Unsoul'd (25 page)

I could not repair what I'd done to Manda, but I could avoid doing the same a second time. Gym Girl and I existed in some sort of relationship limbo, but even souls trapped in limbo deserve some sort of reprieve. I'd called her to apologize for being out of touch ("the tour" made for a convenient excuse) and explained that I was moving to L.A. immediately ("the movie" made for another).

"It's not like we were in a relationship. You don't owe me any explanations," she'd said, "but I appreciate it. You're fun, Randy."

"Thanks. So are you."

"Next time you're in New York, let me know."

"Of course." I wouldn't.

One bug trap, one cordial farewell with an invitation to return. I was fifty-fifty on my farewells to New York sex partners.

And then the third happened.

My cell rang as I said goodbye to the couple who'd bought my TV. (Compared to the ten TVs in Kiki's house, my 35-inch LCD screen looked like an old laptop.) Caller ID told me it was Fi.

"Hi, Fi."

"So," she said, in a forced cheerful tone that I recognized all too well from our time together. It was her "I am royally and justifiably pissed at you, but I'm taking the high road and pretending not to be, but I won't pretend for long" voice.

Yes, I got that all from a single syllable.

"What can I do for you, Fi?"

"Moving day, hmm?"

"You've talked to Kiki."

"You could say that. Yeah."

Fi liked to pretend to the world that she was above such emotions as jealousy, outrage, or offense, but in truth they consumed her, a fact exposed only to those close to her, as I had once been. Many times I had witnessed her exploding into a furious welter of recriminations, accusations, and profanities at some slight, real or imagined. In private. Always in private.

She was outraged now. My first reaction was fear.

My second was amusement. The second stuck. I had nothing to fear from Fi any more. We'd been an ex-couple by now longer than we'd ever been a couple.

"Is this..." She hesitated, her better nature (or perhaps just her more cautious, self-preservative nature) struggling mightily to rein her in. And losing. "Is this some way of getting back at me?" she demanded.

"What?" I considered putting my phone on
mute
so that I could laugh without pissing her off further.

"Are you doing this to fuck me over?"

"That's right, Fi. I decided to get revenge on you and the easiest way to do that was to seduce one of the biggest movie stars in the world."

"Don't be a dick."

"Don't be a bitch."

"I'm just... I'm just warning you, Randall."

"Warning me? Of what?"

"Just--"

"Warning me of what? Not to be with someone who likes being with me? Not to sleep with someone who likes sleeping with me? I didn't fucking roofie her or anything, Fi. I'm not blackmailing her. This was actually her idea, me moving in."

"Just know what you're getting into. And realize that this is very not cool."

"It's actually exceptionally cool."

"Fuck you, Randall."

I couldn't resist: "Been there, done that."

"You are such a fucking child." She hung up.

I finished packing. By the time I was done, I figured it was rise-and-shine time on the West Coast, even for movie stars. I called Kiki.

"So, you told Fi."

"I had to." She sounded sleepy still. Or hungover. Or maybe still drunk. I wanted to be next to her. Not to
go
to her. To
be
there. Now. Instantly.

"I know. She was pretty pissed."

"Not at me." She giggled. "Sorry."

"Whatever. I don't care." And, astonishingly, I didn't.

"I was fingering myself the whole time I was talking to her."

"You what?"

"It was that fantasy you told me about. I swear, I totally don't swing that way--"

"You told me you had a threesome in high school."

"Everyone does crazy shit in high school. I was in that stupid phase girls go through, where it's like everything your boyfriend wants, you decide you have to do. Trust me: The first blowjob in history was some stupid teenage cavegirl wanting to impress her caveboyfriend."

"So...you don't actually like going down on me?"

"Ugh. Why are you always so
literal
? I'm just saying: I don't swing that way, but ever since you told me about that fantasy, I can't stop thinking about her like that."

"Well, I think I put the kibosh on that a little while ago, so it'll just have to be a fantasy for both of us."

She chuckled and then yawned and then I could almost hear her stretch. I thought of her, languid and warm and soft and extended, exposed in that bed of hers.

Of ours.

"I wish you were here," she said.

"Fast as I can."

Wherein I Hollywood. Again.

My first few weeks in Hollywood raced by with all the haste of an Olympic sprinter with diarrhea. I met new people -- Hollywood people, of course -- and got settled into Kiki's place. She had a balcony that overlooked the hills and that's where I set up my laptop and my notepads, toddling out there every morning to write.

The book was close. I could have finished it quickly, but I was enjoying myself, typing a lazy couple hundred words each day, lingering over the sentences and paragraphs, then heading out with Kiki almost nightly.

Kiki wasn't working at the moment, so her days were mostly sessions with her trainer (an impossibly fit and gorgeous man named Stév -- no second e -- whom Kiki witnessed me regarding jealously and assured me was gay), long conversations with Fi, and even longer discussions with her "people." In addition to her agent/my ex-girlfriend, she also had a manager, a publicist, a personal stylist, a personal shopper, a social media "facilitator," and an assistant (who had a key and came and went as she pleased, as I learned to my dismay one day when I strode naked from the bedroom to the kitchen for a snack). And each of these people had at least one person (in some cases, many more) working under/for them. I couldn't even imagine the complexity of it all -- I'd been annoyed when the simplicity of having just a literary agent had transitioned to a literary agent
and
a movie agent.
 

I once asked her how many people she employed directly. She shrugged. "I'm not sure. I'd have to ask my accountant."

Together, we made the rounds of Hollywood. I met the people who mattered and the people she liked and the people who fell into both categories. At some point, a paparazzo caught us holding hands outside a tiny coffee shop in the Valley and there was my picture on
Extra!
KIKI'S NEW MAN? screamed the crawl, a pun both obvious and annoying.

"Well, it lasted about as long as it could," Kiki said of my comfortable anonymity as her partner. "Welcome to the madhouse."

"Holy shit," said my father when we spoke shortly thereafter. "Do you have any idea how many I've rubbed out thinking of her? Do you?"

Probably close to as many as I had, but I wasn't about to tell
him
that. "I thought talking about my girlfriend was perverted, Dad."

That stymied him for a moment. "You... You're right. I'm sorry. That wasn't right. I'm sorry."

I didn't know how to respond. It was the first time in recent memory my father had copped to being somehow inappropriate, had admitted some infraction of propriety. I settled on "Always nice talking to you, Dad..." and got off the line as quickly as possible.

And then, from Tayvon, an e-mail from somewhere in Afghanistan:
Looks like things are getting complicated. I know you hate complicated. Are you dealing with it? Are you OK?
And:
Are you happy?

Yes.

And I was. I would have been happier with Tayvon not in some Taliban's sniper's sights and with a father capable of having a real conversation, but, yeah, I was happy. I was living not the life I'd always dreamed of living, but somehow a better one, one so amazing and glorious and glamorous that it not only surpassed my fantasies, but also compensated for all the years where I'd not achieved anything remotely close.

I was quite possibly the most famous writer in the world. I was living in an astonishingly beautiful mansion in the Hollywood hills. I was technically broke, but my first royalty check (one which Sam assured me was "almost embarrassingly huge") was right around the corner. I was living with and nightly bedding one of the most desirable women on the planet, and despite the old men's adage "No matter how hot she is, somewhere there's a guy tired of putting up with her shit," Kiki showed no signs of clinginess or craziness.

I wasn't just happy. I was deliriously, idiotically, ineffably happy. Just looking at Kiki as she slept next to me made me grin like a fool.

Was I in love with her? I couldn't say. It didn't seem to matter, though. We never said the word -- never even danced around it -- but it didn't seem to be missing. We were together. We ate together. Slept together. Woke together. For someone who made his living with words, I was blissfully disinterested in using them to define our relationship, and Kiki seemed similarly disinclined.

I slowly adjusted to the pace of Los Angeles. To the casual slowness of it all. To the unstructuredness of it all.

I never did learn how to be a real Angeleno. An East Coast boy by birth and rearing, the confusing myriad of streets and freeways might as well have been the minotaur's labyrinth to me, with no Ariadne to guide my way by string. Couldn't tell the 5 from the 101 if you nailed me to a cross. Still don't know if "the Valley" is north, south, east, or west of LA, but it didn't matter because Kiki always had a car to drive us wherever we needed to go. I learned to accept L.A.'s insane traffic -- when you're not behind the wheel, but rather fooling around with Kiki Newman in the backseat, traffic suddenly doesn't seem such an issue.

I began working with Del MacCarter on the screenplay under an informal agreement between the studio and the production company. The deal was that I would be co-writer on the first draft and that we would "see where things go" from there.

"That means they don't think you know how to write a screenplay," Kiki told me, "but they also don't want to piss you off because you're sort of a big deal."

Malcolm and Sam both confirmed Kiki's assessment.

I'd never been much of a collaborator, and here I would be collaborating on an adaptation of something I had already written. Walking into Del's writing studio that first day, I felt a frisson of panic, certain he would despise me for interfering, equally as certain that I would despise him for chopping and channeling my work.

To my surprise, he greeted me with a cold beer and a warm handshake. "I'm glad you decided to be a part of this, Randall."

"Really?"

"Yeah, totally!" His eyes had a manic, unrestrained enthusiasm to them. "Look, no one knows this book like you do, right? I mean, I've read it like ten times--"

"Jesus, Del. I think that's more times than
I
read it."

He laughed heartily. "But you
wrote
it, man! You lived it." He ushered me to a computer set-up -- a desk in the middle of the room, with chairs facing each other and a laptop between. "I figure I'll sit at the keyboard and do the actual key-pounding. You're the idea guy. Unless you want it the other way."

I had already pounded plenty of keys in pursuit of
Flash/Back
-- I didn't need to pound more.

We settled into our seats. "So, the interesting thing about this story is that you've sort of used a four-act structure. So the first thing I'm working through is how to modify that without losing any of the tension you've incorporated, you know?"

I had no idea what he was talking about. I hadn't employed any structure at all when writing
Flash/Back
; most of my writing was by the seat of my pants.

So Del explained the three-act structure to me. It filtered back to me from Aristotle and college classes. I hadn't thought about it in years.

"This is just how Hollywood works," he said, somewhat apologetically. "I know it probably sounds restrictive or anti-creative, but it actually works. Movies are absorbed differently by the audience, so they have to have a certain rhythm, a certain structure to them."

That first day, little writing got done. We talked Screenwriting 101 and I learned the basics of the craft. I suppose I'd always imagined that writing a movie was just like writing a book (only easier, of course), but in that first day, I learned how distinct and separate the two disciplines were. I learned about the different expectations of each audience, and the hidden rules that guided and governed screenplays.

"It seems like a lot of work," I said, and Del took it as a compliment, not a complaint.

"It is, but it's so worth it when you see your words up on the big screen. You'll see. When the movie hits, it's gonna feel like magic to you."

I didn't tell him that there was already enough magic in my life.

Wherein I See Lacey Again

Sam still hadn't gotten used to the fact that I lived in L.A., not NYC, and his calls usually came at eight in the morning. On the East Coast, he'd be getting ready for the day's big lunch meeting (there was always a big lunch meeting). But on the West Coast, Kiki and I were almost always still asleep, except for those days when Kiki had to do some kind of satellite interview or radio show call-in.