by Reiss, CD
Britt and Maryetta bounced out too, giggling. Britt froze when she saw me.
I held up my hands. “I’m not—”
“Laine! How did you find this place?” she asked.
“I wasn’t looking. I—”
More hugs. Who were these people? They were always nice, but this? It was almost as if they were real and a little high but normal for people their age.
“I ain’t seen you in how long?” Brad said.
“I don’t—”
“Since before Mike left!” Britt interjected. “How are you?”
“I’m—”
“Take my picture!” Britt squealed, embracing Maryetta. “I love this woman! I love her so much!”
Maryetta rolled her eyes, and I captured it in a flash.
Too bright.
I adjusted. Caught Brad making a gang sign. Then him with his arm around Britt. Then Sunglasses Guy looking sullen. Brad tying his shoe. Sunglasses trying to run up a wall and losing his shoe. Britt pulling his waistband. Maryetta lighting a cigarette. The alley became a studio, the tight corner of the city a backdrop to a scene.
“We gotta blow! Come with us,” Brad said.
“Yes!” Britt added. “I got a driver. It’s so much better!”
“I can’t, I—”
“Why not?” the guy in the sunglasses asked. He’d had the most fun in front of the camera.
“I’m running out of memory, and I want to see what I have. I know that’s lame,” I said. “Next time?”
A little convincing sent them on their way. They walked down the alley to a small lot on the other side.
“Wait!” I shouted.
Maryetta and Britt turned.
“I need releases!” I said, running toward them. When I caught up, I continued, out of breath. “I need you to sign releases so I can sell these, if it’s all right. I’ll clear them with you first, in case there’s anything you don’t want seen?” I jerked my thumb at the two girls putting a lighter and a foil packet away.
“Yeah,” Britt said. “Call me tomorrow, and I’ll get you everyone’s contact info, okay?” She gave me her number and said to Maryetta, “Remind me to put her on the list.”
“Yeah. You sure you don’t want to come?” Maryetta asked me.
I thought of all the shots I could get. I lived five blocks away. All I had to do was go home and grab a memory card.
“Next time,” I said. I was tired and done pushing myself.
They all trotted off to their cars, unencumbered by worry or fear, and I went home feeling the same way.
I sat in front of my screen, with the freeze-frame of his private video still open, and the comment box empty.
I loved him. I would always love him. I wanted to tell him that thanks to my lawyer’s push, Jake and Enid were behind bars for a long time—not just for distributing photos of a minor, but for drug distribution and statutory rape. And since they had worked over state lines, the federal sentence was worth a lifetime of regret.
I wanted to show him my impact statement so he’d know why it had all become such a mess.
I typed “hello” into the comment box, but stopped myself before sending it.
Why should he come back? Wasn’t he happy where he was? Didn’t he like his freedom? Why should I be the thing that dragged him back into the world he’d tried to escape?
Deleting the comment, I told myself I was doing the right, real, mature thing, stabbing my heart with each tap of the backspace key.
50
michael
My parents had told me I’d gotten the Academy Award nomination. I’d filed the information and ignored it. I didn’t care.
On the last morning of my trip, in the hotel lobby on a screen the size of a headshot, I saw Entertainment Weekly’s predictions. I sat on an uncomfortable chair and ate a roll with tea. I’d stopped pretending I wasn’t curious. Big Girls was nommed for sound editing, followed by music, director, and screenplay.
Then actress—six nominees, with Claire Contreras among them. I was happy for her. She’d been wonderful to work with, and for the first time, I missed being on a movie set.
Instead, I was staring at the TV, waiting for something that promised fulfillment but would never deliver. A reward for doing everything right when nothing had felt right, and knowing what counted wasn’t the praise but the work.
When I was leaving the hotel with my bag slung across my back and my head down, my phone rang. I only accepted calls from my parents, and as expected, it was Gareth.
“You can make it if you leave now,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll surprise you.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Fez.”
“What’s it like?”
“Crowded,” I said. “Rainy. But if I don’t tell them who I am, they don’t know and don’t care.”
I heard muffled voices from the other side, some rustling, then Brooke got on. “Sweetheart, come back, would you? The whole thing’s died down. No one even talks about that girl anymore.”
That girl who’d never left a comment. Who didn’t want to see me back in her city.
“You can make it back for the ceremony,” my mother continued.
“Gareth mentioned that.”
I wouldn’t win because no one would vote for a man who may or may not have been a pervert. Everyone else from Big Girls would win, because they’d been excellent. Claire and Andrea, Max, who’d written the hell out of the thing.
Going home for them was a side benefit.
It was Laine I wanted to see.
* * *
I hadn’t booked a charter. I wanted to be normal for another three quarters of a day. I wore sunglasses, a too-long beard, and a hat. That had never fooled anyone for long, but it would get me to baggage claim.
As soon as the plane hit the ground at LAX, my chest constricted, and I felt such a weight on me, my hair felt heavy.
I fell into old patterns: looking away from crowds, seeming preoccupied, rushing, wondering who would do what for me instead of me doing it myself.
A photo mural twenty feet long stretched across the concourse, showing a perfect blue sky and the word in white, the bottom tilted to the planes of the mountain.
HOLLYWOOD.
Seeing it like that, I didn’t think of the industry or the things I’d run from. I thought of the last time I’d been up there. With Laine.
I got in a cab and scrolled through notifications I’d ignored while I was away.
As the driver got on the 105, I saw Brad’s picture. I could stand to see that nutjob again. He was hamming it up in a grainy black-and-white shot while Arnie tried to run up a wall and Britt kissed Maryetta. The detail in the photo was enthralling, seven stories at once, with the alleyway itself a fully-developed character. I couldn’t look at it without smiling. I kept coming back to it and seeing new things. I moved my thumb to examine some detail in a corner and found the photographer’s credit.
Her name there in black and white, as if she was calling me.
51
laine
Pictures had become cheap. If my hard drive got full, I tossed stuff. I took so many frames that storing every single one digitally would have been unmanageable. My attitude was, if I couldn’t find it if I wanted it, it had to go. So I threw out stuff.
But film? No one threw out actual negatives, or at least Irving didn’t.
“Is this George Clooney?” I held up a clear plastic filer of 4x5 negatives.
Irving put his face next to mine and looked at it against the window. We’d been organizing his piles for weeks, and there still wasn’t much to toss.
“Yeah,” he said, taking the folder and looking closely. “Handsome guy. Unreal handsome.” He flipped me the folder. “This is pre-ER.”
“All of these were under it.” I held up a stack of folders with more negatives. “All Clooney?”
“We had three shoots, so yeah. You know, I bought the guy lunch each time. He ate like a horse. A
ctors, man. No money.”
I marked a fat file “George Clooney” with a Sharpie.
Gareth Greydon’s liver failure had put a bomb under Irving’s butt. It had a long fuse, but it was still a butt-bomb. They were the same age and had known each other at Breakfront when Gareth was a student’s parent and Irving was a teacher. Irv didn’t want to die in a pile of dust and negatives that would get thrown away.
“I have no children, but I have a legacy!” he’d said.
So we started organizing his house. The treasure went deep and wide. I had to stop myself from looking at everything so carefully we stopped working.
“Laine!” Tom called from the front room. “Your phone’s ringing!”
“Who is it?”
“Blocked number. Ignore?”
“Get it, would you?” I called back, moving a pile of boxes to get Clooney in alphabetical order. Brad and Britt were always blocked numbers, and I thought they might call me when their pics were published in Underground. I took another pile and held them against the window. “We need to get another light box.”
“We have one. It’s called the sun, and it’s free.”
“I can get you a light box, you know.”
“Miss Hotshot gets a few spreads with ‘culture’ magazines and what? She’s buying the teacher stuff?”
“Oh,” I said, looking at the next set of negatives. “Oh, my God.”
“What? You found Prince Harry?”
“Michael.”
Not just any Michael. My Michael. My Michael from the bleachers. Varsity tennis Michael. How he got mixed in with pre-ER George Clooney was an illustration of what a mess Irv’s house was, and it added to my shock.
Irv snapped the negatives from my hand. “Nice-looking kid. Move along. Go over there.” He waved me toward the piles on the other side of the room.
I plucked the negatives out of his hand. “These are mine.”
We faced off for a second before Tom came in. “There are four boxes of prints with water damage under the sink.”
“Toss,” I said.
“Keep,” Irving said at the same time.
“I’ll put them to the side,” Tom said. “We can do rock, paper, scissors later.”
“Here,” I said, giving him the clear plastic folder with Michael’s pictures. “Can you put these in my bag?”
“Sure.”
As he was walking away, I asked, “Who was on the phone?”
“They hung up.”
I attacked a new pile and didn’t give the call a second thought.
52
michael
Brad had a huge crackerbox in Bel-Air, because that was what he was told famous actors lived in. He’d been wrong, but like most things he was wrong about, he didn’t care one way or the other. He just emptied the place of any potentially adult trappings and put in stand-up video games, dart boards, three huge televisions, and a pool table. All it was missing was a dark wood bar with brass beer taps.
“What are you wearing to the thing?” Brad asked, lining up a combination shot that would tap the three and sink the nine if he were a better player.
“A tux.”
“By who? I have an Armani jacket that goes good with shorts.” He shot and missed.
“I have one in my closet. I don’t even know who.” I chalked my stick.
“You could get a comp last minute.”
“Nah. Hey, I saw that pic in Underground.”
“Yeah.” He leaned on his stick, cracking his gum.
“Laine took it.” I leaned over the table, lining up the three for an easy sink into the side pocket.
“Yeah.”
“How is she?”
“Fine.”
I missed and scratched. “Fine?”
“Yeah. She’s fine.” He plucked the cue ball out of the rack. “She runs around at night taking pictures and caught us at Grassroots. She’s got a nose for it, you know. Found Dave at Crawlers last night. He told me they hung out and got some cool shit. I’ll tell her you asked about her.”
“Alone? She runs around downtown alone?”
He lined up his shot. “Yep.”
I didn’t know what bothered me more: her toting ten thousand dollars’ worth of equipment around downtown Los Angeles at night or the fact that Brad Sinclair had intimate knowledge of her life when I didn’t. “I called her the other day,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Did she change her number?”
“Dunno, never had it before. She’s a hot shit photographer now. Maybe she’s not taking calls from nobodies.” He sank the four in a tame shot that was beneath him and did nothing to set up his next move. “What’s the face?”
“A guy picked up.”
“Look, dude,” he said, dropping the five. “You tossed her.”
“She tossed me.”
“No…”
“Yes, Brad. I was there.” I wanted to punch him, and I hadn’t wanted to punch anyone in a long time.
Brad, for his part, looked unflustered, swaggering around the table looking for his shot. “Did you fight for her, bro? Or did you just let her walk out? You know, she says she’s leaving to protect your precious career, and you just let her go? That what you did? ’Cos to me, that sounds like it’s easier to let yourself think she did it when, in fact, you broke it off. You let it happen because you were scared of all the shit going down.” He leaned over for his shot. “It’s cool, man. People do shit like that all the time, but don’t act like it was any different.”
He knocked the six into the nine in a shot that looked like pure, stupid luck. The nine spun and barely made it into the corner pocket. Brad fist-pumped.
I had the sinking feeling he was right.
I tried to shake it off, but I thought about it all the way home. Was he right? Had I let her do the dirty work I was too scared to do?
I couldn’t sleep, replaying what my father had said in the hospital, and how I’d failed to live up to what he thought of me on every level. Then I looped the scene in my house over and over. How Laine had walked out and I’d allowed it. I told myself I’d fought for her, but I was a liar. I’d snapped under the weight of people’s expectations.
I got up and sat on my patio. The view mocked me, reminding me that I was nothing, powerless, a speck in a monstrous city. I’d felt like that in plenty of cities across the Pacific, but it had been comforting. That night, the spiked lights of downtown jabbed me in the chest.
Maybe I needed to head down there. Maybe I needed to test out that sixth sense of hers. No one really knew I was back yet. I hadn’t made a call. I was still just a guy in the city. That would last another day but no more. I got into my shoes with anticipation and laced them up with hope.
53
laine
I own this city. I walk with its rhythms, run with its breath, speak its language. Los Angeles is my lover. It knows I’m a survivor. It knows what I’ve done and has found no reason to forgive me, because there has never been a sin. I am brave and strong. I have a good sense of humor. I am loyal and friendly. I have friends around every corner. Celebrities and homeless people, priests and con men. The Mexican dudes playing dice in the loading dock, the guys with the boom box outside the abandoned buildings. The businessmen and actors, the models and personal trainers. The hookers on Sunset know my name, and I know theirs. We all live here. This is our Los Angeles.
* * *
“Two pupusas, bean and cheese?” The lady in the hairnet leaned out of the food truck, three feet above me, confirming my order. She was bathed in floodlights inside the truck.
“Can I have extra curtido?”
“Si.” She made a note as my back pocket buzzed with a text from Maryetta.
—Where are you?—
I looked for a street sign and couldn’t find one. Just fifteen or more people at hastily placed card tables with white plastic backyard chairs.
—East Hollywood. Food truck
in a parking lot off the 101—
—We’re nea
r 18th and
Alameda at a thing.
Paul Messina is here. He
wants to meet you like now—
Paul Messina, the fashion magnate. A photographer did not turn down a meeting with him, no matter who they thought they were.
—I can be Downtown in ten—
The reply came as I was leaning over the hood of my car, shoving pupusas in my face. It was an address I knew well, the Messina Inc. global compound. I got in my little Audi and headed back Downtown.
54
michael
I felt as if I’d never seen downtown Los Angeles before. I’d run through it the way I’d run through everything—head down, noticing things in snippets. I saw it for the first time that night. I drove into the deepest part of the city and parked by the Whole Foods. I wasn’t lying to myself about what I was doing. I was testing myself and her, practicality against hope, just throwing the dice and hoping for sevens.
I walked the streets. No one followed. No one chased. I didn’t see a camera anywhere. The night embraced me, and when I saw a crowd, they were heading into a club hidden behind matte black paint. It was about ten o’clock at night, and the city was alive.
I’d walked a dozen foreign cities in much the same way, hands in pockets, living in the dark places, the hidden byways and underpasses. But I’d never done it at home.
My pocket dinged with a message from Brad.
—Hey, dude. Big thing at
the Messina compound—
—have fun—
—why are you being such a dud—
—I’ll get therapy—