“Can you type?” the man asked Lloyd.
“Sorta…,” Lloyd said, an honest enough answer. Tess had seen him on a computer keyboard. He used the two-finger method, and his speed was admirable, his accuracy and spelling less so.
“Work a photocopier? Answer phones? Get a lunch order right? The last is really the most important. A writers’ office, like an army, travels on its stomach.”
Tess thought that Lloyd would bristle at this list of less-than-illustrious tasks, but he nodded earnestly.
“Whatever you want, Mr. Marcus.”
“Ben,” the man said, then on a delayed double take: “How do you know my name?”
“When I learned I was going to work here, her boyfriend, Crow” – he jerked a thumb at Tess – “sat me down with the computer, and we went over everybody’s credits on IMDb, then I matched the names to images on Google.”
“Were you familiar with our work before you did that little exercise?” Tess couldn’t decide if the question was supercilious, or merely insecure. Of course, it was possible to be both, to use the former as a cover for the latter.
“I seen The Beast twelve times,” Lloyd said. “It’s one of my favorite movies.”
Ben Marcus looked pained. “That’s Tumulty, and Tumulty Senior at that. We don’t give points for that around here.”
“Yeah, I know, but that’s what I like. Horror. You wrote one of my favorite episodes on my favorite show ever, Freak Fest. I mean, I admit, I didn’t know who wrote it before we looked it up, but when I did, I remembered it and shit. There was some righteous evil in that.”
Shamed out of his sardonic smile, Ben Marcus looked awkward, even naked.
“I’d almost forgotten about Freak Fest.” He turned to Tess. “It was an attempt to update the old anthology shows, like Night Gallery, and one of the few things I ever wrote on my own.”
“I liked it when those strange little men chanted, ‘One of us, one of us, one of us.’” Lloyd squatted down and began hopping around in the fashion of a demented chicken. Perhaps Crow should have spent less time on the Internet, more time briefing Lloyd on acceptable office behavior.
“Yeah,” Ben said, his tone moving back into its naturally arch range. “Well, there’s a reason for that.”
Lloyd, still in chicken mode, nodded. “I know, Tod Browning’s Freaks, 1932. Johnny Eck, the Baltimore screen painter, was in it. You know, one of them guys with no legs. Crow ’n’ me watched it a couple of weeks ago. I love those pinhead ladies.”
If the life I see on my deathbed is more a series of greatest hits than unfiltered memories, Tess thought, then this moment will be part of that final slide show: Achingly Hip Screenwriter Dude shot down by a seventeen-year-old street kid, left nonplussed by Baltimore arcana. Johnny Eck! Screen painting! Oh, it was lovely.
“Yeah,” Ben said at last. “Unfortunately, Freak Fest was more of a Weak Fest. No one can make an anthology show work anymore.”
“Why is that?” Tess asked. She had zero interest in the answer, but she didn’t want Ben to resent Lloyd, and appealing to Ben’s insider knowledge might restore the equilibrium, allow him to play the expert he clearly prided himself on being.
“I haven’t a clue. William Goldman gets credit for saying ‘Nobody knows anything’ in the movie business. I’m just the rare soul who admits it. Okay – Lloyd, was it? Welcome to writers’ world. Flip and I are actually doing all the writing this first season, and Flip has a personal assistant, so you’ll be fetching and carrying for me, mainly, but also doing anything that Greer tells you to. Or the script supervisor, Bonnie. Or Lottie MacKenzie, especially Lottie MacKenzie. She may not even come up to your shoulder, but she’s the one person you never want to disappoint on this set. Lottie fires people.”
“He’s not getting paid,” Tess pointed out.
“That won’t stop Lottie. Where’s Greer? Never mind, I’ll show you the computer basics, and the phones. Lottie has mad-anal systems for everything here, from the phones to e-mail. With phone messages, you have to log everything in by hand and by computer. When you send an e-mail, always blind-copy it to yourself. And make sure you have a list of all the restaurants we like for lunch, along with their menus. But you’ll also have to call them to check the specials every day.”
Tess felt a little like a mom, watching the kindergarten teacher lead her son to his cubbyhole. Lloyd, however, had no separation anxiety whatsoever. He couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about the mundane tasks that Ben was outlining.
She gave it three days.
Greer tried to wrap her arms around the slippery dry-cleaning bags, but there was too much to carry in one trip, and one of the bags ended up slipping to the pavement. How did someone who seemed to dress exclusively in T-shirts and blue jeans generate so much dry cleaning? When Flip had interviewed her for the job of his assistant, he had cited dry cleaning as the type of errand she would never be asked to do. No dry cleaning, no child or pet care, Flip had promised. Nothing demeaning. The problem was that Flip, who had been sucked up to most of his life, had no idea what demeaning was. He had kept his promises about children and pets, but that was probably because his son was on the West Coast, along with whatever animals the family kept.
Still, there was no end to the trivial shit she was asked to do. Last week, Greer had spent her workday trying to find out if the cable system in Flip’s rented house could be reconfigured so he could get a different menu of pay-per-view options on the sports channels. She had then spent the better part of an afternoon with one of the electricians, setting up the DVR, and writing a sort of “TiVo for dummies” shortcut guide for Flip.
And now Greer was supposed to be shopping for a bigger house, in case the series got a pickup and Flip had to relocate to Baltimore. This meant endless and exhausting conversations with Mrs. Flip, whose singular obsession seemed to be kitchen countertops. Mrs. Flip had decreed that granite was over, that her Baltimore kitchen, should it come to pass, must have cement or slate surfaces, a hard-to-find decor element in a Baltimore rental, where granite was considered pretty high-end.
Mrs. Flip also had endless questions about the quality of life in Baltimore, which she seemed to think was one rank above a Third World country. Were there mangoes in the grocery stores? Bottled water? Good bottled water? Gluten-free products? What was the local version of Fred Segal? She prefaced every conversation by saying, “You know me, Greer, I really don’t want to be any trouble,” then proceeded to outline a list of demands, questions, and needs so extreme that she was right, they weren’t any trouble. They were way beyond that.
Mrs. Flip’s most offensive moment, however, had come when Greer was offered the assistant job. Mrs. Flip had e-mailed Flip, asking that he send a photograph of the prospective employee. After seeing the JPEG, she had replied: “So not a temptress. Approved.” Greer knew this because she was the one who had sent the photo – attachments were beyond Flip’s computer capabilities – and she opened Flip’s in-box every morning, per his instructions, and “previewed” his mail, assigning each communication a priority code. But then, Mrs. Flip must have known that, too.
The dry cleaning, even halved, was still too much to handle, and another bag slid to the street just steps from her car, a pair of khakis brushing the pavement. Would Flip even notice, much less care? If he did, she could always blame the dry cleaner. Greer had quickly learned that it was always easier to blame someone else, then promise to handle the problem as if she hadn’t caused it. Things had a way of working out. The detective lady had come to work on the production, after all, just as Flip wanted, and as far as he was concerned, Greer got the credit for that. And she would be happy to take it, as long as everyone was happy.