Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (21 page)

But to resume. Charging out to find Darryl Zanuck, whose name I agree is intrinsically funny for reasons no one has ever been able to explain, I was beguiled by an index card tacked up in the lobby of the
Poil du Chien Arms, the hotel in which I had parked suitcase and caboose at the corner of Yucca Street and Cahuenga Boulevard. That was just two blocks from Hollywood and be-still-my-soul Vine, so I was sure I must be right near several major studios and producers’ personal mansions. To my easily widened Alabam’-don’t-give-a-damn eyes, the Poil was a pure humdinger of an establishment, featuring carpeting and doors that had real knobs instead of latches. The divine Carole Lombard had probably been here before me, though not for long. This index card looked classy, too:
MODELS NEEDED
$5
PER PRINTED POSE NO ANIMALS
, it said, in what I soon learned was pen, not pencil.

Five dollars!
Although Momma had disputed this so violently that bits of gummed corn flew from all three of her teeth as she did so, I had heard from a perambulatory sewing-machine agent name of Ratliff that the U.S. government actually did engrave and print a bill in that debominination. The prospect of laying eyes on one of these rarities, and thereby proving to myself that there was indeed a Santy Claus, sped my heels through a milk bath of Hollywood sunshine to the address on the card. This proved to be on a nearby street in a building whose rooftop sign declared that it was always time for some more Maxwell House, leading me to gather that they planned to erect an annex to it in the near future.

When my proud but breathless bazooms led their owner’s way into the room marked
GagilnilArt Photos and Fine Reproductions
, one of Momma’s
Chosen
people, or so I strongly suspected, and from chin’s droop to paunch’s billow a mighty sorry physical specimen to boot, was maneuvering a box camera on a tripod in front of a painted ocean sky, before which stood a depressed-looking sofa and a plastic palm tree with one frond. “Well, here I am!” I told his plump, damp back. “And I didn’t bring so much as a
parakeet
with me, fond as I am of the lil’ devils.”

With a groan of despair, Mr. Gagilnil—for I assumed that this could only be he—bashed at the snout of his camera, which folded back into the box part in hurt and surprise. Hands to hips that had loved potato chips not wisely but too well, knew Ruffles not only had ridges but gave
them, and had long lost the bet about eating just one, he stared at the contraption, fuming. I had a distinct impression of having stepped off with the wrong bazoom, so to speak.

“Did I say the wrong thing a minute ago?” I asked.

“No, it’s all right. When the sign’s on the roof, I can’t see it; that’s why I moved in here. What do I call you, Miss?”

I told him, but when I got to “Gumst-,” he stopped me. “Am I the telephone directory?” he said. “Just a first name’11 do fine—or should I say a Christian one, as I eye you from beneath my beetling brows and my head swims at the doxy-from-Dixie boy-oh-goyishness of it all?”

“Golly,” I said. “Are you really a Jew?”

“Golly, are you anti-Semitic?”

“Golly! So you
are
a Jew,” I said, clapping my hands.

“Gumdrops! So you
are
anti-Semitic,” he said, trying to clap his. He missed. I couldn’t wait to see what kind of pictures he took.

“Not so far as I know,” I explained, “although as it happens a lot of my mature attitude on the subject rests in your furry butterfingers, Mr. Gagilnil, since I’ve never actually
seen
one of you before—except for that fella who does all the double-talk on
Your Show of Shows,
and in Westerns playing unexpectedly large-nosed and thoughtful Apaches and such.”

“A tribe’s a tribe, lady. A genocide’s a genocide. From Buchenwald to Plymouth Rock, it’s all in a day’s work hereabouts, and even though I’m not a busy man I do toss my whimpering vanity the occasional moldy dog biscuit by pretending otherwise here in my lonely six-pointed wigwam, so let’s see what you keep in the ruggage rack.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The skimpy but nevertheless obstructing Daisy Mae blouse, discard,” he explained, all with vigorous hand motions to match. “The oversized shiksa hello-nurses, make birthday-suit ta-dah with. The seedy Yid photographer on Ivar Street whose grainy, sordid, yet mysteriously wistful black-and-white nudies’ very existence you will deny if all goes better for you in Tinseltown than this seasoned observer honestly expects, impress. Or not, as the case may be.”

“Jesus!” I said, undoing my polka-dotted top and reaching around to unhook Mount Rushmore. “Can’t you at least buy me a Baby Ruth or
maybe a box of Crackeijacks first, or anyway wait to play please-don’t-squeeze-the-Charmin with my Goodyears till after the newsreel if not the Woody Woodpecker cartoon?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Miss. In more ways than you know, I see a lot of boobs in my line of work, and by now they might as well be—oy, the humanity,” he said softly, as the gates to the Double-D Ranch for Wayward Boys fell open before his eyes.

When I returned to the Maxwell House the next morning for my first glamor-photography session, Mr. Gagilnil had somebody for me to meet. One high heel a-dandle on the toes of an upraised and bestockinged foot, she was reading a movie magazine on a fake tiger rug on the floor, dressed in black undergarments that seemed to wrinkle and shift awry on her as if their material was perpetually astonished to find itself in actual contact with her skin, and feared hurting it. Looking up from under heavy auburn bangs that fell almost to her eyes, she gave me a lipsticky and lopsided smile as she jumped to her feet in welcome. She struck me as an innocent, and as I had begun to suspect that by most standards I was one myself, that she had this effect on me filled me with a trepidative apprehensileness for her sake.

“This is Bettie,” Mr. Gagilnil said. “And you may yet go as far in this business as she has if you just keep an eye peeled along with everything else, because she’s the best that ever was.”

“Honest, Mr. Gagilnil, am I?” Bettie said, goggling and pleased.

“Try to find a shutterbug between here and Wilshire who’ll contradict me, doll.”

“Okay! Oh, gosh, I’d better get dressed first.” She took a few steps toward her clothes, then turned back with a worried frown. “If I can’t find one, should I come back here anyway?” she asked. “Or am I done?”

Mr. Gagilnil sighed, but it was a fond type of noise. “Tell you what, Bettie, just take my word for it,” he said.

“Where?”

“See?” Mr. Gagilnil said to me. “The best since Venus went on half pay, and she doesn’t even know why. If she did, she’d have that mean, squinty look the rest of them get, and then it would all go down the toilet faster than you can lay Jackie Robinson. Okay! Now: which one
of you wants to get spanked, and which one wants to do the spanking?”

Bettie’s eyes clouded over. “Gee, Mr. Gagilnil,” she said falteringly, “you know I’d always rather be spanked, if that’s okay. The spank-er always has to look like they have some kind of clue why this is happening, and no matter how hard I try you just go through roll after roll and start yelling at me. Besides, I think it’s mean to act like you enjoy hitting somebody, even when it’s only for glamor photography.”

“But it doesn’t bother you when whoever spanks
you
pretends to enjoy it,” Mr. Gagilnil protested. “Or does enjoy it, for that matter.”

“Oh, no!” Bettie said happily. “When I’m the one getting spanked, I always feel like I deserve it, because of something bad I probably did a long time ago.”

“All right, then,” Mr. Gagilnil said. “It’s really only a courtesy question, Bettie, in case you ever change your mind.”

“How do I do that?” she asked dubiously.

Mr. Gagilnil sighed again. “Will you please put her on your lap and lift your arm like you’re paddling her with zest?” he asked me. “I’d like to be done sometime before you goyim celebrate the umpteenth birthday of that simpering little bastard we bumped off back in the Old Country, with blood on our hands but a song in our hearts—
Hatikvah,
I think. Who knew the halo-happy
fegele
had hired a PR firm? Who knew?”

Soon afterward, Bettie got evicted from her apartment on Las Palmas for non-payment of rent. She had the money, but that wasn’t what her landlord wanted, and sheer stupefactionalism at Bettie’s willful refusal—or so he thought—to grasp his point, much less anything more engorged and tactile, led him to toss her and her belongings onto the street. You see, Bettie didn’t even have any idea that men used the pictures that Gagilnil took of us for purposes of sexual self-stimulation. She thought we were underwear, rope, and gag-ball models, and when I idly grumped something about the chuckleheads at the newsstand all playing bell-pull with ol’ Scrawny as Mr. Gagilnil and I were tying her up one day, I saw her eyes get as round as saucers and trembulamaticized as Bambi’s while he made frantic throat-cutting and erasive motions at me from behind
her shoulder. Anyhow, it was after she lost her old place that she moved into a vacant room a floor down from mine at the good old Poil du Chien Arms.

We had a pretty good group at the Poil, although the register could boast of only one big-time Hollywood moviemaker, a natty jokefest name of Wood who made a habit of borrowing Bettie’s and my clothes. When we asked why he needed them so often, he explained that he made costume pictures—thus proving he was what he said he was, as this was a term I recognized from my earliest browsings of
Modern Screen
magazine, when I was still a splindly lass with a mere 36C bustline way back in Great-Grandmaville. My next-door neighbor was a polite fellow called Homer who used to be a hotel bookkeeper somewhere in the Midwest. He had moved to California in hopes of getting work as a cartoon character, for Warner Brothers if he could swing it but on the small screen if nothing better came along. And indeed, as far as all of us who were his friends were concerned, poor Homer was already well on his way to attaining that two-dimensional status in the book Mr. Nathanael West wrote about us, which was received with injured indignation in the improvised courtrooms of the Poil. Even Bettie, who heard parts of it read aloud, waxed wroth: “Why, that man’s just
scared
of people!” she blurted out, blinking rapidly and jerking her lipsticky mouth in a rare effort to shape it into something other than a friendly smile. “And he makes them all awful to prove he’s right.”

Beside her, Homer nodded. “You know what hurt—he didn’t even feel sorry for me,” he said dolefully, wringing his large hands and then automatically groaning. “I thought at least he’d feel sorry for me. But he looked down on me more than anyone out here
ever
has.”

“Or would,” said Wood, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Or would.”

Meanwhile, Bettie’s and my glamor-photography sessions at the Maxwell House continued apace. On days when we were both tied up and gagged—a situation whose true peril dawned on us only when a pair of Seventh-Day Adventists came to the unlocked door of
Gagilnil Art Photos and Fine Reproductions
and launched into their spiel, waving tracts before us as Bettie and I whimpered and rolled our eyes, until our
employer re-emerged at last from the commode and drove the duo off with massive swattings of a rolled-up
Racing Form
—Mr. Gagilnil used to moan with impatience at we girls’ dilatoriness in popping in the gag balls and helping each other secure them with tape or knotted cloth. “Come on, come on,” he’d say-”I’m getting wise to that whole ‘I got a code in the node’ routine. The way the two of you sniffle and mope and carry on, you’d think this was
The Magic Mountain,
for shit’s precious sake.”

Yet my own magic mountains never did bring out the vestigial Mallory in him, except behind the camera. As for Bettie, Mr. Gagilnil once volunteered to me that he didn’t care to test his disbelief in any God by inviting the wrath that he was sure would smite him if he ever put a paw on her perky yet vulnerable flesh; simultaneously granting the paradox that she was most sacred to atheists. That was one confession he made during what proved to be our final conversation, which took place after he had asked me, with an eye to playing the lead, to cast a glance over the scenario-treatment that, just like everyone else in Hollywood, he turned out to have been writing in his spare time.

The Puerile Maid

A Gagilnil Art Photos and Fine Reproductions Production

You are a scantily dressed, impudent maid in the otherwise untroubled household of a French Army officer; Captain Dreyfus. Though innocent of any crime, he is sent one day to Devil’s Island. There he dies, unrehabilitated and unmourned.

At his funeral, which is nonetheless Catholic in the final insult, you are seen making goo-goo eyes at the priest. In an arbor in the Dreyfuses‘ backyard, you and he are making new wine from his hairy goyische grapes when the Captain’s son, Alfred Dreyfus Jr., discovers you in the act. Enraged at the insult to his dead father’s memory, and long in love with you himself as who could not be, he plans a terrible revenge.

Someone watches.

While dusting a telephone, you are seized from behind and blindfolded. Unknown hands drag you to a subterranean chamber. (I’ve got an old Signal Corps buddy in Tarzana whose basement we can probably use for this.) As your pouting lips quiver in sudden recognition of the crime you must now expiate, more unknown hands begin to tear at your saucy maid get-up.

Someone watches.

Your t*tties burst forth, in maddening cahoots with each other as usual. G-d himself has never seen such casabas. Realizing what must come next, you writhe in protest, but to no avail. As your frilly p*nties are pulled down, the glory of your t*shy is revealed in such gigantic closeup that the microscopic, indeed invisible blond ha*rs that inaugurate its nev*r penetrated cl*ft are seen rippling like a field of wheat in the w*nd.

Someone watches.

You are made to lie facedown on a t*ble. Yet no one fondles your m*rvelo*s b**bs. Everyone ignores your sweet c*nt. If th*s were the P*ris skyline, your Christian b*tt would be Notre D*me. If the men in the r**m were a college f **tball te*m,
they
would be N*tre D*me. A m*n approaches. He rams it *p your tender α-hole. A w*man approaches. Strapping on a plastic d*ngus the s*ze of the E*jfel T*w*r,
she
rams it *p your tender α-hole. Everyone on the pl*net, d*gs included, rams it *p your t*nd*r a-hole.