Free The Diamond Lane by Karen Karbo Page A

irritated.
    She hated it when Sather and Darryl talked in code, like a clique of thirteen-year-old girls. She thought it was rude for them to leave everyone else out. Darryl and Sather and Ralph all shared a house in the Hollywood Hills. Ralph was the only one who had ever been married. They had a pool table in their living room instead of furniture. In the family room they had seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of stereo and video equipment and two straight-backed chairs with plastic upholstery, the style popular in the lobby of the Salvation Army. One of them did the cooking, one vacuumed, one scrubbed the bathrooms. Mimi and Carole were forever trying to set Darryl and Sather up, but the women were never thin enough, never mysterious enough, never successful enough, or else too thin, too mysterious, and too successful.
    â€œBut it gets tricky,” said Sather, “it gets tricky. Are you aPerson in Film if you’re below-the-line talent but don’t have any higher aspirations?”
    â€œTake Lisa,” said Ralph.
    â€œPlease don’t,” said Lisa. She twisted open the top of her beer with the bottom of her T-shirt. Lisa was a sound editor and Lithium addict. She had shoulder-length red hair and had made pleated linen shorts and French filterless cigarettes her trademark.
    â€œLisa is a Person in Film not only because she actually touches celluloid. She also doesn’t aspire to anything great. Not that cutting sound is not great, don’t get me wrong, Lisa.” Ralph smiled, revealing a gleaming set of expensive teeth. Like so many others in the business, he had made it a point to have the right teeth.
    â€œHow many Hollywood schmucks does it take to screw in a light bulb, Ralph?” said Lisa.
    â€œWe’ve pissed her off,” said Ralph.
    â€œNo,” said Lisa, leaning forward on the wicker ottoman, pointing her bottle at Ralph. “ You piss me off.”
    â€œI’ll get back to you,” said Sather. “That’s the punch line, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ Did you hear about the Polish actress who fucked a screenwriter to get ahead?”
    â€œThat’s an old one,” said Marty Phillips. Marty had heard every movie joke in town. He washed hair at a famous Beverly Hills salon. On the side, he had a tidy business selling locks of the stars’ hair he swept up off the floor. He sold a baggie full of Cher’s hair for $400. His screenplays always had hair images in them.
    â€œAny chance we can have one meeting where we don’t discuss the business?” asked Carole.
    â€œYeah, like maybe we’ll even get around to talking about the book ,” said Lisa, pulling her ragged copy of Lust for Life out of her shoulder bag.
    â€œPMSed-out tonight?” said Sather. He and Lisa had once been an item.
    â€œI’m about ready to slit my throat, all right? I cut one more car wreck and I don’t know what.”
    People pitied Lisa but envied her paycheck. She made more money sound-editing than any three people Mimi knew put together. But sound editors were the least respected people in town. It was unglamorous, unsexy, boring brute labor. Lisa had once thought of directing or writing or even editing picture. But she hadn’t known what she’d wanted, really, so when she got offered a sound-cutting job she took it. She hated it. But sound-cutting was like drug dealing. You did it a few times because you needed a job and you got paid a fortune. You started getting used to the money and couldn’t bring yourself to quit. There were always sound-cutting jobs around because anyone who had the discipline to take less money to do something else, did. Lisa bought a new car every other year, and had an apartment in Brentwood. She worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day syncing up footsteps, thwok ing tennis balls, high school boys playing the edge of their desks with number 2 pencils,