American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “Good Lord!” Teddy wiped his eyes, finally. “That’s the most fakakta thing I’ve ever heard. How can you go in there and talk to the man every week?”

  “How can I stop? He gives me updates on Jim’s Little League team.”

  “What?”

  “Jim coaches, apparently. A group of kids who play at Mar Vista park.”

  They howled again.

  “It’s like the world’s worst sitcom,” my father said, signaling the waiter for dessert. “It’s like that pilot Rollie once sold where the Beatles were all still together in Chicago, learning to play the blues.”

  “Jesus God!”

  “John Ritter as John Lennon. Remember that one?”

  They had coffee, a pair of espressos, as their late partner’s pretension by now—it was early 1988—had spread across town, even to the kosher belt. Beau swabbed the lip of his cup with lemon peel and dropped it inside. Teddy took his neat. He wore a lavender shirt, a black Italian suit. These two had always been the best-dressed men at ADM, and in the violent pastel clamor of that decade’s latter half, their elegance marked them apart.

  “The thing is,” Beau nibbled a cookie, “I think it’s a lousy sitcom. But it’s a good movie.”

  “A good movie?”

  “Yes! It’s not episodic, even if Dr. Horror-wit decides to feed it to me that way. It’s funny.”

  “It is funny.”

  “It’s a comedy. For Dusty, say.”

  “Dustin’s gonna play Jim Morrison?” Teddy drained his espresso, nested his elbows among crumbs.

  “The older Jim Morrison. Or someone who thinks he’s Jim Morrison. Look at it like this, there’s this Little League coach—”

  And Beau lowered his voice now, for you never knew who might be listening, and began to describe it. It was a funny idea, or not funny, cute—who knows, they weren’t writers—but the fact remained, it had a hook. There were actors who could do it. There were actors who would do it, given the way those old hippies idolized one another, and who might make of it just about anything: tragedy, comedy, Jacobean revenge drama, Robin Williams or Ernest goddamn Borgnine as Jim Morrison, why not? The business was just what it had always been: an idea was “good” or “bad” depending on who had it. You were entitled to anything you could lift.

  “So what d’you want to do?” Teddy said finally. After all these years, hadn’t Beau earned a little mercy, a fresh round of assistance? “How can I help you out?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s just something that occurred to me.”

  “You wanna come back to ADM?” Teddy hesitated, moved a little gingerly around the subject. “For various reasons, I don’t think that would wash.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that.”

  “No? What were you thinking?”

  Beau exhaled. Ever since the day Teddy’s package had been mis-delivered, he’d been under a kind of spell, and ridiculous as this idea was, it created a certain pressure. Why should his psychiatrist have been the one who was crazy enough to suggest it? It seemed like fate, almost. Beau scanned the room, now like his old self, like the man who knew exactly where everybody was at all times.

  “I think I should produce it.” He chewed a toothpick.

  “You wanna produce?” Teddy was a little startled. Surely Beau’s strength was all in making deals. “With Horowitz?”

  “Hell, no. The man’s out of his mind.” Both laughed, again. “Just me.” Beau studied the dregs of his cup. “Remember I did a movie before, long time ago.”

  “That’s right. Oh Lord, you did, didn’t you? Listen, you won’t be able to do it alone, but I could hook you up with Larry Gordon or Art—”

  “Just me.” He set the cup down. “I’m through with partners, Teddy. I’m going forward on my own.”

  Teddy nodded. To this day I don’t know whether to thank or curse him for what came next. Though he was neither as pragmatic as Williams nor as passionate as Beau, what Teddy had was quick wits and immaculate timing. Across the room he spotted a young executive named Sandy Albin, a kid whose tastes ran to broad comedy. He and Teddy had just done a deal, in fact, for an actor Teddy represented named Ian Butterworth, now long forgotten. Tall, Byronic, just a little bit paunchy around the middle. The man was perfect, in fact, for Jim Morrison at forty-five. It took Teddy but an instant to lift his hand and summon the good-natured, baby-faced exec.

  “Hey, Sandy! Sandy, I don’t know if you remember, but this here is a former colleague of mine, Beau Rosenwald . . . ”

  There were plenty of reasons later to believe Teddy had done the wrong thing. Plenty of them, too, to think the mistake was all Beau’s. But just then the fat man’s problems were solved, and the truth was, he hadn’t even known there were any before that afternoon. Arms swinging, he got into his Jag and hammered the wheel with his fists.

  “Jonas?” He was on the phone, yelling at his broker, punching the car’s accelerator as he drove. “I want to sell the house. Today. Now!”

  He had nothing but a pitch meeting, set for next Tuesday. Then again, what more did Beau ever need? Wind tore at his hair, the stereo blared as he roared north on the Ventura Freeway. He hung up so he could scream along with the radio, whatever this tape was that Severin had left inside it.

  “It’s mooorree thaaan amusement now!”

  This was his life. He couldn’t wait to get back in the game.

  III

  SEVERIN AND I, well, we weren’t exactly delighted by Balls and Strikes. Reluctantly, we attended the premiere at the Cinerama Dome, munching on peppered ahi as we circulated through the lobby. It had always been embarrassing to be Beau Rosenwald’s son. But never more than now.

  “Come here, boys.” Beau beckoned us over. “I want you to meet Mickey Schulhof. Mickey, these are my kids.”

  “Hi, fellas.” Another grinning gangster stuck out his paw. “You must be really, really proud.”

  Perhaps we should’ve been. That movie would make a fucking fortune, having morphed in the end into a toothless family comedy that had nothing to do with Jim Morrison at all, that was now just a story about a rock ’n’ roll coach who moves to the inner city. Life rights were expensive, and music rights too. Why—here came Michael Keaton now!

  “Hi, Beau.” Flashbulbs popped. “These your kids?”

  “If he ever makes another movie this lame let’s move to Wisconsin,” I whispered, digging Sev in the ribs. “At least the cheese there is sharp.”

  But here was Beau Rosenwald, unpartnered, alone. And here we were, two snotty little college students, our heads fully stuffed with nonsense grokked from our film studies classes: what did my brother or I know of what this meant to the man? We stood there with our arms folded, while Beau strode boldly into the Schwarzeneggerian Era.

  “Wonderful, Beau!” Was that Frank Price, coming over to give him a hug? “Why don’t you come see me one of these days?”

  In the spring of 1988, our father was off to the races, his failure absolved. Whatever had happened in the past belonged there: all of a sudden, no one gave the late Williams Farquarsen a thought. No longer a crazy has-been who’d holed up out in the country, Beau was now a wily veteran with relationships—Bill, Dan, Marty, Bob—that stood him in good stead. Who cared about what had happened in the ADM conference room? Yet Severin and I skulked around the Cinerama Dome’s margins, outside the range of starlets and photographers. My brother understood. It wasn’t just because he had a head stuffed full of Godard. Beau’s success was much harder to take than any of his prior disgrace.

  Around this time, Severin dropped out of Yale and moved to the Bay Area. He worked as an usher at the UC Theater for a while, then at Amoeba Music in Berkeley. It was the beginning of his legend, the long hours spent clerking and curating the shelves in his head. Just like me, he was trying to crawl out from under our father’s shadow, the uneducated man’s aspirations. He wrote a novel, a primitive psychedelic noir, and then trashed it. I pecked out my own first script—even then, I knew I shouldn’t
compete with him—and threw it away as well. Nothing was urgent. We were just charting out the terrain of our half-related dreams. And though we were bound by blood, we were scarcely in touch for a few years. Williams, too: when he transferred to Santa Cruz, he moved outside my orbit. It wasn’t until the early nineties that we all got back together. Williams broke up with his girlfriend and came home. Severin decided he’d take a tilt at the movie business himself, since it was probably easier to write a script than to work eleven hours on a retail floor. And having spent a period of East Coast Exile—I finished Amherst and went to Boston, of all places—I came back to Los Angeles too. What was the point of staying away? Did I think I could escape all this, that the problem of my bastardry could be solved simply by hiding?

  IV

  “YO!”

  Two days after young Will’s overdose, Sev and I sauntered into his hospital room. They’d moved him to a private one, upstairs. Sev was jocular, bellowing as we entered. As if by now this could be written off as just another of Will’s bunglings, the way he did everything—drink, smoke, skateboard, OD—at full tilt.

  “Hi,” I said. But pulled up short as I spotted Marnie sitting on the edge of his bed. “Oh. Marnie! What’s happening?”

  “What’s happening?” she snapped. “Why don’t you tell me, Nate?”

  “Dudes!” Will just swiveled his head toward the door with a big dopey grin, more like his ordinary self. “So happy to see you!”

  “We’re happy to see you too, boy,” I said. “Never been happier.”

  “I seem to have had an accident.”

  “You do seem to have had an accident. What happened?”

  I wanted to check his memory, of course. He just blinked. Marnie stared bloody murder at me, and at Sev.

  “Hi, Marnie.” Severin was so much better at this than I was, such a mellow parent seducer. “I’m sorry about all this.”

  “You goddamn should be.” She stood up off the end of the bed, picked up her purse and paperback. “I’ll leave you kids alone. You probably can’t do much damage here.”

  She went outside. How different she looked now! She’d never remarried, lived alone now with her memories and her sculpture. Her blonde hair was shot through now with gray, long and silvery like a crone’s. Time and loss had hammered her face. She cleared her throat with inordinate force as she moved into the hall.

  “Whoa. Your mom’s pissed,” Severin said. I know it’s incredible we spoke this way, but together, at least, we were still kids.

  “I don’t blame her,” I said. “Williams, what happened? Can you tell me?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Really?”

  He was upright in bed again, the room clean and white. From its picture windows we could see Third Street, cars crawling along in the shadow of the Beverly Center below. He wore a fresh T-shirt, and his hair was washed. On his table was a Walkman, a vase with some cut alstroemeria, a copy of Raymond Carver’s Fires.

  “Yeah. It’s all a big blur to me, y’know? I just woke up here.”

  “Oh, fuck,” I said, but then Williams broke into a big mocking smile.

  “Haaaa! Just messing with you! I know what happened. I OD’d.”

  “Shit, man.” I exhaled. “Don’t do that!”

  “I know, I know. We were at a show, I remember. We saw Guns N’ Roses at Gazzarri’s.”

  “Goddamn it, Will. Don’t do that,” I said. “You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You should be fucking sorry. You think your death is only for yourself?”

  It’s hard to love someone stupid. But is it really any harder than to love someone smart? Sev pulled me outside for a minute.

  “Don’t do this to him,” he said.

  “Don’t do what?” I said. We leaned away from an unhurried traffic of nurses and orderlies, people for whom emergency was so ordinary there might never be a need to rush. “What am I doing?”

  “Don’t blame him.”

  “Don’t blame him? I’ll tell you what, Sev, I’ll blame you instead.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you,” I said. “You fucking enabled him. You did drugs with him—”

  “I never said that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Don’t you think he’s been through enough? We had to add heroin?”

  Whatever it was, this nonsense my brother and I were talking, this was the beginning of our adult schism. We might never get along in quite the same careless way, with that feeling we’d once had of carrying a shared burden—however unequally—between us. I couldn’t help envying Little Will, almost. It was a weird feeling that came over me in the hallway: mightn’t it be better to have your memory wiped?

  “Fuck you, Nate. I didn’t do this.” Severin took off his glasses, and I was amazed to see there were tears, as he blotted his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  I didn’t. It amazes me to look back, over the course of our troubled, ridiculous lives, and think Severin might have, already—that he knew certain key things I wouldn’t learn for many years still. No wonder he and Will were in cahoots. His sister, Will’s dad—my two friends understood loss in ways I couldn’t yet. The disappearance of his mom, for that matter. What would it take to opiate successfully against so much pain? I ought to have been thankful Severin, too, was still with us.

  I tapped Sev on the shoulder. I wasn’t a total idiot. A cart trundled between us, trailing a smell of rosemary chicken and polenta, royal hospital food. But he just turned and stalked back into Will’s room, leaving me to feel helpless and stupid outside.

  What did he know then? I still have no idea. And at the same time, joyriding notwithstanding—he didn’t have a drug problem, not like Little Will—Severin was beginning to pull his life together, I could feel it. Whereas I was still spinning around in dim circles, brooding over high school sins and the death of a man half of Hollywood barely bothered to remember. Why couldn’t I be more like Sev, in my essence? Or like his girlfriend, Emily White? She was lovely, beautiful, smart, unhaunted by the industry’s past as she worked for our father. It wasn’t her fault Beau was making animal movies, had just scored a big fat hit with Pete, a basketball comedy starring an animatronic chimp.

  “Yo, Nate!” Severin called. “Stop being maudlin and come back in here.”

  I followed him back into Will’s room. How beautiful this place was. The carpets were emerald green and the windows faced the Los Angeles sky, that great beneficence of another day, those clay-colored buildings that, seen from the air, seemed like little more than reticules on a relief map. The room smelled of freesia and rubbing alcohol.

  “Dudes!” Williams turned away from the sunstruck window and flashed us a dumb smile as we reentered. “So happy to see you.”

  “We’re happy to see you too, Will. Again.”

  “It’s nice of you to come visit. I seem to have had an accident.”

  Severin and I looked at one another.

  “We just discussed this, Will.” Severin spoke, this time. “What happened?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Williams looked at us both, exactly the way he had five minutes ago, while my brother and I just stared.

  “Don’t you?” I said. But I knew what was coming.

  “Ahh, just fucking with you. I know, I overdosed. We were at a Guns N’ Roses show!”

  Life is full of wormholes. So the doctor had warned us, too. He might have problems with his memory. He might experience a kind of recurring loop. So did I. Did you ever have that feeling that your life is running in place? That whatever you do leads you right back to where you started? Williams wasn’t being redundant: he actually didn’t remember that Sev and I had just been here. So it was, in Hollywood. Out there, Harold Ramis’s hit comedy starring Bill Murray as Punxsutawney Phil Connors had beaten our father’s chimp pic at the box office, but not by much. By little more than a nose, groundhogs ruled!

 
“Hey, guys,” Williams looked up again, blinking. His eyes shone out of his shallow and handsome face. “Hey, d’you wanna know what happened to me?”

  V

  SAY WHAT YOU will about Beau’s taste, he certainly knew what it meant to make progress. You put the past behind you and moved on. Was that so difficult? Some people—his ex-therapist—thought so, but Beau never had a lot of patience for those folks. Severin had once tried to pick an argument with him about this. Dad, just think about what Faulkner said. “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” To which Beau had responded, William Faulkner? Just look at what this town did to him!

  American Dream Machine was thriving. The company lumbered on under the supervision of Teddy and Milt and its young Turks, a group of ex-assistants who’d risen through the ranks while Beau and Will had been almost too busy warring to notice. These kids took his phone calls now, cocksure and obnoxious in ways his colleagues would never have dreamed; they sold their clients with a passionless efficiency he found almost disconcerting. Whatever happened to building a friendship along with a career? Deep down, I suppose, Beau didn’t care. It just wasn’t the same. Then again, it didn’t have to be. That was what made life, and this country, great: not only were there second acts in American lives, there were thirds, fourths, fifths.

  “Get the fuck outta here!” Beau was on the phone. “No, no—” he snapped his fingers. “Hang on a second, Amy.”

  He snapped his fingers again, twice, a brisk signaling there in his posh office on the Sony lot, where he sat with his sneakered feet tucked up on his desk.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  A girl, twenty-three years old, moved around the coffee table at the room’s far end. The place was a playpen, a long, rectangular cell strewn with toys, stacks of scripts, boxes of energy bars, and bottled water. With its vases full of Violina roses and its gray suede couch, its six-foot stuffed giraffe that lay toppled in a corner, it looked like a child’s bedroom that had been hijacked by a decorator.