We're So Famous

by Jaime Clarke

  ‘Is it someone who knows Bryan Metro?’

  ‘Forget Bryan Metro—he isn’t here.’

  ‘Would Bryan Metro know who this person is?’

  ‘I would hope so.’

  ‘Is it a man or a woman?’

  ‘Man.’

  ‘Is he famous just in Hollywood or all over the world?’

  ‘How can anyone just be famous in Hollywood?’

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘Shit, here comes my boss.’

  ‘Wait—’

  ‘Forest Lawn Cemetery.’

  ‘Hi. I have sort of an odd question.’

  ‘It’s a cemetery, honey. You won’t offend anyone here.’

  ‘Is Bryan Metro buried up there?’

  ‘Metro… Metro… let me think. Is he that silent film star?’

  ‘No, he’s a musician.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure he did die.’

  ‘Tell you the truth, I’m pretty new here and I don’t know. The computers are down, too. Normally you can look something like that up. Do you want me to call you back when the computers are up?’

  ‘I could call you back. I’m not really at a number where I can be reached.’

  ‘Metro, Metro. It doesn’t ring a bell. The only ones I know for sure are Gene Autry (he’s in the Sheltering Hills section, Grave 1048, just in front of one of the statues), Lucille Ball (she’s in the Columbarium of Radiant Dawn in the Court of Remembrance), and Scatman Crothers (he’s Lincoln Terrace Plot 4545).’

  ‘Andy Gibb’s there, too.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘You know who’s right above him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The dwarf who played E.T.’

  ‘No shit. I loved that movie.’

  ‘Well, anyway. I might call you back. When do you think the computers will be back up?’

  ‘Who knows about these things?’

  Right as I roll to a stop on Rodeo Paque turns up the stereo and says, What can beat Marlon Brando’s trash?

  I nod, saying, It’s a score for sure.

  It smells, Daisy says from the backseat.

  Even though it’s night, someone uses the diagonal crosswalk and I watch our reflection in the windows of Pierre Cardin.

  How do they know we’re not just saying it’s Brando’s garbage, Daisy asks.

  We’ll have to dig through it for something personal, I say.

  I think there’s fish in here, Daisy says.

  Roll down the window, Paque says.

  Okay, I say, who’s next?

  Paque pulls the yellow envelope out of the glove box and sifts through the address slips I stole from Imagistic Photo Developers, a swanky film developing place where I work on the weekends until I can get my big break.

  Do you have David Hasselhoffs address, Daisy asks.

  I don’t think so, I say.

  Too bad, she says, I’ll bet he’s got all kinds of cheesy stuff to steal.

  Paque holds one of the slips under the glove box light. I can’t read this one, she says.

  What’s the address, I ask.

  1700 Coldwater Canyon.

  Forget it. That’s where Carrie Fisher lives. She’s got big gates, I say.

  How do you know, Paque asks.

  I put my blinker on and turn left. I’ve been by it, I say.

  Pick someone, Daisy says. This stuff really stinks.

  You pick, Paque says. She holds the envelope open over her shoulder and Daisy reaches in.

  Who’d you get, I ask.

  It’s a tie, she says. Tom Bosley and Peter Falk.

  I vote for Mr. Cunningham, I say.

  Where does Columbo live, Paque asks.

  I turn down the radio—the B-52’s—to hear the address.

  1004 Roxbury Drive.

  We’re close to Roxbury, Daisy says.

  Let’s go then, Paque says.

  I gotta get out of this car, Daisy says.

  I suggest a quick dinner where we can sort it out, get some more loot and meet the others up at the Hollywood sign to get scored.

  You like Mexican, I ask.

  Sounds good, Paque says.

  Any place, Daisy says.

  I pull into the parking lot of El Coyote on Beverly, a Mexican restaurant whose food is notoriously bad but I can’t resist showing it to Paque and Daisy. This is where Sharon Tate had her last meal, I tell them as we drift to a stop.

  Who’s Sharon Tate, Paque asks.

  You know, I say. Charles Manson.

  That’s sick, Paque says. This isn’t going to be a tour, is it?

  I laugh. Daisy climbs out and the Hefty bag of Brando’s trash sags on the backseat.

  Should we go through that before or after we eat, Daisy asks.

  After, Paque says, or I’ll lose my appetite.

  I notice a catering truck idling on the street as we push through the front doors of the El Coyote and Paque lets out a wow when she sees all the cameras and lights inside.

  They’re filming something, I say.

  Daisy trips on a thick black cord taped to the floor. A short man in a yellow baseball cap approaches us.

  Is the restaurant open, I ask.

  Yeah, come in, the short man says, We’re filming an MTM here and all the customers are extras. I just need you to sign this.

  The short man hands us a clipboard.

  What’s an MTM, Daisy asks.

  Made-for-TV-Movie, the short man answers.

  What’s it about, I ask.

  The short man puffs up with importance. Charlie Manson, he says.

  The three of us are seated at a brown formica-top table and someone, maybe a waitress, brings us a plate of burritos. The other tables are eating burritos too, and everyone is looking excitedly at the table under the glare of the lights. The young actress playing Sharon Tate is a dead ringer. I don’t recognize any of the actors, except maybe the one playing Abigail Folger, Tate’s friend. It looks like Jenny Martins, who beat me out for a network pilot about a gas station in Ohio.

  The short man comes into our line of vision and standing next to him is the director, who calls out to the extras, OK, in this scene Sharon and her friends are enjoying their dinner—like you folks are—and Manson gets up and walks by their table and stares Sharon down.

  The director turns to the short man. Are we set for the two shots, he asks. The table shot and the tracking shot?

  All set, the short man answers.

  Look at that, Paque whispers.

  We all look and see the actor playing Charlie Manson, who is so into his role he sneers at us.

  Manson was never in the El Coyote, I say under my breath.

  Hey, the short man says, hearing me. We’re taking some liberties. Are we going to have troublemakers here?

  The entire restaurant is staring and Sharon looks over her shoulder impatiently.

  I shake my head no.

  OK, good, the short man says.

  We get through the table shot in four takes. There’s some easy banter between the actors about when Sharon’s then-husband Roman Polanski is coming back from London and what Sharon’s next project is.

  The burritos are cold and the three of us do the acting job of a lifetime just pretending to eat them. We stop when the tracking shot is set up. The director tells us to take fifteen and I ask Paque and Daisy if they’d rather split and finish the scavenger hunt.

  This is sort of cool, Paque admits. You’d never see something like this in Phoenix.

  There’s usually a cool party after the hunt is over though, I say. Daisy?

  Daisy is still picking at her burrito, not taking her eyes off the actor playing Manson. He looks just like him, she says. Look how much he looks like him.

  His name is probably Jim and he probably lives in Reseda, I say.

  I’m certain the actress playing Abigail Folger is Jenny Martins and all I need is for her to come over and ask me how it’s going. It hasn’t come up, and I hope Pa
que and Daisy have forgotten my boasts when they dropped me off at the airport when I left Phoenix, about how big I was going to make it, but the thought of being humiliated in front of them by Jenny Martins makes me anxious. Do you want to stay or go, I ask.

  Daisy quits picking at her burrito and I look at Paque, who is watching Daisy, concerned about whether or not Daisy is going to have another one of her fits. If she loses it, there’s no telling in what way she’ll lose it. The funniest time she lost it was when we were in high school, at the U2 concert at Sun Devil Stadium, when we saw the actor Bill Murray and Daisy screamed in his face.

  We were all anxious that night because Kissel told us he could get us backstage. We overheard some woman telling her friend about seeing Charlie Sheen in the line for the men’s room. And we loved Charlie Sheen. I was high-strung that night myself because we—Paque and Daisy and me—had just come from a gig as fantasy wrestlers (which was Kissel’s business) and it hadn’t gone so well.

  The three of us were trying to get some money to go to England that summer to try to meet Bananarama. We’d tried raising money by selling No Bakes, a cookie Daisy’s father invented, at the spring training games in Scottsdale, but we ate more than we sold.

  So Kissel (who was my boyfriend at the time; I was seventeen and he was twenty-four) said he had this big-time client who wanted to wrestle three young girls. We didn’t know anything about fantasy wrestling—we only knew it was what Kissel did. Kissel explained the levels of fantasy wrestling: competitive (where each wrestler tries to win), semicompetitive (where you wrestle for real but more just to do different moves and not necessarily to win) and fantasy matches, which is very light wrestling where women put men in different holds and the men try to get out of them.

  The big-time client wanted a fantasy match and Kissel said he’d give us each $1,000 so we said we’d do it. Kissel showed us a move called body scissors—the only move he said we’d really need—where you take your legs and wrap them around a person and squeeze as tight as you can and the other person tries to break free. We also learned a couple of pinning holds, like the half-nelson, the chicken wing, and the near-side cradle, which Kissel said were popular moves in fantasy wresting as the wrestler teeters on the back of her opponent, which the opponent enjoys.

  The big-time client was staying at the Ritz-Carlton and Kissel waited in the room while the three of us changed into our lacy negligees. We could hear Kissel and the big-time client talking business. Kissel pocketed the down payment and helped strip down the bed (sheets were dangerous to the wrestler).

  I’m right outside the door, he said.

  The match started with just Paque, who scissored the guy around the neck, his head buried deep between her legs. The guy didn’t try too hard to break free, but he eventually did. He called out for Daisy and me to jump in and we circled the edge of the bed, thinking about that $1,000 all the way.

  What happened, and why Kissel came running into the room, and why we were edgy the rest of the night, is that the three of us had the guy facedown on the bed, his arms and legs locked up and, while we didn’t realize it, we were suffocating him. The guy kicked free, knocking Paque off the bed. I lost my balance and the guy’s arms came free and in all his flailing he punched Daisy in the nose. Daisy screamed, probably more at the sight of the watery blood streaming out of her nose than the fact that she’d been hit. Kissel pounded on the door but we were all so stunned—the guy included—that no one made a move to open the door and Kissel charged in, saw the blood, and hauled off and decked the client. We tried to tell Kissel what happened but he kept punching the guy and we grabbed some hotel robes (and a towel for Daisy) and waited in Kissel’s car.

  Finally Kissel came out the back entrance and he was madder than shit.

  The guy didn’t even have the money, he said.

  Daisy lay down on the backseat and her nose finally stopped bleeding. Kissel split the down payment—$500—between the three of us, not taking a share for himself.

  You should get your share, Paque said.

  I got my share, Kissel said.

  We used some of our money that night to buy concert T-shirts. We bought XXL’s and draped them over us so that we looked like three ghosts moving through the smoky stadium. Kissel was on the lookout for the dude who was supposed to get us backstage, so he wasn’t really watching Bono and the boys. The more Kissel scanned the crowd, the more nervous the three of us got. We decided to go get Cokes and that’s when we saw Bill Murray. He sort of just appeared and I said, Look, and Daisy looked up and started screaming a high pitch scream. People around us laughed and Bill Murray smiled and started screaming, matching Daisy’s screams pitch for pitch. Daisy was screaming so hard her nose started to bleed again and Bill Murray looked a little freaked out and his friends pulled him away and we ducked into a bathroom, cutting ahead of everyone in line.

  Remember when we saw Bill Murray, I ask, trying to get Daisy’s attention.

  That was hilarious, Paque says.

  Hey Stella, Daisy says, What exactly did Manson do to them?

  The short man walks by and I wait for him to pass before I say, He didn’t do anything. He had people do it. He wasn’t there.

  Wasn’t he in love with Sharon Tate, Paque asks.

  No, you’re thinking of the guy who shot President Reagan, I say.

  Daisy asks me to tell her exactly what happened that night and I tell her about how Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski had rented the house on Cielo Drive, about how Sharon was eight months pregnant and that Polanski was in London, working on a film, but was planning on returning for the birth of his child. So Sharon wouldn’t be alone, Abigail Folger and her boyfriend Wojciech ‘Voyteck’ Frykowski were staying at the house. Their friend Jay Sebring, the famed hairstylist, was there that night too.

  They had dinner at the El Coyote and returned to the house. Across town, Charlie Manson sent Tex Watson, Pat Krenwinkle, Susan Atkins, and Linda Kasabian out in a 1959 Ford to the house on Cielo Drive. It was around midnight and Tex cut the phone lines, which landed on the gate. Manson’s group had to scale a hillside because they were afraid of being electrocuted. As they landed in the compound, a pair of headlights came at them. The women hid and Tex held up his hand. The headlights stopped and eighteen-year-old Steve Parent hopped out of the white Rambler. Parent had been up to the guest house to see William Garretson, the caretaker, who was trying to sell him a radio. Tex gave Parent four bullets at point blank range.

  Didn’t the people in the house hear the shots, Daisy asks.

  Apparently not, I say, because Tex was able to cut a screen in the back of the house and let the others in. They rounded everyone up in the front room and Tex wrapped a rope around Jay Sebring’s neck and slung it up over one of the rafters. He started fixing the other end of the rope around Sharon Tate’s neck but Sebring begged that she was pregnant and Tex just shot him. Voyteck’s hands had been tied with a towel and he struggled free and a fight ensued. Voyteck ran out the front door but was stabbed fifty-one times, shot and pistol-whipped on the front lawn. Abigail Folger tried to run for it but was tackled by Krenwinkle and Tex killed her just outside the house. Which just left Sharon Tate, who pled for the life of her unborn child. Tex said, Woman, I have no mercy for you and stabbed her sixteen times. They used her blood to write PIG on the front door.

  That’s disgusting, Paque says.

  But why did Manson tell them to do it, Daisy asks.

  Manson wanted to be a rock star, I explained, and the guy who owned the house was a music producer who had told Charlie he didn’t have any talent. Manson didn’t know the guy had rented the house out to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski.

  OK, people, the short man says, We’re rolling in five.

  And guess what, I say. Most people don’t know that Steve McQueen was supposed to be there that night too but he got in a fight with his wife and took off somewhere else.

  Lucky, Paque says.

  The restaurant is brought to order. A gro
up of five appear in the door, confused by the makeshift set, and the short man shoos them out.

  The director yells, Action, and the actor playing Charlie Manson stops eating, stares in the direction of Sharon Tate’s table, and pushes back his chair. He is supposed to walk through the restaurant, staring at Sharon’s table, which erupts in laughter as Manson strolls by. Once at the door, Manson is to stop, turn around, and narrow his eyes at Sharon and her friends.

  But when he passes our table, Daisy drops her fork onto her plate and says, Don’t. She puts her foot in the aisle, as if to trip him.

  Cut!

  The actor playing Manson says, What the fuck?

  Others in the restaurant are laughing and Daisy stares Manson down until he says, Get her out of here.

  The actress playing Abigail Folger is not Jenny Martins.

  The short man hustles us out of the El Coyote and replaces us with the party waiting outside as Paque and Daisy and I are thrown out.

  Why do they make movies about that kind of stuff, Daisy asks as I pull out onto Beverly.

  People love it, Paque says.

  It’s late and the traffic in Beverly Hills has thinned to an occasional Mercedes or Jeep Wrangler. We pass a cop cruiser that slows next to an old woman pushing a grocery cart.

  What does everybody want to do, I ask.

  What happened to the trash, Paque asks.

  I left it in the parking lot, Daisy says.

  We decide to try and catch the rest of the scavengers and find out where the party is. The Hollywood sign comes into view, the forty-five-foot letters glowing above the darkened canyon.

  Want to hear a ghost story, I ask.

  Paque is fiddling with the stereo and Daisy is looking out the back window. I start to tell them about Peg Entwhistle, the actress who dove head first off the H back in the ’20s, but Daisy says, We don’t want to hear it, and the car is silent except for the new wave song coming over the radio. A wide dirt field full of cars and people opens up in front of us and I shut off my headlights.

  Hey, I say as we get out.

  Hey Stella, T.J. says. Spill out what you’ve got and I’ll score it.

  We didn’t get anything, I say.

  Hey hurry up, someone says, Before the cops arrive.

  Paque and Daisy drift away from the crowd, peering down at the back of the sign, its wooden skeleton visible. T.J. hovers over the piles of mailboxes, license plates, Beware of Dog signs, weather vanes, potted plants, etc., tallying everything on his clipboard. And while I don’t know exactly what each item is worth, I’m certain a bag of famous garbage would’ve beaten the whole lot, hands down.