“I dread the day you stop asking me questions. Why are you watching Japanese horror movies?”
“Mr. Miller, he’s my drama teacher, he tells us to watch all sorts of stuff. Movies, old TV shows, even commercials. We’re supposed to look at a lot of different ways people approach acting, and see if we can figure out what works and what doesn’t, and why.”
“Old TV shows?”
“Millions of them. TV’s like a time machine. You can see how people acted all the way back in the fifties or the sixties. You know, like Lucy. Would Lucy get hired today?”
“If she wouldn’t,” I said, “I’m in a world I don’t want to live in.”
“Me, too. And the woman upstairs, Ethel. I wish we had a neighbor like Ethel.”
“I’ll bet if you stir that thing, you’ll be able to drink it through the straw.”
“That’s no fun,” she said, dragging the straw through it again.
“Have you ever watched a show, I don’t know the name of it, with a little girl in it named Thistle Downing?”
“Oh, my God,” Rina said, her face lighting up. “ ‘Once a Witch.’ Thistle Downing is like the queen of the world. We’re doing a unit on comedy right now, and Mr. Miller assigned us to watch her and see why comedy is funnier when it’s played completely seriously.”
“And you liked her.”
“Well yeah.” She just managed not to roll her eyes at the question. “She makes it look easy even when you know it’s like the hardest thing in the world. And she was a really serious girl.”
“You think so?”
She considered it for a moment, her eyes on the malt. “I think she was serious, yeah, but that’s not exactly right. It was more like she was sad. You can see it sometimes, in the shows when she got a little older. When she was really little, it was like she didn’t even know she was acting. Later, she sort of got a bunch of technique and she stopped showing you who she was underneath, but she looked sadder. I think I liked her best when she was younger. But I’ll bet she was sad, even when she was a big star.”
“You’re a perceptive kid,” I said.
Rina shook her head. “You know, Dad, only adults think of kids as kids.”
“Yeah? What do kids think of kids as?”
“People,” Rina said.
15
Camelot Arms
In 1996, Li Bai Chen, an eighteen-year-old in Fujian, China, gave a few hard-earned yuan to a street vendor to buy a DVD that he thought was a bootleg of Rush Hour, starring Jackie Chan. When he got it home, it turned out instead to be a movie from the 1950s about a kid whose parents didn’t understand him. The kid smoked cigarettes, wore a red jacket, combed his long hair back with his fingers, and at one point screamed at his parents, “You’re tearing me apart!”
And he ripped out Li Bai Chen’s heart. The kid in the movie had everything a Chinese teenage boy could want: the courage to rebel, an endless supply of smokes, that red jacket, cheekbones that could cut glass, and Natalie Wood.
Twenty-six months later, Li Bai Chen was in Los Angeles. He’d gotten work with a snakehead outfit that smuggled Chinese immigrants into Meiguo, or America, and then he’d gone ashore to deliver the human cargo and prevent them from running away. Once everything was in order, he ran away himself. He had no English and no marketable skills, so he decided to hide in plain sight. He changed his name to Ding Ji Ming and joined a Chinese gang in New York. Chinese names are written with the surname first, but if you wrote Bai Chen’s new name in the Western fashion, first names first, it would be Ji Ming Ding, which was as close as he could get in Mandarin to Jimmy Dean.
Ji Ming, who preferred to be called “Jimmy,” applied himself in the energetic manner of so many Chinese immigrants and rose quickly through the ranks. He spent five hours a day learning English during the time when most people would be sleeping, and got himself promoted to what, in a different kind of business, would probably be called the L.A. office. I ran into him in 2004, when we accidentally burgled the same house. In part because I gave him right of way, so to speak, and in part because I’m something of a James Dean freak myself, we became friends. We’d sit around together smoking, drinking beer, and reciting lines from the handful of movies Dean filmed before he crushed himself to death in his Porsche roadster. One evening I found-in the house of a producer whose burdensome load of material possessions I’d been sent to lighten-a videotape of one of Dean’s first television roles, as a farmer’s son in a 1953 drama called “Harvest.” I gave it to Jimmy. Two days later, I woke up to find a vintage Porsche parked in my driveway with a bow around it and a red jacket neatly folded on the front seat. I was still living with Kathy then-Rina was only five-and this was precisely the kind of episode that made my wife wonder whether she’d made a wise marital choice.
I met Jimmy in Hollywood a couple of hours after taking Rina home, and the two of us jammed into the inevitable Porsche and took three or four turns around Thistle’s apartment house. The Camelot Arms was a half-timbered, half-derelict, pathetically wannabe Tudor building with a few broken windows. It was in an area off Romaine that couldn’t decide whether it was going up or down, although I’d have bet on up. It couldn’t go much farther down.
“Only one way out,” I said, looking at the door.
“Man,” Jimmy said in the hipster English he insisted on using. “When you’re living in a place like that, ain’t no way out.”
“Stifle the film-noir metaphysics, okay? See that door? Practically speaking, if she’s going to come out, she’s going to come out there.”
“And if she does?” Jimmy lit a cigarette. He thought smoking made him look more like the other Jimmy Dean. He’d learned to let the butt dangle from his lips and grin around it in a way that made his cheekbones jump out. With his hair combed back and that ciggie-centered grin, he looked about as much like James Dean as it was possible for a young Chinese gangster to look.
“She comes out, you call me,” I said. “If she’s alone, stick with her and stay on the phone. I’m going to sleep in Hollywood tonight, so I can be with you in eight or ten minutes. If it looks like trouble, if she’s resisting or something, go point your gun at them.”
“Seven-fifty if I have to do that.”
“Fine. If it’s anything you don’t think you can handle, just stick with them until I’m there, and I’ll work it out.” I gave him the scrap of canvas Trey had cut from the painting. “If you see this guy, call me instantly, before he even gets into the building. Clear?”
Jimmy looked down at the picture and gave me a James Dean shrug, full of pained cool. “What’s not to be clear?” he asked.
One of my storage facilities was in Hollywood, so I swung by and dropped off Bunny’s necklace. Even with Rabbits still out of town, I was more comfortable without it in my pocket.
Storage facilities are indispensable to burglars. You need someplace to park stuff while it cools off or while you look for the right fence. Most of the time, I didn’t have to deal with fences because I worked on assignment, but from time to time something extra fell into my hands, much as Bunny Stennet’s necklace had. This storage space was a small one, just a four-by-six, in the name of Wyatt Gwyon, who is the hero, or at least the central character, of The Recognitions. I had a phony driver’s license in Wyatt’s name, which I figured was appropriate, since he’s an art forger, and I’d given it to the manager of the facility when I leased the space.
Here’s a trick in case you ever need to lease a storage space under a different name. First, master the simplest of all sleight-of hands maneuvers, the card switch, where you hold two cards in your hand, one hidden below the other so that the mark thinks you have only one. The entire trick consists of swapping the top one for the bottom one while you divert the mark’s attention. A lobster could do it, and they don’t even have palms. Second, when you make up your fake ID, buy a really stupid-looking wig and wear it in the photo. Third, for the second fake ID (you’re going to need two), choose someone on Flickr o
r another image site who looks a little like you, and photo-shop the stupid wig onto him or her. When you lease the space, wear the wig. The manager will ask for identification, and you flash the ID with your real photo, with the other license hidden behind it. Then do the swap before the manager photocopies it. If he glances at the photocopy, all he’ll see is the stupid hair. Someday you might hit a streak of bad luck and the cops could show up. What they’ll find is a storage unit that was leased by someone with a different name and a different face than yours. And stupid hair.
My king-size bed for the night was in The Hillsider, an anonymous mid-scale motel on Highland, north of Hollywood Boulevard, at the foot of the long uphill to the Cahuenga Pass. The room I got didn’t have a rear exit, but there was a back window I could have squeezed through in an emergency. The driveway opened directly onto Highland, and it was about a six-minute drive, even in traffic, to the Camelot Arms. It was only about 8:00 when I checked in, and I was hungry. I drove down to Hollywood Boulevard and parked behind Cherokee Books. Ten minutes later I had a well-worn copy of Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler’s wonderful book about China, under my left arm and was on the sidewalk, dodging panhandlers and heading for Musso and Frank, one of the oldest and most dependable restaurants in Los Angeles. I’d already read about half of Hessler’s book, but the copy I owned was all the way out in the Valley, at the Snor-Mor, and I couldn’t take a chance on being that far from Thistle’s apartment.
Oracle Bones was one of the books I’d been led to by The Dream of the Red Chamber, and it was proving to be one of the best. I managed to stretch dinner into a couple of hours, barely noticing what I was eating as I followed the sweep of Chinese history over 5,000 remarkably rocky years. The whole time I was in the restaurant, I never once thought about Thistle Downing.
Well, almost never.
Since Kathy and I broke up, this has pretty much been my life: sleep in motels and eat in restaurants, with books for company. It wasn’t as bad as it probably sounds. I felt a kind of lightness about having gotten my possessions down to a suitcase’s worth, just some clothes and my three touchstone books. I had a fine-quality first edition of The Recognitions, complete with dust jacket, autographed by Gaddis himself, that had cost me fifteen hundred and was now worth about $10K, and a beautiful 1930 edition of Moby-Dick with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. My copy of The Dream of the Red Chamber was more prosaic, a five-volume set of Penguin Classic paperbacks in the extraordinary translation by David Hawkes, which he titled The Story of the Stone. I didn’t feel starved for human companionship, not when I had the enormous, tumultuous Chinese family in the Stone, especially the pampered and extravagantly romantic boy, Bao-Yu, who was born with a magical piece of jade in his mouth, and the two girls who love him.
But now I was caught up in something involving real people, and it didn’t look like it was going to end well. None of my Big Three books has a happy ending, but when I read them I took some consolation from the fact that I had no opportunity to affect the way things worked out. Here, on the other hand, was a fluid situation with a bunch of living, breathing folks in it, all of whom were going to end up either in better or worse shape than they’d been in when the story began. Assuming that it was possible for Thistle Downing, or anyone, to be in worse shape than the lost soul Doc had described.
Back on the sidewalk, I persuaded myself that it was all going to be okay. I’d make all Trey’s problems go away, and Wattles would swap the surveillance tape, and I’d move on as though none of this had happened. Maybe I’d just bury Bunny’s necklace.
And maybe Thistle would be okay, too. Maybe she’d get through the shoot intact, or at least as intact as she was when she went into it. Maybe Doc would keep his promise and do something about the drugs, and she’d live happily ever after.
Maybe. But if it were a book, I wouldn’t bet on it.
16
Greater Than
As Rina had said, it was called “Once a Witch,” and it seemed to be on all the time.
I hadn’t known anything about Thistle’s show when I watched those bits of it at the Snor-Mor, that one long scene and the end credits. By midnight, I was an expert.
Thistle played a character called Wanda, which I thought was a little on the cute side, since Wanda was a witch and had an actual wand. In a cosmic mix-up among dimensions, she’d been swapped with a normal baby, leaving her to wreak innocent havoc in the middle-class (read: all-white and all non-witch) suburb into which she’d been mistakenly dropped. A parallel plot line, following the normal little girl who’d been accidentally given to a family of witches, had been filmed but was dropped at the end of the first season, by which time it was apparent that the only reason anyone was watching was Thistle.
The other little girl-who was adorable but, compared to Thistle, lumpen-was apparently allowed to return to normal toddlerhood obscurity, where the odds were good she’d grow up nursing a lifelong grudge against Thistle Downing. Or might have, if things hadn’t gone so spectacularly wrong in Thistle’s life.
By twelve o’clock I’d seen four shows and three actors playing Wanda’s father, all of whom might as well have been furniture. It wasn’t fair, because when Thistle’s spells went awry, they often required some expert physical comedy on old Dad’s part, and at least two of the Dads were equal to it. But, unfortunately for them, Thistle was usually onscreen when their best bits came up, and it just wasn’t possible to take your eyes off her. When these scenes were written, they had been about the father’s dilemma, but when they were filmed they became about Thistle’s reaction to the father’s dilemma. It really wasn’t fair. Here’s Dad, trying to play ping-pong while hanging upside down with his shoes stuck to the ceiling, and Thistle’s just standing there, and you still looked at her. And the Dads weren’t helped by the fact that, by season three, there was almost never a shot in which Thistle didn’t figure.
The actress playing Mom learned early to give the screen away with a kind of ego-free good humor that put her on the audience’s side. Her attitude seemed to be saying to the viewer, I’m with you. Let me get out of the way here, so you can sit back and see what she comes up with. Dads had come and gone, but Mom had lasted through the show’s entire eight-year run.
By the beginning of the fourth show I watched, I had distanced myself far enough to begin to wonder how Thistle could be destitute, no matter how much dope she was gobbling. The residuals from the show had to be substantial. Five or six episodes daily were fed into the maw of the cable channels. Her take had to be hundreds of thousands a year.
I wondered who would know why she wasn’t getting any of it.
The shows I saw were apparently chosen at random by some programming computer. There was no attempt to stick with any single season or even cluster of seasons. As a result, I saw Thistle at eight and ten, then at eight again, and then at fifteen. It was amazing that she could hold me for two straight hours of uninspired sitcom machinations, ninety percent of which was filmed in that eternal, unchanging living room with the same damned bouquet of flowers on the table in front of the couch. She just outshone the material so strongly that everything else faded away. It was like seeing a diamond in a pile of manure.
But Rina had been right. As Thistle aged, she changed. At eight, she was all energy and uncanny instincts; she barely seemed to know the cameras were there. When she was ten, she still had the energy although the instincts weren’t as clearly visible, and she had learned some technique that allowed her to build the jokes gradually and then ride them until the audience was helpless. There was, as far as I could tell, no electronic enhancement of the laughs she drew. They all sounded messy, spontaneous, and ragged, just like the laughs a real audience would create.
At fifteen, she didn’t have so much energy. She was working hard, trying for the first time. Her technical skill had grown, but there didn’t seem to be much of herself behind it. And she looked tired. Caught at certain angles, she had circles under her eyes. In one or two especially unfortu
nate shots, possibly preserved by an editor whom she’d treated badly, she looked exhausted. At fifteen, there were moments when Thistle Downing looked thirty.
And sad.
I turned off the television and booted my laptop, logged onto Google, and read what I could. Family life was unremarkable, at least from the outside, but then the Borgias probably looked normal from the outside. Father died when Thistle was little, mother had the kind of big-toothed smile that said she could probably bite a Chevy in half, and there was a brother, Robert, just an amorphous, pudgy, resolutely ordinary kid a couple of years older than Thistle. The kind of kid you could meet twenty times with no memory of him. In fact, I had to look back after I’d navigated away from the page to check his name again. Robert. His name was Robert.
The biggest story in Thistle’s relatively recent past broke after she sold her residual rights two days after she turned eighteen, saying she didn’t want to be looking over the studio’s shoulder all the time. The deal made headlines for two reasons. First, Thistle was paid one hundred and forty million dollars. Second, her mother, whom she had fired as her manager the day she turned eighteen, sued for a big chunk of it.
And won.
Noting that Mrs. Downing’s guidance had made Thistle one of the ten highest-paid people in television for three years running and that her brother, Robert, had contributed emotional support in spite of looking as emotional as a dinner roll, a superior court judge awarded Mom twenty-eight million, or twenty percent. The case made headlines again when Thistle hired three moving trucks, each jammed full of one-dollar bills, to deliver the money. As crews from practically every television network in the world filmed frantically and Robert ran around flapping his hands, a bunch of guys in coveralls used pitchforks to toss money from the backs of the trucks into the Downings’ front yard for several hours and then drove off. Armed guards surrounded the yard for a day and a half until the money could be counted, stacked, and carted safely away.
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