Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  Hollywoodland. I could live in Hollywoodland. Water my palms and bougainvilleas and patrol the wide hot streets. Take in the view of the reservoir. The gray haze that was beginning to gather over Santa Monica.

  Five minutes from Hollywood Boulevard—the Sylvan Beauties of the Hills of Hollywood lend subtle charm to the Homes of Hollywoodland and Husky limbs and lusty lungs for the Kiddies of the Hills.

  “You’ll need your parents to cosign if you’re serious.”

  “Why? I don’t need a loan.”

  This gave the agent pause. He was roundish and short, well fed, in a tight-fitting blue suit. Brown shoes. His hair was dark, thinning, and gave off a slightly funereal smell, stale lilac and meals alone. He wore one of those pencil-thin mustaches, more paint than virility, that were so popular among the aging juvenile leads in town.

  “You payin’ cash? What are you, the next Pickford?”

  “I’m the brain that decides the trajectories of each new starlet’s eyebrows.”

  A freshly paved road was all the invitation necessary to take a drive in Los Angeles, even if the journey were a mere three hundred yards up the lazy south-facing slope of Beachwood Drive. We passed Moorish fortresses, Spanish haciendas, Norman castles with curtain walls and ivy-covered keeps (built to repel the garden snails and finger-size lizards I surmised) with great peaked bartizans that overlooked the scrub sage and silence.

  “Feel that?” the agent said, giving his steering wheel a graceful turn. “Nice wide roads, generous sidewalks. You can walk here, which is nice. And do you notice what’s missing? Huh? You see it?”

  I don’t think he understood the impossibility implied in his query.

  “No phone poles! No wires ruining the view. Everything underground. Class!”

  We passed a reflecting pool studded with flesh-pink lilies worthy of The Rubáiyát. A balding man in black socks and shorts was filling it with a garden hose.

  “Your parents going to be joining you soon?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your parents? They coming to live with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I sold Baby Peggy a nice, fat Spanish job a few years back. Ten rooms. What’s a family of hillbillies do with ten rooms in the Hollywood Hills? Bootleg? Who knows. Hollywood money, boy! Where they coming from?”

  “Who, please?”

  “Your folks, sister. Where they comin’ from?”

  “Germany.”

  “Ah! Right! Old Deutschland. I was trying to place your accent. Mutter und Pop, eh? I got no beef with your man Hitler, the way he’s wanting to run things. That egg is okay. A little stiff with the Hebs, but it’s about time someone was. You ain’t a Jew, are ya?”

  He did not wait for my answer.

  “Let me tell ya, I’m as white as the next guy and I ain’t got no vinegar for my own color but, sheesh, them Jews are tough nuts. I had a kike couple the other day, I was givin’ a house away for nothin’, a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath, view, and still they wanted me to landscape the joint before escrow. You believe that? Look, folks, I say, planting flowers and trees is half the fun up here, plan your own personal Eden. But that old ball and chain he had with him wouldn’t budge. Grass and palms, they wanted. And not seed, mind you. Hell no! Sod! Listen, I say, you’re takin’ the strained peas right outta my kid’s mouth. But no washee, sister! I tell ya, them folks can sure shave a dollar. Here we are.”

  He pulled his car into a clean drive shaded by drowsy willows. The house was a charming old-English-style wattle and daub with plaster “nogging” studded with imitation straw lathered between the exposed timbers. Two quatrefoils, over herringbone bracing, formed two surprised eyes that faced the street from the top floor. Rosebushes lined the stone walk. The mailbox was shaped like a witch’s head. I fell in love with it instantly.

  “No bunk, kiddo. Now you can wash down your Wheaties in your very own Hansel and Gretel.”

  I moved in on a blistering day in September. That is to say I took the front door key in my small hand, thanked the agent, shut the door, and sat Indian fashion on the swept oak, facing the empty white walls. I had no furniture for the rooms. No clothes for the closets. No carpets for the floors. No cans or toothbrushes for the cupboards. No preference where the footboard faced. No bed for that matter. To me, the house was little more than a human garage. Apart from a few picture books and the pink-and-cream dress the artist’s wife had given me in which I passed a single Sunday afternoon, I had never owned, let alone purchased, something merely for my own amusement.

  I felt safe. For although the house was made of natural materials, it was not raw nature herself. And the intoxicating call was not within my new walls. I owned sinks and pipes and switches and wire, walls and planks and counters and crevices, paint and nails, fixtures, plants, a driveway. I was indeed like that old or ugly groom who takes a pretty wife, not for the dusky evenings during which he can exert himself upon her but merely for the reflection her figure provides, the possibility that he could. I would have friends, dinner parties, high teas, a servant. I could create a salon of cool elegance where the finest artists would congregate and we would talk about the rareness of real beauty and emerging criteria for cinematic art. I could bind them with stories about my past, about the bitter mornings and hard superstitions of my village. But from my lofty present, from my chintz-covered couches and sterling service trays, my past would seem quaint, all that ugliness reduced to sips and nibbles and sympathetic looks. And when it was time to leave, to say our good-byes, I would not retire alone. I would take a companion to the back rooms with me. I would pan for him. Scrounge and mine and quarry for him. If that failed, I’d hire someone to attend all the rough places of the West, the rodeos and honky tonks. And Lucky would be dug up for me. For that’s who he would be. Lucky. With Billy’s eyes and Lon’s marvelous mind. My own little slab creature of comfort. And his duties would be only in his eyes. How he beheld me. And in his arms. In how he held me.

  But I did nothing. After years of constant action, I stopped. Time played its old tricks. That first day and for many more after, I saw the sunshine come in sheets through the clean, mullioned glass. My eyes traced its long tracks upon the floor until it was cold in decline. It was night then, a whole bucketful of night. And the next day I watched the light drag itself across my floor again. And again. For many weeks my thoughts went as blind as a garden worm.

  Then there came a knocking. The room was markedly cooler, if I cared to feel it. I could hear voices between the knocking, whispers and twitters of “But I don’t know who lives here,” and “Who cares, just knock again.” The sound of laughter softened through noses. I wasn’t curious. I was lonely. I wanted to see another’s face. On the lot there was constant warmth and movement. But in these “better” neighborhoods, to know one’s neighbors was to not know them at all.

  I got to my feet. My body was stiff from disuse. I cracked and creaked and plunked my way to the front door.

  “Trick or treat!”

  Loudly, in tight unison from three disguised faces. Three boys, I surmised, roughly my age in appearance, although it was hard to tell under their makeup. They smelled of laundry soap and whole milk. The first, the one standing to the front of their small phalanx, had his face smeared a chalky white, his mother’s concealer perhaps exploited as a base. On his head, to give it a smooth appearance, he wore a black velvet yarmulke with Congregation B’nai B’rith embroidered on its edge, a black triangle of construction paper pinned beneath the words to simulate a widow’s peak. The richness of his cape and the satin of his lapels meant he came from money. Only the wire-frame glasses he squinted through diminished his getup.

  Next to him, under a brow painted green, pounded from the butt of an empty Eight O’Clock Coffee can, was a plump little Frankenstein’s monster whose entire cranium shuddered each time he coughed into a clean handkerchief. He must have cribbed the image from the promotional posters that papered Sunset Boulevard for the picture had yet to b
e released. The last boy wore a miniature satin smoking jacket, his face trussed up in bandages of toilet tissue, a pair of dark glasses covering his eyes.

  “I don’t recognize you,” I managed to say.

  “You will, girly, once the picture’s finished,” the toilet-paper-faced boy said. “We’re still in preproduction.”

  He was meant to be the Claude Rains character from The Invisible Man and I would have to wait another two years to make the connection. Still, it was clear they were children of Hollywood and had the motive instincts of the young Turks they were.

  “So what’s the story?” the diminutive Jewish Dracula said, pushing his glasses to the bridge of his nose. “You gonna treat or we gotta trick?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “She doesn’t understand, fellas,” he snorted. “This from a girl lookin’ like one of my brides. Come off it and quit stallin’.”

  “Yeah, make with the sweet stuff. And none of that old-lady dish candy,” Toilet-paper Face said. “We ain’t no grandmas.”

  “You really don’t know what day it is?” fat little Frankie rasped, embodying Billy’s sweetness far more than he would ever know. “It’s Halloween, kid.”

  This was a tradition that was just beginning to establish itself in American cities. But I had known the night all my life.

  All Hallows’ Eve. That was the night in my village when the women would spit in a circle and bar the door from the wandering dead. When all fires and candles were put out to bury us in the safety of darkness and we would tremble under our covers until first light. Leave it to the frivolous Americans, I thought, to remake our most terrifying night in white sugar and molded plastic.

  “So what’s it gonna be, sister?” Dracula threatened. “We ain’t got all night.”

  “Leave off, Bud.” Frankie sighed. “She doesn’t have anything.”

  “Then she pays the price.”

  “Leave off.”

  “I said she pays the price. Egg!”

  The toilet-paper-faced boy pulled a stinking yellow egg out of the pocket of his smoking jacket and dropped it into the palm of the bully vampire.

  “Don’t say we didn’t warn ya.” And the egg arched slightly before slamming into the bridge of my nose. I felt my head snap and the skin there give, felt the sulfur-slime slip into my mouth.

  “Run!”

  “Why’d you do that?” Frankie whimpered as his friends pulled him into the street.

  “Shut up and vamoose already!”

  I shut the door and put a hand to my face. My nose felt weird, less perpendicular than usual. I walked to my bathroom, the first time in several weeks I had entered that room, and turned on the light. I turned the taps. The plumbing groaned. Then the water ran rust colored, then clear. I splashed the cold on my face, washing off the rotten slime. I’ve never liked mirrors. Their lies are invariably uncharitable. Their truths even more so. But I looked into the one hanging above my bathroom sink for a mere assessment, a survey of the egg’s damage. The bridge of my nose near the tip was somehow dented, a slight disagreement between the cartilage and the bone. A small pressure from my fingers popped it back into place. Then, still staring at myself, I took a fair assessment of what I saw. Black hair with a conservative part in the middle, lusterless and longer than I remembered. A face of papery white, large eyes a congested blue with long black lashes, Volker’s lashes. A small but full mouth, pretty, I thought. But serious. Far too serious. I smiled. My cheeks wrinkled in compliance but my eyes stayed dilated, the pupils as big as bullet wounds. I opened my mouth. My teeth were dull. My gums ashy. My tongue gray. The veins had all receded beneath my skin, leaving it smooth but hard-looking. My fingertips were indeed black. I would have to wait forty years for the proto-punks and Goth girls to bring this look into vogue. What was I going to do until then?

  I heard voices, more children, from across the street. They would soon be at my door and I didn’t want another egging. But what could I give them? The only thing I had multiples of in the whole house were the kitchen cabinet knobs. These I removed with my bare fingers, a fingernail slipped into the screw-slot splintering in the process. I soon had a drawer full of them, and placing them on the foyer floor, I waited for the next knock. It never came. Word must have spread about me, about the strange little girl in the empty house who didn’t know shit from Shinola about this special night. And so I was shunned. Ten, eleven o’clock. At midnight I began replacing the kitchen knobs and then stepped out onto my porch. The street was quiet, smelling faintly of burnt pumpkin and the coming dawn.

  “Happy Halloween, you ratfuckers!” I shouted. A few porch lights snapped on and I ducked behind my door and bolted it for the night.

  CHAPTER 39

  The morning came. Then the night. Then another and another until the days blended into a numb kind of pablum. I heard voices raised, recognized the smell of dawn, cut grass, cooking turkeys, burning leaves. Time meant nothing. My phone rang three weeks before Christmas. I learned it was Billy as soon as I answered it. I coughed hard to clear my throat of dust and the particulate of dead spiders. Then I greeted him.

  “Dearest girl,” he said in his tender lisp, “where have you gone to?”

  “I bought a house. I’m sitting in that house.”

  “Lovely. I’m thinking of doing the same but I need a garden. Something more than these barren patches that pass as verge out here.”

  “How did you get this number?” was all I could think to say.

  “Why, the directory.”

  “The what?”

  “The phone directory. Apparently you do have a phone.”

  “Yes. I’m speaking into it.”

  “Are you quite all right, my dear?” I was anything but all right. I felt like a piece of dismally animated Spam with eyes. I tried to laugh to reassure him and out came a dusky screech.

  “The reason I called,” Billy continued politely, “is a screening of the picture is this evening and you simply must be there.”

  “What about Whale?”

  “Don’t bother about Whale.”

  “He fired me, Billy. The last thing he’ll want to see is a surly ex-employee.”

  “You were never surly, dear. You were amusingly firm. You taught me how.”

  “I wish that were true.”

  “Now you’re being surly.” I couldn’t help a chuckle.

  “Oh, Billy. I miss you.”

  “Then by all means come.”

  “I can’t.” Karl would be there. Enough time had passed for him to formulate an actual case against me. And too many people had seen me take that fall. And get up and walk away. The rumor mill had to be operating at maximum capacity by now.

  “I want you there, Maddy. There might not have been a creature if not for you.”

  “And that means a lot.” Jesus, did it mean a lot. Billy, after two decades in the business, was roughly eight hours away from instant stardom. By midmorning tomorrow he could have his pick of directors. And I had to pluck my dank hat from that ring, had to scuttle into the shadows and lurk in this cavernous new-build for reasons obvious only to me.

  “Billy, I’m glad you called.”

  “I worry about you.”

  “Don’t. I’ll be here. I’ll always be here.”

  CHAPTER 40

  I waited in line for two hours at the Golden Gate Theater in Whittier to see the thing. I had to duck a flotilla of nurses with Christmas holly pinned to their uniforms who were hired to check blood pressure before allowing customers into the theater. It was pure Junior gimmickry. Those with peaky diastolic numbers had to sign waivers before they could purchase their popcorn.

  It cut together nicely, I thought, a bit choppy in parts, with Whale’s trademark disdain of social convention purpling a bit for my taste. The sound was dreadful. But Billy, with his breech-birth entrance and those jump-cut close-ups on his face, was beautiful. People got up, left, took a breath, headed back to their seats. I saw a mother with two tod
dlers, one on each knee, cover her eyes with her program while both her children grinned like hungry mice in the flickering light. There was a riot of uneasy movement through most of the picture and a palpable sense of relief when it ended. People were quiet as they filed out, speaking in hushed and guilty tones.

  “You don’t think some quack could really do that, do you?”

  “I hear Hitler’s already got plans to resurrect Frederick the Great.”

  “Mae Clarke looked lovely.”

  “Really? I though she looked puffy.”

  “Who’s this Karloff fellow?”

  “Who cares, so long as I never meet him in a dark alley.”

  Going to the pictures was a mistake. It fueled my yearning in a way I didn’t think possible. I came back to my cold, dark house and sat on the living room floor, not bothering to turn on any lights. What was I off the lot? How could I find the will to function in the tedious comings and goings of the audience, just another body outside the studio gate? I was a creature thrummed into existence by agencies outside natural laws—or perhaps an expression of her deepest secrets. I was a thing best suited to haunt bedtime closets and the dust beneath single beds. I was only plausible in black and white, lit by artificial lighting. And yet wasn’t I moved by emotions as if my heart still pumped? Where did they come from, my loves and hates and passions and boredom? Were they water from the rock? Was I evidence of the absence of God or a testament to the heat of his vacated throne? Did I even desire to be understood? Reasoned? If nature selected for survival and man for appearance, what had I been selected for? The flickers? Was I Homo cinematicus? Or some flotsam from the dead end of descent?

  The cells of my body knew they were cooked and longed for a return, but still I persisted. Why? Perhaps my mother never forgave me for the pains of childbirth. All I knew was that it had been a mistake to leave the lot. My pride was nothing in the face of this tedium. But I couldn’t force my way into the dance. I had to be invited.