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

Before Cliff can ask, “Where’s Susan?” Shovel Face points at a golden-blond beach-bunny type wearing a buttoned-up Levi’s vest and a pair of white skintight jeans with a KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ patch on the ass pocket. She’s sprucing up the community billboard when Cliff walks up to her and asks, “You Susan?”

Susan turns to face him and instantly gives Cliff the smile Shovel Face has waited six months to get. They both have hair so blond that when their heads are close together Cliff and Susan resemble two different suns from different galaxies orbiting each other. She confirms to her fellow blond that indeed she is Susan.

“Can you open the 8-track case for me?”

She involuntarily makes a face that tells Cliff she thinks these 8-track tapes are a pain in the ass, though Cliff doubts whoever owns this record store pays her to spruce up the community billboard.

In her toneless voice, which seems to go hand in hand with this type of athletic sexy blond Californian beach girl, Susan tells him, “Ahh … yeah, sure thing. Let me go get the key.” She points over to where the 8-track glass case is. “Meet me by the 8-track tapes.”

Cliff watches her tight white jean–covered ass disappear behind a bead curtain to fetch the key, which, since there’s only one and she’s in charge of it, should be in her pocket, not in a desk drawer in some back room behind a bead curtain.

He can feel Shovel Face’s resentment of him as he moves over to the glass case in question. If asked, Cliff would tell Shovel Face that he probably had a chance with Susan four to five months ago. But if he hasn’t made his move by now, she probably chalks him up as a dickless wonder and it doesn’t matter how much pizza and beer they have after work. And, in Cliff’s opinion, his best bet would be to concentrate on good-looking customers.

Cliff scans the 8-track selection through the locked glass, searching for Tom Jones’s Delilah amongst all the other names. Steppenwolf. The Fifth Dimension. Ian Whitcomb. Crosby, Stills and Nash. Hair Broadway soundtrack. Zorba the Greek original soundtrack. Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. Mama Cass’s solo record. Two Bill Cosby records. Some comedy team named Hudson and Landry that Cliff has never heard of.

The beach bunny bounces back and unlocks the glass door, sliding it open with a noisy tug. Cliff bends over to better examine the titles. He can feel Susan watching him with her hand on her cocked-out hip. Cliff finds what he’s looking for and plucks out Tom Jones Greatest Hits. Susan does a slight but audible guffaw and covers her smile with her hand.

His eyebrows rise. “What? Is my choosing Tom Jones funny?”

She nods her golden-blond head as if to say, Yeah, a little .

Cliff exits the record store (still a little pissed at Susan), and steps onto the sidewalk, holding a little burgundy bag with the Hot Waxx logo on it. He heads for the corner of Riverside Drive and Forman to cross the street and get back in his vehicle. Then, across traffic, he spots her again. The bushy-haired brunette pickle girl in the cutoff jeans, bare feet, and crochet halter top, apparently waiting for his return, by his cream-yellow Cadillac. When she sees him standing on the corner, ready to cross the street and return to his car, she jumps up and waves frantically at him. As Cliff gets the green light and crosses the busy street heading toward both his car and the bushy-haired barefoot brunette hippie pickle girl, he notices something. This girl is younger than she looked through his dirty windshield. How young, he’s not sure. But as they converse, he’s going to try and examine that.

Leaning against his Cadillac, the bushy-haired barefoot brunette hippie pickle girl says, “Looks like third time’s the charm.”

“I count you on Riverside Drive and Hollywood Way being our third time,” states the blond dude in the yellow Hawaiian shirt. “And it was definitely not charmed.”

“Picky, picky, picky,” the bushy-haired barefoot brunette hippie pickle girl teases. “Okay, Mr. Persnickety, have it your way.” Then she gives a very over-enunciated line reading on, “Fourth time’s the charm.”

How fucking old is she? Cliff thinks.

“How were those pickles?” Cliff asks.

“Real good,” the bushy-haired barefoot brunette hippie pickle girl says. “They were the fancy kind.”

Cliff raises his eyebrows as if to say, Good for you .

“Give me a ride?” she pleads in her cute-girl voice, then bites her bottom lip for effect.

“What happened to Bernie?” he asks her.

“Who?”

“The guy in the Buick Skylark,” he says.

She sighs. “Looks like he wasn’t goin’ my way.”

“Which way is your way ?” Cliff inquires.

She’s definitely underage, Cliff has deduced, but how underage? She’s not fourteen or fifteen. So the question is, is she sixteen or seventeen? Or maybe, who knows, eighteen? And then she would officially not be underage, at least as far as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is concerned.

“I’m going to Chatsworth,” she tells him.

That makes him involuntarily giggle, “Chatsworth?”

In her puppet body language, she nods her head yes.

With a smirk on his face, Cliff asks her, “So you just hitch up and down Riverside Drive till somebody with a lotta free time and a lotta gas agrees to drive you all the way to fucking Chatsworth?”

She waves away his incredulous reaction. “Shows what you know. Tourists love to drive me. I’m the favorite part of their L.A. vacation. …”

As she talks with her hands, he notices how big they are. My god, her fingers are so long , he thinks. They’d feel pretty good wrapped around my cock and squeezing, with that big giant thumb of hers mashing up the head.

“… they’ll be telling stories about the Hollywood hippie girl …”

As she continues to rattle on, he glances down at her feet. Oh shit, they’re huge too.

“ … gave a ride to the movie ranch to for the rest of their lives.”

Beat one.

Beat two.

Beat three.

Beat four.

“Spahn Movie Ranch?” Cliff finally asks.

Debra Jo’s face lights up. “Yeah!”

Cliff shifts his weight from his right foot to his left foot and unconsciously shifts the little burgundy Hot Waxx bag with the 8-track tape in it from his left hand to his right hand as he clarifies, “So that’s where you’re goin’, Spahn Movie Ranch?”

Again her bushy head nods in a puppet-like yes, accompanied by an “Uh-huh.”

Cliff asks, genuinely curious, “Why you goin’ there?”

“That’s where I live,” she answers.

“Alone?” he asks.

“No,” she assures him. “Me and my friends.”

What? he thinks. At first, when she said Spahn Movie Ranch, Cliff just assumed she was George Spahn’s hippie granddaughter or his hippie caretaker. But when hippies say “friends,” they mean “other hippies.”

“So,” he clarifies, “let me get this straight— you and a bunch of friends like you all live at Spahn Movie Ranch?”

“Yep.”

The stuntman rolls the information around in his brain, then opens the passenger-side car door for her. “Hop in, I’ll give you a lift.”

“Great!” she hollers, as she folds herself up on the passenger-side front seat.

Cliff slams the door behind her. He contemplates, as he walks around to the driver’s side of the Cadillac, the information that the bushy-haired brunette barefoot hippie pickle girl just gave him. If what she says is true, it does sound like something strange is going on at Spahn Ranch. He’s sure, ultimately, it’s probably nothing. Nevertheless, George Spahn is an old man, and it wouldn’t hurt to check up on ’em. All it’ll cost him is the drive to Chatsworth. He ain’t got anything else better to do this late afternoon. Might as well look in on an old friend. In the meantime, he intends to keep flirting with Elbows and Kneecaps and maybe find out more about these “friends” and where they came from.