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Show Cardboard Sky-3 secretary wears jeans with embroidered flowers on the pockets, and a leather vest like a Hell's Angel's. Tony is an actor-producer who is going to play the young Howard Hughes in a television special about success in America. He thinks that people who come to see him will think the hula-girl is a joke. Bill's office is in Venice; Venice is next to Santa Monica; Santa Monica is the most depressing town on the California coast after Pebble Beach. I went to college with Harrison Cost, who lives there. He's been divorced four times and is courting a fifth wife. When I go see him in his condominium apartment in the white tower on Ocean Avenue I spend my time looking down at the shuffleboard players pushing their markers about, twenty-two stories down, on the edge of the cliff on the edge of the Pacific, and I think about Nathanael West, who died in a car crash in Bakersfield. Harrison is getting old at a hell of a clip but his wives keep getting younger. This one can't be more than seventeen. She has very small breasts, red hair, white, wide, spade-shaped teeth. She's smarter than Harrison, but all his wives have been. Some men are meant to live alone, but Harrison isn't one of them. His grandfather was once a partner of Howard Hughes, but got aced out of the partnership in a complicated swindle and had to open a liquor store in Laguna Beach, the third most depressing town on the coast. Tony Bill's father owns many liquor stores in Oceanside and Carlsbad. |
