She was standing next to a car, in her sleeveless dress, still holding her camera. She gave me a look and she said, “I’d stand like this.”
I took the picture.
And because that seemed to relax her, I took another, and then when she seemed to get more comfortable, I said, “Now me,” and I stood in the same way she’d stood, and she was looking through the camera at me, and I could hear that she wasn’t taking the picture. “Go ahead,” I said. “Take it.” Although I was the one in front of the camera, she was the one who was nervous. And I told her, “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” but she said she wasn’t sure about the light. “Don’t worry about light. Work with me, baby,” I said, and did a fake fashion-model imitation.
I was joking, but she was serious, telling me about the difficulty she was having with the light and the focus, and while she was talking I lifted my camera and took another picture — of her. And when I did, she stopped concentrating on her camera and started concentrating on me.
I thought she might like to use my camera, and I held it out to her. “I think it adjusts automatically for the light,” I said, but instead of responding, she just stood there. So I took another picture. I didn’t know what I was doing, but because she seemed to assume I did, I took another, and then another. I moved so that the sun was off to the side, and she put her camera on the hood of a car, moved away from the car, and away from her camera, and she began moving her hands, not to any purpose, except the purpose of looking good. That was her default mode, a mask she was comfortable in, and I was behind my own mask, snapping the pictures.
And sometimes you need a mask. Like the steel bars of a shark cage, sometimes you need to feel safe enough to express something that exists behind the mask. And that’s fine, except in our case, instead of allowing us, from a place of safety, to reveal who we were, the masks did what masks are supposed to do, they hid who we were.
I suggested we “take one of each other, at the same time.” But she didn’t seem to be listening anymore. She was lost now in what she was doing, in the role she had taken, the role of a model, and now she was in it, and as I kept shooting photographs of her, photograph after photograph, I could feel our relationship carving its rut. And it wasn’t a bad thing, this rut, it was still very shallow, but it was getting deeper and deeper, and because it was a rut, we continued to communicate in this way. She was letting me know what she wanted, and she was sensing what I wanted, and I wasn’t telling her where to stand or how to stand, she was just standing there, posing, and I let her pose, and I continued taking photographs.
I’d gone to see a play, a revival of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo. The shark story had been rejected, and now I was doing a piece about a man named Scott, who was in the play — he played Galileo — and what made him different than any other struggling actor in Los Angeles was that he was a celebrity look-alike. His job was to look like Steve Martin. Steve Martin was a popular movie star at the time, and although in the play it didn’t quite work, in his life Scott supported himself by pretending to be the charming, and famously white-haired, movie comedian.
I’d gone to what he called his house in Laurel Canyon. It was actually a garage, a barely converted garage situated slightly below a large house, tucked into the eucalyptus hillside. His living area was a narrow room partitioned off from the rest of the garage, with a narrow bed, a table beside the bed, a brown rug, and a fake-wood dresser. A miniature television was on top of the dresser, playing an old movie, Detour. I knew the movie because a pivotal character in the story was a man named Haskell.
“I leave it on all day,” he said, referring to the television, and then he led me through a doorway-sized hole cut into the drywall, into another area, with a sink and a toilet and a shower that drained into the garage floor. The only thing recommending the place was a deck he had outside. If you walked around the garage to this redwood deck, you were suddenly looking over a wild and natural canyon. Across the canyon you could see the backs of a few houses through the trees.
I was standing with him on the deck, and he was telling me that, although he slept in the garage, he also had what he called “Steve’s office” in a room in the old Bank of America building, on the corner of Hollywood and Ivar. That’s where he kept his Steve Martin gear. We were talking specifically about gear, and generally about the life of a celebrity look-alike.
“It’s a state of mind,” he told me.
This was probably true because, although he was thin, and had the white hair and the easy smile, he bore only a passing resemblance to the celebrity actor he was paid to imitate.
“It really doesn’t matter what I look like,” he said. “It’s the white hair. It’s a trick.”
We were standing near some steps that led off the deck and into the canyon, and I think because we shared a body type, not even Steve Martin’s body type exactly, but because we had a similar posture, he was telling me about his life, that he’d come to Los Angeles to act, and although he enjoyed the Steve Martin routine, he was tired of playing the same part every day. He said he wanted to get away.
“From L.A.?”
“Everything.”
I brought out my recording device, thinking I would start recording our conversation, but his idea for the interview was to take a walk. I followed him down the steps of the deck, past a grapevine with grapes ripening on the branches. He pulled one off and handed it to me.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Right off the vine?”
I took the small round grape and thanked him, but instead of eating the grape, I put it in my jacket pocket. Then he led me down a narrow trail, and it didn’t take long before we found ourselves at the bottom of the canyon, standing in front of an opening to a runoff drain. There was a trickling rivulet of water, and I didn’t know the difference between a runoff drain and a sewer tunnel, but whatever it was he assured me it was safe to walk through.
“What’s in there?” I said.
“The tunnel.”
“I mean what’s in the tunnel,” I said, but apparently the tunnel was more than simply a route to get somewhere, because he bent down, and straddling the rivulet, he started walking into the tunnel, his feet braced against the sloping concrete sides. I could see past him to a faint pinpoint of light at the other end of the tunnel, and as he got deeper into the tunnel, all I could see was his outline. He was calling to me, “Are you coming?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t. .” My words were echoing off the walls of the tunnel.
It wasn’t just water he was walking through. There was mud and debris, and occasionally I would hear him step in something, or on something, and although I could hardly see him, or maybe because I could hardly see him, he reminded me of Charlie Chaplin. He was walking along, his feet splayed out like the Little Tramp, and I saw in his posture an optimism, the optimism of Los Angeles. People come here to escape an old life, or to exchange an old life for something else, or better, and although the old life tends to follow you, there’s always optimism. In the movies, Los Angeles is usually portrayed as a paradise, and because paradise is a place of possibility, I was thinking I should just walk inside the tunnel, and I was about to do it when Scott emerged from the tunnel’s opening. He stood in the weeds, blinking his eyes, adjusting to the light.
“So.” He turned to me. “That was the tunnel.”
As far as I could tell, this had nothing to do with his impersonation of Steve Martin, and so, when we climbed up the canyon and back onto his deck, I thought we’d be starting our interview. There weren’t any chairs on the deck so we both stood. The light was filtered by the trees. “I should probably ask you a few questions,” I said, “about Steve Martin.”