Home Free

by Dan Wakefield

  She turned around again, looking at each of the ground-floor apartment doors.

  “I know it’s got a window on the ocean,” she said, “cause he always brags about the view. Let’s try this one.”

  They went to one of the end apartments, nearest the beach.

  Gene said, “The name on the bell says ‘Ramirez.’”

  “Oh. That doesn’t mean anything. Except that probably no one named Ramirez lives here.”

  She pushed the bell.

  Gene noticed curtains move, but he didn’t see anyone.

  “Yes?” came a voice.

  “Uncle Phil? It’s me, Belle. And a friend. My friend Gene.”

  There were voices in the background and then the door opened. Uncle Phil was buttoning up a pair of old Levi’s. He didn’t have anything else on, including underwear.

  “God,” said Belle sweeping in, “don’t you ever get tired of doing that?”

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  He had the wry, battered look of someone who’s been through a war but is tolerant of civilian innocence; not condescending, tolerant.

  A girl, yawning, came out of the other room. The bedroom, evidently. She was wearing a man’s unironed shirt over orange bikini panties. She was tall and had long dark hair and gave the impression of being rather regal until you heard her voice, which was high and had a childlike lisp.

  “This is Pepper,” Uncle Phil said.

  “Hi, Pepper,” said Gene. “I’m Gene.”

  “Listen, Pepper,” Belle said, “you know you can go blind doing that stuff all the time.”

  Pepper looked at Uncle Phil, her eyes wide.

  “No, honey,” he said. “Why don’t you roll us some joints?”

  “I was looking for Donley,” Belle said, “but I guess he’s not here, unless he’s still in that other room and the three of you have been doing unspeakable things to each other.”

  Uncle Phil pointed to the bedroom.

  “Search,” he said.

  “My God, I wouldn’t go into that den of unnatural practices for all the tea in China!”

  The apartment was small but cozy. Burlap curtains of a warm, goldish color. Wicker furniture. Battered TV, good stereo, lots of books, paperbacks, and some large weighty-looking tomes.

  “Nice pad,” said Gene.

  Phil nodded.

  “Courtesy of our benefactors, the great State of California.”

  “Phil is a Welfare artist,” Belle said.

  “True. And I’m about to bring off my masterpiece.”

  “You mean you can get even more money out of those poor innocent Welfare people?”

  Phil lit a joint and started it around.

  “This, my dear, goes far beyond mere Welfare. It is a step up, a much richer step up, a whole new category.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Affectionately known among its recipients and aspirants by its initials, ATD, it is, in formal terminology, Aid to the Totally Dependent.”

  “My God!” said Belle. “Are you going to saw off your legs?”

  “No, no,” said Phil.

  “Well, he would,” Belle said to Gene, “if it meant he could gouge more money out of the state.”

  “Fortunately,” Phil said, “such measures are not necessary. It is possible to be graded ‘totally dependent’ due to psychological as well as physical problems.”

  “Won’t they stick you in the nuthouse?” Belle asked.

  “They’re overcrowded,” Phil pointed out. “Besides, if I study symptoms well enough and get them down pat, I will be officially ‘totally dependent’ on the society and yet of no threat or danger to it.”

  “Except to its pocketbook, you mean,” said Belle.

  “Where do you get the symptoms, man?” Gene asked. “I mean where do you find out what they are? For what you want to have?”

  Phil pointed to the weighty tomes Gene had noticed. “Medical dictionaries of pathology,” he said. “I am studying in consultation with a new neighbor who was recently departed from UCLA medical school when it was learned that he had a way of making certain pain-killing drugs seem to vanish into thin air. They judged him wrong. He is not a thief, he is a humanitarian.”

  “If you pull the wool over their eyes,” asked Belle, “will you buy one of my palm trees?”

  “Of course. And we’ll hang it proudly and prominently in the living room of our new apartment.”

  “For heaven sake,” said Belle, “will you move to Beverly Hills or something?”

  “No, no, Same place. Same building. But just a larger apartment, higher up. Better view. Although I must say the view from here is quite splendid. Especially at sunset.”

  He pulled back the curtain, showing a dramatic stretch of beach and ocean.

  “Wow,” said Gene. “You really got it made.”

  Uncle Phil grinned, took the joint that Pepper was handing to him, and said proudly, “Don’t tell me the System doesn’t work.”

  There was an A&W Root Beer stand on Ocean Front Walk near the pier and Gene got a job there. They had a small grill and served burgers and hot dogs and tacos along with the root beer. It was sort of like working outdoors because there was a window at the front where people could come up and order and then sit down at one of two little tables in front of the place, and the window was always open. It hardly paid anything but Gene hardly wanted anything. He found a room on Speedway, the sort of little paved alleyway that ran behind Ocean Front Walk. He had asked about an apartment in a little white cement four-apartment unit there but it was $110 which was more than he wanted to pay and so the owner showed him a little room beside the garage. It had one small window, and there was a hot water heater in it that serviced the apartment above; it was all unpainted concrete, but Gene could have it for fifteen bucks a week. He took it. There was a toilet and a washbasin but no tub or shower. He figured he could bathe in the ocean.

  It felt strange going back into town, to Hollywood, now that he was out in Venice. He’d only been there a few days but already he felt it was home, and Hollywood, especially Sunset and Hollywood boulevards, the business and restaurant and nightclub areas, were weird, unfamiliar, frantic places, supercitified, souped-up, garish.

  The office of Muller, Behr and Starkie was a whole other planet. It felt like stepping back in a dream that maybe didn’t happen at all. Gene didn’t want to go there but felt he should see Ray Behr in person and tell him what he’d decided to do. Ray Behr had been a bit abrupt on the phone, but he knew what had gone down and told Gene to take his time about coming back.

  Ray Behr was nodding and pacing and snapping his fingers behind his back while Gene tried to thank him for the job, for everything he’d done, but that Gene had decided he was going to live out in Venice.

  Ray Behr nodded, as if he had known this was what would happen all along, from the very beginning.

  “Venice is the last stop,” he said.

  Gene didn’t want to ask “for what” and besides, Ray Behr had given it his enigmatic smile with the quick turn on the heel and disappearance from the room.

  Over.

  The rains came.

  Since Gene hit L.A. in early December it had never rained once but just before New Year’s it started and still was going now a week later, unceasing, drumming, pouring, blowing, winds making the palm trees bow, winds shaking the houses, rain seeping in everywhere, under doors, in cracks of windows, flooding the streets, stalling cars, this was not a thunderstorm it was like a monsoon, or what Gene supposed one to be, where the rain was all, was everything, ruled, was constant, king.

  Gene was glad he wasn’t in town when the rain came, he figured it would just be depressing there but out by the beach it was beautiful as well as terrible, it was raw and elemental, real and cleansing. He walked in it, soaked in it, wandered in it, held up his face to it, took off his shoes and socks and waded in it, rolled up his pants and walked along the beach in it, slept through it, woke to it, felt he was in it and
wanted to be, wanted to feel rained on rained out drenched clean of the crud in and on him.

  But not even the great torrential rain dispelled the horrible blood-dripping seal. It would come before him in a flash, while drinking beer or walking down the street and he would stop and squeeze his eyes shut, holding his breath, clenching his fists, trying to will it away and it would go then leaving him exhausted, spent, but he knew it was not gone for good it could flash back anytime and would. And he couldn’t talk about it. Who could you tell you were frightened by a seal? Maybe someone else who’d had a bad acid trip, maybe Uncle Phil, but the hitch was talking about it brought it back and so it was best to try to keep it at bay, do battle with it each time, try as well as you could to forget till it wouldn’t let you.

  One of the first days after the rain stopped, leaving the whole place bright and dripping, fresh and new, Belle dropped by the A&W. She wanted to invite Gene to come and have dinner with her and Barnes. She picked him up after work, seeming unnaturally subdued. Even the trip into town in her red Triumph was prosaic, lacking the customary spirit of adventure and sense of narrowly escaping danger by bizarre maneuvers and a benevolent fate. When they got to her place she pulled up next to the curb and said, “Let’s take a walk.”

  “It’s nice out,” she said, as if in explanation. But it usually was.

  “See these houses?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  They were the small, one-story frame or brick or stucco houses that lined so many of the streets in this area of Hollywood, between Santa Monica and Hollywood boulevards, between La Cienega and Doheny. Quiet little streets with quiet little houses, none of them grand or opulent, their charm of a modest kind, coming from trim lawns and trellises, well-tended shrubs and flower-bordered porches.

  “Don’t you think they’re wonderful?”

  “Well, yes. I like them a lot.”

  Belle giggled.

  “See that one?”

  It was one of the frame ones with a pointed roof, a front porch with trellises, the sort of house you could find in any quiet street in the Midwest, like Iowa City.

  “See, the people who built these came from Ohio and places like that, and they thought you always had to have those pointed roofs because of the snow, and so when they came to live here they built them the same way even though they didn’t have to. Anyway I think it’s kind of nice, all these people from those places like Ohio coming out here and building their little houses because they knew it was better out here.”

  She pronounced the word “Ohio” as if it were something outlandish, as if it were a wonder such a place as that even existed.

  “I dunno,” Gene said, “I kind of like the Spanish-style jobs. The stucco ones with the red tile roofs.”

  “Oh, they’re wonderful, too,” Belle said. “I sort of prefer the little wooden Ohio ones but all the ones on these streets around here are wonderful. I’d love to live in almost any of them.”

  Gene understood now.

  “But Barnes wouldn’t,” he said.

  Belle sighed and put her fists on her hips.

  “That fool. See, he says he would like to live in one of those houses but then he gets all these excuses.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the stupidest one of all is, he says he wants to wait to see if his movie gets made and then he could actually buy a house.”

  “You don’t think the movie’ll happen?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is he shouldn’t count on it happening. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve seen all these people come out here, writers and actors and people who want to direct, and they believe what everyone tells them and then they’re heartbroken. I said to Barnes with my utmost sincerity, I said, ‘Please,’ I said, ‘Don’t believe in Hollywood!’ I meant the movie part, of course, not the wonderful little streets and houses.”

  They had strolled back to Belle’s, and sat down on the little slope of lawn in front of the big house she lived behind. It was dusk, quiet, you could see the Hollywood Hills in the distance, green and blue, unexpected, too steep to be all built up, leaving lots of wild unsettled space, a frontier feeling. He understood Belle’s loving it here.

  “Maybe Barnes is afraid,” he said.

  “Well, he shouldn’t be afraid. He’s too old for that.”

  “In Boston he never took his books out of the boxes.”

  “What boxes?”

  “You know, cardboard boxes he had packed his books in when he moved there. He was afraid if he put the books up on shelves he’d be there permanent.”

  “Well, I can understand feeling that way in Boston. It’s too cold there. But now he should want to be permanent.”

  “Sounds like a good deal to me, anyway.”

  “Well, you should tell him that. It’s for his own good.”

  Gene said he’d try.

  At dinner Barnes seemed grumpy, and Belle banged the dishes and silverware around a lot. Afterward they sat around smoking grass and listening to Finian’s Rainbow. Gene said he ought to be heading back and Belle said why didn’t he spend the night in Barnes’s room at the Marmont, then she’d drive him out to Venice in the morning when she went to her studio.

  “Besides,” she said, “somebody might as well get some money’s worth out of that expensive room nobody sleeps in.”

  Barnes pretended not to hear.

  Belle suggested Barnes walk over to the Marmont with Gene while she cleaned up the dinner.

  Barnes stopped at a liquor store on Sunset and bought a bottle of Courvoisier.

  “We’ll have a nightcap,” he said.

  The nightcap turned out to be the whole bottle. Barnes killed most of it.

  “How come you keep it, man?” Gene said. “The room here?”

  “I like it. It’s great to work in.”

  “Isn’t it kind of steep, just for that?”

  “Then if anything happened, I’d still have my own place.”

  “If what happened?”

  “If me and Belle split.”

  “You want to?”

  “No.”

  “Does she?”

  “She wants a little house. For us to live in together.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “How do you get out of it?”

  “Of the house?”

  “Of the whole thing.”

  “Somebody leaves.”

  “Yeh, but then it’s a mess. It hurts more then. Everybody. Besides, it makes me nervous. Living in houses. You can’t just up and walk out of a house. It’s more of a permanent type thing. Here, I could leave any day, any time of night or day. Or I can stay. I like knowing that. It’s the way things are. Things change. People move on. Nothing stays the same. That’s what life is.”

  “A hotel.”

  “Yeh. So you might as well stay in one. Isn’t that how it is?”

  “I guess,” Gene said.

  He was sorry though. About Belle. And Barnes. About himself. About the way it all was.

  The Life Hotel.

  Gene was glad to get back to Venice. Not just to get away from Barnes and Belle’s troubles. He felt at ease there, like he blended in. It was funny. He wouldn’t have felt that way at all in Marina del Rey or Santa Monica, the communities bordering Venice to the north and south. If you just walked south across Washington Street you were in Marina del Rey, a whole other scene, streets with cutesy nautical names like Buccaneer and Outrigger, fancy expensive new houses that Gene thought of as phony Spanish-modern with lots of glass, swinging singles apartment settlements for thirty-five-year-olds trying to live a perpetual college life of beer blasts and water polo, sleek expensive restaurants serving lobster and candlelight. People said Marina del Rey was the future, the affluent leisure life of the smiling upward mobile, and to Gene the idea was so awful he figured it might be true.

  If you walked north clear across Venice you came to Santa Monica, and Gene liked that a lot better but it wasn’t his thing. He liked to
go to the shopping mall there and hit one of the health food stores for a celery shake and raisin on rye, natural nutbread or whatever special was featured. But that was about it. Santa Monica was stolid, secure, sleepy, established, Establishment. You saw a lot of middle-aged men wearing suits and ties, pale and serious, like they might have been accountants in Akron. Santa Monica was nice, with the beach and pier and palm-lined avenue that ran along the ocean, but Gene could never feel part of it, like he did in Venice.

  It wasn’t that Venice was all hippie or all funky, it was a mix of that with middle-class and working people but there wasn’t any rich part, no fancy or pretentious stuff, and people of one kind didn’t seem to take much notice of people who were different, or care. Gene went to a little fair in a vacant lot by one of the canals—they had a little water now from the annual big rains—and there were some watercolors for sale, hot dogs, homemade cakes and pies, a local rock group, a girl selling pots she made. It was to raise money for some kind of Free School they had there. Little kids played in the dust, teenagers walked with arms around each other’s waist, ringlet-haired housewives, sunburned bald men, intense young guys with beards, a black man in a dashiki, another in slacks and a polo shirt, thirtyish long-haired women wearing leather sandals and minidresses. It was Sunday. It was Venice.

  The idea of it Gene dug, too, of a dude trying to build a whole city that would be like the one in Italy. The one Belle called “The Other Venice.” Canals that never got used. They reminded Gene of the line in “American Pie” about driving to the levee but the levee was dry. Right on.

  They played that at Uncle Phil’s a lot, the whole record by Don McLean, and it seemed to Gene like the perfect theme song for Venice, at least for his life and time in it. Everyone would also clap or shout approval at the part about taking the train all the way west, the last one, and that was the end of the music.

  This was it, the Coast, the edge, the last stop, make it here or fall off the edge, and Venice was the perfect headquarters. Especially Uncle Phil’s place, where Gene had taken to hanging out a lot. There were always people coming and going, always some smoke, music, talk, or you could just sit and look out the window, that was cool, too, you never had to pretend or fake anything. Phil got named Uncle because everyone felt that way about him, like he was some kind of wise uncle who’d help you out, you could lay anything on him, he never got uptight about anything.