V
I picked up Udo, the director I’ve been driving around, at the Sunset Tower for what was to be the last ride of our engagement — a midsummer party downtown. I’d had the car detailed and, having spent the afternoon in the company of the 808 in my trunk, with Tupac raging through my tweeters, I was feeling pretty gangster — so long as I was no longer around actual gangsters. As I stopped in the hotel’s roundabout, Udo held open the suicide door for a couple of very tall, very buxom blondes — the like you might meet in an upmarket hotel lobby on the Sunset Strip — and slid in behind them. His assistant Fass flopped into the front beside me. The four of them wouldn’t have been any higher on the Matterhorn.
Normally this kind of proximity to fucking idiots is disconcerting to me, but not in my car. In my car I am at ease in a way that I am nowhere else. Like a true Angeleno, my car is my home, my office, my womb. It is not entirely exaggeration to say that every penny I’ve ever had is to be found somewhere in the polished midnight exterior or gleaming caviar black leather interior of my baby, Beagle. She was the only car I’d ever had, the car I learned to drive in, on the wide streets of Hancock Park when my aunt would take me out on lazy Sunday afternoons when I was 14, 15. My auntie Jeanne who raised me from the time I was a year and a half, when my parents, her sister and brother in law, died in a car crash on the corner of Sunset and Greenway on the way home from a dinner party in Bel Air, had bought the car new in 1964. She was that kind of glamorous wild spirit then, before she inherited me, skittering around town with big cat-eyed Jackie-O glasses and her hair tied up in a silk scarf, pushing her glittering G-ride down sunset with the top down.
Auntie Jeanne too died not longer after our driving lessons in Hancock Park, when I was about 17 — not in a crash, mind, but from the emphysema she’d been dealing with, and smoking through, for years. She left Beagle to me, along with everything else, thought it was me who named the car—and the ‘everything else’ turned out to be a few cabinets full of chicken soup and a whopping medical debt which I’m still ignoring. So, in a way, Beagle’s been with me since the beginning. The only thing that has. The only continuity, the only comfort that doesn’t sour in the dawn. Maybe that’s why I’d gone tits over tails in debt restoring her, tricking her out, fattening up the sound and polishing her to pieces.
Writing had never really paid the bills entirely, and with all the expenditure at Pep Boys, et al., I needed a regular source of money. I think it was Mike who first suggested I drive around a director who was in town to shoot a video. That first gig led to another, and another, until I had a smooth little enterprise as the go-to chauffeur/gofer for visiting directors who either didn’t know how or didn’t care to drive while they were in town. Udo was somewhat of a regular, wrangling me into service every couple of months, and so the sight of his egg-shaped head, sprouting wheat colored hair from the pointy part at the top, was a frequent sight in my rear view. We cruised east, into the dusk, while my passengers talked about the host of this evening’s party.
“Fassy thinks he is a nobleman,” Udo said, mocking. “Some petty duke or somezing. Royalty.”
“Roland Emmerich told me zat ze guy’s grandparents are Austrian!” Fass countered. “Aristocrats who fled in ze ’30s, friend with Mahler and Shoenberg. I don’t know.”
“But of course he’s just a plain actor, I’m sure of it — Mason Carroll? A con man. I bet his fazzer is rich dentist from New Jersey.”
One of the blondes waded into the conversation with, “He told me one time that he was Dutch, or, from the Netherlands, or which one is Amsterdam?”
“Both,” came the impatient cry in unison from the men.
“Right, at one of his parties he told me he was Dutch, and that he joined the circus…”
“Oh, come on,” Udo said.
“No, no. He said he joined the circus when he was eight or something after his mother committed suicide and he lived with the carnies. And then he grew up in Switzerland or somewhere. Germany, maybe. And got a scholarship to Oxford to study religion but was run out of town when he started dating one of the royals’ daughters. Later, he lived in Central America where he led scuba excursions for tourists — ”
“How much time, exactly did you spend speaking wiz him?” Udo was grinning.
“And probably dealt drugs and terrorized ze girls,” Fass added.
“And zen, after the famous spiritual pilgrimage,” Udo said, “he shows up in Hollywood? Why?”
“Fresh from Timbuktu, wiz a closet full of Savile Row, to become an actor,” Fass said in support.
For a moment their patter died down and the other blonde ventured into the quiet. “One of our friends told me that he doesn’t have a belly button. He is completely… how do you say? Clean, there. Smooth.”
This sat on them for a moment. “So, he was never born,” Udo said. “Perfect. Perfect! We are in the garden of paradise and going to meet Adam.”
The party was in an old car dealership by the river. This mysterious host had converted the space into a kind of modernist palace, and a valet was collecting a series of Skittle-colored sportscars as we pulled up. Udo and Fass hopped out, helping their company out behind them, and then headed down an actual red carpet through an aisle of banana palm trees toward their fete. I watched as the billionaire producer Jerry Bass entered just behind them, and then I went to park and wait.
A cursory little search on my phone led to some wildly inconsistent results as to this mysterious host’s identity. To some he was Serbian. To others Arabic, Egyptian, of a lineage tracing its roots back to Ptolemy. There was a sort of infamous version I found repeated in Reddit threads, that he was born to a tycoon in Budapest or Prague, orphaned early on by a car accident and sent to Switzerland for his schooling, raised by nannies and headmistresses. While in school he demonstrated a great felicity with language, quickly learning each one he was exposed to. This led him into the study of those cultures whose tongues he’d mastered. He fell in love with exotic folklore, faith and myth.
According to this version, Carroll then won a scholarship to Oxford to study comparative religion and displayed great insight and a creativity born of true genius. But then the hammer dropped. Mase’s liaison with a beautiful classmate so infuriated her father (depending on the source of the story, the father was either the Dean of the college or a Duke) he had Mason tossed from school.
This episode is then followed, in most accounts, by the trip to the holy mountain lands of Nepal and Tibet — lands so far afield as to be beyond the reach even of invented gossip, apparently, as no tales exist from this period. And then, voila, our hero suddenly shows up in Hollywood intent on becoming a movie mogul.
I couldn’t figure it. The story just didn’t track for me, rang too much of invention and myth. They all smacked of sloppy creations off the pen of Ludlum or Fleming.
After sitting for a few hours I’d begun to cramp so I got out and walked toward the party’s entrance to see if I could catch a few glimpses of anything interesting. The parking lot was surprisingly calm, patrolled by a few liveried valets smoking cigarettes or staring intently at their phones. The deafening din of the party was all encompassing, filling the known universe with its bass. And there must have been an outdoor component to the party as well as some crisply distinct shouts and conversation poured out as well.
I took up position on a cement bench near the entrance and had myself a smoke. There was another man there, a guest, pacing and whistling in the shadows, also smoking. At the top of one of his little laps he looked up and nodded a hello to me and I was pretty sure it was Robert Downey Jr., but I suppose it was really too dark to tell. He walked off again, whistling and smoking. And this time when he returned he stopped, still in shadow, and leaned against the jasmine wrapped wall.
I was too giddy not to say something, and before I’d even really considered it, I heard myself ask, “Good party?”
His response took a moment in coming, as if he’d really, deeply been considering it. Finally, he said, “I can’t even really tell anymore, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, because I totally get that world weary, been everywhere on the jetset map, and done everything on the festival calendar to interest me already… Or maybe he meant that he was drunk?
“You had enough?” he asked.
“Just waiting for a friend,” I said, in defense, out of instinct to hide my status. I could feel him turn his eyes on me, felt him scanning me, felt as obvious as I always do, and was certain he’d dug the entire set-up in a second — my cheap sneakers, unimpressive thrift store suit. No one but a mega watt celebrity could get away with dressing so far down for an event so manifestly up. And I was not familiar, to him or anyone.
“Not missing anything,” he said, maybe Robert Downey Jr., or not, confirming my suspicion that he knew the score. He flicked out his cigarette and stood as if preparing to leave. “Sure I can’t bring you a little schnapps or something,” he asked.
“Oh, no no,” I said, “but thank you,” managing not to add “but I’m driving…”
Possible-Iron-Man scooted, and then so did I to sit and wait in the car.
