After filming a World War Two version ofTop Gun, calledFlight 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 aFlight Deckframe 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, hereallyhad 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. Theirfinalwords 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,manysimilar 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 forbreakfast. 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 areyoudoing 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. “Youpromisedme you’d be there, and now I’ll be covering your backsideonce againas well as mine. I know you pay me the going rate of a babysitter, but I’m not yournanny, I’m your publicist.” She cut the air with a swipe of her hand. “No, Iwasyour 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?”
