The Hollywood Trilogy (8 page)

“I think we should have a round of Martinis,” Jim said. After we placed our order with the waiter, Jim said to Grimaldi, “What do you do for pussy?”

“Jesus, Jim, the same as always. I just walk around North Beach with the tip of a hundred dollar bill sticking up out of my pocket.” But after a couple more raw jokes, Grimaldi told us he was living with a twenty-three-year-old girl. “She says she's Korean, but I don't believe her,” he said.

“What do you reckon she is?” I asked.

“Just another, unh, Chinese,” he said. He took out his cigarette lighter, an old gold Dunhill that had been fondled so much it glowed like an amulet. I must have watched Grimaldi go through this ritual a hundred times, but now it took him forever: taking out the lighter and putting it on the marble tabletop, then reaching into his inner pocket and coming out with his dark-stained old ivory cigarette holder, fooling with it, blowing through it and making sure it was clean, and then withdrawing a box of Benson & Hedges cigarettes out of his blazer side pocket and opening the box, removing the cigarette and slowly screwing it into the holder, both hands trembling enough to drive you crazy, and then finally putting the holder into his mouth and flicking the lighter.

Civilizations could rise and fall while Grimaldi lit his cigarette, a lonely old guy walking the streets of North Beach, having his regular stops, Gino & Carlo's for his first glass of beer in the morning, down the street to the Trieste for espresso and read the newspaper, and then across Columbus to the Chinatown part of Grant Street, slowly wandering from store to store, picking up the groceries and sundries of the day, and then up the stairs on Washington Street to the top floor flat where he kept his collection of Tiffany glass and local painters, the collection supposedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, I don't know, I've never seen it, and then out into the saloons for the rest of the afternoon and evenings, unless his story about living with a Chinese girl was true, and of course there was no way to know, but it doesn't matter, because Grimaldi was an important guy when he was giving starts to all kinds of things, his name was in the paper all the time, and he was interviewed on the television, and now that he didn't have his club anymore, those days long in the past.

We had a couple of Martinis apiece, the place was buzzing with the late lunch crowd, and then the waiter came out to our table and told me there was a phone call for me. Jim gave me a kind of funny look, and I went in to the bar and took the phone.

It was the studio. How they found us I don't know. I told them we were on our way, and they insisted that they were not worried, everything was fine, but of course they were worried sick, because we were late, not really late, but late on a schedule that allowed us to be late, just a little bit late. These couple of days late weren't costing them anything much on the production board, but if we were really late, say, a week late, then the blood would begin to flow, sixty people on salary doing nothing but being paid anyway is enough to drive any production supervisor right out of his mind. But we weren't that late, and I told them not to worry, we were going to have lunch here and then catch an afternoon commuter plane.

When I got back to the table, Grimaldi was alone. I finished my second Martini and was looking at the menu when it occurred to me that Jim might not have gone to the toilet.

“Where's Jim?” I asked Grimaldi.

“He went down the street,” the old man said.

I ordered spinach crepes and another Martini. By the time I had finished lunch Grimaldi had gone on his way, moving down Broadway at about a
foot a minute, and Jim had not showed up. I paid the check and left. The car was still in the parking lot so I took a stroll up to the all-night dirty bookstore and then across and down to City Lights Books and then to the Discovery bookstore where I used to work when it was a tiny place. I didn't recognize any of the kids working in among the stacks of used books and records, so I walked on down past the old Hungry i, the Purple Onion, Grimaldi's, and only the old Onion was still there, but I didn't go down the steps, it was too creepy for me, so I went back up to Vesuvio's and started drinking beer.

I had done comedy and theater in the service and got out of it because of the stage fright, but now everybody in North Beach seemed to be doing something great. San Francisco was full of young poets and folksingers, writers, vocalists and comedians; so me and Jim worked up a little act between us and he begged Grimaldi to let us try it out. Unfortunately, Jim got me stoned my first time, out in the alley before we went on, and by the time I was under the lights I was high and dry. I just stood there through the polite applause and then the silence and then some coughs and shifting in the seats, and then some of them thought it was funny and laughed, and then everybody laughed, and stopped and waited for me to say something. But all I could do was leer at them and try to remember where my mouth was, and they thought this was really funny and it brought down the house, applause and everything, and then they got quiet and Jim realized what had happened to me.

“What's the matter with you?” he said. “Some cat got your tongue?” and sang a couple of songs, talked to me, told jokes, charmed that audience practically one by one, and finally at the end, I said to Jim, “Thank you,” and they ate it up.

So Grimaldi let us do it again the next night, somewhat different but the same basic plan, and we got the laughs. Ten days later Jim put his trumpet away.

I went back to Enrico's and drank more beer, and about seven in the evening Jim came back.

“You feel clean enough to make a dinner party?” he asked me.

“What's up?”

It seemed there was this actress.

THE DIMORRO mansion was well out Broadway in Pacific Heights, about as far west as you could go in San Francisco without crossing the fog line. While we were trying to find the bell, the door was opened by a Chinese butler, who gave us the fisheye until the hostess showed up and pulled the big door open wide and invited us in. Her name was Bianca diMorro, although it turned out she was just another longlegged San Jose girl. Her friends called her Binnie.

It was quite a nice house, and you could see that everything in it was authentic, from the paintings by Gainsborough and Picasso to the Rodin statue of Balzac shitting his pants, at least that's how it looked to me. I didn't even know it was Balzac until somebody told me. Most of the men in the house were dressed in dark blue suits and the women had on floor-length gowns and it was all very festive and pleasant, especially considering that Jim and I had filled in the early part of the evening with more beer-drinking at Enrico's, and had taken certain steps to insure that we would not fall asleep over dinner, if you gather my meaning.

The party was being given for a little Italian guy who was standing in the corner of the living room near Balzac wearing a light blue sweatshirt under a brown velvet jacket and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses hiked up above his eyebrows, which were bristling out over his nose like wings. I never really caught his name, but I found out he was in America directing a movie, and his two stars, including a certain actress, were along at the dinner. How Jim got us invited I don't know, but he seemed to be on good terms with nearly everybody in the place. I wasn't. I didn't know any of these people, and that made me somewhat uncomfortable. I sat in a corner and nursed a brandy and water, while everybody else laughed and chattered and moved from group to group.

The actress Jim was after was tall and blonde and dressed to kill in what looked to be a soft grey silk gown which matched her eyes, except for the soft part. Just for fun I watched her talking to this guy and that guy, nearly all of them millionaires, you would guess, and watched Jim work his way into the group she was with and start everybody laughing; but she didn't seem to be leaning on his every word, and in fact as far as I could tell, she wasn't impressed by Jim at all, which gave me a certain satisfaction. I wouldn't make a play for her myself, she wasn't my type, I learned right away when
we were introduced. For one thing, she was a couple of inches taller than me, and for another, she reeled back visibly when she caught a whiff of my breath and seemed barely able to get control over herself enough to give my hand a tiny squeeze. And those eyes the color of killer-fog. Jim could have her, if he could get her. Which, as I say, did not seem to be happening.

After a couple of hours of hard drinking on everybody's part, Chinese servants came out of the woodwork and set up dining tables in a couple of rooms, me being seated at the regular dinner table, a big round number with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from where I sat. I must have joined in the table talk but I can't remember any of it, except that when the Chinese servant poured me a glass of white wine at the beginning of dinner I was shocked at how good it was, far and away the best wine I had ever drunk, and I looked up in amazement, about to say something about the
great wine
, only to see that all the other people at the table were swilling it down without comment, probably because they drank wine that good every day of their lives. So I swilled away at it, too, like a good boy, and when the red came it was every bit as good and I swilled it, and when the champagne showed up, it was the best champagne I had ever drunk and I have drunk a hell of a lot of champagne, but swilled it on down without comment like everybody else. Jim and the actress weren't at the same table or even in the same room, but the little director was sitting to my right and talked to me in Italian for most of the dinner. But he could understand a little English: When some society woman across the table from us asked me why Jim and I didn't make better quality pictures and I answered by saying, “We'd like to, but the public won't let us,” he laughed and pinched my cheeks. I liked him for that, and one day I will go see one of his movies, if I can only discover his name.

While people were swapping tables and carrying on various conversations at the tops of their lungs, Jim came and found me, and we went out into the big main hall looking for a toilet, finding one up by the front door. After we filled our noses I asked Jim how he was doing.

“Too early to tell,” he said.

“Give her some snort and a couple of Quaaludes and she'll melt in your arms,” I suggested.

“You trying to teach me how to suck eggs?” Jim said. He splashed cold water on his face, toweled off, and I did the same.

Later in the living room while everybody was sitting around in little
groups, I tried to keep track of Jim but couldn't, because women, mostly around forty or sixty, would come over by me and sit, making conversation about one thing or another. After a while I realized Jim was missing, nowhere to be seen, out of sight for more than half an hour. The actress was still in the room, sitting on a little loveseat with half a dozen guys in dark suits at her feet or leaning over the couch, all redfaced and drunk.

But the hostess was missing. Bianca diMorro, long-legged, good tits, nice cascade of dark hair, so I thought maybe Jim was off someplace with her. The host, George diMorro, was right there hanging over the actress. I sat around for another half hour or so, and the hostess showed up again, there she was over by Balzac and the little director, all of them talking away a mile a minute in Italian.

I was heading for the toilet out by the front door when I happened to look up the big double staircase, with its old-looking Persian runner, and saw Jim at the top of the stairs, wearing a solemn expression and nothing else. I went on up the stairs.

“Is there a toilet on this floor?” I joked. He turned without saying anything and we walked down a hall with about fifteen doors, open and shut, on either side. A couple of them were toilets, I could see, but Jim didn't stop until we came to another little stairway. I followed him up and into an area that was obviously the diMorros' private suite. Then through another door into a big silken bedroom. Jim's clothes were all over the floor, and the bed, although made, was wrinkled and the pillows thrown about. Jim sat naked on the edge of the bed, looking mournful and lonesome. I went into the private bathroom and took my piss and came out and he was still sitting like that, so I went to a couch across from the bed and sat down.

I was about to say, “What's the matter?” when Jim spoke up, his voice so low I had to strain to hear him.

“It's all such shit,” he said. “I get so tired sometimes.” He went on in this vein for a while and I sat and listened to him, not having much to say myself, but nodding now and then to let Jim know I could hear him. Life was painful, life was boring, getting up in the morning was like crawling out from under a pile of rubble, etc&etc., until he suddenly jumped up and said, “I want to show you something,” and he went over to a door that was partway open and opened it and went in. I followed him.