 
FOLLOW THE CONTRAILS

William White-acre

copyright 2017 by william white-acre

Smashwords Edition

white-acre.wixsite.com/photography

*other books by the author:

Surrounded By Mythology

I, The Hero

True For X

Forgotten Faces

A Rush Of Silence

Memory 2.0

Heaven On Earth

Mysterious Logic

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Chapter 1 THE BACKSTORY

Chapter 2 GLORIA

Chapter 3 JOEL

Chapter 4 DARI AND WYETH

Chapter 5 LAST EXIT

EPILOGUE

Chapter 1 THE BACKSTORY

I am what is usually (in the business) called a script doctor. My name is Bradford Tuttle and I was born and raised in Oro Rios, California, which is a small town not far from San Diego. I still live in the Golden State, having never lived anywhere else in my thirty one years. Only now I've moved up I-5 a little ways and live in a small apartment on the outskirts of Santa Monica.

Then again, this book isn't really about me at all; but "background" is almost always vital to a story, so I was told by my favorite professor when I was at USC. Never finished though, dropped out in my third year after I was offered a plum job at one of the studios. That may be stretching it a little bit. What it was, to be truthful, was a gig trying to make sense of some idiot's written slop, a screen play about, of all things, Philo Farnsworth, the guy who (arguably) invented television. If they aren't dreaming up projects that are way out there, they want to do remakes, unearthing classics that either shouldn't see the light of day again or can't be improved on. By they, I mean the arbiters of creative input in this town.

Don't ask me how these things get started in Hollywood. There are so many bizarre ideas that get off the ground in TV and Movie land it boggles the mind. Anyway, I was approached by this underling at one of the studios and asked to patch up the script. Why they came to me is the usual convoluted, funhouse mirror type of activity that happens in LA all too often: a friend of a friend, who has a cousin...etc. The nebulous connection that connected me to the project was a guy in one of my classes who just happen to be the nephew of some guy who was an associate producer for HBO and--you get the picture. Because I was indeed plugging away at USC in the wildly overrated film study courses, I was qualified to take a stab at the abortion the honchos were calling a working script. It wasn't, working that is. First, Philo Farnsworth? Secondly, Philo Farnsworth. I don't care if the man did invent the best thing to happen to the modern world, it was still a stretch.

Thankfully, the entire project never saw the light of day. The plug was pulled on the fiasco even before one camera was turned on. Some bigshot came to his senses and stopped it in its tracks, but not before I got my pay check. And it was a big one. They actually paid me gobs of money for, essentially, nothing. Not a thing. I had hardly gotten through the first act. Didn't matter. That was the way it was in Hollywood. Money gushed. It was like classic, simple economics didn't apply. The concept of making film, and TV, all began with the big idea and from there greed and ego took over. On the one hand you had the Suits who wanted to add to their bank accounts, and then on the other was the talent, a stable full of glassy eyed simpletons intent on tasting sweet fame. It was often times a volatile combination but had been working ever since the old farts from back East settled in LA and brought a nation starving for entertainment their fix. I had become just a very small fixture in that production line.

Then I quit school, taking my big pay day, along with my WGA (Writers Guild of America) card, and heading to Venice beach, where I thought I was going to be a successful screenwriter. My parents were horrified. No one wants a college dropout for a son. Hey, they had been against my college major all along anyway. My dad was retired Navy and my mom had been the devoted military wife from way back, enduring long (long) months alone while her husband completed his tours of duty. One of my brothers had gone off to the Naval academy and made our dad proud. The other brother, younger by five years, was a minister, with a wife and two kids. My parents attended his church. My sister, the baby of the family, worked as a flack for our local Congressman, Republican of course. It was said, (by me mostly), that I must have been adopted, from some wayward Hippies.

"Let me get this straight," my father had bellowed once upon a time, right after I told him I would be going to college in LA to study movie making, "you want to go up to LA LA Land and do what?" After a few more choice words on the subject my father, thankfully, never mentioned it again. It helped that I had scored a partial scholarship, thereby alleviating some of the financial burden for my parents, not that it made it any more acceptable.

My father had been a Chief Petty officer on an aircraft carrier for most of his career, which included making sure jets took off and landed without crashing as they did bombing runs over Hanoi back in that war he never really wanted to talk about too much. His world was defined by bulkheads and the smell of aviation fuel for the most part. Everything else he left up to my mother, who was the type to show up at PTA meetings and ask why there wasn't a class about the Ten Commandments in the school's up coming curriculum. I was the proverbial fish out of water, to say the least. In fact, my father had asked, frequently, why I wasn't looking to follow my older brother's lead and gear up for a four year stay at Annapolis. Failing that, he wished that I would enlist like he had done back in the day. There was absolutely nothing wrong with having another enlisted man in the family.

My mother's input branched off in another direction, of course. There were plenty of times I would return home from High School and find a brochure on my bed, usually with Jesus prominently displayed on the front. Her less than subtle hints always included glowing reports about the campus of such and such college and how the courses prepared fine and upstanding young men for the challenge of delivering the Word. Almost all of the colleges were academically suspect, leaning heavily on the scripture, resulting in a greased pipeline right behind the pulpit of some church somewhere out there in the Bible belt. It didn't take, skipped right over me and grabbed my younger brother, who was, bless him, more gullible and a bit of a mommy's boy anyway.

USC was, in the past, a party school, with a reputation as a place rich kids collected at to spend their fortunes with abandon. After all, it was smack dab in the middle of LA. Diversions were built in. The college's mascot name was the Trojans for Christ's sake. OJ Simpson had gone there, or, at least, played for the football team. It did have a film school with some renown, listing among its alumnae personages like: Ron Howard (Opie) and Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame; not to mention a long list of actors, for instance: Tom Selleck, Cybill Shepherd, Kyra Sedgwick and Forrest Whitaker. It was all window dressing of course, because going to college in order to excel in the Arts, especially the movie industry, was asinine. Getting an A on a term paper was never going to get you in the game, much less even in the door. It was all about circumstance and connections, the two acts of God that made everything in Hollywood function.

Did I say I was also gay? Being a homosexual in Hollywood isn't exactly something of note. Half the community seems to be limp wristed, from the hair and makeup crew all the way through a good percentage of the talent in front of the camera, both female and male. We are all so creative and all, don't you know.

Needless to say, back home this wasn't anything remotely to my advantage. My sexual orientation was concealed until the point that I permanently left the city limits. It was the prudent thing to do. Between the Neanderthal leanings of my father to the Scripture screeching of my mother, with the conservative bent of the High School I attended, I didn't feel safe revealing any predilection for delving into same sex, you know, sex. Not that I didn't know which way I wanted to go. The selection process had arrived early enough. By seventh grade to be precise. No more details need be supplied, except suffice it to say my date for the prom didn't have all that good of a time.

Informing my parents, and, by extension, my family of my sexual orientation is a whole another story altogether. Suffice to say my mother cried, my father bellowed, and my siblings looked confused, then angry, like I had somehow offended them. I finally did the deed, after encouragement from a guy I was seeing at the time convinced me to (the bastard) pull the trigger at one of our family gatherings. He had assured me I would feel better about myself afterwards, that I wouldn't have to live a lie all the time around my family. Sometimes lies serve a better purpose in life. It could have been worse, like at one of our family reunions, where Aunt Mildred and Uncle Jim would spit out their drinks at the news. As far as I knew, I was the only faggot in the family; at least no one else had come forward at that point. I'm sure if you did a genealogical search you might find some light in the loafer types somewhere along the line in the family tree.

There were the usual recriminations, along with some beseeching of the heavens too, mostly from my mother, who seemed to take the news the hardest. Not unlike a kick to the solar plexus I guess. Hey, didn't you ever wonder why I never had any girl friends to speak of? When it was over and I had slinked back to LA, glad to be away from the verbal shrapnel, I regretted ever having burst their bubble. I was now a blot on the family name. I couldn't wait until the next holiday, where I was going to have to break bread with my relatives, all the while enduring their smoldering hatred.

That was what shaped my past, or so it goes. I left college and never looked back, off to pursue that Hollywood dream. Make no mistake about it, LA is for dreamers. They come from far and wide, all in pursuit of fame and fortune, which are, most times, symbiotic. You have farm girls from Iowa washing up on the street corners, bringing their fresh scrubbed faces and malleable morals, which are usually easy pickings for the sharks out there, the ones waiting to prey on the easily duped, the star struck idiots. To complement the stable of nubile nymphets, you have young studs arriving daily, hoping to get a shot at their destiny. Being handsome doesn't always fit the bill though. Hollywood creates its own karma. Timing and just plain dumb luck play a part as well.

I would know. I was the lucky recipient of both; of course I will always insist that I am talented as well and would have probably made it even if things hadn't fallen into place like wayward stars aligned in the heavens. No, not really. To this very day I know people on the periphery of the business who are still struggling to make their mark and they are far more talented than me with the written word. LA is like that, one big carnival of injustice and anti-meritorious behavior. Otherwise how can you possibly explain away some of the drivel that ends up on the screen, big and little.

Hollywood could be baroque, while being similar to some Balkanized continent set adrift in a sea of desire and if that sounds like philo-poetic nonsense you have only to spend one day on Wilshire Blvd to see you are looking out through the looking glass, if you know what I mean. The rules, such as they are, exist in a vacuum, one created and designed by the power brokers, the ones who bring you your daily entertainment, from pot boiler movies, with insanely sophomoric plot lines, to contrived sit-coms on TV where the actors all seem as if they have been lobotomized. Hell, most times they even add a laugh track so the viewer doesn't even have to think about the humor content. Flabby, atrophied sense of humor aside, we, the public, are just the minions in the process.

It's true. Sure we have, (in this economic give and take), the leverage because we pay the money, which is the fuel that keeps every thing in order, but we possess no power. None to speak of. In offices all around LA you will find beady eyed cretins devising new entertainment to foist on us, usually with a small brain trust of, say, lawyers and bean counters. Even though there might be different tracts in which to deliver the goods, so to speak, representatives of the big and small screen still share one thing in common and that is: remittance.

Little screen, TV, sucks on the teat from advertising, while the big screen looks to ticket sales, either from the theaters or DVD's. The bottom line prevails, always. If your really bad picture brings in the big bucks, even if the movie makes a star of some functioning idiot in the process, you have another lease on life, good until that next film or TV show bombs. I know all about this little phenomenon first hand because one of my scripts--a tidy little project I was called in on after the original screenwriter actually tried to drown himself by jumping off the Santa Monica pier--went belly up, costing the studio a bundle along the way. Afterwards, for maybe some two years, my name was radioactive. Oh yes, Hollywood has a penchant for seeking out scapegoats. Some exec gets a hair up his butt about wanting to make a movie about circa World War II LA, casts an actor right out of rehab for the lead, one who can't even remember his lines, then wonders where it all went wrong. The box office, the final word, was not too kind.

I survived, barely, by doing any odd job that came my way, such as TV scripts from the outer limits of cable land to B movies, you know, where the actors sound like they are reading from a school primer. The paychecks were small and it was a blow to my ego but a necessary step in order to stay hooked up to the vital lines that would keep me connected.

There were a few scores along the way, thankfully, keeping me linked to the flow of business coming in and out of LA. Fortunately, for me, my rep was rehabilitated when I worked on a screen play which turned out to be a sleeper hit for a small Independent, one that grossed a boat load of bucks. The star of the project was a washed up actress who had been off of everybody's radar for a long time, so long that she had fallen down so far she wasn't even considered D-list material. If memory serves me correctly, she had taken to living in, of all places, Alabama--or was it Georgia? Didn't matter. She couldn't even get her agent to answer her calls. The plot was straight forward, where the lead takes in a runaway, a young black girl, and the two of them pass through the usual stages of discovery, ending up on the other side of things better people. Sure, it was the usual sentimental tripe but the acting turned out to be above average. Anyway, it struck a chord with the public, winning some awards at a few of those phony film festivals that every podunk town seems to have nowadays. Word of mouth did its trick and the picture went on to be nominated for an Oscar.

Didn't win, but my name was back in the mix because of the film's success. Not that I had much to do with it. I like to give credit where credit is due. The down on her luck actress did a glorious job of acting, carrying the project to the very end. She was a real pro, as they like to say. She coached the young, Afro-American actress all along the way. I guess it helped that she was indeed from the deep South originally and was able to reach back and portray the character with a lot of authenticity. The film only worked because of the inherent racial overtones and all. Not that it was all that sociologically important in the scheme of things. Yet it did bring to light the new South's growing pains, something I wrote into the script even though I haven't ever been east of the Mississippi in my life. I did do some research. Thank you Internet, from Google earth to the Wiki, I don't know how I would have pulled it off. How in the hell did the world exist before the Net?

The Motion Picture Industry does have happy endings sometimes. The lead actress took home a Golden Globe and got to fire her jackass agent, replacing him with one of the high powered kind, the ones who get their phone calls returned by all the important types in the biz. I was glad about that. When you have been in this business for any length of time it does tend to strip your soul bare, leaving behind a general all around sense of distrust and simmering rage. Humanity as it is on display in movieland isn't pretty most of the time. The deadly sins are routinely flouted, as they say.

Still, I live here, even (of late) thrive in these environs. I have a relatively (emphasis on relative) nice place in a more or less appropriate part of town, with the requisite expensive car (my one bow to my new found financial situation) and on the go life style. While we wordsmiths aren't exactly high up on the food chain, we do have our mantle in the scheme of things. Out front and center are the celebs of course, with your well known Producers and auteur Directors up on their pedestals too. Behind the public scenes are the Studio heads and the like, the real power brokers if truth be known. They pull the levers behind the curtain, allowing the empty headed Stars to live their gaudy lifestyles, perpetual fodder for the weekly mags. All of those depraved movie stars you see on the covers own their very existence to the chieftains who collect the investment moola that brings the product to life.

Fortunately for all of us who toil away in the industry, bringing more fantasy to light, the American public can't get enough of celebrity trivia, from DUI's to court ordered rehabs to who is bopping whom on any given Sunday. It is all so, you know, unbecoming for a nation to even want to hear about some idiot's wayward practices, all the while he or she is pulling down millions per annum. I am no historian but it does seem to me that never before in recorded history has a civilization been so preoccupied with a strata of society that lives high off of labor that doesn't produce anything but organized mirages. The average person's life is so devoid of meaning that they have to alleviate their sense of emptiness by escaping through cinema and TV, then chase it all with a large dose of journalistic gossip.

I use the word journalistic loosely, of course. Writing about so and so's drunken melt down, with the almost mandatory mug shot supplied, does not make for any authentic journalism, if we are being completely honest here. I have an ex who makes a six figure income from taking photos of celebrities in the act, the act being anything that shows them misbehaving, which occurs on a routine basis in Hollywood. On any given night you can find some dickhead out and about creating havoc at some club after hours. Late night LA is alive with drug and booze fueled decadence. All you need is a reasonably good SLR camera with a decent telephoto lens, a general all around lack of standards, and the ability to stay awake late at night in order to get plenty of shots most photo editors would fork over big bucks for. Like any good wildlife photographer, you have to have patience.

Paparazzi are, for the most part, vermin. They prey on their prey with heartless abandon, always willing and eager to push that shutter button like a trigger on a rifle. This cat and mouse game between the Stars and the camera toting jackals is, ultimately, good for Hollywood. In its own warped way the interplay between them feeds the beast, if you will. It allows the grubby mystique of Hollywood life to be perpetuated, continually. Little blond Starlet decides not to wear any panties out in public, who is there to record this tiny bit of human history? The photographer gets an eye full, the magazine editor gets a story, the Starlet gets more pub, and we as a civilization get entertained. It is a chain of events that, while disheartening, creates its own little economy. I'm no economist but it does seem like supply and demand have never been so...so delineated.

So that is where we are now in this new century of ours. The crossroads has been passed, so it seems. Back in the 1700's, the world feted scientists, (e.g. Herschel, Watson, Priestley, and Rutherford), people who actually were making earth shattering discoveries. Today, we lionize people who recite lines written for them and get paid obscene sums of money to do so. Things have been turned on their head for sure. Ask me if I'm proud to be a part of it and I will tell you, after some equivocating, maybe. I do work hard, in a way. I mean putting words to paper isn't exactly backbreaking labor of course but it is work. Trust me, after you have had to deal with some of the nincompoops in the biz I deserve all the recompense I can get. Truly.

Being in my early thirties, I am in my prime. At the height of my creative output I can only hang on as the inevitable decline begins. The things I have experienced would make for good TV, as they like to say. Hell, they could build one of those ridiculous reality shows around me, despite the fact that I don't live by the mantra: Show Your Ass. Who wouldn't want to watch some fussy homo dishing on the back streets of LA? Not that I'm all that flaming or anything. In fact, I am one of those reserved type of gay men, you know, where you are never really quite sure what team they are on. Might just be metrosexual, you might think.

That's not true either. You won't find me pumping it at the nearest Equinox gym, hell, you wouldn't see me even at a Snap Fitness. I don't dress like I just stepped out of a high fashion catalogue and if you saw my apartment you'd immediately think I was in the process of moving out--or in. I still have card board boxes stacked in one corner. It is safe to say also that Martha Stewart wouldn't approve of my mismatched set of dishes and silverware, some chipped and slightly broken. I am, if not anything else, utilitarian, as I fail to continue to uphold any outstanding stereotypes. Oh, I like sports too, especially those fringe ones like they have in the X-Games competitions.

As to relationships, I've had several, all ending in abrupt changes to the living arrangements. Nothing to see there. Heterosexual unions end just the same way, you know, slightly messy with some shouting along the way. We gay men can be demonstrative of course but then again, judging by the neighbor to my immediate right, the one who had the cops at his door at two in the morning to break up a pan throwing contest, couple contretemps aren't the exclusive domain of the homosexual community. It is said that we in the gay end of things have more partners, which may be true but I think it only establishes the fact that we, as a minority, have a compressed set of guidelines that facilitate our relationships faster. Not unlike comparing dial-up to broadband.

Currently, let me just say I am unencumbered and like it that way. I don't really but like to tell myself that. It is what people do as a defense mechanism of sorts. We humans desire to be connected to each other on whatever level. It is built into our mutually shared psyche. Makes perfect sense. Evolution may keep changing the order of things on some molecular level yet it can't extinguish certain traits. I'm sure my mom would disagree but then again she can't come to grips with biology being at odds with Biblical strictures. It goes without saying she hasn't accepted having a son that does things the Bible proscribes against. You are not going to win that argument, mom. Lord knows she has tried.

My little brother, the minister, has tried too, often. He still sends me brochures for this religious camp where they pray the gayness out of you. At least that's what I think they do. I believe it was called reparative therapy or something. The front of the church bulletin type of thing always has several smiling men on it, all former "butt fuckers," as my dad likes to call us. They have been "cleansed," made whole by Jesus. Pithy to the point scripture is included too of course, making their case against the sinners who can't seem to get their orientation right. To a man, all of the former faggots on the page look like they miss that little dab of KY in their life. I mean it. Each one of them has this demonic smile plastered on their face and look for all the world as if they have suffered from some sort of cruel shock treatment. I suppose they have.

"Honey, did you get the brochure your little brother sent you?" my mother will invariably ask in our weekly phone call, the one where we talk about everything and nothing simultaneously. "He says they have new sessions starting all the time."

This is a timeworn conversation and I have long since grown weary of it. I'm a good son though and try to humor her the best that I can by replying: "Got it, mom, but I'm kind of busy working on this script right now." This accomplishes little because she is determined to save my soul at all cost. No man is going to be burned in the flames of hell for bending over on her watch, especially if it is her own son. "How's dad doing?" I usually throw in, hoping to switch up the conversation, divert her missionary zeal anyway I can.

She doesn't miss a beat though and brings in her ace in the hole by announcing: "Did you ever know Jerry Howell?" Here it comes, I think, dreading the avalanche of righteousness coming my way. "He is back with his wife, you know. They are very happy."

It always seems that these confused sinners are married and have strayed from the marital bed, escaping to do some of the devil's unnatural acts. Apparently, they are men who suppressed their inner urges long enough to accept society's norms and lay down with the opposite sex, resulting invariably in marriage. It happens, a lot. There are kids in the picture too, along with a mortgage and prying in-laws to avoid. How their eventual transgressions come to light I have no idea. Did the wife open up her husband's sock drawer and find a stack of Blueboy magazines concealed under his Hugo Boss briefs? Whoops! Or was he seen exiting that disgusting gay bar down on the avenue, you know, the Cockpit? Did he come on to your next door neighbor, Jim, the ex-football player who works out religiously in the backyard with weights, grunting in time to hip hop tunes. Didn't the panicked wife ever wonder why her husband was so fond of Lifetime movies, or why her husband's clothes were always folded so neatly and why he had his butt beard waxed? Who knew?

I didn't. That was a dynamic I couldn't get my brain to even think about. Although I had concealed my gay orientation early on I could have never gone through with matrimony for heaven's sake. How did that work exactly? I knew where all the parts were of course but damn if I could imagine linking them up in any way, much less procreating in the process. Pretty damn weird, if you ask me.

"Sounds like another success story," I told my mother, imagining her standing in her kitchen while we chatted, probably simultaneously perusing her recipe box contents, wondering whether or not to make that custard concoction she has been wanting to spring on my dad.

Unfortunately, for me, my mother detected my sarcasm and stated reproachfully: "It works, you know!"

My mother wasn't one to raise her voice all that much, mainly because she was so certain of her convictions she didn't think she had to. I called it the certitude of her rectitude, not to her face of course. I was always amazed how some people could possess such unwavering personal beliefs. Hell, I even envied them. They were unshakeable for the most part. I don't think anything I had said on the subject of my sexual orientation had ever registered with my mother. Never. She most likely thought it was the devil talking through me anyway. Somewhere along the line I had been corrupted and it was now her life mission to absolve me of my predilections.

"Why don't you give it a try? What do you have to lose?" she went on, using her customary line of reasoning, a form of logic that, to her, seemed full proof.

"My identity," I answered, regretting it immediately because in these little give and takes over the phone I never wanted to put up any type of resistance, something to latch onto so she could quibble about my intransigence. Persistence was a virtue to my mother.

She gasped into the phone and I imagined her losing her place in the recipe box full of 3 by 5 cards. "That's not your true identity, you know," she exclaimed. "The Lord doesn't let his--"

"Mother, listen," I interrupted, going into evasive mode, "I gotta run."

"Bradford..."

"I'll call you next week. Say hello to dad and company," I stated, hurrying off the phone.

So there was an uneasy truce in my family. My older brother, the Naval Academy grad, barely tolerated me and my baggage, while my sister took time out from her busy schedule as a working mom to pity me, leaving my minister brother to rain down fire and brimstone my way. Actually, well, he just seem to ignore my chosen lifestyle, or, at least, that was how he dealt with it. Having a fag for a brother in his business made for some professional, shall we say, friction in his theocratic orbit. When you lived by and within the confines of Biblical condemnation there wasn't a whole lot of wiggle room when it came to living life with values as your guiding ordinance.

I often wondered what his congregation thought of me or rather him, my brother, the man of the cloth. Did they sit there and listen to one of his Sunday sermons all the while wondering about their leader of the flock having a sodomite for a brother. Surely they must have disapproved on some level, especially since Christians are so fond of judging. If you listened real hard could you hear whispers out in the church pews? Did this make my brother self-conscious as he went about the Lord's work? Hey, didn't Jesus hang out with a lot of men, I might ask? You know what I mean, all those disciples. Blasphemy aside, although I hadn't officially been outcast from my family, I was certainly an outsider.

This made for some pretty dicey holidays around the house. Of recent, I had begged off attending Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings. They were too arduous, with hours and hours of sphincter tightening politeness. One year, a few years back, I had entertained the idea of bringing my latest love interest with me, right down the I-5 and into the living room of my parent's house. Make for some cinematic upheaval. I fantasized about how it would go, with me playing the merry prankster indeed.

"Dad, I want you to meet...(let's call him Roger), Roger," I would say, smiling an idiot's smile, while my dad recoiled, afraid that he might catch something by shaking his hand.

Roger would be cool about it, settling on a short wave and a smile, before saying in the best macho voice he could muster: "Hey there, Mr. Tuttle. Nice home you have here. How 'bout those Chargers, think they'll make the playoffs?"

It would go down hill from there of course, with my mother being the next target. She would be wiping her hands on her apron, wearing one big, fake smile, all the while in her head several timeworn prayers would be competing for space. Roger would tell her that something sure smelled good then compliment her on what she's done with the kitchen decor. Mom would thank him politely, remembering her manners to offer him something to drink. Then big brother would walk in, still wearing his midshipman uniform, at least in my recollection, and give us the stink eye before muttering a greeting under his breath. Of course Roger would feel right at home around Navy uniforms, having been cruised by plenty of drunken sailors over the years. After that my sister would make an appearance, still frazzled after a day at work, cell phone in hand trying to track down her husband who was supposed to pick up the kids. She would smile and comment on Roger's shoes, setting off a running commentary on the virtues of such and such designer. It would all conclude with my preacher brother arriving with his brood and menacing wife, the one who detested me out of principle, and they would both offer up a cool reception.

My mother, at the dinner table, piled high with a mountain of caloric overkill, would ask: "Roger, what do you do for work?" This would at first sound like an innocuous question but would quickly be followed by: "I didn't know you people went in for that type of work." It wouldn't matter what line of work Roger did. That was beside the point. It would be the opening salvo of the battle that was about to begin. Dad would grunt a lot, keeping his attention on his plate piled high with any number of dishes my mother had whipped up. The brothers, in tandem, would ignore us, leaving my sister to take up the slack, in between phone calls to her missing in action husband, the one she hen pecked within an inch of his life.

This never happened for two reasons. One, I was too much of a coward to show up at my parent's house with a lover in tow. Two, nobody I was going out with would ever even think about driving to San Diego, much less spend a day with my parents for a holiday meal. That was the truth, the gospel as I lived it. My family's coda, steeped in the New Testament, ruled the day, and still does.

They all lived in a tidy world down there, a skip and a jump from Mexico. Well, to be accurate, my older brother was stationed on a Destroyer out on the ocean somewhere, holding up his end of things in the interminable War on Terror. While I labored at the site of the American Dream Factory, my other family members eked out an existence in anticipation of the Second Coming.

My sister, bless her heart, worked hard to keep another Republican asshole in office, as she raised her two little future Right-wingers, maintaining the bloodline so to speak. Another generation of narrow minded, soul sucking monsters were in the pipeline. She, and her reluctant husband, the one who was probably bopping his secretary at work, were doing a bang up job in perpetuating the downfall of America. In their vision of the United States of America homogeneity was in vogue, even if the demographics said otherwise. Let it not be said they weren't near sided. There might be one rather large foreign nation immediately to the south, with two thirds of its brown population knocking on the door but, hey, Jesus will straighten it all out when he returns.

My minister brother was on the front lines, if you know what I mean. He was doing battle every Sunday. He too had little ones to carry on the banner in the future. A boy and a girl, two little snotty nosed turds who thought their Uncle Brad was going to burn in hell one day, probably sooner. "Mommy says you are evil," the little girl had announced to me one day, eyeing me coldly. "Yeah, she said you are sinning all the time," the boy chimed in, wagging his finger at me. We were standing in the backyard of my family home, right next to the swing set my dad had assembled so many years before. They were swinging away, two little pious shitheads, certain of their convictions.

I didn't respond, but rather just stood there and took it. Okay, so I was, basically, kind of a coward, but I usually did have a tart, sarcastic rejoinder when needed. Yet, I was mute. More dumbfounded than anything else. My mind was whirling at the time, thinking about what else their mother had been filling the little monsters heads with. Parenting in America really was the source of the nation's problems, from the education system all the way to the political crapfest we like to think of as our functioning democracy.

Sure I would have liked to have yanked them off those swings and slap them both, hard, knock some sense into them. Their parents had been poisoning those young minds on a daily basis. It was criminal. I just knew before long the two of them would be home schooled, better to inculcate the "true" order of things in the universe. They would grow up to be drastically ignorant, with a set of educational constructs that allowed their adolescent minds to stew in their stupidity, all bolstered by fantastical nonsense from the Bible and Conservative doctrine.

Between my sister's offspring and my little brother's two little shits, there would be four more members to be duly initiated into the fold when the time came to keep the stranglehold on the national mindset. The neo-Dark Ages had already begun in America, having been instituted back in the 80's with that President who had lost his marbles, proving that the Republicans and intellect were mutually exclusive. Some day, God willing, we would all live in a world where history began with the Bible and science need not apply. Sandwiched in between will be glorified greed and a general all around distaste for facts. The only saving grace, thank the Lord, was that my older brother hadn't gotten around to having any children, to date.

So I was pretty much devoid of family life, left alone in LA. Not once had anyone in my family asked to come visit me on my turf. I suppose I should have offered to host one of the family holiday meals. That would have set off alarm bells on the home front. Somehow I couldn't picture them in my apartment. It would be like attending an armistice council.

Gay men were used to living untethered. Families were often jettisoned. Some lucky ones maintained linkage. A few of my friends enjoyed that familial connection. I was envious, and I wasn't. You still had to deal with the complications a family inherently brings. As callous as it sounds, your family can be detrimental to your well being. Having a core set of good friends was often better.

Friends I had, in abundance. In this business you had to cultivate acquaintances who sometimes turned out to be good friends. I had been fortunate on that score because throughout the decade or so I had established a coterie of friends, female and male, who turned out to be a godsend. They made your life worth living, even if that sounds like a greeting card sentiment. I could always count on them.

Being in my early thirties, and reasonably healthy, I had a lot to be thankful for, even if in my line of work you could be flushed down the toilet at any given time. It was the nature of the job. Money, high powered dickheads, and fame were combustible. Throw in raging egos and it was a scary mess. You tried not to think about it though, choosing to stay in the moment. That was Hollywood, succinctly put. You were always as good as your last project.

Some people, both in front of the cameras and behind, managed to ride the crest of success all their careers, but they were few. Luck and circumstances played a large part of course, that and a fickle public who sometimes bestowed legendary status on some actors and directors, where they could do no wrong even if they acted or directed stinkers along the way. Hollywood could chew you up and spit you out in record time. The road sides were piled high with decomposing careers. There was no real formula to follow that would guarantee cinematic glory.

It didn't matter that flame outs were happening every hour of every day. Still they came, from little towns in Ohio and scarcely populated Provinces in Canada, where moose out numbered the people. Nubile girls, barely out of their teens, stepped off Greyhound buses, with a smile and a tight ass, ready to be discovered. A large percentage of them ended up returning home disillusioned, shocked to discover that once in the fabled land they were just another piece of candy, while ten percent or more ended up on the streets, easy prey for pimps who turned them out and silver tongue hucksters with spiels about stardom. Males came too, trying to parlay good looks into fame. Competition was stiff because the beauty quotient in LA was so high the average had long ago climbed off the charts and most couldn't compete.

Actors, musicians, directors, writers, there was a stable of young bucks trying to take over, continually. The turn over was high. True there were a few women in the mix but it was still a testosterone charged town. Even though it wasn't exactly a company town like in the past glory days of the big studios, there were still some pretty big honchos pulling the strings. It was inevitable that some freelancers would throw down the gauntlet. Some were making massive amounts of coin, obscene piles of cash. I often wondered why the viewing public hadn't stormed the bastille yet. When you can command twenty mil a picture (and more) something is wrong with the order of the universe.

Naturally, all those funds had to end up somewhere. That was why LA was awash in tacky decadence. The closer you got to the beach the more taste became, you know, questionable. Money, like water, flowed. I personally had been to parties where you thought some Roman Emperor was having a birthday. It didn't seem economically possible for anyone to accumulate so many Benjamins. Didn't the economist have a theory about all of this largesse, I often wondered. How about that columnist in the New York Times? What did he have to say about a culture that enables a relative few to expend so little to get so much? It was topsy-turvy economics. And socially criminally in a way.

When you have seen an actress demand a block long RV on the set, one with a certified chef on stand by and (I kid you not) psychic, then you know we as a society have forfeited everything. There were times I was called on the set to make some last minute changes, giving me a hands on view of the nuts and bolts operation that manufactured the end product, the one that went out over the airwaves or onto the big screen. Not a pretty sight, and deadly boring. The mechanics of what went on behind the scenes is stifling. It was all pedestrian, not unlike an assembly line. Anyway, I would be huddled there, trying to remain inconspicuous, as I banged away on my lap top, hoping to please the producer as quickly as possible. It was then you got to see the magic laid bare.

It was all about pouty actresses and dimwitted actors being corralled by whining directors, with disinterested crew members wondering who was catering the shoot, hoping for something good to eat. It was a miracle anything remotely entertaining came out of these productions. I would hand over my words, electronically of course, and off they would go, on to the next scene, ringing up more money. At first I had been electrified to have my words come out of some half wit's mouth. Being part of the process was ego boosting. I created, like being a god with a very small "g".

That feeling soon diminished though, replaced by the common drudgery of repetition. Relatively big pay checks were nice and all but it was, in its way, mind numbing. How many times can you scrape you mind for ideas, especially since every single plot line devised by man has already been done? Sure you could put a twist on it, one little wrinkle in the script that might make the audience take notice, but it was still formulaic drivel most of the time. You could go outside the box, so to speak, and write up a few twists and turns, something to hit the refresh button on your brain. Then again, as it went, in Hollywood they had a way of slapping down someone with too much creativity. If the suits didn't think it would pass muster with a large swath of America then it wasn't good for business. You must remember, this madness all started back in the 1920's, when they were churning out maybe 800 films a year. Those Jewish guys from back East sure knew how to sell the American myth.

It was, after all, still a business, one with a business model that leaned heavily towards the bottom line. I always thought that every single meeting that agents and producers took in this town should begin with the mantra: Make me millions. Why not? It was right to the point. No need to jump through any hoops. Even if the agent was representing the latest big name it didn't matter. Not in the end. What mattered was more fuel for the next picture. Hollywood, not unlike say Exxon/Mobil, had a goal in mind. It was very simple, really. That A list actor might increase the bottom line but there still had to be a certain trajectory that would fit nicely on a graph. This was capitalism stripped down to its essence. Manufacturing writ large. Universal, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros, and Paramount, they still rule the roost to this day, a corporation success story unheard of in modern capitalism history.

Let me just say it again: Was I proud of what I did for a living? That is a loaded question, I guess. Ask anybody in my family that question and you can imagine what the answer would be. To them, I was part of the problem, as in just another liberal destroying what the Founding Fathers were all about. It was funny how the conservatives really hated the movie industry and its subsidiaries, as if they never partook of any entertainment whatsoever. Did they think that all those TV shows and movies they watched were hatched from some unknown land of diversions?

In answer to the question, I was and I wasn't. Let it be said I wasn't one of those types that thought he would one day win the Noble Prize in Literature. Nope. I had never had that dream, ever. Writing fiction (or even non-fiction) in the book form wasn't something I had aspired to do. Not that I didn't read my share of the classics. I did my homework. Inserting literary references into tired shopworn scripts wasn't beneath me by any means. It was just that as a kid I was always thinking in terms of a cinematic bent, especially after having logged so many hours in front of the TV or at the movie theater. Still, I didn't think there was anything remotely noble about what I did for a paycheck.

Quite the opposite, once you factor in just what I was perpetuating everyday, that being the celebrity regimen that is most probably responsible for causing our country to rot from the inside out. Maybe it's not as bleak as all that. We may be on a fast train on a dead end track but there was always hope. Joking aside, I had long ago come to terms with my life--and lifestyle. Being a wordsmith for the industry made me nauseous at times but it was my lot in life.

With that said, let me get on with the story at hand, namely how I got ensnared in two people's lives and lived to tell about it. Their names are Joel Jenkins and Gloria Worthington, two unrelated individuals who, through me, became linked. How I came to befriend them is what my story is all about.

It all started with a phone call, like it usually does. I was in my car heading to the Valley to see an old friend, someone I hadn't seen in a few months. I answered my phone, hands free of course, and heard: "They told me you were the guy to talk to." Say what, was my first reaction. I hadn't recognized the voice on the other end of the line, so I was puzzled, thinking that maybe they had the wrong number.

"Excuse me," I exclaimed, chuckling.

"Marty...he told me you could pull it off," the voice continued in this gruff voice, one that I'm sure was used to getting what they wanted done--yesterday. "I sure hope he wasn't bullshitting me."

Marty was my agent, a man who if not for being my agent I wouldn't give him the time of day. Simply put, he was a shark. I landed him, or the other the way around, right after my script work on the Southern movie, when my star was at its apex. Before that my agent had been this profanity spewing woman, Sylvia, who worked around the edges of the industry, picking up mostly jobs that nobody else wanted to go after. She was in her late forties, overweight, and angry most of the time. She had two of the attributes Hollywood detested going for her, age and blossoming obesity. Despite these two strikes against her she was, more or less, a good agent because she got me work. That she was good at, even if most of the jobs were low rent and weren't going to polish your reputation all that much.

"Sure, kid, I can fucking represent you," she had said. I had called her after getting a referral from a friend. "Can you get your ass down to my office some time today?"

Her gravelly voice boomed on my phone, so much that I had to hold it away from my ear. I had been given a lead by a buddy of mine who used her as his agent. He was one of those types, you know, who hang around town barely scoring acting parts here and there while they do odd jobs to pay the rent. We were friends in that Hollywood way, which meant that we occasionally saw each other around and shared the bond of two people who were trying to become a part of it. Secretly we both dreaded either one of us becoming successful and leaving the other one behind. Not that it was a zero sum type of thing. It was just that in this warped occupation your ego was in the driver's seat, leaving you with a sense of individual achievement that left little or no room for anyone else. That was why celeb romances, the ones between two stars, were always doomed from the start. No one person could allow, psychologically, themselves to be eclipsed.

"I can be there in an hour," I stammered, startled by her directness.

"I'm waiting," she croaked, then hung up.

The meeting went off okay, I guess. She turned out to be 40ish, dumpy, and blew smoke in my face, while she chain smoked through the meeting the whole time, telling me the particulars of her style of representation. Her office looked like something out of a Noir detective movie, leaving me to wonder where she had gotten the circa 1950's furniture. It would have been somehow chic if not for the condition of the furniture, which had seen better days. I don't think I have ever been in an office (doctor's, dentist's, insurance agent's, etc.) that didn't at least have one painting or photograph on the wall. It was almost as if you were on the set of Twilight Zone episode, only in color.

We inked a deal right away, mainly because I was a rookie in the business and felt privileged to be landing an agent. My eagerness and naivete probably cost me some upward mobility in my career but it wasn't like I didn't get work. Sylvia was good for that. Somehow she had her finger on the pulse of what went on around town, even if it was a rung or two down the ladder. I was grateful to be given a chance to show my worth.

As I said, after that day work was steady. In fact, she called me the very next morning, at six in the morning. "Wake up, numbnuts!" she almost shouted into the phone. "I told ya you might hear from me at anytime of day or night, didn't I?"

"I seem to remember you saying something like that," I said groggily, glancing at the clock on the nightstand.

"Got a commercial for you," she announced, and I could hear her shuffling papers on her desk. "You awake, dumb fuck?"

Commercial, I thought, wondering what exactly that had to do with me. Didn't ad agencies do the copy for that sort of thing? How did I fit in? "Sylvia, I've never done any...you know...ad copy type of work before," I told her, trying not to whine.

"Big fucking deal," she shot back. "Do you want it or not?" she demanded to know, slamming drawers in her desk in the background. "I don't got all day, dickless."

"I'll take it," I found myself saying, immediately regretting it. After I hung up, dazed, I held my head in my hands and wondered what in the hell I was doing. Could be an adventure, I thought, something different. It can't hurt to round out the resume, right?

That was the way it went with Sylvia. She would call me up at any time of the day, bark at me for a minute or two, then demand to know my decision. As a working relationship it was, well, stressful. I had been told that your agent becomes your confessor/friend, if you are lucky. They link you. They are the lifeline. Having a good, solid rapport is vital. I never had one with Sylvia, per se. She was always brusque and border line cold to me, almost as if what we were involved in wasn't a relationship of any sort. Friends of mine had told me how they could call their agent and, basically, shoot the shit once in a while. I had never once held a conversation with her.

Then again, she saw her job as the proverbial facilitator. That she was good at. Party A needed a position filled. She knew Party B could fill it. It was relatively simple. Sylvia had been brought up in a small burg in Texas somewhere, a place that put a premium on results. That she delivered. I couldn't complain about that.

What I ended up complaining about was the quality of the work. After you have pieced together copy, on the fly, about the virtues of so and so's feminine product--written by a gay man no less--and bailed out amateur producers on over budget, straight to DVD shlock, you start to see a pattern forming. I could have stayed on doing the lesser known work around town and made a living. Plenty of people did just that. Nothing dishonorable about it.

There comes a time everybody has to think about jumping the line, if you know what I mean. Take that next step, a voice inside me was always saying. Challenge yourself. Take a risk. It wasn't that much of a personal crucible though.

Marty had reached out to me first. Somebody had mentioned me to someone else who told him and so on. I was at the grocery store when he called me. Two women next to me in the produce section were having an argument about who had done what to whom so I could barely hear him on the phone. Then he repeated who he was and I recognized his name. He had a reputation. His history was full of slash and burn tactics. Some hated him and others swore by him. Why was he calling me?

Hollywood could be like that. It was almost like the oil business, where everyone is wondering who is going to make the next big strike. Marty had a stable of A-listers so I couldn't imagine why he was calling me. I was small potatoes. It didn't make sense. Then he mentioned the actress's name and I knew she had put a good word in about me. She had been grateful for the script, the vehicle that got her back into circulation, making her more relevant.

"Take a meeting?" he asked, speaking in the verbal short hand he was famous for.

"Sure," I managed to say.

We met. It was a cliché of sorts, with him springing for a meal at one of the eateries I had only heard about and never thought once about entering. There was a sprinkling of celebs at the other tables, along with a few heavy hitters on the production end of things. So this is how the other half lives, I thought, immediately regretting not putting on my only suit for the occasion.

Marty was holding court at one of the back tables when I arrived. He was your archetypal Angelino, synthetic tan, just north of 50, with a steady supply of Botox to ward off the march of time. There was also a starlet, if I might use that dated term, seated at the table. She was in her mid-twenties and already in decline. By the time she had gotten out of her teens she had been in several top grossing pictures, making her platinum as far as the Suits were concerned. Of course she was a hand full too, constantly dodging court dates and law suits. Believe it or not I hadn't seen one of her movies; but I had seen her décolletage plenty of times on the rags at the supermarket checkout, the ones where the headlines screamed out all of her contretemps with the authorities.

When I approached the table, she threw back her extensions, a wonderful hue of red, and eyed me like I was the bus boy. She probably thought I was some autograph seeking hound. Marty looked up from his Blackberry and squinted at me, before putting on his glasses. I got a lump in my throat immediately, sure I was going to be asked to leave by the wait staff for being an imposter. There would be a scuffle, as the maitre'd joined in to get me in a head lock and drag me out. The world famous chef, who owned the restaurant, would appear, knife in hand and want to know who was disturbing the glitterati at his eatery. The next day there would be a small piece in Variety about some poseur trying to infiltrate the ranks of the high and mighty--and rich too.

"I'm Bradford Tuttle," I announced in a way too squeaky voice, one that revealed my nervousness. Then I stood there for what seemed like a very long time, long enough to once again hate the sound of my name on my lips. It sounded for all the world like some made up name, one from maybe a bad children's TV show that aired on Saturday mornings on PBS. He would be the character that leads the children in doing their ABC's or something equally silly. The kids on the show would all call him Bradford Turtle and laugh until they were red in the face. I didn't know if I hated my first or last name worse.

Getting his glasses in place, Marty stood up and offered his hand across the table. The nymphet actress relaxed, realizing that I wasn't some celeb crazed fan. I sat down on the other side of her and could smell the gallon of perfume she had doused herself with that morning. It might have cost hundreds of dollars an ounce but putting it on by the liter didn't make it any more acceptable. Now, seated, I was hoping to just blend with the surroundings. No need to make a spectacle of myself. Nothing to see here, just some underling trying to scale the walls to the castle.

It might seem unbelievable but I had never "taken a meeting" before. I had been in LA for a decade or more and somehow it had just never happened. True I wasn't exactly your garden variety person of note but, still. The rite of passage never came up. Most times I had just worked a phone call or even used a fax machine, even on several occasions dropped off scripts to some of those houses on the beach in Malibu you might see in films, the ones that are always in danger of getting washed away in the next storm to blow in off the Pacific. The power brokers didn't need to really speak to me, just read my words.

This is going to be different, I told myself, as I sneaked a few glances around the restaurant. Come Oscar night this very room would be alive with the denizens that make the myth work, all liquored up after a night of congratulating themselves. The winners would be celebrating their achievement and the losers would be drowning their sorrowful humiliation that had occurred on national TV. I would be back at my apartment, the one with the impossibly high rent, leaky bathroom faucet notwithstanding, watching on the little screen, probably with a few friends not in the biz. We would be keeping score sheets after having bet on the eventual outcome, delighting in the nominees' misery when they didn't pick up a trophy. In this town schadenfreude was like a national sport.

"Glad to meet you," Marty stated, speaking with just a tiny trace of his native New York accent, something watered down after having lived in LA for so many years. "Sarah Wheeler," he then said, pointing in her direction, using his customary abbreviated speech pattern.

I smiled at her and she gave me a tired wave, then snapped her fingers at the passing waiter and pointed to her glass, which was empty except for some shriveled up olive. She was having the classic three (or four) martini lunch. Up close, she was truly beautiful, if not just the least bit spent by all the late night revelry. Her eyes really were the most alluring color of blue I had ever seen. Marty then glanced at me for an instant and managed to convey the sentiment that she was a pain in the ass and he couldn't get rid of her; at least that was how I read it.

Not knowing what to say, I said in a strained I'm scared as shitless voice: "I was surprised by your call." This was, strategically speaking, stupid to start out with because it made me sound as if I wasn't somehow worthy of being in the same room as him.

Marty looked up from his omnipresent Blackberry and replied: "Heard good things about you." Then went back to hammering away on the keyboard, grunting ominously. I exchanged glances with Sarah, who forced a smile back at me. Her martini arrived and she greedily sucked it down. And I thought dinner with my family was psychologically crippling, I told myself. The I phone was placed on the table for a minute and Marty said, "Try the trout...the best."

For some reason I hadn't thought about the very elementary act of eating. After all, it was lunch. Not that my table manners were all that atrocious but they did have the tendency to lean towards early caveman at times. Did I say that I was a bachelor? I was used to eating fast food and yelling at the TV, mostly the answers to the game shows. When I did sup with the public it was usually with my friends, the ones who thought pizza was a four course meal and didn't see any need for napkins. Now I had a duel layer of nerves to deal with.

"I like that shirt," Sarah suddenly announced, reaching over to feel the fabric, invading my space big time.

It was all I could do not to recoil, then flee the restaurant, running out screaming like a little girl. Collecting myself, I said, "Thanks."

"What's that made of?" she wanted to know.

Hell, I hadn't a clue what it was made of. It had been left behind when my last boy friend departed. I knew he had bought it at some chic-chic shop on Rodeo so I decided to wear it to the meeting. "Feels like silk," I told her, smiling.

She actually gave me a warm smile in return and I knew the martinis were starting to cloud her vision, not that I'm hideous or anything. It was just that, despite what team I played on, there was an unwritten rule that the established classes didn't mix, not unlike interspecies commingling. She was definitely on the A list and I wasn't even listed. I couldn't help but think about all those headlines devoted to her, you know, extracurricular activities. I mean she had actually been busted for riding a motorcycle down Hollywood Blvd, naked. Her DUI mug shot had been front and center for months afterwards. On the net you could see her "wares" on full display. Even though I really wasn't all that interested it still made me uneasy to be so close to her.

"What do you do?" she wanted to know, figuring out that if Marty was interested she might as well be too.

"Writer," Marty answer laconically, pushing his way into the conversation as only he could. "Got something for you," he exclaimed enigmatically.

"Do you," Sarah purred, patting my forearm playfully.

"Okay," I managed to say, gulping.

There it was, on two fronts. I was now to be represented by one of the piranhas of the agent world and he had something for me. Was this really happening? Were more martini lunches in my future? The next thing you know I would be back in the kitchen asking the chef to whip up my favorite dish and he would laugh and say in some impossible to peg accent that he would get right on it. Sarah and I would start a platonic relationship, one that benefited both of us professionally. We would become BFF's and text each other all day until our fingers started to bleed. I would be attending all the A-list parties and my mother would see my face plastered on the cover of the tabloids at the check out. Finally she would be proud of all of her sons.

Dreams die hard, as Marty said: "Got two scripts. Need 'em yesterday. Studios can't wait."

I looked over at him, taking in his balding head and slightly bulging eyes, then replied, "Two?"

"Fucking crazy, huh?" Sarah cooed, smacking at my arm playfully.

There was a loud buzzing in my ears or at least it seemed that way. Across the room several Suits were giving Marty polite nods. A bottle of champagne was being opened in the corner, giving off a loud pop, quickly followed by cheers as another deal had been sealed. More money for some mush for brains actor, while the public got to see yet another sequel, making it an even four. Soon I would be staring down at my lunch, which would be staring back up at me. Fish have heads, I thought, because my only exposure to what swam in water was usually breaded and sectioned into easily manageable bits and pieces--and formerly frozen. This was it. I was on the threshold of the big time.

The lunch concluded with Sarah excusing herself by saying in no uncertain terms: "I feel fucking sick." She then stumbled to the bathroom and never returned. Maybe she flushed herself down the toilet, I don't know. Marty acted as if it was all systems normal. All that was left of her was the putrid fallout of stale perfume. Over dessert, and don't ask me what it was, some fruit I'd never heard of bathed in chocolate sauce, delivered to our table on a plate that looked like Georgia O'Keefe might have designed it, we worked out the specifics. Listening to Marty was like reading a telegram. He spoke like someone who had flunked his Berlitz course on the American English idiom, where pronouns had been jettisoned for reasons unknown.

It was about then that Marty's phone buzzed and he then handed his phone to me. The man on the other end was some honcho at one of the studios, a guy who made lesser human beings tremble. That would be me. He had squired through picture after picture, resulting in a stream of iconic American films. I wasn't even worthy to be on the phone with him. He was like a Pharaoh. If you stacked up all the money he had made at the box office it would reach the moon.

What I gleaned from his instructions, such as they were, was that my project (s) were to be a road trip of sorts. Now this was novel. Very. Give me my lap top and the Internet and I could write you anything you ever wanted to know about anything. Really. Throw in a little bit of imagination and some historical markers and I could get it done.

Not this time, so Marty informed me after I had hung up with the God of movie making, staring from behind his too large glasses, the ones that made him look like an aging intergalactic alien. Two pictures had been given the green light and both of them had floundered under the weight of, you know, incompetence. Through a combination of subject matter and bad writing the money sunk into the twin projects had produced little or no results to speak of.

That was where I came in. I had a reputation for rescuing ill fated ventures. In the past, so my track record proved, I brought any number of stinkers back to the land of the living, from TV scripts so fucked up they looked like verbal spaghetti to films where the director couldn't make heads or tails of the writer's intent. I could do that. I had done that. Even if the picture wasn't going to win any awards it still worked. The actors spoke lines that made the next scene shootable. Such was my talent.

"Seen your work," Marty informed me, scooping up his dessert and pointing his spoon at me. "It'll work."

Thanks for the vote of confidence, I thought, before replying, "It sounds...kind of impossible."

He actually gave me a wink and stated: "Not a problem."

In what I could glean from his staccato explanation I was supposed to finish two scripts that had been bogged down for months. In fact, the whole two projects had been years in the making. They had been tossed around from studio to studio, with each beady eyed titan of the motion picture business trying his or her hand at it. The subject matter was compelling, there was no denying that. However, each time one studio starting laying the groundwork problems started popping up. I didn't want to know about the difficulties because it didn't serve my effort beneficially or otherwise. Not that Marty was willing to supply all the back story anyway. As far as he was concerned I was the man for the job.

Okay, now I was starting to get a whiff of, you know, lamb to the slaughter type of thing. I could only imagine one of the studio stooges saying something like: "What's his name? Tuttle. Let's throw him in there and see what he can do with this pile of crap." His lackeys would cackle out their approval and then call Marty. He was probably on their speed dial anyway. "Hey Marty, how's it going? Listen, got a real hard nut to crack here. I wonder if you could help me out with this shit storm?" When you need cannon fodder who ya gonna call?

I could fall flat on my face; although now that I think of it I had never experienced that before. Some of my work hadn't been top notch but I had always finished. That's right, no script had ever been denied. I guess I could and should be proud of that fact. It had to mean something in the scheme of things.

In a nutshell, what Marty wanted me to do was complete two scripts about two living individuals. Sounds easy. It wasn't, because the two people in question were ubur famous and one was a notorious recluse. That's where matters stood. Two world renowned people were going to be immortalized further in film, that is if the studios had their way.

Chapter 2 GLORIA

Biographies were never easy, that was a cardinal rule for writers. Unofficial ones were even more difficult, if not impossible. Having the subject on board with the project is always a nice thing. You often times heard about "unofficial" bios being written about so and so, usually muckraking enterprises where the author either had an ax to grind or was being paid big bucks to eviscerate the personage in question, sometimes both.

For me, it was neither. Although I was going to be taking home some remuneration, if you will, it wasn't going to put me on easy street by any means. I also wasn't out to get anyone either. In fact, I hadn't spent a whole lot of time thinking about either subject. They might have been famous but they didn't register all that much with me.

Gloria Worthington was, more or less, a household name of some repute. I mean after all she had written like six best selling novels, with a few more non-fiction tomes thrown in for good measure. I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't read any of them, not one. On the fiction side of things, well, her books leaned towards women's issues, if you get what I'm saying. There would be a strong female figure who, in the end, only gets stronger after having to undergo some pretty harrowing adventures. No, that's not quite right. The theme of most of her fiction centered around human interest things. That isn't correct either. Damn, I guess it would have helped to read some of them.

All I know is I had a friend, an actress, who loved her work and was always going on about how the protagonist was some strong willed woman who had overcome adversity in some way or another. Several of her books had been made into movies and done quite well at the box office, so much so that most A-list actresses were clamoring to read the scripts. That, in Hollywood anyway, was all you needed to hear to know that she was hot property; of course it also helped that Ms. Worthington was also routinely on the top of the New York Times Best Seller List, Amazon too. She didn't need Oprah swooning over her to sell any books.

Oddly enough, her first foray into publishing had been a non-fiction work, a memoir about her first love and his friend, with a little bit of war thrown in too. Now it all seemed dated since it took up the Viet Nam War and all. America had long since moved on, choosing to forget all about that pesky little conflict we lost way back in the other century. Anyway, it was an instant hit and launched her on her way in the literary world.

It must have been something to knock it out of the park on your very first try at bat. Then again, as it goes, you had to follow it up with something else or be thought of as a one hit wonder, a flash in the pan. Well, she did, many times over, switching to fiction with ease. Oh it might have not been all that easy but she sure made it look that way.

Best sellers have a way of making the world look different, so I'm told by another friend of mine who wrote a best selling novel when he was in his mid-twenties and found that people thought he was genius personified. Afterwards, when his second book was roundly panned by the critics and all but ignored by the reading public, he sunk into a deep depression and never came out of it. What I mean is he never wrote again. Last I heard about him was he had taken a teaching position at some non-descript college back East. Being an associate professor at a State college has a way of defining your path in life, or so he wrote me in an email. I could smell his decaying spirit from thousands of miles away.

Gloria had never faced that in her writing career. She had stayed on top, even after surviving several marriages. Being married to one or two tools didn't even set her back all that much. Oh sure, there must have been some moments of emotional turmoil along the way. It only made her stronger, not unlike some of the characters in her novels. Fame, so I'm told, has a way of dissecting your life, as if somehow you have been placed on the ME's table ready for the autopsy. Even if you don't invite the attention from the tabloid hounds they still find a way of peeling back the layers of skin until you are decomposing like some murder victim.

Imagery aside, Ms. Worthington happened to be from Washington DC and enjoyed the status of being born into a family of political world Brahmins. At an early age she had rubbed up against the power elite on Capitol Hill, which, in its way, is another orbit of celebrity. Back in the day, before cable TV of course, politicians eked out a living doing the nation's business in relative obscurity. Politicians, with the exception of JFK, weren't sexy. They were men (with a few women) who got voted into office by a scant percentage of the total population and were content to bring home the bacon, beholden only to a few vociferous constituents and greasy lobbyists with deep pockets. The Nation's business went on as usual, aided by good hearted graft and a hazy concept of civics.

That changed sometime in the late 80's or early 90's. You could blame it on Clinton maybe but then you would be missing the point. Twenty-four hour cable TV was the culprit. There were time slots to fill, all with minutes begging to be plumbed for reaction. Hollywood in all its glory couldn't fill the void completely. MTV and that other music channel had there niche but it wasn't enough. Politics was a natural to fit the bill. It was a blood sport and people love that. Villains were plentiful, setting up an easy selling point. Besides, it was always topical too, lending a built in edge, one that was always changing from day to day, bill to bill, election to election.

Not that I noticed all that much. On the home front, for me, it was always the same. We leaned right and there just wasn't any other direction. Gloria was born into it, having been brought up in the Washington DC. What was that like? I wondered. Did you ever get sick of all those monuments? Wasn't the nations' capital kind of, you know, like living in a History Channel show? Having never been to DC, I couldn't imagine what it was like. The place did seem as if somebody out there was trying too hard. Ersatz Greek architecture has a way of being, you know, cheesy, like a bad Disney ride. Sure we stole a lot of our political structure from the classics but did we have to copy everything?

Let me get back on track here. I was given permission by the publishers to include a chapter from Gloria's first book. I've included it because it has a tract about her childhood that might be illuminating. Far be it for me to try to outdo the author when writing about her.

1 LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD

I will probably never forget the first time I met Luke. Of course, I had heard so much about him from my boyfriend, Daniel. They had gone to High School together, in Virginia. Daniel and I were living together at the time. We were sharing a townhouse in Georgetown that my uncle owned. My uncle worked for the State department and was out of the country, posted somewhere in South America.

My family were long time residents of the DC area, going back to colonial times. I had been brought up in Georgetown, just a couple streets over from where Daniel and I were living. My parents were both Washington born and raised. It was a legacy of sorts, one that reached back to when the city was still swamp land. Daniel would often tease me about my, for lack of a better word, peerage. The only distinction that I saw in any of my personal history was the fact that hardly anyone I met actually came from Washington, DC. The Metro area was awash in transients, most lured there by the pull of the national government.

Daniel himself had spent a part of his youth in the suburbs, on the Virginia side. In fact, that was how I usually divided my friends. They were either from Virginia or from the Maryland side. Daniel and I had met in college, at Georgetown University. Two years later we were sharing a place not far from the campus. My parents, although not dyed in the wool traditionalists, disapproved. Not that it was in any way a reflection on how they felt about Daniel. They approved of him, in theory, but not under those circumstances. My parents had married at the age of twenty-one and embarked on a marriage immediately, setting down roots in the very neighborhood that many of my uncles, aunts, and grandparents had throughout the years.

My father was a lawyer, who worked for one of those high powered firms that had a pipeline to the Hill, one in which politicians were on a first name basis. As to my mother, she had been a "homemaker," but with portfolio. She had taken her degree from George Washington and parlayed it into an attorney's spouse with influence. There probably wasn't an organization in DC she didn't have connections to on one level or another. Besides, she excelled at the one thing in Washington that equaled clout and that was how to organize a cocktail party.

There were many evenings I would sit at the top of our staircase in my pajamas and eavesdrop on the bubbling conversation below, trying desperately to make sense of the adult talk being conducted in all sorts of languages and accents. We often had dignitaries of every stripe over for dinner, accompanied by pols from both sides of the aisle, with some military types thrown in for good measure. My mother, ever the gracious hostess, was expert at the art of conversation, able to expound on just about any subject.

They were a team, my mother and father. I was the eldest of two daughters, older than my sister by seven years, giving me a over half a decade to monopolize my parents attention, affording me the run of the house for a good many years. At my parent's gatherings, I would almost always try to make an entrance, something my mother had forewarned me about. Actually, she had forbidden me, ordering me to stay in my room.

I could never resist. As soon as I would hear all of the hubbub downstairs I would invariably creep to the top of the stairs and listen. Eventually, with clumsy stealth, I would edge my way down the staircase until which time one of the guests would spy me sitting there. Generally, I would be greeted with smiles and offers to join them, much to my mother's consternation. My father would laugh, wagging his finger at me.

Then I would do a tour of the room, stopping to take in the guests, which was usually like a UN committee meeting, with citizens of the world in attendance. Some would shake my hand formally and others, especially from the Communist block countries, would pinch my cheeks and pat my head, as they cooed so close to my face I could smell their boozy breath. My rounds would be cut short by my mother, as she scooped me up and literally carried me up the stairs, apologizing as she went. Once I was plopped back in my room I would be read the riot act, again, and she would be gone, closing the door behind her, leaving behind the faint smell of her perfume. I would eventually slip off to sleep with the clink of cocktail glasses and sound of muffled conversation echoing in my ears.

I have been told it must have been an idyllic childhood, being brought up so close to the seat of power. It was, in its way. At college, after meeting other people of my generation, ones who had experienced a totally different type of childhood, I was envious of them. They had been steeped in middle-America for the most part, able to participate in radically different milestones than I had. Something as simple as a High School football game seemed, to me, like a priceless experience. My educational career had been spent in private schools, where the pretentious quotient was so high that your family's political leanings and place in the Washingtonian pecking order determined just how much fun you were going to have.

Daniel, on the other hand, had attended a High School in the suburbs that, despite its close proximity to DC, afforded him all of the trappings you might desire when imagining the attributes of Americana. He had been the captain of his football team and, if he is to be believed, the Homecoming King. Proof that he had indeed been steeped in all that America represents was best demonstrated by the jacket I found in his closet after he had moved in to our townhouse in Georgetown. It was one of those archetypal coats emblazoned with a large letter on the front, complete with patches sewn on to display all of his accomplishments on the playing field.

I don't know why but when I first saw it I had been astounded, then I laughed. Somehow the Daniel I knew didn't quite fit with the Daniel that might have worn that red and black coat with the patent leather sleeves. When confronted, Daniel had whined defensively: "It's my letter jacket, Gloria, what about it?" I didn't know what to say so I told him in a voice that I hoped sounded earnest: "I'm not mocking you, Dan." He had eyed me for a moment, then scoffed under his breath, before stomping away. Here there after, the jacket disappeared, never to be seen again. I personally think he shipped it off to his parent's house for safekeeping, in due time to become an heirloom of sorts, some talisman to bring back all those fading memories of High School glory.

As memoirs go, it was about average. I can say that now because once I got the assignment from Marty I did a crash course on my subjects and that meant reading some of her work. I will admit that I can't quite understand why the memoir was such a success with the reading public, except to say that it was, in a way, emotionally pithy. I mean come on, one of the lead characters commits suicide for heaven's sake. Sorry if I gave it away for anyone who hasn't read it yet. Then again, Gloria was young when she wrote it and still smarting from the material, if you know what I mean. I can't relate all that much because I have never once brushed up against any personal input in my work. They say you can't write without including at least something of yourself in the written words but I disagree. Oh, okay, maybe on some level perhaps but I assure you when I was rewriting a screenplay on, say, that SyFy piece about lizards attacking America or the serial killer axing little kids in Fresno, I wasn't reaching back and drawing from anything in my childhood.

This was different, I know. Ms Worthington had a moment. War. Love. Death. It writes itself. She lived it too. I'll give her that. Still don't know why it was a best seller though. Must have had to been there. Unpopular war. Demonstrations. Generational divide. I can draw up an outline pretty easily. You really don't need to take any creative writing courses to see that.

She was feted by the press and the women's groups loved her because the book was not only a less than subtle anti-war screed it had a heroine who was strong and didn't need to complete her life by accepting a man, faults and all. Something like that anyway. Okay, I didn't read the whole thing. I relied on a friend to fill me in on all the details. He was a lit professor at a local community college and had read the book in one of his classes years ago. He assessment was, in a word, "drivel." He also said it had its charms too, whatever that means. Like movies though, books can get dated really fast and this one was no different. The "60's" had been analyzed ad nauseam already. I mean, you know, hippies, give me a break.

Fortunately for Gloria Worthington she would go on to complete quite a well rounded oeuvre. Besides, who am I to judge anybody else's body of work? I write scripts for a living, for Christ's sake. I don't think in the future any professor is going to be putting any of my screenplays on his syllabus for the academic year. "In the third week we will be taking up Bradford Tuttle's work," he might announce to his film studies class. "He was responsible for saving about a hundred films and is probably the one man who personally saved Hollywood from destruction." The class would ooh and ahh and half of them would whip out their cell phones or I pads and dash to Wikipedia to get the details of my life. Once on the web page they would find my photo, the one taken when I was drunk at a party and I look crossed eyed. They would quickly read that I am a repressed homosexual who likes to play video games between projects.

It was safe to say I wasn't in a position to criticize anyone on what they write. Like I said before though, I had never had any literary pretensions. None. In fact, I was decidedly low brow or what you might call low rent. Movieland was never going to be thought of as the pinnacle of culture, despite how much print was devoted to it. We didn't even think about character development or casual denouements of any sort. The rules were different in that we really didn't have any.

Oh sure sometimes Hollywood would try to act all cultural by making a picture that might be thought of as socially responsible. Sometimes it even worked, as in the critics liked it and so did the public. They were usually historical dramas and were exceptions to the rule though. We were all about schlock, where the American people (and the world really since they got to see the films too) got to sit there and vegetate for ninety minutes of their time. Buy some popcorn, get some milk duds, then shelve your mind for a little while. It was escapism pure and simple. We provided a service.

For a relatively small price we reduced the national stress level; and the beauty of it all was that any particular genre didn't matter. Like to see bodies dismembered, we got slasher films for you. How about maudlin love stories, got that too. Vapid comedy, no problem. We had it all.

Getting back to the subject, the picture was going to be one of those types that takes up where the protagonist looks back on her life. Made sense because Gloria was now 60 years old. She had lived long enough to lay down some tracks, so to speak. Two failed marriages, resulting in one offspring, a daughter, rounded out the family life angle. Over the years she had brushed up against Hollywood enough to come away with some noteworthy lovers too. Being that her books were mined for box office pay dirt, she was familiar with LA LA land and its, you know, peculiarities. In her day, when she was a little bit younger, she had even added to the celeb gossip gold rush I'm sure. Without a doubt she had appeared in People magazine more than once.

That was before and this was now. Present day found her living in Sedona, Arizona. Don't ask me why, but she did tell me that the American Southwest had fascinated her ever since she first saw the place. This seemed odd to me because everyone of her novels had been set in and around Washington DC. It was what she knew and, as they say, write about what you know; unless of course you are me in which case you fake it the best way you know how. That in itself takes a special type of talent. I once reworked a script that had a cyborg manufactured in China as its lead character. I can't even handle chop sticks competently. It was an Indie film, one of those people liked to call "sweet" because they don't won't to say it sucked. The director was an "Autor," which translates to mean he just got out of film school and thinks he's a boy genius. If you look real (real) hard you might find it on Crackle or Hulu but I doubt it. The title of the film was: The Number Eight. Good luck with that.

I decided to drive to Arizona to interview her, Ms. Worthington. Why, I don't know. Getting to know the subject wasn't really all that necessary but Marty convinced me that it might help me "round out" the script, what ever that means. Bullshit was what usually rounded out the script. I could do that and not skip breakfast in the process. That is to say it was relatively easy. There was enough material on Gloria to make a mini-series. The woman had known politicians, actors, sports figures, you name it, and some intimately. Her life wrote itself, from steamy bed room scenes to grand views of Washingtonian shenanigans. There were plenty of juicy parts to work with.

"Go, talk, come back," Marty had more or less ordered, while in the background another call on his phone buzzed away. He fussed with his phone for a moment, then continued, "Call me."

"I...I don't see why--" I tried to say before he hung up on me. This was new for me. Before, with Sylvia, I had never been, shall we say, manhandled by my agent. Oh sure Sylvia had plenty of advice to toss my way but she never was one to make commanding pronouncements. No, she was more likely to lay out what jobs she had on tap and wait for me to decide. Sometimes she would nudge me one way or the other by telling me to stop wasting her time and decide already. With Marty, it was different in that he instructed me, leaving little room for decision making on my part. Did he do this with his other clients too, I wondered? Wasn't he working for me?

That was decided when I gassed up my car and headed East, knowing full well how much I hated the desert. Being from the San Diego area you didn't have to go far to be in legitimate desert surroundings. I was always one to look West, towards the ocean. There might have been one big, gigantic wasteland of arid dirt out there but I didn't want any part of it. Once my parents had taken us to see the Grand Canyon and all I wanted to do was sit in the car while my siblings ogled the big ditch in the ground. It didn't help that it was in the summer and every tourist on the planet happened to pick that particular day to show up and see one of the wonders of the world.

I had been in my teens then, just another ungrateful turd who hated the very idea of spending hours in a car with my family. I'm sure Arizona, and the American Southwest as a whole, is a wonderful area but not everyone has to wet their pants over it--right? Oh okay, its pretty and they have that whole geological thing going on there, with the rock formations and colorful rocks etc. It's also like being on the surface of Mercury in the summer and is so dry the climate will suck the life out of you. Not to mention it's a Red State where the locals like to pretend they are in the Wild West so they all carry guns.

Road trips weren't one of my favorite things to do anyway. I was one of those rare Californians who didn't like to drive all that much. To compound the problem I was going it alone. I was dreading passing through the Inland Empire, one of the most boring places on earth, (and what the hell does the Inland Empire mean anyway?) then take 15 up to 40 on past the Mojave, bypassing that shithole Vegas, straight into Flagstaff. I actually have friends who like to drive out to the Mojave Desert; then again they do a lot of drugs too. I knew it was going to be a mind numbing experience, one that even my million and one MP3's couldn't alleviate.

There would be mile after mile of monotonous driving, while I dodged eighteen wheelers and RV's driven by ancient dudes from Iowa or maybe Indiana. I would get a blinding headache from the crystalline sunlight. There would be pit stops in small way stations where the only viable structures in a fifty mile radius would be a gas station and fast food emporium. Invariably, so it went, I would stop, gas up, grab some god awful pre-fab food and wonder how anyone could live out there in that vacant expanse of nothingness. Then there would be what the physicists call the Mind Dilation Effect, where time seems to be moving more slowly as your thoughts are locked down after seeing the same stimuli for hours while you are behind the wheel. About the only thing I would have going for me was the fact that it was early Spring and the inevitable seasonal scorching hadn't kicked in yet.

As a kid my dad had insisted on taking us to see all the tourist hotspots. This lineup of glossy post card fodder included the Meteor Crater (a big fucking hole in the ground), Petrified Forest (no forest there by the way), London Bridge (enough said, except that I might add some dimwit actually dismantled the damn thing in London and had it shipped to Arizona--feel free to scratch you head), the Hoover Dam (not exactly the ninth wonder of the world), and Monument Valley, (home to a slew of movie Westerns). I will say that the valley thing was kind of cool and made for some spectacular movie set scenery. Then again my dad got in an argument with one of the local Indians--Navajo I think--and we were asked to vacate the premises. My dad wanted to take a picture of an Indian woman and she didn't care for the idea, then it went from there. My dad was a big believer in Manifest Destiny, suffice to say.

Childhood memories do shape your adult mind apparently, with a nod to Freud, because man oh man I hated the idea of returning to the Grand Canyon State. Yet there I was, passing from Nevada into AZ, zooming on by the roadside sign welcoming me. To be honest though, I should feel right at home in Arizona because so many Californians have transplanted themselves there. I think it was back in the 90's that so many people abandoned the Golden State and went east. High taxes spurned most to flee, that and the general all around perception that California was becoming a little too brown for their liking and AZ was still lily white.

I won't argue with the fact that California in the early ought's is an economic basket case, and plenty of the inhabitants are numbskulls, but I still don't think it was worth uprooting your life to go live in some stinking desert. You can disagree but living with rattlesnakes and scorpions isn't my idea of nirvana. Plenty of mid-westerners thought otherwise apparently. All you have to do is look at some of the demographics of the Phoenix area to see that a boat load of retirees decided to die in the desert, spending their golden years sucking up pollution from climate inversions while they prayed for the sun to go down and lower the temperature to, you know, ninety.

Like a lot of locations around the country, Arizona had its building boom, then bust. Developers overbuilt, throwing up crappy houses for as far as the eye could see. The fact that they were building in a desert, with a limited supply of water, didn't deter them from creating a developmental disaster. Naturally the politicians went along for the ride. After all, it was a Red State and we all know how much they like any kind of regulations. The Gold Rush was on. Get out of the way.

Now, not so much. The local State economy had been driven to its knees by rampant foreclosures, leaving behind new ghost towns of abandoned homes. The good times had to come to an end sometime. Boom and bust. Arizona, historically, was used to that. Hell, most of the West had been founded on that concept. There were plenty of authentic ghost towns around the State to draw perspective from. Only now it was the 21st Century and there was nothing quaint about seeing dilapidated buildings in your neighborhood. There was no mystique. People were suffering. Lives were affected.

That wasn't what I was there for though. No, I was going to Sedona, which was a world away from that scenario. I didn't know what the per capita income of the town was but you can bet it was off the charts. Money flowed through the town like...pick a river. High income populations have a way of being insulated from outside forces at work. You don't have to be an economist to see that fat bank accounts have a way of distorting any wave on a graph.

Sedona had a reputation as the New Age capital of the world, or something close to that anyway. It had its vortex devotees and general spiritual looniness going on. The place does have its charm, if you like big-ass red rock formations shaped by the elements for thousands of years. They had cute names like: Snoopy and Sugar, along with Steamboat and Cathedral. Many a photographer had peed in his pants over them. There had even been several movies filmed in the area, taking advantage of the unique setting for background.

Still, it was just another small American town with a Burger King and a Super 8 Motel. That it was nestled up against some world class geological abnormalities gave it its cred, bringing tourists from all the world. I guess you couldn't fault people for coming there for a spiritual fix, drawn by whatever vibe they thought the area was giving off. Personal beliefs aside, who was I to pass judgment on idiots who thought the earth was speaking to them through rock formations that happen to resemble the head of a lizard?

To date, it seemed to be one of the bright spots in Arizona as it bucked the downward trend in the economy. The tourists were still coming even though the world had almost gone over a fiscal cliff. The town's coffers were bulging from the tax revenue all the gawkers laid out. Personally, you know, I didn't get it but then again you weren't going to see me hiking up any trails to find my own ritualized nirvana and I wasn't going to be toting one of the latest SLR cameras so I could capture that moment in time when man and earth are in harmony. To be honest, I didn't even use my cell phone camera.

I was there for a job. Some moron had drafted a script about a famous woman and then promptly gotten bogged down before it all went south on him. Now it was my problem. Gloria Worthington and I were going to have to develop a working relationship so I could finish up, thereby assuring my career wouldn't be in the toilet. If I let Marty down on this I knew I might as well put a gun to my head and pull the trigger. My reputation would be shredded and I wouldn't be able to even get a job on a B movie.

Why was I even there though, I wondered? This was something I could do in my sleep. Give me a few hours on line and a few weeks and I knew I could bang out a working script, one that almost any director could work with. Gloria was, more or less, an open book. She had been in the public eye for almost forty years! Who couldn't write something about her? Any mushbrain college student in a creative writing class could come up with something without having to resort to a personal visit.

These thoughts were bubbling up in my brain as I made my way down from Flagstaff, trying not to get car sick as I descended the hairpin turns in the Oak Creek Canyon, the winding conduit that spit you right out into Uptown Sedona. It was a great introduction to what was in store for you, visually, as you got to the center of it all. A two lane road deposited the driver, after enduring some serious curves and crawling cars eye balling the scenery, right in the middle of the tourist trap. It was here that you could shop at the curio shops for ugly t-shirts devoted to telling the world you had indeed been to Sedona, while perusing the Art galleries displaying questionable art by artists who apparently made creations totally devoid of taste. Throw in your usual ice cream parlors selling "homemade" ice cream and sandwich shops and you had rip off the doofus tourists central.

Fortunately, so it goes, I wasn't a tourist. I was there on a mission. The groundwork had been laid. Already I had exchanged two phone calls and several emails with Ms. Worthington. She was, however reluctantly, on board with the project. During our brief phone conversations I hadn't really picked up on any raging level of egotism but then again she was famous. Ego had a way of seeping into a person's personality when they became well known. In fact, the amount of ego was usually in proportion to how many magazine covers they were on and TV shows they had under their belt. Gloria had her share of exposure. Just that month she had been on the cover of some magazine devoted to detailing the lifestyles of the over forty set, specifically women. I had picked it up at the drug store not two days before, thinking it might be of help for any recent research I might need.

I will say this about her, she is good looking, even at the age of 60. At least the air brushed version of her on the cover of the magazine was anyway. The miracles of Photoshop had a way of altering reality of course. I would soon find out just how much the photo editors had allowed because I was in route to her home. It had been pre-arranged for the next morning, "nine sharp," so she had said on the phone, speaking in that business woman's tone I would soon learn was a hallmark of her speaking style. She was a woman who was used to getting what she wanted.

The history of Sedona has been written, over all, in just the last twenty years or so. Back in the 1960's and 70's it had been a sleepy burg, a one road town with some hippies hanging around. Then like magic it took off. Apparently, the world was looking for a place to meditate with some really cool rocks around for scenery. Don't ask me how it got revved up for worldwide attention. If you bottle that particular marketing plan you would be set for life. For better or worse, it was apart of the triad in Arizona, one hub in the loop consisting of the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. Modern day tourism was all about completing the circuit, like seeing London, Paris, and Rome in a whirlwind tour of Europe.

In the last thirty years Sedona had experienced a building boom. Houses, big ones, were sprinkled all around the surrounding hills, even pushing up against the famed rock formations, so much so that they threatened to suck the life out of the mystique. Money had come to the place. People, with deep pockets, were building homes of such magnitude that they rivaled the geological freak show they were competing with. It was man at his worst. Not that some of the homes didn't have that certain cool factor, even if they leaned heavily on the ersatz vaguely Mexican hacienda architectural style; but there was no escaping the fact that the new developments were infringing on nature.

It couldn't be stopped. Progress had a way of dictating the terms, leaving behind only hints of the pristine quality the area once enjoyed. Civilization had to win out and even though the population hovered around a number that was less than five thousand it was still a battle between what nature had bequeathed to us and human necessity. Got to have that Safeway.

None of this was my concern though. I checked into a non-chain hotel, one I found on the net, and crashed out. My back was aching from the long drive and although I was starving I was too tired to go in search of a meal. After checking in I took a nap. A few hours later I woke up, groggy, and realized it was after ten. Before leaving LA I had downloaded all of Gloria's writings, including some of her early essays. I whipped out my e-reader (kindle) and scrolled through it, noshing on some junk food I had loaded up on at my last pit stop. Her writing style wasn't my cup of tea but she did have a certain way of drawing the reader in. Oh, alright, she wrote love stories, complete with your garden variety treacle, but there always seemed to be an undercurrent of infinite sadness too. It wasn't chick-lit or, at least, a precise fit anyway. It was easy, I guess, to see why she had been so successful, always maintaining her best seller list status.

The last week had been spent going over Gloria's past and her career, including her two messy divorces. They had been very public in that way the two parties involved regret. Big mouth lawyers, nosy reporters, the inevitable revealing of finances, all worked to make it an unpleasant experience.

Gloria had made more than her first husband by a large margin, making it publicly excruciating for him, I imagine. He was, as much as I could tell, an asswipe who was a failed actor, a guy living on his good looks for way too long. He had done maybe one successful movie before being relegated to the small screen, eventually succumbing to an inconsequential role on a little watched TV drama. When it was mercifully canceled, his life spiraled downward.

This put pressure on the marriage, as can be expected. I had actually met the guy once, briefly. It was at a party up in the canyons. He asked me if I would be interested in helping him out on a script he was working on. It was obvious he was flailing around, hoping to reinvent himself somehow. Not an uncommon phenomenon in Hollywood, by the way. I listened politely and told him to email me the specifics. I was glad that he never did. I could only imagine it would have been worthless, another half-baked script, poorly written with the writer as the lead. I had seen it before, many times.

In the settlement, so it said in the press, he had come away with alimony, proving that the State of California wasn't sexists. I joke. For Gloria, it wasn't so good. Her dirty linen had been aired for all to see. It had been her who was unfaithful and on more than one occasion, with multiple partners. Female libertines aren't usually all that popular with the American public. Women are supposed to be on the receiving end of any abuse. She weathered the storm nevertheless, while he took the payout and left town, never to be heard from again.

The second divorce was more on an equal footing, that is to say she married somebody with a bank account as weighty as her own. He was, I think, a Silicon Valley seed guy, you know, a revenue source for all those spontaneous ideas they are known for, the ones that bring in truck loads of cash. He was also five years younger. How the two of them got together I don't know. On paper, I couldn't imagine what they had in common. He was a West Coast guy. She was from DC. He was far from a literary type, unless you count all those get rich screeds he probably devoured. I mean he was a venture capitalist for heaven's sake. His idea of culture was figuring out how he could digitize the works of Shakespeare and make money on it.

The marriage did last longer than the first one, even producing a daughter, but the longevity was aided by the fact that they spent most of the time on separate coasts, with her in New York City and him in San Francisco. Marriage in absentia can only work for so long, even if you have a Lear Jet to take you coast to coast. This time around the divorce wasn't all that nasty and the goodies were divided up evenly. Adultery played a part of course but they were both equal opportunity offenders. He had some mistresses. She had a boy toy--ten years her junior. The judge dropped the gavel and they went on their merry way. She got the kid out of default because the father didn't really won't to play at being a father. Visitations were arranged then abandoned all together when the daughter reached her teen years. By then, the father had moved on to living overseas, somewhere in Asia, taking his millions maybe billions offshore.

Her story had it all: robust sordidness, beauty, money, and of course sex. I didn't actually need to meet her to write this script. Not at all. This was a project I could have knocked out over a couple of weekends. Truly. Her life embodied the tried and true formula. How had anybody screwed this up? I asked my reflection in the mirror the next morning while I was shaving. It didn't make any sense. I could pull this off in my sleep.

I found a diner on the main road through Sedona the next morning and stopped in for breakfast. Even if I believed my task was going to be easy I wasn't going to my first meeting without some greasy carbs in my stomach. As I sat there eating my breakfast, eyeing one of the geological anomalies in the distance through the window, a jagged ridge line of mountains in varying shades of red, I reread the ending to Gloria's first book. At the risk of spoiling it for you, he dies, jumps right off a bridge in Rock Creek Park. Splat, right by the side of the road. Suicide seems so, you know, trite but this was a memoir so it works.

Then I found myself staring at the eggs on my plate and wondering just how she picked herself up after that. It was a love triangle no longer. Without having to delve into the whole book, she was in love with two guys who happened to be best friends. So far, its been done before. Throw in war and its aftermath, mix in some secret trysts, betrayal, a dash of escalating PTSD and you have a recipe for two hundred and sixty-one pages. There was an anti-war undercurrent in the book naturally but it was more too. She struck multiple chords, from State sponsored violence to youthful fragility and on to the restrictions of love. The movie had been made in the late 70's, garnering the actor who played the unfortunate suicide victim a nomination for supporting actor. I had never seen the film. It had become a relic by the time I got around to examining Hollywood's history and everyone knew that movieland had no past, just the future.

In a surprise, she had called me that morning, about a half hour before we were supposed to meet up. Having been invited to her home, Gloria called to make sure I had gotten the directions to her house. "The address won't show up on GPS," she informed me, laughing briefly, adding, "because Sedona is on a different spiritual plane--another dimension." Although she had laughed when she said it, I wasn't sure how to take what she said and replied, "Oh, okay, then I'll follow the directions you emailed me."

Off I went, heading for my first encounter with my muse. That wasn't an exact fit though. I wasn't being inspired by her. This was, ultimately, business. She was more of a clothes hanger, something that I was going to hang the story on. Besides, this picture was all about the realm of biography. Not that Hollywood wasn't known for embellishing facts and figures. You could count on that. It was in Gloria's best interest to keep me on track, keeping any straying from the truth to a minimum.

I will confess this was only my second biopic, maybe first if you discount the Farnsworth picture for the simple reason that it never got produced. I was accustomed to playing fast and loose with the facts. I once had a science professor from Cal Tech write a paper about all of the mistakes I inserted into a SyFy script, making me the laughing stock of the geek set. Mea Culpa, excuse me for not knowing that such and such rules out whatch-u-macallit, violating everything Einstein ever even thought about. This time around I had parameters to adhere to, facts to stick to. It made me uncomfortable when I thought about it. I was used to a freeform approach to writing a script. It was the nature of the art form really. Writing a script was, essentially, about no boundaries. Besides the obvious restrictions of grammar etc., putting words in character's mouths meant adopting the concept of no rules. We script writers weren't the most disciplined out there, to say the least.

It didn't take me long to get lost. I had been relying on my GPS thingee for so long I couldn't find my way down a one way street. Technology was dragging down all of our intelligence over all. Calculators made arithmetic obsolete. Stored phone numbers on our cells made memorizing a, you know, memory. It wouldn't be long before nobody would be able to read a map. I was first in line.

I had scored on a local map at the hotel, one that had all of the rock formation names printed on it, with squiggly roads interlaced between them. Even though I kept poring over her email, the one with the concise directions to her house, I couldn't quite match the map to the directions. After making a few wrong turns, going round and round the ridiculous traffic circles Sedona had put in, I called Gloria and practically begged for guidance.

She laughed and explained, "Go south at the second circle and then head up the hill."

I digested these directions for a moment, then asked, "Which way is south?"

No one likes to come off as a dunce but welcome to my world. Finally, I found the side road to her house. I hadn't been able to find it on the map simply because it wasn't on the map. She had her own road. That's right, it was a private drive masquerading as a public road. Must have cost a fortune to install a paved road all the way up to her house. When I say up I mean as in on top of a Mesa. The woman lived on her own mini-mountain.

Now this was the numero uno example of how the other half lives, and I was used to living in relative proximity to the celluloid oligarchy of the United States, where half the American Treasury flowed through on any given day. Mansions were as common place as the California sun. Concentrated wealth, however nouveau, made for some rather large abodes in Southern California. They paled in comparison.

Filthy rich husband number two had funded the building of a colossus, wedging in among a geologist's wet dream, right smack dab on top of a red rock understudy. I couldn't believe my eyes. Some renowned architect from Sweden or Germany, somewhere in Europe, had constructed his masterpiece in the American Southwest. Going against the grain, he designed an edifice in tune with a New Age vision. That is to say while most home owners in the area hewed to a Southwest motif, as in the typical Santa Fe hand me down from century old Mexican architecture, this architect decided to go rogue by trying to blend sweeping angles with ancient lapidary, if you know what I mean.

The house, for lack of a better description, looked like a geometry quiz come to life. Math was never one of my best subjects, but my eyes could make out the soaring shapes and embedded glass. Hell, it had taken me five minutes to get over the drive up to her house, a winding road full of switch backs that made the transmission in my car groan. Then there was the 360 degree view! Every room in the house had a million dollar view, in non-inflation dollars. It was like Wagner's opera on steroids, where Valhalla is run by a mathematician bent on ruling the world with isosceles triangles, or were scalene triangles the ones with unequal sides? You have now reached the godhead, please remove your shoes.

I sat in my car for a minute, taking in the sight before me, trying to figure out what material had been used to make the exterior. It seemed to be made out of stainless steel or something. Reportedly, Sedona had a hissy fit when the home was built. Although the building codes were slack, most Sedonians thought the structure violated the local atmosphere with its unabashedly modern design. You were supposed to be in harmony with the local flora and fauna, not compete against it visually. Then I heard barking and was attacked by a humongous dog as I was getting out of my car. Fortunately, he was non-threatening, if you don't mind being slobbered on by a beast that looked like it weighed as much as I did. A woman screamed out something in Spanish and the dog then dashed away, disappearing around the corner. Wiping the dog saliva off my hands, I collected myself and made for the front door. This was it, I thought, time to get started.

The front door opened before I could ring the bell. I was face to face with Gloria Worthington, Washington DC scion, best selling author, zillionaire, and really nice looking. This woman can't possibly be the approximate age of my very own mother, I thought, as she extended her hand, with the tasteful little turquoise ring on the middle finger. What, no diamonds? I wondered. Where is the Cartier watch? The nails didn't even look like they had been painstakingly manicured at some chic spa where you get massages all day and drink wheat grass concoctions with ingredients from the Andes.

"Welcome, Bradford," she kind of purred in a voice that seemed untouched by age. No smoking for her back in the day when everyone smoked like chimneys. Probably even laid off the pot too.

"I finally found it," I stammered, not knowing what else to say, as I marveled at her appearance, knowing full well that she was a contemporary of my parents. Unlike my mother, who usually had any number of contraptions attached to her hair at all hours of the day in order to get it to do unnatural things, all held into place for public viewing with a coating of sticky spray out of a can, Gloria's hair was simply cut, about an inch or two above her shoulders, and apparently free of overpriced product. She was tall, five nine maybe, and yoga instructor lithe. She was wearing jeans and a light blue blouse, giving off the impression that she was one of those elder models you might see in a JC Penny's catalogue.

Over her right shoulder I could see straight through the house because there was one giant window letting in that celestial sunlight the Southwest was famous for. I had never seen windows this large before, not in a privately built home anyway. Maybe you might see them in some museum of modern art somewhere, one of those places that house cutting edge art work and the physical plant has to be up to par with the ultra contemporary artistic displays. It was like seeing a giant diorama of the American West. For a moment I was even disoriented, overwhelmed by too much scenery.

"That's Cathedral Rock," she explained, probably noticing my thousand yard stare.

"Looks like something from the movies," I muttered, transfixed. I immediately wondered if you ever got bored, tired of seeing the view.

"You get used to it," she told me, smiling, motioning for me to follow her. "Why don't we go into the living room so we can chat."

"Sounds good," I said, glancing up at the twenty-five foot sloped ceiling.

I followed along behind her, swiveling my head here and there to take in the decor. She was heavy into minimalism, if that makes sense. The interior had large expanses of nothing but gleaming tile and bare walls, with dancing sunlight penetrating through the windows. I noticed a few art pieces here and there, along with the obligatory gigantic flat screen TV. Must be easy to keep clean, I thought.

Then I remembered something I had seen, a short video of her on some show, where she said: "We all know, most of us anyway, that much of life is about accumulation. That's why we buy houses, subconsciously anyway. With a house you can have a place to stuff all the crap you've been hoarding all those years from rampant consumerism. Ever wonder why there are so many storage companies around?"

She might have had a giant house but she was going the contrarian route when it came to furnishing it.

We stopped at a large curving couch, probably custom made, definitely not from IKEA, and she said, "Would you like something to drink? Tea? Coffee?"

Naturally I had been around celebrities before. It wasn't as if I was some bumpkin or anything when it came to being exposed to the aura of your everyday star. I might not have been a frequent flyer when it came to any A-list flight plan, but I still operated in and around the Hollywood milieu all the time. This situation however seemed different somehow. I had just spent the last few days poring over the image that was Gloria Worthington and was now sitting on a couch with her. Add the surreal quality of the setting, with the other worldly environment of her space age home, and I was teetering a little bit, struggling to get my bearings.

"I'm fine," I answered, lying artfully because I was far from okay about any of this. What am I doing here, rang in my ears? I felt totally uncomfortable. On top of that I kept stealing glances out that damn window. It was like waiting to be transported to another dimension. We were floating in space--and time. The architect who designed the place sure knew how to create a sense of the ethereal. Maybe if you lived there long enough you would get over the disorientation or, at the very least, the distraction of enjoying mother nature from a distinct vantage point. I wasn't even the type to go in for that whole outdoors connecting thing. My friends back in LA had been begging me for years to go up to Tahoe with them, take in the lake, soak up the scenery.

There was a sudden commotion in another room, then the unmistakable sounds of a dog scampering across a tile floor echoed off the walls. Shouts, in Spanish, that sounded a lot like curses, followed the reappearance of the pet dog, which bounded into the room, slipping on the freshly waxed floor. First he stuck his wet nose into my lap, then darted over to where Gloria was sitting, stopping for a brief instant to nuzzle her leg. An Hispanic woman, early forties, short, wearing a Phoenix Suns baseball cap, rushed into the living room, brandishing a leash. Gloria and her exchanged words, in Spanish, as the dog fled into another room, where I could hear it barking wildly.

"That's Pilar," she informed me, laughing, "and Chewy."

"Big dog," I offered, not knowing what to say. "What kind of dog is that?"

"Haven't a clue," she replied, looking over her shoulder in the direction of where the dog had gone. "I got him last year at the pound. It was one of those rash decisions you make that turns your life upside down. He's a hand full. Totally undisciplined. And he likes to chew on everything--hence the name."

"Don't they have those dog obedience courses or something?" I asked, trying to make conversation.

"Didn't take," she said, smiling. "He somehow got a hold of the dog obedience guy's wallet and chewed it all to hell. I was asked not to bring him back to class ever again. Kind of embarrassing."

This is good, I thought. We are sitting here talking about her dog. Very normal. Next maybe we can go into her kitchen and compare our recipes for guacamole. People do this sort of thing. It was a verbal exchange. Neutral. Non-threatening. I can do this part.

"So Pilar has to deal with him?" I stated which sounded more judgmental than I had intended it to.

Gloria eyed me for a moment with her battleship gray eyes, then said, "She's my servant, yes."

This sounded defensive to me, so I said, "I...I didn't mean it like it sounded."

A big, fat silence descended on the room, one in which I could actually feel her distrust starting to strangle me. Celebs could be prickly about the slightest hint of disapproval, that I had personal experience with. I once had a B-lister take offense about one of my lines because he thought it cast aspersions on 1/8 of his ethnicity. He wanted to know whether or not I was aware that he happened to be part Cherokee Indian. The director excised the line and life went on while I took the heat as some Native American basher. The movie was some snoozer on a second tier cable network about spirits from a reservation coming to life and terrorizing the local population of a hick town in, you guessed it, Arizona. Don't think I wasn't proud to have that on my list of credits.

"You know, Bradford, I wasn't too sure about this...this project when I first heard about it," she suddenly told me, eyeing me closely. "My agent more or less talked me into it--with some input from my daughter."

"I know the feeling," I said inexplicably, wishing I could take it back.

"What do you mean?" she asked pointedly, staring. No, her eyes are more blue than gray, I noticed.

"Well, you know, my agent got me into this too," I confessed. "I've never actually had to work with somebody on a picture like this before. My work is kinda solitary stuff. I sit down and write then deliver the goods. Collaboration doesn't really figure in the process."

She smiled at me for a moment, then said, "So we are in this together then. You and me. Two reluctant participants. That doesn't sound too good."

"No, it doesn't," I replied, laughing.

There was more shouting coming from the back of the house. A dish crashed to the floor. More cursing in Spanish. More barking. Then a door slammed shut. Out one of the side windows we could see Pilar shaking her fists at Chewy, who was running circles around her.

"She's on edge lately," Gloria explained, frowning. "Been having to deal with some family issues."

"Sorry to hear that," I said, trying to sound concerned.

"Maybe you can help her with it," she suggested, leaning forward on the couch.

"Me?"

"You're gay, right?"

Taken back wasn't the word for it. I was flabbergasted. Was I wearing a placard telling the world I was a homosexual? Maybe it was the way I crossed my legs when I sat down?

"I'm not sure if that personal info is pertinent to anything we are--"

"Relax, Bradford," she announced. "You don't think I read up on you? I had to know who was doing my life story didn't I? I googled you and you know what came up."

"Okay," I mumbled, offended and perplexed at the same time. "What does my sexual orientation have to do with anything?"

"Pilar just found out her son is gay," she answered, raising her eyebrows. "It hit her pretty hard. In the Hispanic community it can be devastating sometimes. No grand kids, among other things. I thought maybe you might have some insight into this type of problem. Tell her how your parents coped. Isn't that what they do in those support groups for parents of gay children? I'm not wrong about that am I?"

"I suppose that's what they do," I told her, trying not to laugh. "My experience with my parents might not be the best example of how things should be done. They think I am a mutant. Our relationship can be border line hostile some of the time. My mother thinks I'm still going to fry in hell."

"Oh dear," she said, clutching at her chest with both hands. "I like to think that if my daughter came to me and said that she was a lesbian I wouldn't react like that. My god, I'm sorry I even brought it up. Now I feel terrible."

"No, no, don't worry about it," I assured her. "That stuff is water under the bridge. Years and years of crying myself to sleep has given me another outlook on life," I added, trying to make a joke. She eyed me for a moment, gauging the intent of what I said. "Really, don't worry about it. But I don't think me telling Pilar anything is going to help. It's an individual type of thing. Each person has to come to grips with it on their own time line."

This sounded like self-help nonsense but she said, "Maybe you're right. She'll have to work it out on her own. I still feel sorry for her son because she has banished him from the family. I think he lives in California somewhere now."

"Maybe I know him," I joked.

"Very funny," she shot back, then smiled.

I needed all the humor I could muster because I was about to add to our media driven culture by helping in delivering two films about a couple players in the new facade that was modern day America, a place where talentless jerks could live off bank accounts fattened by appearances on TV, and the big screen, even when they were totally devoid of charisma. It was where we were now as a nation. People would actually sit down and watch other people for being, essentially, people. I guess it had all started with the bio genre somewhere along the line, giving the public a taste of what real people were like. Then reality TV came on the scene and suddenly you could make money off the complete absence of structure. Just film individuals being themselves and cash in.

I'm off-track again. I wrote scripts, which were the backbone of the industry. Actors had to say something. Even historical personages formed sentences that had to be transcribed. If I may, let me pass on a little Hollywood history, very little. The term "motion picture" has been attributed to a one Thomas Tally, who owned one of LA's premier theaters back in the early 1900's. He would go on to butt heads with Adolph Zukor, the new head of Paramount. The tiff was all about film purchasing rights because Zukor had implemented the star system, which was where the studio made actors indentured servants to the tune of thousands of dollars in salary. Zukor would go on to be investigated by the Federal Trade Commission for trying to institute a monopoly.

What I'm getting at here is there were real bona fide stars working. They actually acted in scenes written and filmed. It was, despite some people's opinion, art. Some of the early films dealt with historical figures because, frankly, it was the easiest thing to do. With ancient Rome or Greece as a backdrop, the script wrote itself. Besides, hadn't Willy Shakespeare filched some of his best plays from Italian writings? It wasn't like it wasn't a proven gambit.

So these were the earliest forms of reality TV, only with better known characters. The public had a built in taste for seeing ordinary citizens making fools of themselves is one way of looking at it, I suppose. Let me just set the record straight here though. If you are a reality TV maven, those programs you are watching are scripted. You're not seeing reality unfold in real time. Nope. In the background is some director herding the cast in one direction or another, mostly towards their base instincts: not unlike a planned car wreck.

I was there to organize another version of reality TV, only for the big screen. Sure there would be a big name director, with an agitated producer in tow, along side union workers, but when all was said and done it would still be about two real, living and breathing people. Any audience the two films would draw in would be there to see what had happened. It was like pandering to voyeurs. I knew full well right at that moment some prick at the studio would want more, you know, sex in the script, more dirt. Especially pleasing for the front office would be physical altercations, particularly between Gloria and another woman. Any lesbian scenes would be a bonus. Drugs are a plus as well.

I knew the drill. On more than a few occasions my scripts had been kicked back for lack of content. A product had to be sold. "Punch it up," one producer had told me once, almost leering. What he meant was obvious. The viewing audience wanted to be titillated, within reason of course, staying just under the radar of the censors.

Let it be said I wasn't prudish. Placing semi-clothed actors in a scene wasn't beneath me. I had even injected gay maneuvers into the first Act before and gotten away with it, along as matching genitalia didn't come into contact and the kissing was kept to a minimum. However this time around I was dealing with someone that was not only real but in the flesh, as in right next to me on the couch. Somehow I couldn't imagine placing her between the sheets, if you know what I mean. With her clout, I could only imagine that she had secured first read rights to the script and I was going to have to be handing over my work on a daily basis or, at the very least, providing verbal updates.

That would be excruciating for me. I couldn't work like that. Marty had screwed me for sure. It would be like reading back to her all of her transgressions. Then what, smile? Ask her if I had hit the right note or not? I leaned towards being more of an introverted type. Just conducting a continuing conversation with Gloria was going to be work. This was all going to blow up in my face, I was positive about that.

"Have you ever been to Colorado before?" she asked suddenly, as she gazed out the window.

Colorado? I thought, wondering if she had just asked me that. "No, never have."

"Beautiful place. Just love the Rockies," she chirped, crossing and uncrossing her legs, almost as if she were nervous about something.

Maybe she's as uncomfortable about all of this as me, I thought, smiling at the thought. Then she went on to tell me about a symposium she had been a speaker at just the week before in Aspen. Gloria Worthington, the public figure, had been asked to be the keynote speaker at some women's conference, one of those intellectual mash-ups they have so they can exchange ideas about the female gender and commensurate. The title, so she told me, of the gathering had been the question: Is The Female An Abstract Concept? Huh, you might be asking yourself.

Although I had never attended one of these mental masturbation sessions, I knew what they were all about because one of my good friend's was a professor of women's studies at UCLA and had spent time at several retreats. She had posted from them on her blog, giving anyone who took the time to read it an insight into what it was like to be cloistered with a hundred or so like minded females. Here's a hint, it wasn't pretty. Estrogen overload. Let it be said that the fairer sex wasn't above having to have their collective ego stroked. You could almost hear the cat screeching when you read my friend's entries.

"What was your speech about?" I had to ask, always one to be polite.

She paused for a moment, took a long sip of her tea, then said, "I'm sure you're not all that interested in that. Maybe we should just stick to the writing part."

This was a clear opening for me to let it go, just move on, but not me. I found myself asking, "No, really, what was it about. Maybe I can work with it in the script." This was, technically, a lie. I had already decided to cut off the script right after her second divorce, then fade to black but not before they get a aerial shot of this house, maybe with her standing framed by one of those massive windows. The Sedona tourist board would love it.

"Are you sure?" she asked needlessly. "Well, as you probably know, I'm a survivor of sorts and my talk was about...well...surviving different obstacles." A smile crept to her face then disappeared. "Then I added the bit about god too."

"God?" I mumbled, perplexed.

"I wanted to spice it up a little bit," she explained, laughing. "How religion and women fit together in different cultures. The one real, concrete lesson I learned from traveling around the world was that man has to pray to a god to spare him from god. Then you have women. They have a totally different niche...a more difficult one most of the time. It's sort of a contradiction really, with women being worshipped at one end of the scale but residing at the bottom in the general order of things. Like the Virgin Mary, for instance."

"I'm a dunce when it comes to religion," I confessed. "That whole Virgin stuff just baffles me really. My family are all Bible thumpers and we don't go in for the, you know, glorification of Jesus' mom."

We laughed together and she continued, "It's all incomprehensible if you really stop to analyze it. Throw in some of the world's other religions and you begin to see that we are all...all really weak minded beings." She snickered for a moment, then said, "They, religions, have lent something to history though--art. I really love some of the religious pieces from around the world, especially some of the Orthodox icons. Beautiful."

I was on shifting sand here, being that I was (ashamedly) a home body and never traveled. In my lifetime I had lived never more than a few hours from Mexico, most times under an hour, and had never been there. To some, I guess, that is understandable. Still, it did seem unusual. Every one of my friends had been south of the border, even if it was to get wasted at Cabo on a quick junket. Not that I needed to apologize for being an American homer. I happened to be the exception that proved the rule. Americans liked to travel, far and wide. My very own mother had been to Europe, twice. Besides, if I had traveled I doubted I would have taken the time to examine foreign religions.

"Don't know much about art," I offered, hoping to steer the conversation towards the matter at hand. Not that I knew where to start. This was going to be a tricky script because when dealing with a time span there was always the matter of two different actresses playing the same character at different points in the narrative. As a cinematic device it never seemed to quite work out. You had to readily accept the younger actresses as the incarnation of the older one. It could be jarring visibly, not that it couldn't be helped. Gloria's story was going to have to include the earlier period of her life.

"That's a pity," she stated, eyeing me for a moment, then glancing out the window again.

I thought for a moment then said, "I'm probably going to have some scenes of your early life in Washington. It will balance out the storyline."

She seem to brighten for a moment and exclaimed, "You will have to use Pierre L'Enfant's creation as a back drop I suppose. The Capital was envisioned as a city with wide boulevards--very French, interspersed with traffic circles. It's not unlike a demonic mosaic when seen from above."

"A what?"

She laughed and replied, "I was kidding. DC isn't much of a city, really. I mean I was born there and all but it is mostly just a...a showcase of sorts, a place to house the seat of government for make believe. You have the monuments. You have the government buildings. Then you have poverty too. And it all blends together to make a weird kind of vapidness, like living in a big doll house or something."

"That's a strange way of describing it," I told her, laughing. "Sounds like you don't miss it all that much."

"Oh no, I still miss it once in awhile," she shot back almost defiantly, as if I had been questioning her loyalty. "Despite the overall facade quality to the city there is history going on there. It's just hard to get past the what you might call artificiality, like nobody really lives there sensation. I'm sure you've heard somebody else make the same critique before about Washington."

I didn't have the heart to tell her that most of my friends when hearing the word Washington immediately thought of the State due north of where they happened to be standing. That other Washington was back East and didn't merit all that much attention. Almost all of my friends were wonderfully apolitical. When push came to shove they might pipe up and say they were Democrats but by the same token they would be hard pressed to identify anything about the Party. We lived in our own world in so many ways, one that functioned exclusively within the confines of Hollywood Inc.

I let the subject drop, except that I just had to ask about her first entry into the literary world. I couldn't help myself. "Let me ask you one thing before we move on," I said, trying to measure my words carefully. "What ever happened to Daniel? I know-I know, you probably don't want to dredge up all that old stuff but I--"

No...no, it's okay," she politely allowed, smirking at me like I was one of her besotted fans, the ones that probably stalked her on the Internet, cluttering up her Facebook page with idiotic missives about how their lives revolved around her writings. I was happy to not have to go through something as physically and psychologically draining as that. I might have been the only one in my circle of friends who wasn't on Facebook, thank you very much.

"I hope I don't sound like some, you know, crazed fan or anything," I assured her quickly, feeling embarrassed for asking. "I was just curious, that's all." I had to ask because in her memoir Daniel had been her boy friend, the one she was living with when she met Luke, the guy who committed suicide and...you get the picture. Soap operas were less obvious.

"You will be happy to know he is a lawyer, in DC, and he works for some high powered law firm there," she explained, smiling wryly. "His claim to fame is that he worked for the Bush team during the whole Bush v. Gore fiasco."

"He did what?" I asked, incredulous.

"Yeah, that's right, he became a Bushy," she chortled in a sing song tone. "The man is a rabid conservative, having made the conversion from Liberal small time rabble rouser to wingnut back in the 80's. Fortunately, I didn't know him when he converted. We had long since broken up. Good thing."

"That's right, he threw eggs at Nixon, right?" I announced, amused by the thought.

"Oh, you did read the book," she stated, grinning at me. "I thought you were just bullshitting me before. Yeah, he and Luke attacked the inaugural parade with eggs. Sounds bizarre but it was true. Couldn't do that nowadays. Probably get shot on the spot. Back then, they just tossed them over the crowd at the Presidential limo. Faux assassins."

We laughed together, then I said, "And now he's a wackjob? You couldn't make this up? Those must have been the days," I told her, wondering how our country had ever accommodated the hippie movement along side the Pentagon hawks and company. The succeeding generation had been thoroughly co-opted by the market place. I was a proud standing member of that coalition.

This isn't so bad, I was thinking. We seemed to be bonding. She could have been the mother I always wanted: beautiful, intelligent, stylish, and okay with my sexual orientation. How come I had been a loser in the sperm donor lottery? Of course, she did live in Sedona. That went into the con column on the mommy ledger. Then again, she probably had an executive jet I could use to hop back and forth between LA and Red Rock Country. She was also the type to say things like: The whole is bigger than the parts, (or the reverse). Hey, she had enough funds to back that picture I always wanted to do, the one about Rock Hudson. It had everything, from a leading man with a secret to a deadly virulent disease ending in premature death. What's not to like? That's a whole different story though.

Back to reality, I was, in the interest of full disclosure, a stooge for a conglomerate. Confession aside, my principles weren't developed enough to be ashamed or even chagrined. I won't divulge which giant company for fear I might get sued. In my line of work success was hard to predict. Apparently some studio honcho had a hard on for these two living legends and thought they would be pay dirt waiting to be mined. Like a gambler who doesn't see his luck turning bad, he wasn't giving up even after the two original scriptwriters had gone bust. Call it a vision, or whatever, but somebody had a tingly feeling about the prospects of the pictures.

In an age of economic countermeasures, where the movie industry hedged their bets with big name stars or leaned repeatedly on the use of sequels, with toy product tie ins for added revenue, having these two films on the books was probably making some bean counters nervous. Marty had mentioned some heavy weights interested in the two roles but no one had committed to them. Then, of course, you had the problem of age, as in the big name stars being north of fifty, which was usually death at the box office. Without a doubt the movie going audience skewered younger and they definitely didn't want to see two aging actors hogging screen time. I fully expected to be alerted by the suits about including some extraneous character to the plot who happened to be in his or her twenties.

Two directors were on board already. One of them, the director of the Gloria Worthington picture, was an old Hollywood hand, a guy the studio could trust to bring in the whole thing on budget and on time. I had actually worked with him before on a TV show when he was temporarily exiled to the small screen after one of his films bit the dust at the box office and he was made the sacrificial lamb. Evidently, he was back in the good graces again. The other director was one of those auteur types, you know, who think that they are a creative genius or close to it. He was a bully and an asshole. Although I had never had to work with him his rep preceded him by a good mile or so.

He would be a problem for sure. I expected him to kick back my work or simply skirt around large patches of the script, scoffing at my input. It came with the territory. On more occasions than I like to admit my work had been co-opted to the point that by the time the movie was screened I barely recognized my script. I knew not to get in a pissing match though. Nothing ever came from being a scriptwriter with a big mouth. We were expendable. Long ago I had gotten used to being close to the bottom of the food chain.

Gloria sighed heavily for a moment, as she gazed out the window at the landscape painting that was her constant view. I found myself thinking about her and her background. Privilege had been handed to her from birth. She was raised in Georgetown and gone to Sidwell Friends School, then on to Georgetown University. It must have been an insulating experience, trapped in the world of DC politics. I couldn't relate, it goes without saying.

"You know, I never thought about writing a screen play before," she offered, glancing at me for a moment. "It's a different animal for sure."

"Very specialized," I said, nodding. "You have to think in abbreviated terms," I added, stealing shamelessly from what one of my professors at USC had told the class in one of his lectures about the travails of attempting to put meat on the bones of Hollywood's skeleton.

"As you probably know already, I kind of lucked into the literary field," she said by way of confession. Laughing, she continued, "It's true. I had a...a jarring experience when I was young and decided to write about it. The next thing I know I'm the toast of the town. It was all very surreal at the time. Still is."

"This house is surreal," I interjected, grinning at her.

"It's been a long, eventful ride for sure," she announced, sighing again.

Was there a modicum of regret in that sigh, I wondered? What did Gloria Worthington have to regret? She was famous. She was rich. Hell, she was even beautiful. Man, don't tell me she is one of those morose types who have it all and can't find satisfaction, I thought. People like that just piss me off.

I once had a friend in the biz, an actor/director, who had it all: women, fame, money, fast cars, looks, even a house in Malibu. I know what you are thinking: how are you two friends? Simple, he was bisexual. We hooked up once, then became buddies with benefits. His predilections worked for him for a while but started to become more complicated when the female-male axis started to shift towards the Y chromosome more and more.

Two years ago they found him at the bottom of a canyon. He had driven his motorcycle off a cliff. The official line had been that he was the victim of a traffic accident. I knew better. He had done a header off a sharp curve in the road. The man was on multiple anti-depressants. I had been with him enough times to hear him moan and groan about his life, you know, the one where he was paid stacks of money to do what he loved to do, while he lived in the fast lane with the beautiful people. At least he got to die young, which, in Hollywood, could be a smart career move sometimes. They still sell posters of him at Wal-mart for Christ's sake.

"This house is not me," she announced pointedly, eyeing me for a minute. "I wouldn't have gone this route. No. My ex-husband was the megalomaniac in the family. His money had to be on display and this is the ultimate showcase. You know, I've thought of selling a couple of times but...well, there's legal issues involved and all. I don't want to go into the details, really."

"If you sold the place would you still live in Sedona?" I asked, trying to bend the conversation a little bit.

She thought for a moment, then said, "Of course. I love it here. Probably die here. There are some other houses that I would much rather live in. A place that would be more me. Sometimes I walk around inside here and can't help but think I'm in a haunted museum or something."

"Haunted?"

"Yeah," she chortled, laughing, "with my ex's ghost even though the bastard is still alive. Then again, I guess it is a work of art if you think about it. The architect might not have been attune to the surroundings here but he did have a vision. Art is sometimes all about conflict. You find it in music, literature, even movies, right?"

"I'm no authority on film," I told her, giggling. "I just assemble all the words so they can be read."

"You don't really believe that do you?" she wanted to know, as a look of disappointment clouded her face. "If you do then that is just sad."

What are we talking about, I wondered? I didn't want to be spouting philosophical mumbo jumbo. This wouldn't do. Somehow boundaries were going to have to be set, ones where I got the upper hand so I could cull all the info I needed then get out, off to write the script. Me and my lap top and lots of Red Bull. That was the winning formula. Although Marty hadn't told me there was a time limit on this, I figured that they would be up my ass soon enough, wanting updates on how I was progressing. If not anything else, I was known for my speed in delivering the goods.

"I'm going to need some bio stuff on you, from early on," I suggested, ignoring her remarks.

"Do you know who they have to play me?" she suddenly wanted to know. "I know that sounds like a self-interested thing to ask but...you know how that can be."

I didn't really but I replied, "They don't tell me things like that. Might help though, so I can work around any short comings the actress might have...things like that."

Her cell phone rang and she excused herself to answer it. She walked over next to one of the humongous windows and I could hear her talking to what sounded like her daughter. I knew she had one off-spring, a girl, from her second marriage. As she was talking, I took out my cell phone and brought up a bio on her. She was, according to Wiki, a bitch with one big bank account. Went to posh prep school in California. Must have wanted to get away from home, away from her parents. Dropped out of Stanford. Next stop would have been a State school, but she instead gave up on the whole education thing. Did she really need to go to college? Her trust fund was larger than most of the GDP's in Africa. I couldn't imagine sitting in class concentrating on anything when that American Express Black card was burning a hole in my pocket. It said she was now, if my math was right, twenty-seven years old.

Almost three decades on earth and the only thing she had going for herself was an account with one of the largest hedge funds in the country. She had to park her money somewhere. If it was one thing I knew about the rich it was they insisted on increasing their take. Money begets money. I think that was in the Old Testament and if it wasn't it should have been. She had apparently been arrested two times for drugs, weed both times. Must have gotten lucky and not been caught with anything higher up the ladder on the DEA's to do list. Never served jail time. What a surprise! We in America really did have a two tiered legal system, one for the rich and one for the rest of us.

Oh, this was a nice touch, proving that she really was a tom-boy, she liked to race off road vehicles. I wasn't sure what that meant but somehow if I saw her literally living in the fast lane I saw her in a Formula One car, one of those beasts that can do 200 plus miles an hour and look like an Op-Art sculpture in flight. Maybe it was a car designed for the Baja 1000, with spidery suspension, big engines, and Mad Max tires that enable the thing to climb up a tree. I tried to picture her lost in Mexico, you know, because women are congenitally unable to read a map, covered in dirt, smoking a spliff, and asking the locals which way to the next taco stand. She wouldn't need to have sponsors for her racing gig because she had the wherewithal to fund it all herself. That would be a bonus because her vehicle would be painted (pink) with a pricey gel coat absent of decals for motor oil or chewing tobacco or bad American beer or Viagra--or, in her case, fruity smelling shampoo and feminine hygiene products. She would stand out from the crowd of whores who had to beg for money to compete in a race nobody cared about or even saw, except for surprised and dismayed campesinos who wondered why all the gringos were tearing up their desert with odd looking coches.

I heard her hang up and did the same, quickly slipping my phone back in my pocket. How did we live without smart phones before, I asked myself, snickering quietly. She had this brooding look on her face when she sat back down. I knew that look. I had seen the very same one on my mother's face plenty of times. It was the universal pain of having given birth at one time and now you were still paying the price. Happily, I congratulated myself for never having been a parent.

"Sorry about that," she apologized, looking away.

"Something wrong?" I asked, immediately regretting it.

She glanced at me for a minute, then replied, "My daughter...as usual."

There was no other explanation forthcoming so I let it drop. Dari, her daughter, was my ticket to adding a younger slant to the script. I just knew I could work her life into it easily, bringing in the youth audience and thereby a boost to the narrative. The studio could get some nymphet to play her and all would be right in the auditing department. The formula for success sometimes could be depressingly simple. It was a little known secret that some conglomerates kept psychologists on staff just to work the angles of the viewing public's psyche. Made sense, if you were some loathsome corporation sucking the blood out of the populace you depended on for sustenance. It was, all in all, a parasitic relationship.

"Parenting...what are you going to do?", I chirped, hoping that she wouldn't take it the wrong way.
She laughed, and said, "Mothers are the same all over the world, huh? Especially if we have daughters. Mine happens to be a fuck up. It's that whole mother-daughter dynamic I'm afraid. Shouldn't have spoiled her so much I guess."

Hearing her say this made me laugh out loud, before replying, "She can't be all that bad."

Her eyes narrowed for a moment, then she told me, "Yeah, she can. I mean I love her and all but...whew, can she ever get into trouble. Like all the time. She's a grown woman and acts like she's still in college or something. College? Don't get me started on that fiasco. Both of her parents went to good schools and she can't make it through two years of college. It baffles me. Where did we go wrong, right?"

"I have to confess that I didn't finish college either," I told her, ashamed momentarily. "I'm the only one of my siblings who didn't. Kind of sucks. It's just one more thing to disappoint my mom with."

She frowned at me and said, "Really. You didn't finish college. But college is so easy--come on. What were you doing?"

That was a loaded question. Besides, how had we gotten around to talking about my life? There was nothing good that could come out of that. I was there to write her life story, not mine. I cursed myself, and then Marty for getting me into this predicament. This was not what I did best. I resurrected garbage scripts, nothing more. Who ever said I was a biographer? Hell, I should have done this over the phone, long distance. We could have exchanged long emails even, maybe Acrobat documents, something where I could maintain my professional stance. Crap, using Skype would have been better than this, where I could keep my finger on the button to end the call whenever I felt threatened in any way. Now, as it was going, I had to play offense and defense simultaneously and in person.

"Opportunity came knocking and I took it," I explained, hoping to end the discussion, stop it in its tracks before it got rolling. "I went out into the real world and started writing scripts. You know the college class room experience doesn't prepare you for shit."

She raised her eyebrows for an instant, then stated: "Really. That's the excuse you are going to use. Not very imaginative. I hope that doesn't reflect on your script writing abilities."

Oh, now she was not only mocking me for being an academic lightweight, she was also slamming my writing prowess. This was like doing combat with my mother all over again. Same arguments. When I had sprung it on my parents about leaving college my mother had done all the arguing against it. My dad deferred to her because as far as he was concerned he hoped I'd just go into the Navy and, essentially, become a man. That's a whole different storyline, believe me. My father would have liked nothing better than to see me wearing one of those bleached white naval getups, with that silly round hat, especially if I was an enlisted man. Chip off the old block kind of thing, except for the fact that I was a fag and all. It's never fun when you break your parent's heart, shattering their well established dreams. I should know.

"I also needed the money," I protested, or whined, depending on how you choose to look at it. "My parents didn't really have the money to pay for my school tuition." This was, technically, a lie. Although they, my parents, could have scraped up enough to fund my adventure at USC they would have been strapped to do it. As a defense mechanism of sorts I had been telling myself for years that I had done them a big favor by dropping out. It was always about the bottom line.

She scoffed at that explanation, actually clucking her tongue, a habit she had that would eventually begin to annoy me. We stared at each other for a moment, before she announced in a stern tone of voice, "That's bullshit."

Now that we were trading profanity, I struck back with: "So you know so much about my family's fucking finances!"

Gloria seemed to recoil for an instant, then she replied, "I don't know about that but I know when I hear somebody talking shit. I heard enough of it in my life. My ex-husband was a first class bullshit artist." She laughed and continued, "You don't have to be so defensive about your academic shortcomings, Bradford. My ex-husband was always lording his two extra degrees over me--the shithead. He also thought Georgetown was an overrated school."

"Where did he go?" I asked, raising my pen to jot it down in my notebook.

"Stanford and Cal," she told me, forcing a smile.

"East coast West coast thing, right," I muttered, pointing to what I thought was the East and the West with my pen.

The situation seemed to have been defused. We were actually laughing and smiling now. She had a wonderful laugh, expressive, with a hint of abandon, like she might have had a few glasses of wine. Maybe she had. It was early in the morning but for all I knew she might be one of those filthy rich women who measure the passing of the day by how many ounces of libation they've had. Yet she didn't impress me as being a lush or anything. She wasn't slurring her words and didn't stumble when she walked. I made a mental note to ask her about any addictions she might have had in her life, passing the question off as necessary for a true representation of her bio.

The first meeting between us had gone more or less okay. She hadn't scratched my eyes out anyway, nor had she gotten on her I-phone and dialed up her agent to complain about the jerk they had sent to interview her. It had been a tricky enterprise none the less but I came away unscathed, but still leery. During the course of our talk I had made a dozen pages of notes, something I was relatively positive about. Already I had reoriented the script, taking Gloria from a young girl first, instead of an adult and working back like the original script had been laid out. Sure that was a proven method when presenting a long life story but I didn't like it. I wanted to work her younger life first, establishing where she came from, what her childhood had contributed to the storyline.

I knew this was going to cause problems. The director and the producer would see the hassles of a using a young actress and then the transition points when you have to age up the protagonist. It was always a dodgy proposition but I thought it gave the script more of solid foundation to work from. I anticipated plenty of shouting coming my way.

That evening I sat eating dinner in a deli with New York pretensions I found on the main street running through Sedona. They served passable bagels and better yet the place was mostly empty. I had just started in on my Reuben (pastrami) when my phone rang. It was Marty. I knew he was calling from a restaurant because I could hear noise in the background. He had told me he ate all his meals out. That seemed somehow glamorous and sad at the same time. I for one didn't like eating in restaurants all that much because of the inherent hassles that went along with it. You know what I mean, dealing with apathetic wait staff or, alternately, too energetic waiters and waitresses who want to be your best friend until you pay the tip. Then there's the whole matter of actually waiting for you food and when it does finally arrive you are invariably dissatisfied with the portions or the way it was cooked etc. All in all, it's a time suck that you have to pay money for.

"How's it going, my friend?" Marty chirped into the phone, while I grimaced, wondering what actress he was squiring around that night.

"Had my first interview with Gloria this morning," I informed him, picking the pickle off my plate to take a bite.

"Calling her Gloria now are we," he announced, chuckling. "Must be a good sign, huh?"

I rolled my eyes and said, "Maybe."

This was the dreaded call I had been waiting for, one of many to come. Marty would want updates, as he monitored my progress. Of course this wasn't exactly new for me in my line of work. Producers were always hectoring me about getting the job done; except this time I had extra pressure on me because I was, more or less, in the big leagues. This was expected to be a big picture, or, at least, one where there would be high expectations. In the past, I had been more a cog in the wheel of a bit project, one that wasn't really going to be doing anything of note. Think bad TV movies or shows and B movies destined for late night TV on a backwater cable network. Not this time around. There was going to be some heavy hitters involved, along with some actors that made people sit up and take notice. It all made me wish I was back on the Junior Varsity team.

The conversation was, thankfully, short and not so sweet. Marty signed off by telling me in an ominous tone of voice not to "fuck this up." Not the vote of confidence I was hoping for. To him, I was just another expendable piece to the puzzle. I was sure he had a list of other scriptwriters embedded in his Blackberry somewhere, just a menu away with a touch of his finger. If I went down in flames he would just move on to the next sucker in line. I tried not to think about any of that though.

I had other things on my mind as I sat there in that half empty deli, listening to a couple at the next table talking about their wonderful hike that day. They were in their thirties too but much more healthy. I guessed them to be from somewhere in the mid-West, maybe Minnesota. They both had that scrubbed clean look, like they hadn't been out of the fresh air for maybe twenty minutes their entire lives. On top of that they were wearing His and Her getups straight out of the LL Bean catalogue, right down to their hiking socks. If the woman said how beautiful the Red Rocks were one more time I was going to throw my drink at her.

My testiness came from the fact that the very next morning I was supposed to meet up with Gloria at the Cathedral Rock trail head. Needless to say this had been her idea. When she suggested it I had tried to beg off but she insisted. As I was leaving she hinted that I might want to stop at some Outfitters store or something and get a pair of hiking shoes, while I glanced down at my three year old Adidas, knowing full well that the only other shoes I had with me were flip flops I borrowed from a friend last year and never returned. Like a browbeat school boy, I had agreed to the scheduled time and place, all the while thinking that it was going to be a disaster--for me.

Besides, how much work could we get done hiking? I didn't see the point. Who wanted to be huffing and puffing on some dusty trail anyway? Not me. This is a guy who doesn't even like to walk on the Santa Monica Pier. She wouldn't be dissuaded though, leaving me with no choice but to show up and tough it out.

Cathedral Rock, if you don't already know, is probably the best known rock formation of the vaunted Sedona experience. Why it is named that I haven't a clue. I will say it is iconic, with its massive sized pinnacles and all. Let's just say it stands out. Tourists come from all over to stare at it, not to mention photographers. You have probably seen it on some calendar at some time in your life. The formation manages to at one time both show the gritty milieu of the Wild West and the mysterious draw of some New Age portal. Me, it didn't do much, except that I was going to have to climb the damn thing.

Gloria was waiting for me when I arrived the next morning. After greeting me she glanced down and saw my worn and dirty (but retro) athletic shoes and scoffed, saying that I was an idiot. I was discovering pretty quickly that she liked to say what she thought. Rich people were usually like that. They were in a position to create their own reality, if you know what I mean. Money will do that. Don't like something, pay to have it changed. Most times it was that simple. Anyway, after a while they get used to living in a world of their own making.

"Hope you don't kill yourself hiking in those," she offered, pointing at my shoes. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

"Are you trying to scare me or what?" I returned, forcing a laugh.

She didn't share in my laugh but asked, "Ever been on slick rock before?"

"Is that some kind of code?" I asked, again trying to wedge some levity into the conversation.

She gave me an Oh Brother look and then said, "I don't suppose you have a pack either...you know, with a water bottle or bladder. You might need some water, you know."

Already this was turning into some kind of neo-Boy Scout hazing ritual. Both of my brothers had gone that route way back when but not me. Through some ever changing and imaginative excuses I had gotten out of the whole back to nature routine. While my brothers were attaining badge after badge, I was going to the movies when I was supposed to be doing other family linked things. Before long I had simply grown out of my scouting years and grandfathered out so to speak. Just another disappointment for my parents, particularly my dad.

"How long is the hike?" I whined, now feeling the tentacles of panic creeping up on me. The night before I had spent most of the time convincing myself that it was going to be a short adventure, one that I could manage without the obligatory panic attack. Not that I ever had panic attacks. I just was able to avoid anything that might cause one. There was a difference.

She didn't answer me, as she put on a Camelbak, complete with a hose and nozzle that she draped over her shoulder. I had seen one of them before naturally, because Americans were brainwashed into believing you couldn't go ten minutes without refueling like some out of gas Hummer. Hydration was probably the one outstanding achievement of the NIH. We American humans were drowning ourselves everyday. Her silence told me I was on my own. This was Gloria's version of tough love. If I died of dehydration up on that rock, well, then it was my fault entirely.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before but Sedona is about as close to nirvana as you are going to get when it comes to the hiking world. There are dozens of hikes all concentrated in one area and they are mostly well marked and maintained. That's not to say that all the rock seekers who come to Sedona are hikers, just a lot of them. Most tourists pay up and take jeep rides around the formations, snapping away with their cheap cameras while a guide tells them what they are looking at. Those are the lazy ones, who want to feel like they are roughing it but aren't.

Then there are the other ones, the people you see with their North Face gear and fancy packs, some with GPS devices to tell them they haven't made a wrong turn and are heading down a hidden mine shaft, while others go old school with only the sun to guide them. There are different levels of, you know, seriousness going on here. You have your backpackers who head out not expecting to see civilization again for days or weeks at a time and then there are the others who are just taking a day to get away from it all. Either way, they like their nature.

My idea of nature was to stroll down the Ocean Front Walk on Venice Beach for about a block or two, stopping to watch the specimens at Muscle Beach, then gasp my way back to the nearest place I can sit down and have something to eat and drink. People who liked to commune with nature were a whole different species to me. I had lived within ten miles of the beach my entire life and I think I had been in the ocean maybe five times. It wasn't that I was proud of this fact, just adamant in the position I had staked out for myself. No amount of proselytizing was going to change my attitude. Ms Worthington was just going to have to take me as I came.

If only, so they say. We set out on our hike and by that I mean she started out and I tagged along behind. The Cathedral Rock hike while short in duration was one that required you go up, sometimes ninety degrees skyward. It was like walking up a boulder in some places. I kid you not. One section you had to scale a giant slab of slick rock, which is, if you aren't in the know, a hard-ass geological lump worn slippery by the elements after four billion years of blowing wind. You had to actually find hand holds and foot holds in order to get some kind of purchase as you were climbing up.

"You okay back there?" Gloria called out, looking over her shoulder at me struggling to keep up.

"So far," I said, in between breaths.

It was the first thing she had said to me in a half an hour as we made our way past some cairns marking the passageway up towards the looming pinnacles. Several hikers had passed us on the way down, all beaming, happy to have had the chance to link their spirits with Sedona's very own numero uno piece of hiker's paradise. It was all I could do not to smack each and every one of them. They had the same look on their faces I had seen in my brother's congregation. Piety, apparently, comes in all shapes and sizes.

We hadn't gone twenty yards more when we came across a group of people assembled in a circle, holding hands, and all wearing some kind of white garb, not unlike the ones you might see in the Arabian desert. They were chanting in a low rumble. On the ground in the middle of them were some rocks arranged into a wheel design. If I was on acid a scene like this might seem normal, but I wasn't. It was all I could do not to stop and stare at them. Gloria hissed at me, motioning for me to keep moving. I was sure I had seen them before in one of those movies on Roku, where some unsuspecting victim (usually a young, attractive woman) is about to be sacrificed to the god/monster that resides in the mountain in order to keep peace in the village.

We had reached that section I had read about in the bulletin the Ranger district distributed to all uninformed tourists, the ones who thought they were ready to meet nature face to face. Now I knew why they called it slick rock. Gloria was right in front of me and I could feel her expensive Vasque boot against my hand as I flailed around trying to find a notch in the rock to grab on to, something to help hoist myself up another foot or two. The worn soles on my tennis shoes were slipping away like something you might see in a cartoon. I can remember laughing when I saw those idiots climbing on those artificial walls that were all the rage recently, the ones where you pretend you are doing El Capitan but are really in a warehouse with maybe a twenty foot ceiling. It was laughable, made all the more ridiculous because there was an instructor there and you were attached to safety lines. At the worst if you were to fall you might get a bruised ego. Right about that moment I wished I was strapped into one of those harnesses with some young climbing instructor telling me what to do.

Let me just make a short detour here for a moment to say something about Gloria and what she was wearing. As mentioned, she was 60 years old but with a good diet, exercise, and some referrals to the best "doctors", chronological age measures didn't apply. Besides, the legs were always the last part of the anatomy to go on a woman. She was wearing hiking shorts and I would have under counted her age by probably twenty years. So right at that moment I was staring at her ass as she made her way up the rock. I wasn't in the habit of looking at women's butts, or any other feature really, but I had to give a favorable appraisal.

Still, she was a beast up on that mountain, as she barked: "Come on, Tuttle, use your muscles."

That was a touchy subject, for sure. As a gay man, we were expected to be gym mavens of sorts, always one to maintain our physiques. All of my brethren had memberships or were somehow otherwise engaged in that whole physical education pursuit. Me, not so much. Fortunately, to date, my good genes were keeping all out decline at bay. Being blessed with an active metabolism could be a curse sometimes but not most times. All those useless carbs had yet to catch up with me.

"How much further?" I complained, pulling myself up to where she was standing admiring the view.

"Ever see something like that before?" she wanted to know, beaming that same village of damned look the others on their way down had.

Wheezing, I looked around. Okay, rock formation here, there, everywhere, big deal, I thought; but like when you have just attended a sermon, and everyone is immersed in some kind of communal hysteria, I had to go along. "Wow," I sputtered, greedily trying to insert some air into my inert lungs.

Then we were off again. I admired the muscles in her calves as we climbed higher, then higher. Finally, we arrived. This must be what the Marines feel like when they finish Basic Training, I thought, steadying myself on wobbly legs, while Gloria pointed out landmarks in the distance. We had reached a saddle between two large spires of stone on either side of us. In one direction there was a hundred foot or so drop straight down with no railing to prevent some winded dupe like me from plunging to their death. I eased back from the precipice, trying to conceal my fear as best I could. Sadly, I now realized I had at least a trace of acrophobia.

"You okay?" she suddenly asked me, showing concern for the first time all day, in between gulps from the tube hooked up to the bladder on her back.

"I guess I don't like heights," I stammered out, hoping my trepidation didn't show on my face.

She ignored my remark because she was, generally, plugged into the experience, as she stated: "Places like this are as close to the experience you have with gold or diamonds."

By now I knew she was a declarative sentence type of person. You know, the ones who are forever declaring this or that about how they are relating to life with a capital L. We stood there for a few minutes longer gawking at the view.

She shook her head in disbelief at what God had come up with and greedily took a few more sips. Now not only was I beating down some rising phobia I didn't know I had but I was thirsty as hell. Fucking dry ass Arizona, I thought, wondering if I could possibly beg for a sip of water from Gloria. Then again, there was the whole sharing a nozzle horror story, for her as well as me. I wasn't all that much of a germaphobe but then again I did have my boundaries. Back in LA I don't ever remember having my throat feel like sand paper before, even when the Santa Ana's were in full swing.

Down we went, finally, after Gloria soaked up all the atmosphere she could, something to tide her away until the next time she went hiking. I trudged down the trail behind her again, glad that my pulse had returned to the normal range or as close as it was going to get anyway. A few hikers were ascending as we descended. One gentleman, late forties, asked how much further it was to the top and Gloria told him it wasn't but a skip and a hop. I only grunted in response and held my tongue, deciding not to tell them they were on a fool's errand and that hiking was for masochists who needed nature to bolster their self-esteem.

Then the end was in sight. I was tired of listening to Gloria suck on her nozzle. Didn't she know that she should be more like my mother, her contemporary, who hung around the kitchen all day and the only physically challenging thing she faced was opening a jar of whatever condiment she needed for that night's dinner. Just because she was thin and looked well preserved couldn't she act more her age? Okay, sure I was upset that a woman almost thirty years my senior was kicking my ass but then again I wasn't the competitive type. Yet, she was my mother's age. It didn't seem normal, like I had fallen into bizarro world.

Back at the trail head we made plans to rendezvous back at her house for a debriefing. I joke. Now I was beginning to see that this whole hiking event had been for a purpose and that was to put me in my place. It wasn't enough that, stacked next to each other, our bank accounts leaned grossly in her favor, and she enjoyed worldwide fame when even my next door neighbor didn't have a clue who I was, oh no. Gloria Worthington wanted to prove to me that she was, you know, on top of her game. If I could only figure out what game that was.

As she was getting in her Prius (naturally), she looked me up and down and said, "You okay? You're looking pretty dehydrated. Hope you can make it over to my house. I'll call Pilar and have some refreshments on ice waiting for you when you get there."

Her smugness was annoying but I replied, "If I don't get there call 911."

What I wouldn't give for a gallon of Gatorade, I was thinking, as I lowered my aching body behind the wheel of my car. I was exhausted after the climb. Did I feel ashamed that a woman closing in on social security just embarrassed me? I'd like to say no but I guess, if I'm being honest with myself, I was. Next thing I knew she would be taunting me and demanding that I arm wrestle her. I could only imagine she worked out every single day, while the last physically demanding thing I had done recently was to play air guitar on my friend's Wii. Even then I couldn't make it through the whole song.

Didn't matter. My strength was in my pen, or, to be more precise, my finger tips. I didn't need to be physically fit to manhandle my lap top. I worked the muscle in my brain. That was why I could deliver the goods on anything from a story on, you know, Attila the Hun to some drivel about two love starved twenty-somethings living in Pittsburgh. It was all about being eclectic and not really having any founding personal philosophy to muck up the works. My prejudices were minimal and easily abandoned. If anything, that was what made a good, competent scriptwriter. Being shallow had its rewards.

Pilar had a tall drink of one of those inane vitamin waters waiting for me when I got to Gloria's eye sore on the butte, handing it over, while Chewy proved his namesake correct by gnawing on my ankles one at a time. Gloria was in her work out room doing a cool down session on her exercise bike, the one that probably cost more than my car. "Senora Gloria, say you go to work room," Pilar informed me, pointing in the direction of another section of the house, call it the east wing. She then pulled Chewy off of my pant leg and I made my way across the expanse that was the living room.

I could hear the whirl of a bicycle wheel going round and round. Muted in the background was the sound of a talking head on TV. Pausing for a minute, I greedily sucked down the whole glass of whatever it was Pilar had given me, wanting about a gallon more. My legs still felt like jello and there was a throbbing ache buried in my lower back somewhere. The knees of my jeans were soiled from climbing on all fours up the rocks; and Gloria had not let me off easy for wearing jeans to go hiking, calling me "an amateur." Just because it looked like I was dressed to go to the local Carl's Jr. didn't mean she had license to ridicule me. Evidently, the hiking fraternity could be unforgiving.

"Glad you could make it," she said snarkily, as her legs whirled around. She was staring at a forty incher mounted on the wall. Just behind her, through the tinted windows, I could just make out more of the hateful Red Rocks. "Need to top off that glass?" she wanted to know, directing her eyes at my empty glass.

"Oh yeah," I answered, laughing. "I'm parched," I added, even though I hated giving her the satisfaction in knowing I was dying of thirst.

"Push that button on the wall there and tell Pilar to bring you something more to drink," she explained, changing a setting on the bike. "Your hydration levels are way down. It's going to take a lot to get back up to normal. It's not good around here to let yourself get dehydrated. Bad for the skin, not to mention the body in general. I'm surprised you didn't know that already--a smart boy like you."

This was a slam in two parts from her, one about me being uninformed, and two, young. Anyway you interpreted it she was poking fun at me. I didn't give a shit about my hydration levels because usually I didn't need to. I made a silent vow that I had gone on my last hike with Gloria Worthington. I was there to complete a job, not play games with a billionaire's ex-wife.

Regardless, I pushed that button on the wall like my life depended on it, while Gloria shouted out instructions in Spanish for her to bring me another drink. You could hear Chewy barking in the background over the intercom. A minute later I had my nose buried in another tall glass of flavored, vitamin water, with crushed ice. I noticed Gloria was smirking at me as she slowly stopped peddling and got off the bike.

"I'm going to take a shower and then we can get started on day two of the big project," she announced, smiling at me, happy with herself for being in control. "Need to freshen up?"

This was an odd question. I was one of those people who found it almost alarming to use somebody else's bathroom--for any bodily ablutions. Even if my punishment was target practice for a firing squad, I couldn't bring myself to take a dump in someone's toilet. Could not do it. Pee maybe, but even that was a chore. I had been to parties before where I held my bladder for hours so I wouldn't have to make that trip to the bathroom. Call it some kind of psychological damage or whatever, it wasn't going to change how I felt. Once a party host had caught me peeing in the bushes behind his house. Got a good laugh out of that one.

I wasn't even sure what she was suggesting. Did she mean for me to head on into one of the house's dozen bathrooms and take a bubble bath, a sauna, with a splish-splash in the Jacuzzi? Afterwards just slip into one of my ex-husband's designer three hundred dollar robes, the ones with the monogram in gold filigree. Don't forget those Italian slippers, the leather ones made out of calf skin. Will you be needing a masseuse? Shiatsu? Sleep overs would be next.

In fact, due to the size of her house, I was wondering if she was going to invite me to stay over at her place in the interest of proximity. Having me there, as a house guest, would make her control over me all the easier. She probably had every room wired up with cameras and microphones. Pilar could sit in the control room and monitor my every move, even when I was sleeping. Paranoia aside, I hadn't gotten to any sort of trust level with her. I always assumed the worse in people, especially if their interests were at risk.

Unfortunately, I had never really had a valid working relationship with anyone in my short career. Oh sure, I had to kow tow to directors with dictator complexes and the occasional brush with feeble minded actors who were trying to make their input stick in the final script, but they were always temporary for the most part. In my line of work we were mostly lone wolf types and I don't mean that to sound like some sort of frontier individualism or anything. Far from it, if I'm being truthful. It's just that I was the drone who pecked away alone then handed over the goods, nothing more really, even if I did have to field numerous phone calls from agitated assistant producers in the process.

She was waiting for my response, so I mumbled, "I'm good." She frowned at me for a moment then told me to make myself at home, as she disappeared down a long hallway, off to another wing of the house. How do you actually make yourself at home anyway? I thought. It was bad enough I didn't know her very well but she was, you know, famous. I guess I could wander up and down the halls looking for the safe where she kept all her gold...diamonds. Or, maybe, I could try out one of the half dozen exercise machines she had neatly spaced throughout the room. I had to laugh at the thought of me jumping on one, while I raced through a few miles going nowhere, watching CNBC on TV to check how all of my millions were doing.

Then I noticed she had one of those anti-gravity tread mills, the ones that eliminate almost all of the bruising aspects of gravity on the human body while you work out. I had seen a story about them on one of the morning shows once. They cost over twenty thousand dollars a piece. All the pro athletes were using them because it was easier on the knees, among other joints in the body. Having money really did put you into another dimension, I told myself, shaking my head in disbelief. Must be nice.

About five minutes later Chewy found me wandering around the grounds, where I had gone to check out the landscaping. Not really. I had exited out a side door, which locked behind me and was trying to find my way back inside without tripping any alarms. Who knew if Gloria Worthington kept a SWAT team on retainer, a squad to parachute in and take out any attackers. The dog jumped on me a few times then quickly lost interest, dashing off, and thankfully disappearing down a side pathway that led to an overlook. I went the other way and finally made my way to the kitchen door.

"Esta sediento?" she asked me as I stepped in the door.

I'm ashamed to say I was born and raised not twenty minutes from the Mexican border and I can't understand a word in Spanish beyond Gracias. Seeing my confused expression, she pointed to a bottle of water on the counter and pantomimed a drinking motion. I nodded yes and thanked her using my one word of Spanish. The water tasted like the best thing I had ever had as it went down.

"Esta hambriento?" she was now asking me, waiting for my response, as I stood there wondering why this woman didn't speak any English. Then she pretended like she was eating something, rubbing her stomach for emphasis.

Food, I could do that, I thought, smiling back at her. I nodded yes and she said something again in Spanish that went nowhere, lost in the void of my ignorance. She opened up the door to one of those industrial sized refrigerators, one of the ones you might see in a five star restaurant, all stainless steel and big enough to house an entire steer. It was one of three present in the kitchen, the other two being the glass door style, where you can peer in and see what you are going to dive into without having to open the door. Best invention ever, I was thinking.

Pilar puttered around the kitchen, opening cabinets and sliding open drawers, all in an effort to supply me with: an energy bar. It was one of those bars expressly designed for women, with folic acid, vitamin K, and something called biotin, along with a list of ingredients that looked like they might be describing a mineral mining operation. I was, besides surprised, dismayed. I thought she was going to whip up some Mexican dish, something that would have me wondering why I had never tasted something so good in all my years living in San Diego. Little did I know, Gloria had a strict regimen when it came to cuisine at her home. She was one of those vegans you always hear about, the ones who wouldn't think of smelling the aroma of meat cooking. Poor Pilar had to eat all her meals in her servant's quarters out back, lest Gloria see her chowing down on carne filled quesadillas; of course her room and board happened to be in a three bedroom bungalow, complete with a garage and whirlpool.

Trying not to laugh, I took the bar and ate it, smiling appreciatively in between bites of the organic goo masquerading as a food source. Most of it stuck to the roof of my mouth and was hard to swallow. I read the label on the package: Cookies n Cream Delight. Who are they kidding? How come natural food eaters didn't realize the food they ate tasted like the synthetic remains of some experiment gone bad? Further more, why were they always trying to replicate the taste of meat with their ludicrous substitutions of tofu and...whatever else they thought resembled what normal people ate? No matter how much you doctored the ingredients with spices it still tasted like dry wall. I wasn't on a crusade or anything but our ancestors chowed down on anything that moved, ergo we are alive to this day. So what if we have clogged arteries and sugar laden blood streams, through the evolutionary process we have earned the right to die on a full stomach.

"Remind me not to accept a dinner invitation from your boss," I told Pilar, grinning.

"Que?" she asked, puzzled. "Mas, agua?"

I held out my glass for more of the flavored water, hoping that it would wash down the awful energy bar. Time to move on, I said to myself, easing my way out of the kitchen, glass in hand, returning to the living room to wait. Out the window I could see Chewy chasing some rodent like animal around some rocks. A few clouds had drifted into the ever changing scene and were clinging to the tips of the rock formations, making them look even more surreal. Pilar was singing in the kitchen and surprisingly she was singing in English. To my horror, I recognized it was a Beatles song, the same one my mother used to sing when I was a kid. Maybe they put something in my drink, I joked to myself. With any luck I'm not really even standing here in some billionaires' idea of an ego trip. I was still back in LA, back to my old life as a hack just getting by on leftovers from an industry that needs to keep feeding the nation's appetite for entertainment, like a shark that has to keep swimming in order to survive.

"I feel a hundred percent better," Gloria declared, as she entered the room wearing shorts and a t-shirt, barefoot. She was still combing out her hair and was wearing glasses. I probably wouldn't have recognized her if I didn't know who I was speaking to. "Are you hungry?" she wanted to know, calling out to Pilar before I could answer. "I liked to have a smoothie sometimes when I come back from hiking. Ever had--"

The rest of her sentence was drowned out by curses in Spanish, as Chewy bounded into the room, barking as he raced around the couch. Gloria scolded him to no effect, as he leaped over one of the stools by the couch and then started licking at her ankles. Pilar scampered into the living room and swung the dog's leash over her head like some cowboy with a lasso. Chewy dodged her for a minute, before barreling into me, knocking my ass back onto the couch.

"Diablo!" Pilar screeched, trying to whip him with the leash. The dog was too quick for her, springing over my lap and racing for the kitchen.

"Maybe a taser would work on him," I suggested, laughing.

"Very funny," Gloria said, telling Pilar to calm down and let the dog back outside. A moment later we could see Chewy dashing by the windows, with Pilar in pursuit.

Finally Gloria had found something she couldn't control and was now locked into keeping a pet she couldn't bring herself to get rid of. Call it guilt. She could no longer return Chewy to the dog pound than give up her millions. I liked that, seeing her in some sort of grinding dilemma of sorts. It made her more human in a way, like sanding down the edges or something.

"People and their pets," I joked, laughing. "I'm sure there are some self-help books you can buy that might help--you know, like Dog Obedience For Dummies. Something like that."

"I'm sure you think you're being witty right about now, Bradford," she shot back, eyeing me coldly. "Why is it you people from California all have this sense of...of importance? It does seem to be built in to your personality, maybe injected at birth."

This comment seemed to be directed else where, maybe towards her former husband, husband number two, who had been born and raised in Santa Barbara. I had heard the divorce hadn't been all that amiable, at least not as animosity free as they led the press to believe. She had wanted her pound of flesh, along with some pretty steep spread sheets full of dollar signs. After all, they had gotten the big D in California, home to the 50/50 split. If anybody owed the State of California anything it was Gloria Worthington.

"I will not stand here and have my home State defiled," I stated facetiously. Far be it for me to be a Golden State booster. We Californians had our faults and plenty of them, but then again we did lead the way for most of the country, if not the world. It was a fascinating place, except that it did tend to poison all of us. Take the use of Spanish as a code for subversion. Sure we had stolen the territory from the Spanish but did we really have to use names like El Sereno (the serene) or Dias Doratos (golden days) for all the horrible developments that sprouted up north to south, east to west. It was as if Orwell woke up one day and found out he spoke Spanish. Still, California was always more than a state of mind. We stood for innovation. We led the way in the 21st Century. We even had good sports teams, mostly.

People came to California to realize a dream, to get rich from the gold, to be famous in the movies, even just to gaze at the Pacific Ocean. It was where ambition was interlaced with a result. Did we need to apologize for that? Not that we weren't dysfunctional, with our penchant for citizen referendums for dumb as dirt causes, like having millionaires pay next to nothing in property taxes etc. Cali wasn't exactly the shining city on the hill but neither was it the source of all the nation's problems. From the surf culture to the dirt stained regions of agriculture, not to mention mineral rights, it was more a nation than a State. We couldn't be faulted for that.

"This is a State that gave us Nixon, Reagan, and that imbecile Austrian too," she declared a little too triumphantly, showing not only her East Coast bias but her political bent as well. "That is the very definition of indefensible, don't you think?"

I didn't really think about it, if truth be told. Every State has a past, so they say. California was no different, really. We did things on the big stage because of our geographical size, lending more exposure to our, you know, warts. I wasn't going to defend somebody as craven as Nixon or simple minded as Reagan, nor speak to the lunacy of electing a body builder for governor, but I wasn't going to roll over either. If this working relationship was going to function I would have to make a stand sometime.

"Gloria, is this really about California or does it have something to do with your everyday prejudices and shaky marital history?" I asked boldly, stopping her verbally in her tracks. She glared at me for a moment, giving me a look I'm sure she had utilized before when dealing with recalcitrant agents or publishers. I think they call it a withering stare. Had she forgotten all about that whole interlude in her life way back when? The time she had spent living in Hollywood being feted by everyone of importance, as her books were made into movies that grossed some big bucks, was apparently repressed by her. That was a period in her life where she was squired around by some big name actors and she played the celebrity game. Little did she know I fully intended on playing up that aspect of her bio, giving some young actress a meaty role to flesh out.

I will confess my knees were beginning to go weak. Visions of her whipping out her cell phone and placing a call to the President of the United States, telling him to put me on the terrorist watch list or, at the very least, the no-fly list. There would be chummy chit-chat first, then she would tell the leader of the Free World that I was a menace who needed to be taken to Gitmo and waterboarded to within an inch of his life. She would chuckle then put me on the speaker phone with the President, who would then ream me out for being an insolent nobody who dared offend his good friend.

"Do you like to fly?" she suddenly wanted to know.

"Fly?" I retorted, confused.

"Yeah, you know, like in an airplane," she explained, waiting for my answer.

"I guess...not really," I sputtered, not sure where she was going with this line of questioning. Did I miss something? I wondered. Was this code for something else I wasn't privy to? God, was she going to have me tossed off her very own mesa as she watched me plunge to my death into the ravine below. No, she was a WASP for heaven's sake. We didn't go in for histrionics. Our style was to abuse you with character assassinations. Right?

"Either you do or you don't, Bradford," she stated, letting a grin sneak onto her face.

"Take it or leave it," I answered, trying to be honest about it because I had only flown maybe twice in my life, both times amounting to quick jaunts to Northern California. They hadn't been pleasure trips but business related, as in some script was dying on the vine rapidly and needed an infusion of new ideas. LA to San Francisco doesn't take all that long by air, especially when you are being flown both ways on a corporate jet, complete with obsequious flight attendants and booze gratis. As stated before, the Rich really do create their own reality.

"I think I should take you up for a spin around the valley," she exclaimed almost excitedly. "Yeah, it might get us on the right track--you and me. You up for that?"

Now it had become a challenge. I could hear it in her voice, which had changed from her usual even toned rhythm to one that had a hard edge to it. She was a woman who was used to doing combat against men. It was obvious she usually won most of the skirmishes too. I, admittedly, wasn't much of a foe. No, not exactly. I was one of those males who bought into the prevailing wisdom that women were indeed the stronger of the two sexes. I didn't have any problem with that. History was matriarchal as far as I was concerned. Besides, as you know, I was gay and leaned towards the whole contrarian biological blueprint. The female sex wasn't in the formula.

"What are we talking about here, Gloria?" I asked, hoping my voice wouldn't crack, as I beat back any rising sense of panic. "Do you want us to take one of those tourist flights over the Red Rocks, is that what you want to do? If so, I'm not really into doing that."

She laughed, then said, "No, silly, I mean go up in my plane."

I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. Being gilded rich usually meant your mode of transportation was stepped up a notch or two. Chauffeured limos were only part of it, a small part. Gloria might have been going mobile by slumming it with a Prius, buffing up her environmental image a little bit, but she wasn't going to be rubbing elbows with any refugees from the Orbitz website when it came to covering long distances. And first class was for suckers. Not only had she scored on her husband's wings but she had gotten her pilot's license too. So much for keeping that carbon footprint to a minimum. Contrails in the sky were certainly visible proof that you were making steady progress to somewhere. To think that having a solar powered house could be undone by the purchase of an airplane.

"Your plane," I said skeptically. Then, thinking for a moment, I added, "Of course you would have your own plane--stupid me."

Being an airplane owner puts you in select company. Gloria was the proud owner, a hand me down from hubby, of the Beechcraft Baron. It was one of those twin engine prop types, with four seats in the back facing each other, better to have those mile high business meetings as you are soaring among the clouds. As unbelievable as it might sound, this was her second plane. Her "ex" had gotten the jet in the divorce. I have no idea what that one cost but this one was listed for around a cool mil. It might have been a step down in flight travel, going from jet propulsion to spinning propellers, but it still had that certain cool factor. Not that I was all that impressed because I would rather stay terrestrial bound anyway.

Off we went to the airport, with her driving, after she had placed a call to prep the plane for a pending flight. This was indeed novel for me. The ability to tell someone to gas up your plane and have it ready for takeoff had to be up there at the top when it comes to living life on a specific level. Then we got to the airport, after having driven up an undulating road that snaked up the side of a large mesa. The damn runway was directly on top, resting at five thousand feet. Suddenly my giddiness at being able to hop on someone's private plane vanished.

"Looks like a good day to see the Red Rocks," she chirped next to me, while she parked the car next to the hanger where her plane was kept. "Let me double check on the weather reports," she announced, disappearing into an office near the hanger.

I got out of the car and stood there for a moment, wondering just what excuse I could use in order to get out of this boondoggle of an idea. A few planes took off and landed, while I watched and tried not to think about all of the bad things that could happen when you are in a very small plane and are taking off and landing on the top of a pile of rock. Then it dawned on me that I had no idea what level of expertise Gloria had as a pilot. Isn't it always the rank amateurs who end up smashed into some hill side somewhere, with the wreckage scattered for miles around, I thought. You always saw it on the local news, with video of the plane parts looking like so much confetti on the ground. Air travel was, generally, very safe but that didn't necessarily include all of those wealthy weekenders out there risking their lives with their grubby hands on the joy stick.

If Gloria Worthington was trying to intimidate me she had just succeeded. Putting my manhood to the test was a simple endeavor. I had nothing against cowardice. Every family has one and I was the resident chicken shit in mine. She really didn't need to get me up to ten thousand feet to find out that I would crumble like a stale cracker. Courage was completely negotiable.

"Oh, you're back," I mumbled, startled at first when Gloria appeared by my side while I watched a small (very) plane come in for a landing, as the wing seemed to dip precariously first to the right then to the left. "Seems kind of windy up here," I suggested, hoping that she was going to take me up on my meteorological skills.

"Always is," she declared, sniffing at the air like she might be trying to detect pheromones of fear I might be giving off. "Ready? Let's get to it." With that command, she marched off to her bright, shiny plane.

I was one of those kids who didn't particularly like carnival rides. You know what I mean, those scare factories that are assembled and reassembled from town to town across the US, bringing joy to thousands and thousands of children across the land. I hated them. They twirled you and spun you and tossed you, all so you could try not to throw up.

Once, when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, my older brother had talked me into getting on one at this local carnival near our house. The carnival showed up every year instantaneously in the Spring one day and then just as quickly disappeared, but not before it sucked money out of our pockets and frightened the crap out of half of us. My brother knew I detested the rides but bullied me into going on one. I don't remember what it was named. It took you on a hellish journey for maybe five minutes, which felt like an hour, then left your legs wobbly and your eyes blurred. My brother loved it. I didn't and showed my displeasure at being on the damn thing by relieving myself of several pounds of curly fries, cotton candy, and, I think, corn dogs. My expulsions happened in mid-ride, cascading down over the waiting crowd like fallout from a belching volcano. I wasn't real popular after that.

"Isn't this kind of expensive, you know, taking the plane up and all?" I inquired, mentally scrambling as I tried to grasp onto any excuse to get me out of getting in that small plane and leaving terra firma. "I don't want to put you out or anything."

She eyed me for a moment, then grinned as she put a hand behind one of her ears and exclaimed, "Do I hear somebody's knees knocking together?"

I gave her a who me look then put my hands on my hips in the best macho pose I could muster and replied, "I'm still trying to get used to your sense of humor. Must be because you are from the East Coast or something but it escapes me."

She scoffed and ordered, "Get in, weenie."

Let me just say being called names by a woman old enough to be my mother is an experience I would rather not, you know, experience. No one likes being mocked and men especially don't like their manhood being impugned; but I did as I was told and climbed on in. I don't know if you have ever flown in one of the small planes. Let's just say they are a really tight fit, even if they do have room enough for six passengers. It's not like strolling onto an American Airlines flight bound for pick your destination. No. First, head room is at a premium. Once you are inside and seated you realize just how vulnerable your really are to the vagaries of gravitational laws. You are going to be propelled through space with, in this case, two twirling propellers and held aloft by that flimsy looking piece of aluminum you see out each side window. Flight, to me, doesn't make any sense what so ever. Death defying comes to mind.

"Do we get a meal on this flight?" I joked, trying to alleviate the nervousness that was attacking my stomach. The thought of food actually was the furthermost thing from my mind. Flashes of me upchucking all over Gloria's Donna Karan slacks strobed through my brain. Something told me that this flight was probably going to make that carnival ride way back when look like a romp in one of those kid's bounce houses they have at parties.

"Strap yourself in," she ordered, ignoring my remark, while she went through a pre-flight check list, flipping this and that switch, as she mumbled to herself.

What I wanted to do was get in the back and curl up on the floor in a fetal position and cry for my mommy. It did look much better back there, with the leather seats and carpeting. Then we were moving and I could hear her gabbing with the control tower in some arcane dialect having to do with getting us off the ground. People would kill for a visual tour of the Red Rocks and here I was sniveling about it, I thought, glancing out the window at the runway slipping under the wing as we gained speed for takeoff. My butt seemed to feel every little bump on the tarmac. I glanced over at her, cool, collected, Gloria and watched her expertly guide us airborne, before she banked away from the mesa and I felt my stomach do a somersault.

"Whoa!" I managed to cry out.

"Hang on, Bradford, I'm gonna take us over those pinnacles there," she informed me a little too gleefully for my liking.

I'm sure she was probably breaking some FAA rules as she skimmed over the Red Rocks, close enough for me to see several deer head for cover, running for their lives. She casually pointed out the landmarks, content, obviously pleased with herself for simultaneously scaring me and revealing to me the secrets of Sedona. All the while I kept thinking what I'd do when and if we went down after colliding with one big slab of salmon colored rock. It would make the news, of course. A hasty obituary would be drawn up, complete with photos from her life. There would be the usual maudlin quote from one of her fans and maybe a friend or two. They would use a picture of her from when she was younger, not that she didn't look too bad now. I would be mentioned as her male passenger, a slightly balding man wearing dirty tennis shoes.

"Does this plane have one of those warning signals? You know the ones that beep when you are heading into a mountain?" I wanted to know, as I gripped the sides of my seat until my fingers hurt.

"Want to give it a try?" she asked me, smiling the smile of an executioner. "Come on, let me take her up a bit first though."

"That's alright," I protested, trying to beg off like a man who had just been asked if he wanted to pull the trigger at his own firing squad. "I'm fine just sight seeing."

"Don't be a wuss," she shot back, laughing. "A child could do it."

Compare me to a kid, I didn't care. I wasn't going to be piloting any plane. Was this woman nuts? Next thing you know she was going to be telling me to put on a parachute and jump out. Maybe just leap without one. Who knew what she was capable of?

"What's that over there?" I asked her, hoping to divert her attention.

"Take the wheel and I'll tell you," she replied, grinning or maybe leering. "Go on. Put your little hands around the stick. I'll tell you what to do. I'm telling you it will feel like one of the best sensations in your life."

"It'll be the last thing I do in my life," I said, forcing a laugh.

"How you must have disappointed your father," she stated, frowning at me.

We flew on for a few minutes in silence, as she looked out the window. My stomach had finally settled down and it didn't seem like any eruptions were coming up. The palms of my hands were still sweaty though and I was sure my blood pressure was in the red line area. She was humming to herself, enjoying the scenery. Unless she was going to be flying us to Utah I knew the flight couldn't last all that long.

A moment later she suddenly yawned and folded her arms, taking her hands off the wheel. It took me a moment to notice what she had done. I stared at her for a second, waiting for her to get back into pilot mode. Nothing. She was casually looking at her finger nails, one by one.

"Very funny, Gloria," I told her, trying not to stammer as the plane suddenly dipped a little bit, buffeted by some wind. "You made your point, now put your hands back on the thing. Ha ha. If you want me to shit my pants then keep on acting like an idiot. This ain't funny any more."

She looked over at me and pointed to the wheel in front of me. I shook my head no. Gloria yawned again and pretended she was sleeping. In all of the things I had read about her there was nothing about her being a psycho. No wonder she had been divorced twice before. This game of aerial chicken was insane.

"I always get sleepy when I fly," she said, yawning again for emphasis. "How about you, Bradford?"

The plane dipped again and I almost shouted out: "Okay! You win. What do I have to do?"

It's safe to say my flight lesson was elementary and we weren't in any real danger at the time but I was still worried. We flew out over the Sycamore Wilderness as I kept the plane from going into a death spiral. She was beside herself, happy to have gotten her way, I guess. Did these small victories mean something to her? I wondered. At this stage in her life, where she had everything she wanted, did she have to resort to artificial trappings in order to make her day? I wasn't sure. I didn't know her well enough yet or if I ever would.

Although she was well known and wealthy, with a circle of friends and family, I seemed to detect just a trace of, you know, melancholy about her, not unlike you might find in one of those cheesy Victorian novels of yesteryear. I didn't pity her though. The woman had progressed through a lifetime of lifetimes, if you know what I mean. You would have to number her adventures, from literary figure to mother to multi-millionaire. When you thought of larger than life you might think of her as an example. I was along for the ride in more ways than one.

We made it back to earth and I had another story to tell. Some of my posse would undoubtedly be bugging me about my time spent with the Gloria Worthington: the face that launched a hundred gossip columns and numerous court proceedings. If Howard Hughes had a female version, she would be it, so said one of my friends, a girl who knew way too much about the rich and famous for her own good. Breathlessly, she would debrief me once I got back to LA, hoping that I would dish all the dirt.

"Now I want you to land the plane," Gloria commanded as we made our approach onto the mesa, which looked like a runway floating in the sky. Combat hardened fighter pilots would balk at landing there. It looked for all the world like you were going to over shoot the runway and end up dead on the highway below while rubbernecking tourists snapped photos of your burning corpse. Before I could protest, she added, "Just kidding. Hang on, this might get rough."

Did she just say rough? I asked myself, as I clutched at the sides of the seat with all my might, praying, sounding more pious than my brother had ever been. The plane dipped this way then that, bobbed a little bit, then plunged towards the ground. Gloria was calmly chattering into her mike, then she looked over at me and winked. My anatomy felt like it was being rearranged and I was happy I hadn't had all that much to eat. We made a brief touch down, then glided for a moment, and were reconnected to mother earth again. As we taxied along relief spread from head to toe. I was going to live another day.

The props sputtered to a stop, leaving the sound of whispering wind to replace the steady drone of the engines. Another crucible had been completed. Gloria was probably dreaming up something else to torment me with. I had to wonder how many tests there were before I passed the exam. As I got out of the plane I noticed my legs were a little unsteady. Nervous adrenaline ebbed in my veins.

"You were a pretty good co-pilot," she said, only partially concealing her sarcasm. "You'll probably want to change your underwear when you get home though."

I looked down involuntarily at my crouch, then said, "Nerves of steel, that's me."

"Uh huh," she said, rolling her eyes. "Maybe next time we can go down to Cottonwood and go skydiving."

"Right," I muttered, already forming excuses in my mind for future use.

This was her idea of bonding, I guess, making a gay man even more emasculated. I jest, but only a little. Gloria Worthington had come from Washington, where the male world set the boundaries, with a few female voices allowed in for appearance sake. She was used to butting heads with those who made the established structure of doing things, having done it probably since she was a little girl.

I wasn't up for it though. My world didn't have to have all the drama, even if I did it for a living. And it wasn't as if I was all Zen about living life either. Conflict was, of course, the backbone of literature, including the slum areas like screenplays. Character A duels character B, and so on. I got that; but with Gloria it was different in that she was treating me like a cat might treat a just captured mouse. In fact, mice and men might have been her mantra for all I knew and I am not offering up any Steinbeck reference here. She was a woman who was not going to be manipulated, controlled, or even influenced by any man--or any woman for that matter. Back in the day they would have called her headstrong and today we referred to that particular personality trait as a bitch. Call it like you see it.

That evening I was invited to her home for dinner. Oh boy, more mine fields. She had told me she was going to make me a vegan feast, which I immediately imagined would include a whole lot of pseudo food masquerading as actual sustenance. She might have wanted to live to be a hundred and ten but I was willing to take my chances and sample plenty of different fast food fare before I kicked it. Fortunately, my family had been hard core junk food aficionados, leaving me with a life long legacy of chowing down on In and Out burgers, suspect Chinese take out, Randy's donuts, and whatever meals I could procure from the comfort of my car at a drive thru. Our idea of natural food was to have lettuce on the burgers we wolfed down at least once a week. This was not going to be a good match.

"We'll have a working dinner," she proposed, smiling at me, probably feeling guilty for scaring the shit out of me up in the air. "Come on, stop being so formal and all. We need to develop some kind of rapport between us so the project shakes out all right."

Project? I mused, avoiding eye contact, trying to think of some way to tell her that all I wanted to do was head back to my little motel room, order in some pizza from maybe dominos, drink a beer from that local micro brewery I had seen advertised and relax, alone. Mental notes were piling up in my head and I had to make sense of them now before they evaporated to never be dredged up again. Project was what this was becoming, as in drudge work. I liked to slip into a rhythm when I worked on a script, one where the words flowed easily and I didn't have to jump over hurdles along the way. Gloria Worthington was one big obstacle.

"Maybe some other time, okay?" I tossed out there, hoping that she would back off, take the hint, and let it go.

"Your resistance has a certain charm to it...I'll give you that," she announced, laughing. "How about seven? That way you can help me with the prep work. Any good with a knife?"

Now she had switched gears and had added some sort of weird bon homie shtick. Trying to regain my mental balance for a second, I replied, "I never cook." As truth went this was gold plated. My kitchen back home was always so clean because I hardly ever used it. "I eat out a lot, like virtually all the time."

She snorted in disapproval and said, "Not good. You are still young. You need to treat your body right before it's too late."

Oh no, now she was climbing up on her soap box. Next thing I knew she was going to order me to eat yogurt with all those disgusting sounding ingredients that they liked to call probiotics, which in itself had a suspicious ring to it. I had a friend back in LA who was always on me about putting harmful food down my throat, which he said to a gay man without a trace of irony. I loved him for that, my heterosexual buddy with the witch for a wife, the one who made him take yoga with her and insisted he drink acai berry juice everyday because it was "bursting with strong antioxidants." Their plan was to outlive time itself.

"I'll risk it," I told her, laughing.

It was a forgone conclusion. I went back to my motel room and got ready to come back to her house for dinner. I was weak willed, had been forever. Stand up to her, a little voice in my head was saying. Tell her to shove it, or something to that effect. Then there was a tiny voice in my head speaking but I couldn't quite make out the words. Then I suddenly woke up to hear my phone ringing. I had fallen asleep, a quick nap before breaking bread with Gloria. Must be Marty wanting his daily update, I thought only to find when I answered the phone it was one of Marty's assistants, Laci.

"Took long enough to answer," she almost shouted into the phone. I could hear traffic noise in the background so I knew she was on the move, taking her office duties on the road. "Marty wanted me to check in with you."

"Okay," I said, deliberately being vague because I didn't like her all that much and wanted to get her off the phone as soon as possible. She was one of those drones Marty employed who were always in hyperdrive and couldn't wait until they had all of Hollywood on speed dial. She had a degree in something from some big name college and I couldn't imagine what she had majored in before landing a job on Marty's staff. Somehow although she had only been in LA for a year or so she felt somehow entitled, like she should be given a degree of respect reserved for veterans of movieland internecine warfare. I kind of hated her.

"So, give it to me," she demanded. "Any progress with what's her name?" she wanted to know, letting me know that she thought Gloria Worthington must be some fossil that needed special handling care. I doubted she even knew who she was. Her contemporary cultural IQ probably didn't extend beyond who was on the Billboard Music Awards.

"I'm working on it," I mumbled, wishing I could just hang up on her.

"More details, Brad," she demanded, and I could hear her yelling at some motorist in the other lane to hurry up so she could pass the car in front of her. I pictured her cruising up the PCH, scurrying to meet up with her current boy friend, probably an assistant producer or something. "I don't have all day."

"Well, Lace, I might have something by tomorrow," I lied, chuckling to myself.

"Got another call, hang on," she exclaimed excitedly and I knew it must be from the boy friend. Showing more guts than I thought I had, I hung up on her. Speak to my voice mail, I thought, heading into the bathroom for a shower.

Back at the space age mansion, Gloria was in full swing as she puttered around the kitchen, issuing orders to Pilar as she went, who cursed under her breath at that loco Yaqui rico. Gloria didn't entertain all that much anymore, leaving her hostess duties behind. Before, when she was the spouse of a very (rich) important man, she had had to play the dutiful wife and amuse any number of business partners and connected pols. She had hated every minute of it, especially since her livelihood didn't depend on doing the chore. So she chafed at her responsibilities all the while keeping a smile planted on her face, as she primed conversations and delivered refreshments. It was all beneath her and generally stupid, so she believed.

Gloria had told me that it was such a relief when they eventually got divorced and she no longer had to act like a diplomat's wife. It might have been a role her mother cherished, and excelled at, but it wasn't in her makeup to do it. Not her. She was one of the last people you'd expect to be diplomatic as a rule, choosing to voice her opinion whenever she thought it was merited. I, personally, would have loved to see her in her manners strait jacket, smoozing jerkoffs from the financial arena while they discussed their next venture to exploit the world. I would have paid good money to see that.

"Oh, Bradford, right on time," she cooed, standing in the kitchen wearing an apron that had been autographed by some big shot chef who had a show on TV. Are all the rich and famous on a first name basis? I wondered.

"If not anything else, my dad insisted I was punctual because of his military background," I explained, pushing Chewy away with my foot as he attacked my shoe.

"Why didn't you go into the Service?" she asked, surprising me. "Not your cup of tea?"

I didn't know how to answer that question, really. Me, the military, it seemed somehow farcical. Navy. Army. Air Force. Marines? I tried to imagine how I would have fit in. Then, of course, there was the bath room thing. Could I have made it all the way through basic training without using the toilet in the barracks? Would it have made my dad respect me more? What's the word...abrading? Was she trying to abrade my wounds? Man, this woman was evil.

"No chance for advancement, if you know what I mean," I answered, slyly referring to my sexual orientation.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot, you are a sodomite," she stated, turning to Pilar and saying something in Spanish. They both laughed, as I was almost positive I heard her say maricon, the Spanish word for faggot.

"Do you always mock your dinner guests?" I asked pointedly, glaring at her, readying myself for some verbal confrontation.

"Oh, honey, relax," she sang out, laughing. "Surely as a gay man you are used to being mocked. Comes with the territory, right?"

I didn't immediately know how to take this assault. Confused, I said, "It's not like its some kind of sport or anything, something you do as entertainment. Maybe I'm thin skinned but it is without a doubt rude to--"

"Be proud of your perversion," she suddenly interrupted, smiling at me. "A person should never apologize for doing something unless it disrupts the common good, ala John Stuart Mill. I think the world can afford to have a slice of its population not play by the biological rules. Right? I mean who cares if some people choose not to participate. Wine?"

Now she had me on the ropes. I was staggering. Gloria was used to doing combat with some pretty heavy hitters. She had been in the ring, you know, with intellectual heavy weights before and survived without a knockout. I was a minor leaguer. Cut your losses a small voice in my head advised.

"Sure, why not," I replied sheepishly, like a guy who had just been caught with his pants down.

Changing the subject, she stated: "Here's what on the menu for tonight, okay? First up, the appetizer is going to be curried stuffed mushrooms, then for the main course we'll have seitan patties with a bulgur spinach salad and snap peas. For dessert, my world famous silken chocolate tofu pie. How's that sound, Mr. Tuttle?"

She was beaming proudly at me like she had just found the cure for cancer. What could I say? Dancing through my brain was an image of barely palatable food that I was going to have to say was delicious, knowing full well it tasted like warmed over cardboard. It wasn't as if I hadn't been up against some of these alternative eaters before. Half of my friends ate cuisine that, as far as I was concerned, made them ripe for a trip to the nearest mental hospital. Man hadn't trekked out of Africa all those eons ago to revert back to eating something other than good old meat. God had a purpose for animals in mind when (and if) he dreamed them up. Vegetables were only an after thought.

Ever the polite guest, I answered, "Sure, okay. What can I do to help?" The words rang hollow in my ears but there I was putting on an apron, holding out my hand for one large piece of cutlery.

The three of us set about bringing a dinner to life, while Chewy nuzzled our ankles before being banished to the outdoors, attached to a long lease so he wouldn't dash off in search of other people to molest. I sliced and diced some giant mushrooms, then a few onions, before moving on to a wad of garlic. Gloria expertly maneuvered around the kitchen, issuing commands as she went. Pilar and I rolled our eyes at each other while we chopped away at tomatoes and cucumbers. Spices like curry and turmeric, rosemary and other ones I had never heard of were administered by Gloria, moving pan to pot, pot to pan to check on the progress of her masterpiece. Although the meal was taking shape and it did smell good, I knew it was going to be all I could do to not be inconsiderate and beg for a hot dog, hot pocket, anything to wrap my taste buds around.

She had the dessert already chilling, with only the fake whipped cream to create for it to be ready. I couldn't imagine how she was going to design the creamy garnish without using any diary ingredients. Vegans were so extreme in so many ways. Even the cheese was bogus, made from probably some bean curd or something. I think the word "yuk" was dreamed up for circumstances such as this.

To my surprise, Pilar was summarily dismissed as we were starting to sit down for dinner. It didn't seem fair. She had done the lion's share of the grunt work in the kitchen, shedding real tears as she chopped away at the onions. Then she gave me a grin as she was retreating from the scene of the crime, you know, ducking out the back door, happy to be going to her home for what I imagined was some real food. She might have worked for Senora Worthington but she didn't have to participate in the madness.

"Where's Pilar off to?" I asked, trying not to whine.

"Oh, she hates my food," Gloria replied, engrossed in the application of some soy sauce over the phony steaks, the ones that looked like they might have been freeze dried maybe a hundred years ago and were now being resuscitated so we could eat them. "I made a deal with her a long time ago. She can eat whatever she wants but it has to be cooked and eaten in her quarters. I don't want to be smelling the odor of fried meat." She shuddered at the thought, then added, "Let's eat!"

The dining room was, as with most of the rooms in the house, positioned to offer a great view. We could see in the fading light the twinkling lights of Sedona dotting the surrounding hills, making for a delightful sight, almost better than in the day light. Gloria had opened an expensive bottle of wine and was going on about its pedigree or something. It was all lost on me. I was a beer drinker for the most part, with rum thrown in for good measure once in a while. As always, I had snobby friends who could go on about wine, the same ones who liked to travel up to Napa and pretend they knew one wine from another. I always teased them that if I placed blind folds on them I could serve wine out of a box and they wouldn't know the difference. Naturally, they said that was absurd but to date not one of them had taken me up on the challenge.

Candles were lit, making the dinner take on some kind of weird romantic aspect, something that made me think I was being punked; or maybe Gloria Worthington was one of those demented types who think they can seduce gay men, thereby bringing them back into the fold of all humankind. God, I hope not, I thought, as I took a few peeks around the room trying to see if I could see any hidden cameras. She was too old to be a cougar, right?

This turn of events made the evening all the worse. Now not only was I going to have to eat some god awful gruel for dinner but I was going to have to fend off her advances too. I was going to kill Marty for this. That's right, I would march into his office, right past the bitchy gay receptionist with way too much product in his hair, and strangle him. I could take him. He was an old geezer, with a bad hair piece. Half the people in the town would applaud my actions and the other half would be glad to get out from under one of his lousy contracts. A few washed up actresses would show up at his funeral, probably drunk. The industry would go on.

"Smells good," I lied, sitting down to her right at the long table, long enough to seat a football team or at the very least a baseball team. "You don't cook like this all the time, do you?"

She poured out some wine into my glass, confident that it had breathed enough. Then she looked over at me and said, "Only for people I consider to be friends."

This woman was good, I told myself. Life was all a board game, one where she got to roll the dice four times to your one. The rich have to amuse themselves somehow. Scrolling through shows on your DVR won't cut it, even if the big screen TV is large enough to screen a film premiere on. They were in a different orbit. The laws of physics didn't apply to them. Gloria seemed to be in a perpetual quest to avoid the ordinary.

"Are you on Facebook by any chance?" I joked, laughing alone. She was, by the way. My attempt at being funny sat there obtrusively in the dining room.

"Do you really think I would be?" she wanted to know, sounding disappointed.

"I was only joking," I protested, smiling sympathetically.

She wagged a finger at me and said, "Your sense of humor is delightful...simpleminded but entertaining."

I wondered what it had been like to date Gloria Worthington back before. Brains and beauty, along with being a Washington Brahmin, it all must have been a challenge. She had been born and bred to travel in elevated circles, leaving any ideas of frivolity out of the question. Even her sense of humor had to be incisive. There was probably never any room for error. I couldn't imagine what it was like to be so measured all the time. Now that she was a living and breathing icon it made it all the more restricting.

I held up my wine glass and made a toast, saying: "To our working relationship...may it be fruitful."

She chuckled at that and announced, "It better be. My ass is on the line."

I found that comical on so many different levels. What? I was the one who was facing the gallows if I didn't deliver the goods. It was my career, not hers, that would suffer. Gloria would go on being the same figure she was before being lionized on film. Her fans weren't going to abandon her because some dumb Hollywood crappy movie died at the box office. Not likely. Her books would still sell. She wouldn't fall off the guest lists of the high and mighty. Most of all she wouldn't have her ATM reject her for lack of funds. Who was she kidding?

It wasn't prudent to say that though. Writers sometimes have to be diplomats too. If she thought her reputation or whatever was on the line then so be it. I wasn't going to try to disabuse her of the silliness in her rationale. Far be it for me to bring the real world into some wealthy person's bubble of nuttiness.

"These mushrooms are great," I told her, holding one up with my fork. All in all they weren't that bad, even though curry and I weren't exactly best buds. Then again, I never saw the point of appetizers. Meals didn't have to be laddered for me. Fill up a plate already. Get on with it.

"Try the seitan," she suggested, smiling wryly. I hope I got the sauce right."

Of course I was thinking that no sauce in the world was going to improve the piece of faux meat on my plate. What was it with vegetarians anyway? Did they really have to have fake meat dishes in order to feel like they were complete? I joke. "This salad is perfect," she purred, expecting a response from me.

"Yeah, perfect," I muttered, wondering whether or not Sedona had a good Chinese restaurant or not, some place I could head to after this excursion into bad food territory.

The meal was bad enough but then I was expected to indulge in some conversational mind bending too. Gloria liked her dinner accompanied by verbal expositions of some sort or another. She was used to sitting down with blowhards and self-important ass wipes, people who liked to expound on any number of subjects. Me, not so much, especially since my collection of friends spent most of their time devising ways to improve the diversion rate in living life. That's right, what we needed were more video games, movies, and TV shows, anything to facilitate the escape from actually facing another "tomorrow of today," as one of my professors back at USC like to put it. Who knew what she meant by it, except that it sounded cool.

Gloria Worthington had never really shaken off her upbringing in Washington, DC, a place where hand to hand combat came with the job. She had been groomed to be attuned to the machinations of national politics and all that went into it, leaving her with an appetite for one on one confrontations. She thrived on it. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like to be in one of her classes when she taught at the New School in New York City. She would have been one of those imperious type professors who hector the students to make a point, instilling the classroom with crystallized fear.

I made a mental note to put a scene like that in the script, one where she crippled some students with her caustic tongue. I knew little about the college, except that Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams had attended there, while Frank Lloyd Wright and Aaron Copeland had been on the teaching staff, making for some interesting educational history. Put that on your website to bolster your academic cred why don't you. I'd probably want to go there after finding that out.

Gloria was a dying breed though. People no longer really talked to each other. Human communication had been reduced to texting, tweeting, and or emailing. Blame it on the Internet maybe. Something had happened to the exchange of information. I, personally, couldn't live without the Internet, from using Yelp to find a good place to eat to reading the LA Times to even using dictionary.com, who could live without it? She was old school, a person who actually liked to hold a conversation face to face. It had been good enough for human history for a really long time. Not now, though. If anything divided my generation from hers it was the method of social intercourse.

However, I most certainly did want to talk to her about her daughter, Dari. I wanted to go full bore in that direction, using the whole mother/daughter axis in order to build some scenes. I was hesitant because she hadn't exactly been forthcoming about their relationship. There did seem to be some bad blood there between them. That mother daughter scare fest had always been one of my weak points.

I hadn't a clue about how my mother and sister got along, having never really paid much attention when I was growing up. I do remember some shouting matches between the two of them but nothing that I would label major or anything. The teenage years might have been rocky on occasion but in the end my mother got what she wanted: a God fearing woman with a family, including two little future fascists and a husband who attended church regularly and was able to keep his hypocrisy under wraps. Everyone was happy in the end. I just didn't know how they got to that point.

Gloria and Dari, so I surmised, might have been rivals at one point, both jockeying for the attention of the father, the billionaire. I had looked him up of course, even digging deeper than your average Wiki entry. He was handsome, intelligent, educated, and successful, a real specimen. I hated him even though I found him attractive. He had that look about him, you know, all WASPy but with a perpetual tan, like maybe somewhere in his genetic makeup there might have been some Brazilian or Argentinean infusion of some sort, as in maybe on the mother's side or a long lost great grand father. I could only imagine the wife and daughter thought he was theirs to keep. I guess it didn't work out that way because in the end neither one of them got him.

They did get his money, or at least a large portion of it. A shark with a giant office in downtown LA saw to that. Gloria was quick to seek out her representation. Word of mouth worked wonders, as scores of scorned wives passed on the good merits of hiring this lawyer to do due diligence, even if she took a large slice of the profits right off the top. It was worth it to see all those bastards squirm like prisoners waiting to be sentenced. Gloria, and Dari, were the recipients of the legally enforced largess.

What was left of the relationship between daughter and father I could only imagine. Like I might have said, the daddy had skipped town and country, fleeing to parts unknown; although it was said he had taken up residence in either Southeast Asia or maybe the Persian Gulf. He wanted nothing more to do with American and Californian justice. He took his half a billion and retreated, slipping into the shadows of shady international regulations to nurse his wounds.

I dramatize of course. I really didn't know how bad he got raped by the legal system, except to say the divorce trial had been front and center in the news for a good many months back then a few years back. Everybody loved to see the rich get theirs, I guess. I know I did. Hell, the man lost his favorite Lamborghini Gallardo for heaven's sake, the yellow one. He had two, don't you know. Everybody needs a car that can go 0-60 in the blink of an eye, top speed over 150 miles an hour. Along with the car went a plane, apartment in New York City, several houses...you get the picture. It was like an inventory from the Gods. One house had a heli-pad out back, for when you just have to get to the grocery store really quick.

"What should we talk about?" she asked coyly, as if I had much say in the matter.

"I don't know," I answered, hoping like hell she wasn't going to launch into some harangue about an obscure European monk who only wrote in Latin or something. Steeling myself, I piped up with: "Tell me about your daughter, Dari." She shot me a look, one that I'm sure she like to use when she wanted the hired help to fuck off. "I like that name by the way," I added, hoping to soften my impertinence. "Where did you get the idea for that name anyway?"

She eyed me coldly for a moment, taking a slow sip from her glass of wine, from a local vineyard by the way, which was, all in all, not bad. I smiled benignly back at her. Gloria seemed to be weighing her options, which included either throwing said wine in my face or tying me down on the ground and have Chewy maul me with saliva. I waited for my fate.

"Is this for the screenplay, Bradford, or are you trying your hand at psychoanalyzing me?" she wanted to know, letting a wicked smile appear. "I'm not at all sure you're up to the task, Mr. Tuttle. In fact, I dare say you might be out of your element all together on that score."

Who talks like that, I wondered, then replied, "For the screenplay, Gloria. I told you before that I might want to include your daughter...you know, to flesh out the character more. I can't very well write a bio on you and not include your daughter can I?" I complained, trying not to sound too defensive. "Your daughter is an integral part and--"

"Are you finished expounding, Bradford? Can I answer you now?" she stated arrogantly. "Perhaps you can work around that little fact," she explained, with a twinkling in her eye. "I'm only kidding you. Of course you have to include Dari, unless you are going to end the story before my second marriage. You aren't planning on doing that are you, silly?"

Very funny, I thought. Much as I hated being a play thing for her, I had a job to do. Apparently, I was going to have to endure her peculiar sense of humor, and other things about her, if I was going to finish up the project. I was now officially worried about the script. Gloria Worthington is and had been a household name but I wasn't certain I could bring her life to the screen and make it, you know, watchable. Was there a market out there for a sixty year old icon who was an intellectual with a past? I wasn't sure inserting some sex scenes from her escapades back in old Hollywood was going to get the job done. It looked like using her daughter and her weird lifestyle was the scene leverage I might need in order to make it all work.

Dari was now in her late twenties, unmarried, a veteran of several re-hab stints, and like to drive really fast through the arroyos of Baja. Like her mom, she was good looking, but unlike her mother she was something of a tom boy. She had been raised mostly in the West and never actually acquired her mother's Northeast fixation with that whole intellectual mantra. Whatever they were offering up back East she wasn't buying.

Dari, standing five foot ten, a full inch taller than her mother, was into wide open spaces that only the desert could provide. And it wasn't about horses or any cowgirl experience either. Not that. She looked down her nose at the rodeo culture. No, she was all about having something mechanical between her legs. First came motocross bikes and then four wheeling, finally settling on hardcore off road racing, any form of transportation that got her out among the cactus.

Neither one of her parents knew where she got this brand of wanderlust. Her father was an inveterate urbanite for the most part, choosing to have his brush with nature from the balcony of one of his numerous summer homes, while her mother hated the very thought of camping outdoors. Later, in a moment of weakness, Gloria confided that she once thought her little girl might be a dyke because she was so, you know, butch. She told me that she can't ever remember seeing her in a dress.

Dari wasn't a lesbian. She was one of those girls who liked to play with the boys on several different levels, which included beating them at their own macho games. This she did regularly by the time she was in her teens, out racing them on the dirt tracks and out distancing them in the wilderness. A boy friend, a welcome relief for her mother, had introduced her to the world of motorcycles one year when she was home for the holidays from Prep school. She rode off on his bike and didn't return for over an hour. From then on she had the fever.

Amateur races turned into a spot on the pro circuit after she had finally given up on attending college. She didn't see the point in getting a degree, not when she could do something she liked doing. It was a simple as that to her. Against her parents wishes, she abandoned her studies and disappeared into the off beat world of motorcycle riding. It wasn't lucrative, even though she was the only female in most of the events and an obvious drawing card. Who didn't want a tall, beautiful girl to attract attention to the sport?

Her racing career petered out after a few short years though, leaving her with nothing to do until she decided to transfer her lifestyle from two wheels to four. That's when the off road racing came along. One of her ex-boy friends had introduced her to the thrills of speeding along over dangerous roads at breakneck velocity, as you tried not to end up at the bottom of some ravine mangled from a fifty foot tumble. Dari traded one adrenaline rush for another version.

I know I wasn't up on my mother/daughter friction but I detected from talking to Gloria that she might have felt threatened by her daughter. The mother was fearful of anything that diminished her profile, be it comparisons to youth or beauty, especially both. Dari had the youth and the beauty, not to mention a line of work that made her, I guess, compelling. I could only imagine Gloria felt like she had to compete with her own daughter under certain circumstances. She was used to being the focus of most of the attention and had been since she was barely out of her teens. Having a daughter usurp any of that public adulation would have been difficult for her. I knew enough about her now to come to that conclusion.

"Well, I was thinking of just doing your early years, say maybe when you were in elementary school," I joked, laughing.

"He who laughs alone," she intoned, frowning at me. "More wine?"

"Got any pictures of your daughter?" I wondered aloud, regretting asking almost immediately.

"Ready for dessert?" she shot back, walking into the kitchen.

It was pretty obvious that when Gloria didn't like a question she just ignored it. It was a defense mechanism that most people couldn't pull off because usually the question just got repeated. With her, nine out of ten people probably were too scared to ask again. I was going to have to work hard not to be in the ninety percent if I expected to get anywhere with the script.

"I'm kinda full," I called out to her, imagining her doling out large portions of some phony concoction pretending to be an after dinner sweet.

"You gotta try this," she said which sounded more like a command. "I got the recipe from a pastry chef in Europe."

Of course you did, I thought, before announcing, "Not too much for me."

She reappeared a moment later carrying a silver tray with two dishes on it. I noticed the serving set alone probably cost more than my car. Economic comparisons were something you did automatically when you represent the average and they are way above the mean. Money begets standards on a sliding scale that tilts upward, if you know what I mean. My idea of increasing measures is to splurge on my choice of the beverage for dinner, as in American beer versus European. You get the picture.

"Well, what do you think?" she was dying to know, eyeing me for my response.

I didn't like being put on the spot about some course of the meal your hostess had just whipped up. Besides, it was a bogus question. Was I really going to sit there and tell her it tasted like sawdust, maybe spit it into my napkin? By the way, the napkin, (serviette) was some kind of linen that I just knew had been imported from Spain or somewhere and was hand made by peasant women who were masters of their craft and had been doing it since before the Reformation.

"Not bad," I replied, trying not to gag at the cloying gob of gunk that was oozing down my throat. Except for the initial blast of sugary content the dessert tasted like some medicinal toothpaste. I didn't know how I was going to finish it all, while she looked on, pleased with her creation.

"Here, take a look," she suddenly said, propping up one of those digital photo frames, the ones that store a million and one photofiles and offer up a perpetual slide show along as the batteries hold out.

Surprised, I watched as the photos coursed through all kinds of photos of her daughter, from when she was a little girl to present day. Most of the photographs were taken with a mind towards a mother's instinctual pride. This surprised me. I tried to imagine Gloria as a young mother, lugging an infant around, changing diapers, wiping snot off her daughter's nose. Then again, nannies did that, right? Wealthy parents only made drive by appearances with their kids, staying just long enough to record some sort of recollection. Naturally, I had no way of knowing what kind of parent Gloria had been. Maybe she had been a patient and attentive mother. Maybe not.

"Somehow I see you with one of those large photo albums...not one of these," I said, pointing at the digital photo frame device.

"Oh, because I'm an old fart I have to be a Luddite, huh?" she stated, frowning at me.

"I didn't mean anything by what I said," I protested.

She laughed, waving away her comment, then said suddenly, "If Dari shows up you'll have to meet her."

Meet her, I thought. As I looked at the changing photos, which had turned into a whole lot of desert shots with Dari either straddling a dirt bike or behind the wheel of some Mad Max off-roader, I wondered what that would be like. The daughter had inherited her mother's looks but I wondered whether or not she possessed the same kind of personality. She was probably just one of those rich bitches you always hear about, the ones who are forever getting their way and treat every living person like they were their personal servant. I'm just saying that after living in LA and having to peripherally deal with plenty of wealthy females who pretty much have the world by the balls, you know, I have my own tainted view of things. Hey, connected girls in Hollywood don't even have to live within the legal system most of the time.

True. Most judges in that particular district have a definite blind spot for certain aspects of the law when it comes to interpreting statues that affect the famous. They get cushy house arrest or community hours they don't even show up for. Bail is usually automatic. If they do have to face lock up it is most times not in the general population of the prison. Every possible benefit is afforded them, making that blind justice concept laughable. Legality is negotiable.

Getting back on track, I kind of wanted to meet Dari. The thought of it scared me a little bit. Confident women, especially beautiful ones, were a gay man's nightmare. We liked our women to be, for the most part, fag hags, females with relationship issues and an almost congenital desire to be liked. Why else would they like to hang out with homosexuals? Think about it. Apart from sharing ideas about haute couture and other frilly things, what would a female want with a gay man?

I had several special friends from that end of the gender side. Even though I wasn't one to provide any insight into clothes design or anything even close to that end of the spectrum, we shared a friendship. Now that I think about it for a minute, our relationship was predicated around sports. That's weird. We were Dodger fans. Hell, I don't even know why I liked baseball, having never played it even in Little League. When I moved to LA I just fell into it after one of my boy friends took me there for a game. Now I could recite you baseball stats and trivia that might just be a little on the pathological side.

The dinner ended, (thank god), soon enough and I was free to pursue the style of gastronomy more to my liking, as in the drive thru at the local Burger King. Sedona being Sedona, BK didn't even look like your average everyday fast food place. I almost drove right past it on my way back to my motel. The city fathers apparently had insisted on maintaining a decent level of faux architecture, one that blended in with the surroundings at least a little bit. Oh how the paid-by-the-hour inhouse architects at the King must have puzzled over that problem, finally settling on a salmon colored vaguely Santa Fe look for the facade. Still, come on, there were burgers to be flame-broiled. You could dress it up anyway you like but, in the end, greasy calories were on tap for all to have. I had a whopper, with fries, by the way. Oh, okay, and a slice of Dutch apple pie for dessert.

In time, I would meet Dari, and her current boy friend, Wyeth. Wyeth and Dari, they were a pair. He was several years her junior and, basically, an asshole. She had met him, evidently, at one of her race after parties, you know, to blow off steam after speeding through the desert dodging burros and migrants in route to a better life. Maybe its me, but I don't get car racing of whatever stripe. At least the off-road racing actually went somewhere, unlike those idiot Nascar ones that go around in circles for miles and miles. My dad was a big fan of racing, sitting in front of the TV for hours watching an endless loop of loud cars go by in a blur. It was probably the very definition of mindless, in my opinion. Really.

These were the people who participated in the NORRA (National Off-road Racing Association), an organization committed to bringing vehicular traffic to any sand pile they could find, the more remote the better. Dari drove in a race that went from Las Vegas all the way to Reno, passing through some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. It boggled my mind that there were actually human beings out there who wanted to spend hours behind the wheel while they traversed land that looked like the surface of Mars. Further more, they were able to find sponsors for such nonsense.

I know, it sounds insane. How did they get funding for something as stupid as that? Believe me, I couldn't imagine any business plan that would include such a thing. Yet it was one of those off-beat adventures that people got paid to do. Then again, golf is pretty dumb too. Men, and women, hit a little white ball around and get paid millions, ain't life grand?

The two of them, Darren and Dari, would figure bigtime in my immediate future, but that is for a later chapter. If I knew I was going to be drawn into what eventually happened I would have stayed back in LA, content to have a bit part in the movie biz. Unfortunately, as it goes, life can be unpredictable at times.

Chapter 3 JOEL

It is time to move onto the next character that figures in my story. That would be Joel Jenkins, adventurer, writer, thinker, and intriguing guy extraordinaire. I don't mean to wax rhapsodically but Mr. Jenkins was what they like to call a man's man. He had done it all. I don't think there was one aspect of life he hadn't delved into, from flying planes to jumping out of them, from being a journalist to having journalists write about him, from dodging bullets in war to shooting bullets in battle. It was all about living large.

He was a, you know, legend, one that crosses all generations. He was like the guy in that beer commercial: the most interesting man in the world. He lived it and owned it, so said a smitten journalist, a dude, who had written a profile on him for Time Magazine. Hell, he was even on the cover. That was back in the 80's, when he had already experienced the 60's trifecta: watching the moon landing on TV, (a real reality show if there ever was one), Woodstock, and the Viet Nam war. The man was full of encores, apparently.

Joel Jenkins was born to two missionary types and raised pretty much in South America. He spoke Spanish without an accent. His parents had been sent down to the jungles in Peru to bring the Word to some stone age people slackers, the same ones who hadn't taken to Catholicism all that much over the centuries. His parents were basically Bible thumpers, from an autonomous denomination with a chip on its shoulder about everybody else's interpretation of the Holy Writ.

His mother was a registered nurse too, besides being into proselytizing. His father was a jack of all trades with a burning desire to make everyone live by the New Testament, with a little bit of the Old thrown in to even things out. The family was from Arkansas or Missouri, some place that took its religion really serious. Joel had been born there but never lived there. He was spirited away to South America when he was all of maybe a year old.

For the next 16 and a half years he lived in the pestilent rain forest, as his parents set up their mission, only returning to the States for quick jaunts to see the relatives and so his parents could touch base with the congregation back home. These were really lightening raids back home in order to secure more funding for their work back south of the border. His dad, with timely comments from his mother, would pitch his latest venture which usually translated to converting more heathens into the fold. There would be photos and lectures, a show and tell for Christianity's goal of bringing Jesus to every living soul in the universe. The congregants would ooh and ah all the way through the presentation then fork over some more hard earned money. It was, so Joel would inform me, not unlike trolling for investors on Wall Street. To which I say true because a scam is a scam is a...

Life for the young Joel Jenkins was, most times, fairly idyllic. He played with the locals like any other youngster and went to school too. If you believe in small class sizes then this school was for you. The entire school had approximately one hundred students at any given time. Instruction followed the classical method if you consider the Gospels to be an elevated level of education. Just kidding. Remarkably, the religious bent was kept to a minimum so the kids could build a sound working knowledge. Bravo for that.

In order to reach out to all of the resident savages in the territory Mr. Jenkins purchased a small plane so he could travel from village to village. Better to deliver the message literally from on high. By the time Joel was in his teens, he was piloting along side his dad. It was probably one of the first steps in his education, one that would encompass so much throughout his lifetime. It helped also that he was naturally bright and burned with curiosity, two attributes that gave him a leg up on most kids.

He was just turning 17 when he got this burning desire to see the war going on in Viet Nam. In the family's remote outposts news traveled slow but they always managed to stay up with current events some how. His native country was pounding the crap out of a section of Southeast Asia so he wanted to see it for himself. At first, as he thought long and hard about it, he considered joining the US Army. This would have been problematic to say the least for his parents. He hadn't even registered with the Selective Service. For the most part he was a person without a country, unless you included God's half acre.

"I just knew I wanted to see it for myself," he had told a reporter a few years back in an interview, drawing on his memory banks to remember that time forty years ago. "So I broached the subject with my parents and they gave me this horrified look. I can still remember my mother's face...like she had seen a ghost. We Jenkins didn't go fight in wars. My dad had gotten out of World War II because he was a minister."

He talked a good game, finally convincing his parents to allow him to return to the States and live at his relatives place for his senior year of High School. After getting over the culture shock of being in a public school, with girls and sports and grades that mattered, he settled in to become a normal American teenager. Fortunately for him he was given a high lottery number in the draft but he still intended on going over to Viet Nam, but not before he hitch hiked to Upstate New York to attend Woodstock, alone. Traveling by himself would set a trend that he followed for the rest of his life.

Hitching across country from his mother's hometown in Kansas allowed him to see his country up close, advancing his education more. That, along with his year of High School, where he would go on to excel at sports (football and track), with a little bit of fine academics too, rounded out his view point. It was right before graduation that he got an idea.

He wrote to several newspapers around the country but got nowhere. Oddly enough, no press organization was willing to take a flyer on some 18 year old from some hick town in the middle of nowhere. It didn't deter him though. He then used his fluency in Spanish and wrote to some newspapers in South America, laying it on thick about his intent on covering the Viet Nam War. Most of them didn't reply but one did and he got his coveted press credentials. After that he begged, borrowed, and stole to get some funds and was off, landing in Saigon as Nixon was conducting his little flanking skirmish into Cambodia. Somehow Joel conned his way onto chopper flights and then road on little motorbikes until he got a first hand account of the illegal foray into a neighboring country. His story was picked up by several large newspapers and he was on his way. Of course it also didn't take him long to alienate the Pentagon brass too and he was soon persona non grata after that just about everywhere in South Vietnam.

The rank and file soldiers, especially the NCO's, loved him though because he was cutting through the usual bullshit that was piling up everyday in a war without reason. His dispatches were soon read, you know, far and wide, He made a name for himself in no time at all. In fact, the first time I ever heard of Joel Jenkins was when my father cursed his name then praised him for being honest about the war effort. It was the usual response to Joel. First, you hated him for sticking his nose in where it didn't belong then you realized that what he was saying was the truth. That was him, a guy who told it like it was, with a disarming smile.

I couldn't imagine what the grunts thought about him, this young punk scrambling off helicopters at Fire Bases, notebook in hand, with a cheap camera slung around his neck he had bought in the back streets of Saigon. He must have looked like some High Schooler there for his class term paper as he hung around for the mortar barrages and rocket attacks, wanting to experience what it was like to be under fire. Joel lasted just over a year on the beat over there. Burned out quickly or, more like it, burned his bridges. It didn't take long for people to know who he was, the kid with the smile who used his pen to hit you over the head. Offers rolled in from some heavy hitters back home. Investigative journalism, as weird as it might sound today, was all the rage back then. Journalists actually went out and uncovered things, and I don't mean how much blow so and so was doing at so and so's party either. Journalistic standards were definitely higher then.

First though, Joel wanted to go to college. The guy wasn't even nineteen yet. Money was a problem though. His parents were, basically, penniless, having giving it all away and they didn't have much to begin with. Someone he had met along the way suggested he try the Cooper Union in New York City because there was no tuition costs. Sounded good except that it was more than just competitive to get in. The student body was minuscule so they only accepted the very best, the cream of the crop. If you don't know, it's a strange college tucked away in the East Village and was founded by a rich guy coincidentally enough named Cooper. He was from humble beginnings and thought that it would be nice if students could get a really good education for free. Nice touch. The school has a sterling rep, even if most people have never heard of it. Hey, Thomas Edison went there.

Joel also had another problem, his academic credentials were scant. One year of High School wasn't a resume builder. Thankfully for him he had aced the SAT's. So when it came to getting into Cooper Union a lot was riding on his essay, which became a slam dunk after he wrote about his experiences in South America. Not many people could compete with that, tales of warding off disease and impromptu society building with stone age tribes, while battling revolutionaries too. It made for some colorful character construction.

Joel Jenkins scored a spot on the incoming freshman class of 71, arriving in New York City sometime in the summer of 1971. He spent the next year there getting his bearings in an urban setting that he was totally unused to. A place was found in the more skeezy parts of the East Village, where he shared with a girl and a guy, a couple from Maryland. They had placed an ad in the Village Voice and he answered it, telling them he was currently out of work but looking.

Not for long. It wasn't any time at all before he was landing free lance writing jobs, churning out stories like: the Punk scene, the horrible conditions of the VA hospital, how to make the perfect bagel, where he actually worked at a bagel place hand making bagels at five in the morning, architecture of Harlem, how to date a girl from Barnard, the ins and outs of Puerto Rican Spanish, etc. The pay was minimal but it kept his name recognition afloat.

Then came school, college. He had been from a very early age an autodidact, a person who came to knowledge on his own terms. So while he had to sit there listening to professors lecture, his mind naturally rebelled. It wasn't so much his arrogance but his instinctual bent towards accepting information through a different method. Joel lasted a year at college, choosing to drop out instead of slog through for a degree.

Besides, New York City was beginning to wear him down. At first, there had been the excitement of encountering something new. Every neighborhood offered him different stimuli, something he could react to. After months of exploration though he was ready to move on to other things, another location. In his time there he had made so many connections, links that would last him a life time and he would use liberally. They would serve him well as he traveled the world seeking out more and more adventure.

I suppose that is why he was such a unique character. Of course you had to possess the burning curiosity in order to want to see and do everything, but with Joel it was somewhat different. The man went about it in his own way. After Viet Nam he wanted to know what it was like to be the soldier and not just report on it. Not only did he take weapons courses offered locally, but he took sky diving lessons to get the Airborne cred before he traveled to South America and participated in some good old fashioned insurgencies, almost like a mercenary without the pay out. The Cause was immaterial. He just wanted to experience the adrenaline rush of combat, to feel that impulse of fear and destruction. On top of that he studied warfare, poring over manuals and war tracts written by historical figures, anything to place him at the battles.

This would all serve him well when he eventually wrote his book about his war correspondence experiences and life as a revolutionary. There would be maybe a dozen wars scattered across several continents he covered in one way or another.

His photographs would be included too, making the book all the more compelling. I had even read it at the urging of my dad, who thought Joel nailed the aspects of war that most people usually gloss over. Who hadn't read it? The damn thing was on the best seller list forever.

The book not only gave him more stature but it gave him an income he could use to do more exploring, like mountain climbing and white water rafting, all those things lunatics do to prove to themselves they aren't scared of anything. I maintain people like that have brain issues, as in there is something seriously wrong with the way their minds process the outside world. I get scared watching good horror films and that includes the ones I've written the screenplay for.

So Joel spent a large chunk of his life traveling the globe seeking out things to write about while he did death defying stunts. I don't mean he was one of those glory hounds or publicity seekers or anything. Far from it. The guy liked his privacy more than most. What I mean is you weren't going to turn on your TV and see his grinning mug staring into the camera and telling you that he was about to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge without a parachute, please watch. I'm sure he had been hit up over the years by greasy producers wanting to cash in on his notoriety, but he never succumbed to any Hollywood bullshit. In fact, I was surprised there hadn't been a movie about him before now; although there was one shitty TV series based on him before in the late 90's. It was an abortion really, with silly scripts and an asinine dramedy edge to it that made it pretty much unwatchable. It died an early death, thank god.

Now though someone at the studio had seen the light and thought they could translate his life onto the silver screen. More power to them, to me. I was the one who was expected to bring this turkey to life. Not that there wasn't plenty of material to work with. Too much. Then again it would have been nice to have the protagonist on board for the project. Is that too much to ask? Joel Jenkins was adamant about not offering input for the film. Actually, he was against it whole heartedly, finding it an invasion of his cherished privacy. There had been some communication between him and the producer but it was mostly profane, as in he just might have to cut the man's balls off if he pursued the idiotic idea of making a movie about the most interesting man in the world. Something like that anyway, so Marty had informed me, laughing at the absurdity of it all.

I didn't find it a laughing matter. The man had once been an unpaid mercenary, you know, somebody who didn't mind working out his aggression from the business side of a gun. There were Right wing and Left wing governments around the world who still wanted to prosecute the guy. Firing squads were always on standby. A desert tribe in North Africa has a standing bounty on his head. You couldn't put anything past this dude.

To my surprise, it had been reported by supposedly reputable sources, that Joel Jenkins was living in the Sedona area. Sure, I thought. It sounded absurd, like a bad joke. What would he be doing living there, I wondered? The very idea didn't ring true to me. Besides, what I knew of his reputation the guy never stopped long enough to live anywhere. I mean over the years there had been numerous articles about him and his lifestyle but nothing definitive. Joel Jenkins was almost like J.D. Salinger for heaven's sake, a legend the public couldn't get enough of.

Then again, we were living in the mediacene age now, a time where information begat information and was distributed by all sorts of methods, like social media for one, including I suppose the whole You Tube nonsense. Whoever invented the video camera changed the world as we know it. (Note to self: do outline for script about man who invented video camera.) Joel's exploits had been captured first in print, then on film, before morphing into digital. The surprising thing is he had never fostered any of it. Nada. It just happened like an organic movement from the gods. I'm joking, of course but not about him not having a hand in any of his fame.

Anyway, I couldn't imagine him living a secret life, not with cell phones cameras and all. Surely somebody would see him at the local Fry's buying green peppers and lettuce for a salad or something. Maybe stopping at the gas station to fill up. Hiking? Car repairs? Come on, you couldn't go ten feet these days without ending up either on some jackasses tiny-weenie hard drive as a jpeg or on some corporation's security uplink. He probably wore disguises. Yeah, that is something he would do, probably even switching up his gender to pose as a Mexican woman scoring on some chayote in the produce section.

I had been told by Marty, or rather his assistant, that someone who knew so and so had been given reliable information about Jenkins whereabouts. Okay. Telling me he was in the Sedona area didn't really narrow it down all that much. There were thousands of acres of Federal land right out the door, wilderness really. Could you be a little more specific? I'd like to look the address up on Mapquest, make it somewhat easier. Nothing doing.

"How am I supposed to find the guy?" I screeched into the phone while I was in route to Arizona. "I can't just drive up and down the streets calling out his name, can I?"

The assistant was unmoved, used to being given hopeless tasks to complete. I could hear him sighing on the other end, as he slurped at his latte. I was, at the time, entertaining thoughts of making a U-turn and heading back to LA, leaving a nasty message on voice mail that they could go fuck themselves. I didn't of course because I was a chicken shit for the most part.

"I'm sure you'll come up with something," he purred into the phone and I pictured him sitting there smirking, delighted to not be the only minion on the pay roll. "Ta-Ta."

With that he hung up and I slapped my steering wheel, fuming.

There had been thoughts of asking Gloria about the rumors of Joel being on location. Then I didn't want her to know that I was multitasking on this trip, trying to bring in two screenplays at the same time or about as simultaneous as you can get. She would probably go ballistic, as they like to say, telling me that she was too important to have somebody splitting their time between two projects. She would be right, I suppose. She would also tell me that the chances of me even talking to Joel Jenkins were laughably remote. Even famous people respected his legend.

So now I have to be a private investigator too, I thought, as I sat in my motel room, the one that smelled of just released air freshener, where the chemicals fully intended on mercilessly assaulting my nasal passages. I knew that maids all over the world worked long, hard hours but did they have to make the living space inhospitable for the paying public with there array of cleansers? Sorry, just another pet peeve of mine.

I lay there listening to the white noise of TV filtering into my space from the next room, thinking, when I got an idea. It wasn't so much brilliant as practical. I knew Joel liked to sky dive, it being one of those niche sports where fools go to play. Apparently they did that sort of thing in the next town at a little (tiny) airport. I could just scope out their hours of operation and see if he shows up or not. Okay, it was a long shot but my only one.

Playing a Private Investigator isn't glamorous, believe me. What you do is sit on your ass for mind numbing hours watching. You don't see that in any of those laughable TV shows from the 80's and 90's, where the PI is always solving cases on the run, dodging bullets along the way. No, what you really do is act as a peeping tom and catch somebody doing something wrong. In my case it was more like surveillance. I just had to see who showed up to get on a small plane and then jump out, drifting down over the valley with a really colorful parachute. Simple enough. Still boring.

It took me five days before I finally saw somebody half way matching Joel Jenkin's description or what I thought he might look like. For all I knew he might have had plastic surgery and now looked two decades younger. The only photo I had of him that was half the way recent was of him standing among a group of adventurers before they headed up some mountain in who knows where. It was probably ten years out of date.

I waited as I watched his chute descend, making stomach churning loops as he eventually landed near the airport. From there I saw him get in a Jeep and head up the mountain range that surrounded the valley. Being in stealth mode, I kept my distance behind him, jotting down the license plate of his car for future reference, not that I knew what to do with it. I didn't have a source at the local police station like on the TV shows, somebody to run a check for me. Still, it might come in handy.

Up we went, passing through a town perched on the side of the mountain, some make believe ghost town, complete with a raunchy history, which was now home to numerous art galleries and bars. It was a quaint place that was full on weekends with people from down south, there to soak up some phony atmosphere and drink a few. Maybe they even bought some art work but I doubted it.

The man drove on through the town and headed out the other end, eventually ending up on a dirt road to nowhere. Actually it went somewhere I guess but not anywhere most people would want to go. I hung back, way back, because now I didn't have any traffic to conceal my presence. This was tricky. I couldn't let him get too far ahead but then again I couldn't very well tail gate either. Fortunately for me the road was dusty as hell and his Jeep was kicking up clouds of it in front of me like a smoke screen.

We drove on for a few miles that seemed like forever because it was a bouncy ride. I was glad I was driving my Subaru, the one I had bought from a friend who couldn't make the payments any longer. When I bought it and he praised the car's handling and off road ability I thought at the time: Like I'm ever going to need to drive off the pavement. Well here I was, putting my all wheel drive and high clearance to good use.

Up ahead the man in the Jeep slowed down and then made a sudden turn to the left, disappearing down a road that looked more like a trail. I could see his Jeep bouncing over the ruts and small boulders. This is hard core stuff here, I thought, as I slowly followed behind, gingerly inching along, while tree branches on either side reached out to slap at the sides of my car. How crazy is this, I wondered, laughing nervously. Somehow I didn't think my triple A sticker was going to be of any use out here, I told myself. I was on my own.

The man in the Jeep had completely disappeared. After going a little bit further and hearing the bottom of my car scraping over rock I decided to stop in a pull over place and park. I was going to walk the rest of the way. As I got out of the car I noticed I was in deep shit, that is serious wilderness. This was beyond eagle scout stuff, reminding me how much I didn't care for the great outdoors. You can have it.

It was easy to follow the tire tracks that his Jeep was making because the ground was still moist and a little bit muddy. The trees shaded the trail for the most part so no sun penetrated, leaving a few mud puddles hear and there. I dodged them and proceeded up the trail, which was now climbing steeply up the mountainside. Then I thought about getting lost and stopped to see if I could get my bearings somewhat. I knew if I got lost out there they wouldn't probably find me for years. It would make the news, the Red Rock News newspaper. Skeleton of a lone male found on side of mountain, investigation continues. Thought to be body of missing screenplay writer from LA. A car was found abandoned matching his vehicle. My friends in Hollywood would scratch their heads and want to know what the fuck I was doing out in the boonies.

Then I noticed the tracks had stopped, and disappeared. What? I was no tracker but man that seemed peculiar. I searched around for some clues. The tracks were there and then they weren't. Now I was getting scared, frightened in that way when you believe that just maybe all those shows on SyFy are right, you know, with paranormal activity or alien abductions. Which was it? Were aliens lurking to abduct me so they can conduct experiments by reaming me out with hi-tech instruments (no gay jokes, please), or was it some lingering spirits from the gold mining days there to make me work the mines for all eternity? Make a good script.

It was neither. I found, by accident, a hidden side road that had been concealed by some tree branches. Very clever, but now I had another problem. Meth labs were epidemic around Arizona, particularly in the area I was in. This didn't look good. I didn't need to be dropping in on any meth heads with a hidden lab. They would shoot first and not bother to ask questions. My body would be buried in a mine shaft somewhere and then they would push my car off a cliff, like in the movies when it hurtles down the mountainside and then burst into flames at the bottom. Good visual. The special effects crew love those.

Would a meth head or a cooker be sky diving, I asked myself. Not likely. I couldn't picture him bent over some beakers hard at work on another batch of ice then decide to take time off so he could go jump out of a plane. It didn't add up, but why would you want to conceal where you have driven? Had to be hiding something.

My curiosity got the better of me so I continued up the small path, which had gotten steeper if that was possible. My tennis shoes were slipping on the muddy terrain and I was breathing like an overweight housewife. Just as I was about to give up I came to the end of what I would laughingly call a road. It was more suitable for a mule which had been the transportation of choice back when the mines were going off a hundred years ago. Again the Jeep had disappeared. Poof, gone. Okay, now this is spooky, I thought, looking around. There was a stray crackling noise behind me and I almost peed in my pants. I spun around to see a rabbit dash away, vanishing into the underbrush. Laughing nervously, I slowly regained my composure.

To my right, I noticed there was the faintest signs of a trail. Playing Indian scout, I bent over to see if I could find any foot prints. To my surprise, and horror, I found one, and then another. They were leading down the trail. Oh crap, I thought, as I hesitantly walked down a little ways, peering into the deep foliage. I knew it couldn't possibly be private land. It had to be Federal property, making it more and more likely that somebody was using the area for illicit purposes.

I know I've gone on record before that I am not brave, far from it. What I was doing is probably about as insane as anything I've ever done in my life. Alien lifeforms, horny miner ghosts not with standing, I pressed on. Now I wanted to see where the trail went, within reason of course. I wasn't prepared to do a twenty mile hike or anything. I was kind of hoping to find out something within a hundred yards or so, some tell tale sign that I had either found the long lost Pioneer Trail from 1840 or a short cut to some Indian burial grounds chock full of ancient artifacts worth millions on eBay. Naturally what I found immediately was some animal poop, very suspicious looking, and more woods.

It was about then that I tripped and literally fell on my face, like in the cartoons, as in splat. I scraped my knee, tore a pretty good pair of jeans, and found myself staring at...at a camera. At first, I thought that just maybe I had hit my head and got a concussion, something that was making my eyes short circuit. I blinked a few times and then stared. No, it was definitely a camera and it was attached to the side of a tree. I'm no wilderness survivor but I was pretty sure there shouldn't be a camera out in the forest. Then it dawned on me that it was a security camera of some sort. This ain't good, I muttered under my breath, thinking I might have stumbled on some secret CIA camp, one where they were conducting top secret work for Homeland Security.

I thought about making a run for it but wondered how far I would get before some attack dogs tracked me down, gnawing at my limbs as they subdued me. Some guys dressed in all black would appear and whisk me away to an underground bunker buried deep in the mountain. Like something like that didn't exist in that TV show "Lost." Please. Blessed with an active imagination, I was free to think the worst, or at least the most dramatic.

Staggering to my feet, thinking that whoever was watching me must be having a good laugh at my expense, I boldly walked up to the camera and made a face right into the lens. Take that. I laughed uneasily then proceeded up the trail further, now intent on following my pratfall with an appearance in person. I hadn't gone maybe three or four steps when I heard a voice behind me say: "Are you lost?" I'm not sure if it is possible or not but I almost jumped out of my skin. I whirled around and there he was, the most interesting man in the world. Busted.

"Mr. Jen-kins," I stammered, holding out my hand awkwardly. "My name's--"

"You shouldn't be here," he stated, eyeing me coldly. "Turn around and go back to your car and forget you ever saw this place."

"I...I came here to see you," I said feebly, trying not to plead, as I had visions of him stringing me up from one of the trees and letting the animal kingdom have a go at my body. "Really, My name is Bradford Tuttle. I was sent here by--"

"Go!" he ordered, holding up a hand gun and pointing it at my head. "You have about ten seconds to disappear." It was about here that we had one of those pregnant pauses you always hear about. Time was compressed. I stood there thinking that getting shot was probably going to hurt pretty bad. Then he said to my amazement: "Did you say Bradford Tuttle? The screenplay writer?"

I was holding my hands up armed robbery style, and then replied: "Yeah, that's me. I was sent here to talk to you about a movie...a movie about you. You see, the studio is doing this picture about your life and all. I'm writing the screenplay for it. I just thought I might be able to consult with you a little bit about it--that's all. It wouldn't take up much of your time. Not long at all," I lied, now in full on beseeching mode.

He uncocked the hammer thingee on the gun and lowered it, then said, "I liked that screenplay you wrote about the missionary couple down in South America."

For once in my life my work turned out to be a blessing. One of my movies had struck a chord with somebody. I couldn't believe my luck. This was good, now I was making some kind of headway with him. At least he wasn't talking about body disposals yet, even if there had been a gun to my head. "I didn't think anybody ever saw that film. It was kind of dead on arrival." As well it should have been considering I had to pick up the pieces on a total crapfest of a script, something about a couple venturing into the boonies to bring Jesus to a stone age tribe, you know, the ones who wear bones in their noses. It had started out in one incarnation as being a religious backed film then morphed into a I Shouldn't be Alive genre, before becoming a National Geographic style piece, mostly based on factual events.

He laughed and smiled at me. Then I felt something sniffing at my left leg and glanced down to see what looked like a creature from the dog family. "Wiley," he shouted and the animal slinked a few feet away, growling and flashing his teeth. "He dislikes intruders even more than I do."

"What the hell is that?" I found myself asking, shrinking away.

"He's a coyote," he said as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

"You're kidding," I remarked, amazed. "He's your pet?"

"Found him when he was only a pup. His mother died crossing the road down there," he explained, pointing off in the distance. "Raised him and now he's my loyal protector--aren't you Wiley?"

The coyote perked up his ears and then growled at me again. This was certainly turning into a novel situation. Where did we go from here? I couldn't imagine. I fully expected him to march me right off a cliff. The mountains were almost eight thousand feet high so there most have been more than a few places to accomplish the deed. He could always sic his pet coyote on me, I guess. Shooting me would be too easy. Someone like Joel Jenkins would probably go in for something more challenging, more elaborate.

"I know I shouldn't have surprised you like this but I didn't know any other way to do it," I explained, mustering up all of my charm I could.

"You were driving that Subaru, right?" he asked, calling the coyote over next to him. "I thought I had lost you. I must be getting old that I can't slip a tail. Pretty stupid."

"I gotta ask, how do you domesticate a coyote anyway? I didn't think that was even possible," I said, keeping my distance.

"Apparently it can be done," he offered smugly, petting the animal on the head. "Today's your lucky day, follow me."

That was it. I was in, in a manner of speaking. Although he did blind fold me and then lead me up the trail in order to keep the exact whereabouts of his place secret. I couldn't blame him though. He was a man who had pissed off Arab terrorists, the drug Cartel, and even NATO. It was a track record that made him a target wherever he went. No one envied him that distinction. Once I had read that he was responsible for delivering the location of a hideout for a dozen Al Qaeda soldiers. They were in turn vaporized by a missile from a Predator drone. Boom, no more terrorists.

The Cartel had been at odds with him and his family for years because of their mission work always getting in the way of their operations. His father, in fact, had been killed by a narco-terrorist ten years ago, hacked to death by a machete. Joel had in turn, legend has it, killed him with a hunting bow, taking his life with a well placed arrow to the man's throat. Blood feuds were all the rage in many parts of the world.

His mother hadn't lived long enough to see her son's less than Christian exploits, dying of one of those funky fevers you get in the jungle from mosquitoes. I think the one salient aspect of his entire life was the religious upbringing transitioning into some Nietzschean code of ethics. Yeah, I wanted to work that angle in my screenplay, picturing a kid sitting in his dad's makeshift church listening to a sermon, overlayed with the boy as a man carrying out a commando raid on XYZ evil government troops, slitting throats as he went. The director would have an orgasm over that one.

I was sweating by the time we got to our destination, from the hike itself and my escalating nervousness. This felt like being led to the slaughter. He wouldn't do anything to me, I kept assuring myself. He was civilized to a certain extent, right? I had never done anything to him before. All sorts of rationalizations were lodged in my brain.

"What the fuck is this?" I wanted to know, blinking, as he removed the blindfold.

"Club med, what do you think?" he answered, smirking at me. "This is my homestead. Come on inside."

What I saw was a one room cabin flanked on either side by solar panels, sucking up the sunlight through the gap in the trees around the place. There were two windows in the front and one on the left side. The backside of the cabin had been built right into the slab of rock that was buried in the hillside. It was a marvel of simple living, another exemplary example of living off the grid. To the right side of the cabin was a small extension that housed the bathroom, complete with one of those compost toilet things. Fortunately for him a mountain spring ran underground a few feet away from the side window, where he filched his water from. The whole grand design had been the idea of some long dead miner back in the last century, who took advantage of the natural setting to capitalize on all the resources at hand. Joel had only updated it, bringing in some vital technology such as the solar power and a water pump. It was all basic but somehow ingenious too.

Inside, it was rustic but comfortable, with even an Internet hookup which he pilfered off a microwave tower in the distance, bouncing it off and through some mirror sites so his location couldn't be easily detected. He may have been living the life of a hermit but he was comfortable in the process, except for the arduous hike in but then again that kept outsiders on the outside. The first thing I noticed once inside was a battery of monitors off to the left, which were hooked up to cameras around the perimeter. He had known I was coming way before I got anywhere near his tiny domain. You could never be too careful.

Removing oneself from society takes, you know, mental stamina. You have to be really self-assured, able to live within your own construct, if that makes sense. Joel Jenkins could do that. He was the type of person who approached life on his own terms, so when it came time to retreat from it he was prepared for the emotional hardships that came with the decision.

He was also more self-sufficient than most. The man had installed solar panels and whatnot by himself, bringing supplies in on an ATV he stashed under camouflage tarps next to the cabin. No roving satellites were going to find him. He operated his "homestead" like it was some SEAL team Six base or something. Joel Jenkins was what all those crazy survivalists wanted to be when they grew up, able to live without a trace if need be.

Speaking of survivalists, I saw next to the front door in a wall rack several rifles and hand guns waiting for action. Later, I would take a quick inventory for future reference, noting there was something called a FN 16s, with scope, a Remington pump action shot gun, a Taurus hand gun, along with two Glocks, a Bushmaster ACR, and to round out the arsenal an authentic M4 American military weapon that he smuggled in from somewhere for when you really needed that fully automatic firepower. For some perplexing reason he also had a 22 rifle. Besides that impressive array of firepower, so it turns out, he had some plastic explosives and several grenades from (of all places) the Polish army. There was plenty of ammo to go around too.

I might have been a military brat but I was never a gun nut of any kind. My two brothers had their turn at playing hunter in the past and my dad kept a rifle around the house but we were never NRA into firearms. My mother, bless her heart, detested them. Oddly enough, my sister kept a hand gun in her bed room and knew how to use it, going to the firing range regularly. I had never even fired a gun. They made me nervous, if I'm being honest.

Joel told me to take a seat, while he went into the kitchen and took out two beers from the small fridge, telling me over his shoulder that he had to manage his electrical grid in order to power up all of his appliances. The solar panels only went so far. To my surprise, he was a bona fide environmentalist, fueling his Jeep with bio-diesel, which was in reality cooking grease converted into a gas source for the engine. Now I knew why I smelled french fries when I was walking down the trail. He had concealed his Jeep under a canopy of camo. I had walked right by it and didn't notice.

By way of description, I got my first real look at him. He was a shade over six feet, trim, with a close cropped salt and pepper beard. Still handsome in that way some older men can be. He had deep, dark brown eyes and his hair was cut in a military buzz. A little while later I would ask him how he stayed so fit and he would tell me that he did a lot of mega calisthenics, you know, push ups and sit ups. Whatever it was he looked like he was ready for the next triathlon.

The furnishings in the cabin were basic, with a table for the monitors and a table to eat at, along with two wooden fold up chairs, one he used to sit down to eat. His bed had been fashioned out of some discarded wood, where he placed a blow up mattress on top. Everything in the cabin seemed organized for the optimum of use, like some efficiency expert had been called in to give an assessment. That made sense though because what I knew of him it all screamed order, with everything streamlined and ready for action. He was a man of action thereby everything in his life had to be as well. I got the impression that he would be able to vacate the premises at a moment's notice.

Did he get lonely out here, I wondered, glancing around the cabin. How long could he put up with this modern hermit act? I didn't even know how long he had been living there to date. Perhaps it was only his summer home, a place to come to so he could wind down away from it all. That would make sense. Somehow I pictured him living on the Mediterranean somewhere, in one of those small Old World villages, complete with a smoky bistro that peasants sat around drinking pernod in all day. What? I don't know. When you thought of Joel Jenkins domesticity of any sort didn't come up.

I was sitting there, drinking my beer, a local micro brew, making small talk, trying to get a grip on my situation, when some animal jumped into my lap. First the coyote, now this! I sat there face to face with what looked like some creature from a Stars Wars movie. I froze, unable to even scream out. The creature stared up at me with big dark purple eyes.

"Felix," Joel called out, "say hello to Bradford."

I squirmed, and asked in a quavering voice, "What in the hell is that?"

Joel laughed and replied, "That's a ring tail cat. That's strange. He usually stays in his hiding place most of the time."

"Is it...dangerous? He's not going to bite me is he?" I asked, waiting for the worst.

"Never has before," Joel answered, laughing. "There's always a first time for everything."

The animal settled down in my lap and appeared to be napping. Joel shook his head in disbelief and told me the ringtail cat had never been so at ease around him before. I asked him what I should do now and he said I should enjoy the company. Me and animals, for the most part, was a non-starter. Dogs, cats, birds, they were for other people, the ones who needed furry affection in their lives. I didn't. As a kid, we had one pet dog, who died prematurely from heart worm. When alive the mutt had crapped on the carpet and peed in the kitchen too many times to count. He had been bequeathed to us by a relative who couldn't keep him when they moved into an apartment complex. Truly, I think most of the family had been ambivalent about the dog for the most part. We certainly didn't have a weeping ceremony when the dog died, you know, with a burial in the back yard and tearful eulogies by sobbing children. I think my dad deposited his body in the trash to be picked up on Tuesdays. Fortunately it was a small dog and fit easily into a plastic trash bag.

"Is that a tail?" I wanted to know, as it curled around my leg while the damn animal dozed.

"Yeah, it's one of those weird specimens of the animal world. Mostly nocturnal, hence the big eyes. It might be peculiar to Arizona, I'm not sure. He was here when I moved in. The place was a mess, pretty dilapidated and all. I think he had crawled in through one of the holes in the roof and liked the accommodations. Keeps the mice under control. He tolerates us, me and Wiley. Wiley was only a pup when I brought him here so the two of them grew up together more or less. Not that they don't squabble now and then. Right, Wiley?"

Wiley perked up his ears and looked at me, sidling over to sniff at the ring tail cat for a moment, before retreating back over to Joel's side. Maybe, just maybe, Joel Jenkins had gone around the bend. He had taken in a menagerie in his old age and was content to have them as his friends. I don't suppose it would have surprised me if the animals and Joel started having a conversation, like in those movies where the protagonist has the ability to communicate with the animal kingdom--hilarity ensues. Never liked those pictures, even when I was younger. Call me a purist but I couldn't buy into the plotline with talking animals. It all seemed too Disney.
That would be totally disappointing, for me and the studio. How would I ever write a script with that as the kicker? Joel Jenkins was a mysterious legend. I don't think I could ever bring myself to write him as some doddering recluse who was bosom buddies with a coyote and a ring tail cat. It didn't add up. Horror of horrors the movie would be dumbed down so far that it would end up being rated G. It would become a Legion of Decency triumph, instilled with a Christian first act, proceeding on to some wholesome adventure, minus the blood and guts of war of course, and finally concluding with a kid's oriented tale about tails. Church goers would love it, while the Arizona Wildlife this or that organization would beam with pride about the local fauna being portrayed on film, while warning everyone not to try this at home. Don't worry, not many people were going to be sharing their meals with wild animals anytime soon.

Unfortunately, I was. After the proffered beer came food, compliments of Joel's hospitality. He was, by his own estimation, a lousy cook. This was lunch so cold cuts were on the menu, which were hard to screw up. We pulled up the two chairs to the table and we feasted on crackers and cheese, with some questionable jerky, not that I didn't open my big mouth and ask. Turns out he had cured it himself after shooting an elk a few months ago. It was my first time having elk and I wasn't all that happy about it. Fortunately the jerky had so many spices in it I couldn't taste anything else.

Let me just say a fancy repast it wasn't, even if the cheese was some expensive variety that left a lingering taste in my mouth reminiscent of mildew. Joel told me he had first tasted the brand in France back in the day, as he launched into a story about arm wrestling some French Foreign Legion guys in a small town in the south of France. I tried to follow the story but Wiley, now my best bud, kept nudging me with his nose under the table, hoping for some hand outs. I was going to give him all of my yucky cheese but Joel told me not to, admonishing Wiley for being a beggar, which sent the coyote slinking away in disgrace.

Now that I was officially in weird territory, I had to make the best of it by getting on with my work. The fact that I didn't have a clue how to do that couldn't deter me. Damn, I was talking face to face with the Joel Jenkins, man of mystery. It was something I could tell my grandchildren about, if I was ever going to have any. Look at me, Bradford Tuttle, rubbing elbows with one of the most reclusive personages in the world; of course I could do without the mile hike through woods and rustic cabin experience but who was I to complain?

"Like I was saying before, Joel, I was supposed to write a screenplay about your life and--"

"Whiskey, tango, foxtrot," he suddenly exclaimed, jumping up from the table and hurrying over to the monitors. He leaned over and peered at the screens for a moment, then said, "More fucking poseurs."

I could see from where I was sitting two ATVs pull up and stop down on the road. It looked like two twenty something men, both wearing camo, with rifles attached to a rack on their ATVs. Modern hunting meant never having to walk, apparently. All terrain vehicles, high powered scopes, synthetic animal musk, GPS gadgets, hunting had never been so easy before or tilted in the hunter's favor. There were actually parks out there devoted to hunters, where you could fork over a fee and go shoot wild game that were, essentially, captives waiting to be eliminated.

"Do you think they are headed this way?" I asked, wondering what he would do if they did.

He watched them on the monitor for a minute then said, "Nah, they look like lazy bastards, probably haven't walked more than ten yards in years. The ATV might be the worst invention of all time. I mean it. Any feeble, indolent slob can now go out into the wilderness and pretend they are an outdoorsman. It's disgusting."

Joel was a hunter in the sense that he ate what he shot and that included squirrels and rabbits, which he told me were delicious. Now I knew why he had a 22 caliber rifle stacked with the rest of the assault variety. You didn't want to blow the critter all to hell, leaving nothing left to eat. His back to nature shtick wasn't an act. He lived what he believed. In fact, what he seemed to hate most in the world was poseurs, people who pretended to be a part of something but were only there for appearance sake. As he told me, he had been exposed to them in every facet of life, from "toy soldiers" who stayed in the rear, to journalists who remained in their hotel rooms filing stories without ever engaging in their subject matter, to pseudo adventure junkies who crap out at the first sign of adversity. Remember, this is a man who had bagged most of the world's tallest peaks and gone on more back country ski trips than he could count.

Yet he wasn't precisely like the other adrenaline freaks out there in pursuit of the next venture that might feasibly kill them. He somehow intellectualized it, made it more of a quest to understand another level of life as we know it. I made that last part up but it was, in a fundamental way, true. Joel had known so many different angles, that is to say he approached living in such a way that he developed another form of perspective. It was hard to articulate. It wasn't going to be easy to instill that into any film without the script just becoming a highlight reel of his adventures, like some ESPN mini-series or something.

"Nobody has ever stumbled on your place here?" I had to know, wondering what he had done when and if it happened.

"About a month ago two hunters got pretty close," he answered, continuing to watch the monitors. "They were looking for elk. Earlier I had heard the elk mating screech...maybe two or three hundred yards away. Hard to tell up against the mountain here. Sound gets warped sometimes. Anyway, they kept on going. Most times you get guys like those two idiots, out to have a good time riding around then go back and tell their buddies they didn't see any game. Yeah, I wonder why. You ride around making all this noise and you wonder why an elk or deer doesn't pop up and say: 'Shoot me,' please. Pathetic."

"Who owns this land anyway? I mean aren't you squatting here?" I asked, inadvisably.

He shot me a nasty look, then replied, "Hard to say but I think it might be evenly split between the Feds and that criminal outfit mining company. Those bastards own more than half of this whole mountain range. How can one company own so much land? How does that even happen? You know, they mined the shit out of this place for years then when it was exhausted they sit on the land forever. I don't really know where the forest boundaries are. At any rate, I'm kind of enacting my own version of eminent domain here." He chuckled at that comment and went back to watching the monitor.

"What would you do if somebody showed up here one day?" I had to ask.

He grinned, then said, "Depends who it was, I guess."

"What do you mean?"

"You are full of questions, Bradford," he said, frowning at me. "Do you want to know whether or not I would shoot them? Well, who knows? If I was having a bad day, I might."

He said this with a laugh and I said, "Good to know."

Naturally, I knew all about his bio, having studied him before I got to Arizona. I knew about his, you know, checkered past. For instance, his marital status had never changed, as in he had never been married. How could he be married? The man never stayed in one place long enough. Although he did have a long standing romance with a woman from England, who lived in London and worked as a nurse in a hospital there. He had met her in Africa where she had been doing some charity work for a NGO. He had actually been a patient at the clinic where she worked. She had help treat him for malaria. Things went from there. They would hook up when he passed through London, which was often back then. After a while the relationship petered out.

His love life then took on a more episodic tone. Not that he didn't make a splash here and there, like connecting with a tennis star, a TV anchor, and an actress or two, with some models thrown in to round out the selection. His name collected attention. His celebrity defied description because he didn't fit into most molds of fame, and he was never one of those who were famous for being famous. I really didn't know how to categorize him.

Anyway, once in an interview for the Guardian newspaper, a rare one because he never gave them, he had said that he was a "Civis civitatem quaerens," which translates from the Latin into something like: A citizen in search of a city. I suppose he was.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Felix yawned, stretched, then jumped out of my lap and climbed up on a shelf built into the wall and went back to sleep. It was daytime, he wouldn't be active until it got dark. I then noticed a string of beads hanging from a nail behind the door. Trying to break the awkward silence, I asked him where he got them. He glanced at the door and told me they were a tasbih, the prayer beads many mullahs carry around with them. He had gotten them in Pakistan on one of his forays into Taliban territory. A cleric in that mountainous region had given them to him as a parting gift.

This somehow seemed normal if you knew about the man's legend. He had once stalked a snow leopard in Pakistan's Karakoram. This was after he had climbed what climbers call the peak or chogori--the big mountain. Joel had turned his nose up at Everest because it had become too commercialized. That was him in a nutshell. Although K2 couldn't make the claim that it was the highest mountain in the world, it was nevertheless the most dangerous to summit. More than 40 men had lost their lives trying to get to the top. Even his refusal to climb the highest made him, you know, cool. So he would put up with the yak dung fires and drink paiyu cha, the yak butter tea, and score another victory for his image. Not that that was ever his goal.

I didn't get that impression about him. He didn't seem like some blowhard or anything. He really did operate on a different plane. Oh, okay, I was a little in love with the guy but not in that way. He represented everything that I wasn't, and would never be. My life was all about compromises. His wasn't. He was one of the few in this world who can make that claim. I found that admirable.

"Back in a second," he suddenly proclaimed, heading out the door, with Wiley close behind.

I leaned over and saw him pass by one of the cameras. I then noticed on the inside of the door jam he had carved out: RES NULLIUS. I jotted it down in my little note pad for future research. Turns out it means: Nobody's property or something to that effect. He was back in a minute carrying of all things his laundry. A man has to have clean clothes.

"Ever think about getting a maid?" I joked.

"Bane of my existence," he announced. "I used to go down into town to the laundry mat but that got to be too much of a risk and a hassle. My power source doesn't allow for any large appliances. I do it the old fashioned way and then hang dry it. Primitive but rewarding," he told me, grinning.

I noticed as he was folding the clothes one of those pajama outfits they wear over in Afghanistan, the shalwar kameez. It was an olive green color. He told me almost all of his clothes have sentimental value for him. He also had a dhoti from India and something called a djellabah from who knows where. Some people like to keep pictures from their trips, he was fond of indigenous clothes.

The man was obviously protective of his privacy and a functioning recluse, but I got the distinct impression that he was kind of lonely, like he wanted to talk to somebody about just about anything. It didn't have to be about himself. To the contrary, he was, through and through, an intellectual and they have to have access to, you know, access. They have to exchange ideas. I would soon learn that he used the Internet for that slice of his life, but logging onto Quora and adding to the network didn't cut it all the time. You can only go so far geeking out on the net before you start to experience some kind of mental atrophy.

For many years he had maintained a popular blog, one in which he laid down his thoughts about his travels and experiences. Add to that his infrequent articles in mags like Discovery or Scientific American, with some other esoteric periodicals thrown in, and he was able to keep his name out there in the public domain. It wasn't like he was a social media whore though, uploading pictures of himself doing impossible things to Facebook or Flickr. That definitely wasn't his style.

It soon became apparent the floodgates had opened as he engaged me in conversation. Circumstances had driven him under ground but he was still, at heart, a person who needed interaction with other people. I happened to be one of the people. Not that I could stand up to his standards. The man had a theorem named after him, something about a mathematical equation. Don't ask me what it is all about because I couldn't possible explain it to you, even though I had read about it several times and even had the author spell it out for me--twice. It had to do with geometrical angles or whatever. Jenkins wrote out the formula and when he was done it looked for all the world like some Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The Discovery Channel and the Science Channel had both done a special on him. This is a guy who liked to live by Francis Bacon's maxim: Knowledge is power; even though he tacked on his own addendum, which was: information is not always knowledge. How true, in light of our digital age and all, you know, where we are constantly bombarded by info from all sides.

There was a time in his life when he was living back in New York City, lets call it his Savant Period, when he once (or twice) was asked to give scientific talks to some big brained nerd conventions being held around town. This from a guy who only finished one year of college. It is probably little known but there are bars in the Big Apple that actually have evenings devoted to esoteric speeches. The invited speakers gab about nanotechnology or quantum physics, maybe synthetic biology. Who knows? I'm still puzzling over the very idea of secretive science clubs in Manhattan. Say what? These are people who lived by the motto: Passing the torch of enlightenment with cocktails. I thought we as a nation were all dunces when it came to the sciences.

J.J. was a true polymath, able to speak authoritatively about the Hadron Collider, Florentine Art, or perhaps the prospects of the Chelsea Football Club winning in match play, all in two or three different languages. How in the hell was I going to carry on a conversation with this guy? Besides, all I wanted to talk about was him.

"I like living up here because I'm removed from exactitude," he stated. "That's right. Time is no longer sliced up into sections for me. I am linked with agrarian rhythms. You know, it was those damn medieval monks who were responsible for time keeping because they had to pray on schedule every damn day."

Oh sure, blame it on the monks, I thought, smiling, before saying, "Kind of hard to live without a watch nowadays." He stared at me for a moment, unsure if I was being sarcastic or not. I wasn't. I just didn't know what to say.

"It's hard to believe but you have imbeciles to this day who deny evolution exists. I mean, come on. This college up in Michigan ran a lab experiment for years with bacteria that showed succeeding generations of bacteria adapting to its environment. Proof positive that life forms can change to suit their own survival," he concluded, shaking his head in disbelief.

I was beginning to see a pattern forming with him. Joel was so used to letting his brain run wild that he had a habit of embracing tangents, as his conversation spiraled outwards to take in all sorts of subjects. I wasn't much of a psychologist but it probably had to do with the fact that he lived in his head a lot of the time, almost like carrying around one of those Internet virtual worlds or something like that, where he was his own avatar. He probably didn't need me there to even carry on a conversation because he was capable of holding up several ends of the conversation, like those chess masters that compete against a half dozen different opponents at the same time.

"My family is like that," I offered, wondering why I had said it immediately after I blurted it out. I had always kept my family's take on religion under wraps before.

"Like what? You mean they are religionists? Really," he said, amazed. "Please accept my condolences. Hey, I know of what you speak. I'm sure you know about my background. Steeped in the Lord's Word. Dogs, sorcerers, whoremongers, murderers, idolaters--not allowed in the City of God--per Revelations. I'm not sure if I got the order right or not," he joked, laughing. "You got to respect the Bible, don't you? I mean, look, words on paper a few millennium ago and people are still following them like they are a blueprint for...for conducting their lives. That is truly amazing to me. What a con job."

Okay so he was a raving atheist. I could deal with that. It made him a natural villain, especially in America, where we liked our leaders and celebs to at least pay homage to the Lord some of the time. I was going to have to work around that though. I needed him to be sympathetic at least some of the time, right? Scenes were jumbling up in my mind. A lot of the script would write itself: Jungles, wars, love scenes, and the inevitable loss. I had my work cut out for me about the ending though.

"I only pretended to read the Bible," I confessed. "I found it boring."

This was not the thing to say to someone like him, a guy who analyzed everything and he let me know it by saying, "You're kidding. Typical."

This was a deft slam and I had to respond by saying, "God, to me, is a personal matter, not something that has to be...to be so public." This sounded silly, so I added, "Organized religion is mostly corrupt."

He looked at me for a moment with this look of pity on his face, like he was talking to some mentally deficient guy. Then he stated: "The problem I have with Judeo-Christian religion is the Cain and Abel conundrum. Right? (I hadn't a clue what he was talking about, accept that Cain had killed his brother.) Well, where did Cain go exactly after he was exiled, banished? Babylon? North Africa? South of France? I mean he murdered his brother, we get that. But later he got married, founded a city, etc. Life went on for the man. Where did this take place and where did all of these people come from? The Bible wasn't too explicit about any of that. This is Genesis for fuck's sake. Civilization is just beginning. I want somebody to tell me how Cain pulled it off. It's that simple. Another beer?"

He was on a roll now. Beer, sure, why not? Unlike some of the other local microbrews you tasted around the country, this one had a nice taste to it, not too heavy and not to light. I had had some beers where the brewer thought by just slapping a cute, inappropriate label on the bottle all would be forgiven for brewing a beer that tasted like piss. If the price I was going to have to pay for listening to the most interesting man in the world was drink some brews and sit around a cabin in the woods, then bring it on.

Wiley had settled down by Joel's chair, apparently dozing. Felix had disappeared, sleeping up for his night time patrol for rodents. The jerky was sitting in my stomach like a rock but I was holding up. I was beginning to feel so comfortable that visions of me writing some freelance article for, say, Rolling Stone, Wired, maybe even Time danced through my brain. I could only imagine the editor getting a proposal from me about interviewing "the" Joel Jenkins. At first they would be skeptical, like I was some crackpot fantasizing about the perfect interview. Then they would be more impressed by the detail I would provide. Oh boy, my bi-line would be out there for all to see, including my parents. Both of them thought I was some kind of slacker who did nothing for a living. This would show them.

"My brother is a minister," I told him. "We don't get along all that much."

"So was my father, as you undoubtedly know. I spared my parents my, shall we say, skepticism. I doubted my father's chosen profession early on but I didn't ever challenge him about it. There were times I wanted to but thought better of it. The man was doing wonderful work down in that rain forest--the Selva, saving people--and their souls too." He laughed, taking a sip of his beer. "My parents brought real human salvation. I can't tell you how many people my mother alone saved...from disease, child birth gone wrong, warfare."

"When did you abandon, you know, religion?" I asked, unsure how my questions were going to be received.

"William Hawkins," he replied, while I was wondering who in the hell William Hawkins even was. "He is widely believed to be the first man to institute the slave trade back in the 1500's. When I read about him it turned on a switch in my consciousness. I think I was all of fourteen. The man traded human beings for goods. It was commerce, nothing more. That kind of mind set fascinated me. What god would stand for that? Think about it. Would a supreme being dream up a population where some of them would be chattel for the other? Why? It didn't make sense to me, even as a teenager."

"I'd like to ask my brother the same question," I told him, laughing. "I've never really had an argument about God with anybody in my family. It would be a deadend anyway. They already think I'm doomed."

He ignored my remark then said, "My parents were probably more open minded about things but they were by the same token sophists too, with a well rounded sense of sophistry. You have to be to believe in a God, regardless of what stripe it is. I have studied numerous forms of religion and they all have the same thing in common and that is mental vacuity. It is built in. You have to sooner or later suspend logic so you can digest the fable. Sad but true. Just think, man has been grasping at myths for so long they have become an evolutionary byproduct of society. It is almost as if their transcendence doesn't have an horizon."

Now here, take that last statement, savor it. You don't have to understand it, (most people wouldn't, including yours truly), but that is what made him who he was. And he wasn't some pompous asswipe either. There was something vitally different working there; of course he had all kinds of street cred, having lived it all. He had a way of bending reality, so said one of the few people he kept in touch with, a musician he befriended from his days in New York. Oh, I might have forgotten to mention that he also played the flute, again self taught, proving that he was indeed a real renaissance man. He was practicing his form of asceticism but yet he wasn't incommunicado because that would mean that he had succumbed. Maybe it was that easy. He was going to judge the world but only after he had come to terms with its many idiosyncrasies. For 60 years he had done that.

In his one, solo book he had titled a chapter: Jus Ad Bello, justice in war. This was what would become (or called) the manifesto chapter because he detailed his exposure to man's propensity for conflict. By the time the fiasco in Iraq rolled around Jenkins had been involved in numerous conflicts and wars, giving him invaluable expertise in that area. The Bush administration raised the number of contractors participating in the war effort, so much so that by the third year of the war people like Joel Jenkins, with that good old war experience, were able to score employment with the US government doing some of the nitty-gritty work necessary to keep the war effort going. Hooray for privatization!

We might be a country over run with acronyms, especially when it came to the Intelligence community, like CIA, NSA, DOD, NGA, DARPA, DIA, etc, but there was always room for more. Add to this alphabet soup of governmental agencies several private corporations running their own for hire armies and you had gainful employment for any number of former this and that, almost anybody who had carried a rifle in the Service at one time or another. Joel might have been the lone exception to that rule, having never been a part of any organized army, US or otherwise. Yet there he was among the ex SAS and SEALS or Special Forces doing his thing, which included supplying some intel for the Task Force 21 group, the guys who were tasked with tracking down the bad guys in Iraq, including Saddam himself. Anyone on the JPEL, that is the list of evil doers, needed to be taken out.

The military liked to call them high value targets. Ever since the war started going south a joint team of CIA agents and Special Forces types had banded together to create havoc. Nobody was safe. Bin Laden and company, Taliban, Baathist, you name it, you were never far away from the wrong end of a Hellfire missile being fired at you. The military was never too proud to use a freelancer. Joel had been in Afghanistan before, as well as around the Persian Gulf. He had contacts. He also didn't have any pesky standards (ethics) either. Combine that with his knowledge of war's peculiarities and you had a valuable asset.

Conventional wisdom might have said the CIA was the mind of the US, with the FBI as the heart and the military as the soul, but there was still room left over for the individual with talent. America had used, you know, mercenaries throughout its history, from warriors on loan from France to native American scouts. The fact that it wasn't exactly noble did little to detract from the necessity. Who was I to judge? I was a military brat who had elected to remain a civilian, far (far) away from the front lines.

Feeling like I had to keep my end of the conversation going, I said, "I try not to think about any of that." This sounded lame, so I added, "Everybody has to have something they can fall back on. Weak minded is what we all are."

Not him of course, because he gave me a look that said I was a simpleton, then said, "Bradley, I've spent most of my life traveling. I'd say a good two thirds, maybe more. And I've discovered that by traveling I changed my point of view continuously because when you are mobile the next destination changes your perspective. By the time I was thirty I had come up with a philosophy to live by. It is called, ordinarily enough, frictionlessism. Everybody's goal in life should be to reduce friction.

"Wait, there is a second part to my philosophy as well. It veers off into human shared attributes territory and is called: ashamednessism. You, as a participating member in any culture have to have the decency, and capacity, to feel shame. Sounds simple, basic even, but you'd be surprised how little of it there is."

Okay, now he was being sarcastic, even needling me. I got that. The honeymoon between us seemed to be over. He had chatted with me long enough to see that I was a lightweight and not worthy of his time. I wasn't offended really, just pissed off because now I was going to have to work like hell to get his take on my screenplay. Undoubtedly, he wasn't going to be offering up much input. I couldn't give up now though. Humor him, I told myself, smiling his way like he was speaking a foreign language. I just read yesterday on the net that he was used to having confabs with MacArthur Genius recipients or Noble Prize winners, with a few Ivy League professors or Oxford University weanies thrown in too. I certainly wasn't there to compete with the likes of that. Not possible.

"Do I detect sarcasm, Mr. Jenkins," I asked, forcing a smile.

He laughed, and said, "No hurt feelings, I hope. I'd hate to be a bad host and all. Another beer? You familiar with Jonathan Swift's writings? Brilliant guy. He had this thing about the Big Enders and the Little Enders, the warring camps fighting over which end of the egg to crack open. That sums up religion and its internal squabbles for me, because the squabbling parties are both full of crap. Think about it, you are fighting over a myth. Now that is the personification of stupidity, right?"

I was on my third beer. We had been talking for quite a while, as he unleashed topic after topic on me, while I furiously kept notes. He was saying things like: "The end result, once specified, alters the random outcome." That was probably what they argued at one of his science meetings of the minds; and I thought movie making wasn't grounded in reality. Give me the banal, or so said a friend of mine, who might have been a queen but he was still able to live in the real world most of the time. I mean hadn't philosophy's time come and gone? Did we really need another Aristotle to fuck things up even more than they already were?

Joel Jenkins might have talked pure, unadulterated bullshit but he was still "that guy." Yeah, he had that something everyone wanted a piece of. I was going to have to play down the intellectual angle though because movie goers weren't interested in any of that. No, they wanted action. He had that too, fortunately. Now I had to steer him towards his, you know, romantic history.

"Never married, huh?" I stated, trying to not sound judgmental. "Probably didn't have the time."

He completely ignored my question and declared: "Shall we talk about 'the' cautionary tale? The financial crash could have been written up by Homer. What a fucking nightmare. Capitalist democracy ain't pretty." He laughed and took another swig of beer. "I mean it's rape, plain and simple. And its rigged."

"The country is still functioning though," I offered timidly, knowing full well I knew nothing about economics beyond my own checking account. I was hoping he wasn't going to go on a jag about America's downfall.

"You're kidding, right?" he almost screeched at me. "We in America are at a point where the average guy is subsidizing greed. Don't believe me, huh. To show you how despicable Wall Street is there were actually people making money by betting the market would fail. That is the very definition of venality. What kind of corrupt mind accepts that as the status quo?"

I didn't have an answer for him. In fact, I tried not to even think about Wall Street at all. I didn't own any stocks and I worked at a job that had a union, keeping us all in a flimsy pension. For the most part I lived outside the mainstream of economic activity. I shrugged then replied, "Bastards."

"Life is, on a very basic level, all about gains and losses," he informed me, staring off into space, getting a look on his face that I now knew meant a lecture was forth coming. I didn't mind. This was a small price to pay in order to get what I needed. "Hey, what do I have to do to stop this film from even getting made?" he suddenly asked, switching gears.

"I guess you could get a lawyer and sue the hell out of them," I replied, surprised by his question. "Might work. Might not."

"Do I impress you as the type of person who would hire a lawyer?" he demanded to know. "How about I just kill the producer? Director? You? I could do that."

I didn't doubt that he could. Yet he certainly had the money to mount some kind of lawsuit, maybe hold the project up in the courts for a while. Even though he was obviously living on the cheap, he had plenty of bucks from his book sales and other activities. Then again, I really couldn't see him waltzing into some lawyers office and plopping down a retainer. No, he was more likely to put a bomb in somebody's car than that. One timely explosion and the movie goes away. Evidence would be minimal, forensics weak. He would be back in his lair before anybody was the wiser.

Our conversation continued, with him touching on any number of subjects. I couldn't keep up. I wasn't expected to, I guess. He knew that I was a functioning idiot, a guy with only surface knowledge supplied by the Internet. My pride wasn't hurt. If not anything else, I knew who and what I was. I was comfortable with that, unlike so many other people. I didn't offend all that easily.

Then again, did I need to hear about some dude named Kahneman and his work in economics, some boring studies about random sequences and false perspectives? How about heuristics? How about Einstein's mistake with his Theory of Relativity and something about his screw up with statsis in the universe? I didn't need to be told my life was like a math formula where the answer is always X.

Too bad I was, more or less, trapped by my circumstances. None of my friends would believe me if I were to take out my cell phone and call them, revealing that I was sitting in a shitty cabin in the middle of the woods talking to Joel Jenkins. It was surreal. I had never taken acid but I could only imagine tripping must be something like what I was experiencing.

"I hope you don't proceed with...with any blocking measures because I need the job," I said, smiling weakly.

"You're lucky to be working at all in this post industrial age we are living in," he chided, frowning. "Then again what you do is sort of in the service end of things--right?"

I sure loved being needled by him but I kept my cool and replied, "I'd like to tell you what I do is a honorable profession but then I would be lying--to you and to myself."

He thought that was hilarious and laughed uproariously, then said, "You are a wordsmith after all. But listen, you asked me, Bradley, about whether or not I had any guiding principles in my life. Something like that anyway. Well I am 60 years old and have seen a lot of shit in my day. So all I can say is that the correlation principle applies to everything, not just in economics."

"Correlation Principle?" I muttered, confused.

"Yes," he said, shaking his head. "Basically nothing happens without effecting something else down the line. Simple. Beautiful really. Then there is the other component to my grand view of life," he declared, chuckling. "That is the applied normal distribution curve or, as you probably know it, the Bell curve. It is everywhere, right? From IQ's to just about anything that can be measured. Everything we do is ruled by probability. It's really not all that complicated. Stochastic, write that down," he ordered. "Random variables, that covers it."

If you say so, I was thinking, before saying, "I never took any philosophy courses in college."

He eyed me for a second, then announced, "Is that some kind of droll sense of humor or what?"

This sounded more like a challenge than any kind of comment, so I replied, "If you want it to be."

He wagged his finger at me and said, "Don't underestimate yourself."

Damn, was that a weird type of compliment, I wondered? I still couldn't believe I was sitting here having a beer with Joel Jenkins. The man had a whole 'manga' series about him in Japan, you know, one of those oddball Japanese comic books. He was so well known that they made him an honorary hero in the Land of the Rising Sun. Now that was cachet. There was a village in the Andes named after him because he had led a local revolution against the residents revolutionary assholes, and won. He once saved a sherpa and not the other way around. There was one of those specialized big mountain skis named after him. I could go on.

We had been talking for hours, so long that it had gotten dark outside. Now I really was trapped. I wasn't going to walk down that overgrown trail at night. He had already told me that the mountain was crawling with bears. Unless he was going to walk me down to my car I wasn't going anywhere until it was daylight out.

"Man, what time is it?" I asked, hoping to ease into me being scared shitless to be out in the woods after dark. "I didn't realized we've been talking for so long. I can't believe it's dark already."

He glanced out the window then said, "Ever done any dead reckoning with a compass at night?" Then he laughed and added, "You're going to have to stay over. I'll take you back to your car in the morning. Unfortunately, you'll have to sleep on the floor. I have a sleeping pad and an extra sleeping bag. If you don't mind Felix walking across your head in the middle of the night it shouldn't be a problem."

I immediately thought of something he had been talking about earlier on in the day, something about 'bounded rationality' and how it controls your life. Simply put, it had to do with a person's decision making, like when they distill down choices so they can make up their minds. It was always easier when you only have to think about A or B and not A,B, C, and D. I just had two choices in this case. Either I could borrow a flashlight and hit the trail, hoping that I would miraculously find my way back to my car, and not get eaten in the process, or I could just hunker down and spend the night. Not that I really wanted to participate in any slumber party. Still, when did you ever have a chance to spend time with Joel Jenkins?

So I was in for the long haul, in a manner of speaking. An overnighter couldn't be all that bad. He had offered to make us dinner, venison chili. I couldn't pass up some one sided conversation and good food too. Then again, he did tell me he couldn't cook worth a damn. I also had never eaten deer before, which sounded a little on the daring side. It's time to be bold, I told myself, hoping that I wasn't going to have to use his compost toilet too much if the meal went south on me.

As we sat down to eat, and the music he was piping in on his lap top, some crappy ancient rock music by some dude named Jethro Tull, which was heavy on the (no surprise) flute, I couldn't help but think just how crazy the situation all seemed. In fact, the events of my life in the last week couldn't be happening. I was handed a plum (in pay) writing job, I get to meet Gloria Worthington, and now I'm having dinner with the Joel Jenkins. It was all like a bad TV movie. Things like this never happened, especially to me.

"I've never had venison before," I confessed, a little embarrassed.

"No," he mumbled, adding some spices to whatever it was he was concocting on his tiny two burner stove. "Acquired taste," he stated, letting the subject drop. "Hey, do you happen to know what invariant means?"

This was another one of his patented forays into the unknown, something he did regularly. "No, not really."

He eyed me for a second, then explained, "It has to do with truth as examined from all perspectives. Let me give you an example, those numbskulls on the Right think the holy Constitution is a work of invariance--like it was set in stone. Let me tell you, from the Afro-American perspective, the early Constitution wasn't a picture perfect document." He laughed, as he opened another bottle of beer. "I think not, huh." "What the hell is that?" I suddenly exclaimed, noticing something moving around on one of the monitors, our dinner time entertainment.

Joel looked up and stared at the monitor, then said, "Oh, she's back. Haven't seen her for a while. Where's the cub?"

It was a bear, a mother bear, rooting around in full view of one of the cameras. Apparently, so it seemed, she was a regular in the area. Then a cub bear bounded on screen and playfully nudged his mother's back leg. The Black Hills were alive with all sorts of game.

"You've seen them before?" I asked, walking over to take a closer look at the screen.

"Oh yeah, momma bear passes by here all the time," he told me, as he whacked at some onions, filling the cabin with a potent aroma. "I'm gonna make this chili in the medium range, okay? I'm too old for the really hot stuff anymore."

This sounded eerily like something my dad would complain about, so I said, "Tums to the rescue." To which he grunted under his breath and continued chopping away on his tiny cutting board. "Smells good," I added, playing the good guest.

We were actually talking chili, I thought. It didn't seem possible. I was standing there watching a big-ass bear and her cub waltz around the forest, drinking beer, and preparing to eat venison. Oh yeah, I had slipped into a worm hole all right. I mean the man had just been telling me about how the world was run by malleability and immutability, or something to that effect. I tried to hide my confusion as best I could and if he noticed he was too polite to say anything. Our chit-chat had also included tidbits about the Supreme Court decision back in the 1920's that ruled stupid people could be sterilized. He made a point of telling me there had only been one dissenting vote. Kind of scary, I guess.

After that revelation he had moved on to something called synchronous lateral input. "Get enough people to do similar things and soon enough you have a trend that takes on a life all its own. All my life I have fought against that," he declared, pointing the knife at me as an exclamation point.

What kind of world did this man live in? I asked myself, smiling back at him, nodding, showing him that I thought he was right to do whatever it was he did to get him through the day. There were people out there who lived what you might call a philosophical life, you know, one where they were always re-evaluating the merits of living or something fairly close to that. I, for one, didn't work that way. Life, with a capital L, was organic only in that it had to be lived. Now if that sounds like some New Age jargon well maybe it is. Being analytic always had its down side as far as I was concerned. In many ways that was what religion was for, so the average doofus could avoid thinking about the end result of anything. Let the Bible do it for you. Simple as that. Better yet, the minister will fill in the blanks.

It goes without saying that Joel Jenkins wasn't like that. No way. I suppose most atheists doom themselves to having to always find an answer, any answer. Having a critical mind doesn't bring you much relief, I guess. There will always be more questions than answers, or so said one of my former boy friends, who happened to be the proud owner of a giant IQ--not that he used it all that many times apparently. He worked for the City of Los Angeles as one of those guys who dream up projects the tax payers can fork over money for. He was a planner of some sort but couldn't even pay his rent on time. Anyway, he was always asking pithy questions and never supplying the answers. In the end, it was all very tiresome, so we parted ways, with him going off to bring order to chaos in the city limits and me drifting along forever trying to never have to make a decision.

Let me just say here that when Joel Jenkins talks about medium hot he is working on a sliding scale, one that might only occur in Hades. Three alarm fire comes to mind. We sat down at the small table and I was less than eager to dig into my Bambi meat. Now I've had your hot as hell Thai food, and of course Mexican, but this would eradicate bacteria it was so spicy. I was sure he wanted to kill me, probably then bury my body out behind the cabin. The chili was so strong it could raise the dead.

"My god!" I practically screamed, "what did you put in this?" It was a fair question. He did know that it was possible to maim taste buds, right? "Water!"

He chuckled and supplied me with some spring water, which I gulped down. "You call this medium? I never knew you were a masochist."

"Sets off the venison just right," he sang out, slurping up a spoon full. "I can't remember where I got this recipe."

"Lucifer."

"You have to accept it like you are on a mission," he joked. "Beer, chili, good conversation, life doesn't get any better than this."

"How long will it take for you to get me to the emergency room?" I asked, actually dipping my tongue in the glass of water. "Your mouth must be made of asbestos."

I endured the chili, plucking out bits and pieces of deer meat, at his urging, to give it a taste. Who could tell? It was like sticking my face in a vat of bubbling curry. He did have corn chips at least, and dessert, apple pie he had bought at a local bakery. Was this what they called male bonding, I wondered? Men got together to challenge each other by making one another do disagreeable things. There were buddy movies like this. I personally hadn't written any but they did exist, usually casted with two mismatched stars, one good looking and one not. Throw in a brain dead femme fatale and you had a hit, or you would at least take the first weekend lead in box office receipts. I hated the formula.

Of course we weren't bonding, on any level. I was there because he wanted to relieve his "ennui," as they might say in his circles. I had forced his hand accidentally by showing up on his turf. Now I had to follow through and make it work somehow. I was determined to eat his scorching chili, drink his beer, pet his menagerie, listen to him go on about Kant, (or pick any dead smart guy), and bring it home. That was my mission.

It got a little more challenging the very next morning. After surviving the scorching chili, we had sat down to more conversation, before eventually going off to bed. By that I mean me hitting the floor, thanking the beer gods for making me drowsy enough to fall asleep while my back ached and I pushed any thoughts of wayward scorpions and tarantulas scampering across my face while I slept. The insects stayed away but that didn't keep Felix from crawling over me several times in the middle of the night.

This whole solitary life didn't seem nearly romantic from close up as it might have from far away. Sure you were alone, with lots and lots of quiet, but it did have its penetrating sense of being, you know, by yourself. Me, personally, I had never experienced it before. Having plenty of siblings will do that. Add on to that my usual life style of revolving friends and alone time was rare, if not impossible. Humans were social animals, right? We needed companionship. It was in our DNA.

How long had Joel been up there in that cabin? I had asked once but he deflected my question, moving on to some drivel about nocebo and placebo or something about a Manichean world view. You know how you might sit in one of your lectures at college and tune out the professor for a while, as your mind settles on some more friendly stimuli, like sex or maybe food. Talking to him was like that in a way. I was doing yeoman's work here. I know it sounded absurd, especially since there were people in the world who would probably pay big bucks to be in his presence just for a little while, but I made no apologies about being basically shallow.

Then again, you know how some public figures got that way because they espouse some political or philosophical garbage, like libertarians for example, well Joel wasn't one of those guys. He came by his fame and or notoriety through hard and fast living. He had literally been there, done that, as they say. Hey, one of those idiot country singers had even put him in a song because they thought he was a patriot and deserved a ditty in homage to his exploits. The song won a Grammy for fuck's sake.

Joel Jenkins was like that, different things to different people. Some were inspired by him, while others despised what he stood for. That was part of what made him who he was, I guess, because I couldn't really figure out what he stood for. In war, he had fought all over the map, literally and figuratively. I mean, come on, he had sided with the communists and the Islamists, with a few imperialists thrown in for balance as if he was an equal opportunity warrior for hire. Must be nice to have such flexible ethics. I had told him as much right after dinner, when we had settled down to enjoy the quiet of the wilderness together, two dudes riding our beer buzz.

If only I could have recorded it on my cell phone, something to show my friends back in LA. It would have been a big hit. I could have posted it on YouTube maybe. Of course then he would have hunted me down and killed me, probably with that knife he had been using to slice and dice the onions with, one of those combat thingees that look like they could hack off a man's head with one swipe. No one was going to believe me when I tell them I spent time with Joel Jenkins. They would think that I had lost it.

It was right about then, just after dinner, that my cell rang. Nice to know I had coverage in the middle of nowhere. Joel flinched, giving me a look of one part terror and one part menace. I wasn't sure if I should answer it or not.

"How important is that call?" he wanted to know, eyeing me closely.

I glanced at the screen and saw that it was from Marty. "It's my agent," I informed him, shrugging. "He calls me every day for an update on my progress with...with you know. You."

He cursed, then said, "Make it short and don't give any details about me. The cabin. This." He motioned around the cabin and glowered at me.

"Marty, how's it going?" I answered, pushing the nervousness out of my voice.

"Bradford," he called out and again I could hear restaurant noises in the background, along with that moronic actress insisting Marty tell me hello. Marty ignored her and said, "Tell me you are half way there. I don't want to hear anything else right now."

"Progress is good," I assured him. "I am right on schedule--no problem."

"Send me some early samples," he ordered.

"Can't do that. I don't work that way," I stated, trying to muster up some courage in the process. "You'll get a first draft soon enough."

I heard him talking to somebody at the table and the waiter asking for their order. If I could only hang up the phone. Better yet, turn the damn thing off. Let whoever was calling suck on my voice mail for a few days. Make no mistake about it, they were sucking me dry.

"I'll be waiting for it," he mumbled, then he hung up.

"Agents," I muttered, putting the phone back in my pocket, but not before I sneaked a photo of Joel.

"Fortunately I didn't use one when I wrote my book," he told me, reaching out to grab my phone and delete the photo, pocketing my phone afterwards. "I'll give this back to you when you leave tomorrow."

I could see the disgust in his eyes. I had broken what little trust we had built up between us. Admittedly, it was a stupid move but at least I hadn't asked for his autograph. Joking aside, I felt like an ass for my little paparazzi move. I only hoped it wouldn't cost me in the end.

As I was saying about the next morning, I staggered to my feet, trying to will away all the aches and pains from sleeping on a hard floor, and was determined to finish up as much as possible before he escorted me out of his liar. He seemed to be in a little better mood than the night before. He was already up and reading on his laptop, while he was eating his breakfast.

"Next time we have a slumber party I'm bringing my own cot, if you don't mind," I joked, stretching, dreading having to go off to the bathroom, the bio-organic horror story that devoured human waste like a mutant sci-fi creature. He snorted and continued reading. Not good I thought, padding off to the toilet, hoping I could will my urinary tract to work.

"There's cereal over there," he exclaimed, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "Hope you can drink black coffee because we are out of milk. I forgot to get it yesterday."

Now this was a domestic scene for the ages, even if he wasn't exactly a morning person and all. Dry cereal and black coffee, not my idea of a way to start the day. I was one of those Starbucks coffee maven drinkers you hear about, you know, inject it with any number of superfluous condiments in order to make it about as far away from coffee as you can get and still label it java. I wasn't a cereal guy either, leaning more towards bagels or croissants, lathered with butter or fancy cheese impregnated by something from the fruit family. This would have to do though. It was a good thing I never had to go to summer camp.

"Sorry about last night," I finally said, feeling an apology might make it all better. I can be wonderfully naive sometimes.

He grunted and reached over to flick at his mouse on the lap top, changing the page. Probably reading Q clearance papers from Livermore, I thought, smirking. I was, believe it or not, beginning to feel liberated. I had spent probably more time with him than most of the living inhabitants of mother earth, at least anybody in the last decade maybe. I could see my New York Magazine article now: 24 hours with the most interesting man in the world. The magazine would fly me to the Big Apple, put me up at the Algonquin, then have me on the morning shows, one after the other, before moving on to some late night exposure. I would hang out in the West Village and wonder why I had never traveled to New York City before.

On top of that I think I had enough to flesh out the script, make it a screenplay for the Academy to drool over. I always thought that though. You kind of had to in order to get through the day. I wasn't fooled by what I did, even if it might have been relegated to the very back of my consciousness. Even hacks know they are hacks, right? That doesn't mean you can't pretend. It was all pretend after all.

It was right about then, as I was digging into my cheerios, crunching away, that Wiley got all squirrelly. He started whining and practically spinning around in circles. Joel chuckled, continuing to read. I didn't know what rabies looked like on an animal but I didn't really want to find out. It was a safe bet that Joel wasn't keeping up any vet visits for Wiley and Felix. Who knew what they might pick up out there in the surrounding wilderness?

"You are in for a treat this morning, Bradford," Joel announced, telling Wiley to calm down. He walked over to his gun rack and retrieved one of his Glocks, checked the magazine, then motioned for me to follow him. "Wiley's like my early warning system," he hissed, holding his index finger up to his mouth. "We have a visitor," he added, pointing to the ceiling.

This didn't sound good. Not at all. Maybe little green intergalactic men were parachuting onto the roof. Anything that required packing a high powered hand gun couldn't be a positive situation. Joel took the concept of No Trespassing seriously.

"You want me to go outside with you?" I whined in a hoarse (scared) whisper.

"Look, think of it as Wild Kingdom," he joked, smiling. "We are going to step outside, right by the doorway, and look up on the roof. Don't make any sudden movements--and definitely don't run."

"Run?" I stammered.

We stepped out the door, took a couple steps, then stopped. He held the hand gun with two hands, cop style, ready to blow whatever it was away. I cowered behind him, expecting the worse. I noticed Wiley had retreated under the bed. Good move. I looked up. There it was. Big as life, as they say. It was a full grown, male mountain lion. My sphincter went on red alert. I held my breath. He was just sitting there on the roof licking his chops. Of course the chops were a nice color of crimson.

"Must have just killed a deer," Joel explained, loosening his grip on the gun. "That means he won't be all that interested in us."

Finding my voice, I said, "Does he come around here often?"

"At least once a week it seems like," he replied, watching the cat, who was now lazily eyeing us as he licked his paws.

"That's kind of weird," was all I could think of to say.

"The roof is built right into that hillside so he just walks down onto the roof and sunbathes," Joel said, smiling. "What a specimen, huh? Hate to run into him at night around here."

"Me too," I muttered, wishing we could go back inside. Then I started wondering how I was ever going to get out of there. "How long does he hang around usually?"

Joel laughed and replied, "Last time he was here he stayed a week. Just kidding. He'll move on soon enough, don't worry about it. We're old friends by now. I mean look at him, he isn't even perturbed by us. Well, maybe you. He doesn't know you at all. Might be a problem."

"Very funny," I said, edging my way back into the cabin, knowing full well that what I had just seen was going to have to be in the script. Couldn't possibly pass that one up.

My visit was winding down. I had an overload of information to work with. Marty was going to love it. My working title was: The Brand. The modern world operated around labels and Joel Jenkins certainly possessed one. His very name was synonymous with action and boldness. Even though the man had never done an advertisement in his life, he still represented something. Call it charisma on steroids maybe. That's it. He triggered that response in people that every Ad agency wanted. It was visceral, an emotion. I'm sure all those head shrinkers the corporations hired had a name for whatever it was. Maybe it couldn't be qualified but it could be quantified.

They were going to have a hard time filling the role though because it was a unique part to be sure. The actor was going to have to carry the weight; and I was going to make sure that it was heavy. The only problem was going to be me trying to keep the screenplay from expanding too much, as in one big, gigantic global escapade. I would have to rein it in a little bit. Not a problem. I had discipline when needed. Hell, I had once written a screenplay where the actors never even left the room: One camera angle in a room, with a window looking out over an urban setting. Call it my Beckett moment.

It was another beautiful day in Arizona, with an endless blue sky and rising temperature. I couldn't imagine what it must be like in the summer months. High desert living might have a good rep but it did require you to tolerate heat, dry or otherwise. Give me LA's weather any day, even if we had our moments, like torrents of rain sometimes and those damn Santa Ana winds that blew in off the stinking land mass. We had our pollution of course but at least we didn't bake in an oven like an overdone casserole. That was weeks away though. If all went right I would be out of the Grand Canyon State with time to spare.

Joel puttered around the cabin for a little while, always keeping an eye on the monitors. His paranoia was well organized. Then again, I guess he had to keep up a healthy dose of detection. People, benign and otherwise, were out to find him. He had the proverbial X on his back, something he certainly took seriously. I was the one, and probably only one, to penetrate his defenses. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like to always be on alert, to live that way.

As an example, something that put his predicament in perspective, there was this one group of loonies after him called The Declared. They were one of those shadowy right wing groups you hear about, the ones that believe an illuminati exists, which is a cabal of influential people determined to rule the world. It seems all of these conspiracy nutjobs believe someday a New World Order is going to be instituted across the globe. It might be the Bilderberg Group or the wacko people that show up at the Bohemian Grove party every year, regardless, somebody is pulling the strings behind the scenes as they go about their nefarious duties. Make no mistake about it though, they could be dangerous loons, with plenty of guns and raving ideologies to match.

Anyway, some of the more militant types had gone on record that they thought Joel Jenkins was an upstanding member of the elite so they wanted to "take him out." First of all, good luck with that. My money is on Joel when it comes to any kind of combat. Going after a man who has participated in as much war as him is sort of nutty. Then again, that is what most of these people are known for. So Joel doesn't take any chances.

"Ready?" he finally asked, checking around to see if I had left anything.

"Man, I got to thank you for this," I gushed, trying to let him know that I felt honored to be let in on his secret; while in the back of my mind I was pushing back thoughts of him killing me in the forest, adding a wrinkle to the old college thought exercise: If a man dies in the forest does anybody hear him die? Something like that. Hey, I was a film major.

"Turn around," he ordered, whipping out the blind fold again.

"Wait, are you sure the mountain lion is gone?" I asked nervously, pointing to the ceiling.

He laughed and said, "Let's see." He turned and looked at Wiley for a second and added, "He's gone."

"How do you know for sure?" I whined.

"Wiley let's me know. Look at him, he's perfectly relaxed now," he explained, jerking his head in the coyote's direction.

Sure enough, Wiley had come out from under the bed and was his usual unfriendly self, eyeing me suspiciously. It was time for me to go, back down the mountain, back to my ordinary life again. Not that it was all that bad, really. So what if I had just spent the night in a cabin hidden in the woods with the most interesting man in the world. You know when people are asked (usually politicians) who they would like to have dinner with, well, Joel Jenkins is most times on the short list, right up there with Jesus and maybe Aristotle or Elvis.

As we walked down the trail, and I don't recommend you do it sightless by the way, I was thinking about the war story Joel had told last evening. I had practically begged him to tell me one, from whatever continent. He was reluctant. After gently badgering him for an hour or so he finally relented and agreed to tell me just one. Of course I might need more for the movie but beggars couldn't be choosy.

My first hand exposure to war stories had come from my father but he had been on a ship and it definitely lost something in translation. I mean being on a ship off the coast of Viet Nam on patrol doesn't have much bite to it. It was like suddenly finding out your dad was in McHale's Navy or something. Check it out, it's an old TV show, a perfect example of how humor evolves over time, from softcore silliness to what we have today, which is hard core silliness. Don't get me started on that.

Joel picked a story that took place in Africa, West Africa I think. He mentioned the name of the country but, really, who knows what's what over there. They all seem to have repressive governments with tribal grievances thrown in to screw it up even more. Excuse my generalizations. The setting wasn't that important anyway. As Joel said, the location is often times immaterial because man with a capital M shares in the same tendency and that is "mendacity with an overlay of cruelty." He should know.

The war he was involved with was one of those colonial leftovers where the host country has had just about enough of their Euro taskmasters. Back in the 70's or 80's it was all the rage on the Dark Continent. Lily white Europeans were being kicked out for their rampant exploitation and general all around paternal ways. Read Joseph Conrad, he'll clue you in. The racial componentry was only part of the problem though. As with most things there was the whole natural resources aspect too, as in diamonds, gold, and any number of minerals only corporate geologists can get excited about.

This resulted in just another thing to fight over. Joel had been hired to help with the transition from the European overlord situation to a more homegrown leadership position. He was supposed to be fighting for the good guys, that being the Africans. Some saw it as a betrayal of his race but then again those people stood to reap lots and lots of profits from the natural resources and weren't exactly objective. On Joel's part, he didn't really much care either way simply for the reason that he had seen venality instituted from black hands just as much as white. It was the nature of the beast.

"Paroxysms of hate," he told me, lifting his beer as if he were giving a toast, "that is what I was dealing with. Indeed, they might say that because not only were the proxies fighting for the Euros racking up an impressive kill count but so were the locals--and they had decided to even the score among themselves as well. "I needed a score card to keep up with all the brutality," he muttered, suddenly lost in his recollection. "Ever seen a head on a pole?" he wanted to know, forcing a laugh. I told him that I can safely say that I had not. "It kind of brings home the capacity for blood lust."

So he had started out working for the dominant tribe, the one that was getting all the publicity in the world press, the ones who were heir apparent to the eventual switch in governments. The leader was some charismatic guy who had game when it came to snowing the press and had become a darling of sorts. As usual, the foreign journalists didn't bother to do any digging and missed out on the lunatic's past, the one where he had once executed over a thousand people because they happened to be from another tribe. Little details like that escaped their attention apparently.

Joel had rolled up on one of the man's handy work about a month after he signed on to the war effort. It was a village by a grungy river and the place looked deserted. "I thought they had all fled over the border to get away from the fighting," Joel explained, shaking his head. Not really. Down by the water he found bodies scattered by the river bed, maybe two dozen or so. They had been hacked to death, with missing body parts and all. "The worse were the babies," he said, taking another slug of beer. "A panga makes grisly work of a tiny body. Hacking someone to death takes a special type of individual, one sadistic son of a bitch. God's handiwork, right?"

It was a little while after that, and he found out who was responsible, that he switched sides. He didn't throw in with the Euros though but joined up with one of the competing tribes. Took them right to victory. A year and a half later the capital fell. It didn't really matter though because less than a year into the new regime they had taken on all of the same characteristics as the previous one. Inhumane treatment continued. "Nothing bolsters your cynicism like wholesale slaughter," he stated, with his voice taking on a weary tone.

It took him over a year but he organized a rag tag bunch of (basically) subsistence farmers into a fighting force and then won out. Joel ended up getting wounded, twice, from small arms fire. Made him a hero, further perpetuating the Great White Hunter meme. Or was it myth?

This shaped his world view, to say the least. Being cynical is easy of course, but when you are a participant your focus changes by taking on a sharper edge. The average person, me included, doesn't develop that way. We go about life nibbling around the fringe for the most part, content to keep our experiences uncomplicated. It makes for an easier time. Then you have people like Joel Jenkins who seem to want to seek out a more, you know, volatile interaction with what's out there. It wasn't something I, personally, could understand.

"How much longer," I complained, feeling branches rub against my shin.

"You are back," he announced, removing the blindfold.

I blinked against the sunlight, and joked, "Maybe you could open a B and B."

"It's good to see you haven't lost your sense of humor," Joel said, surveying the road, looking for any sign of other intruders.

"Well, it's been an adventure," I told him, smirking.

Getting serious for a moment, he left me with a parting thought by telling me: "My one real regret is not living up to the metric my father laid out for himself."

"What's that?" I asked, curious to know.

"Nobody should have been better off if I hadn't been alive," he explained.

I suddenly felt sorry for him and didn't have any envy for his life style. To be him meant living with day to day paranoia. It was like being a gun slinger or something, where somewhere out there some crazy guy is just waiting to make a name for himself. Hell, I haven't even mentioned the several fatwas that were circulating too, applied by some Mullah with an ax to grind about infidels. Islamists, militants, militiamen, everyday crazies, maybe even a disgruntled husband or two, sooner or later you are going to cross paths with your destination and it ain't going to go down peacefully. On top of that intractable problem he had to deal with some grinding psychological hang ups about his parents.

If the insurance industry is to be believed, Joel Jenkins could be around for another twenty years, leaving him with plenty of close calls. The night before he had a show and tell, letting me see all of the scars he had accumulated throughout a lifetime of dodging death. There were bullet holes and knife slices, along with burned skin from RPG blasts. Part of two toes were missing after he had survived stepping on a mine. How he wasn't a carcass rotting in the ground somewhere was beyond me. Must have been some kind of funky karma working there.

"I might need to contact you again...you know, to get some more info for my script," I offered up, hoping like hell he wasn't going to stuff me in the trunk of my own car. "I've got a lot of good stuff here," I told him, patting the notebook in my pocket, "but you never know when I might need some more insight."

He stared at me for a minute, then glanced down at Wiley, who was sniffing at my pant leg, then stated: "I'm getting too old for assassinations."

Joel didn't smile and I wasn't sure if he was being serious or not, so I replied, "You should be retired. Right?"

He chuckled and said, "I don't exactly have a 401K to fall back on."

I still didn't quite know where I stood with him. Were we best buds now? Or was I simply a diversion? There was no way of telling but then again he probably wanted it that way. Keeping people off balance was just his style. If he wasn't confusing you verbally he was intimidating you physically. It was a personal trait that had served him well for most of his life and now, at the age of 60, he didn't see any need to change up.

Of course there was so much more I wanted to ask him. I wanted to find out what made him tick, as they like to say in the movies. This time around it was true though. I could sit down and slap out any old screenplay about him. That would be easy. I was fully capable of dashing off some crap that the studio would be happy with, one in which there was plenty of violence, with sex too. They could easily market it as a worldwide gunfest, complete with gratuitous gore and all. The trailers for the film would pop off the screen. Explosions, daring raids, blood and guts, what's not to like?

Yet I wanted something beyond the elementary adventure story. Not that my standards were all that high. It was just that I felt with Joel Jenkins I could provide for a fleshed out character, one that was more than just some dude who was a warmonger, with a love life grafted on. Oh I knew there would probably be plenty of push back from Marty and company. They would ream me for sure if I tried to drop a script on them that actually had more than a two dimensional lead. Hollywood didn't like nuance all that much, really. It was more about zeroing in on the average person's most basic instincts. People bought tickets so they could release themselves from any fundamental societal bondage and that usually meant shared mores. Without delving into any psycho-babble, it was well documented that the average schmuck just wanted to let it go for two hours, leave behind the mortgage and the kids, and the wife too.

I usually didn't try to fight that well defined mantra, the one where the suits had meshed the box office with the art world. Most probably I wasn't going to be doing it this time either. Sure, it was disappointing. I had never been much of a trail blazer though and I wasn't going to start now. Shit, I could give it a try at least. Spring it on them and see what happens. Be bold. Make Joel proud of me for bringing his life to full bloom in a cinematic way. Who was I kidding? Either the studio would disown my work, tossing it in the trash can or Joel would pay me a visit to extract vengeance for making him more visible than he already was.

"So, how can I contact you? Use the Bat signal over Sedona," I joked, hoping that he would give me the okay to drop by again.

He thought for a moment, continually scanning the road and the woods, then replied, "I'll let you know."

This, I realized, was purposefully vague. That was just like him. He didn't want to commit to anything. Besides, I'm sure he was probably bored with me already. Maybe I should have praised his flute playing the night before when he took out the instrument and played a few pieces. Even though I hated jazz, modern or otherwise, I still could have clapped a little more. I wasn't the only one. Wiley howled along to the beat. Buttering him up didn't seem like the right move at the time. The man wasn't begging for acceptance, for sure. I knew for the next few days I would be second guessing myself, wondering why I didn't do this or that. Move on, I thought. Take what you got and work with it. If the screenplay goes down in flames you still have that magazine article angle to fall back on. What self-respecting editor wouldn't jump at the chance to splash Joel Jenkins on the cover?

Chapter 4 DARI AND WYETH

I had two working screenplays competing for my attention. Retreating to my crappy motel room, I banged away on both of them simultaneously, proving that I too had a certain genius. I didn't, really. It might have been a distinct talent to be able to work on two different scripts at the same time but it was hardly earth shattering. Call me bi-polar because I was capable of drifting in and out of writing styles or subject matter. Must have been my screwed up childhood, the one where I tried to deny the fact that I really didn't want to sneak a peek at my brother's girly magazines. I'm joking.

Twice before in my career I had done this sort of thing. Of course they might have not been so high profile though, as in one script was for a TV commercial and the other one was a rewrite on a pilot that never got off the ground. Wonder why, the show was about two talking cats musing about their owners. I kid you not. If you need more proof that Hollywood is populated by some serious druggies, I can't help you. In my line of work you had to be able to juggle projects. It came with the territory and was built into the job description.

Like I said though, this was different in that it was such a hot property. Big money was behind it, along with probably some careers maybe, including mine. I could easily see some producers getting de-listed if this all went south. Hollywood was truly a small community when it came to failure. Everyone seemed to know--immediately. You were always as good as your last picture.

That was why I shouldn't have been surprised when the next time I met with Gloria she mused: "So, Bradford, I hear you are working on a Joel Jenkins project." I almost pooped my pants. The last thing I wanted was for her to know about my other screenplay. This was definitely not good. "Must be taking up quite a bit of your time."

"How did you know about that?" I asked ill advisedly, immediately giving it all away. "I mean...I really can't comment on any of that."

"Really," she said, raising an eyebrow. "Not anything about how you are here in Sedona to dredge up information for both of your screenplays. Nothing about any of that? Are you sure?"

Now she was taunting me and doing a really good job of it. I desperately wanted to change the subject but knew she was going to steer the conversation until she got what she wanted out of it. I was stuck. We were sitting in her living room, with the omnipresent view glaring at us. I was locked into a scene that I needed her help on, one in which she, the lead, was extricating herself from the first bad marriage. I was hoping to get some more insight so I could shape the dialogue a little bit better as I got a feel for her first husband's personality.

"Somebody's been doing some digging," I sang out, trying to sound unconcerned.

She stood up suddenly and turned on me, now in full on dramatic mode, and announced: "Of course I have, you silly twit. Did you think I wasn't going to check up on you--dumbass. I mean, who are we kidding here? It didn't take me long to find out you are double dipping. What the fuck is going on?"

I knew her vanity had taken a hit. She was used to being the focus of attention most times or at least nine out of ten anyway. This must have come as a blow to her self-esteem a little bit, especially when she found out the other script was about Joel Jenkins. Being eclipsed is never pretty. Overshadowed by someone like him must have hurt the old ego. I couldn't relate really but one can speculate.

"I was assigned these screenplays and if they overlap somewhat then I can't be blamed for that," I said, hoping my excuse would calm her down. It didn't.

She stomped out by the massive windows and stared at the view for a moment, pouting. Seeing a 60 year old woman pout was, you know, shocking. I had never seen my mother pout once. I had seen her angry, upset, sad, depressed maybe, but not in full blown pout mode, like a little girl. Maybe rich people have the capacity to delve into their inner child easier.

Whirling around, she stated in no uncertain terms: "I want to meet him!"

I laughed. Really, I couldn't help myself. The absurdity of the idea was, you know, absurd. Can you imagine me playing match maker between those two, the go between. Well it wouldn't be like a blind date of course. Still, me bringing them together for whatever reason was preposterous, even if I could do it. Come on, I had no idea how I would pull that off. Visions of me asking Joel if he wanted to meet Gloria danced in my brain for a moment, before I snuffed them out and laughed some more.

"I don't think so," I finally answered, grinning at the thought.

"Why not?" she demanded to know. "Is there something wholly unreasonable about that request? Please tell me."

Oh now I was treading on thin ice. I still needed her input for several things about the screenplay. I really didn't want to alienate her just yet. Later, maybe, after I had closed up shop and dashed back to LA, with my laptop under my arm. Not now. I had to play nice. Make an excuse, something plausible, like Joel had Lyme's disease and wasn't up to any visits or he was recovering from...from prostate surgery and had to stay near a bathroom. Hey, I was a writer. I had poetic license.

"Well, Gloria, he is kind of a, like, recluse," I explained, wincing at my choice of words.

She eyed me for a moment, then said, "Really. So you have talked to him then?"

Crap, I thought, I should have said I never actually spoke to him in person. Dumb shit. Now I was trapped. I thought for an instant and replied, "Briefly." Being evasive wasn't going to work on her. Bulldog comes to mind. I added, "He is not exactly responsive."

"But you have actually talked to the man, right? Bradford Tuttle has had a conversation with Joel Jenkins. The Joel Jenkins. Am I correct in that assumption?" she wanted to know, as she marched right up to me, waiting for my answer.

I looked away, spying Chewy munching on one of her expensive sculptures in the foyer. Seeing an out, I shouted out: "Stop that, Chewy!"

She glanced over and saw what her dog was doing to some art piece she had forked over thousands of dollars for and snarled: "Pilar! Get Chewy out of her. Now!"

Saved, I thought, smiling smugly to myself. Pilar rushed in and snatched Chewy's collar, dragging him out to the kitchen. Now I was going to have to pivot and make the conversation all about her, something she probably never tired of. I was so proud of my cleverness. Being deceptive comes in handy sometimes.

Gloria turned her attention back to me and continued where she left off, not missing a beat. I shrank back into the couch. Hands on hips, she asked, "Well, what is it? Did you speak with Joel Jenkins or not? Come on, weasel."

I had to give it up. What choice did I have? She had me. Not that I put up much of a fight. Deep down, how deep I didn't want to say, I was proud of my connection to Joel Jenkins, even if it was, you know, short lived. That still didn't excuse me from giving up the goods so easily.

"Okay, I spent some time with him recently," I confessed. "It's my job."

"Your job," she spat out, laughing. "You mean to tell me you spoke with him. I can't believe it. That's preposterous on so many levels. How did you ever arrange it?"

Now I wasn't willing to give up that information. I was going to have to bob and weave a little bit in order to get her off the scent. That' right, like a reporter protecting his source. Some things were sacred.

"Can't tell you that," I stated, trying to sound resolute.

"No," she exclaimed, frowning at me. "Oh, I see, you are protecting yourself. You have professional standards to maintain. I admire that," she said, when she clearly didn't. "What an exciting life you lead, Mr. Tuttle. I'm jealous. Maybe I underestimated you."

She didn't of course but I wasn't going to tell her that. In these usual war of wills I was the one to lose out most times. Gloria was going to eventually wear me down and get what she wanted. I think the word is indomitable. Yeah, she was that all right. Besides all her money and fame she was also obstinate too. It was only a matter of time before I coughed up all the details. I was going to sing like a little bitch. Although I thought I might hold out at least a little while.

"Can we get back to your screenplay, Ms. Worthington?" I pleaded, resorting to the formal use of her name in my verbal groveling.

"Sure, Mr. Tuttle, right after you divulge everything," she commanded, arms akimbo, staring at me. "Start from the beginning."

I wouldn't have lasted ten seconds as a prisoner of war before I revealed it all, everything. It felt good though to be able to tell somebody else what I had experienced on my little sleep over. I did leave out some details, like where the cabin might be etc. It was enough to spill about the animals and the conversation, at least what I understood of it anyway. She was spell bound. It's true. Miss billionaire sat there like some school girl hearing about her favorite pop singer. I couldn't believe it. Here was a woman who had rubbed elbows with the rich and famous for all of her life but she was transfixed by my story. It was the only power I would ever have over her. I was like Rasputin or somebody, working my magic.

Then it all came crashing down around my ears. Like an idiot, I had never thought to think where this was all going. Gloria wanted to meet him. She had to have her face time. She might have met the Pope and heads of State, not to mention celebs up the ying-yang, but she had to put the finishing touches on her personal resume. Gloria Worthington was not going to miss out on this opportunity. Not that there was one. Because there wasn't. My little time with the most interesting man in the world didn't permit me to set up lunch dates, not by a long shot.

I could just see me somehow getting into contact with Joel and telling him some woman wanted to meet him. Let's do lunch, I can imagine me saying. I want you to meet a friend of mine. Hey, you might know her, she's stinking rich and writes books dealing with women issues mostly. Not bad looking either. Come on, we'll sit down, have some bagels, chat about neo-liberal economics together; it's all good. He would then disembowel me and feed my entrails to his animals. Something like that.

"I can't," I muttered, looking away, wishing I could disappear into the million dollar view. "It has to do with writer/client privilege."

"What? Bullshit! Give it up," she demanded.

"He'll kill me," I whined.

"I'll kill you," she countered, staring me down.

Okay, she could be very persuasive. I wasn't good around the rich anyway, always folding up and retreating into myself. Something like that. I didn't want to fight her on this. There were other things I needed to get to, like finishing up her life story. What god-damn genius spilled it back in LA, that's what I wanted to know? No way should Gloria Worthington have found out about Joel Jenkins. Now I was, you know, fucked.

Like I said, I gave it up, telling her about my overnighter and everything; but I did leave out the cabin part, moving the setting to a more urban location. She didn't need to know everything. If this ever got out I would be dead meat. He would hunt me down for sure. I would be afraid to start my car every day. My mind flashed back to the story about the guy down in South America who was killed by an arrow, through the throat. Revenge fears aside, I had to appease her because her screenplay also needed to be finished. I wasn't going to be able to get away with half a job done. No way. It was both of them or nothing. A lot was riding on this.

"Listen, Gloria, you have to keep this hush-hush," I pleaded. "None of what I tell you can leave this room--and that includes telling your agent, best friend, priest, whatever. I'm serious. This is top secret shit. No lie."

She nodded solemnly and sat down next to me, so close I could smell her perfume, the one that probably cost more than a month's rent back home. She smiled at me, waiting. If only the situation wasn't so critical, I thought. I could have fun with this, dangle the prize under her nose, while she panted with anticipation. It wasn't often you got leverage over the wealthy like this.

Using my best story telling abilities, I filled her in. She was, you know, spell bound, sitting there lapping it up. It never happened that she found someone that might be higher up on the food chain to obsess about. Movie stars and moguls didn't do it for her anymore. On her perch she looked down on just about everybody. Rarified air, so the poets might say.

And they might call me the classic interloper for sure. That's me, the little guy on the scene to form a quorum of sorts, another cog to keep the whole enterprise going. Somebody had to do the grunt work. Joel Jenkins was about to be outed, revealed as the modern day hermit that he was. Shame on me.

I imagine it was delicious news for her, something to make her life seem on balance as she stumbled around her giant mansion with the omniscient view. Oh yeah, she had been on the cover of magazines and had a bank account with lots and lots of zeroes, as well as some pretty juicy phone numbers tucked away on her I-phone, ready to be summoned up at a moment's notice. Most of her phone calls would be returned too. Yet we all need some...some reassurance, something to let us know we belong. I think they call it validation. Sounds stupid but probably applicable.

At one point, as I laid it on thick, she actually gasped, then caught herself and got a placid (practiced) expression that told the world that she didn't have to care about anything anymore because she was who she was. You can imagine how much I was enjoying toying with her. A little man drunk on his inconsequential momentary power. It was like one of those insightful Twilight Zone episodes, where the subject suddenly finds that he can manipulate his life any way he sees fit, but of course comes crashing down afterwards, none the wiser unfortunately.

That was me. After I told her everything, minus some editing, she sighed and said, "Kind of sad in a way."

"I guess so," I mumbled, wondering where we went from there. "It's not like he's a monk in a cave or anything," I added, wanting to somehow defend his choice to live as he did. I laughed and said, "I mean the guy has Internet access--hello. That pretty much makes him less than a recluse, okay. He also still writes for--what is it? Discover and Scientific American magazines. He doesn't have to be conventional, really. He's Joel Jenkins."

She didn't seemed interested in me anymore, like I had just delivered a letter and my duty was over. "I don't know what to make of it. Does this mean that--"

Her voice trailed off and she stared out the window. I could hear Chewy barking in the kitchen and Pilar telling him to shut up, in Spanish. A pan clattered to the floor. Gloria glanced towards the kitchen then back at me. I didn't know what to say. A plane zoomed over, in route to the airport. I watched it bank around then start its approach to the mesa for another death defying landing.

"Listen, I need some more info on your daughter...and her boy friend," I offered, waiting to see if she would respond. "I think I'm going to use them for balance in the script. It can't all be about you, right?" I joked.

"No, I guess it can't," she said absently, watching the plane land. "Hey Bradford, I want you to set up a meeting. I think the two of us should compare notes."

Slack jawed, as they say, I replied, "What?"

"You heard me. Gloria Worthington and Joel Jenkins need to meet," she announced, walking away into the kitchen.

First, it's creepy when people refer to themselves in the third person, and second, there was no way that was ever going to happen. No chance. No chance in hell. Forget about it.

Then why was I on my way back to the dusty road, up the mountain, in the middle of nowhere? I'll tell you why: I'm an idiot. That's right. Not only am I an idiot but I'm also spineless. I couldn't stand up to a third grader. Don't think I'm not all that proud about it either. I'm not. Somewhere along the line that gene in the DNA you get from your parents had been corrupted or something. Both of my parents were strong individuals, people who didn't take shit from anybody. My dad was one of those Chief Petty Officers you always hear about, the ones who are gruff and demonstrably in charge. Same for my mom. She ruled the house, make no mistake about it.

Enough sniveling already. Part of me wanted to see the fire works of two titans meeting face to face. I'm not going to lie about that. Oh yeah, here comes another magazine article for me. One on one with, you see where I'm going with this. Even if they were beyond the coveted demographic, you know damn well the public would want to hear about those two butting heads. Even if my two scripts weren't dependent on each other I still wouldn't mind brokering a grudge match. We are all hucksters.

The man wrote a blog didn't he? I asked myself. In some ways that meant that he might want to have intercourse with the public. Modern day isolationists wanted to tell people they were removing themselves from the commons. I was going to give a platform to do just that. Surely he wouldn't mind breaking bread with another person of the thinking class. Right? How hard could it be to interest him in wine and conversation with a pretty, intelligent woman? Very.

"You want me to meet Gloria Worthington," he sneered, shaking his head in disbelief.

We were standing on the road to nowhere, with Wiley sniffing at my ankles. I had stood down in the woods waving my arms like some mental patient, hoping to stir his interest when he looked at the monitors back in the cabin. It had taken probably about a half an hour. I knew he saw me standing there. He was most likely deciding whether or not to shoot me or not. We hadn't left on the best of terms and now here I was back invading his privacy again. I couldn't blame the guy for wanting to whack me.

"First of all, she put me up to this," I complained, placing all the blame on her because it was the convenient thing to do. For all I knew he hated her or at least what she stood for. "I couldn't get out of it. Sorry."

"How, exactly, do you know Gloria Worthington?" he demanded to know, eyeing me.

"Well," I began, using my best evasive mode, "we are involved professionally."

His eyes narrowed and he stated, "Another screenplay. God, have you no shame? Killing you would be doing the world a favor."

"Wait, Joel, listen, I was given these two projects at the same time. I didn't really have much of a choice. If you must know, I'm a bottom feeder. Yeah, that's right. I'm not one of the better known screenplay writers--it goes without saying. When they called me up to do these two scripts I wasn't going to say no." I caught my breath for a moment then continued, "This is a really big deal for me and my career. You don't get chances like this very often. Like never."

He thought this over for a moment then said, "If I believed in fate I'd say you just ruined mine."

This didn't sound good. Not at all. He was probably now going to slam the door on our little friendship, probably pull up stakes and move on, never to be heard from again. I was going to be responsible for sending the most interesting man in the world underground. He would disappear, totally. Mankind would lose one of its brightest minds, lost because some dickhead happened to want to write a story about him. That and set him up on a blind date.

But it wasn't going to be a blind date in the traditional sense. He knew who Gloria was. Undoubtedly he had seen photos of her. They were plastered all over the Internet, some leaning towards the nude end of the scale. She had had her blue period, if you know what I mean. Several hook ups with Hollywood stars will do that. Oh she hadn't been a wild child or anything but there were those pictures from a weekend spent at Palm Springs. It was probably longer than a weekend but you get the idea. The point was that there was little mystery here. He was famous. She was famous. It seemed like kismet.

I'm joking. Although famous people linked up all the time it didn't mean that they were destined to do so. Besides, this wasn't to be a romantic encounter but more of an intellectual one, where they could probe each other's minds to see who had the most abstruse thoughts. I don't know what I am talking about. Gloria was all about proving she belonged and I suppose by meeting Joel Jenkins she could accomplish that. Him, not so much.

"Doesn't she write those inane novels? The ones that are always heavily vested in proto-typical feminist clap-trap," he stated, shaking his head, then laughing. "She represents what is wrong with the opposite gender, unable to come to grips with biological deterministic facts. I am astounded she has been able to cajole a publisher into putting her words into print."

Joel seemed bemused now. I guess that's what you would call it. He really wasn't the type to go in for any book club moments. No book tours, you know, where the author sits there and signs their book, while devoted fans gush over them. That was Gloria's world though. One in which she reveled in the adulation as she came into contact with her public.

Joel's book had one chapter, 1/4 Pound Of Pressure, which was dedicated to describing the killing of another human being. It was a first hand account. The title of the chapter referred to that last little tug on the trigger of a rifle before the deed is done. In graphic detail Joel had detailed how his first kill in combat had come off, right down to the man's head exploding from the force of the bullet. Although it was a clinical retelling of the event, it still packed a punch. Adding firearm specs and range statistics didn't detract from the act itself. Exploding eyeball, dislodged cranium, it all kind of spells violent, messy death. Losing ones virginity, crossing that bloody divide, makes for compelling reading. Squeamish need not apply.

So they definitely came from different perspectives, to say the least. He had written one book because it felt that what he had to say had to be said. He wasn't a writer, all the magazine articles notwithstanding. He was more of a thinker, a guy who liked to use his big ass brain to examine this great big world of ours. Gloria was almost the opposite. She too was a thinker but she was more into applying her thoughts to paper in the hopes that somebody out there would find guidance and solace in her point of view. Of course it wasn't all altruistic. She made truck loads of money in the process; but that was capitalism at work, an exchange of labor for recompense. Marxism never did really function, right? We all sell something.

Even Joel was selling a mantra, something for the masses to ponder. He might have been a lousy salesman but he was still out there involved in some kind of commerce. Maybe not. I suspect that if I told him he was marketing a product he would object to my analysis. Money doesn't always have to change hands, does it? A point of view, once it is recognized, becomes like a bartered item. I should have majored in economics.

"You would be doing me a really big solid if you just had coffee with her," I pleaded, hoping that I could somehow convince him and get her off my back. "It would make life a lot simpler for me."

"Did you just say 'solid?'" he asked, smirking. "I didn't realize you were so urban. Must be the LA influence."

"Very funny. Come on, a cup of coffee. How bad could it be?" I asked, holding up my hands prayer fashion. "You meet her, exchange a few ideas, then it's over. Who knows, you might like her. You two must have a lot in common, right? You are both from the 60's and all."

He scoffed, then said, "Only if you agree to be there. And I reserve the right to leave at any time. That is non-negotiable. Are we clear?"

I couldn't believe my ears. I had just brokered a meeting between the two of them. Even if it all blew up I would have at least gotten Gloria off her obsession. Now if they only managed to not kill each other I was golden. I would be able to finish up the screenplays and head back to LA. I smelled a Golden Globe. Finally, I would be able to sit at one of those tables and slurp up some booze, before they called out my name. Everyone knew the Euros loved Jenkins. He was a rock star over there. They couldn't possibly take a pass on a movie about him. I might as well write out my acceptance speech right now.

Okay, I wasn't that deluded, or ambitious. I wouldn't know what to do with any accolades coming my way. In college, I was always startled when I got a good grade. Truthfully, I liked toiling away in relative obscurity, as long as I got paid to do it. The thought of me climbing up on that stage in front of a bunch of people, not to mention the TV audience, made me sweat. It was possible even in Hollywood to lack an ego. Inflated self-esteem wasn't always necessary to advance. Yes, it was. I was proof of that. Almost a decade in and I was still a small fish in a big pond. At least I was still swimming though.

Setting up this meeting between the two icons was like arranging a State dinner where the two parties are at war, or at least living under an expired truce. I thought my troubles were over when I got them to agree to meet, but they were just starting. Gloria, not wanting to be at a disadvantage, wanted to control the environment under which the get together was going to be held. Joel, for his part, just wanted to be able to abscond out the door if and when the time came. He was almost like Wyatt Earp, not wanting to have to sit with his back to the door.

Unfortunately, I was the referee, with no whistle. I could have used one, along with a really fat rule book. I couldn't believe how nervous Gloria was about the whole thing. Come on, she had once met with the President. This time around there weren't going to be any nosy Secret Service around. How hard could it be?

Nothing rattled Joel. I couldn't imagine what would. He had faced down tyrants before. He had dangled from ledges thousands of feet in the air. He had even had a debate with the Arch Bishop of Canterbury. Long story, but suffice to say it was about religion. No one won, God is still on the premises. Still, I did notice a trace of unease, but it had probably more to do with his mania for remaining incognito.

I chose a little bistro type place in Sedona because it met all their requirements. For Gloria, it was near her house and for him it had easy access to the main road. It was also mostly abandoned during the day, especially mid-morning. The ground rules expressly stated that their would be a time limit, not unlike a debate. It would be coffee (or tea) and nothing more. After I complained, they agreed to some sort of pastry too. If it all sounds absurd that's because it was. They were grown ups and from the generation that prided itself on establishing rap sessions. It was all so embarrassing.

Then when I thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous, they squabbled over who was to arrive first. Gloria told me in no uncertain terms that she was damn well not going to be sitting there waiting for him to arrive. He shot back that his time was valuable and he had no patience for childish games. This went back and forth, through me, before they agreed to enter the bistro at precisely the same time. As you can imagine this required us to synchronize watches, me with my Casio, her with a gaudy Patek Philippe, (that cost more than my car) and him with a Luminox black Ops thingee that every self respecting combat dude wouldn't be caught dead without.

The date and time was agreed on. It was all set. Now I was nervous. I had to play diplomat, as well as host. They never warned me about this sort of thing back in film school. If they had I would have changed majors immediately. Nobody needed this kind of grief. To make matters worse, Marty had called and I had ill-advisedly told him what was up. He then lectured me about what I needed to do. Then again, he had extensive experience dealing with balky clients and big time egos. He was actually a master at manipulation, always making it seem that he wasn't manipulating anyone. We "shared" in several feverish phone calls, where he even offered to fly to Sedona and broker a deal.

I begged off, telling him I had everything under control. I could tell in Marty's voice that he was jealous of my pending nightmare, having always enjoyed facilitating matters between famous people. It was his calling. I suppose all agents have to have the capacity for playing the Secretary of State role. Came with the job.

And the day arrived. In the meantime I had kept busy as I traced down facts and crammed them into my screenplay, cleaning them up as I went. I was getting good at juggling two scripts in my head. Everybody has a talent. I tried not to think about our little coffee klatch. Everything had been set in motion. No stopping it now, unless one of the parties got cold feet.

I should be so lucky. The morning of the meet up, before eight, Gloria had called me and asked (I kid you not) what she should wear. Oh sure, ask the gay guy. I told her she was asking the wrong guy. I was still wearing jeans I bought over five years ago. What I knew about women's clothes was even less than what I knew about a woman's anatomy. Then at 9:30, a half hour before the date, Joel contacts me and wants to know whether or not we should set up some kind of signal, you know, something he could use if he wanted to bail. Arranged marriages were less complicated. I told him to just wing it. He grumbled into the phone then hung up.

There was no way I was going to pull this off, I thought, as I drove to the bistro, planning to arrive early so I could prepare myself for the event. I'd hoped that I hadn't painted too bleak a picture of his existence for Gloria. The last thing I wanted was for her to pity him in any way. That wouldn't go over big. Fortunately, I had conveniently glossed over the part about him living with two wild animals named after cartoon characters. Need to know basis, I reasoned. It was bad enough he was hanging out in an old miner's shack. He wasn't some Howard Hughes nutcase, mad at the world with really bad hygiene.

The bistro was mostly empty, thank god, with a twenty something couple sitting at one of the tables slumped over their lattes, probably recovering from a late night; although what people did in Sedona for night life I hadn't a clue. Most of the people passing through were either families bent on seeing the famed Red Rocks, with kids in tow, or hikers looking for that next high or notch in their belt as they added another wilderness trail to the list. Oh, don't forget the New Agers, there to burnish their reps as they hoped for some nirvana vibe. Whatever. I only hoped the two of them wouldn't be a problem, as they just sat there and nibbled on what appeared to be croissants. The only car besides mine parked out front was a rental car with Nevada plates, so I knew they were tourists.

One thing in my favor was there wasn't any meddlesome wait staff to deal with. This was going to be a serve yourself experience. Actually, I would be doing the serving, as in fetching their coffee and snack, while they took up positions opposite each other like two cornered animals. How had I gotten myself into this? This type of thing was for highly paid talking heads on TV, complete with annoying PA's and disgruntled camera men. They lived for scenes like this, where ratings hung in the balance.

Me, not so much. I only wanted to get it over with and not have them kill each other. The last thing I was in the mood for was some kind of cage match where the two combatants scratch each other's eyes out. Ultimate fighting was nothing in comparison. By the way, why do they even have a referee in those things? Isn't it supposed to be no holds barred?

I picked out a table as far away from the couple as I could. The guy behind the counter, some foreign dude from (I'm guessing) Eastern Europe, asked me what I wanted. Don't ask me how he ended up in Sedona pushing coffee and pastry. In LA it would have been no big deal but here it seemed somehow odd. Then again Sedona did have some weird veneer grafted onto the Western image, like having a John Wayne biopic starring a Euro actor in the lead using a bad American accent. I told him I was waiting for someone and would order in a minute. He gave me a disinterested look and went back to rearranging a tray of french pastries in the display case.

I sat down to wait and didn't have to wait long before I saw Gloria cruise up in her Prius. She popped out of the car immediately and stood there surveying the parking lot, which was mostly empty. She noticed my car right away and smiled. I could see that she had decided to go with a post hiker's motif, with Salomon (low cut) boots and Mountain Hardware Capri pants. A long sleeved t-shirt almost completed the look, which had a logo emblazoned on it announcing the fact that she had been to Banff some time in the past. She was wearing a lightweight jacket from Columbia sportswear. Somebody had been shopping at REI. Her hair was pulled back away from her face and held by two silver (real undoubtedly) barrettes or whatever you call them. I got to say she looked kind of hot for an old lady.

It wasn't two seconds later when Joel appeared riding a motorcycle. I didn't even know he had one. He zoomed up and stopped at the other end of the parking lot. He was wearing a helmet which was kind of a rarity in Arizona, since most of the idiots on the roads went sans helmet most of the time. If I was a director I would have captured that shot for sure, with him standing by his bike and her by her car, eyeing each other across the parking lot. They knew who each other was immediately. It was like a show down in a gun fight, only one of them was packing. Guess which one. In Arizona anybody could carry a gun, no questions asked. If you could suddenly resurrect any Marshal or Sheriff from circa 1800's they would probably shit their pants after they saw all the firepower that was out there on the streets.

I watched them through the window and then glanced at the couple. They were blissfully unaware of what was about to happen. I just hoped that they wouldn't recognize either of them when they came inside the bistro. I had visions of one of them, or both, descending on the table begging for autographs. Joel would probably crucify them, while Gloria basked in their idolatry. Oh boy, this was going to be fun, I thought, dreading what was about to happen.

Gloria, to her credit, made the first move. She met him half way across the parking lot and stuck out her hand. Very formal. Joel was wearing jeans and construction boots, dirty from riding the unpaved road on his motocross type bike. Yet he had that handsome thing going on too, all manly, with a hint of danger around the edges, topped off by his Oakley wrap around shades. He was wearing a nylon zip up jacket and I could just make out a shoulder harness probably holding a hand gun. As usual, he was scanning the area, swiveling his head slowly back and forth.

Man, I so wanted to hear that first introduction between them. Just how obsequious did she sound, if she did at all? What was his response? She was all smiles. He wasn't.

While I was sitting there waiting for them to arrive I got to thinking about a friend of mine, a woman, who was in the business. She was a street reporter for a local affiliate in LA, a coveted job for the most part. Her thirties were fast approaching and she knew that she was stuck in neutral in her career. After you have done the usual story about a car jacking gone wrong a thousand times, with the odd human interest story thrown in about some geriatric patient rising from the dead or something, your career gets pretty stale. Although she was attractive and had an ethnicity to boost her chances of moving up the bloviator ladder, things weren't moving along. If I were to whip out my cell phone and call her, filling her in on what I was about to do, she would probably faint.

This whole scene was tailor made for her kind, the ones who lived by the spoken word, purveyors of information with a wink and a smile. How we hated them but still listened, letting their sloppy verbal descriptions define our beliefs. Okay, I'm stealing from one of my college professors who had it in for all of them in the media, even if he was in the communications field himself. He might have washed out in front of the camera, ending up teaching a bunch of disinterested numbnuts, letting his bitterness color his viewpoint, but he still had a way with a phrase. I give credit where credit is due.

My nervousness was making my mind race. I even had sweaty palms, as I watched them approach. They made, to be honest, a nice couple, two people cut out of the same generational cloth. Then again, they were different, vastly different in so many ways. They might have been contemporaries but he had gone to Woodstock and Viet Nam. She hadn't, remaining holed up in her privilege back in Georgetown. Although they both might have been scarred by Viet Nam their individual experiences had been quite the opposite. Apparently the hippie gene had skipped a generation and taken root in her daughter.

I had bigger problems to think about than their two mis-matched bios. These were two deep thinkers, people used to dwelling on serious matters. The only thing I brought to the table was maybe the maxim: Nothing is truly 'fragrance free,' my pithy contribution to the consumerism debate. Oh boy, they were coming through the door.

"Hello, Bradford!" Gloria announced with phony cheer, smiling.

"Hey, you two made it, great," I said, stuttering, motioning for them to sit down, as I stood up to assume a waiter's pose.

Joel nodded in my direction, then surveyed the bistro, eyeing the couple for a moment before checking out what was going on behind the counter. He waited for Gloria to sit down then took a seat where he could see the whole room from his vantage point. Then I had a stray thought about just how many shoot outs had this guy been in, being that I was now going to be a future innocent bystander if and when it did happen. For her part, Gloria seemed not to notice, as she chattered on about the coffee they served there and some french sweet that you just had to try. Joel grunted in response, sweeping his eyes out towards where he had parked his motorcycle. He then plopped his helmet down on the table.

Orders were taken and I scurried off to retrieve them, standing idly at the counter while the ex-communist busied himself brewing up some cups of coffee. I watched the couple to see if there was any reaction but they were now both involved in some furious texting on their phones, probably telling family and friends that Sedona was gorgeous.

Back at the table, Gloria had taken the lead and was quizzing Joel about his life. Oh god, I thought, as I caught snatches of their conversation from across the room. Without even trying she could be overbearing, like a chattering mother out to smother you. Joel was answering her like he was at a disposition and had been advised by his lawyer not to give long answers, just yes and no. I better get back over there and play mediator, I thought, snatching up the order and hurrying back.

"Didn't you fight against the Shining Path?" she asked, eager to hear his account.

Oh crap, I thought, breaking in on the conversation with: "Here's your order!" I knew she was referring to what took place in Peru back in the 90's when some whacked out Maoists had terrorized that part of South America. I also knew that Joel didn't want to talk about any of his counter-revolutionary days.

"Thanks," Joel mumbled, grabbing the cup of coffee, as he looked around like somebody might be recording his conversation, suspicious as always. I was surprised he hadn't insisted Gloria be patted down to see if she was wearing a wire.

After her question hung in the air, unanswered, she shifted gears and exclaimed, "I loved your book. So insightful."

He forced a smile then asked, "What sort of nexus are we talking about?"

I almost coughed up my pastry, which was stale by the way. By now, I knew how his mind worked. Joel liked to glide into conversational points from different angles. If that sounds weird, it was. The man was simply incapable of conducting a normal conversation because he was always analyzing everything, from why the questioner had asked the particular question to what any answer would mean to them. It was a truly bizarre way of communication, almost like talking to someone from the past and the future at the same time.

"Come on, Joel, let's keep the chit chat for mere mortals, okay," I joked, hoping to lighten the mood or at least give Gloria time to figure out that she wasn't just exchanging small talk.

Gloria eyed me for a moment, taking what I said as a personal insult apparently, then said, "Somehow I never realized you were the type of person to specialize in bombast."

Consider the gauntlet to have been thrown down. This was to be my first witnessing of Joel Jenkins encounter with the opposite sex, one who gave as good as she got. The moment was pretty intense, with lots of psycho and social land minds. I started to rethink the whole coffee business, with visions of her tossing hers right in his face. Should have stuck with smoothies.

"I don't make appointments with nostalgia," he declared, ignoring the fact that the man was a walking encyclopedia of tales he had experienced, from jungle encounters with jaguars to dinner dust ups with former Prime Ministers.

"Hey, timeout," I said jokingly, holding up my hands to give the time out sign. "Go back to your corners. We're just here to have a cup of coffee. By the way, is the coffee all right? Would either of you like anything else?"

Sure it was pathetic, me being the neutral party in World War III. I still had a vested interest in the meeting turning out favorably though. I could only imagine how Gloria was going to react if she came away slighted, made to feel foolish. Joel would probably beat me up for subjecting him to a hysterical woman if it came to that. I couldn't win. Maybe I could call Marty. He was good at these types of summits. I could put him on speaker phone, let the two of them have a go at him.

Then the couple got up and walked out. There was a tense moment there when the girl paused for a second and seemed to recognize Gloria, but they left without incident. I could breathe again. We had the place to ourselves.

I won't go into the whole conversation, which lasted longer than I thought it would. For all of his bluster, I think Joel liked talking to her. I imagine he might have found her attractive too. Why not? I'll only give you the highlights of the meeting by mentioning some of the more salient lines in no particular order. Believe me, you wouldn't have understood most of what they were talking about. I'll list them here:

Gloria: You're ideas seem to have been incubated in a thick brine of ignorance. (She scored points with that.)

Joel: Coming from you that is a high compliment. (Kind of weak.)

Gloria: Oh, and I suppose you are destitute. (She seemed to be defensive about having more money than god.)

Joel: No, I'm not, but I do know what has been wreaked on this global community of ours. (I wouldn't give him an A+ for that come back but he scored points for mentioning our weakening social contract. Hey, I read some things too.)

Then there were two representative comments that stand alone because they are so out there.

Gloria: Where are the verities? (Must have missed that show on the Science Channel because I don't have a clue what she was talking about. Naturally, he did.)

Joel: The word virus derives from Rome, where it meant simultaneously venom and semen. Those Romans knew how to obfuscate. One word for both destruction and creation puts a fine point on comprehension. (If you say so.)

The verbal sparring wasn't all adversarial. At times they seemed down right chummy, as they laughed about things that went right over my head. Admittedly, that is a low bar to cross. Example number one: "You're chapter on your first killing was exquisitely done," so said Gloria, trying to keep her gushing to a minimum. Remember, the woman was talking about, you know, murder here.

Naturally, Joel couldn't return the compliment because I doubt it if he had ever read any of Gloria's writings. Let me correct that though. Evidently, he had read at least one of her essays, the ones written back in the day before she was sitting on a pile of cash. "Because there was no allowance for reality," he stated, and it turned out he was quoting from the essay. Don't you just hate those people who can remember everything ever written. I can't even remember the script I wrote last week much less from years ago.

Alright, so it wasn't a lovefest completely. It wasn't a match made in heaven. At least they were finding some common ground and that happened to be politics. Who knew? I thought somehow Joel would be apolitical at the very least. Gloria was a well known Dem, being born into it. The ironic thing about her first book, the one about the Viet Nam vet dying in the end, was that her boy friend at the time, the war protester, had gone on to be a far right asswipe. He even had been one of the attorneys responsible for securing the Presidency for that idiot from Texas. Just a reminder that life takes some pretty strange twists and turns. Just a reminder.

Common ground is a good thing. I could relax, a little bit, even if the guy from the other side of the Iron Curtain suddenly seemed to realize who was in his glorified coffee shop. I noticed he kept staring our way, trying to put faces to names. It wouldn't be long before he whipped out his phone and started snapping photos, forwarding them to everybody he knew. I pictured Joel shooting the phone out of his hand like the Sundance Kid.

"These aren't thinking beings," Joel pontificated, with a grin. "They are on par with medieval levels of intelligence. Truly, like when the brightest minds of the era thought the alignment of the stars influenced maladies in the population."

They had moved on to mutually bashing the political party that aligned itself with adherents who thought Darwin was an imbecile, among other things. I'm just paraphrasing them. They were talking about my family, don't you know. Mentally, I was saying let's wrap this up before Boris over there has us all on the cover of Star magazine.

"So horror is the leitmotif of war, simple as that?" she offered up, bending the conversation back to his book.

He surveyed the room again, for the thousandth time, and answered, "War proves Hobbes was right all along."

This philosophical fluff might have made them feel better but it was giving me a headache. I wasn't used to using my brain for much beyond deciphering a fast food menu or bare bones Wikipedia drivel. I couldn't imagine that there were people out there who actually spent time in the cerebral zone. It was exhausting.

I think right about here I should include a morsel from Joel's book, the bit about, you know, death, the killing part thereof. I pick it up part the way through the chapter. It's mostly self-explanatory, really:

Death I had seen, experiencing it at an early age when I literally stumbled over it, the body, after dashing around the corner of the building in route to my class room. I was all of six years old. One of my father's parishioner's had died prematurely, expiring out behind the building in our little compound in that rain forest that served as a church, a school house and a health clinic. The man was a notorious drunk and for all of his 42 years on earth had never done what might have been thought of as a kind, generous act.

Despite all of my father's skills as a pastor, he had not been able to bring the man into the fold. His resistance to the Word of God frustrated both of my parents, who spent considerable blocks of time in pursuit of the dead man's soul. He had to be saved because my father instinctively realized that his time on earth was limited. This was obvious simply for the reason that the "sinner" in the man raised the probability of violence exponentially. In fact, not a weekend went by that the man wasn't in a scuffle of some sort with another lost soul in the village, often fueled by drink.

He had been, apparently, murdered by another man equally inebriated, hacked to death by a machete. I had fallen over him and come face to face with his mask of agony, which was now crusty with dried blood. Oddly enough I hadn't screamed out in horror but rather climbed to my feet to get a better perspective. He was shirtless and the slashings of the machete blade were obvious, as they made a crisscrossing design across his chest and arm. In his drunkenness, he had bled to death.

I couldn't help but notice that he seemed to be smiling, as if in death he had found solace. I can remember thinking at the time that just maybe my father's description of an afterlife might be true. Jesus Christ was forgiving, even taken this swine into the fold at such a late date. Then my mother called out my name from the steps to the church and I shouted out to her, revealing what God had wreaked. Just another tiny implementation of pre-destiny.

The very next dead body I would see in that region of the world came at the hands of my own volition, which is a fancy way of saying that I had something to do with it. In the advancement of time I had returned home after being away for several years, gone to find my route through life or so said an Uncle who thought that I might want to see a bit of the world before succeeding my father and taking up the mantle of soul savior. That that never materialized I will address in a later chapter, but for now I will say that my apprenticeship with death had been advanced by being in Viet Nam for a year's time.

It was in that Southeast Asian country where I would catalogue numerous eye witness accounts of death. There would be mangled bodies from explosions, limbs torn off from inviolable militaristic physics, where the vagaries of dying were determined not by age or health but by proximity to discharged armaments. This meant children, dead and gone, along with elderly grandmothers. Human life's expiration could be strangely capricious.

Also, the participants died, by the hundreds--thousands. Bullet holes often marked the spot, a tell tale sign that combat training and fickle fate were not always intricately linked. I even saw dead animals, shuffled off to the side to swell and stink, leaving a lasting odor to delineate the transference from the animal kingdom to what was perceived as the human side of things. It demonstrated that mortality came in all shapes and sizes and was forever tenuous.

That was war, man's attempt at devising a method whereby grievances got a complete hearing or so said a Colonel with a withering sense of humor, told to me while I jotted down his name and rank in my notebook. He smiled at me and wanted to pass on some more tidbits about organized destruction but we were under heavy mortar fire and I couldn't really hear him as we hunkered down in the bunker. It hadn't taken me all that long to figure out that mankind didn't really place all that much stock in enjoying God's half green acre. After you had seen napalm in action you knew morality was made of a slippery substance, one in which your fingers were never going to be able to grip it tightly enough to keep a hold. Burning flesh had a way of informing the senses, all five of them, that there was never going to be anything better around the corner, ever.

Then I had my brush with playing god, coming at the hands of an assault rifle, one that had been issued to me by a Leftist group in a South American country no one mentioned very much. We--that is I--were up against a well organized Right wing militia, well funded by drug money and intent on maintaining their grip on the villagers with a campaign of terror and mayhem. Having signed on to the latter day Che Chevara devotees cause, I was quickly enlisted to lead the charge. This translated into me leading the charge when it came time to join the battle.

That I was young and naive was no excuse for being stupid. After my experience in Viet Nam I was now a confirmed nihilist. Philosophy, political or otherwise, seemed irrelevant, passé. Assembled words didn't begin to explain why separating another person from their life advanced the cause. Yet there I was, rifle in hand, marching through the hinterlands in search of death, maybe my own.

I will perhaps never forget that morning. It certainly plagued my dreams for years afterwards. Another hot, humid dawn arrived, leaving me longing for the higher altitude the Andes offered, close but so far away. It was my first sentry duty, assigned to me by a short man with a wispy beard trying to hide his face. To him, I was the gringo there to bring legitimacy to what they were all doing. The first day I arrived he had told me my services had been sanctioned by someone higher up the chain of command but that he didn't agree. In his mind, the enemy had three heads: Narcos, Rightwing death squads, and Gringos. I wanted to tell him that I was proud to be one part of the triad but wisely thought better of it.

My fluent Spanish helped. I knew a great deal of the idioms and commanded the language to the extent that they saw in me someone who commiserated with their plight. I had won the others over easily, but not him. He was one of those Communist commanders that saw themselves as the logical extension of the Cuban revolution, that is to say a diehard Castro disciple. I would never foster his respect and certainly not his trust.

It didn't matter all that much because I wasn't there to win friends or even forward the revolution. My time in that little slice of war zone was for my own personal baptism. The extinguishing of another person's life was an achievement that needed to be accomplished. Again, morals are slippery, fungible even.

That was my mindset on that morning when I was just ending my sentry duties, lost in a haze of sleep deprivation, wanting nothing better than to lie my head down and sleep for only a few hours. Life as a revolutionary combatant wasn't glamorous. It was tedious, with bad food and the constant threat of attack. Your anticipation of contact wore you down, whittling away at your emotional equilibrium until, compounded by your lack of a good night's sleep, your nerves were brittle and the mind started to roil like a rushing stream.

Rifle in hand, omnipresent as it was, so much so that it began to weigh a ton in your hands, burdening your arms until they ached, I was headed back to our camp from the perimeter we had set up the night before. Unknown to me, the nearest villagers, some few kilometers away from our position, had been co-opted and were now bracing for the blowback from their treachery. It was a calculus they had to use. They were existing between two warring factions, both of which had little qualms about raining down retribution in the form of mass capital punishment.

Dumb, blind luck, my everlasting friend, had me look up at the precise moment that one of my opponents in this homicidal drama was stopping to wipe the sweat off his brow. Although my combat was almost nil, bare knuckled instinct told me to raise my rifle and enact that last quarter pressure, the final tug of the trigger. I didn't even have time to aim. A tonal percussive blast strafed my ear, as the butt of the gun recoiled into my shoulder. Time skipped a beat. Then I saw him crumple to the ground.

The element of surprise had been lost. A firefight broke out, one of many I would eventually experience over the years, marked by gallantry and cowardice, as the death count grew larger. It was over in minutes. We ran, disappearing into the jungle, leaving behind a few casualties, more martyrs for the cause.

The man, the victim, left behind perhaps a wife, certainly a family. That was not for me to think about. Contemplation of one's act wasn't recommended. It defeated the will. "We were all chess pieces, each able to move in a certain fashion, all trying in concert to bring down the King." So said one of my "Commanders" in the future, down the road a bit as I extended my stay in the ranks of living and dying soldiers. He was a former member of the South African forces, so he was intimately familiar with the white/black hues of the pieces on the board.

Let me leave off there. It was safe to say that Joel walked the talk. There was an article (one of many) that was written about him by a Brit. I read it in an American online magazine but I forget the name. Anyway, this English dude said about Joel's brain that it was like a "polymer," which as he explained it is a Greek word meaning many parts. I guess that was why he could store all that stuff he had learned over the years and at the same time compartmentalize the good and the bad. Makes sense if you think about all the things that he has gone through.

Their meeting was stretching out too long. I was getting uncomfortable. It wasn't supposed to go like this. Not at all. I thought there would be some polite chit-chat, nothing beyond that. We would sit down and sip our coffee, despise each other from a distance, and go our merry ways. Who knew these two would get locked into a conversational battle? The two of them were now discussing religion, particularly Buddhism. Sedona--nutty Sedona, had a Stupa or Buddhist temple thingee, with a statue of Buddha and everything. Joel was going on about pujas or Buddhist prayer rituals and how he had participated in some when he was hanging out in some place called Zansker. Don't ask me where that is. She was transfixed by his story, like some pathetic rock band groupie. Then he was going on about how animism had been added to the Buddhist prayer this or that, acting like he was some anthropologist guru.

"Are you even sure that when something falls off the media radar it even exists anymore?" she suggested, giggling like a school girl high on her boy friend's cologne. "I have to say that we are now defined by how and what we have assimilated. No longer is conventional wisdom backed up by generations of enforced mores. Now we trade our creeds like stocks, in with the new, out with the old."

This from a woman who had a Facebook page and Twitter account. Talk about hypocrite city, even if she had some staffer handling all of the traffic on the two sites. If anyone has benefited from the new media surge it's her. Come on, she is a best selling author who gets half her traction in the market by revving up the Internet sales. Amazon.com, hello! She was a product of the new age of media distribution. At least Joel was more of a purist. He hadn't built up a Facebook page and certainly wasn't getting blisters on his finger tips from sending out Tweets.
Then again, they were both beneficiaries of the Internet age. We all were to some extent. Hell, I got all my research from it and some of my ideas too. The world wasn't going back now. The World Wide Web had us all by the throat whether we liked it or not. As Joel liked to say: Deities willing, which was a take on the Muslims always saying Inshallah, I guess. He thought it was funny anyway, never saying it without a smirk. The two of them could get all dystopic about the state of the world but they were doing pretty good in it for two old farts. I mean if I was using Joel's own words, I would be saying: This is a transmutation of reality. By the way, he did say just that about something or other. It's in my notes. I couldn't make that up.

"You don't think there's too much culture?" she asked, giving him this dreamy look that I found disturbing, like she was one of those Stepford Wives.

Loaded question or not, Joel replied, "I'm not sure you can have too much culture."

Are you kidding me? They then went on to argue that point for another five minutes, while I wanted to beat both of them over the head. Let's finish this up, I urged silently. Shouldn't you be getting back to your house on the cliff? And isn't your coyote missing you yet? How about we shut it down for the day. Come on.

"Because you made a Faustian bargain doesn't entitle you to pass judgment on what has been left in your wake," she stated, hands on hips, steely eyes ready to continue the battle.

At least she is standing up, I thought, glad to see some movement in that direction, as in out the door. Joel had a bemused look on his face, as he too stood up and snatched up his helmet. Now we are getting some where.

He then shrugged and replied, "I'm no existentialist."

It was now abundantly clear he liked to retreat into one liners when he was called out on some things. Hey, he was human. We all like to pick our battles.

"Okay," I intervened, adding, "and now we can take it outside. Wave goodbye."

They both gave me a look, a combined one that said they thought I was an idiot. I returned the favor by showing that I couldn't give a shit, really. I was tired of babysitting two adults old enough to be my parents. Is this what I have to look forward to with my own parents, I wondered. Good lord, my siblings were going to have to pitch in when the time came for dealing with my mom and dad on down the road. Then again, they weren't two pampered dickheads with reputations to uphold.

A car was just pulling up when we exited. I could see it was full of tourists, probably just getting started on another day in Sedona. It was a family, complete with three complaining kids, a couple girls and a boy. The parents already looked worn down by being on vacation, as their offspring did a tag-team complaining routine. You know, they hated the motel, the rental car was too small, the Red Rocks were lame, and don't get them started on the food. They were going to love the dried up pastry.

Fortunately, they cruised right on by us, non the wiser as they were locked in an argument about driving out to see some "gay" petroglyphs, compliments of a comment by the only son. The two daughters were letting all their friends back home in Chicago know by text just how shitty the whole trip was. Next year, maybe they might want to rethink the family vacation idea.

Time to de-couple the situation, let them go on their merry way. It would be something they could both put in their autobios, inserting it in the next to last chapter. I would be proud to be a bit player in the larger picture, hoping that they would just spell my name right. So I would have something to tell my friends about after all.

"We must do this again sometime," Gloria offered, smiling. "I can't remember when my mind has been so stimulated before."

High praise indeed, but Joel demurred a little by replying, "I see."

She seemed a tiny bit disappointed by this response, but she regrouped and said, "Remember what I said about flying. Anytime. Give me a call." With that, she departed, speeding silently away in her Prius.

Joel watched her drive away, then surveyed the parking lot before saying excitedly: "The woman offered to take me up in her plane!"

"When did she say that?" I asked incredulously, realizing that I must have zoned out while they were talking.

"Oh, I get it, I see where you are coming from, Bradford. She writes gender specific treacle, but she does seem to be a critical thinker, despite everything that might point to the contrary. You are probably wondering why I would even think of getting in an airplane with her. The short answer is: flying. It's not often I get to pilot much anymore. Can't let the opportunity pass me by, right?"

His giddiness seemed kind of weird to me. I looked at him for a moment, then said, "You mean to tell me you would take advantage of her generosity, is that it? I'm surprised at you. It doesn't seem right."

"There's that sense of humor I so appreciate," he countered, laughing. "I, too, am reprehensible. Write that down. Put it in your screenplay. Joel Jenkins has faults like everyone else. Contact the networks."

Then, on the other side of the coin, I got a quick phone call from Gloria on my way back to my motel and she sounded like a High School girl who was waiting to be asked out by the Captain of the football team. Really, I thought, you two do know that you have practically nothing in common but some crappy Rock and Roll music? Attraction, apparently, works on lots of different levels and intensities.

"You're kidding, right?" I almost shouted into my cell, shaking my head in disbelief. "All I heard the whole time you two were talking was arguing. It sounded like two wild animals fighting each other."

"Did not," she disagreed. "We were having a discussion, Bradford. I realize your generation doesn't go in for that sort of thing but--"

"Hold up!" I shouted into the phone, swinging my car into the parking lot of a convenience store. "Wait, let me whip out my notebook and take a look." I fumbled through my notes for a moment then said: "This is Joel, 'In a few short decades there will be no point in traveling from one continent to another because they will be more or less the same as homogeneity grips the globe.'"

"Yeah, so?" she shot back.

"This is you, your response: 'Nonsense, variety is a form of evolution and is historically non-negotiable. I'm surprised that someone as intelligent as you doesn't realize that.'"

"And your point is what exactly?"

"My point is that the two of you are opposites and they really don't attract. You get that don't you? Please tell me that you do," I demanded. "If not then what--"

"You are so plebeian, Bradford. I mean, really, we are both adults and have reached a point in our lives where we...we might approach life differently than you. Has that ever occurred to you before? I realize you are relatively young, and from LA, but you have to step up your game a little bit."

This little sports reference only irritated me more. The LA slam I was used to but I didn't need to be lectured to by her. All I really wanted to do was jam my car into gear and head back to California. I had enough material to work with and the rest I could fake. I had done it plenty of times before. As if on cue, I got another call on the line and like a bell going off I knew it had to be Marty. I told Gloria I would call her later because I had to take the other call. All those times I dreamed of having a high powered agent in my corner now seemed laughable, like a bad joke.

"Tell me what you got," Marty demanded, breathing into the phone.

"Getting closer," I replied, hoping that would get him off my back.

"Details, Tuttle, details," he said, pushing like always.

My ordeal wasn't over. Not by a long shot. I dreaded the thought of all the rewrites and editing sessions that were coming my way. With a project like this there would be plenty of flack coming my way, from producers and bottom line junkies, all there to make my life a living hell. I once had a producer tell me in all seriousness that he would appreciate it if I would change the setting on a screenplay, just tweak it a bit. The script was about Berlin, in World War II. It wasn't like I could uproot the scene and stick it in Madrid. A lot of people in Hollywood were just like that though, blissfully unaware of history in any way. As far as they were concerned there was an antagonist, protagonist, with a little story on the side. Maybe some skin too, with a love scene or two.

"Are you holding forth?" Gloria asked Joel, giggling. To my horror, he was chuckling too. They were like two pod people or something, with this weirded out dynamic between them going on. You know what I mean, when two people are so dialed in to each other they have an annoying vibe they share in and nobody else does.

Seeing my confused look, she added, "That's our shorthand speak. We use it when one or the other of us gets too...too verbose."

You mean like all the time, I thought, smiling back at her, wondering how and when all of this had gotten started. Unbeknownst to me they had been seeing each other ever since I last saw them, which was a week ago. One week. All of this had jelled in one week, I wondered, amazed. Then I realized they were oldsters who didn't have to worry about establishing ground rules or anything. They had been there, making it a whole lot easier to reach whatever goal it was they wanted.

"You two, you know, getting along okay then?" I said, half question half statement.

"We haven't worked out the orders of magnitude just yet," Joel chimed in, producing a joint laughing session from the two of them.

Oh Lord, I thought to myself, then said, "I'll take your word for it."

"A certain tragedy of the commons had to be breached but we worked around it," she informed me, grinning. The communal giddiness was making me seasick. "I guess we owe you and our indebtedness shouldn't go unrewarded."

Get me out of here, my brain screamed, as I said, "Just help me with the screenplays. That'll be good enough." While a little voice in my head was saying: Along with a giant pile of cash so I never have to ever do something remotely like this again.

As semi-repulsive as it might seem, old people still hook up. So they were having a little romance of some sort. I had to accept that and move on; not that I had to wrap my head around the concept exactly. Best to not think about it.

I had been invited over to Gloria's for a working lunch. As I drove up the steep, winding road to her mansion, I got a glimpse of Joel's Jeep in the circular driveway. This was my first tip off that something was up. He had told me about their tentative date to go barnstorming around the county in her plane but I didn't think much about it. Maybe I had been in Hollywood too long but in my experience successful (famous) men always had considerably younger consorts hanging around. It was the way things were done there and had been for a long time. Money bought you more than merchandise, it also allowed you to act like a complete jackass and defy biological strictures too. Women got old but men purchased a new lease on life.

As I was ushered into the great room I could hear Joel and Pilar confabing in Spanish from the kitchen. Chewy had found a new friend to annoy, thank god. Gloria was all bubbly, a transformation that took me by surprise. Gone was her usual minor league surliness or, at least, the undercurrent of sarcasm, like she knew something that you would never know. I kind of liked this new Gloria Worthington.

"How's things progressing?" she asked over her shoulder as she led me to the couch. "Oh, need something to drink? I can have Pilar whip you up a smoothie if you want. I got some divine strawberries this morning."

"I'm good," I told her, wondering how I was ever going to get past seeing her and Joel together, hoping like hell they weren't going to be in any way demonstrative. I just knew I wasn't going to be able to hold it together if I saw them caressing each other's body parts in any way.

"Did you know that Joel was a Green badger at one time?" she suddenly wanted me to know, not that I even knew what the hell she was even talking about.

"A what?" I replied, confused because it sounded like she was telling me that he had been some sort of Boy Scout.

"Silly, you know, with the CIA," she said, beaming, as if that gave him legitimacy. "They do contract work. The stuff that is farmed out by the government."

Now I got it. She was referring to those below the radar companies that did the "risk management" chores for the intelligence community. With privatization in vogue a large chunk of the war effort was being handled by civilians who didn't suffer from a whole lot of oversight. History was being made. We were now a nation that let its populace have at it when it came to prosecuting a war. For better or worse, we were now going to battle with a quarter of our troops out of uniform. I wondered what my father thought of that development. In the near future they might be outsourcing his old job in the Navy to some weekend warriors on loan from the yacht club.

I didn't know why she was telling me this but it was good to know because I would definitely have to work that somewhere into the script. Joel had conveniently left that out of his resume when he was talking to me. Then again, after some cursory research, I realized he had been redacting lots of info. I would work around that problem. My immediate roadblock was too much information, not too little.

"He's done it all," I said to her, as she nodded in agreement, squeezing my forearm. The new Gloria was all touchy feely. "Are we gonna be able to get some work done? I mean with him here."

She looked at me sternly and for a moment the old Gloria was back and in full swing. "Of course," she announced, like I was a simpleton for suggesting otherwise. "If we're lucky you can get two things done."

Sure, I thought, I was going to be able to simultaneously jot down both bios. Did she think I was a stenographer? It was hard enough keeping up with just one of them at a time. I only imagined the two of them would go off on tangents, dripping with overlapping milestones that I would have to ask questions about. I felt a headache coming on.

"Mr. Tuttle!" Joel called out, entering the room with Chewy in close pursuit. Gloria called out to Pilar to remove the dog from the room. "I hope you aren't stymied by all of the research you must be doing."

I stood up and awkwardly shook his hand because I couldn't think of anything else to do. "I'm surprised to see you here," I said, raising my eyebrows for effect.

"Keep everyone guessing, that is a dictum to live by," he joked, and Gloria tittered appreciatively.

Now I will say that this unexpected development was surprise enough but it was shortly eclipsed by the sound of a truck roaring into the driveway out front. It was time for me to meet the offspring, Gloria's daughter. In this, me and Joel were in the same boat. I would imagine that older couples have this mill stone around their necks. Meeting children, especially adult ones, has to be a critical moment, one of those hurdles you have to cross in order to keep the whole thing going. Happily, I hadn't had to endure that and probably won't have to.

"Oh shit," I heard Gloria utter, as she jumped up from the couch and made her way to the front door.

"What is it?" Joel wanted to know, as he fingered the gun holster under his jacket, ready for the worst.

"It's my daughter, Dari," she informed us, accompanied by a worried look on her face.

I knew about the complicated relationship she had with her daughter but I doubted Joel did. Gloria had probably not been so forthcoming about that particular line in her biography. Ah children, they had a way of fucking everything up, even when they were grown. Judging by the almost frantic look on Gloria's face she was not looking forward to answering the door. She had to have been worried about the way Joel would take any encounter with her wild child daughter. I know I would have been.

Then we heard a commotion coming from the kitchen. Chewy was barking. Pilar squealed out. Who knew Pilar liked anybody. Oh boy, this was going to be fun, I thought, eager to get some more intel for my story. One look at Joel told me he wasn't ready for this. Being an only child he had never even had to deal with siblings, much less something as potentially fucked up as this scenario. I could see him heading to his Jeep and driving away, never to be seen or heard from again.

"Hello, mother," Dari called out, not without a smirk on her face. Oh yeah, I thought, she is going to be a piece of work. "Decided to drop in on you, if that's okay."

Let me just say that Dari was pretty good looking, even if she was intent on playing her looks down with her close cropped don't-call-me-a-lesbian hair style and vaguely cowgirl chic look. (Cowboy boots on girls is one of those fashion mysteries that need to be extinguished immediately.) Some women are like that though. They know they are beautiful but insist on playing down the obvious. Bitches.

Oddly, she looked nothing like her mother, having gotten her father's genes, with a wonderfully dark complexion, set off by blues eyes, the one thing passed on from her mother. She was tall and athletic, but still managing not to look like a soccer playing dyke. Mother and daughter hugged in an awkward way, making it inadvertently known that they didn't know how to act around one another.

That being said, I was immediately more interested in who was with the daughter. The infamous boy friend. His name was Wyeth and he happened to be one of those types that got by on their looks, always. Oh I suppose he had some brains but that fact was totally immaterial. He was fit, naturally so because by his own admission he wasn't into exercise. Okay, I thought, as introductions were made all around. I had front row seats to this drama and for once in my life I wasn't directly involved in any way. Oh boy, this was going to be entertaining.

"Mom, don't tell me you have two suitors on call," Dari exclaimed, grinning mischievously. "Ooh, I like the young one, he's kind of cute."

Taking her daughter's taunt in stride, Gloria, responded in a flustered voice, "He's gay, Dari."

"Still kind of cute," she shot back, winking at me.

"Your name is Wyeth?" Gloria asked suspiciously. "How long has this been going on, Dari?"

The old, vintage Gloria was back and in rare form. Politeness was adjustable, apparently, because although Wyeth was standing right there she was treating the situation as if he wasn't. Dari gave her mother a look, one of those I imagine daughters all over the world use at least once in their lives when dealing with their mothers. Me, I was just an innocent bystander, standing there admiring Dari's choice in companion. Joel, on the other hand, was almost instantly uncomfortable. He wasn't at all accustomed to confronting familial trapdoors. I wouldn't have been surprised to see him dash out the door and pulling out his gun if anybody protested.

I couldn't help but think what a great reality show this would all make, minus me of course. What to call it? How about: Lives Of The Rich And Screwed Up. It would get a gigantic share on TV, making stars of Dari and Wyeth, who would undoubtedly break up and bring on different love interests, thereby increasing the show's popularity. All of a sudden I could see myself pitching the whole concept back in LA, with my name on it. Producer's credits at long last.

Ignoring her mother's question, Dari suddenly asked: "Hey, are you that Joel? Joel Jenkins? You gotta be kidding me."

"Guilty as charged," Joel muttered, now really (really) uncomfortable with the situation.

"That Joel Jenkins?" Wyeth piped up for the first time, with a startled look on his face. "Man, I read your book."

I just knew it was probably the only book he had ever read, then again it did have a lot of photos to look at; but I thought I had to say something at this juncture, so I asked, "Are you two here visiting for very long?" Okay, I know it was probably not my place to ask. Who was I to say anything, really? I immediately tried to softened the blow by adding, "I might need to speak with you about the project I'm working on."

And confusion reigns, so said a former director friend of mine on many occasions when he was confronted with a hassle on the set. Make no mistake about it, this was like being on a set, with divas and all. I couldn't imagine how I was going to wrangle some material out of Dari and her boy friend. It didn't seem likely.

"Bradford is doing the screenplay for the movie they are making about me," Gloria announced, beaming, conveniently leaving out the other half of my work load. "He's here to pick my brain for...shall we say, information."

"Really, a gay screen writer," Dari mused, smiling at me, leering really. "There's a lot of material to work with there," she added, smirking, letting her obvious dig settle in. "Decades of living will do that."

Flustered momentarily, Gloria responded with: "Experience is so undervalued in America--don't you think?"

"Me? Yeah, we are all about the here and now," I replied, starting to feel the quicksand I was standing in rise above my head.

"Oracle of Delphi he's not," Joel interjected, laughing. Gloria tittered. "Being immortalized by Hollywood might not be the best career move but it is--"

"I don't ascribe to that way of thinking," Gloria stated, staring him down. These two couldn't help themselves, I thought, waiting for Joel to reload.

"Really," Joel said, trying to keep a lid on his condescension, "you don't think our country is heading for ruin--in a purely cultural sense. I won't even get into the economical end of things."

"America is the most resilient nation in history," she proclaimed, showing more patriotism than I thought she possessed.

"You go, mom," Dari teased.

Shrugging her comment off, Joel stated: "Ms Worthington, pardon me if I feel ill at your gratuitous flag waving. Look, we have no manufacturing base on our shores, our knowledge based services are drying up, and we have a disastrously negative balance of payments as part of the GDP. Not to put too fine a point on it but we are fucked."

I always loved it when rich people complained about the country and where it was heading. I mean, really, I wanted to scream: YOU'RE RICH! Shut the fuck up. Besides, how had they gotten off into the weeds, conversationally that is? One minute we are passing around introductions and the next they are going on about arcane bullshit. That was them, though. The human mind is a precious thing to waste on the idle waiting to hit old age.

"Economists are all charlatans as far as I'm concerned," she shot back ineffectually. "Economic theory is unadulterated bullshit."

So said the woman with mountains of money. Nevertheless, I was kind of enjoying this standoff. Two sluggers going at it over essentially nothing and I had box seats. Then again, there was the matter of the daughter. She stood there amused at first then bored. You could almost see it descend over her face. This was a young woman used to doing what she wanted when she wanted. Trivial arguments didn't figure into her entertainment quotient. Life was too short for tedious crap.

"Maybe you two should work this out in the bedroom," Dari suddenly suggested, laughing. "This intellectual foreplay must work for you two but I don't think we should have to witness it. Right?" She turned to me to second the suggestion. I nodded in agreement, not knowing what else to do. "See. We concur," she said in an exaggerated tone of voice.

"Dari, please," her mother scoffed, embarrassed.

Eventually we did settle down in the living room to talk. I managed to pry some info out of the daughter, in between excursions into nostalgia compliments of Gloria. She was, in the end, just like any other mother, even producing a conventional photo album she hadn't bothered to show me before, which was stuffed with photos of little Dari. There she was in Aspen, complete with a little darling ski outfit. Then there she was riding on the back of an elephant somewhere in Asia, I think. Next came the birthday party with over a hundred guests, catered by some TV chef with an incomprehensible accent. And she was going off to Stanford, looking stoned in the picture as she flashed what looked vaguely like some gang signs with her fingers. The photos seemed to stop at the stage when she was coming into her own as a participant in America's adrenaline sports scene, grinning as she sat astride some colorful dirt bike, with a dollop of mud on her face to prove she was the real deal.

Oh boy, I thought, I was going to find it hard not to venture off script. Dari was fertile ground for adding a branch to the tree that was Gloria Worthington. There was always room in a script for a beautiful femme fatale type. Throw in the boy friend too, of course.

I had gotten his story after some prodding. He didn't talk much, used to being admired I imagined. People from the West, Big Sky country, were like that so I believed. It was all about the wide open spaces, leaving you with plenty of time to listen to the great outdoors. I don't know. What people did out there in nature's expanse I hadn't a clue. Cold ass Winters. Frosty Springs. Pleasant Summers. Glorious Autumns. It was all about the seasonal juggernaut, passing from one slice of nature world to the next. Like living in one of those Sierra Club calendars.

Anyway, he was only one step above a bumpkin, really, barely graduating High School. Higher Ed wasn't all that necessary for him, so he concluded after banging the mayor's wife and having to leave town because of the scandal. Small town drama aside, he hadn't intended on staying put anyway. Trading on your good looks is instinctual. Not that I would know. He left the mountains and went to Portland, landing a job at Nike as a front man of sorts. The story was confusing but somehow a woman executive played a large part. Say no more.

I had visions of him banging her in the board room at the Nike campus there in the suburbs of Portland. He had met her in a bar. Sure, why not. She offered him a job as a sales rep. From there he moved on to Seattle, Denver, and eventually to Phoenix. That was when Dari came on the scene.

"I took one look at him and bam!" she exclaimed when she had overheard our conversation.

I hear you, I thought, putting my own personal crush aside for a moment. At the time he was out of work, having burned (boinked) too many connections along the way. As he told me, "I knew it was time to pull up stakes when my supervisor hit on me in the bathroom one day." So you don't have a gay side, I thought. Pity. The work place in America was a hot bed of sexual liaisons, so it seemed.

He hadn't worked since, that be going on two years. He had landed a living, breathing ATM apparently. For now, being Dari's boy toy suited him just fine. He got to use all her rides (six and counting), spend freely, and hop into the sack with her all the time. There didn't seem to be a down side.

They rode dirt bikes together, and any other vehicle that would make it across the washes of a desert. Currently they were living in a house boat up on Lake Page, which straddled the AZ border with Utah. With Dari's trust fund they could do pretty much what they wanted, independent of what Gloria had to say. Every since she was twenty-one Dari had been financially emancipated. It was no wonder she saw no need to finish college. What was the point? Goals in life could be purchased.

My only exposure to someone like her was back in college, where I met a guy who came from loads of money and was marking time until that magic hour when he would be knighted as a rich son of a bitch, officially. He was a prick, but generous with his funds and had plenty of friends as a result. Still came out HIV positive though, proof that your bank account has nothing to do with creeping pathology and carelessness.

"Hey babe, don't we have to pick up that part?" Wyeth asked shyly, as if he was a kid talking at the adults table.

"I gotta pick up this part for one of my bikes," Dari informed us. "We'll be back in a little while...give you two a chance for a quickie."

"Dari, mind your manners," Gloria scolded.

"No, mom, it's okay. We'll take the gay guy with us. Give you two some time alone," she said, winking at her mother. "Is he safe around Wyeth?"

Little did she know, as I said, "I probably should be going."

"Oh no, Bradford," Dari chortled, "you are going with us."

I am, echoed in my brain before I said, "Where are you going exactly?"

It is safe to say I am not a car maven of any sort. If somebody asks me about the engine in my car all I can tell them is that I turn the key and it goes. Even though my dad had been a bit of a car nut, it didn't rub off on me. My one brother, yes, where they would spend hours in the garage tinkering with greasy car parts, until my mother would have to put an end to it by turning off the light and ordering them in the house. They must have worked on this Mustang model for three years or longer before they deemed it fit for the road. It was made in the 60's and looked, to my eye, low tech even for its day. If it was a chick magnet then they must have had low standards. It was also red. Yuk.

As with cars, well trucks are even more mystifying to me. They belong on farms or ranches in my opinion. When did they ever become respectable? Don't find them sexy either. I suppose they could be an extension of a man's manhood but even that theory seems screwy. Sports cars I can almost buy into as having a sexual component but then again they are only a collection of nuts and bolts, with tires.

With that in mind, I stepped outside to get in Dari's "ride." First off, it was black, cobalt black; which is daring when you live in a climate that gets as hot as Arizona does on a routine basis. I could imagine the paint job sucking up all those sunrays until it literally exploded like some death star. Second, it was a truck, with wheels that made it abundantly clear that whoever was driving it was going to take the shortcut, always, no matter what the obstacle.

It was a Ford SVT Raptor, so I was told by Wyeth in a proud voice when he noticed me gawking. As stock vehicles go, so I was informed by Dari, "this truck kicks ass." I didn't doubt that, as I climbed into the little back seat, wedged in like a toddler out for a Sunday ride with his parents. The backseat was a superfluous appendage that had to have been the figment of the design engineer's imagination. Then again, this vehicle was made to conquer the Outback or some other suitable inhospitable terrain. North Africa. Outer Mongolia. Mars. Passengers need not apply.

Dari got behind the wheel, revving up what sounded like a row of Rock band amps. It was full on and guttural, a mechanical template that made grown men weak in the knees. I was glad I was sitting (squatting) down. She turned to make sure I was in place, smiled, and plunged down the steep drive way. Okay, I'll say it. Like most men, I don't care much for women drivers, finding them easily distracted and wonderfully ignorant to the laws of physics when it comes to applying the brakes. That assessment didn't change.

Dari pulled out on 179, cruised through the roundabout with the tachometer red lining, and sped to her destination. The Sedona five-O are going to love you, I thought, suppressing a giggle. We were in route to a motorcycle shop in a neighboring town, some fifteen or so miles away. Not before she decided to take a little detour first. No need to ask me whether or not I would like to see the chaparral landscape close up, through the curtain of dust the truck tires were kicking up. I bounced around the tiny backseat, holding on for all I could, while she kept up a running commentary about the area, in between dodging boulders and holes big enough to hide a small car in.

In the background was blasting some really nasty heavy metal music. I couldn't believe this girl had gotten into Stanford; then again, her father was an alumnus with a big check book. The two of them sang along to the awful lyrics, something about blood and love or love and blood. Outside, any animals within a five mile radius had quickly departed the area for fear of their lives. I was sure all the pounding the truck was taking would leave us stranded with at the very least a flat tire. Didn't happen.

We continued down a stretch of road that was a road in name only. Then we were sand swimming through a wash, kicking up a stray rock here and there, while Dari told me she wanted to read the screen play I was writing about her mother. I told her that wouldn't be possible because of intellectual property restrictions, trying to make my refusal sound concrete, as in there was no way she was ever going to see it. She only laughed and told me I was full of shit. Wyeth bellowed out a line about the blade of a knife or something to that effect and we continued on.

Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, we exited onto a paved road again and the familiar whine of tires to pavement was music to my ears. There was so much dust on the windshield it was almost impossible to see out. Wyeth said something about sponsorships and Dari smiled, then gunned the engine. These two maniacs were destined to end up at the bottom of a cliff some day, I thought, and hopefully it wouldn't be today.

Wyeth had become, so he said, Dari's manager. She still raced the circuit and needed, I guess, somebody to set up the arrangements. Most times, so I imagined, in the world of off-road racing females were pin-ups, accessories for the racing crowd to ogle as they were squeezed into revealing outfits in order to sell products. With Dari, not so much. Although I was sure she could fill out a bikini, she wasn't going in for any of that. No, she was a player. Driving vehicles over berms at breakneck speeds suited her just fine. I could testify to that. Nerves of steel and great sphincter control was the necessary talent needed and she obviously had that.

So the two of them were a team, in and out of the bedroom. Recently, they had been leasing a houseboat up on the lake, tooling around, enjoying the scenery in comfort. Before that they had lived in a RV, one of those home away from home behemoths that had all the creature comforts. It was a nomadic lifestyle with all the bells and whistles you needed to live the easy life. Sounded idyllic, even if it wasn't for me. Sure you were mobile but you still had to deal with RV parks and peculiar transient neighbors. At least with the houseboat you could weigh anchor and cruise away. Then again you could also sink to the bottom of a very deep lake.

I couldn't figure Dari out. Usually after a little while talking to someone I got a handle on what made them tick. With her, you didn't know what she was motivated by. She wasn't her mother's daughter, that's for sure. Maybe she had some of her dad's personality traits but I had never met him so I couldn't tell. There was something about them though that set off some alarm bells. They were, you know, too secretive. Normally I would have chalked it up to being concerned about money but that wasn't Dari's problem. Not by a long shot. It was something else. Then again, what could be problematic for a woman who had everything?

If only I knew then what I know now. Words to live by. Blame it on Wyeth. I still do.

Dari and I sat in the truck talking while Wyeth went into the motorcycle shop to get the part they had ordered. She seemed to be amused by the whole movie thing about her mother, somebody she had evidently written off some time ago. She had her life and her mother had hers, so she told me, grinning. She seemed to be more interested in me and my life for some reason. I wondered how Gloria had kept Dari out of the tabloids all these years. It wasn't like she didn't lead an exposed life style. I mean she raced trucks in off road races and was devastatingly good looking. Her whole persona screamed reality TV. Throw in a stud boy friend and you were talking cover stories about her every move.

Then again, that didn't seem at all to be her focus. She wasn't some nobody who craved attention that the TV cameras delivered, and she certainly wasn't some entitled Hollywood off-spring trying to step on their parent's fame. Dari liked being anonymous, as long as the checks came in the mail. She was able to do just about anything she wanted to. That was the very essence of freedom.

Unfortunately, she had Wyeth. Everybody can point to something that caused their downfall. For her, it was easy to do. He was a fuck up, good looking but still a nimrod. I was about to find out just how much of one he was.

"Got it," Wyeth announced, placing the part in the bed of the truck. "Asshole charged me extra for it. Can you believe that? I should have popped him one." He shadow boxed for a moment, then laughed.

"Oh sure, Mr. Tough guy," she ridiculed gently, laughing. "Get in the truck already. I want to swing by and pick up some stuff for dinner. You know we can't eat my mom's shit tonight." She mimicked gagging, then added, "Ever had some of her world famous sludge, Bradford? The worst."

I nodded in agreement and replied, "Once. That was enough. What's up with that?"

"My mom thinks she is going to live forever so she eats this fake food. Not that she doesn't look all that bad for her age. Money is the fountain of youth," she chortled, rubbing her fingers together and laughing.

"Then I guess you are never going to get old," I said before realizing it.

She stared at me in the rearview mirror for a moment, then stated: "Real funny. Maybe we should drop him off on 89A, huh Wyeth."

I just met these two not an hour ago and already I was regretting it. When somebody tells you rich people are different what they are referring to is how they think they can marginalize everyone else. Okay, maybe I'm whining a little bit but it is a radically different dynamic going on when you are dealing with them. Just because Wyeth had sold out and didn't mind playing errand boy, among other things, it didn't mean I would. Hey, I dealt with rich jackasses all the time back in LA and managed to keep a grip on at least some of my dignity, and I actually know dumb shits who think nothing of dropping ten grand or more at a shop on Rodeo Drive. Not kidding, I have a friend of a friend who had jewels embedded in their cell phone cover. Think about that for a second.

Dari wasn't all about gratuitous ostentation. Almost the opposite really. I'm sure those cowboy boots she was wearing were custom made and cost a load but then again she was wearing Wrangler jeans and from what I could tell a good old Fruit of the Loom t-shirt. All her money went into her toys, so it seemed anyway. Although I did notice Wyeth was wearing an expensive Movado watch which must have cost some bucks, even if it did clash with his denim shirt that looked like it might have been purchased at Walmart. Of course this didn't make them exactly down to earth types. All the cheap earth tones in the world couldn't erase the fact that she had some hedge fund manager's digits on speed dial. You had to park that bundle of money somewhere.

We raced back up 89A, streaking toward the chimerical vision of the Red Rocks in the distance, undulating in the afternoon heat. After a quick stop at Basha's food store for supplies, we were back at Gloria's. This was a domestic scene only a stoned screenwriter could create, with the world famous boy friend and the cantankerous house keeper, and a retarded dog for comic relief. I was hoping I could pass off an excuse and not stay for dinner but part of me wanted to stay for the human interest angle alone.

"My comidas," Dari shouted out to Pilar, who backed away. This little drama was playing out in the kitchen, while I was sharing the scenery with Joel in the living room. "I am not going to eat my mom's slop. NO way! Esta usted loco?"

Apparently, this was an old wound being opened. Pilar knew not to infringe on her employer's rule about menu items. That was why she ate all her meals in her quarters. Gloria hurried into the kitchen to prevent any squabbles. We could hear their voices echoing out into the other room. Joel grinned at me knowingly. It had come to that. We were now sharing in an understanding, one about his current love interest. Oh yeah, she was border line crazy but still interesting. I didn't want to think about any of the physical stuff that came with the package.

"I don't like to ponder an abstraction," he stated, nodding his head for emphasis.

It sounded like something you might hear after you've smoked a really big fat spliff, so I tossed his comment around in my head for a minute, then asked, "Are you talking to me?"

He laughed and shook his finger at me, "There's that wit again. Really well cultivated. You must tell me how you do it."

Can you imagine the two of them engaged in pillow talk? What would that sound like? It would be like a seminar for MIT doctoral candidates. One of them would say something about the thermodynamics of whatever and the other one would respond by going off on a tangent dealing with the World Bank. Before long their conversation would bend back unto itself and they would be on the same wave length. Something like that.

Chapter 5 LAST ACT

"As I always say: Things always look darkest before they go completely black," so said Gloria, reaching for humor as we faced our own demise. Really, it was as bleak as that. How had we gotten here?

Good question. One minute we were coming to grips with new found relationships, with the usual blemishes, then the next we are in the cross hairs of some lunatics. Let me back up a bit.

My Spidey senses were tingling when I met Dari and Wyeth, even if at first I thought they might just be low intensity lust for the boy friend. There was something off about them. It was well known that Dari was an adrenaline junkie, always searching for that next hit of danger to get high. Otherwise why would she be so eager to drive off a cliff? By the way, she had been in the hospital no less than three times for injuries sustained out in the desert. The inventory included a broken collar bone, ankle, and nose, along with some contusions, cracked ribs, and scrapes and cuts. Then along comes Wyeth.

He didn't belong to any peril of the month club or anything but still managed to flirt with catastrophe anyway. It came in the form of illegal substances. Not that he was any big time drug dealer. Not exactly. He partook and doled, that is to say he sold to his friends whatever was left over. Small time. Weekend hero stuff. Nothing that would ever land him on anybody's watch list. Weed. Coke. E., recreational high inducers that always made you popular, particularly on the club scene.

So far, so good. Drugs, music, sex, it was a recipe that played out just about everywhere in the US, if not the world. Harmless if kept under control, even if there was a War On Drugs going on out there across America. It was, you know, unremarkable stuff. Having Dari step on board only changed the funding; although she wasn't your typical user in any way, choosing to find her high elsewhere for the most part.

Fate and circumstances changed that though. Dumb luck, always plays a part too, along with stupidity. Wyeth brought that to the table. Before they leased the houseboat up on Lake Page, they bought an RV, one of those gargantuan types that are truly a house on wheels. You know what I mean, with all the comforts of home stuffed into a moving vehicle, like more than one bathroom, (with whirlpool bathtub), complete kitchen, big screen TV, (with satellite dish on top), and master bedroom. Believe me, they are awesome having seen my share of them on some movie sets.

In aforementioned RV they had taken up residence for a few months in a small blip of a town on I10 called Quartzsite. It was half the way between Phoenix and nowhere. The town's claim to fame was that it had a population that swelled in the cooler months of winter to thrice the usual size, all because the RV nation thought the place was quaint. I guess. Why else would you set up house in a barren desert in the middle of nothing? Oh, supposedly they had some nice minerals around too but would you really find that a reason to make it a destination spot? Who knew?

Dari and Wyeth had picked the place because they wanted something different, a place they could explore around the moonscape without any interference from the powers that be. In the past, Dari had migrated down to Mexico in order to get her wide open spaces fix. What the Mexicans called La Inseguridad had put a stop to that. South of the border had become a killing field, with the narcos engaged in open warfare, leaving behind a pile of dead bodies. The Mexican press was calling it la nota roja, which was full of gory photos depicting the handiwork of the battling cartels. Violence had been unleashed and there was little or no resistance by the police. If they weren't kidnapping you for ransom they were gunning you down in the street. It was all like an experiment in terror gone wrong.

So Dari had been stateside for a few years, taking in SoCal, Utah, and Arizona. It had been Wyeth's suggestion that they check out the tiny town a hundred miles from nothing. Then again, with the RV, it didn't matter where you stopped because you had everything you needed (and wanted) at your finger tips. They had their toys and they had their mobility, a formula that worked for both of them.

Until Wyeth stumbled onto something he shouldn't have touched. Simple as that. They had been riding out in the desert on their dirt bikes, doing the usual, you know, jumping over hills and dodging snakes. Wyeth stopped to get a drink of water and Dari told him she wanted to race him back to the RV. Back at the RV village they had made friends with the numerous other road nomads and shared in the peculiar community spirit. People were used to sharing space on a temporary basis and didn't ask questions. The sociology of the place suited them. Never having to be civic oriented had its charm.

If I was doing the score for the movie of Dari and Wyeth it would be right about here that I would insert that menacing crescendo you always hear in the background before the character with the most to lose ends up getting to the point of no return. With Dari up ahead, rapidly disappearing in a cloud of desert dust, Wyeth literally ran right over his destiny. It almost knocked him right off his bike, sending him over the handle bars. He managed to get his balance then brake to a stop.

He shook his head and laughed nervously, realizing he had come close to crashing. Then he glanced back to see what he had hit and saw what looked like a half buried oil drum in the sand. Wyeth drove back to take a closer look and saw that it was a dented oil drum and the top had popped off when he hit it. Me, I would have kept going, congratulating myself for being lucky to not have broken my neck. Wyeth, well he let the small boy curiosity get the better of him and took a peek.

Ice, glass, crank, cube, amp, blue, crystal, call it what you will, Wyeth had stumbled upon a mother lode of meth. How it got there didn't matter to him. It might not have been mana from heaven but it was close. Now I know what you are thinking: the man already has a money source, why bother? That's thinking like a normal person, something that shouldn't and couldn't be associated with Wyeth. Okay, true, he had been a salesman before of some description and once a salesman always a salesman might have played a role here. I really don't know. Like I said, I would have kept on going, especially after I saw what was inside that oil barrel.

I never got the accurate weight of his treasure find, but it is safe to say that it was considerable, like in somebody is going to come looking for that any minute now. That this didn't ring any bells in his head points to the man's desire for mercantile adventure, if you want to call it that. He certainly didn't want to partake, leaning more towards the weed end of things. Meth was the type of drug only renegade losers got involved in. It rotted your brain. The shit was synthetic, fashioned by science. Who needed that?

Still, it had intrinsic value on the street. Capitalism didn't discriminate. Product could be exchanged. In that way, it defied the statues. Wyeth had moved to the supply side of things, with demand in the vicinity. I don't know if dollar signs were clouding his eyes but the man wasn't going to let opportunity pass him by.

Dari, to her credit, wasn't on board. She immediately saw the inherent problems with dispensing illegal goods, especially since they didn't belong to them. Then again, and this is where the need for excitement comes in, she thought it might be an adventure. Wyeth sold her on it eventually.

Now the fun started. The drug trade is all about connections. Dispensing the product is a wonderful example of on the ground proprietorship. I'm sure an economist could spell it out more accurately but it's all about the exchange. It goes without saying that Dari and Wyeth didn't have a network in which to unload the product, so they had to get creative. This meant Wyeth made some calls back to PHX, which led to more calls, all resulting in a meeting with somebody named Tinker. As street names go I think I could have come up with something better, but then that's just me.

The meeting came off on a side road next to I17. It was near BLM land and nobody used it but hard core hikers who liked to prove they wouldn't get lost in the desert wasteland where the only landmark was a few saguaro cactus. The only other people who might be interested in the place were those who wanted to dump a dead body. Dari and Wyeth had seen enough movies to know they had to come packing, which wasn't difficult because both of them owned guns. Did I say we were in Arizona? Automatic hand guns at the ready, they arrived early to make the exchange, chattering to each other nervously while they waited.

The amount had been agreed on, barring any unexpected developments. Of course the deal would go according to the weight and quality of the product. The rules of the transaction were simple, really. They sat there in their truck, waiting. I don't think any thoughts of their roles in any morality play registered with them. I wondered if that morning Dari woke up and thought to herself that what she was doing had a wrong element to it. It was something different to do, even if the money they would be making was insignificant to her bottom line. Wyeth, it probably never entered his mind.

The set hour passed and nobody showed up. They waited ten, then twenty minutes. Wyeth said they should wait ten more minutes then get the hell out of there. With their suspicions rising, a black Land Rover SUV appeared. It had tinted windows and crash bars on the front. The SUV stopped about fifty yards away, facing them. If Dari wanted something to pump up the adrenaline, she got it now.

A man stepped out of the passenger side, front. He scanned the area first, then motioned for them to drive over to them. Dari started her truck and slowly approached their new partners in crime. I bet all those races she had been in weren't this nerve wracking. She left the truck idling as Wyeth got out and slowly approached the Land Rover, while Dari gripped the handle to her automatic. "Things were rising on the tense meter," was how she told it to me, later.

Then another man got out of the SUV, tall, slender, Caucasian, wearing a cowboy hat. That would be Tinker, AKA: Gerald Lee Rawlins. He was your local distributor for Northern Arizona and small time gangsta. His portfolio was short being that he had only stepped into the business a year before after his brother had, more or less, left him the route. The brother was doing time in a Federal prison up in Colorado or maybe Utah. Gerald, this time last year, had been working at an Indian Casino in Camp Verde dealing. Before that stint of labor he worked back East, doing computer repair. The cowboy hat was only an affectation. He had never even been on a horse before. I know this now because I looked him up on the net and found out all the grisly details.

Those particular details would include a beheading, where the perpetrator thought to place the cowboy hat back on the decapitated head afterwards. That came later though. Tinker didn't know what he had gotten himself into, and neither did Dari and Wyeth. They would all come away from that exchange feeling pretty good about the deal. Money for meth, one link in the supply chain.

"Good shit," was about all Tinker uttered, smiling briefly.

"Nice doing business with you," Wyeth announced, pocketing the cash.

They drove away happy, with Tinker and company returning to their headquarters in some place called Beaver Creek and Dari and Wyeth headed on back to Quartzsite. It had been a rush for both of them. The money sat in the back of the truck stuffed into a gym bag with the logo of a local work out club emblazoned on the side. They hadn't even bothered to count it or even really examine the contents. For all they knew it might have been cut up newspaper. That little detail seemed immaterial. It was all about the nature of the event, the trespassing on illegality.

It wasn't really worth it. Not by a long shot. Talk about opening up Pandora's Box. Somehow they had pushed the providence of the barrel of meth into the background. Someone had to have manufactured it. It belonged to somebody. Meth has a signature, you dummies. Sure it's not like there is a serial number or anything but there is still some kind of individuality instilled in every batch, especially if it is the good stuff. This was.

Poor, dumb Tinker was the first sign that something had gone horribly wrong. He ended up on the front page of the Arizona Republic, another drug story gone south. His brutal murder was on the six o'clock news too. Children look away, no need for them to see a man's head resting on a fence post, even if the cowboy hat was a nice touch to the gore. Other men died too but they were relegated to the background, just ordinary murder victims gunned down in the dirt. Look what meth will do to you, so said the police, a little too triumphantly because they knew somebody had done the dirty work for them.

Back in their comfy RV alarm bells were going off for Dari and Wyeth. Those men up in Beaver Creek had been tortured. Ears had been lopped off, and fingers. How long would it take for who ever did the maiming and murdering to find out who had been on the other side of the exchange? People would talk, readily. So and so had mentioned so and so and on down the line, until it would eventually get back to them. You just didn't steal some people's property and not get punished for it. That bit of logic and reasoning was inescapable.

"Can't we just pay them off?" Wyeth asked for the hundredth time, beseeching the ceiling for an answer.

"Are you crazy?" Dari answered angrily, glaring at him. "These people aren't reasonable. Don't be an idiot."

"We have to get out of here, now!" he exclaimed, looking out the window, suspecting the worst. "Let's pull up stakes and go mobile for a while."

"To where?" she countered.

"I don't know," he wailed. "Anywhere but here. They are going to be looking here first, before anywhere else."

That was the beauty of being in a RV. Load up, start the engine, and drive. They did, heading west first, before changing course and going north, then northwest. Wyeth had gotten the idea to store the RV some place and change venues. Made sense. Then he got the idea they could lease a houseboat and take to the water and wait out the fallout of what they had done. Time would pass. The bad guys might give up looking. Life would go on.

Not if these psychos had anything to say about it. These were people they wrote the narcocorridos about, the ballads in Mexico about drug lords and their penchant for making death the end result of just about everything. Life was discounted. They kept the usual asesino (murderer) inhouse, better to mete out their version of justice. The Mexican army was scared of them, along with everyone else. If we were living back in Zachary Taylor's day, the cavalry would have been called in to restore order. Remember back in the 80's, when they were having all those coke wars in Columbia, this made that time look like a nursery school play ground.

Inadvertently, Dari and Wyeth had come up against Xibalba, a notorious Guatemalan mara or gang. Oh boy, they would have done better to stir up the Taliban. The gang's name came from the Mayan word for underworld or something close to that. It was headed up by a guy named El Bailarin, which translated into English as the dancer; but not for what you might think. No, he got the name because he liked to dance on the graves of his enemies, all--to date--vanquished by the way. He was having a good run at being a homicidal maniac. The drug trade had been good to him after he started out as a sicario or hitman for the local bad guys.

He was in his late twenties and had climbed up the ladder of the cartel, brutally making his mark along the road to success. After all, he was from Guatemala which had one of the highest murder rates in the world, some ten times higher than the United States. Although he might have gone heavy on human destruction in his short career, he was something of an organizational genius too. It was almost as if he had an MBA or something, savvy about business maneuvers; of course it doesn't hurt when you eliminate the competition permanently. I mean this was what they call the Northern Triangle part of Central America, a place with almost non-existent law enforcement and giant tracts of wilderness that allows anything goes attitudes to flourish.

The mara, notorious in many ways, was best known for their tatts. They went in for those types that require a burning hot instrument of pain, branding, scarring the flesh into the number: 13013. That, as the legend goes, is the zip code from their town back in Guatemala. These were hometown boys made good, if you consider terrorizing parts of North and South America note worthy. These scarification ceremonies were a way of bonding, something apparently criminal groups feel the need for. It also promoted loyalty, although I couldn't imagine changing teams after I had joined with that one. It was a one way ticket to the morgue.

El Bailarin had his work cut out for him, being that he started at a disadvantage from the beginning. He was up against the Mexicans, who all thought Guatemalans were mugrosos (slimeballs). Or was it the other way around? Whatever. There was bad blood between them and there was plenty of blood to spill. Early on, El Bailarin made a name for himself by enlisting servicio chicas, attractive girls (and they were always in their teens) to entice his competitors into vulnerable positions. Men always think with their peckers. The expression in Spanish is: Quien esta debajo de la cama? This translates to mean, Who is under the bed? Next came a well placed bullet to the back of the head while they were in the saddle.

As a business model, you know, it worked beautifully. As long as you were just a little more ruthless than the next hombre, everything progressed nicely. He systematically carved out his territory, including in Norte Americano. After a while Mexico got too hot for him, with the Federales on his trail and rivals planning ambushes all the time. Then he slipped into the US and took up residence with another identity but the same old business acumen. I just know I have to write a screenplay about this guy.

He kept on the move for the most part, spending equal time in LA and PHX, not unlike an executive for a Fortune 500 company. His business was certainly pulling in the dough. Meth labs had been set up all over the Southwest, sending the product out all the way to Maine. The distribution system was a marvel of scheduled linkage that UPS would admire. He worked his people like they were workers in a maquiladoras just over the border, where labor laws were non-existent. Not many would complain.

The upshot of the whole matter was that Dari and Wyeth were fucked. Unless they were willing to change their names and move to Borneo, they were going to be on Bailarin's shit list; but you can always wish for the best. They did. It had been almost six months since their misadventure and all was quiet. Some obscure drug gang from Guatemala couldn't possibly still be looking for them, the gringa and gringo who thought it was a good idea to confiscate found booty out in the desert. Finders keepers.

Were they insane? Even the smoked up pot growers up in the Emerald Triangle north of San Francisco would cut your throat for messing with their crop. Drugs brought out the best in people. Being territorial doesn't even begin to explain it.

So they were visiting mommy, acting all innocent, hoping they had turned the corner. Meth, what meth? Who, us? A heads up would have been nice.

The first indication that we got that something was wrong was when I had a gun barrel stuck up my nose. There was a knock on the door and Gloria asked me to answer it. We had been sitting there going over some vital personal history about her first husband, with Dari and Wyeth sleeping in on the other side of the mansion. The night before they had dragged me to a poetry slam. Yes, I said poetry slam. Oh, there was karaoke too, and lots of drinking. Somehow the two of them had taken me on as some kind of mascot or something. I went along because Dari was a fountain of info, eager to dish on her famous mother.

Even with a hangover, I showed up the next morning for my appointment with Gloria, with some of the crappy poetry lines still ringing in my ears, along with really bad singing. I will say here that the title to this book came from one of the poets, who had something to say about the skies of Arizona or, at least, the vapor trails planes leave behind as they streak across the sky. I suppose there was some kind of meaning he was trying to get across, like the blue skies were imbued with the spirits of the native Americans. He was from the local Indian reservation. Anyway, it had been a late night.

Now I had a headache and Gloria was being her usual evasive self, leaving me to pry the information out of her. Not that she didn't enjoy being asked a bunch of questions about herself because she clearly did. Pilar was in the kitchen prepping for lunch. Chewy, for once, was lying on the floor and chewing on one of those fake bones you can buy at the pet store that are made of god knows what. Then all hell broke loose.

"What the fuck!" I managed to say, as I was being pushed back into the house.

"Callate!" a man ordered, shoving the gun into my chest, pushing me. I had been around Pilar long enough to know that meant shut up. She must have said it to Chewy about a million times, trying to get him to stop barking. Behind him I could see more guys fanning out around the house.

"What's going on?" Gloria demanded to know, standing up from the couch. "What are you doing in my house?" This was her opening salvo, in English, before switching to Spanish. The two of them exchanged heated words, while I mentally reminded her that the man was carrying a gun, one with one of those silencer thingees on the end of it. You know, in the movies when the bad guy shoots somebody and all you hear is this pifft noise, like air being let out of a tire or something.

Then it got ugly real fast. Poor, dumb, Chewy dashed into the room and did what he did best. He immediately started chowing down on the man's pant leg. You can imagine this was perceived as a threat and the guy fired off his gun. Down went Chewy in a heap. Blood trickled onto the floor. There were no more demands from Gloria. We all knew we were in some deep shit now.

I suppose our first thought was that Gloria was going to be kidnapped for ransom. Hey, she had the big bucks. Me, I was just an innocent bystander in all this. My bank account wasn't up and beyond the seven figure count. A second later Pilar was being led into the living room by two other men, also well armed. Out the window I could see two other men checking the grounds. I had always wondered why Gloria, money bags, didn't have better security. I mean people like her usually had walled off compounds with machine gun turrets guarding the prize.

I stood there with my hands up, struck dumb by surprise and the language barrier. They were all spewing out Spanish to each other. Pilar, showing just how insane she could be, was asking them to leave, ahora. They laughed at her then cuffed her a few times to illustrate that she wasn't calling the shots. Gloria had gone into reasoning mode and was offering up some cash if they would just leave. This produced a good laugh from them, as one of them pushed her two hundred thousand dollar sculpture to the floor, where it broke into pieces. So it was safe to say they weren't art lovers.

Meanwhile, Chewy was bleeding out at my feet. I wished they would just shoot him again because he was wheezing in his last throes of death. It seemed cruel to make him suffer. Then again, I didn't want to give them anymore ideas. It wasn't like they needed encouragement. It was right about then that I heard one of them ask Gloria where her daughter was and saw the look of horror on Pilar's face. Perplexed, Gloria lied about Dari's whereabouts. It was Pilar who adopted the mommy complex and rushed at the leader, the one who had shot Chewy, pummeling him with her fists. He deflected her blows then calmly pistol whipped her across the face. She collapsed on to the floor, out cold.

I was hoping that Dari and Wyeth had been awakened by all the commotion but the house was a big place and they were all the way on the other end. Surely there must have been places in the mansion they could hide, some back closet or maybe even one of those safe rooms you hear about, the ones that are impenetrable and you can stay holed up for weeks. Then again where would that leave us? We would then be bargaining chips in this horrorific drama. I pictured them holding a gun to Gloria's head and telling Dari and Wyeth to come out or they would blow her mother's head off. By this juncture, I would already be dead, shot because I was nothing but a witness at this point.

As weird as it might sound, I was still thinking like a screenwriter. I couldn't help it. I had actually written some thrillers before, ones where there were pistol whipping scenes and dead pets. Okay, so it was a cliché, but it wasn't as if I was experiencing some kind of deja vu. Besides, there was pretty high level danger quotient going on. I never died in the scenes I wrote.

We were standing there, still with our hands up. Pilar had come to, groggily climbing to her feet. One of the gang members taunted her a little, laughing. She switched to religious mode and started praying, loudly, while some blood trickled down the side of her face. "Mas Papista que el Papa," one of the gang members stated, giggling. It was colloquial for: more Catholic than the Pope. These guys weren't afraid of nothing. Even religion that may have been inculcated at an early age didn't register. Organized superstition had no effect on them.

"What about Joel?" I hissed at Gloria, who gave me a startled look.

One of them laughed and said: "Senor Jenkins..." and then he made a slicing motion across his throat, the universal sign language for death.

Gloria gasped a little and repeated, "What do you want with us?"

The leader of the group, now busy with another one of Gloria's sculptures, a clay miniature of a nude woman in a dance pose. He fingered the piece gently, then picked it up and tossed it against the far wall, where it splintered into several sections. Dari and Wyeth have to have heard that, I thought. Commands were given and the other two went to search the house.

We were ordered to sit down on the couch, where we huddled to together like scared school children. Pilar was blubbering, oddly enough it was in broken English. Gloria and I exchanged glances, then clutched at each other. We all knew about the horror that was happening on a daily basis down in Mexico. The stories had filtered north of the border, complete with details about cruel executions and torture. Morality had become extinct. The crimes had become bestial in scope, frightening even the most hard bitten criminals. As Joel had said about the narco war raging south of the border, "There was some serious soul theft going on down there." This analysis from a man who had seen women and children slaughtered by machetes.

Then there were shouts from across the house and we knew they had found Dari and Wyeth. A minute later they were being literally dragged by their hair into the living room. Wyeth's nose was bleeding and there was a cut above his right eye. The leader got on his cell phone and called the other two back into the house.

You must remember, at this point we, Pilar, Gloria and myself, didn't know what the motives of the gang were. Gloria was filthy rich, so it made sense that they were there to get some of her money. Maybe Dari was going to be used as a hostage until Gloria forked over some cash. Hell, she might have even had a safe full of bills secreted away somewhere on the premises. She would pay up and they would leave. That would be the best outcome.

Even as I was entertaining these thoughts I knew it wouldn't play out that way. These guys didn't like any loose ends left behind. They were thorough and the easiest way to do that was to lie us all down and shoot each one in the back of the head. No witnesses. Massacre at Gloria Worthington's mansion in Sedona. It would lead all the network newscasts. The grim specifics would come out later. On down the road a few books would be written by some crime writers specializing in true stories. A movie of the week would be out there, probably on Lifetime, with some cheesy actor playing me with a lisp. The mystery would go unsolved. The ruthless, blood thirsty gang from Guatemala would continue to rape the land.

Of course I wasn't thinking in those terms at the time. No. I was trying not to crap my pants, while Wyeth drifted in and out of consciousness after the brief beating he had gotten back in Dari's bedroom. His right eye was beginning to swell up to critical proportions. He probably had a concussion for sure.

Dari, for her part, was pretty cool and collected, which was something considering she must have known what they were there for. It didn't take a sleuth to see that there was a connection between them and the new, uninvited house guests. She asked the leader something in Spanish and he grinned at her, placing his gun barrel up against her temple and pretending to pull the trigger.

Now Gloria was beginning to get the big picture. Her wayward daughter and her dumbfuck boy friend were the cause of everything. "What have you done?" she asked Dari, eyeing her closely. "Do you have something that belongs to these men?"

"Not any more," Dari mumbled, looking away.

"Oh god," Gloria muttered, before shifting gears and saying, "I can pay you."

"Senora Worthington has mucho deniro," the leader sang out, laughing.

"Listen, I can pay you whatever it is that my daughter owes you--then you can leave," she offered, standing up to make her point.

The leader walked up to her and slapped her hard across the face, pushing her back down on the couch. He told her in Spanish that he didn't want her money, and we were going to have to wait to find out what happens to us. Dari apologized to her mother and to Pilar. Meanwhile, Wyeth roused out of his stupor and told them they had better get the hell out of their house. Not smart.

One of the other gang members casually walked up to Wyeth and punched him in the gut with the stock from his assault rifle. He collapsed to the floor and the guy then kicked him in the side. You could hear ribs cracking, which is not a very pleasant sound, believe me. Pilar pleaded with them again to stop. I tried to help Wyeth back up onto the couch and they punched me several times. After seeing all those movies in my lifetime, the ones with the bar room fights and street scuffles, it didn't prepare me for actually being hit. Hurt like hell.

Matters then picked up speed. We were about to meet El Bailarin. He had been waiting nearby until the assault produced results. No use in getting your hands dirty for no reason. He wanted to be on the scene, there to face the two people stupid enough to steal from him. Justice was measured and swift. Nobody would be allowed to walk away after offending his honor. Something like that, in the movies anyway. You would want to give the villain some chops for being disciplined about at least one little thing. In reality, El Bailarin just didn't like getting ripped-off, even if was a debatably innocent mistake. It was about elementary vengeance.

El Bailarin had made one huge mistake: a miscalculation. He had sent a five member team after Joel. It distresses me to think that I had been the downfall of Joel Jenkins. The mara had been watching me for a few weeks without me even knowing it. They were after Dari and had seen me coming and going from the mansion. They had followed me up to the mountain when I saw Joel the second time at his hideaway. As the pieces fell into place, and Dari and Wyeth showed up on the scene, Joel became collateral damage in the scheme.

If only it had worked out that way. Sending five guys against him was just, you know, way stupid. This was a guy who had fought in countless wars, in all kinds of conditions, and was used to doing battle. The other side was used to killing unprepared tweakers as if almost for sport. Remember, this was a man who had seen piles of bodies putrefying in the unforgiving African sun, or as he liked to call it: "Human abattoirs." It was like the junior varsity going up against the varsity.

El Bailarin had chosen his trusted lieutenant, Lobo, a former coyote who used to bring people across the Arizonan desert from Mexico, to lead up the expedition. He had extensive experience with tracking, able to live off the land kind of thing. He was also loyal and really liked his job. They called him Lobo after the gray wolf, which had a reputation as being almost supernaturally elusive. I suppose El Bailarin knew about Joel's rep and wanted to take care of any lose ends in the process. Knowing about his ego, he probably didn't think much about Joel being a threat or anything but just wanted to make sure there were no hindrances. Joel was that viejo dude who lived in the woods, but he did have a connection to Gloria. Might be a complication. El Bailarin was thorough if not anything else. He hadn't gotten to his position by being sloppy.

The assault went wrong from the very beginning. Joel saw them immediately on his monitor. At first, he actually chuckled at the idea of them staging an attack. Not that they didn't come prepared, with weapons and all. He could see they were packing assault rifles. Joel watched as Lobo quickly picked up the concealed trail, even stopping to examine Wiley's scat for a moment. That must have puzzled him somewhat.

Up the mountain they came. Joel, showing some weariness at having to go into combat once again, got ready. He slipped on his kevlar body armor, then prepped his rifles, packing on extra ammo. In a move he had orchestrated countless times in his mind, he armed up two claymore mines, with trip wires. They were capable of mowing a man down in one fatal blast. He then locked Wiley in the bathroom for his own safety.

Lobo had found the main trail leading to the cabin. It was only a matter of time before they got there. Joel watched them progress slowly up the mountain as they passed by the planted cameras. In a very short time one of them would trip the first perimeter mine. "You guys are in for a rude awakening," Joel whispered to the monitor, shaking his head, knowing full well that these men had never experienced anything like what was about to happen.

Twenty minutes passed. Silence. Joel waited for the first explosion. Nothing. He scanned the monitors. They had passed by the next to last camera. One more camera angle and they would be past his line of vision. Joel would be blind to their movements. Then there they were passing by the last camera, only now he could only see two of them. He knew there were five. Lobo had divided them up, sending the other three off to flank the cabin. He had also discovered the first trip wire too. Joel's defenses were down to one mine. The odds had just swung against him.

Now Joel had a decision to make. Because the cabin was built into the hillside, with an easily accessible approach above, where they could fire down on him from the top of the rock formation, he knew he didn't want to be under siege from all sides. The first mine was supposed to take out most of his opposition, as well as scare the shit out of them. The other mine was set up to eliminate an assault from above or at least slow them down. The cabin wasn't well fortified so he knew that any barrage coming his way was going to cause some serious damage. Returning fire would be a problem too, even though he had enough ammo for a month. Joel also knew that he was going to have to make a stand there and now. It would have been possible for him to slip away, disappear into the surrounding forest that he knew so well. That wouldn't have solved the problem.

Then the claymore set up above the cabin fired off. He only hoped it had taken out at least two of them. (It hadn't. Only one guy had been killed.) That left four, but at least one flank was still open. Joel grabbed his M4 and two hand guns, exiting out a hatchway he had cut into the side of the cabin. He had decided to draw them in and then pick them off one by one.

Lobo heard the explosion and cursed under his breath. They had just reached the clearing in front of the cabin. The element of surprise that he thought he had was now long gone. He knew he was now going to have to shoot it out with somebody that was obviously well armed. Executions were supposed to be all about precision, with little or no indecision. Now they would have to slug it out with the gringo and hope that the explosion had gone unnoticed, along with all the gunfire that was about to erupt.

Joel slinked into the woods, putting his camo to good work. His opponents were out of their element. This was about combat, close quarter fighting. He picked his first victim off in about five minutes, creeping up behind him and slitting his throat with the same knife I had seen him slicing onions with. The man never knew what hit him. Down to three.

Lobo thought he had his men in position, using the hand held radio to check on their progress. The cabin was in sight. Just like a driveby shooting, where quantity was more important than quality, a fusillade was coming . Spray out the bullets, level the shack. They opened fire.

Poor Wylie. He cowered in the bathroom, on the floor, as the bullets pierced the walls. They kept firing, so much so that Lobo didn't even notice nobody was firing from his left flank. In all the noise, Joel had raced over to the other side and taken out another guy, placing a well aimed bullet in the back of his head. Two left.

Lobo yelled out to stop firing. He radioed for one of his men to approach the cabin to check and see if Joel was still alive. There was no response for obvious reasons. He tried somebody else and got no response. He now realized they were cooked. At least I figured he must have, as a quick radio check told him that he was almost on his own. That came right after, when he heard a rifle shot to his right.

I can't imagine what that feeling must have been like. Here you show up with five guys to do the deed and now you are down to your lonesome. I doubt old Lobo had ever faced anything like this before. Most of his victims were hapless dirtbags who didn't pose much of a problem or even put up a fight. He had probably seen enough Rambo type movies to know that he was in some deep shit.

Now he was going to have to make his way back down that mountain to his truck and hopefully get the hell out of there. Or he could stay and fight it out. That was an option too.

In reality, he really didn't have any options. Joel knew exactly where he was and wasn't going to let him leave that forest alive. Lobo had become an exercise in existentialism, as in applied fate. All that accumulated death he had left in his wake was about to catch up with him.

It was right about then that his radio crackled to life, startling him. Guess who was calling. In Spanish, Joel asked him how his day was going. Lobo ignored it at first, then replied that he was about to finish the job he had been sent to do. Oh sure, it was bravado, especially since the odds line out of Vegas probably would have put Lobo at a distinct disadvantage, as in a real long shot. Joel taunted him again. I can only imagine Lobo was sweatin' it.

Lobo decided to get off the trail and make his way downhill. He fingered the trigger on his rifle nervously as he carefully picked a route through the woods, always checking for trip wires. Talk about nerve wracking. Every little sound in the forest must have made him pee his pants. It was times like this that made you question your line of work.

Again the radio crackled and Joel ridiculed Lobo, this time about his manhood and calling him an "indio," a pejorative term for indigenous people. Lobo kept his attention on the surroundings, stopping every few feet to listen. Then Joel was back on the radio, saying something about limpieza de sangre, which has to do with purity of blood and ancestry. That Joel, never likes to play fair.

Lobo had reached the road where the trail began, only down hill about five hundred yards or so. He melted into the brush and waited, wanting to make the next move Joel's. Offending his manhood or whatever hadn't really worked. He hadn't spent all that time out in the desert waiting to cross the border without building up a tolerance for patience. It was a nice plan but Joel had already made his way down to the truck. There would be no getaway.

Ten minutes, twenty, a half hour passed. Silence. Lobo waited. In the distance you could hear an ATV drive down the road. A plane droned over head in route to tiny Cottonwood airport. A woodpecker pecked away on a tree a few dozen yards away.

Wisely, Lobo had turned off his radio. There would be no more taunts. It had become a battle of wills. Then again, he couldn't wait all day. Failure wasn't an option, as they like to say. El Bailarin wasn't going to want to hear that he hadn't completed his mission. Joel Jenkins was supposed to be dead.

Listening closely, he came out of his hiding place. Lobo scanned the forest but couldn't see anyone. It would be almost impossible to track his prey under these circumstances but he could prevent Joel from leaving the area. That would mean he had to get down to the road leading up the mountain. He wasn't sure where Joel had stashed his transportation but he knew he would have to exit the only road that came up the mountain. The main purpose of him being there was to stop Joel from interfering with what was going on back at the mansion. He could accomplish that.

In a perfect world, maybe. Joel had more or less pinpointed Lobo whereabouts. He was under the impression that the team sent to kill him had been sent by some former adversaries. Some people can harbor a grudge a long time. He had no idea that they had been dispatched to get him out of the picture. It never even occurred to him that Gloria and Dari might be in danger. As far as he was concerned this was just another skirmish in his life resulting from his past.

Lobo eased down to a position where he had a good vantage point to see the connecting road up the mountain. His plan was solid except for that tourist that saw him cross the road and honked his horn to ask for directions. The dirt, contour road around the mountain was often used by poseurs, the type who buy a stock Jeep and want to pretend that they are going off-road. Their numbers in Arizona were legion, so I was told by Joel. On the weekends you could find the mountains crawling with them, sometimes in groups with silly names like: The Knobby Club or In The Dirt Club. Predictably, Joel detested them.

This time around one of them made his task a whole lot easier. I suppose they thought Lobo was a hunter or something, not finding it odd that a man was standing there with a high powered rifle in his hand. Even though he waved away the tourists, the honking horn had alerted Joel. He surmised the situation immediately and slipped around Lobo and came up behind him.

By the time Lobo first heard Joel approach it was too late. He had gotten the drop on him and was standing there with his rifle leveled right about heart level. The high risk game was up. Joel greeted him in Spanish.

"Excellente," Lobo muttered, honoring Joel's skills.

Ordinarily, so I imagine anyway, Joel probably would have just shot the guy, then buried his body. After all, amnesty wasn't really going to be in the cards. The guy had just tried to riddle his body with bullets and had most likely already killed his two pets in the process. Forgiveness didn't seem likely.

"Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher I'm sure you never heard of, once said: 'Death is not an event in life,' or something to that effect," Joel stated, aiming his rifle. "I suppose the irony won't be lost on you."

For some reason Joel sensed something else was up. When Lobo mentioned that it was too late, he knew he hadn't been the sole target. Maybe he saw it in his eyes too. I don't know. Lobo said little, resigned to his fate. The bullet went right into his forehead. Quick, precise, final, three things you look for when ending a life, so I'm told. He would come back to bury the body, the evidence, because their little duel was enacted beyond the reach of the existing laws.

"We will cooperate with you--anything you want," Gloria said, trying to reason with her captors. "No one needs to get hurt."

Then El Bailarin made an entrance, followed by another gang member, bringing the total to seven. He walked in and barked a few orders, sending two guys out to keep watch. We could see one of them standing out by the back window. If not anything else, they had picked the perfect place for a home invasion. Gloria had no neighbors to pick up a phone and call the cops. She owned the whole mesa, acres of natural landscape to insulate their crimes.

It was right about then that Gloria's phone rang. They had confiscated our phones early on and stacked them on one of the side tables by the couch. El Bailarin snatched up the phone and checked who was calling. As good fortune would have it, Gloria had labeled Joel on her contact list as Switzer, after the term used for mercenary in Hamlet by Shakespeare. El Bailarin was none the wiser. He let the phone go to voice mail, where Joel hung up when he heard the message.

He then looked over his captives and ordered two of his men to remove Pilar from the room. She was dragged into the kitchen, where she put up a fight before we heard a sickening thud and she was silent. El Bailarin smiled at us and said that he had to maintain order and some other bullshit about stealing. His English was pretty good, with the usual East LA inflections and lilt.

"We can pay you back," Wyeth suddenly blurted out, immediately giving up the game. We now knew why they were there. "Honest, we didn't know it was your stuff."

"Dari, what is he talking about?" Gloria demanded to know.

Dari ignored her mother and said to El Bailarin, "We made a mistake but we can make it right--no problem. I can get you what the shit was worth, with interest."

"Just another business proposition, eh?" El Bailarin offered, smiling. "I can see that your family has done pretty fucking good." He swept his arms out and did a 360, laughing. "You live like Kings!"

"I can get the money today," she stated, standing up.

One of the gang members whacked her on the shoulder from behind with his rifle and she fell back on the couch. Wyeth protested and El Bailarin was on him, grabbing him by the throat and lifting him off the couch. He choked him hard then shoved him onto the floor and held a gun to his head. Then he cocked the automatic hand gun and spat on Wyeth, calling him a "ladron" (thief). To El Bailarin, who was about as much a criminal as you could get, he still didn't steal other people's property. Sure he killed people and manufactured and sold drugs but he didn't cross the pilferage barrier. Technically, I guess he had point.

"We didn't know it belonged to anybody," Wyeth complained.

"No, you didn't," El Bailarin mocked, getting right in his face. "You must have thought it was left there by the meth fairies." The gang members laughed together. "You must be really stupid, gringo."

"Okay, we made a big mistake but that doesn't mean we can't correct it somehow," Dari exclaimed.

"Yes," Gloria chimed in, "you are a business man so you should expect to increase your bottom line. We can do that."

El Bailarin stared at her for a moment then asked, "Who the fuck is this?"

"He is a writer," she answered when she noticed he was referring to me. "They are doing a movie about me," she added sheepishly.

"A movie," El Bailarin mumbled, looking me up and down. "You from LA?"

I nodded yes. "Maybe you could write a movie about me. I would make a good subject, right? Lots of killing. Drugs. Sex. I think I'll take you with me, spend a few weeks swapping ideas. Sound good to you?"

I didn't know whether or not he was serious, so I replied, "Works for me."

"Works for me," he repeated, laughing. Then he said something in Spanish to his men and they rolled their eyes.

Wyeth then hesitantly climbed to his feet and said, "We're really sorry about the mix up and all but let us make it right." I guess he couldn't help himself. He was used to being something of a salesman. He probably thought he could approach the situation like a really difficult sales pitch. Everybody wants to make a deal. "Let's just talk about it."

"Talk," El Bailarin spat out, "I don't want to talk about nothing." He stuck his gun out, offering it up to Wyeth. "Take this. Take it. I want you to shoot your girl friend." Wyeth pulled away, horrified. "Come on, man. Do it and we are even. Do it."

"No, I'm not doing that," Wyeth protested, looking wild eyed. "Are you crazy?"

"That will make this all go away," El Bailarin insisted. "Shoot her!" He tried to put the gun in Wyeth's hand. "Come on, man, that will end it. Just shoot the puta and we will leave. Adios."

"I can't do that," Wyeth shouted at him.

"Sabe comer pero no puede matar," El Bailarin sang out, laughing. It means: He can eat but he cannot kill. Maybe it loses something in the translation. "You are weak, man. Like a little girl. I bet she would kill you in a second. Look at her, she doesn't want to die for your ass. Mudo" (stupid).

"Leave him alone," Dari ordered, standing back up again.

El Bailarin laughed, then walked up to her and got in her face, saying, "You have the cajones, eh. He is a mujer (woman). Look at him, pretty boy but no penga." His men laughed. He groped her for a moment and she pulled away.

"Get the fuck away from her!" Wyeth shouted out. One of the gang members slammed their rifle against the back of his head, sending him back to the floor.

"No...stop it," Dari cried out, trying to come to his aid.

"Chica, I don't think so," El Bailarin exclaimed, grabbing her by the hair and holding her back.

"Por favor, don't hurt her," Gloria shouted.

I had witnessed plenty of scenes like this choreographed on the set, over seen by a fastidious director. The actors would practice their moves, making it all appear real. There would be numerous takes and lots of camera angles. I was now living the real part, with blood. Wyeth's face was puffy and bleeding from the pummeling. Never had I ever thought I would be a part of something like this. It was as if the surreal had another dimension or was piggybacking on reality.

Maybe it was the impugning of his manhood or something entirely different, I don't know, but poor Wyeth decided to lunge for El Bailarin's gun. It was a clumsy attempt to save us all, I guess. Didn't work out that way. In his mind I suppose he thought that there wasn't going to be any favorable outcome. He sensed, as we all did, that summary executions would be the end result for all of us. There was a brief struggle and Wyeth ended up being shot, in his right leg.

El Bailarin was shocked at first, probably never having had to deal with resistance before. Most times I can only imagine that he pulled the trigger while his latest victim begged for their life. This might have been novel for him. He laughed uneasily, looking down at Wyeth, who was now cowering on the floor, clutching the gun shot wound in his thigh.

"What the fuck, man?" El Bailarin exclaimed, laughing nervously. "You want to die, huh? I kill you when I want to, cabron (bastard). Hey, maybe he not a chichi (pussy)." They all laughed.

"Wyeth...are you okay?" Dari screamed out, jumping off the couch to rush to his side. "We've got to put something on it. He's going to bleed to death."

One of the gang members took his foot and kicked her away from Wyeth, holding his rifle up against her head. El Bailarin told his men to put Wyeth in one of the chairs that were across from the couch. He groaned as they slammed him into the chair.

"It's time for the trial," El Bailarin announced, grinning. "Hey you, cono (cunt), you are his lawyer." That would be me. "Tell us why he's not guilty."

Now I was directly involved in this macabre drama playing out. I was going to have to dance for them, so I said, "I'm not sure what they have even done."

"Mierda (shit)," El Bailarin muttered, "don't be stupid, man. They are thieves...banditas...robbers. Listen to what is going on."

"Where is the proof?" I asked for what reason I don't know.

They all laughed and El Bailarin said, "Maybe you should have been a lawyer instead of writing movies, huh? The proof is what I say. This hijo de puta (son of a bitch) ripped me off then tried to sell it. Comprende?" He put the barrel of his gun under Wyeth's chin and pretended to shoot him. "What will the punishment be?"

Capital punishment for all, I told myself, exchanging glances with Gloria, who was now catatonic with fear. These men were homicidal psychos, to say the least. There was no way out. We were all going to be executed. I only hoped the pain would be minimal.

Our crisis left me wondering how it would all go down post-mortem. Marty would call and keep calling and then what would he do when I didn't respond? In fact, who would even find our dead bodies? As far as I knew, Gloria didn't have a lot of staff, only Pilar. I guess there was a groundskeeper that showed up once a week or so. He might take a peek in one of the windows and see our remains rotting away in the AC. Back in LA the power brokers would at first be furious with me, then they would hear the news, eventually. Two ill fated projects would die an inglorious demise, probably never to be resurrected again, thought to be cursed or something. Hey, nobody was above being superstitious about certain matters.

All of the media would hyperventilate over the story for about two weeks or so. Afterwards, maybe one of those investigative shows would do a segment on what happened, what really happened. A movie would follow on down the road, a nice blend of Scarface meets Sunset Blvd. What? I don't know. Half of Hollywood would shy away from the picture, afraid of stirring up some bad mojo and the other half would want to wallow in the sordid and gory details. It would do well at the box office, especially in 3-D.

I would be a footnote, of course, and Gloria and Joel immortalized for all time. Dari and Wyeth would become a trivia answer to an obscure question. The house, the mansion, would go unsold for years and finally demolished to make way for some high caliber retreat compound, where the guests could stare at Cathedral Rock until they went blissfully blind.

I joke now but it was different then. Very different. El Bailarin was working his way into a frenzy. He wanted Wyeth dead but just couldn't seem to decide on how to do it. Think about that for a moment. Your average person doesn't deal in those realities. The man had killed so many people he had become jaded, unable to derive his usual psychotic pleasures anymore. You kill a few people with a knife, then maybe a blunt object, throw in the occasional gun shot, and for those special occasions, your bare hands, sooner or later it all becomes stale.

"You don't have to do this!" Dari yelled out, proving that people do actually say things like that in real life and not just in the movies.

El Bailarin laughed and said, "Por que no?"

"We're sorry. We made a mistake but...but you can't do this," Dari pleaded.

El Bailarin thought for a moment, as Wyeth slumped over in the chair. I tried to keep him from falling to the floor. One of the goons poked me with his rifle in the ribs and I let him slide off the chair. A blood stain spread down his pant leg. Then El Bailarin said something to one of his men in Spanish. Gloria had a look of horror on her face.

"No...no, please, leave her alone," Gloria shouted out. "Take me. Take me instead."

"You?" El Bailarin spat out, and the others laughed. "Senora, thanks but no gracias. I want the calienta pollas (cocktease). She owes me." One of his men then grabbed Dari and dragged her towards the other side of the house, towards the bed rooms.

"Stop! I'll pay you anything," Gloria screamed out.

"You fuckin--" Wyeth started to say, as he staggered to his feet, before one of the gang members slammed his rifle butt down on the back of his head.

Dari was trying to put up a fight but El Bailarin and another guy were holding her in a tight grip as they pulled her across the marble floor. Gloria was crying and pleading. I didn't know what to do; not that I was really capable of doing anything. Wyeth was unconscious at my feet.

Joel had jumped on his dirt bike and headed for the mansion. He feared the worse. When he got to the mesa he circled around the bottom, driving off road until he was on the back end below the rear of the house. The el mirador (look out) had been spotted when he drove down the public road. A man standing there blocking the driveway was kind of suspicious.

He had come prepared. The north side of the mesa was a sheer wall of rock, maybe two hundred feet high. Joel had brought his rock climbing gear and was ready to scale the sheer face. Nobody was going to expect that. With his rifle slung over his shoulder, he started out, quickly climbing upwards, not knowing what he would find.

Time was running out though. Dari was about to be gang raped, after El Bailarin had his turn. The two men left in the living room were grinning and joking about this turn of events. Not that rape wasn't usually on their agenda before. I can only imagine. When your usual goal is murder, does rape even register? It would seem that any semblance of morality had long since been extinguished.

We could hear screams coming from the other side of the house. Dari was apparently putting up a fight. One of the goons made a joke, grabbing his crotch and Gloria said something to him in Spanish. The grin disappeared from his face and he pushed her back down onto the couch. I protested and got a smack upside the head for my efforts.

Outside those impossibly large windows, Joel was ascending, slowly but inexorably. There were four men out there on those grounds somewhere. He was going to have to fight his way in. The land line phone rang and we heard it go to the message machine, where a woman's voice informed us that Gloria had a dental appointment the next day, at ten o'clock. The goons laughed and one of them pantomimed getting his teeth worked on with a drill.

Joel crested the lip of the rock wall and paused there to survey the grounds. Unfortunately, the windows were designed to see out and to keep the sun from penetrating the interior of the house. He couldn't see us but I could see him. At that particular moment I was the only one to notice his head pop up. I couldn't believe my eyes, especially since I had been out on that ledge and knew how far down it was. I thought about trying to get Gloria's attention but thought better of it.

We might be saved, I thought, looking away so the goons wouldn't notice what I was looking at. Then again, it seemed impossible that Joel could take on seven men single handedly. The only help I thought I could lend was to divert the two guys' attention in the living room away from the windows. I asked them if I could move Wyeth to the couch and they shrugged, unconcerned by just another dying man. So I clumsily tried to carry him to the couch, drawing their attention in my direction, all the while stealing glances at what Joel was up to.

He had spotted one of the gang members off to his left, standing guard, smoking a cigarette. As luck would have it the man was standing just beyond the scope of the windows and was out of our line of sight. I saw Joel take a bead on the guy with his hand gun, the one with a silencer on it. There was a puff of smoke and they were down to six.

Gloria, as you can imagine, was frantic. Her daughter was being sexually assaulted in her house. I thought of how she had mentioned to me during our several talks that her friends were always telling her she should hire a security firm to watch over her and the property. She had scoffed at the idea, saying that she didn't want to live like that, with electric gates and armed guards. It would have taken a pretty competent and experienced security detail to keep the Xibalba gang from crashing the gates, I told myself.

I was trying hard not to watch Joel's progress out the window. He had made his way over to a open air patio area, a place Gloria's husband had put in so he could grill out, while enjoying the scenery. She seldom used the space. There was a large built in gas grill, big enough to barbecue a steer on, probably cost a fortune. Gloria had been meaning to have it ripped out because she thought it was an eyesore, totally at odds with the surroundings. Like this one big monstrosity of brushed steel wasn't I can remember thinking at the time when she told me about her dissatisfaction with her ex's home improvement ideas.

Now, though, the patio came in handy as Joel dashed over and hid behind the stone wall next to the grill. It was right about then that another goon appeared in the window, apparently looking for his fellow blood sucking murderer, wondering why he wasn't on his post. Almost simultaneously with him noticing that his buddy was down for the count and Joel pulling the trigger again, he dropped from sight, face first into the dirt. The goons inside didn't even see him go down, but Gloria did.

"Joel," I mouthed out silently, rolling my eyes in his direction.

"Oh God," she said aloud, but the goons thought she was still in shock and ignored her.

The odds were better, but not good. Five to one, I thought, reminding me of a Doors song my neighbor back in LA was always playing, a Jim Morrison want-a-be, still clinging to the 60's in his Sixties. He was a washed up cinematographer, who had worked on several films in the past that made him enough money to live in a crappy apartment next to me and the girl in 4B who was a tattoo artist to the stars. Oddly enough, she didn't have any tatts or not any I could readily see. Who knew what lurked under her clothes: spiders, butterflies, flowers, swastikas, or maybe pentagrams. She was a shade into her thirties and had been inking stars and their entourages for years. We didn't like each us much and seldom spoke, for what reason I don't know. For that matter, I didn't talk to the Doors guy either, except to tell him to turn down his awful music once in a while.

Anyway, the song was about the odds being five to one and, I think, nobody gets out alive. I should put a question mark there because I hardly ever listened to the song closely. That the 60's happened at all is still a mystery to me. War protests and free love, we have nothing but war now and sex has pretty much been marketed to everybody. I don't see much progress there. I was only happy that Morrison spared us all and kicked it over in Paris. Being that the City of Angels was his adopted hometown, I can only imagine he would still be haunting Venice Beach to this day, giving all those warped dead idol worshippers a hard on.

I felt useless, a feeling, admittedly, I had plenty of experience with. What could I do though? The two goons had assault rifles or machine guns of some sort, enough fire power that I would have been stupid to try anything, like purposely encouraging suicide. Besides, I don't think it would help Gloria any if I rushed one of them and took a bullet (bullets). As to Wyeth, he was sliding fast. Between the beating he had taken and the gunshot wound, there wasn't much hope there.

Let me just mention here that fear waxes and wanes. It might maintain a certain level but it does fluctuate. I don't know if it is the body's way of managing things or not. I'm sure there are a whole host of physiological alarms going off, yet I seemed to be holding up for the most part. It wasn't as if I had resigned myself to dying either. I hadn't. I just kept my mind active and, I will admit, indulged in some desperate praying. Oh, okay, it wasn't your garden variety down on my knees stuff. I just tried to mentally reassure myself more than anything else.

Out of our line of vision, where Joel had belly crawled across the natural landscape of cactus and rock, he came up on his next victim. The guy got a bullet in the back of the head. Four were left, bringing Joel's total for the day to a nice round 8. Killing machine comes to mind.

At least Joel wasn't at a disadvantage when he got into the house since he had been there several times or more. He sneaked in the back door, the one that led to the kitchen, where he almost immediately came across Pilar's body. Her throat had been slit and blood was covering the expensive Pietra Firma tile she was always complaining about cleaning.

The first hint I got that he had entered the house was when one of the goons doubled over from two or three rounds entering his abdomen area. The silencer had done its job but the other gang member happened to look up when Joel first started firing and saw him standing in the entranceway. He dove behind the couch and then started firing away with his knock off AK-47, conveniently converted to automatic.

I don't think the average person realizes how loud gunfire is, especially when it is right in your ear. It can actually immobilize you it is so loud. Reacting as best we could, Gloria and I got down on all fours and scurried to the other end of the couch, while Joel calmly switched to his A-4 and let loose with a volley of fire that literally shredded the furniture all around us.

Are you kidding me? I was thinking, as Gloria and I held our ears and squirmed around on the floor. Then it was suddenly quiet, except for the ringing in my ears. The room smelled of gunpowder. I took a peek and saw the goon sprawled out on his back. His body flinched once or twice and then we knew he was dead.

The lookout at the end of the driveway heard the gunfire and immediately knew something was up because they seldom used guns in situations like this, and if they did it was the handgun with the silencer. Most times the weapon of choice was a knife, which was much quieter and more satisfying when extracting revenge, so I imagine anyway. With these guys you realized they weren't following any rules and certainly not any laws.

Then we heard the radio one of the goons had been carrying crackle and a voice was asking what was up. Joel then checked his latest two victims to see if they were alive and told us to go into the kitchen. He handed me one of his handguns and said I should watch the back door. Gloria pointed to the other side of the house and filled him in on El Bailarin's whereabouts, telling him to save his daughter.

Things had changed now though. They knew he was there on the premises. It had now become a room to room battle, with a hostage. Joel had been around long enough to know that these type of situations usually didn't turn out well. He had told me about an instance, back in some South American shithole of a town, where he had been locked into a running shoot out with a paramilitary sadists. They went through the village trading shots, all the while the guy was keeping a teenage girl as a shield. In the end both of them had been killed. A stray bullet had pierced the girl's skull.

This time, Joel had more invested in the outcome than just a stranger, even if she had been an innocent bystander. Gloria begged him to be careful and to see that Dari didn't get shot. He motioned for us to move to the kitchen, while I fumbled with the hand gun, wondering if I even could fire the damn thing. Then Gloria realized we had forgotten about Wyeth but after trying to move him we saw that he had died.

"Let's call the police," Gloria said, looking around for her cell phone.

"No, I got this," Joel stated adamantly. "Just go into the kitchen and barricade yourselves in."

I hadn't seen Joel like this. Before, he had been aloof and sometimes rude but never, you know, so determined. Maybe a better word was motivated. These guys had not only tried to take him out but someone he cared about too, not including me of course. Retribution was a concept that was pretty simple to him. One size fits all.

Suddenly there was chatter on one of the radios. The lookout was talking to El Bailarin, telling him that the others were dead. We then saw him run past the windows, heading to the other end of the house. Joel was on his way to beating the spread. He picked up the radio and said into it mockingly: "Oye, Caudillo, say hello to death." There was no response.

We watched him change the clip on his rifle then, as they say, lock and load. He walked down the long hallway leading to the living quarters of the mansion, a warren of rooms that could probably house a baseball team comfortably. We only hoped El Bailarin hadn't killed Dari yet.

The lookout had driven back up the long driveway to lend his assistance. He went around to the side of the house and found the third victim face down in the dirt. Then he peeked around the back of the house and saw the other two dead bodies. Me, I would have taken one look at those corpses and gotten the hell out of there. Nice knowing ya El Bailarin but, hey, you're on your own. Didn't turn out that way. Either he was really loyal or spoiling for a fight, addicted to some rarified violence.

He came back around to the kitchen door and tried to open it but we had locked it and pushed a chopping block up against the door knob. We heard him curse, kick the door, and proceed towards the front door. Fortunately for us the kitchen area didn't have a window, just several skylights to give the space natural light. We knew he was going to try to get in the front next but Joel had locked that door before he headed to the other side of the house. The architect had wanted to keep one section of the house, one zone, with windows only on one side so there wouldn't be a fish bowl effect, as in total exposure to an outside viewer. Windows do work both ways of course, where you can see in as well as see out. I don't think it was just that aspect though. The architect wanted to keep the focus of the viewer once they were in the living room area towards the back side of the mesa.

He had seen fit to put in several front windows too but they were only narrow slits, with a few round porthole types thrown in for variety. Not until you got towards the right side of the house, in the bedroom area, did you get more windows and another side door, which opened out onto the seven car garage. Yes seven, people with big houses have a fleet of vehicles of course, one for every day of the week. You have to think multiple when you are dealing with the wealthy.

Dari had stopped screaming by now. We only hoped that wasn't a bad sign. Joel moved down the long hallway and entered one of the rooms off to the right. On that side of the house the builder had put in a series of connecting rooms, the ones that shared utility in common: laundry room, exercise room, etc. It was a clever lay out where you could actually pass through three or four rooms without having to go back out into the hallway. Joel had been through those rooms before so he knew what to expect. After the laundry room came the Jacuzzi and whirlpool room, which was adjacent to the work out space with all of the high tech machines. It was a nice touch having a panoramic window placed here, so you could admire the pinnacles while you hit the hot tub or Jacuzzi. He cleared these rooms quickly because there really wasn't any place to hide.

Just as he was clearing the laundry room he saw the lookout pass by the window in route to the side door by the garage. "Easy pickings," he said under his breath, as he rushed to meet the guy before he could get inside the house.

The side door was unlocked and the lookout carefully opened the door. Switching to his hand gun with the silencer, Joel popped him just as he stepped inside. He then put another round in him right between the eyes, just to make sure. Now it was one on one.

Bailarin might be on the other side of the house, the main living quarters area, a series of rooms with connecting baths. The rooms, unlike the other side, weren't connected so it was going to take time to check them all out. I think there were maybe ten rooms in all, in varying sizes, from little palaces to studio size. Personally, I had never seen Gloria's bedroom but judging by how Joel ribbed her about it I can only imagine it was huge. You know the type, complete with a walk in closet you could play basketball in. Gloria had lots of clothes and row after row of shoes.

He stopped for a moment to listen. Silence. Switching back to his A4, he started in the first room, swinging open the door, prepared to shoot. Cleared. Another room. And the bathroom. Cleared. Then another. Nothing.

The fourth room he knew was Dari's. He listened at the closed door for a moment. He turned the knob and kicked open the door, sliding out of the doorway, waiting. In combat, these were the worst moments, when you breached a room and had to react to what you found. Reflexes came into play of course but it was also a matter of preconceived notions at your anticipated stimuli. It was best to clear your focus, the mind's eye perception. You mind had to tell your brain what to do. Things happened in an instant. Raw instinct took over from training.

He then poked his head in and leveled his rifle, prepared to fire. The room was empty but he could see that Dari had been taken in there at the beginning. There was blood on the bed covers and her blouse was in tatters on the floor. He did a quick search through the closet and then the bathroom, fearing the worst. No one.

Gloria's room was next on the list, so he took up position by the door. Then he heard a scream out in the garage. That makes it easier, he thought, retracing his steps back to the side door. He knew the garage--climate controlled don't your know because nobody wants to get in a stiflingly hot automobile--was full of cars with plenty of places to hide. Joel figured that El Bailarin had taken Dari in there to use her as a human shield and would be waiting for him through the only walk in door entry. Little did he know that Joel knew the code for the outside keypad to open the garage doors.

He walked to the other side of the garage and keyed in the numbers, then dropped down to a kneeling position, rifle ready to squeeze off some rounds. The electric motor sprung to life and the doors came to life, grinding, lifting up. Joel wasn't satisfied with that approach, so he ran back to the side door and got into position, while El Bailarin released his grip on Dari and opened up on the rising doors, peppering them with rounds. Joel slipped inside the garage and spotted his quarry in between the Tesla sports car (a left over play thing of Gloria's ex) and the Audi.

Puzzled, El Bailarin stopped firing and shielded his eyes from the sunlight streaming in the garage. Joel shot him in the back of the head. One clean shot. El Bailarin fell over the hood of the sports car then slid to the ground. He walked over to the body and fired off another round, again between the eyes. You can never be too careful.

Dari was sobbing, cowering next to one of the other cars. Joel hurried over and helped her to her feet. She had cuts all over her upper body where El Bailarin had sliced her in a slow motion torture routine. He tried to comfort her as best he could, half carrying her back into the house.

"Gloria!" he yelled out when he had gotten back in the house, "I need your help."

Gloria and I heard him cry out and looked at each other. We were on the same wavelength, fearing that maybe El Bailarin had gotten the upper hand and was using Joel to lure us out of our hiding place. I decided to take a peek out the kitchen door and saw him carrying Dari down the long hall way.

"It's okay, come on," I said to Gloria, pushing the door open.

Things happened pretty fast after that. Gloria got a blanket to wrap her daughter in, repeating over and over that she must be in shock. I suggested we call 911 and Joel said we had to give him time, time to disappear. What?

Confused, Gloria exclaimed, "She needs medical help."

"I know--I know, but we have to sync up our stories here," Joel explained, composed as ever after having wiped out a small platoon of bad guys.

"What do you mean?" I wanted to know, frazzled, wanting to get an ambulance there as soon as possible.

"Listen, I'm the trigger man here," Joel said, holding up his rifle for emphasis. "I don't think any explanation is going to cut it when it comes to the cops. I know these guys deserved what they got but there are going to be legal ramifications I don't want to have to deal with. Right?"

Gloria thought for a moment, then stated, "Okay. We are going to have to explain this away somehow. Got any suggestions?"

"Suggestions?" I spat out, incredulous. "Yeah, how about a bunch of homicidal maniacs broke into your house and tried to kill all of us. Will that do?"

Gloria and Joel exchanged glances, and then nodded, showing that at least they were on the same page about all of this. If Joel was fingered as the killer (avenger) there would be investigations and a media firestorm, along with maybe some problematic legal issues, like Joel's illegal guns and that whole domicile protection debate. Are you allowed to use force against seven intruders with prejudice? I joke.

It wasn't funny to Joel. He would be on the hook for seven murders, not counting the ones up on the mountain and although they would enhance his image immensely he still didn't want to stick around for some prosecutor's office to pass judgment on his handiwork. Best to melt away and rely on a concocted story.

"Give me time to rappel down the wall and then call. I don't think Dari is in immediate danger," Joel offered, looking at me and then back at Gloria. "Internecine battle. The gang turned on each other after a faulty kidnap scheme. Use your imagination, Bradford. I know you can do it."

"I'll try," I muttered, thinking about how I couldn't argue with a guy who just saved my life.

He then kissed Gloria good-bye and I walked with him back outside. Telling me to take care of them, he set up his rappelling gear and quickly descended the mesa. I watched him land on the bottom and I released his rope. Down below, he gathered up the rope and got on his dirt bike and roared away. In the distance I could hear the sirens of the ambulance and police cars coming down Route 179. Gloria and I would have to get our stories correct and then sell it.

EPILOGUE

I went back to LA, eventually. The cops kept me around Sedona for a little while. I don't think they completely bought our story but what could they do. Ballistics showed that we weren't connected to the killings. We couldn't escape the media onslaught. After all the sensationalized press, I figured the projects were dead and buried, but it wasn't the case. Marty had called me immediately when the story broke, all excited about the prospects of riding the wave of publicity right to the box office. I thought he was crazy and told him so. He laughed, as I heard him order a bottle of champagne at the restaurant.

He was wrong about part of the equation. The Joel Jenkins picture went belly up, shelved probably for good. Rumor has it that Joel called up the studio honcho and politely told him that he would make the guy's life hell if the movie ever got completed. Idle threats were offered up all the time in Hollywood but when they came from someone like Joel Jenkins they had an effect. Especially after the real facts surfaced about that day at Gloria Worthington's mansion.

I don't know who leaked it. Gloria thought it might have been her own daughter, who had been sedated and drifting in and out of consciousness for a few days afterwards. Some nurse or technician might have heard her rambling on in her delirium about gunfights and all. I hoped that she hadn't suspected me because damn if I was going to be giving up any details. That is until the studio got wind of the facts and wanted me to incorporate them into the script. "Come on, kid, great way to end a story," as Marty informed me over cocktails.

So in the end, with Gloria's blessing, I wrote it as I lived it, adding another strange layer to the screenplay, almost as if in some cinema verite mode. The director loved it. It made Gloria all that much more interesting. Now the film had sex and violence and neither one of them were gratuitous.

"Hey you," Gloria said into the phone, using her usual greeting when she called me, which she did at least once a week afterwards.

"Ms Worthington," I replied, as I always did, still surprised that I had a friendship with somebody like her.

"Are you coming?" she wanted to know, waiting for my response.

I had already gotten several text messages asking me and now the follow up phone call. Gloria wanted to know if I would escort her to the premier of the movie, the one about her. I had been mulling over an answer because I wasn't sure I wanted to be so close to the actual finished product. It wasn't many times that I went to premieres of my work, as in never. One of the reasons for that was because with my previous work Hollywood premieres, with the red carpet and all, just didn't happen. The other reason was I felt shaky about appearing to want to accept credit for the script to a movie that outed my friend, Joel.

There had been grumbling by the legal types back in Arizona, in Yavapai County. They felt like they had been taken for a ride in all of this. They had been had, as they say. Now, a year later or more, with the movie in the can and the PR machine in full swing, with TV ads up and running showing snippets of the bloodshed on the mesa and the Internet buzzing with what really happened, another shitstorm threatened to screw up our lives.

I wasn't all that worried because the studio had a battalion of lawyers on retainer just waiting to muck up the works if need be. I had taken to sneaking behind the curtain of creative license when asked about the ending, which I did each and every interview. Yes, there were now interviews to endure. I was now a name, scriptwriter to the stars. Even my two asshole neighbors were treating me with respect.

My one big worry was Joel. Although his story had been axed, he had still been folded into the other movie, making it "pop" as one of the producers said to me, grinning like a Halloween pumpkin. Everybody was happy around the project. Money was going to be made and there was some early buzz about Oscars being bestowed. Good god, I found myself thinking.

Before I left Sedona, for the last time I vowed, I had gone back up to the cabin on the mountain. I didn't know why. I knew Joel had left, disappeared, probably to never be heard from again. Who could blame him? I just wanted to see what had been left behind. Besides, I was doing research. There was no way I was going to be able to leave out the siege of the cabin in the script.

My new best friend went along with me. She had lost a friend, probably for good. She had asked me to take her there several times but I had been evasive. I wasn't even sure if I could find the place. We drove up one morning, after we made sure the police weren't following us because we had become paranoid after the cops grilled us for a few days.

"Looks like an old prospector's road," Gloria said to me, as I tried to get my bearings. "Are you sure you know which way to go?"

"Gloria, I don't need this," I told her, flustered, because I seemed to be already lost. I then started looking at some of the trunks of the trees, looking for any tell tale signs of having cameras once mounted on them.

"What exactly are you looking for?" she asked, laughing.

"Here," I announced, pointing to a spot on a tree where you could see scrape marks, "Joel mounted a camera here so he could keep tabs on what was going on down on the trail."

"Very clever," she mumbled, running her hand along the trunk of the tree.

"I think it's this way," I told her, leading the way up the mountain.

We finally found the cabin almost an hour later or what was left of it. It looked like swiss cheese. The Xibalba had done a number on the place. I didn't think anybody or anything could have survived the barrage of gunfire that day. A moment later I saw the blood stains in the bathroom and on the bookcase and I knew that Wylie and Felix hadn't made it out alive.

Gloria went around the cabin running her fingers along the table and chairs, picking up the dishes that were left right where they were always kept. Joel had just taken the electronics and most anything that could link him to the area. He wanted to vanish and had apparently accomplished that. I imagined him to be in South America somewhere, probably the Andes. Holed up in a small village, sucking on the thin air and wishing everybody would just leave him alone.

I filled Gloria in on what the cabin had looked like when he was there, showing her where the monitors were and Joel's bed. I suppose we had both lost someone now, even if she might have felt it more acutely; but do you really ever really know a legend? I didn't think you did. You only got to grasp at conceptual representations and that is about as philosophical as I get. For her though, she felt that something missing you feel, tangible or otherwise.

Then again, she was alive, as was her daughter; although she was going to have a long road back to recovery psychologically. Wyeth was gone of course, leaving her with no one to take on life in her customary fashion. To date, over a year after, she was living in a condo in Flagstaff, alone except for a humane society dog she had adopted to keep her company. She had never been back to the mansion and had sold all of her toys. For recreation, she now took walks with her dog. As Gloria liked to say: "That day fourteen and half lives were lost." Sounds about right.

We speculated that Joel must have buried all the bodies on the mountain somewhere, placed them in the ground to eventually mingle with all ghosts of the dead miners from another era. I suppose our visiting his cabin together was just another niche in the bonding process between us, something that was probably psychopathological in nature, if I say so myself. Not that I know what I'm talking about, really. We had lived through a life or death situation and that stood for something when it came to all around mental health. The two of us had a bond that was hard to duplicate.

Being BFF's with a gold plated celebrity was, to be honest, pretty cool. Hey, I was now invited to A list parties, where I would stand there and try not to be too conspicuous. I didn't abandon my base of friends though, even if they thought I my head had gotten a little too big for my own good; and I still lived in my run down apartment building. I knew, from experience, my success could dry up tomorrow, so it was prudent not to go overboard.

On the home front things changed very little. Sundays came and went, with my family still maintaining a direct line to Jesus. Even though my name had been plastered all over the media it didn't change things. I was still the miscreant, the guy who succumbed to the devil somewhere along the line. My brothers could have cared less that I met so and so and went to this or that party. I guess San Diego really was farther away from LA than my GPS navigation thingee told me.

I don't know what I expected to happen. Suddenly my family was going to forget everything and accept me for what I was, like that would ever happen. No, the shaky detente continued, with me as the very black sheep. Only now I didn't care anymore. For the first time in my miserable life I was, more or less, an unqualified success.

And that brought me to the premiere of my movie, which the studio had decided to call: Until The End. Not my title, by the way. Not even close. I wanted to call it simply: Ms. Worthington, but the higher ups kicked that around awhile then brought in a team of dickheads who came up with that ridiculous crap. My new best friend hated it as well.

It was too late now though. Trailers had been cut. Ads placed in all the important periodicals, per the usual game plan for bringing a film to the public's attention, were out there. Gloria was doing the PR junkets around the country, Europe too. I had done some lesser known shows, as I talked about my process and how the film depicted my vision, bullshit that was sure to make my former film professors cringe.

On the big night, as I squirmed in my tight fitting tux, with the dress shoes that were way too tight, (Ms. Worthington wouldn't let me wear my Adidas), sitting in the backseat of a gigantic limo with Gloria, I wondered if I was going to be called out as an imposter. Who was Bradford Tuttle anyway? Wasn't he that hack who was responsible for that abortion about those twins living on Mars...Mercury? Full disclosure, I did write a script about fraternal twins living a bleak existence on a lost planet. It was for the SyFy channel, what did you expect?

"Nervous?" Gloria wanted to know, squeezing my hand, trying to reassure me that I did indeed belong there on the cusp of notoriety.

"Do we have time for one more drink?" I asked, silently pleading for deliverance from this, this softcore version of hell. "I think I'm going to throw up."

"Bradford," she chided mildly, laughing, "it's all going to be okay. Trust me." She poured out some more expensive bubbly, a vintage I could only have come into contact with by watching a movie, as we glided up to the world famous Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd.

"Trust me" rang in my ears. She had been saying that more and more frequently for the last week or so during our like clockwork phone chats. It was easy to see I was bordering on a nervous breakdown or, at the very least, extended panic attack. A few of my friends had tried to talk me down several times, telling me that it wasn't worth it if I was going to have to be committed. Nice guys. Even the next door neighbor, the cinematographer, had lent a hand by giving me some advice. He had been there, done that, another passenger along for the ride, taking a seat in the section reserved for the worker bees who populated the lesser known positions in the assembly line.

The limo stopped at the curb, right in line with the red carpet. They really do have red carpet, proving that some clichés are classics. A lackey, in livery costume, undoubtedly an out of work actor, opened the door for us. This little touch of old Hollywood seemed somehow appropriate. I stepped out into the glare of camera flashes, all I'm sure disappointed that they had wasted their time pushing the shutter button for me. Then I assisted Gloria as she alighted to the curb, showing off her designer dress and jewels. She looked spectacular, by the way, definitely not destined to end up on one of those bitchy worst dressed lists.

Gloria Worthington had been there before. Her life was a stage in its way. Now, you know, she was news making news, as a friend of mine liked to term it. Since the attack and its aftermath she had only gotten more famous. My movie was going to put an exclamation point on it. We swept through the throng of photographers, with her stopping several times to pose, while I faded to the back in an attempt to minimize my presence, like a burglar looking for an escape route. Several jackals shouted out questions, which she parried easily, smiling away. One even asked who she was escorted by but the query was lost to the hubbub all around us.

Inside, the theater was buzzing. Marty and company had made sure all the right people were there to make an appearance, including the lead actress with the meaty part, a two time Oscar winner happy to get in on the movie project and its riveting plot. The riptide of Hollywood fame made it impossible to swim against the current most times. Being there was integral to your next career move. Smile. Look your best. Get your picture in one of the rags, preferably with your best side showing.

As a gay man, all of the exposed cleavage was wasted on me. To the camera lens however, it was a precious metal. Air kisses flew all around me, as I'm sure most were wondering who I even was. Who is that poseur in the ill fitting tux? they might be thinking. I felt like I had just crashed a wedding and everybody, from both the bride and groom's side, knew I hadn't been invited. It would have been less painful if I wore a sign around my neck saying who I was. I wanted to scream out: I WROTE THE DAMN SCRIPT.

Gloria did the rounds, with me in tow. There were a dizzying array of names and titles floated by my comprehension. I smiled and shook hands, shying away from the obligatory faux kiss. Some people actually knew who I was but most saw me as an interloper of some sort, a guy who had obviously rented his garb (it had actually been donated to me by a well known designer) and belonged back in his little shithole of an apartment watching reruns on TV.

Finally, we went to our seats. If I thought the preliminaries were grueling I now had to sit through the finished product. As a minion, I had no idea what the director had done with my words. For all I knew the Gloria character might turn out to be a shrew toting an Uzi. Don't laugh. I once had a script about the pioneer west end up being about a woman murdering her entire family, livestock too. Still got paid, not that I ever wanted to take credit for it.

My palms were sweaty now, as we sat down. Gloria nudged me with her elbow and told me to relax, placing a motherly kiss on my cheek. I guess she was more of a mother to me in most ways. My mother, and family, had politely turned down my invitations to the premiere, begging off by insisting it was too far to drive to LA for a movie. Okay, I had told them, assuring all that they could see it when it came out on DVD. Then again, maybe it was better that they weren't there to see me have a meltdown in front of hundreds of people. They would see me get carried out on a stretcher, babbling, apologizing to everyone for what I had done.

Gloria had insisted that they leave a seat open next to her. She didn't have to say why. I didn't have the heart to tell her that Joel wouldn't be coming, even if he had heard about the premiere event. I was relatively sure he had exited the country, retreating back into his tidy world, a place without the confusion and commitments of friendships. Simplicity was the answer. Pare your existence down to the basics. That precluded any interaction.

Just before the movie was cranked up, Gloria leaned over and asked, "Do you think he will show?"

I looked at her, then at the empty seat, and replied, "Worlds collide only once."

She squeezed my arm and quickly wiped away a tear. I suppose she instinctually knew deep down that their connection was going to be ephemeral in nature. It still hurt though. The theater went dark and the soundtrack rushed into the room. My throat felt tight and I noticed my heart was racing a little. The credits flowed by. One hour and forty minutes of Gloria's life lay ahead. It was like being a maestro to an unfolding opera.

On down the road the film was nominated for an Academy Award in several different categories. Not mine unfortunately. Still, it did "good." Best of all, Gloria was happy about the portrayal. Me, not so much. The director tossed a few scenes that I rather liked and me, as a character in the film, didn't fare all that well. I came off a little on the cowardly side. At least my gayness was downplayed, sparing my family any more mortification; not that my half-ass fame did anything for the family name in their circles.

In the end, my bank account got increased, I met some eligible bachelors, and life went on. Plenty of jobs came my way too. I think it was maybe two and half years after that day in Sedona when I got an email. It was dumped into my spam folder because it was from some nebulous URL and I almost deleted it, but then I noticed it mentioned in the subject line the character in my screenplay on the family down in South America I had written years ago. Immediately I knew it had to be from Joel.

I eagerly opened it, virus be damned, and saw that it was from him. It was short and I want to include it here in its entirety.

BT:

So, you are tasting success. I can only hope your appetite hasn't been permanently altered. Please send my regards to G. All is well.

JJ

I savored it for a moment, glad to see that he was, you know, alive. I imagined him secreted away in some other mountain redoubt, guns at the ready. Another enemy had been logged on his continuing spread sheet, with retaliation minded relatives signing up to avenge the dead. For the rest of his life he would have to contend with not only the living vigilantes but the souls of the dead and buried. It was a mind bending exercise in paranoia but if anybody was up to the task I guess he was.

Thinking of Gloria, I quickly forwarded his email to her, hoping that it might ease her worries. Even though she insisted otherwise, I was sure she still harbored thoughts of a future tryst somewhere in the world, probably in a rustic corner of the globe where civilization wasn't well represented. Then again, I think she knew (realized) there were no sequels in the works.
