Selling Out (36 page)

Broke was all right after all. Money was funny. Perry was glad. Nothing was bad.

“Hey, I'm high!” he declared.

“Hi ho, hi ho,” Ronnie sang, “'tis off to glad we go …”

Down again. What goes up comes down. Law of nature. Law of supply and demand. Whatever happened to Ayn Rand? There is no brandy handy. Have no fear, there's always beer. No good, but better with grass. Ronnie rolls a joint, passes to Perry. He tries, but only coughs. Damn. Dim. The outlook is dim, grim. Grimy. Dustballs growing in the corners. Ought to get out of here. Relax. Nothing to fear. Nothing to fear but fact. Fact is you're broke. No joke. Walls of the world closing in. Head in a spin. Tailspin. Failspin. Fact: fucked.

Perry woke to the smell of old socks and stale beer. A pain was in his neck, a pounding in his head. He'd spent the night on Ronnie's couch. Now it was day, you could tell by the glare behind the dusty drawn slats of Venetian blinds. Perry rose, staggering, walking on nails to the kitchenette, and opened the refrigerator. Beer. Mustard. A glass jar of dill pickles. Moldy piece of cheese. He sniffed a half-empty carton of milk and put it back, then leaned against the wall, seeing black. He blinked and went to the sink, ran some water in his cupped hands and splashed it at his mouth. He stumbled back to the couch.

He woke again later to sizzling sounds. Was he being electrocuted? Was the house about to explode? Like his head? None of the above. Ronnie was frying bacon. Making coffee, feeding it to Perry black. Trying to bring him back. Perry remembered he was broke, his car was miles away over mountains in the parking lot of La Traviata, his wife was on the other side of the country in a house that used to be his, too, in Haviland, Vermont. He pulled a pillow over his head and tried to blank out his mind, but the sizzling sound persisted. Hell.

The rain came. It was unrelenting, unceasing, day after day, for nearly three weeks. It was nothing to be concerned about, Ronnie assured Perry, it happened like this every year around January. It did not fall in scattered showers and storms that occurred throughout the year, like rain in the East, rain that lasted a day and night or at most a couple of days before the sun returned and the world was given a chance to dry out. This rain came in one dramatic, overpowering rush that overwhelmed the senses, leaving the mind as well as the body feeling drenched.

The rain filled up the streets and overflowed the swimming pools. The rain came down the hills and into the canyons, blocking roads with torrents and mudslides. The rain got under the hoods of cars and into the crevices of houses, dampening everything. The rain got into your soul. It never let up. It kept beating down.

Perry stepped in a puddle and suddenly realized that in Vermont at this time of year, the rain of course would have turned to snow. What a miracle! What a fabulous, brilliant conception it was to have the hard drops of water transformed into soft, lovely, intricately beautiful flakes of snow, snow that caressed and silently covered the earth with a clean blanket. Perry could suddenly see it, that winter world he had always known and taken for granted, covered with snow like a blessing. The vision of it was so intense it made him close his eyes, and when he blinked them open again he could feel tears. Hell. He was homesick, like a little kid.

He went back to his condo and got into bed and hid under the covers, trying not to think of where he was, and where he might have been. He got up after dark and had a big tumbler of a hearty Napa Valley Zinfandel. He needed to get a little buzz on to take his mind off the rain. And thoughts of Jane.

“Urgent.”

That was the last message left by Ravenna with his service. The two before had just said to call her, the last one said
urgent
. It was almost three in the afternoon when Perry got back to his condo from another night of carousing with Ronnie that ended up with his passing out on his buddy's couch again. It was getting to be a habit. He had hoped to just sink into his own bed and “General Hospital” while sipping some Pepto Bismol and munching on a bag of nachos. When he really wanted to hear an “All clear” from his answering service he got an “Urgent.” Of course he had to return the call, even though his head was splitting.

“Darling, you've only got two hours!” Ravenna practically shrieked.

To live?

“Two hours to what?” Perry asked, using all his powers of concentration to frame the question.

“To get to Larman Kling's office.”

“Who's he?”

“
Sweetheart
. Larman Kling did
Planet Zero
, and his latest is
Schtick
, which happens to be outgrossing everything this week at the box office. He's hot right now.”

No wonder the urgency. No wonder Perry had to get to this guy's office by five o'clock. He was hot
right now
. By nightfall he might be cold again. The only question was why anyone who was hot was interested in seeing
him
.

“What's it about?” Perry asked suspiciously.

“A project he thinks is ideal for
you!
He was gaga about ‘First Year.' Went bananas when I told him I represented you.”

“What's the project?”

“Darling, go find out! And hurry, I don't want you turning up a minute late to this meeting and you've got to get to Century City.
Ciao
.”

Perry hung up the phone and started taking off his clothes, dropping them on the floor, leaving a trail as he headed for the shower. He switched on the cold water and made the mistake then of going to take a look at himself in the mirror.

He was old.

Maybe the shower would make him new. That and a handful of aspirins were his principal hope.

Larman Kling was not like the cool, sophisticated brand of independent producer whom Perry had so much admired in his initial round of meetings. Nor was he one of the meatball-chomping Neanderthal types. In fact he was not like anyone or anything Perry had encountered before, in Hollywood or elsewhere.

“Sha-
boom
, sha-
boom
, sha-
boom
, sha-
boom
,” Kling chanted as he clapped his hands in rhythm to his words while he stalked (frenetically) back and forth through his office.

“It's the
pace
, the
pace
, the
pace;
that's the key to this story,” Kling explained, rubbing his scalp with his knuckles so hard it made him squint. Perhaps that was the source of some interior electric body current that caused his reddish hair to frizz out as that of a cartoon character who has just stuck his finger in a live socket. He was wearing basketball shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt with a large red bug stenciled on it that served as the symbol of one of his hit horror movies. He suddenly wheeled and pointed a finger at Perry.

“Can you get it? Can you hear it? Can you
do
it?”

“The story, you mean?” Perry asked.

“The pace!”

“Well, I think so, sure.”

“Let's
hear
it, then!”

He beckoned to Perry, motioning his head as if trying to coax the right answer out of a thickheaded student.

“Sha-boom?” Perry said, hesitantly.

“Let's hear it!”

Perry cleared his throat.

“Sha-
boom
, sha-
boom
, sha-
boom
, sha-
boom
,” he chanted, as Larman cocked an ear and listened, tapping his foot and nodding. Soon he began to smile and join in, pacing and clapping and chanting his “sha-booms” along with Perry's, stepping over and around the water beds and mattresses that composed the only furniture of his spacious office. The place looked like a wholesale bedding showroom, but instead of being located in an old warehouse, it was here in this long glass-walled penthouse at the top of one of the towering futuristic office buildings of Century City, on, appropriately enough, the Avenue of the Stars.

Perry's head was still pounding from his excesses of the night before; fighting the effects of booze and cocaine with aspirins was like trying to defend against ICBMs with blasts from a BB gun. Each “sha-boom” he uttered was like a nail driven into his brain; still, he pressed on, wanting to please the eccentric producer, wanting to have a shot at the job. He didn't even know what the story was yet, only what the “pace” was supposed to be, yet that was not the most important factor.

The most important factor was that Perry was broke. This assignment, if he got it, could save the day. The going rate for a feature was a hundred grand. That would bail him out and give him enough to get through the next six months, after taxes—at least he hoped so, he wasn't sure any more. At any rate it was the best hope he had of saving his dire financial situation. Of course, he still had his integrity, and he wasn't going to take on the job if it was something about giant bugs terrorizing a small town in Oklahoma. He knew it was no such thing, of course, or Kling would never have sought him out for the work. Perry was known as a “people writer,” that is, a writer who only did stories about ordinary, law-abiding citizens, plagued by the familiar problems of daily life in the 1980s, rather than by invasions from outer space, or the Brontosaurus That Ate the Bronx.

Thankfully, Kling stopped chanting, nodded his approval, began scratching his head again, and, locking his hands behind his back, began to pace the room while he recounted the plot of the movie he wanted to make. He reminded Perry of Harpo Marx with a voice.

“The power is the power is the power,” he said, launching into his story. Kling seemed to suffer from some sort of compulsion to repeat almost everything he said at least three times, a practice that, instead of making things more clear, made them incredibly more difficult to follow. As best Perry could tell, the story was about an ordinary American family who discovers its seemingly ordinary pet possesses psychic powers, and, when the six-year-old son teams to interpret the dog's insights, discovers that the next-door neighbors are part of an international narcotics ring. The story was an original idea of Kling himself, and he had already commissioned a script by a veteran Hollywood screenwriter, but was disappointed. In other words, this potential job was a rewrite.

“I don't even know if I can rewrite someone else's material,” Perry said.

“The point, the point, the point,” said Kling, wagging his head with enthusiasm, “is I don't want a literal rewrite, I want you to read this script and then put it out of your mind, throw it away, stow it, shove it, and create your own powerful interpretation of the story.”

“I've never done anything on that—uh, well, on psychic subjects,” Perry said. “Why would you ask me to try? I mean, I appreciate it, but I would think you'd prefer someone who knows the genre.”

“You're fresh, fresh, fresh, so fresh!” said Kling. “That's what I want, the fresh I saw in your TV show, and out of that will come the power.”

“Well, I'll certainly think it over,” Perry said.

Kling pressed a copy of the script on him, and then, evidently exhausted, went to lie down on a mattress in a corner of the room. Perry took that as his cue and left, hurrying out to the first bar he spotted in the big Century City complex.

After he had a Mexican beer he called Ravenna.

“Not only is the story crazy,” Perry complained, “this Larman Kling is some kind of madman. I mean, I'm talking
goofball
.”

“Darling,” Ravenna said, “he gets pictures made. Now read the script and think it over. If you do this, it will not only solve your cash flow problem, it will mean you've broken into features.”

It was true. It didn't matter if you wrote a script of the worst movie ever made, it only counted that you'd written a feature that got produced, released, and distributed. Perry had found out that this was the secret of Cyril Heathrow's success. He had once had one script produced, and since then was consistently paid sums in the $250,000 range for turning out other scripts, even though no others had been filmed.

With all these practical matters in mind, Perry read the script that night, as he gulped down some wine. Given the basic idea, it did not seem all that bad. He called Kling the next morning and asked him what he thought was missing from it.

“The magic, the magic, the magic!”. the intense producer exclaimed.

Perry promised to think about it further.

What was to think about?

A man who had $4,000 in cash and a $3,000-plus a month mortgage that was part of a monthly nut of $10,000 (which meant you had to make twice that to have it after taxes) was being offered an opportunity to make $100,000 without breaking the law, and in the process, advance his career.

So what was the problem?

Perry stoked up his pipe and settled back on the couch to face his decision honestly. He admitted to himself what was bothering him about this seemingly golden opportunity. Oh, of course he had known it all along but it was too worrisome, too confusing—and at the same time too childishly simple—to deal with head-on, and so he had kept pushing it back.

The truth was that a year ago—hell, even a week ago, before he knew he was broke—he would have laughed scornfully at any suggestion that he might even remotely consider doing a rewrite of a script about a family whose dog possessed psychic powers.

Are you
serious?

Yet here was the virtuous writer himself, thinking over the offer, for no other reason than desperately needing the money.

There was a term for that.

It was called “selling out.”

It was against all the values and dreams that Perry had grown up with, a mockery of the lofty ideals of his literary heroes.

Hey—can you picture Henry James being in the same room with Larman Kling, much less considering doing a rewrite for him? Surely not even Scott Fitzgerald, in the depths of his own dark night of the soul in Hollywood, took on assignments whose plots revolved around psychic pets!