You Don't Die of Love
10 Linked Short Stories of Hollywood - 2.
MONTAGE
Never take a meeting with the man who has murdered your wife. This is what I’m thinking, as I walk to the Beachwood Cafe in the morning. But somehow, I’ve scheduled the meeting anyway, and I can feel that decision hanging over me as vivid and pathetic as the Hollywood sign on the threadbare hills above. I can’t look. I need to maintain a positive attitude, and seeing those fat white letters rollicking on the hilltop could very easily send me into a tailspin.
It is now 8:00 a.m.; I haven’t slept a wink all night, and to top it all off, my mother is coming in on the plane at two. The clock is ticking. I’m a failure and have only several more hours to turn my life around.
At the cafe, I settle in at the counter and order coffee from Lauren. She is her usual grumpy self. I have watched her get old. She wasn't supposed to be doing this job––not now, not after all those auditions. Compared to her, of course, I am a raging success. But really, the only difference was that at one time I had made a lot of money. This, by the way, does not qualify as a success in my mother's eyes. Any other mother, hell, you’re in-like-Flynn. But my mother is different. She has loftier goals: one has to serve mankind.
“What'll you have, Porter?” Lauren says. “The hang-over special?”
“That's right,” I say, ignoring her less-than-friendly sarcasm. “The hangover special.”
She flips the cup and pours out coffee, eyeing me like a person taking inventory. The problem is that we had an affair long ago, another century really, and it inevitably ended badly, and now I am at her mercy. Never sleep with your local waitress. This is good advice. Believe me, I know. And as much as I hate rules, codes of conduct, petty morality, there are a few dos and don’ts that I will try to point out to you as we go along.
“You look like shit,” she says.
“You are so beautiful to me...,” I sing.
She grimaces and leaves. I nurse my coffee, scan a leftover paper, and try not to let my mother’s imminent arrival spur me into a bout of self-flagellation. But, before I know it, my life is going up in flames before my eyes, one tragic mistake after another stretching back to the horizon line of my birth. Even my first endeavors were doomed. Let’s not forget the puppet Macbeth: sixth Grade, a class project. To the horror of my teacher and the class, I presented Shakespeare’s tragedy with puppets. I created the sets, shaped the heads out of clay, and my mother had sewn the costumes. I never made it past the first act, reading from the text, mumbling into the crook of my arm, the puppets wandering aimlessly, their heads sagging. Mercifully, my teacher put an end to it. A complete failure, but at least I was ambitious then. You can’t fault me on that.
Never stage a production of Macbeth with hand puppets!
As I walk back home, a group of German tourists are standing in the middle of the street while another pudgy compatriot lines them up in front of the distant Hollywood sign. It’s amazing how foreigners will risk life and limb for this picture. The dream lives on, I guess. A car honks and the Germans scatter––another allied victory.
***
“Think about this––does it have to be Vietnam?” asks the studio executive. And then he stares at me, obviously pleased with himself.
I stare back at him. He is standing by the big glass windows of his office looking out over the studio lot, the sun backlighting him dramatically, an effect I’m sure he had planned. Everything is planned with Sid Dumars: the automatic door closer he so princely used when I first came in, and the constant blathering on the intercom to his secretary about important items that just couldn’t wait. Even the gummy bears he keeps popping from a marble urn, are unusual in that they are all one color, and seem to match his socks. Is it possible that some assistant has separated the gummy bears into single colors? The suspense is killing me.
“You getting the picture now?” he asks. “Do you see where I want to take this?”
I get the picture. The studio has recently bought the rights to the film library of a famous independent company from the seventies that’s gone belly-up. They are now in the process of reviewing that library for potential projects ––remakes, sequels, what-have-you. This poor benighted soul standing before me has latched on to a bizarre early film called Horizontal Man by the cult director Gregory Reichart. It is an almost incoherent anti-war movie about Vietnam which Sid Dumars, being the marketing genius that he is, thinks can be remade into a kick-ass patriotic romp like Top Gun, never mind the fact that there really wasn’t much of a plot to Horizontal Man in the first place, and that the whole context of the piece is based on the premise that the Vietnam war was a foolish horror show, perpetrated by a bunch of evil motherfuckers who happened to be running our government at the time. Tough terrain to plant the seed of patriotism.
Oh, the brilliance of these men!
And I should be grateful. I should get down on my knees and worship him. I am desperate for cash and this man wants to employ me. It is the second coming, a deathbed resurrection and, by all rights, I should be ecstatic.
Instead, I’m a little surprised to find myself midair, a strangled cry coming out of me, my hands like eagles’ talons. It is a world class leap, shot from a springboard of adrenaline and rage. I clamp my fingers around his throat and start to strangle him. I’m even more surprised when I drag him to the balcony and try to throw him over. He locks his fingers around a metal rail and struggles valiantly, an amazing simulation of a man trying to save his life… Of course ,he is trying to save his life. I’m a little confused here. You see, it’s not that I’ve lost touch with reality, it’s that reality has lost touch with me. It’s what living here does to you.
Regardless, his screams summon the guards and they peel me away.
Afterwards, I am escorted to the gate of the studio. No police. Nothing. Just like that, bye-bye. The guilty bastard refused to press charges, but still, all in all, it’s hard to call the meeting a success.
It’s worth repeating: Never take a meeting with the man who has murdered your wife.
***
“So, what brings you down?” I ask my mother. We are coming back from the airport. My aging Porsche is running raggedly. I sputter to a light and have to restart the engine. The heat is unmerciful and I am sweating heavily, the after effects I suspect from my earlier homicidal rage.
“We had a coup at the commune,” she says.
“A coup?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says.
Since my mother retired, she has been living with five other aging political activists in a large old Victorian in Berkeley. In her overheated, conspiracy-addled mind, a coup could be an argument over who’s taking out the garbage.
“I’m sure you’ll work it out,” I assure her, as I pull away.
“I’m not so sure,” she says. “We have a deep schism in the body politic.”
“Right,” I say.
My mother rummages around in her carry-on bag. “I bought you a present.”
“Thanks,” I say and take the hastily wrapped package. It’s a book of course; she always gives me books. My phone is to my ear, and I’m listening to a secretary tell me that my agent is tied up in a meeting. I need to tell her about what happened; perhaps she can start some early damage control.
“I’m on my mobile,” I tell the secretary and punch off. I drop the present on the seat and pull away.
“You aren’t going to open it?” my mother asks.
“I’m driving right now, Ma.”
“Well here,” she says, snatching it up with childlike enthusiasm and peeling away the flimsy wrapping.
I read the title: Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara. “Great,” I say, “that should come in handy.”
My mother offers me a toothy smile. Her posture is regal, her chin out, her long gray hair flowing freely to her shoulders, her delicate fingers clamped on the book. She wears no make-up, and only occasionally wears a bra. She’s almost eighty. Think Eleanor Roosevelt with sex appeal and you have some idea.
“Even in the awful mercantile world you live in, my darling, there might be something in here you can find useful,” she says.
“Yeah, like what?”
“Like the guerrilla warrior’s fighting attitude of not being dismayed at any time.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, feeling fairly dismayed.
Another light, Sunset Boulevard.
“It looks so seedy,” my mother says.
I nod. Across the street, two Iranian teenagers in a gilded Mercedes, laughingly veer their car towards a couple of tube-topped hookers standing on the corner. The hookers jump back, and the witty Persians drive on.
“Bastards!” my mother says.
I give her a tight grin and look down, cranking the key again, as my noble car stalls on take-off. Horns sound. My adrenaline surges, and I am off again. The wind is in my face. A swirling vortex of doom laps at my ankles. I strain for some equilibrium, a business-as-usual attitude. My cell phone rings. I pick up. It’s my agent.
“What were you thinking of Porter––taking a meeting with that man?” my agent says.
“I thought I’d be okay.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I thought you’d tell me no, and I needed the work.”
“I would have. You have too much history with that miserable fuck.”
“You know, I think he actually forgot that it was my wife,” I say.
“I’m not surprised. Moral amnesia is a job requirement.”
“What am I going to do?”
“Have you thought of alternative careers?”
“Lonnie!”
“It’s a disaster, Porter”.
“Jesus. I know.”
“Frances,” my mother interrupts, a quaver in her voice. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Frances!”
I glance at my mother’s terrified face. She is staring past me. “What!” I bark.
“I didn’t mean anything...”
I turn and look out my window. The Iranians are there, their Mercedes pulled up alongside, going the wrong way in the opposite lane. They gesticulate wildly, mouths formed around exotic curse words.
“Holy shit, what did you do?” I ask my mother.
My mother looks sheepish. “I gave them the finger.”
“You what?”
“I flipped them off for their despicable women-hating behavior.”
“Oh god,” I say.
I gun my raggedy Porsche forward. The Iranians are driven back behind me by oncoming cars. A traffic light flashes red, and I brake.
“Jesus, we’re fucked,” I say.
“I’m so sorry,” my mother says again.
“You’ve taken a ride from the airport and created an international incident,” I say. “It takes a special kind of talent.”
The Iranians are out of their car and are running towards us.
“Lock you door,” I tell her.
“Porter? Porter, are you there?” It’s my agent still on the line. The cell phone is in my lap. I snatch it up.
“Yes, I’m still here!”
The Iranians start beating on my car, gold chains flopping, their velvety black eyes as lethal as scythes. My mother begins to scream. A dent is forming in my door and the traffic light is nowhere near changing.
“What is going on?” my agent asks.
“Stop that or I’ll kick your ass!” I scream at the Iranians.
“You’re out of control,” my agent says and hangs up.
“Fuck it,” I say and reach for the door handle. “I’m not going to let them do this to my car.”
“Don’t get out of the car,” my mother says.
I get out of the car.
***
My mother brings me an ice pack. I lie back on the couch and apply it to my nose. For a moment the salty taste of blood at the back of my throat takes me back to a summer day, the smell of a catcher’s mitt and a fast-ball, high.
“Attacked by Phoenicians,” she says. “It’s almost biblical.”
“They were not Phoenicians,” I say. “They were spoiled, wealthy Iranian kids getting their jollies.”
“Whatever,” she says, eyeing the house. “This place is a mess.”
The place is a mess because, Sonja, my Latvian housekeeper, went on to greener pastures when I couldn’t pay her salary anymore.
“You’re doing it again,” I say.
“What am I doing?”
She moves into the kitchen, glances out the window. “There’s no water in the pool,” she says.
“You’re up to your old tricks,” I say.
“Oh darling, please.” Her sigh is dismissive.
I get up off the couch, feeling a little rocky. My sinuses seem filled with vast amounts of spongy material, and my sense of balance is wholly unreliable. I follow her into the kitchen, the ice pack pressed to my face.
“Phoenicians,” I say. “See, you’re making things into something they aren’t. You’re creating your usual alternative universe.”
“Listen to you,” she says.
She starts to clean up, and as much as I dread her visits, I have to say the brisk way she begins to load up the dishwasher is helping to shore up my shattered psyche. Still, I’m not going to let her off the hook.
“You’ve always done that,” I say. “Remember, back during the good old cold war heydays, when people were risking life and limb to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, and you told me that the American papers just weren’t telling us about all the people trying to sneak in to the Soviet Union.”
She looks up at me. “I think you should go lie down,” she says.
“Well, they fact is, nobody was trying to sneak back into the Soviet Union (my mother taught history for years at the high school level and as radical as her personal life and politics were, it often seemed to me that she imbued current events with a child’s picture-book grandeur), and we were not attacked by noble descendants of some great fallen empire.”
“You’re looking very pale,” she says. And then I faint.
***
“How do you feel?” my mother asks.
“Fine,” I say.”
We are eating dinner out on the patio. I’m feeling as fine as a person can feel after dynamiting his career. My agent called and has told me that there will be an article in Variety about the incident, and that there’s nothing she can do to stop it. She also confirmed that Sid Dumars was not going to press charges. She recommends a publicity specialist for damage control. I can’t afford it.
I gulp a second glass of wine. Down below, the lights of the city wink at me with a sinister knowingness. There’s a drum beat inside my head––a steady drumbeat of doom. I refill my glass.
“So, do you have something to tell me,” I say.
She smiles at me. Her gray hair stirs in the breeze, witchy by candle light.
“Oh you,” she says. “Fathers are so overrated.”
We’ve played this game for almost thirty years now: who is my father?
“Was it, Larry?” I ask.
She begins to chuckle. “Larry?” she says. Her eyes open wide and her head tilts as if to suggest that my guess is wildly incorrect.
“We have the same color eyes,” I say.
My mother snorts dismissively. “Oh please, Larry is a sweetheart, but he’s not your father.”
I shrug. “He’s the last of them.”
My mother’s witchy hair settles. She brushes it back with a bony hand, tilts her head into her palm, and looks almost woebegone. “Yes...yes, it is.”
“It was a long haul,” I say.
“They were all so dear.”
I had seen Larry’s picture in the paper, his face flattened by a policeman’s plastic shield, gray hair flopping, his frail arm raised in angry defiance. He seemed terribly over-matched by the line of burly cops in full riot gear, and the picture was very effective in an Orwellian way. My mother had sent me the clipping, along with the news of his death. He had been protesting at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and died of a heart attack in a holding cell shortly after his arrest.
I suspected that this visit was because my mother wanted to tell me he was my father. My mother didn’t believe in marriage, or fathers, or monogamy; she considered them all to be oppressive capitalistic plots, so I was convinced that she would only let me know after the seed-giver had died.
Her first and only husband, sadly, had fallen off the back of a motorcycle on the way to a party to celebrate the publication of his first book. It was a memoir of his work in Cuba. He had gone there right out of college, and had helped build health clinics for poor farmers, in service of Castro’s revolution. Her one great love had died, frozen forever in a prism of revolutionary ideology and bohemian fervor, a saintly figure, as idiomatic as those sixties posters of Che Guevara in his beret, with that moody, but abiding gaze into the middle distance. Nobody else could possibly measure up. And for the rest of her life my mother had only boyfriends––four different lovers, that married and unmarried other women, but still orbited in and out of our lives depending on their geographical availability.
Now, the last of these marathon Romeos had died, and it looked like he was not my father. Actually, I was a little relieved. It would’ve been bad timing. Never meet your father in the middle of a career slump.
My mother was looking at me with some sympathy. “You don’t know, do you?” I ask. “I bet you don’t even know!”
She just smiles. “We could pound out the dent,” she says. “We could take off the inside panel and pound out the dent in your car door where those Phoenicians kicked it.”
***
His name is Al Pettus and he has the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen on a human. Sadder even then when I first met him ten years earlier.
“What I’m telling you is to stay as far away from him as possible. You’re lucky he didn’t file charges.”
“Okay,” I say. “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”
“He’s sorry,” Pettus grunts. “Stupid. Really stupid.”
Pettus is a homicide detective. He called me shortly after dinner, and now I am the lone civilian in a cop’s bar on Sunset Boulevard. It’s a little nervous-making to consider that everybody around me is probably armed. Pettus was the same detective that handled the inquiry into my wife’s death ten years earlier. He had confided in me then that he thought Dumars had done her, but couldn’t convince the D.A. that we had a case. We’ve been friends ever since.
“I'll get this,” Pettus says.
He takes out his wallet, drops some bills on the bar. I stare at the wallet on the counter––Pettus has left it out, waiting for some change. The picture of a teenage girl shows, not more than sixteen, brown skinned, a flat, broad face, Mayan cheek bones, dark eyes.
Pettus catches my look. “Her name’s Yanira. Isn't she pretty? She's one of mine.”
“One of your kids?
Pettus shakes his head. “No. She's one of my cases. Boyfriend did her.”
I pause. “You mean she's dead?”
“Oh yeah. Very dead.”
“You catch the boyfriend?”
“Didn't have to. He took a bullet, drive by, over in Boyle Heights, 'bout a week later. Gang related.” Pettus picks up the wallet, stares at the picture. “I heard through dispatch. In my car. Driving. Called up the arresting officer, got the location, headed over. Beat the bag-and-tag boys. And there he was, the miserable little shitbag, dead as a duck, bullet right through the neck. Too late for any kind of meaningful heart-to-heart on the badness of his ways, beating that little beauty to death. So, I kicked him in the balls about twenty-five times.” He waits a moment, savoring the memory. “It felt good.”
He pauses again, grins over at me. “How would you like to see the dragon’s breath?”
***
We drive out to the high desert, just north of the San Bernardino freeway, on a lonely stretch of county road that climbs into the rocky San Ysidro wilderness. Every road sign that flashes into view with our sweeping headlights is riddled with bullet holes. Here and there, the rusting carcass of a car is sunk into the desert sand. Pettus pulls over and we walk out a ways into the desert. He raises his big magnum and fires into a '68 Chevy Camaro, buried up to its windows. I flinch at the sound, as the fiery blast erupts from the barrel, rainbows into the still air, fades.
Pettus eyes me. “That’s the dragon’s breath. You wanna shoot it?”
I nod, take the big chrome-plated monster in my hand aim at the Camaro and fire. We stand for a moment. Pettus takes the gun back, holsters it. He lights up a cigarette, exhales into the black sky.
“You have to come all the way out here just to see the stars these days.” His eyes pick out the Big Dipper, just above the jagged edge of the horizon. “You know that girl I showed you?”
I nod. “Yes. Yanira.”
Pettus takes a deep breath, his chest tightening the buttons of his shirt just below the tugged-down tie. “Well, she won't go away. I'm dreaming about her now.”
“Dreaming about her?” I ask?
“Yeah,” Pettus says, “every night. Pretty wild, huh?” He flashes a look my way, the glow of his cigarette repeated in the shadowed scoops of his eyes. “She comes to me at night She's naked; she whispers in my ear. Her skin is like silk; her nipples are cinnamon colored and big as saucers. Most of the time I can't move. Not a muscle. I'm lying there like a dead man. It's agony. I want to kiss her, but I can't. I wake up, every time, soaked in sweat. You could bounce an anvil off my leg muscles they're so tight.”
He takes another drag, lowers his head, kicks at the Camaro’s mirror, the chrome deeply pitted. “I just want you to know, I understand how it felt with your wife now,” he says.
***
“So, we see that D.W. Griffith was mainly interested in editing techniques that would enrich and strengthen a sequence’s narrative power.”
I’m teaching my film theory class at a junior college. Eucalyptus College is the edifying name, and it’s in Pomona, thirty miles inland and worlds away from any- thing cosmopolitan. I took the job for the extra cash, and now, with the latest development, it looks like it was a smart move.
I let my eyes sweep across the class and see that my passion is not translating in any discernible way––bored and bland suburban twenty-somethings stare back at me. In the back sits a man who looks like he could be in his seventies. I haven’t seen him before. Strange.
I clear my throat and continue. “Meanwhile, a couple of Russian directors were headed in a different direction: Pudovkin, and his colleague Kuleshov, had made a remarkable discovery. In a famous experiment, they discovered that editing was more than just a method for telling a continuous story. They found that by suitable juxtaposition, shots could be given meanings that by themselves they did not possess.”
I can barely pitch my voice over the racket of the overworked air-conditioning, and still sweat trickles down the back of my collar. Time for a little show and tell. I pick up a remote and start the tape. The TV flickers on.
“Let me give you a preview of that famous experiment. I’ve created my own version of that experiment here in order to show you.”
On the screen comes the face of my ex-gardener, Pedro. He stares straight ahead, his expression absolutely natural. I shot it with my video camera right before he quit for lack of payment.
“In this experiment, the Russians joined the shots of an actor whose expression was neutral to a shot of a bowl of soup, a shot of a coffin with a dead woman in it, and the shot of a little girl playing with a toy.”
On the video screen my digital image of Pedro’s face is cut together with a bowl of soup from the Beachwood Cafe, a shot of a woman in a coffin from a cheapo vampire flick, I taped off my TV, and my Latvian cleaning woman’s daughter. It’s some of my finest work.
“And the results were terrific,” I say. “What they found was that their audience raved about the actors performance––how hungry he looked for that bowl of soup, how sad he looked over the dead woman, and how happy he looked about the young girl. And all with the very same expression.”
A towering silence. The grinding of the air-conditioning. I flick off the TV. The students stare. I grin enthusiastically.
“Well ... any questions, any comments?”
The older gentleman in the back starts to raise his hand and then drops it quickly.
***
I walk across campus to my car. In the glare of midday, Eucalyptus College has the look of a slab-walled shopping mall, and has none of the hustle and bustle you’d expect from a place of higher learning. A few sun-struck students wander about listlessly in flip-flops and baggy shorts. Just atop the hill, graded and newly planted, the 210 freeway roars incessantly. Civilization would not be compromised I think if a fissure opened up beneath this campus and swallowed it whole.
Behind me follows Warren, the older gentleman that had almost asked a question. He’s carrying my television set in his muscular arms and grinning at me with a strange energy, a pencil thin mustache riding his upper lip like a lap dancer. He’s the kind of man who should never wear short pants, and his flat-top is cut so close at the top that I can see his pink scalp shinny with sweat. Also, he’s way too old to be carrying something for me, but he insisted.
“Gee, Mr. Porter, I can’t believe you had to use your own television set. You’d think that they would be able to supply you with one,” Warren says.
We’re at my car now. The Phoenicians sprung the hood with their kicks and the latch doesn’t hold anymore. I pop it open by releasing a bungee cord.
“Let’s face it, Warren, I’m working for a college named after a tree, they’re short on everything, including my paycheck.”
Warren gives a big wheezing guffaw, dumps the monitor in. I bend the hood over it, bungee it in place. I’ll be lucky if I can see over it to drive––Porsche’s were not designed for things like this.
“Thanks,” I say and turn to face my newest student.
He hitches up his shorts, squints into the sun. “No problemo,” he says.
In his pocket is a pack of Camels and I notice flecks of tobacco across the front of his rumpled button-down shirt. He scoops out the cigarettes, slaps one against his leathery face, and lets it fall onto his lower lip. It’s a pro-move, as practiced and ceremonial as a high diver testing the spring at the end of the board. As he lights up, I notice the stained fingers and the wolfish look in his eyes––eyes that have done a lot of staring, eyes like...? I’m not sure.
“It seemed like you had something to say in there, today, Warren. What was it? It’s always nice to get some feedback, you know.” I smile at him encouragingly.
Warren is greedy with his first drag and waits a moment before talking. Finally: “I was thinking, you know, about that experiment. Don’t you think it would have more impact if you used, say, Charlize Theron naked, and then cut to the bowl of soup?”
My smile is painted on.
Warren is staring at me. And then he laughs. “It’s a joke,” he says.
I laugh. “It’s a good one,” I say. Clearly, Warren’s got more on the ball than I thought.
Warren fires his cigarette onto the hot asphalt. “Can we talk?” he asks.
***
We’re sitting at a Denny’s. Warren tells the waitress that he drinks his coffee black, and then says in a loud voice, pointing at me, “I don’t care what he says, “I still think you’re cute.”
She actually laughs. I flinch a little. “Jesus, where’d that come from?” I ask.
“Another joke,” he says.
“Right,” I say. “What’s this all about, Warren? “What did you need to talk to me about?”
“Can I call you Frances?” he asks.
“Only my mother calls me that,” I say. “But sure.”
Warren gets that wolf-eyed look again. “I read the story." You attacked him because you think he killed your wife. Right?”
This is so out of left-field, I’m left speechless for a moment. The article was in the morning’s Variety––page three, a short blurb, only about a certain incident and that I was thrown off the lot. A “no comment” from the executive. Frankly I was a little offended that the scandal- mongering press wasn’t waiting for me when I got my morning croissant. Apparently, a homicidal rage is only noteworthy if you’re more famous.
I get my voice back as Warren gets his coffee. He keeps his eyes on me as he sips, a curl of steam grazing those stained knuckles. I can’t help noticing how steady his hand is. Steely you’d call it. Whimsy is not this man’s natural habitat and is the reason his joking sounds so strange.
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“I’m retired now, but I used to work in law enforcement. I have friends.”
“Law enforcement?”
“We’ll leave it at that.”
Now I know what his eyes are like—they’re like cop’s eyes.
“Anyway,” he continues, “I’m recently retired, and I’ve been trying to fill up my days, you know, not vegetate in front of the TV and stuff, so I’ve been taking some classes.” His eyes shade away guiltily for a moment. “But it’s hard to give up old habits.”
“Old habits?”
“Checking into people’s pasts that you’re in business with.”
“But I’m just your teacher.”
“It’s a bad habit.”
“Okay,” I say.
“The way I hear it,” Warren says, “Sid Dumars was a Hollywood exec, riding high. A couple of hit movies, the right people taking his calls, he was going places. Then he takes some wrong turns, a couple films go south on him, a little substance abuse, a sexual harassment suit, his wife leaves him, he loses his job. Meanwhile, you’re doing pretty well, the career looking hunky-dory. And now I’d say, ten years down the road, the opposite is true.” He looks at me. “That accurate?”
I look right back at him. “Pretty damn accurate.”
“Okay, so right about there, in that low point, Sid Dumars hooks up with your estranged wife. She drowns in his hot tub, the ass-end of a Hollywood party. Everybody went home. They were both doped up pretty good. There was evidence of cocaine in her blood sample. He said he came outside and found her floating face down.”
“He drowned her,” I say. “There were bruise marks on her neck and shoulders.”
Warren fondles his coffee cup. “The coroner’s report wasn’t conclusive. The amount of time she’d been in the water, it was impossible to draw any conclusions.”
I can feel the anger marching up my spine. “Okay, look,” I say, “we were separated at the time. That’s true. But then we reconciled. We had decided to get back together. She told him she was going back with me. You should’ve heard the threatening messages he left on her phone. And then he talked her into that party. Just to say good-bye, he told her.”
“And the phone messages?” Warren asks.
“I thought she saved them. I looked for them, but they were never found.”
Warren shifts his body weight. A big hairy arm comes off the table as he reaches into a pocket. He flops a small envelope on the table.
“That’s the tape,” he says. “And I think you’re right. I think he did kill her.”
I stare at the envelope, then back at Warren. There’s nothing in his eyes that says this is a joke. “How did you get this?” I ask.
“Let’s just say that an individual was hired to steal them, and that the individual was later busted on an unrelated federal charge, and tried to use them as a get-out-of-jail-card, but wasn’t able to generate much interest in the powers that be. They’ve been lying around in an evidence room for years.”
I pick up the envelope, unhook the clasp and glance inside. A cassette tape lays inside with an evidence tag attached.
Warren continues, “The bad news, is that I don’t think you’re going to get a new trial with that. It would be a very tough cookie to crack.” He pushes back from the table, throws those big arms across the seat. “But maybe you can still use it in some way.”
I lift my eyes from the cassette. Warren sucks the coffee from his mustache, gives his head a tilt.
“For what?” I ask.
“Justice,” he says. And then he smiles. It’s a sneaky smile, but not unkind, not crazy, and that’s what makes it so scary.
“Why are you doing this, Warren?” I ask.
“I love the movies,” he says.
***
On the way back home, I think about Warren. He’s obviously a corollary of my newfound notoriety. Perhaps there would be more nasty surprises. I’d have to talk to the Dean of my college and see if I can get him transferred out of my class.
I pull into the drive and immediately sense that I’m in trouble. A homeless person’s shopping cart is parked in front of the garage. I let out a curse. Another one of my mother’s bad habits––she brings home the homeless. She was probably out walking and ran into some poor soul, and before you know it, she’s helping him push his cart to the house.
His name is Dirk. He’s lying on the bottom of my empty pool with all his clothes off.
“I’m working on my tan,” he tells me.
“I want him out of here,” I tell my mother.
“Darling, he has nowhere to go.”
“I don’t care,” I say.
My mother is standing beside me. She is wearing a loosely tied silk kimono and a pair of running shoes. The way her breasts balloon against the silk, convinces me that she is wearing nothing underneath. Her hair, in the bone-dry heat of Los Angeles, is so alive with static electricity it reaches out to you if you stand too close. I bat at a wayward strand.
“Did you go out like that?” I ask.
“Just for a walk around the neighborhood,” she says sweetly.
I steer the fully dressed Dirk by the elbow towards the garden gate. The smell of urine coming off him is almost visual in it intensity––a vast, penetrating, rainbow of stench.
“I’m going to have to check your pockets before you go, Dirk,” I tell him. “No offense.”
My mother walks behind me. “Just because someone is poor, darling, doesn’t mean they forego all their rights to privacy.”
I lean Dirk against the fence, kick his legs apart, and start patting him down. I’m wearing a pair of garden gloves and my eyes are watering, and I’m rougher than I should be. Dirk is as passive as the Pillsbury Doughboy. I pull a pair of women’s underwear out of his jacket pocket. They’re my mother’s.
“No,” I answer my mother, “only poor, mentally ill, substance-abusing creeps like Dirk lose their privacy around here.”
My mother frowns. “I’m very disappointed in you, Dirk,” she says.
***
A drink to calm my nerves. I’ve discovered the phone machine is full of messages––reporters, all wanting to know about the attack. I guess I’ve finally cracked the news- worthy threshold. Even more disturbing, is the fact that people I haven’t heard from in years are calling me. And some of them sound downright thrilled that I might’ve tried to kill a studio executive. They all want me to call them, give them the dirty details.
I’m calling no one.
It is my fervent hope that the low-brow producer I’ve solicited work from, and am going to meet tomorrow, is not a reader of the trades. I pour some red wine, gulp it down. Half a bottle and I can still function––half a bottle and the smell of Dirk will dim, and the straight-to-video, under the table, non-union project, that I’m about to sign on to, for a criminally small amount of money, will seem infinitely palatable.
***
“So did you really try to kill him?” the low-brow producer asks. He’s grinning at me. His shark-dead eyes suddenly lively and hopeful. If only he could talk about the scenario, we’re working on with that same sort of joy. But no, stories are dead things to him. They are lurid packaging for a DVD, something that will spring off the shelf at the unsuspecting buyer. The list of things that spring off the shelf are depressingly small: guns, knives, breasts…
“No,” I tell him. “It’s been blown all out of proportion. Let’s get back to the story.”
“Right,” he says and thumbs through his notes.
My mother is working nearby with a large pair of shears. She is trying to save my garden, beating back the bamboo that has threatened to take over the walkway. A large straw hat is jammed down on her head, her witchy hair tamed for the moment. A baggy pair of shorts and an old Rolling Stone T-shirt, the one with the big tongue on it, completes her ensemble. I can tell by the way she’s looking over at us, that she doesn’t approve of my low-brow producer. To her, he must reek mercantile.
“You gotta have your violence and your brutality,” my producer says, scrutinizing his notes.
“I got that note already,” I tell him.
“What about the three-way sex scene with the two black hookers?”
I don’t want to write a three-way sex scene,” I say. “Why can’t we just have one hooker. That’s sexy enough. Besides, our hero is not going to want company. He’s rugged. He’s a loner. It’s totally against his character.”
The producer eyes me sadly. “I don’t think it’s sexy enough.”
“Jesus, you think Robert Mitchum needed two women in a scene with him to be sexy?”
The producer laughs. “Mitchum might’ve been lovin’ up one broad on screen, but you could tell he was thinking about two women just by the way he acted.”
“Three-way sex scenes are not sexy,” I tell him.
“How would you know? I bet you’ve never even tried it.” he says. His eyes drift to the empty pool. “How come there’s no water in the pool?”
“Because I’d drown myself if there were.”
***
I have to get out of the house. I find Debbie, just in time, at Mr. Chang’s on Sunset. She is just closing up. Mr. Chang’s is the Xerox shop I use for all my manuscripts. Debbie is twenty-eight years old and the manager. She is also my girlfriend. I have tried to avoid her; I have tried to break it off; it’s not right on any level. But here I am. I tell her to turn off the lights and lock the door. She does. I tell her to take off her clothes, and then I take off my clothes. (Someday we are going to have to examine my need to seduce women who serve me in some capacity. You might think it’s because of my desire to be in control, and you might be right. And you’d probably attribute it to my mother refusing to let me have a father in my life. Possibly. But I think the blame can be placed elsewhere. Not only would my mother not let me have a father, far more onerous, she refused to let me have a toy gun. I can remember a Ban the Bomb march in the early sixties that she took me on. She carried a sign and I followed her around gazing at her long dark pony tail that trailed down her back and brushed the pale skin between her shoulder blades. I thought she was the most beautiful mother in the world, but that didn’t stop me from secreting a cap pistol under my shirt that I’d gotten from a friend at school. Somewhere along the line, the contraband gun became so attractive pressed against my belly, that I just had to take it out and wave it around, which caused my mother to slap me so hard I flew into a duck pond. Much later in my life, after I went to my pre-induction physical for the draft, and was deemed suitable for military service, and was itching to wrap my fingers around a real weapon, my mother launched a campaign to win me my Conscientious Objector status. She wrote all her pacifist friends and the draft board was deluged by letters of support. Finally, they caved in and gave it to me, even though I begged them to take me. I guess my mother was just too formidable of an adversary)
We make love on a big IBM copier. Little lightning bolts render us in mid-flight, the contrast extreme, our flesh white hot against the glass, and then plunged into darkness, over and over, finally to be documented on the page and neatly stacked, like the cells of an animated movie.
Later we lay sprawled on the floor beside the copier. Debbie is a lovely thing, has red hair, a southern drawl, the palest blue eyes, and the most darling bikini line I have ever seen. She’s from Mississippi, and majored in communications. She also is trying to write a screenplay, so the next question doesn’t surprise me, but still it is one I’ve dreaded.
“So,” she says, “did you read my script?”
“No,” I say.
“What!?” she says. “Why?”
I prop myself up on one elbow and gaze at her as tenderly as I can. “Because, if I read your script, then you’d want me to give it to my agent, and then if she liked it, and sold it, I’d have to kill you, because I can’t get arrested right now.”
“I hate you,” Debbie says.
“I know,” I say.
Debbie begins to jerk on her clothes, the fluorescents going on, my white, middle-aged flesh wretched in the unrelenting light.
“Get out!” she says.
I struggle into my clothes, caving in the back of my shoes as I jam my feet in them, still laced. Scattered before us lie some of our documented labors.
“Can I have this picture of your ass?” I ask.
***
Back pool side, I contemplate its emptiness, the torn Xerox of Debbie’s perky bottom is in my hand. (She said no, and therein began a tussle from which I emerged victorious, due to my superior strength and competitive instincts. Then I ran for my Porsche and thank god it started on the first crank.) The thing to do is to go to bed. Go to bed, pull the covers over my head, and pretend the world doesn’t exist for a while.
I’m in bed. I hear a voice on the patio and sit up. My mother is talking into a cell phone and laughing. Who could she be talking to at this time of night? Suddenly I’m thinking of the answering machine tape. I’d heard it before, ten years ago, and it was nauseating then: the sound of a man deranged by desire, jealousy, and mood-altering substances. Dumars blubbered confessions of love, followed by an obscene list of the body parts that belonged to him and only him, and then the awful and violent things he would do to her if she shared them with anyone else.
I get out of bed, go into my office, and retrieve it from my briefcase. I bring it upstairs. I stand over the phone machine and realize that my hands are shaking. I have discovered that I still have Sid Dumars’ home phone number in my book. Is it possible it was still good? I dial and his machine picks up. It’s his voice. I hang up. I pop out my message tape and insert Dumars’ tape. I push play and his wretched voice spills into the room. Then I pick up the phone again and dial his number. I hold the receiver next to the speaker.
I’m sure the sound of his voice will bring back memories.
I gaze down into the city. Klieg lights punch holes in the sky, wave about. Somewhere down on the strip, a big flashy premiere is unfolding. Dumars’ dark raving goes on and on. My hand is now firm as I hold the receiver. I glance again at the streaming lights and I have to smile––suddenly they strike me as funny. I see them for what they truly are: those bright beams are nothing more than a bluff, as quaint as a night-light glowing dimly in the corner of a child’s room. Afraid of the dark, I think. They’re all just afraid of the dark.
I play the tape over and over into his machine and then I go to bed.
***
Pettus is leaning over his desk, palms flat, head bowed, like some great grazing animal. “So, since the incident at the studio, you’ve had no contact with Mr. Dumars?” he asks me.
“No,” I tell him. It seems Sid Dumars is dead. Drove his Lexus off a cliff on Mulholland sometime during the night. It was a single car accident, no skid marks, plunged two hundred feet into a swimming pool, landed upside down. The police surmise that if the impact didn’t kill him, he probably drowned.
The irony does not make me smile.
I’ve been at Parker Center for over three hours; it is now late in the afternoon. The LAPD have been quite cordial, and the stay has been far from threatening. More like a long wait at the bus station.
Pettus’s partner, a more cheerful man, whose name tag reads “Sullivan,” ambles in. “The mother checks out,” he says.
This doesn’t perk up Pettus at all. He straightens up, rubs his neck, sighs. “Mothers aren’t the best of alibis,” he says.
I need to tell him that he’s wrong. My mother would be a perfect alibi, only because she would feel no special motherly loyalty to protect me. She would be totally objective.
“On the contrary,” I say, “my mother would consider my imprisonment a positive alternative to Hollywood. Remember, some great literature has come out of prison––Martin Luther King’s, “Letter from Birmingham Prison,” for instance.”
Pettus finally smiles a little. “Get out of here,” he says.
I get out of there.
***
I drive home, taking the long way, Sunset Boulevard winding close to the hills. The shadows are long and cool and almost redemptive after the fierce heat of the day. I am strangely calm. Warren the weirdo, worries me of course. I never mentioned him. And I never mentioned the tape he gave me or my sonic assault on Dumars’ answering machine. I sincerely hope that it drove him mad and caused him to send his car over that cliff, but I guess I’ll never know. Still, the thought of it fills me with a warm glow.
I turn up Beachwood and catch the street lamps as they go on––always a good sign. I think about my wife. She had always loved the look of the Beachwood street lamps. Very Raymond Chandler, she had called them: the stone columns, the flame of glass, and the darkness swarming behind them. They made you want to dream, she said once.
My car sputters and dies. I drift to the curb. No amount of coaxing will get it to start again. I’ve still got over a mile to my house. I get out of the car, lean against the hood, and think. My Triple A has lapsed, my credit cards are maxed, the cash in my wallet, too puny. Call your mom, a voice says, and suddenly I feel like a ten-year-old again. In trouble? Call your mom.
I pull out my cell phone and am about to punch in the number, when I hear a sound. I look up. It’s Dirk working his way down the street his shopping cart like a battering ram. I’m surprised to find myself happy to see him.
“Dirk,” I cry. “Dirk, it’s good to see you. Where are you headed?”
Dirk seems very determined. The shopping cart picks up speed, weaves wildly and peels off a side mirror from a parked car. He blazes past me, the sound of broken glass trailing, the urine smell painting the air, his Rasputin eyes burning pin-points. I chase after him.
“Dirk, wait. You want to come home with me? I’m sure my mother would be glad to see you.”
“I got a place to go, man,” Dirk says.
“Where? Where are you going?”
Dirk comes to a stop, straightens up proudly. “1710, North Sutter, San Francisco,” he says.
“What?” I say, “that’s a long way to go, Dirk.”
“I gotta keep movin’ man.”
I stare at him. He does look like he’s on a mission. I laugh. I’m suddenly feeling a little giddy. “Okay, Dirk, I get it. It’s kind of like an existential thing. You’ve given your life a purpose; you have a destination. I like that. That’s very good.”
“Fuck you,” he says and rolls off.
I watch the shopping cart moving away like a Bedouin’s caravan: humped and ragged, it rolls along, shimmering and shaking beneath the flaming street lamps, the chrome flashing and the dark plastic bags tied to the side, floating out like wings.
For a moment I am overwhelmed by its beauty.
I call my mother. She picks up right away. “I’m in trouble,” I tell her.
“Yes, I know,” she says.
“My car has broken down on Beachwood.” I hear a voice in the background.
“You were at the police station,” she says.
“Is somebody there with you, Mom? Who’s that with you?”
There’s a pause. Then her voice again. “Warren’s here. He’s a student of yours.”
I take a breath. I’m feeling very confused. Maybe even a little lightheaded. “What is he doing there?” I shout. “I don’t think I understand.”
“Frances,” my mother says, “it’s a long story.”
“I want to know what that weirdo’s doing in my house.”
“Warren is recently retired from the FBI, dear. In his early years he spied on subversive organizations for Mr. Hoover. Peace-niks and commies were more important to Mr. Hoover than the Mafia.” There is a long pause. “One of the people Warren spied on was me.”
“Who cares about that?” I shout.
“I’m trying to tell you,” she says. “You see ... Warren is retired now, his wife has died, his children are grown and––”
“Mother,” I say wearily, “I just need to get home. Do you think you could call me a cab and put it on your credit card?”
There’s another long pause. I feel a slight breeze, and then the smell of jasmine, strong––more than just a scent, like something brushing up against my skin. A car’s headlights flash into my eyes. Images go skittering by, a whole string of them.
The theory of montage.
Put my face next to a dead woman, what do you get? There are tears on my cheeks. Pudovkin was right.
“Stay put,” my mother says, “and your father will come pick you up.”