Of course as each letter became more tormented, it occurred to me to write and put him out of his misery. I felt guiltier and guiltier reading them … I mean, I had no excuses after the first one. After the first one it was pretty obvious the letters weren’t for me. But there was no return address and I guess it never occurred to him they might-be going to the wrong person, and soon it became pretty obvious to me he’s what I’ve always called a point-misser. Everyone misses the point now and then but some people are just born missing the point. It never occurred to him there might be any other possible reason his labial jewel wasn’t answering. His desire was so grand and uncompromising he would rather assume she was rejecting him than that something as banal as the incompetence of the postal service could be at fault. Some part of him wanted to judge her monstrously, some part of him wanted to be a martyr for cunnilingus instead of a prisoner of chance.
There was something else about the letters, something clandestine, subterranean: The lake, he finally wrote in one, is coming for me, and the second I read it, I saw him somewhere out there in the city barricaded away, building an ark maybe. In China they would have found me by now. I don’t know how long it was, at least fifteen or twenty letters, before I finally noticed they weren’t actually addressed to PSW47/V180, but VI70.
When I saw this, I grabbed up Kirk — at the moment busy trying to demolish my carefully constructed jigsaw of little pieces of the correspondent’s photo attached to the wall — and ran up the stairs to the Hamblin rooftop, where a panoramic view of the lake stretches all the way from Hollywood in the east to the San Vicente Bridge in the west. There out in the water, about a thousand yards away on a more or less straight line from us to the center of the lake, rose an old abandoned apartment building like my own … and I knew right away it was PSW47/V170 where she lived, waiting for his letters to come floating up to her window in bottles, maybe. It was dusk, light failing at our backs, and only after Kirk and I stood there a while watching the black of the water meet the black of the hills beyond, darkness slowly swallowing up VI70 in the distance, did a light flicker in one of its faraway windows, clear as could be since every other window was dark. And just like I knew that was her address, when that light appeared I knew it was her, and she was still out there, waiting for him.
~ ~ ~
When I can leave Kirk with Valerie here in the hotel a few hours, I cobble together what jobs I can, including the one with Doc and the one for the writer down the hall….
… desperate over-the-hill novelist who checked in for a few days in order to finish this screenplay he saw as his last best chance to salvage a career … he wound up staying a week and then two and then a month and now he’s been here almost a year. The screenplay never gets finished and meanwhile his wife and daughter who live on the other side of the city come see him like relatives visiting an inmate. The little girl is about Kirk’s age, long gold hair, and sometimes when the reunion is over and there’s this tearful clutching between the writer and his wife, the little girl stands in the hallway staring at Kirk and he stares back at her. Two little kids, little boy and little girl, just stand there staring at each other wordlessly, they don’t play, they don’t fight. During these times I stay as inconspicuous as possible because I don’t want Mrs. Over-the-Hill-Novelist to get the wrong idea. “I miss my little girl,” he whispers later. Since it would seem he can check out of the hotel anytime he wants and go home, it’s hard to figure.
Day after day, night after night, he sits in his room gazing morosely at his blank computer screen drinking tequila and watching old movies stacked up in the corner. He stares out his window at the growing lake and talks about missing his little girl, and he never answers except to a secret knock, while bellmen slip notes under his door wondering when he’s going to check out. I’ve read some of his script and maybe I’m wrong but I’ve begun thinking the main character, a chick punk singer, sounds a little like me. It isn’t the best movie but I’m certain there have been worse. I think his big problem is he hasn’t the slightest idea how to write women characters, but he looks completely baffled when you try and tell him this. “What do you mean?” he says.
“What do I mean? I mean every female character is a stripper or porn star or sex slave.”
He’s thunderstruck. “Are you sure?”
“Yes I’m sure.”
He ponders this a while more. “What about Tara Spectaculara?”
“Tara Spectaculara? The amazonian motorcycle mistress with the huge tits? The one in the black leather jacket that’s … how did you put it?”—flipping through the script—“…‘unzipped so far it threatens the space-time continuum’?”
“Uh,” he’s thinking furiously, “well, these characters,” he finally clears his throat, “are just, uh, you know … they’re just the … forbidden iconography of the male psyche….”
“Oh, well then. In that case. ‘Forbidden iconography of the male psyche,’ that’s OK then. Stupid me, I thought this Tara was just your basic male wangle.”
“Male what?”
“Wangle.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Yes you do.” Talk about a point-misser! This guy is a serial point-misser. Anyway he got this idea of passing me off as the writer of the script, that’s the way his mind works, and an even better example of how his mind works is he’s saddled me with the nom de plume “Lulu Blu,” who apparently was some kind of woman pornographer back in the Eighties — which you would think kind of proves my whole argument. He’s convinced Hollywood isn’t going to have any interest in failed literary-type novelists, better if a script filled with male wangies about motorcycle mistresses and rocker babes, submitted to guy-studio-execs with their own male-wangies, is written by a twenty-two-year-oldpunkette who would be expected to have special credibility on the subject of motorcycle mistresses and rocker babes since undoubtedly I live with a harem of them and we all have sex together all the time, which of course is the biggest male wangie of all. So for a while one of my jobs has been to run around town sitting sullenly in Century City offices listening to why I’m being turned down — which is to say why he’s being turned down — and I guess I have to admit on some level I must find this guy just pathetic enough to feel bad for him, since I keep doing it even though it’s obviously never going to pay me anything, my five percent of the script contingent on someone actually buying it….
I don’t know much about the movie business but it seems obvious to me they have a problem. “Looks like you have a problem,” I mumble to this one studio guy in his office one afternoon with the lake sloshing through the doorway. Throughout the whole floor they’ve set up little footbridges from this desk to that, and after a while the ultimate status power-move by a ruthless studio boss isn’t the lunchtime blowjob by the personal assistant of either gender but rather commanding an associate producer to swim to his suite on the double rather than walk the little planks now reserved for the elite of a Hollywood that no longer exists. “This?” the executive sneers, “this isn’t a problem. Are you kidding? Sound—now that was a problem. Cinemascope. Television. We survived all that,” this guy, maybe five years older than I tops, shakes his finger at me, “long before your time. What’s this? A little fucking water,” contemptuously waving his hand at the tide lapping at the ankles of the anxious secretary in the corner.