Shortly after that the music had started up. DeLarava had liked to have taped music playing before the cameras started running, even during takes for which the soundtrack would be entirely dubbed in later—she said it helped establish the mood—and the music was always something contemporary with the period the film was dealing with. Today it was Glenn Miller’s “Tuxedo Junction,” and she had decided to start it up early.
As the audiotape reels started rotating and the first notes came razoring out of the speaker grilles, deLarava had turned away from the twins and fumbled something out of her purse. She was clearly trying to conceal it, but both of the twins saw that she was holding a drinking straw—one of the striped ones marketed for children, with a flexible neck and some kind of flavor capsule inside it to make plain milk taste like chocolate or strawberry.
SULLIVAN PITCHED his cigarette out the window and started up the van’s engine. Stopped ahead of him was a battered old blue-painted school bus with the back doors open, and inside it, on wooden shelves and on the floor, were crates of bananas and tortillas and garlic and long, dried red chili peppers. A mobile third-world grocery store, he thought, a hundred feet from the Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk.
It reminded him of lunch, and he wondered if Musso and Frank’s was still in business, a block or two west. He steered the van around the stopped bus and drove up Wilcox to make a U-turn back to the boulevard. Over the tops of the old apartment buildings in front of him he could see the Capitol Records building, designed long ago to look like a stack of vinyl records with a needle touching the top disk.
Vinyl records, he thought. The clocks and maps are definitely broken.
CHAPTER SIX
“I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”
“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”
“Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
MUSSO and Frank’s Grill, Hollywood’s oldest restaurant, was still in business on the north side of the boulevard at Cherokee, and Sullivan parked around the corner and walked in through the double wood-and-glass doors and crossed to one of the booths under the eternal autumn-scene mural and the high ceiling. The Tuesday special was corned beef and cabbage, but he sentimentally ordered a sardine sandwich and a Coors.
This had been his and Sukie’s secret hideout; their friends and coworkers had hung out in trendier places like the City Cafe and the Cafe Figaro on Melrose, or the Ivy down on Robertson.
In fact, he and Sukie had driven here in 1984 for dinner right after the Christmas Eve shoot at the Shelton, and during the drive Sukie had been loudly singing gibberish Christmas carols—O car-bo-lic faith-less, poi-son-ously pregnant…O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-i-on…Com-mander Hold-’Em, bone-dry king of a-angels…—and of course the old schoolyard song they’d got in trouble for singing in some foster home when they’d been seven, We three kings of Orient are, trying to smoke a rubber cigar; it was loaded, it exploded…
As soon as they’d got to the restaurant and been seated, Sukie had ordered a double Jack Daniel’s, and Pete, though he had wanted a beer, had wound up with a Coke, because when the waiter had walked up to their booth Pete had been leaning forward and saying, “Coke?”
After the waiter had left, Sukie had grinned and said, “Coke what?”
Pete had waved vaguely. “What she was doing. Loretta, our dignified boss, snorting a straw along the old hotel wallpaper! Old cocaine mixed up in the dust, do you think?”
In reply Sukie had resumed singing some badly remembered lines from “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”—“We wont go until we got some, we won’t go until we got some, we won’t go until we got some, so trot ’em out now.”
“What the hell, Suke,” Pete had said, bewildered by her manic cheer.
“I figure that’s what the Sodomites and—what would you call ‘em, Gomorrites?—were singing outside of Lot’s house, you know? In the Bible, when all of Lot’s neighbors wanted to bugger the angels that were visiting him. Loretta wouldn’t go today until she got some, and she did get some—she sucked ’em up through that straw.” The drinks had arrived then, and Sukie had drained hers in one long swallow and mutely signaled for another.
“Got some what?” Pete had said after a halfhearted sip of his Coke. “Angels? Angel dust? What?”
“Ghosts”, Sukie had said impatiently. “What did you think? She snorted up a whole pile of ghosts today—did you see how much younger she looked when she finally got into her car and split? She looked thirty years old tonight, a youthful thirty, and she looked a goddamn hundred this morning. We somehow made it possible for her to draw a whole lot of ghosts out of the walls of that place and then snort ’em up her nose.”
Pete hadn’t wanted to start discussing ghosts with his sister. “She’s a, something like a necrophiliac voyeur,” he said. “There’s probably a single word for it. She likes to go shoot films at cemeteries and places where people have died, and kind of rub her fingers in the dirt, we’ve noticed that in her before. Hell, I suppose there’s somebody somewhere who watches the tape of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald, over and over again. Getting off on…what, the thought that somebody really did die here. Creepy, but probably harmless right? But I’m afraid she’s going flat-out crazy now. Where does that leave our jobs? I mean, there she was, crouched over and snuffling along with a straw, as if some dead lady’s perfume might still be in the wallpaper!”
“Pete,” said Sukie, “I don’t mean perfume, and I don’t mean metaphorical ghosts. I mean there were real essences of dead people in that place, and she consumed them in some literal way, like a whale eating plankton.”
Pete stared at her. “Are you saying,” he asked carefully after a moment, “that you think she actually believes that?”
“God, you’re an idiot sometimes. I’m saying that’s what happened. She’s right to believe it, she did eat a bunch of ghosts. Didn’t she change, visibly, between eight this morning and nine tonight?”
Pete tried to smile derisively, but gave it up and let his face relax into a frown. “She did get something out of it,” he admitted. “But come on, ghosts?”
The word hadn’t sounded ludicrous in this dark wooden booth at Musso and Frank’s.
“And,” he found himself going on, “she is often…prettier and cheerier, after a shoot. Still damn fat.” He laughed uncertainly. “Do you suppose that’s what she’s been doing, all along? She never used a straw before. That we ever noticed, anyway.”
“I’m sure she’d have liked it better if we hadn’t seen her do that—but she obviously needed it too bad to be subtle this time. I bet she usually sucks ’em in through those damned cigarettes of hers—maybe ghosts are drawn to that clove smell, like kids to hot cookies. It was a flavored straw, you noticed.”