Up until the time I came to Walker’s, I worked at Hans’s magazine, Beat, as an intern. I worked ten to six, five days a week, for free, for almost a year—hence the bartending job—and I have never spoken to Hans directly. He and Carol are staying at their ski cabin, in town for a jazz festival.
Hans offhandedly orders a vodka on ice from me, like I’m still working for him anonymously out here. Carol asks for a glass of wine. They sit, stiff as mannequins on the circular couch, drinks perched on their laps, with all of the jocularity of patients awaiting biopsy results. My mind is elsewhere as I’m trying to devise a plan for the ensuing call with Lionel.
Claudia, however, is working overtime. “So, Hans, the excerpt is good, yes?”
“Sure.”
“It’ll be out when?”
“September.”
“Good, good. The cover, right? You’ll have to let us know how the issue does.”
Carol seems truly absorbed in the soundless CNN ticker at the bottom of the television. Claudia lights a cigarette, and Walker takes a long draw off his scotch and water.
While I know that Hans and Walker’s relationship is complicated, it feels unbearably so in this moment. The two of them go back twenty-five years, to the genesis of Beat, when they ran it out of Hans’s apartment in Berkeley. Walker was the countercultural id of the magazine—Hans its musical superego. Over the years their relationship has become one of symbiotic dysfunction. Walker famously napalms deadlines and undermines budgets. Hans obsesses over the bottom line of what has become a small publishing empire. Each feels like the other owes him his career, and both quietly seethe that the other guy doesn’t get it.
As we sit here, making minor conversation, there is this feeling that things could go in any direction—they could just as easily hug each other as end up in a brawl. What I hadn’t expected was for the conversation to be largely directed by Claudia, or for it to be less a conversation than a plea.
“We were thinking, Hans,” Claudia says casually, “about excerpting the whole thing. Like a serial.”
Hans’s face goes blank. “Could be good.”
“Really?” Claudia fills up Carol’s wineglass and asks Hans if he’d like another Stoli.
“No thanks.”
“Well, we should talk terms—”
“Well, we probably wouldn’t do it,” Hans interrupts.
“Oh.”
“Let me think about it. I’ll put some feelers out.” Hans puts his vodka glass on the circular table with a finality that says they’ll be on their way. “All right, guy.” Hans and Walker shake hands and give the half hug. Carol and Claudia air-kiss. “We’ve got to get going. Good seeing you, as always.”
Hans removes his glasses and puts on a pair of sunglasses. Together the two pieces of eyewear probably cost twice my monthly New York rent. The whole time Hans and Carol have been here—let’s call it a half hour—I’ve been perched on a barstool at my usual spot at the end of the long counter, trying to stave off my anxiety over the coming call with Lionel. I’ve been getting drinks and lighting cigarettes and doing a significant amount of nodding. Carol took a brief shine to me out of politeness—we discussed wine for about five minutes after she learned I was a bartender. But the whole time we have been with the Bauers, something has seemed off that I can’t quite put my finger on. Devaney is not here, so the dynamic is strange. But that’s not it. Then I realize, when Walker takes a long drag off his Dunhill and looks quietly down at his typewriter—a private moment—that he has barely said a word.
Aside from the initial pleasantries, Claudia and Hans have done most of the talking. Once the Bauers leave, a hush comes over the room. It’s the kind of hush I recognize as the prelude to a bad explosion.
“Jesus Christ, Claudia, I have an idea,” says Walker. “Why don’t we just prostrate ourselves at Hans’s feet and lick his shoelaces. That would be way less humiliating.”
“He didn’t say a definitive no.”
“What about that wasn’t definitive? He was being polite.”
“I thought we had agreed this was a good idea, Walker.”
“Yes, you moron. To me and you this is a good idea.” He motions toward me.
“What?”
“Not in front of the children, Claude.”
“She’s been here over three months, Walker. Do you think she doesn’t understand what’s going on?”
“Understand what?” I say.
“That we’re broke, you idiot.”
“Define broke.” Personally, I’m used to living on $1,000 a month—Walker’s weekly coke habit.
“What’s to define? We have no income until this book is finished,” Walker says.
“What are your other revenue streams?” I ask.
“Let’s see, there’s the mail-order maple-syrup business . . . the tie-dyed T-shirt business . . . our roadside tomato stand . . .” Walker punctuates each item of this list by pelting me with cigarette filters.
“Ow. I’m just asking. What about speaking engagements?”
Claudia looks over at Walker.
“I told you, no more,” he says.
“It’s a lot of money, Walker. It’s easy money.”
“I’m not getting on an airplane. So what does that leave me? The Aspen Rotary Club?”
“I find it hard to believe you’re afraid of flying,” I say.
“I’m not afraid of flying, you halfwit. We just had the ATF out here for tea. What do you think is the first thing that happens when Walker Reade walks into an airport?”
“Oh . . . We could drive,” I say.
“Okay, that leaves us the Grand Junction Rotary Club and the Denver Rotary Club. Now what?”
“Walker, there are a million universities within driving distance,” Claudia says. Indeed, the college crowd has always been Walker’s most reliable market. College campuses are like little factories producing generation after generation of Walker Reade disciples. “There’s Vegas.”
Walker squints, staring at something out the window. “Look, I just fucking hate the things. Makes me feel like an animal in the zoo, for Christ’s sake. All that ‘step and fetch it’ business.”
“What about these paintings you’ve been doing?” Claudia asks.
“It’s something. It’ll be our bridge. But it’s not going to last.”
“We’ll just finish the book,” I say.
“We’ll just finish the book,” Walker says. “Then we’ll cure malaria . . . ! Then we’ll part the Red Sea . . . ! Then we’ll try to find your brain! Why are you so stupid?” Three more filters.
“Stop pelting me with those things.”
“How many pages do we have?” Claudia asks.
“One hundred forty-three,” I say.
“That’s not bad,” Claudia says.
“That’s just entering the woods, you fool.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Claudia says.
Better than nothing—but, at the risk of heresy, I can’t help but think it’s not nearly as much as it could be. It is fascinating to me how Walker writes. It’s older than old school—like how Dostoyevsky or Dickens did it, page to page, editing afterward on paper. Storyboards and typewriters. Although, to his credit, he does seem to have at least some sense of where everything is going.
“Alley, go check the pig,” Walker says.
“Nothing is going to magically appear in that pig until you settle up,” Claudia says.
“The back.”
Claudia heads back to Walker’s bedroom and emerges five minutes later with a large yellow envelope, which she places next to his typewriter.
“Finish the book,” she says, putting on her sunglasses. “What else can you do? Lionel’s calling in a half hour. Figure it out. I have to run a few errands.”
Claudia looks down on the table at a pile of magazines that Carol has forgotten. I can see something register on her face, but I presume it has to do with something ridiculous on the cover, like stars who look like their pets o
r The Sexiest Men of 1992.
“How about I pick up some Mexican for tonight?” Claudia says. “It’s cheap.”
Walker and I both nod, and she heads out.
When Claudia leaves the room, as I have come to learn, it’s like a mother leaving her children in a room full of knives. When she’s gone, trouble often follows. What happened last night feels like a secret we have to keep from her—we both know this without talking about it. After Walker fell asleep, I tucked him in on the couch and went back to the cabin, where I spent a restless evening replaying the range scene in my mind, over and over, from every angle, like the Zapruder film. For the first time, I feel in over my head, but Walker’s words linger. Desperate for relevance? Well, yes. Why else am I here? I’ve yet to be paid a dime in compensation, and I’m on a ship that’s not just taking water—the hull is blown wide and there isn’t a bucket in sight.
“Sweetheart.” Walker motions for me to sit closer. He lights two cigarettes and hands me one. We both inhale deeply. “About last night. I’m just a little stressed-out. You know, lots of mouths to feed. So, I don’t want you to worry. Just . . . Claudia will worry. Just, let’s keep this one between you and me.”
“I totally understand. We’ll get through it. I’m here to help you get through it.”
“Can you mix me a drink before the call, sweetie?”
“Absolutely. What do you want?”
“I don’t know. How about a martini. Make it dirty. And go get the manuscript for me, okay?”
“You got it. You want me here for the call?” If I’m going down, I want it to happen in front of me.
“Nah. Take the night off. Just . . . We need a break.” He hands me the envelope, bloated with cash. “And deposit this in the sow on your way back home.”
“Okay.”
As I make my way over to the bar, I catch a glimpse of the cover of the magazine that Carol had left—one of my favorite trashy tabloids—and finally see what Claudia was staring at. I wouldn’t normally so much as glance right now. When Walker wants his drink, I know better than to stall with a gossip rag. But the cover subject is compelling. The photo is slightly grainy, but the posture—the false humility you can read in the shoulders—is unmistakably Larry. “Secrets from the Set!” screams the cover line for an article about all of the goings-on during the filming of Captain Avenger. Under those words, Larry is embracing his costar: September McAvoy.
I start to mix the dirty martini, stirring slowly so as not to bruise the liquor. I’ve put ice water in the glass to chill it. I am mixing this drink as methodically as I can to give myself a second to think. I can figure out a lot of things: Why Larry would prefer the company of a Hollywood It Girl to me. Why Walker played Russian roulette last night. Why I’m surely heading home after Lionel’s call. But what I can’t figure out is why Claudia didn’t throw these magazines in the trash. Why she didn’t just let me have this small, bright thing to anchor myself. Why she didn’t just spare me.
CHAPTER 18
Most mornings, when I wake up at the cabin, I have a few hours to myself. I smoke. I read. I work on my book. I drink what amounts to a midsize bucket of Maxwell House. I almost always down two of the Mexican aspirin—and resist, with great difficulty, the desire to take more. If Claudia isn’t over at Walker’s, I chat with her. Occasionally I’ll talk to my mother—enduring a one-sided grilling about when, exactly, I’m heading home—take a shower, lay out all of my crazy clothes and, these days, my makeup. These hours are filled with a certain dread. Being at Walker’s is fun of a sort, but even the fun is stressful. It can easily be a disaster, rife with broken glasses, lamps, or dishes, verbal abuse at high volumes, and no recourse in sight. Those nights—most nights—I just take it until I get kicked out, which can take hours. Inevitably, around two in the afternoon, I develop a fairly acute somatized stomachache in anticipation of The Call, and once the phone rings and Claudia gives a firm nod my way, I dress with all the enthusiasm of a Salem witch heading to the gallows. But this afternoon that feeling is magnified tenfold. Unless Lionel and Walker talked last night about nothing more than Jordan vs. Drexler, there’s no way I wasn’t found out.
To make matters worse, by 5:00 today, I notice that my 3:00 call hasn’t yet come. By 6:00 I’m officially worried. Through it all, I’m attempting to distract myself the Italian way, making an all-day sauce. Claudia is, as usual, poring over a checkbook at the kitchen table while I brown sausages. I don’t know if she’s perennially balancing it or, like a midnight snacker who checks the fridge repeatedly, she’s hoping the contents might change. I pour her a cup of coffee, and she turns to me with an expression I sense is a product of recent events. On her desk is a photo taken earlier this year of Walker with her—with no deep creases around her eyes, no look of perpetual concern.
“Can I ask how bad it is, Claude?” I start cracking eggs into a bowl of ground beef to make meatballs.
“It’s bad. We took a second mortgage on the property, but I’m starting to think it wasn’t a good idea. Walker needs to be told no, not given more debt to play with. I’m just not very good at saying no to him. But, you know, we’re finally there. It has to be done.”
She taps the tip of her pen on the table and takes out a Dunhill blue, offering me one. I decline. I’m about to get up to my wrists in meatball mix. But I get an ashtray from the sink for her.
“I have a crazy question.”
“What?”
“Would he ever give up the drugs, the drinking? You know, clean up?”
“Alley, he’s fifty-two years old. This has always been his life—it’s who he is. To cut him off from that would be like caging a cheetah in a zoo.”
Claudia clearly thinks sobriety would kill Walker. My guess: Walker thinks it would render him moot. Actors and musicians, they clean up, the world applauds. But nobody would applaud if Walker Reade cleaned up. His work, his persona, everything he represents, is inextricably tied to his substance abuse—his “fuck you” to the system. But if this kind of defiance was romantic twenty-five years ago, it sure as hell ain’t romantic now. It’s nothing more than expensive. And it’s tamped down whatever genius was there. The irony is that Walker is convinced he can’t function without the drugs. And he doesn’t think the world would give a damn about him if he tried.
I try to imagine Walker cleaned up, and although I’ve only been out here a short time, I can’t conjure what that would look like. Even when he first wakes up and is ostensibly a clean slate, the need is palpable, pulsing—some explosion, good or bad, is always close to the surface, unless mitigated by various substances. The scotch is mixed before the coffeemaker’s last gasp. The coke is rationed out like medicine.
“Do me a favor, Alley.” Claudia is considering how to phrase what she’s about to say. She takes a long drag off her cigarette and blows the smoke out her nose. “Just keep an eye on him. . . . Just let me know if anything weird . . . well, weirder . . . happens.”
“You got it, Claude.” I sense that Claudia is in deeper here than she could ever be in any marriage. Her life effectively depends on Walker, and I know that she, like me, is not collecting a paycheck. The seesaw out here doesn’t budge unless they’re both on it—something they both seem to know without saying it.
I’ve also learned, by now, a few things of my own about codependency. I have become accustomed, when called over sometime in the late afternoon, to assessing Walker’s mood—sour, happy, mad, manic, depressed—and summarily flipping mental switches to accommodate. How will I talk to him? What will I put in the CD player? If he’s happy, he’ll want to go shoot guns. If he’s depressed, he’ll like a movie and a sleazy outfit. When he’s manic, I’ve learned to get him in the hot tub with dessert and booze and some Lyle Lovett.
Then I have to surmise, depending on the glasses in the sink, the detritus in the ashtrays, and what’s happening on the coke tray, what else I might be dealing with. The hallucinogenics make him happy. The coke makes him mean. The pot makes him relax
ed. The booze evens him out. If something has happened with Claudia or Devaney—a fight about money, a tiff about sex—everything can change on a dime. Then there’s the book.
We now have almost 150 pages, but the quality of the work is clearly getting worse by the day. Ever since Walker’s first call with Lionel, my Spidey sense has been on high alert. I’ve parsed every loaded look and cryptic phrase for meaning, to the point of driving myself half-mad, but I still don’t know if Walker is aware of the extent to which I’m rewriting his pages. It almost feels like he’s testing me, handing me progressively weaker work to see what Lionel says about it. Not only that, but I’ve constructed my own house of cards with this book. For months now, I’ve been keeping the two manuscripts—one with what Walker has actually written, which he works from the following night, and one with what I’ve sent to Lionel, which are the pages with my rewrites. And the strain of keeping both narratives at the ready, in my mind, is wearing me down.
For the sake of the historical record: I’m not writing Walker’s book for him. I’ve retained the basic arc that Walker is going for—the shape of the story, the way his personal rage is building the characters, the conflicts, the sex, the politics. But his details, his dialogue, what he’s conjuring, aren’t sharp enough. I simply can’t let them be. I’ve tried to convince myself—usually as I’m lying on the floor of my bedroom finishing up a pot of coffee—that I’m just the messenger here. No matter what I do to these pages, they are Walker’s. But in my bones I know I’ve gotten in too deep. And if I’m just the messenger, my main concern right now is not getting shot for it.
I put the meat into the pot of sauce I’ve made and finally, at 7:15, the phone rings. Claudia nods my way. A wave of relief washes over me, followed by a wave of dread.
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