Los Angeles

WE WANT TO BURN, TO BE DISINTEGRATED, TO WATCH our creations—the towers and bridges, the art, the machines, our babies, our lovers, our dreams and bodies, thousands of years, our ways, our poetry, whatever we want to outlive us—bludgeoned and brained, thrown, crushed, but above all burned.

We meant everyone, George told me, whether they knew it or not. This is what the movies were for. If you didn’t just come out and say it, the experience could be exalted—truly out of this world, as the posters so often threatened. You could know the truth in your heart. But they always asked him for words—for people with names and pasts to run around and point at things or fall in love. Every time, right as it was getting good, someone ruinously handsome would step into the frame and recite a line George had been paid to write—The monster has doubled in size! perhaps, or We only have five minutes to save the earth!—and he was no longer in that world, but thrown back into this one. Differently great and terrible, as he described it. Differently burning.

He left. The film still rolling, no one on the sidewalk. The day’s heat had melted the sky into a syrup of an evening. In those days there was a sameness to Los Angeles that nurtured rituals. The palms swayed, the convertibles honked. The dusk bound the city like gauze. He plucked a cigarette from the silver case. It was a good movie—he had to give himself that. The hideous spiders, enormous from uranium, moved like they were alive, and the flames that shot out of their eyes were believable. The burned bodies and cratered cities would give people nightmares. Even the narrative held together. But it wasn’t quite it, not in the way he’d imagined. They never were. Death from Above!: the poster was illustrated with people in terror and in pain. It said, SCREENPLAY BY GEORGE CURTIS. These films, Hollywood, America—none of it was anything to be proud of.

He wasn’t alone. The boy or man in the ticket booth gestured at the poster. Wanna see it again, mister? I saw it this morning and it worked me up so bad I don’t think I’ll sleep for a week. There wasn’t much of him—the kind of boy you could fold in half and zip into a suitcase—but already George was transfixed. He watched as he removed the stupid little hat they made him wear, as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. A scar rose high over his left eye like a second eyebrow. By now George knew he was staring, and he felt arrestable, deportable. But you can’t necessarily understand everyone with your eyes. The youngster pointed at George’s pocket. Can you spare one of those?

What smoking does is draw attention to the lips, the throat. You can see how we are alive. In all the movies this was how the stars entranced you. The boy thanked him—It sure gets dull out here by yourself, the flick still rolling and all—and George smiled. Some of us, maybe all of us in the beginning, think we’re so subtle, so secret. The film had another hour at least and the booth had solid shutters to prevent burglaries, and everyone needs a break now and then. And the boy did have such lips. He did have, George discovered, such a throat.

It was supposed to be 1956, supposedly autumn—even if California had nothing to do with such things. How else would it people itself? It even ensnared Americans, George noticed. And not just the Iowans and Kansans but so too the New Yorkers, the Bostonians, the Philadelphians. People had left real cities to come here, and not even to flee a war.

A few had done terrible things in what they called previous lives. Yet most of the Americans he met in L.A. seemed seduced. Even grown men—and not just those men—were as foolish and careless as the young, lied-to teenagers who ran away from home. It made their souls easy to steal and sell back to them, enlarged and enlivened. To trouble them. To borrow and make an alteration and return. And even George, after a drink on some rich actor’s terrace, ashing into a pool among the thrashing, laughing, most beautiful bodies on earth—even he felt happily dead.

From the beginning, he tried not to know anyone. He failed. People liked him, and he, despite everything, liked people. Especially Americans. Perhaps because they seemed so much closer to dogs.

His favorite American was Jack Turner, one of two men with whom he shared an office at the studio. Because they worked together and lived only a mile apart, and because George did not drive, Jack pulled up in front of George’s apartment every morning and honked. It was so wholesome. In return, George made coffee—stronger than you could get from any counter or café. Every morning, George remembered, their lips sipped from the same thermos. Which wasn’t anything Jack would notice; he wasn’t the sort of man who’d care about lips. It wasn’t incidental, however, that Jack was unmarried and childless and lived alone in a studio apartment on Hayworth, just before Sunset took its crooked turn. George had taken this into account immediately.

Yet there were years, he told me. Always years, like the sepia silt that gathered on silver and tarnished your reflection. But one day, some poor country’s failed revolution polished time clean, and George saw, quite clearly, who his favorite American really was. Up until then, George said, it’d been so easy to believe he’d found a place to forget in—forever. But life, he said, is like that. It rolls along its boulevards and shuts its eyes to the glare of the sun, and then you’re bleeding to death on some streetcorner where a road named after a flower meets another named after a crook.

It was Tuesday, October 23. All the history books would confirm it. A perfect day in California, but when wasn’t it? You’ll need to call a car tonight, George, Jack was saying as the attendant waved them onto the lot. They’re breathing down my neck. If I don’t finish tonight, you’ll have to come see me at the soup kitchen. Or the morgue.

George searched for the right word. There was at least one of them for everything. Coincidentally, was an incredible one, I’ll be staying late as well. A late-nighter for both of us. There’d been, of course, no such plan. A successful film meant the studio was already pressuring him for a sequel, but he hadn’t made up his mind to take them seriously or not. Death has come from above, Edwards had barked at him, so why not from below? But there’d never been a good sequel in the history of anything, so George had turned instead to another script—something about an imposter. He wasn’t far along, and spending so much time with it at this early stage would hurt rather than help it. Which didn’t matter in the least.

I think you mean an ‘all-nighter,’ but that’s swell.

Yes, George admitted. We’ll get some dinner, perhaps some wine. The night was already getting carried away with itself, in his head. Or bourbon, he offered, as all you Hollywood Jacks seem to prefer.

I like the way you think.

Jack knew nothing about the way George thought. At least, one had to presume he didn’t. Just as nothing had ever happened during the day, with Ellman, their officemate, there at his typewriter, so too would nothing happen in the evening. The two men—one must never forget that he and Jack were two established adult men, men with savings accounts and lawyers and references—would chastely type, drink coffee and bourbon, smoke cigarettes, and curse their failures of imagination, their shortcomings. Their mutual fear, George mused, of death. They would write the films they were paid, modestly, to write.

Of course, with Ellman present there wasn’t even the possibility of something happening, which is to say the possibility of fantasy. Ellman was nearing fifty and wore bow ties. His wrists, richly tendoned and colorfully veined as they hovered over his Royal, were like the dried little sheaves of sage spiritually enlightened actresses threw into their fireplaces. He read Bertrand Russell on his lunch break and maintained an angry, if sincere, correspondence with the censors. It would be, George thought, like making love in front of your accountant, if love was what you could tell yourself it was. Even Ellman’s movies were flops.

Just once, he said when George and Jack walked in together, one might consider that there are others in this world—indeed, in this very room—who enjoy drinking coffee in the morning. Everything he said, he never said it at you; he just unfurled it into the air like a flag and let it wave if it wanted, drape if it didn’t.

That looks like a half-full mug right on your desk, Jack said.

Always the optimist.

I will bring you a cup tomorrow, George said.

One doesn’t have to.

This is true, yes. There’s no compelling one, if that’s what one means to say.

No compelling one, Jack said, and turned to Ellman. He got you all right.

They’d been together like this, the three of them, for two years. Occasionally the studio shuffled in a fourth writer, young men burdened with ideas who either quit or disappeared or got blacklisted. Men who thought they could mock McCarthy and get away with it. Men who doubted war. Men who said the word union and weren’t even allowed to clean out their own desks; their possessions would be mailed, management said, after a careful inventory and examination. George had begun to suspect it was purposeful, these ambitious, feisty little failures flung at them as warnings. He was grateful; they helped deflect from his own oversights. Before the script that would become Death from Above! he’d proposed a film about an ancient monster deep beneath the Nevada desert, awakened by radiation. Why, they’d demanded, wasn’t the monster hidden beneath Siberia? Why was it American radiation and not Russian that had endangered Las Vegas? He apologized. He was European, he protested. Sometimes he missed the subtleties of American politics. He congratulated them on catching his mistake, and appreciated their generosity in putting up with his foolishness. He was as dusty, he said, as an old library book.

"The word is rusty, goddamn it."

Rusty as an old book?

Get out.

In his heart he kept a private script, never put to paper, where the monster was not only awakened by but fed upon American bombs, and by the time they finally listened to the scientist—a Hungarian, say—that the only way to kill the monster was to starve it forever through complete nuclear disarmament, they’d sacrificed half their own cities in attempts to destroy it. That, George told me, would have been a film.

Instead, this is what had happened to his life:

If he stepped out onto the balcony that overlooked the studio’s backlot and connected all the writers’ offices together, he could see a little suburban street somewhere in middle America, an Old West mining town, an outcrop of Mars or the moon (depending on the light bulbs), the imposing gates to an Arabian city. And beyond? Palms, donut shops, diners, and thousands of miles of dazzling cars laced together and draped over all of it like a gemstone shift. It was obscene. Sometimes, alone, he said, I am in Los Angeles, just as he’d once said, in the same tone of disbelief, I am in New York. It had become an existence. Even if survival’s cost, it seemed, had ruined him in other ways.

Ellman had to leave, he announced, for a meeting. It was 4:40 in the afternoon. Jack waved without looking. George wished him a good evening. The studio had encouraged the writers, all of them, to keep notebooks in their shirt pockets, which were handy, management said, not only for ideas and addresses and phone numbers but for observing unusual behavior, should any, they said, exist. Each notebook had the studio logo and the official seal of the United States of America embossed on the leather cover. The inside of George’s notebook was blank. A moment like this, he knew, was what management meant by behavior: At 4:40 p.m., Tues, Oct 23, Francis J. Ellman left—no, was seen leaving—to attend a meeting. The word meeting would be, George imagined, in quotes, if not in actuality at least in spirit, and whoever read it would nod thoughtfully, knowingly. Yes, a meeting. This said, no doubt, from behind a very large desk. Thank you, Mr. Curtis, this is valuable information.

George removed the notebook from his shirt. He pressed it open, spine down, to the first page. He wrote, Oct 1956: A woman falls in love with an all-American man. He is a robot with terrible intentions. He pocketed the notebook. At five o’clock, he put on his hat, stepped out—he said—for some air, and retu rned with two sandwiches and a bottle of bourbon. For later, he told Jack, and put on a fresh pot of coffee.

It was so shameful, all this over a man. It wasn’t the first time he’d stayed late to keep Jack company while he sweated out the final pages of another war picture on deadline—something remarkably common in Jack’s life. He knew, even before Jack did, at what time he would sigh and wipe his forehead and say, I hope you don’t mind, George, as he unbuttoned his shirt to the waist. And George knew how it would feel to look and not look. Jack, it should be remembered, was not young but he wasn’t old, either—in fact George’s age but better cared for, a machine kept oiled and tuned. Jack loved himself. Every few lines, he would give a sort of shrug or a roll of the shoulders, which only parted farther the curtains of his shirt. From thy clay, George thought, to mould me man. If you are like me, you are already imagining what George was imagining, and you already know why George waited, throughout their brief years of work together, for Jack to announce that it would be a late night, and why such a stupid little phrase lit him up like a coal at the heart of a fire given a slow, steady blow of life. And it is that time now. Jack stretches his arms. He wipes his brow. He apologizes. He opens his shirt. Whatever George is typing, over at his own desk, you can imagine it means nothing, perhaps even says nothing. Lines of Novalis or Goethe hammered out from memory, or Baudelaire, or Verlaine, or—God help him—Rimbaud.

I know, I know, Jack said as he shrugged the shirt away altogether. Naked, for the first time, all the way to the waist. The mass of his shoulders flicked and jumped as he typed, spasming like a horse upset over a fly. He grinned. Such a savage, right? I’m afraid we can’t all be as refined, my friend—as civilized—as you. He curled a fresh page into the machine and popped the bottle George had procured. Pretty soon, old George, he said, and held a glass in his direction, the guys up in Mahogany Row will have us all so overworked—their fingers brushed as George took the bourbon Jack had poured—that we’ll all be naked, roaming these halls like dogs, grunting and sweating and typing up these stories, no one to look at—he winked—but each other. Cheers. It was after midnight and there were no other cars in the lot, no other lights pouring out onto the balconies. Jack’s feet were propped up on his desk, his free hand resting gently in his lap, even if one finger waved, calmly, like something alive at the bottom of the sea, as it brushed something sizably hidden. George did not move.

All of this was many years ago, and the expectations—if not the sheer consciousness—of those living in America, or at least those living whitely, had not yet matured or been yet maltreated into being. It was before Norman Morrison set himself on fire beneath the office window of the secretary of defense, and before American students were murdered, in Ohio, for protesting their nation’s bombardment of Cambodia. It was before the marches and beatings of what would be called the Civil Rights era, and long before, in the following century, millions filled the streets of American cities to protest its lingering apartheid. It was merely 1956. Only in backward nations like Hungary could twenty thousand students meet beneath a statue like Józef Bem’s, in Budapest, and demand the abdication of the People’s Republic.

Within hours, the crowd had swelled tenfold. By nine thirty that evening they had crossed the Danube, gathered outside parliament, and toppled the thirty-foot bronze statue of Stalin. They’d planted, George read, Hungarian colors in his boots. He felt electrocuted as he held that morning’s paper. Injected. Gassed. He’d forgotten what it was to hope or believe, to imagine a future beyond the pale headlights of one’s aimless automobile. It took everything to keep his voice flat as he offered the details to Jack, whose own distance and malaise, wiped out after their long night of work, was a relief. It was never wise, George told me—not in those days—to let anyone know you wanted more than what you had. As they departed their office and left the valley, the mountains were beginning to glow in the east. A new, terrible day. But how, George thought, could you care about such trivialities?

Three hours, Jack warned. He left him at the curb. Birds had noticed the light. The most diligent gardeners had begun their work. Tires were purring just around the corner, on the cool pavement of La Brea, and there was a wealth of crisp shade all around him. Upstairs, things weren’t so peaceful. The boy from the movie theater, whose name, it turned out, was also Jack, but whom George nicknamed Jacques, had taken to showing up at random if unholy hours of the night and demanding love or punishment. It was nothing they’d spoken about or agreed to—they never made plans—yet it had established itself through repetition, through patterns of sleep and tumescence. He even had a key, a copy he’d made without George’s permission. They’d met outside the theater only two weeks ago.

Jacques was full of souls and they were all tormented. He cleaned the apartment for George and wore an apron when he tried to cook; he was nineteen and said terrible things like, Come make love to your wife. To make love meant to torture. It wasn’t enough until you’d bruised him. There were wounds up and down his arms, every stage from fresh to scar. He’d once shown George the pleasure, he called it, of extinguishing a cigarette on his thigh. Never do that again, George warned.

That morning, he aped perfectly a wife’s cinematic jealousy. He was furious that George had been out all night, though who can know at what time Jacques had drifted into George’s apartment to smell his clothes and suck up all his air. He was sobbing,