“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind talking to him, he has time.”
“You want him to do a movie?”
“We’re thinking about it.”
“Good luck.” Nicki stubbed out her cigarette before looking up at him again. “We’re gonna open tonight, play around with the Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man.’ What do you think?”
With that innocent straight face, putting him on.
It took Chili four seconds to find the album cover and the title in his mind from twenty years ago, the concert recorded live at the Garden and Tommy playing the record over and over, Tommy at the time stoned on the Stones.
Chili said, straight-faced back to her, “From Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, huh? That one?”
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It got Nicki smiling at him, looking good, those nice blue eyes shining. She said, “You’re a cool guy, Chil, without even trying.”
They’d start a number, race into it and stop and Nicki would play part of it over on her bull’s-eye guitar, slower, smoother, and then one of the guitar players would pick it up, imitating, give a nod and the drummer would kick them off again. They might be good—Chili couldn’t tell. Hearing a line of music by itself, when Nicki showed them how, it sounded okay, but all of them playing together came out as noise and was irritating.
Thinking of that album cover again, he seemed to recall a guy in an Uncle Sam hat jumping up in the air with a guitar in each hand. He liked the Rolling Stones then, back in the hippie days, all the flakes running around making peace signs. It made him think of the time they grabbed this hippie, dragged him into Tommy Carlo’s cousin’s barbershop and zipped all his fuckin hair off with the clippers. He thought of that and started thinking of Ray Bones again and Leo the drycleaner, his calling Leo dumb for leaving three hundred grand in a hotel-room closet, and where was it now? Under his bed at the Sunset Marquis. He’d check, make sure Leo and Annette had taken off, just to be on the safe side. Later tonight he’d call Fay, tell her to look for three hundred big ones coming by Express Mail. Put it in one of those containers they gave you at the post office. He’d hang on to the extra ten grand. Maybe pay off Ray Bones, get that out of the way, or maybe not. But the three hundred, basically, was Fay’s. Let her do whatever she wanted with it. Two to one she’d tell a friend of hers about it and pretty soon the suits would come by, knock on the door, flash their I.D.’s . . .
He wondered what would’ve happened if he’d brought Fay with him to Vegas . . .
And realized he was thinking of it as a movie again, the way he had told it to Harry and Karen, but seeing new possibilities, getting the woman, Fay, into the story more, looking at it the same way he had looked at Lovejoy and saw what was needed. Fay comes to L.A. with him . . .
Except it wouldn’t be him, it would be an actor, Jesus, like Robert De Niro playing the shylock. And for Fay . . .
Karen. Why not? Karen even had kind of a you-all accent, though it wasn’t as downhome as the way Fay talked. Okay, now, by the time they get to L.A. they realize they’re hot for each other and aren’t even sure they want to find her husband, Leo, except he’s got all that fuckin dough. Do they want it? They know somebody who does, Ray Bones, he’s coming after them and he’ll kill for that money.
It didn’t sound too bad.
You have Leo pulling the scam on the airline in the opening . . .
Or, no, you start with the shylock and Fay waiting for Leo to come home from the track, while actually he’s out at the airport getting smashed and the jet takes off without him and goes down in the swamp, blows up.
So you have the shylock, basically a good guy, a former shylock, played by Bobby De Niro. You have Karen Flores making her successful comeback as Fay . . . She wouldn’t have a sweaty job, she could be something else, an entertainer, a singer. You have Leo . . . You wouldn’t have Harry in it or the limo guys—it wasn’t a movie about making a movie—but
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you’d have Ray Bones in it. Leo would be a tough one to cast. Get an actor who could play a good sleazeball . . . It took Chili a moment to realize the room was quiet. Nicki and her guys were looking this way, but not at him. He looked over . . .
And saw Michael Weir.
It was, it was Michael Weir crossing the room from the stairs, giving Nicki a wave, the other hand in his pants pocket, baggy gray pants too long for him. Chili saw that as part of the whole picture, his first look at Michael Weir in person, white Reeboks too. But what caught and held his attention was Michael Weir’s jacket. It was like the one left at Vesuvio’s twelve years ago, that worn-out World War Two flight jacket nobody wanted. It was exactly like it. On a guy that made seven million bucks a movie.
Now Michael Weir had his hand raised to the band. Chili heard him say, “Hey, guys,” and it was his voice, Chili recognized it from movies. Michael Weir was good at accents, but you could still tell his voice, kind of nasal. The cockrockers gave him a nod, not too impressed, these young dropouts with their hair and their guitars. Now it looked like Michael was joking around with them, doing the moonwalk and pretending he was strumming a guitar. He was good, but the guys still didn’t seem impressed. Michael turned to Nicki and right away she grabbed his arm and Chili saw them coming this way, Nicki doing the talking, Michael Weir looking up and then Nicki looking up as she said, “Chil? I’d like you to meet Michael.”
Chili got to his feet, ready to shake hands with a superstar. What surprised him now was how short the guy was in real life.
18 
It took Chili a couple of minutes to figure Michael Weir out. He wanted people to think he was a regular guy, but was too used to being who he was to pull it off.
The two of them sitting at the table now, Chili asked him if he wanted a drink. Michael, watching Nicki and her band through the archway, said yeah, that sounded like a good idea. Chili asked him what he wanted. Michael said oh, anything. Did he want Scotch, bourbon, a beer? Michael said oh, and stopped and said no, he’d like a Perrier. Still watching Nicki and the band. They hadn’t started to play. Chili looked over at the bar, not open yet, thinking he’d have to go all the way upstairs to get the movie star his soda water. Right then Michael said, “They’re a tough audience.”
Chili noticed the movie star’s expression, eyebrows raised, like he’d just heard some bad news but was more surprised than hurt.
“My Michael Jackson went right by them.”
Oh—meaning his moonwalk routine. Chili said, “It looked good to me.” It did.
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“To do it right you put on a touch of eye makeup, white socks, the glove . . . I was a little off on the voice too, the baby-doll whisper?”
Chili said, “I couldn’t hear that part.”
“But I can understand it, guys like that, their attitude. It has to do with territorial imperative.”
Chili said, “That must be it,” feeling more at ease with the movie star, knowing a bullshitter when he met one. It didn’t mean the guy wasn’t good.
“I’m not certain why,” Michael said, “but it reminds me of the one, the third-rate actor doing Hamlet?” Michael smiling with his eyes now. “He’s so bad that before long the audience becomes vocally abusive, yelling at him to get off the stage. They keep it up until the actor, finally, unable to take any more, stops the soliloquy and says to the audience, ‘Hey, what’re you blaming me for? I didn’t write this shit.’ ”