Most of the paper on the floor really was trash and should have been thrown out years earlier: old bills, old warranties, old canceled checks. Some of it was interesting, though: fliers for movies in which Helen had appeared, a stack of love letters bound together in their original envelopes, with a rubber band, from her husband, Gary, who’d fought in World War II, then Korea, and finally Vietnam, where he’d been killed in a car accident in Saigon. The letters all began with the same five words: “Hey Babe, Miss you bad.”
Bob Cooper had left his cell number with her, and when she called it and told him she’d found the papers from Gray Aid, he gave her an address and she said she’d mail them. “How long before you get the place cleaned?”
“I’ll have the papers cleaned out tonight... and I’ll sweep it tomorrow, as a freebee, ’cause I’m not working. All these pictures and stuff...”
“We told you to shit-can it.”
“You mind if I take them? She was a friend of mine.”
“We don’t care, just get them the fuck out. We’ve got a Realtor coming around to look at the place on Monday, gotta be cleaned by then. Could you wash the windows?”
“Not for fifty bucks, no. The Realtor can take care of that.”
She finished with the paper that night. One of the last things she looked at was a crumbling brown file pocket, the kind with a fold-over flap. When she opened it, she found a carefully folded sheath of semitransparent paper. She unfolded the sheets, each about three feet by two, like the paper used by architects for their plans.
Drawings.
Men with old-fashioned movie cameras and microphone booms, some wearing old-timey workmen’s hats. A man in what must’ve been an expensive suit, turned away, with a thirties haircut. One of Helen herself, holding what looked like a long dowel rod that extended over her head. Andi recognized it immediately: the star of the Hollywood painting, Helen as a nineteen- or twenty-year-old, wearing nothing but a bra and underpants. Another drawing was perhaps a different view of Helen, she thought, the blond woman shown from an overhead view; she might have been nude.
She stared at it for a bit, then carefully folded all the papers and put them back in the file pocket and set it aside. The house was still hot, but she crawled around the floor, picking up photographs, glancing at them, setting them aside, until she finally found the one that Helen had shown her, of herself with Thomas Hart Benton. She put the photo in the brown file pocket with the drawings.
By midnight it was done. Andi had five garbage bags of paper but had been unable to throw away the photos and the movie memorabilia.
Helen had told her about her movie life.
“You’d look at me on a screen, and you’d hardly see me,” Helen had said one night as they sat in her backyard, sharing a joint. “Some of the girls — Lauren Bacall — they’d light it up. You’d look at me, and you wouldn’t even see me,” she said.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Andi said.
“It was true. You had to figure it out, and that took a while, but it was true. Still, I made a living. I even have a SAG card. Haven’t seen it in years. I’d be a secretary who’d bring in some papers, and I’d say, ‘Here are the papers, Mr. Shipley,’ or whatever. I was in seventy movies like that, because they knew I was reliable. They’d call me in, I’d sit around for a couple of days, I’d get thirty seconds onscreen, and I’d go home. One time this Japanese guy — Japanese American — got in an auto accident on the Pasadena Freeway on the way to the studio, and they were shooting a war film and they needed a Jap to fire a machine gun from a bunker, and I was small and they put a lot of makeup on me and a helmet and had me in the bunker firing this machine gun, and then in another shot they had me charging with a gun and bayonet and screaming, ‘Banzai! Banzai!’ That was sort of the peak of my dramatic career.”
And she laughed, and she blew a little pungent smoke out into the evening air, passed the joint back, and said, “You get the best shit, Andi. Musicians always have the best shit.”
As Andi was locking up Helen’s house, she noticed an unfamiliar and unhappy odor at the back door and stepped outside: Bob had indeed taken a dump in the backyard, in fact in Helen’s flower bed.
She locked the door and went home.
Andi mailed the reverse-mortgage papers to the Coopers. She had a spotty series of gigs over the next couple of weeks and picked up three extra shifts at Guitar Center when a salesman quit unexpectedly. A FOR SALE sign went up in Helen’s yard, and one day she saw Bob and Cheryl Cooper talking to an agent. When the agent left, she walked over, and Bob said, with a grim shake of his head, “Bad as we thought — we’re gonna get a hundred thousand if we’re lucky, and my mom is backing out of the deal. She’s gonna throw us ten grand each and keep seventy, greedy bitch.”
“Don’t talk about Mom like that,” Cheryl said. She was smoking, dug a second cigarette out of her purse, used the first one to light it, and flicked the used butt, still burning, into the street.
“You suck up to her ’cause you’re trying to get more,” Bob said.
“Fuck you. You’re an asshole.”
“You want a ride home?”
“Fuck you.”
The house sold in August, but Andi never saw the Coopers again. The deal had probably been done electronically, and she never found out exactly how much they’d cleared. She had a very nice ten-day gig at Fox for a TV series that needed some blues guitar and got the transmission replaced on her Cube.
Then she waited, and waited, and waited.
On October 1, a warm Wednesday evening, the girl with the ax turned down Gower Street at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard, down to Paramount Studios, and then right, to her four-hundred-square-foot bungalow with an air conditioner designed and manufactured by cretins.
She unloaded her Les Paul and an Asher version of a Strat, went inside, put them in the guitar cabinet, turned on the air conditioner, got Helen’s old guitar out of a closet, and went back outside to the Cube.
The trip to the Valley, to Van Nuys, took forty minutes because of a fender-bender on the 101. Loren’s Fine and Vintage Guitars was located in a neatly kept strip mall next to a hat store; Loren was an old pal. She carried Helen’s guitar inside, and Dale Loren came out and looked at it, and said, “Holy shit. I think... a ’58?”
“When I first saw it, I was hoping it was a ’59,” Andi said.
“It’s not. The neck’s too fat. Come on back, Andi, let’s look it up.”
They went into the back room, where a worktable was covered with a soft rubber sheet. Loren examined the neck from the end, and both sides, ran his finger down the ends of the frets. “Neck is good. Frets are original.”
“I thought so. I put a ruler on it, and there’s no waves or twist, as far as I can see.”
“We’ll have to do a little more than put a ruler on it... Let’s check the serial number.”
The serial number was stamped on the back of the headstock. Loren had a paper printout of Gibson Les Paul serial numbers. He ran a finger down the list and said, “Here it is: 1958. So, 1958 cherry-red sunburst, even still shows a little bit of the red. They’re usually pretty faded; they go yellow.”
“Cherry red, like a cherry-red Camaro, almost.”
“The same... The bridge and tuners will clean right up, the rust, that’s not a problem at all.”
He turned it over. “Has some buckle-rash” — he rubbed the rough spots with a thumb — “but not bad. Where’d you get it?”
“An old lady left it to me. She said it belonged to her husband — he was killed in Vietnam. He was in World War II and Korea and then Vietnam, and it finally killed him.”