The Comedy Writer (2 page)

I slept fitfully, got up at seven to the sound of someone rummaging through the trash outside my window. Right away I thought of the Suicide Lady, her empty body cooling in a bag somewhere, and I knew it was true: I definitely could have saved her.

was an art deco motel that had lost its license and been converted into apartments. It was on the Beverly Hills side of Doheny Drive—as opposed to the West Hollywood side, which
people paid a hundred less a month for but was just across the street. I wasn't exactly flying high and Beverly Hills sounded good.

When old Mr. and Mrs. Beaupre showed me the place, I wasn't impressed. Despite the strong winds funneling in heat from the desert, no one was sunbathing on the faded AstroTurf patio and, from the condition of the folding chairs, I guessed no one had in a while. They took me to a small studio, or deluxe efficiency, depending on which Beaupre I listened to. It smelled as if they'd waxed the floors with anchovy paste. There was no air-conditioning, no wallpaper, it looked out over an alley, and the shower had about as much force as Old Man Beaupre's bladder, whose sputtering drip I got to hear while his wife was demonstrating the murphy bed.

“You're nuts if you don't take it,” the chunky Mrs. Beaupre said.

“You're nuts if you do,” her husband added, pulling up his fly.

He was a skinny fuck with cheekbones like hemorrhoids. I got the feeling he knew his time was coming and had no reason to bullshit anyone about anything.

She stabbed at him with her nose. “Flush the goddamn toilet, you slob.”

“The paper says we shouldn't flush except the big stuff. There's a water shortage, case you ain't heard.”

“Then don't flush your own toilet, but Henry here don't want to look at your tinkle.”

“Fuck him.”

“Oh, there you go,” she said. “That's real nice.”

“I think I'm going to check out a couple other places,” I said.

“It has a closet,” Mrs. Beaupre said.

“Who you kidding?” said her husband. “It
is
a closet.”

“Tell you what' Mrs. Beaupre said, 'Til knock fifty bucks a month off the rent if you wallpaper the place yourself.”

“That's not necessary,” I said and I started to walk.

Mrs. Beaupre followed. “You're not gonna do any better around here for seven hundred bucks. Maybe you should look for a scummy place in Venice.”

“I just want to see what's out there.”

Two seconds later I was done looking. She was fiddling with keys at the door across the hall. Six feet tall, vanilla hair, pool-table green eyes, and a sky blue workout suit that served up a mountain range of tanned cleavage garnished with Aunt Jemima-size nipples. I knew L.A. was the boob-job capital, but I never expected anything like this. Huge tits,
huge tits
, a couple of duffel bags. I'm not afraid to admit it—I like big tits.

That night I moved my stuff in, aired the room out, hung my crucifix on the wall, and walked to Carl's Market for a fifth of vodka and a skinless chicken TV dinner, which I ate in about one-tenth the time it took to cook. I didn't have any cutlery, so I kept the plastic knife and fork and washed out the plastic plate, too. It was a hot night and the oven had made the room unbearable, so I cooled myself by leaning against the open refrigerator, using its light to read a book about screenwriting. I read the chapter that explained why every character must have a character flaw. Occasionally a helicopter spotlight would sweep across my window, and I felt vaguely uneasy. I poured a glass of Stoly and drank it outside by the black lagoon.

As the booze tucked my nerves away, I started feeling okay again. No dizziness, no tingling, even the headache had let up. I had
a car, an apartment, and two hundred and thirty-one bucks left. It didn't matter that the chaise I was resting on had only a quarter of its Miami-colored rubber straps or that the moldy diving board was broken in half. The fact was, I was sprawled beside a swimming pool with a cold drink in my hand, the smell of cut grass in my head—and it was still technically winter! The wind was gusting, but the heat made it soft, soothing, not like the slapshot of air that had walloped me each time I'd left my Boston apartment. A huge orange moon floated up behind downtown. Yeah, this was more like the California I'd heard about. The day before seemed less ominous now. I remembered it like a dream, as if it had happened to someone else. How the hell had I ended up on the roof? And where were the cops?

I forced myself to stop thinking about it.

My friends and family all thought I was moving west to further my shipping career. I'd been living in Boston a few years, working for U.S. Lines, selling space on container ships—European Export Division, a particularly hard sell in Boston. Most of the other lines went from south to north and then over to Europe, but U.S. Lines went the other way. When a company put cargo on our ships in Boston, they still had to go all the way down the Eastern seaboard, stopping in New York, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville before finally heading over to England. We were also the most expensive line and our ships were older, slower, more likely to bust a prop, etc., so you had to figure only an idiot would ship with us. That's why they put the Catholic college guys in Boston's European Export Division. The guys from BC and Providence College and Notre Dame and Villanova. The guys who could get cocked and still show up for work the next day. They gave us cars,
big expense accounts, and livers the size of beanbag chairs. We had season tickets to the Celts, Bruins, Sox, and Patsies. They sent us to Cranford, New Jersey, for two days each year to see who could drink the most while a Fran Tarkenton look-alike tried to brainwash us with the “secret weapon.” All I got out of the weekend was a hangover, which the very best salesmen managed to hide.

Order a martini at every business lunch and dinner, they taught us. (The theory being that if you drank like a frat boy, the client would, too.) Take the client to a nice restaurant, someplace big and showy—Biba's maybe, or Jasper's—then a ballgame or a play. Booze between innings, booze at intermission. Try to get the client to bring his boozy wife along and kiss their liquored asses. Then on to Yvonne's for late-night cognacs—the expensive ones. Louis the Fourteenth. The whole bottle if they wanted it. Then when the client was out of his mind, hit him with Fran's secret weapon: “We're the only U.S. flagship sailing out of Boston.”

My boss Ed was a good guy, but he would repeat this mantra with an irrational bravado, and sometimes I would, too. Patriotism, that was my angle. The other shipping lines had names like Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk—fucking foreigners. “Be an American,” I'd say. “Be a goddamn American!” Just five or ten percent of their business was all I was asking. Of course, when it came to money, no one gave a shit about patriotism, and that's when I was supposed to beg.

Right around Christmas 1990, my latest girlfriend, Amanda, and I went into drydock. There's something about a broken heart that makes people become writers. I'd been thinking about screenwriting for a while, during those long drives to the seafood and leather shippers in Maine and New Hampshire, when I bounced stories around in my head. I thought about it every time I saw a movie that made me feel something. Even more when I saw one that didn't. I
thought about it whenever I permitted myself to dream of a better life. Writing seemed like something I could do, something I would enjoy, a job to be proud of, to impress chicks with, but I didn't have the nerve until she was gone and I'd bottomed out and I had nothing to lose.

But I wasn't ready to tell anyone yet. They'd laugh.
Henry Hal-loran a writer?
For God sakes, I hardly even read. The sports section, that was about it. A half dozen short famous books:
The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men
, the novelization of
Grease.
Even those took me a couple weeks. I was a business major in college. Accounting. Partying really. It was great training for a U.S. Lines salesman, but a writer?

One horrible side effect of getting dumped is the constant nagging sensation that you're never in the right place. The right place, of course, would be at Amanda's side, and since we were apart, I wasn't there. This left me feeling left out, isolated, barred from a certain part of the city,
the fun part
, as if I were missing all the action. Even though I was living in Boston, I may as well have been on the other side of the continent, and so I decided to go there, which fit into my screenwriter plans anyway. I turned in the new company car, picked up the old red hatchback at my parents'.

The day I left Boston it had snowed all morning and then began to warm up. As the flakes fattened and exploded into rain, a low fog bloomed over the Back Bay. On the Southeast Expressway, I passed the orange, yellow, and blue gas tank that disguised a Chinese man and Barney Rubble. Behind me, the downtown skyline glowed Oz-like in the gray mist, friendly and familiar, but I knew I had to go. It would have been easier to fly to California, but I don't like to fly and, besides, I didn't want to climb in a wide-body and just
be
somewhere. I needed time to think, to plan my strategy. The trip to L.A. was to be a vacation, time to myself. The farther away I got, the less I'd think about her—that was the idea.

I picked up a couple girls hitching in New York, but they hated my guts. Later it would seem like an omen. I told them I didn't normally pick up more than one hitcher, but they were girls and didn't look dangerous.
“Women,”
one of them corrected. There was a time when this would've fried my ass—I didn't need that crap when I was doing them a favor—but I was trying to be more open-minded. I analyzed the situation; it's not as if she was out to get me, so it must have genuinely bothered her. “Right,” I said. I listened as the uglier but less disagreeable one educated me on the pros and cons of karma. She spoke as if it was as widely accepted as crooked politicians. “Then how come bad things sometimes happen to good people?” I asked. “They're paying for their ancestors' sins” was her reply. Which was convenient.

Everything we did was influenced by karma, she said, or rather,
influenced karma.
When I'd picked them up, that had been good for my karma; when I'd called them “girls,” that had been bad for my karma; when I drove past the psychotic-looking hitchhiker on the Jersey Pike, that somehow got me more bad juju; and when I picked up a hot dog at the Vince Lombardi Rest Area, I'd entered karmic hell. A subsequent stick of Delaware beef jerky pretty much killed the conversation and I dropped them off on the Washington, D.C., Beltway, my karma shot to hell.

The beauty of long drives alone in a car is that it's the best place to think. You can't sit on your couch and figure life out, there are too many distractions—you could be doing the dishes, or returning calls, or watching the news. Sunrise in Oklahoma City became sun-set
in Albuquerque, and the whole time I'd be thinking. I'd spent the first half of the trip analyzing what had gone wrong with Amanda and me. That was a waste. I had a breakthrough, though; at twenty-eight hours I slipped into a kind of transcendental mode whereby I could see the future, instead of just blasts from the past. By Vegas my mission was clear. I'd quickly polish the screenplay I'd kicked out my last six weeks in Boston, and, while that was being shopped around, I'd start another. I had to work fast. I had to make something of myself. I had to do something spectacular. I knew that was the only way she would take me back.

I didn't know how long I'd been by the pool, but the moon was above me now, white and small, framed by ripples of high clouds. The breeze was gone and the palm trees had drooped off to sleep. I could hear trucks far away. It was a confusing new city; it seemed impossible that I would ever get to know it. Despite what I'd been through, I wanted to love L.A.

when my leggy neighbor answered her door in just a bra and panties. It never came that easy for me, I had to work for my breaks. I asked if I could use her phone and she swung open the door. The place was feminine in a “Southern” way—i.e., the canopied bed, pink curlers everywhere, the big flowery bonnets all over the walls—and somewhat pushing it with its hysterically juvenile motif—i.e., the teddy bears, Barney, the stuffed duck Mr. Quackee. Worse, however, was the brazen promotion of an artificial virginity—i.e., all the above and her First Communion picture on the nightstand. Her name was Tiffany Pittman and her
claim to fame was that she'd been a Miss New Mexico sometime in the mid-eighties.