Hollywood Ending (23 page)

‘What's that?' Jake asked, pointing at my side.

‘Just a scar.'

‘Pretty big scar. Were you a cage fighter?'

I pulled the dress back over my head. Jake paced behind the fence like a wild cat, running his hands through his hair.

‘Come on pussy,' I yelled. ‘You wanna explore the jungles of Vietnam, or you want to eat tuna fish sandwiches in the car?'

Jake looked at the ground, took a step back, then charged at the fence with such ferocity I was sure it would fall over. I clapped my hands on my face.

‘That's it!' I yelled, impersonating a drill sergeant. ‘Come on soldier. How bad do you want it?'

‘I want it,' he puffed as he reached the top.

‘I can't hear you soldier.'

‘I WANT IT!'

Holding his hands triumphantly in the air, Jake took an almighty leap from the top of the fence and landed straight on his ass. As I helped him up I saw he had torn the back of his pants.

‘Looks like you've got a casualty there soldier,' I said, putting my finger in the rip. He jumped back.

‘Shit. These are Dolce and Gabbana!'

‘Serves you right for wearing designer jeans to a picnic. This isn't a fashion show.'

‘So we're here. I still don't see what the big deal is.'

‘Follow me.'

I took his hand and led him towards the thick of the jungle. He kept looking around as if we were going to be set upon by guards at any moment.

‘Are you sure this is safe? There might be security dogs, or worse. I've already ripped my pants, I don't want my ass to get bitten off.'

‘It's perfectly fine. There's nothing of value here to protect, and who would be crazy enough to break into an old bike park?'

‘You would.'

We approached the edge of a steep ditch that sloped down towards a small swamp and more marshland. I put the picnic basket down and opened it. Jake had packed a blanket that I pulled out and lay across the dry earth.

‘Perfect position,' I said as I looked out over the expanse of the Indian Park Dunes. I sat down and Jake followed, still brushing dirt off his pants and shoes.

‘I guess it does look a little like Vietnam,' he said.

Birds flocked overhead and the wind rustled the trees. I screwed the lid off the wine and took a mouthful from the bottle.

‘Hey, I wasn't sure if you'd be having any of that?' Jake smiled.

‘Are you kidding me. After the week I've had.' I passed it to Jake and he did the same. ‘It's so peaceful out here,' I said. ‘So isolated. I love it.'

‘You come out here often?'

‘Just once, with Benji. Did you ever see
The Twilight Zone
?'

‘The TV show?'

‘No, the movie. You know—Steven Spielberg produced it.'

Jake clicked his fingers. ‘I remember. John Lithgow played a guy who thought there was a gremlin attacking the plane he was on, and no one believed him. And Dan Aykroyd ripped his face off to show he was really a monster.'

‘And he says “You wanna see something really scary?”'

‘That's right! That film scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.'

‘Do you remember the helicopter accident?'

‘Vaguely. Didn't someone die while they were filming?'

‘They were shooting a helicopter scene at night that was set in the jungle in Vietnam. Vic Morrow, this old actor who thought the film was going to be his big comeback, was carrying two little kids across the river down there when a helicopter crashed right on top of them. Vic and one kid were decapitated. The other kid was crushed under the helicopter. The director was brought up on manslaughter charges but in the end everybody walked free. And it happened down there.'

‘Shit.'

‘Yeah. The poor special effects guys were the first to rush into the water to try and help the actors. They found Vic's head and torso floating next to the kids.'

‘That's messed up.'

‘Hey, Vic wanted a comeback. This way, he'll be remembered forever.'

‘Great, as the man who was decapitated for starring in a shitty movie.'

‘Doesn't matter,' I said. ‘He'll still be remembered. You think people would have remembered him for being the guy who starred in
The Twilight Zone
movie? Hell no. But the guy who had his head cut off during filming? That's a dude worth remembering.'

‘You really think that's preferable?'

‘Of course.'

‘Sounds pretty warped to me.'

‘You wanna know why I'm so obsessed with dead celebrities?'

‘I would love to know,' Jake said before taking a mouthful of wine.

‘It's like, when I think about celebrities who have died, it makes me less scared of death, you know? If amazing people like John Lennon, and John Belushi, and Hitchcock have all died, then it can't be that bad, right?'

‘It's a little early to be thinking of death isn't it?'

‘No, it isn't. You can die at any time. Look at what happened to my parents.'

‘I'm sorry,' Jake said.

‘Don't be sorry. People die all the time.'

‘But that doesn't make it any easier on you. It may happen all the time, but when it happens to you, it's not a statistic. It's your life. But your life doesn't have to be all about what happened to your parents. It doesn't all have to be about death.'

I stood and walked towards the edge of the cliff. I looked over at the palm trees, the sand dunes and the puddles of water left by the rain. It was strange to think that such a beautiful place had been the site of such calamity, chaos and pain. I thought of the movie crew dropping their cameras and running for the hills. I thought of the parents of the two little children who were killed. They were so excited their kids had a part in a movie.

‘I should have died that day too,' I said.

‘What?'

‘The day my parents died. I should have died too. But I didn't. Now death follows me every day. I feel it in my skin.'

‘You were in the car?'

I nodded. ‘We were driving home from my Aunt Lynette's house. Dad had had a few drinks and Mom kept telling him to slow down. In hindsight I think he'd been smoking some of the whacky stuff too. He said he needed it to deal with my Aunt Lynette. He ran into the back of a truck that stopped too suddenly in front of us. The front of our car went straight under the truck. It stopped after the front seats. My parents were, well, decapitated is the best way to put it. Just like Vic Morrow. I didn't have a scratch on me. I sat trapped in the backseat, looking at them for what seemed like an eternity. I couldn't see their faces. All I could see was the back of their heads, crushed against the seats.'

‘Like Jayne Mansfield,' Jake said.

‘Yeah. Just like Jayne Mansfield. So I figure, if Jayne died like that, then it must be okay, right? It's not so bad.'

‘Hilda.'

Jake had turned pale. I sat down beside him. ‘I'm not telling you this to upset you,' I said, ‘or to show off or try to shock you. I'm telling you this because I want you to understand who I am.'

‘I know who you are,' he said, and slid his hand onto my neck. ‘You're someone who looked after an old man when no one else gave a shit.'

‘I wish that were true. But Benji and me, we only went to Hank's house to see where someone had died.'

‘But it's more than that now. You know that.'

‘No. Hank just wanted to live the rest of his life in peace and I kept poking at him, and making him go out. And he got hurt, and now he's miserable.'

‘Hank's always going to be miserable. People find excuses to be victims. If it wasn't the fact he was in a concentration camp it would have been something else.'

‘That's not fair.'

‘Life's not fair, but you have to deal with it. I could've used the fact that my parents were doped-up hippies as an excuse to drop out of everything, but I didn't. That's not me. I want to make my own way in the world. I want to write stories that inspire and move people, and make movies that matter. I want to be part of something. Think about it, Hilda. We can do anything we want. We're alive aren't we?'

I couldn't disagree with that. We were alive, and we were still here. We had a responsibility to the dead to keep on living, no matter how painful. Jake squeezed my hand.

‘I think your parents would be proud of you.'

I looked away, over the horizon and the blue expanse of sky that led to the ocean and beyond. ‘Some days I wonder if my parents knew it was going to happen.'

‘How could they have possibly known that? It was an accident.'

‘I know, but you hear stories, about how people just get this feeling that it's their time to go. Like there was this guy I read about in the newspaper who was totally healthy, worked out every day, went to his job at the office, then one day people started to notice this change in him. He started calling all the people he'd lost contact with, all his friends and family who hadn't heard from him in ages, just to say hello and that he loved them. He started to smile more. He was nicer to his colleagues. He went out of his way to make people feel good, got them cups of coffee, all this stuff that was totally out of character. Two days later he died of a brain aneurism.'

‘That's easy to explain,' Jake said, putting his hands behind his head. ‘The dude clocked himself out.'

‘No, he didn't. They couldn't find any evidence of suicide.'

‘Well, then he probably knew he had the aneurism all along.'

‘But how do you explain the change in his behaviour two days before it happened?'

Jake smirked. ‘Maybe he was getting laid.'

‘No. Somehow he knew. I don't know if it was, like, a change in his molecular structure, something on a biological level that made his cells get ready. Maybe it was something spiritual. Maybe the universe gets you ready.' I chewed at my finger absent-mindedly.

‘Don't chew your nails,' Jake said. ‘There's plenty of food here, why you gotta be eatin' your hands all the time?'

‘Steven Spielberg chews his fingernails,' I said.

‘And after you've won your first Oscar I'll be a little more lenient on you; in the meantime those stubby little nubs are just grossin' me out.'

I took my hand out of my mouth, wiped it on my leg and curled my fingers around Jake's.

‘Ewww,' he said, but didn't try to take his hand away. Any thought of my parents disappeared as I tightened my grip on Jake. Together we looked in silence at the dunes, the curves in the dirt from its days as a bike park.

‘Say, isn't this meant to be a picnic?' I reminded him.

‘Of course,' Jake said, letting go of my hand. He dived into the picnic basket and retrieved two sandwiches.

‘Tuna fish or egg salad?' he offered.

‘Tuna fish. Egg gives me gas.'

‘Good to know.'

We ate our sandwiches, finished the bottle of wine and brushed the ants off as they marched up our legs. ‘This is actually a pretty place,' Jake said. ‘I could think of worse places to die.'

THIRTY-TWO

After lunch we drove back to Distant Memories, stopping on the way to pick up groceries for Hank. I started to walk up towards his apartment but Jake pulled me back.

‘Hey, come in here for a second,' he said, tugging me towards his front door. ‘I want to show you something.'

‘If it's in your pants I'm not interested,' I said, swaying a little. The wine had gone to my head and I could feel myself moving from side to side, as if a hundred little earthquakes were exploding in tiny waves beneath my feet.

Jake fished inside his trousers, moved his hand around, and emerged holding his house keys. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘Do you really think so little of me? I'm offended.'

‘I'm sorry. I don't know why I say things like that. That's not me.'

‘It's okay. I deserve it.'

‘No, I mean, I'm just trying to say to you, that's not me. That's not who I am.'

‘Then who are you?'

He opened the front door. I started to get nervous, heard myself blabbering on as we stepped inside.

‘Did you know there's a city near San Francisco built right on a fault line? You're not even allowed to go into the Town Hall because it's slowly breaking in half.'

‘What's that got to do with anything?' he asked, closing the door behind us.

‘Well, why wouldn't you just not build anything on that spot? They're onto their third Town Hall because they keep falling down. It doesn't make sense. Why not just pave it over and put a fence around it?'

‘Are you actually asking me?'

‘Yeah. Doesn't that seem crazy to you?'

‘Seems pretty indicative of the human race to me. They don't want nature telling them where they can and can't build. They'll build where they want, and damn the consequences.'

‘Even if it means they could all die if the building fell on them?'

‘That's the human race for you.'

‘Yeah, well, people suck.'

I looked around. Jake's apartment was not what I would have expected, and if the identical apartment wasn't directly above our heads, you would never believe Hank and Jake lived in the same building. Jake's apartment wasn't a dingy dive with cracks in the plaster and stains on the carpet. It was painted a soft salmon colour, and the walls were lined with framed original movie posters:
Chinatown
,
Shampoo, Blade Runner
. The carpet had been pulled up to expose polished floorboards; a fluffy mohair rug lay in front of a polished black leather sofa. In the corner facing the window was an antique wooden desk, where Jake's laptop sat patiently, waiting for his return. Next to the laptop was an unopened pack of Marlboro Lights, a clean ashtray and a lighter.

‘Wow,' I said, surveying the room. ‘This is nothing like your car.'