Passing Through the Flame (26 page)

“That’s just how I got myself in this position, Mr. Marvin,” he said.

“Harry, please,
Harry.
Let’s go to my office, have a cup of coffee, and talk.”

Marvin led Stein down a long dark corridor, past huge echoing rooms full of the looming shapes of silent high-speed presses and the latest binding machinery, past small sound stages, editing rooms, and several huge barnlike rooms carved up into editorial cubicles, and into a big sloppy office that immediately made him feel at home. Marvin’s desk was a fancy Danish modern job, but it was completely swamped by piles of magazines, manuscripts, invoices, letters, ashtrays, pencils, coffee cups, still photos, and scraps of paper. The redwood-paneled walls were virtually invisible behind bulletin boards, calendars, nude stills of men, women, children, and animals in every conceivable sexual position, covers from girlie magazines, fetish magazines, gay magazines, animal sex magazines, sex novels, posters for sex films, and cartoons clipped out of newspapers and magazines. There was a huge leather couch along one wall, but it was overflowing onto the floor with stacks of paperback books and magazines, so that the only places to sit were the swivel chair behind the desk and four plain metal folding chairs scattered around the room.

“Quite an establishment you’ve got here,” Stein said, pulling a chair up to Marvin’s desk as Marvin sat down and began pouring coffee from the big electric percolator on his desk.

“Yeah, porn is a major industry, and I’ve got a major piece of it,” Marvin said. “When you think about it, the porn industry does a bigger annual gross than Broadway, or the cutlery industry, or probably even the textbook publishers. Yet I’m still considered a two-bit punk by creeps with half my net worth. Screw them, I say. When they’re through putting me down as a gangster and a pervert, they go home, lock themselves in the toilet, and beat off over my product. In this business, your enemies are also some of your best customers.”

He handed Stein a styrene cup of black coffee, leaned back in his chair, sipped his coffee, and studied Stein as his rich old Uncle Albert had, twenty years ago in Chicago. Uncle Albert had been a shark too, a crop futures speculator who got rich screwing farmers and screwing the middlemen who screwed the consumers. Yet Stein had always liked Uncle Albert; the old pirate had had some indefinable and entirely unjustified air of humanity wrapped around him, a style that made you forget his content. In spite of himself, Stein felt drawn to Marvin in the same way he had been drawn to Uncle Albert. He didn’t particularly like himself for liking Marvin, but he couldn’t help it.

“So, Barry, let’s talk about your problem and see whether we can’t work something out.”

“I understand Jango Beck has told you about everything that I didn’t tell you at the party....”

Marvin nodded. “You need a printer who will print your paper without a bond, and you need twenty thousand dollars to post as a bond against loss of the suit the Federal Narcotics Bureau has slapped on you, and you need seventeen thousand dollars to cover your back printing bills. That about covers it, right?”

Stein kept from showing his surprise only by an extreme act of will. I knew he knew about the rest of it, but how did he get the figure on the back printing bill? How much does he know? “You certainly know my business pretty well,” he said cautiously.

“When I’m thinking of doing business with someone, I want to know who and what I’m doing business with, that’s only smart, right? So let’s take it item by item. A printer, you don’t have to worry about. I’ve got a separate shop five minutes from here that takes in mostly outside work anyway. You can print your paper there. I’ll sell it to you; instead of paying printers’ bills, you’ll be paying off the note you sign to me for the purchase. That way, I can’t get tagged for printing unlawful material if the
Flash
gets busted again, because on paper, I don’t own the printing plant, you do. And in twenty years, you can really own it outright. It’ll solve your printing problem, and it’s a sound business deal for both of us. I sell off some excess printing capacity, and you acquire a profitable property that will eventually increase the capitalization of your business.”

This time Stein couldn’t help showing his pleasure and surprise. Marvin was offering him a marvelous deal, and there was no denying it or hiding it. I’ll save the paper and build up a big personal equity at the same time. Instead of throwing money away on printers, I’ll be acquiring an asset, a real moneymaker. If I can really run things at a big profit, the future of the
Flash
will be assured, and I can put money
into
the Movement instead of always having to suck it out! I could finance major Movement activities, be a mover and shaper.

“That’s a very generous offer, Mr. Marvin... Harry....”

“It’s a
sound
offer. I’m no philanthropist, but if I can help a fellow outlaw survive and not lose money in the process, why shouldn’t I? Next week it could be me that the gonifs that own the government try to shut down, right?”

“I hate to mention this... Harry... but that still leaves me thirty-seven thousand dollars in the hole....”

Marvin sipped his coffee, looked at Stein, frowned. “That
is
a problem. I’d be insulting your intelligence if I tried to tell you I couldn’t afford to lend you thirty-seven thousand dollars, right? But you’d be insulting
my
intelligence if you expected me to make a thirty-seven thousand-dollar unsecured loan to a man in your shaky position....”

“But I’ve got the
Flash
to back a loan with,” Stein said. “We sell one hundred thousand papers a week; our ad revenues are good. Aside from all these legal and printing hassles, it’s a thriving business....”

“Wait a second! You’re asking me to let the
Flash
serve as security on a loan to pay off its creditors? That’s just shuffling money around. The
Flash
would still be in debt, and if it folded, I’d be holding the bag.”

“The
Flash
won’t fold, because we’ll win the suit eventually, and then I can give you twenty thousand back. All you’d risk is seventeen thousand. Even in its present state, the paper is surely valuable enough to secure a seventeen-thousand-dollar loan.” Which, of course, was not exactly the case, since the
Flash
also owed about thirteen thousand dollars to various Movement angels, a debt with a labyrinthine history that no one entirely remembered anymore. But that was all heavy internal Movement stuff, Marvin couldn’t possibly know about that.

Marvin nodded. “If that were the whole story, I’d say okay. But you talk as if winning your lawsuit is a sure thing.”

“My lawyers—”

“Don’t tell me bullshit from lawyers. Believe me, my lawyers can lick your lawyers, and the money I pay them is enough to give you a heart attack, but I still get busted and hassled and sometimes convicted on a lot of half-assed obscenity charges. Thirty convictions I got, and I can’t count how many times I’ve been dragged into court, and still those bastards will swear up and down that they’ll win every time if you just wave money in their faces.” Marvin smiled ruefully. “Don’t get me started on the subject of lawyers,” he said.

“But these are
Movement
lawyers, dedicated to—”

“Don’t tell me what they’re dedicated to, I know what lawyers are dedicated to: lining their own pockets.”

Stein saw that he was treading on thin ice. Not merely because Marvin simply couldn’t comprehend the difference between his rip-off shysters and dedicated Movement people like Owen France, but because Marvin was basically right about the uncertainty of the situation, and both of them knew it. Owen was just as certain about his ability to win any case as Marvin’s high-priced ambulance chasers, if for entirely different reasons. And he still lost at least a third of the time, like any ordinary human being. And trusting that the obvious facts of the case would vindicate the
Flash
was trusting in Establishment justice. Neither Marvin nor I have that kind of faith in the courts, I’d better not try to kid him about that.

“Well what if I offer to secure the other twenty thousand dollars with the printing plant...?” he said.

Marvin stared at him incredulously. “With
what
printing plant?”

“With the printing plant I’m going to own.”

“You’re talking about
my
printing plant! That you don’t really own till you pay the note off twenty years from now!”

“Just add twenty thousand to the price of the printing plant,” Stein said. “With the stipulation that I don’t start acquiring equity in the printing plant until the first twenty thousand is paid off.”

“Paid off with interest!”

“With eight percent interest a year. If I win the suit, I’ll payback the twenty thousand right away. If not, it’ll just take that much longer to pay off the note.”

“With twelve percent a year interest on the entire unpaid balance.”

“With nine.”

Marvin relaxed, smiled. “Let’s save ourselves some bullshit, because we know we’re gonna settle on ten, right?”

Stein grinned, began to feel the glow of triumph inside... “Right,” he said. “No sense in being pricks with each other, Harry.”

“No sense at all,” Marvin said. “So you won’t give me a whole act when I tell you I want you to cosign both deals personally, so that both deals are secured by each other. That way, you can’t concentrate all your assets in one end and all your liabilities in the other and leave me with egg on my face, right?”

“You mean if I default on
either
the printing plant loan or the loan to pay the back bills, I lose the paper?”

“Plus whatever equity you have in the printing plant. After all, I’m doing you a pretty big favor. At least if you screw me up, I got a right to salvage as much of my investment as I can, right?”

“Yes, that’s only fair,” Stein admitted. I can’t ask him to take a chance on me that I’m not willing to take on myself. He’s loaning me money on nothing but thin hot air. My nonexistent equity in the
Flash
is securing thirty-seven thousand dollars’ worth of paper. I can hardly refuse to back those loans with my own name, not when Marvin is saving the paper. Saving the paper! The porn king of the San Fernando Valley is saving the
Flash!
I’ve done it! I’m doing it! I’ve saved our asses! And it’s going to make me rich!

“Okay, Barry, then we got ourselves a deal,” Marvin said, extending his hand. Stein took it; Marvin’s grip was firm and forthright as they shook hands conventionally. On impulse, Stein shifted his grip to clasp Marvin’s hand in the Movement handshake, hands locked in a square across each other, forearms upraised. “What is this,” Marvin said, “arm wrestling?”

Stein laughed. “It’s the Movement handshake. Kind of makes you one of our brothers.”

Harry Marvin’s eyes sparkled. “Sure, why not? We’ll give ‘em the finger together, Barry, right?”

“Right on!” Stein said.

“Yeah, sure, right on.”

Paul Conrad parked his Rambler in the garage of the Eden Tower, and waited for the elevator in the gray sunless basement of the soaring white-and-glass phallus. There were no Hollywood hype veneer walls and marble floors down here, only echoing car engines, lounging blacks in mechanic’s uniforms, and gasoline fumes.

The pastel pussy palaces, glass-sided office buildings, pretentious overpriced restaurants, and rip-off boutiques of the Sunset Strip grew right out of the top level of Los Angeles like toadstools. A couple of garage levels at the bottom of a twenty-five-story building was the extent of Los Angeles’ subterranean mystery.

Every time he parked in one of these office building garages, he felt a pang of nostalgia for New York’s majestic underground labyrinth: the huge separate city that honeycombed the granite bedrock of Manhattan. The subway stations were a highway jungle of hot dog stands, barbershops, shoeshine parlors, news stands, sleazy clothing stores, and cheap restaurants—whole neighborhoods with characters all their own. And at places like Rockefeller Center and Grand Central, these subway oases grew into small cities with great central malls, expensive shops, good restaurants, department-store façade, bars, and the electric bustle of midtown Manhattan. The underground world where he had shot
Down Under the Ground.

Paul entered the elevator and the doors scissored shut, the anodized aluminum slabs cutting the garage scene from his mind like some celestial editor splicing his reality film. Inside the elevator was another universe, the Los Angeles of tinted metal, ubiquitous carpeting, pseudo-baroque veneer paneling, electrical hum from somewhere, indirect lighting, and Muzak gurgling down from a hidden speaker.

Only in
this
elevator, the Muzak was decorticated rock, a lush instrumental medley of Bob Dylan’s Golden Oldies all run together into a bubbly background blur.

He pressed the button for the twentieth floor and the elevator whooshed upward soundlessly, any feeling of motion drowned in a cascade of happy background music and waiting-room decor. Los Angeles anesthesia. It was enough to make you puke. And a little bit frightening. Someday all Southern California would turn into Disneyland: robots—twice as cute and lovable as unreliable sweaty human beings—running on tracks guided by computer tapes through a lifelike simulation of reality, ever so much more pleasant than the imperfect natural article. After all, hadn’t Sam Yorty, the disc jockey mayor of LA, seriously proposed turning Watts into a “Niggerland,” with the natives sucking in tourist dollars by staging simulations of good old-fashioned minstrel shows?

But what a stupid train of thought at a time like this, Paul realized. I don’t need to haul New York snobbism into a conference that can take me right out of the mess my life’s in, right here in Hollywood. Where I came in the first place because there’s no way to get to make feature films in New York. Like it or not, Los Angeles is the only place I can possibly get it all together, and if I’m going to deal with what I have to deal with, I’d better not blame Los Angeles for my current bum trip.

Which is about to change, he reminded himself. Which has changed already. A week ago, could I have imagined that today I’d be worrying about blowing a meeting to set up my first feature? I would’ve sold my soul to get anywhere near such a meeting. And no wonder I couldn’t get anywhere! When you’re that down, the smell of your desperation turns people off—which convinces you that your luck is bad or maybe you don’t have the talent you thought you did, and you get more desperate, and spiral on down, down, down....