American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  Again, I’d never thought of him as “liking” much of anything. Conquest, maybe. I thought of him as cold and cruel, no matter how affectionate within his own family; no matter how affectionate he’d been even with me. I imagined him living on water and caffeine, his blood touched with mathematics and greed. He’d seemed to have no wants, only impulses.

  “I dunno.”

  Doheny stretched before us, infinite, palmy. A few blocks west of this corridor, our father and Williams had forged their friendship; a few blocks east, they’d decided to form ADM. We rode this meridian between history and destiny. The monotony of the street at night was hypnotic. The Beach Boys droned at low volume, the song “Our Prayer.” Aaahhhh.

  “Williams was gay,” Severin said. “He liked domination.”

  Did this surprise me? Not really. For a second I was just a conduit, only a shell for various harmonies: the ones on the car stereo, the thrum of the engine, and the hiss of the tires. I didn’t know anything, just then.

  “He was murdered.” Severin turned his eyes, finally, back to the road, like he’d finally seen it sink in. The Beach Boys hummed. AAAHHHHH. “It wasn’t by a mugger.”

  “I see,” I said. “He had a boyfriend.”

  Severin shook his head. “He wasn’t that incautious.”

  “A stranger?”

  Severin shrugged. “That’s what I don’t know. Little Will might. But he’s not saying.”

  I kept my own mouth shut a moment. “Where did you get all this?” I said at last.

  “Rachel told me some. But I knew,” he said. I didn’t raise an eye when he mentioned his mother, called her by her first name; it just got weirder, this question of all our parenting. “My mom used to work with Williams in New York, remember, so she had some access. But.”

  “But what?”

  We were all the way down past Washington now, as far south as my neighborhood. Sev turned left and we cruised through Culver City.

  “Little Will told me one or two things. I don’t know the whole story, but I know enough.”

  “You were going to write about it,” I said.

  “Yeah. Little Will asked me not to.”

  We rode on in silence, down the whole jumbled ruin of Jefferson Boulevard at night, past twenty-four-hour drugstores, empty coffee shops, isolated pedestrians fighting against the wind. Once more I felt the horror of my brother’s life, the lonely stretches he’d suffered through with Beau, without anyone there to buffer him against the man’s infinite need. How terrible it could be, really, to know things, and how curiosity terminates, only and always, in death. We whisked past the hopeless beacon of a hospital, yellow and forlorn; a big orange RTD bus sat stranded out front of it, beached like a whale.

  If Williams Farquarsen was murdered, I thought. Not mugged, but

  killed.

  What then?

  V

  “IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY have an ending,” Emily said. She leaned forward, after I’d pitched her. After I’d told her that story about Severin and then—why not?—invented a movie on the spot, loosely based on the same facts and yet elaborated into something else: a tale of two rivalrous brothers trying to solve a family murder.

  “No ending yet.” I smiled tightly. “Chinatown didn’t have one either, for a while.”

  “You need to have an ending. Come up with one, and I’d consider it.”

  Indeed. It’s tough to build a noir around an invisible body, a crime that stays unsolved. I’d asked Will what happened, of course, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Understandable, really.

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry to hear all that about Severin.”

  “It’s all right. He’s improved.”

  I stood up. Outside, it was already beginning to get dark. Street lamps were on across the lot; people trundled toward their cars. The patches of orange poppies had faded and drowned. How long had I been talking?

  “That stuff with Sev was a few years ago,” I added, watching Emily’s strangely ageless face, with its milk-pale complexion. “A lot can change.”

  “Yeah.” A lot could change in five seconds, after all. “It’s good to see you, Nate. I’ll call you, and I’ll let Byron know,” she said.

  “Great.” I gave her a hug, and right before I left, as I was turning for the door, she grabbed my arm.

  “Tell Beau I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I’d love to work with him again.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I nodded. And walked into the hall, past the poster for that movie about the trapped Texans, the one that netted Emily her first Academy Award. (Mine, it was called. The tagline read, Their Story Was Everyone’s Story.) I strode out, through those gray corridors of power, out of the corporate warren where everyone seemed driven by something less personal than ambition yet more aggressive than fear. You could smell it almost, a cold, acrid smoke that bled through the air vents.

  I stepped outside and crossed through the gate to my car. I drove off the lot, following Overland back to the 10. Wondering, as I passed liquor outlets and video stores that were going out of business, if, even without an ending, I hadn’t found my way clear. If the real question wasn’t “to be or not to be,” but rather, who controls the dream? Who organizes the past in order to clarify the future?

  My phone rang, over on the seat where I’d left it. Where it had been misplaced since yesterday, in fact. I was stuck in freeway traffic, bumper to bumper heading east toward downtown.

  “’lo?”

  “Nate, man, I’ve been trying you.” It was Severin, calling from New York. “Why the fuck don’t you pick up your phone?”

  “I was in a meeting. What’s up?”

  The downtown skyline rose in the distance to my left. I was jockeying over to the right lane, crawling toward the Normandie exit. I could see the Staples Center, the steeples and spires of that ancient Los Angeles whose renaissance was, then, an ongoing myth.

  “Have you talked to Beau?” Severin’s voice crackled and faded, blurring a little bit on his end.

  “No.” I focused on that glimmering skyline: the library, the old Bonaventure Hotel. “How come?”

  Warehouses and art galleries, the shuttered basement that had housed Al’s Bar. And that skid row where Williams’s body had been found, then bagged and tagged in the downtown morgue. A beetling, golden mosaic of light.

  “What’s up?” I repeated. Because Severin’s voice had dropped out for a second, and I was lost in contemplation of that downtown: its neglected grandeur, its strange and seedy nooks and crannies. Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown. “What is it?”

  “Patricia called,” Severin said. The lights seemed to be winking at me, saying something explicit and seductive. “Dad had some sort of a meltdown this afternoon. Get your ass over there—now!”

  VI

  BEAU ROSENWALD WASN’T a fool. Not even at his most foolish. As he hung up after the call from Emily White, he thought of his old pal Bryce, who had said to him once, If you live long enough, you get to play all the parts. You get to be every person in the play. Maybe so, Beau thought. He’d been Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia herself, but he’d never been this one. He’d never been cast so cleanly in the lead.

  “C’mon,” he yapped. But his beloved dog just looked at him stupidly. Leash in one hand, plastic palmful of dog shit in the other, Beau felt useless in a way that was new for him. “Come on!”

  The dog didn’t move. Forty-two pounds of youthful Labrador retriever weight. Once, Beau Rosenwald could move mountains. Now he couldn’t budge a fucking dog.

  “Come!” He yanked the leash a little too hard. And Daisy—technically, Daisy II, after her predecessor had gotten old and blind and drowned in his swimming pool—yipped and followed. “Good girl.”

  The fat man waddled along Fifteenth Street, where sunlight poured through a canopy of coral trees. He replayed the conversation in his head as he walked, because he knew, all along, he knew Emily sp
oke the truth. There never was a movie here. WUSA was awful—shrill and of its period, as bad a picture as Newman had ever been in—and A Hall of Mirrors was no more adaptable in contemporary terms than the Holy motherfucking Bible. Beau knew that. So why the hell had he chosen it?

  Because—and this was the man’s true beauty, that if he lacked a gift for actual self-analysis he still had a form of animal perspective, a way of seeing both inside and around himself that was almost magical—he needed something. Anything. He needed a goddamn movie, a third or an eighth or a fiftieth shot at that brass ring, in order to prove himself to somebody: to me, Severin, Patricia, who knows? Why not A Hall of Mirrors? It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d touched something worthless, as he saw it, and spun it into—not “gold,” exactly, but promissory notes backed by the U.S. Government. It wasn’t about something “good.” It was really just about what was available.

  Beau’s rubber-soled feet scraped along the concrete. The dog brisked across the radiant grass. There was the whisper of paws, the brittle crunch of the occasional dead leaf. A soft moan of traffic, way down along Montana Avenue.

  “Daisy!” He snapped again, as the dog lifted her leg to pee. “C’mon!”

  Why was this failure different from other failures? Because he knew it was his last. Dragging the dog, II, up the block—how Severin had mocked him: Jeez, Dad, even your real animals have sequels? Doesn’t the new dog get a new name?—Beau was aware of a new superfluity. A sense that this was his final orphaning, and only senility stretched ahead.

  “Honey?” Patricia called out from the kitchen as he entered the house through the garage, wiping his feet and unhooking the dog from her leash. “That you?”

  “Yep.” He came in through the laundry room with its black-and-white tiles and its encouraging glow, its warm aura of bleach and Tide. “Me.”

  “What smells?” She looked up just as he approached her across the kitchen. Vintage Picasso pottery and gleaming copper pans were everywhere. “Oh!”

  He was holding the bag of dog shit, which he’d neglected to throw away. He eyed it.

  “Honey?”

  Beau’s vision was beginning to blur. This was how it always started. A familiar silence roared in his ears. He bent down and studied the turd, still soft and warm, in his hand. Fat tub! He held it the way he’d once seen Bryce Beller clutch a stage-prop skull. And then he mashed it, quite calmly, into his face.

  “Hon—ugh!”

  With relish, almost, like a mime eating a peach. He carried it up to his chin like a butterfly, and gave it a voluptuary smooch.

  “Oh!” Patricia shrieked.

  “What on earth is wrong with you!” “What?” Crumbs flaked off his beard, and he shook his head. “I’ve done worse.”

  For money. Which is less than dog shit, in a way. Negative value, untouched by love.

  Patricia turned. She dry-heaved over the sink. Unacquainted with my father’s psychosis—he took antidepressants, but so did she, and so did half of Hollywood—she didn’t know what to do. She retched, and then twisted the tap. It ran cold water.

  “I’ve done worse!” Beau roared. “How d’you think I made my fuckin’ fortune?”

  He flung the bag at her. Dog shit clung to his beard. Then he turned and stomped upstairs.

  Beau Rosenwald, as you know, had suffered these . . . episodes periodically, since the 1960s. His tongue felt like parchment, his heart hammered in his ears. Yet weird was the dispassion he felt, while his soon-to-be-new-ex-wife (why not? It was time for a rotation) sobbed in the kitchen and he clomped toward the bedroom, winding his way up the sun-flooded stairwell.

  All his life, he had been too close to things. That was his great weakness, and his strength. He could never step away, like his two sons: he could get anywhere, everywhere, but never apart from Beau Rosenwald. This was different, today. He burned with a cold flame. When he’d gone after his second wife, the Kansas girl he’d never loved, his anger was genuine. But this woman, whom he loved as much as he ever could anybody, prompted only a chill disdain.

  Patricia’s sobs rang through the house. And as Beau stormed into the bedroom, he remembered going to the midnight showing of Pink Flamingos at the Nuart, with Severin and myself. It would’ve been right around the time he discovered I was his son, and one night the three of us got high and went to look at John Waters’s disastro-kitsch masterpiece. When Divine gobbled that turd there was a collective sigh, a moan throughout the theater that was as much pleasure—this was what we’d all been waiting for—as disgust.

  Old Beau licked his lips. Why not go all the way? He spat, gagged, ran water in the master bath, and then scrubbed his tongue with peppermint paste—over and over—until the memory was finally gone. It was one more thing, at least, that he’d done. In a sense, if you haven’t, you’ve never lived. Beau washed his face, then, with soap and exfoliant. Below him, the garage door slammed. Patricia’s heels clacked across the stone drive. Through the bathroom’s porthole window, he watched the proud tilt of her head, her red hair glowing in the sun. She ducked into her Lexus. Would he see her again? Who knew? The car pulled away, its license plate reading 4 DREAMS. She was an analyst to the end.

  He took a hot shower. Then he shaved his beard, his mustache: everything except his eyebrows. It had been years since he’d seen his face! It was heavy, jowly, not a million miles from Hitchcock’s. There was a little Brando in it as well. How age could make a stranger of you! He looked grave, humorless, intelligent, observant. Are you an athathin? He went on and shaved his head. Why not go all the way? Anyone watching would’ve thought he was mental, but if you ask me, these were among the most lucid moments he’d ever experienced. Think how much of life is vague! He was awake now, and this pure curiosity, that feeling of being alertly dreaming—the floating spark of genius that helmed the machine of the self—was new to him. What it must be like, he thought, to be an actor, or one of his own sons? That night in the theater, we had laughed and laughed and laughed, while that postdrogynous clown scarfed down a mittful of dog waste. We were all so stoned! How does it feel? At last, at last, at last, Beau. At long last, you knew.

  VII

  “ROSENWALD!”

  An hour later, Beau stood in the lobby of the brand-new American Dream Machine offices. He wore a beautiful tan Brioni suit—a muted and subtle coffee color, dulce de leche—an azure shirt, a silky jet-black tie. He looked the way he did in the agency days, with his lace-up brogues and expensive socks.

  “Excuse me?” The security guard in reception stopped him. He looked that way, that is, if he’d come to work each morning with scraps of toilet paper plastering the nicks and cuts on his shorn scalp, and a bug-eyed expression to go with them. “Who are you here to see?”

  “Rosenwald!” Beau snapped, and then lowered his voice as if he now spoke to a toddler. “Beau. Rosenwald.”

  “Uh, Mr.—” The guard consulted a thick directory. The company’s newest offices were once more in Century City, in a big dark building on Avenue of the Stars. They were six full stories high. “Mr. Rosenwald doesn’t work here, sir.”

  “I am Mr. Rosenwald.”

  “Um . . . yes?”

  “I built this motherfucking place.”

  It was late in the day. Their voices drew trails in the air, in the glass atrium that rose on four sides around them. Agents hustled along the elevated hallways, messengers, trainees, all of them with headsets and holstered Blackberries. There had to be six hundred employees at a minimum.

  “Sir.” The security guard stood up. He wore a blue blazer and looked like an out-of-work TV actor. Blond and ruddy and almost-handsome-enough: a Surfwad Detective. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’m Beau Rosenwald,” my father repeated. “And I am one of the original founders of this company.”

  “Oh.” The name, I suppose, rang a dim bell even to this shit-wit, because he stopped a
nd scratched his cheek. “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be.” Beau swung his wrist, heavy with gold Rolex, onto the marble countertop that separated them. “Williams Farquarsen wouldn’t have put up with that kind of mistake.”

  Williams Farquarsen! The guard couldn’t help but snort. American Dream Machine these days didn’t have much in common with that place. Milt Schildkraut still came into the office—they allowed him to putter and move his little figures around, sign a few Friday checks—and Teddy Sanders, of all people, still worked here. That was it. The agency was now the province of its young Turks. It had a sports marketing department, a video-game consultancy, and now counted PepsiCo among its innumerable clients. Old codgers like this guy meant precisely zip to those sleek Ivy Leaguers, those manicured UCLA grads on a mission who gave Teddy his airtime during the Wednesday morning staff meeting and then rolled their eyes as they jogged back to their offices. Everyone else—Peter Jenks, Bob Skoblow, Laura Nyde—had succumbed to their various forms of attrition: cocaine, production deals, retirement.

  “So.” The guard had to restrain himself from saying old-timer. “What can I do for you? Sir.”

  “You can get up on that goddamn countertop and dance.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Beside the guard, two blondes worked the switchboard, their fingers flying over consoles that looked as if they should’ve belonged to NASA. A swatch of refracted, late-day sunlight fell on the marble countertop.

  “That’s how it used to go down,” Beau chuckled. “Before my time, it was jugglers, comedians. Acts used to come into Mr. Waxmorton’s office and show their stuff.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” Beau shook his head. A piece of tissue, dabbed crimson, flaked off his scalp and fluttered to the floor. “I—”

  “Time to go, gramps.” The guard came out from behind the counter. “Really, I better get you outta here.”

  The old man craned his head back. Back, back, back, staring up at the ceiling, at the halls that circled this central atrium like the tiers of a goddamn cake.