Still Holding Read online

  More Praise for Bruce Wagner’s Still Holding

  “In blazing, high-speed prose, he tears into his subject with a taboo-breaking savage rage disguised as wild comedy.”

  —Salman Rushdie

  “A millennial heir to Nathanael West, he captures the stone-cold nihilism lurking just beneath the city’s glossy, cellulite-free surface and the deceptions and self-delusions that fuel so much of the deal making in town. . . . Mr. Wagner serves up [his] themes with his customary black humor and unforgiving eye, proving to fans of Force Majeure and I’m Losing You that his knack for satire is as cutting as ever.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “With Still Holding, Wagner surpasses everything he’s done before . . . this is the crowning achievement of his Cellular Trilogy. While reading it you’ll find yourself thinking: This is the great Hollywood novel.”

  —Bret Easton Ellis

  “Imagine Dickens without London, Dostoevsky without St. Petersburg. It’s like that for Bruce Wagner and Hollywood. He owns this fetid, steaming lump of a town.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “It’s a gorgeous freak show, and part of the pleasure is that Wagner seems to be having so much fun. . . . The return of the novelist most often compared to Nathanael West. (But guess what: He’s better.)”

  —New York

  “Exquisite satire.”

  —Details

  “Still Holding is Bruce Wagner’s greatest novel. It is as if Louis-Ferdinand Céline were retelling the Arabian Nights. . . . It is an uncompromising, hilarious, achingly sad, flat-out brilliant book.”

  —Jonathan Carroll

  “Bruce Wagner—Tinseltown’s answer to Emile Zola—offers up Still Holding, another scathing, keenly observed tragicomedy of manners (and lack thereof) among Hollywood’s wannabes, already-ares and couldn’t-get-arresteds.”

  —W

  “Still Holding finds the Nabokov of New Age Angeleno life in the best form of his career—which is saying something. . . . [Wagner] has simply made [Hollywood] his own territory, with as much genius and ferocity as Faulkner applied to laying bare the gloriously unsavory humanity of Yoknapatawpha County.”

  —Elle

  “A fable of the restless, millennial American self . . . the novel’s characters are so tightly and persuasively conceived against the sprawling absurdity of their setting that Still Holding never feels forced or didactic. . . . Great satire has always been deadly serious business, and Still Holding is very good satire indeed.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Wagner has the odd but marvelous ability to be resolutely kind and unsparingly cutting at the same time, a contradiction played out in the third [of] the Hollywood-set trilogy.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Another razor-sharp exploration of the depths of Tinseltown’s black heart, with clueless young actors, surreal interior monologues, faux Buddhism, and creepy celebrity look-alikes.”

  —The Hollywood Reporter

  “At root, Wagner is a moralist. He captures a world far more horrifying than any of us suspected. No Hollywood novel is quite as upsetting as Still Holding. Even Wagner’s earlier stories pale in comparison. Wagner’s Hollywood is a world truly beyond redemption, one that deserves not adulation but profound moral outrage. It’s to Wagner’s credit that it mesmerizes—even as it horrifies.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “A brutal phantasmagoria on the pleasure and perils of the dream factory.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “At its best his prose reads like some unholy combination of Rick Moody, Anthony Lane, and the Page Six gossip columnist Richard Johnson. . . . the hippest, funniest, and most angrily humane novel written about Hollywood in the last twenty years.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

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  Contents

  BOOK ONE

  The Three Jewels

  Her Drewness

  On the Boardwalk

  Does a Dog Have Buddha Nature?

  A Star is Born

  The Great Plains

  The Benefit

  Fisticuffs

  Sleepless in Albany

  Command Performance

  Asses into Seats

  The Fireman’s Fund

  The Greenroom and Beyond

  How Verde Was My Valle

  Benefits

  A Beachside Reunion

  Pool Party

  Impermanence

  Reunions

  The Afterworld

  School Days

  A Gathering at the Rose

  A Brief History of Tantric Buddhism

  A Colony of Angels

  At 20th Century-Fox

  The Varieties of Religious Experience

  Stagecoach

  Deities

  Hustlers

  Next Day Delivery

  At Sarbonne Road

  Riding in Cars with Boys

  Storming the Temple

  Field Trips

  Dashed Hopes

  One-Man Show

  Entities

  The Life of a Working Actress

  The Omen

  Beginner’s Mind

  Catharsis

  A Gathering at the Gubers’

  The Getty

  L.A. Confidential

  Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration

  Top of the World

  Coup de Grâce

  Late Bloomers

  Absent Without Leave

  A Letter Home

  Morning Tide

  BOOK TWO

  The Three Poisons

  The Morning After

  Vigil

  Hot Property

  Postsurgical

  Mother and Child Reunion

  Ladies Who Lunch

  Transmigration of Souls

  The Bardo of Becoming

  An Actor Prepares

  Out of Hospital

  A Successful Interview

  Home Away from Home

  The World of Mu

  A Day of Fun

  Synchronicity

  BOOK THREE

  The Three Mysteries

  Four Affirmations

  The Banks of Riverside

  Becca in Venice

  On the Street Where He Lives

  A Special Visit

  Vogue

  Buddhism for Dummies

  Mediation

  Transference

  Turbulence

  Special Needs

  The Standard Wrap

  Reentry

  Cadillac Escapade

  True Confessions

  A Disturbing Call

  A Decent Proposal

  A Tangled Web

  Negotiations

  After the Fall

  Contact

  Red Essence Rising

  Bygones

  Rita Julienne Lightfoot

  Apologies

  Blackout

  BOOK FOUR

  Ground Luminosity

  The Eternal Return

  On Her Own

  Under the Medication Tree

  An Actor Prepares II

  Trials and Tribulations

  Labor Day

  True West

  The Leno Show

  Together Again

  Crash Course

  Hollywood Palace

  Christmas Eve Day

  BOOK FIVE

  Clear Light


  The Healing

  Vanity Fair

  Trans World

  With Rob Reiner in the Patio of the Ivy on Robertson

  Dark Horse

  Graduation

  CODA

  Ordinary Mind

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  This is for Seven McDonald

  Pray for those that eat,

  The things that are eaten,

  And the act of eating itself.

  —BUDDHIST MEALTIME PRAYER

  The Three Jewels

  Her Drewness

  AS A GIRL, Becca hadn’t resembled Drew Barrymore at all. But now, at twenty-five, especially after gaining a few pounds, she had grown used to comments from bartenders and store clerks, and the half-startled looks from passersby.

  That was funny because her mom had always gotten the Sissy Spacek tag, even if Becca thought that was mostly because of a bad nose job. Still, Sissy and Drew were worlds apart, physically. It was a subjective thing; sometimes people could see the Sissy, sometimes they couldn’t. But no one ever seemed to have trouble with Becca’s “Drewness.” Her boyfriend Sadge, who on a good day looked like a piss-poor Jack Black, got his kicks from playing it up—like the time he booked a table at Crustacean under Drew’s name. He made sure to get there first and had Becca come forty minutes later in huge sunglasses, head swathed in a knockoff Hermès scarf. They were high, and the maître d’ wasn’t thrilled. (He must have been on to them from the beginning because Sadge had been ushered to the “civilian” zone.) A few diners turned their heads when Becca arrived, but she didn’t have as much fun as she might have because Jordana Brewster was in the house, just on the other side of the glass partition, with a trim bald man Becca assumed to be her manager. Whenever Sadge laughed raucously or cued Becca to ham it up, the aspiring actress felt foolish, as she was certain Drew and Jordana knew each other. Jordana didn’t look over once, and the whole thing kind of threw water on it for her. Suddenly Becca felt cheap, like a character in her friend Annie’s favorite movie, Star 80.

  That was the week she saw Drew on a Jay Leno repeat. Her divorce from Tom Green had just been announced, but there she sat, surrealistically giddy about the marriage. She gushed that her husband had sent a dozen roses and a note saying good luck on the show, and the audience sighed. Jay volunteered that it was actually a statistic that comedians stayed married longer. Drew said how great was that. It was so horrible and depressing that Becca actually got nauseated then angry that someone in programming would have been so careless as to rerun that particular show. She thought it might have been deliberately perpetrated, like when those malicious video store clerks splice porn into animated classics. Jay Leno struck her as a good and decent man, and she told Sadge—who’d laughed throughout the segment until Becca hit him—it was the kind of thing that if it was brought to NBC’s attention by Drew’s management (she hoped), the talk-show host would definitely apologize to her personally. Becca actually considered being the “whistle-blower,” but then her own career concerns overtook her.

  • • •

  “THAT WAS GREAT,” said Sharon. “I think you’ve got the potential to be quite a comedienne.”

  She gave the word a Frenchified emphasis, and Becca was lost. Did she mean stand-up? She was too intimidated to ask for clarification. Maybe she meant Becca should be doing gigs at the Laugh Factory instead of wasting time trying to get movie and TV roles.

  She decided she didn’t care what the woman meant. She would simply persevere, perseverance being the one quality all successful actors had in common. She’d just gotten her SAG card and had finally found a commercial agent but didn’t yet have the all-important “theatrical.” Still, she thought of herself as a winner because only a month or so after a general meeting with Sharon Belzmerz, one of the big casting directors on the Warners lot, she had been invited back to do a taped audition for a WB pilot. Sharon’s friend, Becca’s acting coach, made the initial contact. What you always heard was true—it was all about personal connections.

  “That was really fun!” said Becca. “Thank you so much for seeing me.” She glanced at the video camera on the tripod opposite her. “Can I get a copy?”

  Sharon smiled at her naïveté.

  “Well, the director has to see it first—then we usually recycle.”

  “Oh! That’s OK,” said Becca, hiding her embarrassment.

  “You’re really very good. Don’t worry, you’ll have tape or film soon. You’ll have a whole reel.”

  On the Boardwalk

  WHEN HER FATHER had a stroke, Lisanne took the day off.

  She worked for Reggie Marck in the penthouse offices of Marck, Fitch, Saginow, Rippert, Childers, and Beiard, at Sunset near Doheny. She was thirty-seven and had been Reggie’s crackerjack executive secretary for thirteen years, beginning with his stint at Kohlhorn, Kohan, Rattner, Hawkins, and Risk. When he heard the bad news, he encouraged her to get on a plane and go home. That wasn’t so easy. Lisanne had a profound fear of flying (a condition long predating 9/11). After a round of phone calls to her aunt, she went to the Venice Boardwalk to clear her head.

  The shoreline was windswept and absurdly pristine. Since the bike path’s renovation and the rebuilding of a few burned-out boardwalk apartment houses—not to mention the arrival of Shutters and Casa del Mar—the beach had lost some of its funky grandeur. There wasn’t much to be nostalgic about anymore. The shops, vendors, and performers were forced to clean up their acts, and the city hadn’t sanctioned Fourth of July fireworks on the pier in years because of the gangs.

  Lisanne bit the bullet and took possession of her wistful stroll; she had some serious mulling to do. There was the dilemma of her father’s grave condition, plus imminent jet travel. . . . Still, it was diverting to take in the scene. Because it was a weekday, there weren’t many people out. Interspersed with the homeless was an upscale cadre of citizens busily exercising their right to play hooky at watery world’s end. They spun or sprinted past doing “cardio” or simply sat and stared at the passive ruthlessness of the sea whence one day they would return, if they were so lucky. Heads tilted, faux-contemplative, to regard the occasional chandelier of gulls.

  Lisanne waited for a woman in her late forties to jog by before crossing the path. A tribe of drunks sat on the grass. One of them yelled, “You go, girl! You c’n do it! You c’n do it, girlie!” The runner pretended to ignore him, but Lisanne could tell the bum had found her prideful nerve. Later, she saw a different drunk approach a gorgeous twentysomething couple. The boy’s pants slung stylishly low, and the drunk said, “Hey, your fuckin pants are fallin down your ass!” The boy, smiling and trying to be cool, decided to say, “I know,” to defuse the harassment. His girlfriend was being cool too, but the drunk wouldn’t have it. “Then pull ‘em up! Pull ‘em up!” It was like the commedias dell’arte that Lisanne had studied in school. The bums and winos were there to keep it real, to deflate the ego and remind that all was vanity.

  Lisanne slunk away to avoid being heckled. She was forty pounds overweight—a perfect target.

  She tried to imagine herself climbing onto a plane. As a girl, she didn’t mind flying so much, though she remembered only a few trips. The 747s were so big and she was so small that somehow it was OK. But now it was different: Reggie would have to hook her up with his doctor for the big gun sleeping pills, and if she timed it right, she’d wake up as they touched down at Newark. That was the best of scenarios. Aside from the obvious fantasies of wind-shear-induced nosedives, messy hijackings, human-debris-scattered cornfield fireballs, and charismatic pilots greeting her with gin-laced coffee breath as she boarded, Lisanne considered some of her lesser concerns to be laugh-out-loud comical. What if the pills put her out so deep that her snoring became shamefully stertorous or she drooled on the passenger beside her? What if her throat closed up or she had a reaction to the pills and vomited in her sleep? No—try as she may, Lisanne couldn’t see herself getting into some fucked-up cylinder and hurtling through s
pace. She wasn’t ready to play that kind of Russian roulette. In heaven or hell, the biggest bunch of losers had to be the ones who crashed while flying to be at the side of a stroked-out parent.

  She would take the train.

  Does a Dog Have Buddha Nature?

  KIT LIGHTFOOT WAS in his trailer, meditating.

  He was thirty-four and had meditated at least an hour a day for nearly a dozen years without fail. Out of carefully enforced humility, he had never shared that statistic with anyone, though the urge to do so frequently came upon him. Whenever he felt the pride of a Zen valedictorian, he smiled and soldiered on, letting the feeling wash over him. Years of zazen had taught him that all manner of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations would arise and clamor for his attention before falling away.

  His career as an actor had barely been launched when a friend turned him on to Buddhism. He took up meditating and, a short while after, visited a monastery on Mount Baldy. It was freezing cold, but there was wordless beauty and a stunning quietude that pierced him to the core. That was the week, he used to say, where he got a taste of stillness. Monks and dedicated laypersons came and went like solemn, dignified cadets amidst the ritualized cadence of drums, chanting, and silence—his unthinkable siren and dangerous new friend, for silence too had a cadence. (The hard poetry of silence, his teacher once said.) He watched a man being ordained and later found out he had once been a powerful Hollywood agent. Kit grooved to that kind of convert. He loved having blundered into this magisterially abstract Shangri-la of the spirit, a flawless diamond-pointed world that might liberate him from the bonds of narcissism, the bonds of self.

  He got deeper into his practice. Between theater and film gigs he traveled to far-flung countries attending monthlong sesshins, awakening at four in the morning to sit on a cushion eleven hours a day when not immersed in the meditation of food preparation, tea ceremonies, groundskeeping. He was glad to be young and strong while learning the art of sitting in stillness. Older initiates had a hard time with zazen’s physical demands.

  It became well-known within the show business community, and outside it too, that Kit was a serious practitioner. He rarely discussed his thoughts or beliefs with interviewers unless the venue was a magazine like Tricycle or Shambhala Sun. He didn’t want to trivialize something so personal or, worse, get puffed up in the process. There were enough celebrities talking about yoga and Buddhism anyway. He gave generously to the Tibetan cause and funded clinics and ashrams through an anonymous trust. That satisfied him more than any public discourse ever could.