Best to Laugh: A Novel

  Heading west on the way home, my ability to dodge was the more important skill as buskers had set out their guitar and saxophone cases and tourists clogged the streets, armed with maps, sun hats, and cameras.

  From La Brea to Fuller, the street inclined, and by the time I got home I had worked up a reasonable sweat and had a perfect excuse to jump into the pool.

  Having just skated past the neon Peyton Hall sign, I saw that I might not be getting into the pool as early as I had intended.

  “Hey,” said Blank Frank, perched on the bottom of the steps that fronted my building. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going hot,” I said, lifting the back of my hair to fan my neck.

  “So did you listen to it?”

  “Listen to what?” I asked innocently.

  “Oh, I don’t know—to the traffic. To your conscience. To my tape.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, sitting down next to him. “That one.” I started unlacing a skate; while I could climb stairs with them on, I’d learned it made better sense not to.

  “And . . .”

  My mind shouted out two options, Lie! Tell the truth! but I decided the latter would ultimately save me time and energy.

  “I . . . I liked the energy—wow, it was manic—but I really couldn’t understand a lot of the words and the songs all sort of sounded the same.”

  Chewing his lip, the punk rocker nodded.

  “Yeah, we’re sorta beginners at song writing,” he said agreeably. “And our bass player is just learning how to play. But it’s cool that you listened to it. Thanks.”

  “Not at all,” I said, and, surprised by the easy way he took my criticism, I decided to brave the next question. “You mind telling me how you get your hair to stand up like that?”

  “Sure. Glue and blow drying. You can touch it if you like.”

  He bowed his head and I touched a blue spike and then gently bounced my palm against the whole jagged range.

  “Thanks,” I said, after participating in the weird show-and-tell. “And about your music, even if I had loved it, I’m just a temp. I doubt that anyone would listen to me if I said, ‘There’s this great band you’ve got to hear.’”

  “You never know. Hey, you should come and hear us live sometime.”

  “Hey, maybe I will.”

  “Cool,” said Blank Frank, rising. “How about Friday night? Nine o’clock at the Masque.” He jumped up and holding his arms out, he zigzagged across the lawn the way a kid pretends to be an airplane, in the direction of his dad’s apartment.

  14

  NOBODY WAS INTERESTED IN JOINING ME at the Masque. Ed had his usual Friday night first date that never seemed to lead to a second; Maeve was going to a movie screening with her mother, and Solange had told me she’d rather lean out her bedroom window and listen to her neighbor’s cat, who was in heat and was hellbent on letting both the feline and human worlds know.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”

  The look on Solange’s face could have recurdled buttermilk. “No, it won’t be.”

  On the way to the pool after work, rehearsing the excuse I’d give to Blank Frank for missing his performance, I saw his father emerge from the laundry room next to the garages, holding a basket.

  “Mr. Slyke’s,” he said, indicating the precisely folded clothing stacked inside. “He’s feeling a little peckish, so I offered to act as his manservant—well, at least his launderer. Say, Frank mentioned you might be going to his show this evening. Would I be imposing too much if I asked to join you? I know it’s rather late notice and you probably already—”

  “—no, no, that’d be great. Let’s go together!”

  WHEN MR. FLOVER PICKED ME UP, he handed me a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of red and white carnations.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll . . . I’ll put them in water.”

  “And while you do, I’ll just say hello to Melvin.”

  I returned to find my neighbor, dressed in a paisley bathrobe, standing on the landing with Mr. Flover.

  “Candy,” said Melvin Slyke, wagging his finger. “You keep your eye on this one. Make sure he doesn’t do any of that slam-dunk dancing.”

  “Okay, Melvin,” I said as both men laughed.

  “And cut him off after two drinks. After three he’s a wild man.”

  “I can see you’re getting better,” said Mr. Flover. “If only your jokes were.”

  The two men laughed again and good-byes were said, and minutes later I was cruising down Hollywood Boulevard in a sporty little silver convertible with a dapper gentleman who wore a red carnation in his lapel.

  Mr. Flover was telling a funny story about Frank’s first guitar lesson when at the stoplight at Highland Avenue, he whispered, “There but for the grace of God . . .”

  I followed his gaze to the tall, gaunt figure making his zombie-like trek down the street.

  “Do you know that man, Mr. Flover? Because I see him on the Boulevard all the time.”

  “I can’t say I know him, but I know his story. His name is Erwin Paulsen. Although everyone always called him—for obvious reasons—Slim. He was a lawyer—with a firm catering to show business clients.”

  The light turned, and as the car moved forward I looked back at the man shambling along in rag shoes.

  “What . . . what happened to him?”

  Mr. Flover’s lower lip pushed out as he shook his head. “A house fire. His wife and daughter perished in it. The story was that he was out ‘entertaining a client’—a starlet—when it happened.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “A number of people—from his old firm, his friends—I know a few, in fact—have tried to help him over the years, but he is . . . unreachable. Unreachable and inconsolable.”

  A block and a half later, our pensive silence was yanked away when a man darted into traffic. Mr. Flover braked hard.

  “Olé!” shouted the jaywalker, who wore a bolero jacket and flannel pajama bottoms. “Olé! Olé!”

  “Goodness,” said, Mr. Flover, as the man crossed the street, snapping and swirling a ratty red cape. “Be sure to tell me if you see the bull.”

  THE MASQUE WAS SMALL AND DANK and full of pierced and tattooed people wearing mostly black clothes festooned with holes and/or safety pins.

  “I don’t suppose there’re any chairs,” said Mr. Flover.

  His supposition was correct, and instead of joining the huddle of people in front of the stage we chose to park ourselves against a grungy, graffiti-decorated wall. Well, next to, both of us making the tacit assumption that to lean against it meant we might stick to it.

  “I’d buy you a cocktail,” said the ever-courtly Mr. Flover, “but I don’t really see a bar, do you?”

  I looked around. The only thing that indicated the place was a performance space and not a graffiti artist’s old root cellar was a platform stage, loaded with amps, coils of cords, instruments, and microphones.

  “I think this is more a BYOB kind of place.”

  A guy with foot-long purple spikes jutting out of his head bounded onto the stage and screamed at the assemblage, “Are you ready to rock and roll?”

  The crowd roared back that it was.

  “Then let’s bring ‘em up! Ladies and gentlemen—if there are any of you out there tonight—give it up for the United States of Despair!”

  The dapper Mr. Flover put two fingers to his mouth, adding his whistle to the cacophony.

  A motley crew of four jumped onto the stage, and three yanked their guitars off their stands. The drummer plopped down behind his drum kit, and beating his sticks together he shouted, “One, two, three, four!” and within seconds the room thundered with a fast heavy drum and bass beat.

  “I pledge my allegiance to the United States of Despair!” shouted/sang Blank Frank, grabbing the microphone. “And to the hypocrisy from which it crumbles!”

  The guitars whined like giant mosquitoes as Frank writhed.

  “One nation, under Cash, with libe
rty and justice for no one!”

  The crowd was a swarm of violently bobbing heads, their movement as chaotic and random as germs under a microscope slide.

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to dance?” shouted Mr. Flover and we both laughed, understanding that at the Masque, one jerked or flailed or bobbed, but one did not dance, not even when the band switched from social commentary to songs of romance.

  “Hey asshole—you suck, I don’t—don’t leave me!” bleated Blank Frank. “I rock, you walk—all over me!”

  The live music sounded even rawer than it had on their demo tape, and without my having the luxury of turning the sound down, it began to pulse inside my skull.

  “Break bones—break hearts—break meeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  With that, Frank threw down the microphone and dove into the audience and rode on top of it, like a piece of flotsam on a churning sea of hands.

  “Oh dear,” shouted Mr. Flover over the noise. “I hope they don’t drop him.”

  The refrain to the song was sung over and over, and when Blank Frank was flung back onto the stage, he grabbed the mike and joined his fellow musicians in continuing the chant, whipping both band and audience into a frenzy. The musicians, their heads bobbing with such ferocity that I feared spinal damage, jabbed their guitars at each other while the crowd in front of the stage lunged and pushed and threw themselves at one another, in a dance that had to hurt. That I didn’t see any blood didn’t mean none was shed.

  They played one hard-driving song after another for an hour and then, with a loud, scary scream from Frank, the band members fled the stage as if a fire alarm had gone off, and even as the crowd shouted for more, they didn’t come back.

  Finally a dim light blinked on and the audience began to break up, shouting invitations to meet up at the Formosa, the Frolic Room, the Pig N’ Whistle. We joined the sweaty stream that emptied out into the alley and stood against the building, waiting for the band.

  “Mr. Flover, thanks for coming!” said the spike-headed drummer, enveloping the older man in his muscular arms.

  “Yeah, thanks!” said the bassist, leaning in for his hug.

  “Mr. F!” said the rhythm guitarist.

  It was an odd picture, these tattooed and mohawked punk rockers enthusiastically greeting and hugging Mr. Savile Row.

  “Hey, Pop!” said Blank Frank, bumping his guitar case against the doorframe. “Hey, Candy! Guys, this is my friend, Candy!”

  The band mates introduced themselves.

  “I’m Rock,” said the drummer. “Rock Bottom.”

  “Mayhem,” said the rhythm guitarist. “Mayhem Rules.”

  “Ian Riley,” said the bassist, almost apologetically.

  “I know you probably have things to do and people to see,” said Mr. Flover, “but if any of you would like some fortification before you do those things or see those people, I’ve got a big pan of spaghetti back at the apartment.”

  “Sounds great, man,” said Rock Bottom, “but I gotta go see my girlfriend at Cedars.”

  “She’s in the hospital?” asked Mr. Flover, concerned.

  “She is,” said the drummer solemnly, before letting loose a laugh. “But only because she’s a nurse. Pam works the night shift and likes me to join her on her ‘lunch’ break.”

  “Pop, we’ll just load up the equipment and meet you back at the house,” said Blank Frank. “See you there, Candy?”

  I answered with words I was saying more and more.

  “Why not?”

  15

  FRANCIS—HE insisted all of us dispense with the Mr. Flover and call him by his first name—was the consummate host, piling reheated and tasty spaghetti on our plates and passing around a big wooden salad bowl with the directive, “Mangia! Mangia!”

  “My father was in Italy in World War II,” said Frank (who’d also given me permission to drop the adjective Blank) as we sat at the heavy oak dining room table. “He orders this from Two Guys on Sunset because he says it tastes closest to the spaghetti of his old Italian girlfriend.”

  “Maria Donatelli,” said Francis, sighing heavily. “What she could do with oregano—well, when you youngsters get older, I’ll tell you what she could do with oregano.”

  “Tell us now!” said Mayhem.

  “You’re too young,” said Francis, with a resigned shake of his head. “You wouldn’t know what to do with the information.”

  “Pop, we’re older than you were when you joined the army,” said Frank.

  “Ah, but we were older back then. God forbid if any of you were in the army now—why, I wouldn’t trust any of you boys to load a peashooter, let alone a rifle.”

  As Frank, Mayhem, and Ian defended themselves against this egregious slander, I helped myself to another piece of garlic bread.

  This was the side dish to our late-night dinner—good-natured insults and boasts and laughs—and everyone held out their plates for seconds and thirds.

  “HEY, CANDY,” Mayhem asked, after slurping up a strand of spaghetti. “Do you know you’re eating with a Hollywood legend?”

  “Please, please,” said Frank, “I can hardly be called a legend. Maybe a legend-in-training—”

  “—aw, shut yer pie hole. I’m talking about your old man.”

  “You ran a night club, isn’t that right?” I asked Francis.

  “A night club,” said Mayhem. “That’s like calling Disneyland an amusement park.”

  Ian rolled his eyes. “Disneyland is an amusement park.”

  “You know what I mean. Tell her, Mr. F.”

  “Well, it is true,” said Flover the Elder. “ I was fortunate enough to own the Bel Mondo, from right after the war until 1958.”

  “That’s when Sunset Strip was full of night clubs,” said Frank. “You know, the kind that wouldn’t let you in if you weren’t wearing a tie or a corsage.”

  “Yes,” said Francis, looking with bemusement at his son in his mohawk and torn and pinned black clothes. “All the clubs—Ciro’s, the Mocambo, the Clover Club, the Trocadero—had a certain dress code and our patrons were happy to honor it.”

  “Tell her some of the people you booked, Pop.”

  “Oh, Buddy Rich, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Martin & Lewis, Billie Holiday . . . any of these names mean anything to you?”

  “Pop, come on, it’s not like we were born yesterday.”

  Mayhem nodded. “I love all those people, man. Especially Sinatra. I’ll bet he’d have been into punk if he’d been born later.”

  Francis smiled. “He was a bit of a scrapper back then, that’s for sure. Not at all adverse to using his fists.”

  “Pop’s got this idea that punk’s all about picking fights with people,” Frank said to me.

  “Well, it is, sorta,” said Mayhem. “Except we smack people around with our music.”

  “Precisely my point,” said Francis. “In my day we wanted to romance people, woo them, entertain them. Smacking was the furthest thing from our minds.”

  “For us,” explained Ian, “smacking just means waking up. That’s all we want to do—wake people up.”

  There was a whiskery sound as Francis scratched his throat. “But isn’t it nicer to be woken up with a caress than a scream?”

  When Ian asked me what I was into, my self-censor light flickered amber, but instead of braking I raced through it.

  “I want to start doing stand-up comedy.”

  “Stand-up comedy,” said Francis. “Well, I’ll be!”

  “That’s radical!” said Frank.

  “Make me laugh!” ordered Mayhem.

  Impulsively obeying his order, I lunged out of my chair, and two inches from his face, riffed on the lyrics the band had sung/screamed at the Masque.

  “Hey, asshole! You suck, I don’t—why should I?”

  Standing on the precipice of the brief silence that followed, I wondered if I should apologize, but stepped back when the hush was broken by laughter, Mayhem’s the loudest.

  AFTER DINNER we were
invited to “repair” to the living room, where Frank urged his dad to tell us some stories of old Hollywood.

  “Old Hollywood is Cecil B. DeMille directing silent pictures,” said Francis. “I was part of a far more recent Hollywood.”

  “Every Sunday people would come over to our house in Beverly Hills,” said Frank. “People who worked in Pop’s club, celebrities—”

  “—yes, everyone got along wonderfully—in fact, my cigarette girl JoAnne met Roger Wilbert—”

  “—he was a movie composer,” explained Frank. “Won a couple Oscars. He always used to pull out a quarter from behind my ear.”

  “That’s right, Roger fancied himself a bit of a magician,” said Francis, chuckling at the memory. “At any rate, after brunch we’d always play Charades or games of that nature, and that’s when they fell in love.”

  “How do you fall in love playing Charades?” asked Mayhem.

  “You’re right, it wasn’t Charades. This was a game in which you’d be given an emotion—for example, happiness—and you’d have to say the first thing that came into your mind. And I’ll never forget this, the word given to Roger Wilbert was awestruck, and Roger, looking directly at JoAnne, said, “The first time I saw your face.”

  “Aww,” said Mayhem.

  “Apparently, JoAnne was impressed. They were married three weeks later in my backyard.”

  “Let’s play that game now,” said Mayhem. “Give me an emotion!”

  “Dipshittedness,” muttered Ian, but louder he said, “Okay, Mayhem, what’s your answer for awestruck?”

  “That’s easy!” said the wiry and wired rhythm guitarist, jumping up. “The night I saw the Sex Pistols at Winterland. They were unbelievable, man! Cracked the world wide open for me!”

  He played an invisible guitar, his strumming hand moving in a blur, his other hand wildly running up and down the fret board.

  “And now,” said Francis gently, once it appeared the soundless concert might go on a bit longer than we cared to attend, “now, Mayhem, you choose a person and an emotion.”

  “All right,” said Mayhem, making a final grand circle with his hand. “Here’s one for you, Candy—fear.”