“This will only take a minute,” Buck started towards the men.
Marty grabbed him. “What the hell are you doing?”
But Marty already knew, because it was what the moment demanded, playing out just like those $800-a- weekend screenwriting courses and countless action movies said it should. It was the inevitable scene when the hero proves what a wild, dangerous man he is by stumbling into a hold-up, a hostage situation, a guy attempting suicide, or a creative combination of all three.
But this wasn’t a movie.
“They’re robbing a bank.” Buck let his arm hang straight, hiding the weapon behind his leg. “That’s a no- no.”
“Who gives a shit?” Marty said. “We just had an earthquake. The city has been leveled. The money doesn’t matter.”
“It will.”
Buck shook free of Marty and marched across the street towards the Mexican with the shotgun, who didn’t seem to notice him.
Buck yelled: “Hey, Taco Bell!”
Now the Mexican did. He pointed the shotgun at Buck.
“Yeah, you,” Buck kept coming. “You think you’re slick?”
The self-anointed screenwriting gurus called this the defining moment, or more pompously, “the essential re-stating of the mythic-hero paradigm,” and Marty hated it every time he saw it. The moment was false, formulaic, and creatively bankrupt. Yet, Marty demanded that writers give it to him in the first five minutes of the first episode of every cop show on his network. And if they argued with him about doing it, he fired them and brought in a writer who would. Now Marty was being forced by fate, or some cosmic guardian of the Writers Guild of America, to live the scene. Or die from it.
The two unarmed Mexicans stopping shoving cash into their bags and rose to their feet, shared a worried look, and faced Buck. They didn’t know what to make of this guy. One of them said something threatening to him in Spanish.
“No habla bullshit, Dorrito,” Buck continued to advance on the shooter, who shifted his weight nervously, looking to his friends for guidance and not getting any.
“Fuck off,” the shooter told Buck. “Or I shoot.”
Buck shook his head and turned to the two unarmed men. “Where’d you guys find this moron?” He motioned to the shooter, and they looked, which distracted them from seeing his gun as he passed by. “Taco Bell doesn’t know shit and I can prove it.”
The shooter raised his shotgun level with Buck’s chest. “I blow your balls off you don’t stop.”
“Not with the safety on, dipshit.”
The shooter glanced down at shotgun. In that instant of inattention, Buck jammed his gun into the man’s groin with one hand and swatted the shotgun aside with the other.
Buck leaned into his face so their noses were almost touching. “If your friends don’t sit the fuck down and do exactly what they’re told, you’ll be a Ken doll.”
The shooter was either stupidly defiant or simply unfamiliar with what Barbie wanted from a man, because he didn’t say a word. So Buck cocked the trigger and pushed the gun into him. “How about this? They sit or Taco Bell is gonna be Tinker Bell.”
The point, if not the allusion, got through to the Shooter, who immediately told his friends to sit. They did.
Marty looked at the Koreans. They were smiling. The scene worked every time. It didn’t make it any less stupid. Now that the situation seemed to be under control, Marty marched over to Buck and said: “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Stop whining and take away Taco Bell’s shotgun.”
Marty took it from the shooter’s hand, examined it, then tossed it into the truck bed. “The safety wasn’t on.”
Buck grinned at the glowering Mexican. “Oops.”
B uck was still grinning after he and Marty finished tying the three Mexicans to a telephone pole. It only made Marty angrier.
“You think it’s funny, Buck? You could have gotten killed. And for what?”
“A big, fat paycheck.” Buck stuck one of his business cards into in the shirt pocket of each of his prisoners. “When the cops show up, they’ll know who caught these dipshits. And so will the bank. I should get a couple grand out of this. You know, this earthquake could be real good for my business.”
“Do me a favor, Buck. Take the rest of the day off.”
Marty walked away, weaving through the small crowd of Koreans who gathered to watch Buck at work. Buck tipped an imaginary hat at the smiling Koreans and joined Marty.
“What the fuck are you so angry about?”
“Because you could have started a shoot-out back there,” Marty replied. “And if one of the Koreans got hit, they’d have started shooting too, and it would have been a bloodbath.”
“Bullshit,” Buck smiled and pointed an accusatory finger at Marty. “You were worried about me.”
“I was afraid I’d get killed and wouldn’t make it home to my wife.”
“See? It’s happening already. You’re rooting for me. I told you I was a great fucking character,” Buck clapped Marty on the back. “I’m even willing to consider a black sidekick, as long as it’s not Arsenio Hall.”
Years from now, this was the anecdote Marty would tell at parties or network events. How in the middle of the Big One, climbing through the ruins of LA to get back home, he was pursued by a crazy bounty hunter trying to pitch him a series.
Was that what the big stunt at the bank was all about? Part of the pitch? Whether it was or not, it would be when Marty told the story.
But the story would soon be coming to an end. It was a little after six. Another mile or two, they’d be in Hollywood. Buck would go home, disappearing from his life forever, and Marty would continue over the Cahuenga Pass, arriving in the San Fernando Valley just as night fell. The rest of the trip would be a straight shot down Ventura Boulevard to Calabasas.
Nice and easy. Maybe there would even be a Starbucks open for business. With so many of them in the valley, statistically it just wasn’t possible that the Big One had leveled them all.
That pleasant thought occupied Marty for the next half hour as they climbed over rubble and moved through the injured, the lost, and the hopeless.
Marty tried to imagine how Beth would look, how happy she would be to see him. In his mind, there wasn’t a scratch on her, she was as he left her that morning in the kitchen. Only the coldness would be gone, because he knew if he could walk across this decimated city to her, then traveling the distance in their marriage wouldn’t seem so hard anymore.
To make that journey, he’d have to start almost two years ago. They weren’t living in the Calabasas house then; they were still in the ranch-style place in Reseda. They were “north of the boulevard,” the demarcation line across the valley separating those who’d “made it” and were living in the foothills above Ventura Boulevard from those still trying to and living in the flatlands below.
Marty was in his home office, stuck on page 138 of his second, unfinished novel. Shortly after he got his network job, he set aside his unfinished scripts, rationalizing his failure to complete a screenplay was the price he paid for being too damn good at his job. He spent his days developing other people’s scripts, criticizing draft after draft until the writers got the story and the characters as good as their limited skills would allow. The problem was when Marty sat down to write himself at night, he couldn’t stop being a network executive. He couldn’t write a line without giving himself notes before he was even done typing it.
So Marty switched to novels, knowing that would free him up creatively to be the inventive, insightful, prolific writer he knew he was.
Or would be… if he could just get past page 138.
It wasn’t so much that the stories petered out, which they did, but that none of the characters ever seemed to come to life. They were just game pieces, moving around the plot, performing their story function without ever breathing. He was always dragging them across the page, pushing them into situations, forcing them to speak, and
