American Dream Machine (53 page)

“Excuse me.” Of course, one of the men came over right away. “What did you just do?”

“I told your friend to take a walk.” Beau was just getting ready to leave.
There’s nothing here
. He peeled a fifty out of his wallet and placed it on the table. “That’s all.”

“I think it was more than that. You were very, very rude.”

The old thrills, they were harder to come by than he’d remembered. These people spent more on fitness than they did on drugs. This guy, for instance, was sickeningly big. A blond, apple-faced Nord who was probably a personal trainer. Either that or the governor-in-waiting of the state of California.

“No,” Beau said. “She insulted me first.”

The other man came over now too. He was short, Jewish, Versaced, with his early-graying hair cropped in a modified Caesar ’do. An agent, the new kind. Beau could smell it on him. Both were in their thirties.

“I think you should apologize,” Nord Boy said. His skin was glossy, his features scrunched in a steroidal knot.

“You wanna know a story,” Beau looked them both over, “about Ben Kingsley?” He trained his eyes on the agent. “Since you mistook me?”

“Sure.” The agent smirked. He was from
UTA
or Broder Kurland—some little
pisher
Beau’d seen around town in the past. “Sure we do.”

Nobody had mistaken anybody. These guys were just fucking with him, wondering what the old bloody-headed geezer with a black eye was doing at the Chateau.

“I used to represent Sir Ben. Long ago, and just briefly,” Beau said. Like this would impress them. “In the eighties.”

“Is that right?” The agent spoke. The women were off powdering their noses, so it was just him and the other man, opposite Beau.

“One day, Dickie Attenborough calls me up, he says,
Beau, I’m making this movie about Mahatma Gandhi. And I’m interested in your client
. I said,
Which one?
And he said,
Bryce Beller
. . . ”

“Bryce Beller?” The agent cocked his fists like a little prizefighter, as if just standing behind Nord Boy made him tough. “Who’s Bryce Beller?”

“Actor. Tall, skinny, nervous. Used to do biker movies with Nicholson.” Beau looked from one to the other. Nord Boy looked like a muscle car enthusiast. Maybe he’d remember
Ride Down the Wind
. “Do
you
remember him?”

“Nope.” The trainer swung his arms. “Can’t say I do.”

Beau sighed. The story wouldn’t be funny, the joke couldn’t make sense: how Attenborough had really wanted Bryce for the Martin Sheen role, but there’d been some confusion. Beau’d gone ahead and offered the part of Gandhi to Bryce Beller. The thought of Bryce—
Bryce
! That mad-eyed, equine, eventual specialist in playing snipers, heavies, and terrorists!—cast as Mahatma Gandhi still made him laugh.

“What’s the fucking point,” he snapped. Wasn’t that the whole agency game? If Bryce could be Gandhi, then anyone could be anyone: the doors were wide open. This was a lesson worth imparting. “If you people don’t have a sense of history, I don’t think I can help you gen’lmen.”

“A sense of history?” The big guy squinted. “I don’t think we need your ‘help,’ friend.”

“Who’s
‘Gondy’
?
”

The agent rubbed his chin. And Beau just stared. Anybody could be anybody, perhaps—a fat man’s salvation—but was it true that everybody eventually became nobody?
Who’s Mahatma Gandhi?
Jesus fucking Christ!

“Where’d you go to school, dipshit?” Beau stepped toward him. He could smell the Westside entitlement on this kid, too. “You go to Untaken? Windward?”

The bulky guy shoved him, palm to pec. He didn’t like Beau’s attitude. The agent said, “Beverly High.”

“
OK
. So they didn’t tell you who Gandhi was? Little bald guy. Big pacifist? Fought against colonial rule in India?”

“Naw,” the guy said.

What did it say about the world, too, that Beau, not exactly an eager student, could retain at least this much, yet a boy schooled under the most privileged conditions on earth wouldn’t bother? It offended Beau, it defaced Abe Waxmorton’s memory, that this was what the business, and perhaps civilization itself, had come to.

“Fuck you!” Beau lunged. The trainer shoved him again. “They should teach you about Gandhi and about Bryce and me—”

The women’s heels clickety-clacked across the lobby’s tile floor. Which was all the impetus the trainer needed to haul off and hit him.

“Jesus, Mark!” The agent’s voice skied above. Beau went down so fast it was like someone had chopped him in half.
CRACK
!
“The old guy’s crazy! What the hell’d you do that for?”

You could hear the splintering of bone from across the lobby. The trainer shook his fist. “He was an asshole.”

“It wasn’t necessary.”

Maybe it was. This wasn’t the halfhearted pussy tap of some cheapjack security guard in an off-the-rack blazer; this was Vanilla Thunder: a full on fist-to-the-face from a guy who bench-pressed hundreds of pounds for a living.

“Fuck it,” the lunk said. “He’s breathing.”

Oh, he was. Like a cadaver in a horror movie, Beau swung up from the waist. It took seconds, and all of this—the hitting, his getting up—was so fast people in the lobby were only now turning to look.

“You,” Beau gurgled. Blood jetted onto his shirt and he spoke with a weird nasality. The center of his face was swollen. “Motherf—”

The guy kicked him. Just once. Beau rolled onto his side and there was again that
crack
, the keening pop of a bone being broken.

Uhhrrf
. He vomited. Spat a trickle of blood and bile onto the floor and lay there, still.

“Let’s get out of here.”

The Spanish tile, magnified. The rugs, the legs of the couches. These are the things Beau took in, because, astonishingly, he didn’t hurt. He
was
hurt, but the dull ache in his kidneys, the sharp pain in his ribs—he couldn’t breathe—the piss dribbling down his leg:
all this belonged to somebody else. His
face
, which was the concentration of all suffering: this, too, belonged to somebody else.

“You
OK
? Mister, are you
OK
?”

“Ahhh.” Spit rolled out of Beau’s mouth. His tongue didn’t work. “Yath.”

He pushed up. Somehow, he did it, while three or four people, including the hostess, knelt around him.

“We should call a doctor.”

“No, get him out of here, man. I don’t want him in the hotel.”

Cloudy voices. A manager, maybe. But Beau lurched and tottered to his feet. He could breathe, if he held his left shoulder back. He could almost walk. Limping and humping his way across the lobby, he left a trail of piss and blood.

“Ohhh,” he moaned. “Ohhhhhh.” Was anybody going to stop him? His teeth were pink. He looked like Nosferatu.

Down the stairs he went, on autopilot, swaying and stumbling to the valet stand. He knew this place, he didn’t need to see it. Because his nose was shattered, he could actually feel it pulsing, and the salty trickle of blood in his throat fascinated him.

“Jesus, buddy.” Somehow he was outside, now. Another voice spoke. “What happened to you?”

Beau looked over. His eyes were practically swollen shut.

“Mala,” he said.
I’m all right
. “Falaga.”
Fuckyoulookinat
.

He lurched and swayed, barely conscious. But his hands were so red! He could see all that color, which came from inside him, that rich, regal liquid. Wow! He could see his hands, slick with gore, and the patches on his shirt.

“You can’t drive!”

“
Falaga
!”

He snatched the keys from the valet’s hand. The poor kid, just another Central American who did whatever the guests of this hotel told him, backed off.
He
wasn’t going to say no.

“Hey, buddy!”

Beau shoved a bill into the valet’s palm, whatever denomination he’d just grabbed—it was enough—and bolted. The other man, who was just a dark-haired blur in a tan suit, ran for him, but even now, Beau was too quick. He ducked into the driver’s seat, slammed the door and hit it. A good Angeleno, in a $100,000 car,
feels invulnerable. He gunned out from under the canopy, went roaring down the drive.

Piss streamed down his leg. Or blood. Whatever it was—that bastard had really done a number on him—Beau folded forward and stomped the accelerator. Gasping for shallow breath.

He hit Sunset Boulevard at about forty miles per hour.
He could see, but not see
. Beau sped into the turn, bending right toward Santa Monica. He wanted to go home.

There wasn’t anything on his mind at all. There was just pain, and a desire to reach somewhere—anywhere—it would stop. A big black Lincoln Navigator, its driver a vodka-sozzled twenty-one-year-old girl from Sherman Oaks, very busy on the phone, wove right, jerking abruptly into Beau’s lane. Her front grille crossed over just as he reached the boulevard.

Her car was bigger than his.

EVER BEEN TO
a parent’s funeral?

Strange as it may sound, I wanted to ask that question, over and over, when I attended Beau’s. I wanted to ask it of everyone I saw. Beau was and was not my father, after all. Losing him was almost more a confirmation than it was a new development: it brought home more of what I’d always been missing. And yet I was there, moving among the crowd at his memorial, which was held at the house on Fifteeth Street. I shoehorned into a sun-splashed corner of the living room, listened while Severin stood up to address the guests.

“Excuse me.” He cleared his throat, then did an imitation of an older person’s voice: “Are you Severin Roth?”

Toastmaster Sev. Standing in front of the mantel, as suave as an actor, clutching a glass of Barolo. He wore a pigeon-colored suit, a subtle gray. The same color as Beau’s old overcoat, which hung—still—on a peg upstairs.

“A woman came up to me on the plane and asked me that. I don’t get recognized much, hardly ever, but when she said it, I thought of my father’s favorite joke.”

I hung back, to the side. The room was mobbed, actually, but I didn’t recognize too many people. I didn’t see Emily White, or any of Beau’s Sony-era cronies. Very few were under sixty-five.

“Who’s Severin Roth? Get me Severin Roth
. You know, the joke about an actor’s career.” There was appreciative murmuring. This crowd was old—and local—enough to know it. “I said to her,
D’you know anything about me? D’you know about my dad?”

Around the room, I saw Patricia—she was dignified, as composed as if Beau had died from a long illness instead of a reckless calamity—and Teddy Sanders. Little Will, who’d come alone, stood in the opposite corner. His wife and son were back in New York. There were a few small children scattered throughout the crowd, their faces slack, dimpled, inquisitive or bored. Through French doors I stared out at the backyard, the black-bottomed swimming pool Beau never swam in, a few dried palm fronds that had fallen during a windstorm and not yet been carted away.

“I’d never felt much like my father’s son,” Severin said. “Truthfully, all my life I’ve felt a bit more like my mother,” he said. “My dad was someone I tried to get away from.”

Teddy Sanders caught my eye. Strange thing about Teddy, he still looked exactly the same. His beard and hair were a little whiter, and there were a few creases around the corners of his eyes. But he’d had that aged quality ever since I was a kid, like something mellowed in a cellar. His small nod was a way of acknowledging the history between us. Over the years we’d retained that agnostic relationship former stepparents and children sometimes do.

“But what I felt then”—and right as Severin spoke, I felt my own face get hot—“is that I am, now. I am now my father’s son.”

Was this something to be proud of? I shut my eyes against waves of nausea, spasms of disgust. What kind of man eats dog crap? What was
wrong
with Beau?

And how could I love someone like that so much, without hope?

“Nate.” It was Teddy who came over first, as the crowd unknotted and everyone went back to circulating, snacking, kibitzing. “How’s your mother?”

“
OK
,” I said. It wasn’t quite true. My mother was alive, but her drinking had taken its toll on our relationship; we saw each other every few years, if that. She’d married again, then divorced. She still lived near Seattle, and when I’d called to see if she might come down for the memorial she’d equivocated.
I don’t know, Nate
. . .

She wasn’t here. But I suppose the real tragedy of her life was absenteeism. At least Beau left a footprint. My mother could never decide what she wanted.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Teddy said.

“Thanks,” I said. Gnawing a cracker spread with pâté. “But isn’t
it your loss, too?”

Maybe it wasn’t. Teddy was a survivor. He’d remarried immediately after he and my mom split up, just kept right on trucking. But I wasn’t being glib. I hadn’t gotten up to speak before the crowd, because what would I have said? I’m
also
Beau’s son? After Severin’s speech, I was redundant. And I simmered with an unexpected fury. Fuck Severin, who knew what he was losing. Fuck Little Will even, who knew what he had lost. What this meant to me might take a lifetime to puzzle out.

“I suppose,” Teddy said. That face! It was dense with secrecy, a born negotiator’s. He fingered his nicotine yellow mustache. “I know you had a special relationship.”

Did we? Or had I dreamed that too? Teddy was Beau’s partner; Teddy was another one of my dads. In a way, life offered just this swirling succession of roles. The most special relationship you had was with yourself. You played one thing, but you always were another. Only Beau couldn’t tell them apart. The Indivisible Man.

“Thanks,” I said. Across the room I could see Severin and Little Will talking, conspiring, it looked like. I seethed. Yet Teddy went on, oblivious.

“Beau and I had some fun, in the beginning.”

“I’ll bet you did.” Another man, with a receding silver Jew-fro and a hunched, low-hanging posture like a carrion bird’s, barged over. A few flecks of spit landed on my wrist. “I’ll bet you—”