The Hollywood Project: Shuttergirl Part 13

But I had to try. I had to commit to being better. I ran away to Westlake with Tom, Irving found me, and I finally took his guidance about more than exposure and focal length. I needed to make money, and to make money, I needed to stop playing at being a photographer. I needed to make it a career. I needed to stop s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around, because s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around meant I wasn't chasing the picture. I needed to invest money in relationships, which meant going to clubs and being nice to the wait staff. I needed to let my bitten nails grow out and dress like an adult. I needed to make the city my only lover.

I closed my legs and got on my feet. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

And now Michael Greydon was having an effect on me again. A different one. I wasn't about to get on my back for all comers. I wouldn't be used by strange men as a repository in the hopes that one of them would love me. But I felt that same need to crawl back into the arms of someone who would accept any part of me.

That was bulls.h.i.t.

Unacceptable.

I had no time for it.

I almost missed my turn, and I yanked my car across two lanes of traffic to get onto 4th Street.

That was when I noticed the blue Corolla behind me. It cut across three lanes of traffic to get off on Central with me then changed lanes again when I did. Two guys, from what I could see. I stopped my car on Sixth Street and got out, and they blew by me. The guy in the pa.s.senger seat photographed me standing outside my car as they pa.s.sed. They whipped around the corner, into the parking lot, and came around again.

I knew those guys.

They didn't know who they were dealing with. Downtown LA? Those b.i.t.c.hes were in my crib.

You know who cares about me? You know where I belong?

I belong in motion on the streets of Los Angeles.

I got back in the car.

If you go north on Central and make a right on Palmetto then another right into a certain nondescript industrial parking lot, you can cross to Factory Place, so named because someone had no imagination and named it after what surrounded it. Once you were in Factory Place, you could approach the Los Angeles Gun Club and use the yearly membership you got specifically for access to the underground parking lot. If you knew a d.a.m.n thing at all, you knew that the underground lot had a service egress in the back, onto East Sixth.

And if you were cruel, you let the guys following you catch up to you. You pulled into a spot and let them think you were parking outside. You let them stop and get out, then you drove down the ramp and you watched them stare at your car as it disappeared underground.

"Bye-bye, a.s.sholes," I said as I turned into the sunlight on East Sixth and headed south. I felt better.

Six minutes later, I pulled up to Irving's place.

Irv lived downtown in a two-story craftsman with chipping lead paint and an overgrown front yard. Even when he taught at Breakfront, his house had looked like an abandoned building. It sat on the corner of a street that had been repaved repeatedly to no avail, because of the eighteen-wheelers rolling by daily. Next door, on the east side, sat a Mexican food warehouse, and across the street was a huge parking lot for the offices of a fashion empire that took up the entire block. Behind him was a small light industrial shop where four sculptors worked in granite and metal. He was the only actual resident in a four-block radius.

You'd think he was some lone holdout who wouldn't sell to developers and thus ended up living in a swirl of light industrial noise, rotting food smells, and toxic dust, but he rented. The developers just hadn't been interested in the property in the eighties, and they left it there. The rent never went up because Irv's landlord knew no one else would want to live there.

"That was some kiss," he said as he opened the door.

"The camera doesn't lie. It was a once-in-a-lifetime."

He snorted and got out of the doorway, letting me into his dark living room. "What's in the bag?"

"I have a broken hinge on my mirror. I thought it was the shutter, but I'm rusty. I think I need help."

"You know how to fix that."

I shrugged. "Maybe I needed company."

He took the paper bag from my hands and peered in. "Let's take a look."

The house was steeped in his presence, a complete pigsty with an organizational system based in fractal geometry. You could only see it when you stepped back. Boxes of old negatives were stacked on top of files of the same. Every corner, cabinet, and drawer held a piece of dead photo equipment, a file, a folder, or film. Tom and I knew his system from years of interning and working for him, but no one else would.

Irving had set up the second bedroom as a darkroom, boarding up the windows and sealing them with tinfoil. It was painted matte black, and the door had been replaced with a roundabout that kept out light. He'd jury-rigged the plumbing to put in a sink, and the leakage from the pipes, along with chemical spillage, had destroyed the floor to such a degree that some of the boards had rotted right through to the crawls.p.a.ce.

He led me to the studio next to his darkroom. He laid my spare rig on his table and picked up a screwdriver with such a tiny head that it looked like an awl. "I remember this camera. You're going back to manual?"

I pulled up a stool. "Auto focus is for amateurs."

"That's the spirit." He shook out his hand, cringing.

"Is it the arthritis?" I took the screwdriver and camera from him.

"Hang on." He limped to the bathroom, calling out from the rectangle of light down the hall. "d.a.m.n meds wear off all at once. It's like these little men in my joints wait to ambush me."

I worked out the screws. "I think I'm going to go old school and see how I like it."

"You can't do what you do without the auto. You'd have one guy in the pack with something to use and a bunch of part-time editors going through seven submissions a day if it wasn't for autofocus. The technology created the business."

I heard the click of him shaking out pills and the slap of the medicine cabinet closing.

"So, this guy?" he called from the bathroom.

"Michael? He's not a guy. He's a star," I said.

"Is this a relationship?"

"We have a relationship. He runs away, and I chase him." I had the camera open, its guts spread across the table like a heart patient's.

Irving stood in the doorway. I was thankful I'd never told him about the bleachers, or the young varsity tennis player, or anything.

"Are you going to press charges?" he asked from the doorway.

"For breaking my camera? I should sue Tom."

"I think he's serious about that quiet girl."

"You know what she does onstage? Screams like a banshee and pees into a plastic cup," I said.

"No."

"Yep."

"And Tom likes this girl? Our Tom?" He moved a pile of old negatives from a chair and sat down, cringing as he bent and relaxed.

"Irv, can we talk about you?"

"h.e.l.l, no."

"Can I be honest?" I said.

"No."

"I'm worried about you."

"Oh, s.h.i.t-"

"No, listen-"

"Laine-"

"Stop it, okay? You need help," I said. "And before you start, I'm not talking about cleaning this place up. Forget that. It's a hopeless case. You need someone to a.s.sist you."

He waved his lame hand at me.

"What?" I said.

"What, nothing. a.s.sistants are for people who have work."

"You could get someone in to go through this s.h.i.t. You have pictures of celebrities going back thirty years. I can't even imagine what the c.r.a.p in this house would be worth if everything in it was filed right and sold."

"No one cares about old s.h.i.t, Laine. People want new stuff. I haven't taken a worthwhile picture in... I don't know how long." He looked out the window, or more accurately, he looked toward the window. He was depressed.

I knew his deal. He had plenty of contacts he was afraid to call, because he felt they'd left him behind. He had students surpa.s.sing him in every aspect of their careers. He was breaking down physically, and his methods were so dated they were near obsolete. I could count on my fingers the number of my colleagues who knew that stop bath came before fixer.

"How about I make you dinner?" I said.

"I thought you cared about me?" he joked.

But I could cook. Maybe not gourmet meals, but I could put something edible on the table every night, because Jake had added that to my list of responsibilities after a month. So after I fixed my camera, I made him enough food for the week and wrapped it up while he told me about the old days of Hollywood.

The sun went down, and my phone didn't ring. Not Tom with a twenty on Fiona. Not a single tip. And not Michael.

"I have to get out tonight," I said, packing Irv's freezer with meals. "Nothing's come in, and I'm not sitting around. I won't be ignored."

"Maybe you could go to bed," Irv suggested. "You know, take a night off since one's being handed to you?"

"Never."

But once I got in the car, I was bone tired. I went home, showered, paced, and told myself it would all be okay. I went to bed not believing it.

I didn't know what to do with myself. Go out. Watch TV. Pace the loft. I had a feeling, like a vibrating thread through every thought, that something was going to change. With change came hope and hurt.

Every new foster family had that thread. Every time I was let go because another kid was coming on or because I kept going off in the middle of the night, I felt it.

The hippie couple in Malibu, Sunshine and Rover, had been more than a thread. They'd been a thick rope of optimism. At five, I still had the bad habit of hoping for the best. They read me stories with pretty pictures, and when Sunshine pulled me to her I smelled patchouli and sandalwood. Everything they owned was made of beautiful colors. They laughed together and took me walking on the beach in the early morning in winter.

I didn't care when they lost the apartment. I didn't mind the van. It was big enough for us. I would have lived anywhere with them. But the caseworker came and ended it. Rover said they'd come for me when they got a place. He promised.

I'd grabbed his beard and said, "Okay, Daddy. I'll wait."

I'd kept that hope alive through three more homes, avoiding connection with any family because Sunshine and Rover were coming back. I couldn't let myself love another Mommy and Daddy, and most of them didn't want to be loved. They wanted me to do stuff, or go away, or replace a dead thing in themselves.

I crawled under the covers and tried to talk away that thread of hope. I didn't need it. I shot it down, shooed it out the door, burned it away with laser-beam intensity. By the time I fell asleep, it was a thin line of black ash.

Chapter 20.

Michael Brad was an introvert. You'd never guess it from his entourage or his public persona, but in the strictest sense of the word, he was as much an introvert as I was. When he was tired and overwhelmed and needed energy and strength, he retreated into his music, which he'd never share with anyone.

I respected that, and I understood it. Whenever we were seen together, the sober, straight-laced Michael Greydon and bad boy Brad Sinclair, people always noted how different we were. We were more the same than they could see.

Of course, when he felt good and there was fun to be had, he had fun. Tonight, it was a simple dinner and whatever else the night brought. He planned on being out all night without actually making plans.

Me, I was just hungry. I was going to eat and bail.

When I got out of the car, the valet took the keys, and I was subjected to the usual flashes and catcalls. This restaurant in particular was low-hanging fruit for the paps, and I wondered if Brad had chosen it as a joke.

I waved and smiled as usual, but I also did something unusual. I looked at the paps directly, frustrated by the fact that it was too dark, too backlit for me to catch the people behind the cameras. They were all men's voices, but they always were. Laine was stealth silence in her heels.

The feet. I looked at their feet as I walked toward the back of the restaurant. All boots and run-down sneakers. No heels. How many years had she been in those packs and I'd never said a thing to her because it would be too awkward?

I faced them, and the flashes popped like a lightning storm.

"Mike! Mike!"

"You love us now!"

"Over here!"

"What happened with you and Laine?"

"Wanna kiss me?"

The voice on the last pap was deep baritone, and everyone laughed. I caught myself before I said, "Are you going to put out?" That would imply Laine had, and it wasn't anyone's business.

In that second of thought, the pack of them propositioned me.

"Kiss me!"

"Give me a squeeze right here!"