The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death - Charlie Huston [29]
And he should know. Old L.L. put his years in as a high school teacher. Toiling in the mines of public education for well over a decade.
He'd still be there now.
Except that he wrote a novel. And he lived in Los Angeles. And someone he knew knew someone who knew someone who passed the novel around to someone. And that someone turned out to be Dennis Hopper. And he showed it to Bob Rafelson. And Bob, as he was known around our house, took out an option.
And L.L.'s opinions about remuneration changed very rapidly thereafter.
At least that's how my mom tells the story.
—And what brings the fruit of my loins to the western precipice of this, our waning civilization?
I forked up the last of the sand dabs he'd ordered for me and wiped my mouth.
—Nothing.
I put the fork down and pushed the plate away. Dad hadn't bothered to eat, food inhibiting, as it does, the absorption of alcohol.
He flicked his eyes across a page of the book he had reopened while I ate.
—Nothing. Certainly. Why should a janitor be anything but aimless? The freedoms of the laboring class. Why fill the off hours with knowledge and investigation, with self-improvement? To what end, after all? Nothing. Indeed.
I leaned over on my stool and took a toothpick from the dispenser on the shelf next to the menus. The waiters were coming on for dinner service, I watched one use an ice cream scoop on a tub of refrigerated butter, plopping the perfect little balls into white dishes. Another slid trays of dinner salads into the stand-fridge. The manager chalked specials on a board. A couple regulars came in and the bartender started making their drinks without being asked.
I looked at L.L. reading Anna Karenina. I thought about Anna throwing herself under her train. I thought about the shower of blood and brain on the bedroom wall of the house in Malibu. I thought about the putrid stain the pack rat left on the floor in Koreatown.
I picked my teeth.
—Guess I was just thinking about you, L.L. Thought I'd come by and see how you're doing.
He glanced at me, eyes peering just over the top of his glasses. He signaled the bartender and looked back down at his book.
—A banner day. Another beer is surely in order.
L.L. wrote the screenplay, and it was a hit.
It was read by everyone in Hollywood. Dad became the hottest writer in town. Coppola tapped him to adapt Travels with Charley. Redford wanted to know if he'd brush up a remake of The Heart of the Matter. Michael Cimino was looking to do the life of Jim Thomson. Robert Evans thought he'd snagged the Holy Grail, the rights to The Catcher in the Rye. Did L.L. want first crack? Anything and everything with a whiff of the literary, L.L. Crows was at the top of the list to write, adapt, brush up, or take a pass at.
And he took every job. And he wrote some of the most consistently excellent and praised screenplays Hollywood has ever seen. And not a fucking one was ever produced. Nothing that he got screen credit for, anyway. But in the ’70s, and through most of the ’80s, his red pencil marks had decorated, and vastly improved, he'd be sure to inform you, the pages of a small forest's worth of scripts. Some good, some pure ass. Several Oscar nominees, and a few winners. Not that he gave a fuck one way or another. Because they weren't his stories. He was just the hired gun, getting richer than any human could pray to a fat and greedy Jesus to get.
His story, his admired and lauded screenplay of his one and only novel, walked up and down the runway and had its skirt lifted by every A-list studio/actor/director/producer