American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “You boys got everything you need? They’re fumigating your offices tomorrow, huh?” The security guard scratched his curly-haired dome. All the lights were off except in the lobby. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “Yep, no worries, Gary.” Williams lifted a hand as he headed back out to the garage. “We’ll see you Monday.”

  Legal action was threatened. But none was ever taken. No one was ever able to prove any actual property was missing. The wall hangings and tchotchkes all belonged to the men, the files were duplicates, and those that were confidential were instantly hidden, buried in an Iron Mountain somewhere deep in the Valley. The scripts were already circulating around town, so the agents could claim they had gotten them through other means, hence what could be disputed? The clients? Was that what men like Sam believed they owned? No matter. The perpetrators, or purveyers, or proprietors—whichever they were—of American Dream Machine took out an ad in Variety, the January 10, 1977 issue, announcing their company’s foundation. It took up a quarter page, the golden letters of the company’s monogram shaped like a rocket, with the A atop the D atop the M, tapering from the bottom consonant’s squat base toward the top letter’s point.

  “It looks like an ad for an escort service,” Beau said. “Who’ll know what it is?”

  ADM, with the company’s phone number and primary telex, a suggestion of offices in London, New York, Geneva, and Rome—these were just answering services—listed below the words “Creative Management and Representation.” What the fuck was it?

  “It’s like something you take money out of,” Teddy Sanders said.

  “Exactly.” Williams, resting his feet against the edge of a card table, a card table! Because their so-called offices were stuck back in Roland’s garage, his little ranch-style house on Schumacher Drive. “It’s exactly that.”

  “It’s like an obscene sexual act.” Bob Skoblow snickered. “It’s like—”

  “Exactly!” Williams popped up and slapped the table. “After we fuck ’em, we make ’em taste what it’s like.”

  Such vulgarity wasn’t much like Will, but I suppose even he had his moments, by then. There were six men in all, and just four tables, huddled in the low-ceilinged garage in which they’d plunked down some green carpet and hooked up a ceiling fan and some phone lines. Out here on the fringes, in Carthay Circle. What did they have, besides bravado? So many of their clients were suddenly hesitant, had opted to stay behind with Sam, while the studios were sluggish to respond to the new agency. What if doing business with American Dream Machine jeopardized their relationships with TAG? It turned out Sam had the leverage after all. And of course the moment the guys opened their shop they began to hemorrhage money. The cost of phones, of photocopying alone, of getting every script and every check all the way across town in twenty minutes was punishing. Roland’s garage reeked of detergent and nontoxic mold, the sweat of five men—Milton Schildkraut worked out of his own home, for now—on the phone at the same time, from their varying “desks” in separate corners. It looked like a suburban teenager’s rec room. Beau did half his business in the john, lying on his back under the sink like a plumber, just so his clients wouldn’t know their agents were so impoverished they couldn’t afford any better, and wouldn’t overhear the other men talking.

  “Where d’you want to meet, Brycie, the Palm?” Beau fiddled with his credit card in his pocket, hoping there was room enough to cover this. He’d skip the fried onions. “One o’clock, fine, we’ll make the reservations. Cece!” he called out to Roland’s wife, who was the only assistant any of them had. “Will you get us a table at the Palm, please, one o’clock?”

  All of them went through this. Every one. It took Roland six months to close a deal, and Teddy was so strapped he ate nothing but sandwiches for a month. This was why I’d transferred over to public school, in fact, not that I knew it. Maybe, just maybe they’d make it eventually. But what a nightmare it was for a while.

  “Hey, Rollie!” Beau hollered across the room. “Toss me that thing.”

  Roland threw him a soft, semideflated basketball. Milt, the accountant, was the real player, but the others—lanky nerds and stocky Jews, to a man—weren’t athletic. Beau tried to spin it on his finger and it toppled into his lap.

  “What the fuck are we doing, Rollie? What is this?”

  Late spring. It was the absolute nadir. Olivier had redefected to Sam, Davis DeLong’s career was in the shitter. Their clients were Sally Struthers and Timothy Carey, minor stars who weren’t even commissionable for the most part, since their paperwork was still with other agencies. Waiting for old deals to expire, for Universal to recognize them at all, the agents of American Dream Machine fought on. In the windowless heat collector of Roland’s garage—God knows, there wasn’t any air-conditioning—they sweltered and worked the phones, having just cut back from six lines to three.

  “We should be doing something else,” Beau said.

  Roland shrugged. His soft, high voice didn’t fit with his long body. “It’s what we signed up for.”

  “It’s not what I signed up for,” Beau said.

  “We’re in this together, remember? This isn’t TAG. The old, every-agent-for-himself mentality doesn’t fly.”

  “The hell,” Beau said. Yet he believed this more than anything, what Will insisted was the company’s spine. All for one, one for all. How could he deny the man who’d carried him for so many years? Beau breathed in the rubbery smell of the basketball. “Fucking Williams.”

  Williams was out now at a meeting. Teddy had gone to the airport to meet a writer from New York, while Cecilia was in the house doing dishes. Not like the phone rang, anyway. It was just Roland and Beau, with Bob Skoblow on the far wall plugging his free ear with his finger, leaning urgently into his call like a jockey.

  “Right, Herb, I understand,” Bob said. “But listen, listen—”

  How hard it was to make threats when you had no one behind you. Bob was five foot seven; his Jewish afro was beginning to recede.

  “You think it’s bad for you?” Roland had been working all morning trying to put together a game show called Factazoids. “I’m bleeding out of orifices I didn’t even know I had.”

  Beau snickered. He tossed Roland the ball.

  “It’s all I think about,” Roland continued. “How much money did I lose today? How long before I’m sleeping in my car?”

  “There are worse things to bleed out than money.”

  “That’s true.” Roland flung the ball back again. “That’s certainly true.”

  Skoblow was listening into the receiver now, his face frozen in incredulity. Whether over what he was hearing on the line, or that he found himself in this position at all, who could say?

  “Shit, Rosers, I’m sorry,” Roland said. “I shouldn’t complain to you.”

  “No worries.” The truth was, Beau had begun to live again. Even the regular sufferings of fear were better than the ashen grayness of unfeeling, the numbness that had clutched his heart for months. Who knew that no pain was the worst pain, that ordinary agony was the way to feel alive? “I know how it is.”

  Beau didn’t sleep either. He had developed an ulcer, stomach trouble, but what was this in the scheme of things? He hadn’t had panic for months. Not since Kate died. In a sense, what was left to be afraid of? He lay there in his solitude on Georgina Avenue at night, listening to the whisper of traffic along San Vicente Boulevard, the oceanic stillness of Santa Monica. White fog drifting among the coral trees, dampening the air in the upstairs bedroom.

  Bob Skoblow hung up the phone. He rubbed his face, then shook a Tareyton from his pack and went outside to smoke it.

  “Gents, be glad you’re in the motion picture side of things,” he said. “Music is brutal, brutal!”

  Maybe it was. Or maybe they were all equal in their discovery of the squeeze that one person could put on another, not from necessity—God knows, Columbia Pictures didn’t care about an extra ten grand that was owed to Seymour Casse
l—but because a person could, perhaps even had to in some reptilian sense. On Bob’s desk was a coffee cup emblazoned with the words HE WHO DIES WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS, a phrase that had entered the lexicon not long enough ago yet to be a cliché. These men believed it. They felt that amassing their monuments and possessions made sense, that it would take them somewhere.

  “Boys!” Williams sauntered through the garage’s side door. “You look busy.”

  “Where ya been?” Beau tossed him the basketball now, and Williams flicked his hand up and palmed it. “We were just getting ready to mutiny.”

  “That right?”

  “Yep.” Beau said. “The natives were getting restless.”

  “Restless no more,” Williams said. “Be restless no more, for we are saved.”

  “Saved? Isn’t that a little Pentecostal, for show business?”

  “I just signed Dustin Hoffman.”

  “No shit?”

  Bob Skoblow came in. Like a truant he was sheepish, ducking, skulking. He wore a blue sweater vest, even on a sweltering day like this one.

  “What’s up, Will?”

  “I just pried Dusty away from TAG.” He dropped the ball and spread his arms, palms low, a messianic gesture indeed like a preacher’s. “He’s getting ready to direct a movie at Warners. I close that deal, and we’re OK. It’s always the first big one that’s hardest.”

  Did they believe him? They had to. It was Williams, always Williams who insisted that whenever something good occurred it was everybody’s success. Beau needed to feel this, most.

  Cecilia Mardigian stuck her head in. “Did something happen?”

  Williams told her. Cecilia was a silvering, curly-haired brunette. She and Roland had been high school sweethearts, and married for twenty years. Her complexion matched the Cremora’d coffee in Skoblow’s cup.

  “Wonderful!” She clapped. “That is wonderful news.”

  “It is. Let’s go,” Williams’s lupine smile flashed in the garage’s deadening, indoor light. “Let’s close up early and celebrate.”

  “Where?”

  “The Polo Lounge. Morton’s. Let’s have dinner at Scandia, I don’t care. It’s our office.” He slid his hand in and out of his pocket, then jangled his keys in his palm. “Soon enough, we’ll do business on our own terms.”

  IV

  WILLIAMS AND HIS wife still lived in the Marina, just as they had since the sixties. In this, as in so many respects, they were not a typical Hollywood couple. Marnie Farquarsen had been to Cambridge, and before that to Harvard. She was not an actress but a sculptress, and in the backyard of their house on Dickson Street, a two-story Craftsman three blocks from the beach, she hammered granite into abstract and intimidating shapes. Perhaps it was for her sake she and Williams persisted in a neighborhood that was deep ghetto, or at least bohemian sinister. Everyone else lived in the Palisades, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills. Bob Skoblow still had his old place in Laurel Canyon, the fuckpad to end all fuckpads before he’d married in ’72. For Williams to live in the Marina was beyond eccentricity, especially as the head of an up-and-coming agency who could suddenly afford a little more. Why was he there? It was typical of Will’s strange assurance that no one—yet—questioned it.

  Just as Williams had predicted, Dustin Hoffman’s signing lured another big fish—Sidney Pollack. Bob Skoblow brought in Jackson Browne. The company could handle its operating costs and then some, by now. But Williams’s Craftsman house was like his beat-up Peugeot and his untucked shirt, like his yard creeping with wild mint and brick dust, the seaside squalor, all things that were part of his signature. Together they told people he was trustworthy. The urbane dandy Beau had first met in New York had bent a little bit with the mood of the times, roughed himself up when he’d moved to California, but he wasn’t just some Hollywood shark, he was a person of substance, with an intellectual wife and a family, and some interests outside the biz. Early Tuesday mornings and Sunday afternoons Williams taught Dustin how to surf. This was what made American Dream Machine what it was—not geezers in suits, phonies like Sam who flaunted their degrees yet were practically illiterate, but the fact that Williams was instead an artist, a low-voltage creator just like us, man: he’d sit there at brunch and discuss Tennessee Williams or The Moviegoer for an hour, long enough you’d forget he was urging you toward a deal, usually for something a little lower down the cultural food chain, but who cared? To me, his wife was an equal mystery. Marnie was brawny and strong in hip-huggers and hiking boots. She wasn’t motherly in the slightest. Her strawberry blonde hair was blunt-cut across her forehead, like a feminized variant of a garage punk shag. She had thick hands and thicker glasses and a sarcastic, punishing laugh. You kids, she called us, while she pounded away at her rocks in the backyard. Like we were rude interlopers, amusements to her more than anything. Through Marnie we discovered forms of freakery that would’ve been otherwise unavailable—Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Stanislaw Lem, Omni magazine—while that house’s black wooden floors and gloomy railroad interiors were pierced by her fearsome and pale sculptures. This was a different world.

  “Hey, holmes.” Outside in the street the kids swirled and scrapped on their bikes and boards. They were taller, leaner, skinnier, and darker than the ones in my neighborhood. “Hey Nate, man, check it out!”

  One grabbed my skate and railed against the curb, rode it so hard—doing fakeys and leaping up on the metal banister leading up to Williams’s door—he cracked it, my ten-inch Alva.

  “Sorry, man.” He handed it back to me.

  “Yo, holmes, that sucks.” The others jabbered in the background “Sorry, ese.”

  “No, it’s OK, he’s cool, Nate’s cool.”

  The street was wide, but there was no traffic. The houses were tall and crooked, and the kids prowled in front of them like dogs, like the brick stoops were theirs to bark and piss on. Their hazing was mostly affectionate: they liked me, for some reason. Whereas young Williams had been raised here, I was just some Jewish white kid, a million miles in my experience from Tyrone and Luis and Cris and Esvaldo, eleven-year-olds with the full-on scars—physical and psychic—of men ten years older. Cris got his dick sucked under Santa Monica Pier. Tyrone had a three-inch incision from a knife fight. Esvaldo was so bad he flipped me once and gave me a concussion, smashing me down on the cracked concrete while we were “practicing” his judo. They wore white T-shirts and blue bandannas, Lee jeans and sneakers from Kmart or Sears. One or two of them had been to juvie for the shit they did, but for the most part they were all snap and snarl, too protective of Williams—and by extension, of me—to level any real threat. Will was their golden goose. He’d met movie stars. They called him Big Bird, honoring his pronated, goofy-footed stance. Severin really freaked them out. You’d think if anyone was born to get his ass kicked in this situation, was chum for the Del Rey sharks, it was him, but he moved with an almost magisterial freedom. He didn’t skate, that was an LA thing, but he stood on Williams’s front steps and held court like an auctioneer, the others jouncing around in front of him while he sold off scraps of information.

  “Hey Severin, man, what’s an MU?”

  “Magic user. An MU’s a magic user.”

  “And what’s the difference between that and a Druid?”

  “What about a phraint, ese? What the fuck is a phraint?”

  Severin told them. Rattling the dice—they had twenty sides, or eight, or four—in his palm like torn teeth. It was late summer, scalding and humid. The sun was a pale disc in the oceanfront haze. These kids had never played D&D, but of course Severin was our dungeon master, the keeper of the keys.

  “A saurig’s like a lizard,” he said. Drawing on all the arcane sources beyond Gary Gygax, Dave Hargrave’s The Arduin Grimoire, or the RuneQuest handbook. “Like a human-sized lizard.”

  “Like one of those fucking things from Land of the Lost, hey?”

  “Not quite.”

  They never did kick his ass, not once. I got mine kicked plenty
of times in fun—their fun, at least—and I fucked up my ankle while I was skating the half-pipe Marnie built in the yard. That was the crux of it. We were there to suffer our beat downs, far more than to administer them.

  “Yo, yo!” Williams had assimilated this bit of New York-ese to make fun of Severin. “Check it out!”

  The half-pipe was the center of our world. It was nine feet tall, and Marnie had nailed it together in the dusty reaches of their backyard, beyond the blocks of granite that lay stacked along the western fence. There was no grass here—the surface of the vast, double-length yard was dirt—and under a gray eucalyptus at the back there was the half-pipe. The ramp was hazardous, littered with coarse and sticky seedpods and with three full feet of vertical at the top, but its surfaces were smooth. She’d done a good job with the wood, curing and sanding and bending the ply until the whole thing was perfect and there were no joints or angles to trip us up. Usually we just puttered closer to the bottom and pretended we were shredding, but today Williams had climbed up the ladder to the platform Marnie had put up—what could she have been thinking?—so we could drop in if we wanted. You kids, little fuckers. Go on, kill yourselves if you want to!

  “Uh, Williams? Dude? You’re gonna get hurt.”

  1979. Little Will stood on his skateboard’s tail and considered the drop, both arms extended like a weather vane. He wasn’t Stacy Peralta or Bob Biniak, Jay Adams or Tom Sims, some ghetto banger turned surf shop entrepreneur. He was the eleven-year-old son of a talent agent, privileged no matter how boho his parents were. He wore brown corduroys and checkerboard Vans, a T-shirt that read MR. ZOGS SEX WAX: THE BEST FOR YOUR STICK. A blue bandanna was knotted around his head.