(And then there was that time in the pouring rain as he was walking home along a deserted post-midnight Hudson Street, when a chromed yacht of a poison-green 1961 Plymouth Fury station wagon had pulled up and he’d gotten in, only to discover that the driver was comedian Paul Lynde from Hollywood Squares. Victor would have let him blow him, really he would have, he was that horny. Except that Lynde kept trying to act butch, really butch, which, given a voice that could, unaided, rip the wrapping off a champagne bottle and uncork it—became simply too funny. Victor was kicked out into the water-up-to-your-ankles gutter—laughing all the way home.)
Wednesday night was pretty quiet at Basic Plumbing, as this new spot was cleverly named. But when Victor got into conversation with the bearded kid behind the entrance window (that is, they sat together and played with each other’s joints while smoking weed), he found out that Sunday afternoons were by far the best times. “All the A-gays are all fucked-out from Saturday night, when we’re open to 5:00 a.m. But on Sunday, we’re open 2:00 p.m. to 7:00, so it’s all family guys and your other Undercover Operators.”
So that would be when Victor would go.
At times, when it was raining, the place was empty and he’d sit in a corner and watch porno tapes on the TV or read one of the three fat paperback volumes of Montaigne’s Essays until someone showed up. Everyone who did show up was intent on getting off, and they seldom played around waiting for “Mr. Right.” One Sunday afternoon, he went to a party and didn’t get to Basic Plumbing until close to 5:00. The place was very active. There were two double-sized rooms for group activities with multiple glory holes and even built-in elbow rests. Above the open-work wooden cells, instead of a ceiling there was suspended Mylar sheeting. One could see what was going on simply by looking up.
Sunday after Sunday the place got better and hotter. Victor had only limited contact, having a lover back home, and doing what he and medical others had determined was “safe” sex. Even so the quality went up week after week as more guys from around the city found out about the place. And since there weren’t any kind of physical requisites to entry (just the opposite of the Club 8709), he saw all races, all sizes, all shapes. It could get varied and hot, with Mexicanos who looked like Mayans straight off maize fields in the Yucatan, Jewish guys with pais yet, Farsis in skullcaps, sharkskin-suited Persians, ordinary-Joe Armenians, not to mention the taxi drivers and off duty truckers. Then there were the black security guys, still in uniform, headed home after a short stop for action. Best of all to Victor, those cutely rumpled nerds who pulled up in station wagons with “baby on board” bumper stickers and infant car seats still wedged in.
What in the world would Frank Perry say to those afternoons? Or even Sam, who was slowly loosening up, but if you scratched him hard was still pretty square? These afternoons were, Come on admit it, Victor, a come-down, a let-down, a total low. But what was “left to do” from the real high times, now alas vanished into ancient history?
In Manhattan during the 1970s, a typical night out for him meant dinner, say at some new Thai place (they had just begun to sprout up thanks to the U.S. government’s bombing the shit out of their homes in Asia) eating “Golden Chicken in a Basket” or “Frog Legs in Hot Basil,” then off to a fresh production of Les Troyens aux Carthage with Crespin, Norman, and Vickers, or Ariadne Auf Naxos with Tatyana Tee and Monsterfat Cee at the Met; or to some off-Broadway and Forty-Third Street play, virtually underground, that people were taking seriously. Victor would be all dolled up and with straights and/or gays. That would be followed at 11:30 p.m. by a nightcap at a bar, again straight or gay, depending, and really only if it was mid-week. If it was a Saturday, he was off to one of the private dance clubs—Paradise Garage, The Loft, or Les Mouches (if he felt like Euro-Trash)—and getting porked by an Saudi Oil Princeling, who’d take him back to a suite at the Waldorf or the Pierre. And maybe if he hadn’t sex-connected by that late, it was off to some good After-Hours-Party peopled with disco and gay-bar employees and with a unplanned orgy at someone’s Jones or Duane Street loft. Or perhaps he’d stumble into a cab headed off to the New Saint Mark’s Baths or to one of the West Side Highway and Twenty-Something-Street “private” sex clubs for the final part of the night.
That had been the way to live. Not this. And it had taken Victor most of the decade to figure out how to dress for any such single evening, which—think about it—went clothingwise from tuxedo to jock strap with several distinct stages in between in a twelve hour period.
And yet. And yet. He had never felt an iota more dissolute than the next straphanger on the IRT Number Four train, no more decadent than those businessmen reading the Wall Street Journal’s stock tips, waiting at the Lexington Avenue’s Rector Street Station. If asked, Victor would reply that he was merely interested in a variety of different things. But then, after all, it was La Citta, and wasn’t everyone?
Evidently not. Because here was Frank Perry asking why their character, Theo, who was new in town, would want go to Studio Fifty-Four? Would he even know about it, Frank asked? What were the chances he’d even get in?
And for the first time, Victor did lose his patience, though he hoped it didn’t show.
“By the time of the book—and the movie, Frank—Studio was, like, totally over. The only people going would be newly arrived out of towners like Theo Anderson!”
Lord, it really was a trial at times!
chapter TWENTY-four
It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if it hadn’t been quite so unexpected. What am I writing? Of course, it was expected. Just not at that particular moment. And it probably would have been equally bad no matter when it happened.
It was the ninth week into the Justify My Sins script writing sessions. Victor and Frank had spent two hours and a half of very detailed work so far that afternoon on the Act Two climax of the script. Which meant of course going back to the sixty-minute-in “Turn” of the script, which they’d already decided was not the news that Anna-Marie could “see” Theo while speaking to him on the phone, but instead was their truly accidental (if acceptably so since they were close neighbors) meeting at the corner delicatessen. Her total panic, and befuddlement. His attraction and interest. All that had led to their first date as Theo and “Marion,” the name she’d made up on the spot so as to be anyone but Ann-Marie. If that was the “Turn,” the Act Two climax, therefore, had to be the discovery that Anna-Marie, with whom Theo continued a phone relationship all the while physically dating “Marion,” could see him, had been seeing him, spying on him really, from the very beginning: from in fact Act One, Scene One, Fade-in.
They’d acted out the two crucial scenes as written, Frank taking the woman’s part. Always the woman’s part. Always! Why was that? (Had he acted out Joan when he worked with Cheryl Crawford on their script together?) And Victor acted out Theo, whom Frank once or twice said, “Is, after all, you.” To which Victor had corrected, “Who is me, had I continued the phone calls, which I did not.” And in this way they tried out phrases and intonations, moved words around, shortened lines, lengthened pauses, as well acting it all out physically.
It had been a fairly grueling, if fascinating, two and a half hours but now was coffee-break time, and on this break Victor was grateful for the large and strong Coffee and Tea Leaf French Roast special he’d ordered, black with sugar. He’d really needed it.
Frank usually drank tea alone in his office during these breaks, thinking (or, more likely, making phone calls), while Victor sipped and ate and schmoozed with Sam Alan Haddad.
Sam and he had come to enjoy these breaks. They discussed books, cars, films, and other things of interest (but never the girls or guys they were seeing), and the fairly extensive rewrites that Victor was doing on the script written by Miss Hot Pants Screen Writer and starring Monster Girl Actress. It was now in its first week of shooting and Victor was finding it to be ten times more difficult than Justify.
Sam had just read Victor’s latest chan
ges and approved them and promised another check to be quietly slid into a bank account that Victor had opened recently. That was the solution of course: he could still legally receive the money, and still would pay taxes on it, but Frank would see it, if at all, only as a “production expense” wired directly to a nameless account number, of which there were several already.
(The experience of opening the account was so different from the bank confrontations Victor was used to in Manhattan as to be of note. Here, it entailed excessive friendliness and unpretentiousness, mugs of coffee, and shared first names. All of which was in line with the down home red-tiled roof, adobe-wall architecture, and interior rife with cowboy motifs underscored by vast murals sporting actual purple mountains’ majesty and spacious waves of grain.)
So he and Sam were about as relaxed as relaxed could be when the downstairs bell rang and someone was let in, which happened dozens of times per day and went unnoticed. Except, suddenly, someone was at Sam’s office door, which he kept locked. Sam had to get up, saying, “We’re not expecting anyone. Not even UPS, I don’t think.”
Victor recognized her immediately, even though she looked nothing like her flattering book jacket photo, nor in any way like anyone’s idea of a fate-changing femme fatale.
“Didn’t Frank tell you I’d be here?” she asked, blustering in and more nudging than bussing Sam’s cheek.
The immediate impression she gave was of a heavy woman light on her feet, a little older than Victor, with a Farrah Fawcett tidal wave of honey-colored hair, a well-tended very bright smile, a nearly unnoticeable rhinoplasty, and sweet, cornflower blue eyes. Glancing at the bejeweled watch on her almost chubby wrist, she half-smiled, did something with her shoulders that might have been an attempt at a shrug, and added, “Only 4:00. Willikers! I didn’t think I’d be this early. Well, I’ll just say hello and back out.”
So saying, she entered deeper into the office and plopped herself opposite where Victor sat on a loveseat at a coffee table, watching her unhook the fluffy wintry coat, remove the light gloves (gloves in El-Lay?!) finger by finger, hand by hand. As she thrust it all to one side, he couldn’t help but be attacked by a little hurricane of perfumes and cosmetics cast into the local atmosphere, strong enough that his nostrils began to smart and his eyes water.
The hastily not-quite-kissed Sam remained standing nearby, too stunned to do more than watch her, muttering, “He’s . . . He’s . . .”
“In a meeting. On the phone, Busy. I know,” she said, without a trace of rancor. “Let him know I’m here. I’ll pop in for a ‘Hi’ then get out of you guys’ hair.” Said with a breeziness that undid the effects of the too strong, conflicting scents and which nearly made Victor like her.
“Okay, I’ll try him,” Sam groaned.
She then turned to Victor, one newly ungloved, childishly plump hand out to be taken, and introduced herself, as he was certain she would, as Miss Hot Pants Script Writer. He then introduced himself as Her Replacement.
“With the new movie?” she asked gaily, and he almost added, “Yes. And with your movie too.”
“I thought you’d be in there with Frank?”
“I was. Coffee break.” He pointed to the sweets wrappers and tall cup. “Did I ever need it.”
“I know what you mean. He can be relentlessly detailing. But . . . ,” peering over the irreparable damage Victor had already inflicted upon an innocent pineapple turnover, not to mention the tell-tale skid-mark fruit stain on plastic wrapper, the only sign remaining of a demolished apricot Danish, “Luckily, you have a metabolism to allow all this . . . refueling.”
“Not really. What I have is a very”—he sought for the word, and settled on—“active sex partner. As in lots of chasing.”
“She an athletic trainer?”
“Try, he’s a construction worker. A roofer.”
“Oh! Lucky you! That’s even better than a good metabolism. Before I got married I had one of those. Paisano?”
“Southern White.”
“Umm-mmm!” She put two fingers together and to her lips. “Purr-feck-see-ohn! If you’re gonna go for the whiter meat—”
Just then Sam re-entered, “He’ll be a few minutes. He and Victor weren’t quite done and—“
She stood up. “I could just pop in. Then go shopping and come back?”
“I’m afraid it’ll still be a minute or two,” Sam said with a hangdog expression.
She sat back down. “I’ll wait.” Then, to Victor, “So? I understand you’re also from The Island?”
There was only one The Island: his old neighborhood. They began comparing notes. Of course, she would know someone Victor’s sister had dated in High School, a guy she said who’d become a very successful mortician.
“He was in training even then,” Victor said. “He used to come pick Cathy up in a 1949 Caddy hearse, right out of The Munsters. He always swore there were no corpses in the back, even though there always was a coffin or two. But she told me that one time he swung a corner too tight leaving Green Acres Mall, the back doors sprung open and a casket slid out onto Hillside Avenue. She had to help him lift it back in and she swore up and down that it was too heavy to be empty. That was their last date.”
They talked about her neighborhood, a little to the north of where he had grown up
“Fitzgerald’s ‘West Egg’ in Gatsby, right?” Victor asked.
Right.
It also turned out that she’d gone to the same synagogue and hair dresser as several girls he’d dated in high school. She gave a home address he was familiar with.
“I caddied the golf course down your street for a summer, my senior year. Real pain in the ass golfers on that course every weekend. But boy did they tip well. I made a bundle.”
He decided to not add the fact that he’d received his first blow job inside the golf course locker room from the clubhouse manager, a good-looking guy ten years his senior with a reputation as “a ladies man,” who managed to do him regularly until Victor went off to college, and who, of course, had arranged for the liberal tippers.
She and Victor were now discussing various doctors, dentists, and psychiatrists they and their friends knew, finding there were connections everywhere between them, not thick ones like family, but slighter, yet all told, forming a sort of encompassing social network. No wonder he was the one who was rewriting her script, set after all in their shared neighborhood, a kind of teen paradise in North Central Long Island in the 1960’s, not at all dissimilar to George Lucas’ Santa Rosa as he’d depicted it in American Graiffiti.
Frank’s office door opened and he stepped out, looking for her.
Frank had changed shirts, put on a tie, and was wearing a sport coat. Victor saw Sam noticing and knew it was all for her, and he also now knew Sam hadn’t been lying.
She bounced up from her chair and into Frank’s arms, not quite towering, but totally taking charge of him. After a minute or so, Frank noticed Victor still there and apologetically said, “You wore me out, Vic. Too much to go on working. She’s only an excuse.” Then, to her, “He’s worse than you were. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been ravaged in that office.” Back to Victor, “You don’t mind too much, do you, Vic, if I take off a little early?”
“No. No. You kids get the hell outta here.” Victor held back the gratuitous grandfatherly chuckle, but it would have been missed by them anyway since they were already heading out the office door.
Seconds later, they were gone and Sam was such a mass of anger and resentment that he all but emitted black smoke.
“Did you see? Did you see?” he at last was able to utter.
“I saw that Frank was too smitten to even notice my parting statement, which if I may so myself, contained so much irony it should have reversed the Earth’s magnetic poles.”
Sam put a cupped hand to his mouth and stared at the shut office door, probably at his own bleak future vanishing there.
The silence became so ma
rked that at last Victor got his jacket and leather case of scripts and got ready to leave.
“Just remember,” Victor tried, “it’s always darkest before it gets pitch black. No? How about, the first hundred years are the hardest? No? Then, try ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea dingle Upon which man it fall’?”
That last roused Sam from his stupor. “William Butler Yeats?”
“W.H. Auden. But Sam, I’m proud of you. Yeats was a very good guess. Really!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-five
There had been no reason to go onto the set over at the studio where the film was being shot, so Victor hadn’t. He and Sam were trying to downplay his involvement as much as possible to keep it unknown. Victor was surprised to discover that Frank wasn’t there all day every day either. Sam explained that was because there were a variety of “easy” scenes he allowed his assistant director to do, usually with Sam nearby and everyone near a phone just in case problems arose.
Any scene involving The Principals (as the main actors in the cast were called), and especially the Monster Girl Actress, naturally Frank had to be there. After all, he was known in the Biz as an “actor’s director,” as opposed to those directors who specialized in crowd scenes, epic views, or multiple explosions on giant moving sets.
The arrival of Miss North Shore (as Victor now referred to Miss Hot Pants Script Writer) changed that. She’d allegedly come for a weekend but was still present seven days later. Sam had rescheduled most of the shooting to reflect Frank not being there a lot, or when there, being distracted. There was only so many scenes without the MGA however, and if Frank wouldn’t be there, she wouldn’t either.
Justify My Sins Page 20
