Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  I thought about that for as long as I dared. One big happy family. It sounded so strange. I couldn’t remotely figure out how that would work. Annabelle, Albert, Annie, and me. “There you go again,” she said. “Withdrawing. You do that all the time.”

  “It’s called thinking, Mom.”

  She wasn’t listening. “Oh good,” she said, pointing to the other side of the canyon and the house she was staying in. “There’s that nice Mr. Jones.”

  “Good?”

  “You need to meet him. At least someone thinks your mother is charming and intelligent.”

  I could barely make out the man in a suit standing beside a large gray car, the same middle-aged guy with the jarhead haircut who was stalking us at the club. It looked like he was talking on a cell phone. “You keep trying to sic this guy on me. Who the hell is he?”

  “He, at least, is gracious and polite. And he agrees with me about Albert being a worm.” She waved a pink scarf up and down, looking over to where Mr. Jones was now walking back and forth in the distance. “Yoo-hoo.”

  I got up and gave her a hug. “I’m outta here, Mom.”

  She looked at me, appalled. “Why on earth are you leaving?”

  • • •

  By the time I got back to the Star-Brite, Danny was sitting outside on top of his duffel bag. “We got a choice. I’m gonna let you decide,” he said. “Choice number one.” He held up his airline ticket printout. “We blow this town before it takes another shot at us. I’m locked, loaded, and ready to sprint. Or choice number two is sitting right over there.” He pointed toward the taco stand across the road, which was now a hive of tweakers buzzing around, looking to score some ice, and one dazed transvestite hooker almost falling off his platform heels while lurching toward a pickup truck that had pulled over.

  “Become meth heads and forget about everything? Starting to sound like a better idea than anything else.”

  “Not there. There,” he said, pointing more precisely. A brand-new black Dodge was parked farther up from the taco stand. In the light of the setting sun, I could barely make out someone sitting behind the wheel, talking on a cell phone. “Eugene.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I told him we have one more day here. He says he wants to make it up to us. He has something he wants to talk to us about.”

  “What?”

  “No idea. He said he wanted you to hear it. I told him we’d phone him but he wanted to wait.”

  “Annie?”

  “Probably.”

  My expression must have changed ten times before he turned and whistled loudly.

  In the distance, Eugene jumped out of the car, still talking on the cell phone and waving as if we were old friends.

  • • •

  That night, I found Annie. Exactly as Eugene had promised.

  All his spies, his sources, were telling him that tonight was going to be huge. And the Boo Two kept coming up on radar screens all over the buzz world.

  “Yeah?” I asked as we were standing on the Sunset Plaza median, watching the usual nighttime caravan of expensive cars slowly cruising The Strip, all of them dripping testosterone out the tailpipe. “So what’s the catch?”

  It was the first time I’d seen Eugene look insulted by anything. “Man, and I thought I was cynical. Here am I, just some hustler who shills flash and trash, thinking wow—I have a chance to do good for someone, to help a guy fighting for his country. And what happens? I get it thrown back in my face. Okay, sorry I mentioned it. Let’s just go home.”

  “Wait!”

  About an hour later, when the night was getting started, we moved out. It was another Hollywood recon patrol, for me more hair-raising in its own way than anything we did in Afghanistan. I was so tense that once, when a car backfired, I almost dived for cover.

  “That posttraumatic stress is a bitch,” said Eugene. “I had it once in high school.”

  Eugene had worked his entire network: the bouncers, doormen, women who ran rope lines, paparazzi, and news crews. The word was that at one of the clubs tonight there was going to be a shootout between rich geezers who came armed with blondes. But no one knew which club was going to be the O.K. Corral.

  “You sure you want to do this?”

  “You know any other way?”

  Danny thought for a while as we were driving. “I’m wondering if Constance isn’t right about some things.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What are you going to do if she doesn’t want to see you?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  For a while he was just watching the neon floating past the passenger-side window. “Nothing.”

  But we both knew it did.

  Eugene was driving with one hand, dialing with the other, yelling instructions into two different cell phones, and writing notes while changing lanes and making illegal U-turns into valet lines. There was White Lotus, and after that, Dublin, where some star named Justin had a huge birthday party thrown for him. And Deep, a place in the old Brown Derby at the corner of Hollywood and Vine where the coolest rooms were converted meat lockers.

  And somewhere else on Melrose where strippers danced across the bar in a tiny, packed club reeking of temporary exclusivity. Eugene worked the room like he did all of them, introducing us—“just back from the war, both of ’em”—in ways intended to score points with people like the gaunt, intense director of the biggest hit movie of last summer. Or the innocent-looking young girl from Kentucky who sweetly bragged about having worn out a platoon’s worth of lovers three nights earlier.

  In the midst of it all, I went back to remembering those old photographs I’d seen years ago, the ones of Bogart and Bacall and Clark Gable and Cary Grant and all the other old-time movie stars, elegantly decked out, dining in the Hollywood nightclubs of their own era. And wondered what they would make of it all.

  Eugene wheeled around in mid-cell-phone conversation and made a trigger-pulling motion with his free hand. “Combo!”

  Combo was on La Cienega about a mile south of Sunset. It was apparently the petri-dish club for whatever was going to break out between rich, powerful old men and their young trophy women—and when it happened, Friday was the night to be there. The limos were lined up outside like press releases. “Awesome!” was Eugene’s seal of approval bestowed upon the scene as we cruised past. “No way we’re driving up in a Dodge, guys.” After parking the Dodge four blocks away, we walked past the longest rope line we’d seen, into a corona of news camera lights and paparazzi, restless for action, and then into a wall of security who looked like guys who’d been court-martialed at least once.

  “Hefner’s here. See that limo?” yelled Eugene. The long white limo with the Playboy bunny logo was parked in front of the main entrance, blocking just about everything else. It squeezed the overflow rope-line crowd onto the narrow sidewalk so that everything became crazier than it really needed to be as people pushed their way into view of the door crew. It was one of those go-figure moments—all these twentysomethings crazed to get into a place just because some old guy, an eightysomething, was inside with four blondes.

  Eugene and the black-suited guy at the door did the knuckle-punch hug and the these-guys-are-just-back-from-the-war number that had become standard foreplay. For a moment they were deep into conversation, each nodding, then more grinning and knuckle-punching as the guarded door swung wide open for us, delivering body blows of bass rhythm pounding our innards from the huge speakers.

  The noise in Combo was of the usual battlefield caliber, sometimes sucking the speech right out of your throat. Fake breasts and movie directors were duly pointed out by Eugene as they poked into one another, and the host of a cable network show trolled for the youngest women in front of us.

  On a mezzanine balcony we followed Eugene to a place that looked down on the dining room, an island of status surrounded by the sea of foaming ambition in the outer areas of the club. The island even had its own perimeter, with plai
nclothes guards stationed at the wide entrances to the dining room, keeping out the peering hordes who surrounded it on two sides.

  Below us, over in the far corner, in a huge maroon-velvet booth was Hugh Hefner, looking old and almost dazed as the blondes on either side of him laughed, leaned around, and shouted to one another over the din. “You’re looking at history, guys,” yelled Eugene. “He’s slept with at least six generations of women. Now that’s a man! And imagine what the first woman he ever fucked looks like now.”

  Eugene was already moving down that railing overlooking the other tables. Most of them had an older man in the center—sometimes just flat-out old, shriveled guys, warmed by the rapt adulation ladled out by granddaughter-age women whose bubbly proclamations were met with knowing smiles as an alternative to adjusting their hearing aids.

  It all had the undercurrents of a desiccated frat house, where overpriced bottles of Mumm’s were the entry key, summoned to the tables in price-is-no-object waves from withered hands.

  The team of security guys in front of Hefner’s booth used their iron fist-velvet glove finesse. They all stood looking outward at whatever was coming at them. One of them, a guy about forty, wearing the only plaid blazer in the place and looking like he would mug a Muppet, was particularly skillful at handling anyone who got too close to the big booth—Hef! Love ya, man. You rock, man. Hey I got an idea for you—The plaid blazer had a standard routine for handling intruders: a chiseled smile, a few cautionary words, and then, if that did not work, a fierce grasping of an elbow in some judo grip, causing the intruder’s face to erupt as if he’d been shot through with a live wire that sent him scurrying back into the vast pool of unrequited ambition.

  The security guys had their own choreography, sensing when Hefner made a move behind them. Almost in unison, they took a few steps out toward the center of the dining room, creating more space as Hefner was being eased out of the booth by the giggling blondes. It looked part of an obligatory ritual—Hef’s still got it!—dance number with one or all of the blondes, like his energy level was Botoxed by those thousand eyes on him. And then summoning up a world-weariness appropriate to someone who has done it all—a legend deigning to mix it up with all of you!

  But something was wrong, like a soloist playing from a different score. Every dance step he took with those blondes was completely off tempo, a sclerotic, jerky series of arm jabs and shuffling connected to absolutely nothing. It was as if the founder of the Playboy empire, the man who could not remotely remember the number of naked women he’d had standing in front of him, had suddenly come down with a touch of palsy. Looking out on the world with a rictus smile, as fixed and as rigid as a stone carving, he showed a kind of confusion. Suddenly, almost imperceptibly, he faltered as the blondes swept out like lifeguards all around him, throwing out safety nets of manufactured joy and oh-isn’t-this-so-silly giggles as they steered him back to the booth.

  “Bingo!” yelled Eugene, cradling his cell phone. They say Bingo? Even in the most grimly cool place in town?

  “What’s up?”

  “That was my buddy at the door. The show’s about to start. Milo is showing up in a few minutes. Let’s go.” He was gone before we could ask any questions, pushing through the crowds and yelling over his shoulder as we followed. Whoever Milo was, he was here to do battle! The challenger.

  “The battle of the blondes. History in the making, man!”

  Everything here was history, according to Eugene. But this was primo! Milo was apparently some old guy who owned a record company and started thinking he never got enough credit for all the hit records made on his label a decade or so ago. At the height of his success he’d thrown the obligatory political fundraisers at his Beverly Hills mansion, making lofty speeches, extolling virtues he himself had never lived by. But then the music, his music, faded, moved on, and what was left was a man who drew blank stares from maitre d’s at the newest, hottest places all over town.

  If fame had eluded him once, he was now back for Round Two, determined to out-blonde Hefner at his own game.

  “What’s this got to do with us?” And then silently answering my own question almost before I’d finished asking it. Following Eugene all the way down to the big entrance doors of that club, through the sweating, yelling jostle of hormonal imperatives, I felt a growing dread. I wasn’t sure I wanted those doors to open.

  Eugene could have been a mind reader. “The Boo Two are part of it,” he yelled back to us. “Milo’s latched onto Hefner’s rejects.” The big doors swung open and the light from a hundred tiny suns blinded us as we stepped into the maelstrom.

  “Showtime!” yelled Eugene.

  The challenger’s stretch Mercedes drove up and the place went even crazier. Out of the back of the Mercedes stepped the first of five blondes, representing a kind of glamour that could have been dated decades ago if it wasn’t for the validation of the frenzied yelling and the news cameras they provoked. For one desperate instant I clung to hope. Maybe Annie wasn’t—

  It all shattered, something sheer and fragile, falling away in panes in front of me as Susie Boo stepped out of that limo, as brittle, as perfect, as manufactured, as anything human that had been endlessly worked on could be. With practised breathlessness, she beamed to the crowds.

  And then my dread knew no bounds. The dogs within my mind devoured the shreds of hope as Annie—or a sleek, vacant facsimile of the Annie I had once known—stepped out of the limo. I barely recognized her. The flashbulbs seemed to reflect off her like she was chrome. For an instant she looked dazed, forgetting to smile until her sister said something and her lips parted mechanically.

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what I should do.

  Last out of the Mercedes was Milo, a little ferret of a man with dark, impaling eyes, a despot’s smile, and a prosthetic hand encased in what looked like a sequined glove. The blondes, all of them, formed around him urgently like they were part of a marching band. As the bouncers cleared a path, they became a moving chevron with the little old ferret at the front where cameras from either side could catch him in profile, leading the charge of perfect breasts.

  The chevron flared out, filling the space created by the bouncers who pushed the civilians back. The kaleidoscope elements of blonde hair, white smiles, and identical, red, form-fitting gowns blossomed on cue. Annie had her back to me only an arm’s length away.

  “Annie!”

  And she turned around.

  Was it joy? Or fear? Or maybe both on her face when she saw me?

  The glittering procession toward the big doors of Combo suddenly faltered as Annie stood there frozen, mouthing my name into the uproar. The line she was attached to came to a confused, shuddering halt. Susie Boo, who was on Milo the ferret’s other arm, saw me and fired off a furious look like something out of a nail gun. Without missing a beat, she tugged at Annie, jump-starting her back into the procession as the ferret looked around through hooded eyes for the source of this outrage, this scene-stealer of his grand and expensive entrance.

  He saw me, and for an instant I could have sworn he recognized me.

  “Good evening, Mr. Milo,” Eugene yelled in a voice that was loud enough to be picked up by the syndicated TV cameras.

  Only later did I wonder about this.

  But at that one moment, inwardly crumbling at the sight of Annie, I could absorb none of it. I was taking hits from all the incoming images that made no sense in any way that I could cope with. Seeing this overcompensating little ferret strutting through the chaos with Annie—Annie!—on his arm, commanding the flashbulbs like forked lightning, I stood there with all the noise drifting away from me in a kind of silence of my own making, with music drifting into my head, only the melody, no lyrics.

  But I supplied the words that no one else heard—And the moon and stars were the gifts—Except maybe Annie as she turned toward me again in that scintilla of time before the momentum of the ferret’s daisy chain of blondes tugged her into the darkness of the
club.

  Of course! That was the music! That was what Constance was talking about. Yes! But why are people looking in my direction? All of them? It was only later that I could replay it all with any kind of coherence. I became aware of a finger pointing straight at me. Eugene’s finger. “Here’s our guy,” he yelled to the bouncers. And everything suddenly seemed to be happening in slow motion.

  The real tip-off should have been all the Combo signs that were strategically placed for good camera as I was centrifugally pulled forward into the gravitational maw of the publicity monster that devours what it has just destroyed.

  And why was the ferret suddenly back outside? Nodding to someone? He was nodding first to Eugene and then to someone I had to crane my neck to see:

  Jones.

  Into that melee, guided by Eugene’s ringmaster’s finger, jabbing through the blinding white fog of the news lights, stepped Jones. I couldn’t put one single piece of this damned puzzle together. Jones? Up close he looked like one of those old guys who use shoe-black on their hair. With a flourish that he must have practised a thousand times in front of a mirror, he slapped some papers with the words Superior Court into my hands. Like arrows rushing to a single target, all the news microphones shot toward Jones, his cue to intone morality like a Pentecostal smelling a conversion. I heard his words like they were being bounced through some vinyl sewer: “ . . . he knowingly, illegally, and repeatedly downloaded music by Liberace, a blatantly illegal action and theft of music by downloading . . .”

  And: “The Recording Industry of America cannot and will not tolerate the illegal downloading of music that is robbing the record companies of . . .”

  And: “. . . this man is being served with notice of our intention to seek damages . . .”

  And: “. . . asking for damages of ten million dollars for said illegal piracy of the music of Liberace and . . .”

  And on and on until I started to laugh. Eugene. What a genius. An amazing puppet master.

  And he was right. In its own minor-key way, this was history. Because here, in these first few years of the twenty-first century, an entire industry was crumbling—the music business—melting in the heat of a zillion illegal downloads by kids more nimble than the analog dinosaurs running the record companies. Fuck ’em! Enough is enough! Sue ’em! was the only threat these dinosaurs could think of, yelling from their cash fortresses built by the Beatles, Elvis, and all the others, at these cybertermites busily eating away at the foundations. It was a threat intended to spread terror in the dorm rooms of the nation, freezing fingers on the keyboards of a larcenous, ungrateful demographic. Find a few of these hooligans and make a full-blown-media-circus example of them.