L.A. Success

by Lonnie Raines

  Gertie began her juggling act with the lighter, cigarette and steering wheel. She clearly had depth-perception issues. She had to focus really hard on the end of her cigarette in order to bring the lighter up to the right place to light it. I had to reach up and grab the steering wheel to steer us back on course, and as a barrage of honking exploded around us, Gertie looked up, saw my hand on the wheel and glared.

  “Are you trying to get us killed?” she asked. “Leave the driving to me.”

  We weaved up the coast and passed the sign that welcomed us to Malibu and its “27 miles of scenic beauty.” Ten minutes later, Gertie hung a dangerous U-turn at the pier and parked on the side of the highway.

  “So, you still have that gun in here?” I asked, pointing at the glove box.

  “Yep. Every once in a while if someone does something really stupid on the road, I like to pull it out and wave it around. The traffic opens up around me immediately.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  I opened up the glove compartment, dug around underneath the condoms and pulled out the Walther PPK. Now that I knew it wasn’t real, I didn’t feel as tough as I had the first time I had held it, but it was still cool.

  Gertie was giving her make-up a final once-over in the rearview mirror. I was twirling the gun on my finger, trying to catch it and aim all in one smooth motion. The first few times, I dropped it on the floorboard and had to bend over and stretch to pick it up. Then I flipped it a little faster, and it went around and came to rest in my palm perfectly.

  All of a sudden, two hands grabbed the gun and began smashing my hand down on the car door. I let go of the gun and turned to see Dennis. He put the gun up against the side of my head.

  “The worm turns!” he yelled.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I said, holding my hand in pain.

  “It means that you think the worm is going in one direction, and then—pow!—he goes in the other direction, and his head becomes his ass!”

  I was a little confused as to why he would make such a declaration. Apparently Gertie was equally mystified.

  “Who is the worm in this situation?” she asked.

  “I’m the worm, damn it! I’m the fucking worm!”

  “Are you the ass now, or were you the ass before?” she asked.

  “Enough talk!” he yelled. “You’re going to give me those pictures now, or this is going to get ugly.”

  “We don’t have them. We came here to get them from the guy who does,” I said.

  “How did he get them?”

  “I gave them to him on accident, but he realized what they were worth,” I said.

  “He’s about to learn that they’re worth a headache. Where are you supposed to meet this guy?”

  “At the end of the pier,” said Gertie. “He’ll be standing near the fishermen. He’s an old guy with a beard. You’ll recognize him easily. He looks exactly like Steven Spielberg.”

  Dennis slowly took the gun off me and moved back from the car.

  “Don’t even think about following me,” he said and ran toward the entrance to the pier.

  “Why did you tell him where Spielberg was?” I asked, but Gertie just held up a finger to tell me to be quiet and dialed a number on her phone.

  “Steven? We’re here, but we’ve got a problem. There’s a nutbag coming your way right now. It’s a long story, but basically he has a non-working replica of James Bond’s gun that he thinks is real, and he’s coming to steal the pictures,” she said and then listened. “That’d be great.” She hung up and then turned to me. “Everything will work out fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Actually, it couldn’t have worked out better. Let’s go watch,” she said and got out of the car.

  We walked down the highway to a spot from where the end of the pier came into view. I could see Dennis looking around the crowd, trying to find Spielberg. Then he walked straight over to a man who was fishing and grabbed him by the shirt.

  “He’s got the wrong guy there,” said Gertie.

  Dennis seemed to be yelling at the guy and shaking him a little. After the fisherman yelled something back, Dennis let go of him and moved away, continuing his search. Then he noticed Spielberg. He walked over to him with his hand in his pocket, and when he got right next to him, he pulled out the gun and stuck it against his side.

  “He’s going to regret that. Steven has a lot of built up rage. People have been stalking him ever since he became famous,” said Gertie.

  Spielberg put his hands up slowly, and then with one vicious backhand chop, he hit Dennis in the throat. Dennis went sprawling down onto the pier. Spielberg made a gesture to a couple of the fisherman, his disguised bodyguards, who rushed over and grabbed Dennis.

  Gertie and I walked to the end of the pier. We couldn’t get near Spielberg because the crowd around him had become enormous. After the police made their way over, they took down several eye-witness accounts, handcuffed Dennis and then led him off to their cruiser.

  As Spielberg was being escorted down the pier by the police, he took out his phone and dialed. Gertie’s cell rang.

  “Did you have to hit the guy in the throat?” Gertie asked and then listened. “Well, I guess that was fair. He didn’t realize it was a fake. So where do we meet up now? Okay. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  16

  We drove south on the PCH to a fish restaurant named Gladstone’s, which overlooked the ocean. Gertie pulled into the parking lot and got in line for the valet parking. Like most of the valet parking in L.A., the lines you had to wait in usually took you longer than it would have taken just to pull in and find your own spot. In fact, the spots that the valets were driving to were only about a hundred feet beyond the front of the line of cars. Gertie handed the keys over to a really shady-looking guy. We stood there watching him from the sidewalk to see how long he lingered inside the car after pulling into the space. He got out within an acceptable amount of time, so we headed into the restaurant.

  Gertie told the hostess who we were there to see. We were directed to a part of the restaurant that had been blocked off by partitions. We walked behind them and saw a table for four with a great view of the ocean, but instead of Spielberg waiting for us, there was only Grant, texting away on his phone. When he saw us he gave a nod and continued to text, but now he grimaced and held the phone up higher to let us know that he was making every human effort possible to finish quickly. He firmly pressed the send button, sighed and then looked at us.

  “Glad you could make it,” he said.

  “Where’s Steven?” asked Gertie, checking her hair in the reflection of the window.

  “He couldn’t make it. He’s got a fleet of paparazzi behind him now. But don’t worry—I have what you want. Sit down. The studio is picking up our lunch.”

  Gertie and I sat down. She slid the photo album over to Grant. I took out the third act and slid it his way as well.

  “Great. And here are your photos,” he said and handed me the envelope.

  “Thanks. I’m kind of curious to know why you wanted this thing. I only wrote it when I thought…well, when I thought Spielberg wanted to know what Gertie here was up to.”

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” Grant said, “but it’s too late for you to do anything about it anyway. When we thought you were trying to blackmail us with this script, we decided to take action. We saw that you didn’t have it copyrighted, so I typed it up and added some more scenes explaining how the Dweller came to Earth, and then we gave it to a USC student. We told him if he managed to make a good film with a non-existent budget and handheld cameras, we’d give him a job on Steven’s next project. He’s almost finished filming act two now. Steven will be able to parry any future accusations involving the name ‘Gertie Elliot’ by saying you saw the independent film he produced and are trying to capitalize on a coincidence. We thought it would be a giant piece of garbage, but the kid managed to get Nicolas Cage
to star in it. Nick is apparently trying to jump start his career by doing quirky, independent stuff for free.”

  “This is terrible. I can’t believe I wrote a Nicolas Cage movie,” I said.

  “I even wrote in a sweet tag line for him once he signed on. He looks at the Dweller and says ‘I’m giving’ this world an antenna enema’. Great stuff…Are you hungry? You guys should try the shrimp here. We’ll get some appetizers.”

  We stuffed ourselves royally while listening to Grant talk about himself and what it was like to work with Steven. At the end of the meal, the waiter took away our leftovers and then came back a few minutes later with huge doggy bags made out of aluminum foil, folded to look like enormous crabs. I felt pretty stupid walking out of the place holding a big fucking aluminum-foil crab, especially since everybody stared at it. They didn’t stare out of surprise—it was nothing new to them—but rather because they were comparing my crab to the animals that their waiters had done for them. And what was worse was that by the time I made it out the door, I had managed to get pissed off because some other waiter toward the entrance had done these swans that looked amazing. The people there gave my crab snobby looks and muttered to each other how much better theirs were, the dickheads.

  Gertie handed the valet our number, and then we stood on the curb for about twenty minutes waiting for them to get to us. We weren’t the only ones doing this. There were about fifteen people, all standing there looking at their cars, which were at the most one hundred feet away. No one dared just ask for the keys and walk over there themselves. That would have upset a vital part of the L.A. economy—the part that allows people with shit jobs to make just enough money to share a one-bedroom apartment with three people and look for acting jobs during the week. The valets did their best to look sweaty and tired in order to seem to deserve the tips. I pretended to appreciate it and handed ours a finsky, and we set off again.

  17

  Gertie drove directly to the Malibu police station.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  “Making sure we don’t have any problems in the future.”

  We went inside and asked to file a report. A policeman brought us over to his desk and asked what the nature of our complaint was. Gertie explained that we had been about to take a walk on the Malibu pier when a lunatic reached in our car, hit me, and stole the fake PPK. The policeman looked at us in astonishment.

  “You’ll never believe what happened afterward,” he said. “That lunatic ran down the pier and used your fake gun to force Steven Spielberg to take a picture with him! Mr. Spielberg beat him up pretty good. He’s got a low tolerance for this sort of thing. Would you be willing to testify against the thief?”

  “Of course,” said Gertie. “But then we’d also like a restraining order in case he goes nuts on us once he realizes we helped put him away.”

  “No problem,” he said and whipped out a couple of forms to fill out. The whole thing took less than an hour.

  18

  Ignacio told us to meet him outside his office building in Century City. When we pulled up to the address he had given me, I dialed his number, and he came out five minutes later. He was holding a bamboo-fiber grocery bag that didn’t look anywhere near as bulky as I thought a sack containing one hundred grand would. He bent over and leaned against the car door.

  “You’ll never believe who I just got a call from,” he said.

  “Was it Dennis from jail, calling you to bail him out for having stuck a fake gun in a movie director’s face?” asked Gertie. He looked shocked that we could know such a thing.

  “Exactly. He said he’d forget everything that had happened between us if I’d bail him out. As if I was going to believe that.” He handed me the ecologically friendly grocery bag. I handed him the envelope with the photos. He took it, looked at the contents, and smiled as though he had been set free from prison.

  “I know I don’t need to thank you since I’m paying you, but thanks all the same,” he said.

  “No problem,” I said. “Hey, I’ve been wondering about something. Why did you have me follow Gertie around anyway?”

  “When I was talking to you that day, I saw her name on the for-sale sign in the yard down the street from Dennis’ house and figured if you were out following her around it would give me enough time to slip into the house and get what I wanted.”

  “So all this happened for no real reason at all,” I said, thinking about my new job and all the things I had done to get that far.

  “Next time you need to buy or sell property, we’re your team,” said Gertie, whipping out a business card and handing it to Ignacio. “You’ve seen that we’ll stop at nothing. No matter what you want sold, we can find a way to do it.”

  “She means ‘sell it’,” I added.

  “I’ll definitely call you. It looks like a family member’s health is declining rapidly. I’ll have a house to sell very quickly after he passes away.” He gave a little wave and pocketed the card. Then he turned and walked back into the building.

  We started off toward Gertie’s bank. I opened the sack and pulled out a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills and ran my thumb over the edge.

  “When are we going to buy the house?” I asked.

  “I’ve got three potential properties I’ll take you by next week. All of them are in Santa Monica. I’ll let you choose the one you want, partner.”

  “I’ve got one change I’d like to make to the plan,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not going to live in it immediately. Maybe never. It won’t be up to me.”

  19

  A couple of weeks later I pulled up to our new house in my hybrid, which Gertie had strategically chosen for me since any luxury item I was missing at the beginning of my career could then be justified by saying I was trying to save the planet, and since that was going to be really fashionable for at least two more years, it would give an aura of caring to my real-estate persona. I was early, so I stepped out of the car and did a little light stretching. My back had been killing me lately. With my dad now sleeping in my room, I had moved into the living room. After one week on the couch, I had bought a sleeper sofa, but that was no better.

  After a while I saw Helen’s car driving slowly down the street. She was looking at the numbers on the houses, trying to find the address I had given her. When she got closer she saw me, waved and pulled over to the curb. As she walked over to me, she took a look at the house. I could see that she thought I was being ridiculous.

  “There’s no way I can afford anything like this,” she said and gave me a hug. “Is this your car?”

  “Yes. It gets great gas mileage.”

  “Huh,” she said.

  “Let me show you the place. The guy is desperate to have you move in.”

  We walked around the property and then into the house. Helen wasn’t looking seriously at anything. I could tell that she loved it but that she didn’t want to have to go through the usual process of loving a place and then slinking away once she was told the price. We made our way through the house, starting with the living room. It had the usual fireplace that only people from L.A. can understand the utility of having here, since to us anything below 70 degrees is close to freezing. Next we visited the three bedrooms, each of which had its own bathroom. And finally we checked out the open kitchen, which had Italian tiling and an elaborate gas stove covered by a vent two times larger than what seemed necessary.

  “So when do you want to move in?” I asked once we had finished the tour and were back in the living room.

  “Yeah, right. Look, I know this is your universe now, but it almost seems cruel to show me something like this when you know I can’t afford it. I visited a one-bedroom not far from here last month that was more than I could afford, so there’s no way I’ll be able to pay for a house.”

  “This one is yours,” I said, holding out the keys, which she didn’t take. “Don’t get me wrong. You can’t have it, because it’s
not entirely mine. But I invested in it with Gertie, and we’re going to sit on it until the market clears up. That’ll be at least four or five years from now, so until then, I want to put someone in it I can trust.”

  “But I can’t pay the rent here,” she said.

  “I’m paying the rent. I want you to let me do this,” I said.

  “But—” she began.

  “No. It’s okay. I’m not trying to buy you. I want you to let me do this because I can’t stand what I did before, and this will help me apologize. I had a shot at having a future with you, but I just weaseled free rent out of the situation and continued bouncing through life like nothing mattered. So think of this as my part of the rent from the last couple of years—just a little late.”

  “You…are you going to move in here?” she asked, less bothered by the idea than I would have imagined.

  “I’m going to stay at my place. If you never want me to come over, it’ll be okay. I mean, I’ll understand. But let me do this. There are no strings attached.”

  She looked at the house and could barely contain a smile. Then she regained her composure and seemed to push the idea out of her head.

  “It’s too much…” she said.

  I tossed the keys up in the air in front of her. Before she had time to think, she reached out with her hand and grabbed them.

  “I left the lease in the kitchen. Sign and initial every page and mail it to me. I had to put the official rent amount as one dollar, but don’t worry about paying it.”

  I walked over to the door, opened it, and then turned back to say goodbye. Helen was looking over toward me, but in a way she hadn’t looked at me before. I’m not talking about a deeper-kind-of-love look, but rather a look that seemed to indicate she was having a hard time connecting the current image of me with the former one she had been carrying around with her.