The Bones (15 page)

"What do you think Jonathan makes?"

"I don't know. A hundred, a hundred and twenty-five, maybe," he says, placing them in the heart of the new Los Angeles middle
class where the numbers sound large but bill paying is an E-ticket ride. Stacy always liked to talk about other people's money
and often asked Lloyd what he thought this person or that one earned.

"And she can't stop remodeling that crappy little house."

"That's what they can afford."

"Jonathan's maxed out on his salary, right? How much can you make as an accountant?"

"I have no idea and to be honest, I don't really care."

Stacy thinks about this a moment, trying to answer her own question, then looks over at Lloyd. "Do you think they're losers?"

"They're
your
friends."

"I know. But they're from where we've been, you know? Not where we're going."

They ride in silence for a few moments, before Lloyd, not taking his eyes off the road, asks, "What would you think if I wrote
a book?" With this non sequitur Stacy looks at him as if he had just asked what she thought of the Molotov-von Ribbentrop
Pact, her eyes saying,
What could this possibly have to do with anything in our lives?
But he is her husband so this is simply a spousal peculiarity she will have to put up with, like an interest in model trains
or orchid growing.

"I think it's fine. What would you do, like a Michael Crichton thing?"

"I was thinking about something more literary."

"He makes more money than God."

"Yes, he does," Lloyd says.

"If you want to write a book, you should write a book," Stacy concludes.

Slinky slivers of salmon sunlight . . .

The sun washed gently over the bumpy hills, leaving a residue of pineapple light . . .

God's fingers swept the sky .
. .

Lloyd, wearing old sweatpants and a T-shirt, is seated at the computer in his home office in Mar Vista. Stacy and Dustin are
asleep elsewhere in the house. It's nearly two in the morning and he has been up trying to write. On what is he laboring at
this late hour? Is it the pilot idea every network in town is vying for the privilege of purchasing? No, it is nothing so
mundane as a mere television script. Rather, it is what he dreams will be the beginnings of the Lloyd Melnick oeuvre, an early
effort at what he hopes will come to be referred to by future cultural historians as "Melnick-iana," his first novel. Or at
least the notebook that will lead to the first novel. Because Lloyd does not actually have characters or a plot just yet,
although he has faith those will come. In the meantime, he has set about doing a series of literary exercises: piano scales
for the beginner, whereby he would attempt to render people's faces or physical landscapes in the kind of prose you might
find in a literary novel, the kind reviewed in the pages of respectable newspapers. Lloyd had assigned himself the task of
describing a sunset and has been trying different versions of red/orange/sienna, orb/globe/sphere, for the last several hours.
He stares at the screen and reads softly to himself.

"The slinky sun sloped southerly . . . " Realizes maybe he's leaning a little heavily on the alliteration. Concerned he may
lack the poetical skills necessary to render a sunset in any but the most prosaic terms. Worries Tai Chi could be another
Amy Tan. Lloyd takes a deep breath. Writing was never this difficult when he was a journalist, he reflects. When he was doing
a story, he would simply sit at his desk accompanied by a cup of coffee and the assembled facts and begin typing. Unconcerned
with posterity, he would usually have something perfectly serviceable an hour later. But this literature business is an entirely
different animal. He has been at it for weeks now, banging away with mounting frustration and increasingly tortured by the
thought that everything he comes up with is crap.

The slinky sun sloped southerly?

Who am I kidding? This is bad D. H. Lawrence. No, it's not even up to that standard. It's more like bad Dr. Seuss. Where is
my voice? Where is that distinct prose style that will separate me from the wannabes who can't tell a participle from a diphthong
and scream LLOYD MELNICK WROTE THIS? I was good in grammar back in the seventh grade. I had a positively geometric sense of
how words fit together on a page. Yes, that was just engineering, the practical skills that let me function as a journalist,
but I was a happy bricklayer and I sensed the presence of a muse at the time. I remember the poems I wrote in high school,
the short stories in college. All right, they weren't very good but who was writing good material at that age? And they weren't
bad, exactly. Okay, the poems were bad, but not the short stories. The creative writing professor I had in college liked them.
He was a drunk, yes, but he had won some prestigious literary prizes. He would know. Certainly, I had the glimmer of a muse.
Why didn't I keep writing back then? Why did I stop? How did I allow myself to get sidetracked by the mundane day to day of
existence
—
career, marriage, parenthood, mortgage, car payments; the pinched life of a middle-aged man? Oh, for a muse of fire!

Fire? I'd settle for a matchstick at this point.

How did Homer get away with "rosy-fingered dawn"? What, exactly, is so great about that?

Lloyd has finessed his way to a career as a successful television writer, but in the years since he'd left New York behind
he had lost touch with an animating insight he'd had in his youth—if the whole world is filled with mediocrity, then to be
a little more than adequate is to excel. While this philosophy works should you find yourself on the staff of a sitcom, it
is less dependable if you are trying to create literature.

Tired and knowing he has to show up at the office the next day or risk being underestimated by his industrious assistant,
Lloyd hits the SAVE key and consigns the evening's output to the hard drive, pleased to have at least taken another step,
however minuscule, in this new direction. He turns off the light in his office and walks quietly to his bedroom. Tiptoeing
on the soft carpet so as not to awaken Stacy, Lloyd enters the bathroom, and closing the door behind him before turning on
the light, he opens the medicine chest and removes a bottle of NyQuil. Lloyd doesn't have a cold, not even the hint of a sniffle,
but he finds a belt of the green liquid serves the same function as a nightcap did for his parents with the added benefit
of not requiring mixers and ice. He removes the plastic shot glass that covers the cap, unscrews the cap, and pours himself
a
fix.
Tossing it back, he grimaces as the medicinal liquid coats his throat. He rinses the shot glass with water before capping
the bottle. Then, placing his drug of choice back in the immaculate medicine chest, he turns the light off before opening
the bathroom door and quietly walks over to the bed, where he lies down next to his sleeping wife. Getting under the covers
without disturbing her, Lloyd turns his back and goes to sleep, wondering exactly how far Tai Chi has gotten in her novel
and what was the likelihood he could persuade her to have sex with him.

The following day Frank is at a table in Duke's desultorily picking at his matzo Brie. It's the time between breakfast and
lunch and the place is empty save for a few sleepy-eyed layabouts with their noses buried in newspapers, several strivers
with laptops, and two waitresses who are rearranging the condiment displays on the tables. Across from Frank, working his
way through a plate of eggs, sausages, and hash browns, is Orson Dubinsky, auteur of
Kirkuk.

While most sitcom writers affect an entirely unthreatening, domesticated facade, the kind of face that says you can leave
your car/baby/ bank balance with me and it will be washed/educated/wisely invested when you get back, Orson Dubinsky opts
for another mode of pre­sentation: he looks like Rasputin, the mad monk of czarist Russia. His long, dark hair is parted in
the middle and falls nearly to the bottom of his back. Thick, black-framed glasses cover the upper reaches of his face while
the lower forty is foliated by tendrils of beard growing in multidirectional clumps out of his pale cheeks and neck. His skin
bears the telltale pockmarks of teenaged acne, and as he speaks, he massages his jaw with his fingers to ease the pain caused
by the braces he has recently installed in his mouth. Frank can't help but wonder why someone who resembles Czarina Alexandra's
personal trainer is worried about crooked teeth, given his serial-killer-like appearance, but there it is.

The man's grooming would lead you to think he lived in a refrigerator carton under a bridge when in fact he makes his home
in the hills above Los Feliz with a wife and three kids who go to private school, thank you very much; Orson floating the
house, the pool, and the matching SUVs with a large development deal he had been given (though not as large as Lloyd's) after
tilling the comedy-writing fields for lo these many years.

Kirkuk
is his chance, his shot, the brass ring he's been reaching for his entire career.

"I was rocked when Pam Penner called and said you wanted to do the show, man," Orson enthuses, citing the perfidious lesbian
as he attempts to dislodge a piece of potato from his braces with his little finger.

"Hey," Frank replies, all fake bonhomie, still annoyed he couldn't sell his own pilot. "It's a great script."

"Dude, you are going to take it to a whole nother level." Orson impales a piece of sausage with his fork and, stuffing it
in his mouth, continues, "Pam Penner said she wanted to do breakthrough television, dude. What we're gonna do, is an apocalyptic-spaghetti-noir,
half-hour Eskimo thing that is going to reveal the future of broadcast television. When you ride into the village on the walrus,
it's going to be like Alan Ladd in
Shane,
only funnier. See, it may be comedy but it's got a dark edge to it, which is why we need someone like you," and here Orson
stops once again to attend to an errant piece of toast lodged in his braces. "So it's really not a straight comedy exactly,
it's more of a spaghetti-noir-edy," the
spaghetti
here referring not to the popular pasta but to a series of westerns filmed in Italy in the 1960s and beloved by discerning
cineastes.

Frank nods as he takes in this ridiculous conflation of sitcom, western, and film noir that in the peculiar madness induced
by too much television, Orson is able to envision taking place in the environs of the arctic circle. In spite of himself,
he finds it weirdly appealing.

"There's something we need to talk about. I have to bring it up and I hope you can go with it because it could be a deal breaker,"
Frank says, looking Orson in the eye in an attempt to convey seriousness of purpose.

"Frank, man, I've wanted to work with you since I saw Killer Bones do a gig at the Bottom Line in New York."

"You saw my band?" Here Frank brightens from gray to slightly less gray. He's warming up to Orson.

"I loved the Dylan-at-the-dentist bit. So, you know, whatever you need."

"Who's playing Borak?"

"We're looking for an Eskimo actress."

"An Eskimo, really?" Frank nods thoughtfully.

"Keepin' it real, you know."

"I hear you."

"Do you know any?"

"Not off the top of my head."

"Yeah, it's been a problem. There aren't a lot of them."

Frank looks into the middle distance, as if cogitating on Orson's inability to find an actual Inuit actress, appearing to
rack his brain; perhaps trying to remember a poster he'd noticed in his more northerly travels for an all-Eskimo dinner-theater
production of
Barefoot in the Park
that might have featured a girl whose talents would lend themselves to the role of Borak.

"Do you know the name Honey Call?"

"She's your girlfriend, isn't she?"

"And a very talented actress."

"Dude, don't take this wrong, okay? I hope you're not offended . . . I have
Hot Ninja Bounty Hunters
on DVD. My wife loves that movie."

"Mrs. Dubinsky is a man of wealth and taste," Frank comments, noticing Mrs. Dubinsky's husband has a piece of egg half an
inch long hanging from his beard.

Mr. Dubinsky ignores Frank having referred to his wife as a man and plows ahead. "Does Honey want to do the show?"

"I could talk to her. But she's not an Eskimo."

"To tell you the truth, that idea was coming more from the network than me, and honestly, I think it's a losing proposition."
Orson reflects for a moment on the vision of Honey swathed in animal pelts and likes what he sees. "To get Honey in the show
with you . . . " Here Orson Dubinsky squeezes his eyes shut, envisioning the heights of artistic accomplishment that could
be scaled with such a team at his side, internally rhapsodizing about the possibilities, the encomiums, the quintessential
sense of attainment that would be his. "That's the kind of message I want to send the network.
Kirkuk"
—Orson pauses to gather his thoughts—"it isn't just some workplace comedy about a recovering alcoholic Eskimo trying to run
scams out of his uncle's casino. It's a little guy fighting the machine, trying to grab a crumb from the capitalist pie. It's
about nonconformity, man," asserts this dues-paying member of the Los Feliz Neighborhood Watch. "Putting Honey in it is so
. . . so . . ." Here Orson searches for the mot juste that will describe his vision in the most unique, uncliched way and
arrives with "Edgy! Lynx needs that kind of statement to cut through the clutter."

"Oh, she'll cut through the clutter."

"Let me tell you something, Frank," Orson Dubinsky says, leaning toward his new collaborator. "If I'm sitting on the couch
channel surfing after a hard day at work and I see Honey standing on an ice floe in a bikini . . . dude, I'm throwing out
the remote."

Frank is thinking this could work.

Chapter 9

Lloyd sits across town in a Euro-Laotian restaurant with fish tanks embedded in the floor and koi swimming beneath Plexiglas
at his feet. He is meeting with Bart Pimento, a preternaturally handsome movie star whose career had recently run aground
after he capped a string of flops with some dubious professional behavior involving creative differences and facial hair.
Lloyd stares at Bart, a specimen on a slide, as the actor prattles on about himself and his many concerns including animal
rights, Wicca, and what he believed to be the criminally underappreciated societal value of the hemp plant. Bart's blond mane,
which is usually pulled back into a ponytail between gigs, hangs loosely and frames a traditionally handsome, unlined face.
His cobalt blue eyes are set apart at the perfect distance, his nose the gold standard for plastic surgeons everywhere. The
lips are full and slightly bowed, lending them an almost feminine quality that makes him nonthreatening yet desirable to women
and gay men, for whom he has become something of a poster boy.

As Lloyd gazes at Bart, he is feeling the elaborate facade all not particularly handsome men construct, the one that allows
them to peer in the mirror each morning and think,
I look good,
begin to crumble. He senses his eyes moving closer as his nose, already generously proportioned, expands and his lips begin
to flap clownishly. And what's that? Hair growing out of his ears? Right now?

Bart Pimento possessed the kind of looks that could make ninety-eight percent of male humanity gaze in the mirror and see
the reflection of a warthog, and Lloyd is a member in good standing of that ninety-eight percent. He takes some comfort in
the realization that although Bart may be fine looking, his own SATs were way higher—if the actor even took them, since he
probably didn't go to college. At least Lloyd fervently hoped he hadn't. The thought that someone as beautiful as Bart could
also be intelligent was simply unbearable.

He needn't worry.

Bart has recently returned from the northern-Canadian set of a big-budget movie where he had been let go the day before shooting
was to commence for refusing to shave the mustache he had grown for the role, the aforementioned creative differences and
facial hair. Normally, if the star is important enough, and certainly there had been a time when Bart was important, a mustache
would not be a problem. Doctors might have mustaches, scientists, teachers; they could all be hirsute. But Bart had been hired
to play a monk, specifically, an American monk adept at the various martial arts. Despite the director explaining to Bart
that the highly paid consultant-monk, flown in from Tibet at great cost speci­fically to advise on this movie, had informed
him his brethren did not sport mustaches, the actor, who believed this particular character, this multilayered violent holy
man, must have a mustache, could not be persuaded to shave it off.

There was a time when Bart floated above ordinary life, when his name, always in boldface, had been romantically linked to
myriad movie stars and supermodels and his gorgeous visage graced the cover of every glossy magazine. During those charmed
days that had drifted by in a haze of photo shoots, publicity junkets, and cocaine snorted off the bare bottoms of young actresses
in bathroom stalls of trendy nightclubs, Bart had existed in the exalted hothouse of pop cultural approbation; it was then
he could have gotten away with the prima donna act. But that ship has sailed.

He was the star of three consecutive flops.

He was a pain in the ass.

He was fired.

Having made his point, that he is nobody's fool (!), the mustache came off in the bathroom of the first-class cabin on the
flight from Saskatchewan to Los Angeles. Bart relates this story to Lloyd while absentmindedly twiddling the strings on his
hemp sweatshirt.

"At the end of the day," Bart says, employing a verbal construct that makes Lloyd wince, "that putz," meaning the director,
whose last film had won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, "wasn't going to tell me what to do. But it's all good."
Lloyd winces again. "I wasn't crazy about the role."

A quick aside about why Lloyd is having lunch with a fading movie star.

Due to the collective inferiority complex of most television executives, which cause them to erroneously believe movies are
better than TV, the various network brain trusts are always ready to be persuaded that movie star A, whose career is on life
support, will be able to find a huge audience in television. Never mind people have stopped going to their movies. The collective
wisdom holds that movie stars are good for networks because that gives them known quantities to promote to a cretinous public,
who, it is assumed, are not interested in mere stories but are easily seduced by stars, however unpopular they have become
in movies.

This phenomenon had led Pam Penner to take überagent Yuri Klipstein's call the previous week:

"Pam, Yuri Klipstein."

"The well-known flesh peddler? Who are you selling?"

"Oh, fuck you, you big dyke. Don't pretend I don't care about you as a person."

"I love it when you talk dirty."

"How's tricks?"

"I could use more pussy."

"That's two of us."

"Your wife not putting out?"

"This conversation just got way too personal."

"I show you mine but you don't show me yours?"

"Okay, enough with the schmoozle. I don't want this getting around town."

"My lips are sealed."

"You're the first person I'm calling because I think I can blow your mind."

"You're gonna get me a lunch date with Uma Thurman?"

"Let me make a phone call."

"Yuri, I'm all ears."

"Bart Pimento
may
be—and let me stress I'm emphasizing the word
may
—he
may
be willing to do television."

That was all it took. Bart's agent runs the flag of his possible availability up the pole and the Lynx Network instantly salutes
with a deal guaranteeing him a show within a year and awarding him a big payday whether or not he gets one. After the signing,
Pam Penner went to see Harvey Gornish to discuss the best possible way to deploy this new hunk of potential ratings muscle,
and after kicking around several ideas including having Bart play a doctor, a lawyer, and a navy SEAL, Pam phoned Yuri Klipstein
to gauge Bart's level of interest in them.

That conversation was brief.

"Harvey would like to see Bart in a franchise show," Pam says. "Does he want to play a cop or a lawyer?"

"He wants to do an edgy comedy" was Yuri's reply.

"He's never done comedy," Pam pointed out.

"He wants to do an edgy comedy," Yuri repeated, concluding the exchange.

This mandate was obediently delivered to Harvey, and after mulling over the Lynx development slate with Pam, who was feeling
less joily than usual now that she was to be part of the Bart Pimento comedy trial balloon, and weeding out the obvious mismatches
(all of them requiring Bart to play a parent, something he categorically refused to do, believing it to be the kiss of career
death for a sex god), it was decided that Pam's idea for a show set in a Las Vegas massage parlor could provide Bart with
the perfect television vehicle. Pam called Yuri to run it by him and Yuri called his client to gauge his interest in the concept.
Bart was thrilled at the prospect of playing what was going to be America's first prime-time pimp, and when this was relayed
to the people at Lynx, they did everything but go up on the roof and set off fireworks.

Harvey believed the extremely overpaid Lloyd Melnick was the perfect man to write it, and Pam was summarily dispatched to
discuss this with Lynx's favorite new employee. As for Lloyd, he was expected to accept this managerial fiat with the equanimity
of a five-thousand-dollar hooker staring down at a foot-long dildo and being asked to turn around.

"Bart Pimento?"

Lloyd could not keep the sense of distress out of his voice. Indeed, it had caused his inflection to rise as he hit the second
syllable of Bart's last name, causing him to instantly regret having spoken. Pam Penner and Jason Fendi had dropped into his
office on the lot the afternoon previous to his lunch with the youthful flickering star. Lloyd's laptop lay open on his desk
where he had been working on a description of a mountain lake, having just written the sentence
The blue faraway of the sky reflected fetchingly in the trembling water,
when Tai Chi, who had been interrupted at her own literary labors, buzzed him on the intercom and said, "Uh, Lloyd, you have
some visitors."

A moment later Lloyd had looked up expecting to see Stacy and Cam Rousseau arriving to once again rearrange his office furniture
for maximum energy flow, and was quite taken aback when instead of his wife and her feng shui consultant, Pam and Jason crossed
the threshold. After a short exchange of pleasantries Lloyd was apprised of the situation and you are famliiar with his response.

"You don't like him?" Pam asked, chagrined but not surprised. "We just signed him to a huge holding deal. Harvey is beside
himself."

"It's not that I don't like him. He's fine. But do you go to his movies?"

"Lloyd, no one goes to his movies. That's why we could sign him," Pam explained, being no dummy. "If anyone went to his' movies,
he wouldn't be doing TV."

"But I don't have anything I'm ready to pitch."

Now came the part of the conversation Pam was dreading, the part where she was going to have to inform Lloyd that a power
higher than the two of them was controlling this particular situation.

"Harvey really wants you to write
Happy Endings."

"The massage parlor show?" Lloyd responded. He had assumed that idea had slinked back to the swamp from which it emerged.
Now he was wondering if the horror he was feeling had been sufficiently concealed.

"And he wants it for Bart."

Lloyd looked at Pam as she said this and knew she was simply doing what she was programmed to do. He couldn't fault her personally
because she has car payments, a mortgage, and a cute young girlfriend whose career in origami she is subsidizing with her
Lynx salary. But he had the dawning sense that this could be the exact moment his career goes into the tank.

"Why does Harvey think I'm the guy to write this?"

"You're his favorite!" This from the ever-annoying Jason.

"Wasn't Bart Pimento arrested for throwing fake blood on some old lady's fur coat at a PETA protest?" Lloyd said, trying to
change the subject.

"He's entitled to his opinions," Pam assured Lloyd. "We're in America."

"I defer to no man when it comes to the First Amendment, but I'd like to point out that it seems like the act of an overly
earnest guy, and earnestness, as we know, is the enemy of comedy."

"Have lunch with him."

"Could we just share a bag of Doritos outside the commissary for five minutes?"

"Lloyd, look, no one's going to ram him down your throat, but it's Harvey's idea so you kind of have to take the meeting.
And then you have to write the script," she added, laughing uncomfortably, as if she were joking.

Lloyd closed his eyes and ruminated on how he could have sold his soul for a house in Brentwood.

"I think it's a really good suggestion," Jason offered.

"I know he's not a laugh riot," Pam sympathized. "But, hey, if you have a better idea, pitch it to him. Then you won't have
to write the massage parlor thing. Do it for Mama."

This was a reasonable request given Lloyd actually likes Pam, not perceiving her as adversarial, but rather as a high-level
functionary who hasn't become completely inured to the absurdity of her job, a kindred spirit to some degree, capable of regarding
her surroundings and the duties she performs within them with a certain degree of wry detachment. Nonetheless, he put his
head in his hands and emitted a loud moan. He knew he was being overdramatic, but he had once seen Bart Pimento on a talk
show discuss how he prepared for a role by employing the techniques of Sun Tzu. And he wasn't kidding. Lloyd, having conveyed
his thoughts, looked up at Pam and Jason. But Lloyd says nothing further on the topic, and after another minute of small talk
during which he wonders if stress can cause internal bleeding, they leave.

After the executives packed up their meat grinder and departed, Lloyd found himself too distracted by the unanticipated politics
of his job to pursue further work on the description of the mountain lake. Unable to get beyond
the trembling water,
and knowing it was chaff anyway, he turned off his computer and called his manager, Marty Lavin. When Lloyd explained the
nature of his dilemma, Marty reminded him that his three-year deal was at the studio's option, which meant they could dump
out of it at the end of the first year, and economics what they were, the people at Lynx would prefer if he just played ball
with them. Miserable, he hung up and went for a walk around the lot to clear his mind and ponder how he could foil Harvey
Gornish's extraordinarily misguided notion. As Lloyd walked out of his office, he noticed Tai Chi leaning over her printer,
the top of a purple thong peeking out invitingly from her jeans.

"What are you printing?"

"My novel."

"You're done?"

"One chapter to go."

Lloyd sucked in his cheeks, swallowed, and nodded in a way intended to convey encouragement but only succeeded in looking
vaguely nauseous.

"Are you okay?" Tai Chi inquired.

"Terrific," Lloyd assured her, making for the exit. "One chapter to go. That's great. Weren't you, what, like halfway through
about a month ago?"

"I write every night."

Lloyd absorbed this unintended dart as he walked down the stairs and through the offices of
Men Are Tools,
speculating on what strange god creates a world where he, this poetic author manque trapped in the life of a sitcom writer,
was now dealing with the odious task of extracting a pompous clod of a movie star from his maiden project, while Tai Chi,
a mere support person, had nearly finished a novel.