The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens

  Lyle couldn’t understand how if everybody was looking for him they couldn’t find him, since he continued to roam Hollywood, and here he was looking up at the huge blowup of Babette on the wall of a new building. No, he was not stalking her. No, he wasn’t in love with her. He loved only Maria, remember? But, goddamn, will you look at her?

  “Hey, you’re the Mystery Cowboy on television,” a teenage boy said.

  “Look, here’s the guy that saved the woman from the mad peacock. Huccome you’re hiding?”

  “You see me hiding?” Lyle demanded.

  The kid shrugged. “TV says so, dude.”

  “There’s, like, the peacock guy!” said one of a group of young men with pitched-back baseball caps.

  “Don’t, like, call him that, he’s, like, the Mystery Cowboy.”

  “Can I have your autograph?”

  A teenage girl was poking him with an autograph book.

  “No!”

  “Cummon, Mystery Cowboy.” The girl poked harder. “I already got what’s-his-name on the Millionaire Show.”

  Lyle signed her book: “Lyle Clemens.”

  The girl looked down at the entry, up at him in disappointment. “Who the hell is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Lyle said. “I really don’t.” Finding out everything about life sure could be difficult.

  As long as nobody could find him, he would continue his life just as before. He traveled by bus and subway, discovering intricate routes, studied maps, rode everywhere in this wondrous city. He was a hit on morning buses. Many workers would respond to him with pleasure, “Hola, Mystery Cowboy, how ya doin’, guy?” Mexican women, on their way to work, giggled, and flirted with him, and often called him “el charro misterioso.”

  8

  Em-path-y for down-trotten lost angels.

  Regular runaways on the Boulevard recognized him now. “Hey, Mystery Cowboy dude.” He felt for these young people about his age who hovered in shadowy corners with their spiky hair and pierced bodies; they looked sad even when they laughed. They seemed to be waiting for nothing, anything. Raul might have been one of them if he hadn’t gone back home. Stubby, mean-faced boys with shaved heads and scowly looks, boom-boxes ranting out curses, taunted the young gypsies, who always looked hungry.

  Seeing five or six of the stray young people counting out meager change and coming up short in front of an open food stand, he bought them hot dogs and Cokes, and sat on the sidewalk eating with them, while people paused to stare.

  “Why don’t you give yourself up and end the search, Mystery Cowboy,” an old man stopped to demand. “I gave myself up once, threw myself at the mercy of the court, and they went easy on me.”

  “I’ll do that, sir, thank you.”

  “Naw, Mystery Cowboy, man,” said one of the runaways, a tough girl, “don’t do that; ain’t no mercy in those fuckin’ juv. courts.”

  A group was boarding a tour bus of Hollywood, and he joined, waving back at the tattooed children.

  “Can’t just hop on, cowboy,” the driver said, not crossly. “Gotta buy a ticket.”

  “Oh, let him on,” said a young couple. “Don’t you recognize the Mystery Cowboy?”

  “Okay, saddle up,” said the driver/guide.

  Lyle hopped on the bus.

  “Well, don’t think I didn’t see you with those trashy runaways on the sidewalks. Well, they’re all on the road to perdition if you ask me!”

  Lyle turned to look at a woman and a man who seemed vaguely familiar. She was heavy, huffed even when she wasn’t speaking. Her chins jiggled. The man with her remained silent. Not possible! It was the nasty woman who had sat onstage with him at the magician’s act.

  “No one asked you, ma’am,” Lyle said.

  “Well, aren’t you the rude one!” the woman snapped. “Well, you know, we come to this Babylon once a year,” she announced loudly to everybody. “Well, every time we leave, something terrible happens—a slaughter on the freeway, a big earthquake and, well, we always miss it. Well, don’t you suppose God just loves us?”

  “Wouldn’t think so, Mrs. Well,” Lyle said.

  “Well, how on earth do you know my name?” the woman reacted. “Well, even if—”

  “Ma’am,” Lyle said, “would it be rude to ask you to please shut up so we can hear the driver point out the sites?—and, maybe”—he added this for himself and Clarita—“you might try to feel a little em-path-y for the down-trotten.”

  Several on the bus applauded.

  “Well!” huffed the odd woman.

  “To your left,” the tour guide directed, “is the Hollywood Hotel, the site of the first Academy Awards. They say ghosts of great movie stars roam its lobby … “The Ambassador Hotel, where Joe diMaggio proposed to Marilyn Monroe … The Biltmore Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was murdered … The Brown Derby, where Lana Turner—… There are many ghosts in the City of Angels, and there are many living lost angels.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1

  A windy day in Rio Escondido.

  It was a windy summer day in Rio Escondido. Usually, the winds in Texas fade in mid-spring, having exhausted themselves by then. The violent thrusts of dust and tumbleweeds, gathered along miles of desert, diminish, the howls of windstorms become an angry whisper, then die. For the past few days, however, wind had intensified, not lessened, along with the heat of premature summer. The wind panted with desert heat.

  The wind, the heat—all that had put Sylvia into a terrible mood, Clarita knew; but today it was more than that, much more than the liquor. She sat in her living room, her hand holding the television remote idly, trying to work up enough energy to point it at the blank screen.

  Beside her, Clarita waited for a picture. Though she now had her cherished VCR, bought with what Lyle had sent her, she had found the thrill of it lessening; she missed the quarrels with Sylvia about what to watch—missed her asking her to translate every line of a Mexican soap opera they would sometimes watch together.

  Sylvia sighed.

  That was the seventh sigh of the evening; Clarita had begun counting them only after she had noticed that Sylvia was sighing more than usual.

  Sylvia looked at her. “When is Lyle coming back?”

  “You got a letter from him yesterday,” Clarita reminded her, and quickly seized the opportunity to bring it to her from the small table in the hallway.

  That’s where Sylvia placed Lyle’s letters, keeping each for a time when she felt especially sad, and then it might lift her spirits. She had begun several letters to him, all unfinished. There was too much to say that she could never tell him.

  She took Lyle’s letter from Clarita. She opened it. Several bills fluttered out. With a terrible cry, she let the money and the letter fall to the floor.

  Clarita gathered the bills and the letter, knowing the painful memory Lyle’s gift had stirred.

  “He’ll be back,” Sylvia said softly.

  “Of course he will,” Clarita encouraged. “He left to find himself, and he will, he’s a smart boy, and—”

  “Boy?” Sylvia frowned.

  She hadn’t meant Lyle, she’d meant the cowboy! It was time to speak out, bluntly: “The cowboy is never, never coming back!”

  Sylvia remained impassive. She sipped her bourbon, and smiled as if at something only she knew. “Lyle the First is coming back very soon, wait and see,” she said.

  2

  In which an invitation assures the site of the gimmick.

  “I can assure it—you and Rusty will be invited to the Academy Awards, doll,” Lenora barked over the telephone and into Tarah’s ear—even to give good news she barked, and the ringer had growled.

  Doll! Tarah gave a tiny gasp of pleasure. Her tactic had worked. “Doll” would spread through Hollywood, and people would remember it was she who had reintroduced the word into its current use. Finally the title of the great masterpiece would make sense, in Return to the Valley of the Dolls.

  “What you do to get at
tention is up to you,” Lenora had rumbled on. “I’m sure you’re working on something terrific. You’re wily, doll.”

  “Yes, I am,” Tarah said, fascinated by the coldness in her own voice.

  “Great!” Click.

  Everything was falling into place. All she needed was to find—and quick!—the Mystery Cowboy everyone was talking about, the one who’d been so hot for her that day at the motel pool in Anaheim, the one who would double the publicity she needed.

  A kidnapping at the Academy Awards!

  3

  Some observations about hiding.

  Now it seems impossible that questions about the identity and whereabouts of the Mystery Cowboy continued and extended all the time that he wandered in full view along the streets of the city. How could anyone miss him? A tall, slender young man wearing cowboy boots and—though he did take it off now and then—a cowboy hat was a startling sight. What was occurring was that no one expected him to be so visible, and so everyone was looking for him where he was not, where he should be hiding, out of easy sight. What better way not to be found than not to be in the places suspected, but be where no one would think he would hide.

  Certainly he would not be hiding on Hollywood Boulevard on this beautiful warm evening—not yet dusk—when everyone was out, a Michael Jackson lookalike was signing autographs, tourist buses were pausing before everything, pale young Scientologists fished for customers, men sauntered in and out of porno shops, and cops in shorts biked along the blocks.

  “Hey!”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, cowboy, you! You want a ride?”

  My God, my God, my God, my God, my God, oh, Jesuschrist, yes! Thank you, Holy Virgin Guadalupe! Babette was asking if he wanted a ride! The luscious woman in the posters sat in her slinky silver Cadillac. She had stopped at the corner—in a no-parking red zone!—as he was about to cross. He was speechless.

  “Well?”

  He still couldn’t talk, but he could hop on and he did. Would he ever become used to this? Beautiful women approaching him—not that he wouldn’t have approached them; they just beat him to it.

  She was even more stunning than her poster, definitely a sexy angel. (No competition for Maria, of course, who belonged in his heart).

  Those eyes!—Lyle had lifted his eyes from the woman’s spectacular breasts—eyes with a ready-to-jump-into-bed look, but not for sleeping. Her flesh was so white—he was getting used to tanned flesh everywhere—it was as if she had never allowed the sun to touch her even though the sun would certainly want to. Her silky blouse barely covered the tips of her luminous breasts, her skirt hardly covered her legs, which he was now staring at. As she pushed the clutch to shift the car into drive, her tiny skirt inched up.

  “You like sex, cowboy?”

  “You bet, ma’am!” (I love you, Maria, he sent her a message across the miles, with all my heart—but remember, you keep saying you’re my sister.)

  “Smell me.” She held out her palm to him.

  He smelled her perfume, a wisp of sweetness that tickled his nose wonderfully. My God, my God, my God! He was actually with her! “You are—aren’t you—?” Lyle was sure who she was, but he wanted to hear it, to enhance the wonder of it all.

  “Of course I’m who you think I am,” she purred every word. “You call everybody ma’am?”

  “No, just ladies.”

  She laughed, golden giggles, bubbles. “You are sooooo cute! … But stop calling me ma’am, all right, sweetheart?” she pouted. “You make me feel old, and I doubt that I’m any older than you.”

  She was about thirty-five, Lyle assumed; so what? What mattered was that she was the sexiest woman he had ever seen—next to Maria, of course, and Rose.

  They drove past a giant auditorium, the Hollywood Bowl, up, curving, up, along narrowing streets, green, greener, greener yet, up a lush hill where flowers peeked out of trees and bushes.

  “—later than I thought … Yes … Yes.”

  She was speaking—no, mewing like a cat—into her car phone, clearly changing earlier plans in order to be with him. Great! He sure didn’t want to rush. Who would? Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn! Los Angeles was one wonderful place, wasn’t it? Goddamn, yes!

  She parked in a garage that belonged to a house that looked like a glass bird about to soar above the spectacular canyon they had driven to. Night was coming fast.

  “Come on, cowboy.” With bubbles of giggles she swept out of the Cadillac, and led him inside the house, past glassy rooms, leading him by the hand because all the lights were out and it was dark, leading him straight to the bedroom!

  A stairway—intersected by shadows—led to a loft, a knot of deep darkness.

  She turned on the light—one light, a cone of light that sprawled on the large bed spread with pink, shimmering sheets.

  “I’m hot for you, cowboy, so let’s fuck!” she said.

  “Goddamn,” was all that would come out of his mouth, because she had already slipped out of her blouse—nothing under it except that ravishing flesh—and her skirt—nothing under it either, except that white skin, gleaming within the isolated light.

  He had his clothes off just as quickly, his cock eagerly at attention.

  “My, my, will you just look that! she squealed. “Put your boots back on, cowboy,” she begged.

  Well … okay.

  “—and your hat.”

  “Uh … sure.” But he hoped it wouldn’t stay on too long.

  In the center of the bed, and fully illumined by the cone of light, she stretched, staring above into the higher darkness as if for mysterious inspiration.

  What Lyle was staring at was the delectable woman, resplendently naked. He closed his eyes and pinched himself, hard. She was still there!

  “Come on, it’s all yours,” the sumptuous creation said.

  Rose’s voice began to instruct, Now, cowboy, at first—but Lyle didn’t need guidance any more, and so the voice of Rose faded into a soft sigh … like a blessing.

  Lyle parted the velvety legs with his knees. The cowboy hat tumbled onto her breasts. He removed it from them quickly. He arched over her. Rhythmically and steadily he entered her—and stayed there, barely inching in and out. Then he was riding her. Then she was riding him. Then he was behind her, holding her breasts. Then they were connected sideways, one of his booted legs curled over hers. (Odd—but she kept trying to put his hat back on and it kept falling off.)

  He pulled out, almost entirely, and then he pulled in, and she—

  “Scream out my name, go ahead!” she demanded.

  “Babette, Babette!”

  “Yes, yes, Mystery Cowboy! Yes!” she said loudly, too loudly. “Yes, Mystery Cowboy!”

  Mystery Cowboy? She knew who he was? Time enough to wonder about that later. There was this to attend to now. He—

  Another woman’s voice came out of the darkness in the loft, muffled, but, in its anger, loud beyond its control:

  “Must you always be obscene? Must you?”

  “What the hell!” Lyle stood, clutching his pants to cover his groin—unsuccessfully. “Who’s up there?”

  “Nobody’s up there, come on back, I’m waiting,” said the gorgeous woman.

  “Who the hell is up there?” Lyle raised his voice.

  4

  An untimely introduction.

  “Hi, cowboy, I’m Max Renquist,” a voice called down from the darkness, “and with me is my wife, Mrs. Renquist.”

  “I have a name of my own,” came the brittle voice of the woman. “Must you, always?”

  Lyle peered into the loft, sheltering his eyes from the light so that he could see more clearly—and he did; he saw the outline of a bulky body leaning over the railing, another shadow beside him.

  “Why don’t you just go on and fuck the brains out of that hot bitch and don’t mind us?” said the man’s voice. “She’s just using our place, phoned ahead to ask if she could when she found you—uh, met you—but her twat was so fuckin’ hot she didn?
??t give us a chance to leave before you started jamming her—so we just hid, that’s all. You just go on ahead and pump the fuck out of her, okay?”

  “Oh, oh, oh!” the woman’s voice resounded from the loft, “I cannot abide the coarseness one more moment!”

  Lyle tried to adjust to all this. He weighed his choices: Demand to know more about whoever was up there, or—?

  “Ah, cummon, Mystery Cowboy, whatcha waiting for?” the woman on the bed whispered. “Cummon, my cunt’s hot for your hot cock, Mystery Cowboy, whatcha wasting time for? Put it back in, cummon, I’m hot, I’m wet, ya wanna see how wet I am, huh? Yeah, Mystery Cowboy! Sweet cunt’s asking for Mystery Cowboy’s big cock, cummon, Mystery Cowboy!”

  What should he do?

  To hell with whoever was up there. He returned to the woman in bed.

  5

  Information is supplied, but matters remain unexplained.

  After the woman claimed she was entirely exhausted—how many times had they done it?—Lyle decided he didn’t care about the weird woman and man who had been watching them; so what? They had probably sneaked away. He fell comfortably asleep. When he woke groggily, he saw a dark wig on a stand next to the bed. It gleamed in a splash of dawn. My God! Had he slept with Sister Sis in a new wig? That horrifying thought woke him entirely. Thank God, no, it wasn’t Sister Sis he’d slept with. Lying next to him was a blond woman, pretty, yes, and curvy, but she was not—not—Babette—again! Remembering the shadows in the loft, Lyle stared up. The man and woman who had been up there were gone.