“England.”
“England, eh?”
“Yes. Have you ever been there?”
“Nosir. I’ve seen movies. You an actor?”
“I’m a writer.”
He lost interest. Occasionally he would swear at other drivers, under his breath.
He swerved suddenly, changing lanes. We passed a four-car pileup in the lane we had been in.
“You get a little rain in this city, all of a sudden everybody forgets how to drive,” he told me. I burrowed further into the cushions in the back. “You get rain in England, I hear.” It was a statement, not a question.
“A little.”
“More than a little. Rains every day in England.” He laughed. “And thick fog. Real thick, thick fog.”
“Not really.”
“Whaddaya mean, no?” he asked, puzzled, defensive. “I’ve seen movies.”
We sat in silence then, driving through the Hollywood rain; but after a while he said: “Ask them for the room Belushi died in.”
“Pardon?”
“Belushi. John Belushi. It was your hotel he died in. Drugs. You heard about that?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“They made a movie about his death. Some fat guy, didn’t look nothing like him. But nobody tells the real truth about his death. Y’see, he wasn’t alone. There were two other guys with him. Studios didn’t want any shit. But you’re a limo driver, you hear things.”
“Really?”
“Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. They were there with him. All of them going doo-doo on the happy dust.”
The hotel building was a white mock-gothic chateau. I said good-bye to the chauffeur and checked in; I did not ask about the room in which Belushi had died.
I walked out to my chalet through the rain, my overnight bag in my hand, clutching the set of keys that would, the desk clerk told me, get me through the various doors and gates. The air smelled of wet dust and, curiously enough, cough mixture. It was dusk, almost dark.
Water splashed everywhere. It ran in rills and rivulets across the courtyard. It ran into a small fishpond that jutted out from the side of a wall in the courtyard.
I walked up the stairs into a dank little room. It seemed a poor kind of a place for a star to die.
The bed seemed slightly damp, and the rain drummed a maddening beat on the air-conditioning system.
I watched a little television—the rerun wasteland: Cheers segued imperceptibly into Taxi, which flickered into black and white and became I Love Lucy—then stumbled into sleep.
I dreamed of drummers intermittently drumming, only thirty minutes away.
The phone woke me. “Hey-hey-hey-hey. You made it okay then?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Jacob at the studio. Are we still on for breakfast, hey-hey?”
“Breakfast…?”