The Boy Who Granted Dreams

by Luca Di Fulvio

  “Joey …”

  “Hey, c’mon’, I was jokin’!”

  35

  Los Angeles, 1926

  When Bill got to California — after driving for a week — it left him speechless. It was even more beautiful than the descriptions Liv had given him back in Detroit. The first thing he noticed was the climate. Bill had grown up in New York, where the winter froze your balls off and the summer was suffocating, humid, and sultry. But in California it was mild and dry, with cool breezes. The second thing he noticed was the light. Instead of the dark low skies of New York, punctuated by skyscrapers, California had an azure vault, clear, high, with starry nights. A pure and sparkling light. That unveiled an endless horizon line, whether you were looking at the Pacific or the Sierra Nevada or the lush Garden of Eden in between. And the ocean itself was a pale blue, not the slimy dark sea that mingled with the waters of the East River or the Hudson. Every color in California, whether it was red or green or blue, was intense, vivid, glowing. But the dominant color of that world was yellow: The yellow that gold miners still sought in the rivers and hills; the yellow sun that warmed every corner; the pale, almost white, yellow of the beaches along the ocean. Not the dark, damp, sticky New York docks, but deep broad expanses of warm and shining sand that ran up into the desolate dunes along the coast highway. And all of nature seemed to arrange itself for this explosion of sun, making orange poppies bloom and multiply, bursting into life overnight, colonizing the dry and well-drained ground, emblems of a fast life with no brakes, no thoughts, no regrets, no uncertainty, no musings on the future. This was how life was supposed to be. Happy. And the people, like the California poppies, wore bright clothes; they ran on the beach, laughed and made love, never worrying about the next day.

  Bill had arrived in California three years ago. And he thought, I’m home. He thought he could be happy in that enchanted kingdom.

  He passed through San Francisco and reached Los Angeles. He would never have imagined a city that stretched so far. He’d slept at the first hotel he came to and he’d asked the owner to point out a tall building where he could rent an apartment. He wanted to look out over the ocean from high up, he wanted to be as close to the sun as he could get. The hotelkeeper told him he had a cousin who rented out apartments on Cahuenga Boulevard. All at street level, in a very nice court, and cheap, too. Bill laughed in his face.

  “I’m rich,” he said, patting the pocket where he had forty-five hundred dollars.

  “Yeah? Well, you run through money pretty fast in L.A.,” the hotelkeeper warned him.

  Bill laughed again. He was feeling like a California poppy. He was starting to bloom and he wanted to feel the sun, that’s all. There wasn’t any tomorrow to be afraid of. Only a today to be celebrated.

  But after two months Bill realized that the wonderful view from his apartment was bleeding him dry. He packed his few things and came back to the hotel.

  “Where’s that place on Cahuenga?” he asked.

  That very evening he took possession of his apartment in the Spanish style court belonging to Mrs. Beverly Ciccone, a woman of fifty, full bodied and with bleached hair, who had inherited the property from her second and now defunct husband, eighty-three year old Tony Ciccone, a Sicilian who had planted an orange grove in the valley and then sold it to a fruit juice factory. And now that she was a widow, as she took pains to emphasize, Mrs. Ciccone had to be on the lookout for fortune hunters, because Los Angeles was just full of them and — to hear her tell it — they’d all love to have a place like the Palermo Apartments. “Just like I loved it first time I saw it,” she said, laughing, causing her huge breasts to bounce. Then she led Bill to his new home.

  The Palermo Apartments was a horseshoe-shaped construction facing Cahuenga Boulevard. You reached it by climbing up three reddish stone steps and passing under an arch that looked like the set for a Mexican village in some Western Bill had seen. A walkway made out of large squares of terrazzo went down the middle, and Mrs. Ciccone had planted rose bushes on either side. Narrow gravel paths led to each apartment’s covered porch.

  Each of the twenty apartments — seven along each of the long sides, two at the corners and four across the end — was composed of a living room just inside the front door, a bathroom and a kitchen tucked into a corner. In the living room there was a sofa bed big enough for two people, an armchair, straw matting on the floor and a table with two chairs. Next to the sofa there was a low piece of furniture that served as a nightstand, and a built-in armoire.

  “If you want a mirror in the bathroom you have to pay in advance; it’s five dollars,” said the widow Ciccone. “The last tenant broke it and then he went off without paying me for it. I certainly can’t afford it.”

  “Well, why should I hafta pay for it?” Bill asked her.

  The busty blonde considered this. “Okey-dokey,” she said, “We’ll each of us pay half and that’s the end of it. Two-fifty.”

  Bill pulled the roll of bills out of his pocket. He paid her four weeks up front and half a mirror. The widow Ciccone couldn’t take her eyes off his roll of dollars. When she came back with the mirror, Bill noticed that now she’d put on lipstick, making herself a heart shaped mouth, and she’d unbuttoned her pink blouse enough to reveal her huge milky breasts overwhelming a bra that matched the blouse. And she’d exchanged the worn slippers she’d had on for sharp-toed high-heeled pumps.

  “Are you an actor, Mr. Fennore?” she asked, fingering her peroxided curls.

  “Naw,” said Bill.

  “But you work for the movies, don’t you?”

  “Naw,” said Bill.

  “Funny …” the widow Ciccone remarked.

  “How come?”

  “Why, everybody in L.A. wants to be in the movies.”

  “Not me.”

  “That’s a shame. You’re a good looking man,” she smiled. “You can call me Beverly, Mr. Fennore. Or just Bev.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then I’ll call you Cochrann,” she said. “Or maybe just … Cock. That’s cute,” and she giggled, putting a hand in front of her mouth.

  Bill didn’t laugh. There was nothing funny about women who talked dirty. “Where can I find a bank?” he asked her.

  “Two blocks down. The manager’s a friend of mine … well, he knows who I am. Just tell him I sent you, Cock,” and the widow left his apartment, wagging her abundant rear end, itself a possible a factor in the premature demise of the late Tony Ciccone.

  Bill shut the door and inspected the apartment unhurriedly. The walls were grimy, with paler rectangles here and there, dark-edged, where pictures had hung sometime in the past.

  The next day he deposited two thousand dollars in the American Savings Bank, kept seventy-seven dollars in cash, and bought a paintbrush and two quarts of paint. He came back to the Palermo and painted the walls. That night the odor inside the apartment was unbearable and Bill slept with the windows wide open, hearing the sounds of Los Angeles as he sprawled on the bed.

  Almost all the tenants of the Palermo Apartments dreamed of working in the movies. The girl in apartment number five, across from Bill’s, had long chestnut curls that she’d tended carefully ever since the death of Olive Thomas in 1920. The girl, Leslie Bizzard — “But my stage name is Leslie Bizz,” she confided to Bill — was sure that Hollywood needed to find an actress to replace the star of The Flapper, who had committed suicide in Paris with a fatal dose of bichloride of mercury after being involved in a drug scandal. Six years had passed since the death of Olive Thomas but Leslie kept on shaping the ringlets that, according to her, gave her an amazing resemblance to the deceased star and guaranteed her success. “You just have to be patient,” she told Bill. In the meantime she worked as a salesgirl in a dress shop. And she waited.

  Alan Rush lived in number seven. He was an ancient arthritic whom all the tenants respected because he’d had bit parts in two Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars.

  There was a lissome lad in number eight, S
ean Lefebre, a dancer and chorus boy who worked in the theater and occasionally in movies. Bill had felt an instant loathing for the little fop. And one evening he saw him come back to his apartment, embracing another man, and then he understood why. The next day he denounced the homosexual to the owner of the Palermo Apartments, telling her he was disgusted. But the widow Ciccone laughed in his face. “L.A. is full of pansies, honey,” she told him. “Grin and bear it, Cock.”

  In number fourteen a heavyset rough man lived, Trevor Lavender, a property man at Fox Film Studios. He despised “artists.” All of them, every single one of them. Because they were weaklings, he said.

  In apartment number sixteen lived Clarisse Horton, a woman of forty who was a hairdresser at Paramount and who was raising her son Jack by herself. Jack was seven years old and the fruit of an occasional adventure with a mysterious movie star whose name Clarisse would never reveal. She said Jack was going to grow up and star in musicals. He took singing lessons, endlessly practicing the same pathetic song about a little boy whose mother ran away one night, abandoning him. Jack would spread out his arms, a stunned look on his face as he gazed towards the horizon, following his mother’s imagined travels, asking himself — in the words of the song — where she had gone and answering that perhaps she had gone to join all the other mommies who had abandoned their children, repented, and come back home. “In search of haapp-i-ness,” said the last line of the song.

  But as time went by, Bill didn’t find the slightest trace of happiness, not for him or for anybody else. Talk about happiness? Nothing but smoke blown in his eyes.

  Bill spent more and more time sleeping. Ruth wasn’t tormenting him any longer. The nightmares had disappeared. Bill’s sleep was lethargic, dense, heavy. He woke up more tired and sleepy than when he’d fallen asleep. He yawned all the time; sometimes he stayed in his pajamas for days, not shaving, not bathing. At the beginning he thought he was doing these things because that was how he’d imagined rich people spending their days. A life without tasks, without schedules, without alarm clocks. A life where you never had to do anything. For a while, he’d felt something that wasn’t happiness, but at least a kind of satisfaction. But then, as time went on, that turned to apathy. And apathy brought him a kind of depression. Dissatisfaction — a hidden dissatisfaction, not yet metabolized — led him to look at the world around him with a total lack of interest. The same world that kept him lying on the sofa bed for hours and hours, finally never bothering to fold it back up. His account with the American Savings Bank was drying up, week after week. And, week after week, Bill put off doing anything about it. By now he knew he wasn’t rich any more. He had to start saving. Starting with food. No more meals at the Mexican restaurant on La Brea. He switched to the sandwich stand at the end of Pico Boulevard, parking his Ford at the corner of Speedway and going to lie on the warm sand, eating his sandwich while he looked vaguely at the ocean. But soon he had to give up the sandwiches from Pico, and he used his Tin Lizzie less and less because he needed to save on gasoline. He started buying his food at the Mexican grocery store, cooking it at home. The widow Ciccone didn’t flash her tits at him anymore, Bill noticed. And she quit calling him Cock.

  The more Bill tightened his belt, the more he felt the old rage returning. And with that rage, slowly, he found himself, along with the anger he distilled a new feeling: envy. A consuming envy for the wealth that kept passing him by on every street corner. He no longer saw the down-and-outers like himself; he no longer noticed the other tenants and their daily miseries. He spent most of his time on Sunset Boulevard, peering at the gated mansions or watching luxurious cars speed past, indifferent to him and the rest of worthless humanity. He’d seen Fatty Arbuckle’s twenty-five thousand dollar Pierce Arrow up close; the cobalt blue McFarlane that had belonged to Wally Reid before he died in the loony bin; Valentino’s Voisin touring car with its radiator cap in the shape of a coiled cobra; Clara Bow’s pink Kissel; Mae Murray’s canary yellow Pierce-Arrow and white Rolls-Royce — with liveried chauffeur; Olga Petroca’s violet Packard; Gloria Swanson’s Lancia with its leopard-skin upholstery — a cloud of Shalimar trailed behind it. And now his old Ford made him sick to his stomach because it was ugly, insignificant, ridiculous. And there on Sunset, Bill understood that every single one of those rich fucks had something he wanted. Day after day, envy blinded him until he believed that everybody, not just the rich fucks, had more than he did.

  Again he made an angry promise to himself: He was going to make a lot of money. He was going to get really rich, whatever it cost him. And the quickest way to do this — now that his American Savings Bank account was flickering low — was to work for the movies.

  And so it was that Bill became a slave to the same dream that had everyone else in Los Angeles in thrall.

  He was full of hope when he came downtown to answer an ad he’d seen in an industry newspaper. The ad said a new production company was looking for personnel. The sound stage was far from the part of town where other studios were, but Bill knew he had to start somewhere to reach his dream of wealth. So he showed up. They hired him as an assistant grip. The pay wasn’t much, but it would let him eat and pay the rent at the Palermo. That was all right for a start. Five days a week.

  “Okay,” said Bill.

  “See you tomorrow,” said the set director.

  “Are we going to make westerns?” Bill asked, smiling.

  “We’re shooting one tomorrow,” set the set director.

  “I like westerns,” said Bill as he was leaving.

  The western Bill worked on lasted twelve minutes. They shot it in a single day. A woman was crossing the desert in a stagecoach. Actually no one ever saw the desert, the camera only framed the interior of the stagecoach, shaken from outside by two persons — one of whom was Bill — to give the idea of movement. The woman raised her skirts, undid her bodice to flaunt two generous white breasts and let herself be fucked by a guy who was traveling with her. The scene lasted seven minutes, including the seduction. Then Indians attacked the coach. The woman survived the attack — which wasn’t shown — and was fucked by the Indian chief, a blond actor with a ridiculous raven wig and some red paint on his face. That scene lasted five minutes.

  “I never seen a western like that,” Bill joked with the property man who was stroking his fly as he gazed at an actress trying on costumes for tomorrow’s film.

  “It takes lots of dough to buy porn footage,” nodded the prop man. “Or a cunt like that one.”

  That evening, returning home, Bill had to accept the notion that the road to Hollywood wasn’t going to be easy. But something else bothered him about the new job. All the men on the set were drooling over the starlets. But Bill couldn’t stand those whores. And he felt intimidated when they looked at him. Because those whores were rich. They had fur coats and jewels, maybe fake — but they acted like they were better than he was. He was sure that nobody in the crew could ever get closer to one of the whores than thinking about her while beating his own meat. Because if you weren’t rich they couldn’t even see you, they wouldn’t even notice you were a human being. They only paid attention to Arty Short, the producer and director of these movies. You could bet Arty Short fucked all of them. Whenever he felt like it.

  But Bill couldn’t quit. He didn’t have a dime left. His survival depended on this job, no matter how crummy it was. And this made him tremble with rage, making him hate those fucking starlets even more.

  Through his anger he could hear Bev Ciccone’s piercing voice from the patio. Bill went to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Behind the widow Ciccone there was a girl, a brunette, with fair skin, nicely dressed, dragging a cardboard suitcase too heavy for her to lift. The girl’s expression was amused, sure of herself. Like all the other girls who came to Hollywood. A look that was going to harden with time. With disappointments. She’d have to grow a thick new skin, like the bark on a tree or a hard crust on bread, to keep between herself and the world if she wanted to su
rvive.

  Another starlet, thought Bill. One more little bitch.

  The girl glimpsed Bill watching her from behind the curtains. Immediately she stood straighter, thrust out her chest and looked in another direction. But Bill thought she’d blushed.

  “Here we are,” Bev Ciccone was saying from the adjacent apartment, perfectly audible through the thin walls. She told her about her late husband Tony Ciccone, the orange grove in the Valley, the fruit juice factory and the fortune hunters who pursued her and her dowry, the Palermo Apartments. “Now if you want a mirror in the bathroom, honey, that’s five dollars in advance,” said the widow, following her script. “The last tenant broke it and had the nerve to leave without paying me. I can’t afford it. You can see that, can’t you, honey?”

  From his living room Bill heard the girl agree without arguing. Her name was Linda Merritt and — surprise, surprise — she was sure she was going to be a big star. She’d left her parents’ farm where she’d grown up and she just knew she was going to get a part in Hollywood right away. Bill flopped onto the sofa bed, not interested in the conversation between the merry widow and the new neighbor until he heard the door close and the scrape of Bev’s slippers on the gravel.

  He got up then and pressed his ear against the wall. He couldn’t have said why. Something he’d seen in the new girl’s eyes. Something like weakness. Or maybe it was the dark hair and fair skin that for an instant in the evening light had reminded Bill of Ruth. He didn’t know why, but suddenly he was curious. He heard her set her suitcase down. Then he listened as she went into the bathroom. Presently, the flush and then a squeak. The springs of the sofa bed in her living room. And then nothing for a whole handful of minutes. As if Linda Merritt were sitting perfectly still. Then suddenly — when Bill was about to go back and sit on the couch — a sob. From out of nowhere. One single sob. Held back. Maybe she put a hand over her mouth to stifle it, thought Bill.