Ted dealt with shady people, which is why he insisted on conducting all of his business outdoors in a public place. Sometimes that wasn't precaution enough, though, and he brought John along with him. We never figured out what Ted was selling. Maybe it was contraband, maybe it was information. I was at one meeting, and during the final handshake John recited his favorite poem from The Wolfman: "Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright." Who knows what's going through his mind sometimes? I later learned that this wasn't idle chatter. Quentin Tarantino acknowledged to me privately that John was the inspiration for Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction.
EXT. EMPIRE STATE BUILDING - FULL SHOT - DAWN Kong again roars angry defiance at the world.
John was fascinated by my gear. If I had two cameras around my neck, he'd ask to use one of them. Sometimes I'd give him a loaded camera to see what he could do with it. (If it had a motor drive, I'd set it to single shot mode. He once ran through a whole roll in a continuous burst of Moose running away.) In this case I'd just bought the Yashicamat he's holding, and I had another camera (from Bob Willoughby's garage sale, IIRC) that allowed me to cock the shutter without advancing the film. So he played around with my new camera, while I played around making double exposures with the old one.
