by Bruce Wagner
“You can’t go inside the caves, but you can see all around them. You can even see the parking lot where people leave their cars.”
“Pretty amazing.” (And it was.)
“You’re not on Wikipedia,” said Biggie.
Oy. “Thank God,” said Bud—which would have been a not brilliant but OK response if Biggie had asked why he wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter, those being things one could elect to be a part of or not. Whereas a Wiki page was created without one’s participation or approval, based solely on the small or large mark one had made in general society. Bud prayed the boy would just let it go; he didn’t feel like being busted.
“So,” said Biggie. “My brother said that you—can you refresh me as to why you’re here again?”
Whatever was wrong with the kid happened, at the moment, to work in Bud’s favor.
“Your brother said you had an idea . . . Brando said you had lots of ideas—but I guess the one he said he wanted you to talk to me about was a drama. And not a comedy. He said it wasn’t mainstream. Your brother’s hiring me to write the script of it. He wanted us to meet, so you could pitch me the idea.”
“O! Right! My Antigone!” He actually turned to look at Bud. “Have you read the play?”
“In college,” Bud lied. He hadn’t read it or gone to college.
“Can I just email you the article my idea is based on?”
“Whatever works.”
He wrote down his email; Biggie sent the attachment right then.
“Your name’s Bud,” he said, swiveling in his chair again to face him.
“Correct.”
“My brother likes high concept but I’m moving away from that. I’ll still feed him ideas. Though it’s starting not to feel right anymore.”
Bud understood exactly what the kid meant. Maybe Brando was right. Maybe they would become soulmates. Maybe Bud would move in after all.
Biggie turned back to the screen. “What’s your address? I mean, to where you live?”
He realized that his host wanted to travel to Bud’s home via Google Earth. He gave him Dolly’s address in the flats; if he was faster on his feet, he would have given him Tolkin’s. As Biggie entered “111 S Cañon,” Bud said, “It’s a little apartment in Beverly Hills that I only use to write”—he knew the building was going to look shitty & radiate loserdom. The saving grace was, he had a feeling the kid’s pathology precluded him from judgment.
Just when Bud was fantasizing that the satellite images would be fucked up or hopelessly scrambled, a perfect photo of the front of the apartment house coalesced into crystal clarity. You could even see the car that belonged to the Vietnamese owner parked in the driveway. Biggie did his man-on-the-street thing, and began to walk around the building. Bud had never seen anything like it. Suddenly, they were on the south side, looking into Bud’s room, the room he had lived in intermittently for over 40 years. For a moment, the screenwriter panicked, thinking that Biggie could make an adjustment that might show Bud inside masturbating, an activity he engaged in four to five times a week to burn off nervous energy and facilitate creativity. Biggie continued his saunter around to the back of the building, where Dolly’s old Lincoln Mark IV had been parked with two flat tires for the last five years. She no longer had a license (she wouldn’t physically be able to drive it even if she did), but refused for nostalgic reasons to have it towed for the tax write-off. Bud asked Biggie to “walk” to the rear of the car and focus on the license plate—there it was, . Biggie flew to the front of the building to show him another feature, one that allowed you to go back in time and see what the place looked like from the first day that Google had photographed it ten years ago . . . they watched how the façade of the building had changed year to year with the Vietnamese woman’s remodeling. Bud could recall each of those annual façades, viewing them beside the parallel timeline of his failure as a son, a man, an artist. Jesus.
Bud’s gut tightened as the boy flew up to hover over the building—all the shitty AC units, litter and sandwich wrappers left by slobby workmen—then up they went, hundreds of miles above the earth, back to the caves of Vietnam.
“Can you find your way out?”
Bud was so engrossed in his tech-triggered reveries that for a moment, he thought the boy was saying something about the cave or the script or the process.
“Yes! Right. Sure.” Biggie was already cursor-deep in his spelunking dance. “I guess I’ll call you after I read it.”
“Or come by. Just email that you want to come by.”
Bud shook his hand again; this time there was even less of the boy behind it than before. Then he left the room.
Biggie called out:
“You’re not listed on Wikipedia. Why don’t you have an entry?”
CLEAN
[Bud]
Add To Cart
Mr.
Wiggins drove home from Yogurtland, tweaking the satellite radio. He had the 60s on 6 channel on, without sound. It said THE TURTLES, Happy Together (1965). Almost fifty years ago—the music of his youth. The aged screenwriter remembered being 13. At 13, fifty years ago meant Charlie Chaplin and the vague beginnings of forever-vague World War 1, the general mist of what may as well have been pre-history. Now, fifty years ago meant Manson and “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” So it fucking goes.
He sorted through the mail as he walked from the lobby down the hallway to Apt #4—the usual Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons, junk flyers and come-ons printed on shit paper, take-out menus for a local Chinese, a local pizza, a not so local Thai.
He fished a stately little card from the pile:
Dear Dolly,
For a variety of reasons, more and more people are choosing cremation over traditional funeral arrangements. As they plan their final wishes and needs, almost 50% of Californians have selected cremation as their preference! The numbers are increasing every year!
Bud already did the legwork. A downtown mortuary called Armstrong would pick the body up, haul it to Orange County for burning then tote the ashes back for a loved one to pick up, all for just a bit over 600 bucks. Urns started at $200, hardly worth it since Dolly had always expressed an interest in being buried at sea. If you weren’t a big urner, they’d throw in a plastic box, gratis. His research extended to hospices as well. Veritas had a lot of good online feedback. The minute Dolly’s doctor called to say the old gal didn’t have more than six months, RNs would descend upon the apartment to make sure she was pain-free and comfortable as possible. Bud liked hospices’ general approach—doping patients to make them comfortable, which invariably hastened death. No one likes a long, drawn-out demise.
Her bank statement (Wells Fargo) was hidden between the coupons and throwaways. Bud waited until he was in the foyer to open the envelope. His mother’s balance was $1,384,411.08, even more than he recalled. Boy, that interest really mounts up. He wondered what it would be like to have interest work for you and not against you. What a concept.
Bud wanted to go to bed early. He climbed the stairs to say goodnight. He couldn’t wait to tell her that she could suspend his allowance because he just got a job, a real job, a writing job, but now wasn’t the time. She’d probably say something withering anyway. Still, nothing could change the fact that a hot production company commissioned him to write a feature. His world had been stood on end; he could even tell people he was with CAA and not be lying.
Marta was at her “station” in the dining room, studying a bible. She was a robust, cheerful Salvadoran mother of five and grandmother of 12 who praised god and suffered no fools. She was an ardent churchgoer and as far as Bud was concerned, a living saint. Marta actually slept in bed with her employer during the week—Bud guessed that was a cultural mother-veneration thing, but it still blew his mind—worrying that if Big Baby needed her in the middle of the night, the monitor might not be loud enough to wake her. Marta took off weekends to spend time with her family, which was tough because Dolly hated the other caregivers. If sh
e gave the fill-ins too hard a time, Bud would have to call Marta, who’d drop what she was doing and rush over to admonish, soothe and sweet-talk. By the time she left, Big Baby was so docile that she practically goo-goo’d.
He poked his head in. Dolly was asleep in a chair in front of the TV. Her mouth was open and Bud softened; the face looked like a death mask. Poor Dolly—solitary, snobbish, sadistic, rancorous Dolly. Bud still marveled at how she hadn’t cultivated a single friend in half-a-century. A true misanthrope. Her parents never showed affection of any kind so it was no wonder she was clueless. As one therapist after another had inculcated Bud, she’d done the best that she could. She’d worked like a dog in retail for more than half a century, squeezing out every dollar she could, accruing bonus upon bonus, bending, twisting and torturing the percentages in her favor, scrimping and saving and going without just as her own mother had during the Depression. One of her most striking memories as a little girl was getting scarlet fever; the health department taped the doors and windows, quarantining her family inside. She never forgot the shame of being forced to accept charity—baskets of food left on the doorstep by neighbors in the early morning. And oh how they hated the Jews in Urbana-Champaign. How they hated us!
He was touched that the Universe saw fit to provide Dolly with her first real mother—Marta Morales—at the tail end of her life. She called her Big Baby, and Dolly called her Mama, for real. They had a secret language and laughed at a thousand private things. Better late than never. Bud would be lucky to find his own Marta toward the end.
He was about to back out of the room when she stirred, as if sensing his presence.
“Bud?”
“Hi Mom.”
“Hi! What time is it?”
“Only seven. I’m going to sleep early.”
“That sounds like a wonderful idea.” Her head remained fixed but her eyes lasciviously raked him over. “You’re handsome, and you know it. That beautiful jaw—those lips. You really kind of turn me on.”
He was determined not to tell her about the gig until they cut him a check.
“Last night I woke up with tears in my eyes. I teared up over your father. Can you imagine? I didn’t think I had it in me. I think it was because I was watching America’s Most Talented, & the ventriloquist was singing with the frog. They were singing that song, ‘Crying Over You.’ Do you know it?”
Dolly was focused on the television. Michael Douglas was being interviewed about The Treasure of Sierra Leone.
“Bud . . .” He recognized it as her dark conspiracy voice. “Do you think he’s not telling the truth?”
“Who?”
“Michael Douglas.”
That familiar inflection of groundless contempt.
“About what?”
“I just think he’s . . . got it. I think it came back.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Who knows. And that nut he’s married to—he can sure pick em. I think she wants him to have it—the cancer. Because then she’ll get all the money. She’s no dummy. He’s an old man, Bud! She’s still young. You can’t fault her for that. Do you know what old men smell like? In bed? The farts and the breath? Well I can tell you. Because that was my thing after I divorced your father. The old men were my thing. I was looking for money.”
“Mom, I think I’m gonna go to bed.”
“Terrible taste in women. His father fooled around puhlenty. What was her name—Diandra. He went from bitch to nut. She was smart, the first one, $45 million she got. And she was right to sue again. She should sue a third time. Serve him with papers right when he’s taking his last breath.”
“Night, Mom.”
“We need to find you a Diandra—or a Jamie McCourt. A divorcée. The divorcées are good because most are dying for a good fuck. I don’t care who they are as long as they’re monied. Go for an old one. A dowager. Do you know what a dowager is? I’ll pull out my Neiman’s customer book and we’ll go shopping for dowagers. How about the fag’s mother? Cooper. His mother’s, you know, a Vanderbilt. Gloria. How does it go, what they say about people on top? They fuck their way to the bottom! That’s where you are, let her fuck her way to the bottom, that’s when you grab her. She had a son, you know that, don’t you? He jumped out a window just to get away from her. Why don’t you go out there, Bud? Fly out there and give her a run for her money. Cause she’s got to be as old as I am. In the meantime, go find Jamie McCourt.”
He said goodnight to Marta and went straight to his bathroom for a bowel movement. He’d been constipated ever since Brando Brainard said he got the job. His body was in shock.
Bud sat there with the iPad. He unfroze the Franzen, which was the last thing he’d been looking at—Franzen on YouTube had become a weirdly addictive pastime. In this particular screed, the bloated, bestselling litterateur smirkily held forth on “overrated writers,” casually shitting on Forster and Graham Greene. Bud noted JF’s three-day grizzle gave him a smug, Craig’s List coker’s mien, reminding the over-the-hill aging scripter of those contestants who were certain they’d win The Dating Game—or maybe more like a death-row interviewee, one of those high-IQ serial killers talking on an A&E doc about the 11 undergrad guys and dolls he decapitated then raped back in the Santa Cruz glory days. He said Graham Greene’s so-called important books like The End of the Affair were basically shit but maybe that was a function of being Brit vs. American, and how there was a lot of American writing that Brits didn’t get either—writers like, oh, George Saunders, and, uhm, his pal Dave Wallace . . . again, he shit on his good friend! Not only deftly tucking him into a minor peer’s camp but insinuating that DFW didn’t have the universality—even in death, especially in death—of Jonathan Franzen! “They consider George and Dave to be, I don’t know, puerile, or bratty, or too broad, or annoying . . .”
The gall of the man nearly gave Bud a hard-on, but instead, he squeezed out a few pellets followed by a record-breaking, sustained trumpet of gas—a personal best.
Bud ran a bath and printed out the attachment Biggie emailed, a two-page newspaper article entitled “Between Scylla and Charybdis.” Scylla & Charybdis . . . the names were familiar. He’d google them later.
Instead of getting in the tub, he sat at his desk and flipped through a book called The 90-Day Novel. After his meeting with Biggie, Bud drove down to the beach and treated himself to an early dinner at a Thai place off the Promenade. Then he strolled to Barnes & Noble, where a placard by the escalator announced an “author’s event.” He took his seat in a crowd of studious-looking wannabes. It seemed strange to him that instead of writing a self-help book for burgeoning novelists, then going on to write fiction, Alan Watt did things in reverse; he wrote an acclaimed novel (in 3 months, of course), then took the self-help guru route. The author entered to applause, his ease in front of a crowd attesting to a former career in stand-up. He thanked his publicist, who sat in the front row, then began thanking the bookstore staff by name as if there to accept an award. The 90-Day Novel was published by The 90-Day Novel™ Press, the sign of an entrepreneur at work. The book was in 12 weekly sections, further broken down into Day 1 through Day 90, each with its own epigram by Mailer, Maugham, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Hesse, Jung, Pearl Bailey, & the like. It even included a “story structure analysis” of the author’s own novel, Diamond Dogs, winner of France’s 2004 Prix Printemps for Best Foreign Novel. Bud hadn’t heard of Diamond Dogs, nor had he heard of the Prix Printemps, nor any of the authors that provided blurbs, including the writer of the cover quote, “Frank B. Wilderson III, winner, 2008 American Book Award.”
Bud put the book down and picked up The Paris Review.
He opened it to an interview with Jonathan Franzen, who was being asked about the influence of Don DeLillo on his work.
FRANZEN
I don’t think my pages read like his, because I had a preference for rounder letters—c’s and p’s. I think of him as being more into l’s and a’s and I’s.
INTERVIEWER
FRANZEN
I kept seeing a plate of food with beet greens and liver and rutabaga—intense purple green, intense orange, rich rusty brown—and feeling a wish to write sentences that were juicy and sensuous.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean the sound too?
FRANZEN
No, the way they looked, the roundness of b’s and g’s, the juiciness.
It depressed Bud that he hadn’t thought of letters that way, having shapes and colors like food. He would never be able to talk about vowels and consonants with such sensual, specialized knowledge; he’d never be asked anything in The Paris Review, not even for his thoughts about The Wire or Mad Men. Bud felt all about l’s and o’s and s’s and e’s and r’s—like a loser.
Bud understood there were certain things he would simply have to accept. He might never finish, let alone publish a novel, and if he did, the odds of collecting an award—even a Prix Printemps—were stacked against him. He would never be asked to discuss his life and his craft at the Aspen Ideas Festival. He would never give a TED talk or be profiled in The New York Times Magazine. He would never be extolled, asskissed and fussed over in the pages of Interview by special people like Marina Abramovi´c & Antony Hegarty; he would never hang with Patti Smith and Johnny Depp, nor would they gift him with photos of Genet’s scrotum or original letters from Rimbaud’s gunrunning years or uncracked ampoules once owned by Hunter Thompson. Lil Wayne would never refer to him as “my artist,” and Ellen would never give him a frivolous, on-air gift. He would never be asked to deliver a commencement speech, like Franzen’s boon friend David Foster Wallace. He’d probably never hang himself either.*
