The Hollywood Trilogy (85 page)

Toby came in and sat down next to Jerry. Toby's breath was awful, reminding Jerry of the stench of a dead deer he had come across in the forest once. Jerry tried to shield himself, knowing his own breath might be just as bad.

“How's it goin' with you and Rick?” Toby asked, after wolfing down three donut holes.

“We have a deal,” Jerry heard himself saying. Toby's eyes lit up.

“Hey, what'd I tell you! Man, that's great!”

Jerry told Toby all about it, warming up with the coffee in him, and pretty soon the two men were laughing and babbling about Jerry's first big break.

Then it got awful.

“Hey,” Toby said, as if it had just occurred to him, “you got to take me with you!”

“What?”

“You got to take me with you. Assistant producer or some shit like that. You
got
to.”

There was no doubt that Toby was sincere. His face was strained and anxious as he stared into Jerry's eyes.

“But I'm just the writer,” Jerry said. It was true, yet he still felt like a betrayer.

“You got to take me with you, man! You can't leave me here! You think I wanna sell stroke books all my life? Hey, it was me that got you the gig!”

“I can't,” Jerry said. He felt himself harden inside. He got up and paid for his coffee. His hands were shaking and he knew without looking that Toby was giving him a heavy guilt-inducing stare. At the door, Jerry turned and looked at Toby, but Toby was hunched over his coffee, staring at the back wall.

Helen was smiling at Jerry, though, and said “Goodbye!” brightly as he left.

AND SO, feeling a little like Dick Whittington's cat, Jerry Rexford went off to Hollywood to seek his fortune. He needn't have worried what to do
about Barbara, because she dropped him like a hot potato as soon as she was reasonably sure he had a girl friend on the side. Nothing Jerry said could change her mind, and in a burst of cruelty she invited him over after work one evening—he thought for supper—and when he got there found all his things stacked up on her porch. Her brother Richard tried to be polite but it was clear that he, too, thought Jerry had gone astray. It was hard working beside the man, and then impossible.

Jerry went in to Mr. Harris and apologized for quitting. Mr. Harris, much to Jerry's surprise, only pretended to be sorry, and talked about how Jerry's work had been suffering these past few weeks, and perhaps it was all for the best. As Jerry left Mr. Harris's office he could hear the
fft!
of Kleenex being withdrawn from its box.

Twenty-five thousand dollars was plenty of money to get established, even though, as Harriet Hardardt had carefully explained, he would never actually see so much as half that sum, and no one part of it much more than the almost twenty-five hundred dollars he had already been paid. The gross amount had been five thousand. Jerry would get another check soon, and then, the first day of shooting, he would get another.

“What if the picture never gets made?” Jerry asked, in a rare moment of fiscal intelligence.

“Let's not be gloomy,” Harriet said.

Jerry worked it out. If the picture went into turnaround (oh, he was picking up the language!) he stood to make a total of something under five thousand dollars, cash to him.

“But,” as Harriet said with a small smile, “we'll get you a lot more for your next screenplay, a hell of a lot more.”

“If
the picture gets made, gets released and makes money,” Jerry said cynically.

“Let's not rain on the ballpark,” Harriet suggested.

Rick Heidelberg turned out to be one of the greatest people Jerry had ever met. He arranged a parking space right in front of the Administration Building, so that Jerry did not have to come in through the drive-on gate or walk halfway across the lot to his office. The production company had a shotgun row of four offices, but Jerry's was not one of these. His was across the hall and down the corridor. “Writers need their peace and quiet,” Rick said, and Jerry agreed. Rick's was the corner one, a splendid office, with its
bar, its posters of great old movies, its view of the battlements and turrets of the big medieval castle. The company's suite of offices was right under Boss Hellstrom's, and when the Boss came into the conversation, Rick would point upward with an ironic wink.

A funny thing happened the first day Jerry moved into his office. The place was tiny and bare, with its yellow oak desk and crippled-looking swivel chair, and the Royal Standard typewriter on the middle of the desk.

“It's not much,” Rick said to him.

“Oh, gee, it's just fine,” Jerry said, and as if to prove it, went over and sat on the swivel chair, which gave an angry squeak and almost dumped Jerry on the threadbare carpet. Jerry steadied himself, pulled over the typewriter and made as if to adjust it. He opened the top drawer looking for paper, but found only a couple of empty Dos Equis bottles.

“Former tenant?” he asked Rick, and Rick got this really funny look on his face. On another man's face it might have been called embarrassment, but Jerry couldn't imagine Rick embarrassed.

“The secretaries have all the supplies . . . just ask,” Rick said, and left Jerry to contemplate his splendor.

The halcyon days lasted only a week, but what a week for Jerry Rexford! He would arrive fresh and bright at around eight o'clock, park in his slot, enter through the glassed-in police booth (“Good morning, Mister Rexford!”), past the seated double row of hopefuls, down the dim silent corridor that reminded him of nothing so much as a high school corridor except for the lack of lockers and the famous names on every door, up the staircase to the third floor, where Joyce, Rick's secretary and Roberta,
his
secretary, were just in and making the fresh aromatic coffee.

He would go down to his office, leaving the door open, and in a moment Roberta, his wide-mouthed, big-breasted secretary, would come with the trades and fresh coffee.

“Thank you, Roberta,” he would say, and she would leave the office, gently shutting the door behind her.

Jerry would read about what the other folks in show business were doing (mentally discounting all figures by at least seventy-five percent) and then, his coffee percolating sweetly into his bloodstream, would turn to his typewriter and begin work on the day's pages.

Then lunch at the commissary or wherever Rick decided to take them that
day. For that first week, anyway, Rick and Jerry had lunch together every day, and talked about the script. Rick knew how to compliment while criticizing, he knew how to get the most out of a negative situation, turn it positive; how to flatter without being destructive, and Jerry never learned so much about writing for the screen as he did during those five lunches. Technical matters. How to keep an eye out for the camera without pimping for it. To remember that lines are written to be spoken by actors. To refrain from attempting to direct the picture from his desk, and to forget employing camera terms he hardly understood, in favor of more diplomatic language. For Jerry it was a great relief not to have to fake camera language or directorial attitudes, and scene after scene was chopped and channelled into workmanlike shape, the script getting shorter and shorter all the time, until it had gone from 167 pages to 97.

“Isn't it too short now?”

“Naw,” said Rick. They were at El Coyote, scooping in Mexican food. “It's still literary. Jesus, your first draft timed out at about four hours.”

Jerry now knew that “literary” was not a snide insult, but a practical description of a kind of script with too much action per eighth of a page.

Often the two men spent the afternoon together in Rick's office, playing with the script, with Rick on the telephone most of the time and Jerry, happy on the couch, eavesdropping on the high-powered conversations.

And the screenings. At four each afternoon, they would walk down to Screening Room Twelve and watch hard-boiled private eye movies. It had become a tradition, in one week, that they take a six pack of Coors along, and each would drink three cans. Jerry could not help wondering if Rick had been just as cozy with the previous tenant of Jerry's office, a mysterious Mexican director whom nobody around the office wanted to talk about. But that was the way it was, old projects seemed deadly taboo.

So in one wonderful week they had gone clear through the script, and had something worth showing to the big bosses. Jerry could hardly wait for his next meeting with Rick.

Jerry hardly recognized his apartment, coming in Friday evening after that first week of intense work with Richard Heidelberg. Every night he had come home, slugged himself to sleep with whiskey, and awakened only in time to shower and dress for the next big important day. Now here he was with two days to fill, nowhere to go, no one to be with, nothing to do. All week, in fact, he had expected Rick to invite him to the beach, so that they could go
on working. But it didn't happen, and here he was in the middle of this dirty, messy, smelly, dark little apartment with nothing but whiskey and television to keep him from going crazy.

Later that evening he learned a great truth—whiskey and television cannot do the trick.
Au contraire.
Sometimes television is a wonderful thing. You turn the switch and out comes great science, great art, wonderful comedy, exciting news. Etc., etc. Other times it is boring and stupid. Still other times, tonight for example, it is insistently, nauseatingly, rottenly, boorishly offensive. And whiskey, you know how sometimes the first sniff of the stuff makes you giddy and pleased, and how other times you can't get drunk on a carload? Well, there are other times, too, times like tonight, when no matter how much of the goddamn stuff you slop over your lip, it makes you sicker and wishing even more to get drunk and blot out reality. And yet you know that only the whiskey is keeping you awake.

But it cut the old-socks smell of his apartment, especially with the door open, and that was a sufficiency to keep the door in the open position. It was certainly unrealistic to expect him to stop drinking, now that he had aired the place out. But he cringed at the thought of having company in his place. He would have to move, just as soon as he got his hands on a good-sized check.

Now would be a swell time for a swim, before he got to thinking what he didn't want to think about, namely, his loneliness, the gigantic empty raw spot inside him where Barbara had been, the smaller but just as raw spot where Rick had bored his way into Jerry's heart. The dullness of his own life. He stripped but could not find his bathing suit. So what? Peeping out his windows he had often seen late-night nude bathers in the pool, so fuckum, he would do it too.

The dew-damp lawn felt great against his feet as he crossed toward the pool. He giggled, and somebody said,

“Who's that?”

“It's Jerry,” he said, and stopped. Peering ahead, he saw a couple on the far side of the pool, on some towels. If they were not fucking, they should have been.

“Oh, excuse me all to hell,” Jerry said. “I just wanted to go for a little swim.”

“Well, go ahead, Jerry,” the girl part of the tangle of humanity said.

With a giggle, Jerry half-jumped, half-fell into the warm sweet water of the pool. It felt wonderful to be naked in the water! He swam up and down,
up and down, not getting tired, feeling his mind clear up, his depression, his emptiness vanish. He could barely pull himself up out of the water, and he sat on the concrete, running water and breathing deeply for quite a while before he even thought to open his eyes.

The couple was going at it, a mile a minute. Jerry dropped into the water and moved darkly to the other end, where he could sit on the underwater steps with only his head out. There were dim stars past the black branches of the trees in the patio. Another person came by, opened a screen door,
slap!
and flipped on an intimate amber light within.

And then the couple, still naked, jumped into the water and began to play with each other, giggles and splashes, while Jerry padded into his place and got a nice double shot of whiskey. This time it hit the spot and made him feel really quite goddamn delightful. Back out to the pool, naked as an opossum.

Jerry helped the girl out of the pool, watching the water run off her glinting breasts, and then, oddly, not wanting to intrude on her privacy, her right to be naked, averted his eyes from her sexual parts and looked at her attractive wet face. She lived next door to him.

“I'm Jerry,” he said.

“I'm Brenda,” she said, and introduced her naked companion as Jack.

“You're the one with the black Super 90, right?” asked Jack, a Porsche enthusiast. They talked eagerly about Porsches for a while, sitting around naked, and then the conversation drifted into the picture business (there were few civilians on Fountain) and Jerry was led to an opportunity to point out that he was working on a picture right
then.
To Brenda and Jack's excellent attention he told them all about it.

Jerry thought he saw a note of admiration creep into their eyes as he talked, and that made him shut up. Enough was enough. And so it was, the couple drifted into Brenda's apartment and Jerry into his, where in only a few minutes he could hear them through the wall, banging away on each other. Brenda murmured,
“Please . . . please . . . oh, please . . .”
and Jerry fell back into his desperately lonely funk.