John Shirley - Wetbones Read online

  Prentice waited. He'd shot his wad, he decided.

  After a moment of staring glaze-eyed at a Grammy on a shelf of otherwise mostly minor awards - he'd started out in record production - Arthwright nodded sharply, but contradicted the nod by saying, "Broken Windows didn't work out too well. That was a cop thing too. Might be hard for me to sell you after that."

  Meaning sell him to the Studio. Convince them to do it. Which was bullshit. Arthwright could do what he wanted, now, if he really wanted to do it.

  What had he said? A cop thing too. Like A Cop Named Dagger, like Broken Windows. Cop Things, everything seemed to be Cop Things.

  "Broken Windows was a straight ahead drama," Prentice pointed out, hoping he didn't sound desperate. "Not my forte. I shouldn't have tried it. I can't pull it off without comedy in there too. That's where I shine. I had two hits." And a flop, and one so-so. "And you might point out to the studio that Broken Windows wasn't really a cop thing. It was about burglars, it was mostly from their side, so it was a problem of antiheroes. This wouldn't have that problem."

  His back was sticking to his shirt with sweat. When you had to apologize and explain, backing and filling, it wasn't going to fly. Shit.

  Arthwright said, "Okay, well, have Buddy messenger the outline over to me and I'll take a look. Has this baby got a name or are you just calling it Junior?"

  Prentice laughed nervously. "I'm calling it Tenderloin Seven right now. It's set in San Francisco."

  'You're from San Francisco originally, aren't you?" Arthwright asked abstractedly, standing. Standing up was a way of telling him he was expected to leave without actually having to say it.

  They shook hands. Prentice said, "I grew up in San Francisco. How'd you know I was from there?"

  "The 49ers shirt might have done it," Arthwright said, letting his hand drop, grinning.

  "Oh yeah. I forgot to change back to the Clark Kent suit."

  Arthwright faked a chuckle. He was checking his calendar, as he added, half to himself, "And Amy mentioned it."

  Prentice stared. "Amy? My wife Amy?"

  "Uh huh. I -" Arthwright looked up at Prentice blankly. Hesitation. Just a fraction of a second. Arthwright hadn't meant to bring this up, apparently. "She was out at a party in Malibu. Judy Denver's place. I talked to Amy a little. She had a high opinion of you. She was a sweet girl."

  So Buddy had told Arthwright that Amy had died. Unless he'd heard it somewhere else.

  Had he got the appointment out of charity, because of Amy's death? Christ. I'm climbing on Amy's body.

  And Amy had met Arthwright. And Arthwright was working with Jeff. The world wasn't just small, it was cramped.

  ''Yeah. Yeah, she was . . . a sweet girl," Prentice managed.

  "Yes. Well. I've got a late lunch . . ."

  "Right. I'll ask Buddy to get that outline to you. Take it easy."

  "Whenever I can. Talk to you later, Tom."

  Prentice hurried out, as Arthwright left instructions with his secretary.

  Outside, the day seemed brutally warm after the over zealous air conditioning. But he strolled round a little, thinking. Suppose the deal with Arthwright didn't come off? What then? Arthwright had been discussing Jeff Teitelbaum. By God, Jeff might just be able to help him.

  Prentice paused to frown up at one of the tenement facades. All the sets looked familiar - but this one seemed to jump out at him for recognition. Maybe it had been used for A Cop Named Dagger. Jeff had sent Prentice a polaroid, a shot of Jeff posing on the set of Dagger, peeking around the edge of one of the false fronts; the fake bricks on the front were spraypainted with equally fake graffiti. But the polaroid's angle revealed the raw-wood supports holding up the false fronts from behind, and in the picture Jeff was crouched in the shadows, peering around from the real world into the make-believe world, leering at the female lead, Zena Holdbridge.

  A couple of months earlier Jeff had sent Prentice a postcard from Maui. Jeff was the kind of guy who sent you post cards from Hawaii of topless girls stretching out in the sand, under a printed caption that read, Great View From My Hotel! Jeff getting off on the baldfaced kitsch of it all.

  The sun was beating on the back of Prentice's neck

  as he made his way back to Lou Kenson's parking place. By the time Prentice reached the car he had the start of a good, strong headache. Inside, the car was a vinyl-reeking cauldron of heat from having baked in the sun, trickling an instant sweat down Prentice's back.

  "Fuck it, I'm gonna punch another hole in the ozone layer," Prentice murmured, turning on the air conditioning.

  Driving out of the studio, Prentice tried to evaluate the meeting and came to exactly no conclusion. Arthwright hadn't jumped for it, but that didn't mean it wouldn't go anyplace. He'd been sort of encouraging - but as people said at WCA parties, Hollywood was a place where you could die of encouragement.

  As usual, after a meeting in the Industry, Prentice had no idea where he stood, at all.

  Los Angeles County Juvenile Detention Facility

  Cutting himself worked best. That's what Mitch had found out that morning.

  It wasn't a store-bought knife. It was a shiv made out of a shiny metal piece torn from the frame around a steel mirror, some alloy of tin and aluminium maybe. The mirror was metal instead of glass to keep them from breaking it, but working at the frame, day after day, Mitch's room-mate, Lonny, had bent the frame section, creaking it back and forth, till finally it snapped off diagonally. Making two blade-shaped pieces. Lonny'd sharpened them on a rough piece of iron pipe in the bathroom fixtures; kept one shiv, gave Mitch the other, for protection. The.base of each blade was wrapped in multiple thicknesses of torn towels to make a knife grip.

  Mitch was in Juvie Hall, sitting on the floor, in the

  room he shared with Lonny. He was in for possession of one little vial of hubba. Crack cocaine. He was alone in the room; Lonny was out in the exercise yard. Their room looked like a small dormitory unit, with two-tone walls, orange brown near the bottom and light orange above shoulder level. Tube lights in unbreakable ceiling fixtures. Thick metal mesh over the window. Chickenwire-glass observation window centred in the door. The door was closed and Mitch was on the linoleum floor just to one side of it where they couldn't see him if they just glanced through. They'd think he was out playing basketball with the others.

  Maybe he should have gone down the hall to the bathroom to do this because of the blood. Drip it in the toilet. But he couldn't. He had to do it now. He dug the crude knife deeper into the meat of his upper arm. It didn't hurt at all. He could feel their happiness, and the sweetness, the reward syrup, in his groin and spine and head.

  Blood runnelled down his arm and pattered onto the floor. It wasn't a knife, to him, it was a probe; a sensor.

  Mitch Teitelbaum was seventeen, tall and lean like his brother Jeff; with quick, dark eyes like Jeff but without Jeffs vulturine face. His nose was smaller and his cheekbones flatter. Jeff had a small beard; Mitch had tried to grow a mustache, but what came out was about twelve long, curly black hairs with nothing in between them. "Looks like dog whiskers," Eurydice had said, so he'd shaved it off. He'd shaved it off about two days before he met the More Man and he wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd met the More Man.

  Six weeks? Two months? Since, anyway, a day after the last time he'd seen Jeff. Long time since he'd seen Jeff. Long time since he'd seen Eurydice and her

  brother, Orpheus, too. She had a little sister named from another myth, Aphrodite, maybe one of the ugliest little girls he had ever seen. But Eurydice, she was the prettiest girl he knew personally, and sexy - and when a black girl is sexy, Jeff used to say, she was sexier than a sexy white girl, and Eurydice could make you breathe hard just by shifting her weight from one foot to the other. And he'd gotten some off her, too, that was the unbelievable thing. When the More Man was done he was going to have to go and find her. She'd been real patient with him. "Everybody got to have a first time," she'd said.

&
nbsp; His thoughts drifted on a slow current of the head syrup, teetering and turning like the wax cups he and Jeff used to launch on the culvert-wash that was the so-called "Los Angeles River". The head syrup was not a drug. It was just his name for a feeling. He had tried to tell Lonny about it, and Lonny had thought it was a drug because the words "head syrup" sounded like it. But no: it wasn't, no way. It was more like a radio station.

  He had peeled off his Iron Maiden t-shirt - it lay beside him with the iron-masked face of the metal band's symbol all wrinkled up and horribly distorted with its crumpling. He stared at it as he began on his left pectoral. He thought he saw the face on the t-shirt cock an eye at him and move its mouth like it was giggling. After a minute he looked back at his chest, watching as he methodically dug the knife into himself, observing as coolly as a man shaving or squeezing a pimple, that kind of half focus and meditative distance. All the while plowing the ragged blade-edge into the soft white skin, wishing he'd built himself up more so there was more muscle to get into. Push, push, the skin and

  muscle and fat tissue of his pectoral resisting the blade, it was like trying to cut open a package that was sealed in heavy plastic, the stuff stretching under your letter opener. Push. Punch. It broke through, the blade jabbing out under his nipple, red blood arcing and - for a moment he felt some pain.

  Oh, shit, how did I get here and what am I doing?

  But then the head syrup came back, the pain vanished, and he relaxed. Jerked the blade loose, and jabbed it through his jeans, deep into the meat of his skinny thigh.

  He was not on drugs. He was not insane. He felt no pain at all.

  Culver City, Los Angeles

  "I haven't seen ol' Mitch for, oh, six or seven weeks," Jeff said, around a mouthful of Doritos.

  Tom Prentice and Jeff Teitelbaum were watching the Dodgers get their asses kicked by the San Diego Padres. They were sitting on a sofa-futon in Jeff's second story apartment, near the open French doors onto the balcony. The room smelled like stale cigar smoke; Jeff had trotted out the cigars when Prentice showed up. Jeff liked smoking cigars with his friends because it was playing at "Guy Stuff." Guy Stuff was a joke and very serious with Jeff, both.

  In the background were laughing squeals and taunts from the swimmers in the complex's swimming pool; the sounds of splashing, a teasing underscent of chlorine. It was a high security "singles" apartment complex, with security guards at the gate and TV cameras and its own hot tub spa and weight room and sauna and game room.

  Jeff's living room was undecorated except for a Norman Rockwell print of a small, rosy-cheeked boy with a fishing pole proudly holding up a string full of fish, only Jeff had cut out small men's magazine photos of naked girls and pasted them on over the fish: a small boy proudly holding up a string of naked girls. On TV, a couple of baseball players drank Budweisers with Phil Collins, and then the game came back on. Fernando was on the mound, but his arm was cold today: Martinez was up to bat and whack, he drove a line drive out past third base for the eighth goddamn Padres run of the game and it was only the top of the fourth inning. Prentice was doing his best to space out completely on sports and Tecate beer, because it was the way he got out of his head. Amy was in his head, and it was too crowded in there for both of them.

  He didn't want to hear about Mitch, either. Jeff's little brother, nine years younger, always screwing up. Jeff's parents divorced when Jeff was ten and Mitch was one, and Jeff had gone to live with his dad, who worked for the NRA lobbying against gun control, and Mitch had gone to live with his mom, who was "a whiner," Jeff said, "and a sponge." Prentice had never heard Jeff say anything good about her. She'd been the one to leave; maybe Jeff was forever mad at her for abandoning him when he was ten.

  Jeff hadn't seen Mitch for years, because his parents hated each other and his mom ducked out on the visitation rights. Then Mitch turned up at Jeff's door, two years ago, run away from their mom's new boyfriend. "A real asshole" was the extent of his report on the guy. So Mitch had moved in with Jeff, and Jeff had taken care of him through various traumas, most of them drug-related, for two years, "Trying to straighten

  the kid's head out", and then, bingo, he'd disappeared. Phoning to New York, Jeff bent Prentice's ear endlessly about Mitch; Prentice had heard all the Mitch stories. He didn't feel like hearing any more, especially now when he was trying to think about nothing but baseball. The stately jumble, the clunky Zen of baseball.

  It wasn't working very well. He couldn't keep his mind on the game. He was remembering the first time he met Amy. The experience summed her up . . .

  He was in a New York cafe on a wet October day, lunching with Gloria Zickurian, a book illustrator. Cabs the same yellow as adult bookstores rippled as they passed the rain-streaked window. Prentice and Gloria drank cafe lattes and ate salads and cheese croissants. It was a date, more or less. More for Gloria, Prentice thought, and less for him. Gloria was pretty in a wistful, slightly weak-chinned way. She had big, dark eyes and curly black hair allowed to tousle wispily around her red beret. She wore a rust-coloured, gypsyish dress with a gathered bodice that displayed her cleavage in a way that made him think of bread dough.

  She was proud of the little cafe she'd picked on Central Park west, a yuppie coffee shop with Santa Fe style decor, specializing in salads, or "salades" as the menu had it, and she talked of discovering it until Prentice dutifully said, "Yeah, it's a great little place." Then she launched into an interminable complaint about having been asked to illustrate a line of science fiction books, a field she knew nothing about, resulting in her attendance at science fiction conventions, "where a lot of married fat guys with homemade swords and wide belts and medieval hats" made clumsy passes at her. She bitched about the abysmal taste in cover art at the paperback house she was working for. She droned

  a bit, when she was nervous, nasally stretching out the syllables; afraid of gaps in the conversation. The gaps, Prentice thought, were his favourite part, at this point.

  That's when Amy slammed through the cafe doors, wearing a Walkman and the only miniskirted raincoat Prentice had seen this side of 1968. Amy was willowy, with a kind of blueblood prettiness that would only have been blurred by makeup. Her hair, hennaed cedar-red in those days, was pinned up so you could see the sweep of her long neck. Her earrings were little onyx bats.

  Amy paused just inside the doorway, looking around with quick movements of her head, taking her time putting the Walkman in her pocket, closing her umbrella, letting everyone get a good look at the sweep of long legs in their dark purple pantyhose.

  Spotting Amy, Gloria stiffened, looking as if she wanted to bolt, then sagged with a kind of polite despair when Amy spotted her and made a bee-line for the table. "Glorie-uh!" Amy chirruped, going on with machine gun rapidity, "I knew you'd be in one of these grotty places, where everything costs at least two dollars too much. Gloria, I have great news."

  "This," Gloria said wearily to Prentice, "is my roommate Amy Eisenberg. Amy, this is Tom Prentice."

  "God it took you long enough to introduce me, ooh he's a big one isn't he, I didn't think you liked big ones, big men I mean, I mean big physique"

  Gloria stammered, "Amy - did you, uh, need something?"

  Amy kept her eyes on Prentice as she talked, looking him up and down. He smiled as neutrally as he could. Her wet umbrella was leaning against his chair, dripping on his pants leg. "Your address book, sweetie. I need Polly Gebhart's phone number, I lost it -"

  Gloria snatched up her purse, yanked it open, muttering, "Why don't you get an address book and organize yourself, Amy?"

  Amy took the address book. "I going to, I have to now, that's my news, - there's a producer who's hot for me, for me as an actor I mean -" She made a conscious policy of pretending to stumble over sexual innuendoes, Prentice later learned. "- and he's having me do a call-back, it's for an off-Broadway show, a really happening show that half of Hollywood is trying to get the rights to -" She turned abruptly to Prentice, as if thunderstruck. Looking
at Prentice but speaking to Gloria. "Hey is this that screenwriter you told me about that you were -?"

  "I'm only barely a screenwriter," Prentice said modestly. A kind of pseudo modesty that was really a way of confirming his status. "Just one credit." He'd just had his first script produced, Fourth Base. First script? First one he sold. Fifth one he wrote.

  "Amy, if you've got what you need," Gloria said, brightly "we -"

  "Don't you listen to her," Amy said to Prentice, "it's her quaint way of asking me to join you. But only for a minute." She pulled a chair from the next table, and sat herself on it with the air of a guest on a talk show who's just been asked to sit and tell the host what her newest project is. "This is my first real break, this part in Sweet Fire, but I did that thing at Summer Stock with Julie Christie, you remember that, Gloria?" Gloria, who had sullenly lit a cigarette - she was one of those people who saved smoking for expressing anger - nodded briskly and blew smoke at the window. A waitress caught Gloria's eye and shook her head, and Gloria stabbed the cigarette out in her coffee cup. Amy hadn't

  waited for Gloria's answer. She went breathlessly on, "- And I think the Connecticut gig got me this job because Ervin - Ervin's my agent, Tom - Ervin got this producer a videotape of me working with Julie Christie, who played my mother . . . Maybe I'll just have a capuccino." She grabbed the waitress's apron as the woman sped by, smiled sweetly into the glare this got her, and said, "Could I have a capuccino with lots of chocolate sprinkles? I'd be infinitely grateful. Thanks."

  Gloria groaned and didn't bother to muffle it. Prentice shrugged and winked conspiratorially at her, as if to say, We'll wait her out and then we'll get back to our lunch.

  But Amy stayed for an hour, giving a sort of informal resume of her bit parts and commercial walkons and her part-time gig as a back-up singer in a rock band (surprising Prentice by mentioning that she played the accordion with them, too). She was too amusing to be tedious, but then Prentice's viewpoint on that might have been muddled by the sheer erotic magnetism Amy gave off. She could be quite funny, too, and despite everything, he was glad she'd showed up.