Selling Nostalgia

by Mathew Klickstein

Okay, Milt thought, back to reality.

  Melody was obviously not going to come out and see him when he was in Portland and that was definitely for the best. No muss, no fuss. He needed to turn off his constant drive toward self-sabotage.

  Married married married.

  “So, how’s it going over there, anyway?” he asked, sitting up straight now, as the seats around him began filling up.

  “Oh, you know,” Melody said, trying to sound chipper. “It’s a job. It’s work.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s better than my last job, that’s for sure. But that’s not hard to beat. That place was terrible. One thing I don’t like is they get real uppity about me looking like I’m busy, which is really annoying. We have a lot of downtime, so I was bringing in my knitting and working quietly on a pink scarf for my sister in my cubicle, and one of the managers came by and pulled me aside into a conference room to tell me that if I kept doing that, I’d be fired.”

  “Aw, man, that sucks,” Milt said.

  “Yeah, and it’s like, I can’t even read a book or something at my desk. I swear, Milt, I’ve only been there like three weeks, but there are some days where I haven’t done anything, so why can’t I read? Why does anyone care? It gets me so pissed off!”

  “‘Pissed off’ like Rachel Maddow pissed off, or ‘pissed off’ like Rose McGowan pissed off?”

  “Oh, shut up, Milt,” Melody said in a friendly huff. “This is serious. It’s my work. It’s my life. And it’s fucking annoying.”

  “Jason Schwartzman annoying, or Dane Cook annoying?”

  “SHUT UP, MILT!”

  “You know, I was thinking about this the other day,” Milt said, slightly quieter now that other people were crowding in next to him. “I was at a restaurant with Laney a few nights before I left for LA, and I saw this young girl working the hostess stand up front and she was totally lost in her phone. No one said anything or cared, not the customers coming up to get a table, not the managers milling around checking to make sure everything was okay. It’s like being on your phone is totally acceptable, but if she were reading a book, she would get reprimanded.”

  “Oh, I know!” Melody squeaked. “That’s exactly how it is at my new job! You know what my manager said after she scolded me for knitting in my cubicle? She said that if I don’t have any work to do, I should just surf the internet. She actually said that! She said that way it would look like I’m doing something productive. But I don’t want to do that all day! I’m on the fucking computer long enough already, staring at the screen when I am working. I don’t want to have to do it when I’m not!”

  “God, it’s so scary the way that works. It’s like they’re pushing you into this thing that is already so addictive. And they’re making you do it, like, all day!”

  “I know! I hate it!

  “So,” Milt cycled back around, “you’re not gonna come see me when I’m in town, then?”

  “Oh, Milt,” Melody droned. “I…don’t knowwwww.”

  The disembodied boarding announcement trumpeted around him, and the Pavlovian effect stood him up out of his chair at attention.

  “Hey, they’re gonna be boarding, so I gotta go. Look, it’s cool if you can’t come out. But just let me know if you can. It’s our last show, I’ll be driving out all the way from Boston, and—”

  “You’re driving? Why?”

  “I dunno.” He grabbed his stuff and walked toward the line beginning to grow out of the terminal. “Laney can’t come to that one because she can’t take off that much work and, let’s be honest, there’s only so many times she can watch this fucking film before she loses it. So, I just thought it would be a good way for me to end the tour and have some time to myself and, I don’t know, do some thinking and stuff. I miss going on those solo road trips. It was the one nice thing about living in LA. I haven’t had a chance to do something like this since I got a car again. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve had one, and I never had any time to take a trip on my own while I was in Boston since I was so fucking busy.”

  “Yup, trying to push that wall.”

  “Exactly,” Milt said, smiling. He liked when Melody appeared to actually be listening. And he liked when he could actually pay attention to what she was saying.

  “Well, have a safe flight,” she chimed.

  “Thanks,” Milt said. “Oh, hey, how you holding up with the heat wave, by the way? One of our guys out there helping with the screening told me about it.”

  “Ugggh,” Melody exhaled hard. “Yeah, it sucks. The worst part is my bosses at work are cheap assholes, so they only turn on the A/C a certain amount of times during the day.”

  “USA!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Melody said, resigned. “It’s not fun. I get all sweaty and tired, then my pussy starts to stink real bad.”

  “All right, all right,” Milt said. “I got it. You don’t have to keep doing the Lena Dunham self-revelation stuff. I get it—you’re so brrrrrraaave.”

  Melody granted a peal of her mellifluous giggles, and Milt smiled.

  They said their goodbyes, a less than heartfelt “I love you/I love you too,” and then Milt did what he thought he should do before getting on a plane. He texted Wallace and Ronnie that he was so grateful for both of them and all their hard work and that he would see them soon at the CineRanchero event in Chicago. He sent a text to Silverstein saying to hang in there, a text to Frankly saying thanks for all of his help and worst experience at a strip club in his life, and left a voicemail for his mom saying he was getting on a plane, loved her very much, and looked forward to seeing her at the screening in New York.

  Melody texted him before he turned off his phone: “And say hi to Laney for me. I hope to meet her someday.”

  “I’ll tell her,” he lied.

  CHAPTER 18

  “How’s the job been going?” Milt asked Laney as they lay naked in bed at home in their cramped four-hundred square-foot, age-inappropriate studio apartment in Boston.

  It was rare that they were naked together like this, but they had apparently had much to drink late last night when they’d gone out to “be bad” as they liked to say, what with Milt home from the LA trip and their pretending like it would be a good idea to have some kind of celebratory homecoming.

  Wasn’t that what typical, regular married couples did? Besides, they loved any excuse to go out and be bad anyway. And Laney had some ground-up pink Adderall in a tiny (reused, as was her wont as an environmentalist) Ziplock bag she’d acquired for the occasion from a co-worker.

  They’d indeed been quite bad the night before, after Laney had picked him up from the airport at 7:16 p.m. They spent a lot of money at two different restaurants and three different bars. Maybe four, but Milt couldn’t remember and Laney always blacked-out after bar number two whenever they’d go out on one of their nocturnal adventures over the two years they’d been a couple.

  Here they were, naked now, early morning. All forgotten and, presumably, all forgiven.

  Milt was never too surprised that they both had such durability and bounced back so hard and quick after a night of such decadent debauchery. If only they could say the same about their waistlines. And bank accounts. Particularly since Milt was practically tapped for the time being and still needed to save the piddling fumes he did have for the rest of the tour, at least until receiving the next payment on his ghostwriting project, which he knew he needed to work on a little later in the day.

  Ugggh.…

  Normally he was up first. But Laney, who was taking the day off from work (something she hated doing for various reasons, including lack of money on those days since she was still technically a “temp,” meaning she did all the work everyone else did except she received five dollars less an hour and no benefits like paid vacation or sick days), had woken Milt up by her telltale coughing jag, which meant she was not only up in the darkness of the four-hundred square-foot Boston studio apartment, but was already smoking her vape pen fille
d with her favorite strain (Gorilla Glue) in the corner on the other side of the “couch” in their “den.”

  There had also been that peculiar, not especially nice, sweet redolence of vanilla in the air from said pen, while Laney coughed and coughed, making Milt wonder (again) how the hell someone who had been such a lifelong, all-day-every-day stoner like his wife could still cough like that, especially while inhaling from a fucking vape pen.

  If the shoe had been on the other foot, and Milt was the one silly enough to smoke from a vape pen like that first thing in the morning, hacking up a storm, Laney would undoubtedly be laughing at him for being a “pussy” right about now. But he kept his comments to himself.

  Laney made her way back to him. Milt and she barely touched in the bed that filled nearly half their studio. Their light-blue bed sheets were strewn about the mattress and floor surrounding them, and the cream-colored down comforter was nowhere to be found, likely thrown aside at some point during their debaucherous evening/early morning.

  They were both at slight angles in the bed, looking up at the ceiling, and both kept their hands locked behind their heads on their white pillows. Their elbows did not touch. They were both thoughtful. Laney was stoned.

  There were a few light-pink, dried spots of blood by Laney’s foot, but neither Milt nor she saw that for the time being, their eyes both affixed on the ceiling above as though they were engaged in trying to see one of those 3D shapes from those early nineties “magic eye/4D posters” prominently featured in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats.

  Milt felt that sickly tingle in his throat, but ignored it for now, waiting for Laney to finally answer.

  “Work’s been fine,” Laney said.

  “Still boring?”

  “Always boring. Everything’s borrrrrrinnnnng.”

  Laney performed some kind of research tests all day long at a lab for a company whose name had recently changed and that Milt couldn’t remember now. It was something like YordCorp or YardTech or something like that. He could never properly explain what it was Laney did when they were out having dinner with new friends, and so it was easier to say she did scientific research, to which Laney would pipe in to proclaim, “I’ve finally found a use for my biology degree after blowing my twenties working for pennies at music festivals. They always had good acid, though.”

  No one would ever laugh when she would say this, but Laney would still smile away, the puckish creature she was, like she was always on some kind of mystifying high, away from everyone else and just waiting for the evening to be finished so that she could go home, get in her PJs, vape, and get into bed to read Game of Thrones or watch Sex and the City with Milt on their crappy laptop whose battery had died far too many months ago, requiring its constantly being plugged in, taped-up broken cord flowing all over their damn bed.

  “There’s this new lady there, though,” Laney blurted out, like she had been waiting for just the right moment to reveal the intel.

  “Another chick?”

  “Yup, I’m no longer the lab’s only girl anymore,” Laney said. “It’s really fucking annoying too, because she’s a little older and was brought it in to do some marketing BS for—”

  “Why does a research facility need a marketing person?” Milt asked, interrupting his wife as always.

  “So that we can get better clients and more clients and start expanding and all that. Still a company. Still trying to make money over there. That’s why they can bring on indentured servants like me to do all that work without getting paid right or benefits like sick days. Muh-member?”

  “Yeah.” Milt took a deep breath and let it out. He didn’t know why.

  “Anyway, so this chick is there now, and on one of the first days she started, we were all at lunch in the commissary and she came over to where I’m always eating with Ralph and Christopher and Lionel—”

  “Who are they again?”

  “Ralph and Christopher are my direct superiors, the really geeky older guys, and Lionel is one of the other techs who comes over and eats with us sometimes because I don’t think he has any friends at the company. Anyway, this bitch comes over and she puts her hands on my shoulders and for no reason at all just says, ‘We girls gotta stick together, huh, Laney?’”

  Laney let that hang out there for about four seconds before she rolled over to the side of the bed, reached down, grabbed her vape pen, took a hit, coughed three times, and dropped the vape pen—which Milt heard roll away—onto to the floor. “I mean, I can’t believe she fucking did that. I just wanted to be like, ‘Lady, I’m one of the guys! FUCK YOU!’”

  “Did you say that?”

  “Yeah, I said that. Out loud. To the new marketing director. So now I’m fired. Sorry, I forgot to tell you,” Laney huffed. “But seriously, I really hate that kind of shit. I mean, here I am at this company for six months, working my ass off and becoming friends with all the guys there, happy as a clam in shit that I’m the only chick there, because you know how much I prefer working with dudes because they’re less catty and when they get mad at each other they just punch a wall or each other or something and then move on, whereas chicks can’t let it go and just let it fester and fester until it makes everyone feel shitty like a cancer….”

  “Riiiiggghhhtt,” Milt said, this time maybe more appropriately interrupting to move the story along. At least in his mind. He wasn’t stoned.

  “So, anyway,” Laney said, “I just wish she hadn’t done that. I like being the only girl there, and of course that’s going to happen in a STEM place like where I’m working because—I mean, I’m sorry, but women just tend to not work in the hard sciences. It’s just the way it is.”

  “Mmm hmmm.…” Milt sneezed.

  “Cover your mouth, please. Gross. Why don’t you ever cover your mouth? Why did your mom do such a terrible job raising you? Arrggghh!”

  “You love my mom.”

  “I do, I do. I love her. But I hate what a lousy job she did raising you.”

  “Nah, you love me too.” With that, Milt rolled over to Laney's side of the bed and poked at the flab on her right hip, then pinched it.

  Laney squealed, “Ouch-uh!” slapping his hand away playfully. “I just don’t want to feel different from the other guys. My dad was a college football coach. I have two older brothers.”

  “You’re a dude.”

  “Yeah, I’m a dude, and you’re therefore gaaaaaay, and I don’t want to feel like I’m some kind of outsider just because I also happen to have tits and a vagiiiiiiiiina.”

  Milt took another deep breath and respired slow. His throat was feeling dry and scratchy, and he wanted water but didn’t get up because it was nice lying there in bed with Laney, even if they weren’t touching.

  Laney farted. Neither made a joke about it.

  “Then yesterday, before I went to pick you up at the airport…”

  “Yeah?”

  “She sends this email out to everyone telling us all about some goddamn who-gives-a-shit dinner she wants us all to go to for Sam’s birthday at this pub up the street from our office where we go for lunch sometimes.”

  “Who’s Sam?”

  “Some other tech who works in the office across from ours,” Laney said indolently, trying to get to the point. “And this marketing chick telling us all about this thing I’m obviously not going to, writes at the end of it, ‘And, Laney, I really hope you go, so that I’m not the only girl there!’ I mean, obviously she was kidding, sort of. But…Oohhgghh!” Laney gritted her teeth. “I shake both brushes at her!”

  Laney had this thing where when she was much younger, instead of getting vocally or noticeably mad at her much older brothers when they did something to irk her—like, say, tricking her into stapling her own hand—she would go upstairs to her room, politely close (not slam) her door, and shake her hairbrush at them through the door. For some reason, it seemed to help get her frustrations out, without also irking them into, say, locking her in the closet or shoving her against a wall.

/>   So now, these many years later, when she got mad at someone—particularly Milt—she would say, “I’m shaking my brush at you so hard right now!” To say, “I’m shaking both brushes,” well, ma’am, watch out!

  Milt flashed on the scene from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet when Jamie Kennedy says he will “bite [his] tongue at them.” (Sirrrr). Then Milt flashed on making out with the gal he saw the film with in the theater after the movie was over.

  Ahh, his first “real” date.

  Milt and Laney both knew she bottled up her rage (and most other emotions) until they erupted from her in this way, often inappropriately, sometimes publicly. But it was something that occurred so infrequently, maybe once or twice a year, that it never ceased to be incredibly disarming for Milt to witness it.

  He rolled to her side and placed his hand on her cold, sweaty (her skin was always so cold and sweaty), alabaster skin, caressing it sloppily and steadily with the reluctance of a person who’s not really sure he’s supposed to be doing what he’s doing.

  “Anyway, how’s the MC Phliphlop book coming along?” Laney fumed, blowing the words out of her clenched teeth.

  “Uh, it’s all right,” Milt said. “I obviously didn’t have much time to work on it in LA, but I did get some work done on the plane. More than I would’ve thought, actually. Both on the way there and on the way back, so that was a few hours. I picked at some of my notes here or there, and was able to talk with someone I met up with out there who made for a good interview.”

  “Cool,” Laney said, not really caring one way or the other, shooting daggers at the invisible woman from work in her head, there on the ceiling. Shaking her brushes so hard in her mind.

  “The one thing that sucks is that I got a call from my editor,” Milt said, still rubbing Laney’s arm, but slowing down almost to the point of stopping, realizing it wasn’t helping and that this was one of those times where leaving her alone would probably be the best salve.

  “Uh huh.…”

  Milt rolled back to his side of the bed. “Turns out they want to push the deadline back. Of course, they didn’t say I have to turn it in earlier, but if I can turn it in three months earlier, that would really help the promotional strategy because of some of the recent publicity around Phliphlop and all that crap.”