Fine with me. Fine and dandy.
The funny thing is he’d just been goofing on “My Favorite Weekend” with Maurie. He fished it out of the Herlihy Archives: the days-old column spotlit Fran Drescher, the sinus-challenged former TV star who had suffered through a home-invasion rape and uterine cancer. Chess wondered if they were related, in a cause and effect kind of way.
The headline read NOW JUST FRIDAY NIGHTS ARE FEVERED.
Some of my most fun times are when I go out with a posse of my girlfriends and paint the town rouge…. Alicia Keys was fabulous. We got to go backstage and meet her, and we saw Tom Cruise too, and pretty soon the people in his posse were introducing themselves to the people in our posse — it was so much fun.
“I want my Mapo! I want my rape-o!” said Maurie, over the phone.
“That’s harsh,” said Chess, with a laugh.
“Yeah, well, life’s a bitch and then you get posse-fucked.” Then he sang, “Hold me closer, tiny cancer.”
Maurie said they should get together and talk about his A&E “dillio.” He wanted to know if any progress had been made with locations. Chess said he was still looking but Queen of Angels seemed promising. Then Maurie mentioned an empty clinic in Alhambra where a friend just shot a Fiery Furnaces video. Chess scribbled down a phone number and said he’d check it out. They made plans to have dinner at Chameau, a Moroccan dive on Fairfax that had migrated from Silver Lake. Maurie’s girlfriend, Laxmi, would join them. Chess really had a hard-on for her. He was a sucker for strawberry-blond Manson creepy-crawlers — freckle fields and tiny tits, intrepid, sociopathic girls-next-door with Sweet ’N Low hankerings for all things mystical.
Roll-up for the mystery tour—
ON the way to the restaurant, Chess wondered if he should ask Ma for money. She must be doing all right. He’d only talked to her once since the funeral. That was dumb. Might be awkward — though she’d probably be happy to hear from him. Of course she would. Maybe he’d just put in a call without asking for bread, tough it out awhile longer, get the check from the A&E gig, then rock on over to Beverlywood. That would probably be better form. How much should he hit her up for? The most he ever got in one lump was 5 grand. (Asking Joan would be out of the question.) She never pressed but he was always careful to pay off debts to Marj. He wanted her to know he was good for it in case he ever got in a really tight spot, that he wasn’t a deadbeat. Maurie always said it was best to appear prosperous when asking for hand-outs (even a guy like not-too-long-
ago-beleaguered Trump sued some journalist who wrote a book saying he was only worth a couple hundred mill) and maybe Chess would do a little posturing before he popped the question. Cash out A&E and buy a new suit. Rent a Jag or an Escalade for a few hundy, just for the day, then drive on by. Tell Mom he was in the middle of producing his old friend Maurie Levin’s new script and needed something to tide him over between bank drafts. Tell her there was some temporary international monetary snafu, it was a Canadian/UK/German coproduction and the Krauts were being crabby, whatever. The Canucks were being canny. The Brits were being Britney. He’d ask Mom to dinner at Ruth’s Chris or Mastro’s in Beverly Hills. Spago, wherever. Or maybe they’d go Indian; she was a freak for India, from when they were kids.
Chess began to have warm feelings about Marj but couldn’t separate them from the fantasy of unsolicited largesse. He imagined her giving 10 times what he planned to ask for, the act of spontaneous generosity opening a new era of intimacy between mother and son. There was no reason to feel guilt; he wasn’t going to leave her hurting. It was the opposite. He would give her the collateral of his heart, knowing it would make her feel better to help her son. Chess knew she’d been left cash and property, and had jewelry as well — old-style brooches and pins, earrings, whatever. She had to be sitting pretty. Hamilton was an ace provider. He didn’t know if the house was paid off. Wasn’t his place to ask. He wondered, fleetingly, if you could find out that sort of thing online.
About a mile from Chameau, he began to parse in his head the “My Favorite Weekend” questionnaire the chick had faxed over, thinking he’d use tonight as a typical evening out with friends at an exotic local fave. (He’d have to “take its pulse”; sometimes these boîtes died a sudden death.) He needed to come up with something special for Sunday brunch; Sunday brunch was the “My Favorite Weekend” cum shot. He never went out for breakfast but it’d be nice to say he was a regular at JAR’s or Casa del Mar (Inn of the Seventh Ray, Father’s Office, City Bakery, and the chink places in Monrovia were played out — MFW had already covered them) and that before brunch it was a “ritual” to take his girlfriend — he was definitely going to have a fictional girlfriend — to the Echo Park/Palisades/Hermosa Beach farmers’ market for fresh flowers, dried fruit, star anise, whatever. That kind of gay horseshit. Maybe throw in poor old Trader Vic’s before they tore it down. But since he was a location scout — that was the angle — they’d probably want him in diverse parts of the city instead of the usual Santa Monica, Malibu, or East Side haunts. He could go to Memphis (Jane’s Room), or Ford’s Filling Station, or ’Sup Nigga, or the hungry cat, or the Bucket (Eagle Rock hamburger joint), or some Jap joint (for yoshoku). Fine and dandy. It’d probably be better if he went to a chocolatier in Altadena or the coffeeshop at the Long Beach airport or maybe bought his fake old lady a customized scent at that place on Abbott Kinney. Then he thought he should do his homework because he might have read about the perfume place in a “My Favorite Weekend.” (Got the idea, subliminally.) Maybe it wasn’t even there anymore. He could probably go online and find out which My Favorite Weekenders frequented wherever. He didn’t necessarily want to bother the chick about it but could feel her out when they had their follow-up phone interview.
VIII.Marjorie
THE Super Lotto was now at $78,000,000.
She went to Riki’s, on Robertson. It used to be called “You Are My King Liquors,” but when the owners sold, Riki not very effectively covered the sign with his name. He was always promising customers that one day when he had the time, he would “do it right.”
When she bought her tickets, Marj always wore the lucky lapel pins Ham had given her on their 20th: malachite peas in gold pods and a green jeweled parrot with blue enameled feathers dropping down. They were designed by Jean Schlumberger in the 50s and sold at Tiffany’s. Ham got them at auction. (Her husband had a wonderful eye. One year, he surprised her with a vintage sapphire bracelet by Seaman Schepps. He collected vintage pictures of society ladies in Charles James and Madame Grès that he hung in the apparel offices downtown.) She filled out the lottery form as usual, picking her children’s birthdates and Hamilton’s too. She used to spend $3 but since Ham’s death, she was spending 5.
Riki was from Bombay — she could never help but think of “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” the Kipling story Father read to her at bedtime. He didn’t speak much but boy, could he smile, greeting each customer as if they were an old friend (many were). Riki had a son in high school who occasionally helped out. The young man had the same kind, winning disposition, and perfect manners, to boot. Marjorie often felt she should engage them in conversation — afterall, she’d been to Bombay as a girl, for almost a month with her own dad — but the words never came. That was all right; it was enough to feel their warm familiarity. Just being in the shop made her feel like a culture buff, a woman of the world. Besides, she didn’t remember much about the city, mostly recalling the grand hotel they had stayed in, the Taj Mahal Palace — to make any further claims would have been a shallow and possibly embarrassing assertion. It would have devastated her to be thought of as “the ugly American.” (Not that they had those sorts of judgments in them, though one never knew.) One thing she did ask was if a person was supposed to say “Bombay” or “Mumbai.” The city names had changed, which seemed to happen periodically, all over the world. The son unleashed that winning transgenerational smile and said, “Bombay. If you are the cool people, you call it Bombay.”