ONE
In March of 1962 Jerry Brahms had bought a small two bedroom apartment a block or two within the gates of Hollywoodland, a neighborhood created in the twenties which encompassed a large parcel of land in the vicinity of the Hollywood sign. The house had cost him nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars, a relatively modest sum for a place so pleasantly situated. Back then, he’d still indulged the fantasy that one day he’d meet a soul-mate with whom he would one day share the house, but somehow his romantic entanglements had always ended poorly, and despite three attempts to bring someone in, the chemistry had failed miserably, and each time he’d sent the man to be on his way, and he’d ended up alone. He no longer hoped for an end to his solitude: even the most optimistic of the cancer doctors who’d seen him gave him at best a year. The tumor in his prostate was now inoperable, and spreading.
For all his love of the dreamy far-off days of Hollywood, Jerry was a practical man, and — at least when it came to himself — remarkably unsentimental. The prospect of dying did not move him particularly one way or another: he was not afraid of it, nor did he welcome the eventuality. It would simply happen — sooner rather than later. Sometimes, when he got melancholy, he contemplated suicide, and in preparation for such a moment had amassed a considerable number of sleeping pills, sufficient, he felt sure, to do the job. But though he had very bad days now, when the pain (and, for a man as fastidious as himself, the practical problems of advanced bowel disorders) were so nearly overwhelming that he thought hard about tying up all the loose ends of his life and simply knocking back the pills with a strong Bloody Mary, somehow he could never bring himself to do it.
He had a sense of unfinished business, though he could not quite work out what the business might be. His parents were long since dead, his only sibling, a sister, also passed away, tragically young. Of his few friends there were few that he cared to say anything of any great profundity to. If he slipped away, there’d be little by way of tears: just some fighting over his collection of movie memorabilia — which he’d never had evaluated, but was probably worth half a million dollars at auction — and a few tear-sodden, bitchy remarks at Mickey’s (his favorite bar) when he was gone. Lord knows, he’d made enough of those kinds of remarks in his life: he’d been the kind of queen with a feline answer to just about anything in his heyday. But there was no joy in that kind of thing anymore. His style of queendom was long out of fashion. He was a dinosaur with prostate cancer; soon to be extinct.
Lately he’d found that his condition made him vulnerable to every little sadness that touched his world. The passing of Todd’s dog, Dempsey, had left him in tears all day, though he barely knew the animal. And then the death of Marco Caputo: such a senseless waste of life. He hadn’t ever been close friends with Caputo, but on those few occasions when he’d met the man, Caputo had always been polite and professional, rare enough in these days of mediocrity.
The funeral had not done justice to the man, in Jerry’s opinion. It had been small (there were a couple of family members in from Chicago, but they looked as though they were more interested in what his will would say than in mourning their brother). Todd, of course, was not on hand, though Maxine was there as his representative. Jerry took the opportunity to ask her how much longer she thought the stalker business would be going on for. Were the police trying to catch this woman, and prosecute her, or was poor Todd just going to have to sit it out? Maxine said she didn’t know. She wouldn’t be dealing with Todd’s affairs for very much longer, she told him: it was a waste of time and energy.
The conversation, the tiny, disinterested congregation, the coffin and the thought of its unviewable contents, all sent Jerry back home to his apartment in a blacker mood than usual. But even so, even on a day when it seemed that all decency and all hope had gone from the world, he found it impossible to take his stash of pills and finish the business.