Квентин Тарантино - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - The First Novel By Quentin Tarantino

And here he is, in the flesh, with his hot-ass wife, Rick’s next-door neighbor. Talk about a guy who has the world by the fucking balls , Rick thinks.

Then the electronic gate in front of Roman and Sharon opens up and the Roadster, as quickly as it zoomed into view, zooms out.

“Holy shit,” Rick says to himself, “that was Polanski.” Then to Cliff, “That was Roman Polanski! He’s lived here a month now; this is the first time I’ve seen him.”

Rick opens the car door and steps out, chuckling. Cliff chuckles to himself as well: This is yet another example of Rick’s furious mood swings.

As Rick walks across his front lawn toward his front door, his entire demeanor has changed since he saw Polanski. He says excitedly over his shoulder to his buddy, “What did I always say? Most important thing in this town, when you’re making money: Buy a house in town. Don’t rent. Eddie O’Brien taught me that,” referring to the intense character actor Edmond O’Brien, who Rick met when he once guested on a first-season episode of Bounty Law. As Rick continues, his strut gets more pronounced. “Hollywood real estate means you live here. You’re not visiting. You’re not passing through. You fuckin’ live here!” As he steps up the first three steps that lead to his front entrance, “I mean, here I am, flat on my ass, and who do I got livin’ next door to me?”

He sticks his house key in the lock, twists it, then, turning to his buddy to finish his point and answer his own question, “The director of Rosemary’s fuckin’ Baby , that’s who. Polanski’s the hottest director in town—probably the world—and he’s my next-door neighbor.” Rick steps fully inside his house as he finishes his thought: “I could be one pool party away from starring in the new Polanski movie!”

Cliff wants to jet, so he stays in the doorway, not wanting to step into the house. “So you’re feeling better?” Cliff sarcastically asks.

“Oh, yeah, buddy,” Rick says. “Sorry ’bout that, take care of that fuckin’ Comanche Uprising thing whenever you get the chance.”

Cliff indicates got it , then asks, “You need me for anything else?”

Rick waves him away. “No no no. I got a lotta lines to learn for tomorrow.”

Cliff asks, “You need me to run lines witcha?”

“No, don’t worry about that,” Rick tells him. “I’ll do it with my tape recorder.”

“Okay,” Cliff says. “If you don’t need me, I’m gonna get my carcass on home.”

“Naw, I don’t need you,” Rick says.

Cliff starts walking backward to get out of there quick before Rick changes his mind. “Okay, leave tomorrow morning, seven-fifteen.”

Rick repeats, “Got it, seven-fifteen.”

Cliff clarifies, “That’s seven-fifteen—out the door, in the car.”

Rick repeats, “Got it, seven-fifteen, out the door, in the car. See ya, buddy.”

Rick closes his front door. Cliff trips over to the car that’s parked next to his boss’s Cadillac in the driveway. It’s his in-need-of-a-wash light-blue Volkswagen convertible Karmann Ghia. The stuntman hops in, sticks his key in the ignition, and twists. The little Volkswagen engine rumbles to life. As the engine sparks, so does the sound of the Los Angeles radio station 93 KHJ. Billy Stewart is doing his scat-like improv vocal at the conclusion of his version of Summertime as Cliff reverses out of the driveway, gives the steering wheel a quick yank, which jerks the nose of the Karmann Ghia away from the house and points it down the hill on Cielo Drive. The blond driver revs the gas three times with Billy Jack’s boot, then, in time with Billy Stewart’s vocal gymnastics, throws the stick into gear and hits the gas, shooting down the residential Hollywood Hill, taking each hairpin turn at break-his-fucking-neck speed, heading to his home, three freeways away in the city of Van Nuys.

Chapter Four

Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl

After Cliff became a widower, he never had another serious relationship with a woman for the rest of his life. He fucked girls. He took advantage of all that free pussy/free love that was floating around in the late sixties . But no serious girlfriends and definitely no wives. But Cliff did have one female in his life that he loved and who loved him back. His flat-head bent-eared pitbull with a reddish-brown coat, Brandy .

The dog waits anxiously by the door to Cliff’s trailer home for the sound of her master’s Karmann Ghia pulling up outside. The moment she hears it, her little nub of a tail starts quickly moving from left to right, and she instinctively whines and scratches at the door with her paw. While Cliff is gone all day, he leaves his little rabbit-eared black-and-white television set on so Brandy won’t get lonely. On television at the moment is the February 7, 1969, episode of the ABC Friday-night variety show The Hollywood Palace . Each episode every week would have a new guest host introducing a new lineup of visiting guests. Last week the host was comedic pianist Victor Borge. This week it’s Camelot ’s Broadway crooner Robert Goulet. Goulet is tearing into a dramatic interpretation of Jimmy Webb’s metaphysical classic MacArthur Park.

MacArthur Park is melting

in the dark

All the sweet green icing

flowing down

The front door to the dwelling flies open, and there stands Cliff Booth in his full Billy Jack blue-denim regalia. As she does every night when Cliff comes home, Brandy loses her goddamn mind. Cliff, who treats Brandy with a firm hand (“She likes a firm hand,” he tells Rick), allows her to get her jumping up on him out of her system. But tonight Cliff has a happy surprise for his little lady. Cliff and Rick had lunch today at Musso and Frank, and the stuntman had steak and carried the steak bone in the pocket of his Levi’s jacket, wrapped up in one of the restaurant’s white cloth dinner napkins, all day long. After he gives her a few moments to get her welcome-home happy jig out of her system, he barks at her, “Okay, down down down.” She sits down on her hind legs, snout pointed up at him. Now that he has her undivided attention, he removes the white cloth napkin with the meaty T-bone inside from the pocket of his cool blue jacket.

“Look what I got for you,” he taunts her.

Something for me? Brandy thinks.

As he unwraps it, he says, “It’s gonna blow your mind, man.” Then out of the napkin emerges the steak bone. Brandy, excited, hops up on her hind legs, her front paws pressed against Cliff’s waist. Cliff chuckles at Brandy’s appreciation. You could take a woman out to Musso and Frank, order the same goddamn steak, add a bottle of red wine, and top it off with a piece of cheesecake, and she wouldn’t show anywhere near this level of appreciation. This just goes to Cliff’s theory about the mercenary mindset of girls. Cliff theorizes what other people call courtship is all just a goddamn transaction. Girls would rather go out with some rich fuck, who the bill doesn’t mean shit to, than some lovesick dope, who’s saved up and is spending his last dollar on them.

But not this girl. He holds out his gift and the dog jumps up in the air, catching the bone in her mighty jaws. Cliff lets go, and Brandy retreats to her corner with her little pillow and privately gnaws on the bovine bone.

How Cliff and Brandy came to be acquainted is kind of an interesting story. It was a little over two years ago. Cliff was sitting in his trailer home behind the Van Nuys Drive-In when his phone rang. On the other end was Cliff’s ne’er-do-well stuntman friend, Buster Cooley. Cooley owed Cliff thirty-two hundred dollars. This amount had racked up over the last five or six years. Four hundred here, five hundred and fifty there. He first lent his friend some cash during the time Cliff was doing better than he ever had. It was during the time his partnership with Rick was allowing him to double the leading man in a series of studio action movies. Rick bitches and moans about this time, but for Cliff, these were his salad days. Actually having money for the first time in his life was kind of a mind fuck for the hand-to-mouth Booth. His big purchase was a nice little boat that he bought, lived on, and kept docked in Marina del Rey. It was during these flush days that he lent Cooley the lion share of the cash. Now, Cliff wasn’t an idiot, Cooley might have been taking advantage of him, but he wasn’t scamming him. Every time Buster borrowed money from him, he really did need it. They were going to repossess his car, his TV, kick him out of his apartment, his car again; he needed to pay off his Union 76 gas card, his first and last month’s rent to get a new apartment. Now, Buster Cooley may have been a mooch, but he wasn’t a chiseler. If he had the money, he would have paid Cliff, and Cliff knew that. There was no point in Cliff calling Buster up on the phone and humiliating him. One, he wouldn’t get his money any faster that way; two, Buster would just avoid him from that time on; and three, the day would come when the two men did run into each other (L.A. is a small town). And if Cliff put the pressure on Cooley and then Cooley tried to duck him, when they did bump into each other, Cliff would be forced to confront him about it. And that’s when things between two men of this type could turn ugly real quick. Cliff knew if Buster ever came into cash, he’d get at least some of it. But he also knew Buster was never going to come into cash. So mentally, two years ago, he kissed that money goodbye. And while, sure, he could use it now, he was still glad that when he had it he could help out an old friend. Maybe not to the tune of three thousand dollars, but, hey, at the time, if he couldn’t have afforded it, he wouldn’t have lent it.