and play.
I lit a fresh Marlboro Light and in the fading light watched while a black kid down the block unzipped has pants to flash the merchandise for a guy in a red convertible.
Disgusted, I turned away and clicked on my computer to find my stories. I’m Bruno Dante, I thought, a writer of short fiction, a guy with a failed book, and a twelve-year-old Pontiac to his name. A forty-two-year-old wannabe. Swimming against the tide. Starting over one more time.
On the roof Dav-Ko’s new neon sign clicked on. It began flashing every three seconds, alternately flooding my room with light, then blackening it. I was home.
five
I was beginning to see dead people. They were not really dead. They were people who I’d meet who looked like people I had known who were now dead. It seemed to be happening more and more. In bookstores or supermarkets or liquor stores or bars. People who look like guys I used to know. For instance I saw Timmy Healy a month or so ago. The guy was a ringer for Timmy—except twenty years younger than the dead one. Then there was Bryan Mann. Bryan played jazz flute around town for years then got liver cancer—and ba-boom, he was dead in two months. And last week I saw KK Colberg. Bigger than shit. The KK look-alike sold me a pack of smokes at a liquor store. He reminded me exactly of him. I’d begun to think it might be an omen of my own death. A sign perhaps. And it happened enough that it was beginning to scare me.
But then the night after I saw the KK guy who sold me the cigarettes, I bet another guy—a baseball fan—twenty bucks at the Warm-Up Room bar. I’d bet him that Barry Bonds would homer for the Giants by the seventh inning. Bonds cracked one in the fifth so I decided to set aside the omen curse idea.
Two of the first four limos arrived at the local Lincoln dealer in Hollywood several days after we moved in. These were new ones. Custom-built stretch limos. Both with tinted windows and chrome wheels. Black and sleek and elegant.
Our next two cars were trucked directly to Dav-Ko Hollywood from New York. These were David Koffman’s pride and joy. Both only a few months old. Francisco had already christened the white one “Pearl” and the brown one “Cocoa.”
While Cocoa was a state-of-the-art stretch limo, it was Pearl that was our company’s most requested car in New York. Over-the-top glitz and piss elegance. Pearl actually had eight pounds of crushed pearl in the paint and a forty-eight-inch extension body panel in the center between the front and rear doors. The windows were smoked gray. It had a silk headliner, a stocked bar, a moonroof, two color TVs, and two phones. Pearl’s inside trim was gaudy, gleaming burl wood and her seats were covered in maroon calfskin. Fabulous.
Because he’d chosen to move our office to Selma Avenue I’d pegged David Koffman as a business cheapskate. But I was wrong. When it came to publicity he spared no expense to jump-start Dav-Ko Hollywood, even hiring a top-shelf L.A. PR firm.
Unger & Lilly invaded our office. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday of the first week they’d begun making up fluff news stories and calling local celebrity TV gossip shows. Patricia Unger herself spent all day on the phone framing press releases about Dav-Ko Hollywood. Her staff photographer took a hundred photos of Buffalo Bill in his white linen suit getting in and out of Pearl and by week’s end Unger had managed to get a local TV news program involved in doing a feature on Pearl’s supposed one-year birthday.
Her brainstorm was to give a street party and parade for the limo to kick off the new office. By that weekend two local high school marching bands were recruited and a three-block stretch of Grand Avenue near the L.A. Music Center was closed off for the event. David Koffman contributed to the festivities by hiring three big-titted strippers in bikinis to ride on Pearl’s roof and throw rose petals as the cameras rolled. Pure Hollywood. It took me five Vicodin—three before and two during the event—to get me through.
But Unger’s gimmick worked and our phones began ringing. A record label booked two cars a day for a week to take an English rock band back and forth to their Staples Center concert gigs. Me and Francisco and Koffman himself did the driving.
By the third week