The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter Page A

to the girl at the desk and finally came back to the elevator with a fat little letter, which she opened and glanced over quickly and then stuffed into her big leather purse.
    â€œLetter from home?” I asked her.
    â€œYou’re pretty smart,” she said.
    We walked down the little hill to the Liquor Locker, past the magazine and newspaper racks.
    Jim said, “Anybody got any quarters?” and bought a dirty newspaper. Sonny looked at the cover and made a face.
    â€œI want to go in here,” I said, and went into the liquor store while everybody else stayed outside in the sun. I picked up a couple of pints of Old Crow and tossed one to Jim.
    â€œRemind me I want to stop here on my way back,” Sonny said to Karl.
    â€œThe prices are really terrible in there,” Karl said. “You should shop over at the Chalet Gourmet.”
    â€œAnyway,” she said.

    BY THIS time of day Schwab’s was packed, with a big double line of people waiting for booths in front of the cigar counter and every seat at the long counter filled. Lunch is different from breakfast. At breakfast the day is glittering with promise, the calls to be taken, the deals to be made, the mail yet to come; by lunch a lot of this has been taken care of, but never mind, lunch is who are you with and who’s in the room ; there’s a need to maintain at least the appearance of being fully employed in this pleasant clatter and chatter of show business. Beginners come here to somehow be absorbed into the mainstream, longtime hangers-on come to be with their friends and equals, stars and hits come to keep themselves honest and to remember, this is how it was and this is how it could be again . And a lot of people come here to look at the others, and a lot of assholes and dimwits show up to confuse the issue.
    I like Schwab’s.
    â€œWe’ll never get a seat,” Sonny said, and moved off through the drugstore. Jim and Karl and I took our places at the end of the line, but of course when we had come by the window to the booth room and then in through the big double glass doors everybody did a take at us, as they do with everybody, and the energy of the room began its gradual shift.
    I had to admire Karl. Here he was, a man with literally hundreds of jobs to dispense over the course of a year, brought half against his will into a room full-to-spilling with eager jobtakers—performers, showoffs, clowns, ladies and gentlemen who had been working all their lives at the fine art of attracting attention. A lesser man than Karl would have balked at the door when he sensed the energies inside, or would have refused to come at all. But not Karl. He knew personally at least a third of the crowd and most of the rest by sight, and he behaved like a champ, cool but not aloof, nodding and smiling with recognition, shaking hands and having something to say to everybody who came up to him.
    Yet it was not like watching a master politician shedding his golden light on the chosen obscure, it was more like a tribal elder getting down with the troops; my God, this guy could put everybody in the room on easy street with a wiggle of his finger, he knew it and they knew it, and the energy coiled and surged.
    Naturally, when everyone got over their surprise at seeing Karl they turned back to their own conversations, because nobody likes to get caught with his tongue hanging out. But it was as if everybody had sniffed cocainein the interval between our arrival and the time we were seated in our booth, everyone a little happier, a little more jacked up, because they were here and we were here and big things must be happening. They would not have been nearly as turned on by just me and Jim, we’re only jobtakers like them, but Karl was a Big Boss, and the best way to behave in front of a Big Boss is to appear friendly, fully employed, with a future full of projects.
    Every conversation rose a couple of notches, and the fractured sounds