Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  “I suppose that’s true.” The man laughed. “The beaches are nice. And the view.”

  “But of course it’s true,” Marco said. “Look at all the people from L.A. and tell me this is not the center of the universe.”

  The actor said he was tired of Cannes, because of these people. The phonies. He said he wouldn’t be back, but they always said that. The actor excused himself, Marco followed, and soon they were snorting lines of cocaine off the bidet in the men’s room while the attendant turned his eyes politely to the ceiling.

  Back at the bar, the actor became loud. The bartender winked, knowing how pliable Marco’s targets became once they had conspired with him. Marco surveyed the room and saw that it had become cramped. At the end of the bar he spotted Sylvie. She caught his eye, but didn’t wave. Marco nudged the actor and leaned close to his ear. He pointed to Sylvie, who knew full well she was being pointed at.

  “You want to fuck her?” Marco asked. “You want to sniff cocaine off her ass?” Marco knew the actor would be shocked, at least by the suddenness — if not by the frankness — of this question. It was his way of snapping away the refuge from L.A. and the phonies that he had so briefly provided.

  “You want to put it between her tits?”

  After years of experience, Marco knew, within a few degrees of certainty, what would happen next. The actor might not be shocked at all by Marco’s suggestion. He might, instead, ask how much such a thing would cost. If so, Marco named a price, collected, and vanished. If the man decided it was up to him to complete the transaction and approached Sylvie directly, he would earn a slap and a rough escort from the knowing bartender.

  Or he might get caught up in the moment and take Marco’s question as hypothetical — as mere locker room talk — and advance his own descriptions of what he would like to do and where he would like to put it. Such a man had no intention of paying for anything. He was keeping up appearances and would be shocked when Marco took offense at his depravity and unleashed a stream of insults that attracted the attention of the entire room. The man’s face would turn pale as he felt the entire bar — and, it seemed, an entire country — turn against him. Observed in his perversity, self-consciousness would press on him like a stone. Marco would let it weigh there for the right number of moments before suggesting a one-time payment that would set everything straight.

  A man in such a situation, presented with an escape from an inescapable situation, would turn his wallet inside out with gladness. Later, he would relate the whole thing to friends back home — at a wrap party or maybe even on a late night talk show — and laugh nervously about how he had stumbled upon one of those awkward cultural differences.

  Finally, there was the possibility that the man would say no, he did not want to put it between Sylvie’s tits or sniff cocaine off her ass. That is what the actor said, and Marco knew he was lying.

  “You do not think she is beautiful?” Marco asked, his voice cracking into a shrill arc. “You deny that the women of France are the most beautiful, most desirable women in the world. Tout le monde?!”

  The actor did not turn pale immediately, but panic glowed inside him. One out of ten men in this situation got up and left. Marco let them go, a reward for having resisted — on this single occasion — their depravity. The rest, like Marco’s actor, tried to reason. He attempted to explain that of course French women were beautiful and, yes, France was unquestionably beautiful; he just wasn’t interested in what Marco proposed. But Marco would not be consoled. He pounded on the bar and knocked over his stool. The women to their right turned and looked at the actor and suddenly realized who he was, while the actor put his finger to his lips and tried to quiet Marco as he imagined that the paparazzi would arrive at such a spectacle in an instant. Behind them, the crowd parted and the music died. But while Marco expected to see cameras, coming to claim his mark, instead he saw Ludolf, who grabbed Marco with his giant paws and hustled him through the crowd, onto the patio, and out to the hotel’s manicured driveway.

  “I told you to wait,” Ludolf mumbled as they broke into the night air, flashbulbs popping like firecrackers behind them. Ludolf’s beefy arm hung over Marco’s shoulder, pushing the bill of the baseball cap down over his eyes. Marco stumbled along until he found himself tripping on cobblestones and, at last, being pressed into the passenger seat of his own Land Rover. The bodyguard circled to the driver’s side, tossed his linen jacket past the steering wheel, and told Marco to cover his face.

  “You couldn’t wait.”

  Marco turned to see the Algerian in the backseat, shaking his head like a disappointed father.

  “Wait for what?” Marco asked.

  Ludolf plucked a tabloid off the dashboard and slapped it on Marco’s lap. Marco read the story, in which a woman described being mugged by someone who sounded very much like Marco. Ludolf put the car in reverse and poked a finger at the page, drawing his attention to the crude sketch that captured Marco perfectly — bandana, bunny ears, and all.

  “I didn’t know she was anyone,” Marco said as Ludolf steered the Land Rover onto the Croisette. He recognized the picture of the woman in the paper from earlier in the week, from between the Arab Bank and the Gucci store. It had been easy, like always. She had dropped her purse and run.

  “She’s Mlle. S_______’s girlfriend, from rehab,” Ludolf said. “Now they want a picture of you.”

  “People ask me why I never allow myself to be photographed,” the Algerian said as Marco slumped down in his seat and pulled Ludolf’s jacket over his eyes, breathing through his mouth to avoid the scent of sea air and sweat. “It isn’t to avoid detection. The police know where I am. They come by and I give them lunch. I serve champagne.”

  Ludolf navigated the car east on the Croisette, headed toward the Martinez amid the dense festival week traffic of Citroëns, mopeds, and limousines.

  “I stay out of sight because it’s part of the unspoken rules,” the Algerian said. “Some people see and some are seen. Which is better? Both are good. But one can’t be both. None of us can.”

  Ludolf turned off the Croisette onto the rue Latour Maubourg, then veered down the alley behind the Martinez where the Algerian had first treated Marco to lunch. Marco pulled Ludolf’s coat away from his face in time to see a flashbulb explode in his eyes, as bright as a thousand neon signs. The hair-dryer purr of a moped engine raced and Marco staggered out of the car and tried to give chase, but it was no use. He heard Sylvie’s laugh and made out the knots in her long spine as she sped away, her arms laced around the chest of an unseen paparazzo.

  Marco cursed and walked back toward the Land Rover. As he approached, it rolled away. He walked faster, but Ludolf accelerated. He ran, and the car went faster still until it turned the corner and disappeared. Out of breath, Marco put his hands on his knees and gulped at the mild spring air.

  The Cryerer

  When his Agent called, the Cryerer was sleeping in the Valley. The sun, already up for hours, had long overpowered the air conditioning unit that hummed in his ear, and he woke as always, pasty and flush: moist in a malarial way that felt like, but was not, a fever. He lurched out of bed and patted around for his cell phone. He patted pants and coats and towels and magazines and all over the bedspread before locating the phone on the floor between the bed and the ash-covered nightstand.

  “Where in God’s Dark Universe are you?” his Agent said. “I’ve been hitting you with 911s all morning.”

  “I’ve been running errands,” he lied. “My batteries are dying.” The Cryerer unbuckled his belt and wiggled out of his pants. He wandered into the bathroom, surprised to find himself alone. He opened the door gently.

  It wasn’t working, his Agent explained. The network wanted to write him in.

  “They need your pathetic quality,” she said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” he said, easing the shower curtain aside with tw
o fingers.

  “What? Pathetic? Quality of pathos. It’s from the Greek.”

  “But the connotations.”

  “Put those out of your mind.”

  “Is it bad?” he asked as he wandered back into the bedroom.

  “Of course it’s bad. It’s terrible. It’s worse than church. Worse than prison. That’s why they want your pathetic quality.”

  “I will be who?”

  “The Brother.”

  “Of who?”

  “Of the Sister,” she said. “Of the Mother of the Baby.”

  “And the Baby is?”

  “Gone,” she said.

  The Cryerer wrote down the time and location on an envelope he found hanging out of the nightstand, then fell back onto the bed.

  “Don’t forget the Mall,” his Agent reminded him.

  “Yes,” he said, mashing a pillow into his eye sockets.

  “You’re the best,” she said.

  The Cryerer lay on the bed, trying to find a position. The fever was bad this morning and he smelled sulfur. Rather, he had the sensation of smelling sulfur. There was no sulfur. This much he had learned.

  Where had the Brazil Nut gone? He rolled over, expecting her to be there, as if he had missed her before. He mumbled her name, then shouted it.

  They had met on a movie of the week. He had been the Brother and she had played the Girlfriend of the Colombian Drug Lord. They’d gone for drinks and she had told him everything. He hadn’t told her anything, but she had worked up a warm feeling telling all without interruption — save long pauses she spent, he realized later, snorting cocaine in the ladies room — and she had associated this feeling with him.

  Where was she?

  The Cryerer thought maybe he had killed her. He didn’t actually think so, but he had the thought. When the fever was bad, such thoughts came from nowhere, shouted at him from a great, echoing distance. You killed her. Like the smell of sulfur. Depraved. He went through the events of the night before like a clown counting his fingers after waving them into the lion’s cage. He could do this, he promised himself.

  Had she really rolled down her hip-huggers and let a team of development executives lick liquor and salt off her perverse paunch in an after-hours club in Los Feliz? Had that happened? Had she gone completely drug mad and challenged all manner of men to all manner of things, then looked at him and shrugged like this had an inevitability to it that was obvious?

  Yes. That was something she would do.

  Had she stood, bombed out, in his shower wearing only a strapless bra, staring up into the nozzle and letting water splash over her face and into the dark grooves of her body, slicking back her black hair and smiling blissfully as if she were standing, not bombed out in a shower, but in the chill, rejuvenating folds of a waterfall?

  Yes, yes. This made sense.

  And, thus soaked and resuscitated, had she snapped back, remembering where she was and who he was and, in short, thrown herself at him, cooing sweetnesses and addressing his flesh in a way he pretended was, but knew was not, unaided by substances abused and pre-existing conditions? He thought of the backs of her knees pressed against his elbows, her tanned toes pointing.

  “Is what is like with ballerina,” she said.

  Is what is like with everyone, he thought.

  She had not been a ballerina in some time.

  The Cryerer rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. His vision strobed, and he imagined he was part of a photographic experiment designed to determine if his feet left the ground as he shuffled. He shook an empty bottle of Valium and an empty bottle of Xanax. He shook a forgotten bottle of Dramamine by his ear and tablets rattled inside like dice in a cup. There were three. He washed them down with a handful of warm water before falling back onto the bed and muttering . . . for the motion of the Earth . . . into the pillow.

  When the Brazil Nut called, the Cryerer was standing in a twenty-four-hour drugstore in the Valley. It was past midnight and he was standing in the magazine aisle, checking on the competition. What his agent said was true, he reminded himself. He was the best. There was a guy in Chicago turning in good work in telephone commercials and another in Miami who scored well in Hispanic households, but he was the best. He had range. From a single, slow-rolling tear to a face-wrenching, hyperventilated blubber, there was no cry the Cryerer couldn’t do. He had cradled dead babies, dead soldiers, and dead sisters in his arms. He had received grim prognoses, medical results, and death sentences. He had been shot wide, close-up, and from cranes, looking up from the lifeless bodies of babies, and soldiers, and sisters, crying out into slowly rotating skies.

  He read a story about a movie star he had known in Van Nuys, when he, the star — both of them for that matter — was a nobody. It took the Cryerer a long time to answer his cell phone.

  “Oh hi. You are up?” the Brazil Nut said, shouting over music bumping in the background.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Are you out?”

  “No. I’m at a drugstore.”

  “It sound like you are out.”

  “No. I’m not out. Where were you this morning?” he asked, only slightly relieved to be cleared of a capital crime.

  “Out,” she said. “Why don’t you come out?”

  “I can’t. I have to be at the Mall tomorrow.”

  “You are shopping?”

  “No. It’s just a thing.

  “Thing?”

  “Yes.” he said, distracted by the magazine. “I’ll talk to you later.” He put the phone in the overcoat he wore over his pajamas, took out a bent cigarette and lit it. Despite frequent appearances as the Brother, people didn’t recognize him in drugstores in the middle of the night. Sometimes people asked if he was okay, if he was sad, but even they didn’t know why.

  This guy, he thought as he read. People probably recognized him in twenty-four-hour drugstores. Here were pictures of his secret wedding in Malibu, apparently taken from a helicopter. Here were stills lifted from video shot by a turncoat guest. The Cryerer thought of some videos from Van Nuys the bride might like to see. He puffed on his cigarette without interference from the security guard, who was busy dazzling the cashier with shoplifting stories.

  The Cryerer heard his name and collected his pills at the pharmacy, dropping the magazine on a row of glucometers.

  “Are you okay?” the cashier asked as the guard looked on and massaged his sidearm. “Are you okay?”

  When his Agent called, the Cryerer was sleeping in the Valley. He had almost fallen asleep on the way home from the drugstore, having shoveled down a palm full of Xanax in the parking lot before starting the car. He had slept deeply.

  “I was afraid that Colombian might keep you out all night,” his Agent said.

  “She’s from Brazil.”

  “I thought she was Colombian.”

  “That was a movie.”

  “Now look nice,” his Agent said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s for charity.”

  “I know.”

  “Rested?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the best,” she said.

  When the Cryerer got out of the shower, he opened the medicine cabinet and shook the empty bottles of Valiums and Xanax and the now-empty bottle of Dramamine before remembering his pills were still in the pocket of his overcoat. In the nude, he rifled around and dug the coat out from under the bed and washed down a pair of Xanax with warm water.

  The Cryerer sometimes made appearances in malls and on talk shows. He was frequently auctioned off on dates to women who dreamed of dating a man who cried fluently. They were usually disappointed.

  A calm came over him as he ran a hand over his freshly shaven face. He had a serious face, and when he had no expression at all he looked angry. It made him look old. He put on
a black suit and a shirt the color of a Band-Aid. He tugged at his belt and tried to find his waist. He appeared to be thin, at least clothed, but his stomach bulged, foiling attempts to keep shirts tucked in. His well-kemptness had a half-life, eroding during the day via forces he couldn’t control. He checked and steadied himself in the mirror, and tried out a few tearful poses.

  When the Brazil Nut called, the Cryerer was sitting on a stool in the Valley. He felt the phone humming in his suit pocket but couldn’t answer because he was next. The stage was arrayed with a semicircle of stools. On each stool sat a bachelor. There was an attorney, and a doctor, and a policeman, and a soap opera star. The Cryerer had worked with the soap opera star once on a Sunday night sweeps-sweetener about the life of Saint Augustine. It was called The Temptation of St. Augustine, but was really all about temptation. There had been protests. The Cryerer had played the Brother, although for all he knew Saint Augustine didn’t even have a brother.

  The soap opera star stood on a makeshift runway in an open-collared tuxedo, describing his dream date.

  They — the soap opera star and his date — would meet for drinks in a bar atop a hotel in Santa Monica. They would hop into a sports car and drive the Pacific Coast Highway at sunset, up to Santa Barbara for Italian food at a little place where, the soap opera star alleged, the prosciutto tasted like sweet candy made of meat.

  The bidding was slow. Much slower than the bidding for the policeman, who was middle-aged and bulky, but had promised to escort his date to a series of self-defense classes and firing ranges, and to help her secure a carry permit. The doctor, who seemed very young to be a doctor, had promised a series of teeth-whitening sessions and hinted, obliquely the Cryerer thought, at the prospect of a boob job. It didn’t seem fair.

  The bidding was slow. The hostess, a thin blond woman in a smart aquamarine business suit, urged the women on. “What do we have ladies, for a soap opera star and sweet candy made of meat? For charity?”

  A few hands went up. The star stood awkwardly on the runway, crooning, “Come on, ladies,” into a cordless microphone.