Dog Beach Page 2

  “I need to talk business with my director.”

  The guys, all but Troy, shuffled out onto the back porch, Indian-filed down the steps to the sand. Zoe stood off in the kitchen, hand on a big hip, sipping a glass of cool filtered water from the fridge.

  “You have four weeks to turn in a cut,” Avi said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve put me in a very bad position with my investors. Four weeks, or your schoolboy ass is out of my house. And you pay me back every fucking penny, I don’t care if you have to call your mother in Connecticut . . . Baby Boy Troy.”

  Troy did a chilled take at the name, but then Avi was gone. Zoe finished her water, left the empty glass for the tenants to clean and put away. On her way out, she went to Troy’s desk, sorted through the color-coded strip board. “We shooting Monday or not?”

  “Not if it rains.”

  “We’re in Southern California, duh.”

  “I think we got most of your stuff, Zoe. I know we want to do reshoots on the crying scene, but we have the rest of June.”

  “Easy on the liposuction. If you cut anything, cut that little porn star you’re fucking. The redhead from Charlie’s house. She can’t act her way out of a paper bag.”

  Zoe left the house. Troy stood there, waiting to hear the door latch. “Yeah, okay, Hepburn, you Armenian skank.”

  Someone touched his shoulder and he started.

  “Dude,” Durbin said. “What’d he say?”

  The young filmmakers were back inside, forming a loose huddle. “I think he threatened me,” Troy said.

  “I told you,” T-Rich said. “The guy is sketchy.”

  “You notice how he’s got a vampire accent?” Malone said. “I mean like a high-end vampire. The vampire one percent.”

  “He’s giving me four weeks.”

  “Or what?”

  “I don’t know. But I think he’s tapped the phone. He knows what Alexis calls me, I mean her little nickname for me.”

  “Dog House is tapped?” Malone said.

  “What’s Alexis call you?” Durbin wanted to know. “Is it nasty?”

  “This sucks, man.” Troy clutched for more stale bread, then threw the empty bag.

  Malone stood at the closet, checking on his surfboard. “What did the fourth Kardashian take out of our closet?”

  “A yoga mat,” said Durbin. “Troy, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going nonlinear with the structure. I’m going to baffle myself into an inspired work of lunacy. And then I’m going to run.”

  “Nonlinear is six years ago,” T-Rich said, picking up Zoe’s water glass and examining the perfect lipstick on the rim.

  “Well, you have any ideas for saving this piece of shit?” Troy looked at each of them. A dog barked at the waves outside; a woman called out to someone down the beach. The seagulls returned to the porch, determined. But not a single desperate idea from the Dogs of Entropy.

  Then Malone had a brainstorm: “I’d just run, bro.”

  3

  MARINA DEL REY

  The sun had been up for twenty minutes, but Louie Mo and Dutch “the Clutch” Dupree were just waking in the front seat. They’d spent most of the night in the dark little bar of the Marina del Rey Hotel, drinking house cabernet and recounting the Palm Springs gag. Both had been out of the stunt business for years, but they still called their jobs “gags.” On her third glass, Dutch had proposed a plan for balancing the books: deliver the signed jersey to the client but keep the collectible football; store it in the trunk, like a treasury bond. At first, Louie had resisted, equating this to spilling hot coffee on your thigh and suing Jack in the Box. But by his last glass of sour cab, he had warmed to the idea of double-dipping. In fact, he told Dutch that she was clever.

  Yet, it bothered him now as he lugged the framed Raiders jersey down onto the mooring along a crowded row of aging yachts and sailboats. He could hear Dutch ringing a cell phone somewhere on one of the crafts—the ringtone was some kind of rock guitar riff—and a moment later, the client appeared. He was a hungover hulk of a man, waving Louie on board the small yacht.

  Down inside the mahogany galley, Louie got a better look at Jason Banazak. At six foot six and three hundred pounds, the onetime football star was closer in size to a Kodiak bear than a human being. Dutch told him that the guy had earned a half-dozen sports awards and just as many steroid charges, firearm possessions, and date-rape scandals. Louie noted that he also had the pronounced brow ridge of a Neanderthal. Like Louie himself, Banazak’s best days were far behind him and he had stopped cutting his graying curls. But it was his eyes—flat and cold—that stopped Louie short.

  It wasn’t that Louie was intimidated by the guy’s size; he loved fighting oversized men, playthings if you’ve been trained in kung fu. What scared him was that wounded glaze in the ex-jock’s eyes that made him feel like he was looking into a mirror.

  “Where’s the Super Bowl ball?”

  “Couldn’t find.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Couldn’t find’?”

  “Could not find.”

  “I know every single fucking item they had in that room, and the Super Bowl ball was on a stand with a little plaque.”

  “Couldn’t find Super Ball.”

  “Couldn’t find Super Ball,” Banazak mocked Louie’s broken English, then grunted, sitting on the edge of the unmade cot near a tiny white lapdog. Louie looked around the galley, intrigued. “You live here? On boat?”

  Banazak surrendered a tired nod, already counting off a fold of cash. “Did you fuck them up good, Chinaman?”

  “Yes. Fuck them up very good.”

  Banazak glanced up, grinned with a broken front tooth. He seemed amused by this loan-out enforcer, the little Asian guy with a reputation for clearing a room. When he handed Louie the cash, Louie quickly, almost magician-like, handed back a one-hundred-dollar bill.

  “Oxycodone,” Louie said, surrendering a sheepish grin. “I see it. On the desk. Right over there.”

  It took Banazak a few foggy seconds to make the connection. Then he reached back and snagged a full vial of prescription painkillers, tossed it hard at Louie. When he caught it, Louie went dark. Crude American asshole. A man bluffs his way into a hotel room and beats the living crap out of four scumbags for the price of three, retrieves stolen property and delivers it to your Marina del Rey houseboat and you toss a vial of painkillers at him like he’s a beggar.

  Fuck you.

  That’s what Louie wanted to say. You give to me, you give to me with two hands and with respect. A little humility. But then the lapdog lifted its pink nose and began to yap. Louie drew back a step, but the apso kept barking sharply at him. Funny, Louie thought, how dogs can sense what a person’s thinking. That observation cooled him down. Temper was a weakness anyway, a sign of a lesser man. He remembered the old Sifu at the Peking Opera School telling him such things when he was a child, hanging upside down from his ankles while the Sifu beat him with a rattan cane. Westerners never understood Louie when he talked about Peking Opera School; they thought he’d been trained to sing and dance. The school, however, was really a boarding facility where young students—so many of them orphans or runaways—trained rigorously in acrobatics, martial arts, and tumbling skills. Louie was disciplined if nothing else. But more than anything, right now, he was just happy to have his hands on a fully loaded cylinder of relief. He also felt bad for the big, broken shell of a giant who used to wear number 99. When Louie climbed back to the sunny deck and the smell of hash browns and starter fluid, Banazak remained down in the galley, still staring at the floor.

  “So sad,” Louie said back in the car, going on and on about it. “So sad, this man.”

  “He’s a rapist,” Dutch said, popping an oxy. “Served time for beating up a sixteen-year-old black chick. He’s forfeited any right to fair play. Fuc
k him.”

  Onward they went, like Bonnie and Clyde.

  4

  THE IVY

  “The economics of the industry have changed,” Avi Ghazaryan said in that silky, Armenian timbre. “The town used to be paved with dumb money. You have a good idea, you get a deal. Now? They will only make movies that come with an underlying brand.” He was sitting at a lunch table with three Latino men and a private detective named Papagallo, onetime “private eye to the stars.”

  “My daughter used to play that game Scrabble. Go to Paramount and pitch Scrabble as a movie and you’ll get a deal. Or fucking Slinky. Go to Warners with Slinky and a writer and you’ve got one on the books. One problem: You have to pay the rights holder. So, I ask myself: How do you pitch a brand without having to pay the rights? You ready? Look outside the window. Do you see the little man on the crosswalk light? Yes, you see him. The little stick-figure man. He’s also on all the pedestrian crossing signs, from here to New York. So imagine this: An old woman is out walking her dog in the rain. Lightning strikes the caution sign as she passes. The dog barks, they run inside. Next morning, the old woman—Kathy Bates, say—walks by the caution sign. But something’s strange. The little man is gone from the sign. He’s out there somewhere. And he kills. Serial killer. These guys, the town—I don’t know what town, some fucking town—they bring in a bounty hunter. I can get Randy Couture. He has to hunt down the little crosswalk man, the caution sign man. It’s a brand that everyone knows, but no one owns the rights to.”

  Avi drew a soft breath, ate a little salmon and balsamic greens, genuinely inspired. “I call this idea Caution. That’s it. Just Caution. It’s a pre-branded fucking hit with a nice one-word title.”

  “What’s going on with the zombie movie?” said one of the Latinos, a handsome guy in a blazer named Hektor. Papagallo was busy with his iPhone, and this frustrated Avi; he’d expected a bigger reaction to his crosswalk-man idea, but he knew he was dealing with idiots.

  “This little fuck, Troy,” Avi said. “He’s having an artistic tantrum. Needs more time.”

  “Needs more time?” said Hektor, looking at his partners. “We put in real coin, Avi. You guaranteed a return.”

  “One thousand percent,” said an older Latino, staring warily at the talapia lunch special.

  “That’s right,” Avi said. “As soon as this little fucker finishes the movie.”

  “Well, make him finish the movie.”

  “Why are we babying this guy?” the older one said. “Have Hektor go over there and show him his tattoos.”

  Hektor smiled at the thought. Indeed, the side of his neck facing the wall was scrimmed with elaborate ink swirls and symbols; there was little doubt that those tattoos must have covered his torso and back.

  “He’s just a kid,” Avi said, a little embarrassed by how protective he sounded. “These kids are geniuses, but they’re babies. Immature.”

  “Well, put him in fucking time-out,” Papagallo said, looking up from his iPhone for the first time. “I know a fixer who sends out a guy. Foreign guy. Knee-breaker. Puts the fear of God in guys who don’t want to write a check.”

  “How much?”

  “Let me call my guy, but I think it’s under two grand for him to put the first elbow on. Usually don’t need a second.”

  Avi was gazing out at the little blinking crosswalk man, thinking about how he’d look in motion-capture. And then he had one of those brainstorms like the one that engendered the idea for Slash. In the final scene, Randy Couture should trap the Caution Man at the curb, pull his gun, and speak a line that audiences would be recalling for years: Don’t walk, motherfucker.

  “It’s time,” said the older Latino, still not touching the talapia. “Get a fire under this guy’s ass or give us back our money. My boss wanted to invest in some Internet stuff, but Hektor loves your movies.”

  “The action ones, I like,” Hektor said. “Low Tide, I like. I don’t like the ones when the people talk.”

  “Let me tell you a little story,” Avi said. “By the time Johnny Depp’s next movie comes out, he’s five years older but everyone wants to cast him at the same age as the last movie. That’s the one thing people never understand. Making a movie is like planting an apple tree. Time and patience.”

  “I’d rather just buy the fucking apples at Farmer’s Market,” the older guy said, and Papagallo laughed.

  Avi looked away from the crosswalk man, stared at Papagallo and his itchy iPhone thumb. “Okay. Call your guy. Put a little pressure on my director. But don’t hurt him. Just scare him and let him know he’s not in film school anymore.”

  Avi was up, saying good-bye, but not shaking hands. He had his Beamer’s keys out, eager to call the boys at WME and get on the Paramount lot, ambush Tyler at the commissary. “Tell Tyler I want to hand him a fucking pot of gold” is what he always instructed his agents when he knew he had a eureka idea. Caution. It had the ring of Taken, and Taken had made two hundred million on a twenty-mill budget.

  Don’t walk, motherfucker. It could be the new Go ahead, make my day.

  5

  THROUGH THE OVERPASS

  Driving Highway 10, Dutch had a headache, a dry mouth, and a strange yearning for pork carnitas, slow cooked like they used to do in Santa Fe. A heavy mantle of smog and haze left a residue on her windshield and that’s what she blamed her headache on: L.A. Not the wine; the wine was her friend and ally. Los Angeles was the disease and this ugly stretch of freeway was the darkest part of it. No matter how many times she drove this route, she always forgot that it would soon duck beneath an overpass just north of Santa Monica and mercifully spit her out into a cleansing wash of blue sky and surfers. She always felt a false jolt of freedom, like the drab underpass was the wardrobe and Malibu was the Narnian multiverse waiting on the other side. When she glanced at Louie to see if he was feeling it too, she found him sleeping, mouth agape.

  They were almost at their destination, but she let Louie sleep through a U-turn at Moonshadows Restaurant. She parked where she could find a crack between cars a few houses down from the Las Flores Beach address.

  Feeling the stop, Louie came awake, said the same thing he always did: “I snore?”

  “The brown house up there.”

  She spilled a key from an envelope, handed it over. “They said let yourself in through the gate, follow the path down to the beach, and go in through the back porch.”

  Louie turned the key over in his hands, assessed the duplex. It was one of the more ramshackle beach places wedged between the nicer homes, but Malibu was Malibu and ramshackle was still ten million in real estate; who knew who might live there?

  “I scare this guy, right?”

  “Yeah, scare his ass. Don’t break it.”

  She looked at the address on the Jack in the Box napkin. “His name’s Troy.”

  Louie committed the name to cloudy memory, opened his door. Dutch watched him shuffle along the side of the roaring highway. He often walked with what stunt guys called a “lifetime achievement limp,” but he looked particularly sore and tired today. Still, he had that incongruous youthful stride, buoyed by white sneakers. From behind he could appear almost young, his glutes permanently hardened from five decades of martial arts. Reclining her seat back a notch, she tapped a smoke. Beautiful day. Not a bad place to sit. Maybe she’d see Tom Petty.

  • • •

  “Spank my ass like you’re mad at it,” Alexis Cain breathed, in between shrill, rhythmic calls like dolphin song.

  The redhead who played a zombie in Troy’s movie was sitting on him in reverse cowgirl, wearing nothing but pink Uggs because her feet were always cold. She rode him hard, slapping his leg and digging in her nails. “Spike it like a volleyball,” she wailed.

  From his bedroom window, Troy could see the morning haze burning off Dog Beach. Malone was out surfing, and T-Rich and Durbin wouldn’t be bac
k from Ralph’s with groceries for a good hour. Dog House was all his this morning, his and the ginger’s, cat-backing now like a Montana bull rider. He felt himself lurch, close to eruption. Alexis Cain knew sex like Troy knew the collected works of Abel Ferrara; the girl lived up at the Point in a large glass-and-adobe triplex owned by Charlie Sheen. She was, if the rumors at Googie’s were correct, one of Charlie’s girls. Not one of his porn star goddesses, but part of the farm team. She wanted to go legit, she said, but Charlie wouldn’t take her seriously. This kid Troy seemed to be her best chance. If Slash got distribution, she could be on her way; she was young enough to start over. Young enough to play high school girls if she had to.

  Troy grimaced and did the thing he’d been doing lately for staying power: He thought about scenes from his doomed movie. Almost instantly, it triggered reverse ejaculation. Sometimes even shrinkage. Thinking of profoundly vile things like the compost bucket or Zoe Ghazaryan’s dialogue always helped him prolong in such moments. So he was baffled that the image of Zoe, the bane of his grueling imprisonment in the Dog House, had the opposite effect.

  He spasmed.

  Alexis cheered him on, her voice like helium. She must’ve had a volleyball fetish because she kept using terms like “spike it” and “jungle ball.” Troy begged her to dismount. She was bruising his pelvis now, riding him into the springs. Finally, she pitched forward and rolled, looked up at him crazy-eyed.

  “Did you film us?” she said. “Don’t lie to me, Troy.”

  “Film us? Just now? God, no.”

  Troy caught a mope of disappointment on her face, but before he could analyze it, he heard the sound; they both did. Someone was in the house, moving around. Sounded like a cat getting into the cereal boxes. But there were no cats at Dog House.

  “Shit, it’s her,” he whispered.

  “Who?”

  “Avi’s daughter. She lets herself in from the beach. Probably using the shower.”