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And it was no cheap funeral, guys. Fifty grand minus the folding chairs. Gold casket. Best plot in the place with a partial view of the Universal Stunt Tour on a clear day. Expensive twenty-piece orchestra playing a Gucci dirge. The gathering after was held at the Palm Restaurant and lobsters from Bangor were shrieking all afternoon.

Feiffer hadn’t loved her; he loathed her whiny, finger-paint intellect, even though no other thinking woman would tolerate him. But he still couldn’t stand the idea of another man touching her. Or having touched her.

But as usual he got his revenge.

The devastated new husband, who lovingly nursed Feiffer’s ex through a full-frontal coke solo, had only married her two months before. They’d met at Betty
Ford’s Ping-Pong palace in the Springs and were trying to get her clean together. The guy had been her attendant and trying hard to make a career in medicine. The only thing holding him back was money to pay his tuition. He’d saved for years and was close to getting his start in med school. But for loving the ex-wife of Feiffer he was stuck and had to abandon all plans. And Feiffer, word had it, had hugged the guy at the service after she was in the ground. Hugged him and shared a manly tear.

That was the kind of guy Feiffer took pleasure in being. A toxic calculating prick.

He scared Alan and Alan tried not to show it.

“Well, hope you hate paradise ’cause I’m sending our jet over to kidnap you. We got ourselves a big, fat forty-seven share last night, my friend.”

Alan was silent. It felt like a month passed. Then, clicking into automatic, he said it straight-faced: “That all?”

Feiffer rumbled a bear laugh.

“So … what’s next?” Alan was in a state of shock. Jesus, fucking Christ! He’d passed his celestial law boards. Beat the intergalactic ticket in court. Awakened in the morning to find Kim Basinger next to him, moaning, using his body as a tongue depressor. All three oranges were lining up in the window spelling:
You Are Here.
He could see it all coming. Everything he’d ever wanted. Boats; Italian cars. Helping the hungry. Buying the hungry Italian cars.

He was shaking.

“What’s next, is start thinking about a second season and warm up your laser printer. We’re also discussing a possible feature release in foreign for the pilot.” Feiffer
went on run-silent, run-deep for a few seconds. “Be at my Newport Beach house at nine, day after tomorrow. That okay? No, better, let’s meet at the Polo Lounge. Breakfast.”

“Looking forward to it, Mr. Feiffer.”

“Jack. Please. We’re partners. Let’s get to know each other better, huh?”

Alan said that sounded great, fearing it.

“Have a great flight. We’re going to have one hell of a year.”

They hung up and Alan noticed the girl with the hotel-room-key stare, strolling back again. She smiled at him and he did the same. But coming up behind her was a tall, Nordic, teste totem pole in cutoffs. The Viking swooped her waist with hairy arms and they scampered off, laughing, looking for Valhalla.

Alan went back to the beach and told Erica and she pounded on him with excitement as if trying to save a drowning man. Alan could only shake his head, unbelieving; stunned.

Drowning.

They celebrated by playing in monster waves; looking like drunk salmon trying to get home. Alan heard the Sheraton guy walking down the beach, carrying a remote phone, yelling his name.

He jogged up to the guy and took the remote phone like some primitive would’ve taken a coconut shell thousands of years ago to receive a call.

“Yeah?” He was hoping it was Jordan telling him he’d begun the numerical calculations to determine how many millions Alan would ultimately be worth. And how
he was worthy of all this. Or his father calling from Palm Springs telling him how proud he was.

Maybe Hector, conceding Alan’s talent from his headless ash pile. Or maybe even Laurie from Ithaca swearing she’d always loved him and knew he’d be famous.

But it was Corea.

It was hard to hear him. Alan was sure it was the tropic breezes flowing into the mouthpiece. Or the crashing surf. But it was neither.

“Alan … I just got word from your agent.” The voice was a hoarse whisper.

Alan was amazed at how quickly news traveled in Hollywood. The speed of light would’ve gotten lapped if it tried to survive in L.A.

“Can you believe it?” answered Alan.

There was no answer.

Just the sound of three thousand miles sitting in his ear.

“I said, isn’t it amazing?!” Alan was almost shouting.

The voice was slow, as if sick; weak.

“Alan … thank you for creating me.”

“Hey, thank you for doing such a great job, man …” He didn’t like the way Corea sounded. Was he drunk? Overwrought? Something was really wrong but Alan didn’t know how to bring it up. “You okay?”

Again, silence. Nothing. Maybe the sound of breathing. Maybe just Alan’s imagination.

“… thank you for creating me. Thank you for creating me.” And then he said, “You won’t be sorry.”

Alan felt his stomach tighten. Erica was waving to
him from the meringue surf and Corea kept thanking him for creating him. Saying he wouldn’t be sorry. Thanking him for creating him. Telling him he wouldn’t be sorry. Thanking him for …

Alan suddenly saw Mimi in his mind, holding his hand, warning him. As he waved back to Erica and tried to look happy, he felt his smile losing life, going rigid.

Around him, hang gliders landed like the flying monkeys, in Wizard of Oz, coming to take Dorothy away and Corea’s voice got more faint.

W
hat Hollywood is all about is transformation. People in this town love the whole concept. In less sophisticated places in the world, transformation is called magic.” Feiffer shrugged. “Way I see it, transformation is the more understandable version. Sound like bullshit?”

It was just after eight and the Polo Lounge was filling with agents and studio and network executives who met for breakfast at perfectly set tables. To pull strings, cut strings; wrap them around throats.

At lesser tables, rising producers took pitches from writers who’d driven Jap cars in from the valley, obsessing all the way over Coldwater. Every few tables, lives were bankrupting and hearts clogging as croissants withered and box office performances the previous weekend were examined like colon X rays.

“We are simply and ultimately, aboriginals who use designer tools and swing on slicker vines.”

“Very interesting, Jack.” Alan felt a yawn tunneling out, still half asleep.

“I was a philosophy major.”

“Uh-huh.”

Feiffer was carefully sectioning his grapefruit; a calibrated violence. Alan kept thinking about how the man had ruined people’s lives. Stripped them of dignity and meaning and called it a productive day. Yet here he sat, like Will fucking Durant, discoursing and scooping fruit. A sociopath, figured Alan, as Feiffer bit into a piece of toast, breaking its back, sweeping vertebral remains off the table, with a palm edge.

“Films are about transformation. Let me illustrate.”

Alan tried to concentrate; shed the pajama-head.

Feiffer drew on the tablecloth with a fingertip.

“An idea becomes a concept which in turn becomes a script which in turn becomes a film. A character’s arc within a dramatic structure is nothing more than a description of the form of transformation. The curve of the change, if you will.”

“So, it’s the … form the magic took?” Alan was barely awake, mostly lost.

Feiffer’s jaw worked, thinking that one over, his beard moving as thoughts and food were crushed in his powerful mouth.

“Yes.”

“And in a way,” Alan was getting into it, starting to wake up, “deals are the ushers who bring us in to behold the incantation. To witness the miracle?” Total bullshit.

Feiffer nodded. “To enable us to believe.”

The two continued to eat and Alan began to wonder if Feiffer had been misconstrued; guillotined and mythologized. He seemed to have a need to talk. To extend. There was a seismic charm about him. Like Idi Amin with a liberal arts degree.

Feiffer took a fast call the waiter brought. Listened. Said yes, once. No, five times. Hung up. Had the phone removed like a slain animal. Resumed his thoughts.

“Of course, the business has gotten such a bad name.” Feiffer sipped coffee.

“So much has changed since I started. Now it’s all about these damn Siamese-twin profits. The studios get together with the big agencies and make one bomb after another. And the stars are their plutonium.” He gestured, discreetly. “Look around this room: Tong Wars at every table. Programming emperors and agency mikados breaking bread. So desperate.”

He nodded to various tables; the chic gloom of the dining room. Bleeding bodies lurked behind sunny smiles. Several of the majors had cooked their war chests on action blockbusters targeted for summer and found they had an hour and a half of dick, with a soundtrack that might spurt one top-ten cut.

Garbage movies, with ten-million-dollar box office, in full release, put everybody except the competition in a bad mood. It brought out the worst in people when major players in town were losing money. Nobody wanted to take chances when the box-office flu hit.

Feiffer smiled and Alan wondered what was really on his mind. This breakfast was starting to feel like a
complex version of the dancing bears from Russia; all show and distraction. The man was too busy and too important to be sitting here giving book reports.

“ ’Course things have become so punitive … so Sicilian. Your film or show does badly, you become one of the walking dead. Nothing happens to you anymore.” He nodded at the roomful of voltage bullys. “No one calls except friends who call your machine, calculating exactly when you’ll be out, to say hi … the conversational equivalent of leaving black roses on your grave.”

Alan glanced up. Feiffer was looking right at him; into him.

“But they never actually call when you’re in, for fear of making actual contact and resuming a relationship with a plague statistic.” He smiled, emptily. “You want sentimentality, go to a Manilow concert. You smell flowers, look around for a coffin.”

Alan finally got it.

Why Feiffer was sitting here. Why he’d brought his troubling inventory of deductions and inverted meanings. Why he wasn’t talking about the show. Why he was so determined to make Alan feel the blood supply had been endangered and the horizon was crooked.

It was one more warning.

He knew that if the show didn’t continue to do well, he would be shaken off the Etch-A-Sketch; a momentary life-form. And if the press and public crucified it, Alan would take the heat.

But it was actually worse than that.

“We do need to talk about one thing … just the network looking out for all of us. We’re going ahead with this series, full order. But with one conditional thing.
Minor technicality. If FCC doesn’t appreciate what we’re doing and takes this into any kind of litigation—which it won’t, I can promise you—we can’t indemnify you. It could become prohibitive. Any problem with that?”

Alan thought it over. They both agreed things would never come to that and if they did, Alan would be rich anyway, and they laughed, pretending it was a darkly hip subject. Alan agreed to it and Feiffer said he’d have his legal people draw up papers and for Alan’s people to take a look.

But without the agreement, Feiffer emphasized the show couldn’t go forward with Alan as executive producer. Not given the controversial nature of what they were about to do. Alan nodded, sipping French roast.

“Good,” said Feiffer. “We’ll be fine. I wanted to bring it up with you myself, not let some lawyer scare you. They’re all a tribe of fucking ‘sue-warriors.’ “He grinned and it made him look ominous. “Besides, FCC has better things to do than make an enemy of me.”

He touched Alan’s arm, trying to make it feel like they were friends. “Anyway, I always get ponderous and boring in the morning. We’re here to talk about what a genius you are and how you’re going to save the network.”

No, we’re not, thought Alan. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here for you to deliver a death threat.

I
t was four
A.M
. when Alan first heard the Mercenary’s voice.

He’d been writing the fourth episode and dozed off after describing a sequence in which Barek was in Saigon, in bed with a twenty-year-old Cambodian dancer. As written, the camera would see her breasts and pubic hair and hear her screaming orgasm as they fucked. Her climaxing face and clawing nails would be quickly intercut with the bloodied, screaming face of the Laotian pimp she worked for as Barek beat him to death in a savage fist fight. Back and forth it would go, between orgasm and death. Agony and delirium.

It wasn’t “McGyver.”

“Alan. Wake-up!” It was Barek, frantically whispering.

Alan’s eyes slowly opened and he could hear Malibu
crashing, Bart snoring. He listened. Heard Barek, again. But not in the house. In his mind. Talking to him, as if from ten feet away.

“You
have to
stay awake. You have work to do. I know you think you’re dreaming this. I know you think you made me up. But I
fucking
exist. I was in the Army in Nam. I had a cover in the CIA. Alan … I want this show to succeed.”

His brain was bullshitting him and he ignored it, closing eyes, again.

Barek’s voice shook him awake.

“Alan!
Don’t
fall asleep! I’ve got ideas to help this script! You have to stay awake and listen to me! You have to stay awake and keep writing,
goddamnit!
Make more coffee! And do what I fucking tell you!”

Alan finally put on sweatpants and a T-shirt and stumbled to the kitchen. Began to grind beans. His eyes widened at deafening caffeine-munch. He yawned, slicked hair back with palms wetted under kitchen faucet. Smiled, amazed by the creative process. He’d had conversations before, in his dreams, with characters from various series he’d written for. Now and then, they’d spoken. Weird little chats with the subconscious that made the scripts feel like they were writing themselves weren’t uncommon.