Dan Wakefield - Home Free

“Isn’t that show biz?” Uncle Phil asked.

Gene had to admit he wouldn’t know what else to call it.

Sometimes outsiders dropped in. Not outsiders in the head sense, but like they lived somewhere else. Not the Marina of course, but Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Laurel Canyon. One time Belle came, with her new boyfriend. His name was Jack. He was a comic, and had just done a gig in Honolulu. His agent had promised him a bit in a new movie. Belle had told him not to believe in Hollywood.

“Do you ever see that Barnes person?” Belle asked Gene.

“No,” Gene said, figuring that was easiest.

“Well, I guess he can’t help the way he is,” she said. “But I hope he burns in hell.”

The comic gave Gene a big slapstick sort of wink.

Gene nodded. He sent his love to Belle’s mother.

He didn’t want to leave his people, his world, but he still felt some kind of loyalty to the old one, to the people from before, so when Barnes called and told him Flash was living somewhere in the Valley and wanted them to come to dinner he said OK he would. At least he didn’t have to take a date.

Barnes picked him up and Gene asked what the hell Flash was doing living in the fuckin San Fernando Valley and Barnes didn’t know, Flash had only said he wanted them to come out and see “what a real sweet little setup” he had there.

“Maybe it’s a nightclub,” Gene said. “Maybe he decided the only way he could get any gigs for that group of his was to own the nightclub.”

It wasn’t, though.

The Valley seemed to Gene like the flattest largest most monotonous stretch of civilized earth anywhere on the planet. The straight flat streets went forever, mile upon mile, an endless repetition of houses or businesses, restaurants and bars and TV repair and Laundromats, Jesus, nowhere on earth were there so many Laundromats.

Flash was living in a tiny house much like the countless other tiny houses extending to infinity on either side of his and across from his. Flash didn’t own this particular tiny house, nor did the woman whom he lived in it with. She just rented.

Her name was Mildred.

She was a manicurist and Flash had met her when she did his nails at a hair-styling salon in Hollywood. After the gig in Oxnard, Flash’s Group had broken up, one of the teenyboppers running off with the new Rasputin, the other returning home to Topeka, so Flash had come back down to Hollywood to see what he could get moving. He was down to his last fourteen bucks so he figured to cheer himself and to show how confident he was no matter how dim things looked at the moment he’d go and get himself a manicure. And as long as he was going to do it he’d get him the best. That’s how he met Mildred. She was the best. The manicure cost ten bucks and he gave her a two-buck tip.

“What the hell,” Flash said out of the side of his mouth, “the way I figure, we pass this way but once.”

Flash had then asked Mildred if she knew of any nice quiet sort of homey place a lonely man could have dinner and sort of on an impulse she invited him to her place, and he’d been here ever since.

As he proudly told the tale Mildred looked on beaming, obviously adoring her dashing knight. She had curly dyed red hair, a too-perfect set of dentures, and was probably clipping her way toward fifty.

“Show your friends the new watch I got you, hon,” said Mildred.

Flash held up his wrist, looking rather critically at the watch.

“It’s silver,” he said. “It’s a good timepiece, but gold is my color.”

Mildred said maybe she could exchange it.

They sat around a small kitchen table for their dinner, which was beef Stroganoff. Flash was very proud of that.

“Is this beef Stroganoff,” he asked, “or is this beef Stroganoff?”

“This is beef Stroganoff, all right,” said Barnes.

“Gene?” Flash asked.

He had to say it, too.

“This sure is beef Stroganoff, man,” he said.

Flash was satisfied. Gene remembered him like that, the satisfied look, the napkin tucked into his sport shirt, eating his beef Stroganoff lovingly made by Mildred the manicurist in a little house in the San Fernando Valley.

He remembered Barnes, driving back, in the dark of the car, telling him there was hope again for his movie getting made. There was a chance that they could get Diana Ross to play the Deb, and if they could then the picture was a sure thing.

“A Black Deb?” Gene asked.

“Sure, man. They have em now. Anyway the important thing is to get a star if you want a studio to back you. Doesn’t matter what the hell color they are.”

Because of this new development Barnes had put aside his new mystery set in the Single Shores. If Diana Ross did sign, then he’d have to do a lot of rewriting on that part.

“Well, I wish you luck, man,” Gene said.

Barnes looked dim and shaky.

Gene remembered just how Barnes and Flash had looked that night because he had a feeling he might not ever see them again. Not that any of them was going to die, it was just that Gene felt too uncomfortable now going out of Venice, out of the circle of Uncle Phil and his friends. That’s where he was at ease now, that’s where he felt he belonged, and he wanted to be even more a part of it, get into it deeper.

He and Barnes and Flash had simply gone off in different directions. He thought of them, himself, too, and that reminded him of Robert Frost’s old poem “The Road Not Taken” and he wondered if he and his friends had taken the wrong one to ever be free.

Had they? Had he?

Who knew?

He thought a lot about the peace of mind. The heroin. Everything gentle. No freak shows like with acid, no jumpiness that speed made, not over so quick as coke and more than any of them it brought the famous “peace of mind,” the cessation of interior hostilities, the calming of the mind’s confusion, the easing of the pain.

He knew, of course, the ultimate price. Your life. One way or other. Quick, with an overdose, or slow, as more of it gave you less peace and there was no peace in between but doing whatever you could to get the bread to buy the skag that you needed by then just to get back feeling like you were before you started.

Well.

He understood all that.

He tried not to dwell on it.

He walked a lot. He often woke at dawn with the foghorns and he walked the beach, looking at shells, watching the birds, formations of sandpipers, diving of gulls. He tried to focus on very small things. A single pebble. Turn it in your hand. Examine. Commune. A strand of seaweed. A footprint. His own big toe. Sometimes he’d sit cross-legged in the sand, trying to hold his mind still. Sometimes he kept it blank for a while. Not long though. Sometimes the seal came, always leaving Gene wrung out and shaky from willing him away. Sometimes Lou would appear, bright as life. Sometimes Laura, frozen in the door-framed snapshot that last time he saw her. He didn’t want to think of these things, these people or anything, he just wanted to be there. But they kept creeping in, the thoughts. Lizzie. Mulligan. Chicken wings.

One specially warm day he went out on the pier to feed the sea gulls. He laid out a row of pieces of stale bread on the wooden railing, and stood at the end of it. A gull came down and padded toward the first piece. His yellow beak banged down and got it and then the next, advancing along the row. Suddenly there was an angry caw from above and a beating of wings. Gene ducked but this new gull wasn’t after him, it attacked the one that was eating, gave it a terrible blow just under the eye with its beak, knocking it off the rail. The attack was quick, ferocious, frightening, from out of nowhere. Gene dropped the rest of the bread in the water.