Bruce Wagner - Memorial

At the end of the evening, Lew asked Joan if she wanted to visit the site.

NIP had been transferred to West LA for surgery. (The lawyer handling Ray’s case was handling the Friar’s too.) The old man was still in the CCU and Big Gulp said she was going to raise holy hell the minute she got a bill for a single thing, and that meant either Ray’s or the dog’s medical care.

So far, so good.

Ray had his own DVD in there. Big Gulp brought him ribald American comedies, old Twilight Zone s, and her collection of Nip/Tucks. There was a Forensic Files marathon in progress on Court TV but the facility didn’t have the cable thing together so he defaulted to his Rod Serling favorites.

A few of the classic half-hours actually took place in hospitals and that tickled him. One was about a woman who had a recurring dream each night of sleepwalking past the nurses’ station to the elevator. She always went straight down to the morgue. In the basement, somebody with a joker’s smile appeared at the steel doors and said, “Room for one more.” Big Gulp pretended the shows were silly but Ray could see they scared the bejesus out of her. Another episode, a famous one, was about a disfigured gal going one more round with the plastic surgeons. No one ever said what was wrong with her, just that she was born looking a certain way. What intrigued Ray was how the whole thing took place sometime in the future, where being ugly was an offense punishable by excommunication and forced segregation. He wasn’t a sci-fi buff but the old man liked how artfully it was shot: you never saw anyone’s face, neither the woman’s nor her doctors’. Damn innovative. At the end, they reveal that the surgery has completely failed, but when they finally unbandage the gal’s face you can see she’s a real beauty — it’s the doctors who are monsters. That one always sent Big Gulp running for the door with a shudder. (He couldn’t quite figure her; those Nip/Tuck shows weren’t a walk in the park in the gore department.) The funny thing was that Ray remembered watching that episode with his ex-wife, and how Marj had burst into tears; at 1st he thought she was faking. (When he saw the crying was for real, he thought it terribly sweet.) Ghulpa was a little tougher. The only thing that could make her yelp like that would be the sight of one of those Bengal tigers she was always going on about.

Another of Ray’s favorites starred a very young Robert Redford. An elderly woman’s apartment building was slated for demolition. She was the last tenant left but refused to move. Redford played a cop who gets shot nearby and is asking for help. At 1st, she stands at the door, paranoid, thinking he’s “Mr Death.” But Redford is injured, and so fresh-faced — Jesus, he must have been in his early 20s — that she finally lets him in. A bond develops. He’s the 1st person who really listens to her, and the 1st company she’s had in maybe years.

They tried to revive The Twilight Zone a few times since the Golden Age but never got it right. Maybe it was something about being filmed in black and white or the extinct theatrical craft of actors like Agnes Moorehead and Burgess Meredith. The old man thought the writing was superb. Rod Serling was one of those special characters — Ray loved that he smoked on camera, just like Ed Murrow, and even Johnny Carson — a real creator of mood and dialogue. That era, Playhouse 90 and Paddy Chayevsky and those General Electric shows, was gone forever. He tried watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and Deadwood but they left him cold. Either the comedy couldn’t hold a candle to Skelton, Burns, and Berle, or the “Western”’s language was so vulgar he forbade the sometimes curious Big Gulp to tune in. (Though he did enjoy Rescue Me. ) Even the big network commercials were obscene. One of them showed a handsome older couple dancing. It said “Second Marriage”—and turned out to be an ad for adult diapers. She could watch that crap with the cousins. Not in his house.

He only kept the cable for his Cold Case File s.

SOMEONE called from the LA Times —the “My Favorite Weekend” feature.

Each Thursday showcased a half-celebrity nitwit expounding on how they typically wiled away their Friday through Sunday. The lady on the phone said they wanted to do something different, and focus on an Industry person who was “below the line,” kind of like those promos for the Times in movie theaters that show animators or key grips or bestboys in their habitats. She’d been given Chester’s name by a location manager of a Hyundai commercial he had scouted, and especially sparked to the idea that Chess was a guy who made his living knowing Los Angeles inside and out. He certainly knew where the Lautners, Lloyd Wrights, and Googie coffeeshops were buried. She wanted to email some questions and follow up with a phone interview.

Fine with me. Fine and dandy.

The funny thing is he’d just been goofing on “My Favorite Weekend” with Maurie. He fished it out of the Herlihy Archives: the days-old column spotlit Fran Drescher, the sinus-challenged former TV star who had suffered through a home-invasion rape and uterine cancer. Chess wondered if they were related, in a cause and effect kind of way.

The headline read NOW JUST FRIDAY NIGHTS ARE FEVERED.

Some of my most fun times are when I go out with a posse of my girlfriends and paint the town rouge…. Alicia Keys was fabulous. We got to go backstage and meet her, and we saw Tom Cruise too, and pretty soon the people in his posse were introducing themselves to the people in our posse — it was so much fun.

“I want my Mapo! I want my rape-o!” said Maurie, over the phone.

“That’s harsh,” said Chess, with a laugh.

“Yeah, well, life’s a bitch and then you get posse-fucked.” Then he sang, “Hold me closer, tiny cancer.”

Maurie said they should get together and talk about his A&E “dillio.” He wanted to know if any progress had been made with locations. Chess said he was still looking but Queen of Angels seemed promising. Then Maurie mentioned an empty clinic in Alhambra where a friend just shot a Fiery Furnaces video. Chess scribbled down a phone number and said he’d check it out. They made plans to have dinner at Chameau, a Moroccan dive on Fairfax that had migrated from Silver Lake. Maurie’s girlfriend, Laxmi, would join them. Chess really had a hard-on for her. He was a sucker for strawberry-blond Manson creepy-crawlers — freckle fields and tiny tits, intrepid, sociopathic girls-next-door with Sweet ’N Low hankerings for all things mystical.

Roll-up for the mystery tour—

ON the way to the restaurant, Chess wondered if he should ask Ma for money. She must be doing all right. He’d only talked to her once since the funeral. That was dumb. Might be awkward — though she’d probably be happy to hear from him. Of course she would. Maybe he’d just put in a call without asking for bread, tough it out awhile longer, get the check from the A&E gig, then rock on over to Beverlywood. That would probably be better form. How much should he hit her up for? The most he ever got in one lump was 5 grand. (Asking Joan would be out of the question.) She never pressed but he was always careful to pay off debts to Marj. He wanted her to know he was good for it in case he ever got in a really tight spot, that he wasn’t a deadbeat. Maurie always said it was best to appear prosperous when asking for hand-outs (even a guy like not-too-long-

ago-beleaguered Trump sued some journalist who wrote a book saying he was only worth a couple hundred mill) and maybe Chess would do a little posturing before he popped the question. Cash out A&E and buy a new suit. Rent a Jag or an Escalade for a few hundy, just for the day, then drive on by. Tell Mom he was in the middle of producing his old friend Maurie Levin’s new script and needed something to tide him over between bank drafts. Tell her there was some temporary international monetary snafu, it was a Canadian/UK/German coproduction and the Krauts were being crabby, whatever. The Canucks were being canny. The Brits were being Britney. He’d ask Mom to dinner at Ruth’s Chris or Mastro’s in Beverly Hills. Spago, wherever. Or maybe they’d go Indian; she was a freak for India, from when they were kids.