Turn of the Century (28 page)

When he’s away from home, drifting along, and especially when he’s in Los Angeles, where the metaphors are as ripe and low hanging as mangoes in spring, George tends to read meaning into almost everything. On the way to dinner last night, after Saddler’s, they stopped at Emily’s office at Paramount so that she could pick up a couple of scripts and so George could see the studio lot, which was the only one he’d never visited. (Emily has a housekeeping deal to develop independent films for Paramount—that is, she said, unable to let an oxymoron pass, “quote,
‘independent
films,’ unquote”; that is, she added, screenplays for movies with “no sets, no effects, and no heroes, which the studio will never produce”). What struck George about the Paramount lot, though, was not the famous gate, a cute vestige of prewar Moorish doodadery, but the names. The Lucille Ball Building is bigger than the Marlene Dietrich Building, the Jerry Lewis Building is bigger than the Marx Brothers Building, and among the biggest of all is the building named after Gene Roddenberry, the creator of
Star Trek
. Is there some scissors-cut-paper hierarchy involving celebrity, vulgarity, and modernity? Or a simple algorithm—one square foot for every ten thousand dollars of inflation-adjusted lifetime earnings?

They had dinner at a place off Hollywood Boulevard called Les Deux Cafés. Emily pretended not to be surprised that George had never heard of it. Although she warned him that “it’s
very
1997” (self-mockingly, he thought), as soon as he walked in, through a kind of secret passageway at the back of a Hollywood parking lot into a Shangri-la of Hollywood eugenics and pixilated Provençal splendor,
George felt the particular, autoerotic yap and buzz of certain L.A. restaurants and parties, where the A-list’s collective pleasure in simply being in its own critical mass is intense, the near hysteria of horses at a show. At places like Les Deux Cafés, or events like the
Vanity Fair
Oscar party at Mortons restaurant, almost everyone gets in touch with his or her Merry Chatterer side. Les Deux Cafés made George feel young. The secret-door raffishness of the entrance reminded him of being twenty-two and falling in love with Chumley’s, the old speakeasy wedged in a West Village block that was ahead of its time, proto-themed before theming existed to make authentically charming old places seem contemptibly olde and hokey. The proximity of multiple big stars at dinner—not Sinbad but Denzel Washington, eating only vegetables; not some girl from the WB but Michelle Pfeiffer, George’s fantasy spouse; not David Spade but Jim Carrey, close enough for George to hear a slight hum he makes when he chews—had turned George slightly, quietly giddy. Giddiness feels a lot like youth.

Such a balmy, swirling feast, such a slick, pretty mural of high inconsequence to inhabit for a couple of hours. Except for her story about the recidivist, sex-addicted talent agent, he barely focused on his conversation with Emily. Whatever she said and whatever he said seemed like pretext, the smiling meaningless yabba-yabba-yabba-yabba mouth movements of extras in the background. Extras with lines! George and Emily exchanged gratifying nods and “how-are-you”s with a well-known agent-turned-personal-manager, a well-known lawyer-turned-personal-manager-turned-studio-executive, and Jamie Lee Curtis, who had been their first choice to play Jennie on
NARCS
. The spectacle required most of his mental energy, particularly after they’d finished a bottle of Napa merlot. Careful, surreptitious staring at one’s fellow diners is always exhausting, as is the acute self-awareness—the irresistible mental crane shot of oneself sitting among the beautiful and powerful.

George was so insouciant and preening last night, in fact, that he didn’t register Emily’s relentless fretting about
Real Time
—it will be all-consuming, it could get expensive, we will take so much shit, it’s do-and-die time—as anything but reflexive seller’s remorse, late-night liquored-up Emily schtick. But this morning, in the bright, bright
Venutian sunlight of Las Vegas, waiting for his car, he is going through the dailies, mentally playing back last night, pausing at each of Emily’s caveats and doubts and grouses about the new show.

“Sir, before you sign the blemish waiver I’d like you to spend a few minutes inspecting the body. In detail. Otherwise, you are responsible.”

“I’ll be responsible,” George says, signing.

As he floors the Le Baron away from McCarran International, he smiles:
Las Vegas
. His parents started coming here every spring when he was in junior high, when the city was still uniquely naughty, before big bare breasts and gambling and waitresses in silly costumes were an hour’s drive away from every citizen, before a plurality of hometowns allowed themselves to turn from Bedford Fallses into Pottersvilles. Vegas was Perry and Edith Hope’s Cold War Cuba. (Momentarily, he figures, Cuba will become his own generation’s Cuba.) Their enthusiastic middle-aged embrace of squaresville decadence, back then, embarrassed and slightly shocked him. One day his mother wouldn’t say
stink
or
sweat
, the next she’s wearing a sleeveless blouse and baggy shorts on a jet to Vegas. But by the time he was sixteen he had read Hunter Thompson and Robert Venturi, so when his mom and dad asked Alice and him to come along for their annual Nevada pilgrimage in 1972, he couldn’t wait to go—because it would be so
trippy
and, like,
surreal
, and because he couldn’t wait to see strippers.

Right out of the airport, George spots the famous new two-acre billboard, two hundred feet tall and five hundred feet wide, advertising
MEGAMILLENNIUM
, the yearlong lottery organized by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. The tickets, ten dollars a pop, are only sold here in town, and the holder of the winning numbers, to be drawn at midnight on December 31, will win a jackpot of at least one billion dollars—the biggest jackpot anywhere, ever. Max has written down his 184 numbers in pencil on Beverly Hills Hotel stationery and given George half his life savings, $230, to buy twenty-three MegaMillennium tickets. Lining both sides of the highway into town are thirty-foot-long metallic gold banners formed into graceful swooping pretzels and staked to the ground, printed with big blue letters spelling out the slogan
VEGAS 2000®—EVERYBODY WINS
. The Vatican has declared
2000
a jubilee year, and so too, evidently, has Las Vegas. The
VEGAS 2000s
seem to glow; they flash sequentially down the road toward the horizon into
infinity, like runway strobes. George realizes after a half mile that it isn’t some trick of fluttering phosphorescence or a desert illusion, but fiber-optic stitching. Electrified golden flags! When George was a boy, the twenty-first century was going to be absolutely sleek and white. Starting when he was an adolescent, in the seventies, the future was going to be rubble, random fires, and highwaymen speaking gibberish—a grimy postindustrial ruin. Now the twenty-first century is here, and it’s rococo. High-production-value, fiber-optic, evanescent rococo, imagineered Albert Speer gilded and baking in the desert sun.

This past New Year’s Eve, George caught glimpses on a monitor in the
NARCS
control room of the big, broad streets of Las Vegas absolutely filled with celebrants—three times as many people as local authorities had dared to predict. Las Vegas, maybe more than Times Square, turned out to be America’s millennial ground zero. Now that the newspapers and magazines and TV news shows and web sites no longer have 2000 to anticipate ad infinitum, and the computer problems to explain and reexplain, they’re doing their best to fill the sudden post–New Year’s void of factoid and zeitgeist infofluff—thus, the putative national sense of millennium anticlimax. This new fog of media chatter about the millennium anticlimax has been mostly “funny” confessions and opinions. But now, inevitably, the tiresome jocularity is turning to tiresome earnestness, from Andy Rooneyism to Bill Moyersism in a matter of weeks. According to a story in this morning’s
USA Today
(EXPERTS FEAR WE’RE SUFFERING “THIRD MILLENNIUM MALAISE”)
this morning, there has been a sudden uptick in suicides, in Blockbuster rentals of certain kinds of videos (early Bergman, middle-period Woody Allen, late Spielberg), and in attendance at “church services of the USA’s more ‘somber’ denominations, such as Presbyterian.” The Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould was on every television channel twenty-four hours a day during the last week of last year, it seemed, trying to induce the national disappointment early by explaining, over and over, that not only is January 1, 2000, not
really
the beginning of a new century, but that January 1, 2001, will be nothing special either, since Jesus was born in 4 or 5
B.C.
, and so the third millennium therefore
actually
started back in 1996 or 1997. Max, of course, has been making these very same points repeatedly for the past year. This bout of millennium madness, Professor
Gould kept saying as smugly and chuckly as a huge, bearded nine-year-old, is
hype
! It’s completely
arbitrary
! he said, as if Americans have something against hype or arbitrariness. Las Vegas, now that George thinks about it, turning left off the Strip toward the campanile of the Piazza San Marco, is the capital of the arbitrary: giant, arbitrary architectural facsimiles (midtown Manhattan, a pirate ship, Lake Como, Myanmar, a statue of Lenin, the Eiffel Tower, a lion, a space needle, and now, right here—Venice) installed on an arbitrary patch of desert in order to fetishize arbitrary numbers (1, 7, 11, 21) and arbitrary combinations of tiny spinning pictures of arbitrary fruits (lemons, cherries, watermelon) and metal objects (ingots, barbells). Vegas 2000, indeed. He turns left onto the six-lane entrance road and drives under the Ponte Rialto.

“Bone-jaw-no, sir! Welcome to the Venetian! Will you require your vehicle again this afternoon, seen-yaw-ray?” asks the smiling black giant in a red-striped gondolier’s shirt to whom he hands his car keys. He’s waiting, plastic gondolier-oar-shaped stylus in hand, to note George’s response on a little electronic device.

He stares at him, smiling, momentarily speechless.

“Oh my
God!
” screams a man somewhere nearby. “I don’t believe it! Hey! You
came!
I love you!” By the time George turns his head to see what kind of Vegas asshole is screeching like a cartoon character, Bennett Gould is upon him, grabbing and shaking him with both hands. The asshole is Ben, George’s pal for twenty years, as overexcited as ever. George feels happy for the first time in two days. “This is
monumental!
” Ben shouts. “This is
fantastic!
This is
sublime!
Where’s the wife?” The original comic shading of that phrase as used by George and his friends—“the wife”—has grown so dim it’s now almost invisible, like a watermark. “I got a Lizzie Zimbalist message! ‘Semiurgent,’ she said. What’s going on?” People who don’t know Ben often assume he’s on drugs—cocaine or speed or, as a mutual acquaintance speculated seriously to George a few months ago, some sort of Hoffman-LaRoche synthetic adrenaline that won’t be available to consumers until 2004. Ben Gould operates at a high torque every waking moment, but he doesn’t take drugs, not even coffee. (“I promise you do
not
want to see me on espresso!” he said to George at the end of a long Italian lunch not long after they first met.)

“Lizzie’s at home,” George tells him. “So you’re staying here too?”

“Yeah! Sixteenth floor. Have you had lunch? We’ll have lunch if you don’t mind eating with a few Wall Street assholes.” Then abruptly, without a word or raised finger or even a pause, Ben reaches into his shirt pocket and has his StarTac 9900 out and open—George is reminded of Superman moving at lightning speed. “Yeah,” he says into the phone. Ben’s a stock trader but has also, over the last few years, invested a few million here and a few million there in new businesses—businesses such as BarbieWorld, the restaurant-hotel-entertainment complex opening tonight on the Strip. When people ask his occupation, he says, matter-of-factly, “Wall Street asshole.” For him, it has become the generic term, now almost entirely devoid of opprobrium or even mock opprobrium, something like how hippies started calling themselves
freaks
in the late sixties and homosexuals started calling themselves
queer
in the late eighties. More embedded irony.

“Sorry,” Ben says as he snaps his phone shut and grabs George by the arm. “Let’s have lunch! Come on up!”

“Great. Let me check in. I’ll meet you up there. What’s your room number? Sixteen-what?”

Ben grins sheepishly, lowers his voice, and says slowly, “Sixteen.” George has never met anyone whose voice modulates so abruptly between extremes of volume and pitch, an octave and a half up and down, thirty decibels louder or softer without warning. “I took a floor. You need a suite?” As George smiles back, lips pursed, not quite shaking his head, Ben says, blasting away again full bore, “What?
Excuse
me! I’m in business with a lot of people who wanted to come to this event. I guess I’m too generous to people, I’m sorry, I guess I like to seize the day and
enjoy
life,
mea culpa, carpe diem, mea culpa
, punish me, you midwestern gentile cocksucker!”

A few feet away, a group of four old women in shorts and tank tops stand in a little semicircle, happily staring. One has raised her camera to shoot a picture. They seem to think the manic man in threadbare blue jeans and dark glasses smiling and shouting obscenities is part of the entertainment. They almost certainly don’t imagine he’s worth $247 million.

“Bill Gates can’t
bother himself to pick up the phone personally? What kind of relationship business is that? ‘Ms. Zimbalist, I think you’ve got a fantastic company, welcome to my family.’ Wouldn’t that be the right thing? It’s a thirty-second call. No wonder everyone wants to kill the prick.”

“This is a tiny, tiny,
tiny
deal for them.”

“It’s big for us. For you. Uh-oh, the nice Filipino boy is here with my baby food. I love you, Lizzie, my shaynala.”