Scott Brooks

Opening Pages

Panic City

by Scott Brooks

 

The first goggles were large, obvious, and people asked questions. A little while later, they tried something that looked like a motorcycle helmet, which also drew attention, but remained a fan favorite of certain players who chose to play on electric scooters or skateboards and who also no doubt enjoyed regular fly-bys past the uncertain law enforcement of New York City. Maybe there were other iterations of goggles, visors, as well as the headphones and gloves; you’re unlikely to meet anyone who will admit to knowing much of anything about a game called Panic City and the people who played it. The next goggles, from that summer, looked like the tinted wraparound sunglasses you wore if you were someone who rode their bike so much that you called yourself a cyclist, wore the tight shorts and all the rest.

Those were the goggles they found next to the bright red splashes of blood near the construction site where they were tearing down that old hotel, the goggles that dragged our game and us with it, into the spotlight. The crime scene. 

At the time, they were beta testing the latest ones, the ones we would still be using today had everything not happened the way it did. They looked like regular ray-bans. Classic and unbearably cool.

Surely the way we all would like to be remembered.

 

Horatio Doyle was fifty-five years old, which is no longer as old as it once was. 

In the dining room of his late parent’s Connecticut home, his thumb flicking through pictures on his iPhone whatever, he was fighting waves of nausea and a sense of vertigo. Doyle was looking for a picture of his twenty-two-year-old son, Oliver.  It had to be a clear shot of his face without much else going on in the background and preferably without any errant arms or hands in the frame. He needed it the for the missing poster. Oliver had been missing for three days. After typing the words, “Oliver Doyle” then in caps, “MISSING” he broke out into long, loud sobs that lasted several minutes. 

He stood up from the dining room table that served as his desk and walked over to the window as if looking for Oliver. However, Oliver had gone missing somewhere in Harlem, where he had just begun graduate studies at Columbia University. Doyle, as he was called by most, was in Greenwich, Connecticut, in what he still thought of as his parent’s house though he had owned it since his parents had finally finished dying, in turn. That piece had played out in a rather practical manner, as not long after, Horatio was arrested and tried for computer hacking and other cybercrimes his former employer and the feds felt he was guilty of. His wife Michelle divorced him as a result of his proclivities, though Doyle suspected she had been looking for an excuse, and incarceration had proved more than sufficient. In the year since, he took up in the house he had grown up in, living in the guest room, as sleeping in his childhood room felt like failure, and sleeping in his parent’s old bed felt like something perverted and tragic. On his first night there he thought of the three bears and how the queen-sized bed in the guest room felt just right.

 

He had woken up on the couch still slightly drunk from the night before. With little else to do and even less that he was allowed to do, Doyle had taken to pouring himself a few rye and ginger ales while talking out loud to no one over streaming movies. Lately he had started bringing the bottle of Mackenzie rye and the can of ginger ale into the living room. Michelle was calling him. His face puckered in curious concern when he saw her name on his phone. They only ever texted, and anything that could not be articulated via text was saved for the next face to face whenever that that was. Once she had asked him for a divorce, they became immediate strangers, seeming to have as little in common with each other as a former schoolmate who you bump into at a reunion.

“When was the last time you heard from Oliver?” She asked.

He had to think. Hadn't they texted a few days ago? Had they not talked in weeks?

“I can’t get a hold of him,” she continued.

“Well, how long has it been?”

“Three days,” she said. “His roommate called me and said he hasn’t seen him.”

“He hasn’t been home?”

“He hasn’t been back to the apartment since Sunday,” she said. It was Wednesday.

“Alright, I’m calling the local precinct.” Doyle said.

“I already did,” she said, “The cop laughed in my face. Grad student who knows the neighborhood… as far as they’re concerned he could just be off doing his own thing. He said if there’s no sign of foul play there’s nothing they can do.”

Oliver did not go for lost weekend benders or pile into a car for Atlantic City. He was the kind of son every parent wants. Kind, thoughtful, calls his mother. Growing up, he never played rough and eschewed kids who did. He didn’t even like kids who cursed to impress each other. He was a homebody who never missed a movie night with his dad in favor of carousing with his high school friends.

“What are you going to do?” she asked almost accusingly.

Doyle told her he was going to go to Harlem and hung up the phone. 

Panic City

by Scott Brooks

 

Act of Story Statement:

A Columbia student disappears, and his father goes to Harlem to find him.

 

Antagonist:

After arriving at Columbia to look for Oliver, Doyle learns that his son had a girlfriend, Nina. At first, Nina seems very concerned and helpful towards Doyle.  But Nina is not Oliver’s type and frankly way out of his league and Doyle distrusts her immediately. We eventually learn that it was Nina who got Oliver to play the game as she was involved in it from its inception. In fact, she was once romantically involved with the game’s creator, Josh. Nina has carefully planned using the naïve Oliver in a plot to destroy the game’s reputation and eventual marketability by having someone get killed while playing.

 

TITLE:

 

Panic City

It is not only the name of the video game in the story, but it also reflects the protagonists panic while looking for his son.

 

Genre and comps:

Thriller

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

 

LOGLINE:

A dad’s searches for his missing grad student son and discovers he was involved with a group that met regularly to play a virtual reality video game that has turned deadly.

 

INNER CONFLICT:

Horatio Doyle became estranged from his son after serving a light prison sentence for computer hacking. He is determined to get this right and save his boy. He is also struggling with drinking and still uses it as a crutch as he looks for Oliver.

This comes to a dramatic head after he is roofied at a club the gamers go to, and hallucinates that Oliver is dead while wandering around Morningside Park. This represents a hero’s journey utilizing symbolism from classical literature and once he has made it through the night, he becomes clear headed about how to find Oliver.

 

Secondary Conflict: Dealing with the truth about Nina as her role in Oliver’s disappearance become clearer. Nina and the games developers, Josh and Terrence have convinced Oliver that he accidentally killed someone while playing. With help from some of Oliver’s other friends involved in the game, Doyle learns about the game and realizes he must actually play to discover where Oliver is.

 

Setting:

The timeless streets of Harlem, specifically around Columbia University. This is not the mean streets of Harlem the reader may be imagining, rather a haunted house of dark brownstones and the steep inclines and stairs of Morningside Park. The story veers into the more urban areas especially during the game, adding to the lawless anything-can-happen feeling of playing Panic City. The story is also set in the month of October as orange leaves cover the streets and it gets dark earlier every night…

The story utilizes everyday life in Harlem but through the lens of “nothing the main character sees may even be real”; is that delivery guy on the scooter playing the game? Is that graffiti a clue? 

Meanwhile the privileged Columbia students whose parents pay for gorgeous apartments are using the city as one big template for their fun, are now trying to cover up a murder.

 

I had a cool name which was why I hated to change it.

Bobby Jordan.

With a name like that, maybe I should have been a baseball player, but I ended up a portfolio manager at one of the big New York hedge funds.

Either way, there I was on the roof of a boutique hotel in mid-town Manhattan, my ex-wife’s boyfriend pointing a gun at me demanding I hand over a My Catchy Creature – those stuffed animals from the mid-nineties that everyone went crazy over? One of those. It was Shani the Snail. The Shani the Snail My Catchy Creature was not supposed to exist. Arlo Rothstein’s stuffed animal empire - ingeniously named ARLO – repeatedly denied the existence of Shani the Snail in the press, saying it was an urban legend; The Chupacabra of the plush toy world. 

But it did exist. 

And I had it. Not usually my thing, but…

I was almost sure that Leif - that was his name - did not know how to fire the gun he was shaking in my direction and would be scared to death if he did shoot me. 

Picture him dragging me across the roof in the snow, I’m sorry I’m so sorry… A red bloodstain flowering over the front of my Brooks Brother’s shirt, shouting, somebody help me! his glasses sliding down his sweaty nose. I don’t think Leif was ready to risk jail time for Shani the Snail. He just wanted this to be over with as much as I did. If he did kill me, a lot of people would be very upset. Because I am already dead. That is how Leif, who I believe is some kind of artichoke farmer, lives so well; off my investments and my life insurance payout. Because Bob Jordan was on Flight B-2520 which disappeared in a storm over the Atlantic that never even got upgraded to a hurricane, and no survivors were found.  

 

From the desk of Bobby Jordan, 2008

 

There are occasions throughout history at which certain elements are deposited near enough to each other that their proximity creates a recipe for the absurd. 

If Necessity was the mother of Invention, then Excess was her love child. Happy Soda is the story of Excess and its rampage through a century since it came bleating forth across the plains and settling in on the couches and recliners of America.

Consider the last century. A generation dusting itself off from the Great Depression - a time when an economy halted and a nation just over a century old, contemplated extinction… The sons and daughters of the civil war looked starvation in the face and starvation smiled back.  Uncle Sam, that strange totem for The United States of America, hat in hand, sat down on dusty railroad tracks and looked up at the sky for answers. 

The answer came in the form of bombs dropped from Japanese Zeros on Pearl Harbor. 

The assembly line, suggested half a century earlier by Henry Ford, saw its true potential fulfilled in building the machinery of that great war and got people working again. The war was great in its’ scope, not in a “Less filling, Tastes great” sense, of course. War meant jobs and jobs meant people spending money. 

A person worked hard and saved his money and bought a new American car every few years and that meant that whoever built that car had a job and the man who sold it got a commission and a certain lifestyle persevered and a patriotic duty was done. 

Business is an animal that must be fed to be kept alive. This big, horny beast pounded its chest and demanded the biggest piece of the pie and the middle cinnamon roll, the soft one. 

We are all part of a national creed to buy and sell and work and spend…

All Bobby Jordan was doing - all I was doing - was getting myself a big messy piece of that pie. I picture pizza when people say that even though I guess it’s pie – like dessert pie, like cherry or apple. When I was an undergrad at Georgetown, and we would order out, the guys would make fun of me because I would always get extra cheese on the pie. And that is a lot of goddamn cheese.

“How can you eat that?” someone in our study group would inevitably ask.

I had no answer. I do now, though. Happy Soda.

So it was that cheesy, greasy pepperoni pie that I was getting my piece of when I worked for  _____ Financial Group from 1993 to 2003.

 

Oh, the late nineties in America!  Cellular phones, Seinfeld, No Diggity; no doubt.

People said the phrase, “world wide web,” out loud, the whole thing, every time. So much was coming, we just didn’t know what. A small industry sprung up overnight around an unfounded fear that on New Year’s Eve 1999, everyone’s computer would break because short-sighted computer programmers only ever dealt with the last two numbers of a year and come 2000 computers might get all confused and think the year was 1900 and no one would know what was going on. 

We were innocent. 

Most of humankind counted down the end of the last millennium on the thirty-first of January nineteen hundred and ninety-nine. It was a time to be alive. There were a few party poopers who tried to point out that as there was no year zero, the real millennium would not begin until a year later, but after some consideration most of western civilization decided, fuck them, the room has been booked, the hats and signs have been made and all the rest of it.

I remember my wife Holly reading an article out loud to me one Sunday morning about a group of super-rich people who had chartered jets and flew around the world ringing in the new year over and over again as they crossed each time zone. Holly thought it was a tacky display. History would soon show that the new millennium would begin in earnest one year and nine months after that – again in specially commandeered jets, come to think of it.

In the seven years before that fall, when everything changed for everyone, I managed to embezzle close to half a billion dollars from the fund and its clients. 

Securities fraud, is easy to do, but hard to do well.

But the Why remained for me and that was the question that scared me as much as getting caught did. Why was I doing it? What itch was there left to scratch? Maybe I even had a higher purpose.

 

 

It was early in the summer in 2003 and Damon Diggs, a managing director of the fund, knocked and stuck his head into my office. He was a handsome black guy whose tailored suits and shirts advertised his gym membership. He was too young for his own good, and he was almost always chewing gum. His one weakness was Patek Philippe watches. Guys like us – people with a distracting amount of disposable income are drawn to bright shiny objects that make everything we have done to get rich, and however we may feel about it, seem somehow worth it. One of mine was high-end wine. Damon was a watch guy; Rolexes, and so on, but Patek Philippe were the ones that really got him going. He would take them off and hand them to anyone who showed interest. He would tell you about the next one he wanted to buy. One he had an eye on at auction. Like a kid with a baseball card collection or those Star Wars action figures that I had to have when I was young. 

Or a My Catchy Creature doll.

Once, he noticed a politician being deposed in a congressional hearing on television and thought the guy was wearing a Patek. He Googled it later and it turned out he was right. People were talking about it in the company’s chat room. 

This is also Happy Soda.

I would look at these things, trying to see fifty or a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of watch, and I could not seem to. 

I have always been open to the possibility that I am unrefined.

He once said this to me: “People who know what’s up will know what I am wearing. People know quality when they see it.” He shook his arm down letting the French cuff fall over it before lifting his arm again. “Truth, bro, I wear it because it makes me feel good. I don’t give a fuck what other people think.”

“You wear a fifty-thousand-dollar watch because you don’t care what people think.”

I say things like that, and it gets me in trouble. He raised his eyebrows in surprise; at my frankness maybe, but I had no way of knowing how much my comment got under his skin and who knows, maybe that is when it all started between him and me. 

 

            I was getting ready for a trip to Grand Cayman the next day unlike any other. A senator who I had become friends with and who had several million with the fund had told me that he knew a guy that could use a little advice.

“What kind of advice does this guy need bro? Why all the secrecy?” We were at ___ in Tribeca – he hadn’t wanted to meet at the office. Which is kind of normal for a senator, and who knows maybe he had meetings all day and this was the only time he had to ask for favors. Maybe he had heard about the happy hour oysters. 

“Well, look, this guy gives a lot of money to a Super Pac that funds a lot of what we are trying to do.”

Senator No Name was from oil country and the promise of continued deregulation of the fossil fuel industry was what kept him in office.

“So who is he?”

He laughed, or tried to, and contemplated the ice in his drink for a second more. “You’re gonna get a kick out of this actually, he’s former KGB. These guys are making a killing over there. The entire country is being looted. And my guy needs a little advice getting his finances you know – off shore.”

I put on a shocked face. “Why would you think I would know anything about that?”

“Because you know everything Bobby, don’t bullshit me. Save it for your priest or your wife or whoever. Help me out with this. Believe me, these guys are the future.”

 He needed the money for the Super Pac to come from a legitimate source not the Russian Mafia. I had to go to Cayman to close one of my shell companies and talk to one of the bank Presidents where I kept some money. I offered to escort them. 

“No worries man!” My Senatorial friend said with glee. “We’ll fly there on his fucking jet dude. Wait til you see the girls this guy travels around with.”

Not what I needed in my life at that time to be sure, but how do I say no? 

 

It was around noon I was already starving, and getting ready for yet another trip to Grand Caman, this time with sand I asked my assistant, Michelle, to order one of the crab sandwiches from Santiago’s - a seafood restaurant I had invested in near the Seaport. They were supposed to be using Patagonia crab in the crab salad and I heard that they were skimping. The difference is immediately obvious to anyone who knows better. I told her not to say who it was for just to pick it up and get herself whatever she wanted. I always took good care of my assistants. She had just returned with lunch, (and my Cape Cod salt and vinegar chips and Dr. Browns Cherry Soda.) I was at that moment, hunched eagerly over my crab salad sandwich on a croissant, paper napkin unfolded and tucked into my shirt collar, and there was Damon Diggs standing in my doorway.

“Sup dude how’s your weekend?” Damon asked.

My weekend was a nuclear disaster. My wife, Holly had asked me for a divorce because she found evidence that I was cheating. Credit cards, receipts for private jets to Mauritius and Grand Cayman. But I don’t want to pull focus.

“Fine, great, super,” was all I could think to say. “Yours?”

He appeared to think it over and said, “Good.”  He tapped the door frame with a fist –The watch was a Breitling that day - “Lunch tomorrow? We should catch up. Cool? Cool.” 

Then he was gone.

My mouth hung open ready to receive the crab salad sandwich during the entire brief exchange. When he finally turned, I stuffed the sandwich in my mouth. It was in fact Patagonia crab. Did Damon know something? Were there rumors? Did he want a front-row seat for my beheading? Would he try to warn me? Any of these things could have been done by simply closing my door and sitting down.

Bro, you got a minute? Just a heads up…

But the back of Damon’s suit jacket offered no further information. But something – something about THAT was wrong. Way wrong. Dude, I said to myself, if they knew what you’d done, Damon wouldn’t be taking you out to lunch. They’d be in here with security, the legal department, and the FBI. 

 

When I was a little boy, my mother liked to tell me the story of how my dad was a cautious man who went back to the store three times before buying their first television set, yet he proposed after only two weeks. People are funny, she always said. I thought of that story because it was a little like embezzling half a billion dollars over many years only to have a lunch invitation convince me that I was busted. Know when to walk away, know when to run. Kenny Rogers with some sound advice.

  I froze in befuddled terror that this might all be happening. A tractor-trailer, hydroplaning over the divider right toward me. I locked my door. I unlocked my door.  I opened it, trying to remember how to act casual. After lunch there was a meeting in the board room, it would have looked suspicious if I didn’t go. As I crossed the trading floor, countless imagined eyes followed me; every utterance I couldn’t make out sounded like, that’s him… SEC… fraud… but nothing happened. If I was right, it wasn’t going to be today. If I was wrong, I had lost my edge. I waited until the end of the day, watched the September sun set over New Jersey, orange light soaking the city below. Numb, I stared out the window at the incredible view that a lifetime of work had earned me. The sky darkened, the three bridges over the East River lit up in silent majesty and the distant cree of phones died down for the last time in that impossibly large tower.

I went to work. 

Happy Soda

By Scott Brooks

 

Story Statement:

 A disgraced hedge fund manager survives 9/11 and recounts a rollicking tale of consumerism in the late 90s while creating a new identity.

  

Antagonistic force:

 While there are two stories running concurrently in Happy Soda, there are two antagonistic forces. 

 In Bobby’s story line; post-9/11 New York, the antagonist is his former partner at the hedge fund, Damon Diggs. Damon is a hedge fund manager with a fetish for expensive watches. He sees Bobby Jordan in the street after he is supposed to have died and becomes obsessed with proving he’s still alive. Diggs’ ego can’t take it that Bobby had embezzled half a billion dollars and was now going to disappear and get away with it. 

 The story that Bobby recalls is set in 1996; Dick Stuckey is the pointy end of the spear for the Partnership for a Better America, a capitalist think tank that developed a substance called Happy Soda that drugs the population into buying and spending.

Dick is coercing the CEO of a chain of multi-media outlet stores to sell his business to the PBA while the pharmaceutical interest is attempting to acquire the spleen of a sick woman.

 

Title:

Happy Soda

 

Genre and Comparables:

 Literary fiction, social satire

The Big Short - Michael Lewis

Thank you for Smoking – Christopher Buckley

Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe

 

 

Log Line:

 Bob Jordan’s plans to disappear and start a new life are foiled when a fabled one-of-a-kind bean bag toy from the nineties falls into his lap.

 

Inner Conflict –

 Bobby Jordan is trying to hide and assume a new identity. He is conflicted over the fact that his wife Holly thinks he was cheating on her instead of embezzling millions of dollars, but to reappear and tell her the truth could put her in danger. A former colleague knows Bob is alive and is pressuring Holly to find out if she knows anything.

This is further complicated by the fact that he has unwittingly befriended a doctor she knew in the nineties who ended up in possession of a priceless, infamous stuffed bean bag toy. 

Bobby must use this position to help the doctor and reunite with Holly without ending up in jail.

 

Secondary Conflict – 

 Back in the nineties, Maryanne Finn and her best friend Becky are ardent collectors of My Catchy Creatures – a popular child’s bean bag toy.

Maryanne’s spleen is producing a toxic substance that is making her sick. Becky meanwhile, has befriended a disgruntled toy designer who gives her an X-Rated prototype of a Catchy Creature which she re-gifts to Maryanne while visiting her in the hospital.

Bob’s future wife Holly is in charge of a giveaway of the dolls at Bucks-Multi-Media Mega Store where a stampede leaves a boy unconscious. Holly and the CEO, Buckminster Flush learn that it was the result of too much “Happy Soda.” While investigating this they also learn about the Partnership for a Better America and a plan to steal some woman’s spleen that may be producing an HIV vaccine. They join forces to rescue her and salvage some kind of justice.

 

Setting

We meet Bob Jordan the Tenth of September 2001. He is the last person to leave his hedge fund on the 77^th floor of Two World Trade. He has no idea that the building will be gone at this time tomorrow and everyone he works with will be dead.

He ends up in Chinatown at a karaoke night at Elaine’s Dumpling House.

The next day after escaping with his life, he returns to Elaine’s to catch his breath where he is befriended by one of the chefs and ends up hiding out in Chinatown while figuring out what to do next.

 

The plot in the nineties takes place in the heartland of a much more innocent America than the one we live in now. Rural settings like Weirton, West Virginia and King of Prussia, Pennsylvania are the backdrop for fast food and Ford Escorts, strip malls, factories and hospitals.