American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “Watch this, you Valleys.” He cackled. And Sev glanced up from where he sat on the edge of one of Marnie’s dishwasher-sized granite blocks, reading a Vonnegut. The air smelled like quarry dust, eucalyptus. Inside the house, Marnie was listening to the Doors, and we could hear Jim Morrison grunting and slurring.

  Williams dropped in, racing straight down nine feet and up the other side. If he didn’t eat it, we’d be on to something. No helmets, no pads, just wind and skin.

  “Yes!” I yelled. Watching his green Kryptonics flash as he peaked with a frontside 180. “Yes! Williams!”

  He went down in a heap at the bottom, landing on his chin like Chuck Jones’s coyote. His skate banged, nose-first, into his neck.

  “Will?”

  For a minute I felt everything shift. There had been the heroic dreams of sex and sports and music, there were girls and drugs and movies and waves. But right now, there was only this. Severin stared over too. The silence, the stillness were sickening.

  “What’re you kids doing?” Marnie barged out onto the back porch. “You little gremmies. Williams, get in here and do the dishes.”

  She watched us—hands on hips, glasses gleaming—while Williams coughed and rolled over, pushed up and grinned.

  Fucking A, I thought. His mom was calm as a lifeguard, unwilling to intervene unless she absolutely had to. She didn’t have to. We were astronauts now, we had the power. Free as we were to leave the earth, to feel its surfaces sleek beneath our wheels.

  Sometimes, the elder Will came out and joined us. Behind his gaze was a pressure, a silence. I may have experienced him the way Beau did, as infinitely benign, a generous protector, but nevertheless he carried something frightening inside him.

  “Dad! Come skate!”

  Stepping off the porch barefoot, he’d come over and borrow his son’s board, rocking back and forth on the half-pipe, taking fewer risks, but acquitting himself pretty admirably for an adult.

  “Nate.” He’d pop the board up with his feet, catch it, and hand it back to Little Will. “Your turn.”

  One of us. Almost. But I could feel something, as feral as it was caring, when he looked at me.

  “How’s Theodore? How’s your pop?”

  “Fine.”

  His stare was piercing. He seemed never to blink.

  “How ‘bout you, Sev? Your old man getting enough to eat?”

  He was checking in, I suppose, through us. But I could feel his loneliness, his isolation not just from his colleagues, his troops, but from himself. In this, he resembled us—resembled me—more than any other adult I’d known.

  “Come sit, Nate.”

  I’d join him on the porch. Did he know? How’s Theodore? Yeah, I believe he saw all, everything, and his knowledge of everybody’s weak spots grew wearying. Unlike Severin, I was co-optable. As we sat there with our feet planted on the edge of the dirt, sunlight warming his pale calves, I was afraid of him, but afraid not of adult authority; I was frightened by his own fear, whatever it was that seethed and roiled beneath his casual surface.

  “Ha!” he whooped, at some daredevil move Little Will had just pulled. “Nice, son.”

  Whatever troubled him, it wasn’t visible. But I knew it was there. Even then, I knew.

  “Will! Honey . . . ” There was something else I noticed too, heard and felt on those nights I slept over at my friend’s. Marnie’s throttled voice, in the next room, ballooned with distress. “Honey, I can’t breathe!”

  Marnie Farquarsen had lung trouble, severe respiratory problems. The smog almost killed her.

  “Will!” she moaned to her husband. “Where’s my inhaler? I can’t breathe.”

  I slept in the back of the house, upstairs with my friend. His parents were in front, in the big bedroom that overlooked Dickson Street. On the smoggiest nights she had to sleep downstairs on a screened-in porch. Half the reason they were here and not Bel Air was Marnie’s chronic bronchitis. It was marginally better for her by the water.

  “Hold on, Mar.” With her, too, Williams the elder was different. He seemed twittering, almost cowed, not at all the ruthless operator I’ve assumed he was in the world. From Williams’s guest bed I listened. “I’m looking. Hold on.”

  “It feels like someone’s crushing my windpipe.”

  “What do you need? Do you need a doctor?”

  “I need to leave LA.”

  That wasn’t possible. Not given who Williams was, the nonbeing into which he’d drift if ever he left Los Angeles. What was death, compared to the erasure of your name?

  “Darling, I’ll get you a shot.”

  I’d seen Marnie have adrenaline before. It was gnarly. But so too was Williams’s servility, the sound of a man who bossed other men, who’d soon command a small army, bowing and scraping before his suffering wife.

  “Will, stop it!”

  Whatever he was doing. I heard just the spike of her annoyance against his irksome ministrations.

  “OK, OK, sorry sorry.”

  “All right. I’m fine, but—oh, God, I can’t breathe!”

  I lay on my back, in Williams’s spare twin. His skateboard was useless now, on the floor between us. Moonlight washed his prostrate form across the room. I was sure he was only feigning sleep.

  Marnie coughed, emitting a bronchial racket. When she worked she wore a surgical mask and goggles, took long baths in a room with a humidifier afterward. A person was cursed with the needs of her vocation, forced to work with the things that would kill him. This was true for everyone here.

  “Will you get me some water now, Will?”

  True for me, and for Severin: eventually we’d be crucified with words. The sound of the father, on his way downstairs. This house had been renovated and expanded yet still had all its original cherry floors and beams. The brackish gleam of its interiors spooked me at night. I lay there in the dark, in the Spartan plainness of my friend’s bedroom. I tried to apprehend a density of adult suffering that soon—soon, soon—would mushroom into something more terrible than I could imagine. I listened to the father’s creaking footsteps, Marnie’s coughing, beyond this a brittle quiet that echoed what I felt in my own home. Something wasn’t right; some truth was being concealed. Water gushed from a tap downstairs. Out on the street, a pair of cats yowled and hissed. I can’t breathe. I closed my eyes, barely daring to open them, lest all I see become falseness, oblivion, moonlight, and lies.

  V

  ROLAND MARDIGIAN BOUGHT a car, a beautiful E-Type Jag. He left his wife for a restaurant hostess. And that’s how it started, the men with their plates, their blazoned vanity that signified also the beginning of their rot. By the end of 1979, the company was up and running for real. They’d signed Jon Voight, on the heels of Coming Home. They had Diane Keaton, and Sissy Spacek. Beau had Gene Hackman, and after a long psychological duel that culminated in an afternoon spent helicopter skiing in the Wasatch Mountains—Williams jetting into Salt Lake on the same plane that would turn around and whisk TAG operatives back to LA, believing their crown jewel was safe—the agency signed Robert Redford as well. They were shrewd, they were smart, pooling their clients and maintaining their leader’s ethos that agenting was a team sport. You find the open man. Little by little they insinuated their way closer to dominance. Meryl Streep may have been Sam’s client, but when you were on the set of Kramer vs. Kramer every other day to visit Dustin, you got to know her all the same. You paid compliments, sent gifts. You asked, perhaps, if she had seen Elaine May’s new script, if Sam had gotten her a certain meeting? No?

  Roland was the first to have the blue California license with yellow letters that read ADM RM, the initials of both man and company, affixed to the grill of his automobile. ADM FAR, ADM SKOB, ADM TS, ADM BEAU. Teddy’s white 450 SL convertible with the red leather interior sat in front of our house at an angle, a rakish tilt toward the street like a getaway car’s.

  “This stuff’s much heavier than it seemed a couple years ago.”

  They were mov
ing into their new offices, this time with most of the lifting performed by Starving Students Movers. Beau was carrying only a small cardboard box of files.

  “It’s not the stuff, Rosers—just put it over there,” Bob Skoblow huffed, gesturing toward the corner where there was already a credenza, a gift from Don Henley. “It’s us, man. We’re the problem here.”

  “You think we’re getting old already?”

  “Everybody does, Beau.” Skobs set his own box down. “Just some faster than others.”

  Bob might’ve been a prophet. But for now the company assumed offices on Century Park East, a sprawling, airborne suite that would’ve been unthinkable in the beginning. And for a while, even their blips were successes. Will represented Streisand for all of about five minutes, but when those minutes were spent commissioning her enormous fee, who cared? She could stay, go. She could come back again if she wanted, just like Davis did. If the rumors were true and ADM cut its percentage for one or two important clients, that was all right too. Five percent of Dustin was seventy percent of Ernie Borgnine. This kind of math my friends and I never learned in school. They lured a couple more agents over from TAG, young and hungry ones who represented Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges. They made a rich deal for Michael Cimino at UA. And Roland’s TV department boomed. This was where the real money remained even after the agencies began deferring half their packaging fees, waiting until shows turned a profit before they could collect. So, the men were delighted. They visited psychiatrists and ate their grilled fish and shopped at Jerry Magnin’s and Dick Carroll’s, at Alandales in Beverly Hills, where lackeys handed them spritzers and watched as they fiddled with Zegna ties; they trimmed their beards and schtupped their mistresses and squeezed their lemons over weird and bitter greens. They ate sushi, when it was said to be healthy, or else avoided it when the mercury in fish might—instead—kill you. They went to Charmer’s Market, to Jimmy’s, to Orlando Orsini’s and L’Orangerie; later, to Tony Bill’s place in Venice. They were fed and fat and fucked and fortunate: for a while, at least, they were happy indeed. In six months, Beau gained back half the weight he’d lost. The other half came creeping back slowly. He was dating an actress named Star Mullins. Why be skinny if you could get it anyway, if the things that were offered you came and came and came and came? Star was twenty-three, meaning she’d been all of ten when Severin was born. If you thought this caused us problems you’d be mistaken, although Beau had his misgivings about it. He tortured himself to Horowitz endlessly, turned once more to his partner for advice. Beau, Williams smiled. Even he could give in to the pleasure principle, now. If it makes you happy, how could it be bad? And on a Thursday afternoon that happened to be his forty-seventh birthday, Beau came back from one of these sessions to find his office thronged.

  “What is this?” On his desk there was a rectangular box. So many people waited, the room felt like a phone booth. The company had a full half of the floor, and new agents had arrived from other places. Laura Nyde, Ken Sullowitz, Peter Jenks. “What are you people up to?”

  With high ceilings and glass walls, these offices were bright and hygienic and bustling. They had secretaries now, real ones, and messengers; they had a human resources person, and a coverage department.

  “Just open it. Look.”

  Milt Schildkraut, the man with the bald head and the bear-trap intelligence, leaned in the doorway, hand in his linen pants pocket. The free one twirled a watermelon lollipop, which he worked as if to make fun of a proposed resemblance to Kojak.

  “Go on, Beau.” Slurp. “This one’s on us.”

  Beau removed the box’s lid, unfolded a crinkly mass of tissue paper. Outside, Century City rose in mellow splendor, a midday quiet in which the sun was momentarily occluded by the ABC towers. You could almost forget these buildings held firms—Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Armstrong, Hendler & Hirsch—meant to prevent these men from eating one another alive.

  “Wo-HO!” Beau’s voice tore the silence. It fell during that sleepy after-lunch moment, before people had telephones in their cars. “Look at this!”

  He’d unwrapped the spittoon, again the spittoon, which in its elegant uselessness was now polished to a high gloss.

  “How’d you get this?”

  “It’s not the same one. We boosted it from Claridge’s ourselves.”

  There was an inscription along the sloping rims. FOR BEAU ROSERS, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN C_CK, LOVE DUSTIN.

  “Did Dusty inscribe this? Or is that you, Will?”

  Nervous laughter, the semihysterical jostling of men to whom everything was funny, lest it should ever be otherwise.

  “Look inside.” Williams now strolled into the room, parting the crowd of their colleagues to stand in front of Beau’s desk. “Look.”

  The way it worked now was this: Williams and Beau each had a twenty-five percent stake in the agency, while the others had ten. It wasn’t how they dispersed the money; bonuses were all generous and almost equal. But Beau and Will had sunk the most of their own cash in at the beginning, had taken the largest risk.

  Beau pulled out the rectangular brass tray, the slide-out bottom in which he half expected to find something repulsive. Instead there was a thin envelope and a thick wad of cash. Two tickets to London, first class.

  “Take your girlfriend. You need a vacation.”

  “I do? From what?”

  But Williams just smiled. “Enjoy yourself, Beau. Just do.”

  The agency’s ethos never faltered. They looked after one another, so devoted they were mocked with a nickname—“the Secret Sharers”—at other places. Beau did enjoy himself, more than he ever thought he could. He was the point man for De Niro, he handled Sidney Lumet. With Williams, he shared Scorsese. On top of it all, the best part was that he loved not just his business, but his son. Some days he woke up grieving and clammy and haunted and ill, and there were times still he wanted to die. But he began to feel—at last—he had surfaced. The song of a man who has come through! Too seasoned to imagine success would last forever, he vowed to enjoy it while he could. With Star, he imagined starting a family. With Severin, he went to Dodger games, and facing the orange UNION 76 sign beyond the blue center-field wall, staring from the Dream Machine box behind home plate, he could feel their shared contentment. Want another dog, Sev? His son was undergoing a growth spurt, with the barest hint of a mustache along his lip. My brother may have been an alien to him, into things he could feel were Rachel’s, but Beau had never been closer to another human being.

  “Go on, Rosers!” Teddy Sanders said. “They make movies in England, too.”

  “I’ll sign David Puttnam,” Beau crowed. “We never said we wouldn’t have a London office.”

  And so he went. With Star he stayed at the Connaught, then they went to Rome for a lost weekend. Sev crashed at my house, as they were gone almost three weeks. Everything was paid for by the company, everything. Meals were expensed, hotels were comped, even the ring—yes, there was a ring—came through the phone call Williams made to the props department at Disney, who had a deal with Harry Winston. If ever his life was like a movie, if ever things happened without any effort at all, it was now—doors opened themselves, drivers carried bags, reservations were so elastic that if they wanted to dine at eleven o’clock instead of eight the same table was waiting, with the same silverware and different flowers. All was an idyll. When Beau arrived home, he was married. To a girl from Topeka, who’d had her first drink on a date with him two years before.

  “Hello, sweetheart.” His secretary, Linda, looked up on Monday morning. She was older—thirty-one—and not beautiful, two things he’d sought out when hiring, in order to remain untempted.

  “H-hey, he’s back!” Milt Schildkraut sat on the edge of her desk. Milt had a slight stutter when he was excited. “How was it?”

  “I’m reborn.”

  “You look tan. Who goes to London and comes back tan?” Milt said.

  “We went to Ansedonia. We were in Rome, and Carlo
loaned us his beach house.”

  “Which Carlo?”

  “Pontevecchio.” Beau grimaced, amused. It was the long hand of Williams again, of course. “He’s one of our directors.”

  “I’ve never paid him.”

  “You’ve never paid anyone else. Linda, did I miss anything?”

  “Davis, this morning. Gene. John Calley.” They’d spoken four times a day while he was gone, rolled calls in his hotel room. Besides getting his trades a day late, there wasn’t anything to miss. “Nothing urgent.”

  “Get Gene.”

  He and Milt turned and went into his office. Linda was thick-waisted and black-haired, with the densely waxen complexion of girls he’d known growing up, though she was from Hacienda Heights and not Astoria Boulevard. She was pretty by any regular standard, but since when did that standard pertain here?

  “What’s up, Milt?”

  “Did you a-authorize this?” Milt handed him a mimeographed form.

  Will’s expenses. Beau squinted at it incuriously. The two men signed off on each other’s expenses—someone had to—but all he saw here were ordinary hotel bills, restaurants. “So what?”

  “Who lives in Chicago?”

  “Bill Murray lives in Chicago. What are you being such a bean counter about, Milt?”

  “My job.”

  Outside, Linda squawked, “Left word!”

  “Are we in trouble?”

  “No, n-nothing like that,” Milt said. “Nowhere close.”

  “Then why worry?” He and Williams shared a number of clients. Certain nervous Nellies like Marty, who needed both hands held and another to yank them off under the table. Beau handled Bill Murray by himself, but so what? Murray was as loyal to Beau as Belushi was, in fact because of Belushi, who loved Beau, predictably enough, like a brother. Each looked at the other and saw himself. “I visited Larry in London too.”

  Larry, Sir Laurence. This was Will’s client, in turn.

  “All right, it isn’t a worry. I just worry when there’s nothing to worry about.”