Hollywood Animal Read Online Free Page B

of our marriage, Gerri and I never—not once—talked about what we had accomplished that day at that apartment complex down the street from my father’s house … while we were courting.
    After the shooting … at the end of that day … I knew that I would ask Gerri to marry me.
    Thirty years later, after my divorce from Gerri, I wrote a script about that day for Paramount called
Reliable Sources
.
    Paramount paid me $2 million for it.
    Were Gerri and I accomplices to the shootings of two people and the shooting death of one of them?
    Was I then paid $2 million—thirty years later—for my part in the crime?
    Thanks to the details of our divorce settlement, Gerri got some money from the two mil, too.
    Gerri’s father, George, was an electrical engineer, a graduate of the University of Chicago, who was once arrested for beating his wife in front of Gerri and her sister and her two brothers.
    George was an alcoholic who came home from work at four each afternoon and cracked open the bottle of vodka which he finished by eight that night. In the course of those four hours, as he worked on the bottle, George verbally and sometimes physically abused his family. Once he chased Gerri down to the dock on Lake Erie behind her home and threatened to drown her. She ran from the dock and down the street and caught a bus and spent the next week at a friend’s apartment in Cleveland.
    Gerri’s mother, Susan, had an eighth-grade education and didn’t much like her husband, let alone love him. Their marriage had been arranged by their old-country Hungarian and Slovak parents.
    Gerri’s mother was bitter that she, the most beautiful young woman in the town of Castalia, Ohio, had been forced to marry this plain-looking
engineer
.
    Gerri and her sister and brothers heard their mother and father arguing all the time … because her mother refused to have sex much of the time with her father.
    On these occasions, her father would say to her mother: “God bless St. Joseph for what he went through.”
    And: “The dog will have his day!”
    When I was a Hollywood screenwriter and a King Shit agent named Michael Ovitz threatened to destroy my career, that’s the last thing I said to him before I left his office:
    The dog will have his day!
    Ovitz looked at me like I’d lost my marbles and laughed.
    Gerri’s favorite family member was her maternal grandmother, Sue Balazsik, who lived with her family until her death in her early eighties. The big house on the lake they all lived in was Sue Balazsik’s house.
    An illiterate Hungarian immigrant, she not only owned and managed Lorain, Ohio’s, best Hungarian restaurant, the Cozy Corner (Perry Como came to eat the paprikash every time he appeared in Cleveland), but was also, during Prohibition, Lorain’s biggest bootlegger. She made a fortune outwitting the feds, contributed to a lot of local politicians’ campaigns, and built the big house on the lake.
    When Gerri was a little girl, she and her grandmother watched
The Untouchables
every week. It was the old woman’s favorite TV show, the program the former bootlegger called “The Touchables.”
    And on Lorain Avenue, in Cleveland, twenty-seven miles from Lorain, Ohio, where Gerri and her grandmother were watching
The Untouchables …
    My father and I were watching it, too.
    It was
our
favorite show, too.
    My mother, however, wasn’t watching it. She was in the bathroom hiding from the television set, which she believed was filled with rays from outer space poisoning her.
    My father and I didn’t know as we watched the show—and neither did Gerri and her grandmother—that Eliot Ness became the safety director of the city of Cleveland after he finished with Capone and Nitti and the other little Guinea homeboys in Chicago.
    We didn’t know that Ness was forced to resign as safety director after, rip-roaring drunk, he was involved in a hit-and-run accident on Cleveland’s Shoreway.
    We didn’t know that Eliot Ness died shortly