Tricks Of The Trade

by Ben Tyler

  “Like I’m not already?” Bart paused. “I’ll start as soon as I get to the studio, but this is going to take days.”

  “Then just read what I’ve flagged.”

  “Make up the bed when you’re finished sleeping, will you?”

  “Sure. I’ll change the sheets, too.”

  “No. Don’t do that,” Bart said as he left the room. It would have seemed strange to explain, but he wanted another opportunity to lie in bed, even if he was completely alone, knowing that Rod’s naked body had left its scent somewhere on the sheets and pillowcases. He grabbed his leather jacket from the hall closet and walked out of the apartment.

  In the car, Bart placed the seven-hundred-plus pages of double-spaced text on white bond paper on the passenger seat. He looked at it with the dread of knowing he’d have to at least skim the damn thing.

  Once at the studio, Bart first made a pot of coffee. Then he listened to his messages. Shari (angry). Shari (livid). Angelina Jolie (incensed), Shari (furious), Rusty (affectionate), Shari (petulant).

  Then he logged on to his computer to retrieve his E-mail. There were twenty-seven postings since the night before. Red flags meant they were urgent. But Bart dismissed them. He’d read his cyber mail when the office officially opened. This was his time.

  He wasn’t in any hurry to begin poring through the voluminous manuscript. He had glanced at the first page while at a stoplight on the way to the studio and immediately noticed long run-on sentences. The book was going to be a chore to wade through; of that he was certain.

  Bart hated having to read other people’s unpublished work. As the head writer at Sterling and the author of a book about the behind-the-scenes making of Encino Man with Brendan Fraser (the only reason to write the book in the first place) as well as some short stories here and there and feature articles, novices were constantly after him to read their stuff. They all wanted the same thing: to be told how wonderful their work was and how, with a little more effort, they would be the next Armistead Maupin or Edmund White. They also wanted access to Bart’s agent or publisher with a letter of recommendation.

  Finally, with a sigh of resignation, Bart picked up Jim’s manuscript. He propped his feet up on his desk and placed the manuscript in his lap. He leaned slightly back in his chair and began to read:

  Page 1. Chapter One.

  LOVE ME AND LEAVE ME

  “I cried for forty-eight hours straight!” Jim began. “When that bitch Meredith on Totally Hollywood aired that two-part and completely false and slanderous piece about me, with her doctored videotape, I was so humiliated, I left the studio in the middle of a taping, went to bed, and with my clothes still on, drew myself into a fetal position and cried myself to sleep! I awoke two days later, ready to fight for the truth! This is why I am writing this book, which is meant as an explanation to all my fans and a vindication of my virtue.”

  The first chapter was wretched. Bart found himself laughing not only at Jim’s lack of writing skills but also his whining about the travails of being a star and how his fame got in the way of having an ordinary sex life. While most celebrities complained about lack of privacy, Jim merely griped about sex. He tried to explain how he got caught on a videotape being raped by a gang of mad South Central Los Angeles bangers. He said that he had been followed home from a party by a car filled with six tough guys. They crashed through the estate gate to get to him before he reached the safety of his house and the security alarm system.

  “As I pleaded for my life in what was supposed to be the sanctuary of my guarded estate, I was wrestled to the ground and severely beaten!” he wrote. “When I eventually regained consciousness, I found myself tied up in my own wine cellar! I was a prisoner in my own home, and I was terrified!” Jim ended nearly every sentence with an exclamation point.

  “The ugliest of the gang members, the one who seemed to be the leader, decided he wanted to videotape the big, important TV star that he and his cohorts had just bagged! I know some Spanish, from trying to teach my cleaning lady how to properly iron toilet paper, so I understood that they wanted to sell the video to the highest bidder—on eBay!”

  Bart groaned. It was highly unlikely that gangstas from South Central would be hawking porn on eBay.

  “Then, when I finally thought I had found an opportunity to fight back, I was overpowered by the entire hoard of thugs! They had their way with me. Then they found a cattle prod that had been used as a gimmick prop on my sitcom and they decided it would be funny to use it on me for real! It was the darkest moment of my life! I vowed it was the last time I would ever take home a prop that belonged to the show—especially a potentially dangerous one!”

  Bart knew better than to buy any of this. First of all, there had never been a burglary-and-assault situation. The Star or the Enquirer would have detailed the incident immediately if it had really occurred and been reported to the LAPD. If something as innocuous as George Michael flashing his reknowned genitalia in a Beverly Hills public restroom and could be “News at Eleven” as well as Leno’s opening jokes for a week, then surely they couldn’t have kept Jim Fallon off the night sergeant’s report.

  Second, Jim was well known in various communities, not just among gays, for hiring Latin prostitutes to rough him up. Even his neighbors complained about the types of men who didn’t belong in the area running in and out of Jim’s estate. It was the worst-kept secret that Jim had a penchant for being gagged and hog-tied as a prelude to sex.

  Third, the underprivileged from South Central most likely would not know how to use sophisticated video equipment and make such a professional-looking tape.

  Fourth, Bart was unaware of an episode of The Grass Is Always Greener in which a cattle prod was used. The closest the show came to such a scenario was when Grammy, played by Lily Pudetra, a third-rate road-company version of comic stalwart Doris Roberts, threatened her grandchildren by holding their pet hamster over the open cylinder of a Cuisinart while turning the machine on and off, making the scalpel-sharp blades rotate like a fan.

  With her patented disingenuous smile and sweet-tempered voice, Lily had said, “Alrighty now. Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio here has been awfully depressed lately. Which of you future cocksuckers is going to tell their sweet little ol’ Grammy where they hid her brand-new copy of her favorite Freddie Prinze Jr. video before Leo jumps down the chute to commit suicide?”

  The slack-jawed kids didn’t have to pretend to be mortified. They suspected their TV grandmother was, in real life, quite capable of mixing Leonardo in with the homemade pizza dough she was supposed to be making in that particular scene.

  Bart remembered that episode because it was especially hilarious and the fanatics at PETA and Actors and Others for Animals had gone more insane than usual and tried to have the episode banned. Their ads in TV Guide and USA Today only made the ratings soar. Lily even received an Emmy Award nomination.

  And finally, on the tape, why was Jim’s cock as hard as the plastic dildos he bought at the Pleasure Chest on Santa Monica Boulevard the whole time he was supposedly being tortured?

  “Hell, I’d be as limp as a telephone cord if I wasn’t having the slightest bit of fun with sex and if it looked like my final performance might be in a snuff film,” Bart said aloud.

  Bart recalled that by the time the tape was ready to end, Jim climaxed like a geyser without anyone so much as touching his less-than-average-size dick.

  Bart decided that, so far, this book was simply too far-fetched to be anything but fiction. It was as silly as Liberace claiming that three times he’d “come close” to being married (to a woman). It was all horseshit.

  A few chapters later, Bart found himself rolling his eyes while reading about the failure of Jim’s engagement to a woman that he called “Jenny.”

  Jim admitted that Jenny wasn’t the woman’s real name. He wanted to protect her virtue by using a pseudonym. From all that Bart knew of Jim’s sexual proclivities—made even more clear by the s/m videotapes, and Rod had abscon
ded with a dozen more from a fully stocked vault—this Jenny was probably a Jeremy. Or, more likely, Rod.

  Chances were, like O.J. vowing to find Nicole’s “real” killer, Jenny/Jeremy/Rod was probably in the same halfway house occupied by fictional ex-girlfriends and beards of closeted gay stars who were too freaked about their sexuality and thus continued to pass themselves off as breeders in order to keep the public buying their records, flocking to their movies, or watching their dumb-assed television sitcoms.

  Jim’s reminiscence about hearing the horrifying news of his television show’s cancellation was another complete lie. He claimed to be completely mystified about the cancellation of the network’s number-one sitcom. He had heard the rumors. The truth was, old enemies were out to defame him. Of course, as soon as his infamous video was leaked to Totally Hollywood, he knew the years of rolling sixes or eights had finally hit craps.

  Bart’s first response to the beginning of the book was to bemoan how poorly the text was written. There didn’t seem to be any continuity of thought. Transitions were practically nonexistent. It was like a schizophrenic unable to censor his thoughts or the stream-of-conscious babbling of the venomous Rev. Don Wildmon and his American Family Association, going on about how the Pillsbury Dough Boy commercials and the muscular Mr. Clean solvent ads contained subliminal messages from GLAAD, trying to advance “the homosexual agenda” and corrupting “traditional family values.” Bart found himself nearly nodding off from boredom a number of times.

  Then, suddenly, like the explosion from a firecracker, the book kicked into some kind of fourth-dimension high gear.

  It was as though a voice other than the author’s had come along and possessed the pages, like a demon. The prose became startling, as though the combined nefarious spirits of Cindy Adams and Mr. Blackwell had suddenly taken over. It was the Fatty Arbuckle scandal magnified to the power of a billion. Only this time it wasn’t an obese comic fucking a starlet to death with a Coke bottle. It was the Gen-X Father Knows Best unloading the best of the worst about the nutty, slutty world of Hollywood.

  By page 75, Bart was hooked. Until then, the only value of the book was in finding out more than anybody would want to know about the night a drunk Frank Sinatra came to the Comedy Room on Sunset Boulevard and had heckled Jim while one of the cocktail waitresses stooped down and put her head under the dime-size table and in plain sight of the whole room gave “Ol’ Blue Eyes” a blow job in the middle of Jim’s set. All Jim could say was to parody Estelle Reiner from When Harry Met Sally: “I won’t have what she’s having!” The audience tried in vain to suppress their laughter. After Jim’s set, bodyguards kicked his ass in the parking lot behind the club.

  Then there was the evening that diva Deena Rose brought an entourage that included Bob Mackie and how Rose had talked throughout Jim’s entire set. When Jim tried to comically harass the group to quiet down, Mackie became so embarrassed by his friends and sympathetic to the talent onstage that he stood up and, like the gentleman that he is, publicly apologized. This, however, made Jim appear to be a number-one asshole. A tourist from a chartered bus that was idling outside became outraged at Jim for throwing a fit at “that nice costume designer from the old Carol Burnett Show.” Then she threw the contents of her glass of watered-down Chablis at Jim’s crotch.

  Until page 75, Jim had recounted vague incidents of the people he met day in and day out in Hollywood. He talked of the male casting agents who had him take off his shirt under the pretense that the roles most likely to come along were for the daytime dramas and they required guys with decent builds. These so-called agents often took snapshots of Jim with disposable cameras. More than a few times, an agent was obviously jacking off under his desk as Jim bared his chest and showed what at the time was a perfectly acceptable physique. The subsequent years of stardom, with all his drinking, overeating, and indulgence of recreational drugs, had taken their toll. But when he was starting out, he had an above-average-looking upper torso. Although no matter how many exercises he performed, chicken legs would be his lifetime affliction.

  Still he couldn’t get work. Until the day that the owner of the Comedy Room caught his routine during an open-mike night. Jim retold the oft-quoted story about how she gave him a spot every Monday night for a month. Monday was typically the slowest night of the week, so she felt she had nothing to lose and maybe something to gain. She also made a few phone calls to agents and suggested they come around and take a look at this new guy.

  Michael Scott was one of the agents.

  Over the years many muffin magazines had printed variations on this theme of “discovery.” The only thing new in this book was Jim revealing that Michael, after watching Jim’s performance, sensed that a star was about to be born and wound up the evening schmoozing, then fucking the unknown comic to get him to sign an agency contract.

  Michael was so stupid, he didn’t realize it was supposed to be the other way around: Wanna-bes fucked talent reps. Talent reps made empty promises. Wanna-bes kept fucking talent reps. Talent reps go on to new wanna-bes. That was the typical Hollywood game. In this case, however, Michael was both horny and impressed by this particular wanna-be’s stage presence. In short order, there was the series and major stardom for Jim. It shouldn’t have worked out so well. But it did.

  As 9:00 A.M. loomed, Bart couldn’t put down the manuscript. On every page after 75 he read the names of people he recognized, including some of his colleagues: Shari Draper, Cy Lupiano, CEO Rotenberg, as well as star-crossed John Landis, movie-star slut Mare Dickerson, Betty Ford regular Britteny Austin, tempestuous, tantrum-throwing bully Stan Murray, egomaniacal director Michael Mann, Heidi Fleiss, Madonna, Kurt Cobain, Margeaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson, among many others.

  The pages were peppered with the names of stars, with numerous footnotes about each. They all seemed somehow connected. The “six degrees of separation” link appeared to be dead producer Don Simpson, whose demise was as poetic as justice comes—one of the biggest shits in Hollywood dying on the toilet! While Hollywood pretended to grieve and honor the whacked-out druggie with a memorial service on a friggin’ soundstage, practically everybody who ever knew Simpson smiled at the idea that the Wicked Witch of the West was dead—and such an unforgettable way to die.

  As Bart read along, he decided that truth is stranger than fiction, but this was too on-the-nose to be anything but a play-by-play of the people Jim had to deal with at the studio, as well as guest stars on his show.

  The door to Bart’s door was closed. When Cheets arrived at 9:40, her delight at thinking she had, for the first time, come in before her boss was short-lived when she used the spare key to unlock and open his door. Bart was still reading. “I’m not in yet,” he told his assistant. “If anybody asks about me, I had car trouble. Close the door, please.”

  Cheets was nothing if not happy to be in on something clandestine. She lived to lie. Or, as she called it, “practicing my character study of a sociopath.” She closed the door as instructed.

  Bart then picked up his cell phone and dialed Rod’s private number.

  Rod didn’t answer. He was probably at the gym. Now that he was out of Jim Fallon’s house, he had borrowed enough money from Bart to rejoin his health club and spent at least three hours a day there. His voice mail picked up.

  “Rod, it’s Bart,” he said quietly. “I’ve read a lot of the book. We have to meet. This is a crazy day for me, but we have to talk. Don’t call back at the office. Just meet me at the Griffith Park Observatory at twelve-thirty. If you can’t make it, call me at that time—not before—on my cell. Got it? See you then, I hope.”

  After shutting off the phone, Bart placed the manuscript in his shoulder bag and zipped it closed. He then put the leather bag into the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and locked the three-drawer unit. Then he opened his office door and acted as though he were ready for a regular day of business.

  At noon, Bart reversed the procedure, unlocking the file cabi
net and retrieving his bag. He left the office and walked with purpose to the parking structure. All along the way he felt as though he were carrying a load of narcotics and was being trailed by a contingent of DEA officers. He thought he probably looked conspicuous, and if he’d been disembarking from a jet landing in Europe, he’d be stopped at customs.

  For the first time, he paid attention to warning signs posted all around the parking structure: “All cars subject to search.” He’d never known anyone whose car had been singled out, but he thought, I’ll be the first. Bart waved to the guard as he drove past the gate and off the studio lot.

  Entering the freeway at Riverside Drive, he drove along the 134 to where it split to the 5, taking the off-ramp to Los Feliz, and from there drove up to Griffith Park. On the wide carpets of lawn, Hispanic families were picnicking. Studs from West Hollywood, dressed in Speedo’s, getting a head start on the tanning season, also had their blankets spread out. He saw them occasionally reach into their Coleman ice chests for a bottle of Evian water.

  Bart took the long, serpentine road and followed the signs that directed motorists to the hilltop observatory, which on a clear day could be seen from all over the city, like the Hollywood sign.

  Arriving at the observatory, Bart parked his car, grabbed his shoulder bag, and walked around the grounds outside the massive art deco-style building that always made him think of the climactic scene from Rebel Without a Cause, which was shot on this very location. James Dean and Sal Mineo were still both hot guys all these years after their respective bizarre deaths. And with the previously secret details of Dean’s gay life now established, Bart could only imagine what must have gone on between him and Mineo.

  At 12:30 he saw Rod’s Dodge Dart pull up into the parking area. Dressed in blue jeans and a white athletic shirt that showed off his muscles and his tattoos, Rod looked around until he finally spotted Bart standing by one of the many coin-operated telescopes that allowed a viewer to magnify the city below.