Excerpt from American Dream Machine by Matthew Specktor, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PROLOGUE

They closed down the Hamlet on Sunset last night. That old plush palace, place where Dean Martin drank himself to death on Tuesdays, where my father and his friends once had lunch every weekend and the maître d' was quick to kiss my old man's hand. Like the one they called "the other Hamlet" in Beverly Hills, and "the regular other Hamlet" in Century City . . . all of these places now long gone. Hollywood is like that. Its forever institutions, so quick to disappear. The Hamburger Hamlet, the one on Sunset, was in a class by itself. Red leather upholstery, dark booths, the carpets patterned with a radical and problematic intaglio. Big windows flung sun in front, but farther in the interior was dim, swampy. Waitresses patrolled the tables, the recessed depths where my father's clients, men like Stacy Keach and Arthur Hill, sat away from human scrutiny. Most often their hair was mussed and they were weeping. Or they were exultant, flashing lavish smiles and gold watches, their bands' mesh grain muted by the ruinous lighting, those overhead bulbs that shone down just far enough to make the waitresses' faces look like they were melting under heat lamps. And yet the things that were consummated there: divorces, deals! I saw George Clooney puking in one of the ficuses back by the men's room, one time when I was in.

Unless it was somebody else. The one thing I've learned, growing up in Los Angeles: it's always someone else. Even if it is the person you thought it was the first time. I helped him up. I laid my hand on the back of George Clooney's collar. He was wearing a blue jacket with a deeper velveteen lapel, like an expensive wedding singer. This, and white bucks.

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah." He spat. "They make the Manhattans here really strong."

"Do they?"

We were near the kitchen, too, and could smell bacon, frying meat, other delicacies—like Welsh rarebit—I would describe if they still had any meaning, if they existed any longer.

"I'll buy you one and you can check it out."

I helped him back to his table. I remember his touch was feathery. He clutched my arm like a shy bride. Clooney wasn't Clooney yet, but I, unfortunately, was myself.'91? '92? The evening wound on, and on and on and on: Little Peter's, the Havoc House. Eventually, Clooney and I ended up back at someone's place in the Bird Streets, above Doheny.

"Why are you dressed like that?" I said.

"Like what?" In my mind, the smile is Clooney's exactly, but at the time all he'd said was that he was an actor named Sam or Dave or (in fact I think he actually did say) George, but I'll never know. "Why am I dressed like what?"

"Like a fucking prom date from the retro future. Like an Italian singer who stumbled into a golf shop." I pointed. "What the hell is with those shoes?"

"Hey," he said. "Check the stitching. Hand-soled."

We were out back of this house, whosever it was, drinking tequila. Cantilevered up above the city, lolling in director's chairs. Those houses sell for a bajillion dollars nowadays, but then it was just some crappy rental where a friend of a friend was chasing a girl around a roomful of mix-and-match furniture, listening to the Afghan Whigs or the Horny Horns or the Beach Boys—my favorite band of all time, by the way—or else a bunch of people were crowded around a TV watching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on videocassette. It didn't matter. Mr. Not-Quite-or-Not-Yet-Clooney and I were outside watching the sun come up, and we were either two guys who would someday be famous or two rudderless fuck-ups in our midtwenties. He was staring out at the holy panorama of Los Angeles at dawn, and I couldn't get my eyes off his shoes.

"Why am I dressed like this?" My new friend wrung his hands together limply. I ought to sell that fact to a tabloid, to prove Clooney is gay. "I was at a function," he said.

Excerpted from American Dream Machine by Matthew Specktor. Copyright © 2013 by Matthew Specktor. Excerpted by permission of Tin House Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.