Tinseltown Riff Read online

  Pausing in hopes the air-conditioning would finally kick in with a reassuring whir, he scanned the sixty or so seated wanna-bes leaning forward in their rattan chairs. He faked another easygoing smile and went on with his sketch of a classic movie plotline. The response was negligible. No light in their eyes, no sign of rapt attention or even interest.

  Ben looked over to his far right at Gillian perched by the open window. After all, she was the facilitator, the one who got him into this. But pert, blasé Gillian held her pose and gave him nothing. He was failing; she would toss him no bone, his prospects were nil.

  A sweet-faced lady in a lemon pants-suit raised her hand. She pointed out that according to the conference program, participants were to be offered insider tips--Take-the-guess-out-of-success, the updated mismatched cops formula and so forth.

  Pushing harder, Ben nodded and suggested that classic films were a great guide no matter what the venue. At that point, the whole group grew restless.

  “Look,” the sweet-faced lady blurted out, “so far, till you showed up, we’ve been tossed the skinny on Girly Girls Take Paris and Slacker-nerds and the Prom Queen. So far, we’ve been reminded that in this economy uncertainty is poison and the letters RE are the ticket--revamp, revisit. So let’s move on to what’s trending with this recipe. Dangerous-but-fun, we’ve heard about. Cynical-with-a-heart. So what’s new? What’ve you got for us? Why are we here?”

  The spontaneous applause cut through the pervading indifference.

  Ben signaled strongly to Gillian. But she remained frozen in her lime-sorbet camisole and matching Capri pants. The whoosh kept rattling the jalousies, fanning her bangs, the only part of her do that wasn’t lacquered down.

  The attendees began jostling each other, forming a solid block of unease, augmented by the fake Santa Ana and the glare off the mint walls.

  Sweet-face stood, pointed an accusatory finger straight at Ben and hollered out, “Where is the insider angle? Come on, let’s have it, if you please.”

  Ben tossed the dry marker from hand to hand and thoughtlessly said, “Right. ‘You’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street. And you may not find any you’ll want to go down. In that case you’ll head straight out of town.’

  “Doctor Seuss,” Ben said in the sudden stillness. “When in doubt, you can’t go wrong with good ol’ Doctor Seuss.”

  This gem was greeted with stone silence.

  Ben studied their faces. Most of them were at least in their fifties. And, actually, it was no surprise what he was in for. He’d seen them milling around, tapping away and spreading their fingers on their iPhones. Doubtless spending all their spare time microblogging on Twitter, networking, and scooping up the latest copy of the trades. Also, doubtless, having plunked down hundreds of dollars, champing at the bit at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza. There they were, about to give a three-minute pitch to junior executives from second-tier production companies. Moreover, they had every tip from Sure-fire Killer Scenarios memorized. And the last thing they wanted to do was actually write, let alone listen to Ben talk about classic films.

  At the same time, Ben knew this was his own last-ditch pitch. If he couldn’t get past these dilettantes, he would wind up driving a night-shift cab to and from LAX, bleary eyed, disheveled, hustling for tips. Remembering this very moment when he blew it all big time.

  As the stone-cold stillness shifted to a sense of unified puzzlement and Gillian’s cosmetic façade faded from blasé to blank, Ben jumped back in.

  “Ideally, I mean,” said Ben, winging it. “The lesson from Dr. Seuss is a call to bypass the road well traveled.”

  The unified puzzlement switched back to unease as the chairs began to squeak.

  “Think about it. Every prequel and sequel, every spin on the mismatched cops routine has been kicked around and hung out to dry. But you take another route, leave your comfort zone and go out of your way. Maybe shift gears from mismatched cops to mismatched pair.”

  Totally reaching now, Ben said, “I mean classic doesn’t mean retread. You can still have a blundering rookie who hooks up with a mentor. But does our hero have to be a cop? Does his crusty but benign mentor have to be in uniform and does he have to be crusty and benign?” On a roll, Ben carried on about Dr. Suess’s title, Oh the Places You’ll Go. “Now if that rallying cry isn’t apt, I don’t know what is.”

  Agitated murmuring followed by more determined chair-squeaking as though some fuzzy inside information had indeed been leaked.

  Sashaying to his side, Gillian added, “Well now, how about that? I mean puh-lease. Take a look at him. Average height, slight build, two eyes, a nose and a mouth. A throwback to the defunct nice guy from MGM. But he just opened the door to the new retro. Right, Benjy?”

  “You bet,” said Ben, wincing, hating her for calling him that. “Turner Classics meets leading edge.”

  “Exactly,” said Gillian, continuing to affect her best Hollywood hostess tone. “Boy next door latches on to seasoned pro and takes off. Sounds like a plan. Everyone agreed? Terrific. We have to count ourselves lucky that Mr. Prine was available at the last minute. Because he’s a busy man, took a few minutes away from his tight schedule and, needless to say, if he keeps playing his cards right, the sky’s the limit.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Ben, anxious to learn what Gillian had up her sleeve. “Always nice to have those timeless clichés applied to me.”

  “And what’s the key to those timeless clichés? What’s always the key?”

  Answering her own question, Gillian stepped to the side, erased Ben’s notes with a flourish and began listing links that were all over the map. Like unexpected connections between reruns, YouTube and what-have-you.

  Her list-making reminded him of the time he found himself in her apartment four blocks north of Hollywood and Vine. The one with the glistening black-and-white décor replete with posted rules of engagement, including the timing and sequence of foreplay. You wanted to keep up with Gillian, you had to get with it, be it sex or projects or, as Sweet-face put it, whatever was trending.

  Scribbling away, Gillian noted the wanna-bes’ main competition: ninety-five percent of Writers Guild members were unemployed, ever-hungry for any opportunity to take a flyer and do whatever it takes.

  Gillian’s broad smile and mellow tone belied the way she then uttered, “Those past thirty are especially bad off,” aiming the aside solely at Ben.

  Undaunted, in no time the bevy of seekers were lapping it up. A portly man in an oversized Disney T-shirt and baggy shorts observed that only an hour ago a woman his age, naked, swaddled only in Saran Wrap, was hawking a video of her love poems. Poised between the two oversized palm fronds fronting the hotel entrance, she’d succeeded in gathering a crowd. “Yes-sir-ree,” the portly one chortled, “ready to take a flyer on anything.”

  Sloughing off this loopy deflection, still dying to find out what Gillian had in mind for him, Ben finally managed to cut the discussion short and announced it was time for lunch. But he’d no sooner left the dais, when he was accosted by a gaggle of leery matrons who questioned him about his credentials and wanted to know exactly how he broke in.

  As fast as he could, worrying he was about to lose track of Gillian, he revealed that he spent months watching the mouth movements of Japanese cartoons while supplying the English dialogue. He’d also helped doctor plots for kiddie shows, sitcoms and a few low-budget movies, leaving out the fact that most never got made.

  But before he could break away, Sweet-face and the guy in the Disney T-shirt cornered him and asked how any of this actually jibed with Oh the Places You’ll Go. What kind of success story was this anyway? Then the matrons butted back in. One of them, brandishing a shiny clipboard covered with a jumble of notes, mentioned the movie Wall Street and reminded then that Gordon Gekko said, The most valuable commodity is inside information. If you’re not inside, you’re outside. She also crowed that the second Ben let on what he’d really been up to, it was no longer exclusiv
e and anything he had to offer was worthless.

  Sweet-face chimed in suggesting that, perhaps, Ben was only a flunky who did odd jobs. After all, who’d ever heard of him? And the best any of them could hope for was to follow suit, volunteer to be a gofer at a production company, latch on to a seasoned pro and worm their way in like Ben.

  As they headed off for the lobby kicking this notion around, Ben spotted Gillian by a cooling vent on the far side of the hall. Lying in wait, she now went straight after him, her three-inch heels clacking on the terrazzo floor. How she managed to balance herself--toes tucked into a strand of velvet with no sides or back--was one of the world’s great wonders.

  “Dr. Suess?” said Gillian, hissing over his right shoulder. “‘Find some un-loopy road’?”

  “Okay okay. But, no matter how you slice it, I put a spin on it which you gobbled up. Why? Because you’re relegated to scraping the bottom of the barrel and could really use someone who can wing it with the best of them.”

  “Oh, really? Well if I struck brain back there, your so-called abilities are bloody useless without a bona fide backup who has actually walked the mean streets and provides me with some bona fide cachet.”

  “Meaning? Will you goddamn spell it out? What have you got for me and what’s the price I have to pay?”

  Gillian turned away, obviously weighing the pros and cons of actually letting him in on her latest ploy.

  “Come on, let’s have it.”

  When Gillian spun back, her perfect oval face only inches away, he couldn’t help noticing that, even when miffed, she appeared freshly packaged. Not to mention everything else in her arsenal that made her so maddeningly self-possessed.

  “What are you staring at?” said Gillian.

  “Nothing. Talk to me, will you?”

  Gillian teetered around in a wide semi-circle and returned to her original square. “All right. Here’s the check for your efforts. That ought to cover the repairs on the car you scrounged and leaves only your living expenses and whatever else it takes to survive.”

  “Speak, dammit, what is the deal?”

  She flicked her eyelashes for a few beats and finally came out with it. “This little gig was, of course, just for openers. The real test requires you to leap two hurdles.”

  “Go on.”

  “What did you think I meant up there on the dais? Why did I pick you for the topic? Who did you think I was referring to?”

  “You don’t mean ... ?”

  “Bingo. First off, you enlist the services of Pepe, your alleged friend and undercover cop.”

  The Pepe Gillian was referring to was C.J. Rodriguez. The fact that Pepe was short for Jose and a common Latino nickname was obviously beyond Gillian’s sphere of knowledge. So was the fact that his true identity was unknown. All of which didn’t make Ben’s first hurdle any less problematic.

  “Ah,” said Ben, doing his own semi-circular turn, “of course. And does this, by any chance, have anything to do with Leo, the gonzo Russian? The very same Leo who conned me into glomming Aunt June’s camera and got me to slip past the police barricades the other night to take shots of--?”

  “Never mind, never mind. Okay, assuming there truly is a Pepe ...”

  “Yes? So? ”

  “... you, Benjy, will get him on board as a gritty source. Because, pal, you’ll be moving way out of your league. Because the initial question is, How do we get you in the door? With Pepe behind you, we may, God help us, have an outside chance.”

  “For what?” Ben said as he crammed the check into his shirt pocket. “A fly-by-night indie, a home movie, a shot in the dark? What am I selling out for?”

  “At the moment, it’s up for grabs.”

  “Terrific. And what kind of money are we talking? And where do you fit in?”

  “First things first, you hear me? What’s your schedule like for the next couple of hours?”

  Glancing at his watch, Ben hemmed and hawed. It was almost twelve-thirty. He had to admit he was free.

  “Fine. You seek out your elusive buddy while I pursue more viable contingencies.” With that, Gillian shut off the fluorescent lights, turned sharply and clickety-clacked away.

  Before she made it past the louvered doors, Ben hollered, “Suppose, by some weird quirk of fate, he agrees? What then?”

  “You’ll ring me at my desk by three. If I still have no better option, and against my better judgment, we’ll shift into phase two.”

  “At your desk? On Labor Day? Doesn’t Viacom ever sleep?”

  A few more clickety-clacks and Ben hollered, “The truth, humor me! Tell me why I’m so blessed?”

  “We need a patchwork artist with links to the mean streets. As you’ve duly noted, with everyone out of town on this absurd weekend, and due to the pressing time frame ...”

  “You need a winging-it and grit act pronto.”

  A quick condescending smirk and Gillian was gone.

  For a time, Ben just stood there dawdling. He gazed out at the picture window at the Santa Monica Pier, past the wide sandy beach and swarm of parked cars over to the hazy outline of the boardwalk. He glanced to the left of the Ferris wheel, arcade and roller coaster and fixed on the old-timey carousel. The image of his favorite painted pony came to mind--the silver one with the shimmering green-and-black saddle blanket. The only one prancing and laughing as if to say, “Come on, kid, let’s go for it.”

  Tossing his lecture notes into his battered briefcase, he moved off. He had a few hunches how to hook up with the mercurial C.J. But the odds of C.J. going along were, at best, a hundred to one.

  Outside, the hot breeze turned playful, subsiding into little gusts that meandered through the wide archways of the hotel’s portico. The gusts flittered over the gravel of the courtyard and a crumpled leaflet advertising the writers’ conference; then picked up a notch around the shiny yellow pebbles and maroon flower petals atop the squat Hedgehog cacti. No worries about the flowers though. They were protected by a network of white knitting needles protruding in all directions.

  The gusts drew still for a moment under the pulsing noonday sun. Soon, as if keying on the leaflet, they picked up strength again, lifting the crumpled paper in the air, dropping it and lifting it higher until they pinned it against the jutting spikes.

  The premonitions were obviously working overtime. Telling him it was simply a given that his days were numbered and his time was at hand.

  Chapter Three

  Only a few days before, on a late Friday afternoon, Deke too was on the verge. But he was a wild rover, indifferent about what he might come up against or even what the job was all about. “Bring it on,” he said. All that mattered was a chance for a little fun.

  As he reached the top of the next rise, he was right where a lanky, rawboned man ought to be. Not still killing time in goddamn Cut Bank helping his old man fence-in a herd of buffalo headed for some meat counter. Truth to tell, the days when the two of them could stand each other were long gone. Nowadays it went like this:

  “You home for a while?”

  “Not really.”

  “I could use some help.”

  “That figures.”

  And besides, his old man was pushing sixty-five. Hanging around him, you start missing a step. Hanging around anybody or anywhere, you lose your edge.

  Taking in the scene, he marked the stretch of dark cloud hanging low overhead. The sky so massive the gray seemed flat and painted, tacked on to a sheet of blue as far as the eye could see. From this vantage point he could look down at the Glacier Park Trading Company by the train stop. Starting with its peaked roof faking a crest in the Rockies, he could easily scan the adjacent Glacier Village Restaurant and jagged flat sign running the length of the building. If his calculations were right, some weasely accountant would slip out of one of these wooden buildings or step off the train. Failing that, the guy was already hunkered down in a rented cabin. Either way, as soon as this little errand was done and dusted, he had the rest of the loos
e ends to square away.

  Walt had hinted the whole job might take him down to Salinas. Which was fine. Walt also hinted it could take him further, a whole 1400 miles, maybe as far as L.A. Which damn well wasn’t fine. Deke had always avoided L.A. You head southwest from Vegas onto I-15, you hit the Mojave Preserve, then its Barstow and, before you know it, it’s Riverside and you’re sinking right into it—the smog, the traffic sprawl, hemmed-in to where it was pure torture working your way out again.

  Just the thought of it put a damper on his good mood. Hell of a choice between L.A. and hanging out back in eastern Montana. With its godforsaken squares and rectangles of alfalfa, soybean and wheat. Patches of in-between acres, ochre-colored grasses and then the abandoned line shacks falling apart and empty horse corrals. Plus rusting farm equipment, old tractors with flat tires, a bunch of rotting cars they don’t even make anymore: Nash Ramblers, Packards, Hudsons, Desotos and Studebakers. Things you can’t get parts for, places too far out for a mechanic to reach; a way of life that went bust. And all the while, his old man muttering, “It ain’t so bad.” It is, was and always will be so bad. Aside from the in-between acres, Deke too had been lying fallow. And nothing was going to keep him still anymore. Even if it meant goddamn L.A.

  Casting his gaze solely on the train station, he waited a while longer. Within minutes, the eastbound special came, passengers got on and off. No sign of the little guy. No sign of him anywhere. From the photos, he was probably in his late thirties, wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a squinty, worrisome look on his face. In other words, he appeared to be exactly like he was: a spooked bookkeeper who’d downloaded some files back in Portland, then lit out for the boonies and figured the trail would go cold. A little weasel who flat-out figured wrong.

  Just then, little beeps caught Deke’s attention. He plucked up his Levi jacket off the high flat rock, jerked the cell phone out of the top pocket, flipped it open and hit the green icon. Even transmitted through this little gizmo, Walt’s rasping drawl was deep and tired. If you didn’t know him, you still couldn’t help picturing a barrel-chested geezer in suspenders with a walrus mustache and a lot of mileage on him.