Brief Nudity by Ron Goulart
* * * *
Ron Goulart is well known for his work in several fiction genres, and he is also an expert on pulp-fiction magazines and comic strips. His history of adventure comic strips from the 1930s, The Adventurous Decade, was recently reprinted in a large trade paperback edition. His latest novel is Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle (St. Martin’s).
The official verdict was that he’d been doing a bit of late-night jogging along the beach and suffered a fatal heart attack. Not surprising in a man his age. Actually, though, Bud Hebberd had been running for his life and if he hadn’t fallen dead, they’d have shot him down.
I’d encountered Bud for the first time in several years just three weeks earlier. I was standing there in the Wee Chapel of Eternal Rest in Santa Monica looking down at the closed coffin and reflecting on the fact that I had, unfortunately, reached the age where attending the wakes and funerals of my contemporaries was beginning to take up an increasing amount of my time.
Then, rather tentatively, someone slapped me on the back and spoke my name.
“You’ve held up better than I expected,” he said as I turned to face him. “Not that many wrinkles and the hair looks to be all your own, buddy, in spite of that cornbread color you’ve got it dyed.”
I frowned. The nasal voice sounded somewhat familiar, but I didn’t immediately recognize the man. “Bud Hebberd?” I guessed after a few seconds.
Spreading his arms wide, he admitted, “The same.”
Bud was at least forty pounds heavier than when he ran an animation studio that now and then turned out TV spots for the advertising agency where I was an account man. He didn’t have hair anymore and he was obviously wearing contact lenses that weren’t comfortable and caused him to blink quite a lot.
“Too bad about Gil,” I said as we moved to the side of the little chapel and stood near a brand-new stained-glass window.
He made a noise that was part wheeze and part chuckle. “Once an adman, always an adman, right there with the appropriate cliché,” he said. “Gil Jacobs was a second-rate photographer and a third-rate human being.” He produced another wheezy chuckle. “If it hadn’t been for his sideline, the guy would’ve starved to death years since.”
“And how have you been, Bud?”
“Lousy,” he replied. “My life, as you should remember, took a serious downturn over twenty-five years ago.” He sighed. “That was when Marina Bowen tossed me out on my ear.”
“Hey, you should have recovered from that at least twenty-four years ago.”
Scowling, Bud said, “You never were very imaginative. So you don’t know, being such a stodgy upper-middle-class sort of fellow, what it feels like to have the love of your life turn against you for no apparent reason.” Bud shook his bald head forlornly. “The trauma of that fateful parting, buddy, ruined my career as a serious artist and—”
“As I recall, it was actually a long series of saloon brawls that—”
“Admittedly,” he admitted, “I drank for a brief period.”
“Eleven or twelve years isn’t exactly brief, Bud, even for old coots like us.”
“Let’s walk down to the beach,” he suggested, taking hold of my arm. “The smell of all these damn wilting flowers is starting to—”
“I told somebody I’d meet him here.”
“There’s something important I want to discuss.”
“Even so.”
He lowered his voice. “Listen, I finally found out why Marina dumped me all those long years ago. And if it hadn’t been for that son of a bitch lying in that casket yonder I never would’ve known.”
My curiosity was, albeit only slightly, aroused and I allowed Bud to lead me out of the funeral home and into the misty early evening.
A thin grey fog was drifting in across the darkening Pacific. Bud, breathing heavily, said, “I better sit down for a minute.” He settled, with a wheezy sigh, onto one of the benches along the seafront.
“We can head back inside if—”
“I’m okay. Just not up to long hikes.”
“A block and a half isn’t exactly—”
“I just want to catch my breath,” he said. “Now, about Marina.”
“Gil Jacobs told you something?”
“Not Gil directly, no,” he answered. “I imagine what that jerk did was have a sort of deathbed conversion and became a nice guy for a short while before he kicked off. He instructed his attorney to turn this over to me.” Fishing a small silver key from his coat pocket, he held it up. “Along with a—for him—apologetic letter.”
“Safe-deposit box?” My legs were starting to ache slightly, so I sat down next to him.
Another raspy chuckle. “A commodious safe-deposit box in a California Trust Bank branch in Altadena.” Dropping the key away, he gazed up into the foggy night. “Very illuminating, the contents. Only one of the folders applied to me, but Gil, as he was shuffling off to oblivion, wasn’t thinking too clearly and he turned over all the files that have added so immeasurably to his livelihood over the years.”
I asked, “You’re implying that he was a blackmailer?”
“That he was. In addition to being a jealous and duplicitous rat and a mediocre commercial photographer.”
“He did some good work for my ad agency back—”
“Proving my point.”
The fog was growing thicker and colder. “What did Gil say in the letter?”
After taking a few short breaths, Bud replied, “It was an apology. Yeah, he told me to look in the file he’d kept on me and I’d find out why Marina had given me the heave-ho. I don’t know if you remember that Gil was also interested in her. Not that he had a chance.”
“He showed her,” I guessed, “some photographs.”
Bud nodded. “Sent them to her, actually. You know how on cable at the beginning of every movie they put a warning? ‘Adult content, adult language, mild violence, brief nudity.’ That was my problem.”
“Which? Adult content?”
“No, wise-ass. Brief nudity.” He held up a forefinger. “Once, just only once while I was with Marina, I strayed and spent the night with another woman. A couple of hours at the All-Star Motel that used to be on Wilshire twenty-five years ago.”
“Gil got pictures of that?”
“What I didn’t know was that he was trailing me, trying to get something, anything, that’d make Marina break up with me,” Bud said, wheezing some. “I didn’t even know he was outside the side window using that film that doesn’t need a flash. Inez Federman.”
“Who?”
“Inez Federman, did commercials. She was the young housewife in the Farmer Fred’s Smoked Sausage spots where her husband and repulsive offsprings all start howling for—”
“Nope, don’t recall her. We never used her at our agency.”
“I thought she had a terrific crush on me and one night when Marina went to a screening at the Writers Guild for some Italian tearjerker I didn’t want to see, I ran into Inez at a joint on the Strip. Gil confessed in his letter that he’d hired her to lure me to that motel.”
“And you allowed yourself to be lured, Bud.”
“Inez was awfully cute.” He shook his head, then sat up straighter. A smile touched his plump face. “Now here’s what I intend to do.”
“About what?”
“Marina and me. Haven’t you been paying attention, buddy?” He frowned at me. “I’m going to tell Marina that Gil faked this whole thing. She’s certain to—”
“You actually know where Marina Bowen is?” I asked. “She dropped out of movies a good fifteen years ago. And after doing thirteen episodes of that dreadful sitcom about a widow who inherited a circus, she disappeared from Hollywood.”
“Well, no,” he admitted, “I don’t yet know where she’s living now. I only got Gil’s stuff today. But once I check with SAG and some of her old friends, I know I’ll be able to track her down. Once I find her, I’ll convince her that I was sabotaged by that louse over yonder.” He pointed at the fog-enshrouded funeral home across the street where the neon sign was flashing a blurry Eternal Rest into the night.
Almost three weeks passed before I encountered Bud Hebberd again. Now and then I still do a consulting job for the advertising agency where I worked for over thirty years. They were co-producing a TV reality show tentatively titled Elective Surgery. It was felt that Dr. Vernon Noodleman, bestselling author of Surgery Can Be Fun, would make an ideal host. Noodleman felt otherwise, but since I’d worked with him back in the 1980s when he appeared in a series of TV spots for our Butch Masculine Deodorant account, it was thought that I might be able to persuade him where others had failed.
So I flew to Tucson two days after Gil Jacobs’s wake and spent a week and a half cajoling Dr. Noodleman. I’d just about got him to agree to host Elective Surgery when the Creative Director at the agency faxed me at my hotel to inform me that the show was being retitled So You Want a New Face and they were actively pursuing a noted Chicago plastic surgeon for the hosting position.
Preoccupied as I was with pitching Dr. Noodleman, I pretty much forgot about Bud and his attempts to find his long-lost love.
On a smoggy Tuesday afternoon, over a week after I got back to L.A., as I was leaving the Sunset Strip office of my latest urologist, I noticed Bud, wearing a faded Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts that didn’t much flatter his flabby legs, standing at the corner up ahead.
“How’ve you been?” I inquired, catching up with him.
“Wretched, miserable,” he answered without looking at me, “frustrated, forlorn, downcast, depressed, morose—”
“Okay, enough,” I cut in. “So what did Marina say when you found her?”
“I haven’t found her.” He pointed across the street at Moonbaum’s Delicatessen. “Let me treat you to a plate of blueberry blintzes and I’ll explain.”
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