The Hollywood Trilogy (10 page)

Karl hung up his telephone quickly and looked at me with big round eyes. “What's the matter?” he asked. I went on with my own call, and pretty soon Jim came out dressed and gave Karl another nasty glare:

“You still here?”

Karl stood up. Jim gave him a dazzling smile and hugged him. “Karl, you old bastard, how's your dad?”

Karl grinned, but I could tell he was really pissed off at Jim.

I hung up my telephone. Jim said, “I'm hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead mule. Let's go somewhere and have a nice big lunch.”

“I have a reservation at the Polo Lounge,” Karl said.

“Fuck the Polo Lounge,” Jim said.

“We could go to Schwab's . . .” I said. “Schwab's?” Karl asked. There was no enthusiasm in his voice.

“What's the matter with Schwab's?” I asked him.

“Nothing, it's just I've never been there,” Karl said.

“Well, suck my nuts,” Jim said. “We'll just have to take you to Schwab's!”

As far as I knew, Jim had never been there either.

“What about the girl?” I said to Karl.

“She already ate,” he said.

“What girl?” Jim asked.

“What, the coffee and toast they bring you here?” I said. The hotel didn't have a regular kitchen, but you could get anything you wanted if you were willing to pay for it.

“I think she had juice, too,” Karl said. “I was in the shower.”

“What girl?” Jim said again. He went into the kitchen.

“Get me a beer, will you?” I called out to him, and picked up the house phone, dialing 609.

After a couple of rings she answered, a nice low voice with most of the Texas rubbed off.

“This is David Ogilvie,” I said. “We're all going over to Schwab's for something to eat . . .”

“Here, let me talk to her,” Karl said. He came over toward me holding out his hand for the telephone, but I backed away.

“You want a beer, Karl?” Jim called from the kitchen.

“No, thank you,” Karl said.

“. . . Me and Karl and Jim Larson,” I said into the phone.

I heard the pops from the kitchen as Jim opened the beer, and felt a sudden wave of anxiety right down through my socks. “We'll pick you up,” I said to the girl, and hung up.

Jim came out and handed me my beer. He smiled at Karl.

“Got a little piece of pussy stashed away here at the hotel, huh?”

“Little bit of the old Texas poontang,” I said. “What the hell's her name?”

“Sonny Baer,” Karl said. He spelled it out while Jim and I looked at him blankly. “It's her real name,” he said. “You know those Texas people and their names. Rip Torn. Sissy Spacek. Candy Clark.”

“And now Sonny Baer,” Jim said. “She must be a real asshole.”

“Karl probably wants to put her in our picture,” I told Jim.

“Hell, I'm for it, if it gets Karl laid,” Jim said.

“Maybe we ought to call Schwab's for a reservation,” Karl said.

“Hey, it's a drugstore, man, you don't call for reservations,” Jim said.

After we finished our beers I went into the bathroom and got a couple of joints out of my shaving kit and we drifted down to the sixth floor.

Sonny Baer was dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans. She had bushels of honeycolored hair, big deep blue eyes and a grin that cut the stunning effect of the rest of her and made it clear that Sonny Baer, whatever else, was no asshole. She grinned at me and shook my hand and said, “I see all of vour movies at least twice.”

“What?” I said.

Those eyes had never left mine, not even once, to look at Jim or Karl. “I love your movies. They're funny.”

“What about
my
movies?” Jim asked.

Sonny said, “Oh, are you in the movies?” and won my heart forever. Jim laughed and shook her hand.

“Boy, you got great tits,” he said, grinning and glinting.

“Give me a couple of minutes, okay?” she said, and went into the bathroom. Karl reached for the telephone and took it into Sonny's breakfast nook, and Jim turned on the television set. Jim and I watched a rerun while Karl talked in a low voice and made notes. Finally he came back in to where we were, looked from one of us to the other as if he wanted to say something, gave up and sat down and watched about thirty seconds of a commercial, then got up and went into the back of the apartment, then came out again, sat with us for another thirty seconds at least, and then went out onto Sonny's balcony, which overlooked the front of the hotel and Sunset, the same view as from my front terrace.

We were well into another rerun when Sonny came out, looking about the same, and we all jammed up at the door trying to open it for her.

“Wait a minute,” she said. We all stopped and looked at her.

“Does anybody have a number? I'd really liked to get stoned.”

I pulled out a joint and lit it, and Jim shut the door. It only took a minute for the three of us to smoke up the joint—Karl didn't smoke
anything
anymore, because, he said, it made him lose his feeling of control. Now he just waited patiently. Karl up in my apartment was one thing, he could never handle us somehow, but he didn't get where he was by being a jerk, and now, with an audience, it was more like the public Karl, smooth, darkly handsome, cool as ice. Karl was a real snooker player, and I should have known there was more to this whole Mickey Mouse morning than getting a part for his girlfriend.

“This is great dope,” Sonny said. “What is it?” I could hear that Texas burr coming on a bit stronger now.

“Maui Zowie, the best marijuana in the world,” I said, “and it hasn't even hit yet, give it another five minutes . . .”

“Hot damn,” she said. “They got nothing like this in New York.”

We all got into the elevator, and I pushed B for basement, but Sonny pushed L for lobby. “I want to check my mail,” she said.

We waited and held the elevator door while she talked to the girl at the desk and finally came back to the elevator with a fat little letter, which she opened and glanced over quickly and then stuffed into her big leather purse.

“Letter from home?” I asked her.

“You're pretty smart,” she said.

We walked down the little hill to the Liquor Locker, past the magazine and newspaper racks.

Jim said, “Anybody got any quarters?” and bought a dirty newspaper. Sonny looked at the cover and made a face.

“I want to go in here,” I said, and went into the liquor store while everybody else stayed outside in the sun. I picked up a couple of pints of Old Crow and tossed one to Jim.

“Remind me I want to stop here on my way back,” Sonny said to Karl.

“The prices are really terrible in there,” Karl said. “You should shop over at the Chalet Gourmet.”

“Anyway,” she said.

BY THIS time of day Schwab's was packed, with a big double line of people waiting for booths in front of the cigar counter and every seat at the long counter filled. Lunch is different from breakfast. At breakfast the day is glittering with promise, the calls to be taken, the deals to be made, the mail yet to come; by lunch a lot of this has been taken care of, but never mind, lunch is
who are you with
and
who's in the room
; there's a need to maintain at least the appearance of being fully employed in this pleasant clatter and chatter of show business. Beginners come here to somehow be absorbed into the mainstream, longtime hangers-on come to be with their friends and equals, stars and hits come to keep themselves honest and to remember,
this is how it was and this is how it could be again
. And a lot of people come here to look at the others, and a lot of assholes and dimwits show up to confuse the issue.

I like Schwab's.

“We'll never get a seat,” Sonny said, and moved off through the drugstore. Jim and Karl and I took our places at the end of the line, but of course when we had come by the window to the booth room and then in through the big double glass doors everybody did a take at us, as they do with everybody, and the energy of the room began its gradual shift.

I had to admire Karl. Here he was, a man with literally hundreds of jobs to dispense over the course of a year, brought half against his will into a room full-to-spilling with eager jobtakers—performers, showoffs, clowns, ladies and gentlemen who had been working all their lives at the fine art of attracting attention. A lesser man than Karl would have balked at the door when he sensed the energies inside, or would have refused to come at all. But not Karl. He knew personally at least a third of the crowd and most of the rest by sight, and he behaved like a champ, cool but not aloof, nodding and smiling with recognition, shaking hands and having something to say to everybody who came up to him.

Yet it was not like watching a master politician shedding his golden light on the chosen obscure, it was more like a tribal elder getting down with the troops; my God, this guy could put everybody in the room on easy street with a wiggle of his finger, he knew it and they knew it, and the energy coiled and surged.

Naturally, when everyone got over their surprise at seeing Karl they turned back to their own conversations, because nobody likes to get caught with his tongue hanging out. But it was as if everybody had sniffed cocaine
in the interval between our arrival and the time we were seated in our booth, everyone a little happier, a little more jacked up, because
they
were
here
and
we
were
here
and big things must be happening. They would not have been nearly as turned on by just me and Jim, we're only jobtakers like them, but Karl was a Big Boss, and the best way to behave in front of a Big Boss is to appear friendly, fully employed, with a future full of projects.

Every conversation rose a couple of notches, and the fractured sounds bounced off the walls as the energy moved around the room gathering force.

And so of course it affected us, too, that wonderful sense of wellbeing, helped along only a little bit by the whiskey I poured into my coffee the minute Dorothy the waitress turned her back.

“Look who's drinkin' on New York time,” somebody said, and the words ricocheted and everybody laughed, but not in chorus.

Jim read a couple of the raunchy sex ads from his little newspaper.

“Ugh,” Sonny said. She had joined us as soon as the booth opened up. “Down in Texas we don't do stuff like that except to animals.”

Jim read a couple more but nobody was listening, so he put the paper away and laced his own coffee.

A woman came by the table for autographs, she wanted all four signatures, she didn't give a damn who any of us were, but I had to feel sorry for Pops, back in the booth, red with shame.

While we waited for Dorothy to come back and get our orders, Sonny read her letter and Karl worked the room, making it around to everybody he had to stroke, giving it the personal touch and paying good dues. If somebody had seen him come into the place and then told his booth that he and Karl had this relationship, and Karl failed to acknowledge the relationship, the guy could be made to look foolish, and then some time in the future this could cause trouble. Making movies is trouble enough without trouble.

“When you consider he's got a heart the size of a beebee, he's doing all right,” Jim admitted.

A couple of guys across the room reluctantly got up from their booth, but the pack was massing at the cigar counter and they had to leave. Instead of just going out, they took hold of one another and waltzed down past us and around the other row of booths and out that way, to a scattering of applause. Then a comic who was now working a police show as a straight actor came up to us, gave me a broad wink and bent over to whisper in Jim's ear.

Jim got serious at once. Karl slid back in the booth, strain showing around his eyes, and picked up a menu.

“Who was that?” he asked Jim.

“I don't know,” Jim said. “He told me the poison was in the vessel with the pestle.”