The Hollywood Trilogy (20 page)

“High adventure, 'ey, old sport?” I said to Jim.

“I think I skinned my knee,” he said. He was rubbing the place tenderly.

“Which way to Karl's room, do you think?” I had been to Karl's part of the house many times, but from the roof and under moonlight the perspectives changed, and I was lost. There were chimneys and balconies and terraces and casements everywhere you looked.

“How the fuck should I know?” Jim asked. He was still rubbing his knee.

“You want a drink, don't you?” I said. “Let's get inside any old fucking way, have ourselves a brandy and then proceed to business. Indeed, Holmes, I daresay that is the only feasible course of action open to us.”

“Bah,” said Jim.

“Eloquent,” I said. I moved off up the roof and down the other side of this particular section. I was looking for an open set of windows that I could lower myself into or a balcony I could drop onto without risking my life. Jim
followed me at some distance, often going on all fours uphill and scrambling on his ass downhill. I came around some chimneys after a bit, stopped and turned to warn Jim by holding my fingers to my lips. But he was not looking and kept making noise, so I went back to him.

“Shush,” I whispered, “and you will get to see a rare sight.”

He misunderstood me and said, “Listen, maybe we better just go back.”

“No, it's not like that at all. Come on.”

We moved very quietly around the chimneys, and I stopped and pointed.

There was Karl, sitting on the roof hugging his knees. He was wearing a pair of pants and a white skullcap and staring out toward the ocean. His bare feet gleamed in the moonlight.

I looked back at Jim, and Jim looked at me. Then we both looked over at Karl.

“Hello, Karl,” I said. “Out for a moonbath?”

KARL LOOKED over at us and smiled, as if he had been sitting there waiting. “Hello, boys,” he said.

That stumped me. I couldn't think of anything funny to say, so I asked him, “What the hell are you doing on the roof?”

“I used to come up here all the time,” he said. Jim and I sat down. “When I was a kid I once hid up here for three days. They looked all over the United States.”

“What did you eat?” I asked him.

“I went inside when they were all asleep or out of the house. There was plenty to eat and it was warm.”

He looked at me with great sadness in his eyes. “Don't ever send a small, beautiful boy to
military
school,” he said.

“Oh, God,” Jim said. “Did you have to go to military school?”

“Don't blame my father. What was he supposed to do? My mother died when I was born, so he had this kid on his hands.”

“Yeah, but military school,” Jim said.

“Well, I went to a couple of regular boarding schools, he didn't know, and I was always getting into trouble, so he got advice and the advice told him, military school, they'll take the boy and make a man out of him. Ha ha. They
took the boy and made a girl of him. Jesus Christ, I hated it, too. I pretended to myself that I liked it, but I hated it. But, see, the only way I could look myself in the face was if I liked it. But it was terrible, you can't guess how many military school boys are nuts, really fruitcake, you have a phrase for it, Jim, what the hell is that phrase?”

“Out there,” Jim said.

“That's the one.”

“Have you been drinking?” I asked Karl.

“No, not drinking, nothing, no. It's just the weight; I can't stand the weight, it's too much for me.”

“I am,” I said, “drunk as a goat.”

“Me, too,” Jim said.

“We probably won't remember
anything
that happened tonight,
black-right-out
.”

“I know I always do,” Jim said.

“Oh, fuck!”
Karl said, and with a deep moan he got to his feet and started running for the edge of the roof. He only got a few steps before I grabbed him, but Jim lost his balance and went careening down over the edge of the roof.

“Oh my God I've killed Jim Larson!” Karl said with horror.

“Siddown and shaddup,” I said. I went to the edge of the roof. I hadn't heard any loud thump or any outcry from Jim, just the crackle of some greenery. I peered down into the treetops.

“Jim?” I said.

“Yeah?” came his voice.

“What's happening down there?”

“I'm in the tree,” Jim said.

“You hurt?”

“Well, I don't really know.”

I heard some more crackle, and then a light thump as Jim fell on down, or jumped, to the lawn below. I waited a couple of seconds.

“You okay?” I called.

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm coming back up.”

“How?”

“The old oak tree,” he said.

I went up to Karl, who was just sitting there again. I shouldn't have left him alone like that. I sat down beside him.

“Everything's fine,” I said. “Jim's okay, hell fire, the man's a trained acrobat.”

“I'm sorry,” Karl said. He began to weep into his hands.
“Oh God oh fuck oh God oh shit,”
he sobbed. It looked as if he was trying to dig his eyes out of his head so I took hold of his wrists, but he kept sobbing and beat his head against me. I didn't know what to do so I just held onto him.

“I want to
die!
” he cried. “I want to die, DIE!!”

“But I won't let you,” I said. “So you can forget about that.”

After a while I felt the tension go out of his wrists and I let go of him. He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. I heard the clatter of tiles somewhere on the roof and assumed that trained acrobat Jim was on the way.

“I'm just crazy, aren't I?” Karl said. “This whole night is just craziness.”

“Sure,” I said. “Happens to me regularly, don't sweat it, pal, it's okay.”

Jim showed up. He didn't look so bad. He grinned. “Fell three stories in two jumps, Christ, I ought to go out for the fucking paratroops.”

“Stay here and talk to this asshole while I get us something to drink,” I said. “Where's the nearest open window?” I asked Karl and he pointed.

Inside the house with just the night lighting, everything looked like old Spain, sedate, rich, powerful and impregnable, remote. The clown show on the roof was just not possible. I went through this corridor and that, looked into rooms that were spare bedrooms, drawing rooms, a room with a billiard table, and then into a place I had never been, but the door was wide open, so in I went, looking for Sonny, I guess, more than a brandy bottle, and on through the small comfortable room into a big bedroom with an empty but turned down bed in it, and past that, following the open doors, out onto a small balcony. There was Max in his wheelchair, one hand resting on a barrel-shaped telescope with an eyepiece halfway up the side. Max's eye wasn't on the eyepiece, though; he was just slumped over the goddamn thing dead.

In the last moonlight I could see the white of his eye.

“Oh, Max,” I said.

WHY ME?

I am sitting in my dressing suite in the Golconda Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.

It is Opening Night. Fifteen minutes ago, Jim and I were supposed to appear on stage. The audience is out there, packed in solid, having a fine time watching the girls. The first couple of rows are cheek-to-cheek celebrities, comics, singers, friends of Management.

Jim, however, is not here.

I have not seen Jim in two weeks. Nobody has seen Jim in two weeks.

I remember once in Tokyo, we were drunk in a basement club called the Blue Shadows, listening to J. C. Heard and his jazz band. It was a great night and the band was really swinging, but we ran out of money. We ordered another round of beers and tried to figure a way out of our problem.

“Just wait here,” Jim said to me after a while. “I'll be back in fifteen minutes at the latest.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Up into Tokyo,” Jim said, “to get twenty-five hundred yen.”

“From where?”

He winked. “A secret source. My ace-in-the-hole. Then we'll pay our bill here, get into a taxi and head for Rappongi, where I know a Mamasan who will let us stay the night with the girls of our choice, buy us beers, pay off the cab and even, by God, bring us a double order of
yaki-gyoza
.”

“Sounds like a miracle,” I said, and it must have been, because Jim never came back, and I didn't see him for a couple of months. I finally humiliated myself with promises to the management and even had to get J. C. to okay me, although we had just met that night, fan to musician, and he was obviously uncomfortable about it. Then through the snowswept nightstreets of Tokyo, fueled by rage, arriving at FEAF Headquarters just in time to miss the last bus to my base, and so had to spend the night huddled shivering with the other losers in the lobby of the HQ building.

Thanks, Jim.

BUT I shouldn't panic. Jim does not like the feel of the collar, he does not like to be prodded, he balks at enticement, but he doesn't betray his friends and he doesn't weasel out of agreements. So he should be coming in through the door any minute now, like a cat that's been missing and shows up scarred, exhausted and hungry, or maybe even plump and well groomed, and you
aren't sure whether to pick him up and hug him or just toss him back out the window.

The door even opens, but it is not Jim, just a waitress in a cute black uniform, bringing me a jug of Perrier. I glower at her smile and watch the fear come into her eyes. Mustn't spill, mustn't disturb the star's concentration, mustn't look at all the crazy stuff around the room, just pour the Perrier and get the hell out. Especially since the star just sits there staring and doesn't say a word.

The ice cracks nervously in the tall glass as it cools the water. The air conditioner sighs with anxiety. My stomach groans in suffering. I should have said, “Thanks, Doris, how's your little girl,” and given her a big tip, say, fifty dollars. But she's gone and wasn't Doris anyway. I drink from the tall glass and the ice cracks like knuckles.