Happy Family by Tracy Barone

Author:Tracy Barone
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

A small miracle does happen. Suddenly the object of Michael’s epic procrastination, now definitively titled Everybody Must Get Stoned, is declared finished. Seemingly overnight, HMS Bay becomes drug-free; gone is his old apothecary cabinet full of pills, dope samples, and hallucinogens. Jars of foul-smelling roots, herbs, powders, and liquids leave only dust to outline their existence. The documentary left Michael’s grasp with little fanfare and an expired distribution deal, but he was decidedly upbeat and set out to gather his crew for a new project. Cheri can barely recognize this new Michael. He is buoyant, purposeful. He is living in the present. Today is a new day.

“The question is, can anyone tell you when you’re going to die?” Standing before the five members of his longtime documentary team, Michael is animated, energized, charismatic. “Can a doctor? A psychic? A voodoo priestess? Given that I have a finite but as yet undetermined number of days, I’ve decided that I want to spend them taking a last stand. A filmic campaign across the U.S. where we uncover every roadside palmist, every neon psychic sign, every fortune-teller at every country fair from Coney Island to New Orleans to Santa Cruz. We’ll talk to everyone who claims to have the gift and ask them about death—specifically, my death. It’ll be called The Palmist.” He passes out T-shirts. A hand with Day-Glo-colored palm lines is on the front and on the back is Last Stand. Michael Shoub 1945–?

The team is huddled on the couch and on the frayed armchairs of HMS Bay. They glance up at Bertrand, leaning against Michael’s desk, to guide them. He has long been the still center at the eye of Michael’s creative hurricane. There’s Jane, his production coordinator and assistant, a woman whose entire life has been spent midwifing other people’s art. She doesn’t even have a cat waiting for her at home. Giaccomo, a chameleon-like director of photography who seems to take on the aesthetic characteristics of whatever subject he’s working on. There’s Jonah, Michael’s former student turned editor, and Papa John, a wiry Cajun soundman who doubles as a composer. “The palm is like the stop sign,” Michael continues, “recognizable in any language. It shows up everywhere—in strip malls next to McDonald’s, chicken stands in the South, off the highway, next to the rattlesnake museum in Albuquerque or on a beach shack in Venice. Imagine looking past the signs, through the windows with the cheap venetian blinds, into the faces of so-called American mystics. Remember the snake oil salesman in the beginning of The Wizard of Oz? Bertrand, you know who I’m talking about, right? Dorothy’s on the bike with Toto and she stops to buy an elixir out of his horse-drawn wagon…”

“Yeah, of course, let me see what it will cost to use a clip,” Bertrand says.

“You’re talking about Professor Marvel; Frank Morgan played him,” Jane says, her tiny face peeking out from her mass of gray hair. “They wrote it for W. C. Fields, but he wanted too much money.

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