Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  What if Mr. Glick was like them other men? Just makin’ come-ons to her, lookin’ for trouble? She remembered Dobe’s words of warning. As she stepped onto the elevator, punching the button for the twelfth floor, she prayed that she’d get some honest work.

  “Do I have to pray to Yahweh to get some honest work out of you?” Sy Ortis was asking Milton Glick.

  “Sy, I know you’re going to like this girl.”

  “I better. And Marty better. Because otherwise he’s casting that nasty New York twat, and you are shit out of luck.” Sy was furious about Bethanie Lake, a nobody from the East Coast that Marty was considering. She was already represented by Judy Priestly, so Sy would be cut out. And if he was cut out, Milton would be, too. He could guarantee that.

  Sometimes desperation can alter perception. Even if Sharleen Smith had not been one of the most beautiful young women on the face of the planet, she might have been perceived as such by these two desperate men. But as she was ushered into the conference room, she had never looked lovelier. The cheap clothes, the messy hair, the flush all contributed to an air of irresistible youth and sensuality.

  “Mr. Glick?” she asked. “Remember me? Sharleen, from Bakersfield.”

  “Not originally from Bakersfield,” Sy Ortis replied. “Unless that’s a fake accent.”

  “Do I have an accent?” The men laughed.

  Sy Ortis stood up and walked over to her. No one had offered Sharleen a seat, so she stood there. Sy walked around the girl, then looked over at Milton.

  “Almost white-blond. And no roots. Monica Flanders will like this one. Well, this is at least a possibility,” he said to Milton. “The hair. It’s your hair, Sharleen from Bakersfield?”

  “Well, of course it’s my hair.” Except she pronounced it “hay-er.”

  “Give her a script,” Ortis ordered Glick, and Milton rejoiced. He handed the girl a blue-covered binder, showed her where to read.

  “We’ll run some lines, okay? You read the part of Clover.”

  “Okay,” agreed Sharleen, but it sounded to them like “Oh-ky.” Milton read a line, and Sharleen stumbled through the next one. Then Milton read again.

  Sy barely listened. He knew that Marty primarily cared about the way things looked, and this looked good. Was the kid wearing any makeup? It didn’t matter. He could see this one would put lip gloss on her butt to please. He could draw up the Flanders contract and probably get her to sign for less than a hundred thousand dollars. Perhaps he could charge her an equal amount in finder’s fees.

  Excited but too experienced to show it, Sy picked up the phone and punched in some numbers. He stared blankly into space as he listened to the car phone at the other end ring, then be picked up. He said “hello,” then punched them onto the speakerphone and put the receiver down.

  “Marty?”

  “What, Sy?”

  “Marty, do you want to say hello to your new Clover?”

  “Sure.”

  Sy motioned to Sharleen with an uplifted hand. “Say hello to Mr. DiGennaro,” he told her.

  “Hello, Mr. DiGennaro.”

  Marty snorted, the noise accompanied by crackles of transmission friction. “Where did you get that phony corn pone from?” he asked.

  “From the mouth of the most beautiful virgin you’ll ever meet.” Then it hit him. Were they playing with jail-bait here? A greedy parent could fuck up any deal. “Madre di Dios!” He turned to Sharleen. “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” she said, but to all three men it sounded like “Nan teen.” On the speakerphone, Marty laughed again.

  “You’re pulling my thing.”

  “Get over here and take a look for yourself,” Sy told him. “Let her pull it.” Milton Glick smiled for the first time that month.

  “Sy, I’ll personally kill you if I have to get on the freeway at this hour for nothing,” Marty threatened.

  “This isn’t nothing,” Sy promised.

  They spent the next hour running the lines with her. Sharleen began to worry about Dean, but she was afraid to ask them if she could go. They wanted her address, to know how long she’d lived in Bakersfield, where she was from, if she had representation, and if she was married. Lots more questions, too. Sharleen thought of Lamson and lied. Talked about Arkansas and Oklahoma. She prayed she was saying the right thing. She had been standing in the shabby white high heels now for over an hour. Her calves were aching.

  “Please,” she finally asked, “kin I sit down?”

  “Certainly,” said Milton Glick.

  Sy Ortis realized the girl had been afraid to ask to sit down until now. He took a deep breath. “Milton,” Sy said, “she’s perfect.”

  By the time the third man arrived, Sharleen was worn out. She was afraid to ask if she had the job, what it paid, and if it would last for more than a week or two. She read the lines as she had been instructed and tried not to be put off by Mr. DiGennaro, who prowled around her, sometimes close, sometimes farther away, occasionally crouching, once even pulling up a chair, jumping onto it, and staring down at her.

  “Incredible,” he said at last. “She doesn’t have a bad angle. You know how easy that will make shooting her?”

  Sharleen heard the word “shooting” and took a step backward. Maybe these guys were mobsters. After all, “DiGennaro” sounded like a Mafia name. She licked her lips, gathered her courage, and finally asked a question.

  “So do I get this job or not?” she asked.

  “Oh, I think you do. I truly think you do,” Mr. DiGennaro said.

  10

  By now you’ve probably forgotten Neil Morelli. Why not? So did several million people who tuned him in for the brief time that he starred in All the President’s Chakras.

  I—Laura Richie—had interviewed Neil back before the show came out. He was as high on his success and as cocky as any actor I’ve ever met. He talked about how he was “gonna kick Seinfeld’s ass.” He was driving a fancy car. He was dating his costar, a blonde bombshell who needed a reading for every line she had to deliver. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  It wasn’t that the concept of the show wasn’t funny. It was. It was about a loony astrologer who had the President’s ear and had been named to the newly created Cabinet post of “secretary of astrology.” The show. All The President’s Chakras, could be really wacky, if only the writers could write jokes. But they couldn’t. What can you expect from guys whose writing credits included Charles in Charge? Neil knew he could do better. In fact, he had, but no one would even read his suggested changes, never mind admit that the lines weren’t working. It was a script from Ortis’ group of hacks, and they were losers, skidders, and bums. But Ortis represented him, too. So what the fuck was up?

  Neil had gone to the producer over the director’s head and shown him some of his proposed changes to the script. Okay, maybe he hadn’t been diplomatic. Maybe he had tried to push his bantam weight around, but the guy had overreacted.

  “Get the fuck out of my office,” Lenny Hartley had yelled, throwing the script back at him. “And you’re off the lot for the rest of the day,” he screamed. “I make the decisions around here, not you. You guys are a dime a dozen, so, if you can’t do what you’re told today, don’t come back tomorrow.”

  That was the part that really frightened Neil. He was supposed to be the star of this little piece of shit. So where was the star treatment? He thought he had made it, that he’d finally gotten to a point where he’d get some respect. Some power. Wrong again, bean head. As he drove out through the gates of the lot he shivered, thinking about not being able to come back there. He had finally arrived, finally made it to Hollywood, burned all his bridges. There was no turning back.

  But the script was lousy, and the President was an empty suit of an actor, while the other lead, the First Lady, was played by a dumb bitch who had fucked her way into the part. In fact, she’d fucked Neil. If she didn’t make it on this show, she could always arrange to get another shot the way she had gotten this
one. But what about him? If it flopped, where could he go? And as it looked now, there was no way that this bird would get picked up for the entire season.

  Neil knew that it was make-it-or-break-it time for him. Maybe he shouldn’t have screamed like a maniac at Sy Ortis’ secretary; maybe he should have spoken again to the guy, the mini-agent in Sy’s office, Brad or Tad or Todd or Ted, who had been assigned to him. But that guy was another know-nothing, do-nothing, a schmuck in Armani who specialized in taking meetings and fucking the dumb broads banging down his door.

  I did a bit in the column about the trouble. But, hey, that’s nothing new. There are over four hundred pilots shot each year. Only about two dozen of them make series. Of those, only one or two go on for more than a year. Not great odds. Neil was just a statistical probability.

  Change is a bitch. Not all change, of course. Let’s face it. it’s not so tough getting used to living in a beach house, driving a BMW, having a cleaning woman who does your laundry and cooks your meals and irons your clothes. It’s not so hard to take, after a lifetime of deprivation. Accepting those changes hadn’t been a problem for Neil Morelli. The house in Malibu and the BMW, the pretty girlfriend, the sex in a hot tub—and the cleaning woman—it was like he was born to them. No, they weren’t the changes Neil hadn’t adjusted to.

  It was the new changes he’d had to deal with the last few months, since his series was canceled that were the bitch. Getting used, once again, to a crummy apartment in Encino, dirty laundry that didn’t get washed by itself, and working a day job.

  Fucking working again, like a slave, for fucking assholes. For tips! Neil Morelli returned home from his gig exhausted and miserable. When All the President’s Chakras was canceled, Neil wasn’t surprised, since he had known almost from the beginning that the scripts were crap, that the writers were fourth-rate. In fact, he had prophesied that it would be a catastrophe, unless major revamping was done.

  But knowing the show was going to flop sometime in the future was no preparation for the devastation when it was actually canceled. For the first few weeks after the cancellation, he spent his time on the phone with anyone at Ortis’ office who would listen. Todd, Tad, Brad, et al. After a while, Sy Ortis’ office said the inevitable: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” And the great man didn’t talk to him at all. Not once. That was something out of a thirties movie, for chrissakes. Who the fuck was Sy Ortis anyhow?

  He tried, as he always did, to joke himself out of it. Remember, he told himself, what the Muslims say: if shit happens, it’s the will of Allah. He also remembered Woody Allen’s line about Hollywood: “It’s worse than dog eat dog: it’s dog doesn’t return other dog’s phone call.” But jokes didn’t help. There was no Mary Jane or anyone else to laugh with him. Then the isolation and inertia set in. He knew he needed to do something. His money was running out, he had no plans, his agent had dropped him, and he couldn’t—wouldn’t—go back to New York with his tail between his legs. So he did the only thing he knew how to do. He continued to work on his routine. He wrote and rewrote. But writing funny when you feel like used cat litter isn’t easy. The routines weren’t coming, and when they did they didn’t work.

  Overnight, it seemed, he had gone from Malibu to Encino, from a leased BMW to a used Honda, from starring in a TV series to working as a waiter in a comedy club. It was like getting broadsided by a car. The months had passed, and all he could say was “What happened?”

  Shit happened is what happened, he thought. Or, as the Hindus say, this shit all happened before. Problem was, he was no Hindu.

  Neil tossed his white shirt and black bow tie on the pile of clothes next to the convertible sofa that he never bothered to close and fell across the bare mattress. While he lay on his stomach, he kicked off his scuffed, black Gucci loafers with the holes in the soles and heard them thunk onto the pile of dirty clothes beneath them. He welcomed the sound—the only sound at four in the morning.

  The musty odor of the mattress filled his nostrils, forcing him to turn on his back. There was no one he could share this with, no one who wouldn’t gloat. Even his sister, Brenda, would just offer him some money and sympathy, tell him to come home. Christ! He felt as shamed as a beaten dog. As he lay in the silence of the night, he thought, as he often had, of Mary Jane. She was the only one who would understand, who could comfort him. There wasn’t anyone else who understood him, or whom he understood. If she still did, he thought, after all this time.

  But when he had tried to telephone, only a few months after he arrived in L.A., he found her phone had been shut off. The couple of cards he sent her had been returned. She’d moved and left no forwarding address. Neil still missed her. Missed her more, in his failure, than before, in his success.

  He got up and unbuckled his trousers, let them drop to the floor, kicked them to the far wall, then tossed along his shorts. He plodded into the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and went back outside to the joke his landlord called a kitchenette, took a beer out of the refrigerator, and waited the ten minutes it took for the shower water to begin to run hot. He pushed the collection of old newspapers off the only chair in the room and flopped down, stretching his feet out before him. He was relieved that it was night, still not dawn. He hoped he would be asleep before the daylight crept into the room and illuminated all the nastiness that was now mercifully hidden. Hidden, but lurking.

  He knew the hole worn in the acrylic carpet was still there, just inside the front door, something Neil had thought was a scientific impossibility—to wear out an acrylic carpet. And there in the darkness was the crack in the wall over the kitchen sink that had been caused by a leak from upstairs. And the grease on the stove burners. And the penetrating smell of decay everywhere. That even the darkness couldn’t hide, but the malty aroma of the beer he held just below his nostrils covered it. Thank God.

  He went back into the bathroom, turned on the overhead light, and tested the water. Hot; it took exactly ten minutes, the only reliable thing in his life. He adjusted the temperature slightly, then pulled back the sticky, stiff shower curtain and stepped in. He reached for the soap, and cursed when he realized he was down to a sliver. The shampoo would be almost gone, too, he knew, so he washed quickly and got out of the soap-filmed stall. The towel he plucked from the back of the door smelled, but at least it was his smell. He rubbed himself roughly, tossed the towel onto the damp stack on the floor, and went back to the other room.

  He reached into the fridge for another beer, but was greeted only by a Diet Coke and a rotting apple. Neil slammed the door and flopped back down on his bed. He closed his eyes and prayed that tonight he would be left alone. But he knew he wouldn’t be.

  He breathed quietly for a while; then, just as he was beginning to drowse, he heard it. The words seemed to come in through his left ear, piercing his brain and shocking his spinal cord. It was him doing his comedy routine at the club tonight, and he would have to relive it even if he didn’t want to.

  It had been like this for several months now. Every evening, he went to work and waited tables, waiting for his spot in the last of the three nightly shows. Then it was back here, shower, go to bed, and, before he could sleep, listen to the routine all over again. He always used to record it, but he didn’t need to now. It ran in his head, over and over. Some nights, it was fairly good, and Neil slept relatively peacefully. Other nights—most nights—he had to scream out that it was all wrong, then get up and write and rewrite the routine until he got it better, adding here, deleting there. Then back to sleep, maybe, for a few hours, until it was time to report to the club to wait tables and do the rewritten routine. Finally, home again for the private reviews, as he began to call them.

  At least tonight’s review was good. He listened to the piece he had added about Hollywood agents, and he could hear the crowd laughing. Yes, this bit wasn’t bad. After a drought for months, he was onto something. This was good and I’ll make it better. I’m going to get my second chance, he thought. He stretch
ed out, exhausted, on the nightmare of a mattress. I’m not always going to live in a dump in Encino, he told himself. Someday, he thought…someday…I must do my laundry.

  And he slept.

  11

  Jahne tried to keep calm as she drove over to the television studios. Her Toyota was vetted by the guard at the entrance, who checked her name off a list.

  What do you do to prepare for the chance of a lifetime? She’d gone to the best hairdresser in L.A. Viendra was a man who wore a tight little red dress and size-eleven slingback pumps. He’d looked at Jahne’s heavy hair. “What have we here?” he’d simpered. “How about a crew cut? You’ve got the face for it.”

  “No cut. Can you just cover the gray?” she asked. The white strands stood out against the darkness of the rest of her head.

  “Hmm.” He considered, did a tiny dance around her chair, and shook his head. “No. It would dull the rest of it. Nothing worse than dyed black hair. I have a better idea. We highlight it with blue.”

  “Blue?” she asked, and her voice must have quavered, but he explained it all calmly. The blue would make the black look darker and yet give a luster to the whole mane. She agreed to try.

  Now she tossed her hair in front of the rent-a-cop. It did shine beautifully. “Go right into Building Three,” he told her. She drove across the lot. Once the place had been Desilu, the soundstages where I Love Lucy and so many pioneering TV shows had been filmed. Before that it had been Selznick International Pictures. Jahne turned a corner and there, in front of her, was Tara, the plantation house from Selznick’s Gone With the Wind. She gaped like a Hollywood tourist, but then she saw the sign—Building 3. She remembered now that Selznick had used the building as his offices. She was going in there. Not like a tourist, but as a working actress, the way Ingrid Bergman and Olivia de Havilland and Vivien Leigh had done. She pulled the rented Toyota over and took a few deep breaths. Her hands were shaking. Playing this part was a lot harder than she expected. She pulled down the vanity mirror in the car visor and stared at her reflection. She was beautiful, if a little pale. Her hair glistened like a raven’s wing. She thought of Pete’s voice whispering in her ear—“You’re so beautiful. You’re just so beautiful.” And certainly Marty DiGennaro wouldn’t have invited her here if she wasn’t.