“Enough!” Randall marches over, grabs my arm and shakes me. “Enough.”
I pull free and get in his face. “Defend this!”
“Nothing to defend. I just don’t want to go to jail, man.”
“Please,” I beg. “I’ve signed the contract, I am going to war. So tell me you need these people, this place. This memory. Tell me that you can’t live without us.”
He jiggles his keys in his pocket and turns from me. “Love you, pal,” he says. “All I am is sad. Real sad.”
We depart.
Chicks
I DRIVE BACK into the beige haze of the Valley. Waste away on the weak side of hot. “Smog Index must be ten,” I mumble to myself, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, my body longing to sweat. I don’t know for sure if indices or numbers are used to calculate smog. I believe someone told me that when the L.A. horizon starts to spoil, its tint reminiscent of a dirty aquarium, a Smog Index or Alert is issued, the authorities instructing us to seal up in residence, to breathe only conditioned air.
Smog doesn’t matter, anyway. What matters is that I’ve forgotten whether this someone was a Someone I should remember to remember: man, woman, curious, queer, producer, director, dealer, what? What matters is that I shove on the wall of an industry which mandates that I not only know Everyone, but know exactly what they’ve got going on, when they’re hot, what they’re hot for, and most importantly what I can do to make them hot for me.
It is seventy-nine degrees in Southern California, again. Sunlight spears past the cream vinyl visors as I turn onto Ventura Boulevard. The silver pocket watch in the car’s center console keeps erratic time. Dry breeze through the open windows fans the script pages on the passenger’s seat.
Breeze or not, these pages aren’t going anywhere. Not today. Apparently, my writing remains stuck in bass-ackwards South Carolina. It seems I don’t have a grasp on the language or thoughts or physiology of real-world chicks. Chicks, chicks, chicks.
THIS was part of my pitch to the Producer, earlier today: “Ultimately, the story is an old-school romance in which the innocence of a kiss is infinitely more valuable and, well, more noble than sex.”
He sighed.
“If you will, follow me, here,” I continued. “People are overpumped with sex. Movies, television, commercials, ads, books, e-books, pop-ups, wherever. What they forget about, what they lack, is honesty. Sincerity. Tenderness. So they’ll devour this story. A young couple, desperate in love — only he’s shipping off to war. We follow their last night together, until they part at daybreak on the fragility of a kiss.”
“Sure, kid,” he said, his words a dollop of disinterest. “Hey? I get it. And the war thing sells like crack. But here’s the problem. You can’t base a major motion-picture budget on some sappy kiss. On a fragile whatever. Mature audiences need more — even from a chick flick. They crave more. Hey? Know what I think?”
“What’s that?” I said, I say, again and again, in meeting after meeting, in squat stucco buildings augmented by outrageous European cars, by jasmine vines that struggle up pink walls with ornamental wooden doors.
He noted something clever. His pristine teeth screamed monthly scrape; the flawless skin of his cheeks, abrasion. And as it all came together, teeth and scrape and stucco, my disappointment dragged me to yet another memory of yet another faceless L.A. Moment. To the words of yet another ghost. This Someone — whomever they were — made the observation that Los Angeles architecture is either (A) holding firm to the 1970s, or (B) represents the far evolution of sexless capitalism: Strip Mall, City of the Future. Either way, this city is a fundamental counter-aesthetic to the dignified militarism of home. Where is the memorial? The genteel remembrance of strife?
“Ammo or AOC?” the Producer asked, his finger poised to press on this black desktop orb.
“Sorry?”
“Never apologize, kid. What do you think? Ammo or AOC? I’m meeting a client later.”
“Trick answer,” I answered. “The patio at AOC — only, before it was AOC. When it was still Orso. Anyway, I’ll never understand why anyone goes beyond the Chateau. Cliché or Q-score be damned. You just can’t kill the hang.”
The amount of time I spend memorizing industry blogs is nauseating.
“Good,” he said. He put his fingertip on the orb and instructed, “Set up drinks at Bar Marmont. And put a hold on Room 64, in case things turn fun.”
IF you frame the narrative correctly, the $10 bill in my wallet is exponentially powerful. A potential game-changer. Ten bucks equals three gallons of unleaded gas. Therefore, worst-case scenario, in stop-and-go traffic, it equals sixty-six miles. Sixty-six miles equals four round trips over Laurel Canyon. Four trips over Laurel Canyon are potentially four pitch meetings, out of which I only need one to pop. Statistically speaking, this could be the last time I have to worry about. .
Who am I kidding? Make that one gallon and a $7 pack of Winstons. Make it twenty-two miles and sixteen waking hours of nicotine, alongside the heartbreak of having to list another Bolex lens on eBay, in order to make rent and buy Variety. As complement, go ahead and make it be the scream of a failed CV axle joint, or the driver’s-side window whose crank handle snapped off, meaning that you must roll the thing up using pliers, every time you park in this city of thieves.
The white plastic bag on the passenger’s seat floor contains Ralph’s eponymous organic spinach, Ralph’s eponymous frozen pizzas, and a six-pack of cold, cheap American pilsner. (Ralph’s grocery does not yet offer generic beer.) Got $10 cash back, which I had to ask for special, since the lowest option on the checkout screen was $20.
YOU know those glass electricity globes? Those electricity-filled glass globes in kids’ museums that generate multi-colored lightning? She was like that. Her spark was wit and literariness and sentimentality, and a tiny white dog-bite scar that curled off her upper lip like a bass clef. She had a penchant for spouting high-minded conspiracy theory, e.g., Kafka Predicted the Holocaust. A disdain for the paper-white lily, for banana nut bread from a package, e.g., Martha White (though if one must buy premixed banana nut bread, she figured one might as well go with Martha White). All sorts of details. And, point being, if she was that globe, and if you touched the globe softly, the lightning softly struck back. If you placed hands fully on it, it crackled and thrust in kind. Leave it alone and it, she, did her thing in beautiful solitude.
I left South Carolina six weeks after our first date, having already quit my job and sold my everything to move west and sell a story.
“Superb timing,” she said, then gave me the antique pocket watch as a parting gift.
I sit out here and hock my narrative and make her be the balance. At a stoplight, under the smog-fed palms, she is always the balance I’m missing.