High Life (22 page)
“Hey, don’t I look laid-back? I can wait a couple of days.”
Channel 52 had space on the Warner lot in Burbank—production offices and a couple of small studios that churned out low-budget programs offbeat enough for the under—twenty-fives, but still far enough infield to mutate into middle-America living room pap if the station ever clawed its way beyond the fringe.
I found Larry Burns’s office on the second floor of a prefab building that looked like it was designed to be loaded onto the back of a truck—exterior stairs and walkways, air conditioner vents like ugly afterthoughts under windows blank with wooden venetian blinds. I had to wait half an hour with his secretary before the fucker came out to see me.
Larry looked like a guy who lived on his dick. He wore light-weight cotton slacks and I could see it hanging down the inside of his left pants leg. It was big, no doubt about it, but it didn’t make up for the mess that was the rest of him. He was pear-shaped and soft and he had dandruff on his shoulders. He had some kind of blackhead problem happening with his nose and he’d broken so many capillaries trying to pick them out that the center of his face looked like a permanent boil. It was upsetting to find someone like him in California. In the film industry.
When he finally showed he didn’t say anything, just jerked his head at me and strode outside. I followed him through narrow streets between hangar-shaped soundstages and workshops to a permanent set they used for one of their sitcoms—kind of a cutaway house with no roof or outside walls. Right now it was deserted except for the living room section where three guys and a camera waited at the edge of a pool of bright light. The floor was littered with cables and old bits of silver adhesive tape.
The guys with the camera introduced themselves as director, cameraman, and sound recordist. They pretty much ignored Burns, but they were cool enough toward me. I had to stand out in the light, behind a mark someone had taped on the floor, and speak to camera. Under the lens there was an autocue which the director operated. I guess for a test with a good possibility of bombing they weren’t prepared to shell out for extra staff.
The director told me to relax and pretend the camera was a person. But I knew better than that from my telehosting course. I knew to pretend that the camera was a window into the universal living room. That way you kept your appeal broad and didn’t become inappropriately intimate.
I felt okay. I knew I could do it. I knew that I had to do it. On screen, the projection of confidence is your greatest asset. And I was projecting as hard as I could. Plus, the cocktail of pills I’d taken that morning to kill my nerves was kicking in just fine.
Ten seconds in, I realized the autocue script was one of Lorn’s from last week’s
28 FPS
show—an investigation into the different types of sanitary napkins used by various female stars. A joke on me by Burns, I suppose, but I remembered quite a bit of it and got it off smoother than I would have cold. After that they repositioned the camera and had me do it again.
Burns sat back in the shadows watching me on a monitor. When it was over he barked at the director to send him a cassette, then powered back out into the sunshine like he had things a whole lot more important than me to deal with. When he noticed I was following him he slowed fractionally.
“I’m not totally unhappy. We’ll discuss and let you know. Parking lot’s along there, then right.”
He didn’t say goodbye, didn’t wait for me to, either. I watched him take a sharp corner and head for his building. Then I got lost accidentally on purpose and spent an hour or so wandering around, breathing the fresh-cut timber smell of newly constructed sets. Trying to suck in and keep forever the history that was there, the presence through the years of generations of people whose whole worlds had spun within the safely insulated Hollywood perimeter. Who thought anywhere else was just someplace you wouldn’t want to be.
On one of the prop streets they were shooting a storefront scene. A guy had to walk out the door, say his line to a waiting bimbo, then freeze looking off into the distance. I watched them go through it a half-dozen times, it got tedious, but the actor fascinated me. His clothes didn’t crease, his hair stayed in place, he didn’t sweat. The sun that burned the rest of the crew didn’t reach him.
I looked carefully at his face at the end of each take and I knew he wasn’t there. He was already in his limo heading into the hills, coke in his nose and a seventeen-year-old on his cock.
And all he had to do was walk through doors in a minor TV movie. I didn’t even know his name.
Later, a couple of security guys escorted me off the lot in a golf cart.
I spent the next few weeks out at Malibu. Apart from the obvious advantages, it put distance between me and Ryan. I knew he’d be itchy for the blackmail meeting with Bella and the longer I could avoid telling him I hadn’t done anything to set it up, the longer I’d avoid a beating. He was a pit-bull motherfucker, but I didn’t think he’d front up at the house so early in the game.
Bella made it her mission to show me how pleasant money could be and the time passed in a glutted wonderland of consumption. We hit Rodeo for a wardrobe—hip suits with trousers that fit properly, a collection of casual wear the magazines were showing at the time, absurdly priced denim, leather that felt like it was still alive, shoes, shirts, underwear … A lifetime of clothes that would all be replaced next season.
She wanted me to have a watch, so I chose one made out of platinum. She wanted me to have a new car, so we put the latest Mustang on order—a convertible. Not the most practical choice for L.A., but at her level of wealth practicalities weren’t something you had to spend a lot of time worrying about.
With a new sled coming my way I could have sold the Prelude, but I didn’t. Karen had given up part of herself to buy it, and for me it was too much of a marker to let go—a possession that drew the line between the end of one life and the start of another. I put it in an auto storage place near UCLA instead.
Mornings Bella and I spent in a fug of come and glit, sliding over each other on sheets that stank of fish. She told me she loved me. I said it right back and I think she believed me. She was beautiful, she was a great fuck, but the only thing I loved about her was the potential she had to make my life better. The emotional connection just wasn’t there. Maybe we came from worlds that were too different, maybe the feeling she gave off of being above the usual moral concerns was just too intense. Who knows? How can you figure why you love someone or why you don’t? And what does it matter anyhow if you can fake it well enough to fool them?
Powell was at the house most nights. Bella had told me he usually spent most of his time at his apartment downtown, so it seemed like an obvious attempt to make his presence felt. It worked pretty well. Having Bella climb out of bed so he could stick his faded old bone into her really pissed me off. It was a constant reiteration of how limited my influence over her really was.
Still, sucking up the good life kept me pacified. In fact, receiving expensive goods and services occupied me so fully that for a while I even managed to sidestep the issue of a possible connection between one or both of this Malibu duo and Karen’s murder.
But then Powell had two dogs delivered to the house. Black Labradors. I don’t know where he kept them, I didn’t see them around the grounds, but two days later I found one of them in the ferns at the edge of the woodland. It had been killed and gutted, same as the one I’d stepped in on my first day at the house.
Larry Burns called Bella on her mobile while we were having lunch at a place on Beverly Drive. He didn’t ask to speak to me, but she passed on the news, glowing with excitement.
“You’re second presenter on
28 FPS.
How does it feel?”
“Fantastic!”
And it did. That one phone call changed the world for me. It lifted me out of obscurity and put my feet on the first rung of the ladder that led to a meaningful life. Anyone in L.A. would have killed for the opportunity, and I’d got it after a single twenty-minute screen test. It felt slightly surreal. Two months ago I’d been broke and without a future, now I was sitting in an expensive restaurant, wearing a suit that cost more than four months rent on my apartment, contemplating the fact that very soon I would cease to be a nonentity.
“One thing, though, Jack, you mustn’t mention my part in getting you the job to anyone. Nepotism isn’t good for morale.”
“Yeah, sure. How much are they paying?”
“I’m taking care of your salary—a compromise for your lack of experience. What do you think? Ten thousand a month? You’ll need somewhere else to live as well.”
“You want me to move out?”
“No, but I want you to have an alternative for when it’s necessary. Television is a gregarious environment and you may have to entertain—you couldn’t do that at Malibu. It will also take some of the strain off Powell if you’re away from the house occasionally.”
This conversation resulted shortly afterwards in the acquisition of a three-bedroom house with pool in Laurel Canyon.
All I had to worry about now was Ryan fucking everything up with his pissant blackmail scheme.
At Bella’s. I answered the phone. She was doing a half-day at her clinic in Brentwood and Powell, mercifully, was at his apartment watching incest vids or shooting smack or whatever else he did with himself. Someone for me. Not Bella with pornographic endearments to see me through until she got home but, strangely, Rex. Strange because I hadn’t given him the number.
“Hey, dude.”
His voice was bad—dragging and nasal. Smacked, of course, but worse than that, robbed of even the slightest trace of hope or energy. With the upturn in my situation I could afford to let it make me feel sad.
“How did you get this number?”
“Didn’t you give it to me? I don’t know …”
He was majorly doped. Words tailing off into whispers. I expected him to fall asleep on the phone.
“You don’t sound too good.”
“I’m fine. What do you mean?”
“Drugged.”
“Oh, yeah, a bit.”
“Where are you?”
“At home … Can you come around? That’s why I’m calling, to see if you can come around.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. But can you bring some money?”
Rex rented a small run-down house on one of the single-lane streets that wound into the hills out of West Hollywood. The Mustang had been delivered that day, so trucking over there wasn’t much of a chore. He took a while answering my knock and when he did it wasn’t a pretty thing to see. His face matched the sound of his voice on the phone. Pasty skin, pinned eyes, picked-out zits. He was shirtless and his jeans looked crusty. I’d parked the Mustang out front and he spent a little while focusing on it.
“Yours?”
“Not bad, huh?”
“From the woman?”
“Beats sucking dicks.”
Rex grunted and turned away. I followed him down a hall that was basically untouched, into a living room that was basically an oasis of shit. Carpet littered with pieces of clothing, dead matches, and empty Coke cans. One of the cushions on the couch burnt and the foam inside melted. Bloody syringe sprays on the wall closest to the still-good part of the couch, glasses half full of water on a coffee table, used works, singed spoons, pieces of cotton wool, a small patch of puke under an Ansel Adams photo that had been half ripped off the wall. The room was dark and hot, it felt like somewhere an animal would go to die.
“Did you bring some money?”
“Yeah.”
I handed over five hundred dollars. “Bit of a change, you being broke.”
“I’m sorry it’s such a hassle.”
“I didn’t say it was a hassle. I’m just surprised.”
Rex counted the money and stuffed it into his pocket.
“They repossessed the Porsche.”
Something on the deck out back of the living room creaked. I couldn’t see what it was because the curtains were drawn across the sliding glass doors.
“You look like shit.”
“That’s funny because I don’t feel like anything at all.”
“You’ve got to do something, man. Cut down on the gear.”
“Nope. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to think about where I’m going, I don’t have to do self-improvement, I don’t have to put anything by for a rainy day. They say life’s all about the way you look at it. But if you stop looking, it stops being there.”
Rex turned away. He picked up one of the syringes from the table and started drawing small quantities of blood from a vein in his arm, squirting it out against a wall. It upset me that someone who such a short time ago was helping me make money, who was the closest thing I had to a friend, could become so distant, so unreachable. But as far as he’d moved from the Rex I used to know, I knew I’d moved farther. Into my own new world. Into a place that was so different I could not honestly say I had anything more to give him than money.
“I have to go.”
“So soon?”
“Where did you get my number, Rex?”
“The guy on the deck gave it to me. He said I should call.”
“What guy?”
“He asked me about Karen, but he’s here to see you.”
Ryan. It had to happen sooner or later. I started to leave the room, but the sound of the deck door sliding open stopped me. Ryan stuck his head through the curtains and grinned.