Our Town
Authors: Kevin Jack McEnroe
Copyright © 2015 Kevin Jack McEnroe
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McEnroe, Kevin Jack.
Our Town: A Novel / Kevin Jack McEnroe.
pages cm
1.
Motion picture actors and actresses--Fiction. 2.
Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)--Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3613.C426O86 2015
813’.6--dc23
2014044890
Cover design by Charles, Brock Faceout Studios
Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.
COUNTERPOINT
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Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-638-4
For Mom,
For Dad,
For Patty,
Lindsey,
And Joanna,
“Take some time it won’t be misspent on me,
If you stay another day I swear I’ll make you see,
It’s not where you are it’s where you feel you should be,
And it’s where your heart is.”
I love you the most.
CONTENTS
Histrionic Personality Disorder
Call On Me. I’ll Be There Always.
Part-Time Head Turner, Full-Time Jaw Dropper
Catch Me if You Can When I’m Dippin’ from the Cops
Now There’s a Special Way I Fold My Flag
Stabat Mater Dolorosa, Juxta Crucem Lacrimosa
This Is a Dog Run, Not a Playground
D
orothy White—whose given name was Joanna-Rae Cook—was born in October, 1939, in Americus, Georgia. She was born on a Wednesday, in the hospital, and she was the elder of two daughters. When she was nearly five, her father, her mother, her sister, and she went out to dinner in Eufala, a nearby town. Just a short drive. Only a few exits. Her father, Henry, an atomic scientist, wanted to go out to eat. Her mother, Etta—so beautiful, just like her daughter would turn out to be—was happy to stay in. She enjoyed cooking. She found the process meditative, and the ritual made her whole. Henry, though, wanted to go out. He liked cheap drinks. He liked a bargain. And so he decided on Rover’s Tavern. Monday beers are two-for-one.
They had a nice meal—Dorothy had baked chicken, onion-fried potatoes, and greens. Swiss chard, I think. And Henry drank Schlitz, mostly. After eating, he switched to rye, neat. They weren’t two-for-one, though, so he only had three. Everything was going swell—they were all, the whole family, smiles and happy. Happy and smiles. Just enjoying each other’s company. Just happy to be full. On the way home, though, they were in an accident. On a dark road—a back way—Henry turned a corner and was blinded by another car’s brights. Dorothy’s mother and younger sister died immediately, while Hank passed that night in the hospital from internal injuries. Dorothy,
somehow, was safe. She was broken about it, at first, but she’d be okay. She’d eventually be okay.
For a time, Dorothy was raised by her Nana, until her Nana became mentally and physically incapable of doing so. She was then adopted by a rich local family. Eugene Goodman was a doctor, and his wife, Iris, was barren, and they loved Dorothy dearly. They always, no matter their busy schedules, made sure to keep her close. It was here that she changed her name from Joanna-Rae to Dorothy. Because she felt different here. Happier, somehow. And she thought it’d be nice, and fitting, to recognize that change. Starting over would be a theme in her life. She always felt she could be better than she was.
As a teenager, Dorothy married Willis White, but they divorced soon thereafter. He didn’t nearly deserve her. Wasn’t nearly enough of a man. But she kept his surname—Dorothy White was just straight pretty—and, after that, moved home and enrolled at the local college. While attending, she entered and won a beauty contest—Miss Americus. Coincidentally, a Hollywood agent, Ricky, or something like Ricky, was visiting an acting client who was shooting a movie somewhere nearby. At night, and days they weren’t shooting, Ricky became quite lonely and thought he might like to go out and have a few drinks. Maybe scout some new talent. Something young, hopefully. Fingers crossed. Yet untainted by the world. He attended the Miss Americus trophy presentation because he happened to be at the bar where it was being held. When he saw Dorothy, with her wreath and blue ribbon—
Number 1!
—he thought he’d maybe, for the first time in his life, fallen in love. And when he approached her afterward, pushing through the crowd of people that surrounded her, congratulating her, and he said hello, and congratulations, too, and she responded—“Thank ya kindly!”—he knew.
Dorothy then said good-bye to college, and Eugene and Iris—she kissed them on their foreheads after she’d hugged them both, hard—and moved to Los Angeles with Ricky. When she got to LA, though, Dorothy soon realized she could do better. Ricky was pretty small-time. His suits were never pressed. He couldn’t reserve the right
restaurants. She didn’t even have a reel! He’d crowned himself enough of a photographer to shoot her headshots. And the picture he decided was best to send to the studios portrayed her wearing a red ten-gallon hat, sitting on a hay barrel, and chewing on a rigid piece of straw. This didn’t quite get her foot in the door, so to speak, nor did it garner her the respect she felt she deserved. But finally—finally!—her career began when a producer for Universal spotted her at a cocktail party she’d snuck into—she knew one of the caterers from back at school in Americus. Even though Dorothy ended up just a B-movie actress, who only briefly experienced any true success, her beauty and her vanilla voice and her appetite for proper living earned her, almost, infamy. But she also wanted to be a good woman. A good wife, and a good mother. And a good grandmother, too. A good friend. But she always got in her own way. She never quite figured how to get out of her own way.
L
ater on, between takes, in the corner of a television pilot’s shooting set, behind a key grip with muttonchops who balanced a boom mic between his brown, wooden clogs, stood a perfectly handsome young actor attempting to remove his tan, collarless Barracuda jacket. His zipper was stuck, and he was pulling so hard that his thumb and pointer finger were growing more and more purple-red with each attempt. He kept trying, but he just couldn’t get it unstuck. The set was a modest living room, made to represent the sort of living room you might see in a small midwestern town in the mid- to late 1940s. Its furniture was dressed almost entirely in pastel. A Navajo rug lay flat beneath an avocado-green-painted drop-leaf oak-wood table, mid- to late 1940s and behind that sat a plush, salmon-colored, L-shaped, partially pulled-out sofa bed. The walls were lined with light red stripes, and from those stripes grew yellow roses, painted very well—very accurately—almost as though you could smell them. Leaning against one of these walls, just beside a full-stocked, off-white, rolling wet bar, with matching white stemware and three ivory decanters, stood Dorothy White, smoking a Bravo lettuce cigarette—tobacco was prohibited on set, and the director, an asthmatic, had directed, even off camera, that such be the case—with her legs crossed one in front of the other and a quite curious expression on her face. It seemed as if she smelled something,
but not something pretty, like the flowers. Something gone rotten. Something overripe. She was as perfectly beautiful as the young actor fighting himself on the other side of the room—both tens, grading on a scale from one to ten—and she stared at him. She watched him struggle. She noticed his pain. She saw a man she thought she could help. He had a structurally sound face—symmetrical—with kind eyes, a very masculine jawline, and a clean crew cut, barbered longer on top than at the sides, high and tight. Dorothy took a step, pulled once more from her Bravo, and, now, decided she could help. She was sure of it. So she pressed her cigarette into a decorative ashtray and made her way across the set—swaying past the key grip and the TV pilot’s director, a few gathered producers, and a food cart with corn chips and salsa and carrots with a sour cream dip. And a few extras, and spotlights, and the director’s and the producer’s cloth-backed chairs—until, finally, she arrived at the actor’s feet. She stood before him in a black shoulderless dress and an updo and placed her hands thoughtfully on her hips. A teacup. Short, not stout. Not yet stout. She had thin but muscular arms, a long, angular neck, and a waist that had yet to provide her any worry, but he didn’t notice. He still looked down, consumed entirely by his full-stuck zipper. After about thirty seconds, she tapped him on the shoulder, and he jumped backward, frightened, but without letting go of his coat. He thought he’d got it loosened. He wasn’t gonna let all that hard work go to waste.
