Gary Templeton, originally of Olivette, Missouri, the son of a man who made his reputation as the star of local television commercials for his appliance and electronics business (Big Leo, for whom “no problem was too small”), had been a child of cheery temperament, popular in school, a good but not great student, which is why he had remained largely silent regarding his true destiny, which was to be, he knew, not a salesman like his father, not a teacher like his mother (twenty-four years of service, American history at the middle-school level), but something more mysterious and rewarding. Most people were instruments. He would be a lens. He would be an artist. He said nothing about it in high school. How could he? (When he imagined the looks on the faces of his poor parents…). And then in college, too, he kept it to himself, and in management school, and during those years that he rejoined the family business, and when he met Kelly (When he imagined the look on the face of that poor woman….), and when they had their son, and then their daughter, and then their second son, and when he endeavored to build Big Leo’s TV Shack upward and outward, regional dominance a vital part of his increasingly focused national strategy, and when his father passed, and when his mother developed dementia, and when Kevin graduated college, and when Lucy moved to Portugal, and when Kelly asked for a divorce, and when they patched things up, and when he had his first heart attack, fifty-one years old, same age his father had his, Gary’s not a major one, not a “true chest-banger,” the doctor said, inappropriately Gary thought. But the doc was right, and the day Gary got back from the hospital, he opened up a file and got right to it. He was not afraid of the blank page. It was an action movie with an eco-aware twist, the story of a man who traveled through time from the Middle Ages only to meet a scientist with his hair on fire about humanity’s inhumanity not to man but to the planet that sustained them all. He finished the script, The Yeoman and the Geo-Man, in three months. It came out of him like a fire out of a furnace. When Bill McKechnie, a friend of his dad’s since the first days of the Shack, told Gary that Bill’s son Dave was now an executive at a movie studio and that Gary should send him the script, Gary laughed. How presumptuous! But he did it anyway, to make Bill feel better, the same way he smiled when Bill told him how he was the spitting image of his father, by which he knew that Bill meant fat, and within a week that was Dave on the phone, saying he wanted to buy it. Gary wondered what expression his face was making as he heard the news. Dave had only one change. “The title,” he said. “It’s good but not great. I want to dump the ‘The.’ Both of them, in fact. Now this thing sings.” He paused and then continued. “I mean it,” he said. “This. Thing. Sings.” Gary called his mother, who was at the home. She only sometimes recognized his voice. This time, she did, brightly, calling him “Gare” like when he was a kid. He told her the story. There was a silence. “You know,” she said. “I wouldn’t have touched the title. Who does that Bill McKechnie think he is?” Gary started to tell her that it was Dave, not Bill, but he stopped. It was Bill in a sense, wasn’t it?
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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