Fletch’s Moxie by Gregory McDonald

Author:Gregory McDonald [McDonald, Gregory]
Format: epub
Tags: Fletch
ISBN: 9780307524003
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1982-06-24T05:00:00+00:00

“Wow!” Moxie said. “What’s all this about?”

“Sunset.”

There were hundreds of people on the dock. Spaced to keep out of each other’s sounds, there was a rock band, a country band, a string ensemble. There was a juggler juggling oranges and an acrobatic team bouncing each other into the air. There was a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin doing the funny walk through the crowd. There was an earnest young man preaching The Word of The Lord and a more earnest young man in a brown shirt and swastika armband preaching racial discrimination, and a most earnest young man satirizing them both, exhorting the people to believe in canned peas. Each had an audience of listeners, watchers, cheerers, and jeerers.

Across the water, the big red sun was dropping slowly to the Gulf of Mexico.

The people milling around on the dock, ambling from group to group, looking at each other, listening to each other, taking pictures of each other, were of every sort extant. One hundred miles of Florida Keys hang from continental U.S.A., like an udder, and to the southernmost point drip the cream and the milk and the scum of the whole continent. There are the artists, the writers, the musicians, young and old, the arrived, the arriving, and the never-to-arrive. There are numbers of single people of all ages, sometimes in groups, the searchers who sometimes find. There are the American families, with children and without, the professional and the working class, the retired and the honeymooners. There are the drug victims and the drug smugglers, the filthy, mind blown, and the gold-bedecked, corrupt, corrupting despoilers of the human being.

“Wow,” said Moxie. “What a fashion show.”

The people there were dressed in tatters and tailor-made, suits and strings, rags and royal gems.

“You should talk,” Fletch said, grinning into her huge plastic glasses.

“So many people for a sunset.”

“Happens every night. Even cloudy nights.”

“What an event. Someone should sell tickets. Really. Think what you have to do to get this many people into a theater.”

After touring the crowd, listening to the music, watching the performers, Fletch and Moxie found an empty place on the edge of the dock and sat down. Their legs dangled over the water.

“What an outer reality,” Moxie said.

“Which reminds me,” Fletch said. “Simple enough question: who is the producer of Midsummer Night’s Madness?”

“Steve Peterman.”

“I thought you said he was executive producer, or something.”

“He is. Sort of. There is another producer, Talcott Cross. I never met him. His job is finished, for now. He worked at setting things up. Casting. Most of the location work. You know, hiring people.”

“Where is he?”

“Los Angeles, I suppose. I think he lives in Hollywood Hills. Steve intended to be the line-producer on this film. That is, stay with it during shooting, and all that.”

“So which of them hired Geoff McKensie and which hired Sy Koller?”

“Cross hired McKensie. Peterman fired him.”

“And Peterman hired Koller.”

“Right.”

“So Peterman is more powerful than Cross? I mean, one of the co-producers is more equal than the other?”

“Sure. Cross is more of an employee.

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