Текст книги "The Last Thing I Saw "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I had two more interviews scheduled with disaffected former HLM employees, one at five and one at 7:30 for dinner. I made my way inch by freeway inch back to the hotel in Westwood, getting there just in time to book a next-morning flight north and then meet Rickie Esteban, Rover Fye’s former personal assistant, in the hotel bar. I badly wanted to talk with Martine and Danielle, but they spent most of their time in Mount Shasta, I’d been told, so that was going to have to wait—if I could even make it at all into Desault mines.
Esteban was twenty minutes late, explaining that his bus had hit a pedestrian and had been impounded by the police, and he had walked the last half mile. He worked for a copy center now and had arranged to leave work two hours early just so he could meet me and say terrible things about Hal and Rover and Hey Look Media. He was a muscular young man with an Aztec face, a rhinestone stud in his right ear, and some kind of hieroglyphics carved into his millimeter-length haircut.
Esteban ordered a diet Coke and said, “So what’s the deal with Eddie Wenske? He disappeared or something?”
“No one has seen him since early March, and a lot of people are worried about him. His mother in New York hired me to try to find him.”
“Hey, that dude can take care of himself. He’s smart, that guy.”
“You spent some time with him?”
“I took him around, yeah. We saw Daryl Tangelo, who does Hal’s hair transplants, and we went over to Gaylord Renzi’s, the trainer who does what he can with Hal’s butt. Myrna of Smyrna is Rover’s Jungian astrologer, and she even gave Eddie a good break on a one-time reading. We had a nice lunch with Jervis Melton, Rover’s nutritionist, though we had to make a pit stop at Wendy’s afterwards just like Rover always does. Hal’s yoga instructor, Bruce Stompanato, was on vacation in Tibet when we were going around in December, so I don’t know if Eddie ever got to meet him. But he got a pretty good idea of all the people who can’t stand Hal and Rover, and I think he really appreciated the opportunity.”
“These people all spoke openly of their dislike for Hal and Rover? Isn’t that risky—biting the hand that feeds?”
Esteban shrugged. “They only say this shit behind Hal and Rover’s back. They all kiss Hal’s ass when he’s around, then they laugh their nuts off when he turns the other way. This is L.A., man, whaddaya think?”
“The place seems to conform to a stereotype.”
“Yes and no. Most people here are honest enough and nice. They basically just get up and go to work in the morning. Me and my friends aren’t assholes, I don’t think. But a lot of people who make it in L.A. are like Hal and Rover, and that’s especially true in the industry. I’m staying out of it. I had enough. When Rover shit-canned me, I just said, fuck it, I’m outta this nut house.”
“Can I ask why Rover fired you?”
“Yeah. He wanted me to pick up some package in Venice and bring it on the bus back to Bel Air. I get out there to this place down from the beach and I can see that this is some bad-ass situation Rover is sending me into, smells like piss and broken down. Before I go into this building, I say to a little kid, ‘Hey, what is this place?’ And this little child—he must be about nine years old—this little child says, ‘That place is a meth factory. You want some?’”
“And you turned around and got the hell out of there.”
“I was in no hurry. I just walked on down to the next block, and then I walked down by the beach, and then I got back on the bus and rode back to Bel Air. I told Rover I could have been busted or murdered or I don’t know what all. Do you know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘But I needed that meth.’”
“He probably did, too.”
“Not as much as I needed to get the fuck out of Hey Look Media. I told Rover to go fuck himself, and he looked right through me and said bye-bye.”
I said, “I’ve heard that Rover uses meth and it makes him unstable.”
“Did you ever hear of meth calming anybody down? No, you don’t want to be around Rover when he’s using. I don’t think he ever killed anybody or anything, but he ran over somebody with an ATV at Hal’s place up in the mountains and broke the dude’s pelvis. I was even there when it happened. Hal had to pay off the cops and the guy and his girlfriend too.”
“This is at the family home in Mount Shasta?”
“No, the salt mine sisters live in there now. This is at the lodge on up the canyon. It’s where they made Dark Smooches. Ever see that show?”
“Dark Smooches was the first thing I ever saw on Hey Look TV, and it was the last thing I saw.”
“It was Rover’s idea and he was in it and he’s the producer. That means he can charge whatever he wants to the budget. I told him one time I liked some boots I saw, and Rover gives me the credit card and says go help yourself. Then I saw the boots were deducted from my pay check. He’s always all methed up, so you never know what he’s gonna do from one hour to the next. And Mason Hively is even worse.”
“The writer and director of Dark Smooches?”
“Mason’s a meth freak too, and he binges and you just have to protect yourself. Sometimes he’s having a good time. He goes around yelling, Party in your pants! Party in your pants! But then he all of a sudden gets mean, and then—look out.”
“Is he ever violent? I mean, other than when he’s driving an ATV?”
“That’s Rover who uses the ATV. Mason likes to stay indoors unless it’s dark out or cloudy. Is Mason violent? He screams his head off, but I don’t think he’d cut anybody or shit like that. I know he likes to be tied up and slapped around a little himself. The PAs are always complaining about that. It’s not in the job description, they say, but what can they do? Rover and Mason used to do porn shoots at the lodge, but Hal didn’t like it. He said what if the media found out about all that jizz hitting the ceiling beams at the Skutnik family lodge and somebody blabbed to his mama? So then they had to start doing their porn shoots down here, out in the valley like everybody else. Though that meant the PAs up at the lodge started getting hit on instead of the stars. Some of them thought it was okay if it might help their careers. But most of them figured out that even if they stuff toilet paper up their nose so they won’t retch while they’re making Mason’s ass red with a ping pong paddle, really they were just being totally fucked over and they weren’t going to get parts or be made associate producers, and so they took their leave of Hey Look Media, just like I did.”
“Why,” I asked, “was Skutnik afraid the gay media would embarrass him? Doesn’t he own most of the gay media? That’s part of what Eddie Wenske’s book was going to be about.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t own the straight media. I know he knew Eddie was writing an article for The New York Times, and he was scared as shit that Eddie would say all kinds of nasty stuff about himself and Rover. Which he would’ve. That was the point. Tell the truth about HLM.”
“Did Hal say anything to anybody about trying to stop Eddie from publishing his piece?”
“Oh yeah. One of the PAs told me he heard Hal tell the salt mines—that would be Martine and Danielle in accounting—that this article would never see the light of day. He really thought he could stop The New York Times from doing whatever the fuck it wanted to do. That’s how full of shit Hal and Rover are. Can you believe it?”
“Were they planning to sue, or what?”
“Nah, that was all just Hal lighting farts. Eddie is too smart for those dick asses, and I don’t think they would have done anything at all. I mean, what could they?”
I noted the handsome tattoo on Esteban’s well-muscled upper right arm. “Were you a Marine? Or is your tat just decorative?”
“I did one tour in Iraq, and then I got out. I grew up in a neighborhood in East L.A. where you could get shot. I already had enough of that shit.”
“So you know how to protect yourself, it sounds like. And other people, too.”
“You bet your ass I do. But my idea of protection is, don’t go where trouble is.”
“But if somebody you liked had been hurt or killed, you’d want to do what you could to keep that from happening to other good people, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure. Wouldn’t anybody?”
I already had Esteban’s cell number, and I told him I might give him a call.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Instead of dinner, how would you like to meet Hal Skutnik?” Rob Brandstein said when he called me at six thirty. “There’ll be plenty of Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz at this event—HLM’s hors d’oeuvres are as classy as its programming—and if we feel like it we can still eat something afterwards. But an evening with HLM is always a bit of an appetite suppressant.”
I leaped at the chance, and I met Brandstein and his friend Floyd Tate at the Peninsula Hotel at seven fifteen. A sign directed us to the Hey Look Media reception in an event room on the mezzanine. Brandstein, a large man with an easy grin and tufts of black hair growing out of his collar, had left HLM two years earlier under the usual acrimonious circumstances and now worked in programming development at CBS. He told me his current job status would be good enough to keep Skutnik from spotting him at the reception and having him thrown out. Tate, trim and shiny in a perfectly tailored Thai silk suit and Keds, had also been fired from HLM but continued to do business with the company in his current capacity as a marketer for the company that owned the building where HLM leased its Wilshire Boulevard offices.
The reception, Brandstein had told me on the phone, was to launch Hey Look TV’s new reality show The Boys from Nipple Clamp Junction. The show followed the lives of the employees of a sex toy shop in West Hollywood, chronicling their ups and downs, loves and losses.
“That’s Myron Pfluge over there,” Tate said, as we moved into a sea of chattering men and a few women, most of them buff, buffed, and erect, and all of them nicely gotten up in discreet shades of cotton, linen and leather. “Myron is the show runner for The Boys. He’s best known for running three gay film festivals and a publishing house into the ground, and now Hal has given him a chance to show what he can do with a weekly TV series.”
Brandstein added, “Everybody knows exactly what kind of fiasco to expect, including Hal, but as you can see from the festive air here today, nobody gives a fuck.”
“So HLM programming is all just—what? A tax write-off?”
“Oh, no,” Tate said. “Hal truly believes he’s performing a public service. His contempt for gay America is so wide and so deep that he really thinks The Boys from Nipple Clamp Junction is what gay audiences want to sit and look at.”
“Some do, of course,” Brandstein said. “Several hundred, according to projections I’ve heard.”
“Hal badmouths his own shows all the time and splits his gut laughing about screwing over the people who produce them. He doesn’t give a damn about talent or audiences, except in one case. People say he’s embarrassed that he hasn’t produced anything that would make his mother proud. His father, old Maurice Skutnik, was a gnarly old SOB, people in Siskiyou County say, who couldn’t have cared less that his only son was a cynical purveyor of schlock to the nation’s undemanding homosexuals. But Sandra is a sweet, semi-clueless old dame, I’ve heard, who hopes someday Hal will win the Irving Thalberg humanitarian award at the Oscars.”
I said, “It sounds as if he has a ways to go.”
We had made our way to the bar and placed our orders for wine and in my case Perrier, no beer being available.
“Hal has been telling people,” Brandstein said, “that he’s got a project in the works that’s going to win him an Emmy before his mother dies. Some script that’s in development. It’s something Mason Hively is going to direct, and that tells you right there what to expect. Have you ever seen Dark Smooches?”
“Parts of it.”
“Then you know. Creativity-wise, Hal is delusional. And speaking of the prince of dingy smooches—there he is.”
We approached a knot of four men, three of whom were grinning and nodding at a man with his back to us. The back and top of the man’s head did look like a rice paddy in the dry season, with withered stalks that seemed to have been treated not with cosmetics but with a product manufactured by Sherwin-Williams.
As we moved around to face Skutnik, he caught a glimpse of Brandstein and glowered for just a hundredth of a second—it was just this side of subliminal—and then he beamed and crooned out, “Rob! Rob! And Floyd! Floyd! Doll face! Welcome, welcome!”
The three men who had been grinning and nodding picked up an extrasensory signal that their time with Hal was up, and they moved on.
“Hi, Hal. Congratulations on the series,” Brandstein said. “It looks like another notch in HLM’s glittering belt.”
Skutnik guffawed. “Oh, honey, the show is a total piece of shit, and don’t you believe anybody who says otherwise. I mean, do I give the fag public what it wants, or don’t I? We’ll do a hundred thousand DVDs easily, and we’ve already sold foreign rights to Latvia and Korea. Would I overestimate gay men’s tastes in entertainment? Never, ha ha ha!”
Tate said, “North or South Korea?”
“Oh, ha ha, that was funn-eee! North or South Korea! Rover, Rover! Come over here and listen to Floyd’s joke about our sale of The Boys to Korea!”
A large blond man with muscular breasts, an obvious Wendy’s habit, and a certain desperate glint in his eye ambled our way with a drink in one shaky hand. With the other he squeezed Brandstein’s upper arm and planted an air kiss in the space next to his head. Tate was greeted similarly, and returned the air kiss, and then he introduced me to Skutnik and Fye as “our friend Don Strachey.”
Fye grasped my hand briefly and looked straight through me as he was doing so, but Skutnik acted momentarily startled at the mention of my name. “And how do you know these two disgusting faggots, Don?” Skutnik asked me, and looked as if he was actually interested in my reply.
I said, “I’m visiting from the East, and Rob and Floyd are showing me some L.A. local color. You know, a tour of the movie stars’ homes, the Getty, a reception honoring The Boys from Nipple Clamp Junction. I’m having a marvelous time, thanks to Rob and Floyd.”
“Have fun,” Fye said tonelessly, looking over my shoulder for somebody who wasn’t a tourist.
Skutnik said, “Are you in the industry back on the other coast, Don?”
“No, I’m just a happy consumer of entertainment. I’m self-employed.”
“At what?”
“I’m a private investigator.”
“A real, live PI! How exciting!”
“Excitement is rare, luckily. Mostly I just go around poking my nose into other people’s business and asking questions.”
“Rover!” Skutnik sang out. “A fag private eye. Maybe there’s a reality show in it? You are queer, aren’t you, Don?”
“Actually, I have a wife and eleven children back east.”
Fye was focused on something dramatic going on in his own head, but Skutnik was all ears. “I’m surprised to hear that. I’ve heard that Albany is gayer than Fort Lauderdale. Are your wife and kiddies here in L.A. with you? I suppose they’re out at Disneyland for the day, and you and Rob and Floyd are enjoying a boys’ night out. Did I hit the nail on the head?” He winked.
I smiled and said, “I’m just pulling your leg, Hal. I’m gay as a coot. No wife, no young ‘uns. Just an Irish Catholic boyfriend, a thirty-year mortgage on a townhouse, and a couple of overpriced gym memberships.”
“Oh, that’s funny! You really had me going. Are you and your perverted mister lawfully wed in the state of New York? I don’t see a ring on your finger, but maybe you’ve got it wrapped around some other fat digit, ha ha!”
“Timothy and I have talked about marrying, and we’ll get around to it sooner or later. We’re devoted to each other, and we want to support the cause. Though there wouldn’t be all that many legal benefits for us, since there’s no federal recognition. I’m already in Timmy’s state-employee health insurance plan, which is lucky for me.”
“Yes,” Skutnik said, looking at me carefully. “I suppose in your line of work, Don, you often get hurt.”
“Once in a while it happens. Not as often as happens to private eyes in the movies, of course. We’re actually more like investigative reporters than tough guys with gats.”
He didn’t pick up on that or at least didn’t register any change in expression. “What are you working on now, Don? Or are you on vacation?”
Looking distracted, Fye excused himself with a little gesture.
“I’d like to say I’m out here for the sunshine and salad bars, Hal. But I’m actually working on a missing person case.”
“Really! What? Did Grandpa wander off, ha ha?”
“No, a writer is missing. His mother hired me to find him. Eddie Wenske. He was on assignment for The New York Times when he seemed to disappear in January. He was seen out here early this month. But then the trail goes cold.”
“Oh my God, Eddie Wenske!” Skutnik exclaimed. “That humpy young fag who wrote Notes from the Bush! I met him. He came in to see me, in fact. When was that? God, December, I think. Before Christmas.”
“He was out here then, that’s right,” Tate said.
“Yes, he was writing something about gay media, and of course he came up to have a look at our operation. I mean, if you’re writing about beans, you’d want to interview Heinz. Am I right?”
Tate said, “The musical fruit.”
Skutnik guffawed. “The musical fruit! Like Ricky Martin! Oh, Floyd, you are so funn-eee.”
A well-groomed young man with a BlackBerry in his hand came over and looked nervously at Skutnik.
“I’m talking to this man,” Skutnik snapped. “What’s your problem?”
“Two of the boys aren’t here,” the young man said breathlessly. “Nobody knows where they are.”
“The tit-clamp boys? The fucking stars of the fucking show?” Skutnik was reddening and now breathing faster himself.
“They were supposed to be here at six. Charles, Blair, and Rusty are here, but Nando and Glen aren’t, and they’re not answering their cells, and the photographer is here, and the writer from Proud Man and the writer from Bugger. We’re all set to go with your and Rover’s roll-out pitch, but we can’t get started until all the nipple-clamp boys are here, and the hotel says we have to be out of here by eight forty-five or they’ll have to charge us, and Ogden says no way.”
Skutnik threw his drink in the kid’s face. “Who is fucking supposed to be chaperoning those stupid faggots!” he bellowed. A number of party-goers turned our way and gawked briefly, saw who it was doing the screaming, then turned carefully away.
The young man with the dripping face said, “Lonnie was coordinating transportation. But he said they didn’t show up at the store when they were supposed to, and he’s got somebody over there on an open phone, and Nando and Glen still haven’t shown, and Lonnie is totally going out of his mind.”
“Lonnie is gone!” Skutnik screeched. “Tell Lonnie to get the fuck out of here. I never want to lay eyes on Lonnie again. I hate that stupid fag! Just get him out of here!”
“But he…”
“Out! Out! Get him out!”
Now a middle-aged man in a seersucker jacket and a polka dot bow tie came over. “Hal, what the hell is happening?”
“Ogden, they’re not here! The fucking stars of the fucking show! Two of them are missing the fucking roll-out!”
“Well, that is totally inexcusable!”
“They are out of the show, that’s all there is to it. Those two are fired from the show!”
The man who seemed to be Ogden Winkleman, the New York office head who also enjoyed telling people to clean out their desks, said, “It’s a reality show, but you’re right, Hal. We can get actors to play them.”
“Actors? And fucking pay them?”
Rover Fye returned now, looking even jumpier than before, as if maybe he had gone off and ingested or smoked something to help get him through the crisis. “I will kill those two if I ever lay eyes on their sorry-ass faces ever again! I cannot believe they would do this to you, Hal! Don’t they understand who they are fucking over? It’s just in-fucking-credible!”
“All right, all right,” Winkleman said. “Here is what we are going to do. Jason, tell Lonnie we all want him gone. Gone. Got that?”
“Okay,” said the wet-faced man.
“We tell the writers and the photographer,” Winkleman said, “that Nando and Glen quit the sex toy store to go back to Transylvania where they came from or some crap like that, and their replacements are being auditioned. We restage their appearance at the roll-out next week in a studio situation with rear-screen projection or whatever. Have the photographer get some shots of the dais here and the bar and what have you.”
“That should work,” Skutnik said.
Tate said, “Sort of like the faked moon landing in ‘69.”
Skutnik turned toward Tate and said in a frigid voice, “I fired you once, Floyd. I can’t fire you again, but I can destroy you in this town! You understand that, don’t you?”
I could see that both Tate and Brandstein kind of wanted to laugh, but they knew that they didn’t dare, and they just stared at Skutnik awkwardly.
