Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  “Didn’t your agent tell you,” asked Vaughan, “you’ve got to learn to tap dance?”

  Perry finished off his beer and ordered another.

  “Listen,” said Pru, leaning forward across the small Formica table, “why don’t you go to your friend Ned Gurney with this and be done with it?”

  “Are you kidding? You guys are the ones who told me he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a feature off the ground.”

  Pru sighed.

  “That was months ago.”

  “Don’t you read the trades?” Vaughan asked. “Ned Gurney’s hot now.”

  Perry could feel his own face getting hot.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “How?”

  Vaughan popped another prawn.

  “He finally got Nirvana to do his picture. They signed Meryl and Warren for the leads.”

  “Sonofabitch,” said Perry.

  He heard himself laughing, a hoarse, croaking kind of cackle. The friend—or former friend—he’d betrayed because he had no clout had magically, overnight, become hot.

  “We’ve got to run,” said Pru, sipping the last of her tea and rising. “Sophia’s flight is due in at four.”

  “You’re picking up Sophia Loren?” Perry asked.

  “Sophia Kolski,” said Vaughan, “the new Polish sexpot. Just came off a big French flick.”

  Vaughan molded an outline of a voluptuous body in the air with his hands.

  “She’s hot right now,” he said with a wink.

  “At the box office,” Pru added, taking Vaughan firmly by the arm. “We hope to make a deal with her—a business deal.”

  Vaughan winked again, pulled out his wallet, and peeled off a couple of twenties he tossed on the table as Perry rose feeling dizzy.

  “Please, finish your lunch,” said Pru, giving him a quick peck on the cheek and starting out.

  “Wait!” Perry called. “I want you guys to read something.”

  He bent down and grabbed the briefcase he had stuck beneath the table, rummaging through it with trembling hands and pulling out a folder encased in a handsome green binding. He shoved it at Vaughan, who instinctively backed away, as if Perry were trying to hand him a snake.

  “It’s a treatment,” Perry explained. “Instead of just giving the short story to producers, I thought it might help if I left them a real screen treatment, but I’ve never done one before, so I wanted you guys to look it over, tell me if it’s OK. OK?”

  Vaughan tucked it under his arm and nodded, moving now toward the door.

  “Tell me what you think of it—honestly!” Perry called after the departing couple.

  Vaughan waved the folder at Perry as he hurried out, looking back over his shoulder and saying just as he disappeared, “We’ll get back to you on it!”

  Perry sat down again at the little table, staring at the white raw pieces of fish. They didn’t look very appetizing, but they seemed quite fitting fare for him now.

  They of course were cold.

  XIII

  “I’m hot!” Ronnie Banks exclaimed, raising aloft a bottle of beer from his perch on a stool at the bar of La Traviata.

  Perry recoiled, as if Ronnie had announced he had just become a vampire.

  Damn. The whole point of getting together with Ronnie was to try to find someone who was not hot, someone who would be sympathetic to the devastating news Perry got hit with out of the blue that morning.

  He had to tell someone, and yet he didn’t want to reveal this shameful secret to anyone who wouldn’t understand what it was like, or who might even think less of him for knowing it. He wanted to lay it on someone who was out of work, had little or no money, no hot prospects, was generous of spirit and liked to drink.

  Actors. Actors were the best bet. First Perry had thought of Lon Ridings, who had played the scholarly father of Laurie, but his last sight of the poor guy, pressing his near-nude body (except for those damn jockey shorts, for God sake) into the dirt at the side of Ned Gurney’s patio, was too depressing. He didn’t want someone that far down. Then he thought of Ronnie Banks, the young guy they’d all originally wanted for the role of Jack but who was turned down by the network. He seemed like a nice, hard-luck kind of guy who liked to booze it up a little. He had talked to Perry about getting together sometime, and in fact had sent him an invitation to a play he was in, but it was way out in the depths of the Valley in some kind of makeshift little theater in a converted auto-body shop behind a shopping mall. It did not seem likely that Ronnie Banks had just signed a contract for millions for some kind of multipicture deal, and Perry decided he was the ideal guy to meet for dinner.

  And now he was hot.

  “Hey-ho, no need to sweat it, my man,” Ronnie said when he saw Perry’s obvious dismay, “I’ll only be hot for the next couple days.”

  “Hey, listen, I couldn’t be happier for you!” Perry said heartily, trying to cover his embarrassment as well as his guilt. “What’s your good news?”

  “Got a bit in a new feature—but don’t worry, it’s only ten lines!” Ronnie assured him as he guided him up to a barstool.

  “Congratulations, really. That’s swell.”

  “What’s happening?” Ronnie asked. “You look like someone’s got a contract out on you.”

  “That’s what I feel like,” Perry admitted.

  “Should we make sure to sit with our backs to the wall at dinner?”

  “Good idea. Listen, I really can’t talk about it yet—what’s happening. I’ll tell you after I get a few drinks in me, OK?”

  Ronnie looked concerned, serious.

  “You don’t have to tell me at all, Perry. Whatever it is.”

  “But I want to. I’ve got to tell someone.”

  Ronnie nodded, and finished off his beer.

  “Let’s get a booth and be comfortable,” he said.

  “Great.”

  Perry was glad they’d come to La Traviata. It was a dim, cozy, inexpensive restaurant on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood where a number of entertainment people, including some stars, hung out when they didn’t feel like being seen. They of course did not become invisible when they drank or dined at La Traviata, but according to some unwritten edict the place was not classified as fashionable, so columnists and their stringers never sniffed around it, no tourists ever heard of it, and local civilians who went there never bothered the stars by hounding them for an autograph while the vulnerable celebrity was in the midst of trying to swallow a long string of linguine. It was rather like a neighborhood restaurant for people who lived in a place so spread out and transient that they really had no traditional-type neighborhood.

  Perry didn’t feel like eating at all, but he made himself order. Since nothing sounded appealing to him, he simply ordered things he used to like to eat, in hopes he would like them again—baked clams, veal parmigiana with spaghetti, beefsteak tomato and onion salad, and the house special, creamy cheesecake with fresh strawberries for dessert.

  Everything tasted like cardboard. Perry picked at his food and rearranged it on the plate and even made himself swallow a lot of it, but only because he wanted to maintain some pretense of being all right. The only thing he really wanted was the wine, which he poured down not in any appreciation of its taste but rather like a man pouring water on the burning engine of his car in a desperate effort to quench the fire. Before they got to dessert Perry ordered a second bottle of Verdicchio. Ronnie was drinking it too, of course, but tonight he was way behind his thirsty friend.

  Perry felt if he just got enough wine inside him he’d be able to confess his shameful new secret, and when at the end of the meal it still seemed too difficult, he was sure that the brandy would enable him to speak freely. The brandy was great—not the taste, which was flat and colorless, like everything else, but the sting to his gums, the burning sensation in his throat.

  “Elena—dahling!” Ronnie exclaimed, and jumped up to greet a svelte, glamorous woman who suddenly loomed above the table, ap
pearing to Perry almost like a vision or dream, a beautiful, slightly wavering image reflected in a clear pond. He knew her, yet did not know her—certainly not as Elena.

  “Ronnie, dahling,” the gorgeous woman cooed in a sexy, familiar voice. Holy God! Of course!

  “Ramona Selden!” Perry blurted out, identifying the former call girl of the Washington elite.

  But of course that was only on “Checkmate,” the prime-time soap opera that rose to overnight popularity four or five seasons ago, momentarily challenging the numbers of “Dallas” and “Dynasty,” until it for some reason peaked, waned, and was canceled last year.

  “Elena Allbright, this is my friend Perry Moss,” Ronnie said in introduction, then added, giggling, “‘Checkmate,’” meet ‘The First Year’s the Hardest.’”

  Perry caught his breath as “Ramona Selden” slid into the booth beside him, extending her hand and saying, “Of course, you’re the writer. I loved the pilot—then didn’t they turn it into some kind of cop show?”

  “Pretty much,” Perry croaked.

  “The first year was the hardest,” Ronnie said.

  “Aren’t they all,” said Elena-Ramona, giving Perry’s wrist a quick, sympathetic squeeze with her long, elegant fingers.

  “I loved you!” he declared with feeling, then quickly, to the background accompaniment of Ronnie’s wild giggle, added, “I mean as Ramona Selden of course.”

  “Thank you. Wasn’t she a wonderful bitch?”

  “You had ’em fooled, Elena,” Ronnie said. “No one could guess Ramona was played by a real cream puff!”

  “Come on now, don’t ruin Perry’s image of me, I worked hard at it!” Ramona said, giving Perry a lovely, intimate wink.

  “Can you join us for a brandy?” he asked, shocked by his own daring.

  “Ooh, I’d love to,” she said, “but I’m meeting my new heartthrob in the bar. I just saw Ronnie and wanted to say hello—and enlist his sympathy in my latest plight.”

  “Men?” Ronnie asked.

  “Worse,” said the lovely Elena. “Money.”

  “Already?” Ronnie asked.

  “Broke again,” she nodded.

  Perry’s jaw dropped, and he looked quickly at Ronnie and Elena to see if this was some kind of put-on, a comic routine for a newcomer, but they both seemed depressingly serious, even pained.

  “I’ve been there,” said Ronnie with a funereal look and a quick hit of brandy, then let go the giggle and said, “Hell, I’m almost there again!”

  “Hang tough, pal,” Elena said rising, giving Perry one last thrilling squeeze of the wrist. “Lovely to meet you, Perry. Don’t let this place get to you.”

  “Thanks, really, it was really great—” he burbled as she winked and went off, and as he watched her long, shapely legs move in rhythm to her picturesque ass, he called after her, “It was an honor!”

  “Elena’s OK, huh?” Ronnie asked.

  “She’s fabulous—but hey, she’s not really broke, is she? What was all that about?”

  “Sure she’s broke.”

  “Elena Allbright? Ramona Selden? How could she be broke? She’s a star!”

  “You don’t think stars go broke?”

  Ronnie let out a whistle.

  “In this town everyone’s broke—or was once, or will be. It’s built into the system. No matter how much money you make.”

  “I feel like you staged this whole thing for my benefit,” Perry said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s what’s wrong—I mean, what I was trying to tell you—that I just found out today.”

  Perry leaned forward across the table, glanced furtively around the room to see if anyone was bending an ear toward him, then cupped a hand to his mouth and said in an urgent whisper:

  “I’m broke too!”

  Ronnie leaned back and guffawed.

  “Welcome to Hollywood,” he said.

  Perry insisted on paying the tab with his American Express card—what the hell, by the time the bill came in he might have struck it rich again—so Ronnie insisted on taking him out to Pablo’s in Santa Monica for a drink after dinner. Perry felt a little dizzy when they walked out of the restaurant, so he didn’t mind leaving his car in La Traviata’s parking lot and going in Ronnie’s rattling old Renault.

  “I thought Stu Sherman—that’s my accountant—was pulling some kind of joke on me,” Perry said over his brandy at Pablo’s. “I mean, I never even heard of anybody paying forty-seven thousand dollars in taxes. Hell, that’s more than I used to make in almost two years!”

  “They got it all figured out, so you can’t get ahead.”

  “I thought rich people didn’t have to pay taxes.”

  “That’s really rich—you’re probably just middle.”

  “I used to think one hundred and sixty-seven thousand in a year made you rich.”

  “That just puts you in the fifty-percent bracket. Without any good tax shelters, probably. You got to have millions to come out ahead.”

  “I just got enough to get through the next month or so.”

  “Well, you own your own condo, don’t you?”

  “Do I? I won’t be able to pay the mortgage after next month. Fuckin’ mortgage is three grand. If I can’t pay it, I guess they’ll take it away from me—so how can I own it?”

  “Sometimes I’m glad I’m mainly poor.”

  “Shit. When I only made twenty-six-five a year I was never broke.”

  “Nah. That’s not enough to be broke on.”

  “What the fuck am I going to do?”

  “What about that deal you had with the Vees?”

  “Fuck the Vees.”

  Perry put his head down. He could feel himself shaking.

  “Hey man, we got to get you up!”

  Perry lifted his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Forget it. We’re going to get you glad. I could use a little glad myself.”

  Ronnie lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the Valley. Posters of sixties rock groups, names from psychedelic days, hovered and pulsed on the walls, fading in and out of Perry’s brandy-filtered vision: Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin. Perry thought of a Sunday afternoon in a farmhouse around Haviland when he first went up there to teach. There was sweet wine and homemade bread and Joni Mitchell on the stereo. “I’ve looked at life from both sides now …” It was another lifetime, a time of innocence. He saw the way the sun lay across the rug on that distant Sunday, like a visual echo. Ronnie only had beer, no brandy or wine. Out of a little bureau drawer, a tobacco can, a substance, he took something white, in a cellophane Baggie. He made tiny lines on a hand mirror. Ronnie rolled up a dollar bill. Perry laughed. “Don’t laugh near this, for God sake. You blow anything away, I’ll sue!” This was it, at last—the hip new Hollywood, just like in the newspapers. Coke!

  Broke was all right after all. Money was funny. Perry was glad. Nothing was bad.

  “Hey, I’m high!” he declared.

  “Hi ho, hi ho,” Ronnie sang, “’tis off to glad we go …”

  Down again. What goes up comes down. Law of nature. Law of supply and demand. Whatever happened to Ayn Rand? There is no brandy handy. Have no fear, there’s always beer. No good, but better with grass. Ronnie rolls a joint, passes to Perry. He tries, but only coughs. Damn. Dim. The outlook is dim, grim. Grimy. Dustballs growing in the corners. Ought to get out of here. Relax. Nothing to fear. Nothing to fear but fact. Fact is you’re broke. No joke. Walls of the world closing in. Head in a spin. Tailspin. Failspin. Fact: fucked.

  Perry woke to the smell of old socks and stale beer. A pain was in his neck, a pounding in his head. He’d spent the night on Ronnie’s couch. Now it was day, you could tell by the glare behind the dusty drawn slats of Venetian blinds. Perry rose, staggering, walking on nails to the kitchenette, and opened the refrigerator. Beer. Mustard. A glass jar of dill pickles. Moldy piece of cheese. He sniffed a half-empty carton of milk and pu
t it back, then leaned against the wall, seeing black. He blinked and went to the sink, ran some water in his cupped hands and splashed it at his mouth. He stumbled back to the couch.

  He woke again later to sizzling sounds. Was he being electrocuted? Was the house about to explode? Like his head? None of the above. Ronnie was frying bacon. Making coffee, feeding it to Perry black. Trying to bring him back. Perry remembered he was broke, his car was miles away over mountains in the parking lot of La Traviata, his wife was on the other side of the country in a house that used to be his, too, in Haviland, Vermont. He pulled a pillow over his head and tried to blank out his mind, but the sizzling sound persisted. Hell.

  The rain came. It was unrelenting, unceasing, day after day, for nearly three weeks. It was nothing to be concerned about, Ronnie assured Perry, it happened like this every year around January. It did not fall in scattered showers and storms that occurred throughout the year, like rain in the East, rain that lasted a day and night or at most a couple of days before the sun returned and the world was given a chance to dry out. This rain came in one dramatic, overpowering rush that overwhelmed the senses, leaving the mind as well as the body feeling drenched.

  The rain filled up the streets and overflowed the swimming pools. The rain came down the hills and into the canyons, blocking roads with torrents and mudslides. The rain got under the hoods of cars and into the crevices of houses, dampening everything. The rain got into your soul. It never let up. It kept beating down.

  Perry stepped in a puddle and suddenly realized that in Vermont at this time of year, the rain of course would have turned to snow. What a miracle! What a fabulous, brilliant conception it was to have the hard drops of water transformed into soft, lovely, intricately beautiful flakes of snow, snow that caressed and silently covered the earth with a clean blanket. Perry could suddenly see it, that winter world he had always known and taken for granted, covered with snow like a blessing. The vision of it was so intense it made him close his eyes, and when he blinked them open again he could feel tears. Hell. He was homesick, like a little kid.

  He went back to his condo and got into bed and hid under the covers, trying not to think of where he was, and where he might have been. He got up after dark and had a big tumbler of a hearty Napa Valley Zinfandel. He needed to get a little buzz on to take his mind off the rain. And thoughts of Jane.