American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “Who’s this?”

  A booming voice sounded above me as I collided with Beau in the doorway. I couldn’t help it, I walked right into his elephantine leg. I looked up and saw him staring down at me.

  “You’re Nate,” he added, and smiled. And absently stroked the back of my head and shoulder, once. It was like being pawed by a clawless dog.

  I bounced off him. Without anything to say, and a little bit intimidated by his fatness, by his slothful and easy bonhomie.

  “G’night, kid,” he murmured, as I slithered around and off to my bedroom. I was six years old and of course didn’t mark any of this out as unusual. But I remembered it all the same. My bare feet kicked across the polished brown floors; our terrier, Suzie, followed; Teddy’s voice carried after me.

  “Sweet dreams, Nathaniel.”

  Thus, I met my father, and with him the man who was his necessary concomitant, Williams Farquarsen, whose future would haunt us all. Understanding none of it, just letting their laughter blend into typical adult chatter, while I left them behind, in dream.

  Now Beau sat and ate a plate of curdled, kelp-colored eggs with windows on two sides of him overlooking the sea. Thinking about the only two kids he knew he had and protecting his plate as though someone might take this, too, away from him.

  Rachel, be reasonable!

  Reasonable? He could still hear her sneering. Reasonable people have jobs!

  These past few years, it had gotten worse and worse between them. She’d left Waxmorton and set up shop on her own, yet having her independence made her controlling. She’d grown secretive, paranoid. Maybe she was crazier than he was. Maybe she was jealous. Once a month he came and visited, crawling around on the floor of her brownstone apartment like a wildebeest, exotic and particular and large. The children adored him. Severin attacked with his tummy, just charged and screamed and started smacking Beau’s head with his own belly the moment his father knelt down to greet him. Was this why Rachel was pissed? Because Beau’s son resembled him after all? He’d walk around the Village with one twin over each arm, both of them black-haired, green-eyed, and lovely. These were the moments the world belonged to him, and he to it. Even as a child, Sev had the purest whiff of teenage disarray, his untucked Mickey Mouse T-shirt torn and slovenly; Kate fanned out into alien beauty, her hair cut straight along her jaw like her mother’s. They’d just turned four. With their father they sat in a booth and drank milkshakes, all three inclining their heads in a way that told everyone they were a family.

  It’s healthy for them.

  Healthy? I don’t want them eating sugar.

  The last time he was out, he and Rachel really went at it. You’re a fitness freak now?

  That’s not what I meant—

  I know what you meant. Standing there in the vestibule, because more and more she didn’t want him in the house. Are you taking your drugs?

  My—he’d begun laughing inappropriately. I haven’t had anything happen in a year and a half. They’re just anxiety. My . . .

  What should he call them? Episodes? Fits? But the sight of a man in his late twenties, some bearded Christ-y type who looked like a tranquilized Manson looming into view behind her only made him laugh harder. That’s your boyfriend, Rach? Jesus, no wonder all this macrobiotic blather and stuff about her “karma,” questioning whether she even wanted to sell books.

  “Where do you go, Rosers?”

  “Huh?”

  Beau stared, as Bryce interrupted him. The look of a man whose real life, as vivid as it was, stayed trapped in the confines of his head. “I’m right here.” He scratched his cheek. “Just thinking things over.”

  “Right. Think on this. We get a green light, this movie will change our lives.”

  “This movie is 183 pages long. It’s written on a bunch of paper place mats, and it doesn’t have an ending.”

  “This movie is forward-thinking. Progressive.”

  “Or a beginning. Now that you mention it—”

  “It will win us Academy Awards.”

  “—this movie is a fucking boil, an open sore on the ass of humanity.”

  Bryce looked at him. That cliff-like stare that was never quite handsome enough, those yellowy eyes. His face was too upper-crust, too haughty, too volatile, too something. The gun sat over on the counter.

  “Like that ever stopped anyone before, Rosers. Come on.”

  He laughed. They both did. Their lives were like this gun in a way, adjusted to harmlessness no matter how voluble.

  “We gotta do something. I’m running out of fuckin’ money.”

  “Me too,” Bryce said. “I get it. Melody sweats me the same way.”

  Melody, his ex-wife. They’d met years ago, when Bryce did an episode of F Troop. Their son was the same age as the twins, himself a rare visitor.

  “So what do we do?”

  “We do what we’ve always planned to do.” Bryce stood up and stretched, his concave runner’s torso arching forward. “We make this fucking film.”

  “You gonna take a meeting like that?” Beau nodded at his naked friend’s crotch. “Enough of the noble savage bullshit.”

  “It isn’t bullshit. It isn’t the savagery in people that’s noble, either, it’s the nobility that’s savage. That’s an important distinction.”

  Beau watched his friend’s eyes widen as the actor began to get high off the hash oil that was in his eggs. “All right, fine. We still need to hire a writer.”

  “We don’t need a writer. We can be the writer. We can be the movie if we just let it happen.”

  Poor Bryce, with his faith in these things. He sounded like fucking Rachel. “No one in Hollywood is crazy enough to make this.”

  “We are.”

  “Fair enough.” Beau was tired of thinking about it. He got up and stalked toward the cupboard, with its yellow paint blistering off the door. “I’m gonna have some of that mary-jew-wanna, myself. I need to feel invulnerable again.”

  III

  “SO WHAT AILS?” Williams leaned across the table toward my dad. “What do you need, Beau?”

  “Money.” It was hard for him to ask, but he did it. “I’m broke, Will.”

  The two men were at Duke’s Coffee Shop, attached to the Tropicana Motel. “Seedy” barely began to describe it. Yet just up the street was Dan Tana’s. Barely a mile separated them from TAG and the bustling places in Beverly Hills where Sam’s henchmen did their business, the Bistro and La Scala.

  “So?” Williams removed his sunglasses. “There’s no shame in that, partner.”

  “Isn’t there?”

  “No. The business tells you that there is, but there isn’t.”

  The air smelled of chlorine, from the motel pool. Grease. Beau ate pancakes and Will ate nothing, just sat, clean and dapper, at breakfast with his old friend.

  “How’s Sam?”

  “Fucker.” Behind Williams a man, really just a pile of hippiebeatnik mannerisms, twitched in a booth, slurping his coffee. Will snorted his contempt. “He’s ancient, Beau. You can’t worry about him.”

  “I can’t work.” We can’t eat in a normal restaurant, where you’d be seen in my company. “I can’t get anyone to sign on to this picture.”

  “For now. Beau.” Will turned his palms up on the table. “How much?”

  “What?” For the rest of his days, he would remember this. “What d’you mean?”

  “Just tell me how much you need. You said you needed money. So?”

  Beau had never before asked overtly. Once a week he drove Bryce’s old Chevy into town to have breakfast and to scream at his psychiatrist. Afterward, he met his old friend, who might leave a hundred-dollar “tip” on the table that would enable Beau to meet certain obligations, but Williams had never opened up this way either.

  “Five grand. Would that help, Beau?”

  It would save his life, at least for a while. Beau was hardly more disciplined with money than he was with anything else. But this would allow him to see hi
s kids, buy his medication. It would keep his little dinghy afloat a bit longer.

  “I can’t accept that.”

  “You can. You will.” He’d remember this. “I’ll get you a check.”

  “Will . . . ”

  The two men sat. Beau, near tears, and Will with an untouched elegance. He could walk into rooms as greasy as this one and still retain his dignity, in booths dampened by whores’ pussies and junkies’ necks.

  “It’s more than I need.”

  “No.” It fucked with you, this town, besides. So-called “needs,” luxuries. They ran together like a soft-boiled egg. “You need to see your kids, Beau. You need to stay alive until the worm turns.”

  “It’s not gonna turn.” Williams just nodded at Beau’s pessimism. Stop. “OK, but I don’t even know anymore,” Beau went on, “if it does, what’ll happen? This picture with Bryce, it’s important or it’s just a goddamn pipe dream. How do you know? When is it ever enough?”

  “When you stop suffering.” Will lolled, with one arm up on the back of the booth, imperious. “That’s when.”

  Sunlight swam in the air above Santa Monica Boulevard; the door with its bell tinkled and swished behind Beau as the scenesters came and went. A gang of grubby musicians shuffled in and collapsed in a pile of buckskin in an adjacent booth. There was the click of a Zippo.

  When did you stop suffering, ever?

  “All right.” Beau inhaled. Tobacco smoke, lighter fluid, syrup. His hands were shaking, he noticed. “Thanks, Will. Thanks.”

  This was a kind of heroism. Five grand was a lot of money for both of them, then. And Williams just came out and gave it to him, more than Beau would have ever thought to ask. It was something the fat man would never forget. But what really struck him wasn’t the money (it was never the money, for Beau, if you can believe that). It was Williams, and his cool sense of proportion. When you stop suffering. It was simply that Williams knew how much was enough.

  Then again, what was “enough”?

  “Scream, Beau. Let it out.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Twice a week, Beau drove into Beverly Hills to see Dr. Horowitz, who urged upon him meditation, marijuana, and who wrote him a prescription for lithium.

  “Let’s do something about your anger.” Horowitz was a dainty little fellow with a blond horseshoe mustache and elbow patches. He wore white trousers and swanned around his office barefoot because he believed we should all be closer to the dead. “Let’s take care of Beau.”

  It was hard not to laugh. This man was insane. But he saw all sorts of people, Roland Mardigian, Jeremy Vana. He was the go-to guy for every anxious Jew in Hollywood. He had a tiny hourglass on the edge of his desk and op art on two of his four walls.

  “Come on.” He insisted they do their sessions standing up, and toe-to-toe. “Scream.”

  “Aaaahhhhhh!”

  It was like visiting the fucking zoo, with those animal stripes and spots splayed across the walls. This was supposed to help him? With what? But he went, since for a while he could afford it. And yet nothing ever seemed to change . . .

  “Hey, Rosers!” Bryce hammered on the bathroom door with his fists. Now it was December, the days at the beach short and cool and bright. “Get dressed, we got somewhere to be!”

  “What?” Beau spoke over the thin trickle of the shower, its hiss and steam.

  “Meeting! Let’s go!”

  Beau twisted the rusty tap. The jade green tiles were blotted with mildew; the showerhead was oxidized brown.

  “Who we meeting?”

  “Davis DeLong.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “Nope.” On the other side of the door, Bryce whooped. “Get dressed.”

  Beau hustled along the hall, into the downstairs bedroom where he kept his clothes. It was too dingy to sleep down here, all the furniture draped with sheets, but it would do for possessions.

  “What does Davis want with us?”

  “The Dog’s Tail.” Bryce’s voice drifted from upstairs. Beau heard the jangle of his keys. “He wants to do our movie, my friend!”

  “Bullshit!”

  Beau scrambled into agent-wear, clothes he hadn’t had much occasion for lately, but they still fit if he inhaled and you were stoned. Davis DeLong had bigger fish to fry. He had to.

  “What makes you think Davis would touch a picture like this?” Beau clomped up the stairs now. “We don’t have anything to give him. May as well go after Steve McQueen.”

  “Pessimist,” Bryce sneered as he emerged into the living room. Beau did a double take at the sight of his friend in a tie. “We have poetry.”

  “Poetry.” Beau exhaled. Their lives up here on the second story of this house that was built down along a low bluff that sloped to the sand: these were poetry, too. “Davis gets seven-fifty a picture.”

  “Davis has a chance to work with us.”

  “OK.” Beau smiled. “That’ll tip the scales, I’m sure.”

  Bryce’s paisley tie triangled his chest like a penguin’s underbelly. He wore an untucked denim shirt and sandals. Still, a tie. The sun was beginning to go down outside, the tide rolling in all the way under the house.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The Luau. We’re due in forty-five minutes.”

  “Davis’ll be late. How’d you get the meeting?”

  “Jack made it happen.” Bryce led them toward the door. “I’ll tell you, we don’t even need a script if Davis wants to do it.”

  Lassitude. Reverie. “Poetry,” Beau guessed, was another word for it, but wasn’t the key to their movie tedium? The Dog’s Tail took its name from something Nicholson had overheard at a party. It was meant as a descriptive, applicable to anything from women to vacations. It’s the dog’s tail, they might say of a bad booth at Dan Tana’s, the girl who crawled under your table at last call. It wasn’t always bad: the dog’s tail could be what you secretly yearned for, the life lesson you needed like a small loss at roulette. The dog’s tail, Beller reasoned, was existence itself, which was why this movie had to be made. The story, which Beau, Bryce, and Jack had cooked up over a 4:00 AM breakfast, about two brothers being pursued around the country by an assassin. They had everything but motive, but it didn’t really matter. The movie had begun as an inside joke, one of those flashes of “inspiration” you had at that hour. Bryce, though, wouldn’t let it go. He’d dug into his own pocket to hire a kid named Mitchell Gibson to write it, after everyone else had passed: Dennis Hopper, Curly Bob Rafelson, Buck Henry. Mitchell’s script had “poetry,” sure, it had a rugged desert beauty—even Beau could see the kid could write description, was aiming for American Antonioni—but the movie didn’t make sense. It lacked drive. Mitchell wouldn’t even confine it to a single time period.

  “I hope you brought dope,” Beau said. “We’ll need all the persuasion we can muster.”

  “Davis read the script. He likes it.”

  Beau wore a navy jacket, a white shirt with cuff links. Most days, he dressed like a distressed beachcomber, lay around watching Sesame Street and scratching his ass. But he could still put it on when he needed to.

  “All we gotta do,” Bryce said, as they stepped into the courtyard that led to the garage, “is convince Davis’s agent.”

  “His agent?” Beau’s shirt was immaculate, arcing over his belly like a sail. “That’s Sam.”

  “Sam? Shit, Rosers, he’s coming to the meeting!”

  “How could you miss that?”

  “I told Davis over the phone we needed to talk about the script. He said he already loved it and would bring his agent. There are a thousand agents in this town.”

  Beau laughed. “There’s only one who knows me so up close and personal.”

  The courtyard’s fine white gravel crunched under their feet. To their left was a separate property. No house, but Bryce kept an unruly garden that stepped down to the sea. On its various terraces were recessed wooden benches, cozy fire pits, bonsais and Japanese maple
s. Bryce had a meditation shed there too, the little gray outbuilding where he went to clear his mind. Beau looked over as they passed. Nothing could ever go wrong in this place. So long as neither of them had anything to lose, everything that came their way was gravy.

  “Maybe I should just whip it out and offer to freshen Sam’s drink.”

  “Maybe he won’t remember.” Bryce turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the garage. “Teddy Sanders says the guy had his second angioplasty last month.”

  “Maybe he’ll just drop dead.” Beau studied his face in the passenger’s side visor, began to trim his mustache with tiny scissors. “That’ll take care of that.”

  Bryce drove a ’68 Porsche, sluicing through an absolute absence of traffic, past Zuma and Carbon Beach, the maroon hood gleaming, their voices carried away by wind. Past GLADSTONES 4 FISH and up Santa Monica Canyon. Only when San Vicente Boulevard merged with Wilshire, and the light was gone and the air was suddenly dank, only then did their mood too darken.

  “I need this movie,” Bryce murmured. Fog hung over Westwood. “I haven’t worked since spring.”

  “I know.” Beau was almost tapped again, too. “I know we need it.”

  They parked up the block, to avoid the valet’s charge. Beau cracked his knuckles behind his back as they stepped out of the car. The street was white and cool, the shop windows studded with oversize snowflakes and drab golden orbs, plastic Santas and flock-covered sleighs.

  “Happy holidays.”

  There in the islandic depths of the Luau, all tiki darkness and volcanic flame, Sam oozed sarcasm. He looked like a shriveled head on a stick, prunier than ever as he stuck out his palm.

  “Sam.” Beau shook it. “Good to see you.”

  Davis DeLong, the real prize, reclined in the booth’s deepening center, both arms extended along the top like a groggy fighter’s. He was even more handsome in life. Bryce slid in beside him while Beau stayed on the edge, as far from Sam as possible.

  “We’ve met once before,” Beau said. “I don’t know if you remember.”

  “Sure.” Davis was cool. “At Vana’s.”

  Sam kept his feet outside the booth, facing the room as if he were about to leave. There was no way he’d abandon his star client to these loons, but there was that feeling of Tinseltown cubism, like two or three separate meetings might happen at once.