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major.
    Every weekend, people in the business flocked to the “Springs”; solar lemmings. It was hot and dry and easy to score; coke, cock, cunt. Control. In forty-eight hours, players big and small could make the round trip. Brown in the sun. Have drinks. Set up deals. Make connections. Play tennis.
    Lie.
    Business didn’t stop in Hollywood on weekends. It just moved and used a net. The Tijuana wristwatch hustle kept rolling 125 miles south under a welding sun.
But
really it was another workday. The sun beat down on the crazies, an interrogation lamp, and deals sweated along with everything else.
    Alan downshifted his 928S as a bunch of Big Mac hyenas in a rowdy Trans Am cut him off, laughing mindlessly, dragging an unleaded tail. Two sixteen-year-old girls in back smiled through ghoul makeup and lifted blouses. Their dumpling breasts shook, mimicking the road; D-cup toys. Then, the car vanished.
    Alan pushed his CD player on and cranked the volume on Concrete Blonde’s “BLOODLETTING” to ten. Another hour to go. He hoped his father was in a good mood.
    Or at least not a bad one.
    He roared in front of La Petite Gallerie about noon. The Springs was already on broil and the sun speared him the second he snuffed the engine and got out. He stretched a cello spine, reached back in, tossed his CD and cassette box behind the seat, in shade. Big mistake leaving tapes in an obvious spot. He’d done it once and come back to find a Dolby sundae.
    No different from what this place did to its population, he thought, starting to sweat. Took fine people with good brains, treated them like butter in a frying pan. “Sssssszzzzzzzzzz … honey, I don’t feel so good.” Too long on the fairway, your brain is running down your tie.
    Alan grabbed the gift he’d brought for his dad’s birthday and headed in the fancy front door. Much coolerinside; a meat locker. He straightened his hair, strolled through, taking note of inventory that had come in since his visit a month back.
    Magrittes. Two of them.
This Is Not a Pipe.
One of Alan’s favorites. Magritte would’ve been a trip to have a Heineken with. The bottle would drink him.
    At the curving, teak counter, Alan’s father, Burt, was chatting with a woman in her seventies who looked very rich. She dressed Town and Country summer chic, with emerald-and-diamond bracelets cuffing wrinkled wrists, hair pulled Grace Kelly tight. Burt always had Broadway show music playing in the gallery; never got all those years he’d directed in New York off the turntable.
    Give me a break, Dad, thought Alan. We’re in the fuckin’ nineties here, this isn’t Brigadoon; get used to it.
    “Alan!”
    “Dad! Listen, don’t let me interrupt. Looks like you got a live one here.” He was talking loud enough for Grace Kelly’s hair to hear and she smiled tautly.
    Burt raised a smile that kept a polite distance. It had always been that way, thought Alan, and it seemed things never changed. Never got easier.
    Never got more personal.
    Alan realized it had been the challenge of his childhood to seek his effect on his father by trying to surpass himself. Jokes. Gifts. Accomplishments. Money. Anything that could be measured. Admired. Objectified. All to get enthusiasm from a man he sensed deep down wasn’t capable of it. But Alan knew he’d always keep trying anyway.
    It wasn’t that his father withheld love. Or had none. It was trickier. The love was all there. Just that Burt wasn’t.He was lost, preoccupied, pointing his telescope away from earth, at topics and issues, not human intimacy.
    Since he’d retired from Broadway, and come to the Springs, it seemed to Alan it had gotten worse. Burt railed about lofty ideals but never spoke about personal stuff. It was always “the integrity of art” kind of shit. Life in the pauperized culture. Alan’s mother, Dee, had managed to keep Burt at sixes and sevens with it all. But since she was gone and Burt had remarried to Wanda, he’d become a bad