by Bruce Wagner
“I am so thrilled for you, Bernie.”
“It isn’t a lock, Edie.”
“But they’re very interested. Something good will happen.”
“It seems so. But it isn’t a lock and bagel. We’ll see what the lawyer says.”
“Did you phone Barry?”
“A few days ago. He hasn’t returned my call.”
“He’s very busy.”
“You trust him though, huh, Edie?”
“Obie loves him.”
“Listen, Edie, there’s something I need to get your feedback on—artistically. An idea I want to run past you. I need a hook for this—to tie the stories together, see? That’s what these kids talk about, it’s all about the ‘hook.’ This Cryptmaster thing…you remember Alistair Cooke? English Alistair Cooke? Remember that—what was that show?—Masterpiece Theater. He came out in the openings and tied things together, you know, unified. See, that’s what we’re gonna do, that’s what they want: to take my three little movies and tie them together. Unify and condense. That’s the way they do it. Everything in a package. And what I need to find—this is my challenge—is a device—to interlink, something to grab people by the balls so they keep their rear end in the seats. And what I was thinking,” he said gently, “and bear with me now, because the idea is still…fetal. What I was thinking is that Obie might play that role beautifully.”
Edie smiled. “My Obie? I don’t understand.”
“Hear me out. First of all, I think it would be invaluable for her to be in front of a camera again—mind you, we’re not talking tomorrow, either. But my feeling is that it would be more therapy than a hundred of these so-called gurus and healers we got trooping through there now. For Oberon Mall to feel the lights, the tumult of a crew again—it might awaken something. She’s a performer, Edie. And she’s still a star: for us to forget that does a terrible disservice. I think she craves that, misses that more than we could ever know.”
Edie stared in disbelief. “What did you want her—what could she—”
“Now, I’m just starting to think about this. I’d set it up as ‘Oberon Mall Presents.’ It’s three parts, right? Here’s my thought. Those three parts are the dreams—or nightmares—of Oberon Mall. She’d be like a female Hitchcock: very classy, with Obie, it could never be anything but. We’d have an actress do her voice, you know, looped. A top impressionist. I’d hire the greatest cinematographer, someone from one of her movies. People would beg to work on this show, Edie, they would be honored. The best lighting people; the best makeup; the best everything. Academy Award people. You can trust me with your life, Edie—and so can Obie—to make her look more beautiful then ever. Because it will be a totally controlled situation.”
Edie hurled her glass, striking him hard in the shoulder.
He stood and she fell upon him, pounding his stomach. The producer feebly raised a hand to ward off the blows.
“Have you seen her?” she bellowed. “Have you seen my baby? She’s having seizures!” She struck him across the face, slicing open the skin with her ring. “She’s in diapers! My baby is in diapers!”
She was sobbing now and Bernie lurched to his feet, toward the door. He couldn’t see because of the blood in his eyes. Edie tackled him and they rolled on the floor. He broke free again and managed to shove her into the sofa, buying enough time to dash to the hall. From the stairwell, she roared like Godzilla.
It was only a few blocks to Cedars, yet by the time he made it to the lobby, the producer changed his mind about going on foot. He was having trouble breathing; it felt like a rib was broken. He rode the elevator to the garage and maneuvered himself behind the wheel. As the motorized gate dragged itself open, Edie appeared, pounding on the window with terrible force. He floored it and she tumbled harmlessly back.
The old man got a stabbing pain in front of Orso’s and ran the car into a curb. A valet rushed over and Bernie said he’d only be a minute. The sullen Mexican saw the blood and retreated. Bernie looked in the mirror at the gouge on his cheek. He got a handkerchief from the glove compartment and held it there to stanch the flow. What would he tell them at the emergency room? Better to say he was mugged by a nigger than bitch-slapped by a shack-job. That’s right—some shvug in a hairnet, just outside the bakery where he got his regular almond alligator and coffee. Let me tell you, this is one crazy old Jew who put up a helluva fight. Shvuggie’s out there sucking on a crack pipe with a split lip, fatter than the one he was born with. You better believe it. And that’s Bernie Ribkin talking, cockeyed cowboy of the wild Westside.
“Bernie?” A familiar face peered through the passenger window. “It’s Fred—Fred Toschen.”
“Hiya.” Bernie managed a smile but it was awkward keeping handkerchief to cheek at that angle.
“Jesus, what happened to you?”
“Had some surgery—coupla stitches. Started to bleed again. On my way to the doctor’s…”
“Are you okay? Can you drive?”
“I’m fine.” Who was this man?
“Look, I wanted to say how sorry I am about the other day. If it was me, I probably would have punched Pierre out—and that little a-hole Denny. But you were great. Anyhow, I just wanted you to know I was not involved in their practical joke. I was in that room as a fan, pure and simple.” Bernie beamed like a gargoyle, stifling a cough, afraid of the pain and spewing of blood. “I don’t know what it’s all about, but Pierre seriously has it in for your son, that’s the agenda. It’s like a pathological…grudge. Something that happened when they were kids—”
The producer was sweating, the pain in his chest unendurable. He started the engine.
The valet pulled up in the lawyer’s car and Fred smiled obliviously as he took his leave. “I know how you can get your revenge. Go in there and say you can do it—tell ’em you can shoot the thing in an hour! A sixty-minute shoot! Go in with a budget and everything! I’ll walk into the son of a bitch’s office with you!”
The Range Rover jerked into the street. There was a jam at the crosswalk—wheelchairs heading for the clinic—so he hung a right to Robertson via Burton Way. Right again at Chaya Brasserie. A lung collapsed as the emergency room hove into view, and Bernie blacked out. The car jumped curb, hurtling toward the foot of the Thalians Mental Health Center steps.
A crowd of women watched curiously as the black bumper struck them down.
Troy Copra
It rained the night of the show. A goodly group of friends and invitees attended, but they lost around half during the performance. That was because technical problems caused the taping to take twice as long as had been announced.
There were cheerleaders and cronies from the Adult world and stage actor friends from the old days—now voice-over mavens grown round from the weight of the years. Kiv brought her roommate, Jabba, and wangled an agent, a casting person and a hotshot exec from New Line. She even charmed a guy from the Reporter into coming, on condition he wouldn’t review if he didn’t like what he saw. Missing in action were Sir Lancelot and big-ass Guinevere (they never RSVP’d). Troy hadn’t heard boo about Zev Turtletaub’s birthday reel and assumed it went the way of all flesh.
After the show he took Quinn, Kiv and Jabba to Tana’s. Kiv wasn’t drinking. When Jabba, teased her, she came right out and said she was pregnant. Troy didn’t mind. Everything was changing—no place left to run. He would ask Kiv to move in, officially. Soon he’d be editing Skin Trade, splicing together a new life. He might even land a festival: all Troy needed was an “audience favorite” award and distribution would be guaranteed. It didn’t matter what happened now. Directing was the equalizer and he had his reel—he’d come into his own, leveling the playing field forever. Troy felt a keen sense of victory and knew it wasn’t the Cristal or the coke Quinn slipped him in the grungy head.
Dabney Coleman sat in a booth across the way, Ellen DeGeneres in another. Troy belonged—a gladiator just like them. Kiv kept bringing it back to the show, giddily recounting each roller-coas
ter moment. From the winner’s circle, Troy kissed her sober mouth, Kiv so happy, grasping his hand, moving it over swollen belly as across a Ouija board. They bussed some more, unnoticed by Dabney and Ellen, who, now bent in communion, shared secrets—gladiator lore—leaning together at the hinge of adjacent booths, opposing cameos charismatically shutting out the room.
Zev Turtletaub
Certain pointless vignettes crowded his Dilaudid-steeped consciousness. One was particularly cunning.
A few years ago, he dropped seventy-four thousand dollars at Maxfield’s on clothes and jewelry, gliding from room to room, attended like a famous assassin (or murderous cardinal). At transaction’s end, the owner’s hauteur unexpectedly crumbled. “You’re my hero,” he said, ringing down the curtain on Zev’s exotic fantasia. What galled the producer was that, for a moment, his native misanthropism flagged and he actually believed him. The ridiculous phrase—you’re my hero—had recurred like a punishment ever since, compulsive and deracinated, cropping up for hours, even days on end. He sometimes playfully countered such importunacy by silently singing back, We don’t need another hero! which echoed itself as well, so that Zev was doubly irked. He endured these petit mal sieges with a vague smile on thin lips that usually concealed flat, pearly canker sores, sweet to probing tongue.
The RN came to change his dressing. Zev refused to look at the wound. Flexor muscle and tendon had been torn away and would require a graft. It was too early to test positive for HIV; the concern, for now, was controlling the staph. Anything else was simply not a possibility…he would reject her AIDS as he had rejected everything about her, always: every doomed, sickly thing about all of them, from Mother’s metastatic CA to Father’s catatonic depression and cirrhosis-induced ascites, stomach fanning out big and hard as the Liberty Bell. The lurid pediatrician joked about Zev’s floppy breasts (he was fourteen): Your sister should be so stacked. Aubrey heard their dad use that on him and Zev put her in her place to shut her up; that would be a hole in the ground. Everyone would have their hole. Eye for an eye, hole for a hole, every dog his doggie-do. Zev Turtletaub would puke the world—their world—then bury it.
His only thoughts were to keep the incident from the press; that possessed him, more than the pain. Leslie Trott came up with the spider-bite strategem, flukily believable—the culprit being a brown recluse at his rock-molded Moab canyonland cabin (were there brown recluses in Utah? He’d have an assistant confirm)—something that caused wildfire tissue necrosis.
In a week, his sister would be dead. He bit down on a towel while the nurse lavaged the macerated crater of bicep. What had Aubrey done with her son? He would find him, there was no doubt—he already had people looking. Zephyr was his charge. Raising him would be his duty and his joy.
Was not the boy named for him, after all?
Chet Stoddard
He phoned the hospital in Sherman Oaks, but Aubrey wasn’t there. He drove by the Oakhurst house for almost a week, at different hours of day and night. There were no lights and nothing stirred. Chet revisited some NA/HIV meetings and was able to track Ziggy down.
The garden apartment was just south of Sunset, by the Virgin Megastore. The “infected faggot” cordially asked him in—that’s what Ziggy liked to call himself. A burly volunteer from one of the AIDS organizations was just leaving. When he was gone, the shut-in held forth from the center of the living room, in trademark stand-up despot mode.
“Why do they send me this straight guy who can’t clean? I’m sorry, but the straight guys do not know how to clean a kitchen floor. He comes and he sits, with his Ziploc’d tuna sandwich and his little apple. A polished little apple! My ultimate horror is that when I’m bedridden, this motherfucker’s gonna sit there and read aloud from Marianne Williamson! I mean, what is he doing here?”
“I’ve been trying to get hold of Aubrey.”
“She’s in a world of shit.”
“What’s happening?”
“She’s toxo: toxoplasmosis. Attack of the Brain Parasites.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“Totally crazy and half paralyzed and that ain’t all. Her brother got rid of her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She took a fucking bite out of him! Isn’t that the most fabulous thing you ever heard? Very Anne Rice—and lemme tell you, he is the meanest cunt on the planet. Zev Turtletaub, the Vomit King, ever heard? Zee very grandest of Grand Wazoos. Well, Aubrey Anne gave him a lovely going-away shove—and now he’s on the funicular to Dementia Street and Diarrhea Way. As we speak!” Chet reached for a Marlboro and lit up, his first in eighteen months. “I know, ‘cause I was there, right after it happened—before the parasites turned her into Sybil.” Ziggy started to cackle. “She said she was going for his neck, but he backed up and fell or something and hit his head. So she jumps on him and takes a huge chunk from his arm—those expensive Yon Koster–sculpted arms—and then she barfs into his mouth! Oh God! Don’t you just love it?”
The phone rang and Ziggy networked awhile. Whoever it was needed advice on whether to sue a hospital, healthcare worker, insurance company or possibly the government over some incident Chet couldn’t fathom. As far as Ziggy was concerned, the details—petty, real or imagined—didn’t seem to matter. It was attitude that counted. Attitude was agitprop; attitude was sacred; attitude was all. And today, “attitude” decreed that someone needed to be sued.
“What about her son?” Chet asked when he hung up. “What about Zephyr—”
“Long gone. Underground railway. Vee haff ways. Vee haff connections.”
“But where?”
Ziggy’s jaw moved around, itching to blab. But the loquacious gadfly was mum. “Gone in sixty seconds.”
Bernie Ribkin
DAILY VARIETY
Spielberg mom in
close encounter;
two critical
REX WEINER
Leah Adler, the mother of Steven Spielberg, was uninjured in a traffic mishap outside a wing of Cedars-Sinai Hospital, ironically named after the helmer.
Two of her companions were severely injured when a car driven by Bernard S. Ribkin, 74, leaped a curb, striking startled bystanders. The injured women are Holocaust survivors who Mrs. Adler was accompanying on a tour of the facilities. She is still expected to attend tonight’s gala wrap-up for the International Artists Rights Symposium, of which her son is a benefactor.
Mr. Ribkin is the father of ICM Senior Veep Donny Ribkin.
Charges were not filed. The news that Bernie had been mugged and was desperately seeking medical attention when the accident occurred drew an outpouring of sympathy. Leah herself sent flowers and a note urging speedy recovery. “I know how terrible you must feel,” she wrote, and went on to bemoan these violent times. The story was carried by a number of papers but none connected Bernie Ribkin with the Undead series from which he made his name. In some articles, he was merely referred to as an “elderly driver.”
The battered producer suffered anxiety attacks for weeks afterward. He was worried the press might unearth skeletons, and brand him a menace. Years ago, they would say, a neighbor had been “mowed down” in a “strikingly similar incident”—that’s the way those sons of bitches liked to talk. Always the conspiracy, always the something rotten. Jay Leno might even pick it up and make him a late-night laughingstock.
Bernie had real nightmares about Clara Rubidoux, and the constant harassment didn’t help. Someone was papering his car with HOW AM I DRIVING? bumper stickers—it played hell with the paint—and he knew the phone calls were from her meshugga Showtime son. They were scary. There was more than one voice, doped up and guttural; maybe the whacked-out friends Bernie met that day in Malibu. The question was always the same, whispered at first, then distorted by reverb and repetition: “Mom too middle-of-the-road?” When the old man thought he recognized his own son’s voice, he called ICM. Sure enough, the Senior Veepee was back in his office. Bernie was afraid to talk, convinced Donny was going to ki
ll him.
The doctor prescribed more Halcion, but still he couldn’t sleep. He took long walks at night to the Spielberg mother/son eateries—the touristy Dive! and Pico Boulevard’s kosher Milky Way—but never went in. He wondered if Leah had a boyfriend. Her husband (Steven’s stepdad) had passed on a short while back. His name was Bernie, too, and maybe that was an omen. The old man started getting ideas. He’d lose some weight, get in shape. What might it take to woo a woman like that? Leah Adler seemed feisty and sexual, a gemutlich powerhouse—a pint-size version of Edie, without the torn synapses. Once, he even “bumped into” her outside the restaurant. When he said how much the flowers had meant, she looked at him quizzically. The old man had to remind Spielberg mère who he was.
But who was she? And where would he begin? This was no lonely schizophrenic who happened to live a few flights up—this was the gaudy, tough-minded mother of a billionaire, arguably the most powerful man in the history of the Business. She was probably a snob, with every reason to be. Let’s say, Bernie thought, by some miracle he managed to get a foot in the door. What about his provenance of schlock? How could she even introduce him to her son? But maybe it wasn’t so bad, maybe Steven never approved any of them and Leah kept her admirers hidden; or maybe the director just didn’t care, long as Mom was happy. Could be all the boyfriends were geriatric schlocks, silver-maned fuck-ups and that was just her tacky friggin taste in men—with friends thinking it endearing and hilarious and loving her even more. Scramblin and Scream Works would get her laughing, and that was three-quarters of the battle. Once they were laughing, you were home to bed. Jesus H, maybe Spielberg was an Undead fan himself, the way Tim Burton was a freak for Ed Wood. Who knew?
