Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (34 page)

This is when I knew Mike didn't really die, because if his brother
was really dead, even Grant would not have had the emotional stoniness to complain about the kind of car we got. So hallelujah. Mike
is the only brother out of all my friends' brothers who provides me a
decent foil for my secret affections. For example, Daniel's brother is
more gay than Daniel is himself, if that's even possible, and Lary won't
introduce me to his.

Still, though, we didn't really know what had happened to Mike,
other than a message from Grant's mother, who said he'd been rushed
to the hospital. After Grant finally deigned to seat himself in the pisscolored car, he started demon-dialing to discover what happened.
Between leaving messages, Grant surmised that if Mike didn't make
it, he could move to Colorado and commence helping his sister-inlaw raise his nephew.

At this I thought, Lord Jesus God, let that man live. Not because
Grant wouldn't make a decent father-on the contrary, his penchant
for Mexican busboys aside, Grant is a great father, as evidenced by the
perfectly normal and industrious daughter he sired and helped raise
back in the day before he started having sex with men-but because
if Grant moved to Colorado, I would have a harder time haranguing
him than usual. My ability to harangue Grant is basically what gets
me out of bed each morning.

But Grant, ever selfish, wasn't thinking of me. When he finally reached his brother, he'd already figured out how he was going to step
in and take over Mike's role in his Colorado household.

Mike, it turned out, had had pneumonia, which was exacerbated,
I'm sure, by his inability to stop working. Even as Grant called to
inquire as to his condition, Mike had his own inquiries about our trip
to Los Angeles, because the fact is we would not even have been there
if not for Mike. It was Mike, who owns his own media company, who
brokered film rights for me. It turns out a film project is a tricky process, and a half-dozen times, at least, I would have let it die on the vine
like I hear so many of these things do. But Mike is the one who kept
it alive. He navigated all the industry ministrations to the point where
here we were again, in Hollywood, about to take another meeting at
the Warner Bros. Studio.

Mike, sick as he was, talking to us from his hospital bed (probably), was characteristically more excited about our upcoming meeting
than he was concerned about his own condition. "It's alive," he kept
saying of our deal, sounding a little like Dr. Frankenstein. "It's alive!"

"Ask him how the hell he is," I shouted at Grant.

"He ain't gonna die," Grant hollered back at me.

He damn well better not die, I thought.

X. 1~4_ _Pa_, ~

HERE IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT Los ANGELES so far: Lary could live
here. I know this because he kept repeating it. "I could live here," he
said after his third cappuccino at the Grove, a famous outdoor market
that happens to be around the corner from our motel. In Atlanta I had
never once seen Lary drink a cappuccino-he usually likes his coffee
black as a bowling ball and just as thick-but since coming here he's
been sucking down cappuccinos like liquid oxygen. "I could definitely
live here," he said again.

"Who are you?" I asked, because I've known Lary for fourteen
years and, believe me, I've seen some personalities emerge from himlike Evil Otis, the personality that occasionally lands him in jail for
throwing things at police cars and copulating in public-but this
Lary, this L.A. Lary, is unknown to me.

"Have I met you?" I asked, but he was busy. Some professional
L.A. photographer had plucked him from the crowd and was in the
process of discovering him. Lary gamely smiled his wicked, piranhafish smile as the camera snapped away. I had never seen Lary act
natural in front of a camera before. In his driver's license photo, for
example, he looks like a stroke victim. On purpose.

"Do we know him?" I asked Daniel and Grant. But Daniel had
his head buried inside a watermelon, the only thing he'd eaten since
the plane landed two days prior. And Grant was busy sending the
sonic gay vibe to every Mexican busboy in southern California.

I thought Lary would have taken to L.A. like a baby to barbed wire. Of the four of us-me, Daniel, Grant, and Lary-I am the only
one who kind of quasi used to live here. I was born just up the way in
Burbank, but I hadn't been back until Jay Leno had me on his show. It
turns out the hospital where I was born is right across the street from
the NBC studios. No one seemed as marveled by that as me.

I know everyone needs to have been born somewhere, and maybe
it's normally not that big a deal for them to see where it happened on
occasion, but it seriously did not occur to me until the limo was pulling into the guard post at NBC that, hey, looky there, that hospital
across the street is the same one listed on my birth certificate. Flukes,
really, being there then and having been before. In the latter case my
parents had been driving home after visiting a relative nearby, when
all of a sudden my mother doubled over, figuring she'd eaten some bad
fish, but it turns out it was just me wanting to be born early. "It was
like you jumped out of me all on your own," she used to tell me, "like
you sure were in a hurry to get somewhere."

She was from Kansas and my dad was from Alabama, and they'd
met at a cocktail party six months after she'd graduated from UCLA
and were married six months after that. She didn't know he'd been
fired from his third job selling trailers until they'd returned from their
Las Vegas honeymoon, but by that time she was already pregnant with
my brother. I guess it says something about my mother that, in the
late '50s and knocked up at that, she could land a corporate job as a
mathematician at IBM. "People do what they need to do," she used to
say. I didn't yet know that it is, in fact, rare to find a person with that
quality, a person who does what needs to be done.

That's why I asked Lary to go to L.A. with me. If nothing else, he
gets things done, as almost all of his personalities are immensely productive. He shows up at The Local with curls of wood shavings clinging to his clothes and dried plaster in his hair, all remnants of having
done something, though what it was is often, even to him, a mystery.
"What'd you do today?" I asked him once as I brushed shrapnel off his
clothing. "I don't know," he answered, "but my neighbor's chimney is
missing." I figured he would come in handy in case the movie studio
executives changed their minds and canceled our meeting later that
afternoon, leaving us no choice but to break into their headquarters
and threaten detonation until they agreed to our terms. But that was
the Atlanta Lary. This other Lary, this L.A. Lary, I wasn't expecting.

After the photographer finished, we hopped in the car so Lary
could drive us to some thrift stores, because L.A. Lary likes to drive.
But soon we hit La Brea, where traffic was stuck in Formica it was
so slow, and there we stayed, suspended, like the Precambrian relics
touted in the billboard advertising the Le Brea Tar Pits. "Look, Lary,"
we joked, pointing at the tar pits, "isn't that where you were born?"

But as we laughed I looked over and saw immediately that L.A.
Lary was gone. Atlanta Lary was back. "This blows," Lary groused at
the insufferable traffic. "I could never live here."

WE'VE BEEN IN L.A. ONLY FOUR DAYS and already Daniel has whored
himself hugely. I love that about him. I remember back when he was
faking like he was a folk artist, I used to lead him around from gallery
to gallery by the hand while he wore torn overalls and kept his glance
askance. It was the best borderline-retard impersonation I ever saw:
very understated, with his hair looking like a toddler attacked it with
kindergarten scissors. Make that a blind toddler.

It was a good act, and his art sold like discounted crack until he
himself put a stop to it. It turns out he's a real artist after all, contemporary even. Of course he still wears overalls, just not out in public very much, and his hair is still a wonder to behold. Grant and I
enlisted some other passengers to examine it while Daniel slept on
the flight from Atlanta, placing bets on whether it was real or not.
"Those have got to be plugs," Grant whispered. "No, that's his hair,"
I insisted. I bet Daniel's secret is that he chops it off in tufts with toenail clippers, then sprinkles his head with cornstarch. His head sort of
looks like a moth-eaten ball of horsehair that barely survived a barn
fire. For Daniel, it's a very studied effect, one that he won't change
even if I promise to pay for it.

"Look, there's a hair salon; get your ass in there for a real haircut,"
we keep telling him, as L.A. is chockablock with hair salons. Every
other doorway boasts an avalanche of hair products. I don't know
how Lary can stand it, because of the four of us, he is the one who
is a complete pussy about hair care. Nothing touches his head unless it's mint scented and tested by a team of Vietnamese scientists, which
is alarming considering the rest of him could be covered in egg yolk
and axle grease and he couldn't care less. I estimate that, for shampoo
alone, Lary spends more than I do for an entire year's worth of bleaching the hell out of my own head.

Anyway, Daniel always refuses the free salon visit. Oh well, he
knows who he is. I'm pretty proud of him for marching into that L.A.
gallery with his head looking like it'd been assaulted by bobcats, and
then walking out with representation. His new work reminds me of
Western Atomic Age, anyway, the kind of stuff my mother used to buy
in the early'60s. She had good taste back then. Then all of a sudden in
the'70s and early'80s, when she was making decent money designing
weapons during the Reagan administration, she went all rattan on us.
Our entire condo looked like the movie set of Casablanca, complete
with bamboo beads hanging in the doorway and dead palm fronds
stapled to the walls.

Of course it did not help, at all, that I encouraged her. I'd taken
an interior-design course at the local community college and came
out insisting that the "Mediterranean look" was in. So the first thing
I did was talk her into ejecting all her sleek, teak, '60s Lane furniture
she'd had since her honeymoon and replacing it with a bunch of baled
bamboo stalks that barely passed as patio furniture. The only regret
I remember her voicing was when I'd told her how much I'd gotten
for all her old furniture at the garage sale we'd advertised in the local
paper. "Twenty-five dollars?" she'd asked, disbelieving. "Is that all?
That stuff was valuable. What are those people, blind?"

I was surprised at her reaction. I didn't think she'd mind.
But looking back I see I should have known. By then we'd moved
twenty-five times; that's twenty-five times we'd packed and unpacked
this furniture up and down the California coast, twenty-five times we'd
situated it in a welcoming manner throughout another rented living
room, twenty-five opportunities for me to realize its value. I didn't tell
her that I actually threw this furniture at the people, begged them to
buy it, and cut the price so low they couldn't say no. I couldn't wait to
replace what I had, which, of course, made me blind to its value.