by Martyn Burke
While he waited outside the Star-Brite motel, we changed into the only other clothes we had, which were the same fatigues we wore in the mountains but freshly laundered and without the jackets. We decided that our ratty, khaki-colored T-shirts would have to do.
“Think we should we stick a pencil through this thing and tell him it’s a bullet hole?” said Danny, holding up his T-shirt.
“Sorta hate to disappoint him, don’t you?”
But we did anyway. “No medals?” said Eugene, looking disappointed when we got into his SUV.
He kept pumping us for details about being combat soldiers. Both of us turned into verbal anorexics on the topic. Neither of us felt like telling war stories, especially here. Or anywhere. But he kept probing with all the You-ever-kill-anyone? type of questions. You could almost see his mind working with every question he asked, always angling for something.
“Hey Eugene, you looking for The Edge here?” Danny’s voice was as flat as I’ve ever heard it.
“Found it, guys,” he said. “Found it.”
“Care to share?”
“You wanna know about The Edge? Simple. The Edge is publicity. Any kind of publicity. Good, bad, it doesn’t matter. We live in a world of no repercussions. Outrage lasts as long as a cigarette. Shame is oh-so-yesterday. Lemme tell you a story. True. Swear to god. It happened two weeks ago. A dwarf, a real honest-to-god dwarf, about three-foot-something, showed up at Strut, a nothing place on Hollywood Boulevard. Over near the Roosevelt. Feisty little prick. With a woman about twice his height. An Amazon—he’d be going down on her just by giving her a hug. Gorgeous chick. Everyone thought it was a stunt of some kind. But the promoter, a guy I know, was smart enough to have them whisked through the door. He was also smart enough to know that some kind of freak show was going to break out. Turns out this woman was actually into dwarfs. Go figure. They really turned her on. And this little bastard knew that every guy in the place wanted to drop-kick him into the balcony and grab his gorgeous woman. So when enough eyes were on him, he gets her to hoist him up on a stool at the bar. He pulls down the top of her dress. Right in front of the whole place while the music is blasting and everything’s going crazy. And he starts sucking on these enormous tits of hers. While she’s standing there like nothing’s happening, reaching for her martini and taking a drink while this little prick is doing his lactation act in front of the whole place. Well! Let a million cell phones ring! Is there a god of clubs? By midnight the place was packed. The guy I know, the promoter, went over to that dwarf and told him he and the Amazon had a free pass to anything in the club—the door, drinks, food, anything. He even offered to send a limo for them.
“But you know what? The dwarf and this girlfriend of his simply drove off into the night and never came back. The promoter almost tore the town apart trying to find out who they were. He must have called every casting agent in town, every porn producer, even endocrinologists for christsakes—can you imagine calling up doctors and asking for a list of patients who were dwarf tit-suckers? But nada. Zip. They’d just vanished. And after days of driving himself crazy, he looked out on the multitudes who’d packed the clubs he promoted for three days running, and realized he didn’t need them anymore. Merely the rumors flying around that the dwarf and his woman might show up were enough to fill the place three times over. Now that’s an Edge.”
“Hey Hank,” said Danny. “This is what we’re fighting for.”
I thought about it for a moment. “Sounds okay to me.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
And in a weird way it was. After what we’d seen of women over there?—those fearful slaves scurrying around like shrouded Afghan ghosts, dressed from head to toe in burqas, the steaming cloth prisons they’re forced to wear, with only a mesh grating across the eyes?—even the Amazon-dwarf show was more civilized than that.
And in the end, maybe that’s what it’s come down to: We’re fighting for the dwarf and his girlfriend.
• • •
“We’re here,” said Eugene, stepping out of his car parked halfway into the street as the parking valets swarmed it. We were standing on a street off Hollywood Boulevard, staring up at some old hotel that looked like Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant should come walking out of it. It was one of those Hollywood Spanish places that should only have Packards or Duesenbergs parked around it. But instead there were Hummers and Ferraris fighting for supremacy in the valet pit and a rope line that looked like it probably went to some casting office.
Eugene never broke stride all the way past the bouncers and up into an outdoor pool area, where a skinny, tough-looking woman in her thirties was waiting. Dressed in jeans with a crease, a silk blouse, and expensive leather boots, she looked us up and down. “These them?” she asked.
“Certified war heroes,” Eugene said, motioning to us. “Would I lie?”
21
We were told their names were Sari and Raquel. It was obvious we were expected to know who they were. One of them was famous for being famous and had a reality television show about dating. The other one was an actress whose career was in trouble, having rolled her car off Mulholland Drive into a ravine in full view of the pursuing paparazzi, and even worse, gotten bad ratings for her TV sitcom.
All we knew was that Sari was the taller one, blonde and attractive in an odd way where nothing about her face quite fit together, but it worked for the cameras. And Raquel was the shorter one, breathtakingly pretty in some scalding concoction of childlike innocence and jailbait wantonness. She looked out on the world through confused, haunted eyes above pouty lips and a rare smile that could change her whole face.
They were sitting at a corner table at the open-air club around the hotel pool, shielded from the gawkers in front of them by radiating layers of security and people who looked like they were paid to be friends. The whole place was a kind of fish bowl without the glass, with exotic creatures flitting all around while trying to act casual. The music was the usual ear-cleaving assault from the air that the partygoers called down on themselves. With woofers that almost had you checking your pants.
It took us both about five seconds to register the same unspoken thought: The Edge. “Hey Eugene,” said Danny, “this certified war hero wants to know the fastest way out of here.”
“Guys, guys,” Eugene said with a voice that had lost all its humor. “This is all business, okay? You give me what I want; I give you what you want. Capiche?”
“And what do we want from you?” said Danny.
“His girlfriend. Annie,” Eugene said, motioning to me. “You do for me—and I do for you. Okay?” It was meant as a question, but it wasn’t.
Over at the table, the skinny woman standing behind her shot a look at Eugene, who gave her a thumbs-up gesture. The woman looked at us as if she was evaluating a purchase. Then she nodded to Eugene. “They’re perfect for Sari and Raquel,” she said.
“Who’s that?” Danny asked.
“Carla. She’s a god in this town. A fucking god.”
“What do Sari and Raquel have to do with anything?”
“Hey pal, it’s simple. You fall in love with them.” We both just looked at him with a syncopated Say what?
“You gone deaf?” His grin was back.
“God, I hope so. Did you say . . . ?”
“That is precisely what I said.”
“Fall in love? With them?”
“Oh, like this is hardship duty? Two women so gorgeous they cause chromosome damage just by being near them? And you’re bitching at me? Every other guy in this place is trying to get into their thongs for christsakes.”
“Hey, Eugene—pal,” I said, “let me explain something. We came here trying to find the women we lost. Start. Finish. How’s that for simple?”
“You’re both idiots,” said Eugene. “You don’t really fall in love with them. Just make it look like you are. I told you—this is a trade, okay?”
Our blank stares sent him onto a new level of irritation.
I could hardly hear him because of all the yelling that suddenly came from the end of the pool. One of the women had been pushed or jumped in. She was quickly followed by another woman, a tall redhead. They bobbed up and down as if they were arguing in the pool while flashguns from a dozen cameras blasted away. But something didn’t make sense. Neither of them had gotten their hair wet and their makeup was dry. The dark-haired one had breasts that looked like flotation devices. Not to be outdone, the redhead made sure her skirt floated on the surface of the water.
“See? Now that’s PR!” Eugene was almost hyperventilating with glee.
In the midst of all the chaos there was a guy standing off to the side of all the braying. He looked even less like he belonged than we did, but for different reasons: He looked like he’d just stepped out of an old fifties movie where he played the accountant. He had short hair, almost a military cut, and wore a suit, white shirt, and tie. And spookier, he was looking from something in his hand—something like a photograph—and then up at me. And then back to the photograph.
I grabbed Eugene’s arm. “Who’s the guy in the suit over there who keeps looking our way?”
“Are you serious?
“Of course I’m serious.”
“He’s your friend. Why else would we let a dork like that in here?”
“My friend?”
“Jones. Said your mother told him you’d be here.”
Suddenly Jones lunged through the tangled, laughing crowd, charging toward me. All I knew was that whoever this Jones was, I didn’t want to deal with him. It all smelled like something Annabelle had cooked up in another of her New Age schemes to plunder with the blessings of the Buddha or whatever deity-of-the-month happened to be smoothing over the nasty bits around the edges of all the lacerating self-interest that made going to Afghanistan seem sane.
I was seized with some physical reaction, a fear of going back to where I had escaped years ago, as this Jones fought his way through the tangle of enforced spontaneity and missed Danny’s pincer movement, a leg trip that sent him hurtling into the pool.
• • •
Eugene made sure we knew how he’d saved us—that he’d made those human-wall bouncers push the dripping-wet Jones back into the pool as we raced toward black SUVs that appeared out of nowhere. They came equipped with wannabe Secret Service–types wearing suits and talking into their wrists. As Eugene yelled like a cattle herder, we piled into an SUV and the whole motorcade took off. Driving west and then north into the hills like we were about to come under attack, everything flashed past in a deeply tinted blur. The streetlights barely registered through all that side window tinting, and when one actually did I saw something mounted on the dashboard.
“Tell me that’s not a camera I’m seeing. Pointing right at us.”
Eugene stared straight ahead, acting like he was deaf.
“A video camera? Eugene?”
“What?—you think I own all these vehicles? And hire these security guys? And drivers? Get real. We needed someone’s help to pay for it all.”
“What’s that got to do with a camera being there?”
“It’s from FYI—you know, the show about Hollywood celebrities. They own all the vehicles.”
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“I’ll explain when we get there.”
“The camera’s moving back and forth. With no one holding it.”
“Oh. Yeah. It’s a remote camera—controlled from some studio.”
“What studio?”
“Where FYI does its shows.”
“What? And it’s recording us right now?”
“We’re almost there.”
The motorcade screeched to a halt in front of a Spanish-style house on the hillside. When we got out of the SUV there were black curtains all the way up to the front door. “Why the curtains?” I yelled over the uproar of walkie-talkies and two-way radios.
“All the paparazzi are on their way up here. FYI wants an exclusive.”
“An exclusive what?” Danny said and then, before either of us could say anything else, we found ourselves standing inside a round stucco vestibule, a kind of hacienda-type of place with a huge living room, brightly colored manzanilla red couches, and doors that opened onto a balcony that overlooked the city. The living room was filled with camera equipment and technicians racing around as several men in suits sat poring over legal documents spread out on a coffee table.
And lying on the lounge chairs out on a big balcony, smoking cigarettes and looking bored, were Sari and Raquel.
• • •
From close to the top of the Hollywood Hills, the city looked almost pretty at night. All the lights of L.A. lay below, twinkling into a haze-induced infinity. We were standing at the back of a big old house built on the hillside almost straight up above the Sunset Strip and oozing that fake Spanish-style charm like so many of the places here. From the winding hillside street, it looked deceptively small, a one-level, red-tiled house behind a white stucco wall. But from the back lawn it rose, floor after floor, up the side of the steep hill, each level presenting a tiled veranda or balcony to the vastness below.
Carla, the skinny woman from the club, the one with the boots and pressed jeans, came up to us. “Ah, good. Now we can start,” she said in a voice that reminded me of a dull razor doing its work. When I shook her hand, it was like holding loose twigs. “We have a few legal documents for you to sign. Releases.”
“Ma’am, I’m not sure you understand—”
“Look, we don’t have time to fuck around,” that razor doing its work. She had this weirdly carnivorous look in her eyes. If it came from a guy, you’d think you could be in a fistfight before the next sentence came out. It was pure, innate aggression wrapped in a carefully calibrated smile. Quite a skill. “Look, let me tell you where I’m coming from, okay? I got one girl whose series is on life support and she just got caught in a cell phone video fucking the props guy. And the other one whose next film will tank and who can’t stay sober or straight for two weeks. So we need an image makeover. Clean. Wholesome—like war-hero wholesome. So you’re it.”
“We’re not—”
“Please! We don’t have a lot of time. I need you to listen to me.” With that same look, the impaling one. You could tell that Danny had gotten to her with that expression of his, the one that said nothing was worth being taken seriously. It drove intense people like this skinny woman completely insane. But you could tell she was like that most of the time anyway. She was from the class of the professionally offended. “So listen, FYI will need an interview with you guys, war stuff and all that, understood? They’re paying for all this meshugas,” she said, motioning to the commotion around her. “All you have to do is drive the girls around for a day or two. We’ll provide the cars, you go to a few clubs with them. And then after that we let Extra, ET, and E! to do a piece about them finding Mr. Right, and then tearfully waving goodbye while you guys go off to war—that is what you do isn’t it? War?” She practically slashed us with that look of hers and then scanned the room. “Where’d Business Affairs get to for christsakes? I need those releases signed.”
She vanished into the swirl of technicians and men in suits, leaving us with Eugene. For the first time, he looked uneasy. “Just go with it,” he said.
Danny looked from him to me and shook his head with a weird little smile. “Wow,” was all he said.
“Carla’s a genius at damage control,” Eugene said, anxiously looking toward Danny. “Oh, and I got a call from Constance. She says she’s got something for you. She said she went in.”
“Went in?”
“That’s what she said.”
“I want to see her,” Danny said.
“You can’t leave now
.”
“Hey, Eugene, I came here for one reason. And this ain’t it.”
Danny took a step toward the front door. “You don’t get it: They’re here,” Eugene said, almost panicking as Danny opened the big front door.
The night exploded.
It was like the door was booby-trapped, detonating a blaze of light upon light, a searing white phosphorescent flashbulb assault on the eyeballs. In the millisecond after it subsided, a forest of faces shuddered out of the darkness, all of them bellowing and distorted like melted plastic suddenly frozen. Those paparazzi voices had a blast pressure all their own—menacing, pleading, ordering. “Hey GI Joe, look over here!” “Hey Daniel didja fuck her yet?” “Hey, I did your mother last night. That’s it, look over here.”
For an instant we were immobilized in that avalanche of flashbulb antagonism and noise. With all our combat training, with all our experience in high-stress, quick-reaction, life-and-death situations—and here we seize up? In Hollywood? It was Eugene who lunged from behind the door, slamming it. The sudden silence was startling in its own way. “Paparazzi,” Eugene gasped.
Danny was furious. “Did you hear what they were yelling at me?”
“They do that to everyone. They want you to lose it. They get way more money for a photograph where the guy goes berserk.”
“Yeah? We’re out of here.”
The skinny woman, Carla, had returned. “We use the paparazzi—they don’t use us, okay? Control. That’s what this is all about. Think of it as being in your very own shark cage. Fuck it up and you’re just so much bait. When you walk out of here, you’re gonna do it with Raquel and Sari. Now talk to the Business Affairs guy over there,” she said, motioning to a guy in a suit with no tie. “He’s got a release we need you to sign.”
I went out to the empty balcony and looked at the lights while Danny found a leather couch, sat down, and stared off into space. No one bothered to follow either of us. There was still too much chaos mixed in with a kind of general free-floating attention deficit disorder, so no one stayed focused on anyone else for very long.