by Jack Baran
The Hollywood Guy
by
Jack Baran
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Copyright
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20
21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgements
To Jeremy, who read it first and gave me the courage me to continue. To the many negatives who gave me the notes to persist. To Brand, who insisted that I print it out to see what I had. To Lynne, who gave me the green light to e-publish. To Linda who carefully proofed it and more and Lorenzo who proofed my corrections. Thank you all.
Cover Photo: Frank Spinelli
Author Photo: Cody Baran
Graphic Design: Polly Law
Copyright © 2012 by Jack Baran
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations and dialogue in the novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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CHAPTER 1
Pete Stevens flew east to clear his head after a painful divorce from his third wife Barbara. His plan was to revisit old haunts in Greenwich Village where he lived before LA and check out the possibility of moving back to the city. What he found were facsimiles of his younger self hitting on chicks in Washington Square Park, hipsters grooving on a Japanese Jazz chanteuse improvising at the 55 Bar.
Pete recently turned sixty and is not adjusting well to the number. He’s a big guy with a salon haircut worn fashionably short, but not hiding the grey. He buys expensive clothes but stains them early on. A bit of a know-it-all, his cynical smile reveals a man who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
Back in the ’70s when he lived in the Village he believed in the future, now it’s the past drawing Pete to the apartment off Sheridan Square that he shared with his first wife, Samantha. He stands under a Gingko tree outside the recently steam-cleaned six-story walkup where they paid a hundred and forty-seven dollars a month for a small, three room, second floor rear apartment with a bathroom in the kitchen and bars on the windows, where he sat at a round oak table writing a novel about men who worked on water tanks high above the city. He had his dream and Samantha and that was all he needed.
How much does that apartment go for today, he wonders, two thousand dollars a month? Three? He could ask the gay guy accompanying a Great Dane out of the building, but doesn’t have the patience to wait for the dog to empty its bladder.
Pete rents a car and heads uptown, weaving in and out of traffic on Eighth Avenue, riding the stagger system like he was driving a taxi back in the day. It’s a beautiful thing to see, lights breaking green all the way to the new improved Columbus Circle. He turns up Central Park West, past the twin towers of the El Dorado where he had his first close-up encounter with West Side intelligentsia.
He met Abby, the daughter of eminent psychiatrists, on the Bronx campus of NYU in his junior year of college. It was a rainy spring day and Pete was coming from a meeting with his advisor who was concerned that he was changing his major for the fourth time. Pete reassured him that Sociology was his calling, pure bullshit. He needed to cool out, so instead of going to his next class, he detoured behind the massive domed library to catch a breeze off the Harlem River.
The vaulted colonnade of The Hall Of Fame was a monument to the contributions of great Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cyrus McCormick, Thomas Edison, and Stephen Foster. Pete stopped in front of the bronze bust of freedom centered Tom Paine but was immediately distracted by the beautiful, bra-less Abby staring up at Walt Whitman. His heartbeat quickened as he trailed her across the quad into an audition for an original one act play based on the haunting Wyeth painting, Christina’s World.
At first glance the iconic image seems to depict a young woman crawling through dry grass towards a weather-beaten farmhouse on a hill. We can’t see her face but imagine it to be filled with hope. Upon closer examination, the painting reveals that Christina’s hands are stiffened by arthritis; she probably can’t walk. No longer young, her expression in all likelihood is one of regret. The play ended with a tableau of the painting.
Pete was cast as a boy who wanted the young Christina to run away with him to the big city. The psychiatrists’ daughter didn’t get the part, but he succeeded in making love to Abby in her parents’ bed, pulling out at the last second and coming on the six hundred thread count sheets. The sex was too Freudian to be satisfying but watching the sun rise over Central Park from the master bedroom window was sublime. Pete vowed to one day live in an apartment overlooking the city’s oasis. Instead he never got out of his three small rooms in the Village, nor was he any good in “Christina’s World.”
Miraculously, Central Park is open to traffic today. He turns in on 72nd St. across from where John Lennon was shot in front of the gothic Dakota. Years later, Yoko’s photograph of John’s blood spattered eyeglasses still makes his knees buckle.
Pete cruises under a canopy of trees; rowboats out of a Renoir painting drift languidly on the lake. On a hot sticky day such as this he met Samantha, a tall Brit with a Modigliani figure and long straight hair that she shyly hid behind. Conga drummers were jamming on the steps facing Bethesda Fountain. He and she exchanged curious glances. He walked over and smiled, she smiled back and life as it had been, was over. Samantha was mad for America and Pete became the personification of her obsession.
Out of the park and up Lenox Ave through gentrifying Harlem, over the Willis Avenue Bridge on to the Grand Concourse and into the Bronx where Pete lived with his mother until he finished college and became what she called a hippie.
Forty years is a long time between visits, long enough for the Jewish Center where he played basketball to become a Mosque, long enough for the plush Concourse Plaza, where all the great ballplayers stayed, to become a welfare hotel. Pete turns down 161st Street past the massive limestone Bronx County Court House, smaller than he remembers. The Jerome Avenue El is at the bottom of the hill and beyond, the House That Ruth Built, Yankee Stadium, side by side with its future twin under construction across the street.
Baseball had been Pete’s passion since he came home to America from Iceland with his mother in the summer of 1956. His heroes wore white cotton pinstripe uniforms, sweat stained and soiled by games end. He can still hear the roar of sixty thousand fans as they vanquished opponents in their coliseum. Whitey, Mickey, Yogi, the Scooter, Old Reliable, Hustling Hank and Billy the Kid were his original team, rowdy players who went carousing at the Copa and everyone thought their drunken behavior was ring-a-ding-ding. Pete grew up believing the World Series was supposed to take place in the Bronx. From 1947 to 1964, the Yanks played in the World Series fourteen out of seventeen years. From that golden era came Pete’s sense of entitlement, his swagger and arrogance, baggage, he still carries. Because he grew up ten blocks from the Stadium and was a Bronx Bomber, he knew his first novel would be successful. What a sap.
Nowadays his team, the blue-chip corporate Yankees, is the richest in baseball, spending huge sums to grow the brand in the new house that George is building.
A Lexington Avenue local roars out of a subway tunnel onto the elevated tracks above Jerome Avenue. Alert straphangers catch a fleeting glimpse of the plush green carpet of the historic ballpark before pulli
ng into the station. The Boss threatened to move the team, Pete’s team, New York’s team, to New Jersey, unless the city helped him build a new stadium. The old was antiquated, like Fenway and Wrigley, the rats were killing the ghosts. Fans needed Disneyland. Bullshit, the New Jersey Yankees would have been vilified everywhere. But the city cut the team a sweetheart deal and the Boss is getting a billion-dollar replica that will be better in every way, offering luxury boxes to the well healed, cuisine and cappuccino for the masses and plenty of expensive memorabilia including sod from the old stadium when they tear the place down. As for the ghosts, they’ll move to classy new Monument Park behind a fence in center field where they can be venerated properly.
Pete drives with one hand in and out of the hard shadows cast by the elevated subway tracks, maneuvering skillfully around double-parked trucks trying to make deliveries. His old neighborhood is two stops up the line.
There isn’t a pickle stand on the corner of 170th Street, but you can buy a lottery ticket at the bodega, or get something to eat at the Panamanian restaurant where the Griddle used to be. The street bustles with shoppers like when he was a kid only they don’t speak English. Anchors Corsets is still on the corner of Townsend Avenue, except sexy lingerie has replaced girdles in the window. Vietnamese guy owns the place now. “Why change name, I like neon sign.” Pete lived down the block.
The tall chain-link fence around PS 64 schoolyard never kept anyone out, easy to cut a hole in, or climb over. The kids played stickball end to end of the yard, basketball, Johnny-on-the-pony. Today, the asphalt is split and needs resurfacing, there are no rims on the backboards, red brick walls shout graffiti. This was Pete’s field of dreams, where girls in tight sweaters ambled outside the fence, where he made a chain-rattling catch of a long fly ball and captured the attention of Rhonda who took him up on the roof that night, let him fondle her bare breasts and suck her actual nipples, both firsts for him. He came in his pants as the lights of Yankee Stadium glowed in the distance – Pete was thirteen years old.
His entire education took place in a tiny radius. PS 64 was ground zero, five blocks away was Joseph H. Wade Junior High (who was he?), and then across the Concourse to the big time, William Howard Taft (27th President of the US) High School where he graduated unnoticed in a class of two hundred. He was a green kid when he entered NYU, only a few more stops up Jerome Avenue.
• • •
Six-story, post-war apartment houses are stacked along Townsend Avenue. In the ’50s and ’60s when he lived here, the street teemed with kids dodging cars, women sitting on aluminum beach chairs in front of their buildings, gossiping.
Pete pulls into an open parking space, a rarity in his day, steps out of his air-conditioned cocoon and stands in front of a begrimed brick building, brand new when he moved in with his mother mid-century. A middle-aged Latina is on her way out; Pete tries to stop her. “I grew up here,” he exclaims, “Second floor, 2H, Stefansson. We went sleigh riding down this hill, my hill.” The woman doesn’t speak English, thinks Pete is from La Migra, hurries off. He takes a deep breath and steps into the lobby.
Crude repairs of the marble floor have destroyed the deco design; the elevator is out of order; several mailbox doors hang off their hinges. Pete slowly climbs the stairs to the second floor. At the end of the hallway is 2H, his old apartment. All he has to do is ring the bell and say, “I lived here, my bedroom overlooked the El. I like the sound of the train. Do you?” Instead, he flees in panic.
Under a thick gray sky, Pete escapes across the George Washington Bridge. He turns off the AC and opens the window, imagining he’s in the cockpit of a World War II, P-38 fighter plane transformed into an old Studebaker.
Little Petey was an eight-year-old boy navigating the Studie for his nervous mother Frances, who hadn’t driven in a long time. It was after his dad, Big Petey, died, 1956, the summer he turned nine. He had lived in Iceland since he was five but was really American like mommy.
Frances pulled off at the Red Apple Rest for something to eat. All around them, families gorged on hot dogs slathered with mustard and sauerkraut, they seemed so happy. Little Petey wasn’t hungry, didn’t even want frozen custard.
Pete drives north along the Hudson as the first drops of rain hit the windshield. It’s pouring by the time he swings on to the thruway in the blinding wash of an eighteen-wheeler highballing upstate. There’s little visibility in the downpour, just a green impression ’till the cloud-cover lifts just past New Paltz and he glimpses the soft ridges of the Catskills through the back and forth of the windshield wipers. He turns off at Exit 19 – Kingston/Woodstock, west on Rt. 28. In ’56, Little Petey followed an AAA Map, Route 17 to 209 to 28. Pete had never been back not wanting to disturb the memory of that magic summer.
Stewart’s has replaced the farmhouse on the corner of Zena Road where he pulls in to gas up, discovering that the mini-mart features hand-dipped ice cream. Pete can’t resist making his own chocolate marshmallow sundae.
Driving down Zena Road, there’s another cloudburst. The windshield wipers swish back and forth, back and forth in time to rocking guitars and off-kilter harmonies on the local radio station. Pete turns left at the four way stop sign where Zena meets the Sawkill Creek. The first time he heard Rock and Roll was in the Studebaker.
A jangly electric guitar played behind a snarling vocal. Little Petey jolted to attention, turned up the volume. A staccato drum roll made him vibrate all over. Frances lowered the volume.
“Mom!” Little Petey turned it back up.
What was the song about? A hound dog crying all the time? High classed? Was mommy high classed? Definitely pretty, even if she was skinny and never smiled much. When the song ended they announced the name of the singer, Elvis Presley. “Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,” Little Petey repeated over and over again.
“Stop it! You’re driving me crazy.”
Little Petey didn’t like it when mommy got mad and lost her temper. He shut up and gazed out the side window, a Weeping Willow reached down to drink from the stream. “We there yet?”
“Almost.”
“How far is almost?”
The Studebaker slowed and turned up a gravel driveway. A red barn and a weathered two-story white farmhouse were barely visible through the pouring rain.
Pete slows as he passes the Weeping Willow. The Downing farm is on the left. He turns up the driveway; the same red barn faces the same two-story white farmhouse. Unchanged. Is this possible? Is he hallucinating? Nothing stays the same.
Mary Ann Downing looked out the window of her small attic bedroom. Nine years old, straw blond hair crudely cut, her green cats eyes widened when the Studie pulled up to the house. She tore downstairs. “It’s them! They’re here,” running through the kitchen, “they’re here!”
“Mary Ann,” her mother, Polly, yelled. “Put on your raincoat!” Too late, she’s gone.
Little Petey stared at the girl cart wheeling barefoot in the rain. He burst from the car screaming with pent up energy, followed her splashing through the puddles.
Polly, dressed in shorts, hair tied back with a bright scarf came out the kitchen door holding an umbrella. “Mary Ann! Get back in here!” Frances stepped from the car; she hadn’t seen her friend since before she went off to Iceland. Polly closed the umbrella. “Franny, Franny.” The two women hugged as the children danced wildly around them.
Pete steps out of the car, takes in the familiar landscape, the shuttered house, the padlocked barn, eerily the same, except Mary Ann is not here to welcome him.
The Downing Farm was originally the De Graf place; corn grew in the lower fields and cows once grazed on the upper meadow. There were maple trees on the hill, a stone smokehouse that doubled as a sugar shack and a chicken coop. Over time, the family sold off most of the land. Polly’s parents owned the place the summer his mother stayed there with Jerry Victor, the love of her life.
The rain stops; the sun breaks through the clouds. Pete walks out into
the soggy meadow. He hadn’t thought about his mother in a long time.
Frances, Franny to her friends, originally Frieda Spilkowitz, grew up on a Pennsylvania chicken farm, the eldest child in a large Orthodox Jewish family. Her father Yakov, a brutal man, had buried two wives and the third was already pregnant. When his daughter turned eighteen, he sent her to work in a nearby factory. The family needed money and Frieda was happy to get away from her father’s tyranny.
She met Jerry on the assembly line. He was different from the other workers, spouting a radical doctrine, trying to organize a union. Though young and inexperienced, Frieda possessed a powerful intellectual curiosity. Jerry introduced her to the writings of Karl Marx and the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, explaining how these two men were changing the world. He confided that he went to Russia to get a close up view of Communism; he wasn’t impressed. He believed in the union and the rights of the worker, but he was no Red. Management thought otherwise, branded Giovanni Victorino a Communist and sent goons to teach him a lesson.
Frieda hid Jerry at the farm. Over dinner, he and her father argued about religious orthodoxy especially the treatment of women. They actually came to blows. Yakov, a dirty fighter, had Jerry down and was kicking him mercilessly. Frieda slammed her father with a frying pan and ran away with the union organizer.
The two comrades shared a small tenement apartment on Thompson Street in the Village. She changed her name to Frances Spellman, registered at the New School, and worked nights as a waitress in a former speakeasy entered through a courtyard off Barrow Street. Jerry introduced her to a demimonde of artists, radicals, and dilettantes. It was a rush of experience until Dec. 7th, Pearl Harbor. The world changed overnight. Within a week, Jerry joined the Navy; six months later he was dead.
