The cassettes ranged from Glenn Gould’s humming Bach to the Beach Boys’ Smile, with everything in between from Evergreen, Elton John’s Greatest Hits, and Merrily We Roll Along to Sibelius’ tone poems and Solomon playing Mozart. The books were an even more eclectic selection: a Faulkner novel from that college seminar which he’d never gotten around to reading at the time—Sartoris; a Henry Green trilogy Mark swore by and had given him for his last birthday, doubtless saving up weeks to shell out the $4.95; Capote’s Music For Chameleons; Stanislaw Lem’s weirdly intellectual sci-fi in two mass market paperbacks with aptly mysterious and lurid covers—The Invincible and Solaris; Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister in five slim volumes from England; an equally compact hardcover of ten Balzac novellas; Ackerly’s Hindoo Holiday, which he’d already begun months before; and a fat paperback of all of E.F. Benson’s gothic stories.
Once the cassettes were put out on display and the books spread around the house, and the other previously displayed volumes carefully boxed up and placed under the kitchen sink next to other preventatives and detergents, Victor did indeed begin to feel settled in. But it still looked bare. He needed to find a used book store and get a few more titles and maybe even some National Geographics or Art Forums for color.
“Good. Real settling in will take a while,” Frank said. “Now get comfortable. Here.” He held out a handful of what looked like popcorn to Victor who asked, “Is that what I think it is?”
“You bet. I need to nosh all the time and my wife says this is healthy for me. At least this way it is: without salt or butter.”
Victor hadn’t known Frank had remarried. He’d have to ask Sam who the new wife was.
Frank showed Victor the cannister that the popcorn came in which was about five feet high and two and a half feet around, with circus motifs brightly all over it, as though it was meant for some eight-year-old’s birthday party.
“You buy it wholesale?” Victor asked.
“Have to. I go through maybe five of these a month. A truck delivers them,” Frank said without a hint of embarrassment.
He began talking about a cardiac health scare he’d had a few months back, and also about many of his friends and partners who had gone downhill rapidly because of neglecting simple things like what not to eat or drink. He interrupted a long story about a friend’s heart transplant to ask, “So the house is okay. How’s the car?”
“Fine. Nice, in fact. Kind of sporty. A Datsun Zee. I just got my driver’s license back again last year. Growing up in the suburbs, I’ve been driving since I was a kid, of course,” Victor explained. “But after a few scatty years of totally weird not to mention unexpected vehicle accidents, mostly in Europe, I’d allowed my license to lapse. Especially as I didn’t use a car at all in Manhattan and seldom on trips.”
Victor found himself telling Frank about his most spectacular near-death turn, at the Georgia/Florida state line, thanks to a viciously temperamental Ducati Scrambler motorcycle, and Frank, in turn, began telling Victor about some of the people around him who’d died in various vehicle accidents. “Stunts, most of them,” Frank clarified, “both onscreen and off. Written in a script, and more often not written but impromptu. More like the scripts were written in their own minds,” he added, which was a telling if odd statement. Did Frank and all his movie friends constantly write and rewrite scripts for their lives and then live them out?
They discussed cars they’d liked and hated; European roads they’d driven upon; European (read French) inn and hotel meals they never forgotten; what books and magazines they were reading; what they hated about theater; what they liked about television. A hour went by and Victor wondered, Is this work we’re doing? Or are we just getting to know each other? And is that as important as doing some kind of specific work?
He’d come prepared and wanted to show it. “I had a few thoughts on the plane,” Victor said out of nowhere.
“You mean while me and Sam were dead to the world?”
In fact Frank had been dead asleep when he’d emplaned, and Sam not long after, so he’d had plenty of time to read. They’d both been snoring happily along before the plane had begun to taxi along the runway toward Jamaica Bay for take-off, slept through the first four hours or so of the trip, Frank awakening only to groggily eat, and stumble to the restroom before he stumbled back and fell asleep again. Sam hadn’t even wakened for food, but the stewardess either knew or liked him because she saved it and he wolfed it down in the few minutes before they landed at LAX.
“Lucky you,” Victor said, “I wish I could sleep on planes.”
“You will. Take my word for it,” Frank predicted. “One trip to come, you’ll be so tired, you’ll sleep through take-off and landing both, noisy as they are.”
“So I was thinking,” Victor went on, “on the plane: the book is already pretty streamlined as far as characters go: Theo and Anna-Marie, Theo’s friend Bill, and the man she free lances art for; then Theo’s nosy downstairs neighbor and the old lady across the street below Anna-Marie’s flat. So, and I’m not sure how to say this, don’t each of them gain extra in the script by how few of them there are?”
“They definitely do. Not only that, but I’d like you to streamline it a little further. If that doesn’t offend you too much,” Frank added, a real diplomat. “Theo’s friend isn’t really needed for the plot. Wouldn’t you agree? He doesn’t advance anything crucial.”
“No. You’re right. I put him there in the book to give Theo a friend and more or less to give Theo a sounding board. Bill’s the normal guy. He’d never get into any kind of screwy situation with Anna-Marie.”
“The viewer will do that normalizing work for us. Bill’s not needed. Let’s ditch him,” Frank said. “Also, that guy Anna-Marie does art for—what’s his name?”
“Alton Higgs.”
“Great name. He’s such a prig. Prig-Higgs. But Alton can be done totally off-screen. We don’t need to use an actor at all. Understand, Victor, this isn’t about saving money, although it does. It puts less people up there for the viewer to deal with.”
“I get that. It focuses the concentration.”
“Right,” Frank added, then, “Who was it who said that facing execution had a way of focusing the concentration? Matthew Arnold?”
“Earlier than him. Samuel Johnson,” Victor replied.
“You would know that. I’d lay money that no one else in this building of, what, twenty five offices? three people minimum per office? would have a clue.”
“I’m a writer. It’s my job to know useless information,” Victor admitted.
“It’s useless until you use it. And even then, you’ve got it at hand. All the good writers I’ve known are like that.”
And Eleanor too? Victor wondered. Your thirteen-years-older wife?
“Back to the script: Anna-Marie’s building super, while minor, is needed. He does advance the action. But he’s only walk-on. Just has the one scene. As does the nosy neighbor. Except she may have two scenes. Would you want to play the super?” Frank asked.
“Mr. Nagy? In the movie?” Victor would have been less astonished if Frank asked him to play the lead.
“It’s nothing, One scene. No more than one, two lines. It’ll be a snap to learn the dialogue. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”
“Sure, okay.” Victor said, being as casual as possible. Frank was full of surprises, wasn’t he? “But my point is emphasized. Each of those remaining characters now take on a bigger role, don’t they?”
“Victor, you absolutely get it. Yes, they’re all bigger roles now, especially the nosy neighbor and the old woman who escaped the Nazis who lives downstairs.”
Frank began talking about several actresses who might play those roles: clearly the old woman would be a much expanded part, given some of the stellar names Frank was putting forth as possibilities: Ellen Burstyn and Jessica Tandy, for example. Would they even take such a small role? If it meant working for Perry, Victor guess
ed, they just might.
“By condensing like that,” Frank concluded, “you force the viewers to pay more attention to the characters you have.
“Condensing the places we’ll see on screen also strengthens the importance of the scenes we retain,” he added. “It’s an intuitive thing. The viewer doesn’t realize what’s happening until he’s deep inside the particular world of your movie. A world unlike any other.”
Hey! I just got Film Writing Lesson Number One, Victor thought.
Sam knocked on then opened the office door and mentioned that someone was on the phone for Frank. He said the name, which meant nothing to Victor.
“I need to take this alone,” Frank apologized.
Victor took his coffee out to the main office, but after ten minutes, Sam got a call from Frank, then Frank himself came out apologizing again. “Got a problem with some rushes. Me and Sam have got to go in earlier than we’d planned. In fact, right now! Look, Vic, I know I owe you an hour or more for today. You’ll come in earlier next time. That work for you?”
They all left the building together.
Victor followed Frank’s stately charcoal gray XJ sedan out of the parking garage set deep beneath the building. The Jag headed south, toward Wilshire Boulevard, into a surprisingly colorful, cloud-filled sky that had been clear and sunny an hour earlier. As Victor exited, he aimed the sleek sports car in the opposite direction, toward Sunset Boulevard, heading toward the Pacific Highway and ultimately Topanga Canyon. Northward, the skies were still cloudless and blue. Victor would be earlier than he’d planned, but so what? Andy Grant didn’t work (had he ever, since graduating college?). He was bound to be home.
“So?” Andy asked, hands on hips, “Whaddya’ think of my place?” He stood high on a huge rock that looked like it might tumble at any second amid the nastiest looking little she-goats Victor had ever laid eyes on
“Andy, I think your place looks like a cross between Taliesin West and Tobacco Road.”
Andy Grant threw back his leonine head and laughed loudly. This great noise frightened the five or six goatlets closest to him, who all looked up from their persistent foraging of what seemed to be an unending, unreclaimed, utterly wild landscape and they whinnied or hooted, or at any rate made that noise that little goats make when they’re in agreement. Obviously they were less frightened of Andy Grant’s barking laugh and his appearance than was Victor, who’d not seen his old friend since his last visit.
The house, or rather, the compound lay below them on a more or less brush-cleared if not all that earthquake-proofed looking patch of level earth. All around them was low scrub wood—flourishing despite the goats’ appetite—riddled with stands of quite tall and even picturesque ancient-looking live-oak trees. The surrounding light must have floated in from the ocean, which was a few miles south, and so it all looked like “spacious skies”—with odd, marine-like colorations and hints of the seaside.
The low buildings composing the compound had been put up by some follower of Frank Lloyd Wright and resembled that architect’s less successful attempts at small, domestic “Usonian” residences. There was a guest house immediately at the hewn half-tree-trunk gate to the property, a single room and bath made of lots of horizontal brickwork with deep inset tinted windows winking in the strong sunlight. Maybe a hundred feet away lay another edifice of a few more rooms, scads more blond, horizontal brickwork, and strong wooden beam supports and roofing covering rows of windows, some narrow and high-set close to the roof, others much bigger and angled open to the breezes. Then another few hundred feet away from there sat some wooden and brick sheds or shacks where the goats were housed, as well as a roofless jeep-like vehicle painted a putrid rust orange, and—under handcrafted covers—a nearly iridescent silver Jaguar XKE convertible with a real ragtop. Vic wondered what had happened to the Assassination Vehicle to which Andy had sworn such fealty.
The real surprise for Victor of course was how rural the area was. Only twenty minutes or so off the major highway bisecting Southern California’s most populous valley, he felt like he might at any moment come upon a pair of idiot children playing with paper mâché dolls and cat skeletons in the dirt.
He had followed the careful directions given on the phone, but had anyway almost missed the “town” because it was a mere ninety foot twist of Topanga Canyon Road fronted by a grocery, a feed and grain shop, and a little white wooden mall-ette of maybe five other stores, including a “breakfast boutique,” a combo florist and head shop, and what must be several art and crafts galleries.
Andy’s road lay beyond that particular bit of urban splendor and before reaching another stretch of “town,” consisting of another, arty, dinner-only, restaurant and what seemed to be the entrance to a tiny theater in the round, around which three middle aged riders on horses had gathered to chat.
Luckily enough it was daylight, and even luckier, property numbers were painted on the paved roads, wherever those existed.
Less lucky was Victor’s first sight of his old pal and buddy.
Victor had heard that in certain areas of the country gay men were doing anything they could to avoid the “Auschwitz” thinness so symbolic of being afflicted with the illness only recently identified and named as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Even so, he’d put a greeting hand on the well-padded bent-over shoulder of some fat guy with long reddish blond hair and full beard, thinking it was the gardener or some local helper, and he was about to ask if Tubby knew where the owner was, when the oversized head looked up at him and the inimitably Andy-ish chocolate-candy-center eyes stared hard at him.
“Help me up, wouldya’?” Andy said, the voice all too familiar. When he was on his feet, all two hundred and fifty-five pounds of him, stuffed into Farmer Gray blue jeans and a too-small t-shirt, he added, “Vic! Boy! You are so fucking skinny, I could lose you between my legs and not miss you for a week.”
“You wish,” Victor rejoined, and was then greeted by a bear hug from which he extricated himself only with difficulty.
Andy showed him around the place and then inside for a beer, then said, “Come take a better look.”
That’s how they ended up on the big unsteady rock, which indeed gave a partial view of the Pacific Ocean, as well as in the other direction roll after roll of hill and dale, up and down, just like in a kid’s coloring book.
Next had come Victor’s Taliesin/Tobacco Road quip, which Andy took good naturedly, and then they returned and jumped up and into the open-top vehicle which Andy called his “‘Ford Exploder.” “You know what F.O.R.D. stands for? ’Found on road dead,’” Andy guffawed.
“Or is it ‘Fix or repair daily’?” Victor replied. “My favorite was our neighbor back east who had a Fiat Berline coupe. Prettiest thing on the road, but it spent more time in the shop than at home. He told me F.I.A.T stood for ‘Fix It Again, Tony!’”
He’d just gotten around to asking where they were going—back onto Topanga Canyon Road in the direction opposite of how he’d come, then onto a bunch of connecting dirt roads—when Andy said, “Wouldya rather see actor boys or soldiers?”
“Where? What?”
“Just up ahead. You can see ’em both. But we gotta hike a bit.”
Andy drove upon a high curving paved road upon which a half dozen older houses were visible through big old trees, and they stopped and got out and headed down what Andy said was a trail. It just looked like grass patted down to Victor.
Twenty minutes or so later it was a real trail, with horseshoe prints and tire marks. They stopped and Andy listened. “They’re still here, probably packing up for the day, unless they’re working nights.”
Andy went up between two huge rocks maybe twelve feet wide and eight high and shimmied up, belying his girth and weight, and then peered out through a wedge between them. A minute later he gestured for Victor to join him, putting a hand to his lips to keep him shushed.
The open space between the rocks was narrow and rectang
ular. Beneath them, maybe fifty feet away, lay a series of glens, all filled with an American Army encampment.
“Andy!” he whispered. “We can’t be here.”
“Hush. Look over there. Fourth tent on the left, some crew are taking showers.”
“Crew?”
“It’s a shooting set. A television show set. Look across at those hills and then picture a helicopter circling and then landing.”
“You mean,” and now Victor looked more closely, and sure enough there were the big medical tents, the surgery tent, the barracks, the H.Q., the period jeeps, “this is where they make M*A*S*H?”
“Why? You thought they shot it in Korea?”
“No, but . . . It’s so close to you. And it’s so far in off the road to have to come.”
“For privacy, I suppose. I found it while hiking up to these rocks. There’s a waterfall down below, too. These guys use those jeeps to come and go on the dirt path we took, and the stars and director use the helicopter to go to work.”
“Oh, shit!” Victor whispered, despite himself. “Isn’t that Klinger and Radar coming out of the H.Q.?”
Even from this far off, clearly one soldier wore pink petticoats and the other had his cap’s visor turned up.
“This is too cool!” Victor declared.
But Andy was looking hard at another area. “Jeez! Look at the wanger on the black haired guy! I think he’s just a grip. But so hot. And see that tall skinny reddish-haired guy with the long half stiff? He’s an assistant cameraman.”
“How often do you come here?”
“Every few days. Around this time they clean off, and I whack myself. Only safe thing to do anymore, you know.”
At which point Victor became aware that’s exactly what Andy was doing, inches from him, and suddenly the place became a lot less interesting and glamorous. He dropped away, down to the ground.
“Don’t you want to see ’em?” Andy protested.
“Whoa! Wave that thing in another direction. No, think I’ll go sit over there a while.”
Justify My Sins Page 14
