“Bad dog!” said Amanda, pointing at the big poodle.
“You used to have a black poodle like this one?” I asked.
“Well, ours was just a puppy, but he was supposed to get big like that. Yours looks like he could use a good shearing.”
“Yeah, I think he’s got something wrong with his hair. It keeps growing out like crazy. Hey, just curious—what did you call your dog?”
“Manolete,” he said. The big poodle snapped his head around and started wagging like crazy. “But I didn’t name him. He never looked like a Manolete to me. The friend that gave him to me is Spanish. He told me that it was the name of a famous bullfighter, which to me seemed ridiculous, naming a poodle after a bullfighter.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Well, enjoy your afternoon. Nice running into you again, Amanda,” I said and waved. She turned her head and pressed her face against her dad’s neck so she couldn’t see me. Her dad gave me a “what-can-you-do?” look and continued walking.
My guess was that Ignacio had given the dog to his renters as a moving-in “present.” Gertie had mentioned something about doing that. When you know you want to renovate in about a year, you give your current renters a dog and then make them cough up a pet deposit. When they move out, you keep the pet deposit and the security deposit, since the dog will definitely have peed all over the carpets, which you were going to replace anyway. Ignacio probably hadn’t counted on having to take the dog back, so he recycled the present to Dennis to get rid of it.
I tied the big poodle to a tree near a street musician. I always saw this guy on the Promenade. He was much fatter than me, especially now that I had lost so much weight. He had stringy, greasy hair, and he always wore the same super-sized, faded blue T-shirt and the same pair of enormous, patched jeans. Sometimes he played electric guitar and sang with a partner. Other times he had a beat-up acoustic and would go at it alone. He played a kind of mixture of southern rock and hair metal, occasionally sliding his fingers around fast and shaking his dirty long hair everywhere. Nobody ever stopped to watch this guy because less than a block on down there was usually an urban dance squad or a lovely, cowboy-boot-clad girl who sang love songs. The only thing this guy could believably sing about loving was chicken wings. I threw a few dollars into his guitar case and pointed to the dog. He nodded as he strummed away.
I picked out a couple of pairs of jeans and some western-style shirts, which looked great unbuttoned over my Arnold. As I was paying at the register, the shit phone rang. It was my buddy Grant.
“Wow,” I said. “You got act two fast!”
“Yes, that is what happens when you send something by overnight express. You send it one day, and it arrives on the following day. Amazing, isn’t it? If you had actually typed it, you could have sent it even faster.”
“Ah, you’re just grouchy because you don’t get to treat me like garbage now that your boss likes my work.”
The cashier handed me the credit-card slip to sign, so I whipped out the Montblanc and let him feast his eyes on success.
“That’s why I called you. Steven would like to meet with you,” said Grant.
The cashier handed me the clear-plastic sack with my clothes inside. I mouthed “thank you,” and started walking out of the store.
“I bet he does,” I said. “I’m sure he can’t wait to find out what happens next. You want me to pop over to the studio?”
“No. Steven said he wanted to keep this a secret for now. He wants to meet you tomorrow at the La Brea tar pits, in front of the skeleton of the giant ground sloth.”
“The what?”
“The sloth. Those animals that hang in trees and move so slowly that plants grow in their fur. But thousands of years ago, they walked around on the ground and were bigger than bears.”
“Wow, that’s really exciting.”
“Fuck you.”
“No, really. Tell me more.”
“Be there at three,” he said. I don’t know who hung up on who first.
36
I took off early Sunday afternoon in the Mercedes and drove east on Wilshire Boulevard. The tar pits were past Beverly Hills, on the stretch known as the Miracle Mile. It’s called that because back in the day, someone got the great idea of trying to compete with downtown L.A. there. I find this hilarious because when you arrive at the tar pits, you see all this bubbling tar all over the place that seeps up from who the hell knows where, and the very last thing any sane person would say is, “hey, wouldn’t a shopping center go wonderfully with these boiling pools of death?”
I drove behind the museum and, as always in L.A., paid a suspicious amount for parking to an unsympathetic attendant who looked like he was waiting for me to say a code word that would identify me as the buyer of whatever drug he was peddling. I got out of the car and walked over to a paved path leading around the grounds. There were little black pools of bubbling tar everywhere, sometimes covered with a thin layer of water from the sprinklers. I really had the impression that the tar I could see was like the tip of the iceberg and that the whole place was on the verge of sliding down into the inky muck.
I was staring down at the tar so much that I didn’t notice the life-sized replica of the giant ground sloth, in attack position, until I was right up next to it. I’d have been freaked out by it, but since it was a sloth, I could have taken a little nap once he started to attack and then gotten up and wandered slowly away. Rats! Foiled again! No wonder these things had hung around the tar pits. You’d have to be stuck in the tar for hours before the thing made it over to you.
I followed the trail around to the front of the museum to look at the biggest pool of tar. It was bigger than an Olympic swimming pool, and there were life-sized models of mammoths to make you feel like you were some sort of cave dude back in the day. Two mammoths, an adult and a baby, were on the edge of the pool watching another adult mammoth sink into the sticky tar.
All that is right next to Wilshire Boulevard, which runs through Beverly Hills all the way to the ocean and is lined with the most expensive stores you can imagine. You can drive by the mammoths and then continue to Rodeo drive and see all the babemmoths and trophy-wifemmoths trying to avoid the bitter gazes of the alimonymmoths, who angrily flash credit cards as if they were razor-sharp teeth.
It was the perfect image of L.A.: All the luxury in the world sitting on a thin crust of habitable space, on the verge of sliding down into inky oblivion and being forgotten. Add to that an unbreathable atmosphere, a serious lack of water, and the occasional forest fire, mudslide or earthquake, and you could wonder why people ever came out here in the first place. You could wonder, that is, if you were from someplace else, but when you live here, you know. The fake mammoths they put in the tar are great, but on the other side of the pool, they should have put people standing around with cocktails and Louis Vuitton bags, and twenty feet into the pool, some poor schmuck stuck in the tar with a handful of cash, smiling madly as he sinks away.
That reminded me, it was time for me to go get my money.
I walked up the path to the center of the park, where the huge, perfectly square museum had been built into the side of a small hill, kind of like one of those ecologically friendly houses. When I walked in, the first thing I noticed was that in the center of the museum they had built a glassed-in plant exhibit that looked like a jungle, with birds flying around. All the other exhibits were arranged around it.
I paid the entry fee, and the cashier stuck a little square sticker of a mammoth on my shirt as proof that I had paid. I walked in, passed up the introductory educational movie, and entered the first series of exhibits. The giant ground sloth was one of the first things I saw. The bones were all black from the tar, so it looked much more evil than the fake version outside. It was standing up on its back feet and balancing itself with its thick tail. The little plaque said that ground sloths were herbivores, but since it went extinct, I’m guessing that even a carrot gave this big ugly thing a run for its money.
<
br /> I looked for Spieldburt, but he wasn’t there yet, so I walked around for a while longer. Most of the collection was of wolves, which I didn’t find that interesting, but the mammoth and saber-toothed tiger skeletons were worth the price of admission. I liked to imagine them coming to life and gouging all the tourists with their six-foot-long tusks, taking revenge on the people for having pulled them out of their final resting places. Then I came to something crazy. I’ve already said that I normally don’t read much, but there was an enormous geological time line on the wall with all sorts of dates and explanations. I wasn’t going to read any of that crap, of course—I mean, who goes to a museum to read? I could not do that at home just as easily—but a group of people were at one section acting all amazed, so I went over there.
It turns out that in all the excavating they’ve done—and they’ve dug thousands and thousands of years into the past—only one chick has ever been thrown into the tar pits. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying that more women deserved to be thrown in. It’s just that, knowing what we know about modern society, you have to wonder if people in the past were a lot nicer than they are now. Imagine if the tar pits were open to the public 24 hours a day and there was no security. You’re telling me that not a single modern guy would throw his mother-in-law in? Not a single cheating ex-girlfriend would be “swimming with the mammoths?” Oh hell yeah, they would. And there’d be lots of dudes in there, too. Dudes who whack off to the internet after their women go to bed. Dudes who obsess over which local sports team made up of non-local players is better than someone else’s local sports team made up of other non-local players. Yeah, I’d probably chuck a few of those in myself.
I went back to the giant ground sloth and waited behind a group of visitors who were trying to explain to a young girl of about seven that this big thing was a sloth.
“Sloths look like monkeys and live in trees,” she said. “This looks like a bear.”
“Yes, but it’s related to the little sloth,” said a woman.
“Is it the little sloth’s grandpa?”
“Not exactly. Ask your biology tutor tonight,” she said.
“I don’t have biology tonight. I have ice skating and then the junior dolphins’ dive club.”
Most of these rich L.A. kids don’t realize that what they really have are “mommy-needs-a-free-hour-to-have-an-affair” classes. If I get married some day and my wife ever tells me something like “I signed our daughter up for Brazilian martial-arts class,” I’m calling a divorce lawyer immediately.
The group moved on toward the mammoth, leaving behind one person who glanced shiftily around. I got up close enough to look underneath the lowered bill of his baseball cap. It was him. I was finally going to get to talk with Spieldburt again.
I stepped up right next to him and cleared my throat a little. He looked over.
“Herisson?” he asked. This guy had a short memory, but I guess it was true that he hadn’t seen me in a long time and that I’d lost some weight since then.
“At your service,” I said, and he rolled his eyes.
“You’ll never pull this off.”
“I already know everything I need to know. I’m just waiting for a little advance before I lay it on you.”
“An advance? Are you out of your mind? How do I know you have anything that could do any damage?”
“I’ve been working with Gertie on this. Believe me, I know everything.”
“What has she told you!” he said, grabbing me by my Arnold. I pulled myself free and stepped back.
“You’ll find out, but you better have the money ready. I’m talking five grand!”
“Five grand? You’re doing all this for five grand? What are you, stupid?”
“That’s the going rate. You get it ready, and when I have the third act prepared with the photos, I’ll set up a time to meet through Grant.” Spieldburt looked relieved to hear all this.
“Fine,” he said, slightly stunned, and continued on through the museum.
I doubled back to the entrance and stopped in the gift store. They had a stuffed version of a ground sloth that I had to buy. I also picked up a cool vial of tar.
37
When I got back to the parking lot, I saw Grant’s car. He was ducked down low in the driver seat peeking over at me, so I pretended not to see him. I got in the car and pulled out slowly. Sure enough, his metallic-blue, sun-bleached hatchback rattled out after me.
I started out driving reasonably but then decided to pull a Gert on him. I weaved wildly all over Wilshire Boulevard, sped up randomly, and then slowed down so much that I felt like a turtle. Along one stretch, I darted ahead so far that I couldn’t see him anymore, turned into a parking lot and waited for him to pass me. Then I got back on the road and raced ahead of him, not making the slightest indication that I was on to him as I passed right by. I felt like a killer whale playing with a hapless seal before the final crunch.
I was about to lose him for good when I asked myself why prissy, New-England Grant would be following me anyway. I figured the only way to find out would be to let him continue. I started driving normally, and I could almost hear his car wheeze a sigh of relief. I drove like that all the way to Dennis’ house, making sure not to lose Grant at the intersections.
I parked in the driveway and got out. Grant parked right in front of the neighboring house and ducked down again. I actually had to make an effort not to look over at him. All that expensive education and not a lick of common sense. I entered the house, went up to Dennis’ room and took a peek out the window with the binoculars.
He was dialing on his cell phone, which looked a lot more expensive than his car. I wanted to hear what he was saying, so I broke out the parabolic microphone.
“…back to his house. No, there’s no way he saw me. For how long? Okay. Who? Who’s that? Well, how will I recognize her? All right,” said Grant into his phone and then hung up. He crooked his neck around to check out all the windows of the house and then fiddled with the radio for a while.
From the sound of the conversation, it appeared that Spieldburt had asked Grant to see if I was receiving visits from Gertie. Maybe he thought I had fallen for her during the investigation, kind of like how Dennis had fallen for Ignacio.
I gave Grant an hour and then peeked out the window again. He was making that occasional quick head jerk that signaled oncoming sleep.
I took the vial of tar to the kitchen and stuck it in the microwave for a few minutes until it got really viscous. I wrapped it up in a towel so that I wouldn’t burn myself and took it and the stuffed sloth out the back door. I went through several backyards and then cut over to the street a block behind Grant’s car. Crouching behind a four-by-four, I whipped out the binoculars and focused in on him. He was in a slouch and not moving at all. I mapped out the path I would take up to him and then zigzagged forward, stopping behind the parked cars to verify he was still sleeping.
The driver’s side window was rolled down all the way. Grant’s head was tilted at what looked like an uncomfortable angle, and a line of drool was making its way down to a growing wet spot on his shirt. I was about to carry out my evil plan when the sun reflecting off his complicated phone caught my eye. It was underneath the car stereo in a little compartment. I reached in as far as I could, but with my short arms I didn’t make it much farther than the other side of the steering wheel. I watched him for a few seconds and decided to try it again, but this time I took out the shit phone, held it in my hand, and then leaned into the window head first. I moved slower than a sloth so that I wouldn’t make the slightest noise. I even held my breath until I thought I was going to pass out. With half my body in the window, I slid the shit phone into the compartment and took out Grant’s super-complex device. I gave a little goodbye wave to Grant with it as I slowly pulled myself out of his window.
I moved over to the front of his car and took out the vial of tar. It wasn’t made to be opened, so I really had to claw at it, but when the top
came off, I poured it out right onto the middle of the hood. Then I took the stuffed sloth and planted him in the tar facing Grant. The growling expression it had was going to be perfect for Grant to wake up to.
I doubled back, and when I was in the house again, I checked out the scene from Dennis’ bedroom window.
Grant was sound asleep. I expected him to wake up soon, but he kept sleeping away. A mother and her son walked by, and the kid went wild trying to drag his mom over to the sloth, but even that didn’t wake him up. I was just dying for him to see his surprise, and the longer he slept, the more it ate me up. I finally cracked, took out my new phone and dialed up Grant’s shit phone. I saw his head leap up. Then, as he tried to remember where he was, he wiped off a bunch of drool with the back of his hand and then looked at it as if he had been betrayed by his own body. Then he focused in on the ringing. He tilted his head slightly, like a dog that hears a high-pitched noise, and reached over to pick it up. With a look of disgust he saw that his phone had morphed into the inbred cousin of its former self and that the incoming call was from “Grant.” After a couple of very vulgar words and a punch to the steering wheel, he answered.
“You bring my fucking phone back here right now you—” he said and then launched into a high-pitched, girly scream when he noticed the sloth. I waited for him to calm down a little.
“Don’t worry, it’ll take him a good hour to walk around to the side of the car to attack you,” I said.
“Is that tar on my car?”
“He must have had it all over his feet when he climbed onto your hood. You didn’t happen to be at La Brea earlier, did you? I hear that happens from time to time.”
“If you don’t give me back my phone, I’m going to call everyone in your repertory and tell them you have a venereal disease.”
“My ex is the only one in that phone, and she dumped me, so have at it,” I said and hung up.
L.A. Success Page 18