Fun With Problems (17 page)

Lucy, in Silver Lake, seemed at once agitated and exhausted.

"Ace said he saw you," she told me when we were seated on the patio dead Heathcliff had demolished.

Passing through her living room I noticed that the house was in a squalid state. The floors were littered with plastic flowers and charred metal cylinders. There were roaches on the floor and in the ashtrays, along with beer cans and other post-party knickknacks. Lucy had been running with a new set of friends. I imagined these people as a kind of simian troop, although I never got it clear who exactly they were and how Lucy had been impressed into being their hostess. I did know that it had somehow to do with supply and demand.

I had been out of town and was not familiar with freebasing. I can't be sure that Asa turned her on to it. Basing was the rage then in extremist circles like his. She talked about it with a rapturous smile. I had been around long enough to remember when street drugs hit the industry big-time, and I remembered that smile from the days when each new advance in narcosis had been acclaimed as somebody's personal Fourth of July. A life-changing event. To cool the rock's edges Lucy had taken to easing down behind a few upscale pharmaceuticals: 'ludes, opiate pills. Unfortunately for all of us, genuine Quaaludes were disappearing, even south of the border. This left the opiates, which were still dispensed with relative liberality. While I watched, Lucy cooked up the brew in her kitchen as she had been instructed. She told me she had always liked to cook, though this was a side of her I'd never seen.

Cooking base, we ancients of art will recall, involved a number of tools. 7-Elevens then sold single artificial flowers in test-tube-like containers, so that crack scenes were sometimes adorned with sad, false blossoms. Lucy mixed quite a few gram baggies with baking soda and heated them in a cunning little Oriental pot. The devil of details was in the mix, which Lucy approached with brisk confidence. Alarmingly, the coke turned into viscous liquid. People who have put in time in really crappy motels may recall finding burned pieces of coat hanger on the floor of the closets or wardrobes. Lucy had one, and she used it to fish the brew out so it could cool and congeal. It was then that the stem came into play, and a plastic baby bottle, and a burned wad of Chore Boy. On the business end of the stem, appropriately enough, was the bottle's nipple, which the adept lipped like a grouper on brain coral.

We did it and at first it reminded me of how, when I was a child, my mother would have me inhale pine needle oil to cure a chest cold. The effect of freebasing was different, although if someone had told me it cured colds I wouldn't have argued. It was quite blissful for a time and we were impelled toward animated chatter. I commenced to instruct Lucy on the joys of marriage, for which I was then an enthusiast. She soared with me; her eyes flashed. In this state she was always something to see.

"I'm so happy for you. No, I'm really not. Yes I am."

We smoked for an hour or more. As she plied the hanger end to scrape residue from the filter and stem, she told me about her career prospects, which seemed stellar. She had been cast for what seemed a good part in a film by a notoriously eccentric but gifted director who had assembled a kind of repertory company for his pictures. Some of these made money, some tanked, but all of them got some respect. For Lucy, this job was a good thing. And not only was there the film part. As schedules permitted, she was going to do Elena in
Uncle Vanya
at a prestigious neighborhood playhouse. I rejoiced for her. As I was leaving, supremely confident and looking forward to the drive, I kissed her. Her response seemed less sensual than emotional. I was hurt, although I had no intention of suggesting anything beyond our embrace. Sometimes you just don't know what you want.

Around Westminster, I began to feel the dive. Its sensation was accompanied by a sudden suspicion that Lucy's reversal of fortune might be a little too good to be true. When I got home I took two pain pills and believed her again.

Not long after this we read that Asa Maclure was dead. He had AIDS all right, but it wasn't the disease that killed him. The proximate cause of his death was an accident occasioned by his unsteady attempt to cook some base. He set himself on fire, ran as fast as he could manage out of his San Vicente apartment and took off down the unpeopled sidewalks of the boulevard. He ran toward the ocean. Hundreds of cars passed him as he ran burning. According to one alleged witness, even a fire truck went by, but that may have been someone's stroke of cruel wit.

Asa Maclure was a wonderful man. He was, as they say, a damn good actor. He was also enormous fun. In the end, he was a good friend too, although obviously a difficult one. Suffice it to say I mourned him.

Jennifer and I went to his funeral. It was held at a freshly painted but rickety-looking black church in what had once been a small southern town not thirty miles from where her parents lived in Oak Lawn. Asa's father presided, his master in declamation. Asa had resembled his father, and the man was strong and prevailed over his grief. There were a few people from the industry, mostly African American, all male. Praise God, Lucy did not appear.

Back in Dallas at my in-laws' stately home, we had a few bourbons.

"Your friend has the kiss of death," Jennifer said. She delivered this observation without inflection, but it remained to hover on the magnolia-scented air of that cool, exquisitely tasteful room.

Both of my optioned scripts were being green-lighted.

From what I read in the papers it seemed Lucy had been replaced in the mad genius's picture. The neighborhood production of
Vanya
opened with no mention of her. I presumed she had read for it. Maybe she had assumed the part was hers. Once I met her for a sandwich in a Beverly Hills deli and we talked about Ace's death. Lucy spoke slowly, with great precision, and was obviously high. I was worried about her and also concerned to discover where Ace's death had left her.

"I've compartmentalized my life," she declared. She had brought with her a huge paperback book with dog-eared pages and she showed it to me. It was a collection of drawings by Giovanni Piranesi that featured his series called
Imaginary Prisons,
in which tiers of prison cells are ranked along Gothic stone staircases and upon the battlements of
vast dungeons that ascend and descend over spaces that appear infinite. For reasons that many art lovers will immediately comprehend on seeing some of his drawings, Piranesi is a great favorite among cultivated junkies. His prisons are like their world.

On the blank pages in the book Lucy had written what she called plans. These were listed in columns, each laid out in variously colored inks and displaying Lucy's runic but attractive handwriting. When she handed the book to me for comment I could only utter a few appreciative sounds. Every word in every paragraph of every column was unreadable. I still have no idea what she had written there. Finally I could not, for my life, keep myself from saying something meant to be friendly and comforting about Asa. I got the same cold suffering look I had seen when Brion Pritchard died.

In the weeks after that, in a craven fashion, I kept my distance from her because I was afraid of what I might see and hear. She didn't call. Also the trip to Texas had left Jen and me closer somehow—at least for a while.

A few months later Lucy left a message on our machine, absurdly pretending to be someone else. Suddenly I thought I wanted to see her again. The desire, the impulse, came over me all at once in the middle of a working afternoon. On reexamination, I think the urge was partly romantic, partly Pavlovian. I was concerned. I wanted to help her. I wanted to get seriously high with her because Jen didn't use. So my trip back to Silver Lake was speeded by a blend of high-mindedness and base self-indulgence. It's a fallen world, is it not? We carry love in earthen vessels.

Lucy's house was not as dirty and disorderly as it had been on my previous visit, but everything still looked rather dingy. She did not garden or wash windows; she no longer employed her help. And she no longer cooked, since crack, the industrialized version of base, had obviated that necessity. It was safer too and far less messy than basing. The rocks went straight from the baggie into the stem. For me the hit was even better. She had Percocet and Xanax for coming down, a lot of them. She was still very attractive, and I later learned she had a thing going with a druggy doc in Beverly Hills who must have been something of an adventurer.

"I'm going to Jerusalem!" she said. She said it so joyously that for a second I thought she had got herself saved by some goof.

"Yes?" I approved wholeheartedly. Seconds after the pipe, I approved of nearly everything that way. "How great!"

"Listen to this!" she said. "I'm going there to live in the Armenian quarter. In a monastery. Or, like, a convent."

"Terrific! As a nun?"

She laughed, and I did too. We laughed loud and long. When we were finished laughing she slapped me on the shoulder.

"No, ridiculous one! As research. Because I'm going to do a script about the massacres. I'm going to sneak into Anatolia and see the Euphrates."

She had an uncle who was a high-ranking priest at the see of the Jerusalem patriarch. He would arrange for her stay, and she could interview survivors of the slaughter.

"I want to do this for my parents. For my background. I won't say 'heritage' because that's so pretentious."

"I think it's a great idea."

I was about, in my boisterous good humor, to call her project a pipe dream. Fortunately I thought better of it.

She saw the thing as eminently possible. The Russians had unraveled and she might film in Armenia. There were prominent Armenian Americans in the movie business, in town and in the former USSR. She had me about a quarter convinced, though I wondered about the writing. She had the answer to that.

"This is yours, Tommy! Will you do it? Will you go with me? Will you think about it? Please? Because if you wrote it I'm sure I could direct. Because you know how it is. You and me."

Naturally the urgency was intense. "It's a sweet idea," I said.

"You could bring your wife, you know. I forget her name."

I told her. She had somehow deduced that Jennifer was younger than she.

"They're all named Jennifer," she said.

As if to bind me to the plan, she pressed huge handfuls of Percocet on me. Starting to drive home, I realized that I was too rattled to make it all the way to Encinitas. I checked into a motel that was an island of downscale on the Westwood—Santa Monica border and called Jen, home from her classes. I explained how I had come up to inquire into something or other and suddenly felt too ill to make it back that evening.

"Don't drive then," Jen said. I could see trouble shimmering on the blacktop ahead.

Next Lucy disappeared. Her phone was suddenly out of service. The next time I was up in town I went to her house and found it unoccupied. The front garden was ochre rubble and the house itself enclosed in scaffolding. It was lunchtime, and a work crew of Mesoamericans in faded flannel shirts were eating In-N-Out burgers on the roof.

Once I got a message in which she claimed to be in New York. It was rambling and unsound. She said some indiscreetly affectionate things but neglected to leave a number or address. I did my best to tape over the message, to stay out of trouble. I had only partial success.

A little serendipity followed. I heard from a friend in New York, a documentary filmmaker, whom I hadn't seen in many years. He had gone into a boutique on Madison and met the gorgeous salesperson. She seemed glamorous and mysterious and dressed enticingly from the store, so he asked her out. He thought she might go for a Stoppard play, so he took her to the play and to the Russian Tea Room and then to Nell's. People recognized her. It turned out she was an actor, a smart actor, and could talk Stoppard with insight. She was a wild but inspired dancer and had nearly nailed a part in a Broadway play. She knew me, was in fact a friend of mine.

"Oh," I said. "Lucy."

He was disappointed she hadn't asked him home that night. Casual couplings were not completely out of fashion by then, though white balloons were beginning to ascend over West Eleventh Street. My friend thought he liked her very much, but when he'd called one evening she sounded strange. It sounded, too, as if she lived in a hotel.

I thought I knew the story, and I was right. She could hardly have asked him home because home then was an SRO on 123rd and Broadway and he would not have enjoyed the milieu. All her salary and commissions, as I later learned, were going for crack and for scag to mellow it out. Pain pills were not doing it any longer. I quoted him the maxim made famous by Nelson Algren: "Never go to bed with someone who has more problems than you do." He understood. I didn't think I had deprived anyone of their bliss.

There was something more to my friendly cautioning. It wasn't exactly jealousy. It was that somehow I thought I was the only one who could handle Lucy. That she was my parish.

When she showed up in California again it was in San Francisco. I got a call from her up there, and this time I didn't bother to erase it. Jennifer and I were in trouble. I had a bit of a drug problem. I was drinking a lot. I suspected her of having an affair with some washed-up Bosnian ballet dancer she had hired down at UCSD. The fellow was supposed to be gay, but I was suspicious. Jennifer was a well-bred, well-spoken East Texas hardass a couple of generations past sharecropping. Amazingly, the more I drank and used, the more she lost respect for me. At the same time I was selling scripts like crazy, rewriting them, sometimes going out on location to work them through. Jennifer was largely unimpressed. Everything was stressful.

I was full of anger and junkie righteousness and I went up to see Lucy, hardly bothering to cover my tracks. She had rented an apartment there that belonged to her stockbroker sister, not a bad place at all despite its being in the dreary Haight. I guess I had wanted a look at who Lucy's latest friends were.