Casanegra

by Blair Underwood

  Was this how people felt when they were making love?

  “Shit, Ten. Yes, that’s it. That’sit.”

  A hurricane roared through me, hot pleasure burning away flesh, bone, thought itself. Then, it was done, almost a foggy memory already. Slowly, sound and sight and sensation returned. Serena nestled on my arm for a time, and maybe we dozed. But the next thing I knew, her eyes were wide open, staring at me as she played with the hair on my chest. Her worry was back.

  The light outside was bright. The day had hardly begun.

  “I have a lot to do, baby,” she whispered. “You know how it is. I’ll call you a cab to get you back to your car.”

  I’ll admit it, I was disappointed. I don’t know what I expected—or if I expected anything—but I didn’t want to go so soon. Still, I knew arguing would be a waste of breath. I’ve made a home on the other side of that argument, and there’s no such thing as winning. Once that door is closed, it’s closed.

  “Why don’t you come back Friday night?” she said.

  I didn’t want to be as relieved as I was. I didn’twant to want anything. My head was floating away from me, and I didn’t like the feeling.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Please? Don’t you make me beg.”

  I nodded. “OK. Friday night. But only if I can cook you dinner.”

  “I’ve missed your cooking, T.”

  I’d almost forgotten that I used to cook for Serena. One of my extras.

  So, that was all. I put on my clothes, she called me a cab, and we kissed good-bye at her door, in front of the elaborate fountain and circular driveway on her hilltop estate that had cost more money than I could dream about.

  I was in such a good mood, even the cabbie noticed it. He was a hairy, thickset man with a mustache and a Greek name, Micolas. “Life is good, no?” the cabbie said to me in his rearview mirror, hoping to share vicariously in my fortune.

  I couldn’t help smiling. I had a business card promising some work in my back pocket, a dinner date for Friday night, and a memory worth keeping. “Yeah. Life is good.”

  I didn’t tell him the real reason I was celebrating. I’d just had sex with Serena Johnston,Afrodite, and she hadn’t paid me for it. Not a cent. She hadn’t even slipped me a twenty for cab fare. I was just a man, and she was just a woman. Time was, I would have walked away with an easy ten grand in my pocket after an encounter like that with Serena. My usual fee, on Tennyson Hardwick’s infamous sliding scale. Before I quit the game, of course.

  Ten grand would take me a long way. Ten grand would pad my bank account, pay some of my father’s doctor bills, and stand me upright.

  But ten grand was nothing compared to coasting down Mulholland Drive with the prospect of work with my clothes on, and a dinner date on Friday. I left Serena’s with a feeling ten grand couldn’t buy.

  The way I spent the rest of my afternoon would become significant later, so I’ll spell it out for the record.

  After I left Serena’s, I went to a cattle-call audition at Raleigh Studios on Melrose, across the street from the gated kingdom of Paramount. I stood in line for two hours shooting the shit with the brothers with theater degrees, including one I thought I remembered from my classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute. They were complaining about how all the good roles are going to rappers. That audition was a waste of my time, but when my bank account gets low, I try out for roles I’d ordinarily consider beneath me. I guess it shows; I never get callbacks for the most pathetic parts. Three blank stares from the casting table, and a curt “Thank you” halfway through the reading. I hate that shit.

  Even though my body and clothes still smelled like Serena, the hours I had spent with her—and the lingering sizzle left by her fingers across my skin—felt like an episode of my own personalTwilight Zone, a day from someone else’s life. When I got to my silver BMW 325 convertible, which I’d paid cash for back when I could afford to, I put in my first call to Devon Biggs at Casanegra Productions. His chipper assistant took a message and sounded sincere about having him get right back to me, asking for my homeand mobile numbers. Could Serena have already mentioned my name? That got me smiling again. I could already tell I was going to like the short line.

  To celebrate my friendly treatment by an assistant—in this town, you learn to celebrate even the teensiest victories—I decided to splurge and spend ten bucks to see a movie and buy a small popcorn at the Playhouse, a second-run movie theater not too far from where I live in the Hollywood Hills. I saw an old Sonny Chiba martial arts movie,Sister Streetfighter, which is really a rip-off, because the Man barely appears in it, and doesn’t do his patented psycho–Bruce Lee bit at all. I hang out at the theater almost every weekend, and the guys know me. Later, they would all vouch that I was there between six and eight-thirty. I wish I’d stayed for the double feature, but I didn’t. Instead I went home. Alone.

  The Friday-night snake of traffic on the one-lane canyon road leading to my house was coiled tighter than usual, so it took me thirty minutes to make a ten-minute drive. By the time I got to 5450 Gleason Street, I was ready to hibernate for the night.

  My neighborhood is one of those in the hills with narrow streets, houses stacked on top of each other, and five steps from the curb to the front door. But I love my house.Love it. I might not be hooked up like Denzel or Serena, but I have a bomb crib.

  The house was designed in a New Mexico adobe-style, with a pale clay façade and very few front windows, a fortress. But that’s as far as any consistency goes. The house was originally a sixteen-hundred-square-foot bungalow, but the previous owner added on floors and wings whenever her stocks split, building a five-thousand-square-foot architectural hybrid. Maybe that’s what I like best about the house; it’s unpredictable, and it isn’t always pretty. There’s even a small hidden room, just because. It doesn’t get any better thanthat.

  Being pauper-poor doesn’t sting nearly so badly when you can walk through the doors of a home you’re not ashamed to claim. My crib is assessed at between $2 and $2.5 million, depending on the day. That’s not saying much by Southern California standards, and paying the taxes is a struggle by itself, but Tennyson Hardwick lives well.

  Still, that’s not the reason I love it so much. A house’s soul doesn’t rest in how it looks or how much it cost, but in how it makes you feel. Just like Luther (rest his soul) said in his song,A house is not a home. But mine is. Maybe it’s the first home I’ve ever had.

  That’s why it pissed me off so much that my father had never come to visit me—sight unseen, he decided the house was the result of “ill-gotten gains.” Yes, that’s really how he talks. Hell, maybe he was right. But although some people may consider it ill-gotten that I started out as a house-sitter and never paid a cent to buy it, 5450 Gleason Street had been mine free and clear for four years.

  The mailbox was overflowing, but I didn’t bother checking it. Nothing but junk. I lived without a permanent address for so long that I never took up the habit of receiving mail at the house. Anyone who needed to find me could use the PO Box listed on my card, the same one I’d had for a decade. I like the idea that most people don’t know where to find me.

  My short walkway is flanked by cactuses, which, like me, don’t invite touching and don’t need a lot of fussing and tending.

  Anyone who’s determined can look up the old real estate records, but I don’t divulge the name of the previous owner. I have my faults, but lack of discretion isn’t one of them. Let’s call her Alice. I met Alice a long time ago, toward the end of her career and the beginning of mine, soon after I met Serena. Alice was an actress; not the kind whose name and face got her good tables or invitations to preen on red carpets, but she worked steady for thirty-five years and survived Hollywood, which makes her a hero in my book. Like her house, she made it through all the earthquakes. Alice was older when she sought me out because she had an ego and her pride to maintain, and most men can’t see that a woman’s eyes are her most beautiful feature. At si
xty, Alice’s hypnotic eyes fluttered like she was twenty-five, with thick lashes and a playful gleam. She was still a knockout, her Bikram yoga-toned body stubbornly refusing to sag and wither in the places you might expect. But when I think of Alice, I remember her eyes.

  The front doorway is barely six feet high, custom-built to suit Alice’s tiny five-foot frame, but I haven’t changed it even though the top of my head brushes it when I walk through. And if I had to guess how much of everything in the house is Alice’s and how much is mine, it’s probably seventy-thirty Alice. Maybe eighty-twenty. She’s everywhere.

  Sometimes I feel like I’m still house-sitting for her while she’s off on another adventure to Rome or Cairo, and her weathered voice will surprise me on the other end of a telephone one day:“Well, dear heart, I don’t know how you expect me to drink this cheap Chianti without your perfectly beautiful face to help me wash it down. It’s so thoughtless of you not to have surprised me at my hotel by now. But I trust you’re keeping an eye on the place and sleeping in my bed alone. I’ll be heartbroken if I come back and I find you’ve soiled my sheets with a stranger. You know I’m old-fashioned that way, sugar.” I can still hear Alice in my head.

  I hadn’t seen Alice in two years when a certified letter told me that pneumonia had silenced that husky voice, leaving me her house and everything in it. Alice doesn’t live here anymore, but at the same time she always will. Most actresses have pictures of themselves prominently displayed everywhere, but Alice never did. I had to hunt to find any pictures of her, and the only one I found was from her run inRaisin in the Sun on Broadway in the 1960s, the performance she told me she was most proud of. She was more handsome than pretty; stocky, with smooth skin, a strong jaw, and those unchanged eyes. I keep that picture on my bedroom nightstand, and a curious visitor might ask me one day if the fiery woman in the picture is my mother. That was a common misconception when we traveled together, and it always made Alice peal with bad-girl laughter.

  The rest of the house is crammed ceiling to floor with kitsch and show-business memorabilia, every inch covered with the footprints of successful careers. Alice was a race woman, so she rescued mammy dolls and old-school advertisements featuring fat-lipped coons whenever she found them in antique stores—“That’s a part of our history, too, honey,” she always said—but most of her shrine was to the people who followed her path beneath the stage lights. In the foyer, she hung her most precious possessions: signed movie posters fromA Raisin in the Sun, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, andIn the Heat of the Night. Alice was a huge Poitier fan—but then again, who wasn’t?

  In the living room, there’s a three-sheet of Lena Horne fromThe Bronze Venus, a five-sheet of Dorothy Dandridge inCarmen Jones, and a cool poster for a movie I’ve never seen,The Decks Ran Red, with Dandridge and James Mason. “The true story of one girl on a crime ship!” it screams, over the image of a white sailor pawing at a beautiful woman. The woman looks pretty white, but I figure the studio execs were just keeping their race cards close to their narrow little chests.

  I would need a catalogue to keep track of the posters, dolls, figurines, photographs, and movie programs that make up the treasure stashed inside 5450 Gleason. I keep promising myself I’ll start compiling one on a rainy afternoon.

  That night, when I walked into my house, I thought,Serena would love my crib.

  I never have visitors in my house, but suddenly I wanted to bring one.

  At ten o’clock, after I ate the last of the paella I’d made over the weekend, I sat in the family room sipping a Corona. The platinum-gold lights of the San Fernando Valley streamed through my picture window while Sarah Vaughn sang on a crackling LP from Alice’s collection. I remember wondering what Serena Johnston was doing that very moment. I used to wonder the same thing about Alice across the sea.

  Something floating in the wall-wide tropical tank beneath aHarlem Rides the Range poster caught my eye. I walked over to the tank, and in the bluish light saw two corpses: a neon and a tetra, bobbing in the filter bubbles.Damn, I thought, fishing them out with the little wire net. When I was house-sitting for Alice, I’d been great with the fish. Now that they were mine, they died off like summer sitcoms.

  Burial at sea, then a return to my paella, which had cooled off and lost its flavor.

  I couldn’t have picked a worse night to be alone.

  THREE

  HOPE REHABILITATIONCenter in West Covina wasn’t a hospital, with occasional curing to break up the monotony of misery; and it wasn’t a hospice, where the business of dying is up-front. Hope was a collection of beds in closet-sized rooms for people who weren’t likely to get better, whether they knew it or not. Whether they werecapable of knowing or not. And that’s where Dad had been sent after his stroke, to undergo physical therapy and lie in bed for endless hours to think about how much he hated what was left of his life.

  On Tuesday, the day after Serena reappeared, I went to see Dad. The visits had started out daily, but by now they were stretching to every third day. Dad’s roster of retired LAPD buddies who dropped by to see him had shrunk fast after the first two weeks, so I knew I was the only visitor he was likely to get. Even with the bonus that Dad couldn’t mouth off at me—at least not yet—those visits were rough. I loaded up on Excedrin just to walk through Hope’s automatic doors.

  I once worked for an A-list actress with two Pomeranians, and she used to send me with them to the vet whenever they got a sniffle or snagged a nail. Let’s just say that the staff at Wilshire Veterinary gave more of a collective shit about the welfare of Fluffy the cat or Tweetie the canary than I’d been able to detect from most of the staff at Hope Rehabilitation Center. They’re not bad people; just overworked, underpaid, and unwilling to invest themselves in a bunch of old people who would be dead by Christmas. I know there are better facilities out there, but this wasn’t one of them.

  There are two systems you want to avoid at all costs: lock-up and long-term medical care. All in all, I’d rather be in jail.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” I said to Marcela, one of Dad’s nurses, as I passed her in the hall. The statement was a lie start to finish—Marcela’s mustache was almost as coarse as mine—but I figured a little flirting might keep Dad from being overmedicated or outright forgotten.

  “He’s doing great today,” Marcela said, leering at me with coffee-stained teeth.

  I took that for what it was worth. Dad’s first roommate was “doing great” the day before he died, or so they told his daughter. The place is called Hope, after all.

  I stopped in front of Dad’s door, room 106, and bowed my head with my ritual silent prayer that I would wake up from this nightmare. Then, I went inside.

  Richard Allen Hardwick was alone in his semiprivate room, having outlived two roommates in fifteen days. His walls were the color of old oatmeal, and his television set was perpetually set toJudge Judy or anybody else with a black robe and a gavel. His only joy anymore was in the dispensing of justice, even trite justice. The remote control never left his clawlike hand, and his King James Bible on the nightstand was always open to the Book of Proverbs. The only things that changed were whether he was asleep or awake, whether he smelled like piss or didn’t, whether he looked at me or pretended I wasn’t there. I think Dad resented my coming by as much as I resented being there.

  But what could we do? We were all we had.

  “How’s the therapy going?”

  Dad didn’t blink, hanging on Judge Judy’s every word. Hecould talk if he wanted to, because I heard him spit out a few vulgarities at an orderly two weeks after his stroke. But his words were slurred, and the sound of his voice horrified him. I can’t say I blamed him, but the nurses told me his speech wouldn’t improve if he didn’t practice.

  During my father’s willful silence, I studied his face and tried to remember what he used to look like. At seventy-five, his hale cheeks were deflated. His once-strong brow sagged with wrinkles, and the whites of his eyes were vein-webbed and yellowish.
Somewhere in that drooping face resided the man who had retired as one of LAPD’s most decorated police captains—and he could have made chief somewhere else, if he’d been willing to leave LAPD politics behind. He had overseen more than three hundred men, had been responsible for more than seventeen square miles. Somewhere in that bed was the man who used to scare the hell out of me, and who might have kept me in line if he’d ever been at home.

  Dad and I always had our problems—if someone had told him he’d have to raise his son alone, he’d rather I’d never come along, and we both knew it. Some people aren’t meant to raise children. For the record, I was a smart-assed, impossible kid who wanted no part of Dad’s disciplined way of life. But despite our differences, we might have been able to overlook them all if I hadn’t been locked up in ’99, booked at theHollywood precinct no less, his old command.

  It’s a long story. Dad and I were running out of time to recover from that.

  I watched TV with Dad a while, which was how I spent most of my visits. Sometimes it was almost painless. An hour, an hour and a half, and I could escape back to the world of people walking around on two legs—the temporarily abled,as Dad’s physical therapist liked to call us. Once I walked out of the doors, I could forget that Hope’s dour halls were killing my father. The stroke had only started the job.

  But that day’s visit was going to be different. I’d made my decision, even if it took me a half-hour to actually say it. I was hoping I’d change my mind.

  “OK, Dad, this is how it’s going to be,” I said when the next Verizon commercial came on, and my voice surprised him so much that his eyeballs shot my way. “This week, I’m getting you discharged and you’re coming to live with me at my place. Maybe tomorrow. On the days I can’t be around, you’ll have a nurse. I’m not going to hear any arguments. I won’t have you living in this shit-hole. You deserve better, man.”