The Hollywood Guy

by Jack Baran

  Bobby hovers. “That meant a lot to them.”

  “And don’t call me a genius any more.”

  “I have a copy of the review that said Nasty was a work of staggering genius.”

  “The network paid for that.”

  “Anyway, thanks.” Bobby goes off with Soong Lee.

  Pete sips his drink contemplatively, looks for Barbara in the crowd. There she is doing the funky chicken with the Baptist minister. If she loves him, why can’t he see any evidence? Everyone says it’s obvious how they feel about each other.

  David sits down. “Don’t hate my guts. We go back too far.”

  “Who hates your guts?”

  “Barbara is an amazing woman, be happy for her.”

  “Why? Because she’s with you?”

  “She helped me to self-actualize.”

  Pete suppresses the urge to grab David by the throat and choke him to death. “Who did you turn out to be?”

  “A man who wants to help people.”

  Pete’s anger dissolves. “You?” He bursts out laughing.

  “It’s not funny. I’ve made a lot of money, I want to give something back. I’m setting up a foundation.”

  “To not pay taxes. You can bullshit Barbara but show me some respect.”

  “Because you can’t be trusted, you don’t trust anyone. I feel very sorry for you.” David walks away.

  Pete’s cell rings, his daughter again. He steps outside.

  “Daddy.” She sounds shaky.

  He’s calm. “What’s up?”

  “I played the demo for Annie who thought it was totally retro. She didn’t get the roots thing at all, but my friend Gary and his boys, they were totally down.”

  “It takes time to appreciate something different, even Dylan and the Beatles sounded strange at first, people got used to it.”

  “Exactly. Have you seen Mom?”

  “You knew she would be here?”

  “Dad, I think she wants you back.”

  “Annabeth, your mother is with that putz.”

  “Dance with her.” She hangs up.

  Pete met Barbara at a party in a gallery at Bergamot Station. The local art scene offered sexual opportunity and he was looking for companionship. He was in the midst of a meaningless conversation with a tattoo artist when a mysterious woman arrived late, wearing a man’s fedora and sunglasses. He surmised she was there to cherry pick a lover. Dancing alone, he fell in step with her. No introduction, all communication was through gesture, he picked up her moves, her style, didn’t try to lead. They never stopped dancing, first parallel then closer and closer, brushing legs and thighs, butts bumping. Finally he took her in his arms. They were so comfortable together, sharing a special internal rhythm, the last to leave the party.

  When Pete returns to the wedding, the main course has been served and a toast by best man Phil is in progress. He slips into his seat and goes to work on the prime rib, stares at Barbara across the table seemingly enjoying the toast. It was true that dancing connected them. Once they rented tuxedoes for a Writers Guild Awards Dinner. They made a stunning couple. When the band played a Mambo, Barbara followed Latin Pete into an intricate routine of turns and spins, breaks and pauses, two tuxedoes tripping the light fantastic. How could Barbara love David? Does she actually believe he’s going to start a foundation and give something back - to whom? Absurd. David, the killer agent, wants ten percent of everyone.

  Bobby jabs him in the ribs, whispers frantically, “I can’t do it.”

  Pete is confused. “What?”

  “I can’t speak…. make the toast for me.”

  “Toast?”

  “To Priscilla and Jeff, please, everyone is waiting.” Bobby pushes Pete to his feet.

  He stares at a sea of blank faces. Who is this guy, they wonder? Not the biological father, Bobby Fields, the famous Hollywood actor. Who is this unknown, standing in for the star? The bride and groom look expectantly. Barbara and David, holding hands, stare at him.

  Pete stammers, “I… My friend… Bobby asked me to…” He focuses on the radiant newlyweds waiting for the alleged genius to speak. Polishing off his second double bourbon, Pete starts to improvise. “Priscilla and Jeff, when you kissed under the chuppah, when you kissed.” He pauses, not for affect but because a rush of unexpected emotion swells inside him. His voice breaks. “Your love filled me with hope.” He takes a beat here, deeply feeling it. “On behalf of my best friend, Bobby Fields, I want to offer a toast from a failed romantic who still believes in love and still believes in marriage. It starts with the vows you took today. ‘For better or worse.’ Anyone can marry for better, but it’s the hard times that will test your love.”

  Bobby takes Soong Lee’s hand and repeats, “It’s the hard times that will test your love.”

  Pete continues passionately. “Sickness and health, for richer or poorer - rich and healthy, no problem, sick and poor requires commitment.”

  “Tell it like it is, brother,” shouts the minister.

  “That’s what the vows are all about, commitment.” His eyes lock with Barbara’s. “That’s what marriage is all about, commitment.” Pete raises his glass. “To sharing the good times and overcoming the bad. To forgiving one another’s failings. Priscilla and Jeff let your love grow to perfection!”

  The rabbi cries, “Mazel Tov!”

  The minister shouts, “Amen!”

  The priest intones.

  The monsignor makes the sign of the cross and blesses them in Latin.

  The bearded therapist winks at Pete.

  The wedding guests drain their glasses. The DJ cues “Love and Happiness.” Bobby and Soong Lee hug. David touches glasses with the therapist who launches into a pitch for his children’s songs. Pete makes an almost invisible gesture to Barbara that she reads immediately.

  Al Green croons soulfully. In tempo, Pete and Barbara meet on the dance floor guided by sense memory, arms, limbs and the secrets therein. Al’s voice takes them on a magic carpet ride, dancing as one.

  “Love and happiness,” Pete whispers.

  Is the spark still there? She presses against him: he can’t resist resting his hands on her ass.

  David glares at them, stuck with the therapist who is now auditioning. Who knows, maybe his songs are marketable?

  For Pete and Barbara, physical communication is all that matters.

  CHAPTER 24

  Walking barefoot on the empty beach, Barbara finds Pete’s porkpie hat by the water. “I thought your assessment of marriage was on the money.” She puts it on, tilts the hat at a rakish angle, a perfect complement to the tight fitting dress.

  “Three failures taught me something.”

  “Not to try a fourth time?”

  “Bobby and Soong Lee are going for it.”

  “Let’s see if he can live up to your toast.”

  “We couldn’t.” Pete says this challengingly, ready to engage Barbara in a let’s try it again dialogue, but she has something else on her mind.

  “I want to take a swim. Unzip me.” She offers her back. These two have a history of getting naked outdoors. The tight sheath has a tiny clasp and a delicate zipper but this is another of Pete’s skills, he can unravel knots and untwist chains - stuck zippers, no problem. He deftly releases Barbara from her binding. She may have earned her doctorate in record time but she’s still capable of an impulsive act. Shedding her lime skin, she removes her bra and steps out of her bikini panties, keeps the hat on. Pete drinks her in, touches her sex softly. “Still purring like a kitten?”

  “Meow.” She wades into the ocean, swims out to the break keeping her head above water.

  Pete’s clothes don’t come off as gracefully, but it feels fantastic to stand naked on the warm sand feeling a breeze on his body. Unfortunately when he dives in, he underestimates the depth and skins his forehead and nose on the bottom, comes up coughing and bleeding.

  Barbara, a vigilant lifeguard in summer camp, never loses sight of Pete as she swims to
his aid.

  She cradles him in her arms, he gazes up at her; she still has the hat on. The tide rocks them gently. “You saved my life.” There’s wedding music in the distance, sounds like the Hora they played at Annabeth’s Bat Mitzvah. He hums along.

  “Beth says you’re different. More accessible.”

  “I think I am. What about you?”

  “I’m trying to be more open.” She kisses him with an easy familiarity. “Does she kiss better then me?”

  “No one kisses better than you.”

  “And the other stuff?”

  “This isn’t a competition.”

  Barbara releases him. “Tell me what it’s like to fuck her?”

  Pete finds his footing. “What’s it like to fuck the putz?”

  “Don’t call him that. David makes love, you fuck.”

  “What was the kiss about?”

  “I wanted to see if….”

  “If you still love me?”

  “I wanted to see if I’d feel anything.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. What about you?”

  Pete kisses her again, longer, deeper.

  Barbara wades to shore singing along with the Hora.

  Pete follows her, knowing she likes to initiate. On the beach, their sexuality plays out in a dance of everyday gesture, they never break eye contact. “You’ve lost weight.”

  “Thanks, but I haven’t.”

  She moves closer, takes his cock in her hand and strokes it. “Hello old friend.”

  “You haven’t lost your touch.” Pete tenderly kisses her neck, eliciting a sigh. His fingers know where all her pleasure points are.

  “Neither have you.”

  They cleave together. Barbara, easy to arouse, usually preferred prolonged seduction. Not tonight, tonight she doesn’t want foreplay, tonight she wants Pete inside her now; she wants to feel him now, fuck him now, but tonight he’s not hard and she’s not lubricated. Down on the sand they go, feeding in frenzy on one another. Pete manages to get Barbara creamy but he’s not rising to the occasion. What could be more humiliating than a limp dick in a wet pussy? What is he supposed to say: I took a pill this morning and it wore off - I got no game.

  Barbara pulls back. “After everything you said, now I can’t get you hard?”

  “Not you. I can’t, let me.” He buries his face between her legs, but she kicks him off.

  “Beth heard you fucking the porn queen. ‘Loud,’ she said, ‘like dogs in heat.’” She stands. “How tight is the cunt of a professional sex worker?”

  Pete loses it. “You don’t want me, jealousy is pulling your chain.”

  She meticulously brushes sand from her body, pulls on her dress. “Zip me up, you don’t need a hard on for that.”

  “I can take a pill and fuck you forever.”

  “Is that a threat or a promise?”

  “Sex is nothing, it’s a bodily function, how we feel is what matters. Seeing you tonight, dancing together again was ….”

  “It was your toast to the newlyweds that moved me. Zip me up.”

  “Bethy said you want to get back together.”

  “Annabeth is our daughter. That’s what she wants.”

  “So you would rather be with that putz?”

  “David brings out the best in me. You bring out the worst.”

  Pete watches her walk back to the hotel holding her dress up. After twenty five years of marriage, “you bring out the worst in me” is his distinction. All he ever did was encourage her even when her study included four sessions a week in analysis that confirmed how fucked up every aspect of their relationship was. He halfheartedly agreed to couples counseling and they went twice. Once he was stoned and the second time he accused the therapist of being in cahoots with his wife. After that episode, Barbara began referring to him as “the unexamined mind.”

  He finds her bra and panties under the hat, throws them all into the ocean.

  Back in his hotel room Pete turns on the TV, Yanks/Angels are tied 2-2 in the bottom of the ninth. The game is a nail biter. Pete pulls off his clothes, feels sand in every orifice, every crevice of his body. Still suffering from failure to perform, he closes the door to the balcony, shutting down the damn wedding music.

  The Yanks don’t score, sending the game into extra innings. Time to compartmentalize, put Barbara out of his mind and focus his energy where it will do the most good, especially when the Angels break the tie, scoring one run in the top of the eleventh. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he watches Alex Rodriguez foul off a couple of pitches, then boom, an A-bomb from A-rod ties the score 3-3. Pete cheers, dances in a circle, hay, hay, hoka hay. Guess what - Soong Lee fixed his back.

  The game continues: the twelfth inning comes and goes - neither team scores. His cell phone rings - he turns it off. The room phone goes - he doesn’t answer it. Another goose egg for the Angels in the top of the thirteenth. Pete sits in half lotus as the Yankees come to the plate in the bottom half of the inning. Jerry Hairston, Jr., who didn’t join the team until July 31st, singles. Melky Cabrera, up next, hits a grounder. The shortstop, Marcus Izturis, goes for a double play and throws the ball away. Hairston, running on the pitch, scores all the way from first on the error. Just like that, the ballgame is over: the Yankees win 4-3 and take a two game lead in the ALCS.

  Pete turns off the TV, stands naked on the balcony savoring the win. His euphoria is short lived because his unexamined mind starts examining. Is a pattern emerging? Perhaps his lack of desire for Samantha and his dysfunction with Barbara were actually manifestations of commitment to Cleo? She is the only woman who ever wanted him for his mind. Sex is irrelevant to her, bringing Pete back to celibacy as an alternative life style. Sublimate the physical into the creative, that’s what his mind is telling his body. He doesn’t need to reconnect with his ex-wives or replace them with more sexual folly. Could he find another path with Cleo? Certainly she seems willing. Pete turns off the TV lies down in bed, closes his eyes – self-examination is exhausting.

  Big Petey, in a three-piece suit, runs in slow motion across an overgrown meadow towards the Bellows cabin; grasshoppers scatter in his wake. Cleo welcomes him wearing paint-splashed bib overalls and nothing else. Inside the cabin a blank canvas lies on the floor, paints at the ready. Now it’s Desirée in the overalls - she needs help taking them off. Big Petey is delighted to assist the artist in any way he can. She smears her breasts with pigment and gets down on her hands and knees; she wants to paint with her body while being fucked doggy style. It’s Pete, not his father who unzips his pants in a geezer’s fever dream and fucks her like crazy - woof, woof. Approaching orgasm, Barbara rolls out from underneath and directs his ejaculation on to the painting.

  Waking to sticky sheets, Pete can’t believe he had a wet dream, what a waste. He closes his eyes trying to replay Desirée turning into Barbara. All of them in the dream together, that was amazing. He hops out of bed, exhilarated. Does he smell pussy? You bet, Barbara’s, too bad he delivered a couple of hours too late.

  CHAPTER 25

  Pete slips out of the hotel at dawn. Before going to the airport he detours inland to visit his mother’s grave, stopping at a diner on Alligator Alley for breakfast. Sitting at the counter drinking weak coffee, he watches a pair of pelicans cruise by over a drainage ditch. When the birds circle back and land nearby, Pete takes his bagel with a schmeer outside for a better look.

  The sun blazes down; too bad he tossed the hat. The pelicans eyeball his bagel, move closer. They have beautiful black, orange and yellow-scooped bills. He breaks the bagel into pieces and feeds them.

  In LA, Pete loved to watch hummingbirds take nectar from bougainvillea in the back garden. In Woodstock, twenty pounds of seed supported a mixed population of birds, chipmunks, squirrels and the occasional rabbit.

  His rental car follows the birds across what was once swampland. Twenty five years since he buried his mother in the middle of nowhere. Since then, sub-divisions and shopping malls have
spread civilization’s comforts.

  Pete sat close to Barbara in the back seat of a limousine. He remembers a straight road across a landscape of saw grass and palmetto. She held his hand. At the funeral Pete was unable to reconcile his mother, Frances Stefansson, with Frieda Spilkowitz, estranged daughter of Yakov and Ruth, interred according to Jewish tradition at the Mount Olive Memorial Gardens. He kept asking himself, who was Frieda Spilkowitz? Mommy’s maiden name was Spellman; all her friends called her Franny. He should have objected, it was his right, he was her son. His name was Stevens, changed from Stefansson for professional reasons; he was supposed to make the arrangements, not those crazy people who claimed her for their own. But Pete could hardly speak, let alone insist. He was mute during the prayers but no tears came. After, he wouldn’t leave the gravesite until her coffin was covered with dirt. When they brought in a noisy backhoe, he grabbed a shovel and insisted on doing the job himself. Barbara helped. The two filled Franny’s grave while the rabbi gave moral support. He walked with them to the limousine. He knew Pete was a famous Hollywood writer. Turned out this man of the Torah had written a screenplay about the comic adventures of a young rabbi whose congregation president wants to marry him off to one of his unattractive daughters. What no one knows is that the rabbi is in love with a shiksa. Pete looked him straight in the eye and replied deadpan. “Sorry, not interested in Jews.” Barbara couldn’t stop laughing. Over the years, whenever he wanted to make her laugh, all he had to say was, “Sorry, not interested in Jews,” and she’d break up.

  Cemeteries improve over time as tranquility settles in; Mount Olive Memorial Gardens is no exception. Pete wanders among the gravestones searching for his mother. Here are the Goldsteins and the Feins, Liebsteins, Siegals, Schwartzes, Nussbaums, Tukmans, Feldmans, Berkowitzes, Epsteins, and finally the Spilkowitz clan.

  Pete contemplates his mother’s untended grave. “Hi mommy, it’s Little Petey, remember me? Been a long time. I was so busy… my career was too important… I wasn’t a very good son.” His voice catches. “I really miss you, mommy.” He starts tidying the gravesite. “If you’re wondering why Barbara isn’t here, we’re not together any more, she moved on. Turned out being married to me wasn’t easy. Or you could say she evolved and I didn’t.” He sits down on the ground. “We did produce a beautiful daughter, Annabeth. We call her Bethy from when she was little. She was actually a Bat Mitzvah because Barbara is Jewish. What I can’t figure out is why everyone is Jewish, even you, and I’m still an atheist. Not to worry, I’m developing an interest in Buddhism.” He stares at the gravestone, can’t stop talking. “I met an Icelandic woman, Ingrid, who claims to be my cousin, she’s very funny. Tells me I’m descended from a long line of Icelandic comedians. I wish I knew more about my family gene pool. It might give me some clue as to why I’m such a fuck-up. Just knowing about Big Petey’s violent temper helped me control mine.” Pete lies down beside his mother. “You remember the Downing Farm where we stayed when I was little? I went back. The place was unchanged, only Mary Ann died and her older sister Susie owns it now. She lives in Seattle.” He struggles to hold his feelings in check. “You think it’s possible to start over at sixty? I’m trying to. I pulled out of LA and bought a motel in Woodstock. Remember Little Deep, where we went swimming? Right there. Truth is, I was tired of living in a make believe world. I worked on the place, fixed it up, took three years. I was even celibate but a woman came into my life and you can guess the rest.”