American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “I don’t understand,” he murmured. “What happened?”

  What happened? To his right, the waiting area held only the most perfunctory leather couch and metal-framed table, copies of the trades left out the way you’d toss a coloring book to a bored child.

  “Fuck this place,” Beau snapped. As the guard grabbed his elbow roughly. “And fuck you too.”

  “No need to get testy, pal.”

  He couldn’t help smiling. But to Beau, it was excruciating. Never mind the horror of their last offices—Frank Gehry’s hypocritically extravagant monument to Williams’s ghost, on Little Santa Monica Boulevard—this place was the pits. That the mellow splendor of Talented Artists Group should morph over time into this . . . drab, Teutonic corset? Awful.

  “Where the fuck is Milt Schildkraut?” the old man yelled, bellowing up at the ceiling. “Teddy!”

  Nothing. The guard hustled him into the drive. More out of reflex than anything else, Beau whirled and punched this jackass in the face. The guard lashed back with a roundhouse. He smacked the old coot in the eye.

  “FUCK!” Beau yelled as he dropped to his knee. “God—OUCH!”

  He slapped the ground with his palms. The guard just rubbed his jaw and stood there. He looked like MacGyver. Surferish, thick, and sleazy.

  “Fuck!” Kneeling on the ground, Beau saw spots. The pain was something else. It had been a while since he’d been hit in the face. “You miserable shitlicker.”

  The guard just tapped him in the ribs with his shoe. It wasn’t quite a kick. “Get this asshole his car.” He snapped his short fingers at the hustling valet. “Pronto.”

  Beau knelt, pressed his fingers to his nose. It hurt, it hurt. More than the other, for a second: more than that pain of existence that was always at the center of his life.

  Why did he hit that guard? To erase that other, greater pain. It didn’t work. He stood up, shoving himself roughly to his feet just as the Salvadoran valet arrived with his Mercedes. It was still only late afternoon. Across the street, the façade of the old Century Plaza seemed to mock him. Its gray balustrades looked mangled, derelict.

  You wanna know what it’s like getting old? The ridiculousness, he thought, was the worst. The ineffectuality. Saliva spread across his tongue. A metallic whisper of swallowed blood. Above him the sky was a luminous bronze, a color that might have been called “blaze of glory,” except that Beau had nothing in his pocket to match it. A half chubby? A bruised kidney? How poor is man’s equipment, in the end.

  “Severin!” Our father’s voice rasped, barked into Sev’s answering machine. “Pick up, son! Pick up, if you’re there.”

  My brother played it for me later. The message Beau left him, just one of a bunch from that night. Sad to say he didn’t leave me any, but he sounded sharp—typically alert and ferocious—as he flew up the PCH toward Malibu. For a while he’d just driven around, but now, 6:22 PM Pacific time according to the clock on his dash, he buzzed along the coastal highway. The ocean was on his left, a red sun plunging above the horizon. He passed Gladstones, Moon-shadows. All those shabby landmarks, shitty fish joints, their painted boards warped and corroded by proximity to the sea. He caught the light at Rambla Orienta and headed for Beller’s. Where else?

  “Bryce! Brycie?” He pounded away on the new front gate that enclosed the old courtyard, which used to be open to the street. “Open up, motherfucker!”

  The door opened, finally. But it was Danny DeVito who stood on the other side, blinking up at Beau. Not exactly what the old man had expected.

  “Yeah?” Small, funky DeVito was the anti-Bryce, in a way: an impossible figure who’d miraculously become a star. “Whaddya lookin’ for?”

  “Oh.” Beau bounced on his heels. “Where’s Bryce Beller?”

  DeVito looked him up and down. The actor wore short sleeves, a dab of zinc oxide on his cheek. He and Beau had been producers on the Sony lot at the same time. They knew each other.

  “Bryce doesn’t live here anymore, buddy. He moved ten years ago.” He stood with his hand on the jamb and the other on the knob of a slate-colored wooden door he’d built precisely to keep people out. “Jesus, Beau, what’s the matter? You look a little agitated.”

  Beau just stared. Beyond the door, the courtyard was the same as it had been. Bougainvillea climbed a wooden lattice. The plant’s pink blossoms were torch-like, holding the day’s final glow. Those flowers had been there in Bryce’s time, although the meditation shed—Beau leaned over to see—was gone.

  “You wanna come in?” DeVito furrowed his brow. “Have a cup of coffee, maybe call your wife?”

  Beau shook his head. He fixed the actor with a look that was mute, forlorn, doggish. Then he turned and shuffled away, hunching his back as he moved toward the black Merc that was blocking this now-private-access dirt road.

  “Hey, Beau?”

  Lovely man. In a minute, DeVito would go inside and call Patricia, but just then he shut the door and left Beau alone with his thoughts. Privacy was what the producer needed and deserved. The actor pocketed his half-moon glasses as he crossed the courtyard and entered the main house, which had been rebuilt: it stood white and massive and solid against the edge of the Pacific.

  And Beau? Who knows what he thought then. He knelt down for a moment, just outside the garage. He was too far gone even to remember it wasn’t his old friend’s house anymore; was just able to grasp, in some primitive sense, that this was the site of the greatest tragedy of his life. He crouched for a minute in the center of the road. Picked up a fistful of dirt and rubbed it between his palms. Kate. Katie. When you’d lost that, there wasn’t any way back to the family of man. You were on your own, in a sense. But then, Beau Rosenwald always was.

  The thunder of the sea rose to meet him. An increasing evening coolness spread across his skin. There was a smell of jasmine, and salt water, before he got up and walked back to his car. Little spumes of dust lifted into the air behind his feet, drifted, disappeared.

  “Severin? Sev?” Beau’s second message sounded softer, more reasonable. I suspect our father never stopped fearing for Sev. “You there, son? It’s Dad.”

  Severin was out. He didn’t pick up this message—stamped at 10:47 PM New York time—until a little while later. Maybe he was carousing, celebrating his good fortune. On the heels of Thirsty People, he’d just won a Lannan Award.

  “I was thinking of you, kid.” Beau spoke into his Bluetooth headset. “I’m on my cell.”

  His voice was furred with nostalgia, as he swished back down the Pacific Coast Highway, with the city’s water-drawn margin now on his right. The lights of the Santa Monica Pier twinkled in the distance.

  He hung up. He switched on his headlights and swung left on Temescal to Sunset, then took Sunset east through the Palisades and Brentwood. Whispering cypresses, the dark spires and canyon greenery spread to either side of him. Beau loved his car, the heavy black machine that was built like a Panzer and ran like a Ferrari. God bless the inventor of it, author of the seat’s vibration buzzing along his leg. Nothing Freudian, he thought—who needed a surrogate cock?—just $115,000 worth of German metal and intelligence. One thing, at least, those people got right.

  He made a bunch of phone calls. Just random numbers, it turned out.

  “Rosenwald! B-B-Beau Rosenwald! American Dream Machine! Fuck you, Williams! Fuck you, Smiligan! Fuck. You!”

  Yeah, that kind of thing. Harassment, left on strangers’ answering machines and voice mails. The police retrieved these later. He talked a lot about Williams, and also sang nursery rhymes. The sound of one’s mad father singing “Baa, Baa Black Sheep” into a telephone is something nobody should have to hear.

  “Severin!” Finally, he got his son on the phone. As he rolled into Beverly Hills, shortly before midnight in New York. “It’s Dad.”

  “Dad? Where the hell have you been? Patricia was looking for you.” Severin didn’t carry a cell phone. He might’ve been worried earlier, but Beau had freaked o
ut before. He’d decided to let it go. “What’s going on out there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dog shit? Dad?”

  To my brother’s surprise, Beau laughed, a rich baritone cackle that suggested—at least for a second—he was in control of the whole thing.

  “They’ve been feedin’ it to me my whole life. Seemed like a good time to know what it was really about.”

  “Um, cool, Pop. But Patricia’s really worried.”

  Beau grunted. Under this noncommittal noise, Severin could make out Talking Heads’ “The Great Curve.” Years ago he’d introduced his father to this song, and now it was playing on the man’s car stereo.

  “What’s it about?” Severin said. “Dad, what’s happening out there?”

  “My movie fell apart.” Just then, Beau was cruising past the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Polo Lounge under towering palms to his left. Too quiet, he thought. “Fucking Emily White pulled the pin this afternoon.”

  “Dad, you’ve had movies fall apart before. A million times.”

  “I liked this one!” He kept going toward the Strip. “It was special.”

  Severin sighed. “I could’ve told you A Hall of Mirrors wasn’t a movie. Maybe you should’ve tried A Flag for Sunrise, instead.”

  “Huh?”

  Beverly Hills at night. Beau was practically sniffing the air, looking up at the sky-bound fronds and the gates and hedges of mansions set way back from Sunset. This strange road, with its grassy meridian.

  “Maybe I should take a whack at that one,” Beau said. “What’s it about?”

  It was never too late. Not if he was breathing.

  “I dunno, Dad. That one’s tough too. Costa-Gavras on acid.” Severin coughed. “Will you please go check yourself in? A hospital, or a—”

  “Psychiatrist?” Beau laughed, again. “I was married to one of those. Hasn’t worked out.”

  “Dad!”

  Click. Beau hung up on him. And turned his phone off, so there was nothing—nothing—Severin could’ve done. There were a bunch of messages from Patricia on there too, of course, but he ignored those. Beau knew what he wanted. There were times, however rare in these late years, when he needed the old thrill, became more lycanthrope than man. He wanted flesh, activity. He wanted booze, and maybe even cocaine. He wanted to feel the way he had, once, as the cocaptain of the strongest talent agency on earth. To experience the radical abasement of kings.

  He roared along the Strip, dialing up the volume on his stereo until this German fortress-on-wheels shook. His shiner was darkening into complete view, and the last of the TP poultices had flaked off his head. He unknotted his tie and tossed it onto the seat next to him. There was only one place you ever went, in the old days, when you were feeling like this, when you wanted hookers and self-demolition and ecstasy. You went to the motherfucking Chateau.

  Beau pulled into the hotel’s drive and just left the doors open. The stereo blared as he lobbed the keys at the valet. You had a car that expensive and the big dumb gorillas who kept the door here left you alone, no matter how ugly you were.

  “Uhm, Tanqueray martini.” As soon as he’d settled in, Beau gave the waitress a sly smile, winking Tourettically. “Shaken, up, with olives.”

  What the hell was wrong with him? But this place had changed, too! Not in its particulars—it kept the same Spanish Gothic voodoo coolness out here on the patio, the same jungled greenery around the pool—but in its spirit. Even the help had to be beautiful these days. All the waitstaff and the actresses and the busgirls and the young men, the sharp-suited, curly-haired Italianate sorts who mobbed the lobby and nestled on its couches. These people were the movie business. If Beau craned his neck he could still see the bungalow where John died. But the fat man was beyond the margins, now.

  “Excuse me.” Some girl was approaching, tittering as she stumbled out one of the French doors onto the patio. “I think I recognize you.”

  “Hah?” Beau, who’d done such an interesting parody of a man with his shit together in front of the waitress, now rolled his eyes and gave this girl a bug-eyed stare. “Whashatalkinabowd?”

  “Aren’t you . . . Ben Kingsley?”

  What, in God’s name, was going through his mind? So many things had happened here, significant deaths and insignificant blowouts, long nights of pussy and drugs that ended with him driving home at 5:00 AM with numb teeth. Long ago, long ago. But instead he remembered quotidian things: store-bought cherry pie, heavy-lidded afternoons in his office spent scrutinizing deal memos, drab rounds of Saturday errands with his father as a boy. These were the things that possessed him, because they were peak experience, it turned out. Not fucking some actress. Anyone with a bit of luck and money and some patience could do that.

  “What makes you think I’m Ben Kingsley?” Beau’s gruff, Queens-touched bark would’ve blown this notion out of the water even if everything else didn’t. “I don’t look a damn thing like Sir Ben.”

  “We thought maybe,” she nodded over her shoulder at three friends, “you’d gained weight.”

  She teetered in her heels. Drunk. This tall, thin, brunette heron with a narrow face that drooped too far—just—to be pretty. Sitcom was her ceiling.

  “A lot of weight.” Beau picked up his martini and drained the dregs of it, urbanely. “He’d have to pack on a hundred pounds at least.”

  He set the glass down and checked out the girl. Batting his eyes.

  “Are you an actress?”

  “Yes.”

  “What have you done?”

  “I just did a pilot for Lifetime.”

  He nodded. Figures. He turned away without interest, ready to let the matter go.

  “So,” the woman sneered. “You’re not Ben Kingsley. Who are you?”

  Candlelight spilled across the blood-dark tiles; lanterns glowed overhead. Was he crazy? He looked fevered, in this light. He looked positively malarial. But it’s possible he wasn’t any more crazy than anyone else.

  “I’m no one.”

  “No one?” She swung her head haughtily. The glimmering tips of her hair swept her collarbone. “You have to be somebody.”

  “Whyzzat?”

  “Because there’s no way”—she belched—“no way they’d let you sit here, otherwise. You’re a little . . . old.”

  She was wasted. Her friends—two guys and another, cupcake-blonde, woman—had dared her to come over here, he realized. They stood maybe twenty feet away, laughing.

  “We thought you were Ben Kingsley in a fat suit.”

  Beau stood up. He drew himself to whatever his full height was now exactly—five-seven on a good day. The most offensive thing really was the suggestion that he now lived in a world where Ben Kingsley could even be asked to wear a fat suit. Was the movie business so degraded? Had even the truly elegant stooped so low?

  “No,” he said. His own ugliness wasn’t news, after all. “Now get the fuck out of here, you three-inch-chinned, spastic-looking, Down Syndrome–carrying whore. You look like Allison Janney on the worst day of her life. Get the fuck out of here. Lifetime’s too good for you.”

  Astonishingly, she turned away without a word. As if all he’d done was bid her a good evening. A dog, a miniature Doberman, popped its head out of her purse and yipped at him as she went back to her friends.

  “Excuse me.” Of course, one of the men came over right away. “What did you just do?”

  “I told your friend to take a walk.” Beau was just getting ready to leave. There’s nothing here. He peeled a fifty out of his wallet and placed it on the table. “That’s all.”

  “I think it was more than that. You were very, very rude.”

  The old thrills, they were harder to come by than he’d remembered. These people spent more on fitness than they did on drugs. This guy, for instance, was sickeningly big. A blond, apple-faced Nord who was probably a personal trainer. Either that or the governor-in-waiting of the state of California.

  “No,” Beau said. “
She insulted me first.”

  The other man came over now too. He was short, Jewish, Versaced, with his early-graying hair cropped in a modified Caesar ’do. An agent, the new kind. Beau could smell it on him. Both were in their thirties.

  “I think you should apologize,” Nord Boy said. His skin was glossy, his features scrunched in a steroidal knot.

  “You wanna know a story,” Beau looked them both over, “about Ben Kingsley?” He trained his eyes on the agent. “Since you mistook me?”

  “Sure.” The agent smirked. He was from UTA or Broder Kurland—some little pisher Beau’d seen around town in the past. “Sure we do.”

  Nobody had mistaken anybody. These guys were just fucking with him, wondering what the old bloody-headed geezer with a black eye was doing at the Chateau.

  “I used to represent Sir Ben. Long ago, and just briefly,” Beau said. Like this would impress them. “In the eighties.”

  “Is that right?” The agent spoke. The women were off powdering their noses, so it was just him and the other man, opposite Beau.

  “One day, Dickie Attenborough calls me up, he says, Beau, I’m making this movie about Mahatma Gandhi. And I’m interested in your client. I said, Which one? And he said, Bryce Beller . . . ”

  “Bryce Beller?” The agent cocked his fists like a little prizefighter, as if just standing behind Nord Boy made him tough. “Who’s Bryce Beller?”

  “Actor. Tall, skinny, nervous. Used to do biker movies with Nicholson.” Beau looked from one to the other. Nord Boy looked like a muscle car enthusiast. Maybe he’d remember Ride Down the Wind. “Do you remember him?”

  “Nope.” The trainer swung his arms. “Can’t say I do.”

  Beau sighed. The story wouldn’t be funny, the joke couldn’t make sense: how Attenborough had really wanted Bryce for the Martin Sheen role, but there’d been some confusion. Beau’d gone ahead and offered the part of Gandhi to Bryce Beller. The thought of Bryce—Bryce! That mad-eyed, equine, eventual specialist in playing snipers, heavies, and terrorists!—cast as Mahatma Gandhi still made him laugh.