American Dream Machine (35 page)

All of us were barely sixteen. But we understood Marnie’s needs, I think. Our planned stopover in Joshua Tree suddenly seemed a bad idea. I hardly remember the rest of that night. Severin played a little more guitar and eventually we crawled into our tents and sleeping bags, then lay down on the hard ground and tried to sleep. I found myself imagining the scorpion tucked inside my hiking boot, the embers catching a dry twig, the subtle advance of a snake. That campground, with its high pines and dusty air of abandonment alongside a comfortable
RV
park, became a charmed circle. It was the last place our childhood would ever be seen alive. We drove home the next morning, and if that had been an era of
PDA
s and cell phones, we would’ve had our information long before we reached Los Angeles. Marnie’s phone would’ve rung off the hook, and if we had been in Williams’s other, more Italian, automobile—the one that had such a device in it—we’d have found out too. But the old Peugeot had only a broken cigarette lighter and a Blaupunkt, which didn’t give us anything until we were well within
LA
County.

—
KABC
news time 7:48. Talent agent Williams Farquarsen is still missing after a two-day search
.

“Wait, what?” All of us were jumbled around now in the car. Severin drove, Williams was in the passenger seat, and Marnie was in back with me, her head cushioned with a wadded flannel shirt as she slept. “
WHAT?
”

Severin reached over to turn the volume up. Williams, astonishingly, stopped him.

—
last seen Thursday afternoon in Burbank. Farquarsen’s absence has been reported by
—

“What are you doing?”

—
colleagues
—

Williams IV snapped the radio off.

“What the fuck, man?” Sev glared.

Will looked at Severin. And said nothing. My head spun—Williams was “missing”? What the hell could that mean?—but those two understood one another. Marnie slept on. I think in that moment they grasped what I never would, a certain kind of loss that was beyond even me. Where was Sev’s mom, say? Whatever happened to her? In that brief moment, conditioned as we’d all been, I think Williams didn’t need to hear any more. He knew exactly what was happening.

“What the fuck?” Severin repeated, without intensity. But Williams only stared straight ahead.

“Just drive.”

We’d dropped down via I-15 through Riverside and San Bernardino, recently transited places like Rancho Cucamonga and Ontario, those godforsaken fringes of the Inland Empire.
Temecula
. Redtipped radio towers and billboards. Indian casinos and wind.

“Hey, Severin.” Marnie woke up now, stretching. “You want me to drive?”

Bellflower, Carson, West Covina. Williams could’ve been hiding in any of these places.
Missing
. I doubt he was recognizable outside
LA
metro. Within the city limits, he was the Story.

“Dad’s missing,” Williams said.

“What?” Marnie shot up toward the front seat.

“The radio says—”

Marnie lunged for the radio to turn it on, but Severin obliged her quicker.

“What’s wrong with you?” she snapped at Williams. “Really, I wonder.”

“Mom,” he said. Like there was still the possibility “missing” could mean something benign.

“Will, he’s your father,” she said softly. “You know as well as I do he doesn’t go on furlough.”

I’d never seen an adult cry, not in anything other than an alcoholic frenzy, and so I stared at Marnie while she sat with her hands
in her lap and wept, a mucusy storm like a child’s. I handed her my bandanna and she blew her nose. Severin searched the dial through all kinds of irrelevance, the plodding tonalities of FM rock, before he found another news station that might tell us.

—
Hollywood agent Williams Farquarsen is still missing. Police say he disappeared Thursday afternoon following a meeting with Warner Communications Vice Chairman Ted Ashley
—

The radio didn’t provide much, just reiterated that he was gone. Four days wasn’t long for anyone else, but Williams’s movements were so predictable. Even the cops knew this wasn’t normal.

—
is no suspicion of criminal activity, and Farquarsen is not believed to have fled the country
—

Marnie spotted a gas station. “Pull over.”

We’d just gotten off the 10 and were a few miles north of their house on Lincoln Boulevard. Marnie raced to the pay phones, and the three of us kids sat in stilted silence under the filling island’s strips of yellow neon. There was the oily reek of gasoline. The radio repeated the facts. Will the elder was a no-show for work on Friday and had missed a number of important meetings over the weekend. It was now Monday night.

“I’m sorry,” I said to my friend. What else should I have said? But when Little Will turned and met my gaze, I realized I shouldn’t have said anything at all.

“C’mon,” he said to Sev. “Let’s go get some cigs.”

“Grab me some gum,” I said, but he ignored me.

The two of them walked off to the mini-mart and left me sitting in the car. Was something wrong with young Will’s response? It seems to me now a healthy effort toward denial. I watched Marnie pump quarters into the phone, calling and re-calling Will’s friends until she could find someone who might give her a straight answer. Where was I supposed to go? I lay in the backseat with both doors open and sucked air, sick exhaust, the diesel fumes from the freeway. The night was cool, and the traffic on the 10 made a frantic, serpentine hiss. But there wasn’t any place to run from it, nowhere I could imagine where bad news wouldn’t eventually find us.

WILLIAMS THE ELDER
never came home. He just didn’t surface. Weeks passed, and there were no developments.

“Anything, Mom?” My friend stood in his bathing suit, at my house, dripping after a swim. Every day he called home and each time received the same answer, Marnie’s sharp voice spiking from the receiver.

“Nothing, kid. They’re still looking.”

My own lungs seemed to pump with dread. Just as Beau had revealed himself to me a few years ago as my true father, to my ecstasy and despair, Williams’s vanishing filled me with a primary terror. The events felt related. Could dads just come and go? The cops interviewed Severin; they interviewed Beau. They interviewed everyone remotely close to the situation, including me. Everything was cloudy: the way Will’s Ferrari was still garaged in the Marina, for example, or the way his monogrammed shirts still hung undisturbed in his closet, every last one accounted for. The situation fascinated Hollywood.
Where had Williams gone?
Teddy became the agency’s acting president. People speculated like crazy—yes, even Beau came under some suspicion—but soon enough, they grew tired of it. Williams’s life left so few toeholds: there were no drug problems, no mistresses, no gambling debts or mob ties. By mid-July the case had been pushed back into the deeper reaches of the Metro section, the City pages of the
Herald Examiner
. Williams Farquarsen was missing. Well, yes, but there were still the Olympic Games and Miss America’s resignation and the first female space walker to think about. Hollywood wasn’t
everything, after all. Young Williams and I hunkered down that summer at my house. It was just too chilly, too vacant at his. Marnie and my mom, who’d recently begun dating a smooth New York producer type named Peter Klane—he would appear suddenly in his battered maroon Mercedes, take unexplained flights to Copenhagen or Rio—formed a loose federation based on grief. My friends and I stuck together, and young Williams stayed at my place for an entire month while our mothers went out to dinner and commiserated over Soave Bolla and steamed clams. Then one afternoon the phone rang. My mom picked it up downstairs. I knew immediately. Her voice was somber, serious in a way that had become unusual.

“Will?” she called up. “It’s Marnie.”

He and I were in my room. It made little difference whether we were high, now. The paranoia was with us all the time. I lay on my bed reading
The Dharma Bums
and Williams sat by the window, smoking. Anyone looking would’ve seen not stoners but students, two short-haired boys in khakis with coffee mugs. In a few weeks, we’d enter eleventh grade. I stood up and turned down the stereo on Brian Eno’s
Another Green World
. Williams picked up the tan phone on my nightstand.

“Mom?”

What had I done with that phone, besides talk with people to whom I had nothing to say, call 976 lines and jerk off to the recorded voices of women? Had it ever relayed anything of importance to me? Williams listened in silence, and I went into the hall. Whatever Marnie was telling him was for his ears alone.

“Nate?” My mother stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Williams’s dad is dead.”

She stared up at me. She could still do a convincing impersonation of a rational human being when she needed to. Her big square sunglasses were propped on her head and her hair was pulled back, her gaunt, alcoholic face a rictus of concern.

“I’m sorry, Nate.”

“I am, too.”

That summer, my mother was writing a movie about Princess Grace. Her office, that little shed out by our swimming pool, was a hothouse ruin of gin bottles, index cards, and ashtrays, typed sheets cysted with Liquid Paper. Her skin was crisscrossed with capillaries.

“What happened?” I said.

“He was mugged.”

“Seriously?”

Would I have believed her even if she were telling the truth?

“On the street, downtown. It happened while you were away, but the body wasn’t identified at the morgue.”

I watched my mother. I’d be able to identify her no matter what, so something would’ve had to mangle Williams Farquarsen’s body quite a bit before no one could name it.

“How could they not have identified him?”

She shrugged. “He wasn’t carrying an ID. They had the body as a John Doe. Apparently it was an accident. They think he got hurt during a struggle and bled to death.”

The pieces all fit, but I wasn’t sure I believed them.
Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic
. So said the Raymond Chandler essay my English teacher had assigned me, and this was certainly realistic enough. But at sixteen you’re suspicious of everyone and everything, so who knew? Maybe it was true, maybe the elder Williams had gone to an event—of what kind I didn’t know, since downtown was mostly the province of painters and punks, not Hollywood
machers
—then been jumped and beaten up and left to bleed out on the street. Maybe he’d been scooped off the muck-brown pavement and locked in a metal drawer alongside the drunks and the transients no one ever wondered about anyway. Some lazy beat cop could’ve written him off as such. But nothing to identify him at all? And Williams was a martial artist, so any mugger would’ve had to be swift.

“I see,” I said. Staring down at my mother’s narrow, semiderelict face.

Most of her life was intolerable. If I could reel her back into its earlier years, if I could find its little seams of hope or happiness, I would. Just because a life is awful doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.

“Poor Williams,” she said, meaning my friend. “Poor kid.”

“Yeah.”

“Be good to him, Nate. Look after him.”

She knew something I didn’t. For all the brute and horrible and careless acts she herself would commit, she knew I wasn’t a good
enough friend: I was already too selfish. Williams came out of my room a moment later. He looked so adult, in that way actual adults don’t often, calm and responsible behind his tortoiseshell glasses. He flicked a strand of hair off his forehead.

“My dad died.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, dude.”

“He was jumped on the street.”

My mother turned away. I can imagine what this looked like to her—two boys discussing this as if it were anything speakable, sensical.

“Dude,” I said.
De profundis
. What matter if I sounded like a future beer commercial? “I’m so sorry.”

Williams nodded. Whatever his mother had told him, it wasn’t exactly identical but it was close. A mugging. What an end for a Hollywood ruler, a man who’d governed everything but the tides.

“Thanks.” His face was stark in its privacy. “I appreciate that.”

Williams, my friend, was the first of us to grow up all the way. Unless, in fact, he was the last. Downstairs, my mother wept in the kitchen, her sobs competing with the clatter of dishes as she put them away. Our dog, a psychotic terrier, was chasing something out in the yard, the sound of his voice reduced to a rude gargle. I could hear his nails scrabbling on concrete, my mother’s yips and wails. I opened my mouth but found nothing more articulate to offer, myself.

PART FOUR:
RECURRING

“WILLIAMS! WAKE UP, MAN!
Wake the fuck up!”

He lolled in the front seat. A cold, predawn wind fluttered in my ears, whistled along the car’s rubberized window seams. And because I couldn’t do anything, because Severin was still zooming toward a hospital that didn’t exist, I took it upon myself to pull Will’s damp hair and shake him.

“Wake up, buddy! Come on!”

He was our friend. He may have been an idiot, too, but were we supposed to feel any less for him?

“Sev, what the fuck?” I yelled. We were crossing La Cienega, effectively killing our chances of reaching a proper hospital in time. You went east into deep Hollywood and you were left with Kaiser Permanente, the sorts of places that would reject our shitty insurance plans instead of remembering who our fathers were. “This isn’t the moment to get nostalgic!”

My brother banked sharply down La Cienega, pulling his Gremlin at a ninety-degree angle across what would’ve been a wall of traffic were it not 4:00
AM
. Down a steep hill, past the strange ruin of the Circus Maximus. Its cracked clown faces yawned, cattails breaking through its whorehouse decay.

“What are you doing, Sev? Playing Steve fucking McQueen?”

He cackled.
Just messing with you
.