Marvin’s sensorium had changed again. He was standing in the cool living room near the open glass doors, through which sunlight seemed to extend in a solid chunk, “Thirty days?” he said dazedly. “Has it been thirty days? I’ve lost count.” Lord, he thought, I was only supposed to be here a week or two! I haven’t done any work in a month! I must be nearly broke, and the alimony payment is past due. My God, thirty days, and I can hardly remember them at all!
“Well I’ve kept good count,” said Krell. “You’ve used up your five hundred dollars, and this is no charity operation…”
Marvin found his mind racing madly like some runaway machine trying futilely to catch up with a world that had passed it by, desperately trying to sync itself back in gear with the real world of bank, statements, alimony courts, four-day shooting schedules, rubber checks, vice-squad hassles, recalcitrant actresses, greasy backers. If I can cast something in three or four days, maybe I can use the same cast to shoot three quickies back-to-back, but I’ll have to scout three different locations or it won’t work. That should give me enough money to cover the monthly nut and keep Karen’s lawyers off my back if I get all the money up front, pay them first and kite checks until—
“Well, Marvin, you want to write out another five hundred dollar check or—”
“What?” Marvin grunted. “Another five hundred dollars? No, no, hell, I’m broke, I’ve already been here too… I mean, I’ve got to get back to L.A. immediately.”
“Well, maybe I’ll see you around again sometime,” said Harry Krell. He walked into the brilliant mass of sunlight, leaving Marvin standing alone in the shadowed living room, and, as he did, Marvin saw a brilliant pulse of sunshine yellow, heard an enormous chime, felt a terrible pang of paradise lost.
But there was no time to sort his head out. He had to call Earl Day, his regular cameraman, and get him to come out and drive him back to Los Angeles in the Targa. They could put together three concepts on the way in, start casting tomorrow, and have some money in four or five days. Gotta make up for lost time fast, fast, fast!
For the barest moment, Bill Marvin was enveloped in rainbow fire which sputtered and crackled like color-TV snow, and he heard the zipping, syncopated whooshing of metal birds soaring past his ears, igniting phantom traces of memories almost forgotten after the frantic madness of grinding out three pornies in less than a month, slowing his racing metabolism, catching for a fleeting instant his psychic breath.
Then he was back stiff-spined in the driver’s seat of his Porsche, his hands gripping the wheel like spastic claws, the engine growling at his back, barreling down the left lane of the Ventura Freeway at seventy-five miles per hour in moderate traffic. The flash had come and gone so quickly that he hadn’t even had time to feel any sense of danger, unlike the first time he had tried to drive, only five days out of Golden Groves, when he nearly creamed out as the road became a sharp melody through rumbling drums up in the twisty Hollywood Hills. Now the synesthetic flashes were few—one or two a day—and so transient that they weren’t much more dangerous behind the wheel than a strong sneeze. Each one slipped through his mind like a ghost, leaving only a peculiar echo of vague sadness.
The first couple of weeks of production on the other hand, had been a real nightmare. Up until maybe ten days ago, he had been flashing every half hour or so, and strongly enough so that he hadn’t been able to do his own driving, so that takes had been ruined when he tripped out in the middle of them, so that the actors and crew sometimes thought he was stoned or flipping out and tried to take advantage of it. Fortunately, he had made so many pornies by now that he could just about do it in his sleep. The worst of it had been that making the films was so boring that he found himself actually waiting for the synesthetic flashes, concentrating on them when they came, even trying to anticipate them, and experiencing the actual work as something unreal, as marking time. He was never much interested in sex when he was shooting porn—after treating female bodies like meat all day it was pretty hard to get turned on by them at night—and the only time he had really felt alive was when he was flashing or involved in one of the hundreds of horrible hassles.
He made an abrupt three-lane jump and pulled off the freeway at Laurel Canyon Boulevard, drove across the ticky-tacky of the San Fernando Valley, began climbing up into the Hollywood Hills. The Valley side of the Hills was just more flatland style suburban plastic, but once across Mulholland Drive, which ran along the major ridge line, Laurel Canyon Boulevard curved and wound down toward the Sunset Strip, following an old dry stream bed through a deep gorge that cut through overgrown and twisted hills festooned with weird and half-hidden houses, a scene from some Disney Black Forest elf cartoon.
Usually, Marvin got a big lift out of leaving the dead plastic landscape of lowland Los Angeles for the shadowy, urbanized-yet-countrified world of the Canyon. Usually, he got a tremendous emotional surge out of having finished one film—let alone three—driving away from it all on the last day of cutting, with any one of a dozen readily available girls already waiting at the house for him to start a week-long lost weekend, his reward for a job well done.
But this time, the drive home did nothing for him, the end of the final cutting only left him empty and stale, and he hadn’t even bothered to have a girl waiting for him at the house. He felt tapped out, bugged, emotionally flat, and the worst of it was that he didn’t know why.
He pulled into his carport and walked around the side of his house into the seclusion of the unkempt, overgrown garden. Even the wild, lush vegetation of his private hillside seemed washed out, pallid, and somehow unreal. The bird sounds in the trees and underbrush seemed like so much Muzak.
He kicked irritably at a rock, then heard the phone ringing in the house. He went inside, plopped down in the black leather director’s chair by the phone stand, picked up the living room extension, and grunted, “Yeah?”
It was Wally Bruner.
“What’s going on, Bill? I haven’t heard from you in nearly two months, ever since you started in on that matter we discussed. I heard you’d started shooting three weeks ago, so I knew you weren’t dead, but why haven’t you gotten in touch with me? Did you get what you went there for?”
Marvin stared out of the picture window into the garden, where the late afternoon sunlight cast shadows across scraggly patches of lawn under two big eucalyptus trees. Two dun-colored morning doves had ventured out of their wooded seclusion to nibble at seeds in the glass and gobble moodily to themselves like dowager aunts.
“What are you talking about, Wally?” Marvin said vacantly.
“Damn it, you know! Golden Groves. Harry Krell. Are we ready to proceed?”
Suddenly glowing bubbles of pastel shimmer were drifting languidly up through a viscous wine-colored liquid, and Marvin smelled the sweet aroma of perfect sunset; just for the tantalizing fraction of a moment, and then it was gone.
Marvin sighed, blinked, smiled.
“Forget it, Wally,” he said. “I’m dropping the whole thing.”
“What? Why on earth—”
“Let’s just say that I went up on a mountain, came down, and want to make sure it’s still there.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Bill?”
“What the vintners buy,” said Marvin.
“Bill, you sound like you’ve flipped.”
“I’m okay,” Marvin said. “Let’s just say I don’t give a damn what Karen spends her alimony on as long as I have to pay it, and leave it at that. Okay?”
“Okay, Bill. That’s the advice I gave you in the first place.”
After he hung up on Bruner, Marvin sat there looking out into his garden where ordinary dun-colored birds were pecking at a scruffy lawn, and the subtle gray tinge of smog was barely apparent in the waning light.
He sighed once, shuddered, shrugged, sighed again. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of Golden Groves.
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