Leaving Eden (22 page)

twenty-two

Well, the party was a gigantic disappointment. When Jazz said it was an “industry party,” I was expecting we’d be meeting some stars, even if they weren’t the big ones, but it turned out to be mostly people who worked on movie crews or played in some kind of band. There were a couple of set carpenters, a makeup man, a girl who worked for Craft Food Services, which is this catering business that goes to movie sets, and the dog walker for some star no one had ever heard of. The most important person there was a personal assistant to the personal assistant to the head prop man on
Good Morning, Vietnam,
and she acted slow-witted, though Jazz said it was because she was on drugs, and I said for sure she wasn’t going to be advancing anyone’s career including her own if she continued like that. Everyone there was drinking and smoking dope and wearing dark glasses, even at night. One boy in leather pants that Rula Wade would have killed for talked to me for about five seconds. Once he found out I had just arrived from Virginia, he lost interest. I spent most of my time sitting on a stone fence by the swimming pool hoping I didn’t still look like I was carrying a sign proclaiming
Virgin.

I got up early the next morning, but the other girls in my room didn’t look like they’d be waking anytime before Christmas. I didn’t plan on wasting time waiting for Jazz to surface, so I got dressed and headed out. As I said, the hostel was located right on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from the Chinese Theatre, where they held movie premieres and where the stars put their handprints in wet cement. Just looking over at the red and gold splendor of it made me smile. I wished Raylene could have seen it. I turned right and proceeded along the famous Walk of Fame. I went slow and read each person’s name spelled out in brass letters. There was a little brass picture in the middle of each star, too, indicating what the person was famous for. An old-fashioned movie camera for movie stars, a record for recording artists, a microphone for the radio people. Like that. One thing Mama hadn’t prepared me for was the length of the sidewalk, which went on for blocks and blocks. On both sides of the street. All the famous people you’d expect to see were there—John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe—but there were lots of people I’d never heard of and I was sure Mama hadn’t either. Like Warren Hull and someone named Julius LaRosa. Most disappointing were the stars for the cartoon characters and animals. Woody Woodpecker. Lassie. Not even real people.

After a while, the sidewalk turned down another street named Vine, and I went down that, too. There was a man sitting on the sidewalk applying polish from a bottle to the brass parts of the stars and buffing away with a rag. I watched him for a while, and he told me his job was keeping the brass all shiny. He said when he finished the entire sidewalk, he went back to the beginning and started all over again. It took me almost an hour to cover the entire Walk of Fame. The blister developing from my new sandals slowed me down. I passed by tons of stores. It was possible to buy any tacky thing in the world you wanted on that street. There were T-shirt stores and guitar stores and shops with about eight hundred racks of postcards. I passed one place called “Exotic Shoes,” and that’s exactly what was in the window. Boots that reached near to your waist, and heels so high they could have been stilts—so that just walking in them a person would risk breaking her neck. There was a wig store that had about a hundred wigs in the window in every style and color imaginable. Pink and white and green and purple, along with the usual shades. Raylene would have flipped if she’d seen them. I wished she could have been there, then I thought that it seemed that ever since I arrived in L.A. I’d spent half my time thinking about people in Eden, the very town I’d been hell-bent on escaping.

I stopped at a newsstand to buy a paper called
Variety
’cause Jazz said that’d be the place to look for job ads. While I was reading the paper, I got myself a cup of coffee and thought about Mama doing the exact same thing when she landed in L.A. I found an opening for a receptionist at Warner Brothers Studios, and another for a job in the mailroom at Paramount, so I borrowed a pen from the waitress and circled these as well as a few others that looked possible until something more promising came along. Jazz said if I had any sense of rhythm in me I could probably be a dancer at Jumbo’s Clown Room, but when she’d driven me by there, I saw all these flashing signs that said
Nude
Dancers,
so that was out.

After I finished my coffee I stopped by a drugstore to pick up some Band-Aids for my blister, which was practically bleeding, then I headed back toward the Chinese Theatre. Just as I got there a bus pulled up and all these tourists climbed out and right off started getting down on their knees and putting their own hands in the prints left by the stars, like they thought maybe some of the fame would wipe off on them. Every single one of them was taking pictures. I remembered what Jazz had said about acting like “you were one of us and not one of them,” and was glad I hadn’t brought Mama’s old Kodak.

The place with Roy Rogers’s name had an imprint of his horse’s shoe, too, and an outline of a revolver. Naturally this turned my mind to Spy. That made my chest ache, not the burning kind of hurt that came when I thought of Mama, more a wanting ache, and I got to wondering if he was missing me at all and if his high-powered lawyers were being successful in keeping him out of jail. I sure hoped so. To get my mind off Spy, I walked around a bit more and found Shirley Temple’s handprint. She’d been barefoot when she placed her foot in the cement, and her feet were tiny as a doll’s. A star named Margaret O’Brien had been barefoot, too, and Judy Garland’s foot was about the size of a midget’s. At last I found the place where Natalie had signed. Then two women came over and asked me if I’d mind taking a snapshot of them standing by the theater.

“Imagine,” one said. “We’re standing exactly where all these famous actors have stood. Exactly in the same spot.”

I thought about all the people traveling to this very place, who came from all over the country, all over the world, all coming to be in the movies or get close to those who were stars, like it was a kind of magic, the same kind of magic that made everyone in Eden sign up for
Glamour Day
at the Kurl. I thought about Mama and me and Jazz, and thousands of others, all of us wanting to be famous, no matter what it took or who you had to leave behind, even if they were people who truly loved you. Mama never told me that dreams had their own price and you had to be willing to pay the cost, but they did. Then, standing right there, for the first time I could remember, I found myself getting mad at Mama. It wasn’t right for a mama to be leaving her girl behind just so she could go off chasing some dream. It wasn’t right to mow down anything that stood in your way, especially if it was the folks who loved you. If Mama had been there, I would have told her she’d had responsibilities and I would have told her how it felt to be left behind, and nothing she could have said would have charmed me out of my anger. I was working up a righteous head of steam, and no telling how long I’d have been fuming, when suddenly I remembered the things I’d done. Stealing Martha Lee’s money without a second thought, running off without a good-bye to Raylene or Spy or my daddy. I wasn’t any better than Mama and for sure was as pigheaded in pursuit of the mesmerizing dream of Hollywood. After that, my anger settled down, not because Mama’d charmed me, but because I’d reached an understanding about the power of a dream and how it could turn a person’s head backwards. I wondered if it was possible to work toward a dream without hurting people along the way.

Then, standing right there in front of the famous Chinese Theatre, I had myself a
revelation
. Etta Bird used to say a revelation could about knock the air straight out of a person’s body, and that’s exactly how I felt. It took me a minute or two to get to breathing normal. The revelation didn’t come in any big flash of light or from voices like Etta said could happen. It was quiet and came from a deep and true place inside. It told me that as sure as dogwood bloomed in the Blue Ridge in spring, I didn’t want to be a movie star. Not really. Standing there looking at the handprints of big stars and listening to the women talking foolish, I knew I’d taken money from my mama’s best friend and traveled across the whole country, all the time in pursuit of a dream that wasn’t even mine. Becoming a star was my mama’s dream and somewhere along the road, I’d taken it as my own.

Learning this made me feel empty. I’d been planning on this for so long, it felt like I’d lost something big, and that I’d let Mama down, too. But then I felt Mama next to me and I heard her voice clear, just like I’d been doing for the past several days. She told me it was all right. She said I wasn’t disappointing her in the least. She said a person’s job in life was to find and follow her own dream, and it was time for me to be discovering mine. That made me feel strong enough to get up and head back to the hostel. It looked like I would be using the rest of Martha Lee’s money getting back to Eden, and I sure had a mess waiting for me to clean up when I got there. I figured I could get a ticket home in the next day or two and that would leave me time to finish up my other business.

I decided the first thing I’d do would be to find Natalie’s grave. I asked a lady selling maps at the corner and she said she thought Natalie was buried in the cemetery over by Paramount, although she wasn’t sure. When I got back to the hostel, Jazz was awake and said she’d drive me.

Paramount Pictures was in a part of Hollywood comprised mostly of car wash and body shop places, and the entire studio was bigger than all of downtown Eden, and that is the gospel truth. A fence enclosed it, and on one corner there was this giant globe attached to the roof. There were big arched gates with black metal scrollwork, and you had to have a pass to get inside. I told Jazz my Mama’d worked there, but I could tell she didn’t believe me. She pointed out a restaurant called Lucy’s El Adobe and said a lot of people from the studio ate there, so I told her about Mama having lunch with Kelly McGillis, but she didn’t seem to believe that either.

We found the cemetery on the street backing up to Paramount. Jazz drove right in, and I have to say I thought it was the prettiest cemetery I’d ever seen. There were big stones containing actual pictures of the person who was buried there. We asked the lady in the gift shop where Natalie Wood’s grave was. She said there were lots of movie stars there, like Jayne Mansfield and Peter Lorre and Rudolph Valentino, nearly every important dead person in Hollywood, she said, but not Natalie Wood. She told us she thought Natalie was buried over at the Forest Lawn cemetery, which was across town, by the Warner Brothers Studios, the other place for famous people. Before we left, we took a little drive around the place. We saw Mel Blanc’s grave, and his stone said,
That’s All Folks,
’cause he was famous for being the cartoon voice of Bugs Bunny. On some stones the engravings weren’t even in English. Jazz said they were in the Cyrillic alphabet. Douglas Fairbanks’s stone was off by itself at the foot of a long, narrow pool. Lots of people had carved their initials in a tree located nearby just to prove they’d been there, and that reminded me of the tourists putting their hands in the cement prints at the Chinese Theatre.

After we left that cemetery, Jazz said she was starving. We went to a Chinese place for lunch. Then she wanted to go clothes shopping, and it was late afternoon before we finally got over to Forest Lawn, which was more like a big park than a cemetery, with statues of people like George Washington. You might not believe this, but there was a wedding going on when we got there. With a tent and everything. Imagine. People actually got married there. Raylene wouldn’t have believed it either. I could just hear her saying that only in Hollywood would people want to get married in a cemetery. The man at the gate made us stop and he gave us a list of printed regulations. There were rules for everything, like how long flowers were allowed to stay on the graves—five days—and no pets and no picnics on the grounds, which seemed peculiar to me. Why could you have a wedding and not a picnic? Jazz told him we were looking for Natalie Wood’s grave, and he checked in a book he had and told us she wasn’t there. Jazz asked if he knew where she was and he said he thought she was over at the cemetery by Paramount.

Then we had to get back because Jazz had to get ready for work. She said we’d look again the next morning. By the time we got back to the hostel, it was too late to do anything about finding the woman named Sasha. I showed Jazz Mama’s paper with the address, and she said Mississippi Street was over in the flats. She said if I wanted to go in the morning, she’d drive me as long as I gave her some money for gas. Then she started getting herself all fixed up for work at Jumbo’s Clown Room. I spent the rest of the evening making trips to the bathroom to see if my moon had come, which it hadn’t. It looked like having Spy’s baby was one more thing I’d have to be facing when I returned to Eden.

In the morning, as soon as Jazz woke up, we headed over to the flats, which was this other section of L.A., and we found Mississippi Street without taking one wrong turn. There were rows of little houses, one right next to the other, not one of them much bigger than my daddy’s. The number on Mama’s paper was the only one on the entire street that was built of stone. And the front yard was filled with cactus plants, like the person living there couldn’t decide if she wanted to be in California or Texas.

Jazz asked if she should wait, but I told her no. My stomach was jumping when I pressed the bell. You could hear music blasting inside. An old Billy Joel tune cranked up high. I rang again, holding the button in. Then the door opened and I swear I nearly passed out cold. Standing in front of me was a woman who looked so much like Mama, they could have been sisters. “Yes?” she said.