Meet Me at the Starlight

Chapter 4

MATT

MARCH 1987

SANTA MONICA

Ugh. What time was it? By the angles of sun on the floor, it was midmorning. A hundred yards away, the ocean waves refreshed the southern California shore as seagulls circled, calling for breakfast.

Someone had opened the French doors out to his balcony, letting in the sounds of the street—a car door slamming shut, masculine voices tangling in tight conversation.

“Matt, bro, you got coffee?” A bare-chested man stood in the doorway, his jeans slung low, his hair standing on end.

“In the pantry. Coffee maker is on the counter.” And you are ... ?

Matt was no stranger to strangers in his place, but in the last year, his open-door policy had gotten wider and wider. What started as an intention to be gracious and helpful had turned into destruction. What started as trying to redeem himself by being a friend to many ended with strangers, looters, and squatters ruining his place. He’d replaced doors, windows, bathroom fixtures, carpet, tile, and at least four mirrors. He’d painted and repainted the bare walls and replaced the bare cupboards—bare because his housekeeper, Golda, hid all of his carefully curated art, fine china, flatware, and Egyptian cotton linens.

As Matt reached for his jeans, his brain sloshed against his skull in searing protest. Oh, man, what happened last night? He breathed through a wave of nausea and disgust, catching visions of a drag race.

What day was it? Sunday?

Last night, he’d dined at the Beverly Hills Hotel with the beautiful, sexy Cindy Canon. They’d been cast in a new romantic comedy Date for My Daughter, and through table reads and rehearsals, they’d discovered their sultry chemistry.

But that was on set as Mitchell and Clementine. So Matt invited her to dinner to test their personal chemistry. Why not? She was gorgeous, with expressive eyes and full pink lips. He was, well, the Matt Knight.

During the evening, they sipped wine and talked about how her career took off after her second film and how she was shedding her small-town Mississippi ways and the rules of her father’s house and church.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she said with a cute Elvis-like flip of her lip. “Dad, there’s a world out there to be lived, you know? To explore. Like, time to loosen the religious tie, old man.”

She laughed a lot, which made Matt laugh, which he’d not done very much of in recent memory. Laughter inoculated him from the general sense of unease he always carried with him.

After filming a World War Two version of Top Gun, called Flight Deck, which had him in Europe and on rolling seas for five months, Matt came home exhausted and ready to par-tay.

He and his co-stars, Rob Stone and Steven Hilliard, had become superstars when the movie eclipsed last year’s flyboy flick. Sorry, Tom Cruise.

So he was ready for a rom-com with someone fun, spunky, lively. Cindy was great, but he knew they had no future. Once, just once, he’d fallen for a co-star, but she’d fallen for the billionaire producer.

Making his way to the en suite, he brushed away last night’s death smell with Colgate, then studied the bruises around his knuckles. Matt didn’t need the mirror to know he was an unshaven thirty-two-year-old man with bloodshot eyes, bed head, and a body in need of a shower.

Think, man, what happened? After dinner, Cindy clung to his arm—which he liked—as they left the hotel, discussing where to go next. They decided on Whisky a Go Go, where they ran into Steve and Rob, who were in a Flight Deck frame of mind.

After the first round of tequila shots, it was pedal to the metal and somewhere along the way, he lost Cindy, perhaps took a swing at someone and ... the rest of the night was a blur.

Out of his room, he ran into another interloper, wrapped in a sheet. “I found this in the bathroom.” She passed him a letter before disappearing in the last bedroom on the left. Man, he really had to get a hold of his life.

The envelope bore the familiar pinched handwriting of Booker Nickle, former best friend.

This was his third letter in three years, and the third one Matt tossed, unopened. He didn’t know why Booker was writing, but he lacked the courage to find out. Their final words eight years ago lived in his soul.

Stuffing the letter in his hip pocket, Matt leaned over the second-floor balcony to assess the living room. It was littered with people, empty whiskey bottles and drug paraphernalia defacing the glass top of his custom coffee table. The sight was all too familiar.

When he spotted his Porsche keys on the carpet under an end table, he bound down the wide curved staircase and snatched them up with a vague memory of Steve dragging down Sunset Strip. If the cops didn’t knock on his door to arrest him for reckless endangerment or for public intoxication, he’d repent of his ways—for real this time—and find a way to live right.

In Hollywood, Matt Knight was a giant. The lucky kid who came to play football at USC but ended up “in the pictures,” as Granny would say. Everyone wanted to be him.

Yet in real life, he was nothing like the characters he portrayed on the silver screen—heroic, larger than life, defender of truth and justice—and, yeah, the contradiction ate at him.

Stepping over bodies and bottles, Matt grabbed the small gong purchased somewhere in Manhattan while promoting a rom-com he did a few years back with Hazel Rosen and supermodel Harlow Hayes.

“All right, let’s go, let’s go. Everyone up and out, out, out!” He hammered the gong and kicked at a guy under the coffee table.

In the kitchen, the bare-chested dude looked up from where he nuzzled the neck of a disheveled brunette. “What about that coffee, man?”

“There’s a diner down the street. Let’s go, let’s go.” Yelling made his head pound, but he wanted the evidence of last night—and of so many, many, many similar nights—out of sight. No less than twenty or thirty people filed out of his seven-bedroom, six-thousand-square-foot house on the Santa Monica coast. He recognized no one.

When he was alone, he locked the door and surveyed the damage. Why, Matt? Why do you do it? His beautiful place, the one he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to decorate with one-of-a-kind pieces, was being destroyed. Last time Golda came to clean, she informed him she might not be able to scour away the perpetual reek of sweat, booze, and vomit. But she’d try.

He reached for the portable phone. “Golda, hey, it’s me. Can you come clean the place? It’s a mess. Call me.” She’d charge him double for a Sunday, but he didn’t care. He’d pay triple just to have last night Cloroxed away.

Shoving open the glass doors to the lanai, a salty bite of the Pacific breeze cleared his head a bit, and his stomach growled for breakfast. The aforementioned diner served a mean omelet and good coffee.

He showered and dressed in his last pair of clean jeans and pulled a T-shirt from a bureau drawer—one a stranger had clearly rifled through. The dirty jeans, he tossed in the laundry, and the letter? He hesitated. Why was Booker writing? To say once again, “You ruined my life, man.” Was this a new tradition? An annual tribute to remind Matt of his failings? Maybe he should gather up some courage and read it. Yet another moment ticked by, and he dropped the envelope in the trash.

Next, he stripped every bed in the house and dumped the lot in the laundry room. Forget triple. He’d be paying Golda quadruple for this mess.

The front doorbell rang, and Matt dashed to answer. “Golda, darling—”

“It’s Amelia, darling, and why are you still here?”

“I live here. What are you doing here on a Sunday morning?” He stepped aside to let her in.

“I knew it. You forgot.” Amelia, his public relationship guru, had handled his press since he earned his SAG card. “You’re supposed to be at a luncheon in Beverly Hills.” She stood in the grand foyer, glaring at him with disdain. “You promised me you’d be there, and now I’ll be covering your backside once again as well as mine. I know you pay me the going rate of a babysitter, but I’m not your nanny, I’m your publicist.” She cut the air with a swipe of her hand. “No, I was your publicist. I quit, and oh my gosh, why does the house smell like a sewer?”

“Amelia, I’ll go. Right now. I promise.” He reached for his car keys. “Call them, say I had an emergency but I’m on my way. And you can’t quit.”

“Watch me. And put your keys down, it’s too late. By the time you arrive, they’ll be on the golf course. But that’s the good news.” She moved to the living room and looked around. “Where can I sit without contracting a disease?”

“You’d better stand until Golda comes. What do you mean that’s the good news?”

“Last night is all over the papers and radio. Were you really dragging down Sunset Strip?”

“My car, yes. Steve was driving.”

“And you got in a fight with a fan?”

Matt flexed his hand. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I can’t stand it. You rich man-boys. Matt, you’ve got to grow up, honey.” Barely in her mid-thirties herself, Amelia was “Mama” to all her clients. “It’s biting you in the butt. The drag racing is one thing, the fighting another. But, darling, you left Cindy Canon behind. You abandoned her at some seedy bar. She was terrified.”

“Abandoned? Come on, that’s not ... like me.” It certainly was like him.

“She’s furious. Her agent called me at three in the morning. Do you know how much I hate to be pulled out of a good dream to be yelled at? Do you know how often I have good dreams?” Amelia leaned to see something moving on the carpet, made a face, and jumped to the lanai doors. “Matt, you’re one of my favorite clients, but, sweetheart, you’ve got to stop sabotaging yourself. You’re taking me down with you.”

“Amelia, I’m sorry. Truly. We were, shew, um, I remember there were tequila shots and—why did her agent call you and not Cosmo?” Cosmo Gilcrest, agent to the stars, all but discovered Matt twelve years ago.

“Oh, he called Cos too.” Amelia inhaled a deep breath. “Matt, you’re thirty-two years old. Stay out of the clubs. You’re fine for months on end, even years, then bam! You blow all your goodwill in a weekend. You’re not a drinker, Matt. Shoot, you’re not really a partier. Stop this nonsense because it’s not killing whatever’s eating you.”

“Nothing’s eating me.”

“How little we know ourselves.” She smiled, patted him on the cheek, wished him luck in his future endeavors, and left. He stared after her, trying to find the words to explain how a single letter riled up so much inner strife.

Grabbing a trash bag and a pair of work gloves from his immaculate garage—he may have to live there while the house was fumigated—he gathered discarded clothing, bottles, and carryout bags stained with grease. He’d give Amelia a few days, then call her and repent. And he wasn’t above begging.

He shoved a ratty T-shirt that had been thrown over his answering machine into the trash bag. It blinked up at him. He had a message?

Matt pressed play. The first voice was from Tom Cruise, back when Flight Deck surpassed Top Gun. Matt hit delete, unsure why he’d even saved Cruise’s humble response to Matt’s gloating and taunting.

Matt, be better.

Next was a message from Cosmo, but they’d talked since then, so ... delete.

The next voice was so sweet, so familiar, so emotionally stirring. Granny. “Matty? Can you call me?”

The recording ended abruptly, with a time signature from twenty days ago. Twenty days? Then a second message played from ten days ago.

“Matty, I think the Starlight is in trouble. We need you.”

What? How could the Starlight be in trouble? The old rink was the heart of his hometown.

Another beep, and Dad’s voice played from the machine. “Matt, it’s Saturday night so you’re probably out but don’t ignore your grandmother. Call her.”

I will, I will. How did he miss her messages? He was about to dial Granny when Cosmo rang in.

“Hey, is this about last night?” Matt asked. No use beating around the bush.

“Are you sitting down?”

“That bad?”

“You’re off the movie with Cindy. She didn’t appreciate being left alone, and I quote, ‘at a dark cave with werewolves and vampires.’ She was scared, and in her mind, made to look a fool.”

“Werewolves and vampires?”

“Her metaphor, Matt. But did you hear me? You’re off the movie.”

“Yeah, I heard you. Isn’t that a bit drastic? Cindy and I are great together. She’s just mad. I’ll send her twelve dozen roses, apologize, and promise to never do it again.”

“Amelia tells me you missed the Beverly Hills luncheon.”

“I overslept.”

“We worked hard to get you a spot at that luncheon. The producers of the new action film Die Hard were there. Which, by the way, John McTiernan, the director, just called. He’s going with Bruce Willis.”

“The guy from Moonlighting? He can’t be serious.”

“Matt, you work like a dog on set. No one can challenge you there, but every now and then your personal life turns into a freak show. I don’t get it.”

“Cosmo, you can’t throw a rock in LA and not hit a freak show. And what’s wrong with a guy blowing off steam?” He glanced around his trashed place. “Or helping out a few down-and-outers?”

“If you wanted to help those less fortunate, start with yourself. Look, Cindy doesn’t want you in her movie. The screenplay was written for her. She’s the star. She has the producer’s ear and probably his heart. So she gets her way. Besides leaving her to fend for herself, you also told her she needed to work on her craft or you’d upstage her. You also insulted the director, saying he didn’t know his head from—”

“I get it, Cos.” When would he learn? Alcohol lured every thought from his head and through his lips. “I’ll apologize.” He’d gotten good at apologies. Except for the one that mattered most. “And for the record, Roger Woods is a brilliant director.”

In twelve years, he’d done twenty films, half of them rom-coms, several with Roger, and they’d all been huge successes. Except for the one about the alien monsters, but it was early in his career, so Matt didn’t count it.

“I’ll pass that along. Just so you know, I’m on your side, Matt,” Cosmo said. “But you have to figure out why you do this. Maybe filming and promoting Flight Deck took it out of you. Why don’t you take some time off? Go to Club Med or Greece or Australia.”

“I think the Starlight is in trouble.”

“Actually, I’m going home. See what’s happening in Sea Blue Beach.”

“Excellent idea. You can disappear from the news for a while. Make people miss you.”

“Thanks, Cosmo. I mean it. Sorry for all the trouble. If you need me, I’ll be at my dad’s.”

Matt took ten minutes to pack and call Golda to tell her he was going out of town. “I’ll leave you a check on the kitchen counter. Close the place up when you’re done. I don’t want anyone crashing here while I’m away.”

Then he threw his bag in the Porsche and headed east through the evening shadows toward the Starlight.