Hollywood Animal (24 page)

Michael had a new plan in mind. He would represent me himself, along with another CAA agent, Rand Holston. I knew that when he said he would represent me himself it meant that he would send me presents for Christmas and that Rand Holston would do the actual work.

It was, I had been told, a common CAA ploy.

Holston came up to Marin County and arranged a lunch in a fancy place. He was in his early thirties, an earnest robotic yuppie. Well, I thought, I’m not marrying the guy and maybe Guy McElwaine would become an agent again one of these days.

· · ·

During the same period, I wrote three screenplays without a contract. I’d loved the freedom of
City Hall
—no discussions, no meetings, no advice from anyone, just the pure bald pleasure of writing a story I believed in.

The first was called
Platinum
. It was about a rock and roll singer who is thought to have died. His brother, a Cleveland cop, thinks his death is suspicious and winds up very much out of his element tracking his brother’s glitzy and highly connected friends. My agent sent the script out to over a hundred financing entities in town. Every one of them passed. The script, the universal opinion held, was “too dark.”

The second was called
Magic Man
. It was a poignant, nostalgic piece about the relationship between a rock disc jockey in the early sixties and a sixteen-year-old refugee Hungarian kid very much patterned after me. It involved payola and was about loyalty and values. My agent sent the script out to the same financing entities who had passed on
Platinum
. They all passed again.

The third script was called
Checking Out
and was about a man in his thirties who suddenly realizes that he is going to die. He becomes obsessed with death and the obsession changes everything in his life. It was a dark comedy.

My agent sent the script out to the same financing entities who had passed on
Platinum
and
Magic Man
. They all passed once again—except for the producer Ned Tanen, the former head of Universal, now an independent producer, who had been ill, found the script very funny, and wanted to think about it.

He thought about it and then he passed.

“They all thought it was too dark,” my agent said.

“It’s a dark comedy,” I said.

“They thought it was too dark for a dark comedy.”

“Well, I can’t lighten it any,” I said, “it’s about dying.”

“Tough subject,” he said, “I get it.”

The good news: my price was higher than ever before, I was making more money than ever before, agents and producers and studio heads were now wooing me more than ever before.

The bad news: the only movie I’d had made had flopped. None of the scripts I’d written on contract had been made or looked like they’d ever be made. Three spec scripts I’d written hadn’t sold. The only spec script I’d sold,
City Hall
, was now being turned into a Goldie Hawn vehicle by other writers. (Dolly Parton had passed.)

I got a call from a young guy in Marin County. He was working behind the counter at the Book Depot in the middle of town, serving coffee and selling books. His name was Ben Myron. He had formerly painted addresses on curbs
without
the homeowners’ permission and had then presented them with a bill for his “services.” Now he wanted to be a producer.

Ben Myron asked if I had anything “in the drawer” that he could try to sell in Hollywood.

“Do you know anything about Hollywood?” I asked him.

“I grew up in L.A.”

“Do you know anything about the movie business?”

“Truthfully,” he said, “no.”

I let him have
Checking Out
. It was the one I liked the most.

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I’ll figure it out. Should I pay you any money for the option?”

“Do you have any money?” I asked.

“I don’t, but my girlfriend has some,” he said.

“Forget about it,” I said. “Call me when you sell it.”

Guy called to see how I was doing. He always said, “What trouble are you getting into?”

I told him that the new producer of
Checking Out
was working behind the counter at the Book Depot in Mill Valley and had once painted addresses on curbs.

“Perfect,” he said, “just perfect. Do you know what you’re doing? You’re establishing a real reputation for writing scripts that no one wants.”

He went on and on. The spec scripts, he said, were going to destroy whatever career I had.

“I love writing them,” I said, “I don’t have to hustle anybody, I don’t have to be nice to people I can’t stand—”

“From what I hear you’re not nice to people you can’t stand anyway,” he said.

“It’s more honest for the studios, too, isn’t it?” I asked. “They don’t have to take a chance on the fact that maybe I’ll write a good script. They can read the finished script—take it or leave it. It ain’t a pig in a poke.”

“You’re too ornery for your own good,” Guy said. “You oughta be out making nice instead of carrying knives around with you. That’s what screenwriters do.”

The two houses were close together, and she was my father’s neighbor, divorced, raising her two little boys.

I had met her once on a previous visit to my father as she stood in her front yard, pruning her roses.

On this visit I ran into her at a friendly bar called Nighttown not far from
my
father’s house. It was humid and sticky outside and we had a couple of cold beers together, then started chasing them with shots of tequila.

She asked me about Hollywood and I could tell she read the tabloids: What was Sylvester Stallone
really
like? Did everybody in Hollywood
really
do drugs? Was it true that so-and-so was gay? Was it true that I had made
millions
writing screenplays?

When Nighttown closed she asked me if I wanted to have “one for the road” at her house—a very short road because I was sleeping at my father’s house that night.

We had another and another in her dark living room, then went back to the cold beer because her house wasn’t air-conditioned. Her little boys were asleep.

After a while we went up to her bedroom and couldn’t wait to get our clothes off because we were so sweaty.

A light went on in my father’s house and as I made love to her I looked out the window and saw my father sitting there in the blistering heat of his own bedroom—bare-chested and sweating and staring off at nothing.

Afterward she told me that she saw my father sitting there and staring all the time.

We slept for a couple of hours and one of her little boys woke up and she told me I had to go. I kissed her goodbye, got dressed, went downstairs quietly, and used my key to open the door to my father’s house.

I went upstairs and he was still sitting in the chair, slumped back. He was asleep. I kissed him on the top of his head and glanced out the window and saw her.

She had her little boy in her arms. She was rocking him back and forth. She saw me looking at her and turned her light off.

CHAPTER 5

[Flashback]

Commies in Klevland

KARCHY

Hey, Pop, how come you still call yourself
Dr
. Jonas?

KARCHY’S FATHER

I still doctor.

KARCHY

No you’re not. That’s old-country stuff. You don’t work in a hospital or anything.

KARCHY’S FATHER

I doctor law, got Ph.D. degree in Hungary. I
doctor
.

KARCHY

It doesn’t mean anything over here. Nobody cares.

KARCHY’S FATHER

I care. It mean something … to me.

Telling Lies in America

PRIESTS MET US
at the railroad station in Klevland and drove us through the dark streets. It was late at night in the winter. Mounds of snow covered the ground.

They stopped at a building next to a building with a large neon sign and led us up a long stairway into an apartment with no furniture. Bare lightbulbs hung from the ceiling. There was no heat.

We lay down on the floor in our coats. There was no food. My mother cried and smoked a cigarette.

I clutched my cowboy guns.

The apartment was small. One bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a tiny office for my father.

The priests, who were Franciscans like Father Benedek and Father Ipoly but younger, brought us some furniture. I slept on a couch in the living room. There was a small concrete yard in the back between our apartment and the printing shop where the newspaper was set into type and printed. I played there and in a private alleyway that ran on the side of our apartment. Beneath us was the newspaper’s circulation office, where more priests sat.

I ran around the concrete yard and the alley firing my guns at the priests.

Our address was 4160 Lorain Avenue, which was also the address of the newspaper my father was going to edit, the
Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday
.

Since the paper’s printing shop was behind our apartment, the smell of burning lead was pervasive. Also filling the air was the smell of burning potatoes: the Num Num Potato Chip factory, a tall red-brick building, was on the other side of our apartment.

We were at the epicenter of Cleveland’s West Side Hungarian neighborhood. Right out our living room window to the left was Papp’s Bar … across the street was the Korona Kavehaz, also known as the Crown Café … down the street were the Debrecen Restaurant, Sarosi Dry Cleaners, Gerzeny Movers, Sam Finesilver’s Hardware Store, and the Louis A. Bodnar Funeral Home.

Lorain Avenue was a main artery furnishing Hungarian goods to people who worked at Republic or U.S. Steel and stayed close to other Hungarians in what they called their “strudel ghetto.” There were 150,000 Hungarians in Cleveland living mostly in blue-collar neighborhoods whose boundaries were populated by Puerto Ricans, Appalachians, Irish, German, and black residents. To either side of Lorain Avenue were old streets with little houses intersected by an intricate, mazelike network of dark and garbage-strewn back alleys.

The focal point of the West Side Hungarian community was the church, St. Emeric’s, behind the block-long West Side Market on West 25th Street, sixteen blocks from our new home.

I was enrolled at St. Emeric’s, the Hungarian-American grade school. The teachers were Hungarian nuns in black clothes, the Daughters of the Divine Redeemer. The school was attached to the parish, whose pastor was Father John Mundweil. A gruff man in his forties, he scowled a lot. Even the sisters were afraid of him.

The school grounds were at the edge of a bluff overlooking the city’s flats. From the field at the edge of the bluff, you could see a river—the Cuyahoga—flowing between the factories. The river smelled of sulfur and chemicals. The closer you got to it, the more it stung your eyes.

The river made me cry.

· · ·

My mother walked me to school on my first day. I wore my cowboy outfit.

It was the last time I wore it. One of the other kids knocked my hat off at recess and stomped on it and when my mother arrived to walk me back from school, my fancy vest and pants were covered with mud.

Because the nuns and most of the kids in school … kids named Csaba and Tibor and Geza and Gyuszi and Arpi … were Hungarian, I couldn’t get away with not saying or doing anything like I had in Washington.

I hated school.

The Daughters of the Divine Redeemer, who taught mostly in Hungarian, were scary. If you didn’t know an answer … if you misbehaved … they slapped you … pulled your hair … hit your hands with a ruler … pulled your pants down and hit you with a paddle … said you were going to burn forever in hell … said they’d call the police to take you to jail … said they’d tell Immigration to take you back to the old country.

Sister Rose told us that America, like our school, was named after St. Emeric, Hungary’s heroic Prince Emeric, St. Stephen’s son. The Italian mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci was baptized after Hungary’s St. Emeric. Not only did it mean that America was named after a Hungarian, it meant that had St. Emeric not lived, there would not be a place called America.

Only thanks to Hungary was there an America!

Shortly after we arrived, the circulation office of the newspaper downstairs was burgled.

All that was taken, I heard my father tell my mother, were files the Franciscans had kept about the things my father had achieved in Hungary.

My father said it was the Komchis … coming after him.

They were afraid of the Komchis in another way, too. They mentioned the names of Hungarian men … who’d been sent back to the Komchis … back to Hungary … by America.

I asked why America would send Hungarians back to the Komchis and was told that there were Komchis everywhere, even in America.

I was frightened, too. I was afraid that one morning I’d wake up to find that the Komchis had taken my father away. I stood at the living room window which faced our street—Lorain Avenue—with my cowboy guns in hand, looking for Komchis.

I didn’t see any but one day I saw two Hungarians yelling at each other outside Papp’s Bar, talking of course about the horse’s cock that would enter their behinds. Then I saw one of the men take a knife out of his coat and push it into the other’s stomach.

The man fell and blood gushed out of him the way it had gushed out of the pigs at the slaughterhouse. I stared until I heard the siren that was getting closer and closer.

When it got very close, I ran into the bathroom and covered my ears.

Rats were in the alley and the concrete yard but, probably because the Franciscans placed traps in the stairs, there were no rats in our apartment.

But the building next door to ours was the Num Num Potato Chip factory and the rats had overrun it. We could see the rats scurrying on the ledges leading to the factory windows.

An old Franciscan named Father Ákos collected the trapped rats in the yard and in the alley every morning. He took them to a shed behind the printing shop where he grilled and smoked them.