Long Shot (11 page)

He was supposed to beg her pardon and pretend she'd mixed him up with someone else. He wasn't meant to show his cards just yet. If he blew it now, Sid and Edna would have his ass. He turned and looked in her eyes again. He heard the minister call on God. And he whispered back: “Don't mention it.”

chapter 3

EDNA TEMPLE WAS FORTY-FIVE
when she waitressed her last meal, in a bar and grill in Shiner, Texas. She woke one morning and decided it was Hollywood or bust. With nary a backward look, she hitched a ride west with a strawberry trucker who took out the fare in trade. Though she harbored no illusions of making a go as a movie star, she figured there was lots of room a little lower down. In any case, she'd wasted all the time she had for wasting.

Within a week of her arrival in L.A., she'd set up shop in the concrete court of Graumann's Chinese Theater, about a foot and a half from Lassie's paw print. She sold hand-drawn maps of the stars' homes—with actual X's, as if it were
Treasure Island
. The maps themselves were completely out of date, since nobody lived for long in any one place. She copied her information off the more commercial version sold in liquor stores along the Strip. But the crudeness of her handiwork had a certain air of authenticity about it. She looked like she had the latest dope. Besides—as she would have been first to tell you—in a thing like this, it was all in how you pitched it.

She understood exactly what the tourists traveled out here for. They wanted a personal nod—a glimpse of somebody very big or, failing that, a peek at where the famous hung their hats. The good people of Cedar Rapids were lost in Beverly Hills. They could not get a table for lunch, for love or money, and they couldn't so much as go to the cleaner's without being valet-parked. The way they kept their windows rolled, they acted as if it was breaking the law to drive up and down the boxwood streets. Which is why Edna manned her little booth in a down-home style, after the manner in which she sold brownies at the Shiner Baptist Fair. The out-of-towners knew right off whose side
she
was on.

In ten years, her maps grew more and more skilled—and even more eccentric. She took to listing certain houses with their pedigree of scandals, all done up in medallions. She sketched in palms and bathing beauties, to give the whole a bit more color. Between 1956 and 1969, her price hiked up from fifty cents to $3.98, the latter figure verbally discounted anywhere up to a dollar. She became such a fixture that the L.A.P.D. stopped turning her out.

In the end, she might have parlayed it into a proper job at Rand McNally, but she developed an allergy to the desert sun. She would blow up with hives and prickle and wheeze. Hats didn't do her a bit of good. At fifty-eight, she found herself banished to nights and early mornings. Her Marco Polo skit was over. She would have gone mad with cabin fever if it hadn't been for Sid.

Sid Sheehan was a spinner of yarns. In the beginning, out on the street in the thick of the Great Depression, he did odd jobs to get by. When Pittsburgh started to cramp his style, he packed his tools and rode the rails in search of the last frontier. At the end of the line, in Hollywood, he discovered there were people quite content to have a thing done slapdash, as long as they got the week's gossip thrown in. From the wives of studio craftsmen to the actors waiting at home for the phone to ring, there was always someone who couldn't put up a shelf. Sid's stories never had any basis in fact. It was his casting that gave them the ring of truth. Somehow, a good bit of dirt about this or that star proved L.A. was just another town—as small as those his customers had safely left behind.

“What do you hear about Marion Davies?” one of his homebody types would ask as he squeegeed a plate-glass window. And he always knew where he left off, since the serial form was his specialty. He'd fashion a little scandal up at Hearst Castle—say, a midnight swim in the Neptune pool that got out of hand. He'd leave his tales unfinished—hints of incest, hints of drugs—to keep them coming back for more. He was plasterer, paperhanger, chimney sweep, pool boy. But it was cliffhanger endings that made Sid indispensable.

The bourbon finally took its toll in blood-blue thumbs and dizzy spells. Slapdash evolved into worse-off-fixed-than-broken. Though he had come to be as picturesque as a knife grinder out of Dickens, people stopped answering doors when he made his rounds of the neighborhood. They couldn't risk the mess. Besides, after a certain point, one didn't need a journeyman for gossip. By the end of the sixties, gossip was in the very air one breathed. The age of the tinker was past.

So he stumbled into cemetery work. He was standing at Tyrone Power's place, one winter afternoon at Hollywood Memorial, when a tourist asked him if he was related. “Oh, sure,” he said, off the top of his head, “I was the one drove his car.” And he followed it up with a patch of the great man's love affairs, his hunting trips and all-night drunks. At the end he asked for a small donation, to put a little green around the tomb. “He deserves a bit better than weeds and dried-up grass,” Sid said reproachfully as they started to fish their pockets.

Though he tried them all from time to time, he seemed to do his most creative work with Ty. On a good day, he could take in fifty or sixty dollars. Unfortunately, he was scarcely three years into this new career when he started to suffer from tremors and spells. He lost the power to thread a proper narrative. People still cocked their ears and listened, but soon it became apparent he didn't know what he was talking about. For all his poignant details, this old man was an out-and-out liar.

Between them, Sid and Edna made Hollywood work for the little guy. Being as how they'd put out such good products, they should have been able to live off their residuals. Fate derailed them both too soon. There came the day when they couldn't afford a cup of coffee to get them going. Groggy and down for the count, they met by chance in the Cherokee Nile, at the door to the manager's office. Both had been drawn by a card in the window, announcing a cozy apartment that went for eighty dollars a month. A classic case of the “cute meet.”

They couldn't agree who'd seen it first. They swapped some verbal abuse and finally roused the manager—who pegged them as a couple right away. Then they all trooped down to the basement, where they walked through a warren of rooms that was clustered about the boilers, all shot through with pipes. Cozy was putting it mildly. If they hadn't been so broke, they never would have agreed to it. But, having lived alone so long, they'd both forgotten how to shout and carry on. Edna could feel her sinuses clear. The buzz stopped buzzing in Sid's temples. It must have dawned on both of them how simple things could be, if only they had someone else to take it out on.

For the next ten years, they pooled their welfare checks. They scrapped like kids, saw three or four movies a week, and never for a minute fell in love. Nothing much happened, one way or another, except they survived. Until, one summer day, with the blinds drawn against the midday dazzle, Edna Temple came across a minuscule notice, buried at the back of
Modern Screen
. Pictures for sale, it looked like. Hard to tell why anyone would want them for two dollars apiece, unless they were frontal nudes. What struck her was the return address: the corner of Franklin and Cherokee, apartment 11D.

She waited in the foyer, close by the mailboxes, all day long till Greg came down. She confronted him with the evidence, then stuck with him, talking nonstop, all the way back to his apartment. Greg could only nod and dumbly shake his head, so appalled was he to be confronted in the flesh by an actual fan. To gain time, he showed her the stacks and stacks of photographs in his dining room. Then he gave her a Cary Grant, by way of a little souvenir, and pushed her toward the door.

But Edna knew a break when she saw one. She took the stub of the pencil out of her apron pocket. She licked the end and wrote in big round letters across the heart of the picture: “All my love, Cary.” Then handed it back to Greg with a defiant look, her tongue against her upper lip to steady her wobbly teeth. She saw the dawn of a great idea pass across his face. And then she said: “I bet a guy could charge five dollars for a thing like this. Wouldn't you say?”

In that one stroke, she showed him how to hit the big time. The United Fans of America was launched. Greg stopped selling dime-a-dozen studio shots and went full steam into personalizing. Soon he needed two assistants, just to handle the volume. And the hard-luck pair in the basement flat came into their own at last. Like Greg himself, they'd only lacked the proper vehicle. Now they raked it in. But it wasn't any wonder, since they gave the world the better mousetrap it was always on the lookout for. They'd hit on a way to package dreams.

“Hold still!” gritted Edna between her teeth.

She sprayed a wide swath of instant disinfectant. Slumped in the chaise where she held him down, Greg choked as the mist caught him full in the face. He held out his chin till she daubed it clean and iodined the scratch. After that his poor left shoulder, where the scrape was deep, bright pink, and oozing freely. Then his knees, his shins, and two stubbed toes. He looked like he'd taken a bad fall off a skateboard.

“It's your own damn fault,” she scolded him.

He lay there stinging in his jockey shorts and made as if to take a little sun. Grumbling, Edna packed her first-aid kit. She hitched up the tits of her great balloon of a bathing suit. She sank herself down on a rubber mattress just at the base of the sphinx. She wasn't done with him yet.

“Listen, honey. You clutch like that, you're gonna get screwed. It's as simple as that.”

“I didn't clutch,” he protested wearily, drawing the back of his hand across his forehead. “I got sick of skulking around, that's all. I thought I could sidle up to the grave and check out all their faces.”

“It's Vivien's fault,” said Sid, from behind his
Times
. He sat at the shady end of the terrace, under an awning propped by bamboo spears. His pants were rolled to his knees, and his feet were cooling in a kid-size pool, about four by six and plastic. A birthday gift from Sid and Edna when Greg turned thirty-two. He let the paper down a minute. “
She
could have got him out of there. All she had to do was walk him down to the gate and turn him loose. They wouldn't have called the cops if she hadn't let them.”

“You can tell Sidney Sheehan to spare us the hindsight,” she said as she put on a coat of lotion. “
I
was against it, right from the first. Didn't I tell you you'd end up in jail?”

“Yes, Edna.”

“And I trust you don't have any weekend plans. We're four days behind as it is.”

The week's mail was spread out on the terrace floor, in an arc around her mattress, fanned like some enormous deck of cards. She began to open those that looked as if they might have money inside. Slowly, little piles of checks and money orders grew beside her. Now and then—though all their advertising begged the people not to—she pulled out cash, smiling as if she'd got a prize.

“I'll tell you what I'd like to do,” said Sid. “When they get the stone on, I'd like to see it.”

“You mean the grave,” she said, “is that it?”

“Well, why not? I'm something of an authority, after all.”

“Gee, Sid,” reflected Edna dryly, “maybe Vivien Cokes would hire you. You could sit up there and tell stories.”

“She's jealous, Greg,” said Sidney Sheehan. “On account of I'm so creative.”

Reluctantly, as if pushed too far, she heaved herself to her feet. She padded across the terrace floor to talk some sense to him. She stepped in and joined him, ankle-deep in the little pool, while Sid put his paper aside and stood up proudly. They were forced a bit too close for a proper fight. To work up to a pitch of fury, with all the right gesticulations, they needed a fuller range. For the moment, however, they seemed to prefer to cool their feet on a hot spring afternoon.

“Listen, smart-ass,” Edna growled, “when's the last time
you
did something right?”

“You know what pisses you off?” he said, unruffled and aloof. “You always got the yo-yos, down at Graumann's. Now, when I was in the cemeteries, I drew a higher class of people. Why don't you admit it?”

They let their feathers fly as if it were a cockfight. Each had a finger jabbed at the other's breastbone. Sid swayed back and forth on his blue-veined legs like a stork. Edna's dimpled thighs and meaty upper arms began to shake as she got going. Water splashed over the lip of the pool. From a distance, it looked like a native dance.

Greg winked an eye to see how they were making out. Convinced they were over the worst of it, he rolled away to a fetal crouch. The bumps and scrapes were minor enough, but he still had a lot of nursing of his ego to perform. It wasn't just that he'd never spent the night in jail. He'd never had a parking ticket, either, so assiduous was he not to cross swords with the law. It amazed him, in a way, that he'd survived it. All the same, as he swooned on the chaise in the midday sun, at a stage where things hurt worse before they started getting better, survival was small consolation.

The Steepside, guards had led him down to the very room he'd broken into, there to wait for the L.A. police. When he asked for a lawyer, the bully in charge stomped on his toes. Later, a couple of beer-belly cops took him away in handcuffs. They tripped him hard as he got in the squad car, and he didn't remember another thing till they slapped him awake to be booked. His ears were ringing by the time they dumped him in a detention cell, but by then he'd begun to detect a pattern.

“You and that cocksucker movie star both,” said the pasty-faced jailer. He sent Greg sprawling down a flight of stairs. “Who you fairies gonna cum in now?” the turnkey snarled as he locked Greg in.

They were all getting back at Jasper Cokes. They'd always thought he stood for something decent. His being a deviant underneath called into question every other tough guy's act. It meant they had to prove themselves, which they did by kicking ass. Though they hadn't a shred of evidence that Greg was one of Jasper's boys, they were partial to guilt by association. Any old fairy would do in a pinch. If they made a mistake and pummeled a man who was perfectly straight, well, that was life. Besides, a real man ought to act butch enough as to leave no doubt at all.