American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

“Bah,” Morrison muttered. “Fucking suits.” Focking zoots. Davis and Bryce burst out laughing.

  Beau would never make a movie like this again. He knew that. His sensibilities were too vulgar, too crassly in line, really, with Waxmorton and Sam and even Davis, who by the end of the decade would be playing rascally rum runners and smug Southern cops. The film ended on Udo’s howl and Li’s head toppling across the sand, the appalling shot Beau had seen a thousand times before. The head looked real, unlike those gloppy Polynesian-seeming fakeries you saw in midnight horror movies. And then the lights came up and there was a clumsy silence.

  “Was that you?” Beau glanced over his shoulder finally at Davis. “Or was it a stunt cock?”

  Davis grinned sheepishly. A silhouetted glimpse of his penis might’ve been the movie’s best commercial hope. Bryce had already scampered from the room, while the studio head looked miserable. Glowering from the depths of his chair like a constipated king.

  “Nice work, Mo,” Beau called across the room. “I mean that.”

  The director glared. Praise was less fun than provocation.

  Beau rubbed his hands vigorously. “Just wait’ll people get a look at this!”

  Light dropped from the ceiling, the aspic glow of small theaters, where you could read the feelings on every face in the room. The boss’s despondent expression finally resolved into something sharper.

  “They won’t.”

  “What?” Beau tried to keep his tone airy. “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re not releasing it.”

  Beau felt in his chest that terrible constriction, that feeling that had led him, once, to do something stupid and rash. He fought it down now, or at least his medication did.

  “You can’t.” He moved toward the executive’s chair and the man recoiled slightly. “Please.”

  “Are you begging me?” He certainly enjoyed this part. “Are you begging me to release it?”

  “No.”

  He had a silver pompadour and a blue oxford shirt, a thick red tie with a Windsor knot. The guy’s face was a beveled rectangle, he looked—as Severin would’ve seen it—like a Jack Kirby drawing, with three distinct sides to his chin. His loafer sat on top of his knee and he jiggled it slightly.

  “You do what you have to,” Beau said. “I’m just saying there’s an audience for this movie.”

  “Who?”

  Beau faltered. “In Europe. On college campuses there are kids who—”

  “Who what?” The look on the studio head’s face said it all. “Who can’t sleep?”

  It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that Beau had problems with this sort of authority. But now he just stalked out of the screening room. He’d learned at least a partial lesson. Severin and Kate were waiting in the lobby.

  “How was the movie, Dad?”

  “I liked it.”

  “When’s it coming out?”

  What would he do? Davis DeLong stood by himself, pacing in stupid circles. Vana and Li clustered by the buffet table. Jeremy drained the dregs of a bottle of zinfandel. Bryce hung back in a corner. The studio wouldn’t hang the film’s failure on any of their shoulders, what was such a fakakta idea to begin with. Who, then? Morrison? Forget about it, that guy’s future was teaching film studies at Cal State San Diego, his exile was already assured. When’s it coming out?

  “Someday,” Beau said.

  He was fucked. His kids had been dumped in his lap, and he had nothing. He moved to the buffet table to pick at the scraps, as if to get all the free food he could before the world ended.

  “Someday when?” Severin followed him.

  Beau gulped a glass of water, shoveled a whole swatch of cold chicken piccata, pounded flat, into his mouth. He shivered with the need for release—vocal, esophageal, bowel—but none was forthcoming.

  The studio boss darted out of the screening room and went right for him.

  “You fat fuck! This is all your fault!”

  “Not in front of my kids.” Beau put down his plate. His hands shook.

  “You bring me a piece of shit like that and you’re worried about the ratings board when I talk?”

  “Behave yourself, little man.”

  You. The boss didn’t have to say it. Somehow, he pinned the whole failure on Beau, who had an opportunity to throw one of the others under the bus. All of them may have deserved it more than he did. But he just let his hand fall onto Sev’s head. The top of his son’s scalp was warm.

  “Come on.” Three years of his life were gone, but who cared when you had what mattered more? He looked across the lobby at Kate. “Sweetheart, let’s go.”

  VII

  “HEY NATHANIEL! NATE! Nice jump shot.” Williams Farquarsen hung against the fence of our school playground, watching Little Will and me play basketball. “Good hustle.”

  He drew his son aside. “You all right?”

  Little Will gulped air. He went all out, as he would doing other things, later. Neither of us was particularly athletic. Kickball, handball, the other competitive sports that swept our elementary school playground weren’t our beat. We were good students, both, bonded since kindergarten. I was into reading and language arts, whereas Little Will was more of a math geek. But he was already wild and graceful. He didn’t look much like his dad—olive-skinned and blond-haired, he was more like Marnie—but he had a little of Williams’s chilly fire.

  “Suck it up, suck it up. No water yet. Go on.”

  He wanted his son tough, disciplined. He treated us hard, like little adults. The only softness I saw in my friend’s father was at home, when I slept over at their place in the Marina. When I watched Williams with his wife, he was almost a different person: solicitous, tender. But after school, when he made Little Will and me play basketball—Teddy didn’t think it was a bad idea for me either—I gleaned what he might’ve been like at work. Driven by something too cool to be ruthlessness, that lacked even that much passion.

  “C’mon.” He taught us spin moves, a relentless dribble, taught us to heave shots at a low-hanging hoop. He made us run laps, our bodies flopping like puppets as we skittered around the yard. He was unexpectedly athletic himself; it turned out Williams was a surfer—had been since the mid-sixties. While Beau was reeling in the wake of his failure, drummed into a retreat from which it seemed there would be no easy comeback—it was one thing to antagonize an agent on the decline and quite another to piss off the corporate head of a studio: this was a problem even Williams Farquarsen couldn’t help him with—my friend and I were gasping, wheezing, skinning our little knees and palms on the playground in back of St. Jerome. “Nate, take the charge. Will, you go after him. Hard. No man plays except to win. Come on!”

  No man plays except to win. Over and over he said this. I suppose it was part of the philosophy that would guide him, with which he would later marshal his troops to greatness. We took it to heart.

  “OK, OK.” After an hour or so, he’d call it off. We did this a couple of times each week, until we collapsed into the backseat of his car and he drove us home, gasping, parched. It was unusual, but then Will’s dedication to his family life was also that. He never did do the reckless things my father had and would. “You want some of this, Nate?”

  He handed me a thermos of cold water. At the other end of the playground a clutch of older kids, sixth graders, played catch and made horizontal forays on primitive, clay-wheeled skateboards. How that world was about to change. We were in one of our own, at the far end with the kiddie hoop and its one tattered net. Williams, in a pale gray sweatshirt, cuffed my neck.

  “There you go. It’s good for you.” He meant the water, the exercise. Those humid afternoons in the spring of ’75, sunlight pushing through afternoon fog to paint the bricks around the playground yellow. Girls skipped rope; a transistor radio, belonging to one of the teachers, played Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You,” Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom.” “I’ll give you a ride home, Nate, but I have to stop
and pick something up first.”

  “OK.”

  We waited in the car, a Peugeot that smelled of trapped air and sweat, a sweetness of beach debris, while he stopped in front of a law office and ran inside. We had no idea what he was doing, there at Albrecht Ellis Associates—a small firm, one of those sleepy little businesses in Santa Monica that would’ve had no truck with people in the industry, which is exactly what Williams needed—we didn’t know anything, or care. We sat there panting, fiddling with the radio dial, shoving and jostling. Little Will pointed at my leg.

  “Look.”

  Blood ran down my calf. He wrinkled his nose and snorted. I did too. I didn’t feel anything. The car door opened and Williams ducked back in. He threw a manila folder on the passenger seat.

  “What are you boys up to?”

  We fell into the back, and I looked down to where I’d cut my knee. Williams’s eyebrows lifted a little.

  “Did you hurt yourself?”

  I wouldn’t forget this moment. Who’s to say why? A little scraped skin in a childhood full of it, the pink and pale flesh mixed with the black gum of asphalt and the bright red of my blood. Maybe it was the way it didn’t hurt until someone pointed at it, or how the elder Williams’s face—he had such delicate features, little buttons of sclera and bone—opened up in raw curiosity. He wasn’t like other fathers. There was something missing, but also something extra.

  “D’you need a bandage, Nate? Let’s get you one.”

  Right before he ducked back out to go retrieve the first aid kit that rattled around in the trunk, Bactine and Band-Aids in a white plastic box, right before I burst into tears, I saw it. Williams’s eyes flashed green, his pale lips tugged down at the corners. A wince or a grimace that was nothing like Beau, the fat man I automatically, if not yet consciously, associated with him. It was a terrible expression, small and involuntary: in it were fear and hunger, and some private pain that must’ve mirrored my own, else I would never have noticed it.

  Traffic washed along Wilshire Boulevard, behind him. The yellow air drifted and eddied, with traces of fog and exhaust. Little Will kicked the seat, restlessly, and if either of us had been old enough to open our eyes and stir from our childhood’s sleep—What was in the folder Williams had just retrieved? If I had to guess, it was paperwork surrounding an incorporation: he must’ve been laying his groundwork early, for what else would he have been doing visiting a sleepy little law office like this one? He wasn’t going to divorce his wife, and TAG had its own lawyers, for deals—if we’d been able to do this, what else might we have seen?

  Williams turned and circled around to the trunk. Just another Hollywood father, too, playing hooky for an afternoon. Little Will shoved me. Junior shark. We weren’t too young to be turned on by blood. Just so, I burst out screaming, the need for attention dawning in my consciousness at last.

  VIII

  “I NEED A JOB.”

  “Huh?” The man in the black-and-white shirt looked him over as Beau inhaled. That smell of polish and plastic. “I’m sorry, you don’t really look like someone who—”

  “Beau Rosenwald.” At his weakest, my father always fell back on his name. “I made movies. I was a talent agent.”

  “This is a sporting-goods store.”

  “You think it’s easier to sell actors than shoes?”

  Beau’s face flamed. Imagine what this was like! They were in a store on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, Beau having cornered the manager over by a rack of orange skis. K2, Kneissl. This was how fast you could fall in Hollywood, no matter that you were already near the bottom to begin with. Just days ago he was toe-to-toe with a studio head. Now he was shivering, quavering before some schlub with Bozo tufts.

  “I know more than you think,” Beau said. “Sizing, soles. I used to work in my father’s shop in Queens.”

  The manager was jug-eared, tiny, and balding. His name tag read IRV.

  “You wanna fill out an application?”

  “You think I should?”

  Strange, that beneath his shame, Beau Rosenwald felt peaceful. He’d gone home from the screening last night and slept better than he had in years. In time—sure—the movie would sneak out anyway. Morrison would buy back the negatives and screen it around town, then with Vana’s help they’d be able to find a distributor and show it in New York, Chicago, Montreal. They’d tone down the violence, and so the whole thing might become what it perhaps was always meant to be, a semi-interesting cult movie designed to appeal to distant obsessives. Maybe all Beau did then was submit to fate, there in the side room of Tex’s Sporting Goods. As the excruciation of the moment peaked and then subsided. Shoes.

  The manager looked him up and down. “Get a vest.”

  Hired on the spot, he’d go back to his roots and flog sneakers. This was a comprehensive admission of defeat. Yet it was also oddly satisfying. The fat man, hustling in middle age. He had become what everyone else wanted him to be, had fulfilled some prediction of his failure. This was what it was like, not to be the hero of your own story. Shuffling from stool to storeroom over and over, opening those boxes—size ten, or ten and a half—and removing the shoes from their bundles of tissue paper and lacing them up while he knelt and looked at the toes. How’s that feel? Every box smelled new. Dripping flop sweat, his skin felt buttery as a calf’s. Day in, day out, for three months, five. One afternoon a kid came in and cornered him.

  “You were in that movie, weren’t you? With Davis DeLong?”

  He’d had one line in the picture, played a trooper Udo shot and left for dead at the roadside.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Yes, you were. Morrison Groom’s film. They just showed it to us at AFI. He spoke to our class.” Oh, for God’s sake. There was an enthusiast for everything. “I never forget a face.”

  Beau had forgotten his own face. He said, “Nope.”

  The twins were in public school. Sev and Kate had lived with him at Bryce’s for a while, and then Beau had moved to Santa Monica, closer to his job and his benefactor, who continued to live his off-the-track, bohemian, and domestic life in the Marina. Williams had offered to help with the twins’ private school tuition if Beau wanted them to go to St. Jerome. That’s how good the man was to his friend.

  “Beau?” The phone rang at work, in the afternoon. He picked it up and found his voice recognized straightaway.

  “Yep?”

  “It’s Davis.”

  He was standing on the floor at Tex’s. Wearing his own referee’s shirt and a TEXAS LONGHORNS cap, looking less like anyone who had ever been in the movie business than you can imagine. Like a fucking zebra, stranded there against the store’s puffy neoprene jackets and jumpers.

  “Davis!” The actor had quickly recovered from their debacle and would soon receive a nod for best supporting in a picture he’d just shot opposite Gene Hackman. While Beau was repricing all the skis and hanging out new wetsuits, accommodating the change of season in April. “How’d you find me?”

  “Through Beller.” There was a sound as if he were chewing tobacco, juice flowing down the line. “You’re selling shoes, now?”

  Beau didn’t say anything. Just stood with his name tag and his whistle around his neck and rubbed his chin. The full ridiculousness of his situation had never hit him, or else it hadn’t existed until an actor, a man who tried on and discarded selves like a hyperimaginative three-year-old, pointed it out.

  “I want you to represent me.”

  “What?” Surely this was a joke, fate rubbing his nose in the wet plate of failure.

  “I’m unhappy with Sam. There’s a picture I’m wanting to do at Columbia and he’s trying to talk me out of it.”

  “You don’t think you should listen this time?” Beau laughed.

  “No. Look, Beau, I need your advocacy.”

  “Why me?” Not for the last time, Beau asked this question. “Why d’you want me?”

  “I need a new agent.”

  “I’m inactive. Haven’
t had a client since ’72.”

  “So?”

  “Conflict of interest. I’m a producer. I can’t be an agent and a producer.”

  “Why not? Have you seen any money beyond your original fee?”

  Beau leaned against the glass display case, next to the register. He stared down at jackknives, bandannas, pins for different ski resorts—Alta, Whistler, Mammoth—and thick tubes of Bonne Belle lip gloss. Kate loved it when he brought those home.

  “Not a dime.”

  “So represent me. You’ll sign a waiver, resign from the guild. Whatever it is you have to do.”

  “Why me? Davis, you could have anybody.”

  “Why not you?” Davis said. “You’re Hollywood’s last honest man.”

  Beau rubbed his forehead and stared down, down, down into the case. Root beer was Kate’s favorite flavor, then bubble gum, cherry. He was perspiring, he suddenly realized, his face not just damp but dripping. Was it the thought of a lifetime selling shoes that frightened him, or this other life, in show biz, that scared him half to death?

  “Columbia won’t negotiate with me.”

  “Hmm?”

  His boss swung by and clipped him on the shoulder. Back to work, Rosenwald.

  “You said Columbia. They won’t negotiate with me even if I offer you to them for nothing.”

  “Not true.”

  “Why not?”

  “Vana’s in charge now. Haven’t you heard?”

  Over and over, he’d play this moment in his head. For years there would be nightmares in which he found himself menaced inside Tex’s yellow thicket, clutching an unloaded BB gun against the threat that had already passed. If only, if only, if only he’d said no. Would the rest of his life have been different? Would he have saved himself the greatest tragedy of all? But what he felt when he hung up the phone was a surge of ecstasy so violent he might’ve exploded.

  “Beau, we need you—”

  “Fuck you.” He yanked the phone free of its rickety wall brackets and tossed it onto the floor. His jug-eared boss just stared at him in amazement. “Fuck you, Irv. Nothing personal.” He flung the cap, name tag, whistle behind the register, plunked down ten bucks, and took a fistful of lip gloss. “I’ve got places to be.”