Dictating precisely how our meat reached the table may have been one of the few things he could control that season at Hollywood Park. EZ’s movies made lots of money, he was driven around L.A. in a super-long, handmade maroon-and-black Brewster with a raked heart-shaped grill, and his wife, whatever she did on the side, was regularly cited by Photoplay as one of America’s ten most-beautiful women. But for months EZ had not saddled a winner. Now, sitting with his trainer, Ozzie Hirsch, who had trained the best horseflesh in the West, with winners in the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes and four times horses in the money in the Kentucky Derby, Shelupsky devoured his steak with a feverish intensity and with his eyes seemed about to devour Hirsch. This was as pleasant to watch as a tiger toying with a lamb, but compelling.
“Mr. Shelupsky,” the trainer said now, fiddling nervously with his trout. He was being treated like a nigger, and he didn’t like it, especially with a real specimen of that race sitting as an equal opposite. “Things goes in waves.”
“Tell me more stories, Oz. How much money I pay you?”
“It’s not the money.” Hirsch said. “It’s just the way it is. If you paid me double and you spent ten times as much for stock we could still be this way. You only got to wait it out.”
Shelupsky polished off his steak, smeared the white napkin, still folded on the table, across his mouth, leaving it stained pink from blood, picked up the gold-plated Zeiss field glasses Nora had given him for his birthday, and watched a chestnut mare cross the finish line, then another horse, then two more, neck and neck, then a fourth, then a fifth, then… his, a smallish gray with four white socks and, were he human, what could only be called an expression of bottomless apathy. “The steak I just ate could beat this nag you got me, Ozzie. If you was a writer you wouldn’t be on the lot. But I have faith in you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Shelupsky.”
“Only not forever.”
When Oz Hirsch left the table, his fish lying there on the black-and-red Hollywood Park plate, explored but not eaten, EZ turned his attention to me: same tiger, fresh lamb. “You know what I pay him?”
“No, EZ, I don’t.”
“Good you don’t. But you know what I pay you. I got something to see for that?”
“Fritz and I are working on it.”
“Is there a writer in this city ever got paid for six weeks that he didn’t turn in a script on the last day?”
I allowed myself the luxury of a shrug. If this were all that was bothering EZ Shelupsky, I could stand it. “EZ, this isn’t exactly Colored Cowpokes of Colorado.”
“I hope not. Larry, how can I say this delicately?”
“Are you going to try?”
“No,” EZ said. “Why the fuck should I? I’m paying you, not the other way around. It’s like this: the Negro audience, I love them with all my heart and also my wallet, but they’re a simple audience. They want a laugh, they want a song, a little tap-dancing, a hero, a girl-hero, and happily ever after. The Jewish audience, they have a certain attitude. When the people of the book go to the movies, you can’t buy them off with chorus girls and Cab Calloway. Explain me one thing I don’t understand.”
I sliced what was left of my filet into slivers, each one oozing red. EZ’s own plate was wiped clean. He had used a roll to mop up the pool of blood. Maybe he really was a tiger. “If I can.”
“Why is it I’m making a movie about the American Jews, and for the American Jews, and who do I have writing it but a colored and a kraut? Am I crazy or what? Give me one reason I shouldn’t pay you off right now, you and Fritz von whatever together, and give the whole thing over to a real Jew, or two or three. For what I’m paying you, I could get a minion.”
“You know why, EZ,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “First off, you trust me, both to do top-class work, on time and ready to shoot, and because you know I won’t talk to The Hollywood Reporter or Variety and give your competitors a chance to catch up.”
“Maybe you should be a producer, Larry. But tell me the truth, man to man. Do you really know enough about being a Jew? Last time I looked, you’re a colored — granted a Harvard colored. And that Fritz, I never saw a Jew like that in my life. Every other word comes out of his mouth, it’s ancient Greek. How can two guys like you carry this thing off? Be honest with me, Larry. We’re almost like friends. Pretend you’re not in the movie business — tell the truth.”
“You know, EZ, that the NAACP was founded by Jews?”
“And still bankrolled.”
“And Jews are in the forefront in the colored man’s struggle for equal rights?”
“So?”
“And there isn’t a Negro church in America that doesn’t sing hymns right out of Jewish history, right out of the Old Testament. Let My People Go. Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho. We Is Comin’, Father Abraham. And look at you, a Jew, and you’re running one of the biggest colored businesses in the world. Jews and Negroes, we have quite a bit in common. Hell, EZ, I wouldn’t be surprised if your next wife will be just a little on the dark side.”
Perhaps I’d gone too far. EZ Shelupsky’s face went ashen, and he averted his eyes as though I knew something I shouldn’t — which I did, but which he could not possibly know, because if he did he would have to know how I had come by the information, and that would not be pleasant. After a while the studio head seemed to regain his composure. He feigned a smile, looked directly at me, and said, “Equal but separate, that’s the way it should be, Larry. I don’t think intermarriage is a good thing. People should stay with their own.”
“You married a gentile.”
“A white gentile, Larry, and a wonderful, loving woman.”
I’d heard from my dyke friends just how wonderful. “I’m sure she is.”
“And unlike many people in California, I’m not looking to keep changing partners. I’ll leave that to the wildcats and the homos who can’t settle down.”
“I know homos who have.”
“Can’t last, Larry. You know that. The homo is driven by sex. One partner can’t cut the ketchup. And the wildcats, I think they just learned from the homos. I don’t mean to offend. But it’s the truth.”
There was little to say to that. EZ Shelupsky, up to this moment an imperial monster — all powerful, all knowing, all consuming — had revealed a part of himself whose sadness and fear would probably haunt him to his grave. I had long before come to terms with what I was, but EZ Shelupsky would deny in his soul what his heart required and thus compromised would struggle within himself, taking the pleasure he demanded and feeling shame, then not taking that pleasure and feeling within himself the cold emptiness of a life unlived, a solitude unrelieved.
For a long while we sat in silence in the red-and-black wicker easychairs in the clubhouse shade while a new set of horses was guided into the starting gate, a shot was fired, and the track announcer described the fluid chaos that before our eyes formed itself into an elongated arrowhead, at whose tip a horse and rider came flying across our field of view, followed by a second, a third, then a pack, then stragglers, then nothing but dust.
“That fourth horse,” EZ said, putting down his field glasses. “That’s mine. Every nag I got these days finishes out of the money. You know what? I don’t feel sad for myself, certainly not for that Hirsch who gets paid plenty to give me losers, but for the poor horses. A horse runs to win, just like us, Larry. And if we don’t win, God help us, we’re losers.”
Once again, I knew more than I could let on. “Not to worry, EZ. You’ll have a winner soon.”