Death Is a Lonely Business (20 page)

I often saw him riding his bright orange Raleigh eight-speed bike along the ocean walk from Venice to Ocean Park and Santa Monica. He was always dressed in a fine, freshly pressed, brown hound's-tooth English suit with a dark brown Irish cap pulled over his snow-white curls and shading his General Erwin Rommel or, if you prefer, killer hawk's Conrad-Veidt-about-to-smother-Joan-Crawford-or-Greer-Garson face. His cheeks were burned to a wonderful polished nutmeg color, and I often wondered if the color stopped at his neckline, for I had never seen him out on the sand, stripped. Forever, he cycled up and down between the ocean towns, at liberty, waiting to be summoned by the German General Staff or the club ladies over at the Hollywood Assistance League, whichever came first. When there was a cycle of war films, he worked constantly, for it was rumored he had a full closet of Afrika Korps uniforms and a burial cape for the occasional vampire film.

As far as I could tell, he had only one casual outfit, that suit. And one pair of shoes, fine English oxblood brogues, highly polished. His bicycle clips, brightly clasping his tweed cuffs, looked to be pure silver from some shop in Beverly Hills. His teeth were always so finely polished, they seemed not his own. His breath, as he pedaled past, was Listerine, just in case he had to take a fast call from Hitler on his way to Playa Del Rey.

I saw him most often motionless, astride his bike, Sunday afternoons, when Muscle Beach filled up with rippling deltoids and masculine laughter. Hopwood would stand up on the Santa Monica pier, like a commander in the last days of the retreat from El Alamein, depressed at all that sand, delighted with all that flesh.

He seemed so apart from all of us, gliding by in his Anglo-Byronic-German daydreams . . .

I never thought to see him parking his Raleigh bike outside A. L. Shrank's tarot-card-large-belfry-with-plenty-of-bats-open-at-all-hours shed.

But park he did, and hesitated outside the door.

Don't go in! I thought. No one goes in A. L. Shrank's unless it's for poison Medici rings and tombstone phone numbers.

Erwin Rommel didn't mind.

Neither did the Beast, or Caligula.

Shrank beckoned.

All three obeyed.

By the time I got there, the door was shut. On it, for the first time, though it had probably yellowed there for years, was a list, typed with a faded ribbon, of all the folks who had passed through his portals to be psyched back to health.

H.
 
B. WARNER, WARNER OLAND, WARNER BAXTER, CONRAD NAGEL, VILMA BANKY, ROD LA ROCQUE, BESSIE LOVE, JAMES GLEASON . . .

It read like the
Actor's Directory
for 1929.

But Constance Rattigan was there.

I didn't believe that.

And John Wilkes Hopwood.

I knew I
had
to believe that.

For, as I glanced through the dusty window, where a shade was half-drawn against prying eyes, I saw that someone was indeed on that couch from which stuffing sprang in mad abandon from the burst seams. And the man lying on the couch was the man in the brown tweed suit, eyes shut, doing lines, no doubt from a revised and improved last act of
Hamlet.

Jesus in the lilies, as Crumley had said. Christ fresh to the cross!

At that moment, intent upon reciting his rosary innards, Hopwood's eyes flew open with actor's intuition.

His eyes rolled, then his head flicked swiftly to one side. He stared at the window and saw me.

As did A. L. Shrank, seated nearby, turned away, pad and pencil in hand.

I stood back, cursed quietly, and walked quickly away.

In total embarrassment, I walked all the way to the end of the ruined pier, bought six Nestle's Crunch bars and two Clark Bars and two Power Houses to devour on the way. Whenever I am very happy or very sad or very embarrassed, I cram my mouth with sweets and litter the breezeway with discards.

It was there at the end of the pier in the golden light of late afternoon that Caligula Rommel caught up with me. The destruction workers were gone. The air was silent.

I heard his bicycle hum and glide just behind me. He didn't speak at first. He just arrived on foot, the bright silver bike clips around his trim ankles, the Raleigh held in his firm grasp like an insect woman. He stood at the one place on the pier where I had seen him, like a statue of Richard Wagner, watching one of his great choruses come in tides along the shore.

There were still half a dozen young men playing volleyball below. The thump of the ball and the rifleshots of their laughs were somehow killing the day. Beyond, two weight-lifting finalists were lifting their own worlds into the sky, in hopes of convincing eight or nine young women nearby that a fate worse than death wasn't so bad after all, and could be had upstairs in the hotdog apartments just across the sand.

John Wilkes Hopwood surveyed the scene and did not look at me. He was making me sweat and wait, daring me to leave. I had, after all, crossed an invisible sill of his life, half an hour ago. Now, I must pay.

"Are you following me?" I said at last, and immediately felt a fool.

Hopwood laughed that famous last-act maniac laugh of his.

"Dear boy, you're much too young. You're the sort I throw back in the sea."

God, I thought, what do I say now?

Hopwood cricked his head stiffly back behind him, pointing his eagle's profile toward the Santa Monica pier a mile north from here, along the coast.

"But, if you should ever decide to follow
me
,” he smiled,
"that
is where I live. Above the carousel, above the horses."

I turned. Far off on that other still vibrant pier was the carousel that had been turning and grinding out its calliope music since I was a kid. Above the big horse race were the Carousel Apartments, a grand eyrie for retired German generals, failed actors, or driven romantics. I had heard that great poets who published small lived there. Novelists of many wits and no reviews lived there. Well-hung artists with unhung paintings lived there. Courtesans of famous film stars who were now prostitutes for spaghetti salesmen lived there. Old English matrons who had once thrived in Brighton and missed the Rocks lived there with stacks of antimacassars and stuffed Pekingese.

Now it seemed that Bismarck, Thomas Mann, Conrad Veidt, Admiral Doenitz, Erwin Rommel, and Mad Otto of Bavaria lived there.

I looked at that magnificent eagle profile. Hopwood stiffened with pride at my glance. He scowled at the golden sands and said, quietly, "You think I am crazy, allowing myself the tender mercies of one A. L. Shrank?"

"Well...”

"He is a very insightful man, very holistic, very special. And as you know, we actors are the world's most unsettled people. The future is always uncertain, the phone should ring but never does. We have much time on our hands. So it is either numerology or the tarot cards or astrology or the Eastern meditation up under the great tree at Ojai with Krishnamurti, have you
been?
Fine! Or Reverend Violet Greener at her Agabeg Temple on Crenshaw? Norvell the futurist? Aimee Semple McPherson, were you ever saved? I was. She laid on the hands, then I laid her. Holy Rollers? The ecstasy. Or the Hall Johnson Choir down in the First Baptist Church Sunday nights. Dark angels. Such glory. Or it is the all-night bridge or the start-at-noon, play-till-dusk bingo with all the ladies with heliotrope hair. Actors go everywhere. If we knew a good eviscerator we would attend. Caesar's Gut-Readers, Inc. I could make a mint scalpeling doves and fishing out the innards like card-pips where the future lies stinking at noon. I try it all to fill the time. That's what all actors are, time fillers. Ninety percent of our lives, stage-waits. Meanwhile, we lie down with A. L. Shrank to get it up at Muscle Beach."

He had never taken his gaze from the pliant rubber Greek gods who frolicked below, washed by equal parts of salt wind and lust.

"Have you ever wondered," he said at last, a faint line of sweat on his upper lip, a faint brim of perspiration along the hairline under his cap, "about vampires who do not appear in mirrors? Well, now, see those glorious young men down there? They appear in all mirrors; but no one
else
does. Only the minted gods show. And when they stare at themselves, do they
ever
see anyone else, the girls that they ride like seahorses? I have no such faith. So now," he went back to his starter subject, "do you understand why you saw me with the wee dark mole A. L. Shrank?"

"I wait for phone calls, myself," I said. "Anything's better than that!"

"You actually understand." He stared at me with eyes that burned the clothes off my body.

I nodded.

"Come visit me sometime." He nodded at the faraway Carousel Apartments where the calliope groaned and lamented over something vaguely resembling "Beautiful Ohio." "I'll tell you about Iris Tree, Sir Beerbohm Tree's daughter, who used to live in those apartments, the half-sister of Carol Reed, the British director. Aldous Huxley sometimes drops up, you might see him."

He saw my head jerk at that and knew I was on the hook.

"You like to meet Huxley? Well, behave yourself,” he caressed the words, "and you just might."

I was filled with an inexpressible and insufferable need that I had to force myself to repress. Huxley was a madness in my life, a terrible hunger. I longed to be that bright, that witty, that toweringly supreme. To think, I might meet him.

"Come visit." Hopwood's hand had crept to his coat pocket. "And I will introduce you to the young man I love best in all the world."

I forced myself to glance away, as I had often glanced off from something Crumley or Constance Rattigan said.

"Well,
 
well,"
 
murmured John
 
Wilkes
 
Hopwood,
 
his Germanic mouth curling with delight, "the young man is embarrassed. It's not what you think. Look! No, stare."

He held out a crumpled glossy photograph. I tried to take it but he held it gripped firmly, his thumb placed over the head of the person in the photo.

The rest, sticking out from under the thumb, was the most beautiful body of a young man I had ever seen in my life.

It reminded me of photos I had once seen of the statue of Antinous, the lover of Hadrian, in the lobby of the Vatican Museum. It reminded me of the boy David. It reminded me of a thousand young men's bodies wrestling up and down the beach from my childhood to here, sunburned and mindless, wildly happy without true joy. A thousand summers were compacted down into this one single photograph, as John Wilkes Hopwood held it with his thumb hiding the face to protect it from revelations.

"Isn't it the single most incredible body in the history of the world?" It was a proclamation.

"And it's mine, all mine. Mine to have and hold," he said, "No, no, don't flinch. Here."

He took his thumb off the face of the incredibly lovely young man.

And the face of the old hawk, the ancient German warrior, the African tank general appeared.

"My God," I said. "It's you."

"Me," said John Wilkes Hopwood.

And threw his head back with that merciless grin that flashed sabers and promised steel. He laughed silently, in honor of the old days, before films talked. "It is I, rather," he said. I took off my glasses, cleaned them, and looked closer.

"No. No fake. No trick photography."

It was like those contest picture puzzles they used to print in newspapers when I was a boy. The faces of presidents, cut in three sections and mixed. Here Lincoln's chin, there Washington's nose, and above, Roosevelt's eyes. Mixed and remixed with thirty other presidents you had to recut and repaste to win a fast ten bucks.

But here a young man's Greek-statue body was fused to the neck, head, and face of a hawk-eagle-vulture ascending into villainy, madness, or both.

Triumph of the Will was in John Wilkes Hopwood's eyes as he stared over my shoulder, as if he had never seen this damned beauty before.

"You think it's a trick, eh?"

"No." But I stole a look at his woolen suit, his fresh clean shirt, his neatly tied old-school tie, his vest, his cufflinks, his bright belt buckle, the silver bike clips around his ankles.

I thought of Cal the barber and Scott Joplin's missing head.

John Wilkes Hopwood stroked his vest and legs with rust-freckled fingers.

"Yes," he laughed, "it's covered up! So you'll never know unless you come visit, will you? Whether the old half-gone-to-seed Richard has-been really is the keeper of the Summer Boy flame, eh? How can it be that a miracle of young-ness is mated with an old sea-wolf? Why does Apollo lie down with…"

"Caligula?" I blurted, and froze.

But Hopwood didn't mind. He laughed and nodded as he touched my elbow.

"Caligula, yes!, will now speak, while lovely Apollo hides and waits! Will power is the answer. Will power. Health foods, yes, are the center of actors' lives! We must keep our bodies as well as our spirits up! No white bread, no Nestle's Crunch bars…"

I flinched and felt the last of the bars melting in my pockets.

"No pies, cakes, no hard liquor, not even too much sex. In bed nights by ten. Up early, a run along the beach, two hours in the gym every day, every day of your life, all your friends gym instructors, and two hours of bicycling a day. Every day for thirty years. Thirty years! At the end of which time you stroll by God's guillotine! He chops off your crazed old eagle's head and plants it on a sunburned, forever golden, young man's body! What a price I have paid, but worth it. Beauty is mine. Sublime incest. Narcissus par excellence. I need no one else."