The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston Page B

ate.
    —Nothing.
Certainly. Why should a janitor be anything but aimless? The freedoms of the laboring class. Why fill the off hours with knowledge and investigation, with self-improvement? To what end, after all?
Nothing.
Indeed.
    I leaned over on my stool and took a toothpick from the dispenser on the shelf next to the menus. The waiters were coming on for dinner service, I watched one use an ice cream scoop on a tub of refrigerated butter, plopping the perfect little balls into white dishes. Another slid trays of dinner salads into the stand-fridge. The manager chalked specials on a board. A couple regulars came in and the bartender started making their drinks without being asked.
    I looked at L.L. reading
Anna Karenina.
I thought about Anna throwing herself under her train. I thought about the shower of blood and brain on the bedroom wall of the house in Malibu. I thought about the putrid stain the pack rat left on the floor in Koreatown.
    I picked my teeth.
    —Guess I was just thinking about you, L.L. Thought I'd come by and see how you're doing.
    He glanced at me, eyes peering just over the top of his glasses. He signaled the bartender and looked back down at his book.
    —A banner day. Another beer is surely in order.
    L.L. wrote the screenplay, and it was a hit.
    It was read by everyone in Hollywood. Dad became the hottest writer in town. Coppola tapped him to adapt
Travels with Charley.
Redford wanted to know if he'd brush up a remake of
The Heart of the Matter.
Michael Cimino was looking to do the life of Jim Thomson. Robert Evans thought he'd snagged the Holy Grail, the rights to
The Catcher in the Rye.
Did L.L. want first crack? Anything and everything with a whiff of the literary, L.L. Crows was at the top of the list to write, adapt, brush up, or take a pass at.
    And he took every job. And he wrote some of the most consistently excellent and praised screenplays Hollywood has ever seen. And not a fucking one was ever produced. Nothing that he got screen credit for, anyway. But in the ’70s, and through most of the ’80s, his red pencil marks had decorated, and vastly improved, he'd be sure to inform you, the pages of a small forest's worth of scripts. Some good, some pure ass. Several Oscar nominees, and a few winners. Not that he gave a fuck one way or another. Because they weren't his stories. He was just the hired gun, getting richer than any human could pray to a fat and greedy Jesus to get.
    His story, his admired and lauded screenplay of his one and only novel, walked up and down the runway and had its skirt lifted by every A-list studio/actor/director/producer in town with a yen to take on the what had become
the greatest movie never made
, and while it had more than a few dollar bills stuffed in its panties, no big spender ever stepped up to throw down for a trip to the champagne lounge.
    A source, one might say of some slight bitterness in years to come.
    —And what are you reading these days?
    I looked up from the copy of
Down and Out in Paris and London
that I'd taken from his pile. I'd scooted over to the stool next to L.L. to make room for a couple that was waiting for a table. Full dinner service in swing, Chez Jay went from elbow room empty to sardine can packed in less than an hour. I'd forgotten.
    Sitting at his side, reading silently, sipping at a beer, it came back.
    Childhood revisited.
    I closed the book.
    —Horror mostly.
    He rubbed his forehead, kept his eyes in his own book.
    —Dare I ask by whom written?
    —Whatever. Stephen King, Joe Lansdale, Clive Barker.
    He winced.
    —Web. Ambrose Bierce, Lovecraft, Stoker, for God sake.
    I went on.
    —Dean Koontz, Kellerman.
    —Edgar Allan Poe, ever heard of him? J. S. LeFanu? Algernon Blackwood?
    —James Herbert. Straub.
    He slammed his book closed.
    —Are you trying to kill me? Did you come here solely to antagonize me and rub my face in your ignorance? Certain tales by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton for fuck sake, all