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

Soon they’re speeding down Riverside Drive. On the radio, the Real Don Steele is joking his way through a commercial for Tanya Tanning Butter. Debra Jo, who gets a lot of rides, immediately starts going into the directions of how to get to Spahn Ranch. “So you wanna get on the Hollywood Freeway—”

Cliff cuts her off. “I know where it is.”

She leans her fuzzy head back in the seat and gives the blond dude in the Hawaiian shirt a curious look.

“Are you some old cowboy dude who used to make movies at the ranch?”

“Whoa,” Cliff says, with such enthusiasm it surprises Debra Jo.

“What?” she asks.

He answers as he maneuvers the Cadillac around traffic, “I’m just surprised what an accurate description of me that was. Some old cowboy dude who useta make movies at Spahn Ranch.”

Debra Jo laughs, “So you useta make westerns at the ranch?”

He nods his head yes.

“Back in the old-timey days?” she adds.

“Well, if by old-timey days , you mean television eight years ago, yeah,” he says.

Debra Jo puts her huge dirty feet up on the Cadillac dashboard, pushes her filthy soles into the smooth cold glass of the windshield, and asks, “Were you an actor?”

“No,” he tells her. “I’m a stuntman.”

“Stuntman?” she repeats excitedly. “That’s way better!”

“Really?” he asks. “Why is that ‘way better’?”

“Actors are phony,” she says with the air of authority. “They just say lines that other people write. They pretend to murder people on their stupid TV shows, while real people are being murdered every day in Vietnam.”

Well, that’s one way to think about it , Cliff thinks.

She continues, “But stuntmen? You guys are different. You jump off fuckin’ buildings. You set yourselves on fire. You embrace fear.” Then, going into the philosophy she learned from Charlie, “It’s only by embracing fear that one conquers one’s self. To conquer fear is to render one unconquerable,” she says with a satisfied smile on her pretty face.

Whatever the fuck that means , is what Cliff thinks but doesn’t say as he takes the ramp to the northbound Hollywood Freeway.

On KHJ’s Big 93, the Box Tops’ new song, Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March , comes out of the speakers.

After he successfully merges into traffic, Cliff decides to ask, “What’s your name?”

“My friends call me Pussycat . ”

“What’s your real name?”

“You don’t want to be my friend?”

“Of course I want to be your friend.”

“Then I told you, my friends call me Pussycat .”

“Fair enough. Pleased to meetcha, Pussycat.”

“Aloha. Did you know ‘aloha’ means hello and goodbye?”

“Actually, I did know that.”

Touching the shoulder of his yellow shirt: “Are you Hawaiian?”

“No.”

“So what’s your name, Mr. Blond?”

“Cliff.”

“Cliff?”

“Yeah.”

“Clifford or just Cliff?”

“Just Cliff.”

“Clifton?”

“Just Cliff.”

“You don’t like Clifton?”

“It’s not my name.”

She lowers her legs from the dash and snatches up the little burgundy Hot Waxx bag off the front seat. “What’d ya get?”

Cliff protests, “Hey, wait a minute, Miss Rude. Ask.”

She sticks her big hand in the little bag and pulls out the Tom Jones Greatest Hits 8-track tape and bursts out laughing.

As opposed to his reaction to the smirking Susan, Cliff smiles at Pussycat’s ridicule. “Look, fuck you, you stuck-up hippie bitch. I like the song Delilah . You got a problem with that?”

Holding up the 8-track tape with Tom Jones’s picture on it, she sarcastically asks, “Whatsamatter, they all outta Engelbert Humperdinck?”

Leaning in close to her: “I like him too, smartass.”

She waves her big hands at the end of her long arms to indicate, No problem. “Hey, Mark Twain said, ‘If people didn’t have different opinions, there’d be no such thing as horse races.’”

He asks, “Is that what Mark Twain said?”

She shrugs. “Somethin’ like that.”

Her long fingers tear at the cellophane that covers the 8-track till she rips it off. She removes the cardboard border that the chunky plastic tape sits in, then reaches over and switches the Cadillac’s music system from radio to tape player.

The Box Tops shut off.

While Cliff keeps one eye on her and the other on the Hollywood Freeway, Pussycat shoves the 8-track into the car’s tape player. It makes a loud ca-chunk sound, then for a moment or two they just hear tape hiss emitting from the car-stereo speakers, then Tom Jones’s bombastic What’s New Pussycat? blares out in full stereo.

“Okay,” Pussycat admits. “I do like this song.”

She reaches out and twists the volume knob louder, as she begins moving her shoulders to the music and performing a sexy little dance for Cliff’s pleasure on the passenger-side seat of Rick’s Cadillac. She brings her bare legs out from under the floorboards and tucks them under her fanny. Then, as she rises to her knees, she unbuttons the metal button on her Levi’s cutoffs.

Cliff, who has still not uttered a word, raises his eyebrows.

Okay, maybe this is worth the gas to Chatsworth , he thinks.

In response to his reaction, the brunette raises her two brown caterpillar eyebrows as she unzips the fly of her cutoffs. Then slides them off her ass and down her legs, till she’s holding them in her hand, revealing soiled pink panties with little cherries printed on them. She twirls the short-short Levi’s on her finger in time to the calliope-like piano of What’s New Pussycat? till she tosses them down on the floorboard.

As she shimmies her ass left to right in time with Tom’s vocals, Pussycat hooks a thumb under the underwear and slowly slides the dirty pink cherry panties down her legs and off her person. Then she lies back against the passenger-side car door and spreads her legs open, revealing to the driver the mountainous mound of dark pubic hair between her legs. The hair between her legs is as wild and bushy as the hair on her head.

“Like what you see, Cliff?” she asks.

“You bet,” Cliff truthfully tells her.

She lies down onto her back on the passenger-side seat of Rick’s Coupe de Ville, putting her bushy brown head against the door. She raises her left leg and presses the heel of her foot against the driver’s seat headrest and raises her right leg and wedges her other foot between the dashboard and the windshield on Cliff’s side, presenting herself spread-eagle to the amused driver.

Then, in time to Tom Jones’s song about a pussycat, she licks two of her fingers and begins running them up and down against her clit.

Cliff continues driving down the Hollywood Freeway, keeping one eye on the road and the other eye on Pussycat’s dark bushy pussy.

Pussycat closes her eyelids and says in a voice affected by her arousal, “Stick your fingers in me.”

“How old are you?” Cliff asks.

Pussycat’s eyelids pop open.

It’s been so long since anybody cared about that, she wasn’t even sure she heard him right. “What?”

“How old are you?” Cliff repeats.

She laughs incredulously as she says, “Wow, man, that’s the first time anybody’s asked that in a long time.”

“What’s the answer?” he asks again.

She props herself up on her elbows but keeps her legs spread wide as she tells him sarcastically, “Okay, we’re gonna play kiddie games? Eighteen. Feel better?”

Cliff asks her, “Do you got some kinda ID? You know, like a driver’s license or something?”