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  ‘We all have our own shit to wade through, Butterbugs.’

  ‘But love-Code! But – you’re my main thing! Aren’t I yours?’

  ‘When I have time, Butterbugs. When I have time. Right now I have to go. I have to. You talk to Sonny. Even Parker. You can still talk, can’t you? It’s the Industry. It’s not all glam. People have been killed for less. Don’t let it throw you. Talk to Sonny. I’ve got to hang up now. Good luck, Butterbugs. Good luck…’

  The click happened.

  Butterbugs kept the receiver to his ear.

  ‘Cody! Are you there? Cody! Are we… over?’ Then, lowering it slowly, ‘We’re over. She just stopped it. I know it. And I did it.’

  Remorse, guilt, sorrow. And disappointment.

  Cody, over. The Bucolics, over. Sonny, over?

  He still couldn’t get ahold of his mega-agent, nor could he ascertain his whereabouts. Porter Parker was gone, too. Gone to his horse ranch. And Sonny, probably to his ‘egg ranch’, maybe?

  Brad-Chad Basch was having a party. Butterbugs’ neighbor was no friend, but he’d prevailed upon him more than once for a ride to Universal City when his own snappy little BMW was on the blink (tinny cooling sheet metal rubbing on fan belt; all better now). Brad-Chad was a ‘rising’ production assistant at Marlor Sportz out in the Valley, and he was one of those generic boy-toy types that the television pools had plenty of, so, following a tip from some burned-out baseball player acquaintance now producing second-string filler at Marlor, he decided to tap into the production side for the time being. He was obviously jealous of Butterbugs, and didn’t at all understand why Butterbugs was getting into pictures while he wasn’t. But that didn’t prevent his mug from showing up at Butterbugs’ front door, just five hours after Cody hung up on him.

  For those five hours Butterbugs had sat in frozen, shorted-out stasis. It was now past 9:00AM.

  ‘Hey man,’ called Brad-Chad through the screen door, ‘Friday Morning-Call-In-Sick Party at my place. Now! No better time to strut some punch than morning, huh? Course, you’re not the party type, but we need male bodies so that the non-lesbo chicks’ll come. So show up, man.’

  It was the power of suggestion that now guided Butterbugs toward his next move. Obediently, almost robotically, he followed his orders, shuffling well behind this person, with whom he had nothing in common, and didn’t particularly care for. Through the dry klenn-wood grove he wended his way, past poorly-maintained flowerbeds and stalks of stock. Everything was left to desiccate ’twixt rock and shadow, while today’s youth on furlough from any responsibilities that honest workers in Hollywood might take up on this particular workday – this school day – gamboled in a non-swimming pool back yard, surrounded by spider-vine and shriveled crewel-weed trees.

  Reclining on ramshackle chaises under the morning smog-filtered sun, or in Roman pose on a divan dragged out for the occasion, in old redwood deck chairs and even a couple of cut open juice barrels, the fellowship of Brad-Chad Basch assembled for purposes of truant entertainment.

  Of bong, briar bowl, brass thimble, and pipe-spoon did they sing, tipping their magic matches toward ignition for inhalement, oblivious to the consequences, wholly determined to get ripped.

  Then there was Becky Berry, clad in a turquoise bikini and high heels, one of the chicks to show, but not quite cute enough to hook Brad-Chad or any of his lotos-eater friends.

  ‘Come on, Sharlie!’ she cooed at one of the gang who was fiddling with paraphernalia on a rotating globe stand, ‘How do you like my top? Top’s from one suit, bottom’s from another! Look!’

  She did an okay sort of pirouette.

  Slug-like Sharlie barely looked up as he heated his crack pipe with a Bunsen burner.

  ‘Zat mean your butt is a different size than your rack? Aren’t they supposed to be the same? Or, ya know, a little on the top-heavy side? Hlurp-lurp!’

  The fellows smirked with pleasure. A perfect moment before starting their easy climb to the highs.

  ‘You stupid shit-ass!’ Becky yowled.

  She went into the house.

  ‘Becky’s the best you got, Brad-Chad? Been there, done that.’

  ‘Yoo-ba-doo-ba-doo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Is that all you got?’ crowed an ironically chunky ectomorph.

  ‘Yeah, Dreckie, but just wait. More coming. Crowd’s pepping up. Not the same old ho’s.’

  ‘You think?’ queried a younger kid.

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it, Buckskin. Hey, try some of this Filipino creamy. Good shit.’

  Becky re-emerged through the smudged patio slider, wheeling a drinks trolley, stepping daintily lest her stilettos got stuck in the potholed pavement. Her rickety caravan came to a stop where the concrete ended, a bit too distant from the revelers. She looked like a greeter at a clunkily-staged bit of debauchery in a ’60s exploitation flick. Frowning, she studied the haphazardly-arranged ingredients on the trolley and muttered.

  ‘I gotta get a Coke and go think.’

  Whether the Coke was wet or dry was a news item unannounced.

  Sluggish in his passage via the overgrown back way, Butterbugs appeared at a UV-ravaged trellis gateway, shrouded in dangly vine husks, where he faced the garden party.

  Brad-Chad happened to look up through the curling lavender witch-weed smoke and coughed.

  ‘Hey, neighbor. Here. Over here. Told ya we’d be partying. Partee! Guess you’re not working today, neither. Why should we? Ya know? No crunch time here. It’s morning punch time. Huh-heh!’

  With a voice dull and preoccupied with inhalements, his welcoming address hardly added up. After ‘Hey, neighbor’, it was as if he were just talking to himself.

  Lacking any current society except his own, there was no reason not to go forward into this invitational gathering. The only things missing on Butterbugs’ person were a seersucker jacket and a straw boater, so innocent did the premise seem.

  Music by The Ponjees, Mark and The Attractions, The Kickers, The Mupps, File K-2245639200, Philip Chudge and His Friendly Band, The Chicklettes, Mhow-Mhow, and Engine Kid wound out of a reel-to-reel recorder. Interestingly, it played at a level conducive to conversation. Tape heads were pretty oxidized, probably. Other heads were getting baked, then deep-fried.

  ‘So, Brad-Chad? Is this, you know, that dude you told us about, ’n’ stuff? He was in a movie or something?’

  Sharlie took a gander at the on-comer, but with sprawled casualness.

  ‘Yoe. Something. Hey Butterbugs, are you gonna party? How come you didn’t bring a hot date? Something bodacious. Or at least something inflatable. Or at least a six-er?’

  The boys laughed whilst inhaling and guzzling. They were all generic white guys, without one shred of character amongst them. Still, Butterbugs had seen worse. Despite their mild teasing, he saw no threat here.

  ‘I’ll, uh, have a lite beer, or equivalent. Or even a near beer,’ he announced.

  ‘A LITE beer, as opposed to anything heavier!?!’ snorted Sharlie. ‘That’s heavy-duty, dudes!’

  ‘Yeah, guess you’re just a lap-baby, neighbor. Grab one in the watering trough over there.’

  ‘Somebody like that, you can tell ’em to do anything, and they’ll do it,’ remarked the worldly Sharlie, prepping to light up another toke sequence. He peered after Butterbugs on his way to the brew-belly cache and snorted.

  ‘Sharlie, did you get that new Blombo vidgame?’ asked Galahad, another partier.

  ‘What the fuck! You mean you haven’t even…’

  And they yakked on, while the neighbor tried to sort out what was what in the beer selection. It was only the absence of presence of mind, a condition so visited upon him in past passages of circuit-breaking events, that caused Butterbugs, the dedicated actor in search of – truth – to be digging around in a dubious chest, daring super-cooled waters to chip the ice from some smooth tin of bland beer with blander labeling, at about 9:45 in the morning. But he was.

  Would his role models have made any difference ri
ght now? That is, if they had been present to enact any sort of parental discipline?

  Cody? Too busy with her kids and high-powered cinema execs.

  Vonda? Expired; perhaps she would have just joined in the partying.

  TABP? Too high up and far away; these backyard boys would make him commit soul emesis.

  Sid Grauman? Too big. Period.

  Porter Parker? He’d be too busy trying to get it all for wholesale.

  Sonny? Where-oh, where-oh WAS Sonny, anyway?

  Old Dad? Old who?

  Heatherette? That’s right, Heatherette! Surely she would have made a difference. But she was off somewhere past the alley of Yniguez Terrace. Light-centuries away.

  No doubt about it, this was Esteban the Cerveziac territory. That old alley guy got some joy out of life in the long run, didn’t he?

  Butterbugs grabbed two tins. After all, he had essentially been up all night, and to him this was late evening. The streaks in the soiled sky, like strands of coagulated blood, could possibly be construed as a contented sunset. Perfect time to kick back and swill a carefree cold one with some dinosaurs.

  Returning to the encampment of goof-offs, he was able to find a seating arrangement between a child’s lawn chair and a hard place. Splayed, he cracked the tin and awaited further ridicule.

  Brad-Chad’s banal gang, now properly dispatched on the road to dumbshit-land, proceeded to take turns proving themselves.

  It was nothing, really. All were too middle-class, too comfortable within the potentially desperate game that the non-privileged might gamble at (and lose) in this here town. But because they were talentless and going nowhere fast as wannabe players in the game of Hollywoodian success, they nevertheless were able to find somewhat secure posts as service and support entities, slightly related to the Industrial system that made this town tick. Brad-Chad was doing his production assistant thang at Marlor. Sharlie was an associate purchasing agent for a branch of UPS that made most of its deliveries to radio stations. Dreckie was a paper cup picker-upper for Zundison/General. Buckskin was slugging it out in a Carl’s Jr. management training programme only two blocks away from KBEX. Galahad was in charge of ordering litho crayons for Western Costume. Becky was a receptionist at D.K. Dill’s Most American Rapid, which distributed George Pibbage whiskey to the region. There were a few other guys there, too, too unremarkable for comment. Dull worker bees playing hooky, made duller as the sun rose higher.

  Once they had reviewed their familiar subjects of games, tunes and babes, the THC and other compounds dictated that the collective imagination would run dry. Therefore, this board of cool dudes eventually turned their attentions toward the neighbor guest, only because he was the new face in town. Not that they were particularly interested.

  ‘So where’s your date, neighbor?’ bored Brad-Chad inquired.

  ‘Well, I don’t have one.’

  ‘Not nobody!’ spat Sharlie.

  ‘Not as of… a few hours ago,’ explained Butterbugs, mindlessly popping his fifth beer.

  ‘What’s that all about?’ asked some guy over on the fringe, whose name everyone always forgot at times like this.

  ‘It’s just that,’ continued Butterbugs, his tongue loosened by lager (in contrast to those disabled by pot), ‘a few hours ago, I had a girlfriend. Now, I don’t. I guess.’

  ‘Oh, wow,’ said Buckskin.

  And that’s all he said.

  ‘So what’s the deal?’ asked Brad-Chad, almost in a normal tone.

  ‘Well,’ drawled Butterbugs, now on his seventh, ‘it’s like this. My girl was a beautiful, beautiful – girl. She wasn’t a girl…’

  ‘Oh! She wasn’t a girl!’ Galahad was getting pretty fucked-up.

  ‘No! She was a mature woman. Oh! What a woman. A lover, as sainted as the morning sun. My gawd, how she looked then…’

  ‘You’re funny,’ mumbled Buckskin, almost in wonder, unused to poetic inflections.

  ‘I just don’t know what the big deal is,’ scoffed the no name in back.

  Brad-Chad was adept enough, even in his mean-green-state, to realize there was a line of questioning worth following with this neighbor dude.

  ‘So, uh, was she, you know, in pictures?’ His tone was sensibly somewhat sincere.

  ‘Ooooh, yeah. Pretty high up.’

  ‘You bull-fucking-shitter,’ squawked Sharlie.

  ‘She is high up in Goth Studios, sir. I’ve been there. I do not lie.’

  Brad-Chad cleared his throat and straightened his posture noticeably.

  ‘Uh, hey, neighbor! Howdy! Can we git ya another swill? Huh? Becky! Beer! NOW! Bring over a six-er for the Beer Guy, here.’

  Then, in a much gentler voice to Butterbugs, and holding out an FDR-style cig holder with smolder attached, quipped:

  ‘Smoke tokey-smokey-toke?’

  ‘Oh, no-thinks…,’ mumbled the neighbor.

  Then he noticed Becky’s hot pink hooker-heels parking next to him, and his eyes traveled up her white thighs and into the puffball of her crotch. He leered tipsily, then looked over at his host and widened the smile.

  ‘She’s for you, neighbor!’ The host grinned. ‘She, uh, thinks! Want her?’

  Brad-Chad’s expression, as if he were some sort of beneficent provider, was stunningly sleazy, way beyond anything Butterbugs encountered in his extensive experience with the porno industry that one day.

  ‘Shut up, Bradley-Chadley!’ Becky moaned, then dropped the six-pack of IceGrain Liquid Bread all the way to the ground, where it made a perfect landing for anyone who doesn’t much care to reach far for his next swirl of swill.

  ‘I’ll make my own choice,’ she continued, snottily. ‘Hey, Bubbah!’

  She looked down at Butterbugs and slowly descended into an unladylike position of cross-leggedness, barely accomplished due to heels sinking into the dry turf below. Her daring g-string was so distressed that it was forced to reveal the peripheries of a thick thatch of hair, the color of which didn’t exactly match her darker spit curl ’n’ bangs perm on top. She made no effort to correct this indiscretion of modesty.

  ‘Hey, good-munch. OK then. How about it?’

  She blew cute-rings of cig smoke at his ear.

  ‘Yeah! Yeah, neighbor! Go ahead! Try my girl out! My Yamaguchi’s got less miles on it, though! And it’s a two-stroke! Wanna ride it? Hah, hah, hah!!’

  Sharlie was coming unglued with yucks.

  All were in the proper position for a bit of Roman orgying, voyeur-style. The only thing missing was a proper Corinthian-columned vomitorium.

  ‘Why Sharlie, you still got that old beater mo-cycle that spits blue smoke? Thing’s ready for the graveyard!’ Buckskin was in wonder, always.

  With amazing dexterity, Becky immediately stood up, adjusted her strings, kept her heels from sinking by tiptoeing with determination back to the patio, before spinning about and repeating, ‘You stupid SHIT-ASS!!’ to Sharlie, and marched over to the drinks trolley to make a great big – dwink.

  ‘See, neighbor?’ the boor said to Butterbugs, ‘I pull her chain and she always says the same thing. Kinda boring after a while. Might have to have her tape changed. How d’ya do that, anyway, Gala-been-had?’

  The lesser one said nothing, and simply responded by taking out a small switchblade, tripped its release, and flashed his own version of a shit-chewing grin.

  ‘Boys!’ Brad-Chad burst out with a commanding laugh. Then, looking at Butterbugs. ‘My dudes have high spirits, but hearts of pure gold! Right, Galahad?’

  ‘Yoe!’

  Galahad duly returned the blade to its storage and withdrew it, in as cool a manner as possible. He and Sharlie continued to smirk.

  ‘So – neighbor, you were saying, about this Goth girl – er – ‘woman’?’

  ‘Oooh yeah. Her…’ Butterbugs tore into Becky’s gift. ‘Oooh, I dunno. Oh, n-no… She was too mucsh. Too much, I mean. Mean?’

  ‘In bed??’

  ‘You!! No –’

  ‘Cou
ldn’t quite handle her ‘high power’? Huh?’

  They all chuckled.

  ‘Oh, you-o guyses! My gurrull wasz a bootiful, byoutiphul wummun…’

  ‘Oh no, he’s gonna cry!’ mocked Sharlie.

  ‘Yeah, I’d cryyy… I should cry it off my chest… Jes so’d I cud kiss her brest – uh-er, breasts – agann!’

  ‘Ewww…’ was Buckskin’s comment.

  ‘I weepeth! Aye! I dooo. For herrr…!’

  The gang really didn’t know whether to continue razzing him or admit to genuine pity. The sincerity of his performance was undoubted. So they did the best thing and retreated into their continued exploitation of the day’s drug bits.

  Left to his own devices, Butterbugs shed tears unto his beer. Saline stood no chance against hops. When that was all gone, he roused himself and stumbled in search of a brew-flowing creek. He ended up over by Becky’s trolley, though. While its wheels weren’t exactly spinning, his perception of them was. Regardless, he was able to stabilize once he grabbed the controlling handle bar. There were bottles, cups and tumblers, in and out of focus, and a sorrow that still needed drowning. But, what to seize? Why, the biggest thing! A beer pitcher, one of those PeteZaParLa things, of heavy-gauge glass and unbreakably reliable. And filling it, with a fluid much-textured and viscous, was the heartiest serving-up of a SpappyThom-kinda slop he’d ever witnessed. Tomato puree, buzzing with anger, hopefully doctored with Dave’s Insanity Sauce: the perfect antidote to his slurping grief! Solemnly, but severely, would it purge him of this mælström of torturous guilt and loss. It was as if at least one of the Ten Commandments slates was being bonked over his head right now, with an Eleventh, scratched at the bottom, that screamed:

  ‘Thou shalt grab and guzzle with great gusto!’