by William Poe
Cherry Park was the only place in Long Beach where I knew that hustlers hung out. After circling around several times, a boy appeared under a street lamp.
“What’s your name?” I asked, pulling to a stop beside him.
“Joe,” the boy said. “What are you into?”
“Nothing kinky. I just like to get my dick sucked.”
“I can do that. How much you willing to pay?”
“Thirty bucks.”
“Let’s go.” The boy hopped into the car and lit a cigarette. “You live in Long Beach, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Belmont Shore, right on the beach.”
“Thought I’d seen you before.”
I pulled into my garage, and as I closed the door, I heard someone mumbling around the corner. Ripples’s patrons often passed out on my street, but the voice I heard was a woman’s.
“Listen,” I said, as Joe and I walked toward the steps, “my ex-wife has been hanging around. I just wanted you to know in case she shows up.”
We were at the bottom of the stairs before I saw Masako sitting halfway up. She was still weeping, her head buried in her knees.
“Ignore her,” I whispered to Joe. We passed right by her on the steps. She didn’t move.
I locked the dead bolt and heard Masako mumbling again. Only then did I realize she was quietly singing one of the church’s holy songs.
“Come on, Joe,” I said, leading him into the bedroom. “Let’s get down to business.”
I don’t know how long Masako hung around. When I opened the door the next morning, she was gone. I gave Joe his money and sent him on his way. He disappeared down the street toward Ripples. I went out to the beach and found the pockmarked stone I had picked up on the beach the night before. I spent the morning painting it with silver enamel, filling in the craters with different primary colors.
I missed Lyle. It was hard to face the fact that he had left me for his high-school sweetheart, but if I had run into my high-school love, Tony, I’d have left anyone I was with at the time to get back together.
CHAPTER 11
Some weeks later, I received a registered letter from an attorney whose office was in Little Tokyo. Masako had filed for divorce. I signed the forms and mailed them back without hesitation.
When I eventually went to drug rehab, my counselor asked if I still believed that Reverend Moon was the messiah. I found it strangely difficult to answer at the time, remembering that when I had signed the divorce papers, I could not shake the feeling of having entered into a Faustian contract. According to the church’s beliefs, by rejecting my marriage, I would end up in the lowest realm of hell. Satan would once again become the Angel of Light, Lucifer, before the gates of heaven opened for me.
Whatever I believed deep inside, while living in Long Beach I pursued a hedonistic life of leisure. In the afternoons, I sat on the landing in a lawn chair with a pair of binoculars and watched beautiful young men playing volleyball on the beach. Each night, I went to Ripples and got drunk. Nearly always, I met someone to stumble home with when the bar closed. They invariably left the next morning and hardly said hello when I ran into them again. No one went to Ripples looking for a soul mate.
I continued toiling on the black drawings, calling the series “Spirals to Oblivion.” No one would ever see them. Before I left Long Beach, I wadded them up and threw the heap into a trash bin along Ocean Boulevard. The works expressed what I felt at the time, but I didn’t want them to become part of a legacy.
By the time the lease ran out on my apartment, I was penniless, having gone through every cent of my quitclaim windfall. Scott’s place was crowded, with three people sharing rent and each taking a bedroom, but he allowed me to sleep on his couch. For all his goofing off, Scott had passed the California bar exam and become a lawyer. He encouraged me to get a real job rather than sell things on the street, which is what I had started to do for food money. He gave me the names of temporary placement agencies associated with motion picture companies, and I got a few gigs as a location sitter at homes in Beverly Hills. My car came in handy when I landed jobs serving as a gopher to production assistants.
Scott slowed down on his cocaine use after Maury complained that he was calling in sick too often. I didn’t have money to buy coke during that period, but when offered a line, I rarely refused.
I took my meager and sporadic paychecks and spent most of the money at the Spotlight. Twiggy, sentimental and remembering how good I had been about tipping when I was flying high, set me up with a free drink for each one I bought. Having seen an endless parade of people come through the bar—one month on top of the world, penniless the next—he knew my fortunes would change.
Vivian urged me to return to Sibley, often saying that she wished I would go back to school. Her suggestions never registered with me. Hollywood allowed me to be anonymous, and that was what I wanted.
Connie never failed to tell me that I was in her prayers. “You should start going to church,” she would say. “Jesus is the Savior, not that Korean Antichrist.” I would politely state that exposure to one group of true believers was enough for a lifetime. If anything, I felt the experience had inoculated me against religious thought.
One of Scott’s roommates moved out right when a serious job opportunity presented itself.
“There’s a chance I can get you set up with one of Maury’s clients,” Scott told me one night, “if you don’t mind sweeping floors.”
“What kind of job are you talking about?” I imagined myself in a white coat and bow tie, like the fellow at the end of “Peabody’s Improbable History” episodes from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
“An Italian film distributor named Nicolò hired Maury to represent him in a case involving intellectual property rights. Something about video and whether nontheatrical clauses in old contracts cover those rights. I overheard him asking Maury if he knew someone who wanted a job organizing his warehouse.”
As a regional fundraising leader in the church, I had managed dozens of warehouses, places where we kept the products that members sold. I knew what drudgery it could be: heavy lifting, ledger books, and lots of dust. My face must have shown that a job like that wasn’t my idea of a good time.
“Come on,” Scott encouraged me. “It’ll give you a steady income. And who knows? Maybe it will lead to something bigger.”
“Okay,” I agreed. What choice was there? The ten-year gap in my resume had already become a problem at job interviews.
“I’ll get Sandra to set up a meeting,” Scott said.
“Sandra? Why not Maury?”
“Because he’s so infatuated with her that he has to put a nitroglycerin pill under his tongue every time she walks toward him. Sandra will get you in the door, I guarantee it.”
The next day, Sandra told me over the phone that she had told Nicolò I was experienced in warehouse management.
“But Sandra,” I said, “I don’t know squat about the film business.”
“Doesn’t matter. From what I hear, his place is such a mess, he doesn’t even know what he’s got. You’ll do fine.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Sandra gave me an address. “Got to go, sweetie. Maury’s heading this way.”
She had to be careful. Maury didn’t want anyone talking to me.
Nicolò’s office was on the Sunset Strip at the edge of Beverly Hills, in a stylish building from the twenties. Standing in the reception area, I could see a long corridor with closed doors. In the other direction was a copy room stacked with six-drawer filing cabinets. A dark-haired fellow, who appeared to be in his twenties, worked feverishly at a computer terminal, apparently entering information from contracts spread out on his desk.
After a long wait, Nicolò appeared from one of the doors along the corridor and motioned for me to come inside. He was in his mid-fifties, overweight, and bald, with a large head and piercing gray eyes. His hand swallowed mine in its broad grip when he greeted me.
Ginger, his sec
retary, buzzed the intercom before we even started to talk. Someone was calling from Varese, the city in Lombard, Italy, where Nicolò was born. I sat for the next thirty minutes listening to animated Italian. As he spoke, Nicolò seemed to study a print of the aging scholar by Leonardo da Vinci that hung behind his desk. He waved his arm in my direction from time to time, as if to say, Not much longer.
When the phone call ended, Nicolò looked over the résumé I had prepared. It listed the string of odd jobs I had held recently, naming several production companies and remaining vague about just how much of an assistant to an assistant I had been. It satisfied Nicolò that Sandra’s endorsement of me was warranted. He took me to a large room at the end of the corridor.
“I cannot find a thing,” Nicolò lamented, sweeping his arm through the air as if to encompass the chaos within. “You see what I mean?”
The room was a jumble of cardboard boxes, each bursting at the seams. Film canisters and racks of three-quarter-inch videotapes were stacked floor to ceiling. Thousands of manila folders lay in dusty piles.
“You can make sense of this, yes?” Nicolò asked.
It would be a daunting task, but I had tackled worse during my days managing fundraising teams.
“My company is a small one. I cannot pay much,” Nicolò said. “Two fifty a week to begin.”
“This could take months,” I said. The man was offering me barely enough to survive.
Nicolò gestured toward the file folders. “Some of these are old contracts that need to be renegotiated. There is money in that. We can talk about a raise if you identify them.”
I agreed to his terms. Nicolò shook my hand again. I followed him to the front desk. “Please help Mr. Simon fill out his employment papers,” he said to the secretary.
“Hi, Ginger. I’m Simon,” I said, shaking her hand.
She wrote down my social security number and said she would pass it on to the bookkeeper, a man who only came to the office on Fridays.
Nicolò’s salesperson, Patrick Day, arrived before sunrise to telex the European clients. He was the son of a pharmacist who worked at the Thrifty Drugstore on Rodeo Drive. His family lived in the Beverly Hills flatlands. In terms of local snobbery, one may as well live in Watts.
When trying to act sophisticated, Patrick always missed the mark. He wore earrings when they were not the fashion for men and sported Italian-made shoes when sneakers were in vogue. His hair was slicked down when others strove for a look that said, I just woke up. But for Nicolò, Patrick had classic American looks, and that is why he was hired. Foreign buyers would first negotiate with Patrick, but only Nicolò could finalize a contract.
Sorting through the jumble of papers in his storage room, I learned a great deal about motion picture distribution. Before long, I had familiarized myself with representation agreements, the terms of contracts with video companies, and Nicolò’s working relationship with custom brokers and video-transfer labs, as well as how to interpret letters of credit and other financial documents.
Nicolò got his start by marketing American cartoons dubbed in Italian. Eventually, he expanded to selling independent American films to Italian television. Most were low-budget and of very poor quality, but Nicolò had the finesse of a used-car salesman, bundling three awful films with one that promised a modicum of sales. Video had resurrected movies that for years had languished in vaults. People who thought they owned worthless film libraries suddenly found they possessed a potentially valuable commodity.
The advantage of film distributors was that they always made a profit, keeping 25 percent off the top, and deducting expenses from the remainder before giving the owners anything.
When I got the files organized, prioritizing the contracts according to their long- and short-term profitability, I asked Nicolò for a raise. His negotiating style was to promise anything and then claim he hadn’t understood the agreement. He denied ever saying he would increase my salary if I made sense of his old contracts.
Unrelated to my demand for more money, Ginger resigned the next day. She wanted Nicolò to hire her away from the temporary agency that had placed her. He refused.
“Before you get another receptionist,” I told Nicolò, “I have a proposal. Let me do Ginger’s job. I’ll continue to manage the inventory and also take care of the phones. Just up my salary to what she was getting. How about it?”
“Reception is a woman’s job,” Nicolò said. “Clients want to hear a female voice when they call.”
“Think about the savings,” I said. “We communicate with clients through telexes and faxes most of the time, anyway. Most of the phone calls are from your suppliers looking for money.”
Nicolò rubbed his chin for a second, and then his eyes lit up. He thrust out his hand, and we shook energetically. “You are right. Very correct,” he said, gazing toward the ceiling, as if to get confirmation from above. “I do it.”
“Things will be fine,” I assured him. “You’ll see.”
As it happened, more of Nicolò’s clients telephoned than he was remembering. Answering the phone would give me a chance to get to know them. I also wanted to connect with the producers who supplied his films. My goal was to take Patrick’s job.
Patrick thought of me as the doofus who stacked boxes in the back room. He was appalled when Nicolò gave me Ginger’s job. He had treated her as his personal secretary, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask me to do anything.
When Nicolò agreed to buy a computer for the front desk so I could build an inventory system and create a phone log, Patrick nearly went through the roof. He struggled to get his work done on a computer that was so slow, it took minutes to save a large document. He challenged what I knew about computers in the first place, but by then, I had learned quite a bit from Scott, who had written a program to print legal forms, and had learned how to use a modem to connect to the courthouse to pick up the daily docket.
After a month, Patrick gave Nicolò an ultimatum: hire a receptionist and send me back to the inventory, or he was gone. Nicolò told him he appreciated the sales he had made over the last two years, and he was sure he’d do well in the future. If he needed a reference, Nicolò would be happy to provide one.
It was the first real success since my glory days in the church leading hundreds of members and commanding millions of dollars. Despite the small size of Nicolò’s company, I saw opportunity.
Nicolò quickly came to depend on me. Each day, I arrived earlier than Patrick had done to retrieve our telexes and check faxes. I dealt with most of the correspondence. Nicolò trusted my judgment, though he often penciled in changes when he signed contracts.
By autumn, I was ready for MIFED, an important market for selling independent films that was held in Milan, Italy. The annual event took place each year at the end of October. Most buyers were looking for theatrical releases, but some wanted video rights.
Nicolò placed an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter’s special issue. We had a poor offering, but the worldwide video market was hungry for any American film that had been shown in theaters. Though our most recent film was made over a decade before, each could claim having had a theatrical release.
I arranged tickets and made reservations at the Hotel Windsor in Milan. Nicolò had suggested the hotel since they catered to British and American guests and most of the employees spoke English.
The night before the event began, Nicolò introduced me to his cronies, a group of wealthy old men with white hair who all had gregarious personalities. Nicolò had known most of them since his youth. They showered him with affection. For me, the evening could not have been duller. After dinner, we toured piano bars, seemingly a popular form of entertainment in Milan. Not understanding either a word of the conversation or a lyric of the songs being sung, I drank nonstop—first wine, but then switching to “gin-tonic,” as the Italian bartenders called it.
Sometime around dawn, after finally separating from his friends at a bar that featured the lousiest Bar
ry Manilow imitator one could imagine, Nicolò took me to the Principe da Savoia, a palatial hotel where serious figures in the film industry gathered. Nicolò had nothing to offer these wheelers and dealers, but he liked to be seen there, hoping to gain a patina of legitimacy. Nicolò was the smallest of small potatoes, but everyone knew him. I had not realized until that trip that Nicolò had once been an actor.
It was a fascinating crowd. Everyone scrutinized everyone else’s gestures, watching for the slightest hint that their bravado was bluff. Did they really have Robert De Niro lined up for a role in their new film, or were they fishing to see if an investor would be onboard if he was in their film?
Nicolò began telling people that he was in negotiations to distribute a film, currently in production. He came up with a title out of thin air, The Tragic Amazon. If I hadn’t pulled him away, he would have signed letters of agreement for something that didn’t exist and never would.
We arrived at the Windsor Hotel with only two hours before we had to be at the event. I could only have been asleep for an hour when Nicolò almost knocked down my door trying to rouse me. I dragged myself to the lobby for continental breakfast and cups of foamy cappuccino. Nicolò had the concierge hail a taxi.
MIFED was held in the largest convention center in Europe. By the time we arrived, Nicolò and I had fallen asleep. The taxi driver yelled several times before we woke up, wobbly as the hula girl glued to his dashboard. I’m not sure how much money Nicolò gave him, but it was far more than the cost of the trip. Nicolò’s exhaustion was catching up with him.
At the main entrance, billboards announced the new films being screened. Some were enhanced with neon lights in hopes of catching the attention of buyers before they picked up their badges at the registration desk.
The offices were assigned according to an established pecking order. Those who had attended for many years got the best locations. New distributors got a booth.