The Metaphysical Ukulele (9 page)

I found the writing room empty and Chandler in his bungalow, doing what, as far as I can tell, most writers do with most of their time: nothing. He gazed out his office window at the view of the bungalow across the sidewalk and its window with the view of him. He wore his shirt sleeves and looked tired. His tie was rumpled. A beige jacket hung on the hat tree next to his desk, alongside a beige fedora and a beige overcoat. Everything about the guy looked a little beige.

I stepped into his office without knocking. Why not? The door was open. Chandler spoke as if I'd hit my mark and that was his cue to begin the monologue. “Hollywood will bleed you white,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

Chandler kept his gaze where it had been: on that little patch of open air between writers' bungalows. He didn't look for an introduction and I didn't offer one. He was a smart enough cookie. Who else could I be but some other cowboy with a stick to prod this beast into writing? A weak patch of stale yellow sunlight nestled up on Chandler's papery skin.

“There is no such thing as an art of the screenplay,” Chandler said, maybe to me, maybe to that sidewalk outside. “There never will be as long as the system lasts. The essence of this system is to exploit talent without permitting it the right to be talent.”

I stepped fully inside the office and took a seat on the red striped sofa. A pair of beige leather brogans sat on the
floor beside me. I'd known brogans only as work shoes, but these brogans—with the leather soft and unscuffed as the air of a new day—had an elegance to them.

Chandler kept talking. “To me the interesting point about Hollywood's writers of talent is not how few or how many there are, but how little of worth their talent is allowed to achieve. Writers are employed to write screenplays on the theory that, being writers, they have a particular gift and training for the job, and are then prevented from doing it with any independence or finality whatsoever, on the theory that, being merely writers, they know nothing about making pictures. It takes a producer to tell them that.”

Chandler stood and walked around his desk. He regarded me directly for the first time. With his thin lips and horn-rimmed glasses, he looked more like a professor than a Hollywood screenwriter. The fact that he was engaged in a lecture with no concern whether or not an audience was listening only compounded this impression. “So what is required of my talent today?” he asked, though he didn't ask me. “To make a vehicle for some glamorpuss named Moronica Lake with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume. And for Alan Ladd, some male idol of the muddle millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler. Pictures for purposes as these, Hollywood lovingly and carefully makes.”

Enough was enough. I didn't have time to hear the cries of a typist who makes twelve hundred a week. His suit may have been rumpled and beige, but it still had the cut of a
West Hollywood tailor. Just because he wore it like a cheap suit didn't make it cheap. If he couldn't write with a pillow of money like that to rest his head on every night, then to hell with him. If some big studio organ grinder wanted me to poke this monkey into dancing, then so be it. I'd poke.

“So what are you going to do about it?” I asked Chandler.

Chandler seemed surprised that I had a voice at all. But what followed next indicated that he'd taken my question to heart and come up with the most ridiculous answer he could muster. He turned back to the desk, picked up the phone, and asked to be connected to his producer. Three seconds later, he laid out his demands.

This Chandler was a booze hound on the mend. He'd been strictly tea and crumpets while he typed up this latest masterpiece of glamorpuss expressions. But if they wanted him to finish it, he had to get liquored up enough to lubricate that dry brain of his. So he proposed that he'd return to his home and write from there. The studio would provide two limousines to be on call outside his house, each with a driver working an alternate twelve-hour shift. The limousines could run the script pages to the studio while they were still warm from the secretary's typewriter. The limousines had to be Cadillac. Chandler insisted on this point. If his maid needed to rush to the market for his next bottle of rye or his wife needed to rush to the hospital because he was driving her mad, she needed to do it in style. I didn't hear him specify anything about the drivers. Perhaps one had to
quote passages from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on request and the other had to know the Song of Solomon.

He also demanded six secretaries. They would work in pairs, eight-hour shifts apiece. Whenever he had a thought of fleeting brilliance, they'd be there to take dictation. He called out one of the secretaries by name. I knew that name. She'd show up wearing a pair of Tippecanoes and a green day dress. She'd have to starch it so it would keep its shape when his paws ran all over it.

And, of course, there must be booze enough to get him through the last act.

Chandler paused after making his demands, but only long enough to hear some sap say “Okay.” He grabbed his coat from the hat rack, stuffed his arms inside, and fluttered out of the room with neither word nor glance for me.

I now had the writer's office to myself. It was the perfect opportunity to hunt for a funny-looking ukulele. A regular shamus would have taken that opportunity and turned the office upside down. Not me. I stretched out on the couch and thought over the situation, which I couldn't help feeling was coming rapidly to an end. Despite the dusty morning sun filtering through a bungalow window, time had gotten too late to find anything the studio would pay me for. The ukulele didn't do anything that the booze wouldn't. It was one bottom-shelf muse or another. I had nothing more to do than linger long enough to get fired.

Outside the bungalow was a bustle of activity. Low-rank studio personnel raced each other to get things going
on this picture again. They rustled up secretaries and Cadillac limousines and drivers and steno pads and portable typewriters. They found producers' hats and ushered the producers off to three-martini lunches with a ukulele-less writer trying to unblock the blocked. They clawed past each other in a climb they must have envisioned would get them to the top of this dung heap, without realizing that the smell is the same no matter where you are on the pile. I kicked off my wingtips. One fell to the ground. The other lingered on the arm of the sofa, next to my stocking feet. I lay there, watching gravity pull on that shoe. I waited for it to drop.

Candy came out of the bustle and into the bungalow. He was still a picture of futile aspirations in his thinning flannel suit. “There you are,” he said.

I sat up and slid my shoes back onto my feet. I knew his business, but I didn't let on anything I didn't have to. I said, “Here I am.”

“I don't know how you did it,” he said, “but you got Chandler to give us the ransom note.” He tossed that same envelope full of double sawbucks onto my lap. “That's all we needed.”

I stood up and walked over to him and gave him a hard stare. “You hired me to find a ukulele and I'll find it.”

“We hired you to light a fire under a writer, and his ass is burning. Your job is done.”

I jammed the envelope into his bony chest. He caved it in like I'd hit him with my fist and not a stack of paper. I held the dough close to his heart, waiting for him to take it.
He didn't budge. He just stared at me with those sad monkey eyes. The organ grinder had played a tune for him and he only knew this one dance step. I let go of the money. It fell to the ground. A fan of Jacksons lay at his feet. I told him, “The picture business is just like this town itself. It looks like paradise but the air is poison.”

Two days later, I was back in my little office. Two days' mail lay scattered in front of the mail slot. I went through it in a regular double play, from the floor to the desk to the waste-basket, Tinkers to Evers to Chance. I opened the window to my office and let two days' dust and dinginess float out. On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired, remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn't any use. She was finished. She had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.

The one thing of interest in my mail was that same envelope Candy had given me twice and taken back twice. Now he'd given it a third time. It still carried the same cargo. If I were to be a man of honor, then, the best man for this world and a good enough man for any world, I'd have to follow through with it. I'd have to find that damn ukulele.

With no leads on a case that was chewed up like an old string, I did what ordinary folks do when they lose something. I think about where that something belongs and look there first. I asked myself, “If I had a banjo ukulele and it
wasn't in my rubber room in Camarillo, where would I keep it?”

My regular room at home would be my best guess.

When the maid opened the door at 6520 Drexel Avenue the silence in the living room slapped me in the face. Chandler snored on the davenport. Two odd secretaries sat on two odd chairs studying the latest fashions in the latest magazines. A gin bottle poked its head out of a champagne bucket on the library table in front of the davenport. The maid stood by the door shooting me with daggers from her eyes. “May I help you?” she asked.

All the words were in her sentence, but she said it in that choppy Chinatown way. Something was off about it. She sounded less like someone from Chinatown and more like someone from Echo Park imitating a Chinese accent. Her uniform matched her accent. The collar and apron were made of white lace. The rest was a fuzzy black wool. Chandler may well have stolen this get-up from Butterfly McQueen's dressing room.

“The studio sent me,” I said. I held out the studio executive's card that Candy had given me. Pipe ash scarred the white of the card.

The maid took the card and studied it like it was money made on a letterpress at home. “Mr. Chandler's asleep.”

“You forgot to drop the s,” I said.

“What?”

“If you were really Chinese, you'd say, ‘Mr. Chandler
asleep,' not ‘Mr. Chandler's asleep.' You'd drop the s.”

The maid put one hand on the door in preparation for shutting it in my face. “Have it your way. Mr. Chandler asleep. Asshole.”

She started to close the door on me, but I stopped it with my foot. “I'll just come in and have a look around.”

“Suit yourself.” The maid turned and headed back into whatever kept her busy in this two-bedroom house on Drexel Avenue. I lingered in the foyer. The secretaries kept their eyes on the fashion magazines. Two typewriters sat on the kitchen table behind them. Small, neat stacks of paper lay beside the typewriters. Chandler rolled onto his side. Both secretaries set down their magazines and picked up pads covered in scratchy shorthand. Chandler eased back into a snore. The secretaries returned to their magazines. The pillow under Chandler's head collected puddles of drool. I set off for the bedrooms.

One step into the hallway, I heard a cheerful, “Yoohoo.” I sought the source of the sound and found an elderly woman in a four poster bed. One of her legs was in a cast and propped up on pillows. She wore an elegant nightgown. A matching down comforter covered her. Her short white hair wasn't perfect, but it seemed tussled intentionally. She waved me closer. I took a step and leaned against the door frame. “Who are you?” she asked.

“The studio hired me to find Chandler's ukulele. The most logical place seemed to be his bedroom.”

“Well, you found his bedroom. Come in and take a look
around.”

I knew Chandler had a wife who was almost twenty years older than he. That seemed to be the nugget of wisdom most of Chandler's friends gave me first. So her presence in the bedroom made sense. The lack of any sign of Chandler inside the bedroom made less sense. The dresser was covered in small bottles and scents, the wardrobe full of silks and frills. I couldn't find as much as a watch or pair of slippers that belonged to a man. “You must be Cissy,” I said.

“Who else would I be? I'm too damn old to be one of those floozies Ray chases after.”

“He's not running too hard after any floozies right now.”

“Wait till this script is done. He'll be back in one of those writer's rooms on the Paramount lot, drinking his morning champagne with some broad making moon eyes at his paycheck.”

“A broad? Making moon eyes at his paycheck? Lady, you talk like someone out of one of his books.”

Cissy patted the edges of her hair, not to move any hairs but to make sure none had moved. “He gets it from somewhere.”

I walked around to the empty side of the bed. A couple of paperbacks lay on the night stand there. I picked one up. A Miss Marple Mystery. “You put this here to torment your husband?”

Cissy shook her head. “I won't be blamed. Ray reads those himself. For inspiration.”

“What do they inspire him to do?”

“Grind his teeth to the gums. Pick a fight with a world too cruel to even fight back.”

I ran my thumb over the illustration of a dowager in a housecoat on the cover of the book.

“There's a peculiar thing about writers,” Cissy said. “They seemed destined to scream into a din that swallows their sound. Don't they?”

“I seem to hear enough of them coming through loud and clear. Maybe too many of them.”

“There's a difference between hearing something and listening to something. Do you know the myth of Sisyphus.”

“Sure. The fellow who kept pushing a rock up a hill. Same rock every time, as far as I can tell.”

“There's an element of Sisyphus to writers' lives. Not that they're always pushing a rock up a hill that's destined to roll back down. Hell, we're all doing that, aren't we?”

“To some extent.”

“For writers, though, it's more a matter of being forever doomed to speak to someone who refuses to listen. They'll hear you. Sometimes they'll pay you for your sound. Take Ray out there. Pretty soon, he'll wake up and take another shot and start making noise in the living room. Those two dames will type it up and he'll pass out again and wake up and read what they typed and wonder who made that horrible noise. But he'll get through the script and Paramount will find their killer and Alan Ladd will get away with everything in the end. Don't you worry. But even if everyone sees the picture and the Academy awards him some honor, he'll
still feel like no one who heard his words listened. He'll feel like he's back at the bottom of the hill, putting his shoulder to the stone once again.”