Sacred Monster

Flashback 20

Another transformation had come to the living room of the house in Malibu. The books and bookcases were gone, as though they had never been. The furniture, pushed back against the walls, was scruffier, showing signs of hard wear. Five television sets in various parts of the room were all switched on, but the sounds they might have been making were impossible to hear because the room was jammed with partygoers: a young and hedonistic crowd, laughing and shouting, scoffing down the bottomless supply of liquor and the endlessly refilled side table of finger foods. Jack reeled among his guests, a glazed look in his eyes and a glazed smile on his face. He held a quart bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label by the neck and paused from time to time to knock back a slug.

Buddy moved toward Jack through the partygoers. He was sober, neatly dressed in pale sports jacket and open-necked shirt, and in his eyes was a faint expression of disapproval of the scene swirling around him. That expression disappeared when he reached the sozzled Jack, to be replaced by his usual look of aggressive and self-confident comradeship. Never had the familial similarity between these two been less noticeable;.Buddy was trim and neat, clearly in good physical shape, while Jack was getting jowly, his body sagging within his rumpled clothing. The parallels between them had become obscured by their very different ways of caring for themselves.

“Hey, Buddy!” Jack called, seeing his oldest friend, turning to stagger toward him. “Hey, my Buddy!”

“Listen, Dad,” Buddy said, low and confidential, “could I have the car?”

“Sure, Buddy.” Jack frisked himself with uncertain gestures, switching the bottle from hand to hand, until he found a set of car keys, which he handed over.

Buddy nodded, pocketing the keys, but said, “No, Dad, I meant could I have the car.”

“Whuzza?”

Buddy brought out of his inside jacket pocket automotive sale documents and a pen. Leading Jack to a nearby table, spreading the papers on it, handing Jack the pen, he said, “Just sign here, Dad. You see, I got a little something to take care of south of the border.”

“Oh, sure, Buddy,” Jack said. An amiable drunk, he put the bottle down, scrawled his name with a flourish, dropped the pen, picked the bottle up, and drank.

Buddy retrieved documents and pen. “Thanks, Dad,” he said, patted Jack on the shoulder, and left.

A girl who’d been sitting on the sofa beside the table grinned up at Jack and said, “Hey, baby. You got a car for me?

“That’s my oldest friend in all the world,” Jack told her.

“Yeah?” the girl said. “He doesn’t look that old.”

Jack thought about that, nodding, smiling in a distracted way, and then he got it, and it broke him up. His eyes came to life! His smile beamed like the sun! His arms shot up! He slopped Tennessee sour mash whiskey all over the place! He yelled, “Oh, wow! Holy — oh, gee!”

“It wasn’t that good,” the girl said, beginning to get worried.

“Wasn’t — Comere! Comere!”

Jack dragged the girl up off the sofa and threw his arm around her shoulders. While she held her head drawn as far as possible away from him, looking sideways at his manic profile with only semicomic revulsion and alarm, he dragged her toward the hot center of the party, crying, “Hey, come here! Hey, listen to this! Wit? Holy shit!”

“But it all came to a head the night I won my Academy Award.”