Donald Westlake - Get Real

Well, it didn’t matter, he just had to do it. So he made himself come to the OJ tonight a little after ten, half-hoping this would not be a night when they were present here, and when he walked into the place he saw the bartender in patient but apparently indecisive conversation with a foreign person who appeared to be unequipped in English. This distraction had made it easy for Doug to slide on by the chattering habitués at the left end of the bar and hurry down the hall to that closed back room door. When he leaned against it, ear to the old wood, he could just hear the murmur of voices, but not what they were saying.

They were here! His heart pounding, Doug tried to decide what to do. Should he just barge in on them and hope to talk fast enough so they’d understand his problem before they threw him out? Or should he simply knock on the door, like any normal visitor, which might provoke who knew what kind of response? Or should he leave them their private space and go back out to the bar and take a table there and order a drink—yes to that part—and wait for them to come out, in hopes that then and there he could talk to them, persuade them, convince them?

It was an impossible situation. He stood there, indecisive, trying to find some ray of hope in any of the options before him, stood there who knows how long, and all of a sudden the door opened, and there was Stan, of all people, with the other four seated at the table behind him. Doug had greeted Stan with honest surprise and pleasure, and Stan had responded by slamming the door in his face. (Well, closing the door, but still.)

He had to go forward. He could not retreat. And he could not simply wait for them to open this door again; that might be hours from now. He had to force the issue, dammit, force the issue. Firmly he reached out and turned the knob and opened the door.

They were all seated now, at all the chairs except the one with its back to Doug. “Guys, I’m sorry I—” Doug started, and all five of them reared back to point in various directions and tell him in various loud and pungent ways to get lost.

“I need you guys!” he cried. “I’m in terrible trouble. Please, just listen to me. Let me tell you what happened.”

Something in his desperate manner caught their attention, if not their interest, or their sympathy. They looked at one another, and then Tiny said, “You wanna tell us a story.”

“A story? I—” Then he nodded, quickly. “That’s right,” he said. “I want to tell you a story.”

“Then you go back out there,” Tiny said, “and you tell Rollo, you came here to see what the boys in the back room will have, and they will have another round. And these two will have another bottle. All on you.”

“Oh, I know that,” Doug said, but couldn’t resist adding, “all on the production. No problem. I’ll be right back.”

When he hurried out to the bar, the foreign gentleman was gone and the bartender was picking up random glasses from the backbar, wiping them a little bit with a small towel, and putting them down again. Doug caught his attention, made his request, handed over his credit card, got it back, and the bartender slid over to him a tray containing a bottle that claimed to contain bourbon, two draft beers, a glass of gin and tonic and ice and lemon peel (his own addition), and a glass of red liquid that was undoubtedly not cherry soda.

“Tell them I’ll grab the trays later,” the bartender said.

“I will. Thank you.”

The tray was too heavy and too tippy to carry one-handed, so Doug carried it in two hands, which, at the other end of the hall, meant the only way to deal with the door was not to knock on it but to kick it, which seemed aggressive but couldn’t be avoided. So he kicked it, gently, and Stan, on his feet again, opened to him and said, “Good. That’s good. You did good. Sit there.”

So he sat with his back to the door and said, “I really appreciate this, fellas.”

“Tell us the story,” Tiny said.

“All right.” Doug lubricated a bit with gin and tonic and said, “Just to give the highlight, The Stand fell apart. Today. While we were downtown.”

Andy said, “Fell apart? The vegetable stand?”

“No, the whole show.” Doug needed more lubrication. “All at once, Kirby, the younger son, the one that wanted to come out of the closet on a G-rated series, all at once he runs off with a human cannonball from some cheap one-ring circus going through those small towns up there. At the same time, the older son, Lowell, the shy intellectual on the show, decides to go into a Buddhist monastery up in Vermont with a vow of silence, and, needless to say, no telephone. And what apparently set them both off was because the parents, with no warning at all, announced they’re getting divorced, because she’s in love with the family plumber and he’s tired of northern winters and he’s taken a job managing a chain motel in Tahiti. They’re all gone, there’s nobody there to run the stand, and the truth is, it was never a viable business anyway, the only reason to have a stand like that in a location like that was because of the show. So now it’s gone and we’ve got nothing.”

Tiny said, “Do something else.”

“I’d love to do something else,” Doug told him, “but you’d be amazed how many topics have already been covered by reality shows. Undertakers. Plastic surgeons. Long-distance truckers. Polygamists, though tastefully. And besides, I’ve still got another problem.”

Andy said, “I know this is mean to say, but somehow I can’t get enough of your problems, Doug. Lay it on us.”

“Before we knew you guys were gonna ankle,” Doug said, “we put together a rough cut of the season so far and showed it to the next level of bosses, up at Monopole, and they love it. They think it’s gonna be a breakout. They’re already selling it overseas.”

Everybody took a minute to absorb that, and then the kid said, “That guy Ray you sent us, the ringer—”

“He really does walk on walls,” Doug said.

“We know,” the kid said. “And we also know he really is an actor, and the reason he was there was to spy on us and report to you.”

“Well, I wouldn’t phrase it like that ,” Doug said. “Besides, what does that have to do with anything?”

“Cast us all with actors,” the kid said.

“Great idea,” Andy said. “You’re not showing our faces anyway.”

“But that isn’t reality,” Doug objected. “That isn’t the way it works.”

John said, “Why not? How real is reality anyway?”

“Real enough,” Doug said. “If we use actors, then it’s got to be a scripted show, so then we need writers, and all at once we’re into unions and all kinds of other expenses and it prices us right out of the market. The whole point of reality shows is to give the networks a way to fill airtime on the cheap.”

John said, “Okay, I see your problem, so now let me tell you our problem. There’s no robbery there.”

Doug didn’t grasp that at all. “But,” he said, “you agreed Knickerbocker Storage would be bound to have—”

“It doesn’t,” Stan said, in the flat tone of one who knows.

“It was always a fake anyway,” John said.

Doug said, “A fake? Why? How?”

“Well, mostly,” Andy said, “it’s your fault.”

“Oh, not something else,” Doug said.

John said, “You remember, way back when, we’re trying to figure out what job you’d like to make a movie of, and I said something about cash, and you said you never saw cash anywhere—”

“And then you hiccupped,” Andy said.

Doug looked at him. “I did?”

“We both noticed it,” Andy said. “All of a sudden, you remembered where you’d seen cash, and you tried to cover up for it.”