Steven Bochco (4 page)

CHAPTER 6

It's later that night, and the air temperature in the Hills is still in the high seventies, thanks to a blast furnace of a Santa Ana blowing in from the desert toward the ocean, leaving Hollywood a hot, glistening jewel under a shimmering, starlit sky. Bobby's wandering around his house barefoot, in boxers and a T-shirt, shell-shocked from the worst day of his entire adult life.

You can bet lots of men happily fantasize about dumping their wives, living large and single, picking and choosing from an endless supply of good-looking women dying to hook up with them. But the reality is, Bobby's never lived alone his whole adult life, and without Vee to animate it, the house not only feels empty but abandoned.

Half hating her, half missing her, hoping she'll call and knowing she won't, not even knowing where the hell she's gone, Bobby winds up ransacking her drawers and closets in a jealous rage, hoping he'll find evidence of her affair. He can't help torturing himself all over again with the image of her kneeling on the floor in the back of Axelrod's Mercedes, parked somewhere off Mulholland Drive, face down between his naked thighs, sucking the balls off him in the dark, then telling him how hot he makes her feel and how much she wants him.

In a life that's had its share of ups and, lately, more downs than the Dow Jones, this is the lowest Bobby's been yet, maybe ever, and he just makes it to the toilet before vomiting up all the wine he'd been drinking on an empty stomach.

CHAPTER 7

At the same time Bobby Newman is cleaning up his puke and changing into fresh clothes, two people are having sex in the master bedroom of a house not too far down the canyon from Bobby's. The man is a handsome Latino actor named Ramon, well built, in his mid-thirties, and the woman, Linda, is a dark-haired, white-skinned beauty with a knockout body, who, judging by the way she's sliding up and down Ramon's stiff dick, knows just what to do with it. Ramon's no slouch either, and if fucking were a spectator sport, these two would draw a hell of a crowd.

What's interesting about the two of them fucking, aside from the fact that watching attractive people fuck is always interesting, is that this scumbag Ramon is secretly taping the encounter with a video camera hidden inside the armoire facing the bed.

I suppose you could speculate about why Ramon likes to tape his sexual encounters, but one of the reasons I
know
he does it, at least in Linda's case, is to extort money from her, should it come to that. Ramon's been trying to get Linda to “lend” him a million dollars to start a production company, and she's been stringing him along, telling him she needs to talk to her husband, Marv, about it, but the truth is, she has no intention of ever talking to her husband about it, because she knows Ramon is a scumbag and her only interest in this guy lies south of the border.

And so it is, on this night, after a particularly athletic hour of sex, that Ramon presses his case for the money somewhat more aggressively than he has in the past, and Linda, with equal aggressiveness, tells him he ought to back off, that she doesn't like being pressured.

“You didn't mind the pressure the last hour or so, did you, baby,” Ramon says, trying to play it off, but by now, Linda's tired of playing.

“Ramon, you're a good actor. You're a good teacher. You're a
great
lay. But I can't see talking Marv into investing a million dollars so you can suddenly be a Latin power player. It isn't gonna happen.”

Ramon's not looking for a fight, not necessarily, so, nice as can be, he wonders what if he goes to talk to Marv himself?

“Are you threatening me, Ray?”

“I don't threaten, baby. I'm just suggesting.”

“Are you
suggesting
if I don't come up with a million dollars you're going to tell Marv about us?”

“It don't need to come to that, baby,” Ramon purrs. “I'm just sayin' a million bucks to Marv is chump change,
nada.
He'd give you that just to keep you happy.”

“And if I say no?”

“You don't got to take a tone with me. I'm just sayin'.”

“What are you
just saying,
Ray?” And she
is
taking a tone by now. “Because if you think you can blackmail me—
fuck
me—out of a million dollars by threatening to tell my husband about us, you are making a serious mistake.”

And by now she's pretty much in his face, which Latin men don't generally tolerate very well, as evidenced by the fact that Ramon points an angry finger in
her
face and says, “You think you can fuck with me 'cause you some rich bitch married to a fuckin' billionaire? You think you can come sniffin' around me, take my classes, get in my pants, for nothin'? It don't work like that. Uh-uh. You play, you pay.”

Linda gets out of bed, finds her thong panties on the floor, and steps into them. “You listen to me, Ramon,” she says. “It was fun. You got greedy. It's over.”

Ramon grabs the phone next to the bed and starts to dial. “How about I call Marv right now, huh, you cunt?”

Linda smacks him hard, and without hesitating, Ramon smacks her harder, which sends her backpedaling, almost losing her balance, and Ramon, his blood up now, and liking it, is all over her, grabbing a handful of her hair, ready to hit her again, when she grabs a gold-plated trophy resting on his mantel and clubs him as hard as she can, base first, just above the temple. A four-pound trophy with most of its weight in the business end will take the fight out of you pronto, and Ramon is no exception, staggering around crazily for a few moments before collapsing onto the bed.

CHAPTER 8

Changed into a fresh t-shirt now, Bobby has wandered out onto the deck overlooking the Hollywood Hills (did I mention you can see the
HOLLYWOOD
sign from there?).

When Bobby bought the house, the first thing he did was purchase a Bushnell XR90 electronic telescope. He told Vee it was for stargazing, and in fact, particularly on nights like tonight, you can see some pretty amazing close-ups of the moon, Venus, Saturn, and the Milky Way.

But the real reason Bobby paid almost four thousand bucks for Big Bushy (as he calls it) was so he could go out on the deck at night and spy on people. Get a look at Uranus, as it were. I know this because he told me. He said when he was a kid growing up in New York City, he loved to scan the neighborhood buildings with his father's binoculars, hoping to catch women undressing or couples fucking or whatever. He told me he once saw two guys doing the tango, nude. There was another guy he used to watch who'd screw his girlfriend in the morning, then lie around all day in bed jacking off to girlie magazines, then screw his girl again when she came home from work. He once even saw some guy looking at
him
through binoculars. But the absolutely coolest thing he ever saw was a guy making love to his pregnant wife on a mattress on the floor of their apartment bedroom. And the way the guy touched her, the sweetness of it, the tenderness with which he massaged her belly, was the sexiest thing he'd ever seen in his life. He said it wasn't so much seeing the sex that excited him but rather the feeling that he was somehow violating people's most private moments of intimacy without their knowledge.

I guess writers, by definition, are voyeurs. Bobby sure is, and on that hot night, alone, sick with jealousy and loneliness, he scans the houses in the canyon below, looking for something to distract him from the further contemplation of his totally fucked-up life.

And, boy, does he find it.

Through the telescope, Bobby spies every adolescent boy's wet dream: a man and a woman, really into it, fucking their brains out.

With the sliding glass bedroom doors open because of the heat, he can practically hear the sound of their bodies slamming into each other. As the telescope frames them in extreme close-up, Bobby can literally see the beads of sweat on their naked bodies, even though the house is a good thousand yards below and across the canyon.

Juicy.

The woman's lying on her back, her right arm partially obscuring her face, muffling her cries of passion, while the man is on his knees, upright between her thighs, his hands gripping her hips like the handles of a wheelbarrow, thrusting into and out of her, harder and harder, till both her arms go up over her head and she grabs the top of the headboard, bowing her pelvis up at him, her mouth wide with pleasure.

And right then, Jesus Christ, Bobby realizes he knows her. It's what's-her-name, she's married to Marv Paulson, a fat billionaire piece of shit who owns a bunch of television stations, and the young, well-built guy she's currently throwing a world-class hump into sure as hell ain't him.

Now Bobby sees the thing that changes his life. After Mrs. Marv Paulson finishes fucking this guy, their pillow talk begins to get a little less intimate and a little more animated, and before you know it, things are escalating to the point where they're up on their feet, bare-ass naked, arguing heatedly. Bobby can faintly hear the sound of their angry voices, but the words are lost as they reverberate through the canyon.

Finally, in a turn for the ugly, she hauls off and smacks him. Without hesitating, he smacks her back, push begets shove, and before you know it, she picks up a trophy sitting on the guy's mantel and whacks him over the head with it.

He staggers around for a few seconds like a chicken with a wrung neck before collapsing, half on, half off the bed. Even from a thousand yards away, the guy looks dead.

As Bobby watches Marv Paulson's wife rush around hurriedly throwing on her clothes, he suddenly remembers her name: Linda. And behind that, in a rush, he also remembers her backstory, which he knows because Vee was in some acting class with her, and Linda told Vee her whole sordid life history over a few too many margaritas one night after class.

Linda Paulson's about forty years old, except for her nose, which is around twenty-two, and her tits, which are twelve. She grew up somewhere in Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, I think, and by the time she was sixteen, she'd fucked the best-looking boys in her high school (plus a couple of the teachers), she knew she wanted to find fame and fortune (not necessarily in that order), and she figured, with her looks, she had a shot at both of them in Hollywood.

After graduation, she hitchhiked to L.A. with a friend, just for the summer, she told her mom. She never came home. She got a job posing for underwear ads for the May Co., the kind you still see in the
L.A. Times,
and used the money to finance acting lessons. When she started making the rounds of casting directors, she caught the attention of one in particular, who shall remain nameless, and happily screwed him cross-eyed for a series of small roles in various television series. Off these parts, usually consisting of not much more than appearing in a nurse's uniform and uttering lines like “This way, Doctor,” she got an agent, who told her he could make her a star if a) she fucked him and b) she got a nose job. She did both. He neglected to mention that her talent (at least for acting) was minimal, though, candidly, if that were a prerequisite for success, three quarters of the actresses working in television today would be unemployed.

Within eighteen months, Linda had gotten an agent, secured enough work in TV to buy a nice car, rented an apartment in a high-rise on Doheny between Sunset and Santa Monica, and expanded her network of friends and acquaintances to the point that her social life was pretty much a non-stop party. Of course, this was the early eighties, and cocaine was everywhere, which was how she wound up meeting her first husband, part of a group recreating in the guest bedroom of a house in Sunset Plaza doing lines of coke.

He was a fifty-six-year-old production executive at Warner Bros., and within a week she'd moved into his house in Beverly Hills. Within a year, they were married, and Linda was on her way. She stayed in the marriage for six years, hoping to parlay her husband's clout into a viable acting career, but it never happened.

Toward the end of the marriage, increasingly frustrated at her husband's inability to use his influence to her advantage, she met an incredibly good-looking young guy who was the brother of a girl she knew from acting class. He was visiting from Atlanta, the attraction was instant, and they wasted little time getting horizontal, and every other which way, with each other. Linda had always enjoyed (and been good at) sex, which was how she'd managed to tolerate the fifty-six-year-old tub of guts she married in the first place. But now, with a hard-bodied young man who told her he was a successful cable entrepreneur in Atlanta wanting to marry her, she dumped her husband in a heartbeat.

She married the sexy cable entrepreneur and moved back to Atlanta with him, figuring she was going to be the second coming of Scarlett O'Hara, only to discover the guy wasn't exactly what he'd said he was. He was in the cable business, all right, but the entrepreneur part was something of an exaggeration. What he actually did was drive a truck and lay cable for the local TV signal carrier.

Newly divorced, Linda returned to L.A. six months later and, with her last four thousand bucks, bought herself a spectacular pair of 36C's and dyed her hair blond. The rest, as they say, is history. Marv Paulson never stood a chance.

In his early fifties then, already forty pounds too heavy for his five-foot-nine-inch frame, Marv was a fat slob who stuck a napkin under his collar and sweated when he ate. He was also, at the time, closing in on a net worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 million bucks.

Among his other exotic tastes, Marv liked anal intercourse. Linda was more than willing. He also liked to watch Linda make love to other women while he whipped his skippy. She was okay with that, too. Within a year of moving back to L.A., Linda was living large and opening mail addressed to Mrs. Marvin Paulson.

Believe me when I tell you that Linda's story is not that uncommon in Hollywood.

Hell, for that matter, neither is Marv's.

Marv is the kind of guy you love to hate. He started out life wealthy, thanks to a father who made millions building downtown office buildings in L.A. Marv cheated his way through high school, partied his way through college, knocked up a couple of girls along the way that his daddy paid to go away, and when the old man keeled over on the par-three fourth hole at Riviera one Sunday afternoon (he was six over par at the time), Marv suddenly had close to 10 million dollars of inherited wealth, which he shrewdly (not to mention shamelessly) leveraged into ownership of a few dozen flea-ridden flophouses. His timing couldn't have been better. Catching a wave of downtown real estate development, he sold off all the properties for ten times what he paid and put it all into television stations when they were a license to print money.

Then, when the good-time nineties finally rolled around and everybody and his cousin was getting rich in the stock market, Marv was getting even richer. Of course, this is where you'd hope a guy like Marv would've fallen flat on his ass, hanging around the market too long, watching his stakes in Time Warner and Enron go belly up. Instead, like the creature he is, Marv got out of the stock market in March 2000, just before it began to nose-dive. While everyone else was buying more stock as the prices dropped, hoping to make a killing when the market turned north again, Marv was smugly saying things like “Trading down killed more Jews than Hitler.”

So, while most of his cronies were getting their brains beat out in the market, Marv was buying himself a new Rolls-Royce, a Gulfstream 4SP, four floor seats to the Laker games, and a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot Bel Air mansion. It's safe to say, if there's ever a nuclear holocaust, Marv's the guy you want to be standing next to.

The problem is, when you're rich and you're wired up as nasty as Marv Paulson is, your perverse impulses tend to escalate, and Marv was no exception. I don't know what money buys you in Muncie, Indiana, but here in L.A., if you can imagine it, you can buy it, even if it's not exactly on page three of the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog.

Over time, Marv's appetites grew to include pleasures as diverse as losing a million dollars at the craps tables in Vegas, then beating up black whores and taking a dump on them. Nice, huh?

My point being, at a minimum, you can begin to see how being married to a guy like Marv gets pretty old pretty fast if you're a sexy woman like Linda Paulson, and everywhere you go guys are checking you out, imagining soapy water running down your perfect 36C's, imagining what it'd be like if you were sucking
their
cock in the shower instead of fat Marv's. Jesus Christ, I'm getting a chubby thinking about it myself.

It's in that context you can pretty easily understand how come Linda likes to mess around a little on the side herself, just to keep her hand in, as it were.

And when it turns out this scumbag Ramon is trying to extort her by threatening to go public with their affair if she doesn't give him money, you can also understand why she'd whack him over the head with his proudest possession before she'd let him screw her out of the life she'd worked so hard to screw herself into . . .