HOLLYWOOD ENDING

She looks at me from the other side of the car, and I pretend not to notice her. But her aunt chuckles and says, “Don’t look now, but she’s got a big grin on her face. My niece is gonna remember your last day in Hollywood.”

The niece.

My own niece calls me a few months ago and says “It’s been almost three years since we saw each other,” and she says a few more things but I am locked onto this fact. Three years without her? We talk on the phone once a week, and I am always offering escape to Iceland or Africa but with just enough drama that her hopes to join me never quite materialize. Her name is Aisha, which in Arabic can be taken to interpret “being” or “alive” or “life” according to dialect and geography. My sister named her Aisha because she thought it was a beautiful name and perhaps she might make other people happy to be alive, and 17 years later this has proved to be the case.

My Oscar nominee pal Will calls from New York and asks how Hollywood is doing and I ask him if he remembers those days when his parents went out for a drive with his brother and they’re late, and he stands around as a teenage kid first worrying about their fates and then fantasizing about what he will do without them alive. “Remember that feeling, Wilberto, of suddenly being alone, or thinking that you might be all alone in the world, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next now that your entire family is dead?” Will is smiling on the phone, indulgent, and asks me what happens next.

“I’m going to leave LA and make a movie for Peter Fonda about a rockstar who is alone and lonely but won’t admit it and one day his niece Aisha shows up at his door with the shocking news that his sister is dead and Aisha has no family but him. The budget will be twenty-five thousand dollars. Just Fonda, Aisha, sound guy, me and the camera, and one more bodyguard type who watches all our backs for cops and landlords. Film the entire thing in an apartment in the lower east side.”

Will wonders about Fonda. It’s been long and dry since Ulee’s Gold. Will wonders if I have a script, and maybe there are actors who might be interested, like Eric Roberts or Harvey –

“No, Peter Fonda will get it. Tiny movie. A star turn, completely positive with both characters helping each other out.”

Get the script, says Will, and I put an ad on Craigslist to start selling my stuff. Hollywood is over for me, at least for now.

The first ad shows a photo on my stove of a 14-pc cooking set, unscratched and unstained, a gold-plated toaster, a coffee-maker for my friends since I have never even sipped coffee (my charismatic father ruled: “no swearing, no smoking, and no goddamn coffee,” so one sister drinks coffee, one smokes, and I curse), a cuisinart juicer, colanders, cutting board and knives, all for $33 and I get 125 e-mails. I only open one, because it has the word “niece” in the title.

Melissa comes up the next day with her niece and chats with me as she drives about the two car accidents she’s been in during the past three months and about how she really needs the kitchenry now that she’ll be looking after her 11-year-old niece as well as her own son, while I continue packing and barely hear her words.

Melissa’s niece is named Mina. She is a gorgeous niece, as all of them are, but her eyes and smile catch on suspicion and she looks at the floor a lot as we gather up the kitchen stuff. Mina walks something out to the car – a blanket from Mexico that I have thrown into the deal – and Melissa, who keeps talking about Mina as though Mina cannot hear or is out of earshot, whispers loudly to me: “She’s not the same as she was before her mom got killed a few weeks ago,” and Melissa says something else, many other something elses, but I watch Mina pack the blanket into the car and feel a bolt of panic in my throat. What else can I give her?

“This is an Apache tear from a forest that has turned to stone,” I say, nonchalantly, not trying to look her in the eye, as I give Mina the small dotted stone, “And if you rub it enough in your hands it becomes translucent. You know what that means? It means see-through.” Mina looks at the dark stone, black glass with grey spots; how can this change so much?

We load the car with lots of other surprises, and Melissa makes arrangements to come back for a glass desk she thinks her son might like. I give Mina a book, and in the background Melissa exclaims that her niece is always reading. “This is a book about the coolest wild places on Earth,” I say, and Mina flips a few pages to a mountain range in Afghanistan and asks if I have been there. “No, but I memorized the entire book and now it’s your turn and when you’ve memorized the entire book you can give it to somebody else who you think will memorise it.”

As they drive out of Laurel Canyon, Melissa calls and says Mina has chosen a desert in north Africa as a destination, and that Mina will kill her but she wants me to know that Mina liked the fact that I had such long blond hair like hers and pink shoes and also that I was always smiling. I don’t tell Mina that I am smiling to hide the frightened self I see in Mina’s face, my own reflection of being 11 without my mother, gone in an instant.

In the movie, Fonda is a rockstar who refuses to play his guitar. Aisha asks him to play a new song she’s written at a dance rehearsal, and he says he doesn’t play any more even though he agrees a guitar is like a bicycle when she says he should forget about that and simply help his niece. She plans the rehearsal anyway, and of course Fonda tries to talk her out of it. The night before the rehearsal, he is looking at his guitar. There is a picture of his sister with Aisha as a baby hung near the television which he has never seen before. He looks at the picture, at the guitar, back and forth, and then stoically searches though a closet until he finds a small gun in a case. No bullets. He looks some more, and then simply points the gun at his guitar and whispers, “Bang.” Aisha is standing behind him. “Do you want the bullets?” He’s shocked and jumps in fright. “I hid them,” she says, “Since you got so stoned and drunk the other night and started talking about suicide.” She takes the gun and loads a single bullet. “You scared me with all of that because I remember Mom telling me once that you thought the truth was available in three shots of whiskey, and I counted the shots the other night and you had five,” and Aisha points the gun at the guitar and fires a bullet through the instrument. She gives a startled Fonda the gun, and says, “Anytime you want to shoot yourself, let me help you do it.” Loud knocking at the door. Neighbors in the hallway. Everyone wide-eyed and aggressive in that hallway manner of Manhattanites; a pot-bellied butcher steps forward and says, “This girl is the best thing that ever happened to you, you long-haired freak, and if you hurt her you’ll answer to apartment 7R.” Aisha assures the neighbors that everything is cool, while Fonda’s character is perplexed that she knows everyone in the building so well. “It’s because I’ve been here for three months,” she says. Fonda is surprised: “You’ve been here three months? Damn. Feels like three days. Every time I see you . . . I’m surprised you’re here.” Aisha laughs as she hands him the bullets: “Every time I see you, I wonder why I hadn’t seen you before.”

I tell this scene, more or less, to Will when he is out here. He tells me his lawyers can arrange a face to face with Fonda, and never mind the script. But the twenty-five thousand budget business is a handicap. Well, let’s get the script together and then see who wants to do it. When? “I’ll write it in two weeks.” Will laughs at me, but the invitation is open; we can get to Fonda or Roberts and another actor’s name crops up who is always in the movies as a sort of poor man’s Macy, but I stick with Fonda. He will understand. Another actor relays a story about Fonda showing up in a long beard and sunglasses at a movie set and being told to wait when he announced he was here to see Bridget. It took half an hour before the PAs realized this was Bridget’s dad, but the whole time he sat there silently, patient. While Will is out here, I walk through a dozen scenes, speaking all the characters and situations, but do not bother to write anything down. I am hopelessly caught up in model shoots for my last three weeks, but Melissa keeps calling about the glass desk and I leave her messages saying I have a few more gifts for her niece, Mina.

My own niece Aisha calls from Miami Beach, where she is now in a shoot of some kind. I quickly hatch a plan: “Listen, let’s get Athena and you in the Arctic Circle and make a music video of a song with you guys dancing and howling and do it in November or early December so we get the aurora, too, and give some excuse to school to let you guys out,” and Aisha tells me she’s flying to Chile to spend a month with her new boyfriend in the mountains and maybe I should come down and we can drive to Patagonia. “Isn’t that one of those wild places you had in that book? The book of wild places you said you were going to visit each and every one?” Yes, yes, Patagonia. I meant to go, but ended up lost in the Amazon instead, in Tabatinga in a town where everyone had a gun but me, and I was lonely and scared and went to change some dollars and found myself in the office of a druglord who asked me sternly: “Is it true you lived in Lebanon?” He wants me to tell him al the details, because his mother is Lebanese, or was Lebanese, and left when the water got under her skin and swore she would be back but never was back, and now here he is, Lebanese, in the middle of the jungle, no passport, no identity, and too scared to go to Lebanon to look for his mother, who left him thirty years ago. He is openly crying, bawling, as he changes my money, stacks me up with Cruzeiros, and tells his henchmen to fly me halfway to Iquitos the next morning, and for that night and the next day everyone in Tabatinga treats me like a delicate object, refusing my money, hiding their guns, filling me with nectar and wild pig and yams, wondering what strange magic I have visited on their boss.

Yes, Patagonia . . . I must fly down there. Aisha tells me she’s there until September 15, and I cannot look at my iCal, because every day is scratched in with something important, but what is more important than my niece? She is the only niece I have. She is really, really, the only family I have, even though somebody like me has many friends who treat their friendships with me as something very extravagant because I breeze in and out of town like the circus. On a regular but exotic orbit, trailing flecks of the Serengeti or Himalaya in my wake, I come in with a slightly new act and conjure up some distant memories and everyone has a great time and defends me ferociously and checks to make sure my fingers don’t get caught in the door or the rope, but I’ve only got one family.

Twice, when I got woke up in the ICU from surgery that killed me, Aisha was there with tears in her eyes, disbelieving. Was it really me, laid out and lifeless? It couldn’t be.

Will wonders if I have scenes written. No. But Fonda seven times in the movie looks at the picture on the wall showing his sister and his niece long ago, and six times he does nothing. Just looks. Maybe sips his juice while he waits for Aisha to get home from a date. On the seventh time, he walks up to the picture and traces his finger around Aisha’s face. And then his finger starts to touch his sister, but not quite . . . because suddenly he is sobbing and he turns from the picture and lies down on the floor, in that instinctive fetal pose every man adopts when he lets himself shatter; childlike, without a mother.

Are the scenes written? No. Well, yes, right here, right now, 9:36 pacific time. Because Mina came over today, and again I looked at her looking at me from the other side of the car. I gave her a computer, showed her how it works. More books, chimes made of polished stone, a ceramic sun and a metal moon, and a bust of a classic head, Grecian or Roman, I have no idea, Zeus or Julius Caesar, and Mina saw it the first time and coveted it. Her aunt doesn’t understand, who would want such a thing? But Mina carefully carries the white bust out to the car and nestles it in the apricot-colored rug from Turkey, next to the book that has all the maps of the stars at night, were you can look up the planets and the galaxies, even, and some of the pages glow in the dark, and while Mina takes something else out to the car her aunt whispers loudly, “I don’t know how it’s going to work out, but she’s doing better than I would if I just lost my mother like that.”

Like that.

Alex sees something going on and comes downstairs. He is my neighbor. His wife just got a hosting gig on TV and is on the cover of GQ or Details and there is cause for celebration, but something he feels in his skin tells him there is a situation outside, and he comes to help me. Mina is standing beside the car with a white guitar I have just given her, and which of course given to me. The guitar comes loaded with love, but is out of tune. Alex brings his own guitar down, and two tuners, and says “Here, let me see that,” in that gruff Mississippi way of elders and youngers and who comes first and who needs to be looked after, and he tunes her guitar while I watch Mina watching him. He gives her the spare tuner, and then a pick with Kenny Chesney’s name on it, because Kenny trusts Alex, and from where these guys come from trust is the only thing that matters, and it cannot be bought for millions and millions of dollars. I am not a country music fan, but Mina knows the name and puts the guitar pick between her teeth and takes the guitar to the car. She’ll be bragging about it in September when school starts, and she’s the new duckling, ready to be plucked by the gangs of swans who have ruled this territory forever. “Thanks, man,” I say to Alex, but he grunts and walks back upstairs.

Melissa and Mina leave and call me driving down the canyon. Melissa says some very nice things and then that there is somebody who has something to say to me: it’s Mina, “Thanks Sean so much for the chimes and the guitar,” she says, and in the background I hear Melissa loudly whispering to tell me to drive safely to New York city but Mina ignores her to tell me exactly what she wants to tell me: “Don’t worry, I’m gonna learn how to play it.”

What do we say to Peter Fonda? Two weeks, thirty or forty scenes, and a song written for the movie, right there on screen, by him and Aisha, and I don’t want ever to get in the business of selling something by comparing it to other Hollywood opportunities, like, “It’s a cooler take on aging than O’Toole in Venus.” So to my surprise I am sure the script now needs to exist, so the lawyers and agents can exert pressure properly on whoever they need to exert pressure to keep the budget to twenty-five thousand dollars. Will says to people already, he won’t do it if it costs more than twenty-five thousand, and this is my trump card, along with the story, which will say many things but will really be about an uncle and his niece, and an aunt and her niece, with the disappeared mother a light rather than a shadow for 90 minutes.

“There is no drama,” I say to Will, “But there is always recognition.”

So the audience knows what is happening at the end of the story, when Aisha has to leave and brings a bicycle to her uncle on the sidewalk on 10th street between 1st and 2nd, and tells her uncle to hold onto the seat as she starts pedaling. “What for?” asks the uncle. “You’ll see,” shouts Aisha, who keeps pedaling before shouting, “Okay let go,” and he says “Why” and she says “Let go!” and he does and she sails away, never looking back, pedaling furiously until she is out of sight and Fonda starts to laugh because he gets it, because he let go just when he needed to, and caught himself somehow by doing so: caught himself laughing.

And we cut to Aisha and the bicycle around the corner, where she jumps off and lets it crash almost into a grocer stand and for the first time in the story it is Aisha who is crying, tears as long as her hair as she walks shaking her head miserable at the abandonment of her uncle, the only family she’s got. She walks away from the bicycle, leaves it on the sidewalk, wheel spinning. There is not an atom of joy in her face or heart, nothing but fear as she steps into her own future with only herself for support.

And just like that, Alex is at the door, wondering if I need a hand moving anything, since my car is not even loaded and I am supposed to be on the road. We will not say anything about Mina or the guitar. It isn’t in his nature. Me, I’m blabbing the whole thing right here.

Mina, shy, secretly looking, has a guitar and a magic stone, and a book of wild places already committed to memory. She will always be alone, she already knows, too young to learn it, but there are moments when you have everything, and when you can give everything without even knowing that you are giving.