Free The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter Page A

you not to wave?
    Guys who haven’t worked in years. No more shades, no more laughing gang of hangers-on. There’s always a big bunch of them at the table just to the right of the entrance of the booth section, and one by one they come over to me at the counter, this particular morning, say hello, the hand touching me lightly on the back, and I grin and shake hands, half-standing, and we exchange little jokes, and they go back to their booth, everybody’s on a first-name basis at Schwab’s. Dotty and Dorothy, Eddy, Bob, Jim, Jack, Jackie, Jackie and Jackie.
    Two cups of coffee, a copy of the L.A. Times , a slow stroll back to the hotel past the former site of the Garden of Allah, small silent prayer for the ghost debauchers Bob, Scott, Dash, Des . . . up the slight hill to the hotel, out onto the shady morning terrace in the back to read my paper and get back into the civilized world. I had slept enough, but Jim was still in the spare room making up for the days he had lost, and the studio’s happinessthat Jim was at last here in place where he belonged would begin to fade under the realization that now we were here, we had to be worked, and that there would be a lot of executive unhappiness to be gotten through before everyone could heave a last sigh and start counting the profits.

    BY TEN I had smoked a joint, taken my car up Sunset to the big carwash and run it through, gone to the Ralph’s Market further up Sunset and done a big staples shop, come back to the hotel and put everything away and was in the middle of making breakfast—three eggs fried in butter, four strips of butcher’s bacon, an English muffin split, buttered and broiled almost black, fresh orange juice and coffee—when I heard a tapping at the door to the suite. It wouldn’t be the maid, she wouldn’t knock, she’d ring and come on in, so I opened the door only a crack.
    There was Karl Meador, our producer, standing out in the hall with his hands in his pockets:
    â€œHi, can I come in?”
    It seemed he had spent the night in the hotel with a lady friend. I got back to the kitchen just in time to toss the eggs, with Karl behind me. I offered him coffee, juice, eggs, but he turned everything down.
    â€œTrying to keep it off,” he said, and sighed. Karl had gone through a fat period, and I didn’t blame him not wanting to eat. Now of course he was slim and trim, wearing a silk shirt open to the third button, and you could see a couple of thin gold chains hanging in amongst his black chest hairs, Levi’s that looked as though they had been tailored and washed out for him by the studio costumers and a pair of Puma running shoes. Karl was nothing if not fashionable. During his fat period he had also gone through his dopesmoking hippie period, and he had worn coveralls and plaid shirts to the office. Before that he had been in his Ivy League period, wearing all that three-piece-British boots drag.
    Now he sat in my sunny dining room and watched me eat.
    We talked about one thing and another, mostly girls. Karl was into fucking famous women and had fucked a whole string of them and was always getting into the papers this way, never failing to plug his latest picture. Karl makes a lot of movies, three or four a year sometimes, if things break right, but he isalways the executive producer of our pictures since the first one ten years ago (Ivy League Period). He was very enthusiastic about the girl in suite 609, who had come to Hollywood from Texas via New York. The way Karl went on and on about her, she was probably going to get her big break in our movie.
    While I was sopping up the last of the egg yolk with the last of the muffin, Karl said, “Listen, where’s Jim? I called the lot and he’s not there.”
    Jim keeps a bungalow on the lot.
    â€œI haven’t seen him today,” I said.
    Just then a toilet flushed in the back of the apartment, and Karl looked at me with that