Shooting Elvis Page 9

  I said, “I don’t cheat.”

  Jerry said, “Everybody cheats. Primate nature.”

  Out on the street, Jerry took one look at my wheels, said like he knew everything, “Boyfriend’s truck?”

  I could see why he’d think the mini-truck wasn’t mine, it wasn’t the kind of car a woman would drive, with its big tires, custom chrome and smoked windows, it was a boy-car, boastful and dangerous. I knew a dozen boys with trucks like Phil’s, but not one girl. Me, I drove a Honda, safe and practical, but the more I drove the mini-truck, the more it got to me. The power, the flash, the speed. Sure, Jerry was right, it wasn’t my car, but I resented the way he said it, like maybe I wasn’t up to driving a truck like that, so I said, “My truck. Got a problem with that?”

  He said, “No problem at all,” said it with a grin. He hopped into a dusty gray Ford Econoline van, told me to follow, listed an address in Hollywood Hills where we’d meet if I couldn’t keep up. The moment I turned my back the van launched away from the curb in a plume of tire smoke. Seemed Jerry meant for me not to keep up. I bolted into the mini-truck, fired it up, jumped on the gas pedal. The V-6 snapped my head against the rear glass, the rear-wheel torque started to slide the back end out. I kept the gas pinned to the floor, whipped the wheel against the skid, straightened that truck right out. A yellow traffic light at Sunset caught me a hundred yards behind with Jerry flying right through it. I swung over to the right-hand lane, turned right, jetted through two lanes of fast-moving traffic, hung a suicide left into a convenience store parking lot, cut through the parking slots and scraped the back bumper on the sidewalk bouncing right onto Sunset again. I made the light at Hollywood six cars behind the van. Jerry didn’t even know I was there. He turned right at Franklin, lumbered toward the hills. I pulled parallel to him at the next light. Didn’t cut him so much as a look. When the light changed, he tried to bust loose. But no way with him driving a van. I hung a couple of car lengths back, went with him. He gunned it up into Hollywood Hills, the van rolling through the narrow streets and twisting around fish-hook curves like an asphalt whale. The HOLLYWOOD sign loomed in the soft brown scrub hill above us. The van raced up a steep incline, gasped for air, pulled to the curb.

  I slid in behind, walked up to the passenger window. Jerry pretended to be interested in the view out his side mirror. I hopped into the passenger seat. He cruised around the corner and parked. I checked out the inside of his van. The back was a mini-office. Fax, phone, refrigerator, reading lamp, motion fan, CD Walkman, headphones, skinny futon. Posters plastered the van walls. A red 1957 convertible Stingray, a Harley with a babe on it, Miss Bud 1994. Jerry was so much like some guys I knew back home it spooked me. He told me to look out the rear window. The glass was one-way. He could look out, but nobody could see in, a little like Jerry himself.

  He said, “You drive pretty good, for a girl.”

  I said, “Looks like I drive a helluva lot better’n you.”

  “I was just testing you a little. You can’t fool me, you know.”

  “Fool you how?”

  “You can dress up however you want, I still know who you are, knew who you were the moment I set eyes on you.”

  “Who am I?”

  “You grew up in some hick California town. Your dad works in a factory or lumber mill, same thing. Your mom has a job in a coffee shop, wears a name tag on her right boob reads Marge or Betty. The kind of town all the kids go to the local park weekend nights to get high and fuck around because there’s nothing else to do. You were lucky or smart or just cold, didn’t get pregnant by the time you were eighteen, when you were old enough to realize there was nothing to keep you there anymore.”

  Jerry knew everything about me, knew me like only another small-town kid could. The way he acted, it was his job to know. Dumb idea this was, going to work with detectives.

  I said, “Where you from?”

  “Up north.”

  “Where up north?”

  “Near San Francisco.”

  “You mean like Novato, Petaluma?”

  “Not that far north.”

  I thought of all the unglamorous towns near San Francisco where a young guy in L.A. wouldn’t want to be from, would want to escape the moment he could. Somewhere not north or south, east or west, somewhere not much of anywhere. I said, “Stockton.”

  “Good guess.”

  He looked at me, his eyes climbing my body so slow I could feel the pitons and rock hammers anchoring in my flesh. He said, “You know, you’d be pretty cute if it wasn’t for that pig-sticker in your nose.”

  Like I should take it for a compliment.

  I said, “You’d be pretty smart if it wasn’t for the lump of dirt you got for brains.”

  His laugh brayed around the tin-can insides of the van. With guys like Jerry, you can’t take any shit, not even on the first day, not even if they’re your boss, because if you do, you’ll have to take it for the rest of your life. He grabbed a nine-by-eleven manila envelope from behind the driver’s seat, said he thought he was gonna like me. He dropped the envelope on my lap. I yanked out an eight-by-ten glossy of an actress type, what they call a head shot in the Hollywood biz. I liked Jerry, too. Liked him and hated him, same as all the small-town bad boys with nothing to live for except cheesy bravado stolen from rock stars and bad movies.

  Jerry said, “Recognize her?”

  I said I didn’t, asked who she was. He told me her name, said she played the dumb blond teenage daughter on a hit sitcom. Then it clicked, seeing her face on TV one night, hearing Wrex laugh and say it was his favorite show. I’ll call her Alice. Jerry told me a story about how Alice was out clubbing one night, had too much to drink, slept the night with a guy she’d never seen before. This Joe sold ties at Saks Fifth Avenue, so you get the idea he was stylish but playing out of his league, like a high school ballplayer getting a one-night stand in the majors. Everything should be cool, the average good-looking Joe walks home with a starlet one night. “Fantasy fuck come true,” as Jerry put it. But this Joe doesn’t take it that way. The experience changes his life. He calls her the next day. She doesn’t return his call. He calls once a day every day for the next week. She never answers. She never calls him back.

  He falls into a weird obsession. He can’t go back to being the Joe who sells ties at Saks, not now, not after glimpsing his true station in life, as consort to the stars. It’s pretty harmless at first. He researches her career. Buys, steals or copies every scrap of print, film and video she ever appeared in. He wallpapers his apartment with her face. Writes her rambling letters, which, read in order, document the unraveling of his sanity. His dead seriousness comes clear when he quits his job. He tells his boss at Saks he doesn’t have to work anymore because he’s going to be Alice’s personal manager. He delivers this news with blatant hints they’re sleeping together regularly and ecstatically.

  The volume of his calls increases to several a day. His messages are confessions of love, worship and adoration. She needs to have someone take care of her, someone like him. No. Him exactly. He pours his heart into her answering machine in thirty-second increments until the tape expires. One day the number has been disconnected. He thinks she’s been kidnapped. She’s madly in love with him but can’t escape. Her agent is keeping her loaded up on drugs so she’ll stay away from him. Our Joe calls the agent, makes threats. He camps out across the street from Alice’s house, the same house Jerry and I are watching. He’s there one night when she returns home from the studio. He tries to be charming, but his passion tumbles out in words Alice confuses for babbling. She locks herself in the house. Joe pounds on the door, pleads with her to let him in. She refuses. He says he’s dying of love for her. She says she’s going to call the police. Joe tries to kick down the door, but it doesn’t give. He walks around to the back, hammers at the windows. The police catch him just as he’s crawling into a window he shattered with his fists. His hands are bleeding. As they lead him away he calls out, “I’m dying, Alic
e, I’m bleeding to death for you.”

  The judge is understanding. Joe temporarily went off his nut. He’s never been arrested before. Always been a solid Joe, a good citizen. The judge gives him a suspended sentence and a restraining order that prevents him from calling Alice or her agent, from being seen within fifty yards of her house or the studio where she works, from attempting to see or talk to her anywhere on the planet.

  But Joe doesn’t get smart. He gets clever. Sends Alice cutout newsprint love notes under the pen name Romeo Jesus. Rents a billboard on her route from the Hills to the studios. Plasters it with a giant poster of his face, a Jesus crucifix, and the words I’M DYING FOR THE LOVE OF YOU. Joe claims the poster is his love message to Hollywood. A number of young girls have fallen in love with his image. You see them every now and then on the corner of Franklin and Larchmont, staring up at his face in adolescent adoration. Last week, Joe mailed Alice a small glass case containing two veined and blood-red lumps of flesh that a lab identified as the hearts of two lovebirds. The police can’t prove a thing, they assign Joe to the Threat Management Unit, abbreviation TMU, an L. A. innovation in police science designed specifically to catch celebrity stalkers. The problem is, the city has so many celebrities and stalkers TMU can’t watch them all, and compared to some of the other loonies Joe is considered pretty harmless.

  Alice, meanwhile, is starting to get a little crazy. Thinks every helicopter fly-by is this guy buzzing her. Swears she sees him watching her with a telescope from the ridge opposite the rear deck of her hillside house. The only place she’ll change clothes is in a closet. She dreams that he’s coming after her with a cleaver. Wants to cut out her heart and eat it.

  Jerry emptied a half dozen telephoto shots of Joe onto my lap, pointed out the color of his hair, what kind of sunglasses he favored, the make and model of his car, the address of his Glendale apartment. The first thing I noticed was Joe drove a BMW but lived in a dump. His hair was salon-cut, his complexion sun-lamp bronze. He liked to wear polo shirts and white shorts and carry a tennis racket during the day, although it was not known he ever played a game. At night, he favored a light-blue striped blazer, off-white trousers, black loafers with tassels, went to the most exclusive restaurants in the city, sat at the bar and drank mineral water. It seemed Joe wanted to trade the shabby little facade of his life for a bigger and equally empty facade.

  Jerry said, “If you see him anywhere near this place, shoot him. None of this artsy-fartsy crap either. Shoot him close enough to see his face, and make sure you get her in the shot too.”

  I said, “Don’t you think it’s a little obvious, me sitting in my car a few houses down, like maybe I should hide or something?”

  Jerry said, “How long you been in this business?”

  I said, “About twenty minutes.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “I was just asking.”

  “So much experience, you’re probably thinking it’s about time you took over the whole operation yourself.”

  “Sorry I said anything.”

  “Forget it. Just do your job, don’t forget you don’t know anything yet, don’t even know who our client is.”

  “So who’s our client?”

  “Like I said, you don’t know anything.”

  After that, Jerry considered me trained. He gave me a log book, drove me back to my truck, told me to go to work. I parked down the block from Alice’s hillside house, sat in the passenger seat, watched the house in the rearview mirror like he told me to do. It was another ninety-degree-plus day, second-stage smog alert. Breathing was like sucking on an exhaust pipe. Nothing happened. Nobody came in or went out. I had some donuts with me in the truck, a couple cans of Coke. I began to understand what Ben meant about getting a fat butt.

  Jerry came to relieve me at five, didn’t say a word, just drove to the other side of the house and parked, pointed me gone with a long index finger. I drove downtown, passed a billboard advertisement for the phone company. The main character was a white girl-next-door type in shorts and college sweatshirt. A book was tucked under her arm, she held a sheet of paper had “A+” scrawled along the top. She cradled a telephone between her neck and shoulder. Her mouth gaped, her eyes were bright with excitement. The telephone line stretched to another telephone on the opposite side of the billboard, where Mom and Dad listened, surrounded by the latest appliances in a sparkling kitchen. Dad was home from the office, tie loosened, a swath of fatherly gray at his temples. A tennis racket was clenched in Mom’s free hand. Her tennis whites were clean and bright as her kitchen. The top of the billboard was stamped with the slogan GOOD NEWS IS AS CLOSE AS YOUR TELEPHONE.

  I never saw my family depicted on billboards, in television commercials, magazine advertisements. Was it my fault, some past-life karma thing? Why did I have a silent, absent and angry pop? And my mom, where was her chance at leisurely tennis afternoons? Why was it that our kitchen never sparkled? How come I never called home all breathless with excitement about anything? Why wasn’t my family happy? I wanted my share of those perfect billboard moments of life. I wanted to think about my family with happiness, not be troubled by sadness and doubt and resentment. I wanted to come from a family with more money than problems.

  I stopped at a Ralph’s Supermarket, cruised the aisles for comfort foods. I loaded the cart with stuff my mom would buy for a summer dinner. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Heinz Ketchup, French’s Mustard, Farmer John’s Ballpark Franks, Ralph’s Hotdog Buns, Lays Potato Chips, a six-pack of Bud for the grownups, RC Cola for the kids. It made for some kind of connection, and I felt less lonely watching the items roll toward the cash register. My family legacy was a taste for specific brand name foods.

  I carried everything up to the studio kitchen, went to work. I put two pots of water to boil, one for the macaroni and cheese, the other for the franks, emptied the potato chips on a platter, popped one cola for now, stored the rest in the fridge. When the macaroni was done, I mixed in the powdered cheese with a wooden spoon, until the sauce was a familiar pasty yellow.

  Billy b came into the kitchen for a beer, looked at the brand names scattered on the counter, said, “I didn’t know you could cook kitsch.”

  “I grew up on it.”

  “I heard food like this will kill you.”

  “Sure will, just takes some time doing it.”

  He said there was a hibachi on the roof, why didn’t we have a barbecue. We loaded the food on a tray, climbed the ladder through the skylight. Billy b watched me grill the hot dogs under a sky the color of curdled milk. Downtown skyscrapers towered out of the smog to the north. Tarpaper roofs, power lines, smokestacks stretched east to the horizon. A city of angles, lines, intersecting planes, the geometry of it confused me. I wished I could see it through my camera, so big and dirty it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

  Billy b dropped down into the studio for what he said would be a couple more beers, but when he returned, he had a blanket tucked under his arm, the two beers in one hand, a condom in the other. The city spilled its noise and fumes around us as we made love, our throats thick with smoke and dust, our bodies slick with sweat, our cries a drop of rain on the parched landscape, and I thought about a photograph I’d like to take from the perspective of one of the skyscraper lights clicking on above us, of these two liquid forms making love on a tarpaper square in the geometry of the city.

  When we were done, he said, “I want you to do something for me.”

  I said, “What?”

  We got dressed and climbed down to the studio. Billy b picked up a sack, carried it to his workbench. I followed him. He took me by the shoulders, walked me to a spot a couple feet to the side of a blank canvas propped against the wall.

  He said, “Stand here,” looked me up and down like I was a mannequin. A broom leaned against the corner of the studio. He snatched it up and tossed it to me.

  I said, “You want me to sweep the floor?”

  “Pretend it’s
a gun.”

  He put the viewfinder of a Polaroid camera to his eye. I forgot to look away. The flash almost blinded me.

  He said, “More aggressive.”

  “But I don’t know anything about guns.”

  “Pretend.”

  I put the broom under my arm, like it was a machine gun.

  “Good, now make your eyes hard, like you’re about to shoot somebody.”

  I squinted.

  “Do something with your mouth.”

  I curled my upper lip, felt stupid.

  The flash seared my image into the emulsion. The camera spat film into Billy b’s hand. He watched the chemical haze burn away, taped the photograph to the upper corner of his canvas.

  I said, “What are we doing?”

  He reached into the sack on his workbench.

  “I always work from photographs.”

  “You’re going to paint me?”

  He shook the sack bottom up. Out spilled a dozen pink roses, a blond wig not too far different from my original shade. He tossed the wig so I could catch it.

  “Before and after. The girl next door turned mad killer.”

  I fit the wig over my head, said, “I have a problem with the mad killer part.”

  “Think of it as iconography.”

  “It’ll be my face. People will think it’s me.”

  “People will think what I tell them to think. It’s not you. It’s the media-crazy process of fame, of becoming famous in America. The media storm is brewing over our heads, you’re the one standing higher than anybody else, giving the finger to heaven. You’re about to become the lightning rod for celebrity.”

  “But I don’t want to be famous.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You are. Frankly, I’m jealous.”

  He thrust the roses into my arms.

  “Hold them like a baby.”

  I cradled the roses and smiled.

  The flash sparked. I felt burned, blinded.

  Billy b said, “Like it or not, for fifteen minutes you’re going to become the most famous person in the world.”