Did his not doing it make him more of a writer then, or less?
He shifted to his back, staring again up at the cottage cheese ceiling.
Milt knew he would not check his phone. He had left it off, and it would stay off. He would not look at light. He would not see what Gil Gladly was hitting him up about now, also likely still not sleeping. He would not try to pretend that he could get some work done on his ghostwriting project.
He would not even see if Laney was up too, knowing she slept the sleep of someone with no guilt and no anxiety.
He wished he could find out how she figured that particular trick out. And he wished he had used the bathroom at the Thai place before they had left. His magma-filled stomach was really going to town now. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could take the searing pain.
To distract himself, he tried to piece together the events that had transpired after the Thai place.
It was a complete blur by then, of course (should he not drink so much anymore? was he drinking more because he was on his tour, because of the stress of everything, because he was also technically at the same time sort-of/kind-of on “vacation” since he was traveling, even if it was technically for “work”? did it even count as work if he wasn’t getting paid? was it Knut Hamsun who wrote, “Business is labor that is worthy of its hire”? should he really be quoting someone like Knut Hamsun to himself?).
He remembered Gabe’s friends leaving, right around the time they finished at the Thai place. He remembered getting back to Gabe’s, taking one look at the bathroom, and promising himself he would not use it.
Then Milt remembered….
The couch was occupied when they got back. Sitting on it, stretched out in his ratty robe, professorial glasses, long wispy brown beard and hair, was Gabe’s roommate Philip. Gabe’s sick roommate Philip. Sitting on the couch, Milt’s bed! Infesting the raggedy thing with his germs!
Next to the fever-sweaty and pallid Philip was Philip’s tiny-tot of a girlfriend, a hippie girl with princess-braided auburn hair, vintage Gloria Steinem glasses, and a loose, sack-like nightgown that immediately in Milt’s head made him think of yet another line from The Virgin Suicides. (So much Dunst this trip!)
Still a bit punch-drunk from the run-in with the dirty blonde lesbian at the Thai place, Milt had to watch his tongue around the delightful little girlfriend of Philip’s, who reached out her hand to Milt and introduced herself as Annie.
Aside from not wanting to appear too eager to make physical contact, Milt hesitated to shake Annie’s hand, at once realizing she was likely on her way toward getting sick too, and just hadn’t yet been exhibiting any symptoms.
Annie was slightly on the tubby side, probably a new development, Milt felt, and it made her look more like a cherubic angel in Gloria Steinem glasses from some Renaissance painting. Or maybe that had to do with her beatific, near-expressionless Mona Lisa grin that didn’t seem to go away as she passed around a pink glass pipe and smoked pot along with her (sick, goddamn it!) boyfriend, followed by Gabe and Frankly.
None of the others seemed to mind that Philip looked like he was ready to stand in as background in one of those nineties Outbreak-type films that were mercilessly foisted on the unassuming public one after the other.
After declining the germ-laden pipe when it was his turn in the rotation, Milt asked Annie what it was she did. Annie explained that she had been working at the library at the college where Philip earned his PhD and where she had been working on her own, off and on.
Then the combination of working on her thesis with the library job became far too stressful for her. So stressful, in fact, that she evidently got “sick from stress.”
“My body hurt all the time,” she elaborated. “I couldn’t get up in the morning most of the time.” So, she had stopped working altogether. No library job. No thesis. The fact she lived off of Philip didn’t seem to matter to either of the couple. At some point, she had added, she’d go back to work. Maybe she’d finish her thesis. “Some day. I just don’t know when.”
“What’s your thesis about?” Milt recalled mumblingly asking.
“Tracking and investigating the relationship between the trauma of having grown up with certain scenes in movies and TV shows that we all watched and their impact on certain issues a lot of our generation ended up later having with anxiety,” Annie answered without a tinge of irony.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You know, like the Swamp of Sadness scene in NeverEnding Story where Atreyu’s horse Artax dies, or the way we never got to see what Nanny from Muppet Babies looked like and she was always abandoning the kids in the nursery, and also the whole sequence with the little girl who gets banished to the painting and disappears over time in the film version of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Though that one’s a little more esoteric.”
The blurry memories continued bombarding him as Milt lay there on the couch wondering what time it was and if he could sneak out and go to a bathroom up the street. There had to be a Denny’s that was open somewhere nearby.
He remembered now too that while they were all discussing Annie’s failed thesis, on the television was a new HBO documentary about Steven Spielberg. It had dawned on Milt that Gabe and Frankly were meanwhile getting ready to settle in on their own areas of the couch/lounger and continue laughing, smoking, drinking whatever booze and beer Gabe had in the kitchen or that was rolling around in bottles on the floor beneath their feet, meaning no one would be getting to sleep any time soon.
When it was Philip who had politely asked about an hour later, “Are you okay, Milt?” Milt wasn’t sure how to say, “Well, to be honest, I have a super-important meeting tomorrow with a producer on a possible new project that Gil Gladly hooked me up with, followed almost immediately by the first screening of the documentary I’ve been working on for the better part of the past two years as part of a full fucking nationwide tour I spent the last six months putting together.…”
But instead, he had said something like, “Uh, yeah. I’m just a little tired…and, uh…”
“You need to get to bed?” Gabe hazarded to guess.
“Oh,” Annie said, passing the pipe to her boyfriend who was a pale, moist ghost by this point, “are we keeping you up? I sometimes forget other people have to work!”
They all had a chuckle about this, including Milt, who was forcing it more than the others.
Milt nodded and said, “I mean, it’s your place and all. But yeah, I was hoping to get to bed soon if possible. And am I crazy or is this Spielberg documentary—”
“Uh oh, here we go!” Gabe busted-up. “You hate this too, don’t you? Milt hates everything! You probably never even liked E.T. as a kid, did you?”
Annie and Philip looked over to Milt sympathetically, and the three shared a look that said the same thing. Philip then turned to Annie and they shared their look, before Philip turned back to Milt, asking, “Do you want to use our bed? We can just stay out here. We probably won’t go to sleep until the morning. We’re kind of night owls.”
“Uh…shouldn’t you get some rest to take care of your cold?” Milt asked, nervous he’d be forced to end up in Philip’s room, breathing in all the toxic contagions of his Outbreak cold.
Annie’s face registered the fact that Philip had clearly misread her look. She wasn’t saying, “Let’s let him have our room.” She was saying, “You know what, guys? We probably should hit the hay. What is it? Like 2:30 a.m. already?”
Thank God.
There had been a jump-cut there leading Milt to where he was now, staring at the ceiling and contemplating all of this.
This long-running, loud film festival blasting him in the brain while the hours crept by so-slowly. His stomach demanding satisfaction. His worrying about how much he always worried about things, including how much he worried.
Did everyone worry like this? And why the hell would it matter if they did? Why did he always worry about whether or not “everyone” else was d
oing what he was doing?
Frankly shifted again, got up, coughed, belched, and toddled off to the bathroom. Milt was jealous of Frankly’s bravado.
Milt finally wondered if he could operate in a few hours on two or three hours of sleep, realizing it didn’t matter. He’d have no choice.
CHAPTER 14
Milt knew he shouldn’t have used Gabe’s bathroom. He just knew it.
After finally giving in and taking the massive, disgusting, chicken-wings/whiskey/Thai-food dump his stomach had been demanding, he reached behind where he sat on the bowl, found the flusher…and flushed.
He sat there momentarily, looking around the room, at the scum, grit, and grime. The color scheme ventured from faded motel mauve to a kind of sad sunflower yellow, and finally around to the shitty browns and pathetic grays revealed by numerous cracks in the walls, the Pepto-pink, cracked tile floor, and faded flowery wallpaper.
There were used towels—two brown, one kind-of white—drenched and left on the floor. Two empty bottles of what had been blue Listerine were tipped over on their side, one on the muddy sink lined with circuitous networks of black and dark brown hair, and the other on the floor not too far from Milt's feet, next to a green plastic trashcan overflowing with diseased bathroom detritus.
There were so many used, wadded-up tissues that Milt did everything he could not to breathe, particularly because of the rank smell that had been present even before he took his triumphant shit.
That was when he heard it. Nothing.
The water didn’t go down. It hadn’t flushed all the way down. He heard it not go all the way. That was what he heard when he had heard that dreaded bathroom noise of…nothing.
He lifted himself slightly off the toilet seat, which sort of fell to the side a bit.
Fresh off of hearing Annie’s impractical thesis, there came here an obvious flash in his mind of the Rockbiter explaining what the Nothing was in The NeverEnding Story.
Back to reality. Milt had clogged the toilet in his friend and fellow filmmaker’s absolutely abominable bathroom. At god-knows-what-hour (6:00 a.m.? -ish?). The very morning of his two-years-in-the-making feature film documentary about Mister Gil Gladly.
Where were these stories in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter?
They kind of get left out of the mythology of the whole thing, don’t they? Milt thought.
Then the noise got worse…the Nothing grew to something. And that was when he felt it.
That was when Milton Siegel knew it.
He felt the warm trickle of water first on the back of his right ankle. Then his left ankle.
He recoiled like he’d been bitten, glad he had already wiped, because he sprung up from the toilet bowl as though it were on fire, and Jesus Fucking CHRIST the goddamn thing was overflowing!
There was what appeared to be brownish-yellow tea flooding out from all around the rim of the toilet bowl now, rushing like someone was willing the fucking, literal shit out all over the cracked pink tile floor. The towels there were already drenched, so they’d be of no help to sop up the lava of muck.
This was certainly not Milt’s first overflowing toilet. So, the initial panic that propelled him forth quickly waned as he pondered what to do next. He was in someone else’s house now, and half the people here he didn’t really know. Should he go get Frankly?
Philip was still obviously so incredibly sick—Fuck, Milt suddenly thought, I better not get sick being in this shithole bathroom! Don’t touch anything else!—and could not be bothered. Annie with her Gloria Steinem glasses was a GIRL, and there was no way he was gonna bring her into this fetid morass.
Gabe was a heavy sleeper, Milt remembered from previous visits, and would always lock the door to his room.
Frankly was the only answer. Poor, put-upon Frankly.
Milt made his way tiptoeing through the poo-and-piss water cascading across the floor, opened the door, and there was Frankly in mid-sun-salutation.
“You do yoga now?” Milt whispered loudly.
“What did you do?” Frankly fired off once he turned to see what was going on in the bathroom.
“Dude, we need to figure this out right now.”
“Where are the towels?”
“Drenched on the floor, totally no good,” Milt answered.
Frankly rushed to the kitchen, turning on a few lights—one of which, an orangish vintage lamp, sparked before going out.
Milt, stunned like a deer in headlights, heard his phone vibrate and ran over to it—the soles of his feet sopping wet—and ignored the mess that was only worsening in the bathroom, to check his phone that displayed a text from Gil:
“Got a weird call last night from Entertainment Weekly. They wanted to know about my last hospital visit. I never told anyone about that. I think they’re gonna do a hit piece on me about my heart!!!!”
Milt saw that it was indeed 6:13 a.m. (had Gil slept either?), and turned back to the bathroom, where water was rushing out now onto Gabe’s carpet that thankfully sopped up the flow.
Frankly darted over from the kitchen, carrying piles of old, faded LA Weekly’s and used them to start covering the flow from the bathroom.
Doing his best to remain calm and collected, Milt texted back to Gil:
“All good, man. I’m sure that’s not the case. EW doing something on you and the film would be HUGE and there’s no reason they’d do something like that about your heart. It’ll be fine. Get some rest. BIG DAY TODAY!! See you in a few hours.”
Christ, Milt couldn’t believe that Gil was freaking out about this now. And putting it on Milt. He was just waiting for Gil to ask him to hit up the unassuming random EW girl and see if she could kill the story.
Milt had essentially taken on the role of Gil’s publicist for the tour and elsewise. Like when he had tried to get BuzzFeed to do something about the screenings, and the one gal there they could get to even respond to their entreating emails barely seemed to care at all. Milt had written up this great proposal for her, with all the information she’d need, and an exclusive video of some stuff they’d cut out of the film that she could post along with the story.
In the end, she declined, which sort of made Milt feel the way he had in the past when he’d been rejected by girls he wasn’t really that into anyway. It was BuzzFeed, after all. On one level, that would likely be of some help. On another, who gave a fuck? It was BuzzFeed.
Two days later, when he looked the girl up to see what else she had been working on, there was some random video she had posted about Olivia Wilde’s dog. Milt had joked with Gil, “Looks like Olivia Wilde’s dog is just a little more likely to trend than you.”
Gil had laughed at the time. He knew better. He hoped. Milt hoped. Gil had a friend who had been interviewed by the same girl, revealing she lived somewhere outside of Nashville. “And that’s why she’ll never get out of the middle of fucking nowhere,” Gil said, granting his most typical rebuke of someone he didn’t like. For him, if you were in the entertainment or media industry and didn’t live and work in NYC or LA, that alone was a clear indication of what a loser you must be, of how you’d never amount to nothin’. He’d even playfully gibed Milt about living in Boston a few times.
That Gil happened to live in New Jersey these days seemed to be lost on the man of many contradictions.
All of that notwithstanding, here they were, with Gil possibly getting ready to drop a deuce on their premiere by getting all nutty on some possible piece in EW that may or may not come out and that may or may not be about Gil’s heart condition.
Oh, God, Gil, PLEASE don’t tweet about this! was all Milt could think, not wanting to put the idea in Gil’s head by telling him not to do just that.
“A little help?” Frankly called out to Milt, standing paralyzed, gripping his phone, seeing that Gil had texted back:
“You’re probably right. Leave it alone for now. Don’t forget about the meeting with Blake. And don’t fuck that up. I’ve worked with him twice and want to keep wo
rking with him. You’re welcome!”
Milt dropped his phone on the couch, dashing with still-wet feet and trying his best to rub off the mess on the carpet as he did to Frankly, who was on his hands and knees frantically laying out page after page of the LA Weekly’s on the floor around the bathroom.
The door on the left of Philip’s room blasted open. “Oh, shit!”
Annie rolled out of bed and, eyes still squinty from being half-asleep, stepped over in her long purplish muumuu that reminded Milt of something Mrs. Roper from Three’s Company would wear, and cried out, “Oh my god! You finally killed the fucking bathroom!”
“I didn’t do shit!” Milt yelled, not meaning to make a pun.
“Clearly ya did,” Philip said, rather humdrum and as though he was rather used to this by now.
“Fuck, Philip!” Annie hollered. “What is this, like the fucking third time it’s happened this week?”
“I told you I was gonna call the landlord, okay?” Philip said, surprisingly calm or maybe just waked-and-baked already. He shouted out across the way to Gabe’s door, “Hey, Gabe!”
He shuffled over in his Jesus Birkenstocks to Gabe’s door with an upside-down The Dark Side of the Moon poster haphazardly gaffer-taped to it and started pounding. “Hey, man. Gabe. Yo. Wake up, man. The toilet’s all fucked again.”
Milt stood there helpless, gobsmacked.
Frankly, the only one actually doing something semi-constructive, remained on the floor, running out of pages of LA Weekly’s.
The water kept coming out. Annie was on the couch squeezing her legs under her muumuu up to her chest, putting on her glasses that had been left on the upside-down plastic trash bin next to said couch. She lit up a joint.
Gabe’s door finally opened and he hobbled out, wobbling, eyes shut. For once, he was not grinning impishly. “Whhha…?”
“Dude, the toilet’s overflowing,” Philip said.
“Again!” Annie shouted from the couch, coughing after inhaling a heroic hit from the joint.
Selling Nostalgia Page 16
