Dan Wakefield - Home Free

One of the band, his shirt and velvet jacket still on him, his velvet pants tangled down around the ankle-high black buckle boots on his feet, his white body writhing on the bed his tongue licking up at the black fur of Sue the girl from Xanadu her leather skirt pulled up around her waist as she rides up and down on his mouth while his cock high and swollen is leaping and turning to the lick of the small pink tongue of the other one her mouth goes down as the spastic spurt begins so she swallows some and some goes over her cheeks her long gold hair falling over his hips he arches with a scream and she looks up, licking some of it off her pink delicate lips, smiling, looks at Gene, says in her high little girl lilt:

“We were going to do you later.”

Insides coming out, spilling on his shoes, the blue and white Mexican tiles of the veranda, spoiled, lumpy pink, stinking, sinking, the sea, stop it, go, run, get to the room where the sea can’t get you she can’t get you nothing can get you again ever never no

White.

Ceiling. Walls. Room.

Faces.

Swimming.

Blink, they stop.

Barnes.

Belle.

Barnes is scared.

Belle starts talking.

“People shouldn’t try to commit suicide. They should read Trollope. Especially the Palliser novels. How can you go around trying to commit suicide when you haven’t even read the Palliser novels? You probably read these disgusting modern novels that don’t have any stories in them, and words put in queer places all over the page and rotten things like that.”

“No,” he said, a feeble croak.

“Then you go to these horrible modern movies, that’s what you do. You go to see Bergman and those foreign people and these modern Hollywood jerk directors who don’t have any plots and no wonder you get depressed and want to kill yourself. And on top of it all listening to that disgusting rock noise, it’s enough to make anyone deranged.”

Belle didn’t put any blame on Laura or the acid because she didn’t know about Laura and as for the acid she enjoyed doing some from time to time and didn’t like to believe those lurid scare stories about the dangerous kind of bad trips people could have. She believed her bedside lecture, and also blamed the rotten influence of Ray Behr and blamed herself for getting Gene mixed up with him and his depraved associates. She was determined now to aid in Gene’s rehabilitation.

That was fine with Gene. He figured he’d need all the help he could get.

His hand was bandaged. Two fingers broken. His body was cut, scratched, and burned in a couple of places. Had someone beaten and tortured him? Yes. Himself. How?

The Sea. The Blue Sea. The seal that came out of it. He had always been fond of seals, had loved to watch them slip through the water at the Aquarium in Boston. But back in the room that night at the Marmont when the Sea receded it let out the seal, it was there with one blink, a black, slimy, snarling beast with blood coming out of its mouth. Coming at him. He hit, hit it, hit it. Then it stopped coming at him and he was it. The seal. A black slimy thing, ugly and sick. He tried to scratch the slime off himself, then tried to burn it off with matches. Then he got the pills, tried to kill it with the pills, poison it to death. Almost did. Barnes came early to work on his script and found him.

Laura. That last night of her bright in his mind still made him nauseous. But that one would fade, in time the colors would dim and the shapes would come unfocused. The one that freaked him was the seal, the blood-fanged ghoul from the great blue acid sea. That was no mental snapshot fixed in place, that was a real monster that had already made another flash appearance in his head. He didn’t know how he’d kill it off without getting himself in the process. Maybe he’d learn, maybe it would leave if he got himself together, started living better.

He spent another night in the hospital and after a little talk with a tired shrink, he was released.

’Twas the night before Christmas.

God knew what all was stirring through the Marmont.

Not Gene.

He read a MacDonald, sipped a beer, slept.

Christmas at the Marmont. Telephone operator nipping from a guest’s gift bottle of holiday cheer. Rock stars dripping in the pool, assortment of groupies in brief bikinis draped around it, an actor from England with wife, kids, nanny, stretched on a lounge chair reading the Trades. No Santa Claus here—too fat to get in. Too old. Wrong clothes.

Gene was glad Belle picked him up to go with her and Barnes to her parents’ house for dinner at noon. Scrambled eggs with chorizo, the sweet Mexican sausage, champagne Barnes brought, then gourmet gumbo, made and served by Belle’s mother, most gracious welcomer Gene had ever been welcomed by in any new place. She and Belle’s father took polite puffs off the joint that was passed, wanting to make Belle and friends feel at home, then, in the somnolence ensuing, Mother said, “Well, shall we all just lie around aimlessly awhile?” and they did, till sometime later Belle took Barnes and Gene on a walk to see how beautiful it was and it was, the curving streets and lanes, silence, the whiteness of houses instead of snow, just as good, and the soft warmth of the winter sun, in Hollywood, not the imaginary place of movies but the one where people lived.

Walking back Gene feared that Barnes would blow the whole peaceful scene when he said, “Belle, why can’t you be more like your mother?”

Gene braced himself for an onslaught, but Belle just sighed and said, “Why can’t everyone?”

Her mother gave Gene a jar of preserves that he didn’t want to eat but preserve, like the day, the calm and soft of it, quiet relief from the jittery electric life he’d been into, the jangle and the din.

God rest us merry gentlemen.

The first step in Belle’s plan to cheer up Gene and give him a better outlook on life was to show him her artwork.

She drove him out to her studio in Venice in the beat-up red Triumph given to her by a former boyfriend who was an actor. When he got his first big part he bought an XKE and took up with a woman whom Belle described as “one of those starlet hussies.” At any rate he gave his old Triumph to Belle “sort of as a going-away present,” she said.

Belle propelled the car in a series of fits and starts, bucking and snorting, squealing and backfiring. She refused to drive on the freeways, for which Gene was thankful. She knew her beloved native city by heart and darted through all kinds of shortcut alleys and plunged along avenues, pointing out little-known stores or shops or restaurants that had earned her favor, explaining that avoiding freeways was not only safer but more educational, since you got to see more of the actual city. When Barnes that first day had spoken of Belle’s “loyalty” to Los Angeles, Gene could not have imagined its depth and ferocity, not yet having met Belle. When Barnes warned Gene about calling L.A. “plastic” in Belle’s presence, he hadn’t mentioned that Belle had lost all patience with people who mouthed that cliché, and instead of trying to “reason” with them anymore she simply kicked them in the shins. Hard.

Belle’s studio was in a large sort of loft above a garage on a funky street four blocks back of the beach. It was rented by a hot young sculptor named Donley who had given Belle the use of an ample-sized corner for her own work. She had partitioned off her section with bookcases she had painted bright colors, to make it more her own. The main space of course, was given over to Donley, who worked exclusively in automobile tires.

He piled them on top of one another, he cut them in halves and quarters, he tied them with ropes, he hung them from ceilings with chains, he painted them in vivid Day-Glo colors or covered them with velvet or leather or silk. He was regarded as one of the bright young men of the L.A. art scene, and had one-man shows about twice a year at the very chic galleries. Rich people bought his tires and hung them in their living rooms in Beverly Hills. Then they weren’t tires anymore, they were “Donleys.” That, Belle-explained, was how the art world worked.