Ghosts of Hollywood
Short Story Written by A.K. Steinhoff

Desmond could still hear the passing traffic as he approached the construction site. A former Pauper’s graveyard, now a stretch of high end real estate. Bright lights from the newest set of garish condos washed out the empty dirt lot, with its skeletal back hoes and fork lifts, giving it the feel of a movie set. And why not? Why shouldn’t this stretch of land have the same empty fake feeling as everywhere else in Hollywood?

        “Don’t be so dramatic,” piped up Zigar, the imp in Desmond’s overcoat pocket. With his left hand, Desmond shoved the imp back down into his coat, then zipped it shut. It flailed and fought beneath the trench coat’s slippery fabric, like an alien parasite. All the same, Zigar quieted as they approached the dirt mound, a thin blue plastic tarp carefully held down by stacks of concrete blocks at each corner. Even the imp wasn’t stupid enough to chatter on, considering what lay asleep only a few yards away.

        “A plastic tarp,” Desmond scoffed. The sight of the frayed blue cloth flapping at one end infuriated him and terrified him simultaneously. Further proof of the sacrilege at work, the disrespect of this wanton principality. “City of Angels,” he barked to no one. “More like City of desecrated bodies, left in the unending sun to rot. They didn’t even bother to haul them off yet!” The imp thought better of the sarcastic reply on the tip of his forked tongue. In a few moments, Desmond might be all that stood between them and vivisection. Imps couldn’t die, but they could be torn limb from limb by undead ghouls. They could also be chopped into tiny bits by an old fashioned lawn mower, and the reassembled using necromancy. Zigar had learned not to question Desmond’s motives or abilities.

        The truth of his tirade aside, Desmond knew he was just stalling for time. He had a heart as black as a demonic, murderous pirate captain, but a stomach as queasy as a five year old on a tilt-a-whirl. “How many do you think there are in there? The mound isn’t as big as it looks from the road,” Desmond spoke to his pocket. Zigar’s little shoulders shrugged under the fabric.

        “Do you want an undead army or not?” Zigar asked. Desmond did. He didn’t just want it. He needed some kind of satisfaction for the years spent in this city, getting nowhere, getting rejected, feeling as worthless and forgotten as the fast food wrappers lining the side of the 405. For most, reanimating the contents of a pauper’s graveyard wouldn’t have been the obvious route for peace of mind. Desmond was not, and would never be, one of the masses. His grad school creative writing class had been quite clear on that one.

        The incantation came from a moldering tome he’d purchased over the internet. Little known fact about the underground magical community, they frequently relied upon the internet to sell and exchange extremely dangerous items and information, under the assumption that most people would fail to take it seriously, and those hapless fools who did would find themselves facing any number of dark spells laced through the gigabytes and coding to turn their brains to mush should they try to make a purchase. Only a real sorcerer would know the proper incantations to counter such an assault, thereby keeping the item in proper hands. Proper, of course, was a relative term when speaking of maniacal sorcerers and necromancers.

        Desmond felt certain the books cover was real human skin, its thin pages made by a process unused since Caesar’s blood ran and congealed across the forum floor. It stank of death, having spent the last one hundred and eighty years clutched in the arms of a deranged and now rotting monarch, a man convinced the only cure for his madness was to surround his sick bed with occult paraphernalia. Needless to say, this particular memento hadn’t helped his recuperation, and more likely had been the cause of his mental anguish. It was a tool of destruction, for certain, and destruction sounded as delicious to Desmond as a donut from Randy’s at three in the morning. A donut, plus a coke with crushed ice.

        Zigar squirmed deeper into Desmond’s pocket. Demon and coward were not exclusive conditions. “I can feel it inside my head! It wants us to start!” he squealed with a shiver.

        Desmond didn’t need the quaking imp to tell him what the book wanted. He nodded, to himself as much o the book. “Yes,” he said to the echoing cars racing down the boulevard. “Yes.”

        He laid the book down on the earth, pulled out a small oak wand the size of a miniature pen, or what many electronics nerds would have called a stylus before the creation of touch screen palm pilots and cellular phones. He took the oaken wand, and began to drag it through the dirt, the lines and patterns forming a series of arcane symbols. The work was both easy and hard. A set of shapes and letters, almost childish in their simplicity, but the slightest error could set off an explosion big enough to launch nine cubic feed of dust and gravel into the air, removing Desmond’s arms and face in the process.

        Finished, Desmond retrieved the book and began to read. His voice sounded clear and melodic. His tongue did not stutter once over the ancient language. All the years in high school choir trying to woo Sarah Peterman had done some good for him. It certainly hadn’t gotten him Sarah.

        He repeated the words over and over again, each time letting the sound swell, first projecting across the empty lot, then letting loose until he was shrieking a banshee’s death rattle, face red, knuckles white around the book’s edges, vocal chords ready to shrivel up and die like the stacks of unhallowed souls lumped together in the unhappy mound before him.

        Man and imp waited, watching as the corners of the tent continued to flicker in the ocean’s breeze. Zigar dared a peek out of his hiding spot, hoping with all twelve inches of his little green body that his master had exaggerated greatly the extent of his powers.

        “Well, boss. You win some, you lose some. Back to the drawing board,” he chattered.

        The tarp moved.

        Desmond grinned. No, not grinned. He snarled with joy. He sneered with pure delight at the unholy monstrosity before him.

        The imp, however, did not share in his mirth. “The wind! It’s only the wind. You know it was blowing before, didn’t you see it? Why get your hopes up over a little gust of wind?”

        Without taking his eyes off the tarp, Desmond slid a hand into his coat pocket, and in one nimble flick of his wrist, snapped the little creature’s neck. In a few minutes, the bones would straighten and mend, and once more the imp could ramble onwards. Perhaps sitting silently, suffering through the pain of a broken neck, would teach him not to spout inanities at such a monumental occasion.

        In some sick way, abusing his fiendish companion empowered Desmond. He stepped forward. Not just moving now, the tarp churned with life. When the first arm broke through, Desmond shuddered, though not from fear. The pale limb wore a frayed blue sleeve, which might have been pretty before spending eighty years decomposing in a coffin, along with its wearer. After the arm came a girl, who must have been quite young and pert at the time of her demise. Desmond wondered how such a frail, even delicate looking creature could possess such strength to wrench her mangled body out of a hill of dry earth. The answer lay right in his hand, the small oaken twig, or more specifically the spell itself. These monsters had strength, because he, Desmond, had used his powers to grant it to them. The dead spewed out from the hill, writhing and twisting like maggots to pull themselves free. Their tattered clothes represented a gauntlet of eras, none of them from after the Pauper’s Cemetery had closed in 1968. With all the mud and holes though, it was hard to tell.

        Onwards they came, climbing to their skeletal feet, often dragging broken legs or missing them all together. That didn’t seem to hinder their pace one bit. Onwards towards Desmond, with the young girl at their front, her dry skin rustling like a bad taffeta prom dress. He looked down at the book in his hands. This was the part where he needed to tell them what to do, command them. Desmond’s finger flicked over the lines, looking for where he’d left off.

        He raised the oaken wand, pointing it at the dead young woman, then scraped out a few more of the harsh, guttural ancient words from the back of his throat. This spell would bind their will to his and render the whole lot of them slaves to his bidding. Inside the pocket, Zigar kicked at his master’s chest, beating out his legs like the wings of a hummingbird. He wanted to say, ‘you’ve done it wrong.’ He wanted to scream ‘you forgot a word. A very important word!’ but the small bones in his throat still protruded through his unhappy green larynx. In the end, Zigar could not but shrug and hope for the best. Desmond finished with a triumphant grin. He pointed in the direction of Hollywood, turned to glare at the fifty foot white letters sitting high and mighty up on Mt. Lee. They stood for everything he hated. The fake glamour. The arrogance. The lies.

        “Back in my day, there used to be more of them,” said the dead girl, and then pounced on Desmond. He black teeth were deep in his forearm before he even registered what or rather, who had bitten him. A tall zombie with a dashing suit and a face like a charred marshmallow threw a casual arm around Desmond’s shoulders, like old buddies out for a night of ladies and booze. From the look of the non burnt half of this fellow’s face, he probably stood quite well with the ladies. Post coffin that is. The once handsome fellow tugged on Desmond, pulling him away from the young 1920s girl. She pouted, Desmond’s blood running down her chin.

        “NO! The book said- Not me! Hollywood! Destroy Hollywood!” His words gurgled off into nothing. The handsome fellow knocked him onto his back, tearing into the side of his throat with the gusto of an action star. In all the chaos, a limping Zigar slipped from Desmond’s pocket, shaking off bits of gore than had rained down his former master’s shirtfront. To his right the pile of dirt continued to shake as the last few stragglers gained fresh air and freedom. Not my problem, he thought. Least I didn’t get chopped into tiny pieces. With that air of optimism, Zigar scurried off in search of a new authority figure to scorn.

        Meanwhile, Desmond still thrashed. His raw magical essence surged at the tips of his fingers, the tiny oaken wand nearly smoking with power. Those sweet, silvery vocal chords, having so tragically failed to help him into Sarah Peterman’s pants, failed him once more in far direr straights. He couldn’t utter a single spell. With the blood oozing from his arm and neck, Desmond watched a third zombie kneel down beside him. Awkward and spindly, the zombie scratched a spider crawling out of his ear.

        “They butchered my play. All I wanted was to be taken seriously as a writer,” he said, shaking his head. The spider flung to the ground. “So much for that dream.”

        In a moment of solidarity, Desmond croaked, “Me too.” The zombie screenwriter couldn’t hear him. He was too busy nibbling on Desmond’s fingertips, the same ones who’d banged away at his rusty old Remington typewriter for the last seven years, all for nothing.

        The young woman wiped her hands on her blue dress, the red stains hardly noticeable amongst the other filth. “Well,” she said, feeling a little self-conscious next to the half handsome, half burnt, all zombie man standing beside her. “He did have a pretty good idea.”

        “Of course I did, you idiots!” The zombies turned, looked down at the recently dead, even more recently undead Desmond, trying to stuff intestines back into his middle. “Jeez guys,” he rasped, and then stealing his former minion’s catchphrase, “overly dramatic much?” Desmond groaned, looking at his mangled hand. He wouldn’t be processing words with that finger anytime soon.

While the undead control spell may have flopped, his undead creation obviously succeeded, even after his own demise. After a few deep breaths that sent bits of throat flinging out of the hole in his windpipe, Desmond calmed down enough so he could look at his arm without screaming with rage. This was a second chance. Or, maybe it was a third chance, his second having terminated upon his lungs filling up with blood. It didn’t matter. He could still get some satisfaction, some revenge.

Desmond looked out to the dead Hollywood wanabees loitering around the empty lot, their primal instincts undone by his own personal resurrection act. If not for the massive, fatal wounds to his body, Desmond would have thought the lot rather pathetic. A pack of withered starlets, aged actors, forgotten wordsmiths and broken crewman, all exiting stage left long before they saw their names slapped up on the screen in unfeeling grainy letters. He could relate.

“As I was saying,” Desmond wheezed, thankful for no longer possessing nerve endings. He gestured back to the sign, then shrugged his shoulders. “Unless you’d rather just eat a few more tourists and accomplish absolutely nothing.”

A few of the younger male zombies hooted in the affirmative. Probably a couple of urchins sold to some ancient 1940s Hollywood producer to fetch coffee and whores. Desmond gave them a leveling stare that suggested they had chosen poorly. The boy zombies went quiet.

“I for one think it’s a real swell idea,” said the crispy zombie hunk. He offered his arm to the young woman. She took it, gladly. The man held out his hand with a flourish, letting Desmond take the lead. The youngest zombie on the block, Desmond took another deep breath. He felt the spindly playwright pat him on the shoulder in sympathy.

“Actors,” he said. “What can you do?”

Strangely, Desmond felt better already. And when all one hundred and twenty-one inhabitants of the former pauper’s cemetery strolled out onto five lanes out of the northbound freeway, causing massive fender benders and a whole slew of terrified stares, Desmond felt absolutely spectacular.

The amount of havoc wreaked by a solitary zombie astounded even Desmond. He watched a pair of undead gaffers take out the entire crew filming a toothpaste commercial. The bubbly blond actress kept flashing her overly bleached smile up until the very moment the men popped her head off like the cap of the product she had so superbly hawked only moments before. A gang of rotting comedy writers rushed the set of the most popular show on television, first forcing the actors to perform outdated Dick Van Dyke and MASH specs before devouring their brains. Given the conditions, the actors put on a rather good show for the live studio audience, or at least those who sustained too critical of injuries to flee with the rest of the shrieking tourists. And there were plenty of those tooling around the infamous boulevard itself, snapping photos of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, bumping into each other as they stopped to gape idiotically at one sidewalk star after another.

“Look at how small Bogie’s feet were! You kids know who Humphrey Bogart was, don’t you?” screeched a grandmother about as old as Desmond’s zombie book.

“Bogart!” the burnt zombie groaned. “What a heel. Nobody liked him but old ladies and squares.” To emphasize his displeasure, he grabbed the old lady by the waist and took a healthy bite from her waxy granny skin. “What do you think of your precious Bogie now?”

“I stand by my statement!” she cried, before going into shock from the pain.

On the whole, the zombies felt more than a little disappointed at terrorizing Hollywood Blvd. Most of the studios had moved to the Valley years ago, leaving nothing but a long string of porn shops, marijuana stores and the occasionally overly expensive trendy restaurant. Where was the glitter, the magic they had all dreamed about? Where were the red carpets, the glamorous ladies in long, sparkling gowns? Where was the prestige? Where were all those bright, shiny successful people to get their revenge on? They sat inside Musso and Frank grill, the failed starlet zombie sipping iced tea, pushing around their waiter’s kidney on her plate.

“I thought biting the faces off of producers would make me happy,” she sighed. “But they’re not the ones who rejected me. Those guys are long dead.”

“You’re rather astute for a girl who just fell off the turnip truck,” the lean writer said, mocking.

“Oh! Fell of the turnip truck. How original. I thought you said you were a good writer,” she snapped back. Desmond jumped to his feet, putting himself in between the pair.

“This is pointless. You’ll only tear each other to pieces, and then we’ll have to get more duct tape.”

“Sweet lips, I’ll buy you all the duct tape in the world,” said the burnt actor zombie. The writer rolled his eyes.

“Please, she only likes you because you were actually famous once. Before your faced burnt off in that motorcycle crash. You should have died, buddy, instead of trying to make all those terrible artsy independent films. Then maybe we’d remember who you are.”

“Say that again, you little script weasel!”

The writer leaned in, carefully annunciating each syllable. “Washed. Up.” The once pretty actor launched himself across the cramped booth. Desmond thanked his lucky stars that they had eaten all the people in the restaurant, including the staff and cooks. Otherwise this would have been an extremely embarrassing situation. If an actor has a tantrum in a restaurant, and no living soul is around to witness, does he still make a sound? The answer, unfortunately, was yes.

“I have an idea!” Desmond shouted over the undead men’s tiff. They continued to flail and bat at each other like angry tots on a playground. Were there no mature adults in this whole industry? Feeling left out, the young woman proceeded to binge eat to hide her depression, and hunkered down onto the kidney on her plate. Frustrated, Desmond snatched up the kidney and hurled it at the actor’s head. “I said I have an idea!”

The burnt actor looked up. “You threw a kidney at me. Brando once through a kidney at me when I stole a part from him. Jerk.”

“That’s just it,” Desmond said. He turned to the dead starlet. “You felt dissatisfied because you couldn’t get at the directors who blew you off and called your work crappy.”

She pouted. “I wasn’t crappy. I just got bad reviews.”

“Whatever,” Desmond continued, then looked at the crispy fried has been. “And you hate every successful male star, because your career was cut short by your hideous facial scars. Right?”

“What part of this is supposed to make us feel better?” the actor asked.

“It’s making me feel better,” the writer chimed in with a smile.

“You bit off my finger, so you don’t get to talk right now,” Desmond snapped. “The point is what if you could get at those guys? Now wouldn’t that be some satisfaction?”

“But we can’t!” the girl whined. “They’re dead. And in the nice people cemetery. With real headstones and visitors.”

“So were you. Well, the dead part. And we fixed that.” The quartet of zombies stewed on this, while finishing off the waiters’ remains.

A half hour later, after a short stroll down Cahuenga Blvd, the entire zombie platoon congregated outside the tall iron gates of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Everyone wanted a piece of this action. Security proved no difficulty for a horde of zombies, especially one so charged for butt kicking as this lot. They stormed the front entrance, simply eating any guards that felt overwhelmed with a sense of duty, and rushed the grounds. The rabble ceased, almost instantly, as did their fervor. The beauty and tranquility of the well manicured lawns stretching off in every direction would have stopped their breath, had they breath to stop. Moonlight sparkled on the lake all the way to their left.

“Valentino,” the young actress cooed.

“Yeah,” growled her burnt paramour. “That guy.”

One hundred and twenty-one zombies clustered around Desmond, waiting. Desmond rolled up his sleeves, reached into his coat. Then he patted his pants pockets, digging his finger stumps way down deep. Nothing. His oaken wand lay in the dirt back in the empty lot, abandoned in the scuffle of the zombie attack. Technically, a zombie gets nothing out of consuming the flesh of another zombie, other than the fulfillment of destroying the idiot who’d forgotten his magic stick, rendering the whole bloody plan useless. Ironically, Desmond felt more afraid now than he had back in the lot. After learning first hand the sort of damage this lot could do, he trembled at the thought of being torn into even tinier pieces. Desperation creeping down his back like beads of sweat, Desmond racked his brain. Why had he come up with this stupid idea in the first place? Maybe his mom had been right, and he’d have been better off back in Wisconsin teaching high school English. No, thought Desmond. Even a half life as an undead monster, torn to bits by its own kind filled him with less dread than trying to teach inner city hooligans about William Shakespeare. He just had to stall until he thought of something. Anything at all that would distract these self-absorbed undead long enough for him to-

“That was fast,” said the writer, slapping Desmond on the shoulder once more in spirited camaraderie. Desmond looked up to see figures approaching, cutting through the mist rising up off the grass. The group collected together in an orderly fashion, betraying no wanton lusts for human flesh or any other sort of disorder for that matter. Their clothes, though perhaps a tad moldy or faded, remained neat and clean. No digging through dirt piles or tearing a stocking while disemboweling freeway goers for this group. Even their skin looked nicer, less decomposed somehow.

A deep voice rumbled to be let through, and the crowd of clean, pretty dead people stepped aside casually for the newcomer. An older fellow, tall and bald with neat patches of white hair on either side of his head. That voice, thought Desmond. I know that voice. Had Desmond paid a little more attention in his film theory class, instead of arrogantly doodling scenes from “Fight Club” and “The Big Lebowski” on his notebook, the man’s identity would not have eluded him.

The small green imp on the man’s shoulder, however, Desmond spotted in a heartbeat. Especially when he saw the small oaken rod twirling in the creature’s tiny hand.

“Zigar!” he shouted “Little shit, you abandoned me!”

The imp shrugged. “Got a new master now, boss. One who don’t break my neck every two seconds for no reason. And by the way, you totally botched the control spell. Forgot like half of the key words. Of course, some people don’t even need musty old books to work their magic. They can do it from their grave. By themselves. While unconscious. Did I tell you what a fan I am, Mr. DeMille?” Zigar beamed down at the elderly gentleman, as if he was his long lost demon father.

“You gotta be shitting me!” Desmond whined.

The bald chap put a protect hand around the imp’s little body. “Would you kindly watch your language, son. There are women present, some of them well-mannered,” he said. A few of the ladies in this new cluster of zombies chuckled.

“Oh you!” tittered a leggy blond, giving the gentleman a playful jab to the side, then fluffed her golden curls, and winked at Desmond. “Not that well behaved.” Desmond wasn’t sure how he felt, being winked at by the zombie corpse of Jayne Mansfield. A combination of turned on and weirded out.

“What’s that on his arm?” asked one of the young zombies from the poor side of the town. “Is that like a muppet or something?”

“Gee wiz! I didn’t know Jim Henson was buried here!”

The old man growled. “He’s not, you blathering ninnies. No wonder you didn’t make it in the biz. You haven’t got a single thought between the lot of you! Terrorizing the industry, feasting on tourists and desecrating historical landmarks.” He pointed forcibly in the direction of the Hollywood sign. Though blocked by nearby buildings, the zombies didn’t need to see it to know what he was talking about. A group of them had spent the entire night scaling the hillside to fiddle with the giant letters, changing the first O to an E. Not the most creative act of vandalism, but it amused the zombies regardless.

“What’s it to you, old timer?” Desmond always wanted to call somebody an old timer, and felt quite pleased to finally get the chance.

“Old timer? Show some respect!” came a deep, graveling female voice. A short African-American zombie pushed her way to the front. She tugged at the older man’s arm. “Come on, C.B. These zombies need a lesson in manners.”

“Hey!” cried the young dead actress, clearly feeling self-conscious again in front of so many dead celebrities. “You’re all zombies too!”

“Yeah? Well we only came back because of you!” snapped the pretty blond.

“Liar!” shouted the burnt actor. “Tell ‘em Desmond. He brought you back, so I could see how well Valentino dances with my fist down his throat.”

The Italian lothario didn’t deign to look up. “Like I haven’t heard that one before.”

“SILENCE!” Even in death, Cecil B. DeMille’s voice stopped everyone cold. “No more fuss. Whatever hooligan prank you thought to pull, the fun is over. Everyone back in their graves.” Zigar tapped DeMille on his shoulder, than whispered something in the famous director’s ear.

“A row of condos? Oh dear. That is unfortunate.”

Maybe it was seeing so many glamorous actresses, in all their finery, or maybe being reminded of her homeless zombie situation pushed her over the edge. Either way, something proved too much for the girl to stand. The little poor actress clenched her zombie fists and screeched. “That’s just the problem! For us the fun never started! You can talk with your successful careers and perfect, happy lives! You don’t know what it’s like to suffer, to have your dreams taken from you!”

As one, every zombie celebrity threw back their heads in rich, raucous laughter. Valentino looked ready to choke, his arm thrown around the shoulders of a dark haired beauty from the 1920s.

“You think we had perfect lives?” he managed to wheeze out in between guffaws. “I died at 31. From appendicitis! Appendicitis!”

“I didn’t even make it that far!” said the girl beside him.

“People know you though,” said the tortured writer zombie. “You’re on wikipedia. That’s a big deal.”

“Living is a big deal.” Again, when DeMille talked, the pauper zombies listened, hung on his words of wisdom. “Bigger than mansions, than Academy Awards. It’s not what you have, but what you do with it.”

Desmond snorted so loud, part of his rotten brain flew out his left nostril. “That is the biggest load I have ever heard. Let’s do this.” With his unnatural zombie strength, he grabbed the nearest stone cross, ripped it out of the ground and tried to smash it over DeMille’s head.

“No you don’t!” screamed the small African-American lady, and tackled Desmond around the waist. He hit the ground hard, smashing his spine in a way that would have killed a living man. As it stood, the blow paralyzed Desmond from the neck down. His fingers slipped on the massive stone and it slammed into his gut with a soft thud. It didn’t hurt to turn his head, despite the unhappy chunk of collarbone jutting through his flesh beneath the little bits of smashed grave marker. Kneeling beside the lake, Valentino dunked the burnt actor’s scarred face over and over again. To their left, Victor Fleming held the writer’s arms behind his back as Hattie McDaniel pummeled him in the stomach. A shrill noise whizzed by Desmond’s ear as Jayne Mansfield chased the squealing young starlet by with a flaming bouquet of roses, screaming “It’s okay, sweetie! I just want to set you on fire!”

A pair of tiny green legs scampered into view. “Sheesh. You look bad.” Desmond didn’t have motor functions to kick Zigar, nor did he have the spirit. The imp mistook his silence for remorse, and prattled on. “Yeah, I’m sorry too. About ditching you. And ratting you out to C.B. He’s a great guy. Maybe he could get you a writing job.” Zigar watched DeMille and Valentino hurl one of the greasy urchins into the lake. “Or not.” Uncomfortable, Zigar shuffled his feet, unable to look Desmond in the eye. “Okay, well. I guess I’ll see you around then.” The imp started to shuffle off, then whipped back, scrambling across the lawn to place a small thin object into Desmond’s hand. His oaken wand. Then he was gone.

Desmond stared up at the sky, the colors slowly morphing from blue black to gray to yellow, while old Hollywood beat the crap out of the no name zombies. He’d been wrong to use the others, to make his fight theirs. And who knew? If he hadn’t been stupid enough to provoke the ire of a heap of rejected artists, maybe he’d still be alive, and not feeding the worms at a wealthy Hollywood cemetery. Something stirred in Desmond’s cold, non functional heart, other than the maggots. Was there such a thing as fourth chances? Things could still work out, if he could manage to heal his broken spine, reverse his unfortunate zombie condition, maybe take a few more creative writing classes, find an internship at one of the studios, work his way up. He would think of something. After all, with the sun about to rise, it was almost tomorrow, and if he’d learned anything about Hollywood, is that tomorrow is another day.