Lost in Hollywood Read online

  “Maybe it was custom made especially for her,” I said.

  “And maybe it has some existential meaning to it,” Payton said.

  “And may—”

  “I’ll take your luggage, dudettes,” Leo interrupted.

  Once we got past the painting, the house was a little less glam. It was too warm, and smelled like stale popcorn and Mexican food. Sunlight tried to sneak in through the windows that were thick with grime, filling the room with the same type of haze that cloaked the Hollywood sign. (Leo must not be a very good housekeeper.) There were curvy sofas that may have been elegant in Marilyn Monroe’s time, but now they made the place feel more like a vintage furniture store.

  “She’s in the master bedroom suite.” Leo pointed. “Over yonder.”

  We walked across the living room’s white marble floor to the bedroom, which was hotter and stuffier than the rest of the house, but just as big and similarly decorated in a retro style. It had a sitting area, a bathroom, and double doors that probably led to a closet.

  ABJ’s appearance surprised me. Her eye was black-and-blue and a bizarre shade of green. A bandage wrapped around her head disturbed the flow of her lovely hair. Despite the wound and medical cloth, she still looked elegant in red lipstick a wearing a satin robe.

  “Hi, Aunt Betty-Jean,” Mom said. “How are you feeling?”

  “My head hurts.” She rubbed the gauze dressing with a manicured hand. “And that nurse won’t give me any aspirin.”

  To Mom Leo whispered, “I’ve worked for her for eleven years, so she knows I’m not her nurse, but in the afternoon things get foggy, mucky, guacamole in the head.”

  Foggy isn’t enough? Foggy and mucky aren’t enough? He has to add guacamole to her head?

  Mom said to ABJ, “I’ll get you some aspirin.”

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “Umm . . . I’m not your doctor. It’s me. Sue. Your niece. Your only niece.”

  She looked at Mom with a blank stare. Then her eye twinkled a smidgen. “Right. Of course,” she said. “I’m just playing with you, Sue. Sue the Salamander. That’s what I used to call you, right?”

  Mom relaxed. “That’s right.”

  “I’m tired now, Sue.”

  “Of course you are.” Mom pulled ABJ’s sheets up under her chin. “I’ll see you a little later.”

  ABJ looked past all of us to Payton and said, “You were always my favorite, Ginger.”

  Now, since I haven’t seen her in a while that might not have sounded so strange, if Payton and I even looked a teeny tiny bit alike. But we don’t. We’re similar in height and we wear the same size jeans, and we both wear pink shoes whenever possible—it’s like our signature—but there’s one big very noticeable difference in our appearance. Payton is black, and I’m white. So, this was a very strange thing for ABJ to say.

  Once we were outside of ABJ’s bedroom with the door closed, I said, “Wha . . . wha . . . what was that?”

  Payton said, “Two words: Whackytown.”

  “I think that’s one word,” Mom said.

  Payton ignored her. Payton knows how to count words. She does this sometimes to be funny, but other people don’t always get it. Not everyone understands our academic or science-y humor. I’d grown to expect it.

  Then Payton added, “Maybe we’ve spent so much time together that we actually are starting to look alike. I’ve heard that happens to people who are married for a very long time. And some people start to look like their pets.”

  I took her by the hand and led her to a nearby wall mirror. We stared into it. I never thought of my bestie in terms of a color. To me she is just Payton, or Payt. “I think most people can probably tell us apart.” I lifted my foot. “Unless you only look at the kicks.”

  “Yup.” We always seemed to agree.

  “You look like a space worm,” Grant said to Payton.

  “There’s no such thing,” Payton said.

  “Just because you haven’t seen it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Exhibit One—the tooth fairy.”

  “Let it go,” Mom said to Payton, who was ready to debate the existence of the tooth fairy with Grant.

  We walked back over to Dad, who spoke with Leo just outside ABJ’s door. “What did I tell you?” Leo pointed to his head. “Guacamole.”

  That certainly wasn’t a medical term, but I got the gist of what he meant.

  He continued, “I hate to suggest it, because I love that woman like she was my own mother, but maybe she needs to be in some kind of a hospital or special home.”

  “She isn’t that old,” Dad said.

  “Well, tell her brain that, because it’s crumbling like a taco shell in a blender.” Leo walked over to a pile of mail on a tabletop supported by a pair of carved ostrich legs. He handed a bunch of official-looking documents to my dad. “Look at these.”

  “They’re from the Los Angeles Police Department,” Dad said.

  “That’s right. The po-po have rounded up ol’ Bette a few times. If we don’t get this figured out, she’s gonna end up in the big house, the clink, Club Fed.” Even though Leo had used three different descriptions, we must’ve still looked confused. “Jail!” he said. “Let me know how I can help.” He crossed the marble floor and left, pulling the front door closed behind him. It slammed loudly. Then he opened it again and said, “Sorry. That was the wind. I didn’t mean for it to slam like I was making a dramatic exit. I’m not the angry sort. Peace out.”

  Grant said, “Soon we’re gonna run out of room to put criminals and we’ll have to exile them to another planet. Probably Mars. They’ll be our test colony to see if human life can survive there. Near Mars’s equator it can be seventy degrees during the day, so that’s no problem, but it’s negative one hundred degrees at night. It should be interesting to see how our species evolves.”

  Payton tapped the side of Grant’s head. “There is a lot going on in there. It’s a shame we can’t channel it to something . . . Earthly.” To me she said, “He may be a candidate for a partial brain transplant.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The part that makes people normal.”

  We high-elbowed on that.

  “Well, she doesn’t look so bad,” Mom said.

  Dad said, “I think there’s more going on than a fall. We need to get her to a doctor.”

  “I’ll make an appointment,” Mom said. She glanced around at the grandeur of the house, reminiscent of the 1940s, or maybe it’s the 1950s. “I wonder how much money she owes for this house.”

  “Wasn’t she famous?” I asked. “Doesn’t she have lots of money?”

  “She was, so I guess she did,” Mom said. “Unfortunately, she hasn’t had an acting job in a long time. Look at this place. She probably spent it all.”

  “She could’ve thrown it into the Pacific,” Dad said, “and not remember.”

  “We’ll talk to the bank first thing tomorrow.” Mom opened the refrigerator door. “I think I’ll run to the store, by way of Hollywood Boulevard, of course, where I’ll also pick up one of those maps of the star’s homes. Maybe there’ll be time for some sightseeing while we sort this out.” Then she said, “You kids put on your pj’s. The bedrooms are upstairs.” As she closed the fridge she scanned the magnets. “Look at this ad. It’s for Burrito Taxi. I don’t know what that is, but Aunt Betty-Jean loves Mexican food. Let’s give it a try. I can go shopping tomorrow.”

  “Anything with a burrito is cool with me,” Dad said.

  While Mom used her cell phone to text an order as directed by the magnet, we went upstairs to find everything covered in white sheets. There wasn’t much up here for Leo to clean, which made me wonder what that man did when he came to “housekeep.”

  Payton and I chose a room with twin beds. The bedroom set was the same style as the rest of the house—maybe new age. If Dad was making an Internet video to sell it, he’d say it was in “mint condition,” because it looked like it had never been used.

  There was a knock on the f
ront door. We looked down the center staircase to see Leo standing in the foyer in a taxi-cab-yellow-and-black-checkered shirt and hat. There was a fabric burrito attached to each shoulder.

  “Did someone order a Burrito Taxi?” he asked.

  5

  “You’re a housekeeper and you drive a Burrito Taxi?” Dad asked.

  “I own a Burrito Taxi,” Leo explained. “I deliver people and burritos. I keep all the ingredients hot in the trunk. You text me what you want and I’ll drop it off. I drop off people too. And I pick them up. I don’t pick up burritos.”

  “Very interesting business model.” Dad scratched his head. I’m sure he wished he’d thought of it.

  “Yup. And all profit. I won the taxi in a contest, so there are no payments.” He pointed to the street. “Go check it out.”

  We rushed to the door and looked out. It wasn’t any kind of normal taxi. In fact, it was so far from normal that I wondered for a minute if Leo was a distant relative of ours—well, the rest of my family, not me.

  “It was in a movie,” Leo said. “I did the artwork myself.”

  All the paint in the world couldn’t hide the fact that the Burrito Taxi was a banana vehicle. That is, it was a working car shaped exactly like a banana, but painted like a burrito with its stuffing oozing out the sides and end—black beans, rice, cilantro, guacamole. Leo was clearly a right-brained person—that’s someone who is good at art and has an active imagination—not unlike Grant, and Dad. Payton and I used our left brains more in our word of logic and facts. I’d put Mom somewhere in the middle.

  The Burrito Taxi had two doors, one for the driver, and one for the passenger. Both seats were very low to the ground at the center of the banana . . . err . . . burrito. The front and back ends of the taxi bent up in a banana-like shape.

  “I started selling banana splits—they melted,” Leo explained. “Then bananas on a stick—they browned. And then I thought . . . burritos! People in Hollywood love burritos! Now they could have them delivered. No one else is doing that. And since I have the passenger seat and a little backseat, I had extra room for people. Most people don’t mind the ride taking a few extra minutes to stop for a delivery or two because they love making an entrance somewhere in a burrito.”

  “I like the way you think, Leo,” Dad said. “Do you have a passenger out there now?”

  “Oh yeah. Yup. Sí.”

  “Who?”

  “My very own teen business manager in her traveling office,” Leo said.

  “Where is she?”

  “On the other side.”

  We hustled out and around the opposite side of the burrito mobile. There was a plexiglass dome with strips of green plastic streamers resembling shredded lettuce hanging from it.

  “A sidecar,” Dad said. “You just don’t see those enough anymore.”

  “And,” Leo pointed to brackets, “it’s removable.”

  “Genius,” Dad said.

  A girl wearing headphones and tapping at an iPad slid a small section of the plexiglass aside like it was a window at a take-out place.

  “¡ Hola!” She was dark-haired and tan. “Mi nombre es Margot.”

  “Oh,” I said. I knew enough Spanish to introduce me and Payton. “Mi nombre es Ginger. Y esto es Payton.”

  “¡ Hola!” Payton shouted, like the girl was hard of hearing.

  I said, “Payton, she speaks Spanish. There’s nothing wrong with her ears.”

  “Oh right. Silly of me.” Then she shouted real slowly at Margot. “¡¿ Cómo estás?!”

  “Estoy bien—uh—” She pointed to the headphones and pulled a little microphone attached to a wire to her mouth. “Hola. Burrito Taxi.” She listened. “Sí. Sí. Diez minutos.”

  Leo said to us, “My niece Margot is about your age. She’s spending her spring break helping me out. I told her she doesn’t have to, but she loves me and she loves this taxi. She helped me paint it, you know.” He lowered his voice. “But, if she had a few pals to hang with . . . then, I wouldn’t feel so guilty. Maybe you girls can, you know, do whatever it is girls do?”

  “Gotcha,” I said, but I was thinking that it might be a little difficult since she didn’t seem to speak English.

  “It’ll be fun,” Payton said. “We girls stick together. It’s like a big club.”

  “ABJ was right about you. You are great.” He looked at his watch. “I gotta go. Places to go. Burritos to deliver.” He looked at Dad. “You coming?”

  “Heck yeah!” He looked at my mom, then asked Leo, “I mean, can we swing by the grocery store too?”

  “No problemo.”

  Mom said, “You never go shopping.”

  “I never had a Burrito Taxi sitting in the driveway.”

  “Okay. Don’t forget milk and eggs and take Grant,” Mom said.

  “Can he fit?” Dad asked.

  Leo put his hand on top of Grant’s head. Then he lifted him and put him down. “He can fit in the back.”

  Just before they left, Mom asked Dad, “Can you get me a map of the star’s homes?”

  Dad winked at her, then got in front.

  We waved as the burrito mobile and its sidecar pulled out of the driveway and then we went inside.

  Mom took two burritos and went to ABJ’s room.

  Payton and I brought ours upstairs and ate in the bedroom. “Is that genius?” I asked her. “Or crazy?”

  “I was wondering the same thing. Maybe some of the craziest ideas are genius,” she said. “What about the first time someone suggested lettuce in a bag? Maybe people thought that was crazy.”

  “Maybe one day all taxis will deliver Mexican food,” I suggested. “Or—”

  “Kittens!” we said together.

  We really do think alike.

  6

  The next morning Payton and I came down the grand center stairs in matching pink high-tops. I paired mine with a white miniskirt. My long blond braid bumped off the middle of my pink T as I walked.

  We found ABJ and Grant sitting at a small table in the breakfast room, which was like a casual dining room off the kitchen. It had big French doors that opened onto a patio, from which you could see the whole valley that was Hollywood. Grant was hunched over a handheld game, his thumbs moving lightning fast.

  ABJ’s bandage looked like it had been rewrapped around newly coiffed hair. She flipped through a copy of Entertainment Weekly and nodded along as Grant explained, “The trash will need to be gathered into a lump . . .”

  “How would you keep the lump together?” ABJ asked.

  “Gorilla Glue.”

  “You’d need a lot.”

  “Oh yeah,” Grant agreed, still not lifting his eyes from his game.

  My mom and dad, freshly showered, came in to get coffee from the pot on the glass table and filled travel mugs for themselves.

  “How’s your head?” Mom asked.

  “Much better, dear, thank you.”

  “We were going to talk to the people at the bank today. Do you want to come? I can drive,” Mom asked ABJ.

  “Oh, thank you, but I’ll stay here.”

  “Are you sure?” Dad asked. “It might do you some good to get out.”

  “No thanks. I don’t know who may call or stop by and I want to review a script that I got in the mail.”

  “Okay.” Mom offered her a paper. “If you don’t come, you’ll need to sign this, so that they’ll talk to us about your financial matters.” Mom used to be a lawyer, so producing official papers in a snap is easy peasy for her.

  ABJ slowly scrolled her signature with a big loop in the J in Betty-Jean, like an autograph that she’d given a million times, which I guess it was, although maybe not a million. ABJ had one big role that she won an Oscar for in the 1960s. Besides that, she’d had only small parts in small movies.

  Leo walked in the front door. “Hola,” he called. He came into the breakfast room, and to ABJ he said, “You’re up. And looking like a superstar.” To us he asked, “Doesn’t she look fab?”


  “No, I don’t,” she said and pretended to push away the compliment with a little blush.

  “Leo, we’re going out for a while,” Mom said. “To look at Aunt Betty-Jean’s financials.”

  “Do you want me to take you in the Burrito Taxi?” he offered.

  “Sure!” Dad cried.

  Mom placed her hand on his shoulder. “That’s okay. Aunt Betty-Jean is letting us use her car.”

  “The Caddy?” Leo confirmed with a look of surprise. “She never lets me use her Cadillac.”

  “Maybe she likes me more?” Mom teased.

  “Don’t know about that,” Leo said. “I always have a supply of shredded cheese. The ladies like a guy who travels with cheese. Know what I mean?” He nudged my dad who nodded and laughed along, but I don’t think he understood what Leo meant. Neither did I. “When I saw that Cadillac, I immediately thought, ‘mega long hot dog deliveries.’ Not just hot dogs, of course, also kielbasa, sausage, bratwurst, anything long that you could put on a bun. That car is so big, it could hold a six-foot dog nicely, you know?”

  “Oh, I know,” Dad said. “What do you say, Aunt Betty-­Jean? You want to go into the mega jumbo long hot dog business? It could be the answer to your every financial worry.”

  Dad and Leo, I suspected, would be friends for life.

  “Can I get back to you on that?” ABJ asked.

  Dad said, “You take as much time as you need.”

  “But how would you buy six-foot buns?” Mom asked.

  “That is a problem,” Leo said. “But I think this guy”—he poked my dad—“could find a solution for that.” Leo was probably right.

  Mom said to Leo, “We should be back around noon.” To me, Grant, and Payton she said, “Stay out of Leo’s way. He’s not your babysitter.”

  “Payton and I will start on the Science Olympics.” I turned to ABJ and explained, “A model of the brain.”

  Payton said, “We’re using clay.”

  “And we made a bet,” I added.

  “With the DeMarcos.”

  “They’re building a robot,” I said.

  ABJ said, “How cliché.”