Homesick for Another World(47)
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My landlady’s name was Mrs. Honigbaum. When I lived with her, she would have been in her late sixties. She wore a short dark-blond wig and large gold-framed eyeglasses. Her fingernails were long and fake and painted pink. Her posture was stooped in the shiny quilted housecoat she wore when she walked around. Usually she sat behind her desk in a sleeveless blouse, her thin, spotted arms swaying as she gestured and pulled Kools from a tooled leather cigarette case. Her ears and nose were humongous, and the skin on her face was stretched up toward her temples in a way that made her look stunned all the time. Her makeup was like stage makeup, or what they put on dead bodies in open caskets. It was applied heavy-handedly, in broad strokes of blue and pink and bronze. Still, I didn’t think she was unattractive. I had never met a Jew before, or anyone intellectual at all back in Gunnison.
Mrs. Honigbaum rented rooms in her house for forty-five dollars a week to young men who came to her through a disreputable talent agent—my agent. Forty-five dollars a week wasn’t cheap at the time, but my agent had made the arrangements and I didn’t question him. His name was Bob Sears. I never met him face to face. I’d found him by calling the operator back in Gunnison and asking to speak to a Los Angeles talent scout. Bob Sears took me on as a client “sight unseen” because, he said, I sounded good-looking and American over the phone. He said that once I had a few odd gigs under my belt, I could start doing ad work on game shows, then commercials, then bit roles on soaps, then small parts in sitcoms, then prime-time dramas. Soon Scorsese would come knocking, he said. I didn’t know who Scorsese was, but I believed him.
Once I got to town, I called Bob Sears nearly every weekday morning to find out where to go for auditions and what time to be there. Mrs. Honigbaum let me use the phone in her bedroom. I think I was the only tenant to have that privilege. Her bedroom was dark and humid, with tinted glass doors looking out onto the swimming pool. Mirrors lined one wall. Everything smelled of vanilla and mouthwash and mothballs. A dresser was topped with a hundred glass vials of perfumes and potions and serums I guessed were meant to keep her youthful. There was a zebra-skin rug, a shiny floral bedspread. The ceiling lamp was a yellow crystal chandelier. When the door to the bathroom was open, I saw the flesh-colored marble, a vanity covered in makeup and brushes and pencils, a bare Styrofoam head. The lightbulbs were fixed along the edges of the mirror, like in backstage dressing rooms. I was very impressed by that. I went in there and studied my face in that lighting, but only for a minute at a time. I didn’t want to get caught. While I was on the phone with Bob Sears, the maid sometimes flitted in and out, depositing stacks of clean towels, collecting the crumpled, lipstick-smeared tissues from the waste bin by the bed. The phone was an old rotary, the numbers faded and greasy, and the receiver smelled like halitosis. The smell didn’t really bother me. In fact, I liked everything about Mrs. Honigbaum. She was kind. She was generous. She flattered and cajoled me, the way grandmothers do.
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Bob Sears had said I’d need a head shot, so before I’d left Gunnison, my mother drove me to the mall in Ephraim to have my portrait taken. I had a lazy, wandering eye, and so I wasn’t allowed to drive. She drove me resentfully, sighing and tapping her finger on the steering wheel at red lights, complaining about how late it was, how hard she’d worked all day, how the mall gave her a headache. “I guess in Hollywood they have chauffeurs to drive you around and servants to make your food,” she said. “And butlers to pick up your dirty underwear. Is that what you expect? Your Highness?”
“I’m going to Hollywood to work,” I reminded her. “As an actor. It’s a job. People really do it.”
“I don’t see why you can’t be an actor here, where everybody already knows you. Everybody loves you here. What’s so terrible about that?”
“Because nobody here knows anything,” I explained. “So what they think doesn’t matter.”
“Keep biting the hand and it might slap you across the face one day,” she said. “Boys like you are a dime a dozen out there. You think those Hollywood people will be lining up just to tie your shoes? You think you’re so lucky? You want an easy life? You want to roller-skate on the beach? Even the hairs on your head are numbered. Don’t forget that.”
I really did want an easy life. I looked out the window at the short little houses, the flat open plains, the sky purple and orange, blinding sparks of honey-colored light shooting over the western mountains where the sun went down. “Nothing ever happens here,” I said.
“You call fireworks over the reservoir nothing? How about that public library you’ve never once set foot in? How about all those teachers who I had to beg not to fail you? You think you’re smarter than all them? Smarter than teachers?”
“No,” I answered. I knew I wasn’t smart back then. Being an actor seemed like an appropriate career for someone like me.
“You’re running out on your sister, on Larry,” said my mother. “What can I say? Just don’t get yourself murdered. Or do. It’s your life.” She turned up the radio. I kept quiet for the rest of the drive.
My life in Gunnison really wasn’t that bad. I was popular and I had fun, and pretty girls followed me around. I’d been like a celebrity in my high school—prom king, class president. I was voted “most likely to succeed” even though my grades were awful. I could have stayed in Gunnison, gotten a job at the prison, worked up the ranks, married any girl I chose, but that wasn’t the kind of life I wanted. I wanted to be a star. The closest movie theater was in Provo, an hour and a half away. I’d seen Rocky and Star Wars there. Whatever else I’d watched came through one of the three TV channels we had in Gunnison. I didn’t particularly like movies. It seemed like hard work to act in something that went on for so long. I thought I could move to Hollywood and get a role on a show like Eight Is Enough as the cool older brother. And later I could be like Starsky on Starsky and Hutch.