by Phil Doran
I drove down Sunset Strip. My stomach was churning and my brain bubbled with rage. If I worked in this town a hundred years, I’d never understand why they buy a script they love and proceed to change it beyond all recognition. There are fifty thousand scripts floating around—why don’t they just buy one that already has what they want? And if they can’t find one, why don’t they just grab one of the ten thousand writers hanging around Starbucks and tell him to write down what they’re saying?
For God’s sake, after twenty-five years of shoveling jokes in the sitcom boiler room, aren’t I entitled to something real and heartfelt? How could they take this away from me?
I stopped pounding on the steering wheel long enough to realize that I was stuck in that knot of traffic that always jams up around Tower Records. I decided to put aside my self-pity and at least see who this Charlie was. The guy must have some talent or they wouldn’t get so excited. Who knows, maybe he was the next Denzel Washington. Or failing that, the next Ice T.
After much browsing through the Rap/Hip-Hop/Urban Top 40 Section, I couldn’t find anyone named Charlie. But I did come across a whole rack devoted to Charylie. So Charlie was a chick! Son on the Moon? I couldn’t even keep my own title!
I picked up a CD and studied the angry young lady glaring at me. She was wearing a doo-rag and camouflage overalls. Her hair bristled in every direction, as did her facial piercings. I flipped over the CD and saw that it featured such classics as: “Yo’ Mama Is a Hootchie Ho’ ” and “F.T.C.H.C.P. (Flush the Crack, Here Come the Pigs).”
I lay in bed surrounded by books on hip-hop culture. I was staring at the TV, where a movie I had rented was playing. It was a teenage slasher flick called Is the Noise in My Head Bothering You? Part II. One of its stars was Charylie, and the best thing I could say about her performance is that she screamed very effectively.
I had been working for days and everything I wrote was bad. The words I put in Charylie’s mouth seemed leaden and contrived. I was supposed to meet with the producers in a couple of days, and I was starting to panic.
Had I lost my fastball? Was I so busy pouting over these changes that my heart wasn’t in it? Throughout my career I had moved easily from show to show, writing for casts that were black, Hispanic, or female. Each time I was able to submerge myself inside the characters. I would start talking like them and soon I could hear them chattering away inside my head, until all I had to do was jot down what they were saying.
But not this time. This time I was just a middle-class, middle-aged white guy trying to sound like an angry teenage girl from the projects.
Maybe they were right. Maybe I was too old.
I stopped the movie. The TV was set on the Discovery Channel, where a dry, PBS-type voice was narrating the cycle of life as played out by a herd of wildebeest on the Serengeti Plains. How they frantically fought off the fiercest adversary to protect their young, but callously left the old to fall behind and be eaten.
Just like when I was a young writer coming up, and my peers and I snickered at the old guys and their talk of Jack Benny and Fred Allen. How could these old farts understand our generation? How could they ever know how we thought and spoke and felt? If there was anything more ridiculous than how we dressed in the seventies, it was the sight of some old man in a bad toupee, his saggy butt squeezed into a pair of bell bottoms and his belly bulging under a psychedelic T-shirt. How we laughed at them in our eagerness to take over their jobs.
Now it was happening to me.
I needed to talk to somebody. I couldn’t call any of my fellow writers, even to ask if they knew whether or not Britney Spears had had breast implants. They’d be so envious I had this deal, they’d think I was calling to rub it in. Which perhaps I was.
I started to call Nancy when I reminded myself that I couldn’t tell her about the struggles I was having. She’d see it as my way of saying that I really didn’t want to be here anymore. And even if she were right, what did it matter? What choice did I have?
I dialed up my sister, Debbie, who still lived in the town we grew up in. Debbie and I talked for about an hour, chewing over all the latest comings and goings back there. Things like the old greasy spoon next to the high school suddenly becoming an upscale Thai restaurant, and how ancient Mrs. McCauly up the block had finally passed away. Our conversation only underscored how lost I felt. I knew that small town and its people in ways I would never know Charylie. Sure, I could write her anger, but where was her humanity?
I decided to talk to my agent, but I had to handle this delicately. After two years of my bugging him, he had finally sold something, and now here I was bitching about it. Of course he would be sympathetic, but in Hollywood you never knew who was in bed with whom. He, or his agency, might represent the producers. Or Charylie.
I got an appointment to see him the next day. In the meantime I put in a call to the producers. About an hour later they called back. I started with the prerequisite pumping of sunshine about how well things were going. I tried to sound carefree and confident, but I could hear my own voice and it sounded full of wrong notes. They asked me if any parts were giving me problems, which opened the door for me to be honest. But I was so terrified that this gossamer thread my career was hanging by would dissolve with one wrong word, I just mumbled that everything was going great.
The following morning I drove to Beverly Hills and was valet-parked at my agent’s office. It was hot and sticky, and I picked my shirt away from my skin as I walked across the vast marble plaza. I passed a towering fountain my years of work had helped pay for. The cooling mist of its spray glazed my face and I felt slightly reimbursed.
I took the elevator up to his floor and stepped out, to be greeted by his assistant, Greta, a disturbingly pretty California girl. You just knew that there had to be tan lines under that Prada suit. She told me that he was on a conference call and would be with me shortly, but in the meantime would I like some mineral water or a cappuccino? I chose the latter, settling into one of those plush, oversized chairs they have to make you feel insignificant. I picked up Daily Variety and thumbed through it. As I glanced at the articles, I thought about getting a little ink for myself. A blurb about me selling my script, blah, blah, blah. But what if the whole thing blew up in my face? Better wait. Plenty of time for some big-time pub if and when.
Greta returned with my cappuccino and a smile. She told me how happy she was to finally meet me after we’d spoken on the phone so many times. She had always wanted to tell me how much she loved a certain show I had once worked on. I thanked her, privately grateful she hadn’t mentioned that she was in junior high at the time.
She went on to say how much she loved the writing, and how she believed it had actually sparked her ambition to try and break into the business. I knew it was all boilerplate bullshit. Knew she probably said that to everybody who sat in this oversized chair. I knew all that, but it still felt good.
Greta trotted off to check on his conference call, and I took a sip of my cappuccino. It looked beautiful but tasted like coffee-flavored dishwater. I desperately yearned for a caffè macchiato from that little place with the green awning across from the . . . I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing. When I was in Italy I kept thinking about L.A., and now that I was in L.A., I was yearning for Italy. What was up with that? I forced myself back to the trades, flipping past all the articles about those younger and more successful than me.
But when I got to the obituaries, something caught my eye.
Remember the guy who told me never to fall in love with my own stuff? There he was, dead at sixty-three. The obit listed the shows he had written, which were impressive, and the awards he had won, which were numerous. I drifted back in time. About ten years after he had given me that advice, I was producing my first network show. I had heard that he was out of work and I wanted to repay his kindness, so I called him. I explained that the star of our show had packed the writing staff with his relatives and his running buddies, so I didn’t ha
ve the title or the money to give him what he deserved. But I’d love to have him involved, perhaps as a consultant who came in once or twice a week.
The offer was demeaning for a guy of his stature, and the show was, quite frankly, one of those idiotic eight o’clock family comedies that I’d built a career out of writing. He thanked me for thinking of him and a few days later showed up at one of our run-throughs. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him grimace at the over-the-top acting and the sophomoric writing. He left as soon as it was over, muttering something about being too old and too rich for this.
I saw him again three years later. I walked into a restaurant and spotted him at the bar. I sat down and tried to make conversation, but all I got was a drunken rant against every prick who’d ever screwed him. Here was a guy who had made a lot of money, won a shelf full of awards, and had achieved about as much acclaim as any TV writer can ever hope to get.
I still remember how he looked at me with unfocused eyes and said, “In the end, kid, no matter how big you are, this town won’t leave you with one shred of dignity on your bones.”
His death made me realize how lucky I was. I had my health, I had about as much sanity as I’d had when I first got here, and most importantly, I had somebody who loved me so much, she wanted to drag me out of L.A. by my hair. Maybe she was right. Maybe I needed to get out now before I became that bitter, drunken bastard on the barstool.
Wait a minute, was I actually thinking of walking out on all this? Me, who never quit a job in his life? Me, whose working philosophy can best be described as just leave the money on the dresser and if you had a good time, tell your friends?
Then, for no reason whatsoever, Charylie popped into my mind. It was just a fragmentary image. The way she cocked her head or curled a lip. But it was so dead on, the tumblers clicked and her entire life opened up to me. I saw her as a baby, a child, and a woman in one vast, continuous panorama. I had to stop myself from shrieking with excitement.
I scrambled for a pen. My hand was a blur moving across the paper as I tried to follow her rap about society. It was something about how we’re all suffering from “strangulation by communication” because we’d been “massmedia-ized like some fries that have been supersized.” Then I stopped writing, because I realized she was talking to me.
“Yo, man,” Charylie said, plopping her purple Doc Martens down on the coffee table. “What you be comin’ up in here all whinin’ and cryin’ like some little punk bitch?”
“I’m not whin—”
“Look at you, sucka. You be all wah-wah-wah, oh, please, Mr. Agent-man, don’t let ’em change my script. I loves my script.” She was laughing at me.
I looked over at Greta. She was on the phone and hadn’t noticed that I was having a conversation with a person who wasn’t there.
“What you even doin’ comin’ up here at all?” Charylie’s eyes were on me like an arraignment.
“Trying to make a living.”
“You done made a living. Ain’t you got money?”
“Yeah. Some.”
“Ain’t you seen your name on TV enough?”
“Yeah.”
“Then move your sorry ass over, nigga, and make room for somebody else. You been feedin’ at this trough long enough.”
She was right. It wasn’t the money or even the ego strokes anymore. I was mindlessly chasing stardust, because without show business, I had nothing else in my life. No hobbies. No interests. No real friends outside of the people I worked with. I was condemned to spend the rest of my days trying to fill a hole that was essentially bottomless.
Charylie was now on my lap. She wrapped her arms around my neck and whispered, “Listen, boy, you ain’t so old, you just got to be a little more bold.”
Yeah, maybe I could change. Maybe I could build my life around something else. Nancy was offering me a chance to reinvent myself, if only I had the—
“He’s ready to see you now,” Greta announced.
How could I see him now? I was right in the middle of figuring out what I wanted. Why I was here. Not here in my agent’s office, but here on earth. Oh, God, I’m no good at these vast, imponderable questions. I’m good at writing jokes and ordering Chinese food, but when it comes to everything else, I’m pretty clueless.
“He’s ready,” Greta repeated, as if I had a hearing problem.
I stood up and looked at the door to my agent’s office, and then at the elevator.
“Sir? . . . Sir?”
8
Giornalista
I was standing in front of our bedroom mirror, my face turning a fire-engine red as I struggled to fit into my loosest pair of pants. After taking a breath, I groaned, sucked in my gut, and made one last attempt. I had just about gotten my zipper closed when I saw Nancy standing in the doorway.
“Are you okay,” she said, “or are we going to have to use the Jaws of Life to cut you out of those?”
“I know . . . I’m getting a little heavy,” I said, rummaging through the armoire for something with an elastic waist. “And do you know why?”
She pursed her lips in mock concentration. “Could it have anything to do with you eating like a cow?”
“Because in this wonderfully modern country of Italy, there’s no such thing as a garbage disposal, that’s why.”
“Oh, this should be good.”
“Okay, I’m having pasta or risotto or whatever you’ve made, which, incidentally, is delicious, but I’m getting full. I still have stuff on my plate, but there’s really not enough to stick in the fridge, which is so tiny, there’s never any room anyway.”
“So it’s the refrigerator’s fault.”
“So . . . I start thinking about having to scrape off my plate, first with a fork and then with my fingers because a fork just can’t get up all those stubborn little scraps, and then shovel the whole gooey mess into that leaky paper bag we’re using for garbage, which is going to get all slimy and smelly, which’ll attract ants, not to mention spiders, which you’ll insist I kill, and then I’ll claim that as a devout vegan I’m against the killing of any living thing, and you’ll say since when am I a devout vegan since I just inhaled enough meat to gag a timber wolf. It’ll turn ugly, we’ll get into a big fight, and so to avoid all that, I just eat everything on my plate, and, okay, maybe I am getting a little lunchy, but as you can see, I’m only doing it for you.”
“Why, thank you, Tubby, that’s so considerate.” She giggled as she took me in her arms and hugged me in a way that said she was glad I was back from L.A.
And I hugged her back because I was just as glad.
“You must stay up nights thinking these things up,” she said.
She was right. I was staying up nights, but it was mostly to try and figure out what to do with my life now that I had decided not to sell my script to those producers. Remarkably, my agent had been very supportive over my sudden display of integrity, and if I hadn’t known any better, I could have sworn he was treating me with a modicum of respect. He told me to go back to Italy, start writing something new, and not to worry about my script. He’d sold it once and he could sell it again.
That was three and a half weeks ago and I hadn’t heard from him since.
After Nancy left to go to the market, I made myself a little lunch, and, yes, I ate everything on the plate, because I happened to be a little depressed, you know? What was disheartening was this new script I was working on. When I was in Hollywood I had seen how hungry they were for big-budget action-adventure films. Lots of exploding tanker trucks and Uzi blowback, and every time the hero immolated a neo-Nazi skinhead, an anthrax-wielding Chechnyan, or a Columbian drug lord, he uttered some macho catchphrase, like “Hasta la vista, baby,” or “Feel lucky today, punk?”
So after lunch I sat with a yellow legal pad on my lap, trying to find that one catchphrase so testosterone fired it would rip through the Ritalin haze of a generation of teenage boys and entice them to plunk their Slurpies into the cup holders of every multi
plex in North America.
I wanted to write something I didn’t have any emotional connection to, so when the inevitable changes and rewrites came, I would feel no pain. But apparently this was not sitting well with me, because when I looked down at the catchphrases I was working on, I saw that I had written:I AM A WHORE
I felt alone and adrift. I needed to write something to keep my brain from devouring itself, but what? I thought about turning on the TV for inspiration, but the idea of surfing through all those Italian-language channels flayed me. I think at that point I would have sat through a documentary on the Phillips screwdriver if it were in English.
I was mindlessly staring into space when I became aware of the absolute silence. I looked around and realized that the kitchen faucet had stopped dripping. This was odd, because that constant plunk, plunk of the Italian Water Torture was something we’d come to count on, like the neighborhood rooster who suffered from some form of cock-a-doodle-do dyslexia, causing him to start crowing when the sun went down, continue through the night, and be left in poor voice for the sunrise.
I went to the sink and turned the handle, and, sure enough, it was dry. I went into the bathroom and tried that faucet with the same result. We’d had water before lunch. Had we forgotten to pay our bill? Was there a broken pipe? I picked up the cell phone and dialed Dino. A recorded voice from TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile) came on, urgently telling me something I couldn’t understand. I was musing over the possibilities of living in a world where we had no water and the phones were down, when I remembered having seen a flier or something from the Agenzia dell’acqua. I seemed to recall throwing it out, so I proceeded to dig through the bag of stinky garbage.
