by Neal Pollack
After twenty-five dreary Battlecats episodes, Brad returned to his regularly scheduled program of driving around to meetings with people he’d never see again at companies that didn’t really exist. He smoked a lot of pot for inspiration and sold one other spec script, which never got made. In all, he earned about $300,000, which sounds like a lot of money and would be a lot of money under normal circumstances, but it’s not really that much when you spread it over ten years, give 15 percent of it to lawyers and are trying to support a family of four in Los Angeles. Maybe they shouldn’t have bought that Prius in 2007, but it was hard to resist the gas mileage, and it’s not like they’d bitten on the premium package. Regardless, a decade had passed since they moved to LA, and with it another semipromising literary career dried out under the Southern California sun, like so many kale chips in an oven preheated to four hundred degrees.
It should have gone so much better, he thought to himself, as he did every morning.
And with that it was time for Brad Cohen to face his present-day reality. Brad sighed and stood up, his belly hanging farther over his plaid pajama bottoms than he would have liked. Last night’s massive weed session to coincide with the Lakers-Spurs game had left his brain and lungs feeling gummy. People told him that vaporizing was supposed to be better for him than smoking, but he’d yet to feel the evidence. Maybe he should stop with the pot. But then he wouldn’t be able to get stoned anymore, and that was hardly a solution.
Brad went to the bedroom door, which was as shitty and disgusting as ever. Kedzie, the dog, clawed at it with dirty paws every morning at six, so it looked like the dog had been rubbing his ass up against it for a decade. What had once been at least part of a tree was now a dog-shit door. To Brad, that pretty much summed it up.
He’d always imagined that his adult home would be a prideful thing, a personal-taste fiefdom of lacquered floors and handmade art and shiny, humming, energy-efficient appliances, a fire in the hearth, a driveway that didn’t buckle, high-beamed ceilings, and speakers built into the media-room wall. People would come over and he’d grill meat and they’d admire the color of his den. But no one ever came over, because there was no place to sit. His house had dust bunnies in the corners, mold in the kitchen caulking, weird splotches on the hall floors, yard-sale dining room chairs, and a rusty hinge on the backyard shed. The light in the bedroom closet had shorted out years ago. He kept his sweaters from the ’90s in a kitchen drawer, under the strainers and the cheese grater. There was no other space. Plus, he didn’t even own the house. But he had an Xbox 360. That was something.
Juliet sat on the couch with Cori, the four-year-old. Claire, the seven-year-old, had been carpooled away hours ago to the extremely mediocre neighborhood public school, where the classroom wall art looked like it had been produced in the fatal-disease ward at the children’s hospital. This is where Brad would send his beautiful girls for years so that they could gradually have their winning, innocent spirits sucked from their bodies.
He’d always wanted two girls named Mary and Rhoda. Juliet nixed that, and especially nixed his next suggestion, Maude and Rhoda. From there the suggestions got progressively worse. After Juliet said no to George and Weezie, and Brad had said no to Thelma and Louise, they’d decided to name their kids as the kids arrived.
Juliet and Cori were watching Yo Gabba Gabba! Everyone he knew seemed to love that show, but Brad hated it so much. Your time to rock has ended, Gen X, he thought. No beatboxing mack daddy in a puffy, multicolored Kroft hat is ever going to bring back your youth. Or maybe he was just envious of the creators. He felt that way about most people his age who were more successful than he was. Regardless, the show was hyper and shrill and annoying. It really frosted his donut.
“Turn that crap off,” he said.
“Look, honey,” said Juliet. “Daddy’s awake!”
Cori, wearing a purple tutu and as adorable as a Muppet, bounded off the couch and gave Brad a big hug.
“You smell pretty bad, Daddy,” she said.
“Don’t I know it,” he said.
They got Cori to sit at a table in her room with some crayons and a little plastic dish of baby carrots. She’d stay reliably quiet for twenty minutes that way, maybe even a half hour, which her beleaguered parents immeasurably appreciated. It was a big difference from Claire, who talked constantly and required entertainment from the moment she awoke until the moment the melatonin finally kicked in and she mercifully went to sleep, often not until after nine thirty. Cori, on the other hand, could stare at a ladybug half the day and not even notice that she had to pee, which created its own disruptions but was less obtrusive in the main.
This allowed Brad some minutes to sit at the table with a cup of strong tea and a bowl of granola, which Juliet had made, smothered in almond milk, which she hadn’t made but had persuaded him to use instead of regular milk, which bloated his stomach and made his face blotchy. His wife sat across from him, smiling. How he admired her. Unlike Brad, who most days looked and felt like something left out beside the recycling can, Juliet hadn’t even been remotely ravaged by middle age’s silent, relentless creep. True, she wasn’t one of these LA women whom motherhood had somehow made thinner, blonder, and tanner; their family didn’t have the resources for that level of beauty bionics. The births had broadened her hips, and the lugging around of kids and their crap gear had done the same to her shoulders. But her skin still shone vitally, her eyes were white and clear. Her hair, maybe a little gray around the edges, had texture and substance. She was so beautiful. The world hadn’t beaten Juliet.
Here was her secret: herbs. She’d never had much of a career. When Brad had met her, she’d been working at the gift shop of the Art Institute and selling hand-knitted blankets at the occasional Lincoln Park craft market. After they’d moved to California, she’d made a couple of half-hearted attempts at being a personal assistant, but she wasn’t that good at the gig, and then the kids came along and they couldn’t afford day care. But she grew the herbs like weeds, which some of them technically were. The house’s only successful feature was a sunroom in the front, which mostly had glass walls and got great light all day. That, along with a corner of the backyard where the dog wasn’t permitted to roam, was where Juliet put her pots and planters, filled with the secrets of the forest and the jungle. You had your literal garden-variety basils and tarragons, thyme and oregano, all of which made the food taste really good. But Juliet’s real gift was for the medicinal stuff, obscure mosses and worts, damiana and various salvias. She had cone plants and succulents and fragrants that, if not cooked in just the right way, could be fatal if ingested. These she kept on a shelf so high that even the cat couldn’t access them.
Juliet stewed her herbs. Some of them she froze. She made them into sprays and tinctures, salves and ointments, combining them with root essences that she’d bought at an Asian specialty store in Alhambra. She put them into bottles and jars, plugged them with corks and rubber stoppers, and made her own labels. The only herb she didn’t traffic in was the one Brad desired most, but he had a prescription that he could cash in for that at an infinite number of stores around town. There were other plants, other remedies, and Juliet made hundreds of dollars a month selling them online, sometimes for as much as $1,500 during prime allergy season. That money had made a huge difference lately. The Battlecats residual checks were getting smaller and smaller.
One night, as Juliet stood at the stove stewing up a semifoul, greenish-black concoction in a copper pot, she wore a flowing, gray pashmina knockoff. The cat perched on her shoulder. As he watched the steam billow about Juliet’s face, Brad had a somewhat stunning thought: My wife is a witch.
She wasn’t an Elizabeth Montgomery or Melissa Joan Hart kind of witch who could wriggle her nose and then suddenly his boss (not that he had a boss, goddammit) would be standing there in his underwear holding a cocktail shaker. She wasn’t a Witch of Eastwick or some kind of hot Fairuza
Balk–like goth chick either. This wasn’t Charmed. But Brad’s kitchen definitely hosted some kind of daily witchcraft.
Later, after the kids were asleep, he confronted her. “You’re a witch,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Admit it.”
“I not,” she said, which is how their baby had always said it.
“You make potions,” he said. “Every night. You put roots into a cauldron while you’re singing.”
Juliet blushed, as though she’d been caught doing something shameful.
“Look,” she said, “I’m not interested in casting a circle, like all those people I follow on Facebook. I don’t want to learn spells. But I do believe that the earth contains ancient healing properties, and I want to tap into that tradition.”
“It’s OK, dude,” Brad said. “I don’t care that you’re a witch. You do a good job.”
“Thank you, honey,” she said.
“I think you’re a sexy witch.”
“It’s not about being sexy. It’s about having a profound connection to the earth.”
“I understand,” he said, hoping to steer her away from politics tonight.
“This is about physical and psychological healing. People can sniff out phony witches from a long way off.”
“I imagine that’s true,” he said, “but can you use witchcraft to manipulate me sexually, you sexy witch?”
“Stop with the sex,” she said.
He gave her the pouty smile he knew she couldn’t resist. She smiled back.
“We can try a few things,” she said.
Many happy months followed.
Brad liked Juliet’s witchery, especially because she was so circumspect about it in public. It was almost like a secret identity. Besides him, only the fellow members of her “witch group,” as she now allowed herself to call it, knew. “Isn’t that called a coven?” he’d asked, but she’d scolded him for being so recherché.
In any case: witch.
Now that he knew her secret, it was all she’d ever talk about at home. As they sat there at the breakfast table, precious child-free seconds ticking away, she described how a rival witch group, which was far more committed to goddess worship than hers, was trying to take away their Sunday meeting space at the nearby Unitarian church by offering the congregation more money. Apparently, witch factions didn’t coexist well in the same space, and making things more complicated was the fact that a group of male witches, largely interested in the sexual powers of black magic, had begun to occasionally troll the witch group’s Facebook page, bringing foul, corruptive, sexist talk to innocent exchanges about herbal efficacy.
“Wow, the Wiccan world is so political,” Brad said.
“We’re not Wiccan, technically,” said Juliet. “But yeah, you have no idea.”
The little one approached the table. “I threw up,” she said.
Brad rolled his eyes. That girl vomited more than Caligula.
“Well, we should clean you, then,” Juliet said.
“I need to get clean myself,” Brad said. “I have a pitch meeting today.”
“You do? With you?”
“Fox. The drama people. Alison set it up.”
“That’s a big deal. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He hadn’t told her because he’d almost forgotten. A decade of driving into the void will do that to you. The idea of going to Hollywood and talking about your ideas to TV and movie producers sounds glamorous. And it is, if you actually sell any of those ideas. If you don’t, then you’re little better than someone going door to door selling carpet samples, or working the diet-powder table at Costco, except that those people occasionally make a sale.
Amazingly, Brad had never been on a film or TV set, had never seen a camera roll. Raymond Chandler once said that you could live your whole life in Hollywood and never get to the part where they make the movies, and he was right. Battlecats didn’t count because they animated it in Croatia and did the soundstage crap in Toronto.
The traditional LA arc is all about the crack-up, the meteor shot to success gradually frittered away by a lifetime of bad luck, bad decisions, and bad drugs. The grocery stores of Sherman Oaks are littered with such cases. And then you have the people who play it right—more than you might imagine, actually—who make good connections and good money and work hard enough and long enough to carry themselves through to retiring in Ojai. Those are the people Brad envied most, the ones who’d never really accomplished anything but still had private orange groves on their property. J. J. Abrams was a faraway dream. Brad knew he didn’t have those chops and never would.
His ambitions didn’t exactly soar anymore. Brad didn’t dream of being the editor of the New Century. Even publishing another book was beyond him now. But that guy who’d worked a few seasons on the Lost staff and then had a couple of fantasy scripts on the Black List? Brad could have been that guy. Two seasons, maybe three, on The Mentalist was all he asked. If asked, he’d have agreed to do that job. But there were a lot of people in line who were better connected and more talented than he’d ever been. No one was going to ask.
He got into the shower. Whenever he was feeling OK about his life, all he had to do was shower, and that disabused him of any optimism. It wasn’t a nice shower—at all. The landlady had converted the garage more than a decade ago, adding a bathroom. But she’d either done all the work herself, or she’d hired the Three Stooges. The stall had been unevenly tiled. Bulbous chunks of brown paste clumped in the corners, making the floor almost impossible to clean and permanently moldy. The wall tile was no better, with light brown smears all over, and squares that bulged out at odd angles. The water pressure was so strong, so sharp, and the temperature so erratic that it felt to Brad like guards were hosing him down. To add to the ambience, the landlady hadn’t put a light in over the stall, and the room had no windows. It was like showering in a dark cage. He found himself longing to spend the night in a motel just so he could take a bath in a cheap plastic tub. That would have been the Chateau Marmont by comparison.
On the floor sat two drains, inexplicably side by side, with checked metal covers. When you removed the covers, you saw nothing but a hole opening into the ground. Brad wondered where the wastewater actually went. Did it just gather in puddles underneath the house? If he took a shit down the hole, would it just drop straight into the sewer? He never did, but he was tempted.
Many mornings he’d spend wasted minutes in the stall, using more water than he should, slapping his head against the slimy tile or haphazardly scraping mold off the clear plastic curtain with his fingernail. The shower should be a nice time, he thought. Why is the shower not a nice time?
On that morning, as he rinsed himself for another trip into the void, Brad knew: he was a failure.
You only get one chance in this life. His career browser couldn’t be refreshed. Brad was just about out of dimes for the meter.
After fifteen totally wasteful minutes of water torture, he got out, dried himself, and put on a clean pair of dark Old Navy jeans and a cherry-red Penguin golf shirt that had looked very fashionable when he’d seen Adam Brody wear it on The O.C. seven years ago. The shirt had faded a bit, and the collar was fraying, but it still fit, so Brad kept it in the rotation. New clothes for Daddy weren’t exactly in the budget these days.
Once more unto the breach.
Before his meeting, Brad met his manager at John O’Groats on West Pico. It had blue-and-white-checked tablecloths and maps of Scotland on the wall. There were little dishes of caramelized apples on the table so that you could scoop them into your Dutch baby pancake after you punctured the dough. This was what frustrated Brad about LA the most: you had all these incredible places to eat and drink, and lots of weird old stores full of character and characters, and then you headed out into the belly of the day, and the city seemed to be composed of
nothing but guys with leaf blowers and horrible plastic people who were out to ruin your career. So a diner like this one served as both an oasis and a mirage.
Brad got to the restaurant late, after driving around for twenty minutes looking for a free place to park. Alison was sitting at a table, talking on her smartphone. She waved him over and mouthed the words “Just a second,” and then proceeded with her conversation, which seemed to consist of the word “OK” twenty times, followed by a loud, “Well then you can go fucking screw yourself!” And then she hung up.
“Sorry,” she said. “My nanny’s being a real pain in the ass.”
“Sure,” Brad said.
The decade since Brad moved to town, which felt like a century, had been hard on Alison as well. She’d quit the Film Strip a couple years after he’d arrived, much to his worry, but had quickly signed on at another company that appeared to have almost identical offices. There had been several changes since then, including a few distressing months where she’d set up a desk in a corner of the communal gym in a condo complex where she didn’t even live. Brad could barely hear her over the endless whirl of the elliptical trainers. Currently she was working solo out of a room on the seventh floor of a high-rise in Century City but seemed to be doing well enough so that she could afford to pay someone to handle her e-mail. In the meantime she’d adopted a preteen Guatemalan orphan, who was giving her all kinds of problems.
“My Producers Guild insurance doesn’t cover speech therapy,” she said. “Can you believe that?”
“Crazy,” Brad said.
His own insurance had run out three years previous, and now he just paid out the hole for catastrophic coverage for the girls. The rest of their health care was in his witchy wife’s hands. She was doing a good job so far, but he always worried.
