Dead Stars (19 page)

He felt like a monkey, not a man.

That's right: they had a monkey in their house, a
ganja
-smoking monkey that ate their food & yanked his dick & got his load off watching Jap schoolgirls getting raped.

It was time to put away childish things.

. . .

New father, new baby, new life.

(Permanent new legal parents, Dawn & Jim.)

    New dreams, new ambition.

(Uhm, there weren't really any old ones.)

All these
lets and shit were always buying houses for their parents. They'd turn, like, 18, & say, “The birthday present I got myself was buying a house for my mom & dad. It was the best present ever,” some such shit, & Rikki would smirk and call them dicks but now it was like
Who the fuck am
I,
they're out there
doin
shit & I'm just smokin weed and pullin my pud.
Mom 'ould damn well come out from her room if I knocked & said,
hey moms, it's Rikki, can I talk to you a sec? I, uh, I just, well uhm I just bought this house for you & Dad. It like has a pool? It's, like, a mansion in (Malibu) (Hancock Park) (the Holly Hills)—so many rooms (in my father's new house)—you know I don't mean to break confidences but Dad told me about those buddhahead mutherfuckers.
Sorry for the language Mom. But like, uh, I made a donation? And they wrote another letter, I'll show it to you, it said they were
REALLY SORRY
for what they did
,
they want you to
COME UP
& do that job they originally didn't want you for. I bought a ticket for you, 1st-Class, for you and Dad. Got you a room too at the 4 Seasons right near where the buddhaheads are doing their bullshit.

He suddenly had an Idea, the Idea of his young life.

Rikki's epiphany was to seek out his heroes & take counsel from those bigger-than-life fathers whose movies had sustained him during the Lost Years when he wandered the DCFS
*
desert of dark, crappy, DVD-stocked dens, trekking by court order from group- to residential- to assigned-family homes, till (free at last) he reached the promised land (Dawn&Jim): Laurence Fish., Denzel W., Forest Whit., Morgan F., Wesley Snipe. He knew they were approachable—if he could find them!—& would see themselves in little boy Rikki, crying for help. Wikipedia said Fishburne lied about his age to get his first part in that war movie, said he was 17 but he was 14 . . .
could I do something whack like that? Something dope/fucked up for real? Naw, prolly I'm just a punkbitch.
He needed to go hunting for courage like the lion in
Wizard of Oz.
He'd yellowbrick it to the Wizard—his BIGGEST role model hero Antwone Fisher—the man whose mama was in jail when she gave birth to him, & whose papa was a gangsta just like Rikki's (Antw.'s daddy got shot before Antw. was even born) . . . . . . . .
Antwone Fisher
, soul brother/teacher/father, raised in the System just like Rikki was except Antw.'s best foster family happened to be his
very first one
, but the state (like they do) took him away from the
good fam
& put him in with
hella bads
& Antw.'s life went to shit till he joined the Navy . . . whereas
Rikki's
best placement wasn't till the very
end
, the rest of them before, before Dawn & Jim, the rest being multitudinous shitholes—though, no matter how shitty or crazy the placements, each made sure to have its dark, DVD-stocked den, not only because it kept the kids
occupied,
but for the show&tell required to impress the [very] occasional visiting social worker . . . a key difference being that Rikki didn't join the Navy, not yet anyway, & didn't see how he ever would———

Antwone made himself a player out of sheer guts, got a job as a studio guard,
infiltrated
the Hollywood System so he'd be heartbeatclose to what was going on. Sitting there daydreaming in front of the paused porn, he started to think maybe he would even apply for a job like that once they got settled in their new space.

He'd write a script about his life just like Antw. did, then get Antw.'s advice if the script was any good & see maybe if Antw. could help get someone to direct it into a movie the same way he got Denzel to direct his. Or maybe Antw. would read Rikki's screenplay and want to direct it himself.

It was all good.

He knew he had a shot with those niggers, especially Antwone because of the whole shared hard knocks/DCFS/gangsta dad/crackhead mom/adoption thing. Yeah yeah he would sure to have a shot because

he
               
will
see
hisself
in
my

eyes

CLEAN

[Bud]

Bud Wiggins, Returning

Tolstoy

was wrong. That's what Bud thought, anyway.

As he mulled it over on the way back to Dolly's, he saw a laughing bum on a bus bench on La Brea, just south of Sunset. More like a laughing Buddha than bum (though maybe they were one & the same), for he was ecstatic; his jaw opened in ravenous hilarity, arms & fingers gesticulated wildly, eyes on fire as he stared ahead at the invisible movie playing on a screen that only
he
could see—blockbuster comedy of Eternity. The peculiar thing was that just before he turned right on Olympic toward Beverly Hills, Bud passed
another
ecstatic bum in a
FUTURE CELEBRITY
t-shirt, this one even
more
extreme than the last in his appreciation of whatever was being unreeled. For 35 years, Bud had been knee-jerk monetizing his daily experience through a screenwriter's filter, &
this
one quickly coalesced into a pitch about a “happy virus” descending upon the meek & the homeless then worked its way up from there. He quickly rejected it, remembering he was no longer in the business that bore him such meager fruit through the decades. Besides, he suddenly recalled that David Foster Wallace's big book touched on that; Bud never liked being accused of general plagiarism.
*

He thought of Tolstoy because he'd seen plenty of
unhappy
bums of the paranoid type who rage in public places. It was easy for Bud to come up with reasons behind their display of insanity: a fire and brimstone fervor of religious psychosis; anger at the intrusion of Homeland Security, whose voice spoke through their teeth or the radios of passing cars; disgust at Women, whose gender was the source of all disease, all misery. But when it came to imagining what was behind the
happy
bums' façade, well, he was fairly certain, if asked, they would not say, “I am at one with the beautiful absurdity of the cosmos!” or even “I am Jesus & I shall save you!”—because, at least in the
latter
, what would be so hysterically funny about that? No, the difficulty was in discerning
what was on the screen
that caused such insane joviality. Clearly each was having a singular experience; each was seeing something
specific to himself
that tickled his madhouse funnybone.

Hence:

Unhappy bums are all alike; every happy bum is happy in his own way.

Take that, Tolstoy.

. . .

Nothing had changed, really, in those 35 years. Bud was still addicted to pills and living in the downstairs room of his mother's rent-controlled, split-level apartment—
The Charleville Manor
—in Beverly Hills. He couldn't find work, any kind of work, and relied on the kindness of almost-strangers; friends in the Industry who'd mostly slipped away. A few times a week, he awakened to his own high-pitched screams. The only thing that was different was suddenly being 59 years-old. Recently, the dentist told Bud he was grinding his teeth, and asked if he wanted a night guard. Bud joked, “Why bother? I've only got about 15 years left.” Instead of cracking a smile (the dentist's assistant remained stoic as well), the dentist just shrugged, as if to say,
You've got a valid point there.

The building Dolly lived in was now owned by a Vietnamese woman with serious OCD. The reign of the Jewish landlord—the building was once owned by the furrier Abe Lipsey—was long over. The VC drove a little Mercedes & her face bore an agéd, frozen, mani-pedi smile; she was as anxious for Dolly to die as Bud was. Dolly had been in that apartment more than 4 decades. Her rent could only be increased x-amount per year, the results being, to the VC's immense consternation, that she paid less than ½ what the other tenants did—the dogged, nest-building, penurious Dolly (Chinese Year of the Ox) rolled over any financial obstacles in her way. In time, she became Neimans' highest earner, having fleeced the company through an elaborate system of purchases, returns & swap-outs that involved the bedazzling, bedizened expertise of the aforementioned Mr. Lipsey, furrier & landlord to the dying stars. (Broderick Crawford's ex-wife, the starlet Joan Tabor, had died in one of Lipsey's buildings, a suicide Bud remembered
The Beverly Hills Courier
writing up as an accidental OD of influenza
R
_x
.) When she retired at 83, she had a tad more than a million in savings; now, she was a relatively spry nonagenarian whose only fear was falling. Bud hoped she'd soon take a dive because the longer she lived, the more her savings were depleted by the round-the-clock caregivers she'd hired specifically to prevent her from taking a tumble.

Dolly was half-blind and half-deaf but enjoyed her TV golf. She would sit in her chair in front of the set—a $1,300 lazyboy with a motor allowing it to tilt on a 45° angle that made sitting down & getting up fun—and rip into the physical traits of the linksmen. Though if a handsome one was playing, her voice turned creepy & horny.

He sat on the carpet holding her hand. In the last few years, Bud learned something strange & poignantly sad about his mother—she literally didn't know
how
to hold a hand, or how to let someone hold hers (like a girl who never learned how to kiss). She would dig with her thumb into his flesh until Bud nearly yelped in pain. Most of the time he endured it, simply by using the mantra
the money the money the money is coming
but often he was compelled to give brief tutorials on the art of handholding. For a few minutes she'd listen, with a proper sort of acquiescence, before suddenly digging into his flesh again with a cartoon villain's gleeful. Dolly's senses may have been dulled but her acuity ferociously lived on. The moment Bud entered her room, she scanned his body, his grooming, his clothes.
Are you going to grow a beard? Are those boots or are those high heels that you're wearing? They're ugly! Ugly! Ugly!
When she wasn't being critical, she leered, and told him how
thin
and
gorgeous
he was. He cringed.

How did it happen that after 60 years, this rancorous crone, this snapping turtle, this weird, decaying dominatrix, this
virago
still dominated his life?

Bud had been on a daily “maintenance dose” of opiates since the dawn of time. There were five or six doctors he could count on for refills—they'd been treating him for “migraines” for so many years that Bud believed he actually had the malady. He
did
have migraines but they were what are called “rebound headaches,”
caused
by the pills. He bought
R
_x
off the Internet once and wished he hadn't because twice a day he got emails from the “fulfillment department”:
Bud, your prescription is ready!

Opiates were constipating, to say the least—a friend of his with AIDS was prescribed liquid opium because it was the only thing that effectively stopped the diarrhea—so Bud had always been rather fussy about his prematurely geriatric toilet. He took 1000 mg of magnesium a day and never traveled too far from his stash of stool softeners and MOM (milk of magnesia). Impaction was a ring of hell to be avoided at all cost. In his day, he'd been forced to go to the emergency room more than once; one visit ended in provoking an attractive young RN to announce, post-enema, “You've just given birth!” Bud got chills when he read about the obese woman who died writhing & obstructed on the floor of an ER waiting room. A zeppelin of shit had accreted in her gut for days but the Hugh Laurie at King-Harbor said it was probably gallstones and gave her Vicodin. Her husband begged them to treat her but it must have been a busy night, everyone knows how the triage thing goes. The guy was so frustrated he actually called 911. When they asked for the address, the poor schmuck told them they were in the waiting room of the King-Harbor ER. Bud heard the tape on a website; the dispatcher couldn't wrap her head around him calling from a
hospital
, you know, it was like, what a dorkus! Somebody call
America's Funniest 911s
! Of course, she said there was no
way
they could send paramedics to an ER . . . a security camera captured everything, she falls off her seat half-conscious, puking feces, and the janitor comes and just mops up around her like in a silent film! Meanwhile, the zeppelin's exploding through the sluice (“O, the humanity!”), a razored bowling ball of rockhard shit slipping the surly bonds of bowel to touch the face of God and waxed linoleum. The hour-long footage got
leaked
—another soupçon offering to the webgods, to the daily unquenchable fatal reality show planet. The woman had three kids, and mischievous hackerh8trs spammed their emails with mash-ups of Mom seizing on the floor, adding
Blair Witch
screams & Howard Stern farts.

. . .

It took a few days for Bud to connect with his agent. He had called right after listening to the message at the end of the Steve Martin event—it was already 9:30. Sometimes the assistants were still working late, but not
that
late; he left word. It felt good to say, “Bud Wiggins, returning.”

Bud had made a study of his rise and fall in the Business, by virtue of the way the assistants addressed him. When he was at his hottest as a Hollywood screenwriter, he'd call and get, “O hi, Bud! He's
just
finishing a call but I know he
really
wants to talk to you. Can you hold? Oh—wait, he's just wrapping up!” (Which meant the agent was
physically gesturing
to the assistant
not to lose Bud
.) “Okay! I'm putting you through . . .” It wasn't unusual—back then—for the excited agent to hop on before the assistant even finished talking. But as the workless months dropped from the calendar like dead leaves falling, the assistants stopped using his name. It became “Hi” or “Oh hi,” the personal touch gone. The agent would invariably be on a conference call (the quaint, pre-wired era when conference calls denoted power and status) and they'd put Bud on hold for
long
fucking minutes. Then, “It looks like it's going to be a while, can I have him return?” In the years that followed, they'd put Bud on hold and wouldn't come back to check with him at all . . . after a few minutes of holding the Void to his ear, they'd pierce the silence with an angry, clinical slap:
He'll have to call you back.
The days of unquiet desperation had begun. Somewhere near the fin de siècle, a new idiom was born—Bud found himself awash in a sea of “I don't have hims.” Depending on one's status or the assistant's disposition, he or she might choose to customize and embellish, such as, “You know right now I
actually
don't have him . . . can he return?” (If you had
some
heat, they had a wink in their voice one could translate as seductive.) As time went on & Bud got colder (if a frozen corpse possibly could), the “actually” became a curt
I don't have him
until one day, all that was left was the lightspeed
He's not available—
no flirty apologies, only barely suppressed, deadened annoyance: end of the line.

Agents were usually in early, and when Bud hadn't heard back by 10
A.M.
, he decided to call in. Who knew, maybe the voicemail wasn't working or whatever.

“Bud Wiggins, returning.”

The assistant was cheerful enough. The new hires gave you the least amount of shit. They didn't know who the losers were.

“Bud, I'm putting you through to Chris.”

His gut flipped.

“Hey, Bud! How are you?”

“I'm good, Chris. How are they treating you?”

“Well. Very well. Life is good. I'm gonna have to jump, but here's why I'm calling. I got a call from Rod Fulbright, at CAA. David Simon's doing a new series about Hollywood and wants to meet with you.”

“Who's David Simon?”

“
The Wire.
And
Treme
. He's a very talented guy, but not our client. So
call
him—call Rod—tell him that we spoke, and he'll give you the information.”

“Why does David Simon want to talk to me?”

“It's probably about the Hollywood show. Maybe he wants you to work on it. I really have to jump.”

“Chris, it doesn't make sense—I mean, it's
great
, but——”

“Oh—do you know Michael Tolkin?”

“Sure I know Michael.”

“That's it then, I forgot, sorry about that. David got your name through Michael. Michael's executive producing.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Call Rod.”

. . .

He knew Tolkin from gradeschool.

Thirty years ago, when Bud self-published his book of short stories about wash-ups in the Business, for a brief moment he was the toast of the town. He remembered Tolkin coming up to him at a party and saying, “I really think you're onto something there.” Over the months that followed, there was a lot of interest in Bud writing the screenplay: Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Bob Altman. Altman had supposedly considered adapting the book himself but decided to make
The Player
instead.

Bud called Rod, but only spoke to his assistant. Xochilt said the meeting with David Simon was set for next week, a Thursday, at one o'clock, at the Polo Lounge.

“Rod asked me to pass this along,” she said. “When David talks about
The Wire
, he refers to it as a
novel.
”

“You mean it's based on a novel?”

“I'm actually not sure. I can get back to you on that. But apparently when David discusses it, he prefers to call it a novel instead of a series. You should do the same. OK?”

“Perfect.”

He thought he should probably call Tolkin. They'd been out of touch; he could get his number through the agency. He watched the pilot of
The Wire
on his computer then lay down to ponder the plot of his own work-in-progress.
Though maybe I should call my novel a cable series,
he thought, almost cracking himself up.