American Dream Machine (57 page)

I turned the engine over again and headed west. I felt the way I did when I was a child listening to
AM
radio, the Beach Boys piping out of a white plastic clock or the speaker of Teddy Sanders’s long-finned convertible: so much excitement attaching itself to everything, and to nothing at all. I drove farther down Beverly, and when I reached the more populous part of West Hollywood, by the Pacific Design Center, I pulled over and wandered into a café.

“Do I know you?”

I’d just wanted to kill the afternoon, to breathe and drowse under the palms. A voice at my elbow spoke and I looked up.

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“You look familiar,” the woman said. “Are you an actor?”

I laughed. “God, no. I’m a writer.”

She was a radiant blonde, medium height and mildly untidy. I wouldn’t say she was “gorgeous” in the conventional sense, but rather her face, an oval holding long and irregular features, gleamed with a plain light. Hazel eyes, bee-stung lips. The faint freckling of a tomboy.

“That’s the problem with Hollywood,” I added. Inside, the image of George Clooney flickered across a
TV
screen mounted on a wall above the bar. “Everyone looks like somebody else.”

She laughed. “I’m not in the movie business. But you do look familiar.”

Who knows what principle guides a life, or what makes one human being visible to another? She might’ve walked right by me on any other day.

“What do you do?”

I turned my attention away from the screen and to the girl, more interesting after all than watching an actor play a part he has a thousand times.

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

My turn to laugh. Even now I couldn’t separate myself entirely from my father’s life, its massive outline. “That figures.”

Behind her, traffic slid along Beverly Boulevard. I watched its glide-and-shine; a Mediterranean-looking woman scowling at her Blackberry at one of the tables outside; the curved purple façade of a building across the street, its painted sign reading
BLUEPRINT
.

“Have you written anything I would know?” she said.

I smiled. “Maybe.”

We talked for a while. She wore blue Keds tennis shoes and jeans, and when she left me finally—she wrote her number on a napkin and tucked it into my shirt pocket—I watched her go, watched her walk up the avenue with her golden ponytail until she was just some indistinguishable part of the landscape, a beautiful microbe in this city of millions, and I lucky to know she was.

Around me were models, waifs, girls with head shots in folders on their tables: the Casablancas Agency was just down the street. I paid my check and left them to their reckless ambition, their wish—the one that never comes true, quite—of someday being adequately seen.

Everything is everything
. My brother’s old maxim rang in my ears, those words he used to say when it was 4:00
AM
and we, in our cloudy little heads, were trying to make some sense of this irregular world we lived in.
Was that Olivia de Havilland or Joan Fontaine in that picture? Henry Gibson or Arte Johnson?
It never mattered. We were only so lucky to be alive to disagree. I walked up the block, remembering my father also, how he and his friends had once had the same arguments.
Hey, Brycie, I think you’re wrong
. The way he was when he talked, spreading his arms like he was framing the point, whichever one he was trying to make, in its most boastful physical terms, as though he were describing the apocryphal dimensions of a caught fish.
That wasn’t Al Pacino, it was Elliott Gould
. . .

Everything is everything
. Is that enough of a moral? It seemed so, as I strolled along in the golden twilight—that hour in which this city seems its most quixotic and fleeting, in which the palms are bronze like weathercocks and the girls along the boulevards are all twenty-three years old. My father was born a freak, and he died the same way. He grew into an ordinary American, just like me. I walked back to my car, started up my engine, and headed
toward the beach. Somewhere west, the Dream Machine lumbered on under the guidance of different people, kids who grew younger and less respectful every year. (Teddy Sanders? He’s dead now, or at least retired. He would’ve been the first to tell you this was the same thing. Milt Schildkraut? Alive! Always, alive!) The agents were yawning at their desks, eating the rag ends of their afternoon power bars, leaving word with their clients and the studios. I crossed La Cienega, like any true native, too, indivisible from my car, half man and half steel. To my right were those high, rolling hills with their platformed houses and terraced swimming pools, those epic views that went on for miles. The radio played my favorite song, the one about blossom worlds and colorful clothes. The one that always makes me Smile.

And this girl? Reader, I married her. We live by the water, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I don’t disclose any more than that, except to note that we have a life so ordinary it would bore even Beau, that monster of the common, to hear of it. This is all any of us have: myself, Severin, Williams, our dads. Even Sharon Stone spends her afternoons sighing with boredom, although no one speaks of it. We pretend our tedium extinguishes in glamour. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I said at the beginning this story would have little to do with me. Perhaps it does, and perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps this is my father’s life, or yours. I don’t know. Unless I am wrong, yet again, and it is
all
mine: mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. My horror and my happiness, my capital and my gains, my hope and my idiocy, my falsity and my fairness, my deformity and my energy, my revolt and my appeal, my exaggerations, my accuracy, my memory, my grief, my embarrassment, my exuberance, my despondency, my ridiculousness, my overdose, my money, my dads, my penury, my failure, my maternity, my murder, my betrayal, my funeral and my trial, my gossip, my perversion, my revenge, my forgiveness, my entrance, my finale, my authorship, my punishment, my sentences, my tragedy, my escape, my vanity, my labor and my estate, my beach and my boys, my summertime and my eternal spring, my, my, my, my (
AAAHHH
) elations!

My deepest thanks to Virginia Specktor, Fred Specktor, Nancy Heller, Jonas Heller, Jonathan Lethem, Katherine Taylor, John Hilgart, Sean Howe, Sam Feirstein, George Nolfi, Joanna Yas, Strawberry Saroyan, Gretchen Kreiger, Maryse Meijer, Jodie Burke, Morgan Macgregor, Deirdre McDermott, Catherine Park, Christian McLaughlin, Kate Zenna, King’s Road Café.

Tony Perez, Nanci McCloskey, Lee Montgomery, and everyone at Tin House. Marc Gerald and Janelle Andrews. Kassie Evashevski and Dan Erlij. Kimberly Burns.

The
Los Angeles Review of Books
.

I am indebted to Frank Rose’s excellent history of William Morris,
The Agency
.