Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (31 page)

From my vantage point near the curb I had the impression that someone had skimmed the multicultural stew of Los Angeles and come up with everything that floated, the airiest and most buoyant bits, the postcard images that glitter like bits of mirror embedded in the dreary grouting of everyday life. In addition to folks in national costumes representing every major civilization since Abyssinia, we had three Carol Channings, two Judy Garlands, two Diana Rosses, two Carmen Mirandas, one postaccident Jayne Mansfield carrying her head under her arm, one Hispanic possessed by the soul of Maria Montez, an indeterminate number of Terminator clones, and a variety of superheros in skintight spandex in every color.

Hanks’s flurry of calls, probably reinforced by the breathless story about Max in
People
—titled “A ‘Tarnished Star’ That Shone Bright”—had brought out the lights and the microphones of the press, and even a few rumpled paparazzi. The TV and radio crews worked the area around the door, blinding people with the bright lights called sun guns and sticking mikes into faces, while the paparazzi flocked to the arriving cars in the eternal hope that one of them contained Madonna or Richard Gere. So far they’d had to make do with a couple of second-tier television actors and one of Madonna’s rumored ex-girlfriends, and the television reporters were showing sportsmanlike signs of settling for a human-interest story.

Our identification system, such as it was, was working smoothly. As the McGuire Sisters, say, or Robin Hood and his Merry Men pulled to the curb they were greeted by the parking attendants. The McGuires or whoever had to mill around on the sidewalk until they received their parking stubs, which gave our outside watchers time either to identify them by sight or to make a note of their costumes and add them to the list of those who were to be kept in view as much as possible. Some of these question marks were eliminated as they passed through the door, pausing to get their lottery ticket, or when they bellied up to the bar. Another watcher was stationed at the holy font—now bathed in a submarine blue light that did strange things to the colors of the orchids and pouring an endless cycle of H2 Blessed O from Lourdes.

Hanks had been right. Virtually everyone made a stop at the font.

Spurrier’s three young deputies were in uniform, drawing admiring glances. I’d bought three pairs of cheap mirrored shades at a Sav-On drugstore and insisted the cops put them on, partly for that over-the-top touch that turned their uniforms into costumes and partly to hide their eyes. Cops’ eyes are unmistakable. Spurrier was dressed in his invariable sport coat, topped off by a rubber Big Bad Wolf mask. My pleasure at his embarrassment was tempered by the fact that I was costumed as Donald Duck. Eleanor had surprised me with the outfit, claiming she’d chosen it because it was nonthreatening. When I put it on, though, she’d literally fallen onto the bed laughing. By way of getting even, I kept it on and showed her what I thought Donald probably did to Daisy between shows.

I’d been discreet. I’d told only about ten people who the Big Bad Wolf was, and made each of them promise to tell no more than five others, and only people they knew well. I wanted Ike to have an evening he’d remember. He’d already been goosed twice. The gay community, I’d been assured, considered goosing outré, but an exception was being made in Ike Spurrier’s case.

I’d just finished a tour of the perimeter when a chauffeured Rolls-Royce purred its way to the curb and Hanks himself got out, blinking in the glare of the television lights. In the midst of the leather cowboy outfits, plus a covey of sequined Supremes, he looked like a rock in a bowl of M&M’s. He was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and dark tie. Something bright gathered itself in the gloom inside the car behind him, and Henry emerged into the light wearing a boxy, shiny, blue silk shantung suit, black-rimmed spectacles, and a gray fright wig that streamed straight up, as though he were standing under a giant vacuum. He warranted a few flash bulbs.

“You, I get,” I said to him. “Don King.”

“I told him it was too obvious,” Hanks said, checking the crowd. He waved to a tiny Chinese woman holding a microphone, whom I recognized from one of my rare brushes with local TV news.

“But what are you supposed to be? The undertaker?”

He gave me the half-smile. “
Much
more subtle than that.” He looked down at the suit with satisfaction. “I’m Mike Ovitz.” He made his
heek heek
noise, and the Chinese woman, dressed head to foot in a lipstick red that would have been eye-catching anywhere else, pushed her way through the crowd toward us.

“He wish,” Henry said.

“Excuse me, Mr. Hanks,” the Chinese woman said to Hanks, licking her lip gloss with a pointed tongue.

One of the Supremes elbowed her way up to Henry. “You’re what?” she asked, “Buckwheat?”

“Ho,” Henry said, a man with a secret.

The Supreme bridled. “I am
not
. I’m one of—”

“As in ho, ho, ho,” Henry amended quickly. “Like a Santa laugh.”

“Mr. Hanks,” said the Chinese woman.

The Supreme stopped glaring. “That’s okay then. I’m the tragic Supreme, the one who killed herself?” She studied his wig. “Honey, you standin’ at attention all over. You must be glad to see me.”

“What a tragic Supreme needs,” Henry said, leaning over and brushing her face with the flying hair, “is a literary advisor.”

“Henry,” Hanks said sharply. “I’m not going to be abandoned at the dance, am I?”

“Oh, help.” The Supreme took a step back. “You’re with Mr. Hanks? Honey, you could be bad for a girl’s career. Mr. Hanks doesn’t forget.”

“Thirty years ago Mr. Hanks didn’t forget,” said Joel Farfman, coming through the door with Tonto in tow. Tonto was a beefy fifty, plain and graying, but the pride in Farfman’s eyes when he looked at him was almost heartbreaking. “These days, Mr. Hanks is lucky to remember to swallow after he chews.”

“Are you here?” Hanks asked haughtily. “I knew we should have sent invitations.”

“Mr. Hanks, can we have a few words?” asked the Chinese reporter. To her cameraman, she said, “Get over to the curb, Burt—I mean, Charlie—that way you’ll see the crowd behind me.” She waved him back and gave her hair a preparatory fluff.

“I have to hand it to you, Ferris,” Farfman said as Charlie backed over the edge of the curb and fell into oncoming traffic. “Bernadette’s
pissoir
is really packing them in. If only they knew what they’re dabbing on their foreheads.”

“Goddamn it,” the Chinese woman said bitterly as Charlie untangled his legs from the cables. “I knew I should have brought Burt.”

“How we doing with the whozzat list?” Henry asked me.

“Only about twenty so far. Almost enough to keep an eye on. The font helps. Most of them lift their masks when they splash themselves with miracle juice.”

Charlie was up and unscathed, eye pressed to his view-finder, and the Chinese woman raised her microphone to permanently wet lips, assumed an expression of Deep Human Concern, and said, “This is Candy Toy in West Hollywood, where joy and sorrow go hand in hand tonight.”

A battered pickup truck, going too fast, bumped a wheel over the curb and knocked Charlie about four feet sideways. We all jumped back, the Supremes squealed a chord, and Candy Toy said, “Shit.” A banner on the side of the truck read BLACK AND BLUE IS BEAUTIFUL. The passenger door opened and Little Bo Peep, pastorally resplendent in crinolines and shepherd’s hook, got out and curtsied to us. Beneath the blond wig, with its Mary Pickford curls, was the face of the man at the table from The Zipper.

“Where’s your sheep at?” Henry asked.

“Driving,” Bo Peep said in his sweet breeze of a voice. “If I don’t let him drive he won’t let me shear him.” He gave Charlie, who had skinned a knee, a look of concern.

The leather giant came around the truck wearing a woman’s full-length sheepskin coat backward and black spike-heeled shoes on his hands and feet. When he reached Bo Peep he dropped to all fours and Bo Peep took hold of a leash dangling from the black patent-leather collar around the sheep’s neck. The sheep looked up at me and his brow creased in perplexity.

“Thought you were straight,” the sheep said.

It wasn’t worth explaining. “I was visited by three spirits,” I said.

“Where’s Christy?” asked Bo Peep. “Oooo,” he squealed in mock alarm, catching sight of Spurrier, who’d just come through the door. “The Big Bad Wolf. You better stay away from my little sheep, Mr. Wolfman.”

“Christy’s inside,” I said, brushing past Spurrier, who was immediately swallowed up by a squealing nimbus of Supremes. “I’ll go in with you.”

Candy Toy grabbed Ferris Hanks by the arm, curled a baleful lip at Charlie, and said, “This is Candy Toy in West Hollywood, where joy and sorrow—’

Henry joined me as I followed Bo Peep and her sheep into the ballroom. “Looks okay, huh?” he asked.

“You couldn’t have done better,” I said. The ballroom was completely transformed. Pinlights picked out the bar and the stage, where a warm-up band called the Bottoms played slow country and western. The lead singer, a woman with a brush cut and penciled sideburns down her cheeks, was doing her third k. d. lang song in a row while people near the stage danced or just swayed back and forth, hugging. Costumed men had formed a circle around Bernadette’s font, waiting patiently to anoint themselves.

Ferris’s handsome Roman slaves, decked out in short white tunics with a Greek key motif and wearing brass bands on their ankles and upper arms, wove through the crowd with trays of rumaki, petit fours, and other appetizers that had apparently been on ice since the fifties and that made me wonder how long it had been since Ferris had been to a party. The door to the kitchen swung open every few seconds as a newly laden tray was borne into the room. The ballroom’s primitive air conditioning was already showing signs of giving up for the evening, and the slaves were sweating with effort.

“They in for quite a night,” Henry said. “You wouldn’t think it, looking at all these little-bitty waists, but this crowd is murder on free food.”

“I’m going to check the back,” I said. Henry stayed with me as we passed the kitchen and went down the dark hallway to the exit. The door to Mickey Snell’s office was open, and he was seated at his desk, blowing cigar smoke and directing a stream of squeaky chatter at one of Ferris’s Roman slaves, who was spreading tan body makeup on one of the whitest legs I’d ever seen. Henry stopped halfway down the hall and took hold of a man coming out of the ladies’ room.

“None of that,” he said. “We got real women here.”

“I am a real woman,” the man said. He was dressed as Barbra Streisand, complete with three pounds of putty on his nose. “Real enough for you, any day. Who in the world is doing your hair?” Barbra made a peace offering of air kisses and swayed her way back to the ballroom while Henry fluffed up his wig.

I pushed the rear door open and came face to face with Batman. “Everything okay?” I asked.

“No problem,” Batman said. “Nobody in the lot but the parking attendants. Okay if I smoke a joint?”

“Have you got marijuana in your utility belt?” Henry demanded, still working on his hair.

“You wouldn’t
believe
what I’ve got in my utility belt,” Batman said, patting a complicated system of pouches surrounding his washboard stomach. “I don’t know how I’m going to get along without it. Maybe I’ll keep it when I return the costume.”

“No grass,” Henry said sternly. “No poppers, no coke, no nothing. I’ll bring you some white wine, but that’s it.”

“Nobody talks to Batman like that,” Batman said. “Who are you supposed to be?”

“Never mind,” Henry snapped. “Whoever I am, I can tell Batman to go climb a pole, and if Batman don’t get his ass up that pole fast enough, then I give ol Batman a ticket home. You know what that means?”

“No money?” ventured Batman.

“You got it, Bat.”

“Batman knows the value of a dollar,” Batman said.

“One wine, coming up,” Henry said. “You got your walkie-talkie?”

“In my utility—”

“Well, take it
out
of your utility belt, Bruce, how you gonna get to it if you need it? Geez,” he said to me. “I always hated Batman. Even when I was a little kid. All you had to do was look at Robin, you knew the dude was in deep trouble.”

“Get personal, why don’t you,” Batman said sullenly.

“I ain’t even started,” Henry said. “And don’t trip on your cape.”

“Testing, one, two—” someone squeaked over the P.A. system in the ballroom, and I went back up the hall, past Mickey Snell’s office, empty now, and the rest rooms, to see what was going on.

The Bottoms were congregated at the back of the stage, unplugging their instruments and calling to friends in the crowd. Mickey Snell tapped a muscular thumb on the microphone, making a noise like someone doing a cannonball into a vat of tapioca. Someone yelled, “It’s
on
, Mickey. Do something about the
air
.”

“Testing,” Mickey Snell said implacably. “This little piggy went to market—”

Two of the Seven Dwarfs, complete with little peaked cap and granny glasses, were patrolling the catwalks, looking down on the crowd. One of them made a thumbs-up sign at me, conveniently pointing me out to anyone who might be wondering who was in charge, and I looked behind me, pretending to think the signal was intended for somebody else. Henry was right there.

“Okay, Doc,” he called. “You and Grumpy trade off with Dopey and Sleepy in half an hour.”

The sun came out. Ferris, basking in a circle of light with Candy Toy, and with Charlie the cameraman limping in tow, walked past me, pausing to give a glad hand and an encouraging word to people who had no idea who he was. Toy held her microphone inches from his lips, catching every historic syllable for the benefit of the guys who would edit it out back at the station.

“When do the eulogies start?” Ferris asked me. I turned my back to Charlie’s camera and brought both hands up behind me with one finger extended in an ancient insult. Charlie’s lights died.

“You know damn well when they start,” I said. “And keep me off camera. Where are the dog tags?”