Selling Nostalgia

by Mathew Klickstein

  “All right,” the business lady by the radioactively lit-up computer screen said, handing Milt back his card and a receipt (a receipt!). “We had to charge you ten percent for the credit card usage, is that okay?”

  What would have happened if it hadn’t been okay? He remembered that bouncer peeking in earlier on Devlin’s and his session. Carlos was big. Milt decided to continue to keep his mouth shut. “Uh, yeah, sure.”

  “All right, thanks!” the woman chimed, turning back to her computer screen, typing something up on the keyboard, then going back to fucking around on her phone behind the counter while she waited for her next customer.

  Milt walked over to Frankly. “Did you get it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can we please leave. Right now?”

  “Sure.”

  Milt and Frankly fled out the door, a flushed look of ignominy on Milt’s face. If he could have seen himself, he would have seen the face of one of the very guys he always thought so pathetic at a strip club.

  $910, Milt thought over and over again. Almost chanting it in his head. $910, $910, $910.…

  “Nine-hundred and ten dollars,” he vented aloud, as he entered Frankly’s car in the parking lot.

  Frankly got in, shut his door, dropped a miniscule bag of white powder and pebbles on Milt’s lap, and corrected his friend. “With the credit card fee, you mean one thousand and one dollars.”

  Milt dropped his face into his hands, moaning, “With tip, eleven hundred and one.”

  “Jesus,” Frankly said, peeling out and getting them back on the highway. “Maybe you’re not really Jewish.”

  Off they drove. Milt decided he would leave his phone off for the duration of the evening so he could better embrace the evening still ahead that would be fueled by the most expensive cocaine he had ever purchased.

  CHAPTER 10

  Everything’s going to be fine / Everything’s going to be fine / Everything’s going to be fine / Everything’s going to be fine.…

  Milt was repeating this incantation ad infinitum in his head, lying on the couch of Frankly’s and his UCLA alumnus Gabe Martinez’s dark, cramped Los Feliz two-bedroom apartment.

  Milt would not turn on his phone to check the time, knowing it would only get him up all the way, then he’d be a disoriented train wreck all day long.

  He lifted his neck from the lumpy pinkish pillow and craned his neck to the right. Through the darkness, he could barely see across the small living room, overstuffed with Basquiat-esque paintings in various styles of frames and sizes, most of them lying on the yellowish, brown-blotch stained carpeted floor. Across the room, the sliding glass door leading to Gabe’s balcony was obscured by a dust-covered, beige canvas floor-to-ceiling set of curtains hanging loosely from the top of the doorway.

  Milt could glimpse a sliver of radiative light blasting through the left side of the curtain and was relieved to know that his hours of lying there on that obnoxiously uncomfortable gray couch Gabe probably found on the street, overanalyzing everything in his life to the point of pseudo-bad-trip panic, were nearly at an end. It was still early, but Frankly would probably be up soon.

  Milt knew Frankly’s circadian schedule from the time they had lived together, and knew that, like himself, Frankly was a morning person.

  He was going over and over again thoughts about money, about his looming deadline on his ghostwriting project, about money, and more about money.

  How much was on his credit cards again?

  Milt did have money in his pocket, he forced himself to remember. He had money in his checking account. They would very likely be selling the Gil Gladly documentary at some point. Netflix was blowing oodles of money on anything they could get their sweaty hands on like this was Silicon Valley right before the tech bubble burst in 2001.

  Granted, Milt knew he wouldn’t get much for the fucking thing—most of the sale would go back to Gil, the project’s main investor. The rest would be deservedly split amongst all the guys who had worked so hard on it.

  More importantly, Milt considered, it would open more doors for him in “the industry,” as they say. Wouldn’t it? He knew too many people who had made documentaries or indie features, sometimes with fairly big name “stars” who had gone to Sundance, Cannes, SxSW, Tribeca…and returned empty-handed. Or with some shitty long-term deal with a payment broken up into too many tranches over, say, a five-year period with a streaming service like Netflix, et al.

  No, Milt. Don’t think like that. Stop self-sabotaging.

  The money would come. Not much, but it would come. It had to. His crew and he had spent so much time and energy on it, and a lot of their own money besides Gil’s initial investment. So much extra traveling, so many pizza lunches and dinners.

  The important thing was they had made a good film. Even people who couldn’t give a shit about Gil Gladly would probably enjoy it. Those people had better like it. This tour wasn’t exactly paying for itself and Laney and he couldn’t stay in their Boston studio apartment forever. Shit, he’d be forty in four years, and at some point they wanted to start having kids. Sooner than not, she’d be thirty-five.…

  Guessing it was likely around six, Milt set his head back down on his pillow and stared up at the French vanilla-colored cottage cheese ceiling that, mystifyingly, may have had more brown-blotch stains on it than the floor.

  Milt’s imagination concocted a strange, troll-like man who lived upside-down on the ceiling, drinking his morning coffee, spilling it everywhere.

  Milt briefly considered jerking off to Devlin bumping and grinding up against his crotch from behind. Or perhaps Melody’s apple-tatted ass once again. He thought better of it when he turned his head on the pillow to see that Frankly was in the cluttered living room with him, passed out on the ratty old yellowish corduroy easy chair a mere five or six feet away.

  Milt wondered all of a sudden if he should text or tell Melody that he jerked off to her sometimes. Did girls like that? Would she be flattered? Offended? Disgusted? Indifferent?

  This somewhat spiraled Milt down a madcap rabbit hole of thoughts involving identity politics and the Russian Revolution (October) and then the French Revolution. Then the image of tumbling down such a rabbit hole made him think about Alice in Wonderland; the book, not the animated Disney film. Then he thought about the differences between the animated Disney film of Alice in Wonderland and the book that he knew actually had a slightly different name than the film(s). How interesting was that to contemplate?

  Milt pulled up the scratchy, unwashed Garfield bed sheet Gabe had left for him when Frankly and he had come in with a key he’d left under the mat for them the night before around 2 a.m. They had hoped to get up to LA during the day after breakfast with Milt’s mom, but that was simply not what happened.

  Frankly and he’d been pretty coked-out and they were still reeling from the horrendous bill at the strip club Milt had rung up, but they were also both exhausted and neither ever had much trouble sleeping after a coke binge. Milt’s body reacted differently to the drug, in fact, than the stated purpose. Oftentimes, the stimulant just put him right to bed.

  Many a time, he recalled fondly, Laney and he would do some when they were still in their wondrously wild peacocking courting phase and still did things like coke back where it flowed like water in Lincoln, Neb. Milt would go right to bed and Laney would spend all night cleaning her house until six or seven in the morning, blasting Tool on one of her roommates’ record players, said lucky roommates were always gone at their own boyfriends’ houses. Those were the days! Little to no worries at all, before all this nonsense with the doc and tour.

  This amusingly pleasant memory, combined with the silly kissy-face emoji Laney had sent to him at some point during the night that he couldn’t recall, led Milt to realize—still staring up at the cottage cheese ceiling above, listening to the small fan he brought with him everywhere to emit the white noise he required to sleep for whatever few hours he could get at a time—that he
was pretty fucking lucky. “Blessed,” as some would put it.

  He had (some) money. He had a wife who would send him silly little kissy-face emojis, ones about which she would sometimes say, “Well, I send them just because I think that’s what you expect me to do,” to which he would respond, “Well, we both know how stupid they are, but it’s nice you’re thinking about me at all like that, and that you still feel the need to basically say, ‘Hey, you’re in my thoughts.’” Milt had friends. He had his health.

  Why was he fretting so much about his life? Things were pretty good, weren’t they?

  He began to feel guilty about all the struggles and tribulations of folks like Wallace and Ronnie who were dealing with all the same struggles about money, the doc, and figuring out adulthood, all the while being bitch-slapped by Mother Nature’s wrath taking revenge for all the centuries of being bitch-slapped by humans and their pollutive industrial ways.

  Oy!

  He even had another fleeting moment of guilt about what Sally Miranda—incompetent or no, raging bitch wearing an Andy Warhol fright wig hairdo or no—was going through with the fires in Chicago.

  And here was Milt, worrying about stupid things he had far more control over than things people around the country were going through real problems like fucking natural disasters!

  Gabe’s place might have been absolutely disgusting. So much so that as much as Milt wanted to get on the floor and meditate for a bit to calm himself, he would not. Just as he would not use Gabe’s filthy, disgusting bathroom. Made more disgusting by the smell, what with Gabe having left a sloppy note on the door explaining they’d need to limit their flushes to three a day, collectively, due to temporary conservation restrictions set by his landlord courtesy of the statewide drought.

  Yet, how lucky was Milt that he had a friend who had a place right up in Los Feliz, not too far from where the premiere would be for his film? A place he could stay at for free.

  “You okay?”

  Milt turned to Frankly, who was stirring on the easy chair (also very likely purloined from the street) on which he had been sleeping all night.

  “Yeah,” Milt said. “Just been having trouble sleeping the last few hours. But I think I’m okay now. You up?”

  “Yeah,” Frankly said. “Man, you worry too much about things.”

  “That’s anti-Semitic,” Milt snickered, smiling. “You wanna go get some coffee?”

  “Obbbbbviously,” Frankly said, stretching his short arms in his blue rain slicker. “Let’s go, Jewboy.”

  By the time they were out on the sidewalk in the quiet, vacant streets of Los Feliz, Frankly was asking a simple question. “Why did you bring your toothbrush and toothpaste with you?”

  “Are you going to use Gabe’s bathroom?” Milt asked. “I’m using the bathroom at whatever coffee shop we end up at.”

  “I see your point,” Frankly said, pressing on past two threadbare homeless people who may or may not have been asleep. Their surprisingly purebred yellow Lab appeared to be dead.

  Milt stepped around the dog, the two men and/or man and woman sprawled out across the moist, cracked sidewalk, and nodded at a coffee shop that was likely one of the only establishments in the sleepy hipster enclave open at the early hour.

  Frankly stepped inside, ordered a cappuccino and a breakfast sandwich, then added, “And whatever this guy wants.”

  Milt felt terrible about having Frankly pay, but not terrible enough to decline, ordered a latte—calculating the calories in his head—and asked if they could give him a side of lox and a side of sausage.

  “We don’t really do that here,” the lanky, nose-ringed, purple-haired, tatted androgyne in Woody Allen glasses retorted. “Everything is pre-made.”

  “Oh,” Milt said, calculating again—carbs, carbs, carbs. “I guess I’ll do the breakfast sandwich, then.”

  Frankly paid and said he’d bring the food to one of the tables outside, and away Milt departed to the bathroom so he could brush his teeth in a place that wasn’t the cleanest spot in LA but did beat the fetid petri dish that was Gabe’s bathroom.

  When Milt came out to Frankly, already noshing on his breakfast sandwich, he asked, “How you feeling?”

  “You know me,” Frankly said. “The same. Always the same.”

  “Cool.”

  Frankly took a sip of his cinnamon-speckled, frothy cappuccino in its white alabaster mug. “Hey, by the way. You missed it.”

  “Missed what?”

  “Celebrity sighting while you were in the bathroom.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Milt sipped his own coffee, not really caring one way or the other, inured to the excitement of celebrity sightings in LA after his tenure in town years before.

  “Yeah, Danielle Fishel,” Frankly revealed.

  Milt brightened up at this. “Topanga? She came to the coffee shop while I was in the bathroom?”

  “Yup,” Frankly said, smirking knowingly. “She didn’t buy anything. I think the barista is her roommate or something. She came to say something to him…or her…or whatever.”

  “Oh, shit! Topanga! That’s kinda cool. Did you say anything to her?”

  “Yup,” Frankly said proudly.

  “Did you ask her what it was like to know you’re the first girl an entire generation of guys jerked off to?”

  “Nope.”

  “Awwww, booooooo-urns.”

  “She had this weird black shape tattooed to the back of her neck and I asked her what it meant.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Nothing,” Frankly said, leaning back in his chair. “She just turned to me, flashed a smile, then said bye to her roomie, and left.”

  It was still quiet out on the street that reminded Milt at once of the days when he lived here as a starving young filmmaker/writer and of the times he lived in similar areas in Brooklyn. A narrow street, wide sidewalks, vintage stores. An absolutely adorable pie shop.

  It would have been gray out even if it were not what? 7:30 a.m.? Milt didn’t wear a watch, wasn’t ready to turn on his phone or ask Frankly. He kind of liked not knowing what time it was.

  “So…” Milt said.

  “Mmm hmm.”

  They sipped their coffee, finishing their sandwiches. Milt’s hands twitched. So did his brain. He couldn’t fight it any longer. He pulled out his phone from its denim pocket home in his pants, and turned it on.

  It immediately began vibrating in his hand. He placed it to his ear and turned away in his chair from Frankly. “Hey, Deborah, what’s up?”

  “Oh, doing just fine, Milton,” Deborah Goldflab said, sound-ing slightly concerned.

  It was a tone of voice Milt never liked hearing. It also unnerved him slightly that Deborah used his full first name, something typically reserved for his parents or past girlfriends when they were mad at him. Laney never once called him by his full name, he realized, even when she was mad at him. Unless she was doing it mockingly: MilllllTON.

  Then again, Deborah Goldflab was older, late forties, maybe early fifties, and was the director of operations at the Boston arts and culture space where they would be putting on the Gil Gladly doc screening back home.

  “Good to know,” Milt said, essentially trying to get Deborah to actually state what her business was here.

  “So, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but we had a few complaints from some people out here who were wondering about Tad Willoughby from Round the Clock being a part of the screening event.”

  “Mmm hmmm,” was all Milt could say, starting to tremble. “You guys seemed pretty excited about Willoughby when I first brought him up as guest moderator. He’s a big name.” Milt turned back to Frankly, who tweaked his head with curiosity.

  “Well, you know the art center here is all about inclusivity and expressing everyone’s opinions,” Deborah continued. “We just the other day had someone from the local Young Republicans chapter—”

  “Right.…”

  “But, well…” Deborah paused.
“There have been some…mmmm, concerns about Mr. Willoughby’s recent tweets, and we just wanted to make sure that…ummmm, Mr. Willoughby’s going to be totally…mmm…professional while hosting the event and doing the Q&A with Gil Gladly.”

  “Ah,” Milt said. “Yeah, I don’t know Tad and don’t keep up with his social media stuff.” He laughed, trying to comfort Deborah. “I’m not quite a millennial, so I’m not much for social media in general. You know what I mean, right?”

  Deborah laughed as well, placatingly. “Right, well…uhhhh, there’s just been some…concerns,” she repeated. “Concerns.”

  “I’ll ask Gil about it,” Milt said. “But since Tad is such a big name and we were lucky enough to be able to get him for the event, since he happens to have a house in the area and is old friends with Gil, I would hate to lose a lucky break like that, especially so last-minute, you know? How would that look? Plus, he’s just…he’s a big name. I really think it will help a lot to sell tickets.”

  “Sure, sure. None of us here are saying he can’t come. We just want him to be—”

  “Professional,” Milt said. “Right.”

  “Yeah,” she laughed placatingly again, clearly still nervous.

  Frankly raised his hands, nonverbally inquiring, The fuck?

  Milt shook his head at Frankly and finished up the call. “Look, I’ll call Gil Gladly right now and will let you know what he says about this, okay?”

  “Sounds good,” Deborah said. “Thanks, Milton.”

  Milt hung up and drank some of his now tepid latte.

  “What’s going on?” Frankly asked with a tone that suggested he didn’t really care one way or the other.

  “Eh, the usual,” Milt said, dialing Gil’s number.

  “Hayyylo,” Gil chimed loudly on the other line.

  “Hey, Gil,” Milt said. “Uh—”

  “I’ve only got about thirty seconds, so make it quick.”

  “What? It’s not even eight in the morning.”

  “And I’m a b-b-b-busy m-m-m-an, M-m-m-ilt. What’s up?”

  “Yeah, so Deborah just called and—”

  “Who the fuck is Deborah?”