“Maui Zowie, the best marijuana in the world,” I said, “and it hasn’t even hit yet, give it another five minutes . . .”
“Hot damn,” she said. “They got nothing like this in New York.”
We all got into the elevator, and I pushed B for basement, but Sonny pushed L for lobby. “I want to check my mail,” she said.
We waited and held the elevator door while she talked to the girl at the desk and finally came back to the elevator with a fat little letter, which she opened and glanced over quickly and then stuffed into her big leather purse.
“Letter from home?” I asked her.
“You’re pretty smart,” she said.
We walked down the little hill to the Liquor Locker, past the magazine and newspaper racks.
Jim said, “Anybody got any quarters?” and bought a dirty newspaper. Sonny looked at the cover and made a face.
“I want to go in here,” I said, and went into the liquor store while everybody else stayed outside in the sun. I picked up a couple of pints of Old Crow and tossed one to Jim.
“Remind me I want to stop here on my way back,” Sonny said to Karl.
“The prices are really terrible in there,” Karl said. “You should shop over at the Chalet Gourmet.”
“Anyway,” she said.
BY THIS time of day Schwab’s was packed, with a big double line of people waiting for booths in front of the cigar counter and every seat at the long counter filled. Lunch is different from breakfast. At breakfast the day is glittering with promise, the calls to be taken, the deals to be made, the mail yet to come; by lunch a lot of this has been taken care of, but never mind, lunch is who are you with and who’s in the room; there’s a need to maintain at least the appearance of being fully employed in this pleasant clatter and chatter of show business. Beginners come here to somehow be absorbed into the mainstream, longtime hangers-on come to be with their friends and equals, stars and hits come to keep themselves honest and to remember, this is how it was and this is how it could be again. And a lot of people come here to look at the others, and a lot of assholes and dimwits show up to confuse the issue.
I like Schwab’s.
“We’ll never get a seat,” Sonny said, and moved off through the drugstore. Jim and Karl and I took our places at the end of the line, but of course when we had come by the window to the booth room and then in through the big double glass doors everybody did a take at us, as they do with everybody, and the energy of the room began its gradual shift.
I had to admire Karl. Here he was, a man with literally hundreds of jobs to dispense over the course of a year, brought half against his will into a room full-to-spilling with eager jobtakers—performers, showoffs, clowns, ladies and gentlemen who had been working all their lives at the fine art of attracting attention. A lesser man than Karl would have balked at the door when he sensed the energies inside, or would have refused to come at all. But not Karl. He knew personally at least a third of the crowd and most of the rest by sight, and he behaved like a champ, cool but not aloof, nodding and smiling with recognition, shaking hands and having something to say to everybody who came up to him.
Yet it was not like watching a master politician shedding his golden light on the chosen obscure, it was more like a tribal elder getting down with the troops; my God, this guy could put everybody in the room on easy street with a wiggle of his finger, he knew it and they knew it, and the energy coiled and surged.
Naturally, when everyone got over their surprise at seeing Karl they turned back to their own conversations, because nobody likes to get caught with his tongue hanging out. But it was as if everybody had sniffed cocaine in the interval between our arrival and the time we were seated in our booth, everyone a little happier, a little more jacked up, because they were here and we were here and big things must be happening. They would not have been nearly as turned on by just me and Jim, we’re only jobtakers like them, but Karl was a Big Boss, and the best way to behave in front of a Big Boss is to appear friendly, fully employed, with a future full of projects.
Every conversation rose a couple of notches, and the fractured sounds bounced off the walls as the energy moved around the room gathering force.
And so of course it affected us, too, that wonderful sense of wellbeing, helped along only a little bit by the whiskey I poured into my coffee the minute Dorothy the waitress turned her back.
“Look who’s drinkin’ on New York time,” somebody said, and the words ricocheted and everybody laughed, but not in chorus.
Jim read a couple of the raunchy sex ads from his little newspaper.
“Ugh,” Sonny said. She had joined us as soon as the booth opened up. “Down in Texas we don’t do stuff like that except to animals.”
Jim read a couple more but nobody was listening, so he put the paper away and laced his own coffee.
A woman came by the table for autographs, she wanted all four signatures, she didn’t give a damn who any of us were, but I had to feel sorry for Pops, back in the booth, red with shame.
While we waited for Dorothy to come back and get our orders, Sonny read her letter and Karl worked the room, making it around to everybody he had to stroke, giving it the personal touch and paying good dues. If somebody had seen him come into the place and then told his booth that he and Karl had this relationship, and Karl failed to acknowledge the relationship, the guy could be made to look foolish, and then some time in the future this could cause trouble. Making movies is trouble enough without trouble.
“When you consider he’s got a heart the size of a beebee, he’s doing all right,” Jim admitted.
A couple of guys across the room reluctantly got up from their booth, but the pack was massing at the cigar counter and they had to leave. Instead of just going out, they took hold of one another and waltzed down past us and around the other row of booths and out that way, to a scattering of applause. Then a comic who was now working a police show as a straight actor came up to us, gave me a broad wink and bent over to whisper in Jim’s ear.
Jim got serious at once. Karl slid back in the booth, strain showing around his eyes, and picked up a menu.
“Who was that?” he asked Jim.
“I don’t know,” Jim said. “He told me the poison was in the vessel with the pestle.”
I happened to look out into the drugstore, and saw the fat face of a comic I had worked with years ago, out by the display of stuffed animals, in a place of concealment. He winked at me.
I excused myself from the booth and went out and over to him. Instead of shaking hands or anything, I pulled a long secret agent face and said, “The vessel with the pestle.”
“Got it,” he said, and moved off like a big fat Groucho toward the telephone in back.
Returning to the booth, one of the Jackies came up to me and said, out of the corner of his mouth, “Is it true?”
I nodded my head.
“The vessel with the . . . ?” He made stirring motions with his finger.
I nodded and slid back into the booth.
It was just silliness, but all over the place we were playing this dumbass game, and it spread from booth to booth, skipping only the newcomers and the tourists, the line from an old Danny Kaye movie getting all sorts of twists and obscene interpretations, and the big joke was, nobody would crack.
Karl was mystified. “What’s going on?”
“Karl thinks everything has to do with him,” I said to Sonny. “What a paranoid. Just because there are people skulking all over the drugstore . . .”
Then a comic wowowing like a redskin grabbed a big blue-and-white stuffed rabbit from the shelf back of the counter and ran through the drugstore with it. I looked at the woman behind the cash register. She was wearing the most noncommital expression I had ever seen.
“What’ll you have, kids?” Dorothy asked.
Karl was still looking at the menu, probably trying to find the Cobb salad, which is what he liked to eat at the Polo Lounge, a Cobb salad being a regular sa
lad that has been through a blender and looks, to me anyhow, as if it had already been eaten once. “What’s good here?” he asked without looking up.
“The fish is good,” Dorothy said.
Sonny ordered a bacon and avocado sandwich on toast, a big slice of melon and a pot of tea, Jim ordered a cheeseburger with fries and a vanilla milkshake and I had the same. Karl examined the menu front and back a couple of times while Dorothy shifted feet and tried to look patient, and finally ordered a small green salad and a glass of tomato juice. While we were ordering, a couple of girls came up and spoke to us, and I heard a guy in back yell, “Hey, gimme a job, man!” but he didn’t get a laugh with it, and then there was a cracking sound and a yelp from the area of the cigar counter. The place went dead.
All I could see was a whitefaced guy lying on the floor, and then the mob surrounded him. But word spread rapidly. Some clown, all jacked up to the point of craziness, had somehow smashed the glass counter and cut himself badly. Gradually as the word got around, the babbling in the room started again, but now it was different, the energy had gone negative and there were waves of anger flying through the room, directed at us.
We had done this thing.
Everybody was showing off because we had brought this jobgiver into the room, and now some poor devil lay on the floor with his ass cut open.
Jim was up first and halfway over to the crowd before I got to my feet, hating it, not wanting to go over there but knowing I had to. When I got there Jim was kneeling beside the guy—I didn’t recognize him, just another no-name guy—and the druggist was holding a gauze pad against the guy’s cut-open pants. There was a good deal of blood on the floor, and I avoided it carefully as I kneeled. I was afraid I would faint, but this once it didn’t happen.
“The ambulance has been called,” the druggist said to me. “They should be here.”
The guy on the floor was grim. His eyes rolled around as he looked at the crowd of standees, Jim and me, the druggist, and another guy kneeling, probably the one he came in with. The guy on the floor had wanted to attract attention. Well, he had attracted quite a lot.
“How are you feeling?” Jim asked him.
“How should I feel?” the guy said bitterly. “I jump up on the counter like it’s a horse and cut my ass open.”
“What do you do for an encore?” I asked, hoping he would take it the right way. But he stayed bitter.
“Showing off,” he said. “The story of my life. Show off and screw up.”
“Amen,” said Jim.
“I bet you’re the first guy to get a Purple Heart in Schwab’s drugstore,” I said.
Some of the crowd laughed, but the guy just looked at me.
Jim talked to him quietly for a while, learned his name, chatted with him about some people they knew in common, and then the two whitejacketed ambulance boys came trotting in and we helped get the wounded man onto the gurney.
“Goddamn lucky man,” said one of the ambulance boys. “One more inch . . .”
We went back to our booth. The hostility was gone out of the room. By now everybody was seeing it as an event that might generate a little publicity, might make an item for Hank Grant or Army Archerd. Maybe even the wire services would pick it up, and I watched various people getting up and making their way back to the telephones. “I don’t see why you like that place,” Jim said to me after we left. He probably thought it was always like that.
OUT ON Sunset the sidewalks were empty and the street aswarm with cars. Karl and Sonny walked ahead of us, close together, talking. When we drew up to the Liquor Locker they both went in. Jim and I stood outside in the tiny parking lot. I took a nip from my pint and passed it to Jim.
“You said you had a lot of shit to do today,” I said. “I’m still kind of shook up about that guy,” he said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“But I do have a plan,” Jim said. “A way to get her shirt and pants off. I’d love to see those pretty little tits.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We’ll go swimming,” Jim said.
“I wonder if they have any film on her.”
“What the fuck difference does it make?”
When they came out of the Liquor Locker both were carrying big paper bags full of stuff like deluxe mixed nuts, a quart of orange juice, bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, loaf of bread, milk, etc&etc. We moved slowly up toward the hotel.
“Well, I have meetings all afternoon,” Karl said. “When’s our first meeting, do you remember?”
“Isn’t this it?” I said.
“I have a great idea,” Jim said. “Let’s all go for a swim.”
“The pool here is too cold,” Sonny said. “I tried it out a couple of times.”
“Later in the year you’ll appreciate it,” I said.
“There’s not a pond in Texas less than ninety degrees,” she said. “Except when they’re froze over.”
“Why don’t we head for the beach?” Jim said.
“Does anybody have any more grass?” Sonny asked. “I ran out a couple of days ago.”
“Oh, hell yes,” I said. “I still have a joint in my pocket.” Which I took out and lit, passing it to Sonny.
“Hell,” said Karl, “if you’re going to go to the beach, you might as well come over to the house. I guarantee our pool is as warm as any Texas mudhole.”
We walked lazily into the driveway past one of the staff watering the concrete and up to the elevators. Here, there was an uncomfortable pause while the three of us who smoked finished the joint. I swallowed the roach, washing it down with a bit of whiskey.
“My car’s a two-seater,” Karl said. “Unfortunately.”
“Okay,” I said, “then Sonny can ride with me, and we’ll get acquainted, and you and Jim can talk business.”
“Can’t we all go in your car?” Jim asked me. Glint.
I laughed at him. “You want to sit in back with Karl, hugging your knees?”
So it was all decided. But this was no time to leave Karl alone with her. We all went up to 609 and had a nice musical comedy, putting her stuff away in the kitchen, drinking her beer and my whiskey, while she went in and changed and Karl got on the telephone. When she came out she seemed to be dressed exactly the same.
“Let’s go,” she said.
In the corridor I said to Karl, “You guys go ahead, Sonny and I will go up to the penthouse and get some more of my Maui,” and I made it firm. Jim took Karl by the arm and off they went.
“Now, we are alone,” I said.
“Let’s go upstairs and get that weed,” she said.
WHEN IT’S right, it’s right and you can feel it in the air, when your bodies brush together the sparks fly and the ozone cooks; she cannot take her eyes off you, you cannot take your eyes off her, and nobody has to say a thing. As the elevator rose lurching slowly two flights, I wanted to put my hands on her shoulders and turn her toward me and watch her face tilt up and her lips part, I knew it would happen that way, that she would come in against me and I would press her against the elevator wall, and the kiss would be so hot and filled with excitement that we could slide to the floor unknowing and clutch each other melting into one soul.
Naturally, that’s not what happened.
I didn’t lay a glove on her in the elevator. We didn’t even talk, I just looked at all that sweet honey-ginger hair and thought about the way it would feel against my skin. When the elevator door opened and I saw the maid’s cart parked in front of my open door I wasn’t even slightly phased, but touched Sonny with the tips of my fingers at the small of her back and she moved into the suite turning up to me and smiling. My knees almost buckled from the look in her eyes.
“Be done in a minute,” the maid called from the kitchen.
“That’s fine,” I called to her. To Sonny I said, “Let’s go out on the terrace,” and when we were outside feeling the sweet warm winds, she said, “Oh, this is so beautiful,” and I could have kissed her then, her face all lit up, bu
t instead I said, “Let me get that weed,” and went in the bedroom and got my bag of marijuana out of the cigar box I usually keep it in. I was rummaging around in one of my unpacked suitcases when she came to the door and said, “What are you looking for, papers? I have some down at my place.”
“Aha,” I said, and held up a package of papers and my little glass doorknob roach clip. She came over beside me and looked down at the long fronds of seedless weed. “That is so beautiful,” she said softly.
I could hear the maid preparing to leave. Only a few minutes more.
“Let me go in here,” she said, pointing to the bathroom. I was sitting on the bed, rolling a couple of joints on the glass top of the bedside table. By the time I finished rolling these and she got out of the bathroom the maid would be gone and we would be alone again. It made my fingers tremble so much I could hardly make them work, so the two joints were fat and messy. When I stood up my cock was bulging in my pants in an unmistakable fashion, and I laughed, because it didn’t matter at all, let it bulge, soon enough my pants would be gone and hers, too, and we would be on this big white-covered bed fucking like lightning bugs. My heart was about to blow a hole in my chest I felt so good. I didn’t need or want any more marijuana, whiskey, anything; I just wanted that sweet lovely girl under me, on top of me, all over me.
Karoom, goes the toilet.
Click, snap, goes the front door.
Suddenly I knew she was going to come out of the bathroom naked, shimmering, ready for love. Here I was, still fully dressed, as if I hadn’t got the message, as if I was impervious to the electricity of acceptance all over the room, and I sat down on the bed again and had one of my shoes off and was pulling at the other when she came out.
Dressed.
“What are you doing?” she asked me.
Now, here was a place where I could have used some advice. Maybe what I should have said was, “Changing my socks,” or “Just want my feet to breathe a little.” Something diplomatic.
But what I said was, “Putting on my birthday suit.”
The Hollywood Trilogy Page 7