I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU TOOK ME SERIOUSLY

2012-02-06T17:04:00.000-08:00

Eternal Flame - 1988

One of the coolest things about moving to Los Angeles and becoming one of the young up-and-comers in the industry was that if I saw someone in a film or on television and wanted to meet them, there was actually a chance, no matter how slim it may be, that I could. Suddenly, movies were like the halls of my high school or the quiet rooms at my college library – a place to scout chicks. Sure, the majority of the pretty girls I saw in those movies would have zero interest in meeting me, but the simple possibility of perhaps meeting them in person was an incredible thrill for me. Actually, if we’re going to be honest, the vast majority of the girls in the high school halls and college library quiet rooms also would have had zero interest in meeting me, but that’s another story.
In August of 1985, I went with some friends to see Weird Science at the University Village Theatre across from USC. Now, I can’t say I enjoyed the movie all that much. I never really bought into the premise that two nerds could make a woman with their computer. And in the rare moments when I feel I have time to sit down and judge and rank the John Hughes oeuvre, Weird Science never rose to the level of Trains, Planes, and Automobiles or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Home Alone. But then again, I don’t really spend all that much time judging and ranking John Hughes movies.
I’ve heard from others that Hughes wrote most of his scripts in less than a week’s time, some being started and finished in a single day. He was to Hollywood what Minute Rice is to starchy side dishes – and while there are times that a bowl of Minute Rice is absolutely lovely, much like a John Hughes movie, one doesn’t walk away from a bowl of Minute Rice thinking, “Now that belongs on the menu at Spago.”
But, let me step back. I don’t mean to be overly critical here. There was certainly a major redeeming characteristic to Weird Science that makes it, even to this day, a film I enjoy watching. That redeeming quality was the character of Hilly. She was a stuck-up popular girl from the boy’s high school who eventually saw the light and started dating one of the boys. From the first moment I saw her on screen I thought, “I have to meet her.”
Now, let’s take a quick pause here, because obsession with an actress is dangerous ground and not something that is cool in any way, shape, or form… but that’s not what happened to me. I’m really talking much more about something like a high-school crush or infatuation
When the credits rolled, I saw that Hilly had been played by Judie Aronson. I thought “Ohmygod, she’s Jewish too.”
I told the guys I was with, “I’m going to meet her. I can do that now.”
“What would you do if you met her?” my roommate asked.
“Get to know her… Take her to see a movie.”
I honestly don’t think my “movie-star-crush” on Judie had any plan to it. I was just kind of enamored with the possibility that I had a legitimate chance to meet her one day – exactly the same as going to a party at school hoping a cute girl from fifth period would be there so I could talk to her – nothing more, nothing less.
A year passed, and despite all the Hollywood parties I went to, and despite all the Young Artists United events I attended, I hadn’t met Judie. I hadn’t even met anyone who knew Judie.
As an aside, Young Artists United was a wonderful charity that anyone and everyone who was young in Hollywood belonged to in the late 80s. They held meetings in huge screening rooms, like on the then Lorimar lot in Culver City, which would be packed with every young sitcom actor and young agent I had ever heard of. Now, Young Artists United had some tacit rules of coolness, rules that would help me career wise later on. The most important of these tacit rules was that if you were at one of these meetings and happened to be sitting next to someone famous, or waiting at the water fountain behind someone famous, or standing at the urinal next to someone famous, you did not acknowledge who they were. If they spoke to you or you spoke to them, you did so as you would with any other stranger. They were just another young Hollywood person, like you and if you told them who they were, that would degrade you in their eyes, as well as they eyes of anyone else in earshot, instantly changing you from a young Hollywood artist to a nerd from Paramus, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, besides being careful not acknowledge artists, I was also watching lots and lots of MTV, which played a popular and long since forgotten media of the 80s known as the music video. These were short (song-length) videos of performers performing their songs, with a little bit of shtick and fantasy thrown in. People in my generation would actually sit down in front of the television and watch these videos, one after another, for hours on end, sort of the same way today’s generation checks their updates on Facebook. At the time, we could even say we were working, because every music video was directed by another potential David Fincher or Michael Bay, neither of whom were David Fincher or Michael Bay yet, but were simply waiting to be discovered by their music videos.
Now, much like the movies, the music videos on MTV (and on Friday Night Videos, which ran on NBC) were chock-full of women who I now figured I might have the chance to meet. In fact, I’d even met one of the MTV VJs, Martha Quinn, so the likelihood of meeting a performer seemed good. The one I wanted to meet most was the lead singer of The Bangles, Susanna Hoffs. After first seeing her in the poppy video of “Manic Monday,” I found myself falling absolutely and totally in love with her in the follow-up video, “Walk Like An Egyptian.” A little more than half-way through, she looked right then left in a way that was so flirtatious that it still gets talked about among men of my age. Her big brown eyes, her huge teased hair, and her Rickenbacker guitar all made her seem like some kind of prized doll that I wanted to protect. And she was Jewish. She soon became the second member of my “I have to meet her” list.
But if Hollywood is known for anything, it is known for crushing the dreams of young nerdy men from New Jersey like me, and another year and a half passed during which, no matter how many Industry bars I weaseled my way into, no matter how many B-list award shows I got tickets to (The People’s Choice Awards was a blast) and no matter how many major exec’s desks I temped on, I never crossed paths with Judie or Susanna. That is until I got a job as an assistant at Lightyear Entertainment in the brand new and nearly empty Maple Plaza (Beverly Hills 90210).
Lightyear was casting The Return of Swamp Thing, and I had been assigned the job of taking the headshots out of their envelopes for director Jim Wynorski and his two assistants (making me essentially the assistants’ assistant). As I tore through the piles and piles of headshots I started to amass a large collection of paper cuts spread painfully over the surface of both my hands. Still, each envelope I opened was a new surprise. The headshots came from a make-believe world where everyone was stunningly beautiful. It was fun at first, but as the piles and piles and piles of envelopes kept coming in, it started to remind me of picking nits out of rugs with tweezers back when I worked at my family’s rug store.
Just when the drudgery of it all began to overwhelm me, I opened an envelope that changed everything. This magic envelope contained Judie Aronson’s headshot. She was utterly perfect. I pondered what the right thing to do was. I wanted to sneak the 8x10 glossy of Judie out of the office and take it home, but I also wanted her to come in to read so I could meet her, and to do that, I had to give the photo to Jim Wynorski. I made a decision and handed the picture to Jim. I asked him to bring her in to read. He looked at it briefly, shook his head, and tossed it in his reject pile.
I was devastated. I waited for Jim and his two assistants to head out for lunch. Then I rescued Judie from the reject pile and put her headshot about three down in the bring-in-to-read pile. Jim and his two assistants came back about an hour later and started culling from the bring-in-to read pile, when Jim saw Judie’s headshot.
“Charles, have you been fucking with my piles?” He asked.
“Only that one picture,” I said. “She’s a great actress. She’s really pretty. It’ll be fifteen minutes of your life if you don’t like her, and I’m telling you, you’ll like her.”
“Do not fuck with my piles… this is not a game. We’re making a movie here.”
“I’m sorry… It won’t happen again. I just wanted you to bring Judie in.”
“Why?”
“She’s a great actress.”
“What have you seen here in?”
“Weird Science.”
“What else?”
“That’s pretty much it… but she has a lot of other credits… look.”
“Friday the 13th…”
“There you go…”
“Part IV.”
“She’s really good.”
“I got a lot to do here… give me one thing that makes her stand out from the rest of these actresses.”
“She’s Jewish,” was all I could come up with on short notice.
“She’s pretty good,” Jim’s assistant, John Terlesky said. “I think she could work.” John was an actor himself and Jim respected John’s opinion, unlike mine. He looked over to his other assistant, Peter, who nodded “yes” he liked her too.
“We’ll call her in for you Charles, but you owe us,” Jim stated flatly, dropping Judie’s 8x10 back on the bring-in-to-read” pile.
“And, you better get this chick’s phone number, or you’ve wasted our time and yours,” Peter added.
Get her phone number? I hadn’t thought that far ahead and if somehow I had found myself faced with asking Judie for it, I probably would have had some kind of severe panic attack that resulted in me hiding in a closet while popping Rolaids like sunflower seeds. No, I just, really, really, really wanted to meet her, if nothing else to fulfill my belief that I could. This was a mission and I was finally seeing a chance to succeed at it.
Still, even though I knew I couldn’t ask her for her number, maybe, Judie would come in and think I was cute and give me her number on her own. Then I could call her and ask her out for pasta and eggs at Hugo’s, work our way up to lunch at Ed Debeveck’s, dinner at Kate Mantilini's and maybe one day, I’d take her for Grand Marnier soufflé at the Mustache Café on Melrose.
I dressed in my best clothes the next day, seersucker pants and very thin knit sweater. I couldn’t eat a thing. In fact, I hadn’t really eaten since I’d first seen Judie’s picture. It was even hard to take in full breaths. Every time Jim or Peter came by my desk, they would smile and ask, “Is your girlfriend here yet?”
I realized with abject horror what would happen if one of them asked that when Judie walked in. I looked up at the clock. It was still forty-five minutes to her appointment, but most of the actresses seemed to show up a good half hour before they were supposed to.
Around Noon, the front door of our office swung open and yet another actress walked through. I didn’t know who she was, but to be honest, the door had been swinging open once every fifteen minutes all day, so I just watched her come in and nodded at her. She had her hair up, only a little bit of makeup on, and was more “grown up” (if that makes sense) than Judie would be. She was just another pretty actress.
She walked up to me and said, “I’m Judie Aronson. I’m here to read for Swamp Thing.”
I almost threw up. I realized I didn’t have the breath support to get full words out.
I know this will sound completely nuts, but the moment I heard her name and realized who she was, she went from being just another actress to becoming angelic… a beauty far beyond any other woman I had ever seen. I was so nervous I thought my sweat was going to dissolve my sweater.
“Sign in here, your sides are here,” I said weakly, while trying desperately to come up with something witty to add. Crap, I’d had all morning to work on this and I hadn’t come up with a single line to show her I was brilliant. About the only thing I knew for sure was I shouldn’t let on that I knew who she was. Whatever I did, I figured I should not mention falling in love with her during Weird Science.
“Okay if I wait here?” she asked, pointing at a chair just across from me.
“Sure,” I responded, wondering if she could tell that my insides were dissolving.
She sat and started to look at her sides and then looked up at me again. I hoped she was noticing how cute I was. I tried to put together any string of words in my head that might make sense and also sound endearing. I had nothing.
“Is the parking lot safe? I have a new car and I don’t want it to get scratched.”
“Yeah… I mean, yeah,” I said. Now that was a brilliant response.
“I can’t spend money now,” she went on, as if this was a logical next thought after car scratches. “I bought a house. I was in a sitcom with Brian Keith and everyone said it was going to be picked up but it was cancelled instead and now I’m 23 with a mortgage.”
“Uh huh,” I replied, truly sorry for her, but unable to even express my sympathy in an interesting or understandable way.
“I better look at my sides if I’m going to get this job.” She looked down and didn’t look up again until Peter called her in for her audition.
When her reading was done, she walked out the front door without looking my way.
Oingo Boingo sang “Weird Science” in my head.
Jim, Peter, and John came over to my desk.
“She wasn’t bad…” Jim said. “She’s still on the list.”
“Did you get her number?” Peter asked.
“Is she your girlfriend yet?” John wondered.
At that exact moment, Judie came storming back through the door and right up to me. This floored all four of us so much, that I think Jim, Peter, and John shared in my utter panic.
“Do you validate?” Judie asked, holding out her parking ticket. Truth is, we didn’t, and there was a sign on my desk that said as much… but I nodded, gave her two parking stickers, and handed her back the ticket. She grabbed it and said, “Bye.”
I was devastated and yet, oddly exhilarated at the same time. I’d actually done it. I’d met Judie. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the role in the end, as it was later determined that they had to have a known star and went for Heather Locklear.
A couple months later, Lightyear’s principle owner, Steve Romero, brought a friend into the office, and said to me, “Charles, say hello to Tammy Hoffs, a wonderful director with some great ideas.” I shook her hand, had some very small chat with her, and then headed out to grab lunch from a roach coach that parked in the back of the building.
When I got back, Tammy was gone. Steve dropped a VHS cassette on my desk.
“Watch this, it’s Tammy’s movie with her daughter Susanna. Do you know her daughter?”
“No… I don’t this so.”
“She’s in a girl band… has a song out now ‘Eternal Flame.’ She’s about your age. She actually brought this by for Tammy while you were on your break. I was going to introduce you.”
“That was Susanna Hoffs’ mother?” I somehow got out through my choked breaths.
“Yeah … Anyway, watch this and tell me what you think.”
I took the movie home and plopped it into the VCR. It was called The Allnighter. Susanna danced in skimpy underwear in front of a mirror in one scene. But that was not the biggest surprise of the movie. Susanna’s boyfriend in the film was… John Turlesky, Jim Wynorski’s assistant. This was it. This was my chance to meet Susanna. I would go into work the next day and suggest a meeting for Tammy and Susanna to discuss a new movie project. I couldn’t believe my luck.
I waited with anticipation to speak to Steve. He was on the phone most of the morning, and every time I walked by his office, he’d just look up at me and then back down in order to concentrate on his call. Finally, when he got up to go to the rest room, I stopped him.
“We have to do a movie with Tammy and Susanna,” I said.
“That would be great,” he responded, “But Susanna isn’t acting any more. I’m going to meet Tammy for dinner next week to discuss ideas though. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
I felt myself deflate and wondered if Steve could see me folding into myself.
A few months later, I was invited to a party in Malibu. It was at John Lovitz’ and Byron Allen’s house. I was pretty freakin’ psyched. This was like getting invited to a party thrown by the football players in high school, except instead of a pool, we‘d have the Pacific Ocean, and instead of a keg, we’d have Kamikaze shots and Long Island Ice Teas. I have to admit that first moment when Jon Lovitz walked by me and nodded hello the way he did to everyone else at his house, I suddenly felt oddly elevated – like I was important, very important, part of the biz.
The house, deck, and beach were packed with ingénues and young actors, including a couple members of the Brat Pack. There were also young agents, agents’ assistants, and some of the better connected kids from the mailrooms of Triad Artists, ICM, William Morris, and CAA. But in a way, it really was not that different from the high school parties and college parties I had gone to. The popular kids at this party just happened to be Judd Nelson and Rob Lowe. I had a couple Kamikazes to get myself lubricated enough to network and schmooze. After my third shot, I saw a familiar looking girl walking towards me. It was Judie Aronson coming down the deck that ran along the side of the house. But wait, it gets better. Judie Aronson was with a friend of mine, Eric, an agent I knew from poker. The two of them strolled right up to me and Eric put out his hand to shake. “
“Charles, good to see you. This is my neighbor, Judie.”
I shook his hand and then I shook her hand, pretending that I was meeting her for the first time. Truth of the matter is that she didn’t really pay enough attention to remember me anyway. She walked out onto the beach to say hello to some other ingénues and I turned to Eric and said, “Judie Aronson is your neighbor?”
“Yeah, sweet girl… wait a minute, you like her, don’t you?” Eric said. Then he smiled a kind of wicked smile and said, “Actually, you know, she’s not seeing anyone. You should go for it.” For the life of me, I couldn’t tell if Eric was being serious or pulling my leg. He had a wry sense of humor and I knew that there was a real chance that he was sending me into the lion’s den to get a good laugh out of my being slaughtered. I talked to him a bit more, trying to feel him out the best I could to see if he was being serious or setting me up.
“You don’t trust me?” he finally said with a big smile. I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him. I went and had three more Kamikaze shots in order to gird myself.
I stared out at where Judie was standing, her bare feet in the sand, and her sandals in her hand.
“Go talk to her,” Eric said, sneaking up on me. But he was smiling way too big. My Spidey senses were telling me not to believe him. I just stood there, staring out at the ocean, feeling the warmth of the Kamikazes, and wondering what I would say to Judie if I did have the nerve to say something. I had failed the first time I met her to say one witty thing that would make me interesting. I hadn’t come up with a single line yet in this, my second meeting. Besides remaining cool by not acknowledging who she was, I was basically without any other weapons in my arsenal.
Truth of the matter is that I was pretty drunk – not quite dead drunk and believing in my infallibility thank God, but instead, at a point that I knew I was slurring and I knew that people could tell I wasn’t sober.
What to do? What to do? What to do? I looked back out again to admire Judie, but she was nowhere to be seen. I felt a tap on my shoulder. Judie and Eric were standing next to me. She still had her sandals in her hands.
“Judie doesn’t feel well. She needs a ride home, but I kind of want to hang out some more,” Eric said. “You don’t live near Encino, do you?”
“No…” I stuttered out. “Playa”
“Too bad,” he said and they started walking away.
“Boot, I’m happy to dwive dere,” I called to them. Eric turned back to me.
“Are you sure it’s okay,” Judie asked.
“Ab-so-woot-wy…”
“But you live all the way down in Playa-del-Rey?” Judie frowned. Why the Hell did I admit that. It was literally the polar opposite direction from where she needed to go.
“I don’t mind. I like driving…” I went on, finally getting a sentence out correctly, but somehow taking on the tone of a beggar.
“That’s okay, I’ll find someone who lives near me,” she said. No dummy, she wasn’t going to accept a ride from an idiot who was slurring and oozing Kamikazes from his pores.
She walked away again, looking for a ride among the strangers. To this day, I have never seen her again.
In the years that followed, I would ask Eric about Judie whenever I ran into him, but he was no longer encouraging (if he had ever actually been encouraging anyway, I still don’t know). I went to Eric’s wedding, hoping that Judie would be there, but when I asked Eric about her, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I invited her, but she couldn’t come.”
Frankly, that’s okay. In the years that followed, I met a girl, fell in love with her, married her, and settled down for ever after and as happily as possible. But somehow, I still felt unfulfilled in never having met Susanna. After all, I had really promised myself that I would, but with my career having turned to Movies-of-the-Week and with the Bangles having broken up, I didn’t really see how it was possible any more.
Eleven years after I last saw Judy, I was invited to a party in Hancock Park. It was a true “be seen or you are nobody” kind of affair with Tiki accessories everywhere in the backyard of a classic Hollywood mansion. The yard was full of a potpourri of television agents, television executives, television producers, television directors, television stars, and here and there, some actual feature talent too.
The other woman was wearing little, if any makeup, a baggy shirt, and jeans. And yet, as incognito as she was trying to be, the effect was the exact opposite of the first time I saw Judie Aronson I person. This time, not expecting anything I immediately knew who the woman talking to my wife was. I handed my wife a glass of wine and tried to nose my way into her conversation.
I parked my wife by a Tiki torch and went off to find us some wine. As I returned with two merlots, I saw my wife talking to a woman about her size. They were smiling and pointing at their stomachs.
“This is my husband, Charles, this is Sue,” my wife said.
I reached out and shook Susanna Hoffs hand. I was so stunned by meeting her that I couldn’t quite think of anything to say, so I fell back on my training from the Young Artists United meetings all those years ago, and I simply didn’t acknowledge that I knew who Susanna was. Why I thought this would work (Oh, my god, he’s so cool he’s not telling me my name and my biography) I honestly have no idea. I was frankly impressed that my wife seemed to be doing the same. Susanna and she talked about C-sections and carrying a baby when one is petite.
Suddenly, for the first time in over ten years, I felt the sweat forming, I felt the panic rising, and I sensed that I was melting. I’d played the silent, don’t know who you are and don’t care card long enough. If I was ever going to make an impression on Susanna and have her remember meeting me I had to think of something intelligent to say, something that would win her over instantly. Damn… nothing was coming to mind.
But I think what was killing me the most was here I was finally talking to the girl with the Rickenbacker and the huge eyes in the “Walk Like An Egyptian” video and the conversation was about wrestling with the big pack of diapers at the supermarket and how shoving it under the cart doesn’t really work if you’re buying to packs because you have two kids still wearing them.
I thought back to when I had met Judie all those years before, and how I wanted to impress her with my conversation, only to have the main thrust of our discourse be parking validations and whether or not Encino was on my way home. Now, here I was again, meeting a girl on my must meet list, and the conversation had turned to three-year-olds who throw tantrums when you don’t carry them and the sciatic pain that results when you give in to them.
I looked over to Susanna and I could see her in my mind singing “Manic Monday” on MTV, singing “Eternal Flame” on VH1, and singing “If She Knew What She Wants” on Friday Night Videos. This was it. This was my moment, the chance I had waited for my entire life, to become friends with Susanna Hoffs. I had to think of something to say… anything.
I could sense my wife growing tense, hoping for me that I would come up with something brilliant. Meanwhile, Susanna chatted about how expensive Baby Gap clothes were, and being tired of rewinding Teletubbies tapes.
When the discussion turned to having any more kids, I suddenly thought of a good line and blurted out, “I wanted a third child, but was told my only chance was a second wife.”
Susanna smiled politely and turned back to my wife.
A few moments later, the baby/toddler/sciatica conversation had run its course, and Susanna said, “It was great meeting you.” Then she was off.
“How did you end up talking to her?” I asked my wife.
“She walked up to me.”
“She walked up to you?”
“We’re the same size… she wanted to know if I had kids.”
“But, but… but…” I went on.
“Why are you acting so weird? Is there something wrong?” My wife asked.
“You know who that was, right?”
“Sue,” my wife answered…
“Sue who?”
“I don’t know. Why does it matter?”
“That was Susanna Hoffs…
“Who’s that?”
“The Bangles… ‘Walk Like an Egyptian…’” I sputtered out.
“Really?” my wife asked, looking over to where Susanna was talking with her friends and looking back at us.
“Are you sure…” my wife went on, “I thought she was just some chick named Sue.”
I looked over again, but Susanna and her friends had turned the other way. From where I stood, she was just some chick named Sue and frankly, I was just some dude who had actually fulfilled a decades long mission, but with nothing to show for it.
She never looked our way again.
I am glad I met Judie and Susanna. I’m glad I fulfilled my prophesy. I just don’t quite understand to what purpose I had to meet them if I wasn’t going to acknowledge who they were. Sure, famous people like their anonymity, but artists want to know that they left an impression and that they touched someone emotionally – and they can’t know that if you don’t tell them.
I really don’t know why I needed to meet them. They certainly didn’t need to meet me, and I am guessing that neither of them have any memory that they ever did.

2012-01-26T17:59:00.001-08:00

Flying Home - 1989

Elise’s machine picked up. I figured she hadn’t gotten up yet… and was wearing nothing… but the big wool sweater she'd swiped from my closet last time she was in L.A. It looked better on her and as long as she didn’t reach for anything too high up, it did a decent job of protecting her modesty. I pictured her lost in her mound of comforters atop the mattress she had propped on milk crates. I envisioned the exposed brick walls of her East Village fifth-floor walk-up letting the cold in and making the sputtering cast-iron radiators work beyond their capacity. Each radiator would be covered in bath towels and makeshift ashtrays, making their job all the more difficult. I imagined my sweater rising and falling and rising… and falling in the rhythm of deep sleep.
I left a message that we needed to talk.
Next, I called American and asked about using my miles for a flight that very morning. Turned out under the circumstances it was allowed, but I had to be absolutely, 100%, completely, totally, thoroughly, utterly, and positively sure to bring a check to the ticket counter at LAX to pay the $20 service charge with. They couldn’t accept cash or credit cards and if I didn’t have a check they would not under any conditions let me use my miles to get on the plane. I promised to bring a check. I even lied and said I was putting the checkbook in my pocket right then to ease her mind. She responded by reminding me that if I didn’t bring a check, I couldn’t fly, because they could only accept a check, no cash and no credit cards, no matter what. Bring a check or don’t fly.
Two hours later, I stood at the ticket counter without a check. I forgot. My friend who had driven me to the airport offered to run me back to my apartment in Playa, but there wasn’t time to do that and make the flight. The lady behind the ticket counter explained tersely that I hadn’t followed proper-airline-mileage-redemption protocol. So I told her why I was redeeming the miles on such short notice. That took some of the wind out of her sails. She looked down, probably thinking, “They don’t pay me enough to be a social worker too.” Then she looked around to the other ticket counter ladies for guidance and got a chorus of “There’s nothing you can do,” “He has to have a check,” “Rules are rules.” Finally she shook her head, unable to believe she was about to do what she was about to do, and told me to wait where I was a minute.
“You do have the twenty dollars, right?” she checked. I held the bill up to show her.
About five minutes later she came back with her purse, and pulled her checkbook out of it. She wrote a personal check to American Airlines for twenty dollars, using the memo section to mention my name and my AAdvantage number, placing it in the special envelope for these types of mileage redemptions, the one that said “Checks only” on it.
I thought, today I’m someone special who others will do things for. Hell, the friend who had driven me to the airport had come all the way down from the Valley before work to get me from Playa to LAX. And, two other friends had shown up at my door even earlier from the Marina with a coffee maker to make sure I got my morning cup of coffee. Suddenly, I was the guy everyone wanted to serve.
Once on the 767 and up in the air, I pondered this new and temporary power I had to get people to be nice to me. A streaming rope of fog rushed over the wing outside my window. I pulled the Airfone out and cradled it to my shoulder thinking I would call Elise and tell her what was going on in some debauched belief that it would finally get her to sleep with me. I mean, everyone else was being really agreeable already, why not her? I conjured her voice in my head saying, “Oh, Chuckie, I’m so sorry… yes, come over. I’ll do you now… no, it would be my pleasure… considering the circumstances.”
I pulled out my credit card and swiped it. The phone beeped and the little window displayed, “Card Denied.” I put the Airfone back and poured the second of my airline-sized bottles of Gordon’s into a cup and swigged it. It had cost me five dollars, and with the five for the first bottle plus the twenty I had to give the lady at the ticket counter, I was left with only ten. I needed more hooch, but wasn’t sure how to pay for it.
I walked past the sleeping passengers, each one of them contributing to the stale cross-country-plane-smell, and over to the flight attendant who was perched on a jump seat in the back galley. May have been the lack of food in my system, but those two little bottles of Gordon’s gave me moxie. I don’t normally have moxie. I don’t even find it to be that attractive a sounding word. But at this moment, I was glad to have it. I just started talking to the flight attendant as if I knew her, telling her that American Airlines was the best airline in the world and how they had helped me out and why I was flying back east. She looked a bit stunned at the “why,” so I decided to let her off the hook, and very sweetly thanked her for getting me home.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “What are you drinking?”
“Gordon’s.”
She reached into the cart, pulled out two more little Gordon’s bottles, and stuffed them into my hand surreptitiously.
“Shhhhh,” she said. Wow – this getting stuff that I want is still working, I thought.
Within a few minutes the plane began to slow, descend, and turn. I downed both little bottles as quickly as I could. Below us, an ice-covered Newark Bay glistened in floodlights. I saw gleaming oil refineries, shimmering freight yards, a sparkling confusion of highways, the polish of one hundred years of detritus and urban blight covered in a beautiful frost. This was New Jersey. I was home.
Standing to de-plane, it hit me that I was drunker than I had accounted for. I sat back down and waited for everyone else to get off, then slowly made my way up the jetway into Terminal A, to the telephone, to the almost local call to New York City that I had to make, where I would find Elise’s gravely little-girl-voice on the other end, having shucked herself out of my sweater, and having draped a pale yellow peasant dress over her figure. I imagined her resting the phone on her shoulder, climbing onto the desk that she had next to the radiator, crisscrossing her legs underneath her, and lighting up a cigarette, which would barely get smoked, which would burn out in the ashtray while she held the phone cord to herself, lit another cigarette absently, and talked to me.
But there was at least one person using and at least one other person waiting for every payphone I saw. As I pondered what to do, I noticed a short Indian man standing in the glass hall. He was about sixty and he was looking me up and down and over with his brow furrowed and his head jogging and bobbing like the carriage on an antique adding machine. I had never seen him before in my life, but I'd been hearing about "Kapoor at work" since kindergarten and I assumed that this must be him. I nodded hello and he stated in the most assured of tones, “You are Chuck.” Next thing I knew he was hugging me.
He said it was nice to meet me, but he wished we had met another time under other circumstances. I asked if we were going to go, but he told me that we had to wait for my brother’s flight. He offered to buy me dinner or a drink while we waited. I said no. Didn’t want to spoil the drunk I had with food, didn’t want to make it worse with more alcohol. Kapoor put an arm around me as if I was his son. He smiled a smile full of middle-aged-man teeth all pointing in different directions.
My brother’s flight was landing at a different terminal, so we went out to Kapoor’s car, a brand new, 1989 Mercedes 300 TE Station wagon. My dad had the same job as Kapoor at the same firm and drove a 1977 Buick Regal with duct tape on the rust spots. On any other day, I would have pounded the slush off my shoes before getting in the Kapoor’s car, but I figured on this day, I had the right to just carry the slush into the car.
Kapoor drove us the short distance but long drive via the scrambled airport roads to the Continental terminal, Terminal C. I asked if it would be okay if I smoked – something I never would have even suggested the day before or the day after. Kapoor nodded sure, but said, with concern.
“I didn’t know you smoked. Did your father know?”
As I pulled the glowing lighter from the dashboard, I could see that it had never been used before. Moments later, we got out of the car. I took a long drag and dropped the butt in the slush. I breathed deep, taking the cold air deep inside of me. Flakes fluttered everywhere. Street lamps cast blue cones of light in the snow.
I had this horrible realization that I wasn’t quite registering what was going on all around me – the people walking past, Kapoor talking, the taxis drivers chatting in Urdu and Ukrainian, the snow fluttering. Instead, it was as if I was catching just glimpses, snippets, and blurs of these things, like my mind was a film that had come off the sprockets and was sputtering in the projector. I looked over at Kapoor to see if I would even recognize him from my fifteen minutes of knowing him. He was already staring at me and smiled as if he was embarrassed to have been caught.
"I could use a phone," I told him.
“There will be one inside the terminal,” he suggested, walking towards it. “The terminal” I thought… “That sounds kind of morbid.”
“Do you want to call your mother?” he asked.
But even before I could answer, we saw my brother waiting for us at the baggage carousel. He leaned against a security gate and swung a backpack from his arm. He looked confused, like he'd accidentally stayed on a bus past his stop and was trying to figure out if he should get off here or keep riding in the hope that the bus would just loop back.
"I wondered who was going to pick me up," he said. "I tried calling Mom from the Airfone, but I got the machine; cost me seven bucks on my credit card."
The two of us made an awkward attempt to hug, and I introduced him to Kapoor. Behind us, there were lines for the telephones. I wasn’t going to get to make a call.
"How was your flight," I asked.
"Fine until I had to wake up."
"You lost weight."
"Been trying," he said. "Listen, it's going to be awhile. These people waiting here aren't even from my flight and there's only one carousel going. I forgot how disorganized life is here."
My brother and Kapoor walked over and found a spot by the revolving luggage, while I waited and watched the pay phones.
Time must have passed, because I looked again and my brother had his suitcase. As I followed them out to the 1989 Mercedes 300 TE Station Wagon an overwhelming sensation of panic came over me. The film projector thing had gotten worse. I wasn’t registering anything that was happening. I realized that if Kapoor and my brother weren’t there, I would have been lost. I wouldn’t have known how to climb into the car, how to get out of the cold, how to keep from being hit by another car. I watched them get in the car and copied what they did.
Next thing I was aware of, we were somehow out of the airport and on the highway. There was the rattle of old diesel busses coated in grey ice racing us up the hill, the rattle of new, bigger diesel busses coated in grey ice chasing them, and the tremble of diesel tractor-trailers violently probing the night air behind us. On top of that, all of this was seasoned with the dance of orange and green and yellow taxis, swerving between the busses and trucks, under a cap of night clouds.
Kapoor asked questions. I just sat there. He smiled as if my not responding was making him nervous. My brother said that we didn't really know anything yet. But Kapoor went on, as if by going over the day's events again and again, he'd find an answer to his own mortality.
Through my window, I saw Newark pass away, then Bloomfield, Clifton, Paterson, Elmwood Park, Saddle Brook, Rochelle Park. These were places that used to seem so big and far apart from each other when I was little, but now seemed like puzzle pieces packed together in the tiniest of jigsaw puzzles known as New Jersey.
Kapoor shook his head... Out of nowhere, he raised his voice a couple decibels and sort of laugh/cried, "I just don't believe it. I mean, how? I tell you, I heard and I said, 'You're joking. You must be joking.' I was in a big shock all day."
I couldn’t quite tell if he was trying to be our friend or our surrogate father. Somehow, I was hoping for the latter. I lit the second cigarette ever to be lit from the 1989 Mercedes 300 TE Station Wagon’s lighter and knocked on the window.
"How come light comes through the glass but not the door,” I asked.
“Glass is an amorphous solid,” my brother said. “The photons have a free pathway through it.”
Yeah, that didn’t really quite mean anything to me.
Kapoor smiled, "How is the physics business?"
"Hardest part of the day's getting up in the morning. The rest is a breeze," my brother responded.
"So it’s a solid to you and me but a liquid to light" I interrupted.
"Not exactly," he said.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"The door reacts with the photon," Kapoor answered, “It either absorbs it or reflects it or a little of both. The glass doesn’t react with the photon. It goes right through it.”
“Like the wind through a screen.” I asked.
“Not really,” my brother added. “The wind through a screen is getting bent and redirected everywhere it hits a solid – more like the wind through a hole.”
"So if I were the photon, the door would be a girl I’m just friends with and the glass would be a girl I was dating?” I asked.
My brother shook his head. "If that helps you wrap your mind around it… go with it.”
Kapoor piped in, "I always wanted to study physics; I just never had all those years to spend in school."
"Long as you can get yourself out of bed, the other stuff's a cinch," my brother said.
I had been dismissed – the writer in the car who didn’t understand what a photon was. Meanwhile, those very photons passed through the 1989 Mercedes 300 TE Station Wagon’s passenger window, creating images of elms and oaks and maples, pines and lindens and ginkgoes, lining the road in formation. We were deep into suburbia, off the Parkway and into Paramus where GI-Plan ranch houses shared the land with newer split levels and even newer faux Colonials and Tudors.
My mind went to Elise. I tried to conjure up poetic lines about the trees and the houses I was seeing to tell her about, to woo her with. I saw mailboxes shivering under winter coats of frost, cars gritting their teeth behind the snow on their bumpers, trees standing naked like concentration camp prisoners. I saw the Paramus Boy’s club which was just a couple blocks from my home.
I quickly popped about a dozen tic-tacs into my mouth and licked my fingers with my newly minty tongue to cover the smell of tobacco.
Our house looked the same as it always had. There were a few rough shingles that needed to be replaced, and some pebbled potholes on the drive. A few yellow lights burned through the windows. My mom stood in the front doorway with our neighbor. Kapoor helped us with our bags and then drove away, barely saying goodbye. Our neighbor simply told us she was story and walked back to her house too.
My brother and I took turns giving my mom awkward hugs. None of us in this family know how to hug, I thought. We all went inside, walking straight to my parents’ bedroom. The bed was pushed against the wall, and the Persian scatter rugs were bunched up every which way.
“I woke up and touched him and I thought, he’s cold,” she said. “He shouldn’t be cold like that. That’s when I called the ambulance.”
My brother led her back into my old room. I heard him tell her that everything would be okay. She broke into loud sobs.
"I called the ambulance the moment I realized he was cold,” she said weakly.
I pulled the bed back to where it belonged and found an oxygen mask lying on the floor. My brother kept saying that it was all right, everything was all right. I straightened the rugs. I pulled the night¬stands back to their places next to the bed. I pocketed the oxygen mask to hide it and went to the other room.
My mom looked up at me.
"We were going to see a play, but he didn’t feel well enough… and he went to bed instead" she said. I sat with her. I didn't know what to do. I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know who my brother was. I honestly wasn’t sure who I was or if I was properly registering what they were saying to me. I didn’t know if the photons hitting my retina were showing me reality.
The three of us sat on my childhood bed where I grew from three foot something to six foot something, where I dreamed of Hot Wheels, baseball players, rock bands, and girls, lots of girls, each one the ‘one,’ my soul mate. With each girl I believed I would never love another, but then I’d met the next one, until finally, I actually met her. I actually met the one. I met Elise. I wanted to be there for my mother and brother… but it also finally sunk in. I didn’t need Elise to “do me” because of what happened. I needed Elise to love me for the rest of her life as her soul mate because of what happened. Oh screw it, the “because” wasn’t important, it was just the hand that I’d been dealt.
We stayed with my mother for a couple hours (or a couple of minutes – I wasn’t sure). Suddenly the doorbell rang. It was my aunt and uncle. They'd driven the three hours from Delaware. When my mom saw them, she ran into the kitchen like she was going to make dinner. Everyone said we weren't hungry. She came back empty-handed.
Tidbits of conversation started here and there, regarding plans, insurance, who to tell, whether or not to put something in the newspaper. My aunt, as if she had been coached by Kapoor, said his words to us almost verbatim, “I heard and I said, you’re kidding… I just didn’t believe it.” My uncle, who had a Persian accent and usually spoke in longer and less contracted sentences than the rest of us, was uncharacteristically brief. “It is just terrible.”
I escaped into the master bedroom. It was as if the last five years living in LA were something I’d just dreamed – that in reality, I had never left this house.
I pulled a matchbook from my pocket and found the backstage number Elise had given me for emergencies. I dialed it on the same Princess phone that I had used to plan bike rides with friends to 7-Eleven, to plan drives to bars, to ask the first girl I ever went out with on our second date. The phone on the other end rang twenty or thirty times before a gruff whisper on answered.
"Ensemble in the Square."
"Elise Field, please," I responded.
The whisper was silent for a moment. I heard loud laughter in the background.
"She's busy," the voice said, a tone of annoyance in its breath.
"This is important."
"Call back later."
"All right, all right, tell her that her best friend called, that I'm at my parents' house in New Jersey."
But the line went dead before I was sure I’d actually left a message. I kept the phone to my ear for a while. I lay back on the big bed and stared at the ceiling.
I hadn’t seen Elise in a year. That had been a few months after she had visited me in L.A. I stayed in her fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village. I hadn't even told my parents I was in town. Elise sat across from me, legs crisscrossed as she perched atop her desk. The yellow glow from the city lights outside her window splashed over her.
"Only writer I ever knew that wasn't full of shit," Elise said, "was a guy I met in Tampa. I told you about him. The playwright I made love to the first night I met him?"
My chest constricted. I looked at her. She could have been painted by Seurat.
"He undressed me slowly, picked me up gently," she went on, "and carried me to bed like I was a treasure. I knew he’d be like that. It was in his writing. He made love to the page with his words tenderly and forcefully all at the same time. Too bad he was crazy; I might have stayed in Tampa for a couple more months."
“As your best friend, I need to let you in on a secret,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Men are scum.”
“Is that so?”
“We have but one thing on our minds, Elise… just one thing. I know… I’m a man. . We say nice things and act kind, when all we are thinking is, will saying this or doing that get her to take her pants off? You can’t trust us. You think we see a person. We don’t. We see something to fuck."
“All men?”
“Every single one of us. Here’s a rule we all learn when we get to college… let a girl talk to you for two hours, she’ll kiss you… for three hours, you can get to second base, for four hours, you’re home free.”
“I’ve talked to you for four hours a thousand times and you didn’t get anywhere. We’re still friends.”
“Listen to me; I know what I’m talking about.”
Elise made a sound like “pshaw,” reached under my sweater (the one she was wearing), and pulled her bra off. She dropped it on the nightstand next to me. She took off her thick socks, and her brass jewelry. She took off everything but the sweater. She hadn’t heard a word I’d said.
"I don't think it's healthy for you to assume that your personal weaknesses apply to the entire male sex," she said as she massaged a dab of hand cream over her hands and arms. Then she walked over to the kitchen sink and brushed her teeth with a naked finger full of toothpaste.
"I just want you to be safe. You’re my best friend. You don't know how disgusting and single-minded men really are," I said, wondering if I should lie down and see if she’d let me sleep in her bed for the night.
She laughed. She took a towel off a radiator and wiped toothpaste from her mouth and cheek, then climbed into bed. She looked over at me, still sitting there and said, “Do you have enough blankets on the coach, Chuckie?” I nodded yes and got up and walked over to the couch.
She continued her thoughts, “You know, I hate to say this, but you almost sound jealous. I don't do that to you when you tell me about women. I'm happy for you when you have someone. Love and romance matter. You should be happy for me. We're best friends."
I tried to fall asleep, knowing she was less than ten feet away. A few minutes are she had stopped talking; I looked over her way and saw the comforter rising, falling, rising… and falling.
The next morning, I woke up and saw that she was already gone. I headed out for the airport bus that left from Grand Central. Once on the bus, I grabbed my notebook to write down some thoughts and found a note in Elise’s handwriting on the first empty page. It said she loved me and was so thankful we would always be friends. “But, I love you…” I thought. She was so unfair.
Now, one year later, the phone rang, and I jumped as if being caught stealing from my father's wallet. Down the hall I heard my aunt telling someone to hold on a minute. She shouted out my name, and I picked up the phone.
"Hello?" I asked.
"Collect call from Elise Field, will you accept the charges?"
"Um...yeah."
"We just finished. Why didn't you tell me you were coming into town?"
“I’m not quite in town… I’m in New Jersey…” I said in a smart aleck kind of way.
“Chuckie… that’s so wonderful… I want to see you.”
“My dad died,” I responded.
I could almost see her, makeup starting to melt under the sweat from the lights and the sweat from the hour and the sweat from the conversation, but there was concern in her silence and her way of listening, in which I knew she heard every word, and I knew her eyes were looking at nothing in front of her, but seeing my face, because she was with me and wanted to be with me and had to be with me because in this entire world we were the only two people who existed. And, when I stopped talking, she said.
"I just have to clean some stuff up and I'll go straight to the station."
"Last one to Paramus leaves at midnight. Can you make it?" I asked.
"I think. Let me go then. I'll have to run... I love you, you know."
The line went dead. I lay back and stared at the ceiling some more. As a child I'd stared at the same ceiling for hours. There was a place where the layers of paint formed a robot's face, chewing on a cigar. I wondered if my father had ever noticed it.
I reached into his night stand, played with a watch in there, looked at his bank statement, studied the a ceramic turtle I'd made for him in the fifth grade, looked at a picture of him and my mother when they were younger than me. I found cards from my mother, found a roll of tokens for my father's commute down the Parkway. These rolls were like gold to my dad. I put it in my pocket to bring to his car, where it belonged.
I put on my coat and felt something huge in the coat pocket. It was an oxygen mask of all things. I walked to the front door.
"Where are you going?" my mom asked.
"Elise is coming in on the midnight bus," I answered, "It's due in twenty minutes."
"Seriously? Tonight?" my brother asked.
"If you want to stay with your mother, I can go get her," my uncle offered.
I shook my head no, and headed out the door. The temperature felt like it had fallen another twenty degrees. Ice coated everything. After scraping windows, and cranking the engine a few times to clear the carb's barrels, I got my father's 1977 orange Buick Regal with the white landau roof started. I headed through the streets of glazed trees to the tiny bus station just south of the Suburban Diner on Route 17.
It would still be another fifteen minutes or so until the midnight Shortline bus reached Paramus. I lit a cigarette off the car lighter, and looked out at the highway. Ironically, even on my father’s 1977 Buick, the lighter looked brand new and unused.
Trucks and cars sliced their way through the ice on Route 17, each making a deep, grinding noise as their tires dug into the salt on the road. A police car drove into the parking lot, shone its light on me, and then moved on. Even as the police car was still pulling away, I wondered “Did I just see a police car or did I imagine it?” I was still struggling to register what was going on.
“It's okay,” I told myself. Elise is on the bus. Elise is coming to rescue me. The world will go on because Elise loves me. She’s in love with me – for the rest of my life. Elise is on a fucking midnight bus to Paramus NJ in the middle of this cold because she is in love with me. Everything will be okay. Everything will start to register normally.
At 12:18, two minutes ahead of schedule, the Shortline bus pulled in, crushing ice and snow, wearing frost and fuming cold diesel exhaust. I watched carefully as it stopped, but no one got off. I did a 180-scan of the parking lot. Maybe she’d gotten off and I hadn’t registered it. Even after sweeping the parking lot with my eyes three times, I did it a fourth, in case somehow I hadn’t seen her.
I got out of the car. The cold bit into my face like a razor. The bus station was locked shut, but inside a space heater glowed, warming the empty room.
I walked to the bus. The door came open and the driver looked down at me.
"Coming?" he asked.
“Picking someone up,” I answered.
“Nope… didn’t get any Paramus tickets tonight,” he said… and then he closed the door and dove away.
Behind me, a tractor-trailer blew his horn. I stood silently. The wind cut into me. A little Subaru pulled into the parking lot the same way that the bus had done. The air clung to my skin like ice water. I stared at the Subaru, trying to figure out if it was really there or I was imagining it. Both windows rolled down with an electronic whir, causing a cracking of ice as they descended.
"She's not coming," my brother shouted from the passenger side.
I stared at him, trying to figure out what his words meant.
"She went to Penn Station. She thought you meant to take a train," he continued, while my uncle, who was driving added, "Chuck, by the time she arrived at the Port Authority they informed her that the last bus was already gone."
I turned away from them, dismissing them with a backward wave of my hand.
“Okay… we’ll see you,” one of them yelled as I walked back to my dad’s 1977 Buick Regal. The Subaru pulled out onto the highway leaving the parking lot nearly empty once more.
I looked at the Regal. It needed body work where there was duct tape on the rear fender. It also needed a new side mirror.
No one was ever going to do that body work. No was ever going to replace that side mirror. I put the roll of Parkway tokens in the glove box. No one was ever going to use those tokens. No one was above me. No one was below me. No one was next to me. No one else was there.

2011-09-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

Cover Girl Murders - 1993

The early to mid-1990s for me were a period of rapid career growth, horrific career stumbles, and much personal introspection. It was a time of figuring out just who it was that I was in order to try and distinguish myself from the rest of the fresh-faced-young Hollywood execs all around me. Without a roadmap or internal compass, I went on to make some pretty questionable choices, going down some dead-end paths that in retrospect were a bit more arrogant, irritable, and Mercurial than I should have chosen. This time of supercilious self-importance is still known to the world as Freericks’ Douche Period.
Whether I was dealing with an agent, a writer, or a boss, I was, to use the technical term, a big douche bag. Had you met me during this unfortunate time you would have felt an overriding desire to smack the overconfidence off of my face like Michael Douglas smacked the gang bangers in Falling Down.
The pinnacle of my douche-dum came about the time I was shooting The Cover Girl Murders in Mexico. Production was on a remote beach where wild horses ran through the brush like squirrels… well, huge, frightening squirrels.
I was walking on the beach near our set with my boss, who was dressed in a Clorox-white tee-shirt and baggy black shorts. He turned to me and said like a travel-show host, “Come join me, will you, for a little bikini watching.” He punctuated his words with a tight laugh. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a camera in the other.
On the hill above us, two policemen, one with a Luger pistol and one with a Fusil Automatique Léger assault rifle, stood by their beater VW Beetle squad car. One of the officers perched a ratty jack-booted foot on the running board while the other snagged a hard-boiled egg from craft services. At the shoreline below us, a photographer shot the bikini-clad Bobbie Phillips in one sexy pose after another.
“Nothing like a little coffee and bikinis,” my boss went on, going nasal on the vowels and changing pitch from word to word due to his Beverly Hills High accent. He led me under the Panama-rubber trees to where crystal water shattered into foam. Bobbie Phillips’ leggy legs wobbled while she searched for a safe landing on the sharp rocks. Her thick, long, blond hair, bangs brushed forward, created a Lady Godiva meets the oldest daughter on Full House effect that I could not stop staring at.
“On location for a fashion shoot… the Minolta Freedom Zoom 110… if you know what I mean,” my boss said, holding up his camera. I actually didn’t know what he meant. “Zoom” sounded like a double-entendre, but he stressed the 110 part, which just meant… yeah, I had nothing. Still, I was on the clock and his direct report, so I laughed.
Bobbie lay on the packed sand as the waves splashed over her calves. Everything about Bobbie was perfect, including the gravelly tenor of her voice. I thought about taking her home and seeing if my fiancée would let me keep her.
“This is all I need… gorgeous woman, beach, rock, and water,” my boss said, tilting the bounce board that he had volunteered to hold, directing sunlight onto Bobbie, and making her glow. It was as if we were shooting a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, not just faking it for a USA Network cable movie. And in that moment, with the golden sun reflecting off of Bobbi, the sound of SLR mirror slapping up and down like a Duran Duran song, and the gulls floating above us, the world was perfect.
What made it so utterly perfect wasn’t the pristine beach, the gorgeous ingénue, or the stunning weather. What made it so utterly perfect was that I was being paid to be there. Standing on this beach, looking at this beautiful actress in a bikini was my freaking job.
A zephyr from Banderas Bay tickled the Avon Skin So Soft on my arms and I sat back and wondered, yet once more, why my boss was the VP when I was only a Director. I had studied dramatic structure at SC, and was the author of twenty-minute play on the life of Alexander Hamilton that had been noted by my professor as the best piece in the Spring of 1986’s Twenty Minute Play Festival. It just wasn’t fair.
Man was I a douche. Truth is that the Director position wasn’t even supposed to have been mine. Had things gone according to plan, instead of a morning of coffee and bikinis, I should have been on my couch at home watching CNN loop.
What am I talking about? A few weeks after I started at Wilshire Court, my boss mentioned that I had been hired because of my brilliant cover letter. Said cover letter talked about growing up watching the thrillers of Hitchcock, Frankenheimer, and De Palma in the basement den of a suburban home with my high school girlfriend. It went on to describe snuggling under a hand-knit blanket, sipping sangria from a deerskin bag, and eating Jiffy Pop while the movies thrilled. My boss thought the last sentence showed an attention to detail that demonstrated a superior intelligence.
Unfortunately, I didn’t write that cover letter. The one that I wrote said that I was highly-motivated team player excited about a future in basic cable television movie development, and had worked on My Boyfriend’s Back starring Sandy Duncan, providing me valuable on-set experience. But someone had mixed up who wrote which letter. Soon after, they narrowed the selection down to two people; me and the guy who actually wrote the letter. As we were seen as fairly comparable choices, the deciding factor became the letter, but because they thought I wrote it, they gave me the job.
My career was on a trajectory – the trajectory of a Roomba, bouncing around the floor randomly. And I was a giraffe trying to ride it.
Shortly after I learned about the letter, the head of Wilshire Court took me aside and told me that I was his script-note bulldog. Both insanely overconfident and pathetical self-doubting, I wanted to please, and thought the path to success was to become a notes meeting douche. This should be easy, because everyone who worked in television, I thought, must be utterly incompetent or they would be doing features (of course they weren’t, but I was a douche).
That feeling turned into anger that someone of my clear and obvious talent had been relegated to television, and one day without warning, instead of just being obstinate and unwilling to compromise, I wigged out. Our director wanted to turn a script about a robot trying to kill a woman into Beauty and the Beast. I would hear none of it, and kept telling him that wasn’t the story we hired him to make. When he asked in a pleading voice, “can I just take five minutes to explain my vision,” I said, “not this late in the game, no.” He tried to explain anyway. With my boss and boss’ boss watching, I channeled my inner Scott Rudin and Joel Silver, yelling, pounding the couch, and shaking my head in disgust. I threw out invectives, expletives, and pure disdain. When I was through, the director looked like the dog in a Skinner box.
After the meeting was over, I was worried that I’d gone too far, but no one said anything. Not only that, but the director agreed to shoot the movie we wanted because I yelled. This was my new modus operandi. Soon I was going postal as often as a middle-aged man goes to the men’s room; belittling a writer, over whether a character would say “what are you up to, Alan” or “watcha doin’, Al,” blaring at a director, who said “piano-piano” to me (which I thought meant “the world’s smallest violin is playing for you,” but actually meant “go through life softly and easily ”), spitting bullets at a wet-behind-the-ears agent for not returning my phone call on the same day I called. As an aside, there’s nothing much dumber than making an enemy out of an agent who might one day go on to become a partner at UTA, let me rephrase that, who did go on to become a partner at UTA.
In the middle of my douche phase, I was made responsible for a roster of projects that included Who’s Killing the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Models. When the title didn’t clear, we renamed it The Cover Girl Murders. My job was to read each draft and create a detailed document called a “notes memo.” In layman’s terms, this meant that I was expected to pee on the writer’s hard work.
Lower-level execs like me justified our existence through the notes memo, which highlighted and exemplified not necessarily how to fix a script, but rather how much smarter we were then everyone else involved in the project. What’s worse, the notes memo was but one small cog in the Hollywood machine known as Development Hell. If you’ve ever been through Development Hell, you’ve experienced countless notes memos, countless disappointing drafts, countless “re-thinks,” and countless months locked in an office, eating yet one more order of take-out chopped salad (hold the salami), while grinding out yet one more idea to try and salvage that which should never have been undertaken in the first place. Under this stress, what eventually happens is that you lose all perspective and start to cobble together ineffective plot ideas that you believe are brilliant. Brilliant, Hell, by the time you get to this point in the process, you probably think that your idea is good enough to solve world hunger.
Development Hell for The Cover Girl Murders lasted for more than two years. It seemed like the movie would never get done, so it was a pleasant surprise when one day, out of nowhere, after yet another draft, I found myself checking in to the production hotel in Mexico to shoot it. (Another aspect of Development Hell, is that a lot of times scripts get ordered to production simply because another script that was going to fill a production slot has slipped due to the damage cause it be Development Hell.)
The production hotel was the Marriott Casa Magna, a beguiling cross between a classic Mayan temple and a Marriott. The ocean breeze wafted through the corridors at all times, filling my head with thoughts of fluffy towels, daiquiris, henna, baby oil, tan lines, white limousines, and dance clubs full of tight sparkly dresses.
Two days before first shot, the cast, director, producers, and studio execs had a night on the town. After filling ourselves on some amazing Mexican food (turns out it’s pretty good in Mexico), we went to a disco, where the cast danced with abandon… while I stood to the side talking to Fawna MacLaren, the 35th Anniversary Playboy Playmate of the Year.
The light show pounded in my head and in my viscera. I was nauseous. Tag Team blasted through the speakers. Sweat beaded on my forehead. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I just wanted to go to bed. I announced that I was heading back to the hotel. Fawna asked if we could share a taxi. Sweat beaded on her forehead too. Tag Team rapped loudly, “Whoomp, There It Is,” as I walked out the door with real-life Playboy centerfold and found a little Nissan taxi.
Now, if you’ve ever been to Puerto Vallarta, you know that the roads there are a little… I think the scientific term is… “bumpy” – sort of like the entire town is built from the rest of the world’s old speed bumps. Those rattling thumps didn’t help, as I was frankly already jumpy about sharing a pitch-dark cab with a Playboy Centerfold doused in Dolce & Gabbana, wearing a sexy summer dress, and donning huge earrings that clacked with each and every unplumbed paving stone. I’ll be the first to admit that I get nervous when I share a Mexican taxi with a Playboy Centerfold on a drive that is loosening my molars with each crack of the cab’s under frame.
Let me be clear however, up to that night, I had never, ever, ever cheated on my fiancée. Since that night, I have never, ever, ever cheated on my fiancée or wife (same person). And on that night I never, ever, ever cheated on my fiancée either, but I must come clean and admit that the… shall we call it the… um… concept of cheating did enter my mind… in a purely holy-crap-this-might-actually-happen kind of way.
Now, the truth was and remains that Fawna was safer with me than she would have been with Mother Teresa… heck she was safer with me than she would have been with Paul Lynde. But still, I found myself imagining Fawna saying things like –
“Have you ever done it in the back of a taxi?”
When in reality she said –
“Does it look like the taxi’s going the right way? It’s really dark out there.”
In my mind she said –
“I’ll have room-service send a bottle of wine and some hot oil to my room.”
She actually said –
“I am exhausted and queasy and this drive isn’t helping.”
As we reached the Marriott Casa Magna, I pulled a wad of pesos from my wallet – miscalculating and giving the driver a 500% tip.
In my mind, Fawna said –
“Would you mind coming up to my room? I need someone to help me out of this dress.”
In reality she said –
“Thanks for getting me back safe. See you at the table read.”
I was both disappointed and relived. The recently engaged part of me was glad that there wouldn’t be anything awkward between Fawna and me, but the douche-bag part of me was upset that my long unfulfilled dream of spending a night with a woman who other men only saw in magazines that they held up in one hand, would remain unattained.
As we were about to go our separate ways, I wondered if I should kiss Fawna on the cheek goodnight or shake her hand? I put out my hand to shake, which brought out a smile on her face and we said goodnight the way too colleagues on any business trip might say goodnight.
Back in my room, I turned on the radio and Mariah serenaded me to sleep with “Dreamlover.”
The next day at the table read. My boss and I kept looking at each other and flinching at the clunky lines and the weak plot twists.
“We have to fix it,” I said after the table read was done. My boss nodded yes, and then said, “After dinner – we’re eating with Bobbie, Vanessa, and some others.”
We tried to find a restaurant by simply walking from the hotel towards what looked like a small commercial area. But as we got closer, the buildings were either under construction or being torn down (I really couldn’t figure out which). We kept going towards the Marina Vallarta, assuming we’d find something there, but it was under construction (or being torn down, again not sure), so we ended up heading back to the hotel, where we were seated at a faux Benihana. After a few bottles of Mexican Saki and a few rolls of Mexican spicy salmon, we were all feeling kind of giddy. I looked at Bobbie and Vanessa and thought, this is kind of like being out to a nice dinner with the high school cheerleaders, or the pretties girls at college – except these women were model beautiful in a way that made me wonder whose life was this that I was living?
Next thing I knew a food fight broke out… Bobbie grabbed a handful of rice and shoved it down the back of my shirt. Oh, I was back in college, hanging with the popular girls, having a food fight, being popular myself. I grabbed some rice and aimed at Bobbie, but a little voice inside my head stopped me, saying – don’t go any further with this or they’ll discover that you don’t belong, that you’re not one of them, that you’re just some shmoe from New jersey. So I put down the rice and just chuckled along with the others as they wrapped up their culinary battle.
Still, during the rest of my time in Mexico I would walk up to Bobbie every once in a while and say, “We still have unsettled business.” She would give me a smile and a quick, “I know. I know it’s coming…”
After dinner, and with the beginnings of a hangover doing the backstroke in my stomach and the butterfly-stroke in my head, my boss and I settled in his room to spend the rest of the night, “fixing the script.” We went through the dialog, line by line, rewriting anything that didn’t sound right. We added humor, coming up with brilliant jokes on the fly, and dropping them in where we thought they would add to the tension. We cut. We pasted. We edited. We added.
Once we were done, I took the marked up script pages down to the front desk and had them faxed to Warner Brother’s Script Typing Service in Burbank. My boss and I congratulated each other on our excellent work and went to bed secure in the knowledge that we had “fixed” the script -- that we had elevated it to the level of one of the lesser Hitchcock classic (like Frenzy or Family Plot).
The following morning, we picked up the fax of our new script pages and had them Xeroxed on yellow paper (there were already blue and pink changes in the script). The first day of shooting began and we watched with unbridled joy as our words came to life. Wild horses pranced like huge squirrels in the woods behind us. Police in a VW protected us. A photographer peeled Bobbie off from the rest of the cast to do a photo-shoot. My boss and I followed, enamored with the idea of coffees and bikinis for breakfast. When we all trudged back to the main set from the shoot, helping Bobbie who had hurt her feet on the rocks, the show’s star, Lee Majors arrived.
My boss and I set up two chairs with Lee (we were the only ones important enough to sit with him, I figured). He told us stories about Hollywood in the 1970s and working with the head of Wilshire Court way back when they were both young. He gave us the inside poop. I looked out at the rest of the cast and crew and thought, we’re the elites here in our little troika. We’re the star and the two studio execs. (Remember, this was my douche period.)

Suddenly, Lee looked at my USA Network baseball cap and snatched it from my head.
“This is mine,” he said. The Six Million Dollar Man stole my hat. He handed me his hat, from Planet Hollywood, where he’d been hanging with his buddies, Willis, Stalone, and Schwarzenegger. My high school friends and I used to snatch each other’s clothes the same way, wearing our buddies’ things as a sign of friendship. Somehow, the hat made me part of the Majors, Willis, Stalone, and Schwarzenegger social circle in my diluted mind (again, this was my douche period).
When Lee walked away I covertly made the noise effect “a-dwa-dwa-dwa-dwa-dwa-dwa,” the way one kid goofs on another kid that he’s pals with.
I was sad to leave my friends when the time came to depart. Later, on the airplane home, my boss and I tried to come up with series ideas we could attach members of the cast on so that we would get to work with them again. The one idea I remember was that Bobbie Phillips would be the daughter of a murdered judge. Driven by revenge, she bought a skip-tracer business, and kept on the old owner because he reminded her of her late dad (we saw Brian Keith in this role). Hey, it could have worked… seriously… it could have.
Back in the states, I was the king of the shit in my mind. The only bone in the burrito was that I was pretty much a complete and total douche bag causing my self-righteous wigging out to get more and more out of control. I had actually convinced myself that having a hair-trigger was the key to my success.
Meanwhile, one day, completely unbeknownst to me, my boss was told by the head of the company that he had to lay off one Director of the three he had working for him. As far as I know, he liked all three of us, but had pretty much pin-pointed one of my colleagues to get the axe (because someone had to). It was at this point in time, prior to him identifying the odd-man out, that in front of the entire department he said to me,
“Go the Women in Film luncheon tomorrow and don’t just get some food and leave. I need a full, detailed report back that lets me know you paid attention and schmoozed.”
I’m not honestly 100% clear why this ticked me off so. I think it may have been that with his interstitial laugh and Beverly Hills High accent, the whole thing came off sounding as if I was his minion, his peon, his serf, something less than him who had to take on the grunt work of going to the beautiful Beverly Hills hotel, having the incredible and expensive lunch, hobnobbing with the elite of the elite, and reporting back.
“I’m not a three-year-old. All you have to do is to tell me where to go,” I responded. Even as the words came flowing out of my mouth, I wasn't certain if I should be angry or not, but I'd committed to arguing and thought I'd look worse if I just stopped, apologized, and agreed to go the fancy hoity-toity event where I'd get to eat a crème brûlée that was out of this world and have face time with network presidents.

My boss was under pressure, knowing he was about to lay off my colleague and something snapped in him too. He screamed back at me that he’s the boss and I’m not to question him.
We got into a shouting match that was just ugly. I was yelling, pounding the couch, and shaking my head in disgust. I threw out invectives, expletives, and pure disdain. When I was through, the man who had quite recently taken me with him to Mexico for coffee and bikinis and palling around with Lee Majors looked like the dog in a Skinner box.
The next day my boss asked me to have drinks with him after work. After the waiter took our order, my boss told me that I was being laid-off.
In that one moment my life went from discothèquing with Playboy centerfolds, food fights with stunning ingénues, and swapping hats with The Six Million Dollar Man to watching CNN loop while I sat on my couch in my apartment. Weeks without a job turned into months without a job turned into a year without a job, all, if you looked at it one way, because I’d picked the wrong day to pick a fight, or if you looked at it the other way, because I was a douche.
One day, after watching CNN loop twice; I walked down to the Venice Pier and stood where the final frames of the movie Falling Down had been filmed. In that scene, Robert Duvall played a police officer trying to get Michael Douglas to surrender. Douglas was a good guy who had wigged out and gone postal.
”Let's meet a couple of police officers. They are all good guys.” Duvall said.
“I'm the bad guy?” Douglas suddenly realized for the first time.
“Yeah.” Duvall told him.
“How did that happen? “ Douglas wondered.
A few nights later, I caught The Cover Girl Murders playing, and I sat down to watch. I listened for the script changes that my boss and I had made and I blanched. We had written some of the worst and dorkiest lines I think I’ve ever put down on paper. We had fixed nothing. We had been two big douches, peeing on someone else’s work.
Oh Hell, we were studio execs. That’s what we were supposed to do.

2011-09-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry - this and all of the other thirty or so older stories are no longer available on line.

They will be part of a new book.

Stories are now posted for sixty days.

Please contact me if you want to see a story from the past again.

2011-08-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry - taking down stories after sixty days now - so that I may include them in the next book.

2011-06-29T17:06:00.001-07:00