American Dream Machine (16 page)

“Hey, Sev, you know who owned this car? It belonged to Montgomery Clift, the actor.”

“Who?”

The tape deck played Bob Dylan, a song that was just a sloppy, repetitive shanty.
Rock me mama, like a wagon wheel
.

“Hey Severin, you know what this car really is?” Bryce turned so he could be in on the game. “It’s Rocinante, Don Quixote’s nag.”

“Don Quixote?” Severin was skeptical. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“He knows Don Quixote, not Monty Clift?” Beau roared. “Severin, you are your mother’s!”

But he wasn’t, not then. Nor was Kate, leaning in the crook of her father’s arm, hair smelling of lemongrass or wheatstraw as she gripped his body with hers, adhering. The sky was lilac, the soft-brushed color of six o’clock. By the time they reached the lot it was proper twilight, all of them stumbling out of the car in a daze of wind and travel. Down the lot’s alleys, past the hangar-like soundstages and warehouses.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Bryce’s voice echoed as he called for the kids to follow.

“Why?” Severin said. “It’s not like we’re going to be allowed to watch.”

They sounded innocent,
felt
innocent, as if they were merely witnesses and not the film’s perpetrators. Outside the screening room they ate chicken piccata and lobster salad off paper plates, drank Chablis from paper cups. Morrison was late, and he arrived dragging the film’s second reel in a canister.

“Morrison.” Jeremy stuck out his palm, and Beau was reminded why he liked Vana, the fact that he never held a grudge in a town filled with Sicilian temperament. But the director just brushed by him.

“Let’s get this thing started, eh? Let’s see what you people make of my fucking masterpiece.”

He was drunk, maybe. Why were directors, to a man, such cowboys? Little Morrison, tottering there in his boots.

“Wanna get tight with a dictator, kid?” Beau leaned over and whispered to his son. “Mo there’s your man.”

He folded his paper plate and tossed the last of his lobster salad into the garbage.

“Please, Dad?” Sev said. “Can I watch?”

“No.”

If only he could hold other lines as firmly as he held this one. The teenage sitter he’d hired led Severin away.

“Come on, let’s get some dessert.”

The rest of the cast had already filed into the screening room, except for Udo the no-show. He’d cut bait the last day of shooting. Sam was absent too, not even bothering to guard the hen house in this case, perhaps attending to some other client’s catastrophe. Beau took a seat up front beside Vana. Li slid in on the studio exec’s other side.

“Hey, Jer,” Beau whispered. He eyed the actress, as girlishly inscrutable as ever while she worked on a red lollipop. “Why don’t you ask Sue Lyon there to move into your lap?”

The executive shifted uncomfortably. Beau chortled. There were barely a dozen of them, in a room that could’ve sat forty. Bryce sat in the back with Davis, whose eight-year-old son, Rufus, dozed across his lap. Jeremy’s boss sat by the star also. The studio chief and the star would always be buddies, never mind that the president was thirty years older and they had nothing in common. If it failed, these two men would walk away without a scratch.

The projector whirred, and light hit the screen. The studio boss, who reminded Beau of Waxmorton, moneyed and gray and doughy and intelligent, coughed. The movie unreeled in front of them.

“It isn’t that bad,” Beau whispered.

“It isn’t about bad.” Jeremy wouldn’t look at him. “We can’t make movies like this and survive.”

Li had her hand on his leg, Beau noticed. But Jeremy had a point. This was a plotless road epic, a few years past the prime of such things in this country. Beau saw plainly: the movie wasn’t
bad
. The
violence was a little gratuitous—beyond Penn and Peckinpah—but these moments only punctuated the film’s melancholy stasis. It made sense to Beau. Life, or at least
his
life, was like this. Stillness, torn by pornography.

“Bah,” Morrison muttered. “Fucking suits.”
Focking zoots
. Davis and Bryce burst out laughing.

Beau would never make a movie like this again. He knew that. His sensibilities were too vulgar, too crassly in line, really, with Waxmorton and Sam and even Davis, who by the end of the decade would be playing rascally rum runners and smug Southern cops. The film ended on Udo’s howl and Li’s head toppling across the sand, the appalling shot Beau had seen a thousand times before. The head looked real, unlike those gloppy Polynesian-seeming fakeries you saw in midnight horror movies. And then the lights came up and there was a clumsy silence.

“Was that you?” Beau glanced over his shoulder finally at Davis. “Or was it a stunt cock?”

Davis grinned sheepishly. A silhouetted glimpse of his penis might’ve been the movie’s best commercial hope. Bryce had already scampered from the room, while the studio head looked miserable. Glowering from the depths of his chair like a constipated king.

“Nice work, Mo,” Beau called across the room. “I mean that.”

The director glared. Praise was less fun than provocation.

Beau rubbed his hands vigorously. “Just wait’ll people get a look at this!”

Light dropped from the ceiling, the aspic glow of small theaters, where you could read the feelings on every face in the room. The boss’s despondent expression finally resolved into something sharper.

“They won’t.”

“What?” Beau tried to keep his tone airy. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re not releasing it.”

Beau felt in his chest that terrible constriction, that feeling that had led him, once, to do something stupid and rash. He fought it down now, or at least his medication did.

“You can’t.” He moved toward the executive’s chair and the man recoiled slightly. “Please.”

“Are you begging me?” He certainly enjoyed this part. “Are you begging me to release it?”

“No.”

He had a silver pompadour and a blue oxford shirt, a thick red tie with a Windsor knot. The guy’s face was a beveled rectangle, he looked—as Severin would’ve seen it—like a Jack Kirby drawing, with three distinct sides to his chin. His loafer sat on top of his knee and he jiggled it slightly.

“You do what you have to,” Beau said. “I’m just saying there’s an audience for this movie.”

“Who?”

Beau faltered. “In Europe. On college campuses there are kids who—”

“Who what?” The look on the studio head’s face said it all. “Who can’t sleep?”

It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that Beau had problems with this sort of authority. But now he just stalked out of the screening room. He’d learned at least a partial lesson. Severin and Kate were waiting in the lobby.

“How was the movie, Dad?”

“I liked it.”

“When’s it coming out?”

What would he do? Davis DeLong stood by himself, pacing in stupid circles. Vana and Li clustered by the buffet table. Jeremy drained the dregs of a bottle of zinfandel. Bryce hung back in a corner. The studio wouldn’t hang the film’s failure on any of their shoulders, what was such a
fakakta
idea to begin with. Who, then? Morrison? Forget about it, that guy’s future was teaching film studies at Cal State San Diego, his exile was already assured.
When’s it coming out?

“Someday,” Beau said.

He was fucked. His kids had been dumped in his lap, and he had nothing. He moved to the buffet table to pick at the scraps, as if to get all the free food he could before the world ended.

“Someday when?” Severin followed him.

Beau gulped a glass of water, shoveled a whole swatch of cold chicken piccata, pounded flat, into his mouth. He shivered with the need for release—vocal, esophageal, bowel—but none was forthcoming.

The studio boss darted out of the screening room and went right for him.

“You fat fuck! This is all your fault!”

“Not in front of my kids.” Beau put down his plate. His hands shook.

“You bring me a piece of shit like that and you’re worried about the ratings board when
I
talk?”

“Behave yourself, little man.”

You
. The boss didn’t have to say it. Somehow, he pinned the whole failure on Beau, who had an opportunity to throw one of the others under the bus. All of them may have deserved it more than he did. But he just let his hand fall onto Sev’s head. The top of his son’s scalp was warm.

“Come on.” Three years of his life were gone, but who cared when you had what mattered more? He looked across the lobby at Kate. “Sweetheart, let’s go.”

“HEY NATHANIEL! NATE!
Nice jump shot.” Williams Farquarsen hung against the fence of our school playground, watching Little Will and me play basketball. “Good hustle.”

He drew his son aside. “You all right?”

Little Will gulped air. He went all out, as he would doing other things, later. Neither of us was particularly athletic. Kickball, handball, the other competitive sports that swept our elementary school playground weren’t our beat. We were good students, both, bonded since kindergarten. I was into reading and language arts, whereas Little Will was more of a math geek. But he was already wild and graceful. He didn’t look much like his dad—olive-skinned and blond-haired, he was more like Marnie—but he had a little of Williams’s chilly fire.

“Suck it up, suck it up. No water yet. Go on.”

He wanted his son tough, disciplined. He treated us hard, like little adults. The only softness I saw in my friend’s father was at home, when I slept over at their place in the Marina. When I watched Williams with his wife, he was almost a different person: solicitous, tender. But after school, when he made Little Will and me play basketball—Teddy didn’t think it was a bad idea for me either—I gleaned what he might’ve been like at work. Driven by something too cool to be ruthlessness, that lacked even that much passion.

“C’mon.” He taught us spin moves, a relentless dribble, taught us to heave shots at a low-hanging hoop. He made us run laps, our bodies flopping like puppets as we skittered around the yard.
He was unexpectedly athletic himself; it turned out Williams was a surfer—had been since the mid-sixties. While Beau was reeling in the wake of his failure, drummed into a retreat from which it seemed there would be no easy comeback—it was one thing to antagonize an agent on the decline and quite another to piss off the corporate head of a studio: this was a problem even Williams Farquarsen couldn’t help him with—my friend and I were gasping, wheezing, skinning our little knees and palms on the playground in back of St. Jerome. “Nate, take the charge. Will, you go after him. Hard. No man plays except to win. Come on!”

No man plays except to win
. Over and over he said this. I suppose it was part of the philosophy that would guide him, with which he would later marshal his troops to greatness. We took it to heart.

“
OK
,
OK
.” After an hour or so, he’d call it off. We did this a couple of times each week, until we collapsed into the backseat of his car and he drove us home, gasping, parched. It was unusual, but then Will’s dedication to his family life was also that. He never did do the reckless things my father had and would. “You want some of this, Nate?”

He handed me a thermos of cold water. At the other end of the playground a clutch of older kids, sixth graders, played catch and made horizontal forays on primitive, clay-wheeled skateboards. How that world was about to change. We were in one of our own, at the far end with the kiddie hoop and its one tattered net. Williams, in a pale gray sweatshirt, cuffed my neck.

“There you go. It’s good for you.” He meant the water, the exercise. Those humid afternoons in the spring of ’75, sunlight pushing through afternoon fog to paint the bricks around the playground yellow. Girls skipped rope; a transistor radio, belonging to one of the teachers, played Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You,” Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom.” “I’ll give you a ride home, Nate, but I have to stop and pick something up first.”

“
OK
.”

We waited in the car, a Peugeot that smelled of trapped air and sweat, a sweetness of beach debris, while he stopped in front of a law office and ran inside. We had no idea what he was doing, there at Albrecht Ellis Associates—a small firm, one of those sleepy little businesses in Santa Monica that would’ve had no truck with people
in the industry, which is exactly what Williams needed—we didn’t know anything, or care. We sat there panting, fiddling with the radio dial, shoving and jostling. Little Will pointed at my leg.

“Look.”

Blood ran down my calf. He wrinkled his nose and snorted. I did too. I didn’t feel anything. The car door opened and Williams ducked back in. He threw a manila folder on the passenger seat.

“What are you boys up to?”

We fell into the back, and I looked down to where I’d cut my knee. Williams’s eyebrows lifted a little.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

I wouldn’t forget this moment. Who’s to say why? A little scraped skin in a childhood full of it, the pink and pale flesh mixed with the black gum of asphalt and the bright red of my blood. Maybe it was the way it didn’t hurt until someone pointed at it, or how the elder Williams’s face—he had such delicate features, little buttons of sclera and bone—opened up in raw curiosity. He wasn’t like other fathers. There was something missing, but also something extra.

“D’you need a bandage, Nate? Let’s get you one.”

Right before he ducked back out to go retrieve the first aid kit that rattled around in the trunk, Bactine and Band-Aids in a white plastic box, right before I burst into tears, I saw it. Williams’s eyes flashed green, his pale lips tugged down at the corners. A wince or a grimace that was nothing like Beau, the fat man I automatically, if not yet consciously, associated with him. It was a terrible expression, small and involuntary: in it were fear and hunger, and some private pain that must’ve mirrored my own, else I would never have noticed it.

Traffic washed along Wilshire Boulevard, behind him. The yellow air drifted and eddied, with traces of fog and exhaust. Little Will kicked the seat, restlessly, and if either of us had been old enough to open our eyes and stir from our childhood’s sleep—
What was in the folder Williams had just retrieved? If I had to guess, it was paperwork surrounding an incorporation: he must’ve been laying his groundwork early, for what else would he have been doing visiting a sleepy little law office like this one? He wasn’t going to divorce his wife, and
TAG
had its own lawyers, for deals
—if we’d been able to do this, what else might we have seen?