There it was again. That agenda. Become an attorney like her father and spend all his time in a skyscraper downtown, getting paid for helping corporations screw people.
“This writing thing is okay for now,” she allows. “Daddy says that a good writer can be a good attorney. There’s a lot of writing in law.”
“Yeah, bad writing.” Learning about life from someone who has just seen her eighteenth birthday strikes Charlie as the biggest joke of his repeated life. He chuckles.
“Don’t laugh at me, Charlie Moment. I know you think you are smarter than me. But there are some things not even you know.”
“Like what?”
“Like how much I adore you.” She lunges at him, and soon he finds himself rolling around with her again, on the backseat of her father’s Coupe DeVille, again and again, time without end. Somehow Charlie knows that he has experienced this night a thousand times, but does not know how he knows.
* * *
Charlie spends several hours a day working on a new screenplay, mostly in the morning, when he can look like he is taking notes in class. He free-associates around the basic plot, writing scenes that pop into his head. Later he types up a more orderly, plot-driven set of scenes played for satire. He finds the bare-bones feel of script format a useful slimming down of the apparatus of stories and novels. Movements need little description, background still less—it’s all in the dialogue. Greenway was right. The medium does suit him.
It all comes from movies Charlie One saw. Plus, he adds insights that come from the immediacy of the turbulent 1968 unfolding around him.
He gathers momentum, feels it zip through his veins, hammer in his ears. But the return of youth has made him careless. He says to friends at a bowling alley, “Y’know, life is like this—gutters and strikes.” The high school crowd picks up and repeats this epigram. He even feels a little guilty, because it’s a lift from The Big Lebowski.
His parents are surprised that in addition to the University of Chicago and University of Illinois, he also applies to Stanford and two Universities of California, Berkeley and San Diego. He knows that Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley are long shots, with his spotty grades, but UCSD and Illinois are plausible. When his father casually mentions wondering which one he really wants to go to—obviously hoping it’s one of the far cheaper publics—Charlie is struck by how blithely young Charlie assumed that with his B+ average he could get into a UC. By 2000, high schoolers will paper dozens of university admission offices with their xeroxed or online pleas, counting on shotgun statistics. In 1968 it is not really a big deal.
“Why so far away?” his mother asks. He hasn’t the courage to say, That’s precisely why. A plan simmers in the back of his mind and he doesn’t want to discuss it yet.
* * *
Charlie has come to treasure time spent with his parents and sister—just watching TV shows or going to see narrow-eyed Steve McQueen zoom his Mustang through steep San Francisco streets in Bullitt. On a Sunday picnic their transistor radio plays tracks from the new White Album by the Beatles. Charlie picks up on the joy that the tunes bring to them. He watches his mother dance around a redwood table under dappled eucalyptus shade, singing the lyrics to a Beatles song all wrong, in her high soprano, nearly in tune. He loves it all anyway, as his first life as a teenager never allowed.
Everything is different this time. On Sundays his mother’s lengthy grace doesn’t grate on him. This time he savors each one
At high school he recalls who wrote poetry in Klingon, who sold dope, who was really gay and thought nobody knew. Friends, long forgotten by his late forties. As they pass by him again, he has a sad appreciation of how fleeting it all is.
* * *
Charlie is back in the diner with Bob Greenway, hamburger sizzle flavoring the air. Their chunky waitress with the sloppily lipsticked mouth waits for Greenway to decide between a cheeseburger and a club sandwich. She smiles at Charlie, eyeing him in a manner that is a little bit more than friendly. She glances back at Greenway and then throws Charlie a slow wink, saucy chin below vibrant red.
“Uh, Charlie?” Greenway says, and Charlie realizes he is staring at the waitress.
“Uh, oh, just had a plot idea . . .” He looks away from her, trying not to be rude as he does.
Greenway announces his carefully considered decision to have a cheeseburger with onions and turns to the typed pages that he has brought to their meeting. “I like what you’re saying about those three screenplays. There isn’t anything fresh about them, and your idea of a dramatic arc is good. In LA they don’t seem to have much of that. Y’know, I thought that the science fiction idea about this future in which scientists use parapsychology to find a killer was kinda interesting.”
“Pretty standard, really.” Charlie’s comment pops out of his mouth without thought, before he realizes that it’s an anachronism in 1968. The psychic paired with the detective hasn’t yet become hackneyed.
“Okay, well, you go to the new movies—I don’t.”
Charlie is relying on the many movies that he has seen, will see, in the videocassette era. That, and Heinlein and Asimov and Philip K. Dick. Greenway still lives in a world where new movies can be seen only in cinemas, while television runs ancient movies hacked up to fit commercials. Charlie is beginning to understand that this gives him a substantial advantage in dissecting futuristic screenplays. “I know the ropes and the tropes,” he says.
“Tropes?”
No teenager would know that term, so Charlie covers the mistake. “Picked the word up from Mr. Montini.”
“To be honest with you, Charlie . . .” Greenway takes a pull at his Camel. “I’m kinda gettin’ uncomfortable acting as your middleman with the studio guys. I can’t even take fifty percent of your reading fee anymore—you sure don’t need me filtering your reader reports.”
“Hey, I appreciate that. I’ve learned a lot from you.” Waits a beat, then: “What if we were to do a screenplay ourselves?”
Greenway clears his throat and takes a sip from his Coke, his face a mixture of eagerness and doubt. “Kid, have you got the time? You aren’t even out of high school. You must have a lot of history and stuff to learn.”
Stuff I’ve been teaching for years, Charlie says to himself. “Believe me, Bob, you aren’t going to be able to prevent me graduating from Woodrow Wilson High.”
Adult confidence slips into Charlie’s voice, but he can’t stop himself. His hunger to do something creative for the first time in his life drives him.
Greenway laughs wistfully.
9 Charlie turns off the ignition of the Dodge Dart, sliding quietly in neutral gear into the dark park that has been their regular Friday-night place for more than a year. Trudy was nestled against him the whole ride here, her muscles tight from her silent anticipation. Her scent had that musky tang already.
The night closes around them. Crickets sing of joy. He thinks of a sudden rhyme, the sort of thing that is coming to him often now as he imagines becoming a writer:
Nothing in the cicada cry
Suggests they are about to die.
Waiting only a beat, Trudy reaches for his belt buckle.
Charlie squirms slightly. Trudy pushes on his stomach and sits up. “What is it, Charlie?”
“I have a surprise for you, baby. Something to show you.”
“Yes, Charlie?” Her voice rises an octave. Oh God, Charlie thinks. She’s hoping for an engagement ring.
He breathes in the cool night air and decides to go on despite his misgivings. I know her so well now. . . . “Let me get it out of my pocket.”
Trudy quivers with anticipation, her grin wide. Charlie knows at once how she sees this moment. Charlie waiting for her in front of the altar, his hair trimmed neatly, wearing a beautiful tuxedo, James as best man. Organ music swells around her, Mendelssohn’s triumphant wedding march. Her father is holding her tightly around the waist, so proud of her as—
But then she sees that it’s an envelope, an officia
l-looking one. Her smile drops away and the muscles of her shoulders go slack. No, it isn’t a ring.
Charlie takes a piece of paper out of the envelope and hands it to her. “What is this, Charlie? Is it the draft or something?”
Charlie laughs. “I’m just seventeen, sweetheart. They can’t draft me for another ten months. I have three more months of high school, too. Not even the Nixon administration would do that.”
“There you go about the president! He’s not as bad as you think.”
No, he’s a lot worse, Charlie says to himself.
“Look at the check.”
“It’s a check? Why are you showing me a check?”
“Read it, baby. Just read it.”
“ ‘Pay to the order of Charles B. Moment.’ It starts out well.”
“Go on.” Charlie is starting to tense. Why can’t he work this through better?
“The sum of twenty—twenty thousand dollars.” Trudy gasps, then falls silent.
Charlie was expecting cries of joy by this point, but none come.
She studies the signature. “It’s from some movie studio company, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. For a script.”
She jerks her head, shrugging off this detail. “You’re not going to college? What about—”
“I got into UC San Diego.” The letter came in days before, but he has told no one but his family.
“And?” She peers at him. He says nothing.
“You’re going to go to Hollywood, aren’t you?”
“After graduation.”
Trudy bursts into tears and rage, fists slamming Charlie on the shoulder. “You aren’t going to the University of Chicago. You aren’t going to be a lawyer. Daddy was right. You’re no good, Charlie Moment. You’re no good.” But she sobs on his shoulder, throwing her arms around him.
* * *
Charlie’s father bangs into the house with an ebullient “Hey, everybody!” and tosses his hat and coat in the closet. Charlie gets up from the sofa, holding his envelope, hoping it will catch his father’s attention.
His father’s eyes narrow with worry. “What do you have there, son?”
He tosses it on the table, delaying the issue. “I have to talk with you, Dad.”
“Sure, Charlie. Sure.” His father pats Charlie’s shoulder, easing out of his day.
They go into the dining room, the stuffy citadel of family business, and sit down kitty-corner to each other across the polished maple sheen. Charlie hands over the rumpled envelope without a word. His father opens it, raises his eyebrows, and unfolds the check.
“Twenty thou. They bought the screenplay, didn’t they, the one about the president?”
Charlie nods. He has learned to let silence do the talking for him with his father.
Eyebrows arched, lips pursed, his father pushes down on the table with both his hands, fingers splayed. He exhales stale breath, his Adam’s apple squeezing up from the knot of his tie. “Charlie, you will be the first person in our family to make a name for themselves.”
He puts his hand firmly on Charlie’s arm. “I’m proud of you, boy.”
“Dad, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?” Charlie can see that his father might not see the full implications.
His father just smiles distantly and folds his hands.
“I’m going, I mean after graduation, going to Southern California. They will need me to work on the script during production.”
“No problem, Charlie. You can do that this summer, right?”
A beat. “Well, movies aren’t filmed to fit college schedules.”
His father leans back in his chair, a study in bright enthusiasm.
“I see, Charlie. You’re worried about going to college.” His father slaps Charlie on the upper arm. “Look, son. This is the real world. I’m lucky if I clear fifteen thousand a year at the gearbox, uh, the transmission factory. They’ve given you more for a hundred pages of words . . . just pages of words.”
Actually, a hundred and twenty pages I wrote in three weeks, he thinks but knows not to say. His father blinks, amazed at the thought. Mere words. Then he sucks in a raw breath, coming to terms with a new world. “And I know you’ve got plenty more in you. Your mother and I have the greatest faith in you, Charlie. You’ve become a serious person, at least since you gave up on that”—his father’s voice drops a few notes for the phrase—“political stuff.
“You’re a fine young man, and your mother and—”
“And what, Ned?” Charlie realizes that his mother has been watching them from the hallway, holding a dish towel in her hands. “What is that on the table?”
“Why, it’s a check from a studio, honey.”
“What is it for, Ned?”
“Twenty thousand, sweetheart.” Charlie sees from his father’s quick, suppressed frown that things are not going to go as well as he thought they would.
Storm clouds flicker in his mother’s face. “What about our son becoming a writer?”
“This is writing, honey. Very successful writing.”
“So he goes off to Hollywood and becomes a drunk like Scott Fitzgerald.” Her tone skates on acidic ice. “Nobody ever hears about him because he never does write that great American novel. What about our son then?”
Charlie did not see this coming. He stands, hands open to her. “Mom, it doesn’t have to be like that.”
Her face wrinkles. “You’re only seventeen! What do you know about failure, about disappointment? You aren’t the only one here who has dreams.” His mother’s wrenching desperation scares Charlie. Is there something I don’t know? he asks himself. Something going on between his parents?
His father’s tone thickens. “This is Charlie’s big chance. He can make something of himself.” A low note sounds in the man’s voice, a yearning Charlie has never heard. “Maybe he won’t have to sweat it out in some dull white-collar job, be a nobody? Let him take that chance, honey. If it doesn’t work out, he can apply to start college a year later. A chance like this may not come again.”
His mother doesn’t reply, quietly wringing the dish towel in her hands. She turns away from them slowly and her footsteps echo down the hall.
“Charlie, I’m sorry. Your mother and I . . . we haven’t been . . . happy lately, okay?”
* * *
Bob Greenway and Charlie Moment slide into their usual booth, don’t bother to pick up their menus. It’s their last meal in the diner where they first met. They both know this is it, and excitement flows through them. Their chunky waitress sways over to them promptly.
“The usual, gentlemen?”
“That’s right, Doris,” Charlie says, smiling at her.
Doris returns his smile with more of her mouth than usual. “Two cheeseburgers coming up, Charlie.”
Greenway takes out a Camel but doesn’t light it. “Ever thought about growing a beard?”
“Sure. Why?” He had one most of his adult life, the last time.
“It would help with the studio. I think we could sell you as twenty-eight with a beard.”
“Ah.”
“Maybe get a tan, too. Looks count in Hollywood.”
Charlie can see that Greenway is right. He nods pointedly. “What about my hair?”
Greenway laughs, soon devolving into coughing. Charlie waits for him to finish. “You really are a keen son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
Greenway blinks, realizing quickly that Charlie’s ambitions are not to be mocked. “Uh, okay. The way I see it is the studios are fucking scared right now. The sixties blew up in their faces. The old formulas stopped working. Once Frank Sinatra doesn’t define cool, they got no idea where to go. This guy Lester makes these stupid movies about four mop tops—no offense, Charlie, okay?—and cleans up. He’s hip. So question is, how can they make money with real pictures?”
They still don’t see how big the Beatles thing could be? Charlie wonders. “Yeah, let the hair stay long.” Greenway can’t fight off his addictio
n any longer. Lighting the cigarette, he takes a long drag. A slight shudder runs through his body as his nerves settle. Charlie recalls a favorite saying of his father’s: Never miss a good opportunity to shut up. Clearly, Greenway has never heard of this rule.
“Your long hair, mustache . . . maybe beard, the twenty-eight years we’re going to give you, this script”—he picks it up, slaps it down with relish—“they say hip, cool, young. The studios aren’t going to be interested in an old hack like me. They will flip for you as, like, that Paul Lennon.”
“John Lennon.”
“Okay, sure. Point is, they need you. With your insights and my writing ability, we could be huge.”
“My writing is getting better.”
Greenway leans back and smiles, slapping his belly as Doris slides their cheeseburger plates in front of them. She pats Charlie on the shoulder and gives him her largest crimson smile, teeth radiantly white.
Greenway picks up his juicy burger. “Don’t get me wrong, Charlie. I love the screenplay that Action Pictures bought. It’s just that the whole plot thing, substituting for the president, is kind of Twilight Zone, you know. It was nifty making it a comedy, though.”
Charlie just watches. Greenway barely gets the point. Cultural swerves take a while to sink in. Charlie already has a short list of movies that he is going to chisel into screenplays, all carved from rough-stone memories of hit movies that he has already seen. This was the first he tried, and it was even easier than he had hoped.
Greenway puts the cheeseburger down to pick up his cigarette for another puff. Why does everybody smoke in 1969? Charlie wonders. Didn’t anybody read that surgeon general’s report?
“But you still need to work on your scenes. I think you write too short. But we’ll see when we get notes from the studio.” Greenway bites into his burger. Charlie finally picks up his and takes a bite, the taste bursting rich and juicy on his tongue. Savor it. . . .
* * *
Part II
* * *
Long Upward Spiral
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