It’s All True Stories
by Jack Saunders, from a screenplay of “A1A Stories”
SAUNDERS is in his living room in Panama City, watching television. The phone rings. It is POTTER.
They talk, split screen.
“How’s my guitar doing?”
“We noticed it right after you left. I’ve been going to take it to you, but I’ve been kind of busy. I’ll drive it over there tomorrow. Be sure to leave your house unlocked.”
“It’s unlocked. I lost my key.”
The next morning. SAUNDERS in the living room eating seven-grain cereal with yogurt and drinking coffee. BRENDA comes out in her nightgown.
“Good morning,” she says.
“Good morning,” he says. “There’s coffee on the stove. And cereal.”
Brenda goes into the kitchen. Says something.
“I can’t hear you when you’re in the kitchen,” Saunders says.
Brenda comes out. “I couldn’t hear you,” she says. “I was in the kitchen.”
BRENDA is reading the morning paper. SAUNDERS stands in the door with a guitar case.
“I’m going to Potter’s,” he says.
“Don’t forget to get the box of Owen’s gospel tapes,” she says.
“Oh, yea,” he says. “I forgot to ask Potter if he had them. I’ll look for them inside the house.”
SAUNDERS pulls out of the drive in a Ranger pickup truck with a camper shell on the back.
SAUNDERS drives through morning rush hour traffic in town. Strip stores and billboards. Urban blight. Malingerers. It looks like Watts.
SAUNDERS drives along Back Beach Road. Passes a two-story building with a parking lot inside a chain link fence. A sign on the building says Columbia Research Corporation.
Off-camera, Saunders says,
I used to work at Columbia Research Corporation.
When I hired on, I thought that there was five years’ work there. I thought I’d become part of their cadre of skilled professionals, a staff person, who could finally ride out hiccups in the government tasking.
But that was before Operation Dalkon Shield siphoned off all the research and development money that used to come down from Washington.
I worked there eight months. They laid me off like you’d get rid of excess magazine subscriptions when times get tough.
SAUNDERS crosses the bridge at Phillips Inlet. Stops at a Junior store to use the bathroom. Buys a large cup of coffee and a pint of milk. Adds fresh milk to his coffee.
SAUNDERS turns down Highway 30A. Drives along the old beach highway, which alternates undeveloped land with dunes and ponds and real estate signs and overdeveloped land, with high-rise condominiums, Swiss chalets with pitched roofs to keep the snow off, and pastel wood-frame houses with tin roofs and lots of windows and porches and railings and gables and widow’s walks and observatories and gingerbread. White picket fences, cassina hedges. And they haven’t reached Seaside yet. A few old squat cinder block bungalows and stilt houses with quaint names.
“There are more of these things every time I drive along here,” he says.
SAUNDERS drives through Seaside. Total community. No stilt houses here. Designer houses, on designer red-brick streets. Residents only.
A bicycle lane in the main road, with lots of joggers and power-walkers in designer and power-walking outfits.
“I feel like David Byrne in True Stories,” he says. “Showing someone Virgil, Texas. ‘It’s all true stories,’ Kerouac said.
“I heard they have a rule that you can only hang white cotton out on the clothesline. But come to think of it, I’ve never seen a clothesline.
“Potemkin Village. These people don’t ever break a sweat. Except on purpose, playing squash. Back home.
“This can’t be home. It’s second home.
“This is the Republican’s answer to the homeless. As Slippery dick says to Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam, ‘Harris-fuck the doomed.'”
Further up the road, SAUNDERS turns up a dirt road up a hill, back into the dunes. At the top of the hill he makes a left turn onto another dirt road. Passes houses with bicycles in the yard. The pickup trucks of working people. Trash cans overturned by dogs or raccoons. And left that way.
He pulls into the drive of Potter and Suzette’s, a two-story house with a deck on the second story looking out over the Gulf of Mexico, walking distance, but a walk, away. Both of them are at work. A dog barks inside the house.
SAUNDERS stops, gets out, with Potter’s guitar, opens the door, goes inside.
“Gian,” he says. Pronounced gee-an. “You’re on the case, ain’t you boy.”
Gian wags his tail. Stops barking. He is halfway down a spiral staircase.
“Where’s Owen’s gospel tapes?” he says. “Did Potter have them in the back of his truck when he left our house after the pick-in? Did he bring them inside, out of the sun?” He looks downstairs. Sets Potter’s guitar down.
Saunders goes upstairs, looks, Gian going back upstairs with him.
“Not here,” he says.
SAUNDERS drives back home.
“I set a book up here,” he says. “Part here and part in Key West. Compare and contrast. Had the hero kill off his wife, so he could be a single person, and become romantically involved with a new person, and move up to Santa Rosa Beach, where he walked on the beach and wrote. You know: ate watercress sandwiches and made love in the afternoon, like Jack London and Charmian.
“Whenever I come up here I feel guilty. Unfaithful. Like I killed off Brenda to become a writer. Which is the only way it looks like it’s going to happen: if one of us dies.
“If I die, they’ll publish me. If she dies, I’ll use the insurance money to live like a hermit and publish myself.
“But if we both live, we have to both of us work for wages. And fight over what money there is.
“Ain’t that a bitch.”
BRENDA is sitting in the living room when SAUNDERS walks in.
“Did you get the box of tapes?” she asks.
“I didn’t see them,” he says. “I looked.”
“Did he say he had them last night?” she asks.
“I didn’t ask him,” he says. “I just assumed that if he did have them, he’d leave them out for me.”
“Does he have them?”
“I don’t know. Owen thought he might have them in the back of his truck. When he called to say he’d left his guitar at our house, I asked him to bring them inside if they were in his truck. But I don’t know if he had them, someone else picked them up, to watch them for Owen, or what. If Owen can’t keep track of his own box of tapes, I’m not going to get into the business of doing it.”
“Well, why did you drive all the way over there and come back without the box of tapes?”
“I drove over there because I was writing about driving over there. I think when I drive. Taking his guitar back was just a pretext. I needed to drive through Seaside for my movie. What are you getting on me for?”
“I thought you went over there to get the box of tapes. I need those tapes. I have buyers for those tapes.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know where the box of tapes is. Jesus.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you went to get the tapes. What’s the point, otherwise.”
Saunders glares at Brenda.
“Movie,” she says.
SAUNDERS and DICK VAJS sit on the deck in Panama City, talking. Brenda and Betty are in the garden.
“Then, Brenda feels that I should take out the griping,” Saunders says. “She says the constant pissing and moaning puts people off.”
“I kind of like it,” Dick Vajs says. “It isn’t constant. It adds variety, like a spice. And you’re so good at it. It’s like hearing a person cuss for 20 minutes and not use the same word twice.”
