“Hello,” said Jim.
“Hello,” I said back to him. I waited. There was a little crackling on the line. Long Distance.
“Where are you?” I finally asked him.
“I’m up at your place,” he said. “On the mountain.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “I’m down here in Hollywood.”
“I know.”
I waited. More crackling. Finally I said, “How’s everybody up there?”
“Just fine,” he said. “All but me.”
I made noises like a violin but he broke in:
“Hey can you come up? I want to talk.” After a little pause, he said, “I really feel bad, man.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Oh, shit, I’ll come down there. I’m acting like a goddamn baby.”
“No, it’s okay, let me come up there . . .”
So it was all a waste of time, me driving down alone. Every year it’s something.
WHEN I flew back to the ranch all my relatives except Grandpa had pulled out. Whether from some kind of Okie delicacy or just because they all wanted to go to Laguna Seca and watch the automobile races, I don’t know, but when the taxi pulled up at last in front of the ranchhouse there were unfinished projects everywhere in sight, piles of sheetrock, bags of cement and an old broken-down cement mixer from some previous tenant, a couple of the cars opened and spread about in mid-operation, several cans of paint and brushes left to soak. My relatives could rush into the middle of a project faster than anybody I ever saw, but then the pace would get leisurely, consultations would begin, and after a while everybody would be up on the porch in the shade of the house, sitting on the cushioned redwood outdoor furniture or on kitchen chairs dragged outside and brought back in at supper time, smoking and talking about their various projects. Grandpa alone failed to join these afternoon board of directors meetings. He spent most of his time out in the heat, cultivating the ground to get it ready for a second crop, having missed the first crop because I was up here alone at planting time and didn’t plant anything. Grandpa went ahead and planted, after he had conditioned the soil, and then of course the rest of the summer would be spent in warfare. But usually I only heard about these things over the telephone, when Cousin Harold or somebody else would answer the phone (most of my relatives, including Grandpa, didn’t like telephones), and so coming back like this, only two days gone and yet so much changed, was a little bit of a shock.
I paid off the cab driver and watched him bobble and slide his cab down the rock road until he was out of sight among the trees, and then turned and walked up onto the porch. There were all the chairs out from storage under the porch, the cushions already puffed and shaped to the behinds of the sitters. I looked around. Everything seemed dead, except for the chairs and the open French doors to the living room. Down in the orchard I could see Grandpa doing something at one of the trees, and I waved and yelled, but I don’t think he heard me because he just kept on doing whatever he was doing.
I went in through the doors and into the kitchen, hoping to find something to eat. Jim was there, wearing an apron and huaraches and a pair of jeans, washing some dishes.
“I don’t think I ever saw you doing dishes before,” I said.
“Hello, Ogle,” he said. “Everybody went to Laguna Seca for the races. They’ll be back in a day or two.”
“I don’t miss them,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Jim said.
I poured myself a cup of coffee, Grandpa’s coffee, took a sip and sat back. “What was for breakfast?” I asked.
“Oatmeal pancakes,” Jim said. He kept doing the dishes. “All gone, though. Sorry.”
“Another time,” I said.
“I could call Grandpa in,” Jim said. “He’d probably be glad to fix you a stack.”
“I doubt if you could get him to do it,” I said. “Does he know you’re back?”
“I yelled at him.”
Jim kept doing the dishes. He looked all right. I went out on the porch and sat in the sun, and after a while Jim came out with a cup of coffee and sat on the rail, looking down into the frog pond.
“This is nice up here,” he said. “What do you do all winter?”
“Jerk off and read,” I said. Knowing Jim, I knew he would get around to it after a while, or not. There was no prying at him, that’s what most of the people who deal with him learn right away, don’t push Jim.
“I don’t blame you for liking this place,” he said. “But don’t you get lonely all alone in the winter? What do you do for pussy?”
“I go to town, just like everybody else,” I said.
Jim took out a little gram bottle of coke, shook some out onto a fingertip and snorted it. He passed the bottle to me, and I snorted some, too.
“I haven’t been to sleep in a few days,” Jim said.
“Why not drink a fifth of whiskey? Put you right out.”
“I tried booze, but all that happened was I got boozy and coky instead of just coky. Had some pretty bizarre fantasies. Let’s walk down and see what Grandpa’s doing.”
“You better put on a shirt,” I said.
We walked down to the orchard. Grandpa, wearing overalls and an old striped polo shirt of mine and a straw hat he’d had for at least ten years, was inspecting the trees. We said hello and kissed and he told me that my trees were going to rack and ruin, and that it was hopeless. I said I didn’t care, and he told me I was a damned idiot for wasting fruit trees. I said he could have them and he grunted, which I took for a laugh, and, treating us like boys, shooed us away: “Go on, now, I’m working!” and me and Jim got out of the orchard.
“Have you ever seen the spring?” I asked Jim. He hadn’t, so I took him across the drive to the edge of the woods where there was a big apple tree with a rock spring almost between its roots. A long time ago somebody had sunk a half barrel down around the spring, with a barrel cover, so that after lifting off the rocks put there, and taking up the cover, you had about two feet of icy cold spring water, even in the hottest summertime. We cupped our hands and drank, and then sat back in the shade of the tree. Everything was bright green where the spring leaked out and went back underground. The birds had pretty well stopped singing for the day, and the insects had taken over; they would go at it until about noon, and then everything would shut up, and all that might happen would be a hawk or vulture cruising overhead on the thermals. You can’t tell me they’re hunting, at that time of day. Nothing’s moving at noon for them to hunt. I think they’re just fucking around up there, staying out of the heat. I told this to Jim and he laughed and we had some more coke.
“I’m going crazy,” Jim said after a while. “And it’s no fun at all.”
WE STAYED out by the spring for quite a while. Jim didn’t mention about being crazy again, and I didn’t push him. He wanted to talk about a Japanese girl. Jim and I had been in Tokyo at the same time, me at Tokyo International Airport (Haneda) and him with the Air Force band, stationed at FEAF headquarters downtown. Jim had a couple of rolled joints in his shirt pocket, and we smoked half of one of them. “Don’t smoke too much,” he warned me. “This is Hawaiian dope, the best in the world.”
I said I would be careful.
Jim was in a mood to babble and fortunately I was in a mood to lay back and watch the birds circle, eating a couple of tight sweet-and-sour little green apples, and drawing up a double handful of icy water from time to time. Jim laid back too, and to look at him you’d think he didn’t have a trouble in the world. He talked about the Japanese girl, calling her Shiroko, The White Hooker of Shinbashi, as if it was her title. She wasn’t white but always wore a white kimono and seemed to always be drifting out of the fog just when Jim would be walking through that part of town. He knew all about her before he ever went home with her; she was famous, not just because of the white kimono and her incredible beauty, but because she was deaf and dumb, and could only make grunting noises. These sounds put a lot of guys off, but not everybody, an
d so once when Jim was really drunk he jumped out of the back of his taxi and went up to her, standing on one of the little stone bridges this part of town was full of.
“It was hard to make the deal,” Jim said. “ ‘You speak how much?’ was a little gross, with her grunting at you and holding up her fingers for you to count how much, ‘Two hundred? No? Two thousand? Yada! Nondemonai!’”
We sat around for a while and listened to the wind in the trees.
“Am I boring you with all this bullshit?” he asked me.
“No, man, I heard about her,” I said, and managed to keep myself from saying that I had gone home with her once, myself, and hadn’t known all these years that Jim had. She was an incredible beauty, yes, true, and she did making squawking noises instead of talk, wore a white kimono, etc&etc., but the most important thing about her was her eyes. She had deep black eyes that looked at you from a hundred thousand miles away, and all the dirtiness, the embarrassment, the crude wrongness of the deal seemed to fill your mouth, even though she was polite and considerate and took you by the hand into her little hotel up one of the alleys off A Avenue, and you wished you hadn’t stopped her, or after finding out she was deaf and dumb, you would smile and be a good guy and just give her some money and go away, but no, you couldn’t pass up that incredible beauty, you couldn’t let yourself not fuck her, and so you did, with her kissing you and grunting and groaning and giving you everything she had, but afterward you would look into those eyes and wish you hadn’t. At least that’s the effect she had on me. I didn’t tell Jim any of this.
“I saw her in L.A., man,” he said to me.
“Must be a lot older,” I said, but the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
“No, not like that, I just saw her, walking down Hollywood Boulevard, wearing her same old white kimono. Back in Tokyo after I took her home that one time I went AWOL, man, lived with her for six fuckin’ weeks. Then I went back and pulled an Article Fifteen and the band took off for the Embassy Run and I never saw her again, never went to Shinbashi again, man, that six weeks was really something.”
First there was one big bird, then two, then three, all circling, their wings like dark outstretched fingertips, riding the thermals, drifting among the warm odors, waiting for that sharp, bitter smell of carrion that would mean dinnertime. We watched them for a while.
“How about seeing her on Hollywood Boulevard?” Jim asked me.
“Just one of those crazy optical hallucinations, I guess,” I said back to him. “Happens all the time. Like these goddamn birds, do you really think there are any birds overhead?”
“Not if you say not, huh, Pal?” Jim laughed.
“Pretty scary, huh?”
“You goddamn fucking believe it,” Jim said.
“That’s the way we use to talk in the service,” I said. “You don’t know, do you!
“Huh?”
“Huh, hell, pay attention!”
“Scared the shit out of me, not that I believed it was her, you know, but just to be reminded scared me. I wonder how long she’s been dead . . .”
“Does she have to be dead?” I asked, but my own sinking heart knew she was dead, long dead, Tokyo hooker dead.
“She’s dead,” Jim said with certainty. “Dead as a fucking doornail. Or why would she be haunting me on Hollywood Boulevard?”
“I certainly don’t know,” I said.
“That’s not what’s driving me nuts, though,” Jim said. “It’s everything else. If my life consisted entirely of seeing Shiroko on Hollywood Boulevard in the middle of a busy hot afternoon, I’d be the happiest man on earth, but no, there’s more, there’s lots more, Jesus, you must be bored by all this talk, I’m not a whiner, God knows, but I’ve got plenty to whine about.”
Jim got carefully up, dusting the grass and dirt from his jeans, and sang one of his bestselling records, only with a really funny whine in it. I laughed after the first few bars, but he sang the whole song anyway, and then sat down again.
“That would sell shit,” he said.
I agreed.
WE SAT quietly by the spring. It was one of those times you wish could go on forever, a little hunk of perfect peace. At the edge of the woods, away from the house and the orchard, one of the half dozen or so cats who lived around there was sitting on an old grey fencepost with just the tip of his tail moving slightly. The old cat seemed to be in a good humor, his eyes half closed, when I heard a whirring, clicking sound and saw a hummingbird hovering a few inches from the cat’s face. Hummingbirds are tough little guys and with that vicious needle beak and that incredible speed, there isn’t much for them to be afraid of. The little emerald bird whirred and clicked at the cat. The cat opened his eyes wide, looked at the tiny bite-sized creature, and turned away. A deliberate snub.
The hummingbird whirred off, clicking with satisfaction. I laughed.
“What’s funny?” Jim asked.
Since he had just sung me a song, I felt it would be all right if I ogled him. I looked into his eyes, my mouth slightly open, my expression that of a man who is about to say something, something right on the tip of his tongue, if he could only just begin to get the words out, and held that expression, expectant, like troops at drill when the drill sergeant has yelled “FORWARD . . .” and everyone is set for “MARCH!” but the sergeant doesn’t say it, and the troops lean forward, still expecting the sergeant to catch the rhythm and say “MARCH!” but he doesn’t, and so the troops begin to fall down or relax or stiffen up, and then, when the timing is perfect to screw everybody up, “MARCH!”
Only of course Jim was used to it, hell, it was the basis of our act, me slow and him fast, me with not quite enough marbles rolling around in my attic; him always with something to say, a song to sing, a little dance, but never making fun of me, never the songs or jokes at my expense, always my helpful sweet enthusiastic friend who would love me to be untonguetied, but him the straight man and me the one who, at the last possible minute, comes out with the word or the sentence or the grunt that makes the house come down.
But for now I just ogled him, my jaw getting gradually lower and lower until he had to crack.
We had been at it together for a long time but we still broke each other up, and I don’t know about anybody else, whether painters or writers or actors or pratfall comics secretly love and admire their own stuff, but we sure did, and not all that secretly. People enjoyed that about our act, and told us so in their letters, and the best bit we ever did on the Tonight Show, the bit that got the most mail for us, was when Jim had been late as usual and Carson didn’t think he was going to show up at all, even though Jim had been there all day rehearsing. Now he was gone, the staff was going crazy, Carson was doing his backstage burn, and finally the clock swung around and we were taping without him.
Carson called me out onstage first, because we were set to leave early, and Jim still wasn’t there. I came out feeling fireants all over my body, and after the applause, sat down and listened to him improvise an excuse for Jim.
I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. We had material, but Jim did all the setting up, and my payoffs without his setups were less than nothing.
Finally Carson turned to me.
“Ogilvie without Larson,” he said. “This is probably a show business first. What shall we talk about?”
Thanks, Johnny. Since I had no material I could use, I just ogled him, thinking he would take Jim’s part, but instead he ogled me back, and Carson is a master ogler.
We ogled each other back and forth, with Carson giving the audience little side-ogles to bring them into it, and we were doing pretty well, getting a satisfactory volume of response from the house, when Jim stood up in the trumpet section of the band, holding somebody’s instrument, and said, “What’s the matter with you boys?” To the audience, once the lights and camera had pinned him, he said, “They both been eating peanut butter, look at ’em . . .” and the cameras came back to us, and we did our mouths-full-of-peanut-butt
er impression, and then back to Jim, who said to me, “Well, what is it? Bubble gum? What are you boys chewing on that makes your faces so stiff?”
When it felt right, I said, “Prunes . . .” The camera went in on Carson for the laughter and applause, and when it was dying down Jim cued the bandleader and began his first song from there, but that wasn’t the part that got the fan mail. It was while Jim was singing. I leaned forward, still ogling, thinking the camera was off me until the end of the song, but then on went the little red light that meant my camera was hot. I ogled some more, and the cameras intercut us, Jim singing and moving down out of the band, and me apparently dumb with enjoyment listening. As Jim finished the number I fell off the couch.
It was naked camera-stealing, but the people who wrote the letters saw it as an example of brotherly love.
“How do you guys stand each other?” Carson said later.
THE BIRDS had smelled out their dinner. Over in the orchard, underneath the apricot tree. Grandpa lay dead on his side, his eyes wide open, his mouth loose and his tongue hanging out just a little bit. Jim saw him first, as we were about to go up to the house and get something to eat.
“Oh-oh,” he said. “Grandpa’s down!”
We ran over to the body and got on our knees in the dirt clods, but it was no use. He was clearly dead.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. Jim took his feet and I took his arms and we carried him back up to the house. His head hung down and so I didn’t look at him, except to be careful going up the porch steps not to bump him against the stairs. We laid him out on one of the big redwood loungers. He was awfully light.
“How old?” Jim asked.
“Mid-eighties,” I said. “He was one of my favorite people.”
“Well, he’s dead now.”
I sat down next to Grandpa’s body and Jim went into the house. I looked up at the sky and saw the buzzards circling. I thought they only did that in cheap movies. Then suddenly there were thousands of black specks dancing in the light and my heart blew out of my chest and somebody right next to me was bellowing in anguish, it didn’t take me very long to realize it was me because I could see my face in the windows, my eyes crazy and my teeth clenched, and then the glass disappeared with a helpless tinkle and I was swinging a huge chair against the French windows and crying out in pain, yet I was watching all this, unable to stop. Then Jim was there and I was sitting cross-legged on the porch crying into my hands.
The Hollywood Trilogy Page 3