Underbelly (8 page)

Standing in the tableau, a mellow croon by Billy Eckstine filled the space. When he was a kid, he had an uncle, husband of his mom's sister, who'd lived out here and visited the family in Chicago in the summer. Uncle Calvin would sit around drinking Hamms and Pabst beer, playing dominoes with his father and his friends, telling stories about Central Avenue, the Stem, from back in the day. Later, eating his fries at a McDonald's inside the Science Center, he watched a group of kids ohhing and ahhing on some kind of school outing. Time was tight indeed.

Because of traffic and the work around the Emerald Shoals project, he got back downtown on the bus to the coffee house late. There they were showing a '60s four-waller,
The Brain Invaders.
Angie Baine was second-billed with John Agar as some sort of scientist to his military man. She of course also falls in love with him, but has to electrocute him atop Mount Wilson after he's turned into a brain eater. All part of some Russki shenanigans it seemed. The audience dug it.

Afterward, with Angie seated up front and looking pretty together, she answered questions and signed copies of a book about B-movie actresses that included a write-up about her and some cheesecake shots. Magrady looked through the coffee table book and stopped appreciatively on a shot of a nude Baine, hair up in a beehive, in an old-fashioned bathtub filled with liquefied chocolate. Seductively she munched on a giant strawberry with several of the fruit sprinkled about in the chocolate.

“Bet you figured I'd be wasted, huh?” she told him as he came up to congratulate her as the crowd filtered away.

“Well,” he began.

“You've inspired me, Magrady. I wasn't drinking at the King Eddy. But I was on my way to get my hair done, and knew Earl would at least let me make a call.” She squeezed his hand. “Glad you came.”

“Yeah, this was great, Angie.”

“You can be sweet when you want to be.” She kissed him on the neck.

An octogenarian who'd been hanging back clomped over using his walker. He had on a turtleneck, a wig worse than what Phil Spector had dared to wear in court, and a large medallion on a heavy gold plated chain around his neck. Baine smiled weakly at him and the old fella socked Magrady in the gut. It wasn't much of a blow.

“This is him, isn't it? This is the swingin' dick bastard you're schtupping these days?”

Angie Baine giggled and Magrady took a step back. The clown with the bad rug might not be a candidate for an AARP-sanctioned boxing match, but he wasn't inclined to take another punch, no matter how anemic, to his stomach.

“Be cool, Jeremy,” she said to the senior citizen. “You don't want to stroke out.”

“Who is this chump?” Magrady asked, eyebrow raised.

“He adds yet another insult to his affronts.” His arms shook his walker. “Who am I,” he mocked.

“Jeremy was the director-producer of
Brain Invaders
among other such efforts,” Baine illuminated, touching the oldster's shoulder. This instantly put a calming effect on him, and he relaxed.

“Then how come you weren't at the screening, Coppola?”

“I was getting my pole waxed, Cool Breeze,” he groused at Magrady.

“Look here, dad,” Magrady started, thumping Jeremy's medallion with the back of two fingers. It depicted in bas-relief a nude couple doing it 69-style. Real classy. “Shouldn't you be more concerned with how many times a day you need to take your blood pressure pills?” He couldn't help it. Ever since he was a teenager, when a guy tried to make time with a girl of his, he'd have to show he wasn't a punk. Bad old habits died awfully hard.

Baine twinkled a smile at him. “Stop.”

Jeremy whatever the hell his last name was said, “Baby, let's let the past stay where it belongs. You know I'll do right by you. Fact, I've got a movie in mind that I want you for as the lead.”

“Get real, Jer, those days are long gone,” Baine advised.

He smiled with freshly scrubbed dentures. “I'm serious, Angie. Some youngsters over at 'SC film school had me over there for a double bill at the Norris Theater on campus, and we got to talking after the Q & A.” He shuffled his body closer so as to insert himself between Baine and Magrady.

“You know those rich little shits over there. A couple of these kids got parents in the Industry. One of them has called me since and wants to talk about me doing some direct-to-video pictures.”

It was Baine's turn to arch a brow. “With an old broad as the star?” She laughed heartily. “I don't do granny porn, Jeremy.” She winked at Magrady. “At least not for the public.”

The crusty director made a sound in his throat. “I'm not that hard up to get back behind the camera. This is legit. Hell, I'll give Magic Mandingo here a role if that's what it'll take.”

“I got your sister's Magic Mandingo right here, Jer.”

The object of his derision turned slightly, wearing a lopsided smile. “Yes, I'm sure you do.”

“Boys,” Baine said to forestall another go-round. She put her hand in the crook of Magrady's arm. “It was good seeing you again, Jeremy.”

The ancient filmmaker repositioned himself on his walker as the couple started to leave. “Let me repeat that I'm not kidding about this, Ange. I'm not so deluded to believe this is some sort of comeback, but wouldn't it be nice to go out on a high note?”

She squeezed Magrady's upper arm. “The moonlight stopped shining on us a long time ago, Jeremy.”

He pointed a gnarled finger upward. “There might be just one more in the firmament for us.”

Baine offered Magrady a resigned look and wrote down a contact number on the back of a discarded parking lot ticket and handed it to Jeremy. His teeth clacked as he smiled broadly. The two left, the night cooler than expected. She snuggled closer.

“You gonna spend the night?”

“If you like,” he said warmly.

She kissed him. “I do.” They walked deeper into the Nickel like kids out on Lover's Lane. They passed a skeleton-thin man in a derby defecating in an alleyway and a woman with very few
teeth padded in clothes of mismatched styles pushing a shopping cart. Leaning in the cart was a three-foot-tall plaster statue of a brightly painted Ann-Margaret in go-go boots and miniskirt circa the 1970s.

Magrady put an arm around Baine's shoulders just as an LAPD cruiser drifted near. It was one of the newer Chevy Commodore models. The uniforms put the alley light on them to make sure the burly black man wasn't manhandling the nice white lady. Or was Stover keeping that close of a watch on him? Magrady worried. Was that being paranoid or precautious?

“You okay, ma'am?” one of the cops asked, putting the wolf's gleam on Magrady.

“I'm fine,” Baine smiled, waving them off. They kept the light on the couple for several more beats, then drove off. Further up the patrol car illuminated two Grape Street Crips and the cops stopped and detained the gangbangers.

As they walked along, Bain said, “Say, I also called you because Floyd got in touch.”

“He wants that pass card back, doesn't he?”

“You're a regular Nick Carter.”

“Ain't I? You tell him I had it?”

“Of course not. I'm your Velda, right?”

They both chuckled. “He's coming by?”

“Said for me to meet him 'round one tomorrow at that farmer's market they have up at the VA in Westwood.”

Magrady regarded her.

Her shoulders lifted and fell. “Don't ask me. Maybe he wanted to avoid Asher.” She referred to the one-armed desk clerk at her SRO. “They don't get along.”

“More likely he's staying out that way.”

“See, you are a clever dick.”

“I hope you mean that in a good way. And you know for a woman your age you sure talk.. suggestively.”

“It doesn't seem to bother you.”

“This is so.”

To be polite he called Janis Bonilla from a phone at the Midnight Mission. A case worker Magrady had done a favor for let him do so.

After some chit-chat, Bonilla cracked, “You got all the dames worried about you, huh?”

“Good night, Janis.”

“Good night, Gracie.”

Magrady was relieved that Asher wasn't on the desk at the Chesapeake, though he'd encountered him there during nighttimes in the past. Getting into a hassle now when he was hankering to direct his energies elsewhere would just be a drag. Concentration was everything.

Sure the rules were no guests after 8 p.m. but plenty of clerks, unlike the anal Asher, let you violate that rule—particularly if you offered money or booze or a hit of something stronger as thanks. In this case, El Cid, Sid Ramos, was on duty. He was a mellow fellow veteran as far as Magrady was concerned.

“Em,” he said in that rasp of his, knocking a fist with his friend. He'd been over there before Magrady, a homeboy from El Sereno who wound up being a Lurp, an LRRP, a long range reconnaissance patrol maniac. These were men who operated in
small teams, going deep in country to scout air strike targets and do recon. It took a certain type who liked being alone with their doubts and fears for days on end yet remain coiled. El Cid had engaged in various activities when he got back to the world, including a jolt in the pen.

Magrady retorted, “It bees like that.” He grinned at El Cid as the two moved past. The desk man returned to reading his book,
The Last Cavalier
, by Alexandre Dumas. As Magrady understood it back in his time, while Dumas was in bad shape and his work out of favor with the critics, but not the masses, he couldn't help but do his thing and churned out a daily serial in a newspaper. Nowadays some pipe-smoking academic had come along and put the chapters together and edited them as the last novel by the cat who created the Three Musketeers. Magrady realized these knot-head, pants-saggin' kids only knew the Musketeers as the name of a candy bar, let alone Dumas was part black.

Damn youngsters didn't know squat these days, Magrady lamented as Baine slowly stroked him as they kissed. Thereafter they went at it like caged minks.

B
EFORE LIGHT THE NEXT MORNING
, and after another invigorating thrash with the able Ms. Baine, Magrady dreamed of Vietnam. But this wasn't a sweaty rehash of a firefight or reliving yet again the horror of watching some greenie writhing in the mud holding his guts in while being held down by his comrades as the medic tried to super glue the wounds closed.

This was an incident on base where a Japanese-American sergeant was walking from the outdoor showers with a towel wrapped around his waist. Two freshly rotated in replacements, one black, one white, saw him and freaked out. “VC! VC!” they started hollering, with the excited black GI bringing up his M-60 to spray the sergeant.

“Hey, you goddamn idiot,” the sergeant swore, “I went to Dorsey High School in Los Angeles.”

“He's trying to trick us,” the white one told his buddy.

Magrady had spotted this and with some others had already run over and stopped the altercation before blood flowed.

The sergeant shook his head afterward. “JAFS,” he said. To Magrady's puzzled look he illuminated, “Just Another Fucked-up Situation.”

They both chuckled as the man went off to get dressed in his uniform. What ever happened to those two chuckleheads, Magrady couldn't say. But that JA sergeant, whose name was Yoshida, became a public defender. This he knew as during one of his lost periods, by the randomness of the cosmic wheel, Yoshida had been assigned by his office to represent Magrady after he'd been arrested for trespassing—while tore up on coke and booze.

“You don't remember,” the attorney had said after interviewing Magrady in jail about his case.

“I do,” he admitted, ashamed. “I just hoped you didn't remember me.”

The other man nodded his head. “It's JAFS, Magrady. You're not the first one of us I've helped whose had some bad luck after coming back to the world. We'll get past this and take it from there.”

Sure enough he got a return engagement back in rehab coupled with a community service sentence reduction. Yoshida had him placed with Community Now, a grassroots organization his wife sat on the board of in those days. Eventually, due partly to strategic planning and partly to infighting, Community Now would become Urban Advocacy

Daybreak, he in his boxers and Baine in a slip, the two lay together in bed listening to a Bartók CD. Her head on his torso, Baine asked him, “You think about your kids?”

He massaged her butt. Considering her seven-plus decades, it was quite a lovely sensation. But at his age, Magrady could squeeze fresh bread and get a thrill. “Yeah, a lot recently.” It probably would break the mood to tell her partly because he had his gun at his oldest's house out in Diamond Bar.

“You?” She had a grown son she hadn't seen for some time. A lying, cheatin'-ass doper he recalled from bitter experience.

“Chad got word to me. Says he's clean and lean.”