Hollywood (6 page)

“Don’t sign that crap then,” said Sarah.

“Never,” I said.

I found a piece of paper, then wrote on it;

“Vin: I can’t do it. This is a nightmare in hell!”

Then I jammed everything into the stamped return envelope and pushed it away to mail later.

“It’s been a long day,” said Sarah.

“And Charles Manson is not the only killer,” I added.

“You know,” she said, “he bumped them right off. The others do it from a distance and seldom get caught.”

“Let’s drink a while,” I said, “and readjust to our own reality.”

“Let’s drink until the sun comes up.”

“Really?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You’re on,” I said, already feeling much better.

The place I was living in at that time did have some qualities. One of the finest was the bedroom which was painted a dark, dark blue. That dark dark blue had provided a haven for many a hangover, some of them brutal enough to almost kill a man, especially at a time when I was popping pills which people would give me without my bothering to ask what they were. Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die. I would walk around alone all night, from the bedroom to the bathroom and from the bathroom through the front room and into the kitchen. I opened and closed the refrigerator, time and time again. I turned the faucets on and off. Then I went to the bathroom and turned the faucets on and off. I flushed the toilet. I pulled at my ears. I inhaled and exhaled. Then, when the sun came up, I knew I was safe. Then I would sleep with the dark dark blue walls, healing.

Another feature of that place were the knocks of unsavory women at 3 or 4 a.m. They certainly weren’t ladies of great charm, but having a foolish turn of mind, I felt that somehow they brought me adventure. The real fact of the matter was that many of them had no place else to go. And they liked the fact that there was drink and that I didn’t work too hard trying to bed down with them.

Of course, after I met Sarah, this part of my lifestyle changed quite a bit.

That neighborhood around Carlton Way near Western Avenue was changing too. It had been almost all lower-class white, but political troubles in Central America and other parts of the world had brought a new type of individual to the neighborhood. The male usually was small, a dark or light brown, usually young. There were wives, children, brothers, cousins, friends. They began filling up the apartments and courts. They lived many to an apartment and I was one of the few whites left in the court complex.

The children ran up and down, up and down the court walkway. They all seemed to be between two and seven years old. They had no bikes or toys. The wives were seldom seen. They remained inside, hidden. Many of the men also remained inside. It was not wise to let the landlord know how many people were living in a single unit. The few men seen outside were the legal renters. At least they paid the rent. How they survived was unknown. The men were small, thin, silent, unsmiling. Most sat on the porch steps in their undershirts, slumped forward a bit, occasionally smoking a cigarette. They sat on the porch steps for hours, motionless. Sometimes they purchased very old junk automobiles and the men drove them slowly about the neighborhood. They had no auto insurance or driver’s licenses and they drove with expired license plates. Most of the cars had defective brakes. The men almost never stopped at the corner stop sign and often failed to heed red lights, but there were few accidents. Something was watching over them.

After a while the cars would break down but my new neighbors wouldn’t leave them on the street. They would drive them up the walkways and park them directly outside their door. First they would work on the engine. They would take off the hood and the engine would rust in the rain. Then they would put the car on blocks and remove the wheels. They took the wheels inside and kept them there so they wouldn’t be stolen at night.

While I was living there, there were two rows of cars lined up in the court, just sitting there on blocks. The men sat motionless on their porches in their undershirts. Sometimes I would nod or wave to them. They never responded. Apparently they couldn’t understand or read the eviction notices and they tore them up, but I did see them studying the daily L. A. papers. They were stoic and durable because compared to where they had come from, things were now easy.

Well, no matter. My tax consultant had suggested I purchase a house, and so for me it wasn’t really a matter of “white flight.” Although, who knows? I had noticed that each time I had moved in Los Angeles over the years, each move had always been to the North and to the West.

Finally, after a few weeks of house hunting, we found the one. After the down payment the monthly payments came to $789.81. There was a huge hedge in front on the street and the yard was also in front so the house sat way back on the lot. It looked like a damned good place to hide. There was even a stairway, an upstairs with a bedroom, bathroom and what was to become my typing room. And there was an old desk left in there, a huge ugly old thing. Now, after decades, I was a writer with a desk. Yes, I felt the fear, the fear of becoming like them. Worse, I had an assignment to write a screenplay. Was I doomed and damned, was I about to be sucked dry? I didn’t feel it would be that way. But does anybody, ever?

Sarah and I moved our few possessions in.

The big moment came. I sat the typewriter down on the desk and I put a piece of paper in there and I hit the keys. The typewriter still worked. And there was plenty of room for an ashtray, the radio and the bottle. Don’t let anybody tell you different. Life begins at 65.

Down at the Marina del Rey times were getting hard. For transportation Jon Pinchot was driving a green 1968 Pontiac convertible and François Racine drove a brown 1958 Ford. They also had two Kawasaki motorcycles, a 750 and a 1000.

Wenner Zergog had borrowed the 1958 Ford and by driving the car without putting water in the radiator had cracked the engine block.

“He’s a genius,” Jon told me. “He doesn’t know about such things.”

The motorcycles were the first to go. The 1958 was used for shorter trips.

Then François Racine packed off for France. Jon sold the 1958 Ford.

And then, of course, the day came when the phone rang and there was Jon.

“I’ve got to move. They are going to tear this place down and build a hotel or something. Shit, I don’t know where to go. I’d like to stay in town and work out a deal for your screenplay. How’s that thing coming along?”

“Oh, it’s coming...”

“I’m close to a deal. And if it falls through I’ve got a guy in Canada. But I’ve got to move. The bulldozers are on the way.”

“Listen, Jon, you can stay at our place. We’ve got a downstairs bedroom.”

“You mean that?”

“Sure...”

“I’ll be out most of the time. You won’t know I’m there.”

“You still have that 1968 Pontiac?”

“Yes...”

“Then put your stuff in and come on over...”

I walked downstairs and told Sarah. “Jon is moving in for a while.”

“What?”

“Jon Pinchot. They’re going to bulldoze his place. He’ll be staying here a while.”

“Hank, you know you can’t stand living with people. It will drive you crazy.”

“It will just be for a little while...”

“You’ll be upstairs typing and he’ll be downstairs listening. It won’t work.”

“I’ll make it work. Jon has paid me money to write this thing.”

“Good luck,” she said, then turned and walked into the kitchen.

The first two nights weren’t bad: Jon and Sarah and I just drank and talked. Jon told some stories, mostly about problems with actors and what he had had to do to get them to perform. There was one fellow, halfway through a shooting, who suddenly refused to talk. He would rehearse the scenes but he wouldn’t speak. He was demanding that a certain scene be shot as he wished. They were in the middle of a jungle somewhere and running out of time and money. Finally Jon told the actor, “Shit, have it your way!” And the actor acted out the scene his way, with dialog. Only he didn’t know that there wasn’t any film in the camera. After that, there were no problems.

It was on the second night that the wine really flowed. I did some talking myself, mostly repeat stuff, stuff that I had already typed up long ago. It was early in the a.m. when Jon said, “Giselle has fallen in love with a director with one ball...”

Giselle was Jon’s girlfriend in Paris.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Only it’s worse now. Cancer. They have cut out the other ball too. Giselle is very very distraught.”

“It sure seems like bad luck.”

“Yes, yes, I write her, I phone her...I do all I can to help. And there they are in the middle of a shooting...”

(Everything always happened in the middle of a shooting.)

Giselle was a famous actress in France. She shared an apartment with Jon in Paris.

We attempted to cheer Jon up about his girlfriend’s bad luck. He unpeeled a long cigar, licked it, bit off the end, lit up, inhaled and let out the first plume of exotic smoke.

“You know, Hank, I always knew that you would write a screenplay for me. There are things that a man knows instinctively. I’ve known this for a long time. And I’ve been searching for the money to do this for a long time, long before I contacted you.”

“Maybe I’ll write a very bad screenplay.”

“You won’t. I’ve read everything you’ve written.”

“That’s past. In the writing profession there are more has-beens than anything else.”

“This does not apply to you.”

“I believe he’s right, Hank,” said Sarah, “you’re just a natural-ass writer.”

“But a
screenplay
! Shit, it’s like I’ve been roller skating and now you put me on an ice rink!”

“You’ll do it. I know you’ll do it, I knew you would do it when I was in Russia.”

“Russia?”

“Yes, before I met you I went to Russia looking for the money to produce your future screenplay.”

“Which I didn’t know anything about yet.”

“Exactly. Only I knew. Anyhow, I heard from a reliable source that there was a woman in Russia who had $80 million in a Swiss account.”

“Sounds like a cheap TV thriller.”

“Yes, I know. But I checked. I have sources for this kind of thing that are very good. I can’t tell you too much about them.”

“We don’t want to know,” said Sarah.

“So I found out the lady’s address. And then began the long slow process. I began writing the lady letters...”

“What did you do?” asked Sarah, “put in frontal nude photos?”

“Or anal nudes?” I asked.

“Not at first. At first the letters were quite formal. I told her that I had come upon her address in the strangest way, that I had found it scribbled on a tiny piece of paper in a shoe box in a closet in Paris. I suggested that we might be destined. Oh, you have no idea how hard I worked on those letters!”

“You’d do all this to get money to produce a movie?”

“More than that!”

“Would you kill?”

“Please don’t ask me that. Anyway, I sent letter after letter, gradually turning them into love letters.”

“I didn’t know you knew Russian,” said Sarah.

“I wrote the letters in French. The lady had an interpreter. The lady responded in Russian and then my interpreter put them into the French.”

“They wouldn’t use that even in a cheap TV thriller,” I said.

“I know. But I thought about her $80 million in that Swiss account and my letters to her got better and better. Love letters. Red hot.”

“Have some more wine,” I said refilling Jon’s glass.

“Well, she finally asked me to come see her. And suddenly like that, I was in the snows of Moscow...”

“The snows of Moscow...”

“I got a room that I think was bugged by the KGB. I think they even had the toilet bugged. They could hear my shit dropping.”

“I think I hear it dropping too...”

“No, no, listen to me...I finally made an appointment to see the lady. I went to her place, I knocked. The door opened and there stood this beautiful girl! Never have I seen such a
beautiful
girl!”

“Ah, god, Jon,
please
...”

“Only it wasn’t the
lady
, it was the interpreter!”

“Jon,” Sarah asked, “what are you drinking beside this wine?”

“Nothing! Nothing! It’s
true
! I walked into the room and there was an old hag sitting there dressed in black. She had no teeth but many warts. I walked forward, bent down, took her hand, closed my eyes and kissed it. The interpreter sat in a chair and watched us. I turned to the interpreter.

“ ‘I’d like to be alone with
you
, I said.

“She spoke to the old woman. Then she turned to me and said, ‘Metra desires to be alone with you. But in a church. Metra is very religious.’

“ ‘I believe that I am in love with you,’ I told the interpreter.

“She spoke to the old woman. The old woman spoke back to her. Then the interpreter spoke to me: ‘Metra says that love is possible but first she wants you to go to church with her.’

“I nodded yes and the old lady got up slowly from her chair, and we left the room together, leaving the beautiful young girl behind...”

“This fucking thing could win an Academy Award,” I said.

“Please. Remember, I am trying to get the money for your future screenplay.”

“Yes, please go on, Jon. Tell me the rest...”

“All right, we got to the church. We kneeled in the pews. I am not religious. We kneeled for some time in silence. Then she tugged at me. We rose and went forward to an altar full of candles. Some were lit. Many weren’t. She started lighting many of the unlit candles. It excited her. Her mouth trembled and little streams of saliva came down out of each corner of her mouth. It ran down and disappeared into her wrinkles. Please believe me, I have nothing, nothing against old age! But why is it that some people age so much worse than others?”

“I dunno,” I said, “but I have an idea that people who don’t think too much tend to look young longer.”

“I don’t think this one thought too much...anyhow, after lighting many candles she became excited again. She took my hand and squeezed it. She was strong, a strong old lady. She pulled me over to a statue of Christ...”

“Yes...”

“She let go of me and kneeled and started kissing the feet of this Christ. She went at it. The toes were wet with her saliva. She was in a grand passion. She was quivering. Then she stood up, took my hand, pointed to the feet. I smiled. She pointed again. I smiled again.

Then she grabbed me and started pushing me down to the feet. Shit, I thought, and then I thought of $80 million and I kneeled down and kissed the feet. You know, they don’t clean those feet well in Russia. Metra’s saliva...and the dust...it was only with great will that I was able to kiss. Then I stood up. Metra led me back to the pew. We knelt again. Suddenly she grabbed me and her mouth was on mine. Please understand, I have nothing against the old, the aged, but it was like kissing a sewer hole. I pulled away. Something turned in my stomach and I went to the confessional booth, pulled back the curtains, entered, kneeled and puked. Then I rose and we left the church together. I left her at her doorway. Then I got a bottle of vodka and went back to my room.

“You know, if I wrote a screenplay like that they’d run me out of town.”

“I know. But wait. This thing is not over. Drinking the vodka, I thought it all over. No need to back off. The old lady was evidently crazy. One doesn’t kiss in church, does one? Maybe at a wedding. So there I was...”

“Kiss and get married, huh?” I asked.

“Well, I wanted to be sure of the $80 million. After finishing the vodka, I began a long love letter to Metra, only all the time I was thinking of the interpreter. It was some love letter. And in between the love talk I explained to her that I wanted to make a film about the two of us and that I had heard of her money in Switzerland, only that had
nothing
to do with my being there, except that I was without funds and I wanted dearly to bring our love story to the screen and to the public and to the lovers of Christ.”

“All this to get money to produce a screenplay that Hank didn’t even know about and hadn’t written?” asked Sarah.

“Absolutely,” said Jon.

“You’re crazy,” I suggested.

“Maybe. Anyhow, the old lady got my love letter and I believed she had agreed to go to Switzerland with me to pick up the money. We made arrangements. Meanwhile there were two more trips, to kiss the feet of Christ and to light many candles plus some of the other kiss-kiss bit. Then...I got a call from my source. The woman who had the $80 million in Switzerland had the same exact name, was the same age of my old woman, but had been born in a different city of different parents. It was a stupid coincidence and it was over for me. I had been tricked. I’d have to get the money elsewhere...”

“That’s one of the saddest fucking stories I’ve ever heard,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” said Jon, “But it’s true.”

“Why do you suffer like this just for the business of making movies?” asked Sarah.

“Because I love it,” answered Jon.