2

SEEING L.A. FROM THE AIR WAS MORE FRIGHTENING THAN memory permitted. Real, vivid, science fiction. It was just after sundown when we began to land. The natural light of day was gone, replaced by billions of smog particles that gave the coming darkness the hue of blood in a draining sink. This enormous, overfed, infected pink pig of a city rolled across the landscape as far as the eye could see, coughing, snorting and sucking up whatever was once natural and undisturbed.

As the plane descended over the clogged freeways I felt eaten, swallowed within the canopy of filth. A primal instinct warned me that being here was a mistake. Demands would be required of me that I was unprepared to fulfill. The darkness here was too large to defend against.

When we’d landed and I woke Agnes up, we got off the plane and made our way to the baggage claim turnstiles to wait for my brother, Fabrizio. I’d forgotten about the long halls and moving walkways. Suddenly, my mind clicked on like a screaming monkey. Then the body craved booze. I was starting to sweat and feel dizzy.

I left Agnes there by the shiny rotating suitcase conveyor belt. In the bathroom, I pumped handfuls of water up to my face and felt the coldness counteracting my perspiration. Then I checked my appearance. What I saw made me sneer. The guy in the mirror was an impostor. The business suit and tie were absurd and excessive. I still could not give up trying to show them that I was okay. Why did I care? They already knew that my life was coming apart.

I was decomposing from within, like this preposterous town. L.A. was the right place for me after all. I belonged here with the killers of my father: the mind-fucking twenty-two-year old movie producers and distribution gurus who’d dictated the course of his life. I was a true son of L.A.

This was perfect. In a drunken sexual frenzy, I had disgraced myself, then cut my wrists in jail, and now I would show up to shake my brother’s hand and kiss my mother’s cheek.

Standing there I made a decision. I didn’t care. There had been far too many stupid attempts to please others. There would be no more personal requital. My father had spent his life saying the right thing, and ass-kissing actors and Hollywood agents, and now he’d be dead for his trouble. It had never made him happy. I was what I was.

I dried my face. I wasn’t sorry. Then I went outside to the baggage area to find my brother and my wife.

The given name on his birth certificate was Fabrizio. My father immediately regretted the choice as too affected for a writer’s son and too ethnic for Southern California, so a few days later, he changed it to Thomas. Tommy. But they never changed it legally.

I liked the name Fabrizio. It was off-beat and clumsy. I was twelve when he was born, and I chose to continue to call him Fabrizio when we were alone. Not Tommy. The old man told me to stop, but I never did. It stuck as a secret affection between me and the kid. To me, he was Fabrizio.

We were opposites, physically. My hair was light. I was short and thick like my father, with his eyes and nose and chin, but fair-skinned like my mother. Fabrizio was dark like the old man, with wavy Wop hair, but with slim and gentle anglo features like his mother.

We were amalgams of cross-breeding, what happens when a woman of English-German upper middle class ancestry marries an olive-skinned, thick-fingered, Italian bricklayer’s son.

I had left Malibu for New York City when Fabrizio was twelve, and the kid had come to view me as kind of a half-parent. While he was growing up, I was frequently the subject of conversation at my family’s dinner table. He learned about the large amounts of money that I earned and spent in my varied telemarketing business ventures. Later, as reports of arrests and suicide attempts were repeated, his opinion of me changed. Now he would look at me much as my wife did, like a lab animal.

Fab was twenty-five now and a USC graduate in economics. He still had the same car from eight years before. A 1970 Ford Country Squire wagon with the monster four-sixty motor that he’d rebuilt himself. He was dating the same two girls from high school.

We loaded the bags into the Country Squire and headed north toward Malibu. From Fab I learned that my father’s condition was unchanged. His kidneys had failed irreversibly, and the doctors were predicting death within a day or two.

It was seven p.m. and the heat from the day kept the air warm. Fab and Agnes talked while I smoked in the back seat with the window down.

There were cars and clothing named after Malibu. TV shows. Years before, when I first arrived in New York, people had odd reactions to the information that I was from Malibu. I learned that I came from a place that people went to, but weren’t supposed to leave. New Yorkers looked at me like I was an animated Disney character. After the first conversations, I stopped talking about where I was from. If somebody asked where I grew up I’d say, “L.A.”

One night, two weeks after I’d arrived in New York, drunk in a bar on First Avenue, I bet a guy who had a sister in Pomona that there were statues of movie stars all over Los Angeles. The Emilio Esteves was in Santa Monica and the Peter Graves was in Glendale. Vincent Price, before he died, had a chain of California discount stores named after him.

As we made the drive north up the Coast Highway I remembered things. Landmarks. I tried to estimate how many times I had passed Gladstones’ Restaurant. Five thousand times? Ten thousand?

I recalled the photographs of what my father’s house had been like over thirty years before—a big Y-shaped ranch-style deal standing alone near a windy cliff eight miles past the Malibu Colony.

There were no housing developments or banks out that far in those days, and the nearest market was almost halfway back to Santa Monica. I remembered noticing as a boy, when I scrambled up on the roof to shag a stray baseball, that the closest house was half-a-mile away. Our place was built on a spur of land jutting out into the Pacific Ocean where the Indians had buried their dead two hundred years before—named after the French explorer, Dume. Pronounced Doom.

From Torrance or Redondo Beach looking north, the last point of land visible is the hill named Point Dume, flat-topped since WW II when the War Department gave it a crewcut in preparation to make it a strategic gun emplacement. But the “Yellow Menace” from the east never arrived, and twenty years later, Jonathan Dante bought one of the four haciendas on the barren land.

In the 1950’s, the afternoon winds would howl across the flatlands and tumbleweeds blew off the cliffs and hang-glided to the sea a hundred feet below. You could hear seals barking on the rocks and from time to time, around the end of the point, a tribe of whales would chug by, gasping spray twenty feet into the air on their way to warmer waters in Mexico.

Movie money had purchased the Dante home. My father, who at twenty-one had hitchhiked to L.A. from Boulder with three dollars in his pocket, had become a rich screenwriter. He had heeded the advice of his mentor, H.L. Mencken, who years before, had told him to “take every cent they’ll pay you.”

After six months in L.A., young Jonathan Dante was rotting in a hotel room on Bunker Hill, unable to finish his novel, broke and weeks behind on his rent. Mencken exhorted him to take the gig.

It was only a two-week assignment. A writer friend of my father’s who knew his short story work and was pulling down fat weekly paychecks at RKO, recommended they hire the old man to re-write a court scene in a John Garfield flick. The job paid five-hundred-a-week. Enough to finance Dante’s novel for another six months. He grabbed up the quick money and for the rest of his life served two masters.

What happened to Jonathan Dante in Los Angeles is what happens to a man who falls in love with a beautiful, heartless bitch. Each time you touch her round hard breasts and press yourself deeply between her legs, rapture explodes your heart. Possessing her flawlessness fills you with a drug, a perfect divine bliss. You have a dick that never gets soft. The paychecks, the kisses fix everything.

He didn’t look forward or back anymore because he’d learned that in Hollywood the now is all that counts. He forgot that his passion was writing novels. He took up golf. Covering the nut and nights drinking at Musso’s with his screenwriter pals, became what mattered. After that, his preoccupations became rewrite deadlines and stocks and real estate and the putting green at Fox Hills.

L.A. was a flawless plum of a town then. Wonderful big open streets and crisp, dry air and an endless sun that filled the world with hope. Her people were open and friendly and the picture business brought a dream-come-true reality to the place that was unavoidable. It really could happen. You could move west to L.A. and change your life. Southern California was FDR’s prototype of the New Deal.

A poor writer growing up in the poverty of the thirties, finding L.A. blooming, beautiful—an air-brushed kibbutz paradise—Dante knew he must have her and let his tongue penetrate her every orifice. At the time it didn’t matter too much that, in the essence of his bones, he knew he was licking the clit of the spider lady.