Tough Luck L.A., page 2
Herbert saw me looking rather dumbstruck, so he handed me the books as he sat down at the desk and continued rummaging through a thick stack of papers. “You have seen her naked before, haven’t you?”
I was not surprised at Vicky’s nakedness. But she’d never said anything about working for Herbert. Of course, neither had I. I usually referred to him as “that schmuck” or “this asshole,” and she’d never been curious to know more.
So I said, “Yeah. Have you?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Herbie answered childishly. He was studying my face, wanting to know if I really cared. “I heard from a friend of hers that you know her.”
“From whom?”
“She shall remain nameless,” he gleamed, then continued seriously, saying, “I got five days to bankroll a horny pic. Some people saw her pictures and they liked what they saw. You can vouch that she’s no junkie?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Kid, Ben, listen. We gotta have somebody that can read lines, act, be intelligent. This is sort of a class picture.”
“You mean the penetration’s off-camera.”
“Yeah. So refresh your memory.” He handed me a stack of eight-by-ten color glossies, all of Vicky.
“How old are these?”
“Year or so—why? Your girlfriend?”
I ignored that. “So call her up and talk to her yourself.”
“Don’t you think I have? I have! She don’t want no part of it.”
That made me smile. The old girl was finally coming to her senses—all by herself, just as she’d managed to get herself into a mess that way too. I really felt proud of her. “So what do you expect me to do about it?”
“Talk with her. Convince her. I’ve got connections could get her a spread in Playboy just like that.” He tried to snap his fingers. Skin rubbed, but no pop.
“I see.” I dropped my voice a little as I felt the need to be serious. “I think she’s getting out of that, though, now.”
“What do you mean?” He raised himself up by the arms of his chair, then dropped back down, his stomach swaying like a wave until it settled back into a mound of dough. He lowered his head, folded it into his chins, and talked at my chest. “She wants to be in show business, doesn’t she?”
“I’m not really sure that she does anymore.”
Herbert wasn’t taking no for an answer. “How do you think Marilyn Chambers—Marilyn Monroe, for Christ sake—how did all of them begin their legitimate careers? Burlesque. Pornography. I’m getting out of these dirty books. You come by here in six months, this office won’t even be here. I could use this girl. If you knew the backers I’ve got, the money—ugh! People are begging me to let them invest. See, the best way is to take this girl Vicky, start her in the sex films—then we can gradually make her a very, very big star. And I mean first class—no doormat. I’d like to talk to her about it.” He stopped, then said, “Maybe you could help, you know—promote.”
Nothing I could say would shut him up. So I looked through the pictures and didn’t even listen. Some had Vicky lying on her side, finger in mouth, sucking; in a few, she was standing, caressing herself in the obvious areas; and a few were from behind with Vicky’s face turned back over her shoulder, her mouth slightly slack, her eyes half-closed and dazed, the tan-lined cheeks of both buttocks glossy and firm. The pictures took me back to four years ago, on a rainy day, when I was standing in the Hollywood Wax Museum trying to figure out if anything about the place had story potential. After the auspicious reviews of my first two novels, I’d landed a cushy job teaching freshman English and creative writing at Penn State. I had loved it, but when one of my books came to the attention of a big-name shyster producer, I had gone for an option deal hook, line, and sinker and had come to California to do the screenplay. There had been very little on paper, but a couple of telegrams and a handful of smoothly orchestrated phone calls had made up my mind for me. Once I got a taste of California, I knew I wouldn’t want to leave, and when my loyal shyster found a project he deemed “more contemporary” a few months hence, I hadn’t had much choice. I’d been living hand to mouth, waiting for my script assignment to begin. But on this particular day, I remember I was sky high. I’d just sold my first porn. Three hundred fifty bucks for a week’s work, and, now, at least for a couple weeks, I could begin work on something that might interest me. I was eating and I had proved to myself that I could support my writing habit. Which was a real relief. I couldn’t get my old job back, couldn’t get a new one in teaching, and couldn’t conceive of what else I might possibly do.
So I wandered around the Hollywood Wax Museum looking for a story. And from Washington to Nixon, Quasimodo to the Mummy, Garbo to Gleason, all I got was a conspiracy of glass eyeballs staring me down. A good image, really a metaphor not unlike the myopic eyes of Gatsby’s Doctor T. J. Eckleburg looking down over America from a faded billboard. But these eyes had nothing to do with the heads they inhabited. They were supercilious, smug, and piercing. They made you feel that somebody else possessed something that you needed and wanted—the only problem being that it was impossible to know who had it or what it was, for that matter.
I was standing in the Chamber of Horrors, right in front of the Hitler-Mussolini display, when something hard bumped into the back of my legs. A girl’s voice screamed and it fit in perfectly with the recorded soundtrack of eerie organ chords sighing forbodingly over hysterical cackles, ghostly winds, and creaking doors. I turned around and saw the whites of her eyes, her blouse, and knee socks pulsating brightly under the blacklights.
I picked her up at the Yalta Conference. She was standing there scared and crying. She had a suitcase next to her that was almost as big as she was. Churchill, Stalin, and FDR didn’t give a damn about it, but I did, so I took her for a sandwich. She had on what looked like a parochial school uniform: a sopping wet threadbare cashmere sweater matted down over a white blouse, short woolen skirt, knee socks, and soggy penny loafers. Her waist-long damp blonde hair was tied back into a ponytail. She had a little narrow face and wide, startled amethyst blue eyes. She looked around eleven or twelve, but she was actually seventeen. She had run away from a pilloholic mother in Phoenix and, even though she was terrified, hell if she was going back.
Everything and yet nothing has changed since then. When Herbert grabbed the pictures from me and started leafing through them and commenting on how “she’s good from any angle,” I realized where I was and stood up and started for the door. It was clear that he wasn’t finished, but I wasn’t interested. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I told him.
He stopped me, saying, “Maybe we could arrange advances for you. Would that give you more incentive?”
Sometimes lying doesn’t hurt. “Umm, yeah. I guess so.”
“You talk to her. See how she feels about things.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be seeing her,” I teased.
“If you could manage to run into her and tell her what I feel about her, uh, potential, I’d certainly do all I could for ya.”
“I might see her next week.”
“Wait a minute.” Herbert pushed his chair back away from the desk to get his stomach out of the way so he could open a drawer. He took out a ledger and started writing a check, then handed it over. “Maybe this will help.”
Seven hundred and fifty smackers. With my back rent and car payments and insurance, it was already spent. “I’ll do whatever I can,” I pronounced sanctimoniously.
“Today,” said Herbert. “I gotta know by tomorrow.”
“Do you still want the revisions?” I asked him.
He laughed obscenely. “Just do what you’re supposed to.”
“O K,” I leered back at him.
“But I meant what I said before.”
“More come sequences, sure,” I told him on my way to the door.
5
“Here he comes!”
“Well, whoopee do!”
“He’s only the greatest switch hitter in history, that’s all. Only gotten two hundred hits nine seasons out of fifteen. How many years do you think it took Ty Cobb to do that?”
“I don’t care. He still stinks as far as I’m concerned.”
“Twenty-three years.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, leading off for Cincinnati, playing third base, number fourteen, Pete Rose!”
An echoing of boos. Nearby, some eloquent cussing.
“Yea!”
“Pete, if you don’t sit down, we’re going to get lynched here.”
“He’s great.”
“But if you had to choose a third baseman, you’d take the Penguin any day.”
“Not me.”
“You’d give up thirty homers, a hundred and ten RBI’s?”
“Cey ain’t got nothin’ to him.”
“Doesn’t have anything in comparison to him, you mean.”
“If you’re gonna start correcting my English again, I’m leaving.”
“Oh, calm down. You know it could stand some correcting.”
“So could yours sometimes.”
“Well, you should point it out to me then.”
Wood on it. Rose sliced a low line drive through the hole to right.
“All right!”
“Sit down.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You’re a hypocrite, you know that? You can’t root for the Dodgers and root for Rose at the same time. If your first name weren’t Pete, you wouldn’t give a flying fuck who he was!”
“Bullshit! Watch your language too! I’m just a kid, you know.”
“Don’t remind me.”
We traded smiles. It was therapeutic. Just me and the kid. I didn’t want to think about whether or not Ellen was right, but I was enjoying myself and so was Petey and that was all that mattered.
So there I was at Dodger Stadium doing my usual irreverent impression of a conscientious dad on a bonus Big Brother night for an eleven-year-old juvenile delinquent from the Mar Vista Boys’ Home. I’d been Pete Connelly’s big brother for about a year now. I really liked the kid and I guess he had a good time with me too, although he’d never admit it, never say thank you when I dropped him off. He didn’t have to see me and he could have dumped me and asked for somebody else, but he didn’t. And he was the one who had asked me if I could get hold of some tickets for the game. So my guess was that he could put up with me. And even though I wasn’t much of a father figure, I still thought the kid liked me for it. He seemed sort of relieved and appreciative that I didn’t come on too hard-nosed and bossy. If I pulled the reins on him, I usually knew what I was doing. He could still do whatever he wanted within reason. I couldn’t explain or define it, but we just had a good time together and he knew it. He also knew I didn’t want to be his father. I just wanted to help him out, be his friend if I could, which is probably what a decent father does anyway. Not that I wanted to be one and not that the ideal works out when any kid and parent pursue that risky collision course on a full-time basis. I thought I could wait a while for that one. Maybe a lifetime.
The first day we got together, I let him drive my car and maul over the delicate transmission in a parking lot. I told the kid then that if he didn’t like me or I didn’t like him, we’d call it quits right away. Nobody was going to be anybody else’s martyr. I had dumped a few other kids because I couldn’t stand them, assuaging my guilt with the notion that perhaps someone else could be found who could establish a better rapport. I explained this to Petey the best I could and now that time had passed and we were still getting together, I thought he felt good about himself because he felt I really liked him, that I wasn’t doing him some kind of begrudging favor. When he asked me one time why I did this sort of thing, I told him it gave me a break on my income tax. That shut him up, kind of pleased him, I think, that I wasn’t out to save the world or anything.
I noticed that Petey was letting Stanley drink the whole large paper cup full of beer.
“That’s enough.”
“He likes it.”
“Too much isn’t good for him, Pete.”
“Ah, what’s it gonna do to him?”
“It’ll make him dizzy. You don’t want him to barf on your shoes, do you?”
The kid gave me a dirty look, took the beer away, and patted Stanley on the head. Stanley’s a bit on the small side for a bassett hound. I sneak him into various events in this special duffle bag I’ve got. It was kind of a pain, but I knew that Petey liked it, so I brought Stanley along and let the kid carry the bag into the park. The ticket man knew we were up to something, but he was too busy to care. Which is what you count on.
The crowd was jumping. It was the first Dodger-Reds game of the season. Griffey, the Reds rightfielder, had walked, moving Rose to second, from where he went on to score after Bill Russell’s wild throw to first base on the second leg of the double play. We were sitting in general admission on the third base side almost even with the bag, in the first row behind the railing. They weren’t great seats but I still had had to get them two weeks ago. We were close enough to see Rose’s familiar and repugnant hustle as he rounded third and came easily home. I almost expected him to slide in just for the hell of it, to impress upon us how hard he was trying to make everything look difficult and breathtaking.
Petey’s eyes were locked onto the field. He jumped up out of his seat again, of course. He had one hand to his head holding a transistor tuned in to Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett; the other waved his mitt back and forth at the field. In any other situation, it would have looked like he was sending out a distress signal. His seldom smile was, for the moment, as wide as the Grand Canyon. So I didn’t mind too much.
He sat down again and a paper airplane flew by us and through the railing. Stanley howled at it and started climbing out of his bag, so I had to push him back down and tell him to stay.
The Reds decided to let us go with only one more run and the first half of the inning ended, giving us time to concentrate on our hot dogs.
A vendor came by carrying a box load of souvenir paraphernalia. It wasn’t enough that they had the concession stands all over next to the restrooms and food stands. They had to bring them to your seats too. The kid looked up at the old guy hunched over the pennants, autographed baseballs, balloon bats, and calendars. He showed he was interested by taking his radio away from his ear. When the vendor wiped his brow and started his slow trek up the stairs, Petey bent down and petted Stanley, mimicking a bassett look.
“All right, so what d’ya want?”
“Nothin’ he’s got.”
“Oh.”
“But I need to get me a windbreaker. I been pitchin’ at school.”
“So?”
“My arm gets sore if I don’t keep it warm between the innings.”
“Are you serious?”
He glared at me and said no with such bitterness as to defy a metaphor.
“Are you going to try out?”
“For Little League?” That pained him.
“Yeah. For Little League.”
“I’m not gonna play with a bunch of babies.”
“You could—”
“I don’t care if I could be a first-string pitcher, make the All Stars, nothin’. I told you, Ben.”
“How do you know you’re that good?”
“Take my word for it.”
“I think you’re just afraid to find out. That’s all.”
He gave me the finger.
“That’s nice. Very mature.”
Some distinguished gentleman sitting in the row behind us leaned down toward my ear and spoke to me in a confidential tone. “I wouldn’t let my kid get away with that if I were you.”
I turned around. The guy was old enough to be my father. He had a long, loose, bronzed face, a funny-looking pencil-line moustache, thick, supple lips that were wet and smooth, oiled up from eating peanuts and probably ready to flap the breeze with anyone who came along. A real meddler wearing a yellow golf cap, red cardigan over a loud madras sports shirt with black on gray checked slacks. A man of distinctive taste. Petey had turned around too, having overheard him. “You gotta show ’em who’s boss,” he nodded sternly, looking sidelong at Petey.
I thought of all the charming turns of phrase I could send his way. Instead, I told him calmly, “If it doesn’t bother me, I don’t see why it should bother you.” I asked Petey if he had been referring to the gentleman in question. He nodded no, and I said, “See?”
So the guy said, “If it don’t bother you, something’s wrong with you.”
Petey told the man that he’d used bad grammar.
The man’s bronze face turned crimson, like a sunset. A slight, frail woman wearing a black wig regarded me disdainfully as she patted the man’s arm with the back of her hand.
Petey looked at the man and curled his lip, sneering toughly. He put his mitt down and clinched his right hand into a fist. The other hand still held the radio.
I smiled at the man and did my best to act friendly. “I like your shirt,” I said. “And thanks for the advice. If I need some more, I’ll—”
I gave a vaudevillian turn of the hand, giving over the stage to my young protégé.
“—flush twice.”
Petey smiled proudly. Then I put my hand on his shoulder as we turned around and laughed our heads off.
I could hear the man’s wife saying, “Why, I never.” Petey laughed loud enough to make the dog start howling, and I heard the lady tell her husband something like, “Just ignore them.”
Then we settled down to watch the Dodgers get their tails whipped. Morgan hit a double, went to third on a wild throw by Dusty Baker, then stole home. Three more runs for the Reds in the third. Petey yelled out things like: “You’re givin’ it away! Bums!” He gave the dog some more beer; and Stanley tipped the cup over, which solved all my problems—except that it spilled over Petey’s sweatshirt.
