The Comedy Writer (29 page)

Several throbbing adrenaline rushes now as I drove through neighborhoods that would shake many a faith. I got lost, was grateful for my invisible little Arrow, finally found a shelter wedged into a strip mall. I parked in front of the door—illegally—and asked to see her. Doheny. While I waited, I kept glancing outside. A few women came in and out, some asking for coupons, others just staring up at the TV. A faint pharmaceutical smell and the palpable chasm between staff and resident gave me a whiff of an insane asylum. It wasn't that, though, which in a way made it worse. This wasn't a “shelter” in the sense of someone's sheltering arms; more like a lean-to in a blizzard.

When she appeared, I was surprised—she was clean and looked rested. I said, “Come on, get your stuff, let's go.”

She was probably very startled, but she behaved as if she'd been expecting me and after matter-of-factly signing her new name on a few forms and grabbing her bags, she was sitting beside me in my car. She lit a butt, looked out the window, fiddled with the radio, all the while acting very blase, as if I picked her up from incredibly depressing places every night about this time. She was clean, like I said, but there was a smell coming from her. Not terrible, not good; something like a grammar school cafeteria.

“I said I'd let you stay with me until you got your shit together, and that's what we're gonna do.”

She hung her arm out the window, I tapped on the steering wheel. I think neither of us could believe the other was beside them.

“Ain't you gonna hate having a roommate?”

“I'm not having a roommate, I'm having a guest. Like I said, it's just until you get your shit together.”

“What about your precious personal life?”

“I don't have a personal life.”

“Fucking A.”

Not a clue what she meant.

“And what about the fridge? Can I go in there now?”

“I never said you couldn't use the refrigerator. I just asked that you not touch my notebooks. It's important stuff, and it's also personal.”

“Okay,” she said. Then, surprisingly, “Thanks.”

“Anyway,” I said, “it won't be that bad with two of us. There's just a few things I'll have to give up.”

“Like?”

“Well, like walking around the apartment wearing a bra with a peacock feather up my ass.”

She smirked at this.

“That doesn't make me gay, you know.”

“Of course not,” she said. “It just means you're a cross-dresser.”

“Right. And a bird lover.”

I smiled at her and she blushed.

“Well, this is very noble of you, Henry. Very noble.” She tossed her butt out the window. “Maybe you're not such a fark after all.”

my eighty-year-old Irish grandfather came over for the Sunday afternoon dinner, as he always did, and he got smashed, as he often did, and when he started filling the air with Irish songs, my father said, “Get the hell out of here, Johnny, you're stinkin' drunk.” This triggered a minor melee between my parents—not that my mother worried about the old guy weaving his way home. (This was another time, when dogs ran freely
through neighborhoods and people burned trash in backyard barrels and kids rode bikes without helmets and no one thought twice about drinking and driving.) What pissed Ma off was that her father had been called a drunk in front of his grandchildren. Grandpa wasn't a drunk, I knew that. He was a landscaper who owned a dump truck loaded with hand mowers and grass clippings and every kind of rake and gardening tool conceivable. He was built like a man half his age and was the hardest worker I ever saw. But the fact was on Sundays he drank, and my father wasn't against tipping a few with him, right up until the jigs would start and my old man got surly and he'd tell the old guy to screw.

On this particular Sunday, my grandfather had just staggered out and my parents were quarreling and us kids were bickering about something, too, but this all stopped when we saw the dump truck blow past the backyard window and we heard the crash. When we got outside, the truck was bent around a large oak, its rear wheels chugging full-speed ahead, blowing a pile of black and orange dirt onto the yard. My sloshed and bloodied grandfather was sitting contentedly in the driver's seat, and when he looked to his left, he was dumbfounded to see the whole family peeking in the side window as he rumbled down some highway in his head.

Sometimes you can run head-on into an immovable object and not know it, and I guess that's one reason I went back to find Colleen. What was I supposed to do? I'd received a sign from God, hadn't I? How many people get that? And the thing that tore me up was that I couldn't even tell this messenger from above (Gus) the truth. To hell with the Big Brothers, I was going right to the source of my guilt: the dead woman's sister. So she was back, and it was my choice, and I was going to do everything in my power to help her get on her feet again. It wasn't a suicide mission—not consciously; I
believed that, with a little organization and direction, I really
could
help her out.

That first night I felt like the guy who dumps his beautiful mistress for the hag of a wife and the bratty little shits. Noble. And depressed. Doheny's mood didn't cheer me up any as we shared a beer by the pool.

“My life sucks,” she said.

“You're just in a slump.”

“No, it sucks. It always has sucked.”

“It'll get better. You just have to keep plugging.”

“Why bother?”

“Colleen, you've got to understand something—”

“Doheny.”

“Life is like a marathon race, Doheny. It's tough starting out, and then you get in a groove and things go okay for a while and you're moving along fairly effortlessly, and then you hit a wall and you feel like quitting, but that's when you've got to suck it up and plow ahead, and eventually you break through and it gets easy again.”

“And then you get to the end and what?”

“They put a wreath on your head, I don't know.”

“Why does it have to be so hard?”

“I don't know.”

“And why is mine always the hardest?”

“It's not the hardest,” I said. “It just seems that way. I promise you, when it comes to personal hardship, I can hold my own with the best of them.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Trust me.”

“Okay,” she said, “try this on for size. When I was six, I saw my
best friend get hit by a car and thrown a hundred feet into the air. She died.
After
being in a coma for eight months. From the time I was nine until I was thirteen my stepdad raped me a couple times a week. When I was ten, my only brother died in a motorcycle accident. On my birthday. After that we never celebrated my birthday no more. When my mother found out her husband was humping me, she blamed
me.
When I was fourteen—”

“All right, you win.”

“You see?”

“You win, you win.”

Doheny lit a cigarette. “Fve had it bad.”

“YouVe had it worse than me.”

“Thank you.”

I touched her shoulder. I thought she was going to cry, but she'd experienced a minor victory—her life was worse than mine— and she managed a small empty laugh. “Fuck,” she said.

We walked up the street for a six-pack and she said she didn't feel that the acting thing was going to work but didn't know what else to do. I told her she should do the thing she loved the most, whatever that was, but she said she didn't love anything.

“That's not true,” I said. “Think about it. If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?”

“I don't know. Party.”

“Something where you could get paid. Would you like to be a chef? A costume designer? Work with old people? You like skating, maybe you could get a job back home at a rink. Whatever the answer, whatever the thing is that you'd like to do most in this world, that's what you should do.”

“No matter what it is?”

“No matter what. Because if you really,
really
want something badly enough, you can't help but be good at it.”

4'I'd like to be a doctor.”

“Think of something else.”

“What's the matter with a doctor? You know, like at a hospital.”

“You can't be a doctor. It's out of the question.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for starters, you need to be able to read.”

She slapped my arm.
“I can read.”

“You'd also need a high school diploma. Look, if you like medicine so much, why don't you get a job in a vet's office? You could start by clipping and bathing the dogs and work your way up to … well, clipping and bathing dogs seems like fun.”

“Yeah, right. I'm going to work at a place where they put animals to sleep. No thank you. If I'm gonna go into medicine, I'm gonna help
save
lives.”

“Okay, think of something else. Something within reason. Something where hard work and ambition and street smarts are enough.”

And that's how Doheny decided to become a writer. Of course I tried to discourage her. I told her it was boring, solitary, odds are it wouldn't work out, and even if it did, she probably wouldn't ever make much money. I told her the act itself involved tapping into the wrong side of one's brain: the right side, the creative side, the lobe that housed depression and fear and anxiety and many other monsters. I told her if she didn't ache to do it, then don't. Leave that door shut, she'd be a happier person for it. She had very nice hair; had she considered hairdressing school? But no, writing was suddenly
the only thing she ever really wanted to do—with the exception of skating, acting, and internal medicine—and, besides, it was easy to get started. She didn't need a degree, she didn't need a license, all she needed was a pen and pad. She could start the next day and officially be a writer. Just like me.

Seinfeld had passed. It felt like: “The tumor is malignant.” Crushing. I knew I'd connected with Larry David in some way, and the other Larry had come around, too. It must have been Seinfeld; I never did get a good vibe from him. Was it the Red Sox/Mets thing? Nah, they'd won, what did he care if I was still a Sox fan? A weak moment: He didn't think I could write for his show because I wasn't Jewish. I quickly dismissed this as paranoid and pathetic. The Herb Silverman syndrome. Sure, there were a lot of Jewish people working for the show, but that's because Jews are funny. Who were they going to hire, a bunch of Swedes? Still, the rejection hurt. “What about the virgin story?” I asked. I was certain they'd liked the virgin story. “Larry did like it,” Levine said, “but it wasn't enough.” On top of that, the only other meeting I had that week had been canceled.

All the irons were out of the fire and cooling fast. Nothing was happening behind the scenes. I felt Levine's confidence flickering. Despite his upbeat tone, he wasn't returning my calls as fast. This frightened and angered me. But the bottom line was, Levine had other clients to deal with, clients who brought in the ten percent. His sun didn't rise and set depending on whether Henry Halloran got a job.

“Would you lose respect for me if I figured out a way to work for Ted Bowman?”

“No,” Levine said, “I'd gain it.”

“Get me in there if you can. Tell him I've got a great idea for his psycho killer love story.”

“I don't know, Henry …”

“Let me just play this out.”

“It's your call.”

“I take full responsibility. What do I have to lose?”

“You sure about this?”

“I'm sure. I have a plan.”

“Let me hear it.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to hear it.”

“Bullshit. You've probably got three people waiting on the line right now, and if I do tell you you won't listen anyway.”

“Henry …”

“Jesus, Levine. just set it up. If worse comes to worst, I'll pitch him one of my own ideas. Just get me the fuck in there.”

Despite everything, I was convinced I'd made an impression on Larry David, and I could still see myself working over there if that prick Seinfeld could be won over. So I took a few days before working on my Bowman pitch and dashed off a
Seinfeld
spec script. Meanwhile, Doheny was embarking on her own book, tentatively entitled
The Daughter My Mother Hated.
I had given her my Syd Field screenwriting manual, but she said she didn't want to write movies, they were for hacks, she wanted to be a real writer and write books. She also blew off
Strunk and White
and jumped right
into the fire with a new Bic pen and a fresh Mead composition notebook. When a half hour passed and she was still staring at a blank page, she said, “I quit. That's it. This is worse than fucking homework.”