“No problem,” I said.
“I have reserved a table in the garden for luncheon.”
“Thank you.”
He looked at me. “The baroness will be here in a moment to accompany you and see to your comfort.”
“Thank you again.”
“I don’t like it. Something isn’t right,” Lonergan said as he walked away.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t think there will be gambling. If it were a sure thing, the boys would be here in a minute offering more money than you can come up with.”
“You may be right. But let’s run the game out. We’ll know more tomorrow than we do today.” I saw Marissa come into the bar. “Right now it’s time for lunch.”
30
The luncheon was as beautifully served as the dinner had been the evening before. There was fish, freshly caught from the waters in front of the hotel, a lovely Montrachet, which was completely wasted on me but which my uncle savored, followed by fresh lime ice and coffee. The soft breeze through the overhanging trees kept the sun from being too hot on our backs.
When we had finished, Marissa got to her feet. “I have some work to attend to in the office. Is there anything I can do for you this afternoon?”
I glanced at my uncle. He shook his head slightly. “No, thank you. I think we’ll just go back to our cottage and rest awhile before the cocktail party.”
“Okay. But if there is anything you should want, you know where to reach me.”
We got to our feet as she left. My uncle looked after her approvingly. “A fine figure of a woman,” he said. “Quality.”
I looked at him skeptically. It might have been the sun, but I thought I saw him flush. He changed the subject quickly. “Walk back along the beach?”
“I’m with you.”
When we got to the water’s edge, my uncle suddenly bent down, took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trouser cuffs. Holding the shoes in his hand, he stepped gingerly into the surf. He looked back at me. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
He was like a kid, kicking at the water and skipping away from the surf as it threatened to climb his legs. There was a faint smile on his lips and an oddly distant look in his eyes. “I’ve always wanted to do this ever since I was a kid.”
“You never—”
“No,” he said quickly. “I was eleven years old when I went to work. Your mother was a baby, your grandfather was dead and your grandmother was taking in washing to keep the family together.”
“What did you do?”
“I got a job sweeping up and cleaning out the spittoons in Clancy’s Saloon opposite the railroad station in Los Angeles.”
I was silent. This was something I had never heard. No one in my family had ever talked about where he had begun.
“Your grandfather and Clancy had worked on the railroad together. That’s how I got the job.” He stopped and looked out over the water. “I can still remember watching the Union Pacific freight train coming down the center of Santa Monica Boulevard and running alongside the tracks, waving to my father and Clancy in the cab of the big steam locomotive.”
“We’re a long way from Santa Monica Boulevard right now.”
“We both are. I remember that you began there, too.”
I nodded. It was hard for me to believe that it was only five years since I stood in the store on Santa Monica Boulevard and watched Persky direct the moving men as they took out the last pieces of furniture from the office of the Hollywood Express.
Persky glanced around, trying not to look at me. The store was empty except for scraps of paper and litter on the floor. “I guess that’s all of it.”
He went out the door, followed by the moving men. Outside, in the street, the carpenter finished boarding up the shattered storefront. He tried the door to see that it worked, then turned to me. “That’ll be a hundred bucks,” he said.
I gestured to Verita, who was standing next to me. “Give him a check.”
“No checks. Cash.”
For a moment I began to get angry; then I realized how foolish it was. If I were in his place and saw all the furniture going out, I would feel the same way. I stuck my hand in my pocket and came up with a roll. I paid him with a hundred-dollar bill that I peeled off the top.
“Thank you,” he said, obviously impressed. “If you need anything else, give me a holler.”
I locked the door behind him and turned to Verita. “I should have known it was too good to last.”
“Could have been worse. You might be dead. But you’re not. You might be broke. But you’re not. With the twenty-five thousand you got from Ronzi in settlement, you have eighty-one thousand in the bank.”
“Let’s see how much is left after I pay my bills.”
We went upstairs and sat down at the kitchen table, where she had set up the account books. “Let’s take the big ones first,” I said. “How much of Reverend Sam’s advance is left?”
She flipped the pages of the ledger. “He gave you forty thousand. You ran six pages. That leaves thirty-four thousand in his account.”
“Write the check.” I waited until she pushed the check over to me to sign. “Lonergan next.”
“You don’t owe him anything. He called me this morning and told me he wrote it all off as an investment.”
“Fuck him. I don’t need his charity.”
She was silent.
“Did we give him his share of the ads in the last issue?”
“No.”
“How much did it come to?”
“Three thousand one hundred,” she said, glancing at the ledger.
“Add the twenty-five thousand advance and draw the check.”
Silently she wrote the check and gave it to me. Unpaid printers’ bills and other miscellaneous expenses came to twelve thousand. Salaries came to seventeen hundred. “Now what have we got left?”
“Five thousand three hundred,” she said without looking at the ledger.
“You’re right. I’m not broke.”
The tears began to roll down her cheeks.
“Hey, didn’t you tell me it could have been worse? Just a few months ago I had absolutely zero. Now I have five grand.”
“I’m—I’m sorry, Gary.”
I took her hand across the table. “Don’t be. It was fun while it lasted and it sure beat hell out of standing in the unemployment line.”
She drew her hand away. Her eyes fell. “I spoke to the office yesterday. The supervisor said that I could start again on Monday morning.”
“Am I eligible for benefits?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not going back. If I can’t be in the line at your window, what good is it?”
“But I have to work, Gareth.”
“You are working. I didn’t tell you you weren’t, did I?”
“No—but.” She hesitated. “I thought it was all finished.”
“Finished?” I got out of the chair and took a can of beer from the refrigerator. I pulled the tab and drank from the can. “I’m just beginning. Before all this started, I was wandering around like an asshole, fucked off at the world. But no more. That’s over. Now I know how to get it. I’m going to fuck the whole world.”
Without thinking she spoke in Spanish. “Usted está muy macho.”
“That’s it.” I crushed the empty beer can in my hand and dropped it in the wastebasket. I pulled her to her feet and hugged her. “That’s what I was looking for.”
“No comprendo.”
I laughed. “Macho. The name of our new magazine.”
31
It took us six months to get the first issue on the stands and it was a disaster. Penthouse had come into the States just before we started publishing and began to tear up the market. Comparing Macho to Playboy and Penthouse was like comparing the Hollywood Express to the New York Times. The soft-focus photographs of beaver that Penthouse was using had every man in America sprouting a mustache. Playboy fought
back by going full frontal, but they still airbrushed their girls. We laughed when we saw it. The neatest pussies in the country. But it wasn’t funny to us. We were really hurting. And there was no way we could top either magazine—with words or pictures. They just had too much talent going for them. And the talent went where the money showed. All we had were promises.
We put out the second issue a month late in order to give the newsstands a chance to dispose of more of the first issue. The third issue was also a month late. By that time we knew it was all over but the shouting. The national distributor sent us a termination notice, which meant that if we wanted our magazine on the stands, we had to deliver it ourselves. But that was academic. I was almost fifty grand in hock and there was no way I could hope to get the money to publish even another issue.
We sat around the kitchen table, staring glumly at the piles of bills in front of us. “Is that all of it?” I asked.
Verita nodded. “Forty-nine thousand three hundred fifty-seven dollars and sixteen cents exclusive of payroll.”
“How much is that?”
She looked at Bobby and Eileen. “The staff took a vote. We pass.”
That made the tenth week in a row they had passed. “Thank you,” I said. “How much have we got in the bank?”
Verita glanced at the ledger. “About seven hundred.”
“Shit. It’ll take the rest of my life to pay off.”
“You don’t have to,” Verita said. “You can file for bankruptcy. Both for yourself and the company. Then you’ll be clean. You can start all over again if you want.”
“What happens to the name?”
“Macho?”
I nodded.
“It belongs to the company. You lose it together with whatever other assets they turn up.”
“What other assets? Some secondhand pictures and articles that nobody wants?”
“My father says he’ll lend you the money to go on,” Bobby said.
“Thank him for me, but that would be like throwing the money down the sewer. We haven’t cut it.”
“Maybe one more issue would turn the corner,” Bobby said.
“No way. Not when we’re trying to do what the others are already doing better.” I reached for a cigarette. “Unless we come up with a new approach, we’re nothing more than a third-rate imitation.”
“What new approach is there?” Bobby asked. “There are only so many ways you can shoot girls and we’re down to beaver already.”
I stared at him. It wasn’t what he said but the way in which he said it. Somewhere in my head a wheel started turning.
“And between the Playboy Advisor and Penthouse Forum, they’ve covered almost every sexual idea you can think of in writing,” Eileen said. “There’s not much more we can do in that area.”
Another wheel began to turn. “Maybe what we did was play the game by their rules. Maybe we were on the right track with the Express because we didn’t know the rules and made up our own as we went along.”
“A national magazine isn’t the same as a local paper,” she said.
“Isn’t it? Do you think the rest of the people in America are different from the people in Los Angeles? They’re all interested in the same thing.”
“LA has a more liberal lifestyle than Squeedunk. They’re more open about things.”
“They don’t fuck in Squeedunk?”
“Maybe they do, but they don’t talk about it as much.”
“I don’t care whether they’re talking about it. What I’m interested in is whether they’re thinking about it and reading about it.”
“They have to be. They’re buying Playboy and Penthouse even if they don’t understand some of the words.”
“They’re looking at the pictures, too,” Bobby said. “Penthouse grabbed almost three million copies by the end of their first year. All beaver shots and raunch. Hefner feels the pinch in his circulation and he’s coming up with a new magazine to compete with Guccione. He made a deal with the French magazine Lui to share photos and other material. He’s calling it Oui. A friend of mine saw an advance copy. He says it’s class raunch.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“No airbrushed beavers,” Bobby answered. “The girls comb it.”
We all laughed.
“But they’re still pushing the same old line. Both of them. It’s called everyman’s instant expertise. The right French wines, the ‘in’ fashions. Clothes, holidays, sports, movies, books, food. You name it. Mr. Blue Collar can now order a sixty-seven Pommard to go with his Big Mac or he can jump into his Aston Martin to take his old lady to the local drive-in movie.”
The girls laughed, but I didn’t. I didn’t think it was funny. Fifty thousand dollars unfunny. I got to my feet. “We’re not going to settle anything tonight. I’m going to lie around over the weekend and do some heavy thinking. I have the strangest feeling I fucked up by missing the obvious.”
“If it’s so obvious, what is it?” Bobby asked.
“It sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But that’s the honest truth. I just don’t know.”
The telephone rang just after they left. Lonergan’s voice was cool. “Gareth?”
“Yes, Uncle John.”
“I’d like to see you.”
We had neither seen nor spoken to each other for more than four months, but there was no “How are you?” or “What’s new?” Just “I’d like to see you.” I’d eaten enough shit for that day; I didn’t need him to lay any more on me. “You know where I am,” I said truculently.
“Can you meet me at the Silver Stud at midnight?”
“What the hell for?” I snapped.
He was unruffled. “I have an interesting proposition for you.”
“The last time I went for one of your interesting propositions I almost got myself killed.”
“That was your fault. You insisted on doing things your own way instead of letting me handle it. Midnight. Be there.”
I hesitated a moment. “Okay.”
“Gareth.”
“Yes, Uncle John?”
There was the hint of a chuckle in his voice. “This time do me a favor and park your car in the street, will you?”
He hung up before I could answer. He didn’t have to worry. I’d never got around to buying a car of my own. And it was just as well because if I had, the finance company would have picked it up a long time ago.
I almost didn’t recognize the place when I got there. The windows were all silvered over except for two small white ovals through which the neon sign was visible. There was no way that anyone from the street could see in. There were even more changes in the interior.
The old wood and mahogany bar and tables had been replaced by chrome and black plastic. Four silent film projectors hung from the ceiling in the center of the room and threw their pictures on the screens which were set up in different corners of the room. They were gay loops. Nude boys with big cocks, fucking, sucking, masturbating and sodomizing all over the room. Toward the rear of the bar a wild-looking black girl sat on a small platform, playing the piano and singing in a hoarse voice. There was no way I could make out what she was singing over the noise until I got close. They were all dipstick songs with gay lyrics.
I managed to get through the crowd to the rear of the saloon after having my cock and balls cupped once, my ass grabbed twice and turning down an offer of a hundred dollars from some old queen who wanted me to spend the night at his house in the Hollywood Hills. As usual, the Collector was seated at the table beside the staircase.
“What are they giving away?” I asked.
“It’s been like this ever since they remodeled. Every night is New Year’s Eve.” He gestured to the seat opposite him. There was a bottle of scotch on the table. He filled a glass with ice cubes from a plastic bucket and pushed it toward me. “I got your drink here. Help yourself.”
I splashed the whiskey over the rocks. “When did they remodel?”
“Right after you parked your ca
r at the bar.” He grinned. “I figured you did Lonergan a favor. The insurance company paid for the whole thing.”
“Shit. Maybe I ought to ask Lonergan for a commission.”
The Collector laughed. “You kin ask.” He poured himself another drink. “How you been keepin’?”
“Usual.”
“Lonergan will be a little late.” His eyes went over my shoulder. “Did you see the chick at the piano?”
“Yeah.”
“Wild-lookin’, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
His voice dropped almost as if he were talking to himself. “Man, would I like to put it to her. She’s got me climbin’ a wall.”
“Why don’t you just ask her?”
“I did. She just ain’t interested. No way.”
“Maybe she’s a dyke.”
“She’s no dyke,” he said quickly. “She wants to be a star. Shirley Bassey. Aretha. Like that. She’s out to make a big score.”
“She’s not going to find it here.”
“You can’t tell. The night people really dig her. And some of those queens carry a lot of weight.” He got to his feet. “She’s ’bout due for her break. I’ll introduce you.”
“What for?”
“How the hell do I know. Shee-it,” he added, “if I didn’t have an excuse, she wouldn’t even come here and sit with me.”
“Okay.” He was really hurting. “I’ll tell her what a big man you are.”
He was right about one thing. She was out to make a score. Almost before she sat down, the words were out of her mouth. “Bill tells me you’re a publisher. I wrote some songs I’d like you to look at.”
“I’m not that kind of publisher.”
“What kind are you?”
“I publish a magazine. Macho.”
Her face went blank. “Never heard of it. What’s it like?”
“Playboy. Penthouse. Like that.”
“I don’t do nude layouts,” she said flatly.
I was annoyed. “Don’t worry. I won’t ask you. You’re too skinny.”
Harold Robbins Thriller Collection Page 37