The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  “Eighteen.”

  “You trying to break into pictures?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on…”

  “No, really.”

  “Then, are you from California?”

  “I’m from New York.”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here. It’s the you know what of the world.”

  “Everybody I’ve met hates it,” she said. “But still, they stay.”

  “Actually, I don’t know why I bother to stay myself. It’s just another two-step job in the chorus line.”

  He was funny, trying so hard to be accurate about what he really meant.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  They put out their cigarettes at the same time.

  “It’s this money thing,” he said in a puzzled way, bending forward and clasping his hands together. “It drives me crazy. I lie here thinking up ways to make money. I’ve got a buddy who’s worse than me. When we get together—you can’t imagine all the crazy schemes we think up! Sometimes I think he’ll end up in jail! My nature isn’t especially criminal though.”

  “I wonder a lot what it’s like to have money. Last night I was at a movie writer’s house. It had an artificial brook in the garden and a dining table longer than this room. He must have given the cabdriver a hundred dollars for taking us around all night.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “James St. Vincent.”

  “Yeah, I heard of him.” He was silent a moment. Then, “You know, I just thought of asking you to introduce me to him, but then, right away, I thought how they treat writers out here. Nobody pays them any attention at all.”

  “But they pay them so much! He told me he gets ten thousand dollars for writing a picture.”

  Jake repeated after her, “Ten thousand dollars!”

  She handed him another cigarette. “I shouldn’t smoke,” he said, lighting it. “It makes my gut hurt.”

  “It would take care of me for life,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said thoughtfully.

  “But there’s nothing but poor people in this country—”

  “—plotting to make fortunes.” He laughed. “I’m poor. Out here, they say broke. It has more class.”

  “You aren’t poor. You’ve got a family with a ranch. I meant, really poor people.”

  “There always will be the poor. It’s the natural way. Rich and poor. Max Shore rags me about my attitude. Did you know he was a Communist? I’d never met one before. He tried to organize the extras once, you know, into a cell or whatever they call it. After months of work, he got about twelve people together, and two of them were a hundred years old and only came in case there was free coffee and a little something to eat. He’s too nice a guy to be mixed up with that bunch. They ought to go back to Russia.” He looked at her and smiled. “Not that I would mind going there myself. I’d like to go everywhere before I die. How did you come to meet Max?”

  She told him, leaving out her only reason for having gone to San Diego which, without reflecting upon it, she did not want to tell him. But he didn’t pursue the subject further, only remarked she was lucky not to have met Max’s wife who was, he said, like a sergeant. Hadn’t she ought to go and speak to Mrs. Corrigan and make sure she’d get the room? Annie wondered about that. He assured her she wouldn’t have any trouble. Mrs. Corrigan only paid attention to cats and rents.

  “Have you got any money?”

  “A little,” she said.

  “I’ve been hoarding a few dollars. You want to have supper and go to a movie? I love the movies!”

  “Yes,” she answered without hesitation, aware she was doing exactly what Johnnie had warned her against, acting on impulse, making herself available. But Jake Cranford was such a nice peaceful boy. She felt easy with him; what questions he had asked lacked the pointed belligerence she was accustomed to from people who were either her own age or close to it. She didn’t like the company of very young people—they forced her back into the singularity of her own life, imprisoned her in her own strangeness.

  “You don’t mind paying your own way?” he asked her.

  “Oh, no…”

  “I worry all the time I’m going to blow my fare to New York. I knew a guy did that. He gave himself a big party before he left here and when he woke up a day later, he’d spent his ticket. Listen, you know you could report that man to the police, the one that beats the dog.”

  “I’d be afraid to do that,” she said. She put her cigarettes back in her purse, and catching sight of the card of perfume vials, felt a brief flicker of concern for Johnnie. But maybe he’d be able to go back to his own place tonight—she couldn’t always be available to Johnnie either, could she?

  “Well, why did you come out here?” Jake was asking her.

  “There was a woman I met driving out. I was just hanging around in New York. She offered me a ride and I came along.”

  “I’ve never been east,” he said. He opened the door of a small closet and took out a shiny jacket like a basketball player’s. She thought of her own clothes hanging in that space. They wouldn’t take up much room. And Walter’s! She turned away toward the window, suddenly apprehensive, as though she’d glimpsed Walter himself looking out at her unforgivingly from the closet.

  Across the way, she saw a heavy-set man wearing a thick brown sweater moving about hurriedly as he rearranged several chairs. As she watched, he suddenly threw up his hands and began to conduct as though an orchestra sat before him. A minute later, she heard the faint strains of music.

  “He does that all night,” observed Jake, standing next to her. “And he plays the same records over and over, classical stuff.”

  She glanced briefly at his jacket. It looked too big for him. “My brother’s,” he said.

  “Do you know the man over there?”

  “Oh, yeah. I spend the evening there once in a while. It’s a real show. I’ll take you there sometime. They let in anybody. I think they like people to watch them.”

  Just before they left the house, Annie spoke to Mrs. Corrigan, the limping woman who had directed her to Jake’s room. “You can have the room, I guess,” Mrs. Corrigan said. “Why not? They come and they go. There are nothing but wanderers in this town. …” She appeared to have sewn another stitch in her mouth. Annie could hardly hear her.

  She suggested they go to the Greek’s. The food was cheap and good. Over their coffee, she admitted to him that she was not quite eighteen. He laughed and called her San Quentin quail, and when she asked what that meant, explained it had something to do with taking underage girls across state lines.

  “Carson Brody, that buddy of mine with the criminal mind, he comes from Boston, your part of the country. You’ll have to meet him. He knows so much—I never knew anybody had so much information. You know why the movies are out here? Carson told me. It’s because of the Mexican border being so close. Movies really started in New York, before the World War. The biggest outfits got special patents. But a lot of little companies couldn’t afford them and made movies anyhow. So those little companies came out here and kept on making pictures, figuring they could get away to Mexico before they could be stopped with injunctions. Carson’s always reading law books.”

  “He wants to be a lawyer?”

  “Carson? He doesn’t want to be anything. He’s just waiting for a chance…he says you have to know everything, then people won’t do you in. I don’t see it quite the same way. You want to see a Jimmy Stewart movie? There’s one a few blocks from here.”

  “I don’t like him much, that lower lip of his…”

  Jake laughed. “Listen, he’s made a fortune out of that lower lip. Well, I’ll take you to Ivan’s. That place is as good as any picture. Since you told me your real age, I’ll tell you that my name’s really Jack. Carson told me to change it to Jake. He said I’d do better because people would think I was Jewish and there’s so many Jews in the picture industry.�
�

  He put down his coffee cup with extreme care, then bent toward the table, his hands flying toward his belly. Alarmed, she reached out to him with her hand. He shook his head, his eyes closed, his mouth gripped with pain. “It’s okay,” he gasped. “All the cigarettes and coffee. I shouldn’t go near coffee.”

  He straightened up, gave her a weak smile, and took a medicine bottle from his pocket; there was hardly anything in it. He poured out the few remaining drops of green liquid, swallowed it quickly, then sank back into the chair. “I’m supposed to eat baby food and take phenobarbital. But that chewed-up stuff makes me gag and the phenos make me blue.”

  “But what is it?”

  “I’ve had it for years. Colitis…my colon goes into spasm. It hurts, but it passes. See, it’s going away already. You know, they looked at my gut once through a fluoroscope. I digest five times faster than a normal person. If it showed, I could go on tour. Come on, it’ll help me to walk. A man on a bus told me the trick was to walk, brings the blood to where—Oh, hell! I don’t know.”

  Annie was looking at his roughened hands, one of which still grasped the medicine bottle. He caught her thought. “I know I look as if I were going to keel over any minute, but I was a good hand.” He stuck the bottle in his pocket. “I worked for my father on the farm all the time I was going to high school. I was up at 5:00 A.M., you bet, working like a fool.”

  “I’m going to work tomorrow,” she said. “I got my first job.”

  “Yeah?”

  “In L.A. It’s a dress shop. I’m called a stock girl.”

  “What’s the pay?”

  She hesitated. But, she realized, she didn’t have to lie to him. “Eleven dollars a week,” she said.

  “That’s pretty skinny pay,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s one thing I’ll give Max. It’s a crime the way people get paid. I mean, you get eleven dollars a week, and St. Vincent gets ten thousand bucks for a script—”

  “But I don’t really know how to do anything,” she said.

  “Listen, you could make a lot more, waiting on tables or in a drive-in. The picture people give big tips. Or you could model—if you have any clothes. Have you? I guess not. Well, that’s not such a hot idea. These model agencies, some of them are no better than —” he paused, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  He hadn’t wanted to offend her, and she thought of Samuel and Johnnie, of Walter and her own father, who did not spare her. Jake was really innocent.

  “You mean, they get girls for men?” she asked softly.

  “Yes. And for women too.” They looked at each other seriously. Suddenly, he flushed. “Let’s go now and see what Ivan’s up to.” In the end, he’d paid for both their suppers, saying it didn’t matter, he’d manage the fare east, and anybody who was working for eleven bucks a week shouldn’t be made to pay their own way …think what Max Shore would say if he, Jake, exploited the working classes. “The pro-le-tar-iat!” he intoned.

  They walked back to Sycamore Street. It was almost as if they were walking home together from school, she thought, recalling her brief sojourn in the Nyack high-school sophomore class where she had successfully conjugated Latin verbs and flunked math.

  At Ivan’s, they were at once plunged into the particularities of mad existences. Only a few minutes after Ivan had waved them to a wooden bench, his roommate, the Sheriff, arrived, carrying a large burlap sack which he emptied on the floor in front of them. Out of it fell alarm clocks, trusses, capsules, lipsticks, blue bottles of Milk of Magnesia, cigars, a hot-water bottle, an enema bag, bars of candy, bottles of castor oil, tins of Ex-Lax, and a Mickey Mouse doll.

  “Get the Beast down,” commanded Ivan. “This will interest him.”

  The Sheriff flung off his cowboy hat. “It’s sickening!” he cried in an outraged tenor voice.

  “You see!” Ivan exclaimed. “He has no respect for his work. How the hell did you get out of the place with that sack, Sheriff? You’re branching out, I see. God! You’ll be showing up with the contents of the whole Owl drugstore next week, then the entire chain of them, then Los Angeles, then California itself, goddamnit! Now everybody shut up! I’m going to play Number 39 in E Flat. You like Mozart, girl? What’s your name?”

  Annie nodded silently, watching Ivan’s tic. It was a kind of folding of the upper cheek against the bottom lid of his eye and it seemed to be having a separate conversation with her. “Annie,” she said almost inaudibly.

  The Sheriff opened a can of beets with a pocket knife and began to spear them, chewing them morosely, one by one.

  “I said,” Ivan cried irritably, “to go and get the Beast. He’ll want to pick over the night’s haul, and I enjoy that. You shock him silly.”

  “Nothing shocks him,” replied the Sheriff, his mouth bleeding with beet juice. “That’s just another of your fairy tales.”

  Ivan shrugged. He picked up the record carefully, wiping it with a shirttail. “‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is King,’ ” he chanted ponderously. “Annie, you’re just a sweet young girl. You can’t imagine what a sordid hole this place is. The landlady is an old sot, gin bottles under her bed, with all the English airs she puts on to make me feel low-class.”

  “She is English,” observed the Sheriff.

  “He,” Ivan said, pointing an accusing finger at the Sheriff, “torments her. He told her there’d been a landslide in Iceland—her son is stationed there, in the army—and that the entire population had been wiped out. Sadist!” He roared with laughter, his tic accelerating so it seemed about to consume his eye. Abruptly, the wild shouts ceased. Ivan glared at the Sheriff. “She was so drunk today, she couldn’t have taken a phone message. God! What if someone had called me? You may well be responsible for my having lost a stupendous assignment, you bastard!” He turned his attention to Annie. “This is a house of freaks,” he said. “There’s a giant who lives in the next room. He has a seven-foot-long bed. Once a week, he brings home several Filipinos, and the ensuing racket drives me mad!”

  “Don’t discuss that,” said the Sheriff angrily. He kicked away the empty beet can and lay down on a narrow cot. “It’s very nasty.”

  “And this maniac lying there works in the Owl drugstore and steals them blind once a week and leaves this trash around for me to take care of. He doesn’t even fence it. How the hell could you fence Ex-Lax? Why don’t you steal something useful, you insane creature!”

  The Sheriff closed his eyes.

  “Now we will listen,” Ivan said quietly. He wound up the phonograph but no sooner had the music begun than he pulled up the arm, staring at it with an expression of hopeless rage. “Why don’t you swipe some new needles for me, you fool!” he shouted in the Sheriffs direction. “It’s the only pleasure of my life! Look at that novel!” He waved at the pages of manuscript piled up around the corners of the room. “It’s over two thousand pages long—for sheer length, I should be given an award. By now, the first pages have already turned yellow. I might as well be dead and buried. Annie, are you in pictures?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a good girl. I’ll tell you a story. You tell her, Sheriff, about Cusimano.”

  “Why is he called Sheriff?” Annie whispered to Jake. “I never found out,” he whispered back.

  The Sheriff began to speak tonelessly, his eyes closed.

  “Cusimano had a clean little barbershop in Chicago. One day he read in a magazine that Sam Wood was making the life of Rudolph Valentino. He sold his shop, gave most of the proceeds to his wife, bought himself a pin-striped suit, and came west to Hollywood. By a miserable stroke of bad luck, he ended up in this very house. He was fat and fifty. Ivan found out soon enough that this idiot had it in his mind to play the leading role, Valentino himself. Ivan suggested to him that in Hollywood you don’t merely arrive and announce your intention—no, you have to do something splendid, extraordinary, to attract notice. The poor dumb sonuvabitch listened to Ivan like it was Moses talking. Ivan said Cusimano wo
uld have to get a horse, dress up like a sheik, and ride out to the studio at five o’clock in the morning—”

  An enormous man wearing nothing but shiny black trousers and felt slippers marched into the room, kissed Ivan on the cheek and, groaning with the effort, lowered himself to the floor. “Ah, God! It’s been a black day!” he said.

  “Shut up!” exclaimed Ivan.

  “Pinochle?” asked the man plaintively.

  “So Ivan,” the Sheriff resumed, “undertook to provide Cusimano with horse and costume. On the morning agreed upon, Ivan arrived here with a horse he had stolen from a milkman. Ivan knows nothing about horses, fears them in fact, but he was so intent on destroying Cusimano that he was able to undo the animal’s traces and lead it by its reins—”

  “Oh, Christ!” exploded the fat man. “I’ve heard that goddamned story a thousand times. Who’s that girl?”

  “Almost up the stairs and into the room,” continued the Sheriff imperturbably. “Ivan had already stolen a few dollars from the landlady’s cookie box while she was out cold on the kitchen floor, and with it he had purchased several lengths of white cloth and a yard or so of green braid. Ivan, aided by myself, dressed Cusimano and escorted him to his steed, which was trying to lie down on the sidewalk.”

  “That horse wasn’t in such bad shape,” observed Ivan mildly.

  “The horse looked abnormal, like a camel with an inverted hump. That horse was abnormal like Ivan and the Beast—”

  “Don’t call me abnormal, you gonif!” shouted the Beast, scratching the black curling hair of his chest.

  “But Cusimano was so unhinged by the thought of the glory that lay ahead, he didn’t notice the animal’s condition. At the very last minute, after he was astride the horse, I saw that he was wearing Al Capone shoes, black, so we removed them—”

  “Wait!” cried Ivan, darting to a closet from which he took, handing them to Annie, a pair of tiny black pointed shoes.

  “We gave the horse a kick or two. We were only an hour over schedule. It was six in the morning.”