“Over the hill and through the pass, to Cindy’s house we go,” was what I trilled as I traveled along the Red Line. I was to cross the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, make my way to the Lankershim Boulevard Station in North Hollywood, San Fernando Valley, USA, for a short vacation. A few hours later, a refugee from Cindy and her retinue of fashion industry spa rats, I was sipping coffee outside Priscilla’s: a coffee joint on the border between the Toluca Lake section of North Hollywood and the city of Burbank. It was time, Lila and I had decided, to once again become as one in the flesh, as well as to discuss the facts of our financial life; the prospects, and more importantly the timeline for acquiring housing in the likely multiple-family dwelling in our future. I had been bivouacking in the hotel going on three months, all the while, becoming dangerously content. After rent, food, whisky, and an occasional spliff, foregoing necessities such as new books, Q-tips, or a television set, I was saving next to nothing from the dinky pay they give you at “pimperaries”. But still I needed a brief getaway from the demands of pleasantly indolent squalor and cheerful dissipation. A few days was all I could manage at Cindy’s, and no doubt all that Cindy could manage with me. Lila had little time to spare from either work or art, and no inclination to tempt her purse in the hedonistic nether world with me and mine, so stuck rigidly to her austerity plan. Nevertheless, for both of us, periodic temporary reconciliations were to be as necessary, as they were desirable.
Priscilla’s seemed to be warehousing more than a few writers. There were numerous persons with notebooks or legal pads or laptops, writing conspicuously. Some of them wore glasses. Perhaps it was the electro-magnetic power of Warner Brothers around the corner, which pulled amorphous scraps of plot and theme and ideas for special effects out of poor wretches, previously innocent coffee drinkers morphed into unwilling scribes. Hypnotized when passing the billboard-swamped walls of the Warner’s edifice, the post-hypnotic suggestions of future gabillions of dollars, convertibles, and associate producer credits kicked in about the time the dear souls were paying for cappuccinos. Yes, popular art works in unmysterious ways.
It was one of those sparkling pure days of winter you sometimes get in Los Angeles: crystal sun, dry air, and warmth infused on a gentle wind. You could sit outside in a circle of sun and incubate, which is what I did, at a table of my own in front of Priscilla’s: coffee in reach, a cigarette on standby in the ashtray. Lila sauntered around the corner from the parking lot in back, coming out of the west in a blaze of sun that burned small, black holes in my retinas when I tried to stare. It was clarified when she was standing beside the table before she sat, from how she looked, and even the way she smelled, that beyond soul connections and practical matters this was a conjugal visit. After a brief, but intense public display of affection I told her, “I’m glad you didn’t have to hike up here or take a cab.”
“No. Cindy cooperated. Lack of generosity isn’t one of her faults. This car of hers is nice, really nice. Wait’ll you see it.”
“It’s wasted on me. You know that. All cars look the same to me. Except that aluminum foil monstrosity we own. How is it by the way?”
“It takes a long time to replace a radiator, apparently. I think they might call me tomorrow and tell me it’s ready.”
As we were walking to Cindy’s car I asked, “How much is that radiator going to cost?”
Looking at me like I was one of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, she told me, “I’ll protect you from the actual figure. But it’s in the hundreds…leave it at that.”
“That’ll whack a hole in the piñata you’re saving money in.”
“No fucking shit. How’s your savings plan going, bud?”
“Well…”
Noticing as we started driving, that we were not moving in the direction of Cindy’s, but south in the general direction of Ventura Boulevard I asked, “Where are we going?”
“Up in the hills. We have to do a couple of errands. I have to pick up something from somebody’s house for Cindy. It’s part of the deal to use the car.”
“No escape from Hollywood deal-makers…North Hollywood deal-makers, now.”
“Better than walking.”
“Tell me about it.”
We began the climb up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, swung off at Mulholland, wended around and climbed some more, then took a tiny street that snaked along the edge of a ridge. Lila slowed the car, affirmed the address on the piece of paper lying on the seat, then drove through the gate onto a circular drive in front of a show piece so luxe it would embarrass the Borgia clan. Lila explained to the woman who answered the door the nature of our visit. The woman told us she would notify Mrs. Rapinski of our arrival, and invited us in. As Lila and I stood waiting in the foyer I asked, “Mrs. Rapinski is who? Is what?”
“I don’t know what she does, exactly. They’re working together…not as in they work at the same place, but they’re working together on some kind of project. That’s as much as I know.”
“I can sense there’s more you want to tell me.”
“I have to walk past a fashion coffee klatch to get to the kitchen a lot of the time. The proud, the few, the brain-dead fashion crew.”
“And what does Big Daddy do?”
“Edgar Lapinski is one of those studio guys. Development? I think development. Got any scripts you wanna leave off?”
“I will not work with Edgar Rapinski.”
Lila was laughing, but put on her serious face quickly when the woman who answered the door returned. The woman said, “Mrs. Rapinski will be right down.”
Before the woman could even turn around, the doorbell chimed. The woman opened the door and found herself face to face with a Federal Express deliveryman.
“I have a package for Mr. Rapinski. Are you Mrs. Rapinski?”
“Pfft. I’m the housekeeper.” She spoke now with a heavily pronounced Spanish accent. “Mrs. Velazquez. But I can sign for it, can’t I?”
“You certainly can.” The deliveryman handed her the clipboard and showed her where to sign.
“All right. Here you go.” He handed her the package. “You have a good day.”
Mrs. Velazquez smiled politely and told him, “You have one too.” She smiled at us as she walked past, taking little steps, and carrying the package so gingerly that if you couldn’t see it you might have guessed it was a specimen bottle without a lid. Mrs. Velazquez ran into Mrs. Rapinski as she was coming off the stairs, and into the foyer. Mrs. Velazquez showed Mrs. Rapinski the package. Mrs. Rapinski took it from her, and instructed her to, “Go upstairs to Mr. Rapinski’s library and ask him to come down, please.” Mrs. Velazquez did as she was told. Mrs. Rapinski then proceeded to greet her guests. She approached Lila with an outstretched hand, and when Lila’s met it, Mrs. Rapinski shook it so anemically you wondered if she would have the strength to speak. I got a sideways glance of acknowledgment, but nothing more.
“You’re the person Cindy Sizemore sent?”
“I’m the person picking up the portfolio for Cindy Sizemore, uh huh.” Lila was not amused.
“One second.” She turned around quickly and began to walk away, saying over her shoulder, “It’s down here in my office.” She disappeared, and a minute later returned with an oversized manila envelope. As she was handing it to Lila, Edgar Lapinski descended the stairs, a lanky man with silver hair wearing a Lakers jacket. As he walked up to his wife, Mrs. Rapinski pointed at us and said, “This is…”
“Lila,” Lila offered on cue. I followed suit.
“Donovan.”
Mrs. Rapinski said to Mr. Rapinski, “It’s from New York.”
Taking the package and examining the label he told her, “It’s the book.” He took a set of keys from his pocket, and used the edge of one to perforate the tape sealing the flaps of the package.
“Which book?” she asked.
Mr. Rapinski continued to yank and tear his way into th
e package, lifting his eyes long enough to send a condescending glance in the direction of Mrs. Rapinski.
“Oh,” Mrs. Rapinski remembered. “The woman we saw on Charlie Rose…the rare, signed first edition or something.”
As he extricated the bubble wrap, he muttered, “Umm Hmm.” Then he lifted a black, hardcover book out of the box, and dropped the box beside a vase on the table in the foyer. He turned the book over and examined the back of the jacket.
“Great condition. She really is the most incredible writer of this era, one of the most incredible writers, ever, truly. Beautiful shape. Beautiful.”
Mr. Rapinski opened the book with extreme care, first flipping the pages gently, but eventually whipping them over with inexplicable vehemence.
“What the…” He held the open book in the air for Mrs. Rapinski to see, meaning that Lila and I, standing behind her, could see the pages too. They were entirely blank.
“Look,” he bellowed plaintively, and turning pages for us displayed the innards of the book in all their blank-paged wonder. “What kind of bullshit is this?”
While Mrs. Rapinski nonchalantly took a closer look, Lila answered, “Not the good kind.”
Mrs. Rapinski squinted at the pages as if perhaps the printing might actually be so subtle, or so discreet, the human eye could not detect it from any sort of distance.
“There must have been some kind of mistake,” she determined.
“You think?” Mr. Rapinski said.
Lila and I looked at one another and shrugged. I said, “Not much there…definitely over-rated.”
Lila nudged me with an elbow and scowled, then asked Mr. Rapinski, “Is it signed by the author?”
Mr. Rapinski looked down, flipped the pages back to the front and reported, “It’s inscribed, yeah.”
“I think what you’ve got there,” she told him, “is a rare book. Probably worth a whole lot more than you thought before.”
Mr. Rapinski considered this for a moment. We were all in a little semi-circle staring down at the empty pages.
“They just don’t write them like they used to,” I offered.
I got the elbow from Lila again, before Mrs. Rapinski concluded, “I really don’t know Edgar. I think you’re probably going to have to talk about this with whoever sent you the book.”
Mr. Rapinski looked steadily at his wife with what only could be described as a certain amount of bewilderment.
At this point Lila held the manila folder up, waving it until she had fully captured Mrs. Rapinski’s attention. She told her, “Well, thank you. We need to get going.”
After we had passed through the gates of el hacienda grande that fashion and development built, and returned to the road, I told Lila as we drove along, “I think I can see the ocean from here.”
With the car skirting the precipice of a tall ridge, she looked off into the distance to her right, clamping her hands as tight on the wheel as possible while she did.
“Yeah, I can see it. That’s something. All the way to the Pacific.”
We were chugging down the winding noodles of road to the valley again when I asked, “What’s a one bedroom go for in Cindy’s neighborhood?”
“I’m thirsty,” she said. “I need to stop pretty soon and get a bottle of water.”
“Fine by me. We’re almost down.”
“A one bedroom in Cindy’s neighborhood?”
“Yeah.”
““A grand. Probably a little more. Twelve, thirteen.”
“Oooh.”
“It’s a little cheaper over here than over there, that’s about it.”
“For us at the moment anything seems a lot. On the other hand, maybe it’s never being able to transcend the lower depths of buying power that makes me feel perpetually young.”
“Makes me feel old. But poverty as The Fountain of Youth…that’s a good one.”
“Lookout sugar,” I begged, after she nearly punted a bicycler over the guardrail into the chaparral.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I guess bargains never are easy to come by,” I philosophized.
“Unless you want to live in Pomona. I don’t know if rent-free mansions even constitute a bargain in Pomona.”
“Mansions in Pomona…now that’s a good one. You know you’re the one always claiming that scrapping for bread preserves the killer instinct.”
“Something YOU agree with.”
“Yeah, in most cases it probably preserves it. I’m an exception, since my killer instinct will be permanent either way I’d be willing to bet.”
“Mine too. But I’m also willing to bet we’ll never be in any position to know for sure.”
“Smart bet.”
“Wherever we live, there’s no getting around that giant chunk of startup money.”
“Money’s always the elephant in the room, ain’t it? ”
“It is unless we abruptly pull out of artistic Russian Roulette and join the reputable wankers.”
“No pulling out of anything here. I’m stubborn, no matter how stupid it makes me look.”
“Do you care whether we end up over here or over there?” she asked, pointing, in her mind, actually pointing to the other side of the hills.
“Not really.” I could just as well have added that at the moment I had lost the will to live above the lower circles of poverty in which I currently resided with such sybaritic snugness. The amount of money that needed to be plunked down initially, and forked over regularly sounded staggering. We’d had it far too easy at Bob’s. It wasn’t sumptuous living in the guesthouse; but neither of us needed that, or could even stand it. The principle point of this was to cohabitate. The second was to retrieve a better quality and greater quantity of privacy, while preserving time and a proper nimbus for our “little hobbies.”
“Having been at Cindy’s a while, I have to admit it’s a good location, especially for the valley. That neighborhood is basically the border between the valley and Hollywood.”
“So we could go back and forth across the border with impunity, as far as Immigration’s concerned.”
From there, the conversation actually deteriorated, though such was a principle form of amusement for the likes of us. We had stopped for water, and now were sitting at the stoplight at Laurel Canyon and Moorpark. The car could be heard to sputter while it sat idling. Then it coughed. Then, it died. Lila repeatedly tried to start it again. But Cindy’s car was dead as liberal Republicanism. When it came to cars, Lila and I were like a communicable disease.
As we got out of the car, car horns behind us and around us began rioting in the streets. Lila ran at the side of the car with the door open in order to steer, as I tried to push. From somewhere, a man appeared on the other side of the back bumper and helped me nudge the car rightward into a lot. I thanked him for helping, at which time he asked, “Have your cells?” I told him we didn’t. He volunteered to us that his wife in their car across the street had hers, and invited us to use it.
Lila tried twice, but could get no answer from Cindy. The man and his wife, who looked similar in age to, and appeared to be at an economic level comparable to that of the Rapinski’s, offered to take us back to Cindy’s in their souped-up ride. Our choices were either to wait with the car, or to take the ride. We put a note on the car designating it as inoperable, and promising a reasonably swift re-location to the necessary repair facility. Without talking with Cindy, we had no idea where she would wish to tow it, or even perhaps, who should do the towing. We did expect to figure prominently in subsidization of the process.
During the obligatory vacuum-filling-colloquy-among-confined-strangers as we whizzed along, Lila mentioned that we were returning from visiting someone in yon hills. Our driver asked Lila if we had visited, “anyone I might know?” Sworn to no secrecy either by Cindy or by the Rapinskis, she told him, “Caroline Rapinski.”
This information ripped the lid off a barrel of laughte
r in the front seat.
“They’re friends of ours,” the woman said.
“Edgar and I do a little business sometimes, too,” the man volunteered, with a chuckle so meretricious it sounded like an aluminum can being kicked along a sidewalk.
“Edgar is a studio executive, and my husband runs a talent agency. Are you in the fashion business with Caroline?” the woman asked Lila.
Lila told her she wasn’t in the fashion business at all, while my grin grew so expansively, my face resembled a baking biscuit. Then she elaborated, confessing to the woman she was merely a wage earner working at drawing and painting in her free time. I steeled myself against the ubiquitous, “What do you do?” that was about to be fired at me like a silver bullet. When it hit, I was ready. In order to prevent any apprehension on his part that I would punk him in the back of the head with a roll of food stamps, then rob him, I once again placed contributor to the Encyclopedia of American Political History at the top of my resume. Naturally, the vagueness of my occupation confused him. So, as in times past, an example seemed appropriate. Lila pulled a pen from her purse, while I found a use for the flyer for a play at the neighborhood playhouse someone handed me at Priscilla’s. Tuning out the ambient strained conviviality, I hurriedly scribbled out today’s exemplifying entry. As I was writing, our driver turned into the parking lot of Vendomes Liquor in the heart of Toluca Lake, and asked us if we would mind a stop for refurbishment of his booze supply. Since the cause was such a good one we immediately assented. I continued to write, and by the time he returned to the car with his brown paper sack brimming, I had finished. I made the announcement that my sample was ready to be publicly spoken. Everyone turned in my direction, and I read:
The American Invasion of Grenada
Due to a customary Republican combination of hubris and ineptness, the administration of Ronald Reagan retained United States Marines in Lebanon, long past when it was necessary or safe for them to be there. Part of a multinational peacekeeping force contending with turmoil in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, (an invasion in response to attacks on Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization from the Lebanese side of the border), U.S. marines were sitting ducks by 1983, when all hell was breaking loose: embassy bombings, snipings…an array of truly unsportsmanlike behaviors. The suicide bombing of the Marine barracks on October 23, 1983, was a shocking event to American citizens; an embarrassing one for the Reagan politburo; and a real political downer for the Republican Party. With the unemployment rate above nine percent, Ronnie’s recession stinking up the joint, and the Bonzo-in-Chief’s approval rating in the mid-thirties following the barracks bombing, if you were a thinking man’s Marxist in Grenada, this may have been about the time you said to yourself, “Uh oh.” Yes, invading Grenada was to be the distraction of the day for the Reagan Mob.
In Grenada, banana republican Commies who had ousted a Commie tinpot dictator, and replaced him with a newer model Commie tinpot dictator, ostensibly for aesthetic reasons, hired crews of Fidel’s finest day laborer’s spared from the revolution in Cuba to pave a dirt road somewhere in the jungles of Grenada, and, according to crack Reagan propagandists, turn it into the finest military airfield in the rural Caribbean. The Reagan marketing squad warned with a wink typical of their group of cut-ups, that with Communistas swallowing the tropical island whole, Cuba and Grenada soon would join forces to form a Marxist Moby capable of dominating so powerfully, as to cause the entire northern hemisphere finally to knuckle under in godless, communistic submission.
As if there were further need of scarifying scenarios, or trumped up Dudley Do Right rationales, there also was the pretext of the fabulous medical school of Grenada sitting there naked as a jaybird: an appetizer for the voracious communistic whale. Reaganistas, citing the need to rescue the school’s handful of American medical students…not the best and brightest of America’s future physicians or members of the AMA, declared that now more than ever, American military might should be put to use if only to keep the world safe for medical malpractice. America’s European allies expressed disapproval of this unilateral invasion of Grenada. But given that conservatives considered having foreigners as allies a regrettable nuisance, as well as a perpetual source of self-doubt, when comparisons were made to housebroken peoples abroad, it was no surprise when The Great Communicators enunciated, that: friends don’t let friends stop them from engaging in face-saving military aggression.
After Fortress Tropicana Americana had been handily shellacked, and with a puppet show entirely acceptable to the Regan Administration as visible as light at the end of a tunnel, democratic Grenada could safely set sail in the paternalistic waters of American hemispheric hegemony. For dessert, the Reagan Ringtail Rounders employed this helpful distraction to even further use, in the aftermath of their major military triumph, recognizing an ideal time to install Pershing Missiles in Germany. This occurred despite protestations by bullied Germans, and many elsewhere, that by doing so the targeting of Germans by Soviet missiles, in the event of an East-West dustup would conscript German cities, already on the front lines of the cold war, into battle numero uno of a hot war, and in such an event, render them sacrificial vaporization fodder.