Rake by Scott Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

opportunity for release presented itself while I was buying a six-pack of beer.
    A young enlisted man was shopping with his doughy, sad-looking wife and two kids. Despite the wear and tear visible on her face, she was no more than twenty-five and retained sad vestiges of a genuine beauty lost to disappointment, early motherhood, and life on an army base. One of the few advantages for family men in the armed services is the base PX, where prices are a fraction of what they are in civilian grocery stores, but this guy wasn’t happy about the bargains to be had; he was bitching and moaning to his wife about the amount of food she was loading into their cart. One of the kids, a boy of about six with a blond crewcut bleached by the sun, grabbed a package of potato chips from the shelf and tore it open. The dad, a corporal, saw this and yanked his son by the arm and, while the kid was still in midair, smacked him across the face.
    There’s a protocol to be followed in these cases. You alert the MPs, you get witnesses, you deal with it through the proper channels. What you don’t do is go all kung fu on the poor unsuspecting bastard, break both his arms and legs and put a crack in his skull so hard he’ll never quite think right again. All of which, without really considering the consequences or the logic of it, is what I did to that poor cracker son of a bitch, right there in front of his wife and kids, who looked upon me not as their rescuer but as an assailant, a turn of events which, though predictable and quite understandable, made me sad.
    In the brig I had some time to think it over. I was more than a little bit frightened by what I’d done, particularly by the speed with which my rage had overtaken me, and after some wordswith my commanding officer and with an army shrink I came to the conclusion that maybe a little bit of psychiatric work might be in order. My CO was a standup guy, and though he couldn’t pull enough strings to keep me in the unit (this was during peacetime—there’s no way today’s U.S. military would have kicked me out), he did manage to get me the option of a discharge instead of prison time.
    Once out, I thought about pursuing therapy, but instead I managed to lie my way through the application process well enough to find myself accepted into Southwest Minnesota State University, where I promptly signed up for a theater course on the assumption that this would be where the good-looking girls were.
    And the assumption wasn’t wrong. The thing was, though, I discovered that there was something else I was really good at. Before long I was the star of the department, was stringing along a half-dozen nubile beauties, and had discovered that acting was for me a means of controlling my anger as well as a path to self-knowledge. Since that time, I have never instigated a fight (though I’ve never run from one, either).
    •       •       •
    I had an interview and photo shoot scheduled with Télérama at eleven o’clock at the Musée Rodin. I had a reputation in the press for being an intellectual, at least by the standards of television actors, and the editors thought it would be a good visual joke to get me posing beneath The Thinker . The joke was probably on me—God knows, a few years of covering television would have made me hate the medium and everyone involved in it—but press was press, and I had a good working relationship with the reporter. We spent half an hour on the photos and then hunkered down in the restaurant in the garden for the interview.
    Here I was at a loss: to mention the movie or not? Bad luck to talk about a project too early, certainly, but Télérama has a lot of readers, including no small number in the industry, and a casual allusion to the thing might cause some ears to prick up. And of course the film was about a piece of sculpture, and here we were amidst one of the great sculpture collections of the world.
    “So what brings you back to Paris? Just a