The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter Page B

bounced off the walls as the energy moved around the room gathering force.
    And so of course it affected us, too, that wonderful sense of wellbeing, helped along only a little bit by the whiskey I poured into my coffee the minute Dorothy the waitress turned her back.
    â€œLook who’s drinkin’ on New York time,” somebody said, and the words ricocheted and everybody laughed, but not in chorus.
    Jim read a couple of the raunchy sex ads from his little newspaper.
    â€œUgh,” Sonny said. She had joined us as soon as the booth opened up. “Down in Texas we don’t do stuff like that except to animals.”
    Jim read a couple more but nobody was listening, so he put the paper away and laced his own coffee.
    A woman came by the table for autographs, she wanted all four signatures, she didn’t give a damn who any of us were, but I had to feel sorry for Pops, back in the booth, red with shame.
    While we waited for Dorothy to come back and get our orders, Sonny read her letter and Karl worked the room, making it around to everybody he had to stroke, giving it the personal touch and paying good dues. If somebody had seen him come into the place and then told his booth that he and Karl had this relationship, and Karl failed to acknowledge the relationship, the guy could be made to look foolish, and then some time in the future this could cause trouble. Making movies is trouble enough without trouble.
    â€œWhen you consider he’s got a heart the size of a beebee, he’s doing all right,” Jim admitted.
    A couple of guys across the room reluctantly got up from their booth, but the pack was massing at the cigar counter and they had to leave. Instead of just going out, they took hold of one another and waltzed down past us and around the other row of booths and out that way, to a scattering of applause. Then a comic who was now working a police show as a straight actor came up to us, gave me a broad wink and bent over to whisper in Jim’s ear.
    Jim got serious at once. Karl slid back in the booth, strain showing around his eyes, and picked up a menu.
    â€œWho was that?” he asked Jim.
    â€œI don’t know,” Jim said. “He told me the poison was in the vessel with the pestle.”
    I happened to look out into the drugstore, and saw the fat face of a comic I had worked with years ago, out by the display of stuffed animals, in a place of concealment. He winked at me.
    I excused myself from the booth and went out and over to him. Instead of shaking hands or anything, I pulled a long secret agent face and said, “The vessel with the pestle.”
    â€œGot it,” he said, and moved off like a big fat Groucho toward the telephone in back.
    Returning to the booth, one of the Jackies came up to me and said, out of the corner of his mouth, “Is it true?”
    I nodded my head.
    â€œThe vessel with the . . . ?” He made stirring motions with his finger.
    I nodded and slid back into the booth.
    It was just silliness, but all over the place we were playing this dumbass game, and it spread from booth to booth, skipping only the newcomers and the tourists, the line from an old Danny Kaye movie getting all sorts of twists and obscene interpretations, and the big joke was, nobody would crack.
    Karl was mystified. “What’s going on?”
    â€œKarl thinks everything has to do with him,” I said to Sonny. “What a paranoid. Just because there are people skulking all over the drugstore . . .”
    Then a comic wowowing like a redskin grabbed a big blue-and-white stuffed rabbit from the shelf back of the counter and ran through the drugstore with it. I looked at the woman behind the cash register. She was wearing the most noncommital expression I had ever seen.
    â€œWhat’ll you have, kids?” Dorothy asked.
    Karl was still looking at the menu, probably trying to find the Cobb salad, which is what he liked to eat at the Polo Lounge, a Cobb salad