And off they went to her place nearby. She was terrifying inher need, and bayed like a stampeding elk when she saw thatJohn wasn't wearing underwear. That night was his first sleep ona mattress in weeks, but he was promptly booted out in themorning when she left for her job processing spreadsheets at a Dean Witter office.

The following night he scored again, this time with a frowzy-haired plump young mother strollering her eight-month-oldpast a Pottery Barn. She also lived close by, and offered John ameal afterward-lettuce and a packaged stroganoff ca.s.serole,which he ate Without talking. The woman and her screaming child struck John as being so alone in the world. It hit him thathis own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and aspaid for as three weeks in Kenya's velds or a cherry red Ferrari.Real loneliness wasn't something an a.s.sistant scoped out andgot a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness. John began to consider his own situation a frill.The only way he could enn.o.ble it was to plunge further, moredeeply and blindly, into his commitment to the life of the road,and garner some kind of empathy for a broader human band ofemotions.

The woman asked John to stay the night, but he declined, lestshe become slightly attached to him and even lonelier whenhe left.

In Riverside County he hopped a railway flatcar that carried him to Arizona under a milky night sky. The rhythm was calm-ing and he slept, waking up to pink canyons and coral clouds.There was a fellow n.o.body at the other end of the car, hoveringover the car's edge to speak in sign language to an invisible friend. John made no effort to talk. It was an unwritten codeamong n.o.bodies that they not bother each other, and therewere so many of them out there! Once John knew what to lookfor, he saw them everywhere. In the same way his brain erasedtelephone poles when viewing scenery, his brain had also blocked out n.o.bodies.

n.o.bodies had surrendered their families, their childhoods,their jobs, their lovers, their skills, their possessions, their affec-tions and their hopes. They were still human, but they'd becomepart animal, too.

Two months into his trip, John was prettymuch a n.o.body, too.

He remembered cruising with Ivan, in the old orange 260-Z,back in the UCLA days of pointless cla.s.ses, sunshine, largehouses filled with rock stars and no furniture, buckets of friedchicken and music that engraved itself onto his brain like script on sterling silver. They were returning from a failed party in the Valley, cresting the Hollywood Hills-Los Angeles lay beforethem. John had pulled the car to the side of the road and Ivan asked him what was the matter. John was silent. He had sud-denly seen a glimpse of something larger than just a landscape.

"John-O, c'mon, what's the deal? You're zoning on me,buddy."

"Ivan, cool down a second. Look at the city."

"Yeah. So?"

"People built all of that, Ivan. People."

"Well, duh."

John tried to explain to Ivan that until then, he'd always un-thinkingly a.s.sumed that the built world was something that wa.s.simply there. But now he understood that people made and main-tained all of the roads as well as the convulsing pipes of sewage that ran beneath every building, as well as all the wires that car-ried electricity from the center of the planet into the hair dryersand TV sets and X-ray machines of Los Angeles County. And withthis news came a further understanding that John himself could build something enormous and do the job just as well as any-body else could. It was a jolt of power.

Ivan sort of got the picture. But not totally. John had alwayslooked back on that moment as the one where he became a "bigthinker."

But now, on the train at night, John felt as if he'd been lev-eled, humbled, like somebody gone back to visit the house they'dlived in as a child to find it turned shabby and unremarkable.

Somewhere in Arizona the train stopped and John got off.

4O6.

Chapter Fourteen.

Making hit movies was one of the smaller problems in John'slife. Ivan handled the workaday stuff like budgets and windmachines and union haggling. John's role was to walk into aroom where nothing really existed except for a few money guyswho wanted a bit of glamour, a good dollar return and a fewcracks at some industry sweeties. John would conjure up a spellfor these Don Duncans, Norm n.u.m.b.n.u.t.s and Darrens-from-Citicorp. He had to cram his aura deep, deep, deep inside theirguts, spin it around like a juicer's blade, then withdraw andwatch the suits e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e dollars. "People, this isn't about cash,this is about the American soul-it's about locating that soul andripping it out by its root. It's about taking that root and plantingit deep into the director's warm beating heart, hot pulsingblood feeding the plant, nourishing it until it flowers and givesus roses and zinnias and orchids and heliotropes and even, f.u.c.k,I don't know, antlers. And we sit and watch the blooms and we'vedone our part. It's the only reason we're here. We're dirt. We'rec.r.a.p. We're s.h.i.t. But we're good s.h.i.t. We're nothing but soil forthe director to grow a vision. And we should be proud of it."Usually, John would climb right up onto the meeting desk forthis portion of the event. People rarely wanted details. Theywanted hocus-pocus and John gave it to them. John had good 4O7hunches and he acted on them quickly, with almost alien accu-racy. He believed that most people had at least a few good ideaseach day, but that they rarely used them. John had no brakes.There was no lag time between his idea and its implementation.He was a film commando. Sometimes it frightened him howeasily people would follow somebody who conveyed the ap-pearance of direction or will.

Bel .Air PI was a reasonably low-budget buddy-cop film inwhich a has-been rust-belt homicide-detective-turned-PI part-nered up with the mayor's daughter, a tawny renegade ("Dar-ling,"

said Doris after reading the script, "your heroine is atawny renegade. Whatever next.'") to establish a PI agency. Theirfirst case was to search for the missing wife of a studio exe-cutive who was located in many KFC-sized pieces in an Im-perial County lemon orchard. Drugs were involved. Betrayal. Afinal shoot-out and chase in which Cat and Dog stopped fight-ing each other to unite against the forces of evil and then Get.i.t On.

The movie relaunched the career of a faded seventies rockstar and gave steroids to a film genre then on the wane. AlmostimmediatelyBel Air PI 2 (Bel Air '2) was in the works, and Johnhad drugs and dollars and p.u.s.s.y hurled into his lap.

Bel Air 2became a monster hit, bigger than the original, andwas followed by an alien invasion thriller with a soundtrackthat number one'd for five weeks, and a terrorists-occupy-Disneyland-style thriller that went ballistic in European andj.a.panese release but didn't work so well in North America,as copycat directors had glommed onto John's noisy, music-drenched formula. To John moviemaking wasn't formulaic. Itwas a way for him to create worlds wherein he could roam withinfinite power far away from a personal history, free of child-hood disease and phantom relatives, 4O8.

Wherever John went, the volume was up full. Once, Johnand Ivan drove John's car-of-the-month, a Bentley "the color of Grace Kelly's neck," down to La Quinta for a Polygram exe-cutives' weekend retreat. They left the car parked in the desert while they searched for pieces of cactus skeleton Nylla wantedfor her flower arranging. Once they'd been in the sun a while,John went to the car and brought back to Ivan's rock perch anarmload of items. First was a laminated menu stolen from aDenny's. He rolled it into a funnel, and used it to send item number two, a half bottle of tequila, down his throat. He thenreached for the third item, a rifle. He used it to fire five volleys into the car's skin, turning it into a fast, expensive sieve. Ivan yelled, "Studly!" John promptly vomited, and stopped having cars-of-the-month after that, settling on the gunshot Bentley ashis distinctive final choice. John had a reputation to keep, and when he entered rooms, success and decadence swarmed abouthim like juicy gossip.

John's one true friend across the years was Ivan. As an addedbonus for Ivan, John came with a mother, Doris-a presencesorely missing in Ivan's life since his father got marriage outof his system just months after Ivan's birth. John and Doris hadbeen living in the guesthouse for two weeks when Ivan wa.s.shipped home from an experimental boarding school near BigSur. He'd been caught sniffing ether from an Orange Crush bot-tle. The ether had been stolen from the science lab by a studentwho traded it with Ivan for a set of puffy stereo headphones.

"Why were you sniffing ether?" John asked on their firstmeeting, in the front hallway of the main house, the floor'sstone so smooth and shiny and hard-looking that John thoughtthat anything that dropped on it would shatter-gla.s.s, metal,feathers and diamonds. Having never been to California before,he believed he could feel the heat mending his body."I was trying to get over something," Ivan said.

"What?"

Ivan looked at this pale, scrawny, unfledged child, more ghostthan body. Ivan decided from the start to take John into his con-fidence. He a.s.sumed that such an underdeveloped body could only harbor an overdeveloped mind. "I have this dopey paranoidfear about"-he paused-"the Ice Age."

"The Ice Age?"

"Yeah."

John could hear Doris and Angus sitting in the living room,laughing away.

Ivan went on. " I keep on seeing this picture. These pictures. Awall of ice like the white cliffs at Dover-sc.r.a.ping acrossPasadena and then down Wilshire and crushing this house."

"Who told you that? It's a crock of s.h.i.t. That's not the way it works. First thing that happens is that it snows-but then thatsnow doesn't melt over the summer. And then the next winterit snows again, and that snow doesn't melt, either. And then itsnows maybe a few feet each year, and none of that melts.

Af-ter a thousand years-a blink in the scheme of things-you'vegot a slab of ice a mile thick. But you're long gone by then. Andif you were smart, you'd have moved to the equator the firstyear, anyway."

Ivan stood and smiled at John and from then on ceasedworrying about the Ice Age. They turned and looked out at theflickering sprinklers in the yard through a small diamond-paned window. "What happened to you?" Ivan asked. "Youlook like you're dead or something. Like you're on a telethon."

From that point, John's body metamorphosed. He grew tall, almost brawny, but good health arrived too late in his adoles-cence to entrance him with team sports. He only cared aboutsolo activities in which he could claim pure victory without the ego dilution of teams. John also stopped watchingTV, supersti-tiously equating it with illness.

John and Ivan aligned, making super-8 films as larks, the firstof which was t.i.tled Doris's Sat.u.r.day Night.

It chronicled her c.o.c.k-tailed devolution from Delaware insecticide heiress elegantly tamping shreds of hard-boiled egg onto crustless toast triangles,loving the attention, then shamelessly hamming it up, becom- ing a haggardmal vivant gurgling fragments of sea shanties intothe pipes beneath the kitchen sink.

Their second film was more mundane. Angus said theyneeded to learn about sequencing and editing, so John and Ivan followed Angus through a typical day of work at the studio-capturing his meetings, lunches, drives around the city and ascreening at night. It was edited together and shown with goofy subt.i.tles at Angus's fiftieth birthday party under the t.i.tle Film Ex-ecutive Secretly Wearing a Diaper Because It Makes Him Feel Naughty, andmarked their debut into the filmgoing community.

John was a surprisingly confident young man, and a doer,not a thinker. This was an impulse Doris had encouraged him tohone. She didn't want John to be a Lodge in any way, and so fos-tered in him an enthusiasm for anything that went against theDelaware grain. She encouraged action, creativity and a strongdislike for the past. She had also talked Angus into removingIvan from the private school system altogether, so both he andJohn could attend the local high school. Neither flourished, butboth were happy enough there, and afterward both young mensc.r.a.ped their way through UCLA, spending the majority of theirtime making short films and chasing girls. John also experi-mented with cars. He bought the orange 260-Z from the pro-ceeds of flipping successively more valuable cars, while Ivandrove a mint green Plymouth Scamp he bought from one of An-gus S gardeners.When they were both twenty-four, they founded Equator Pic-tures, using Ivan's connections and a small loan from Angus.They quickly had their hit with BelAir PI, making them both in-dependently wealthy, independently powerful as well as depen-dent on each other. John was the unstoppable freight train. Ivan ensured that the vegetables served by craft catering were fresh,and slipped $500 to a crotchety neighbor beside a locationshoot who refused to turn off his Weedwacker.

One spring day, somewhere between Bel Air PI and BelAirPI 2,John and Ivan were at an ARCO station filling up John'sgunshot Bentley. 260-Z, his primary vehicle even though bynow he owned the usual industry array of flash-trash cars. John said to Ivan, "I like to pump my own gas into my own car, Ivan. I always go to a self-service pump. Did I ever tell you why?"

"To connect with the man in the street?" Ivan laughed.

"No. Because I like to look at the numbers rev by on the gaspump. I like to pretend each number's a year. I like to watch his-tory begin at Year Zero and clip up and up and up. Dark Ages . . .Renaissance .

. . Vermeer...1 776...Railways . . . Panama . . .zoom, zoom, zoom . . . the Depression . . .WorldWar II ...Sub-urbia . . . JFK . . . Vietnam . . . Disco . . . Mount St. Helens . . .Dy-nasty . . .and then, WHAM!

We hit the wall. We hit the present."

"So what?"

"This is what: there's this magic little bit of time, just a fewnumbers past the present year, whatever it is.

Whenever I hit these years, then for maybe a fraction of a second, I can, if notsee the future, feel it."

"I'm listening," Ivan said. He was so patient with John.

"It's like I get to be the first one there-in the future. I get tobe first. A pioneer."

"That's what you want to be-a pioneer?"

Yes.

Ivan paused and then, with some consideration, asked,"John-O, have you checked your tire pressure?"

"Nah."

Ivan got out of the car, got a pressure gauge from the atten-dant, and came back and checked the pressure. "You've got todo the little things, too, John. It all counts, big and small."

Chapter Fifteen.

John finished dinner with Ivan and Nylla, then went down tothe guesthouse. Doris, having declined dinner with crack babyMacKenzie, was asleep. For the first time since his return fromhis botched walkout he didn't feel cold dark steel down hisspine. He thought back to the women he'd been with brieflyduring that walkout, then he thought of Susan. Turning thefront door k.n.o.b, it came to him that maybe he could spongeaway the look of loneliness that he'd seen in Susan's eyes-andJohn was now pretty sure it was loneliness he'd seen, despite thesmiles and the confidences. If he'd learned one thing while he'dbeen away, it was that loneliness and the open discussion of loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget s.e.x orpolitics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room. Susan could be more to him than his latest box-officeranking. With Susan he might actually help for once, might ac-tually raise something better out of himself than a hot pitch for a pointless film.

Something moral and fine inside each of them might sprout and grow.

He phoned and got her answering machine again. He hungup. He felt sixteen.

When Susan didn't respond within an hour, John found his heart racing, his concentration shot. By midnight he was asbuggy as he'd ever been on drugs, but without the distractions.

He decided to forward his phone messages to his cell phone,then go rent tapes starring Susan. He wanted to see if the lonelylook in her eye had always been there or if it was somethingnew. He also just wanted to see her face. This is how fans feel about stars, he thought. So this is what it's like. To John, stars were just partof the flow of people through the house, like the maids, theagents and the caterers.

But tonight he understood the allure ofthe tabloids and the fanzines.

He drove Ivan's Chrysler sedan down into West Hollywood. Ivan and Nylla preferred the sedan because of its anonymity. Itdidn't look like a rental car, and it didn't look, as Doris had said,"ethnic or frightened middle cla.s.s."

Traffic was tolerable; the night's darkness still felt clean. Hefound a rental place, West Side Video. On entering he saw it wasthe kind of shop where the manager a.s.serts personality by laser-printing signs highlightingevil mothers, cute &dumb, and arcane subcategories likegore fests andlemons, where John was genuinely amused to see his old turkeys, The Wild Land andThe Other Side of Hate.

He realized he had no idea what movies Susan had been in.He asked the clerk, name-taggedryan, if he had anything star-ring Susan Colgate, and the clerk squeaked with pleasure."Meese Colllllllgate? I should think so. Right this way." He ledJohn to an old magazine rack filled with sun-faded tape boxes. Above the rack was a laser-printed sign readingst. susan the divine. The top of the rack was camped up with altarlike candlesand sacrificial offerings-j.a.panese candy bars, prescription bot-tles, a model Airbus 340 with a missing wing, and a mosaic ofhead shots of Susan culled from a wide array of print media.Ryan stood patiently, waiting for John's reaction, but John was silent, the inside of his brain firing Roman candles. He felt as.e.xual need to own the altar.

"She's something, isn't she?" Ryan asked."You did this?" John asked, looking at Ryan, a Gap clone- khakis, white T-shirt with flannel shirt on top. A pleasant BradyBunch face. Like a gag writer at Fox.

"With tender loving care."

"I'll give you a hundred bucks for it, right now."

Ryan was taken aback. "Mr. Johnson-I'm sorry, but I can'tpretend I don't know who you are-this is my shrine. It's notlike I can just give it away like that."

"Five hundred, but throw in the movies."

"Mr. Johnson. I made it. It's not like a joke or something. Well,maybe a bit of a joke. But I've been saving these clippings foryears."

"Nine hundred. Half of what I've got. It's my last money.Everybody knows I'm broke. Even with Mega Force-that's in atrust."

"Don't tell me this! Too much information, Mr. Johnson!"

"John.

"Too much information, John." Ryan put his hands on hiships and watched as John scanned the t.i.tles on the boxes'spines. The store was empty. They could speak loudly. "John, I'm astranger to you, but let me ask you something."

"Welcome to detox. Ask away."

"Are you, how shall I say, in love with Miss Colgate?"

"What?" John was shocked, not by Ryan's forthrightness, butby the same sort of ping he used to get when he discovered who-dunit in an Agatha Christie mystery. "Love? I-"

"Go no further. It's okay. I work for the forces of good. And itdoesn't surprise me, you know."

"What doesn't? I never said I was in love."

"Psh.You're like the old RKO Radio tower shooting out boltsof Susan."

"You're a b.a.l.l.sy little s.h.i.t."

"Now, now." Ryan could see John didn't mind. In fact, quitethe opposite. "I mean, both of you have done disappearingacts. Her after the plane crash three years ago, and you earlierthis year."

John wasn't going to fight it. "Go on. What's your point?"

Ryan rubbed his chin and became professorial. "Well, thiswould have to be a new thing, wouldn't it?

Because if it was evenslightly old, you'd already have seen all her old videos by now."

"Bingo, Dr. Einstein."

"When did you meet?"

"Today. At lunch. At the Ivy."

Ryan whistled, then relaxed his posture. "Tell you what,John. Rent all the videos and I'll report them as lost or stolen."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And don't waste your last money. I'll throw in the al-tar, but there's a catch."

"It wouldn't be life on earth if there weren't a catch. "Qu'est-ce-que c'est,Ryan?" John found himself greatly liking this strangeyoung man.

"You have to answer a series of skill-testing questions afterreading a script I wrote."