Homesick for Another World(48)
I explained all this to the photographer at the mall. “People say I look like Pierce Brosnan,” I told him. He said he agreed, handed me a flimsy plastic comb, told me to sit down and wait my turn. I remember the little kids and babies in fancy clothes in the waiting room, crying and nagging their mothers. I combed my hair and practiced making faces in the mirror on the wall. My mother went to Rydell’s and came back with a new rhinestone belt on. “Discount,” she said. I suspect she lifted it. She did that when she was in a bad mood. Then she sat down next to me and read People magazine and smoked. “Don’t smile too much,” she said when it was my turn with the photographer. “You don’t want to look desperate.”
Oh, my mother. A week later she drove me to the bus stop. It was barely five in the morning and she still wore her burgundy satin negligee and curlers in her hair, a denim jacket thrown over her sunburned shoulders. She drove slowly on the empty roads, coasted through the blinking red lights as though they didn’t exist, stayed silent as the moon. Finally she pulled over and lit a cigarette. I watched a tear coast down her cheek. She didn’t look at me. I opened the car door. “Call me” is all she said. I said I would. I watched as she pulled a U-turn and drove away.
Gunnison was mostly empty fields, long gray roads. At night the prison lights oriented you to the north; dark, sleeping wolves of mountains to the east and west. The south was a mystery to me. The farthest I’d ever gone down Highway 89 was to the airport, and that was just to see an air show once when I was a kid. I had never even left Utah before I moved to Los Angeles. I fell asleep on the bus, my little Toshiba under my feet, and woke up in Cedar City when a fat man got on and took the seat next to me. He edged me against the window and chain-smoked for three and a half hours, his body roiling and thundering each time he coughed. In the dim bus, flashes of light bounced off the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses, smudged by fingers greasy from the doughnuts he was eating. I watched him pick out the little crumbs from the folds of his crotch and lick his hands. “The Garden of Eden,” he said. “Have you been to Vegas?” I shook my head no. All the money I had in the world was folded up in the front pocket of my jeans. The bulge there embarrassed me. “I go for poker,” the man gasped.
“I’m going to Hollywood to be an actor,” I told him. “On television, or in movies.”
“Thatta boy,” he replied. “The slimmest odds reap the highest payouts. But it takes balls. That’s why I can’t play roulette. No balls.” He coughed and coughed.
This cheered me to hear. I was bold. I was courageous. I was exceptional. I had big dreams. And why shouldn’t I? My mother had no idea what real ambition was. Her father was a janitor. Her father’s father had been a farmer. Her mother’s father had been a pastor at the prison. I would be the first in a succession of losers to make something of myself. One day I’d be escorted through the streets in a motorcade, and the entire world would know my name. I’d send checks home. I’d send autographed posters from movies I starred in. I’d give my mom a fur coat and diamonds for Christmas. Then she’d be sorry she ever doubted me. We crossed into Nevada, the blank desert like a spot on a map that had been rubbed away with an eraser. I stared out the window, imagining, praying. The fat man caressed my thigh several times, perhaps by accident. He got off in Las Vegas, at last, and a black lady got on and took his seat. She batted the smoky air with a white-gloved hand. “Never again,” she said, and pulled out a paperback Bible.
I put on my earphones and busied my mind with the usual request: Dear God, please make me rich and famous. Amen.
? ? ?
Mrs. Honigbaum was a writer. Her gossip column, “Reach for the Stars,” ran in a weekly coupon circular distributed for free in strip malls and car washes and Laundromats around town. The gossip she reported was unoriginal—who got engaged, who had a baby, who committed suicide, who got canned. She also wrote the circular’s monthly horoscopes. She said it was easy to steal predictions from old newspapers and switch the words around. It was all nonsense, she told me.
“You want voodoo? Here.” She pulled her change purse from a drawer and fished out a penny. “The first cent you’ve earned as an actor. I’m paying you. Take it, and give me a smile.” Once she even made me sign one of my head shots, promising that she wouldn’t sell it, even when it was worth millions. “Don’t get too attached to who you are,” she said. “They’ll make you change your name, of course. Nobody’s name is real out here. My real name was Yetta,” she said, yelling over the clamor of her TVs. “Nobody here calls me that. Yetta Honigbaum, can you imagine? First I was Yetta Goslinski. Mr. Honigbaum—” She pointed to a small golden urn on top of her filing cabinet. “Now I have no family to speak of. Most of them were gassed by the Nazis. You’ve heard of Hitler? He had the brains but not the brawn, as they say. That’s what made him crazy. I was lucky. I escaped to Hollywood, like you. Welcome, welcome. I learned English in six days just reading magazines and listening to the radio. That’s brains. And believe it or not, I was a very pretty girl once. You can call me Honey. It’s a lonely life.”
She said she didn’t believe in fate or magic. There was hard work and there was luck. “Luck and hard work. Good looks and intelligence. In this city, it’s rarely a two-for-one.” I remember her telling me that the day I moved in. “Any fool can see you’re handsome. But are you smart at all? Are you at least reasonable? That counts for a lot here. You’ll catch on. Did you see this?” She held up the cover of a flimsy magazine showing Jack Nicholson picking his nose. “This is good. This is interesting. People like to see celebrities at their worst. It brings the stars back to earth, where they belong. Listen to me. Don’t go crazy. I should warn you that there are cults in this city, some better than others. People ask you to open a vein, you walk away. You hear me?” She made me fill out a form and sign my name on a letter stating that if anything happened to me, if tragedy struck, she would take no responsibility. “I don’t know what they teach you in Utah, but even Jesus would get greedy here. The Masons, the satanists, the CIA, they’re all the same. You can talk to me. I’m one of the good ones. And call your mother,” she said.