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

"What kind of function? A convention of Tony Bennett fans? A mob wedding?"

I don't remember what he said next. I think he said, I was in Vegas, and I asked him how much he'd lost. I probably gave him a sloppy kiss. I knew it was you, Fredo! There was an empty swimming pool nearby. It must've been February. Italian cypresses rose up in inviting cones, the scalloped houses dropped off in stages beneath us, and eventually the whole hill flattened out into that ash-colored plane, that grand and gray infinity that is Los Angeles from up above: God's palm, checkered with twinkling lights and crossed with hot wind.

"I can never remember the words to this one . . . "

"What," I said. "It's mostly moaning."

"They're all mostly moaning."

George and I went digging into the old soul music catalog, to prove our masculine bona fides. None of those Motown lite, Big Chill-type classics that turdscaped so many of my father's late eighties productions. We went for the nonsense numbers, the real obscurities. We sang "Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um" "The Whap Whap Song,"

"Oogum Boogum," "Lobster Betty." A couple of those might not have been real, but we did 'em anyway.

"Nice pipes."

"Thanks," he said. "I was up for The Doors but I never got a callback."

We spent the rest of the night drinking and singing. People blame Los Angeles for so many things, but my own view is tender, forgiving. I love LA with all of my heart. This story I have to tell doesn't have much to do with me, but it isn't about some bored actress and her existential crises, a troubled screenwriter who comes to his senses and hightails it back to Illinois. It's not about the vacuous horror of the California dream. It's something that could've happened anywhere else in the world, but instead settled, inexplicably, here. This city, with its unfortunate rap. It deserves warmer witness than dear old Joan Didion.

"Don't do that, man." My voice echoed. I clapped my friend on the shoulder. "Don't do the pleading-and-testifying thing. You'll hurt your knees!"

"I'm all right."

By the time we were done, we were deep into the duos, those freaky-deaky pairs from Texas or Mississippi: Mel & Tim; Maurice & Mac; Eddie & Ernie. Those gap-toothed couples who'd managed to eke out a single regional hit before fading back into their hard-won obscurity. My new friend seemed to know them all, and by the time we were finished I didn't know which of us was Mel and which Tim, which of us had died in a boarding house and which, the lucky one I presume, still gigged around Jacksonville. Him, probably. He was dressed for it.

"I should get going," he said, at last.

"Right." Not like either of us had anywhere to be at this hour, but he needed to go off and get famous and I needed to find my jacket and a mattress. A man shouldn't postpone destiny. "Later."

We embraced, and I believe he groped my groin. After that I never saw him again, not if he was not, as I am now forced to consider, George Clooney. I just watched him climb the steps out of the swimming pool, into which we'd descended in order to get the correct echo, the right degree of reverb on our voices. This was what it was like inside a vocal booth at Stax, or when the Beach Boys recorded "Good Vibrations" at Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. So we told one another, and perhaps we were right. For a moment I remained in this sunken hole in the ground that was like a grave slathered with toothpaste—it was that perfect bland turquoise color—and sang that song about the dark end of the street, how it's where we'll always meet. But I stopped, finally. Who wants to sing alone?

This is what I remember, when I think of the Hamlet on Sunset. This, and a few dozen afternoons with my dad and half brother, the adolescent crucible in which I felt so uncomfortable, baffled by my paternity and a thousand other things. Clooney's cuffs; the faint flare of his baby-blue trousers; the mirrored aviator shades, like a cop's, he slipped on before he left. It was ten thirty in the morning. I held a bottle of blanco by its neck and looked over at the pine needles, the brittle coniferous pieces that had gathered around the drain. Clooney's bucks had thick rubber soles and made a fricative sound as he crossed the patio, then went through the house and out. I heard the purr of his Honda Civic, its fading drone as he wound down the hill and left me behind with my thoughts.

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.