The pressure was off, and I was on my own.
It was funny to be there in the middle of the whole thing (and a world away from Layla), not giving a damn one way or another while the rest of them scurried around as if their lives depended on their next move. The reigning big stars wearing big star masks, not even daring to be themselves when the lights went off and the camera lenses were covered. The studio boys downing Pepto, having anxiety attacks over the tiniest screw-ups. Only the union laborers seemed sane, showing up day after day, knowing checks would be waiting at the end of the week and in years to come regardless of rain or hail, sleet or snow.
Weird to see the whole situation so clearly, so suddenly.
A bunch of kids hung around the set. I did rope tricks for the little ones and told dirty jokes to the older kids. One little girl asked me for a lock of my hair, and I traded her for a box of color crayons.
The crayons were a lot of fun. I had a copy of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon with me, and I highlighted it with the enthusiasm of a demented English major. Passages to do with disability, I shaded green. Disfigurement was blue. Yellow was degradation.
Death was red.
There was a whole lot of red in that book.
The red crayon was nothing but a nub by the time I finished reading. With the last bit of it, I wrote nasty letters to the director of my first picture and the woman who lived in a glass house. I told them that they were both dead and weren’t smart enough to be down.
I sent the Hemingway book to Layla’s favorite starlet, air-mail.
Then I spent a glorious day under the Texas sun, covered in black oil and laughing like a hyena.
The best thing about coming back to California was the smell of the ocean. I sucked it in while I drove to the little starlet’s beach cottage. The Spyder’s lights cut through the evening fog. The salty air burned my lips, which were chapped courtesy of the Texas sun.
The starlet was surprised to see me. At least she pretended to be. We sat in her living room, which was pretty spare except for a hi-fi and a bunch of 45’s. There was only one book in the room, and it lay among the records like a machine gun in a water pistol armory.
“I haven’t had a chance to read it yet,” she said, her eyes searching the sharp stands of beach grass that dotted the dunes outside the room’s large picture window.
The grass leaned with the wind, slicing wisps of fog that haunted the beach. I shot a knowing glance at the fog, and the starlet was smart enough to catch it. “She wants a lot, doesn’t she?” I said, and the girl who liked to ask so many questions nodded, her eyes suddenly wary, as if she could actually see Layla pressing her ear to the window.
I settled into a director’s chair stolen from the studio, letting my voice boom so that it echoed in the sparely furnished house. “Well, the trick is not to give her what she wants. That’s how you keep her interested.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
I nodded. That was the truth. It was easy to say, hard to do. The director had never learned that. Neither had the columnist.
“It’s something you have to learn,” I said. “Or maybe it’s an instinct.”
She didn’t look at me. Her eyes scanned the beach.
My eyes scanned her. Lazy, dark curls. Worn jeans clinging to her ass, her thighs. One thumb nervously tugging a frayed belt-loop, the cleft of her back dotted with gooseflesh. And reflected in the window, against the hard gray beauty of the fog, a cotton shirt knotted between her young breasts, the knot rising and falling with some urgency as her breaths came sharp and fast.
I smiled at the thought of how she’d look on the big screen once she made it out of the background, once the camera drank of her and no one else — each perfect little detail magnified, each imperfection snipped away in the editing room. It was easy to see why Layla would do almost anything to get a piece of someone like her, or someone like me. Compared to us, directors and columnists didn’t have much to offer.
“Maybe I can teach you.” I rose from the chair. “Give you something… ”
That got her attention. “A few pointers?”
I grinned. She was really listening now. “No. I’ll give you something that you can use… a little piece of me.”
She came to me then, and we didn’t give the fog a second glance as we settled on the hardwood floor.
But I felt the fog when I hit the road. Running in my bones like cold Pacific tides, stinging deep and clean in the cracked slivers of my chapped grin.
Couldn’t smell it, though. Couldn’t smell the ocean, either.
All I could smell was the Spyder’s guts: oil and gas…
… and a few fresh drops of Layla’s blood.
I see them every now and then on the talk shows. Layla and her starlet, who isn’t so young anymore. They usually want to talk about some TV movie deal they’ve managed to scam, but invariably the host wants to talk about me.
And, after some phony protesting about the sanctity of my memory, that’s what they do. They also show up at my grave every year on the anniversary of my death, along with a bunch of middle-aged folks who tend to favor red windbreakers and white T-shirts. Layla makes a little speech, the starlet sheds a few tears, and then they get down to the business of autographing publicity photos that they posed for nearly thirty years ago.
It must have been tough for Layla, not getting what she wanted out of me. I think it was the first and only time that ever happened to her. Except with the starlet, of course. She must still be working on that, though, because she’s certainly not keeping the alcoholic babbler around out of love. No. After all these years I’m convinced that Layla’s still trying to get at the little piece of me that I shared with that sad, confused woman.
Blood out of the proverbial turnip.
After I totaled the Spyder, the whole thing blew up in Layla’s face. That was the best part, and I’m almost glad that I was still around to see it happen. First the scandal magazines hounded her with stories about witchcraft and voodoo and all that, but those idiots didn’t even realize how close to the truth they’d come. They just made up some junk, ran a couple of Layla’s ghoulish Rigormortia publicity pictures, and let it go at that.
Layla didn’t quit, though. I’ll give her that. Even when she hit bottom, she kept pitching. The director and the columnist faded from view despite her best efforts. She went through a mess of Tab’s and Ty’s and Troy’s, but none of them made it any where. Pretty soon she was left alone with the starlet. That’s when she decided to go into the legend business.
I’m not sentimental about it, though. Layla was the one who wanted to play chicken. I just went along for the ride, so to speak. But if she was the one who lost her temper, well, I was the one who made her lose it.
I guess that makes me the big winner, doesn’t it?
See, I’d realized what Layla didn’t know, what none of the people who worshiped her could ever learn. The wanting, the needing, is the best part. Once you get something, you’ll never hunger for it in that same way again. And once you surrender something, you’ve lost it forever; it’s what you are, and it’s gone gone gone. Ask the director, or the columnist, or the legion of Tab’s and Ty’s and Troy’s.
As for me, I’d decided that it was better to keep the lion’s share all to myself. Layla wasn’t going to have it. The director and those like him weren’t going to strip it away, bit by bit, year by year. I never wanted to wake up and look in the mirror, wondering where it had gone.