18% Gray

by Zachary Karabashliev

  *

  I park in front of a liquor store a few blocks from where Elijah lives. I know Elijah from a screenwriting class we took together a few years back. We got to be friends and kept in touch after the class was over. I go to a pay phone, pick up the greasy receiver, and dial his number. Elijah Ellison is large, redheaded, and freckled. He’s twenty-nine and rents a shed by the pool at Steve and Tara’s place. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and doesn’t eat meat. The remarkable thing is, despite a complete lack of any success whatsoever, he continues to write screenplays 24/7. Elijah is obsessed by the idea of writing a romantic comedy—something along the lines of When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman, or Sleepless in Seattle . . . Whether he has talent or not is hard to say. What he definitely has is perseverance. If I were an envious person, I would envy him.

  The last time we saw each other was two years ago. I was jobless and desperate. I had slipped into one of those moments of madness (or enlightenment), in which you feel that nothing is impossible. I was writing a script then. We met to discuss it.

  “The idea is great,” he said, “but it’s hard to figure out whether it’s a comedy or a drama. What is it? You’ve got to clear that up.”

  “Well, Elijah,” I countered, “is it really so important whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy or . . . ?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Elijah, it’s easy for you to say this is comic, that’s dramatic, and this . . . well, this is a tragedy. To me, man, everything I write is a giant jar of salsa: salty, sweet, sour, with a hot aftertaste!”

  “So what I’m hearing is that you’re only interested in doing Great Things.” Well, it’s hard for me to say no to that. “Now me, I don’t have a single great idea, nothing even close, but I’ve finished seven romantic comedies and a dozen more short scripts. I have short stories and a complete novel. It’s better to have an average but completed idea than a great unstarted one!” Sometimes I want to strangle the guy. But now I call him from a pay phone.

  I park on the street, under the blooming magnolia. Pacino, the dog, starts barking and Tara answers the door.

  “Zack, how are ya?” She immediately notices my black eye but says nothing. I say “Hi” and hand her the bag with the bottle of wine. She and Steve like good wine. The other dog, I forget his name, licks my shoe. I go inside.

  “Where’s Steve? Where’s Elijah?” I say.

  Tara talks very fast and a lot. In fact, Tara talks fast precisely because she talks a lot. “Elijah is here, and Steve should be home any minute now. Where’s Stella? Why didn’t she come with you?” Without waiting for an answer, she goes on: “She’s probably busy. How are you guys anyway? You know what? Her painting, the one with the scorched trees that I saw at her show last year . . . I just can’t forget it. What with all these wild fires now . . .” On the TV screen there is a forest burning somewhere in Southern California. “I want to buy it. Can I buy it? How much would it be? But where can I put it here? No, no, no . . . it belongs in a gallery. It’s huge! How big is that painting, Zack? Seven, eight, nine feet? And black. It’s not black, actually. It’s dark, very dark, but not black. But it’s huge!” She whistles and waves her hands. “Big, it’s gigantic. Yes, Stella is amazing, amazing! Last year she painted burned forests, now we have wild fires all over the place. Hmm. How does that work, huh? It’s like she knew, it’s like she knew in advance. You’ll sleep here tonight, right?”

  Here’s the story—Tara and Steve were theater actors in Boston, where they met Elijah. Ten years ago, they moved to Los Angeles to get into the film industry. They founded a theater company, started staging new plays, and did all kinds of things to survive. Now, Steve is a producer and Tara owns a casting agency and directs plays from time to time in small theaters, just for the heck of it. When Elijah later decided to storm Hollywood with his average screenplays, they offered him a place to crash until he found a job. He accepted the offer and four years later he’s still there. He occupies a tool shed crammed with mowers, junk, and boxes of books. At least it’s by the pool.

  “Hey, Zack Attack!” I see his big orange head peek through the door. “Who gave you that black eye?” He grins.

  “I fell down the stairs,” I say as I collapse on the couch. A Hummer parks outside, the dogs bark, and Steve opens the front door. He’s been shooting a commercial all day and is glad to see me. He grabs a bottle of scotch and offers ice. I say, “No, thanks, no ice.” He smiles and we lift our glasses for a toast.

  Hours later, the four of us are standing around the bar in the kitchen, sipping wine and munching on cheese, ham, and grapes arranged on a pig-shaped cutting board. We talk about movies, theater, Hollywood, Europe . . . Steve tells a funny story about something that happened to him in South Africa while producing a stupid movie. Tara laughs loudly, throwing her head back. Her cheeks are already flushed. Elijah is gloomy. Elijah is always gloomy. Maybe because he doesn’t eat meat, drink, or smoke. I’ve never seen him with a girl, either. Elijah is not gloomy only when we talk about romantic comedies. Pacino, the dog, is sleeping at my feet. The other one, I still don’t remember his name, follows the fish in the tank with his amber eyes.

  “Hey, guys,” I begin nonchalantly. “I want to meet with that Jamaican dude you introduced me to last year at Jeff’s party. Remember? What’s his name? The guy . . . with the turban?”

  “Oh, you mean Chris?” Steve says.

  “Yeah, that’s the guy.”

  “You need some pot? We’ve got some here if you want.” He looks at Tara with that it’s ok to light a joint, right? glance.

  “Pot,” I say, “is the last thing I need right now. I just wanted to talk with him about something.”

  “He’s a little . . . you know,” Tara begins, “discrete. I’m not sure whether he’d like to . . .”

  Steve jumps in. “A discrete guy.”

  Chris is an enormous, muscular black man with a handsome, inspired face that radiates peace and wisdom. He wears white, free-flowing clothes and, sometimes, a colorful turban on his head. Last year I spent half an hour with him at a party and, while we were drinking (I—wine, he—orange juice) by the pool, we talked about inner peace, freedom of choice, inspiration, happiness, and all sorts of nonsense. The next few days I was in a cheerful mood. I was later told that he provided Steve and Tara with marijuana; they liked to smoke from time to time.

  “I’m writing a novel,” I start lying through my teeth, detecting how Elijah instantly perks up, “in which the main character stumbles upon a bag of marijuana.” Elijah relaxes; a lame idea, nothing new. “So, I guess, my question is . . . what can my hero do with a bag of weed? Could he sell it, how much would it cost, stuff like that?”

  “Don’t you know?” Steve asks.

  “Well, if I did, why would I be looking for Chris?”

  “And how does the story end?” Elijah says.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, how can you start writing something without knowing how it ends?” He almost snaps.

  “Goddammit, Elijah, if I knew how it ended, why would I start writing it in the first place? That would be totally boring for me.”

  “How can you reach the end when you don’t know where you’re going? The end is the most important part.”

  “It’s no more important than the way there.”

  “You have to know the end. Start at the end. Start there and go backwards, to the beginning.”

  “Go backwards?”

  “Sure! What does your hero want? That’s the question. What does he want? What drives him? What drives the story chapter after chapter after chapter?”

  “A bag of weed.”

  “A bag of weed can’t do that. What does your hero want to do with this bag of weed? Can he possibly achieve it? Or not? From there, you know whether you’ve got a tragedy or a comedy. But there’s another problem.” Elijah pauses. “Pot is too . . .” he gesticulates, “harmless. It doesn’t have that aura of . . . evil, so to speak. It doesn’
t push people to do terrible things. On the contrary, it brings joy, relaxation, peace. Nobody kills somebody for a joint.” Pause. “Plus, it’s not expensive either. So the stakes are low. You should think of a different drug: heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, something like that. You should raise the stakes to the max—money or death!”

  “Listen, my friend. This isn’t a script for a thriller. This is a story about . . .” I try to calm down and sound convincing. “Actually, this is not a story about drugs. This is a story about a guy who loses his talent . . .”

  “His . . . what?” Elijah’s eyes narrow, puzzled.

  “. . . loses his faith,” I keep going.

  “Ay, ay, ay.” He shakes his head mockingly.

  “. . . loses his appetite for life . . .”

  “Existentialism?” Pure disgust.

  “. . . loses his love . . .”

  “So you’re writing a love story?” Sarcasm, plain sarcasm.

  “. . . himself . . .”

  “And he finds a bag of ganja? Genius!” Elijah slams the table with his fist.

  “But one night, one crazy night, as if in a dream, he stumbles upon a bag of marijuana.” I sigh and stop. I won’t bother telling the skeptical bastard what my story is about. He doesn’t ever leave his shit-hole because he’s too busy reading countless how-to handbooks on screenwriting written by losers who haven’t made a single film. I know Elijah is searching for the formula behind the romantic comedy. He talks like a character from a romantic comedy, yet he’s neither romantic, nor comic. Elijah is just a benign tumor on my life story, and Lord only knows why I like him.

  Silence.

  Tara nods at Steve. He goes to the post-it spotted fridge and starts looking for something. Somewhere among the numbers for insurance agents, dentists, auto mechanics, producers, actors, lawyers, bankers, handymen, and the like, is the link to Chris. Then Steve dials a number and makes an appointment for me for the next day. We drink more wine and go to bed very late. I fall asleep the second my head meets the pillow.

  I dream about Stella.

  *

  I can’t remember myself ever doing less than three things at the same time, which has made me confusing—I suppose—for people who neatly catalog their acquaintances. In college, I wrote short stories and articles for the local paper, I loved photography, and played the guitar. While I did the former two less frequently and only for pleasure, I took my music very seriously. I had a cheap electric guitar, which I plugged into an old Russian radio, turned the volume up to the max, and wailed on the strings. I played with the volume cranked up because it was the only way to distort it enough to make the sound unidentifiable. I was looking for my sound then. Later, I added several more people to this mayhem and created something like a punk-rock band. We would play three-chord tunes all night long. Gradually, grandiose plans for worldwide success started taking shape in my head, and for some odd reason, they seemed realistic. I managed to inspire the poor souls around me with some kind of wild enthusiasm and belief, absolute belief, that we were destined for glory.

  The lead vocalist was a metalworking machinery operator with thick glasses, the drummer was a cousin of mine who worked in his father’s beekeeping business, and the bass player was an overweight, acne-stricken kid from a small town nearby who was about to graduate in accounting. However, the three of them were good musicians, so the rest just didn’t matter. My own musical education consisted of a handful of classical guitar lessons and countless hours of heavy metal on the old Kashtan eight-track. I didn’t really know the guitar technically, which is why I tried to compensate with high volume, distortion effects, and insane onstage behavior. And because I was on familiar terms with only a few guitar chords, my songs were simple and exploded with the fury I felt precisely because I couldn’t write music. I secretly hated my inability to master the guitar musically, but, on the outside, I was all confidence and authority in front of the boys. It was my energy, I believe, that kept people coming to our small gigs. Stella spent hours with the band in basements and garages, a silent witness to the chaotic rehearsals and quarrels. She just sat off to the side and drew in those countless notebooks of hers, submerged in her own world whose soundtrack, I suppose now, was a compilation of my angry songs.

  *

  Chris and I meet at the Aladdin Café on the beach. It’s still overcast, but the skies seem promising. I tell him my made-up story, trying to sound like an inspired writer. This marijuana thing is just one of the story lines in the novel, but I want to sound authentic. I tell him I want to know what the odds are of my character being caught. I’ve heard that every other surfer around here is an undercover cop and, although everyone smokes, if my character tries selling pot just like that, they’ll get him sooner or later and the novel will have to end. That’s why I want to learn more, how it works, how he gets rid of a bag of pot, retail or wholesale, and, of course, everything will stay just between us. He knows who hooked me up with him so there’s no danger of . . .

  “What’s your question, man?” The low velveteen Jamaican voice interrupts my stream of bullshit. I take a breath and shoot:

  “How can the hero in my story sell a bag of marijuana?”

  “He can’t,” the big black man answers calmly.

  “What do you mean, he can’t?!“

  “He can’t.”

  “Well . . . how about half a bag?” I decide to take what I can get.

  “He can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “He don’t know how.”

  “That’s why I’m here with you, my friend. Tell me how.” Chris studies me carefully, sizing up the bruises on my face.

  “Listen, man. Your hero has a problem. First, he loses, then he finds, yes? What he finds, though, he doesn’t need. And what he needs, he already has.”

  “Well . . .” I clear my throat. “What can my hero do?”

  “Let him move on now. OK, man?” The big black figure with a white turban leans back in his chair and sips his orange juice.

  “Chris, you don’t think I’m . . . ?” I make small circles around my temple with my pointer finger.

  “No.” He smiles for the first time and the big golden hoop in his ear trembles.

  “You don’t think I’m a cop or . . .”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  Chris turns his head. After a pause, staring at the ocean: “See the waves, man. Each one is born, it grows, it fights, it foams, and then comes ashore, bsh-sh-sh-sh, and it dies and becomes ocean again. Beautiful, yes? And again, and again, and so on . . . and so on . . .”

  “You’re not helping me, man,” I say.

  “I help, man. I help.”

  *

  We put together eight songs and found a studio where we recorded them on a primitive four-track recorder. The album was entitled The Winds of Hell. We produced a cardboard box of TDK cassette tapes, and now the only thing we needed was an album cover. I asked Stella to draw something. The next day, she gave me a picture. It was an expressionistic, somewhat naive silhouette of a girl, arms stretched out as if ready to fly out of the frame of a dark-blue window. It was beautiful, but the boys from the band didn’t like it. I didn’t think it fit, either. So we went to Angel the Artist. He listened to Judas Priest, wore ironed jeans, and lived with his mom in a gloomy apartment that always smelled like sauerkraut.

  Our album came out illustrated by Angel the Artist, with a picture of a snarling monster clutching a guitar in its tentacles.

  God, was I really that blind?

  *

  It’s clear that I’ll have to deal with this on my own. I need to improvise. There’s a bookstore across from the coffee shop. I go in and buy a roadmap of the United States, a college-ruled notebook, and two 99-cent pens. Then I stop at the photography section. I open a book of portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson. I sit down between the aisles tête-à-tête with the faces captured by the great master’s little camera. I turn the pages one by one. There’s Matisse wi
th a pigeon in his hand; William Faulkner in the company of two stretching dogs; Jung with a pipe looking straight at me; one very innocent Capote; Ezra Pound, who here reminds me of my late grandfather, Stefan Nichts; a smiling Che Guevara; Samuel Beckett staring at the bottom left corner of the photograph; Albert Camus with a short cigarette butt in his smile and a turned-up jacket collar; a suspicious Sartre on a winter bridge over the Seine; Stravinsky with two large hands and a walking stick; a tired Marilyn Monroe . . . All dead, dead, dead.

  Half an hour later, I put the book back on the shelf. I feel like crying. I wish I could cry. I leave the bookstore and wander down the sidewalk aimlessly. I stop in front of a bridal store. It’s still Friday. It’s still not too late to call Scott the manager and come up with an excuse for my absence today. I can see his grimace. Ok, I’ll let it slide this time, things happen, but from now on . . . I can show up earlier than usual on Monday. I can stay late. I’ll work on my attitude. I’ll be more blasé in my inspections. I’ll forget about my Tijuana adventure and about the bag in my trunk. Everything will be fine. I’ll bandage my heart and get back into the traffic on my way to work.

  *

  —i don’t want you to be quiet like . . .

  —like what?

  —like . . . that

  —i’m taking your picture

  —OK, but I want to talk to you

  —all right. you talk, i’ll listen

  —well then, this session is over. i’m getting dressed

  —wait, wait, wait, wait. just a few more shots and it’s over