Chris Mitchell (22 page)

“She happens to be a very special friend of mine,” he said, taking the picture back. “And now she’s applying for a job at Starbucks.”

“Maybe she can go to Universal,” I said.

“Maybe
Sam
can go to Universal,” Brady spat. “So she took a couple of pictures. So what? She didn’t hurt anybody. They didn’t end up on the Internet or go home with a guest. Everybody takes out-of-character pictures. Here.” He handed me a stack of photos, each one depicting a different character in the Disney roster, behaving inappropriately: Aladdin on a cell phone, Cinderella on the toilet, Prince Eric kissing the Snow Prince. “Everybody does it. Nobody gives a fuck. Except Sam. So he made an example out of my friend.”

“Couldn’t you talk to him?” I suggested. “You used to be friends.”

“Friendship is a tandem bike,” he said. “You have to work together or you’re never gonna make it to the ice cream shop. For ten years now, I’ve been pedaling and Sam’s been putting on the brakes. No, the time for talking is long gone. I promise you this: before the end of the year, one of us will be gone from Disney.” Brady looked at the framed photo affectionately. “Good color balance, by the way.”

Brady went back into the kitchen and reappeared with a tray of sushi and a large bottle of cold sake. No sooner did we begin eating than I heard a scratching at the bedroom door. Brady pretended not to hear it. “I suppose I could just spend some time researching Sam—dig up a little dirt—stuff that Disney would salivate over. It wouldn’t be hard to find…”

The scratching behind the door became more insistent. It stopped for a moment, then started again with a muffled whimper. “Either your hostage is trying to escape,” I said, “or it’s dinnertime for man’s best friend.”

Brady wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing white face paint across his lips and knuckles. “Just ignore it,” he said, filling my sake cup. “But if I got Sam fired, I suppose they’d approach me again for a management position, and I’d politely decline again. And some other douche bag would slip in to make my life miserable.”

“You wouldn’t want to be a manager?”

Brady popped a plump piece of octopus in his mouth and chewed without mercy. “Do I look like the management type?” He spat a piece of rice as he said this. “Seriously, twenty years in Disney characters does not make me the best candidate. It makes me crazy. Wanna know something? I never dreamed of being president or leading an army. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Batman. I wanted to be the sniper who got behind enemy lines and got the job done while the system languished under its own bureaucratic bulk.”

“A lone wolf,” I said. Behind the door, the whimpering got louder, the scratching more frenzied. “So what’s a sniper doing working at Disney World?”

He shook his head and swallowed the octopus. “You’re not asking the right question,” he said. “First, you need to understand my goals. What am I trying to snipe? Batman fought evil. Robin Hood robbed from the rich. John Galt stole the most creative, productive minds in the world. You need to understand the motivation before you can figure out the mission.”

“Okay, then, what’s your motivation?”

Suddenly, the dog behind the door started barking, mean, throaty, growling yelps that physically disturbed the air and made the crystals in the chandelier shimmer. Brady put down his chopsticks and went to the bedroom door. He opened it as if he were going to slide through, but the door flew open and a dirt-colored pit bull bolted through and headed straight for me. I fell backward off my chair, covering my face with my arms, and rolled myself into a fetal ball until I realized I wasn’t being attacked. The dog was standing on my chair, wolfing down my sushi.

Brady helped me to my feet, where I watched from a distance as he pushed the pit bull away from the table and led her back to the bedroom. She was healthier and fatter, and her fur was no longer patchy, but she was familiar. “Is that the same dog—,” I started.

“We rescued,” Brady finished, closing the door again. “Yeah.”

“I thought you gave her to an animal trainer.”

Behind the heavy face paint, Brady looked embarrassed. “Turns out she kinda liked me.”

I thought back to the night we had kidnapped the dog. There had been something nostalgic about his posture and the ridiculous ease with which he had found the unmarked mobile home in the dark swamp, far from anything that would show up on GPS.

“That night,” I said, “how did you know that place?”

Brady nodded as if he had been waiting for me to ask. “I spent a couple years there in high school, before I moved out on my own. It was my dad’s place—still is, technically. I never should have left Jake behind.”

“You named her Jake?”

“Don’t judge me. Ever since I was a little boy, I wanted a dog named Jake. My dad called her Zelda, after my mom.” For the first time since I’d known him, Brady looked shaken, his lips taut, the lines around his eyes deeper. In the refracted light of the chandelier, behind the makeup, he seemed his age. I felt sorry for him. He’d obviously had a rough childhood. But then, who hadn’t? A sense of betrayal took shape and floated to the surface of my emotional soup.

“Why didn’t you just tell me we were taking back your dog? You made up that whole story about a DAK trainer and rehabilitation. And being a philanthropist.”

“Guerilla Philanthropist,” he corrected. “And I didn’t make it up. I truly believe people are capable of doing something more if they just stop living within their comfort zone. Look, I shouldn’t have lied to you. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know how you’d take it if I told you the full story.”

I looked down at my plate where Jake had turned my sushi into a disastrous mix of rice, seaweed, and slobber. “I’m no Puritan. I can take it,” I said. “But I don’t want to be kept in the dark. If you want me to be a part of your Guerilla Philanthropy missions, I want full disclosure.”

“Full disclosure.” Brady smiled. “Deal.” We toasted saki cups, happy to be past that brief challenge.

Still, something wasn’t sitting right. “You call yourself a Guerilla Philanthropist and yet you study Ayn Rand. How do you reconcile objectivism with altruism?”

“Let me be very clear here,” he said through a mouthful of tuna. “Altruism in the ideal sense only exists in theory. When you give a coin to a blind man or when you donate anonymously in church—even if nobody ever finds out—there’s still a benefit, some sense of well-being or pride or divine grace, something that turns the act into a zero-sum exchange rather than an unequivocal gift. There’s always a payback.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Rand wrote that the purpose of a man’s life is the pursuit of rational self-interest. Before I die, I want to hike Machu Picchu. I want to see the aurora borealis. I want to sleep with an Icelandic girl. And I want to prove that altruism can exist by committing one purely unselfish act. I want to do one thing for somebody else that gives me no benefit whatsoever.”

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “The Karma dividends would nullify the altruism. The Catholic Church would canonize you. Some reality TV producer would want to follow you around, broadcasting your good deeds for big advertising dollars, and you’d be back where you started—selfish, ego driven, hungry eating sushi off designer plates.”

Brady pointed his chopsticks at me. “You remember Beltran from the jai alai fronton?”

“You said his brother wanted to fly us to the Caribbean.” I hadn’t given it much thought since then. I assumed it was just banter.

“That’s the one.” Brady smoothed the front of his kimono. “His brother lives in Havana where he’s sort of an independent relief worker. He receives medicine from other countries and distributes it to hospitals around Cuba.”

“Aren’t there government agencies that do that? The Red Cross or something?”

“In theory, yes.” Brady refilled our sake cups. “However, pharmaceutical companies are charging astronomical prices for medicines to try to recoup the billions of dollars they’ve invested in research. Nobody in the undeveloped world can afford their medicine, and they’re the ones that need it the most. Diseases like AIDS are ripping through the population, virtually unchecked, and the Western world is unable to do anything above the line because of our cold war trade embargo.”

“You lost me.”

“Since Castro took over Cuba in the early ’60s, the U.S. has imposed a
global
restriction on trade with the government; that means, anybody who trades with Cuba gets cut off from trade with America. It’s created a unique society of complete independence, and provided the world with a shining Communist success story, but it’s also built a healthy underground railroad for Western pharmaceuticals. Cuba’s not the only country being ransacked by HIV, and Beltran’s brother isn’t the only person doing something about it. Resistance movements are popping up in Brazil, India, and all over Africa.”

“Guerilla Philanthropists.”

“For real.” He smiled and shot his sake. “So what do you say? You want to be a part of the revolution?”

“What!” I nearly spat my sake through my nose. “Smuggle drugs into Cuba?”

“Bring lifesaving medicine to people who need it. Actually, it’s not nearly as exotic as it sounds. It’s a very small quantity, and I’d be the one carrying the stuff. I just need a spotter in case anything happens to me. All expenses paid. There’s no actual risk for you.”

Cuba’s an entire country off-limits to Americans, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. I had always been intrigued by those mid-century images of Havana at night, glamorous and swanky, textured with cigar smoke and rum-drunk gangsters. Deep inside me, something was stirring. It was a feeling I hadn’t allowed since I’d internalized the Disney lifestyle: the thrill of stepping outside the box, of following my shadow down a mysterious alley at breakneck speed, and of dealing with the consequences much, much later.

“We’re balancing the odds for people who have no way to help themselves,” Brady was saying. “The point is we’re doing something altruistic here. We’re the good guys.”

“What if something went wrong? Who goes after the ‘good guys’?”

“Good question.” He frowned. “The American government. The CIA. The pharmaceutical companies. And probably the WTO, but it’d take them
decades
to work out what we did.”

“How illegal is it?”

“It’s more illegal than stealing a dog from a trailer park,” he said, “but not nearly as illegal as premeditated genocide.” He noticed a mauled piece of octopus on my plate. “You gonna eat that?”

I pushed the plate toward him. “Tell me, Nemo, how did you catch this octopus?”

Brady paused, the sushi halfway to his open mouth, ready to launch into a story, then his face cracked. “Fine. As it turns out, I caught a trout, and I’m told they don’t make very good sashimi. So I stopped at the Publix fish counter on my way home, and there you have it.”

For the rest of the evening, we talked about politics and philosophy, subjects that had turned mushy in my head. It felt good to stretch my mind beyond desert island fantasies and Disney trivia and to debate topics that used to matter to me like foreign policy, social issues, and art. Before I left, I agreed to go with Brady to Cuba, to assist in his quest to perform one truly altruistic act. I went home that night with a Zen-like sense of calm, a feeling that reinforced my belief that I had made the right decision, that dropping everything else in pursuit of the Disney Dream was an inevitable stepping-stone on my path to Enlightenment.

D
isney World is a municipality with its own governing body, post office, and fire department. They write their own building codes, patrol their own properties, and enforce their own rules. If they wanted to, they could build a nuclear power plant or a golf course made of cheese. They don’t need anybody’s permission because, in Disneytown,
*
Disney is the alpha and the omega. One upside of this sovereignty is that it assures them a direct role in Florida’s legislation, even when it comes to laws that affect the other theme-park residents in and around Orlando. Another bonus feature is that they have the ability to contain and defuse any embarrassing situations before the mainstream media can get hold of them and blow them out of proportion. The downside? Well, come to think of it, there isn’t one.

Throughout the month of October, the Disney parks had become crowded with families in a rush. They needed autographs, pictures, and souvenirs, and they weren’t letting anything stand in their way. These were the late vacationers, the ones who had to cram in two weeks before the end of the year, but still wanted to avoid the airlines’ exorbitant holiday fares. They were in Orlando to have fun, and they were merciless about it.

On one especially hot October day, we were short a couple of photographers, so Orville had me running all over Animal Kingdom, covering a character breakfast in Dinoland, Tree of Life shots on the bridge, and all the character kiosks in Camp Minnie-Mickey. It was almost noon before I was finally able to take my break, and I was so dehydrated, my legs were shaking. As I left the kiosk, Mickey gave me a thumbs-up and a sympathetic pat on the back. I rode one of the blue Schwinn bikes to the lab where I deposited my last few rolls of film and collapsed in a chair.

“Hola, chico.”

I pressed my thumbs to my temples and began vigorously rubbing. “Hello, Marco.”

“Boy, it sure is crowded today,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to be outside shooting with these crowds.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. I stood up too fast and my head spun. I had to hold on to the processing machine for balance.

“At first,” Marco continued, “I was upset that Orville put me in the lab, developing photos, but when I saw how many people were here, I realized he was doing me a favor.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m going to lunch. If Orville is looking for me, I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Oh, one thing. Some of your photos came out really dark.”

I stopped, my hand on the doorknob. “Which photos?”

Marco flipped through a stack of character shots. “This roll,” he said, “and this one. Actually, pretty much all of them.”

“Let me see,” I said, reaching out for the folders. “I could’ve sworn—” Sure enough, they were all underexposed, and not just a little bit.

“I know. I was really surprised.” Behind Marco’s concern, I could hear something that sounded like satisfaction.

When a photographer picks up a camera, he goes through a basic checklist before ever taking a picture, starting with adjustments to the exposure settings. There was no way I could have been shooting the wrong exposure all day. There was another possibility, however. Sure enough, from where I was standing, I could see that the digital numbers were all screwy on the processing machine.

Marco moved to stand next to me. “Oh no!” he said, his hand over his mouth. “You mean the machine has been broken all day?”

“It’s not broken,” I said. “But we have to reset this thing before it ruins any more film.” As I punched in the proper processing information, I realized that something wasn’t right with the numbers. While the machine had underexposed my film, making my photos come out dark, the numbers I was changing were for
over
exposure. Sure enough, the stack of photos in the tray was way too bright as if somebody was shooting wide open on high-speed film.

Marco dropped into Orville’s chair and stretched his arms behind his head. “So”—he arched his eyebrows—“is the machine all fixed?”

His smug smile was a half-eaten worm in the poison apple of his face. “What is this? A tantrum? Revenge? Are you having a bad hair day?”

He shrugged. “Just doing my job.”

“Nobody will buy these,” I said. “What do you think Orville’s going to say?”

“Orville is never going to find out.”

“Yes, he will,” I said. But I knew he wouldn’t. Marco probably planned to set the numbers right before anyone knew any better. Nobody else in that lab would know what Marco was doing, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell. Never rat on a rat. At Disney as it was in the skate park.

He pouted. “
Pobrecito
, now you’re beginning to understand. All these Rules. They only enforce the obvious. I’m not eating onstage or pointing with one finger. I smile—” His wicked grin turned into a dazzling happy face. “And if that isn’t enough, I have insurance.” From his chest pocket, he produced one of my out-of-character photos, “Suicide King,” in which King Louie was holding a prop pirate gun in his mouth. “You see, chico, Disney World is exactly like the rest of the world where you’re innocent until proven guilty. But with one little exception: once you’re proven guilty at Disney, you’re finished. You get kicked out of paradise and you’re never allowed back in.” He saw me eyeing the picture, and slid it across the counter to me. “You can have this one,” he said. “I have plenty more.”

The conversation with Marco upset me on levels I barely understood. It wasn’t so much his bitchy attitude (which I had come to expect) or the thinly veiled blackmail attempt (which could indict pretty much the entire DAK character department if it came to light) but the looming threat that lay just beneath the words. When I had first arrived at the Magic Kingdom, I came in as a casualty of the outside world, my wounds still fresh, seeking a sort of sanctuary within the hallowed walls of Disney. As cynical and solipsistic as I had been, Disney World had accepted and comforted me while I healed. I was living proof that Disney Magic could mend a broken heart. I was a convert.

But Marco was insinuating that this Magic was an illusion, that the world beyond Disney’s border was no different from the world within. His disenchantment was what offended me the most. His attitude was blasphemy, worse than my brother’s stoic practicality, worse than my own early cynicism had been because Marco was a Cast Member. He was a disciple of Disney, and his false witness was a shit stain on the shiny surface of my born-again devotion.

I left the photo lab intending to go to the cafeteria, but I wasn’t hungry, so I spent my lunch break riding the blue Schwinn bike around backstage, stopping at the monkey habitat and the canoes behind the Tarzan stage, every place that had ever given me good memories. Leaning the bike against a wall behind Asia, I went back onstage through a Cast Members Only door, and headed for the lab. In Dinoland, I came face to face with Nick Elliot, now sporting long hair and a brow ring.

“Duuuude!” He was with three other guys, a wakeboarder, a pro BMXer, and some other guy I didn’t recognize who had a tattooed nose. “You’re still at Disney? What the fuck!”

I glanced around to make sure nobody had heard his swearing. “I’m still here,” I said. “Living the dream.”

“The dream?” Nick shouted. “The dream is being in Daytona for Rick
motherfucking
Thorne’s bachelor party, bro! We just finished a demo in Tampa, where we all made
cash
so we’re road-tripping! I wanted to do a pit stop at Disney so I could show these guys the Rat Factory before we hit the bars.” His friends laughed, fist bumps all around. “What do you say? You in?”

I could feel the Magic unraveling around me. People were noticing Nick and his friends, their tattoos and saggy jeans, the “Chronic Masturbator” T-shirt, the stench of kneepads. Parents pulled their children a little closer, rushing them down the path. “I dunno.” I tried to look casual. I leaned against the Dino-Rama railing, then remembered I was onstage, in wardrobe, and stood upright. My shadow had fled. “I have to get up pretty early tomorrow,” I said.

“That’s bullshit!” Nick shouted. “Dude, you gotta come. We’re gonna ride the concrete bowls, and then Thorne says he’s buying everybody a hooker!” There were more fist bumps and some inappropriate hand gestures.

I tried to memorize the guests’ scowling faces as they hurried past us, so I could track them down later and provide some semblance of recovery: free pictures maybe, a Tree of Life photo frame, a stuffed Piglet. “I’ll call you later,” I said, backing toward a Cast Members Only door. I could hear a dozen kids crying, and I was certain it was my fault.

“I know you, bro!” Nick’s voice rose above the din of Dinoland. “You can’t hide here forever!”

I was off my game for the rest of the day, and then, to make matters worse, I couldn’t get the air conditioner in my Jeep to work. By the time I got back to the Ghetto, I was dripping sweat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my roommate. The demands of his regular job and his secret project had kept him away from the house so much I’d begun to imagine that I lived alone, so I was surprised to see his Firebird parked in front of the apartment.

“Hey stranger,” he said when I walked through the door. “You look like you got thrown in the pool.” The Scotch bottle was within reach, but as far as I could tell, he wasn’t drunk yet.

“My AC died today,” I said.

Johnny picked up a sweaty highball glass from the counter. “Let me take a look,” he said. “Ah might be able to work some magic.”

He followed me to the parking lot where I popped my hood. He rested his glass on my bumper, then leaned over the engine and began twisting caps. The sun had begun its descent over the Disney golf course, with a gentle breeze blowing from the direction of the Clermont Muscat vineyards.

“You’re home early,” I said.

Johnny opened up his car, and rummaged through a box in the back. “Ah took the day off,” he said. “Ah’m writing up a press release for Project Jericho and ah wanted to get it right.”

“Project Jericho?”

“It’s just a working title.” He opened a plastic bottle and poured a bright blue fluid into my engine. “We have so much work to do, ah may have to take tomorrow off too.”

“Two days of hooky.” In all the time I’d known him, he’d never even been fifteen minutes late. “Can you tell me about it yet?”

“Not yet—nondisclosure and all that mumbo jumbo—but ah promise you’ll be the first to know as soon as we go public. Oh, that reminds me, we want to have the launch party here this weekend. You don’t mind, do you? It won’t be anything crazy. Just a few close friends.” He lowered my hood and adjusted his Jeff Gordon cap. “Now fire it up and switch on the AC.”

I started the Jeep, and right away, the cold air began to blow. “Perfect!” I shouted over the engine.

Johnny smiled. “Ah’m a one-man pit crew.”

I showered and put on a decent shirt. I had promised to take Calico out to dinner, and I was looking forward to getting beyond this stressful day. Her apartment was only about fifteen minutes away, but the traffic on 1–4 held me up for almost an hour. As usual, Calico’s door was unlocked. I found her in the bathroom, putting on makeup.

“Humph. I was
just
about to give up on yew.” I wasn’t sure, but it sounded like she was talking in an English accent. She looked over my shoulder, into the parking lot of her apartment complex. “Which cah did you bring this evening?”

“My Bentley’s in the shop,” I teased, “so I brought the Jeep.” I moved to hug her, but she turned her back and fiddled with a selection of lip gloss. “Sorry I’m late,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe the traffic. Everywhere you look, overheated Geo Metros on the side of the road. It’s like tourist stew out there.”

“Is that sew?” she called out from the bathroom. Then, she mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear.

“Beg your pardon.”

She stuck her head around the corner. “I said, I’ll be right out. Make yourself at home.”

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water, then flipped through a fashion magazine that was holding down a pile of bills on her kitchen table. Calico’s kitchen was the most lived-in room in her apartment. It served as an office, a waiting room, a library, and a den. Her kitchen table was stacked with mail, magazines, phone messages, and any other odds and ends that didn’t fall into the category of cosmetics or clothing. About the only thing she didn’t use her kitchen for was cooking.

The way she decorated her apartment had always intrigued me. She had an eclectic collection of souvenirs, haphazardly displayed beside mundane objects. In the cupboard where she kept her Diet Coke was a bottle of Andoran wine in her birth year. Under a stack of old
Vogue
magazines, an autographed poster and front-row ticket stubs from Cirque du Soleil. And scattered like Easter eggs on every flat surface, hundreds of photos of herself in provocative poses around Orlando. “Here I am partying at PI—I was so drunk! Oh! And this is me cuddling a tiger cub. Isn’t he gorgeous?” Finding objects d’art among the piles of junk was like making an archaeological discovery.

“I had the most annoying confrontation with Marco today,” I said, stretching out on her couch. “And then, out of nowhere, an old skater friend of mine showed up at the park, and he was acting completely inappropriate. I spent the rest of the afternoon chasing kids around, giving out stickers and coupons.”

“A scandal?” Calico appeared in the doorway, wearing bright red lipstick and long, fake eyelashes. “How delicious!”

“Well, ‘scandal’ might be a little dramatic, but, you know.” My words derailed. “Are you going onstage?”

She smiled, and I could see a smear of bloodred lipstick across her teeth. “Of course not, dahling. Why do you ask?”

“I’ve never seen you in this much makeup outside the Grotto,”

“I felt like dressing up tonight,” she said, her voice taut with impatience. “Yew
are
taking me out to dinner, aren’t yew? I’m famished.”

She went to get her purse. As I waited on the stair landing, I noticed Venus twinkling through the tree branches, and it reminded me of when we went skating in Celebration, the magical night when we first kissed. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.” I smiled at her, but she gave no indication that she had even heard me. She shut her door and walked toward the stairs, swinging her hips like a catwalk model. I offered my arm, but she brushed past me, knocking me to the side. “Hey!” I cried out, clutching at the handrail. “What’s with you tonight? And what’s with the accent?”