In Violet

By David Coddon

Jonny Stoddard, an aspiring L.A. screenwriter, sees Hollywood in his dreams and jetliners in his nightmares. On one eventful night, his freak proximity to a spectacular accident further complicates Stoddard’s already complicated SoCal life: his relationship with his traffic-copter-queen girlfriend; his hot-and-cold attitude about his day job as a high school teacher; and his creative struggle to tell the story of Violet, a doomed starlet with a Hitchcock obsession. David Coddon is a Southern California-based fiction writer, longtime journalist and theater critic who, when not in creative mode, teaches at San Diego State University, the University of California San Diego Extension and San Diego Mesa College.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483492179

Book preview

Gayle

1. TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT, ALL RIGHT

An L.A. freeway around midnight …

Jonny Stoddard fumbled for a cigarette in the crumpled pack of American Spirits wedged into the console behind the gearshift. Empty.

Shit.

He switched on the car radio:

"News, traffic and weather together on KNX, Los Angeles."

He nodded silent approval. Music would only make him sleepier. Speaking, droning voices – that’s what he needed, driving home from a party that hadn’t been worth the evening spent there.

The House met in a late session Tuesday night seeking to hammer out a compromise on a proposed bill that would …

Jesus, he derided the uninspiring news. Jonny tightened his grip on the used Mustang’s steering wheel as he veered from Lane 2 into Lane 3, then accelerated and maneuvered around a slow moving panel truck with bold black lettering in Spanish plastered across the rear doors. His headlights illuminated the words El ala de fuego. Wings of fire.

Reducing speed, Jonny squeezed that unnamed place above the bridge of his nose but between the eyes where tension and fatigue resided. This lane was clear ahead of him for at least 10 car lengths, and he resolved, against all inclination, to remain alert.

KNX time, 11:55. Let’s check traffic with our Sabrina Flick. Bree?

A dulcet woman’s voice intoned as brightly as if it were 2 in the afternoon:

Pretty quiet on the freeways at this hour, Bob. We’ve got word of a stalled vehicle in the No. 4 lane of the eastbound 10 near Robertson, and on the eastbound 105 just before the 110 merge, a two-car accident that’s been moved over to the side. CHP is working that one …

Jonny changed lanes again, this time navigating around a yellow sedan with the Taxi sign on its roof flickering orange behind the black letters. It was a lucky break, really, that the American Spirits pack was empty. This was his second full week abstaining from cancer sticks. That was tangible, nearly boast-worthy progress. That was hope.

The sonorous news anchor, his tenor inflected with behind-the-mic self-importance, returned:

An elementary school in Monrovia has discovered a unique way to get kids to eat healthier at lunch time – with a classroom visit by Mr. Sprout. KNX reporter Mike Sediway has the details …

That did it. Somewhat violently toggling his radio from AM to FM, Jonny flooded the claustrophobic space inside the Mustang with a saccharine love song. For a moment, inhabiting the lilting melody was Sabrina Flick, traffic queen who on day shifts flew around in the smoggy L.A. skies wearing aviator shades, mascara and fingerless gloves. On night shifts, she reported auto mania from the safety of a studio computer, and, he knew, she sometimes did so in workout clothes or pajamas. On a night not unlike this one a month ago, he’d been telling Ms. Flick over shots of Jim Beam about driving around the Valley as a teen-ager and taking chances behind the wheel of his cousin Kirby’s ‘65 Buick Riviera. The Shark, Kirby called his beloved car. It looked like a shark at that, with its pointed snout and finned fenders, and it was sleek like a Great White cutting through the surface of the sea in the sunlight. He told Ms. Flick that The Shark had lipstick-red leather upholstery, and she joked that it sounded like a pimp car or a whore car, but he corrected her: this car was too classy for that. He saw once more, in the indistinct reality of moonlit freeway ahead, the way her smile angled when they were teasing each other, and how the little mole dotting her complexion just to one side of that smile really was a beauty mark.

He flipped back to AM.

This is CBS News Radio. I’m Scott Tannehill in Washington …

Jonny wanted a smoke now, more than in the past two weeks. He reached into the console again and came up with a bent, wrapped stick of cinnamon gum. He dropped it somewhere between the seats.

Five minutes later, the network news report ended, and the local anchor reassumed command of the airwaves.

This is KNX News Radio 1070 in Los Angeles. It’s 12:05. Time again for traffic with Sabrina Flick. Bree?

This stretch of the northbound San Diego Freeway, where Long Beach morphed into L.A.’s South Bay, was flat and wide and at most hours of the day bottlenecked with commuters and diversion-seekers and compulsive lane changers. At this hour, after midnight midweek, you could almost count eight to ten car lengths between yourself and the guy in front of you, and driving 55, if not 65, wasn’t impossible. Ms. Flick herself said the traffic south of LAX was wide open.

Wide open and, even in the midst of all these faceless drivers on both sides of the 405, lonely. Jonny brushed dirty blond hair from his forehead, swallowed, felt the stubble under his chin. Ms. Flick dissolved in sudden, crackling static. He punched the BAND button on the car radio a third time, back again to FM.

Pop singer Joan Osborne was delivering, in a high nasal voice, the playful prelude to her ballad One Of Us:

"Oh, one of these nights at about twelve o’clock

This whole earth’s gonna reel and rock

Things they’ll tremble and cry for pain

For the Lord’s gonna come in his heavenly airplane …"

Jonny’s shoulders jerked as the steering wheel vibrated in his grip. The music on the radio turned to a rumble that filled up the entirety of the car. He still had control. He hadn’t struck the median or another car or blown a tire. What the hell was the noise and where was it coming from? It was like thunder or a sonic boom, but instead of venting its wrath then disappearing, it continued, steadily, growing more ferocious.

As he checked his rearview mirror for room to change lanes to the right, the slit of glass filled up with piercing light, an incandescence that now spread across the entire back window.

It had to be some amphetamine-dazed 18-wheel trucker riding his ass, but this wasn’t the beam of semi-tractor headlights in his rear window. These lights, so fierce they’d made him start to pee himself, were a blinding, flashing white, with flickers of red and blue in them, and they were descending from the inky blackness above.

He squeezed the wheel hard and slammed on his brakes when he saw in his windshield the silver tail fin that appeared like a fluorescent beast, to light up the night, coming to flatten him. Crashing down …

The entire car shook, and Jonny, without time to pray, saw only blackness.

2. FLICK ME!

He remembered as a child no older than 7 or 8 being on the back of a full-grown, 15-hands-tall black horse. The part of him that was scared shitless, which was 90 percent of him, caused his little hands to tremble and for a second or two his eyes to tear. The part of him that was excited intensified as his father led the horse away from the corral, then let go of the bay colt’s bridle. You’re on your own, son. Don’t let go. Up and down. Across the pastures to somewhere benignly unknown.

Whoa! Yee-ha! he cried out, trying to sound like a cowboy.

A woman’s low-throated voice spoke, monotonally, entirely without affect and not at all like a cowgirl: Whoa. Yee-ha.

She sat cross-legged. Her long manicured fingers, their nails painted cerise red, tapped bare kneecaps. The white silken shirt, the only item of clothing on her, was barely buttoned. Gobs of just-blown-dry mahogany hair crowned a winsome face distinguished by two moist green eyes behind severe dark-rimmed glasses, eyes that regarded him with what appeared to be just a modicum of interest, perhaps even boredom.

No horse. Nearly naked woman instead. His eyes flashed. Who are you?

Flick, she said, throwing back her head, tossing the deep brown tresses full of static electricity.

Who?

I said Flick.

That’s not a name.

She uncrossed her legs, affording him a view of bristly pubic hair a shade lighter than her bobbed, ‘50s-era ‘do. Ask me, she said, about the sig alert on the 405.

Why the hell?

Her specs slipped down her pert nose. Because that’s what I do.

Sabrina Flick, he lit up. The traffic girl?

Now her glasses slid off her nose into her lap. Traffic this, she said, opening wide her tanned legs.

You heard me, Mr. Stoddard. Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

The words, delivered with palpable condescension, had been spoken in French, but he understood them. He watched the Philosopher King from Paris nudge and remove his round-lens spectacles, breathe on them with a huff, then replace them on his wrinkled forehead. I myself am dead, but I’m weary of you.

Jonny stiffened. If you’re dead, what are you doing here?

To reiterate, this is a chance meeting.

Are you saying I’m dead? The instant he’d said this, Jonny felt his head heavy on his shoulders and, though fighting it, his eyes closed.

He heard his chance companion again:

You seem to be under the impression that anyone who writes is by definition an insufferable egoist when in fact the ego is only consciousness itself.

Jonny, not knowing why really, expected such a lecture point. La Transcendence de l’Ego. The Transcendence of Ego. Now his head floated; his own words were whispers. Consciousness, he said, is overrated.

His ears were filled with the lilt of an accordion playing a tune the lyrics of which were familiar to him from a long-ago film in black and white, its romantic co-stars aglow and ethereal:

"Quand il me prend dans ses bras

Il me parle tout bas

Je vois la vie en rose

Il me dit des mots d’amour

Des mots de tous les jours

Et ca me fait quelque chose …"

His hands tightly around her waist, he pressed his wind-strafed face against her ear. Ms. Flick, leaning forward with bold determination, sat in front of him on her Kawasaki Eliminator, doing 60 in a 40. Neither wore helmets. He had her hair in his mouth and bugs and dust peppering his cheeks. He also felt an erection, both from the forward propulsion of the bike and the warmth of her bare midriff beneath a blue T-shirt that had been sucked right out of her tight black jeans.

She laughed, revved the engine and shouted something unintelligible about either the road or the ride.

A Chevron station whizzed by in industrial red, white and blue. So did a VW Beetle they left quickly behind. With abandon, she shot through the marginal space in between a Toyota pickup in one lane and a Nissan Pathfinder in the lane beside it. He gritted his teeth and committed to her all control. Securing his index fingers in the unbelted loops of her jeans, he hoped she could feel his hard-on. In the instant that possibility tantalized him, he ached to tell Ms. Flick that he loved her. And why not? She flew above L.A. in something called a Robinson R44 three mornings a week, and tirelessly polished her bike when she wasn’t riding it around illegally. She dressed like the primmest, bespectacled, most virginal librarian imaginable at her other job keeping books for an Allstate insurance office inside a mall, and with her shiny overbite smile wide prepared Belgian waffles in her thin, barely-there black lace bra and panties for him on Sunday mornings.

So if he regularly craved this singularly exciting woman, why did he shudder and brace for a crash? His fingers tightened, digging into her midriff.

What’s the matter with you, Ace? she twisted around in the seat of the Kawasaki once they’d stopped at Pacific Ocean Park.

Hey, fella! Fella, can you hear me?

Jonny felt hot, steamy breath near his face. But not as hot as the sensation tingling his spine and shoulders.

Fella! Can you open your eyes?

He observed an indistinct, oval shape encircled by steam. That was all. But when the voice called to him again, this time less urgently, the steam dissipated and the semblance of a whiskered face was looking down at him. The tousled hair was red or reddish brown, with caterpillar eyebrows to match.

So you’re with us, pronounced Caterpillar Brows.

Jonny’s shoulders throbbed. Who’s us?

Another voice, from somewhere unseen, said: Planet Earth.

Knock it off, Charley, Caterpillar Brows called over his shoulder. He felt Jonny’s forehead. This guy’s in shock.

It was an understatement. What happened? Jonny managed.

The two of them – Caterpillar Brows and Charley – were speaking not to him, but about him, and he felt the numb chill of medical instruments on his hands, legs and face. The music he’d heard had faded into obscurity, like the closing bars of a tune played for the first and last time.

Something sharp poked him in the right arm and against his will his eyes closed shut once more.

Sitting in his lap on the kitchen chair and facing him, she cupped her left breast with her right hand and flicked its erect nipple back and forth over his nose.

I call them The Twins, she said, doing the same with her left hand cupping her right breast..

Somehow, he managed to gurgle Do they have names?

Who?

The Twins?

Ms. Flick threatened a smile, bit her lower lip. Then she caressed the back of his neck and with a jerk forced his face against her bosom. You’re the writer. You name ‘em.

Smothered in her powder and sweat, he could think of nothing to say.

Fella! Can you tell me your name? Where you were born?

He had to have been lying on the hardest bed in history, and worse, it was moving, and moving fast. From the roof above him dangled an IV bag, its hose snaking somewhere into his flesh.

Mister? called out the other voice, like the other competing with the scream of siren and churning motor.

Jonny, he gasped, tasting spittle. Stoddard. Jonny Stoddard.

A scratchy, hairy hand grazed his arm. And where were you born? shouted the first voice.

Momentarily, he had no idea. Then … West Covina. Kauai Street.

Isn’t that in Hawaii?

I told you once, Charley. Christ. You’re an EMT.

Jonny swallowed something like bile. His head fell to one side.

3. VIOLET

Did Violet Westwood have any penetrating fears? Any overarching sense of dread? A premonition? A nightmare?

That’s what he’d have to figure out, or the whole thing wouldn’t work.

Jonny slapped the flat keyboard of his dusty laptop with one hand. He reached for the half-filled tumbler of Line 39 Cabernet ($8.99, he’d discovered, with a Ralphs card) on the desk to his right, swallowed a generous, fortifying dose, looked once more down at the flickering laptop screen, massaged his eyelids.

Why should this be so difficult? It wasn’t like Violet was the only woman in the world, for Christ’s sake. There was Suzy Kinnison, The Girl From The North, protagonist of his previous failed, unsold screenplay. There was the Screen Gems Torch Lady, pictured on a poster above his desk and holding up a shining beacon for Hollywood’s wannabe screenwriters, like himself.

There was Sabrina Flick, traffic copter princess. Flesh and blood, and then some.

Jonny stared at the defiant empty page. Shrinking Violet, who in her disarming but very private way dreamed of inhabiting the femme fatales and platinum heroines of Alfred Hitchcock’s great films, deserved the best of his ingenuity. A woman of unappreciated ingenuity and guile, she deserved an eloquence that matched the acuity of her brain and the heat of her body.

Jonny closed the file. The little screen returned to its blank scape of dull blue and square-shaped desktop folders, many of those named for as-yet-unfinished or to-this-point abandoned stories:

PROUD VICTORY.

SOUTH VULNERABLE.

FREE FORM PHANTASY.

BABES IN TROYLAND.

THE LAST ROULADE.

Another folder, titled ARTSY, contained photographs that either he or Ms. Flick had taken in the year and a half that they’d been seeing each other. There were captured moments from nights out on the Sunset Strip usually in the thick of boozy crowds. There were images documenting getaways north to Cambria or south to Rosarito Beach. And selfies taken while high or giddy that probably were too embarrassing now to share with anyone. Why was he keeping them? More to the question, why was he keeping the folder titled DIANA? It was filled with digital images of his ex-wife or of the two of them together. Time to trash it.

Instead he closed the laptop, drained the remainder of his red wine, took a swipe at his wayward hair in the bathroom mirror and set out for the Scarlet Lounge.

The Lehigh Arms had opened in 1946 in Larchmont, a neighborhood of Hollywood that dated back to the late 1800s and whose signature was postcard-ready historic homes, from Craftsman to shingle-roofed Mediterranean. The Lehigh itself was a stately two-story residential hotel still evocative of an epoch gone by. Its cinnamon-brick, white-shingled façade and roof-high Doric columns on either side of the walk-up front doors belied what were otherwise ordinary-sized and -equipped apartment units inside, none with air conditioning or gas stoves, and each one separated from the other by thin walls that made everyone’s intimate business everyone else’s fodder for gossip. The Lehigh’s selling points, and the reasons that it rarely had a vacancy, were twofold: the small but in their own way charming bungalow apartments in the rear, which surrounded an old but appealing retro swimming pool; and a lively piano bar on the premises, the Scarlet Lounge, which dated back to the Lehigh’s early days as a Hollywood destination hotel and, the stories went, was originally named for the heroine of Gone With the Wind. The Scarlet Lounge still attracted a clientele that came from outside the hotel residency, though most of them came on foot and left, well oiled, the same way.

Jonny considered himself lucky indeed to have snatched up one of the Lehigh bungalows just a year after he’d moved back to L.A. from New York, post-divorce, and the monthly rent was reasonable by faded-Hollywood standards. He could afford it with his high school English teacher’s salary, unsatisfying as it was, and rationalize that at least he resided in the realm of the silver-screen dreamers among which he considered himself.

He’d harnessed the discipline to visit the in-house Scarlet Lounge only now and then in spite of its lure and convenience. Alcoholism ran deep in his family tree, with his father, Walter Stoddard, being the mighty oak. Boozing, too, was the enemy of both aspiring writers and anyone with something to be depressed about.

Pushing through the swinging door inside, Jonny’s senses were immediately activated by the greasy, grilled aroma from the sliders the lounge specialized in serving until 11 for barflies who wanted something to munch, and by the frisky tinkling of the piano keys from just beyond the horseshoe-shaped onyx bar. He didn’t recognize the tune that Daddy Gene Valentine, the lounge’s resident keyboardist, was playing, but then that repertoire tended toward the Big Band era and usually escaped Jonny’s 35-year-old memory bank of musical knowledge. Not that it mattered. Daddy Gene played, and now and again sang, with such verve that the title or nature of the tune invariably filled the Scarlet Lounge with bonhomie.

Like a few among the Lehigh’s tenants, Jonny claimed a regular spot at the bar. His, far enough away from the piano to allow concentration when he was making notes on his script yet close enough to be tantalized when he wanted to be by the music, was available. One of the two regular bartenders, a balding jaunty fellow named Paul (the other regular was a sweet, 60ish blonde named Maxine), nodded to Jonny as he sat down and made a circle with thumb and index finger. That meant Jonny’s Tanqueray and tonic, his usual, would be coming up.

Jonny paid no attention to the three other patrons at the bar as he settled in and pulled a pen and a creased five-by-seven notebook from his jacket pocket.

From the piano, Daddy Gene trilled a flamboyant introduction, and then he sang out in a throaty but on-tune contralto that smacked of long nights on the job and more than a few sublime memories during them:

Kiss me once and kiss me twice then kiss me once again, it’s been a long, long time …

Jonny had heard this one before. Sometimes Daddy Gene sang it trying to mimic Bing Crosby, he always explained. But tonight he was doing it as Daddy Gene.

Haven’t felt like this, my dear since I can’t remember when, it’s been a long, long time …

In the light flickering from within a red glass candle jar on the bar top, Jonny flipped a page in his notebook to a scribbled heading that read: MC INTERIOR V.O. Violet, thinking and smoking at a café table by a window magnetizing the falling rain from outside, musing on her adolescent girlhood:

Before I even knew what either one meant, I discovered the profound connection between sex and death, the inner monologue started.

"My Saturday night date, leather-jacketed Billy something or other, had stood me up. Out of Pall Mall cigarettes and carrying around an empty purse anyway, I just went home. The house was dark. But not quiet. Not hardly. Halfway up the stairs, fumbling my way, I heard them: crying out, breathless, desperate somehow. The nearer I got to the top of the stairs, the more desperate it turned.

"Then I heard her scream. My mother. And crying. An explosion of crying.

‘Mama!’ I lost a shoe