Street Magicks

by Paula Guran

  “Mm. This Manson kid. He could be Keanu Reaves?”

  God, no, I thought. Jacob caught my eye and nodded desperately. “I don’t see why not,” I said. It was all imagination anyway. None of it was real.

  “We’re cutting a deal with his people,” said the Someone, nodding thoughtfully.

  They sent me off to do a treatment for them to approve. And by them, I understood they meant the Australian Someone, although I was not entirely sure.

  Before I left, someone gave me $700 and made me sign for it: two weeks per diem.

  I spent two days doing the treatment. I kept trying to forget the book, and structure the story as a film. The work went well. I sat in the little room and typed on a notebook computer the studio had sent down for me, and printed out pages on the bubble-jet printer the studio sent down with it. I ate in my room.

  Each afternoon I would go for a short walk down Sunset Boulevard. I would walk as far as the “almost all-nite” bookstore, where I would buy a newspaper.

  Then I would sit outside in the hotel courtyard for half an hour, reading a newspaper. And then, having had my ration of sun and air, I would go back into the dark, and turn my book back into something else.

  There was a very old black man, a hotel employee, who would walk across the courtyard each day with almost painful slowness and water the plants and inspect the fish. He’d grin at me as he went past, and I’d nod at him.

  On the third day I got up and walked over to him as he stood by the fish pool, picking out bits of rubbish by hand: a couple of coins and a cigarette packet.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Suh,” said the old man.

  I thought about asking him not to call me sir, but I couldn’t think of a way to put it that might not cause offense. “Nice fish.”

  He nodded and grinned. “Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China.”

  We watched them swim around the little pool.

  “I wonder if they get bored.”

  He shook his head. “My grandson, he’s an ichthyologist, you know what that is?”

  “Studies fishes.”

  “Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that’s like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it’s always a surprise to them, going ‘I never been here before.’ They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, ‘Who are you, stranger?’ ”

  “Will you ask your grandson something for me ?” The old man nodded. “I read once that carp don’t have set life spans. They don’t age like we do. They die if they’re killed by people or predators or disease, but they don’t just get old and die. Theoretically they could live forever.”

  He nodded. “I’ll ask him. It sure sounds good. These three—now, this one, I call him Ghost, he’s only four, five years old. But the other two, they came here from China back when I was first here.”

  “And when was that?”

  “That would have been, in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-four. How old do I look to you?”

  I couldn’t tell. He might have been carved from old wood. Over fifty and younger than Methuselah. I told him so.

  “I was born in 1906. God’s truth.”

  “Were you born here, in L.A.?”

  He shook his head. “When I was born, Los Angeles wasn’t nothin’ but an orange grove, a long way from New York.” He sprinkled fish food on the surface of the water. The three fish bobbed up, pale-white silvered ghost carp, staring at us, or seeming to, the O’s of their mouths continually opening and closing, as if they were talking to us in some silent, secret language of their own.

  I pointed to the one he had indicated. “So he’s Ghost, yes?”

  “He’s Ghost. That’s right. That one under the lily—you can see his tail, there, see?—he’s called Buster, after Buster Keaton. Keaton was staying here when we got the older two. And this one’s our Princess.” Princess was the most recognizable of the white carp.

  She was a pale cream color, with a blotch of vivid crimson along her back, setting her apart from the other two.

  “She’s lovely.”

  “She surely is. She surely is all of that.”

  He took a deep breath then and began to cough, a wheezing cough that shook his thin frame. I was able then, for the first time, to see him as a man of ninety.

  “Are you all right?”

  He nodded. “Fine, fine, fine. Old bones,” he said. “Old bones.”

  We shook hands, and I returned to my treatment and the gloom.

  I printed out the completed treatment, faxed it off to Jacob at the studio.

  The next day he came over to the chalet. He looked upset.

  “Everything okay? Is there a problem with the treatment?”

  “Just shit going down. We made this movie with . . .” and he named a well-known actress who had been in a few successful films a couple of years before. “Can’t lose, huh? Only she is not as young as she was, and she insists on doing her own nude scenes, and that’s not a body anybody wants to see, believe me.

  “So the plot is, there’s this photographer who is persuading women to take their clothes off for him. Then he shtups them. Only no one believes he’s doing it. So the chief of police—played by Ms. Lemme Show the World My Naked Butt—realizes that the only way she can arrest him is if she pretends to be one of the women. So she sleeps with him. Now, there’s a twist . . . ”

  “She falls in love with him?”

  “Oh. Yeah. And then she realizes that women will always be imprisoned by male images of women, and to prove her love for him, when the police come to arrest the two of them she sets fire to all the photographs and dies in the fire. Her clothes burn off first. How does that sound to you?”

  “Dumb.”

  “That was what we thought when we saw it. So we fired the director and recut it and did an extra day’s shoot. Now she’s wearing a wire when they make out. And when she starts to fall in love with him, she finds out that he killed her brother. She has a dream in which her clothes burn off, then she goes out with the SWAT team to try to bring him in. But he gets shot by her little sister, who he’s also been shtupping.”

  “Is it any better?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s junk. If she’d let us use a stand-in for the nude sequences, maybe we’d be in better shape.

  “What did you think of the treatment?”

  “What?”

  “My treatment? The one I sent you?”

  “Sure. That treatment. We loved it. We all loved it. It was great. Really terrific. We’re all really excited.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “Well, as soon as everyone’s had a chance to look it over, we’ll get together and talk about it.”

  He patted me on the back and went away, leaving me with nothing to do in Hollywood.

  I decided to write a short story. There was an idea I’d had in England before I’d left. Something about a small theater at the end of a pier. Stage magic as the rain came down. An audience who couldn’t tell the difference between magic and illusion, and to whom it would make no difference if every illusion was real.

  That afternoon, on my walk, I bought a couple of books on stage magic and Victorian illusions in the “almost all-nite” bookshop. A story, or the seed of it anyway, was there in my head, and I wanted to explore it. I sat on the bench in the courtyard and browsed through the books. There was, I decided, a specific atmosphere that I was after.

  I was reading about the Pockets Men, who had pockets filled with every small object you could imagine and would produce whatever you asked on request. No illusion—just remarkable feats of organization and memory. A shadow fell across the page. I looked up.

  “Hullo again,” I said to the old black man.

  “Suh,” he said.

  “Please don’t call me that. It makes me feel like I ought to be wearing a suit or something.” I told him my name.

  He told me his: “Pious Dundas.”

  “Pious?” I wasn’t
sure that I’d heard him correctly.

  He nodded proudly.

  “Sometimes I am, and sometimes I ain’t. It’s what my mama called me, and it’s a good name.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what are you doing here, suh?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m meant to be writing a film, I think. Or at least, I’m waiting for them to tell me to start writing a film.”

  He scratched his nose. “All the film people stayed here, if I started to tell you them all now, I could talk till a week next Wednesday and I wouldn’t have told you the half of them.”

  “Who were your favorites?”

  “Harry Langdon. He was a gentleman. George Sanders. He was English, like you. He’d say, ‘Ah, Pious. You must pray for my soul.’ And I’d say, ‘Your soul’s your own affair, Mister Sanders,’ but I prayed for him just the same. And June Lincoln.”

  “June Lincoln?”

  His eyes sparkled, and he smiled. “She was the queen of the silver screen. She was finer than any of them: Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish or Theda Bara or Louise Brooks . . . She was the finest. She had ‘it.’ You know what ‘it’ was?”

  “Sex appeal.”

  “More than that. She was everything you ever dreamed of. You’d see a June Lincoln picture, you wanted to . . . ” he broke off, waved one hand in small circles, as if he were trying to catch the missing words.

  “I don’t know. Go down on one knee, maybe, like a knight in shinin’ armor to the queen. June Lincoln, she was the best of them. I told my grandson about her, he tried to find something for the VCR, but no go. Nothing out there anymore. She only lives in the heads of old men like me.” He tapped his forehead.

  “She must have been quite something.”

  He nodded.

  “What happened to her?”

  “She hung herself. Some folks said it was because she wouldn’t have been able to cut the mustard in the talkies, but that ain’t true: she had a voice you’d remember if you heard it just once. Smooth and dark, her voice was, like an Irish coffee. Some say she got her heart broken by a man, or by a woman, or that it was gambling, or gangsters, or booze. Who knows? They were wild days.”

  “I take it that you must have heard her talk.”

  He grinned. “She said, ‘Boy, can you find what they did with my wrap?’ and when I come back with it, then she said, ‘You’re a fine one, boy.’ And the man who was with her, he said, ‘June, don’t tease the help’ and she smiled at me and gave me five dollars and said, ‘He don’t mind, do you, boy?’ and I just shook my head. Then she made the thing with her lips, you know?”

  “A moue?”

  “Something like that. I felt it here.” He tapped his chest. “Those lips. They could take a man apart.”

  He bit his lower lip for a moment, and focused on forever. I wondered where he was, and when. Then he looked at me once more.

  “You want to see her lips?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You come over here. Follow me.”

  “What are we . . . ?” I had visions of a lip print in cement, like the handprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

  He shook his head, and raised an old finger to his mouth. Silence.

  I closed the books. We walked across the courtyard.

  When he reached the little fish-pool, he stopped.

  “Look at the Princess,” he told me.

  “The one with the red splotch, yes?”

  He nodded. The fish reminded me of a Chinese dragon: wise and pale. A ghost fish, white as old bone, save for the blotch of scarlet on its back—an inch-long double-bow shape. It hung in the pool, drifting, thinking.

  “That’s it,” he said. “On her back. See?”

  “I don’t quite follow you.”

  He paused and stared at the fish.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I found myself very conscious of Mr. Dundas’s age.

  “They don’t pay me to sit down,” he said, very seriously. Then he said, as if he were explaining something to a small child, “It was like there were gods in those days. Today, it’s all television: small heroes. Little people in the boxes. I see some of them here. Little people.

  “The stars of the old times: they was giants, painted in silver light, big as houses . . . and when you met them, they were still huge. People believed in them. They’d have parties here. You worked here, you saw what went on. There was liquor, and weed, and goings on you’d hardly credit. There was this one party . . . the film was called Hearts of the Desert. You ever heard it?”

  I shook my head.

  “One of the biggest movies of 1926, up there with What Price Glory with Victor McLaglen and Dolores del Rio and Ella Cinders starring Colleen Moore. You heard of them?”

  I shook my head again.

  “You ever heard of Warner Baxter? Belle Bennett?”

  “Who were they?”

  “Big, big stars in 1926.” He paused for a moment. “Hearts of the Desert. They had the party for it here, in the hotel, when it wrapped. There was wine and beer and whiskey and gin—this was Prohibition days, but the studios kind of owned the police force, so they looked the other way; and there was food, and a deal of foolishness; Ronald Colman was there and Douglas Fairbanks—the father, not the son—and all the cast and the crew; and a jazz band played over there where those chalets are now.

  “And June Lincoln was the toast of Hollywood that night. She was the Arab princess in the film. Those days Arabs meant passion and lust. These days . . . well things change.

  “I don’t know what started it all. I heard it was a dare or a bet; maybe she was just drunk. I thought she was drunk. Anyhow, she got up, and the band was playing, soft and slow. And she walked over here, where I’m standing right now, and she plunged her hands right into this pool. She was laughing and laughing and laughing . . .

  “Miss Lincoln picked up the fish—reached in and took it, both hands she took it in—and she picked it up from the water, and then she held it in front of her face.

  “Now, I was worried, because they’d just brought these fish in from China and they cost two hundred dollars apiece. That was before I was looking after the fish, of course. Wasn’t me that’d lose it from my wages. But still, two hundred dollars was a whole lot of money in those days.

  “Then she smiled at all of us, and she leaned down and she kissed it, slow like, on its back. It didn’t wriggle or nothin’, it just lay in her hand, and she kissed it with her lips like red coral, and the people at the party laughed and cheered.

  “She put the fish back in the pool, and for a moment it was as if it didn’t want to leave her—it stayed by her, nuzzling her fingers. And then the first of the fireworks went off, and it swum away.

  “Her lipstick was red as red as red, and she left the shape of her lips on the fish’s back.—There. Do you see?”

  Princess, the white carp with the coral-red mark on her back, flicked a fin and continued on her eternal series of thirty-second journeys around the pool. The red mark did look like a lip print.

  He sprinkled a handful of fish food on the water, and the three fish bobbed and gulped to the surface.

  I walked back in to my chalet, carrying my books on old illusions. The phone was ringing: it was someone from the studio. They wanted to talk about the treatment. A car would be there for me in thirty minutes.

  “Will Jacob be there?”

  But the line was already dead.

  The meeting was with the Australian Someone and his assistant, a bespectacled man in a suit. His was the first suit I’d seen so far, and his spectacles were a vivid blue. He seemed nervous.

  “Where are you staying?” asked the Someone.

  I told him.

  “Isn’t that where Belushi . . . ?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  He nodded. “He wasn’t alone, when he died.”

  “No?”

  He rubbed one finger along the side of his pointy nose. “There were a couple of other people at the
party. They were both directors, both as big as you could get at that point. You don’t need names. I found out about it when I was making the last Indiana Jones film.”

  An uneasy silence. We were at a huge round table, just the three of us, and we each had a copy of the treatment I had written in front of us. Finally I said: “What did you think of it?”

  They both nodded, more or less in unison.

  And then they tried, as hard as they could, to tell me they hated it while never saying anything that might conceivably upset me. It was a very odd conversation.

  “We have a problem with the third act,” they’d say, implying vaguely that the fault lay neither with me nor with the treatment, nor even with the third act, but with them.

  They wanted the people to be more sympathetic. They wanted sharp lights and shadows, not shades of gray. They wanted the heroine to be a hero. And I nodded and took notes.

  At the end of the meeting I shook hands with the Someone, and the assistant in the blue-rimmed spectacles took me off through the corridor maze to find the outside world and my car and my driver.

  As we walked, I asked if the studio had a picture anywhere of June Lincoln.

  “Who?” His name, it turned out, was Greg. He pulled out a small notebook and wrote something down in it with a pencil.

  “She was a silent screen star. Famous in 1926.”

  “Was she with the studio?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “But she was famous. Even more famous than Marie Provost.”

  “Who?”

  “ ‘A winner who became a doggies’ dinner.’ One of the biggest stars of the silent screen. Died in poverty when the talkies came in and was eaten by her dachshund. Nick Lowe wrote a song about her.”

  “Who?”

  “ ‘I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll.’ Anyway, June Lincoln. Can someone find me a photo?” He wrote something more down on his pad. Stared at it for a moment. Then wrote down something else. Then he nodded.

  We had reached the daylight, and my car was waiting.

  “By the way,” he said, “you should know that he’s full of shit.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Full of shit. It wasn’t Spielberg and Lucas who were with Belushi. It was Bette Midler and Linda Ronstadt. It was a coke orgy. Everybody knows that. He’s full of shit. And he was just a junior studio accountant for chrissakes on the Indiana Jones movie. Like it was his movie. Asshole.”