Duplicate Soul

Twelve million wheels rolling black rubber on black tar, oil on fire. Three million individuals grip the wheel. The web of freeways spider around the seething metropolis. The city of angels wears the corrupt, smoggy halo of a defiled saint.

Seeing this, Stevie Green did not know what to expect. The drive across the midnight Nevada desert had been a pleasant experience. How odd it had felt to stand outside in comfortably warm air at 2:00 A.M. But in contrast, these eight lanes of drowsy fast endlessness threatened to make a guy uptight. Stevie came from Saskatchewan. He didn't know everyone else driving in California was uptight already.

The contents of the high school graduate's suitcase explained what he was trying to do: make the big time, the hard way. He was caught by the traffic same as everyone else. Stevie figured he looked just like them.

At the beginning, the thought never crosses the mind of the Stevie Green that he is not the only one who has compiled a list of agencies. On the same morning as young Green was cruising into town, precisely twenty-four other men drove into the city with similar intentions.

The Pasadena Motel Six would have to do until he could get a job. The first thing he decided to do was to drive into Hollywood. The permanently poor-looking urban lowland gave way to a sort of ultra-urbia of garishly exaggerated style relieved by only a few tasteful exceptions. The glib surface tells a thousand stories at once. Reading one at a time is tricky. Hollywood looked richer than the surrounding boroughs, yet it amounted to little more than a cornucopia of America's mistaken aspirations and very rich successes. The boulevards run on for hundreds of blocks. Where does a man choose to pull off when he has nowhere to go?

The MacDonald's bathroom was clean. Stevie adjusted his black sunglasses. He beamed and his manly square jaw did its job. He felt as neat as an action description from a detective thriller.

First day and nothing but driving. Second day and he spent another tank of gas visiting a dozen talent agencies. Name, photo, address, telephone number. He promised to call them back when he got a place of his own. Third day and he did not like any of the apartments -- double the price for the same thing back home. Fourth day and Stevie found someone who needed a roommate.

Elroy was a college student, a Colorado boy studying to be a film editor. It was risky, Elroy joked, to have a black name -- being white -- in a brown part of town; every second person on the street was either black or Latino. But it was just half an hour for Elroy straight up the 110 to the U.S.C.

The only advice Elroy could give to Stevie was to go into the middle of Hollywood and get a job in a restaurant. The agencies, so far as Elroy had heard, would give him nothing unless he knew someone who wanted to use him.

On the fifth day the young actor spooned Cheerios as Elroy flipped the stereo on under his Dodger's cap and exited for school. Then Stevie went out to follow the student's advice. Politesse pays. By late afternoon Stevie had landed a busboy spot on Sunset. The manager was a Portuguese with a belly full of lobster and rice. Three of the five waiters had done bit parts on various T.V and feature productions. After a few days, it seemed to Green that everyone around him was acquainted with very many people in the industry. He had understood almost as immediately that that did not mean anything. A million ants in a hill, and only one queen at a time.

Rising up to control everyone, Green sensed a large, dull cautiousness. A manifest conservatism of ordered doing demonstrated that a few with power controlled many with none. He saw that even chances had to be taken according to certain narrowly defined rules of an odd type of American virulence, which included a hearty respect for the greed of others. Only stupid loud mouthes put down wealth while wanting it for themselves.

Nothing happened for a month. The restaurant was monotonous but it was nice to be outside on the terrace because the weather was always perfect. At last, one of his co-workers invited him to a hot party. Everything could happen in a single night. He might learn half of what he would need to know about getting things done in Hollywood. So he went, and he saw.

It turned out that the people who aspired to be actors all believed that they had to have striking good looks, and for the most part, they did have them. Living examples of a techno-aesthetic, not only did the beautiful aspirants look good, but also each one was possessed of a velvet voice tuned to the frequency of a clear midwestern accent crossed with the more vibrant California tone. Lovely was the absence of New York and Southern incomprehensibleness among the actors' voices. Others at the same party, who did not aspire to stardom, were as well-dressed, or as scruffy, but were not so deliberate about being cute as the actors.

The party was some kind of preproduction hype to stir up young hopefuls to try their best at next week's screen test. The producer and casting agent were supposed to be present with their eyes open, or so it was said. But nobody had pointed them out to Stevie.

A talk bubbled between himself and a wonderfully amiable young blond. She was up from Santa Monica to "sleep with her friends" for the weekend. Stevie was by now warm with liquor and it felt so good to be talking with a woman who enjoyed projecting her sexuality.

" You're really from Canada? I've always wanted to go up there, " she was saying.

" You should. It's peaceful. "

" You're so... unusual. You don't seem to be so tense. "

" I guess it's the booze. You know something? I think it's true. California girls really are nicer and more beautiful than anywhere else. "

" The best are attracted here, and we stay. "

" You and I could get out of here and go round the corner to Venice before the sun sets, " Stevie suggested.

" Or we could just drive up Sunset before we meet the producer. Are you kidding Tonto? Be my friend now, and maybe later we can make ourselves come true, okay? "

Stevie laughed at her sharp language. Miss Bright laughed. That was her name. Stevie had laughed at that too.

But from the outside, nobody would have divined the subtle misery cloying their apprehensions about the slim chances each had for meeting a real break. Somewhere was the producer, breathing his minutes for their years.

The time to make a deal is brief. Sometimes, the big boys bite. They have to. But usually, they only nibble smugly. Everyone knows this yet hopes for the smallest chance to explode into something huge. So, why cry at vain luck?

Stevie and Miss Bright decided to split up and go looking for the producer, nonchalantly. Stevie actually wanted to get some open air into his crowded lungs. The pool deck was lined with the presentable cool types whose orgasms would become wilder the moment they sold their bodies for real dollars.

Such strange thoughts began to happen to Stevie. Thoughts he never could have had, had he not come to this particular spot on the earth. He knew people would do anything, and with a sense of wry and desperately perverse excitement, he believed that they must do anything to succeed.

And this was the paradox, the obverse of the conservatively snobbish and puritanical American narrowness -- this animal lust -- a wilfully incorrigible need for social advancement, even at the price of some secret debasement. A community made of shared humiliations is a peculiarly wounded creature.

The freedom and wealth of success is mediated by the automatic tension of having to go through hideous trials to get it.

Stevie was not being so intellectual about it to himself. He was smiling just like a guy who has slept solely with women up to now, and thinking about it because the man feeling his chest and breathing an amorous word about sneaking into a bedroom was not a dream. And as really as the slutty boy had lain his hands on him, Stevie really moved back across the patio without saying a word.

It was becoming apparent that something was wholly unreal about this party. Someone claimed that the punch mixers had dissolved some 'ludes. All the men had erections now, even the ones still having innocent conversations.

He homed in on a bedroom door. Yes, something was going to surprise and disappoint him on the inside. Stevie entered by compulsion, the night space.

The sexy Miss Bright knelt before the priapic idol of her potential riches, sucking on three of his inches easily. Stevie automatically wondered why -- because the guy was a butter tub with one of those ugly, too short beards like a worn out wire brush. Then he knew it must be the producer.

Would she be doing this if she had known that the vat of money to whom the penis belonged made a professional point of splitting his bimbos from starlets with a purposeful acumen. Because a clawful slut can be tossed out, whereas a talented starlet cannot be replaced so easily. Miss Bright must have thought a fast suck meant sure success.

Stevie looked for details a moment more. The producer's eyes were shut with pleasure. Sweetly, he mumbled an incoherent stream of dirty words. Miss Bright had noticed Stevie watching, but she kept on sucking steadily even as she met his eyes.

A deal was a deal and this was the quickest way to make it.