by John Shannon
‘Hold on!’ I yell. Polite to the last, even if it’s my assassin. Yeah, that’s Moms’s doing.
I tug on my pants and answer the door, holding the pants up with a fist.
‘Mr Smithee, sir. I’m so very sorry. The computer tells me your Visa has a problem.’
‘You’re not from Hollywood, are you?’
The man is an East Asian of some sort, with jet-black hair and a squared-off shirt with a lot of white-on-white embroidery. ‘My family is from Gujarat, sir.’
‘What a glorious place that is,’ I say, offering my most winning smile. I have no clue where Gujarat is. ‘I confess, the name Smithee is a kind of in-joke in Hollywood for remaining anonymous. I’m in the movies. I’ll give you another credit card in my real name. When you’re done with it, just slide it back under the door. OK?’
‘Yes, sir. But if it is still not good with my service, we are in very grave trouble.’
‘You’re not in trouble, Mr Gujarat. I promise. But please leave the name “Smithee” on the card I signed.’
I hand him an American Express in my real name, wondering what has gone wrong with the other one, and I shut the door before this man can look too closely at the mess inside.
Maybe the If He Hollers production company is hunting me down, I think, and that bastard of an agent Ardak Sahagian has sold me out. It wouldn’t be beyond him to reveal the names on all my credit cards. Maybe they’ve found some way to shut them down in order to drive me into the open. Shit!
I plop back down on the bed, but I’m not likely to sleep again. I sit straight up in realization: If they’ve canceled the Smithee card, they know where I am, or they will very soon.
FOUR
A Place to Hold All the Failings
I drive out of the tiki motel as soon as I’m fully awake, so whatever rats are on the scent can’t track me. Gone, No Forwarding, I think. It’s the title of my second movie, made from a Joe Gores novel about a skip-tracer, and I can’t remember a damn thing about it except the baby-faced director just out of film school who kept strutting around the set braying foolhardy orders until the production company pulled him off and brought in a reliable older action director, known to have better set-manners.
This morning I use all my credit cards to draw a couple thousand in cash from a whole string of banks all over the Valley. They can trace the banks and cards as much as they want, but best of luck tracking me now, assholes – I’m running on cash.
Then I drive up Topanga to Fernwood and up a winding lane to an overlook above Tuna Canyon. I came this route once before, maybe ten years earlier, and found that the Sandstone Ranch was nothing but a dowdy empty house awaiting a buyer. Presumably some sad soul owns it in absentia, unless the accumulated karma of its reputation has driven everyone away. Something says, this is a bad place, Ty.
I lean out of my car to press the button on the squawk-box at the gate and wait. A big slab of sandstone set into the rock gates announces:
Sandstone Ranch
‘I think you made a mistake, pard,’ comes back the electronic gargle.
I realize I have nothing to act on now, no connections at all, except this dream of finding my past through this sad benighted house. I can’t be turned away. It’s become a terrible mythic longing.
I know the house is two miles down a one-lane access road that isn’t paved for the first half mile, a bizarre kind of deterrent to journalists and simpletons like me.
‘I’m thinking of buying the place,’ I try over the intercom. ‘I’d pay a lot more than you owe on it.’
‘That’s a nada, pal. I’m just the caretaker. But you can spread a little green around, and the bank will never know.’
‘A hundred bucks to look the place over,’ I offer. ‘That help any?’
‘Make it two hundred, and you get the grand tour, pard.’
I know perfectly the sound of a sucker-raise from a yo-yo sitting on a pair of threes. There’s practically nothing but poker on movie sets, and the stunt men I learned from can smell bluff like sharks on chum. ‘Let’s say a hundred, and if I’m happy with the tour, I’ll make your day really memorable.’
‘OK, big tipper.’
The gate buzzes, a slider rather than a swinger. The whirring goes on for a bit before the old gears use up their backlash, and the gate begins to pull open.
As I drive in I realize the place probably hasn’t seen a crowd, or even a single heart-pounding newcomer since the late-nineteen seventies. Something aches inside me. The view as I crunch slowly down the gravel road is awesome, the greening winter hills falling away dramatically to the blue-green Pacific, choppy with tiny whitecaps far below. Darker kelp beds make big jigsaw shapes like something secret hidden in the depths. Even from up here you can see flights of pelicans cruising low.
The car bumps on to asphalt, cracked and weedy, and eventually I see the overlarge ordinary-looking building in the distance. Yet it’s the building. I can’t resist a frisson from Moms’s tales and so many of my own imaginings – I see a dark first floor of unlit glass and upstairs the main floor with a house-wide balcony bisected by a fat white chimney.
I pass the flat field where so many cars must once have parked on weekends. There’s no evidence of it now, and I stop near the house, beside a beat-up old Mazda 323 on the forecourt.
The house door is opened by a stubbly guy in khaki Sansabelt pants and a wifebeater T-shirt, smiling as if the expression hurts him. An aging Stanley Kowalski. He must be seventy-five, and something about him suggests he’s been ill.
‘I’m Karl Rubin. I used to meet so many people right here, in the nude, if you can believe it.’
‘Why not?’ But I want to say: Too much information, dude.
‘And right on that spot –’ He points to the wood floor about three feet inside the door – ‘Sammy Davis, Jr., started undressing and dropped what must have been a ten-carat diamond cufflink. He didn’t give a shit.
‘But his date, the porn actress, Marilyn Chambers, did and she fell to her knees – no joke intended! – and grabbed it up like a chipmunk. Then Mr Davis dropped a diamond-covered cigarette lighter, and the woman grabbed that, too. Jesus! Next time, I was going to go down on my knees, but the man laughed and soft-shoed on into the living room. It was already full of people, undressed and otherwise, yakking about the philosophy of sex or some such. They were so intellectual about it all.’
‘Did you know Melanie Bird?’ I interrupt his reverie.
‘Mel, sure! She was Donna, too. She was here from about halftime. A really nice woman she was.’
Once again I’ve run into someone who obviously doesn’t recognize me. I wonder if movie culture is disappearing among older grown-ups, the way music and books have. In another year or two, the only celebrities at the mall will be people from reality TV – and Warhol will be right about the famous fifteen minutes. The thought oppresses me, as if I’m pissing my life down a drain. All this make-believe.
I snap myself out of this stupid funk before the Skinnies can show up. ‘So nobody wants to buy this place?’
‘It’s got twenty-five acres attached. That’s like having a big Albert Ross around your neck.’ I begin to wonder if he’s pulling my leg. Albert Ross? ‘The Coastal Commission doesn’t let you subdivide. Asking price is five-point-six mil. It’s a lot of bread for a pretty ordinary house and twenty-five acres you can’t use. The only thing it’d be really good for is a nursing home or a rehab.’
The man leads me into a big darkish room.
‘Tell me about Melanie,’ I say.
‘I think she came with a husband. Maybe. But a lot of guys freaked out at the scene and took off pretty quick. That was a long time ago, man. Here’s the main meeting room. When we had lectures, everybody would just sit on the floor or on a bunch of old chairs. Most of the speakers talked about this big change that was coming to human consciousness, yada-yada.’
The room we stand in is a big echoey nondescript space; an old console TV faces one easy c
hair, a parody of a bachelor pad that’s the size of a dance hall.
‘I came as a handyman but I became one of the steadies. I got laid as much as I could on the big party weekends.’ He laughs a fake laugh, but it chokes off. ‘Anybody buys this place is going to want to put up some walls, I think, maybe rebuild completely. Unless he likes free-range bowling.’
‘Did Melanie hook up with somebody?’
‘It didn’t work that way. At least, it wasn’t supposed to.’
‘Come on, people have special friends.’
‘Get over that thinking, man. It’ll keep you from seeing what this place was. Melanie had friends, sure, she hung with a woman named Joyce McDonald. Her guys, I don’t know. She was pretty busy that way. I even had her a few times, but she was nothing special. It was kinda like – “You moved, did I hurt you?”’
The man didn’t notice that I was doing my best not to cross the intervening space and strangle him.
‘I hate to say it, but sex gets old. At least when there’s so much of it going. I could use a little of the overflow now.’ He laughs his suppressed laugh again, like someone profoundly alone.
I wonder if it isn’t better just to come out and tell him she was my mother. He’s getting hard to take – and I also worry if part of my annoyance isn’t the fact that he hasn’t recognized me as a movie star. Deep down, maybe it is.
‘Follow me. I’ll show you what used to be the ball-room.’
I know the joke, but follow him glumly down the wide stairs to another big empty room with brown carpet and no furniture at all.
‘This was all mattresses and bare butts. Come look here.’
A large bathroom toward the back has flowery gold and brown wallpaper, and the caretaker beckons with a come-see finger. Up close the scrollwork resolves into copulating couples and threesomes and various other Kama Sutra notions. Shit. It makes the place seem so sophomoric.
‘Cute,’ I say. ‘Listen, man. I’ll give you two hundred if you just tell me any African-American men Melanie Bird hung with.’
Karl Rubin squints at me, getting it at last. ‘You’re about that age, ain’t you, son? Well, it weren’t Sammy Davis, that’s for sure, if you got a golddigging mind. There was a few coloreds here, for sure, but there was one she seemed keen on. Marcus Stone was his name. He was a college professor, out in the Valley.’
I count out one hundred and sixty in twenties, crumple it all spitefully into a ball and drop it into a grimy toilet in the Kama Sutra bathroom.
‘There’s no call to do that, son.’
I remember a walkoff line from one of my early films that I never really understood. ‘That’s just the squid ink inside me.’
‘Somebody’s out looking for you, Stoney,’ the man said at his door.
‘You know this because …?’
‘My friends.’ Harper pushed his way in.
‘We don’t have friends, friend. Beyond business, we have cunning and we have fear. Tell.’
‘Speak for your ownself.’ Harper gave him a long cool stare. Harper had made a point of not putting a shirt on over his huge buff chest, which he’d just shaved and oiled. ‘It ain’t business and it ain’t payback. I think it’s personal. I don’t like it when your old-school life come and want to jitterbug.’
Marcus Stone pressed three fingers to his temple in the small pool house that was now his home, a gesture he had used for years to try to rid himself magically of trouble. Too many years. ‘Nothing gets in the way of business, you know that.’
Harper did his best to prove Stoney’s dictum about having no friends. ‘Listen, old man, me and the Rollin’ Seventies could swallow you with a glass of water if we have to. I’m your connect to everything you need now – your soldiers, your dealers, your heavy cash. I even brought in a new soldier from the Big J. I pick up the Colombians flying in today. Everything got to be smooth as silk. Convince me this guy looking for you now is no problem.’
‘This the first I heard of it, child. Somebody from back in the day? How the fuck I know, dickhead?’
‘You smell like a trunk full of dead cats, Stoney. You ever take a shower, man?’
‘Don’t be dissing me. Hear? Or we got to get down hard, you and me.’
‘This the way it is,’ Harper announced. ‘If this motherfucker gets in the way, I’m’a tell my new trouble man Pennycooke to take him down hard. It’s just pest control. You with the program?’
Marcus Stone shrugged, thinking for some reason of his uncomplicated life way back in the day, teaching community college, staring intently at all the lovely short-skirt knees on girls in his classroom, when he was still righteous and clean and respected. He knew how he had spun so far off track, but wondered what fate had set it up. ‘Go on then, if that’s your mind. Bust a cap on this old-time mothah. I don’t give a shit.’
Gloria woke first, in the sunbright bedroom upstairs. The light came through the gauze curtains, blazing across the room to a big painting of the French Quarter in New Orleans, all filigreed iron railings and a half dozen people hanging over to wave and toss strings of glass beads. Mardi Gras, of course, she thought. She was surprised that it meant anything at all to him, but then she knew that some pretty corrupted Paiute Indian customs – even the Ghost Dance – still mattered a lot to her.
She studied Sonny, sleeping, so anguished and restless. He rolled and barked a few unintelligible words. It was hard not to reach out and gather him in, with all his torment. He’d been about as good a lover as he could be under the circumstances, and she knew the circumstances included his timing things and secretly slipping into the bathroom for a Viagra. Everybody had issues, she thought.
Just then his wristwatch on the bedside table started alarming, a soft burring at first, then a little louder, a double-buzz louder still. He began to wake on about the fourth increase in tone. A twitch here, a knuckle rubbing the sheet, a leg shuddering. Sonny Theroux, you’re a whole encyclopedia of nervous tics, she thought. She leaned over him to the table, and pressed a stud that seemed to silence the watch.
‘Whoa. Early don’t last so long.’
‘Do you have to go to work?’
He shook his head, but he might have been clearing it. ‘I just don’t want to miss any precious time I get with you.’
She ruffled his hair, a bit hard. ‘You’re a tormented man, you know that?’
‘Gentle, darling. A little too much fond-lick with your strength and I’m broke in two.’
‘Don’t get off into dialect with me, Sonny. You may have started off in some swamp, but I know you’ve et in hotels.’
He laughed softly. ‘Very good one, ma’am. I enjoy the wordplay but I enjoy you more. I really love those great big breasts hanging over me. Señora Hinojosa has the morning off, so we can cook breakfast for ourselves. Or whatever we have a mind for.’
‘Well, first, for accuracy, this breast here is mostly silicone after I had the evil cancer taken out. Second, I’ve got to get myself to Fresno to register for at least some of this conference. Why don’t you just fuck me once more right this minute, if you’ve got more of your joy pills.’
‘Do I?’ He got up and headed for the bathroom, but glanced back. ‘I didn’t know you’d noticed, but you’re a helluva cop. You know the big social drawback of Viagra?’
She shook her head. ‘The wait?’
‘All those trophy wives. They got to actually screw the wrinkled old fart now.’
She smiled. Some day, she’d ask him what the problem was with him – if he knew. Maybe blood pressure meds. He certainly had a full plate of anxieties. But no questions now. Now she wanted to enjoy his erect penis, even if it took a bunch of elves cranking on the mechanism to get it up, and she wanted to distract herself from the whole dangerous game she was playing.
Jack Liffey let himself wake at his own tempo, which often meant he’d feel a bit groggy with oversleep for a while. He didn’t even look at the time. He’d gotten used to waking beside Gloria and really missed her. He kne
w damn well she was probably experimenting up north, but what he didn’t know was whether she saw some possible future, wholesome or otherwise, that did not contain him. And that idea scared him to death.
He could hear faint banda music on the block already, its polka-like beat normally an annoyance. But now it made him feel at home.
After he showered and fetched the L.A. Times, he saw that the answering machine was flashing. Screw ’em. It could only be the film company, riding his ass for instant results. Why were film people always such assholes, he wondered. It was almost a rule of life. He should have it tatted up on a sampler and framed: film people are assholes. It would sell like crazy in L.A.
He poured out a little cereal and ate it while scanning the headlines. The paper had been so thoroughly debased by a pinhead Chicago real estate tycoon that it was no longer worth reading much, except to note now and again a hint of something local buried deep inside that affected a case he was working on. For years he’d been on the knife-edge of canceling and taking only the New York Times.
Morning memories popped up. He remembered, during the divorce proceedings so many years ago, his wife’s mother saying dutifully (it had been necessary then) that he was a lousy father, and it had really hurt him. It was part of the game the system had demanded back then, before the invention of ‘the uncontested divorce’. But it had made him reconsider himself – the way any outside judgment did. Am I inconsistent? Am I loving one minute and then forgetting my family the next? He almost phoned Maeve that instant to reassure himself that he hadn’t been that bad a father.
Jesus. All this morning misery suggested so many other screw-ups that he had squashed down deep into the hardened white space that he kept far inside himself just to hold all the failings. What had happened to make him lose his sense of humor about himself? Cool it, Jack.
Finally he let himself think of Gloria and wondered if she really had gone to see Sonny. How had he even guessed at that? A single glance between them that he’d observed six months ago? Her own eagerness to make the trip? And – was he imagining? – a kind of understated retreat from him beforehand. No, he wouldn’t reject her preemptively. Gloria was it for him, damn it. He wanted her, and he’d fight for her.