A Conversation with the Mann (50 page)

“Don't take it bad,” Neely said. “That's just the way this town is. What you've got to understand, Hollywood … it's … You
got a minute? I want to show you something.”

I mumbled an okay.

“Dom, head back to Beechwood, then up the hill.”

Dom drove as told. We went up to Hollywood Boulevard, then piloted east.

Outside the car window passed Hollywood. The actual point-on-a-map part of Los Angeles that was Hollywood: the Chinese theater.
The walk of fame. The Capitol records building. And people. Lots of people wandering the streets who'd come to Hollywood to
be stars. Only, they weren't stars because they didn't know how to become a star, or they didn't have the talent to be a star,
or they refused to give a little hey-hey to the producer who could make them a star, so they ended up wandering the streets
of Hollywood, directionless, trying to find some reason to justify their lives while searching for a new plan to get where
they wanted to be. In the meantime … set decoration is what they were. Tinseltown extras to be used or not used, moved here
or there, or shredded up and thrown away at the whim of the self-important so that they might feel significant. Guys like
Harry Cohn. Tiny, wretched, powerful Harry Cohn.

Very suddenly I was sick of Hollywood.

I was sick of the scene and the empty shells of flesh that took up space but didn't fill it. I was tired of their lying smiles
and their air kisses and their cooing voices that told you “Dahling, but it's so good to see you” when all they cared about
was being seen. It was all so phony. Phony as the peroxide blondes who slept their way into the good mother/strong woman roles.
It was as fake as the matinee idols who spent their nights trolling the boys' clubs that poxed Santa Monica Boulevard.

I was mad at Hollywood.

I was jealous of Hollywood.

Most of all, I was bitter that Hollywood refused to do more to give me all that she had.

I was below the Hollywood sign. That's where Dom had driven us, a plateau maybe a football field south from the thirty-foot-tall
letters. About as close as you could get without making the climb.

The sign. The shining beacon I'd sought in my youth, that had been calling me most of my life. This close, it was just cheap
sheet metal and painted wood.

Dom and Neely got out of the car, and I did, too. From way up where we were you could look out over the Los Angeles basin,
spread to the horizon, the lights of the city shimmering and popping.

Neely didn't so much look at all that as admire it. “You have to understand,” he said, “guys like Harry, guys like Louis Mayer,
David Selznick, Goldwyn, Zanuck, the Warners; you have to understand them. Little guys, ugly guys, sons of immigrants who
had nothing but the dirt on their skin. Hated guys. Hated for the country they came from or their ignorant accents. Hated
for the god they picked to worship. Just plain hated.

“Then one day those guys got it in their heads to come West—California, Los Angeles, a cow town that cows wouldn't be caught
dead in. But they came out here and created something, those guys did. The movie business. They built the studios. MGM, Paramount,
Fox, and Warners. They made stars, they told stories, they spoon-fed fantasies to the whole world.”

Neely was so into his sermon, he was just about speaking in tongues.

Dom lit a smoke.

Neely: “And by the time they were done with all that, with their own bare hands they had torn an oasis up out of this useless
land. They'd built a city. They'd made a dream. They'd given us Hollywood.”

Hollywood. From my days in lumber I knew a couple of things. “Hollywood can't even grow out here. The soil's not right,” I
offered up, unimpressed. “Even the name of this place is just more of the bullshit the town uses for fertilizer.”

I sucked a deep, raspy breath, pulling into my mouth and nose dirt from the ground where I lay. It mixed with stomach juice
that burned like acid as it gushed up my throat, collecting in a greenish pool just before my face. My body rolled slightly
with a spasm. My tear-blurred eyes looked up and saw Neely, hands clenched fists from the gut shot he'd just delivered me.
He still had that smile.

Neely said at Dom: “Get him up.”

Dom's hands—big slabs of beef—were all over me, hauling me from the ground by a combination of shirt and flesh.

I heard Neely say “Over there” but could not tell what direction he meant. Fear counseled me he was talking about the edge
of the plateau.

“Oh, Jesus,” I babbled. “Jesus, God, no!”

My back slammed onto the hood of the Lincoln, caught a piece of the hood ornament. The impact forced another spew of stomach
juice from me. It gurgled over my chin and waterfalled down my chest.

“His pants,” Neely said.

“Christ, oh, Christ…”

Dom tore down my pants as much as took them off.

Barely over my own wailing, I could make out the sound of metal scraping metal. A knife opening. The touch of it to my groin
I felt through my entire body—the blade cold and hot at the same time.

I was in Florida. I could smell the humid air. I could feel the weathered wood of the gas-station wall trading its splinters
for my blood.

“I'm going to give you a choice. Jackie? Jackie, you listening to me!” A couple of slaps to the face to catch my focus. “You
got a choice. I can either cut off your little black balls …”

The tip of the blade slid over my testicles.

“Or I can chop off your big coon dick. I take your balls, you're the last nigger in your family, but at least you can fuck.
I lob off your dick—”

“Please …”

“I cut your dick off, no more catting around when you're T-Birded, but maybe they can get some juice out and you can have
a kid one day. It's up to you, Jackie.”

“Please don't. Don't le—”

“Which is it going to be?”

“I'll do anything.”

My slobbering only made him more insistent: “Dick, or balls? Dick—or—balls?” The blade shifted between the two.

I couldn't think. I could even begin to rationalize if one option was better than the other. Except for crying, I was useless.
“I … mu-my …”

“Which?”

“Don't …”

“Dick, or—”

“Please don't!”

“Which?”

“I …”

“Which?”

I puked.

“Which!”

“My …”

“Goddamm it, pick one, or I swear to God I'll cut 'em both!”

“My balls!Oh, fuck, my balls”—slobbering and pathetic—” take them … take my …”

I made myself ready, if there was such a thing, for the violence that was an instant away.

The instant never came.

I felt the knife move not into me but away from my body.

Dom unhanded me.

With nothing else holding me up, I took to the ground.

“Can you hear me, Jackie?” Neely. Close. Whispering into my ear.

I sniveled a yes.

“You've got till morning, okay? I don't care who she is, I don't care where you find her, but you've got till morning to get
yourself some little black monkey to marry, or I take your cock, your balls, and that's just for starters.”

Neely didn't say any of that with anger or hate. He said it very calm, very cool, very matter-of-fact, and that made what
he said all the more frightening.

He stood up from me, but I could still hear him clearly. “It's Harry's town, Jackie. He built it. And in Harry's town, niggers
don't fuck white women. Not the white women he owns.”

Dom started to pick me up, but Neely stopped him with “Leave him. Let him walk back. Maybe he'll find a jig along the way
to make a Mrs.”

From the ground my bleary eyes watched an odd-angled Dom and Neely get in the Lincoln and then the Lincoln drive away.

From the ground my bleary eyes looked up. The sign said:
HOLLYWOOD.

I
LAY IN THE EARTH
, in the dirt, my pants at my ankles but fully dressed in humiliation. I had been raped. My manhood, uncut, had been carved
from me. I was a shameful sight. I was ashamed. I lay and I cried.

When I was tearless, I got up, fastened my pants around me the best I could, and began a shuffle from the hills, my body stooped
as if clenched around the lingering force of Neely's blow.

Forty minutes worth of time got me to Franklin in Los Feliz. Traffic—cars and pedestrians—all passed me without thought. Torn
clothes, dirt-caked, I was a bum.

Worse.

I was a black bum, and bum that I was, I decided I needed some gas in order to complete the next leg of my journey. Booze
had been good to me the last time I'd been threatened. I'd give it a chance to be good again.

I found a liquor store, the shopkeeper's face saying “you disgust me” all the while he was selling me my drink. The alcohol
messed me up more and did nothing to even me out. Fear was an inhibitor. The phantom pain in my groin could not be drowned.
Not by the first bottle. Not by bottle numero dos.

More walking. A drunken sway along Hollywood Boulevard, south to Sunset.

I must have been a sight by the time I somehow managed myself back to the Colonial. Rank, sweaty, drunk, and smelly. I must
have been something like the missing link. A semblance of humanity but one step removed. I wanted only to hide in my room
and welcome the new day by avoiding it. I felt my pocket for my room key. It wasn't there. Lost, probably, to the ground below
the Hollywood sign. I could've just gone to the front desk, gotten a new key.

Could've.

But drunk from booze and a beating, I chose to have myself a little breakdown instead. I found a hidden chair in the back
of the lobby and returned to my new pastime of bawling like a girl. I sat there in my own filthiness, my own foulness, in
a dark corner that my own ego and lust had shoved me into: get married, or die. Where I was was a cell, and the feeling of
being trapped with the walls closing in made me bawl all the harder.

Hands.

Hands on me. Gentle, loving black hands caressing me, holding me. And a voice as sweet and kind as the touch that went with
it.

Doary. Dear, beautiful Doary. Kind, beautiful Doary. I never realized how beautiful. Her forgiving eyes. Her spun-silk skin.
Her mouth, her kissable mouth … Doary, always with the sympathetic word no matter how late the hour, no matter I gave her
the brushoff time and again. Doary. I never realized … I never … I loved Doary. It wasn't just the drink working me. In her
touch, in her grasp, there was an affection and longing—a matching loneliness of a girl who toiled so close to success and
excess, fame, and the love of the masses but always denied love herself—that the lonely boy, still very much a part of me,
could not reject.

I took Doary in my arms, pulled her close, told her: “Doary, I love you.”

She demurred, but I didn't allow her to protest. I kissed her quiet, I told her again and again how I needed her, how I had
to be with her. I told her again “I love you.”

Maybe she said something about me being a wreck, being drunk. I talked her past that. I convinced her of the absolute—we were
meant to be together. We had to be together.

Probably Doary was the one who drove us to Vegas. My state wouldn't've gotten us out of L.A. alive.

Definitely what happened shouldn't have happened, but I kept myself drunk to get us a five-dollar license and a ten-dollar
hitching.

Maybe I'd stayed liquored so I could say it wasn't the fear of threat that drove me to a wedding. A mistake of a wedding,
yeah, but a mistake I'd made without the help of a knife to my balls. I had to believe I was still my own man. My ego needed
to claim at least that. However it was, the deed was done. Miss Doary White had become Mrs. Doary Mann. And that was the punch
line: When it was all over, I'd still married a White girl.

I
CALLED
T
AMMI
. By the time I'd figured out what I could possibly tell her, word was already on the street about my marriage, Harry's goons,
no doubt, making sure that everyone knew the rumors of his starlet and Jackie Mann were just that.

Tammi, probably expecting me, didn't pick up the phone. Not the fifth time I called, not the fifteenth or the twenty-eighth.
I called over to Motown, asked for her. I got Lamont Pearl.