American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “We’ll be here.”

  We watched Little Will insinuate his way toward the back of the restaurant, pushing through the people jammed around the edges of booths, disappearing back beyond the kitchen. Beer bottles sparkled dimly; the wayward embers of cigarettes moved in the humid darkness. Then an older man, lean and greasy and not a member of our tribe, slid into Will’s spot.

  “You cats wanna go to Gazzarri’s?”

  Severin gave him a sidelong look. “Gazzarri’s?” Also, cats?

  The guy shrugged. “You look like dudes who could use a pick-me-up.”

  “Maybe,” Severin said, “but Gazzarri’s . . . ”

  What he wouldn’t say was that Gazzarri’s was for heshers, metal-heads, a different kind of Sunset Strip enthusiast entirely. But then, this guy seemed to be one, skinny and vegetal in his purple jeans. His hair was a peroxide wreck.

  “What’s wrong with Gazzarri’s?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s . . . ”

  The guy just bobbed his head. “I thought you fellas were cool.”

  “We are,” Sev deadpanned. “Just not as cool.”

  The room was so loud we had to shout. I took a long slug of lukewarm beer.

  “We can’t go to Gazzarri’s,” I said. “It’s closed.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Why not?” I looked around. Where was Williams? He’d been gone a little too long.

  “Guns N’ Roses secret show.”

  “Bullshit.” Severin snickered. He leaned back in his Peckinpah T-shirt, which depicted a shoot-out from The Wild Bunch: a silk-screened pattern of spattered blood and viscera. “That place holds like five hundred people.”

  Metal Man nodded, closed his eyes. He had the serenity of a prophet, which is exactly what he was. “I know. It’s a big deal.”

  “There’d be riots on the Strip if they tried to play that place instead of the Coliseum.”

  He bobbed his head. I had the feeling he could see us through closed lids.

  “I’m just telling you what I know.” Kneyow. He sounded like we did in seventh grade. “Take it or leave it.”

  “We’ll leave it,” Severin said. “No offense, guy, but we’re . . . classicists.”

  Williams came back. He jammed his hands into his pockets and stared.

  “Classicists?” the guy said.

  “Yeah,” Sev said. “Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. That kind of thing.”

  “Huh.” The guy blinked, dazedly. “I thought Bob Dylan was dead.”

  “I think we should go,” Williams said. He must’ve caught some of this on his way back from the bathroom. “I think we have to go.”

  We looked at him. You do? But Williams offered the guy a little soul-brother handshake, tips of the fingers hooked and thumbs crossed. “Dude.”

  “See? I knew there was a reason I came over to talk to you gen’lemen.”

  “I guess so.” Besides to remind us that certain customs never ended, that stoners were an imperishable subset of the human race? “We’re certainly glad you did.”

  “So how do we get into this little shindig?” Williams leaned down.

  The guy hooked him with another soul-brotherly handshake. “Just tell ’em you know Twink.”

  “Twink?” I said. “Your name is fucking Twink?”

  The guy didn’t look like a “Twink,” he looked like a Gunnar or an Ebbot. I watched him jounce off, hair-fronds waving. Part Viking, part toothpick, part Ficus benjamina.

  “Where’d you disappear to?” I asked Will.

  He shrugged.

  “We’re not seriously thinking of going to see Guns N’ Roses, are we?” I said.

  “We are,” Severin said. “We’re thinking seriously about it.”

  Williams sat down. “Dudes.” He kneaded his forearms a moment, languidly. Just like that, it was junior high again. “We gotta go. We’re there.”

  Out in the parking lot, Williams staggered and slurred. “I’ll drive.”

  “No,” Severin gave him a once-over. “I will.”

  I watched Will. “You all right?”

  Truthfully, he was always like that. I don’t know what I thought I was seeing. He smoked a lot of dope in those days, as did Severin, but they got high in different ways. Severin was hyperkinetically lucid as he jolted from one wack “insight” to the next. He could wrap up a crackpot history of cinema in ten minutes, one hand on the wheel of his AMC Gremlin while the other sparked up another doobie, never moving the car out of second gear.

  “I’m fine, man.” He had beers in his pockets, one apiece in each side of his khakis, and he was wearing a ski vest and knit cap. Also a Nirvana T-shirt that read FLOWER SNIFFIN KITTY PETTIN BABY KISSIN CORPORATE ROCK WHORES.

  “Don’t wear the cap and ditch the vest when we get there,” I said.

  “Then they’ll see the T-shirt and think I’m picking a fight.”

  We piled into Sev’s car, that eggshell-yellow, dusty, and antiquated machine. Williams was in the backseat and I rode up front.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m not so sure . . . ”

  “What?” Severin said.

  We rode the swept corridor of Fairfax slowly, at cop-repelling speed. The yellow lights flashed overhead, the street was deserted. We passed the dark marquee of the Silent Movie Theatre, then a stucco nursing home with prison bars across its windows.

  “I don’t think we should go to this,” I said. “I’m having that feeling.”

  “What feeling?”

  Williams lounged behind us, his head flung over the seat back.

  “Something bad is going to happen. Not just, we’re going to get hazed by a bunch of spandex-wearing assholes. One of us is going to get hurt.”

  Severin snickered. “You in one of your spooky Chandler moods tonight, Nate? Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.” I could practically hear his eyes rolling. “You know you’re the one person in this car who isn’t stoned.”

  “I know. And I feel that way, and I’m right.” I was. “Think about that.”

  “Leave the paranoia to the experts.” He shifted gears. “We’re going.”

  Laurel Canyon loomed in front of us, the black humps of the hills and the grayish, antemeridian sky, the inky-white blots of cloud cover and the road, the narrowing thread of Fairfax where it twisted up to meet Laurel and then lost itself among the trees. Everything is everything. Will’s father’s ghost haunted that road in a red Ferrari. There was enough terrible history in this city to justify any amount of fear. Mine had nothing to do with headbangers and less still with a Chandler obsession. It was ontological, pure. We turned left on Sunset. Around us the city unwound at speed, in flashes and fragments of neon. People clustered outside the Whisky, the Roxy, in the parking lot of Tower Records. There was no evidence this “secret show” was real. A cluster of heshers outside the Rainbow, but there was always that. And then right there, outside Gazzarri’s. A crowd: a sea of peroxide white and black leather, denim and lipstick, scratch tattoos.

  “Looky there.” Severin swung a U-ie, scanned the street for parking. “We’re in luck.”

  “Or out of it.”

  We found a spot and got out of the car. Williams last, on unsteady legs. He had his hands in his pockets, weaving like an awkward sailor, as if the ground might start bucking beneath him at any moment. He worried me most: he was more like our dad than his own, so purely at the mercy of his own appetites.

  “You seen Beau lately?” I nudged Sev.

  But neither of us had seen him. We were about to embark on something that would require our own answers. A hot wind kicked up around us, one of those sinus-rattling Santa Anas that meddle with the mood of the city. Above us a billboard swarmed with images of Robin Williams in drag. Before us lay destiny in the shape of men in lipstick and eyeliner, women who’d drop to their knees to do the cocaine crawl.

  “Let’s go,” Sev said. “We’re late enough as it stands.”

  IIr />
  BEAU ROSENWALD OPENED his eyes around noon. He clutched his head, twisted the sheet across his waist as he sat up straight on Bryce Beller’s pull-out couch. Ugh. His temples ached, the top of his skull. His eyes were flaming, and his tongue felt like he’d dipped it in a vacuum bag.

  “Belll-ERRR?” He reached out toward a dented can of yesterday’s Tecate and then thought better of it.

  “You up, Rosers?” Bryce’s voice drifted over from the kitchen. “You want eats?”

  Beau sat with his face in his hands, legs over the side of the couch. He looked like he was weeping.

  “Nurse,” he muttered. “Nurrrsse.”

  From outside the room’s picture windows came the sound of surf. They were out past Zuma, where the city tapered into oblivion. Beau had an apartment along the fraying edge of Beverly Hills, on Sherbourne Drive, but he never went there. He and Bryce were trying to produce a movie: all his energy, all his time went into this. The rest of his life was a ruin.

  “You makin’ breakfast, Brycie?” Beau lurched up. He knotted the humid sheet around his waist and moved toward the kitchen. “Or are you makin’ weird stuff?”

  “Little bit of both,” Beller yelled back. His voice rode over the sizzle of butter. Beau passed a set of white wicker chairs, trampled a careless assemblage of Navajo blankets and throw pillows. He entered the adjacent galley. “Egg whites.”

  “Egg whites?” Beau blinked in the kitchen’s explosion of light. “What kind of person eats only the fucking whites of an egg?”

  “A healthy one.” Beller turned from the stove as Beau entered. He was naked. “Yolk fucks with your chakras.”

  “Put some pants on.”

  Beller shrugged. “Can’t. Can’t afford ’em. I used to have an agent who could book me a job.”

  “You used to have an agent, period. I keep telling you to go back and sign with Teddy Sanders, let Williams look after you—”

  “Fuck those people. Seriously, Beau. I’m your client, through thick and thin.”

  “Thin, right now.”

  Bryce looked him over and shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that, fat man.”

  Beau slid into the breakfast nook, jiggling the salt and pepper shakers, the empty bottles, the desiccated limes and dirty ashtrays. Plates were caked with red residue; his elbow rested on a yellowed copy of the Herald Examiner, its headlines reporting Bobby Fischer’s victory over Boris Spassky, an editorial about Hanoi Jane. Weeks ago. It was late September, 1972.

  “You ruined my couch,” Bryce said. “It tilts toward the middle now.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, no. You paid for it.” Bryce chuckled. “You stay as long as you like.”

  It was true, though. Bryce owed his career to the big man behind him. Hardly so very illustrious, but the days of waiting eight hours on the lot to say a single line of dialogue, of mooching around the commissary to split a chicken wing with Harry Dean Stanton were over.

  “Stay as long as you like,” he repeated. He’d been a deranged piano prodigy in his last movie, a man whose hands were injured during the war. He’d just wrapped a picture in which his character shot John Wayne’s. “Once we get this picture off the ground we’ll both be in clover.”

  Ghee sizzled. Bryce’s movements were loose. His back was a uniform bronze from his heels to his nape. The light in the room was dazzling, almost white as it spun up off the Pacific. They were out past Broad Beach, even, where all they could see was untracked sand and craggy rocks.

  “This picture,” Beau murmured. Days could pass without the two of them encountering another human. This was the closest thing he had now to a “career.” Except for Will, all his colleagues had abandoned him. Most wouldn’t even take his call. He kicked his feet against the sandy linoleum. Bryce’s browned body moved in front of the stove. “This picture’s a fucking mess.”

  Bryce whirled. A Smith & Wesson .45 was in his hand, a long-barreled pistol which erupted, twice. The room filled with the smell of cordite. Smoke drifted from the nozzle.

  “I got you!” Bryce yelped. He folded to his knee and wheezed like a seal. “I got you motherfucker!”

  Beau grabbed his rib cage and then—what? It took him this long to realize he hadn’t really been shot: the two ear-splitting pops had been enough to make his heart stop.

  “Jesus.” Beau’s voice was dull in his ears, blunted by the noise at close range. “What did you d—blanks? Those were blanks?”

  “Yep.” Bryce laughed. “I had you there.”

  Beau stood. His belly slopped over the twisted top of the white sheet. Bryce twirled the gun around on his finger, then handed it over to Beau.

  “You know who gave me this? John Wayne hisself.”

  “Put some pants on. I don’t like to be shot by someone in the nude, it’s like being an adulterer.”

  “It’s a nice gun.” Bryce took the gun back. “I could hunt with this thing.”

  “Then why don’t you?” Beau pointed toward the sea. “Go out there and shoot us some fish.”

  “Aw, don’t try me, Rosers. Be a good guest.”

  He set the pistol on the counter and spun it. Round and round until it rested, pointing somewhere harmlessly between them. It shoots blanks, Beau thought. What could happen? What worse was going to come to them? Just then he couldn’t get a job to save his life, and Bryce’s career really hadn’t followed the lines it was supposed to either. Nicholson had become the star instead. Who would’ve guessed that? Bryce handed him a plate of some suspicious-looking eggs: they were brownish-green, and scrambled. Beau sniffed.

  “What’s in these?”

  “Nothin’. I made yours light.”

  Beau took the plate. Some weird stuff, Beller was into. Transcendental meditation, yoga, running. What sort of person deliberately ran for miles on end, without really going anywhere? Beau turned away, to stare at the Pacific and eat his eggs in peace.

  What’s the matter with Beau?

  After the pissing episode, some people obviously began to wonder. But right now the biggest problem was a certain constriction of his options. He’d gone back to New York for a while, but that life—in his native habitat, closer to his kids even if Rachel didn’t want him to see them—amounted to nothing. Was he supposed to produce plays, or drive a taxi? Here there was some hope, however faint, of resurrection. Friends had landed in medium-high places. Jeremy Vana was an executive vice president at Columbia Pictures. No one could be too helpful. Sam still wielded a lot of influence. But Beau’s day might eventually come.

  It was around this time I first met him. Not that either of us recognized what it meant. My mother had married Teddy Sanders, Beau’s former colleague in TAG’s motion picture department. Did Teddy have any inkling I was not his own child? I can’t imagine he cared too much, if he did. Those were different times, and while I strongly suspect Teddy knew, my mother never told Beau. Not for a long time. Why she waited, I’ll never know either. She’d left the agency not long after she started dating Teddy. He could’ve done the math. But Teddy and Beau had been colleagues, and so I remember him having the fat man over to dinner together with Williams, my mother cooking pepper steaks and uncorking bottle upon bottle of Margaux. Both men were indelible: my kindergarten classmate’s father for his sleek and mellow elegance, and as for Beau, who could forget a person of that size? But I was too young to understand trouble, to know that the huge man roaring with laughter in the next room, keeping me awake with profane jokes, could in fact be close to suicidal.

  “What do you think it is,” my mother murmured when he left the table to hit the head. “What’s Beau’s problem?”

  “You worked for him.” Teddy gave her a sly glance. “Wasn’t he always like this?”

  “Not like this,” Will drawled. “This is different.”

  My mother nodded. “He seems . . . desperate. I think there’s something wrong.”

  I stood in the shadow of the sideboard in my pajamas, one of my earliest memories. I gnawed a t
oothpick, prosciutto and melon from Greenblatt’s Delicatessen. This was in the old house on Warnall Avenue in Westwood. Walnut floorboards and crystal chandeliers.

  “This is the movie business.” Teddy was at the dining table, deflated in his chair. He wore his off-hours uniform of scuffed Gucci loafers and pale denim shirt. His long hair was already thinning, his blond mustache pale at the tips. “Nothing gets done without desperation.”

  “That’s the flaw,” Williams said. He studied the glass of ice water in his hands like it was a diamond. “It’s what’s wrong with the business, and it’s our friend’s tragic flaw.”

  Leave it to Williams to put it in Aristotelian terms. He set his water down, spotted me, and winked.

  “Nathaniel, c’mere.”

  I walked over to him. I could hear Beau’s heavy tread beginning at the far end of the long hallway that ran past my room.

  “D’you like school?”

  I nodded. Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t: it was too soon to know which of these men, which father, I’d come in time to resemble. The educated or the more instinctual one. Will took me in. I felt it, what Beau must have felt when they met too. The strength of his whole attention, neither gentle nor harsh, a caress without any love in it. Already, I was friends with his son. Little Will and I had been paired off by something besides being the two youngest boys in our class. Call it fate.

  “Go to bed, sweetie.” My mother could hear Beau coming down the hall also. “Go on.”

  Williams winked at me. There was alarm in my mother’s voice, the way there’d been when she’d spoken up earlier. I think there’s something wrong. It seemed to carry some balance of affection and horror. But I was far too young to interpret that. She stood in her regal turn-of-the-decade beauty, black turtleneck and flower-print skirt. Long-faced, ash-blonde, and somber. She waved her True cigarette at me. Go.

  I love remembering my mother this way. Twenty-nine, not yet consumed by alcohol and disappointment. She took a sip of wine, her profile whittled, elegant. The convivial Hollywood wife. Williams turned away, but I could feel him still, the enigma of his strange concentration. Few men are truly fathomless, yet he seemed so.