Pimp

Twenty-Five

In his bungalow apartment in Venice Beach Bill Moss was antsy, big-time. He’d just taken a call from some New York cop who was coming by to “ask some questions about Bust.” Was that just bullshit and was he really coming to talk about Mo? Yeah, probably.

Bill looked at his laptop, Final Draft open to the Bust screenplay, and man, it had been flying. The words tumbling over each other in an attempt to outshine anything he’d ever written before. He was into the Drano scene, but wasn’t using the dialogue Segal and Stiegsson had written. They were fucking novelists; what did they know about screenwriting? Even Faulkner and Goodis had gotten the shit kicked out of them out here.

Bill stopped typing for a moment, nearly laughed, saw that image of the Drano melting through the skin of the dead psycho and thought, Fuckit, I’m the real deal, the big cheese, a Matt Weiner of word alchemy. Hot on this thought was lurking paranoia. The lingering stench of having offed Mo was like a constant whisper of, You are so fucked, Jose.

He crushed some speed ampoules, put them in a blender with pineapple, Red Bull, and sheep urine. The sheep urine was a tip from Gwynne, before she consciously uncoupled from the Coldplay dude.

Going Taxi Driver, he muttered, “Every muscle must be tight,” as he put the concoction on warp speed and watched as the whole mix whirled.

He was dressed in khaki combat shorts and a black T with the words LET IT BE... LET THAT SUCKER SLIDE across the chest. His feet were pushed into Huaraches, loose Mexican sandals he’d bought in Cancun while working on his last script. It had been called Fast Track, and was, let’s face it, a total ripoff of the ill-fated HBO series Luck, based on a self-published book by some has-been New York City crime writer. The writer had been e-mailing Bill lately, and contacting him on Twitter and Facebook, trying to arrange a time “to hang out” during his next trip to L.A., but Bill had been blowing the jackass off. Yeah, like he needed to hang out with some hanger-on novelist, when he was finally making it onto the Hollywood A-list, getting rez’s at the best restaurants and partying with Nic Pizzolatto.

As Bill gulped the foul beverage, he remembered hanging on the set of Luck, for research — writer code for stealing ideas — and shooting the shit with Dusty, that’s Dustin Hoffman to the plebs, and what a fucking shame it was that Luck had been cancelled just because, get this, a few freaking horses got hurt. Boo hoo, Jesus Christ, did they ever count the death toll after a John Wayne western?

In the large right pocket of the awful shorts, Bill had a long lethal blade with a gold handle and a precious stone embedded in the handle. A gift from a nephew of Ortega’s. Oh yeah, Bill knew the players. As in speed dial to the maddest and most juiced honchos, guys Bruce Willis would piss himself to know. The drink shot into his bloodstream, giving his heart a wallop, making him feel like the Irish psycho in the Bust screenplay.

The doorbell shrilled, and fuming, wired, murderous, he let the cop in.

“I’m Miscali,” the prick hard-assed, then pushed by him, no like, hello, how you doing, and insult to fucking injury, walked over to the Bust screenplay and, Bill couldn’t fucking believe it, began to read.

Bill took a moment of sheer incredulity to assess the guy. Where the fuck did he find that shitty suit? If he’d worn that suit in the eighties it would’ve been ten years out of style. Was there an auction of the old wardrobe from Barney Miller? In L.A., where pretty much anything went fashion-wise — see Brad Pitt — this suit screamed, Shoot me now.

Miscali sneered, “So you’re glorifying that psycho Fisher, the man responsible for the death of my partner, one of New York’s finest ever?”

The drink took Bill for a momentary mellow stroll along his pride in the work. He said, “I’m working on the part where a cop gets iced and dumped in a lot in Harlem — that your partner?”

And Miscali did the worst thing of all, he sneered. You could see the contempt dripping off him. He snarled, “Exploitive sensationalist bullshit. You get off on killing? Are you writing a movie or the script for a snuff film?”

The insult pushed Bill to instant aggression. He fingered the blade, went, “What’re you implying?”

“You get ideas in your head, when you’re writing this shit, maybe you get the urge to act some of them out.”

“That’s the way you think it works?” Bill asked. “All writers are killers?”

“No,” Miscali said, “only some of them.”

Bill lost it, went, “Cut the shit, I never even knew Mo!”

Jesus, he thought, did I really say that?

Miscali was all attention, moved right into Bill’s face, pushed, “Mo? What’s that story?”

Bill, knowing he couldn’t take it back, went on a mad whim, went, “Love the suit.” And the tiny voice in his head snapped, “Bill... Bill, what the hell are you doing, you don’t want to antagonize this guy.”

But he did, he truly did, and added, “In that outfit, you’d be a natural on Jerry Springer.”

Let the insult hover. Miscali eyeballed him, his face red, a mix of shame and rage entwined. He said, “Think you and me, pal, we might take a run down to Hollywood South, drop you in a cell with some Crips, give you some material for the...” Indicated the screen. “...screenplay.”

The contempt that had just been dripping before leaked all over that word, and then the knife was out and with a Red Bull-fueled ferocity and speed-induced grunt, the blade was above Miscali’s groin and was cutting, moving fast, shredding, all the way up to the cop’s throat. Miscali let out a howl of sheer and utter shock, and Bill stepped back as a literal geyser of blood shot into the air, splattered his newly art deco’ed ceiling. Then with a slight whimper, the cop collapsed in a bloodied mess on the floor.

Bill muttered, “Holy fuckin’ shit.” Then, to an unseen audience, “Did you catch that?”

Bill blacked out for a few hours but came to, hours later, in a junk-filled lot in downtown L.A., Miscali’s feet sticking out of a nearby dumpster. Jesus Christ, Bill hoped nobody had seen him come down here. Fuck it, he decided, he had to trust his unconscious mind. It was what had gotten him this far, as a writer and as a killer, and it would take him the rest of the way to the top.

As Bill slunk away, he thought of Miscali’s Macy’s bargain shoes sticking out like a beacon, hearing Hannibal Lecter’s line to Clarice about her footwear, and he whispered — to himself, to the world — “No fucking doubt, I’m movie literate.”