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Mackenzie's Universe
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Other Books in Series: During his search for an answer, Mackenzie meets three women. He's attracted to them all--Alexis, the owner of a weekly newspaper in the Texas hill country; Lorraine, a wealthy ranch owner who works at the newspaper for kicks while looking for a man; and Kate, the high-powered president of a Houston public relations firm. As Mac works frantically to bring his life-long fantasy relationship to fruition, a life-threatening tumor in Alexis turns his world—and his fantasy--upside down. Synopsis: My friends call me Mac. I’m almost 50 and some say I look a bit like Mel Gibson, well at least the part he exposed to the British army in “Braveheart.”
I’m divorced but living a good life, doing what I want to do, which is writing. After a career in the sports departments of five Texas newspapers, where my byline was Joe Mackenzie, I’m now writing fiction. Yes, you skeptics, there is a difference. I’m into my third novel of a five-book contract featuring the adventures of a National Football League quarterback named Ben Simcoe. You could say he’s a composite of some of the real pros I’ve met and interviewed, but Ben is more of a role model for teens.
I’m being paid a weekly stipend to baby-sit my cousin’s 40-foot luxurious motor home in a new RV park near Texas City. I’m not starving. Every once in a while, I’m fortunate to have a dalliance. So what’s the problem? It’s this: I spend hours almost every night contemplating the workings of the universe – this entity that wants us to be happy and provides what we pray for. I want to know how it works, that’s all.
Why? Because I’ve developed a philosophy, a life-style of visualizing, and it comes down to this: Everything I want, I get. That is, everything I really focus on.
When I want answers to such complicated questions, I won’t entrust them to a shrink or to a preacher. I call my friend, Stan Simms, my old roomie from Angelo State, a real brain. Next, we’re at his country club, playing a round of golf on a bright January day in Houston while I’m trying to explain how my philosophy works. There was my first vision, of taking a luscious senior to my junior prom. There was a beautiful wife, whom I envisioned and met in Corsicana. There was the ideal house my wife Denise and I wanted in Austin. There was my conquest of cancer. There were the new jobs and the promotions I desired. There was my cousin offering me the RV baby-sitting gig when I really needed a place to plug in my laptop. The clincher for Stan might be the three-some I worked up despite Denise’s original objections. To prove all this works, I tell Stan that I’ll reveal a new vision I’ve created, sending the context of that to an e-mail box to which I’ll give him access in a year’s time.
Ahead of us on the course, we’ve noticed two women in their 40s accompanied by an older woman in a golf cart. Because of a broken sprinkler system on the fourth green, we catch up and join them. The two players are gorgeous, a Maureen O’Hara type named Alexis Carroll and a Candice Bergen clone named Katelyn M. Cannon. They’re with their former college golf team coach for an annual reunion. One of the missing alums is a friend who works at NASA; she begged off because the shuttle is up. Alexis and Kate charm me. I’m in woo, with two.
After the round, we sit in the country club lounge and get acquainted. I don’t change my mind: I’m still in woo. Alexis is a Persian Gulf War widow who left the copy desk of the Houston Chronicle and bought a weekly newspaper in Banderas Springs using her husband’s life insurance. She flatters me by remembering my columns for the rival Houston Post. Kate is a divorced Easterner who came to Texas to go to college and to start a public relations business trying to prove her independence from her clan back east. She also flatters me, promising to read my books. As we break up, Alexis boldly asks me to escort her to the local Chamber of Commerce awards dinner a week hence. She’s the president of the chamber and is reluctant to go stag for the third year. I agree, happily, and we all exchange e-mail addresses.
That night, I compose the e-mail that Stan is to see later: “I want to own the New York Giants.”
Now, there’s a proof dream. If I can do that, I’ll have Stan to back me up when I write a book, do seminars, TV specials and lectures on this concept. But why the Giants? Well, before there were Dallas Cowboys in Texas, my dad was limited to the other NFL teams playing Sundays on CBS and he liked the Giants’ Kyle Rote, a former Southern Methodist star. I grew up with the Giants. I’ve been sending my book royalties to a broker who’s making the account grow. I’ll need 600 or 700 hundred million dollars to buy into the team. Got a ways to go, a long way.
Now, my late-night visions include Alexis or Kate as the wife of the
team’s owner. On Saturday, knowing that the following week won’t be ideal for Simcoe writing, I’m in seclusion, working hard. On Sunday afternoon, when I pick up the Chronicle, the front-page headline is WE MOURN AGAIN. The shuttle has crashed.
I call Alexis, knowing that the tragedy could affect her plans. Everything is still on for a Monday arrival. She invites me to dinner. “Besides, I’m looking forward to seeing you,” she says. Great.
I e-mail Kate some condolences, and in a quick exchange she asks for my shoulder to lean on. She’s distressed and wants to drive to Texas City, to visit. There is something she needs to ask me about. “We need your help, Mac?” With what? “Alexis has breast cancer.”
Kate has read a passage in my first book about a team trainer who cites his mother’s victory over breast cancer as motivation for players who are hurting. “Control and defeat the pain. Heal yourself.” Kate wants to know if this is for real. Yes, it is, but it’s a long story. Can we talk over dinner? After happy hour, I grill some sirloins, we talk, we sip some wine, and we explore what my philosophy can do for Alexis. During a short walk to appreciate the sunset over Dickinson Bayou, I reach out to take her hand.
She spends the night – in the master bedroom, alone. I sleep restlessly on the pull-out sofa.
“Call me when you get back. I left my business card on your bed,” she says Monday morning.
After I’ve checked in at the La Quinta in Banderas Springs, I call Alexis and we arrange dinner. Her place, for award-winning chili, and I’m in charge of the beers. The chili is great but my philosophy falls flat. Alexis believes in a random universe, in the possibility of cancer and in her research. Her faith has been placed in oncology but, as I tell Kate on the phone later, that’s okay too: Alexis believes she can lick it and, if that’s true, she will. Kate wants to grill me a dinner, at the RV, when I come back Friday. My visions continue.
The Tuesday morning seminar goes well, the Banderas Springs Gazette’s news staff of five plus Alexis absorbing my experience and advice in a low-key, laid-back session. Lorraine Jaeger, a part-time business writer who resembles a tall Julie Andrews, is delighted to be assigned my seminar pay-off, a lunch on the Gazette. Alexis begs off, citing a doctor’s appointment in San Antonio. Lorraine is a bright and aggressive woman, probing for personal details at our Tex-Mex lunch, willing to share her biography as well as hear mine. Her ancestors founded the Lazy J ranch in the 1800s, but she lives in town to enhance her social life. Nevertheless, her expectations for local companionship are about at zero. She invites me out to visit the ranch the next day; we shall go for a ride.
It turns out to be quite a ride. In a hunting cabin up in the hills, she zips off her jogging-suit jacket. She is wearing nothing underneath; a planned seduction on a green-felt poker table. We are both hungry, and we take our fill. Later, at the ranch and by her pool, I discover a woman of courage, intelligence and confidence, who just asks me to be honest with her. “Do you want to see me again?”
“Yes, I want to see you again. I love to play poker.”
In the morning, fearing that it would be a long time before we would see each other again, given the banquet and my plan to drive home on Friday, Lorraine brings coffee and éclairs to my room. Breakfast in bed. It is as sweet as the chocolate I lick off her fingers. We share a long kiss, the longest kiss of my life but the only result is that I upset Lorraine when I tell her we are the best of friends.
When I pick up Alexis for our banquet date, she solicits my opinion: Because of frequent absences during her cancer treatment, should she ask Lorraine to be the deputy publisher of the Gazette? Sure, and then I surprise myself. What if I help out in the newsroom? I won’t take no for an answer.
Lorraine is the emcee at the awards dinner, a role she’s inherited as the owner of the oldest business in the county. She’s good. She surprises me with her presence at the microphone, as Alexis surprises me with her grace and diplomacy. After the program, Alexis calls us aside and asks Lorraine to help, a full-time job on the business end. Lorraine refuses the salary hike, and she is pleased that I’m coming to help, too.
My visions continue, invoking scenes from the NFL draft. Surprise! Now Lorraine pops into a scene as the wife of the team’s owner.
I had hoped my cousin would permit me to take his RV to the Hill Country, but he’s planning a trip to Arizona. On the drive back to Texas City, I’m also wrestling with my focus: Who’s the woman I really want in my vision? Choose one, Mac – Alexis, Kate or Lorraine? Stop the nagging; I have to get ready for Kate.
A woman who can grill? I am impressed, by the tender prawns, by the crisp bacon-wrapped sea scallops and the rest of the meal. Our conversation is mostly about me, at Kate’s insistence, but she is helpful in critiquing my work. We polish off two bottles of Riesling wine before I realize we are in the same predicament as the last time she visited. She shouldn’t be driving back to Houston after drinking. She wants to stay, but insists on the pull-out sofa bed.
Lorraine interrupts our appreciation of a red-streaked Texas sunset, phoning to invite the RV onto a pad her ex-husband had constructed at the ranch for their motor home. She doesn’t miss a beat when I relate that my cousin’s RV isn’t coming. You can stay in my RV, Lorraine offers.
As the sun slides behind the bayou’s tree-line, Kate and I discuss the philosophy of my universe and the subjects of my visions. The main points are that we are part of God, the universe, and that I can’t influence the rational decisions of others. To her credit, she doesn’t ask if my dreams include one Kate Cannon. We go to bed separately, but I’m tortured by my imagination alone in the bedroom. Hours later, she knocks on the door and winds up in my bed.
“You passed the test,” she says before she pulls off her shirt. “My test of your honor.” It would be difficult to describe accurately the experience of Kate. She is nice; she is naughty. She is in command; she is servile. She takes; she gives.
After a sensuous night, we talk about my volunteer job at the Gazette and Kate expresses skepticism about Lorraine’s motives and persuades me to stay at the La Quinta. She’ll meet me there on Wednesday.
On Interstate-10, driving to Banderas Springs, my hands-free cell phone beeps. Lorraine wants to chat, and I take the opportunity to back out on the RV offer. She guesses the motivation and she probes, but I am reluctant to discuss my woo-life and my philosophy on a phone that’s going 65 mph. Later, Lorraine? “Sure, how about my place, in town? Happy hour at 6 o’clock.”
At the hotel, I manage to write a few pages before dinner. At Lorraine’s, I get more than a few pages of her life story as the small-town, filthy-rich divorcee who can’t find a suitable date. In desperation, Lorraine has turned to Internet dating sites. In a moment of remorse, respecting that Lorraine hadn’t demanded anything emotional from me despite the poker-table play, I admit that she, too, has been part of my visions. Because we might be working together for some time, we make a pact: Friends it is.
I enjoy being back in the newsroom. I’m making a difference as Alexis undertakes a new treatment that promises to spare her the knife, the poison and the burns of radiation. Kate’s Wednesday arrival triggers a volcano of passion and a welcome concession to my check-book balance: Go ahead and go to the RV at the ranch, to give you a better place to be creative, but when I come to town we’ll meet at the La Quinta. Perfect.
Lorraine is pleased. “I’ll call the ranch.” Perfect.
Alexis holds a staff meeting, briefing everyone on the situation. The employees are supportive. “Just get better, ma’am.” Alexis turns and winks at me. “I will, I know I will.” Perfect.
It is perfect for many weeks, Kate driving over almost weekly, Lorraine flourishing in her expanded role, and Alexis reporting a reduction in the size of the tumor. The newspaper is doing well, too, and my agent is delighted to let me know that my books are being considered for a television series. Perfect.
Perfect, until April 17, when Alexis fires me “for my own good,” adding “I’m doing a lot better” and her treatments are now every other week. But “I’ll always be in your debt. I will make it up to you some day.” She worries that I have too much on my plate, with a book deadline and TV treatment due. Before I drive back to Texas City, Lorraine elicits some possibilities for our staying in touch. If she has a date with an Internet prospect, would I come along to back her up? Sure. But my mind is really on Kate. During the drive, I rehearse a marriage proposal and her acceptance. Perfect.
Kate is waiting for me at the RV. She’s flying out of Hobby airport in two hours to tend business and family issues. My perfect life is beginning to unravel, although she insists on a quick encounter before driving away. We talk on the phone but, by the next Tuesday, the only excitement I’ve had is being a secret chaperone for one of Lorraine’s Internet dates. Sitting at the bar in a lounge, watching Lorraine and her date, I feel a sharp stab of jealousy. What’s that about?
In my private debate about that strange reaction, I realize an important point. The visions should be about me, not someone over whom I have no control. So, envision a situation, a condition of happiness and of abundance, but don’t tie the outcome to another person. Focus, Mac.
On Tuesday evening, Lorraine calls. She is sobbing. There’s been a highway accident, and Alexis is critically injured. Her mother, who was driving, is dead.
I drive straight to the Fredericksburg hospital and alert Kate on the cell phone while on I-10. Lorraine joins me around midnight, after informing the Gazette staff of the situation, but there’s no good news. Alexis has suffered a ruptured spleen and has unspecified spinal and cranial injuries.
In the morning, after just a few hours of sleep we go to work. After a staff meeting at the Gazette, Alexis’ lawyer asks for a meeting. Lorraine and I are surprised to hear that Alexis recently changed her business plan to name us the interim managers of the Gazette should she be unable to fill that function, with the lawyer serving as a tie-breaking vote in cases of conflict. There is no conflict, other than the emotions we experience over the next 68 days of coma.
Alexis is moved to an intensive care unit at a nursing home. In her state, she’s unable to receive the previous treatment. The cancer grows. In the hope that her subconscious can hear me, I promise Alexis to tend her newspaper, to do what I can.
Lorraine seems to be made for the job of handling the business end of the newspaper while I manage the newsroom. Kate tries to come over every week but her business and family issues are taking a toll. Plus she is on to me. “You’re enjoying this more than I thought, more than I’d hoped,” she chides. Until I know what the next month would bring, I stash the marriage proposal. But she is right; it is good to be back in the saddle again.
Two days after our nation’s birthday, the cancer has invaded Alexis' lungs and trachea, creeping up from her nipple like a three-fingered hand to choke the life out. Lorraine and I are there. When there is no more breath in Alexis, we are stunned to see her cotton gown moving. It is the cancer, the tumor, protesting with a pulsating wave its lack of nourishment, the death of its host. The cancer is an alien, an invader. “Die, you bastard,” I mumble, with fists clenched in anger.
After the funeral, Alexis' lawyer has another surprise for us. Before she went to her third treatment, Alexis, an only child and without heirs, changed not only the business plan but also her will and she has left the Gazette to Lorraine and me. Even up. We walk out of his office with the titles ‘co-publisher.’
I won’t sell out to Lorraine and I can’t afford to buy her out. Kate suggests hiring an editor in my place. I can’t. I promised.
Kate is moving east. Her father has persuaded her to get involved in the family’s business. “I have to stay,” I tell her. Kate explains that she has to do what she has to do. “Maybe another time, another place … I’ll call you when I get to Albany.”
Albany, N.Y. The site of the New York Giants summer training camp. Katelyn Mara Cannon is the granddaughter of Wellington Mara, the team’s majority owner. “I’ll be in touch, Mac. Bye.”
The universe responded, but in a way I do not understand. Wrestling with my future, my options, my opportunities and my decisions, I tell Lorraine that I need some time to write a book.
“About what, Mac?”
“About the universe and how it works. From my perspective anyway.”
Lorraine smiles and winks at me. “Give it a go, Mac.” We shake hands, for a few seconds longer than strangers would.
“How does the universe work, Mac?”
“It makes people write books.” Like this one
After being mentored in the 1980s by a professional, whose credits included scripts for a prime-time television show, Warner enjoyed some attention from two agents and a Broadway producer. An award-winning screenplay was pitched to the major TV networks, but his big breakthrough was elusive and he accepted two more journalism gigs before deciding that a full-time effort was needed to write and to market his work. Since giving away all his neckties and unstrapping his wristwatch in August 2001, Warner has completed a novel (Circle of Wholes) and a feature-length screenplay (John Again). He has also updated and revised an earlier novel (Yours, Forever), and he is more than halfway finished with a new novel.
Earlier manuscripts scheduled to be dusted off, reviewed, and revised include four screenplays (Dove Creek, Yours, Forever, Fourth Quarter, and True Soldier) and two novels (Hotel Texas and Fort Mackenzie).
Warner’s metamorphosis from suits to shorts included some major down-sizing – from a three-bedroom house to a 33-foot RV motor home, from two closets to 15 hangers, from shoe tree to two pairs of Minnetonka loafers, from three walls of books to one cupboard shelf, and from an over-crowded computer desk to carry-along laptop. The RV’s navigator has been married to Warner for 39 years and continues to provide him inspiration for adaptability, perseverance, and love scenes.
Over cocktail chatter, Warner might be goaded into admitting his fondness for a few of life's necessities. Football. Beachcombing. Fiction writing. Grilled salmon filets. Sunsets at Cape May Point. Tanqueray and tonics on the rocks, stirred. Hammocks. Newspapers with two crossword puzzles. Jeopardy. Actresses named Hepburn. Celine Dion or Shania Twain. Mark Twain or Elmer Kelton. New-age gurus Dyer, Chopra and Wilde.
Because this work bases its premise on the teachings of three New-Age gurus – Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer and Stuart Wilde – it is conceivable that one of them might endorse the philosophy promoted by the protagonist.
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NOTE: All material is copyright protected. No portion of this material may be copied or reproduced, either electronically, mechanically, or by any other means, for resale or distribution without the written consent of the author. All copy has been dated and registered with the American Society of Authors and Writers. Copyright 2007 by The Swetky Agency |
