King Maybe (12 page)

“You're going to work toward a small life by making a hundred-million-dollar movie.”

“It's what I know how to do.” He peeled himself
from the fire and headed toward the stairs, but it was movement for movement's sake, and he turned halfway and came back toward me, stopping eight or ten feet from my chair. Raised both hands, palms outward, telling me to sit there and listen. “At this time in my life, I need to
say
something. I need to try to tell people the things I'm beginning to figure out, in a way they won't forget. A movie, okay? And at the same time, it'll be my
discipline
. No more ten things at once. One movie, word by word, idea by idea, inch by inch. Image by image. Like scrimshaw.” He made it to his chair and did something that was midway between sitting down and collapsing. “Like how a face ages, one slow wrinkle at a time. Pulling it out of my soul, if I can find my soul.”

“
Ambient Violet,
” I said.

He leaned forward in the chair, very quickly. “Laugh at me, I'll kick your face in.”

“Then don't amuse me.”

“The whole thing, the whole movie, it takes place in the moments between the time someone—an old woman—breathes in for the last time and the time she breathes
out
. The opening shot is a wall, just a rough, blank, whitewashed wall, somewhere in the Third World, with a crack running down it. And we get a quick glimpse of her face with her eyes wide open, staring at the wall—maybe fifteen, twenty frames, just enough to register her—and then we're back to the wall, and we hear her inhale deeply, a little raggedly, the sound slowed way down, and the camera moves inch by inch toward the crack, and almost imperceptibly the crack widens and turns blue, and we do a tilt-shift, and it's a river with some trees over it, and it's the thing she knew best in her life. And then she's a young girl at the edge of a river, and we're there with her.”

“In her memory.”

“In her life. And her life, it's
nothing
. It's nothing anyone would ever write down. She lives, she falls in love, she has a couple of children and one dies, she gets old and sick, she finally breathes out, she passes away, and
nobody remembers her
. And the river is still there, the crack on the wall is still there, and
they
don't remember her either.”

I said nothing.

“And that was the whole world,” he said. “That was all of life, all of time, that was everything everyone has ever wanted or needed or been afraid of, and she didn't go anywhere, she didn't do anything. She didn't get painted, she didn't get filmed, she didn't get rich. She lived, she loved her kids, she died. The history of the world, in close-up. What would I mean to her? What would you mean to her? We'd be a streak on the horizon, a blemish on the stars. She wouldn't give us a thought. She had—she had, like that girl in there watching
Lawrence of Arabia
—she had fires to build. People to keep warm. Then she was gone. The end.”

“Why violet?”

He looked embarrassed, as though he'd been hoping I wouldn't ask. “Violet is the color of memory. To me, I mean.”

“Got it.” I sat back in the chair, distancing myself from his intensity as I might pull away from a space heater. “You think you can make that movie?”

“I don't know,” he said, tight-lipped. “I'd have to become somebody else to do it, wouldn't I?”

“I asked if you
thought
you could make it.”

“I think I have to try.”

“Well, shit,” I said. It was my turn to get up, even though there was nowhere I wanted to go. “If I say no, you'll kill me, so what do you need me to do?”

Outside, the wind rattled the windows.

12

Tired of Being Dead

“So you want to be an actress,” I said. We were crossing Santa Monica, heading north into Hollywood. It was late afternoon, still hot and windy. The trees were waving their arms around, and their shadows stretched themselves all the way across the street. The shadowscape felt premature, with daylight saving time gone for only a week.

“Jake told you, didn't he?” she said accusingly. “Bet I know how he made
that
sound.”

“Jake doesn't matter. You want to act, right?”

“Who doesn't?” she said. “Especially when you're out on the Texas panhandle, just you and the wind, and the only color you got is what's on the
tee
vee.” She was looking down at her lap, and I could see why; the neighborhood through which we were driving was the absolute ass end of Hollywood, street after street of buildings neither old enough to be interesting nor new enough to look clean.

As though reading my mind, she glanced up for a second, just a
Where are we?
check, and said, “When I first got here? I looked at all these crappy soda-cracker buildings and I felt like they was just—sorry, they
were
just—inviting earthquakes, daring them, saying, ‘Come on in and shake.' It reminded me of trailer parks in the South, just hollering up to the sky for a big fat tornado: ‘Git your ass down here and blow me all to shit.' Yeah, I wanted to be an actress. Me and every other semi-pretty chick in Texas.”

“Don't short yourself. So you sat around and watched TV and thought about coming out here?”

“Right at the next turn,” she said. “Yeah. It looked easy. Learn the words and let them get you all made up, and there you are, going out with some Jonas brother. It's funny, when you're in that gear, wanting it so much, you don't notice how bad some of them are, the girls on TV. If you did, you'd probably consider, ‘Hey, maybe it's harder than I think.'”

“Bad actresses,” I said.

I made the turn. She said, “Was that the complete thought?”

“No. Did you watch a show called
Dead Eye
?”

“The zombie thing, few years back? That chick, I mean, she was fine-looking, even if she had kind of early-bloomer fifteen-year-old looks, but she was hopeless. She talked like a machine, like Siri on the iPhone, on a bad day And I mean she actually looked at the
camera
sometimes.”

“Somebody Dawn?” I said.

“Tasha,” she said. “Tasha Dawn. We used to have contests, like imitating her, in junior high. She had this little wee helium voice? ‘I am so
tired
of bein' dead,' she said once in a while. I guess it was supposed to build her character or something. We used to say it in Mr. Winslow's social-studies class. He'd say something extra dull with like a hundred dates in it, and a dozen girls would say, ‘I am so
tired
of bein' dead.' But, you know, out there on the panhandle I looked at her and thought, ‘If she can make it, I can.'”

“She married it,” I said.

“So I learned.
El queso grande
, the big cheese himself. Some girls have all the luck.”

“I'm not sure she's as lucky as all that.”

“Well, she's not living
here
,” Casey said. “Right here, just pull over.
Mi casa
, on the right.”

Casey's building was a nondescript three-story apartment house, one of hundreds stamped out of a mold: just a big concrete lower-Hollywood shoe box with pathetic little balconies, all of eight inches deep, protruding below the windows like a patient unenthusiastically showing the doctor her tongue. Casey waited a moment after I pulled up to the curb, looking at me sort of expectantly with one foot tapping, and then she said, “Buy me a drink sometime? I'll tell you some Texas stories.”

“Sure,” I said.

She waited an awkward moment for me to ask for her phone number, and then smiled and said, “Looking forward to it. I am so
tired
of bein' dead. Hey, thanks for the rescue.” Then she got out and leaned back in, reached into her purse, and took out a card, which she dropped on the passenger seat, only her first name and a number. She said, “Just in case,” and backed away and closed the door and hurried up the sidewalk to get ready for her appointment, whoever that might be, a rangy, lonely, small-town Texas girl hopelessly lost without a map, a few short blocks south of the Walk of Fame.

I felt like I had a large stone sitting dead center on my chest, a dense mass made up of many unpleasant things: the separation from Ronnie, the aftermath of my brush with the Slugger, whatever tangles had developed in the relationship between Tyrone and Rina, the state of Casey's life, the commitment I'd made to Jake. Plus, of course, Jake's damn, impossible movie and the fact that I was pledged to commit a burglary to find out whether Jeremy Granger, a.k.a. King Maybe, exploiter of teenage girls, was intentionally shredding Jake's legacy.

And the sheer persistence of the wind had stripped the coating off my nerves. My skin felt like a collection of tiny electrical short circuits.

Was anything all right
anywhere
? I gave it a few minutes' thought, sitting there, and didn't come up with a yes. If—as some ironic people used to say as they flashed air quotes—life was a box of chocolates, someone had sat on the box.

It occurred to me that I was about twenty minutes away from Ronnie's neat, bright, book-filled little apartment in West Hollywood, where most of my clothes were. I was either going to have to make up with her and move back in, if she'd have me, or else go pick up my clothes in some kind of final gesture. Or, I thought, defer the whole thing until she was in a better mood
and go buy some new clothes.

I drifted my way around the block a few times, literally unable to choose a direction. I didn't have the slightest idea how to put things right with Ronnie. There was no good reason to go back to the Dew Drop Inn and many reasons not to. It would have taken me ninety minutes in the thickening afternoon-to-evening rush to get to Rina and Kathy's house in Tarzana, where I'd probably be pushed aside in all the preparations for the party.

Yikes, the
party
. Rina's birthday, mysteriously moved to a different night that was not actually her birthday and apparently off-limits to Tyrone. That settled it: go see Kathy and Rina. But first the coward's solution: don't go see Ronnie, call her.

In all the time I'd known her, Ronnie had never recorded a personalized voice-mail message. Either she was happy with the electrically cheerful female voice the phone company supplied or, more likely, she didn't want her real voice hanging out there where it might be heard by someone from her (apparently) permanently shrouded past.

So it was a surprise, when I was idling at the curb half a dozen addresses east of Casey's shoe box with my phone at my ear, to hear Ronnie's voice say, “Hi, this is Ronnie. If you want to
leave a message or recite some poetry, please wait for the beep. On the other hand, if you're Junior Bender, go fuck yourself.”

I didn't wait for the beep. With my ears burning and the stone on my chest twice as heavy as before, I turned my badly dented white Toyota toward the Cahuenga Pass and the San Fernando Valley, toward the house I once thought would shelter my family and me forever.

The Cahuenga Pass, which derived its name from a Spanish mispronunciation of
Cabueg-na
, a Native American trading post that once occupied much of the space where Universal Studios stands today, was for centuries a footpath through the chaparral covering the Santa Monica Mountains that lie between the Valley and the Los Angeles Basin. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the original trail had been broadened to create a rough and rocky dirt road that led over the hill from the abandoned ruin of Cabueg-na to the booming little townlet assembled from four adjoining sections of land by a developer named Harvey Wilcox. His wife, Daeida, named the development Hollywood after an estate (which she'd never seen) owned by a friend of hers, back east in Illinois. Although Daeida chose the name for its upper-class intimations of quality and grace, by the 1930s Hollywood would be so linked in the American public's mind with sex, drugs, and moral corruption that the residents of another Hollywood, in Indiana, would change their town's name in self-defense.

In its infancy, though, Hollywood was a model of civic virtue. Wilcox was vigorously opposed to fun of the louder varieties and prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol within the limits of his new city. The nearby Pass, as it was called, inevitably became rum-sodden outlaw territory, home to high spirits and loose women. Many of the latter operated out of Eight Mile House, the first hotel in the area, which was noted for the extreme frequency with which its rooms were rented, often six and seven times a day, and the heavily armed desperadoes who congregated there. No less distinguished a personage than Cecil B. DeMille had been shot at on the Pass.

By the mid-1920s, Eight Mile House had been reduced to a pile of old lumber, and Hollywood's most socially prominent women were agitating to plant an enormous and reproving cross high in the Pass, a reminder visible to sinners for miles around that the Lord's righteousness did not expire at the Rockies. They won their battle, but eventually the cross went the way of the whorehouse. In the end they were, after all, both just wood.

I saluted mentally as I crept past the place where Eight Mile House had so briefly filled the Pass with the sounds of gunfire, breaking glass, and groans of simulated pleasure. The footpath was now an eight-lane freeway, cratered with potholes, stained with oil, and choked with carbon monoxide, just another permanent vehicular ordeal to be endured by commuters twice a day. It was enough to make me yearn for a horse, a dirt track, dappled sunlight, and oak trees full of songbirds. Lord, how we've battered and pasteurized the world.

At Woodman I gave up on the freeway and coasted down to the surface streets. I grew up in the Valley, and Valley residents have always seen traffic jams as a sort of noisier weather: they came and went, like smog and heat waves, and there was nothing to be done about it.

But that didn't mean we didn't try. I zigzagged my way across the grid toward Kathy's house, running residential streets and alleys, selecting obscure detours through the east-west streets that only seasoned Valleyites know. In the end I probably added six or seven miles to the trip and subtracted two or three minutes from the clock, but I was feeling vindicated as I made the right onto Santa Rita. On some tiny, meaningless, totally trivial level, I still had it.

I was pulling to the curb when I saw Tyrone standing at the open door. He had his back to me, and the person blocking his way into the house, silhouetted against the light in the hall, was my ex-wife, Kathy. For a small, usually genial woman, Kathy can project a really impressive force field of rejection. If there were ever a
Star Trek
movie set in Tarzana, Kathy's Rejection Force Field would get a story arc all its own.

Tyrone stepped back, and I took my foot off the brake to kill the red lights and let the car roll forward. I heard Kathy's voice, as edgy as a bouquet of razor blades, and then I was out of sight. I drove past a couple of houses to the little circle off to the left, did a 360, and waited as Tyrone slouched toward me, head down, hands in his rear pockets.

When he was about eight feet away I lowered my window and said, “Hey, kid.”

Without looking up, he said, “Yeah, yeah.”

“Tyrone,” I said.

He stopped and looked up at me. “It's you,” he said.

I said, “I hear that all the time.”

“I don't mean to be rude,” he said, “but I already heard all about what a shit I am. And you know what? If you've got something to add, I'd just as soon you keep it to yourself.”

“Tyrone,” I said. “Please get in the car.”

He looked me in the face for a good five seconds. Then he said, “Why?”

“Short version, I don't know what's going on, and I'd like to hear it from you. Long version, I . . . um, I've come to appreciate who you are and the way you are with Rina, and who knows? Maybe I can help.”

Tyrone's eyes were the golden brown of autumn leaves. Against the dark skin of his face, they seemed to leap out at me across the dusk. The only expression I could read in them was doubt. An almost-friend, a hit woman named Debbie Halstead, had once taken a single look at him and predicted that Tyrone would spend his life trying to escape from women, and I'd been watching him ever since, searching for a glimpse of the corruption that extreme good looks can bring. So far I hadn't seen it.

He went around and got in. Then he loosed a sigh that practically blew out the windshield. “They know this car,” he said. “You want them to let you in sooner or later, right? So you don't want them to see you sitting out here talking to me.”

“The conspiracy of the patriarchy,” I said, putting the car in gear.

He said, “Say what?”

“Talking to myself.” I made the right onto Vanalden. “That happens when you get divorced.”

“So,” he said. “What did they tell you?”

“Nothing. Just that I wasn't supposed to mention you in front of Rina.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sweep old Tyrone under the rug.”

“I think the implication was that Rina is in kind of a fragile state where you're concerned. In other words, if you'll excuse me pointing it out, it was more about her than you.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “Her family, it's about her. Me, sitting here on my side of the car, if you'll excuse
me
pointing it out, it's about me, too.”

I said, “I am so weary of everyone having a perspective and all of them sounding so valid. How the hell am I supposed to get anything clear if everybody's
right
?”