Hollywood Ending (2 page)

Although it was only ten in the morning the frat boys were drinking Coronas and the stereo was cranked to the hilt with an Elvis Presley song. A few tourists wearing Hollywood T-shirts and cameras slung around their necks waddled through the doors.

‘Oh, Harold,' a woman said to her husband as she hooked her arm through his. ‘They say Jack Nicholson used to drink here with Dennis Hopper when they made
Easy Rider
.'

Her old hippy husband looked around in awe. ‘Far out.'

These people should have annoyed us just as much as the frat boys, but the truth was they were just like us. They were scavengers feeding off others, obsessed with lives that were not their own. They were our people.

Benji pierced his eggs with a fork, looked at me and took a bite.

‘You look stupid with that pink hair,' he said through a mouthful of food. In a fit of boredom I'd dyed my hair the night before. It seemed like a fun idea at the time but the pink hadn't really taken and my head looked like Hello Kitty threw up on it. I tossed my napkin at Benji.

‘You said you liked it this morning.'

‘I've changed my mind. It looks cheap.'

‘Well, you look disgusting. Finish your food before you open your mouth.'

He stuck out his tongue, revealing the saliva-coated remnants of his meal. ‘Have some respect at Janis's table,' I said.

‘Janis wouldn't care,' he snickered, chewing loudly. ‘She would fully appreciate someone enjoying such a hearty, lard-laden meal.'

He reached over and grabbed my orange juice.

‘Your Aunt Lynette's gonna be pissed when she sees your hair,' he added, swallowing a mouthful.

‘No, she won't. She won't even care.'

The waitress refilled our coffees and I ordered another OJ. I looked out the window. There was surprisingly little traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard. When the road was clear you could imagine it was the 1960s, and Barney's was filled with beatniks and poets rather than drunken sorority girls. I finished my juice and watched Benji eyeing off the girls at the bar. One of them bent over, exposing pink frilly panties beneath a tight leather skirt.

‘Seeing as how you're distracted, do you mind if I check something?' I asked, pointing to his computer.

Benji unplugged his camera and spun the laptop around to face me. Another great thing about Barney's was that it had free wifi. I logged onto my favourite website, The Celebrity Autopsy Room, and checked my profile:

Name: Hilda Swann.

Age: 17.

Lives: Encino, CA.

Mood: Apathetic.

I opened my personal preferences, changed my mood to excited. Summer vacation had finally arrived, and Benji and I were going to spend it doing what we loved best.

Summer vacation means different things to different people. To the popular girls at school it meant three months of hanging around the mall, playing beach volleyball in string-bikinis and being screwed by jocks under the boardwalk. To the neglected kids it meant being packed off to summer camp to battle the bugs and basket weaving. For Benji and me it meant days and days of glorious death.

Favourite movie:
Harold and Maude.

Favourite music: Nirvana, The Ramones, The Carpenters.

Favourite book:
Hollywood Babylon
by Kenneth Anger.

Interests: Dead celebrities, living in LA, books about serial killers.

My Favourite Dead People (in no particular order):

Sharon Tate

John Belushi

Chris Farley

James Dean

Marilyn Monroe

Phil Hartman

Kurt Cobain

Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia, for those not in the know)

Jayne Mansfield

My parents

‘Can I check something?' Benji took the laptop back. ‘I'm waiting for this dude to contact me.'

‘Don't mind me.' I called the waitress over. ‘Can we get the check?'

‘There it is,' Benji said, smiling. ‘Bingo.'

He took a napkin and scribbled on it, then stuffed it in his pocket.

‘What's that?' I asked.

‘You'll see. Come on. Let's head up the hill.'

It was a beautiful day so we decided to walk all the way from Barney's to Janis's place. Janis OD'd at The Landmark Hotel on Franklin Avenue—now The Highland Gardens—on heroin that was cut too pure. The batch killed a whole lot of people in LA, but Janis was the only famous one. Benji had stayed in the room once before but every time I tried to make a reservation it was already booked. Sometimes it was booked solid for weeks in advance. People wanted to be close to Janis, even if all that meant was sleeping in the same bed she'd puked in before dying on the floor.

When we got to the hotel we tried to see in through the windows of her ground-floor room, but the curtains were closed. We walked back to the car, disappointed. Benji checked the back seat to make sure his bricks were still there.

‘What next?' I asked.

‘You up for a little adventure?'

‘What did you have in mind?'

Benji leant over. ‘You ever heard of Bernie Bernall?'

Bernie Bernall? ‘I don't think so,' I said. ‘Was he in
Plan 9 from
Outer Space
?'

Benji rolled his eyes. ‘God, you're such a lightweight, Hilda. Bernie Bernall was a silent movie star whose career was ruined when they introduced the talkies. Apparently his voice was so bad he became the laughing-stock of the industry. They tried dubbing another voice over his but it didn't work. He became a junkie and an alcoholic, then killed himself in his apartment.'

‘How?'

Benji leant in close. ‘He stabbed himself.'

‘What do you mean,
stabbed himself
? Like with a knife?'

Benji shook his head. ‘Scissors.'

Scissors. What a way to go. I whistled. ‘That's awesome.'

‘Not only that, they were small sewing scissors, so blunt you could barely cut your toenails with 'em. He just gouged that shit straight into his heart and moved it around 'til the hole was big enough to kill him.'

‘Wow. How could I have not heard about this?'

‘It gets worse. His wife was in New York when it happened, and apparently she didn't give a shit. She didn't even come back to town for the funeral.'

‘Damn.'

‘She didn't even send flowers. She sent a telegram saying how “regretful” she was that it had happened or some crap like that.'

I frowned. ‘He must've been some kind of asshole.'

‘I don't think it was that. I just think when he stopped being famous no one gave a shit about him anymore, you know? Everyone forgot about him, even his wife. Suicide was his last stab at being famous.'

‘Literally.'

Benji held up the napkin he had scribbled on at Barney's. ‘I just found out where his apartment was.'

My eyes lit up. ‘Where?'

‘Echo Park.'

Echo Park. One of the oldest neighbourhoods in LA, home to junkies, freaks and bohos. Jackson Pollock and Ayn Rand once lived there, as well as Tom Waits and Frank Zappa. Gentrification had turned Echo Park into a trendy suburb but there was still a good amount of squalor in its rambling Spanish homes and overgrown gardens. I took the piece of paper from Benji, held it in my hands.

‘I want to get inside,' he said.

‘Oh yeah?' I laughed. ‘How are we going to do that? Break and enter?'

He put the car in gear and pulled out from the curb. ‘Simple,' he said. ‘We'll just ask.'

I looked at Benji, with his military clothes, dark sunglasses and black army cap. ‘You think some little old lady is gonna let you into her apartment?'

‘Hilda, you have seen my methods of persuasion. I can charm myself into anyone's good graces.'

We drove down Hollywood Boulevard, past Mann's Chinese Theatre and away from the busloads of tourists and faded stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We headed east towards downtown LA, where the road became cracked and pitted with potholes and the most colourful sights were the prostitutes outside the Rite-Aid.

‘Can't remember last time I was this far downtown,' I said.

‘Did you know Echo Park was actually the centre of the movie business during the silent era?'

‘You know what? I did not know that either. Gee Benji, you're a wealth of information today.'

‘I just read a book about it. All the major studios were in Echo Park before they moved out to the Valley. Mack Sennett's studio was there. Can you imagine how cool it must have been? Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle and all those guys making all those fantastic films, pioneering the medium. It would have been magic. Fatty Arbuckle raped a girl with a Coke bottle, you know.'

‘Don't you mean a champagne bottle? Fatty was a classy guy.'

It was one of the most famous stories from that era: the fat movie star in the bowler hat who allegedly held the studio bit-player down on the bed and rammed the bottle inside her, causing massive internal injuries. The actress had died, and even though Fatty was acquitted by a jury, his career was ruined by the scandal. Ten years later the studio he had worked for all his life finally took pity on Fatty and cast him in a movie. Fatty proudly proclaimed it was the happiest day of his life. That same night he died of heart failure.

‘Hang on,' I said, ‘didn't Elliott Smith die in Echo Park too? In a similar way?' I remembered a newspaper article about the Oscar-winning folk singer who took his own life.

‘That's right!' Benji said, excited. ‘He had an argument with his girlfriend, and she says she went to take a shower, and after the shower she opened the bathroom door and found him standing in the middle of the kitchen with a knife in his chest.'

‘Maybe he was possessed by the ghost of Bernie Bernall?'

‘Maybe his girlfriend was lying to the cops and stabbed him herself.'

‘Who knows. Have you ever heard his music? He seemed pretty miserable to me.'

‘Knife through the heart miserable?'

‘More like emo self-harming miserable. So, what's the game plan today?'

‘No game plan. We'll just knock on the door, ask if we can go in and take a few photos.'

‘What if some crack-head opens the door and wigs out on us?'

Benji gestured to the glove compartment. I opened it and took out a small aerosol can.

‘Pepper spray?'

‘You can never be too careful, Hilda. This town's full of psychos.'

I put the spray back. We'd done some crazy shit before but knocking on people's doors and asking if we could take a look inside was a new one. There was the time we trekked through the Hollywood Hills trying to find the mythical ruins of a movie star's pool, said to be wedged between two properties on vacant land. What made the pool so special was the mosaic tile work on an adjoining wall which depicted a large spider sitting in a web, a creepy remnant of old-time Hollywood we were desperate to see. We climbed down a cliff face and pushed our way through the undergrowth, but when Benji saw a snake we screamed and ran out of there as fast as we could, our mission thwarted.

One night we climbed the fence at the Hollywood sign and slept under the stars, the enormous ‘D' towering above us, Los Angeles teeming below. We hid under the letter so we couldn't be seen, curled into its side with pillows and blankets, and talked about all the people who'd OD'd up there, and the actress who'd leapt to her death from the ‘H'. In the middle of the night I felt a tugging on my sleeping bag and woke to find a coyote tearing at the fabric. I stared into its black eyes for a few seconds before it took off, running silently into the scrub.

I watched Benji as we drove. He was stealing proud glances at the bricks on the backseat, his precious artefacts to add to his vast collection of strange objects. He liked to think of himself as the Indiana Jones of the macabre.

‘Stabbing yourself in the heart with scissors,' Benji said with admiration, ‘that takes balls.'

‘I remember now. Elliott Smith's girlfriend told the cops she found him with the kitchen knife already in his heart and pulled it out. Her prints were all over it.'

Benji shook his head. ‘That's messed up. People should know better than to pull out the knife if someone's been stabbed. It's the dumbest thing you can do.'

‘I don't think that's something they teach you in school, Benji.'

‘They should. It's useful shit to know.'

We drove down a dead-end street full of crummy apartment blocks and bungalows with faded pink paint. There weren't many sprinklers on this side of town, and the lawns were dead and covered in weeds. Benji pulled up in front of a white stucco apartment block, the name DISTANT MEMORIES emblazoned on its side.

‘That's a pretty depressing sign,' I said.

It was hardly the place for a movie star to live, and I figured Bernie Bernall must have been really down on his luck when he moved here. The building was two storeys with a flat roof, and a sign advertising vacancies was hammered into the ground outside. There were thick bars over the windows: the apartment block looked like a prison. Mail-order catalogues were scattered along the front lawn, the edges eaten by snails. Benji shut off the engine.

‘If you were gonna kill yourself,' he asked, ‘how would you do it? I'd jump off a building, so I could sail through the air and watch the pavement rushing up towards me.'

‘Pills,' I said quietly. ‘I'd use pills.'

‘Bor–ing.' He opened the glove compartment and took out the pepper spray. ‘We'll be needing this.'

We walked up the sun-bleached path to the apartment block, Benji with the spray concealed in his jacket. He stood in front of the mailbox looking for the right apartment number, and when he found it he took a photo.

‘The death certificate says the apartment was on the ground level,' he said, nodding towards an apartment with its blinds open, rock music blasting from inside. ‘But this guy online told me the death certificate is wrong and it's actually that apartment right there.'