Life Goes to the Movies (14 page)

“You were tortured?”

“You want me to tell the story or not?”

“Sorry.”

He clears his throat. “They took us one by one from this holding pen underneath the hut, dragged us up through a trap door and sat us down at a
table where they made us play Russian Roulette. We could hear the snap of the pistol hammer hitting an empty chamber, and then the explosion when it
found a bullet, and then we’d see the blood dripping down through the bamboo floorboards.”

I’m thinking: huh, this sounds familiar…

“When it was our turn they brought me and Stevie up and took bets on who’d get the first bullet. I’m sitting watching Stevie put the
pistol to his head saying, ‘Stevie ya gotta do it! Stevie if ya don’t do it you’re gonna die, they’ll throw you in the pit.
C’mon, Stevie. Go ahead, go ahead Stevie, go ahead. Go ahead!Show these bastards, these cocksuckers, show ’em! Don’t worry,
Stevie, don’t worry kid, don’t worry—’ ”

“Deer Hunter!”

Dwaine goes under, blows bubbles.

Greetings
from
Hollywood
(a Western)

“It’s the climate, I’ve been drinking
too much orange juice.”
—W. C. Fields, Million Dollar Legs
The Pertinent Movie Quote Wall

A
t first glance Hollywood is all that I hoped it would be. There’s something thrillingly one-dimensional about this place, with its overexposed
lighting and pastel shades straight out of a Bugs Bunny caper. The air shimmers with fraudulence. Everything looks like a movie set waiting to be boxed
up for storage or burned. The pedestrians walking the sidewalks are all extras outfitted by Western or American Costume. Which is fine with me, since
I’ve always felt that movies and all things associated with them are (or should be) fake, that their purpose in life is to make life less real,
less boring.

My view, of course, is antithetical to Dwaine’s. Dwaine believes that movies should make life more real, lessphony, that not only
are they capable of changing the world, movies shouldchange it.

As for those record-breaking rains Archibald wrote to us about in his postcard, we see no sign of them, just a cartoon blue sky tinged by what Dwaine
assures me is a customary layer of butter-colored smog. A transit bus (we have delivered the Bonneville, minus three hubcaps and spattered with insect
guts, to its undergraduate owner in Marina del Rey) rolls us through the brothy haze, past muffler and lube shops and storefronts with carnival signs
hawking GUNS and AMMO.

The bus merges onto Sunset Boulevard, where it jockeys among bumper-to-bumper herds of Mercedes SL convertibles, each driven by someone with a car
phone and a leathery suntan. Everything glitters with gold like a Klondike stream, or anyway it seems to. Only the sleepy-eyed Mexican day workers
crammed into the back of the bus offset the general impression of Paradise Regained.

The bus pulls up to a red painted curb in front of a Chinese restaurant conflating itself with a movie theater, or vice-versa. Dwaine taps my shoulder.
“This is it,” he says. “Tinseltown.”

We hopscotch down the trail of pink terrazzo stars embedded in black squares, reeling off the legendary bronze names as we go, bound for Musso &
Frank’s restaurant, where we find our host sitting alone among tables packed with men wearing nice polyester shirts and sports coats.
“Moguls,” Dwaine leans close and whispers to me.

Archibald blows his nose, adjusts his road-kill of a toupee.

Mr. Flynn watches with transparent anxiety as we stoke our stubbled furnaces with eggs Benedict, assorted grilled breakfast meats, and fruit compote.
We haven’t shaved since St. Louis, haven’t brushed our teeth since the Arizona Crater, haven’t eaten a square meal since our
drive-a-way funds expired in Needles, California. When the tab comes Dwaine jumps on it.

“On us,” he says, and is about to slide the check into his black book and bolt when Archibald stops him.

“Let’s have none of that out here,” he says.

As we head for the hotel rain clouds roll in, pig-shaped with dark bellies. Archibald reaches a hand out, catches a raindrop.

He sneezes.

2

Since then it hasn’t stopped raining.

In the suite’s vast kitchen I ram a thick carrot down the vegetable juicer’s throat while Dwaine halves a grapefruit for the citrus juicer.
The juice is all for Archibald, who lies in one of a pair of twin squeaky Murphy beds surrounded by over-the-counter cold and flu remedies, his toupee
sprawled in a puddle of grapefruit juice freshly squeezed. A hot water bottle sucks starfish-like at his bald head. The suite reeks of Vick’s
VapoRub. It rains, Hollywood melts.

Meanwhile the three steel film canisters holding Night Vision gather darkness and dust in the tuck-a-way ironing board closet. They’ve
been sitting there for four days. Archibald has yet to arrange a single screening. He considers the rain a bad omen. Until it stops, he refuses to do
business in Hollywood.

“Where’s my juice?” he wheezes. “I need more juice!”

Dwaine has brought his machete along for the trip. Using it he whacks a grapefruit in half, then he twists both halves into the citrus juicer’s
maw, like he’s James Cagney and the citrus juicer is May Clarke’s face. A tumbler fills with bubbling pink grapefruit juice. On a silver
tray with a sullen butler’s air Dwaine delivers the juice to Archibald’s bedside. “This is fucked,” he says back in the
kitchen. “We’re fucked. We shouldn’t have come.” He whacks more grapefruit.

“It can’t rain like this forever,” I say. “He’s got to get out of bed eventually.”

“Bet?”

Once the toast of Hollywood hotels, the Hotel Montecido (“the Hotel of the Stars”) has since fallen on hard times. Graffiti filigrees its
vanilla stucco walls. The swimming pool is a dry jungle of vines. These days the hotel’s fray-braided doormen greet more muscle cars and
pimpmobiles than Deusenbergs and Mercedes. Be that as it may, ours is one of the finer suites, a deluxe maisonettewith flocked fleur-de-lis
wallpaper, rabbit-eared TV, tuck-a-way ironing board, and a candlestick phone straight out of Sam Spade’s office. Yellowed back issues ofBillboard and Varietyshare the desk drawer with Gideon’s Bible.

As for the stars, those yet lingering here are as faded and threadbare as the hallway carpeting, as rusty as the water that farts brown from the
hotel’s sink and tub taps. Two days ago I saw Chuck McCann, the former kiddie show host, talking downstairs on the lobby phone, wearing a white
T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. And just yesterday I rode the hotel elevator with one of the stars of Car 54 Where Are You?,the one who
goes, Oooh! Oooh!

At least those stars are still alive. It’s the dead movie stars that worry me. On my way back from buying a paper in the rain this morning I saw
a man step out of the next-door suite. When he bent down to pick up his complimentary copy of Variety, I caught a glimpse over his shoulder of
Cathy O’Donnell, the actress who plays Wilma in Best Year of Our Lives,ironing clothes. Then the man looks up and (I swear!) he’s
the dead spit of Eddie Robinson in Little Caesar, down to thick lips ringed with shaving cream.

“You’ve been watching too many of those old black-and-white movies, that’s what your problem is,” is Dwaine’s take on
things as he smokes yet another in an endless series of cigarettes out on our balcony, which offers a Cinemascope view of Hollywood Boulevard, a
flattened rainbow of gas stations, drug stores and fast food joints. At a stretch we can see the Pacific Ocean. Taking center stage is the twenty-four
hour porn theater, the marquee of which flashes

PINK PUSSYCAT

PINK PUSSYCAT

PINK PUSSYCAT

—night and day, day after day.

3

From the same balcony we watch local rats doing trapeze acts, flying through the air with the greatest of ease as they swing from palm tree to palm
tree, building their nests in the fronds.

“Star rats,” says Dwaine, watching them, smoking.

“That’s a whatchamacallit,” I say.

“An anagram.”

“Not an anagram, the other thing. You know, Madam I’m Adam. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.”

“It’s called an anagram, babe.”

“No it’s not.” (We’re getting on each other’s nerves.)

“More juice!” cries Archibald.

4

We walk in the drizzle down to the Boulevard, to join the bit players in the local Jack in the Box, and where, as I sip a Coke, Dwaine shows me the
contract again. A single paragraph choked with faux legalese.

“There’s no date,” I note. “You can’t have a contract without a date.”

Dwaine snatches the contract back. He studies it, gray eyes toggling back and forth. Through the plate glass window two neighborhood bums share a meat
food snack. Under a dripping parka one of them looks exactly like Clarke Gable in The Misfits.The other bears a striking resemblance to Jack
Palance in Man in the Attic.

“Big deal. So there’s no fucking date. So what? A contract’s a contract.”

“Tell that to Dexter Groon,” I say, “and he’ll laugh in your face.”

With quarters liberated from Archibald’s dresser top we ride the bus to Venice Beach, where Dwaine leaves me lying in a patch of wet grass under
a date palm. As I gaze up through its fronds at the cloud-stuffed sky people young and old zip by on roller skates. A housefly lands on my arm. It
amazes and disappoints me to see a common housefly in California. A half hour or so later Dwaine returns. He doesn’t look triumphant.

“I showed Groon the contract,” he says.

“And?”

“He laughed in my face.”

Back at the Montecido, Archibald sits up watching a special news report on the rabbit-eared television set. The rain has broken all records. Floods and
mudslides everywhere. Governor Brown has declared a state of emergency.

“Where were you?” Archibald asks.

“Reconnaissance mission,” Dwaine answers.

“From here on,” says Archibald, “no leaving this hotel without my express authority, is that understood? If you don’t care for
those terms, then by all means leave, but don’t come back.”

Dwaine’s forehead smolders, the metal shards swirl in his eyes. Gently I escort him to the suite kitchen to whack more grapefruit.

“I may be rancid butter, but I’m on your side of the bread.”

“Gene Kelly,” says Dwaine, whacking. “Inherit the Wind.”

5

Seven straight days of rain and then: a miracle.

Sunlight streams in through the balcony doors. Archibald, risen from the dead, points to the candlestick phone.

“Call Columbia! Call MGM! Call Paramount! Call Universal! Ask for Shapiro!”

“At which studio?” I say.

“All of them!”

Within an hour I’ve booked eight screenings. The canisters holding Night Vision come out of the tuck-a-way ironing board closet and get
loaded into the coffin compartment of a 1968 Cadillac hearse. Having run out of vans and station wagons the rent-a-wreck agency offered the hearse to
Archibald at an irresistible discount. “I’ve always felt dead in this town anyway,” he said as we pulled out of the rental lot.

6

Universal, MGM, Fox, Warner Brothers, Screen Gems—all turn Night Vision down. But Paramount still beckons and hopes are riding high.
Dwaine and I are dressed in our Sunday best—Archibald’s Sunday best. Dwaine wears his seersucker suit, I wear his rancid corduroy blazer
with leather elbow patches, our trousers cuffed and bellies sucked in to accommodate Archibald’s scarecrow physique. We wear Archie’s
cowboy boots, too, mine with snakeskin tops, Dwaine’s of ostrich hide. Dwaine’s slip, mine pinch.

Sunlight spears the hearse windshield, making Dwaine’s dreamridden eyes look even dreamier, cataracted. I ride shotgun, Archie stretches out in
back with the cans.

Halfway to Paramount a plump raindrop plops like a rotten berry on the hearse windshield. It starts pouring. The Santa Monica Freeway turns into the
Nile, the rent-a-hearse into a funeral barge. Archibald points to a mansion sliding down a hillside like a pat of butter melting in a frying pan.
“Irwin Allen’s house,” he says, pointing. Tottering by the side of the highway a soaking-wet hitchhiker is a ringer for Joel McCrea
in Sullivan’s Travels.We pass Henry Fonda and the rest of the Joads in their truck and keep going.

7

A security guard in a pith helmet checks our names against a roster and swings the gate open. Dwaine rolls the hearse into the Mercedes sculpture
garden that is the visitor’s parking lot. As Archie waits in the car Dwaine and I lug the heavy canisters through gray sheets of rain toward the
screening trailer, where a sign beneath a burning red light bulb above a blue door says:

SCREENING IN PROGRESS

We wait soaking for the light to go off. When it does we knock. A scowling man in porkpie hat and pale trench coat (the coequal of Richard Widmark inKiss of Death)answers.

“We’re moguls,” Dwaine tells him. “Hand over the cans, babe.” Film canisters in hand, Madigan recedes into the dark
depths of the screening trailer.

The red light goes back on.

8

Dwaine rolls the hearse onto the studio back lot, where giant fans whip raindrops into a storm at sea for what appears to be yet another remake ofMutiny on the Bounty,with masts snapping like twigs as mutinous stuntmen plunge to their air-cushioned deaths. We drive on, passing a Wells
Fargo stagecoach, a wooden submarine, King Kong’s left foot, and the upper two-thirds of the Eiffel Tower.

We roll past plaster brownstones on a fake New York street.

“Dumbass Californians,” Dwaine says shaking his head. “They even got the Johnny pumps wrong! They’re black with silver tops,
not fucking green! Everyone knowsthat! What the fuck is wrongwith these fucking people?”

We round a corner and the world changes. Suddenly we’re in a western frontier town, saloon, general store, dry goods, blacksmith, livery stable,
arranged tidily along a muddy thoroughfare. Except for the rain the set conforms perfectly to my obstinate view of the wild, wild west. Dwaine pulls up
to the Dry Gulch Saloon.