Selling Nostalgia

by Mathew Klickstein

  Milt was thinking about this urban transmogrification when he realized Blake was speaking to him. Luckily, Blake, being a true-blue Hollywood guy, didn’t seem to notice Milt wasn’t paying attention.

  Everything was already sounding to Milt as though he were under water. The NYC cocktail lounge trip-hop sounded absolutely lo-fi, as did most of whatever Blake was saying while talking nonstop about his company, his past work, and future projects he was developing. Most of which, from what little Milt did hear, sounded like the kind of things that would never go anywhere.

  The scenario reminded Milt of having lived and worked in Hollywood all those early years when everyone had a business card that read “P R O D U C E R” without their ever having produced much, if anything, rambling on and on about their hopes and dreams like they were rock-hard investments. Hey, we have Mark Ruffalo attached! This is gonna be GOLD!

  Frankly, crammed into the blood-red leather booth to his side, was saying nothing. How could he, when Blake was talking and chuckling loudly, nonstop? His eyes were wide and excited.

  Milt was fairly certain Blake was not on coke right now; he was probably always like this.

  Milt kept nodding, trying his best to sound sincere in his own laughter, regardless of whatever Blake was actually saying, and guzzling scotch after scotch that Blake kept suggesting he order every time the tiny waitress with black hair in a ponytail and big, beautiful green eyes in her own gray vest and pink bowtie came by to ask if they wanted any more.

  “I’m putting it all on the card!” Blake said, triumphantly. “Don’t worry. Have as many as you want! It’s your big day! Film premiere, motherfucker!”

  Milt wondered if being drunk like this made him more of a self-centered asshole, hence why that last part he actually heard and paid attention to.

  Milt was so out of it, in fact, he had completely forgotten that this meeting was not supposed to be about Blake Douglas and his projects at all. Milt was supposed to be doing the talking here. Wasn’t he? About his project he’d pitched to Gil, who in turn had pitched it to Blake, who set up this very meeting with Milt?

  At least there were free drinks involved.

  Blake kept talking and Milt understood what was really going on here. It had happened multiple times before at meetings exactly like this.

  Conclusion: Blake was just trying to get his shit going like anyone else. Like Milt. That “producer” business card must’ve worked on Gil, as it did on so many others, and here now Milt was meeting with the guy, listening to him rattle off his aspirations for the future.

  Frankly was guzzling down another double and had some speckles of white powder across his nose from the coke they’d done in the car before coming into the “meeting” Blake was luckily fifteen minutes late to.

  Blake luckily didn’t notice (or care) that the coke mustache was on Frankly’s face, and Milt had to say he admired his friend’s ability to stay so composed even when on multiple stimulants. Even on only a few hours of sleep. Even after an early morning of sopping up shit water with LA Weekly pages.

  Yes, Frankly drove like a maniac, but he was fucking good at it. Maybe having three ears somehow helped him have more sensitivity to things.

  Milt was still considering this very notion while they were parallel parking an hour later out in front of the Egyptian. They had promised to meet Blake inside after they all had made their way out of the downtown bistro and Blake had taken the check, not registering any sense of surprise or worry when the bill had come.

  Milt stumbled out of Frankly’s car, completely running off of scotch and adrenalin by now. They were out of coke. Thankfully. He fixed his Simpsons tie, buttoned up his brown vintage Mr. Rogers-esque sweater-jacket, and walked toward the theater with Frankly running after him after having paid the meter with his credit card.

  They stopped briefly before the old-timey marquee hanging high as they made their way through the European style, tree-lined courtyard leading to the box office.

  There it was. The name of their movie in bold, red, big letters: Good Golly, Gil Gladly.

  “Want me to take a picture of you under it?” Frankly asked.

  Milt was trying to understand what exactly this meant, wobbling a little from side to side, and seeing now, lined against the pink Spanish tile wall a line. Of people. People who had come—were in fact waiting—to buy a ticket to Milt’s movie that he had made with his friends…about fucking Gil Motherfucking Gladly! The dude from Balloon! KidTalk!

  Milt broke up laughing.

  He was pretty sure Frankly asked something like, “Wuzsofunny…”

  Milt was inside the theater. A grand, beautiful, majestic ballroom of a place. The kind of movie palace you see in documentary footage showing regal, elegant premieres from the mid-century.

  He stumbled into the lobby, the wide, double glass tinted window doors being opened for him by two large black security men with walkies squawking, who were escorting Milt (right?) through the red-carpeted lobby, along with a babbling, frazzled lady of indiscernible age (twenty-three? forty-six?) with frizzy hair pulled back into a ponytail, while Milt was trying to recall if Frankly had actually come into this place with him or was left back outside with the line of plebeian ticket holders.

  …Walkie talkies squawking everywhere…

  The crowds were growing, their plangent sound of the sea rising, and on closer look, the carpet was filthy and fuzzy and there was an empty yellow popcorn box over there on the other…

  “Milton!”

  He wasn’t sure if he'd already been talking with YouTube star and host for the Q&A that would follow the screening Astra Singh for long, but here she was. With her geeky, oversized pink-framed glasses and her big ol’ bright agate eyes, her perfect caramel skin, and her butt-length platinum blonde hair. He remembered reading somewhere she had it dyed that way in order to look more like what’s-her-face from Game of Thrones.

  “…so amazing! Congratulations, can’t wait to see it…. Thank you for inviting me…. I’m so super-excited…and, ohmygodyouknowwhat?”

  Milt’s right knee had been ready to give out, but he stood tall and strong and kept trying to focus on what Astra Singh was saying, what information she was conveying, but could only think about Astra Singh as a thing unto herself.

  How did Astra Singh make money being a “sexy geek girl” so to speak? She just went around to these different comic book conventions and events like this and then posted these kind of DIY videos on YouTube and elsewhere online and somehow she got paid for this stuff?

  Nuh-uh.

  Milt wasn’t buying it.

  He laughed, thinking of Gil’s thing about “YouTube star” being an oxymoron.

  “I know, it’s totally funny,” she said, buzzing like the detuned radio refrigerator math guy from Radiohead’s “Karma Police.” “It’s, like, so totally amazing to be here, because, oh my god, I can’t believe I get to actually meet and, like, talk to GIL GLADLY, because when I was growing up…”

  Milt’s mind was elsewhere, doing calculations, recalling one of his buddies who somehow had a YouTube video that went viral and got millions of hits and never saw penny-one, and that was four years ago!

  “I’m really…glad you’re here,” Milt said, placing his hand on Astra Singh’s right shoulder. “Gil and I were really happy…that you decided…to do this.”

  This lit Astra Singh up and she began prattling on now about how much research she had done and—

  Milt was wondering where she got those glasses, and also popcorn box? they still have boxes of popcorn in this place?

  He was feeling a little less woozy by the time he was face-to-face with Gil Gladly himself, who he realized did look like the old version of Danny Bonaduce from The Partridge Family and all those irritatingly sad reality shows that had followed (and hadn’t he done some kind of radio show for a while too? wasn’t he some kind of alcoholic?). Danny Bonaduce, not Gil, who didn’t drink or do any drugs or smoke or do anything bad at all except eat a
lot of crappy food, which was one of the reasons he always joked he had been run off from in front of the camera. (“I got t-t-t-tooo old and too f-f-f-f-f-fat.”)

  Gil kept his tired, slightly cerise eyes—almost like those of a bunny—locked on Milt’s, which were both doing their damndest to cooperate and stay focused.

  STAY FOCUSED!! THIS IS GIL GLADLY! THIS IS THE GUY!

  This made Milt think for a second about the line from Swingers, and he explained that the meeting with Blake had gone well earlier (hadn’t it?) and thanked Gil for having set it up. They shook hands, and Milt wondered why Gil always felt the need to stand so very close to him, and wondered too when Gil's reddish, fuzzy Danny Bonaduce hair had become so mottled with Father Time whiteness.

  “You really made this all happen, Milt,” Gil said, and there was a momentary look in his eyes, with a few drops of light amber sweat drizzling down the side of his right jowl covered in light orange five-o-clock-ish peach fuzz intermingled with whitish flakes of old man hair, and that momentary look was one of gratitude and pride.

  Milt didn’t have time to process this rare instance of direct gratitude, because he was marveling first at the fact that Gil had always seemed so short on TV, and yet whenever Milt met him in person he was always so tall, then at those burly Danny Bonaduce arms folded across his Danny Bonaduce paunch in his black outfit that made him look like he was getting ready to rob a bank or fight a ninja…gorilla.

  Milt reflected back on something comic book writer Alan Moore had said about the fact that people thought he wore all black to look more like a wizard, and in fact, he did it these days because it helped him look slimmer.

  He found himself being taken away by two more gigantic black security escorts with walkie talkies squawking and there he was, left alone, drunk and completely overwhelmed by the crowds and….

  No, no. They’re only here to help. Remember? It’s your event, and they’re taking you through the crowds—careful!—to where you need to….

  Then he was at the bar inside the actual theater, no longer just in the lobby, apparently introducing himself to folks and being introduced to folks and telling everyone how glad he was that they were there (Wait. Had he actually met Jessica Chen? Had she shown up? Had they talked?).

  Milt was conversing, more or less, with the young-ish, hipster-ish bartender behind the beautiful, elaborate old bar with a wall of glowing spirits behind him…and the bartender kept giving Milt free drinks “on the house—congratulations on the film! This is amazing! Look at all these people! I think I saw Gavin Hellman from Stay After Class come in. I think he’s sitting right over there two rows up!”

  Gabe was there now, with his roommates Philip and Annie (both of whom looked as though they had not gotten out of their rumpled, hippie-ish bed clothes or combed their hair or showered or anything of that sort).

  Frankly was there now, and in addition to the gratis drinks a-comin’ one after the other from the bartender, there were little bottles of airplane booze coming from a backpack that Gabe had brought—“Congratulations, man! You did it!”

  “Here we are!” said Frankly, the first time in god-knew-how-long that Milt could remember Frankly actually expressing some sense of excitement or anything aside from an everlasting blasé meh.

  Philip and Annie seemed particularly stoned and were smiling brighter than Laney ever did when she was this stoned, and Milt thought about how well Laney and Philip and Annie would get along, all being latter-day hippies, and then there was Adam-Anthony Andrews, who was on another eighties Balloon show called KidNStuff, which was one of Balloon’s first actual sitcoms before they became only sitcoms with pretty actors and actresses and animated shows that all looked and sounded like everything else on Disney and Nickelodeon and PBS Kids. But it was nice seeing Adam-Anthony again for the first time in years: “Congratulations, man!”

  Adam-Anthony, who still looked not only pretty good but pretty young for someone now in his forties whom Milt had known a few years back when they’d become friendly after he’d interviewed Adam-Anthony for a…a thing and

  “Thanks, dude,” Milt said, standing a little to the side and holding himself up with one hand against the bar.

  This didn’t seem to affect Adam-Anthony’s gleefulness, as he advanced even closer to Milt. Why did these people always get so close when they talked to you? Was this a Balloon thing or an LA thing? Because Milt remembered that there were a lot of other people he knew back in the LA days who would do the same thing and practically come nose to nose to you when they talked right into your fucking face.

  “I have this idea I really want to talk with you about, if you’re up for it,” said Adam-Anthony.

  “I’ll sallma time or make the ferm ter,” Milt said, though it very likely came out something much more cogent, because Adam-Anthony smiled brighter and said, “Great, man. I’ll give you a call. Congrats again, dude. This is just terrific. Look at all these people!”

  ….Milt was in the bathroom of the theater, tears welling down his face, nose running, so full of absolute joy and jubilance that Laconians would call it jouissance, while he was laughing and crying and talking on the phone to Laney after the movie and Q&A had finished two hours later.

  “We did it, baby. We did it we did it we did it we did it!”

  He had been texting Wallace and Ronnie throughout the screening the same thing: “Boyyyyyysssss, we did it we did it we did it!” while standing in the back over by the bar while everyone else in the theater packed the 350 or so seats (fans, mostly friends and old colleagues of Gil’s, a few faces and names Milt had recognized but no one HUGE huge, of course; this was the Gil Gladly documentary, after all).

  Ronnie had texted something back about how excited and proud he was, and that he was texting from a Walmart where he was snowed-in due to the massive storm still raging in Denver…but this was a time for joy! So, fuck it! And they were breaking out free hot chocolate for everyone stuck inside. Bonus! (Good ol’ indefatigably blissful Ronnie.)

  “We did it we did it we did it!” Milt was saying to Laney over and over again on the phone, pacing around in circles on the white tile floor of the fluorescently-lit theater bathroom, with people coming and going through the door, taking a piss, washing their hands, leaving, not really noticing or caring that there was this frantic, weird guy with eyes a-watering pacing around, maddeningly crying out, “We did it we did it we did it!” into a phone clenched far too tightly to his ear like he was trying to push the whole goddamn thing into his head.

  “That’s great, baby!” Laney’s staticky voice said. “Did you have fun?”

  “I still am!” Milt bleated. “It’s so much fun! I wish you were here!”

  “I’ll be at some of the other ones,” Laney said. “One day we’ll be able to afford to go to all of them together!” (Classic Laney.)

  “It was absolutely amazing in every fuckin’ way, Laney. They got it. They really got it. It’s all been worth it. Everything we’ve done. It was all worth it. If nothing else happens, we did this and it all happened and it was fuckin’ perfect! This will be the best moment of my life.”

  “Until we start having kids!” Laney said, stonedly giggling.

  “We’ll see!”

  People were coming and going faster and more frequently now, and Milt was starting to feel self-conscious. “Well, I’m in the goddamn bathroom at the theater right now walking around in circles like a madman, and people are coming and going. I probably look really weird, so I better get off. I just wanted to tell you that WE FUCKIN’ DID IT! RONNIE AND WALLACE AND GIL AND EVERYONE ELSE AND ME—WE DID IT! AND IT WORKED! I LOVE YOU AND CAN’T WAIT TO SHARE THIS WITH YOU AND I THINK EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE FINE!”

  “Me too, baby,” Laney said, sounding serious in the best possible of ways. “I really love you, I’m so proud of you, and I know everything’s going to be fine.”

  They hung up and Milt was out the bathroom door, passing by some people, a few of whom actually knew who Milt
was and shook his hand and congratulated him, including an older film professor, who hugged Milt tight and said, “I’m so very proud of you, son.”

  Milt could only hug him as tight back and whisper into his ear, because he felt like he had to tell someone and this guy was probably the closest thing he had to that right person, “I didn’t invite my dad here.”

  The professor pulled away, looked at Milt, and slowly nodded, understanding. He hugged Milt again and said they should get breakfast some morning before Milt went back home. Milt said they’d do that but knew they probably wouldn’t for any number of reasons including logistics, time, money, and lack of transportation.

  But it was nice of the professor to have suggested it and it was nice that Milt could tell someone, someone of his stature and age and wisdom and guidance back when Milt was first getting into all this malarkey that he hadn’t invited his dad to this thing. (Milt’s mom and her new boyfriend had already left for New York for a wedding of one of Milt’s cousins and would meet Milt and Laney at the upcoming Manhattan screening.)

  Milt only had Gabe, Frankly, and Annie and Philip here, because he had no other family on the West Coast aside from his mom and dad, and because all his friends in LA when he had gone to film school were either gone or simply were no longer people Milt had stayed in touch with.

  There had been some friend of Milt’s from high school who apparently now lived in LA and had heard about the event who came to check it out, and congratulated Milt with a tap on the shoulder. Milt couldn’t remember who the guy was, but he did remember the dude had said, “It’s funny you’re writing about and making movies about TV now. Because you never seemed that into it when we were younger. Probably because TV competed with you when we’d all be hanging out at someone’s house or something.”

  The screening itself had been one thing, hence the tears, the texts, and the call to Laney in the bathroom. The Q&A after had been something altogether outstanding, with the audience really being there with Gil up on stage talking and answering questions asked by Astra Singh sitting next to him beaming like she was interviewing the one and only motherfucking Santa Claus.