The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  Irony, again. It is not Jim the singer, Jim the straight man, Jim the headliner, it is Jim the writer, his face carefully composed, his voice moderate. He looks at me sitting redfaced at my dresser, greywet at the armpits, little dabs and streaks of cold cream on my black knifecreased pants.

  “Oh,” he says, “I thought I heard a scream in here . . .”

  I just stare at him.

  After a while, he gives me a reassuring grin and closes the door again.

  I should get up and go out there and apologize, make a little joke and come back in here to wait. Instead I change my pants and shirt. The shirt doesn’t have any cold cream on it, but under the arms it is as fermy wet as if I’d been playing handball. “Whew, what a stink!” I say to myself. The new shirt is soft and confident against my skin, the new trousers even more razorsharp, and this makes me feel good as I look at myself in the full length mirror. I hold up my arms like a Spanish dancer and make a tiny stomp.

  “Hola!” I whisper.

  If Jim isn’t here in five, no, ten, minutes, I’ll send somebody out to make our apologies. Maybe Ford Hamilton, he’s out in the house, roosting with the turkeys, and I grin like an evil bastard, because if there is one audience in the world that Ford Hamilton couldn’t reach, it is out there now, waiting for its favorite cornballs.

  For all I know, Jim is in his dressing room. Why hasn’t he called me? He wouldn’t. But somebody would tell him to call me, and he would say, “I don’t want to talk to David, he’s too crazy, he gets stage-fright, I don’t want to be around him,” and then somebody might say, “But he has to be told you’re here, doesn’t he?” and Jim grins and says, “Fuck’im, he trusts me or he doesn’t,” and the fantasy collapses because I know it wouldn’t happen.

  I dial Jim’s suite. The line is busy. It is right down the hall, I can get up and go out through my circle of friends and down the hall and see who is on Jim’s phone. But no, I can’t. If he’s there I’ll hate him for the rest of our lives, and if he’s not, I don’t know what I’ll do except scream and hit the walls.

  I think to myself, if he wants me to stay in the business, this isn’t the way to do it.

  But if he hates me, my mind starts to say, if he hates me, has hated me for years, has swallowed his hatred because of his own terror of working alone, being alone, not succeeding, then the cruelty of this awfulness would be nothing more than what I deserved . . . The only way to reach David Ogilvie is through Jim Larson . . . for the wrongs he has committed, for his badness of character, but NO, GOD DAMN IT, JIM IS NOT THAT KIND OF MAN!!!

  And it snaps. The weight is gone, my stomach sweetens. I look at my wristwatch. The time has come. I slip into my jacket, take one last vanity peek in the mirror. I open the door.

  All eyes are upon me.

  Then before I have a chance to say a word the outer door opens, and it is Jim. He grins at me, “Tried to call you, Man,” he says, and I believe him. Behind him crowding into the room are Bianca and George diMorro, dazzling in their evening clothes, and more people crowding in behind them, and for a dizzy second I have a vision of Sonoma Mountain and the fine misty winter calm as I stand in the warm pool and look out over the valley. And then I find myself falling into the cold grey eyes of the actress who had snubbed us at the diMorro party, and look down to see her slim red-tipped fingers lightly on Jim’s sleeve.

  “Hello, everyone,” I hear myself saying. “Now, don’t be nervous,” and it gets a great laugh, my old buddy C. C. Eubank squeezing in the door, charming with a lock of hair down over his eyes, Galba in his bug-green tuxedo, Karl Meador, relaxed and brilliant and handsome, where the hell has old Karl been these past few days, for that matter? He does not look over at Sonny, who got to her feet as the mob started pouring into the room. I go over to Sonny and give her a kiss, just brushing her lips and not looking into her eyes, and Jim grabs me by the arm and says, “Hey, no time for that, let’s roll,” and he pulls me through the people, through the door and down the corridor, his collar open and a small red stain on his ruffled shirt, like, while I’ve been here losing my sanity he’s been eating spaghetti with the hotshots, come on, he hasn’t been eating spaghetti for two weeks, has he, but he might have been romancing, by God . . . Or he might have been buried out in the desert with a stake through his heart, waiting for the right phase of the moon . . .

  He’s got me by the elbow now, and I’ll never ask him where he’s been; we half-walk, half-run down the corridor to our private elevator, and only the hottest of the hotshots are allowed on the elevator with us, the diMorros, of course, Karl, Galba, the grey-eyed actress who didn’t like the way I smelled and who will not let go of Jim, and Chet. Jim turns to me in the packed elevator and says, “What’s been happening?” and I say to him, “Not jack shit, my friend,” and we laugh secretly and smell the anxious sweat that isn’t ours for once and then the door opens and a hundred madeup faces flash past as we hurry, now just the two of us, through the held-open curtain and out into the blackness, and there they are. The last drop of fear inside me evaporates.

  My light hits me, and I stand quite still. Jim’s light follows him to the other side of the stage and the band starts to vamp.

  I smile, a baby’s first wide grin, and the house comes down.

  This is love, my friends, and the hell with the rest.

  THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF JODY MCKEEGAN

  For Marie and Julie

  “The show must go on.”—ANONYMOUS

  PART ONE

  ONE

  WHEN SHE was fifteen, Jody McKeegan lived in a small house behind the Piggly Wiggly Market where her mother worked as a grocery checker. Her father did not exactly live with them, and Jody was glad of it. Every time Burt McKeegan showed up there would be trouble, even though he usually brought money and tried to make up for being gone. He would be drinking, as usual, and his dark red hair would be hanging down over his green eyes as he sat on the old overstuffed couch with his big hands holding the pint loosely between his legs. He would talk, telling stories about his life that Jody later decided were lies, because the only time Burt McKeegan ever had any money was when he won at the horse races, and of course whenever he did that he would show up. The stories were all about travels and adventures that cost money. Another dead giveaway, which Jody didn’t even think about until she had traveled a little herself and told a few lies, was that Burt never told any stories in front of Eleanor. No, when Eleanor was home, and before the trouble would start, he would discuss plans for the future. Even though Burt was washed up and everybody knew it, he still had a lot of hope for the future. All her life Jody had this same unreasonable burning hope for the future, as if the mere passage of time would erase all the trouble and bring the joy she knew had to be out there somewhere waiting for her.

  Burt, well, Burt had been cut down by time and circumstance, and she knew he was full of crap and would never amount to anything. He had been a body-and-fender man, a big young Irish galoot with freckles and a grin and a ball-peen hammer, happily whanging away at fenders and car doors when the Depression struck and took his job away, just after Jody’s elder sister Lindy had been born. Out of work and with a new family to support—a family he had acquired by making love to Eleanor, then eighteen, behind some trees at a picnic at Blue Lake Park and then overjoyed when she told him she was pregnant because she was so pretty and he was ready to settle down anyway—laid off by the garage out on 82nd Avenue, fiery in his refusal to allow Eleanor to work by finally driven out of their house by the simple fact of poverty. It maddened him to have to sit home twiddling his thumbs, and so at first he would get up each morning, dress carefully as if he were going looking for work, take the lunch Eleanor had made for him and go to one of the taverns out Sandy Boulevard to sit around with other men. After a while he began going downtown and hanging around the pool halls. Burt was a pretty good pool player, but not good enough to make any money at it. He started drinking during the day and coming home later and later, and then not at all. E
leanor lived for a while on money given to her by her sister and her parents, and then finally she took a job and left Lindy at her sister’s house. When Burt found out she was working in a stringbean cannery he got very drunk and came home and chased Eleanor around the house with a butcher knife, or so Lindy told Jody years later.

  “Where did he get the money?” Jody wanted to know.

  “Oh shit, drunks always have money,” Lindy told her. Lindy was beautiful, and Jody, who was not, worshipped her. Lindy was short for Rosalind, and she had her father’s dark red hair and milky skin, but her eyes were a deep rich dark brown, and by the time she was twelve men were following her down the street. But men did not trouble Lindy. Even during World War II, when they were living in a housing project and Eleanor was gone most of the time working at the Swan Island shipyard, Lindy had no trouble with the kind of men who hung around trying to get at her and the other young bobby soxers. She knew when to kick and where to kick, and she was smart enough to scream when that would work and smart enough to keep silent when only that would work, and just once was she overwhelmed, by three high school boys from St. Johns. They got her in the laundry room of one of the project buildings after school one day, and two of them raped her while she cursed and spit in their faces. The third one would have raped her too, but a neighborhood boy who was practicing his saxophone heard her cursing through the thin walls and came rushing in on the rich boys (boys who did not live in housing projects) and began flailing away with his instrument and screaming with rage. His name was Ron Higby and he was over six feet tall already, and so the rich boys made their retreat bleeding and threatening to call the police.

  “Go ahead and call them, you dirty pimps!” Lindy yelled after them. “Are you hurt?” she asked Ron. He shook his head silently, his dented and bloody saxophone hanging brokenly from his hand. He was looking at her. She was wearing a pink cashmere sweater, now stained and dirty, pink bobby sox, saddle shoes and nothing else. Her skirt and torn underpants lay on the cement floor of the laundry room.

  “Oh,” she said. “Get out of here and let me dress, will you?” She threw him a smile. “I’ll thank you later.” She did—she thanked him. He admitted that he was in love with her and she smiled and said that she thought he was sweet, but that she only dated servicemen. But a couple of nights later she made a sailor pay her fifty dollars, and she gave the money to Ron. “Fix your horn,” she told him. She was fifteen at the time.

  Both Eleanor and Burt were working, but Eleanor was making more money as a spot welder than Burt was as a sweeper, and so they did not live together much of the time. Burt was only a sweeper because on the fourth of July, 1935, just before Jody was born, he blew the fingers off his right hand drunkenly fooling with firecrackers. He even got his picture in the paper, grinning and holding up his bandaged hand, but there went any chance of a career requiring ten fingers. He still had his right thumb and stubs of two fingers, and he could grasp a broom. If anyone started to commiserate with him about his missing fingers, Burt’s green eyes would light up. “The goddam thing kept me out of the army, didn’t it?” he would say, waggling the thumb and stubs.

  Eleanor and her two girls were still living in the housing project when the war ended, and even though the economy seemed to be booming, Eleanor had a hard time finding work. To complicate matters, a man had fallen in love with her, and Burt was on one of his long absences from Portland. Eleanor said Burt was “out of town,” but Lindy told her sister, “He’s up at Rocky Butte, breakin rocks, I’ll bet!”

  Because she was hanging around downtown, Lindy knew a lot more about their father than their mother did. She knew where he drank and where he shot pool and the women he played around with, in Portland’s smalltime coalition of bookies, pimps, gamblers and petty crooks. Lindy encouraged her mother to go out with Dick Westerhauser, and she even hinted that Eleanor ought to make it easier for Dick to give her money. He was always offering. He owned Westerhauser Buick in Beaverton, and since the end of the war he was rolling in money and did not know what to do with himself. He was a big man, bigger than Burt, for that matter, and old, perhaps as old as fifty, with a wife and a couple of grown children out in the suburbs. But he sought romance, and he would take Eleanor out to movies and dinners, and even to night clubs once in a while, bringing her home at four or five in the morning, where as likely as not little Jody would be alone, even though Lindy had promised to babysit. Once Eleanor came in from the motel where she had been making love to Dick Westerhaus and found Ron Higby asleep on the couch and Jody asleep in her bed with a saxophone cuddled in her arms. She was angry with Lindy for lying to her again, but not as angry as before, and Lindy told her, “Mom, for Christ’s sake, who’s going to come busting in our place?”

  Dick Westerhaus offered to help Eleanor move to a bigger apartment—a real apartment instead of a housing project—probably so that he could comfortably spend the night once in a while instead of going to motels and having to get up at the crack of dawn to get her home, but Eleanor, after several days of putting off her decision, perhaps hoping that Burt would show up, called him at the Buick agency and told him not to come around anymore. Then, with only the twenty dollars a week unemployment, she moved her family out of the project and into a small but private apartment across the river in Vancouver, Washington, where she continued to look for work. This move almost broke up the family. Lindy could not stand Vancouver. As far as she was concerned it was the North Pole, and she would often disappear into Portland for days at a time. She began also wearing clothes which Jody had never seen before.

  Lindy was supposed to be going to Vancouver High School, but she wasn’t. On her second day she told her home room teacher to kiss her ass, and left school with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She found a boy hanging around outside the building and talked him into driving her across the river and down to Broadway and Yamhill, where she got out of the car and disappeared into the drugstore among her friends. She did not come home for nearly a week that time, and Eleanor almost called the police on her. But she didn’t, because she understood what Lindy was after, or she thought she did. The world was a mess, and Lindy was too beautiful to waste her time in school. It broke Eleanor’s heart to think of the punks and small-time gangsters Lindy ran around with, but she had a deep confidence in her daughter’s native intelligence, and she was sure Lindy would get over it and move on to what they both hoped would be her career in motion pictures.

  Lindy wanted very much to be a movie actress, and she knew that the best way to do it, if you were from Portland, was to be elected to the Rose Festival as a princess, and then be chosen as queen. That would get the national attention and the offers to come to Hollywood, and Lindy figured she could take it from there. But the only trouble was, Rose Festival princesses were selected from among high school seniors, and Lindy could never stay interested in school long enough to become a senior.

  There were modeling agencies in Portland too, but Lindy walked up the long dark staircase to one of them and inside ten minutes, five waiting and five being interviewed by a woman she could tell was high on pills, Lindy realized the modeling agency was a racket, a mere front for a school where dumb-looking girls were taught to walk around with a book on their head for eighteen dollars an hour, or some such ridiculous amount. And prostitution. More than one pimp had promised to keep her in clothes and money, so that when the time came she could go to Hollywood in style, register at the Pasadena Playhouse and learn her craft, and then move on into pictures. In fact, most of the young pimps in Portland claimed to have Hollywood connections. Maybe they did; but Lindy never went for their stories. Not that she wouldn’t take clothes or money from men, but she saw no reason to turn a percentage over to a pimp just so that he could sit around the Desert Room with the other pimps and whine about his girls. Lindy considered herself the equal of any pimp she ever met. And besides, she had no intention of becoming a hooker.

  One day Lindy came home to the apartment in Vancouver i
n the middle of the afternoon. Jody was there alone. Eleanor was working part time at the public library, helping take inventory. Lindy looked very bad, with dark circles under her eyes, and as she sat at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee Jody could see that her hands were trembling.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  “I’m okay. Just a little tired, honey.”

  “You’re not even talking to me,” Jody said. Usually she was anxious and unhappy until she knew where Lindy was, but this time Lindy was actually home, and she was still unhappy. Lindy smiled at her, and reached out to touch her on the forehead.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ve been up for like five days, that’s all. I just need some sleep.”

  But later, when Jody peeked into the bedroom, Lindy was lying on her back in the semidarkness with her eyes open. When Eleanor got home, she went into the bedroom, and Jody stayed in the kitchen, listening to the murmuring voices of her sister and her mother. She heard the word ‘drugs’ several times, but at the time she related the word to the kind of things you got from drugstores, and so did not understand until some years later that they moved back to Portland not because the job opportunities were better but so that Eleanor could try to exert just a little more control over Lindy’s life.

  Eleanor was just past thirty-five when she got the job at the Piggly Wiggly, and although the money was not as good as the shipyard, she did not have to work so hard. The days went faster than she expected, because from the time she came to work until closing, the store was crammed with shoppers, and Eleanor was frantically busy unloading carts, slamming the keys on the cash register and sacking groceries. The fluorescent lighting was unearthly and the noise was constant, but Eleanor did not notice. Nor did she often notice the faces of the customers, unless they were trying to cash checks, and then all she really had to do those first months was wave for the assistant manager to okay the check. After a few weeks she even stopped being amazed at the kinds of things people put into their stomachs. For a while Eleanor sweated heavily while she worked, and she had to wear a bandanna around her head not only to keep her hair out of her eyes but to keep the sweat from rolling down her face and embarrassing her, but after she got more into the pace of her work she could make one uniform do for three days. This was important, because the faded yellow and green dresses had to be heavily starched, a job she hated.