Flavor of the Month (38 page)

Overnight, it seemed, he had gone from Malibu to Encino, from a leased BMW to a used Honda, from starring in a TV series to working as a waiter in a comedy club. It was like getting broadsided by a car. The months had passed, and all he could say was “What happened?”

Shit happened is what happened, he thought. Or, as the Hindus say, this shit all happened before. Problem was, he was no Hindu.

Neil tossed his white shirt and black bow tie on the pile of clothes next to the convertible sofa that he never bothered to close and fell across the bare mattress. While he lay on his stomach, he kicked off his scuffed, black Gucci loafers with the holes in the soles and heard them thunk onto the pile of dirty clothes beneath them. He welcomed the sound—the only sound at four in the morning.

The musty odor of the mattress filled his nostrils, forcing him to turn on his back. There was no one he could share this with, no one who wouldn’t gloat. Even his sister, Brenda, would just offer him some money and sympathy, tell him to come home. Christ! He felt as shamed as a beaten dog. As he lay in the silence of the night, he thought, as he often had, of Mary Jane.
She
was the only one who would understand, who could comfort him. There wasn’t anyone else who understood him, or whom he understood. If she still did, he thought, after all this time.

But when he had tried to telephone, only a few months after he arrived in L.A., he found her phone had been shut off. The couple of cards he sent her had been returned. She’d moved and left no forwarding address. Neil still missed her. Missed her more, in his failure, than before, in his success.

He got up and unbuckled his trousers, let them drop to the floor, kicked them to the far wall, then tossed along his shorts. He plodded into the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and went back outside to the joke his landlord called a kitchenette, took a beer out of the refrigerator, and waited the ten minutes it took for the shower water to begin to run hot. He pushed the collection of old newspapers off the only chair in the room and flopped down, stretching his feet out before him. He was relieved that it was night, still not dawn. He hoped he would be asleep before the daylight crept into the room and illuminated all the nastiness that was now mercifully hidden. Hidden, but lurking.

He knew the hole worn in the acrylic carpet was still there, just inside the front door, something Neil had thought was a scientific impossibility—to wear out an acrylic carpet. And there in the darkness was the crack in the wall over the kitchen sink that had been caused by a leak from upstairs. And the grease on the stove burners. And the penetrating smell of decay everywhere. That even the darkness couldn’t hide, but the malty aroma of the beer he held just below his nostrils covered it. Thank God.

He went back into the bathroom, turned on the overhead light, and tested the water. Hot; it took exactly ten minutes, the only reliable thing in his life. He adjusted the temperature slightly, then pulled back the sticky, stiff shower curtain and stepped in. He reached for the soap, and cursed when he realized he was down to a sliver. The shampoo would be almost gone, too, he knew, so he washed quickly and got out of the soap-filmed stall. The towel he plucked from the back of the door smelled, but at least it was
his
smell. He rubbed himself roughly, tossed the towel onto the damp stack on the floor, and went back to the other room.

He reached into the fridge for another beer, but was greeted only by a Diet Coke and a rotting apple. Neil slammed the door and flopped back down on his bed. He closed his eyes and prayed that tonight he would be left alone. But he knew he wouldn’t be.

He breathed quietly for a while; then, just as he was beginning to drowse, he heard it. The words seemed to come in through his left ear, piercing his brain and shocking his spinal cord. It was him doing his comedy routine at the club tonight, and he would have to relive it even if he didn’t want to.

It had been like this for several months now. Every evening, he went to work and waited tables, waiting for his spot in the last of the three nightly shows. Then it was back here, shower, go to bed, and, before he could sleep, listen to the routine all over again. He always used to record it, but he didn’t need to now. It ran in his head, over and over. Some nights, it was fairly good, and Neil slept relatively peacefully. Other nights—most nights—he had to scream out that it was all wrong, then get up and write and rewrite the routine until he got it better, adding here, deleting there. Then back to sleep, maybe, for a few hours, until it was time to report to the club to wait tables and do the rewritten routine. Finally, home again for the private reviews, as he began to call them.

At least tonight’s review was good. He listened to the piece he had added about Hollywood agents, and he could hear the crowd laughing. Yes, this bit wasn’t bad. After a drought for months, he was onto something. This was good and I’ll make it better. I’m going to get my second chance, he thought. He stretched out, exhausted, on the nightmare of a mattress. I’m not always going to live in a dump in Encino, he told himself. Someday, he thought…someday…I must do my laundry.

And he slept.

Jahne tried to keep calm as she drove over to the television studios. Her Toyota was vetted by the guard at the entrance, who checked her name off a list.

What do you do to prepare for the chance of a lifetime?
She’d
gone to the best hairdresser in L.A. Viendra was a man who wore a tight little red dress and size-eleven slingback pumps. He’d looked at Jahne’s heavy hair. “What have we here?” he’d simpered. “How about a crew cut? You’ve got the face for it.”

“No cut. Can you just cover the gray?” she asked. The white strands stood out against the darkness of the rest of her head.

“Hmm.” He considered, did a tiny dance around her chair, and shook his head. “No. It would dull the rest of it. Nothing worse than dyed black hair. I have a better idea. We highlight it with blue.”

“Blue?” she asked, and her voice must have quavered, but he explained it all calmly. The blue would make the black look darker and yet give a luster to the whole mane. She agreed to try.

Now she tossed her hair in front of the rent-a-cop. It did shine beautifully. “Go right into Building Three,” he told her. She drove across the lot. Once the place had been Desilu, the soundstages where
I Love Lucy
and so many pioneering TV shows had been filmed. Before that it had been Selznick International Pictures. Jahne turned a corner and there, in front of her, was Tara, the plantation house from Selznick’s
Gone With the Wind
. She gaped like a Hollywood tourist, but then she saw the sign—Building 3. She remembered now that Selznick had used the building as his offices. She was going in there. Not like a tourist, but as a working actress, the way Ingrid Bergman and Olivia de Havilland and Vivien Leigh had done. She pulled the rented Toyota over and took a few deep breaths. Her hands were shaking. Playing this part was a lot harder than she expected. She pulled down the vanity mirror in the car visor and stared at her reflection. She
was
beautiful, if a little pale. Her hair glistened like a raven’s wing. She thought of Pete’s voice whispering in her ear—“You’re so beautiful. You’re just so beautiful.” And certainly Marty DiGennaro wouldn’t have invited her here if she wasn’t.

“You
are
beautiful,” she whispered to her reflection. “You
are
beautiful. And you
are
talented. Go show him that. Go show him how pretty and how talented you are.” Her hands still trembled. “Don’t be afraid,” she told herself. “This is an adventure.” She took a deep breath. Her own voice didn’t help her much, but the echo of Pete’s came back to her again: “You’re so beautiful.” She could believe
that
voice.

She got out of the car and walked up the path to Building 3, then followed the receptionist’s directions to the suite where Marty’s offices were. A pretty woman with a crew cut met her outside the door. Did
she
go to Viendra?

“Jahne?” she asked. “Marty’s waiting for you.”

Wordlessly, Jahne followed her down a long hallway where dozens, hundreds, even thousands of actors had walked before. You are Jahne Moore and you are talented and beautiful, she had time to tell herself fiercely, and then was ushered into his office.

Marty DiGennaro was crouched on a big leather sofa, surrounded by a tangle of cables and cameras and lights. As she entered the room, he leapt up and took her hand. He was so nervous and small and wiry, he reminded her of a whippet as he bounded off the sofa, across the room, and then onto an ottoman.

“Sit down, Jahne.”

She slid into the low beige leather chair across from him. He made a gesture with his hands to the several people crouching amidst the tangle of equipment. “This is Bill, Steve, and Dino, Jahne. If you don’t mind, we’re just going to talk, and they’re going to tape us.”

Oh, fine, Jahne thought to herself. She wondered what he would do if she said she did mind, but that was not in the cards. She felt her hands and armpits go clammy with sweat. She knew she could impress him at an audition, or even a cold reading, but playing Jahne Moore was not so easy for her. She tossed her head, shrugged, and smiled. “You’re the boss,” she said.

He laughed, a high-pitched giggle. Since the time he’d had two movies that were each grossing ten million a day, he’d been called “the Boss” by much of Hollywood.

“What do you know about the sixties, Jahne?” Marty asked her.

“You mean hippies and flower-power kind of stuff?” she asked.

“Exactly!” he said with such a high level of enthusiasm that she figured that it had to be faked.

“Well,” she continued, “I guess it was the Beatles era.” She quickly calculated how much it was likely a twenty-four-year-old would know about the period. And how to play a little with Marty’s head. “Wasn’t Paul McCartney a Beatle before he was in Wings?” she asked innocently.

“Ouch!” Marty yelped, and one of the guys behind the camera groaned. “Makes you feel old, doesn’t it, Dino?” Marty asked. “What else do you remember, Jahne?”

“Well,” she said, another punch line prepared, “Bobby Kennedy was president until he was shot.” She smiled into the camera and licked her lower lip. “And wasn’t there a war someplace?”

It took them a minute to see that she was putting them on. Then belly laughs from the guys, that giggle from Marty. “Okay, okay. Very cute.” Marty smiled at her. He stood up and walked to her left, over to the window. She turned her head to look at him, but the camera remained on her. Well, if this was her screen test, she could play to a camera as well as to an audience at the Melrose Playhouse.

“Jahne, I am a child of the sixties, and I am obsessed with it. But I think other people are, too. Baby boomers who lived through the sixties, and the younger generation that wishes it had. Do you know what a PIQ is?”

“No,” she admitted.

“It stands for Program Idea Quotient. Every year the HTI—the Home Testing Institute—asks television viewers to rate program ideas. The networks use the results to make forecasts of audience levels. My idea for a sixties show was tested. It scored the highest possible points, both with the sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-old group and the thirty-five-to-fifty-year-olds.
That
never happened before. I want to do a show that is set during that era. I can exploit the music and the style of the time, and I can bring in the political upheaval as well. This is Clinton country. There’s a lot of opportunity for nostalgia, but it is more than that. There are a lot of parallels to today, and I think I can bring those out.” He moved back to the seat across from her. She nodded, tossed her head, and watched the camera pan as she turned her head to follow him.

“You ever see
Easy Rider?
” he asked.

“Sure. That was Jack Nicholson’s first movie, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Well, I want this project to be a new take on that kind of pilgrimage: finding oneself; finding America. And I want three girls to do it. Three girls on motorcycles.”

“Sounds interesting,” she said. Jesus, she had never been on anything bigger than Neil’s motorbike. She crossed her legs, smiled at the camera, and said, “I wish I had worn my colors.”

Marty smiled. “I have a lot of ideas. I want this show to look different than anything else. We’ll use a single camera and film it—no videotape at all. And we’ll use a lot of locations. These girls will cross America. I’ll use smears and sneaks and follow focus. It’s not going to look like any other TV show. I have some of the best technicians in the business already signed up.”

Jahne nodded, although she didn’t have a clue what a sneak or a smear was.

“What kind of makeup do you wear?”

She blinked, paused. Why? Did she have a visible scar? Was there something he, a great director, saw on her face that others didn’t? “Just some regular base. Lancôme, I think. And blusher…”

“Any objection to signing an exclusive with a makeup company to only wear theirs?”

“No.” She tried not to show even a flicker of her relief.

“Hey, Dino,” Marty said. “How are we looking?”

“Looking good, boss,” Dino told him.

Jahne flashed the camera another smile. “So what next?” she asked.

Marty handed her a dozen unbound pages. “How about reading this? The part of Cara.”

She picked up the script. A young girl talking to another one about her ex-boyfriend, about her parents, about society, about life. Kind of cornball, but sweet. Over it all, that veneer of toughness that a kid needs to protect herself from being thought a kid.

She looked up. “Okay. Who reads with me?”

“I’ll feed you the cues off camera,” Marty said.

So she began. She pitched her voice a little higher than usual, to get the youth, but it made her tough act so much more poignant. And she took the monologue about her father really fast—almost gabbled it—as if she had to say it aloud but didn’t want it heard. She ended the scene—where she asks, “Do you know what I mean?”—with a whisper and a look right into the camera. She knew it was a good reading. A real good reading.