Between the Bridge and the River Page 18

  He couldn’t see more than two or three inches in front of his face, or maybe it was two or three miles, it was hard to tell with the milk. It was a texture he didn’t recognize, a sensation he only vaguely knew. Perhaps from the womb. He smiled a big, wide smile to himself. Carl would be very proud he was thinking like this.

  Gradually he felt himself ascending until he broached the creamy surface and found he was about thirty feet from the shore of a tropical island. A small three-palm-tree job with a shiny white deserted sand beach. It was bright yellow daytime.

  Up from the beach the three palm trees grew wildly, like Rastafarian bed-head. Fat bumblebees buzzed happily in the shade.

  Fraser waded ashore and saw that he was naked. He looked around. No one about.

  He suddenly felt a sadness that he had never experienced before, it hit him like a giant Georgia freight train. He fell to his knees and wept, his heart shattered, his soul broken in a billion pieces.

  It was over.

  He was dead.

  After what could have been a few hours or a few days or a few years, Fraser looked up and saw an olive-skinned man with Bryl-creamed hair walking down the beach toward him. He was barefoot and hatless but otherwise was in the uniform of a French policeman. He had his sleeves rolled up and was smoking an unfiltered cigarette.

  Fraser cowered from him, terrified.

  “Hey, relax,” said the policeman in heavily accented English. “You are shaking like a Bethlehem shepherd. I have a message for you.”

  “Who from?” Fraser asked, trying to appear less afraid than he was.

  The policeman laughed. “‘Who from.’ Very funny.” He was really tickled.

  Fraser smiled but had no idea what the policeman was laughing at.

  The policeman handed Fraser an envelope. Fraser opened it. It was his final report card from when he had left school at sixteen. Under the teachers’ additional-comments column was written in red ink:

  Could do better.

  Fraser looked up. He was about to ask what it meant when the policeman dealt him a vicious blow across the skull with his nightstick.

  He blacked out.

  He came to.

  He heard himself moaning and at first everything was a bloody, smudgy mess but it seemed to burn off like a foggy marine layer. His vision finally focused with astonishing clarity on the anxious face of T-Bo, the teenager who had brutally beaten and mugged him only ten minutes before.

  “Hey,” said T-Bo. “You okay, man? I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. You okay?”

  Fraser looked at him and smiled through bloodied and broken teeth.

  “I am born again,” he said.

  RECOLLECTION

  THIS FROM THE BEST-SELLING MEMOIRS of the flamboyant and charismatic, popular African-American television evangelist Bishop Thomas Leroy Bosley, published on the eve of his fiftieth birthday.

  Although the bishop dictated the work himself, what many people do not know is that the book was in fact ghostwritten by a bitter old cynic named David Trundle, who as a young man received some acclaim for his screenplays for the Hollywood movies Fingerplay and Big Friendly American Wedding Celebrity. Bishop Bosley paid him $250,000 for the gig, a fraction of what he used to get for his scripts.

  The birth of my belief came almost immediately on the instance of my meeting with a man I shall call Rabbi. He never was in any way affiliated with the Jewish faith, but the term Rabbi was given to him by me. I felt that he truly was deserving of the term. His wisdom seemed as old as the Hebrew teachings and he was a great teacher to me. He certainly opened me up to the LORD, and even though we parted ways after a short time together and I have no idea what happened to him, I do believe it was God who sent him to me.

  I believe the LORD chooses some unusual messengers to check that we are paying attention to his children when they bring us the Good News of the Gospels.

  My child, you must never turn away a true messenger of the LORD because of his ethnicity, his profanities, his hygiene, or his apparent unworthiness. A man can have poop in his pants and Jesus in his heart.

  “Then how will I know the messenger?” you ask.

  I cannot answer for you. Feel in your heart. Pray for guidance. Ask the LORD.

  The Rabbi was the last man I ever laid my hands on in anger or violence, Praise God. He was a man of God himself, although he said he was a hypocrite and that it was me who finally drove him to his true belief through the shock of the beating he received at my hands. My bloody hands. He said the experience “pushed him from the dry dock of sinfulness out into the ocean of God’s love.” Amen.

  The details of my childhood have been documented in this book and in the press by my friends and enemies over the years, and much has been made of the disadvantages that I faced as a young man. While I do not negate or in any way minimize the situation that I faced then, I now believe that in no way did it excuse the life of crime that I had been infected with. I say the word infected. Amen.

  I say the word infected advisedly, for many others faced the same torments as myself and did not succumb to sin. Were they morally superior to me? Were they closer to our LORD? I say, “Nay, they were not.” The plain truth is that I was shackled by the devil and he had taken control of my person, my soul. It was Satan, Ole Blackbritches himself, who drove me into the arms of Jesus. His wickedness backfired on him. The night that my friends and I pounced on the Rabbi, to beat him up and rob him, I was in a place where I could only be saved by a divine act of grace, which struck me as a bolt from the blue much like our beloved St. Paul on his journey to Damascus. And the LORD saw fit to bless me with his sacred lightning bolt. Amen.

  We attacked the poor Rabbi, who had wandered drunkenly from a nightclub, the den of his own iniquity. Yea, though he was a Rabbi, he was also a sinner. He fought us back fiercely but he was outnumbered by younger, fitter, angrier men, and he was incapacitated by his intake of alcohol and drugs. We took his wallet and his passport (for he was a foreigner). I believe we stole his watch also, and I seem to remember we also stole his pants, although I could not imagine why we did that. We ran off leaving him bleeding and unconscious in the filthy back alley.

  My friends and I had by this time purchased a car with the profits of our sinful missions, a Chevrolet Caprice convertible, 1975, pimped out with a chrome roll bar and spin-back chunky rims. Amen.

  We returned to it to count our takings and escape back to the projects, where we would be safe. During the fight with the Rabbi, I had made eye contact with him and felt that he was special, that he was filled with the love of the LORD.

  The look had troubled me as we made our escape and as I sat in the car among my fellow thieves and watched them laugh and delight in our grisly exploits and count our ill-gotten gains. When we went through the Rabbi’s effects, we found an invitation for him to attend a meeting of evangelists in Birmingham, Alabama. A convention of the Holy United Church of America. Praise God! It was at that point I had the terrible realization that we were guilty of attacking a man of the cloth. We had robbed and beaten one of the LORD’s righteous servants. Shame consumed my soul. Suddenly it was as if the car was filled with a white light and a voice seemed to say:

  “Turn back, Thomas Leroy. Repent thy sins, while thou have time.”

  I was afraid and exhilarated at the same time. I was suddenly filled with a terrific rage.

  I grabbed the money from my colleagues, who were mystified by my behavior. I threw them from the car and drove back to the scene of the crime, to the Rabbi, who lay bleeding and unconscious in the alley.

  I lifted him up and placed him in the passenger seat, so that I could take him and attend to his wounds. I begged his forgiveness. I tearfully admitted I had committed this horrible act of violence against him. He mystified me with the spirituality of his reply. Far from admonishing or condemning me, he whispered, “I am born again. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” over and over again. I also wept, for with him and through him, I felt the beautiful, benign,
forgiving presence of the LORD.

  Amen. Praise Jesus. Amen.

  THE ROAD TO GOD: SIX

  FROM THE MOMENT THEY HAD BEEN BORN, their DNA contained a combination of madness and showmanship, so it was inevitable that Saul and Leon would have ended up in Los Angeles, the home of the attention-seeking spiritually disenfranchised. In the years that they were there they plowed the depths of greed, insanity, and nihilism, which is to say that they participated fully in the civic activity of Beverly Hills, their chosen parish. In their time in Bleaktown they saw their world change, they saw riches beyond imagining, and participated in the most discouraging acts of depravity, both together and separately. They saw fortunes, including their own, rise and fall and rise again, and they saw the thing that disappointed them both the most.

  It was this: “A man profits nothing if he gains the whole world and loses his immortal soul.”

  What they did not see was the beauty, art, and holiness, which was a shame because that was also there.

  Hope springs eternal—the Renaissance flowered under the Borgia popes. The Universe seeks balance and abhors a vacuum, and so Los Angeles also offers curative mysticism and mental health, but unfortunately the line between good and evil is blurred by the smog of money and cosmetic dentistry. It takes an expert to pick a safe route. The devil smiles brilliantly through the brown fog, offering a three-picture deal and a two-week psychic retreat in Santa Fe complete with deep-tissue massage and recreational heroin.

  In other words: In L.A. it is very difficult to tell who your friends are.

  And, of course, even when you think you have the place and its people finally figured out: The ground keeps shifting.

  Saul and Leon were lucky to escape with their lives and at least a shot at redemption.

  Cadence Powers had led them to the pit, and after a short, brilliant burst of success, he was consumed by his own creation.

  Saul and Leon, having found themselves stranded in Palm Springs with no method of escape, that is to say they had no money, took heed of the old maxim that the Lord helps those who help themselves.

  They helped themselves to a purse that an old lady had left draped over the back of a chair in a coffee shop.

  The coffee shop was called Stubb and Flask, named after the second and third mates on the Pequod, the doomed whaler of Moby Dick. It was one in a chain of stores that sold good, regular coffees with fancy-sounding names at a preposterous markup. This made the gullible customers feel they were getting a quality product, a little like Neiman Marcus or the Mormons. The literary connection of the name also made some customers feel well read, which indeed some of them were, but what’s the point of being well read unless you can feel it—i.e., show off about it. Stubb and Flask coffee shops became immensely popular the world over until they were sabotaged by eco-warriors, who claimed the company was ruining the planet with plastic heat-retaining lids for their to-go cups: The lids had a half-life of fifty thousand years. The eco-warriors firebombed a few stores in Paris and New York and customers panicked, deciding to return to reasonably priced diner coffee and safety. No one wants to be hideously burned for a nonalcoholic beverage, no matter how delicious and intelligent.

  In the purse that Leon and Saul stole there was three hundred dollars cash, twenty-six Vicodin pills (a powerful painkiller with a very pleasant narcotic buzz), a brochure for a pet funeral home in San Bernardino that provided open-casket ceremonies for cats and dogs, and a partially used tube of Preparation H, a salve for the treatment of hemorrhoids. It was an Aladdin’s cave for the boys; the only thing they couldn’t use was the pet undertaker literature but they kept it anyway as a souvenir. Saul later had the brochure framed and hung it in his office.

  The boys used the money to buy two one-way tickets on a Greyhound bus from Palm Springs to Las Vegas, and after enjoying a latté each from Stubb and Flask, they took a couple of Vicodin and grooved all the way to Sin City.

  Saul had developed juicy grapelike hemorrhoids from being so fat and damp and sitting on the plastic in the back of the truck from Florida, so before they left, he slid into the bathroom at the bus station and with his index finger liberally applied the healing balm to his angry anus.

  The combination of theft, drugs, cash, and anal relief made Saul feel as good as he ever had and set a pattern for his life for years and years to come.

  The boys slept on the bus, slumped in the uncomfortable seats, their heads touching.

  In Vegas they got a room in the Bier Keller, a cheap and strangely Bavarian-themed motel about a mile east of the Strip, the main street in town. A twin room in the Bier Keller cost twenty dollars a night and, huddled in a dark bedroom named the Putsch Suite on a bed that would vibrate if you fed it twenty-five cents, the boys plotted their march to world domination.

  Saul was of the opinion that Leon’s talent was so great that they only had to let people know what he could do and cash and prizes would follow.

  Leon was of the opinion that Saul could take care of everything.

  They shook hands on their business arrangement in their dark room, the only contract they ever had.

  Leon sings and performs and he gets 50 percent.

  Saul takes care of everything else and he gets 50 percent. (Ironically, in later years Leon and his ghastly retinue of hangers-on would always talk about “taking care of business” but the only person who ever took care of Leon’s business was Saul.)

  Rather than plod aimlessly from audition to audition trying to find a spot in a chorus line, Saul had Leon sing every night at Mr. Bambaloni’s. Soon people were turning up at the bar to hear Leon, not themselves, sing. Saul, in interviews he later gave, equated this time to fishing. He was just waiting for showbiz to bite, which it did the night Cadence Powers stumbled in.

  After hearing Leon sing, Cadence approached him at the bar and gave him the old spiel about Los Angeles and Hollywood and opportunity, and perhaps he might like to talk etc. etc. Cadence knew he should play it cool. Passive/aggressive is key in talent negotiation but he also knew that this guy would get snapped up fast if he didn’t get to him immediately. Leon listened to Cadence’s pitch patiently for a few minutes, then pointed across the bar to Saul, who was sitting in a booth in the corner sipping a Shirley Temple.

  “That’s my manager. He takes care of everything.”

  Cadence looked over at the sweaty, acne-covered (Tootsiepop Ted had just killed LeShay Jackson and dumped her eyeless body on a hiking trail on Kennesaw Mountain) fat kid and thought that he would be able to snow the youngster with some big name-dropping and money talk.

  He was wrong, of course. Saul was already much tougher than him. Saul burned Cadence for a cash advance and he and Leon moved to Los Angeles. Cadence paid for this move out of his own pocket and signed the boys into a partnership with him personally. He did not want to be marginalized by the more senior agents at CAM who would have stolen Leon from him at the earliest opportunity had he not protected himself in this way.

  He got the boys a two-bedroom apartment on Sweetzer Boulevard in West Hollywood, not far from his own place, and set about getting Leon a series of “generals”—meetings with casting directors who could put Leon’s name forward for him to be considered for upcoming projects.

  Casting directors in Hollywood are usually gay men or middle-aged women, so Leon shone in these getting-to-know-you meetings. He flirted and smiled and joked and charmed, but there are lots of extremely good-looking young men who can flirt and charm in Hollywood, it’s one of the things that makes the town so obnoxious, so although he did well, that is to say he was liked, nothing came of any of these meetings.

  Saul complained to Cadence that he had Leon go up for acting jobs when he was a singer. Cadence said, bullshit, everyone was an actor and he knew what he was doing. He just wanted enough people to know who Leon was before he had a showcase. He was raising Leon’s profile.

  “What’s a showcase?” asked Leon.

  “It’s where you get to score your fir
st goal,” said Cadence.

  The only other client of any importance that Cadence had was an English screenwriter named David Trundle. Trundle, although a mediocre talent, had managed to wrangle a scholarship for the prestigious UCLA screenwriting course that had been paid for by BAFTA, the British Academy for Film and Television Arts. He got this through his social and family connections in the U.K.

  Trundle, a triumph of the English public-school system (which is what the English call their private-school system), was a well-mannered weasel who would succeed far beyond his potential. In another time he would have joined the British Foreign Office.

  The screenwriting course itself is prestigious because it has produced a number of students who have written highly lucrative formulaic blockbuster movies for the big studios, movies about evil tornados or evil aliens or evil scientists or evil dinosaurs or serial killers or tough-but-likable maverick cops who don’t play by the rules.

  Cadence’s biggest triumph at CAM was when he managed to get a million dollars for a spec script Trundle had written, a ludicrous thriller called Fingerplay, the story of identical twins Esau and Luke, who are separated in childhood. Esau becomes a scientist/serial killer and Luke becomes a tough but likable maverick cop who doesn’t play by the rules.

  Esau finds a way to forge fingerprints by genetically restructuring his own hands. He steals his brother’s identity and frames him for a string of murders, and Luke, the good twin/cop, has to clear his name or he will go to the gas chamber and lose his girlfriend.