Secret Celebrity

chapter four

The Ridgeley Apartment complex is the real Melrose Place. The tenants are mostly young and have enough s*x and melodrama in their lives to keep a nighttime soap opera running into syndication. Its former and present residents include a professional ice skater who attempted suicide. The ex-girlfriend of a major TV star. A British video director who was rumored to have had an affair with Madonna years ago. A New York journalist who knows everyone who is anyone on both coasts. The heir to a cosmetics fortune. (He lived in the only expensive apartment—the penthouse.) An agent. A struggling fashion designer. And, Waz.

Waz was the reason I knew about the place. Warren Zubrowsky was the name on his passport but no one called him that. He was forty-two, a painter but he made his living as a DP for videos and commercials. We'd met on a job and had become close because we were both going through an obsession with Paul Auster novels. The obsession passed but the friendship remained. Every few weeks we'd talk on the phone or get together for lunch. Usually to talk about how not to get sucked into the vortex of a spiritually bankrupt culture. That, and who was fvcking who. But this was the first time I'd visit him at his apartment. It was also the first time I'd called with a specific request.

~~~~

WAZ AND I sat in his living room, drinking Hansen's lemonade out of the bottle. I sat in the leather armchair that faced one of his paintings—a luminously lit staircase that led nowhere. Waz sat across from me on the couch. The TV, set in a custom-built wall unit, was on with the volume off. The windows, which faced the courtyard, were open. The grass had recently been cut and the flowers—mostly bird-of-paradise—were in full bloom.

"Does anyone ever sit out there?" I asked.

"Nope. Never. Well, one guy did. Once. Dickey Johnson. Apartment 101. One Sunday afternoon, he dragged a lounge chair out there and parked himself on it with the Sunday paper. Everyone looked at him like he was crazy." Waz paused. "Actually, he is. But I like him."

"What does he do?"

"I don't know. Probably won't know. He's very private. And he's moving back to Philadelphia. Says he doesn't like the weather out here."

"Sunshine doesn't do it for him?"

"He hates the Santa Anas. Only he calls them Santanas. The other day he said, 'Don't want to be around for those Santanas. Those winds are spooky'."

"Well, they are."

"Yeah, but they beat being in Philadelphia."

"What do we know? L.A. is probably the only city in the world you and I could live in. What does that say about us?"

~~~~

"Hey, Waz Man." The person calling out was walking through the courtyard. He stopped in front of the apartment's open windows. He was a young man in his late twenties, dressed in a suit, carrying a Filofax and wearing Person sunglasses. For a second I thought it might be Dickey Johnson but it didn't fit my image of a guy who'd make a spectacle of himself by camping out in drugstore lounge chair in this courtyard.

"Hey, Jeffrey," Waz said. "You're getting a late start, aren't you? I thought agents were at their desks and on the phone to New York by eight a.m.?"

"Seven a.m.," he replied sharply. I noted that it was now 11:30. Not that I cared what time anyone got to the office. Especially not an agent, since they weren't placing those early-morning calls on my behalf.

"You have a late night?" Waz asked. Jeffrey acted as if he didn't hear the question. He looked away for a moment and then turned back. "I'm thinking of getting a new car. Are you happy with your Bronco?"