Girl of My Dreams (11 page)

Late in the day Jim's freight passed a hobo jungle on the outskirts of Bakersfield. A few men from the jungle ran for the train as it slowed. Jim saw a boy trying for the freight too and waved at him. “This towheaded kid with a pair of quick legs, maybe the age of the girl in the car,” he said, “runs alongside the train. His hair is blowing back and his eager eyes are trying to catch the freight by themselves. I'm thinking this is what I'll miss about the road. The kid is laughing—catching a train is a game with him, a new game. He reaches up for the grab iron, and he gets it but he can't hold on the right way. He tries to let go but now he's being dragged by the freight.

“I jump off to help him, and another guy jumps to yell for the engineer to stop. More hoboes pile out of the boxcar and run toward the towheaded boy. When we reach the kid I see his quick legs first. They are no longer part of his body. We pull the kid off the tracks. He has passed out and a gush of blood is pooling below the stumps where his legs have been sheared off. He comes to and smiles, asks for a cigarette, and one of the hoboes fishes out a butt to stick in the kid's mouth, tells him he'll be okay now. The kid looks up and says, ‘Yeah, I reckon. I'm headed for Hollywood, you know. Them fuckin' guys can't go on forever. They're gonna need a new Sparky.'

“Actually, it's Spanky and he's too old to be one of the Our Gang rascals even if he still had his legs, but the kid says what he says. The woman and the girl are now looking at the towhead, and the girl like a tender bundle of mercy with her wheatfield hair backlit by the late afternoon sunlight kneels to ask him if he needs anything. ‘No, no, no, no, I'm fine now,' the kid says, ‘but gee aren't you a sweet one, for a minute there I thought I might not make it. You look no different from an angel, do you?' The kid puts up his hand to ward off something in the air. He takes a deep drag on the butt, and then he's finished. The smoke never comes back out of his lungs. The woman says to the girl, ‘No use wasting tears.' The hobo who gave him the butt takes a long look down and says, ‘You got to hand it to him, the kid died dead game with a hard-on.' That was the eulogy.”

“Jesus,” I said to Jim.

“I took a bus the rest of the way,” he said, “couldn't stand to leave the woman and the girl on the freight so I paid for them too. I was being a sentimental bourgeois, but at least they wouldn't get mauled by those particular hoboes on that particular freight run.

“A carpet of beggars greeted me at the studio gates when I reported to Jubilee my first morning. Depression youth loitering with their bright hopeful eyes. Not all of them—some of them had eyes as scared as a deer's. Desperate greedy parents bring their kids to the gates like they would to school but a school that won't let them in. Nobody gets warm piss around here unless they're connected, obsessed, or cheaters.”

“But wait, Jim,” I objected, trying to shift gears after the story of the dead boy as fast as Bicker himself did. “You're not any of those, yet here you are at Jubilee on salary.”

“The story I sold to
Collier's
connected me, and who says I'm not obsessed? I got the royal welcome at first, like all of us. Beeker Kyle takes me around, acts as if being assistant studio manager gives him permission to bust in all over the lot. Tiptoes, Kyle does, sneaking around to catch someone at something. He had me stay at his place a couple of nights until I found a room. I'm given a monk's cell off the kitchen in his Ocean Park cottage. I'm told at the studio Beeker Kyle is Jubilee's own saccharine fascist, with a semi-retarded half-brother he's generous with, while everyone else is pebbles to be walked on. In the night I hear arguments and loud swearing outside my tiny room. In the morning I see no sign anyone else has been there. When Kyle appears for breakfast he's unrested, gruff. ‘My bedchamber,' he says archly as he coils his villain's mustaches, ‘is the resort of infernal fiends.' Behind his back, Kyle calls Mossy ratface. On Kyle's tour I met Palmyra Millevoix. You know her?”

I sucked in my breath. “No, not really.” Poor Jim asked no follow-up question as I reflected bitterly how unintentionally accurate my answer had been.

“Yeah, she doesn't do it for me. Too much a combination of innocence, which is false, with worldliness, which she uses like a shield. I sat at her table in the commissary once. She didn't eat anything but salad, which I don't trust in a woman. When Baxter Ellis Huxtable came out to write the screenplay for his unjustly famous novel, I introduced him to Pammy. Pompous ass bragged later he got into her eminent feathers and it was like being alone, bouncing around by himself.”

Bicker couldn't have seen me cringe inside, hoping it wasn't true, worried it was.

“Felt like a pimp,” he continued, “not exactly what I rode the rails out here to become. Kyle turned me over to Colonel DeLight, who comes on buttery in his patronizing Kentucky way. He's basically a reader but he makes writers feel he's in their fraternity. Cools off guys who get hot under the collar, warms up the ones who get frozen out. Instructs the novices in screenwriting, which he's never done himself.”

Jim mimicked DeLight: “‘The trick, son,' he drawled at me, ‘is to make shuah you always have more than one ball in the air. Don't linger on a street lamp and its charm. Show us how the glow from the lamp looks when it comes through the windah into a room. Now you have two things, street lamp and room. From there the rest flows. The lamp throws a certain shade on objects in the room. These objects belong to Theodore, or to Theodora, and some to Theodora's daughtah, home from college to recovah from a love affair and a minor breakdown. Now we're off to the races, son, see what Ah'm drivin' at?' And that's Colonel DeLight's way of showing you how to write a screenplay. Meanwhile the son of a bitch runs a sweatshop for Mossy, the girls who sew costumes.”

“I can't believe that,” I said. “There are unions all over the lot.”

“Not really. Mostly just union talk. Upstairs from the actresses' dressing rooms—not the stars' dressing rooms obviously, the starlets and featured girls.”

“Colonel DeLight has been pretty good to me,” I said. “I don't believe it.”

“Surprises, that's the thing,” Jim said as he put his feet on the upturned packing crate that was my coffee table and lit a cigarette. Poor Jim Bicker was spent. “You never know where you are,” he concluded, “until later.”

6

Sunday Could Be Grim

Dear Pammy,

Last night was a revelation. There I was at our mutual master's mansion having a perfectly decent time when suddenly something happened. You stepped to the piano …

I had decided to write her a letter. Poor Jim Bicker emboldened me. He didn't seem to care what people thought of him; why should I? When Bicker took his leave—he was going to East Los Angeles to spend the rest of Sunday with Mexicans, helping them become as angry at gringo ways as he was—I filled my Schaffer pen and tried to be neat.

But “mutual master's mansion”? Clumsily alliterative, its true awfulness was in my presuming to identify myself with her as a fellow employee of Mossy's. She was not only a light-year from me but also far above him in the firmament, and his success depended far more on her than hers on him.

“Dear Pammy,

“After your impromptu performance last night I heard only choruses of adulation attempting to match your own matchlessness. You were simply and complicatedly superb. I suppose this sounds like nothing so much as another of the countless fan letters you receive weekly, yet I have to say how wonderful you are, what a privilege it is to labor, however humbly, in the same Jubilee vineyards of which you are most deservedly queen. I was having a perfectly decent evening at Mossy's, mingling with a quorum of the town's notables, but when you materialized at the piano and put your elegant vocal instrument to work, you captivated us all, raising the party to the level of an unforgettable occasion. Forgive my intrusion, I thought I ought to tell you.

“Devotedly, Owen”

I struggled with “Devotedly,” rejecting “Fondly,” “Sincerely,” and “Admiringly.” As for my name, I considered adding Jant to the sign-off. She was unlikely to think the letter was from Owen Lashley the cutter, or from Owen Hasselbrook the timpanist, though she could conclude it came from Owen Wachtel the Jubilee assistant producer who actually was at the party. The other two weren't, but Pammy wouldn't necessarily have known that any more than she may have noticed that I was there. Oh well, be bold, be familiar, live dangerously.

I drove to Camden Drive in Beverly Hills, parking across the street from her house, where I would just slip my letter under her door. Though they'd left Mossy's party together, I didn't think she'd be spending Sunday with Marlene Dietrich, convening with the German expatriates who had begun to gather in Hollywood. She'd be with her daughter. Pammy and Millie lived in a columned white house set well back from the street. A chandelier hung over the front porch, above which was a second-floor terrace. A dozen or so fans were collected on the sidewalk. Maps of the stars' homes had recently been published; on weekends there were always gawkers. Above Sunset Boulevard the homes were defended by great hedges or tree barriers or high walls, but since Pammy lived in the more plebian flats below Sunset, her house was approachable.

Two of the fans, I saw from the window of my Essex, were no fans at all but held a sign that read
SINNERS ALWAYS SUFFER LAST
. The genuine fans were arguing with the sign holders. “She's gorgeous, she sings like heaven, she doesn't hurt a soul, leave her alone,” said the fans. “Palmyra Millevoix is immoral and alien to Christ's teachings,” said the man and woman with the placard. It wasn't clear whether they were referring to the roles she played, Millie's uncertain paternity, rumors about Pammy's personal life, or expressing general dissatisfaction with permissive popular culture.

I detoured around the demonstrators and headed for the house. Her blue La Salle was not in the driveway, so much the better. “If you have a delivery,” a fan called out, “she's not here.” “They say she has a place in the country,” said another. “Stay clear of sinners,” one of the anti-fans said helpfully. “Thank you,” I said. I knelt to put my envelope through a mail slot next to the front door when a last-instant thought struck me. Almost every word in the letter was a lie except “Devotedly.” I hadn't had fun at the party, I hadn't mixed well with others, I didn't hear accolades for her because I was dizzy with gin, in fact I'd had a humiliatingly terrible time at the party. Also, she really sang only one song; I'd heard much more of her music when I'd gone to her studio bungalow many months before, and I hadn't written her a letter after that, only press releases.

With my back to the sidewalk I slipped the letter under my shirt so the fans would think I'd delivered it. As I walked to my car a middle-aged man asked if I knew the star well. “Oh, just a bit,” I said, “and she's as wonderful as they come.” “Then why is the letter poking out of your shirt?” he asked. “I decided to deliver it to her personally,” I said. As I climbed back into my car, the fans joined with the anti-fans in laughing at me.

The rest of Sunday stretched out like the Sahara, and Sunday night was always grim: the weekend was over. When I was a child that meant I'd be leaving my parents the next morning for school. Since we moved as much as we did, it was often a school where I was unsure of myself, wondering if the boys would speak to me, if the girls might notice me, who I'd play with at recess. That was when I first understood there is no such thing as a happy ending. If the weekend had been fun and adventurous, I hated to see it come to a close. If it had been boring and we'd been visiting people without children, the men smoking evil-smelling cigars and talking about the war, the women trading recipes and gossip, Sunday night was miserable in its continuation of my misery.

At home on Sumac Lane, I made myself a lunch of canned chicken noodle soup and two pieces of toast. Removing my bookmark from
Swann's Way
, I felt some relief that no one would ever ask me to adapt Proust.

The phone was ringing, but I decided not to answer it.

7

Backstory

My mother was the first Chinese person I ever knew. Odd how random events strike you. You may not suspect a misfortune is on its way, or that anything is going on besides a lost sled when you're a child, a car running out of gas, a wave bigger than the others. Each may seem a mere curiosity, ominous only if you have a gift for prophecy. The stain, though unsightly, did not upset me at the time.

“Little Owen come with me, Little Owen come to me, Little Owen let us see How we can spend our century.” She crooned to me at bedtime. My father beamed.

Do my three syllables carry the visual resonance of something you may once have noticed, if scarcely, as you would passing a billboard or lonesome scarecrow when you were out for a drive in the country? Well after the stars, before the director. Do the syllables seem to have flashed by? A trivia question? What a fate. Yet the little trio of sounds—oh-when-jant—prove my existence.

By the same author: Gun for Hire; The Scarlet Letter; Bleak House; The Last Train; Low Sun at Durango; Richer Than Mr. Mellon; Holiday in Havana; The Sun Also Rises; Troilus and Cressida; Barchester Towers; Meet Me at the Waldorf; Playing Hooky. Lastly, my collected essays, Articles of Faith, which I hope you have seen.

You will have surmised that up through
Barchester Towers
I refer to pictures I worked on. Never mind the bastard producers didn't give me credit on all of them, or got away with an Additional Dialogue By designation that meant nada. The next two after
Barchester
are misbegotten plays. On the first of these I collaborated with George S. Kaufman while flying solo on
Playing Hooky
. They lasted a total of ninety-three performances on Broadway, ninety two of which were due to the Kaufman name.