Free The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter

butler stood about threefeet from us waiting—I thought he was going to convoy us to the door, but he wanted to tell me that there was someone who wanted to talk to me. It turned out to be a tall skinny fellow in a chauffeur’s uniform, with his hat in his hand. He was to be our driver. The studio had sent him.
    We got all the stuff out of Jim’s rental car and stuffed it into the back of the limousine and then got inside. The chauffeur said he would take care of getting the rental back to Hertz. He was to drive us to the airport if we could make the 12:30 Redeye Special, but if we couldn’t he was to drive us to Los Angeles.
    We had missed the Redeye by about an hour, so we slept in the back of the limousine, all the way to Hollywood.

    â€œJESUS,” SAID Jim, and turned on the lights.
    My suite was filled with flowers and baskets of fruit, and somebody on the hotel staff had closed the windows, and somebody else on the staff had turned on the steam heat, so that it was about one-hundred degrees and the fruit had begun to stick to its cellophane.
    I grabbed the nearest casement window and tussled with it until it sprung open with a rusty lurch and almost pulled me out eight stories over Los Angeles. I commented on this while Jim burned his fingers on the handle to the steam heat. The hotel telephone, not my private line but the one that goes through the switchboard, rang one long, very long, ring. I was naked and had all the windows open and Jim had managed to shut off all six steam outlets before I answered the phone, and it had rung that long ring the whole time. It was the desk, I was getting messages and they wanted to know if I was in or out. I told her I was out and to send up the messages, but I knew what they were before I saw them. Every year, the same thing, every subagent at the agency would send us a letter by messenger congratulating us on our movie, just a couple of typewritten lines in the middle of a sheet of the heavy crackly paper they use, a signature and the typist’s initials below. One year I got sixty of them in two days, all from men I had never met and never would meet. This year it was only forty-six, but the agency business has gone all to hell, I hear.
    I went around the room looking at the flowers and cartons and baskets offruit. I happen not to like cut flowers, but none of the people who send this kind of crap ever seem to get the message. Jim and I put all the stuff out in the hall by the elevator, and after a while, after I had showered and brushed my teeth and combed my hair, the apartment began to be cool and fresh again. Jim had gone into the spare bedroom, and I left him alone.
    The apartment has two terraces, one looking out over flat smoky L.A. and the other one at the back, overlooking the hillside covered with trees and people’s houses. I stood looking down at a tiny man in a white jacket and dark pants watering a driveway back of the hotel. A mockingbird slowly and carefully went through his repertoire, and from somewhere in a copse of dark pines an owl gave a last contented sleepy hoot. It must have been about nine in the morning, and I felt pretty good. I dressed and walked down the street to Schwab’s and sat at the counter for some coffee.
    In Schwab’s, the place to eat is the room with the booths, which opens at eight. The counter is reserved for people who don’t have enough friends to fill a booth or for some reason want to be alone. Nearly everybody respects this; if you are at the counter you want to be alone. If you are sitting in a booth, particularly if you are sitting alone in a booth, looking nervously at the entryway every time somebody shows up, you want company. Lots of comedians and comic actors at Schwab’s. People with series, coming in literally in sunglasses with literal entourages. To these people one must wave and smile, after all, they sat there a dozen years waiting for the chance to come in like this, who are