by Nick Cole
She decided she would follow her grandmother’s dreams for a little while. Not to become a movie star. She didn’t like acting. She was shy. But maybe… maybe she could just go to California and see that Hollywood sign. Maybe she could do just that.
That would be a nice way to say goodbye to her best friend. Her grandmother.
She knew a girl from high school who had moved to Hollywood. She could stay with her.
Later that week, late at night, the girl from high school picked her up at LAX. It was dark, and the girl, who’d been living in Hollywood for two years, had changed. Her hair was now pink. Her nose pierced. Her boyfriend’s name was The Big E. He called her Kat; back home her name had been Jenny.
They drove through the night streets of LA, heading to the flat “Kat” shared with her “main man.” The apartment was slender, narrow, and crowded with all manner of strange posters, glow-in-the-dark lighting, and bizarre pottery. A pervasive aroma of sandalwood hung in thin clouds.
After sharing a few beers with Kat and her main man, the girl was left alone, downstairs, without bedding, to wait out the last hours until dawn. In the bathroom, as she dressed in her pajamas, she looked out the small window. She could just barely see the O-O-D of the HOLLYWOOD sign out the tiny window. She was excited, and she wished her grandmother were here with her right now. Because she was so close. Closer than she’d ever imagined she could be.
She slept for a little while. When she awoke, after she’d dressed and scrubbed her face, she took her backpack and opened the door to the streets of Hollywood.
The smell of magnolia and wet grass overwhelmed her, the morning gray and misting. But that didn’t bother her.
She wandered through neighborhoods where cute little dollhouses nestled amid a profusion of blooming greenery. She crossed busy streets, blighted and trash-strewn. Eventually she came to a coffeehouse. Even though it had rained earlier in the morning and all through the night, the outside tables were set. Two waitresses, one pale with large twisting tattoos running up and around her forearms, the other a slender East Indian girl, moved among the early morning customers. Sunglasses and suits, an assortment of jogging and workout clothes, vibrant, bright, urban, tan, hip, going and coming.
She found a table and sat for a long time before the pale tattooed waitress approached her. She asked for coffee and a blueberry muffin along with a glass of milk. The waitress allowed her sunglasses to slip down the bridge of her nose at the mention of milk. One look at this buxom farm-raised blonde, fresh from the country with her clothes five years behind the times, and all was clear to the cynical urban hipster.
When the coffee, milk, and muffin arrived, so did the check. The girl waited until the waitress was gone, then peered into her change purse. This morning meal was an extravagance. She chastised herself for the expenditure. But then she heard her grandmother’s voice, from the bedroom, from the past.
“It’s okay, spend the money. See Hollywood.” She could still feel her grandmother pushing the cash into her hand. “Go. See Hollywood for me. Just once in my life I wanted to do a scene. That was my dream.”
The sun broke through the clouds, flooding the patio in golden light. She took a bite of muffin and then, as fast as she could, she drank the entire glass of milk, just as she had when she was a little girl. She laughed at herself. And as if the milk or the laughter had been some sort of medicine, fear and doubt about money faded away. She leaned back now with her coffee. Here she was. In Hollywood. This was right. She had made it.
In the bushes next to her, she heard a sneeze. A wet runny sneeze with a secondary plopping sound. It was the sneeze of a small creature. She looked into the bushes and saw one cat’s eye peering out at her.
***
Before the Great Director was who he became, he was merely one of many struggling to make a name for himself. He was working on a made-for-television movie of the week that was under-budgeted, understaffed, and not the golden child of the production schedule. He was fighting the good fight. He was trying to make a great movie out of a bad script with a terrible budget and washed-out talent.
All morning he’d been trying to shoot a scene. A scene he could see in his mind, and how it should look. But time and time again, as he cast actress after actress, none could nail it. It was clear what the problem was.
It was him.
In an homage to earlier, more golden times, in an attempt to be a revivalist and add a baroque twist to a seemingly simple plot, he’d recruited a fallen star to play a very small part. A cameo even. A man who’d once made children laugh, parents guffaw, and a post-war nation forget their problems each night. But there had been a scandal. Long after people had forgotten whether it was politics, sex, murder, drugs, or a bad word said on live TV, the fallen and forgotten actor was still working. Still ready should they ever need him again.
Except the years had not been kind.
Work as an actor, the profession he’d trained his entire life for, had not been readily available throughout the years. His life had become one of suitcases and work by the week. Dinner theater here, Shakespeare in small parks there. Sometimes years would pass where he would not work at all as an actor. In these times, he supported himself by selling shoes, washing cars, tying balloons into animal shapes for small children at birthday parties, and many, many other things.
There was drinking. There was a wife. She stood by him, faithful as the years wore him down. But he was always ready, ready to come back. Ready as the drink blossomed in his nose, now a terrible red carnation. Ready as the cigarettes and the worry etched deep lines in his face. Ready as poverty forced him to go years without seeing a dentist. Ready as the teeth fell out one by one. Ready as a life of hard work for a weekly wage wore him down, flattened his feet, hunched his shoulders. Ready as defeat and failure danced around him, victorious in round after round of the boxing match that was his life. The prizefight he’d lost long ago.
But the Great Director had remembered him. Needed him. Just a small part. A part for a man who was beaten. He was beaten. A man who’d wasted every good thing in his life. He had wasted every good thing in his life. A man who was repugnant to any good youthful thing that was full of life. He was repugnant to the young and the just starting out.
Actresses were paraded in front of the Great Director to play the part of the waitress in the greasy spoon who gives the repugnant old man a slice of pie and a kind, warm smile. The old man returned the gesture with a smile and then a tear. He could do that, because he was a trained actor from the old school, weeping unabashedly on one sleeve, a smile for all the world on the other.
The problem the Great Director was having this morning, as he labored to capture truth and beauty, was that none of these so-called beautiful actresses were full of innocence, charity, and warmth. Their lives were such as to be the opposite of those things. While they went through the motions of showing the right expressions, that ultimate lie detector, the camera, caught them out every time. The performances got worse, and the studio gave him more actresses. Again they could not show the charity needed for the scene. Finally, a suit from the studio pointed out, gently, that maybe it was the old man who was the problem.
The Great Director knew this was not the case. The old man was great. He’d nailed it each time, making it better as he went. He was too good for these actresses. They couldn’t keep up. But the picture had to be shot, and it was getting time to replace the old man with an actor who would not incite so much revulsion in pretty young actresses who had their whole lives in front of them.
The old man had this one last thing.
The Great Director sat glowering in his chair. The actress most recent to try charity and warmth had called her agent, threatening and crying, screaming to the agent that the production was abusing her. The crew worked to reset the shot. The old man approached him.
“Maybe ya better replace me, kid,” he said in
a gravelly voice destroyed by years of cigars and whiskey. “We gave it a good shot. It was enough for me to just get back in the game for one last day.”
“No,” said the Great Director, who folded his arms just below his light meter and pouted.
A long time ago his father had let him stay up late to watch a movie. An old movie when he was a boy. An old movie starring the human wreck standing in front of him. He’d laughed and laughed until his father, coming down in the night to tell his son it was time to go to bed, stayed and watched, enjoying his son’s laughter, getting caught up in the zaniness of the plot, the antics of the clown, the happiness of having everything you could ever want as you shared a secret with someone you loved, like your son and an old movie. Later, as his father carried him to bed at the end of the movie, he remembered whispering, “Thanks, Dad.”
“No problem, son. That was a great movie. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
“The show’s the thing, kid,” said the old man, hacking loudly. A disturbing cough that continually wracked his convulsing chest. He spit a gob into a white handkerchief and inspected it, looking for something.
“Ya gotta get this thing in the can. Believe me, I understand, kid. Thanks all the same though.” He paused. “It sure was good to be back in the game, at least… for just a minute. Thanks.”
“No,” said the Great Director angrily, and he walked off the set and out into the sunlight.
At the coffeehouse a few blocks down the road, he ordered a double tall mocha, found a chair on the patio, and glowered, weighing his options. He couldn’t turn his back on a hero. What kind of man, what kind of filmmaker, would he be then?
He was young enough, then, to want to be the man he thought he might become.
Across from him, seated a few tables away, was the woman who one day would become his Perfect Robot Wife. She was pulling apart pieces of her muffin and sticking them into a small dark hole in the bushes. At first he was intrigued by her beauty. Another beautiful actress. He wanted to know what she was doing. So he watched, sipping his mocha, letting the troubles of his passionate life fade away.
He watched her. She was kind. She cooed and coaxed at the bushes. Soon he knew, by the shape and demeanor of the thing within, that there was a cat there. He could see one glowering eye.
Could she coax the cat from its lair?
Cautiously, the head of a cat emerged, and what an ugly head it was! Other people who had been watching the scene with similar non-interest, in both her and the activity, saw the head and commented on its ugliness, some laughing, some affecting compassionate concern as they uttered, “Oooh, poor creature, they ought to put it out of its misery,” one or two even mentioning the cat might be dangerous. It looked mangy. It probably had rabies. It could attack.
Now the Great Director was ready. If the cat attacked, he would leap across the patio and save her. What an introduction, he thought.
All of a sudden, the girl reached down and gently scooped up the cat. Fluid, delicate, motherly. When she brought the cat into full daylight it was even uglier and mangier than anyone had guessed. It was dirty and scarred. It looked as though it had recently emerged from the worst trash can in the city. His soon-to-be Perfect Robot Wife picked it up and held it. Placing it in her lap, she stroked its fur and remaining ear. The cat was clearly happy. It closed its remaining eye and purred. A long deep basso thrumming of contentment.
At that very moment, the Great Director knew he’d found his actress.
The girl who could love the unlovable.
He introduced himself. Within minutes, maybe because of her naiveté, but probably because of his smooth talk, as he suspected throughout the years to come, she and the cat and the director were headed toward the set. The actress who screamed and threatened was fired. His future Perfect Robot Wife quickly slipped into costume. She did the scene. Once and then twice. The Great Director captured it. It was perfect.
In the last remaining eighteen months of his life, due in no small part to the success of the scene, the old man enjoyed a revival of popular acclaim and spirit. He took no more whiskey. He smoked no more cigarettes. But he still tied balloon animals for small children.
***
The Ugly Cat was dead. None of his kind were with him. No family. No friends. Just this woman who’d found him. Loved him since the day she’d met both him and her husband, the Great Director. She cried long into the darkening night.
There was nothing anyone could do to make it better.
***
Later that night, he led his wife to the kitchen. He made some tea, found a box of cookies, wrapped her in a comforter, and disappeared down the hallway.
At first he thought about using a plastic trash bag. He thought that might upset her. He found the laundry room, remarking inwardly that he’d never been here before. He took a wicker basket that’d probably cost him what most people spent on groceries each week, and he retrieved the dead cat, wrapping the blanket around it and hefting the body into the basket. He placed the basket in the back of the SUV and turned out the lights in the garage.
On Tuesday, he made arrangements at a pet cemetery to bury the cat. His Perfect Robot Wife retreated to her bedroom. She spent long hours staring out the window, holding a chewed-up penguin cat toy. He made her a sandwich, some chips, a glass of iced tea, then retreated to his study, wondering exactly why he had a study.
On Wednesday afternoon they arrived at the cemetery. The funerary home had retrieved the body the previous day. They’d both dressed formally. She because she always dressed appropriately and perfectly. He because he did not know what was considered acceptable attire for a cat’s funeral, so he’d opted to go all out and wear his best suit. He could always come in on the ball, he reasoned with an old Little League analogy. There was an awkward moment when they greeted each other after dressing in their separate bathrooms. How long had it been since they had dressed to impress only the other and no one else?
The funeral was short and sweet, though the Great Director had fully expected some sappy cat homily from some bizarre cat priest. Instead, a man in a flowing robe, balding and with a gray beard, made his way up the green hill with the aid of a gnarled wooden staff. He had arrived via cherry red Volkswagen bus. As he climbed the hill leading to the Ugly Cat’s grave, no small feat in a robe but made easier by the staff he carried, he huffed and puffed. Wheezing, he came right to the Perfect Robot Wife and held her hand.
“I am so sorry.”
And he meant it.
The three of them stood there for a long moment. Without the pet priest asking, “Is this it?” he went to the head of the grave and began, and this is what he said.
“What’s it all about?” His voice was rich and sonorous, worthy of some Old Testament prophet. “We gather at holes in the ground and we ask ourselves, what is it all about? The death of another makes us ask this question time and time again. For a moment, this weighs heavily on our hearts. We agonize, we weep, we imagine the last moment, the last breath, and then, what?”
He paused to survey the green sward surrounding the pit, stretching away in all directions.
“I don’t know,” he said simply. “But I know this. It is here at the pit that we find regret. Too many people find themselves next to these holes saying, ‘If only…’ If only I had spent more time with Mr. Bonkers, spent more money on Mittens, spent more of myself on Sir Barkley. Then we walk away. We vow to change our ways! To start afresh. But within a matter of galactic microseconds we are back to our old ways, only to realize we regret our past behavior, our actions, our choices, our very lives.
“Who can stand next to this yawning chasm and say it was enough? The monuments I built. The money I accumulated. The women, the drugs, the great sex… the rock and roll!” His voice rising, he ends the last sentence on a Ted Nugent-esque high note. “Who can say ‘It was enough’? No one, not one of us.
Not I.”
He looked into his sleeve and checked a note card tucked within. “The Lord tells us, ‘Oh Israel, oh Israel, how I longed to gather you up in my arms, but you would not listen.’ How awesome for the Creator of this universe to say such a thing to us. To gather us up. To restrain us from our folly. To embrace us with love. We cat lovers, we know the heartbreak of restraining the un-restrainable. Instead we humans run, we chase, we scurry after dangled string and balls of yarn, and when we find ourselves here again, we cry out, ‘Not me! I will change my ways.’ But do we? No. We do not. Soon enough we are back to our old ways, heedless of the hole that lies at the end of each of our lives.
“You ask me, ‘Brother Larry, how can I change my ways? I don’t want to live a life of regret!’ The Apostle Paul tells us, ‘If I have not love, I am an empty brass bell.’ What is this ‘love’ then? What does it mean to me, Brother Larry? I tell you this: love is patient, love never fails, loves hopes, love never gives up. Love is the greatest! Love bears all things!”
Brother Larry lowered his arms, which he had been slowly lifting in Moses-like exhortation throughout the service. Then he dropped his head and the sermon was finished.
Once again he came close, placed a long gaunt hand on each of their shoulders, and thanked them. “I’m glad you checked the Christian ceremony box,” he whispered. “It’s really a lot easier. The Eastern religions get a little weird. People are more nervous than they’d like to admit when they think their pets might become their next boss.”
He walked down the hill, leaving them by the side of the grave. He started his bus and was away, waving, off to another ceremony somewhere else.
They stood for a while, not saying anything. The Great Director felt far away from his wife. She did not cry. All her tears were gone. They walked down the hill, back to the Range Rover, and left the cemetery.
***
Along the streets, people were whiling away the warm Wednesday afternoon. Shopping, or in cafés, drinking coffee, eating a late breakfast, even reading the paper. Dogs waited, drinking from paper cups. The young and the beautiful drove in convertibles, sunglasses on, pointing at the sights and sounds of Hollywood. The Great Director spied a fast food drive-in and parked the SUV in the lot. His wife looked at him questioningly, then asked, “Are you getting something?”