Hollywood by Charles Bukowski Page B

out the scene his way, with dialog. Only he didn’t know that there wasn’t any film in the camera. After that, there were no problems.
    It was on the second night that the wine really flowed. I did some talking myself, mostly repeat stuff, stuff that I had already typed up long ago. It was early in the a.m. when Jon said, “Giselle has fallen in love with a director with one ball...”
    Giselle was Jon’s girlfriend in Paris.
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “Only it’s worse now. Cancer. They have cut out the other ball too. Giselle is very very distraught.”
    “It sure seems like bad luck.”
    “Yes, yes, I write her, I phone her...I do all I can to help. And there they are in the middle of a shooting...”
    (Everything always happened in the middle of a shooting.)
    Giselle was a famous actress in France. She shared an apartment with Jon in Paris.
    We attempted to cheer Jon up about his girlfriend’s bad luck. He unpeeled a long cigar, licked it, bit off the end, lit up, inhaled and let out the first plume of exotic smoke.
    “You know, Hank, I always knew that you would write a screenplay for me. There are things that a man knows instinctively. I’ve known this for a long time. And I’ve been searching for the money to do this for a long time, long before I contacted you.”
    “Maybe I’ll write a very bad screenplay.”
    “You won’t. I’ve read everything you’ve written.”
    “That’s past. In the writing profession there are more has-beens than anything else.”
    “This does not apply to you.”
    “I believe he’s right, Hank,” said Sarah, “you’re just a natural-ass writer.”
    “But a screenplay ! Shit, it’s like I’ve been roller skating and now you put me on an ice rink!”
    “You’ll do it. I know you’ll do it, I knew you would do it when I was in Russia.”
    “Russia?”
    “Yes, before I met you I went to Russia looking for the money to produce your future screenplay.”
    “Which I didn’t know anything about yet.”
    “Exactly. Only I knew. Anyhow, I heard from a reliable source that there was a woman in Russia who had $80 million in a Swiss account.”
    “Sounds like a cheap TV thriller.”
    “Yes, I know. But I checked. I have sources for this kind of thing that are very good. I can’t tell you too much about them.”
    “We don’t want to know,” said Sarah.
    “So I found out the lady’s address. And then began the long slow process. I began writing the lady letters...”
    “What did you do?” asked Sarah, “put in frontal nude photos?”
    “Or anal nudes?” I asked.
    “Not at first. At first the letters were quite formal. I told her that I had come upon her address in the strangest way, that I had found it scribbled on a tiny piece of paper in a shoe box in a closet in Paris. I suggested that we might be destined. Oh, you have no idea how hard I worked on those letters!”
    “You’d do all this to get money to produce a movie?”
    “More than that!”
    “Would you kill?”
    “Please don’t ask me that. Anyway, I sent letter after letter, gradually turning them into love letters.”
    “I didn’t know you knew Russian,” said Sarah.
    “I wrote the letters in French. The lady had an interpreter. The lady responded in Russian and then my interpreter put them into the French.”
    “They wouldn’t use that even in a cheap TV thriller,” I said.
    “I know. But I thought about her $80 million in that Swiss account and my letters to her got better and better. Love letters. Red hot.”
    “Have some more wine,” I said refilling Jon’s glass.
    “Well, she finally asked me to come see her. And suddenly like that, I was in the snows of Moscow...”
    “The snows of Moscow...”
    “I got a room that I think was bugged by the KGB. I think they even had the toilet bugged. They could hear my shit dropping.”
    “I think I hear it dropping too...”
    “No, no, listen to me...I finally made an appointment to see the lady. I went to her place, I knocked.