The California Roll: A Novel Read online

  At Hollywood parties, even Halloween ones, actors and others are always working the room. Unlike me, they’re not trying to steal an honest buck; rather, they carry this myth inside them, the Myth of the Perfect Party. They believe that they’re always just one party (or industry softball game or even AA meeting) away from encountering that one producer or casting director or studio executive who’ll change everything for them forever. With this flawed thought in mind, they relentlessly parse everyone they meet into two groups: Those Who Can Help My Career and Those Who Don’t Exist. To be “nonpro” at a Hollywood party is to be a wallflower perforce.

  I noticed this one older couple, clearly nonpro and therefore fully marginalized, completely ill at ease in their homemade Raggedy Ann and Andy drag. Hopelessly adrift on this surging sea of ego, they had eddied to a corner of the living room and stood isolated in their own private backwater. I had it in mind to join them there, pitching myself as a socially awkward inventor of medical devices—in search of investors, of course—as out of place as they in this clove-cigarettes-and-appletinis crowd. First, though, a quick spin to the bar to collect some sparkling water, for we socially awkward inventor types are notoriously teetotal.

  As I waited at the bar, the woman beside me said, “Couldn’t find a costume?” I looked left and absorbed at a glance the parts of the whole: Nordic nose, slightly seventies cinnamon shag, big silver hoop earrings, bas relief collarbones, and the rounded curve of breast beneath a creamy satin vest that missed exactly matching her teal blue eyes by about 5 percent of spectrum tilt toward true green.

  “You either, it seems.”

  “No,” she said, looking herself down and up. “I misunderstood. I thought it was come as you are.”

  “On Halloween?”

  “Like I said, I misunderstood. What are you drinking?”

  A good grifter adapts quickly to changing circumstances, so … good-bye, socially awkward inventor, hello, bourbon connoisseur.

  “Fighting Cock,” I said, fully expecting a nervous, entendre-engendered laugh.

  Instead I got a haughty, “Here? You’re lucky if they pour Four Roses.”

  “Four Roses, then,” I said with a shrug. “You?”

  “GMDQ,” she said.

  “Not familiar with that libation,” I said.

  “Libation.” She snorted a laugh. “Like, ‘Let’s all get libated tonight?’”

  “I’m not sure libated is a word.”

  “Oh, it’s a word,” she said. “Not that you care.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “You just don’t strike me as a slave to orthodoxy.”

  “I admit I’ve never been accused of that,” I said. “And GMDQ?”

  “Get Me Drunk Quick. Two parts vodka, one part attitude.”

  “Might want to cut back on the attitude,” I said. “I think you’ve had a little too much already.”

  This also created a hole where a laugh should have been. Nevertheless, she extended her hand, offered her name—“Allie Quinn”—and waited for me to offer mine back. This was not as simple a matter as you might think, for I had many to choose from, and your name, let’s face it, defines you. Kent Winston makes you a bowling buddy; Raleigh Newport is an investment counselor. Who did I want to be?

  It was Halloween. I chose to be me. “Radar Hoverlander,” I said.

  “Radar?” she asked. “Like that guy in M*A*S*H?”

  “No, but I get that a lot.”

  By now the bartender was waiting to serve us. Allie pointed to two bottles and said, “That and that.” We got our drinks and moved away from the bar. “Now,” she said, “what’s up with the mufti?”

  “I assume you mean the word in the sense of civilian clothing, not interpreter of Muslim law.”

  “Now you’re just showing off,” she said. I shrugged. “So. The costume?”

  “I’m a party crasher.”

  She gave me a long, blank look before saying, “Oh, I get it.”

  You ever get that feeling like you just farted in church?

  With four simple words—“Oh, I get it”—Allie ruled my noncostume not charming and not conceptual but merely self-conscious and lame. This would have bothered me were it not for the known true truth that women seduce men precisely by making them feel self-conscious and lame. It’s the first move of an elegant and time-tested three-act play.

  Act one: Steal status. Like it or not, in the world of women and men, men hold the high ground. True, women man the sex valve and can shut it off at will, but as long as man has hand, this problem is not irresolvable. Meantime, whether in negotiation, sales, or seduction, it’s difficult to win uphill battles against status, so job one is to level the playing field. Women can do this to a man just by judging. Mock his haircut. Laugh at his ignorance. Look down your nose at his nose. Dis his supposedly clever costume concept.

  Belittle a man and he will be little. This is a known true truth.

  Once he’s weak and vulnerable, it’s time for act two: Initiate intimacy. To make a man covet your opinion (and therefore covet you), you need to create a bond, and the best way to do this is to touch. Brush a hand along a shoulder. Stand too close. Push a random strand of hair out of his eyes. Pluck lint, even. Your tender touch renders him like a dog in submission position.

  Now comes the third act in this little passion play: Extend validation.

  Validation (and this is an absolutely historically verified known true truth) is a mighty aphrodisiac. Let a man feel good about himself, and he will adore you out of gratitude. Tell me I’m wrong, guys. Tell me you haven’t ever thought, “I like her because she likes me.” You can’t help it. It’s human nature.

  This is why hospitalized soldiers fall in love with their nurses, and not just in movies but in real life. First they experience this steep status drop from warrior to patient, and they’re forced to surrender control, which they hate. Next, it’s meet the new boss—this nurse who initiates intimacy in all sorts of sponge-bath and bedpanny ways. Finally, the intravenous validation drip: You’re a good man, soldier, and a good patient; you’re going to be okay.

  So there you have it. Steal status with a mock or a smugly held opinion. Slice through defenses with the stiletto of intimacy. Then make ’im feel good. After that, you can write your own ticket.

  So when Allie absently reached behind my neck to flip down the label on my shirt, I had to believe she was on script.

  And when she suddenly started liking my jokes, I knew I was being played.

  * * *

  * Or even ever. The day I’m sniffing through panty drawers for loose change is the day my big toe starts itching for the trigger.

  * * *

  3.

  dilated in

  W hen you lie for a living like I do, you become pretty sensitive to the lies of others. This isn’t telepathy, telemetry, or tele-anything else. It’s just looking for the bedrock rationale. It didn’t take a particularly large leap of insight for me to realize that by plan and design, Allie had laid siege to my company. I couldn’t help wondering why. You might think she just liked the cut of my jib, but I’ve seen my jib and I’m here to tell you it’s not cut that cute.

  So I decided to do a drunk check, because drunks will make choices that only make sense by way of drunk logic. This is useful to men, who often have no card of seduction to play, save a woman’s impaired judgment. What you do is, you hold up your hand, fingers spread, really close to her face, and ask how many hands you’re holding up. If she says one, she’s sober. If she says five, she’s drunk. If she says, “Five … wait … one,” and then falls out laughing, the pump is, shall we say, primed. The element of surprise is critical for a fair reading, so I sprang it on Allie without warning.

  She looked past my hand and eyelocked me with the knowingest wry smile. “The drunk test?” she said. “Really?”

  And turned and walked away.

  Okay, so maybe she wasn’t hitting on me after al
l.

  I shrugged it off. In this business you shrug off a lot of false starts. I set down my drink and went looking for the misplaced displaced rag dolls. They had departed, but I noticed a clean-cut kid in hospital scrubs, wearing a stethoscope made of pens and a surgical cap fashioned from a Writers Guild of America bandanna. He carried a computer keyboard and a copy of Screenwriter magazine.

  None of which caught my eye like his shoes.

  I slid over and struck up a conversation—never hard at Halloween parties, because every conversation begins with Let me guess. “Let me guess,” I said. “Script doctor?”

  “Got it in one,” he said. “Most people don’t.”

  “Well,” I replied, “with all due false modesty, I’m smarter than everyone.” I filled in the space of his chuckle with the selection of an appropriate name. “Nick Rauchen,” I said. We shook hands. He introduced himself as Jason Dickson. “But you’re not really a writer, right?” He shook his head. “I think you’re …”

  I love the look on people’s faces when you guess right. It’s not that hard, really. You just read the facts at hand. For starters, he had that Myth of the Perfect Party look in his eye, and even as he talked to me he was looking past me, as if there might be a better conversation, a hotter lead, a more compellingly life-changing contact waiting for him somewhere out there among the swarm of sexy kitten costumes and knights in aluminum armor. Thus this: not a writer—because writers know better than to buy into that myth—but interested in writers. And a white guy name. Not just white but deep-pockets and prep-school white. Harvard white. I recognized the vibe. But it was the shoes, really, that told the tale, for this Jason couldn’t resist wearing his status shoes to a costume party. Peeking out from under his scrubs, a pair of Tod’s Monk Straps, the exact kind you wear if you’re an earnest young striver at a first- or second-tier Hollywood talent agency where appearance is as important as competence or ability. For confirmation, I had checked out his fingernails, and, yep, they were manicured. Manicured. So then, in sum …

  “An agent.”

  He blinked. “How did you know?”

  “I read minds.”

  “What, you mean like professionally?”

  Man, talk about a soft opening. Now I started to grind the grift in earnest, spinning a colorful yarn about my brief stint as a stage hypnotist and my board certification in something I invented on the spot called witness therapy. Eventually I worked around to my putative current profession, playwright and performance artist. I riffed on this theme for a while, and by the time I was done, he’d paid cash up front for VIP seats to the premiere of my utterly nonexistent one-man show, Come Up Pants, at the equally nonexistent NoHo Playhouse. He gave me his business card so I could mail him the tickets.

  I don’t even consider this working.

  It’s all about the want. Everyone has one. Identify the want of your fish and he’s halfway in your boat. Poor Jason the Agent Boy was clearly treasure hunting; I just had to convince him I was treasure, an undiscovered talent he could ride to high heights in his agency. And here’s the beauty part: Since he was looking for treasure in the first place, it was easy for him to see it in me.

  People see what they want to see, and sometimes they hand you their money.

  But after the snuke, I started to feel a little detached. I wandered around the party, not really measuring marks or anything, just floating. I caught a glimpse of Allie engaged in animated conversation with some guy in a bear suit. She was smoothing the nap of his fur. I felt an odd irk at that, quasi-queasy almost. We were the only two people at the party not in costume. Were we not made for each other, or each other’s company, at least? Meanwhile, everyone else at the party began to look quite transparent to me, their costumes no longer concealing them at all. I could tell who was drunk, horny, angry, resentful, frustrated, or bored, as if they wore their emotions like subtitles. I was familiar with this heightened awareness. It often comes after a score: a lingering presence in the zone, still dilated in. * Yet there was this dispassion, too, something also common in the wake of a scam, even a workaday one like this. First I get high, then I get low. The little voice inside my head is saying, “Yeah! Score!” but then, after a pause, “Now what?” In this business, it’s always about the now what, and after the what, there’s just more what and more what after that. In the grift, we call it the disconnect, and actually you have to have the disconnect, or otherwise you start having sympathy for your marks, and then you play them soft. Not good.

  But this party, past its peak, had passed its pique. True, there were still some targets about, getting drunker and more vulnerable by the moment. At minimum, I could lay pipe for snukes down the road. Yet suddenly I couldn’t be bothered. I thanked my host (who pretended to know who I was) and headed out.

  I walked downhill to my car, but loitered at it and didn’t get in. There was something bothering me about me, a mental splinter of sorts, or a toothache I couldn’t help probing with my tongue. Where did I and the party part company? It wasn’t like me to ride a bummer. I like parties. I like me. I like my job. I like how every single situation I’m in is an opportunity to hone my craft. I mean, I could be getting my television hooked up and find some way to con the cable guy. That’s a gift. I love that gift. I use it every chance I get and I never, ever get tired of it. “All manic all the time,” that’s the tag line for Radio Radar. But just then I felt flat as a piece of paper. What had sucked all the joie from my vivre?

  And here came the answer, dancing barefoot down the street, holding her strappy heels in her left hand. Balance appeared to be a problem, for the street was steep and all those GMDQs seemed to have gone to her head.

  “Well,” she said, “if it isn’t Hoover Loverhandler, master of the mufti.” She came up and stood quite close to me, and pronounced each next word like a sentence: “I. Want. A. Cigarette.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Fresh out.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t really smoke.” She smiled. “Like you don’t really drink. I saw you ditch your bourbon.” Really? She was watching me? I’m not used to that, and couldn’t decide whether I liked it or not. “But still, you seem like a knowing guy.” She twirled her shoes by their straps. “Do you know what these are?”

  “I believe they’re called come-fuck-me pumps.”

  “Ooh,” she said to the universe, “this is a smart one.” Then, to me, “Drive me home, smart one. I’m smashed.” To prove the point, as if it needed proving, she waggled her fingers in front of her face, said, “Five, no, one!” and fell out laughing. Though it was less like being drunk and more like a staged reading from the Book of Drunk.

  “What about your car?” I asked.

  “No car. I teleported.”

  “Really? In this neighborhood?” I archly arched an eyebrow, pushing it doubly ironically high.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Who teleports in this neighborhood? My friend drove. She split with some guy.” Allie put her hands on her hips, framing her waist with her shoes. “So? Ride home or what?”

  So I drove her home. Or no, not exactly home. At her instruction, we switchbacked along Mulholland to Outpost, then downhill into Hollywood. But when I got into the grid, somewhere near Gower and Fountain, she said, “This’ll do,” and was out of the car before it even stopped.

  She’d left behind one of her shoes. “Hey,” I said, bending to pick it up, “You …”

  But she was gone. Nowhere to be seen. For a drunk chick with one shoe, she sure moved fast.

  Maybe she teleports after all.

  * * *

  *Why not? Can’t one be on target and wide open, too?

  * * *

  4.

  java man closest 2 u

  I f you Google “Radar Hoverlander,” you’ll get a bunch of hits on thrust vector control systems—radar-guided surface deployment mechanisms for off-planet rovers. Most of it is blue-sky development shit: “As soon as the rover is ready to roll, the tether connection will be sever
ed and the Sky Crane will fly off and crash-land a short distance away.” Which certainly sounds like a party, but anyway it amuses me to think that my quirky name has such an oddball double meaning. Like Johnny Ben Wa Balls must feel every day.

  If you Google harder, eventually you’ll find your way to a little website called www.radarenterprizes.com. There you will be persuaded that yours most humbly truly is the proud proprietor of a company selling embossed items for promotional use. Need a pen with your company’s name? I’m your guy. Giveaway cameras for your wedding? No problem. “Compliments of” calendars or mouse pads? Just click to order. No job too small. Now this, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a boring-ass business, but it provides cover, something I can file taxes on. A shell of a shill, then, my flag planted in cyberspace to provide evidence—well, fabricat evidence—that little Radar is legit. If you click on Contact us, you can send a message to [email protected], a mailbox I check only infrequently because the bulk of what I receive is bulk nonsense—come-ons for Vilagra or Vinagra, and You’ve received an e-card from a friend!—and nothing annoys a scammer more than someone else’s lame attempts at spivery. But I do check it. You never know what will wash up on your beach, and fulfilling a legitimate order takes no more effort on my part than forwarding it to my liaison at a certain factory in Shenzhen. I never leave money lying on the table. That’s just not good practice. So I periodically sift through the spam; anyway, it tickles me to see what the lesser minds of the snuke cook up.

  The morning of November 1 found me sitting out on the tiny deck of my duplex, feet up on an empty crate of military-surplus gas masks (yard-sale score—can’t resist a dumb bargain), poaching wireless on my laptop. The view from up there was spectacular: a steep drop down to Silver Lake Boulevard; lush, overwatered hills on the far side, reeking with bougainvillea and overpriced homes; and the downtown skyline in the distance, a towering picket fence of glass, corruption, and chrome. I’m not much for aesthetics, but on certain of these clear L.A. days, when the wind blows warm off the desert and sends all the smog to Catalina, you can almost pretend the place is pretty.