Margaret Dunn

West Coast Ghosts

Lloyd asked me to look after his house while he was away. Shooting was scheduled to wrap in July but he wouldn’t be back until August, he said. You know how it is. These homo directors like to beat dead horses so much that they become glue. I nodded and he threw me the keys. When the car came he was cursing and sweating, stopped to press his lips to my cheek. Left a blemish of wetness that I’d later wipe at as they pulled out of the drive.

The house itself was nice, one of those minimalist types. Cold and uncarpeted with windows that look out over the valley. Photographs of women lined the walls–mostly naked and foreign-looking, like they had an accent you could just whack off to. That first night I ordered in and got high, gave each of the naked women names. Marisa Martha Maddie Mae Judy. Then I started to hate them and took several down and stacked them in the pool house.

Those early weeks of the summer were hot and uneventful. I worked out and listened to a lot of EDM, played a game of phonetag with my mother that I didn’t intend to win. Someone died on a side street off of Sunset and I watched them wheel the body away.

“Drugs?” I asked the cop.

“Dehydration,” he said.

So I hated leaving the house. Even more, driving out to my apartment. It was a four-floor walk up out in Studio City that depressed the shit out of me. My agency still forwarded my mail there at Lloyd’s insistence, though. Residual checks from a Boston Market commercial and the like.

“Things are coming for you, kid,” Barry had insisted. He was one of those wet-voiced agent types but a real pro, people said. Called me a young Tom Berenger. “But they’re coming slow.”

So I took it slow. Watched movies and worked out, like, a lot. Perfected my Walken impression. Googled Lloyd. Lloyd on set in a black t-shirt, Lloyd in a golf cart. Lloyd out to dinner with his co-star, that Spanish actress with the rack. There was one where they were crossing a street. It was blurry but when you zoomed in it looked like his hand was on the small of her back. I screenshotted and sent it to him.

“Tap that yet?”

He didn’t respond.

Then there was that night in June when I found a woman in the yard. A party was going on next door. You could hear the music and I hadn’t spoken to another person in three days. I went to poke through Lloyd’s medicine cabinet to find something fun and that was when I saw her–a woman in a kaftan, crawling across the lawn.

By the time I made it out there she was curled up, seemed valium-drunk with one heel on, the other in her hand.

“You seen my boy?”

“What?”

She asked again, taking off the other shoe. I wiped the dirt from her forehead.

“Sure, I have. I’ve seen him.”

The couple hosting next door were a respectable kind of mortified. I commended them for that, the way they pressed a damp cloth to her temple, spoke softly about calling her driver. I’d be laughing and kind of was. The husband gave that type of handshake where they hold your elbow.

“No worries, man. It happens,” I said.

“Is Lloyd here?” the wife asked. The woman had vomited a bit, left a sheen on her lips.

She stroked her back. “We want to apologize to him, too.”

“He’s away shooting, actually.” I smiled. “Aruba.”

Of course, they said, of course. I worried they would ask more but they just guided their friend up by the elbows. Reminded me of a calf, the way she walked. All weak-kneed. As they crossed back over the lawn the wife turned and waved. I waved back. When I brought the woman back onto the patio she had tried to kiss me. I didn’t tell them that, though.

Their names were the Ramones. Like the rock band, Lloyd said, but not. I said that was a bummer and he asked if I could name a Ramones song. I couldn’t. The wife came by the next day with an armful of hydrangeas. I told her you shouldn’t have! Because I felt like that’s what I was supposed to say and put them in the sink. She took them out and got a vase from a cabinet, said to call her Josie and that it was no trouble.

“We’re really sorry, again. Ambien and liquor, not a good idea.”

I kind of nodded. She bruised a leaf between her fingers as the vase filled with water.

“Are you Lloyd's son?”

“Son?” I laughed.

“Yeah– I don’t know! Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to offend.”

She had that kind of look in her eye and there was this heat rising in my face and then I was explaining that I was his cousin.

“Kid cousin, really.”

“Mhm,” she replied, it all coming together. “I can see it in the eyebrows.”

My mom had been calling a lot. Growing up it was just the two of us so we used to be pretty close. These days I don’t know what else she does except church and work. Call me, maybe. I tell her I have a job as a waiter even though I don’t. She’d asked to come out to visit once or twice but I couldn’t think about her coming into my apartment, seeing the mattress on the floor. Once I made it, sure, she could come and visit. But I’d have to do away with Lloyd and all that. Couldn’t think of her realizing what we were, either.

After Josie came she left another voicemail. I only read the transcription. Most times it’d be that she saw on the news there was a shooting in my area of LA and wanted to see if I was okay. This time it was a rape.

That night I texted Walker because I needed to black out. We’d met at an audition a few weeks earlier and he had the best weed. Decided to go to this one bar where a buddy of his works, and he promised the girls were all thin and wore low-riders like it’s 2007. In the uber there he was going on and on about “them” and “the system” and that kind of crap.

“That’s the difference between us and them. It’s a fundamental thing. You ever read Marx?”

Walker was the king of almosts. We all had almosts, some of us had a few. But Walker must have had seven or eight. He was a good looking guy, a Kentucky import and spoke with that kind of twang. Almost got the lead in the spy franchise, almost was the guy who bangs Sydney Sweeney in that HBO show. The subsequent rage manifested itself as philosophizing about class division.

“But I don’t know, kid. I think if you discount the rack, Sydney isn’t all that,” he was saying. “Butterface.”

When we got there he ordered us vodka sodas. There was a girl with pink hair that I kind of recognized standing in a booth, a group of guys that might be on the Dodgers but I kind of hoped weren’t. “Talent is decent tonight, at least.”

“Won’t your old man be mad?” Walker murmured.

“Whatever.”

The next morning I woke up in Lloyd’s bed with Walker’s arm around my waist. A brown-out kind of night–I had a faint recollection of us on the bathroom floor. One of us was crying and I was pretty sure it was him. I played CandyCrush with the sound on until he woke up, and there was the song and dance of ‘I don’t usually do this.’“Relax, man. It’s not that deep.”

Walker lingered around after, looking at the house– the empty spaces on the walls, the ‘Ganymedes’ statue in the foyer. Watched as I ate peanut butter from the jar in the kitchen.

“You live here with him?”

“No. Just house-sitting.”

He nodded. “Right. And that actress he’s seeing?”

I rolled my eyes. “Huh,” he said, rubbing at his chin. “Politics, I get it.”

“Optics, more like.”

“That annoy you ever? Think I’d be pissed with all the secrecy.”

“It’s a nuanced situation.”

“Those sound like his words,” Walker replied, reaching for the jar. I got to it first.

“You just talked yourself out of peanut butter pancakes, bro.”

He kept coming by a few times a week after that. He was kind of funny, had that laugh where he’d throw his head back. We’d lie in bed doing audition prep, reading sides. He would put his hands on his chest and told me to count to twelve then back to one, then back to eleven, and so on. “An old Hindu breathing exercise,” he said, “Picked it up in Dvaraka. Spent a summer at a temple there, learning to live.”

The roles Barry sent were all jokes. He agreed.

“Nice to have some support,” I’d say. In the afternoons we would lie out on the patio and get stoned, eat the bird food he called ‘clean.’ “Lloyd can be stand-offish, or just a fucking asshole. And my mom thinks I’m a waiter. Probably wants me to get a real job–little does she know.”

“She’s not from around here, I sense?”

“No. Originally Saltillo, north side of Mexico, but lives in Arizona now.”

“Well that’s not far.”

“Might as well be Dvaraka,” I replied.

He nodded, squinting at the sun. “She a taker or a giver?” I asked what he meant. “In my experience people fall in one of those two types. But then there are also the people who don’t know they’re givers–cause the takers do it all sneaky.”

“Giver, for sure,” I swallowed. “And once I get a break I’ll make her a taker.”

“You’re a good kid.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Not really.”

Lloyd landed me a lunch meeting with a producer. I didn’t know if it had to do with Walker– those cameras would have seen him coming in, leaving in the morning– but I don’t care either way. I got my eyebrows threaded, practiced anecdotes and smart-sounding things to say about film as a craft.

Be fun, Lloyd texts while I’m in the Uber there.

Wdym

?

Be fun. The guy is a bit shy.

Shyguy is a big deal, is what he is, I wrote back.

The producer had done a few arthouse-y films, one in Swedish that had taken top prize somewhere. Lloyd called those film festivals gay and pretentious but somehow this guy didn’t qualify. The hostess sat me at a table by the window. While I waited I did those breathing exercises–those Hindu ones– but lost count somewhere. He came in late, sweating and wiping his hands on his lapels.

“Nice to meet you– I’ve heard all the best things from Lloyd.”

We talked weather and the latest at the box office. Grilled octopus for him and I got a salad, one round of Mexican mules and then a third. I tried to be funny, likable. Ran my hand through my hair, said things like ‘Marvel movies– the Hitchcock films of the future’ and his laugh would be guttural. At one point a tentacle fell from his spoon, left a pale sheen on the white of the table cloth.

“I’m doing something newer now–” he leaned in. “Probably shouldn’t even be talking about it. Could use a charismatic, good-looking kid like yourself, though.”

“Oh yeah?”

He had sides back at this place he was renting by the beach. I could just Uber back home after. We talked Dodgers during the drive. He had box tickets, he said. Would have to send them my way.

The house was nice, a little smaller than Lloyd’s but it looked out at the ocean. He’d get the sides in a minute, he said. Just wanted some blow first. It looked good so I did some, too.

Script was some remake of a Fellini film– all ancient Roman and weird. We read out a few lines together but it was hard to focus on the words, get a real grasp of motivations, desires, needs probably because I’d drank so much and done that other stuff that might have been cut with something I didn’t know what.

Good actors make bold choices, I kept thinking. The den was so spacious my voice carried and echoed. There was something about a wolf or a whore and we were halfway through the scene, and he’s really going for it, hands warm on my chest, under my shirt and his face closer. And then I was off the couch, saying woah and I’d dropped the script. Leaned down to pick it up but the pages were all shuffled and out of order from the fall, and he said or just leave it. Good actors make bold choices, he said, breath hot on my cheek. So I guess I left the pages there on the floor.

The next day the internet had new pictures of Lloyd. Lloyd taking selfies with fans. Lloyd stepping out of the ocean water. Lloyd at a restaurant, one of those beach side ones. Drinks with a woman hidden in a sunhat– an old flame, could it be?

My mom had left me two new voice mails.

I didn’t leave the house for about a week after that and ran through the gabapentin prescription. Walker came by after I’d asked him to go to the drug store for me. Brought lean cuisine, advil, gatorade–

“I said gabapentin, not advil.”

“Well, reckon I’d have to be Lloyd to pick up that script, no?”

I shrugged. He told me I smelled horrible, asked if I wanted to go for a drive. “Not really,” I replied. “I want you to go, though.”

The week before Lloyd was back I decided to lose fifteen pounds. Saw videos of Patrick Bateman on TikTok and decided to emulate that routine. Cold spoons over the eyes, five-hundred crunches each morning. I’d work my way up, I knew. He could do almost a thousand.

“You see a difference?” I asked Lloyd, flexing my stomach.

“Yeah, you look like teenager. Eat a burger.”

“I am a teenager.”

That shut him up. I moved back to the flat in Encino, with its shitty mattress and its forty-seven stairs. It wasn’t all that bad, though. He got me a car–a nice one, brand new. Promised me the engagement between him and the Spanish actress would be called off sometime in the winter.

“And maybe– we’ll have to see, but maybe we can go public sometime in the spring.”

And that made me feel a bit better but still wasn’t doing too hot. Thought about my mom a lot, once wondered if she’d die before then and felt so bad that I vomited all over the floor. Called her after to tell her I loved her, and she talked about birds that had been nesting in our garage. As I listened I counted my ribs in the mirror. I’d booked this Calvin Klein campaign where they had to bleach my hair. Lloyd started saying he wanted to get me to see his psychiatrist—his, he stressed, not someone on my own. I went out on long drives around the city, circle the blocks around Sunset. There was this one homeless woman I kept coming back to. She wore two different shoes and held a sign that read ‘Please help me Jesus.’

Walker and I still hung out some, only when Lloyd was busy. Told him I didn’t really know how I felt about acting anymore. He nodded like he understood.

One night I was in my studio in Encino and Lloyd told me to come over. I was already pretty loaded and told him so but he insisted, said to bring something fun. So I left the house with a little thing of blow in a takeout bag from an Indian place, tripped and cut one of my palms open on the pavement. The car was nice, red and nice and on his insurance because I couldn’t afford it. Had a little hood ornament of a rooster on it–I didn’t know why. I’d named him Ferdinand. In the reflection I looked bad. Ugly and fat and like a fucking idiot, sucking at my palm. His beak was open, as if to speak. What are you saying? I stroked its gizzard. Well, what’s your life like?

When they pulled me over that night on a side street I started crying. All hot and heavy, just straight bawling and couldn’t breathe. And when they found that takeout bag they just walked me over to the backseat of the cruiser, no cuffs or anything. I cried the whole way to the station.

On my one phone call I called Lloyd. Told him how they’d been asking about the car registration, stuff I didn’t know how to answer–why his name was there, on the documents and such.

“Are you trying to punish me for something?”

“I– what?”

“Trying to ruin my fucking life?”

He put up my bail but didn’t come to the hearing. Walker came in a cab and got me. I sat next to him in the backseat and watched the meter tick up. There were stories on the internet–my name, my picture next to his. My phone was going off in my pocket. They were rumors, then. Little things that would grow in the coming weeks, I was sure. But nothing from Lloyd, nor my mother. I did the Hindu breathwork and felt the blood rush to my head.

Daphne Kalotay on Margaret Dunn

This moving, if painful, story amazed me on multiple fronts. For one thing, it is daring, its young narrator—an aspiring actor in contemporary Hollywood—at first appearing to be despicable. Only as we continue to read do we gradually (seemingly magically, so deftly is this done) understand the full desperation of his situation: self-loathing, semi-closeted, forced to hide his primary (highly inequitable) relationship due to the continued homophobia of the American movie industry. Without being didactic or melodramatic, the author presents a realistic, if nearly dystopian, world of "takers" and "givers" in a touching and ultimately satisfying story.

Margaret Dunn is a double major at UPenn in English and Classics. She recently completed a collection of short stories titled Babies, which won Penn's creative writing honors thesis award. This fall she will be working as a freelance writer based in NYC.