The Growl
Ron Hartley My boyfriend rents a house in Hollywood Hills that comes with a leopard. He does hair and makeup on movies while Diego paces back and forth under the skeptical eye of a caregiver who also comes with the house. Whenever I’m there I can sense the beast’s power: how he makes everybody obsess about who is subservient to whom, how his presence is so keenly felt and how, when he roams about, his absence is so keenly felt. Diego came from Mexico in the trunk of a Lexus. His extra large rosettes indicate he’s a ghost leopard, the rarest of the big cats in the Panthera family and a perfect exotic fit into the tinsel town milieu. His long fangs glisten frightfully next to boyfriend and me in the candlelight, and his two inch claws crackle sharply on the planks of a sunroom overlooking the sprawl of LA, and on the Spanish tile floor around our bed. I’m from the walls and sobriety of New York City where a leopard can get you arrested and where the West Coast boyfriend thing has to be put on hold in deference to a straight life that includes my wife. Whenever I’m in New York I dream of LA, and whenever I’m in LA I dream of LA, so the first thing I do when I get back to LA is call boyfriend, because I love boyfriend, and because I desparately need to recalibrate. As if coincidence was a precursor to fate, I was in LA for three weeks to shoot a cat food commercial. Honestly darling, I really don’t know if I can stay at the house anymore, I said. I feel so naked there—like meat on bone, I said. Lets get a room by the ocean, maybe the Miramar in Santa Monica. Families stay there. There’s vending machines in the lobby and kids running around. Don’t you just love that kind of thing? No, I hate kids, he said. Then how about the Mondrian, I said. But that’s Sunset Strip, he said. Someone from your crew will show up at the bar and think I’m action. Let’s do the Bell Air. We could do face time with Diego from our bed. Can’t, I said. Too pricey, the only palace out there we’re not allowed to book. Then c’mon, let’s stay here, he said. What’s the big deal. I’m putting Diego on speaker, say hi. Que pasa, Diego? I said. A primal growl thundered into my phone, awakening my brain to such clarity I began to giggle. I could use that awesome utterance at the end of the commercial? Little Angora kitties that meowed so adoringly before dinner would emit high protein growls after. Their coats could morph into tawny yellow, patterned with little baby rosettes. I asked if there was a digital voice recorder at the house. For what? boyfriend said. The for what threw me. What if he wanted a finders fee? The agency could get a stock growl for next to nothing. Como te encuentras, I said, and Diego growled again. What a remarkable larynx he had, raspier and way scarier than stock, a growl I could sell. It’s like the wanting cry of a kitten magnified a thousand times, I could say, the kind of sound hit that can have Growl Cat Food selling to the tune of 38 percent market share. My future was alternating in and out of focus. The Marsha Ray agency in Seattle had just landed a mega cat food account featuring a macho line of chicken hearts and livers, and their sign-on bonuses were worth half my salary. I needed that growl on my reel. I would have to go to the house once more, risk mutilation and record Diego. Boyfriend would love having me there again which might deflect any need for a finder’s fee. Listen, darling, forget the Miramar, I said. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. It would be such a thrill to stay at the house again. Remember how we got off on those eyes—those golden eyes staring at us, I said. There was a whisper on the other end, or was it a growl? It was at once seductive and ominous, like an urgent wind from the sea that rustles the palm leaves when a cyclone is just fifty miles offshore. |
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About the Author:
Ron Hartley was a staff creative director at several New York ad agencies and helped create close to 100 national network and cable TV campaigns. Much of his writing is about that strangest of worlds. Ron was recognized by most of the major advertising awards shows and his personal work in art and photography has appeared in Photo Review, Art and Psyche at NYU, The Katonah Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Public Library, Aras online, and other venues
Ron Hartley was a staff creative director at several New York ad agencies and helped create close to 100 national network and cable TV campaigns. Much of his writing is about that strangest of worlds. Ron was recognized by most of the major advertising awards shows and his personal work in art and photography has appeared in Photo Review, Art and Psyche at NYU, The Katonah Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Public Library, Aras online, and other venues