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“How’d you know he was an actor?”

“I just assumed. The guy has presence.”

Alan told her he wanted to talk. She came in, looked at the burned photograph of Tech. Made a face, ran a palm edge on the desktop to sweep blackened fragments.

“What do you think?”

“That guy? Sexy. Reminds me of like Oliver Reed in a really bad mood.”

“Oliver Reed is always in a bad mood.”

“He’s incredible. Can he act?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t read him.”

“What were you doing in here?”

Alan didn’t answer. Still shaken by the odd behavior. Lauren came behind, massaged his shoulders. “You like him, don’t you?”

Alan said he didn’t.

“You like him.”

“No. He’s not what I want.”

She nodded; unconvinced.

Alan thought more and called to her as she walked to the door. “Call the gate. See if you can catch him before he splits. Try and get a phone number on the guy.”

She nodded, closed the door. Alan didn’t feel good. His head ached. And Corea gave him the creeps.

A “charming phony.”

Fuck
him.

T
o get to Palm Springs from L.A., you stroked your armpits with surfboard wax, poured your car its favorite beverage, and tried to go into a trance for a couple hours. The drive during July was a bad, sticky drag that made people want to punch little kids in the mouth just because they asked for an ice cream.

The freeway went through weird, spectral places like Cucamonga or Azusa and smog wiped grimy hands over everything, making the trip like a ride through a muffler. For geeks into bug organs on glass, it was major.

Every weekend, people in the business flocked to the “Springs”; solar lemmings. It was hot and dry and easy to score; coke, cock, cunt. Control. In forty-eight hours, players big and small could make the round trip. Brown in the sun. Have drinks. Set up deals. Make connections. Play tennis.

Lie.

Business didn’t stop in Hollywood on weekends. It just moved and used a net. The Tijuana wristwatch hustle kept rolling 125 miles south under a welding sun.
But
really it was another workday. The sun beat down on the crazies, an interrogation lamp, and deals sweated along with everything else.

Alan downshifted his 928S as a bunch of Big Mac hyenas in a rowdy Trans Am cut him off, laughing mindlessly, dragging an unleaded tail. Two sixteen-year-old girls in back smiled through ghoul makeup and lifted blouses. Their dumpling breasts shook, mimicking the road; D-cup toys. Then, the car vanished.

Alan pushed his CD player on and cranked the volume on Concrete Blonde’s “BLOODLETTING” to ten. Another hour to go. He hoped his father was in a good mood.

Or at least not a bad one.

He roared in front of La Petite Gallerie about noon. The Springs was already on broil and the sun speared him the second he snuffed the engine and got out. He stretched a cello spine, reached back in, tossed his CD and cassette box behind the seat, in shade. Big mistake leaving tapes in an obvious spot. He’d done it once and come back to find a Dolby sundae.

No different from what this place did to its population, he thought, starting to sweat. Took fine people with good brains, treated them like butter in a frying pan. “Sssssszzzzzzzzzz … honey, I don’t feel so good.” Too long on the fairway, your brain is running down your tie.

Alan grabbed the gift he’d brought for his dad’s birthday and headed in the fancy front door. Much cooler
inside; a meat locker. He straightened his hair, strolled through, taking note of inventory that had come in since his visit a month back.

Magrittes. Two of them.
This Is Not a Pipe.
One of Alan’s favorites. Magritte would’ve been a trip to have a Heineken with. The bottle would drink him.

At the curving, teak counter, Alan’s father, Burt, was chatting with a woman in her seventies who looked very rich. She dressed Town and Country summer chic, with emerald-and-diamond bracelets cuffing wrinkled wrists, hair pulled Grace Kelly tight. Burt always had Broadway show music playing in the gallery; never got all those years he’d directed in New York off the turntable.

Give me a break, Dad, thought Alan. We’re in the fuckin’ nineties here, this isn’t Brigadoon; get used to it.

“Alan!”

“Dad! Listen, don’t let me interrupt. Looks like you got a live one here.” He was talking loud enough for Grace Kelly’s hair to hear and she smiled tautly.

Burt raised a smile that kept a polite distance. It had always been that way, thought Alan, and it seemed things never changed. Never got easier.

Never got more personal.

Alan realized it had been the challenge of his childhood to seek his effect on his father by trying to surpass himself. Jokes. Gifts. Accomplishments. Money. Anything that could be measured. Admired. Objectified. All to get enthusiasm from a man he sensed deep down wasn’t capable of it. But Alan knew he’d always keep trying anyway.

It wasn’t that his father withheld love. Or had none. It was trickier. The love was all there. Just that Burt wasn’t.
He was lost, preoccupied, pointing his telescope away from earth, at topics and issues, not human intimacy.

Since he’d retired from Broadway, and come to the Springs, it seemed to Alan it had gotten worse. Burt railed about lofty ideals but never spoke about personal stuff. It was always “the integrity of art” kind of shit. Life in the pauperized culture. Alan’s mother, Dee, had managed to keep Burt at sixes and sevens with it all. But since she was gone and Burt had remarried to Wanda, he’d become a bad Breslin column; half soapbox, half water balloon.

Wanda, not exactly Ariel Durant, wasn’t able to give Burt much perspective since she had the depth of a serving platter. Alan had never felt she was good enough for his father, but Burt had few complaints. She was his twenty-eight-year-old doll and made him happy no matter how much of a snipped kite she was. The word
dip
came to mind when contemplating Wanda. So did the word
user.
But Alan could never allow himself to say that to his father. It would’ve stabbed what little communication they’d managed over the years. It just wasn’t worth unscrewing the bulb over a woman who couldn’t understand peanut butter.

And it didn’t help that Alan was hormonally thrilled by the sight of her. When the sun hit her just right, like a crew of overhead lighting techs, he could see himself in bed with her. Lost in tight little muscle caves. Sometimes he thought it would be so easy to just—

Burt grabbed Alan’s shoulders.

“Hey, you made great time. Played Pac-Man with your radar gun, huh?”

The two laughed. But it was that strained sound that
doesn’t make you think either person is that happy about things. Burt’s grape-green eyes blinked, waiting for Alan to fill in the blank. Alan was feeling it again; the way his dad always put him in that position. Waiting for Alan to do something. Expecting him to say something. Perform for him. Please the director. It was these moments Alan could see himself loading the chamber and pressing the barrel against Burt’s—

“… happy birthday, Dad.” Alan walked closer, gave his father a big hug. Burt smiled, hugged back.

See, it was things like that that drove Alan into the wall. Burt would hug like some big, loving, Italian father, then let go and stare. Not say a word. “Zorba goes zombie,” Dee used to say.

“Hungry?” Alan asked, even though what he really wanted to say was, “Dad, I’m uncomfortable in your company, but I love you and I wish maybe together we could work on it and make it better. What do you say?”

But he couldn’t. He’d opted for the safe topic. The habit. Anyway, he was only down for the day. How do you fix thirty-four years of being politely estranged from someone who gave you life and can barely see you, in an afternoon?

“Starved. I was thinking you’d be getting here around now, so I skipped breakfast. Wanda went shopping … picking me up something at the last second, no doubt.”

They walked toward the front door.

“How is Wanda, Dad?”

“Looks younger every day. I think her next birthday she’ll be what …?”

“Twelve?”

“Hey! I got a crazy idea for lunch. Little different than we planned. Okay with you?”

Alan shrugged. Smiled. It was nice to be with his dad.

The tram car tipped from the platform and groaned free, suspended by arm-thick cables. It had been made by the same firm that rigged the ones in Switzerland, which crept up snow-frosted mountains, snail-shuttling wool caps; red noses.

Burt was moving from side to side, staring out the window, acting like Mr. Gyroscope.

Alan felt sick.

“Ever been up this thing? You’ll love it. It’s a kick. Goes from the desert floor, thousands of feet up. Snow up there, too. Believe it? We’re going to eat in the snow. Crazy place to live.”

Alan acknowledged the wonder of it all by closing his eyes, trying to plug a cold sweat. Don’t pass out, you fucker, he told himself. It’s your Dad’s fucking birthday. Don’t be an asshole. Stay calm.

“Hey.” Burt was pointing. “Over there. Mountain goat.”

He ran a tanned hand over the railing under the window. “I mention your sister sent me a card? Cute message. The marriage must be wobbling, though. Loren didn’t sign it. Just her and the kids.” Burt gestured philosophically.

Alan always dug Loren. But when he and Marie had this garlic/vampire effect on each other, it was hard to like either one. Good was quickly pleated into anger and
destruction when they got around each other. But the kids were gorgeous. They made beautiful children together.

“Yeah, I don’t talk to them too much. Owe them a call I think.” Had to be four months. Alan and Marie had little in common. He’d tried. She’d tried. They just couldn’t get the horizontal and vertical right.

Father and son nodded in a way that moated off further discussion. Alan’s sister wasn’t an area for pleasant conversation. Burt and Marie were as different as there and gone and the future dimmed when you considered the stuff that comprised their basic cores. Forget it, thought Alan. That relationship just washed up on shore one day and headed off onto the island of life in two separate directions.

“Just too independent for her own good. Never did get with her outlook.” Burt looked over the retreating Springs. “But one hell of a cute card. Real sweet. Hey, you still living in that house at the beach? That murder place? Why don’t you move?”

“It was a great deal. Told you. And it’s an incredible spot.”

“I couldn’t live there.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Violent death clings to things.”

“Nice phrase. Junior college?”

A competing smile.

“Anyway, I never think about what happened.” It was a lie.

“I think it’s very weird you don’t think it’s weird. I couldn’t live there. Upset me too much.”

“What’re you talking about? Palm Springs is fucking
death row. Everybody listening to their Grecian Formula dry. Waiting to kick.”

“Oh, that’s a nice thought …”

Alan felt his colon trapeze as the tram car hitched over one of the towers that guided it up the mountain. He gripped the handrail. Burt noticed.

“Afraid of heights? Shoulda told me.”

Alan managed a smile. “Falling. Afraid of falling. Different.”

Burt laughed, silver, Sinatra hair shimmering. He steadied Alan, wanted to talk about a film Warner’s was thinking about offering him to direct. He told Alan it would be a joint production between a French financier and Warner’s and would star Julie Naughton.

“She’s still alive?” Alan remembered Julie from when he was a kid and his dad almost killed her with his bare hands.

Julie had been an impossibly gifted, anorexic nightingale, and basic renaissance loon, with so much scar tissue on her wrists, her hands seemed attached by skin-zippers. She was egotistical and demanding; a
Bell Jar
Mary Martin.

Eight years back, when Alan was still at 20th, executive story editing a
G.Q.
cop show, and his dad was between musicals, Burt had directed Julie and Dru Simone, an annoyingly moody ex-model and recovered heroin addict, in a two-woman
Grand Guignol
three-act for a Central Park summer festival. The play was about two sarcastic lesbians who shared clitoral intimacy up to the moment one, armed with scissors she’d been using to snip tampon coupons, reduced the other to entrails, then committed suicide, gulping a Smith and Wesson.

The play, titled
East Infection
, had been written by a bitter but witty androgyne who later put his/her head in an oven and died as a slightly confused roast. Opening night, it had sickened theater critic Frank Rich, who closed the show.

Burt had been cited in all major criticisms, and
Newsweek
had referred to him as a former footlight wunderkind whose every good instinct had simply “dropped dead.”

One thankfully brief
Esquire
blurb had said the play was a “drill with no bit which still managed to bore. No one was sorry when the lesbian murder-suicide was over and the single regret was the play hadn’t opened with it.”

Still, Burt and Julie had mostly gotten along and always sworn they’d find a project, up the line, to do together. Mademoiselle Simone had retired from performing altogether, after two badly received, excessively cheery films she’d done in Australia lost huge money. She eventually opened a chain of croissant-themed sandwich places which sprang up all over America like poppies.

“Howard the Dyke …” was all Alan said, teasing Burt with his usual joke about
East Infection
’s reviews.

Burt smiled tightly. “Got your mom’s sense of humor, telling you. If you’d taken after me, they’d’ve thrown you out of TV a long time ago. I’m too damn serious. Can’t do humor. Different mind-set. Lighter, I suppose.” He coughed. “Hey, I ever ask you if you know Norman Lear?”

A hundred times.

Alan spilled a little of his vodka and tonic onto Norman’s arm at the bar at a Writers Guild strike meeting once. Norman was decent about it.

“Yeah. Great guy.”

“Gotta hand it to him. Guy takes prejudice, turns it into an entertainment empire. It’s impressive.”