Gunnison was mostly empty fields, long gray roads. At night the prison lights oriented you to the north; dark, sleeping wolves of mountains to the east and west. The south was a mystery to me. The farthest I’d ever gone down Highway 89 was to the airport, and that was just to see an air show once when I was a kid. I had never even left Utah before I moved to Los Angeles. I fell asleep on the bus, my little Toshiba under my feet, and woke up in Cedar City when a fat man got on and took the seat next to me. He edged me against the window and chain-smoked for three and a half hours, his body roiling and thundering each time he coughed. In the dim bus, flashes of light bounced off the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses, smudged by fingers greasy from the doughnuts he was eating. I watched him pick out the little crumbs from the folds of his crotch and lick his hands. “The Garden of Eden,” he said. “Have you been to Vegas?” I shook my head no. All the money I had in the world was folded up in the front pocket of my jeans. The bulge there embarrassed me. “I go for poker,” the man gasped.
“I’m going to Hollywood to be an actor,” I told him. “On television, or in movies.”
“Thatta boy,” he replied. “The slimmest odds reap the highest payouts. But it takes balls. That’s why I can’t play roulette. No balls.” He coughed and coughed.
This cheered me to hear. I was bold. I was courageous. I was exceptional. I had big dreams. And why shouldn’t I? My mother had no idea what real ambition was. Her father was a janitor. Her father’s father had been a farmer. Her mother’s father had been a pastor at the prison. I would be the first in a succession of losers to make something of myself. One day I’d be escorted through the streets in a motorcade, and the entire world would know my name. I’d send checks home. I’d send autographed posters from movies I starred in. I’d give my mom a fur coat and diamonds for Christmas. Then she’d be sorry she ever doubted me. We crossed into Nevada, the blank desert like a spot on a map that had been rubbed away with an eraser. I stared out the window, imagining, praying. The fat man caressed my thigh several times, perhaps by accident. He got off in Las Vegas, at last, and a black lady got on and took his seat. She batted the smoky air with a white-gloved hand. “Never again,” she said, and pulled out a paperback Bible.
I put on my earphones and busied my mind with the usual request: Dear God, please make me rich and famous. Amen.
? ? ?
Mrs. Honigbaum was a writer. Her gossip column, “Reach for the Stars,” ran in a weekly coupon circular distributed for free in strip malls and car washes and Laundromats around town. The gossip she reported was unoriginal—who got engaged, who had a baby, who committed suicide, who got canned. She also wrote the circular’s monthly horoscopes. She said it was easy to steal predictions from old newspapers and switch the words around. It was all nonsense, she told me.
“You want voodoo? Here.” She pulled her change purse from a drawer and fished out a penny. “The first cent you’ve earned as an actor. I’m paying you. Take it, and give me a smile.” Once she even made me sign one of my head shots, promising that she wouldn’t sell it, even when it was worth millions. “Don’t get too attached to who you are,” she said. “They’ll make you change your name, of course. Nobody’s name is real out here. My real name was Yetta,” she said, yelling over the clamor of her TVs. “Nobody here calls me that. Yetta Honigbaum, can you imagine? First I was Yetta Goslinski. Mr. Honigbaum—” She pointed to a small golden urn on top of her filing cabinet. “Now I have no family to speak of. Most of them were gassed by the Nazis. You’ve heard of Hitler? He had the brains but not the brawn, as they say. That’s what made him crazy. I was lucky. I escaped to Hollywood, like you. Welcome, welcome. I learned English in six days just reading magazines and listening to the radio. That’s brains. And believe it or not, I was a very pretty girl once. You can call me Honey. It’s a lonely life.”
She said she didn’t believe in fate or magic. There was hard work and there was luck. “Luck and hard work. Good looks and intelligence. In this city, it’s rarely a two-for-one.” I remember her telling me that the day I moved in. “Any fool can see you’re handsome. But are you smart at all? Are you at least reasonable? That counts for a lot here. You’ll catch on. Did you see this?” She held up the cover of a flimsy magazine showing Jack Nicholson picking his nose. “This is good. This is interesting. People like to see celebrities at their worst. It brings the stars back to earth, where they belong. Listen to me. Don’t go crazy. I should warn you that there are cults in this city, some better than others. People ask you to open a vein, you walk away. You hear me?” She made me fill out a form and sign my name on a letter stating that if anything happened to me, if tragedy struck, she would take no responsibility. “I don’t know what they teach you in Utah, but even Jesus would get greedy here. The Masons, the satanists, the CIA, they’re all the same. You can talk to me. I’m one of the good ones. And call your mother,” she said.
I had no desire to speak to my mother. I took a mint candy from the crystal bowl on Mrs. Honigbaum’s desk. “My mother and I don’t really get along,” I said.
Mrs. Honigbaum put down her pen. Her shoulders slumped. I could see the fringe of her real hair poking out from under her wig in short gray tufts across her forehead. Tight bubbles of sweat, murky with makeup, studded the deep lines of her wrinkled cheeks. “You think you’re the first? My mother was a terror. She beat me black and blue, made me chew on bars of soap any time I mouthed off. She forced me to walk miles in the rain to get her plums from a tree, then beat me because they were full of worms. And yet I mourn her passing. I’m a grown woman, and still I cry. You only have one mother. Mine got starved to death and thrown in a trench full of rotting corpses. You are lucky yours is still living. If I were a Christian I would cross myself. Now go call her. You know she loves you.” And still I didn’t call.