The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (11 page)

A source, one might say of some slight bitterness in years to come.

—And what are you reading these days?

I looked up from the copy of
Down and Out in Paris and London
that I'd taken from his pile. I'd scooted over to the stool next to L.L. to make room for a couple that was waiting for a table. Full dinner service in swing, Chez Jay went from elbow room empty to sardine can packed in less than an hour. I'd forgotten.

Sitting at his side, reading silently, sipping at a beer, it came back.

Childhood revisited.

I closed the book.

—Horror mostly.

He rubbed his forehead, kept his eyes in his own book.

—Dare I ask by whom written?

—Whatever. Stephen King, Joe Lansdale, Clive Barker.

He winced.

—Web. Ambrose Bierce, Lovecraft, Stoker, for God sake.

I went on.

—Dean Koontz, Kellerman.

—Edgar Allan Poe, ever heard of him? J. S. LeFanu? Algernon Blackwood?

—James Herbert. Straub.

He slammed his book closed.

—Are you trying to kill me? Did you come here solely to antagonize me and rub my face in your ignorance? Certain tales by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton for fuck sake, all horror of the highest order. Dear God, Webster, Henry James! Shirley Jackson! Or in later years, Harlan Ellison, Bradbury, Matheson!

I slammed my own book.

—I'm not looking for fucking enlightenment, I'm looking to turn my fucking brain off for a couple hours!

He rose from his stool.

—Turn your brain off?
Turn your?

He began collecting his books.

—Well, I have news for you, Web.

He cradled the books and put his face in mine.

—You have fucking well succeeded at that!

Heads had turned, the manager was coming over.

L.L. took a thick roll of bills from the hip pocket of his faded and baggy madras shorts and flipped a couple hundreds on the bar.

—Sorry about the fracas, Ernesto. My son is a mongoloid, and if I don't speak at a certain volume and pitch he can't understand human speech.

Exit, L. L. Crows, having added to his great legacy of closing lines.

I never heard about how great teaching was when I was a little kid. By then, the mid-eighties, he was one of the senior script doctors of the industry,
a go-to guy when a little class was needed on a project, making an obscene living tweaking other writers' illiteracies. All I heard about was how vital the movies were.

People say escapism as if it were some foul bane. As if the denizens of this weary world were not deserving of some surcease and ease. They say it as if that is the only virtue the cinema might possess. As if it is not the great art form of the twentieth century. As if Godard and Fellini and Hitchcock and Cassavetes and Bergman and Altman and Wilder never walked the earth. One movie, one, of only moderate success, it touches more lives than I touched in nearly fifteen years of teaching. The years I toiled in that cesspool of incompetence and mediocrity called the public schools. I shudder, Web. My bowels turn to water when I think of what I might have accomplished. But no regrets, regrets are for small men with minor minds. We, my boy, we are for scaling mountains, you and I. We are for leaving monuments. A movie, a film, it is a testament in light and color and sound, a record of achievement, a projection of artistic vision penetrating directly into the brains of the audience. They cannot help but be touched, changed, when our words vibrate their eardrums, when the photons carrying our images strike the rods and cones of their eyes. Filmmaking, Web, let no one tell you otherwise, is a noble endeavor, the surest way for giant men to leave their marks upon the landscape of human emotions.

Delivered as he drove me around greater Los Angeles in his 560SL, after keeping me home from school so we could go to the NuArt together to see a Michael Curtiz revival, pointing from time to time with the hand that didn't contain a can of beer.

There, at Wilshire and Crenshaw, the house that served as exterior for Nora Desmond's mansion. There, the rest home Jack and Faye go to in
Chinatown.
There, the Ennis Brown House, Price's
House on Haunted Hill.
The Ambassador Hotel, where Anne Bancroft and Hoffman have their affair. Your mom and I fucked there once. Here in San Pedro, right there, they filmed the Skull Island landing in
King Kong.
This spot here, Hollywood and Sunset, where Griffith built his Babylonian temple and staged the single largest orgy of all time.

Mom was spending most of her time in Big Sur by then, hanging with the Esalen crowd. Yoga and transcendental meditation and organic hummus and mud baths and, I assume, fucking men considerably younger and less caustic than her older and no longer looked-up-to husband.

So she wasn't around when L.L. got the call that his screenplay had finally
been green-lighted. She missed the scene when his ghostwriter pals drove up the canyon to drink their way through the case of Krug he opened for the occasion. She missed the following morning when he got the final draft of the script from his agent and found that it had been rewritten five times in the year since it had been most recently optioned; thick batches of colored pages mixed into the script, indicating the many hands that had revised his work. She missed the evisceration he performed on the house after reading the rewrites, while I sat out front on my Big Wheel, and Chev and I listened to him creating a whole new lexicon of cursing. And by the time the movie was made two years year later, with Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald in the leads, directed by John Badham, she had relinquished claims on communal property and left for Oregon to find her
true self, unencumbered by the artificial constraints of marriage and rigidity of bourgeois child-rearing concepts.
That final exit relieving her of the scene after L.L. went, hope springs eternal, to the premiere.

He sat through it. All one hundred and seventy-nine minutes of it. Sat through every tired cough and forced laugh from the audience, sat through the round of relieved applause as the credits rolled. Sat through the entirety of its mediocrity, and saw it as a movie guilty of the ultimate crime: forgettability It wasn't even bad enough to be remembered for the incompetence brought to bear. Nor, after all the years and near-misses gone by, were the expectations, or the budget, high enough for it to be held out as a great flop. He sat in the theater, enduring the shoulder pats and congratulations of various sucker fish of the movie business. And I sat in the seat next to him the whole while.

The climax Mom missed by fleeing north was to come the following morning when L.L.'s agent informed him that his name could not be removed from the credits.
An Alan Smithee Film
would never grace the opening titles. So he began making a bonfire of every bit of movie memorabilia, every treasured celluloid print, stacks of laser disks, collected and bound editions of every screenplay in which his talent had played a roll, and his SWG membership card, and proceeded to burn down half the house, nearly sending an inferno through the canyon and over the entire range of the Hollywood Hills.

The next day, after L.L.'s lawyer got him out on bail for his arson charges, I was enrolled in private school, gifted with a collection of the
Great Western Works of Literature
, and received my first in a lifelong series
of lectures praising the professional educator and condemning popular culture in all its forms.

But never condemning the movies. Which, to tell by their eradication from L.L.'s conversation, were an advancement in entertainment that had never existed at all.

I followed him out to the parking lot, to his current SL, the latest in a line of annual acquisitions. That residual money for the years of hackery still rolling in.

—L.L.

He dropped the books on the back seat of the open-top car, adding them to the small library jumbled there, and turned to me.

—What? What can I do for you that I have not already done? Having seeded you and nourished you and clothed you and educated you, what more is there that I can do at this late date?

I looked at the purple veins in his nose. The swollen feet stuffed into chef's clogs, the spindly legs sticking from the shorts, the sweat-stained fishing hat that covered the melanoma scars on his bald head. I thought about reminding him of a few details from our life. And then not seeing him again for another two years.

Instead I thought about the dead man's stain soaking through the carpet, maggot trails leading away from motor oil blood and greasy tallow.

I pointed at the car.

—I could use a ride.

He started to raise a pointing finger, and stopped.

—Yes. A ride.

He opened the driver side door.

—Get in then.

I walked around the car and got in and he drove to the parking lot exit and waited for a couple pedestrians on the sidewalk, and I saw him looking down at the pier, at the merry-go-round. He rubbed his mouth, opened it, closed it.

Leaving me to hear what he'd said many times, over twenty years gone down, in this same place.

There, on the pier, the merry-go-round Paul Newman runs in
The Sting.
Do you want to ride it?

In front of the apartment L.L. reached into the backseat and knocked through the books until he found the copy
of Anna Karenina
he'd abused me with at the bar, and flipped through the pages as I got out of the car.

He closed it and held it out.

—Take this.

—I've read it.

He leaned across the seat and shoved the book into my chest.

—Read it again. It will help keep you from getting any more ignorant than you have already become.

—Well, when you put it that way.

I took the book.

—Thanks.

He put the car in gear.

—Don't thank me. Just read the damn book.

And he was off, tires breaking traction as he squealed away, nearly running over my feet.

I watched him careen around the corner, almost killing a man pushing a bicycle hung with plastic bags filled with empty bottles and cans.

—I'd say it was good to see you, L.L., but I'd be so fucking lying.

—I love
Anna Karenina.

I looked at Dot, still on my couch, still in Chev's Misfits T, but now appareled with low-rider jeans, several textbooks scattered around her.

—What the fuck are you doing here?

—Studying. What's your favorite part? Mine's when they tour Europe together.

I walked to Chev's bedroom door and looked inside, finding the usual piles of dirty clothes, overflowing ashtrays, Cramps and Black Flag and
Hot Rod
magazine posters, and liberally sex-stained sheets. But no Chev.

—What I meant by my question was,
what the fuck are you doing here?

She reached under her shirt and scratched at the nipple Chev had pierced.

—I'm taking summer term so I can graduate in three years and they cram like five months of work into like five weeks and I have to study for like three tests and my sister is having her sweet sixteen at the house and she's been watching those shows about those huge birthday parties girls throw and she's doing a theme that's supposed to be Studio 54 but it looks like it's going to be more like Adult Film Stars of the Future and the place is infuckingsane because she's being an utter and total rag and I have to have quiet so I can pass fucking developmental psychology which is totally kicking my ass.

I put a hand to my forehead.

—But what the fuck are you doing
here?

She picked up her notebook and tapped a pen with a fuzzy purple ball at the end against the lecture outline neatly printed on the open page.

—Chev said it was cool.

—Chev's not the only one who lives here.

She doodled a little kitty face.

—He said if you were a dick I should remind you that he's the only one paying rent right now.

I dropped the book at her feet.

—Fuck you. Have a book.

She picked it up with one hand, scratching her nipple again with the other.

—Cool! Thanks.

I walked to the kitchen, pointing at her chest.

—And don't do that, it'll get infected and your nipple will fall off and the rich, shallow and handsome afterbirth you're destined to marry will reject you and you'll end up a crack whore.

I opened the fridge and looked at the shelves stuffed with groceries; fresh, organic, very healthy groceries.

—What the fuck?

She settled into the couch, opening the Tolstoy in her lap.

—I took some of the money you left this morning and went shopping.

I closed the door and looked at her.

—Chev is going to shit when he sees food in here that didn't come from the Arby's or the In-N-Out.

She flipped pages.

—No he's not. He likes me a lot. He said so.

I took a package of tofu from the fridge.

—He say that before or after you bought this?

She flipped more pages.

—Doesn't matter. He likes me. I can tell.