Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (9 page)

I let the hefty manuscript sit there while I sipped cup number five. My dad had always said to drink coffee black (which seemed strong, manly) so you don't get fat (which seemed weak, effete) so when I made the decision to become caffeine-dependent in high school, I poured in the cream and sugar, a habit I've never been able to shake. And now I'm getting fat.

“That for the Cooley adaptation?” It was the guy sitting next to me. He was wearing a tropically patterned shirt and a hat with
Jumanji
stitched onto it.

“Excuse me?”

He made a head-butting gesture toward the manuscript. “I heard Paramount scored the rights to Cooley's Black Dahlia book. You working on that? Buddy a mine said they got Elmore Leonard to do the screenplay. That'd be a lineup, huh? Leonard adapting a Cooley novel, it'd be like Chandler adapting Cain's
Double Indemnity
, right?” He flagged down the waitress, said, “S'cuse me, can this Rob Roy get a little more grenadine, please?” and as the girl poured a three-count of cherry syrup into his Coke, he turned back to me and said, “So is it true Cooley lives in the Sharon Tate house? Name's Burnet,” wiping his hand on his cargo shorts then extending it to me for a shake.

I took some bills from my wallet, threw them on the counter, gathered my sister's manuscript, and left. As I drove to our old Van Nuys house, the sun was starting to go down, its orange rays shooting straight down Ventura Blvd., illuminating every speck of dirt on the inside of my windshield, turning it opaque. When I got to our old house, the sun was down, no longer a nuisance. Lights were on and a car was in the driveway, so I parked a few houses down, turned off my headlights. I sat there for quite a while, turned on the radio, found Garrison Keillor spinning some folksy yarn. With one eye on my childhood home, I rooted through the glove box, found a pack of cigarettes that must have been Chris's. Perhaps feeling a little insecure, like
A Prairie Home Companion
was not a proper stakeout soundtrack, I pushed the cigarette lighter down, let its coil get red-hot, and lit myself a smoke. I coughed for a good long while, opened the car door to throw up a little on the side of the road, but by the second cigarette I had it down cold. I cracked the car window, Garrison Keillor's avuncular voice suddenly seeming wraith-like as it crept out into the night with
my smoky exhalations. The lights in my old house finally went out and Edie came out, followed by Rory. They got into what must have been Rory's car—a sensible Dodge station wagon, which disappointed me, as I imagined him driving an old VW van, some Merry Prankstersish doodles graffitied onto the sides—and they drove off, with me following at a safe, unnoticeable distance. They went to a small Greek restaurant in North Hollywood, which, like an alarming number of local establishments, seemed secretively cloaked in tropical flora, as if all the restaurateurs in the San Fernando Valley hoped for low-rent Mafioso clientele. Because of this, I had to park my car and walk around to the side of the restaurant where the Dumpsters sat, and peer in a window through a bush with large, Jurassic leaves, just in order to see anything.

Oliver had been waiting for them, and all three were now shaking hands, smiling. It seemed as though this were their first face-to-face meeting, but there was a familiarity surely bred from multiple phone conversations. The restaurant was not very busy and the servers lounged in the background like extras uninterested in playing their parts. It was a Sunday night, and I wondered if orthodox Greeks had any special rules about Sundays. (That Anthony Quinn movie didn't mention anything about Sundays, as far as I could remember, but perhaps it was sacrosanct and the proprietors of this restaurant had to break from tradition in order to accommodate hungry Americans whose appetites were indifferent to the Sabbath. I imagined passionate intergenerational arguments between swarthy men in aprons.) Oliver, Edie, and Rory sat at a table in front of a large mural depicting a Mediterranean paradise: Corinthian columns flanking a sylvan landscape, winged cherubs hovering over plump grapevines; there was also
a goat. Oliver seemed very excited as he (I can assume) told Edie and Rory about all the wonderful things that he could do for her (their?) book, how she would become the darling of the publishing world.

“You've really got something here,” he'd said to me, ten years ago, upon reading my first novel. We were sitting in his Hoboken loft, drinking bourbon, and he hefted the twelve-hundred-page manuscript and made a herniating face. “A whole
lot
of something.” We laughed and got drunk and he did his Tom Snyder impression, interviewing me about my big debut novel. I slept on his couch that night and in the morning woke up to his girlfriend standing over me. She looked insomniac, or maybe Eastern European, and she told me to follow her. I did, to the bedroom closet, where she threw me a T-shirt and told me to put it on. Oliver was just waking up in the bed next to us, his hair a tsunami pompadour, his eyes looking swollen shut like a newborn puppy's. I put on the T-shirt. It was very old and very soft and had the Clash's
London Calling
cover screenprinted on it. “You are small like a girl,” she said. “I bought it but it doesn't fit me, so it is yours.” I wore that shirt on the flight back home that day and imagined I'd wear it when the real Tom Snyder interviewed me about my big debut. I don't know what happened to that girl, but I saw someone who looks like her on a recent episode of
Law & Order
, so maybe things are working out for her. Regardless, the shirt doesn't fit me anymore.

When Oliver and Edie and Rory were done with their meal, they all shook hands again and smiled some more. Oliver's client-greasing had gotten much more professional, I suppose, less personal. At their dinner, I saw a lot of spanakopita, saw a lot of baklava, but I didn't see any bourbon, didn't see any vintage T-shirts. I followed Oliver's rental
car back to his hotel, a La Quinta Inn near the freeway. The Oliver of ten years ago, the Oliver who would never have given Edie's egregious tripe a second glance, would have been staying on the other side of the hill at the Chateau Marmont, or at least a nice Radisson. But here he was, in the copper light of an empty parking lot. Of course it wasn't just Oliver's professional fortunes that seemed to be waning. I wasn't blind. I knew that our relationship had been waning for some time as well. If it hadn't, I wouldn't have been so hesitant to get out of my car, walk up and talk some sense into him right there in the parking lot. But most of our friendship, in fact, had consisted of me trying to save it, keeping those memories of grad school alive. Even that night in Hoboken had been my initiative. We'd talked on the phone about my book and when I said I was coming into town, he said to meet at his office. I then said I needed a place to crash and suggested his couch. I had to make a plea for the old days, hoping he was finding post-MFA life as lonesome as I was. Although I like to remember leaving New York that day with that T-shirt and Oliver's approval for the novel I'd spent years writing, I often forget that I also left with the knowledge that real friendship was a luxury of maudlin youth, that grad school had simply been a desperate attempt to prolong that longer than was societally responsible, so we could have a few more years of late-night drunk talk, our attentions coke-piqued, about Things That Mattered, like the state of American fiction, how we'd be friends forever, how this blow tastes like sweetener. We had now graduated, moved on into grown-up solitude, finally understood that comradeship was a matter of convenience and proximity. But if I am to be honest with myself here, I'd have to admit that our friendship had started to wane even before graduation.

In our final semester at Iowa, Oliver asked me to go with him to Chicago to buy some blow. He said his regular guy was gone, so he'd found a new guy, but he needed a spotter, since this was a new guy. I was happy to be his spotter. It was February, still gray and cold, and the heater in my car was busted. A resolute easterner, Oliver still didn't have a car of his own. As a Californian, I was baffled—and inexplicably offended—that anyone could get by without a car, like someone saying they just didn't bother to grow feet. So we drove the five hours to Chicago with our breath visible in front of us like empty voice bubbles in a rather dull comic strip. The gray sky matched the gray ground, the horizon just a blurry line drawn across a slab of cement. When we got to Chicago, I was amazed to be in what seemed to be a real American city for the first time, amazed to realize that this was the farthest east I'd ever been before. It was so dense and so tall, and I wanted everyone to be walking around with fedoras and briefcases, hurrying to get to whatever it was people did in cities like this—meetings, rendezvous with mistresses, more meetings. Instead I just saw people bundled in parkas looking like they had no particular place to go.

We stopped at a gas station where Oliver hopped out and called the guy from a pay phone.

“He gave me directions,” Oliver said, getting back in the car.

“To his place?” I asked.

“To another pay phone.”

We followed the directions to the other pay phone, which was outside an OTB place so there was a short line of trenchcoated gamblers waiting for the phone. Oliver waited patiently in line, while I waited nervously in the car, my emergency lights on while I idled in front of
a hydrant. I tried to catch his eye a few times—conversation had been as sparse as the flora on the drive and I probably just wanted some sort of reassurance, though of what I'm not exactly sure—but he was intently focused on his line-waiting, on fitting in with these degenerate gamblers so as not to arouse suspicion. He finally made it to the pay phone and made the call.

“He gave me directions,” Oliver said, getting back in the car.

“To another pay phone?” I asked.

“To his place. Find a place to park. It's on the next block.”

The only spot I could find was outside a convenience store where half a dozen guys of indeterminate ethnicity huddled. As we wandered around looking for the address, bundled up in our peacoats, I said, “I feel like that scene in
Some Like It Hot
,” following behind him, “you know when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are wandering around Chicago, when it's all blizzardy, after they lose their winter coats on a horse race. Greased Lightning! You remember that part?”

“What?” he said, trying to find the address on the awning of a building. “No.”

“Yeah, you remember.
Some Like It Hot
, right before they witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.”

“Never saw it.”

“What? Sure you did. Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe.”

“Okay, shut up,” he said. “This is it.”

We were at an unassuming door on the side of a brick building, the dozen tiny mailboxes on the wall beside it the only way you'd know it was a place of residence. Oliver rang the buzzer and we heard a static-y voice say, “What.”

“Mongoose,” Oliver said.

I was quietly thrilled by the clichéd theatricality of it all—there was a password!—and wanted to comment on this to Oliver but he seemed too in-character to be receptive at the moment.

The guy rang us in and we trudged up four flights of stairs so steep I was eye-level with Oliver's oxfords.

“This is like that scene in
Vertigo
,” I said.

The chamber acoustics of the stairwell amplified my voice.

“Just play this cool, okay?” Oliver said.

When we got to the door, Oliver knocked. We heard heavy footsteps approach the door and, assuming that the guy was looking at us through the peephole, we—or at least I—tried to look as uncoplike as possible while not looking so naïve as to be easily conned. Sometimes I think part of me has forever lived in the moment when you suspect someone is looking at you through a peephole, trying to look respectable, all the while knowing my face is distorted into absurdity by the fish-eye lens.

The guy opened the door. He looked like a linebacker. (Days later, as Oliver and I told a heavily censored version of this story to some classmates, having already agreed on which parts we'd omit, Oliver would gloss my description: “By ‘linebacker,' of course Paul means he was a big black guy. Don't be coy with your racism.”) He was wearing a baby blue terry cloth robe, and there were little geometric bits of shaving cream on his otherwise freshly shorn head, which glowed in a faint halo, a bright light coming from inside the apartment.

“You Olly?” he said.

“Yeah. This is Paul.”

“You didn't say the password,” I said.

“He already said it,” the guy said, “at the intercom. Don't need to say it twice.”

“Oh, right.”

He let us into the living room, locking the door behind us. The windows were covered in sheets. At first, I thought it was for aesthetic reasons, as they gave the room a nice harem feel, but then I saw the sixteen-millimeter film projector set up behind the couch, projecting a blank square of light onto the screen pulled down on the other side of the room. It was the only light on in the place.

“Sit yo asses down,” the guy said. We did, and he disappeared into the next room.

Oliver and I stared at the blank movie screen, and listened to distant shouting that might have actually been a dog barking.

“You must have seen
Some Like It Hot
. There's no way you haven't seen it.”