“Maybe it’s time we got Sherry a new interest,” I said.
“Christ, you fuck me and three minutes later you’re talking about business,” she said. “Good thing I’m not the romantic type. Are you in love with Jill?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Oh, well,” she said. “I’ve just noticed that half the people in the world are fucking people they don’t love. I love Digby, but here I am. I just want to know if you love Jill.”
“She’s nicer than most,” I said, “but she doesn’t have a purple cunt.”
She got a laugh out of that. Her little bird face crinkled.
“I knew you didn’t love her,” she said. “Why are you always asking me about Sherry?”
“Just curious,” I said.
She pointed at one of the buttons on the telephone console. It was red, unlike the others.
“That’s her line,” Lulu said. “When that line lights up I answer, no matter what I’m doing. The others can blink, but Sherry and I are very close. When she needs counsel I give it.”
I rolled over between her long legs. “Suppose I shove it in you and wait for the red one to blink,” I said. “I’d like to hear you give some business advice while you’re getting fucked.”
“I can handle that,” Lulu said, opening her legs. It reminded me of a drawbridge going up, I don’t know why. I socked it to the plum and we rolled around for a while, me feeling like I was glued to her, but the red button didn’t blink. “She’s probably with the swami,” Lulu said.
“We have to be careful when Digby gets out of the hospital,” she said later. “He’s very sensitive to rivalry. He just can’t deal with it. I guess being impotent makes him feel at a disadvantage. Let’s not threaten him, okay? And let’s not let Jill find out, either. I’d still like to handle her, even though I hate her.”
“I’ll have the little documentary ready to screen in about two weeks,” I said. “Get Sherry to come and let me screen it for her. It’s not long, and she might get a laugh out of it.”
“Sure, but she’ll probably bring Swan,” Lulu said. “He doesn’t let her attend screenings without him.”
“Bring him,” I said. “Bring the dogs, kids, her manicurist, whoever she wants. I just want her to see it.”
Lulu was looking at me shrewdly, like she was playing chess and trying to look about seventeen moves ahead. It was ridiculous. I don’t look that far ahead.
“You fucker,” she said. “It’s a good thing I define myself through my career. If I were dealing with this as a woman I wouldn’t let you near her.
“There was a time when I was just a woman,” she said, looking at me angrily, as if I was about to contradict her.
“So what?” I said. “There was a time when I was just the son of a wheat farmer who went broke. Obviously we’ve both gone on to bigger and better things.”
“I guess that’s why I keep Buttons,” Lulu said, not listening. “He needs me. I can’t do anything for his career because he’s ruined it. He just needs me.”
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t care about your love life. I think you’re an exceptional businesswoman. I think we can help one another.”
“How come you think you can help me?” she asked. “You’re nobody, and I’m already on top. How can you help me?”
“I might get to the top, too,” I said. “I might even take the elevator.”
She shook her frizzy head. “I don’t know why you want to be famous so bad,” she said. “It’s not that hot. I mean, I know everybody famous says that, but it’s really true. I mean, look at me, I’m practically a queen and I’m lucky to get fucked once a month.”
I laughed at that. “Your luck’s changed,” I said.
But she was still giving me her chess-player look when I left.
IT’S CRAZY, THE WAY everybody in Hollywood wants to impress you with what a human being they still are. They all heard somewhere that fame and stardom reduces their humanity or something, and they worry about it constantly. Of course, it’s true—most of them are only human about a tenth of the time, and then only through their greed and their egos. Nothing’s more human than greed and ego.
That’s why Jill was so exceptional. She had already decided she had stopped being human, somewhere up the road. “I’m a drone,” she said. She had decided all she was good for was work, so she wasn’t always dropping her humanity worries on me. She must have told me twenty times how surprised she was to be getting a little bit of a love affair again, after she had already given up on such things.
Of course, part of that was bullshit. When she was halfway happy she looked about twenty-four, and she still drew the guys. Most of them backed off from her, but she still drew them.
On the other hand, part of it wasn’t bullshit. She was pretty resigned. The resigned look went away when she was feeling hopeful, but it always came back. She had sort of checked out on normal life, whatever that is. I don’t think she really expected any long-term thing with me, although maybe she kidded herself once in a while, when we were at our best. When we were at our best we were all right. She was quick—had a mind. I didn’t have to explain things to her. She understood things like a snap that most women wouldn’t get if you talked to them for a week. I liked that, not having to labor the points. And she was pretty, at least when she was fresh.
The bad part was that she was too grateful. She acted like I’d saved her from the old folk’s home or something. People who are grateful expect you to be grateful back, and it’s not part of me. I don’t think I’ve been grateful since I was fourteen, when my Uncle Ellis gave me a .410 my folks didn’t want me to have.
Lulu Dickey was a nice change, at least when I could get her to stop whining about her lost humanity. She was always apologizing for being famous, or else pretending that she wasn’t. That was typical Hollywood. All the famous people have to act like their fame doesn’t really belong to them. They treat it as if it had been planted on them while they weren’t looking, by some publicity agent—the way narcotics agents plant pot in hippies’ apartments.
If you ask me, most of them ought to consider themselves lucky to have something to distract them from their fucking humanity, which is all the same everywhere, as far as I know. Any idiot can feel. Anyone can have a baby, have someone die, fuck up a marriage, get lonesome, go broke, forget how to fuck, get bored with their situation, all that. Anyone can fall in love—I could do it, if I found the right face on the right body. Why movie people feel they have to keep the ability to suffer all that ordinary shit, I don’t know.
Humanity just backs up on nothingness, of one kind or another. Maybe you build a routine and slog through it day after day, or maybe you fall out and stay drunk or take pills or something, but it doesn’t change much. The same old boredom keeps sucking at your legs. I saw it all over the Midwest, when I was flying around. Bouncing up and down in those smoky little airplanes, I could look out the window and see nothingness for hundreds of miles in every direction.
Then when I got my office on the top floor of the tractor company I could look out toward New Mexico and see the same nothingness—fifteen hundred miles of it before you even came to an ocean.
When you first get to Hollywood you think it’s different. You got the hills and the greenery, lots of fancy cars, women with some bounce in their asses, all sorts of pizzaz—but eventually it’s just the same. You wake up some morning all smogged in—nothing but gray out the window, like fucking San Francisco. You don’t feel like fucking, you don’t feel like talking, and you know it’s got you.
Fame has to be the answer—the big desmogger. It’s the difference between having your plug pulled and having your plug in the socket. When you’re famous you’re always alive. The phones ring all day, the cars come when you want them, the money’s in motion. You get invitations. Once you’ve got it you might have a problem keeping it, but that’s not a bad problem. So it takes some smarts and some balls. It’s not a bad problem to have. Without the
kind of problems it brings you’d probably just be saving up to buy linoleum for some kitchen in some suburb, or else sucking wine bottles on some skid row.
Every time I hear people complain about fame I wish I could kick them out of an airplane in the middle of North Dakota or Nebraska or somewhere, or else fill one of their fucking swimming pools with fog and hold them under for about a week. If I ever produce a horror movie, I think I’ll construct a fog chamber and throw a big party in it and then slip out and lock everybody in. Then I’ll turn on the fog and let everybody wander around in it, getting back in touch with their humanity. That ought to get my name in the papers.
AFTER DIGBY BUTTONS EMERGED from the dope hospital Lulu and I went out to her beach house to fuck. We were already sort of tired of one another, but somehow it just seemed to inspire us. After we knew it was all over we got pretty intense about it and didn’t quite want to let it go. I guess once we figured we had gotten away with it we couldn’t resist a last kick or two. We had an active time, there by the ocean-side, until Lulu finally decided enough was enough.
Her decisiveness really impressed me. Not one woman in a hundred will stop fucking somebody she likes to fuck just because she’s decided it’s time to stop. Most women will suffer five or six years of abuse and still not stop, but Lulu just wiped her cunt one day and stuck those long legs back in her prefaded jeans and called it off.
“I got this thing for Digby,” she said. “Suppose we made the papers? It’d just be the end. He’d take about two pounds of dope and then he’d die.
“Besides,” she said, “if we leave it nice we might get some time later on. Who knows? It could happen if you stick around.”
“I’ll probably stick around,” I said.
“The trick is to avoid a lot of anger,” she said. “I’m really not into anger. If I just go home and you just go home then what’s to stop us from picking’ it up again later on, when I’m not so worried about Digby?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s to stop us. Is Sherry coming to my screening?”
She looked at me shrewdly. “So what do you want to do, Owen, fuck her or produce her next picture or what?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to do anything. I just think she’ll like the picture.”
“I don’t know if you’re too bright, Owen,” she said. “You don’t want to fool around with Sherry. She’s too much for you—too much for everybody. She’s even too much for herself. Even if you got rid of Swan and produced a picture of hers or something, it wouldn’t matter. Sherry gets all the credit for everything she does. Her producers might as well not exist. All you’d be is her latest cocksman. A male sex object. In my opinion you’d do better to stick with Jill.”
“I just asked a question,” I said. “I don’t particularly want your opinion.”
Lulu sat and watched the waves for a while, frowning. “You don’t know Sherry,” she said. “She’s not a pushover, like me. Sherry is tough.”
“Maybe I just want a look at her,” I said. “Maybe I’m as star-struck as the next asshole.”
She stood up and pulled on the woolly coat that she always brought to the beach with her. It looked like it was made from an English sheepdog. I was just as glad to see the last of that coat. Every time I came near it, it shed all over me.
I guess it worried her, my future. She was still frowning when she got in her little brown Jag and drove away. But the next day, dry as a cactus, she called and said Sherry would come to the screening.
“Diggs and me want to come too, if that’s all right,” she said. “Diggs needs to get out more.”
“Bring him, he’s welcome,” I said.
8
OF COURSE BO WOULD WANT TO BE AT THE SCREENING. IT was his studio, and he would naturally want to be on hand for any occasion involving Sherry Solaré. Sherry had walked straight off a picture he was producing once, and he had promptly sued her and won three million dollars in damages. The decision was still floating around in the appeals courts, but there was a good chance it would stick. Naturally the two of them hated one another. When I told him Sherry was coming his little eyes lit up.
“The top cunt,” he said. “I’ve adopted that phrase, which I know you coined. Of course I’ll be there. I don’t want to breach protocol where the top cunt is concerned.”
Outtake was about three times as good as I had figured it would be when we got back from Rome. Jimmy Boyd had done a great job. It was a funny movie about making movies. In fact, the whole situation was funny. I was involved with a picture that even the critics might like, while Jill was helping to finish a total clunker, just because she was loyal to some notion she had about old Tony.
I was at the screening room twenty minutes early, wanting things to start. Lulu and Digby Buttons showed up first. It was my first look at Digby, except for those pictures in Lulu’s bedroom—those had clearly been made in happier days. He was nearly as tall as Lulu and looked like he weighed about ninety pounds. He was shivering and wearing a shabby old overcoat, and his mouth hung open. It was hard to believe he had once been the idol of millions. They had a Chink bodyguard with them. I guess the Chink was supposed to pick Digby up if he fell down and started drooling in the aisles.
“ ’Lo Owen,” he said. Then he sat down, pulled some earphones out of his pocket, and began to listen to music and sort of jerk in his seat. Lulu sat down by him as if she was his little wife. It’s amazing, the people women can love.
When Sherry came in she was wearing dark glasses so big and black that they could have been cut from the lid of a coffin. She didn’t take them off, either. I would only have known it was her because her hair was the usual rat’s nest.
Bo should have been there, but he wasn’t, so I walked up and introduced myself. Swan didn’t look at me.
“This is the one with a cunt for a mouth,” he said to Sherry.
Then he looked at me. “One crack out of you an’ we’re leavin’,” he said. “I’ll take that fucking projector and wrap it around a flagpole.”
I coldcocked him—hit him right in the mouth and knocked him flat. Bo Brimmer and one of his executives walked in just at that moment, which made it perfect. Hitting him was just what I needed to stop my nervousness. It had worked just that way in ball games, too. If I could lay somebody out on the opening kickoff I felt fine from then on.
Swan wasn’t expecting to get coldcocked, of course, and I hit him hard enough to stun him. I really knocked him flat down in the aisle, not to mention splitting his lip wide open. He lay there for a minute, bleeding into his beard.
Sherry Solaré sort of opened her mouth, she was so surprised. I couldn’t tell what her eyes looked like, behind those coffin-lid sunglasses, but it could have been she was a little bit pleased at seeing her boyfriend get popped.
The executive that came in with Bo was certainly not pleased. He was absolutely aghast, and rushed over to Swan and knelt down by him.
“My god, what have you done?” he said, visions of lawsuits in his eyes. Swan did practically nothing but sue people, usually on Sherry’s behalf.
“Kenneth, you do tend to miss the obvious,” Bo said, coming up to Sherry. He nodded, she nodded.
“Hiya,” she said, and then walked down to where Swan was lying. The black sunglasses swung my way for a second, but then they swung back. She had on a woolly coat that might have come off the same dog as Lulu’s. I don’t know why you see so many woolly coats in a place where it’s never cold. Maybe they just go with woolly women.
Sherry looked down at the fallen warrior. “Now you know how it feels,” she said. “It’s not so sexy, is it?”
Swan’s eyes had yet to clear, and he had quite a bit of blood in his beard. Sherry nudged his shoulder with her foot.
“Are you taking a nap, or what?” she said. “I’d hate to think I was fucking somebody who won’t get up and fight.”
Lulu was standing in the middle of a row of seats, watching it all from her great height.
Sherry
nudged Swan again. “Come on,” she said. “This is the first screening I’ve been to where there was a fight.”
Swan shook his head a few times and his eyes cleared. He looked at Sherry furiously. Then he struggled to his feet and started toward me, but the executive, who was still worried about the legal implications of it all, got him in a hug and tried to restrain him. Swan ended up clipping him one, which caused Sherry to smile faintly.
“No, Swan,” she said. “You hit the wrong one. Hit the big one.”
At that point Bo strolled down the aisle, straightening his bow tie.
“Back in Arkansas we do our fighting in the great outdoors,” he said. “We go outside, so as not to break the furniture or frighten the projectionists. Projectionists have enough anxiety as it is.”
“Horseshit!” Swan yelled, shoving the poor executive, who was still trying to restrain him. “You fucker!” he yelled, pointing his finger at me. “I’ll get even with you!”
But he didn’t hit me. Instead he turned and stomped down to the front of the theater and dropped into a seat. He wiped his bloody beard on the sleeve of his corduroy coat.
“Ken, would you see if you can find him some Kleenex, or maybe some paper towels?” Bo asked. “He’s bleeding like a stuck hawg. We don’t want him bloodying’ up our seats.”
The executive was very relieved to have something to do. He left, leaving Bo and Sherry and me standing in a clump. I wasn’t sure what the next move was, but I felt relaxed again. Bo and Sherry appeared to be completely at ease with one another, despite their history.
“Can I sit between you two?” Sherry asked. “He’s a vindictive little punk. He may come charging up here and try to strangle me, once he stops bleeding. I’d enjoy the picture more if I just felt secure.”
“Honey, we’ll have him put in jail if you say the word,” Bo said. “We’ll clap the motherfucker in irons.”
“Don’t call me honey, you peanut,” she said, turning sour abruptly. Instead of waiting for us, she went and sat down by Lulu. Digby Buttons was still hunched over beneath his earphones.
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