Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

Bleat-bleat. Bleat-bleat. Bleat-bleat.

“I’m awake!”

“You sitting down, punkin’?”

“Gimme a second.” Rory poured himself the last of the hot milk and a final cup of coffee, balancing his cup and saucer as he rolled back on a leather recliner. “I am actually reclining now.”

“The press tour is canceled.” Irene was old school. Press junkets were what corporations organized to sell product. Press tours were what movie stars did to promote their films.

Rory spit café au lait all over his bare legs and the leather recliner. “Huh? Wha’?” he said.

“Go online and you’ll see why.”

“I never got the wi-fi password.”

“Willa is divorcing that venture capital vulture of hers.”

“Why?”

“He’s going to jail.”

“He do something crooked and piss off the feds?”

“Not the feds. Hookers. In his car on Santa Monica Boulevard. Seems he was in possession of something other than his medical marijuana, too.”

“Wow. Poor Willa.”

“Willa will be fine. Weep for the studio. Cassandra Rampart 3: Destiny at Hand Job will take a hit at the box office.”

“Should I call Willa and tell her how sorry I am?”

“You can try, but she and her team are on a plane somewhere over Greenland. She’ll hide out at her horse ranch in Kansas for a few weeks.”

“She has a ranch in Kansas?”

“She grew up in Salina.”

“What about the big events on the docket for today? Fireworks and the French Air Force and all those orphaned pets?”

“Canceled.”

“When do we go on to Singapore and Seoul and Tokyo and Beijing?”

“We don’t,” Irene said, without an ounce of regret in her voice. “The outlets want only one thing, Willa Sax. No offense, but you’re just the guy in her movie. Rory No One. Remember that poster I had in my office that said ‘What if they gave a press conference and nobody came?’ Oh, wait. You’ve never been to my office.”

“What happens now?”

“I leave on the studio plane in an hour. Not looking forward to that twelve-hour bitchathon. The movie opens domestically in four days, and the first paragraph of every review will be about hookers, OxyContin, and the man who paid for sex while wed to Willa Sax. Sounds like the plot of Cassandra Rampart 4: The Parole Hearing .”

“How do I get home?”

“That’ll be handled by Annette in the local office.”

“Who is Annette?” Rory had met so many people throughout the junket the names and faces might as well have been of Martians.

Irene called him punkin’ a few more times, told him he was just aces all around, a real mensch, and that she thought he was going to have a fantastic career should CR3: DAH make its money back. And, she liked the movie, actually. Thought it was cute.

I don’t speak Russian. The French language has too many letters and punctuation marks to make sense to me. Good thing this other typewriter is in English.

I think Willa Sax—a.k.a. Eleanor Flintstone—is a great gal who doesn’t deserve this. She deserves a better guy than one who likes streetwalkers and hillbilly heroin. (A guy like me! Not once in one thousand interviews did I ever confess my deep and constant crush on that lady. Irene told me not to be that honest with the press. “Tell just enough of the truth, but never lie.”)

I have a pocket full of money. Per diem. In every city Irene handed me an envelope of cash! Not that I had a chance to spend any of it. Not in Rome. Nor Berlin. In London I had no free time. Maybe I should see what pleasures a few euros will buy me here in Paris…

LATER!

I went outside of a hotel on my own for the first time since Berlin.

Hey, Paris ain’t bad! I was expecting the usual hordes outside the hotel, the fans hoping for a glimpse of Willa. Hundreds of them, mostly men, duh, have been waiting outside, photographers, autograph hounds, et cetera. Willa called them the Paper Boys. They are gone now, the word probably having gone out that Willa Sax has left the City of Light.

Annette LeBoogieDoogie says just because the junket is canceled I don’t have to fly home immediately. I am free to linger in Paris, in all of Europe if I want, but on my own money.

I just did some wandering around, in fact. I crossed the river via a famous bridge, then walked right by Notre Dame. I dodged the scooters and the bikes and the tourists. I saw the glass pyramid of the Louvre Museum, but did not go in. No one recognized me. Not that they should. Not that they would. Rory No One, that’s me.

I walked into the gardens—the place where we were going to have a huge event with rock bands and jets flying by and fireworks and thousands of people wearing free 3-D glasses. Instead, crews were breaking down the stage and the screen. The barricades were still up but were made moot. There was no one to keep back.

Beyond the gardens was a big traffic circle called Place de la Concorde—millions of cars and Vespa scooters, lanes and lanes of them going both ways and around and around a monument needle in the center. A huge Ferris wheel has been there since 1999. Bigger than the one in Budapest—when was that? When did I make the movie there? In junior high? The one in Paris is not nearly the size of that one in London, the one that goes around only once, very slowly. When did we have that huge press conference in front of that thing, the event that had the children’s choir and the Scottish Mounted Light Cavalry and one of the lesser members of the royal family? When was that? Oh, right. Last Tuesday.

I bought a ticket but did not have to wait long for the Ferris wheel to let me on. Hardly anyone was in the line so I had the car all to myself.

I went around a bunch of times. Up high I saw the city stretch to the horizon, the river wind its way to the south and to the north, with many fancy, long boats sliding beneath all the famous bridges. I saw what is called the Left Bank. And the Eiffel Tower. And the churches up on the hills. And all the museums along the broad avenues. And all the rest of Paris.

Before me was the whole of the City of Light and I saw it for free.

SO MANY RUMORShere at da Paper! The Bull Elephant in the room says the Tri-Cities Daily News/Herald is giving up the economic ghost of a printed version of our Great Triple-Metropolitan Newspaper. If/when such a business move is made, the only way you’ll be reading my column and everything else you now hold in your hands is on one of your many digital devices—your phone, maybe, or a watch that needs recharging every night.

SUCH IS PROGRESS,but it makes me think of Al Simmonds, a rewrite man at the old Associated Press. My career at the AP lasted close to four years, but I would have been quickly pink-slipped were it not for Al Simmonds, who took the choppy prose and schoolkid syntax from my reporter’s notebook and turned those scribbles into bona fide news copy. Al is long gone, bless his heart, so he never saw the advent of reading a newspaper on a laptop or pad. He passed away before the idea was any more real than the Starship Enterprise . Not sure the man even had a TV, as he complained that nothing good was on the radio since Fred Allen went off the air (this story is now carbon-dating me!)…

AL’S TYPEWRITER WASa Continental—a beast nearly the size of an easy chair—bolted to his desk, not because anyone would try to steal the thing. You’d have been foolish to have tried to lift it. Al’s desk was a small, narrow altar of editing. He would bang out his version of my copy—leaner, crisper, better, dang it—then flip up the typewriter on hinges, and on the cleared space go at his own stuff with a blue pencil. The man made quite a racket doing his job a few hundred times a shift—the chonk-chonkka of his typing with the ba-ding of the bell, the krannk of the carriage return, the shripp of the copy ripped from the machine, then the ka-bump of his tossing back of the massive tool of his trade to scribble away with an even more primitive mode of writing. Al was at one with that typing machine and was never more than a yard away from it and his desk. He sent me out for coffee and food on many occasions, but when I came back with the delivery he’d be hacking away at some copy and I’d have to set the food on a nearby stool until he flipped up the Continental and made room for his lunch. If Al Simmonds sounds like a stereotype, a cartoon version of a newsroom denizen, he was in every way but one: he didn’t smoke and hated all the dopes at the AP who did.