Hollywood High? On Sunset and Highland? My Mystery Lady and I had gone to the same high school? Whoa. Could we have been there at the same time? Was that where we’d met? Had we had a class together?
I don’t want to brag, but even in high school, I had the kind of face girls remember long after they’ve become women. I’d gotten fan mail and notes from at least a hundred women who claimed to have gone to school with me, and almost all of them mentioned incidents we’d shared—most of which I’d forgotten. Mystery Lady might have had that compulsion.
I examined all three notes again, especially the second one. It was the only one that didn’t feel breezy, spontaneous, and a little superior. The note was labored, trying hard to say something without quite saying it.
It’s a shame, because I think we could have been friends. Maybe people like us don’t get friends, and those dreams remain deferred. We start out thinking we can have it all, but we learn as we go. Sometimes you just got to know when to give up some things . . . and hold on to what you got . . . Like Mama said once, there ain’t nothing left for me to say.
Dreams deferred. A Langston Hughes reference, of course. We could have been in poetry class, or black lit. Or participated in an assembly during Black History Month.
But if Mama wasn’t my former madam, who was she? My Mystery Lady’s mother? Then I realized why the phrases sounded so familiar: Although the wording had been slightly changed, she was quoting the immortal Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.
I’ve appeared in three different stage productions of Raisin, and the first was back in high school. In high school, I’d played Walter Younger, Sidney Poitier’s part in the 1961 film. Maybe my Mystery Lady had been in that production with me.
I leaned back and closed my eyes. Had anyone from Raisin or my high school drama class stood out? Someone I’d slept with or flirted with? Someone who might have been Brainiac enough to either run or work for a high-tech security firm?
Most of the dialogue she’d quoted was Mama’s, I realized.
Who had played Mama in the show? June Middleton, and a girl named Marsha . . . something. I remembered her getting teased for having a name straight out of The Brady Bunch. Bit of a geek.
Marsha had been the understudy, since she had bad acne and a stilted delivery. But she’d had a steel-trap memory. She’d nailed her lines for three roles in three weeks, and she finally got her chance to take the stage after June got stomach flu on closing night. Marsha didn’t bring the house down, but she saved the day. And I remember really clicking with her during one scene, in the zone, so deep in those characters that the footlights disappeared.
We’d made a connection. I hadn’t thought about it in more than twenty years, but it was true. I hadn’t collected yearbooks, so I couldn’t flip one open to find a last name, but I was willing to bet that my Mystery Lady’s name was Marsha.
I sent her an email:
You’re either June or Marsha from Hollywood High. I say Marsha. You’re just playing a new role. I already know your secret.
See how she liked being unmasked, I thought.
Mystery Lady didn’t answer right away, but I went to sleep with an evil smile.
SEVEN
SATURDAY, I WOKE up to find that I’d missed an email late Friday night. I thought it was from my Mystery Lady, but it was from Rachel Wentz, Sofia Maitlin’s manager. Finally!
It had been three months since the wedding, and in case no one’s told you, every social event in Hollywood is about networking. Period. I’ve seen people work the room at Forest Lawn Cemetery. If you think I’m lying, ask somebody who knows.
I’d introduced myself to every producer I recognized in that banquet hall in São Paolo—with tact and grace, of course. By the time I left, half of Maitlin’s wedding guests knew that I had just been cast in Lenox Avenue, the highly awaited prestige film penned by an Oscar-winning screenwriter. I didn’t tell them I’d won the part only under the threat of a lawsuit against studio exec Lynda Jewell, but that’s my business.
Every two weeks, Lenox Avenue was in the news because of the dream cast. Denzel, Halle, Leonardo, and Christian Bale were on board, not to mention enough black actors for a remake of Roots. (Yeah, John Amos had a part, too!) And the script—which I’d finally gotten my hands on after months of delays—was so fine it should have come wrapped around an Oscar. It wasn’t only the best script I’d ever been attached to, it was one of the best I’d ever read.
My set call was in little more than a week, and I couldn’t wait even though my part was minuscule; Lenox Avenue is set in Harlem, where most of the movie was being shot on location, but my scenes were being shot on a Hollywood sound stage. Remember that scene in GoodFellas when Joe Pesci gets pissed off at the poor kid serving him and his buddies drinks and then shoots him, saying, “Dance, you cocksucker! Dance!” That was basically my part: I’m the guy in the bar who rubs someone the wrong way, and I end up with a bullet between the eyes. I had three lines, literally, and one of them was, “Oh, shit!” Hell, I’m the king of the three-liners. But when I was working Sofia Maitlin’s wedding, anyone would have thought I was Denzel.
I hoped the email from Rachel Wentz meant my schmoozing had won me some acting work, a fantasy that lasted the two seconds it took to read it: Call me Mon. S. wants you on security at Nandi’s birthday party next Sunday. Not exactly what I had in mind. Was Maitlin only being a protective mother, or did she have reason to expect a problem at a kiddie party?
When I think back on it now, it’s as if I knew what was coming.
Since I was lining up a bodyguard gig, I had an excuse to call my martial arts instructor, Cliff Sanders, and try to squeeze in a private class. He hadn’t heard from me in months, and this after I’d committed to a lesson every week—my strategy for finally getting my black belt after ten years of intermittent agony, humiliation, and glory. So far, it hadn’t happened. I’m not good at finishing what I start.
Cliff laughed when I called. “Come on and bring your sorry ass up here, boy.”
Cliff lives north of L.A., in Canyon Country, out near Magic Mountain, and it might as well be on the moon. It’s only a half-hour drive north of my house “without traffic,” as if there’s any such thing, but it’s in the wrong direction—away from the Los Angeles heartbeat, on the way to Palmdale. Thirty years ago there was hardly anything out there except parched rocks and sun-faded grass. Brush fires came and went, taking only weeds. Now it’s all strip malls and housing developments, growing as fast as the weeds used to.
Cliff was waiting in his driveway. The garage yawned open.
“Whassup, Hollywood? Ready to get that pretty face messed up?” Cliff called out. You never want to hear those words from Cliff unless he’s smiling.
Cliff is in his midfifties, but you’d have to carbon-date him to know it. He’s built like a double-wide refrigerator, and his wrists are as thick as my forearms. He has a gut, but it’s as solid as a sack of rocks. Unbelievably strong: Once upon a time he benched five hundred. As flexible as Gumby, he’s just one of those prodigies who started with an infinite pain threshold and the body control of a reincarnated yogi, then added an ocean of sweat and a bucket of blood. Not all of it his own. One of those sleepy, bemused guys who always seems to know a secret worth dying to learn. He’s one of the deadliest men in the world.
Cliff has worked as a bodyguard for everyone from Muhammad Ali to Hugh Hefner, and is one of only two men in the world to complete Master Instructor Masaad Ayoob’s Lethal Force Institute pistol-shooting classes back-to-back.
I was with Cliff in Vegas eight years ago for a mixed martial arts event the night three ultimate fighting behemoths tried to intimidate everyone off the hotel elevator. I got off. Cliff stayed on. He got off three floors later, the only one still moving under his own power. He had a bloody lip, a torn shirt, and a Buddha’s contented smile.
As soon as I was within Cliff’s reach, his palm shot out, snake quick. A playful sting vibrated against my ch
eek before my hand was up to block. In terms of pure speed I’m faster than Cliff, by maybe a tenth of a second. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t telegraph at all. There’s just no body language, nothing to react to. No aggressive tension to trigger the hind-brain. Your conscious mind is on its own, and, brother, that’s just not fast enough. By the time it occurs to you to move, you’re napping.
“Hey, man, save it for the garage.” I laughed. “Been awhile.”
“Whose fault is that? Get your lazy ass in here.”
“Well, move your big ass out of the way.”
Cliff laughed. “You’re a sad SOB, Hollywood.”
Cliff had converted his garage to a dream martial arts studio—mirrored wall, heavy bags, and a twelve-by-twelve red-and-blue jigsaw mat.
We caught up on what had been happening in our lives in the past few months. Cliff told me about his new fiancée, and I told him about some of my adventures on the T. D. Jackson case, keeping it vague. I don’t like to talk specifics about my cases, even with the man who taught me how to be a bodyguard.
“Heard you worked a gig for Sofia Maitlin.” His eyes twinkled.
“Not from me you didn’t.”
“I’ve known her regular guy Roman awhile—former Marine, good man. Ask him about Larry Flynt’s wife sometime. He told me he ate something that messed up his stomach in Cape Town, so they called you. You must be moving up in the world. She as fine as she looks in the movies?”
“Seen worse,” I said. Cliff laughed.
When Cliff turned on his massive iPod dock, it was time for class. That day, Cliff was all about the motion and music of percussion, so West African drumming filled his garage. With Cliff, once the music starts, the chitchat is over. The buddy thing went bye-bye, and we became teacher and student. I bowed, he nodded.
He ran me through some of the moves he’d last worked me on. Cliff has more black belts than a clothing store, and like many genuine masters, from Ueshiba to Bruce Lee, he had created his own art, a stripped-down synthesis called WAR, an acronym standing for Within Arm’s Reach. It was designed for bodyguards, and its specialty is efficient dismemberment without exposing a cowering client to harm. Not a lot of spinning and circling in WAR: You fought as if you had been backed into a corner or pressed against a wall.
It reminds me of Javanese Pentjak Silat Serak, one of Cliff’s areas of expertise, a beautiful movement system based on pure mathematics. And as in Silat, WAR’s blows are designed to disrupt balance rather than merely damage the body. When Cliff moves on you, it’s as if you had an invisible third leg you’d never known was there, and he knows how to kick it out. When you watch him do it to someone else, it looks like they’re just falling down for him. It looks fake. Until your butt bounces off the floor. The man is a genius, and swears that if I’d just be a little more serious, I’d have a major breakthrough in six months.
Maybe I would keep coming to class this time. Maybe.
I worked hard, breaking the forms into self-defense applications, improvising, moving to and against the music. But no matter how hard I tried, Cliff knew I wasn’t totally there.
“What’s going on with you today, Hollywood?”
I mopped sweat from my face. “Guru,” I told him, using his formal Indonesian title as a Silat instructor. He liked that more than Sensei (Japanese) or Sifu (Chinese), although he’d earned the right to both. “I feel pretty strong overall—but I saw some knife action a little while ago that kinda freaked me. I’m not sure I could have coped with it, and I hate feeling like that.”
Cliff nodded, face as smooth and impassive as an Easter Island statue. He went to his shelf and brought back two black composition-plastic practice knives. He handed one to me and kept the other, twirling it around his fingers like an evil parlor trick.
“What’d you see?” he said. “Show me.”
I did my best to imitate the rapid-fire jabbing motion I’d witnessed in Langa. Watching, Cliff nodded slowly, his eyes sparking. “Where’d you see that?” he said.
“South Africa.”
“Guess so. Not Japanese, Chinese, or Filipino.” And he’d know. It isn’t just that Cliff has trained with the best, all over the world. It’s that he’s become the one the best come to, when they really want to train. “It sure the hell don’t look like anything I’ve seen. Show me more.”
As I imitated the knife’s dance, Cliff improvised within my jabs, gently pushing my wrist right or left, up or down, as he deflected me. Cliff moves so well he sometimes seems to be in slow motion. I couldn’t get my knife near him, especially with an unfamiliar movement pattern.
“Fast as you?” he asked.
“Faster.”
His smile flattened a little. Playtime was over. “How much faster?”
“Ten percent, maybe.”
“Rhythm?”
“Broken. Staccato. Maybe based on Jo’burg jazz. Reminded me of Max Roach on the drums, man.”
“This, my brother, is some deadly shit.”
“Tell me about it.” My breathing was already accelerated.
“If I were you, you see this thing again, I’d use furniture-fu.”
“What?”
“Tossing lamps and chairs. You ever see this stuff again, don’t even think about fighting fair. You don’t wake up, you’re in for a dirt nap. You’re a primate: Use a tool.”
“And what if I were you?”
He smiled. “Silly question.”
For the next ninety minutes, Cliff woke me up. The drummer’s frantic djembe flowed through both of us as we lunged and darted. Knives scare the hell out of me. Anyone who tells you they’re easy to deal with has never met anyone who could use one. An hour of decent blade instruction transforms a cheerleader into Black Belt Barbie.
So Cliff worked with me on attacking the legs, improvising weapons out of lamps and newspapers, putting power into my fastest low kicks and more accuracy into my eye jabs. Cliff always works out with a Cheshire cat grin, but I was too busy sweating to smile.
“Okay, young man,” Cliff said. “We’re about to go live.”
He returned to his shelf and returned with two real knives.
The edges were wrapped with black tape, leaving just a half inch of point. Give you enough of a scratch to keep you mindful. I wouldn’t trust just anyone to spar with me using a real knife, but I trusted Cliff—and he trusted me. There’s a bond between martial arts teachers and students that reminds me of men who have experienced combat together, something hard to communicate to someone who hasn’t been there.
Without warning, Cliff began the dance. We started slow, finding a smooth flow together, with Cliff constantly reminding me to concentrate on my exhalations, to let the inhalations take care of themselves. Controls fear, and engages the core muscles to increase power.
My mind floated away into flow, and I lost myself in the glittering pas de deux. We worked forty-five- and ninety-degree angles, the geometry of destruction. Concentrating on imaginary triangles and squares beneath our feet kept my mind off being punctured. The Moors knew this, and their insights birthed the great Spanish circle Antonio Banderas mastered in The Mask of Zorro. The calculating mind shuts down emotion, increases your chances of survival.
I was allowing myself cautious pride in a particularly canny riposte when Cliff tapped the back of my right hand with his knuckle, like a live electric wire. My knife fell to the mat at the same instant his blade touched my throat.
“Shit,” I said under my breath.
Cliff’s grin waited. “It’s not all flow either. Don’t get hypnotized.”
I was lucky to walk away with only a nick.
I didn’t know it then, but Cliff Sanders had just saved my life.
EIGHT
MONDAY AFTERNOON, THE towering royal palms against the bright blue sky made me wonder how Oliver was doing in Langa. I was on my way to an appointment at Sofia Maitlin’s house in Beverly Hills to go over the plans for the birthday party when my cell phone rang: WILDE LAW CENTER, the
ID said. My lawyer had called back right away.
I’d left a detailed message with Melanie Wilde’s secretary to avoid confusion about why I was contacting her. Melanie Wilde and I had fallen into bed after she hired me to find out how her cousin T. D. Jackson died, so I didn’t want her to think I was trying to mess with her new marriage. She’d betrayed her man for me once.
“Hope you didn’t mind hearing from me,” I said.
Melanie sighed on the phone. Her memories of me weren’t happy ones either. “No, it’s okay,” she said. Silence filled the space when we might have recapped old times. “So you’re looking for a referral to adopt a teenage girl, huh?” Skepticism drenched her voice.
Red light. I braked my Prius. “You think it’s a problem?”
“Young, single guy—might raise more than eyebrows. How long has she lived with you again?”
“Two years.”
“And she’s seventeen? What’s the rush, Ten? Here’s the best advice I can give you: Wait a year. Adult adoption is much easier. You have no idea what a hassle you’re in for.”
I felt disappointment so keen that it reminded me of losing April in Cape Town—final and irreparable. I hadn’t told Melanie much about Chela’s history, or mine, but it was as if she already knew. Never mind that Chela and I also both had arrests that might appear in the system if someone started digging. If I couldn’t win Melanie over, I’d have no chance with any adoption lawyer she referred me to.
“She’s a handful, Mel, and she needs a father.” The word father felt odd to my tongue. “I think adopting her would help me be a better guardian. Build her trust. I want her to have a solid place to call home before she turns eighteen. Maybe it’s just symbolic, but . . .”
From Cape Town with Love Page 8
