Hollywood Read online

  “WE’VE ALL GOT ASSHOLES, RIGHT? IS THERE ANYBODY IN THIS ROOM WITHOUT AN ASSHOLE? IF SO, SPEAK UP AT ONCE, AT ONCE, YOU HEAR ME?”

  Jon Pinchot dug his elbow into my side: “See, he’s a genius, see?”

  Jean-Paul circled at the same quick pace, screaming: “WE’VE ALL GOT THIS SLICE IN THE BACK, RIGHT? DOWN THERE, ABOUT IN THE MIDDLE, RIGHT? THE SHIT POURS OUT OF THERE, RIGHT? OR AT LEAST WE HOPE IT DOES! TAKE AWAY OUR SHIT AND WE ARE DEAD! THINK HOW MUCH SHIT WE SHIT IN A LIFETIME! THE EARTH, AT THE MOMENT, ABSORBS IT! BUT THE SEAS AND THE RIVERS ARE GAGGING UP THEIR VERY LIVES WHILE SWALLOWING OUR SHIT! WE ARE FILTHY, FILTHY, FILTHY! I HATE US ALL! EVERY TIME I WIPE MY ASS, I HATE US ALL!”

  Then, he stopped, seemed to see Pinchot.

  “You want money, right?”

  Pinchot smiled.

  “Fucker, I will get you your god damned money,” said Jean-Paul.

  “Thank you. I just told Chinaski, here, that you were a genius.”

  “Shut up!”

  Then Jean-Paul looked at me.

  “The best thing about your writing is that it excites the Institutionalized. Also those that should be excited. And that figure goes into the many millions. If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.”

  “Jean-Paul, I’ve already gotten those.”

  “Yeah? Huh? Who?”

  “X-girl friends.”

  “YOU DULL ME!” he screamed and began circling the table again, scratching himself as he did so.

  Then, after one last big circle, he ran to the bedroom, slammed the door and was gone.

  “My brother,” said Henri-Leon, “is not feeling well today. He is upset.”

  I reached around and refilled the glasses.

  Pinchot leaned toward me and whispered, “This suite, they’ve been here for days, eating and drinking, they don’t have to pay the bill...”

  “Really?”

  “It’s paid for by Frances Ford Lopalla. He thinks Jean-Paul is a genius...”

  “Love and Genius are two of the most over-used words in the language,” I said.

  “You’re starting to talk silly now,” Sarah told me, “you’re starting to get stinko.”

  With that, Jon-Luc Modard emerged from his corner. He walked up to us.

  “Give me a fucking wine,” he said.

  I poured it tall. Jon-Luc drank it right down. I poured another.

  “I’ve read your shit,” he said. “Best thing about it, it’s so simple. You have a case of brain-damage, no?”

  “I might. I lost almost all the blood in my body in 1957. I was in the basement of a charity ward for 2 days before some crazy intern with a conscience found me. I think maybe I lost a lot of things then, more mental than physical.”

  “It is one of his favorite stories,” said Sarah. “I love him, but you have no idea how many times I’ve had to listen to that story.”

  “I love you too, Sarah,” I said, “but somehow, the telling of old stories, again and again, seems to bring them closer to what they were supposed to be.”

  “O.K., Popsy, I’m sorry,” Sarah said.

  “Listen,” said Jon-Luc, “what I want to ask you to do is to write the English dialogue for the sub-titles of my new movie. Also, I have a scene I want to use from one of your stories, where the man gets a blow job under the desk and just goes about his business, answering the telephone and all that crap. Is it a deal?”

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  Then we just pulled up the chairs and started drinking. And Jon-Luc started talking. He talked and he talked, looking only at me. At first, I felt flattered, then after a while, I felt less than that.

  Jon-Luc kept right on talking. He was being dark and playing Genius. Maybe he was a Genius. I didn’t want to get bitter about it. But I had had Genius pushed at me all through school: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Ibsen, G.B. Shaw, Chekov, all those dullards. And worse, Mark Twain, Hawthorne, the Bronte sisters, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, it all just laid on you like a slab of cement, and you wanted to get out and away, they were like heavy stupid parents insisting upon regulations and ways that would make even the dead cringe.

  Jon-Luc just kept right on talking. That’s all I remember. Except now and then, my good Sarah saying, “Hank, you shouldn’t drink so much. Slow down a little. I don’t want you dead in the morning.”

  But Jon-Luc was on a roll.

  I no longer understood what he was saying. I saw lips moving. He was not unpleasant, he was just there. He needed a shave. And we were in this strange Beverly Hills hotel where you walked on peacocks. A magic world. I liked it because I hadn’t seen anything like it before. It was senseless and perfect and safe.

  The wine poured and Jon-Luc kept going.

  I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta.

  No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.

  The drinks poured and Jon-Luc kept on talking. I’m sure that he said many astonishing things. I simply focused on his eyebrows...

  The next morning in my own place, in Sarah’s and my bed, the phone rang about 11 a.m.

  “Hello?”

  It was Pinchot.

  “Listen, I have to tell you something!”

  “Yes?”

  “Modard NEVER TALKS. There has been NOBODY, NOBODY WHO HAS EVER CAUSED HIM TO TALK LIKE YOU DID! HE TALKED FOR HOURS! EVERYBODY WAS ASTONISHED!”

  “Oh, O.K.”

  “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND! HE NEVER TALKS! HE TALKED TO YOU FOR HOURS!”

  “Listen, Jon, I’m sorry but I’m sick, I have to sleep.”

  “All right. But I must tell you one more thing.”

  “Shoot.”

  “It’s about Jean-Paul Sanrah.”

  “Yes?”

  “He says that I must suffer, that I haven’t suffered enough and that when I have suffered more he will get me the money.”

  “All right.”

  “He’s strange, isn’t he? A real genius.”

  “Yes,” I answered, “I think that he is.”

  I hung it up.

  Sarah was still asleep. I turned on my right side, toward the window, because sometimes I snored and I wanted to direct the sound away from her.

  I had just fallen into that gentle dark, that last rest given to us before death, when Sarah’s favorite cat, Beauty, stepped off her own special pillow by Sarah’s head and walked across my face. One clawed foot tore into my left ear, then she jumped to the floor, walked across, and leaped up onto the sill of the open window facing east. As the bloody sun moved up I was not gripped by entrancing thoughts.

  7

  That night, sitting at the typer, I poured two drinks, I drank two drinks, I smoked 3 cigarettes and listened to Brahms’ Third on the radio, and then I realized that I needed something to help me get into the screenplay. I punched Pinchot’s number. He was in.

  “Allo?”

  “Jon, it’s Hank.”

  “Hank, how are you?”

  “Fine. Listen, I’ll take the ten.”

  “But you said it might hinder your creative process to take it in advance.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. There hasn’t been a creative process.”

  “You mean...?”

  “I mean, I’ve worked it out in my mind but there is nothing yet on paper.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “It’s about a drunk. He just sits on this barstool night and day.”

  “Do you think the people would care about such a man?”

  “Listen, Jon, if I worried about what the people cared about I’d never write anything.”

  “All right. Should I bring the check
over to you?”

  “No. Just put it in the mail. Tonight. Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” said Jon.

  I walked over to the typewriter and sat down. It worked right away. I typed:

  THE DRUNK WITH THE BLUE AND YELLOW SOUL

  EXTERIOR/INTERIOR—DANDY’S BAR—DAY

  The CAMERA PANS DOWN FROM ABOVE; IT MOVES SLOWLY through the bar entrance and INTO THE INTERIOR BAR.

  A YOUNG MAN sits on a barstool as if he had been there for eternity. He lifts his glass...

  I was into it. All you needed was the first line, then everything followed. It was always there, it only needed something to set it running.

  That bar came back to me. I remembered how you could smell the urinal from wherever you sat. You needed a drink right off to counteract that. And before you went back to that urinal you needed 4 or 5. And the people of that bar, their bodies and faces and voices came back to me. I was there again. I saw the draft beer again in that thin glass flared at the top, the white foam looking at you, bubbling just a bit. The beer was green and after the first gulp, about a fourth of the glass, you inhaled, held your breath, and you were started. The morning bartender was a good man. The dialogue came and took care of itself. I typed on and on...

  Then, the phone rang. It was long distance. It was my agent and translator from Germany, Karl Vossner. Karl loved to talk the way he thought hip Americans talked.

  “Hey, motherfucker, how ya doin’?”

  “All right, Karl, you still riding your joystick?”

  “Yeah, my ceiling is riddled with flakes of dry sperm.”

  “Good man.”

  “Thanks, baby. I learn all the good things from you. But, baby, I got good news. You wanna hear, motherfucker?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, baby!”

  “Well, besides whistling ‘Dixie’ out of my asshole, I’ve translated 3 of your books: poems, The Lice of Doom; short stories, Cesspool Dreams; and your novel, Central Station Arson.”

  “I owe you my left ball, Karl.”

  “O.K., send it airmail. But, baby, there’s more...”

  “Tell me, tell me...”

  “Well, we had a book fair here last month and I met with the 6 biggest publishers in Germany and let me tell you, they are hot for your body!”

  “My body?”

  “Your body of work, you know. Dig?”

  “I dig, baby.”

  “I got these 6 big publishers in a hotel room, I laid out the beer and the wine and the cheese and the nuts. Then I told them it would be open bidding for the advance on the 3 books. They just laughed and got into the booze. I had those assholes playing right into our hand. You are a hot number and they know it. I told a few jokes to get them loose, then the bidding started. Well, to get to the short-hairs, Krumph made the largest bid. I had the motherfucker sign a contract. Then we all hung one on together. All us assholes got stinko, Krumph especially. So, we scored. We’re in like Flynn!”

  “You’re one cool dude, Karl. What’s my cut?”

  “Baby, it should amount to around 35 grand. I’ll wire it to you within a week.”

  “Man oh man, that’s really rowdy!”

  “It beats blowing glass, motherfucker.”

  “And how, baby. Hey, Karl, ever heard this one? What’s the difference between a chicken’s asshole and a rabbit’s asshole?”

  “‘No, what’s the difference?”

  “Ask little Dick.”

  “I got it! Far out!”

  With that, our conversation was over.

  Within an hour I was 45 thousand dollars richer. 30 years of starvation and rejection were starting to kick in.

  I walked back to the typer, poured a good tall drink, belted that, poured another. I found 3/4’s of a stale cigar, lit it. Shostakovich’s Fifth was on the radio. I hit the typer:

  The Bartender, Luke, leans forward over bar, eyeing the young man.

  LUKE

  Listen, you’re in this place night and day. All you do is sit and suck up the booze.

  YOUNG MAN

  Yep.

  LUKE

  O.K., look, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings or nothing but like maybe this shit don’t lead nowhere.

  YOUNG MAN

  That’s all right, Luke, don’t worry about me. Just keep them coming.

  LUKE

  Sure, kid. But ain’t there another part of you somewhere?

  YOUNG MAN

  Hey, Luke, you ever heard this one? What’s the difference between a chicken’s asshole and a rabbit’s asshole?

  LUKE

  I don’t want to hear no jokes, man. I want to know: Isn’t there another part of you somewhere?

  YOUNG MAN

  Well, shit. I was in the 6th grade, I think. The teacher asked us to write something about our most moving experience. And I don’t mean like moving to Denver.

  LUKE

  Yeah.

  YOUNG MAN

  Anyhow, I wrote about this frog I found in the garden. He had one of his legs caught in a wire fence. He couldn’t get away. I got his leg out of the wire fence but he still wouldn’t move.

  LUKE

  (yawning)

  Yeah?

  YOUNG MAN

  So I held him in my lap and talked to him. I told him that I was trapped, that my life was caught in something too. I talked to him for a long time. At last he hopped out of my lap and hopped across the lawn and vanished into some brush. And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.

  LUKE

  Yeah?

  YOUNG MAN

  The teacher read it to the class. Everybody cried.

  LUKE

  Yeah. So?

  YOUNG MAN

  Well, I thought that someday I might be a writer.

  LUKE

  (leaning forward)

  Kid, you’re nuts!

  I decided that was enough screenplay writing for one night. I just sat by the typer and listened to the music on the radio. I didn’t remember going to bed. But in the morning, I was there.

  8

  Vin Marbad came highly recommended by Michael Huntington, my official photographer. Michael snapped me constantly, but so far there had been no large call for these efforts.

  Marbad was a tax consultant. He arrived one night with his briefcase, a dark little man. I had been drinking quietly for some hours, sitting with Sarah while watching a movie on my old black-and-white TV.

  He knocked with a rapid dignity and I let him in, introduced him to Sarah, poured him a wine.

  “Thank you,” he said, taking a sip. “You know, that here in America, if you don’t spend money they are going to take it away.”

  “Yeah? What you want me to do?”

  “Put a payment down on a house.”

  “Huh?”

  “Mortgage payments are tax deductible.”

  “Yeah, what else?”

  “Buy a car. Tax deductible.”

  “All of it?”

  “No, just some. Let me handle that. What we have to do is build you some tax shelters. Look here—”

  Vin Marbad opened his briefcase and slipped out many sheets of paper. He stood up and came toward me with the papers.

  “Real estate. Here, I’ve bought some land in Oregon. This is a tax write-off. There are some acres still available. You can get in now. We look for a 23% appreciation each year. In other words, after four years your money is doubled...”

  “No, no, please sit back down.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t want to buy anything that I can’t see, I don’t want to buy anything that I can’t reach out and touch.”

  “You mean, you don’t trust me?”

  “I just met you.”

  “I have world-wide recommendations!”

  “I always go by my instincts.”

  Vin Marbad spun back toward the couch where he had left his coat; he slipped into it and then with briefcase he rushed to the door, opened it, was o
ut, closed it.

  “You’ve hurt his feelings,” said Sarah. “He’s just trying to show you some ways to save money.”

  “I have two rules. One is, never trust a man who smokes a pipe. The other is, never trust a man with shiny shoes.”

  “He wasn’t smoking a pipe.”

  “Well, he looks like a pipe smoker.”

  “You hurt his feelings.”

  “Don’t worry, he’ll be back...”

  The door flung open and there was Vin Marbad. He rushed across the room to his original place on the couch, took off his coat again, placed the briefcase at his feet. He looked at me.

  “Michael tells me you play the horses.”

  “Well, yeah...”

  “My first job when I came here from India was at Hollywood Park. I was a janitor there. You know the brooms they use to sweep up the discarded tickets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ever notice how wide they are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that was my idea. Those brooms used to be regular size. I designed the new broom. I went to Operations with it and they put it to use. I moved up into Operations and I’ve been moving up ever since.”

  I poured him another wine. He took a sip.

  “Listen, do you drink when you write?”

  “Yes, quite a bit.”

  “That’s part of your inspiration. I’ll make that tax deductible.”

  “Can you do that?”