The Comedy Writer (22 page)

“Stop right there,” I said. I took a moment, tried to catch my breath. “Are you telling me you've been in L.A.
this whole time?”

“Of course I have. I told you, dum-dum, all my money was tooken by the rapists.”

“Well, why the hell didn't you buy your ticket when you got to the terminal, which would've precluded the robbers
tooking
it eight hours later?!”

“What?”

“Why didrit you buy your fucking ticket right away?”

“Oh, yeah, right, that's all I need. I buy my ticket in advance, then Greyhound goes belly-up and I'm out eighty bucks.”

I hung up the phone and kept it unplugged for the rest of the day.

At about six I went out for the paper and a couple tacos. I read the
L.A. Times
at home, drank a can of Diet Coke to give me energy, then sat down and started reworking
How I Won Her Back.
One of my favorite scenes was when the protagonist Joe is working at a flea market and meets a guy who shows him how he can get back the woman he loved and tragically lost ten years earlier. The scene accomplished a lot. It was funny the way the guy and Joe clash at first, sad when you realize how much this woman meant to Joe, and it let the audience know exactly what the movie was about (if the title hadn't already filled them in). A common complaint, however, was that people wanted to know more of what the couple was like back when they were together. I thought this idiotic and had resisted making any changes. They'd been in love, madly in love, or obviously Joe wouldn't be going to so much trouble to get her back. What they were like, how they met; hey, this wasn't a miniseries.

Now I started seeing it differently. I thought about
The Natural.
Would audiences have cared as much if it started with Redford already recovering from his gunshot wound? No way. They cared because they'd seen him strike out Babe Ruth at the train depot. They cared because he could've been something great, and it was a tragedy he wasn't. Suddenly I saw how showing the good times would give the audience more to root for, and I knew a way to do it without adding thirty pages. I'd just let them meet, slip in a few
happy scenes leading to their tragic demise, and cut to ten years later. Ten pages, tops.

Following the Northwestern beauty into traffic school, though embarrassing, was funny. With some fine tuning, it could be
really
funny. That's how they'd meet. Joe sees Joan at the store, they make eye contact, the big lunk is smitten and follows her into what he assumes is AA. But this is where art enhances life. When the man with the red beard asks Joe what he's doing there, Joe stands up, takes a deep breath, and says, “Hi. My name is Joe, and I'm an alcoholic.” Everyone in the room laughs at him (including Joan, who's onto his game), and Red Beard says, “That's great, Joe, but this is traffic school.” Better still, Red Beard could say, “Unless you were drinking and driving, Joe, we don't care,” and so on. Joe then slinks out of the room and, just when he's given up all hope of meeting her, Joan comes out and says, “Hey, alky, why don't we get a drink later?” Big smile from Joe, and we cut to them dating.

There was a short knock at my door and Herb Silverman entered.

“I need the fifty bucks.”

I couldn't hide my annoyance.

“Now?”

“Yeah now. And by the way, what the hell were you thinking last night?”

“I had to go home. I was tired.”

“You were tired? We're sitting there with two of the hottest chotch in town,
in the world
, and you're tired?”

“Herb, when I was a senior in college, I felt a little funny going out with freshman girls. I did it, but I felt funny. Now eleven years later I'm going to go out with high school kids?”

“She's not in high school.”

“I know. She dropped out in ninth grade. She'd be a junior.”

“A lot of actresses leave school early.”

“A lot of actresses are stupid. Besides, she's a model.”

“Oh, what are you, Mr. Fucking Intellectual? You only screw Rhodes scholars now? Give me my fucking money.”

His tone was really bugging me, seeing as how technically I didn't owe him anything and in fact
he
owed
me
, but he was working some kind of Ponzi scheme that I'd lamely allowed myself to be sucked into, and so I had to bite my tongue and take it. What happened was this: Herb had borrowed two hundred dollars and a couple weeks had passed without any mention of it. I needed some dough and wanted to remind him he owed me without seeming rude, so I asked if he needed to borrow
any more
money.

He said yes.

I wasn't expecting this and didn't have any money to lend him and I told him so.

“Then why the hell did you … ? Oh, I get it, you wanted to remind me that I owed you money.”

I scoffed.

“Don't worry,” he said, “I remember.”

“So … do you have any of it now?”

“No.”

“Not even half?”

“I just told you I needed to borrow some from you, remember?”

“Come on, Herb, I'm in a pinch.”

“Sorry. I only have enough for my rent.”

“How about fifty?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Don't be a dick.”

“Jesus, Halloran, I wouldn't've borrowed the damn dough if I knew you were gonna go Gotti on me.”

“Just give me fifty. It won't count as payback on the money you owe me.”

“You'll pay
me
back before I pay
you
back?”

“Right. Soon as I get dough. Then you'll still owe me two hundred and you can pay me whenever you get it.”

He thought about this. “Okay. But don't fuck me. You're not gonna deduct it from what I owe you?”

“No.”

“That would be real sleazy, Halloran.”

“Give me the fifty bucks, for Christ sakes.”

So here we were three days later, and he was treating me like a deadbeat, and I was annoyed as hell, but I'd agreed to the terms, so what could I do?”

in his late forties who rarely looked me in the eye, which was okay with me, because at eleven in the morning his eyes hung down like shucked oysters and when they did slide my way, it was in a suspicious, accusing way. His development person, Sonya Abrams, had read
How I Won Her Back
and I assumed she'd liked it, though she didn't speak much, just took notes, nodded occasionally, and twice asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino water. The second time I accepted, but it was just to get her out of the room, which is what I think she wanted, because she never returned.

“So what have you heard about me?” Bowman asked.

His voice was flemmy—a low milk-shaky rattle that came more from an aggressive laziness than an ear, nose, or throat problem.

I paused, searched for the right words. “Well …”

“The truth.”

“I've heard that you're difficult and you're brilliant.”

“Don't bullshit me.”

“I've heard that you're difficult.”

“You retracting the brilliant' part?”

“I've seen your movies. You
are
brilliant.”

“You thought
Coma Cop
was brilliant?”

This was tough. It was okay. Big star, big director, great special effects, run-of-the-mill story. Brilliant, no. Definitely not brilliant. But it had made a hundred million dollars.

“With a capital B,” I said.

Ted Bowman began to floss his teeth; I fought to hold my gaze.

“So do you know why you're here?”

“Well … Sonya read my script …”

“I got twenty-seven projects in development. Every one of them is an action thriller or buddy ccp movie. I told Sonya to find me a comedy writer who could write a fucking funny love story. She found you.”

“Great.”

“Along with about thirty other morons. See, I don't want just another fucking romantic comedy. I want a love story with a twist.”

“Okay …”

“You follow me?”

“I think so.”

“A major twist. I want to blow people's minds, turn love upside
down, show them what it's really like out there in the nineties— from a guy's point of view.”

“Uh-huh.” I scribbled into my notebook. “Love in nineties,” I said as I wrote. “Guy's POV.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Are you in love right now?”

“Um … yeah, I guess.”

“What do you mean, guess?”

“It's a little complicated …”

“You in love with a dude?”

“No, no. I'm in love, but I'm not going out with her. It's … over.”

“Then you must know better than most how fucked up it is to be in love now?”

“It's hell,” I said.

“Worse.”

“Much
worse.”

“Yet it's all anyone wants. Well, I want to take love and show it for what it really is.”

What love really is
, I wrote.

“And that is … it's
death”

“Huh,” I said, and I kept scribbling, but it was just gibberish.

Ted Bowman read something that had printed out on the box on his desk. He grabbed the phone and said, “Hey, shitball, I'm busy right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell him to get fucked.” He managed a laugh. “It's Greek or nothing. Call you from the car.”

After he hung up, he stood and looked out the window.

“Love is death,” he repeated.

Love is death
, I wrote.

“Are you with me?”

“Absolutely with you. I know exactly what you're talking about.”

“And that is?”

“It's a nightmare out there, and they never tell it that way. They always sugarcoat it, make it the way you'd like it to be. But you want a love story that tells the truth, shows what love is really like today— from a guy's perspective.”

“Exactly.”

“Great.”

“And I want the guy to be a serial killer.”

cars seem to come out of the pavement like worms. It was barely more than a mist, but it was unusual to get anything this time of year in Southern California, and on my way to work everyone was driving like they were in two feet of snow. I hit my horn a couple times, took a shortcut, sped around a scrum of cars. Just as I got back into the lane, my car did a three-sixty and I thought I was a dead man, but somehow I managed to miss everything and ended up going in the right direction, only now I slowed down and drove as if I were in two feet of snow.

Bowman had kept me waiting for our meeting and the rain set me back further, so I was late for my lunch shift. The other employees gave me the cold shoulder for not helping with the prep work, which I didn't blame them for. I told them my car had broken down, which was stupid, but they were mostly teenagers and this was easier for them to swallow than the truth about the loser grillman getting tied up at the studio.

That was something I was trying to cut down on, though. Lying.

Despite Levine's speech, I wasn't convinced that lying was necessary to break into the biz, and it certainly had no place in everyday life. But I had developed a bad habit of complicating my life with stupid, unnecessary lies. Nothing big, like I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, just stupid ones, like when I told the
L.A. Times
woman that I didn't know anybody in town. Well, actually, I did know a few people: Silverman and Colleen and Tiff. It had started back in Boston, right around the time Amanda was kicking my ass, probably out of some insecurity. Maybe I'd just been a salesman too long. If I had sex three times, I'd tell my friends it was four. If I got two hits in a softball game, it became three. If I got up at ten o'clock, it'd be
a quarter to ten.
Like it mattered. Why I did it I didn't know, but I was trying to stop.

As soon as she walked in, I rushed to the counter and elbowed a zitball named Gerald out of the way. She was unbelievable. Not just beautiful and big-titted and all that.
Mature. Elegant.
Grace Kelly-esque. Way out of my league. She was with a handsome older couple who turned out to be her parents. The folks were very kind to me right off the bat, and I thought I detected a vibe from her. I cracked a joke, made eye contact, shared a generational smile. I took the order, then forced the conversation until I found something we had in common: Though the family was from Illinois, she worked in Boston as a flight attendant for American Airlines. The parents were returning from a business trip in the Far East, she had a stopover in L.A. They only had a few hours together. Anyone with a speck of sense would've let it go at that.