The Comedy Writer (3 page)

“I considered dropping one of the 's,” she said. “That way Pittman would still be pronounced the same, except there'd only be one
t.>

“Must be tempting.”

“Not really. I like the way it looks with two
t's.
Sort of like Pittsburgh. Where you from?”

“Rhode Island.”

“Oh, I love New York.” (Despite the pageant victory and big fake jugs, it turned out she wasn't that bright.)

“So, what do you do?” I asked.

“I'm a mattress.”

“A what?”

“Model, actress, waitress.”

She quickly rattled off a list of TV shows and movies she was up for or had had bit parts in. (Sometime later I would view her “reel”—a compendium of performances ranging from the big-titted beach bunny on
Married with Children
to the big-titted beach bunny on
Charles in Charge
, along with a few big-titted beach bunny B-movie roles.)

As Tiffany lowered a silky black dress over her head, I watched the material cling to and then slip over her hips. I had never been with a hooker and, to my knowledge, she wasn't one, but all I could think was wouldn't it be nice if she were, and AIDS didn't exist, and I could afford to fuck her until my prostate cramped up?

Tiffany said I should use the phone now, so she could leave for work. I didn't really have anyone to call, so I rung up my brother Bill collect in Providence and informed him I'd arrived alive. I lied and told him I'd set up interviews with several of the big shipping
companies in Long Beach. When he asked for my number, I said I was using the phone belonging to the woman across the hall. Tiffany gave me a playful slap on the arm and said,
“Girl.
Women are old.”

my first call was to the
Los
Angeles Times.
I'd jotted down a list of writers in that morning's paper and kept dialing until I reached one. The man I got had written a story about a young girl who'd ratted her parents out for drugs and now was being shuffled through the foster care program. I told him about the woman who'd killed herself, how the cops hadn't done shit, that he should write an article. The man told me to write a letter to the editor, maybe they'd publish it. When I explained that I couldn't possibly capture the horror of the story in a letter, he suggested I write an article myself, care of the
L.A. Times Magazine.
Said it sounded like something they might use in their Private Lives section.

I was having a hard enough time writing screenplays and wasn't thrilled about spending time on a story I had a hunch would never get published, but I kept seeing her gray face, so that night I leaned against the open fridge and fought my way through a seven-page, double-spaced story in a detached style that I felt was “journalistic.” By 3 A.M. I was almost done and was starting to shake a little. I was starved, but the story had me a little freaked; death was in the air, and I didn't feel like heading out into the night. I found a box of Triscuits that the previous tenant had left in the cupboard and ate them while I read over my story. I had several facts to check— names of streets, neighborhoods, trees, etc.—but otherwise it was pretty much done, and I was pleased. I'd gotten a little cute with
some descriptions, but I'd refrained from pointing fingers or editorializing about the police; I told it the way it happened. For the most part. The point of the story was that the system had broken down and really had nothing to do with the crazy bullshit between me and the woman anyway. So I felt okay about it. I did keep the part about her saying it was my fault, whatever the hell that meant.

Suddenly I felt a tickle on my neck. An ant. I killed it and felt a couple more on my cheek. Then a few on my hand. Then in my nose. I looked inside the box of crackers and saw a vibrating mass of black. I jumped up, spitting and slapping at myself, ripping my clothes off as I ran into the bathroom.

After I finished flossing out ants, I worked until 4 A.M. When I was done, I was ecstatic and wanted to call someone, but I couldn't call Amanda, so I called my mother. She was just getting up back East and we talked for a few minutes. I told her I loved her, and this left her a little concerned, but I felt good and when I went to bed, I slept okay.

so the next day I shaved, showered, clipped my nails and nose hairs, and went looking for a job. I considered wearing a tie but thought it too “Eastern” and settled on just a sportcoat. I jerked through the unsynchronized traffic lights of Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, bumper to bumper, past the abandoned shopping carts and the tanned, thin-nosed ladies in Mercedeses and Rollses with the BORN TO SHOP stickers. I wondered what it was that these people did that everyone could have a nice car. The women drivers all seemed to be fluffing their blonde hair or
checking their faces in the mirror; the men were dark, Middle Eastern probably, and clean-cut, with neat, shiny haircuts and Euro suits. I started getting a funny feeling in my throat, a narrowing sensation, and I decided to head to the beach and work my way back.

I kept the windows up and the roof flap buttoned, careful not to let my hair blow all over the place. Recently something had been going on up there. I wasn't exactly balding, but I was having a harder time getting it together every morning. Either my hairline had snuck up half an inch, or my face had dropped. The sparkle of youth was beginning to dull into middle age, and I knew I looked better in a baseball cap.

I saw all the Carole King-looking housewives on the Westside towing their kids around in four-wheel drives. I applied at a couple restaurants in Santa Monica, then filled out a few applications in Brentwood. After a quick stop in Westwood, I made a sweep of Restaurant Row on La Cienega Boulevard, then headed farther east toward the Musso and Frank Grill and a few other old-time Hollywood haunts. On Santa Monica Boulevard I drove past a theater marquee offering GlRL SCOUT Sluts. Underneath, in smaller print, was FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY. Everywhere I looked there were bus stop benches advertising mortuaries. Leaning against one was a shirtless guy carrying a backpack and wearing red biker shorts that showed off a hard-on the size of a Little League bat. I was trying to gauge if it was for real when he noticed me looking and waved.

I drove past a playground where a bunch of guys were playing hoop and I felt a pang. I loved hoop, but I couldn't play anymore. A month before Fd left Boston Fd been in a pickup game at the
Charlestown Y when my heart freaked out. I collapsed to the court and my friends rushed me to the hospital. By the time we arrived, my ticker was beating normally again and I was all tied up in knots from hyperventilating. The doctor said I was okay, just low on potassium, but I knew differently. I'd felt the thing go crazy.

Now I was starting to shake again with the blood sugar. I searched for a place to eat. Fatburger didn't sound too appetizing, and Carl's Junior grammatically disturbed me, sort of like Howard's Johnson. I stopped at a shack called Oki Dog for a dollar-and-ninety-five-cent slab of concrete. The Oki Dog was a frankfurter with pastrami, cheese, and chili, wrapped in a soft taco. It weighed about two pounds and I knew it was horrible for me, but it tasted good and would soak up the hunger for several hours.

I sat on a picnic bench and ate next to a bunch of runaways. I was struggling with a mound of french fries that were chewier than a box of Good & Plenty when a guy sat down across from me.

“People call me Forehead,” he said, “on account of the fact I got a big forehead.”

It wasn't that Forehead's head was any bigger than normal, it's just that his eyes were placed where most people have a nose, and everything else was squeezed under it, thus giving his cranium the Martiany appearance. He was fairly young but had an old odor about him, and he wore Hush Puppies without laces. The fuzz on the leather had worn away and congealed into a dark resin. The sole of one shoe was detached and hung sideways, a drunken tongue, revealing a long slate toenail that curled over his big toe like a pony's hoof.

“You look lost,” he said.

“Hm?”

“God is your savior. He will lead you if you follow.”

He had the breath of someone a day out of oral surgery.

“Yeah.”

“I used to be lost,” he said, “and then one day it hit me:
God is good.
And I can prove it irrefutably.”

“I bet.”

“Think about it. He made it so man cannot urinate when he has an erection. Because if He didn't … well, there's a lot of sick dudes out there.”

“Erection” had been my cue to head calmly toward the car, but he trailed behind me to complete his thought and subsequently began mumbling something about mankind evolving not from apes but beans.

“Think about it,” he said. “People even
look
like beans. Some people look like string beans, some people resemble coffee beans; you, for instance, you look like a lima bean.” His breath was starting to sicken me, so I handed him the rest of my Oki Dog and drove off.

I spent a couple more hours browsing the classifieds and cold-calling restaurants. When it became clear that nothing good was going to happen that day, I grabbed my sticks and drove down the sun-bleached pavement of Pico Boulevard, past the fast-food joints, power lines, and kosher meat stores, to the Rancho Park driving range. It felt good to blast a couple buckets. I hadn't swung the clubs since I'd played with Amanda's father, back when there was talk of a wedding. At the time the thought of being married and playing golf every week with the in-laws made me a little sick. Now it seemed like a great life, and working on my swing felt like a positive thing to do. While I took my cuts, I started imagining what our kids would look like. My eyes were brown, but I saw the kids
with big blue ones, like Amanda's. Hers were as blue as they get, her whole family was that way. Maybe they'd slant down a little like mine. They'd all have dark hair, since we both did, and big straight fiUingless teeth like hers. Things like eyes and teeth would definitely carry over from her dominant genes. And they'd be athletes, too. She was a real thoroughbred, Amanda. I put down my nine-iron, picked up a three-wood. I took a baseball cut at the striped ball, slicing it into the screen that protected the golfers on the eighteenth fairway. I realized I was being a little masochistic and I started feeling dizzy again, so I stopped thinking about kids and old girlfriends and tried to concentrate on hitting the damn thing straight.

at the Blue Terrace, I saw Tiffany Pittman's pussy every other day on the average. The way it would happen is I'd be coming or going and I could see her through her peephole, which really wasn't so peepy, as it was actually a two-by-three-inch door and was always left open. Still, to see anything I had to get up pretty close, and I never would have done that, except she always called out when she heard me in the hall. In the beginning I'd stood a few feet back and only caught glimpses of skin here and there as she walked around her apartment, never looking my way, as if she were on a speakerphone. After a while I caught on that it didn't matter to her where I stood, and since it did matter to me, I started moving closer and closer and we'd talk longer and longer and eventually it got to the point where I'd have a two-by-three-inch indentation on my face every time I got in my car or apartment. I had just come home from the driving range that night and I
was lugging my clubs up the stairs, trying not to think about Amanda, and Tiffs peephole was open and there she was again, so I jammed my face into the friendly rectangle.