Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  “It’s so small, Maddy. Are you sure he lives there?”

  “I’ve seen him with his dog.”

  “He walks his own dog?”

  My humble truck was disenchanting enough (I was thrilled it still started after a jump from a pier-front busboy), but my house was the real coal at Christmas.

  “It looks like something out of our village,” my mother said, not even bothering to cover her disappointment.

  Inside, the taps were dry, the light switches worthless. The only furniture was the trunk my mother had brought with her and from it she removed a candle stub, lit it, and then proceeded to explore the rest of the house.

  “Maddy,” she said, chiding me softly, “why do you live like this?”

  Moving smoothly from room to room, her candle held high like the hero in a vampire picture, she said, “You might as well be buried, my girl.”

  “Why do you use the candle?” I asked. “We don’t need the light.”

  She exhaled impatiently as a teacher might with a child who has failed yet again to grasp the simplicity of arriving at a certain sum.

  “Why do you fuss about only what we need? There are joys in this world, my girl. And candlelight is one of them.”

  That night we broke some dried branches from a dying sycamore and lit a small fire in the grate. We lay down before it, our bodies flat to the hardwood, stretched out like the corpses we were. My mother was clarifying the conditions of our existence, segueing from theory to actual practice in a light and meandering tone better suited to a sorority sleepover than the cold necromantic catechism of what would be ours forever. We were no longer mere factories of reaction. We were inside cause now. Beyond death and therefore life’s limitations. For instance, she asked if I was comfortable there on the floor. When I said I wasn’t, she laughed and said that the hardness of the floor had nothing to do with how I felt about it. The floor was only half the conversation. My back was the other half, and if I chose to “hear” comfort, warmth, luxury, or any combination of the three, I had the ability to do so. Eventually I wouldn’t even need to feel the floor to be comfortable upon it. I would carry comfort inside me.

  “But what happened to the duck?” I asked.

  I said it without explanation, free of context, testing the growing intimacy that only her direct reply would confirm. She smiled and turned to me, beautiful in the firelight, and said, “Where all duck that’s unfortunate enough to end up in orange and champagne sauce goes.”

  I had watched her consume the entire dinner without ever having to void her mouth in a napkin and I was curious, even jealous.

  “We shit out this black liquid stuff,” she said, laughing like a girl who had “shit” too loud in company. “I don’t know how it works.”

  I seized upon this at once and theorized that our bodies, now no longer dependent upon nutrients, no longer needed to bother with the functions of digestion and absorption and performed, probably by some kind of diastolic friction, a simple reductive shorthand.

  “Perhaps,” she said to my lengthy explanation.

  “Is it always liquid?”

  “Why do you want to know about shit? We get to enjoy food. That’s all that matters.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’ll work on it tomorrow. Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Why would we sleep?”

  “To dream of love, silly. Why else?”

  There was an automat on Hollywood Boulevard not far from Grauman’s Egyptian called the Hornblower. Nautically themed, it had ratlines for room dividers and voluptuous figureheads supporting each booth. For a handful of hot nickels, you could feast like a privateer and never bother sitting. My mother thought it a perfect spot for my first gastric dry run, so we headed over the hill, trying to beat the lunch rush.

  “Maybe we start with a dish of Jell-O,” my mother said, heading toward a window where a quivering stack of toxic-green cubes peeked through.

  “I don’t like Jell-O.”

  “You’ve never had Jell-O.”

  “I don’t like the look of it.”

  “Then the chocolate pudding.”

  “Shouldn’t we have something substantial first?”

  “What for?”

  Her logic was unassailable. She deposited the nickels. To the minute flourish of a three-note boatswain’s whistle, the tiny window lifted automatically. Wiping a thin metal spoon on her blouse, she handed me the dish.

  Now, don’t do anything. Just look at it. Anticipate it. Wait for it.

  I looked up into her shining eyes. Her lips had not moved.

  Smell it. Still cold on Christmas morning. Hot from a sweetheart’s hand. Toasted. Sweet. Earthy. Primal. Cup your palm around the memory of it and place it on your tongue. The scent with clever feet. Taste. The scent with deepening roots. Feel it spreading on the palate, cousin to the smell. But louder. High up in sinus, carpeted on the tongue. Creeping like fog. Like delicious milk chocolate fog, turning to rain, now standing water, richer, into cream. Into a dense toasted sweet, roasted gale.

  A tiny storm of love.

  “Easy there, sweet chips,” my mother said out loud. “Small bites. You don’t want to be sitting there with Eleanor Powell and have brown shit shootin’ out your nose.”

  And she dipped the head of her spoon into the muddy goop and demurely placed the bite between her cunning little teeth.

  “That crap’s not bad. Get another,” she said, taking my dish with relish.

  The plates began to stack. There were the remains of an Irish stew, a shepherd’s pie, a macaroni salad, two chicken pot pies, a liverwurst open-faced, a side of bread-and-butter pickles, a plate of borsht that stained the corners of our mouths like circus clowns, mashed potatoes with chitlin’ gravy, a matzo ball soup, calf’s tongue in mushroom sauce (forty nickels!), and a lime chiffon pie. I felt filled but not stuffed. Rather like a tube of toothpaste that had just been given an initial squeeze.

  “What are we going to do with the rest of the day?” I asked. It felt strange to put forth such a question, but I liked being under her tutelage. It was a relief after so many years of fending for myself. I wanted the lessons to continue.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m looking for work,” she said, her voice crisp after a sip of coffee.

  “You should try the studios. It’s a cinch they’d put you under contract.”

  “Why the hell would I do that?”

  “Don’t you want to be a star?”

  “Are you kidding? Too much work. Hell, I can rope a rich joe, give him the tumble of his life, and be eating the same fancy chow and wearing the same fancy frock as the poor dumb dame who sweated under hot lights for fourteen hours.” She already sounded American.

  “Don’t you want to earn your own money?”

  “What for? The money don’t know the difference.”

  “But you’d be reliant on a man.”

  “That’s what he’d think.”

  Again, her logic was unassailable. If you looked like her. But I couldn’t be content with her particular brand of consumerism. I would never be happy in the crowd, feeding from the shadows. I was my father’s daughter, odd as that sounds, and I wanted one final tilt at that tinsel-covered windmill.

  “I thought you’d given that up,” she said when I told her my plans.

  “There’s more than one studio in this town,” I said.

  “They want them young, honey. But not that young.”

  “Well, Jesus,” I said sullenly. “Don’t spare my feelings. Just have a nice hot shit right on my dreams why don’t you.”

  At the mention of feces, even as a euphemism, I felt my bowels suddenly liquefy. My mother saw the change on my face and immediately burst into laughter.

  “Too much, too soon, sweetie,” she said, trying to hold me up.

  I slapped her hand away.

  “Christ, I don’t know if I can make it to the bathroom.”

  “Ball it up, darlin’.”

 
I hadn’t had to control a sphincter of any kind in two decades.

  “What do I do?”

  “You could stick your thumb up your ass but that might be a tad conspicuous.”

  I must have moaned or something, for her smile faded and she took my face in her hands.

  “No feeling can manifest without your permission, Maddy. Do you hear me? Wish it away.”

  I felt like the hull of the Titanic just moments after the kiss of that first iceberg.

  “Look at me. There is no pressure in your belly, no pain in your guts. You feel nothing until you are ready to feel it. Okay? Nothing until you are ready.”

  I was a first-time skater letting go of the rail. I took a cautious step and stood up. A loud, high-pitched whine escaped through the fabric of my skirt. I felt a pressure and a tremulous belch rang out of my throat along with an acid surge that made my eyes water.

  “I think I threw up a little.”

  “Choke it down. That’s a girl. Better’n soda pop. Now tighten up and walk to the ladies’ room. There you go.”

  What came out of me was a christening of sorts. It was not foul. There was a watery sweetness to it, if anything. And from the confines of that stall I heard the women come and go, talking of the days of Valentino, missed periods, the cost of the local Red Car. How hot dates needed to be treated like just-baked pies, set on the sill and left to cool lest one would be burned. Or at least that was what her mother had told her. I could pass as one of them, but something was lost, a new vulnerability revealed. My mother drew strength from the lies. I felt somehow beholden to them. She had enjoyed our reckless feast, had ignored the faces pressed to the glass that watched us suck down the food our bodies didn’t need. I had felt there was something obscene in the indulgence. But I wanted her to stay.

  Could we be like mother and daughter? Not likely. But we could be friends, close girlfriends who shared at least portions of their lives. And given enough time, enough talks, perhaps one day we would be like strangers who had grown to feel like family.

  CHAPTER 51

  My mother wanted to be found and so she conspired to get lost. Zipper, as Zann had predicted, had indeed made her a star in Berlin. But beyond her first rush of ascendancy, she found her celestial position offered little prolonged advantage. Unlike me, she realized the necessity of her self-generated shadows. She wisely became a sister to the moon. The only light she craved was what she could borrow. What she wanted was access, a kitchen full of cookie jars low enough to disguise her reach. She dismissed the stage shows at both Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian. The story of Myrna Loy being discovered in the pre-picture chorus was a cautionary tale for her. She needed to be at ground level, in the cramped heat of the nightclub where eye contact and the scent off her heated skin would be as effective as mace. She tried the chorus lines at the Cocoanut Grove, the Roosevelt ballroom, the Embassy Club, but she lacked the generous fleshiness of the women of the day. She was lean and kinetic, almost cruel in her litheness, and the modernity of her form was lost on the men hiring.

  As a last resort, she applied as a cigarette girl at Lickter’s in the Chinese Theatre store next to Grauman’s. She was given the job, provided she “fatten up,” and was told to come back in the costume of a tobacco-producing country. Cuba, the Dominican Republic, all the island plantations had been taken by sullen Chicano girls from Echo Park. She decided on the Russian steppes, where a particularly harsh varietal grew that, once cured in vodka and kiln-dried over yak chips, was a necessary component in a pipe blend favored by Spencer Tracy.

  Finding a costume was easy. The elite Nazis of her association had been avid role-players. Their bedrooms had been more like black box theaters than places of repose, and they had spared no expense costuming their illusions. My mother’s trunk held unparalleled treasures, and among them was an assortment of titillating getups, all of which had seen action among the most solvent Oberführer. She had Dresden peasant dirndls complete with wooden shoes and tear-away bodices, a pair of crotchless lederhosen, Slavic shawls embroidered with geometric depictions of gypsy girls in compromising congress with all assortment of woodland creatures, ghetto fishmonger skirts of distressed silk with a gold lamé star of David. But her favorite was a black sable kubanka with a matching thigh-length greatcoat given to her by a Brigadeführer whose fondest memory of the front had been the almost melodic rape of a doe-eyed soprano from Minsk. This outfit was perfect for her tenure at the smoke shop and it would be a simple trick of the mind to keep the sweat from beading on her forehead as she coyly lifted and bent under the heavy wool and fur.

  My mother never spent the night with one of her conquests. Once finished, she was dressed and into the raw night like a shot. She nurtured obsession in them but always with a carefully reverse-engineered longevity. Overfondness she knew would breed overexposure. I could count on seeing her for at least a few hours before the sun came up. She had started small, an associate producer at Metro, an agent at William Morris, both of whom yielded little more than change for the powder room. Then one night Gary Cooper came to her cigarette counter, desperate for a pack of Craven A’s. She laughed later, that still-dark morning, when she told me how shy he had been. He spent the first hour after their clothes were off performing rope tricks from his Montana boyhood. But she assured me the rumors about his endowment were true. He had far more in common with horses than her other boyfriends. The night after her tryst with Cooper, twelve dozen roses and a silver-appointed saddle arrived on our doorstep. She sold the saddle for fifteen hundred dollars to the parade master of Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses. Other stars followed, and with them came more lucrative loot. Gold cigarette cases, emerald-encrusted telephone dialers, a pair of champion-blooded Borzois she sold to a breeder in Glendale. She kept nothing. Every gift, no matter how extravagant, met with the same frigid assessment. Everything was hocked.

  In two months we had a house full of furniture. Chinese deco rugs absorbed the sound of our two-in-the-morning laughter. We sang in German with Greta Keller from a phonograph given to my mother by Irving Thalberg, the only gift she kept. When she intimated to a Danish count that her mode of transportation was of necessity the Red Car, a cherry-red Bugatti was gathering condensation in our driveway the next morning. Having never bothered to learn to drive herself, she made me pilot the thing to a dealership on Sunset Boulevard wearing false whiskers and dark glasses. Our comfortable domesticity was a new frontier for her. And I was the perfect cover. What could cool a waxing passion that had reached the ebb of its usefulness faster than telling her lover she had a needy little girl home?

  CHAPTER 52

  It was winter of a new decade and I was campaigning hard for a Christmas tree, hoping that pretending to be a family might quell the real fire in my gut. I had seen plastic wreaths wired to the grills of limousines, seen the mechanical elves in the windows of Robertson’s. It didn’t have to be an elaborate decoration. Just a little tree with a few lights and tinsel whose modest glow would keep me company while I waited for the night hours to pass and my mother to come home.

  For the last few years she had bristled at the idea. Christmas Eve was a big night for her, what with all the parties and the general feeling of expansiveness that she could so easily engorge into personal gain. And she’d gripe that it was an unnecessary expense, that there was plenty of cheap glitz on the streets if I were feeling sentimental. But I always thought she was uncomfortable with the druidic implications of a tree. Like most self-made people, she did not like to be reminded of where she came from.

  “Just a small one. No bigger than me.”

  “No, Maddy.”

  “But I’m the one who’s here alone most of the time.”

  “That’s your choice.”

  “But it’s Christmas.”

  “Only because some thieving converted Roman said so.”

  “Jesus Christ, I don’t want to get into some dreary historical dialectic. I just want a pretty little tree to stick in the fucking corner for
three lousy weeks or so. Is that really so much to ask?”

  “How bad do you want it?”

  Her gray eyes flashed at the prospect of winning something from me. I should have known all along this was her real intention. I paused and looked at her. She could not contain the gleeful smile devouring her face.

  “What do you want?” I asked cautiously.

  “To have you come with me to that party.”

  Decent lager and bratwurst had become treasonous as America flirted with a second war with Germany. I agreed, perhaps sullenly, with her rabidly liberal refugee friends who saw a declaration was long overdue. Weimar was home to us. Not this third try at some starchy and humorless reich. They were having a huge blowout at the home of one of the composers. It would be an opportunity for her to see many of them, but also an opportunity to take the pulse of the town. A new breed of power was surfacing in Hollywood, and its chief priests were sure to be at this party. The problem was it was to be a family affair, wives and children, and she was uncomfortable showing up in an obvious shade of scarlet. She needed me to sell the benign domestic angle while she worked her dark snares belowdecks. The fact was I was desperate to go to this party, to be among the anointed few who still breathed the stale studio air. But I couldn’t let my mother know that. Not if I wanted my tree. “I’ll want at least a ten-foot tree, then.”

  “If we can stay until midnight,” she said.

  “Eight-foot, and nine thirty.”

  “Six and ten.”

  “Done.”

  IT WAS ONE OF THOSE PLACES IN THE CANYON BUILT FOR A VIEW. IT WAS meant to resemble a Norman castle with battlements above the modern top-story windows and a plywood portcullis over the driveway. Attached to the simulated stone was an enormous sign, Vegas-worthy, which read: Freedom H. Q., Operation: Steel Boot = Hitler’s Ass with a rather convincing forced perspective pictograph of a bent and soon to be bowel-addled Führer gaping at the viewer in sheepish surprise.