The Hollywood Trilogy (60 page)

Instead, he snorted three lines on each side and began riffling through a copy of
Playboy.
With Elektra snoozing there was twice as much coke for him, and somehow at the time it seemed like a good deal. She slept all day Monday while he sat in the living room, either going through magazines or thinking feverish thoughts, doubling his intake of the drug out of spite, going deeper and deeper into anxiety, fear of running out, fear of existence, fear of
moving, fear that he was addicted to cocaine and would spend the rest of his life in this crippled trance, having an awful time. Later he started hitting the whiskey, and by midnight he was blistering drunk, helplessly throwing up into the toilet, somebody holding his shoulders and applying a hot washcloth to his temples; and then he was in bed, nauseated but able to keep the room from spinning, and then he was gone.

When he woke up, he felt as if somebody had been hitting him on the nose with a crowbar, but otherwise he was all right. He sat up. Elektra was not there. The magazines were all put away and the bedroom was neat and orderly for the first time in days. The smell of food was in the air. Food! Rick had not had an appetite for a long time. It was a delicious sensation. He got out of bed and walked, wobbling only a little, into the other part of the house.

Blinds were up, curtains open. All the mess was gone. He could hear the reassuring beat of the surf, and the sky stood richly blue against white clouds.

“You want some O.J.?” Elektra asked. She came out of the kitchen wearing a tee shirt and a bikini bottom. She smiled at Rick and kissed him lightly and gave him the big glass of orange juice, which he threw back all in one long gurgling gulp. “Can you eat yet?” she asked. “I had some bacon and eggs and muffins . .”

“Let's give it a try,” Rick said. He followed her into the brightly lit kitchen and sat in the nook by the window that overlooked the cliff and the ocean beyond. Down the beach came a man riding horseback, galloping right along, a big older man with a mane of grey hair and a tan so dark he looked almost like a Kanaka. The man wore only faded jeans, and as he rode out of sight under the overhang of the cliff, Rick wondered if that was going to be the last few chapters of
his
life, rich enough to be able to horseback ride on this beach, bored enough to have to go ahead and do it.

Quietly he watched Elektra make his breakfast. Her timing and methodology were impeccable. While the bacon sizzled over a low flame in the black cast-iron frying pan on a back burner and the English muffins toasted in the toaster-oven on a shelf beside the stove, she put butter, salt and pepper into the long-handled French frying pan and shook the pan gently as the butter melted, bubbled and settled back down. Still holding the pan handle in her left hand she opened the refrigerator and took out two AA large brown eggs in her tiny hand, closing the refrigerator with a little swing of her hip, and
broke the eggs one-handed into the pan, tossing the broken shells into the garbage sack at her feet. Quickly, but without splashing grease, she turned the bacon with her fork. The eggs began to bubble as she continued to shake the pan with her left hand, and now with the fork began stirring the eggs rapidly.

The heat was low and the eggs came together slowly, at first yellow and white, like mixed-up fried eggs. As she kept stirring, taking care to let no part of the eggs remain against the heat for long, they began to turn pale yellow and solidify. She turned off the heat, still stirring, and dumped the scrambled eggs on the plate. The toaster-oven popped open but she ignored it for the moment, scooping up the bacon and placing it aside on a folded paper napkin. Then she plucked the hot brown-crusted buttery muffins from the toaster-oven and onto the plate. Adding the bacon she slid the plate of food in front of Rick.

“Smell good?” she asked.

Rick nodded and murmured and started to eat. The eggs were the best he had ever had. The kitchen was neat and clean. Elektra had obviously been working away all the time he slept, quietly, so as not to disturb him, but working working working, where some other broad might have just headed for the beach and waited for the Mexican servants to show up. But not Elektra, and once again he congratulated himself on having her for a girl friend. God, this bacon was
just right!

Was it love? He did not know. There was no reason to call it that. They said they loved each other all the time, but they also said they loved this and that, so the word was really just a way of expressing enthusiasm. Rick knew he wouldn't have had a chance with Elektra if he hadn't been Richard Heidelberg, and she wouldn't have stood a chance with him if she hadn't been so royally beautiful and so smart and so lucky. But of course what was the point of being Richard Heidelberg if not Elektra Soong?

“With a Soong in my heart,” Rick sang mischievously.

“Oh, eat your meal,” she said, and sat opposite him to watch. He ate with little yelps of joy at each new flavor, complimenting her on her cooking.

“Oh,” she said, “eggs and bacon are easy. Someday I'll really cook for you, but you have to have about twelve people here or it's not worth it.”

“That would be a swell party,” he said, his mouth full of egg. “You in the kitchen slaving away.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “I'm going down to the beach for a while. Are you gonna come down?”

Rick swallowed and suddenly remembered the Two Great Ideas. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. He sipped his coffee, as Elektra watched him, her head cocked to one side.

“Remember the Arab clothes?” Rick looked embarrassed.

“Sure. That was fun.”

“But not such a great idea, huh?”

She laughed. “ ‘My son, the Arab!'”

“Sweeping into Nate 'N Al's in our sheets and pillowcases!” Rick laughed. “Amidst the machine-gun fire . . .”

Another great idea down the drain.

But what about
. . .

“Hey,” he said to her.

“Yeah?”

“Let's go to bed . . .”

And off they went.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE TRADE journal had offices in the Hany Building, on Hollywood Boulevard near Cahuenga, a musty old building whose lobby was the only bright spot, with a florist on one side and a twenty-four-hour smut bookstore on the other. Jerry Rexford stood waiting for the elevator, looking at the orchids in the refrigeration case, just to keep from looking at the rows of specialty pornography and sex equipment displayed on the other side. Not that he wouldn't look at the sex stuff, but he didn't want the clerk to see him. They were always fairly degenerate types, and when they caught you ogling, they gave you this knowing look, somewhere between a leer and a sneer, as if to say,
“Ah, you're as filthy as the rest of us!”
Which was true, but why bring it up?

Jerry could hear the elevator arrive, but the doors didn't open for a few more seconds, as if it took all the machine's strength to force the door to the wall. Then there was a criss-cross steel door with a shiny worn brass handle to push, while the elevator creaked impatiently. Once inside and both doors
closed, Jerry punched 5 and waited. A smell, something between stale cigarette smoke and tired feet, defied him to analyze it. He had plenty of time. No one got on or off as he slowly proceeded, laborious inch by inch, to the top story of the building.

Jerry's palms were wet. He hugged his briefcase, full of resumes and exemplars of his writing, to his chest, feeling the strangling clutch of his necktie at his throat, tied too tight because since arriving in Los Angeles Jerry had gone up a size in necks and could not button his best shirt, the only one that worked with his blue suit, and had to use the tie, a nice maroon with white polkadots, to cover up.

The name of the trade journal was
Pet Care Hotline,
but Jerry did not laugh. Trade journals were a world to themselves, and a lot of them had laughable titles—if you went for that sort of humor. Indeed, to Jerry the hubris of calling yourself
Time
was funnier than
Pet Care Hotline.
Here they were, at the end of a long corridor of dirty white octagonal tiles and pebbled-glass doors. He could hear the sounds of routine office work faintly through the glass, and this reassured him. After the wonderments of getting settled in Hollywood, this was like home ground.

As Jerry politely sat waiting in one of a row of hard chairs the color of dead bananas, he looked over the office. A small bullpen, surrounded by “private” doorless offices glassed in to a height of about seven feet, and the real private offices at the other end. Five or six people milled around or sat at desks, looked up with disinterest. There were no handsome men and no good-looking women. The men were in shirtsleeves, with ties, the women a little less formal. One very large woman wore a slack suit, which in Jerry's opinion she shouldn't have been wearing. So here it was, a drab little office full of drab people doing a boring job. Also, the pay would be terrible.

But he knew how to do the work, and it took none of his attention, and having steady work was important. From a base like this, Jerry hoped to eventually make his way into the movie business. He would be, in Henry James's wonderful phrase, “one of those upon whom nothing is lost.” He would keep his eyes and ears open, he would assimilate Hollywood through osmosis. Of this he was confident.

Mr. Harris, the president and publisher of
Pet Care Hotline,
was a small red-haired man in a stiffly starched white shirt. He shook Jerry's hand at the door to his office and ushered him in. “Please sit down, Mister Rexford,” he
said, and Jerry thanked him and sat and turned in time to see Harris rubbing his hands with a Kleenex and dropping the used tissue into a wastebasket beside his desk. The wastebasket was filled with white wads of Kleenex, and there was a box on the desk. Jerry's heart sank.

But he got the job.

“Tell me about yourself,” Mr. Harris asked him with a shy boyish smile as he rocked back and forth in his truly impressive executive leather high-backed chair, the only impressive piece of furniture in the whole place.

“Well, I don't know a thing about pet care,” Jerry said with a little smile. He knew he did not have to, to do his work. “But I can write and I can edit . . . I'm sure you've gone over my stuff,” he said, pointing at the tearsheets in front of Mr. Harris.

“Yes, you do quite good work, that's certainly not at issue. Tell me, what brings you to the Sunny Southland?”

Jerry had been waiting for this one. He let a brief expression of pain cross his face, followed by what he hoped was manly determination. “New Horizons,” he said. “Plus that sunshine you just mentioned.”

“Married?”

Again the slight look of pain, quickly erased. “No,” he said.

Harris tugged a Kleenex from its box and idly began to polish the glass top of his desk. “Tell me what you think you can accomplish at
Pet Care Hotline,
Mr. Rexford.”

A tough order, but Jerry was ready for it. You have to treat the littlest publisher as if he were Henry Luce. Jerry gave Mr. Harris a verbal song-and-dance, hardly hearing the words himself. Beneath it all he was transmitting the information that he, Jerry Rexford, knew that selling advertising (not his job) was the important thing, and that the editorial columns did nothing much more than support those ads. To do this they had to be obsequious to advertisers and potential advertisers, hostile to government interference and sympathetic to the problems which beset those who provided pet care products to the public.

That was about the size of it for any small trade journal writer. His basic job was to rewrite press releases, publicity handouts and the illiterate, cliché-ridden and generally dreadful prose of those advertisers or potential advertisers whom Mr. Harris hoped to flatter by having their picture and byline over articles such as, “Are You Displaying Dog Toys at the Right Eye Level?”

He would also be expected to go to pet care conventions and to cover any hot fast-breaking stories relating to pet care, but these were few and far between, and if there was anything really hot, like a breakthrough in the tick situation, the boss would grab it for himself.

At the end of the meeting, Harris stood up and smiled at Jerry, holding out his hand.

“Welcome aboard,” he said.

Jerry got out before catching Harris wiping off his hands, his desk and the chair Jerry had been sitting in. The wages were okay, nothing spectacular, and he started work tomorrow. Soon enough then to meet his fellow employees, and he made his way through the bullpen with downcast eyes, as if he had been turned down.

In the elevator he felt a lurch of nausea. This was not Hollywood, nor was it the world of Henry James. More like Dickens, and Jerry Rexford hated Dickens. Now more than ever.

THEN THE Los Angeles weather turned hot, and Jerry Rexford learned to hate the place. It was not the maddening heat of the East or the South, or the blistering desert heat he actually enjoyed; it was a stinging acrid flooding heat that made everything hot to the touch. You could not rub your eyes, he found out quickly, because that just rubbed it in. You could not go to the beach, because, as the Los Angeles
Times
and the
Examiner
were always telling you, “200,000
JAM BEACHES
!”

It cooled down somewhat at night, but not enough to cover yourself with a sheet, until you woke at four a.m. chilled and sticky. The best you could do, he decided, was leave all the doors and windows in the little apartment open, and sit naked either reading or watching television—even though lights and television sets radiated volumes of heat themselves—one couldn't just sit there in the dark.