Rick Moody - The Diviners

Madison says, “Even Thaddeus doesn’t want to do a Thaddeus Griffin movie.”

Mercurio, the girls observe, is just pretending that he carries a loaded handgun and has guys working for him who are ruthless killers, because you have to have credibility with the fan base, and that fan base, the girls say, is white male private school students from large cities. Mercurio can’t afford to alienate white male private school students from large cities, and so he needs a handgun, the girls say, so that the private school kids believe in him. The Vanderbilt publicists do not have the same credibility problem and they don’t need handguns. They could borrow handguns if needed. They understand that credibility is imperative to all the people they represent, however, and they will do what they can at the corporate level to ensure that Mercurio’s credibility survives incessant advertising, television promotions, bad marriage choices, a house in the suburbs, homosexual dalliances, insider trading scandals, diva behavior, gavel-to-gavel trial coverage, all of that. Mercurio is so sweet and he has had such a rough life, what with losing his cousin in a plane crash. So you have to find something for Mercurio. He wants an independent film where he can work outside of his established persona, you know?

“Maybe a digitally animated version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?”

“Does it have like a hundred kinky positions in it?”

The girls miss Madison’s withering sarcasm, not because they are uninformed, but because they are talking too fast. Madison is so smart! Brunettes are smart! Sometimes she has both of them on hold, the Vanderbilt girls on two separate lines, Barclay and Sophie, and she just goes back and forth between them, and sometimes they have each other on hold at the same time, and sometimes she has them conference calling her. To summarize, Mercurio would like to take a meeting with Madison and then he would like to take a meeting with Vanessa, and Madison should definitely call up the guy from the Internet start-up, hair the color of wheat, and she should take him out to lunch. The girls tell her that the Internet developer guy is really serious, he really wants to learn about the movies, he’s totally cute, you wouldn’t believe.

And of course the cab is stuck in traffic, and the driver has one of those pine-scented tree car fresheners hanging from the mirror, and it’s going to pollute Madison, and she might have to puke. They pass St. Bart’s at a crawl. Madison is skeptical, as she is always skeptical, about the Internet start-up guy, but she takes out her personal digital assistant and she scans through the projects that she’s responsible for. Which of them might be worth bringing to the Internet start-up guy and which should she bring to Mercurio, and should she talk to Vanessa about Mercurio? And then she tells the girls that she has found a really excellent waxer, heard about her from a friend working at Jet Set, and the girls say, who? Like maybe they are a little irritated that they don’t already know about this waxer. But Madison doesn’t say who because sometimes you have to withhold information just a little bit, that’s how you end up being the monthly selection for the Vanderbilt girls, so she says that she is getting the Brazilian wax, and it is really excellent, and this happens not to be true at all, hurts like hell, and then the girls say, oh, by the way, did we tell you that the Internet start-up guy is a Mormon?

“A Mormon?”

“Yeah, a Mormon.”

“Really?”

From Utah and everything, and they do not know if this means that he has several wives all under the age of eighteen, but it does seem to mean that he doesn’t drink very much, if at all, and he comes from a parched western landscape, and maybe his great-grandparents, his people, came over the lip of the bluff in a wagon, having endured persecution and disrespect and murder all across these United States. Okay, Madison knows what Mormon is. A Mormon is someone with strange undergarments who has an obligation to go abroad to Africa when he’s fifteen to attempt to convert the Africans to his religion and who has, in the process, sexual experiences he never talks about. He has strange sheets. She says she’ll have to put them on hold, and she calls the Internet start-up guy, whose stock is plummeting, and she gets his assistant, and she says that she is Madison McDowell from Means of Production and she’d like to make a lunch date for that very day, which is Friday. Turns out the Internet start-up guy does have a name, and his name is Zimri. It’s the most incredible name, Zimri, sounds like a name for a Sufi dancer. Madison can understand how a half dozen sixteen-year-old Mormon girls would marry a guy called Zimri. And for a while she’s on hold at the office of the Internet start-up guy, and it’s playing music that is definitely not hip-hop Mercurio, and she’s wondering if maybe this is the music of the famous choir, or would that be a little obvious, you know, if you were a Mormon, to have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir playing on your voice mail service. Maybe she should option the life story of his great-grandparents, coming overland in their wagon trains, enduring persecution, fighting off mountain lions, singing about saints in the choir.

She’s responsible for the project about Otis Redding. Zimri might be interested in that. It’s a fictionalized narrative about Otis Redding, called Try a Little Tenderness, and it creates a thriller subtext around the life of Otis Redding, saying that Otis Redding did not have mob connections, you know, even though some people say he did. They really were not mob connections, according to the script, what they were was connections with the Nation of Islam. Which is ironic, because he was one of the first soul singers with a fully integrated band. Well, see, it’s an early point in his career, and he’s still back in Georgia and he’s just busting out of Little Richard’s band, where he got his start in the late fifties, and he falls under the sway of the Nation of Islam because he just wants to believe that some message of hope could transform the African American struggle. What Otis Redding does, in the script, is he comes to reject both the Nation of Islam and the gradualist politics of the white man. All of this while on his last tour, you know, before the plane goes down, just like with Mercurio’s cousin. Otis goes through an intellectual dark night of the soul on the last tour. He goes from the heights of ecstasy to the lowest lows; he sees into the troubled soul of this great land, and this is what enables him to write “(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay” while visiting friends in Marin County. There’s some stuff about Herbert Hoover, but this part hasn’t been worked out entirely yet, and there’s some stuff about the great soul players in his band, and there’s a little bit about his white girlfriends, including a woman who was married to a prominent senator from the state of Virginia, but they have to be really careful about that because Otis remained married his entire life, and the family has given permission to have the movie made, and if they don’t like the white girlfriends, then there won’t be permission to call the film Try a Little Tenderness or to use any of the original music. The third act will answer the question of who had Otis Redding eliminated. And the answer is that they haven’t quite figured out who eliminated him yet, because Vanessa wants it to be terrorists, for some reason, while Madison and the writer are leaning toward Cubans, in revenge for the Bay of Pigs.

Because she’s been left on hold too long, Madison puts Zimri the Internet start-up guy on hold in return and she goes back over to Barclay, half of the Vanderbilt partnership, and says, “Maybe Mercurio could play Otis Redding.”