Dan Wakefield - Home Free

“There was,” he said, “but I can’t remember what.”

She smiled.

“How about a sandwich and a glass of milk?”

“Right,” he said. “That was it.”

There was a plate-glass window looking down at sweeps and sprinklings of lights. Belle had told him how pretty it was. This was the living room of Ray Behr’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Gene blinked, got different lights. An authentic Wurlitzer jukebox from the forties. A pinball machine. Starkie was sitting in a green leather barber’s chair in the center of the room, cranking himself up, then down, slowly. A painting of a palm tree at sunrise. A blown-up black-and-white photograph of the entrance to Ralph’s Market in Hollywood, covering a whole wall.

The tickle girl brought him a plate with a large ham and cheese on rye with a pickle and a napkin laid beside it and a tall glass of cold milk.

“You must be the guardian angel,” he said.

She winked.

“Just Patty.”

He wolfed down the food and just as he was wiping some mustard from the corner of his mouth with the napkin, Ray Behr sat down beside him. He was holding a can of beer.

“You did good,” he said.

“How?”

“Getting that bitch out of her funk.”

“Edie?” he asked. “Easy.”

“Not for most people.”

“What’s her problem?”

“She thinks she has power. In a little way, she does.”

“Who the hell is she?”

“Edith Ast. She writes a rock column out of San Francisco. The trouble is, it’s syndicated. That’s where the little power comes in.”

“Well, I’m glad if I helped or anything. It was fun. It was quite a party.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it. That means you’ll like working for me. Would a hundred and ten a week be OK to start?”

It was almost twice what he’d made at Adams House, Publishers.

“When do I start?”

“You already did.”

“I did? When?”

Ray Behr gave it his famous sardonic smile.

“When you got the first glass of champagne for Edie Ast.”

Electric.

Electric guitars, electric bass, electric organ, twang and boom and trill of everything turned on, turned up, and the lights, beating and slashing, electric sight and sound, together. Gene began to feel he was electric. Wired. Turned on, plugged in, pulsing.

Parties. His company had them for clients. The record companies had them for Groups they were pushing, singles, albums, new stars; promoters had them before or after concerts, everyone going back and forth to each other’s parties, part of the business, keeping up, keeping in, staying with it, on top of it, being there, seen, the scene.

Ray Behr was always on top of it, magnetic and enigmatic. Some said he’d been a serious musician who had played under Ormandy in Philadelphia and for no apparent reason in the midst of a concert had thrown down his oboe (some said flute) and said fuck it, and had come to L.A. Others believed he had been a hot young executive at Chrysler and one day walked out of a board meeting, said fuck it, and had come to L.A. Of course he had all the women he wanted, they couldn’t resist the sardonic smile, but some said he’d never got over his first wife, who was either, depending on whom you heard it from, a dazzling product of Scandinavian royalty (she slipped away to elope by crossing some fjord in a boat with muffled oars) or an octoroon beauty descended from Sieur de Bienville, founder of the city of New Orleans. Whatever the case, it did not prevent successive waves of other women from trying to make him forget.

“Chicken wings!”

Ray Behr stopped his pacing to exclaim this latest stroke of genius.

Mouths hung open and heads shook in sheer wonder, breath sucked in and let out in low whistles of admiration.

Ray Behr had put his foot down an hour before saying how sick he was of these same cocktail weenies and rubbery shrimp and half-dollar-size slices of bread with some anonymous gunk spread over them and crummy crackers that you stuck in some sort of goo that looked and tasted like paste—no! The end of that. People were sick of it. Give em something new for Godsake. Original. Something to munch on and drink with that hadn’t been used before just because everyone was stuck in the same old rut.

Starkie had moved his great bulk forward from his Buddha squat and said, “Cracker Jack! Boxes of Cracker Jack. You’d get a prize to take home. Novelty item.”

Ray Behr wrinkled his nose, showing how wrong it was.

“Sweets?” he asked.

That’s all he had to say. Everyone knew the idea was a bummer.

Starkie grunted, his head falling back on his chest in renewed contemplation.

Joints had been passed, a few uppers taken, Wild Turkey was sipped, and still for more than an hour Ray Behr had paced in silence, his associates mute, except for one desperate cry of “Sardines?” which he didn’t even acknowledge. And then, out of nowhere, just like that, he had pulled the answer right out of the air.

Chicken wings .

Of course.

And then he went himself one better, he took the basic idea and put the finishing touch on it, the one thing that would make it even more of a hit.

They wouldn’t just be any old chicken wings, they would be Colonel Sanders Chicken wings! And they would be served in the regular Colonel Sanders cardboard chicken buckets! It was too much. It was perfect. Camp. Hip. And yet functional. Couldn’t you just picture the goddam cardboard chicken buckets sitting around on cocktail tables at this posh estate in Beverly Hills?

Hell, it was art.

It was Gene’s job to arrange for the procurement and delivery of chicken wings for two hundred people, an assignment he handled with the efficiency and dispatch that Ray Behr was coming to expect from him.

“No sweat,” Gene had said when the chicken-wing assignment was delegated to him, even though he realized at once that part of the tricky logistics of the thing involved accurately estimating how many chicken wings a guest would be likely to consume at a cocktail party for a rock group.

“No sweat,” was what he always said. He had learned to handle the company car, a hearse painted red white and blue by one of the hip young Los Angeles artists. He made pickups and deliveries: food, liquor, record albums, promo materials, dope, bodies. Not dead. Just out of it. Smashed. Fried. Booze or dope or uppers or downers or combinations thereof or all of the above. He was adept at administering the tickle in the throat, the steaming black coffee, the random bandage, and if necessary, the deposit of the body at Emergency. But, of course, he tried to avoid that. He kept a first aid kit in the glove compartment.

He had to be up, not only in his head, but at all hours, till dawn off and on, and Starkie got tired of doling out his own Ritalin pills to Gene and gave him the name of a nearby Dr. Feelgood who serviced many in the music industry.

“You don’t have to make up any symptoms or shit,” Starkie explained, “just tell him what makes you feel good.”

“Dexamyl,” Gene said.

He said that because he and Lou used to take it when they had to stay up late or get up out of some downer and it hadn’t made him near as nervous as this Ritalin that Starkie had.

“No!” the doctor shouted.

Had he got the right doctor?

This one was pasty-faced with patches of black left from careless shaving. He had black hair slicked back over a shiny dome. He sure as hell looked the part. Later Gene learned this doctor offered free prescriptions to selected women in return for the opportunity to suck their tits. There were rarely any takers.

Right now he was giving Gene a lecture on the evils of Dexamyl and how the U.S. Government had just issued a warning to doctors that this dangerous substance was being abused and should henceforth only be prescribed to hyperactive children and adults who suffered from some disease Gene never heard of that was some kind of sleeping sickness.