Justify My Sins

by Felice Picano

  All this Gilbert had warned Vic of, having seen and barely fended off Andy at a funeral back East a year previous. But what could Victor do? Andy was his oldest friend: he couldn’t not see him out here, could he? All he could really do was strongly limit the times and places he did see him.

  “Okay, I think . . . “

  Andy did something with his body which looked to Vic like blocking. He dashed left and a second later Paul Gibbons had him by the shoulder. “Vic? Is that you, Vic?”

  Caught.

  “Hi Paul.” Behind Paul, Andy stuck his tongue out and went up and down as though licking Paul from head to toe, then, momentarily sated, he slunk off.

  “Were you leaving?” Paul asked. “’Cause I was thinking of going.”

  “Oh, sure.” Thinking, How do I tell him I don’t have any more than forty-six bucks on me? Maybe he’ll take a check?

  Once out in the alley, Paul instantly pushed him against the wall and began kissing him. Paul’s tongue was down his throat so long and so intensively that Vic began to lose his breath. At the moment he was about to black out, Paul withdrew.

  “Gosh! That was nice,” Paul said, “I just knew, first time we met, that you’d be a firecracker.”

  Vic had forgotten what a sweet tenor voice and nice, All-American Boy temperament Paul had. Must help the comfort zones of out of towners dying for a “massage.”

  Paul grabbed him by the arm and briskly pulled him along. They were headed for the bushes for sure.

  But no, instead they stopped at a low silver car. Wasn’t that one of those Mercedes-Benz coupes with the—

  “Watch this!” Paul said, hitting a little remote-key-thing in his hand, and the two doors came straight up over the top of the car.

  —gull wing doors? Yep!

  “Cute! Huh?”

  A sixty-five grand Mercedes. “This your car?” Vic asked.

  “Yep. Gift from an admirer,” Paul he explained. “Get in.”

  They drove out of the alley, startling two guys when the Benz’s headlights flashed their undressed lower torsos in the bushes.

  “Ooops!” Paul said, “I usually dim it here, to be courteous. But I’m so excited seeing you!”

  When they drove past the bar and stopped at the light, Andy was outside, talking up a guy with a walrus mustache and a substantial basket whom he’d all but pinned to the wall. He seemed to be moving in for the kill when he noticed Paul, smiled his dirty old man smile, and then made a low Peace sign at Vic.

  “This your first time in Wee Whore?” Paul asked. Then laughed. “My little joke!” He kissed Vic once again while swinging around a corner onto another main street headed uphill. “How about a little tour of El Lay.”

  At every light, he kissed Vic longer and longer, until Vic began to feel light-headed. The feeling only increased as they were now on a wildly curving road, headed through high surroundings. “Laurel Canyon,” Paul announced, then shifted into third. There was no traffic ahead of them and they swung around the esses and half curves going about fifty. Once when Vic all but fell into Paul’s lap, Paul held his head there and laughed. But Vic thought, Oh what the fuck, and at each new curve he nuzzled his head there again until there was a substantial boner beneath the white denims.

  They crested a hilltop. Trees, stars. “Mulholland Drive. We’ll come back and do it from another end,” Paul announced, then drove down the hill, which curved less but which opened out to an enormous view of another light-filled city ahead. “The Valley!” Paul announced. He reached into his t-shirt pocket and pulled out a little glassine envelope.

  At the longish red light at Ventura Boulevard Paul opened the envelope and spread it out on the little console area beneath the radio and temperature controls. He rolled up a twenty and sucked up a line.

  “Your turn.” He handed the rolled bill to Vic.

  “Cocaine going ’round my brain.” Vic thought of Jelly Roll Morton’s song as it hit.

  Then they were moving forward again toward a ramp twisting left onto an elevated highway.

  “The One-Oh-One,” Paul announced, and looking past his silhouette, Vic could make out the Hollywood Hills, clear in the night with some houses way high-up, lighted.

  He’d never felt better. But he could feel better yet. He made a decision, and bent down again, over Paul, who’d not lost his hard on. He unzipped him and pulled it out and began to work on it. Paul kept driving, and he kept sucking, then lifted his head for another hit of coke, then sucked again, back and forth, until Paul changed lanes rapidly and Vic hit something with his ear and suddenly the doors were going up, and Paul was hooting, laughing, and Vic went back down on him with the doors open and the cool night air rushing past his face and touseling his hair.

  Just before Paul came, Vic noticed a carload of teenagers passing by on Paul’s side. Someone in the car saw him and they remained alongside the Benz, tooting their horn repeatedly, and yelling encouragement out the open window.

  “You fit right into life in the fast lane!” Paul commented as they got off the freeway.

  They parked at an overlook on Mulholland Drive, with the basin of Los Angeles spread out in front of them like an electrified road map for square miles on end. There, they exchanged saliva seemingly forever while a teen couple in the next car watched for a while, then got into their own thing.

  “You are one dirty boy, Vic! One naughty, dirty boy!” Paul shook his finger at him. “So. We’re still on tomorrow, right?”

  “Don’t you have a massage tomorrow?”

  “I only work in the afternoon,” Paul said, after more necking. Then Paul returned Vic’s favor, but this time with the gull wings firmly shut.

  He dropped Vic off at the hotel and kissed him again, right in front of the doorman, then spun out of the gravel porte-cochere, doing forty.

  Vic all but staggered as he walked into the lobby and very, very slowly up the stairs to his room.

  The doorman must have said something because since he’d checked in, no one on the staff had paid Vic any attention, but suddenly thereafter, everyone at the desk knew and used his name.

  Hmm! Vic thought. So it is true. There is no such thing as bad publicity!

  CHAPTER SIX

  “To write this scenario or outline or precis or whatever it is, I was forced to use a typewriter from the hotel that I swear was last used by Kim Novak to write a thank you note to Mrs. Darryl F. Zanuck,” he told Marcie on the phone. “It’s aqua and cream colored. With Atoll-blue ink!”

  No comment.

  “Six pages. And their so-called notes were of a stupidity that even I, with my newly, and much lowered expectations, found appallingly jejune.”

  Still no comment.

  “Tim, the jerk, asked why Anna-Marie had to be killed at all! Can you believe it? It’s only the crux of the whole fucking book, and he—”

  Still not a hint of a comment.

  “We’ve had another meeting since that matin degoutant! And they actually expect me to walk into some stranger’s office and tell him I am willing and able to write an entire television movie based on this . . .” he shook the pages at the phone “. . . abortion!”

  His agent hadn’t said a word. Was she even there?

  “Marcie? Are you still alive?”

  “Barely. All I know is their check cleared,” she said. “I’ve deposited the money minus my commission into your account.” A pause, then, “Ed telexed to extend your stay at the Bee Aitch Aitch for another week. He says they all like you.”

  “Like me? How could they possibly like me!?”

  “Don’t ask me, I’m only your literary agent,” she replied.

  “I mean they don’t know me. They haven’t talked to me. Not a one, except of course Ed himself. But then it turned out that despite his show of great sincerity, even he had a hidden motive. He actually thinks I’d jump at a chance to move out here and become a junior screenwriter under his tutelage.”

  The minute it left his mouth he knew he shouldn’t h
ave said a word.

  He heard what was surely the most loathsome ever combination of outrage and sinus clearing: Marcie at her haughtiest.

  “May I remind you, Victor, before you toss all your eggs into the Hollywood basket, that you have a new contract for a new novel, to be titled, Nights in Black Leather, with your current publisher, who has already put a great deal of time, money, and effort into promoting your first and second book, the latter a current bestseller. Which, by the way, may I also remind you, is the cause of your being out there in sunny California in the first place. And if you think for one moment, I’m going to base for you . . .”

  He let her rant on for a while. Then:

  “Marse, I’m not even vaguely considering his offer. Despite the fact that I was offered more money than God!”

  “How much?” the financial agent in her instantly bypassed the offended agent of two minutes before.

  “You don’t want to know. It was obscenely high. For a rewrite!”

  “Don’t do it! I’ll get another advance from Laetitia.”

  His editor. “I’m not doing it. I already told you that, Marcie. These people and this business or whatever scrap of an iota of it I’ve seen so far is completely beyond me.”

  She didn’t hear.

  “I’ll talk to Laetitia right away, just as soon as you and I are done.” Marcie said. “I always thought they underpaid for your next book. This is a good way to get them to raise the price. They really want one book from you every summer for several years in a row. That’s the plan.”

  Whoever knew “they” had “a plan”?

  “Can you really get more beyond what they agreed to pay?” he asked.

  “Upfront, as a second advance, sure.”

  “Well, sure then, try to get more and I’ll keep Ed dangling. But I tell you the way all this is going, it’s going nowhere anyway.”

  “That’s not what Silver Screen Films thinks,” Marcie said.

  It suddenly struck him. “I’ve got to stay here another week? Even though this is a total disaster?”

  “Vic, look on the bright side. It might still happen.”

  “And I might still grow a very attractive vagina, but in the way things usually work, I doubt it.”

  She laughed. “I might even go lesbo for you if you did.”

  “Rick being more of a shit than usual?” he asked.

  “This doesn’t leave the phone, Vic, or you’ll find your cute ass in such a sling.” She took a deep breath to add, “He’s auditioned for this movie.”

  “Auditions mean noth—“

  “He’s been called back twice and his agent, who has done and when I say ‘nothing’ I mean ‘less than nothing,’ I mean ‘actual negative amounts of work on Rick’s behalf.’ Well this jerk says they really do want Rick for the part.”

  “A movie? A feature film? That’s great!”

  “It is a movie,” she was speaking carefully. “And it will be feature length. All resemblance to anything even vaguely cinematic suddenly goes out the door from there, Vic. It’s set in the Serengeti Plains and it’s”—she hesitated, then spit it out as though it were all one word, “Some kind of out of jungle-space-slasher-flick. I mean Rick has been on Broadway, for Chrissakes, although in smaller roles, I admit.”

  “Does it have a title yet?” Vic had to ask.

  “I swear, Vic. I’ll come out there and personally kick your butt down every stair of that hotel and across the width of Sunset Boulevard if you reveal a single word of this conversation.”

  “Who am I going to tell out here? Sam with the layered hair? Tim with the cuffed jeans and questionable rhinoplasty?”

  “Lucy. Lowell. Herb. They’re all just a phone call away.”

  That is, people they both knew in publishing in Manhattan. “I swear on . . . well, on my unmet lover’s foreskin or something equally valuable, I’ll never reveal it.”

  “It’s titled . . . High-Savannah Holocaust.”

  He laughed despite himself, but managed to cover it up so she couldn’t hear. “That’s not so terrible.”

  “Come on, it’s ghastly. Can you just see Rick explaining it on his resume when he goes up before Joe Papp for Shakespeare in the Park?”

  “He can always say he’s experienced to play the lion in Midsummer’s Night Dream.”

  “You’re a real help, Vic. Thanks.” She began a lengthy coughing fit.

  “When does Rick leave?”

  “Next Thursday, if you can believe it. I guess they’re afraid he’ll come to his senses and back out of the contract. He’ll be in Tanganyika, which, he’s been told, is mountainous and thus dry and sunny by day, with temps no higher than seventy-five degrees and . . . and . . . you’ll still be out there in summertime L.A. Meanwhile I’m on my third, count ’em three, head cold of the winter, I am wrapped in a wool sweater with a wool jacket and wool hat looking like some extremely minor character out of Heidi, the heat’s on full blast and I’m still freezing here.”

  “The sacrifices you make for your clients. One question more. Will he be back in time for the Black Party?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t need your sarcasm. I’m now hanging up.”

  “Wait. Marcie. What do I do?” Vic asked. “I mean this is already totally wasted time.”

  He could almost hear her shrug.

  “Let me remind you: you are getting paid . . . Oh! I don’t know. Take some time off today. Go sight-seeing!”

  “I have been taking time off. I’m walnut-colored from the poolside and I’ve been out every night screwing my brains out. I work maybe two hours a day, tops! Which is more than they do. They work maybe an hour every day. Silver Screen, I mean. They take a half hour meeting. Break for lunch. Come back another half hour and leave for the day.”

  “You never know what might happen,” she said and followed it up with five more clichés, then added, “Victor, please. Do it for me.”

  He hung up, but five minutes later, the phone rang again, and he picked it up sure it was Marcie with a sensible plan for salvaging this operation, but it was only the desk downstairs: his driver was waiting, and he was reminding him that Vic had a meeting with the guys at Silver Screen in twenty minutes.

  Arrrgggghhhh!

  The humpiest room-service waiter of them all, and there definitely was a grouping of truly certifiable cuties, chose right then to come pick up the remnants of Vic’s lunch. The guy looked like a younger more muscular Bjoern Borg without the beard.

  When he asked, as usual (they all asked, incessantly), how he was, Vic said, “I’m deeply depressed! You wouldn’t care for a blow job, would you?” Figuring what could the guy do, report him to the manager?

  “Gosh! Well! That sure is a great offer. I mean . . . “

  He hemmed and hawed so cutely that Vic said, “Never mind. Oh, you forgot this,” and Vic put a napkin on the tray and exited into the bathroom to brush his teeth. When he came out again, mercifully, the room service waiter was gone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ”Gotta remind you,” Vic’s driver began, “it’s my night off.”

  “No problema. I’ll get someone at the party to take me back to the hotel.”

  Given the driver’s sour look at that, Vic asked, “Bad idea?”

  “Let me put it this way: you’ll all be drinking. Remember what the drive up here was like?”

  Fifteen hairpin curves in a row with two streetlights spaced a mile apart and invisibly overhung by bougainvillea—and they’d gotten lost twice.

  “Got it. I’ll call a taxi.”

  Meade had a card ready for Beverly Hills Cab.

  The house was 1930s Stock Broker’s Tudor, not very different from some of the heaps Vic and Gilbert used to bike past daily on their way to middle school. But this one had a deep, curvy driveway and various extensions that he’d later discover included a substantial guest house, a pool cabana, and even a little awning-covered “viewers box” for watching whomever was playing tennis on the regulation-sized cour
t. Inside, it was a bit more updated than the few ancient piles back home he and Gil had stepped into with their Elizabethan-era cupboards and frayed Turkey carpets brought over on the ship that had closely tailed the Mayflower. Here it was all modern and bright. Hell, they even had electric lighting!

  Vic was the guest of honor, and as he arrived relatively late, they sat down almost immediately. People out here ate dinner early, went to sleep early, and alas, Vic fretted, awakened awfully early too. When he’d commented on that, one of Silver Screen’s secretaries offered, “It’s so beautiful every morning! Who’d want to stay in bed?” after which she sashayed out the room humming like Snow White before he could rip the metal pencil sharpener off a desk and hurl it at her. Less Polyanna, another suggested, “We’ve got to do business with the East Coast, which is three hours earlier. Maybe that’s why we’re here by eight a.m? So we can catch them before they’re debilitated by cocktails at lunch.”

  Ed Trefethern didn’t only know movie people. Present was a woman with a quite consciously shaved head who was a new underground “dance-artist.” Also a playwright Vic had vaguely heard of, and an aging Sci-Fi novelist, who turned out to look like nothing less than your standard, wacko-scientist from any 1950s Giant-Ant movie. He immediately took Vic aside and said, “You’re fresh from New York?”

  And when he admitted it was less than a week, the writer said, “Please, say something Yiddish.”

  “I’m not Jewish,“ Vic protested.

  “You’re a New Yorker.” He argued. “Please!” he begged. “It’s been so long. Anything!” he prompted.

  Just then a stout Mexican cook passed by.

  “A schoene maedel she’s not,” Vic commented.

  The writer’s hand went to his heart. “Lovely. More! More!”

  “What do you want me to say? That I find this burg completely feydreit? Because I do. Welshmen, like our charming host, schmooze like alte kockers from Kiev. While guys who should be Black Panther killers chomp on bialy’s smeared with grieves and schmaltz and wish me a maazel as though they were moils. What gives?”