The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  That was all right. These pages, God save the mark, were “keepsies.” The script was now seventeen pages longer. Not every night’s work was half so good, and some of them ended bitterly, with Jerry tearing pages in half and dumping them in the overflowing wastebasket. Jerry looked around himself and saw the mess of his apartment, once again feeling the guilty pressure to clean things up a little, now that he was finished with his work session. But it was too depressing. A man who has had a seventeen-page day deserves better.

  He thought about showering, dressing and going out. The bars were just getting started. But it would cost money. Sighing again, he looked in the refrigerator, removed a beer and popped it open. There were no clean glasses, so he had to gurgle his beer from the can, and got some of the icy sticky liquid down his front. Now it was definitely time to shower.

  No! Now it was time to go swimming!

  A quick sluice, another can of beer, and Jerry felt so good he just wandered out by the pool, a towel firm around his waist. If there was nobody around, he would have a little naked swim for himself.

  But there was a couple on the lawn across the pool, wrapped up in each other, kissing, Jerry imagined. He quickly turned his back and returned to his apartment. His face was hot and he was very angry. Not with himself or even the necking couple. Just angry. He felt primed for action, something, anything but hanging around the clammy apartment staring at his mess (you couldn’t close the door and windows when it got clammy like this, because the place would immediately turn unbearable again).

  Jerry took stock. He was afraid. He was a very fearful person. He was afraid to go into a room full of strangers, like a bar, and he was still afraid of his own patio and pool, which he should not be. All he had to look forward to was six a.m. and the donut shop, a bit of friendly conversation and coffee, up to the office to open early, and settle down to the day’s work. He had tried, for a while, to do his daily stint of writing in the early morning hours, when his mind was freshest, but that left his evenings a great yawning gap between dinner and sleep, a gap he simply could no longer fill with television or reading. So this way was working out better, but there was still a bit of a gap. Working left him tired but jacked up. For a while he had cured this by hitting the whiskey, but there was a horrible side-effect: he would awaken, instead of at five or six, at about three, and be wide awake until dawn. Then he might fall into a light snooze which would produce a string of vivid nightmares. He would waken late for work and off-key for the whole day.

  So now instead of whiskey, he would have a few beers, which helped him over the hump without dashing him awake in the middle of the night.

  Jerry flicked on the television and got a third beer. There were a bunch of Hollywood big shots on a panel show, and he watched them without much interest, except to think that these were the people he hoped to live and work among, these overdressed oafish people with their coiffed hair and braying voices. He hoped to become important among them, and he couldn’t even take a swim in his own pool. But of course it would be different when he had a private pool, and it would be much different when people saw how well he wrote. Then he would have great confidence, and would be able to make his way among these people, go on television, plus his pictures, marry a movie star and become the First Earl of Rexford. “Lord Rexford?”

  “Yes, Pimpleton?”

  “The maid is here to brush your teeth . . .”

  Jerry cackled to himself. He was beginning to feel pleasantly sleepy.

  THE NEXT morning, when he got to the donut shop, it was empty. Jerry was a little disappointed, because he wanted to tell Toby about having a seventeen-page night. Toby could be tremendously encouraging because, sarcastic hipster that he was, he never belittled Jerry’s efforts to become a Hollywood writer, and if Jerry confided to him some piece of news, such as a good night’s work, he eyes would light up and he would say something encouraging, like, “Way to go, man!” or “Hot damn, they’ll have yer star on the Boulevard by Christmas!”

  But no Toby. Maybe he was stuck by a customer over at the dirty bookstore. Most of the customers, Jerry had been told, were furtive and wished to keep the transaction down to dollars and cents, but some of them, knowing they had a captive audience behind the counter, would hang around and burble about their lives while Toby sat dead in his chair, staring glassily into the middle distance, hoping the goddamn bore would finally get the message, pick out his porn and move along.

  “Lonely assholes, most of ’em,” Toby said gloomily.

  Jerry filled his cup from the coffee self-service and smiled at Helen, the tall blonde waitress. She gave him a wonderful smile back and wished him good morning, and went back to her work, cleaning out the big metal container that held the glaze. Jerry stared at her ass for a while, fascinating in tight uniform slacks. At first, he had thought Helen was flirting with him, the way she would look deeply into his eyes when they spoke, and that had been part of why he had looked forward to coming to the donut shop in the mornings—she was the only person in Los Angeles giving him any kind of a tumble. He had feverish daydreams about her.

  But over the days and weeks he came to believe that Helen was a very simple, very direct person, and looking deeply into his eyes only meant that she was paying attention to him, not flirting. Helen was not all that terrifically intelligent, he decided. When she spoke to customers over the donut counter in front, Jerry noticed after a while, she always said the same things in response to the same questions. This was natural. What made it interesting was that she did so freshly, not as if she were bored, or tired of saying the same things, or as if she had memorized every possible response to every simple donut-shop question. No, freshly, brightly, as if she had just heard the question for the first time, and was just thinking up the answer for the first time.

  “Miss, how much are these donuts?”

  She would recite the entire price list, always in the same order and the same manner:

  “Anything with a hole in it is twenty-two cents, jelly donuts are twenty-eight cents, the twists are twenty-two cents and the cinnamon rolls are twenty-two. Holes are twelve cents apiece.”

  “How much are these right here?”

  “Twenty-two cents.”

  “How about these?”

  “Twenty-two cents. Everything with a hole in it is twenty-two cents.”

  “How about this one?”

  “Twenty-two cents.”

  People buying donuts early in the morning were often very picky and indecisive. Some of them were clearly hostile, as if they expected Helen to give them an argument:

  “I’d like a half-dozen donut holes . . .”

  “Oh, with your waistline?”

  But of course she never did, always had a smile for everyone, and sold them their poison cheerfully.

  Now that Jerry was a regular, she took to telling him about her life, her boyfriend and his problems with motorcycles, her animals—Helen lived with her mother on a semi-chicken ranch out in the deep valley—her alarm clock, and her boss, a mystery figure who came in the darkest of night and made all the donuts, vanishing by six a.m., but calling once in a while on the telephone. Every time Helen mentioned her boss she would smile and roll her eyes. Exactly the same every time.

  Jerry stopped fantasizing about Helen one morning at coffee break time, when he was down picking up everybody’s coffee orders from the office. Helen was alone with a man of about forty, dressed like a dude, checked slacks and light tight leather jacket, his white hair curly and hip, his tan dark. Jerry did not like the man immediately, and kept staring at him out of the corner of his eyes while Helen filled his order.

  “The usual?” she asked, and Jerry nodded. Helen could remember “the usual” for a bewildering array of people, so she wasn’t all that dumb.

  The man was talking to Helen about sex. This really bothered Jerry, but he kept his mouth shut.

  “I bet you got a lot of boyfriends,” the man said.

  “Nope,” said Helen, bent o
ver the donut counter. Jerry saw the man ogling her ass and felt like going over there and punching him out. “Watch it, you old fart!” he wanted to snarl, but didn’t.

  “I bet you’ve got all the boys upset,” the man persisted in a kidding tone.

  “I guess so,” Helen said. She was putting Jerry’s order into a cardboard cup-carrier. The man got up and came over to her, reaching out to touch her on the side of the head, saying, “You’ve got the most beautiful head of hair.”

  Jerry was about to push him away, but Helen just stepped behind the counter and the man stumbled forward, and she laughed at him.

  “Better watch your step,” she said cheerfully, and the old gasbag had to sit down again, his face red as a maraschino cherry.

  Helen exchanged a secret look and a wink with Jerry, and Jerry felt a thrill of comradeship.

  SUNDAYS WERE the worst. On Saturday, Jerry could explore Los Angeles, those parts of it he wanted to know about, taking walks along Hollywood Boulevard among the throngs of inhabitants and misguided tourists, happily discovering that the Boulevard had a fine collection of new and used bookstores, from Larry Edmonds’ old shop specializing in Hollywoodiana, to the Cherokee crowded with stacks of old comic books, big-little books and fantasy, occult and science fiction sections. Then there was a Pickwick, a gigantic store with all the new books and a fairly good backlist. Jerry had to be careful shopping, because he would have enjoyed taking home an armload of stuff every time he went out.

  Then there were the hicks in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, gawking at the footprints, pawprints, titprints, etc., seeming less than immortal in the hot afternoon sunlight. Jerry was contemptuous of the tourists; after all, he was now an Angelino himself.

  The Boulevard had a lot of movie theaters on it, and Jerry spent a lot of time in them until finally it became crippling to his work. He would go see a movie, and then all the way home he would compare it to his own screenplay, which would make him sweaty either because what he was doing was so much better or so much worse he felt he was losing his judgment. Pages would get ripped out, or other pages hastily written, Jerry grim and biting his nails as he sat naked on his towel, all to be sacrificed next time he saw another picture.

  So there went going to the movies.

  He liked to walk in downtown Beverly Hills, too, because it seemed like a regular city, with its expensive shops, tall buildings (but not too tall) and beautifully dressed people. It was here that Jerry made the delightful discovery that there was a street in Beverly Hills named Rexford Drive. Someday when he became famous people would say that it was named after him. What about Hayworth Street in Hollywood? Which came first? Rita or the street?

  Naturally, Jerry wanted to meet girls. The ones on Hollywood Boulevard were a little too tough-looking. He had never been a man who could pick up a girl on the street, although he had not realized this fact until now. In Beverly Hills, where the women were extravagantly beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful women Jerry had ever seen, they would not even look at him. There was no eye contact with these lovely rich young women, who had nothing to do all day but shop and be picked up in their limos and go play tennis. There was no friendly banter in the stores, either. Jerry was used to having good relations with the girls who worked behind the counters of stores, but here in Beverly Hills they took one look at him and moved off. The trouble was, Jerry did not look rich. Finally he decided that downtown Beverly Hills was crass, and it was no longer fun to go there.

  There were places to go in his Porsche, drives to be taken in the hills, or to places he had heard about all his life but never seen, like Capistrano or Palm Springs, but after a while he had seen all he could see from the car, and it was no fun hanging around without anybody to talk to. And the Porsche was acting up. It did not like Southern California at all, and hated the drive from Jerry’s apartment to the Boulevard, always carboning up and threatening to stop dead in the middle of the street.

  Jerry took it in to the repair place at Wilshire and Doheney, sitting with his hands between his legs in the big hangarlike garage watching the mechanics working on Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Finally somebody looked into his car, and Jerry started to get up and go over to find out what was the trouble, but in roared a long expensive automobile, and a rich man jumped out, and Jerry’s mechanic left the Porsche with its back obscenely open and ran to make jokes with the rich man. Jerry sat and boiled. An hour later they told him his car was okay, nothing wrong with it.

  “Take the sumbitch out and open ’er up once in a while,” he was told. He had been driving too conservatively.

  But Sundays were the absolute worst, because all he had to do on Sundays was sit in his apartment wishing he had the guts to go outside and make friends. Sundays were all for nothing, with the added pressure of Monday coming.

  Gradually, his loneliness began to turn inward, in the form of self-dislike. He began to question his life-plan, his ambitions in the movie business. He read the trades, he knew things were whirling on all around him, pictures were being made, men and women younger than Jerry finding themselves in the headlines for their accomplishments, while Jerry pecked and edited his life away at Pet Care Hotline. As for the screenplay he was writing so faithfully, what was it but a bunch of imitations, the same old whore of a plot with not even new clothes? It was a hunk of garbage, Jerry would think, lying miserably on his couch, dressed in his shorts and drinking beer. He should go over and throw it into the garbage sack.

  Sometimes he would actually do it, and then feeling silly, take it back out and put it on the table. More than once this led him into a guilt storm of activity, and he would clean the apartment from one end to the other.

  What a life!

  “How did you make out with Adams, Ray & Rosenberg?” Toby asked him one Monday morning as they sat enjoying their coffee.

  “Same as everybody else,” Jerry said. “They’d be glad to see my screenplay when it’s finished . . .”

  “You talk to one of the boys?”

  “No,” Jerry admitted. “Just the girl at the door.”

  “Fuckers,” Toby said, but not as if he were surprised. Toby seemed to think that a good agent should be able to tell from Jerry’s sincerity that he would soon be a hot property, a surprisingly naive attitude considering its source.

  “I’m not so sure I’m all that sincere,” Jerry said. “Maybe I just want to score the big bucks like anybody else . . .”

  Toby was amused. “Yeah, that’s what I mean by sincere.”

  Jerry had come to realize that Toby was his only friend in Los Angeles, but even so, he was shy about asking him out for a drink, or even spending time with him at work, in the twenty-four-hour dirty bookstore. Toby did not mind, but Jerry imagined the customers were put off by having a man in a suit and tie standing there while they roamed among the pornography. So they saw one another only during the fifteen minutes or so in the morning when Toby would put the “BACK IN 10 MIN” sign on his door and duck out for coffee.

  ON THIS particular morning, Toby was in rare good humor.

  “Just the man I wanted to see,” he said, and patted the stool next to him. There was nobody else in the place except Helen, who was refilling the Orange Whip machine, but Toby looked around conspiratorially, and pulled a magazine from under his newspaper. Jerry moved to look at it, but Toby said, “Back off for a minute,” and riffled the pages rapidly until getting the one he wanted. Then he pressed the magazine to the counter and said, “Okay, have a look . .”

  Jerry looked, did a take, and looked again.

  “Who does that look like to you?”

  “It’s Elektra Soong, isn’t it?”

  Toby’s eyes wrinkled with cynical amusement. “Elektra Soong in a dirty magazine? With her ass up in the air?”

  Jerry looked again. Elektra Soong had been on the cover of Rolling Stone a couple of issues back, with her boyfriend Richard Heidelberg. Jerry remembered that he and Toby had lusted over her photographs inside, and Toby had des
cribed her as “prime pussy.” Jerry had to agree. Now, looking at the semipornographic photograph, he could not help but think he was looking at Elektra Soong—badly photographed and obscene. “Good God,” he said.

  “How much would you bet?” Toby teased.

  “God, nothing. This picture could have been taken, you know, before she . . .” Jerry was not sure what he wanted to say.

  “Before she made the big time, huh?”

  “Yes. What a shame, to have it published now . . .”

  “Shit, half the stars in Hollywood have pictures like this in the closet somewhere . . . but this ain’t Elektra Soong.”

  Jerry said just the right thing: “Well, she looks enough like her to be her sister . . .”

  Toby laughed wildly. “Yer close! Yer close!” Dramatically he opened the magazine and showed the rest of the photo layout, the headlines, the text. Jerry’s skin went cold. The photo he had felt deliciously lustful over had been that of a man. A man who was the spit and image of Elektra Soong, but nevertheless a man. Jerry felt immediately furious at Toby for trapping him like this.

  “Don’t lose your cool,” Toby said, “I fell for it, too. This is Elektra’s brother, kid brother . . .”

  “How do you know?” Jerry asked. “The name here is Karol Dupont.”

  “Would I waste your time with this crap? I met her, last night at a party.”

  “Her?”

  “By courtesy,” Toby said. “A bunch of drag queens at this party up in the hills, and she was there. I got to talkin’ to her, nice bitch. Crazy about her sister.”

  “What’s this got to do with me?” Jerry said a bit stiffly.

  “Nothin’, only this could be your connection, don’t you get it?”

  “My connection?”

  “Yeah. Karol’s in touch with her sister, her sister’s livin’ with Rick Heidelberg. I know Karol, you know me . . . get the picture?”

  It made Jerry a little dizzy, but he got the picture. “You can’t be serious,” he said, but looking into Toby’s feverish eyes, he knew that Toby was serious, and thought he was being a great help.