GHOSTWRITER HOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL

Chapter Three:

CHAPTER THREE:

    Like I said, Mel, the guy who adopted me, was a Hollywood agent. I never could bring myself to call him 'Dad' because my 'Dad' was 'Daddy' and Daddy is dead.  Mel was just a knockoff.  A lovable, Bullwinkle-ly moose of a man with thinning hair in a comb-over and thick, black rimmed glasses before they came back in style.

    I grew up in a kind of no-man's land; the Mid-Wilshire district near Hancock Park in Los Angeles. Mel had an office on the corner of LaBrea and Wilshire in the old Mutual of Omaha Building. It was built in, like, the 1930s with a Rexall Drug store on the street level and offices above. If you wanted to find his office, Mel always said, you could just look for the Mutual of Omaha sign.

    On top of Mel's building was a colossal neon profile of and Indian Chief in glowing headgear, that could be seen for miles. In any direction. Totally, colossally, politically incorrect. Next to the Hollywood sign up in the hills, it was one of the biggest landmarks in the area, although I never saw any indication of their business in the building. From the window next to my bed, in our apartment nearby, I could sometimes see its ghostly image reflecting off the glass paned window across the driveway. If Mel was there late and I was alone, it felt less scary that it was there, like he was still close by. And it was true. If I had wanted, I could have walked the three-an-a-half-blocks, used a key at the after-hours entrance, walked through the lobby and taken the elevator up to the 7th floor.

    By the time I was old enough to remember it, Mel's office was already a time capsule with plastic mid-mod furniture, shag carpeting, wood paneling and cottage cheese ceilings. In the the late 1980s he still had a few clients, but they were all getting up in years, which is to say even the youngest of the women were already in their 30s and some of the guys were in their 40s or 50s. Of course as a little girl they all seemed really old and grown up to me.

    Mel was born in 1950. As soon as he could, at age 17, he said, he hot-tailed it out to the west coast. He took the train from Union Station in Chicago right after Christmas. It took six days because the train hit a cow during a blizzard along the way and got stuck in a snow drift. Mel said it was freezing cold. They had to live on powdered drink packets and what have you, like crackers and ketchup. He said at one point they weren't so sure they were going to make it out alive, but if they did, he swore once he arrived in Los Angeles, he was never going back.