Go West Young Man

by Robbie Michaels

  She was gone a minute before returning. “That was the bank again. They’ve just received another transfer for $10,000, this one from your landlady. I don’t know what you boys are doing out there, but we’ve never had this much money to work with to save people’s lives! I’m gonna use some of it to improve the safe houses. They all need a new coat of paint. I need new mattresses and sheets and pillows and towels for all of them. I’ll finally be able to buy a new washer and dryer to replace the one that died.” And she went on, clearly determined to put the money to good use. I promised her I would relay the information to Derrick until she could do so in person.

  The following day when I was at work, a man in ratty jeans, scruffy T-shirt, ball cap, and sunglasses stepped up to the counter and placed an order. I was shocked, because I immediately recognized his voice and said, “Derrick?”

  When he removed his sunglasses and ball cap, several people in the shop recognized him and started to murmur to one another. A few cell phones were pulled from pockets, and quick photos were snapped. I had someone take over for me for a minute so that I could step around the counter. Derrick wrapped me in his arms and gave me a big hug, which I returned.

  “Thank you so much!” he said. “I’ve dreamed of finding my angel one day, but really didn’t think it would ever happen. And then to find her and find out that she’s your mom, I’m just blown away. You’ve got quite a mom, Mark.”

  “She was certainly blown away by your gift as well! She couldn’t stop talking about what she was going to be able to do with the money: paint the walls at the safe houses, buy new mattresses, sheets, towels, and other things they desperately need.”

  “So she does this type of thing occasionally?”

  “All the time, unfortunately. There is, a constant need for her and her group to intervene. She saved Bill and his mom after Bill showed up at school one day all messed up, black and blue, eye swollen shut. He was a mess. That night she went in and got them out. She let me go with her on that one—the one and only such rescue I’ve been on.”

  “I better get out of here before I’m mobbed. Word is starting to spread that I’ve been spotted.”

  “Can I get you something before you go?”

  He gave me his order—a simple request—which I immediately prepared for him. He paid and left a hundred-dollar bill in the tip jar. “Bye, Mark. And thanks.” And as quickly as he had appeared, he had redonned his ball cap and sunglasses and was gone.

  As you might expect, as soon as he was gone, every single one of my coworkers wanted to know what America’s number one movie star wanted from me. I, of course, couldn’t tell them and wouldn’t tell them the nature of our talk, simply saying that he stopped by to talk about something. They all wanted to know how I knew him. Since half of the people in Hollywood were aspiring actors and actresses, they all wanted to know if I could introduce them and if I could get him to come watch some play or performance they were giving. I did my best to put everybody off, telling them the truth that Derrick was a tremendously busy man who was out of town way more than he was in town, and that I didn’t know if he even did things like that. I told them that I would ask, but that they absolutely should not get their hopes up because I had no idea what he thought about such things.

  Chapter 12

  Our Summer Passes Quickly

  OUR first summer in California passed way too quickly. We worked. When we could scrape together an extra free day together, we always tried to go off exploring to find something fun to do. As much as possible, we did lots of day trips all around southern California. On the rare times when we had two days off back to back, we did bigger trips, like Palm Springs, San Diego, and things like that.

  We spent a surprising amount of time with Derrick; he even joined us on some of our day or overnight trips. The man really did seem to need friends—not “yes” people, but honest-to-God friends who could be brave enough to tell him when he was being stupid or pigheaded. Oh, and people who knew that he was gay and would never tell anyone this—or that his real name was Elmer. Fortunately for him, we fit that bill perfectly, since we wouldn’t let him get away with any crap. We called him on things with no hesitation. And we were also there for him when he was down or frustrated or just needed to hang out with his own peeps.

  Probably the highlight of the summer was something we couldn’t have predicted. Derrick got Bill a bit part in his latest pirate movie—the movie he was filming when he and Bill had their mock sword fight. Bill only had one line, which he delivered with great gusto. Most of his thirty seconds on camera were spent sword fighting with Derrick, something which they practiced for hours. After one too many hours of listening to them practice, I finally yelled at them and said, “This scene is maybe forty-five seconds long! Why do you need to practice so much for forty-five fucking seconds?”

  Both Bill and Derrick were perfectionists, and if they were doing something they wanted to do it right. And if something went wrong with a scene, they wanted to be sure that they were not the cause of that problem. When they actually did film that scene, they were both delighted beyond words that they got it in one take. When the movie came out, folks back home would have no problem telling that it was Bill who was sword fighting with Mr. Hollywood.

  Moira told Bill to immediately start a résumé that touted his skills, abilities, and everything, including his role in the big-budget pirate movie that was due to be released in December as part of the Christmas holiday barrage of new movies. She gave him examples and told him that since he’d had one onscreen moment with a line, the odds were in his favor that he could get another, which is exactly what happened. The woman was good. She knew her stuff. There was no doubt about it.

  At the end of the summer, after filming of the pirate movie was finished and it was in the hands of the film editors, Derrick made a date to take us and Moira out to dinner in a fancy Hollywood restaurant. He knew that he couldn’t go anywhere in town without being spotted, but that’s exactly what he wanted. He was an actor with a new big-budget motion picture due to come out in three months, so he was starting to use his star power to build excitement for the picture and help to sell tickets. And there was no better way to use that star power than to be seen out and about.

  Derrick knew how to talk with anyone, and Moira also knew how to work a crowd and push a particular product, in this case Derrick and his new movie. Watching the two of them talk with reporters when they “happened” to catch us while out for dinner was amazing. The way the two of them used the reporters for their own ends was phenomenal. They were good. And we didn’t mind. We got some good food out of the deal, got to watch two experts at work, and got to have our pictures taken a lot. Nobody knew who we were, but because we were out with Derrick, everybody knew that we were both somebody they should know. And when we were seen out with him over and over and over again, all of the Hollywood reporters became hyper-attuned to us and wanted more information.

  We even had one meal out with Derrick and his “wife”. Talk about awkward! Derrick acted up a storm, as did the woman. Both of them were in the marriage simply as a tool to help their careers. They actually didn’t even especially like each other, not that they necessarily disliked each other, but they were both very good actors who could put on quite a show for public consumption. That one meal was awkward because we didn’t know the woman, we didn’t know what to talk about with her, and we didn’t know what, if anything, that we had discussed with Derrick privately she knew about, so we ended up treating 90 percent of what we knew as off-limits for conversation. That didn’t leave us much material for dinner-table conversation. Still, we muddled through, had our pictures taken a few thousand more times, and then went home.

  Derrick took to spending more time at Moira’s house, or more particularly, at our place. Her house was set up so that he could drive into her driveway and around behind the house so that no one could see who was behind the wheel. To the best of our knowledge, no one ever knew it was him that was coming
and going in the little yellow ultra-pricy sports car.

  When not hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite, which got tiring, by the way, we still had our day jobs giving tours at the studio and serving overpriced and overcomplicated drinks to egotistical people. There were a couple of times at my Starbucks when people who were well-attuned to the local media asked me if that was me that had been out to dinner with Derrick the previous day or the previous week. I was able to put them off with a simple statement like, “If that was me, would I be working behind the counter at Starbucks?” That worked every time, even though I was waiting for someone to push a little bit more and call me on it. I knew it would happen at some point.

  We also met lots more of Moira’s clients, although we still weren’t really clear on what she did for them or with them. I made a note to myself that, when I had a chance, I needed to ask her for specifics. She seemed to know some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry. We recognized many of the actors and actresses that she introduced us to, but much of the talent from the other side of the camera was largely unknown to us. We knew that we had probably seen their work and that they were probably very good at what they did, but we didn’t have a clue who they were or what they did.

  By the end of the summer, we had amassed quite an impressive collection of photos of us standing with our arms around the biggest names in the movie and television industry. We were usually wearing nice jackets and holding a glass of wine (strictly a prop), which made us look sophisticated. Of course there were some other photos where we were in shorts and T-shirts and were laughing with the big names in ultracasual settings.

  It gave me joy beyond belief to send some of those photos to our little hometown newspaper, along with a carefully crafted story about how two local boys made good in the big city. Moira, of course, looked it over first and made some suggestions on better phrasing in a couple of places, as well as one thing that I needed to delete. I didn’t know if they would print them, but my mom called when the next issue came out. Not only did they print them, but they put them on page one with a big headline. Finally, everybody in our little town, our friends and our foes alike, were going to see that we’d moved on, and that no matter how much hate they hurled our way, we’d made something better for ourselves.

  Of course, we couldn’t have done any of this without Moira or Derrick, and for that matter, Moira’s daughter, whom we met on our first trip to California. If it hadn’t been for her, we never would have met her mother, and we never would have gotten plugged into the circle that we were in.

  When Bill got his part in Derrick’s latest pirate movie, I made sure to get a still photo clip from the studio (Moira helped), and I wrote a story (which she edited—she was a publicist or an agent or something, I think) about the movie, Derrick’s career, and Bill’s part in the movie. Moira had seen a first cut of the movie, and they had used all of Bill’s scene, so he was on camera for something like thirty seconds. We didn’t care if it was thirty seconds or thirty hours—he was going to be in a big-name movie that millions of people would go to see.

  The newspaper back home ran the story and the photo. And for the first time in history, the local city newspaper saw the photo and story, picked it up, and republished it. Since the story was actually about two things, Derrick’s new movie and Bill’s part in the movie, as more newspapers picked it up, Bill sort of disappeared, since no one knew who he was. But everybody knew who Derrick St. James was, and everyone wanted to see anything he starred in since he was a really, really good actor.

  By way of my mom, the little weekly newspaper in our town asked me to write a little more about Bill and how he had been “discovered,” as they put it. Of course I was glad to give it a try, again with Moira’s fine editing skills polishing the piece. I loved writing but knew that my skills were only basic. Her skills, on the other hand, were top-notch. She knew how to say something so that even the most boring fact was interesting.

  With Derrick’s permission, which was easy to obtain since it was originally Moira’s suggestion, I sent the newspaper some more photos that showed Derrick, Bill, and me on one of our day trips. In one of them, we were all shirtless and wearing sunglasses as we walked along the beach. In another, we were sitting around an outdoor café table laughing uproariously about something. In another, we were all stone-cold serious and appeared to be arguing strenuously about something.

  Derrick was a big name in America, even in small-town America, so the newspaper ran all of the photos I sent. Like the earlier photos, the big-city newspaper picked them up and ran them as well. They all especially liked one that I had taken that showed Derrick and Bill rehearsing a scene together. Both were holding scripts and were facing one another with serious looks on their faces. Bill was simply helping Derrick learn his lines and work on his expressions and body language. He was standing in for the guy who would actually appear in the role opposite Derrick.

  The photos and stories I was sending were proving to be so popular in the local weekly newspaper that circulation was increasing. People appeared to be buying the paper to see the pictures and read about what we were doing and the big movies that were in the works. Moira sometimes had me release details that no other news agency knew about so that we could create some buzz. Damn, but she was good. Buzz we created.

  As they clamored for more photos and more stars and more inside gossip about Hollywood movies and actors, Moira was only too willing to help out. She gave me prewritten information on several of her big stars and the movies they were working on, in each case giving something small about the movie that no one else had. The editor of the local newspaper loved it, and Moira was getting some free publicity in parts of the world where she otherwise wouldn’t have much chance of communicating, so she was happy too. This was proving to be a win-win situation for everyone involved. I got a byline in the local newspaper every week, my name was associated with some big stars recognizable to everybody with a TV, Moira got her stars more in front of the public eye, and the local newspaper was growing in circulation and importance in the eyes of their peer newspapers around the state.

  When I had nothing to send one week, Moira invited me to come to the studio, where she got me into the rehearsal one of her actors was doing for a sitcom in which he starred. Since it was a rehearsal, it wasn’t as regimented as the final production would be. She had me bring my camera and take lots of shots—shots that showed the actors doing their roles as well as some that showed the actors and the fact that they were on a set in a studio. She had me get some that showed the actors holding scripts, conferring with the director. She even had me get one that showed some over-the-hill actress having a temper tantrum on a set and storming off, leaving everyone watching her in frustration. She was not one of Moira’s people, and in fact Moira intensely disliked her and loved giving her some bad press, secretly hoping that she could push the used-up actress off the show and out of her way. My week when I had nothing proved to be the biggest hit of all, with the largest readership in the newspaper’s history.

  Chapter 13

  Last Week Before Classes Start

  WE HAD planned carefully to take off the last week before classes started and go away for a few days together. We had been working and socializing so hard that we hadn’t had much quality time together. We thought that a trip out of town would be the perfect solution. However, what we ended up with was beyond our wildest dreams. When we told Derrick one night what we were thinking of doing, he offered an option that we hadn’t considered. Our thinking had been focused on what we could do by car. We thought maybe we’d drive up to San Francisco, or go to Yosemite, or something like that. But Derrick had grander thoughts that were so far beyond anything we could plan that we hadn’t even considered such fantasies.

  Derrick had a house in Hawaii, on the island of Maui. I didn’t even realize that Hawaii was more than one island. I thought Hawaii was an island—a single island. But he explained that the state of Hawaii was made up of many islan
ds, with eight primary islands that were inhabited. He suggested that we go there for our week and relax in the sun and surf. Such a thing was so outside our realm of understanding that we didn’t know what to say or do. He saw us hesitating and said, “Come on, guys! You can do this! You’ll have a good time.”

  “But what will we do there?” I asked.

  “Well, you’ll lie in the sun, frolic in the surf, go out and eat fabulous food….”

  “Okay. How will we know where to go to find this fabulous food? From the way you’ve described it, this place is a pretty big island. I always pictured Hawaii as this little itty-bitty place in the middle of nowhere, and now you’re telling me that there are hundreds of islands and that it takes an hour to fly from east to west!”

  “Okay. It takes an hour to fly from the southernmost point on the island of Hawaii to the northernmost point on the island of Kauai. You’ll be only going to one island on this trip, the island of Maui, which is my favorite of the islands.”

  “And how long does it take, for example, to drive all the way around that island?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s complicated, because there are two halves to Maui. On one half you can’t drive all the way around, only about three-quarters of the way. On the other half you can drive all the way around if you have four-wheel drive, but it’ll take you three or four hours to do it, because part of the road is twisting and winding while another part is steep.”

  “Enough!” I said. “Just stop. That sounds entirely too complicated. We just want to have a few days to relax and unwind and be together before we enter the next big unknown phase of our lives. And between school and work and homework and studying, we’re barely going to have any time until Christmas.”