Black Neon

by Tony O'Neill

  “I ain’t nobody’s guardian angel,” Lupita said.

  “No-one’s saying you are. And I’m not saying I expect anything from you. But even if it’s just to get me out of the way of Paco’s goons… take me with you. Please.”

  There was a long silence, and then Lupita said, “Aw shit girl, whatever. You can come along, so long as you don’t get in my way.”

  Genesis screamed, and threw her arms around Lupita’s neck. The celebrations were interrupted by a loud banging. In the adjacent room a guy was hammering on the wall and yelling for them to quit screaming and turn the goddamned music down. Lupita shrugged Genesis away and stormed over to the connecting wall. She smashed her elbow against it a few times. “If you don’ shut the fuck up, mister,” she screamed, “I’m gonna come through this mutherfuckin’ wall and break your fuckin’ face! Maricon!”

  The noise in the next room stopped immediately. Lupita turned up the stereo, which was still blasting Gene Vincent. Then she came back to Genesis, and put her incomplete arms around her neck. When she spoke, it was in the tone of someone imparting a great, cosmic secret.

  “Genesis,” she said, “Now that we’re gonna be partners, or travelling companions, or whatever the hell you wanna call it, I’m gonna tell you something that someone told me a long time ago, and it’s the truest thing I ever heard. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Honey. You can learn most things in life, but good taste is just something you’re born with. You dig what I’m saying?”

  “Sure thing, Lupe,” Genesis breathed, holding on to Lupita like a shipwreck survivor clinging onto a piece of driftwood, “I understand…”

  FIVE

  Gibby Getnor was in the back of a taxi, speeding towards Charles De Gaulle airport. The young Moroccan driver was blasting some ferocious jungle music that featured a gruff-sounding DJ barking machine-gun lyrics in a thick Jamaican patois over a frantic, crackhead drumbeat. A nagging hangover still gnawed away at his skull and the blaring music wasn’t helping any. Gibby was thinking about the inevitable long lines at customs he would have to endure, about having to strip off his shoes and belt, and about enduring a barrage of surly questions from some gun-toting mental subnormal in a polyester uniform. All this so he could enjoy eleven hours crammed in a flying sardine can, eating glorified dogfood, and breathing in other people’s germs. Christ, he hated air travel.

  An even more alarming thought was needling at him. After their disastrous meeting at Les Deux Magots, Gibby was coming to see that he could no longer represent Jacques Seltzer. For fifteen years Jacques’ intransigence had reduced Gibby to a state of near penury. After Jacques’ latest refusal, Gibby realized that waiting for his client to change his mind was an exercise in futility. He felt like a fool, like some pathetic cuckold who had watched his wife fuck the mailman, the gym instructor, the pool boy, the grocery bagger, their son’s high school friends, all the while hoping that once she got it out of her system that she would come back to him. Gibby realized that Jacques Seltzer – like that irredeemable slut-wife – was never going to give Gibby what he needed. He had to get out now, before he was too old and tired to find someone else.

  Gibby had come to this uncomfortable conclusion as he pondered how to tell Kenny Azura – one of the most powerful men in Hollywood – that the answer was a firm “no”. In a flash Gibby realized that his life could no longer revolve around the abstract hope that one day Jacques might begin work on Black Neon. He had a daughter at Columbia for chrissakes, alimony payments, and a mortgage to pay on his Brentwood condo. A decade and a half of feigning interest in Jacques’ shitty photographs was a decade and a half too long. If he dumped Jacques now, maybe it would provide him with the impetus to get out there and aggressively hunt down some higher-earning clients. Maybe. However it played out, something had to give.

  Between his toxic thoughts, and the music blaring from the radio, the buzzing of Getnor’s cell phone almost came as a welcome relief. He looked at it, glowing softly in the dim taxi. As if the phone had read his mind, it was Jacques on the line.

  “Can you turn that down, s’il vous plait?” he grumbled, and then, clicking the phone open with a tone of forced joviality: “Jacques. I was just thinking about you… what’s happening?”

  “Gibby. I have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “But first you must understand something. I dropped acid an hour and a half ago.”

  “Oh. My God, Jacques, are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay!” Jacques said, testily. “There hasn’t been good quality lysergic acid available in France since the early seventies. However, I have also been smoking some top quality Moroccan hashish and this has given me an inspiration. Tell me Gibby, what do you know about street life in Hollywood? Whores, drug addicts, dealers, gangs, this kind of scene?”

  “A little. It depends. What are you asking? You need me to… uh… hook you up with something?”

  “Maybe. I have been actually thinking about our conversation this afternoon, yes? About this Boy King of Hollywood, and his offer to finance Black Neon.”

  “Really?” Gibby tried to subdue his new enthusiasm. “You really mean it, Jacques?”

  “Putain! I want to do a film that will hold up a mirror to this disgusting pig whore that is Hollywood. I want to take this boy king and rub his nose in his own shit like a disobedient animal! If I am going to subject myself to this vile process again, then I want to make Black Neon the ultimate Hollywood movie. My magnum opus! This is my concept – a film about the real Hollywood. None of that red carpet, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt merde. I am looking for today’s equivalent of the people that Bukowski or Fante were writing about. The beautiful losers. The fuck-ups. The junkies and the hustlers. No actors. Real people, living their real lives, must act out my movie. I do not want an actress who plays a whore. I want a whore who plays an actress playing a whore, oui?”

  Gibby nodded, “Sure… I get you, Jacques.”

  “I will need a scriptwriter to flesh out these ideas… and of course, most importantly, I will need an in to this world. I will have to assimilate, complètement. In many ways this movie will be an undercover mission, yes?”

  “I see.” Gibby had no idea what Jacques was babbling about, but he knew better than to ask.

  “Now, I warn you Gibby: I am very fucking high right now. So if I go off on an… how you say? Tan-gent, yes? Then you must stop me.”

  As the acid really started to take hold, twisting his brain in all kinds of frantic and fascinating ways, Jacques’s grasp of English became increasingly flimsy. Gibby concentrated hard, trying to catch each twist and turn of his drug-mangled syntax.

  “No, no, no. You’re making perfect sense, Jacques. Really.”

  “So, you can help me, yes?”

  “Of course!” Gibby beamed, “Of course I can! Kenny is gonna be thrilled, Jacques, I promise…”

  “I do not give two shits about what Kenny thinks. What I care about is his money. I am an artiste, Gibby, and I want this whole business of complete artistic control in writing, oui?”

  “Sure, sure.” Gibby said in a placating manner, “You know something, I might just have the guy for you…”

  Recently, Gibby had been taking note of an interesting character who attended his Thursday Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at The Viper Room. Even though he regularly attended AA meetings in and around Hollywood, Gibby did not think of himself as an alcoholic. In fact he enjoyed alcohol immensely, and had no more intention of quitting booze than he had of giving up eating avocados. Gibby Getnor attended AA meetings for the same reason that half of the agents and producers in Hollywood attended AA meetings: to make connections.

  The meetings themselves, for all their talk of humility, anonymity and “all addicts being the same,” worshipped at the altar of fame and celebrity just as much as anywhere else in America. Whenever an A-l
ist actor was rumored to have started attending a particular AA meeting, the church or recreation centre which held it would have to move the weekly sessions from a small circle of metal chairs in a chilly rec room, to the long rows of tables in the cafeteria in order to handle the inevitable overflow. Suddenly the place would be packed with the same girls you would see staggering out of Château Marmont on a Saturday night, with the conspicuous addition of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous tucked under their arm. Dozens of opportunistic hustlers would converge there each week trying to sell their latest script or at least talk ‘recovery’ – and maybe a little business – with the fresh meat. Sometimes the celebrity would simply read the Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous at the beginning of the meeting and then split, as if making a reluctant cameo in an otherwise lacklustre movie.

  Despite the fact he wasn’t a celebrity, Gibby still found this character – whose name was Randal – utterly fascinating. Gibby felt that the stories he shared about his own insane drug use would have made a great movie. One time Randal let slip that he worked for Chainsaw, the hot new boutique studio at Dreamscape, and then it took all of Gibby two minutes on his iPad at IMDB Pro to figure out Randal was none other than Randal P. Earnest, son of Donald Earnest – founder of Mercantile Studios – and brother of Harvey Earnest, the founder and CEO of Dreamscape. A Hollywood insider with a working knowledge of the street drug scene, Gibby reasoned, could be the perfect tour guide for Jacques.

  In his thirty-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment overlooking the Church of Saint Germain, Jacques began to absently rub his forearm with his hand. The skin began to get warm, then hot, and then he watched in silent horror as the flesh started to bubble and melt away altogether…

  “Hey – you still with me, big guy?” Gibby said, after listening to Jacques distractedly muttering to himself in French for a few moments.

  Jacques shook his head, and realized that the arm looked perfectly normal again. “Oh, uh, yes. Sorry. Well, it seems we are in business. Speak to this fellow and email me when you arrive home. You must remind me in case I do not remember this conversation, oui Gibby?”

  “You got it. Take it easy, baby.”

  Gibby clicked the phone shut. He closed his eyes for a moment and listened contentedly to the soft rumble of the taxi’s engine. He felt dizzied by his sudden and unexpected change of fortune. After a decade of being nothing more than an elusive industry rumor, Black Neon was suddenly and unexpectedly alive. The driver cranked the music up to a brutal volume again, jolting Gibby out of his thoughts.

  “S’il vous plait!” snapped Gibby, but when he opened his eyes he saw that the driver had pulled off the motorway and they were already in the airport itself. He started rummaging in his pockets, looking for his wallet. He silently hoped that he had enough Ambien to keep himself knocked out for the entire journey back to LAX.

  SIX

  Randal P. Earnest, thirty-eight-year-old black sheep of the Earnest film dynasty, six months clean and holding onto sobriety with slipping fingers, was sitting in the doctor’s office waiting to hear the results of his test. The Doctor was an old, fat Russian called Titov. The test itself had been surprisingly quick, and so far the doctor had spent more time reading Randal’s answers than Randal had spent filling out the questionnaire. Titov studied the paperwork in front of him for several minutes, his grey, bushy eyebrows furling and unfurling in concentration, before he leaned across the table and told Randal that – regretfully – the results were positive.

  There was a frozen moment in the room as the two men regarded each other. Randal’s receding bleach-blond hair had almost totally grown out to its natural black, and his pale, watery eyes hid shivering in his skull like a couple of paranoid crackheads holed up in a thirty-dollar-a-night motel room. He had once been handsome, for sure, but the steady accumulation of self-loathing and sobriety weight had made the face in the mirror almost unrecognizable to itself. Although he had been expecting a positive diagnosis from Titov, Randal still felt a palpable sense of relief. He felt the urge to reach across the desk and kiss the old fucker right on the lips. Instead he just nodded sagely, his face a mask of acceptance and regret.

  “The positive result is the bad news,” the Doctor said in his thick Russian accent. “However, the good news is that there are many options open to us, and I am to suggest that we begin treatment immediately.”

  At this late stage in his life, Randal P. Earnest had just been informed that he suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder – a cognitive defect that made concentrating on many everyday tasks incredibly difficult. For the past few months he had been working at the behest of his older brother at a new subsidiary of Dreamscape Studios, called Chainsaw Pictures. Randal thought of all of the meetings he had suffered through these past few months with Chainsaw Pictures’ head honcho Kenny Azura. The wunderkind at the helm of Chainsaw was an insufferable little shit-sucker with a carefully barbered goatee and the manner of an overprivileged child. Azura’s reputation was built upon his uncanny ability to attach himself to projects that ultimately hit big at the box office. The word was that he had nearly destroyed several of these movies in the process, throwing production into chaos with his megalomaniacal demands and his legendary mistreatment of writers. In fact, among Hollywood screenwriters Kenny was particularly loathed. He had a tendency to fire anyone who disagreed with him and was even rumoured to have personally re-written scripts himself, in flagrant violation of Screenwriters Guild rules. The word on the lot was that Azura often had to be worked around, and the many films he took a producers credit on had succeeded despite his involvement, not because of it. Still, when the films were released Kenny Azura was sure to be seen on the red carpet performing a victory lap, and giving interviews to all the major networks about bringing “his movie” to the big screen. At best Azura was an astute motherfucker who had an uncanny knack for predicting when a movie would be a hit. At worst – and this was certainly Randal’s perception – he was nothing more than a ruthless self-promoter who’d had the outrageous good fortune to stumble upon several projects so good that not even an idiot like Kenny Azura could fuck them up. Either way he had a notable track record of success, and in the movie industry box office receipts were one thing that could not be argued with.

  Randal thought of himself shifting from buttock to buttock while the stupid bastards who bankrolled the crap that Chainsaw was working on rambled endlessly about test audiences, demographics, viral campaigns and script re-writes. He’d sit there day after day, week after week, staring out of the window and wishing he was holed up in a sleazy motel with a couple of Filipino whores and an eight-ball of crystal meth. It was a comfort to have it confirmed by a medical professional that this wasn’t some kind of moral defect on Randal’s part, but instead a medical disorder that could easily be treated with liberal doses of amphetamine salts. After all, for poor, unfortunate souls like Randal P. Earnest, without amphetamines in their system it was almost impossible to concentrate on anything.

  After providing the diagnosis, the Doctor proceeded to ramble at length about the philosopher Emmanuel Kant, at which point Randal again found himself zoning out, merely nodding and uh-humming at the appropriate moments. Since his last stint in rehab Randal had been sequestered in a small apartment in West Hollywood. His access to the family money had been severely curtailed by his older brother, who now controlled the Earnest estate. He was given a weekly allowance and a leased car, and was expected to show up at Chainsaw Pictures’ offices in Century City a minimum of three days a week to “help out”. This translated to Randal being forced into the role of a glorified flunky for an overgrown USC frat boy who drove a canary yellow Lamborghini Reventon and had a private doctor who came to the office twice weekly to shoot him up with B-12. Randal could tell that Azura despised him – his smile was as fake as his Orange-Glo tan – but knew that the head of Chainsaw Pictures tolerated him out of deference to Randal’s older brother, and Kenny’
s boss, Harvey Earnest. The agreement was that if Randal could make it for twelve months drug free, regularly working at Dreamscape and attending 12-step meetings, he would finally be allowed unrestricted access to the family’s money again. His weekly “touch base” meetings with his brother were a drag, a glorified pep talk from a man who thought that Tony Robbins was the pinnacle of western intellectual thought. Since getting sober back in ’89 Harvey had read nothing but self-help and recovery books and had a maddening habit of peppering his day-to-day conversation with bullshit phrases like “self actualization”, “personal mission statement” and “it is what it is”.

  As much as Randal resented performing intern level work for his brother’s heir apparent, he did find working with people who were at least a decade his junior to be a bleakly fascinating experience. Sober, he began to notice his age and the cultural shifts that had happened while he had been locked away in the blissful embrace of the speed pipe. This sudden disconnect terrified him. All of the bands that his coworkers talked about were completely alien to him. He saw one kid wearing a Ramones T-shirt by the copy machines his first week on the job, and Randal tried to use it as an excuse to make conversation.

  “Cool shirt. So you’re into the Ramones? I love their shit, too.”

  “Oh, uh, I dunno.” The kid looked down at his shirt with a puzzled expression. “They’re, like, a band?”

  He also started to wonder if everybody who worked there was completely straight. Cocaine no longer seemed to be the drug of choice amongst the gophers and social climbers in the studio scene. Randal had not touched drugs since getting out of the treatment centre, although he had started secretly drinking again. He had pissed in a cup daily at his brother’s behest since leaving rehab and always come up clean. The day his brother told him he would no longer be enforcing the piss tests to prove his sobriety, Randal stopped at his local Ralphs and bought a bottle of cheap bourbon and a litre of Coca-Cola to celebrate. When it came to drug talk though, his ears were still particularly attuned to even the slightest narcotic-influenced vibration. For months he detected nothing. He could not fathom these fucking kids. It seemed to Randal that they would be the first generation to come up who were actually more dull and conservative than their forebears.