“That’s what most shoots are like,” Frankly said, getting serious. “I guess it’s part of why we do this kind of work.”
“I guess,” Milt said. “It’s definitely not the money.”
“What money?” Frankly said with an extremely rare laugh. He was clearly uber-stoned now.
“Right,” Milt conceded. “That’s just it….”
“What?”
“I’m supposed to be doing this shit for the money.”
“So? You make some…sometimes.“
“Yeah, but there’s so much easier money made elsewhere. There’s a lot of things I could do.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“No, really,” Milt intoned, sitting up in his chair. “Why do I do this shit? Go on shoots at San Francisco Comic-Con with fucking Gil Gladly in partnership with Balloon. Without even getting paid. I mean, I’m not a fanboy, a geek, or a nerd. Not really.”
“And?”
“And, I don’t know. Sometimes it makes me feel bad about the whole thing,” Milt said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s like I’m an outsider. Not really a fraud. I mean, I guess I’m into this shit. Obviously. I watched Balloon when I was a kid. It’s fun hanging out with people like Gil. Most of the time.”
“Obviously.”
“I wouldn’t be able to put so much time and energy into these kinds of things otherwise,” Milt said. “But is it a job or a passion? Or a hobby? Or what the hell is it? I don’t really get that much money, considering everything I always do on projects like this.”
“Especially on this project.”
“Yeah, I mean, aside from the money Gil dropped in my account for the budget in the very beginning of all this nonsense, we haven’t gotten shit. I’ve been paying for most of the last six months’ worth of stuff out of my own pocket, and people like you, Wallace, Ronnie, and everyone else have just been working as a labor of love type deal.”
“Yeah, sure,” Frankly scoffed with his own unique version of a subtle laugh. “‘Labor of love.’ Keep telling yourself that.”
“Then there are people who really, really just want to touch Gil, or be around him, or talk to him, or get a selfie with him, or autograph, you know?”
“Now they are really nuts.”
“It makes me feel weird sometimes that they would do anything to be around Gil, and I’m sitting here complaining about how he’s always hitting me up on the phone about shit he’s freaking out about, or I’m having to tell him where to go or what to do next to get ready for this tour or whatever else.” Milt sighed.
“Maybe that’s why you’re so good at this stuff. You’re not a fanboy, so you can take it seriously and ask good questions during interviews and take care of business instead of being one of these frothing-at-the-mouth bloggers squeeing out on your interviewees and whatnot.”
“Yeah,” Milt said. “That’s me. The Margaret Mead of eighties/nineties pop culture.”
“Now if only you could figure out some way to get a whole lot more Twitter followers than Margaret Mead,” Frankly said with a wide crocodile grin.
“Sorry, I’m one of the eighty-plus percent of Americans not on Twitter and that’s where I’m stayin’!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Frankly said, tired of hearing Milt’s statistic for the umpteenth time. “I know, I know.”
They both laughed now. It felt good. It was one of those moments when Milt realized all at once just how stressed out he had been.
They were both quiet for a few minutes. Milt rolled the window down, and laid his head on the black rubber of the door into which the window had disappeared. Felt the rush of the silver-chilly wind on his face, through his crinkly Semitic hair.
Something dawned on him. He sat back, rolled up the window.
“One thing about those geeks, though,” Milt said, more serious, staring out the windshield to the eucalyptus trees in front of him lining the parking lot into which they were now entering, having almost reached their destination. “They’re spending all this money on old boxes of Nintendo cereal they find on eBay or go to these elaborate Ghostbusters conventions or whatever it is.…”
“Yeah?”
“It all seems so silly and it’s easy to make fun of.”
“Oh kaaaaay.…” Frankly said. “Your point being?”
“So many of these people, they still, like, have a family of their own. Wife, kids, and a day job, and…”
“Normal, you mean,” Frankly said.
“Yeah. They have real lives. They’re weird and strange and obsessed with the eighties and nineties, but then they go home and have a house and a car, two kids, and a wife. A job. A real job. Not just—”
“Not just writing and making movies about these things like you do.”
“Yeah. They wear the costumes and buy the old boxes of cereal and spend their two-week vacation going to these conventions I fucking hate having to deal with, but they’re the ones with lives of their own. For right now, I just have Gil Gladly’s. It’s not even mine.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah, then half the time I’m basically just traveling around behind him sweeping up the shit he leaves behind, so that I smell like fucking shit myself. That’s fun.”
Frankly parked, keeping the car running.
He pulled out another joint from his jacket pocket to light up, offering the stuff once more to Milt, who once again shooed it away. Frankly opened the window, let his arm with the joint hang out there as he smoked and exhaled.
Frankly was totally and enviably at ease. Milt worried about getting caught in a car with the joint, but Frankly smoked like none of this mattered.
Frankly finished his joint, flicked it out the window, turned off the car. Milt picked up the hat he’d been keeping on the floor at his feet and put it on.
They both opened their doors, then they were out in the Southern California night, an unseasonably warm breeze blowing across them both and through the trees lining the parking lot as they turned to the pink neon-lit sign ahead.
“I don’t want to stay out too late, so just get the coke from your girl and we'll head to the beach to do it, okay?” Milt asked, handing Frankly two hundred-dollar bills as their sneakers crunched on the gravelly path leading up through the near-empty parking lot toward the strip club.
“Well, we gotta hang for a bit and have a private dance, or else the bouncers might think something is up,” Frankly said.
“All right,” Milt said. “Just as long as we can get out of there early enough to go to the beach, do the stuff, and get back to my mom’s so I can get up early and get some work done tomorrow. I’m behind.”
“Jesus,” Frankly said, opening the door to the strip club with a blast of distorted hip-hop music pummeling them, “you’re so Jewish.”
CHAPTER 9
It wasn’t a hard choice.
As soon he locked eyes with the olive-skinned, pocket-sized Devlin standing across the way, Milt was transfixed. He sat in his chair in the dim mauve lighting of the Santa Ana strip club Frankly had taken him to so they could procure some cocaine from his stripper “friend.” Milt was in.
Devlin would make for an ideal way to kill a few minutes while Milt waited for Frankly to conduct his business.
Upon entering the modestly sized and fairly empty strip club a few minutes earlier, Frankly and he had moved in that quiet, strange walk one does while entering such an establishment. Slightly embarrassed, slightly guilty.
But only slightly.
They were here for the coke, sure. But without needing to say anything aloud, Frankly gave Milt the look which said, “We need to hang here for a bit and we need to get dances so it doesn’t look like we’re just here for the illegal drugs, okay?”
“Okay,” Milt silently communicated back at Frankly.
Into their respective chairs they plopped, turning off their phones as signs requested.
Frankly flattened out comfortably, his whole body becoming one of thos
e beanbag stuffed animal toys, languid and inhumanly relaxed.
Milt had never really liked strip clubs. He always felt particularly bad about the people who would go there. The clubs themselves seemed scuzzy and strange to him. They smelled, and tended to be balmy, like a fenny bog. The walls seemed to sweat and were for some reason always lined with a kind of pubic black carpet.
He’d go to strip clubs with friends, and had gone a few times by himself, though he never really felt very good about it. Afterwards, the experience would leave him hollow, like he’d wasted both his time and his money.
But here he was now. Might as well make the best of it. Drugs were on the way, time would pass.
The music pulsed, muffled and distorted to the point of being white noise nearly drowning out the distraction of these intrusive thoughts as Milt sat in his chair a few feet from Frankly, who raised his hand to motion over some drop-dead young swain in a see-through gold lace nightie that would have better fit her much younger, smaller sister if she had one.
Frankly whispered in the girl’s ear, and she flitted over to Milt, leaning down so he could smell her breath of whiskey, harsh spearmint gum, and gritty charcoal cigarettes.
“What can I get you, sweetie?” she asked sultrily.
“Uh…I’m fine right now,” Milt replied.
“We don’t have a cover here,” she said, “but you do need to buy two drinks, love, okay? ”
“Oh.…”
“You want me to just get you a couple bottles of water?” she asked, knowing that “oh” really meant, “I’d rather not drink tonight,” being totally in tune with the lingo of the various species of men who came through here.
“Yeah,” Milt sputtered. “Sure.…”
He didn’t know why he was so fucking nervous, why he couldn’t keep it together. She must have seen that he was clenching the side of his chair hard, because she put her soft, surprisingly icy hand on his and leaned in closer to his cheek to whisper, “I’ll be right back.”
The bottles of water, Aquafina, were nine dollars each. Milt wouldn’t drink the water. Ever since he had helped write the memoirs for a dowager of a well-known Pepsi executive who had told him, “Never drink Aquafina! It’s the excess water we don’t use for production of the soda!”, he never had a drop again.
The distorted white noise of the music, some kind of clubby hip hop track that briefly sounded as though it were a skipping CD—What-what-what-what-what-what Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah Ungh-ungh-ungh-ungh-ungh—ensconced Milt in his own sonic bubble until…
“Hey, how’s your night going?”
Another silky-soft icy hand rested upon his own still clenching the right side of his chair. It wasn’t a girl, it was a woman. She must have been in her forties. At least. He’d seen strung-out before, but this was not it. Just tired. This was probably one of her many jobs. She was probably back in school, probably had more than two kids. The light streaks in her otherwise auburn, wavy, shoulder-length hair loudly advertised she was trying to fit in with the five much younger girls who were tomcatting around, or the two up on the dance floor clicking their oversized clear plastic shoes and writhing around naked with glittery bodies lined with a patina of telltale baby fat.
“I’m fine,” Milt said. “How are you?”
It was a reflex. He immediately felt silly saying it. But that’s what came out of his dry mouth. He wished he could drink the Aquafina, but would not.
“Oh,” she leaned back in her chair, presaging her pitch to come, “you know. Just starting my night. Man, it’s been slow.”
“Yeah, Thursday night! It’ll…uh, probably pick up soon, right?”
“I hope so. I don’t want to be here too late. I have class in the morning.”
Bingo.
“Oh yeah?” Milt said, keeping the conversation going out of politeness. “What are you studying?”
She sat up and looked at him with a sudden crack in the veneer, punctuated by a confounding smile. “I…don’t really want to say.”
“Mmm,” Milt said, looking around the room for alternatives. If this was the game, he wanted to make sure he was with the right partner. And she wasn’t it.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“Whatever pays the bills,” Milt replied, his standard superficial response.
“Nice,” she said. “That’s why I’m going back to school. This doesn’t pay the bills. Not all of ‘em, unfortunately.”
The music changed to something similarly indiscernible. Milt heard that generic fast-talking boilerplate mumbo-jumbo of the unseen DJ announcing a changeover of girls (Missy and Lihhhhhhhh-dia were up next, with Daisy on deck), and saw Frankly escorted hand-in-hand by an extremely tall Thai girl with short, silky black hair and a silver bra, silver G-string, and matching silver fuck-me pumps toward the private dance booths on the other side of the club beyond the stage.
The tall Thai stripper strutted slowly, holding Frankly’s right hand over her shoulder, leading him like a dog on a leash to her secret lair where she would fleece him of whatever money he could muster, and where Frankly would presumably make the buy.
Squinting, Milt was fairly certain he could see Frankly’s supernumerary earlobe twitching as he disappeared with the stripper beyond the black velvet curtain to the private area.
His attention stolen away from the woman sitting with him, Milt could tell she was getting impatient, that she knew it was now or never, and likely the latter.
She sat up straight. “Do you want a dance like your friend?”
Milt took another survey around the room with his eyes, doing his best not to be too obvious. He really did feel bad for the stripper pitching herself to him. But he also didn’t want to spend a hundred bucks or more on her. Wasting money on a stripper was one thing. Wasting money on one he didn’t really want was another.
“I…uh, I might…” he said, almost stuttering like Gil Gladly.
The look in her face changed again, this time to “fuck it,” and she sat back, resigned. “Sweetie, this is the time when you can be honest, okay? You can tell me if you don’t want a dance. It’s all right.”
“I don’t want a dance,” Milt blurted, relieved she had granted him permission to do so.
Without so much as a “buh-bye,” she was on her feet and off to one of the other scant patrons who had come through the door since she’d sat down with Milt.
There was a brief moment where he thought he’d simply sit it out, wait for Frankly to finish his business, actually get their night started. It was a simple plan ahead. Get the stuff, go to the beach, enjoy the stuff, grab some drinks at a local bar, head back to Milt’s mom’s, pass out. Wake up early in the morning, have some breakfast, and head up to LA where Frankly and Milt would prep for the premiere, camping out at the apartment of a mutual friend from UCLA, Gabe Martinez, one of their few former classmates who’d remained in LA and was actually working in the industry.
Then Milt locked eyes with Devlin.
There she was. Perfectly tanned, olive-colored skin, as though she had been lovingly burnished by some master craftsman with the most enviable job of rubbing oil up and down her near-flawless body. Large, startlingly green Kewpie doll eyes (Milt’s favorite); a tiny button nose, the kind he loved to pinch when granted access; cotton candy pink lips glistening with gloss in the low light of the dank place. She wore a translucent yellow bra—simple, ascetic, no flares—and matching diaphanous lingerie underwear.
Along with her light brown hair, she looked soft, cuddly, adorable, innocent. The only part of Devlin (whose name he would learn quite soon) that screamed “I will dance naked on top of you for money” was her requisite overly-high heels that showed off her manicured toenails and their pale pink polish.
She saw he was looking her up and down and grinned hungrily. Her tiny, endearingly misshapen Chiclet teeth immediately reminded Milt of that indelible line in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides in which the anonymous, omniscient narrator similarly admires the misshap
en Chiclet teeth of Lux, the main sister of the book’s adoration, played in Sofia Coppola’s luminous film adaptation by the hauntingly lovely Kirsten Dunst.
Devlin stepped right up to him, leaned over him in his seat, and said simply, “Hey.”
“Hey,” Milt said back to her, looking up at her, aching to smell her hair.
“I’m Devlin. Do you want a dance?”
“Yes.” He stood up, allowing her to hold his hand and walk him away from his two unopened bottles of Aquafina.
Milt was not so much walking behind Devlin as hovering across the dark-brown carpeted floor on tiptoes, dragging his feet as though he were ensorcelled a la Fairuza Balk’s Nancy in The Craft or fellow femme-fatale witches from Disney’s Hocus Pocus.
He was floating, hand held by Devlin’s as she walked forward, glancing back at him once before entering the private area. That beaming, soft smile made it clear he was about to enjoy himself.
He gripped her hand, which was warm, and they entered beyond the black curtain to one of the private booths. She helped him sit down, his eyes not leaving hers. She radiated with a wide smile. She went to the door, closed it. The room was empty, not decorated. A soft pink lightbulb dangled from the low ceiling, barely luminating everything.
It was a dreamy, comfortable place unaffected by the physical and mental limitations of time and space.
Milt could see her body, her face, her smile as she turned to him and slowly unbuttoned her yellow bra. She closed her eyes in ecstasy (real or fake, it didn’t matter), and wiggled her hips, pulling down her nearly transparent lacy daisy-colored underwear around her high-heels—which would stay on, of course—and was otherwise mercifully, blessedly, miraculously, completely nude before him.
Devlin was unquestionably beautiful. Her gentle voice was at once reticent and firm, and Milt no longer felt the need to clench anything with his hands. He was not nervous. He was disarmingly mesmerized.
He sat on the bench and licked his dry lips as she motioned toward him, her high-heel shoes clacking on the cold concrete floor of the cubby-like room doused in roseate light.
Selling Nostalgia Page 9
