Ballad of a Real Man
Charlie half-expected his headlights to tear through a painted backdrop as he pulled his car along the street. Silhouettes hovered in distant windows; their hands perfectly poised with martini glasses and cigarettes. A sunset of warm hues complimented the house with such precision it had to be painted, not the real thing. Not that art imitated life anymore. Just the other day as Charlie flipped through his mail, he found the latest Time magazine whose cover looked like a child’s fever hallucination, not art: a face with misshapen eyes and crooked lips.
“Full house,” mumbled George in the passenger seat.
Charlie had almost forgotten he had company. He studied the side of George’s face, the slight crook in his nose—wanting to hold up his hands like a viewfinder as George posed as his classic typecast: GEORGE SANDERS (20s, male, like Charlie with jagged edges).
George always got to play the sidekick with a chip on his shoulder, someone interesting. Someone who could change on the turn of a dime. Charlie’s characters lacked that depth: CHARLIE WARD (20s, male, clean as his fresh pressed clothes).
But what his roles lacked in depth, they made up for in pay. Sidekicks didn’t get top billing. And they surely didn’t drink coffee on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and flash smiles on the cover of Tiger Beat. Though Charlie could do without the latter.
George dug through the glove compartment, muttering, “So much for ‘invite only.’” He produced a small pink box with a bow, turning it over in his hands.
“You bought her a gift?” Charlie patted his pockets, looking around his seat for the box he wouldn’t find.
“It’s a birthday party.”
“Well, sure, but what could you buy Elle that she can’t get herself?”
George held the box up to Charlie, as if introducing a new food to a stubborn kid. “It’s a gesture.” He popped the door open. “From the civilized company, anyway. God knows what kind of people she invited here.”
Charlie lifted his sunglasses to get a better look at the house. Party guests loitered on the front porch, lounging absently on a hanging bench. One of them, a young woman, stuck her bare feet up in the air and held a joint between her lips.
“Did you see that new picture she’s in? It’s promiscuous.” George popped his door open.
Charlie plucked a cigarette from his pocket. After cupping his lighter to his face, he took a slow drag and exhaled a stream of smoke at George. “What do you care?”
“I think we worked too hard to make real pictures while these new kids and their groupies run around with cheap handhelds in their backyards and call it a film,” George offered. He always made everything about “us” and “them,” as if calling himself and Charlie “we” made them equal. The billboards over Sunset Boulevard proved George wrong; no one ever looked up from the road to see George’s face plastered there. They never would, unless he got his nose sanded.
“You don’t find it interesting?” Charlie tucked his lighter into his pocket and stepped onto the pavement.
“You do?”
Charlie shrugged. If he could let himself speak plainly, he’d tell George that he did. He took to the acid-trip films crawling out of the woodwork as he did the shadowy characters that George could play.
George laughed, swatting in dismissal. “Of course you don’t—look at you!”
Following the gesture, Charlie glanced down at his shirt, at the pearly buttons that caught any residual daylight. He pulled at his sleeves. “What do you mean?”
“You look just like that ad of yours. The new Chevrolet one.” George held up his hands, as if to capture the frame. “I can see the tagline: Chevy Impala, built for—”
“Alright.” Heat flared up Charlie’s cheeks as he paced away from the car, hoping to disturb George’s image. He didn’t want to think about the advertisement—of the clean-pressed version of himself with whitened teeth who seemed to always linger over his shoulder. In the paper, above the highway, everywhere.
George held up his hands in surrender. “Didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”
Dry grass crunched under their feet as they crossed the lawn to the porch. Charlie could hear the faint chords of an off-tune guitar somewhere in the backyard, but the sounds of low jazz and conversation from inside drowned out the strange melody.
George gestured to the occupied bench on the porch. “You see? This is what I’m talking about.” He muttered something, saying, “Uncivilized.”
The couple strung out on the porch hummed to themselves. Their eyes sauntered around the horizon, as if unaware of Charlie and George’s presence. The woman’s long hair spilled across the bench and onto the floor, a flower peeking from behind her ear. Charlie half- expected the woman to open her mouth and show off whatever tablet was dissolving on her tongue. Or pills she had yet to swallow. Or whatever the residents of Laurel Canyon were cooking up because the acid you could buy wasn’t natural or anti-capitalist enough.
He reached for the doorknob, but a low sound like grinding stones came from the woman.
“Hungry?” Her eyes, unfocused, rested somewhere over his head.
Charlie froze. “What?”
She moved her hand under the bench and dragged a giant jar out of hiding. It sloshed liquid on the porch, soaking into the wood. Her fingers submerged into the jar and pulled out a whole pickle. “Hungry?” she repeated.
Charlie blinked a few times, as if to wake himself. “No. Thanks.”
He opened the door and held it out for George, who didn’t bother casting a second glance. Charlie did, though. Neither of the couple noticed. They giggled about something, looking up at the ceiling with spaced-out grins. The kind of smiles that couldn’t sell a Chevy.
*
Charlie ran his thumb along the grooves of his glass as he swirled the liquid around. He missed the tinkling of ice that should have collided with the edges. It had since melted in the heat of the living room. Too many bodies crammed shoulder to shoulder, clogging the air. Among none of the faces could he spot Elle. It seemed everywhere he looked; he only found another overeager guest clamoring for his company.
The current guest: BILL GRANT (60s, male, a Western outlaw by day and a habitual gambler by night) whose stained fingernails itched his peppered chin. “The thing about plastic, Charlie, is versatile use,” Grant said, scratching an unshaved patch of his beard. “It’s an endless product.”
The way Grant spoke almost made Charlie pity the man. Grant must have known that everyone in Hollywood pitied him; he’d gotten too old to play cowboys and too volatile for any director in his right mind to cast him in anything else. It was, in part, Charlie’s fault. He’d made his television debut on Grant’s cowboy show. Within a few seasons, his character phased Grant out of his own program. Audiences didn’t want the aging man anymore. If Charlie wasn’t careful, Grant’s shaking hands would wrap around his throat and kill him. All in the name of mass-produced cowboy dreck. Over such mindless work. He didn’t even need to perform his own stunts. The beatniks in Venice West would turn up their noses and cry, Conformist! But Charlie didn’t have much of a choice. Not if the choice was having work or no work.
Charlie glanced past Grant’s obstructing figure. Across the room, he found a woman in white with long blonde hair. The last time he saw Elle, she wore her hair in a curled bob—like Marilyn Monroe. The classic: ELLE DONNELLY (20s, female, blonde starlet, with a smile and mod dress out of a Vogue magazine).
Now, he couldn’t place her aura or assign her an archetype. Her bright dress stuck out against amassing suits like lights on a C-stand. She bore more resemblance to the pickle woman on the porch. Not by uncleanliness, but in how she stalked slowly around the room, as if her feet drifted along the ground. Charlie watched as she threw her head back to laugh. He could have mistaken the sound for clinking glasses or stirring spoons in cocktails.
“The world is plastic,” Grant continued. “And living rooms can be plastic, too. Plastic tables and chairs in every American home! A solid investment for a young man.”
Charlie pulled at his collar, mumbling into his glass: “Someone’s gotta open a window.”
As if a commercial break ended, Charlie watched Grant’s focus shift, catching on someone else across the room. He imagined Grant’s point of view, his eyes focusing on the faraway subject of: POTENTIAL INVESTOR (20s, male, in a suit that may have tags on).
Grant wandered off with a slight stumble in his step. Once he’d slipped far enough away, his dark jacket blended perfectly with the chattering mass of bobbing heads.
Charlie caught himself playing with his cufflinks. He relaxed, trying to hang his fingers in his belt loops as if unbothered by the tableau. But despite the cool night, his palms sweat as if caught under a stage light. The crowd had lined up, side by side, like teeth. Their edentulous grin left a place for him: a gap between a few shadowy men. Charlie could read the cue like an action line: Charlie crosses the room; one hand pats a suited shoulder, the other accepts a drink.
The thought made his sleeves grow tight, shrinking on his arms—like the starched fabric could swallow him whole. Or worse, it could swallow him up and spit him back out right in the gap where he belonged. Where he was expected to belong. The rubbing elbows of dark suits melted together as if they all belonged to the same man. Like one giant billboard plastered across the living room. The longer Charlie stared, the more the shapes reminded him of his own ad.
*
Though the sun had set and cooled the Hollywood Hills, the inside boiled with sweat and cigarettes and alcohol. Charlie took down a glass of water in a few gulps, liquid trickling down his chin. His focus hitched on the pool, through the glass door. Watching the light glimmer on the water’s surface brought him an illusion of cold. Always a simple spectacle. You could shine a light on anything, and it would dance.
A strong voice interrupted his thought, calling his name. Though the speaker’s thick accent turned his name to: “Ch-AH-lie!”
Jesus, Charlie cursed himself. Who is it now? Charlie covered up with a charming, but dismissive, smile as he turned to face: BURT HUDSON (50s, male, ego bulging with his buttons, thin hair slicked as if he’s still twenty).
Charlie couldn’t tear his eyes from Burt’s face—the soft wrinkles around his eyes and pronounced pout that obscured the features of a star. Charlie remembered seeing Burt Hudson films as a kid, watching the man play all kinds of heroes. Men who caught robbers on moving trains, who chased bootleggers in a flashy car, who got the girl with a fade-to-black kiss. A real star, not a daytime cowboy like Bill Grant. And he spoke like one:
“I’ve heard you’re one to watch, son.”
Charlie couldn’t fathom a reply. He could only stare at Burt’s face and gawk. The wrinkles started to resemble creases on an old poster, something you could find in a secondhand store. Like an old car ad. A make and model ancestral to the ones Charlie sold.
“Thank you,” Charlie replied in a hush as Burt led him away.
“Can I offer you some friendly advice? Man to man.”
Charlie leaned forward, almost nestled under Burt’s arm. The closer he got to his company, the more intrigued he became with Burt’s face. He could count the pores on his nose, trace the steaks of red in his eyes. Burt looked more mortal than Charlie thought possible.
“Elle Donnelly’s family’s no good,” Burt whispered. “Better keep your slate clean.”
Charlie stopped walking. Burt waited a moment, as if expecting Charlie to run after him. When Charlie didn’t, Burt closed back in, fastening both hands to Charlie’s shoulders.
“I used to work with her mother. And wasn’t she something else. Lost it all, though, when MGM found out she was a commie. They’re un-American, that family.” Burt spoke that word like it stuck to his tongue, tearing through it like gum: un-American.
Charlie meant to swallow his next question, but the heat choked it out of him: “Then why are you here? It’s her party.”
“Is it?” Burt looked around at the decor, maybe for a blemish. Or a hammer and sickle. “Whatdduya know.”
“Yeah, what do you know?” Charlie mumbled. Something deflated in his chest as he watched Burt reopen his mouth, going on about the “youths” and “patriotism.” Charlie couldn't distinguish one word from the next. All he could manage was to watch Burt’s lips flap, the creases on his cheeks distorting as he did.
Charlie should have brushed off Burt’s grip, smiled an apology, and been on his way. But he couldn’t help staring into Burt’s face, like the man was a walking omen. Some distant version of himself who drifted from one party to the next, pushing fifty and acting twenty.
As Burt led Charlie into a dark room, the glow of his short cigarette etched his wrinkles into darker lines. His hair, though he swept it back in the same style he’d worn since there were televisions, looked even thinner. Charlie wondered if Burt planned to wear the same get-up and hairstyle until he died—or until he had no hair left to comb, at the very least.
A slew of men awaited them: MEN IN SUITS (40s-60s, stiff) who sipped their drinks in one hand and held cigarettes in the other.
Smoke drifted from the ceiling out a cracked window. Against the low light of the room, the campfire outside swelled. Charlie could see vague figures prancing around in bright colors. Some of them looked half-decent, in loose dress shirts and trousers. The others looked like they’d just been plucked out of the Strip—so high on whatever they pawned off the person next to them that they hardly noticed they were no longer cramped in Pandora’s Box, swaying to whatever vagabond stoners took the stage. Someone outside sang, not rock ’n’ roll, but a lament to the flames.
The men in suits quieted when they saw Charlie. After studying the frown lines on their faces, the creases in their foreheads, and their pompadours, each face resembled one he’d seen long ago, as a kid. When his family took him to the movies, he saw their faces on screen in black-and-white. The men stood in a frame straight from the movies; they mirrored each other’s wide stances, holding their chins up like their cigarettes, their tailored suits and sagging cheeks jaggedly pronounced by the low light. The gangster, the pilot, the buccaneer, the cowboy.
First, the gangster: “Charlie!”
The man’s rough voice took Charlie by surprise. He should have spoken like honey, like he was trained to in his youth, but the words sputtered like an engine that couldn’t catch.
“I saw your billboard on my way to the office,” continued the Gangster. “Chevy Impala: built for real men. Thought it was good.”
At the words, Charlie could practically see himself leaning with his arms folded on a shiny hood. Throughout the whole shoot, he’d felt like a fool, smiling and posing, but he imagined the pictures would look better than they felt. The first time he encountered the twenty-foot, towering version of himself, he was walking from his car to a restaurant to meet a “friend”—a friend he’d been given clear instructions to meet at a specific time and place where there happened to be a surplus of photographers. Between the size of the billboard, the sharp contour of Charlie’s cheeks, and his perfectly pressed tuxedo, nothing about himself looked natural. The fine print along the bottom read, Perfection for a low price! Something about it made him feel sick, and he almost deserted the stunt, leaving a manicured starlet in the diner by herself. He didn’t, though, and within a few weeks he and the girl were all over the tabloids.
The same unease crept up Charlie’s neck. He tugged at his collar. “Thanks.”
Another man stepped forward, wearing a long crease on his forehead, where the shadow of his cowboy hat used to sit.
“You’re just what these new pictures need,” said the Cowboy. “These auteurish schmucks’ll ruin American cinema. We need more men like you. Real men with strong images. None of this crap.” The Cowboy gestured to the window with his cigarette, ash drifting to the floor as he did.
The guitar outside grew louder. A few hollers filtered through the window, the crackling fire spewing sparks and flecks of ash into the sky. Someone danced in the firelight, and he recognized her long hair that nearly swallowed her limbs: the pickle girl. She flitted her arms, swaying like she, too, caught fire. The rest of the group lounged around as a man in a bright orange coat strummed the guitar and sang. The man hit each chord with so much energy; Charlie worried his arm would unhinge and fall into the flames.
An inexplicable impulse drew Charlie’s eyes upon the group’s strange array of color, their odd dance. For a moment, the pickle girl stopped dancing. She stared back at the house, at the window. Charlie could have sworn her dark eyes locked on him while her lips curled into some semblance of a smile. The man kept singing in words muted by an off-beat chorus of singers. All Charlie could make out was: “Mr. Jones.”
A hand fell upon Charlie’s shoulder, and he nearly jumped out of his sweat-slicked shirt. When he looked over at the culprit, he recognized George’s crooked nose.
“I’ve been lookin’ all over for you, asshole!” he slurred. After too much time in his intoxicated company, Charlie had learned the language.
“Sorry,” Charlie mumbled, taking a long gulp of his drink, whatever it was.
George looked around the room at Charlie’s company of glittering cufflinks. His pupils dilated to saucers. “Wanna introduce me to your friends?”
Charlie had nothing else to say to the men around him, the men who’d rather decide what box he best fit in. Or better, what box would suit their delusion that what the world needed was more men of their kind. Of stoic faces, matching ties, crisp collars. A dry gulp burned down his throat like he’d swallowed a rose. Then:
“Everyone,” Charlie glanced at his company, “this is George.”
They responded in iterations of “Howd’ya do-s,” and “Heya, George-s,” and “Good t’see ya-s” while the man outside repeated the same refrain: “Mr. Jones.”
A man in pants too tight for his aging legs stepped forward. Charlie imagined he used to be a buccaneer or a sailor. Someone who those pants used to flatter.
“We were tellin’ Charlie how much we’d liked his new ad,” the Buccaneer croaked.
George cackled. “That thing? You know what I told him when I saw it?” He didn’t wait for an answer to his question. “I said, ‘Ain’t that a woman’s job? Leaning on shiny cars and sticking her tits out?’”
The men erupted in a chorus of gut churning laughter. They laughed so hard that they clutched their stomachs. Charlie thought they’d throw their guts straight up and watch them dance around the hardwood floors.
“I’ll tell ya how we should make our money, Charlie, and it’s not in taking ladies’ jobs.” George’s eyes lagged behind his words, landing late on Charlie. Paired with a groggy, self-satisfied grin. “Like you with your modelin’.”
A few of the old men chuckled in humphs. A sound akin to coughing up phlegm. The Cowboy spit—probably chew. That would explain his moistened fingers and tinted nails. Charlie didn’t bother to hide his cringe. He bet that charming habit was one of many the Cowboy couldn’t shake. A souvenir from his time served in the studio-built Wild West. Where people waited to clean up after him and half the buildings were two-dimensional.
As George leaned closer to the men, his perspiring forehead inches from theirs, he resembled a funhouse mirror. His face echoed the empty smiles of the men in his company, projecting their own sentiments right back at them. Showing them the kind of young man they wanted to see. A young man who idolized their faded personas in spite of the world ready to move on without them.
“Now this is it.” George wagged a finger, and the rest of his crowd stared wide-eyed, bewitched. He lowered his voice, like he wanted to tell some playground secret, between playing dodgeball and learning his times tables: “Plastic. Now I’ve just invested . . .”
Charlie reached for some invisible knob, something to turn down the noise. If he heard one more mention of plastic, he worried his ears would start to bleed and ruin his clean shirt. But every word out of the surrounding mouths started to sound the same. A slew of overlapping nonsense from the Buccaneer, the Gangster, the Pilot, the Cowboy:
“. . . a bright young man . . . real American movies . . . sense of tradition . . . plastic . . . protect our values . . . plastic . . . the damn teenyboppers . . . plastic . . . plastic . . .”
Charlie wanted to shake George by his shoulders and ask him, Aren’t you listening? Don’t you hear them? But he couldn’t do that. Some force kept him in place, nodding along to another manicured conversation of someone selling him something, asking him for something, giving advice on something. Charlie listened for the music to block them out. His ears strained for the old guitar and the man singing, his voice low and jagged like a rushing river: “Mr. Jones.”
He gave a light pat to George’s shoulder but knew his friend wouldn’t feel a thing or even care as Charlie turned and stumbled toward the back door. The blanket of cigarette smoke encroached on his vision, threatening to fog the whole room out of his view. He needed air. He pulled at his shirt, prying it from his chest only for the fabric to cling right back to him. His gelled hair slipped into his face and stuck to his forehead. With a swing of his arm, he reached the glass slider and slipped onto the patio.
*
With a click, click, click, a small flame emerged against the dark sky. It swayed like the raging bonfire, like the chorus of people just beyond the house. He plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket. After taking a slow drag, his heart slowed, his consciousness flooding back into his body. Each limb tingled as he relearned how to move them of his own will.
“You look like hell,” a woman chimed, her voice light like the shutter of a camera.
Before turning his head to see Elle’s tall boots and grown out hair, he replied, “Good to see you, too.” He took a drag. “Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.” She held out a joint for a light. He obliged.
“Quite the crowd.” Charlie leaned on the railing, his cigarette dangling over the grass.
Her quiet laugh clashed with the jagged voices singing at the fire. She waved her fingers at the house, as if swatting a fly. “They’re impossible. Those men you were talking to.”
Images of the bumbling men inside pricked at his skin. He couldn’t picture Elle in the living room, listening to sales pitches from men who drink her liquor and spit on her floor and call her a communist.
Charlie took in Elle’s smug grin, then asked, “Why are they here?”
Heavy boots clunked on the wood as Elle closed in. She leaned next to him and whispered with a smile, like she was telling a secret, “The Old Hollywood’s dead. That’s what they’re saying anyway. I wanted to see if it was true.”
He remembered the nausea he felt under foul breath and stale advice from Burt Hudson. His grimace at another unsuccessful sales pitch from Bill Grant whose audience didn’t want him whether he sold Westerns or plastic tables.
His eyes settled on the campfire. “Who’s they?” he asked, though he knew somehow.
Elle nodded to the campfire crowd. “Any one of them. You could ask any young person sitting in a theater, too.” She puffed her joint. “You can feel it, can’t you?”
“I don’t know.” A pit in his stomach said otherwise. So did the impulse that kept him from looking over his shoulder into the fogged windows. “They think you’re crazy. Said I should leave you and your crowd alone.”
“Maybe so.” Elle shrugged. “So you could do what, sell more cars?”
A roar filtered through the open window. George and the others huddled like conspirators, perspiration on their faces. In unison, they opened their mouths and howled in something like laughter, but the redness in their cheeks looked painful. Like something out of a cartoon. The ones Charlie had watched as a kid on the weekends. The window frame captured the scene like a TV screen—as if he could touch the glass and let the static spark his fingertips. As their cheeks reddened, he half-expected a cut to commercial, for Grant to turn to the window and grin about plastic.
“You’re selling something no matter what side you’re on, no?”
Elle glanced at the fire, her cheeks absorbing the glow. “Sure, but here’s the difference.” She leaned closer, gesturing with her joint as she asked, “The old guys inside, what are they selling?”
“Is this a quiz?”
“Answer it.”
Charlie glanced over his shoulder, at the silhouettes in the windows, almost unchanged from the ones he noticed at the beginning of the night—stiff arms, cocktails, cigarettes. “I don’t know.” He did, though. He kept hearing some distorted pitch about plastic.
“In there,” she gestured, “they sell whatever’s handed down to them. The heroes always win, the women always marry, the beds are always made. It’s all so manufactured.”
Charlie took a drag. When he exhaled, he watched the smoke dissolve into the sky. The cool air relaxed his shoulders, letting him sink onto the railing of the porch. He tried to block out the trailing music and conversation from inside—the intoxicating buzz of everyone saying nothing at the same time. He imagined if he listened any longer the noise would hollow out his skull and leave his head empty. None of those men in their pressed suits and bottomless bourbons would care much. So long as he could play the role they wanted: CHARLIE WARD (20s, male, says things like “patriotism” or “religion” or “values,” and boasts a plastic smile).
“Everything right here,” Elle’s eyes lingered on the dancers at the fire, “it’s different.” He followed her eyes, watching as a girl threw her arms over her head, swaying.
“What do you make of it?” she asked.
Charlie tapped his cigarette, watching ashes drift onto the grass. “I’m not sure yet.”
“This city’s eating itself. It’s gonna split clean in half.” She took a drag. “And you either pick a side or fall in the crack and get swallowed.” After staring at the fire for a moment, she picked herself off the railing and descended onto the grass. The growing flame flickered in orange on her features as she pulled off her boots, resting them beside the staircase.
Elle’s face, wrapped in warm light, turned to him once more. “I’ll tell you something: it’s sure as hell not gonna swallow me.” She ran after the lanky dancers and loungers, her figure becoming one of many in a swaying cerebrum of limbs.
As she drifted away, he heard, “Don’t let it swallow you,” but couldn’t place the advice as words from Elle’s lips, crackles from the fire, or the buzz of busted guitar strings.
The pickle girl started to spin, her hair and arms stretching out around her. A wide sleeve on her sweater nearly scathed the flame, grazing smoke. No one in her company so much as flinched. Half of them laid out, sprawled in the dry grass, looking up at the foggy sky where at most two stars shone. One of the loungers stood to dance. The man with the guitar kept singing.
Pickle girl stopped flailing and stared dead at Charlie. She lifted her lanky arm and waved. Paying no mind to the houseful of salesmen, she smiled and took a few steps toward the patio. The girl floated across the grass on bare feet and stopped where Charlie could see the pattern of beads she’d strung along her forehead like an odd crown. She turned a hand up to the sky and held it out to him. The man sang like an invitation: “Mr. Jones.”
He looked back at the house one final time, hearing synchronized laughter and hollow conversation. Inside and out, he knew that crowd, how to bite his tongue and stomach them. But ahead, with the pickle girl and her odd clothes, he saw no pattern. Everything about them felt unbound, changing like Santa Ana winds. Though he didn’t understand them, he knew one thing: when the world split, he’d be damned if he let himself get swallowed.