The Bone Polisher

14 ~ The Hall of the Mountain King

The hardest part was reconciling the picture of Ferris Hanks I’d assembled in my imagination with the Ferris Hanks sitting across from me. I’d anticipated a wizened, exquisite Mandarin from Central Casting’s criminal mastermind division: crippled perhaps, shaved bald as an egg, and wearing flowing robes or thigh-high boots and a black leather cape. What I’d gotten was a miniature Broderick Crawford. In a USC jogging suit.

Everything about Hanks’s face was square. He had a nose like a thumb and a chin like a shoebox. His short dark hair, expertly clipped into varying lengths, was combed forward in Roman fashion, and the lower ridge of his skull, where it jutted out over the back of his neck, had a corner like a coffee table. The neck was powerful, roped with muscle, giving him the look of someone who habitually opened doors with his head. As short as it was thick, the neck emerged from shoulders as broad as an automobile bumper.

“Max was a fool,” he said in his dry old-man voice. The voice was the oldest thing about him. “A good actor, but a fool.”

We were in a living room almost long enough and almost cold enough for a game of ice hockey. Frigid air was being pumped energetically into the room through two vents, big enough to crawl through, high on the walls. It was a room my mother had definitely not furnished. Navajo rugs imposed dull-colored angular patterns over a gray slate floor, and tall hand-painted Japanese screens, profusely decorated with irises and camellias, concealed the corners. Crowds of men, women, and gods congregated festively on the walls, each crowd cut from a separate panel of heavy flat Thai teak. The furniture was low and massive, dark wood and burgundy leather, with the cushions tied to the wooden frames as though they’d attempted in the past to rearrange themselves while no one was looking. Against the longest of the walls stood a police lineup of full-size wooden cigar-store Indians. In the center of the lineup, looking like the one who dreaded stepping forward, was Henry. Henry had a gun in his hand and an ambivalent gleam in his eye.

“He did a lot of good,” I said.

The Yorkshire terriers had scattered themselves over the burgundy leather couch on either side of Hanks, like living throw pillows. Hanks removed one from his lap and opened a profusely carved ivory box. He closed it again, looking disappointed. “He could have done more good by staying in front of the cameras,” he said. “The damn fool.”

I had a feeling this was territory Hanks had explored often. I also had the feeling Hanks thought a lot of people were damn fools.

Upon closer examination, it wasn’t so much that Hanks didn’t seem old; he just seemed a kind of young that did not, that never would, exist in nature. The skin drawn taut over the square face was the color of a glazed ham and the texture of a bat’s wing. The short hair was a peculiar dark red that suggested a genetic link with the later Ronald Reagan. It all came together to create a sort of humanoid artifact, animatronic, perhaps, that required, and got, a great deal of skilled technical care.

He leaned forward, grunting with the effort, and pulled a brass box with a domed lid across the table. With thick, blunt fingers he pried at the lid without result. “What do you know about me?” he asked.

“You were his agent,” I said. I was cold enough to shiver.

“ Heek heek heek,” he wheezed, bouncing slightly with each heek. He picked up the box, turned it upside down, and banged it against the edge of the coffee table. The lid popped off, clattering on the slate floor, and he kicked it under the table and peered into the box. One dog opened a curious eye. The others seemed used to it. “What else?”

“Nothing much,” I lied. “What should I know?”

He’d lost interest in me. “Henry,” he rasped, the back of his throat rattling like a box of rocks on the H. “Where are they?”

“Forget it, Ferris,” Henry said.

Ferris Hanks raised both feet and stamped them on the floor together, causing a furry ripple among the Yorkies, and the dark face went a couple of shades darker. “Cut this shit,” he said. “Go get them.”

“I ain’t leaving you here alone,” Henry said stolidly.

“I know your counting skills aren’t all they should be,” Ferris Hanks said, “but I’m not alone.”

“Fuck you, Ferris,” Henry said, surprising me.

It didn’t surprise Ferris. It seemed to calm him. “You’re a fool, Henry,” he said without force. Then, to me, “We’ve been together too long.”

“At least you haven’t started to look alike.”

“ Heek,” he said. “Don’t you think Henry’s good-looking?”

“He’s a veritable fever dream,” I said.

“You hear that, Henry?” Hanks’s eyes, long and heavy-lidded and a fraudulent deep-sea blue, came back to me. “And that’s all you know about me? You mean, no one’s maligning me these days?” He didn’t sound pleased.

“I’ve heard your nickname, of course.”

His thumb of a nose pointed down, like a disapproving Roman emperor, toward a broad, masculine mouth with a thin upper lip and a full, square lower one. The left corner went up, producing the closest thing I’d ever seen to the half-smile I keep reading about, and the left eye disappeared into a mass of leathery, batlike wrinkles. The right regarded me steadily and coldly enough to have belonged to someone else. “How do you think someone earns a nickname like that?”

The chair I was sitting in was big enough for me, Henry, and Henry’s extended family, and it provided a lot of squirming room, which might have been why it had been offered to me. Hanks watched me expectantly. “I don’t know,” I said. “They called me Sluggo in school, and I never slugged anybody.”

“You made that up,” Hanks said petulantly.

I had. “Mr. Hanks, I’m sure you’ve had a fascinating life, crammed with really rotten stuff, but it’s Max I’m interested in.”

Hanks rummaged in the brass box, just in case something had materialized inside it while he wasn’t paying attention. “You could pretend,” he said.

“Stop fiddling, Ferris,” Henry said. “They not in there.”

He gave the box a thwack with his finger. “Did you hear why Max left me? He was Rick then. Rick Hawke.”

“Sort of a silly name,” I said, just to annoy him.

“I made that name up,” Hanks said mildly. “I made up all their names in those days. They just trotted into the office, dozens of them every week, all as beautiful as a summer’s day, looking to be stars. Truckdrivers, elevator operators, construction workers, men with real jobs. Now they’re all waiters. ‘Good evening, my name is Dwight, and I’ll be your waiter until I’m discovered by a major studio.’ ” His voice had risen to a feathery whine. “I don’t know how anyone can eat out these days,” he said in a normal tone. “Every meal is a fucking audition.”

“With a beefcake appetizer,” I said.

“Jesus, it was fun,” Hanks said. “All the studios wanted boys then. Girls were just scenery, an opportunity for the clothes designers to use a little color. I changed that. Remember Jimmy Dean’s red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause? My influence. ‘Put the color on the boys,’ I said, ‘they’re the ones everybody’s shelling out to see. If the girls want color, dump some on their hair, the silly bitches.’ Just busloads of wannabes every month, pouring in from all over. And I owned the market.” He reached up and twisted a lock of odd-red hair. “Owned the market.”

“And what about Max?”

“Max, Max, Max,” he said vehemently. One of the dogs looked up as though it had heard its name. “I’m much more interesting than Max. Not many people have lived their entire lives on their own terms and gotten away with it, boysie. It’s a small club. I may be its oldest living member.” The hand was still in his hair, and he yanked violently at the lock and then examined his fingers to see whether any had come out. He turned the hand to me and spread it open like a stage magician, showing me that it was empty. “Still, Max was special. Is it true what they’re saying?”

I crossed my legs. “Depends on what they’re saying.”

“You needn’t play it so close to the vest, you know. It wouldn’t pain you to give a full answer once in a while. Unless you get paid by the word, heek heek. They’re saying that some gay basher killed Max and cut off his hand and that he’s some sort of lunatic who does this for jollies. Is that true?”

“Where’d you hear it?”

Hanks snapped his fingers with a sound like a gun going off, and pointed at me. Dogs jumped. “Stop that right now. You want, you give. Law of the jungle.”

“You scarin’ the wolf pack,” Henry observed.

“It’s true,” I said.

His tongue came out and slid over the lower lip. “Did you see the body?”

I wasn’t going to pay in that currency. “No.”

“Hmmm.” He regarded me dubiously. “Did the latest dreary young man?”

“He found Max, if that’s what you mean.”

“Probably wasted on him,” Hanks said. “Max’s boys were always so hapless. Although why he stole that one is really beyond me.”

“Stole?”

“Snatched him away from that old poof with the Bette Davis eyes who runs the Bookstore of the Living Dead Celebrities or whatever it’s called. On Hollywood Boulevard, which should tell you all you need to know.”

Wyl had told me he’d pointed Christy to Max himself. “That’s not the way I heard it.”

“Well, I can’t help that, can I? Consider the source, I always say. Who was your source?”

“Someone who knows all three of them.”

“I suppose discretion is admirable,” Hanks said, pushing two dogs aside so he could probe between the cushions of the couch. “But that doesn’t make it good conversation.”

“They gone, Ferris,” Henry said. “They gone from behind the screen, too, so don’t bother gettin’ up.”

“I don’t know which of you I find less interesting,” Hanks lamented to me. “You won’t tell me anything, and Henry enjoys thwarting me. But whatever anyone told you, the transfer of that sullen lad from the antique dealer to the aging actor was not accomplished without a certain amount of melodrama.”

“And who told you?” I asked.

“I really shouldn’t call Max aging,” Hanks said, ignoring the question. “He was old. Still, you know, he’d aged well. As well as anyone does.” He looked through me, and I heard Henry fidget against his wall. “He didn’t quit acting because of me, you know.”

I made a note to ask Wyl a couple of questions. “Why did he quit, then?”

“Max had principles,” he said, making it sound like a disease. “He couldn’t, what’s the phrase, live a lie. As though we all don’t in one way or another. Not Max, though, oh, no, not Max. It wasn’t enough for him to have a TV show in the top five and pull down ten thousand a week, and that was muchos dolores in those days.”

“ Dolares,” I said.

His eyebrows shot up as though something was chasing them. “Are you correcting me?”

“ Dolares,” I said again. “ Dolores means pains.”

“Henry?”

“The fuck would I know?”

“Well,” Hanks said comfortably, “it was all a pain to Max. He had to be True To Himself. He wanted to-God’s truth-he wanted to come out, as they say today.” He sat back and watched me brightly, waiting for me to fall out of my chair. “In the nineteen fifties.”

“And you wouldn’t let him.”

“Are you crazy? Rumors were already flying about my little stable. You’re too young to remember Confidential magazine, but they were hot on our cute little tails. Most of my young men were discreet-two of them were even straight-but some of them had their nuts in the wringer. Parties got raided and there were all these boys in pajamas, or not in pajamas, depending on when the door got knocked in. All these studs with the superhero names I’d dreamed up for them and the oh-so-butch voices I’d taught them to use, hadn’t I, sweetheart?” he asked one of the dogs, toying with its ear. “We did everything for them in those days. Actors knew they were cattle back then, not like now when they think they can elect presidents and run the Pentagon. We named them, taught them to walk-that was usually hilarious-gave them pasts, gave them wives when things got touchy, wiped their expensive new noses when they got sick. It was a big investment. Not something to be thrown away because a cop went through the wrong door or some damn fool wanted to be true to himself. Be true to me, I told him, be true to your public. Stop thinking about yourself all the time.”

“What did he say?”

“Said he wasn’t thinking about himself, he was thinking about All Of Us, all us poor downtrodden queers locked in our closets. The closet’s good, I told him. It gives us strength, gives us self-discipline. Gives us a secret. People with a secret are always more interesting than people who don’t have one.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Passionately. We were united then. We shared our problems, shared our jokes. The straight world was open to us, there for us to plunder, like King Solomon’s mines or the Hall of the Mountain King. We were the Knights of Malta, a secret society, smarter and prettier and funnier than they were, and we had what they wanted, and they didn’t know what it was or even why they wanted it. They had one little life each, and we had as many as we wanted. You can develop a lot of useful skills if you’re leading a secret life, or three or four. God, it was a glorious time.”

“You were apparently outvoted.”

“Democracy is a terrible thing. The ordinary always wins. I was on the losing side. Max’s bunch won, and look where it’s gotten them. The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name has become The Love That Cannot Shut Its Trap. Gays have become the one thing they never were: boring. Look at them, a bunch of bank tellers and dental assistants, holding hands on the sidewalks and mooning at each other. Joining neighborhood watch organizations. The fucking Kiwanis.” He stopped to clear his throat, and it turned into a cough, deep and hacking, that bent him over the table until his face almost touched it. When he straightened up, he was the color of rare beef. “Henry,” he said pleadingly.

“The drowning man,” Henry said, ponderous as the Old Testament, “want his drink of water.”

“Old age is vicious,” Hanks said, wiping his eyes, “and I mean that literally. It strips away everything but our vices and then denies us those. If you’re lucky, you’ll die young.”

No easy rejoinder sprang to my lips.

“It’s disgusting,” he said. “All I tried to do was get Max married, for his own good, to my perfectly nice secretary, and he hated me for the rest of his life. Quit the series, turned his back on all of us, went off to some filthy third-world country to get worms, and came back a cut-rate prophet, a walking Kmart of spiritual misinformation. Working his shabby little ministry for ego gratification, rescuing the dull, frumpy ones who weren’t handsome enough or smart enough to qualify for the New Jerusalem, the bogus, bourgeois, inane empire of ennui with all its brave muscle-bound subjects. Oh, yes, in the new gay order, life is free, life is open, and all are welcome. As long as they’re pretty and slim and vapid and…”

“Young,” I suggested.

He sank back emptily on the couch, blinked, and smoothed the short hair down over his forehead. “That, too, of course. Not that age is at much of a premium in the heterosexual world, either.”

“You called Max,” I said. “Asked him to come back to work. Repeatedly.”

His eyes got wary. “Someone’s been talking out of turn.”

“Why did you bother?”

“There were parts,” he said shortly.

“And thousands of actors who could have played them. Why keep calling someone who’d turned his back on you, someone who was guaranteed to say no?”

Hanks’s eyes flicked to Henry and then up to one of the crowded Thai carvings. “Bought that at the wrong end of the market,” he said. “I’ve always been better at dealing in people.”

I didn’t look at it. “Why Max?”

He watched the carving expectantly, as though he were waiting for the people to come to life and start dancing. “He was the one who got away.”

I looked at him until the silence brought him back to me.

“Max was a good actor,” he said, sounding defiant.

“You tried to destroy him.”

He snorted, not a pleasant sound. “If I’d wanted to destroy him, I would have. Destruction is something I can do in my sleep. In a coma. Max destroyed himself.”

“And you pursued him like a Fury.”

“The Furies were always my favorites,” he said. “Single-mindedness is such an admirable trait.”

“And then, decades later, you tried to get him back.”

“Self-interest,” he said. “Economics, pure and simple.”

I watched him until he looked away. “Max broke your heart.”

“Hearts don’t break,” he said to the people in the carving. “You’re old enough to know that. They shrink, they-they corrode — they atrophy with lack of use, but they don’t break. ‘Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ That how it goes, Henry?”

“Thass how I recollect it.”

“Henry is my literary adviser,” Hanks said. “You may have been wondering what he was doing here.”

“I hadn’t.”

“He likes to stand in one place for long periods of time. You’ve probably noticed that. He’s not idle, though. He’s working on a mental concordance of English lyric poetry. Aren’t you, Henry.”

“You say so, Ferris.”

“I do say so,” Hanks said. “I say it every chance I get.”

“You loved Max,” I said.

“ Everybody loved Max,” Hanks said, slapping the table with the flat of his hand. I’d heard a number of people say those words, but not with such intensity. “Max was one of those people other people throw love at. He accepted it like, like air, like confetti, like nothing. He didn’t even know I loved him. He didn’t notice. I turned my life inside out for Max. I got rid of clients who weren’t his type, fixed it so other agents wouldn’t take them on. I negotiated raises for him when he was already one of the three highest-paid actors in television. He didn’t notice. He said, ‘Really, Ferris? That’s nice. Can we do anything about the scripts?’ I got the best writers in town, writers who hated television. I blackmailed one of them to write scripts for Max, told him wouldn’t it be awful if his wife found out about his little tootsie and started thinking community property. A writer everybody wanted, fucking Brando wanted him, and there it was in the trades that he was writing for Tarnished Star. Let me tell you something, boysie, one of the tricks of having power is that you don’t throw it around. I was throwing it around like a drunk, like a novice, and all for Max. And what did it get me? Gornischt is what it got me. A lawsuit from the network when Max walked is what it got me. A nasty postcard from India is what it got me. Break my heart? Don’t make me laugh.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

He passed a hand over his forehead. “I don’t remember the last time I laughed.”

“Ferris,” I said reprovingly, “you laughed when your dogs attacked me.”

“ Heek,” he said, and both eyes disappeared. “You looked like you had wet your pants.”

It was a smile, sort of. As much of one as I was likely to get. “I need your help,” I said.

He got comfortable, a man in his milieu. “Of course you do. Why else would you have climbed my fence?”

“I want you to throw a wake for Max.”

Whatever he’d expected, that wasn’t it. “A wake? Whatever for?”

I’d expected a refusal, but not a question. “That’s not how I work,” I said. “I have ideas first and then figure out why I had them.”

“How haphazard.”

“I prefer to think of it as instinctive.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “What makes you think I’d consider such a thing?”

“We’ve already covered that. For Max.”

“For years,” he said, “I thought it was a question: ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot?’ My answer was always yes. As quickly as possible.”

“But you didn’t forget.”

“Not for lack of trying. Lord, how I tried.” He toyed with the brass box and then looked up. At Henry.

“Why not?” Henry said.

“An excellent question,” Hanks said promptly, “and one that isn’t asked often enough. I knew a prostitute once, a woman of almost inexhaustible willingness, and that was her credo. Anything anyone asked her to do, she replied, ‘Why not?’ Wound up owning half of North Hollywood. Ever wondered why they call it North Hollywood?”

“Because it’s north of Hollywood.”

“You lack poetry,” Hanks said. “You should spend time with Henry.” He fondled the ears of the nearest dog. “Why me? And don’t give me sentimentalism.”

“You can afford it,” I said. “And it would amuse you.”

He closed both eyes. “It might at that.”

“You haven’t laughed in years,” I pointed out.

“I ain’t never heard him laugh,” Henry said solemnly.

Hanks still had his eyes closed, but the left corner of his mouth went up. “Halloween’s around the corner.”

“Great,” I said. “A theme.”

“I don’t entertain at home,” he said, opening his eyes.

“And I wouldn’t ask you to. I want it in West Hollywood.”

“The dreariest of venues.”

“It’s your chance,” I said, “to show them how it should be done.”

The right corner of his mouth went up, too. It made him look almost pleasant. “If I do it,” he said, “I’ll give them an evening they’ll never forget.”

“Anything you want, as long as it’s legal.”

“Where have you been? Everything’s legal these days.”

“You’ll do it, then.”

He lifted the paws of the dog nearest him and clapped them together lightly in applause. “I’ll think about it. Call Henry at six tomorrow evening.”

“You’re not as bad as they say you are.”

“No one’s as bad as they say he is. I used to come pretty close, though.” His eyes widened. “I thought you didn’t know anything about me.”

“I lied.”

“We’ll have lots of time to talk about me while we plan this thing.” He waved the words away like smoke. “ If I do it. It’ll broaden your frame of reference.” He picked up the ivory box and slammed it onto the tabletop. “Henry,” he said, “it’s midnight. I’ve practically promised this man a favor. Now can I have a fucking cigar?”

Henry stirred from his spot by the wall. “You got to say please,” he said.