American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “OK.” Little Will pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Obviously, it tore him up still to remember. At last, he said, “All right.”

  The street was silent. The wooden door to the garage was open, but there was no puppy who might escape: Patricia had given Daisy away that morning. For a moment there wasn’t any sound except the wind moving through the leaves of the coral trees and the magnolias, the rustling fronds above.

  IX

  WILLIAMS FARQUARSEN TURNED away from the car. He’d just said goodbye, just rested his palms on the metal strip below the driver’s side window and bid farewell to his wife and child.

  “Bye, Will.” He gave his son a pale smile. “Take care.”

  He watched the Peugeot go gurgling up the street and then turn right, out of view. Any one of us might’ve looked over our shoulders and watched him watching, seen him standing in the middle of a wide residential street on Saturday morning, barefoot and in blue jeans. Severin, Little Will, and I were there. His small frame receded, bracketed by crooked Craftsmen. He looked less like a captain of the film industry and more like an itinerant sailor, a blotch of navy and white. Only the longish red hair distinguished him, made him look—from a distance—a little like the figure on a Cracker Jack box. He turned and prowled, lithe, into the house, his feet slapping at the brick steps. His frame like a burglar’s in the hazy Marina Beach afternoon.

  He took a cool shower. This was his first act, once we were gone, a simple and domestic gesture most people make just once in a day, but Williams usually did twice. He washed his body, five seven, 151 pounds. He had very little hair between his head and his groin. His pale nipples were tiny. In this, too, he might’ve been taken for a boy only slightly younger than we were.

  He washed his hair and he combed it fine. He went downstairs and he read a script and he drank an espresso. The air outside his office held that blasted beach light: almost white. He loved the Marina for this, the way it reminded him of when Marnie and he were young and their son was an infant. Before American Dream Machine, before he was anything himself but a soldier, and this place, the Venice Boardwalk especially, was still dangerous. Asked why he never left the neighborhood—Why don’t you take a place in Malibu, Will?—he prevaricated, but the truth was, he just preferred it. He came here when it was still feral, when there were iron bars on all the windows and the crumbling, low-slung houses belonged to hippies, junkies, and painters, squatters and fags. Looking out the window, he could feel these pressures still. Walking along the boardwalk at night, or riding his bicycle there—those things he still sometimes did—was an invitation to be killed. That hardly stopped him. Some nights he’d wheel the bike home slowly, sauntering along with his expensive watch. Nothing had ever happened.

  Once, he’d stopped and sucked a man’s cock. Twice. The first time had been a kind of awakening, even if he never intended it to happen again. They were in an arcade, right there on the boardwalk. Neither of them had said a word. Will was on his way back from a ride he’d taken late at night, just to clear his head, and he’d spotted someone, a solitary form leaning against one of the columns holding up the portico that ran down portions of the boardwalk. Walking slowly, alongside his bike, Will wasn’t afraid. He knew how to kill a person with his hands.

  The man wore a uniform: blue jeans, leather jacket, T-shirt—that hypermasculine style that, in 1968, only queens wore at the beach. He was tall, muscular, and kept his eyes leveled on the horizon. Will’s flesh pimpled as he approached, but it was just the cold. The air reeked of peanut oil and urine, the dereliction of the area—both the boardwalk and the Santa Monica Pier were harbors for needle traffic—felt in the stinging wind. The man just nodded. A single motion of his head as Will approached. He was clean—Williams could see the pale, masculine sheen of his skin, and even taste the hint of soap in the breeze. But the man simply reached down and began unbuttoning his fly with one hand. There was no eye contact. Williams, entranced, knelt down.

  When he recounted this event to himself later, Williams understood, correctly, that it wasn’t just about sex. He liked transference of power, and information: he loved to dominate a man from below. He liked the secrecy. No one in Hollywood could imagine him here, sucking a hustler’s dick at 2:00 AM. The man made little moaning noises. Will spat semen onto his jeans. Then Will stood up and slapped him. Not hard, but enough to let him know that he—the rugged-looking stud who waited out here for traffic—was the loser in this transaction, the soft one. Not the small man who’d just buckled to his knees.

  Williams wheeled his bicycle home, past T-shirt shops and incense stands, those same, crumbling buildings that are there today: bohemian apartments and hotels renting by the week, coffee parlors and bookshops that sold insurrectionary pamphlets. Aspen, Dreamweapon, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. No one touched him. It wasn’t that his desire was entirely a secret from Marnie. How could it be? Yet Williams kept this part of his personality locked down. It wasn’t strictly a compulsion, that’s what other people wouldn’t have understood. It was a deliberate and rational act. You could indulge your impulses and still be in control of them. This was the biggest rush of all.

  “Will, it’s Teddy.” His Saturday reverie was interrupted by a phone call. He looked up from a script that happened to be about a war. Blinking away cobwebs, he cradled the receiver to his ear. “Sherry Lansing just called me.”

  “How’s our friend?” Will chuckled, looked out at the street: the day had mellowed into a hazy, lazy, June afternoon.

  “She wants John.”

  “John’s not available. Not at her price.” He fingered his empty demitasse cup, studied the dregs. “He’s doing Perfect in the fall, anyway.”

  “She made an offer.”

  Each of these men had his own style. Teddy over the phone was as encouraging as matzoh-ball soup: there was a convalescent warmth; to do business with him was to be made whole.

  “Tell ’er to fuck herself.” Whereas Will’s style forked anger and campy affection; you were quartered until you lost. “Tell her I love her.”

  Teddy sighed. “Four million dollars. It’s on the table till Monday noon.”

  “I’ll talk to her Monday morning,” Will drawled. All sweetness now, he studied the street. “Let her twist a little over the weekend.”

  Poor Beau! He was always too real, not good enough at masking his feelings. Williams loved his former partner, he did, but you could never trust a man who was that easily overwhelmed.

  “John?” Williams picked up the phone and made another call. “Honey, it’s Will. Listen, Sherry Lansing just called . . . ”

  Gossip. Rumors. These things were always there, most often around sexuality, and sometimes Will felt this was really the axis on which not just Hollywood, but all of American life, turned. You managed information, not assets. You never had to tell anyone those things that couldn’t be repeated.

  “So what do you think I should do?” John said.

  You never even had to tell yourself.

  “I think you should take a long walk, and we should talk about it Monday morning. Take the plane up, if you like. Four million dollars will buy you lots of gasoline.”

  For someone who always seemed to know where the pressure points were, Williams was not always aware of his own. The script he’d been reading was about a pair of generals squabbling over control of the Seventh Infantry Regiment in Saigon. For a while, he worked on in silence. But the script had planted an itch. It was always, really, about power. And the apertures left by privacy. Given time on his own, Will’s restlessness expanded. Temptation went to work.

  It’s the dreaming itself that’s dangerous, in the end.

  Will’s home office was narrow, as cluttered as a ship’s kitchen. It wasn’t opulent at all. The adjacent living area was teak-dark, sparsely furnished, its bare cots and tables like an ashram’s. A Motherwell painting, one of the Spanish Elegies, hung on one wall.

  He looked up. Outside, the street was empty, an
d the houses had gone gold around the edges. The phone was quiet, a minor miracle. Usually Saturdays were as bad as any other. He tossed his script aside. The glassy, twilit quiet, the gloom that crept over the yard made him think of Beau. He still did. His ex-partner would come in and disturb him, sometimes, barking and snuffling along the margins of his dreams. He missed the fat man’s laugh.

  The full moon had already risen. It hung over the pitched roofs opposite, a lurid circle strung in a periwinkle sky. Williams went into the living room. This house was inky, sinister: its floors and fixtures were chocolate brown, its walls a brightness-swallowing gold. As you receded within its interior—like a lot of those narrow, crushed-together Craftsmen just a few blocks from the beach, this one faced north—all you found was an ocean of shadow. At night, the effect was overpowering. The place held the phosphorized glow of an old crime-scene photograph. Again, this was the way Williams Farquarsen liked it. All day, he worked in the sky-bound openness of Century City, in one of those drab and candid towers where you looked out and found yourself floating over the horizon like a stupid pilot. Here, he felt sheltered. And he found himself alone.

  He played an old country record. Set the needle down in the groove and listened to the sublime crackling. Take the edge off things. He closed his eyes to the sounds of Ernest Tubb, and then Webb Pierce, whose weird, hillbilly warbles were not exactly the things you’d expect the head of a Hollywood agency to listen to, but everyone has a private life. Some more private than others.

  Williams got dressed. He stood before the bedroom mirror and hid himself, pulling on a threadbare gray T-shirt, ratty jeans, a baseball cap that read—this was long before the movie—CRIMSON TIDE. He looked like trailer trash, a real grease monkey. Earlier, he’d spoken to his wife and son. (“Hi, honey, where are you?” “Just outside Dolan Springs. The car overheated, we had to stop for coolant.”) It gave him pleasure to stand before that mirror and be so easily veiled: from his wife, his child, himself. He loved his family, but nothing took precedence over this peacock display, this preening concealment of the self. With his hair tucked under his cap, he sucked his cheeks to look skinny, haunted, hollow-eyed, and feral. Perhaps this was drag queen stuff after all.

  He took the keys to Marnie’s Opel, and then he drove downtown. There were many places he could go, but like any decent actor, Williams improvised against the script. Breezing through the clammy night, he deliberated. Left turn on Lincoln. There were places in San Pedro, in Long Beach. He felt well hidden, in plain sight. He felt safe. He had clients who relied upon very little disguise, whose belief was that acting was largely interior. David Bowie played John Merrick onstage without makeup. Just as there were actors at the other end of the spectrum, who gained eighty pounds to be boxers, who wore silk underdrawers to become Al Capone. Williams hid his hair, changed his clothes, and the rest was intuition. Privacy was still possible in 1984. Paparazzi never staked out his house; nothing he did was ever going to show up on Defamer. He took the 10, heading east. Even as he passed the 405 interchange, he twitched, and there was a reptilian impulse to switch lanes and go south. But he didn’t. He just kept rolling toward the light, chasing that patchy and disreputable skyline.

  The car vibrated, the air hissed and fluttered. It was one of those nights when the halogen spills from the city and the wild ivy by the freeway is torn by wind and the buildings seem ready to come unmoored. To Williams’s mind, everything seemed edged with meaning and yet not quite ready to fit together, like a puzzle that hasn’t been cut right. Drugs give that feeling, but so does desire. The rectangular green signs, with their reflective white borders and lettering: LA CIENEGA, LA BREA, WESTERN, NORMANDIE. Each one seemed to promise whole zones of erotic distinction, through which he drove ever deeper. He needed to be farther away. The car smelled of monoxide, gas, that stale air of afternoons at the beach: of damp towels, trapped sunlight, and coconut lotion. Chewing gum wrappers sparkled in the ashtray, a crushed pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint. His son’s.

  He got off at Alameda and followed the street north until he was near the bar he remembered. He’d been there twice before. It was a sex club, on one of the streets that held mostly artists’ lofts, garment warehouses, sweatshops. There were plenty of these, and plenty of after-hours clubs too—places that were not exactly strange to young Hollywood, buzzing caverns filled with glassy-eyed teenagers and cheap MDMA—so Williams was taking a risk. But he liked risk. And there were clients of his who liked it too. He’d done it before and escaped unscathed. You could get in and out of this place without being seen. He approached an unmarked metal door and buzzed twice, then climbed a narrow set of unlit stairs. In his hand was a perfect fake California driver’s license, a gift from a director who’d recently done a movie about forgery. He flashed it as he nodded at the doorman, who recognized him without recognizing him.

  Inside, the room was red, that lurid, caramelized pink of strip clubs. Farther back beyond the bar there was a private section, its crimson bulbs thickening the air like a darkroom’s. Will could see the bodies writhing within. There was a smell of sweat, lubricant, poppers, semen, but he stopped, instead, at the bar. Most nights, he did. He hated the indiscriminate prodding of those rooms, stupid cocks as blind as moles. He sat at the bar where there was nobody else and he ordered a Manhattan. Usually, he didn’t drink, but in places like this, he had to: he had to calm his nerves. That chattering exhilaration in his upper chest and throat, a want so close to terror.

  From the next room came moaning, slapping, and rustling. If you went deeper you’d find men dominating others, leather masks, ropes, punishments, sobbing sounds and groans that telegraphed much deeper forms of release. He’d done all this, once let a man put out a cigarette on his chest, but this wasn’t Will’s scene. Role-playing was just too overt. He liked subtlety, one-on-one: the event that pitted him against another guy, starting on the bottom but then arriving on top. In a sense, this was an exact corollary to his business. Except, there, he never bottomed anymore. So he needed to come here.

  His Manhattan arrived. A fey drink, but the whiskey made it fitting for a Southern boy. There was a couple sitting at a table along the far wall, kissing. Like any other couple doing that in a bar, except the one’s fly was unzipped and the other was reaching over to stroke his cock beneath the table. It was huge, Williams could see clearly from where he sat. He watched with only moderate interest. Other men getting it on did nothing for him. He lacked that mirroring response; pornography’s call to echo left him unmoved. Williams was a voyeur, but actual voyeurism, just watching people, wasn’t enough. What he really wanted was to see himself. If it wasn’t impossible, for all kinds of reasons, he’d have wanted to be videotaped. As it stood, he liked to fuck in his automobile, where there were mirrors that afforded at least a tiny glimpse, and where there was privacy of a sort. He could recede to that space in his head where he watched himself, purely.

  Someone came in. Will could hear the footsteps behind him. The exterior room was quiet, perhaps because it was still early, perhaps just because the bar was useless, itself. No one came here to drink. The stereo played the things you’d expect—Yaz, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Sylvester: Hi-NRG disco classics—while behind the bar a muscle-bound skinhead poured drinks from label-less bottles. It really was a generic operation, extending its promise of anonymity even to the things you drank. Not lost on Williams was this supreme irony: his life was entirely branded, yet he came here, of all places, to find his most intimate self. Which could never be revealed. This was the problem, when you lived the way he did. You brokered the stars but were reduced to mere glimpses of your very own fugitive strangeness.

  “Beer.” Burr. The man who’d just come in was one of those cowboy types, those guys with no sense of irony. How Williams hated these! Their sameness brassed him off, just as it did the way some people typified themselves butches, queens, ladyboys, Marlboro men. Walking with a client through Earls Court in London, he’d seen acre upon acre of leather-jacket
ed clones. Imagine being so reducible, an actor with only one role.

  “Ha.” From three seats away, the man spoke. “Can I have your cherry?”

  Williams just looked at him.

  “What’s wrong? I said—”

  “I know what you said. I heard you.” He turned back to the bar.

  The guy had bristle-black hair, a dark mustache below a crew cut. There was a disconnect between the super-short hair and the luxuriant mustache, as furred as a caterpillar.

  “Such a stupid thing to say,” Will muttered. “Are you a high school boy? Is this cotillion?”

  “What?”

  Not too keen, this one. He had a pronounced scar, a vertical groove that cut his forehead and singed an eyebrow. Otherwise, he seemed less memorable even than most. Yet Will’s voice softened, just as it sometimes did on the phone. He sounded distinctly, almost tenderly, Southern.

  “I said”—Ah sed—“is this cotillion? Are you really that witless? I don’t like cowboys.”

  The guy walked over. Williams already knew that they were going to have sex: “liking” didn’t enter into it. The guy sat down next to him. He was ugly, with pitted skin and chapped-looking lips. Small blue eyes, cataracted with darkness.

  “I’m Michael.”

  “Will.” It might’ve been imprudent to use his real name, but Williams could get away with it. He still had on his CRIMSON TIDE cap, his tattered T-shirt. There was a pack of cigarettes in his back pocket. He looked like what he might’ve become if he’d never left Louisiana.

  “You want another?” Michael leaned over and put his hand on Williams’s lower back. “You OK there, handsome?”

  He grunted. The last thing Will wanted from this guy—whose own name was almost certainly not Michael, he could tell—was small talk. But they had another drink and then, when Williams had drained his and set the triangular glass on the bar, the man leaned over to kiss him.