Time Bomb

Bad bluffer. Pinocchio would have laughed and lent him his nose.

I said, “I think you know. One family destroyed- three generations exterminated, because the wrong people got asked the wrong questions. Asking you might have been safer, but Ike couldn’t get through.”

He waved a hand frantically. “Don’t lay that on me.”

“You’re laying it on yourself. You’ve never forgotten Bear Lodge. That’s why you agreed to see me.”

He slumped, ran his fingers through his spiky hair, checked the time on a wristwatch thin enough to fit through a coin slot.

I said, “Getting his message last summer brought back those memories full force. You probably considered seeing him. Your idealism may be long-buried under a heap of game shows but-”

He sat up. “I don’t do game shows.”

“- you’re still a person of principles. Or so it’s been suggested.”

“Yeah? By who?”

“Judy Baumgartner at the Holocaust Center. She says you helped them get that documentary produced. She’s the one who told me about your book.”

His expression turned sour. He pulled something out of his jacket pocket. An orange lollipop that he unwrapped with stealth and haste, as if it were a forbidden pleasure. He jammed it in his mouth, sat back, hands folded across his belly, pacified.

“Principles, huh?”

“Why’d you turn him down?” I said. “Too painful opening old wounds? Or was it just inertia? All those meetings you take every day, you simply didn’t have the energy to handle another one?”

He yanked out the lollipop, started to say something, gagged on it, and stood up, turning his back to me. He faced the rear wall, taking in his cartoon buddies.

I said, “Fairy godmothers and glass slippers. Would that life were so simple.”

“You with the government?” he said.

“No.”

“Show me some ID.”

I took my driver’s license, psychology license, and medical school affiliation out of my wallet and handed them to him. “Got major credit cards, too, if you want to see them.”

He turned around, examined them, gave them back. “Doesn’t really mean anything, does it? You could be who the papers say you are and still be government.”

“I could but I’m not.”

He shrugged. “And what if you are? Like you said, times have changed- no one cares anymore. What’s my crime? Shifting gears into a survival mode? What’s the penalty gonna be? Working at another network?”

I smiled. “How about working with game shows?”

He leaned forward. “Come on, level with me. What’s this really about?”

“It’s about what I told you. I want to ask you some of the questions Ike Novato never got to ask.”

“Why? What’s your connection to him? Were you his shrink?”

“No. I never met him. But I’ve been looking into the death of one of his friends. A young girl named Holly Burden.”

I waited for a sign of recognition, got none.

I said, “Her family asked me to do a psychological autopsy. To try to understand why she died. That led me to Ike. He was one of the few friends she’d had. A confidant. I traced him back to the Holocaust Center, some books he checked out on racism. He’d written your name and number in a margin. Judy was certain he hadn’t met you there, thought he might have tried to reach you because of your previous life.”

I opened the briefcase and pulled out his book. “I bought this today, read the Bear Lodge story and saw the Berkeley picture. Figured out who Ike really was.”

He sat down, put the lollipop back in his mouth and withdrew it quickly, as if it had lost its flavor. “Some literary masterpiece, huh? I was coming down from acid and mushrooms and Methedrine chasers when I wrote that. Flashing back and seeing God. One superstoked weekend, no revisions. I didn’t even come up for air. Pulitzer Prize stuff, it ain’t.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” I said. “It had a certain raw energy. Passion. The kind you probably don’t experience much anymore.”

“Look,” he said, stiffening, “if you think you’re going to come in here and lay all this guilt on me- for surviving- forget it. I’ve worked that through. With my own psychologist.”

“I’m happy for you, Terry. Too bad Ike won’t be working anything through.”

We locked eyes again. Again, he broke first.

“A cave,” he said. “That’s where I ended up- that’s where I wrote the damned thing. In a cave, okay? You understand? That’s how I was living after Bear Lodge. Like some Neanderthal because I had no rich daddy like so many of the others in the movement. No trust fund, nothing to fall back on when the dream ended. I couldn’t get a serious job because I’d dropped out to fight the good fight after one semester. I had a D average, no skills to do anything other than march around and chant. And the market for chanters wasn’t too hot after the dream died, unless you felt like doing some Hare Krishna free-lancing. I even tried that, but their bullshit got to me, their scams and their stinking incense. All I knew was picking fruit, digging ditches, stoop work- that’s the kind of stuff I grew up doing. On a scrub lot that never went anywhere because my daddy couldn’t compete with the big growers and died with more debts than good sense. I headed up the coast, picking my hands bloody, bunking with the illegals. I was in Yuba City when they started digging up all the braceros Corona had hacked up. The guy who’d bunked next to me had disappeared. Victim number twenty-three. That scared me outa there, up to Oregon. My cave. Picking plums by day, playing Neanderthal by night. Scared me into a clear head, too- no acid, no pills, not even hash or grass. No Betty Ford clinic, just me and the long nights and the creepy-crawlies. To help get through it, I started writing. The ultimate therapy, right? Abby had done it; Jerry had done it; why not me? The end result was that piece of stupidity you’re holding in your hot little hands. The first draft was dull pencil on sheets of ledger paper I ripped off from the shift boss. At night, using a flashlight. Later, when I had a couple of bucks, I bought a notebook and some Bics. I wrote other stuff too. Poetry that sucked. Short stories that sucked. A TV script that sucked. Comedy. Lots of comedy. In order to laugh myself out of suicide. Same plot line, over and over: revolutionaries who work for IBM but can’t quite hack the straight life. Ha ha funny, right? I convinced myself it was profound, convinced myself no one was out to kill me anymore and hitched down to L.A. Showered, shaved at the Union Station, bought a suit at the Salvation Army, walked all the way to this center of spiritual purity and tried to get my script read. Couldn’t get a foot in the door, but downstairs there was a sign saying they were hiring pages. I faked a wholesome attitude, got the job. First money I earned was used to publish the piece of crap. First printing of three hundred copies, never went into a second. I peddled it to head shops on consignment, never saw a dime. Learned hippie entrepreneurs were the worst. Learned I wasn’t going to be Mr. Bestseller- time to shift to another tack. So I worked. Every scut job the network offered me. Worked my way up to this. I won’t bore you with the details.”

“Sounds like the American dream.”

“Hey, it’s a free country. Really is. I learned that the hard way. Testing the system- starting at rock bottom and taking it to the limits. Which is more than most people ever do. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty that’s rotten in the system, hut what’s better? The Ayatollah? The Chinese? So I’m here for the long haul, trying to get through each day, paying my mortgage. I know what I do every day isn’t feeding starving orphans, it isn’t heart surgery, but I try to get some quality through when I can, okay? It’s no better or worse than anyone else’s gig, right? Which is what I want now. To be like anyone else. Blend in, concentrate on Terry, learn to be self-centered. Drive a car with leather seats, sit in the Jacuzzi at night, listen to compact discs, and get philosophical. Just get through each day.”

He pointed a finger at me. “I paid more dues longer than anyone else I know, so forget your guilt.”

I said, “Your guilt isn’t my concern, Other people paid dues too. The ultimate dues. Norm and Melba Green, the rest of the gang at Bear Lodge. I’m sure any of them would be happy to trade places with you.”

He closed his eyes, rubbed his eyelids, “Oh, boy, everything comes back like a wheel, doesn’t it.”

I said, “You were part of the group, weren’t you? What made you decide not to show up the day of the big blast?”