He wrote his novel before he met my mom. Really, he met my mom because he wrote the novel. It was a cult thing. Dozens of printings over the years, each of them a run of a couple thousand, well regarded enough to get him several guest lecture gigs in the late sixties as a not quite elder statesman of the counterculture. If not for that, he'd never have been at UC Berkeley in ’68. Never gone to the Fillmore with some of his grad students to see a happening, and loudly denigrate it as bullshit, sounding off at the back of the hall, a bottle of mescal in one hand and a huge joint in the other, surrounded by the more reactionary wing of the peace and freedom movement. If not for that, he'd never been challenged by an attractive young undergrad from SF State, who proposed to show him how rock music, acid and free love could change the world. Never would have eye-droppered a dose of U.S. government pure LSD and ended up fucking the undergrad's brains out in Golden Gate Park at dawn, receiving along the way what he once described to me as, The most sublime head known to man or Jesus. I saw the universe entire in that blow job, Web, the whole damn shooting match. Never would have taken the undergrad to wife that week. Never would have brought her back to Los Angeles with him. And certainly never would have gotten stone fucked up with her twelve years later, on one of the rare occasions they had sex anymore, and forgotten to make sure she had in her diaphragm and impregnated her with a child she would refuse to abort, all of it ending with me as his son. Or that's how he tells the story.
The old man rubbed a hand over his round belly.
—Would you have preferred that? If I'd just plopped you in front of the boob tube for your education? It could have prepared you for a menial life, it would have been no trouble at all. It would have been much easier than teaching you how to read when you were two. It would have been much easier than showing you the constellations or taking you to the Getty to see Rembrandts or the Hollywood Bowl to see Bernstein. It would have been much easier than giving you an education that you were able to use, something to share with your students. There's no nobler profession, no better use of a life than to teach, but I could have saved us both the trouble and given you a TV and that would have made you happy, it seems.
I looked at the old man.
—I'm not teaching anymore.
He blinked.
—Oh, and what kind of job have you turned your energies to?
—I'm. Cleaning stuff.
He picked at the tuft of gray hair sprouting from his right ear.
—A janitor.
—No.
—You're cleaning for a living?
—Well, for the last couple days.
—Then you are, my son, either a janitor or a housekeeper. Are you a housekeeper?
—No.
He swiveled on his stool and signaled the bartender.
—Do you have, by any chance, an application? My son, I think, might be looking to improve his employment situation.
The bartender blinked.
—We're not hiring.
My dad shrugged.
—Alas. Another beer then. He can use it to drown his useless dreams and sorrows.
I drained my glass and set it down.
—Thanks, Dad. But I think you're mistaking me for you.
He grinned, showing me the gap where his two upper front teeth used to be before he lost them in an Ensenada bar fight.
—Ah, now there's the little son of a bitch I raised.
Lincoln Lake Crows loves teachers and teaching. In theory. Which is to say he loves the idea of teachers and of teaching.
The Noblest Profession, Web. No greater calling than the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next. A thankless task it is, to the outsider. The teacher, the true teacher, knows that the rewards of his calling are not properly measured in silver. They are measured in the achievements of the teacher's students. Respect, yes. Admiration, yes. A word of thanks, yes. All these are well deserved and appreciated. But the true and absolute payment comes in seeing a student learn and apply that learning. No matter how modest their accomplishments may be, that is the reward. That is coin of the realm for a true teacher.
And he should know. Old L.L. put his years in as a high school teacher. Toiling in the mines of public education for well over a decade.
He'd still be there now.
Except that he wrote a novel. And he lived in Los Angeles. And someone he knew knew someone who knew someone who passed the novel around to someone. And that someone turned out to be Dennis Hopper. And he showed it to Bob Rafelson. And Bob, as he was known around our house, took out an option.
And L.L.'s opinions about remuneration changed very rapidly thereafter.
At least that's how my mom tells the story.
—And what brings the fruit of my loins to the western precipice of this, our waning civilization?
I forked up the last of the sand dabs he'd ordered for me and wiped my mouth.
—Nothing.
I put the fork down and pushed the plate away. Dad hadn't bothered to eat, food inhibiting, as it does, the absorption of alcohol.
He flicked his eyes across a page of the book he had reopened while I ate.
—Nothing. Certainly. Why should a janitor be anything but aimless? The freedoms of the laboring class. Why fill the off hours with knowledge and investigation, with self-improvement? To what end, after all? Nothing. Indeed.
I leaned over on my stool and took a toothpick from the dispenser on the shelf next to the menus. The waiters were coming on for dinner service, I watched one use an ice cream scoop on a tub of refrigerated butter, plopping the perfect little balls into white dishes. Another slid trays of dinner salads into the stand-fridge. The manager chalked specials on a board. A couple regulars came in and the bartender started making their drinks without being asked.
I looked at L.L. reading Anna Karenina. I thought about Anna throwing herself under her train. I thought about the shower of blood and brain on the bedroom wall of the house in Malibu. I thought about the putrid stain the pack rat left on the floor in Koreatown.
I picked my teeth.
—Guess I was just thinking about you, L.L. Thought I'd come by and see how you're doing.
He glanced at me, eyes peering just over the top of his glasses. He signaled the bartender and looked back down at his book.
—A banner day. Another beer is surely in order.
L.L. wrote the screenplay, and it was a hit.
It was read by everyone in Hollywood. Dad became the hottest writer in town. Coppola tapped him to adapt Travels with Charley. Redford wanted to know if he'd brush up a remake of The Heart of the Matter. Michael Cimino was looking to do the life of Jim Thomson. Robert Evans thought he'd snagged the Holy Grail, the rights to The Catcher in the Rye. Did L.L. want first crack? Anything and everything with a whiff of the literary, L.L. Crows was at the top of the list to write, adapt, brush up, or take a pass at.
And he took every job. And he wrote some of the most consistently excellent and praised screenplays Hollywood has ever seen. And not a fucking one was ever produced. Nothing that he got screen credit for, anyway. But in the ’70s, and through most of the ’80s, his red pencil marks had decorated, and vastly improved, he'd be sure to inform you, the pages of a small forest's worth of scripts. Some good, some pure ass. Several Oscar nominees, and a few winners. Not that he gave a fuck one way or another. Because they weren't his stories. He was just the hired gun, getting richer than any human could pray to a fat and greedy Jesus to get.
His story, his admired and lauded screenplay of his one and only novel, walked up and down the runway and had its skirt lifted by every A-list studio/actor/director/producer in town with a yen to take on the what had become the greatest movie never made, and while it had more than a few dollar bills stuffed in its panties, no big spender ever stepped up to throw down for a trip to the champagne lounge.
A source, one might say of some slight bitterness in years to come.
—And what are you reading these days?
&nb
sp; I looked up from the copy of Down and Out in Paris and London that I'd taken from his pile. I'd scooted over to the stool next to L.L. to make room for a couple that was waiting for a table. Full dinner service in swing, Chez Jay went from elbow room empty to sardine can packed in less than an hour. I'd forgotten.
Sitting at his side, reading silently, sipping at a beer, it came back.
Childhood revisited.
I closed the book.
—Horror mostly.
He rubbed his forehead, kept his eyes in his own book.
—Dare I ask by whom written?
—Whatever. Stephen King, Joe Lansdale, Clive Barker.
He winced.
—Web. Ambrose Bierce, Lovecraft, Stoker, for God sake.
I went on.
—Dean Koontz, Kellerman.
—Edgar Allan Poe, ever heard of him? J. S. LeFanu? Algernon Blackwood?
—James Herbert. Straub.
He slammed his book closed.
—Are you trying to kill me? Did you come here solely to antagonize me and rub my face in your ignorance? Certain tales by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton for fuck sake, all horror of the highest order. Dear God, Webster, Henry James! Shirley Jackson! Or in later years, Harlan Ellison, Bradbury, Matheson!
I slammed my own book.
—I'm not looking for fucking enlightenment, I'm looking to turn my fucking brain off for a couple hours!
He rose from his stool.
—Turn your brain off? Turn your?
He began collecting his books.
—Well, I have news for you, Web.
He cradled the books and put his face in mine.
—You have fucking well succeeded at that!
Heads had turned, the manager was coming over.
L.L. took a thick roll of bills from the hip pocket of his faded and baggy madras shorts and flipped a couple hundreds on the bar.
—Sorry about the fracas, Ernesto. My son is a mongoloid, and if I don't speak at a certain volume and pitch he can't understand human speech.
Exit, L. L. Crows, having added to his great legacy of closing lines.
I never heard about how great teaching was when I was a little kid. By then, the mid-eighties, he was one of the senior script doctors of the industry, a go-to guy when a little class was needed on a project, making an obscene living tweaking other writers' illiteracies. All I heard about was how vital the movies were.
People say escapism as if it were some foul bane. As if the denizens of this weary world were not deserving of some surcease and ease. They say it as if that is the only virtue the cinema might possess. As if it is not the great art form of the twentieth century. As if Godard and Fellini and Hitchcock and Cassavetes and Bergman and Altman and Wilder never walked the earth. One movie, one, of only moderate success, it touches more lives than I touched in nearly fifteen years of teaching. The years I toiled in that cesspool of incompetence and mediocrity called the public schools. I shudder, Web. My bowels turn to water when I think of what I might have accomplished. But no regrets, regrets are for small men with minor minds. We, my boy, we are for scaling mountains, you and I. We are for leaving monuments. A movie, a film, it is a testament in light and color and sound, a record of achievement, a projection of artistic vision penetrating directly into the brains of the audience. They cannot help but be touched, changed, when our words vibrate their eardrums, when the photons carrying our images strike the rods and cones of their eyes. Filmmaking, Web, let no one tell you otherwise, is a noble endeavor, the surest way for giant men to leave their marks upon the landscape of human emotions.
Delivered as he drove me around greater Los Angeles in his 560SL, after keeping me home from school so we could go to the NuArt together to see a Michael Curtiz revival, pointing from time to time with the hand that didn't contain a can of beer.
There, at Wilshire and Crenshaw, the house that served as exterior for Nora Desmond's mansion. There, the rest home Jack and Faye go to in Chinatown. There, the Ennis Brown House, Price's House on Haunted Hill. The Ambassador Hotel, where Anne Bancroft and Hoffman have their affair. Your mom and I fucked there once. Here in San Pedro, right there, they filmed the Skull Island landing in King Kong. This spot here, Hollywood and Sunset, where Griffith built his Babylonian temple and staged the single largest orgy of all time.
Mom was spending most of her time in Big Sur by then, hanging with the Esalen crowd. Yoga and transcendental meditation and organic hummus and mud baths and, I assume, fucking men considerably younger and less caustic than her older and no longer looked-up-to husband.
So she wasn't around when L.L. got the call that his screenplay had finally been green-lighted. She missed the scene when his ghostwriter pals drove up the canyon to drink their way through the case of Krug he opened for the occasion. She missed the following morning when he got the final draft of the script from his agent and found that it had been rewritten five times in the year since it had been most recently optioned; thick batches of colored pages mixed into the script, indicating the many hands that had revised his work. She missed the evisceration he performed on the house after reading the rewrites, while I sat out front on my Big Wheel, and Chev and I listened to him creating a whole new lexicon of cursing. And by the time the movie was made two years year later, with Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald in the leads, directed by John Badham, she had relinquished claims on communal property and left for Oregon to find her true self, unencumbered by the artificial constraints of marriage and rigidity of bourgeois child-rearing concepts. That final exit relieving her of the scene after L.L. went, hope springs eternal, to the premiere.
He sat through it. All one hundred and seventy-nine minutes of it. Sat through every tired cough and forced laugh from the audience, sat through the round of relieved applause as the credits rolled. Sat through the entirety of its mediocrity, and saw it as a movie guilty of the ultimate crime: forgettability It wasn't even bad enough to be remembered for the incompetence brought to bear. Nor, after all the years and near-misses gone by, were the expectations, or the budget, high enough for it to be held out as a great flop. He sat in the theater, enduring the shoulder pats and congratulations of various sucker fish of the movie business. And I sat in the seat next to him the whole while.
The climax Mom missed by fleeing north was to come the following morning when L.L.'s agent informed him that his name could not be removed from the credits. An Alan Smithee Film would never grace the opening titles. So he began making a bonfire of every bit of movie memorabilia, every treasured celluloid print, stacks of laser disks, collected and bound editions of every screenplay in which his talent had played a roll, and his SWG membership card, and proceeded to burn down half the house, nearly sending an inferno through the canyon and over the entire range of the Hollywood Hills.
The next day, after L.L.'s lawyer got him out on bail for his arson charges, I was enrolled in private school, gifted with a collection of the Great Western Works of Literature, and received my first in a lifelong series of lectures praising the professional educator and condemning popular culture in all its forms.
But never condemning the movies. Which, to tell by their eradication from L.L.'s conversation, were an advancement in entertainment that had never existed at all.
I followed him out to the parking lot, to his current SL, the latest in a line of annual acquisitions. That residual money for the years of hackery still rolling in.
—L.L.
He dropped the books on the back seat of the open-top car, adding them to the small library jumbled there, and turned to me.
—What? What can I do for you that I have not already done? Having seeded you and nourished you and clothed you and educated you, what more is there that I can do at this late date?
I looked at the purple veins in his nose. The swollen feet stuffed into chef's clogs, the spindly legs sticking from the shorts, the sweat-stained fishing hat that covered the melanoma scars on his bald head. I thought about reminding him of
a few details from our life. And then not seeing him again for another two years.
Instead I thought about the dead man's stain soaking through the carpet, maggot trails leading away from motor oil blood and greasy tallow.
I pointed at the car.
—I could use a ride.
He started to raise a pointing finger, and stopped.
—Yes. A ride.
He opened the driver side door.
—Get in then.
I walked around the car and got in and he drove to the parking lot exit and waited for a couple pedestrians on the sidewalk, and I saw him looking down at the pier, at the merry-go-round. He rubbed his mouth, opened it, closed it.
Leaving me to hear what he'd said many times, over twenty years gone down, in this same place.
There, on the pier, the merry-go-round Paul Newman runs in The Sting. Do you want to ride it?
In front of the apartment L.L. reached into the backseat and knocked through the books until he found the copy of Anna Karenina he'd abused me with at the bar, and flipped through the pages as I got out of the car.
He closed it and held it out.
—Take this.
—I've read it.
He leaned across the seat and shoved the book into my chest.
—Read it again. It will help keep you from getting any more ignorant than you have already become.
—Well, when you put it that way.
I took the book.
—Thanks.
He put the car in gear.
—Don't thank me. Just read the damn book.
And he was off, tires breaking traction as he squealed away, nearly running over my feet.
I watched him careen around the corner, almost killing a man pushing a bicycle hung with plastic bags filled with empty bottles and cans.
—I'd say it was good to see you, L.L., but I'd be so fucking lying.
WHAT BEING A DICK GETS YOU
—I love Anna Karenina.
I looked at Dot, still on my couch, still in Chev's Misfits T, but now appareled with low-rider jeans, several textbooks scattered around her.