American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “You don’t?” I said. “I’m waasted.”

  “Then you’re a puss.”

  “No.” Having said it, I couldn’t take it back. “I’m fuckin’ stoned.”

  The pills were worthless. Even I knew when I gobbled mine down it wasn’t gonna do a damn thing. Wax, vitamins, God knows what they were, but I’d been conned. As for the joint, there was marijuana in it somewhere, some weak strain of local-hillbilly shake, probably, but also stuff from a spice jar. Rosemary and oregano, but we didn’t cook either. We were in the alley, about halfway down the block toward Carlyle. I’d thought to go over and knock on Sev’s door but Williams stopped me. This was for the two of us, only.

  “Michelle Pearlman lets me squeeze her pussy.”

  “She doesn’t.” I looked at my friend, half credulous.

  “She does.”

  Squeeze? See how young we were? It was late afternoon. The sun burned beyond the tops of the conifers, but we were in cool shadow, along a clean white wall in the wide alley that was almost like a street. These were suburbs; the only things back here were empty trash buckets and immaculate garages.

  “You’re a virgin.”

  “Fuck you.” I gambled, knowing the word’s purview but not its precision. “So are you. You’re more of a virgin than I am.”

  “You’re a puff,” he said. “An impesal.”

  God knows. Putz; imbecile, I think. But I’ll never know for sure. The leaves rustled, the afternoon cooled. Williams could talk about Michelle Pearlman all he wanted: one forbidden fruit was more or less the same as the next. Sex and marijuana were zones of equal ignorance, equal sanctity. My eyes burned, my virgin throat.

  “We should go home,” I said. Five minutes, or five hours, later. “My mom’s probably looking.”

  My mom was probably drinking, too. Not that I’d yet begun to notice. Besides looking after me, she’d taken up screenwriting, written a feature, which would eventually be made by Orion Pictures. A true story, set in a Florida prison. My mother’s restless intelligence never did find a home, quite.

  “Haaa,” Williams laughed. “Maybe I’m a little baked.”

  I looked up at the sky, the columnar cypresses that grew out of the neighbors’ yard, watching these things the same way I watched the girls in my class, with wonderment and shyness and not a little bit of terror. Were we high? Who could tell?

  “Let’s go,” I said. “My mom’ll be waiting.”

  Williams and I walked home, but when we got there my mother was puttering around the kitchen instead. Sev sat in the dining room, sucking on a milkshake and nibbling grilled cheese.

  “Duuuude.” Williams fixed him with a heavy stare, dragging his vowels and his knuckles so Sev would know what was what. “What’s happening, son?”

  Severin glared. Fingers dripping with carbonized toast crumbs and semiliquid cheese. He was taller, sharper somehow behind those glasses, but he was the same geeky Sev. He propped his elbows on the dining table and crunched, contemptuously.

  “Not much . . . son.”

  Beau was just out of the hospital. He had committed himself voluntarily for six weeks. Chest pains, hallucinations, night terrors. Some colleagues of his, Skobs and others, took turns watching Sev during this time. Even my mother chipped in. How could she not? On some level, she may have felt the tiniest bit responsible for this motherless, fatherless boy. Although Sev was more of a man than Williams or I were: grief completed him as a human being. He would always be ahead of us; we could never outflank him. Drenched in Visine, breath stinking of Tic Tacs, we were like stupid suitors swimming in cologne, while Severin, the real Mannish Boy, swept in behind us and cleaned out the hive.

  “Where were you?” My mother refilled Severin’s milkshake, leaning over with the blender pitcher. Williams grunted out the riff from Cheech and Chong’s “Earache My Eye.” Get it, Sev? My mom stood by the long table that was so seldom used, this room with its candelabras and chandelier, its old wooden sideboard. “What were you boys up to?”

  “We were outside playing strikeout,” I said.

  “I didn’t see you.” Severin smirked.

  “We were up the street, closer to your house. You know that garage with the rectangles on it?”

  Good alibi; there was such a garage. My mother shrugged and set the pitcher down. Unconquered just yet by her own demons, her face traced with only the barest of lines. Severin mopped the brown froth from his mouth and gave an exaggerated ahh. My mom wiped the table with a towel. Bending her head so her blonde hair gleamed in the afternoon light. And that was the end of that.

  III

  OUR FATHERS WERE not in heaven. They had decided, instead, to form a company, to band together against the Waxmortons, the Smiligans, the old coots who had oppressed them all from the beginning. The idea had taken hold before Bryce Beller’s Fourth of July party, and there were a few apostates—namely, Williams Farquarsen III—who’d been plotting this since 1974. American Dream Machine. The name was his, the idea, the ideology. All that time he’d been teaching me how to dribble, his eyes were on the prize. When I think back on my childhood, it was always Williams, that chamber of strangeness, that master enigma, who invented it all. Where Tinseltown was crawling with offices that had bland, recessive banners—International Creative Management, Talented Artists Group, William Morris, names that were as corporate as their manners were old-fashioned—American Dream Machine would be flagrant, defiant, loud. No more sad men in flannel suits and loafers, grumpy Jews eating tuna fish sandwiches at the Hillcrest Country Club, acting like the agency biz was a form of gentle intelligence work, Graham Greene without the violence or self-betrayal. American Dream Machine would have the arrogance of a studio, would function like one insofar as it would package the actors and directors, controlling the means of production in order to ransom the capital. The studios no longer had all the power, not the way they once did. Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer could spin in their graves, but the business would at last be free. This was Williams’s vision, and the others fell in with it soon enough. He was the head of Talented Artists legal department. It was easy enough for him to incorporate quietly, to found the new agency without saying a word. The old one had other shells and subsets, actors’ dormant production companies and loan-outs to whom they paid monies owed, less commission. This made it easy to hide. American Dream Machine’s existence didn’t matter to anyone, the entity wasn’t noticed by Sam or anybody else as Williams simply began to pay certain clients through it. Milton Schildkraut, from accounting, was in from the beginning. Bob Skoblow and Roland Mardigian signed on soon thereafter. Teddy Sanders came aboard, which left Beau. Who walked into Will’s office one day at the very end of December and found these men all gathered together.

  “What is this? The fucking Boston Tea Party?” TAG was in its new building over on La Cienega. “What are all of you doing here?”

  Beau thought he and Williams were simply going to lunch. Instead they were all waiting for him, perched on his old friend’s furniture, arrayed upon white couches and chairs and a bearskin rug, the louche, tropical-chalet trimmings of the corner office.

  “Have a seat, my friend.” Will stepped forward to greet his old colleague. “Great to see you.”

  No one had seen Beau since the notorious Fourth, and all were shocked to find him positively gaunt. He’d lost seventy-five pounds in five months and now looked like a cancer patient, like a normal-sized man who—at five eight and 190—bore the trace of having been annihilated by mortal experience. His hair had gone an almost coppery-blond, and he wore a full beard and big amber glasses. Williams had joked that he’d need a disguise to enter Sam’s lair, but he didn’t. He simply wasn’t recognizable.

  “You know why,” Williams said. It was weird to see him, too, in such a big office, an echoic variant of Sam’s original with the parquet floors and U-shaped desk. “You know what we’re here for, Beau.”

  A roomful of dark hair, o
f Azoffian and Geffen-like beards, the way the hitters all looked back then. Will himself was clean-shaven, barefoot as was now his way, while through the window behind him spread the palmy path of La Cienega.

  “You said there was business.” Secretly, Beau’d thought they were going to ask him to bury the hatchet with Sam and offer him his old job. He’d have done it in an instant.

  “There is. But first.”

  Roland Mardigian stood up. They all did.

  “We’re sorry for your loss, Beau.”

  “We are.”

  “Yes.”

  Everyone spoke. They used the murmurous, civilian voices you almost never heard from them, a sort of plainspeak in which the nicknames, the boasting were all gone. They’d all attended Kate’s funeral, of course, and a couple had called him—some regularly—in the months intervening. Will himself had called every day. But this was informal, and because it wasn’t dictated by any social code, because Williams decided to start with this, Beau was moved.

  “How are you getting on?” Roland asked. Beau sank down on the couch next to him, spread his shoes out onto the white rug. “Are you sleeping?”

  “Not really.” Beau removed his sunglasses. “I’m still having a hard time.”

  “And the rest of it?” Bob Skoblow, cigarette burning, spoke. The last man in the room who still smoked. “How are you, my friend? How does it feel?”

  The big question. How does it feel? Figures Bob, the hipster, the Bob Dylan aficionado, would ask.

  “I don’t know,” Beau sighed. Even his cheeks were sunken, as he blew air. “I honestly can’t say. I get up, I do business . . . ”

  “So you are working?”

  Another sigh. “When I can.”

  It meant a lot to him, to see these people. Bryce was still his client. Davis DeLong. Rufus could’ve been charged with juvenile something-or-other, manslaughter probably, but he was all of ten years old. Davis had whisked the boy into treatment and immediately donated $250,000 to promote gun control. The gesture itself felt senseless, as idiotic and ill-considered as anything Davis had ever done or said with him from the beginning, but it was felt. His loyalty to Beau, unless it was just to his own career, touched Beau. It equalized the event, strangely. Not Davis’s fault, not Beller’s or Vana’s, not even—on good days—his own. The A-bomb had fallen in his heart. There was a sense of cities, provinces, whole nations gone to ash. How does it feel? Good Lord. It felt like having your future reduced to nothing, and your past set so moltenly ablaze there would be no escape from it.

  “We miss you,” Teddy Sanders said. “We want you back.”

  Beau picked up his glasses and put them back on. It touched him, more than anything ever had really, to be missed, given how much of his time was spent missing someone else. He and Severin now lived together like friars, companions of some weird and unpredictable necessity.

  “You want me to come back here?”

  His voice, too, was weak, parched for want of civilized use.

  “We want you to come with us,” Bob Skoblow said. “We’re building something new.”

  “Building something?”

  For these five men to be sitting in an office in broad daylight and talking so openly—behind a closed door—was the height of boldness. The sense was, it was now or never. The moment they told him, they could never go back.

  “What are you talking about?” Beau settled deeply into his seat. Even when he was skinny, he controlled the flow of gravity in a room. “What are you guys up to?”

  His voice grew cagey. The instant it was business, he became an astronaut circling the world.

  “We’re starting an agency,” Williams said. “We want you to be a part of it.”

  Everybody looked at Beau. They watched him, even though Williams was speaking. Who was the real president? Who owned this moment?

  “An agency? Why start another agency?”

  “Because.” It was Williams who had the answers at least, Williams who held the truth in his pocket. “This place is rotten. There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark . . . ”

  With Beau listening, he laid out his plan. They would leave in January. They had waited through October in order to receive their bonuses and had just spent the week before the holidays, a time when Sam was vacationing in Aspen, cozying up not just to their own clients but to his, checking in just as their roles—junior agent on Laurence Olivier’s team, say—demanded. The sense was that some of these stars were available, as loose as milk teeth within Sam’s feeble representation.

  “This place is hopeless, Beau. Sam should be booking jugglers and trained apes. We’re in the movie business, not vaudeville.”

  Most of their own clients would go with them too, or so they thought. Of course, there was no way to know until they actually left. Beau listened without saying a word. Watching his old friend, who still kept the long hair, the florid mannerisms, the Southern gentility of old. Even if the business had coarsened him up a little.

  “We need to do this,” Will said quietly. He brushed his red hair away from his face, adjusted the cuff links on his untucked shirt. “It’s our time, Beau.”

  “What about Abe?” was what Beau said when he finally spoke. “I don’t care about Sam, obviously. But what about Mr. Waxmorton?”

  “We have his blessing.”

  “Is that right? How did that happen?”

  “I spoke to him,” Will said. “Mr. Waxmorton understands the situation.”

  Abe had finally retired the prior summer. Beau had taken Severin back to New York in the fall, just for a long weekend, and together they’d driven out to North Fork to visit him. Beau had found the same old elegant Abe, puttering around his house and missing his beloved Flora. The real impetus, of course, was to see what had happened to Rachel. Her apartment was empty, the phones disconnected. Only once since the tragedy had Beau and Rachel spoken, a transcontinental telephone call two days after it happened. Beau had been doped up on tranquilizers, could feel the rage even so—both his and hers—just pouring down the wires, concentrating itself in his jaw, his cheek, through a conversation that was mostly silence. Forgive, please. He couldn’t get the words out, couldn’t ask her for anything he wasn’t able to offer himself. The funeral’s Friday. He finally managed that. Will you come?

  She hung up on him. Was it her inhumanity or his own that drove her away? Was it an accident? Was it what she called fate? She just evaporated. She didn’t show up at the memorial, and then she was gone. He’d hired a detective, briefly, then asked Waxmorton—who else might know?—what had happened to his ex-wife. But Honest Abe just shrugged. Haven’t heard from her since she left the agency.

  “We have Mr. Waxmorton’s blessing,” Roland said. “We’ve all been to see him. He knows the business has to reinvent itself to survive.”

  Beau looked from one face to another. Great, lanky, goonish Roland, whose narrow eyes made him appear like some vengeful ghost. He seldom smiled, might have been a villain in a movie, played by an actor, himself. The one they’d cast a few years later as the albino assassin in Foul Play, what was his name? William Frankfather.

  “I’m in. If it’s all right with Abe. If he really has offered us his blessing.”

  “The only thing he asks is that we never compete with TAG in New York. No theater department.”

  No theater. He could live with that. When the company took on the occasional playwright, as they would David Mamet, say, Teddy would be on point. Skoblow would run the music department, Roland TV. But the play would never be the thing.

  “So when do we start?”

  Was it pity that moved them, these Frankfathers? I sometimes think it was. Although it might’ve been simply that Beau had a conscience, was in some sense still the most ethical man in the room. If Will was the mastermind, Beau was the soul. They needed his blessing, more than they did his clients.

  “We’ll get our things out of here by next weekend,” Williams said. “Come the new year, we’ll be launc
hed. Sam will never know what hit him.”

  There certainly wasn’t any grandeur in the beginning. Bob Skoblow and Roland Mardigian snuck file boxes out of the TAG offices daily, hid manila folders under their coats. The Rolodexes too were dismantled by stealth, the cards replaced by blanks, so Sam wouldn’t see what was happening. The same way a spy might think to gull his would-be assassins by arranging a pillow in his bed, the agents who founded American Dream Machine erased themselves from those offices step by meticulous step. Until the final weekend, when they came in at night to finish the job with sudden violence. Then, at last, they took the things that belonged to them, the one-sheets and the wall hangings and the tchotchkes, the client gifts that practically defined them: their own very bodies.

  “Hey Rosers, you want this?” Skoblow called from the hall, while my dad was looting Williams’s office.

  “Huh?”

  Beau actually wore a ski cap and black clothes. They’d seen too many movies. This wasn’t a jewel heist. The head of security, barely more than a janitor, had let them into their own building. This wasn’t cloak-and-dagger shit yet; there were no confidentiality agreements. The agency business had been a gentleman’s game, until now.

  “This here.” In the doorway, Skobs held up Sam’s spittoon. “It’s been polished.”

  “Naw.” Beau smiled. The first smile, almost, since Kate was lost. “I’ve learned to use the urinal.”

  They took their Betamax tapes, their libraries. They took their furniture, their desk chairs, their candy jars and paperweights. They took hidden stashes of Hershey’s bars, of tea and cocaine, took autographed pictures and liquor and stacks of unanswered fan mail, took deal memos and pleas and yellow legal pads. They took everything that wasn’t nailed down, that didn’t belong, as property, to Talented Artists Group. They left Sam’s spittoon on top of his desk, gleaming and filled with water, like some sort of aqueous, pasteboard crown.

  Drink up, drink up, the cup is full, read the note Williams Farquarsen left pinned beneath it. A garbled, gratuitous insult, because for all his cool and thoughtful caution, he had the smallest of reckless streaks, a place where rage erupted into nonsense. He was just like my dad, in this one minuscule respect. They ransacked the place and took off with as many of Sam’s clients as they could. But they left him his pissoir.