The Hollywood Trilogy (56 page)

“You won't even pricktease me to get me to do it, will you,” Maggie said. “Shit, you might as well. Anybody see you coming out of my room's going to think we've been balling anyway, won't they?”

“No I ain't going to pricktease you. I don't have to. You'll do it anyway.”

Maggie took a belt from the open bottle of Wild Turkey and said, “I guess you're right. It's too far to walk, and you'd get lost anyway.”

“Do you want me to drive?” Jody asked. “You look kind of drunk.”

“I'm not as drunk as you are,” Maggie said.

“That's true,” Jody said. “Let's get that dope.”

BUT THE Goon did not have any marijuana for sale. He lived in a small house-trailer in a lot filled with old car bodies out in back of a large frame boarding house. Maggie parked on the street and he and Jody walked down the dark path between cars and knocked at the door. After a moment the Goon opened up. He was sleepy-looking, wearing a white tee shirt and a pair of old shorts.

“Well hi,” he said. “I was just laid back a little.” They entered the tiny crowded trailer. Jody noticed the smell of old sweat hanging sourly over everything and shuddered, because it reminded her of the lower East Side.

“I hear you got fired,” Maggie said to the Goon. They were all sitting
down, Maggie and the Goon on the messy bed, Jody on a pile of clothes and records in the one chair.

“Well, they took my job away, but I don't mind,” the Goon said. He smiled crookedly. “I have other sources of income.”

“Well yeah,” Maggie said. “We came over in fact hoping you might sell us some weed. Just a lid, or even less if you can.”

“Man, I'll gladly share what I've got with you, but all it is is my personal stash. Things are drying up around here. I had to go clean to Mobile for that last pound I bought.” He reached under the bed and brought out a shoebox lid covered with twigs, seeds and a little marijuana. “I think maybe we can get two joints out of this.”

“We can't smoke your last weed,” Maggie said. He got to his feet.

“The hell we can't,” Jody said. “Don't be in such a hurry.”

“Really, we shouldn't hang around,” Maggie said, but Jody was watching the Goon's delicate fingers as he rolled the joints. As soon as the first one was finished he handed it to Jody, who lit it and passed it to Maggie, still standing by the door. It did not taste like the stuff they had had in Maggie's room. It seemed stronger and not as harsh.

“Good weed,” she said as soon as she let out her breath. “God, I hope it's good anyway. I really need something.”

“I hate to smoke and run,” Maggie said. He looked nervous underneath the blandness, Jody thought. He was probably put off by the smell of sweat, and it probably made him nervous to be someplace where he was not protected by the movie company. Come to think of it, back home in California he lived in a big house with a swimming pool. The poverty probably offended him, too.

“You can go if you want,” Jody said in a strained voice. She was trying to hold her breath and talk at the same time. “I'm going to hang out.”

Maggie's lips went tight. She was sorry to see that; she had always liked this guy.

“I can't leave you here,” Maggie said. He stuck his hands aggressively into his front pockets.

“Oh now, let's not talk like that,” Jody said.

“You're both perfectly welcome to leave or stay,” said the Goon. He finished rolling the second joint and stuck it between his teeth like a cigar and grinned at Jody. She lit a match and held it out to him and he bent forward cupping the joint in his hand and looking into her eyes as he sucked in the
smoke. Trying a little of the old sexy look, she thought. He must be a terror with the local chicks, with his drugs and his reputation. He leaned back and blew a gigantic smoke ring, then leaned forward and sucked the smoke back into his mouth. Aha, Jody thought.

“Well, let's get the hell out of here, okay?” Maggie said.

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Jody said. She held a joint up to him but Maggie refused to take it. He looked pretty angry. “Can you drive her back to the motel?” he asked the Goon.

“Anything she wants, she gets,” he said.

“All right then, goodbye,” Maggie said and opened the door.

“Get if you're going,” Jody said. She wanted him gone, he was nothing but a big bringdown now. She stood up and said, “Are you waiting for a kiss goodbye?”

Maggie got that look on his face that men get when they suddenly realize that three is a crowd, and went out the door backward, almost forgetting that there were two little metal steps to the ground, almost falling but hanging on to the door, and then slamming it shut with a tinny whack. She could hear his feet crunching angrily through the lot.

“God, I thought he'd never go,” she said. “But don't you get any ideas. I really feel like talking. I've been up all night. You wouldn't believe the fucking day we had out there.”

“I heard,” the Goon said. He leaned back against his pillow, relaxed, and took another hit off the joint he was holding. Jody finished hers, wet it and swallowed the roach.

“Waste not, want not,” she said. “Shit, I went all this time with no booze, no weed, not even a fucking glass of wine with my goddamn dinner, just to keep from fucking up this movie, did you know that?”

“I knew you wasn't running around much,” he said. “I thought you'd be around, you know, you look like people, but then everybody else said you were really cold as hell, but I never believed it.”

“You know me pretty well,” she said. She did not want to stand and she did not want to sit, so she more or less paced up and down in the tiny floor-space between the bed and the door while the Goon lay stretched out. The weed was good, much better than she had expected, and Jody felt that rising sense of joyful expectation she almost always got from good marijuana, as if something wonderful was just about to happen. “Goddamn, I feel good,” she said. “I haven't felt this good since I left California. I really did it to those
bastards,” she said. “I really knew I could do it. Nobody thought so but me, they always said, ‘Baby, you're a good fuck, maybe even a great fuck, but you can't act for shit.' I never listened to them. Acting. What is it? You pretend to be somebody else for a while. I been somebody else all my life, haven't you? You ever show yourself to people? I never do. I did my sister in this movie. She was the one who wanted to be in the movies. I never did. I just wanted to do it because she wanted to do it, and then you know you wake up one day and that's all you can do, what you figured out for yourself when you were nothing but a goddamn kid. Fifteen years old, man, that's when I decided to really get into it. I done everything but act. You wouldn't believe. Maybe you would. Do you have any more dope? I really want to get it on. I'm not going to sleep tonight. I took a couple of reds and I'm still not sleepy, man. My head's racing. I did it. Do you know what I mean? I mean I really pulled it off. For the first time in my cheap fucking life I did what I said I was going to do. All my life I couldn't take the pressure, you know, but I took it. I ate the shit they asked me to eat and begged for more, because this time it was for me! Do you have any
drugs?
”

“I got some skag,” he said. “Are you into it?”

Jody laughed. She could not stop pacing up and down the little room. “Skag? What the hell are you doing with skag in this fucking place?”

“We ain't that far out into the backwoods,” he said. “A few of us take the stuff.”

He went into his kitchen and rummaged around and came back with a hypodermic kit, and then went into the bathroom, closing the door with an arch look at Jody, as if to say, ‘I trust you but you never know,' and then came out with a small yellow balloon.

“I haven't had a taste of that stuff since New York,” Jody said. She stretched out on the bed while he fooled around getting the heroin cooked on his dirty little stove. “I used to live with a stone junkie, we'd just do smack, lay back and let life roll along, you know?”

“I'm not heavy into it,” he said.

“I never thought I'd run into a shot of dope right out here in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “But you have to take me back to the motel pretty quick, because I'm going to fade out. I have to work tomorrow, doing the goddamn scene their way, which is the most chickenshit way you ever heard of, with me dying like the queen of the wimps. But they'll see. I hated to do it, but I had to.”

“Aren't you going to stay a little while with me?” the Goon asked without looking at her. He drew the clear liquid up into the outfit and threw the empty balloon over to her. “You want to tie off and go first?” he asked her.

“I'll just shoot it into my leg,” she said, and sat up unbuttoning the top button on her jeans and then unzipping them and pulling them down around her ankles. She did not happen to be wearing any underpants, and she saw him sneaking a look at her pubic hair. “Don't get any big ideas,” she said. “I love the man I'm with, and I don't sleep with nobody else. I'd fuck you if I felt like it, though. I just don't happen to feel like it. Gimme that needle,” she said. “I got a favorite vein here on my leg.” She found the vein and punched in, drawing back on the needle until blood showed in the glass tube.

“Ah,” she said. Here it was, the easy death that had never been far from her hand.

“Are you gonna shoot?” the Goon asked.

“Bullshit,” she said, and drew the needle from her leg. She handed it to him and immediately he began to tie off. Jody pulled up her Levi's. “I think I'll step aside and let this one go by,” she said, but the Goon wasn't listening. She opened the door and went out, hoping that Maggie was waiting for her in the production car. But he wasn't, and so she had to walk all the way back to the motel. It took almost an hour, and by then she was ready for a good night's sleep.

TURNAROUND

This book is for Richard

“A man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost.”—
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

PART ONE: WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS just dawn as the black Porsche stopped with a sputter at the intersection of Mulholland and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The engine was choking spitefully over something, as usual, but Jerry Rexford paid no attention. This was an important moment for him. Until now he had been driving down the length of California, and then the long predawn rolling emptiness of the San Fernando Valley, but from this intersection forward he would be in Hollywood, the mythical kingdom he had dreamed about all his life, the Movie Capital of the World.

At that moment, the engine died. If it was an omen, Jerry Rexford did not have time to reflect on it, because right then a police car with two young cross-belted cops pulled up to his left. Jerry waited for them to go ahead, but they didn't. They watched him. His face heating up under its all-night beard, he tried to get the engine started. The car was always skittish, and now seemed to be so carboned up that it would never go.
URurURurURurURur.
The cops were as silent as dummies in their car. Jerry looked around, realizing that from their viewpoint he was a man behaving in a suspicious manner, in an exclusive residential neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills at five a.m. A stranger in a black Porsche which he obviously did not know how to operate. He could feel the sweat running down his armpits as he twisted the key viciously and tramped once again on the accelerator. If it would only run just a little bit, he could get across the intersection and be on the downhill slope. Then he was sure he could coast all the way to Sunset Boulevard
(Sunset Boulevard!)
and then let the car have a little rest when he went for something to eat.