his hairs responding to the pull. He’s worked on this. When he does it with his forearms, he can actually see his hairs start to rise, and he is sometimes able to lock the exchange in mid-motion, in a static-electric freeze-frame.
The greeting breaks Pimletz’s concentration. He pulls away from the screen, looks up, and sees the guy next to him, Hamlin, back from a smoke or the Men’s with a ridiculous white band stretched against his too-thick hair. He looks like John McEnroe used to look, Pimletz considers, back when he used to pitch tantrums instead of financial services. Thick, curly hair, belted like a bale of wheat. Of course, Hamlin only looks this way up top, now, with the headband. Rest of him is fat around the neck and middle. Only exercise he gets is in his fingers, from the way he works his phones and his keyboard. Truly, the guy gets more done in a day than Pimletz can manage in a month, and what eats at Pimletz is the way Hamlin rarely leaves his desk to accomplish it. It’s all right there. Hamlin can work the phones like no one else in the Record-Transcript newsroom, no one is close, and the kicker is when he finally bangs out his stories, it’s like he’s taking dictation. The words just burst from what he knows. Zip. Splat. Done.
The thing between Pimletz and Hamlin has been going on six or seven years, and what it is has been mostly Hamlin’s doing. What it has been mostly is Hamlin riding Pimletz about anything he can find, whenever he can find it. Guy’s never wanted for ammunition. Sometimes the riding is about Pimletz’s failure to escape the obit desk after twenty years, his inability with women, his inertia. Sometimes it’s about a foot in Pimletz’s mouth regarding a colleague or some other newsroom transgression. (Once, Pimletz was goofed into calling an already-humiliated Mike Dukakis for a comment on the accidental drug overdose of his wife, Kitty; Hamlin got a good ride out of that one.) Mostly, it is just a calling to embarrassing attention Pimletz’s occasional lapses in judgment, some of which have passed into lore.
Today’s ammo is just about nuclear, and it is stretched across Hamlin’s creased brow. “So?” he tries again. “I’m waiting.”
“For what?” Pimletz doesn’t know, yet. Two and two have never been easy for him.
Hamlin points to his silly headband, and, with his in-shape fingers, highlights the block-lettered PIM from the Chinese laundry Pimletz sometimes uses. Pimletz finally makes the connection, quick on his feet or no. What’s not to connect? He gets an eyeful of what used to be the waistband to his underwear, stretched now and advertising his shame—PIM—and he shrinks from it. Jesus, Pimletz thinks. Fuck me dead and out the door. I’m just a humiliated piece of shit.
In a beat, he credits Hamlin with puzzling together the whole sorry bathroom episode from a few moments earlier, working backward from this thin piece of evidence. Then he thinks, wait, I’m being paranoid, right? This is paranoid. It could be anything, this PIM. How does a guy like Hamlin make the leap from something like that to me? Where does that come from? Not even Hamlin’s mind works like that. No way he knows about before. Then he thinks if he pretends not to get it Hamlin’ll go away; it’s never fun for him unless he gets Pimletz going.
“What?” Pimletz says, trying to salvage what there had been of his dignity. He means to play it calm and interested.
“Don’t give me what,” Hamlin says.
“No, really, what?”
“This,” Hamlin says, playing at exasperated. “This.” He slips his finger under the waistband, lets it snap back against his thick hair. The noise is not what he was looking for, so he tries it again. “This is what.”
Pimletz pretends to consider Hamlin’s fashion statement. “Okay,” he says, “fine, it’s you.”
“Oh, come on, Axel,” Hamlin says, mischievous, not giving up. “You gonna sit there and tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“You haven’t said anything. You’re not talking about anything. What are you talking about?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Again with the what?”
“Again with the what.”
“You have nothing to say to me?”
“What do you want me to say to you? I don’t know what you’re talking about. What else do you want me to say to you? I’m missing something, right?”
“Fuck, yeah, you’re missing something,” Hamlin says. He lifts the band from his head and places it on the desk in front of Pimletz. “This. You’re missing this.” Then, “Tell me this isn’t yours.” He’s got a smile on his face only Pimletz recognizes. “Claim it, and I leave you alone.”
Pimletz examines the band. He holds to his plan. “Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, returning the evidence. “Where’d you get this?”
Hamlin takes the waistband, then he takes the step or two between himself and Pimletz. “In the trash, where you left it,” he says.
“So now you’re going through the trash?”
“Nothing to go through. It was just there, right on top, hanging out.” Hamlin starts to twirl the band around his index finger like a lariat.
“Hamlin.”
“Tell you what, Axel,” Hamlin says. “Let me see your shorts.” He stops with the twirling and makes a sudden reach for Pimletz’s belt, the kind of locker room antic that doesn’t usually happen in the Record-Transcript newsroom. “You got any on, I leave you alone.”
Pimletz hadn’t figured on this. “Don’t be an asshole,” he says, squirming away.
“Just lift your shorts.”
“Enough,” Pimletz says. He thinks about slapping his hands against the desk in a show of firmness, but he doesn’t have this in him.
“Enough what?”
“Enough,” Pimletz says, broken. “It’s mine. Okay. It’s mine. That what you wanted?”
Hamlin pulls at the elastic garment like a rubber band, snaps it at his prey. It lands softly on Pimletz’s humiliated, piece-of-shit head and, for a moment, dangles in front of his face like a wild For Sale tag in a hat store. “No, Axel,” Hamlin says, gesturing to the landed waistband in that same moment, “that’s what I wanted.”
The rain is bucketing down on Terence Wood, still on the hood of his parked car, still locked on the way things used to be. Hendrix has passed onto Smashing Pumpkins, and Springsteen, and news on the hour. Keith Richards, solo. The Presidents of the United States: she’s in your head, she might be dead. Wood no longer hears the music or feels the bass thumping through his car. He’s lapsed into his own meditation, and, in his head, the storm has become mere color, detail. It’s there, but it doesn’t bother him. If he were wearing his trademark baseball cap (plain, gray, corduroy), the water would be pouring from the bill in rivers thick enough to fill one shot glass before he could down another, but the rain does not touch him in any way more direct than as stage direction. Camera pulls back to reveal WOOD, sitting on car, weathering the hard rain like a soldier. Camera pans to WOOD’s P.O.V., across the dark horizon, into nothingness.
The dirt beneath Wood’s Pathfinder has been quagmired by the downpour. The front tires, pulled into a just-started ditch about three feet from the rusted metal rail rimming the lookout parking area, have been all but swallowed by the pool of muddy water that has, in turn, essentially filled where the just-started ditch used to be. The front bumper is kissing a section of metal railing with the message “Get to Know Us!” spray painted onto its crenelated surface, the bright graffiti mixing with the rusted grunge in a breath of inner city along Maine’s rocky coast.
Wood emerges from his meditation long enough to fix on the graffiti—he saw it when he pulled up and he is pulled back to it—and, on impulse, he slides down the sloped hood for a closer look, with an exaggerated adult, “Wheee!” The momentum from his slide is more than he expected, and he is nearly thrown from the lookout’s edge before he catches himself. He lands in a tributary to the puddle surrounding his tires, filling his essentially new Adidas Torsion Response Class running shoes with a cold, wet muck he cannot, at first, place. Oh, yeah, that, he realizes. Mud. Of course.
Wood pulls close, balances against the rusted railing, but it comes loose with his full weight. It doesn’t snap away suddenly or dangerously, but he has targeted a section of railing that has been rotted by neglect and by the elements, and it refuses to support his leaning. It leans itself, with him. If there were sound effects, the railing would bend away from Wood with the creek of a door in a haunted house.
He stands and kicks at the still-fastened end of the railing with his muddy Adidas. It breaks free with his second try, and, with a third kick (and the same bluster that went into its spray painting), he sends the loose section over the edge of the seaside crag from which the wheee-d! Terence Wood, only moments earlier, had rescued himself and from which he is now not quite so protected as he earlier had been, even though earlier there had only been this rusted-through section of railing charged with his safekeeping. Still, he feels exposed, vulnerable, where earlier he didn’t know to consider either. He imagines the descending flight of the kicked piece of metal, catching air through its ridges, slapped by the harsh winds against the rocky hillside, alternately floating and hurtling down the couple hundred feet to the stormy sea below. He figures how long it will take to reach the water—thirty-two feet per second, per second, he remembers—then he waits it out, listens.
When he hears nothing and tires, he backpedals to the driver door and fumbles with the handle. He pulls the door open. The car rocks with the heavy, powerful motion. It rocks, too, when he returns himself—also heavily, powerfully—to the driver’s seat. There is sudden give to the wet earth, and the car shifts uncertainly with this new burden. Again, with sound effects, he guesses he’d be hearing the avalanche crunch of moving rock and wet soil, the coming loose of ground beneath his treads, his own difficult breathing, amplified. Wood’s drenched clothes flash cold against his back when he leans against them, and he sits up straight, away from the leather seat.
Suddenly, Wood is thrown to the dash with a lurch. Actually, it is not all that sudden, and he is not quite thrown. It isn’t even much of a lurch, but the effect is the same. It happens, really, in a strange, slow motion, like an action sequence drawn out for special effect, but it is very definitely a change in position. The weight of the Pathfinder, and Wood’s within it, is too much for the wet, giving ground, and, as he bends forward to free his cold, clinging shirt from his back, the car shifts with him, makes a new place for itself on the changing terrain with an overstated inhale. There. Better. It doesn’t occur to Wood he might be in any danger, not at first, and when it finally does, he doesn’t move too swiftly to save himself. He’s afraid to upset the uneasy balance the vehicle has just now achieved, and so he slithers himself tentatively along the leather seat—there, okay, just a bit more—pushes up and out against the slammed door, and reminds himself of the DeLorean he still keeps in one of his garages, somewhere.
He steps from the cab and into the mud, and the car lurches again with the shift. This time, it pitches to its passenger side at an even sharper angle, and the driver door is slammed shut by this new perspective. Without its hulking, tortured, celebrated presence of a driver, the car settles into its new space and is still.
Wood gets a thought. He doesn’t know where it comes from, but his head is like a lit pinball machine with the idea. There is no ignoring it and no thinking it through. It is something to do, and the only thing to do, both. And so, also on impulse, he slogs to the rear of the car and begins to push. It’s a struggle, at first, to claim his footing, to get a grip against the slick of rain on the back bumper, but he manages a kind of traction. He is giddy with what he’s doing, drunk, and he doesn’t stop to think. He is caught up in it, transported. He puts his full weight into the effort, but the car doesn’t move. He does this again. He pulls a muscle in the small of his back (his diagnosis) and straightens himself to ease the pain.
Okay. He needs a strategy. He doesn’t mean to think too much about this, but it appears now he must. Think, he coaches himself. Think: all four tires are encased in a thick of mud, the parking brake is on, and these are likely inhibiting his progress. Wood, realizing, returns to the cab, lifts the slammed driver door, unlocks the brake, and throws the car into neutral. He lets the door return itself to its foundation.
He figures the way to move this baby is with an easy rocking motion to help the treads get a new hold. He’s seen this done, on location in Santa Fe, when a sprinkler valve burst and flooded a sound truck into place. One of the grips, who had a towing business as a sideline, suggested this course, so Wood retreats to the rear and presses his weight against the back bumper, like he is testing the shocks, like he was shown. The Pathfinder bounces to his considerable shifting weight, up and down, and soon it gets going side to side as well. Up and down. Side to side. Up and down. From a distance, it looks like a car full of sweaty, his-and-her teens parked on some Inspiration Point. There’s another not-quite lurch, slow-motion sudden, and he strains to help it along, but the tires are bogged in the mud and not going anywhere.
He’ll have to gun it, he determines, already having put more thought into this act than it comfortably should have required. Oh, he hasn’t yet thought it through to its other end, but it’s coming. He once again races to the driver door and lifts it open. This time, he climbs in and braces his left arm against the heavy door to keep it from shutting. With his right hand, he turns the key, puts the car into gear. His ass is half on the driver seat, half off. His left leg is anchored in the mud outside his door, ready to spring him clear, his right stretched under the dash. He stomps on the gas pedal, thinking of Lombardi, thinking, “Get to Know Us!”
The Pathfinder, gunned, responds to Wood’s loose plan like a bad idea. The tires spin wildly, like the car is on blocks. The clean roar of engine is exhilarating, and it rubs against the laboring tire noises to where Terence Wood almost forgets what he’s doing, why. Actually, now that he’s on it, he’s got no idea why. Why not is as far as he’s gotten. Why the fuck not?
He gives up on the gas. He’ll have to try something else. A board. Yes, that’s what he needs, a block of wood, something flat and hard to wedge beneath his tires. He searches the car. About the only flat, hard surface he can find is his leather briefcase, which contains what there so far is of his memoirs. There isn’t much, mostly fits and starts, some notes, one full chapter about his first wife, Elaine, a book he’s supposed to be reading called Writing Well, a long memo from his publisher.
Wood steps out of the car and around to the front passenger side. He crouches. He burrows a space in the mud just ahead of the tire and fits his briefcase into it, like a ramp. Then he walks back to the driver door and resumes his position, one foot in, one foot out. He’s ready to go either way. He guns it again. The tires spin wildly again. Nothing. He gives it another try. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s deep into it now, can’t redirect himself. This is what he’s doing. This. Here. Now.
Finally, one of the tires catches traction, and then another, and before Wood can out-think himself, the car moves forward. It kicks out from under him, although this too happens in slow motion, and in this long unfolding he has time to step his right leg and half-ass from the car and with his right hand on the wheel point the machine to the new opening in the metal railing. It all happens in an instant, but it is an instant protracted, drawn out in Terence Wood’s head to where he can hear his own heartbeat, bury his past, conceive his future.
In the next moment, on normal speed, he imagines his two tons of metal and leather and state-of-the-art Bose sound system careening to the choppy sea. He gets a clear picture in his head. Then he cuts to a memory of his son, Norman, sending one of his miniature Matchbox racers down the spiral staircase up at one of the cabins (possibly New Hampshire), watching it bound, and shatter, and separate at the fittings, and then he cuts back to the present, big as life, his black Pathfinder spinning front over rear, plunging, thirty-two feet per second, per second, thundering down the couple hundred feet to the water, losing its rear axle against a stone promontory along the sea wall below. He wants desperately to hear the explosion, or splash, something, to give emphasis to what he has just done. He braces for the impact.