The Bones (9 page)

Lloyd takes a look at the broken head and sees the thick plastic hair adorning the broken pieces.

"Stu has presidential hair. A bald man can't be elected president in this country. The French might elect a bald man, but
Americans won't. If Roosevelt had been a bald man, he never would have been elected, we wouldn't have balled England out in
WWII because the Republicans were isolationist, and the Nazis would have taken over in London, which means no Beatles or Stones
because they would have been considered degenerate by the German cultural commissars, you know, guys who thought Benny Goodman
was depraved. Never mind the Beatles and Stones
were
degenerate. That's beside the point. The point is we have the Beatles and Stones because Roosevelt had hair. He didn't have
good hair, it wasn't Kennedy hair, but it was hair. You see the connection? It's a sobering thought." Frank regards his gun,
as if surprised to find himself holding it. Then, to Lloyd: "Are we done here or do you want to shoot some more?"

Lloyd, for his part, is still absorbing Frank's riff about hair and liberty. It's an impressive connection. Without realizing
it, he reaches up and lightly touches his own thinning pate. "Is that a bit?"

"What?"

"The thing you did just now about presidential hair."

"Nah, it just came. I was looking at the pieces of Stu's head . . . Think I should do it onstage?"

"Yeah. It's good."

"Otto got it. I'll look at it later." Frank very laissez-faire when it comes to his act. "So you want to shoot some more?"

"I think I'm done for now," Lloyd says, thrilled at having not sustained a gunshot wound. He makes a silent vow to take shooting
lessons and then ask Frank for a return engagement. For a reason Lloyd cannot entirely discern, it has become important that
Frank perceive him as a good shot.

"So let's talk about the pilot," Frank says.

The three of them, Frank, Lloyd, and Otto, are standing in the shadow of the fifty-foot doughnut marking Randy's, a piece
of Los Angeles kitsch visible from space and a short walk from the LAX Gun Range. Otto tapes Lloyd and Frank, who right now
looks incredulous, holding his cruller in midair.

"Don't patronize me, babe." More of an edge than usual.

"I'm not patronizing you, Bones. The opposite, in fact."

"You don't want to do this?"

"I can't. This is what I've been saying."

"So what am I supposed to tell the people at Lynx? I called up Harvey Gornish myself and said you and I were gonna do this
thing together, and he was so jazzed he forgot to kick his dog before he left for work. Now I have to go back to him and say,
what, you're doing other stuff?" Frank shakes his head and looks into the distance. The late-afternoon traffic is starting
to jam up on La Cienega. The belly of a large airplane appears above them silently gilding into LAX.

"I don't particularly even want to do TV right now. It's not that I don't want to do your thing."

"Bones Alone."

"Whatever you're calling it. I signed this deal, which on the one hand is a really good thing since they have to pay me a
lot of money but . . . remember back in New York, like a hundred years ago, you told me you were writing a detective novel?"

"I was?"

"That's what you told me."

"Maybe I was that week."

"I think I'd get a lot more satisfaction if I could do that than I could from doing some"—he was going to say "piece of shit"
but he catches himself—"show for Lynx."

"Can't you be pretentious on your own time?"

"If you want, I'll help out on the one they're trying to get you to do. I'll come to the studio when you're shooting and I'll
punch it up. But I don't want to write
Bones Alone
at this point in time, not that I don't have the utmost respect for the comedy stylings of Frank Bones." Realizing he has
just offered an exit line, Lloyd decides to make his getaway. "I gotta go. My wife has her book club tonight and I'm babysitting."
As Lloyd walks toward the Saab he actually has the thought that Frank could shoot him in the back. He turns and faces Frank,
who is not looking at him.

"Call me if you want me to come to the studio for lunch."

"For
lunch?"
Incredulous. "Patronize me more, babe."

Lloyd turns around and walks away, feeling that, while he might not have an iota of Frank's true talent, he's the one with
more currency in the business. Then he remembers what he thinks of the business. The doughnut repeats on him, leaving a sickly
sweetness in his mouth. Like Lot's wife, Lloyd is unable to resist turning to look over his shoulder, and while he doesn't
turn into a pillar of salt, he does notice Otto is taping him.

"Hey!" Frank says to the kid, whacking him on the arm and causing the lens to jiggle. "Who's this movie about, babe?" When
Otto swings the camera back in his direction, Frank looks into the lens and says, "Fuck Lloyd Melnick."

Late that night, Lloyd sits slumped in a chair in his home office, his laptop open on the desk Stacy had purchased for him
at Restoration Hardware when she felt his old, nondescript model was no longer worthy of his increasingly successful television
endeavors. On the computer screen is a white Ford Bronco rolling slowly down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles with a phalanx
of police cruisers in lugubrious pursuit. He watches, staring at the screen as the SUV goes down the same stretch of freeway
again and again.

"Did Dustin go to bed okay?"

Stacy, wearing black tights and a clinging tank top, is standing at the door nibbling on a celery stick, a copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
under her well-defined arm.

"He watched
Finding Nemo."
Not looking up.

"Again?"

"Stacy, what do you want? It's not like he's interested in having a conversation with me. He kept asking when you were coming
home."

She takes this in, not entirely unpleased. Dustin clearly prefers his mother to Lloyd, and although Stacy will not admit this
to her husband, she finds the vote of confidence from their four-year-old affirming. It allows her to look at Lloyd with sympathetic
indulgence.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm changing my screen saver."

"Oh, yeah? To what?"

"The O.J. freeway chase."

"Why would you want to watch that?" The disbelief in her voice exactly what he expects as she walks over to check it out.

"I got tired of Half Dome."

"So you want to look at O.J.? Lloyd, that's kind of weird."

"Bones has the Zapruder film as his screen saver."

"The what?"

This is one of those excruciating marital moments for Lloyd. He shrinks a little inside as he is forced to acknowledge he
has spent the last ten years married to a woman who has no idea what the Zapruder film is. On the other hand, she
is
reading Garcia Marquez, which suggests a degree of cerebral engagement not necessarily congruent with someone who has seven
active credit cards. If Lloyd were more honest, he would realize that the aspects of Stacy he has grown to dislike are those
he secretly worries are developing within him.

"It's a home movie taken by this private citizen who was in Dealey Plaza the day Kennedy got shot. It's pretty famous."

"Why would I want to know about that? It's sick, anyway, if that's his screen saver." Lloyd has no answer that won't spark
a conflagration, so he remains silent. Stacy looks down at the screen where O.J.'s SUV roils along the same strip of asphalt
in a perpetual loop. She places a hand gently on his shoulder. "So how did the meeting go? Are you going to work on his show?"
He had told her the shoot-em-up with Frank was a standard business lunch.

"No."

Stacy tightens her grip on Lloyd's shoulder without being aware of it.

"Even after Robert asked you?"

"I told you I'm going to pitch my own show and I don't want to do something with Frank that I know is going to crater before
we begin."

"But Robert asked you to, Lloyd. That's a good thing. And his wife called today. She wants me to be on the fund-raising committee
for Save Our Aching Planet."

"Are you going to do it?"

"It's not going to be so easy if her husband requests a little favor and you blow him off."

"Well, I'm gonna ball. I hope that doesn't interfere with your plans."

"Fine. Do whatever you want."

She turns around and walks out, leaving Lloyd to stare at the Ford Bronco, trapped in an endless circle beneath the Los Angeles
sky. There's something about the Bronco chase that's not working for Lloyd. He knows the Zapruder screen saver is better.

Chapter 5

So the reason we have the
White Album
and
Beggars Banquet
is because Franklin D. Roosevelt had hair.

Frank is saying this to the crowd at the Comedy Shop on Sunset Boulevard the next evening. He has worked his stoned, gun-range
riff from the previous day into the relatively coherent rant with which he is about to end his set.

Never mind FDR had to walk with an Erector set in his pants. Polio is not what matters to the voting public. What matters,
what's important, what's meaningful to the American electorate is the man had hair. We'll elect a gimp but we don't trust
the bald guy. The only time we ever elected a bald man president was Eisenhower, and he got elected because his opponent was
what? ANOTHER BALD MAN! Never mind Eisenhower was the greatest American general of the twentieth century. If Adlai Stevenson
had hair, Ike would have spent the fifties drinking martinis at the driving range. Because we're a deep people. We care about
what's important, and let's face it, hair is important. Here's a thought: What if Jesus was bald? You know what that means?
No more Christianity. The whole belief system would have been out the window before the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus would never
have been booked to work the Mount if he were a bald man. He'd've been playing the lounge. The Mount was the main room. To
work the Mount you needed hair. You think the apostles could have sold a religion to the world where the poster boy was a
bald man? You know why you never see pictures of Muhammad? It's because he looked like Phil Silvers. The Muslims aren't stupid.
All those pictures of Jesus on the cross and he's got extensions, right? That long, thick rock
V
roll hair. It's a great image. But if Jesus were bald, it'd look like someone nailed Murray the Pickle Man up there. I could
see back in Jerusalem if Jesus was developing male-pattern baldness, Jonathan saying to him, "Uh, Jesus, babe, we're losing
disciples to the Zoroastrians. The Essenes are outrecruiting us. Lord, maybe you oughta think about plugs. You wear a hat
for a week, we establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, and everyone says, 'He looks good. Did he lose weight or something?'"
Thanks, you've been a great crowd. Please remember to tip your waitress.

The set is vintage Bones. Offensive to sensitive palates, but to discerning ones, entertaining, illuminating, and, finally,
to his colleagues, inspiring, Bones a comic's comic, the ultimate getter of what are known in the trade as band laughs. Tonight
he kills the room. With the Jesus-gets- plugs material, the comedians in the back, a cadre notoriously penurious with their
approval, are most appreciative; their amused exhalations of air causing the arms, folded tightly across their chests in a
permanent pose of make-me-laugh, to shake slightly.

What had begun the previous afternoon as rumination about the plastic hair on the shattered head of a Neiman Marcus mannequin
has emerged from its gunpowder-begrimed chrysalis to flex its gossamer wings and float delicately over the inebriated nightclub
crowd, darting, swooping, and landing finally in Frank's set, a fresh and lovely brand-new three minutes of material. It is
the best thing he's done in months and it makes him feel unambiguously good.

Frank is on his third lemon vodka at the bar in the back of the club. He's in the middle of a conversation about the sinking
of the
Lusitania
with a young comedian who had gone to Harvard and was now working as a writer's assistant on a game show, when he is approached
by a slender, young redhead in a tight black T-shirt with the Comedy Shop logo, the mask of Greek tragedy being spritzed by
a seltzer bottle, emblazoned across the front. She's an aspiring famous person, a future nobody whose ripe sexuality will
serve to open enough doors to keep her dreams alive long after a more realistic individual would abandon them; ladies and
gentlemen, please welcome the new waitress, Candi Wyatt.

"Hi, I'm Candi."

"Frank Bones."

"I know. I spell it with an i."

"Bones?"

"Candi! I love your act." Getting right to the point.

"That's just the one the public sees. The private shows are better."

Frank notices Harvard Game Show looking her over, trying to decide whether to make a play. If Frank wants to accept the tribute,
HGS needs to look elsewhere. Candi has no idea the young gagman was ever born.

"I just started last night. I can't believe how lucky I am to have this job."

"Serving overpriced drinks to cheap tourists who get drunk and forget to tip? It doesn't get better that that, does it?"

"As long as I can audition during the day." Incapable of a snappy comeback in this situation, Candi is trying to keep her
heart palpitations, a thrumming caused by this new proximity to a semicelebrity, something she has scant experience with,
from becoming obvious. "Anyway, I just wanted to say I thought you were really special." Another lead balloon. Not that it
matters, her job not to be the funny one but the minx.

"Sam Schlegel," says Harvard Game Show to Candi, attempting to call attention to his fading presence. Candi and Frank both
ignore him.

"My shrink lets me charge him a two-drink minimum. That's how special I am," Frank tells her. Sam Schlegel takes his Harvard
degree and goes to refill his drink.

Candi smiles at Frank, not up to the sodden repartee, the
soi-disant
romantic-comedy crapola he reflexively launches into whenever a possible sexual conquest presents itself, but nonetheless
thrilled to continue this conversation with a person she's seen on television. When Candi was fifteen, Frank's HBO special
was the subject of a particularly animated school-cafeteria conversation with three of her drama club girlfriends; the nature
of the debate: Would any of them ever have sex with a famous person? Frank was not traditionally handsome but he exuded a
confident cool that worked to cancel out whatever was keeping him from a career as a male model, a quality that made it possible
for theatrically inclined teenaged girls who had seen his act on HBO to discuss fucking him.

"I can't believe I just said that."

"What? That I'm special? Babe, you can call me special all night and then make me breakfast."

This voiley leaves her literally without words other than "I'd better get back to work." She turns around and backs away from
Frank a few steps before bumping into Debbie, a thirtyish waitress Frank slept with six months ago, who looks at him and shakes
her head as if to say, I know you will once again bring shame upon your gender.

"Come out to the parking lot on your break," Frank says to Candi. "I've got some Thai stick that's burning a hole in my pocket."

The following morning, Honey is dressed in a hospital gown lying on a gurney near an elevator in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
The tranquilizer she ingested fifteen minutes earlier is starting to take effect, and whatever trepidation she had been feeling
over the imminent surgical enhancement of her breasts is beginning to ease into hazy anticipation. Honey has been a 34B since
high school and is convinced her inability to ascend to the glittering heights of international stardom is directly tied to
what she perceives to be the meagerness of her bust. That the mammary-centric view of female Hollywood success, whereby a
woman's professional advancement correlates directly to the size of her breasts, is about fifty years out-of-date is entirely
lost on her; for Honey's view of glamour has not evolved past images of smoky cocktail lounges and stiletto-heeled shoes.
It is of little importance to a mind rooted in the fifties-era mountainous iconography of Jayne Mansfield that the last ten
winners of the Oscar for Best Actress had breasts smaller than Arnold Schwarzenegger's. Never mind Honey was born in 1975
when Jane Fonda towered lithely over world cinema, a flat-chested goddess, idol to a nation of women who had incinerated their
bras, rejecting en masse patriarchal notions of female beauty. Honey hasn't read the manifesto. She has specific retro notions
of what works for her, Honey Call, and a D cup is going to work. Hence the impending scalpel of Dr. Nasrut Singh.

An orderly, young and black, wearing headphones and quietly moving his shaved skull to an unheard beat, stands by the elevator
door waiting for it to open.

Frank is next to the gurney reading that day's
Variety.
An article on page three announces his deal with Lynx, and he is not happy about its contents.

"I told Robert not to release this. They're saying I'm doing the Eskimo thing," he informs the woozy Honey.

"How long did Dr. Singh say I'd be under?"

"I specifically told him, I don't know how many times, I'm not taking any job where I have to wear an anorak."

"You don't remember?"

"What?"

"What Dr. Singh said?"

"About what?"

"How long I'm going be out?"

"I don't know. Let's remember to try to get extra Vicodin, okay? It's very important not to forget that."

"Okay." Honey's on the ledge, about to slip into sweet nothing. "Frank?"

"Hmm?"

"Am I pretty?"

"You're fantabulous, babe. Every day I ask myself how I got so lucky."

"Really? You do?"

"Straight up."

"And you think this is going to help me?"

"Maybe when you're in there you can get Dr. Singh to do a little eye work."

Honey is startled out of her reverie. Her body tenses as much as the drug she's taken will allow. She focuses on Frank's face,
upside down from her perspective on her back.

"Eye work? What do you mean? Do I have crow's-feet?" The panic is palpable.

"I'm kidding. You're perfect. And in a couple of hours you're going to be perfect with bigger breasts," he tells her, his
eyes on the article about his pilot.

The elevator door opens and the orderly steps to the gurney. "This is as far as you can go."

Frank, wondering if they'd let him go farther if he were more widely known, leans over and kisses Honey's glossed lips.

"You've got to love a woman who makes an effort to look good when she's going into surgery."

"You didn't smudge me, did you?"

"I don't think so."

"Are you going to be in the room when I get out?"

"With a bottle of Dom Perignon. We'll have an unveiling."

The orderly wheels Honey into the elevator and Frank is already walking in the other direction before the doors have closed.
Honey tries to look over her shoulder at him but her neck can't do the angle.

Frank climbs into his motley Caddy in the Cedars-Sinai parking structure, pays the attendant, and heads east to Fairfax, his
thoughts far from Honey and her current medical adventure. Making a left onto Highland, he slips an early Springsteen CD into
the player and cranks the volume. Frank truly loved the young Bruce, the Bruce who wrote of fast cars and highways and hot
summer nights on the boardwalk. The later Bruce, the one so concerned with the plight of the voiceless in the heartland, the
pain of AIDS sufferers, and the horror of 9/11, he had little use for, preferring to get his pleasure from pop and his reality
from CNN. It wasn't that he didn't respect the older, more serious Bruce. But music for Frank was about sex, and it was difficult
to get a hard-on when the guy was singing about a plane slamming into the World Trade Center.

Cranking the volume another notch as he turns onto Cahuenga and heads toward North Hollywood, Frank recalls the period when
he was making enough money to hire a band to back him up. Although Frank viewed impressionists as being fairly low on the
food chain (below guys who worked with guitars but above prop comics), his own not-so-latent desire for rock stardom led him,
almost against his will at first, to introduce impressions of certain favorite rock stars into his act. He would do adept
and crowd-pleasing renderings of the voices and mannerism of these singers and could certainly have serviced that part of
his act a cappella, but his income had spiked so he hired his own band of mostly session musicians, whom he dubbed Killer
Bones, and gave vent to his fantasies during a handful of gigs in New York and Los Angeles. The ability of Killer Bones to
vamp like the Famous Flames while Frank did an impression of a thirteen-year-old James Brown chanting the haftarah at his
bar mitzvah lived in the memory of those who saw it long past the few times it was performed. Everyone agreed Killer Bones
had serious musical chops, chops to the point where they could credibly have backed up any number of actual singers, but Frank
found the financial drain of paying real musicians ultimately wasn't worth the ego gratification he received capering in front
of them, so he reluctantly returned to working with only a microphone and the harmonica he would use to do his Dylan-at-the-dentist
bit.

Frank glides the Caddy into a space across the street from an old, Spanish-style, two-story apartment building on Ardmore.
Crosses the street, not bothering to look around since there's no one he knows who could possibly see him in this neighborhood,
and in a moment he's standing in the entryway pressing the button for apartment 2C. The buzzer squawks, granting him entrance,
and a few seconds later the chipped green door of 2C swings open revealing Candi Wyatt in shorts and a University of Texas
sweatshirt a few sizes too large. Frank sees a fat, hairy cat chasing another fat, hairy cat up and over a sofa.

"Hey, come in," Candi says, holding
An Actor Prepares
by Constantin Stanislavski, the binding uncracked since she purchased it forty-five minutes ago in a hasty attempt to suggest
seriousness of purpose.

Frank enters, looking around the one-bedroom apartment, the decor early thrift shop, but he's not there to critique the interior
design. A piece of diaphanous, red material hangs over the window filtering the late-autumn light and lending a hint of Tijuana
bordello to the premises.

Candi had given him her phone number the previous evening in the parking lot of the Comedy Shop after he had feigned an interest
in her embryonic career, and his trip to North Hollywood today is ostensibly to coach her for an audition she had managed
to get for Charisma, a new feminine hygiene product.