Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories - 3 Page 13

  They talked about the incident and O'Connor recounted McKennah's martial arts skills. The young actor seemed embarrassed. He repeated, "I just reacted."

  Felter said, "I've got to say. I'm sure this fucked you up some, pardon my French," he said, glancing at the women.

  "I'm so offended," Sandra Glickman said, frowning, "you motherfucking cocksucker."

  They all laughed.

  Felter continued, "Are you cool going ahead with the show?"

  McKennah and Glickman said they were. O'Connor said, "Of course," but then he caught something in the producer's eyes. "That's not really what you're asking, is it, Aaron?"

  A laugh. "Okay. What I want to know is: If we go ahead with the show tomorrow, how are people going to react? I want your honest opinions. Should we give it some time to calm down? The dust to settle?"

  "Which people?" McKennah asked. "The audience?"

  "Exactly. Are they going to think it's in bad taste. I mean somebody could've gotten hurt bad."

  O'Connor laughed. "Excuse me, Aaron, but when have you ever known a TV show to fail because it's in poor taste?"

  Aaron Felter pointed his finger at the man.

  "Score one for the old guy" was the message in his eyes.

  *

  THE THURSDAY FINALE of Go For Broke began with a description of the events of last night. But since Entertainment Tonight and every other quasi news program in the universe had covered the story, it made little sense to rehash the facts.

  Besides, there was poker to be played.

  With the same fanfare as yesterday--and five sunglass-clad guards nearby--the play among the last three contestants began.

  They played for some time without any significant changes in their positions. Then O'Connor got his first good hole cards of the night. An ace and jack, both spades.

  The betting began. O'Connor played it cautious, though, checking at first then matching the other bets or raising slightly.

  The flop cards were another ace, a jack and a two, all varied suits.

  Not bad, he thought...

  Betting continued, with both Glickman and McKennah now raising significantly. Though he was uneasy, O'Connor kept a faint smile on his face as he matched the hundred thousand bet by McKennah.

  The fourth card, the turn, went faceup smoothly onto the table under the dealer's skillful hands. It was another two.

  Glickman eyed both of her opponents' piles of cash. But then she held back, checking. Which could mean a weak hand or was a brilliant strategy if she had a really strong one.

  When the bet came to McKennah he slid out fifty thousand.

  O'Connor raised another fifty. Glickman hesitated and then matched the hundred with a brassy laugh.

  The final card went down, the river. It was an eight. This meant nothing to O'Connor. His hand was set. Two pair, aces and jacks. It was a fair hand for Texas Hold 'Em, but hardly a guaranteed winner.

  But they'd be thinking he had a full house, aces and twos, or maybe even a four of a kind--in twos.

  They, of course, could have powerful hands as well.

  Then Glickman made her move. She pushed everything she had left into the middle of the table.

  After a moment of debate McKennah folded.

  O'Connor glanced into the brash comedian's eyes, took a deep breath and called her, counting out the money to match the bet.

  If he lost he'd have about fifty thousand to call his own and his time on Go For Broke would be over.

  Sandy Glickman gave a wry smile. She slid her cards facedown into the mush--the pile of discards. She said, for the microphone, "Not many people know when I'm bluffing. You've got a good eye." The brassy woman delivered another message to him when she leaned forward to embrace him, whispering: "You fucked me and you didn't even buy me dinner."

  It was quiet enough that the censors didn't need to hit their magic button.

  But she gave him a warm kiss and a wink before she headed off down the Walk of Shame.

  *

  ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES remained for the confrontation between the last two players, O'Connor with $623,000, McKennah with $877,000.

  The young actor was in the button spot, to the dealer's left. He slid in the agreed-on small blind, ten thousand, and O'Connor counted out the big, twenty.

  As the dealer shuffled expertly the two men glanced at each other. O'Connor's eyes conveyed a message. You're an okay kid and you saved my hide yesterday, but this is poker and I wouldn't be honest to myself, to you or the game if I pulled back.

  The faint glistening in McKennah's eyes said that he acknowledged the message. And said much the same in return.

  It's showdown time.

  Let's go for the bump.

  The deals continued for a time, with neither of them winning or losing big. McKennah tried a bluff and lost. O'Connor tried a big move with three of a kind and got knocked out by a flush, which he should've seen coming.

  A commercial break and then, with minutes enough for only one hand, the game resumed. A new deck of cards was shuffled. McKennah put in the small blind bet. The rules now dictated twenty-five thousand at this point and O'Connor himself put in fifty.

  Then the deal began.

  O'Connor kept his surprise off his face as he glanced at the hole cards--cowboys, a pair of kings.

  Okay, not bad. Let's see where we go from here.

  McKennah glanced at his own cards without emotion. And his preflop bet was modest under the circumstances, fifty thousand.

  Keeping the great stone face, O'Connor pushed in the same amount. He was tempted to raise, but decided not to. He had a good chance to win but it was still early and he didn't want to move too fast.

  The dealer burned the top card and dealt the flop. First, a two of hearts, then the four of hearts and then the king of spades.

  Suddenly O'Connor had three of a kind, with the other two board cards yet to come.

  McKennah bet fifty thousand. At this point, because he himself had upped the bet, it wouldn't frighten the younger player off for O'Connor to raise him. He saw the fifty and raised by another fifty.

  Murmurs from the crowd.

  McKennah hesitated and saw the older actor.

  The turn card, the fourth one, wasn't helpful to O'Connor, the six of hearts. Perhaps it was useless to McKennah as well. He checked.

  O'Connor noted the hesitation of the man's betting and concluded he had a fair, but unspectacular hand. Afraid to drive him to fold, he bet only fifty thousand again, which McKennah saw.

  They looked at each other over the sea of money as the fifth card, the river, slid out.

  It was a king.

  As delighted as O'Connor was, he regretted that this amazing hand--four of a kind--hadn't hit the table when more people were in the game. It was likely that McKennah had a functional hand at best and that there'd be a limit to how much O'Connor could raise before his opponent folded.

  As the next round of betting progressed, they goosed the pot up a bit--another hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  Finally, concerned that McKennah would sense his overconfidence, O'Connor decided to buy time. "Check." He tapped the table with his knuckles.

  A ripple through the audience. Why was he doing that?

  McKennah looked him over closely. Then said, "Five hundred K."

  And pushed the bet out.

  The crowd gasped.

  It was a bluff, O'Connor thought instantly. The only thing McKennah could have that would beat O'Connor was a straight flush. But, as Diane had made him learn over the past several weeks, the odds of that were very small.

  And, damn it, he wanted his bump.

  O'Connor said in a matter-of-fact voice, "All in," pushing every penny of his into the huge pile of cash on the table, nearly a million and a half dollars.

  "Gentlemen, please show your cards."

  O'Connor turned over his kings. The crowd erupted in applause.

  And they then fell completely silent when McKennah turned over the mo
dest three and five of hearts to reveal his inside straight flush.

  O'Connor let out a slow breath, closed his eyes momentarily and smiled.

  He stood and, before taking the Walk of Shame, shook the hand of the man who'd just won himself one hell of a bump, not to mention more than a million dollars.

  *

  THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED the airing of Go For Broke were not the best of Mike O'Connor's life.

  The loss of a quarter-million dollars hurt more than he wanted to admit.

  More troubling, he thought he'd get some publicity. But in fact there was virtually none whatsoever. Oh, he got some phone calls. But they were mostly about the foiled robbery attempt and Dillon McKennah's rescue. He finally stopped returning the reporters' calls.

  His pilot for Stories was now completely dead and nobody was the least interested in hiring him for anything other than things like Viagra or Cialis commercials.

  "I can't do it, honey," he said to Diane.

  And she'd laughed, saying, "It wouldn't be truth-in-advertising anyway, not with you."

  And so he puttered around the house, painted the guest room. Played a little golf.

  He even considered helping Diane sell real estate. He sat around the house and watched TV and movies from Netflix and On Demand.

  And then one day, several weeks after the poker show, he happened to be playing couch potato and watching a World War II adventure film from the sixties. Mike O'Connor had seen it when it first came out, when he was just a boy. He'd loved it then and he'd loved it the times he'd seen it in the intervening years.

  But now he realized there was something about it he'd missed. He sat up and remained riveted throughout the film.

  Fascinating.

  Long after the movie was over he continued to sit and think about it. He realized that he could identify with the people in the movie. They were driven and they were desperate.

  He remembered a line from Homicide Detail. It had stuck with him all these years. His character, tough, rule-bending Detective Olson, had said to his sergeant, "The man's desperate. And you know what desperation does--it turns you into a hero or it turns you into a villain. Don't ever forget that."

  Mike O'Connor rose from the couch and headed to his closet.

  *

  "HEY, MIKE. HOW YOU DOING? I'm sorry it didn't work out. That last hand. Phew. That was a cliff-hanger."

  "I saw the ratings," O'Connor said to Aaron Felter.

  "They weren't bad."

  Not bad? No, O'Connor thought, they were over-the-top amazing. They were close to OJ confessing on Oprah, with Dr. Phil pitching in the psychobabble.

  "So." Silence rolled along for a moment. "What're you up to next?"

  Felter was pleased to see him but his attitude said that a deal was a deal. This was true in Hollywood just as much as on Wall Street. O'Connor had taken a chance and lost and the rules of business meant that his and the producer's arrangement was now concluded.

  "Taking some time off. Rewriting a bit of Stories."

  "Ah. Good. You know what goes around comes around."

  O'Connor wasn't sure that it did. Or even what the hell the phrase meant. But he smiled and nodded.

  Silence, during which the producer was, of course, wondering what exactly O'Connor was doing here.

  So the actor got right down to it.

  "Let me ask you a question, Aaron. You like old movies, right? Like your dad and I used to talk about."

  Another pause. Felter glanced at the spotless glass frames of his posters covering the walls. "Sure. Who doesn't?"

  A lot of people didn't, O'Connor was thinking; they liked modern films. Oh, there was nothing wrong with that. In fifty years people would be treasuring some of today's movies the way O'Connor treasured films like Bonnie and Clyde, M*A*S*H or Shane.

  Every generation ought to like its own darlings best.

  "You know, I was thinking about Go For Broke. And guess what it reminded me of?"

  "Couldn't tell you."

  "A movie I just saw on TV."

  "Really? About a poker showdown? An old Western?"

  "No. The Guns of Navarone." He nodded at the poster to O'Connor's right.

  "Go For Broke reminded you of that?"

  "And that's not all. It also reminded me of The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch, The Dirty Dozen, Top Gun, Saving Private Ryan, Alien...In fact, a lot of films. Action films."

  "I don't follow, Mike."

  "Well, think about...what was the word you used when we were talking about Stories? 'Formula.' You start with a group of diverse heroes and send 'em on a mission. One by one they're eliminated before the big third-act scene. Like The Guns of Navarone. It's a great film, by the way."

  "One of the best," Felter agreed uncertainly.

  "Group of intrepid commandos. Eliminated one by one...But in a certain order, of course: sort of in reverse order of their youth or sex appeal. The stiff white guy's one of the first to go--say, Anthony Quayle in Navarone. Or Robert Vaughn in The Magnificent Seven. Next we lose the minorities. Yaphet Kotto in Alien. Then the hotheaded young kid is bound to go. James Darren. Shouldn't he have ducked when he was facing down the Nazi with the machine gun? I would have. But, no, he just kept going till he was dead.

  "That brings us to women. If they're not the leads, they better be careful, Tyne Daly in one of the Dirty Harry films. And even if they survive, it's usually so they can hang on the arm of the man who wins the showdown. And who does that bring us to finally? The main opponents? The older white guy versus the enthusiastic young white guy. Tom Cruise versus Nicholson. Denzel versus Gene Hackman. Clint Eastwood versus Lee Van Cleef. DiCaprio versus all the first-class passengers on Titanic.

  "Kind of like the contestants on the show. Stodgy white guy, minority, hotheaded youth, the woman...Bingham, Stone, Kresge, Sandy. And after they were gone, who was left? Old me versus young Dillon McKennah."

  "I think you're pissed off about something, Mike. Why don't you just tell me?"

  "The game was rigged, Aaron. I know it. You wrote your quote 'reality' show like it was a classic Hollywood Western or war movie. You knew how it was going to come out from the beginning. You followed the formula perfectly."

  "And why the fuck would I do that?"

  "Because I think you're trying to get a movie financing package moving with Dillon McKennah. That caper film he was talking about. He'd shot himself in the foot with Town House and that other crap he appeared in. He needed a bump--for both of you."

  Felter was speechless for a moment. Then he looked down. "We talked about a few things, that's all, Dillon and me. Hell, you and I talked about Stories. That's my business. Oh, come on, Mike. Don't embarrass yourself. It was a fucking pissant reality show. There was no guarantee of a bump."

  "But it did get Dillon a bump. A big one. And you know why? Because of the robbery. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that was a classic Act Two reversal--according to the formula of scriptwriting. You know how that works. Big plot twist three-quarters of the way through. Guns of Navarone? The young Greek girl, Gia Scala, the supposed patriot, turns out to be the traitor. She destroys the detonators. How're the commandos going to blow up the German guns now? We're sitting on the edge of our seats, wondering."

  "What does that have to do with anything?"

  "The robbery, Aaron. The attempted robbery. It was all set up, too. You arranged the whole thing. That's what made it more than boring reality TV. My God, you even added a dash of COPS. You got the attempt and Dillon's Steven Seagal karate moves on security camera and that night it was on YouTube and every network in the country. TV at its best. You think there wasn't a human being in the country who wasn't going to turn on the second episode of Go For Broke and watch Dillon and me slug it out?"

  "I don't know what--"

  O'Connor held up a hand. "Now, don't embarrass yourself, Aaron. On the set of Homicide Detail, we had an advisor, a real cop in the LAPD. He's retired now but we're still good buddies.
I talked to him and told him I had a problem. I needed to know some facts about the case. He made some calls. First of all, the gun that Sammy Ralston had? It was a fake gun. From a studio property department. The sort they use on TV sets, the sort I carried for seven years. Second, turns out that his phone records show Ralston called a prisoner, Joey Fadden, in Lompoc prison a few weeks ago. The same prisoner that you interviewed as part of that series you shot on California prisons last year. I think you paid Joey to get Ralston's name...Ah, ah, ah, let me finish. Gets better. Third, Ralston keeps talking about this mysterious biker named Jake who put the whole thing together and nobody knows about."

  "Jake."

  "I dug up my fake shield from the TV show and went to the bar on Melrose where Ralston said he met with Jake. I had a mug shot with me."

  "A--"

  "From Variety. It was a picture of you and your assistant. The big one. The bartender recognized him. You got him to play the role of Jake, costume, fake tats, the whole thing...I just walked past his office, by the way. There're posters on his wall, too. One of them's Brokeback Mountain. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Jake. Think about it."

  Felter said nothing but his expression was essentially: Shit.

  "Dillon knew about the setup. He knew about the fake gun. That's why he took on a guy who was armed. He wasn't in any danger. It was all planned. All planned for the bump."

  O'Connor shook his head. "I should've guessed before. I mean, the final hand, Aaron? You know how most poker games end: Two guys half-comatose from lack of sleep and one beats the other with three sixes over a pair of threes. A four-of-a-kind versus a straight flush? That only happens in the movies. That's not real life."

  "How could I rig the game?"

  "Because you hired a sleight-of-hand artist as the dealer. You saw his card tricks when we met him...I ran him down. And I checked the tapes. There were no close-ups of his hands. I've got his name and address. Oh, and I also got the phone number of the gaming commission in Nevada."

  The man closed his eyes. Maybe he was thinking of excuses and explanations.

  O'Connor almost hoped he'd say something. Which would give the actor a chance to throw out his famous tag line from the old TV series. Save it for the judge.

  But Felter didn't try to excuse himself. He looked across the desk, as if it were a poker table, and he said, "So where do we go from here?"

  "To put it in terms of television, Aaron," Mike O'Connor said, pulling several thick envelopes out of his briefcase, "let's make a deal."