L.A. Success (25 page)

My guess was that Ignacio had given
the dog to his renters as a moving-in “present.” Gertie had mentioned something
about doing that. When you know you want to renovate in about a year, you give
your current renters a dog and then make them cough up a pet deposit. When they
move out, you keep the pet deposit and the security deposit, since the dog will
definitely have peed all over the carpets, which you were going to replace anyway.
Ignacio probably hadn't counted on having to take the dog back, so he recycled
the present to Dennis to get rid of it.

I tied the big poodle to a tree near
a street musician. I always saw this guy on the Promenade. He was much fatter
than me, especially now that I had lost so much weight. He had stringy, greasy
hair, and he always wore the same super-sized, faded blue T-shirt and the same
pair of enormous, patched jeans. Sometimes he played electric guitar and sang
with a partner. Other times he had a beat-up acoustic and would go at it alone.
He played a kind of mixture of southern rock and hair metal, occasionally
sliding his fingers around fast and shaking his dirty long hair everywhere.
Nobody ever stopped to watch this guy because less than a block on down there
was usually an urban dance squad or a lovely, cowboy-boot-clad girl who sang
love songs. The only thing this guy could believably sing about loving was
chicken wings. I threw a few dollars into his guitar case and pointed to the
dog. He nodded as he strummed away.

I picked out a couple of pairs of
jeans and some western-style shirts, which looked great unbuttoned over my
Arnold. As I was paying at the register, the shit phone rang. It was my buddy
Grant.

“Wow,” I said. “You got act two
fast!”

“Yes, that
is
what happens
when you send something by overnight express. You send it one day, and it
arrives on the following day. Amazing, isn't it? If you had actually typed it,
you could have sent it even faster.”

“Ah, you're just grouchy because you
don't get to treat me like garbage now that your boss likes my work.”

The cashier handed me the
credit-card slip to sign, so I whipped out the Montblanc and let him feast his
eyes on success.

“That's why I called you. Steven
would like to meet with you,” said Grant.

The cashier handed me the
clear-plastic sack with my clothes inside. I mouthed “thank you,” and started
walking out of the store.

“I bet he does,” I said. “I'm sure
he can't wait to find out what happens next. You want me to pop over to the
studio?”

“No. Steven said he wanted to keep
this a secret for now. He wants to meet you tomorrow at the La Brea tar pits,
in front of the skeleton of the giant ground sloth.”

“The what?”

“The sloth. Those animals that hang
in trees and move so slowly that plants grow in their fur. But thousands of
years ago, they walked around on the ground and were bigger than bears.”

“Wow, that's really exciting.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, really. Tell me more.”

“Be there at three,” he said. I
don't know who hung up on who first.

36

I took off early Sunday afternoon in
the Mercedes and drove east on Wilshire Boulevard. The tar pits were past
Beverly Hills, on the stretch known as the Miracle Mile. It's called that
because back in the day, someone got the great idea of trying to compete with
downtown L.A. there. I find this hilarious because when you arrive at the tar
pits, you see all this bubbling tar all over the place that seeps up from who
the hell knows where, and the very last thing any sane person would say is,
“hey, wouldn't a shopping center go wonderfully with these boiling pools of
death?”

I drove behind the museum and, as
always in L.A., paid a suspicious amount for parking to an unsympathetic
attendant who looked like he was waiting for me to say a code word that would
identify me as the buyer of whatever drug he was peddling. I got out of the car
and walked over to a paved path leading around the grounds. There were little
black pools of bubbling tar everywhere, sometimes covered with a thin layer of
water from the sprinklers. I really had the impression that the tar I could see
was like the tip of the iceberg and that the whole place was on the verge of
sliding down into the inky muck.

I was staring down at the tar so
much that I didn't notice the life-sized replica of the giant ground sloth, in
attack position, until I was right up next to it. I'd have been freaked out by
it, but since it was a sloth, I could have taken a little nap once he started
to attack and then gotten up and wandered slowly away. Rats! Foiled again! No wonder
these things had hung around the tar pits. You'd have to be stuck in the tar
for hours before the thing made it over to you.

I followed the trail around to the
front of the museum to look at the biggest pool of tar. It was bigger than an
Olympic swimming pool, and there were life-sized models of mammoths to make you
feel like you were some sort of cave dude back in the day. Two mammoths, an
adult and a baby, were on the edge of the pool watching another adult mammoth
sink into the sticky tar.

All that is right next to Wilshire
Boulevard, which runs through Beverly Hills all the way to the ocean and is
lined with the most expensive stores you can imagine. You can drive by the
mammoths and then continue to Rodeo drive and see all the babemmoths and trophy-wifemmoths
trying to avoid the bitter gazes of the alimonymmoths, who angrily flash credit
cards as if they were razor-sharp teeth.

It was the perfect image of L.A.:
All the luxury in the world sitting on a thin crust of habitable space, on the
verge of sliding down into inky oblivion and being forgotten. Add to that an
unbreathable atmosphere, a serious lack of water, and the occasional forest
fire, mudslide or earthquake, and you could wonder why people ever came out
here in the first place. You could wonder, that is, if you were from someplace
else, but when you live here, you know. The fake mammoths they put in the tar
are great, but on the other side of the pool, they should have put people
standing around with cocktails and Louis Vuitton bags, and twenty feet into the
pool, some poor schmuck stuck in the tar with a handful of cash, smiling madly
as he sinks away.

That reminded me, it was time for me
to go get my money.

I walked up the path to the center of
the park, where the huge, perfectly square museum had been built into the side
of a small hill, kind of like one of those ecologically friendly houses. When I
walked in, the first thing I noticed was that in the center of the museum they
had built a glassed-in plant exhibit that looked like a jungle, with birds
flying around. All the other exhibits were arranged around it.

I paid the entry fee, and the
cashier stuck a little square sticker of a mammoth on my shirt as proof that I
had paid. I walked in, passed up the introductory educational movie, and
entered the first series of exhibits. The giant ground sloth was one of the
first things I saw. The bones were all black from the tar, so it looked much
more evil than the fake version outside. It was standing up on its back feet
and balancing itself with its thick tail. The little plaque said that ground
sloths were herbivores, but since it went extinct, I'm guessing that even a
carrot gave this big ugly thing a run for its money.

I looked for Spieldburt, but he
wasn't there yet, so I walked around for a while longer. Most of the collection
was of wolves, which I didn't find that interesting, but the mammoth and
saber-toothed tiger skeletons were worth the price of admission. I liked to
imagine them coming to life and gouging all the tourists with their
six-foot-long tusks, taking revenge on the people for having pulled them out of
their final resting places. Then I came to something crazy. I've already said
that I normally don't read much, but there was an enormous geological time line
on the wall with all sorts of dates and explanations. I wasn't going to read
any of that crap, of course—I mean, who goes to a museum to read? I could not
do that at home just as easily—but a group of people were at one section acting
all amazed, so I went over there.

It turns out that in all the
excavating they've done—and they've dug thousands and thousands of years into
the past—only one chick has ever been thrown into the tar pits. Don't get me
wrong—I'm not saying that more women deserved to be thrown in. It's just that,
knowing what we know about modern society, you have to wonder if people in the
past were a lot nicer than they are now. Imagine if the tar pits were open to
the public 24 hours a day and there was no security. You're telling me that not
a single modern guy would throw his mother-in-law in? Not a single cheating
ex-girlfriend would be "swimming with the mammoths?" Oh hell yeah,
they would. And there'd be lots of dudes in there, too. Dudes who whack off to
the internet after their women go to bed. Dudes who obsess over which local
sports team made up of non-local players is better than someone else's local
sports team made up of other non-local players. Yeah, I'd probably chuck a few
of those in myself.

I went back to the giant ground
sloth and waited behind a group of visitors who were trying to explain to a
young girl of about seven that this big thing was a sloth.

“Sloths look like monkeys and live
in trees,” she said. “This looks like a bear.”

“Yes, but it's related to the little
sloth,” said a woman.

“Is it the little sloth's grandpa?”

“Not exactly. Ask your biology tutor
tonight,” she said.

“I don't have biology tonight. I
have ice skating and then the junior dolphins' dive club.”

Most of these rich L.A. kids don't
realize that what they really have are
“mommy-needs-a-free-hour-to-have-an-affair” classes. If I get married some day
and my wife ever tells me something like “I signed our daughter up for
Brazilian martial-arts class,” I'm calling a divorce lawyer immediately.

The group moved on toward the
mammoth, leaving behind one person who glanced shiftily around. I got up close
enough to look underneath the lowered bill of his baseball cap. It was him. I
was finally going to get to talk with Spieldburt again.

I stepped up right next to him and
cleared my throat a little. He looked over.

“Herisson?” he asked. This guy had a
short memory, but I guess it was true that he hadn't seen me in a long time and
that I’d lost some weight since then.

“At your service,” I said, and he
rolled his eyes.

“You'll never pull this off.”

“I already know everything I need to
know. I'm just waiting for a little advance before I lay it on you.”

“An advance? Are you out of your
mind? How do I know you have anything that could do any damage?”

“I've been working with Gertie on
this. Believe me, I know everything.”

“What has she told you!” he said,
grabbing me by my Arnold. I pulled myself free and stepped back.

“You'll find out, but you better
have the money ready. I'm talking five grand!”

“Five grand? You're doing all this
for five grand? What are you, stupid?”

“That's the going rate. You get it
ready, and when I have the third act prepared with the photos, I'll set up a
time to meet through Grant.” Spieldburt looked relieved to hear all this.

“Fine,” he said, slightly stunned,
and continued on through the museum.

I doubled back to the entrance and
stopped in the gift store. They had a stuffed version of a ground sloth that I
had to buy. I also picked up a cool vial of tar.

37

When I got back to the parking lot,
I saw Grant's car. He was ducked down low in the driver seat peeking over at
me, so I pretended not to see him. I got in the car and pulled out slowly. Sure
enough, his metallic-blue, sun-bleached hatchback rattled out after me.

I started out driving reasonably but
then decided to pull a Gert on him. I weaved wildly all over Wilshire
Boulevard, sped up randomly, and then slowed down so much that I felt like a
turtle. Along one stretch, I darted ahead so far that I couldn't see him
anymore, turned into a parking lot and waited for him to pass me. Then I got
back on the road and raced ahead of him, not making the slightest indication
that I was on to him as I passed right by. I felt like a killer whale playing
with a hapless seal before the final crunch.

I was about to lose him for good
when I asked myself why prissy, New-England Grant would be following me anyway.
I figured the only way to find out would be to let him continue. I started
driving normally, and I could almost hear his car wheeze a sigh of relief. I
drove like that all the way to Dennis' house, making sure not to lose Grant at
the intersections.

I parked in the driveway and got
out. Grant parked right in front of the neighboring house and ducked down
again. I actually had to make an effort not to look over at him. All that
expensive education and not a lick of common sense. I entered the house, went
up to Dennis' room and took a peek out the window with the binoculars.

He was dialing on his cell phone,
which looked a lot more expensive than his car. I wanted to hear what he was
saying, so I broke out the parabolic microphone.