by Woody Allen
I remember her body against mine and a kiss that caused steam to jet out of both my ears. I also remember the look on her face when I turned her in to the NYPD. I sighed over her state-of-the-art equipment as she was cuffed and led away by the fuzz. Then I beat it over to the Carnegie Deli for a pastrami on rye with pickles and mustard—the stuff that dreams are made of.
GLORY HALLELUJAH, SOLD!
The Internet auction site eBay has gained a new spiritual dimension, with a seller offering prayers for cash. The self-styled Prayer Guy, based in Co. Kildare, Ireland, is selling five prayers, with bidding for each of them starting at £1. Buyers with pressing spiritual needs can buy immediately for £5.
—Item in church newsletter, August 2005
HEN THE RATINGS came out and The Dancing Ombudsman got a minus thirty-four, there was some talk at Nielsen that people who accidentally tuned in the show then put their eyes out like Oedipus. In the end the bottom line prevailed and our staff was assembled in the office of the producer, Harvey Nectar, and each writer was offered a choice between resignation or going into a closed room with a revolver. I won’t downplay my responsibility as a participant in what Variety called “a fiasco comparable to the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs,” but I will say in my defense that I was basically a punch-up specialist put in at the last minute to leaven the burn-unit scenes with sight gags.
The last few seasons working on the tube have been a little rough on me, and it seems the many flop series my name has appeared on proceeded one after the other with the relentless consistency of carpet bombing. My agent, Gnat Louis, was taking longer and longer to return my phone calls, and finally, when I collared him over salmon cheeks at Nobu, he leveled with me and pointed out that to the industry the credit Hamish Specter on an end crawl was a synonym for potassium cyanide.
Unbent by the turn of events yet requiring a minimal ration of caloric material in order to remain amongst the living, I scoured the want ads and happened to come across a curious one in The Village Voice. The proposition read: “Bard wanted to write special material—good pay—no atheists please.”
Skeptic that I was as an adolescent, I had recently come to believe in a Supreme Being after thumbing through a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Figuring this might be the yellow-brick to a little fresh scratch, I shaved and donned my most solemn attire, a black three-button number that would have been the envy of any pallbearer. Computing the tariff for private transportation versus the subway, I made a beeline for the IRT and jiggled to Brooklyn, where, above Rocky Fox’s Stick Academy, a green felt parlor with the usual cast of unsavories nursing their cue balls, existed the national headquarters of Moe, the Prayer Jockey.
Far from ecclesiastical in feel, the offices I entered bustled with the whirligig energy of The Washington Post. There were cubbies all over where harried scribes were banging out prayers to meet what was obviously an enormous demand.
“Come in,” a corpulent presence beckoned as he laid waste a covey of rugelach. “Moe Bottomfeeder, the Prayer Jockey. What can I do you for?”
“I saw your ad,” I wheezed. “In the Voice. Right under the Vassar coeds who specialize in body rubs.”
“Right, right,” Bottomfeeder said, licking his fingers. “So, you want to be a psalm scrivener.”
“Psalms?” I queried. “Like ‘The Lord is my shepherd’?”
“Don’t knock it,” Bottomfeeder said, “it’s a big seller. You should be so lucky. Any experience?”
“I did do a TV pilot called Nun for Me, Thanks, about some very devout sisters in a convent who build a neutron bomb.”
“Prayers are different,” Bottomfeeder said, waving me off. “They gotta be reverent, plus they gotta give hope, but—and here’s what separates the truly gifted minter of supplications from your Hallmark hacks—the prayers have gotta be worded in suchwise that when they don’t come true, the mark—er, that is, the faithful—can’t sue. You follow me?”
“I think I do. You’d prefer to avoid costly litigation,” I bantered.
Bottomfeeder winked. His bespoke threads and Rolex suggested a crackerjack business mind not unlike Samuel Insull or the late Willie Sutton.
“Believe it or not, I began as a lower-class drone like your self,” he said, launching unasked into his formative years. “Starting out selling neckties from an open valise à la Ralph Lauren. Both of us hit it big. Him in fashion, me by skinning the flock. Let’s face it, most people have pressing spiritual needs. I mean, every cretin prays. Using the old dreidel, I knocked out a couple of plaintive invocations on my laptop and the ginch I was bouncing at the time got the lightbulb to auction them off on eBay. Pretty soon the demand got so great I had to put on a staff. We got prayers for health, for love problems, for that raise you want, the new Maserati, maybe a little rain if you’re a rube—and of course the ponies, the point spread, and our hottest item: ‘O Heavenly Father, Lord God of hosts, let me abide in the kingdom of glory forever and, just once, hit the lottery—oh, and Lord, the Megaball.’ Like I say, the wording’s gotta be such that should the heavenly request tank, we don’t wind up getting served.”
At this point the door clicked open and a troubled head popped in. “Hey, boss,” the confounded author yelped, “a guy in Akron wants a prayer so his wife should bear him a son. I’m stymied for a fresh approach.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Bottomfeeder said to me, “I recently added a service where we customize prayers. We fashion the text to the unworthy’s individual needs and mail him some personally tailored begging.” Then, turning to his minion, he barked, “Try ‘May the broad lie down in green pastures and drop foals abundantly.’”
“Brilliant, M.B.,” the writer said. “I knew if I was stuck for a sacred phrase—”
“No, wait,” I interjected suddenly. “Make that ‘May she multiply fruitfully.’”
“Hey,” Bottomfeeder said, “you’re cooking with gas. This kid’s a pheen.” I was basking in my compliment when the phone rang. Bottomfeeder pounced on it.
“Holy Moe Bottomfeeder, the Prayer Jockey, speaking. What? I’m sorry, lady. You have to talk to our complaint department. We do not guarantee the Lord will grant whatever it is you’re on about. He can only give it His best shot. But don’t get discouraged, sweetheart. You still may find your cat. No, we don’t give refunds. Read the tiny letters on your prayer-confirmation contract. Spells out our liability and His. What we will do, though, is send you one of our complimentary blessings, and if you go over to the Lobster Grotto on Queens Boulevard and tell ’em the Lord sent you, you’ll get a gratis cocktail.” Bottomfeeder hung up. “Everybody’s on my case. Last week I got sued because we mailed the wrong envelope to a woman. She wanted a little divine assistance to make her face work turn out swell, and I accidentally sent her a prayer for peace in the Middle East. Meanwhile Sharon pulls out of Gaza and she gets off the operating table looking like Jake LaMotta. So what do you say, chuckles, in or out?”
Integrity is a relative concept, best left to the penetrating minds of Jean-Paul Sartre or Hannah Arendt. The reality is, when winter winds howl and the only affordable dwelling shapes up as a cardboard carton on Second Avenue, principles and lofty ideals have a tendency to vanish in a whirlpool down the bathroom plumbing, and so, postponing plans for a Nobel, I gritted my teeth and leased my muse to Moe Bottomfeeder. For the following six months, I must confess, a myriad of those pleas for divine intervention you or yours may have requested or bid for on eBay were knocked out by Mrs. Specter’s onetime prodigy, Hamish. Among my gold-leaf texts were “Dearest Lord—I am only thirty and already balding. Restoreth mine hair and anoint my sparse areas with frankincense and myrrh.” Another Specter classic: “Lord God, King of Israel—I have tried but in vain to shed twenty pounds. Smite my excess avoirdupois and protect me from starches and carbs. Yea, as I walk through the valley, deliver me from cellulite and harmful trans fats.”
Perhaps the top price ever paid at a prayer auction was for my moving plea: “R
ejoice, O Israel, for the stock market hath arisen. O Lord, can You do it now for the Nasdaq?”
Yes, the Benjamin Franklins were falling into my account like manna from heaven until one day two swarthy gentlemen, heavily invested in Sicilian cement, dropped up to the office while Bottomfeeder was out. I was at my desk, debating the ethics of a prayer for some new home owners pleading for the castration of their contractor. Before I could ask the visitors how I could help them, I found myself making the same sound a fife makes as the one named Cheech lifted me by the scruff of my neck and dangled me out the window, high above Atlantic Avenue.
“There must be some mistake,” I squealed, scrutinizing the pavement below with more than a vested interest.
“Our sister won a prayer here last week,” he said. “She bid high on eBay for it.”
“Yes—yes,” I gagged. “Mr. Bottomfeeder will be back at six. He handles—”
“Well, we’re here to give you a message. That co-op board better accept her,” Cheech explained.
“We hear you wrote that prayer,” the brother with the ice pick added. “Let’s hear it—and loud.”
Not wanting to deny their request and seem a spoilsport, I trilled the material in question in the manner of Joan Sutherland.
“Blessed art Thou, oh Lord. Grant me in thine infinite wisdom the two-bedroom with the eat-in kitchen on Park and Seventy-second.”
“She paid twelve hundred bucks for that prayer. It better come true,” Cheech said, snapping me back inside and hanging me on the coatrack like a duck in a Chinatown window.
“Either that or we mail your arms and legs to four different addresses.” With that they quit the offices of Moe Bottomfeeder, Prayer Jockey, and after making sure they were long gone, so did I.
I don’t know if the building in question finally accepted Teresa Calebrezzi as a tenant, but I can say that while there are not many writing jobs here in Tierra del Fuego, my kneecaps are still of a piece. Amen.
CAUTION, FALLING MOGULS
WHILE PERUSING THE times movie ads in desperate search of some bearable celluloid high jinks with which to palliate a summer of heat and barometric readings one associates with August in Yoknapatawpha County, I had the interesting fortune to find a little oddment entitled The Kid Stays in the Picture. This nostalgic documentary chronicled the rise of a young Prince Charming from a minor acting role as a matador to a taurine Hollywood studio head, laid low by the banderillas of blind ambition, marital heartbreak, and the untimely foreclosure by public servants of a commodious stash of nose candy. Emotionally shredded by this Euripidean tragedy, I eschewed sleep that night to mint a screenplay on the theme of hubris in Lotusland—a manuscript that promises to be an artistic and commercial event unexperienced since Howard the Duck. Some scenes follow.
Fade in on a papaya stand on Manhattan’s West Side. Dispensing franks and coconut milk is a hangdog pilgrim in his fifties whose prematurely aging visage speaks eloquently of suffering at fate’s mercurial whims. He is Mike Umlaut, who muses to himself ruefully while drawing a piña colada as his boss, Mr. Ectopic, looks on.
UMLAUT Saints preserve me. That I, Mike Umlaut, once resplendent CEO of a dream factory, vacuuming profits like a slot machine, am reduced to doling out tropical beverages as a means of keeping my stove warm.
ECTOPIC Let’s move it, Umlaut. There’s a customer bellowing for a corn dog.
UMLAUT Right away, sir. Just slicing a papaya in such wise as to retain its healthful vitamin content. (To himself, as he fetches a corn dog for an insistent eight-year-old) Ironic that I who began my career trafficking in victuals should end up in similar fashion.
(Camera shakes as we dissolve back to Umlaut’s first job as caterer on the set of Where Beavers Fear to Tread, a studio epic shot at a lot close to Paramount. We dolly in to the craft-service table, where we discover Harry Eppis, the producer, pondering the assorted pick-me-ups.)
EPPIS (to Moribund, his yes-man) What to do? Here I am, two years over schedule on an eight-week shoot, and my lead actor, Roy Reflux, gets busted for frottage at the Gap. Is it a wonder my ulcer’s the size of a flapjack? You there, wretched caterer: black coffee and a cinnamon Danish.
MORIBUND You’ll have to shoot around him, H.E. At least till his parole. It’ll add copious zeroes to our budget, but you knew Reflux was a handful when you inked his pact.
UMLAUT Excuse me, sir, for daring to speak, but I couldn’t help overhearing your little dumka. Why not just write his role out?
EPPIS What? Who said that? Do my cochleas deceive me, or was it the lowly purveyor of buns?
UMLAUT Think of it, sir. His character, though amusing, is not pivotal. A few lashes laid to the writer’s back and he could emend the scenario with sufficient cunning as to manumit you forever from Reflux, that pot of kasha, whom you’re vastly overpaying, if Variety’s any judge.
EPPIS I’ll bet he’s right. This below-the-line inchworm has just brushed a veil from before my peepers. You’ve a quick noggin, you rascal—and obviously it extends beyond schnecken.
UMLAUT By the way, I wouldn’t have black coffee and cinnamon Danish if you have an ulcer. The one is sodden with caffeine, the other sports too savory a spice. Why not let me coddle you a more user-friendly tandem of oeufs.
EPPIS Is there no end to this Renaissance man’s vision? There’s a place for a noodle such as yours in the front office. Henceforth you will be in charge of all pictures made at Bubonic Studios.
(Dissolve to a movie premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The words “One Year Later” are supered over the glittering throng that engorges the lobby. An admixture of moguls and superstars exchange insincerities with agents, directors, and ravishing young wannabes. The camera travels down the chandelier, à la Hitchcock, to a close-up of Mike Umlaut’s trembling hands as he converses, sotto voce, with his newly acquired agent, Jasper Nutmeat.)
NUTMEAT Take it easy, kid. I’ve never seen you so wired.
UMLAUT Wouldn’t you be, Nutmeat? My first picture as producer. If Behold a Pale Endocrinologist doesn’t make it, I’m finished. Fifty million simoleons suctioned from studio coffers and deposited in perpetuity with Thomas Crapper.
NUTMEAT You gotta go with your instinct, kid. Your gut told you America’s ready for a picture about the smelting process.
UMLAUT I’ve only staked my future on it. But what am I to do, Nutmeat? I’m a dreamer.
(A velvety voice punctuates Umlaut’s reverie.)
PAULA And I’d like a chance to make your dreams come true.
(Umlaut snaps around and we cut to a blond apparition in her early twenties, clearly descended from Olympus by way of Hugh Hefner’s mansion.)
UMLAUT Wha? Who are you, you fortuitous agglomeration of protoplasm?
PAULA Paula Pessary. I’m only a starlet now, but with a teensy break I could lay siege to the hearts of a truly solid demographic.
UMLAUT And I’ll see to it you get the at-bat so coveted.
PAULA (stroking his cheek) I promise you, I’m well trained in the art of gratitude.
(The bow tie of Umlaut’s tuxedo begins spinning like a propeller.)
UMLAUT I mean to marry you and make you the brightest star in the firmament, and I’m including Canis Major, the dog one.
PAULA Mike Umlaut marry? Everyone knows that as Tinseltown’s budding Thalberg you’re glimpsed nightly at sundry boîtes always squiring a fresh mouse.
UMLAUT Till tonight. Tonight, the earth shook.
NUTMEAT (running over) The reviews are in. The movie’s a smash. You’ll never have to return another phone call!
(Cut to exterior shot of Bubonic Studios. Cut inside to reveal the new head honcho, Mike Umlaut. He sits in his office, where the walls are dotted with Warhols and Stellas, plus an occasional Fra Angelico to limn the breadth of his taste. Surrounding him are flunkies and myrmidons aplenty. Nutmeat, now a vice president, is present, plus Arvide Mite and Tobias Gelding, two ubiquitous studio dealmakers. Dolly in for two-shot of Umlaut barking orders
to his harried secretary, Miss Onus.)
UMLAUT Get me Wolfram Ficus on the phone and tell him I’m sending him a copy of Such Foolish Chickens. Tell him to read the part of Yount the apothecary. And ready my private Gulfstream; there’s a sneak preview of The Reluctant Embalmer in Seattle. Have the plane taxi down Rodeo Drive and pick me up in front of Spago after lunch.
GELDING M.U., the weekend figures are in. Gerbils and Gypsies has broken every record at the music hall.
MITE As has The Learning Disabled Toreador. Everything you touch goes platinum.
UMLAUT Say, boys, have any of you read Gilgamesh?
(They assent enthusiastically.)
NUTMEAT The Babylonian Bible? Sure, several times, why?
UMLAUT I’m going to say one word to you: musical.