Buster Midnight's Cafe (17 page)

“Well, she stands like her then.”

I studied the statue for a minute, but I couldn’t see it. “She doesn’t have any arms, either,” I told her.

“May Anna, you ought to buy whole people,” Whippy Bird told her.

“White dresses,” I said. “To match everything else around here. May Anna, how come everything’s white?”

“A decorator from Sing Sing did it. Besides, it’s not all white since you got here.” That was surely true.

Me and Whippy Bird gave a lot of thought to a present to bring May Anna. She already had about a hundred pictures of Moon, and we sent her candy from Gamer’s on her birthday every year. May Anna said bring her some snow, so Moon filled up a jar with snow, but it melted into brown water. Just before we left, Whippy Bird came up with the right answer, as she always does.

We gave May Anna her present right after she showed us the house. It was wrapped in a big grocery sack and tied with a bunch of string. May Anna untied every single knot, even though she didn’t save the string, then she slid the present out of the sack and laughed and laughed. It was the wood cutout of the jug from the Brown Jug. “I got married to Buster under that sign. This is a wedding present,” she said. “How did you get it?”

“Stole it. What else?” Whippy Bird replied.

May Anna was so pleased, she took down a mirror in her living room and hung the sign in its place. It was dirty, because me and Whippy Bird never thought about dusting it off before we wrapped it, and May Anna got cobwebs on her slacks when she was hanging it up. She didn’t mind. We all admired how fine that brown jug looked in May Anna’s white house. It hung there for the rest of her life.

May Anna handed me the suntan lotion, but I shook my head because the sun never hurt me. “May Anna, isn’t there anything to do around here?” I asked her, and we all laughed.

The truth was this was the first time we’d sat down in the week we’d been there. May Anna took us to the Brown Derby for lunch. It was a restaurant in a big brown hat where they charged too much. May Anna said people from Nebraska went there and mistook each other for movie stars. She was surely right because somebody asked me for my autograph, probably because I was wearing one of May Anna’s hats, one with a veil that covered my face and made it hard to eat.

Mostly, though, May Anna sent us off in the Caddie by ourselves. She said if she was along, we’d never get to see anything because of the people asking for autographs, and that was surely true. Every time she was with us and we stopped, people gathered around May Anna and asked would she sign something personal in their autograph books. Or would she pose for a picture. They asked whether she was going to marry Clark Gable even though she’d never met him. Me and Whippy Bird had to stand there for about twenty minutes waiting for her to finish.

Me and Whippy Bird liked riding around in the Cadillac because people stared and tried to figure out who we were. Sometimes Whippy Bird waved her arm as she got out of the car and said, “No autographs. Please, no autographs.”

The best thing we did in Hollywood was go to Warner Bros, with May Anna and visit her trailer and even sit in the chair that said
MARION STREET
on the back. It wasn’t so comfortable. I’d rather have overstuffed. Then we went into the cafeteria, which everyone calls the commissary, at Warner Bros., which everyone calls Sing Sing, which you already know. We saw all the famous people who were working there that day. We even saw Bette Davis’s back. She was dressed in lace and jewels, only the jewels were glass. You could have fooled me. Whippy Bird says fooling you is no big trick, Effa Commander.

Everybody called everybody else darling, and so did May Anna. Anna Bates, who was once May Anna’s roommate though she never became a star like May Anna, came by and said, “Darling, I’m so sorry …” but she didn’t say what she was sorry about, and we didn’t ask. May Anna introduced us as her best friends. “How quaint,” she said. She must have liked us.

After she left, Whippy Bird said she didn’t think Anna Bates was sincere. May Anna said sincerity in Hollywood was as hard to find as virginity in Venus Alley.

When John Garfield stopped by, May Anna introduced us and said we were friends of hers from Butte. Now we’d never cared much about John Garfield until he said, “Nice place, Butte. Nice mountains.” So you can believe he was one of our favorites after that.

May Anna didn’t pay much attention to him. She was watching a fat man in red pants make his way past the tables. When he reached ours, May Anna grabbed for his hand. “David!”

“Oh, hiya, honey.”

May Anna was all keyed up, and me and Whippy Bird looked at each other wondering what was going on. “When I read the script for
Debutantes at War
I thought, oh, my God, the part of Esther was written just for me. I know it was,” May Anna said, not letting go of his hand.

He wasn’t what you’d call friendly. He looked down his nose and said, “Sorry, honey. It’s an ingenue role.” Then he pulled his hand away, leaving May Anna looking crushed. Then he noticed Whippy Bird’s curls. “Are they real?” he asked.

“Are yours?” Whippy Bird asked, looking at his bald head.

“Son of a bitch,” May Anna said when he left.

“Damn fool,” Whippy Bird said. After she explained to me what
ingenue
meant, I asked why May Anna didn’t play women her own age.

“How many movies have you seen with thirty-one-year-old heroines?” Whippy Bird replied.

I thought about that later while I sat next to May Anna’s swimming pool, watching her slap on suntan lotion. Maybe it wasn’t so easy being a famous movie star.

We heard the phone ring. Then the maid came out and announced it was May Anna’s agent. She went inside, and we couldn’t help but hear her. “The son of a bitch told me I was too old. Twenty-six is not too old!” Me and Whippy Bird looked at each other. “You tell him I can sing like a bird.”

Me and Whippy Bird were still looking at each other when Whippy Bird said, “Is a chicken a bird?”

Then we heard May Anna say, “It’s a good thing Sing Sing didn’t produce
Snow White.
They’d of cast me as the old witch. Listen, I need that job. I need the smack. They’re talking about not renewing my contract. You get the part for me or I’ll find somebody who can.”

“May Anna has troubles,” Whippy Bird said.

“She doesn’t live a life of ease like we thought,” I replied.

We heard May Anna slam down the phone. A minute later she came out with a cigarette in her hand, flicking little bits of ash off her bathing suit.

“Why don’t you retire, May Anna?” I asked her. “You’ve got plenty of money. You could sell this house and live any place in the world and never have to work again. You wouldn’t have to go back to Butte. You must make more money than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt doesn’t pay rent. And he gets free limo service. I don’t own this place, I rent it,” she said. “And I owe for three months.”

“Then why don’t you move someplace you can afford?” Whippy Bird asked her.

“Ha!” May Anna said and stubbed out her cigarette on the table then threw the butt behind a statue. She lit another with a silver table lighter then took a long draw. “Nobody lives any place they can afford in this town. It’s all appearance. You have to look successful. It’s a rotten place, where everybody’s always watching for signs you’re on the skids.” She picked bits of tobacco out of her porcelain teeth with the red nail of her little finger then sat down with her feet in the pool.

“The funny thing is, I didn’t care about being an actress when I came here. I wanted to make money and be famous, be a movie star is what I mean. Now I want to be good. I’ve been taking acting lessons, and I think I’m getting better.” She looked embarrassed when she said it, but she didn’t need to. It’s OK to brag to your best friends.

Whippy Bird sat down next to her by the pool and splashed her feet in the water. “May Anna, we know you’re better. People used to go to see you because you’re beautiful. Now they go to see you because you’re an actress.” You might think that Whippy Bird said that because she was May Anna’s friend, but that’s not so. Whippy Bird is a good judge of acting. In the fifties, while we were watching
Medic,
a doctor show on television, Whippy Bird saw an actor she liked. She wrote him a letter of encouragement, maybe it was the first fan letter of his career. He even wrote back to say thanks for your support. That actor today is Dennis Hopper.

“Why don’t you quit the movies and marry Buster?” I asked her. For a minute, I was afraid I’d gone too far. Buster and May Anna weren’t any of my business. I didn’t know what was going on between them. We hadn’t seen Buster in a long time. We hoped to see him in California, but May Anna told us he had gone to New York for a fight.

“Sometimes I wonder myself why I don’t marry Buster. I guess it’s always in the back of my mind. I know that someday I will. But in this town, marriages don’t last very long. Everybody tries to get you married. If you’re married, they try to get you divorced. Besides, I’ve been dating one or two other men.”

The maid came back out and said May Anna’s agent wanted her again. While she was on the phone, Whippy Bird said, “Effa Commander, we have to stop spending May Anna’s money.”

“You mean the money she hasn’t got,” I said.

“We can stop taking the limo for one thing and find a street car, and swear off these fish eggs.”

“I should have brought along our gas ration coupons,” I said.

May Anna was smiling when she came back. “I’m going to have a party on Saturday night. A farewell party for my two best friends from Butte, since they’re going home on Sunday. My agent will bring David Veder. He’s the producer of
Debutantes at War.
The one you met. I’ll sing.”

Me and Whippy Bird stared at May Anna. “Oh, I know. I sound like a dump truck. But I’ll hire a loud band. David’s hard of hearing anyway. Everyone will tell him I’m wonderful. Besides, I think having a party is a fine idea. You can meet everybody—and they can meet you.”

Having a party is an easy thing to do in Hollywood. A secretary from the studio invited all the people, and May Anna’s cook did all the work. I don’t know why May Anna even had a cook because all she ate was dry toast and tuna fish out of a can. In fact, on the cook’s day off, when I fixed pasties and apple pie, May Anna said it was the only decent meal she’d had since she left Butte, even though she didn’t eat much of it. She said she had to be careful since the movie screen made you look fat.

Since me and Whippy Bird decided to help May Anna save money, Whippy Bird told the maid she would help clean the house, but the maid got mad and said the house was already clean. I told Cook—May Anna just called her Cook—I’d help her in the kitchen. She said she didn’t need me, but after May Anna talked to her, she said she did.

I thought ham sandwiches with plenty of mustard would be nice or maybe egg and onion sandwiches, which was a favorite of Buster’s. But Cook said people liked little cream cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off. They didn’t sound very good to me, but I guess people who like fish eggs eat other damn fool things, too.

Whippy Bird said I ought to make something special for the party, so I decided on Ginger Ale Salad, which is one of Whippy Bird’s favorites. Cook said I didn’t have to go to all that trouble, but it’s not as much trouble as you might think. Besides, it was for May Anna, wasn’t it? Whippy Bird said it was the best thing at the party, but she’s always handing out the compliments. I will admit, though, that when the party was over, the Ginger Ale Salad was gone but there were plenty of cream cheese sandwiches left. The Ginger Ale Salad only serves eight, though, and May Anna invited about a hundred and fifty people. I was surely a dummy for not making more.

Now I’m going to tell you who ate my Ginger Ale Salad. Mr. Errol Flynn, that’s who. Me and Whippy Bird saw him standing there by himself, and we dared each other to go up and say hello. We knew the best way to break the ice would be to say could we have your autograph. But after seeing how people were always after May Anna, we thought if we asked for an autograph we would look like a pair of amateurs instead of childhood friends of the famous star Marion Street. We had to find another way to meet him, which Whippy Bird did, as you might expect.

She marched right up to Mr. Flynn and said, “Hi, I’m Whippy Bird, and this is Effa Commander.”

“You mean there really is a Whippy Bird and an Effa Commander?” he asked, giving us his famous smile that you have seen light up the screen. You can bet that made us feel fine to think May Anna told people in Hollywood about us. Then he lifted his finger, and in about three seconds, there was a waiter with a tray of champagne glasses. He gave one to each of us.

When the waiter left, Mr. Flynn offered us a cigarette from a silver case. We said we didn’t mind if we did. It hit me and Whippy Bird at the same time that we were in Hollywood, California, drinking champagne and having Errol Flynn light our cigarettes.

He asked if we were having a good time and even complimented us on our dresses, which was nice because May Anna bought them for us as a treat that morning. She said she wanted to show us off and didn’t expect we’d packed our cocktail dresses.

So she sent us in the limo to a dress shop. We didn’t want her to pay, but May Anna told us she got dresses for a discount because she was a movie star, and shops wanted her to wear their clothes as an advertisement. Me and Whippy Bird never figured out why that shop would want to sell dresses to May Anna’s friends at a discount. Maybe they thought people in Butte would send them mail orders.

The clerk was waiting for us when we got there. I wanted the red dress that had sparkles all over it, but the clerk said the black one looked better, and Whippy Bird whispered that maybe May Anna had already ordered the black one for me. We thought since it didn’t have sparkles, it might be cheaper, though we couldn’t tell for sure because there weren’t any price tags. We each got a strapless black dress. The clerk wrapped them up and put them in the limo for us. We didn’t even have to carry the shopping bags.