“You live here? No shit! Where?”
“A minor street off Laurel Canyon.”
“City view? Valley view?” the agent probed.
“City View. Well, most of downtown is blocked, but I’ve got a south-western view right to the airport. Sometimes I can see the ocean.”
“Me, too. We must be facing the same way. I’m off Outpost.”
“That’s not far at all,” Victor agreed. And since Joel was looking at, almost staring at, the younger man with that peculiar mixture of hunger and disinterest typical of a gay man of his years and station in The Biz, Victor added, “This is Dmitrios Juenger. He’s got an entertainment company. And—“
“And I’m hoping to exploit some of Mr. Regina’s literary works for the screen,” the unfazed Dmitrios added, shaking the older man’s hand. “I’m very honored to meet you, Mr. Edison.”
“The honor happened when you met Victor,” Joel pointed out. “He’s the talent. I’m just a ‘suit.’”
“Ah but what a suit!” Victor fingered the cuff. “Armani?”
“Yves St. Laurent.”
Dmitrios cut in, “I was discussing with Mr. Regina how we could begin to arrange some meetings about that exploitation. Naturally, your name came up right away.”
“In what capacity?” Joel asked, and as he did he revealed a slight twitching just below the left eye that Victor recognized as the result of a nerve-damaged facial condition known as Guilliam-Barre syndrome. “Oh, I know: it must have been as eye-witness to the truth of some of Victor’s more debauched memoirs.”
“Really?” Juenger’s eyes went wide. “You mean you were there?”
“Well, I was there when it was Victor versus half of a particular National League football team.”
“There were only two of them,” Victor corrected.
“Both gargantuan. One the quarterback. The other the offensive captain. And it was at an extremely low-class joint named Basic Plumbing,” Joel added, “Don’t deny it,” he warned. Then, “And the outcome was . . . well, iffy.”
“‘Iffy’ my well-plowed rear end,” Victor said. “I was like the mayo on a ham and cheese hero.” All three of them laughed.
Joel quickly looked around to check that they were pretty much alone in the theater before adding, “The regulars at Basic Plumbing spoke about that evening for years afterwards. And especially, and I quote one of them, ‘That pushy, lucky, New York queen!’” Turning to Dmitrios, he explained, “It was kind of like Woodstock. Everyone claimed they were there that night.”
Dmitrios’ eyes remained large with wonder. “You two must have had some terrific times before HIV came along! God, how I envy you!”
Victor felt he had to make an emendation to that. “That’s certainly true. But then we also had to go through AIDS and all that too, for which we were not so lucky! Right, Joel?”
“Cor-rect-erooni, Victor! I ended up being HIV-Negative. And I must say, my diagnosis was to the general astonishment of the entire populace!”
“Me three,” Victor admitted. “And there wasn’t much fun in that, since everyone else died.” To Joel he added, “It was after my life partner passed that I decided to come out here. We’d been talking about it for some years.”
“So, I heard. And of course, I myself became quite cautious,” Joel admitted.
“I’ll say. I heard you’d married. A woman.” Victor said. “That’s cautious.”
“It wasn’t quite that drastic. We just lived together. We still sort of do,” Joel added enigmatically. “But then, unlike you, I wasn’t right in the thickest of it! How ever did you escape?”
“Well, you know what the Paulette Goddard character says in The Women? ‘Where I spit, don’t no grass grow ever’!”
They all laughed.
“Actually, I’m sort of not kidding. After the doctors and researchers nearly exsanguinated me, searching through my blood to find out why I never did get infected, they discovered I was in that small percentage who can’t get infected. Because our T-cells are deformed. Yes, I am a mutant. I don’t deny it. Which goes far to explain a great deal of my nefarious existence. But to change the subject, Joel, what did you think of this uncut version of the film?”
“Scrumptious. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Joel said. “I remember how much I loved it when it first came out. I mean the star power alone! Sterling Hayden and Burt Lancaster as the fathers. DeNiro and Depardieu as the two sons! Even I would have never thought of that particular casting coup!”
“That homecoming scene in the barn between the two?” Victor said. “When they kissed in the hayloft, I thought Depardieu was going to buttfuck DeNiro, the way he lifted his legs up like that.”
“I hoped! But then the scene with the whore in bed with the two of them? Jerking them off together?” Joel effused. “And of course Donald Sutherland and Laura Betti as fascist child killers. Priceless!”
“And Storaro’s cinematography?” Victor asked.
“You could eat it with a spoon.”
The screening-room staff had begun to come in carrying brooms and rolling vacuums, so the three moved into the aisle and began up toward the door.
“Of course with all the heroes being Communists, the film was sure to offend most Americans,” Victor said.
“It did rather bomb here. But it delivered internationally. I believe it was Bertolucci’s top grossing film, until The Last Emperor came along.”
“Even beyond Last Tango?” Victor asked.
“I believe so. Remember, no one would screen that in much of the Mid East or even the Far East. Whereas this one . . . “
They’d reached the screening room lobby. A few smaller groups of people clustered, discussing the movie.
“Listen, this is great and I’d love to continue. But I’ve got a dinner thing I can’t get out of,” Joel said. “We’ve absolutely got to get together, Victor.” He was all bonhomie. “I forgot how much I missed our cocktail sessions. Let’s do one very soon.”
“Okay. Sure. My schedule’s pretty open.”
Turning to Juenger, Joel said, “I’m sure Victor never told you any of this, because unlike every Hollywood writer I know he is modesty personified. But when Victor was out here working, he knew all the top directors.”
“Hardly. Two, maybe. “
“And the biggest film stars, at their height of success.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Admit that Warren Beatty and Julie Christie were like your bosom buddies?”
“I met them twice.”
“Victor virtually wrote the last decade of Frank Perry’s oeuvre. Not to mention being the only human actually able to speak without murdering Sh—“
Victor interrupted, “Yes, let’s do have cocktails soon. You’re at William Morris?”
“With yet another loser secretary! How do I pick them, Victor?”
“By their crotches?” Victor asked.
Joel laughed. “Call tomorrow. I’ll warn Vlacheslav in advance so I don’t have to yell at him when he screws up.”
Out on the curb, it was dark and glittery with West L.A. evening traffic negotiating the slowly deepening West L.A. evening fog.
Naturally, a large charcoal gray Lincoln Town Car was idling just where Joel stepped out onto the curb.
“Can I give you a lift?” he asked.
“Our chariot’s down there a bit,” Victor pointed to the street.
“Call!” Joel insisted, got inside, and was gone.
As they were walking to Juenger’s car, Victor could see the numbers being added up behind the younger man’s mind.
“Don’t get your hopes up, kiddo. Joel Edison talks the talk, and walks the walk, and we will have cocktails together. But he’s never really delivered for me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-two
Victor was using the hose to water the potted plants on the deck and trying to recall exactly what the hard-faced transsexual in the gard
ening department at the Sunset Boulevard Home Depot had told him about gardenias. Did they like morning sun and hate afternoon sun? Or was it the opposite? And what had “Mara” said about wind? It was pretty windy on this deck, no matter what Victor did. He was shielding the gardenia somewhat, using a wall of the house. The roses, of course, loved the sun and the heat and the wind: they were such sluts! They were already over-filling their pots. But the gardenia . . . ! If only he’d not tried to not pay attention to Mara’s face, which resembled Patrick Swazyze’s taken apart and put back together again by a cosmetic surgeon with macular degeneration. Or Mara’s voice, which was several full tones below Victor’s. Maybe he was watering them too much? But then the leaves would turn brown, right? What did it mean that they were turning yellow? He’d gotten a gardenia-positive potting soil for them. He’d raised the pH factor for them. Maybe he should have lowered it? Christ, but these plants were more of a pain than raising a child!
“So, hello there, neighbor!”
Victor was so startled he all but hosed down the person suddenly standing on his deck. How had the guy even gotten there? It was twenty steps from anything even resembling an entry from the street.
“Didn’t mean to startle you!”
He had truly startled Victor. Primarily because of who he was: Don Wright, Mr. Totally Gorgeous Physical Fitness Trainer from next door. Well, actually, next door and down the hill about seventy feet. This close, he looked even taller, maybe six-two, and handsomer: perfect butterscotch hair, straight, good sized, obviously whitened teeth, Midwestern American face. He was wearing a vaguely silver A-shirt, which barely covered his large and perfectly muscled torso, and a pair of black running slacks with a single silver line down the side made of some kind of ultra-sheer material—solidified jizz, probably. Like the top, the slacks revealed as much as they hid. And flip flops. Big bony feet. Be still my heart, Victor thought.
“I’d better put this away before I get us all soaked,” Victor said, recalling that it had a quirk of giving one last, unprepared for spurt—much like a Cubano married lover he’d known years ago in Cocoanut Grove. He moved the hose over to the side of the deck before totally shutting it off. “There!” he said, but it spurted once more when he least expected it—just like Gustavo—and he got splashed.
Don Wright: “So I’ve been meaning to come say hello. You’re here what? Two or three months?”
Six. “Something like that.”
Don: “But you know how it gets. Busy, busy, busy.”
If he’d ever thought to glance at this deck he would have seen that Victor was anything but busy, busy, busy. “Right!”
“And we will get together. I have these like monthly cocktail parties for my clients.”
Victor had heard the last one. It had gone on till after midnight.
“Some of them you really should meet. You’re a famous writer, I found out, and you’d all get along fine. But the reason I came is that house there!”
He pointed to the house between theirs, if above them both by about sixty feet. Two cute gay guys, maybe thirty-five or so, lived there. One red headed and kind of solid, the other leaner with tight black hair and seductive eyes. Victor guessed him to be some Mediterranean combo, half Lebanese, half Greek, maybe. Red drove a new smoke-gray Porsche Carerra, and Charcoal tooled around in a late model tan Tundra.
“What about it?” Victor asked.
“Well, their dog is like the size of a pony. The black one?”
Jeremy, he remembered Red calling it once. “I’ve seem them walk it.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” and suddenly Mr. Midwestern Muscles was very intense. Victor could tell because, despite clothing, he was more or less unclothed and suddenly all his muscles sort of clenched: those around his neck, along his arms and even on his shoulders. “That dog barks constantly. Especially at night. And it wakes me up at like 5:00 a.m. You must hear it. It must wake you up too.”
“My bedroom windows face this way.” Victor walked Don along the deck and pointed. “Totally facing the other direction. In fact, they’re blocked from the house that’s annoying you by that hilly hummock. I can barely even see their place from here.”
“Well, you’re lucky. It’s really loud and it’s not right.”
“It’s certainly not good for you to be awakened a 5:00 a.m.,” Victor agreed.
“I mean I get up early anyway. Eight. But at five?”
He was so sincere that Victor wondered what a penis would look like sort of angled thirty five degrees out of the left side of his mouth.
“So I was hoping you would say something to them. I mean back me up a little.”
“I never hear the dog.”
“Never!?”
“Well, when they’re walking it past the house and maybe sometimes late at night.”
“It’s got that real deep voice because it’s so big. Woof. Woof.” Don actually imitated it pretty accurately: a diverting party trick. “They keep it outside all night. Is that humane?”
“I’m not a dog owner. I’m the totally wrong person to ask.”
“And then, when they were away for ten days last month? Man! That was when it was the worst.”
Victor had actually heard the dog during that time. He said so.
“They should have put it in a kennel,” the fitness trainer said. “Wouldn’t you have done that?”
Victor said he knew there were two schools of thought on that topic. Some people felt that kennels were a bad influence on dogs. Unduly toughening them up. Others thought kennels socialized dogs better. He didn’t know which was right.
This was not a subject Don wanted to hear about nor consider in any depth.
“So, will you agree to back me up? To say something to them and back me up?”
He was so tense, so muscle-clenched, so annoyed that Victor said, “Sure. Next time I see them, I’ll—“
“Sooner, please! I mean, I can’t take another night being awakened at five . . . !”
“I don’t know what effect I can have,” Victor said candidly. “They get home around six. Why don’t I arrange to get my mail at that time and ‘bump into’ one of them?”
“I’d really appreciate it. Really!”
He awkwardly came forward and sort of half hugged Victor, leaving a strong and clear body odor, part salt, part sweat, probably mixed with anger and free-floating testosterone molecules, and a little Calvin Klein Obsession for Men. It was all a little too potento for Victor’s lizard-like sense of smell, but he could certainly grasp its attraction.
Don: “Thanks. You’re a good neighbor. Come over and get a session. On the house.”
A fitness session he meant. Fitness, Victor. Focus!
Victor was about to say, “I do yoga,” when suddenly Don was jogging up the twenty steps to the parking area, his square buttocks pumping like pistons in an engine.
Victor realized he had a chubby.
“Down boy. With that b.o., he’s gotta be a top. C’mon!”
THIRTY-three
He’d overslept, and now heard voices outside: doubtless Andy’s company.
Victor dashed cool water on his face, dashed warm water on his hair, then, only slightly awakened, he changed into something that was still shorts and t-shirt, if a smidgen more night-like and formal.
While he could hear and even, at times, see them, it seemed difficult to actually get directly to them. Certainly not from his little suite, and, it turned out, not from either of the other bedroom suites, although allegedly all of those opened to the outdoors. At last, Victor steeled himself to potential sea-sickness and exited through the icthyphilic dining room.
A tall, middle-aged queen with lacquered black hair in a loose fitting Hawaiian-knockoff shirt and very long canvas shorts with so many side pockets he might be a plumber’s assistant, turned to face Victor and all but glared, which made his hound-like face and expression even more hangdog.
“Esteban Barshai,” A
ndy announced, “meet my house guest, Victor Regina. And yes, before you ask, he is the Victor Regina!”
“The writer, right?” Esteban asked in the flattest, most Midwestern accent, one utterly at odds with his exotically European name and South American appearance.
“Dat be me. What’s to drink?” he asked Andy.
“Stebie is here with his partner, Elmer Radicchio the Turd.“
“Bitch!” A short fireplug of a fellow, closely resembling the larger of Tobey’s Shelties, pushed himself forward now and dropped a surprisingly small, well-manicured hand onto Victor’s elbow.
“Elmore Raddizzi the Third,” he said with a tight smile. He was dressed similarly to Esteban if in somewhat dulled colors. His hair was both sleekly gray and dark blonde in seemingly alternating sheeted patches, kinda like little Portia’s head fur. The name meant something: wasn’t he the Raddizzi dried-pasta heir or something?
“You’ve met The Light of My Loins, I see,” Elmore all but curtseyed. “And this is . . .” turning about and not seeing someone, “Well, I guess she’s at the bar, to no one’s astonishment.”
The other men turned as one to the outside bar behind them, which Victor guessed (and later had confirmed) was a portion of the original second backroom bar from Ciro’s on Sunset Boulevard, and thus even more glamorously out of place on this side patio than it appeared. There, hoisting a giant green-glass bottle of what looked like Scotch, was a fake-ly blonde-haired harridan wearing a mint-green sheath and straw-yellow low-heeled sandals. She spun partly around, revealing beneath a stage-turban a face halfway between the aged Lillian Hellman and George Washington in the Gilbert Stuart painting. She winked at Victor—not the prettiest sight—and took a sip and then an even longer sip.
“Carol Bruce,” Elmore finished. “C’mere, Care, and meet Victor. He’s a famous writer from Nueva Jorck!” In a lower voice, he added with no little awe, “Carol’s an actress in L.A who still gets work in the Biz!”
She more or less ambled in their direction; some pleasantries were exchanged. Victor half kept up with the conversation, more or less ruing that he’d awakened himself and changed to meet this particularly fashion-challenged crew.
Justify My Sins Page 27
