by Owen Thomas
“Someone needs to clue him in that there is no Oscar for most boring screenplay adapted from an original work.”
Goatee bellowed with approval. Casey Travern decided it was safe to join the levity while it lasted, smiling broadly at me as though threatening to actually laugh. When I did not return any sense of mirth, the smile faded and the string of cheese on his plate suddenly seemed to renew its appeal.
“Seriously, Blair,” said Sausage, “you’ve really got to talk to the guy about the facts of life. If he’s gonna be a part of this process…”
“I will,” said Blair, not looking up from the wine bottle. “I will talk to him.”
Goatee looked over his shoulder and back. “What are you going to tell him?”
“I’m going to ask him if he wants a crack at the script.”
There was much laughter. Even Casey could not resist this time, chuckling, but not looking up.
“No, seriously,” said Goatee.
“Seriously,” said Blair calmly, looking up for the first time, “you’re a couple of worthless hacks and you wouldn’t know a good story if I stuffed it up your clacker. As of right now you’re both sacked. Stay off my bloody set.”
And there it was.
* * *
Firing the screenwriters in defense of Angus worked a temporary resurgence in my affections for Blair Gaines. Were it not so common in women my age, I might be embarrassed to have found this authoritarian display such an aphrodisiac. But it is common. Lucky girls learn to let go of their fathers early. I was no luckier than most.
In my own defense, I can say at least that Blair’s exercise of power, while merciless and even brutal, was all the more attractive to me because it was just and because it was genuine, not for show or to impress me. It had, in fact, everything to do with Angus and the integrity of his story and nothing whatsoever to do with me.
Blair did not know that throwing a lightning bolt in defense of Angus would draw me towards him nor, frankly, that he even needed to worry about me drifting away in the first place. As far as Blair was concerned, sexually speaking, I was his. Of course, we both knew that he was rapidly losing control over his romantic attraction for me – romantic in the fullest sense of that word, eclipsing everything sexual – and we both, for our own reasons, tried to suppress this fact.
As it turned out, my reinvigorated lust made our relationship easier on both of us, temporarily dwarfing as it did, the swell of Blair’s more complicated feelings. We became, for a short time, again, irresponsibly libidinous teenagers, and the world around us simply a place of stolen moments and small enclosures – rooms within rooms, elevators, bathrooms, kitchens; rooms with furniture and footrests and handholds – desks and chairs and countertops – whose sole function was to support our bodies and encourage our need to be devoured.
Much of this reckless abandon occurred within the three weeks following that lunch. Blair called for an immediate hiatus in the production schedule and spent several days fighting with producers over the delay and the expense of idle labor.
The screenwriters had been Brightleaf Studio darlings from the beginning and their summary dismissal ruffled more than a few feathers. Several of the producers threatened to pull out unless they were reinstated and Blair threatened to pull out if they returned. Still so new to the game, I genuinely feared that the entire project would be scrapped. But Blair knew what he was doing and assured me that no one was about to let the movie go. He was right.
The challenge was not in convincing the moneymen to hang in there. The challenge was convincing Angus Mann to take over the script. Blair was prepared to do the rewriting work himself if necessary, but he wanted Angus. It did not matter to Blair that Angus had never written a screenplay. Blair had written screenplays and he could structure the scenes and pencil in the lighting and the camera angles and otherwise bridge the gap in Angus’ technical knowledge. But it was the heart of the story that was missing; an ineffable quality that the screenwriters would never have known in a million years and which even Blair was at a loss to identify with any real particularity. It’s a wreck, Tillyjohn. It’s a bloody wreck and I don’t know why! The more he pondered the story Angus had written, the more he hated the screenplay, even wondering at times how he had ever thought it was passable.
“There is something true, Tillyjohn, in that phrase, lost in translation,” he said to me once as his post-coital mood deepened into a quiet bruise and he drew languid shapes in the steam on the window above the Jacuzzi. “What we need is an interpreter. A guide. A translator. We need Angus Mann.”
Blair’s initial efforts at persuading Angus were met with a lot of unreturned phone calls. We surmised, correctly I think, that Angus had locked himself in his hotel room with a bottle of bourbon. Angus had a reputation as a drinker and although I had seen a great deal in him that might have been consistent with alcoholism – his reclusion, his cantankerousness, the redness of his cheeks – I had never actually seen him intoxicated. Quite the opposite, even at his most anti-social, Angus was never uncomprehending; never thick or dulled in his perception. He caught everything. Even his tirades were eloquent and lethal, hardly the inebriated rants one might expect of a habitual drinker.
But when I met him on the street in front of his hotel, he was unkempt and disheveled and his eyes were shot with veins of red, as though he had not slept in the weeks he had gone missing. He was certainly no less formidable in manner or mind. But I suspected alcohol just the same.
I was relieved and a little surprised to see him. Blair and his staff had tried the hotel endlessly. Angus had not checked out, but he was never in. I told Blair that I thought he had simply climbed onto a plane and returned to Ohio. It’s not like the hotel was his responsibility; it was all on the studio. Why not just go home?
But I did not know that for sure; any more than I knew that Jack Daniels or Jim Beam or Johnny Walker had barricaded Angus inside a hotel suite. What I did know was that nobody knew where he was and that this caused in me an insidious, creeping worry.
Once, when I was young, I discovered a puddle of water in the basement utility room of our home. The room was mostly a holding cell for my father’s junk – a museum for the remnants of false starts and bad ideas; a shrine to the power of impulse. These things, these abandoned cocoons, filled the knotted pine shelving and stuffed the lime-green pressboard cabinets until the first layer of things had begun to serve the functional purpose of supporting a second layer of things – every National Geographic issue ever published, most of which had never been opened; old darkroom equipment; boxes of a pink vitamin supplement powder; a telescope and stacks of star-mapping books; two acoustic guitars and colorful, paper-bound books of sheet music for songs like Teach Your Children Well and If I Could and Classical Gas. Watercolors. Antique box-cameras. A home-brewing kit. Boxes and boxes of empty photo albums.
Greta stood in the corner of that room, armless, on her concrete platform, with her faded blue conical head and her large, gun-metal eyes and her blinking red heart. I understood nothing of boilers as a child except that they hissed and thrummed and clicked in small dusty rooms that were off limits to children; rooms that, perhaps for that reason, made for exceptional places to hide.
But Greta made more sense to me than a boiler. She was a dusty, pallid white perched on black iron heels that showed through a lacey skirt of rust along the bottom, as though she had been walking through filth. She was the guardian of my father’s things. She was the woman who consented to being locked away in our basement just so that these things would be safe and so they would not escape back into the world. It was her unwavering sense of purpose that impressed me. Greta knew who she was.
The puddle had formed beneath an elbow of silver piping inside a sink cabinet were I was crouching. I huddled in the dark, breathing in the dank smell of the place for well over twenty minutes, listening to my brother and his friend, Peter Wilson, as they turned the entire house inside-out looking for me. Every twenty seconds, t
hrough the thumping and calling from upstairs, I heard the thin splat of water from beneath my legs and could feel the spray against my bare calf. Long after they had given up the game for Jello squares and reruns of Doctor Who, I sat in the dark listening to that drip…drip…drip. Like a clock. Like a heartbeat.
That was the afternoon I found the box of magazines, next to me all of that time under the sink; not just Playboy, which I had seen before in David’s room, but other magazines, thin and glossy and incomprehensible. Greta was displeased and made her sounds. I did not tell David or Peter. I did not tell anyone. The junk room was quietly filling with water and I told not a soul. That night I lay awake for hours, the sound of drips in the basement of my brain, slowly filling with worry about what I knew and the injury I had caused my father.
It was a strangely similar worry that plagued me in the days that followed the disappearance of Angus Mann. Far beneath my conscious irritation, I sensed that a destructive process – some ruinous liquefaction – was under way that I, somehow, had started and was responsible for stopping.
I found daily excuses to pass by Angus’ hotel, even, on more than one occasion, eating lunch in the brasserie and loitering along the lobby shop windows looking, but not really looking, for a birthday present for my mother, hoping for some visual confirmation; some proof of life. But nothing.
I stopped that charade when it became clear I was unable to reconnoiter in anonymity. My tabloid publicity and my celebrated turn as Katie Finn in Peppermint Grove had ensured that I was noticed just about anywhere and in any manner of attire. The baseball hat and sweatpants were no disguise. Within ten minutes I was signing autographs. A man handed me a flower. Another asked for a date.
I marvel that even back then I hated it – the sycophantic thrumming; I just didn’t know it yet. Like so many things, I secretly hated what I needed.
Given my lack of success on these not-so-discrete missions, it is all the more ironic that I spotted Angus in front of his hotel when I was simply passing by one day. I was coming from my body-training session and was on my way to the studio, no less than a thirty-minute drive even on a good day. I was late and had no intention of stopping to look for Angus. Blair was to be supervising the installation of the newly coated sections of the Rhuton-Baker dome. Nothing about that event required my presence, but Blair had insisted and I had obeyed.
My route past the Wilshire Hotel was purely fortuitous, due to an accident that had shut down southbound Buena Vista and forced a detour. As I approached the intersection, I could see paramedics talking slowly at a man in the driver’s seat of a mangled silver Saab. He showed no signs of listening or comprehending their words. His hands were still gripping the wheel and he was quietly bleeding from his ear and the corner of his eye. His nose was a pulpy mess. He was staring out the empty frame of his windshield, the twisted motorcycle lying in the road in front of him, the rider under a stained sheet near the meridian.
I was thinking of Mr. Saab’s face and of the dark dawning in his bloody eyes when I saw Angus on the sidewalk outside the hotel. He was smoking a cigarette with a maroon and gold bellhop who, given the general incongruity of Hollywood, could just as easily been a lost, drumless majorette. I circled the block and parked.
“Angus!”
I waved and yelled at him from a quarter of a block away, concerned that he would disappear into a throng that was gushing from a caravan of black SUV’s into the hotel. He looked up slowly, registering no surprise to see me. He took a drag of his cigarette and looked away. The bellhop was now busy slinging luggage from the back of one of the SUV’s onto a cart. I saw that he was far too old to be a majorette.
“Where on earth have you been?” I tried not to sound recriminating.
“Hollywood,” he said after a moment, “which, I have concluded, is not of this earth.”
“We’ve left messages…Blair has been trying…”
“Yes, how is old Blair, anyway?” He looked at me wryly and it was then that I realized that he looked like hell and I suspected that he was just then reemerging from a binge. I ignored the question, pretending not to understand what he meant.
“So you’ve been here this whole time? We came by the hotel…”
“I haven’t been at the hotel.”
“Where…”
“What does it matter?”
“It doesn’t. I thought maybe you went back to Ohio.”
He contemplated the end of his cigarette. “What I can’t figure out, Matilda, is why I ever left Ohio in the first place. Did you know that Sherwood Anderson never left Ohio? Never once. Not even for a few days. Certainly never to make a movie.”
“Clark Gable left Ohio, and he never looked back.”
“Touché. Is that why you left? To make movies? To be a star?”
“I don’t know. I guess. To figure out who I am.”
“Have you?”
“What?”
“Figured it out.”
“I’m an actor.”
“Are you now?”
“Yes. Angus, you really need to talk to Blair. Seriously.”
“I find that strange.”
“What?”
“That a person would define herself as an actor.”
“It’s not like I’m the only one, Angus.”
“Acting is what you do, loosely speaking, it’s not really who you are, is it?”
“I’m an actor, Angus. Jesus. I’m an actor. It’s who I am, it’s what I do. Okay?”
“Suit yourself.” Another drag as he took a passing interest in a man angry with a taxi. The taxi honked its reply and sped away. “But you do all kinds of things, don’t you. I should hope that you are not everything that you do. That would be quite sad, and a little sordid, wouldn’t it?”
I caught the unspoken aspersion and I was angry and ashamed all at once. “Why don’t you just make your point?”
He shrugged. “No point. I’m just saying that by my way of thinking, we are what we want, not what we do. We do all kinds of things, but it is what we want in life that defines us. Writing is what I do. Waste time in Hollywood is, apparently, what I do. But that says far less about me than what I want.”
“Which is?”
“To be left alone.” His voice was warm and casually conversational, but the sentiment was so genuinely cold, so desolate, it was enough to make me ache.
“Well I want to act.”
“How badly?”
“Bad enough to put up with your shit, Angus. Look, I’m parked right around the corner. I’m on my way to the lot. To see Blair. He really wants to talk to you.”
“Do you know the sad commonality between writers and actors?”
“No, but I bet you’re going to tell me.”
“We are enslaved by the characters we create. We depend on them to speak for us. We are ventriloquists of a sort.”
“I don’t create characters.”
“All the worse for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you depend on writers and writers, Matilda, as figments of their own imaginations, are an inherently undependable lot.”
“You’ve really knocked yourself out proving that point over the past few weeks.”
“I’m sure your little movie is getting along just fine without me.”
“You really have no idea what’s going on, do you?”
“The less I know, the happier I am.”
“Our little movie, as you put it, has come to a complete halt without you.”
“You needn’t lie to make me feel included; although I am touched.”
“Jesus. You really are an ass, you know that?” I extracted my cell phone and dialed Blair’s number. He answered in irritation.
“Tillijohn…where the hell are you?”
“Guess who I found.”
“Ah! Beauty! Where is he?”
“We’re outside the hotel.”
“Put ‘im on.”
I handed the phone over to Angus who took it with a si
gh and a roll of his tired, bloodshot eyes. I watched his face intently, listening to one side of the conversation and trying to deduce the rest.
“Exploring greater Los Angeles,” he said, mashing his cigarette into the side of the building and dropping the stub into his pocket. “I think your people call it a walkabout. Yes, why is a very good question, Blair. I suppose because what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, or at least grateful for lives we would otherwise take for granted. If I can survive this city, then I can do anything. Yes, I know about the Red Line. No. I don’t like mass transit. Jewish empathy maybe. Yes, I was there once. Disgustingly undercooked. The L and the A in L.A. Cuisine stand for ‘lost appetite’ as far as I’m concerned. Well I’m delighted you’re amused.”
A torrent of humanity bustled past us down the sidewalk, a tour group and marauding shoppers, causing me to step off the curb. They passed between us in twos and threes, and I watched Angus’ face, as though through the slats of a moving fence, profiled against the sunlit marble, holding my phone to his ear. I was surprised at how happy and relieved I was to see him.
He was a mess to behold. All but the corner of a flap of his denim shirt had escaped the waistband of his khakis, which were generally streaked with grime. One sleeve was rolled up past the wrist while the other hung open limply almost to the knuckles. Both shoes were open and untied, the dark tongues flopped off to the side as though exhausted from walking and salivating laces in flat lines along the pavement. His beard had grown shaggy and ill-kempt and his hair was an unruly shrub of straw.
And yet it was the familiarity that struck me most. It was as though I had known him all of my life and there was something true in that part of him that could not be scuffed and tousled and soiled. Something in him, inexplicably, seemed to define me; a feeling that was as compelling as it was terrifying. Like the very idea of gravity from the ledge of a building. The gentle pull on the viscera. The erogenous buzzing.
The parade finally passed and I stepped back onto the sidewalk, this time leaning my back against the building next to him. Angus was tracing a crack in the pavement with the toe of his shoe.
