“He asked me to keep an eye on you,” I said.
“What did you say?”
“I told him I would.”
“So when are you coming to L.A. so you can start doing that?”
“Soon,” I said.
I hung up and walked into the bathroom to shower.
Lipsticked words had been scrawled on the mirror. They said, “Welcome to the wonderful world of AIDS.”
I wasn’t worried. The same message had been left for me by another young woman on another mirror in Vegas recently.
It was the new practical joke going around.
I saw Betsy in L.A. for the first time on my forty-eighth birthday. I had lunch with her at the Café Rodeo and told her the scripts she’d left behind for me to read were awful.
I meant it: Her short stories were wonderful. Her scripts sucked.
“I can get better.” She smiled. “I’m glad you told me the truth. Most people don’t.”
She asked me what I was doing that night for my birthday and I told her Guy McElwaine was throwing a birthday party for me at Dominic’s.
“Can I go?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Can I go with you?”
I laughed and said, “I like you—you’re very appealing and attractive, but I’m married. I have two children, I—”
“I’ve met them,” she said with a smile. “They’re very nice. I like them. But I’m a big girl.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m a big girl,” she repeated, laughing at me.
I took her to the party that night and watched her. Sharon Stone was there … Tom Berenger, wearing a Confederate hat and fairly drunk … Phillip Noyce … Bill Macdonald. Betsy held her own with all of them. She seemed to put Sharon off somehow; I thought it was Betsy’s youth.
We all drank too much and wound up at Guy’s house. Guy found an ancient mud-colored joint he’d hidden in a jewelry box in 1976 and he put Frank Sinatra on.
Betsy and I drifted away from the others and found ourselves in a child’s room filled with mobiles and stuffed animals. I kept a close eye on her … as I had promised her father, the governor of Ohio … all night.
I saw Betsy steadily after that whenever I went to L.A. She said she was falling in love with me. I knew I liked her very much. I knew this was a relationship, but I didn’t think it was love.
“I’m going to wind up hurting you and I don’t want to do that,” I said.
“You can’t hurt me,” she said, “you’re a big old softie.”
It made me laugh.
“I think you should leave your wife and kids and run away with me and live happily ever after,” Betsy said.
I said, “I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can. What’s the best place we can run away to? I’ll bet you’ve seen some places.”
“Useppa,” I told her. “What’s that?” she said.
“A tiny island in Florida. It’s hidden away. The CIA used it to train the guys who were slaughtered at the Bay of Pigs.”
“Perfect,” Betsy said. “Poetic. Tragic. Idyllic for us.”
We were in a suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.
“I’m going to dream about being on Useppa with you,” Betsy said, turned over, and went to sleep.
But she didn’t dream about Useppa. I woke up at dawn to her choked sobs. She was dreaming, as she often did, about the little sister she’d found broken to pieces in the street just down from her house.
“I want you to leave Gerri and your kids and come to Useppa with me,” Betsy said.
“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t. Sometimes I think I wish I could but I just can’t.”
“You really don’t love me, do you?” Betsy said.
“I really don’t know. There are moments I think I do.”
“When? When we’re making love?”
“Please stop this,” I said, “I haven’t lied to you.”
“Fuck you,” she said, “asshole.”
She went for a long walk with her father and told him she was in love with me.
“He reminded me,” Betsy said, “that you were married and had kids and that we were good Catholics and that this was wrong. Then he said that he liked you and that you’d looked lonely to him. Finally he said that he loved me very much and would be there to support me whatever happened between you and me.”
“What a great dad,” I said.
“Asshole,” Betsy said to me, “don’t you realize how much fun you’d have in our family?”
I had to be in Cleveland to make a speech. Betsy wanted to come back with me but couldn’t—she didn’t have the money.
I flew there and late at night my phone rang. It was Betsy. She was two hours from the city on the turnpike—she had driven all the way from L.A. just to be with me.
I was happy Betsy called.
I got the barmaid with the nipple ring who didn’t like Basic Instinct out of my suite quickly.
Betsy said she was running out of money. I believed her. I had seen George Voinovich’s home in Cleveland and was convinced that if there was one honest politician left in America, he was it.
Betsy couldn’t afford her apartment anymore; the new one she’d picked out was in a high-crime gang area in Venice.
“You can’t live there,” I said. “You’ll get raped or killed or both.”
“I want to stay in L.A. for two years to see if I can make it writing scripts,” she said.
“What would it take for you to live on for two years?”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“I’ll lend you the money,” I said.
“I’ll pay you back,” she promised.
I gave a close producer friend a $50,000 loan and he gave Betsy a check for $50,000. That way Gerri Eszterhas wouldn’t suspect anything.
Sometimes Betsy and Bill Macdonald and I would go out to a club and drink and listen to live rock and roll. Bill and Betsy and I liked each other and the three of us almost always had fun together.
Bill told me he had told Naomi about my relationship with Betsy and said that Naomi was very curious about her.
“What did you tell Naomi?” I asked Bill.
“I told her Gerri is your anchor in life and you’ll never leave her,” Bill said.
I was supposed to fly to Paris to shoot a Chanel commercial I’d written that Roman Polanski would direct. Bill Macdonald asked if he could come with me. We’d hang out in Paris for a week while Naomi went up to Marin to hang out with Gerri. I was taking the Concorde from New York. Bill was taking a charter flight from Washington. We’d meet in Paris. That was the plan.
When I got to New York to catch the Concorde, I got a message that my father had suffered a stroke in Cleveland. I turned around and headed back to Cleveland. It was too late to inform Bill, who was already on his way.
I reached him in Paris. He turned right around and flew to Cleveland to be with me at a difficult time.
When he got to the hospital in Cleveland I thanked him and he said, “Hey, I love ya, man.”
And I said, “I love you, too, Billy.”
Betsy was with me, too. She came to be by my side.
The night I took Sharon Stone out to dinner … the night I wound up on the floor crawling around her dollhouse … the night Sharon went down her street wearing bra and panties and carrying a butcher knife … Betsy was in my suite at the Four Seasons waiting for me when I got back.
I told Betsy some of what had happened and Betsy kidded, “Damn. We could’ve had some threesome!”
“Go back to Cleveland,” I said. “You’ve been out here too long.”
“Three months.”
“That’s what I mean.”
Betsy thought that was funny.
Sometimes, when Betsy and I were in Cleveland together, I did feel there was a possibility I was falling in love with her.
She came alive in Cleveland, she radiated. Her eyes sparkled and she walked down the street with a strut, letting her boot
heels clomp the concrete. She sipped white wine in L.A. but she gulped tequila shooters as we watched hard-rock blues bands in the Flats in Cleveland in bars decorated with old, battle-scarred Cleveland Browns helmets.
She was, of course, the governor’s daughter, the former mayor’s daughter, recognized by passersby who always greeted her with a smile.
At times, with her Slavic cheekbones and blue-collar style, she reminded me of young women I’d known on Lorain Avenue as a kid. She was as ethnic as I was, enjoying tripe with eggs at a factory café and stuffed cabbage at the Slovenian Home. We both had more fun in those places than at Spago or at the Ivy in L.A.
I was going out to dinner in L.A. with Betsy, but I’d never visited Bill and Naomi at their apartment in Marina Del Rey, so I stopped by on my way to dinner. Their place overlooked the beach and they had a fireplace going when I got there. Naomi had bought two bottles of Cristal and smoked salmon and Hungarian salami, all my favorites.
I couldn’t take my eyes off Naomi. She wore tight jeans and cowboy boots and a Western shirt and as she walked across the room to bring some more smoked salmon, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Hey, look at you!”
She turned and gave me a special smile and I knew that she knew that I had been looking at her body.
Bill seemed oblivious to all of it, maybe because, he confessed, he’d had four or five screwdrivers.
We drank the Cristal and I told them I had to go. I said I had to have dinner with Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing of Paramount, but I could tell from her expression that Naomi knew that was a lie—she knew I was going to see Betsy.
“You just got here,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’ve gotta go.”
I gave Bill a hug and then Naomi and headed out the door. Naomi stopped me and handed me something in an envelope—two perfectly rolled joints.
“Two for the road,” Naomi said.
I knew how very carefully she had picked her words. She knew that Two for the Road was my wife’s favorite movie of all time. She knew that the movie was about the relationship between a philandering husband and his wife. And I knew that she knew that Gerri’s husband was going off into the night to do some philandering.
I broke up with Betsy the next time I was in L.A. I wasn’t going to leave Gerri and Steve and Suzi for her. I wasn’t going to offer her any kind of future. I’d wind up hurting her even more than I was going to hurt her now.
She was in love with me but it wasn’t reciprocal. She was too moody for me, too prone to black-dog depressions, too scarred maybe by the broken body of the little sister she had found in the street.
I’d continue to use her body, I knew, unless I ended the relationship … like I’d used the bodies of too many others and I didn’t want to do that to her. I liked her too much. She was an intelligent and attractive young woman who deserved a real future and a man who’d love her.
I told her that I was breaking it off because I was married and had kids and didn’t want us to hurt my family.
“You’re nuts,” she said. “You’re one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met. You stopped loving your wife a long time ago. Your kids are grown—they’re hardly home and off with their own friends. You’ve spent most of your life taking care of others and have neglected only you. You’ve got a great heart that’s sort of atrophied and unless you give yourself the freedom to really love another woman, you’re going to engage in the same kind of self-destructive behavior you’ve engaged in for much of your marriage. If you keep doing that, your atrophied heart is going to die.”
I thought about what she said for a couple moments and then I reached over and took her hand and brought it to my lips and kissed it.
“You’re right about everything you said—except one thing. You’re the wrong ‘another’ woman. I don’t love you.”
Betsy looked at me, her eyes wet, shook her head slightly, said, “Oh, man,” and walked out of the room.
She sent me a forty-four-page letter after I broke up with her. It was more a long short story than a letter and my feeling was that she should try to get it published somewhere.
George Voinovich was elected to the United States Senate.
Betsy went back to Cleveland. She met a guy she loves … and who loves her … and had a baby they named after John Lennon.
[Dissolve]
The Lovers
THEY MET AT a store on Melrose, where they were both clerks, helping out Leo or Cruise or Brad when they came in to check out the new Lori Rodkins or Chrome Hearts or the freaky Gothic stuff Peter, the owner, brought back from Morocco or Mexico or Bali.
They liked the gig and they liked each other. Lisa was nineteen and wanted to be a model. Sarah was twenty-two and wanted to design clothes.
They started hanging out after work at the Viper Room or the Sky Bar and when Lisa got a tat of a snake on the small of her back, Sarah got one, too. They moved in together in a little place two blocks up from the Strip. They were both vegans and sometimes, even though they ate little, they both came home from a night out and forced their fingers into their throats and rid themselves of the poisons and slept much better.
It was Lisa who came up with the idea, having heard about it from a girlfriend of her brother’s, who was a junkie and an ex-con and had actually hung out with Robert Downey when they were both in the joint.
They went down to one of the antique stores on Montana in Santa Monica and found the perfect blade but the weight of the old-time razor frightened them and they put it away in a drawer. A week or so later they snorted a little smack and Lisa got the straight razor out of the drawer.
They examined the gleaming blade and Sarah handed it to Lisa and Lisa started but couldn’t do it herself.
She handed the razor to Sarah and begged her, showed her the spot on her arm where she wanted it and Sarah took the razor and slashed a perfect cross into her forearm.
They watched the blood trickle and drip to the floor, snorting a little more smack, and Sarah handed Lisa the blade and then it was her turn to slash a cross into Sarah’s arm.
They became lovers that night, licking and kissing each other’s slashes, and the next day they showed everybody at the store and everybody thought it was so really cool.
They talked about doing it to each other’s beautiful faces but they weren’t stupid. This was still a new relationship and they weren’t sure if they were ready for that kind of commitment.
Peter checked out their slashes and went to Mexico in search of straight razors, coming back with ivory and ebony and crucifix-bedecked razors which quickly became the hottest thing in town.
CHAPTER 17
[Flashback]
Howdy Doody with a Ducktail
RAY
Hey—winning isn’t everything.
JOEY
That’s what you said, Dad.
RAY
There are more important things.
JOEY
Like what?
RAY
Happiness. Health. Enjoying each and every moment. What do you think, Joey?
JOEY
Bullshit, Dad.
Checking Out
TWO CATHOLIC HIGH schools were supposed to be the best in the city—St. Ignatius was a Jesuit school only six blocks from where we lived. The other was Cathedral Latin, across town on the East Side, an hour and a half by bus from us.
I wanted to go to neither school. Both were all-boys schools. I wanted to go to West Tech, ten minutes away from us by bus, where there were girls.
But my parents insisted that I go to a Catholic school. I wasn’t admitted to St. Ignatius but Cathedral Latin accepted me.
My mother knelt down and thanked God.
On my first day at Cathedral Latin, I felt disoriented. The other boys had names like DeSapri and DeGrandis and Boravec and Bolan and Ondercin and Cudnik. There were Italians and Irish and Slovaks and Slavs, but there were no Hungarians.
Many of them, East Siders, had known e
ach other in grade school and in Catholic CYOs and banded together here quickly. Relative to where I came from, they were rich kids. They wore colorful sweaters of fine weave and light, tan-colored pants, blue button-down shirts and shiny, pointy-toed black shoes. I wore the gray flannel pants we had bought at the Salvation Army. And a white shirt my father no longer wore which was baggy and bunched out of my pants. And the shoes which were too big. And I had my Hungarian accent.
Many of these kids had their own cars, most of them shiny and new.
I still looked like Howdy Doody, but Howdy Doody with a ducktail haircut.
I heard the word “asshole” directed at me soon and, more commonly, the word “greenhorn.” My ears stuck out and the kids sitting behind me flicked them with their fingers.
When I turned around to hit back, the teachers said, “What are you doing, Mr. Esterhose?” and the kids laughed.
It became my Cathedral Latin name: Joe Esterhose.
The teachers were Marianist priests and brothers, most of them young men in their twenties and thirties. None of them seemed able to pronounce my name. It came out “Esterhash” and “Esterhanz” and “Esterhaze” and “Esterass” and “Esterhose.”
I sat alone at lunch. I hated the three hours each day that I spent going back and forth on the buses and the rapids to Cathedral Latin.
I wore the same clothes almost every day—I had two pairs of pants my father had bought and two of his shirts.
One day, when I switched to my other pair of pants, a brother said to the class, “Well, Mr. Esterhose has a new pair of pants today.” The kids laughed.
“How was school?” my father asked me each day.
And I said, “Fine.”
I couldn’t tell him that I was miserable, that I hated every moment of it, that the kids and the brothers made fun of my name, my clothes, my ears, and my accent. My father had enough problems.
“Fein,” he said. “Always fein like all the other Americans. You, too, Jozsi, a liar like the other Americans.”
“I’m not lying, Papa,” I said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
“I am glad to hear it, Jozsi.” My father smiled. “Me too. I am fein, too. Everything is fein with me, too.”
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