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By Root 1048 0

a few key members of the Velvet Mafia and Silver Lake hipsters and couples from Malibu and a good-looking chef with his own reality show. Conversations began as the food was served: the second house in Telluride, the new production company, the frequent trips to the plastic surgeon, the tantrum so violent that the police were called, all the exertion that led nowhere. I listened to it all, or imagined I did. There were too many words I didn’t understand the meaning of anymore (happy, cake, jingle, preen), and I was so over this world that it made no impact on me: the number of explosions per scene, the movie that took place in a submarine, the script that lacked a sympathy portal, the S&M dalliance with an underaged hooker, fucking the prom queen recovering from implant surgery, the screaming rockets, the washboard abs, the sex on the air mattress, the Vicodin binge. And then the conversation took a more sober route when talk of a certain movie came up: if it didn’t gross over a billion dollars, the certain movie would lose money for the three studios financing it. After that, the pointlessness of everyone’s enterprise hung placidly over the dinner. And soon you were noticing that the facial surgery had rendered so many of the women and men at the party expressionless, and an actress kept wiping her mouth with a napkin to stem the drooling after too much fat had been injected into her lips. A giant cactus stood blocking a downstairs hallway with the words “believe the skeptics” scrawled in black across its green skin, and as storytelling resumed I wondered how you could ever get past the cactus. But then I realized I was concentrating on that only because I wondered who was going to listen to my story? Who was going to believe in the monsters I had encountered and the things I had seen? Who was going to buy the pitch I was making in order to save myself?

After the initial site reading indicated—no, confirmed—that the house was infested, I had been driven back to the Four Seasons, where I wired a transfer into Miller’s account. I was told “the process” would take two days to complete and I did not want to know the specifics of how they planned on cleansing the house. Obviously, I told myself, this was something they knew how to do—they were professionals; they had proved this to me during the ISR—and I would stay out of their way for those two days by traveling to L.A., under the auspices of the Harrison Ford meeting, where I would retrieve my father’s ashes from the Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Carrying out this plan was my only focus (I was not going to be waylaid by anything) and so by two o’clock on that Thursday afternoon I had already booked a flight and—after meeting with Marta at the hotel to explain that the house on Elsinore Lane was being fumigated and she would be staying with the children at the Four Seasons until I returned on Sunday—I was driving to the Midland Airport. While steering the Range Rover down the empty interstate, I called ICM and asked them to set up the meeting with Ford’s people for the following day since I was flying in that night and was leaving Sunday morning. Everything went so efficiently that it was almost as if I had willed it. There was no traffic, I was whisked through airport security, the plane left on schedule, it was a smooth flight and we landed before the estimated arrival time at Long Beach (since so much of LAX was under reconstruction). When I spoke to Jayne while driving down the 405 toward Sunset she was “glad” (which I interpreted as “relieved”) that I was doing this for myself. I had opted out on the Chateau Marmont since it was a haunt from the drug days and stayed at the Bel Air Hotel instead; it was close to the dinner party that the producer of the Harrison Ford project had invited me to when he heard I was coming to town, and also to my mother’s house in the Valley. It wasn’t until I was ensconced in my suite at the Bel Air, sorting through a stack of Harrison Ford DVDs the producer had messengered over—along with directions on how to