The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  “Bah,” said Jim.

  “Eloquent,” I said. I moved off up the roof and down the other side of this particular section. I was looking for an open set of windows that I could lower myself into or a balcony I could drop onto without risking my life. Jim followed me at some distance, often going on all fours uphill and scrambling on his ass downhill. I came around some chimneys after a bit, stopped and turned to warn Jim by holding my fingers to my lips. But he was not looking and kept making noise, so I went back to him.

  “Shush,” I whispered, “and you will get to see a rare sight.”

  He misunderstood me and said, “Listen, maybe we better just go back.”

  “No, it’s not like that at all. Come on.”

  We moved very quietly around the chimneys, and I stopped and pointed.

  There was Karl, sitting on the roof hugging his knees. He was wearing a pair of pants and a white skullcap and staring out toward the ocean. His bare feet gleamed in the moonlight.

  I looked back at Jim, and Jim looked at me. Then we both looked over at Karl.

  “Hello, Karl,” I said. “Out for a moonbath?”

  KARL LOOKED over at us and smiled, as if he had been sitting there waiting. “Hello, boys,” he said.

  That stumped me. I couldn’t think of anything funny to say, so I asked him, “What the hell are you doing on the roof?”

  “I used to come up here all the time,” he said. Jim and I sat down. “When I was a kid I once hid up here for three days. They looked all over the United States.”

  “What did you eat?” I asked him.

  “I went inside when they were all asleep or out of the house. There was plenty to eat and it was warm.”

  He looked at me with great sadness in his eyes. “Don’t ever send a small, beautiful boy to military school,” he said.

  “Oh, God,” Jim said. “Did you have to go to military school?”

  “Don’t blame my father. What was he supposed to do? My mother died when I was born, so he had this kid on his hands.”

  “Yeah, but military school,” Jim said.

  “Well, I went to a couple of regular boarding schools, he didn’t know, and I was always getting into trouble, so he got advice and the advice told him, military school, they’ll take the boy and make a man out of him. Ha ha. They took the boy and made a girl of him. Jesus Christ, I hated it, too. I pretended to myself that I liked it, but I hated it. But, see, the only way I could look myself in the face was if I liked it. But it was terrible, you can’t guess how many military school boys are nuts, really fruitcake, you have a phrase for it, Jim, what the hell is that phrase?”

  “Out there,” Jim said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Have you been drinking?” I asked Karl.

  “No, not drinking, nothing, no. It’s just the weight; I can’t stand the weight, it’s too much for me.”

  “I am,” I said, “drunk as a goat.”

  “Me, too,” Jim said.

  “We probably won’t remember anything that happened tonight, black-right-out.”

  “I know I always do,” Jim said.

  “Oh, fuck!” Karl said, and with a deep moan he got to his feet and started running for the edge of the roof. He only got a few steps before I grabbed him, but Jim lost his balance and went careening down over the edge of the roof.

  “Oh my God I’ve killed Jim Larson!” Karl said with horror.

  “Siddown and shaddup,” I said. I went to the edge of the roof. I hadn’t heard any loud thump or any outcry from Jim, just the crackle of some greenery. I peered down into the treetops.

  “Jim?” I said.

  “Yeah?” came his voice.

  “What’s happening down there?”

  “I’m in the tree,” Jim said.

  “You hurt?”

  “Well, I don’t really know.”

  I heard some more crackle, and then a light thump as Jim fell on down, or jumped, to the lawn below. I waited a couple of seconds.

  “You okay?” I called.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m coming back up.”

  “How?”

  “The old oak tree,” he said.

  I went up to Karl, who was just sitting there again. I shouldn’t have left him alone like that. I sat down beside him.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “Jim’s okay, hell fire, the man’s a trained acrobat.”

  “I’m sorry,” Karl said. He began to weep into his hands. “Oh God oh fuck oh God oh shit,” he sobbed. It looked as if he was trying to dig his eyes out of his head so I took hold of his wrists, but he kept sobbing and beat his head against me. I didn’t know what to do so I just held onto him.

  “I want to die!” he cried. “I want to die, DIE!!”

  “But I won’t let you,” I said. “So you can forget about that.”

  After a while I felt the tension go out of his wrists and I let go of him. He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. I heard the clatter of tiles somewhere on the roof and assumed that trained acrobat Jim was on the way.

  “I’m just crazy, aren’t I?” Karl said. “This whole night is just craziness.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Happens to me regularly, don’t sweat it, pal, it’s okay.”

  Jim showed up. He didn’t look so bad. He grinned. “Fell three stories in two jumps, Christ, I ought to go out for the fucking paratroops.”

  “Stay here and talk to this asshole while I get us something to drink,” I said. “Where’s the nearest open window?” I asked Karl and he pointed.

  Inside the house with just the night lighting, everything looked like old Spain, sedate, rich, powerful and impregnable, remote. The clown show on the roof was just not possible. I went through this corridor and that, looked into rooms that were spare bedrooms, drawing rooms, a room with a billiard table, and then into a place I had never been, but the door was wide open, so in I went, looking for Sonny, I guess, more than a brandy bottle, and on through the small comfortable room into a big bedroom with an empty but turned down bed in it, and past that, following the open doors, out onto a small balcony. There was Max in his wheelchair, one hand resting on a barrel-shaped telescope with an eyepiece halfway up the side. Max’s eye wasn’t on the eyepiece, though; he was just slumped over the goddamn thing dead.

  In the last moonlight I could see the white of his eye.

  “Oh, Max,” I said.

  WHY ME?

  I am sitting in my dressing suite in the Golconda Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada.

  It is Opening Night. Fifteen minutes ago, Jim and I were supposed to appear on stage. The audience is out there, packed in solid, having a fine time watching the girls. The first couple of rows are cheek-to-cheek celebrities, comics, singers, friends of Management.

  Jim, however, is not here.

  I have not seen Jim in two weeks. Nobody has seen Jim in two weeks.

  I remember once in Tokyo, we were drunk in a basement club called the Blue Shadows, listening to J. C. Heard and his jazz band. It was a great night and the band was really swinging, but we ran out of money. We ordered another round of beers and tried to figure a way out of our problem.

  “Just wait here,” Jim said to me after a while. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes at the latest.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Up into Tokyo,” Jim said, “to get twenty-five hundred yen.”

  “From where?”

  He winked. “A secret source. My ace-in-the-hole. Then we’ll pay our bill here, get into a taxi and head for Rappongi, where I know a Mamasan who will let us stay the night with the girls of our choice, buy us beers, pay off the cab and even, by God, bring us a double order of yaki-gyoza.”

  “Sounds like a miracle,” I said, and it must have been, because Jim never came back, and I didn’t see him for a couple of months. I finally humiliated myself with promises to the management and even had to get J. C. to okay me, although we had just met that night,
fan to musician, and he was obviously uncomfortable about it. Then through the snowswept nightstreets of Tokyo, fueled by rage, arriving at FEAF Headquarters just in time to miss the last bus to my base, and so had to spend the night huddled shivering with the other losers in the lobby of the HQ building.

  Thanks, Jim.

  BUT I shouldn’t panic. Jim does not like the feel of the collar, he does not like to be prodded, he balks at enticement, but he doesn’t betray his friends and he doesn’t weasel out of agreements. So he should be coming in through the door any minute now, like a cat that’s been missing and shows up scarred, exhausted and hungry, or maybe even plump and well groomed, and you aren’t sure whether to pick him up and hug him or just toss him back out the window.

  The door even opens, but it is not Jim, just a waitress in a cute black uniform, bringing me a jug of Perrier. I glower at her smile and watch the fear come into her eyes. Mustn’t spill, mustn’t disturb the star’s concentration, mustn’t look at all the crazy stuff around the room, just pour the Perrier and get the hell out. Especially since the star just sits there staring and doesn’t say a word.

  The ice cracks nervously in the tall glass as it cools the water. The air conditioner sighs with anxiety. My stomach groans in suffering. I should have said, “Thanks, Doris, how’s your little girl,” and given her a big tip, say, fifty dollars. But she’s gone and wasn’t Doris anyway. I drink from the tall glass and the ice cracks like knuckles.

  “Relax,” I say to the glass, “You’ll be flat before you know it.”

  The bubbles hiss at me faintly. “So long, sucker,” they seem to say.

  I was in full makeup wearing what my grandfather would have called a monkey suit, with the jacket off. I sniffed my armpit. Two hours ago I had come out of the shower clean as a baby, and now I smelled, not just strong, but rank, oily and acid, screaming stink of fear. I had not eaten since yesterday and would not until tomorrow, so my guts had nothing stronger to grip down on than mineral water. I kept getting intestinal threats of diarrhea accompanied by a gaseous buildup I dared not tamper with for fear of disgracing myself in the eyes of my dresser, now long gone and probably out in the house with relatives, since I had told him over an hour ago to fuck off. I sat for a few minutes, enjoying the agony, daydreaming the scene where the dresser is called back, his relatives look up, ahh, he’s an important fellow, no? Yes, he must go backstage and change his master’s diaper for him—what a wonderful story to dine out on among friends. So not even a whisper must escape my body. I can fart after the show. I can do any goddamn thing I want after the show. Not this show, the last show. Not the last show of the evening, the last show of the run. Then I will fart, strip and run naked through the desert.

  I confess to a little stage fright from time to time.

  I stared at the telephone. If it rang I would jump out of my skin. If it did not ring I would go crazy. But I would be dipped in shit before I would make a worry call. Let the rest of them worry, Ogle is in Meditation until The Arrival.

  Jim, you motherfucker, I’m going to knock your fucking teeth down your fucking throat if you do this to me one more time. Exclamation point.

  The mantra for today is “motherfucker.”

  Everybody else backstage who has the slightest involvement in our act is probably going crazy, too, because among other stupidities, nobody gets to fret and wring their hands for fear of bringing on Nemesis. Everybody, from that master of methane Gregory Galba to Doris the waitress, has to go around smiling while their guts grind.

  I insist on it.

  Aw, hell, Dave, take a Valium, there’s plenty of them in the medicine cabinet so thoughtfully stocked by Galba, certainly as a joke, but Gregory wouldn’t mind if I went nuts. He had filled the medicine cabinet with drugs. It was a hit parade of stupefacients, the top ten of legal dope, the hall of fame for mindfuckers: Valiums, Percodans, Quaaludes, Benzedrine, Ritalin, amphetamines, biphetamine, the list goes on, and I won’t touch a one of them. Not because I don’t like the wonderful sensation of shredding apart, but ordinary precaution, like, if I take a Valium for this caper, what about tomorrow? Six Vals? Then on Tuesday I can have my convulsions. Screw that noise, screw Gregory, unctuous provider, and doublescrew Jim, who may have killed himself or God knows what while I am cursing him out.

  No drugs. Not even marijuana, my dear old friend and teacher, the one who slowed me down; not cocaine, ol’ nosedrip is back, not mushrooms, who wants to go out there and find a room full of flesh-plopping bipeds? No drugs. But God, how I would love to rush to the medicine cabinet or the secret compartment in my suitcase and stuff it all into my face and disappear into purple smoke.

  I could even go out onstage while the drugs are getting ready to kick in and tell the audience that after a lifetime in show business I have chosen this moment to retire, and then, as the “AWWWWW!” rolls over me, spread my arms and sweetly fly out over their heads and . . .

  I look up quickly. The door has spoken.

  Click, it says.

  I wait.

  But, whoever it was decided to keep his head another day.

  It certainly wouldn’t have been Jim. Jim does not hesitate at doors.

  Seventeen minutes late.

  Laugh, laugh, laugh. Nobody gives a fuck about seventeen minutes; if the show started on time half the audience would faint from surprise. But you’re supposed to be here.

  But he’s not really late until he’s half an hour late.

  Unless you think maybe he’s two weeks late. Lying on the roadside trussed up in a dark green plastic bag, arms, legs, penis, head, severed; trunk, severed. Dead, oh, about two weeks . . .

  For that matter, I could sure use a drink, for that matter. Three or four straight shots of 100-proof bonded whiskey would probably have some interesting effects on my stomach, and to keep the glow I could drink onstage, toasting the audience, slopping around, using the booze to get laughs. Then the second show. Um, how you feeling? Unghktlph . . .

  The dressing room has four doors. One door leads to the bathroom, with tub and shower and a wicker basket full of corncobs, provided by Galba, beside the toilet, as well as a huge reading rack of the scummiest pornography he could find, water sports, enema clubs, child porn with outrageous titles like FAMILY PARTY, magazines full of women trussed up like hogs, strapped to crosses, bent into expository positions and wired down, magazines full of women in black leather costumes flicking plump, stupid-looking men with Sears, Roebuck riding crops, and on and on. And of course Gregory would not want me, at some fitful four a.m., to have to go to the drugstore for anything, so the bathroom was also equipped with a couple of huge enema bags and a set of extraordinary nozzles in a wall rack like dueling pistols; in a bowl on the counter with the two sinks was a wicker basket of assorted rubbers for “thrilling Milady with their deckle-edged plunger ripple action . . .” and a row of standing dildos of various sizes, textures and length and a bottle of amyl nitrite with a little hand-written card, IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, SNIFF TWICE AND INSERT OBJECT.

  Gregory’s crude mining-town scrawl, naturally.

  Another door leads to the elevator that leads to backstage and also to Jim’s dressing room suite, just down the hall. The door to the closet was open, and I could see, just by moving my head a little, some of the late-night finery he had provided, again, how much of this is what his press agent told him was “gargantuan humor” to go along with his reputation, and how much was paving stones for the road to hell? With Gregory you never knew. He might have thought that every entertainer was an emotional circus and liked to get up in women’s underthings or rubber suits. There was also a very fine selection of resort clothes for me to wear around the pool or the gambling tables, although I never went to those places, and the row of identical monkey suits for me to work in.

  The last door leads to the living room of the suite, with its own private entrance reached only by going through another special door with a cop to check your right to pass into the dazzle of backstage life.
Right now I would guess the living room was full of friends and well-wishers, not the ones who were already at ringside out of politeness, but the close ones who were not exercising privilege but were giving me moral support, like, they were out there if I needed them. Ron and Jim, who write and direct our pictures and have for four years, a couple of real Hollywood guys, nice people who can deliver and who are able to say of something they have written, “Isn’t that awful?” and not go home to the Valley and grind their guts about it. Jim spent his spare time writing mystery novels and indulging in domestic life with his family, and Ron was big in the Guild. They always came to our opening in Las Vegas and always brought their combined families and didn’t demand six ringside tables, and I could always hear them laughing, Jim going hughughug, and Ron, cackle cackle, always on our side, always showing a cheerful front, getting a little thick through the middle, both of them, not doing what they had set out in life to do but making so much money they could hardly find it in their hearts to complain; they were out there, probably telling jokes to lighten things up. Of all people, they knew Jim and had faith in him.

  But he has never done this before, Not two weeks. My own faith in Jim was not shaken, trust your animal, my grandpa used to say when the cat would run away, but two weeks! He left before we even wrapped picture, three days of pickups and some looping left to do, gone, snap, his apartment on the lot unlocked and empty, his home in Palm Springs still filled with his wife and her real estate salesman buddy.

  Sure I fucked her. Out there in the backyard, while he went to get some champagne to celebrate.

  The show biz hotels were checked out in order of rank and stature, first the Bel-Air, then the Beverly Hills, the Beverly Wilshire, L’Hermitage, the Chateau Marmont, the Sunset Marquis and finally the Montecito, but no Jim. The couple of times I exploded, thank God with nobody around, I wondered why if they could locate us at Enrico’s in San Francisco without a clue, why were they having trouble now? The only possible reasons:

  1.Jim does not want to be found.