“Is your chocolate cake homemade?”
She had him. Smiling, she said, “It sure is.”
“Maybe I will,” he said, walking away.
Chapter 10
Tawny
Tawny Starr was a talking head.
On the Hollywood strip that was a pretty big deal, even gave you bragging rights. She had been in a movie, actually said a line, and that was as close a brush with stardom as any of the vicious drag queens and hookers she shared the streets with ever came to. Seventeen, broke and living three months in L.A., she had walked onto a set at Universal Studios, and nabbed a speaking role in a flick with Brad and Angie directed by Syd Marcus and the Oscar-winning Czech cameraman with the backward last name. It wasn’t much, a crummy line, “That will be five dollars.” while serving colored water to Brad’s stand-in inside a noisy nightclub, but it got her name in the bottom of the credits, and qualified her for a SAG card.
Talking head. A cameramen had called her that, and Tawny had thought he was making fun of the way her jaw stuck out when she spoke. Humiliated, she’d wept behind a backdrop until a chummy make-up girl pulled her into one of the trailers, and they’d done a few lines. In every movie, the make-up girl explained, there were characters who had no real identity; faces in the crowd who said things, then disappeared. These characters could be anyone, or look like anything, it really didn’t matter, just so long as they said their lines clearly. In the business these actors were called talking heads.
It had started innocently enough. She was standing in front of Schwabs when a stretch limo pulled up and the passenger window went down. Inside sat a graying studio exec with a funny look in his eyes. No words were spoken, no proposition made. He had simply held up a gold straw while his Oriental driver got out and opened the back door. Tawny had hopped in.
The exec had a lot of class. They’d eaten dinner at a swanky Vietnamese joint called Le Duc, taken a midnight drive through Malibu, then home to Beverly Hills to snort more coke and screw. The next day they woke at noon, did more lines on an Italian marble coffee table, and screwed some more. When they were finished, he’d announced he was going to put her into a movie.
“Give me a break,” Tawny had said.
He had. Down to the MGM lot that afternoon and she was on a movie set being measured for a cocktail waitress’s outfit, then whisked to a sound stage. They had shot her scene four times, then called it a wrap. On the way out she was given a check and made to fill out her first tax form. That night she phoned the exec, dated him a few more times, but couldn’t wrangle any more parts. He was Mister Busy, and had promised to call.
For a while she had gone on casting calls, and tried to avoid the streets. When the last of her money ran out, she took a job selling black leather panties and other freaky stuff in a boutique called Slut. Working behind the counter she might get noticed, offered another part, and it would lead to something; that was how the dream went back then.
Tawny got noticed, mostly by men buying birthday presents for their wives, and she regularly turned down dates, endless drugs, and weekends in Aspen and Maui. She didn’t see the point in making someone else happy when it didn’t make her happier. Or a little less broke.
After a month in Slut her eyes began to wander. Down the block from the store, a white-haired chick had come up with a real calling card. Twirling a boa constrictor, she let it wrap itself in a life-threatening coil around her throat. Sometimes a Mercedes or BMW would pull up, and the chick would jump in, off on another adventure. A few hours later she’d be back twirling the boa, a few bucks richer.
Tawny had decided to give the streets a shot. From her closet she dug out a halter top and shorts, and painted metallic thunderbolts on her fingernails. She hated whoring, but on the street there was action and the chance, no matter how slim, that someone would pluck her out of the slime, and put her smiling face back in front of the cameras. A one in a million shot; that was how the dream went now.
The black Eldorado bumped the curb.
“Hey sweetheart,” called the driver. “Come over here. Don’t be shy.”
Tawny leaned seductively against the newspaper machine, a stationary object on a street whirling with rough trade.
“What are you hiding,” she said, trying to make him out. “I don’t like what I can’t see.”
A dim light illuminated the car’s interior. “You’re a fox. Slide over this way. I won’t bite.”
She edged up to the gleaming, factory new car. Now visible, the john shot her a sorry smile. His face was old and weathered and he wore a black muscleman shirt that barely held in the tire of flab around his mid-section. I have a daughter about your age, he would confess as he started to do the grossest thing imaginable to her. Give her my regrets, Tawny would want to say.
“Are you available?” he asked, flashing another smile.
Something about the guy felt wrong. Tawny had learned to trust her intuition, and banged her hand on the hood of the car.
“Take it someplace else, Pops.”
The Eldorado bolted with a rubbery squeal, and she watched its taillights disappear in the traffic.
The bad feeling in her gut would not go away. She crossed against the light and walked five blocks to Madrid, a pickup joint that she sometimes frequented.
Madrid’s parking lot was packed. In its center, four police vans were parked in a tight circle. Another roundup. Girls she knew were being handcuffed, others herded into the fun buses. Tawny started walking backwards in the shadows, and when she was sure no one had spotted her, ran in her heels down the street. She ducked into a video arcade.
She found an old Bally shoved against the back wall, and fed a quarter into a machine that had been rewired to give only three balls and no Free games. As the machine came to life, she imagined the constant thunder of tumbling pins, and thought about her mother playing in the Women’s Baptist Church League every Tuesday night, and never able to break one-sixty.
“Hey, beautiful. What’s your name?”
A big dude edged up beside her, his eyes hidden behind a pair of wraparound shades that people wore in L.A. to make tourists think they didn’t want to be recognized.
“Tawny. What’s yours?”
“Bob. My friends call me Bobbie. Want to go on a date? We could have drinks, maybe a bite to eat...”
Tawny crossed her arms, gave him the deep freeze.
“Or we could act like big kids, and head straight for my place. I live up in the hills.”
She didn’t like his approach. “It’s going to cost you. Two-fifty an hour.”
He gave her a boyish grin. “Really? Why did I think you were picking me up.”
“Fuck off.”
She stormed out of the arcade. At the corner she started to cross when he came up from behind, pinching her arm.
“Come on. I was only joking.”
“Get your goddamned hands off me.”
“Calm down. How about two hundred?”
“Two-fifty. Take it or leave it.”
“Come on. Every price is negotiable.”
“Not tonight. And not for you.”
“You, my dear, are a little whore.”
“So was your mother.”
He pinched her arm and made her cry. Her foot found his groin, and he doubled over. Pulling off her shoes, she ran across the busy street and halfway down the next block before glancing over her shoulder. He was gone.
Every guy in this sleazy town had a come on. Even the married ones. At the next block she waited for the light with a dispirited bag lady. The bag lady opened her mouth, and a torrent of obscenities spewed out. Tawny stared in horror past her. Bobbie was knocking people down running towards her, eyes ablaze.