“Anything you’d like to ask me?” I said. A peace offering.
“Yeah, there is. Did I piss you off before?”
“When?”
“When I asked you to stop here before you went to your hotel.”
“You didn’t ask me. You told me.”
He chuckled, amused. “Gotcha. I’ll remember that.”
“See that you do. Anything else you want to know?”
“Yeah. How do you feel about It’s a Wonderful Life?”
I tugged at my ear. “I understand that’s your favorite movie of all time.”
“Because it’s so uplifting,” he said enthusiastically. “I must have seen it two hundred times, and every time I do I sob with joy. It’s definitely what I’ve aspired to with my Badger movies. You’ve seen it?”
“I hate it.”
The color, what little of it there was, drained from his face. “You’re kidding.”
“I am not.”
“B-But how could you?” he sputtered, flabbergasted.
“Because I come from a small town. A real one, not one that’s on a back lot in Culver City. It was a mean, narrow-minded place, and no one lived happily ever after. I fled as soon as I could. That movie takes me back there. I find it depressing.”
“But it’s such a happy movie!”
“It’s a fake movie.”
“No, no, no,” he argued vehemently. “It’s not fake. It’s an ideal. We need our ideals, Meat. They’re vital. Without them, we’d all be lost. Totally lost!”
He got good and worked up. I let him. Because it wasn’t Frank Capra he was defending. It was Matthew Wax. He was answering all of those critics who had blasted his last Badger movie. He was also giving me an excellent self-appraisal of his work.
“I can’t believe you, Meat!” he fumed. “I really can’t. I mean, I’ve never met anyone who said that before!”
“You never met me before.”
He shook his head at me, baffled. “I don’t understand you.”
“I’m something of an acquired taste, like raw oysters.”
“I hate raw oysters,” he snapped. “They taste like snot.”
Lulu sat up at all of this talk of seafood. I glanced at Grandfather’s Rolex. It was past her suppertime back home in New York, where her stomach’s clock was still set. Of course, when it comes to Lulu and seafood, it’s always suppertime somewhere in the world.
I got to my feet and smoothed my trousers. “I’d like to go to my hotel now.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, agreeably. “Hey, you in a hurry?”
“Seldom.”
“Then c’mon,” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “I want to show you something first.”
He bounded off of the set into the darkness beyond. I tagged along, Lulu bringing up the rear. The late day sun was almost blinding after being inside the soundstage. Lulu froze there in the doorway, blinking, until I slipped her shades on for her. Matthew pulled a Western Flyer out of the bike rack and climbed on. I did the same. Then we set off, riding slowly. It was a comfortable ride, what with the padded seat and whitewall balloon tires. Also a familiar one. I’d had one just like it when I was a kid, and deep down inside I’d always preferred it to the jazzy, grown-up ten-speeder I gave it up for. Matthew’s was somewhat small for him. He rode with his knees stuck out, like a kid using his little sister’s bike. But he seemed used to it. Lulu ran up ahead and escorted us, arfing ebulliantly. More hamming.
“Definitely a great dog,” observed Matthew. “She ever do any acting?”
“Every day of her life.”
“I’ve always loved dog pictures. Rin Tin Tin, Lassie. Ever since I was a kid. Lulu would make a perfect star, y’know. She’s got looks, personality. Have you ever considered …?” He trailed off when he noticed the look on my face. “Why are you glaring at me like that, Meat?”
“No reason.” A conspiracy, that’s what this was.
“I’d love to direct one of my own someday,” he went on. And on. “I’ve just never found the right story. Hey, if you come up with an idea, let me know. We could develop it together.”
“I don’t do screenplays,” I said. Because I don’t, and because there’s no greater way to keep a movie person eating out of your hand than to reject them. I’ve never understood why that’s so, but it is.
“Suit yourself.” He seemed disappointed.
But not as disappointed as you-know-who. She slowed up alongside my bike and showed me her teeth. I showed her mine.
The studio was quiet now. It was past five, and many workers had gone home. The few we saw gazed at Matthew with reverence as he rode by. But they didn’t wave or call out to him. And he seemed not to notice them at all. We turned off into Homewood and rode our bikes leisurely along Elm. An odd sensation. I felt like I should be tossing the evening paper onto everyone’s front porch. My first paying job, a few short decades back.
“Tell me about your new movie,” I said, shaking off the memory. “I understand it’s to be another Badger.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I’m picking his story up a few years after he’s graduated from Homewood State. He’s moved out here to L.A. and become a really successful film director—although the critics hated his last picture. Debbie Dale is an actress. The two of them are married, but she’s just left him and taken their baby with her.”
“Sounds somewhat autobiographical,” I observed.
“Yeah, it kind of is,” he said sincerely. “I’m calling it either Badger Goes to Hollywood or Badger All Alone. Which do you like?”
“Neither.”
“God, you’re so negative!” he cried out, chuckling. Then he turned serious. “See, Badger, he’s always had things turn out his way. And now they’re not, and he’s all alone and—”
“Hence the title.”
“Maybe that is a little heavy-handed,” he admitted, glancing over at me. “Johnny’s coming back in it. This is an important picture for him.”
“And what about Pennyroyal?”
“Oh, she’ll still be a presence. Debbie’s constantly in Badger’s thoughts. His dreams, memories. I’ve got footage of her from the first three movies that I never used. Plenty of stuff. She’ll be in it. She has to be.”
“And Trace Washburn?”
“Badger doesn’t need a dad anymore,” he said gruffly. “Badger’s on his own now.”
And Trace was out on his ear. His affair with Pennyroyal was costing Matthew’s one-time leading man plenty.
“And how does it end?” I asked.
“Not happily, Meat,” he revealed. “At least it doesn’t in my current draft. I’m still not a hundred percent sure though. I guess I’m still trying to find it.”
“ ‘The thing that’s important to know,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.’ ”
“Very true,” he agreed. “Who said that?”
“Diane Arbus, shortly before her suicide.”
The town square was shady, and a bit cooler. Matthew pulled up in front of the courthouse and got off his bike and sat down on the courthouse steps, his long legs stretched out before him. I joined him, the steps feeling warm through my trousers. Lulu stretched out languorously on the sidewalk directly before Matthew, preening like a bikini-clad starlet at a big shot’s pool party. It was a truly shameless display. A stern talking-to was definitely called for.
“I really love this place,” Matthew said wistfully, gazing out over the town green to the old white church. Its steeple was still brightly lit by the sun. The rest of it was in shadow. “A lot of good times here, Meat. Good memories.”
I glanced over at him. There was something creepy about the way he’d said it. As if this were an actual town, not a collection of false fronts.
“I’m gonna use it again in my new movie,” he said. “As what it really is—the place where Badger filmed his last hit, before it all went sour for him. He returns here, searching for answers—like Dana And
rews in the bomber junkyard scene in The Best Years of Our Lives. I always loved that scene.” He turned and looked at me. “You really grew up in a town like this?”
“I grew older. I wouldn’t say I grew up.”
He held a freckled hand out to Lulu. She quickly scampered up the steps to him and let him scratch her ears. Me she snubbed. I wasn’t a big-time director. Hell, I didn’t even do screenplays.
“And you?” I asked.
“It wasn’t at all like this.” He shook his semibald head. “Not my old neighborhood. I’ve never been back there, y’know. Not since the day we moved away. That was after Dad died. I’d started working at Panorama. Twenty years. That’s how long it’s been. Not too many good memories of that place. Not any, in fact.”
“Well, that settles that,” I said.
“Settles what, Meat?”
“What we’re doing tomorrow morning, first thing.”
“Do we have to?” he blurted out, like a scared, spoiled kid. “I mean, I’d really rather not.”
“All the more reason to do it.”
His eyes searched my face. “It’s important?”
“It is. Trust me.”
He hesitated, then sighed with resignation. “Okay, Meat. If you say so. We can drive out there. Sure.” He started tearing nervously at his forelock. Abruptly, he stopped himself. “Would you like to read my new script?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Great,” he said, pleased. “I’m curious to hear what you think.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll tell me the truth. Shelley, Sarge and the others—they just tell me what I want to hear. On account of they work for me.”
“So do I,” I pointed out.
“No, you don’t. Not like they do. They depend on me. They’d be lost without me.” He paused, groping for the right words. “It can be a real pain sometimes, having so much say over people’s lives. Nobody’s ever completely straight with me. Not ever.” He looked at me pleadingly. “Will you be, Meat? Please?”
“It will be a pleasure,” I assured him. I wondered if he really wanted the truth, or if he just wanted me to think he did. I didn’t know. I only knew that it would not be a pleasure.
A roar invaded Homewood now. The roar of a motorcycle—a big one, heading our way. It came hard around the corner of Elm, a shiny new Harley Fat Boy, hog of hogs, practically a house on two wheels. A kid with a wild mop of hair was on it. Matthew grinned and waved to him.
The kid grinned back, and pulled up before us with a screech. “Like it?” he called out, revving it.
Matthew gave him two thumbs up.
He revved it again, then shut it off. And then Johnny Forget, Matthew Wax’s troubled young star, climbed off and came over to us. Matthew got up and hugged him. He seemed genuinely glad to see him.
“How are you, Johnny?” he asked. He seemed genuinely concerned, too.
“I’m okay,” Johnny replied in his soft, little boy’s whisper of a voice. “I’m doing okay.”
Johnny Forget wasn’t a little boy anymore. He was twenty-four. But he still came off like one. He was small, about five feet six, and his body and features still seemed softened by baby fat. His angelic good looks remained. The big, soft brown eyes, the full red lips, the shy innocence that made teenaged girls positively melt. He was the same little Johnny, the Johnny who was, for a couple of years, the most photographed celebrity in America, eclipsing even Johnny Depp, Madonna, and Bart Simpson. Clearly, he didn’t want this to be so. He was doing his best to deface himself. His gleaming, matinee idol’s blue-black hair was now a wild mop of Rastafarian dreadlocks, dyed to a garish shade of canary yellow. He wore a nose stud in one nostril, an earring in one earlobe, and a two-day growth of beard. Also blue and purple bruises around his throat, as if someone had tried to throttle him. He had on a black leather motorcycle jacket with all sorts of zippers and buckles, no shirt, torn, faded jeans, and black biker boots. But he was still little Johnny, reeking of Patchouli, the old hippie cologne that smells like a cross between marijuana and spoiled pork.
I hadn’t realized it before—or cared, frankly—but he was also quite obviously a major league boy toy.
“What happened to your throat?” Matthew wondered, as he looked him over.
Johnny stared at him blankly. He seemed a little slow on the uptake, semiglazed, semi-not all there. That’ll happen if you go through a lot of drugs and don’t have a lot of extra brains to begin with. “My what?” he finally said, silently mouthing the words a split second before he said them, as if his voicebox were one beat late clicking in.
“You didn’t crack up your new bike already, did you?” pressed Matthew.
Johnny fingered the bruises on his throat. “Uh … no. Things just got a little rough the other night, y’know?”
“Rough?” Matthew didn’t comprehend.
“At a party,” Johnny explained, giggling dumbly. “With friends, man.”
“Oh, I see,” Matthew said, though I don’t believe he did. Boys didn’t have rough sex with each other in Homewood. Or any other kind of sex with each other. “Say hey to Hoagy. He’s working with me on my book.”
“I’m Johnny, man,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Glad to know you.”
“Likewise.” His hand was soft and plump, like a girl’s. “The vamp over there is Lulu.”
She had moved a safe twenty feet away, from where she eyed Johnny witheringly. She has this thing about colognes. She is intensely allergic to Calvin Klein’s Obsession, for instance. Patchouli she just flat out hates.
“I’ve been leaving messages all over for you,” Matthew said to him. “Where’ve you been?”
Johnny shrugged. “Around,” he replied vaguely. “I didn’t want to hassle you. You got so many hassles.”
“You’re not a hassle, Johnny,” Matthew said, placing his hands on his shoulders. “Stay for dinner, okay? Ma’d love to see you. We can go to Malibu Grand Prix later.”
“Can’t, man.” Johnny glanced back at his bike. “Just wanted you to see it. You really like it?”
It was loaded down with every manner of fender, trim, and ornament there was. A truly gaudy machine. “I really do,” Matthew exclaimed, admiring it.
“Go on and take it for a spin,” Johnny urged him.
Matthew hopped right on, delighted, and started it up. He revved it a few times, enjoying the roar, then went tearing off down Main Street.
Johnny watched him ride off. Then he fished an unfiltered Camel from his jacket pocket, stuck it between his teeth, and lit it with a Bic lighter. He let the smoke out of his nostrils and tossed his brightly colored mop of hair. “It all seems so stupid,” he said, dreamily.
“What does, Johnny?” I asked.
“Life, man. It all seems too stupid.”
“Only because it is.”
He smiled at me. He liked me now—I understood him. Of course, that wasn’t so hard. “Matthew’s the only one.”
“The only one, Johnny?”
“The only person in this world who cares whether I live or die.”
“Your mother doesn’t?” I asked gently.
“I got no mother, man,” he snarled. “The wicked witch is dead.”
I nodded, though I knew this wasn’t strictly accurate. He’d only wounded her in the arm when he shot her. She had dropped the charges in exchange for a cash settlement. “What about your friends?”
That got only a short, derisive snort out of him.
“And your fans? Don’t they care?”
“Fuck them,” he snapped petulantly. He looked down Main. The sound of the Harley was very faint now. “Do you ride?” he asked me.
“Occasionally.”
“A few friends and me, we all ride up into Topanga Canyon. Do some beers and smokes and shooting.”
“Shooting?”
“Semiautomatics, man. I got this AK47 assault rifle that’s major. Totally. I got all kinds of shit—a Colt Sporter, a Tec-9. … They’re like
this real power trip, y’know? Watermelons make the best targets.” He imitated the sound of an exploding melon. It wasn’t pretty. “Gore, man. Totally.”
“Keeping semiautomatics is somewhat frowned upon by the law, isn’t it?” Certainly they would frown in the case of this particular puppy.
“Name one fun thing that isn’t,” he dared me, defiantly.
I let him have that one. “I’d like to interview you for Matthew’s book, Johnny. Where do I get in touch with you?”
I got the vacant stare. “He wants me to talk to you?” he finally asked.
“He does.”
“It’s okay then. If Matthew says so.”
I could hear the motorcycle again. Matthew was on his way back.
“Where do I get in touch with you, Johnny?” I repeated.
He tossed his cigarette aside. “I really don’t like being tied down to any schedule or place, man.”
“I see.” He was starting to get on my nerves. Bright, he wasn’t. He made Matt Dillon look like John Kenneth Galbraith. Not that he wasn’t trying. He was trying real hard—to be tough and nasty and bad. But it was all pose. He was a rebel without a clue, a child star, and if there’s a more fucked-up brand of creature on earth, I’ve yet to come across it. True, he had played Badger convincingly as a wide-eyed kid. But now Matthew was expecting him to play him as an adult—as a famous director who’s going through a serious life crisis, no less. Was Johnny capable of this? I wondered. “How do I contact you, Johnny?” I said, trying it a little louder and a lot slower.
He went bratty on me. “Through my agency, man,” he sneered. “How do you think?”
“Not as well as I once did,” I confessed. “But I try not to let it get me down.”
He tossed his hair and stared at me. “Huh?”
“Forget it.”
Matthew came roaring back up Main Street. Pulled up in front of us, revved the Fat Boy a couple of times, and shut it off. “I want one,” he declared, patting it.
“Take it,” Johnny offered. “It’s yours.”
“I don’t want yours, doofus.” Matthew laughed. “I’ll get my own.”
Johnny swiped at his nose with the back of his hand. “Could I maybe talk to you a second, Matthew?”
The Woman Who Fell From Grace Page 29
