Ear to the Ground (7 page)

EYES OF THE WORLD

THE EYES OF THE WORLD WERE UPON LOS ANGELES, AND no longer did it have anything to do with O. J. After the CES prediction—and after Caltech agreed “a major seismic event” seemed likely for the end of the year—Orenthal James Simpson was yesterday's news. The skittish were moving out of Southern California at a rate of twelve families a day, packing their station wagons and minivans and heading north to Portland or east to Phoenix and Tucson. AM radio was abuzz with the subject and wouldn't leave Charlie Richter alone. He'd stopped reading the papers and watching television, tired of seeing his face staring back at him.

The mayor, too, was feeling the heat. Publicly, he proclaimed Los Angeles “a safe and beautiful place to live.” Privately, though, he watched the exodus with a mixture of desolation and fear. Eventually, he began making calls, looking for the kind of help only the federal government could give. And so it came to pass, on the morning of August 9, that the president's motorcade stopped traffic on Highland Avenue, creating a nightmare for anyone trying to hop into Burbank on the 101.

The president was in a peculiar mood. He had been shaken by the news that morning of Jerry Garcia's death. Because he
had
inhaled. The Grateful Dead's concert at the Avalon Ballroom in 1968 had made an impression on him he would always have to repudiate for political reasons. Riding in his limousine, he remembered that night's second set, when
he had peaked during the drums and had been frightened by Mickey Hart's primal pounding of the tom-toms. But “Morning Dew” came and calmed the future president's heart. He'd abandoned his shoes and made his way toward the stage, where a freckle-faced girl with flowers in her hair danced next to him. Seized with presidential confidence, he had grabbed her by the waist and spent the following week with her.

As the president's limousine moved down Highland and he sat listening to “China Cat Sunflower,” he decided to cancel his dinner with the mayor and stop by the candlelight vigil in Griffith Park.

The president had lunch at the Center for Earthquake Studies with Charlie Richter, but their seismological discussion lasted only three minutes. Preoccupied, the president asked quietly if Charlie had ever seen the Grateful Dead. Charlie perked up. “I took a leave of absence my junior year of college to follow them.”

“No kidding?” The president put down his fork.

“How ‘bout you?”

“About thirty shows,” the president said. “I have like a hundred tapes. Most aren't soundboards. Twentieth generation or something. But I like the crackle.”

“I can't believe it's over.”

“When was your first show?” the president asked.

“Telluride, ′78.”

“Friday night or Saturday?”

“Saturday, I think.”

“Saturday.” The president leaned back and concentrated. “‘Franklin's Tower,' ‘Tennessee Jed,' ‘Scarlet/Fire' …?”

“That's the one …”

Ian Marcus was a millionaire. Just after the prediction, with every studio in town bidding on
Ear to the Ground,
pressure
mounted for Grace to track Ian down. Ethan jumped down her throat the minute she arrived at the office. “It's your fucking
boy
friend's script,” he'd told her. “Why haven't I seen it?”

You can't
buy
luck in this town, she thought. Like William Goldman says: “Nobody knows
anything
…”

The deal had closed a few minutes before midnight, in a booth at Jones. What a
nightmare.
Michael Lipman, one of the world's great assholes, was having the time of his life. And, Grace knew, there's nothing worse than an ecstatic asshole. Ian didn't say a single word, just sipped champagne and performed calculations on a legal pad. Once, he leaned over and French-kissed her. How could she refuse?

Grace made one last call to business affairs, asking if they'd go as high as seven figures. She was told the president of the studio was reading the script, or skimming it anyway, and it was almost an hour before he consented to spend a million dollars to buy
Ear to the Ground
for Ethan Carson.

By midday on August 9, several FM stations were playing nothing but Grateful Dead, but the AM talk shows continued to feature earthquake commentary. At CES, the mayor and the president made a joint statement, separated by a beaming Caruthers. Then the president disappeared into the Prediction Lab, where he sat telling Charlie funny stories about the
Europe ′72
tour. Soon they were nearly friends, and Charlie was invited to accompany him to Griffith Park.

As the president's motorcade cut through traffic and turned left into the park, Deadheads gawked at the sleek black limos, wondering what industry bigwigs had decided to make the scene. Around the carousel, thousands of people had gathered: gauze-draped girls whirring among bare-chested boy-men who wailed and beat bongo drums.

The president watched quietly for a few minutes, and signaled to his driver that it was time to move on. Charlie laid a hand on his arm.

“I think I'm going to stay,” he said.

The president smiled and shook his hand. “Of course.”

Charlie watched the motorcade pull away. He took off his jacket and loosened his tie, and hiked over the rise of grass toward the carousel. Halfway down the slope, a girl about twenty looked up. She wore a tie-dyed dress and had a long braid down her back.

“Hey,” she said.

Charlie stopped.

“I know who you are. But you don't have to talk about it.”

He smiled.

“You should take off your shoes,” she said, then turned up the music on a tape deck next to her. From the speaker, Jerry's voice rose, strained, struggling to reach the high notes:

“Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings.

But the heart has its seasons, its evening, and thoughts of its own.”

REASONABLE DOUBT

THE GOVERNOR SAT, FEET UP, LOOKING AT HIS DESK DIARY and counting weeks until the New Hampshire primary. He hated the word “gubernatorial.” It reminded him of “goober,” a term his adolescent son had used to describe a moron or geek. More important, the governor was concerned with
ends,
and “gubernatorial” stank of
means.
Humming a few bars of “Hail to the Chief,” he called in his speechwriter and demanded the fruits of that morning's labor.

Fresh out of Yale, the kid never shaved. But the cunning little bastard would cut his own grandmother's throat if she stood in the way of something he wanted. The governor loved that, happy to have someone so ruthless on his team.

“We go with a neg,” the kid said.

“That's what I was thinking.” The governor nodded.

“We crush the earthquake. We crush the president and all the liberals. We support the mayor and the citizens. And we offer prayer as an answer, but only in closing.”

“Subtle.”

“Soft.”

“Subversive.”

“God bless California. God bless America,” said the governor, filling his chest with air.

“Practicing again?”

“Don't be a smartass.”

At Warner Brothers Studios, on the second floor of Producer's Building Seven, at the Tailspin Pictures conference table, sat
the Finnish action director Henny Rarlin, whose blockbuster movie
Die Hard as a Rock
had earned him a place on the Hollywood A-minus list. A moment ago, Ethan Carson had tried to impress him by speaking some Finnish. No go. Seated on Ethan's left was Grace, and next to her sat the newest member of the Million Dollar Spec Club. Ian wore tiny round tortoise-shell Armani eyeglasses which, he thought, made him look terribly intelligent. The three of them waited for Henny Rarlin to finish a heated conversation on his cellular phone.

“Why? Why, why, why?” he asked the apparatus. Then, loudly: “Well don't call me until you fucking
know
.” He snapped his cellular before turning to the others and announcing, “I haven't read the script.”

Ethan, Grace, and Ian grimaced appropriately.

“But I love earthquakes. I made some notes.”

“Notes?” Ian took off his glasses. “But you haven't read the
script
.”

“Ian …” Grace tried.

“I don't need to read your fucking …”

“Now, now.” Ethan began to kiss some Finnish ass.

Henny Rarlin stood up and towered over Ian. “Lemme tell you something, you little
child.
You sold your script to
Varner
Brothers. They bought it for Tailspin Pictures. Now it belongs to
me
.”

Ian tried to swallow.

“Ian …” Grace tried again.

“You shut up,” he told her. “A week ago you wouldn't even
show
the goddamn thing.”

“Not here, Ian …”

“What are they fighting about? What are you fighting about?” Henny Rarlin wanted to know.

“Nothing,” Ethan said. “Creative differences.”

“I am the director. Who are
they
to be having creative differences?”

The room fell silent. Ian fiddled with his glasses. With his eyes, Ethan told Grace to apologize. Right. This is business, she
realized. And sometimes business
sucks.
But then she caught a glimpse of Ian, his expression so smug it nearly knocked her off her chair. You asshole, she thought, and before she could stop herself, she hissed, “If it weren't for Charlie's prediction, nobody would've
looked
at your fucking script.” Then she got up and stormed out of the room.

Grace was so angry she could barely see the road. She shouldn't have walked out like that, but all she could think about was breaking up with Ian as soon as she got home. Seven months she'd given to that obnoxious come-lately, and she'd be damned if she'd give any more.

When she turned west onto Franklin, Grace was thoroughly blinded by the setting sun. She pulled to the curb, rooted around in her bag for sunglasses, looked up, and saw a 7-Eleven located conveniently before her. The next thing she remembered was paying for a pack of Merits and getting back into the car. For old time's sake, she pushed in the dashboard lighter, tore off the cellophane and aluminum wrapping, and tried to retrieve a cigarette before the contraption popped out. Grace examined the lighter's glowing tip before giving life to the Merit hanging from her lips. She smoked without shifting position and felt a dizziness that soon passed. Then she lit another and, refreshed, pulled back into traffic. And so, in a time of need, Grace had been reunited with an old friend.

“We live in an age of sound bites and media hype.” The governor smiled across his audience, meeting every attending pair of eyes. “It has become possible to transmit and receive information alarmingly quickly—to compose quickly, send quickly, receive quickly, and, sadly,
react
quickly. I read everything printed about this sensational prediction, really dug there in the science. But I'm shaking my head. And I've been talking to a lot of people who're shaking their heads, too. Scientists and scholars and heads of universities—they
think it's hullabaloo. But the media spun it into a story, and with that story, they sell papers. I'm all for enterprise, but what we pay for when we buy newspapers, or when we're watching the news on television, is the
truth.
So I say, if there's an earthquake coming, let it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt—in this nation, under God, with liberty. Because in the world of speculation and sensationalism,
there is no justice for all.
God bless California. And God bless the United States of America.”

THEY ALL LAUGHED

EARTHQUAKES MEANT BIG MONEY. STERLING CARUTHERS knew that. Loma Prieta had paid off sixteen billion dollars, and Northridge had come through for thirty. The key, Caruthers thought, was in knowing how to make devastation work for you.

He sat in his office at the Center for Earthquake Studies pondering just that, watching stock quotations and real estate prices scroll down his computer screen. Both were declining steadily, but he knew there was a way to make a killing from it all. There must be a passage through those numbers, a pathway to exorbitant wealth. It was just a matter of solving the equations, of studying the situation until the proper combinations made themselves known.

Caruthers thought about the moguls. What would they have done? The Chandlers, the Dohenys, the Harrison Gray Otises. Men of vision, he thought, who made a killing in the San Fernando Valley, way back in 1904. Caruthers sat in his swivel chair, and praised the science that had brought him to the threshold of an opportunity this large. Watching columns of numbers cascade on his monitor, he opened his mind to the world of speculation, lighter than air.

But Charlie Richter lived in the world of doubt and deliberation, and suffered from the disease of integrity. Was predicting earthquakes any better than snooping around,
telling someone her husband or his wife was unfaithful? Was he providing a
service
? Or just gossiping scientifically, on a global scale?

Whatever the case, in the past week he had come to be perceived as a doomsayer, less a scientist than a hack. First came the governor's speech, and now everyone from Maggie Murphy to Jay Leno found fault with Charlie's work. What a laugh! Suddenly, everybody was a seismologist.

More than ever before, Charlie lived and breathed and slept with his numbers. At the moment, in fact, he was eating with them—at the bar of the Authentic Café. What could he do, he wondered, to prove this earthquake beyond a reasonable doubt? And what did “reasonable doubt” mean? As a legal expression it referred to past events, but Charlie was venturing into the future. What could he do when everyone was so numerically illiterate?

Charlie left his wonderings and looked up. He didn't expect to
see
anything, but there, across the dining room, was Grace, having dinner with a long-haired man of unknown identity. Charlie wondered if she had spotted him earlier, when she'd come in; and then he considered what she'd do if their eyes were suddenly to meet. It was a game he played to test a woman's love, a silly and unscientific game, but Charlie played it anyway. And this time, he won. Grace covered her mouth with a napkin and jumped up from her chair. When she excused herself, her companion looked concerned.

Charlie stood as Grace approached somewhat defensively.

“Are you OK?” she asked him. “I tried to call you.” She looked back at her table and smiled.

“It's been …” Charlie suddenly felt depressed.

“Ian and I broke up.”

“Really?” He brightened, but without letting her see. Then she noticed Charlie noticing the long-haired man.

“It's business,” she told him. “A film maker.”

“When did you and Ian …?”

“This morning.”

He smiled. “How many times have you two broken up?”

“Don't make fun of me, Charlie.”

Henny Rarlin got up then and strode across the restaurant, embarrassed that a man of his stature would be left sitting alone. Grace explained to Charlie that Henny had made
Die Hard as a Rock.
He thrust his hand into Charlie's and spit out his name like an Uzi fires bullets. Then, he took Grace by the elbow and tried to steer her toward their table.

“What are you doing?” she said, and pulled away.

Diners looked up as Henny Rarlin ranted. “Are you having dinner with him, or
me
!?” Charlie gestured for his check, and Rarlin said something he couldn't hear. Grace slapped the film maker's face, and stalked out of the restaurant. It all happened so quickly, Charlie just laughed.

It was laughter, probably, that gave him the idea. His body's convulsing, the release of tension, the movement of unnoticed muscles. Five minutes later, at a pay phone on Beverly, Charlie called someone at ABC News. Then he jumped into his car and headed east on the 10.

Outside of Indio, he saw them—the vans, the crews. A helicopter hovered. When he pulled up, a sea of microphones came through his driver-side window, so he told the one about the Pirate and the Parrot, and they all laughed.

Looking closely at his watch, Charlie got out of his car, stood on a mound of dirt, and put his arms in the air till the crowd quieted down. “It's gonna be between a 3.1 and a 3.3,” he announced. “Right where you're standing.” A cacophony resulted, and twenty reporters hurled questions at Charlie. “One at a time!” he shouted. He turned to a sober-looking blonde whose hair appeared frozen to her head. “Yes?” he smiled.

But before she could say a word, the rumbling began.