The Hollywood Trilogy (28 page)

I LOOK at the clock on the dressing-room table in front of me, big red glowing numerals. Silently, a minute dies and another is born. I depress the button on top of the clock and it shows the running of the seconds into minutes. I watch for a while, my fingertip white on the button. Once more I decide that if there is ever going to be an end to this madness I will quit the business, I will fake an accident, flaming wreck not enough left to identify and go live in the mountains with my grandpa. Then I remember he is dead. I take my finger off the button and the clock stares at me unblinking.

Jut for the fun of it, I slam the clock down into my big open jar of cold-cream,
wush!
The clock is facedown and I can't see it, but it grinds on, I can hear the tiny grinding noise inside. I pull the cord, kind of hard, I guess, because the clock flies across the room and hits the wall with a crack and a splat, and the cold cream jar goes rolling off the dressing table, hits my foot and rolls under the table. I screech, and then again, and the door opens.

Irony, again. It is not Jim the singer, Jim the straight man, Jim the headliner, it is Jim the writer, his face carefully composed, his voice moderate. He looks at me sitting redfaced at my dresser, greywet at the armpits, little dabs and streaks of cold cream on my black knifecreased pants.

“Oh,” he says, “I thought I heard a scream in here . . .”

I just stare at him.

After a while, he gives me a reassuring grin and closes the door again.

I should get up and go out there and apologize, make a little joke and come back in here to wait. Instead I change my pants and shirt. The shirt doesn't have any cold cream on it, but under the arms it is as fermy wet as if I'd been playing handball. “Whew, what a stink!” I say to myself. The new shirt is soft and confident against my skin, the new trousers even more razorsharp, and this makes me feel good as I look at myself in the full length mirror. I hold up my arms like a Spanish dancer and make a tiny stomp.

“Hola!”
I whisper.

If Jim isn't here in five, no,
ten
, minutes, I'll send somebody out to make our apologies. Maybe Ford Hamilton, he's out in the house, roosting with the turkeys, and I grin like an evil bastard, because if there is one audience in the world that Ford Hamilton couldn't reach, it is out there now, waiting for its favorite cornballs.

For all I know, Jim is in his dressing room. Why hasn't he called me? He wouldn't. But somebody would tell him to call me, and he would say, “I don't want to talk to David, he's too crazy, he gets stage-fright, I don't want to be around him,” and then somebody might say, “But he
has
to be told you're
here
, doesn't he?” and Jim grins and says, “Fuck'im, he trusts me or he doesn't,” and the fantasy collapses because I know it wouldn't happen.

I dial Jim's suite. The line is busy. It is right down the hall, I can get up and go out through my circle of friends and down the hall and see who is on Jim's phone. But no, I can't. If he's there I'll hate him for the rest of our lives, and if he's not, I don't know what I'll do except scream and hit the walls.

I think to myself, if he wants me to stay in the business, this isn't the way to do it.

But if he hates me, my mind starts to say, if he hates me, has hated me for years, has swallowed his hatred because of his own terror of working alone, being alone, not succeeding, then the cruelty of this awfulness would be nothing more than what I deserved . . . The only way to reach David Ogilvie is through Jim Larson . . . for the wrongs he has committed, for his badness of character, but NO, GOD DAMN IT, JIM IS NOT THAT KIND OF MAN!!!

And it snaps. The weight is gone, my stomach sweetens. I look at my wristwatch. The time has come. I slip into my jacket, take one last vanity peek in the mirror. I open the door.

All eyes are upon me.

Then before I have a chance to say a word the outer door opens, and it is Jim. He grins at me, “Tried to call you, Man,” he says, and I believe him. Behind him crowding into the room are Bianca and George diMorro, dazzling in their evening clothes, and more people crowding in behind them, and for a dizzy second I have a vision of Sonoma Mountain and the fine misty winter calm as I stand in the warm pool and look out over the valley. And then I find myself falling into the cold grey eyes of the actress who had
snubbed us at the diMorro party, and look down to see her slim red-tipped fingers lightly on Jim's sleeve.

“Hello, everyone,” I hear myself saying. “Now, don't be nervous,” and it gets a great laugh, my old buddy C. C. Eubank squeezing in the door, charming with a lock of hair down over his eyes, Galba in his bug-green tuxedo, Karl Meador, relaxed and brilliant and handsome, where the hell has old Karl been these past few days, for that matter? He does not look over at Sonny, who got to her feet as the mob started pouring into the room. I go over to Sonny and give her a kiss, just brushing her lips and not looking into her eyes, and Jim grabs me by the arm and says, “Hey, no time for that, let's roll,” and he pulls me through the people, through the door and down the corridor, his collar open and a small red stain on his ruffled shirt, like, while I've been here losing my sanity he's been eating spaghetti with the hotshots, come on, he hasn't been eating spaghetti for two weeks, has he, but he might have been romancing, by God . . . Or he might have been buried out in the desert with a stake through his heart, waiting for the right phase of the moon . . .

He's got me by the elbow now, and I'll never ask him where he's been; we half-walk, half-run down the corridor to our private elevator, and only the hottest of the hotshots are allowed on the elevator with us, the diMorros, of course, Karl, Galba, the grey-eyed actress who didn't like the way I smelled and who will not let go of Jim, and Chet. Jim turns to me in the packed elevator and says, “What's been happening?” and I say to him, “Not jack shit, my friend,” and we laugh secretly and smell the anxious sweat that isn't ours for once and then the door opens and a hundred madeup faces flash past as we hurry, now just the two of us, through the held-open curtain and out into the blackness, and there they are. The last drop of fear inside me evaporates.

My light hits me, and I stand quite still. Jim's light follows him to the other side of the stage and the band starts to vamp.

I smile, a baby's first wide grin, and the house comes down.

This is love, my friends, and the hell with the rest.

THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF JODY MCKEEGAN

For Marie and Julie

“The show must go on.”—
ANONYMOUS

PART ONE

ONE

WHEN SHE was fifteen, Jody McKeegan lived in a small house behind the Piggly Wiggly Market where her mother worked as a grocery checker. Her father did not exactly live with them, and Jody was glad of it. Every time Burt McKeegan showed up there would be trouble, even though he usually brought money and tried to make up for being gone. He would be drinking, as usual, and his dark red hair would be hanging down over his green eyes as he sat on the old overstuffed couch with his big hands holding the pint loosely between his legs. He would talk, telling stories about his life that Jody later decided were lies, because the only time Burt McKeegan ever had any money was when he won at the horse races, and of course whenever he did that he would show up. The stories were all about travels and adventures that cost money. Another dead giveaway, which Jody didn't even think about until she had traveled a little herself and told a few lies, was that Burt never told any stories in front of Eleanor. No, when Eleanor was home, and before the trouble would start, he would discuss plans for the future. Even though Burt was washed up and everybody knew it, he still had a lot of hope for the future. All her life Jody had this same unreasonable burning hope for the future, as if the mere passage of time would erase all the trouble and bring the joy she knew had to be out there somewhere waiting for her.

Burt, well, Burt had been cut down by time and circumstance, and she knew he was full of crap and would never amount to anything. He had been a body-and-fender man, a big young Irish galoot with freckles and a grin and a ball-peen hammer, happily whanging away at fenders and car doors when the Depression struck and took his job away, just after Jody's elder sister Lindy had been born. Out of work and with a new family to support—a family he had acquired by making love to Eleanor, then eighteen, behind some trees at a picnic at Blue Lake Park and then overjoyed when she told him she was pregnant because she
was so pretty and he was ready to settle down anyway—laid off by the garage out on 82nd Avenue, fiery in his refusal to allow Eleanor to work by finally driven out of their house by the simple fact of poverty. It maddened him to have to sit home twiddling his thumbs, and so at first he would get up each morning, dress carefully as if he were going looking for work, take the lunch Eleanor had made for him and go to one of the taverns out Sandy Boulevard to sit around with other men. After a while he began going downtown and hanging around the pool halls. Burt was a pretty good pool player, but not good enough to make any money at it. He started drinking during the day and coming home later and later, and then not at all. Eleanor lived for a while on money given to her by her sister and her parents, and then finally she took a job and left Lindy at her sister's house. When Burt found out she was working in a stringbean cannery he got very drunk and came home and chased Eleanor around the house with a butcher knife, or so Lindy told Jody years later.

“Where did he get the money?” Jody wanted to know.

“Oh shit, drunks always have money,” Lindy told her. Lindy was beautiful, and Jody, who was not, worshipped her. Lindy was short for Rosalind, and she had her father's dark red hair and milky skin, but her eyes were a deep rich dark brown, and by the time she was twelve men were following her down the street. But men did not trouble Lindy. Even during World War II, when they were living in a housing project and Eleanor was gone most of the time working at the Swan Island shipyard, Lindy had no trouble with the kind of men who hung around trying to get at her and the other young bobby soxers. She knew when to kick and where to kick, and she was smart enough to scream when that would work and smart enough to keep silent when only that would work, and just once was she overwhelmed, by three high school boys from St. Johns. They got her in the laundry room of one of the project buildings after school one day, and two of them raped her while she cursed and spit in their faces. The third one would have raped her too, but a neighborhood boy who was practicing his saxophone heard her cursing through the thin walls and came rushing in on the rich boys (boys who did not live in housing projects) and began flailing away with his instrument and screaming with rage. His name was Ron Higby and he was over six feet tall already, and so the rich boys made their retreat bleeding and threatening to call the police.

“Go ahead and call them, you dirty pimps!” Lindy yelled after them. “Are you hurt?” she asked Ron. He shook his head silently, his dented and bloody
saxophone hanging brokenly from his hand. He was looking at her. She was wearing a pink cashmere sweater, now stained and dirty, pink bobby sox, saddle shoes and nothing else. Her skirt and torn underpants lay on the cement floor of the laundry room.

“Oh,” she said. “Get out of here and let me dress, will you?” She threw him a smile. “I'll thank you later.” She did—she thanked him. He admitted that he was in love with her and she smiled and said that she thought he was sweet, but that she only dated servicemen. But a couple of nights later she made a sailor pay her fifty dollars, and she gave the money to Ron. “Fix your horn,” she told him. She was fifteen at the time.

Both Eleanor and Burt were working, but Eleanor was making more money as a spot welder than Burt was as a sweeper, and so they did not live together much of the time. Burt was only a sweeper because on the fourth of July, 1935, just before Jody was born, he blew the fingers off his right hand drunkenly fooling with firecrackers. He even got his picture in the paper, grinning and holding up his bandaged hand, but there went any chance of a career requiring ten fingers. He still had his right thumb and stubs of two fingers, and he could grasp a broom. If anyone started to commiserate with him about his missing fingers, Burt's green eyes would light up. “The goddam thing kept me out of the army, didn't it?” he would say, waggling the thumb and stubs.