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He doesn’t say “come in” but just leaves the door open. I follow him down a short inner hallway to a dusty living room.
“Not that I should complain about faces,” he says as he settles down into a sagging easy chair. “Look at my mug. I used to be kind of a dreamboat. Not Steve McQueen or anything, but I did all right.”
He’s right about being past his dreamboat prime. His forehead is like a rutted dirt road. The rest of his face is oddly sunken. The cheekbones are flattened like there’s plastic under the flesh. His lips are slightly crooked.
I say, “Is that because of a car accident?”
“You know it. Seat belts were for sissies back then, except one day the Mustang decides to wrap itself around a tree and my face is hamburger.”
“That must have been hard for an actor.”
He waves a dismissive hand at me.
“They put me back together the best they could, but I was never the same. These days, of course, surgeons work miracles.” He laughs a rasping smoker’s laugh. “Like some of the critics said back then, I was ahead of my time.” He laughs again and holds out his hand. “You have my two hundred?”
I put two bills in his hand and he looks them over before putting them in his pocket.
The white walls of the apartment are lined with posters of his old movies. Photos of his palling around with celebrities from the sixties and seventies. Some kind of award plaque too far away for me to read. Next to that is a plastic toy Academy Award with his name on it.
“What do you think?” he says. “Not bad for a farm kid from El Paso.”
His sunken face and the sun-faded memories are pretty sad, so I say, “It’s impressive.”
But Gentry isn’t dumb. He says, “No. You think it’s shit. I can tell. Let me ask you something, Johnny Handsome. How many movies did you star in? Me? Twenty.”
I don’t mind if he gets mad at me. I just don’t want him to throw me out.
“No, really. It’s interesting.”
“Fuck you. Why don’t you take your attitude and that face and crawl back to the freak show?”
I look at him hard.
“I paid you up front, so we’re going to talk. And be honest, you didn’t star in all those movies. You were a bit player who didn’t get decent billing until the last four or five.”
He purses his lips and the angles of his face go even more out of whack.
“That’s four or five more than you, Clark Gable.”
“You’re right. I’ve never been in a movie and I never met a celebrity in my life. But you have and that’s why I paid you two hundred dollars. So, let’s talk about Chris Stein.”
He picks up a pack of Marlboros from a little table by his chair, tears the filter off one, and lights up.
“What do you want to know?”
“You were friends for a long time.”
He puffs out a stream of smoke and in the sunlight, he disappears for a few seconds.
“We were. Met soon after we each came to L.A. We were roommates for a while too, only we didn’t let many people know because back then two good-looking guys together in a shitty little apartment, people might think we were fags.”
This guy gets more charming by the second.
“So, what happened? You were both about to hit the big time.”
“The accident,” he says. “And coke. I couldn’t leave the stuff alone. Got a bad rep. Between my face and the drugs, the doors slammed shut. And boom. That was that.”
Gentry gestures to the Academy Award with his cigarette.
