American Dream Machine (22 page)

“Hey, brah,” Jamie slurred. “C’mere.”

“Hey, what?” He’d never talked to me, but even I knew there was only ever one chance to convince people you weren’t a pussy. I
was
a pussy, but still. “What d’you want?”

Jamie was leonine, darker-skinned, quiet, and sinister. His mother was Hawaiian. He wore a heavy flannel shirt even when it was hot. He nodded. “Over here.”

I walked over toward him, in the patch of shadow that fell behind the backboard. I was wary of getting my ass kicked, but Jamie
wasn’t really a bully. His brother was an I-9er, and this meant that he never had to prove anything. He opened his fist when I got near him. Three white pills lay on his palm, bigger than aspirin.
RORER
714.

“You want to buy these?”

It was recess. No teachers were near. I half knew what he had. I’d heard bigger kids, fifth and sixth graders, talk about
Columbia gold
and
smoking out
. But Quaaludes were something else.

“How much?”

I wasn’t going to buy them, but I wasn’t going to flinch.

“Five bucks. Each.”

“I don’t have money,” I lied. I was nine. “Sorry.”

He slid the pills back into his pocket, the shirt I suddenly realized was a drug dealer’s coat. Or maybe I didn’t know that till later, since I didn’t know what a dealer was yet either. Jamie’s sleepy, serpentine demeanor was enough. He had raccoon eyes, pillowy lips like Mick Jagger’s.

“Just thought I’d aaask, brah.”

I brought money the next day. I didn’t want to take drugs, but I wanted to own them.

“Hey, Jamie.”

We were just where we were yesterday. He looked over as if he’d never seen me in his life, as if whatever happened back then—
when?
—was but a distant dream.

“Those, um.” I watched Jamie. “Those . . . pills.”

He leaned against the backboard and looked at me sidelong. Like I was a complete Val for daring to speak to him at all.

“You know? You offered me some shit?”

I got bold. Where it came from, I don’t know. Junior high kids at Lincoln were onto this stuff already, not me. I was in the middle of something, an occult transformation. I’d given up my glasses, wore a replica USC football jersey, short-sleeved and porous. I felt athletic and limber, but suddenly sports were only a metaphor, and that muddy little baseball diamond behind us was just a place to win girls. An orange Corvette slid past along Lincoln, blaring Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.”

“Oh, riiight,” Jamie said. “Naaate. That’s your name, huh?”

Every vowel was extended, bent into that casual dudespeak that was just the way we were. Parody California all you like, but it meant something else to us, was simply an attempt, I think, to
keep our sexuality under control. I reached into my pocket and took out twenty bucks I’d lifted from Teddy’s billfold that morning. Jamie looked at me like I’d just whipped out my pecker. He shook his head and I tucked the money back out of view.

After school, we met in the bathroom. He stood by the towel dispenser, smoking a Marlboro. The floor in there was like a garage’s, smooth and gray and stained.

“Hey.” Jamie stepped forward and this time had a palm full of different things. A joint that was twisted super-tight at both ends and a couple of melted-looking yellow capsules.

“What’s that?” I breathed through my mouth to avoid the smell of urine and borax.

“Kine, brah. And some yellow jackets.”

“Yellow jackets.” I sanded this off at the last minute so it wasn’t a question. It didn’t really matter what these did. “How much?”

“Ten.”

I gave him twenty and split.

“Hey brah.”

I whirled. My sneakers, twin-toned, powder and navy blue Vans, skeetched across the floor.

“Don’t be a pussy. I’ll fuck you up.”

I was a pussy, like I said, so I hoped there wasn’t a pure cause/ effect between Jamie’s two statements. But I just burst out into the shadowed halls and ran all the way home. I hadn’t yet formed an intention. Possession for now was its own reward. I hid the stuff in my room, first in my five-dollar combination “safe,” then in my hamster’s cage, and finally—as I realized I didn’t want to enable rodent suicide—in my sock drawer. Obvious, but my mother wasn’t tossing my cell just yet. And so, without any danger of being found out, I forgot about them. My drugs. Six months passed, and it wasn’t until August that they came up again.

“Whatchoowannado?”

“I dunno, man.” Fifth grade was the year I became a man, and Williams too transformed from snickering punk to full-on dude, a boy child in excelsis. In Dogtown T and
vato
hat, he was Tony Alva at half size, cool as fuck. “What
choo
wannado?”

In our spare time, which was all of it, we took turns speaking like Steven Tyler, racing our words together the way he’d done to introduce
the songs when our mothers took us to see Aerosmith at the Sports Arena. It didn’t occur to us that cocaine would’ve been helpful in achieving the desired effect. Cocaine. That drug, thankfully, came later.

“Shee-yit.” Williams’s Tyler was actually pretty convincing. “Dunno.”

We were up in my room, which was where we tended to hang out in those days. His house was too far away, involved taking the 3 or the 8 to the 2 and then a long skate down Main Street. It was too long, too risky, that pregentrified corridor of porn theaters and liquor outlets. It involved too many opportunities to be hassled (everything was “hassle.”
Don’t hassle me, brah
). We’d pick up our skateboards—I’d just switched my laminated Sims Taperkick for a ten-inch Alva—and joust with them, beating at each other’s hands. We pored over comic books almost as fervently as we did Teddy’s copies of
Swank
and
Oui
. Only now we were into
Conan the Barbarian
, the issues drawn by Barry Smith especially, and something about that barrel-chested, longhaired savage flashing his blue-shadowed pecs really turned us on.

“Dude,” I said, slipping into a mellow patter to counteract all that Tyleresque speed jive. I remembered my drugs. “You wanna . . . get high?”

“Sure.” Williams pissed me off by not even batting an eye. “I’d love to do that.”

“You would? I’ve got some yellows, dude. I’ve got weed.”

We were suddenly speaking this language, it had angles; we pretended to experience we hadn’t had or else were inducted simply by assimilating its vocabulary.

I went into my closet and came back with the skinny, desiccated J and three pollen-colored pills. They looked like cheap vitamins. This was all the leverage I had in the world. “Check it out.”

My bedroom was decorated in blue denim then, my bedspread and pillowcases, but the carpets were a burnt brown and the white ledge of my wall-built desk still held the trappings of my childhood: atlases, Narnia books, Ralph’s glass cage full of shavings even after the animal had died.

“Huh.” Williams came over, inspected. “Coo-el.”

Outside the street was empty, almost frighteningly quiet. His father and Teddy and Beau were at work. They’d already made their big move. And just so, we were about to make ours.

We went outside, passing my mother who was talking to the housekeeper in the vestibule. The vacuum cleaner whined, the family terrier yapped. My mom didn’t even give us a glance.

“I don’t feel anything.”

“You don’t?” I said. “I’m waasted.”

“Then you’re a puss.”

“No.” Having said it, I couldn’t take it back. “I’m fuckin’ stoned.”

The pills were worthless. Even I knew when I gobbled mine down it wasn’t gonna do a damn thing. Wax, vitamins, God knows what they were, but I’d been conned. As for the joint, there was marijuana in it somewhere, some weak strain of local-hillbilly shake, probably, but also stuff from a spice jar. Rosemary and oregano, but we didn’t cook either. We were in the alley, about halfway down the block toward Carlyle. I’d thought to go over and knock on Sev’s door but Williams stopped me. This was for the two of us, only.

“Michelle Pearlman lets me squeeze her pussy.”

“She doesn’t.” I looked at my friend, half credulous.

“She does.”

Squeeze
? See how young we were? It was late afternoon. The sun burned beyond the tops of the conifers, but we were in cool shadow, along a clean white wall in the wide alley that was almost like a street. These were suburbs; the only things back here were empty trash buckets and immaculate garages.

“You’re a virgin.”

“Fuck you.” I gambled, knowing the word’s purview but not its precision. “So are you. You’re more of a virgin than I am.”

“You’re a puff,” he said. “An impesal.”

God knows.
Putz
;
imbecile
, I think. But I’ll never know for sure. The leaves rustled, the afternoon cooled. Williams could talk about Michelle Pearlman all he wanted: one forbidden fruit was more or less the same as the next. Sex and marijuana were zones of equal ignorance, equal sanctity. My eyes burned, my virgin throat.

“We should go home,” I said. Five minutes, or five hours, later. “My mom’s probably looking.”

My mom was probably drinking, too. Not that I’d yet begun to notice. Besides looking after me, she’d taken up screenwriting,
written a feature, which would eventually be made by Orion Pictures. A true story, set in a Florida prison. My mother’s restless intelligence never did find a home, quite.

“Haaa,” Williams laughed. “Maybe I’m a little baked.”

I looked up at the sky, the columnar cypresses that grew out of the neighbors’ yard, watching these things the same way I watched the girls in my class, with wonderment and shyness and not a little bit of terror. Were we high? Who could tell?

“Let’s go,” I said. “My mom’ll be waiting.”

Williams and I walked home, but when we got there my mother was puttering around the kitchen instead. Sev sat in the dining room, sucking on a milkshake and nibbling grilled cheese.

“Duuuude.” Williams fixed him with a heavy stare, dragging his vowels and his knuckles so Sev would know what was what. “What’s happening, son?”

Severin glared. Fingers dripping with carbonized toast crumbs and semiliquid cheese. He was taller,
sharper
somehow behind those glasses, but he was the same geeky Sev. He propped his elbows on the dining table and crunched, contemptuously.

“Not much . . . son.”

Beau was just out of the hospital. He had committed himself voluntarily for six weeks. Chest pains, hallucinations, night terrors. Some colleagues of his, Skobs and others, took turns watching Sev during this time. Even my mother chipped in. How could she not? On some level, she may have felt the tiniest bit responsible for this motherless, fatherless boy. Although Sev was more of a man than Williams or I were: grief completed him as a human being. He would always be ahead of us; we could never outflank him. Drenched in Visine, breath stinking of Tic Tacs, we were like stupid suitors swimming in cologne, while Severin, the real Mannish Boy, swept in behind us and cleaned out the hive.

“Where were you?” My mother refilled Severin’s milkshake, leaning over with the blender pitcher. Williams grunted out the riff from Cheech and Chong’s “Earache My Eye.”
Get it, Sev?
My mom stood by the long table that was so seldom used, this room with its candelabras and chandelier, its old wooden sideboard. “What were you boys up to?”

“We were outside playing strikeout,” I said.

“I didn’t see you.” Severin smirked.

“We were up the street, closer to your house. You know that garage with the rectangles on it?”

Good alibi; there was such a garage. My mother shrugged and set the pitcher down. Unconquered just yet by her own demons, her face traced with only the barest of lines. Severin mopped the brown froth from his mouth and gave an exaggerated
ahh
. My mom wiped the table with a towel. Bending her head so her blonde hair gleamed in the afternoon light. And that was the end of that.

OUR FATHERS WERE
not in heaven. They had decided, instead, to form a company, to band together against the Waxmortons, the Smiligans, the old coots who had oppressed them all from the beginning. The idea had taken hold before Bryce Beller’s Fourth of July party, and there were a few apostates—namely, Williams Farquarsen III—who’d been plotting this since 1974. American Dream Machine. The name was his, the idea, the ideology. All that time he’d been teaching me how to dribble, his eyes were on the prize. When I think back on my childhood, it was always Williams, that chamber of strangeness, that master enigma, who invented it all. Where Tinseltown was crawling with offices that had bland, recessive banners—International Creative Management, Talented Artists Group, William Morris, names that were as corporate as their manners were old-fashioned—American Dream Machine would be flagrant, defiant, loud. No more sad men in flannel suits and loafers, grumpy Jews eating tuna fish sandwiches at the Hillcrest Country Club, acting like the agency biz was a form of gentle intelligence work, Graham Greene without the violence or self-betrayal. American Dream Machine would have the arrogance of a studio, would function like one insofar as it would package the actors and directors, controlling the means of production in order to ransom the capital. The studios no longer had all the power, not the way they once did. Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer could spin in their graves, but the business would at last be free. This was Williams’s vision, and the others fell in with it soon enough. He was the head of Talented Artists legal department. It was easy enough for
him to incorporate quietly, to found the new agency without saying a word. The old one had other shells and subsets, actors’ dormant production companies and loan-outs to whom they paid monies owed, less commission. This made it easy to hide. American Dream Machine’s existence didn’t matter to anyone, the entity wasn’t noticed by Sam or anybody else as Williams simply began to pay certain clients through it. Milton Schildkraut, from accounting, was in from the beginning. Bob Skoblow and Roland Mardigian signed on soon thereafter. Teddy Sanders came aboard, which left Beau. Who walked into Will’s office one day at the very end of December and found these men all gathered together.