The Bones (18 page)

From the stage comes the booming voice of Benny Ripps, the comic working the emcee slot tonight. An overweight man in a loud
sports coat and a bow tie who everyone assumes is gay although he will never acknowledge it, Benny is saying, "Ladies and
gentleman, one of the best acts in the business—he just signed to do a pilot for the Lynx Network, so if it gets picked up,
he better let me do a guest shot—please put your hands together for Frank Bones."

An electrical charge passes through Frank at the sound of his name. Turning quickly to Candi, he says, "Let's do it another
night," and bounds toward the front of the room to the drunken applause of a roomful of tourists. Frank climbs to the stage,
shakes Benny's hand without looking at him, and steps to the microphone.

If you don't applaud any louder than that, I'll be so depressed I'm gonna go out later and smoke crack.

A little before one in the morning Frank is parked in front of a modest house in Sherman Oaks with a cell phone pressed to
his ear and the motor running.

"Sparky, it's Bones. I'm in front of your house. Get out here."

Frank closes the cell phone and waits, twiddling the knobs on the Caddy's radio. The station Frank is listening to is playing
some kind of techno music he can't stand. After breezing down the dial he lands on Al Green's voice and, satisfied, puts his
head back and lets the velvet tones fill the car. In less than two minutes there is movement on the lawn and Frank sees a
short figure dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt heading toward him. Sparky has a big Fu Manchu mustache, the kind that has
been out of style for about thirty years everywhere but motorcycle gangs, falling off his sad drinker's face. He arrives at
the Caddy and leans against the door, lowering his head so it is inches from Frank's face.

"What're you doing still driving this shitbox, Bones? Aren't you some big important guy?" Sparky asks in the flat tones of
his native Kansas.

"Christ, Sparky, pop a fuckin' Tic Tac," Frank says, recoiling at his friend's breath.

"Dude, you woke me up. Am I supposed to brush my teeth before coming out here?"

"It wouldn't kill you."

"Let me hook you up with a new car."

"I can't drive a hot car, Sparky. What're you, nuts?"

"They're not hot and I'm ticked off at the implication." Sparky's dignity wounded. "I'm selling to a guy who deals Ferraris.
I'll hook you up with a very favorable lease."

"Not tonight. You got Daddy's Christmas present?"

"Ho ho ho," Sparky says, handing Frank a vial. Frank peels off a hundred-dollar bill for his dealer and places the vial in
his shirt pocket.

"You know, Sparky, you ought to think about shaving that mustache."

"My thigh tickler?" he replies, stroking it gently. "In your mother-fuckin' dreams."

Frank drives home, where he climbs into bed with Honey, who has been asleep for hours after having made a list of things she
is going to do the next day that include getting new head shots, having her hair color adjusted, and making inquiries about
hiring a publicist. She briefly awakens when Frank arrives between the sheets but, not wanting to talk to him, pretends to
be asleep.

Chapter 10

Several months go by during which Lloyd writes a draft of
Happy Endings.
He endures the task by telling himself he is following in the footsteps of Plautus, an ancient Roman writer of phallocentric
comedy, a satirist who took a great interest in the sexual misbehavior of his contemporaries. The pilot story concerns a new
girl accidentally putting nail polish remover in her massage oil and an important customer getting a skin rash. It's garbage
and Lloyd knows it, but that doesn't matter. He put in some good jokes to throw the network off the scent and a Saul Bellow
reference to gild it with an intellectual patina. Then he made sure to give Bart a big scene with two naked girls in a hot
tub filled with Jell-O. Bart read it and called Lloyd to tell him he was gifted.

Mission accomplished.

Lloyd is drinking coffee in his kitchen one February morning trying to coax his daily NyQuil hangover into dissipating. He's
cursorily looking at the
Los Angeles Times
sports section, more out of habit than interest, and watching his son work his way through a bowl of cereal that has been
laced by the manufacturer with enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma. Today is what's known as the table read
of Happy Endings,
the day the cast sits around a table and reads the script to a privileged assemblage that includes production company executives,
people from the network, and assorted friends of the writer, all of whom are hoping for jobs on the show should it test well
and the powers that be decide to put it on their broadcast schedule.

Given what is happening later, Lloyd appears calm, even serene. But that is not to last.

"Lloyd!" Stacy shrilly calls out from upstairs.

"What?"

"Can you come up here, please?"

Whenever Stacy called Lloyd from another room and further communication between them was deemed impossible after initial contact
had been made, it was always he who moved into her territory for the exchange to continue. She would never come to him. He
used to argue with her about it ("Can you come in here for chrissakes, I can't hear you!") but now just accepted it as another
in a long line of issues he had given up contesting, marriage in Lloyd's mind having become a series of small surrenders.
Putting the newspaper down, he sluggishly trudges upstairs, the coffee not quite victorious yet in its battle with the rear
guard of the NyQuil.

He crankily barks, "What?" as he ascends the stairs.

Stacy is in their bedroom standing in front of a dresser holding one of his favorite T-shirts, an old, gray rag with the word
IDAHO emblazoned in block letters across the front. He'd been a camp counselor one long-ago summer and had traded one of his
own college T-shirts with another counselor who attended, not coincidentally, the University of Idaho. Since it had started
to fray, he's only worn it sparingly, but it held great sentimental value for Lloyd, the way cheap things can when they remind
us of simpler times.

"Do you mind if I throw this out?" she asks him when he appears at the door.

"Are you kidding? Yes, I mind."

"Lloyd, it's in tatters," Stacy says, holding it between two fingers at arm's length.

"I like it, okay?"

"Fine. Wear it as a pajama top. But I'm going through our stuff and I want to get rid of some things before we move, which
is in a couple of days, I know I don't have to remind you." In one of the few indulgences he's allowed himself since his newfound
riches have materialized, he has opted out of their moving process and told Stacy to hire elves to pack up the family possessions
and unpack them once they are ensconced in stately Melnick Manor, as he has taken to referring to their new home in a satiric
tone that flies beneath Stacy's radar. "I want you to think about a new wardrobe, Lloyd."

"Me? A new wardrobe?"

Stacy inhales, the look on her face the same one she gets when her son is being particularly uncooperative and she needs to
restrain her desire to smack him.

"We're living in a new house, you're working at a new place . . ."As if that's reason enough and she needn't continue. But
it's not reason enough for Lloyd.

"Yeah?"

"So you need to look the part."

"I do look the part."

"Lloyd," she whines. "When we went to that party at the Hylers' house, you were the only guy there who was dressed like a
homeless person, okay?"

"Where do the homeless dress like me?" he asks, looking down at the cargo shorts and University of Arizona Wildcats T-shirt
he's wearing. "Bermuda?"

"I'm not saying this to be mean, but come on, you're a grown man, you're successful, you're my husband"—here she tries a different
approach, letting a hint of flirtatiousness creep into her tone—"and I want you to look good." Lloyd just shakes his head
as if he can't believe he's actually having this conversation.

"Robert Hyler has a personal shopper. He gets all his clothes and never has to leave his office," Stacy informs Lloyd, attempting
to make the notion easier for him to swallow.

"Who told you that?"

"His wife told me when we were hiking."

"Since when do you hike?"

"Since Daryl asked me to."

"You're hiking?" This is too hard for Lloyd to believe. The Stacy he knew would pack Dustin into the car to drive the boy
to a play date five houses away.

"If I asked you to hike . . . " Lloyd can only finish the thought by once again shaking his head in disbelief.

"Oh, Lloyd, get real, I'm not going to pretend I like hiking. She dragged me up some mountain trail . . . I thought I was
going to step on a rattlesnake. But I'm doing it for us!"

"What has running up a mountain with Daryl Hyler got to do with us?"

"She's very connected in a world I admire."

Well, there it is,
Lloyd's thinking. Just coming right out with it, as if it weren't something to be embarrassed by, this desire to ape the life
of a nouveau riche poseur whose alleged social conscience mostly served to create a stage on which to parade her own bountiful
ego. When did this happen to Stacy? he wonders. When was the precise moment this former New York City dietitian with the NYU
degree, this child of middle-class New Jersey, became so anxious about her place in the social firmament that she would walk
up the side of a snake-infested mountain with someone like Daryl Hyler? Because Lloyd certainly didn't share her concern,
and as he looks at his wife, now holding another of his T-shirts she has marked for destruction, he senses one more chink
appearing in the facade. How much abuse can the structure take before it collapses in a heap of rusty memories, battered hopes,
and worn-out recriminations?

"Would you like a personal shopper?" Stacy asks.

"I'll see you later."

Lloyd turns around and walks out, the exchange with his wife having done what the caffeine was not able to do. When she calls
after him and says, "Will you at least think about it?" he pretends he doesn't hear her.

Lloyd guides his car into the parking space in front of his office and heads into the building. He has banished from memory
the conversation with Stacy, and there has been a bounce in his step since he agreed to write Pam's idea, then took the network
casting note and hired Bart Pimento. The fate of the show is now out of his hands. If the impossible happens and it works,
he will receive the plaudits and subsequent attention, and if it craters, as he knows it will, people will say the network
made Lloyd work on an awful idea, then compounded it with an unfortunate casting choice, and there was nothing Lloyd could
do. As for those big, fat checks? They'll keep right on coming.

He takes the stairs two at a time, and as he approaches Tai Chi's desk, where she has been seated forlornly for the past week
unable to devise an ending to her novel, his assistant looks up and tells him, "Frank Bones is in your office."

What could Bones possibly want? Lloyd had read in the trades Frank was doing
Kirkuk,
so it couldn't be about that semiautobiographical piece of self-aggrandizement he had been pitching. What then?

Lloyd goes into his office and sees Frank seated behind his desk smoking a joint. The comedian is dressed in his familiar
black pants and a loose black shirt.

"Babe."

"Bones."

While Frank's manner gives no hint that he'd recently been fantasizing about secretly engineering Lloyd's death by arachnid,
Lloyd's attempt at conveying neutrality stalls out somewhere between impatience and irritation. He tries to cover it with
a tight smile. When Lloyd follows with "What's going on?" he manages to suggest the dispassionate tone he was attempting in
the first place.

"I'm doing a show on the lot."

"Yeah, I heard. The Eskimo thing. Listen, Frank, I'm doing a table read today so I'd love to kick back and get arrested for
smoking dope but . . . " Here he trails off, letting Frank draw his own conclusion.

Frank takes a long hit from the joint and exhales, filling the office with a cloud of sweet smoke. "Lloyd, what happened to
you, man? You were a fun kid when we used to hang back in the city." No other city but New York to the people who had lived
there.

"Could you at least put the joint out? Harvey's on the President's Counsel to Kill All Drug Users and he's got spies."

"Workin' for the man!" Frank says, affecting a blaccent, something he would do when he got high and lapsed into Ebonics,
man
coming out "maayy-un." "Okay, fine," he says in standard English, wetting the tips of his thumb and forefinger with his tongue
and then pinching out the burning joint and putting it in his wallet. "So I'm doing this show . . ."

"You told me."

"And Honey's in it."

"Always good to keep it in the family."

"She's surprising a lot of people."

"God bless."

"I'm sure it's not as good as your thing . . . "

Frank leans back, deciding whether to come to the point or massage Lloyd for a few more moments. Despite the cannabis currently
clouding his cognitive capabilities, it is finally dawning on him exactly where Lloyd is in terms of their relative positions
in the industry firmament, and right now he occupies a far more exalted position than the one occupied by Frank; Lloyd, no
matter what becomes
of Happy Endings,
is financially set for life if he shows up at the office for the next three years and does crossword puzzles, but Frank .
. . that was an entirely different and less predictable story. Although his agent had negotiated a payday that would make
him a well compensated man, at least as far as the current fiscal year is concerned, it is a one-shot deal.
If Kirkuk
arrives with a toe tag, Frank will be back on the road once the money runs out, doing four shows a weekend and all the waitresses
he can eat.

"Lloyd, the script's a train wreck. And I'm here asking the guy who one day long ago I put up on my couch, ladies and gentlemen,
to take a pass at it with me." The script was anything but a train wreck. In fact, the tonsorially challenged Dubinsky had
concocted something quite entertaining and original. But Frank, correctly fearing this could be his last shot at a starring
role in a network project, has become consumed by the idea it is not all it can be. In Frank's mind
Kirkuk
needs to be some kind of amalgamation of the Marx Brothers, Monty Python, and Richard Pryor before all the freebasing. Hence,
his painful pilgrimage to Lloyd's office.

"When?"

"Now."

"Frank . . ."

"I'm not gonna beg, but I'll buy you a car."

"I told you I have a table read today. I'd like to help you but . . . " And here Lloyd changes tactics and decides to lapse
into complete honesty. "Bones, listen . . . I don't want to be here. I don't want to be doing
Happy Endings
or any other show, okay? I'm clocking for the paycheck because I have a huge nut and I have to feed the beast," he explains
in a riot of metaphor. "Don't want to do my show, don't want to do your show. I can't sleep at night, okay? I drink so much
goddamn NyQuil I'm personally causing their stock to spike. Most nights I come downstairs and sit on my living room couch,
which by the way cost more than most people in Bakersfield are going to make this year, and I read."

"Scripts?"

"No. Books, okay? I don't want to be writing television anymore. I want to write a book, so I'd really like to help you but
I'm barely holding on doing this piece of crap they're making me do. I don't mean to unload all this on you, but I don't want
you to take it personally when I say I'm not going to look at your script. Actually, I heard it was good."

Frank chews his Hp and ponders his situation, Lloyd's confessional monologue not having registered.
How prepared am I to completely debase myself at this moment?
"I'm not going to get another chance if this one goes in the tank," Frank tells Lloyd, trying to plead without sounding pleading,
a nearly impossible trick that he does not entirely pull off. "I'm almost forty-five years old." Even under these circumstances
he couldn't completely stop lying. Lloyd knew Frank had turned forty-eight that year. "We start shooting tonight."

"I told you I can't do it."

"Okay, then. I'll beg," Frank says, despising Lloyd for his success, his luck, his seeming control. Then, dropping all pretense.
"Please do this for me."

"I'd love to but—"

"How could you write for someone like Charlie Fleishman and not write for me? He's vanilla pudding, man, mayo on white toast."
Then, what is intended to be the coup de grace lands: "I thought you were cooler."

Lloyd ignores the dig and says, "I took that gig a long time ago." This is a neutral statement by which he intends to imply
three things: that he is older and wiser, that he is beyond writing for Charlie Fleishman now, and that this entire discussion
is the bailiwick of someone far less successful than he.

None of this is lost on Frank, who looks up at the celling. Inhales through his nostrils. Tilts his head to look out the window.
Lloyd watching him the whole time. Then removes a gun, a Walther 9mm, from his waistband and places it on Lloyd's desk. Lloyd,
already emotionally shaky, tries to look at it impassively but his eyes involuntarily widen. Frank rubs his chin with the
back of his hand and shakes his head, looking down. Raising his eyes, he stares directly at Lloyd and says, "Don't make me."
Lloyd is feeling his body do involuntary things. His foot twitches. His heart starts to pound. Strangely, he feels blood rush
to his penis. The seconds tick by, five, ten, a minute? Lloyd losing all sense of time. Then Frank smiles tightly, picks up
the gun, points the barrel at his temple . . .