L.A. Success (16 page)

I turned on the tube and began to
zone out. The alcohol made me feel all warm and sleepy, but I knew I had to
keep fighting to stay up. And then I forgot why I needed to fight to stay up. I
flipped through the channels a little, thinking I'd find a movie to fall asleep
to. A commercial for iPod came on, the one with those colorful shadows holding
iPods and dancing around. Then I remembered: Spieldburt at the Apple store! I
looked at the clock. It was almost 8pm. I thought about asking Tommy for a ride
in my car, but the time it would have taken to explain all that would have made
me even later. I threw on my shoes and took off.

10

I got to the Promenade at fifteen
after. I walked over to the Apple store, with its white logo and
stainless-steel paneling. I went inside and made my way over to the laptops.
There was a huge crowd of people looking at them. I had to get in line and wait
while people tested them. When I finally got to the front and found the most
expensive one, I was seriously relieved.

I played around on the laptop until
everybody around me got so impatient that they started complaining about how
annoying I was. I figured that with everyone paying so much attention to me,
Spieldburt would never risk coming over, so I left my place and started walking
around the store. By closing time he still hadn't arrived, so I had no choice
but to give up and leave.

On the way home, I stopped at
Starbucks and ordered a coffee.
I had to re-establish the good, caffed-up me and
flush the alcohol out of my system. I had the coffee guy throw several shots of
espresso into a dark-roast. I was amazed at how much coffee lingo I knew now.

I walked back to Dennis' house
through the cool ocean breeze, my coffee keeping me warm from the inside, and I
thought about my current situation. I now had an enormous problem. What if Spieldburt
had arrived at the store on time, waited around for ten minutes, and taken off
angry that I wasn't there? That would definitely have been bad for me. I tried
to convince myself that he hadn't come at all because of some movie crap. I
really wanted to think I was going to make some money, especially now that I
knew everything I needed to know about Gertie.

I went back to Dennis' house to see
if Sharkburt had left me a message. I turned on the outside light and looked
around the courtyard while Ballsack followed me playfully. I didn't find an
envelope, but the possibility that the big poodle could have eaten it crossed
my mind. This was the first time I was happy to know that I'd be able to feel
what he had eaten in my hands the next morning when I walked him.

Inside, my dad was playing chess. He
looked up when I came in, which surprised me. Normally he just kept playing or
sculpting without paying much attention to me.

“Talking man broke the window,” he
said.

“What? What window? What man?”

“The kitchen window,” he said.

I went back to the kitchen, and sure
enough one of the panes of glass in the kitchen door had been smashed in and
broken glass was scattered on the floor. There was also a lot of blood on the
jagged shards that remained in the frame.

“Hey Dad, you didn't cut yourself,
did you?” I called toward the living room.

“No, talking man cut himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wanted to open the door. I went
over to the door to watch him. He saw me. He yelled and cut his hand, then ran
away.”

“Don't let people open the doors! If
you see somebody doing that, call me immediately, okay? It's an emergency when
that happens.”

I found a broom in one of the
closets and swept up all the broken glass. Then I covered up the busted pane
with cardboard and duct tape. I was going to have to call a repairman.

That night I tried to sleep at
Dennis' house in case someone came back to break in again. I wasn't very
comfortable there to tell the truth, and the big poodle kept jolting up every time
I moved around, as if he were ready to head over to my place. I was still
feeling the effects of the huge coffee, so I had a lot of trouble sleeping. At
around three in the morning, when I was pretty sure no intruder was coming
back, I took Ballsack to my place, and after a little bit of frog barking, I
fell asleep.

11

The next morning, I lay in bed a
long time, thinking about what I could do next. I wanted to clear up the
situation with Helen, but the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous my possible
explanations seemed. She'd never believe I was working as a P.I., following
Sharkburt's lover around. I couldn't show her a single piece of evidence that
I'd ever even talked to Spieldburt. And that brought me to my second problem:
how long was I going to have to wait for him to contact me again?

I gave the big poodle a good walk
around the neighborhood. After he had done his business, I put on the old hand
condoms and scooped it up. As I was mashing it around to make sure there were
no partly digested envelope scraps in there, a woman passed me on the sidewalk
with her chihuahua. She looked at me sympathetically, as if this poo scooping
somehow gave us a common denominator. I shrugged my shoulders, turned the
gloves inside out to wrap up the steamy mound, and went on my way.

12

I had to turn the tables on this
Sharkburt situation. Unfortunately, that meant I was going to have to see that
uppity, wormy assistant out in Glendale. I prepared for a long stakeout and
drove with the big poodle out near Spieldburt's studio, where I took up
position at the outdoor Starbucks tables. I scribbled around on the blank
sheets of paper I had brought, mainly as an excuse to wad them up and shoot
them at a nearby trash can. Occasionally I would walk the dog around the area,
always keeping an eye out for Grant's rusty, metallic-blue hatchback, but I
didn't see it that day.

It dawned on me, as I was creeping
home in the long line of exhaust fumes, that Sharkburt probably had many
assistants, and that they probably took turns getting the coffee. Who knew how
many days it would take for me to run into Grant again?

For the next three days I kept the
same routine, hoping to see Grant. The amount of money I was spending on coffee
was insane. It was like going to a bar, except I wasn't drunk so I realized how
much cash I was blowing.

On the fourth day, Grant pulled up
in his hatchback. I hadn't been able to put my finger on why I had got a weird
vibe from his car, but now I realized: why was a guy who thought he was better
than everybody driving a shitty car? It made him seem even more like a
pretentious dickhead, because if he had really been as important as he thought,
he wouldn't have been driving such a piece of garbage. In fact, maybe that was
why he was so arrogant—he had to compensate for the car.

I stood up and waited for him to
come over. I put a big, goofy grin on my face to hide my annoyance at having to
talk to him again. I was looking right at him with my toothy smile, but he just
walked on by without acknowledging me. I was sure he had seen me and was just
making this as difficult as possible. I tied the big poodle to a table and
followed him in.

I got right behind him and made
several throat-clearing noises. He pretended to glance at something near me,
and then, as if I had caught his attention, he looked at me, both eyebrows
slightly raised, his eyes half closed and his head cocked to the side. Then, he
exhaled loudly.

“Oh, it's you,” he said.

“Grant, hey! I thought I'd buy you a
little coffee and tell you my idea for a movie that your boss will love.”

“You are buying the coffee, right?”

“Yep.”

“All right. But I make no promises,”
he said, turning around to face forward. I waited for him to pay attention, but
he just stood there as if I weren't trying to talk to him.

“I'm waiting,” he said without
turning toward me.

“Okay. It's about a guy who is house
sitting for a private detective. While he's taking care of the house, he goes
snooping around in all the rooms, trying on the detective's clothes and messing
with his stuff. Then, a mysterious man in a trench coat comes to the house,
wanting to pay big money for a job. The house-sitting guy likes money, so he
pretends to be the detective and takes the job. He ends up following this wild
old nympho, and stuff gets crazy,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could
manage.

Grant moved up to the cash register
and ordered. He didn't seem to have heard what I'd said.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“People who have ideas like yours
should never, ever write them down. You're still going to pay for this, aren't
you?” he said, looking at me finally.

I paid for the four coffees and
followed him out. I had to try one more time before he got away.

The big poodle was looking right at
me all excited and wagging when I came out. In fact, every time I left his
sight, even for a second, he would get super happy when I came back. I think
his perception of time was all messed up. When I walked passed him toward
Grant, he started whimpering and pulling at the table.

“Hey, wait just a minute,” I said to
Grant. “Let me untie Ballsack here.”

Grant stopped and turned around to
face me.

“You named your dog that?”

“Well, he is kind of hairy and
roundish.”

“I have a masters in French literature.
He's my favorite author,” he said. Then he looked off toward nothing and
started spouting some French crap with one hand raised in the air. When he
started speaking English again, he said something weird about how he had cried
the first time he got through a pair of Oreos. Maybe I had misjudged this
guy—he seemed more like a nutcase than a prick.

“Look,” he continued. “I don't meet
very many people in this business who appreciate real literature, so forgive me
if I thought you were just another fraud. You write out a few scenes and bring
them to me to look over. If I like them, I'll show them to Steven.”

I thought about asking him why I
couldn't talk to Spieldburt directly, but from the way Grant had said it, I
knew I was supposed to act like he was doing me an enormous favor.

“Thank you. Thank you so much,” I
said. He gave me his number, walked over to the hatchback and drove off.

13

I drove back to Dennis' house to
make sure the guy I had called to fix the window pane had done his job.
Everything looked good, and the new chain lock I had also asked for was in
place. I told my dad to use it whenever I wasn't home. As long as the talking
man didn't knock on the door and politely ask my dad if he could come in and
steal something, I felt confident that this would keep him out.

Since Gertie hadn't called me in a
while, I was wondering if she had decided to start using Tommy to give me
messages. Giving a guy who had massive trouble talking important messages
seemed stupid, but when I thought about it, I realized it was exactly the kind
of thing Gertie would do. No matter what her idea was, I would be so excited to
have successfully beaten it out of Tommy that I'd probably say yes to it.

I headed home and found Tommy in the
yard cleaning off Gertie's picture on the real-estate sign with a paper towel
and a squirt bottle. His right hand was bandaged up a little.

“Hi Tommy,” I said.

“Hhheh-lo,” he wheezed.

“Wow. Nice pronunciation.”

“Gairtee 'elp me. Hhheh-elp me.”

“Speaking of 'Gairtee'—she leave me
any messages?”

 
“Leaves,” he said. “I leave, you leave, he she
it leaves.”

“I don't know how they talk in
England. This is America, pal,” I said, but he just smiled away like he was
proud of himself. “Messages? From Gertie? For me?” I asked, pointing to myself.

“No.”

Then something started seeming fishy
to me. In fact, I'd been asking myself questions about this guy ever since I
had learned of the concealment—the mushroom hiding. But now, I had something
strange I could ask about.

“Say, Tommy—what's up with the bandage?”
I asked, holding up my right hand and wiggling my fingers to show him what I
meant.

“I hhhave tapping computair much.
Hhhand has pain.”

I went inside and thought all this
over for a while. Was my dad capable of irony? Of calling Tommy by the name of
the main thing he couldn't do well? Tommy, the Talking Man? And why would Tommy
want to break into Dennis' house? The only thing I could imagine was that
Gertie was somehow involved in all this. Maybe she had recognized me during one
of the stakeouts. Maybe she had been playing me for some time now. Maybe she
had followed me out to Glendale...Why else would she not have called me over
the last four days?

I didn't feel safe in my own house
anymore. I was going to have to watch what I said from now on. I decided to
start feeding him false information just in case I was right. I'd tell him I’d
been spending my days at Universal Studios, Disney Land, or Dodger games.

After dinner, the Mushroom Concealer
sat down on the couch with me. He had a piece of paper in his hand. It was
folded over in half, but with one hand he opened it just enough to sneak peeks
at what he had written. He did this when he thought I was looking at the TV.