“We better stay with him,” Bone said. “He’s pretty shook.”
Valerie coolly regarded Bone. “Unlike you.”
“Yeah—unlike me.”
In the elevator, alone together, she kept at him. “Admit it—this is kind of what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“Failure? Sure, it’s my bag.”
“I’m serious.”
Bone met her snowy gaze for three or four floors. “Could be,” he said finally. “Anyway, this way we stay out of jail.”
“Did you really deliver it?”
“What?”
“The message, of course. The note.”
“No, I ate it.”
“The truth,” she demanded. “Please, Rich.”
“It tasted kind of dry,” he told her.
When they reached their room Cutter went into the bathroom and locked the door. After a few minutes of ominous silence he came out again and told Valerie to give him some more money.
“Twenty anyway,” he said. And when she hesitated a moment he shouted at her. “Come on, goddamn it! It’s our bread, remember! Our gig, sweetheart. So give!”
Valerie gave. And Cutter, stuffing the bills into his pocket, left the room.
“Where’s he going?” Valerie asked.
“The bar.”
“You said we should stick with him.”
“Up here, yeah. But he can’t jump out of the bar. Ground floor, remember?”
“I still think we should be with him.”
“Whatever you say.”
That was not enough for her. “You know how he is.”
“I know how he is.”
Her look now was not unlike that of the Dakota schoolteacher, resentful and aggrieved. Saying she had to freshen up first, she went into the bathroom.
Bone lit a cigarette and walked out onto the balcony to watch the Los Angelenos on the freeway below, hundreds of them pouring past every minute, a cataract of steel and plastic and humanoid hate-sweat roaring down the poisoned air. And he found it singularly appropriate that just last night Valerie—this day’s new enemy—had offered him a kind of love or at least what had come to pass for love, here, just a few feet above it all, this modern Inferno, this better hell built by man. As always, just the sight of it somehow fortified Bone’s cynicism, gave second wind to his enduring despair. He knew it all really was not worth thinking about anymore, had become a kind of catechism at best. Life was brutal and ugly and one endured it alone and any love or beauty he found along the way was purely accidental and usually short-lived. Nothing in and of itself had value. There was no gold standard in life. The currency was paper, a constantly devaluing paper. Of course. And what else was new?
Valerie finally emerged from the bathroom, looking no different as far as Bone could see. In silence the two of them took the elevator down to the lower lobby and the cocktail lounge situated at the end of the pool. It was large and sunlit, hardly the sort of place Bone would have preferred for an afternoon of drinking, especially with Cutter in the mood he was in. But then the choice as usual was not his to make. Alex had taken a table almost in the center of the room and he was leaning back in his chair against a pillar while his right leg, the steel-and-plastic one, was propped on a corner of the table, close to a double martini. And he was smoking a cigar, a panatella with a silver band still on it. Seeing Bone and Valerie, he waved them in like a Mafia don granting an audience.
After they had ordered drinks, Cutter pounded the table. “Now isn’t this just goodsie fudgie,” he said. “The three of us here together again, old palsies having a few drinks, saying a few words over the body.”
“Oh, come on,” Valerie protested. “I don’t see why we’re so down. We can still keep trying to reach the man. What difference will a couple of days make?”
Bone explained. “The note said it all. And if that didn’t bring him around, what will? We keep trying to reach him, he’ll call in the police. It’s that simple.”
“Maybe he didn’t get the note,” Valerie said.
Bone looked at her. “He got it.”
“Then I say write another. Keep trying.”
Cutter buried her in cigar smoke. “Aw, come off it,” he told her.
“Off what?”
“Face it, lady. We bombed.”
“I can’t see why it’s so final. We can’t just give up so easy. We’ve got to keep trying.”
“Pollyanna want a cracker?” Cutter offered her one of the pretzel sticks the waitress had just served, along with a round of drinks.
Valerie ignored the offering.
And Cutter snorted derisively. “Jesus, I am some winner, huh? Ain’t this some beautiful streak I got going? You know what I am, kiddos—a modern Midas. A reverse Midas. Everything I touch turns to shit.”
Bone drank to that. “Bravo Alex—that’s the attitude. No sense just accepting it, that Wolfe isn’t our man. Let’s wallow in self-pity instead. Let’s cover ourselves with crap.”
Cutter nodded in solemn mockery. “I’m with you, Rich. As always. My captain.”
Valerie asked them what would happen next, what would they do, and Cutter told her they were already doing it.
“You mean all night?” she asked. “The three of us, in this town, and on my money?”
“Why not?”
“I’ll go home broke.”
Cutter shrugged. “So what? You’ve always got your avocation to fall back on, if you’ll pardon the pun. As Swanson would say—as Hemingway said, you will have found your profession. All you have to do is give in to it. Relax. Why sheeitt, I could even be your man, baby. A player, as they say. All I’d have to do is get me some satin threads and one of those wide-brim floppy hats and a chartreuse Caddie with a watermelon radiator cap, and we be in bidness, me and my woman, my own private ho. How’s that sound, huh? Just you and me, babe—against the world.”
“I don’t think I’m gonna like tonight,” Valerie said.
And Bone found he did not much like it either. They had a second round of drinks and then a third and fourth, and the bar gradually began to fill, not with tourists so much as salesmen and a few show business types including some unusually beautiful girls, probably starlets from the nearby Universal Studios. And as the crowd grew larger, so did Cutter grow louder and more verbal.
One of his great strengths, he said, was his ability to objectify his own experience, to see it clear and dispassionate, a trick he’d used in Vietnam in order to keep his sanity. “You just sort of rise up out of yourself, you know, like a chopper, lifting right up out of there, so you can look down all cool and unafraid and say, ‘My, my, look at that poor grunt about to get his ass zapped, yes it sure is a crying shame about him, isn’t it, the little creep down there locked in time and place, an object really, nothing more.’ But not me, kiddos, I mean this other me—up there above it all, above all this shit, this sea to grimy sea. I just float free.”
“So you feel no pain?” Bone said. “No disappointment?”
Cutter made a face, judicious, contemplative. “Well, I must admit that right now maybe I do feel something. Let’s say I mourn to a degree for that gimpy fellow down there at that table being indulged, nay mocked, by his bonny unmarked friend.”
Bone told him no one was mocking him.
“Does it matter? No, I was just saying I objectify that poor fellow’s pain. I feel it not. I do wish him well, however. In fact it has always been my ferventest prayer and dearest wish that he might one day strike it rich—and by that I don’t mean some squalid financial score like the one that has just fizzled for him—and of course for his attractive friends too. No, I mean a real score—some spiritual or philosophic or maybe even political coup, like say that neat little job Saul of Tarsus brought off on the road to Damascus. Something like that, you know? A blinding light, and yea, maybe even a time of darkness too, preparation. But for what, huh? Epiphany? Apotheosis?”
Bone looked over at Valerie and it was obvious she had not heard Cutter car
ry on like this before, had not known just how high he could fly when the mood struck him, and she looked almost awed. But Bone had been here before, had gone this route many times, so he just sat back and drank and ate pretzels and listened.
“You see what I mean, don’t you, Val? A gift from above, you know? Sort of like Erickson’s or Wolfe’s. You wake up one day and lo and behold, there it is—the Way, the Truth and the Life. Now it doesn’t matter if it’s setting fire to rich folk’s property or marketing cheaper eggs or for that matter being a together dude pimp—the important thing is the way of it, the truth and the life of it, it’s got to reach you down in here—” And at this point he touched his stomach, and frowning, feigning consternation, moved on to his chest and shoulder. “—or here, or well, the right place, you know?”
A waitress happened to be passing their table just then and Cutter seized her by the arm and poured out the rest of his story.
“But it’s never happened, would you believe that? The gods have denied me. Indeed, they have pissed upon me, they have shat upon me. They have used me as a toilet bowl. Now I ask you, is that fair? Is that any way for gods to carry on?”
The girl, looking both bewildered and frightened, pulled her arm free and began to back away, all the while staring at Cutter as if he had crawled out of a grave. But was smiling benignly. He raised his hand and gave her one of his papal blessings.
“Peace, my child,” he intoned. “La plume de ma tante est dans votre derrière.”
As the afternoon crawled toward night, Cutter gained strength and Valerie grew increasingly quiet. One after another she smoked her Virginia Slims and drank her Tom Collinses, but she said almost nothing and in fact barely moved except when Cutter would ask her for more money, which she would then obediently dig out of her purse and hand over, as if that were her only purpose in being there. When they left the hotel, it was Bone who drove the Pinto while she sat meekly between the men, submitting to Cutter’s hand under her sweater and up her skirt, and even accepting his kisses too, this despite the fact that he had thrown up in the hotel men’s room not even an hour before and his breath would not let them forget it.
Bone had had five or six drinks himself and he was not keen on driving anywhere, especially not on the Hollywood Freeway to Sunset and then making his way through the heavy night traffic to the strip, but Cutter had insisted that was where they must go, that no other place except Sunset Strip could possibly do justice to the misery of the occasion, and if Bone did not want to take the wheel, well Cutter would be happy to do the honors himself and in the bargain would save them a good deal of time. So Bone drove. But he had to fight the alcohol every mile and every block of the way, forcing himself to concentrate hard on the traffic signals and the cross streets and the cars hurtling at him on Sunset. Once he had parked, however, it was like giving in to sleep—the alcohol seemed to pour through him, deadening and dulling all but his ego, making his mind a kind of fisheye lens blurring and shrinking the strip and all its florid fauna while at the same time it magnified him and Cutter and Valerie at the center. And that was how the night progressed, this small bagged epicenter of the universe moving erratically down the street, from one bar to another, from topless to straight to bottomless to gay. And even high as he was, Bone found the topless-bottomless mills as depressing as ever, sexless and castrating, soul-killing cells of gloom in which red-and blue-lighted girls listlessly swung and stroked and bumped their sleek spayed bodies before the uplifted and oddly bovine gaze of the crowd, dead men all. Even Cutter could not endure it for longer than a drink, nor find a blasphemy to equal it.
A gay bar up the street, however, proved no such obstacle as he loudly asked where all the girls were. And as one, the cool cosmeticized faces swiveled on him, like a firing squad of B-B guns. But Cutter laughed it off:
“Just kidding, girls. Actually I’m a latent from Fresno. I’m thinking of coming out.”
Bone knew there were few surer ways of getting stomped than by abusing homosexuals on their own turf, so he hustled the three of them out of the bar, while Cutter loudly explained to Valerie that the place was a good example of what he’d meant by epiphany: “These bastards really got something to believe in—the priapic principle, the cocks as God.”
But somehow they made it to the street, with Cutter laughing happily and banging his cane against anything that would make a racket. Because this was the strip though, he barely drew a glance, fitted in as unremarkably as a coyote in a zoo. The street in fact reminded Bone of those old movies about Hollywood, with the inevitable studio scene showing the hero and heroine as they made their way across the lot crowded with “extras” hurrying here and there—cowboys and Indians, slave girls and Roman senators, pirates and Foreign Legionnaires—all managing somehow to look quite normal, workers costumed for a job. Such was not the case, however, with their modern counterparts on the strip. For some reason the costume had become the reality. Indeed these actors did not even appear to know that they were costumed. And so they paraded the street—Cochise and Billy the Kid, Apollo and Venus and the Count de Sade.
A block from the gay bar, Cutter, Valerie, and Bone came upon a young black man dressed almost exactly as Cutter had said he would get himself up to serve as Valerie’s pimp, and of course Alex could not resist approaching him. Whispering and limping, Cutter asked him if he could fix up his “kinky friend here” with a Great Dane—his tastes were “positively bestial.” Fortunately the pimp enjoyed the put-on, going into a kind of limp dance of amusement and even giving Cutter’s wry, outstretched hand the sharp slap of brotherhood. But the comedy and amusement were all on his side—Bone did not miss the look of desperation in Cutter’s eye. And yet he had no idea what he could do about it, how to arrest the steep angle of their descent. So he trudged along with Valerie as Alex led them into a joint that advertised “Rassle a Naked Lady.” The price was ten dollars, which naturally did not give Cutter a moment’s pause—he simply snapped his finger at Valerie and she resignedly gave him the money, which he then handed to the proprietor, a chalk-skinned little rodent of a man who looked as if he retired each morning into a coffin. He said that Cutter could strip down to his pants if he wanted to, but he had to keep them on. There would be “no hanky-panky here.”
“Just rassle,” he said. “Just what you pay for.”
Cutter took the man at his word, probably to a degree unprecedented in the history of the establishment. The girl was a tall Chicano built along the lines of a Lachaise sculpture, with great swelling breasts and thighs. And her gaze was lithic, unmoved, as Cutter took off his sweater and T-shirt, revealing the stump of his arm and the terrible quilt of shrapnel scars dimpling his torso. She knew what he wanted of course, what they all wanted, to squeeze her great bazooms and touch her big black pussy, and she would suffer it, she was paid for it, it was a job. Instead Cutter walked up to her and, grasping her by the arm, threw her face-down on the mat. Then, forcing her arm up behind her back, he told her to say uncle or he would break her ulna and possibly her Volga too. For some reason the girl preferred to lie there and scream for the proprietor, who came running out of a back room with a small baseball bat in his hand. But Cutter would not let go.
“Tell her to say uncle,” he persisted.
“Say it! Say it!” the man yelled at her. “Jesus Christ, tell him uncle!”
And finally the girl caught on. “Uncle! Uncle!” she cried.
Cutter got off her then, mugging triumph, holding his good arm and the stump together above his head. The proprietor was yelling at him and threatening to call the police, but Cutter barely glanced at him. The bat the man held could have been a breadstick for all the attention Alex gave it.
“You said rassle,” he told the man. “So I rassled.”
Down in the street again, he gave Bone and Valerie a different reason: “The poor kid, having a job like that. I decided to give her something to remember. For a day or two, at least.”
Between eleven and midnight Cut
ter led them into the Bergerac, a small posh restaurant with a domed ceiling and a large fireplace and soft globe lights burning over a very voluble clientele, most of them young, mod, and successful-looking. One look at Cutter and the maître d’ hustled the three of them into the bar, an even smaller room with birdbath tables crowded along a row of leaded stained-glass windows. Bone, hoping to avoid the drunk tank, asked the waiter for a menu and was told in exceedingly fine diction that the kitchen was closed. But the long night of drinking had not been totally lost on him either, and he crooked his finger at the undoubtedly once-and-future actor and told him pleasantly to reconsider his answer or Bone would personally shove the table lantern up his ass sideways. The waiter reconsidered, brought them menus and drinks, and took their orders, petit filets mignons all around. But almost immediately Cutter wondered out loud why he had bothered to order any food, since he couldn’t possibly eat anything.
Valerie asked him what was wrong. Was he feeling sick again?
“Of course,” he told her. “Always.”
“Throwing up sick, I mean,” she clarified.
“Of course. Always.”
Valerie turned to Bone, her look almost accusative. “Say something. Do something.”
“There’s nothing to do,” Alex said. “Nothing he can say. I’m just not hungry, that’s all. Thirsty, yes. In fact, I think I’ll probably be thirsty the rest of my life.”
“Why not?” Bone put in.
“Listen to him, will you? The old Bone credo—why not?”
“Why not?” Bone said again.
And Cutter laughed. “Because, that’s why. Simply because. Didn’t anyone ever teach you anything?”
“Because, huh?”
“Hell yes!” Cutter started to laugh then, hard, doubling over his drink. And a number of people in the small room turned to look at him, which only caused him to shout at them. “What’s the matter with you cats anyway? Can’t a man laugh? Can’t a man be happy?”
Cutter and Bone Page 18