Justify My Sins

by Felice Picano

  And they weren’t meeting him at Fox, as Victor had hoped. Instead Dembrowski was treating them to an early dinner at a nice Italian place located in the “Golden Triangle” of Beverly Hills right on Canon Drive where they could all be seen together, this being a big deal, according to Dmitrios.

  For the first time Dembrowski actually seemed to fit the role: he was an ordinary looking, middle-aged Jewish man of substantial heft, wearing a good summer-weight Italian wool suit, good shirt and shoes, and he drove a late model Mercedes S-Class sedan to be valet parked. And so he might actually be assumed to still be a “player.”

  Not much conversation allowed them to learn that he lived on Rancho Road in Encino. While Victor knew this might be posh as all get out, it was rather far from the center of things, Beverly Hills-West Hollywood. But at least he was easy-going and he ordered them all cocktails as well as a bottle of wine for the table.

  Dmitrios began with a revised (because it would be broken up by eating and talking convivially) version of his and Victor’s prearranged “act.”

  Dembrowski seemed completely unfazed by the allegedly hot-topic nature of the material. In fact, by his own admission he was “fascinated by all this gay business,” and he instantly began asking when the younger and cuter Dmitrios (but not Victor) knew he was gay and what he did about it. And with whom.

  Juenger was instantly taken in by this candor, and spoke at some length. Their appetizers arrived and Dembrowski kept asking for more details, which Dmitrios continued to supply, the two of them getting chattier and chummier.

  Two men Dembrowski knew strode past their table, spotted him, and said hello. The producer eagerly stood and introduced everyone around, explaining to the others that Victor and Dmitrios were “an interesting new development I’m considering.” Of course this would allow the others—probably also in The Biz—to assume that Dembrowski was at least tilting back into it via some hot new project. They either bought it whole or pretended to and so it was all extremely cool.

  No sooner had the two guys left for their own table and the three sat down again than Dembrowski all but shoulder blocked Victor, facing Dmitrios, and the conversation became increasingly personal and two-sided again.

  Sometime after their pasta had been served, Victor concluded that Dembrowski had a case of the hots for Dmitrios, despite having a wife back in the Valley and two grown children in college. Doubtless he was playing this particular game based on physical attraction and was looking in return for physical action.

  Victor wondered if this was even worth signaling the younger man about, not to say taking him aside to give warning. Then he figured that Dmitrios was no child, and after all he sure seemed to know what he was doing over there.

  Dembrowski had begun to delve into his own past and brought up a certain early morning in a fraternity house when he’d awakened entwined with two other frat brothers, all of them passed out from excessive mixed liquor the night before. Victor realized that he was bored and that the subject of his book and any subsequent film or TV miniseries based on it would probably never come up again tonight. Or if it did, would do so only glancingly and post-coitus.

  Unseen by the others, he arranged to have his cell phone dial itself, and he took the call loudly.

  The other two were only momentarily distracted and hardly at all disturbed when he said he had to leave and did so, just before Dembrowski’s specialite de maison dessert arrived: the “Volcanic Tiramasu.” Instead, Victor ate sliced cantaloupe for dessert at home while watching Star Trek: Enterprise on the tube, which, despite good looking and kinda game guys and girls, was a little ho-hum even for someone as over the hill as he apparently was.

  He never later asked which packet of material his manager left with Jon Dembrowski. And naturally he never heard Dmitrios mention the name again.

  Probably the most exciting thing about the party was being able to see where he lived from a totally different angle, from below—from, in fact, Don Wright’s point of view.

  It helped that the sun had been smothered early today in an untypical April excess of marine layer. Early fog had settled in, burnishing everything in the canyon in a generous misting-over. The occasionally visible streetlights that wound about the hilly road might have been night traveler’s lanterns or gatherings of fireflies. His own place, with its few dim lamps on, its balconies and decks thrust over the hillside above, resembled some fabled Taoist temple, or at least a late Spring pavilion where Mandarins gathered to pen ink-stone poetry about the delights of imbibing rice wine. The entire hillside looked like nothing so much as one of those Sung Dynasty scrolls suspended two stories down at LACMA’s Asian Pavilion.

  “What a night, huh?” someone said near by.

  “It’s enchanted!” Victor replied before turning and seeing the other speaker was the Once Famous Actor, the alleged star of the party and Don Wright’s big “catch.”

  “I was going to say depressing!” the actor (Victor couldn’t recall his name) said. “But yeah, I guess it’s also kind of enchanted. Don-Boy tells me you’re a writer, so I guess I should listen to what you have to say.”

  “Don’t!” Victor warned. “You’re entitled to your own opinion.”

  “That’s true. But even so, we go to writers to tell us something new, or maybe something more about what we think we’re seeing, don’t we?”

  That was a refreshing way to put it.

  “I guess we do,” Victor admitted.

  His own unwritten experience so far this evening had been to arrive kind of late, since he was unsure he’d even come, and then be introduced by his host to others as a “writer,” which received about as much interest as if he’d been introduced as a local carpet-layer. When Don went on to say, “No. No, you guys don’t get it! Victor’s a real writer. He’s published like, what was it, Vic? Fifteen books?,” that received a bit more response. Nothing special. Writers, after all, unlike directors and producers and money-men, didn’t hire actors, actresses, make-up people, set-designers, or the other occupations, which apparently abounded at the party.

  True, one dark haired woman who looked like she’d divorced and then had cosmetic surgery and then done lipo-surgery and then started Pilates “seriously,” did come to him with a mini-tray of canapés looking for a date, or to fuck, or who knew what. Victor was polite and vanished at the first opportunity. Now he was alone on the top terrace in the slightly weepy weather, trying to remember what he knew about the Once Famous Actor.

  “Don mentioned something about how you’ve returned from abroad recently,” Victor uttered, he hoped politically. “For a new role, was it?”

  “Yeah. I mean I actually came because of some family trouble. Dad’s got prostate cancer and could use support during treatment.”

  “I hope that works out for him.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ve been working abroad all this while?”

  The actor laughed and took a sip.

  “That’s pretty much the official line being given out. The reality is, I was unofficially eighty-sixed from Hollywood some nine years ago after a series of what my publicity guy calls ‘unsavory incidents.’”

  Now it was coming back to Victor. The headlines. The pics of the actor kickboxing a paparazzo’s camera out his hands. Drink, drugs, and wasn’t there also a teenage girl in the picture, hidden in an SUV somewhere?

  “Welcome back.”

  “Hey, thanks. I did do a few pictures there. But they were all standard stuff. You know.” He drew back and swung his body into Kung Fu attitudes and even did a few sudden jabs near Victor’s left ear and another with a foot aimed at his groin. “Paid the bills till the Rich Bitches came along. After that, it was just relaxing and Riding the Pussy Popsicle!”

  “That sounds sweet,” Victor said. He’d not flinched at the hand and footwork and so felt he could say, “if you like pussy.”

  “I like it well enough. Although, when I come across someone like you
r pal, Don-Boy inside, well, then I suppose the attractions of the other side become more clear. He’s a total package like I never was.”

  “No, you were.” Since he’d already been pegged for queer, it was easy for Victor to then say, “The attraction of someone like Don-Boy is that you can have the dick. Then, if you’re lucky, and/or play your cards right, you can turn him over and he can have yours. All in that same package.”

  “You think so?” The actor laughed, and from close up and even in the bad light, he looked less than the thirty-eight years old he surely had to be by now, having been discovered almost two decades ago. Even the bad skin around his chin, from what must have been a torrid acne, was kind of sexy.

  “So now,” the Once Famous Actor said, “I naturally enough wonder if you said that because you’ve had him already? Or if I’ve got to do all the work myself?”

  “Don and I are strictly neighbors.”

  “Even though he talks like you’re every Baskin Robbins flavor rolled into one? Saved his life and all that shit.”

  Once Famous Actor could be insistent. And not uncharming.

  “Strictly neighbors. The other was . . . unintentional. But I don’t think it would take that much work,” Victor flirted back, “for you, at least! So if you don’t see any special female around tonight, you might . . .”

  “I might . . . . ?”

  “You might get ‘a little too drunk to drive home.’”

  The actor laughed. “You may be right. He has been trying to get me to these monthly parties of his since I got back from Hong Kong.”

  “There you go!”

  He could it see it now. This older, very solid guy, pinning Don Wright to the sheets like one of Nabokov’s specimens to a stippled page. The cursory struggle. A few bites. Maybe a knock, forehead to forehead, and then . . . .

  “He’s just signed with my agent.“ The Once Famous Actor was thinking it all through aloud. “On top of which, he’s looking to get into my very own special project . . .” He finished his drink and set it down. “It would be minor role.” He laughed again. “Poor fucker doesn’t seem to have a chance, does he?” He nodded. “Know what? You’ve put it all into real perspective for me! I’m going in for another one of these guys,” hoisting the drink, “so I can get convincingly tanked. You coming?”

  Some forty minutes later people were splitting. Victor didn’t find the Once Famous Actor among their number and suspected he might have already staked out a claim in a bedroom below.

  A much older woman with a German accent was speaking to Don and a few others, and when Victor went up to his host to say goodbye, Don grabbed his arm excitedly and pulled him very near, shoulder to shoulder, whispering into his ear, “Magda. My acting coach.”

  Magda was charming, answering some of the younger guests’ questions about how she found Central Europe now, after the Soviet puppet governments had been kicked out. She’d not been there since the 1950s. What she had to say was witty and accurate.

  “Victor lived in Berlin a few years ago,” Don offered.

  “My godmother was German,” Victor explained. “Even though she died when I was young, I learned enough German to be comfortable there. But all the educated people speak English.”

  “Better than we do,” Magda put in. “Wo bleibt Sie im Berlin?” she asked Victor.

  “I lived in the old Western section. Charlottenburg,” he answered. “But of course I went all over the city. By subway and by bicycle: Fahrraden. One friend had a car and we drove outside the city to the lakes. Die Heiligen See. The enchanted forest and all.”

  “For me it was so fascinating returning, having been there as a girl.” Magda said. “But for you it was brand new, yes?”

  “Except what I knew about the city and the air-lift and the dividing wall and all. I had friends there, too, that I met in Manhattan. Also, you could see the past and present side by side all around you in Berlin. It’s not hidden.”

  “A lot like Los Angeles, nu?” she asked. “On two blocks of Santa Monica Boulevard you have the old RKO Pictures buildings, turn the corner and there’s Charlie Chaplin’s Studios, and the old Formosa restaurant, and the Yukon Trading Company, all being used the same or being reused, and it all works together. It all fits. No wonder they are sister cities, Berlin and El Lay.”

  The others moved away. She and he continued to talk about Germany, and she about what she’d seen of Prague and Budapest. It was a great chat, the one he’d so far missed tonight. And a great contact, like the ones Victor found he made so easily here. Unlike New York or D.C., here people of all pasts, all occupations, came together instantly, fluidly, and easily mixed without needing rigid hierarchies of professional status and income-earning capacity to define their selves and boost their morale.

  It was some twenty minutes later, once they had all left the party and he was distantly following three younger men, who were walking uphill in the fog now turned white as milk to where they had parked the car they’d arrived in, that Victor heard his name spoken.

  “I’m sure it’s the same guy. Maybe that’s why they were here together. Victor Regina and _____.” Naming the Once Famous Actor.

  “And Don Wright!” another said.

  They couldn’t know he was behind them in this fog, Victor lingered out of sight but within hearing.

  “Don’s aiming for the role of the guy’s sidekick or something, in the new film.”

  “I heard the whole thing is like his big comeback vehicle,” the first speaker said. “All the Big Guns are like giving him ‘one more chance’ and this is ‘it.’”

  They meant the Once Famous Actor.

  The third asked, “And the script is what? Boy-girl?”

  “With some twists. Scotty Burns and Evan Dolfmann are writing it. Scotty’s girlfriend told my regular squeeze about it. They’re adapting some old novel, and like, seriously updating it.”

  Scotty. Evan. The two screen writers at the meeting at Sam Haddad’s office. They were talking about Justify My Sins!

  “As a vehicle for him?”

  “His big comeback vehicle . . .”

  “And Don Wright’s first film role,” the third one added.

  “Lucky Don.”

  “Lucky both of them.”

  They’d stopped at the car and the driver dropped his keys and Victor walked past on the other side of the road. Even with the fog he knew they knew it was him, since one said after he’d passed, “That was the writer guy, wasn’t it?”

  “Don said he was a neighbor. Are we getting into the car? It’s beginning to seriously rain.”

  In the remaining twenty feet or so to his house, Victor figured out what role Don Wright would be playing, the one he and Frank had taken out of their version of the movie. He also understood what role the Once Famous Actor would play: the twenty-two-year-old naif, just arrived in Manhattan from the Midwest. Because, of course, he was signed up with Joel Edison. Meaning that he must be the “personal reason” Joel had for doing the film in the first place.

  Indoors, Victor shook off the wet jacket and even dried his hair, hearing the rain begin to pour down onto that small section of copper sheathing upstairs, roaring like horses’ hooves.

  He was baffled and upset by all this news.

  Or was he pleased and unsure?

  Or was he angry and insecure?

  Or . . . ?

  It used to be that he could call someone and ask what he was thinking, what he was feeling. His hand had instinctively gone to the phone and begun to dial Mark. But there was no Mark to patiently listen to him and talk it through. No Mark, no Gilbert, no Jeff. No adoring lover, no trusted friends.

  No one, in fact, any more. All of them were dead. He was alone. Alone in the rain in an empty, dimly lit house, in a milk-white fog, on the side of a tall hill, in a city he didn’t really know and couldn’t even see, at the very edge of the continent.

  He sat in the dim light of the house with the ra
in thundering down all around him. For a moment, Victor pictured Done Right and the Once Famous Actor having sex not that far away, just down the hill.

  But no matter how he fantasized it, he still felt un-turned-on. And worse, in his gut he felt unrelentingly out of place, with no way to turn back.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “It was good of you to arrange to meet me, way out here,” Carol said. She was looking a lot more sober; her eyes had an oddly more life-like appearance, although her mascara application had been hit or miss that morning. Still, she’d tried. The rest of the make-up was almost subtle. She was dressed conservatively in a pale blue outfit with a cream sweater over the shoulders, knotted at the throat, apt for her age.

  “You look well,” he said, then remembered she’d told Andy she hated compliments. “That’s not a compliment.”

  “Not taken as one. I’m off the sauce. I’m working too much lately. Or at any rate going in regularly. It’s daytime-drama,” she specified. “They’re all twelve or thirteen years old on the set. I was in a hospital bed scene, right? And the director kept fidgeting with the scene which I thought me and the girl were doing okay. Finally he said, ‘The old bag’s gotta go!’ I thought he meant me.” She laughed. “Turned out he meant an ice-pack, some prop on the bed I wasn’t even aware of.”

  She looked down at the menu through very svelte and narrow reading glasses. “I recall the egg salad sandwich being edible.”

  “I’ll take the Pastrami on Rye,” Victor said to the waitress in the delicatessen they’d met at. “And a Cel-Ray.” To Carol he said, “I like living dangerously.”

  Carol ordered a coffee, changed it to a decaf, then to a cream soda. After all, they were at Solly’s in Van Nuys.

  “This is a fun place! Reminds me of Nueva Jorck.”

  “It’s okay.” She looked around. “I’m locating places near the Nearly Dead Stars Home where I can be taken out during my declining years, which are approaching fast.”

  “Is that near here?”

  “Woodland Hills.” She pointed. “Just up the yellow brick road.”