Playland

by John Gregory Dunne

  A sudden squall.

  Fuck you. I know why you’re looking at me that way. I’ll cry tomorrow, Lillian Roth. Whatever happened to Baby Jane? You know what I think? You think I’m your meal ticket. You bought yourself a little piece of Hollywood history. You’re not the first asshole who found me, thought he could cash in on me. Don’t you ever forget that, and fuck you again.

  I did not take offense. It was the way her brain worked, rerouting itself past burned-out connections. There was still a lot of power in that system. She knew what would hurt. But she had been born with that. A tropistic instinct. The only way to survive.

  Handle with care.

  Do not rise to the bait.

  Wait her out.

  She took a cigarette from the pack of unfiltered Pall Malls on the Formica table, the pack opened the way women open cigarettes, with the foil and the tax stamp ripped away and all the cigarettes exposed. She tapped the cigarette on her thumbnail, firming up the loose strands of tobacco, and then held it between her fingers and waited for him to light it. He found a wooden safety match on the hot plate in the kitchenette and when he returned to the Formica table he flicked it lit with his thumbnail, a piece of business he had learned on the set of a period cop movie he had once written for Burt Lancaster. The way he lit the match seemed to strike a responsive chord, a softening of the harsh lines around her mouth and the hawser veins in her neck. It was the sort of flourish specific to the pictures she had starred in. She drew deeply on the Pall Mall, but did not inhale. After a moment she let the smoke billow out, then inhaled it back in again, through her nose, finally exhaling through her mouth. A small smile, a lightening of her mood, as if she had done a close-up in one take. With a thumb and a finger she removed a bit of tobacco from her tongue. The whole procedure dated her, he thought. Smokers don’t tap filter cigarettes against their fingernails anymore, and rarely French inhale, a good visual but from another time.

  Perfect, Chuckie O’Hara said when I told him of this first meeting, you have a good eye for a writer. A remark intended as a compliment, and I had been around the business too long to take offense. Like all directors, good and bad, Chuckie fed on the details, in the details, he would say, is the character. His hands framed a shot, moving in close, perhaps in his mind focusing on the bit of tobacco she had lifted from her tongue, or the smoke curling from the face in profile, then with a reverse from the other side.

  What did you call her? Blue?

  No. If I had to call her by name, I’d call her Mrs. Toolate. Most of the time, though, I didn’t call her anything.

  But what, Chuckie O’Hara wanted to know, did she look like?

  She was sixty-three, and she looked every minute of it. It had been forty years since she had left Hollywood, and more than thirty since she abandoned public life and the cosmetic ministrations available to even the most minor of celebrities, the nip, the tuck, the dyes, the clamps. Her face was never really beautiful, just arresting, discomforting in its pre- and post-pubescent availability, and now it was not so much worn by her travails as lived-in, less a face than an open book, dog-eared and much sampled, an encyclopedia of living. She had a racking cough that periodically contorted and reddened her face, her breath coming in short spurts until the attack eased. Her movements were extremely precise, not a motion wasted. Her eyebrows had always been incongruously thick; in her days of fortune, she was too young to have her eyebrows plucked and penciled in the style of the time, and incongruously lush they still were, drawing you, however much against your will, into her gaze. Her hair was dark, shot here and there with gray, and short as it had always been, but long enough to be drawn together with a rubber band into a tiny ponytail, and over her left brow a shock of pure white, like a skunk’s back, through which she would constantly thrust the hand not holding the omnipresent Pall Mall. Only her hands betrayed her years and then some, knotted with veins and mottled by liver spots. Her nose, disturbingly sensual when she was young, was now more generous, and still sensual. Tall and tomboyish as a child, she had sprouted accordingly, and as a young woman she grew only to medium height, neither mannish nor voluptuous. Though the weather had gone chill, she still wore a shapeless summer sundress, and appeared to carry neither undue weight or bloat or distention or the more disfiguring components of age and gender. Sticking from the pocket of the sundress, as if she had forgotten to remove them when the gardening season ended, were a pair of pruning scissors and a dirt-encrusted trowel; over her shoulders she wore a gray cardigan buttoned only at the neck. No stockings, and on her feet an oversized pair of fleecy mules.

  Did she shave her legs? Chuckie O’Hara asked.

  Yes.

  Recently? Like she knew you were coming, and lathered up and maybe cut herself with her little Bic.

  No cuts, no nicks. A little stubble.

  So heterosexual of you to notice. Did you fuck her?

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, Chuckie.

  That’s not an answer.

  It comes from being alone, flying off the handle like that, she said, crushing the cigarette into an ashtray that said Detroit Pistons NBA Champions 1989. I should know better. My motto always was, at least it used to be, it still should be, it’s not a bad thing to live by, someone’s pissed on you, don’t ask questions, go your own way, you got no beef, because you come right down to it, you probably deserved it. You asked for it. Still. You know what I do, I feel like that? I make a new will. It gives me something to do. Putting people in it, scratching the fuckers out, settling scores. I know what you’re thinking, what has she got to leave? I’ve got something, it doesn’t look like it, but I do, yes, I do. I don’t need much myself. I got one suitcase, that’s it. If it gets heavy, I just get rid of stuff. The story of my life. No, fuck that. No self-pity, it’s the lowest form of human emotions, I read that once in Miss Manners, I love her column. I made my bed, Christ, I made a lot of them. Or at least I was in a lot of them, but maybe that’s not the same thing. I had a lot of husbands, that’s for sure, ten, eleven, I lost count. You get right down to it, I’m probably some kind of bigamist, I mean, I’d wake up with some asshole, and he’d say we got married, and I’d say is that right, and I’d head for the bus station without getting a divorce. It’s against the law, I think, but shit, if you can’t remember getting married, let alone remember the name of the guy you were married to, then what kind of marriage was that? Your eyes, your lips, your pubic hair, are in a class beyond compare, da da da da-de-da, na-nu-na-na, and when I tell them how wonderful you are, they wouldn’t believe me, they wouldn’t believe me. Now I just have my dog, the one you hit, you bastard, look at that mutt, he’s got the mange, and his insides aren’t too good. I love that mutt, in dog years he’s the same age I am, and if he leaves a little deposit under the bed sometimes, what the hell, he doesn’t cheat on me, and he doesn’t gab about me, and he doesn’t bite me, and I guess that’s what passes for love these days.

  Was she drunk? Chuckie O’Hara said.

  Not really.

  You mean you couldn’t tell?

  I mean she wasn’t drunk, at least she wasn’t drinking then and she didn’t seem in any way impaired. But the whole trailer had this peculiar smell of stale booze and sweat and cigarette smoke. It’s hard to appreciate how tiny it really was. There was a small portable heater on the floor turned up full blast, which made the whole place terribly hot, there were no windows open, of course, and it trapped this stale stink inside. I suppose I remember it so well because it was so goddamn hot, as hot inside as it was cold outside. Once she got going I just let her ramble, I didn’t ask her any questions, I was afraid if I tried to guide her, to ask her anything specific, she would have flashed, and that would have been that. The specifics I would get to in time. At this point all I wanted to do was gain her confidence. And so I just let her jump around. She was putting me on, of course, and I think she knew I knew it.

  Darling, of course she didn’t, Chuckie O’Hara said. She’s an actress, an actress believes eve
rything she says the moment she says it, and if she says something different the next minute, that’s the way she is, she believes that, too. What next?

  We went shopping.

  Shopping … it’s too wonderful.

  She wanted to go shopping, drive in my car, she didn’t drive anymore, fill up the trunks from the rebate coupons she’d saved, she had drawers full of them that she’d clipped out of the newspapers, for Joy liquid, Micro Magic Tater Sticks, two dozen Mars bars, junk food …

  Divine.

  I’m not sure I can describe it.

  Why?

  We order by telephone, people like us, let the housekeeper take care of it, pay the full freight, have it delivered, tip the driver, don’t check the bill. We get ripped off, what the hell, it’s not worth the aggravation of doing it ourselves.

  What a sequence, a tracking shot down the aisles, no cutaways …

  IX

  It was double-coupon day at Farmer Dell’s.

  She worked the empty aisles as if she was on a search-and-destroy mission, half-humming, half-singing in her no-uvula vibrato the Farmer Dell jingle: Sock it away every day, every way, sock it away at Farmer Dell’s. Jack followed behind her, pushing her shopping cart, trying to keep up. She hardly paused, flipping boxes and packages and cans and bottles into the cart without looking back, certain he would be there, for items on the higher shelves beyond her reach using a two-pronged pulley stick she said she had bartered a dozen Duracell size-D alkaline batteries for at a convenience store in Flint. All the while dispensing a running commentary on coupon shopping lore: “Stay away from the freezer section, freezer items spoil, forget freezer discounts.” Down aisle one, up aisle three, down aisle five. “Pick a slow time, two in the afternoon, after lunch and before the day shift at the auto plants lets out and the line workers come in to buy their one package of Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese, half pint of Hershey’s chocolate-flavored milk and two Hostess lemon cupcakes with marshmallow filling.” Food for fuel. Not serious enough for her. Not her aim, not her game.

  Three bottles of Smucker’s Mint-Flavored Apple Jelly, four six-packs of Sunsweet Prune Juice. You can never get enough prune juice. Drano for the lower bowel, that’s what it is. Cleans it out. Whoosh. And that Fleet’s Ready-to-Use Enema with Comfortip. The best. Need a testimonial, come to me. It might put me back in show business. Spokesperson on the Fleet’s commercials. Slips right up there past those troublesome hemorrhoidal tissues. Not many can say that on the tube and make you believe it. You ever hear June Allyson in that commercial for sanitary diapers those old ladies wear who wet their pants? If Juney can do it, I can do it, Juney could never act her way out of a paper bag. Too Miss Priss. Four Heinz Sweet Gherkins, five packages of Oscar Mayer All-Beef Franks, eight to a pack. Six jars of Colman’s hot mustard to garnish the franks. Four crocks of Curley’s Old-Fashioned Boston Baked Beans. Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot.

  Sock it away every day, every way.

  “Never empty the shelves, it’s not considerate, these are people on fixed incomes, you’ve got to let them in on the bargains, they’ve got to make ends meet too. Unless the offer’s going to expire, then you grab everything you can. Can’t use it, give it to the shut-ins down to the church.” She turned up aisle three, school supplies, paper goods, detergents, the cart already half full, and still ten aisles to go. A half dozen eight-by-eleven spiral notebooks and a package of ballpoint pens. Ziploc quart-size heavy-duty freezer bags. Bounty two-ply towels. S.O.S. steelwool soap pads. White Rose cellulose sponges. New Hefty thirteen-gallon degradable kitchen garbage bags. “I never used food stamps, don’t have to, don’t believe in government handouts, that’s for deadbeats. There’s so much free stuff, you put your mind to it. Just have to plan ahead. Never pay the full price. Never. You have to pay the full price, look for another item. They don’t have a special on Scott Tissue, go to Dulcey. A definite difference with Dulcey. Remember that one? A big hit on the jingle hit parade.” Her vibrato rose once again, “ ‘There’s a definite difference with Dulcey …’ ” Six packages of Reynolds Wrap Quality Aluminum Foil. “Why pay money when you can always get something for next to nothing, you got the time to spend, and baby, time is what I got a lot of. Everyone needs Reynolds Wrap. It’s the old barter system. I trade my Reynolds Wrap to my neighbor for Campbell’s Pork and Beans. You say what do I need with a dozen cans of Edge Shaving Gel, and I say I’ll trade two Edge at three forty-nine a can for some sixty-watt pink bulbs. I love pink bulbs. I always had them in my house on Linden Drive. In Beverly Hills. You know Linden Drive?”

  Her reminiscences were so unexpected, like a radio signal that cut in suddenly from another band, loud and clear, always taking him by surprise. “In the flats.”

  “I lived at six fourteen. Then Mr. French said I had to move north of Sunset, a star of my magnitude shouldn’t live in the flats, it reflected badly on Cosmopolitan Pictures, and the studio found me a house up on Tower Road, around the corner from Bing and Dixie Crosby, Dixie was always sloshed. Writers lived in the flats, Mr. French said, and B-picture directors. Not stars. You only lived in the Valley if you had a ranch. People make fun of the studios, but they really looked out for you, they always had your best interests at heart.”

  Gold, Jack thought. Keep her talking. A stroll down memory lane. But the signal was fading again. There was shopping to be done, bargains to be had. She kept her eye on the sparrow. Maxwell House Colombian Supreme. Fancy Tomato Catsup. Hershey White Chocolate with Almonds. “For the sweet tooth. Never had a zit, always had a sweet tooth. Don’t starve. I may eat an awful lot of tuna fish and soup and franks and beans and not enough vegetables, but the weight is good as long as I stay away from too many nachos and the Chee-wees.” She was warming to her recital. “You got to learn the ropes. Soak empty bottles for the labels. Keep a pair of scissors handy, cut the coupons off. Clip, scrape, mail, redeem. I just do it for myself, I don’t join any of those coupon clubs where you trade your stamps for someone else’s. Not me. I’m no entrepreneur, I’m just me.”

  She opened her tote and removed a fistful of stained and crumpled and torn coupons. Two for one. Half off. Special. “Coin of the realm,” she said as she dropped them back into the tote. Jack noticed again how old and mottled her hands were. “I find them in Dumpsters. Trash bins.”

  Every day, every way.

  “You can’t believe the things people throw away.” Her voice had the messianic quality of a lay preacher’s. “The coupons, the POPs, the little baby faces on the Pampers boxes. Sometimes the mothers throw out the boxes with the dirty Pampers inside, the cunts, so you get poo-poo all over your hands. But so what. Trash means cash, don’t you forget that. You never knew that, you’ve always been rich, I know all about you, I think I fucked your father once, did I tell you that?”

  He nodded. It was a question he had never expected to be asked in Hamtramck, Michigan. At Farmer Dell’s double-coupon day. Could she really have fucked my father? he thought. This ex-cinemoppet? Oh, yes. Entirely possible. Hugh Broderick didn’t miss many comfort stops. Something he would rather not know, in any case. There had to be some secrets. Some gaps in life’s knowledge. He wondered what POPs were. That was a gap in his knowledge.

  “I’d pay the garbage men to let me look through what they’d picked up. I didn’t have much to pay them, but I never fucked them, I’d never fuck for garbage.” Sound thinking, he thought. You have to take a stand. He wished she would lower her voice. “You go into Dumpsters, though, you got to be careful. I always wear workman’s gloves, you never know what you’re going to run up against. Rats, dog shit. I’ve been bit by rats twice, had to go to the hospital and get a shot. And the ants. They can skin you alive. Those big red army ants, they’re like those little fish with the teeth …”

  “Piranha …” He thought, She’s like a combat veteran talking about a war I evaded.

  “That’s the one. Piranha fish. Run in schools. Like these ants.
And raccoons. You get in a Dumpster with a raccoon, you got to give him pride of place, you don’t want to mess with those ’coons.”

  Her logic seemed unassailable.

  “One time I fell into this big industrial Dumpster, this was in Ypsilanti, it was so slippery with slop on the sides I couldn’t hardly get out, and wouldn’t that have been an obit, ‘Former Child Star Suffocates in Dumpster.’ Anyway, the upshot was I invented this stick to spear things. I took a mop handle and hammered some nails in it, bingo, I could spear things, look them over, there comes a time when you don’t want to climb into Dumpsters anymore.”

  As there had been a time when a house in the Beverly Hills flats was socially unsuitable for a star of her magnitude. It was almost too much to assimilate.