John Belushi Is Dead (16 page)

“An actor died in Hank's apartment?” Jake asked. “When?”

“It was decades ago,” I explained.

“I'm very confused,” Jake said.

“Nurse!” Hank yelled.

“No need to yell, Mr. Anderson. I'm right here.”

“Gimme your ass,” he said, reaching out. She slapped his hand away.

Jake laughed, then clasped a hand over his mouth when I glared at him. “What?” he said. “Come on. You've gotta admit that was kinda funny.”

“I'm so sorry,” I said, turning to the nurse. “He's probably just concussed.”

“It's perfectly fine,” she said, smiling through gritted teeth. “It's just the morphine talking.”

“Cocktease,” Hank muttered.

“Hank, do you know this guy?” I said, nodding toward Jake. “He was at your apartment.”

“Hey, Hank,” Jake said, holding the toiletry bag aloft. “Got your toothbrush.”

“What'd you bring him for?” Hank yelled. “The kid's a goddamn pain in the ass.”

“He gave me a ride.”

“I'm his neighbor,” Jake said, explaining to the nurse. “I live in the apartment under his.”

“Are you the one who called the ambulance?” she asked.

“Sure am.”

“That was really lovely of you to look out for an old man like that,” she said, and she inched closer to Jake, stopping just short of batting her eyelashes.

“Oh, please,” he said, all fake humility. “I did what any other decent person would do. If we didn't look out for each other, the world would be a very soulless place indeed.”

“Soulless,” the nurse repeated, nodding and contemplating. “Yes, it would.”

“You've got to be kidding me,” I muttered under my breath, and when I looked back at Hank I was relieved to see he had passed out, his snore filling the room like the sound of a jackhammer.

W
E STAYED AT THE
hospital until the doctor arrived. He told us that Hank would need to stay overnight so they could take X-rays. It appeared to just be a concussion, he explained, but they wanted to be sure.

“In your medical opinion,” I asked, “should a man his age be living on his own? I mean, doesn't he need someone to look after him? Perhaps he needs to be in a home.”

“He's not alone,” Jake said.

“Are you family?” the doctor asked him.

“I'm his neighbor. I check in on him all the time. Hank's more than capable of looking after himself.”

“You do?” I said, surprised. “I've never seen you.”

“Actually, Mr. Anderson's had a few close calls recently,” the doctor said, opening Hank's medical file and running through it with a pen. This wasn't the first time Hank had been admitted to the hospital. The previous year he'd been brought in unconscious and was diagnosed with alcohol poisoning. Prior to that he'd fallen down the concrete stairs outside his apartment, bruising his back and spraining an ankle. Still, I remembered Hank's words:
Bernie pushed me
. What role had I played in this? What crazy ideas had I put in his head?

I thanked the doctor and walked away, heading back down the corridor toward Hank's room. Jake's arm shot out.

“Whoa,” he said, grabbing me. “Where are you going?”

I shrugged him off. “To see Hank.”

“He's asleep. Nasty bump like that, he needs his rest. How about we go for a coffee?”

“Listen, I don't even know you.”

“Hey, come on! What are you, some kind of punk Nancy Drew? Here, pull my face. This isn't a Scooby-Doo mask, and it's not gonna come off in your hands. I just want to buy you coffee.”

“Okay.” I sighed. I was tired, had no idea where I was, and didn't have the energy to try to figure things out. On top of everything
else, I was feeling disappointed. Benji had said that I liked being the only person in Hank's life, that it made me feel special, and I guess that was true. Everything started to fall into place: Jake was the person who bought Hank's groceries for him and maybe even tidied his apartment. But why? What the hell would a guy like Jake want with an old man like Hank?

“Like I said, Hank's mentioned you before,” Jake said as we walked from the ward. “But he hasn't told me much. I'd like to get to know the mysterious girl who's been spending so much time with my neighbor.”

“Yeah? Well, I have some questions I want answered myself,” I said, and somewhere in the hospital an alarm sounded and we watched doctors and nurses rushing from one room to the next.

W
E DROVE DOWN
R
OBERTSON
Boulevard in Beverly Hills, where all the famous people go to get photographed by the paparazzi. They loitered on the streets and spent ridiculous amounts of time looking in store windows, shielding their faces from the cameras and smiling coyly. Jake gave his car to a valet and we walked into a small coffee shop that was swarming with the young and rich of Beverly Hills. I immediately felt out of place. I pulled my Wayfarers from my bag and tried to act like I was too cool to care what I looked like, but I needn't have worried because no one gave me a second glance. They were all too concerned with themselves, with their appointment books and cell phones. Jake himself took a call on his cell as we walked in, and held up two fingers to the host, who seated us in the middle of the room. The windows were reserved for celebrities, where they could see and be seen. It all confirmed for me again that I liked them better dead.

“No, I can't have the rewrite with you tomorrow. I've had a
family emergency,” Jake said, winking at me. “How about next week? Yeah, Monday should be fine. Should we meet at the studio? Okay, good buddy, take care.”

He snapped the cell phone shut, took off his baseball cap, and let all his black curly hair come tumbling out, swishing it around like he was in a shampoo commercial. He picked up the menu and scanned it.

“You work in the film industry?” I asked, guessing from his phone conversation.

“Yes, I do,” he said, almost beaming proudly. “I'm a screenwriter.”

“Have you written anything I would know?”

“Probably not. At the moment I'm mainly a script doctor. Most people don't realize there's sometimes twenty or thirty writers on these big movies. Audiences complain about seeing five or six names credited on a screenplay, but they'd have a fit if they knew how many writers were really involved in the crap that's out there.”

“So what does a script doctor actually do?”

“We fix things. We all have our areas of specialty. Dialog, fight scenes, car chases. Mine is sex.”

“Excuse me?”

Jack smirked. “Sex scenes. Where they go in the movie, how they play out, the length, the amount of nudity involved.”

“Are you serious? You mean, like, the hand on the misty window in
Titanic
?”

“Can't take credit for that one. But that was good work. Even I can admit that.”

The waitress came over to take our order. “I'll have an egg-white
omelette,” Jake said, smiling up at her, “with mushrooms and spinach, and a fruit cup on the side. Gotta have my protein.”

The waitress giggled. “For you, miss?”

“Just coffee.”

“You don't want to eat?” Jake asked, sounding concerned.

“I'm not hungry.”

“Hank's gonna be fine,” he said, picking up on my unease. “You should really eat something.”

“I can't.”

“You'll have to excuse her,” Jake said to the waitress. “We've had a very traumatic experience today. Our dad is in the hospital.”

“Oh no,” the waitress said.

“What?” I almost shrieked.

“He was hit by a bus. The one-oh-eight out of Echo Park.”

“How horrible,” the waitress said, putting her hand on Jake's shoulder. “Will he be okay?”

“He's in a coma. They expect him to make a full recovery, but until then my main priority is looking after my little sister here.”

“You're so lovely to do that.” The waitress beamed and actually patted me on the head like I was a puppy. “You poor little thing. I'm sure your dad will be okay.”

“Why, thanks,” I grumbled.

“You're lucky to have such a nice brother.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Listen,” she said, leaning forward and speaking in a low voice. “I really shouldn't do this, but I'm going to comp your meals today. Don't worry about paying for anything.”

Jake took her hand. “Why thank you so much, Ruby,” he said,
looking at her name badge. “I'll have a side order of toast, too. Whole wheat. And my sister will have a fruit salad.”

“You got it, sweetheart,” she said, writing it on her pad and leaving.

“That wasn't funny,” I said.

Jake laughed. “Come on, we got a free meal, didn't we? Anyway, enough of this small talk. Let's get serious. So, Hilda, what do you do?”

“I go to high school.”

“High school, huh?”

“I've nearly finished. One more year to go.”

“Right, so you're, like, uh, sixteen or something?”

“Seventeen.”

“How old do you think I am?” he asked, a grin spreading across his face.

I shrugged. “I have no idea,” I said, trying to sound disinterested. He leaned forward.

“I'm nineteen,” he whispered, sounding proud.

“Nineteen?” I couldn't believe it. “Are you kidding me?”

“Well, I just turned twenty,” he said, “but I was nineteen longer than I've been twenty, so as far as I'm concerned, I'm still a red-blooded American teenager.”

“But, how are you—”

“So spectacularly successful at such a young age?”

I crossed my arms, unimpressed. “That's not how I was going to put it, but sure. I'll indulge you.”

“Dropped out of high school,” he said, relating his life strategy as philosophically as if he were Tony Robbins. “High school doesn't mean shit in this industry. I always knew what I wanted to do. So
I got a job writing ad copy for a studio, gave a few story treatments to the right people, and bam! Here I am.”

“Writing sex scenes.”

He beamed. “That's it, baby.”

“Well, you look much older,” I said a little cruely.

“Not too much older, I hope,” he said with some concern. “But yeah, it's helpful. But you'd be surprised. Most of the studios are run by kids barely out of diapers. Kids just out of college are deciding the fate of millions and millions of dollars and, more often than not, getting it wrong. It's scary.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, not really knowing what to say. I was still thrown by how someone barely a few years older than me could have accomplished so much already. Jake was so different from Benji, and from me. He seemed to have it all figured out already, when the only thing Benji and I knew for certain were the final resting places of the rich and famous. I played with my napkin, suddenly not feeling so confident.

“Do you live around here?” he asked.

“Encino.”

“Wow. You're a long way from home.”

I looked around the coffee shop, at all the Bulgari diamonds and Botox. “Tell me about it.”

“So I understand you're part of some cult obsessed with death?”

I froze. “Did Hank say that?”

“Something like it.”

“I don't belong to a cult. It's more like an informal online community.”

“Obsessed with death.”

I rolled my eyes. “How do you even know all of this?”

“So you're not a member of the Children of God?” he said, ignoring the question. “You're not trying to convert Hank into some weird Jonestown-type deal?”

“Of course not. I don't even believe in God.”

“Interesting. So you told Hank his apartment was haunted?”

“No. I didn't say his apartment was haunted, I just told him someone died there.”

“But now he obviously thinks it is. He thinks this actor guy, Bernie or whatever his name was, pushed him over.”

“I didn't mean for him to get scared,” I said, feeling guilty. “I didn't know he'd take it that way.”

“Well, the dude's pretty messed up about it. Next thing he'll be calling for an exorcism or asking for the Ghostbusters.”

“Like I said, I never told him the place was haunted. Are you saying this is all my fault?”

Jake sat back. “Far from it. I just want to get to know you. I get the feeling we'll be seeing each other around. We can't pretend we're strangers.”

The waitress came back with our food. I picked at the fruit salad with a fork while Jake wolfed down his meal. A piece of egg got caught on the corner of his lip and made me feel a little sick. There was something off about Jake, something not quite right in the way he had appeared out of nowhere, an extra who seemed to have suddenly burst forth as a major player. The egg dropped from his lip back onto the plate and he scooped it up with a forkful of mushrooms. Something flashed in my mind: the first day Benji and I went to Hank's apartment, I saw a figure in the apartment below Hank's, hunched over a desk, music blaring.

“So this ‘death' thing you're involved with—”

“It's not a ‘thing.' I just like visiting places where people have died.”

“Sounds kinda sick.”

“It's no sicker that this,” I said, looking around the restaurant at all the Beverly Hills housewives and their superskinny daughters. “Half these people are walking corpses as it is. Botox has killed their skin cells.”

Jake laughed loudly, almost choking on his food. “You crack me up, Hilda. You're like Mae West, or Ethel Merman. One of those larger-than-life, wise-crackin' vaudeville types.”

I didn't like the way he said my name, implying more familiarity than we had with each other. It felt too slick. “So I'm a joke?” I shot back.

Jake put his fork down. “Man, everything's an inquisition with you.”