Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (8 page)

Iowa City in the seventies felt like summer camp, people from all over the map converging into one diverse but insular mob. Rumor spread that John Cheever was visiting and so we'd stare at every foppish drunk in every bar and wonder if this was him, the suburban surrealist, lyricist of the middle class, until the man would get paranoid and shout things that were decidedly unlyrical, and we'd move on. Poets had the most sex. There was one married couple, both poets, who had an open marriage, wrote villanelles about their dalliances, workshopped them. I heard about this from a poet friend who snuck me copies of the wife's work, which I pored over, hoping for some
oblique allusion to our own drunken dry-hump—just one alliterative description of my boner-taut denim, please?—but found not a one. By second year, they were workshopping divorce-themed blank verse. Everyone seemed to know the names of obscure flora and fauna, and filled their work with them the same way class-climbing urbanites casually name-drop expensive brands. Knowing the names of things, I thought, that was what real writing was about, and I still have the copies of National Geographic's
Guide to North American Birds
and
Guide to North American Trees
that I bought at a yard sale in Dubuque. In my fiction workshops, I sat across the seminar table from grizzled guys in olive-green army jackets who wrote stories that contained hauntingly precise descriptions of what a Vietcong's blood felt like splattered on your face after you'd bayoneted them in their dark viscera, and I worried I didn't have enough real-world experience to be a writer. Or at least I didn't have the right kind of experience. My own descriptions of blood-splattered faces smacked of hackery and cheap imitation. Which is why if you asked me back then what I wrote about, I'd say, “The crisis of simulacra.” My fear that I didn't have the right kind of experience to write the gritty realism I was surrounded with was also what made me appreciate my late-night jaw sessions with Oliver, the Schedule-Two stimulant mixing with a genuine giddiness that I was actually experiencing something real and illicit and fun and that Oliver was laughing at my jokes and intensely interested in everything I had to say about L.A., even though when I ran out of my own (relatively few) interesting stories about showbiz, I began to appropriate stories I'd read elsewhere, stories from Milton Berle's memoir or Hedda Hopper's tell-all. “Dude,” he said, “you're like the most interesting person I know.” Or at least he
said something to that effect. Point being, he seemed pretty primed on California in general and Hollywood in particular, and I figured after the MFA we'd move westward together, be the vanguard of a new literary Los Angeles. But at a party the night of our graduation, Oliver said he didn't want to write anymore; instead he was “going to New York to see how the sausage is made.” At the time, I hadn't actually heard that expression before, so I initially thought it was some sort of gay thing, that, in addition to walking away from the literary ambition that enslaved the rest of us, Oliver was walking away from heterosexual pretenses as well. (People often said he was very handsome, and the way he maintained rapt eye contact in conversation always sparked pangs of homophobia in some men, made uncomfortable with his particular brand of homosocial friendship, which a mutual acquaintance once called “armingly disarming.”) But as we kept talking into the night and next day, the expression's real meaning began to emerge. “You angry at me?” he asked. No, I said, I just had to figure out a different roommate situation in L.A., was all.

It wasn't until years later that I began to suspect his reasons for getting disillusioned with Hollywood, or at least the Hollywood I'd presented to him. He had just begun agenting and tried to get me a job ghostwriting the memoir of Ken Aurora, that insufferable talk-show host with the veneer smile, called
Don't Spit on Superman's Cape, Don't Tug on the Wind: Lessons Learned on the Big Red Couch
. “This is right up your alley,” he said, rather flatly. “
Hollywood Babylon
–type stuff. Doesn't have to be true.” At the time, however (this must have been around '84 since for reasons I don't understand I associate this period with watching Reagan/Mondale debates on TV), I was seven
or eight hundred pages into a first draft of
Season of All Natures
, which I thought would be my magnum opus, and I said I didn't want to be distracted from my real writing. I also told him that if word of my involvement in Aurora's egregious bit of pop pulp leaked once
Season of All Natures
was published, the Pulitzer committee would refuse to take me seriously. “Okay, then,” he said. Of course,
Season of All Natures
was not published, and I often mourn the money I could have made penning Aurora's book of showbiz sycophancy, those countless-told (and surely apocryphal) tales of drinking with Peter O'Toole, of bedding Liz Taylor, of giving Johnny Carson the idea for the Carnac bit. But when I see that paperback available in airport bookstores, along with its follow-ups
Talking Heads, Taking Beds: More Lessons from the Big Red Couch
and
Couch Surfing: Even More Lessons from the Big Red Couch
, I still feel a pang of fear that Oliver's offering me that job was his way of saying he knew how much of my showbiz tales—which he'd always responded to with rich laughter—I'd stolen from cheap Hollywood memoirs, how much of my life had effectively been ghostwritten. “Doesn't have to be true.”

Well, the talk with Chris did not go well. He and Julia are currently at the movie. But that just means I have more time to myself to get some writing done. The house is empty, free of distractions. My mind is clear and I'm ready to proceed with the task at hand. I am sitting here in the spare room, constellations of dust motes drifting through a shaft of early afternoon sunlight, the only sound the rubbery
vroom
of each passing car's Doppler effect. (I suddenly feel obligated to admit that those last two clauses I've written before. They appeared in chapter 86 of
Season of All Natures
when the character of Gavin is
wandering through his old childhood home, but they are still applicable here. Is it wrong that I'm now poaching descriptions from my decade-old unpublished novel? Is my guilt based in a fear that I cannot come up with something original, that my best writing is behind me, or that in stripping
Season of All Natures
for parts I'm finally admitting that it is officially—as Oliver told me it was—dead in the water? Or is my guilt based in my increasing awareness that this legal document is beginning to take on a novelistic form? Do I hope that you at New Wye True Crime are impressed enough with my wordsmithing that you will tell the literary guys down the hall to reconsider
Rarer Monsters
? Sure, it's only natural for that to be floating somewhere in the back of my mind, although I am fully aware that true crime editors are drawn to a, shall we say,
louder
style than are higher-brow editors [I've seen the kind of pulps you print—all those
italics
, all that emotive punctuation!—you must be a very demonstrative bunch], but that is good because it allows me to loosen up the narrative voice that your literary brothers so praised in their gentle rejections: I am no longer hiding behind the terse telegraphese that I picked up in writer school: I am angry. But does all that suggest that selfish ulterior motives are eclipsing the real objective of this letter—i.e., to thoroughly debunk my sister's claim that our father was responsible for the death of Betty Short before her book goes to press, while there is still time for you to pull it from publication? I don't think so. I believe my fundamental intentions here are pure, but I must admit biases where they crop up—even at the sentence level—in order to let the case for my father's good name stay untainted. But I must move on, as I see that I have already wasted fifteen minutes and one page on this issue, which I probably
should have relegated to a footnote so it wouldn't stand in the way of the case for my father.) (In theory, I prefer footnotes to parentheticals. Philosophically, I agree with footnotes, the way they allow thoughts to branch off in their own direction, without the terminus that a parenthesis necessitates. Thoughts should not be terminal—they are not
matryoshka
dolls, neatly fitting into each other, nooked cozily into the larger narrative. Thoughts, ideas, revelations, are endlessly subdividing tributaries that should be given enough water to allow them to rival the river from whence they came. But it's just not practical. Composing footnotes on a typewriter, paradoxically, requires a kind of forethought that goes against the very anti-terminus, free-branching ethos of footnotes, simply because you have to plan ahead, know exactly how long a given footnote will be, so you can format your page accordingly. I really should get a computer. But, as it is, I'm trapped in a terminus.)

On with my case.

Oliver finally got back to me. I was at home, in the garage, going through the box of final research papers marked
Fall 1993
, trying to jog my memory for a small, shy, bespectacled brunette, when I heard the phone ring. I went into the kitchen and answered.

“Paul,” Oliver said. “What's up? Hey, I'm going to be out there in L.A. this weekend. We'll have lunch on Sunday, okay? Better yet, you want to come do the Universal Studios tour with me? I'm bringing my niece. Do you know her? She's eight. She really wants to do the
Back to the Future
ride, and the birthday gift I'm giving my sister this year is taking the little ankle-biter off her hands for a week. My sister named this girl Yuna. You believe that? I hate my sister sometimes. I'll be honest, Yuna creeps me out a little. It's like she has no affect, just that
blank stare you see in movies about kids who'll kill you in your sleep. Anyway, I'll be out there with her, and I'm taking her on the Universal tour because she wants to do the
Back to the Future
ride, so maybe you can meet us there, tell her neat things about Hollywood or something. Great, it's settled then. Sunday it is. I look forward to it.”

I'm pretty sure I must have said something in all of this, but all I remember now is Oliver's block of monologue. We didn't actually end up meeting at Universal Studios. He called me the morning of and said Yuna had woken up early and so they were already there, about to hop on the tour bus, so I spent the afternoon at Pinz, playing a few guttery frames, and then met up with them at Mel's Diner on Sunset after they'd finished with Universal. When I walked in, I saw Oliver waiting beside the hostess stand, an oversize T-shirt,
Hollywood
emblazoned across the front, awkwardly fit over a blue button-up. He was holding a Universal Studios tote in one hand and a novelty plastic Academy Award in the other. I approached and was going to do a handshake-hug combo, but all the souvenirs got in the way and I just patted him on the shoulder. After some standard platitudes, I said, “Are we just waiting for a table?”

“No,” Oliver said, his eyes scanning the restaurant under thick eyebrows that were starting to go gray. “Yuna's in the bathroom. She's a bit tuckered out from the day, I guess. I have to get her back to the hotel.”

“Okay, she can take a nap and we can grab a drink or something. I'll take you to this place that has over a hundred scotches on the menu.”

He put the plastic award in his tote bag and ran his fingers through his hair (which, to my annoyance, was showing no signs of thinning, until I reminded myself that anti-balding medications often
cause impotence, so perhaps he was paying the price for that mane), then he pulled out a thick manila envelope. “I'm meeting up with Edie later. I just wanted to give this to you. I asked her if you'd seen it and she said no.”

Suddenly there was a small girl standing beside Oliver, her frizzy hair looking electroshocked, wiping her wet hands on his khakis. “Honey, darling,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“They didn't have paper towels,” Yuna said.

“Okay,” Oliver said, grabbing her hand. “Oh, God. Your hands are slimy. You have to rinse the soap off, sunshine.” Then to me, he said, “I know it's been a while, but I do want to bring you in on this. I want you and Edie to work together on it.”

I was holding the manila envelope, thick as a manuscript. “Any news on
Rarer Monsters
?”

He looked at me the same way he'd been looking at Yuna. “That was four years ago, Paul. I'm sorry.”

“I'm tired!” the girl shouted.

“Highland Grounds,” I said.

“What?” Oliver said.

“The scotch bar, that's what it's called.”

And then Oliver and his weekend charge were gone. I'd like to report that I ran after him, grabbed him by the lapels, told him not to buy this story, that Edie was mentally unstable, that she was raping our family's memory, but I just stood there between the hostess stand and a row of arcade games, holding the manila envelope. I looked it over but didn't open it, wondered if manila envelopes actually came from Manila. Everything I knew about Manila and the Philippines
I'd learned from an episode of
20/20
about sex tourism, so as far as I knew it was quite possible that Manilans had an unusual amount of documents that needed enveloping.

I can see myself standing there in some autistic trance as the hostess approached me, and I'd like to shout at myself to wake the fuck up and do something, but instead, when the pretty young hostess holding the large menu and an impossibly white smile said, “One, sir?” I just said yes and allowed her to seat me at the counter with all the other parties of one, guys sipping coffee and staring straight ahead like they were at a bank of urinals. I just ordered a coffee and slice of apple pie, and left the envelope sitting beside me for the next four cups of dreggy joe. When my nerves felt like piano wires, I finally opened the envelope. There was no title yet, just
My Book
by Edith McWeeney. The formatting on the table of contents was a little funny, everything centered like a submission for a junior high poetry class. I flipped through the manuscript until I came to one page that read,
Part Two: The Case of the Black Dahlia
.