Hard Day

Rollin Hand was a prick to me. 

They were all pretty much pricks.  All the different incarnations, all the missions:  full of pricks.  Even the jobs I didn't go on, they would bring me back a T-shirt, or some other kind of touristy bullshit souvenir.

"Put the hat on.  Let's see if it fits.  Hope it does, it was the only one even close to your size."

That's right, look at the gym rat in a T-shirt that he couldn't possibly have worn even as an infant. 

They would do that kind of thing all the time.

Rollin brought me a silk suit one time from a job he did in Hong Kong.  I remember the quality was excellent.  A beautiful blue color.  Really first-rate goods.

So he had me try it on.  No problem.  Fit really well, actually.

That was until I tried to walk in the thing.

I don't know how they did it, but it was tailored in such a way that with one step, I managed to split the trousers from belt loop to fly and then, when I turned around to try and see what happened, the jacket split right up the back.  Real funny, Rollin.

He was "rollin" on the floor laughing for about 5 whole minutes.

My mom always told me that they wouldn't put the time into pranking me like that if they didn't like me.  Maybe she's right, but there were many times I left Phelps' time capsule of an apartment wishing I had thrown everyone of them over the balcony.

It was several years after I had been sheet-caked out that Rollin reached out to me.

It was all done through channels, of course.  There were cut-outs and blinds, but eventually we ended up meeting in, of all places, Windsor, Ontario.  Don't know if it was convenient for him, but I can assure you it was not convenient for me.

It was a rainy October afternoon.  I remember that because it felt like we were in the north of England.  A cold, piercing rain that cut right through you.  We had lunch in the back room of a greasy Greek restaurant just off Victoria St in the downtown. 

Turns out, Rollin got his cake shortly after I did.  He knew it was coming.  He would get more and more of the skin jobs that called for an old man and he was using less and less make-up.  His mirror told him long before his controller.  The "Man of a Thousand Faces" had been reduced to one, a mask that he couldn't pull off at the end of the job.

He could no longer hide who he was and once that was gone, once he had to really look at himself, he recognized the price his country had collected for his service.

Much as I had hated the guy, I have to say that when he told that to me, my heart kind of went out to the sonofabitch.  Poor dumb bastard, we'd all told him about it but when he was at the top of his game he didn't need to listen.  He was playing in cabaret and in our high-stakes world and winning universal acclaim.  There was no reason to believe that that wouldn't always be the case.

His first wife left him when he was in the Eastern Bloc doing a job on a banker who was trying to jump-start the Fourth Reich.  I don't think we ever met her, but I could be wrong. 

He couldn't understand why she had left him.  It couldn't have been because he was never home.  Probably had nothing to do with the fact that when he was home, she was always finding bits and pieces of latex all over their place.  (Turns out, she was allergic.)  Couldn't possibly be because he was always taking her make-up.  (At least, that's what she told me.)

The next two wives are a blur because they came and went much faster and each in their own way made sure that he would have to be working until long after the audiences lost their interest. 

Divorce laws kept changing--especially during those years--and Rollin never did.  Each new wife added about 5 years to his working life.  He called it "bitch feed" that he would have to scratch up like some sort of sad rubber-covered chicken.

It surprised me that he felt a need to unload like that.  His whole life story from our last job together up until earlier that morning.  He also felt obliged to apologize for that silk suit gag.  Forty years or more later, he was still carrying that around.

And as he would talk--still using those flamboyant gestures that were so common with smokers where they would use the vapor trail from their cigarettes to accent a story point, or punctuate a joke--I could still see the Rollin I has known all those years before.

I could also see the tattoos on his neck.

I finally asked him how bad it was and he told me.

Not all the bitches were going to get fed. 

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised:  it seemed like some kind of poetic justice, but there, in that restaurant on that day, it was sad.  Very sad.

We talked a lot about sleep and how that had become harder and harder to come by.  For a man who adopted and discarded faces as he did, to be visited by..., haunted by, those faces....  Maybe others enjoyed the sleep of the just, but not him and, truth to tell, not me either.

We talked about our lives since we left the job:  the wins and, more frequently, the losses.  We had a good laugh about Briggs as a TV talking head.

It got so we were the only ones in the place and then it got so that the restaurant had to close.  They only did lunch on Saturday--not enough traffic to stay open all day.  It got so I had begun to think about the long drive I had ahead of me and the relentless thunkety-thunk-thunkety-thunk of the Michigan roads.  It got to the last moment that we both knew would be the last moment.

He wanted to show me one of his god damned magic tricks.  Pick a card?  Really?  I told him that I didn't want to see a trick.  Every time he brought out the cards, it ended up costing me money.

I got up to leave and he touched my arm.

"Just one more thing," he said.

And then, he made that move where he raised his hand across his throat and grabbed at the edge of his make-up....  He always did exquisite work, I do have to give him that.  If I hadn't seen him do it, I would not have been able to tell the before and after difference.

I shook his hand for a long minute and I wished him good luck.

And then I had my hand on the door and he called to me in a stage whisper.

"I left you a souvenir in your car."

Of course he did, that prick.

Of course, he did.  It was hanging from the hook behind the driver's seat.  It was the same shade of blue exactly.

More Equal

I used to be big in advertising.

That was my cover job.  I wrote copy for several of the larger New York agencies. 

I was pretty good, but because I never knew when the phone would ring I never had time for the office politics that can make all the difference between having a job and having a career in a field like that.

They drum into your head how you are supposed to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself.  Be an anonymous working stiff and never let anyone know anything beyond what's written in your bio.

The problem with that is that for someone who looks like me it can be a little difficult to blend in.  All I can figure is that someone screwed up when they assigned me to advertising.

I think they would have switched me out if I had turned out to have a knack for it.  I mean a real knack.

And truth was, it was good for me.  The best way to get a job out of my head was to focus on something else, something entirely different.

While I was on the Street, I worked on some pretty substantial campaigns.  Names you would recognize.  I planned the campaigns, worked with the clients and brought the different creatives to the table.  Of course, they could never be my accounts.  Wouldn't do to have the campaign to sell stockings planned by a spy.  I would argue who better, but Briggs wouldn't budge.

I was never allowed to sign my work, but that bitch Cinnamon could have a very public career as a fashion model?  What the fuck?  It always amazed me that we would go to some 'stan or other and no one had ever seen a magazine?

Same goes for that prima donna Hand.  "Man of a Thousand Faces...."  We would do whole jobs with him out in the open, sometimes right across from theatres or night clubs where he had just done one of his legit shows and that was fine.  Me, I gotta use a beard to sign off on the Fatima cigarette campaign.

I just didn't matter to them as much as the others.  Wouldn't have mattered if I had an excellent singing voice, or was a skilled horseman, or could turn invisibile.  The only thing that mattered was if I could pick up whatever piece of shit they came up with.

The ultimate shitty thing was when they cut me out.  Not only did they put me on the street with the taste of that crap sheet cake in my mouth, they took my cover so I couldn't go back to advertising.  I was forbidden from contacting sources and using covers that were active when I was inside. 

I couldn't even start over in Chicago:  too small a sandbox, someone might tumble to me.

So I was forced to become a tumbleweed.  Like The Fugitive, I was on the road from then on.  Town to town, job to job, looking for some place to fit in, some place to belong.

And there were some shitty jobs and shittier towns along that road.  It wouldn't be so hard to stomach if I didn't see the others still living their lives as though nothing had happened.  Why am I cleaning the vats at the chicken processing plant on the third shift for eight bucks an hour when that bitch Cinnamon is being featured on "America's Next Top Model"?

I guess that some of us are more equal than others and there was nothing about that in the recruiting flyer.

The Simplest Things

They never called me as a solo.  Not once.

There was the time they set me up as a sideshow strongman, but I never got sent out on my own.

I had the skills.  I had mad skills, as the kids say.  I guaran-goddamn-tee that I had Barney fuckin' lapped in all those classes. 

Running, jumping, shooting, fighting:  all of them.

They tested us all the time.  Got so as I could fill in those circles with a Number 2 pencil in my sleep.

"Newspaper is to scissors as duck is to...."  I hate those questions.

And they never tell you what the right answer is.  Everything you do is always "interesting."'

I was so god damned "interesting" that I spent my career fetching wrenches and pretending to be interested in whatever it was that we were supposed to be doing.

Can't go near a hardware store without breaking out in a cold sweat.  Something about the smell of the place and I can feel my pulse drumming in my ears and feel the beads of sweat start to form.

Feel the same way about any kind of truck, which is unfortunate given that for anyone who is not French, most cars and passenger vehicles are too small. 

Spent too much time in the things.  Way too much.

And it was always my job to make sure it was packed with anything we might possibly need while in-country.  And I do mean ANYTHING.

A lot of the jobs I was on went to plan, many more than we had any reasonable right to expect, but there was the odd one that required us to improv our way out and then, if I didn't have whatever they needed I would get the brush for months afterwards.

I probably shouldn't tell this story, but once when we were doing a simulator job--trying to convince some dumb sonofabitch that he was in the cargo hold of a Russian freighter I got tagged for not having the right kind of gum wrapper.

Fucking guy quit smoking the week before--the fucking week before, mind you--and he had swapped out one habit for another.  Guy went through more gum than that bitch Cinnamon went through stockings.

"Where's the gum, Willy?"

"How come you don't have the right kind of gum?"

"Are you stupid, or something?"

How I was I supposed to know that he was mainlining gum like some sort of speed freak?  There was nothing in the file.  Nothing.

I checked.

Rollin ended up stalling him with some bullshit and we cobbled together "the last package on the boat."  I free handed the label and we filled it with some scraps of latex from Rollin's make-up kit.  And, at the very last minute, as the guy was going to put a piece in his mouth, one of the Hartford Rep guys knocks it from his hand and the package goes flying into the "bilge".

Worked out great.  Didn't save me from getting the shoulder on the trip out, but it was a great moment.

That kind of stuff happened all the time. 

"Willy, pack the truck." 

"Willy, make sure the props are checked."

"What do you mean we don't have a period-correct 16th Century Persian drinking cup, Willy?"

Whatever the job was, it would have been so much simpler to shoot one or two of them and we could have gone home.  I sometimes wonder if they didn't come up with the most complicated way possible to do the simplest things.

The Secretary

It started with Briggs, but really Phelps was not any better. 

Got something heavy?  Call Willy.  Need to smuggle someone past security?  Hide them in a suitcase and have the gym rat carry them through the lobby like they were full of down comforters.  Nobody will ever suspect a thing!

Yeah, right.

You can't do jobs like that unless you look like you can do jobs like that.

I don't care if the guy did weigh a buck-ten in his skivvies, carrying a weight takes muscle and wearing that doesn't look like anything else than what it is.  But Briggs goes "Oh no, nobody's going to suspect a thing.  Just make it look natural and it'll be natural."

Great.  It's so easy, you do it.

Job after job, year after year, I'm riding in the back of one rattletrap car or another, or I'm driving some truck that is more of an idea and less of a functioning vehicle. 

We had ropers and we had inside men and then there was Barney and me.  The ropers and inside men all traveled in style.  Even Barney some times.  Me, I was more of the underneath man and, since nobody saw me, it didn't matter how I got where I was needed.  That bitch Cinnamon never got tossed out of the back of a cargo plane, I guarantee that.

I  read a thing the other day about the toshers who used to sift through the shit in the sewers of Victorian London looking for anything of value.  By all accounts, the worst job ever and I remember thinking, "been there, done that."  There were days and there were places when that would have looked like a promotion with stock options.

It's the belief that you are going to find a gold coin or a priceless family jewel that keeps you going in a job like that.  It's what makes the working conditions tolerable.  It took me the longest time to find my own way.  A way to make doing all those jobs make sense for me. 

Seriously, you try spending every waking minute with Barney:  he'll talk your ears off.  Smart as a whip, do doubt about it, but obsessive, you know?  Guess it helped him in his work, but if I never see or hear about another Bonsai tree it will be too soon.

Anyway....  Where was I?  Oh yeah....  I still hadn't found my thing, you know?  I was really frustrated doing all these shitty jobs.  It's important work, for your country and all, but still it gets to you.  I hear that the guys that do the wet work burn out pretty quick, but I can tell you that I was less than a year in and I was more than ready to go back to New York and do copy work.

It was in the line at some cafeteria.  I don't remember where at the moment.  Anyway, I met someone.  It was one of those things, you know?  I wasn't looking.  Didn't know I was even interested, but there was this kind of electric thing, like they talk about in the magazines.  Thought that was a bunch of bullshit and then it happened to me.  Electric.  Working with Barney I have been shocked plenty of times, believe me.  Son of a bitch doesn't know the meaning of a ground wire.  But that was never like this.

Anyway, if they were making a movie of my life, this would be the part where they would play the song by the pop star and show a series of shots of us walking and talking and eating and riding horses and laughing.  And we did do all of that, just without musical accompaniment.

We talked a whole lot.  Never about work:  that's one of the first rules you learn in my business. 

It took some doing, but I figured it out.  I think he wanted me to.

For obvious reasons, I can't be too specific here, but "Peter" was involved in scouting and securing the drop sites where IMF leaders would pick up their assignments. 

Doesn't sound very important, but I can tell you it made the hours of hot, sweaty, dangerous work fly by knowing that we were going to run Brigg's fat ass all over town to get the next assignment.  And believe me, the worse the job, the greater the runaround on the next one.

That's all it took and I was ready for the next mission.

Oh, the Places I've Been

I found a postcard the other day.  Can't think why I still had it:  bad tradecraft.  Very bad.

Only it was the only one I ever got.  Barney sent it to through a dead drop I kept in Imperial Beach.  All those years and it's the only one he ever sent.

It's got a picture of a range of mountains on the border between Switzerland and Svardia.  No place I've ever heard of.  It's got the ugliest stamp that I think I've ever seen.

Can't think why he sent it.  If it's the time I'm thinking of, I was on this job.  Although you'd never know it.

It was our first big "simulator" job and I was stuck watching the train yard.  Eighteen fucking hours freezing my ass off while their inside playacting.
The first one and they kept me out of it.

Fucking Briggs!

Oh sure, got heavy boxes to move, call Willy.  But when they do something really innovative, really pushing the envelope kind of stuff, do I get a call?  Nope.  Fucking postcard.

Fucking Briggs!  I'm glad he flamed out. 

He shows up every now and again on my TV and it's all I can do to keep from shooting the god damned thing. 

First time I saw him doing his national security analyst thing, I half-thought it was a cover.  Maybe he's in deep.  Always did like the long con.  More I think of it, more I think that he's just found a place to serve up the crazy that consumed him.

I'll never know which is right.  Nobody left to send a postcard now.  Besides, once they give you the cake, they don't give you anything after that.

God damned postcard....

Sheree always wanted to travel.  She dreamed of seeing the world.  Hope she has.  Sorry I couldn't take her.  Hope she found someone who could.

We were really great together.  Just found one another at the wrong time.

When I got to the street, I was not only turned out, I was burned out.  Spend the best years of your life chasing all over the world fighting your country's enemies and the last thing you want to do is get in another plane.

Thing is, I saw the world, just not the pretty parts.

There's a guy in the next bed whining about his time in Korea and going on and on about some whorehouse.  What I wouldn't give for those kind of memories.

I start talking about crawling through tunnels or helping a guy escape from prison who blew up a United States Senator and I am on an express train to the secure ward and I guarantee you there are no postcards there.

Somebody's Watching Me

I know what's going on.

Fucking guy's watching me.

He makes like he's sleeping all the time.  All the fucking time he's snoring and making everyone think he's totally out of it.  I know what's going on.

I know what's going on and now I can't sleep.

I gotta get out of this bed.

Between the uncomfortable bed and the constant poking and prodding from the nurses with their squeeky shoes and now this guy.  There's a lot to keep track of.

I've been trying to remember if he's someone we ever worked a game on.  Can't remember.  There were a lot of them and that was a lot of years ago.

But that would be stupid for the guy to come himself.  Bad craft.  Send a proxy, a blank sheet.  No track-back.

Wish I could get out of this bed.

Can't let him wait me out.  He's just waiting for me to fall asleep.

I have to take him out before he takes me out.

Asked the nurses about him when I found out I was getting a rommate and they didn't know anything.  They have better tradecraft than some of the pros I worked with.  They can stand in a shaft of sunlight and not be able to confirm it's daytime.

They're just waiting for me to fall asleep.

Could be this guy's a stalking horse.  Maybe they'll come from a different way.

Can't afford sleep.

I need to take this guy out so they have something else to focus on.

Fucking guy.

The Impossible Part

I still wake up at night in a cold sweat.

Most nights, in fact.

I never know what will set it off.  Could be a something I saw during the day.  Could be a sound.  Most often, however, it's a smell.

I may not even know that I smelled it.  Something that was too faint to register during the day can overtake my sleep and it's like I'm right back there..., in those places and doing those horrible jobs.

It's like 30 years since I got my last call and I can be right back there in an instant.

Seems the "impossible" part is leaving the job behind.