The Big Bamboo (9 page)

Sergio swiveled on his stool, lost in time. “The good ol’ Elbo Room, established 1938.”

“It’s changed too much,” said Roy.

“Not for me,” said Sergio. “It’s the spirit that counts. Can you feel it?”

Chi-Chi leaned to Roy. “He had an espresso.”

“When I close my eyes, I’m right back in that movie.” Sergio pointed at the old publicity photos on the north wall. “Instead of Hollywood, they held the premiere at the landmark Gateway Theater up on Sunrise. Made the newsreels.”

The bartender came over. “What’ll it be, fellas?”

Sergio pointed toward a corner. “Isn’t that where the Basil Demetomos Dialectic Jazz Quintet played?”

“We don’t have jazz here. Just rock.”

“No, in the movie.
Where the Boys Are
.”

“Movie?”

“Paula Prentiss, George Hamilton. Travis McGee’s marina was in the aerial shot over the opening credits. Just got finished studying the anniversary DVD. In the subtitles, they misspelled the Elbo Room through the whole damn thing. Added a
w.
Bet that burns your ass with all your obvious pride working here.”

“You been drinking?”

“No,” said Chi-Chi. “But we need to start. Round of Jack, neat.”

“You got it.”

Roy looked around. “Who’s missing? Where’s Moondog?”

Chi-Chi removed his toothpick and shook his head. “Two months ago.”

“Didn’t hear,” said Roy.

“It was quick,” said Coltrane. “Nobody expected.”

“What’s happening to us?” said Roy. “We used to run this place.”

“Time,” said Chi-Chi. “The old guard’s almost all gone. First Greek Tommy, then Mort the Undertaker, now Moondog. Soon, no one will be left to tell these kids how it was.”

“To happier topics,” said Roy. “You mentioned on the phone about some swag?”

Chi-Chi placed a shaving bag on the bar. “Good score.” He began removing watches. “Most are low-end but we got two beauts.”

Roy stuck a jeweler’s loupe in his eye and held the watches to his face. “These
are
nice.” He picked up another. “Who’d you hit?”

“JCPenney.”

“You’re joking.”

Chi-Chi took the toothpick out again. “Candy from a baby.”

Roy grabbed another watch. “What game did you use?”

“Electric scooter.”

“That’s a good game,” said Roy.

“Should have been there,” said Coltrane. “It was priceless. Sergio was just supposed to create a diversion, but he kind of overdid it.”

“Never seen so much broken glass,” said Chi-Chi. “Thought he wasn’t going to be able to get up, and we’d have to abort.”

“You have to remember how suppressed the times were,” said Sergio. “They slipped all kinds of secret stuff into that movie. Like when Timothy Hutton’s dad, Jim, is hitchhiking, and the convertible full of spring-breaking coeds pulls up, and the driver asks, ‘What size are your feet?’ He says, ‘Thirteen.’ And she says, ‘Get in!’…”

Roy took the jeweler’s loupe out of his eye. “I can give you three.”

“Sounds fair.”

The bartender arrived with shots.

“The studio was going to use Hollywood heavies for the score,” said Sergio. “But then newcomer Connie Francis said she only worked with a friend from Brooklyn. They thought she was crazy until they heard the demo. That young composer? Neil Sedaka!”

“Don’t mind me asking,” said Roy. “But why do you still do it? You don’t need the money.”

“Same reason as you,” said Chi-Chi. “Feel alive.”

“Here’s to that,” said Coltrane.

Roy set his empty glass down. “Speaking of trivia, Sergio, you seen that grandson of yours lately? The police came around again.”

“Little Serge? Who knows? Hadn’t heard from him for six months. Then he’s banging on my window at three in the morning with a crazy story about figuring out the mystery of how that hermit pioneer moved twenty-ton boulders to build the Coral Castle south of Miami. Says he’s off to build an even bigger one and runs away. That was July.”

“Takes after you,” said Chi-Chi.

“Where you going for lunch?” asked Roy.

“Cafeteria,” said Coltrane. “Want to join us?”

“Not the cafeteria again!” said Sergio.

“What’s wrong with the cafeteria?”

“Old people eat there.”

“We’re old.”

“That’s the point,” said Sergio. “The Big Clock’s ticking. Whenever I’m in a cafeteria line, all I can think about is death breathing down my neck, and I’m stuck behind some slow-motion putz who can’t decide whether he wants the bowl of Jell-O cubes.”

“We’re leaving for the cafeteria now,” said Chi-Chi. “Come or don’t.”

“Wait up!” yelled Sergio.

Farther south on Nebraska Avenue, the hooker motels thin out. Traffic becomes lighter, then none at all as the road reaches an abandoned stretch of downtown so lifeless it appears radioactive. Not even bums or roaches. The only thing open is the historic Union Station, recently restored and used by Amtrak to service a skeleton clientele.

A ’71 Buick Riviera rumbled across the train tracks and pulled around behind a boarded-up brick warehouse. A Lexus was already there.

“Why are we stopping here?” asked Coleman, pulling a sixer from a paper sack.

“I have to have sex with that woman.”

“But we were going to do stuff.”

“I know, but I gave her my word.” Serge opened the door. “This won’t take long.”

“If you don’t want to be here, why don’t we split? People blow off appointments all the time.”

“That’s the problem with society,” said Serge. “No premium on being dependable. Like when I drop off one-hour photos, I’m back in fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds. But are they ready? Oh, no. They’re shorthanded today or got an overflow of Christmas orders. But if my coupon is
one day
past expiration—sorry, they have rules.”

“What does all that have to do with coming here?”

“I believe in personal responsibility,” said Serge. “If you want to change society, start with yourself and hope for karma. So now I’m forced to have sex if I want my photos on time.”

A piece of plywood had already been crowbarred off a ground-floor window on the back of the building. They climbed inside. Serge headed up a rickety staircase. Coleman stayed on the bottom step, keeping lookout through a knothole.

Fifteen minutes passed in silence. Coleman was completing his third Schlitz when he began to detect a rhythmic creaking in the overhead joists. He pulled another can off the plastic ring and looked up toward the closed door at the top of the stairs.

Behind the door was a loft—the one film crews had used as
The Punisher’
s hideout in the fictitious Railroad Hotel. All evidence of that was now gone, just two people and a sleeping bag.

“They shot the Puerto Rico scenes at Fort DeSoto and Honeymoon Island,” said Serge, thrusting hard. “The restaurant with the Memphis assassin was the venerable Goody Goody, 119 North Florida Avenue…”

“Ohhhh! Ohhhh! My God! Ohhhh! I’m almost there! Don’t stop! Faster, you maniac, faster!…”

“Saints and Sinners nightclub was the Bank of America, Kennedy and Cass…”

At the foot of the stairs, Coleman picked at a chip of paint, trying to ignore the female shrieks.

“Yesss! Yesss! Yesss! Yesss! Punish me!…”

“Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in fifty-six?”

“Estes Kefauver!…”

Serge gasped and quivered at the apex. His eyelids fluttered, a montage of nanosecond images from a half-century of Florida celluloid flashed across his mind’s eye.
Hell Harbor, A Guy Named Joe, Tarzan’s Secret Treasure, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, Follow That Dream, Absence of Malice, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Black Sunday, Ace Ventura, There’s Something About Mary…

“Don’t stop!…”

He stopped. His eyes flew wide. “I’ve got it! I’ve got the opening hook!”

Coleman saw the loft’s door fly open. Serge raced down the stairs, zipping his pants. “I’ve got the hook!”

A woman’s voice screamed through the open door behind them.
“You son of a bitch! Come back here!…”

Aman floated facedown in a swimming pool.

“Is he dead?”

“Definitely.”

“But how can he be dead?” asked Mark. “You said the movie’s about him.”

“It starts at the end and then goes back.”

“Shhhh!” said Ford. “The scene with our apartment is coming up.”

On TV: a black-and-white Hollywood street sloping down into the city. A sign at the corner: ALTO NIDO. The picture panned up to an open third-story window with gauzy curtains blowing out.

“…I was living in an apartment house above Ivar and Franklin…”

The camera zoomed through the curtains to a man in a bathrobe hunting and pecking on a manual typewriter. A pencil was clutched sideways in his teeth.

“Is that the guy from the pool?” asked Mark.

“I can’t believe you’ve never seen
Sunset Boulevard
,” said Pedro.

It had been two weeks since a pair of full-time slots opened up in the props department, and Ford and Mark had turned in their food court uniforms for good. They were assigned the same shift as Pedro, who introduced them to the rest of the gang in the hernia belts: Tino Carbella and Ray “Butter Fingers” Koch, who regularly had his pay docked.

“They’re also aspiring actors,” said Pedro. “Even had a few small speaking parts. A line here and there, but their characters are never fleshed out.”

These were the good times. They worked together, and they played together.

They zipped set to set in golf carts. They talked “the industry” while tagging Westminster mantel clocks with red reservation slips. They brown-bagged it together in “Central Park,” the all-purpose New York sliver of backlot behind the Sphinx and the all-purpose jungle lagoon. There was chemistry.

“I hate props,” said Mark.

Then, a FOR RENT sign went up. Pedro placed a security deposit on a third-floor unit at the Alto Nido, and they all moved in together. Ford kept polishing his script and kept arriving early for work. He ignored Pedro’s subtlety advice, instead delivering copies of his screenplay to the offices of every Vistamax exec remotely near the decision chain to green-light a project.

“You’re being too pushy,” said Pedro.

“Can’t help it,” said Ford. “I just have this feeling, like something big is about to happen.”

Guards in a glass booth checked IDs and waved luxury vehicles through the antique iron front gates, which had been used as props in a recent send-up of Paramount Pictures.

Golf carts whizzed between soundstages. Two workers carried a plastic mountain range. At the very rear of the compound was the administration building. Twin silver Rolls-Royces flanked the entrance, twin names stenciled on cement curbs: M. GLICK, I. GLICK.

Mel and Ian sat at identical mahogany desks, side by side, in their spacious office overlooking Warner Bros. Studios in beautiful downtown Burbank. Behind their desks was a giant, scowling portrait of their grandfather and studio founder Horatio “Lockjaw” Glickschitz.

Horatio had originally launched his new studio as Screen Gems, until the lawsuit from the first Screen Gems, and it became Screen Jewelry for a brief period from 1931 until 1933, when it was finally and fatefully rechristened Olympus Films, a name that would grow in stature for five decades until the studio was acquired in an extremely hostile takeover by the Japanese generic VCR giant Vistamax. The brothers were out. But the new owners had bet heavily on the Beta format and, after the manufacturing division tanked in Osaka, they brought the Glicks back on board with a controlling interest of voting shares and a mandate to cut costs to the bone.

Accidentally, it worked.

A Vistamax production rarely cracked the top ten, but the budgets were so farcically low it didn’t matter. The big main-street theaters had long since been replaced by mall-plex-o-ramas with twenty-odd screens that all needed to be filled. Multiplied by thousands of malls across America and, by default, a
bad
Vistamax film paid for itself the first weekend.

The Japanese said: More.

The Glicks were up to it, cranking out a preposterous volume with three-week shooting schedules and zero production values. An assembly line of eighty films a year, just like in the old days when everyone was under contract. This is how Vistamax became known as a “throwback” studio. That, and they fucked everyone. The highest-paid department was legal.

The Japanese were thrilled. They pumped dividends back into the studio, which the Glicks invested in a series of extremely profitable teen slasher flicks and personal cocaine habits that lasted to this day. Which was a Monday…. A secretary knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

“Your nine o’clock,” said Betty.

The Glicks wiped their noses and slid coke drawers shut.

Three unsure young men entered and stood in the center of the room. They all had spiked, gelled hair like the Glicks did—last week. They stared at the brothers’ shaved heads and suffered a loss of nerve.

The Glicks simultaneously checked appointment books, then leaned back in padded European upholstery and folded hands in their laps.

“So, you want us to back your independent film,” said Ian.

“Indies used to be hot,” said Mel.

“But now they’re ice-cold,” said Ian.

“Which means they’re just about to get hot again,” said Mel. “Your timing’s perfect.”

“Tell us about it,” said Ian.

The young man in the middle timidly stepped forward. “It’s the story of a—”

“No,” said Mel. “How much can we make it for?”

The young man was off balance. “Uh, depends on what you want…”

“We want shit,” said Ian.

The young man glanced at his partners, then back at the brothers. “Do you know what the story’s about?”

“No,” said Mel.

“But we’ve heard good things,” said Ian.

“How much?” asked Mel.

“It’s hard to say because the story—”

“Does the story have a beginning and an end?” asked Ian.