Sex and Violence in Hollywood (2 page)

Gwen crawled toward him and got off the bed, stood in front of him. “Yes, I guess he is,” she said, grinning as she slid an arm around him and plucked the cigarette from his fingers.

Outside, beneath the second-story window, the Ferrari’s engine was killed.

“You know, if he smells that cigarette, he’s going to know you’ve had sex with someone,” Adam said.

“Why do you say that?”

The Ferrari’s door opened, and a moment later, slammed shut.

“Because that’s the only time I’ve ever seen you smoke cigarettes.”

“Such an observant boy.”

He took the cigarette from her hand. “There’s that boy shit again.” Took a quick puff.

Outside, footsteps sounded on concrete below.

Adam’s already full bladder seemed to shrink.

“Do your parents know you smoke?” she asked. Her shoulders bobbed with silent, secret laughter.

Adam nodded and smiled, handed the cigarette back. Tried to stir up some saliva in his suddenly dry mouth. “Yeah. Very funny. I’ll see you around.”

He quickly gathered up his clothes and hurried out of the bedroom.

* * *

In his bedroom, Adam slipped Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn into the DVD player and flopped onto his bed to watch.

He could not believe he was fucking his dad’s new wife.

Maybe it’s because I hate him, he thought. Then: No, not maybe.

He liked Gwen, and would even if they were not having sex. But they were, and it was incredible, and he liked her even more for it. She had a cool Grace Kelly beauty, but there was something more beneath it, something Adam had only glimpsed when she let her guard down. Gwen gave the impression of someone who knew a secret that no one else in the world knew, and of someone who would always keep it to herself.

The fact that his dad was married to her did not concern him at all. Adam could not muster a particle of guilt for his relationship with Gwen, and he had tried. Because he hated his dad so much. For killing his mother.

TWO

Adam took a seat
at the dinner as Mrs. Yu served the meal.

“Ah, you come eat, Missa Adam!” Mrs. Yu said excitedly, grinning. “Dat nice, dat nice. I get you prate.” She hurried out of the dining room.

Gwen smiled at him and his dad turned to him slowly.

“Decided to eat with us for a change?” Michael Julian asked.

Adam shrugged. “I was hungry for a change.”

Mrs. Yu returned and hurriedly put a plate and utensils and a linen napkin before Adam. She patted him on the shoulder and said, “We have tie-tip tonight. You rike.”

Mrs. Yu had come to America from China with her sickly husband decades before Adam was born. Mr. Yu had been run over by a truck and killed shortly after they arrived. Michael had hired her when Adam was just a baby only because everyone else he knew had Mexican and South American servants and he wanted to be different. Michael always wanted to be different. He had specifically sought out a Chinese maid, and would settle for nothing else. “When was the last time you saw a Chinese maid, huh?” Michael sometimes asked of anyone within earshot. “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, that’s when. These days, they all speak Spanish.”

Adam never pointed out that Mrs. Livingston, the housekeeper on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, was Japanese. He knew if he did, his dad would only say, “Chinese, Japanese, what’s the difference.”

Michael Julian had declared his independence in the face of trendiness by hiring a servant of different ethnicity from everyone else’s. Had it been possible, Adam was sure his father would have hired an extraterrestrial. The ultimate in cheap immigrant hired help. If you could keep them from eating the cat.

“Well, it’s been a while since you’ve joined us at the dinner table, Adam,” Michael said. “Did the projection bulb blow out at the Nuart, or something?”

Adam said nothing. Mrs. Yu continued to place food on their plates.

“How are things?” Michael said. “What have you been up to, if anything?”

“Not much,” Adam said. “I’ve been doing some writing.”

Michael stopped eating, looked across the table at Adam. He seemed on the verge of smiling as he leaned forward slightly, almost imperceptibly. “Writing? A screenplay?”

Adam shook his head as he cut his meat. “A little poetry. A short story.”

Michael rolled his eyes and sighed. “I’ve told you. How many times have I told you?” He picked up his knife and fork and went to work on his dinner. Stabbed and cut his meat as if it had offended him. “If you’ve got some talent at writing, put it into a screenplay, for Christ’s sake. Anything else is a waste of time. Publishing is falling apart. Nobody has time to read books anymore, let alone poetry.” He shoved a big bloody piece of meat into his mouth and chewed as he talked. “But a screenplay...if everything works and it gets produced, it’s on the big screen, bigger than life. Then, it’s on the shelf at the bookstore of the twenty-first century, the video store. Each produced script is...it’s like a little piece of eternal life.”

Michael Julian was a big man. Broad shoulders, thick arms, and a round belly. When Adam was a little boy, he remembered his dad being lean and muscular. But these days, his body was a sloppy, lumpy mess. As large as his body was, though, his head was too big for it, and he had no discernible neck. His head appeared to sit between his shoulders without suspension, as if he were always shrugging.

“If you can write poetry and short stories, you can write a script,” he went on. “Just write what you know, then add the honey.”

“Honey” was his euphemism for sex and violence. Adam had heard it all countless times before.

Michael’s dark brown hair was long and thick and wild. It curled and waved just past his shoulders. Bushy eyebrows and a bushy beard and mustache that looked as if they had been purchased to match the bushy hair on his head. For all Adam knew, they had. There was a streak of gray in his beard on each side of his chin, both artificial. He thought the look commanded more respect than facial hair with no gray.

The beard and long hair helped disguise the fact that his face was not only, like his head, unusually large, but perfectly round. The facial hair, however, could do nothing to camouflage the flatness of his face. It even sank in slightly in the center, giving him an ugly profile that he never knowingly allowed to be photographed. Gossip columnist Mitchell Fink had referred to him once as “the dinner-plate-faced scribe.” The tossed-off remark had so infuriated Michael Julian that both Adam and his mother had been even more careful than usual to stay out of his way for about two weeks.

“That honey sweetens the box office receipts,” he continued. “Pays more than any Goddamned short story. Who the hell’s gonna read a short story? I don’t think anybody even publishes them anymore. But everybody goes to the movies.”

Adam did not respond to his dad’s screenplay speech. He wished the conversation had never begun, and certainly did not want it to continue. The food was good, though. Adam seldom ate at the table when his father was around, but the food made up for the company.

Saturday and Sunday breakfasts had been Adam’s favorite meals as a boy. His mom always cooked them. Saturdays, she would make waffles with fresh fruit and whipped cream. Sunday, eggs and bacon and fried potatoes. The indulgent breakfasts were eaten at that table, with Adam seated in the same chair he occupied now. And with his mother seated in the same place as Gwen.

He frowned slightly as he thought about those weekend breakfasts. They had stopped abruptly when he was still a little boy, but he could not remember why.

He looked at Gwen, sitting in his mother’s place, and felt a moment of déjà vu. It had been longer than he had thought since he had eaten at the dining room table. The last time, that spot, where Gwen sat—his mother’s spot—had been empty.

* * *

Mom was Emily Moessing. She had not been quite as pretty as Gwen, but much more beautiful. A bigger forehead, bigger nose, weaker chin. Long straight dishwater-blonde hair that would not curl or take on any shape no matter what she did with it. But she was not ugly or even plain. Tall, a killer smile, big brown eyes.

Adam could not hear the massive wind chimes she had hung around the patio without thinking of her laugh. She used read to Adam at night, acted out each story, made Dr. Seuss sound like Shakespeare.

If they met today, Adam guessed, Michael Julian would not give Emily Moessing a second look. She simply was not his type now. Of course, when Michael Julian and Emily Moessing met, Michael had not yet achieved his tremendous success.

They met while he was writing for a few television action series and she was working in wardrobe at Paramount. Their marriage was a good luck charm at first. Somebody bought one of his screenplays, and the movie, Mayhem, did surprisingly good business. Somebody saw her sketches and made her a designer. He started selling scripts for big money. The critics laughed at and eviscerated the movies, but they were hits at the box office. Emily was in big demand, worked with the biggest directors in the business. His reviews got worse...and she got an Oscar nomination. Then another. The third time, she won.

The New Yorker called Emily “the Edith Head of our time.” Michael’s bitter response was, “That’s not the kind of head I’m interested in.”

Her Oscar ate at him like a cancer. After she won it, things fell apart fast. They shouted instead of talked. Adam would find his mom crying in the kitchen or living room, sometimes with bruises on her arms, neck, or a swollen black eye.

Emily was beautiful, but not in a Hollywood way. Her beauty was authentic and shone from inside. Everyone loved her and her work, and everyone with an I.Q. higher than their shoe size agreed that Michael was a prick who pulled his scripts out of his ass.

Adam was convinced that Oscar was why his dad had killed his mom. He had no proof. Nothing solid he could show anyone. Just a certainty deep in his gut.

* * *

“How’s the movie coming?” Gwen asked, delicately dabbing the corners of her mouth with a napkin. Adam watched. There was no sign of such delicacy when she had his cock in her mouth. She caught him staring and smiled.

“It’s coming along. Everybody’s worried it’s gonna piss off the gay community,” he said as he lifted his hands and hooked invisible quotation marks in the air with the first two fingers of each. “Those dipshits never learn. Of course it’s gonna piss off the queers. The cannibal serial killer’s a fag, for Christ’s sake, it’s gonna make ’em all nuts.” He stabbed his fork hard at his food, took in a mouthful and chewed, but kept talking. “But that’ll mean another, what? Twenty? Thirty million at the box office? You can’t buy the kinda publicity you get from a buncha Judy Garland fans picketing theaters and whining on radio talk shows. That kinda stuff sells tickets, for Christ’s sake.”

Gwen asked, “What if this is the time everybody decides to agree with them?”

“Never happen,” he said. “This movie’s already got everything going for it. Sex and guns, a couple kick-ass car chases, some kinky killings. The protests’ll be a plus. And with any luck, there’ll be some controversy over the MPAA rating. You know, they’ll wanna give it an NC-17, we need an R for it to be a success, we’ll have to cut some sex, that kinda thing. The movie’s gonna make a fucking fortune, and they all know it. The only reason the studio’s worried about the fags protesting is that half the people who work there are fags, and they don’t want their friends talking bad about them under the hair dryers.”

Adam could not hold back a quiet laugh.

“You think that’s funny?” Michael asked, turning to him with a smirk.

“I was just...laughing at the way you put it.”

That was partly true. Adam was repulsed by his father’s harsh language toward homosexuals and racial minorities. He often referred to Mrs. Yu as a “chink” when he thought she was out of earshot. His favorite term for black people was “jungle bunnies.” He practically fell over laughing every time he said it. The reason Adam had laughed at the dinner table was that he knew a great number of the people his dad worked with, and for, were indeed openly gay. And because his dad regularly attended benefits to raise money for AIDS research and to support gay rights. They were two of the biggest thorns in Michael Julian’s side. A bit of him died each time he attended such a function. Ate at him from the inside out, because he did not give a damn about the charities he was donating to or the causes being supported. More often than not, he was completely opposed to them. But he knew everyone who was anyone would be there and it was important to attend to be seen. And it was nice tax write-off. Adam found that funny.

Somewhere in the house, a phone purred.

Michael and Gwen exchanged a lingering look. He started in his chair and laughed quietly.

Adam knew they were playing footsie under the table and suddenly, no matter how delicious the food, he lost his appetite.

Mrs. Yu entered the room with a cordless phone in hand and went to Gwen’s side.

“Missy Gwen, phone for you.”