Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © 1995, 1996, 2016 by Paul Kolsby and David L. Ulin

  ISBN: 978-1-939419-88-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933957

  This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

  Designed & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  Cover illustration by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com.

  For Erik Himmelsbach, who believed.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  EAR TO THE GROUND

  THURSDAY NIGHT

  THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

  MEETING OF THE MINDS

  A GOOD BOSS IS HARD TO FIND

  SATURDAY NIGHT

  SATURDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

  PRIMARY DISTURBANCE FORCES

  THE NUMBERS GAME

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  THE WAY OF ZEN

  SHAKING ALL OVER

  RECOMMENDATION: PASS

  HITTING THE FAN

  SAN ANDREAS, D–55–8.9–DECEMBER 29, 1995

  EYES OF THE WORLD

  REASONABLE DOUBT

  THEY ALL LAUGHED

  BEDTIME STORIES

  THURSDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

  THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

  AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

  GREEN MEANS GO

  THE LOGIC OF NUMBERS

  PARALLEL LIVES

  COLLABORATION THERAPY

  A MODEL WORLD

  CITY UNPLUGGED

  POINT OF ORIGIN

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  BUYER’S MARKET

  SEIZE THE DAY

  WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

  AND THE EARTH STOOD STILL

  THE NUMBERS GAME, PART TWO

  PLAYING THE ODDS

  END OF THE ROAD

  HAPPILY EVER AFTER

  APPENDIX

  CHARLIE IN KOBE

  INTRODUCTION

  There is a certain comfort in knowing that although the Los Angeles landscape is always in flux—1920s art deco beauties morphing into 1960s atomic stucco apartments morphing into boxy glass condo monstrosities—the low-grade threat of an earthquake leveling all our architectural mistakes is ever present. In Ear to the Ground, which originally appeared as a serial in the Los Angeles Reader in the 1990s, David L. Ulin and Paul Kolsby put that threat and worry to good use. Capitalizing on potential catastrophe is a winning game in Hollywood, and in the hilarious Ear to the Ground, Ian, a struggling screenwriter who is reminiscent of many a struggling screenwriter in many a coffee shop in the Los Angeles Basin, wins the golden ticket of a million-dollar writing deal in the midst of The Big One’s imminent arrival. The novel is a commiseration on the excess of the 1990s, when screenwriters like Joe Eszterhaus were scoring multi-million dollar deals and directors like Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich were making their stamp on Hollywood with bombastic disaster films like Armageddon and Independence Day.

  The 1990s also offers some of our most enduring cinematic visions of Los Angeles and Hollywood. The Coen Brothers’ masterpiece of a screenwriter’s Hollywood hell, Barton Fink, carried on a long tradition of Hollywood send-up novels like Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. These tales of terror are still handed out to eager film school students on their first day and provide more of an education about the wherewithal necessary for a spot on the lot. Necessary too, upon arrival to a Paramount-adjacent studio apartment, is a viewing of the quintessential Hollywood send-up, Swimming with Sharks. Working an agency desk for a week could surely get the first glimmers of anyone’s vengeful reverie going, even now. But the believers still keep coming, enduring humiliation and despair for a chance to grab the brass ring of fame. Ear to the Ground carries on the tradition of these acerbic Hollywood satires as starry-eyed earthquake specialists are caught in the web of disaster movie-making with excitable D-girls, alongside cameos from bad boy European super directors.

  Like William Faulkner, Joan Didion and Bruce Wagner before them, writers have long been wading into Los Angeles’s literary waters, myself included. One has to deeply love the strange, lonely pulse of the hidden neighborhoods and haunted canyons and be on the right vibration to “get” Los Angeles and write about it with credibility. It’s a vibration I struggled to tap into over my years in Los Angeles, but I feel lucky to have found it—in all its peculiarity and sunny doom. There’s a reason writers flock here and a reason I couldn’t stay away (five years in New York was all I could muster): Los Angeles is a city of perpetual hope and chance, a 24/7 Vegas casino with a bright sun and glittering blue sky, and a place where reinvention is still an ever-present dream.

  There’s an exciting nostalgia that wafts through Ear to the Ground—nestled between the moment Jerry Garcia died and O.J. Simpson’s trial for murder began—and though Ed Debevic’s and Damiano’s are gone from our grid, it’s nice to revisit a time when million dollar movie ideas were still being written down on bar napkins.

  — Karolina Waclawiak

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Ear to the Ground was originally published as a weekly serial novel in the Los Angeles Reader, beginning with Volume 17, Number 30, May 5, 1995 and ending with Volume 18, Number 17, February 2, 1996. An additional chapter not published in the Los Angeles Reader, “Charlie in Kobe,” appears here for the first time as an appendix. Minor inconsistencies in the narrative that occurred during the process of serialization have been left intact.

  EAR TO THE GROUND

  LOS ANGELES IS THE ONLY MAJOR CITY IN THE WORLD, thought Charlie Richter, heading east on Sunset in his red Rent-a-Corsica, where everybody has to drive. The May morning sun was a laser, confounding even the most creative extensions of his car’s visor, so he looked over at the bus to his right, moving along with him at eleven feet per minute. Its passengers seemed uniformly unhappy, and it occurred to him that Detroit had planned its L.A. marketing campaign carefully. Drive and you’ll be happier.

  When traffic began moving freely, Charlie spilled his coffee to the tune of a drop at La Cienega, a splish at Fairfax, and a thwap at La Brea. He took a right—going south—determined to avoid left-hand turns of any kind. La Brea was straight and simple and easy to maneuver one-handed. The red light at Melrose introduced him to a pretty blonde, around thirty, alone in a spanking white Honda Accord, howling with laughter. She caught him noticing and lowered her passenger window. “Howard Stern,” she giggled.

  “What?”

  “On the radio. Howard Stern.”

  The light turned green and he saw no more of her. Turning again, he made his way along Oakwood, past its stucco apartment buildings that appeared to have been shaped from a single mold. He noticed the cracks in their exteriors—at the corners usually, and extending diagonally and horizontally from the windows. Apparent also were the patch-jobs, where wet concrete had been slung as caulk and had discolored quickly.

  Charlie pulled into a permit-only zone in front of 418 North Spaulding where, twelve minutes later, he received a thirty-five-dollar ticket. He was, meanwhile, scratching plaster from the house’s front wall with a Swiss Army knife and mixing it on the palm of his hand with a bluish liquid he squeezed from an eyedropper. Satisfied with his findings, he walked around to the north side of the building, l
ooking for a way into the basement. He discovered a crawl space, which, with a shove of the grate, he easily entered.

  Louis Navaro intended to rise early and wash his car in front of the building he owned. He had given the Santa Ana winds nearly two days to swirl their desert dust around his quarter-panels and work their insidiousness into his MacPherson struts. A bucket of hot water and a serious gob of Latho-Glaze would stun the demons, and force their retreat. It was his building; it was his car. The woman who’d left him seven years earlier had taken everything else—except for a duplex he’d converted from two vertically stacked apartments, blasting through the ceiling of the lower in a surge so libidinous he was convinced it was the sort of gesture to make her stay a lifetime.

  He was wrong, of course, and after two years he moved into a smaller unit on the other side of the building, hoping the duplex would be easy to rent, in spite of its price: twenty-four hundred dollars, firm.

  Currently, he lay in bed, staring at a tiny crack in the ceiling that resembled the depiction of a river on a map. He’d had a dream about a cruise boat that sailed, curiously, from Los Angeles to Chicago. The rest was pretty hazy, and no amount of recollection served him. So when at first there was a scraping sound beneath him, he didn’t notice. It persisted, however, and became a pop-pop, then a cack-cack, so Navaro got up. He jumped into some khakis and, zipping up his fly, went out the front door, and around to the side of the building.

  Only Charlie’s feet and ankles were visible. Navaro, barefoot and barechested, took note of the exposed black leather uppers and the conservative-looking trouser cuffs. He paused for a moment before he heard from within the rap of metal on metal.

  “What’re you doin’ there? Hey!” The rapping stopped.

  “Hello? Mr. Navaro?” The voice was muffled.

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s Charlie Richter.” It sounded like “Cawa Rawa.” Gradually, the ankles led to shins, and thighs. Charlie’s white button-down emerged, smudged. The expression on his face resembled that of an auto mechanic with bad news. “I was checking the foundation.”

  “The foundation?”

  “I was wondering why there’s no X-brace along the front.”

  “What?”

  “Front to back, the expanse is X-enforced, but along the front it’s only an H, and then kind of a …”

  “Hey, I’m tri’na find a tenant, not a building inspector.”

  “No, I mean …”

  “Whaddya afraid of? The Big Bad Wolf?”

  Charlie smiled and stood up.

  “This building got through Northridge, nothin’ happened.”

  “Uh-huh.” Charlie brushed some pebbles from his trousers and looked over at the lawn. “What was your price again?”

  “Twenty-four hundred, firm.”

  “Two thousand.”

  “No way.”

  “Tell me,” Charlie hesitated, “how long’s it been vacant?”

  Navaro lit a Pall Mall, and spat out a fleck of tobacco. He took a couple of drags and looked his prospective tenant in the face. “This is the only duplex in the neighborhood.”

  “Precisely.” This somehow put the landlord at a disadvantage. “Nobody wants to pay that much rent around here.”

  “It’s a damn good neighborhood. And a damn good apartment.”

  “At twenty-four hundred, people want to live in Beverly Hills.”

  “Whaddya need so much space for?”

  “My equipment.”

  There came the pause that accompanies any derailed negotiation, until one side or the other realigns it. In this case, it was Charlie.

  “Here’s what I’m saying. I’d like you to think for a minute about my next offer, and if you can’t abide by it, just say no, and I’ll wish you the best.”

  Navaro dropped his cigarette. Charlie, seeing the landlord’s bare feet, squashed it cold, and continued: “But if you say yes, we’ll be in agreement, which makes sense, since we’ll be living under the same roof. So, if it’s all right with you, I’d like you to think carefully before answering.”

  “All right.”

  “You’ll think about the figure I’m about to give you?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Navaro answered impatiently.

  “Two thousand.”

  Grace Gonglewski swallowed the last sip of her coffee and put the cup on the kitchen table, in the center of the patch of sunlight that drifted in through the triple row of windows over the sink. She glanced at the script tented beside her, then looked at her watch. Eight fifty-four. I’ll finish this tonight, she thought, and then she let the pages fan themselves shut with a breeze that ruffled the tiny hairs on her forearm. Ruefully, she glanced toward the high-ceilinged expanse of the living room, where two waist-high stacks of screenplays sat next to a white Ikea couch.

  Each day at Tailspin Pictures seemed like a lifetime to Grace. She felt, every morning—usually at the intersection of La Brea and Hollywood, where that chrome sculpture reminded her of New York—that she would die in Los Angeles, probably at Warners, reading at her desk.

  They wanted her to plow through three thousand pages of screenplay format every week, identifying gems. But God help her (He didn’t) if what she thought was a gem turned out to be coal, or—according to Ethan, two years her junior—shit.

  She had not the power to say yes at Tailspin Pictures; neither actually did her boss. Grace lived and marched in the ranks of Development, and it was her job to say no.

  If all that was something of a crapshoot, however, Grace’s apartment, at least, was hers alone, created in her own image, where she answered to no one but herself. Looking at the pattern of sun and shadows coming through the curtains, she felt, not for the first time, as if she couldn’t bear to leave. Then she went to get her sunglasses and keys.

  The bedroom was mossy, dark, a tangle of sleep smells, crumpled bedclothes and curtains drawn against the light. As Grace’s eyes adjusted, she grimaced at the mess. Sprawled across the width of the queen-size mattress lay Ian, hand raised, as if in protest, against the headboard’s knotty pine. God, Ian—she’d forgotten all about him, although it should hardly have come as a surprise. In three months, they had never once had breakfast together, and lately, she’d even given up kissing him good-bye. Looking at one skinny, dark-haired leg protruding from the sheets, she felt a small finger of revulsion tickle the back of her throat, and she had to fight off the urge to kick him, to tell him to go on home where he belonged. Then she noticed the delicate architecture of his back and, as his breathing rose and fell in small crescendos, her revulsion faded into a shimmering aura of desire.

  Outside, the sun was bright but not hot, and morning mist hung like vapor in the air. As usual, Navaro was sitting at the bottom of the front steps, staring at his 1979 Le Sabre as if it were a limousine. When Grace passed, he raised his head and leered at her, sunlight reflecting like lightning off his oiled black hair.

  “Guess what?” he said, eyes on her breasts. “I rented the place.”

  It took a moment, but then Grace saw the open doorway behind him, and understood.

  “Really?” she said. “To who?”

  “Some guy,” Navaro explained. He took a quick look over his shoulder before cocking his finger to his ear and moving it around. “He’s a little strange, you know? Asking me about the foundations, shit like that. But hey”—he raised his palms to the sky in an exaggerated shrug—“he paid me three months’ rent, up-front.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Grace said, not really caring but wanting to be polite. Still, she lingered, the glimmer of a question flickering at the edges of her mind. “He’s not in the entertainment business, is he?”

  “Depends on how you define entertainment. He says he’s a scientist, whatever that means.”

  The first thing Charlie did inside his new apartment was to hang his suit and dress shirt in the upstairs hall closet. Then he walked off the dimensions of the place, jotting his findings in a blue pocket notebook, and
trying to picture how it would look after his machines had been installed.

  In the master bedroom, Charlie looked out the windows at the overgrown backyard. Beyond it lay a high chicken wire fence and the back of another house. He didn’t know much about the neighborhood but, Charlie thought, it didn’t matter; the only important thing was that he was here. He could taste the excitement, a flavor in his mouth. He took a deep breath, and another. Then he went into the bathroom and let the old stall shower run.

  For as long as Charlie could remember, the feeling of running water on his body had calmed him, had helped him sort out his thoughts and clear his emotions. Today was no different—until he stepped out of the shower only to realize, too late, that he did not have a towel. For a moment, he stood there, helpless, but then he shrugged, and shook himself off like a dog. Water splattered everywhere, fanning out like the cracks left behind by an earthquake … and suddenly, Charlie was seeing the connectedness of the pattern, each drop linked to the ones around it. He closed his eyes and tried to imprint the vision but, like some abstract notion, the floating image would not coalesce.

  So Charlie walked naked through the apartment. Briefly, he considered getting dressed, but it was still too early, so instead, he carefully laid out his clothes on the hardwood floor and sat down to meditate. Slowly, painfully, he folded his legs into a lotus position and let his eyes unfocus on a spot across the room. He drifted, but only until a driving bass line began to rumble through the wall from the apartment next door, followed by a fuzzed-out electric guitar, and the steady snap of a bass drum and snare. Although Charlie tried to ignore it, within seconds, there was nothing in his head but noise. Christ, he sighed. Then, refocusing his eyes, he extricated himself from the lotus and went for his clothes.

  In the middle of the spare white expanse of Grace’s living room, Ian was in his boxer shorts, rocking back and forth to Courtney Love. He had only been out of bed for five minutes or so, but already the day was beginning to unveil its charms. The bag he’d stashed in the battery compartment of his laptop had yielded exactly one joint, and now he stood smoking and swaying, the sun glancing off his back and legs like a lover’s caress, muscles melting into languid liquid, and the edges of the world going all woolly, as if a layer of green gauze had been laid across his eyes.