The Ticket Out Page 7

  “That’s easy—I’m not going and neither are you.” I looked at my watch and slid out of the booth. “I’ve got things to do.”

  “You have to drive me home first.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “I sold it.”

  I leaned against the booth. “Sold it? Jesus—why?”

  “I needed the money.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Sis reached up and rubbed my arm. “They cut back my hours at the bookstore, and I’ve just started with a new therapist, but she’s expensive and my insurance only covers partial psychiatric, and I...”

  She hung her head.

  I said, “How much do you need?”

  Sis kept her head down. “Five hundred. They’re going to cut off my phone, and I don’t have the rent for next month.”

  Christ, five hundred. Something in me snapped. I’d bailed her out for two years and suddenly I wanted to slap her.

  “Sis—”

  “Please don’t call me that. I’m not a baby anymore.”

  “Then why don’t you get a real job? Why don’t you get on with your life instead of trying a new shrink every other minute? You’re paralyzed by too much therapy.”

  Sis got her know-it-all look. “Any therapy is too much therapy, according to you.”

  “Don’t we have the same past, and don’t I earn a living? Don’t I function in the world?”

  “You function because you don’t think about it. You use movies as a substitute for your emotional life.”

  I’d heard that one before. The room was empty, but I lowered my voice. “Hell, yes, I think about it. I think I’ve got better things to do than wallow in a goddamn psychological swamp with you!”

  Sis mumbled, “Go screw yourself.”

  I lost it completely. “Am I supposed to be like you? Am I supposed to get some intermittent, sorry-ass job so I can go to group therapy five times a day? So I can consult seventeen zillion ‘health professionals’? Why don’t I just quit my job? Why don’t I sit around at the beach trading horror stories about asshole fathers? Then who’d pay for all the shit that’s supposedly curing you?!”

  Sis tried to take my hand; there were tears in her eyes. I jerked my hand away, opened my wallet, counted out six bills, and dropped them on the table. Six hundred dollars from the Greta Stenholm research fund.

  I said, “Rent—and a taxi home.”

  Sis wiped her eyes. “I love you, Annie.”

  I shook my head. I said, “Sorry, not tonight,” and walked out of the restaurant.

  I DROVE INTO Hollywood and parked in front of the Chinese Theater. I came here to calm down. To calm down and get a fix on Greta Stenholm. This was her old neighborhood.

  The scene at the Dining Car had upset me. Even on a good day nothing made me madder than Big Bill Whitehead. I shouldn’t have taken it out on my sister, but she could be so helpless sometimes.

  Tilting the seat back, I watched people go into the late show.

  I felt exhausted and overwhelmed. There was too much to absorb and too much to do. A lot to be afraid of, too: I hadn’t forgotten about that.

  I shut my eyes and tried to empty my mind. I wanted to concentrate on Greta Stenholm.

  My mind wouldn’t empty. I heard my sister say, “I love you,” and flashed on our arguments about family feeling. I tried to picture Stenholm, and pictured my mother instead. She was the only dead body I’d ever seen before.

  I’d never discussed her death with anyone except Sis and the cops at the time. People knew she was dead, that was all. I’d been matter-of-fact with Lockwood because nothing else was called for. But I hadn’t felt matter-of-fact. I didn’t want to dredge up that story. I didn’t want to remember what I thought when I saw my mother dying.

  I’d been home on vacation and heard the argument from another part of the house. The gun went off just as I ran into the kitchen. The explosion shattered glass, and I got caught by a spray of blood. Sis was screaming; Father let her go and watched Mother collapse. She’d blown a big hole in the side of her face. Blood gushed everywhere. I could see the frayed stump of her tongue and bone fragments piercing her cheek and eye. Her chest was still moving, and she made a horrible whistling noise as she tried to breathe. I tasted her blood in my mouth, saw the red blood on my clothes, and my first thought was: This is the most painful moment of my life— and I can’t feel any pain.

  It was almost as bad as the shooting.

  I’d waited years before I told my sister about it. She’d had all kinds of therapy by then and she wasn’t surprised. She said that the experience was common and encouraged me to talk about my childhood. I had tried, but I didn’t remember much. I remembered getting punched and ducking flying objects. I remembered being thrown across rooms and down flights of stairs. I remembered blacking out, temporarily deaf from a smack to the ear. I remembered getting locked outside during a Canadian winter when it was sixty below with the windchill.

  My sister said that memory loss was normal in cases like ours. But my memory loss wasn’t total. I remembered the atmosphere of my childhood distinctly. And I remembered the emotions I grew up on. I remembered the constant fear. I remembered the desire to understand and escape; I remembered the contempt. The only emotion I ever felt for Father was contempt. And I felt contempt for my mother because she stayed with him and didn’t fight back.

  Sis never fought back either. She took more of Father’s crap than I did because she was a passive target. But when she got sober, she made it her life’s work to forgive him—and to make me forgive him, too.

  Sis’s favorite movie was The Prince of Tides. She watched it twice a year as a ritual. A line from the voice-over had become her mantra: “In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.” That made me furious. In the first place, some crimes were unforgivable. In the second place, forgiveness wasn’t the issue. It wasn’t my job to find a way to forgive Father: it was his job to act right. My sister believed that her forgiveness would change him. So far it hadn’t—and I knew it wasn’t going to. Sis and I argued about it, but the arguments always ended the same way. Sis said that we had to love our parents. I said that I loved the movies.

  That’s why she decided that movies were a substitute for my emotional life. I’d tried to explain what movies meant to me; Sis chose to simplify.

  A tour bus pulled in at the curb ahead. I checked the time. It was late but the buses kept coming. I watched tourists fan out through the forecourt and thought just how complicated the explanation was.

  When I left for college I swore I’d never look back. And I didn’t, until Mother shot herself. Then I knew that college wasn’t far enough, not even the States were far enough. I had to get clean away. If I didn’t cut myself off, the family would catch me and crush me and I’d become a casualty like my sister.

  I’d dropped out of school and taken off for London. I had my life savings, some people’s names, and no plan: I just wanted to get lost. I partied all the time. I smoked dope day and night, and slept with every guy who appealed to me. Months went by in a haze, and one morning I woke up in West Berlin. I didn’t remember how I got there—and didn’t care. Sometimes I slept with someone because I had no place to stay. In Berlin one of those guys hit me. Nobody’d hit me since Father and I went ape. I grabbed an ashtray and beat him unconscious. I jumped on a train after, and wound up in Paris with my last fifty bucks and the name of a friend of a friend who was studying film.

  The friend of a friend lived above a revival house near the Sorbonne. The revival house was running a retrospective of Michelangelo Antonioni films. While I waited for her to come home, I’d gone to see The Passenger.

  I felt my forehead get hot. Even now, the memory of what happened in The Passenger brought on a sweat.

  It was the first show of the day and I was alone in the theater. I’d never seen an Antonioni movie, so I didn’t know what to expect. I was hungover; I was fried from sitting all night in the train; I was having parano
id fantasies where the Germans charged me with murder. Strung out and unprepared, I stared at the screen and couldn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t understand how I couldn’t understand. I moved closer to the front—and still couldn’t understand. Half an hour in; I freaked. I burst out screaming. The projectionist ran into the theater to see what the matter was. I babbled about the movie. He said it wasn’t me; he’d shown The Passenger for a week and didn’t understand a thing. He said his favorite Italian director made Meet Me in St. Louis. When I didn’t get the joke, he offered to stop the film and buy me a brandy next door.

  I sent the projectionist away and stayed where I was. I forced myself to watch to the end. By the end I still didn’t get it—but I was calm. I knew that The Passenger was a test. I knew that my whole crazy year in Europe had been a test. I’d fought the family and I’d fought fear. I’d burned out a lot of ugly, useless shit, and I was ready to start again.

  After the film I went back to the booth and seduced the projectionist. He was a sweet guy who couldn’t believe his luck. He told me what he liked about Vincente Minnelli and disliked about Michelangelo Antonioni, and let me watch Mystery of Oberwald for free.

  I moved in with the film student, the friend of a friend. I gave up booze and dope, and never missed them. I met more film students and became part of a gang that lived for movies. Father cut off my allowance when I left the country so I was forced to find work. My only options without a permit were cash jobs like housecleaning or English conversation with widows and lechers. The jobs paid nothing; I was broke a lot and didn’t always eat. Some friends started a culture ’zine, and I became their critic. That led to freelance subtitling, then to subtitles full-time. I’d learned French in Canada—I never thought it would pay the bills some day.

  When I wasn’t working for money, I was working for free: I wanted to see if I had any filmmaking talent. I worked as a production assistant. I wrote student shorts, cowrote some longer scripts, and directed a two-minute comedy sketch. I even joined a women’s cooperative before I realized I wasn’t made for collaboration. What I really loved was reviewing. I loved the solitary dark, and I loved being alone to think and write. I discovered that writing channeled my violence. I thought I’d left that stuff behind, but I saw the world in violent terms and it showed in my reviews. An editor once said that I wrote like every sentence was my last. I had laughed. Any sentence could be your last, I’d told him. But I didn’t say that my mother died like that.

  I’d discovered something else: my ability to love another person had been screwed at the root.

  I had a passion for men. I’d sleep with someone just to touch his hair or hear a funny story about Jean-Luc Godard. Sometimes it was ninety minutes in the back row of a theater, sometimes a month of nothing but bed. I’d also had serious relationships. The breakup of the last, and most serious, ended my seven years in France. He was a director I met after raving about his films in print. Things went fine until he mentioned marriage and children. Our final fight was over the word love. He said that I’d never told him I loved him. He was right. I could say it about movies or books, but I couldn’t say it to a man I really adored.

  The breakup was hard but I didn’t regret it for long. My sister said that our mother soured me on a conventional woman’s fate. That was partly true. Another part of me was just numb; when people talked about Love love, I knew I’d never felt it. But I felt plenty of strong feelings. And a life full of men and movies was the only life I wanted.

  I looked up at the facade of the Chinese.

  L.A. had been a shock at first. I’d gone from a Cahiers du cinéma crowd who talked like Abel Gance and Sergei Eisenstein were still alive, to the Hollywood of “event” pictures and corporate marketing tie-ins.

  Movies were a lot of things for me. Window on the world, fortress over the void, magic carpet, aphrodisiac, microscope, telescope, and sometimes an antidote for the pain. But they weren’t an excuse to ignore my past. They weren’t a substitute for emotion.

  Damn Father for coming to L.A. Damn him and Sis for reminding me about the past.

  But they hadn’t started it. Lockwood had, when he made an issue out of the Colt.

  Jesus—

  I just remembered—

  Lockwood hadn’t returned my call. I’d gone all day without telling him about the ambush at Greta Stenholm’s apartment.

  I checked my watch: 12:30 A.M.

  I got out Lockwood’s card, picked up the car phone, dialed the police station, and left another message at the desk. This time I said it was urgent.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I WOKE UP thinking about Isabelle Pavich and her taunt: “Friends of Greta Stenholm tend to get dead.”

  It was now Thursday morning. Greta Stenholm was murdered Tuesday and I had a major urge to shake some answers out of Pavich. I spent an hour on the computer, searching the Times archives for murders. After an hour of frustration I decided to call Pavich. Then I changed my mind. I had USC names of my own, and Pavich gave me the creeps. I’d exhaust every possibility before I made a deal with her.

  Vivian left a message while I was at the Chinese. The LAPD had no record of a break-in at 7095 Hawthorn; and she’d try to get more background on Lockwood, but she wasn’t optimistic. I left a return message. I told her about the Lockwood-watcher journalists, and the information trade I wouldn’t agree to. Maybe she could get something out of them, I said.

  I checked my face in the mirror. My cheek was better; it felt more stiff than painful now. I popped four aspirin, dosed the bruises with arnica cream, and had toast and coffee. The dead-friends remark nagged at me. The burglary nagged at me. Why would Stenholm not report it? There were only two reasons I could think of? Either nothing happened, or something happened that she didn’t want to tell the police.

  I packed up my notes, raided the attic for more money, and headed out. First stop was the bank, to change the hundreds into smaller bills. Next stop was the gun store.

  Gun Galaxy backed onto a liquor store just east of Beverly Hills. The owner was a mild-spoken black man who hated whites and made his money arming them. I always bought my shells from him—although he disapproved of the Colt as old-fashioned and unwieldy.

  He was unlocking his doors as I pulled into the parking lot. He greeted me with his usual pitch for a Lady Smith & Wesson. I laughed and laid out my problem: the cops had seized my gun and I needed immediate, concealable protection. He didn’t ask questions; he just listed everything he had in stock, legal and illegal. It was a substantial list.

  I bought a can of Mace, brass knuckles, a sap, and a pair of handcuffs. I might have bought a Lady Smith & Wesson if it hadn’t been for the fifteen-day wait and the fact that I couldn’t manage an automatic without practice. As it was, I walked out of the store with a miniarsenal. It made me feel nervous but safer.

  The ambush the other night had been educational. I learned that my reflexes were rusty; I’d gotten out of the habit of selfdefense. And being jumped by a stranger was different from being jumped by someone you knew. When the little goon grabbed me, I seized up: that had never happened before. I’d have to prepare myself to fight back, like I’d done with Father all those years.

  Neil John Phillips, Stenholm’s writing partner, was next on the agenda. He lived in the Fairfax District not far from the gun store. I drove over there.

  Phillips’s block was lined with old Spanish duplexes. I knew that he’d filed for bankruptcy, but these places ran three grand a month at least. I parked in front of his address. It was a ground-floor apartment on the corner. An engraved business card was taped to the mail slot: NEIL JOHN PHILLIPS—WRITER OF SCREEN PLAYS.

  I banged the lion-head knocker and waited. Nobody answered. I circled around to the back door and knocked again. The screen was latched from the inside. I stood on the steps and tried to see in the kitchen window. The louvers were frosted glass and shut tight.

  The backyard was all pavement and a row of garages. They were marked w
ith the duplex numbers. I walked over, lifted Phillips’s door, and got hit with a blast of hot air.

  The garage was crammed with cardboard boxes. It was so full there almost wasn’t room for a car. But there was no car. I went to the nearest stack and opened the flaps on the top box. It held hundreds of brittle yellowing memos, stamped with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer logo. I picked one up and the edges crumbled in my hand.

  The memo was dated June 6, 1944, and was sent by Louis B. Mayer to a Mrs. Chadwick. It began “Re: Miss Garland’s weight” and continued with detailed dietary instructions. The studio was putting Judy Garland on a stringent no-fat regime, and prescribing more amphetamines. I tried to think how old Garland would have been in 1944. Twenty?

  I dug through the rest of the memos. Lots of them mentioned famous stars and seemed too valuable to be sitting in someone’s garage; they were crumbling to dust. I caught references to Miss Crawford’s freckles, Miss Garbo’s large feet, and Mr. Gable’s chronic infidelity. Louis Mayer had sent some; heads of production units and departments had sent others. There were even a couple signed by Irving Thalberg, MGM’s legendary head of production.

  I circled the garage looking into the most accessible boxes. All I found was old MGM paper—routine bureaucratic stuff of no interest.

  One box contained a dozen bound scripts. The first few were authored by a B. N. Hecht. They were new scripts, not collector’s items, and it took me a minute to figure them out. I realized that “B. N. Hecht” must be a pseudonym for Neil John Phillips. The blackballed Phillips must have borrowed a name from MGM’s classic years: Ben Hecht was one of Hollywood’s great screenwriters.

  I found a copy of The Last Real Man. That was the script that had caused the controversy and ended Phillips’s career. I opened the cover to take a look. A large piece of paper fell out from between the pages. I caught the piece of paper and unfolded it.

  It was a pencil sketch of some kind of floor plan. The structure had long approaches from three directions, a central courtyard, and rooms labeled EDITING, and PROJECTION. There was a kitchen, a commissary, several offices, and a long hallway lined with bedroom suites. It was a weird hybrid, a cross between an open-air house, it seemed like, and a rudimentary movie studio. But there was nothing to identify the sketch—no address or name. I flipped the drawing over: the back of the paper was blank. I couldn’t tell if the building existed, or if it was a film geek’s vision of nirvana.