Funny how an idea comes like a seed. A seedling, an inspiration. By the time Ian reached his desk, he’d developed a protagonist and a story line. How simple it was: the man who’d lost everything. He lit a joint and, four hours later, had fourteen pages of a new screenplay.
At first, Ethan Carson thought the man from Landmark Theaters Dallas had miscalculated. He was certain that, instead of a weekend figure, the man was quoting for the entire week. Ethan immediately called someone in marketing at Warner Brothers and found that, indeed, they were doing serious business in Dallas. Ditto, Boston and Philadelphia, Seattle and Portland. Chicago had been slow Saturday afternoon, but had picked up, selling out its three o’clock matinees. New York held steady. The only competition was a film directed toward black women, Holding It In.
Ear to the Ground, it appeared, had legs a mile long. It didn’t drop off at all, would do $36 million in its second week, for a “cume” of $73 million, and would likely do $550 million globally. Ethan became graceful and buoyant when he received Bob Semel at the door, and by six o’clock there were two hundred people at the Carson house, drinking enough champagne to float the Queen Mary.
PLAYING THE ODDS
HENRY GRANT HAD NO INTENTION OF MOVING TO TUCSON. He’d been there once, and it wasn’t his kind of town. Emma talked about it like it was the Promised Land, but to Henry it was just a flat, ugly place where the bars closed early. He kept his mouth shut, though, until they reached the intersection of the 10 and the 15, where he took the road to Vegas.
“Think of it like a vacation,” he told Emma, when she protested. “Dorothy’ll love it.”
Emma slid away from him, leaning up against her door so hard she had to press down the lock. “I’m sure that’s exactly what you have in mind.”
“It’ll be fun,” he said, and floored the pickup, trying to make a little time.
That night, after Emma and Dorothy were asleep in their cheap motel room, Henry took a drive down the Strip. The desert sky was dark, but the lights of Vegas sparkled against it like stars come to earth. In the lobby of the Mirage, dolphins swam and trees reached up to an artificial sky, and he thought what a kick Dorothy would get out of the place. Then Henry heard the ching-ching-ching of the casino, and left all sense of family behind.
He started with five dollar blackjack, where he found a seat at the center of the table, next to a postal worker from Kansas who was in the process of losing his rent. He won his first hand when the dealer went bust on a sixteen, and the second when he drew a twenty-one. Easy. By the time the blonde cocktail waitress — who was wearing a cheerleader’s outfit — brought him his third free beer, Henry had seven hundred in winnings. So he decided on a bit of a challenge.
Henry had never really understood craps, but it seemed simple enough. Instead of cards, it was dice. Besides, it was where the action was. So he threw down a couple of hundred dollar chips, ordered a bourbon, and set about learning the ropes. A pretty redhead blew three times on the dice before she threw them, her diamond bracelet jangling and catching the light.
The game moved fast. Nickel come; nickel go. Play the field. Hardways. Make the number. Easy as pie. And by three AM, when his education had cost him two thousand dollars, he jumped in the pickup loaded with his family’s possessions and went back to his motel room on tip-toes, for a little more tuition money.
He’d learned enough to know the odds were with the house, always with the house. But when he played “Don’t Pass,” the house suddenly got cold. Sick of pulling out a hundred here and a hundred there, he bought five grand worth of chips, thinking the stack would bring him confidence and luck. Besides, he would never bet it all. That was for suckers. When it was his turn to roll, he bet against himself, and, dumb luck, he rolled beautifully.
An hour later, Henry sat in a men’s room stall and counted his money. Ten thousand was gone. He was drunk, his mouth dry. No more craps, he thought. He sat back against the wall. His heart fluttered, and he hoped it would attack him. “Die, Henry, die!” he murmured to himself. No such luck.
But after a while, back out at the bar, Henry had an inspiration. Or rather a conversation, with a middle-aged man, about how the 49ers — who would face the Green Bay Packers in the playoffs the following day — couldn’t lose. “Y’got the best coached organization in the history of professional sports,” the man said. “And they got two other important things. The best offense in the league, and the best defense, too.”
Yeah, Henry thought. The 49ers. The 49ers are a sure thing.
So on his way out of the casino at six-forty-five in the morning, Henry laid his money down. Ten thousand on the San Francisco 49ers. If he won, he’d break even. The spread was ten points, but the Niners always won big in the playoffs. And, points or no points, only a fool would bet Green Bay. He drove back to the motel and crept into bed.
Six hours later, at the end of the first quarter, the score was 14-0, Packers.
“Why do we have to stay here and watch football?” Emma wanted to know.
“Yeah, why?” Dorothy chimed in.
“Go on out if you wanna go out!” Henry snapped.
When Green Bay marched down the field to make it 21-0, and the 49er faithful began booing their team, Henry knew it was too late. He threw the remote control at the television screen, smashing it into a dozen pieces.
“What’s wrong with you, Henry?” Emma yelled. “It’s only a game!”
And, trying unsuccessfully to clear his throat as her words echoed in his ears, Henry readied himself for a life of desperation and pain.
END OF THE ROAD
STERLING CARUTHERS GOT INTO HIS CAR AND SAT FOR A moment. He looked through the windshield, the way people do when they’re not thinking about anything specific, or really anything at all. He was staring at the hedges that separated his Laurel Canyon home from that of his neighbor, a man who played catcher for the Dodgers, and with whom, until recently, he was on friendly terms.
Caruthers backed carefully out of his driveway, ran a stop sign at the bottom of his street, and six minutes later was moving northwest in medium traffic on the 101. It was not yet seven a.m., and he consoled himself with the knowledge that the sun was tormenting drivers in the opposite direction. The weather was fair, but the San Fernando Valley was bleak somehow, crawling with cars like maggots on a mango. If he craned his neck, Caruthers could see Warner Brothers, with its soundstages, its bungalows, its trailers and little golf carts, that dreadful commissary, and those corporate offices where he’d been lattéd and seltzered endlessly. He’d like to blow the whole studio up. Maybe he’d get away in time and maybe not. What did it matter, anyway?
As he passed the exit for Calabasas, which he’d taken too often to go to the home of his ex-wife’s parents, he wondered if the force of the Warner explosion would take care of them, too. The whole family had turned on him when they’d learned of one of his extramarital affairs. A minor indiscretion: It had been meaningless, drunken, nothing compared with his love for Emily.
Still, it had gone on for more than a year. Those same in-laws had been so warm before — he often enjoyed golf with Emily’s father, who called him “Ster,” or sometimes “son.”
“Two birds with one bomb,” he thought, enamored of the phrase. Then he realized a bomb in Burbank would never blow in Calabasas. Caruthers recognized a pattern: They’d abandoned him, like everybody did. Two wives had left him, a poor one he loved and a rich one he didn’t. He regretted losing them both. He tried to remember their faces, but could only remember photographs of their faces. Though his second wife wore Chanel, he could conjure only the idea, and not the smell of the perfume. He remembered the dress — black polka-dots on white — one of his mistresses wore like a bathrobe, after they’d had sex. Made love. He couldn’t imagine her wearing the dress; he could only see it hanging there, up on the end of a door.