American Dream Machine Read online

  AMERICAN

  DREAM

  MACHINE

  AMERICAN

  DREAM

  MACHINE

  A NOVEL BY MATTHEW SPECKTOR

  TIN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon & New York, New York

  Copyright © 2013 Matthew Specktor

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Specktor, Matthew.

  American dream machine : a novel / Matthew Specktor. -- 1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-935639-45-9 (ebook)

  1. Theatrical agents--Fiction. 2. Motion picture industry--Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons--Fiction. 4. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.P437A83 2013

  813’.6--dc23

  2012035642

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First U.S. edition 2013

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  www.tinhouse.com

  For RSG, and in memory of Bill Spruill

  Contents

  PART ONE: A DROP IN THE BUCKET

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  PART TWO: THE DOG’S TAIL

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  PART THREE: DREAM BABY DREAM

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  PART FOUR: RECURRING

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  PART FIVE: MARLOW/E

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  Acknowledgment

  THEY CLOSED DOWN the Hamlet on Sunset last night. That old plush palace, place where Dean Martin drank himself to death on Tuesdays, where my father and his friends once had lunch every weekend and the maître d’ was quick to kiss my old man’s hand. Like the one they called “the other Hamlet” in Beverly Hills, and “the regular other Hamlet” in Century City . . . all of these places now long gone. Hollywood is like that. Its forever institutions, so quick to disappear. The Hamburger Hamlet, the one on Sunset, was in a class by itself. Red leather upholstery, dark booths, the carpets patterned with a radical and problematic intaglio. Big windows flung sun in front, but farther in the interior was dim, swampy. Waitresses patrolled the tables, the recessed depths where my father’s clients, men like Stacy Keach and Arthur Hill, sat away from human scrutiny. Most often their hair was mussed and they were weeping. Or they were exultant, flashing lavish smiles and gold watches, their bands’ mesh grain muted by the ruinous lighting, those overhead bulbs that shone down just far enough to make the waitresses’ faces look like they were melting under heat lamps. And yet the things that were consummated there: divorces, deals! I saw George Clooney puking in one of the ficuses back by the men’s room, one time when I was in.

  Unless it was somebody else. The one thing I’ve learned, growing up in Los Angeles: it’s always someone else. Even if it is the person you thought it was the first time. I helped him up. I laid my hand on the back of George Clooney’s collar. He was wearing a blue jacket with a deeper velveteen lapel, like an expensive wedding singer. This, and white bucks.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” He spat. “They make the Manhattans here really strong.”

  “Do they?”

  We were near the kitchen, too, and could smell bacon, frying meat, other delicacies—like Welsh rarebit—I would describe if they still had any meaning, if they existed any longer.

  “I’ll buy you one and you can check it out.”

  I helped him back to his table. I remember his touch was feathery. He clutched my arm like a shy bride. Clooney wasn’t Clooney yet, but I, unfortunately, was myself. ’91? ’92? The evening wound on, and on and on and on: Little Peter’s, the Havoc House. Eventually, Clooney and I ended up back at someone’s place in the Bird Streets, above Doheny.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” I said.

  “Like what?” In my mind, the smile is Clooney’s exactly, but at the time all he’d said was that he was an actor named Sam or Dave or (in fact, I think he actually did say) George, but I’ll never know. “Why am I dressed like what?”

  “Like a fucking prom date from the retro future. Like an Italian singer who stumbled into a golf shop.” I pointed. “What the hell is with those shoes?”

  “Hey,” he said. “Check the stitching. Hand-soled.”

  We were out back of this house, whosever it was, drinking tequila. Cantilevered up above the city, lolling in director’s chairs. Those houses sell for a bajillion dollars nowadays, but then it was just some crappy rental where a friend of a friend was chasing a girl around a roomful of mix-and-match furniture, listening to the Afghan Whigs or the Horny Horns or the Beach Boys—my favorite band of all time, by the way—or else a bunch of people were crowded around a TV watching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on videocassette. It didn’t matter. Mr. Not-Quite-or-Not-Yet-Clooney and I were outside watching the sun come up, and we were either two guys who would someday be famous or two rudderless fuck-ups in our midtwenties. He was staring out at the holy panorama of Los Angeles at dawn, and I couldn’t get my eyes off his shoes.

  “Why am I dressed like this?” My new friend wrung his hands together limply. I ought to sell that fact to a tabloid, to prove Clooney is gay. “I was at a function,” he said.

  “What kind of function? A convention of Tony Bennett fans? A mob wedding?”

  I don’t remember what he said next. I think he said, I was in Vegas, and I asked him how much he’d lost. I probably gave him a sloppy kiss. I knew it was you, Fredo! There was an empty swimming pool nearby. It must’ve been February. Italian cypresses rose up in inviting cones, the scalloped houses dropped off in stages beneath us, and eventually the whole hill flattened out into that ash-colored plane, that grand and gray infinity that is Los Angeles from up above: God’s palm, checkered with twinkling lights and crossed with hot wind.

  “I can never remember the words to this one . . . ”

  “What?” I said. “It’s mostly moaning.”

  “They’re all mostly moaning.”

  George and I went digging into the old soul music catalog, to prove our masculine bona fides. None of those Motown lite, Big Chill-type classics that turdscaped so many of my father’s late eighties productions. We went for the nonsense numbers, the re
al obscurities. We sang “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um,” “The Whap Whap Song,” “Oogum Boogum,” “Lobster Betty.” A couple of those might not have been real, but we did ’em anyway.

  “Nice pipes.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I was up for The Doors but I never got a callback.”

  We spent the rest of the night drinking and singing. People blame Los Angeles for so many things, but my own view is tender, forgiving. I love LA with all of my heart. This story I have to tell doesn’t have much to do with me, but it isn’t about some bored actress and her existential crises, a troubled screenwriter who comes to his senses and hightails it back to Illinois. It’s not about the vacuous horror of the California dream. It’s something that could’ve happened anywhere else in the world, but instead settled, inexplicably, here. This city, with its unfortunate rap. It deserves warmer witness than dear old Joan Didion.

  “Don’t do that, man.” My voice echoed. I clapped my friend on the shoulder. “Don’t do the pleading-and-testifying thing. You’ll hurt your knees!”

  “I’m all right.”

  By the time we were done, we were deep into the duos, those freaky-deaky pairs from Texas or Mississippi: Mel & Tim; Maurice & Mac; Eddie & Ernie. Those gap-toothed couples who’d managed to eke out a single regional hit before fading back into their hard-won obscurity. My new friend seemed to know them all, and by the time we were finished I didn’t know which of us was Mel and which Tim, which of us had died in a boardinghouse and which, the lucky one I presume, still gigged around Jacksonville. Him, probably. He was dressed for it.

  “I should get going,” he said, at last.

  “Right.” Not like either of us had anywhere to be at this hour, but he needed to go off and get famous and I needed to find my jacket and a mattress. A man shouldn’t postpone destiny. “Later.”

  We embraced, and I believe he groped my groin. After that I never saw him again, not if he was not, as I am now forced to consider, George Clooney. I just watched him climb the steps out of the swimming pool, into which we’d descended in order to get the correct echo, the right degree of reverb on our voices. This was what it was like inside a vocal booth at Stax, or when the Beach Boys recorded “Good Vibrations” at Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. So we told one another, and perhaps we were right. For a moment I remained in this sunken hole in the ground that was like a grave slathered with toothpaste—it was that perfect bland turquoise color—and sang that song about the dark end of the street, how it’s where we’ll always meet. But I stopped, finally. Who wants to sing alone?

  This is what I remember, when I think of the Hamlet on Sunset. This, and a few dozen afternoons with my dad and half brother, the adolescent crucible in which I felt so uncomfortable, baffled by my paternity and a thousand other things. Clooney’s cuffs; the faint flare of his baby-blue trousers; the mirrored aviator shades, like a cop’s, he slipped on before he left. It was ten thirty in the morning. I held a bottle of blanco by its neck and looked over at the pine needles, the brittle coniferous pieces that had gathered around the drain. Clooney’s bucks had thick rubber soles and made a fricative sound as he crossed the patio, then went through the house and out. I heard the purr of his Honda Civic, its fading drone as he wound down the hill and left me behind with my thoughts.

  PART ONE: A DROP IN THE BUCKET

  I

  “NATE, MAN! NATE!”

  I’d fallen asleep. And when I woke up—has this ever happened to you?—it was a different house, a different season, a different day altogether. In fact it was, although it felt much the same. I’d fallen asleep on a chaise lounge, outside another house in the hills. Same neighborhood, even similar patio furniture.

  “Hmmh?”

  Different season, same hangover. But this one, of course, I remember, because it set up the most disastrous night of my young life. This particular morning, which was not the one after I met semi Clooney, was in April 1993.

  “You were out there all night?” Someone was yelling to me from inside.

  I rubbed my eyes, which burned with pollen. “Yeah.”

  My voice was hoarse, my throat was dry. It didn’t seem unusual to me: falling asleep was what you did when you’d been up a certain number of hours and weren’t into cocaine. Still, I’d come out last night and lain down to look at the Italian cypresses and the stars, and suddenly it was morning, and hot, with the sun hanging overhead, the sky almost white. My back was sore, as there were no pillows on the chaise, just wooden slats. I levered up and rubbed my skull.

  “You want breakfast?”

  I couldn’t even tell who was talking. It was either my half brother, Severin, or it was our friend Williams. The three of us were so close, it almost didn’t matter.

  “Yeah,” I yelled. “I’ll be right in.”

  Severin, Williams, and I. We’d known each other all our lives, and until this particular morning we were just young Hollywood princes, wastrels who’d never stood anything to lose. None of us were yet twenty-five.

  “Coming,” I mumbled. But then I stopped and knelt down for a minute by the swimming pool. This one was full. I dipped my hand into the water. Unheated. What I wouldn’t have given for a siphon and a skateboard. From one of the windows upstairs came the sound of people fucking. Whose place was this? Another night in the Hollywood Hills, another evening of people living both way above and beneath their slender yet infinite means: young actors between gigs, bastard children of wealthy executives like myself. I waited for the erotic clamor to pass, listened to the Santa Ana too as it battered the treetops and rattled the foliage all the way down to Sunset. I thought I heard my father, his voice buffeted around in all that crazy wind. Nate! You skinny little shit! Why aren’t you home writing? You wanna make something of yourself, you should be working, working, working! He was always harder on me than he was on Severin, though hard enough on us both. Eventually, after the sex stopped, I got up and went inside. I collided with Williams as I strode through the sliding glass doors into the living room.

  “Hey, bub.” He hugged me. We pawed each other like boxers, forehead to forehead, mauling each other’s ears. “Did you eat? I was calling.”

  “No,” I said. We wouldn’t let each other go. There was a barely suppressed violence to our embrace, as if at any moment one of us would throw the other to the ground. “I didn’t want to interrupt anybody.”

  The room smelled like bad dope, cheap marijuana seeds and stems. There was a white couch, and a pair of high-top sneakers lay shucked off beside it. The place had that characterless mood of a ski condominium, everything pale and impersonal.

  “Who lives here?” I let Williams go. He wasn’t dressed, except for his shorts.

  “Tudor.” The head of his dick protruded, a little, through his fly, but he didn’t seem to know or care. “He’s out of town.”

  I didn’t know who Tudor was. Williams had scumbag friends in those days, twentysomething punks who swaggered around like Robert Altman was their best pal, who hung out at the Viper Room and Dominic’s after hours, sharking the pool table and powdering their noses. Guys like that could get a freewheeler like Will into trouble.

  “Cool.” I forgave Williams everything, because we were like brothers, too—we’d known each other since kindergarten—and because his dad was killed when we were fifteen. What else did he have to hang on to, besides any old bit of driftwood that came his way? “I’m gonna get some chow.”

  How handsome he was: tan and lithe and flawed only by the little scars a lifetime of skateboarding had left him with, a chipped tooth and the crooked stride of someone who’d sprained an ankle often enough to favor the other one permanently. I was pretty good-looking myself, fortunate enough to take after my mother, one of those glossy blonde sylphs, neither actress nor agent, who haunted the corridors of power in the sixties. But almost inevitably when there were women around, they were Will’s. He had a magnetism neither my brother nor I could match. This time, though, it was Severin who’d gotten lucky. I h
eard feminine footsteps coming down the stairs.

  “Bye.” The girl peeked in. She was like this place: pale, Nordic, pretty. Her face was pure, almost featureless, like sunlight on a white curtain.

  “Later,” Williams said. I waved. I recognized her, too. After she slipped back down the hall Williams chuckled.

  “Dude, that’s your dad’s intern.”

  Sure. Emily White was her name. I heard her calling out to my brother. Severin, have you seen my keys? Our dad used to be business partners with Little Will’s. The two men founded the most powerful agency in Hollywood. They were like mismatched halves of the same being. We grew up under their shadows, the three children of twin fathers.

  “Are you cold?” I said. Because Williams was shivering a little, rubbing his biceps. He was high, but that wasn’t unusual. We were teenagers, basically, who saw nothing wrong with hitting the bong at eight in the morning. His oval eyes shone, those dark apertures that only underscored his supercilious beauty, his sunstruck good looks.

  He shook his head. “I gotta go find my shit.”

  He went upstairs. I watched him amble away and then followed the sound of banging and clattering to the kitchen.

  “Hey, man.” Severin was bustling between the fridge and the stove. “You want eggs?”

  “Yep. Lox ‘n’ onions.”

  I looked around. The girl was already gone, having left through the patio door.

  “No lox. Wait!” He opened the fridge. Even then, long before he moved back east and got famous, he had a New Yorker’s haste and energy. “Yes! Lox, from Canter’s.” He sniffed. “I dunno how good it is.”

  Shorter than I was—and barely six months older; he and I had different mothers—he came over and ruffled my hair. I was the accident, the product of an affair, where he was Beau Rosenwald’s legitimate son. That made all the difference.

  “Sit.” His headlock was a lot gentler than Will’s. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

  I flopped at the table and watched him, playing absently with a Zippo lighter while I did. He was our father’s son, though he certainly didn’t look it. He was wiry and small, with pitch-black hair and a boundless intellectual confidence.