Dead Stars (9 page)

On the way home from the apartment office of THE HONEYSHOT! he got the idea of his life. He'd become Harry's secret weapon, his sniper, his 5-
honeyshot
General, Commander-in-chief of the Smarmy Army. He would enlist for 18 months, then hopefully, with his patron's blessing, gather up his edited work—nip slips, honied moneyshots & everything in-between—and show them at Gagosian.

He'd take another new name.

Some kinda cross between Weegee & Banksy: Squeegee, maybe.

MoMA won't even know what hit her.

. . .

“For me,” said Harry, “after Emma, I got a bit depressed. It was like,
Where can you go from here?
But I'm moving on. You know what
honeyshot!
I'd like to get? I'll tell you. And it ain't Kate or Pippa, let somebody else get em, it'll be soon enough. Cause Emma was the
real
royalty. And it ain't Amanda Knox, either. You know who I'd like? Gabrielle Giffords. That's right—my
belongs to Gabby. Jesus, did you see the picture of her in
People?
Post-headwound
svelte
. Wearing denim, with that little trake scar . . . thumb hooked in her jeans, like one of those hot bored MILFs you see at Anthropologie or Trader Joe's . . . I'd like to hook
my
thumb in her jeans! Cause I ain't all about the juvies. Like to get that perimenopausal kite string—a clear shot. Ain' never gunna happen. A guy can dream, can't he?”

“Sure, Harry. Got to.”

“You can make 200,000 a year, minimum.”

Jerzy pulled out a joint and lit up. He had the very strong notion it was OK & it was.

“Minimum.
Guaranteed.
But you gotta be
serious
. You gotta be diligent. You gotta eat, sleep & drink THE HONEYSHOT! It's all about longevity, Jerzy Shores, & persistence of vision. You want to do right by all the
beauties.
All the babes in toyland soon to be appearing in a chauffeured Escalade near you: I'm talking Hailee Steinfeld. I'm talking Elle. I'm talking
Madonna's kid
—Jesus H! Between the two of em, Hailee and Lourdes could support the depilatory industry without any help! I am guessing there are rumored
bales
of hair down there. And Elle ain't ethnic, as you know, Elle's
fair
, but sometimes the fair ones can surprise you in the southern regions . . .
Elle's fair in love and war—

mirror mirror on the wall

who's the hairest 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

——————there is a
serious
bumper crop a-comin! New muffs & mufflers,
major
single lady bidness up ahead!
Kylie Jenner
is
seriously
on the tote—she's
five-ten,
did you know that? Of course, my Christmas wish would be to have something
beforehand
, a sextape, or a topless—I can dream, right? O Jesus, I want that one almost as much as I wanted Emma. Maybe just as much, who knows, the
's a funny thing.

“I'm gunna give you a special assignment, Jerzy Shores, think you're ready for a special assignment? I don't want to wait anymore. As long as I don't put em out there, don't got to wait for the single ladies to be legal. Understand? I'll pay
5,000
for any you bring in, no one's gunna have a clue what you're up to, how could they. It ain't even against the law unless you
upload
. That's what got Perez in trouble, he should have kept Miley to himself. This is between you and me—little keepsakes. Because the world is going to hell & I don't want to wait anymore, it's fuckin too hard on me. I want to see what I can
now
. I want to see the
world
. I don't want to wait for the Willows. I want Judy Moody's too . . . . . . . . . that's right, go out and get me Chloë, get me Hailee, get me Elle! Get me little Sally Draper, get me fuckin Ariel Winter . . . don't be shy! I'll take Rebecca Black, she's got a forest growing down there. Kendall too. Kylie I'm more interested in but I wouldn't turn my nose up at Kendall. I'd do
something
with my nose, but I wouldn't turn it up! Get me Janet
Devlin 
. . . the devlin made me do it! Get me
Drew Ryniewicz 
. . . get me Sophia Grace and Rosie the Hype Girl! Rosie the Riveter! I wanna see
axe wounds
, I wanna see
movie SCARS . . .
get me to the
geek.
Marc Anthony's kid—Ariana's 18 soon. Michael Fox's twins. Get
palsy
with em—should be a walk in the parkinsons! I want to see the Depp kid. A little depp'l do me
.
And the Baldwin girl, Ireland. Go ahead, get your 30 rocks off &
pig out
on that thoughtless pig!

“But I'm thinking ahead, son,
way
ahead. About all the little ones who become part of the family, the national quilt, over the years, cause it takes a village
.
I'm thinking of all the little ones, the Suris and the Shilohs! (The Suri with the fringe on bottom.) The Obama girls—they are not ungettable nor are they sacrosanct. THE HONEYSHOT! is
out
there, THE HONEYSHOT! is its own rite of passage, THE HONEYSHOT! is a
visionquest
, out there like a tidal wave of baby beaver bounty: Here come the Gosselins! Here comes Honor Alba! Here comes Nahla Berry! Here comes Naleigh Heigl! Here comes Violet & Seraphina Affleck! Here comes Ava Witherspoon! (We just got her mother's cunt sliding out of the car to do a Kimmel.) Here comes Ella Bleu Preston-
Travolta!
Here comes Sadie & Sunny
Sandler!
Here comes Cleo
Schwimmer!
Here comes Satyana
Hannigan
& Billie Beatrice/Georgia Geraldine
Gayheart-Dane
& Savannah & Eden
Cross!
Here comes Indiana & Clementine
Hawke!
‘Ever'
Jovovich!
Harper Renn
Thiessen!
Here comes Vida
McConaughey,
and Charlotte
Gellar-Prinze Jr.
—here comes Britney's
sister's
fucking kid—a girl, right? And Haven cashwarren
Alba—thank Haven for little girls—
& Harlow & Apple . . . . . . . yeah yeah yeah, the HONEYSHOT!
needs
an Apple a day——oops! Here comes Maddie Duchovny! Amaya Hargitay! Vivienne Jolie-Pitt! Stella Luna Pompeo! Jessica Springsteen! Vida McConaughey! Destry Spielberg! Evie
Bono
Hewson! Krishna
Lakshmi
! Archie
Poehler
& Alice
Fey!
Coco “Coochie” Arquette-Cox! The little bitch from
Modern Family
, what's her name?
Aubrey.
Aubrey Anderson-Emmons.
Coming down the pike and legal in just 12 short years! Rebecca Romijn's got
twins—
of
course
she does, she's 65 years-old—Charlie & Dolly! Sarah Jessica's got
twins—
of
course
she does, she's
82
—Tabitha & Loretta! Don't you see what we're sitting on? THE HONEYSHOT!s gotta keep the faith . . . . . . which brings me to Faith
Kidman-Urban
——and let us not forget Sunday Rose
Urban-Kidman
, it's a
month
of Sundays, kid! Tobey Maguire's got
Ruby
, Salma Hayek's got
Valentina
, Tori Spelling's got
Stella
, Diddy's got
D'Lila
&
Jessie—
both girlchilds—J-Lo's got an
Emme
, Heidi & Seal got Leni & Lou—
Lou's a girlchild
. Bethenny Frankel's got a
Bryn 
. . . . . . . if I live long enough, I'll see Blue Ivy's black velvet . . . cause you see we get to know them from the time they're babes, we watch em laugh, we watch em cry, we see em dragged thru Barneys, see em squirm in rich and famous arms leaving Starbucks & Whole Foods & the fucking Malibu Lumber Yard, see em tousle-haired & toddler-jogging beside their toned-up yoga moms in the Colony, see em in Sandra Bullock's arms, Jesus, Bullock's arms must be more ripped than Cameron Diaz cause all I ever see is her hoisting that blackie like a kettlebell. We feel their joy & we feel their pain
(and I am telling you, Jerzy Shores, the day you hand over a shot of Paris, Michael Jackson's kid, that will be a day of celebration, a day of healing, of giving thanks to the Divine!)
—————we watch em grow up & grow tits, watch their teeth come in, buy our kids whatever style crap they're wearing . . . . . . . . . . . . then before you know it, they're staring out at us with their dead, hungry eyes from
Vogue
and
W
, in their Rodarte & Manolos, their Margielas & Louboutins, & they're leaving Starbucks or Whole Foods or the fucking Malibu Lumber Yard under their own power. Suddenly, our babies are going to premieres & museum costume ball fundraisers, I am telling you my new friend that it takes a village, & the village,
We the People of the United Village of Honeyshot!s
hold our breaths watching each little career begin, & we wish the best for our sisters, that's what they are, our little soul sisters—our daughters too & our future Moms—and we cushion the falls—the rehabs, DUIs, botched surgeries, 4-month marriages—just as we tally their triumphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . until one day it's
time
, time for me to show their cunts to the world.

“And when that time comes, we are there to help. We are there to help them from our heads & our
s.”

CLEAN

[Bud]

The Art of Fiction, Part One

Steve

Martin had a new book out; a bad bug forced Joyce Carol Oates to cancel her interview with him at the Central Library in LA. Oates had recently compared him to Edith Wharton, and Steve was looking forward to the Q&A.

JCO was one of those writers Bud was certain he would never read yet perversely enjoyed reading
about.
Everyone knew she had written a thousand books; a slow reader to begin with, Bud just couldn't see the point. Besides, he hadn't even read all of Dickens, and Dickens was in his Top Five. (It took a full 40 years for Bud to admit to himself that he would never—never, ever—read Proust. Capote supposedly never did either.) Still, he drew ironic comfort from the
Believe-it-or-Not!
aspect of Ms Oates's tsunami œuvre, & the trademark
shtick
pathology behind its creation
.
Which was somewhat of a shame (Bud thought charitably) because it wasn't so much the books that were being reviewed anymore, as it was the Brobdingnagian output. Every writer deserved a fair shake, yet he supposed the mother of so many
oaters
only had herself to blame. JCO often wrote under pseudonyms; you couldn't keep up with her
nom de spew'ems
either. Maybe that was sort of the whole point—staying ahead of your readers and critics. It was better than staying
behind
them, which is what Bud Wiggins had done.

. . .

He was turning 60 this year. A screenwriter since his mid-20s, Bud had a sole “written by” to his name, a co-credit (one of four others) on a forgotten horror film of the late 80s. When he turned 55, out of desperation, Bud took an early retirement, allowing him to collect a pension of $1,140 a month. The beauty was that WGA rules allowed him to continue to work, without being penalized. In fact, any income received
post
-pension would automatically be applied to a
second
retirement, collectible when he turned 65. The problem was, he was virtually unemployable. Until he found a job, he would have to keep living with his mother in the below-Wilshire apartment he grew up in as a boy. Dolly had lived there since the divorce, practically since Kennedy was shot (when the rent was $235 a month). Her husband Morris—Bud's father—killed himself back in '77.

A few years ago, with the help of a therapist, Bud Wiggins arrived at the mature, painful conclusion that he lacked talent as a screenwriter. He'd been given so many chances to soar yet each time fell to earth. And now, through an uncertain alchemy, he transformed defeat into liberation—the liberation that came with admitting he was finished, done, his sojourn in the Business was over. Of late, mortality was very much on his mind. Just how did he want to spend the years he had left? He decided at last to try his hand at what he felt he'd been put on earth to do—novel writing. Bud smiled to himself at the inept timing of his strategem: fiction was becoming a dead thing before his & the world's eyes, a faster death than anyone had imagined or been prepared for. But what could he do?
You can't fight the feeling.

It used to be a cliché that actor-waiters, CPAs and dentists were all working on screenplays; then came the old joke “. . . but what I really want to do is to direct.” Now it seemed that no one cared about writing scripts
or
directing. They only wanted to be novelists.

Novels were the new screenplays.

. . .

Truman Capote was such a fan that he famously declared Joyce Carol Oates to be “a joke monster who ought to be beheaded in a public auditorium.”
*
Bud wasn't as opinionated. He
did
like the idea of writers whose work, either paraphrased or quoted, existed only in reviews; it had a Borgesian (Bolañoesque?) ring. Maybe he'd try his hand at a short metafiction with that theme.

The halogen bulb of JCO's industry attracted the moths of novelists
manqué
, old infants no longer so terrible who'd given up the ghost of authorial fame in mid-life, instead finding peace in the green-enough pastures of
TLS
and
The London Review of Books
. These gentlemen and gentle ladies inadvertently began their Sunday reviews of JCO's latest eructation with a winking bow to her promiscuity on the page, which depending on individual temperament or even the mood of the moment, could be a swipe or a grovel.

Bud thought her ageless, gazelle-necked, bug-eyed flap photos never really did synch with the characterization of her work. (He saw her as a Victorian figure on display in the
Quality Lit
wing of Tussaud's, alongside other prodigies of indefatigable overprolificity: Cartland, Simenon, Dumas, King.) He gathered from reviews read over time that Oates's
thing
was ultraviolent, hypersexual Gothic. With each long novel and long short story, the writer apparently upped the ante of outlandish narrative, her new releases storming the marketplace sometimes three at a time like soccer thugs intent on breaking the skulls of the books that came before them. The complex, superheated plotlines that Bud was able to skim from reviews placed her indeed in the prinicipality of the Grand Guignol soap. It was the vexing habit of the woman's fiercely loyal critics to provide bizarrely fussy
précis
of whatever book they'd been engaged to appraise—much like competing technical manual writers vying for the prize of Best Instructions in the matter of operation of delicate scientific equipment. When it came to
Shakti Oates
, Mother Goddess of fertility, they shared a freemason-like covenant, a moral-ethical philosophy binding them together in an erotomanic rigor of thoroughness and
objectivity
. The sheer meticulousness of their endeavors launched them—obliviously—into cultism. It was a hobby of Bud's to read all of her reviews, though sometimes just finishing them was daunting, as if her prolixity had gone viral, paralyzing the very coolies vested in carrying the palanquin.

As a novelist, Bud wanted—needed—to study and profit from her example. The woman was some kind of witch. Her defamers were legion yet, in the end, through devilry, the nastiest cavils were massaged into batty, ecclesiastical pronouncements placing her squarely among the Immortals. So, aside from said carpings—the periodic hoots, hisses, graffiti, buckshot and urine-splashing afforded any writer worth their salt (cf: obsolescent belle-lettres blogsites)—the Oatress was critically bulletproof. She was a member of good standing in that country club Bud only dreamt of one day belonging, with its tenured, critically sun-kissed topnotchers: Auster, Vollman & McEwan, Cormac McC & Lorrie Moore . . . though Bud
did
remember that JCO's memoir of her husband's death
*
got respectfully slammed in the
Times Sunday Book Review
(front cover, no less!), second-fiddled to
The Year of Magical Thinking
. Well, you can't have everything. Anyhow, Joyce was no Joan. Joan had
another
book out about the death of her daughter—take
that
, JCO! When it came to LA freeways, fires, & losing loved ones, Didion had the lock.
*

When JCO bailed, the Central Library suggested T. Coraghessan Boyle or Neil LaBute; Steve wasn't thrilled. He rallied on learning Salman was in town to do Bill Maher, but the logistics didn't work & Salman sadly declined. In six hours, the auditorium would be filled. The hosts were starting to sweat. Norman Lear, Carolyn See and James Franco were rejected out of hand.

Steve had just given the (tepid) thumbs-up to Arianna, when Dave Eggers returned his call.

They met in 2009, when Dave won the $100,000 TED “Wish” Prize. (Steve emceed the ceremony and later became a big supporter of 826 Valencia.) Dave said he'd loved to have done the Q&A but was home nursing a sick child. But he said he managed to get in touch with another winner of the TED award, Karen Armstrong. Karen was a former nun, a scholar of comparative religion who created the
Charter for Compassion
, a project that was dedicated to promoting awareness of the universality of the Golden Rule in world religions. Steve actually met Karen a few years before on Necker Island. Richard Branson invited a whole group to bat around ideas that might further the cause of reducing hate and extremism. It was a great time: Steve already knew Bono and, of course, Lou and Laurie—& Aby Rosen and his wife, the socialite psychiatrist Samantha Boardman. He'd never met Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, or Queen Noor, who had an elegant, California girl beauty. Steve also knew Peter Gabriel, Peter Morton and Michael J. Fox (& wife Tracy) but had never met Sean Parker, who he really only knew through Justin's neat performance in
The Social Network
. Steve and Oliver Sachs marveled at how
they'd
never met, & happened to be big fans of each other's work, though admittedly, Dr. Sachs wasn't entirely
au courant
with his new friend's literary contributions. The actor-comedian-novelist's biggest love connection on that Necker Island trip was Desmond Tutu. The bishop was brilliantly congenial, with sunny, elastic features and a comedian's natural timing. There was something of the impish forest elf in him, and he smelled like an animal. He told Steve he'd retired and was “completely over the moon” about spending his days doing nothing but watching movies with his grandkids. He told him their favorite was
¡Three Amigos!
and Steve chose to believe him. Why would the bishop lie about something like that?

Karen Armstrong was in LA and
thrilled
to pinch hit. She was perfect: Steve loved the idea of being interviewed by a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an organization founded by King George IV boasting Coleridge, Kipling, Hardy and Shaw in its lineage of Fellows. Rocking good company.

. . .

Bud Wiggins sat in the audience listening, yet found it hard to focus—one of the downsides of ADD. He began a casual catalogue of his miseries.

He had zero savings and hadn't sold a network pitch in years. His old school chum Michael Tolkin was an important ICM client, and Bud was convinced it was only Michael's quiet interventions that had kept him on the ICM books. Back in the day, it'd have been Bud doing the good deed; back in the day, for about six months, Bud was hot. That was a long time ago, when Ovitzsauruses roamed the Earth, Arabs were the only billionaires, & Teri Garr didn't have MS.

He was $200,000 in debt. His mother, the top earner at Neimans in Beverly Hills until she reluctantly retired at the age of 83, had managed to save over a million dollars. “That,” she liked to say, regally, “is your legacy.” Dolly was 92 now—op-ed sociologists were calling anyone over 85 “the old old.” The doctors had learned their trade too well; the old old had become a ruinous drain on the nation's resources; the old old were very tough to kill. Dolly got nastier by the week. Like blood to a vampire, foulness gave her sustenance, and a certain
élan
.

Just this morning she'd railed against one of her Salvadoran caregivers. “I told her that she was now
required to wipe my
ass
. Do you know why? Because I want her hands in my shit.”

Bud was 59 (the young old), and desperately eager to trade the burnt-out dream of Hollywood screenwriter for a new one, the dream of being a novelist. Since he was a boy, he'd thought of himself as a prose writer. Even a published one—when he was in his 20s, driving a limousine at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Bud wrote an article for
New West
magazine about what it was like to chauffeur the stars. He got fired for that, but gained confidence as a writer. He began writing long monologues in the voice of various habitués of a bar he frequented: Fast Eddie, wheelchaired as the result of a parking lot shooting; Aesop, the bearded hippie & sometime movie actor who went table to table selling turquoise jewelry; Soledad, the waitress whose bartender husband was shot and killed; Seymour, the bystander who got winged in the gunfight that killed Soledad's husband, & squandered his settlement money on pinball machines. He was in the planning stages of writing a novel about those people, when fate intervened. He fell in love with an actress in a comedy group. They did improvisations in her living room and started to write up dialogue, scenes, & situations. They linked the sketches and a producer bought the results. A movie was made, and it didn't really matter that it would never be released—for a while, they were an employable team. ICM gave their script to other writer-clients as the template to be aspired to.

Bud never lost the sense that prose was his raison d'être. He felt like the proverbial woman who sacrificed a brilliant singing career to have babies; his babies were his scripts and they were all mongoloids. It was time to sing again. He knew he had a novel in him, but what kind? What genre? What kind of style, what type of characters? What would it be about? Sometimes when he got too crazy, Bud enjoyed going to events like the one at the Central Library because the grueling process of writing was usually presented in a relatable, somewhat entertaining light, and it relieved the pressure, at least for a little while. He already knew the life of a writer was arduous, and lonely too. You could be lonely working on some shitty TV script—if that was the way it was going to be, why not end up with a novel? With a novel, you at least had people's respect.

He tuned back in. Steve was telling Karen about the important lesson he was taught by Carl Reiner . . .

What was the connection between Steve and Carl? He rooted around in the IMDB section of his brain to come up with the answer and found it: Reiner directed Steve in
The Jerk
and
The Man With Two Brains
. (Bud was impressed by his ability to access movie trivia, even though it felt a little like being in a convalescent home doing daily mental aerobics.) Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart—all these guys were in a small file shoved in an unmemorable section of Bud's amygdala. When he was a kid, Bud remembered how they all used to be on top of the world, the whole country knew who they were, and now that generation was finished, a living cemetery of dementia'd old olds, sequestered in falling-down Holmby Hills mansions, moldy and unkempt, horizontal hospice heads & groupies confined to their beds in stinky, understaffed, memorabilia-hoarded rooms, thousands of garish, encrusted picture frames with signed photos of the dead and dying, and the questionably alive: Carol O'Connor, Gilda and Gene, Bernie Brillstein, Brandon Tartikoff, Sandy Duncan, Karen Valentine, Mel and Anne, Sid and Imogene, Steve & Edie, Mickey & Judy, Kovacs and Freiberg, Roddy McDowell, Orson Welles, Chuck Connors & Orson Bean, Pat McCormack, Jack Paar, Pat Paulsen,
herrrrrrre's
Johnny—all current enlistees and recruits to the Double Void: that terrifying 2nd erasure following career death——————