This very noon’s lunch meeting was in downtown Hollywood, inside a Hamburger Hamlet right across the street from Mann’s Chinese Theater, and thus sure to possess a sort of over-the-hill glamour. And, being less than a two mile drive, what could possibly happen? Right?
Wrong! As Victor turned right off Hollywood Boulevard and onto Orange, searching for the entrance to the garage that Geoff Bax told him his company used and thus would validate parking for Victor, he suddenly heard and then saw hail. Hail the size of golf balls loudly crashing down all around him out of a sky nearly cloudless a minute ago.
He found himself in the middle of an action-scene from a horror flick. Every car stopped in its tracks no matter the traffic-light color. The Iowan turistas in front of the row of movie theaters on both north and south sides of the streets screamed, panicked, and rapidly ducked for cover. The Supermans, Batmans, Darth Vaders, Wonder Women and other colorful “personalities” working the street for tips from posed photos with said turistas stood utterly dazed, getting bonked on their bat-ears and bass-amplified helmets. Unbelieving SoCal motorists got right out of their cars to confirm what was happening, only to witness a double hail ball the size of their head crash into their tinted-for-only-$99.95-plus-tax windshield. As the hail doubled so did the noise and the breakage.
Victor saw a chance to maneuver through stopped cars and made a quick turn, illegally on red, and zipped over to the underground garage just as hail shattered down wildly, randomly, and three times as thick around his car. He didn’t even stop to see if there was damage as he shot into the covered entry, stopped for a ticket, and watched the astounded ticket-taker check out five, count ’em!, five large balls of graying ice where his windshield met the car hood.
Luckily there was no damage. He drove to a spot a floor down, parked and got out. He crumpled a copy of the Calendar section of the L.A. Times to wipe the still-quite-hard ice-balls off the front and back windows of the car, counting twelve of the mothers.
As the elevator rose to the floor connecting to the office building, he could see that both ticket-takers were illegally and uncharacteristically outside their booths at the street entry, gawking at the amazing barrage. He entered the back of the building’s lobby and noted people gathered in the Hollywood Boulevard entrance, clearly entranced by the pavement-thunking weirdness outdoors. Upstairs, he gave his name to the sweet-tempered Latina dyke at the desk and sat shaking his head as the clouds transformed rapidly into a fully sunny sky.
When Geoff Bax held out a welcoming hand for a shake a few minutes later, Victor was ready. Quickly unwrapping it from the newspaper, he clasped a still hard, if now melting, ice ball from his palm and into Bax’s meaty palm.
“What the . . . ?!” Bax, another Midwesterner, recognized it but couldn’t believe it. He dropped the hail onto the coffee table then picked it up again. “Where in hell did you get that?”
“Just outside your front door. A dozen more like that blitzed my car as I was parking.”
Geoff went to look, but Victor said, “Its over, already.” Geoff was unfazed however, which boded well if he was to be Victor’s new editor. He dropped the ice ball into a vase of giant African daisies in the lobby. “Let’s go eat. I’m starved.”
Once in the leather booth, Victor ordered off-menu: “The guaca-burger with everything,” he told the waiter, leaving Geoff to search for it on the big double list.
“You’re only here a short time and you’re already playing the ‘off the menu game,’” Geoff said in admiration.
“Not really. I’ve been ordering these since I was a kid out here. All the chefs at Aitch-Aitch make ’em.”
Five minutes of small talk and then the food arrived. After, Geoff sprung his surprise. “We’ve got a new marketing person. Don’t worry. He won’t interfere with me or with your books.”
“Books in the plural,” Victor picked it up, “Because . . . ?”
“Because your agent finally sent me the British Edition of In-Sanity and I read it and I’ve got to publish it here. So now refresh me on its background. Your American editor left after Never Can Say Goodbye came out at the other place and you didn’t offer them this crazy-good book because why? Because you didn’t want to stay, right?”
“Exactly. I had been orphaned at my first publisher in 1981 and it was such a Colonoscopy-Without-Benefit-of-Percodan that I vowed up and down that I’d never let it happen to me again. The new editor that time did mostly romance novels. The editing process resembled thirty-two root canals in a row. She even changed the title of the book to something utterly meaningless. The dust jacket ended up looking like a Daniele Steele reject. A com-plete dis-ass-ter. So with these guys, I decided to cut to the chase. I offered the so-called replacement to my irreplaceable-if-utterly-nuts-but-terrific-editor a collection of short stories as my next book, as per contract. And as I hoped he would, he passed on it.”
“What an idiot! You’ll send the stories to me too, right?” Bax asked. “And we’ll do up a new two-book contract.”
“Sure,” Victor sad, surprised by how quickly and easily that had happened. “Meanwhile Goodbye topped all the charts in England and around the Commonwealth. So my really nice and cute editor there in London begged for the next work. In-Sanity was all but finished. It’s a nice package.” Victor pulled his own surprise out of his jacket pocket. “Don’cha think?”
“Nice, indeed,” Geoff agreed, handling the hardcover. “Correct me, but this matches the UK cover of Goodbye, doesn’t it?” Bax asked.
“Two peas in a pod. Goodbye is at twenty-five thousand copies already, which is a best-seller in the U.K.”
“Can I have this copy long enough to bring to the editorial meeting on Friday where I’ll present your stuff?”
“It’s all yours. Keep it.”
And so the business aspect of the lunch went better than Victor had dared expect. A two book contract: In-Sanity and the stories! Wow.
What pleased Victor even more than how easily this was all happening was that it severed another connection with the East Coast and his utterly painful and hopefully forgettable past. If he had a West Coast publisher, he reasoned, he didn’t need to truck at all with New York-based ones. Not that he expected that Bax’s group would be able to sell his titles with the sweeping ease of the corporately-owned megaliths in Manhattan. But who knew? They might do pretty well for him. The advances Bax mentioned were only about half of what he’d gotten for Goodbye, but that book had earned four times that advance and counting, now that he had foreign language editions out all over Europe. So it almost didn’t matter.
What did matter was that Victor was a very big, possibly the biggest, fish in Geoff Bax’s editorial pond. And for now that was enough.
Bax himself was an odd kind of guy: half lumbering former-football-halfback in physique, damned with the nimble mind of a soccer player, and, even worse, with the fertile but not yet much tested imagination of a dangerous world class hoaxster. His experience, he had confided to Victor at a recent upstate book conference dinner, effusing equal parts of irony and humor, ranged from working at a Southeastern U.S. purveyor of those plastic-covered grilling cookbooks you used outdoors alongside your half-ton all-chrome Weber, to a tony little shop of four located in a pre-Revolutionary War building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he irregularly issued foreign policy textbooks and diplomatic memoirs of such exacting topic discrimination that they were clearly intended for a grand total of eight hundred and twenty-six readers, most of them located deep within the D.C. Beltway. And now he’d arrived at this once-hippie-owned publisher, taken over a decade ago by an alternative magazine mini-empire owned by two elderly gay men and their straight sisters. He’d been recently hired to overhaul this small and rather sleepy press and goose it instantly into the Big-Time. His Midwestern origins (openness and even residual naiveté) had been neatly eroded away by years of Ultramontane Brahmin sophistication, with the lightest of Georgetown U. slash Big-City polishes.
Whenever Bax looked at the unfailingly hot and handsome guys who sauntered into the Hamburger Hamlet in twos and threes for lunch, his eyes all but rolled in their sockets, he was so intent on not looking at them. From this, and given the little he knew of Geoff’s rather restricted East Coast personal life, again previously presented with wit and deprecation over too-strong Mojitos and deadly Appletinis, Victor could already predict for the editor two years of intense immersion in El Lay sex/drugs/rock’n’roll’/n’boys, with either a precipitous decline—ending in a police and hostage stand-off in a motel room littered with empty beer cans and pizza delivery boxes somewhere Coastal south of Capistrano—or a suddenly cleaned-up act, twelve-step program, and a bit of discreet cosmetic surgery as he skipped town. Something drastic was clearly in the wind; it wouldn’t be easy for Bax. But then he was twenty years younger, and so Victor guessed Bax still had lots of time to make a few Truly Major Mistakes.
Two of those lovely young things just now entering the Hamlet swerved on their heels from where the maitressse d’ had aimed them and instead ambled over to their booth. One was tall and Afro-American with expressive facial features, a swank style of dressing, sea-green eyes (or lenses?), and ultra-cool skin tone of lightly-stained oak. From his decades of visits to the West, Victor already knew this type as the Guy-in-the-Aitch-Wood-Know, working part-time for some less than top drawer pop music producer or film-maker, who partied more than he ever recorded or shot anything, but who nevertheless had the right kind of BMI or AMPAS credentials.
He now intro’ed himself as Lindsay Something-or-Other. His lunch companion (they’d probably gone home to screw one time and had ended up in giggles realizing they were both bottoms) was a Caucasian without any immediately identifiable ethnicity, just below medium height, thin without being in any way meager, with scarves tossed across the shoulder of what looked like a quite expensive custom-made sports jacket, and those designer jeans with pressed pleats that ordinarily made Victor gag. He had masses of thin, curly, perfectly charcoal-black hair framing a not handsome but rather distinctly “Aristo” head and face. This featured much nose-bone, distinctive brow ridges, cheekbones for days, sulky lips, and a very good though pallid complexion.
The latter approached the table, took Geoff Bax’s unsuspecting hand, and spoke to Bax, reminding him that he was Dimitrios Juenger, and they’d met through Muffy-So-And-So at Scott-So-and-So’s commitment ceremony to that awful boy, what was his name?
It took a few minutes for Geoff to mentally validate his credentials upon which a single question about their connection, Scotty, was asked, and Dimitrios then turned his semi-reptilian, washed-out blue eyes upon Victor.
“Of course, Lindsay and I both instantly knew who you were.”
While Lindsay went on to talk about two of Victor’s better known books that he adored in particular, Victor watched Juenger look upon him with that radiating interested benevolence typical of an alley tabby approaching a heedless golden oriole.
He was no longer surprised that in L.A. people whom you were certain had last actually picked up and read a book when Mrs. Soos was discussing Return of the Native in the seventh grade nevertheless somehow knew who he was, and that he was (in their own parlance) a “Marquee Name” writer. They knew a few titles of what he’d written, and even could tell him which ones had sold well. The Marquee Name business was, of course, the give-away. These folks seldom read books; the closest they came to any volume besides the IMDb Annual was U.S.A. Today’s Thursday best-seller lists. Also they apparently memorized by heart any marquee they’d ever come across. Victor had long ago gotten over any annoyance at this phenomenon and now accepted it as his (questionable) due. Let ’em gush, even if their gush was nine-tenths spam.
However, once lover-boy was done talking and it was Juenger’s turn, he didn’t so much gush as say directly to Victor, “We should get together some time. Maybe we can figure out some sub-rights sales of your titles. I take it you don’t have a film rights agent?”
“I don’t have a film rights agent who actually wants to sell the film rights to any of my books,” Victor replied candidly.
“Maybe I can. Here’s my card.”
After they’d sauntered off, the maitresse’d came by for a not-that-subtle “Now who was it who’s famous that I missed” look-see at Victor while Geoff paid the bill.
“I have no idea how I met the guy or who this Muffy is,” Bax admitted. “But I definitely was at Scotty and Ron’s commitment ceremony.”
Confirming for Victor that the two had stopped by the table because of him.
“Maybe the young man blew you behind the ice sculpture and you forgot?” Victor suggested.
From the silent, pained look that Geoff returned him, it was very, very possible that or worse had occurred, and was now being only spottily recalled
He and Geoff stepped outside four minutes later into another darkly threatening all-encompassing thunderhead, leading to yet another potential secretly-shot Spielberg flick filled with huge clouds moving far too fast, and all of it rumbling and sounding quite sturm und drang.
“Who knows what’ll fall out of the sky now,” Bax said.
“Rolex watches made in Taiwan?”
“Anything’s possible.” Geoff summed it up: “It is, after all, Holly-Weird.”
”Canyon floods in rain” read a sign in place along Laurel Canyon Boulevard right before the intersection with Kirkwood. Victor always noted it, but wondered how that was possible since the street rose so high to Mulholland Drive.
Returning from lunch, he couldn’t help but notice that the depressed sides of the road were indeed filled with swirling eddies of wildly flowing water. Stopped at the second uphill traffic light, he looked about and made out their source, the roads and lanes and dead-end streets on either side, all of which debouched into this central cut through the five mile wide band of Hollywood Hills. All this water must be from the same downpour he’d experienced an hour or so before that had brought on the Hollywood hail. And as he watched, the braiding, twisting, streamlets seemed to gain density and energy. Someone in a car behind beeped, and he accelerated.
Victor had joked about the road up to his house that it was “a good ten minutes up, and maybe three minutes down to Laurel Canyon again.” The road twisted around itself a dozen times, swerving around every bluff and cliff whereupon property had been carved out and a house set, placed, leaned, or floated on stilts. Even though this was a relatively early built-up section, circa 1950 to 1975, newer homes had been added, and many of them seemed like one good wind would take them down. He knew that sewers had been installed and strengthened every time the road was upgraded, but still, given the steep angle, the water rushed down like Niagara after storms.
He was driving up now, approaching one such section of road half-way up to where he lived, a spot beyond which a solid enough looking bluff held three large architecturally modern houses, blocking the view of the road behind. The road widened here temporarily, and there were sewers on either side of the expanse. But with this much runoff, that only served to spread the water like a sheet across the entire road.
Victor must have sensed, intuited, or for less than an instant possibly even seen flashes through foliage of a vehicle coming down at him. It was mostly hidden from view, though, as he came to the wide section he stopped and idled the car, all the while feeling the wheels being tugged at, almost feeling the car being pulled by the water back along with the rapids on either side. He saw to his left and rather high up a silver SUV slew around the curve just past those houses, headed down right at him.
In a flash it was clear the car was out of control. The flooded road and the sheeting water had grabbed the big vehicle and it was now hydroplaning.
He could make out the driver—a male in a baseball cap —grabbing at the steering wheel and attempting to turn the wheels, to no avail. The SUV just kept coming, faster, headed right toward him, toward anything right here.
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Thinking fast, Victor accelerated into the nearest driveway. As he arrived, he turned around in time to see the SUV slide past exactly where he’d just been stopped. The young man at the wheel had his mouth wide open and was clearly out of control.
Victor got out of his car and ran out to the road.
The SUV hydroplaned another seventy feet down into a curb at the next big curve, rebounded from it jerkily, and spun around completely, then halfway again. At last it came to a stop, facing opposite the direction it had been going, in fact now facing uphill.
Victor ran down to the car, slogging through the water, which at times was up to his ankles. The guy at the wheel had slumped back into the seat’s headrest, his head back.
Victor rushed the driver’s side door, which proved to be unlocked and opened it.
The young man stared up at the ceiling in horror. “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
Victor jumped in far enough in to reach over and shut off the engine. He then reached over the guy’s lower body and pulled up the emergency brake. He snapped off the seat belt restraints.
Justify My Sins Page 23