American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “What’s the fucking point,” he snapped. Wasn’t that the whole agency game? If Bryce could be Gandhi, then anyone could be anyone: the doors were wide open. This was a lesson worth imparting. “If you people don’t have a sense of history, I don’t think I can help you gen’lmen.”

  “A sense of history?” The big guy squinted. “I don’t think we need your ‘help,’ friend.”

  “Who’s ‘Gondy’?”

  The agent rubbed his chin. And Beau just stared. Anybody could be anybody, perhaps—a fat man’s salvation—but was it true that everybody eventually became nobody? Who’s Mahatma Gandhi? Jesus fucking Christ!

  “Where’d you go to school, dipshit?” Beau stepped toward him. He could smell the Westside entitlement on this kid, too. “You go to Untaken? Windward?”

  The bulky guy shoved him, palm to pec. He didn’t like Beau’s attitude. The agent said, “Beverly High.”

  “OK. So they didn’t tell you who Gandhi was? Little bald guy. Big pacifist? Fought against colonial rule in India?”

  “Naw,” the guy said.

  What did it say about the world, too, that Beau, not exactly an eager student, could retain at least this much, yet a boy schooled under the most privileged conditions on earth wouldn’t bother? It offended Beau, it defaced Abe Waxmorton’s memory, that this was what the business, and perhaps civilization itself, had come to.

  “Fuck you!” Beau lunged. The trainer shoved him again. “They should teach you about Gandhi and about Bryce and me—”

  The women’s heels clickety-clacked across the lobby’s tile floor. Which was all the impetus the trainer needed to haul off and hit him.

  “Jesus, Mark!” The agent’s voice skied above. Beau went down so fast it was like someone had chopped him in half. CRACK! “The old guy’s crazy! What the hell’d you do that for?”

  You could hear the splintering of bone from across the lobby. The trainer shook his fist. “He was an asshole.”

  “It wasn’t necessary.”

  Maybe it was. This wasn’t the halfhearted pussy tap of some cheapjack security guard in an off-the-rack blazer; this was Vanilla Thunder: a full on fist-to-the-face from a guy who bench-pressed hundreds of pounds for a living.

  “Fuck it,” the lunk said. “He’s breathing.”

  Oh, he was. Like a cadaver in a horror movie, Beau swung up from the waist. It took seconds, and all of this—the hitting, his getting up—was so fast people in the lobby were only now turning to look.

  “You,” Beau gurgled. Blood jetted onto his shirt and he spoke with a weird nasality. The center of his face was swollen. “Motherf—”

  The guy kicked him. Just once. Beau rolled onto his side and there was again that crack, the keening pop of a bone being broken.

  Uhhrrf. He vomited. Spat a trickle of blood and bile onto the floor and lay there, still.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  The Spanish tile, magnified. The rugs, the legs of the couches. These are the things Beau took in, because, astonishingly, he didn’t hurt. He was hurt, but the dull ache in his kidneys, the sharp pain in his ribs—he couldn’t breathe—the piss dribbling down his leg: all this belonged to somebody else. His face, which was the concentration of all suffering: this, too, belonged to somebody else.

  “You OK? Mister, are you OK?”

  “Ahhh.” Spit rolled out of Beau’s mouth. His tongue didn’t work. “Yath.”

  He pushed up. Somehow, he did it, while three or four people, including the hostess, knelt around him.

  “We should call a doctor.”

  “No, get him out of here, man. I don’t want him in the hotel.”

  Cloudy voices. A manager, maybe. But Beau lurched and tottered to his feet. He could breathe, if he held his left shoulder back. He could almost walk. Limping and humping his way across the lobby, he left a trail of piss and blood.

  “Ohhh,” he moaned. “Ohhhhhh.” Was anybody going to stop him? His teeth were pink. He looked like Nosferatu.

  Down the stairs he went, on autopilot, swaying and stumbling to the valet stand. He knew this place, he didn’t need to see it. Because his nose was shattered, he could actually feel it pulsing, and the salty trickle of blood in his throat fascinated him.

  “Jesus, buddy.” Somehow he was outside, now. Another voice spoke. “What happened to you?”

  Beau looked over. His eyes were practically swollen shut.

  “Mala,” he said. I’m all right. “Falaga.” Fuckyoulookinat.

  He lurched and swayed, barely conscious. But his hands were so red! He could see all that color, which came from inside him, that rich, regal liquid. Wow! He could see his hands, slick with gore, and the patches on his shirt.

  “You can’t drive!”

  “Falaga!”

  He snatched the keys from the valet’s hand. The poor kid, just another Central American who did whatever the guests of this hotel told him, backed off. He wasn’t going to say no.

  “Hey, buddy!”

  Beau shoved a bill into the valet’s palm, whatever denomination he’d just grabbed—it was enough—and bolted. The other man, who was just a dark-haired blur in a tan suit, ran for him, but even now, Beau was too quick. He ducked into the driver’s seat, slammed the door and hit it. A good Angeleno, in a $100,000 car, feels invulnerable. He gunned out from under the canopy, went roaring down the drive.

  Piss streamed down his leg. Or blood. Whatever it was—that bastard had really done a number on him—Beau folded forward and stomped the accelerator. Gasping for shallow breath.

  He hit Sunset Boulevard at about forty miles per hour. He could see, but not see. Beau sped into the turn, bending right toward Santa Monica. He wanted to go home.

  There wasn’t anything on his mind at all. There was just pain, and a desire to reach somewhere—anywhere—it would stop. A big black Lincoln Navigator, its driver a vodka-sozzled twenty-one-year-old girl from Sherman Oaks, very busy on the phone, wove right, jerking abruptly into Beau’s lane. Her front grille crossed over just as he reached the boulevard.

  Her car was bigger than his.

  VIII

  EVER BEEN TO a parent’s funeral?

  Strange as it may sound, I wanted to ask that question, over and over, when I attended Beau’s. I wanted to ask it of everyone I saw. Beau was and was not my father, after all. Losing him was almost more a confirmation than it was a new development: it brought home more of what I’d always been missing. And yet I was there, moving among the crowd at his memorial, which was held at the house on Fifteeth Street. I shoehorned into a sun-splashed corner of the living room, listened while Severin stood up to address the guests.

  “Excuse me.” He cleared his throat, then did an imitation of an older person’s voice: “Are you Severin Roth?”

  Toastmaster Sev. Standing in front of the mantel, as suave as an actor, clutching a glass of Barolo. He wore a pigeon-colored suit, a subtle gray. The same color as Beau’s old overcoat, which hung—still—on a peg upstairs.

  “A woman came up to me on the plane and asked me that. I don’t get recognized much, hardly ever, but when she said it, I thought of my father’s favorite joke.”

  I hung back, to the side. The room was mobbed, actually, but I didn’t recognize too many people. I didn’t see Emily White, or any of Beau’s Sony-era cronies. Very few were under sixty-five.

  “Who’s Severin Roth? Get me Severin Roth. You know, the joke about an actor’s career.” There was appreciative murmuring. This crowd was old—and local—enough to know it. “I said to her, D’you know anything about me? D’you know about my dad?”

  Around the room, I saw Patricia—she was dignified, as composed as if Beau had died from a long illness instead of a reckless calamity—and Teddy Sanders. Little Will, who’d come alone, stood in the opposite corner. His wife and son were back in New York. There were a few small children scattered throughout the crowd, their faces slack, dimpled, inquisitive or bored. Through French doors I stared out at the backyard, the
black-bottomed swimming pool Beau never swam in, a few dried palm fronds that had fallen during a windstorm and not yet been carted away.

  “I’d never felt much like my father’s son,” Severin said. “Truthfully, all my life I’ve felt a bit more like my mother,” he said. “My dad was someone I tried to get away from.”

  Teddy Sanders caught my eye. Strange thing about Teddy, he still looked exactly the same. His beard and hair were a little whiter, and there were a few creases around the corners of his eyes. But he’d had that aged quality ever since I was a kid, like something mellowed in a cellar. His small nod was a way of acknowledging the history between us. Over the years we’d retained that agnostic relationship former stepparents and children sometimes do.

  “But what I felt then”—and right as Severin spoke, I felt my own face get hot—“is that I am, now. I am now my father’s son.”

  Was this something to be proud of? I shut my eyes against waves of nausea, spasms of disgust. What kind of man eats dog crap? What was wrong with Beau?

  And how could I love someone like that so much, without hope?

  “Nate.” It was Teddy who came over first, as the crowd unknotted and everyone went back to circulating, snacking, kibitzing. “How’s your mother?”

  “OK,” I said. It wasn’t quite true. My mother was alive, but her drinking had taken its toll on our relationship; we saw each other every few years, if that. She’d married again, then divorced. She still lived near Seattle, and when I’d called to see if she might come down for the memorial she’d equivocated. I don’t know, Nate . . .

  She wasn’t here. But I suppose the real tragedy of her life was absenteeism. At least Beau left a footprint. My mother could never decide what she wanted.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Teddy said.

  “Thanks,” I said. Gnawing a cracker spread with pâté. “But isn’t it your loss, too?”

  Maybe it wasn’t. Teddy was a survivor. He’d remarried immediately after he and my mom split up, just kept right on trucking. But I wasn’t being glib. I hadn’t gotten up to speak before the crowd, because what would I have said? I’m also Beau’s son? After Severin’s speech, I was redundant. And I simmered with an unexpected fury. Fuck Severin, who knew what he was losing. Fuck Little Will even, who knew what he had lost. What this meant to me might take a lifetime to puzzle out.

  “I suppose,” Teddy said. That face! It was dense with secrecy, a born negotiator’s. He fingered his nicotine yellow mustache. “I know you had a special relationship.”

  Did we? Or had I dreamed that too? Teddy was Beau’s partner; Teddy was another one of my dads. In a way, life offered just this swirling succession of roles. The most special relationship you had was with yourself. You played one thing, but you always were another. Only Beau couldn’t tell them apart. The Indivisible Man.

  “Thanks,” I said. Across the room I could see Severin and Little Will talking, conspiring, it looked like. I seethed. Yet Teddy went on, oblivious.

  “Beau and I had some fun, in the beginning.”

  “I’ll bet you did.” Another man, with a receding silver Jew-fro and a hunched, low-hanging posture like a carrion bird’s, barged over. A few flecks of spit landed on my wrist. “I’ll bet you—”

  “Oho we did, Bobby!” Teddy gave it up for the interloper.

  My God! “Skoblow?” I clapped his bony shoulder. “How’s it hangin’, papa?”

  He checked me out. So transformed, he was. Beady black eyes, khaki pants, and an argyle sweater-vest. He looked like a senile crow.

  “Dark days.” He scowled, lip quivering. “Some mornings I can’t even put my pants on without pain.”

  “That’s not just a problem of age,” I said.

  I gave him a wry smile and turned to join my friends, to find out what I was missing. Behind me, Teddy asked Bob how things were going in Phoenix, what was his handicap?

  “About a seven,” Skoblow said. “Pretty good for a kid from Arthur Avenue.”

  “Hey-yo!” Williams tackled me, blocked into me softly with his shoulder when I got close. “How’s it going, man?”

  He was pushing me backward, moving like a bulldozer while I was striving toward Severin, as if to keep me out of their conversation. Both of them had come in late last night; I’d seen them but briefly, at the cemetery this morning.

  “Not great,” I said. “Closed casket, y’know?”

  “I do know.” He grimaced. “I think I do.”

  I studied him. He, too, had changed very little. His hair was short and had gone the color of gunmetal. But he was still a punk. He retained the old swagger, the same pronated stride. The boxy cut of his tan suit made me feel like we might’ve been hanging at some kid’s bar mitzvah, setting up to play Truth or Dare with the honeys.

  “Something else bothering you, Nate?”

  I’d asked him once what really happened to his father, and he’d just deflected the question. I never did have much tact. I don’t know why I imagined that’s what he and Sev were discussing just then, and that they were leaving me out of it, but I did. And I had to know, for the same reason I had always needed to know: because Little Will’s dad was my dad, almost as much as Beau was, and because I’d been brooding over what actually happened even before Severin told me what he knew. The story of the mugging was never credible, even when we were teenagers.

  “Yeah.” I hesitated. “What really happened to your father?”

  “Christ, man. You never quit, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  Here we were at Beau’s funeral. Suspicion had even rested upon him, once. If not now, when would I ever know?

  “Is it really any of your business?”

  “Is it not my business?” I said. “It was my childhood too.”

  He just stared at me. A wary, passive, middle-aged stare. He and I had known each other now for thirty years. Once upon a time I’d scraped him out of a vomit-filled bathroom stall with a needle in his arm: you’d have thought I might ask him anything. We were the custodians of each other’s catastrophes, after all.

  “Just leave it,” he said. “You don’t really want to know.”

  Later, I lost my cool. I’m not proud of it, but I sucker punched Little Will. He didn’t see it coming.

  “What the hell?” He, Severin, and I were just on our way outside. We’d left the house through the same door Beau had used to make his final exit, passing through the laundry room and the garage. I jumped on Will the moment we stepped out into the wide stone drive. He doubled over.

  “Fuck you,” I snapped. Severin held me back as I lunged at Will, who was down on his knee. “Fuck you guys! You never tell me anything.”

  “Nate, what was that?” Severin said. He had his arms laced across my chest and over my shoulders. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Will knelt, rubbing his temple. I didn’t get him very hard, and he seemed more bemused, for once, than angry.

  “What the fuck, dude?” He stood up. “Seriously?”

  It was late. The three of us were the last to leave, and the moon floated high over the driveway. Green hedges rose to my right, grown tall for privacy. Beau’s second car, the one he hadn’t taken that night, still rested right in front of us. Starlight slicked its silver chassis.

  “What’s wrong with you people?” I said, once Severin let me go. “You never tell me anything.”

  “What do you imagine we’re not telling you?” Sev said.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t at my clearest. I’d had a few glasses of wine, was fogged—as was my way—about so many things, really. Williams stood up. He came over and planted his palm against my chest, not with violence, but as a kind of steadying gesture.

  “He thinks we were talking about my dad.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Severin muttered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t. But you guys don’t talk to me.”

  This was an exaggeration, but what wasn’t? In the end, what isn’t?


  “Jesus, Nate.” Little Will’s voice dripped disgust, or impatience. He let his hand slip off me. “It’s so important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him just then what it was, that in that moment knowing what had happened was everything, as he and Severin—the collective facts of our lives—were pretty much all I had left.

  “I’m your friend,” I said. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

  The three of us prowled around the driveway in circles, pacing like cats. Like the teenagers we still were, and perhaps might always be, together.

  “I don’t know that it is enough, Nate. A person’s entitled to his privacy.”

  “That’s true.” Though as I contemplated the open, closed book that was Beau Rosenwald’s life, its infinite variety and fathomless weirdness, I wasn’t positive I agreed. Weren’t we obligated, as friends this close, to try to understand each other, and to occupy each other’s shoes? Wasn’t it my own experience, too? “But we were all there.”

  “None of us were there, Nate.” Little Will shook his head. “That’s the problem. None of us are ever really going to know.”

  Sev had stepped away. He was sitting on the low iron fence that ran beneath the hedge; he was staying out of it, it seemed. Only I knew he wasn’t, really. I knew my brother had as much at stake in this as I did.

  “We still have a right to the facts,” I said. “To what’s true.”

  I kept my eyes on Sev. Who sat with his tie loosened, a fevered-yet-cool expression that made him look like some cerebrating hipster of the early sixties. He could’ve been one of the original crew at Talented Artists, all pumped up on Benzedrine and the Beatles. He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt.

  “Just tell him, Will.” Finally he spoke. “Tell him what you told me.”

  Little Will shook his head. Maybe he was right. Who were we to ask him to sound his own suffering yet again? But Severin already knew what had happened, and given the history between our families, the pain our fathers had inflicted upon one another, and upon us, I had every right to know also. Given that none of us were islands, that we were all a part of the main.