Hits and Misses

by Simon Rich

  “What happens if he doesn’t know his Social Security number?”

  A smile slowly spread across Saint Peter’s face. There was a conspiratorial gleam in his eye. “If he can’t prove his identity,” he said, “I can’t let him into heaven.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jack said. “This is ridiculous. What are you saying, that I’m an imposter or something?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the saint. “I’m just having trouble believing you are who you say you are. I mean, surely the real Jack Krieger would know his Social Security number.” He turned to Dylan with a goading grin. “Surely the real Jack Krieger would know the basic facts of his own life.”

  Dylan realized, with shock, that his fear of his boss had vanished. In its place was something close to glee.

  “Young man,” Saint Peter said, “I don’t think we’ve been officially introduced.” He stretched out his palm and nodded at him. “What’s your name?”

  Dylan grinned at his boss as he shook Saint Peter’s hand.

  “I’m Jack Krieger,” he said.

  Jack’s face turned pale. “This is bullshit,” he said in a strangled whisper. “He’s lying!”

  “Don’t worry,” said Saint Peter. “I’ll confirm his identity.”

  He handed Dylan a pen.

  “Write down your Social, your Wi-Fi password, and your children’s birthdays.”

  Dylan neatly printed out the information.

  “Well, that settles it,” said Saint Peter.

  Dylan laughed with delight as a pair of cherubs scooped him up on a throne of gold and rubies. His injuries magically healed as the angels flew him through the gates of heaven.

  “Want a line?” one of them asked, holding out a large tray of cocaine.

  Dylan shrugged. “Why not?”

  He snorted the drugs and glanced back at Jack, who was being dragged to hell by a pair of shrieking demons. Dylan felt some anger toward his boss for all he’d put him through. But mostly he was grateful to him. Because the old man was right—the job had taught him all he needed.

  Dinosaur

  The dinosaur watched in silence as the younger writers took turns pitching jokes. They’d been at it for over an hour, shouting out punch lines at full voice. He hadn’t seen a writers’ room so animated since the eighties, back when everyone did cocaine.

  “How about this?” suggested Surya, a twenty-four-year-old with purple hair. “Nimaah gets the Snapchat, turns to her girlfriend, and says, ‘Woke up and smell the coffee.’”

  Everyone laughed except the dinosaur. He made a mental note to look up the term “woke.” This was the third time today someone had used it in a pitch. The dinosaur had no idea what it meant, although he’d come to believe it was somehow connected to Beyoncé. Was it a dance craze she had started? Like when Madonna did the vogue?

  The dinosaur realized that some of the young human writers were peering up at him. He hadn’t said anything since lunch, and his silence was growing conspicuous. A bead of sweat dribbled down his scaly green back. He had to contribute something.

  “How about this?” he said, flicking his tiny dinosaur wrist in a show of nonchalance. “How about…someone says…‘Roar…I’m a dinosaur…I’m gonna kill you with my mouth’?”

  The room fell silent. Several writers took out their iPhones and pretended to check their email. The dinosaur could feel his tail wagging nervously behind him.

  “Or, you know,” he mumbled, “something like that. That was the bad version…” He lowered his giant dinosaur head. “Or maybe something with ‘woke,’” he murmured softly. “Something where someone does the woke.”

  Cheryl, the showrunner, cleared her throat. “I think it might be time for a juice break,” she said. The writers nodded solemnly and filed out the door. The dinosaur couldn’t help but notice that nobody had offered to bring him back a juice. He didn’t drink juice—he was a dinosaur—but still, it stung.

  The dinosaur turned toward Cheryl. She was only about one-twentieth his size, but that didn’t make her any less intimidating.

  “Some really funny pitches back there!” said the dinosaur. “Surya’s really bringing it today!”

  “We need to talk,” Cheryl said.

  The dinosaur swallowed. He was trying his best to seem calm, but his wagging tail gave him away. It kept smashing into the corkboard, ripping note cards off the wall and sending pushpins flying through the air.

  “Listen,” Cheryl said. “I really appreciate all that you’ve brought to the room. Experience…” She closed her eyes for a beat, clearly trying to come up with another positive attribute. “Experience,” she repeated. “But unfortunately, I just don’t think this show is a good fit for you.”

  The dinosaur blinked his yellow eyes, trying his best to hold back tears. He’d been writing for TV for a hundred million years, and nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

  “Look,” he said. “I know my pitches have been kinda weak lately. But I swear I can get it together.”

  “It’s not just that,” Cheryl said quietly.

  The dinosaur squinted at her. “What do you mean?”

  Cheryl looked the dinosaur firmly in the eye. “You’ve been making the other writers feel unsafe.”

  The dinosaur laughed, his razor-sharp teeth glinting in the light. “Unsafe? What are you talking about?”

  “Some of your pitches have crossed the line. For instance, the ones about killing people with your mouth.”

  The dinosaur folded his tiny arms and cocked his head. “I’m sorry,” he said sarcastically. “I didn’t realize we weren’t allowed to pitch jokes in a writers’ room.”

  “It’s not just jokes,” Cheryl said, her voice lowering. “On more than one occasion I’ve gotten complaints from human staffers that you’ve made them feel physically uncomfortable.”

  “Give me one example!” said the dinosaur. He bit his lip. He’d meant to speak in a professional tone of voice, but the statement had come out as more of a deafening roar.

  Cheryl picked up her glasses, which had blown off her face, and coolly wiped the lenses with a tissue.

  “Okay, fine,” she said. “Last Friday, at drinks, someone said they saw you put your teeth around Marlyse’s neck, like you were going to eat her. And then you roared and said, ‘I’m gonna eat you. I’m a dinosaur!’”

  “Are you serious?” the dinosaur said. “She’s upset about that?”

  Cheryl nodded. “The word she used was ‘traumatized.’”

  “That was just a bit!” the dinosaur protested. “At Letterman, we did stuff like that all the time!”

  “Yeah, well, times have changed.”

  The dinosaur massaged his giant temples.

  “Look,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, all right? Please give me another chance. I need this job. My ex-wife is insane. She’s a velociraptor, and believe me, the stereotypes are true. You know what she asked for in the settlement? My meat. She wants to literally, like, take chunks of my body and eat them, like food!”

  He heard a distant peal of youthful laughter. The humans were returning with their juices.

  “I guess I should head out,” he murmured.

  “I think that would be best,” Cheryl said. “Good luck.”

  “Yeah,” the dinosaur said, his voice slightly choked. “Thank you.”

  He couldn’t fit through the door of the conference room so he walked through a brick wall, leaving behind a large dinosaur-shaped hole, one of many he had created during his tenure at the show. He looked through the hole from the sidewalk, wondering if it was the last time he’d ever get to see the inside of a writers’ room. There was only one way to find out.

  “I’m sorry,” said the dinosaur’s agent over the phone.

  “Come on, Haiyan!” the dinosaur pleaded. “There’s gotta be something!”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  The dinosaur shook his head wearily. His original agent, Sol, had retired five years ago, and h
e’d never really jelled with the woman who replaced him. It had taken three days to get her to even return his frantic voicemails.

  “What if I lowered my quote?” he asked. “I could work for a show as a story editor or a staff writer.”

  “The Writers Guild won’t allow it,” she said. “You’re a dinosaur. You need to get paid dinosaur rates.”

  “What about my spec script?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

  “Hello?” said the dinosaur. “Haiyan, did I lose you?”

  “I’m here,” Haiyan said.

  “What about my spec script?” the dinosaur repeated. “Did you send it out?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s great! What are people saying?”

  Haiyan hesitated. “The response has been mixed.”

  The dinosaur’s yellow eyes widened with shock. He’d never been more confident in a screenplay in his life. “That’s crazy!” he said. “What don’t people like about it?”

  “The most common complaint we’re getting is that the jokes seem a little dated.”

  “You mean the fax machine runner?”

  “There’s that,” Haiyan acknowledged. “But also, a lot of the jokes tend to be about humans, and about how they’re weaker than dinosaurs.”

  “They are weaker!” roared the dinosaur. “That’s what’s funny about them!”

  There was a long silence. The dinosaur got the sense that at some point he’d been put on speakerphone.

  “I’ll let you know if anything comes up,” Haiyan said curtly.

  “Yeah, okay,” said the dinosaur. “Thank you.”

  The dinosaur poured himself some scotch and glanced at the rusted Emmy Award on his mantel. He’d won it back in the Jurassic period, right before Letterman moved to CBS. At the time, he’d thought he’d be on top forever. He remembered a meeting he’d had with Sol, in which the old man had urged him to register his most popular sketch characters with the Writers Guild.

  “Trust me,” he’d said. “You’ll want those residuals when you’re an old has-been.”

  The paperwork had sat on the dinosaur’s desk for two years, and eventually he’d thrown it out to make room for an espresso machine. How could he have been so naïve?

  He lapped up some scotch with his tongue. It was strange: even though his career was in shambles, he didn’t feel less talented than he used to be. He felt like the same old dinosaur. Gradually, a thought began to form in his walnut-sized brain: Maybe it isn’t my fault. Maybe society is to blame.

  He thought about his heroes: Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Mel Brooks. You could never get away with stuff like that today. And why? Because of political correctness! That was the problem. The touchy-feely, namby-pamby liberals were destroying TV comedy. And it was up to the dinosaur to fix it.

  The only question was: how? He could go on a crazy rampage, he supposed, and murder everyone by ripping them apart with his teeth and then eating their bones. But then everyone would say that he was the crazy one. There had to be a more elegant solution.

  A soft blue light beckoned to him from across the room: the power button of his Dell computer. Of course! The answer was right in front of him! He patted his Emmy for good luck, then finished his scotch and started typing.

  The dinosaur woke up the next morning with the worst headache of his life. He was groping around the medicine cabinet for some Tylenol with codeine when a hazy memory flashed through his mind.

  He had written something.

  He took a deep breath and reached for his BlackBerry. There was a rare missed call from Haiyan.

  “How bad is it?” he asked her.

  “Pretty bad,” she said. “Look on Deadline.”

  The dinosaur squinted at his Dell. “How do I get to their website?”

  Haiyan cursed with impatience. “Just type the word ‘deadline’ into Google and click on the first link.”

  “Okay, bear with me. I didn’t learn touch-typing in school. Okay…almost there…Oh my God! ‘Dinosaur posts hate screed on Facebook’? Does that mean me?”

  “Yes.”

  “God damn it!”

  The dinosaur put on his glasses and scrolled through the post. It was studded with boldfaced names, all of them celebrities who had condemned his rant on Twitter.

  “This is crazy!” the dinosaur shouted into his phone. “How can I be ‘prejudiced’ if I myself am a minority?”

  “What are you talking about?” Haiyan asked.

  “I’m Jewish!”

  “That doesn’t count,” Haiyan said.

  The dinosaur roared.

  “Listen,” Haiyan said. “I’m sorry to do this over the phone. But I can no longer in good conscience represent you.”

  The dinosaur’s mouth went dry. “What do you mean?”

  “The agency is dropping you as a client,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

  The line went dead, and the dinosaur knew what it meant for his career. As quick as the flash of a comet, it was over.

  It took almost a year for the dinosaur to find a job, but eventually he scored a gig bartending at an Irish pub in Studio City. It was tough on his ego at first, but as the years wore on, he grew to like the work. Nobody at Hallohan’s knew about his past. He was just some dinosaur bringing them their Guinness.

  A television was mounted in the corner of the bar. It was usually tuned to sports, but sometimes a sitcom would come on. The dinosaur would watch for a few minutes, trying to make sense of the references. He didn’t think the shows were very funny. But if the customers seemed into it, he let them watch and even offered to turn up the volume.

  He was mopping up some peanut crumbs one day when he heard someone call out his name. He looked up and saw a middle-aged Indian guy smiling at him.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I think we used to work together.”

  The dinosaur squinted at the human, trying to place him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My memory sucks.”

  The customer smiled sheepishly. “I used to have purple hair,” he said.

  The dinosaur laughed with excitement. It was Surya, the staff writer he’d worked with on his very last TV show. He poured out a scotch and slid it across the bar. “Drink up!” he said. “It’s on the house!”

  Surya thanked the dinosaur and filled him in on the past two decades. He’d risen in the ranks, all the way up to showrunner. The dinosaur felt a stab of jealousy, but it passed. “That’s great, Surya,” he said. “I always knew you had it in you.”

  Surya thanked him, but the dinosaur could sense some weariness in his voice. He poured him another drink. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Surya said. “It’s my staff. It’s difficult to connect with them.”

  “Are they funny?”

  “I have no idea,” Surya admitted. “All of them are robots, and their references are crazy. It’s always ‘terabyte’ this and ‘gigabyte’ that.” A few customers glanced at Surya, clearly offended by his robot impression. He hung his head with shame.

  The dinosaur slid him a bowl of peanuts. “Just make sure to register your characters with the Writers Guild. Trust me, you’ll want those residuals.”

  “That’s good advice,” Surya said. “Thank you.”

  The dinosaur bashfully flicked his little arm. “It’s nothing.”

  “I’m serious,” Surya said. “You’re saving my life here.”

  The dinosaur grinned. “Usually, with dinosaurs, it’s the other way around.”

  The line was so tasteless Surya couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Oh man,” he said as bits of peanut sprayed out of his mouth. “You got me.”

  The dinosaur tried to respond, but his voice got caught in his throat. He gave a slight bow, then grabbed a rag and gratefully wiped up the crumbs.

  Artist’s Revenge

  Michael Dane knew that, objectively, his directing career had been successful.

  His movies had
grossed more than three billion dollars. They’d spawned video games, comic books, restaurants, Macy’s floats, and theme parks. When he released a new sequel, people camped out for days for a chance to see it early. He was friends with Johnny Depp. Not close friends, but definitely legitimately friends, like they texted each other funny links and stuff.

  But despite all his accomplishments, he couldn’t help but feel like a failure. And the reason was simple: Alan Schwab.

  For decades, the legendary film critic had dogged him, describing his work as “cheap,” “hollow,” “flimsy,” and “disgusting.” Lately, he’d even begun to insult Dane in reviews of other people’s work, referring to choices that upset him as “Dane-esque.”

  In interviews, Dane claimed he “never read reviews.” But secretly, Schwab’s words were seared into his brain. Every night, while he tried to fall asleep in his large glass mansion with an unobstructed view of the ocean, Dane thought of Schwab’s cruelty. How could he get back at him? How could he even the score? Revenge seemed impossible. But then one night, like so many times in his career, it happened: inspiration.

  Alan Schwab woke up naked in an underground bunker, his arms and legs chained to a chair.

  “Don’t move,” Dane whispered from the shadows. “You’re still recovering from major surgery.”

  The critic looked down and gasped. Sure enough, there was a jagged incision just below his nipple.

  “My God!” he cried. “What’s happening?”

  “An explosive device has been implanted in your chest,” Dane continued. “If you don’t do exactly as I say, I will detonate your heart.” He stepped slowly into the light, holding a small remote control. “You might recognize this gambit from my film Final Battle 2. In your review, you called it an ‘overly simplistic plot contrivance.’ Well, as you can see, it gets the job done.”