Agent to the Stars (12 page)

Read Agent to the Stars Online

Authors: John Scalzi

BOOK: Agent to the Stars
6.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Well, if
Baywatch
did it, so can you,” I said.
“Ours is different than the
Baywatch
cologne. It's made with real human pheromones.”
“You're kidding,” I said.
“No, man, really.” Elliot reached up into an overhead compartment, grabbed a sample-sized cologne bottle, and handed it to me. “They're actually
my
pheromones, too.”
I unscrewed the top and took a whiff . It smelled like I expected Joshua would smell if he were left out in the sun too long. “Powerful,” I said. “How did they get your pheromones, if you don't mind me asking?”
“They put me on a treadmill and then collected my sweat,” Elliot said.
“Sounds delightful,” I said.
Elliot shrugged. “It wasn't so bad. They let me watch movies while I exercised. Listen, I think we should see other people.”
“What?” I said.
“I think we should see other people,” Elliot said.
“Elliot, we're not going steady,” I said, putting the top on the
cologne and placing it on the near table. “Shucks, we've never even dated.”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “I've been thinking a lot about my future recently, and I sort of want to explore my options. See what else is out there. Tom, you know there's a lot of wild rumors going around about you at the moment.”
“Great,” I said, flopping into a chair. “The one week everyone reads
The Biz
is the week I'm on the cover.”
“The Biz?”
Elliot said.
“Yes, Elliot,” I said. “You remember, the place where you read all those wild rumors.”
“I didn't read anything about it,” Elliot said. “I heard about most of it from Ben.”
I sat up. “Who?”
“Ben,” Elliot said.
“Ben
Fleck
?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Elliot said. “You know him?”
“I can't believe this,” I said. “I've been cherry-picked by Ben Fleck.”
“He said that you've cracked up lately,” Elliot said. “That you've been handing all your clients to other agents because of the stress. So I figured, if you're doing that anyway, might as well at least stay in the same company, where they know me.”
“Elliot,” I said. “I'm not cracking up. I'm fine. And I still want to be your agent. Look where you are now, Elliot. You're doing pretty well for yourself. Which means that
I
did pretty well for you. You don't just chuck that away because Ben Fleck calls you up and tells you I'm cracking up. You don't even
know
Ben, Elliot. He's an incompetent agent. Trust me on this one.”
“Yeah,” Elliot shrugged again. “Well, he says that he can get me into film, that I'm ready for the big film roles.”
“Of course he would say that, Elliot. He knows that's what you want. That's what everybody wants.”
“Well, what do you think? You think I'm ready for film roles?”
“Sure, some,” I said, conveniently ignoring my previous plan to keep him strictly on television for the next season. “But you still need to build your base. You remember what I told you about David Caruso. Jumped out of TV too soon. He had two flops and then it was ten years before
CSI Miami
.”
“Uh-huh,” Elliot said. “Look, Tom. I know you don't think I'm a rocket scientist, but I'm not totally dumb. I'm thirty-two years old. I'm only making $50,000 an episode. I've got another four seasons on my contract. Where does that leave me?”
“With five million dollars?” I said.
“I can make that off of
one
movie, man,” Elliot said. “Thirty-two is prime time in the movie business. I've got to strike now. Ben's ready to back me up on this, and I think I ought to take him up on that. You're right, it
is
what I want. I'm sorry, Tom.”
There was a knock on the door. “We're ready, Elliot,” Don said, through the door. “Put down that Mensa test and get on the set.”
“Elliot,” I said. “Think about this, all right? Don't decide anything right now.”
“I got to go,” Elliot said. “No hard feelings, Tom? It's just business.”
It was my turn to shrug. I could see where this was going. “Sure, Elliot. No problem.”
“Great,” he said, and opened the door. “You know, you can keep that bottle of cologne.”
“Thanks,” I said. He smiled, closed the door behind him. I
picked up the bottle of cologne and stared at it for a minute before I threw it against the far wall of the trailer. It shattered quite nicely.
 
Ben's
administrative assistant, Monica, beamed at me prettily as I strode up.
“Hi, Monica,” I said. “Ben wouldn't happen to be in at the moment, would he?”
“He is, but he's with a prospective client.”
“Really,” I said. “Anyone I know?”
“Do you know any Playmates on a personal basis?” Monica asked.
“Afraid not,” I said.
“Then you don't know her,” Monica said.
“I'll learn to get past the disappointment,” I said.
“That's the spirit,” Monica said. “You want me to tell him you dropped by?”
“That's all right,” I said. “This will just take a minute.” I stepped past her desk and walked into Ben's office.
Ben was sitting at his desk with the aforementioned Playmate in the guest chair. He smiled expansively at me. “Tom,” he said. “What a surprise. Have you met Leigh? She's a Playmate.”
“Not yet,” Leigh piped. “Not until November.”
“Something for us boys to look forward too, then,” Ben said.
“Hello, Leigh,” I said, shaking her hand. “It's a pleasure to meet you. Excuse me for just one second, please.” I turned, leaned over the desk, and sucker-punched Ben in the nose. I turned back to Leigh, who sat, stunned, watching as Ben yodeled in pain at his desk, holding his bleeding nose in his splayed fingers. I sat on the edge of Ben's desk and smiled winningly.
“So,” I said. “Found an agent?”
Leigh ran screaming from the room. I turned back to Ben. He had fingers jammed into his nostrils to staunch the bleeding.
“You fucker,” he said. “You broke my fucking nose!”
“You cherry-picked Elliot Young from me, Ben. I don't appreciate that very much. I also don't appreciate what you said about me in
The Biz.
Those were hurtful words. I was bothered. Since you don't have any clients I want, and I'm not planning to talk to the press, I had to do something to even up our ledgers. I think we're about even now, don't you?”
“You're totally fucking insane,” Ben said. “Enjoy your last day as an agent, you asshole.”
“Ben, let me make this clear to you,” I said. “If you ever stick your nose in my business again, I'm going to work you over with a sledgehammer. I don't mean that figuratively. I literally mean that I will walk into this office, lock the door behind me, pull out a sledgehammer and work on you until your bones resemble gravel. Are we clear?”
“You're out of your fucking mind, Tom,” Ben said.
“Ben, are we clear?”
“Yes,” Ben glared at me through the beginnings of bruises. “Yes, we're fucking clear, already. Get out of my fucking office, Tom. Just get out.”
I walked to the door. A crowd was waiting on the other side. I stared at them.
“Congratulate Ben,” I said. “He's the proud father of a bouncing baby nosebleed.”
Ben started screaming for Monica. I walked the short distance to my office.
Miranda followed me in. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I am in
so
much pain. I think I broke a finger.”
Miranda slipped her notepad under her arm. “Let me see,” she said. She reached over. I gave her my hand. She palpated my middle finger.
“Ouch,” I said.
“It's not broken,” Miranda said. “It's not even sprained. But you clearly don't know how to throw a punch.”
“I'll do better next time,” I said.
Miranda pinched down hard on my finger. I screamed.
“Don't you
ever
do something like that again,” she said, “or I'll kill you myself. I like my job, and I'm not going to have you risk it just because you're my boss. Got it?”
“Yes!” I said. “Let go.” She did.
“Now,” she said, pulling her notepad back out. “Messages. Jim Van Doren called.”
“The hell you say,” I said.
“No lie,” she said. “He says he's working on another story and wanted to see if you wanted to comment this time.”
“I can't comment,” I said. “I already promised you I wouldn't punch anyone else.”
“That's my boss,” Miranda said. “Amanda called. She says she wanted you to know she made Tea ‘grovel like the she-dog she is' for the part in the Will Ferrell film. Says that she and Tea have come to an understanding and that she doesn't expect too many more problems.”
“And here you thought you were going to have to do a lot of hand-holding,” I said.
“No kidding,” Miranda said. “I think we created a monster. Carl called. He wants to know if you're available for lunch tomorrow.”
“This is a question?” I asked.
“That's what I thought you might say,” Miranda said, “so I told him you'd be free at 12:30. Meet him at his office.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Last message,” Miranda said. “Someone I've never heard of, but says he knows you. Didn't leave his last name.”
“Joshua?”
“That's him,” Miranda said. “Sort of cryptic message. Said you'd understand.”
“What is it?”
“He said, ‘Something happened. I'll be late.'”
Carl
leaned on the railing of the Santa Monica Pier, happily munching on a corn dog. I had a corn dog of my own, but I was somewhat more somber. I was figuring out how I was going to tell my boss that the alien he had entrusted to my care had mysteriously disappeared into the Angeles National Forest.
The good news was that Joshua
did
take one of the cell phones with him; it was from that phone that he had called my office and left the message. The bad news was that after leaving the message he wasn't answering the phone. As soon as I got his message, I began calling his phone at five-minute intervals until I got home. There was no answer.
When I got home, I changed into sweats, a T-shirt, and my long-neglected hiking boots, and hauled my carcass out of the backyard. Between a fifteen-year-old dog and pile of goo, I
figured the chances were slim that the two of them had gotten very far. I picked the direction that I figured they might go in and went thataway.
When I was thirteen, I knew every tree, every slope, every large rock in the woods out back of my house. Every once in a while, I'd drop a book, several candy bars, and a couple of Cokes in a backpack, leave a note for the parents, and head into the hills. I'd come back several hours later in pitch darkness, unconcerned that I might get lost or misdirected. This was Los Angeles, after all; just point yourself in the direction of the lights, and ten minutes later you're on one suburban street or another. More to the point, however, was the fact that I knew my way around—it was as unthinkable for me to get lost in those woods as it was for me to get lost in my own backyard.
In the fifteen years between my thirteen-year-old self and my current one, someone went into the woods and switched the trees and rocks around. Five minutes in, I was utterly lost.
Three hours later, scratched, bruised, and limping from where I jammed my foot into a rabbit hole, twisting my ankle, I resurfaced from the Angeles National Forest miles from where I had entered. I would have been completely disoriented if I hadn't had the luck to emerge from the brush two hundred yards from my high school; as it was it took me nearly another hour to get home because of my ankle.
Later, as I soaked in the tub, I formulated a plan: when Joshua came home, I would discover if it were possible to strangle protoplasm. It was a good plan, and I congratulated myself for coming up with it on my own.
Joshua, however, stayed one step ahead. He simply didn't reappear.
At 2 a.m., I gave up and headed to bed. The rational portion of my mind figured that a creature that had crossed trillions of miles of hard vacuum would be able to keep himself alive for a night in the suburban woods above Los Angeles. The crazy little man in my head, however, was convinced that Joshua had already been eaten by the coyotes. I briefly considered trying to get my cellular company to triangulate the phone's position, but I suspected that the phone had to be receiving for that. There was the other small matter of Joshua being an extraterrestrial; it would be hard to explain to search teams what my phone was doing immersed in a puddle of sentient mucus. The best I could do was leave the patio door unlocked and hope Joshua and Ralph made it home.
I got to sleep at six. Neither Joshua nor Ralph had made an appearance. When I finally left the house at eleven for my lunch with Carl, the two of them were still missing.
The one space alien on the entire planet, and I had managed to lose him. I was fired for sure.
“God,” Carl said, holding his half-eaten corn dog in front of him. “I love corn dogs. Who would have thought that hog snouts could taste so good if you just rolled them into a tube, shot them up with nitrates and breaded them in corn paste? But there it is. How old are you, Tom?”
“I'm twenty-eight,” I said.
“When I was in my twenties, Tom, I'd come out here with Susan, my first wife, and we'd get a couple of corn dogs and then we'd walk to the end of the pier and watch the sunset. This was in the late seventies, when the smog was so bad breathing the air constituted a health hazard.”
“I remember the bad smog,” I said. “I got out of a lot of P.E.
classes that way. We had to stay inside and watch filmstrips. I learned all about the California missions that way.”
“I don't really miss all the smog, mind you,” Carl said, staring off . “But they made for some beautiful sunsets. The late seventies were a horrible period in the history of the universe, Tom—you had stagflation, the American hostages in Iran, and some terrible, terrible apparel. And smog. But the sunsets weren't so bad. It doesn't make up for anything, but it goes to show not everything can be bad all at once.”
“I didn't know you had been married more than once,” I said. “I had thought Elise was your first wife.” Carl's wife Elise was the scariest person you'd ever want to meet—a terrifyingly intelligent trial lawyer who also had a doctorate in psychology. She was thinking of running for Los Angeles District Attorney. From there it would be a short hop to mayor. Between the two of them, Carl and Elise would be running southern California within the decade.
Carl glanced over. “Elise is my second wife. Susan died in '81. Car accident; some drunk idiot came up the wrong way on an on-ramp and plowed right into her car. They both died instantly. Pregnant at the time, you know.”
“I'm terribly sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean to bring up any painful memories.”
Carl waved it off. “No reason you should know. I never talk about it and no one ever talks about it around me. One of the advantages of being the sort of boss that scares the hell out of the subordinates. Susan was a wonderful woman—but so is Elise. I've been very lucky.”
“Yes, sir.” We ate our corn dogs in silence.
“Come on,” Carl said, after he had finished his dog. “I haven't
walked on the beach for weeks. We can chat while we walk.” We walked off the pier, stopped off at Carl's car to drop off our shoes and socks, and then walked into the sand towards the surf.
“So,” he said, when we walked to the water. “How is Joshua doing?”
I swallowed and saw my career flash before my eyes. “He's missing at the moment, Carl,” I said.
“Missing? Explain.”
“He and Ralph—my neighbor's dog—went out for a walk in the woods yesterday, while I was off seeing Elliot Young. When I got back into the office, Miranda had a message from him, saying that something had happened, and that he'd be late. That's the last I've heard of him. I went looking for him last night, but I didn't find him. I stayed up until six this morning, and he hadn't returned.”
“Where would he go?” Carl said. “He's not exactly inconspicuous.”
“The Angeles National Forest starts more or less in my backyard,” I said. “They went into the woods.”
If I were Carl, this would have been the point where I would have fired me. Instead, Carl changed the subject. “I hear you flattened Ben Fleck's nose yesterday.”
“I did,” I admitted. “He pinched Elliot Young off of me. He's also the ‘Lupo Associates insider' in that damned story in
The Biz.
Punching him seemed the only alternative to breaking his neck. Although I'm feeling guilty about it now. I think I may have broken his nose.”
“It's not broken,” Carl said. “We had some X-rays done at Cedars Sinai. It's merely ‘severely bruised.'”
“Well, that's good,” I said. “I mean, relatively speaking.”
“It is,” Carl agreed. “Be that as it may, Tom, I would prefer
in the future that you find some less dramatic way to resolve your issues with Ben. Ben may have been asking for it, but that sort of thing isn't very good for company morale. Also, all things considered, it's drawing unwanted attention to you at the moment.”
Carl was referring to the blurb in the
Times'
movie industry column—one of the office spectators had leaked to the paper, and the paper did the legwork and found out that Ben had snaked one of my clients. It also mentioned the article in
The Biz
as a contributing factor, giving the article credence in the process. For even more fun, the
Times
had called my office this morning as well, looking for a comment on
The Biz
and its editorial practices. It felt like the media had pried up a floorboard looking for a bug, and that bug was me. I just wanted to fade back into the darkness.
I laughed. Carl look at me oddly. “What's so funny?” he asked.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking about it. This week I was ditched by two of my clients, was labeled insane by a magazine, assaulted a colleague, and let an alien walk off into the woods, where he's probably been eaten by a coyote. I'm trying to imagine how this week can get any worse. I don't think it can.”
“We could have an earthquake,” Carl said.
“An earthquake would be wonderful,” I said. “It would give everyone else something to think about. A nice big one, seven or eight on the Richter scale. Major structural damage. That'd work.”
Carl stood there a moment, seemingly preoccupied. I followed his line of sight down to his toes. He was busily squelching sand through them. After a few seconds of this, he stepped out of his footprints and let the tide wash into them, partially erasing them. Then he put his feet back into them.
“Tom,” Carl said. “Don't worry too much about Joshua at the moment. He'll be fine. The Yherajk are pretty much indestructible by our standards, and I doubt that the coyotes or whatever are going to get a bite out of him. Joshua can make a skunk seem like a bed of roses. He and … Ralph?”—He looked for confirmation; I nodded—“are probably just roughing it or something. You didn't tell me that he had made friends with a dog.”
“They get along great,” I said. “They're the solution to each other's boredom. I think Joshua likes Ralph better than he likes me.”
“Well, that's good news, at the very least. Anyway, I expect Joshua will be back soon enough. Try to relax a bit.”
I snorted just a little. “Now if I could just get
The Biz
off my back, I'd be set.”
“Some of that's been taken care of,” Carl said. “The
Times
is doing a story on
The Biz,
you know.”
“They called me this morning,” I admitted, “I've been sort of dreading calling them back.”
“I've already talked to them,” Carl said. “Gave them a nice long chat about how
The Biz
took our company's innovative mentoring policy and made it look like you were having a nervous breakdown. I said that if you were having a nervous breakdown, then I and several of the senior agents were also having them, since we've also started mentoring some of our newer agents.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You didn't have to do that.”
“Actually, I did,” Carl said. “It keeps the bad press to a minimum. I'm not blaming you about it—this Van Doren character was already working on something, and you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with him. Anyway, the mentoring idea is not a bad one; we've been a sink-or-swim
agency long enough. It might do some good to do things the other way for a while.”
“I'm surprised you found out about it,” I said.
“I asked Miranda,” Carl said. “She seems to think highly of it and you.”
“I think highly of her as well,” I said. “Actually, I'm hoping to get her a raise.”
“Give her a ten percent hike,” Carl said, “but tell her to keep quiet about it. We've been cracking down on raises recently. But I figure she deserves it, or will by the time this whole thing is through. Which reminds me, since you thought of the mentoring program, you've won our Annual Innovation in Agenting Award. Congratulations.”
“That's great,” I said. “I've never heard of this award before.”
“It's the first annual,” Carl said. “Don't get too excited. I've already told the
Times
you've donated the cash award to the City of Hope.”
“That was very nice of me,” I said.
“It was,” Carl agreed. “The point of all this is that now, rather than being looked upon as someone who is cracking up, which is interesting and creates press, you look like someone whose eye is on the ball and whose heart is in the right place, which is boring and no one gives a damn about.
The Biz,
properly, looks like a rag filled with poor reporting. And Ben Fleck looks to have gotten his. Everything works out.”
“Wow,” I said. “I thought I was fired for sure.”
“Well, I'll be honest with you, Tom,” Carl said. “It's not exactly the way I wanted it. We've cleared most of these distractions away this time. Now do me the favor of not requiring me to pull another
deus ex machina.
I don't really like it, and it brings more attention to us than I want. Fair enough?”

Other books

Every Last Cuckoo by Kate Maloy
Viking Passion by Speer, Flora
The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick
Kathryn Smith by In The Night
Rebel by Francine Pascal