by Jess Walter
Take, for instance, Claire’s nine thirty: a liver-spotted TV writer who played squash with Michael during the Reagan years and now wants to make a reality show about his grandkids (proudly displaying their pictures on the conference table). “Cute,” Claire says, and “Aw,” and “How sweet,” and “Yes, they do seem to be over-diagnosing autism now.”
But Claire can’t complain about meetings like this unless she’s ready to hear the Michael Deane Loyalty Lecture: how, in this cold town, Michael Deane is a man who never forgets his friends, holding them in tight clench and staring into their eyes: You know I’ve always loved your work, (NAME HERE). Come down next Friday and see my girl Claire. Then Michael takes a business card, signs it, and presses it into the person’s hand, and just like that, they’re in. People with a signed Michael Deane business card might want tickets to a premiere, or the number of a certain actor, or a signed movie poster, but usually what they want is the same thing everyone here wants—to pitch.
To pitch here is to live. People pitch their kids into good schools, pitch offers on houses they can’t afford, and when they’re caught in the arms of the wrong person, pitch unlikely explanations. Hospitals pitch birthing centers, daycares pitch love, high schools pitch success . . . car dealerships pitch luxury, counselors self-esteem, masseuses happy endings, cemeteries eternal rest . . . It’s endless, the pitching—endless, exhilarating, soul-sucking, and as unrelenting as death. As ordinary as morning sprinklers.
A signed Michael Deane business card is a form of currency on this lot—the older the better, in her estimation. When Claire’s ten fifteen flashes a card from Michael’s days as a studio exec, she hopes for a movie pitch, but the man launches into a reality pitch so awful it might just be brilliant: “Paranoid Palace: we take mental patients off their meds, put them in a house with hidden cameras, and fuck with their minds; turn on a light and music comes on, open the refrigerator and the toilet flushes . . .”
And speaking of meds, her eleven thirty seems to have gone off his: Michael Deane’s neighbor’s son striding in wearing a cape and a chinstrap beard, never making eye contact as he pitches a television miniseries about a fantasy world he’s created all in his head (“If I write it down someone will steal it”), called The Veraglim Quatrology—Veraglim being an alternate universe in the eighth-string dimension, Quatrology being “like a trilogy, except with four stories instead of three.” As he drones on about the physics of this fantasy world (in Veraglim, there’s an invisible king, an ongoing centaur rebellion, and male penises are erect for one week every year), Claire glances down at the buzzing phone in her lap. If she were still in the market for signs, this would be a good one: her career-challenged, strip-clubbing lunk of a boyfriend has just gotten up—at twenty minutes to noon—and texted her this one-word unpunctuated question: milk. She pictures Daryl in front of the refrigerator in his underwear, seeing no milk and texting this inane question. Where does he think this extra milk might be? She types back washing machine, and while the Veraglim guy drones on about his schizoid fantasy, Claire can’t help but wonder if Fate isn’t fucking with her now, mocking the deal she made by giving her the worst Wild Pitch Friday in history—maybe the worst day of any kind since eighth grade, when an alarmingly gushy period arrived during a coed PE kickball game and dreamy Marshall Aiken pointed at the blossom on her gym shorts and screamed to the teacher, Claire’s hemorrhaging—because it’s her brain hemorrhaging now, bleeding out all over the conference table as this wing-nut launches into book two of The Veraglim Quatrology (Flandor unsheathes his shadow-saber!) and another text arrives from Daryl, flashing on the BlackBerry in her lap: cereal.
Jet tires chirp, grab the runway, and Shane Wheeler jerks awake and checks his watch. Still good. Yeah, his plane’s an hour late, but he’s got three hours until his meeting, and he’s a mere fourteen miles away now. How long can it take to drive fourteen miles? At the gate he uncoils, deplanes, and makes his way in a dream down the long, tiled airport tunnel, through baggage claim and a revolving door, onto a sunlit curb, jumps a bus to the rental-car center, falls in line with the smiling Disney-bounders (who must’ve seen the same $24 online rental-car coupon), and when his turn in line comes, slides his license and credit card to the rental clerk. She says his name with such significance (“Shane Wheeler?”) that for a deluded moment he imagines he’s traveled forward in time and fame, and she’s somehow heard of him—but of course she’s just happy to find his reservation. We live in a world of banal miracles.
“Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?”
“Redemption,” Shane says.
“Insurance?”
Coverage declined, upgrade shaken off, pricey GPS and refueling options rejected, Shane heads off with a rental agreement, a set of keys, and a map that looks like it was drawn by a ten-year-old on meth. Ensconced in a rented red Kia, Shane slides the driver’s seat into the same zip code as the steering wheel, takes a breath, starts the car, and rehearses the first words of his first-ever pitch: So there’s this guy . . .
An hour later, he’s somehow farther from his appointment. Shane’s Kia is gridlocked and, he thinks, might even be pointed in the wrong direction (the GPS now seeming like a screaming deal). Shane tosses aside the worthless rental-car map and tries Gene Pergo’s cell: voice mail. He tries the agent who set up the meeting, but the agent’s assistant says, “Sorry, I don’t have Andrew,” whatever that means. He begrudgingly tries his mom’s cell, then his dad’s, and finally, the home number: Shit, where are they? The next number that pops into his head is his ex-wife’s. Saundra is the last person he wants to call right now—but that’s just how desperate he feels.
His name must pop up on her phone still, because her first words are: “Tell me you’re calling because you have the rest of the money you owe me.”
This is what he hoped to avoid—the whole who-ruined-whose-credit and who-stole-whose-car business that has colored their every conversation for a year. He sighs. “As a matter of fact, I’m in the process of getting your money right now, Saundra.”
“You’re not giving plasma again?”
“No. I’m in LA, pitching a movie.”
She laughs and then realizes he’s serious. “Wait. You’re writing a movie now?”
“No. I’m pitching a movie. First you pitch it, then you write it.”
“No wonder movies suck,” she says. This is classic Saundra: a waitress with a poet’s pretensions. They met in Tucson, where she worked at Cup of Heaven, the coffee shop where Shane went to write every morning. He fell for, in order: her legs, her laugh, and the way she idealized writers and was willing to support his work.
For her part—she said at the end—she fell mostly for his bullshit.
“Look,” Shane says, “could you just hold the cultural criticism and MapQuest Universal City for me?”
“You seriously have a meeting in Hollywood?”
“Yes,” Shane says. “With a big producer on a studio lot.”
“What are you wearing?”
He sighs and tells her what Gene Pergo told him, that it doesn’t matter what one wears to a pitch meeting (Unless you own a bullshit-proof suit).
“I’ll bet I know what you’re wearing,” Saundra says, and proceeds to describe his outfit down to the socks.
Shane is regretting this call. “Just help me figure out where I’m going.”
“What’s your movie called?”
Shane sighs. He has to remember they’re no longer married; her bitter-cool ironic streak has no power over him anymore. “Donner!”
Saundra is quiet a moment. But she knows his interests, his reading table obsessions. “You’re writing a movie about cannibals?”
“I told you, I’m pitching a movie, and it’s not about cannibals.”
Clearly, the Donner Party could be a tough subject for a film. But pitches are all in the take, as Michael Deane wrote in the oft-copied chapter fourteen of his memoir/self-help classic, The Deane’s Way:
; Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts. I could walk into Fox today and sell a movie about a restaurant that serves baked monkey balls if I had the right take.
And Shane has the perfect “take.” Donner! will concern itself not with the classic Donner Party story—all those people stuck at the awful camp, freezing and starving to death and finally eating one another—but with the story of a cabinetmaker in the party, named William Eddy, who leads a group of people, mostly young women, on a harrowing, heroic journey out of the mountains to safety, and then—attention, third act!—when he’s regained his strength, returns to rescue his wife and kids! As Shane pitched this idea over the phone to the agent Andrew Dunne, he felt himself becoming animated by its power: It’s a story of triumph, he told the agent, an epic story of resiliency! Courage! Determination! Love! That very afternoon the agent set up a meeting with Claire Silver, a development assistant for . . . get this . . . Michael Deane!
“Huh,” Saundra says when she’s heard the whole story. “And you really think you can sell this thing?”
“Yes. I do,” Shane says, and he does. It’s a key sub-tenet of Shane’s movie-inspired ACT-as-if faith in himself: his generation’s profound belief in secular episodic providence, the idea—honed by decades of entertainment—that after thirty or sixty or one hundred and twenty minutes of complications, things generally work out.
“Okay,” Saundra says—still not entirely immune to the undeniable charm of Shane’s deluded self-belief—and she gives him the MapQuest instructions. When he thanks her, Saundra says, “Good luck today, Shane.”
“Thanks,” Shane says. And, as always, his ex-wife’s passionless, entirely genuine goodwill leaves him feeling like the loneliest person on the planet.
It’s over. What a stupid deal: one day to find a great idea for a film? How many times has Michael told her, We’re not in the film business, we’re in the buzz business. And yes, the day’s not quite over, but her two forty-five is picking at an open scab on his forehead while pitching a TV procedural (So there’s this cop—pick—a zombie cop) and Claire feels the loss of something vital in her, the death of some optimism. Her four P.M. looks like a no-show (somebody named Shawn Weller . . . ) and when Claire checks her watch—four ten—it is through bleary, sleepy eyes. So that’s it. She’s done. She won’t say anything to Michael about her disillusionment; what would be the point? She’ll quietly give two weeks, box up her things, and slink out of this office into a job warehousing souvenirs for the Scientologists.
And what about Daryl? Does she dump him today, too? Can she? She’s tried breaking up with him recently, but it never takes. It’s like cutting soup—nothing to push against. She’ll say, Daryl, we need to talk, and he just smiles in that way of his, and they end up having sex. She even suspects it turns him on a little. She’ll say, I’m not sure this is working, and he’ll start taking off his shirt. She’ll complain about the strip clubs and he’ll just look amused. (Her: Promise me you won’t go again? Him: I promise I won’t make you go.) He doesn’t fight, doesn’t lie, doesn’t care; the man eats, breathes, screws. How do you disengage from someone who’s already so profoundly disengaged?
She met him on what is now looking like the only movie she’ll ever work on—Night Ravagers. Claire has always been weak for ink, and Daryl, who had a walk-on (lurch-on? stagger-on?) as Zombie #14, had these great ropy, tattooed arms. She’d dated mostly smart, sensitive types (who made her smart sensitivity seem redundant) and a couple of slick industry types (whose ambition was like a second dick). She hadn’t yet tried the unemployed-actor type. And wasn’t this what she had in mind when she left the cocoon of film school in the first place, tasting the visceral, the worldly? And at first, visceral-worldly was as good as advertised (she recalls wondering: Was I ever even touched before this?). Thirty-six hours later, as she lay postcoital in bed with the best-looking guy she’s ever slept with (sometimes she just likes to look at him), Daryl matter-of-factly admitted that he’d just been tossed out by his girlfriend and had no place to live. Almost three years later, Night Ravagers remains Daryl’s best acting credit, and Zombie #14 remains a gorgeous lump in her bed.
No, she won’t break up with Daryl. Not today. Not after the Scientologists and the proud grandpas, the lunatics, zombie cops, and skin-pickers. She’ll give Daryl one more chance, go home, bring him a beer, nestle into his broad, tatted shoulder; together they’ll watch the TeeVee (he likes those trucks that drive across the ice on the Discovery Channel) and she’ll have that tenuous connection to life, at least. No, it’s not the stuff of dreams, but it’s a perfectly American thing to do, a whole nation of Night Ravager zombies racing across the horizon, burning through peak oil to get home and sit dull-eyed, watching Ice Road Truckers and Hookbook on the fifty-five-inch flat (the Double Nickel, as Daryl calls it, the Sammy Hagar).
Claire grabs her coat and starts for the door. She pauses, glances back over her shoulder at the office where she thought she might get to make something great—silly Holly Golightly dream—and once more checks her watch: 4:17 and counting. Outside, she locks the door behind her, takes a breath, and goes.
The clock in Shane’s rented Kia also reads 4:17—he’s more than a quarter-hour late, and he’s dying. “Shit shit shit!” He pounds the steering wheel. Even after finally getting turned around, he got caught in several traffic snarls and took the wrong exit. By the time he rolls up to the studio gate and the security guard shrugs and informs him that his destiny is at the other gate, he is twenty-four minutes late, sweating through his carefully chosen whatever-clothing. When he arrives at the proper gate, he’s twenty-eight minutes late—thirty when he finally gets his ID back from the second security guard, shakily slaps a parking pass on his dash, and pulls into the lot.
Shane is only two hundred feet away now from Michael Deane’s bungalow, but he stumbles out of his car the wrong way, wanders among the big soundstages—it is the cleanest warehouse district in the world—and finally walks in a circle, toward a nest of bungalows and a tram filled with fanny-packed tourists on a studio tour, holding up cameras and cell phones, listening to a microphone-aided guide tell apocryphal stories of bygone magic. The camera-people listen breathlessly, waiting for some connection to their own pasts (I loved that show!), and when Shane staggers up to their tram, the star-alert tourists run his disheveled hair, broad sideburns, and thin, frantic features through the thousands of celebrity faces they keep on file—Is that a Sheen? A Baldwin? A celebrity rehabber?—and while they can’t quite match Shane’s oddly appealing features with anyone famous, they take pictures anyway, just in case.
The tour guide chutters into his headset, telling the tram-people in something like English how a certain famous breakup scene from a certain famous television show was famously filmed “right over there,” and as Shane approaches, the driver holds up a finger so he can finish his story. Sweating, near tears, in full overheated self-loathing, fighting every urge to call his parents—his ACT resolve now a distant memory—Shane finds himself staring at the tour guide’s name tag: ANGEL.
“Excuse me?” Shane says.
Angel covers the headset microphone and says, heavily accented, “Fuck jou want?” Angel is roughly his age, so Shane tries for late-twenties camaraderie. “Dude, I’m totally late. Can you help me find Michael Deane’s office?”
Something about this question causes another tourist to take Shane’s picture. But Angel merely jerks his thumb and drives the tram away, revealing a sign that he was blocking, pointing to a bungalow: MICHAEL DEANE PRODUCTIONS.
Shane looks at his watch. Thirty-six minutes late now. Shit shit shit. He runs around the corner and there it is—but blocking the door to the bungalow is an old man with a cane. For a second, Shane thinks it might be Michael Deane himself, even though the agent said Deane wouldn’t be at the meeting, that it would just be his development assistant, Claire Something. Anyway, it’s not Michael Deane. It’s just some old guy, seventy maybe, in a dark gray
suit and charcoal fedora, cane draped over his arm, holding a business card. As Shane’s feet clack on the pavement, the old man turns and removes his fedora, revealing a shock of slate hair and eyes that are a strange, coral blue.
Shane clears his throat. “Are you going in? ’Cause I . . . I’m very late.”
The man holds out a business card: ancient, wrinkled and stained, the type faded. It’s from another studio, 20th Century Fox, but the name is right: Michael Deane.
“You’re in the right place,” Shane says. He presents his own Michael Deane business card—the newer model. “See? He’s at this studio now.”
“Yes, I go this one,” says the man, heavily accented, Italian—Shane recognizes it from the year he studied in Florence. He points at the 20th Century Fox card. “They say, go this one.” He points to the bungalow. “But . . . is locked.”
Shane can’t believe it. He steps past the man and tries the door. Yes, locked. Then it’s over.
“Pasquale Tursi,” says the man, holding out his hand.
Shane shakes it. “Big Loser,” he says.
Claire has texted Daryl to ask what he wants for dinner. His answer, kfc, is followed by another text: unrated hookbook—she’s told Daryl that her company is about to stream out an unrated, raunchier version of that show, full of all the nudity and sodden stupidity they couldn’t air on regular TV. Fine, she thinks. She’ll go back for her company’s apocalyptic TV show, then swing through the KFC drive-through, and she’ll curl up with Daryl and deal with her life on Monday. She turns her car around, is waved back through security, and parks back in the lot above Michael’s bungalow office. She starts back to the office to get the raw DVDs, but when she rounds the path, Claire Silver sees, standing at the door to the bungalow, not one Wild Pitch Friday lost cause . . . but two. She stops, imagines turning around and leaving.