by Ben Peller
But that’s another story, one I’ll share at the next meeting. Keep coming back.
Writers in the Night
My next choice from Shawn’s emails leads me to the campus of USC. It’s a breezy Southern California spring afternoon, and the students are clad accordingly in shorts, skirts, and generally loose fitting attire. With my button down shirt, slacks, and a sheepskin jacket, I feel vaguely like an intruder. I allow myself to indulge in the kinky thrill these students may sense I’m a stalker of sorts, and it’s semi-true, being that I’m stalking Shawn Michals. Of course they probably really only see me as a geeky Graduate student who’s been working on a thesis of some kind for months and hasn’t realized it’s springtime yet.
As out of place as I am, I do manage to locate the English Department inside a suitably majestic looking building behind statues of thickly wrinkled people pondering books.
I find Professor Jonathan Wooden in his office, brow furrowed over some papers. He looks as frozen as one of the statues I passed on the way in.
“Mister Wooden?” I tap on the door’s edge.
He looks up. “Doctor Wooden, yes. What can I do for you, sir?”
Something about people with sagging jowls who feel the need to point out that they are DOCTORS while calling others “sir” is irksome. I swallow a smartass comeback still forming and say, “I’m here to pick up something that was sent from a gentleman named Shawn Michals.”
His brow crinkles deeper momentarily before relaxing as his eyes almost pop out of his sockets. “Ah, him!” he exclaims. “Yes, I know of him.”
“Of him?” I ask. “You mean he wasn’t a student here?”
“Good gosh, no,” Dr. Wooden snaps his head from side to side. “One of my students got involved in a relationship with him. A very talented young woman. Eileen Rosset. She’s an extremely special young lady.”
The way these last three words drip out of his mouth, as though he’s talking about his favorite appetizer at some fancy restaurant, give me a slight shiver.
“I’m sure she is,” I manage. “Do you have something Shawn sent you, perchance?”
“Ah, yes, I do,” he says, reaching down beneath his desk. “He wrote that someone might be coming for it. I believe in his letter he used the term ‘if they had the balls to claim their destiny.’”
I laugh. Can’t help it. Just the wording reminds me of Shawn and his sometime grandiose way of attaching crude yet telling terms to seemingly simple acts.
To my surprise Dr. Wooden is joining me in laughter as he places an envelope on his desk.
“Have you read it?” I ask.
“No,” Dr. Wooden stops laughing. “Why would you think I might’ve?”
“I just thought… being an English professor and all… you might be curious…”
He dismisses my assumption of his curiosity with a twist of his hand. “I read my students’ work very seriously, but I don’t read unsolicited material.”
“Makes sense,” I nod. “Well, he asked me to pick it up. So I guess you could call me a solicitor of sorts.”
When I reach out and place my hand on the envelope he doesn’t let it go. “After you read this,” he says. “Would you let me know what it contains? From what Eileen wrote about him for her class assignments, he seems like someone worth knowing. Maybe not worth liking, mind you. But worth knowing.”
“Okay,” I nod. “What did she write about him? In her assignments?”
Dr. Wooden chuckles. “You must know, that as a professor of writing, I am obliged to consider the writings of my students confidential.”
Fucking professors. Psychiatrists. Priests. They won’t reveal anything they’ve heard unless you confess to murder. I shrug and say, “I promise I’ll let you know if he writes about killing anyone.”
Dr. Wooden surprises me with yet another laugh, and lets his hand drift from the envelope. “Touché,” he says. “I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’ve got a class to lecture to in about fifteen minutes—“
“Is Eileen still attending classes here?” I ask, startled by a need to talk to this woman who had an intimate enough relationship with Shawn to write about him.
Dr. Wooden shakes his head as though he were anticipating the question all along. “She switched majors. And schools.” he reveals, a trace of sadness in his voice. “She said she didn’t think she had what it took to be a writer. She mentioned something about going into Pharmaceutical Law, whatever in Hades that is.”
I have no clue, either. “Okay,” I hoist the envelope. “I’ll let you know.”
“He mentioned another thing in the letter regarding your destiny, as it were,” Dr. Wooden says, standing. “He said you were going to write his story. Is this true, are you a writer?”
“I’ve had a book published, yes.” I nod. But without Shawn Michals, was I in fact a writer? The stories were his stories, after all. I could certainly claim to be an editor of sorts. A seeker and assembler of someone else’s tales.
“Good,” Dr. Wooden returns my nod. “I wish you well on your latest project, young man.”
Being called a “young man” by this man makes me forgive him the “sir” earlier. I head out to campus, rush past the stoned figures contemplating pebbled words, and descend to the basement of the Student Union. There I find the campus bar, Traditions, (or “Traddies” as it’s affectionately called). I order a screwdriver, open the envelope and take the first step on what Dr. Wooden has accurately termed “my latest project…”
Writers are, usually by way of natural selection, A) psychotics B) sociopaths C) drunkards or D) not very good.
And to all you writers reading this who are working yourselves into a rage, you may possess yet another malady that’s seemingly intrinsic to writers: we tend to take ourselves way too seriously.
Before I graduated to being a semi-recluse I did some time as an aspiring screenwriter, and a lover, in Los Angeles. Here’s a scene that took place on a second date between me and a woman I met at (shudder) The Coffee Bean on Main Street in Santa Monica.
INT. WRITER’S APARTMENT – NIGHT
A MAN in his 30s, clad in torn jeans and a tight t-shirt that boasts a 1980s glam rock band’s slogan of “kicking ass on the wild side of your town,” lounges on a sofa that is similarly dated amidst an apartment no one with any sense whatsoever would give the time of day to whoever might be living in it. A WOMAN in a short dress strolls out of the bedroom, trying to put an earring in her ear.
WOMAN
Could you help me find my hole
for this, honey?
MAN
That’s not the only hole I’ll help
You find, sweetheart.
Not only is this exchange frightening, but even more shocking is that after a few seconds of a heated glance, both man and woman scrambled for pens while declaring that the preceding atrocity was their property and they were going to use it in an episode for respective television series’ they were working on.
Okay, so I wasn’t working on a television series at the time. But she was. And the cruel third act to this episode was that that exchange actually made it on the air.
Shelia, you still owe me a residual.
Another problem is that writers are by nature quite observant, not to mention cynically inclined to turn any situation into a potential plotline. When my pet python, who I let roam free around my apartment, wound up slithering into a hole in my bathroom wall, I bemoaned his loss for days, hoping he would come back. Alas, he did not. Whatever Checkers (named after the checkered pattern on his skin, not Nixon’s dog) had found beyond my bathroom walls was obviously more enticing than snaking around my studio apartment. I was glad he’d found a brave new world, but still missed him. When I spilled this all out to a fellow writer who I’d been seeing for a few months, Alison, her bright blue eyes widened. “Oh my God!” she said, voice quivering. “That’s…”
I nodded, ready for a hug and maybe some awesomely empathic lovemaking.
“
A totally cool storyline!” she went on. “A snake gets loose in the city. Maybe if we make it where he goes down the toilet and gets into the sewer system. And he starts eating all these rats and gets really huge. Or maybe there’s some radioactive waste that’s been dumped in the sewers, and it makes him really huge! Kind of like a Snakes on the Plane meets Anaconda…”
By this point I’d tuned her out, too obsessed with a plotline for a movie of my own which involved a masked killer stalking not horny teenagers, but overenthusiastic screenwriters. I decided not to tell Alison that this movie had already been done; the only difference had been it had been an alligator that had gotten flushed down a toilet and proceeded to somehow get huge and stalk the sewer systems of New York. Let this poor fool write it, I figured. She was currently enrolled in UCLA’s Film and Television Department, a program that had rejected me more times than I cared to remember. If that’s the kind of writer they accept then I was glad the ignoramuses there had rejected me, I silently affirmed to myself.
The only problem with this affirmation was Alison did write it, and the thing was optioned by a major studio right after she graduated, resulting in her being signed to ***2. We were still dating then, and to my secret anger, she managed to work her agency’s name into our conversation every time we saw one another. That her optioned script hadn’t been produced, that she hadn’t written one word in the past six months, or that she wasn’t even quite sure of the name of her current agent at the agency didn’t matter. She still had the flower basket the agency sent her when they signed her sitting on the mantle beside her bed. The flowers had long since wilted and were now shriveled up and brown. We were lying in bed one afternoon (one plus with dating a writer: you’ve both sometimes got massive amounts of free time on your hands so you end up having way too much sex), when I glanced over at the decaying flowers and mused, “Wow. You’ve still got those flowers that your agency sent you.”
“Of course I still have them,” she responded in a nanosecond. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“For one reason…” I ventured. “They’re kind of… dead.”
“So what?” Alison demanded. “They’re a symbol of the fact that I am signed to one of the top agencies in this town.”
“Yeah, but…” I laughed, which was a seriously wrong move. “You don’t even know your agent’s name there. I mean, that flower basket is a total Gatsby.”
“Gatsby?”
“The Great Gatsby,” I said.
“I know what the hell the book is!” she shouted. “Just because I write screenplays instead of novels doesn’t mean I’m ignorant.”
“But you haven’t written any screenplays lately.” I explained, with the uneasy feeling this wasn’t going to end well. “Keeping those flowers even after they died is like the broken clock that Gatsby keeps in his house. You’re kind of trying to cling to the past even when you have no-“
I’d only been trying to inspire her. Yes, part of my inspirational campaign had been fueled by a bit of jealousy, being that she constantly pointed out that she was signed to a top agency while I couldn’t even get a meeting with a manager in Simi Valley. She cut me off with the reaction I’d halfway been hoping for, one a touch on the “over” side, with her yelling at me to get the hell out. I scrambled out of bed and while I hopped into my pants I managed to duck an alarm clock, a picture of the two of us, and then the flowerpot itself. As I hurried out the door she screamed that I was a “Cliff Notes reading motherfucker” and that she would soon become one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood.
I never spoke with Alison again. I felt bad about our final farewell for about three months until I happened to read in VARIETY that she’d sold a spec script in a mid-six figure deal I liked to think I’d played at least a partial hand in; it wasn’t about a giant snake roaming the sewers of Los Angeles, but instead a romantic “dramedy” which featured the title The Man Who Called My Flowers Wilted.
The title was changed upon release to *3, and when I saw the movie I was proud of the actor they chose to play me, an insensitive jerk in Act One, transformed into a soul searching man in Act Two, eventually evolving into a blubbering patsy in Act Three.
Once again, my inspiration was evident and I didn’t make a dime.
Indeed, the creation of art can be a messy business. Courtney was a playwright who at the time I met her possessed an impressive resume of three produced plays. True, one had been presented in a coffeeshop, another in a college acting class, and the third in a furniture store. However, they had been produced, and in Los Angeles, being “produced” is everything. So I was suitably impressed with her. Courtney seemed taken by me a bit as well, and was especially fascinated with the fact that my mother had been bipolar, being that she herself had had what she termed “a flirtation with bipolar tendencies.” Ha fucking ha. One “flirts” with a fellow human being, or with the idea of one day becoming an astronaut. Flirting with mental illness is like flirting with an oncoming tsunami, taunting “come and get me.”
Still, Courtney seemed relatively stable, and claimed to be on enough lithium to tranquilize a tiger. She also had amazing eyes, a staggering body, and very naughty ways of using her tongue when we made out. But she also claimed to be a virgin, and wanted to “truly feel” the person she gave herself to.
So when she asked to see my bipolar mother’s journals, claiming this would be a way in which she and I could “truly feel” one another, I figured Why not? Being that my mom had interrupted many an encounter with me and a young lady back in my high school days, screaming about “the sins of bodily functions” and totally ruining my chances of getting laid, I figured that she owed me one. I could even half-picture her rooting me on from heaven or hell or wherever she’d wound up.
Courtney the playwright perused my mother’s journals over a period of weeks. When I called her to discuss the possibility of getting them back, I found her number was disconnected. No doubt, I figured, Mom had struck again from beyond the grave. Once Courtney realized how crazy the woman who’d given birth to me had been, she’d become so terrified she’d either moved or changed her number.
My assumption of Mom’s deathly reach was struck down, however, when one night wandering alone through Santa Monica I happened along a small Improv Theater. There, on the marquee, was the title, LAUGHING THROUGH LITHIUM. One of Mom’s favorite phrases, one which she’d repeatedly scrawled in her journals. When I bought my ticket and went inside I saw Courtney onstage, ranting about how her five year old son made her feel old, and while in one of her manic rages would sometimes lock him in the closet and then knock on the door and make him repeat “knock knock, who’s there” jokes until he finally stopped crying and started laughing.
“Knock, knock,” Courtney said.
“Who’s there?” she replied to herself in a child’s voice. I was offended; I didn’t think I’d ever sounded that scared.
“Who?”
“Who, who?”
“Who, who who on earth left this kid in my closet?” Courtney snickered, admittedly doing a pretty good imitation of my mom’s.
Standing in the back row (the seventh), I was aghast. That episode had been described explicitly in one of my mother’s journals. I’d asterisked the damn thing because I’d been planning to use it in one of my books. What the hell’s the point of going through an ordeal like that which is both so hurtful and at the same time kind of funny if you can’t write about it?
Now this woman was onstage beating me to the punch at the thievery of my mother’s innermost thoughts. The nerve. I kicked myself for not copyrighting my mother’s journals when I’d had the chance.
Courtney launched onto another “knock knock” joke, this one regarding the word “boogey.” I remembered this one explicitly. After all, I’d lived through it. A Sunday night in August when I’d been around six years old. When she got to the punchline I shouted, “Boogey man is in that closet with you!”
Courtney squinted a bit and seemed to recognize me. This
caused her to unleash a series of “uhs” and “ummmms” before she dropped the mic and retreated from the stage. The two people in the audience exchanged puzzled looks, then got up and left the theater.
It all worked out. After confronting Courtney backstage, she agreed to return my mom’s journals and cancel the remaining four performances of her show. I thought about a lawsuit, but since the entire run of the show had drawn a total of twenty-three people, I figured no harm done.
Another reason writers can be annoying as lovers: we have awesome memories. However, the skill tends to run along gender lines. The six month anniversary of the night you first made love? Chances are a woman will remember this while a man will recall the date of the first time you had sex in a public bathroom.
Writer’s block: sounds innocent enough but it can wreak havoc on a relationship. A writer sometimes can’t think of anything to write about. So they’re forced, because their art decrees it so, to create something to write about. This demands a keen and sharp mind, a willingness to look like a total asshole, and above all, complete disregard for anyone else’s feelings. I can’t count the number of times a fellow writer/lover has suggested something totally stupid, such as me “jokingly” telling a guy shooting pool with forearms the size of balloons that he looks totally hot. I’ve been guilty of this myself, one time urging a woman named Eileen, a very talented writer, to stride down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood stark naked at three in the morning.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be right by your side.”
“Why am I doing this again?” Eileen slurred. She was a bit drunk.
“For experience!” I exclaimed. “You want to be a writer, don’t you?”
She nodded sternly. “Of course! I do go to USC, you know-“
All these women and their fancy schools. My CSUN Matador pride stirred sufficiently enough for me to challenge, “Well, then, if you call yourself a writer, I dare you to take this chance. For the experience, if nothing else!” Babbling on, I couldn’t help but think, Goodness, I’m drunk, and even I can barely believe the bullshit tumbling out of my mouth.