Bukowski and the Movie Star

It was ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Bukowski wrestled with a looming deadline and an insatiable thirst. The thirst had to be satisfied before the blank sheet of paper could be addressed. He loitered outside the Lock and Load Lounge on Hollywood Boulevard, drawing hard on a hand-rolled cigarette and studying the busy car wash across the street. All the pretty people, the vital and productive citizens, rushing to meaningless jobs but really rushing to the grave, making their cars pretty and shiny for their journey to Valhalla.

A brand-new 1978 Jaguar XJ6 was rolling off the belt, a handful of hard-working Mexicans giving the bright chromium and steel a once-over with chamois cloths. The new model Jaguar was easy on the eye, as far as land yachts go, but Bukowski could never surrender his Volkswagen Beetle for a shiny new Jag. The Beetle represented the apex of German automotive technology, the one thing that Hitler got right: a car affordable enough for the average working man.

Bukowski polished off his cigarette and swiveled through the doors of the Lock and Load Lounge. He settled onto a bar stool, ordered a draft beer from the surly bartender who looked like he got kicked in the teeth the minute he rolled out of bed that morning, and considered the face of the stranger occupying the stool next to him: jet-black hair, well-built, late-fifties perhaps, the hearty Midwestern good looks of a marquee idol, though the youthful gloss was fading and the trembling hand that held the martini glass was betraying something more than a mere case of nerves.

“Anyone ever tell you that you look like that movie actor?” Bukowski dropped half of the beer from the frosted stein down his parched throat. “Gig Young?”

The man slowly turned to face Bukowski, drunken eyes swimming in their sockets like panic-stricken fish. “I am Gig Young. Motherfucker. I am Gig Young.”

“Horseshit. What’re you doing in the Lock and Load Lounge?”

“Not many bars in town will have me,” he slurred. “Not the good ones, anyways. I’ve been 86′d from the Polo Lounge, Trader Vic’s, the bar at the Marmont, the Beverly Wilshire …”

Bukowski scrutinized the man’s craggy features and determined right away that he was indeed gazing upon the handsome supporting player who stared down at him from the silver screen and sometimes on the TV in old rerurns of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Gig-Fucking-Young. Who gives a shit? Bukowski returned to his beer.

Before he could down the last swallow, the actor’s vodka-laced breath was assaulting Bukowski’s flaring nostrils. “I won an Oscar in 1969, you know, worst goddamn thing that ever happened to me. Best Supporting Actor. The kiss of death, end of the line. When I walked up to that stage to collect that fucking hunk of junk, I thought ‘Here we go, now they’re finally gonna create a Gig Young movie’, you know, a vehicle I could star in instead of just being fancy wallpaper in the background but it doesn’t happen that way. There’s a whole goddamn curse along with the Academy Awards. You win one and suddenly the phone stops ringing; everyone assumes — they fucking assume — that your price went up or that you got an atttude all of a sudden and are difficult to work with or … I don’t know. The so-called accolades of your peers is the lowering of your coffin into the grave. My career was over the minute they called me up on that stage.”

Actors, Bukowski knew, particularly movie actors, are an insufferable lot, prone to drama and histrionics, even more so when they’re drunk; he avoided eye contact with the man and threw his words into his empty beer stein instead. “I heard differently about you. You had one hand on the throttle and the other hand on the bottle.”

“Hey!” The actor laughed and tossed his hands in the air, nearly falling off the stool in the process. “One hand on the throttle, one hand on the bottle. You’re a goddamn poet!”

Bukowski rolled another slim cigarette in his calloused fingers. “Actually, I am.”

The actors eyes narrowed to small slits. “Who the hell are you?”

Bukowski hiked his shoulders. “I’m an avereage guy. Nothin’ special. Writer. Poet. Dying in a steaming pile of shit, just like you.”

“Here’s to steaming piles of shit!” The fading movie star hoisted his martini glass, polished off the lukewarm remains and signalled the mean-faced bartender. “Two more, barkeep!” He licked his dry lips and returned his attention to Bukowski. “Now, what’s this garbage that you’ve heard about me and how the hell would you know anything anyway?”

“I know a few monkeys in the movie business; it’s a residual effect of life in L.A. You got shit canned from Blazing Saddles because you were having DT’s on the set.”

“Well … that’s true,” the actor softly confessed. “My first wife, Sheila, she died of cancer one year after we were married. Did you know that, Mister Smart Ass?”

“And my father beat me damn near every day when I was a kid. So what? No one needs excuses to climb into the bottle. Life gets complicated and fucked up the second you pop out of the womb.”

With a scowl, the bartender deposited a fresh beer in front of Bukowski and a dry martini refill for the inebriated movie star.

“You’re a philosopher too,” the actor mumbled, as if talking in his sleep. “I got fired from Charlie’s Angels last year. I was gonna be the voice of Charlie. Too goddamn drunk to record my lines so they brought in John Forsyth. I mean, I had things going on at the time so, yeah, I was hitting the sauce a little. Jesus. Give a guy a break, huh?”

They sat in silence for several moments, the steady hum of traffic on Hollywood Boulevard flooding through the open door and filling the void with white noise. The actor completed his work on the martini and rose, staggering, swaying precariously like a suspension bridge in the wind.

“Someone pour me into a cab,” he muttered, floundering toward the door and the harsh white sunlight that was filtered through billions of particles of airborne automobile exhaust.

Bukowski never saw Gig Young again, not in life and certainly not in the movies.

Six months later, on a crisp October afternoon with a hint of a Santa Ana wind in the air, Bukowski perched himself on the very same bar stool in the Lock and Load Lounge. He ordered a Michelob and unfolded the front page of the L.A. Times. The story in the right hand panel just below the banner and above the fold immediately caught his eye:

The dateline was October 19, New York City. Actor Gig Young, the wire service reported, shot and killed German actress Kim Schmidt, his bride of three weeks, and then turned the gun on himself in their New York City apartment. The direct cause of the murder-suicide, authorities stated, remained unclear. Young was almost 65; his bride was 21. An NYPD spokesman said that an Oscar statuette was found between the bodies of Young and his wife.

Bukowski downed the Michelob in one long swallow and turned to the Daily Racing Form. It was a good day for a drive out to Santa Anita.