The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  “I got some skag,” he said. “Are you into it?”

  Jody laughed. She could not stop pacing up and down the little room. “Skag? What the hell are you doing with skag in this fucking place?”

  “We ain’t that far out into the backwoods,” he said. “A few of us take the stuff.”

  He went into his kitchen and rummaged around and came back with a hypodermic kit, and then went into the bathroom, closing the door with an arch look at Jody, as if to say, ‘I trust you but you never know,’ and then came out with a small yellow balloon.

  “I haven’t had a taste of that stuff since New York,” Jody said. She stretched out on the bed while he fooled around getting the heroin cooked on his dirty little stove. “I used to live with a stone junkie, we’d just do smack, lay back and let life roll along, you know?”

  “I’m not heavy into it,” he said.

  “I never thought I’d run into a shot of dope right out here in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “But you have to take me back to the motel pretty quick, because I’m going to fade out. I have to work tomorrow, doing the goddamn scene their way, which is the most chickenshit way you ever heard of, with me dying like the queen of the wimps. But they’ll see. I hated to do it, but I had to.”

  “Aren’t you going to stay a little while with me?” the Goon asked without looking at her. He drew the clear liquid up into the outfit and threw the empty balloon over to her. “You want to tie off and go first?” he asked her.

  “I’ll just shoot it into my leg,” she said, and sat up unbuttoning the top button on her jeans and then unzipping them and pulling them down around her ankles. She did not happen to be wearing any underpants, and she saw him sneaking a look at her pubic hair. “Don’t get any big ideas,” she said. “I love the man I’m with, and I don’t sleep with nobody else. I’d fuck you if I felt like it, though. I just don’t happen to feel like it. Gimme that needle,” she said. “I got a favorite vein here on my leg.” She found the vein and punched in, drawing back on the needle until blood showed in the glass tube.

  “Ah,” she said. Here it was, the easy death that had never been far from her hand.

  “Are you gonna shoot?” the Goon asked.

  “Bullshit,” she said, and drew the needle from her leg. She handed it to him and immediately he began to tie off. Jody pulled up her Levi’s. “I think I’ll step aside and let this one go by,” she said, but the Goon wasn’t listening. She opened the door and went out, hoping that Maggie was waiting for her in the production car. But he wasn’t, and so she had to walk all the way back to the motel. It took almost an hour, and by then she was ready for a good night’s sleep.

  TURNAROUND

  This book is for Richard

  “A man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost.”—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  PART ONE: WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD

  CHAPTER ONE

  IT WAS just dawn as the black Porsche stopped with a sputter at the intersection of Mulholland and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The engine was choking spitefully over something, as usual, but Jerry Rexford paid no attention. This was an important moment for him. Until now he had been driving down the length of California, and then the long predawn rolling emptiness of the San Fernando Valley, but from this intersection forward he would be in Hollywood, the mythical kingdom he had dreamed about all his life, the Movie Capital of the World.

  At that moment, the engine died. If it was an omen, Jerry Rexford did not have time to reflect on it, because right then a police car with two young cross-belted cops pulled up to his left. Jerry waited for them to go ahead, but they didn’t. They watched him. His face heating up under its all-night beard, he tried to get the engine started. The car was always skittish, and now seemed to be so carboned up that it would never go. URurURurURurURur. The cops were as silent as dummies in their car. Jerry looked around, realizing that from their viewpoint he was a man behaving in a suspicious manner, in an exclusive residential neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills at five a.m. A stranger in a black Porsche which he obviously did not know how to operate. He could feel the sweat running down his armpits as he twisted the key viciously and tramped once again on the accelerator. If it would only run just a little bit, he could get across the intersection and be on the downhill slope. Then he was sure he could coast all the way to Sunset Boulevard (Sunset Boulevard!) and then let the car have a little rest when he went for something to eat.

  Jerry patted the dashboard. “Come on, honey,” he said, and the engine coughed hesitantly and then, thrum! The tachometer smoothly ran up to 5000 and back down to 2500 RPMs. Jerry realized he had had his left foot pressing the clutch into the floor the whole time. He made sure he was in first gear and slid across the intersection in front of the immobile dummylike police officers and down into Hollywood. As he knew they would, the cops followed him all the way to Sunset. The Porsche, unused to the hairpin turns and long unbanked curves, rippled out a string of explosions into the teeth of the cop car.

  Jerry Rexford called himself a writer, and thought of himself as a writer. When his various jobs made it possible he got up early in the morning and wrote. He wrote short stories, plays, poems, letters, essays, hopeful screenplays and novel fragments. But when the L.A. cops pulled him over and asked him what he did, while they ran him through R&I, and he said, “I’m a writer,” the cop who was leaning against the Porsche tapped his teeth with a ballpoint pen and said, “Write anything lately I might have read?” and Jerry had to say no. “Laborer,” the cop said as he wrote.

  Obviously, R&I had nothing on him. The two cops stood there on the empty boulevard. Finally one of them bent down and said to Jerry, “Well, what the hell are you doing out at this hour?”

  “I just drove down from up north.”

  “We got that. But why?”

  “I’m just starting out,” he said sheepishly. It couldn’t get any worse, he might as well roll over on his back and wave his legs in the air, like a helpless goddamn dog. You got me! You got me! Scoop out my belly and be done with it!

  Aloud, he said, “This is my first day in Hollywood. I’m sorry.”

  The cops grinned at each other knowingly. One said to Jerry, “Hey, don’t have to be sorry. You just wanted to get an early start, huh?”

  The other cop said, “In Hollywood, the early worm gets the bird.”

  Jerry found himself laughing, although squeaking might have been a better word for the sounds coming out of his mouth.

  “That’s a good one, Lew,” the first cop said.

  The other cop, obviously in a good humor now, said, “You proceed west here on Sunset for a few blocks, there’s an all-night place.”

  The other cop said, “Yeah, Schwab’s don’t open for another couple hours,” and snickered.

  Jerry felt himself blushing again. It was true, the damn cop had pinned him, he was headed for Schwab’s, and he hadn’t known it was closed this early. That had all been part of the fantasy, driving down at night and that first hot Hollywood cup of coffee at the famous show business drugstore.

  To add insult to injury, the sarcastic cop, Lew, pointed across the street, where Schwab’s lay closed behind its big windows. “There’s Schwab’s,” he said, and then pointing again, “There’s the Chateau Marmont, there’s Greenblatt’s and over there, see that little park? That used to be the Garden of Allah.”

  “Thanks,” Jerry said. At last rid of the cops he drove slowly down to the twenty-four-hour restaurant, the Porsche silent as a Rolls-Royce. He got out, stretched and went inside. His jockey underwear felt musty between his buttocks as he sat at the long curved counter, but it was too late to grab and pull.

  Well, here I am, goddamn, he thought. The coffee was hot and strong, and cleared the oppressiveness from his head. There were others in the place, Hollywood people, people who got up at this hour routinely, maybe some of them were even in the Business, hell, they have to get to work real early . . . Jerry turned slightly, to look at th
e people in the red booths, and almost the first person he saw, sitting with a couple of other men, was Paul Newman. Jerry turned back and smiled down into his coffee. Seeing Paul Newman sitting there like anybody else, grim over coffee and breakfast, made Jerry’s face turn beet red and made his heart pound, even though he knew damned well it couldn’t actually be Paul Newman. After a sip of coffee, he turned for another peek, and they made eye contact. Those big blue eyes, it had to be Newman! Jerry broke the contact before Newman could break it, and took another sip of coffee, this time getting some of it on his chin and dripping down onto his pants. He sat there awhile frozen over the coffee, waiting for the powerful and unpleasant emotions to die down. What if it was Paul Newman? So what? The man goes to work just like everybody else, probably hates getting up at this hour, morning after morning, just like everybody else, this is Hollywood, the people who work in the movies are going to be around, walking, driving their cars, eating, drinking, buying toothpaste . . . He took another peek. Oh, hell, the man didn’t look like Newman at all. He was too ordinary. He was an ordinary guy who looked a little like Paul Newman. People probably told him that all the time. But why did Jerry feel so overwhelmed, just by seeing supposedly Paul Newman eating breakfast?

  Now that he knew it wasn’t Newman after all, Jerry turned and boldly looked over at the booths. Other people were eating in booths on both sides of the putative Newman, and didn’t even seem to notice the resemblance. Jerry felt completely recovered. Jezus, he thought, I better give some thought to being around these glamorous people . . . Daydreaming, he saw himself in the company of Newman, the real Newman, and being relaxed enough to go over the script with him while in the dim background everybody on the set waited expectantly . . .

  “Hey, Paul!” a voice called out. Here were his two policemen, and Lew was grinning and waving to Paul Newman, who waved back, and Jerry felt himself going into a fugue again, just as Lew turned to him, pointed a finger and cocked his thumb and said, “Glad you could find the place, kid.”

  The two cops took a booth over by the window, and by the time Jerry got up his nerve to peep at Newman again, he and his party were at the cash register.

  “Isn’t he a beauty?” the waitress said to Jerry. “I could just eat him alive.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THAT SAME morning, but a little bit later and a couple of miles west Alexander Hellstrom lay quietly in his huge bed on the third floor of his Bel Air home and watched the ceiling turn pink with the dawn. Hellstrom grinned and stretched luxuriously. He loved to awaken at dawn, to know that he had not missed any of the day. He wiggled his toes and flexed his fingers. The woman next to him made a small sound and curled away, embracing her pillow. Carefully, so as not to disturb her, Hellstrom got out of bed, his feet touching the delicate silk pile of a Shiraz rug, which Hellstrom also liked. In fact, he liked nearly everything about his life, and especially enjoyed his enjoyment of it. “Nothing is too good for Alexander Hellstrom,” he was fond of telling himself.

  In the bathroom, with its hanging ferns and Mexican tiles, this morning’s Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, the Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter were all neatly in place, the newspapers hanging from racks and the trades and Barron’s stacked on the table next to the dark green marbled toilet. After a brief examination of his big handsome face, to see if any poisons had risen to the surface overnight, Alexander dropped the bottoms to his striped silk pajamas and sat, picking up the Wall Street Journal first, to see if anything really important was going on.

  Alexander enjoyed wearing silk pajamas. Women had asked him, more than once, why a man of his inclinations would also wear clothes to bed and he had never once told them the truth, that when he was a child, pajamas and flannel nightgowns in winter had always given him a deep secret pleasure of security, and that he still got a nostalgic coziness from them.

  After twenty minutes or so of relaxed reading, Alexander stepped naked into the shower, five nozzles, malachite tiled walls, gold fixtures, and gave himself a bracing shower, just a bit too cold at first, and then after he had thoroughly soaped himself, a hot sluicing that made his skin ruddy under its heavy workman’s tan.

  He walked back into the bedroom. The girl was just a lump under the coverlet. A tiny snore came from her direction, like the distant humming of bees. It was a nice snore. Some women made horrible noises in their sleep, but not this one. Her name was Teresa di Veccio, a beautiful rich young lady from back East. Alexander had met her a couple of times in New York, and then again last night at a party in Holmby Hills. She had seemed like kind of a snob, with her nose up in the air most of the time and her lovely body concealed in a sensible dress, talking about painters Alexander had never heard of and did not want to hear of, but when he had suggested that she come home with him, promising, “I don’t have a painting in the place worth more’n fifty bucks” (a damn lie), she had nodded modestly and placed her hand in his, trustingly, like a child, and he felt, for the first time that night, a tremendous eroticism. They can always get you with that perfect combination of beauty, innocence and trust, because you know that underneath is the hottest kind of fire.

  Teresa di Veccio. She was probably used to sleeping until noon, and then lying in bed with her tray and her telephone until two or three, and then spending the rest of the day caring for her body or shopping. He wondered what she would think if he just got back into bed and started to fuck her. A lot of women, in Alexander Hellstrom’s experience, did not like to make love in the morning. It made them grumpy to be pawed at and stuck into before their morning coffee. But she had indeed been something else the night before, and Alexander could feel himself swelling into readiness. He pulled the covers away from the girl.

  She looked quite beautiful and innocent, her body childlike except for the knowing delicious swell of her breasts. Her eyes blinked open and her lips parted in a sleepy groan, but before she could ask what was happening, Alexander was on top of her, his big hands on her thighs, pulling them up and apart so that he could stuff himself into her. They both made loud groans at the same moment, and then after only a few collisions, Alexander gave an enormous cry and lay on top of her panting like a man who has just been rescued from drowning.

  “Um, you’re crushing me,” she said after a few moments, but Alexander did not move. As a matter of fact, he was thinking about his morning’s work at the studio. But these thoughts gradually disappeared in the pink mists of another surge of desire, the girl wriggling somewhat helplessly under him, and so they began again, only this time much slower, and together. And this time it was she who began the moaning.

  Later he said, “Do you want to go for a swim?”

  “It’s too early in the morning,” she said, and snuggled down into the covers again.

  “Push that dingus on the bedside table for coffee,” he said, and walked out the French doors naked and down the wrought-iron staircase to the white marble swimming pool, its water pale blue in the morning light.

  ALEXANDER ENJOYED swimming alone in his big pool with its savage tangle of tropical vegetation at one end and the long rolling lawn that smoothly curved around the house and down to the front entrance. He enjoyed it particularly because his first work in Los Angeles years before had been swinging a pick on a swimming pool construction crew, trimming up the rough spots left by the big yellow scooper. It had been a hard job, in blistering sun or downpours of L.A. rain. Those rich people wanted their pools and they wanted them right now. But Alexander had never worked on a pool as beautiful as the one he owned and was floating in the middle of, with just his nose and toes sticking up out of the water.

  Although he could not see them, Alexander knew there were two handsome seal-brown rabbits in the tangle of ferns and shrubbery behind him. The rabbits were not afraid to come out into the open when people were around; to the contrary, they seemed to enjoy company more than Alexander, and had often been photographed hopping around underfoot when the long linen-covere
d tables would be set up on the lawn for a garden party or a benefit luncheon. Alexander himself seldom spent more than a few minutes among his guests at these big flossy affairs, but the rabbits seemed to have fun, and seemed to enjoy being photographed almost as much as the hambones. The rabbits did not have set names, but Alexander could tell them apart by sex, although both were fixed. The male was slightly larger and seemed to get a lot more out of life, frequently jumping straight up in the air or bounding out of the vegetation unexpectedly and then sitting quite still, as if he had been there all the time. The female seemed brighter somehow and more forgiving about the conditions of her life. There was no way to explain to her that Belgian rabbits were bred specifically for meat and fur and that hers was a life of luxury by comparison, that the look in her eyes as she sat sideways panting, comfortable on the lawn, should have been gratitude rather than forgiveness. The male, when he was not having fun, would sometimes strike a pose, his nose up in the air wriggling—rabbits have a fantastic sense of smell—his legs poised for flight if only he would smell the right scent; that seemed almost tragic, as if he knew he was a rabbit, that he was fixed, and that his life would be forever in this luxuriant but somehow arid garden of paradise.