from Five Years With Gavin Blod

Chapter One

You would think such a day would have a better beginning, the day I met the man of my dreams, the day I wandered from a poverty- and vice-laden existence to one of drink, debauchery and celluloid (not to mention cellulite). But when I got up that morning, I still had a harelip, which prevented most movie producers from ever taking notice of me; I still had my chronic hemorrhoids, preventing me from sitting long enough to earn a decent living as a secretary; I still had a short attention span, preventing me from going to night school to pick up a career. So many obstacles, so few excuses.

All of these factors had kept me on my back, working for whoever would see their way clear to throw me a few dollars. Some of my previous clients had been stars so vainglorious and yet so unsuccessful, they'd insisted on showing me in several of their movies (usually they occupied ground far behind the lead characters in any given shot, or else were shot early on by the bad guys and avenged by the protagonist), and my attitudes towards them were so nurturing and encouraging, my nickname on the streets was "Ma." Strangely enough, this increased my business even as it decreased my sex appeal, but the money was still rolling in, so I wasn't complaining.

When I hit the streets that day, I was wearing an imitation-silk blouse and badly-stitched leggings. I'd been up all the night before, crying, after receiving a phone call from a certain prominent actor whose premiere party had gone terribly awry. It had been a comedy starring two ex-Friday Night Live members who had carried the performance away from him and left him basically holding an empty bag. "It's like I never existed," he said, sobbing, over the phone, "and I'm not even sure I can go on like this. I mean, my whole life has been acting--what's left for me?"

"What about your wife and kid?" I asked, fighting back tears. "And your plumbing job in Bismark, North Dakota?"

"Who could go back to that?" he sobbed. "I've tasted Hollywood! I've scratched my initials on the Walk of Fame for people to barely notice and dogs to pee on. How can I find justification in a life spent fixing toilets so college kids can make their night's binge drinking disappear tastefully into the sewers?"

There was no consoling him, and I left him at 3 a.m. a babbling, exhausted cretin, sucked dry by the Cinema Vampire. There was no way to reach him, and I still had bills to pay.

I stood on the corner of Gardner and Vine, about five miles east of Hollywood, where most tourists tend to get lost and ask for directions. That's originally what I thought I was going to have to deal with when the Beetle pulled up--Mom and the kids squabbling in the back seat, Dad asking for directions and mouthing How much? when his wife wasn't looking. Instead, the door opened and Gavin Blod stepped out. "Are you a hooker or what?" he snapped irritably.

I stepped back and evaluated him. In 1995, the skinny, Ichabob Crane-appearing actor with the badly-salvaged English accent had managed to boost his career with a string of B-comedies that had, so I believed, effectively established him as the stooge's stooge, a man's man caught up in a world of simple powers beyond his control. I'd recently seen him in the barely-considered The Movie Usher on late-night television and, although not familiar with his later works, I knew enough about him to be sure he was good for at least a tenspot.

"Most people approach me with a bit more reserve," I said slowly.

He didn't even appear to have heard me. "I have to be on stage in half an hour. How fast can you work?"

"Fast enough. How much can you pay?"

He fished about in his pockets frantically and came up with a double sawbuck. His manner became more and more puzzling--he was brusque, certainly, but then I'd dealt with that sort of demeanor from men too rash and inwardly shy to admit that they wanted what their eyes so frequently sought out. "That'll be fine," I said, tucking the bill down my blouse. "Where to?"

"Where the hell do you think?" he snapped, opening the door and sliding back to allow me to enter.

His eyes kept sizing me up, and I didn't blame him one bit. I was young, relatively untouched by the vermin and desperation that surrounded me day and night in my chosen town of residence, and I'd managed to steer clear from most drugs and airplane glue. I figured he would last two, maybe three minutes, and I'd be able to coax him into a studio visit. Instead, he grabbed me by my shoulders...and broke down crying.

I sighed inwardly. My reputation as "Ma" had undoubtedly reached the successful actors as well. Sooner or later I'd have directors looking to whine to me, but before that could happen, I had to listen to Gavin croak on and on about his career.

"It's just not fair," he wailed. "I tell the jokes...and nobody laughs! Is it my fault they're not funny?"

I patted his shoulder awkwardly. The shoulder of my dress was completely soaked.

"I mean, the director tells me he wants passion! Excitement! Romance! I ask him how I'm supposed to leak all of these things into a guy on a bar stool, and he says, 'Oh, are you the drunkard? I thought you were the leading man!' And I tell him I am the leading man, god damn it, and he says, 'Then I quit.' And it's supposed to be my fault!"

He went on like this for the better part of thirty minutes, during which time I saw several potential clients go by, most of which had starred on Bochco's Cop Rock. But as I was to find out, Gavin Blod was the last man in the world to realize he was standing in anyone's way. Or that anyone else was standing in a bus's way.

Eventually, he managed to pull himself somewhat together. "Hey, let's screw," he said brightly, all his pathos eventually exhausted for the time being. "You're not too bad looking after all."

"I'd sort of like a drink first," I said, trying not to sound as grumpy as I felt. He shrugged, threw open the glove box (banging my knee in the process) and produced a small bottle of Wild Turkey. "I like a girl who plays hard to get," he said aimably. 

Hard to get. Right. There were still handprints on my butt; my hair was badly-mussed from that Home By Myself kid's eager, adolescent hands; my lipstick was smeared from a dozen clumsy ventures. But Blod wasn't pawing at me any more. He was sipping his whiskey, his eyes fastened contemptuously on the wedding ring on his left hand. I watched him, remembered that he had money, and felt something in me softening up considerably. Without a doubt, he was going to invade my dreams that night.

Two weeks later my writer friend Craig Long called me up. "It's a beautiful day, and I thought we could take a drive," he suggested magnanimously. "I've got some scripts to drop off. What do you say, sugar-doll?"

I was immediately suspicious. First of all, Craig Long didn't like to drive. Second of all, he didn't own a car, his last one having been repossessed after his inability to make payments. Third of all, I knew for a fact he didn't have any scripts--he didn't have a job, or any work to speak of. But I didn't smell any request for money in his call, or else he would have prefaced with the old "You know how terribly my baby brother died in 1991? It took them four days to pry his hand from that milk bottle," so I agreed, threw on something that didn't smell like a bunch of men, and met him outside. He was behind the wheel of an elegant Mercedes Benz (somewhat worse for the wear, though, bearing evidence to a few head-on collisions) and the door was already opened for me. Curious, I stepped inside.

We wound through the seedy streets of Chinatown, eventually making our way through Compton and Inglewood before turning on a dirt road I'd never noticed before, driving up a lengthy, badly-paved driveway and to the front of a palatial estate. I was dying to know who lived there, but Craig wasn't saying.

Imagine my surprise (pleasant? dull? contemptuous? who could say?) when we walked around to the back of the house, by a large swimming pool (nearby, on one of the lounge chairs, slept a tall, heavy Chinaman), which contained a life raft. Inside the raft, apparently passed out and snoring heavily, was Gavin Blod.

Craig made a few attempts at clearing his throat, then finally gave up, picked up a lawn chair, and tossed it next to Gavin, drenching him considerably. Gavin woke up irate. "For Christ's sake, Long!" he bellowed. "Where's that piece of tail I told you to get me two hours ago?"

"Mr. Blod, may I presume to introduce Ms. Jennifer Dennis," Craig intoned solemnly before heading to the portable bar to make the first of what I assumed would be half a dozen vodka tonics. That meant I was stuck here for the afternoon, possibly all night, so I steeled myself and smiled hello to Gavin Blod.

If he was embarrassed by his outburst, he certainly didn't show it. "Nice outfit," he said, his eyes once again doing their best to penetrate the layers of clothing I had apparently had the presumption to place between myself and his person. "Let me guess--a Dior original?"

"A J.C. Penny original."

He nodded. "It suits you. Not too presumptuous."

I sat down, curious to know how such a coarse, apparently unrefined man had managed to land so many heartbreaking girlfriends, not to mention the willowy Katie Ann Ivy, whom he'd been married to for a number of years at that point. I mentioned her absence, which he waved away irritably.

"Every time I change the locks, she just changes them right back. So I figure, what the fuck, let the little lady come and go as she pleases. Listen, if you want a drink, or something to eat, or a couple hundred bucks, just say the word. The freeloader walks away with anything that's not nailed down, anyway."

"I heard that," Craig announced, returning from the bar with what looked suspiciously like a second drink in his hand. "You better lay off, you limey bastard, or I won't put you in my will."

Gavin snorted. "What will? You'll die a pauper, probably owing me money."

"You'll be free of my freeloading then," Craig retorted. "So I figure that makes us even."

"You might have something there," Gavin admitted. "Why do you drink that cissy vodka anyway?"

"You started locking the wine cellar, remember?"

"Oh, that's right. Remind me to lock you in with it sometime. That would take care of the whole stupid mess."

I listened to this exchange with a wry smile on my face. Not so much because it was entertaining (though I did relish Gavin nailing Long to the wall, as so many people had done before), but because I sensed these were the grips of a middle-aged man who has suddenly found himself without a friend in the world, and is doing his best to convince himself that he prefers it that way. The Chinaman sleeping nearby, I learned later, was one Chris Tso, who would eventually team up with Craig and Gavin in the movies, but who was then gainfully employed as Gavin's gardener. "The bastard doesn't know anything about gardening," Gavin grumbled to me later on. "Why should he? They don't even have grass in China, I bet."

Another servant appeared soon after with a tray ladeled with sandwiches. Not sure of the next time I would be able to eat, I helped myself to three of them and made them disappear in short order. Gavin followed suit, leaving Craig to the bar and himself to me.

"So," he said, after I'd eaten. "I hope your strength is back up."

"Why, am I going to need it?" I asked, batting an eyelash, hoping to look seductive.

"Definitely. First of all, I need the upstairs windows washed. After that, the pool needs to be cleaned. I also have  a list I need taken care of at the grocery store, and I can't get anyone around here to apply my hemmhroid medicine..."

"Just a minute," I interrupted. "Are you offering me a job?"

He shrugged again. "You'd have the entire west wing to yourself. Your own room, if you wanted it."

I surveyed the grounds around me. As near as I could tell, the crumbling patio was the west wing. "Salary?" I wondered aloud.

"We can probably work something out. But you'd have a roof over your head, and I'd bet you've slept wiht worse than me."

He had me there. "Is this for your image or something? You need a woman to flash around at parties?"

He stiffened at that. "I need someone to take out my frustrations on. I need someone to scream at, to throw out of the house once in a while, to provide for in order that my own deflated ego and libido might be spared for other, better-looking women than you. If I believed in Freudianism, I'd probably call you Ma. Instead, I'll call you Cheek, and tell everyone it's my cutsey nickname for you, if you like."

"Incidentally, my name is Jennifer Dennis."

He waved this away impatientlly. "I don't need to know your biography. All I need to know is if you love me enough to be my footstool, in exchange for me being your sugar daddy."

All my life I'd been subject to indecent proposals couched in the most decent-seeming language possible. Now I found myself on the flip side, a whole new world opening up before me, one of sleazy illicit affairs, of no love and not even the pretense for love, of parties on the sly and avoiding the angry wife's phone calls. And Gavin Blod, as I learned time and time again, was not the man to hide such happenstances from anyone except the beloved public. "Little slut," he would remark fondly while I scrambled to make him toast and cereal, and while his words and demeanor might be kind, he would mean it, and much, much worse. It sounded like the most honest relationship a girl could ever hope for.

"All right," I said. "I mean, I love you."

"Good," he said. "Now the shovel is in the garage. I'm sure you can smell out the septic tank."