Джеймс Эллрой - Widespread Panic

Jack berates Budd. Jack reads him the ripe riot act. Jack motormouths on many topics. Jack pounds popular front groups and takes them to task. Jack jacks off à la idiot ideologues worldwide. The PD shoots the bug tapes to State HUAC. Fourteen Smith Act indictments result.

The bug’s still in place. Jack’s sublet the comrade’s casa since ’48. Ex -Commies visit Jack. They juke him with jungle juice and get him to jaw. Jack jaws on overdrive. He’s every Red Squad cop and dirt digger’s dream. ’48 to ’55. That’s seven years. The bugs remain in place. Jack don’t know shit.

I drove over and parked outside Casa Comrade. I brought Jack a jug of Jim Beam. Jack sat on his front steps. I saw him. He saw me. It was Oh shit — Freddy Otash, redux.

I got out and walked up. Jack went Sieg Heil and hummed “Das Horst Wessel Lied.” I yukked and tossed Jack his jug. He yanked the cap and yodeled a big blast.

“Freddy the O. Gauleiter for the occupation forces of Chief William H. Parker.”

“You know who I work for, Jack. I’m a free-speech man, just like you.”

Jack grabbed his crotch. “Free speech is a shuck. It’s a smoke screen to cosmeticize the fascist agenda. Confidential riles up the schvarzers and faygeles. In that sense, it’s an organ of revolutionary intent.”

I laffed. “I’ll tell Bob Harrison that.”

“Tell Bob I saw his first wife at a Scottsboro Boys rally, back in ’30-something. She was holding hands with a shvoogie and Pete Seeger’s Filipina girlfriend. They were singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ — off-key, no less.”

I stuffed a fifty in Jack’s shirt pocket. Jack reyodeled Jim Beam. He hummed “Lili Marlene” and the love-death bit from Tristan und Isolde.

“Freddy the O. wants something. He never comes just to schmooze. ”

I said, “The Actors Studio. The late ’40s. I know you go back to the Group Theatre, so I thought you might be able to help me.”

“The Actors Studio. Oy. Not a revolutionary organ, susceptible to takeover by Comrade John Howard Lawson and the hundreds of young Red Guard majorettes eager to suck his big dialectical cock.”

I said, “Come on, Jack. I was thinking you could give me some names.”

Jack went mucho outraged. “ Me? Name names ? You think the apparatchik to end all apparatchiks would name names and betray the Fourth Apparatus of the Central Soviet?”

I said, “Jack, you’re a pisser.”

Jack stumbled into Casa Comrade. He left the door open. I saw him banging bookshelves and tossing tomes on the floor.

I lit a cigarette. Jack barged back outside. He passed me a school-type yearbook. It was buckram-bound and gilt-embossed. The cover read: The Actors Studio/1946–47.

“Thanks, Jack.”

Jack hummed “The Internationale.” “I know about the bug, Freddy. My schvartze cleaning lady discovered it when I first moved in.”

I was floored and flat-flabbergasted. I grabbed Jack’s jug and jammed down the juice. The world rippled and revised itself right before my eyes.

“You could have pulled it. You’d have saved some comrades of yours a whole lot of grief.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe they deserved what they got. Maybe I thought I’d fuck with History and roll the dice for a while.”

I traveled Trans-Jack Airways. The Lawson-Kennedy loop. It flew Casa Comrade to Beverly Hills. I buzzed by the Beverly Wilshire Pharmacy and filled Jack the K.’s order. Spaceman Jack would orbit tonite.

I hit the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a back-bungalow bash. I lit through the lobby and landed right on cue. Women outnumbered men six to one. It was all stacked starlets and porko politicians. DA Ernie Roll and AG Pat Brown. Both quash- Confidential conspirators. Governor Goodie Knight. Colored congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Note his “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” campaign button.

I crashed the crowd. I popped out to a poolside porch and straddled a deck chair. A brisk breeze induced aaahhhs. I studied the Actors Studio book.

I poured through picture-packed pages. No-name kids built sets. Lee Strasberg made like Moses and laid down the law. I noted name actors and nudniks I’d seen on TV. I hit a section marked “1946–47 class.” Kids congregated on bleachers and smiled, heartbreak hopeful. Page twenty-two popped out at me. I thought I saw—

Some names and no-names mingled. Kim Hunter, Ralph Meeker. Two no-name males. I recognized Reed Hadley of Racket Squad. There’s Julie Harris and boss Barbara Bel Geddes. There’s the wounded waif I saw at Hollywood Station during the Red Light Bandit’s rampage.

She’s hopeful here. She’s heartfelt. She’s wearing a paint-smeared smock and saddle shoes. She’s standing beside a lissome light-haired woman I’d never seen before.

A name list laid out the players. Miss Third Victim was Shirley Tutler. The light-haired woman was Lois Nettleton.

Jack the K. walked up. I tossed him the pharmacy bag. Pill vials vibrated and did the shimmy-shimmy shake.

“Dare I ask what it cost?”

I said, “Zilch. The pharmacist’s a defrocked physician. He owes me numerous favors.”

Jack relit his cigar. “I’ll be a defrocked U.S. senator, if I can’t raise a whole lot of money tonight.”

“There’s not a lot of money in the next room. The girls don’t have it, and the political guys never give it away.”

Jack chortled. “Give me a good one, Freddy. My sisters like dish on handsome young actors and their secret lives. And don’t give me Rock Hudson, because that’s yesterday’s news.”

I said, “James Dean is known as the ‘Human Ashtray.’ ”

“That’s fairly unsavory.”

“Barbara Payton’s on the skids. She’s car-hopping at Stan’s Drive-In, across from Hollywood High.”

Jack said, “Old news. You set me up with Babs when you were a cop and I was a congressman.”

I said, “Katharine Hepburn is really a man. Whisper ’s running the story next month. She underwent hormone therapy in the Soviet Union.”

“I’ll live with it. As long as she’s not a Commie or a Republican.”

My time was up. Jack’s eyes wiggled and wandered. He’s Two-Minute Jack with his minions. He’s Ten-Minute Jack in the sack.

“It was good seeing you, Freddy.”

“Always a pleasure, Jack.”

The sun salved me. The breeze went warm and bid me to bask. I dipped and dozed. The bungalow behind me went muffled and mute. I saw Shirley Tutler’s picture and heard Miss Blind Item’s voice. Soft sounds soothed me. Reverie. I’m rapt and reverential. I’m a kid back in church.

Wheels popped over pavement. Dishes rattled. Somebody said, “I didn’t know you knew Jack.”

I opened my eyes. Oh shit — it’s Rodent Robbie Molette. A hairnet hid his fried hair. He’s Busboy Robbie today. He’s rolling a room-service cart.

“Everybody knows Jack. He exemplifies our new egalitarian society. It’s why he talks to guys like you and me.”

Robbie scratched his balls. “Be that as it may, I should take advantage of running into you, and tell you the latest scuttlebutt from the shoot.”

I said, “I’m listening.”

“You should listen, given the gist of what I’m about to tell you.”

“Robbie, don’t draw this—”

“Okay, here’s the latest and greatest, which ain’t so great in my view. A, Nick Ray’s talking ‘escalation.’ He wants ‘the kids’ to ‘plumb their motivation’ and ‘escalate their mischief.’ B, he’s talking hot-prowl 459’s, liquor-store robberies, and making some sort of ‘radical alternative movie,’ that will ‘complement and enlarge the meaning of,’ this lox Rebel Without a Cause, which in my view is headed for the drive-in circuit in Dogdick, Arkansas.”