The Comedy Writer (19 page)

Discipline was key. When the urge to meet women struck, I'd drop fifty cents on a porno newspaper and put an end to that. I'd never had much guilt about masturbating, but now I actually derived a degree of pride from it. I knew it was the right thing to do and spanking it became as vital to my routine as writing and working out.

I tried calling Jenna Weingarten a few times, with no response. A couple afternoons I had the notion to drive to the
Times
building to see her in person, but I chickened out.

One day I decided that I wasn't well read, so I went to the library, found three famous relatively short books, and spent the weekend reading them. On Friday I drank several cups of coffee and stayed up all night fighting my way through
Rabbit, Run.
I kept a dictionary beside me and looked up every unknown word and wrote the definitions on a piece of paper.
Rabbit
was jammed with the densest prose I'd ever seen and I felt proud and sophisticated, not simply for reading it but for loving it. Saturday when I awakened I got in the tub and stayed there until the water was as gray and cold as a November Boston sky and I'd hit the century mark of
The Great Gatsby.
A few hours after my supper shift, I was so flushed from having read two books in two days that I dove right into
Lolita
and got about seventy-five pages under my belt before nodding out at dawn. “My mother died in a freak accident. (Picnic, lightning.)” God, I loved that. I continued reading without ever getting out of bed on Sunday and by 9 P.M. I was finished and my brain so addicted to the written word that I ran out to Book Soup to seek out one more thin celebrated novel.

Walking down Sunset, I approached a man who appeared to have his arms behind his back, but upon closer inspection had no arms at all. When I realized this, I glanced away, but it was too late,
he'd nailed me—it was midgetville all over again—and I was pissed for not knowing how to act around people who were different. He was probably immune to the gawks by now, that's how I tried to rationalize it, and then I said the hell with it, I wasn't going to let this hang over me, so I spun around and caught up to him.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?” He didn't answer, but stopped walking, so I said, “I just moved here and I can't find a decent fucking bookstore. How's Book Soup?”

The “fuck” was for effect; I wasn't going to treat him with kid gloves, just because he didn't have arms. Again he didn't answer and I repeated the question, this time without the “fuck,” and finally he said, “Book Soup is a marvelous bookstore. It's very good.”

I nodded and he moved on and it hadn't gone the way I wanted, so I gave chase. “Hey!” I said. I ran past him and he was a little nervous now (what with his limited defenses), so I quickly said, “Look, like I said, I just moved here and, uh, someone gave me a couple tickets to the Dodgers, and I don't really know anyone and, I don't know, you want to go?”

“Dodgers?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“How about the Angels? Maybe we'll catch Jim Abbott.”

I honestly didn't make the connection until I got to “Jim Ab …”By then it was too late. I had just asked one of the two armless guys in L.A. if he wanted to watch the other one pitch. “Or, uh, or, uh, someone … whoever.”

By then he was off again, with a brisker pace, and I knew that was that, so I just blocked the whole thing out and continued on to Book Soup.

The novel I purchased was
The End of the Road
by John Barth,
which wasn't famous but was short and was recommended by the pretty cashier. I didn't put it down until I finished at 6 A.M., at which point I calculated that I'd read approximately forty percent of the books in my lifetime during that one exhilarating weekend.

I bought a smoked turkey and coleslaw sandwich and ate it between the baby World Trade Center towers that are the crown jewels of Century City. The concrete was loaded with suits. Lawyers, stockbrokers, and entertainment execs, I presumed. The place, this miniature metropolis, was amazingly clean—it looked more like a movie set than a city. Somebody's assistant, a fresh young beauty straight out of Central Casting, sat down beside me and started eating her lunch. Suddenly I felt good about being single and unattached, able to lust after this woman without guilt. It gave me a happy feeling to know that anything could happen, the possibilities were boundless, we could fall in love, or she could just blow me, and then I realized nothing was going to happen unless I did something fast. Surely one of her coworkers was on the way, or some scoundrel would zoom in and lay on his slimy moves. But how to break the ice? Everything seemed obvious, awkward. I saw another young man approaching, white deli bag in tow, ostensibly looking for someplace to sit, clearly up to no good.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do I have something in my eye?” When she looked up from her salad, I was pulling on my eyelid, my left eye crossed, revealing the bulbous white of the back of my eyeball, along with the pink tint coming from the inside of my skull. When she didn't answer, I blinked a few times.

“Is there a lash or something in there?” I asked.

Finally she stood and examined me.

“No,” she said, “I don't see anything in your eye … but there's something in your teeth.”

I sent a spritz jetting through them and felt the dislodged leaf with my tongue.

“Thanks.”

After a minute of uninspired small talk, I said I was late for a meeting, and then, unjustifiably buoyed by her forced smile, turned back and asked for her number. She looked as if I were asking her to join the Manson Family. I finally managed to wangle her work number out of her, but this I quickly forgot, as I knew she had no interest in ever hearing my voice again, and she wasn't so hot to begin with.

I was in an elevator going down to get my car when the man beside me spoke.

“Keds?”

When I looked over, I couldn't believe it.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Are those Keds?”

Sometimes when you see famous people in person, they look completely different. Robert Redford didn't. He looked just like Robert Redford, and he was gesturing toward my sneakers.

“Uh, no. Cons.”

He smiled at them. “When I was a kid, I used to love those.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

There were a million things I wanted to say, but I reminded myself not to be a “fan” and kept my mouth shut. The elevator doors opened. Sundance and I headed into the parking lot.

“So you a writer or an actor?”

“Writer,” I said.

“What's the script?”

I almost spit up a laugh. This was getting ridiculous, he was asking me about my script.

“It's called
How I Won Her Back”

“Good title.”

Suddenly a rush of adrenaline. What an opportunity! I should ask him to read it, he'd be perfect for the lead. He was a little older than I'd envisioned, but it could be rewritten.

Then I saw what a fuckhead I was being. Every scumball who met him probably felt the exact same things.
What an opportunity! What could he do for me? How could I have a piece of him?
It was a slimy sensation. He was being a regular Joe, I shouldn't ruin it for him. If everyone he talked to hit him up for favors, he'd never talk to anyone. He'd turn into Howard Hughes or Michael Jackson. He'd be a freak.

“Will you take a look at my script?”

It was insidious, this power he possessed, the ability to green-light movies. This was the corrupting aspect of Hollywood. I was experiencing it firsthand, the chipping away of my soul.

“Please read it,” I said. “It's really good.”

“Why don't you submit it to Sundance?” Redford said. “We have a young writers' contest every year. If it's good, you may win.”

He was adroit at deflecting assholes like me. A punch in the face wouldn't have gotten his point across better.

“If you write honestly,” he said, “then you're a good writer and you'll succeed.”

I thought about the
L.A. Times
magazine piece. Honest it wasn't. Honest would have complicated it. Honest would have announced to the world that I was a coward, not a hero. I asked him
how the film festival had gone that year. This was obviously something he liked talking about because he stopped in his tracks and told me about it for forty-five minutes. Occasionally someone would walk by and gawk, and every ten minutes I had to fight back a new urge to force my script on him. But we stood there and chatted about his film festival and institute, and when I ran out of questions, we shook hands and he wished me the best, and I drove out of there thinking I'd just met one of the greatest guys in the world.

The Greater Los Angeles Big Brothers Association and asked what I had to do to get involved. They sent me an application several pages long, which I fastidiously filled out and promptly returned. A week later I got a phone call saying I'd been approved for a preliminary interview. When I questioned the “preliminary” part, a man sternly explained that the screening process would involve several detailed interviews, as well as a psychological evaluation, and could take up to six months. This was a disappointment, as I'd envisioned myself playing catch with the little tyke out in Will Rogers State Park any day now, but given the state of the world and the man's tone, I couldn't argue.

On the morning of my first interview, I put on my salesman suit and left early to drive to Big Brothers. Unfortunately, the offices were downtown and what normally would be a twenty-minute drive took over an hour and I showed up fifteen minutes late. The middle-aged woman who interviewed me was very tall, with brittle yellow hair. Despite my tardiness, she was cordial, unlike the man on the phone who'd made me feel as if I were calling from NAMBLA. She inquired about my personal life, my family, the girlfriend I'd referred
to in my application, but I knew I couldn't tell her the truth, that I had no one, it was pathetic, not to mention the red flag it would raise. I didn't care to talk about Amanda, though, she was still a sore subject, so I went on and on about the former figure-skating champion I was dating—living with actually. I thought it kind of ironic that psycho girl was servicing me in some way— karma strikes again—and of course this thought reversed my karma when a moment later Margo Jones was demanding a name and I saw her write down
Colleen Driscoll
and she asked when was the best time she could interview this girlfriend of mine on the phone.

So the Big Brothers were history and on the way home I started not to care. I guess I could've coached Tiffany into playing the Colleen Driscoll role for a half hour, but even then I was looking at a half year before I could hook up with my kid. The hell with the Big Brothers, I decided to take a crack at the Best Buddies program instead. They were newer, probably not as bogged down with bureaucracy.

At a red light I saw a guy about my age crossing the street with his three kids. Suddenly it occurred to me:
Why didn't I have kids?
Forget the fact that I wasn't married or attached in any way, but why hadn't I ever gotten anybody pregnant? Most of my friends growing up had, at one time or another. I'd been with enough girls in those pre-AIDS days when precautions were seldom taken. I used to think I was just lucky, but now I wondered. Could I be shooting blanks?

I stopped at a phone booth, called Dr. Hoffman, asked him to recommend a urologist.

“Why?” he asked.

“Piss-stinger.”

“What?”

“It stings when I piss.”

This was to get on my old Ernesto's insurance plan. Twenty minutes later I was sitting in one of Cedars Sinai's black medical towers talking to Dr. Gerald Stein. He was kind to take me without an appointment, I said, and I bullshitted him a little about the alleged painful urination before matter-of-factly inquiring, since I was there, how would I go about getting a sperm count done? Well, nothing in life is free, and even though the insurance company would indeed cover my visit, I couldn't wangle my way out of Dr. Stein's office without first having him plunge the world's huskiest finger up my keister. He massaged my startled prostate until a dew-drop of cum dripped from my screaming urethra onto a slab of glass. I did, however, leave there with a sperm count instruction sheet and a small plastic cup, as well as a tremendous piss-stinger, for real this time.