NORTH OF SUNSET
by
Henry Baum
* * * * *
North of Sunset
Copyright © 2006 by Henry Baum
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. And unfortunate. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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* * * * *
NORTH OF SUNSET
A Novel
Henry Baum
* * * * *
“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Last Tycoon
* * * * *
CHARACTERS
Michael Sennet : Actor
Martin Goldfarb : Producer
Cheryl Leigh : Actress
Frank Vicente : Paparazzi Photographer
Curt Knudsen : The Vanity Plate Killer
Det. Harry Stein : Homicide Detective
* * * * *
Michael Sennet
Oh, Michael. Oh, Michael. Oh, Michael. It got boring if you heard those words enough. Well, not boring exactly. Sex was never boring. What’s another word for boring? Pointless. It got pointless. L.A. was the easiest place in the world to get fucked if your face was recognizable. Maybe it was the easiest place to get fucked even if you weren’t famous. As long as you put on certain airs and both your eyes looked like tiny movie screens. Michael Sennet could walk into any bar in the city and every eye would come his way. It would seem like he was swaggering even when he was standing still. The men would look at him with resentment and envy. The smart girls would think, I wonder what it would be like to sleep with a famous person. The dumb girls would think, I wonder what it would be like to fuck a famous person. And all of the women were pretty. This was L.A., a cauldron of eager, but desperate, young actresses. But even so, Michael Sennet thought all women were pretty. Sometimes he thought he was too unrestricted. That one over there has a big ass, big tits. Softer, more playful. Shit, that one’s built for a workout, for endurance. There was something to find interesting about every woman, even the buck-toothed and sullen – then you’d be doing them a divine favor. And so they all made it into his bed, a silken King-size in a King-sized room next to a bathroom with a bidet. A Jaguar, a black Jeep, a Triumph motorcycle and a vintage 1955 Porsche Spyder, the same kind of car James Dean died in, sat like living trophies in the garage. All were kept safely in a big house designed by an interior decorator in that warm Old Hollywood style that reminded him of the better past. The forties, that should have been his time. The women, the girls, would enter that house, look up at the high-ceilinged chandelier, the Persian rugs, into the wide, blue eyes of Michael Sennet, and they would almost begin weeping with weakness. It was like sex even before the sex had begun. Not so long after, she would be underneath him on that King-sized bed screaming, Oh, Michael. Oh, Michael. Oh, Michael.
He had gone the common route: high school plays. His first role was playing Nathan Detroit in “Guys and Dolls.” Michael was as regarded in his high school as the star quarterback. Everybody’s All American actor, starting at age fifteen. His high school friends would grudgingly think, “That’s what it’s about, being him.” The girls would fall into his bed well before he was famous, unlike his rabidly undersexed friends who had to make it easy with alcohol. People liked Michael. He shined with confidence and people were glad he was there to watch. Even the alienated liked him, because sometimes it was hard to hate someone who had everything because at least he proved it was possible.
In college he tried to be serious. He studied acting for a year before dropping out thinking, this is bullshit. Acting was either something you could or couldn’t do. Those classes seemed mainly to be for people who couldn’t. Shakespeare was fine, but it didn’t speak to him. He felt guilty about that briefly – wasn’t he supposed to worship Shakespeare? But he reconciled it by declaring that he was more interested in expressing the language of his life – the blunt, simple American language. He’d rather play Willie Loman than Hamlet. What did the 16th century have to do with him? He came from cities, cars, modern life. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing.
He spent a summer snorting heroin with his college roommate, Ben, an academic who managed to write all of his papers on dope. One night in July, after Michael’s fourth bag of dope, feeling good and listening to old jazz, Michael decided that he didn’t want to study acting anymore and he wanted to do it for real.
He thought about going to New York but he didn’t want to be in theatre. Theatre was nice for a night but he didn’t like the sense of impermanence. There was a certain invincibility he felt hanging out backstage after a performance with the girls looking up at him with wet but wilting eyes and the men patting his back – a feeling he had replaced with dope on his summer off, he thought abruptly. But theatre was forgotten a few hours after the performance. It was like acting into the wind. Performing on stage felt like a mobile kind of love while it was happening but hours later, even in bed with a girl, he would need another fix.
So he thought about L.A. Movies were permanent. You could still watch Bogart from the forties. And Olivier, even though he might have been great on stage, it could only be remembered through the mind of a critic. What people would remember him for was his work in movies because that could be watched again and again.
Michael loved movies. To him it was the greatest medium – a combination of literature, music, and painting, but more popular than them all. Movies were as accessible as Michael was himself. Movies were where he belonged.
His college drama teacher, Jeff, a failed actor who slept with many undergraduate actresses, recommended an agent in L.A. The agent, Darren Hargrove, was enthralled when Michael Sennet walked into his office. “Your eyes,” he said. “They’re both tough and serene. You can’t buy eyes like that. They’re intangible.”
There was only one certainty in Michael’s life: he was born to be an actor. He had a malleably masculine and sensitive face, not quite soft but it had an ability to shed some of its hardness. There weren’t many people better looking than Michael Sennet. Yet the face that he saw in the mirror and the face he saw on screen were two different people. He didn’t want that to be true – it was a groundless feeling, a kind of waking unconsciousness. But that sense of separation was what allowed him to be a good actor. He could totally lose himself into a character, both body and mind.
He started in commercials. In fact, he was only in one, a car commercial, and he vowed after the experience to never fucking do that again. He got the part after six auditions. He liked going to auditions, even when he was rejected. It made him feel professional. And he never had any doubt that it would eventually happen for him. This could partly be attributed to dope which he had cut down to one bag a day. He told himself he would give it up once he got more parts. He hadn’t stopped when he got the part in the car commercial – he was actually on dope during filming – which helped because this was degrading shit, playing the sensitive tough guy in a car commercial. He did finally stop doing dope for his part in “Killers.” After that, dope stopped being such an issue.
The money from the commercial eventually ran out. Even a starving artist needed to eat. He never wanted to get a regular job, at all costs. Regular jobs were for regular people. People who lacked imagination. Michael had too much imagination: he wanted to become a thousand people. He loved the idea of playing a construction worker, an insurance salesman, a bank teller or whatever else, but the thought of a hard eight hour day/forty hour week made him feel both nauseous and numb. He was an actor, nothing else. He was special, he was meant to do something exceptional with his life – people had told him that since he was a child – and it fueled his desire to avoid the real world.
He began looking in the classifieds. Most of the jobs required three years experience, enthusiasm he didn’t have. He had enthusiasm for acting, wasn’t that enough? He was nearly paralyzed – not so much with discouragement as with annoyance at having to bother. That very night – which convinced him that his career was an act of unrandom magic – he met the agent Jordan Douglass at a party thrown by Daniel Hargrove. She took him home and he fucked her well. If he acted like he fucked, she joked, he would definitely make it.
Michael moved in with Jordan Douglass and she took him on as a pet project. She got him an audition for the cop movie, “Killers.” He didn’t have to do any television or even cable, he jumped right from one commercial into movies. In the movie he played a criminal who becomes a cop. He got a lot of notice for that movie, the good boy/bad boy role. “Killers” started everything.
Who was that young actor? That was the question after “Killers” came out. Maybe not in every home in America but that was the question in Hollywood, and that was what mattered. He expressed the right kind of male beauty and confidence, while at the same time exhibiting a brooding sensitivity. “The Sensitive Cowboy.” That was the title of the first magazine article about him. “The Next James Dean?” was the caption of his first cover. Agents and offers and screenplays began coming his way. And he didn’t take it in with hectic, childlike excitement but with the calm confidence of inevitability. That was just why he didn’t need heroin anymore. He was feeling a natural high now. The world seemed like it was put here for him alone. Music was sounding better, the cracks on the sidewalks looked like wide and friendly smiles. Everything had the steady hum of shine.
And the girls. Backstage at his college theatre was nothing. The best he could do then was a blow job in the dark, empty theatre still in costume, on stage. But now. A magazine cover opened up women in a way nothing else could. It was almost a reluctant opening up: they had no choice. He could have spent every waking moment fucking if he wanted to but he still wanted to act. He didn’t know where the drive came from, but he wanted more movies, more magazines, a fluid frenzy of attention.
He didn’t know it at the time, but it was the same relationship he had to drugs. He built up a tolerance. If he had one magazine cover, he needed another one in a bigger magazine, a longer article. He wasn’t aware of what triggered the drive but it rumbled there with the same fluid frenzy.
And then he was famous. Pure, white fame. He commanded money and love and everyone’s attention in the room. Privately he thought this was what it was like to be God. Everyone’s nervous but grateful reverence, his perceived flawlessness.
From “Killers” he kept getting more work. He usually played darker roles, a hustler, an inmate. He was acclaimed by both critics and his peers. And eventually he starred in movies of his own. The first was “The Dark Ages” and on the strength of that success he could have ridden the wave of three bombs. But he didn’t. He had three blockbusters in a row. “Down Below,” a submarine drama, “Chapter Eleven,” about the rise and fall of a business tycoon, and “The End of Time,” a sci-fi thriller about dreams.
Then came “Back Seat Driver” – a comedy that wasn’t funny. Nothing was so deadly as a bad comedy. Michael Sennet learned what he couldn’t do: he couldn’t be funny. The failure made Michael very nervous. It showed him that his success wasn’t unconditional. He had to maintain his fame as if it were a decaying body. He needed to add more movies, more girls, more parties, and more drive, or else go back to the skeleton of his past. From that point on a feeling always lingered: fame, like life, was fleeting.
Despite the failure, Michael began earning fifteen million dollars a movie. He hadn’t grown up poor but money was never a forgotten issue. Growing up, his family lived in a house with two stories, even a pool, but his father was always miserly about money because his own father had been a struggling, immigrant foot doctor. “Money is like water,” Michael’s father said. “There’s never enough of it.” That statement didn’t account for the amount of money Michael had now. He had exactly too much of it. There was no way to get rid of fifteen million dollars except by burning it, or giving it away. And he made fifteen million dollars – before points – at least once a year. There was nothing he couldn’t buy.
So Michael never had to worry about money or women anymore, or people’s fawning graces. And if you’ve never had this experience, it can be just as alienating as world-hatred. If everybody treated you the same way life became mild, like the L.A. weather, a kind of exalted uniformity. Those times when he slowed down enough to think, he realized that he was deeply bored. Thankfully he didn’t have to slow down very much. There was always a première, or a meeting, or a production, or a TV interview, or a girl. But during those down-times he would think, what does a person do after they have everything? Find God? Pack your bags and move to India and worship someone small and dark? He didn’t have a decent answer. And so he spoke to that doubt as if it were another person in the room, Fuck you, I’m bright as light, I’m doing fine.
#
Driving. People’s eyes went wide when they looked over and saw Michael Sennet driving next to them. A black Jeep Limited. Something about that black car with the gold lettering, Limited, made Michael think of a throne being carried through the L.A. streets – held up by his money and fame.
There was only one good reason to live in L.A.: Hollywood. The city was lit by a union of sunshine and studio light – a strange, artificial light like a nighttime sporting event that was so bright and electric that you couldn’t believe any of it was real. Michael owned this city. Everyone wanted to meet him, be him. He could see the desire in everybody’s eyes, a kind of breathing hope. Even the failure that existed here – and there was more failure than success – was lifted up by his presence. They all drove right alongside each other on their way to the same Pacific Coast Highway, Westwood, Bel Air, San Vicente, Olympic, Pico, Sunset Strip, Culver City, Hollywood Boulevard and beyond.
He was their mayor – responsible for the city’s optimism. He was even responsible for the economy. He was a politician by default. More people wanted to see him driving on the freeway than the mayor in a cold limousine. Maybe that’s why he liked to drive so much. When he was driving he felt at home in the sprawling city – in the whole city – because ALL of it would welcome him with reverence, nervousness, encouraging laughter. And that just made him feel good.
He was now on the 405, about to pull on the 10 to go downtown to meet Marty Goldfarb – producer, friend – who was on the set of a loft made to look like Soho, New York.
But he wasn’t paying attention. He was about to miss his exit. He had to pull over three lanes in the five lane highway, quickly. He was a good driver. He made the first two in that beautiful smooth sweep that was like surfing. But the offramp was almost here, and he wasn’t on it yet. If he didn’t pull off soon he’d hit the yellow divider. He’d once seen in a movie that it was filled with water. He didn’t want to hit that divider; seemed too messy. He turned onto the offramp sharply and was forced to pull directly in front of a pickup. The truck honked wildly, skidding left then right then straight, and then it started speeding up, its nose coming up to Michael’s rear like the reprimanding eyes of a teacher. I guess they don’t recognize me, Michael thought. The pickup was right behind him, almost nudging him. Rust red, dented, headlight eyes bearing down, it almost seemed to be growling. This is like a movie.
Michael sped up and looked in the rearview mirror. The pickup sped up right along with him. They were on the offramp, high above the city now, held up with columns that would break in the coming earthquake. Michael’s heart pounded. Imagine dying like this, murdered, on the freeway. Such anger in this city.
Finally, solace. The offramp was ending as they pulled onto the 10. But this only made things worse. The pickup sped up faster and tried to get right alongside Michael. Pretty fast for a piece of shit. Michael had nowhere to go because some silver hatchback was in front of him. And the pickup was almost here. Who knew what kind of rage the pickup would inflict on him? Michael looked over at the pickup with wide-blue-eyed fear. It couldn’t have matched the look that the driver of the pickup made when he realized who he had been toying with – a look of smiling, red-eyed deviance that immediately changed to worried submission to oh shit I didn’t see that car in front of me, swerve, change lanes, hit the wall, sparks, crash against the side wall, up on two wheels and topple over, skid on its side to a complete stop on the shoulder of the 10, lucky I didn’t die, my heart is in my ass, throat and feet.
Michael saw all this happen in his rearview mirror. He immediately pulled to a stop on the narrow shoulder of the freeway.
The pickup lay on its side a quarter mile away. Michael wasn’t sure why he was walking in that direction – help, vengeance, curiosity – he just was.
He was almost there. Some people were rubbernecking, but most sped by, a sound like a swarm of indifferent killer bees. The driver, dressed in overalls and a flannel shirt, a worker of some kind but with no equipment in the back of his truck, had managed to open the door of the pickup. He was trying to raise out of the truck as if cracking out of an egg.
Michael arrived before the man could pull himself all the way out.
The man looked up at Michael from inside his truck, feet standing on the passenger door. He was overweight, pale, meek-looking in person. Sad rather than angry.
“You,” the man said.
“Me,” Michael replied.
“I didn’t know it was you.”
“No.”
“If I had known I wouldn’t of–”
“But you did. And look what’s happened.”
Michael felt good now. This was why he had come back here: humiliation.
The man made a thoughtful smile. He said, “I didn’t think you were real. I thought you were animated.”
Michael glared. “You sure you want to be insulting me. You’re in the middle of a predicament here.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
The man frowned with guilt and some fear. He stared up at Michael’s eyes made dark by sunglasses. It almost seemed as if Michael wasn’t here to help.
Michael took a step back from the truck and surveyed the moment. There was something searing, something pathetic, here. A symbol and a symptom of how things could go wrong. All the dumb, aggressive energy of this city crashed on the side of the freeway. And I’m part of it.
Michael placed his hand on the roof of the truck and peered down. The seats and the dash were cracked. It smelled of old plastic. “Here, take my hand,” he said. He put his hand out. The man grabbed it which felt strangely intimate, like old friends in agreement. Michael started pulling.
A car started honking on the freeway. Michael turned around. A girl in a red Nissan Sentra hung out the passenger side, screaming, “Hey, Michael! I love you, Michael!” and drove on.
Everybody’s going to hear about this, Michael thought.
He turned back to the truck. In one motion he pulled the man out of his truck. Somehow the man wasn’t hurt. He brushed off his pants and stood next to his truck, staring at it like it was a big, collapsed pet.
“Thanks,” the man said, eyes still on the truck. Then he looked at Michael worriedly, but with a slight embarrassed grin. “You’re not, you know, gonna press charges or anything, will you?”
Michael considered this with no change of expression. “No sir,” he said. “I won’t if you won’t.”
* * * * *
Martin Goldfarb
Martin Goldfarb. Fucking Marty Goldfarb. Almost as if it were one word. A ball-breaker in the sense of breaking his own balls along with everybody else’s balls. A Jew with a cross to bear.
That’s not exactly true. Sometimes he could be weak beyond weakness. That’s when you really didn’t want to get near him. Soft and hurt was much more dangerous than blind, committed rage because then you would be drawn in close to Marty Goldfarb. Once you were drawn in close to Marty Goldfarb, it was easy to betray Marty Goldfarb, and then he would attack you with the kind of accuracy that once made the devil cry tears of joy.
#
Marty sat in his trailer now, shittier than he was accustomed. He wasn’t the kind of person who demanded air conditioning set to a perfect 71.5 degrees, leather everywhere, a massage every five minutes – too much luxury made him uncomfortable – but at least there could be some fucking grapes. This trailer was no different than the one for the first time supporting actress. He was sixty-two years old. He had earned something, if not from age alone, that’s all he was thinking. Fuck them, whoever they were.
Maybe he was just feeling bad about this movie. Usually a movie had one or two car chases worked into the greater framework of the movie. But for this movie car chases were the movie.
No, that wasn’t it either. That wasn’t something that usually bothered him. Actually, a film’s success was a point of giant pride for him, regardless of what the movie was about. Perhaps even because the movie was as empty as this trailer, it made him feel like a magician getting something out of nothing. There was artistry, even integrity, in making money, in entertaining people. Christ, he told that artist residing somewhere deep inside him, I’ll give you 100 million dollars and lets see you make something watchable, even meaningful. It’s hard to make entertainment, as hard as it is to make some meaningful streak of red across a canvas.
Ironically, the reason they were filming here in shitty downtown was because the scene called for our hero, the race car driver/crime solver, to be busy seducing a Soho artist. Oh to have such beautiful control over these things.
Marty thought his respect for the past was what separated him from most people in the industry. He dreamed of creating great things, Oscar winners, not just money-makers. For most people in Hollywood, the history of movies was as neglected as the history of art. Some basis in the past was necessary or else it was like giving creative control to an unformed child. There were people in the industry, especially the new young people, especially agents, who thought that Hollywood was the only place on earth. If you lived here long enough you began to think that there was nothing in the world more important than Hollywood – not realizing that people in the computer industry, people in the car industry, people in the toilet paper industry, thought the same way. Everyone needed toilet paper. In a town where only what was happening now was important, how well the last movie did, or didn’t, people forgot that they were a part of a great, steady cycle, even if only a century old. Perhaps the writers thought this way. They thought about their place among the beautiful old architecture, elaborate theaters and Spanish tile, much of it crumbling and forgotten. Some of the most successful actors thought this way as well. Their wealth and glamour had its place next to the black and white visions of the past. But most of the eager, agented faces, or the agents and executives themselves, were so frenetic with competition and success that they forgot about the past. It didn’t matter if they made classic movies as long as they lived well. They ate their commissary lunches with smiling pride, but not with so much regard. Maybe this forgotten past was why movies had become so bad. The movies themselves were crumbling with the architecture.
Marty openly knew that what he did was bullshit. It wasn’t useless, but he knew happy endings were full of shit, nobody ever rode into the sunset, because he never had, even if he did own a summer home in Los Angeles, as pointless as having a winter home in the arctic. He just wasn’t an artist, that’s all. It didn’t seem worth the self-torture when he was worth 50 million dollars and movies made people, cry, laugh, and fear – all things good art was supposed to do. He chose to stay with what he could do well, sell things that moved people in a basic way, but moved them just the same. And shit, if selling didn’t have its own kind of artistry. Just like a baseball pitcher painted corners, he was painting the landscape of America in its malls, on its highways, on the grand, bland surface of suburban America. And he was comfortable in that role.
It was an America he’d never known. He’d grown up in Long Island, not Nebraska. And like any Jew he longed to be white. For him the Shiksa Goddess was the public, the strip malls, the American cars, proms, football, all the shit he hadn’t known, secretly hated, and envied the way a depressive envied sanity. But here he was, the hairball Jew, dictating what all those people paid to see. He’d married his Goddess. Aside from the movies themselves, this may have been his greatest achievement.
There was art in entertainment. There was art in entertainment. He was an artist, damnit. He was.
Christ, why was he having this argument with himself again? Anxiety. Something else was bothering him. The phone was ringing, and call it man’s intuition, he did not have a good feeling about what was going to come at him from the other end. The phone rang again and the little light on the phone flickered like it was going out. He picked up the phone.
“Yes?”
“We need milk,” a voice said.
Marty’s heart sank. “What?” he said.
“Milk,” the voice repeated.
“That’s why you’re calling me? To tell me we need milk?”
“Yes. No. I want talk to you.”
Oh, Jesus. This shouldn’t be. This shouldn’t ever have been. Esmerelda was her name. He liked that. But how could he have gotten involved in this? The maid. The fucking maid. It was almost too obvious a thing for him to do. But then he thought, I work in obvious things: the movies I produce. So maybe it was right for him to be screwing the Mexican maid every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Because he loved the Spanish asses. They all wore these jeans tight as skin. He didn’t know where they bought them because he had never seen them on anyone but the Mexican maids. And all of them were plump so they shouldn’t have been wearing jeans like that at all. What made a woman with a fat body wear tight clothes? It had an ignorant sort of boldness that he respected and he wouldn’t quarrel with those acid-tight discount jeans because he liked the plump Spanish asses, liked them more than he should.
There had been a succession of maids ever since they had moved to their house in the Hollywood hills. They always seemed to need to be replaced. They went back to Mexico, or Ecuador or wherever they were from, or they got another job. He didn’t know exactly what happened to them but suddenly they would vanish and a new woman would be washing dishes, taking care of the kids, padding through the house with plump armfuls of laundry. And he had thoughts about all of them. The thoughts were suppressed because usually he was too busy to bother, or it was too difficult to go through the motions, or, after all, he was married. But on those days when he worked at home he could feel them in the house with him. Sometimes they would come into his office by mistake and blink nervously to the ground, saying, “I sorry,” like a Mexican geisha. Sometimes he would brush past them when he went to get something from the kitchen and they were doing the dishes. Jesus, why was it so sexy to watch the maids do his dishes? Their plump ass made tight by the jeans, their hands glistening with water and soap, their eyes soft with concentration. Every time he would get his drink or whatever it was, go back to his office, and cloud himself with work.
Then one day he decided, This is MY house. Why am I feeling like the weak one here? They come from their little one-story houses with dusty front yards and torn furniture in their American form of Mexico and then come here to my house with a stone-lined pool, skylights, marble kitchen, two-car fireplace, waxed wooden floors, matching, matching decor, and they want me to come up behind them when they’re washing dishes and stroke their thick but soft Mexican hair.
And so that’s what he did. He waited for when Esmerelda was washing dishes because her hands would be submerged in his dirty plates and her defenses would be down.
He came up behind her and put his wide, dark hands – well-haired since he was fifteen – on her lavender shoulders. She shuddered and softened almost as if she had been expecting him. Then he turned her around and he kissed her. He couldn’t think of any other way to do it. He couldn’t talk to her. He kissed her. Her hands dangled by her sides, unfighting.
He stopped the kiss and looked at her. Her eyes were as glistening as her hands and she had the same shy, demure smile she always had. “What,” she said, and then either stopped herself or couldn’t find anything to say. He had her, he thought. Nothing was going to stop him. He was the man of the house.
He brought her to a bedroom, a guest bedroom. She walked slowly as if this was the way to a kind of punishment, but she never stopped. And then they had the best, most foreign sex Martin Goldfarb could ever recall. Maybe because she was so timid about it. Timid and explosive at once. Shy but overeager, as if the ice between rich man and maid had finally been broken. It was a beautiful kind of release.
And now she was on the phone, asking about milk or something else.
“We need milk,” she said.
“Milk? What does that have to do with me, Esmerelda?”
“I want you to – you need to bring milk.”
“Esmerelda, this is crazy. I can’t bring milk home right now.”
Then he understood. She was trying to get him to come home and this was her small, naive way of speaking in code. Probably because his wife was home.
“Is Judy there?”
“Yes. But she leaving.”
“Couldn’t you have fucking waited until then?” He stopped. He didn’t want to yell. She was breakable. “I’m sorry. I can’t come home right now. I’m working.”
“OK,” she said softly, so regrettably soft, in her thick Spanish accent.
They hung up the phone.
Almighty. What was it about women, all women, that they were exactly the same? They didn’t change if they were poor, rich, or just off the boat. They all wanted more. Even the maid. Marty wanted to meet a woman who he could fuck without commitment. He could get a prostitute but he like the way women in love looked at him, luminously soft, and they screwed better that way. A prostitute could never give him that. No matter what price. What he needed was a women who he could love and play with and then turn off. Actually switch off. Oh shit, now he was getting ugly. Women were all right, he amended.
Things had started out fine with Esmerelda. They had gone into the guest bedroom and then she continued her work, washing the sheets from the guest bedroom along with the rest of the laundry. But then she began missing him. This had started recently, with phone calls like the one for milk. Once she had called and said “Hello” and just remained silent, like a teenager making a silent call to a crush.
What made Marty most annoyed was that the more things got complicated with her love and attachment, the more he had to put an end to it, and he didn’t want to put an end to it. He liked fucking her in the guest bedroom and going back to work. He worked better that way, with a stronger, earned confidence. She was too timid a woman to ever tell Judy anything, but she wasn’t very sharp either and something might slip. Marty didn’t want to divorce his wife, as much as he sometimes hated her.
Judy Krassner. That was one ugly name. Jew-dy. She was so much a Jap that she’d even come from Israel. Sometimes he felt as if he was his own personal Pearl Harbor.
Even so, he didn’t want to break up that house. He liked the kids, James and Rachel, both in college, Lydia living in New York trying to be a fashion designer. And Judy did perform a function. He couldn’t go to every award ceremony and premiere alone. Sometimes he even liked Judy. He wasn’t so callous. He remembered when they first met, on the Santa Monica pier, both watching the fishermen. It was such a perfectly romantic scene, how could he find fault in it? They had the usual struggling years in a small apartment. Even though she was a rich girl, the daughter of someone in Israeli government, she didn’t take the money coming to her, which sometimes irritated him, sometimes he admired. All that time he was working: first for a bastard of an agent, Peter Johnson, then at Lorimar Pictures, becoming a vice-president, then at Fox, and finally on his own with a deal with Columbia Pictures. It was the steady anticipation of success that made their early marriage so romantic. They’d been through a lot together. He could never forget it.
But she had become something of a money-spending, mirror-loving beast. Everything was excess. At the last Christmas party she had rented a snow machine and bought four Christmas trees. Four Christmas trees. Scattered throughout the house were every Nutcracker man she could find in the antique shops around L.A. There was enough food and pastry to feed four Christmas trees worth of parties and it ended up costing $45,000. Their oldest daughter’s wedding had only cost twenty.
He couldn’t be sure of it but he was almost certain that she bought a new piece of clothing every day. Many items of clothing in her closet dangled with pricetags and would never be worn. And every single day she had a facial. The facials made her face so pure and without blemish that the rose of her cheeks had taken on a hard, plastic sheen. She was still attractive, a woman other women wanted to look like – blonde, thin in a way only L.A. wives were thin – a flawless breed of woman, like an actress who had never seen an inch of cellulite and whose clothes always fit right. But at times Marty would look at his wife and think she looked like a crazy, expensive clown.
Aside from that, they got along well enough. They ate well, talked well. Judy was fascinated and elated by everything that went on in Hollywood. She loved to entertain. She was a great hostess. In that way they were perfect companions. Marty may have been an unstoppable talker in the office or at lunches, but his mind would often shut down when he got home – a daily, scheduled collapse. Judy was good for him those times – running the house, running those necessary parties, talking when he could only listen, feeding him. He loved her. He did.
Christ. Women. He couldn’t think about this. Esmerelda and Jew-dy would have to wait. Michael Sennet was coming to the set for a meeting.
With Michael Sennet, Marty had his best partnership. They had made five films together, starting with “Killers.” He felt, and wasn’t inaccurate in feeling, that he had discovered Michael Sennet. This in itself could have been his finest achievement and proof of his instinct. Each movie was more successful than the last but it was the third movie, “Dark Ages,” that had been Michael’s breakthrough and kept him at his current level. And so their relationship was one of mutual gratitude. Sometimes it was clouded by the usual Hollywood unsentimental bullshit that made everyone forget anything anybody had ever done for them – oh yeah, you, I guess we have a past. But they skated through those impulses and stayed working together at a regular pace. Marty liked to think he was a mentor.
There was a knock on the trailer door. Jessica, his secretary who needed to be fired, poked her head inside and said, “Michael Sennet’s here,” with the small, unavoidable smile that girls always had when they saw Michael. It was the same look women had after good sex – eyes wet with sensual gratitude – and all Michael did was arrive. To be that man.
Michael entered the trailer looking sullen.
Marty stood up and walked quickly towards Michael with his hand outstretched, like a host at a party trying to make every guest feel welcome.
“Michael, the word’s already going around that you saved a man’s life.”
“Already? It’s only been a half hour.”
“Half hour hell. I bet that guy was on the phone in five minutes. He’s already on TV.”
“Really?”
Michael smiled a little at this news.
“It’s a hell of a thing. If only it were a movie, we could’ve made some money off of it.”
“Oh, we’ll make some money off of it,” Michael said sourly.
“I suppose you’re right. We should just film you for a day, release that. People would line around the block. Just Michael Sennet performing his normal human duty as hero, king, and God.”
Michael didn’t smile, appearing neither kingly nor Godly.
Marty took a seat behind his small trailer desk. He watched Michael staring at his hands as if they were disappearing.
“How is it, Mike?” Marty asked. “You’ve looked better.”
“I have? I’m all right.”
“You look down.”
“I guess I’m tired, that’s all.”
“That’s anybody’s excuse, not yours.”
“Well, Dr. Goldfarb, I’m tired because I’ve been fucking all night.”
Marty smiled enviously. “That true?”
“No, but it could be.”
Michael grinned.
Marty paused, the envy changing to an old ugly Jew’s regret. “What is it, then?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Do we have to talk about this? I guess I’m bored.”
“Bored? What could you be bored with?”
“Well, tell me this. What do you do after you’ve slept with the most beautiful woman that’s ever walked the earth. Snorted the best heroin to ever grow out of Asia. Starred in one of the top five movies of all time. Achieved the best of everything and now, now, saved somebody’s life?”
Marty rolled back in his swivel chair as if away from a bad smell. “Jesus, maybe you should see a shrink.”
“No, I’m just in a mood. We get this way, did you know that?”
Marty nodded seriously, feeling both paternal and self-preserving. “You need to get back to work, that’s what you need to do.”
“Yes. This always happens to me when I’m not working.”
“You read anything?”
“Nothing, really. You?”
“Nothing so striking or nothing that doesn’t need a lot of work. What do you think you want to do?”
“Something without special effects. Something without bullshit. Something human.”
Marty shuffled uneasily in his chair. He said – as if his words would rain gravely down – “So you want to make something small.”
Michael nodded and smiled as if hearing the word for the first time. “Yes,” he said. “I want to make something small.”
* * * * *
Curt Knudsen
All of a sudden there were three shapes in the sky. They each looked as large as the moon – rows upon rows of lights and windows, hovering over the hillside, dwarfing the houses. This seemed familiar somehow, it had happened before, or this was always happening and he just now took the time to see it. Something like that. He should probably tell someone about this. But they might just gawk at him like he was crazy. They didn’t understand the connection he had to these shapes in the sky, circles and triangles and rectangles all lit up. He stared at the three U.F.O.s as if he had been chosen to see them. The world’s never going to be the same after this, he thought. Finally. That made him feel a happiness stronger than falling.
Curt opened his eyes in bed. Damn, that wasn’t real. But it felt real as anything. Maybe the aliens were appearing in a dream. That’s how they traveled. Abducting him in his dreams.
Curt’s head cleared of sleep and he realized, no, that’s just a dream. Not the strangest dream he ever had, but not the calmest either. He went through phases when he was dreaming all the time and then times when he wasn’t dreaming at all, like his mind didn’t want to tell him stories. He had been dreaming pretty heavily for about three weeks now. This was the first UFO dream and he didn’t know where the hell it had come from. Shit, yeah he did. His brother Carl had been telling stories about fighting in Vietnam the night before. “Chinks are like aliens,” he said. “You ever see a picture of an alien everybody’s always talking about? They got the same yellow skin and big, slanted eyes. Shit, I bet the Japanese are in line with them right now. All the technology they’ve got. And the food. You ever see what alien fucking food those fuckers eat? Wouldn’t surprise me if they were from a different planet altogether.”
Curt sat up in bed. The room was wood-paneled. White sheets, white blankets, black bed-frame. One dresser and a nightstand matched the fake wood of the walls.
Half-naked, Cindy sat at the edge of the bed watching TV, bathing the room in a flickering, but dead, gray light.
“Jesus, Cindy, I told you to not watch the TV while I’m asleep,” Curt said. “That shit enters my dreams.”
“What you been dreaming about?” Cindy asked.
“That doesn’t matter. I just don’t like the TV on while I’m sleeping.”
“You been dreaming about the local news? I been watching the local news.”
“Will you just listen to me. Why do you gotta make this so hard? Turn off the Goddamn TV.”
Cindy looked at him blankly – no frown, no smile, nothing. “I been watching this report on Michael Sennet,” she said, ignoring him entirely. “You know, the actor? Seems he pulled somebody out of a flaming car accident.”
“That so,” Curt said, trying not to pay attention to her.
“Yep. Look, there it is again. It’s all over the place.”
Cindy turned up the TV with her toe. A few weeks back she had seen a report about some beautiful girl who didn’t have any arms and had learned to do everything, even drive, with her feet. Cindy thought if she could do that with her feet while still having her arms, she’d just be unstoppable. But she wasn’t very good at it and now the TV was too loud.
A blonde reporter was standing street level in front of the 101. The wind blew. “…freeway behind me. Michael Sennet added another success to his list of credits today by saving a man’s life. Eyewitness accounts say that the man was trapped in his car after crashing against the wall and flipping over on the east-bound 10. Sennet stopped and helped the man out of his car. Incredibly, no one was hurt. Michael Sennet was not available for comment but a spokesperson said that he is happy that he could be of service and he is relieved that the man is doing well. Back to you in the studio.”
Cindy turned to Curt. “Isn’t that something?”
“That’s something,” Curt said.
Curt got out of bed, wanting to get away from Cindy and the TV. He went into the living room.
There was a TV in there too. A one-bedroom apartment 1000 square feet and there’s gotta be two TVs. This was where his life had turned. There was no going back because there was nothing to go back to. At least he had some company, he thought. Cindy was cheaper than keeping a prostitute, if not much less annoying. And she was cute, in a fat sort of way.
Curt sat on the couch which was covered with a blue blanket after the dog – Sue, a dog named Sue – had pissed on it one too many times. The dog was sixteen, going on seventeen, and it had lost bladder control recently. The blanket masked only half the smell. That’s not right, Curt thought, it just isn’t right, but he kept sitting there. Where else was he going to go?
He stared in front of him at the wall opposite the couch. On the wall there was a framed poster for the movie “The Eyes of Laura Mars.” He hadn’t even seen the movie but he liked the poster, that woman’s white eyes. Behind the poster was something that usually calmed him down. On the peeling white wall there were seven license plates, all from California, some blue, some plain white, some white with the orange sunset: DGRSFAN, IBRK4ME, STGEMOM, SXYURPN, JESUS4U, BEMYGRL, NVRLERN.
Cindy hadn’t ever seen them. She followed the Vanity Plate Killer case in the newspaper and on TV (this might have been the main reason he wanted her to not watch TV while he was sleeping – he didn’t want to start dreaming about people talking about him) but she wasn’t bright enough to connect the obvious. It was risky to keep her around but Curt was the type who needed a woman at all times in order to feel grounded and good about himself. Besides, if Cindy ever did find out that Curt was the killer, she’d be excited to be living with the local killer she’d seen on TV. Sometimes she said she’d even make believe that Curt was the Vanity Plate Killer. That was when Cindy was better than any prostitute.
So Curt wasn’t worried about Cindy. No, Curt didn’t worry about much. To him, to old girlfriends, even so far back as to people in elementary school, it was his finest quality. He could get annoyed, angry, bitter, even violent, but he never got worried. He never got anxious. And he didn’t like anxious people. Cindy was never anxious – although that was because she never really thought about anything, to her things just happened – but still he liked that about her. The Jews, now, they were an anxious people. Nervous, neurotic. They were his least favorite people, and maybe the reason this whole vanity plate thing had started in the first place.
Curt belonged to the American Purity Church. It was a tight knit group – there were only fifteen of them – started by his friend and mentor Dusty Macelroy. Dusty said that the Jews were descendants of the devil. Adam and Eve were the first Jews. Eve was seduced by the snake, Satan. Jews were impure from the very beginning. So whites were the only pure race. But Dusty took this theory into a whole new direction, a direction Curt respected, and the reason they had moved to Los Angeles. Hollywood, Dusty said, was run by Jews, founded by Jews. Hollywood was the devil itself, spreading its Jewish impurity. Un-holywood, Dusty called it.
Two years earlier they had decided to move to the heart of the beast. They were Curt, Cindy, Dusty, and four others, two who moved back immediately after finding that they couldn’t handle the city after Willamette, South Carolina, and two others, a married couple named Jim and Sally Brooker who died in a car accident only three months after they had moved there – which told everyone they had done the right thing by moving to Los Angeles. Obviously it was sinful and worth cleansing.
The congregation met sporadically, maybe once a month. “Congregation” was perhaps the wrong word. The whole point was that they weren’t a religion. They were anti-Christian. They didn’t want to live by the standards of their childhoods, which had been pretty un-Christian. The APC wasn’t as organized as Curt would have liked. Most of the time the Purity Church consisted of only Curt and Dusty sitting in Dusty’s small house in Culver City and talking about anything, even sports. Twice they had a picnic, and three times they had everyone in a room together at the same time, but mostly it was just Dusty and Curt.
The Vanity Plate Killings were Curt’s idea, and Curt’s alone. Dusty didn’t even know about Curt being the killer. He knew about it in the sense that he’d read about it – everybody had – but he never put it together that Curt himself was responsible. Curt wanted it that way. He wanted to keep it a secret so he could spring it like a surprise gift when the time was right. Seven murders in the name of everything they talked about. The longer Curt held out, the more the gift would rise in esteem. He wasn’t sure when he would reveal it because he knew he still had work to do. Sometimes Curt would tremble with little-boy madness that he couldn’t deal this hand he held. He was the talk of the city and he didn’t always get the respect he thought he deserved. Dusty always had the floor. But he kept to his plan – willpower was something Dusty talked about a lot. Being stronger than all the common weakness.
The way the Vanity Plate Killer idea started was this: his friends Jim and Sally had gotten into an accident with a car that had the license plate AGR8LVR. The accident had actually been Jim’s fault – he was just too overwhelmed by the city and he lost concentration, took a left turn when he shouldn’t have – but that fucking license plate, A Great Lover, or Liver if you wanted to look at it that way: it was the final insult. Jim had lived long enough in a hospital bed to tell Curt about the license plate. He also told Curt about the fearful but calm look of his wife before she died. Sally had been so pummeled by the oncoming car that her collar bone had broken through her skin and stabbed Jim in the right shoulder. Jim was stabbed by the bones of his own wife.
Jim and Sally had a happy marriage, the only one Curt had ever witnessed. Curt’s parents were bad, trash, leave it at that. He didn’t dwell on it. Jim and Sally were good people. They worked for a living, knew about some things, didn’t get in your way, agreed with you about the more important things. They were how people were supposed to be. It was Sally who was more involved in the church than Jim. She did some secretarial work, typed up some of Dusty’s ideas, put titles on them and made them look like articles. Sometimes she mailed the articles to members of Congress or part-time members scattered across the country. So except for the violent dislike Sally had of foreigners, something she said she’d had since she was born, Sally and Jim were gentle people. They were boring people, sure. Jim was basically a doormat. Sally collected little cat figurines. They had come to L.A. not out of any great passion, but because Dusty had asked them to – they had all known each other since high school. But Jim and Sally loved each other and that was enough for Curt.
To be killed by some fucker with that license plate, it still filled Curt with anger. To die in a car accident in Los Angeles, hit by a BMW with vanity plates, it was a symbol or a symptom of something larger. L.A. was a warzone full of riots, fires, mudslides, a Biblical amount of tragedy. And every kind of foreigner in the melting pot. L.A. was like hell in America, all the way south and west.
And then there was Hollywood. The pumping heart of the City of Angels. Celebrity was an ethnic group in itself, a dangerous minority. Minorities were the most dangerous when people started thinking they were equal. People didn’t just think celebrities were equal, people thought they were better. Be them black, Mexican, Chinese, or Jew. And behind them all, Jews were calling the shots. He’d even heard that some of them were gay Jews. It was like affirmative action taken to the extreme, a select few risen to the rank of untouchable. Hollywood was the capital of America, and America was the capital of the world, so there was a lot at stake.
This was Dusty talking mainly. But Curt agreed. The Vanity Plate Murders came out of their talks. What was a better symbol of everything that was wrong with this country than Los Angeles? And what was a better symbol of Los Angeles than a California vanity plate? These days vanity was like a race. So Curt was doing what he and Dusty had originally set out to do when they came here: shake people up, change minds, maybe even hurt people who deserved it. What Curt was most proud of was that he was doing it by himself. Dusty, his mentor, was still just spouting words. Sometimes he thought Dusty was full of shit. All talk no action. Dusty talked on and on about getting the word out. He even talked about getting on TV. Fight fire with fire, he said. But that never happened. Curt was the Vanity Plate Killer. Him. The newspapers wrote about him everyday. For the first time in his life he had accomplished something.
So Cindy watching the news about some celebrity helping somebody wasn’t making Curt very happy. He could go up to the TV and turn it off but she would whine in a way that was even more grating than television, and she’d probably just turn it back on, glaring at him with her brand of female indifference. It was a choice between two sounds he didn’t want to hear.
Curt decided to let the TV run. At least the volume could be turned down on the TV.
* * * * *
Michael Sennet
“How does it feel to be a hero?”
“Are you going to make a movie out of the experience?”
“How old was he? Was he handsome? Were you lovers?”
Michael was leaving the set when they pounced on him. He didn’t know how the hell they had gotten here so fast. But they always did. They arrived before his publicist had a chance to promote the story. Even if the guy in the truck had gotten on the phone to the news in five minutes, that information had to somehow make its way to the tabloids, and then they had to find out where Michael was going to be – he’s having a meeting with Marty Goldfarb? Where’s he? What set? Michael didn’t know if every little receptionist was selling information but it seemed like his entire appointment book was public. If by some chance there was an emergency and he had to be taken to the hospital, the photographers would be at the hospital before him.
Hyenas hovered around lions waiting to eat the scraps of their kill. The paparazzi were worse than that. Hyenas fed off death. The paparazzi fed off life, turning it into a kind of living imprisoned death. He could get bitter about it, you know, humorless.
I shouldn’t complain, he reminded himself. It goes with the territory. That was easier said than done. Try being blind for a day, this wasn’t so different. To have your access to a regular life stripped away every time you left the house, it wasn’t so different than blindness.