Drive

Chapter Eighteen

For a long time after Standard’s death he didn’t take on any more jobs. Not that he wasn’t approached. Word gets around. He watched a lot of TV with Benicio, cooked huge meals for and with Irina. “Learned out of self defense,” he’d said when she asked how he’d found his way to cooking. Then, as he grated fresh Parmesan, Italian sausages laid out on the cutting board to warm, he told her about his mother. They clicked glasses. A good, inexpensive sauvignon blanc.

Day or two a week, he’d go off to the studio, give them what they wanted, be back before Benicio got home from school. The checks Jimmie sent him each month grew. He could go on like this forever. Nothing gold can stay-he remembered that from a poem he’d read back in high school.

Not that in L.A. you could easily tell without consulting a calendar, but fall had arrived. Nights were cool and breezy. Each evening, light flattened itself against the horizon trying heroically to hold on, then was gone.

Home from her new job as ward clerk at the local ER, Irina refilled their wineglasses.

“Here’s to-”

He remembered the glass falling, shattering as it struck the floor.

He remembered the starburst of blood on her forehead, the snail of it down her cheek as she tried to spit out what was in there in the moment before she collapsed.

He remembered catching her as she fell-and then, for a long time, not much else.

Gang business, the police would tell him later. Some sort of territorial dispute, we think.

Irina died just after four a.m.

Driver having no legal rights, Benicio got shipped off to grandparents in Mexico City. For a year or more he’d write the boy every week, and Benicio would send back drawings. He’d put them up on the refrigerator of whatever apartment he was living in, if it had a refrigerator. For a while there he kept on the hop, moving cribs every month or two, old Hollywood to Echo Park to Silverlake, thinking that might help. Time went by, which is what time does, what it is. Then one day it came to him how long it had been since he’d heard from the boy. He tried calling, but the number was out of service.

Hating to be alone, to face empty apartments and the day’s gapping hours, Driver kept busy. Took everything that came his way and went looking for more. Even had a speaking part in one movie when, half an hour into the shoot, a bit player grew ill.

The director ran it down for him.

“You pull in and this guy’s standing there. You shake your head, like you’re feeling sorry for him, this poor sonofabitch, and you get out of the car, leaning back against the door. ‘Your call,’ you tell him. Got it?”

Driver nodded.

“That just goddamn dripped with menace,” the director said later when they broke for lunch. “Two words-just two fucking words! It was beautiful. You should think seriously about doing more.”

He did, but not the way the director meant.

Standard used to hang out a lot at a bar called Buffalo Diner just off Broadway in downtown L.A. Food hadn’t been served there since Nixon’s reign, but the name survived, as did, in patches, the chalk in which the last menu had been put up on a blackboard above the bar. So Driver started being there afternoons. Strike up conversations, stand a few drinks, mention he was a friend of Standard’s, ask if they knew anyone looking for a first-rate driver. By the second week he’d become a regular, knew the rest of them by name, and had more work than he could handle.

Meanwhile, as he began turning down shoots, and went on turning them down, offers declined.

“What am I supposed to tell these people?” Jimmie said the first few times.

Within weeks he shifted to: “They want the best. That’s what they keep telling me.” Even the Italian guy with all the forehead creases and warts had been calling, he said-in person, not just through some secretary or handler. In goddamn person.

“Look,” Jimmie’s penultimate message said. By this time Driver had stopped answering the phone. “I have to figure you’re alive but I’m starting not to give half a goddamn, if you know what I mean. What I’m telling people is I seem to have acquired a second asshole.”

His last message said: “Been fun, kid, but I just lost your number.”