by Michael Ryan
“Thanks, what do I owe you here, two nights at the Ritz? Forty, right? Or did Sparky clean out the minibar as usual and go bonkers on room service?”
“Forty’s right, but I ought to pay you. Sparky here, he’s my favorite. He is such a sweetie. These golden labs are like holy children. Look at that face. He knows I’m talking about him, don’t you, Sparky? I’ll tell you something else, these dogs speak volumes about their owners too. Some of these toy poodles these rich bitches bring in here—they ought to have little straitjackets for them. But Sparky, he’s just as sweet and good as he can be.”
“Hear that, Sparky?” I said. He did hear it. He barked.
I ALWAYS had to take Sparky for a run at the beach after I picked him up at the kennel. It was like making eggs for Krista. He would be hurt if I skipped it and I realized that I didn’t in fact have that much to do anyway since I was supposed to still be in Baja honeymooning. I parked in my driveway and hooked Sparky to his leash and walked him wagging and sniffing and dragging me up the block to the highest point in the switchback overlooking PCH where there’s a 200-foot stairway leading down to a pedestrian tunnel under the highway to the beach. The tunnel is a nasty place, urinous and graffiti-smeared. It floods when it rains, and the water from the highway sits there in puddles for weeks. It’s so bad that the homeless don’t sleep there, but on this day a shirtless blond kid wearing a leather necklace and combat fatigues was camped on one of the few dry spots, leaning on a sleeping bag and reading The Dharma Bums. Sparky gave his nose a lick. “Hey, doggy,” the kid said to Sparky. He had a tray of beaded jewelry on a black cloth next to him.
“Some pretty trinkets for the lady?” he asked me.
“What lady?” I asked.
“Everybody’s got a lady, man.”
“Not me,” I said. “Let’s go, Sparky.” I bent down and unhooked his leash, and he bolted straight through the puddles out onto the beach.
“Great dog,” the kid called at my back. Sparky is much admired—unlike me, I thought as I came out of the tunnel, and got a little laugh from myself out of that. He was already down at the water’s edge. He had stopped to sniff something that was black and shiny, which, from where I was, looked like a body bag. All I could think of was the dead Korean girl. Sparky was certainly thrilled by it. He was running around it in a circle, and, as I approached, he began rolling on it, or, I should say, in it, since it turned out to be a large mound of black jelly, of marine origin, although it was impossible to say exactly what particular species. Whatever it was, though, Sparky loved it. It smelled worse than any other substance in the known universe. He rolled in it and wiggled ecstatically on his back, his legs flailing like a cockroach’s. Then he rubbed his muzzle in it, kneeling on his forelegs and rooting right in there, denting the thing until he pulled his head out and it filled in again with a sucking noise. Doggy heaven. Quintessence of rotted fish matter. I walked ten feet up the beach and yelled at Sparky and threw his stick into the ocean. He went for it. Getting stinky was big fun but not as much fun as retrieving a stick in the pounding surf. I hoped the ocean would clean some of the suppurating black jelly out of Sparky’s fur so I wouldn’t have to, but I wasn’t greatly optimistic about it.
After fifteen minutes of throwing the stick, I usually sat in the lifeguard stand and watched the water and let Sparky do his own thing investigating the beach and chasing gulls for a while. It was all clearly established and understood and mutually agreed upon: easily my best relationship. I climbed the ladder and lifted myself into the seat. There was still fog over the ocean. The sun sometimes doesn’t burn it off until noon. Behind me the bike path that runs from Venice to Malibu was full of Sunday morning traffic: bikers and joggers and Rollerbladers in American Gladiator outfits (helmet, elbow pads, knee pads, and a bikini)—but almost nobody was walking by the water, much less swimming in it. The undertows would be deadly. The waves were still high and strong from Friday’s storm. The last time I had looked at the ocean I had been looking through Sabine’s kitchen window. It already seemed like another life ago, like a dream, or, as Don said, a hallucination. I remembered the other thing he said too: You don’t humiliate people. It was still incomprehensible to me that this was not at all what I was doing while I was doing it. What I was doing was having sex with Sabine. And I was not getting married. Those two things. In that order. I certainly knew that Doris was going to be hurt, but my responsibility to her was such a low third in my consciousness that even this didn’t occur to me until I woke up with fifteen minutes to get to the church. I felt like an item in her Life Plan: obtain boyfriend, get married, have baby. I was like one of her deals. A lined-up duck. A sperm donor. Her determination served her so well in her career, maybe I wanted to be the one thing she couldn’t have.
That last thought sent a shiver up my spine—as if I had intentionally hurt her, maybe out of jealousy from my own weakness and failure. Her career was spectacular. My career was a mess. I was thirty-nine years old. I had been in LA fifteen years and had pretty much done everything I could do out here and had, as they say, plateaued. I did the circuit of clubs here and around the country, had my shots on Letterman and Leno, showed up on the Comedy Channel now and then, etc. But I hadn’t grown. That urinal-midget bit was as good as anything I had done since, and that was eight years ago. I was still trying to fit the six-minute format, still trying to please the twenty-somethings whose frame of reference is limited to TV, sports, dating, and airplane food. It had not been lost on me that spending more time with Doris in New York might have led somewhere. The audience in New York is older and hipper. Maybe I could have pushed myself to another level. Maybe I didn’t really need to do bathroom jokes.
Sitting there in the lifeguard stand, I realized I had done it again. I started out thinking about hurting Doris and in half a minute I was thinking about—guess what?—me. My career. Mememe. Was I really so selfish that I could not consider another person for one full minute? Even a person I had supposedly loved? Maybe I deserved everything they said about me at the Robert Roast. (How the hell was I going to pay for that dinner?)
But Sparky didn’t think so. He came running up to the lifeguard stand, barking for me to come down. He was followed by a well-shined woman of about forty in a sweat suit and baseball cap. I smiled at her as she approached. I saw that she was about to say something to me and I expected it was going to be something nice about Sparky. She yelled, “You ought to wash that fucking dog. It smells foul.”
I said I was just about to go do that.
“It’s too late now. He just rubbed that shit on my sweat suit. Blaah. It’s horrible,” she said, and stomped off up the beach.
IT WAS in fact pretty horrible. People out for their Sunday morning walks crossed the street to get away from us as we walked home. As we squeezed past the kid reading The Dharma Bums in the tunnel, he screamed, “Keep that dog away from me!” Sparky’s stock had abruptly plummeted. Sharp sell-off in Sparky. Pension funds dump Sparky. I shortened Sparky’s leash, so I was holding him almost at the neck. By the time we got home, I smelled like he did.
I always used Renate’s old plastic kiddie pool to wash Sparky, which she kept on her back patio next to the hose. The patio was surrounded by a garden, all the flowers in bloom, every variety of extravagant California blossom, which Renate lovingly cultivated every day, the sun just breaking through so you could almost see the flowers stretching toward it. I tied Sparky to the spigot, dumped a whole box of dog shampoo in the pool, and had begun filling it from the hose when Krista came out the back door. She was wearing the same thing she had left my apartment wearing, jeans and an oversized T-shirt and no bra.
“Let me help!” she said.
“He’s pretty smelly, Krista. And so am I.”
“I don’t care,” she said, and knelt down in the pool to stir the shampoo in the water with her hand. I could see her breasts down the top of her T-shirt. She splashed water on her shirt and it clung to her. To my horror, I felt a strong sexual
charge, like a drug rush, bang. Even worse, Krista seemed to feel my feeling it. At the exact moment it hit me, she looked up and smiled at me, like this spike of lust for her was the loveliest thing in the world. I literally shook my head as if I had been slapped.
“Where’s your mom, Krista?” I asked, my voice squeaking.
“She’s out,” she said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Why? You want to be alone with me?”
I ignored that question. Absolutely ignored it. “I need to talk to her about something,” I said.
“Come here, Sparky,” she said. “Come here, baby.” She hugged him around the neck and kissed his stinky muzzle. “Here he is, here’s my good boy,” she said. “They don’t like you because you stink but Krista loves you no matter what. Let’s get you all clean and fluffy.”
She began soaping him in great sensual strokes. He hated it when I did it but with Krista he seemed to purr. I could see that I was irrelevant here. And, contrary to what Doris said at the Robert Roast, I was not about to climb into the pool with Krista.
“I’m going to go take a shower, OK? If you really don’t mind giving Sparky his bath.”
“I like it,” Krista said. “I’d like to give you a bath too.”
“Ha ha,” I said, weakly, and took myself away from there. Fast.
7.
I locked my bathroom door before I stripped and turned on the water, picturing the scene in Psycho which in 1960 made everyone in America afraid to take a shower for months. I could hear the screechy violins on the soundtrack as the knife came down over and over again on Janet Leigh’s then (weirdly) my tender flesh. It spooked me. I had also locked the front and back doors to my apartment and closed all the blinds. And after my shower I dressed in the bathroom. Then I peeked outside: nobody on the patio. Krista had obviously finished washing Sparky and had taken him inside the house. I dreaded going over there to fetch him, dreaded being met by a smiling naked Krista. I knew that my momentary spike of lust was to her as solid as a declaration of love etched in stone. It was as if she lived on another plane of reality, especially in terms of communication. I swear she could read my thoughts. She’d tell her mother that I was sick when she couldn’t possibly know I was sick, and she’d be right. It spooked me even more than the shower scene. I had always been simply kind to her, which I’m sure is why she “loved” me. Now I had shown her another feeling, and I was equally sure that sooner or later she would act on it. I was not looking forward to that.
I decided that the best thing for now would be to wait until Renate got home before I fetched Sparky. He’d be okay there, safer than I would be. I went into the living room and sat down in my Swedish recliner and pushed the message button on my answering machine. I was not looking forward to this either. Masochistically, I played the whole tape, all fifty-four messages. There were no more from Doris after her last frantic call from the church which I had already listened to from Sabine’s. And there was no Sabine either. I hadn’t expected there to be, of course. She had vanished, poof. No doubt to an exotic island in her Brazilian bikini spending her 200 grand on mai tais and pool boys.
There was only one message I listened to twice: from Odom Bucket. One sentence, commanding me to call when I got in. He had certainly wasted no time.
Odom Bucket was my agent. In the eight years he had been my agent, he had called me himself maybe three times. All other communication came through assistants. I had lunch with him once, eight years ago, when he took me on. If it weren’t for that, I would have thought he was the Wizard of Oz. He must have been six two and 300 pounds, a dead ringer for Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (obviously by design). He always wore a white linen suit and a professionally waxed bald head. I met him at his table in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When I walked in, I certainly didn’t have any trouble identifying him, which no doubt was the idea. He seemed to be in his fifties at that time, but nobody knew how old he really was or where he had come from, which no doubt was also the idea. There were plenty of shady rumors about his past—gunrunner, gay porno magnate, Albanian politburo, you name it. He laughed at them, showing a set of teeth that must have had little klieg lights implanted in them, the whitest and shiniest you could buy. He was the Don King of comedy—the power agent, the one you wanted. If he was working for you, you worked. If a club owner didn’t book you when Odom Bucket told him to book you, he didn’t book anybody else either, since Odom Bucket represented everybody else. So he booked you. It was catch-22. Known comics didn’t become known until Odom Bucket represented them and he didn’t represent them until they became known. He dealt exclusively in clubs, TV, and videos. When a comic got a bigger offer—a movie, a network series—Bucket immediately sold the contract to ICM or CAA. At a premium, of course. He wouldn’t swim with the big fishes. But by limiting what he did, he owned the store. He owned the whole franchise.
When he took me on, my career took off. No more open mics, no more barroom comedy nights, no more “alternative comedy” clubs. That’s when I did that video Madge rented. As much as I hated to admit it, he took me on because of Doris. It was never stated, but it was his gift to her. They never did business together. Bucket was much smarter than that. He dealt in influence. It cost him nothing to take me on. What he got from it was Doris’s goodwill—highly valuable, since she herself was, as Don put it, a player. This is how Bucket worked. He was crude and obvious only if he needed to be crude and obvious. He knew very well that the power of power is in people’s perception, cultivated through favors as well as fear.
He certainly scared me. I knew how he felt about my long off-again on-again engagement to Doris. I worked less when it was off-again. He never dropped me though. Understanding the vagaries of romance, he kept himself covered. We didn’t invite him to the wedding, but I had no doubt whatsoever that he had already heard I had stood up Doris at the church. I was about to become gainfully unemployed. In LA, an unemployed comic lies just south of an unemployed screenwriter and an unemployed actor. But there was no sense putting off calling him, since the only thing worse than his dropping me would be to worry about his dropping me.
He must have had one of those gizmos that displays who’s calling because he picked up and said, “Good morning, Robert.”
I expected an assistant to answer the phone. “Odom,” I said. “How are you?”
“I am excellent, as always. I make a point of it. And if I weren’t you’d never guess. How was the honeymoon?”
“No honeymoon, Odom. No marriage. As I think you know.”
“That was the rumor. But I like to go to the source. Information, Robert.”
Information: Bucket invoked the word as if it were the unspeakable name of God.
“So to business,” Bucket continued. “I have bad news and good news. Which do you want first?”
“Yes, Doctor, the bad news is the blood test shows I’ve got terminal cancer but did I see the great-looking receptionist? Well, the good news is you’re fucking her,” I said. There was dead air on the line. Bucket didn’t even sniffle, much less chuckle.
“Which would you like to hear first, the bad news or the good news?” he repeated.
“The patient never does too well hearing the bad news first. Besides I already know what it is. Give me the good news.”
“The good news is that I have gotten you an HBO special, my friend. Shoot in a month, airs this fall. Twenty-eight minutes of Wildman Robert Wilder, all new material, no commercials. For years you’ve been bitching about the six-minute format. This is your chance to show what you can do.”
“That is good news,” I said, not believing it for a second. “Let me guess the bad news: since you’re dropping me, there isn’t going to be any HBO special. Or anything else.”
“Wrong. The special’s on if you want it. But you’re right, I am dropping you. After this deal I’m not your agent anymore. After we sign the HBO contract, we’re through.”
I took a minute to absorb t
his. I didn’t absorb it.
“Still with us, Robert?” Bucket asked.
“Doris, right?” I said.
“Doris said nothing to me. I haven’t even talked to her.”
“But she will appreciate the gesture.”
“Robert,” he said impatiently. “This is business. You don’t get it. None of you guys get it. I took you on because it was good business. I’m dropping you for the same reason. The end. You’ll get another agent.”
“Not Odom Bucket.”
“True, not Odom Bucket. But there are other good agents out there. Not great agents. Good agents. They’d murder their mothers to represent you.”
“I’ll be consoled by the deaths of so many elderly women.”
“I’ll messenger the HBO contract over for you to sign.”
“And if I don’t?” I don’t know why I said this. Of course I was going to sign it.
“If you don’t, you’re stupid. You’re thoughtless and apparently heartless but you’re not stupid. Anyway I don’t care a whit. Who knows, maybe you and Doris will have a happy reconciliation. If so, I’ll give you a call. Until then, good luck.”
“Thanks, Odom. You’re swell.”
“I get the job done,” he said, and hung up. I sat there for a moment wondering at my smart mouth. It sometimes worked without me at the controls. My body, too, according to recent evidence with both Sabine and Krista. Where did I get the chutzpah to talk to Odom Bucket like that? Maybe I didn’t care a whit either anymore.
Then I registered what he had said: I had an HBO special. Was it really possible? It must have been Odom’s wedding gift to Doris. Pump the hubby. But why was he giving it to me anyway, after what I had done to her? Like everything else during the last two days, there wasn’t much sense thinking about it. I might be shooting my HBO special from jail as far as I knew: Robert Wilder Even Wilder From Prison!
