Chapter 03 –The Good Guys: Part 1
"Axe!" LeBlanc barked as he wobbled into my eye line through the after work crowd at Julie’s Mansion; Illona reached sideways from her overstuffed chair and casually grabbed his belt to steady him.
"Couple loose cartons and lots of pins," he said, expelling a lung and a half of steely grey smoke into an unsuspecting room. "No ball caps," he added, waving a fickle path with his index finger. "The fuckers’ll steal’em on the way in."
He turned to leave; Illona released him into a lurch that Rob twisted into the pivot of an afterthought by swinging his arm to tap the side of his substantial nose. Rolling her eyes, Illona leaned forward to steady him as he sagely said, "Rio," meaning bring toilet paper, as if I would forget projectile shitting in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
"No sweat. I’ve still got some Canadian flag collar pins, as well," I said, re-establishing eye contact with the leggy woman who had been checking me out: early thirties, subtly painted, no ring on the killjoy finger. Even if...
"You’re gonna know sweat," Rob muttered toward the carpet, apparently willing his feet to move through the tangle of boots and purses that had ensnared him: pausing for an intellectually tedious drag on his cigarette, a solution made its way through the internal haze and he wiggled his toes. Locating his own shoes, he leaned toward the exit; Illona released him into God’s hands a day sooner than was scheduled on The Nationals’ assignment board.
"The flight to Rochester leaves at ten," I said to his back. "Meet you at customs at eight."
"Anything else he should know?" Percy, a pretentious technician who occasionally worked with him, said dryly: Rob had worked the bang-bang in Vietnam and half-a-dozen other countries that could have killed him just as dead, but with less prestige. I had only been married once so far.
Stopping short, LeBlanc swayed under the influence of combined poisons while the four women on the love seats next to ours snatched quick sips in preparation of another rutted pilgrimage into the remnants of his mind.
"When we hit the ground," Rob replied, turning to locate Percy, "Axe will say nothing he doesn’t want every fuckin’ one to know, and if the state plumber says shit runs uphill, he’ll stand on his head to fart. He won’t bitch about humping heavy shit through mined fields, because his second wife is getting nastier by the pound and dying quick is better than word by nagging fuckin’ word. S’not simple learnin how to act like a dumb-fuck who can’t find a shithouse without a producer booking the hole," he opined with a questioning glance at our table. An independent thought inserted itself, and he reached into his pocket to pull out a wad of crisp travel money. A twenty fluttered to the floor.
"I got everything except how snot is simple," Percy said, glancing toward the petite brunette sitting next to Legs.
Resolving that retrieving the bill was too risky, Rob jabbed a nicotine-stained finger toward Percy’s smug face, forgot what he was going to say, and instead peeled a hundred dollar bill from the stack in his hand.
"R.J., buddy?" I said, tapping my wrist where a watch would have been if I gave a shit about time.
Rob set the bill beside the hundred he had already put there, and left to pack for a three-week road trip.
Percy dismissed him with a pitiful shake of his head, while twice glancing toward the brunette for confirmation that she hadn’t caught on that it was his second wife who was gaining weight. She hadn’t. At the same time, the busty brunette sitting closest to Doug leaned over unnecessarily far to ask what catastrophe had befallen Rochester, New York.
"They’re working a story on cable TV programming," he said, blandly.
"Then they’re going to El Salvador," Illona said, picking the twenty off the floor. With a wink my way, she took the extra hundred from the table and handing me the money said just loudly enough, ‘If Legs doesn’t do you come and see me for your last one."
"Whom and what was the mad fornicator about?" Legs interjected, pronouncing for-neh-kay-tor conscientiously.
"That depends; do you work for a credit card company?" I said
Percy mouthed "whom?" toward the brunette, who tapped her temple in the universal sign to indicate intellectual capacity.
Without hesitation, in crisp sentences Katerina placed her life in time and space before closing her monologue with what I interpreted as sultry syllables insinuating a satin sheet ride if I was forthcoming. Setting my crystal glass aside, I cleared my throat in preparation of explaining the paradox that was Robbie (R.J.) LeBlanc.
I first told Katie that R.J. was a senior network news cameraman who worked and drank like an obsessive-compulsive never quite getting it right, and that correspondents from Washington to Hong Kong joked about his rare moments of lucidity with a confused respect for nature having compensated him with uncanny instincts, and a brilliant professional eye. I admitted that I hadn’t paid attention to his gifts during a year of constant embarrassment, as world events tortuously constructed our personal history, because it took all of my physical energy to keep up with a man fifteen years my senior, and all of my intellect to decipher his transmissions to Earth.
No-one-calls-me-Katie asked me if "Axe" was my temperament.
I told Kathy that I was one of the few among humanity, Nordic countries aside, who could correctly pronounce Axelson when they first read it aloud. Spelling it was another wondrous event, even when transposed from one document to another. As Robbie had discovered after only one attempt, there are three syllables in my name, so I became Axe, it stuck, and I didn’t mind.
"How did you come to recognize his genius?" Kathy-is-a-chatty-doll replied. “And Kate will do.”
"I didn’t realize his ramblings were veins of professional gold until an encounter in the London Press Club." I sipped my drink, and sat forward to explain that, as a part of the introduction ritual, a producer from France’s O.R.T.F. asked me whom I worked with. Without thinking, I said "Leblanc" as if his name was De Gaulle. Overhearing me, an Australian television cameraman passing by with fists full of beer stutter-stepped, expertly tilted the mugs so that only foam breached the rims, and said, "Fuckin’-ell–didn’t ‘ee go missin’ in Biafra? Bin sixteen years since the-bugger-an-me knocked some back."
"He’s missing wherever he is," Cliff, the CBC bureau chief would have said with affection had Rob’s expense reports never required his signature.
"Shoots crackin’ stuff, though. You with ‘im?" the cameraman said, motioning a pint my way.
"Ya–John," I said, mindlessly stretching my arm across the table.
"Tim," he said, placing a pint in my hand instead of setting it down. "Tell ‘im the Aussie is at the Imperial."
"Will do, but he has a hard time remembering last Saturday."
"No worries mate. Nam," he said turning away.
I told Kate–will-do that no one forgets a combat assignment, and that abbreviating locations is not so much slang as it is an earned turn of phrase, and respected as such. To use it otherwise is at a minimum considered pretentious.
"No matter how hard they live afterwards?" she said, shaking her head.
"There may be some gaps," I said, failing to appreciate her insight.
I next told Kay that in the silence acknowledging the slaughter of illusions that followed the utterance of ‘Nam’, we overheard Tim say, "You’ll never guess ‘oose in town," to which a cohort immediately replied, "Must be LeBlanc if he took me fuckin’ beer already."
"Recognition like that," I said, to the woman who was eyeballing me like a diabetic at a dessert buffet, "is the highest non-posthumous accolade you can get in this business. I paid attention to everything he said after that lunch."
"How did you learn to understand him?" Katerina-or-nothing said, chuckling.
I explained that R.J. established contexts through historical events and geographical references, like normal people would use Waterloo to reference a defeat. However, there were rarely more than three people on the continent who understood his waypoints—all of them colleagues who were familiar with particular assignments. Even then, Robbie conjufuckgated so many disparate elements of his travels that even close friends were often obliged to intuit his meaning.
"Now that we’ve shared enough experiences to have evolved our own Waterfuckin’loos," I said, taking a sip of scotch, "there’s a beautiful irony about translating his reality for local reporters who consider working with him a trial by fire, while internationally vetted journalists fight over his time."
Staring as though I’d vanish if she took her eyes off me, Katerina asked me why I called him different names—or was it a quirk of all television crews to clip identifiers, she quipped dryly.
"Usually, it’s about circumstance," I explained. "Robbie and Rob are off duty names. Leblanc kind of addresses the legend, but face to face, and R.J. is code: he can’t see anything to his right when we’re shooting, so if I see something he needs to know about, I call him R.J., and he does whatever I say without asking me why." I snapped my fingers.
"There’s a lot more to you than you’ve shown in this place," Kat purred provocatively.
Sadly, this is all I remember about my last truly naïve night on the planet. The morning shoot in New York was also lost to a thumping, dehydration blur that mercifully gave way to an antihistamine-induced coma during the late afternoon flight to the place I would earn the right to call Salvador in press clubs around the world. And in the wee hours, hope the flashbacks would be in black and white...
I thought the profanity worked in the context of a scene that implied terrible things past, and to soon come again, but I questioned the wisdom of offering a sexploit in the first material Jeanette might read, so I didn’t print it. Show and tell could wait; I had wowed her sufficiently, and there was a lot more where that came from.
During her early lessons, Jeanette learned to assess people’s beliefs through the language they used. The key, body language aside, was to embrace a conclusion don Juan Matus made in Carlos Castaneda’s writings—while endlessly rehearsing our self-image, we unwittingly practice a different set of beliefs than those we state. A related observation from Jeanette, and most helpful in terms of all my early lessons, was that nothing exists independently of anything else. It followed that properly assessing a single statement for its underlying nature reveals a deeper pool of beliefs.
The following slice of conversation is an example of what Jeanette could glean from just a few words. Of course, I didn’t realize she had acquired this ability when we first met, but it later explained why her conversational contributions were often quirky, thereby evoking specifically focused responses from me.
We were following two twenty-something girls out of a mall when one of them complained to her friend, "Whatever happened to the customer is always right?"
"Retail is a gyp," her girlfriend commiserated.
Jeanette tugged on my arm to slow our pace, and to let the girls move out of earshot.
"Gypsy's aside," she then said clinically, "customer service is about correcting company or customer errors and misunderstandings according to the policies of manufacturers and retailers. There is no moral imperative, spoken or implied, and little that is personal about transactions between strangers, other than what their perceptions of personality and fairness can create out of an act of commerce. The continuity of the girls’ thinking dictates that other aspects of their lives will be plagued by affront and confusion, because they don’t realize they have made their happiness subject to availability, credit approval, processing fees, and that reality may not be exactly as illustrated. Their emotional investments come with thirty-day manufacturing defect protection before their satisfaction becomes a warranty issue. True joy for them," she quipped, "has to be hand washed, never bleached, and if the girls read a promise into a sale's philosophy instead of reading the label, they will end up calling 1-800 Tough Go. Does this make sense?"
Because we had discussed social influences by this time, I said, "Everything the girls believed about their circumstance was based on their reasoning being manipulated through their gender, age, and commercial cultural influences?"
"And therefore how they think in general, just as you created a ‘man’s world’ out of selective elements of your combat assignments." She said this as if it was an obvious comparison…which it suddenly was to me.
Finished writing for the day, I went for a two kilometer shuffle I would euphemistically call jogging until it was true, then I took a shower as a rare cloudless blue outside my window bowed to a tawny dusk. Still half an hour early for our appointment, I walked four blocks down Pendrell Street and across Denman to the English Bay Café, where I expected a double dram of Scottish bog would add sparkle to my personality. I was still dull from the night before.
"Waiting for someone," I said to the hostess, nodding toward the back bar.
"Aren’t we all," she replied laconically, as I passed her by.
With a quick glance back, I saw her sardonic grin abruptly change to fright, and I barely managed to sidestep a striking woman in a sea-green summer dress. Quickly regaining my balance, I assembled my boyishly crooked smile to apologize, when she exclaimed, "You must be John!" thereby announcing our circumstance to the entire dining area.
Figuratively off balance, the spontaneous cleverness that having no tact had forced me to develop over the years abandoned me like sincerity in a confessional, and I tardily squawked, "You must be Jeanette!" sounding like an elderly parrot on Valium.
Laughing as if I had intended to be funny, Jeanette tugged on my sleeve leading us to a table as if we were a couple playing a familiar game.
Soon seated with drinks on the way, our exchange of approval pleasantries flowed like the patter of old friends meeting after years apart, including finishing each other’s sentences and chuckling at the same unspoken ideas. Ironically, I was thinking this was too good to be true, just as our phone call had been, when she made me think I might be right: Jeanette interrupted my lead line about travelling to England, as a prelude to a battle tale, to say she had made a decision that had irrevocably altered her life, as well.
I hadn’t said anything like that, but I couldn’t deny that it was true; I dutifully asked her what it was.
"Oh—I’m sorry; it’s too soon for that," she said sheepishly. Suddenly pitching forward, with misplaced ardor she said, "Why did you go to England? Why did you leave, for that matter?"
I thought our rapid-fire exchange might have caused a slip of tongue, which made little sense because we had been bottom-dealing nuance since my stunned Polly impression; then I noticed her emerald eyes were illuminating mischief lines in her expression.
"I went to England to freelance, and I left by invitation," I said as if no time had passed.
"Were you standing around the palace when a guard told you to move along, and you didn’t think to ask how far?"
"A work visa problem moved me along. Didn’t Tom mention that?"
"He said something about a deportation to enhance my interest in you," she said, with a discerning grin. "Why did you end up leaving Toronto to come here—the freelance world not as good as you thought it would be?"
"It was time to go."
"What happened?" she said too eagerly.
"Nothing big," I said, unsure if she was mocking me for some reason.
"It was big enough to bring you here?" she said, innocently.
"I guess stuff just added up until it made sense to leave," I said, cutting short a peppery sip of Caesar.
"Can I assume you’re ashamed of that stuff, so I’ll stop asking you about it?"
"Not at all." I shrugged to hide my surprise at her assumption. "I hit the wall writing a book, and a friend suggested I enter a short story contest to clear my head. I was fiddling with…"
"What was it about?"
"A guy gets a letter from a friend who’s killed while working in conflicts. Still wondering what could have gone wrong, because the old pro had taught the young guy how to work in that world, he makes a call to the network to fill the vacancy."
Jeanette stared as if I had farted.
"It’s called, ‘You Taught Me Well,’ as in he won’t make the same mistake," I explained.
"Ahhhh," she said, stretching a breath, "which is exactly what he’s about to do. Clever. Can I read it?"
"Huh? Ya, sure. Anyway, I was working on that when I heard about development grants; I mentioned that last night."
She nodded for me to carry on.
"I had just finished working a job in Northern Ontario, a story filled my head, and I thought what the hell? Maybe four months later…"
"A story just filled your head?" She snapped her fingers.
"Writing the proposal was more like copying than making it up. Anyway," I shrugged again, "about four months later, the short story came in the money at the same time a core client and I weren’t getting along. After that..."
"You saw the inevitable heading your way," she interjected, bobbing her head in recognition of a familiar experience.
"After that, my grant was approved on the same day that I got an offer to teach at my old college."
"When it rains…" Jeanette said, "but I haven’t heard anything that would cause you to move three thousand miles into unemployment."
"I haven’t gotten to that part… for some reason." I said wryly.
"Please continue," she said demurely.
"Thank you, madam. Freelancing in Toronto wasn’t looking good in the long term, and the teaching offer evolved into something I wasn’t interested in." I picked up my glass. "I talked to Ed, and he offered to underwrite my career change if I moved here. Like I said, little stuff added up."
"Giving up the sure thing was gutsy. Do you know how you actually made up your mind to come here?"
Having no idea what she meant, I grinned and said, "How many ways are there?"
"Four," she replied easily. Glancing at the ceiling, she amended her statement. "No—there are five common ways of making up one’s mind," she said confidently.
"Don’t let me interrupt you."
With a curious nod to imply challenging her claim was uncalled for, Jeanette said, "We all have an internal dialogue that follows different processes depending on our perceived circumstance." Counting on her fingers, into my less amused expression, she said, "If the timing isn’t important, we can boil down some situations into simple arithmetic and play the odds, or," she touched a third finger, "we can grind answers out of our experiences if it’s a close call. If timing matters, we might react from necessity, or our egos might take over the ship. Anything familiar yet?" she grinned.
"They all fit to some degree," I said evasively.
"Was your move here a life altering decision?" she persisted.
"Any move could be thought of in that way," I deflected.
"Yet you didn’t assess the very moment of making that important decision?"
"I told you, twice actually, that a bunch of little stuff added up."
"You didn’t say what influenced that moment of significance." She raised her brow.
"How would I know that after seven months?" I chuckled awkwardly. "And what does it matter now?" I shrugged.
"Do you mean it?"
"Mean what?"
"Do you want to know what influenced you, and why it matters?"
"Go ahead," I said, thoroughly puzzled.
"Let’s look at what just passed between us, as a framework for investigating your decision making process."
"Okay, let’s do that," I said, looking for our server.
With a crisp grin she might have thought I didn’t see, she said, "You thought I was kidding about the ways there are to make decisions, then you felt put on the spot by me asking specifically about one experience. Your ego took over to ‘twice actually’ put me in my place," she mimed quotation marks, "instead of your brain grinding out an answer you didn’t realize was available to you, because it’s rare that anyone properly assesses any moment." She pitched forward to touch my hand. "I only speak about these kinds of personal evaluations to special people, because everyone else takes offence so easily." Jeanette painted the word ‘easily’ with exasperation.
"I can see how that might be," I said studiously.
She settled back in her chair.
"Good," she said, reaching for her drink, "so let’s go through the processes: what did you feel in the moment you decided to come to Vancouver?"
Pausing to try to recall that moment, I honestly said, "I felt a mixed sense of loss and relief, like when you realize the end of something is certain, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Or maybe there’s nothing you want to do about it."
"That’s the moment we recognize the demise of a circumstance, which frees us to create a better one. What thought drove the idea of moving here?"
"It’s a beautiful place, and Ed lives here."
"How do you know him?"
"We met in basic training for the Navy, in 1970."
"Go back to Toronto in your mind."
"I’ve been interrogated before," I grinned.
"Meaning?" she said innocently.
"I’m familiar with techniques of loosening people’s thoughts to catch them in lies."
"Are you lying to me?"
"No, but...."
"Then why not go back to Toronto in your mind for me?" she said simply.
I wanted to argue the unreasonableness of expecting me to pinpoint a single moment, but my mind shifted focus as if it had been whisked there on her silent command; I suddenly understood what she was after. "None of my options looked good," I said confidently.
"The arithmetic method seems to be how you made up your mind, so why did you call Ed?"
Interestingly, hearing this took me past that phone call to the moment of my actually making a decision; Ed’s presence in Vancouver, and his generous offer were certainly influences, but they were not the deciding factor. Enjoying this odd moment of reflective clarity, I said, "This may sound too simple, but I think it’s what you’re after."
"Don’t worry about what I might think… ever," she said softly.
"Ultimately, by which I mean I know this was my deciding factor, I didn’t feel there was anything wrong with coming here."
"Excellent. That’s the fifth option; you did it as an act of faith."
"Pardon me?"
"You trusted that things would work out even though you focused on the negative to discover how you really felt," she said with a tiny shrug.
"Faith had nothing to do with it," I said coolly. "I’ve seen people pray for a battle to pass by their homes, instead of leaving with us, because they didn’t believe a softening up bombardment is an oxymoron. Faith is a sucker punch," I explained into her baffled expression.
Scholastically, Jeanette said, "Your intensity mourns its loss concerning the rest of humanity, but your actions say that something inside you knew what to do. When you stopped fretting over peripheral circumstances your choice became clear." She waved her statement aside as if it had been embarrassingly obvious. Offhandedly, she said, "You can tell me what happened when you’re ready. The same applies to your screenplay, by the way."
"The same what?"
"If you were happy with your screenplay, you would have brought a scene to impress me." Wearing an elfish expression to diffuse my affront, in spite of her being correct, she shrugged another miniscule affair. "You also wouldn’t have fired a salvo at me if your faith in anything other than yourself hadn’t been damaged. As I said, whenever you’re ready is fine. Or not."
Puzzled by the warmth of her indelicate approach to sizing me up, I felt trapped into explaining at least one of the issues she had mentioned: I told her about my diluted screenplay plot, to explain why I had arrived empty handed.
"Quality barbershop quartets can create the illusion of a fifth voice called a ringing chord," she said when I was finished. "It’s very difficult to do."
"Hmm." I nodded as if I had a clue what she meant.
Chuckling, she said, "Your off-topic insights created the illusion of outside influences being active in your plot, without directly referring to them. You should run with it—it sounds like a gift waiting to be opened." She looked at me expectantly.
"My deadline is too close for that. Besides, Tom came up with a practical solution. Still..." I said, indicating that I wasn’t out of trouble.
"You’re experienced enough to know that expedience is everything it’s cracked up to be, and you’re letting a deadline ruin your story after all of that hard work?" Who’s to say that listening to the fifth-voice isn’t the way to go?" She sipped her drink.
"Following peripheral issues is what put me in shit—not that it hasn’t worked before," I quickly added, lest she think I was unimaginative. "You are a curious one," I said ambiguously.
Pushing her drink to one side, Jeanette left me a full sentence behind by dealing with my idle comment as a personally important topic.
"It takes time to get to know people in the best of circumstances, but in superficial surroundings like these it can be more work than it’s worth." A bolt of cynicism creased her academic expression, the influence departed with the memory of whoever he was, and she continued casually. "I don’t mean some people aren’t worth knowing. I’m saying there’s no point in trying to penetrate their social mask unless they’re ready to look at themselves, like you did a minute ago." She rested a hand on mine. "I also cut to the chase with special people, but it can still unnerve them."
"Is that why you hold their hands down?"
An electric interlude passed between us; she slid her hand away, leaving them both flat on the table. Whether she did this in anticipation of comforting me or protecting herself was unclear.
"It sounds more like you study people than interact honestly with them," I said, my casual tone belying an accusation of deception.
"We all do that in our own way." Jeanette reached across the table; tapping twice on