Plan B (38 page)

Alison remembered that we hadn’t eaten dessert and she brought out a batch of marshmallows and brownies, as well as some long hot-dog tongs we could use as spits to roast the marsh-mallows. In all the activity, no one but me heard the three short knocks on the back door. Given the insane nature of the evening so far, I was only mildly surprised when I opened the door to find Darth Vader standing on the Schollings’s deck. “Can I help you?” I asked the Dark Lord of the Sith.

“Let me in, Ben,” Jack said, his voice muffled by the mask. “I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

I stood aside mutely as he walked into the house and followed him into the living room, where he effectively silenced the conversation as everyone stared at him with varying degrees of concern.
Alison stood up slowly, gaping at Jack, who finally reached up and pulled off the Darth Vader helmet. There was a crackling of static electricity as the mask came off and it caused Jack’s hair to float comically around his head. He used his fingers to brush some greasy strands out of his face, smiled uncertainly and said, “Miss me?” Alison walked slowly across the room, her face twitching with emotion and Jack fell into her arms.

“That,” Jeremy announced, “is my mask.” We all laughed and the laughter seemed to break the spell on Chuck, Lindsey, and me. The three of us jumped up and ran to hug Jack and Alison and each other, patting and holding each other with tears in our eyes, acknowledging the enormous stress of the last few days now that we could finally relieve ourselves of it.

“Where were you man?” Chuck kept asking him. “Where the hell were you?” But Jack just held onto Alison with his eyes closed, not responding to any of our exhortations, until, as he began to slip down and out of her grip, it finally dawned on us that he had passed out.

Don and I carried Jack over to the couch and laid him down as Chuck ran into the kitchen to get his medical bag. We all watched as Chuck examined Jack, who by now had regained consciousness and was muttering to himself. “He’s dehydrated and he’s got a high fever,” Chuck said, frowning as he pulled out a stethoscope and slid it under Jack’s black T-shirt. I wondered where he’d gotten the shirt. “He may also have low-level hypothermia. Someone get some blankets.”

As Chuck continued to examine him, I noticed that Jack had a fair amount of cuts and scrapes on his neck and arms, as well as his chest. “Jesus,” I said. “Where the hell was he?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck said. “He’s suffering from exposure. It looks like he was outdoors for some time.”

“Is he in any danger?” Alison asked as Lindsey came downstairs with a load of blankets.

“Nah,” Chuck said. “I don’t think so. He just got himself sick.”

“High?” I asked, quietly.

“Can’t tell,” Chuck said. “Although the fever could be part of withdrawal, which would be a good sign.”

“Not high,” Jack mumbled, opening his eyes. “Just fucking cold.”

“You sure?” Chuck asked.

Jack grabbed Chuck’s wrist. “No drugs!” he whispered, his voice scratchy and hoarse. “I’m clean, man. Sick and sober.”

“Okay then,” Chuck said. “I believe you.”

“Better believe it, man,” Jack said, closing his eyes. “Better fucking believe it.”

Chuck wrote out some prescriptions, and Don drove into town to fill them. Lindsey made some vegetable soup, which Jack began to devour as if he hadn’t eaten in days. “Easy,” Chuck said, pulling the bowl away. “You want to keep it down, you have to go slow.” Jack nodded in understanding, but as soon as Chuck moved the bowl back, Jack began wolfing it down again. He just couldn’t help himself. Within a minute he began retching and Chuck took the bowl away. “Forget it,” Chuck said. “You’ll eat through your arm for the time being.” He produced an IV drip and inserted the needle into Jack’s arm. He had no stand for the bag, though, so he called a wide-eyed Jeremy over and had him perch on the sofa back holding the bag. “Just hold that until it’s empty,” Chuck told him. “It should take about forty-five minutes.”

“Okay,” Jeremy said gravely.

Chuck left to put away his bag and get a drink. Jack opened his eyes weakly to find Jeremy staring down at him in wide-eyed fascination. “Who’re you?” Jack asked him.

“Jeremy Miller.”

“Oh,” Jack said and closed his eyes again.

“He’s still pretty out of it,” I told Jeremy.

“I can’t believe that this is really him, you know?” Jeremy said. “Blue Angel. Right here on the couch.”

“When I see him in the movies, I think the opposite,” I said. “I think, I can’t believe that’s my friend Jack up there on the screen.”

“Do you think he’ll be okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, although I was wondering about the long-term prognosis.

“I was in the forest,” Jack told us the next morning, as if that made sense. We were all eating breakfast in the living room. His fever was down and some of his color had returned, although his face still appeared somewhat haggard. There were still dark pouches under his eyes, but he seemed bright and focused and significantly improved from last night. “I got this crazy notion that I had to get back to nature, you know? Like get born again or something, so I just took off into the woods.”

“Why the woods?” Alison asked. She was sitting by his feet at the edge of the couch, where she’d no doubt spent the night. Lindsey and I were on the love seat, and Chuck was on the armrest of the easy chair across from us. I’d walked a reluctant Jeremy home the night before, when the IV bag had been depleted. He was in school now, probably finding it almost impossible to keep the secret I’d asked him to for at least another day. As Don had been leaving last night he’d promised to stop by on his way out
of town, but he had yet to show up, so for now it was just the five of us, which was really the way it needed to be anyway.

“I don’t know,” Jack answered Alison. “I wasn’t thinking too rationally. When I left the house, I was planning on getting to town, calling Paul, and getting the hell out of Dodge, you know? I was going to have him wire me a ticket, and get my ass back to LA. I was already a little feverish, I think.” He stopped for a moment, a perplexed look crossing his face. “I didn’t even think to put on a shirt,” he said in disbelief. “Jesus, can you imagine that?”

“Get to the part where you become Tarzan,” Chuck advised him.

“Can I have a cigarette?” Jack asked.

“No, but you can have some oatmeal,” Chuck said.

“Christ,” Jack complained, but he didn’t turn down the oatmeal when Chuck put it in front of him.

“Slowly,” Chuck cautioned him.

We all watched Jack eat three or four spoonfuls as if it was the most fascinating spectacle we’d ever seen. It occurred to me that this must be what it’s like to be Jack Shaw the movie star. Everywhere he went, people surrounded him, trying to get a glimpse of even the most mundane aspects of his life.

“Anyway,” Jack continued, wiping his chin with his forearm. “I’m walking down the road, trying to hitchhike, but there’s like no one out there, and the few cars that go by don’t stop. It didn’t occur to me what I must have looked like. I thought for sure someone would recognize me and stop. Every time I go out I hope no one will spot me, and the one time I want to be spotted, no one does. Go figure. Anyway, I thought, no sweat, I’ll just walk. So I’m walking down the road and I’m looking at the mountains on both sides of the road, with all those trees and
everything, and they just looked so quiet, you know? And I thought about what would happen when I made it into town, and when I made it back to LA, between work and the media and all, and I just figured I’d be high again before too long. I’d either score something here, or Paul would have something for me when I got back—”

“Paul gives you drugs?” I asked incredulously.

“Yeah,” Jack said simply.

“That bastard,” Lindsey said

“He doesn’t shove them up my nose,” Jack said pointedly. “I’m the one who takes them.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Chuck said. “Your agent is a fucking drug dealer. You have to get rid of him.”

“It’s not that simple,” Jack said.

“It ought to be,” Chuck retorted angrily.

“Let it go,” Alison said softly. “We’ll deal with it later.”

Jack looked at her appreciatively. “Listen,” he said to Chuck. “I’m not denying that he’s part of the problem, okay. But I just don’t want to fall into the trap of pushing the blame onto anyone else. The problem is me and me alone, okay?”

“Okay,” Chuck said, although he clearly remained unconvinced.

“Anyway,” Jack said, after a few more spoonfuls of oatmeal. “I’m walking down the road, looking at these mountains, and it starts to rain, just this light drizzle, you know? And I feel the rain on my skin, and it feels good and clean, like the first clean thing I’ve felt in months. And I don’t know what happened then. I was just standing in the middle of nowhere, and it was dark as hell and there were these quiet mountains all around and I felt alone, but not in a bad way. I just felt like I was alone with myself for the first time in so long, you know?”

I’d lost count, but it seemed like the fifth or sixth “you know?”
in Jack’s narrative. He desperately wanted us to understand, to affirm his experience. Alison was nodding and I saw that her eyes were moist. “And I just thought,” Jack continued, “if I could just be alone like that for a while, I could somehow get a handle on myself, kind of get back in control. And the mountains and the forest just looked so peaceful, and one thing I was sure of was that I’d have one hell of a time trying to find any cocaine up there.”

“So you just walked into the forest and set up residence, like Thoreau?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” Jack said. “I wanted to sort of beat myself down. No food, no distractions, kind of like the Indians used to do, you know, to become a man.”

“You had a Native American bar mitzvah,” Chuck remarked, eyebrows raised.

Jack smiled. “Something like that.”

“And we were worried that an intervention would be too dramatic,” I said wryly.

Lindsey laughed. “We should have known we’d be outdone by a true professional.”

“What the hell did you do in the woods for three days?” Chuck asked him.

“I meditated mostly,” Jack said. “I thought about all of you and me and my life and the drugs and my career and everything, you know? I played these games where I would organize and reorganize my priorities. And I walked a lot, all over the woods, up one mountain and down the other. It’s really an amazing thing. Your natural instinct when you’re in the woods at night is to be afraid and get the hell out you know? And your natural instinct when it’s raining is to find shelter. And when I forced myself to ignore those instincts and just relax and embrace the rain, the cold, and my fears it was very liberating. And once I found myself liberated
from those needs, stopping the cocaine didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.”

“So why come back now?” I asked. “Aside from the fact that your friends were sitting here with their lives on hold worrying themselves sick about you.”

Jack smiled sheepishly. “It was just so fucking cold, man.” Everybody laughed. “Next time I go out to commune with nature, I’ll be better dressed for it.”

“Where’d you get the shirt?” Lindsey asked him.

“I don’t remember,” Jack said, frowning. “Where is it?”

“I threw it out,” Alison said. “It stank.”

“I don’t know. I must have found it in the woods.”

“You know you lost your wallet?” I asked him.

“I didn’t lose it,” he said. “I threw it into a stream. I didn’t want to be tempted to go into town and buy drugs. Wait, how do you know about that?”

I told him about how his wallet had been found, and how we’d all become suspects in his kidnapping and possible murder. “Jesus!” he said, breathing out slowly. “I don’t know what to say. It didn’t occur to me that it would be found.”

“I’m just curious,” I said, annoyed in spite of myself. “What did you think we’d all be doing here while you were gone?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, did you think we’d all just go home and give up on you? Did you think we would all quit our jobs and just stay here until you resurfaced?”

“Ben,” Alison said, trying to cut me off.

“No,” I said, surprising myself with the force of my resentment. “I want to know. Did it occur to you we might be worried? Did you even think about us?”

Jack looked up at me, his gaze unswerving. “No, I guess I didn’t, Ben, and I’m truly sorry about that, because you’re all
pretty much my only real friends. I was just zoned out, you know? I was in another world, and I guess I just figured you’d be here when I got back.”

“And here we are,” I grumbled, my anger dissipating in the face of his honesty.

“I knew I could count on you,” he said with a grin.

“Fuck you.”

“I love you, man.” He stood up and came over to hug me.

“No, fuck you,” I said, putting up my hands.

“I love you, Ben.”

“Fuck you,” I said again but by then I was laughing and he was hugging me and I realized that I was really, truly, glad he was back and that he was okay.

“So,” Alison said, interrupting our horseplay. “Do you think it worked?”

“What?”

“Your trip. Your time up there. Do you think you’ve kicked the habit?”