Hidden Bodies (9 page)

She smiles. It would be a dick move to hit on her in front of Gwen and I am not a dick. This is why I agree to see Gwen’s new apartment. She lives in a guesthouse by a pool in Los Feliz.
It’s depressing and small and there are pictures of Madonna everywhere. Gwen humps me and I close my eyes and picture the candy girl. We use each other. She sucks my dick.

I spend the night in Gwen’s guesthouse and this is where it’s true when the deluded aspiring actors say that the business is all about timing. The
one fucking night
I leave
the Village and fall asleep in Los Feliz, I wake to three texts from Calvin:

Dude girl here with Portnoy Complaint

She’s being weird about money wants cash not direct deposit you want to buy it off her?

All good, she was in a rush so we worked it out got it 4 u

My hands are shaking and this guesthouse smells like soup and I am out of the squeaky bed and I am looking for my shoes and fuck. This is my fault. I lost my focus. I have to get out of here but
I can’t find my fucking shoe and I look under the bed and it’s nothing but dildos and stilettos and acting manuals. Fuck my shoes. I don’t deserve them.

My Lyft is one minute away and I step out into the overbearing, in-your-face, moronic sun and I duck my head and here are my shoes, lined up next to Gwen’s, as if she wanted the people in
the big house to know about this, about us.

I get into the Lyft and the driver wants to know if he should take Franklin or Fountain and he doesn’t have sunglasses and the AC is broken and he misspells the name of my street in his
GPS. The phrase
one-night stand
is a misnomer. There is no such thing as a one-night stand. Sometimes, what you do for one night destroys your future.

IT’S
not a book. It’s a
screenplay.
White, thin, single-sided pages bound by brass tacks. Calvin rubs his eyes. Stoned. Sucking
on a kale smoothie. “Dude, you said
Portnoy’s Complaint
.”

I am livid. “The
book
.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Right thiggity there.”

“This is a
screenplay
,” I hiss. “Who collects
screenplays
?”

“JoeBro, don’t take this the wrong way, but you need to chill. Have you ever done a juice fast?” He hits a pack of American Spirits against the desk. “You get so intense.
That gets your cortisol going. Cortisol is not cool.”

This is like getting pulled over for not using your blinker and I could kill Calvin. I could kill Amy. I could kill everyone and put them in a blender and make them into a smoothie.
Fast
Five
is on the TV and I watch Dominic Toretto and RIP Brian O’Conner assemble a team. My team fucking sucks.

“JoeBro,” Calvin says. “You got Tinder banged and you look all miserable and shit.”

“I rushed over here for the book.”

“Well, like, the screenplay is
about
the book, so, like, it’s kind of the book, only in different form, like the way iced coffee is still coffee even though it’s
cold.”

I can’t help it. “Fuck off, Calvin,” I snap.

“Dude,” he says. “You need to chill.”

Toretto never
chills
because you don’t get anywhere in this world by being
chill
and Calvin is going on about a Flaming Lips
LP
and food trucks and Big Bear and
bacon, about how
wasted
he was last night. I wish I had Cocaine Calvin. Pothead Calvin is impossible, a no-talent Duplass brother, smug and slow. His
buds
are texting.
They’re at some fucking market downtown and they can bring us lunch and Calvin still doesn’t get that I don’t drink vegetables or care about
dope food trucks in K-Town.
I
care about books.

I tell him I’m not hungry and he says I need to laugh and he gives me his iPad and commands me to watch a
killer Henderson video.
I tell him I don’t want to watch the video
but he says that I have to. “Henderson is on,” he says. “He goes
off
on his new girlfriend and this dope is gold. This gold is dope. Genius.”

Everyone here calls everything
genius
. “Calvin.”

“JoeBro, you need to chill,” he says. “Watch. Chill. Be.”

But how can I be chill when Delilah is texting, clinging, and Calvin is yammering about pitching
Ghost Food Truck
to Comedy Central or IFC. He might
get weird
with it and go to
Adult Swim and he’s banging the vaporizer that never works against the counter and his ego swells and
Ghost Food Truck
would
actually
be mellower on HBO and maybe you could
even put John Cusack
in
that truck and maybe he would pick up girls and disappear and look for the girls and
never find them, because like, it’s a Ghost Food Truck and he’s
a ghost and he doesn’t know it.
I give in and tell Calvin it’s
genius
and he texts his
writing partner Slade
and I would bet my nuts that Calvin and Slade will
never write
Ghost Food Truck
the cartoon, the movie, or the HBO series. People in LA talk about writing but they don’t actually do it. It’s the LA equivalent of going to the
Cloisters or the Met in New York. You say you’re going to do it but at the end of the day it’s Saturday or it’s too hot or it’s too cold or you could just as easily watch
TV.

But then what the fuck makes me so superior? I can’t even find Amy.

“I’m popping next door for another kale smoothie,” he says. “You want?”

“No, thanks,” I say.

“JoeBro,” he says. “You got to get out of your head, brother. Watch the H man.”

“Calvin, I’m pretty beat.”

“The video is two minutes.”

“I actually hate Henderson.”

“Nobody hates Henderson,” he says. “You crack me up, JB.”

I give in again and I watch Henderson on
F@#K Narcissism
. He’s on his couch, in one of his trademark laugh-at-me T-shirts (#BOOBS), talking about a girl with a
dirty vag.
I don’t like that abbreviation; it’s a pussy or it’s a vagina but it’s not a
vag.
He calls the girl an
organic pig
who smears
superfruits
all over
his sheets and her
vag
is hard to reach because of her
bush
. My hands start shaking and I turn up the volume.

“Blueberries,” Henderson rails. “I tell her to keep the blueberries in her vag and I think this is a reasonable request. I get hungry. I take a bite. But these sheets, my
sheets, these are high thread count sheets, people. Okay, I’m sorry to be that asshole, but I did not just get a deal from Comedy Central. I got a
deal
from these idiots. So these
sheets are not cheap. And she is gonna make it up to me, you know, a little lovin’, but then my show comes on and she wants to
watch it.
Do you believe this shit? So now I got
blueberries, I got blue balls, and I’m my own cock block. You sit on your shitty futon in your shitty apartment and you dream about having the girl and the sheets and the money and then you
get it and hello. Can I get laid in my own bed? Hell, no! I’m my own cock block!”

The crowd roars. He looks at someone in the audience. He shouts: “Love you, Amy baby. Super kisses, baby, it’s all good, right?”

My heart thumps and my throat closes. The camera does not pan over to Amy and I rewind the clip and he says it again—
Love you, Amy baby
. She’s sleeping with the enemy,
my
enemy,
our
enemy. Vile duplicitous cunt, and in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
, Mia Farrow pulls this shit on Woody Allen. They watch movies together and bond over their
disgust for a television producer played by Alan Alda. Woody is smitten, sweet, noble, and in the end, Mia Farrow chooses to marry the
producer.
She tells Woody that he’s not so bad.
When I wrap my hand around Amy’s cum-stained throat, she’ll say the same thing about Henderson, tell me to lighten up. In this moment, at the counter in the bookstore, having found Amy,
I have to do something vile too. I have to text Calvin:
This is genius.

Calvin rushes back, maybe he did a little Adderall, and he’s
stoked
that I have seen the light and join him in worshipping at the altar of Henderson, funnier than Richard Pryor,
smarter than Jerry Seinfeld—
Did you know he didn’t even go to Harvard? He never ran the
Lampoon
like Conan!
—and yet Henderson is a genius—
Literally,
his IQ is like 10,000
—and he deadlifts and he wrestles and the man can do anything. Right now he’s in Malibu, surfing and Instagramming
while
riding waves. I could go to
Malibu and drown him and smash her head against rocks but with traffic and bus schedules, I wouldn’t make it by sundown.

“Does he live at the beach?” I ask.

“No, he lives up in the hills,” says Calvin. “He has these Friday night workouts where he fills the house with people and jams on new material, you know the way comics show up
randomly, he likes to do it in his home.”

It’s Friday. My heart might explode with Rachael Ray knives. “Cool,” I say. “You wanna go?”

Calvin shrugs. “I don’t know, JoeBro. I’m, like, in the writing zone and I used to hang out with his crew. I mean I’ve met him, but, like, I’m trying to keep it all
about the writing right now, you know, get back into the scene when my shit blows up instead of just hanging out and stuff.”

Oh, but Calvin, you’re never blowing up because you are never finishing anything. I breathe. I reason. “Well, that’s great, but sometimes, the thing you need is to get back in
touch with people, you know. I bet if you told him about
Ghost Food Truck
he would go nuts.”

Calvin sighs. “True, but like, I feel like I’m entertained by him and I love him but he would just
not
be the right producer for
GFT
, you know?”

Because there is no such thing as
GFT
and I am going to move back to New York someday—I promise my brain, I will—but I say this:

“Honestly, Calvin, you are a funny dude. Like,
GFT
could be a one-hour, but picture Henderson and his people chomping at the bit for it and then you use that ammo to go to your
one-hour places.”

I will sit here and tell lies all day long to get Calvin to commit to this party. Amy will be there. I need to be there. But I cannot show up alone. I cannot be
that guy
and I cannot
bring Harvey because the only thing creepier than a guy alone at a party is a guy with an
old guy
at a party.

Calvin hesitates. “I don’t know the password.”

I am so close. I’ve won him over with my compliments and there’s no choice. I need that password. I need it now. I text Delilah:
Random question. Do you know the password for
Henderson?

She writes back:
Jim Walsh’s Hooded Bathrobe

I write back:
Thanks

She writes back:
Best one ever right? I love his passwords. Love old 90210 .

I don’t write back. She writes more:
I might go. Are you going?

But I can’t have Delilah around. After I show up with Calvin, I will slip away, some bullshit about meeting a girl, and then I will find Amy and get her alone and I can’t have
Delilah following me around asking me who I’m looking for. It’s vicious, it’s cruel, but there’s only one way to stop her from showing up at Henderson’s. I write back:
Actually fuck it. Do you wanna get a late dinner, 10 or 11? I wanna go to Dan Tana’s. Yeah?

She writes back:
YES

Calvin is playing music, going into party mode, raving about Henderson’s
guac
. And I’m sure Delilah is in her apartment, bouncing up and down, deciding what slutty dress
she’s going to wear for me tonight, not realizing that she would look much better if she covered up, if she teased me.

I imagine Amy is on her knees sucking off her
boyfriend
and I bet she doesn’t have to do anything to get ready for their big party tonight. I bet they have maids.

YOU
don’t go to a party empty-handed and my reusable Pantry bag is stuffed with rope, my Rachael Ray knife, rubber gloves, plastic bags, duct
tape, and Percocets from Dez.

I spent all afternoon looking for pictures of Henderson’s house online. Sometimes it’s easier to plan the crime if you know a little bit more about the scene. But I couldn’t
find pictures of Henderson’s house online and I went a little crazy trying to figure out what to do.

If Amy loved me, it would be different. I could make eye contact and signal for her to meet me outside and we could whisper to each other about our regrets and our unresolved feelings. I could
tell her to make an excuse and we could slip off together and drive into the mountains or the beach. Los Angeles is full of places to hide a body, but when the person inside the body doesn’t
love you, it’s not an easy thing, turning that breathing person into a dead one.

I bought a ton of Percocets off Dez, figuring this is Hollywood. People overdose all the time. But then I realized that Henderson’s in love with her and if she passes out, he will be all
over that shit and call an ambulance. So I Lyfted to Home Depot, where I bought random stuff, rope and duct tape, plastic bags, cable ties, and plastic gloves. The girl at the register winked and
said she’s also a big fan of
Fifty Shades
and this is what has become of our society. Fucking and killing are the same damn thing.

Now I walk outside with my bag and Delilah texts:
Not stalking but have fun grocery shopping.
☺

I ignore it. For her own good. I want her to learn to be less available.

At La Poubelle, Calvin is already semi-wasted, practicing hashtags. “Which do you like better?” he asks. “House of Henderson or Henderson’s House?”

I start planting the seeds for my alibi and tell him I invited this girl from Tinder. He says cool, and he better remember this in the event of an investigation. Calvin orders an Uber and three
of his
buds
show up—fuck fuck fuck—and we pay our tab to meet them outside. The guys all brought beer and they toss their sixers in the trunk, and they give me shit because I
insist on holding my reusable Pantry bag on my lap. It’s too crowded and Calvin’s friends are too loud and they won’t let up about my fucking bag.