The Englishman's Boy (39 page)

“I thought it was politics,” I say.

“Politics of a peculiar kind. The Western world is rotten, degenerate. Action is required. Myths are the only spurs to action.”

“Go on.”

“Not Greek myths – Apollo, Zeus, Hera. Myth in a sociological sense. Myth as a complex of pictures which express the deepest desire of a group. Sorel talks about the French working class and their belief in the myth of the general strike, the great violent paroxysm which will bring the bosses to their knees, destroy the bourgeoisie, and usher in a new age. According to him, the myth doesn’t need to have any grounds in reality, or have any possibility of being accomplished; it’s there to motivate people, provide the impetus for violent action. Because violence is the only means of invigorating a degenerate society. Your friend gave you an indecent book to read, Harry.”

I don’t bother to answer. A fine drizzle, scarcely more than a mist, is drifting down upon us. We are floating, soiled angels wrapped in a dirty cloud. The sea blurs; Rachel’s face shines luminous behind a veil of moisture. Like gauze on a lens, it softens her.

Before I know what I am saying, I tell her I love her.

She lights a cigarette, the flame cradled in her hand. “This isn’t like you, Harry,” is her only comment.

“You said not to plan so much. It just came out. Maybe I’ve adopted your style – out of control.”

“Or maybe you just want somebody to take over for you. Tell you what to do.” Her gaze is fixed on the beating waves. “I can’t do that. What I am willing to do is take care of the bills for your mother until you settle this thing.”

“I’m not broke yet,” I say.

“All right, then
do
something. Don’t play helpless.” She stubs out the cigarette. “I’m going for a swim. Think about it. Decide.”

I avert my eyes, listen to the rustle of her disrobing. Each article of clothing she discards, the strength of her perfume increases. Then the scent of her is gone, the void filled by the poorhouse-soup smell of the Pacific, suggestively warm, vaguely salty, vaguely vegetable. I wait, but not as long as I should have, stealing a glimpse of her as she covers the last few yards of sand to the waves, her outline bleary in the rain, delicate, moving – a small ghost.

I had wanted to reach out and touch her. For an instant, I had half-believed she wanted to be touched. But a moment’s cheap daring fails, even in the mist. Do something, she said. But what? Ambiguous. Wasn’t it?

So I do something. That night I go to my office in Best Chance Studios and clean out my desk, sit down and type out a letter of resignation. My letter isn’t righteous or impolite, it simply treats what happened at the party as if it hadn’t, like a fart at a formal dinner. Not a mention. The best exit I can manage from a bad situation. I only hope it will work.

Closeted in my apartment I wait to see what Chance’s reaction to this will be. No letter, no ringing phone. I haunt my window, watching the street, expecting Fitz, but Fitz doesn’t come. Young women in cloche hats parade back and forth on the sidewalk, walking furry handfuls of dog straining on leashes fine as fishing line. Mexican gardeners trim little squares of lawn in front of the apartments lining the street, their lawn mowers tossing spumes of green. The milkman, the postman, the iceman come and go. By noon the sun roasts the road and makes the softening asphalt smell like bad meat cooking, everybody but me pulls down their window blinds to hold the heat at bay. I leave mine up so I have warning of Fitz’s arrival.

A little after six the telephone operators, the hairdressers, the manicurists, the waitresses, the salesgirls bustle by. In the passageways of my building girls heft packages and struggle with keys. Doors bang shut, radios start to squawk, the tantalizing smell of frying pork chop and hamburger reach me as I sit smoking at my window, cocking an eye for Fitz. Time passes and turns the road briefly golden, the sky a turquoise swimming pool of bliss. The sun dips, the boulevard slides into grey, the horizon blushes pink before freckling itself with pale evening stars. I doze in my chair, jerking awake to every sound outside, my head turning to the street before my eyes have opened. No Fitz.

After four or five days of this, I begin to think maybe he isn’t coming, maybe I’m getting away with it. I start to look for another job. But I’m still a nervous kid playing hooky, looking around corners, half-afraid of bumping into the truant officer, Denis Fitzsimmons.

I know one or two people at most of the studios, but they are lowly types without the pull to snooker me employment the way Rachel Gold did. I make the rounds at Fox, Metro, Goldwyn Company, Louis B. Mayer Productions, Universal, Famous Players-Lasky, United Artists and Warner Brothers. Sure, I have experience, but experience writing titles. Any hack can write titles, titles are work for burned-out, boozy newspaper has-beens. The studios want creative types. Somebody with ideas. Somebody with zip. Sell me a story, they say. If you can’t sell me on a peppy story, I don’t need you.

I try, but when I push some story idea the hysterically false enthusiasm of my voice prompts such shame and embarrassment that gradually my improbable and idiotic scenarios falter, trickling away into the censuring silence of my auditor like a weak stream into desert sand.

“What’s this, kid?” they say. “No cigar.”

They aren’t interested in me, but they
are
interested in Chance. What’s going on with him? Rumours are obviously surfacing. Rumours of a big Western. I learn that things are moving rapidly with the picture we had dawdled over, moving fast.

Somebody at Universal informs me Chance has suddenly hired a lot of “pioneer types,” grizzled, hard-faced men who could give you nightmares with a glance, men whose reputations are worse than the way they look. He’s cleaned out a reservation of Sioux, loaded them on a train bound for Montana, men, women, children, cost no object. It seems that shooting has already begun. Chance must have doctored the script himself.

And I learn he hasn’t cast Noah Beery in the lead as I’d suggested, but a punk of seventeen by the name of John Bean who has the manners of a reform-school inmate. Bean can act, they say, but he isn’t box office, too much meanness in his eyes to make hearts flutter or to melt an audience like an ice cream cone on a hot day. He’s been in
trouble with the police in Los Angeles, some claim it was drugs. What the hell is Hays going to say? What the hell is my former boss up to? they want to know. What’s he doing with this zoo? I only shrug noncommittally and grin weakly, play stupid, and keep my mouth tightly zipped. If anybody’s going to get anything on Chance it isn’t going to come from me.

Day after day I beat on doors without getting so much as a sniff of interest from any of the majors. I decide to swallow my pride and turn to the small studios and independents referred to as Poverty Row, operations which teeter on the precipice of bankruptcy and take small profits from quickie one- and two-reelers to plough back into more of the same.

Six long weeks after my resignation from Best Chance Pictures, I find myself in the office – really a glorified outhouse with a pepper tree out front stickying up the porch – of a man called Herbert Farnum, who rattles off cheap Westerns and Mack Sennett copycats. I’ve hardly finished trotting out my credentials when he slings his big feet up on his desk and says, “So you used to work for Best Chance Pictures. What’s the dope on this Western Chance is making? They say he’s throwing big bucks into it.”

“That all started after I left,” I say. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“I’ve heard he’s going to direct,” Farnum says. “All of a sudden I hear he directed pictures in the East before the war. Made one- and two-reelers when things were just getting off the ground. But he didn’t use his own name so’s not to embarrass his old man. A rich boy’s hobby. I’d call that news. You know anything about that?”

“Not a thing. But I doubt it’s right.”

“Talk is that’s how he and his monkey Fitzsimmons got together. Back in the days that the directors in New York used to hire tough boys from the Irish gangs – Plug Uglies, Hudson Dusters, the Whyos – to protect them from Pinkerton detectives who smashed their cameras and kicked the shit out of their crews for ignoring the Motion Pictures Patent. Sounds like for a society boy Chance liked the low life and the rough stuff.”

“Who told you that?”

“Word gets around,” he says vaguely. “Some little birdie’s been singing. As the man said, your past has a habit of catching up to you. And besides, he’s got to have a taste for the bad boys if he’s making a movie about that fucking Shorty McAdoo. You know Shorty McAdoo? Mean little cock-sucking bandit. He worked for me once and he didn’t do nothing but stir up trouble with the cowboys. Haley Carr, my star, told the director to fire him. When McAdoo found out why he was getting his walking papers the little son of a bitch climbed on a horse and chased Carr all over the lot until he roped him. Then he dragged Carr down Gower on his belly. Carr was so scabbed up we had to take him out of the picture and stick somebody else in. We had a day of retakes on account of that fucking McAdoo.”

“Well,” I say, hopping quickly to change the topic, “this is all very interesting but what I came here about is a job.”

“Job?” he says, annoyed to be reminded why I’m here. He considers for a moment, lips puckered. “Could be if you write scenarios I like, I’ll buy them fifty bucks a pop. Westerns. But it’s strictly free lance. I don’t pay writers to loaf at my expense.”

I get to my feet. “All right.”

Going out the door I can hear Farnum muttering to himself. “Fucking McAdoo. Imagine somebody making a picture about that no-good grifter.”

I stand on the porch steps, my shoes sticking to the adhesive pepper-tree sap that has dripped on the boards. How will McAdoo take the news of his immortalization?

It’s not until a month later that I find out. Bound for Poverty Row with another dopey scenario to flog, I see the two of them a block up the street, headed my way. I consider crossing the road to the other side, but my limp is conspicuous; I’ll be spotted. Better to face the music.

There’s no choice but to hang on the sidewalk, waiting. Already I know Wylie has seen me, he stoops to pass on his news to Shorty, one hand flicking in my direction, his great height crooked over McAdoo. Shorty doesn’t appear to be listening, he just keeps coming on with deliberation, not a hitch or hesitation in his bandy-legged strut.

This morning McAdoo’s wearing a bleached blue denim shirt and pants and an obviously new seal-brown stockman stetson shading a face that shows no willingness to break into a smile of welcome. Wylie’s balancing a new hat on his head too, a big white Carlsbad which raises his altitude in the neighbourhood of seven feet and makes him look like he’d blow over in a gentle zephyr.

“Take a look at the mangy dick-licking dog,” Shorty says to Wylie as they come up. By the scowl on him, there’s no doubt Wylie is in complete agreement with McAdoo’s opinion of me.

“Nice to see you, too, Shorty,” I say. “I take it you’ve heard the rumours.”

He doesn’t answer at once. His eyes, pitted in dark, brooding flesh, are unflinching as they study me, but there’s something else in them too, weariness, perhaps even a touch of sadness. He looks older, more tired, than the last time we met.

“I told you once, I’m an old whore who’s been rid hard,” says Shorty. “But I don’t know if ever I been rid this hard before, Vincent.”

“Shorty says you sold him body and soul. That’s what Shorty says. He says that,” Wylie chimes in excitedly.

McAdoo makes a cutting motion with his hand. “Shut up, Wylie.”

We’re standing in front of a diner with gingham curtains in the window. “Let’s discuss this,” I say. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

Shorty squints scornfully up the street. “What makes you think I’d set down with you?” he says.

I pull open the door. A little bell tinkles inside. “Come on. Hear me out.”

For a second, he seems bent on refusing but then brushes by me, Wylie following, his forehead wrinkled with disapproval because Shorty has accepted my invitation. We choose a booth and sit in tense
silence while we are served. The two of them blow into the steam rising from their mugs, identical judgements.

“I thought you would be in Canada by now.”