by John Shannon
“I once had a birthday party, I think I was eleven, and she flounced all around the house in that blue satin ball dress they’d all seen in Time of Trial. Nobody even remembered me at my own party, and even my best friend couldn’t understand why I was getting so mad. And later I’d have a boy over and she’d come in with some shirt unbuttoned down to her belly button and bend over to give him a Coke. Dad couldn’t take it and he was gone by the time I was four. He was no angel, but he didn’t have to own the fillings out of your teeth. I can’t even listen to her talk, you know? I can’t listen to one goddamn word without hearing the subtext screaming at me, ‘Look at me, Look at me, Look at me!’
“Yeah, she’s insecure, sure, but I get tired of making excuses. Some insecure people are modest or quiet or generous. I’d like to be modest and generous, but she’s made me what I am now. I had to scream and fight and grab for any space at all in the world. She would have crowded me right off the edge of the goddamn planet.”
The food came and Lee Borowsky tore into it as if she’d been starving for days. The coffee was only tolerable, but even that gave him a little rush of pleasure.
“She didn’t seem insecure to me,” he said.
“She’s an actress, you berk. What do you think? She’s played Catherine the Great, she can’t fool you about something like that? You don’t really have a clue.”
His mental image of Lori Bright hadn’t shifted much, but it had grown fuzzier at the edge, as if preparing to move when more evidence was in. It was amazing what a second viewpoint could do to what you thought you knew of someone. He figured the daughter was overstating, caricaturing her mother because of a thousand resentments, but there was probably truth there, too.
“Actually, I was always surprised they didn’t put the famous horse in that movie. Mom would have loved that.”
“That’s a folk myth,” he said. “Catherine the Great didn’t die trying to screw a horse. She died of a stroke.”
Lee Borowsky wagged her fork in the air like a conductor’s baton. “Some things should be true and that’s that, man. It’s just like this town. All those stories of old Hollywood that I’ve heard ad nauseam, blah-blah-blah. Gable and Lombard falling in love and Bogie and his first wife punching each other up on their yacht and Tracy and Hepburn not being able to marry, and Rosebud being the pet name for Marion Davies’s clitoris, and the one-way mirrors on Errol Flynn’s ceilings, and Steve McQueen doing his own motorcycle stunts in The Great Escape, which I know for a fact is bullshit, I’ve met his stuntman. Who knows what’s true? It’s a kind of epistemology of lies, and it’s all about people whose careers are a kind of telling lies about who they are every day. I can’t deal with any of it anymore.”
“You don’t look much like your mom, either.”
She met his eyes fiercely, as if wondering why he’d said that. “I’m adopted, didn’t she tell you?”
He hadn’t known, but she seemed to find his nonresponse acceptable.
“Don’t start making a big deal out of it. I don’t like the great Lori Bright very much, I don’t like who she is and what she did to me, and I reject her as a real mom, but she’s still my mom, you know? I think at a certain age she got a whim that she was missing out on being a mother, or one of her publicists told her she ought to be a mom for the sake of the great unwashed in Dubuque, and I was the most painless way of doing it, without losing her figure, and then she just kind of lost interest in the whole thing and turned me over to nursemaids and au pairs. But she chose me and every once in a while she took an interest in me and I’m not about to try to hunt down some bitch who abandoned me.”
“That’s pretty harsh on everyone concerned.”
She shrugged. “I bend my eye on vacancy and with the incorporeal air do hold discourse.”
“Lear?”
“In a girls’ school you get to do ridiculous things like that. I played a lot of male parts, but I wasn’t much good.”
“It’s not the gender. Nobody in high school has seen enough of life to do Lear.”
“Everything’s accelerating, old man. Our first mortal sins are at six now, big betrayals at eight, dark night of the soul at ten, world-weary cynicism by twelve, and deathbed repentance at fourteen.”
He laughed. “I think I can picture it. A couple of dry martinis and then storytime before bed.”
She laughed, too. “Oh, I’ll bet Mom’s fallen for you. You’re just too tasty, as she’d say.”
But she didn’t follow it up. She regained her interest in the hash browns and began shoveling.
“We have to negotiate,” he said finally. “I won’t drag you home right away if you call your mom and talk to her, and you’ve got to give the money back. If it’s for the movie, ask her for it and I’ll argue your case. Will you give me your word not to make a run for it?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die?”
“Something like that.”
She laughed and shook her head in disbelief. “Men are amazing. What makes you think, if I’m willing to make up an extortion scheme and run away from home, you’ll compel me to be honest by making me say a few magic words?”
“It’s what my computer friends call waving a dead chicken at the problem. You know it won’t really do any good, but you hope.”
“That’s a good one,” she said. “The chicken.”
The waitress left the bill on its little brown tray and he put a twenty on it.
“Don’t cha use plastic, old man?”
“All my money’s tied up in cash,” he said.
15
CAUGHT IN THE CROSS FIRE
AS HE HEADED SOUTH A BIG GRASSHOPPER CRANE SWUNG A truss high on the hills above the Sepulveda Pass. The concrete slabs and granite of the Getty Center abuilding up there looked like a giant burst lunch box dropped from outer space. Textures and styles waged their edgy war above the 405 and he found all that fashionable disquiet suddenly edifying. It made him think of Lee Borowsky in a new way. Maybe she was the true postmodern child, the girl who was just too restless and energetic to adopt any one sensibility. Lee had been a fizz of attention, deadly earnest one moment, then refusing to be taken the least bit seriously, skating over the surfaces of modern thought and quoting all her ideas out of their proper scale like the boasts of little children. She insisted on her right to her own postures and her art, but she never let herself be questioned because she refused to plant herself in a place where she could be wrong. Nothing had a frame of reference and nothing evolved, nothing ever grew up gradually. He wondered if all the kids were that way now, if it was the only way to adapt to circumstances when the circumstances went out of control.
He was getting old, he decided. He was out of sorts with the time.
• • •
ABOUT Wilshire Boulevard, he noticed the pickup following him down the freeway. Two heads were silhouetted in the cab. He recognized the rope lashing down the hood and figured they must have picked him up at Lee’s. The one with the zigzag tattoos had boasted he knew where Lee lived, but he didn’t figure they had it in them to go this far out of the way for revenge. He changed lanes a few times, and they were too stupid not to do the same.
It was a wrinkle he didn’t like very much and he stopped at a busy supermarket and ran in. They were waiting in the pickup, two rows over, when he came out with a small bag, but he knew how not to look. They followed him again as he drove up to Ridge Glen in the Windsor Hills and parked behind the green Explorer as if he belonged there.
Jack Liffey carried his bag up the lawn and noticed the screen door was shut but the door within was open. “Stay inside, Tyrone,” he said softly. “You’ll want to hear this.”
He sat on the glide and kicked lightly to set it going. A little wind ruffled the peppertrees and filled the street with their sweet smell. The pickup parked on the street below and the two got out and stared. It was the tattooed duo, all right, still in strap undershirts to show off all the blue tracery.
They strode up the lawn
but then seemed to lose confidence and waited facing the porch.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he said.
They seemed disconcerted by his calm.
“Fuck you. We goin’ to paradise, you and us.” It was the one with the South Seas tracery. The zigzag one had always been quieter.
“Last time we met down in Orange County,” Jack Liffey said, “you were starting to tell me about a young black woman you knew in high school, but we were interrupted.”
His eyes puzzled over it for a moment. “Oh, yeah, Tamille Hudson. She was one stuck-up nigger, I tell you. We both remember her, huh?”
Zigzag nodded once. He probably remembered the auto-mag in his mouth, too, and he didn’t seem to feel like chitchatting.
“That one thought she was as good as a white bitch. She got all A’s and she talked like she had a plum in her mouth. If you heard her on the phone, you couldn’t even tell she was colored. When she started dating that white boy, we had to teach her a lesson.” He snickered. “We said we was his friends and we took her in the car up to the reservoir. We made her read poetry and she didn’t mind that so much, but she objected when we gave her some white-power stuff we got and we had to force her to read it aloud and put some feeling into it.” He chuckled a bit. “She had a real problem saying the word ‘nigger’ with enough abomination.”
Jack Liffey heard a faint noise from inside the house, and he hoped Pennycooke held off a little.
“We figured she’d actually be pretty if she wasn’t a nigger. Like you just take a pretty girl, all normal, and dip her in ink, she still looks pretty good, you know? But you just can’t shine shit, huh? Still, she had all the apparatus, and we made her take her clothes off and do both of us and we said we’d get her and her boyfriend both if she told on us. She ain’t been so nearly stuck-up since. Dropped her white boy, too, and went back to her own kind, the way it ought to be.”
The screen door slapped open, and the boys’ eyes went wide. “Whoa!”
Jack Liffey glanced at Tyrone Pennycooke out of the corner of his eye. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking as flamboyant as he’d ever seen him with black-and-white-striped bell-bottom pants, a yellow flowered shirt, and a bright green vest with a matching puffed-up billed cap. He made a sucking noise through his teeth, like a rattlesnake warming up.
“I want you to meet my friend Tyrone,” Jack Liffey said.
“What I want ask you naow, bwoys, you tink you de true baldheads of Babylon?”
Almost like a reflex, the boys went into their martial-arts stance, bowlegged and elbows out, side by side. They shouted in unison and yanked on an imaginary bar over their heads. “I’m a proud white Aryan warrior!”
Heads snapped left, their tongues came out, heads snapped to the front, arms flailed up and down.
“Protect our blood! Protect our culture! Protect our folk!”
They stamped one leg, then the other, snapped their heads up and down, and Pennycooke just waited, watching coolly, as the dance and chant carried on and on. Jack Liffey decided it was the oddest minute and half he’d ever lived through, and he didn’t want it ever to end.
“Death to the mud people!”
Tyrone Pennycooke must have guessed they were winding down, because he reached into the waistband behind his back and came out with his big clumsy-looking Webley-Fosbury pistol.
“Dat’s enough naow. I-an’-I penetrate de simple concep dat you two baldheads tink you is ugly bad, you is steppin’ razors; and you got you a karate of de great white spirit. Well, I-an’-I got de karate of de people.” He gestured with the pistol. “Time for you two to forward up hyere.”
Jack Liffey took the six-pack of Vernor’s ginger ale out of the paper bag and set it on the end of the glide. “It’s the best I could do.”
The Jamaican almost smiled when he saw it.
“I think you and I could probably make a separate peace,” Jack Liffey said.
“Blessings, I don’t tink so, but I going to be busy right now. You listen me, bwoys, you step up hyere or I shoot you where you stan.”
They were starting to look worried. Jack Liffey gave them a wave and headed for his car. As much as he wanted to stick around, he needed to get to Musso and Frank’s by noon.
• • •
“IT’S for G. Dan,” Jack Liffey said to the tall headwaiter in the red toreador jacket as he handed him the envelope with a folded-up chunk of the morning paper in it.
The only guy sitting alone over on the left looked like Humpty-Dumpty, with broad green suspenders over a white shirt to show he wasn’t embarrassed about the paunch, but the guy might not have been Hunt.
Musso and Frank’s was all dark wood and snug booths in red leather and overcooked English grill food. It had been around since 1919, which was ancient by L.A. standards, but in L.A., ancient only really meant before Technicolor. The place was fancy enough to be discreet with celebrities of all kinds and the headwaiter had second thoughts, but Jack Liffey had nodded in roughly the right direction, so he delivered the envelope.
Jack Liffey followed it over. “Don’t bother. There’s nothing inside but the stock reports.” He sat as Hunt set his knife and fork delicately beside a chopped salad that had been neatly sliced and diced. He remembered reading that the French thought it a cardinal sin for metal to touch salad ingredients, but nothing French had ever been within miles of Musso’s.
“You can probably guess I’m Jack Liffey.”
“Probably.”
The waiter came back and hovered. “Is everything all right, Mr. Hunt?”
“Yeah. Scram.”
They watched each other for a while. Nearby, a TV sports reporter he vaguely recognized was entertaining two stunning blondes and a little boy.
“Want a ginger ale?” G. Dan Hunt asked with a shadow of a smirk.
“I just left your boy administering that very beverage to some other guys.”
“No kidding?”
“Long ago I used to read about Dan Hunt and Jimmy Frattiano,” Jack Liffey said, “but you’re too young to have hung out with Mickey Cohen.”
“That was my dad. Daniel, Dan the Man. Him and Hooky Rothman and Slick Snyder and Jimmy ‘the Weasel’ Frattiano and Happy Meltzer. That was another era, for sure. They hung out at the men’s shop Mickey ran, Michael’s Exclusive up on Sunset, that was a bookie in back. But mostly I remember the Carousel, the ice-cream store he had later over in Brentwood. The ice-cream guy pushed a button if you were a friend and you went through a door by the drinking fountain into the betting there, too. I was eight or nine and I thought all ice-cream parlors had a place in back where guys talked about nags a lot. My dad watched over the Mick some of the time.”
“Must have had the night off when they blew up the front of his house.”
“Where were you then?”
“About that time my dad was lugging crates off freighters down in San Pedro.”
Humpty-Dumpty nodded thoughtfully. “Too bad about this coast. Now, in New York you could always buy crates of stuff cheap that ‘fell off the pallets.’ You could never touch stuff out here. Too many fuckin’ commies in the union.”
He went back to eating. “It’s your dime, Liffey.”
“I find missing kids. That’s all I do. I came in the front door of this thing looking for the fifteen-year-old daughter of Lori Bright, who I think you’ve heard of. That’s all I’m here for. The cops keep dropping broad hints that there’s a shooting war going on between a little company called PropellorHeads and your friends at Mitsuko-Monogram. You may find it hard to believe, but I just got caught in the cross fire.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “You were smoking a little cigar, wore a Mexican blanket, rode your mule into the pueblito, and people started shooting from all the windows.”
“Something like that.”
“So?”
“I was hoping we could declare peace. You could call off the reggae band and we could all walk away clean.”
“What’s in it
for my client?”
“My goodwill.”
Hunt snorted. “That ought to get them laying on extra shifts in Nagoya.”
“I know it’s a little like a flea saying he can bring down an elephant, but I can cause a lot of trouble. For Mitsuko and for you personally.”
The utensils stopped moving. “You don’t want to start with the threats, believe me.”
“I just want to be left alone.”
The eyes came up and rested. There was something a little crazy in them, bright specks in the brown. “First, guy, I’d have to believe you’re pure as the driven snow. Second, I’d have to care whether you get squashed in the fuss or not. I don’t give big odds at the dog track on neither one. Now, if you ain’t gone from here before the fish course, I get Mr. Winston over there and his pals to toss you into the alley.”
The headwaiter was watching the table like a hawk.
Jack Liffey rose. “I’ll tell Mitsuko you had a chance to head off all their trouble.”
“You do that.”
HE went straight to a pay phone down the street on Hollywood Boulevard. As he dug out change a couple of loungers came forward from the shadows of a shop that sold T-shirts and trinkets.
“Dime bag?”
“Want a date?”
He just shook his head.
“Hey, that you, Admiral? That business we were talking about earlier? You go right ahead. Rock-and-roll.”
He hung up and turned to the redhead with the buckteeth who was still watching him.
“Sorry. You can have your office back.”
16
A DAMAGED REALITY
ON THE WAY TO PROPELLORHEADS THE NEXT DAY, HIS EYE WAS caught by a shop on Little Santa Monica called Dirty Lingerie. A long line of women snaked away down the block under a banner: YOUR FAVORITE SOAP HUNK SIGNS YOUR BRA. A woman at the head of the line fled, squealing happily, and a fortyish matron stepped forward to a card table on the sidewalk and tugged a sweater up to reveal a thick white bra. A young man in a muscle shirt leaned forward with a Magic Marker to ask something and then write on her breast. Two other young men stood beside him, all with the dark chiseled sort of looks you saw in Esquire ads, signing away as women unbuttoned their blouses and bent forward with no apparent reticence. We’re back to the postmodern, he thought.
