Hollywood (4 page)

So, there I was over 65 years old, looking for my first house. I remembered how my father had virtually mortgaged his whole life to buy a house. He had told me, “Look, I’ll pay for one house in my lifetime and when I die you’ll get that house and then in your lifetime you’ll pay for a house and when you die you’ll leave those houses to your son. That’ll make two houses. Then your son will...”

The whole process seemed terribly slow to me: house by house, death by death. Ten generations, ten houses. Then it would take just one person to gamble all those houses away, or burn them down with a match and then run down the street with his balls in a fruit-picker’s pail.

Now I was looking for a house I really didn’t want and I was going to write a screenplay I really didn’t want to write. I was beginning to lose control and I realized it but I seemed unable to reverse the process.

The first realtor we stopped at was in Santa Monica. It was called TwentySecond Century Housing. Now, that was modern.

Sarah and I got out of the car and walked in. There was a young fellow at the desk, bow tie, nice striped shirt, red suspenders. He looked hip. He was shuffling papers at his desk. He stopped and looked up.

“Can I help you?”

“We want to buy a house,” I said.

The young fellow just turned his head to one side and kept looking away. A minute went past. Two minutes.

“Let’s go,” I said to Sarah.

We got back into the car and I started the engine.

“What was all that about?” Sarah asked.

“He didn’t want to do business with us. He took a reading and he thought we were indigent, worthless. He thought we would waste his time.”

“But it’s not true.”

“Maybe not, but the whole thing made me feel as if I was covered with slime.”

I drove the car along, hardly knowing where I was going.

Somehow, that had hurt. Of course, I was hungover and I needed a shave and I always wore clothing that somehow didn’t seem to fit me quite right and maybe all the years of poverty had just given me a certain look. But I didn’t think it was wise to judge a man from the outside like that. I would much rather judge a man on the way he acted and spoke.

“Christ,” I laughed, “maybe nobody will sell us a house!”

“The man was a fool,” said Sarah.

“TwentySecond Century Housing is one of the largest real estate chains in the state.”

“The man was a fool,” Sarah repeated.

I still felt diminished. Maybe I was a jerk-off of some kind. All I knew how to do was to type—sometimes.

Then we were in a hilly area driving along.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Topanga Canyon,” Sarah answered.

“This place looks fucked.”

“It’s all right except for floods and fires and burned-out-neohippy types.”

Then I saw the sign: APES HAVEN. It was a bar. I pulled up alongside and we got out. There was a cluster of bikes outside. Sometimes called hogs.

We went in. It was damn near full. Fellows in leather jackets. Fellows wearing dirty scarfs. Some of the fellows had scabs on their faces. Others had beards that didn’t grow quite right. Most of the eyes were pale blue and round and listless. They sat very still as if they had been there for weeks.

We found a couple of stools.

“Two beers,” I said, “anything in a bottle.”

The barkeep trotted off.

The beers came back and Sarah and I had a hit.

Then I noticed a face thrust forward along the bar looking at us. It was a very fat round face, a touch imbecilic. It was a young man and his hair and his beard were a dirty red, but his eyebrows were pure white. His lower lip hung down as if an invisible weight were pulling at it, the lip was twisted and you saw the inner lip and it was wet and it shimmered.

“Chinaski,” he said, “son of a bitch, it’s CHINASKI!”

I gave a small wave, then looked straight ahead.

“One of my readers,” I said to Sarah.

“Oh oh,” she said.

“Chinaski,” I heard a voice to my right.

“Chinaski,” I heard another voice.

A whiskey appeared before me. I lifted it, “Thank you, fellows!” and I knocked it off.

“Go easy,” said Sarah, “you know how you are. We’ll never get out of here.”

The bartender brought another whiskey. He was a little guy with dark red blotches all over his face. He looked meaner than anybody in there. He just stood there, staring at me.

“Chinaski,” he said, “the world’s greatest writer.”

“If you insist,” I said and raised the glass of whiskey. Then I passed it to Sarah who knocked it off.

She gave a little cough and set the glass down.

“I only drank that to help save you.”

Then there was a little group gathering slowly behind us.

“Chinaski. Chinaski. . . Motherfuck. . . I’ve read all your books, ALL YOUR BOOKS!...I can kick your ass, Chinaski .„. . Hey, Chinaski, can you still get it up?...Chinaski, Chinaski, can I read you one of my poems?”

I paid the barkeep and we backed off our stools and moved toward the door. Again I noticed the leather jackets and the
blandness
of the faces and the feeling that there wasn’t much joy or daring in any of them. There was something totally missing in the poor fellows and something in me wrenched, for just a moment, and I felt like throwing my arms around them, consoling and embracing them like some Dostoyevsky, but I knew that would finally lead nowhere except to ridicule and humiliation, for myself and for them. The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy. It was something we would all have to work for once again.

And they followed us out. “Chinaski, Chinaski...Who’s your beautiful lady? You don’t deserve her, man!...Chinaski, come on, stay and drink with us! Be a good guy! Be like your writing, Chinaski! Don’t be a prick!”

They were right, of course. We got in the car and I started the engine and we drove slowly through them as they crowded around us, slowly giving way, some of them blowing kisses, some of them giving me the finger, a few beating on the windows. We got through.

We made it to the road and drove along.

“So,” said Sarah, “those are your readers?”

“That’s most of them, I think.”

“Don’t any intelligent people read you?”

“I hope so.”

We kept driving along not saying anything. Then Sarah asked, “What are you thinking about?”

“Dennis Body.”

“Dennis Body? Who’s that?”

“He was my only friend in grammar school. I wonder whatever happened to him.”

As we drove along, I saw it: Rainbow Realty.

I pulled up in front. The parking area was not paved and there were large potholes and ruts everywhere. I located the flatest surface, then parked. We got out and walked to the office. The door was open and a fat dirty white chicken sat there. I nudged it with my foot. It stood up, emitted a bit of matter and walked into the office, found a place in the corner and sat down again.

There was a lady at the desk, mid-forties, thin, with straight mud-colored hair embossed with a paper flower, red. She was drinking a beer and smoking a Pall Mall.

“Shit, howdy!” she greeted us, “looking for a place, roundabouts?”

“You might say,” I answered.

“Well, say it then! Ha, ha, ha!”

She knocked her beer off, handed me a card:

Lila stood up.

“Follow me...”

She didn’t lock the office. She got into her car. It was a ‘62 Comet. I knew because I once had a ‘62 Comet. In fact, it looked like the same one I had sold for junk.

We followed her up a rural winding dirt road. We drove for some minutes. I noted the absence of street lights. Also, on each side of the road were deep canyons. I made a note that driving along there at night with a few drinks in you could be hazardous.

Finally, we pulled up in front of an unpainted wooden house. Well, it had been painted, once, a long time ago but the weather had worn away almost all the paint that had been a henshit white to begin with. The house seemed to sag forward and to the left—our left, as we got out of the car. It was a big house, looked homey, earthy.

All of this, I thought, because I’ve accepted an advance to write a screenplay and because I’ve got a tax consultant.

We walked up on the porch and the boards, of course, sagged under our weight. I scaled in at 228, most of it fat instead of muscle. My fighting days were over. To think I had once weighed 144 pounds on a 6-foot frame: the grand old starving days when I was writing the good stuff.

Lila beat on the front door.

“Darlene, honey? You decent? You better be because our butts are a-comin’ in! Got some folks who wanna see your castle! Ha, ha, ha!”

Lila pushed the door open and we walked in.

It was dark inside and it smelled like there was a turkey burning in the oven. Also, there was the feeling of shadowy winged creatures floating about. A light bulb hung down from a cord. The insulation had peeled away and you could see the bare wire. I felt something like a cold wind at the back of my neck. Then I realized it was only a rush of fear. I shook that idea off with the thought, this place has got to be really cheap.

Then Darlene emerged from the darkness. Big lipstick mouth. Hair in all directions. Eyes gushing kindness to cover up years of waste. She was fat in blue jeans and faded flower blouse. Two earrings like eyeballs, they hung there swinging a bit, those blue irises. She was holding a rolled joint. She rushed forward.

“Lila, you chippy! What’s hangin’?”

Lila took the joint from Darlene’s hand, took a drag, handed it back.

“How’s your ol’ peg-legged-fool-of-a-brother, Willy?”

“Oh, shit, he just got thrown in county jail. He’s scared shitless they’re gonna get him in the ass!”

“Don’t worry, honey, he’s too hog-ugly.”

“You really think so?”

“Really.”

“I hope so!”

Then we were introduced around. Then there was silence. We stood there as if we had lost all power of thought, of what we were about. I rather liked it. I thought, well, this is all right, I can stand around here as long as anybody. I concentrated on the twisted wire of the light bulb cord.

A tall thin man slowly entered. He walked toward us, one stiff leg at a time. He put one leg forward and then deliberately followed it with the other. He was like a blind man without a cane. He came toward us. His face was a mass of beard and the thick hair was twisted, tangled. But he had beautiful eyes, a dark dark green. Emeralds for eyes. The sucker was worth something. And he had a
big
smile
. He walked closer. Stopped and kept
smiling
,
smiling
.

“This is my husband,” said Darlene, “this is Double Quartet.”

He nodded. Sarah and I nodded back.

Lila leaned toward me, whispered, “They both usta be in the movie business.”

Sarah was getting tired of the time all this took.

“Well, let’s have a look at the place!”

“Why,
sure
, honey, you all bring your ass and folia me...”

We followed Lila into the other room and as we did I glanced back. I saw Double Quartet take the joint from Darlene and have a drag.

Jesus, he had such great eyes; eyes are truly the reflection of the soul. But, damn, that
big
big
smile
ruined it all.

We were evidently in the dining room or the front room. There was no furniture. There was an empty water bed nailed to one of the walls and across the vtater bed, scrawled in red paint was:

THE SPIDER SINGS ALONE

“Looka this,” Lila said, “look at that yard. Some nice land!”

We looked out of the window. The yard was like the road, only more so: large potholes, neglected mounds of dirt and rock. And out there, sitting all by itself, upright, was a lone, discarded toilet. The lid was missing.

“That’s nice,” I said, “kind of odd.”

“These here people are ARTISTS,” said our realtor.

We stepped back. I touched the curtain that covered the window. Where I touched it a piece of the curtain dropped away.

“These here people are
deep
inside,” said Lila. “They just don’t bother with the
ordinaries
, you know.”

We went upstairs and the stairway was solid, strangely so. It was good and true, and I felt a little better then, walking up there.

All that there was in the bedroom was a waterbed but this one was full. It sat in the far corner, lonely by itself. One strange thing, there was a large swelling at one edge. It gave the impression of an explosion to come.

The bathroom was tiled but the floor had gone unwashed for so long that the tiles had almost disappeared in the smear of dirt and footprints.

The toilet was brown-crusted, forever. No ever changing that. There was crust upon crust upon crust. It was worse than any toilet I had ever seen in any dive, in any bar I had ever been in, and I began to gag at the memory of all those crappers and at the thought of this one here. I walked out for a moment, steadied myself, inhaled, made up my mind not to think about any of it, and then re-entered the bathroom.

“Sorry,” I said.

Lila understood. “Shit, pard,” she said. “It’s all right...”

I didn’t look in the bathtub but did note that somebody had scrawled with various colored paints on the wall over the bathtub:

IF TIM LEARY AIN’T GOD,

THEN GOD IS DEAD.

MY FATHER DIED IN THE

ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE

AND THE DEVIL HAS A

PUSSY

CHARLES LINDBERG WAS

A

COCKSUCKER

There were a few other messages painted here and there but they were smeared and garbled and difficult to read.

“I’m gonna let you two wander about, you know, so you can get the feel. Buying a home is a real head-shaker. I don’t want to rush you none.”

Then Lila left. We heard her going down the stairway. Sarah and I stepped out into the hallway. Hanging near us, from a frayed rope, was an old rusted coffeepot.

“Oh my god,” Sarah said suddenly, “my god!”

“What is it?”

“I’ve seen photos of this house before! I remember now! I thought it looked familiar!”

“What? What is it?”

“This is one of the houses where Charles Manson killed somebody!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Let’s get out of here...”

We went on down the stairway. They were waiting for us down there: Lila, Darlene and Double Quartet.

“Well,” asked Lila, “what do you think?”

“I’ve got your card with your phone number,” I told her, “We can get in touch.”

“If you people are artists,” said Darlene, “we can knock some off the price. We like artists. Are you artists?”

“No,” I said. “Well, I’m not, anyhow.”

“I can show you some more places,” said Lila.

“No, no,” said Sarah, “we’ve seen enough today. We have to rest up.”

We had to push past them, and all the time Double Quartet just kept
smiling
,
smiling
...