The rebel, p.25
The Rebel, page 25
“You’re James Dean, am I right?”
Although Jimmy knew who this man was, he asked, “Yeah, and who the hell are you? I want to see Marilyn.”
“I’m her doctor, Dr. Greenson. She said you might come over and asked me to tell you that she’s feeling a bit under the weather and won’t be able to see you tonight.”
So this was her Jesus. Hair thin on top, black, bushy eyebrows, hawk nose, black Errol Flynn mustache, tight mouth. Big pores, and he was sweating under that starched shirt and gray-as-your-day suit. He was the quintessential tight-ass, and Jimmy knew that this tight-ass was in love with Marilyn. He was in love with her money, too. Marilyn practically lived at his home, and it seemed that he spent more than a little time in hers. Marilyn had told Jimmy that she bought her house in Brentwood because it was close to her Jesus.
“So you’re her Jesus.”
“What?”
“Nothin’.”
Dr. Greenson smiled mirthlessly. “I heard what you said, son. I’m her doctor, that’s all.”
“Well, I want to see her.”
“I just gave her a sedative, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to disturb her. Are you all right?”
“What do you mean?” Jimmy asked, hostile.
Dr. Greenson shrugged. “When she wakes up, I’ll tell her you were concerned and stopped by.” With that, he turned and walked back to the house.
Jimmy called to Dr. Greenson but was ignored.
He heard Maf bark when Dr. Greenson opened the front door, but the noise was muffled and distant, and suddenly it was dark. There was no intervening blue time, no transition from day to night, from real to dream.
Jimmy got into his truck. He had a plan.
He was going to get blind drunk.
HE CALLED MARILYN. HER PRIVATE NUMBER: GRANITE 6-1890. NO answer, still no answer, not even that fuck Dr. Greenson.
He called Pier, then hung up. Finished off the bottle of Johnny Black. Broke his sculpture of himself. Tore up his photographs of Pier. Searched for pills, popped two small purple capsules—he couldn’t remember what they were—and fell into electric, snapping sleep. Pier used to say he’d been “monstered” when he told her about his recurring nightmares of his mother rising from her grave. She’d wake him up when he screamed in his sleep. She’d touch him fuck him suck him whisper him back to sleep, so he could dream again.
Dreaming…
I’ll kick those monsters out, Jimmy.
You’re the monster, Pier.
No, Jimmy, you’re the monster, and the train clatters, clacks, whistles through his head, whistling through his mouth and his eyes and his ears and—
The phone was ringing.
Drugged out, wheezing, trying to catch his breath, Jimmy picked up the receiver.
“Jimmy? Jimmy? You there? Answer me. That fucker Bobby came back again and ransacked my house. Twice. I called Dr. Greenson, but he’s…unavailable.”
“I saw him at your house.”
“He was here. He gave me a shot and…”
“And what?”
“And then he left.”
“Are you fucking him?”
“Jimmy, please come over. I’m really scared.”
“Maybe you should try your Jesus again.”
“Jimmy? What’s wrong with you? Jimmy?
But it was Jimmy’s turn to fall asleep on the phone. When he woke up, guilty, sweaty, queasy and muzzy-mouthed, head pounding, eyes aching, it was almost 3:00 A.M. He remembered Marilyn’s call. His receiver was off the hook; he had cradled it to his ear all night, and not even the beeping of the phone had awakened him. He dialed her number. It was engaged, which meant that she was either talking with someone or had fallen asleep on the phone. Either way, he was going to find out.
He had to make things right, lest she think he didn’t care about her, didn’t love her. He wanted to sleep with her, too, comfort her, and make everything better. And she would tell him what to do about Pier.
But he knew what she would say.
Forgive her and stop being such an asshole. You’re fucking me—how is that different from Pier trying one on?
It’s different, Marilyn.
How?
It just is…
HE TOOK THE ROLLS BECAUSE ITS AIR CONDITIONER WORKED BETTER than the truck’s, which emitted a burning smell. The Phantom V’s lacquered expanse of hood swallowed the road ahead, swallowed the soul-silent darkness.
Marilyn’s house looked ghostly in the hazed moonlight. The gate was wide open. Cars whispered up and down Fifth Helena Drive with their lights off. A dozen cars and a white ambulance were parked in the cul-de-sac. There were Lincolns and black and white police cars with their dome lights turned off. There were a few nondescript panel vans. Figures hurried in and out of the house and across the lawn. Everyone silent. Everyone busy. Jimmy turned his headlights off, parked the Rolls in a concealed driveway, and stumbled outside. The dry, hot wind coming from the Mojave Desert almost choked him; the trees around Marilyn’s white stucco home rustled and swayed. Jimmy could hear the clinking tinkling of the wind chimes that the poet Carl Sandburg had given her. Above, a helicopter wheeled, then, making a chock-a-chock rotor noise that cut through the wind and dark, it landed on a nearby golf course.
Jimmy’s head pounded and his eyes ached. He was hungover and felt like he was going to be sick. But he was focused on Marilyn, on getting to Marilyn.
Two burly men in dark suits stood by the gate; they chain-smoked cigarettes, spoke in hushed voices, and were probably armed. Jimmy would never get by them. He climbed over the white wall, using vines to gain purchase. Oh, shit, I’m too sick for this. He fell, landing in shrubbery in one of Marilyn’s secret gardens, crushing flowers, bruising his right arm, which pulsed in metronomic time with his headache and nausea. The smell of the flowers was sweet, cloying…nauseating. At first he thought he had broken his arm—he had felt a thrumming when he hit the ground—but he could move it in all directions. It would hurt later.
Son of a bitch…everything would hurt later.
A high-pitched woman’s voice. Screaming.
“Murderers! You murderers! Are you satisfied now? You bastards. You fucking bastards!”
Jimmy watched two men supporting the distraught woman, holding on to her as she tried to break free. She looked like Marilyn’s publicist, Pat Newcomb. Long, well-cut, blond-streaked hair. Suit. High heels. She was crying, sobbing, inconsolable.
He made his way across the lawn, keeping to the long shadows cast by the light from the windows. Hearing men’s voices—We’re done here, Mac. Shit, I’ve had the course. Let’s leave it, it’s clean as it’s going to get. Let the Fox assholes finish it up—he staggered to Marilyn’s bedroom window. The window was broken. A shard of glass crunched under his foot. He stood frozen, but the men inside didn’t hear him. They left, their voices fading as they walked into the hallway.
One of the voices had a Boston accent. Damn Bobby, Jimmy thought as he peered through the window.
He saw Marilyn lying facedown on the bed. Her color was wrong: white and blotchy. Her legs were straight, and her arms were by her sides, as if she was a soldier at attention. “Marilyn,” Jimmy said, then again, louder. “Marilyn!” he shouted. She’s overdosed. Why isn’t anyone helping her? “Marilyn…Marilyn, goddammit, Marilyn, wake up!”
A tall man with prematurely gray, short-cropped hair stepped into the room. Startled to see Jimmy, he turned on his heel.
Jimmy recognized him. He was one of Bobby’s aides. Jimmy shouted to Marilyn again, but she didn’t move. Panicked, he smashed at the window with his arm, Cutting himself. He didn’t feel any pain, but there was blood all over the sill. He pulled off one of his penny loafers, swept it along the edges of the window to remove the jagged, knife-sharp bits of glass, and climbed into the room.
“Marilyn, dammit, wake up.” He tried to shake her awake, but she was ice cold, ice-cold rigid frigid dead cold, blue blotchy dead, a stiff, bleach-blond soldier standing lying dead at attention.
Jimmy heard screams but only dimly realized they were his own; and then he was throwing punches at a tall, red-haired, freckled man who had entered the room with other men. All shadow figures. He tried to punch the familiar face of Bobby’s gray-haired henchman, as if the skinny lawyer was Bobby himself. You did this, Bobby, you son of a bitch shanty-Irish bastard, and then for an electric, white-pain flash of a second he was playacting with his mother, pretending, and this room was a stage, and there was just Jimmy and his mother, everything else was pretend, and he was acting all the parts for her, and she said, in a man’s voice, that she was sorry and—
“I didn’t hit him hard, but Jesus Christ he was going wild.” Bobby’s aide was calmly talking to two uniformed policemen who were holding Jimmy.
Jimmy stared at Marilyn, transfixed. “Marilyn, wake up.” He tried to pull away from the policemen but couldn’t. “What’d you do to her?” he shouted at Bobby’s aide. “She’s dead, isn’t she? I know what’s going on here.” He lunged for the aide, but the police held him firm. “I’m going to tear your face off, you scumbag. Marilyn was scared that cocksucker Bobby was going to hurt her. Where is he?” Then Jimmy started shouting for Bobby.
“I’ll get the doctor,” the aide said.
“I know who you are,” Jimmy said to him, and then he called to Marilyn, shouted at her to wake up, told her he was sorry he’d fallen asleep when she called, sorry that he’d accused her of fucking her Jesus, that asshole doctor of hers, “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Marilyn, but I’ll make it up to you, I’ll get you out of here, you’re going to be all right, everything is—”
“Jimmy. Jimmy!”
“Yeah?”
“I’m Dr. Greenson.”
“What the hell’s going on here?”
“Get him out of here,” Dr. Greenson told the police.
“Where’re Bobby’s henchmen?” Jimmy asked as the policemen dragged him out of the house. Dr. Greenson walked ahead of them. “You ain’t her Jesus!” Jimmy shouted. “You ain’t nobody’s Jesus!”
Outside. The breeze still hot. Wind chimes tinkling. “Let go of me you’re hurting me.” The policemen smelled like Old Spice aftershave and rotten food. Let me go. Marilyn…
“I can give you a sedative, but I need to know if you’re on anything else,” Dr. Greenson said. “I’m sorry that man had to hit you.”
“You’re not giving me anything. What did you do to Marilyn?”
“Marilyn took an overdose, Jimmy. She’s dead, and the police are conducting an investigation. I’m very sorry. Sorry for all of us.”
“She didn’t take any overdose. I talked to her, and—”
Then he was in the police car. He couldn’t remember how he got there—his right hand and arm were bandaged and aching, and he was missing a shoe—but he remembered what Jesus had said.
“Sleep it off.”
He was in the backseat, stretched out, cold as Marilyn. Policemen were driving him home.
He felt the caressing chill of Demerol needling through him, numbing him, sweeping him back to his secret place of safety, even as he cried for Marilyn.
SIXTEEN
Book of Secrets
LOS ANGELES: AUGUST 5, 1962
The clock radio, tuned to station WBOP, had been blaring for hours.
Jimmy slept through “Loco-motion,” “He’s a Rebel,” “Mashed Potato Time,” “Limbo Rock,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Duke of Earl,” “The Wanderer,” and new songs by Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, Del Shannon, and Elvis; he woke up when the disc jockey replaced “Sherry” with Ray Anthony’s tuneful and symphonic “Marilyn,” recorded in her honor in 1953. After a few seconds, the deejay interrupted the recording. His voice was low and scratchy, his trademark: “Marilyn Monroe dead of suicide at age thirty-six. We grasp at straws, as if knowing how she died will bring her back. Not since Jean Harlow have the standards of feminine beauty been so embodied in one woman. Marilyn Monroe, dead at thirty-six. Let’s take a moment of silence in her honor.”
Jimmy clutched the base of the telephone to his chest, as if it was a teddy bear. He coughed, stirring up the dust balls on the floor. Had he fallen off the couch? His back and neck ached. He was in a fetal position.
Marilyn?
The phone was dead. He had tangled the line in his sleep and pulled it out of the wall socket.
Jesus Christ, you asshole, she’s not there, she’s dead, no more Marilyn sleeping on the phone, no more choking breathing overdoses, you’re dead, Marilyn, and it’s all my fault.
Take your medicine, Mr. Big Rose.
Face it.
She called you for help, and all you could think about was whether she was fucking her Jesus.
Jimmy opened his eyes; they felt gummy, granular. The light was incandescently bright, and the deejay resumed the music, playing “Sherry” by the Four Seasons.
Marilyn had had her minute of silence. Time to turn on the world.
Jimmy tapped the plungers on the phone, as if that could give him his direct line to Marilyn up in heaven. He crawled along the floor to reconnect the line. His hand was seeping blood through the bandages, discoloring the carpet. His arm ached, his head ached, he needed drugs, but he couldn’t get up just yet to find them; and they probably weren’t there anyway. Jimmy started laughing. It was time to take his medicine, but he couldn’t overdose if he tried. He didn’t have enough booze or pot or pills. Not even rat poison.
Only some aspirin and Alka-Seltzer.
He could fizz himself to death.
The phone rang, and Jimmy dropped it, surprised. He picked it up again and, impossibly expecting it to be Marilyn, said, “Yeah…that you, Marilyn?”
“Jesus, don’t you know? You don’t know, do you? Oh, my God…”
“Pier?”
“Yes, Jimmy, it’s me.” She sniffed and in a quavering voice said, “I’ve been trying to call you for hours. I just had to call you. I’ve got something to tell you, Jimmy, I’m so sorry, but—”
Jimmy felt the light the room the world pouring into him. His lungs hurt as he took a deep breath. He must have smoked three packs of Chesterfields last night. His fingers were yellow with nicotine. “I already know, Pier, it’s all right.”
“Oh, Jimmy, oh, my God, I just can’t believe it. It was all my fault, I should have let you go and help her, I should have helped her, I should have called her, we should have done something, you tried, you did everything you could, but I was just jealous and stupid and—”
“Pier, it’s not your fault, it’s not anybody’s fault.” But Jimmy didn’t believe that.
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry we had a fight.”
“So am I.”
“I forgive you if you forgive me.”
“Yeah, okay,” Jimmy said.
“Do you want me to come over?”
“No, you don’t have to.”
“But I want to.” Jimmy didn’t respond. “Jimmy, are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“I love you, Jimmy. Everything will be fine, I promise. I won’t ever be jealous like I was, and it’s all over between me and Dom.”
“Dom?” Jimmy said sarcastically.
“Jimmy, cut it out. You know who I mean. It’s been over for a long time. You never had anything to be jealous of, Jimmy, never ever, but I understand why you were. So?”
“So what?”
“So I’ll come over, okay?”
“Okay.” Jimmy hung up the phone and stared at it, as if willing it to ring, as if he could concentrate so hard that he could melt the phone and boil away the morning—or was it afternoon?—boil everything away until all there was was Marilyn, Marilyn calling him, asking for help, and he would save her and make everything right, and fuck you, Dr. Greenson false Jesus bastard, and fuck you, Mrs. Murray, you troll, and fuck you, too, Pier, fuck your boyfriend Dom, fuck everything because I love you, Marilyn.
Jimmy held the phone in his lap and started laughing, crying; it was like throwing up, as if something was caught in his lungs, in his throat, and he tasted bile, bitter, as if there would never ever again be sweetness, sweetness was gone, boiled away. Sweetness was Marilyn, and Jimmy squeezed his eyes shut because he flashed back to Marilyn lying at attention, cold sweet dead, smelling like bile, and there you are, Jimmy, there’s your karmic godhead crystal dharma Kerouac Buddha epiphany; it’s not your mother rising out of the ground to condemn you, it’s Marilyn. Not Pier. Marilyn.
Jimmy howled and roared. Pier was right. He had always been in love with Marilyn, and now she’s gone, and you’ve got nothing but the telephone, that’s all Marilyn had, now you got it, you stupid fool clown, that’s all you got, the phone and no Marilyn, and Jimmy was laughing crying at himself when the phone rang again, jolting him, and he opened his eyes to the burning light and said, “Yeah?”
“Jimmy, it’s Joe.” The voice quiet, without affect.
“DiMaggio?”
“I didn’t know who else to call. Funny, huh?”
“I guess.”
“But Marilyn would have wanted it this way.”
“What do you mean?” Jimmy asked.
“You and me, like when we got her out of that hospital. You know what she told me later?”
“What?”
“She made me promise that if anything bad happened…to call you.” He laughed mirthlessly. “An’ we don’t even like each other.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for calling,” Jimmy said.
“We’ve got to get Marilyn released.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“From the morgue,” Joe said. “We got to get her out of the morgue.”
“You just call a funeral home or something.”
“Got to be immediate family.”
“Her mother’s still alive. In a nuthouse in Norwalk or someplace like that.”
“I already tried to call her. An official at the sanitarium told me that her mother said she never heard of Marilyn Monroe. So there you are.”
“Try her half sister. What’s her name, Berniece something?”
Although Jimmy knew who this man was, he asked, “Yeah, and who the hell are you? I want to see Marilyn.”
“I’m her doctor, Dr. Greenson. She said you might come over and asked me to tell you that she’s feeling a bit under the weather and won’t be able to see you tonight.”
So this was her Jesus. Hair thin on top, black, bushy eyebrows, hawk nose, black Errol Flynn mustache, tight mouth. Big pores, and he was sweating under that starched shirt and gray-as-your-day suit. He was the quintessential tight-ass, and Jimmy knew that this tight-ass was in love with Marilyn. He was in love with her money, too. Marilyn practically lived at his home, and it seemed that he spent more than a little time in hers. Marilyn had told Jimmy that she bought her house in Brentwood because it was close to her Jesus.
“So you’re her Jesus.”
“What?”
“Nothin’.”
Dr. Greenson smiled mirthlessly. “I heard what you said, son. I’m her doctor, that’s all.”
“Well, I want to see her.”
“I just gave her a sedative, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to disturb her. Are you all right?”
“What do you mean?” Jimmy asked, hostile.
Dr. Greenson shrugged. “When she wakes up, I’ll tell her you were concerned and stopped by.” With that, he turned and walked back to the house.
Jimmy called to Dr. Greenson but was ignored.
He heard Maf bark when Dr. Greenson opened the front door, but the noise was muffled and distant, and suddenly it was dark. There was no intervening blue time, no transition from day to night, from real to dream.
Jimmy got into his truck. He had a plan.
He was going to get blind drunk.
HE CALLED MARILYN. HER PRIVATE NUMBER: GRANITE 6-1890. NO answer, still no answer, not even that fuck Dr. Greenson.
He called Pier, then hung up. Finished off the bottle of Johnny Black. Broke his sculpture of himself. Tore up his photographs of Pier. Searched for pills, popped two small purple capsules—he couldn’t remember what they were—and fell into electric, snapping sleep. Pier used to say he’d been “monstered” when he told her about his recurring nightmares of his mother rising from her grave. She’d wake him up when he screamed in his sleep. She’d touch him fuck him suck him whisper him back to sleep, so he could dream again.
Dreaming…
I’ll kick those monsters out, Jimmy.
You’re the monster, Pier.
No, Jimmy, you’re the monster, and the train clatters, clacks, whistles through his head, whistling through his mouth and his eyes and his ears and—
The phone was ringing.
Drugged out, wheezing, trying to catch his breath, Jimmy picked up the receiver.
“Jimmy? Jimmy? You there? Answer me. That fucker Bobby came back again and ransacked my house. Twice. I called Dr. Greenson, but he’s…unavailable.”
“I saw him at your house.”
“He was here. He gave me a shot and…”
“And what?”
“And then he left.”
“Are you fucking him?”
“Jimmy, please come over. I’m really scared.”
“Maybe you should try your Jesus again.”
“Jimmy? What’s wrong with you? Jimmy?
But it was Jimmy’s turn to fall asleep on the phone. When he woke up, guilty, sweaty, queasy and muzzy-mouthed, head pounding, eyes aching, it was almost 3:00 A.M. He remembered Marilyn’s call. His receiver was off the hook; he had cradled it to his ear all night, and not even the beeping of the phone had awakened him. He dialed her number. It was engaged, which meant that she was either talking with someone or had fallen asleep on the phone. Either way, he was going to find out.
He had to make things right, lest she think he didn’t care about her, didn’t love her. He wanted to sleep with her, too, comfort her, and make everything better. And she would tell him what to do about Pier.
But he knew what she would say.
Forgive her and stop being such an asshole. You’re fucking me—how is that different from Pier trying one on?
It’s different, Marilyn.
How?
It just is…
HE TOOK THE ROLLS BECAUSE ITS AIR CONDITIONER WORKED BETTER than the truck’s, which emitted a burning smell. The Phantom V’s lacquered expanse of hood swallowed the road ahead, swallowed the soul-silent darkness.
Marilyn’s house looked ghostly in the hazed moonlight. The gate was wide open. Cars whispered up and down Fifth Helena Drive with their lights off. A dozen cars and a white ambulance were parked in the cul-de-sac. There were Lincolns and black and white police cars with their dome lights turned off. There were a few nondescript panel vans. Figures hurried in and out of the house and across the lawn. Everyone silent. Everyone busy. Jimmy turned his headlights off, parked the Rolls in a concealed driveway, and stumbled outside. The dry, hot wind coming from the Mojave Desert almost choked him; the trees around Marilyn’s white stucco home rustled and swayed. Jimmy could hear the clinking tinkling of the wind chimes that the poet Carl Sandburg had given her. Above, a helicopter wheeled, then, making a chock-a-chock rotor noise that cut through the wind and dark, it landed on a nearby golf course.
Jimmy’s head pounded and his eyes ached. He was hungover and felt like he was going to be sick. But he was focused on Marilyn, on getting to Marilyn.
Two burly men in dark suits stood by the gate; they chain-smoked cigarettes, spoke in hushed voices, and were probably armed. Jimmy would never get by them. He climbed over the white wall, using vines to gain purchase. Oh, shit, I’m too sick for this. He fell, landing in shrubbery in one of Marilyn’s secret gardens, crushing flowers, bruising his right arm, which pulsed in metronomic time with his headache and nausea. The smell of the flowers was sweet, cloying…nauseating. At first he thought he had broken his arm—he had felt a thrumming when he hit the ground—but he could move it in all directions. It would hurt later.
Son of a bitch…everything would hurt later.
A high-pitched woman’s voice. Screaming.
“Murderers! You murderers! Are you satisfied now? You bastards. You fucking bastards!”
Jimmy watched two men supporting the distraught woman, holding on to her as she tried to break free. She looked like Marilyn’s publicist, Pat Newcomb. Long, well-cut, blond-streaked hair. Suit. High heels. She was crying, sobbing, inconsolable.
He made his way across the lawn, keeping to the long shadows cast by the light from the windows. Hearing men’s voices—We’re done here, Mac. Shit, I’ve had the course. Let’s leave it, it’s clean as it’s going to get. Let the Fox assholes finish it up—he staggered to Marilyn’s bedroom window. The window was broken. A shard of glass crunched under his foot. He stood frozen, but the men inside didn’t hear him. They left, their voices fading as they walked into the hallway.
One of the voices had a Boston accent. Damn Bobby, Jimmy thought as he peered through the window.
He saw Marilyn lying facedown on the bed. Her color was wrong: white and blotchy. Her legs were straight, and her arms were by her sides, as if she was a soldier at attention. “Marilyn,” Jimmy said, then again, louder. “Marilyn!” he shouted. She’s overdosed. Why isn’t anyone helping her? “Marilyn…Marilyn, goddammit, Marilyn, wake up!”
A tall man with prematurely gray, short-cropped hair stepped into the room. Startled to see Jimmy, he turned on his heel.
Jimmy recognized him. He was one of Bobby’s aides. Jimmy shouted to Marilyn again, but she didn’t move. Panicked, he smashed at the window with his arm, Cutting himself. He didn’t feel any pain, but there was blood all over the sill. He pulled off one of his penny loafers, swept it along the edges of the window to remove the jagged, knife-sharp bits of glass, and climbed into the room.
“Marilyn, dammit, wake up.” He tried to shake her awake, but she was ice cold, ice-cold rigid frigid dead cold, blue blotchy dead, a stiff, bleach-blond soldier standing lying dead at attention.
Jimmy heard screams but only dimly realized they were his own; and then he was throwing punches at a tall, red-haired, freckled man who had entered the room with other men. All shadow figures. He tried to punch the familiar face of Bobby’s gray-haired henchman, as if the skinny lawyer was Bobby himself. You did this, Bobby, you son of a bitch shanty-Irish bastard, and then for an electric, white-pain flash of a second he was playacting with his mother, pretending, and this room was a stage, and there was just Jimmy and his mother, everything else was pretend, and he was acting all the parts for her, and she said, in a man’s voice, that she was sorry and—
“I didn’t hit him hard, but Jesus Christ he was going wild.” Bobby’s aide was calmly talking to two uniformed policemen who were holding Jimmy.
Jimmy stared at Marilyn, transfixed. “Marilyn, wake up.” He tried to pull away from the policemen but couldn’t. “What’d you do to her?” he shouted at Bobby’s aide. “She’s dead, isn’t she? I know what’s going on here.” He lunged for the aide, but the police held him firm. “I’m going to tear your face off, you scumbag. Marilyn was scared that cocksucker Bobby was going to hurt her. Where is he?” Then Jimmy started shouting for Bobby.
“I’ll get the doctor,” the aide said.
“I know who you are,” Jimmy said to him, and then he called to Marilyn, shouted at her to wake up, told her he was sorry he’d fallen asleep when she called, sorry that he’d accused her of fucking her Jesus, that asshole doctor of hers, “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Marilyn, but I’ll make it up to you, I’ll get you out of here, you’re going to be all right, everything is—”
“Jimmy. Jimmy!”
“Yeah?”
“I’m Dr. Greenson.”
“What the hell’s going on here?”
“Get him out of here,” Dr. Greenson told the police.
“Where’re Bobby’s henchmen?” Jimmy asked as the policemen dragged him out of the house. Dr. Greenson walked ahead of them. “You ain’t her Jesus!” Jimmy shouted. “You ain’t nobody’s Jesus!”
Outside. The breeze still hot. Wind chimes tinkling. “Let go of me you’re hurting me.” The policemen smelled like Old Spice aftershave and rotten food. Let me go. Marilyn…
“I can give you a sedative, but I need to know if you’re on anything else,” Dr. Greenson said. “I’m sorry that man had to hit you.”
“You’re not giving me anything. What did you do to Marilyn?”
“Marilyn took an overdose, Jimmy. She’s dead, and the police are conducting an investigation. I’m very sorry. Sorry for all of us.”
“She didn’t take any overdose. I talked to her, and—”
Then he was in the police car. He couldn’t remember how he got there—his right hand and arm were bandaged and aching, and he was missing a shoe—but he remembered what Jesus had said.
“Sleep it off.”
He was in the backseat, stretched out, cold as Marilyn. Policemen were driving him home.
He felt the caressing chill of Demerol needling through him, numbing him, sweeping him back to his secret place of safety, even as he cried for Marilyn.
SIXTEEN
Book of Secrets
LOS ANGELES: AUGUST 5, 1962
The clock radio, tuned to station WBOP, had been blaring for hours.
Jimmy slept through “Loco-motion,” “He’s a Rebel,” “Mashed Potato Time,” “Limbo Rock,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Duke of Earl,” “The Wanderer,” and new songs by Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, Del Shannon, and Elvis; he woke up when the disc jockey replaced “Sherry” with Ray Anthony’s tuneful and symphonic “Marilyn,” recorded in her honor in 1953. After a few seconds, the deejay interrupted the recording. His voice was low and scratchy, his trademark: “Marilyn Monroe dead of suicide at age thirty-six. We grasp at straws, as if knowing how she died will bring her back. Not since Jean Harlow have the standards of feminine beauty been so embodied in one woman. Marilyn Monroe, dead at thirty-six. Let’s take a moment of silence in her honor.”
Jimmy clutched the base of the telephone to his chest, as if it was a teddy bear. He coughed, stirring up the dust balls on the floor. Had he fallen off the couch? His back and neck ached. He was in a fetal position.
Marilyn?
The phone was dead. He had tangled the line in his sleep and pulled it out of the wall socket.
Jesus Christ, you asshole, she’s not there, she’s dead, no more Marilyn sleeping on the phone, no more choking breathing overdoses, you’re dead, Marilyn, and it’s all my fault.
Take your medicine, Mr. Big Rose.
Face it.
She called you for help, and all you could think about was whether she was fucking her Jesus.
Jimmy opened his eyes; they felt gummy, granular. The light was incandescently bright, and the deejay resumed the music, playing “Sherry” by the Four Seasons.
Marilyn had had her minute of silence. Time to turn on the world.
Jimmy tapped the plungers on the phone, as if that could give him his direct line to Marilyn up in heaven. He crawled along the floor to reconnect the line. His hand was seeping blood through the bandages, discoloring the carpet. His arm ached, his head ached, he needed drugs, but he couldn’t get up just yet to find them; and they probably weren’t there anyway. Jimmy started laughing. It was time to take his medicine, but he couldn’t overdose if he tried. He didn’t have enough booze or pot or pills. Not even rat poison.
Only some aspirin and Alka-Seltzer.
He could fizz himself to death.
The phone rang, and Jimmy dropped it, surprised. He picked it up again and, impossibly expecting it to be Marilyn, said, “Yeah…that you, Marilyn?”
“Jesus, don’t you know? You don’t know, do you? Oh, my God…”
“Pier?”
“Yes, Jimmy, it’s me.” She sniffed and in a quavering voice said, “I’ve been trying to call you for hours. I just had to call you. I’ve got something to tell you, Jimmy, I’m so sorry, but—”
Jimmy felt the light the room the world pouring into him. His lungs hurt as he took a deep breath. He must have smoked three packs of Chesterfields last night. His fingers were yellow with nicotine. “I already know, Pier, it’s all right.”
“Oh, Jimmy, oh, my God, I just can’t believe it. It was all my fault, I should have let you go and help her, I should have helped her, I should have called her, we should have done something, you tried, you did everything you could, but I was just jealous and stupid and—”
“Pier, it’s not your fault, it’s not anybody’s fault.” But Jimmy didn’t believe that.
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry we had a fight.”
“So am I.”
“I forgive you if you forgive me.”
“Yeah, okay,” Jimmy said.
“Do you want me to come over?”
“No, you don’t have to.”
“But I want to.” Jimmy didn’t respond. “Jimmy, are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“I love you, Jimmy. Everything will be fine, I promise. I won’t ever be jealous like I was, and it’s all over between me and Dom.”
“Dom?” Jimmy said sarcastically.
“Jimmy, cut it out. You know who I mean. It’s been over for a long time. You never had anything to be jealous of, Jimmy, never ever, but I understand why you were. So?”
“So what?”
“So I’ll come over, okay?”
“Okay.” Jimmy hung up the phone and stared at it, as if willing it to ring, as if he could concentrate so hard that he could melt the phone and boil away the morning—or was it afternoon?—boil everything away until all there was was Marilyn, Marilyn calling him, asking for help, and he would save her and make everything right, and fuck you, Dr. Greenson false Jesus bastard, and fuck you, Mrs. Murray, you troll, and fuck you, too, Pier, fuck your boyfriend Dom, fuck everything because I love you, Marilyn.
Jimmy held the phone in his lap and started laughing, crying; it was like throwing up, as if something was caught in his lungs, in his throat, and he tasted bile, bitter, as if there would never ever again be sweetness, sweetness was gone, boiled away. Sweetness was Marilyn, and Jimmy squeezed his eyes shut because he flashed back to Marilyn lying at attention, cold sweet dead, smelling like bile, and there you are, Jimmy, there’s your karmic godhead crystal dharma Kerouac Buddha epiphany; it’s not your mother rising out of the ground to condemn you, it’s Marilyn. Not Pier. Marilyn.
Jimmy howled and roared. Pier was right. He had always been in love with Marilyn, and now she’s gone, and you’ve got nothing but the telephone, that’s all Marilyn had, now you got it, you stupid fool clown, that’s all you got, the phone and no Marilyn, and Jimmy was laughing crying at himself when the phone rang again, jolting him, and he opened his eyes to the burning light and said, “Yeah?”
“Jimmy, it’s Joe.” The voice quiet, without affect.
“DiMaggio?”
“I didn’t know who else to call. Funny, huh?”
“I guess.”
“But Marilyn would have wanted it this way.”
“What do you mean?” Jimmy asked.
“You and me, like when we got her out of that hospital. You know what she told me later?”
“What?”
“She made me promise that if anything bad happened…to call you.” He laughed mirthlessly. “An’ we don’t even like each other.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for calling,” Jimmy said.
“We’ve got to get Marilyn released.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“From the morgue,” Joe said. “We got to get her out of the morgue.”
“You just call a funeral home or something.”
“Got to be immediate family.”
“Her mother’s still alive. In a nuthouse in Norwalk or someplace like that.”
“I already tried to call her. An official at the sanitarium told me that her mother said she never heard of Marilyn Monroe. So there you are.”
“Try her half sister. What’s her name, Berniece something?”
