Hollywood Hills

by Joseph Wambaugh

  "Wouldn't you?" Jonas pulled the balled-up shirt away from his face for a moment.

  "I'd have to think about it," Flotsam said. "She's a woman." Jonas said, "She's a slit-licking lizzy warthog! She ain't no woman."

  "According to the law she is," Flotsam said. "We'll do what you want. You could make a private person's arrest and we'll be glad to transport, but then we'll expect you to follow through all the way. Think about going to court and telling in public how that babe clocked you. It could be way embarrassing, dude. Up to you, though."

  That stopped Jonas cold. He thought about it a moment, about the humiliation and all the hassle, and he said, "Well, what if we forget about it, the both of us? Can we do that?"

  "Okay with us," Flotsam said. "But I don't wanna get another call about you two duking it out again."

  "You won't. I'm going home," Jonas said. Then he yelled to Ludmila, "You can't fire me! I quit, you goddamn commie carpet muncher!"

  "Fock you, stupid head!" his former employer said and flipped him the bird.

  That afternoon when Jonas Claymore got back to his apartment that he shared with Megan Burke in Thai Town, she was lying on the couch watching an old TCM movie in a Percocet fog.

  She was shocked when she saw him, and said, "Jonas! What happened to you?"

  "I got in a fight at work," he said, "with some fucking Russian. Hollywood's full of commie trash. There ain't no Americans in charge of anything these days."

  Megan said. "You're hurt."

  She was wearing a baggy T-shirt and cutoffs and her legs looked even knobbier and paler than the last time Jonas paid any attention to them. When he'd met her, she had healthy dark brown hair in a stylish bob that ended a couple of inches below her ears and looked like a dark hoodie. She liked to wear those cute tights from Target then, but now the tights and most of her clothes were gone, and her hair was longer, dull, and frizzy. He figured that pretty soon it would be bleached out and falling to her shoulders with bangs reaching to her eyes like Lady Gaga's. A lot of the girls he knew did that to themselves, trying to look like the singer, but they ended up looking like shot-out skeezers, all sunken-eyed, pruned, and shriveled. There were dark circles under Megan's nervous violet eyes and altogether he thought she looked like shit.

  "Just get me a damp washcloth and a towel," he said. "I gotta lay down."

  When he was lying on the couch, she returned and started dabbing at his wounds, causing him to yelp when she touched his damaged earlobe.

  "Jonas," she said. "You've lost a chunk of meat from your ear! How did that happen?"

  "A bite," he said.

  "He bit you?" she said, shocked.

  "Fucking Russians shoulda been nuked to the Stone Age," he said to the ceiling.

  She said, "He hurt you pretty bad."

  Then Jonas said, "You shoulda seen the damage I did. It wasn't one-way."

  She dabbed at his ear with a soiled dishtowel, saying, "I'm sure you kicked his butt."

  "I knocked the shit outta that Russian pus bucket," Jonas said to the wall. "Then I almost get busted by the cops for defending myself. Me, the victimized American."

  Megan said, "Just rest now and don't think about it."

  "This is why my grandpa killed communists in Vietnam?" Jonas said to the coffee table littered with fan magazines, candy wrappers, and pizza boxes, as well as OC paraphernalia, including a 6 x 10 inch piece of tinfoil creased in half, a cigarette lighter, and a ballpoint pen with the ink tube removed lying beside it.

  "Try to calm yourself," Megan said.

  "So a commie dirtbag could come to Hollywood and sucker me when I wasn't looking?"

  Megan said, "Your nose'll start bleeding again. We've got half an eighty left. Do you want to chase the dragon?"

  "A half of one bean?" Jonas said. "But I gave you a Ben Franklin yesterday!"

  "It was three days ago, and Wilbur's charging us eighty-five per ox. And we smoked a piece of it when we did those watsons and perks. You're having a brownout. Don't you remember any of it?"

  He vaguely recalled the Vicodins and Perocets, but he couldn't recall smoking half of an 80 mg OxyContin tablet. "It's that goddamn screw-top wine," he said. "It fucks up my memory. Can't you go boost a better bottle somewhere? I'd even settle for a couple forties of OE."

  "I'm not a thief," Megan said.

  Jonas was getting heart palpitations and was sweating cold. His knee joints and right shoulder were aching, which he blamed on the fight. But when he looked more closely at Megan he saw that she had broken into a sweat as well, and she couldn't stop yawning and scratching herself. That is, when she wasn't coughing.

  "Goddamnit, Megan, look at us," he said. "We're jonesing. I gotta chase the dragon and I mean right now!"

  She jumped up, ran to the bedroom, and got the last piece of the OC tablet, bringing it to the coffee table and placing it in the crease of the foil.

  "This ain't a complete half," Jonas accused. "You smoked a bite off it, didn't you?"

  Megan didn't reply and he was too desperate to press her.

  "Just hurry up," he said.

  Megan placed the flame of the lighter underneath the foil and heated the OxyContin tablet. Jonas picked up the empty ink tube, which, unlike a drinking straw, would not burn easily, and put it in his mouth. Megan tilted the foil, and as the heated fragment slid down the crease propelled by gravity and heated from beneath the foil, Jonas hungrily inhaled, and even swallowed as much rising smoke as he could, chasing that smoking ox down the crease before it burned up completely.

  "You're not worried about me, are you, Jonas ?" Megan said. "Don't you think I need a taste, too?"

  Jonas said to her, "You call this chasing the dragon? All you left me was a crumb. There ain't enough ox here to chase a fucking lizard."

  He waited for the rush, but all he got was an anemic feeling of lethargy. They were developing such a tolerance that for weeks neither of them had felt the warm flush of the skin or the wonderful drowsy euphoria that they used to get when there was enough for them both. When they weren't so addicted.

  "Wilbur only deals in cash, no credit," Megan said between coughs. "I tried hard to talk a couple of OCs out of him when he came on to me, but he smells awful. I wouldn't ever let him so much as touch me for anything, Jonas. There're some things I won't do." She gulped back a sob and said, "I don't want to ever come to that!" She threw herself facedown on the sofa then and wept.

  He looked at her, thinking, yeah, pretty soon she'd have the Lady Gaga hair and a tramp stamp or two, like the last woman he'd let live with him. She'd probably end up peddling her ass on Sunset Boulevard. Then he tried to remember the girl he'd met when she was selling clothes at the Gap. Why was it that every girl he met turned into a degenerate?

  "Goddamnit," Jonas said, "we need enough bank for that fucking quack over in Echo Park. He'll write us scrips for anything we want if the money's right."

  Then Jonas felt a deep depression envelop him and he stopped looking at Megan and said, "I got fired," to Cuddles, her calico cat, who was squatting on a kitchen chair sleepily watching all the human drama unfolding.

  The calico cat just yawned, lifted a back leg, and licked her ass, but Megan sat up and said, "You what? Oh, Jonas, what're we going to do?"

  "Don't worry," Jonas said. "For quite a while I been thinking a lot about the Bling Ring. They only fucked up and got caught 'cause they didn't stay focused. I think they had a cool idea, though. You and me, we could do it right."

  "Do what right?"

  "Walk into the houses of celebrities and other rich people and take what we want. And make enough to live decent and stop slaving for all the foreign shitbags that're taking over the whole town."

  "You're not making sense," Megan said. Then she started coughing again and her sweating increased.

  "I'm making sense for the first time in a long time," Jonas insisted.

  "Let's talk about it tomorrow," Megan said, wiping her face on her T-shirt. "It's stressful to talk lik
e this when you're all beat-up and not thinking."

  "Baby, it's easy," he said, "and the Bling Ring had a blast doing it."

  "It's not like running out and boosting from department stores," Megan said. "Breaking into houses? That's very different and very scary."

  "Whadda you mean 'breaking'?" Jonas said. "Those rich morons up in the Hollywood. Hills, they leave their houses wide open. Know where Paris Hilton kept her house key? Under the fucking doormat. And they leave their windows unlocked. And you're getting so skinny these days, you could crawl through a doggie door too small for a fucking Chihuahua. Nothing could stop us from getting into any house we want."

  Megan Burke suddenly flashed on how it had been in the beginning with Jonas Claymore, back when she was someone else and so was he. At first, they'd smoked pot on dates before doing zannies and benzos. It was carefree and it was fun at first. Then came the perks and norcos. And then they'd started smoking OxyContin, and after riding the ox for all these months, they had become unrecognizable people. Megan didn't know this Jonas, and in fact, she didn't even know this Megan that she had become.

  "Can we please talk tomorrow, Jonas?" Megan pleaded. "This is nerve-racking and it's making me burbly."

  "Jesus fucking Christ," Jonas moaned, eyes rolling back, not wanting to be reminded that he, too, was experiencing bouts of diarrhea since the jonesing episodes started. "I ain't got enough tribulations in life, I gotta hook up with a chick with irritable bowel syndrome? Why can't I catch a break just for once?"

  "Sorry. Gotta do number two," Megan said, getting up and running to the bathroom.

  "Go ahead, jingle bowels," he said. "Drop a deuce for me while you're at it."

  Chapter Five.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the red carpet event at the Kodak Theatre, Hollywood Nate Weiss was lying on the sofa in his North Hollywood apartment, where he lived alone, considering the business card he'd received from the director Rudy Ressler. For years, while working red carpet events and taking every opportunity to chat up the rich and famous, he'd been given plenty of business cards by virtue of being an LAPD cop from people who hoped he could fix a ticket or do other things for them that were equally impossible. He'd tried and mostly failed to meet the kind of people who could get him real work. No one was more aware than Nate that the clock was not on his side.

  The last job where he'd had a speaking role was three years ago in an indie production that had vanished and not even gone to DVD. He'd been a day player on that one and of course had been typecast as an LAPD cop. His scripted line was "Put your hands on your head and grab the wall."

  When he'd tried to tell the director, a no-talent bully ten years younger, that it was impossible to grab a wall or anything else when your hands were on your head, the director said, "And what're your qualifications in such matters?"

  The assistant director then whispered to the director that Nate was an LAPD police officer in his other life, and the director grumbled something and then said to Nate, "Just go, 'Up against the wall.' And try to act excited because you've collared a perp you've been looking for." Then he turned to the assistant director and said, "Or maybe we should have the lieutenant say that?"

  "Say what?" the AD asked.

  "We just collared a perp we've been looking for," the annoyed director said.

  "Excuse me," Nate interrupted. "The words perp and collar are terms used in the East, and though they're very popular on TV shows, we don't use either of them at LAPD. Would you like me to give you some substitute words that we use out here in the West?"

  The director had dead-stared him for a moment and said, "Just say 'Up against the wall' and let it go at that. So okay, Officer ... whatever your name is, let's try to get it right in one take and move the fuck on!"

  Nate figured he must've gotten it right in one take. Either that or the little putz simply had had enough of him, because he growled, "Cut," two seconds after Nate delivered the line. Then he said, "Print it."

  Nate was out of costume and on his way within the hour. If he could do it over again, he'd do or say whatever was asked of him without comment. It had been so hard to get work even as a day player that he hadn't done anything lately except take jobs as an extra a few times a year. And at age thirty-eight, time was surely of the essence.

  Remembering his humiliation at the hands of that director caused him to get up and find the business card of Rudy Ressler. He opened his cell and dialed the number.

  A young man answered, saying, "Rudy Ressler's office."

  "This is Officer Nate Weiss, LAPD," he said. "Mr. Ressler asked me to call."

  The young man said, "Just a moment," and put Nate on hold. Nate almost gave up, but after nearly five minutes, the director came on the line and said, "Officer Weiss. I'm glad to hear from you!"

  "You asked me to call you, Mr. Ressler," Nate said.

  "I certainly did," Rudy Ressler said. "I owe you. Let's do lunch today. How about two o'clock?"

  "You don't owe me anything," Nate said, disappointed. He'd hoped for more than lunch from this man.

  "I certainly do," the director said. "And I'd like to discuss the possibility of you reading for me. I'll be starting a movie for cable a few months after I get back from Europe."

  A job! That perked him up, and Nate said, "I'd love to have--do lunch with you. I don't have to go on duty till five fifteen. Where and what time?"

  After they finished talking, Nate got dressed. He started to put on a Tommy Hilfiger jersey but decided instead to wear a red tapered Polo shirt to reveal his biceps in case the part was for a buff-looking guy. And then he had to settle on gray cargo pants from Banana Republic because they were the only pair he had that was clean other than jeans. He figured the cargos would be okay because he wanted to look younger. He wondered if he should tell Rudy Ressler that gray temples were very premature in his family and offer to dye them dark if the director preferred. He hated to think about the fortieth birthday about to befall him in just eighteen months.

  Nate showered and got to feeling upbeat because this was the first night he'd be working with Hollywood Station's new arrival, Snuffy Salcedo. Of course, all cops were notorious gossips, and a police station secret was as hard to keep as a first marriage, but Snuffy was surely in a class of his own. Hollywood Nate figured he'd get an earful about the chief and Snuffy's life among all the police brass and the drones at City Hall. But for now, Nate had big game to hunt.

  At 1:50 P. M., Hollywood Nate pulled into the parking lot of a hot restaurant in west Hollywood. It was one of the new Italian places he'd read about that charged exorbitant prices to paint the food on the plate. They featured bite-size morsels of "imaginative" pasta and unrecognizable tidbits of sea creatures that wouldn't fill the belly of the baby opossums that raided the trash cans near Nate's apartment in North Hollywood. But he wasn't there for the food.

  He spotted Rudy Ressler sitting at a patio table shaded by potted palms with an attractive woman who Nate figured was probably Ressler's age, though she looked younger. Nate understood the magic that was performed every day in the offices of plastic surgeons and dermatologists who almost outnumbered Realtors on the west side of Los Angeles. She was dressed for summer in a champagne-colored button-front sleeveless linen dress, and her highlighted chestnut hair was cupped just below her tiny ears.

  Next to her was a younger man about Nate's age in a Calvin Klein multistripe gray suit, a crisp white shirt, and a necktie that cost more than everything on Nate's body. He had been around Hollywood types long enough to recognize the uniform of the day for agents from ICM and CAA.

  Rudy Ressler was dressed supercool in a wrinkled cotton shirt, a black T-shirt beneath it, loose-fitting, acid-washed jeans, and retro black tennis shoes. In short, he took pains to dress as he had when he was in middle school, as did most of the above-the-line people on any shoot that Nate had ever worked. In the light of day the director looked older than he had on the red carpet. His rusty thinning hair was growing out at the roots, and his skin
was getting blotchy. The director's eye job wasn't great either, and when Nate got close he could see the surgical scars by Ressler's ear. Nate thought the director ought to sue the quack who remodeled him.

  At first Rudy Ressler didn't recognize Nate, but when he did, he jumped to his feet. "Officer Weiss!" he said, loudly enough for others at nearby tables to hear, obviously thinking it exotic and cool to be doing lunch with a cop.

  Nate smiled and they shook hands. Rudy Ressler said, "I'd like you to meet my fiancee, Leona Brueger. And this is my agent, Todd Bachman."

  Leona Brueger gave Nate a dazzling smile, held out her hand palm down, so that he didn't know whether to shake it or kiss it, and said, "Well, this is a treat. A real cop. Or should I say police officer?"

  "Cop's fine," Nate said. "In fact, it's my favorite word."

  He shook her hand, and it was quite cool for such a hot afternoon. The agent gave him a vigorous sweaty handshake and said, "Rudy tells me they call you Hollywood Nate, but I'm not sure why."

  "He works at Hollywood Station," Rudy Ressler said. "And get this. He has a SAG card!"

  "You're an actor as well as a cop?" Todd Bachman said. "When I can get work," Nate said.

  Rudy Ressler said to Nate, "Todd's with CAA."

  "Would I have seen you in anything?" the agent asked Nate. "I'm not sure," Nate said self-consciously. "But I'm always available if you need my type in a production you may be packaging." Nate thought that everyone laughed too hard at that. He was trying to be amusing but he was also being very serious here. "Are you represented?" Rudy Ressler asked.

  "Well, not exactly," Nate said, getting stoked over the possibility of being represented by CAA.

  Leona Brueger chuckled and said, "He's got a great look for anyone casting a cop character, doesn't he, Todd? The camera would love him."

  When she said it, her lashes fluttered subtly, and Nate thought, An older chick batting her eyes at me? But then he noticed that her eyes were a bit heavy-lidded and there was an empty wine bottle in an ice bucket beside her, but neither the agent nor Rudy Ressler had a wineglass in front of him. So then he realized that Ms. Brueger liked to get her drink on.