by Liana Maeby
“You know that actress I told you about? Freshman who started here this year? I can’t say her name, but . . .” Angus winked and pointed to a signed poster above his desk. Teen actress and legendary former baby-pageant champion Jolee Jessup smiled at me from the center of a pink heart.
“She had some big bender at her new house in Malibu. Called me over, and invited me to stay too.”
“Wow. Was it enlightening? Have you renounced your scholarly ways to join a pop band?”
“Why do you always have to be so cynical, Leila?” Angus was cutting lines with a razor blade atop a copy of A People’s History. He shook his head. “Man, those Disney girls can get fucked-up.”
“It’s in their DNA. Ten years ago, it was another pack of fruit snacks to get through the audition.”
Angus inhaled a line. “Hollywood, yo.”
“Hollywood, yo.”
As I drove home with a bottle of Adderall and a just-in-case eight ball tucked into my purse, I thought about that bizarre call from Harlan Brooks. By the time I reached my apartment, the drugs I’d done at Angus’s were starting to make my nerve endings feel like they were being fucked by a group of lovesick teenagers—which is to say, I felt fantastic. So I picked up my phone and dialed the last number that had come in; sure enough, an agency assistant was on the other end. She connected me to Harlan, who answered with a “Lay it on me, babe. You in for dinner?”
“Yep, I guess I’m in for dinner.”
I met Harlan at Beast, a trendy restaurant on Highland with a meat-only menu. I spotted him at a table in the front, a thirty-five-ish short guy in rectangular glasses and an expensive purple tie. When he saw me walking toward him in the drapey cream-colored minidress I’d thrown on before leaving the house, he yelled across the room, “You’re not a fucking vegetarian, are you?”
In response, I ordered the crispy pig’s head in pickled vegetable aioli with a side of veal’s tongue—kind of disgusting, but I was trying to make a point. Over dinner, Harlan laid out his plan for our beautiful future together. He would introduce me to the world as a hotshot “it girl” right away—before I even had to do anything—and we’d sell lovely little screenplays together for all eternity. I’d be in magazine spreads and on marquees, and we’d both be rich. “All you have to do is trust me,” he said. “And try a bit of this shallot-crusted steak.”
When Harlan got up from the table for the third time and returned with an extreme case of the coke sniffles, I knew we’d get along just fine. And that sentiment was toasted over half a dozen drinks at a little dive bar across the street called The Nickel. The bartender was a world-weary Irish lass named Angie who kept sighing like she wanted to cut us off—except for the fact that neither of us was having any trouble holding our liquor. I imagine the cocaine helped with that.
After he took yet another trip to the bathroom, I asked Harlan if he cared to share what he was holding. He looked me over with a wry little smile plastered across his tight, pearly mouth. “Hey, Leila, I know I just called you a wise old screenwriting sage, but you’re still a kid.”
“Sounds like you’re just being greedy,” I replied.
Harlan insisted on coming with me while I snorted up his powder, to make sure my heart didn’t explode right then and there in that bar on Highland—for that would be the glamorous whiz-kid story without the payoff. So we locked ourselves in the unisex bathroom to the chagrin of the fiery waitress. “Nothing unsavory, Angie,” Harlan yelled.
Inside the small bathroom, Harlan pulled out a vial of white powder, and I took a mirror from my bag. I tapped out some of the blow and snorted it with a rolled-up Post-it, my instrument of choice. (There are germs on dollar bills, and germs can kill you!) I did one line, then two lines, then three lines, while Harlan watched. “Well, bravo then, you little psychopath,” he said. “You’re even more ready for this lifestyle than I thought.”
I flipped him off with both hands and left the bathroom. I ordered another round from Angie, and a scotch and soda was waiting for Harlan when he returned. We bullshitted for a while about movies, realizing we found all the same things funny and all the same things boring. And then he tried to get down to business. “So,” he said. “Here’s the thing about Los Angeles.”
“I know the thing about Los Angeles, dude.”
He continued. “It’s all facade, of course. That great big shiny sun we worship so fervently has been bedazzled, and those nighttime stars were commissioned by Swarovski. But everyone here thinks they’re a part of that facade. So all you have to do is convince them that they’re right, make them feel like you’re going to help them live out their fantasy, and in return, they’ll help you live out yours. Even when there’s no money, there’s money everywhere. You just have to know whose vase to overturn.”
“I mean, I already have a plan,” I said.
“Do you now?”
“Yep. You want to hear it?”
“Lay it on me.”
I stood up and tapped my nose. I walked back to the bathroom and left the door open. Harlan came in and started cutting lines. We took turns snorting, one after another, and I could feel my head filling up like a snow globe. I was dizzy and entirely too high, close to a breaking point.
“And . . .” Harlan said. “Your big plan?”
I steadied myself on Harlan’s shoulder and waited for the snowflakes to part. I fought the rush of blood flooding my head, leaned forward, and whispered into his ear.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I told Harlan I was on board to work with him, and he immediately started sending me out on meetings with creative executives and their associates, executive creatives. The first job I secured was a pilot for ABC. The studio wanted “a hip and modern retelling of Robin Hood as a teenage girl.” It took a bit of work, but Harlan finally convinced them that I was just the gal for the job, what with my insight into the hearts and minds and hormones of the youth and all.
I was used to a heavy pace of academia, so I handled my classes at USC without much trouble. Not that this was any great accomplishment. One such class was called Creativity Seminar—the professor would bring in broken headlights and old shoes and other artifacts of shit, and we were supposed to let ourselves be inspired by the ugly mundanity of daily life (not a problem for me). My more challenging and, dare I say, more legitimate courses were handled with my tried-and-true writing-everything-on-Adderall process. Add my natural distaste for sleep, and I had more than enough time to dedicate to the Robin Hood project.
Nevertheless, in terms of research, I did none. Mari and I watched Men in Tights one night because it happened to be on, but that was the extent of it. Instead, I reached inward, pulling out truth and beauty from the well of wisdom located inside my own body, somewhere around the pancreas. I decided to set the thing in an upper-crust Los Angeles private school called Sherwood (there’s an actual upper-crust Los Angeles private school called Oakwood; feel free to gasp over my brilliance at any point). My Robin Hood was Rocio, an East LA girl from a poor family who attended the joint on scholarship. She was a total badass and, naturally, totally hot. In the pilot, Rocio develops a flirtatiously antagonistic relationship with a handsome lacrosse player whose father happens to be on the school’s board of trustees. She fucks him and robs Pops blind, but then gets all guilty about it after she realizes she has real feelings for the kid. Especially after he turns up in East LA for the block party Rocio organized with the stolen money.
Here are the notes I got back from the studio:
Confused about the name Rocio. Like that she’s ethnic, but we don’t want her to be so ethnic that she alienates the audience.
Sex in the pilot??? Should wrestle with losing her virginity as a season arc.
Can we add a mariachi band to the block party?
Board of trustees should mirror bad guys in orig. Robin Hood. Same names, etc.
Wasn’t there also a priest character in orig. story? Can we add a priest?
Like gay brother character. C
ould be more flamboyant. Could add stuff with priest.
Do we have a role for Betty White?
At the end of it all, the show didn’t get picked up, thanks to news of a “a hip and modern retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as a teenage boy” over at FOX, but the studio was happy enough with my work that a steady stream of it started coming my way. There was another pilot, then a few rewrites of ABC Family movies and some TV stuff. Nothing huge, but solid work that a lot of people in this town would kill for.
My favorite job was a freelance episode I wrote for an hour-long ABC drama called Grace’s Hope. The show centered on the daughter of a conservative church family that had been uprooted from a small Southern town and dropped inside the bowels of New York City. In my episode, Grace is offered, and consents to smoke, that demon, marijuana, for the first time. Never one to avoid being a pain in the ass, I made up my own pot lingo and assured the studio it was real. In my script, a joint was a “tapeworm”; a bong, a “periscope”; and the munchies became the “diabetes jones.”
The show flew me out to New York the week my episode shot. I had a midterm for my evening class on Alfred Hitchcock to take the night before, so I finished the script quickly, drove to the airport, and dashed onto a red-eye. As soon as I landed at JFK, I hopped in a cab, threw my bags down at the Ace Hotel, and caught another taxi over to the set in Brooklyn. Call time was 8 a.m., and I arrived only half an hour late, a personal record. I poured myself some coffee at the craft services table, headed directly for the chair labeled “Writer,” and fell immediately to sleep.
The actress who played sixteen-year-old Grace was actually a twenty-three-year-old stick of dynamite named Melanie. She smoked cigarettes between takes, wrapped up in a fringed suede jacket, then slipped seamlessly back into the skin of the pretty blonde innocent she’d been hired to play. I noticed that Melanie was staring at me as I came to from my little nap. As soon as I’d cleared the fog from my brain enough to participate in eye contact, Melanie winked and raised her eyebrows mischievously. At lunch, she cornered me by the condiments. “Okay, be honest: ‘tapeworm’ I can believe, but ‘periscope’? There’s no way anyone calls a bong that.”
“Sure,” I replied. “Those are all real terms, straight from the marijuana community of the greater Los Angeles area.”
“Bullshit,” Melanie said, and put her hand on her hip.
“All right, yeah, it’s bullshit. I made it up.”
“You’re a fucking psycho.” Melanie laughed. “I love it. There’s a party tonight at the Chelsea. You’re coming with me, and if you even try to argue, I’ll hand your lying ass right over to the producers.”
For the rest of the afternoon, I was kept awake by my writerly duties. The director called me over to do a few line rewrites for the scene where Grace confesses to her father that the oregano in the little baggie on her desk is, in fact, not oregano at all, but rather an eighth of “Lucifer’s sage.” They wanted me to add a tearful hug and a bit of praying, during which they’d voice over a message from Grace’s cool new dealer friend.
After shooting wrapped for the day, Melanie headed to the wardrobe trailer and clothed herself in a blue minidress and studded heels. She fastened her long blonde hair into a fauxhawk and painted herself with eyeliner. Over the dress went that fringed jacket, which I now noticed was embellished with two small buttons, featuring Joan Jett and Dusty Springfield. Melanie offered me a dress, but after I’d spent two straight days inside my leather leggings, the pants had become like a second skin I was afraid to shed, lest my skinny bones and sinewy muscles be revealed raw under the lights of New York City.
To say that I was underdressed for the party would be an understatement, as it would be to call it a party. Properly, the event was a “salon,” meaning we were all there to edify one another over cocktails via incendiary conversation—or, if worse came to worst, a game of Balderdash. The apartment belonged to a rich kid named Lindsey Valmont, who split his time between a suite of rooms at the Chelsea Hotel and a loft in Williamsburg. Evidently, he was some kind of critic whose actual credentials no one could seem to track down. Lindsey greeted me and Melanie at the door in a checked bow tie, his expensive hair coiffed high above a pair of John Lennon glasses. Inside the apartment were various twenty- and thirtysomethings dressed in gowns and suits, sipping wine and champagne out of crystal. A Leonard Cohen record played on the stereo, and the wall opposite the front door was decorated with a large print of Robert Mapplethorpe calla lilies. “Welcome to my not-so-humble abode,” Lindsey said, kissing Melanie on the cheek and then on the neck.
“Lindsey, this is Leila. She’s writing my show this week.”
“A friend of Mel’s is a guest of mine,” Lindsey said, pecking at my face before I had a chance to duck out of the way.
Lindsey brought us drinks, and Melanie and I made our way over to the couch, where two couples were discussing a fiction piece in the Paris Review—some story about a troubled young woman who inherits an old parakeet from her eccentric great-aunt.
“It was very Lorrie Moore,” one of the women said. “But also kind of Alice Munro.”
“I couldn’t help but think Joan Didion,” the other gal chimed in.
“And of course there was so much Virginia Woolf in the semicolons.”
“I read it on the shitter,” a man in a pink sport coat said. “Which gave the writing a not-unwelcome scatological undercurrent.”
“Hmm,” I said, raising my eyebrows thoughtfully. “Didn’t you find the parakeet to be a little caricaturish?”
The man pondered this, and the women nodded and murmured.
“You know, now that you mention it, I actually did,” Pink Coat said, turning to address me head-on. “And did you feel that the dialogue was kind of derivative of Gilmore Girls?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “I haven’t read the story.”
Melanie cackled out loud at this and grabbed my hand, leading me away from the stunned group of aesthetes and over to an open window, where she placed cigarettes in our mouths. “These people are fucking idiots, aren’t they?” Mel asked.
“I wouldn’t argue with the description.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Hey, these are your friends, lady.”
“Nah,” Mel said, sparking her Gauloises. “I don’t have any friends. These are just people who want to say that they know me and people it makes sense for me to know. Or some shit like that.”
“Don’t get all sentimental on me.” I laughed.
Melanie took my hand and played with the ring on my index finger. “Thanks for coming with me,” she said. “I’m glad I don’t have to sit through this on my own.”
I smiled at Melanie, feeling a little overwhelmed by the sudden attachment this girl I’d met only twelve hours earlier had clearly formed, and not entirely sure where it was heading. I pulled my hand away and tossed my cigarette out the window to land in a puddle or a gutter six stories below. I glanced around the room. Lindsey was roaming about with a fistful of assorted pills, instructing his guests to close their eyes and pick one at random. I could see Percocet in there and Valium and maybe ecstasy. I guessed there were probably some uppers as well, but Lindsey caught me trying to peek and waggled his finger in the way only a man in a bow tie can. Then he walked directly to where I was perched on the arm of one of his overstuffed white chairs and held out his palm. I closed my eyes, selected a smooth round pill, and swallowed it down. “Take another,” Lindsey said, and I did.
By the time midnight rolled around, I was feeling mercury-mouthed and a little dizzy. The room had begun to take on the characteristics of a biology experiment: people shifted and moved at a variety of paces; discussions turned into monologues, and monologues into hysterical laughter. Lindsey turned off the Leonard Cohen and cleared his throat to prime himself for an announcement. “I’ve got something really special in store for you guys tonight,” he said, gesturing to a small, pretty Korean woman standing at his
side. “Helen here is a pianist who’s just graduated from Juilliard—and lucky us, she’s agreed to give a little concert.”
Helen seated herself at the grand piano in the center of the room and banged out something complicated with a hell of a lot more notes than seemed necessary to my deliriously high ears. After two songs, I began to get restless, so I quietly slipped out the front door. I wandered into the hall, gripping the gold railing along the staircase, feeling disoriented as I stumbled through the holy hotel. I sat down on a step across from a gray-toned Joan Miró painting. I stared at the surrealist blobs hanging crookedly on the wall, suspended in a series of rows, and tried to figure out what in the fucking fuck kind of drugs I was on.
I don’t know how long I’d been zoning out on the painting when I registered footsteps behind me. I turned to see Melanie hovering over me, her long legs made infinite by the angle. I smiled up at her, and she tilted her beautiful blonde head over the railing. “Listen,” she said. “I think you’re sexy. I mean, I think I have a crush on you.”
“How’s that concerto going?” I asked, beckoning Melanie to come join me on my step.
“Yeah, I can’t go back in there. Jesus Christ, I mean, who stops a party for a goddamn piano recital?”
“Once again, Miss Melanie, they’re your ‘friends.’”
“Ugh. Let’s get a room, yeah? Just to hang out and maybe nap?”
“Sure.” I smiled at Melanie and ran my fingers along the brown fringes of her jacket.
Melanie went down to the concierge and booked us a room on the fifth floor. We walked into the small white space, and Mel slammed her back up against the door. “Jesus Christ, I am so fucking high,” she said. “You want another cigarette?”
“Sure.”
Melanie and I crawled through the window and out onto a small fire escape, letting our feet dangle over the edge of the railing. My head was spinning, and the horns and catcalls from the street below blended into some harmonious thing that sounded more to me like music than any of Helen’s living-room gesticulations. “I like New York,” I murmured to Melanie, and then cracked up over my grandiosity.
