Tricks Of The Trade

by Ben Tyler

  “He doesn’t need a job. He’s doing this as a favor to Warren Beatty. Anyway, from what I can tell, he’s interviewing Shari—not the other way around.”

  “Why do I feel like Agnes Gooch and you’re Auntie Mame, sending me to a party with Brian O’Bannion?”

  “Because ‘Life is a banquet, darling!’ Are you never going to let me make amends for Fallongate? I consider myself completely responsible for your asshole. And I don’t necessarily mean the one who dumped you.”

  “I’m going back to my office,” Bart confirmed. “But do not, I repeat, do not send him down to me unless you’ve thoroughly cross-examined him. If he’s found guilty of interest in at least the second degree, okay? No less. Promise?”

  “On Shari’s grave!”

  “That’s my real fantasy.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I’m closing my door for a while,” Bart said to Cheets. “If a dog trainer comes looking for me, let him in.”

  “Since when did you get a doggie?” she asked in her usual have-to-know-it-all prying manner.

  “I’m thinking about buying one.”

  “Poor little beast. I mean the dog. You’re never home. You’ll have a latchkey puppy. It’ll grow up to be as dysfunctional as—”

  Bart closed his door on her and crossed to his desk chair. As dysfunctional as me? he supposed was Cheets’s unheard assessment.

  He sat down, turned on the CD player on the credenza behind him, and filled the room with the sound track from Somewhere in Time. He looked at the glossy, three-color brochure, which featured the CGA wearing jeans and a khaki safari shirt rolled up above his elbows. He was kneeling beside four dogs of various breeds and offering a blinding smile for the camera. The photo caption read: Dr. Rusty Stone (center) and family.

  Bart began reading the text of the brochure:

  RUSSELL STONE, Ph.D.

  Domestic Animal Behaviorist

  A graduate of Exeter Agricultural Institute, with a master’s in animal husbandry, and a doctorate in veterinary medicine from UC Davis, Russell “Rusty” Stone is one of the leading animal trainers-both wildlife and domestic pets-in the United States. His devotion to…

  There was a knock on the door. “It’s unlocked,” Bart called as he pushed the brochure aside and picked up a sheaf of papers and a red pen, pretending to be editing the text of the press kit for Diane Keaton’s new comedy.

  The door opened, and the CGA person—or young Mike Farrell/Tom Wopat clone—beamed as he poked his head in. “Bart?”

  “Guilty.” Bart smiled back, pretending not to recognize whom he was speaking to, let alone that they had just exchanged vibrations in Shari’s office.

  “I’m Rusty Stone. Mitch said you were having problems with your schnoodle?”

  Cheets howled. “Is that what they’re calling it now?” She laughed a booming, hear-me-in-the-last-row-of-the-balcony voice.

  Bart shook his head in a “Don’t pay any attention to her” gesture.

  Rusty went on. “Mitch asked me to come down to see if I could help you out.”

  “Oh, you’re the animal trainer from Shari’s office. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you. You were sitting down. I didn’t know you were so tall. Come in. Close the door.”

  “Is this a good time? I don’t want to interrupt your work.”

  “Yes. It’s perfect. Almost time to wrap it up and get the heck out of Dodge, anyway, so to speak. Have a seat. So, you train animals? Shari’s certainly an interesting breed, isn’t she? She really needs discipline—or, rather, her Jack Russell needs discipline. Shari just needs a muzzle and some doggie downers.”

  “Saturday Night Live, the mock commercial,” Rusty said, relating to the doggie downers reference.

  “You remember that one?”

  “Jane Curtin, wasn’t it? How about Quarry, the breakfast cereal?”

  “One of my all-time favorites.” Bart laughed. “I thought it was a real commercial. ‘Bass-O-Matic’ and all that John Belushi stuff was too over the top. A lot of great stuff over the years. Wish Lorne Michaels had been able to keep up that originality.”

  “Love your choice in music, by the way.” Rusty indicated the CD player. “That’s my favorite score. Actually, anything by John Barry is my favorite, and much of Richard Rodney Bennett.”

  “The love theme from Nicholas and Alexandra!”

  “My God. I thought I was the only one who knew about his genius.”

  Bart said, “Dare I expose my ardent admiration for Karen Carpenter and jeopardize bursting this bubble?”

  “My heart is still broken,” Rusty said solemnly. “I went to her funeral.”

  “So did I!”

  They stared at one another for a long moment, in that way people do when they visit the Louvre for the first time and suddenly turn around and unexpectedly find Aphrodite. The real, original Aphrodite. There is awe and wonder that transcends words.

  Finally coming up out of his reverie, Rusty began telling Bart how difficult it would be to train Shari’s dog, since Shari herself could not be bothered with finding the time to be present for any of the sessions. He explained how important it was for the master or the mistress to be there for each lesson and to work with the pet throughout the week. “It’s not like sending an inconvenient child away to a convent or boarding school. A dog doesn’t just come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations.”

  As Rusty spoke, Bart surreptitiously broke eye contact for a split second to glance at Rusty’s ring finger. No wedding band. The furtive glance was not lost on Rusty, who took a moment of his own to look at Bart’s hands. A signet ring adorned his right-hand ring finger. Nothing on the left. They both smiled at each other. If they’d been the stars of that old television series My Favorite Martian, this is where their antenna would have protruded from their respective skulls: Their gaydar was transmitting signals back and forth like NASA to the Hubble telescope.

  “So, about your schnoodle?” Rusty broke the spell but kept his perennial smile.

  Bart decided to level with him. He didn’t want to play games or lie and then have to try to remember what he’d said that wasn’t true, only half-true, only completely false. “Listen. I’m really sorry. I don’t have a schnoodle.”

  “That’s too bad,” Rusty said with a mischievous grin.

  “Mitch sent you down here because—”

  “You were anxious to find a new schnoodle to replace your old schnoodle?” Rusty interrupted. “He said you were in a quandary, that you didn’t want to make the same mistake and tackle a big schnoodle when perhaps a standard-size schnoodle would do.”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Bart laughed. “Oh, that Mitch. He always knows how to make a guy uncomfortable.”

  “No need to feel anything but what you’re feeling. I’ve known Mitch forever. He’s definitely a bitch. In dog terms, I mean. But he also said some other things. Since you’re about to leave, what do you say we have dinner and talk about…schnoodles? Or just teaching old dogs new tricks?”

  “Now that’s the kind of training I could use,” Bart said. “I need a little discipline—about leaving the office at a reasonable time, anyway. Let’s go.”

  Bart quickly cleared his desk, turned off his computer, put his telephone on CALL FORWARD and opened the door, allowing Rusty to lead the way. “I’m outta here, Cheets,” Bart called. “See you in the morning.”

  Exiting Sterling’s publicity building, Bart and Rusty walked past soundstages 14, 15, and 16, eventually arriving at the employee parking structure. Along the way, Bart gave Rusty a brief history lesson about the classic films that had been made on the lot.

  “Anyplace in particular you’d like to eat?” Rusty asked.

  “Anywhere we can talk over a bottle of wine.”

  “Italian all right? How about La Strega, over on Ventura? Great food and not too noisy.”

  “I love that place. Meet you there in about twenty. Depending on traffic.”

  “Don’t try the freeway
this time of night,” Rusty suggested. “Take Riverside to Coldwater, then up to Ventura. I’ll call from the car and get a table on the patio. It’s such a nice evening, we shouldn’t be stuck indoors.”

  During the ride to the restaurant Bart conjured up thoughts about Rusty: Here was a guy, obviously intelligent (if the academic credentials mentioned in his brochure were any indication), attractive, sensitive enough to work with animals, seemingly unattached, and making the first move to suggest they have dinner. Bart had, just that morning, decided to consider the idea that he might begin to see other men. But he didn’t think he’d actually meet anyone, at least not so quickly. He had been busy and, frankly, just not interested. Until now.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Bart,” he said to himself as he drove along the route, staying as close behind Rusty’s carnival red Jaguar as traffic allowed. “It’s only dinner, for crying out loud. You might not even have anything to really talk about.”

  He knew that he had a habit of looking on the negative side of potential relationships. God knows, after being burned by Rod, he wasn’t getting his hopes up too high.

  By the time Bart found a parking space along a side street and walked into the restaurant, it was five minutes after Rusty had been seated at a table exactly as he’d said, on the patio, under an outdoor gas heater. Springtime evenings in Los Angeles were usually chilly. The desert cooled down at night except when the Santa Ana winds were blowing. This was not one of those nights. The hostess escorted Bart to the table, and Rusty stood up like a gentleman and shook Bart’s hand, as if they hadn’t seen each other in a long time and were keeping a long-standing dinner engagement.

  Within moments of Bart’s unfolding his white linen napkin and placing it on his lap, the waiter came over with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. “I hope you don’t mind,” Rusty explained, “I took the liberty of ordering a bottle. You do like red, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” Bart said as the waiter displayed the bottle for Rusty’s approval. As soon as the cork was removed, Rusty advised the waiter that there was no need for the pretentious gesture of taste-testing the wine before both glasses were filled. “I trust you implicitly,” he said, smiling, thus ingratiating himself to the waiter.

  It was soon evident that Rusty was the type of individual who charmed everybody he met. The lowliest bread boy and the restaurant’s owner were equals in his eyes. They were all treated with the same respect and consideration. Thank-yous (but not the obsequious, overly courtly type of gestures) were distributed equally to the shy young man who poured olive oil from a cruet into a ceramic dish for dipping sponges of bread, to the waiter’s recitation of the evening’s menu specials, to the refilling of their wineglasses before they were empty, to the brushing of crumbs off the tablecloth, to the return of his American Express card after the check had been signed.

  By the end of the evening, after exchanging respective, abbreviated life stories, including mention of recent disastrous relationships, both men could hardly believe where the time had gone. Both had enjoyed the same meal: chicken risotto, no dessert, and a cup each of peppermint tea. To their mutual amazement, they found that although their careers were completely different, their appreciation of specific music and literature (classic and popular) and film and theater (they had both seen the same shows during their initial Broadway runs) was practically identical. There had not been a single instance during the night when either had pretended to agree with the other when it came to the merits of particular writers, artists, and political and religious figures, past and present.

  “My God. We’re like Richard Bach and Leslie Parrish,” Rusty said. Bart caught the reference to the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions and his wife.

  “They’re absolute soul mates,” Bart agreed.

  The latter title, they both vehemently agreed in unison, was really the Bible and not a work of fiction.

  “Well,” suggested Bart, “we can’t let this be the last of our conversations, can we? What’s on your agenda for this Friday night?”

  “You are,” Rusty said, leaning forward across the table to speak. “I’m clearing my calendar. This time, I’ll cook.”

  “He cooks, too!” Bart exclaimed to no one in particular and yet to the entire restaurant. “What can I bring?”

  “Sounds cliché, but just bring yourself. And your schnoodle.” Rusty was wearing the roguish grin again. “Oh, that’s right.” He snapped his fingers in mock disappointment. “You don’t have one. Pooh. Guess we’ll have to make due with my schnauzer.”

  Both men were laughing as they got up from the table and exited the restaurant. Once outside, as Rusty was waiting for the valet attendant to bring his Jaguar around, he said, “One last confession before you go. When I left Shari’s office, I was the one who asked Mitch who the guy was who had interrupted the meeting. You looked…adorable, although I must say a bit intimidated by Shari. I thought to myself, Hmmm, this guy’s interesting.”

  Bart confessed, “You’re the only good thing that’s ever come out of ‘Scary Shari’s’ office! Usually it’s just four-letter words that she hurls at me.”

  “You deserve more respect,” Rusty said seriously. “We all do. After I observed her treatment of you, I told her I couldn’t train her dog. I don’t work for, or associate with, the kind of people who give off Shari’s low-level vibrations. There’s too much odious energy emanating from her chi. I could feel it as strongly as I feel the opposite from you.”

  Bart was speechless, aware that he was definitely smitten with Rusty. Especially with the man’s positive outlook on life. Ever since beginning his job at Sterling, Bart had struggled with being surrounded by negative energy. The attitudes of the upper-level managers to whom he reported as well as the egos of the stars and the downtrodden secretaries and assistants combined to make the atmosphere of the publicity department redolent with cynicism, fear, and malevolence. These were among the reasons Bart hated working in Hollywood. It wasn’t his job he disliked. The writing was, for the most part, pleasant enough. It was the difficult, unhappy personalities with whom he had to interact twelve to fourteen hours a day that caused his anxiety. It was starting to dawn on him that these caustic attitudes and negative vibrations were insinuating themselves into his own temperament. As if through osmosis he was absorbing the cynical characteristics of those with whom he worked. It was not a pretty sight.

  When Rusty’s car arrived, he hugged Bart good night. Then he thanked the valet and handed him a five-dollar tip. Rusty raised his hand to acknowledge good-bye as he pulled into traffic on Ventura.

  Bart floated the two blocks to his car, realizing that aside from the brief disclosure of his most recent relationship, he hadn’t thought of Rod at all during the evening. For the first time since meeting Rod in January, he drove home with renewed interest in his own life.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rod closed the sliding-glass door to his room as he sang the theme song from the old television comedy The Jeffersons.

  He was moving up, all right, to Jim Fallon’s dee-luxe mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Rod was leaving West Hollywood for good and not about to look back. After weeks of skillful maneuvering and convincing Jim that their sex life was mutually extraordinary, Rod got the invitation he’d been wrangling for—and a charge account at the Gap.

  Rod had quit his job at the Trap and deleted his Rotoroot4U screen name from AOL. He tried to maintain one important vestige of his past—his gym membership—but Jim wouldn’t hear of it and surprised him by turning an unused wardrobe closet (the size of Rod’s old room) into a weight-lifting area. Jim even promised to hire a personal trainer.

  “For yourself, maybe,” Rod said with indignation, then quickly realized he’d blundered. “I mean, we’re never too young to do cardio,” he amended, feigning consideration for Jim’s health. He couldn’t have Jim thinking that he had any complaints about his ugly body. That could spoil Rod’s plans.

  The office for Rod th
at Jim had set up and decorated came complete with a brand-new computer, a huge oak desk, matching file cabinets, and a personal account at Staples for all the supplies he would need to continue his writing. Unfortunately, however, Rod’s writing time was becoming less and less productive. Day after day he got to the computer later and later. He’d no sooner sit in the plush leather chair and begin a new scene for his new screenplay than Jim would show up with a martini in one hand and his cock in the other.

  As far as Jim was concerned, he was keeping Rod and was therefore entitled to sex whenever he damn well felt horny, which was at least twice during the day, again at bedtime, during the night if he woke up, and of course, first thing in the morning, when he was at his most randy—and least attractive. Halitosis was not a pleasant wake-up call.

  Rod, having no place else to go, no job, and no extra cash from the tricks he used to troll for over the Internet, was basically a prisoner, albeit on an extraordinary estate. “The Island of Dr. Morose,” he called it. If he didn’t submit to Jim’s sexual demands, they had arguments, which ultimately led to Jim’s feelings being hurt and Rod giving in, anyway, just to appease Jim and maintain the status quo. It wasn’t that Rod was afraid of being thrown out of Jim’s hilltop manse. He’d find other digs soon enough. He was more concerned that Blind as a Bat wouldn’t get produced if Jim lost interest in him. Nothing else but the screenplay mattered to Rod.

  Michael, too, was coming around more often, doing what he could with what clout he had to resurrect Jim’s crash-and-burn career. At Jim’s behest, Michael was supposedly representing Rod’s work as well.

  As far as Rod was concerned, Michael dropped by “Fallon’s Lair” too often—especially when he’d arranged an audition for Jim. He made it known to Rod right away that he, too, expected sex in exchange for prestigious Actors and Others representation. “When the cat’s away…” He grinned when he came to collect his reward for not telling Jim about Rod’s past life. And he came to collect often.