by Erin Somers
In between bites, I told Hugo about the pizza guy.
“He was really tenacious.” I studied the flyer. “It’s got an eight-bit frog on it. Maybe they have arcade games. Have you been there?”
Hugo wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I have not been,” he said slowly, “to a place called Frogger’s.”
When all that was left of the pizza was errant mushrooms and cheese hardening in the bottom of the box, I said to Hugo, “Now what?”
He said, “What would you do if this was your place?”
I glanced around, trying to picture it. I imagined a broom leaning perilously close to the door next to a crummy old Schwinn, and that made me laugh.
“Enslave my enemies in the comedy club you’ve got down there,” I said. “Brick them in to die.”
“What enemies could you possibly have? Julian?”
“No, Julian’s my friend. We were pages together. He helped me get my job. But he’d be thrilled to hear you know his name.”
“Of course I know Julian’s name. Julian makes sure people know his name. He broadcasts desperation like the radio tower in the RKO logo.”
“He’s not so bad,” I said. “He’s sort of endearing once you get used to him.”
“Sure.”
“No, he is. Let me see what I can tell you about him to make you see that he’s okay. I had to drop something off at his place one time on the weekend and he lives in just one room in the West Village. This tiny studio. How stupid is that? He could have a bigger place in Brooklyn, but he told me he likes it. It makes him feel like a woodland creature. He insisted I stay for tea and he gave me a book about Lyndon Johnson. Not lent. Gave. I’ll read it one day, too, when I have exhausted every other entertainment option. He was wearing this vintage Communist Party lapel pin on his blazer. I forgot to mention he was wearing a blazer. In his own house.”
Hugo seemed bored. “Sounds obnoxious.”
“No, because it’s totally sincere. Okay, how about this: He’s got a car, an old maroon Volvo. He parks it on the street, and he told me the thing he likes best about it is having to move it all the time. He actually looks forward to getting out of bed in the morning three days a week, moving it across the street, sitting there while the street cleaner goes by, and then moving it back again. He eats a bagel and reads the newspaper. The print newspaper. He’s got this idea that being a real New Yorker means suffering for every convenience anyone else would take for granted.”
“Are you in love with him? You sound like you’re in love with him.”
“Well yeah, but just the normal amount,” I said. “Nothing serious.”
“It seems like he’s not cut out for the writers’ room,” said Hugo.
He was probably right. Writers’ contracts were renewed every thirteen weeks. Every thirteen weeks you had to worry about whether or not you’d be fired. Some people were able to take this in stride. Others were not. Julian was destroyed by it. His contract came up twice during his time as a staff writer. Both times he’d been pushed to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
The first time it happened, he started campaigning for himself four weeks out. Pitching more than usual, becoming manically participatory. He stopped by the offices of the senior writers and got them to weigh in on the odds of his renewal. He showed up with obscure confections for the staff. Montreal-style bagels, macaroons. He made sure everyone knew who had brought them. The more he worried, the worse his joke writing got.
A week out his hands were shaking.
His office mate, Layla, came in one morning and found him asleep under his desk. He’d spent the night there, she told me. He’d been too keyed up to go home. Or else he’d gone home and been too keyed up to stay. She couldn’t really get a straight story. But the anxiety prevented him from being anywhere but work. That was the gist. He smelled terrible.
The next time it was even worse. He ran himself down so thoroughly he got pneumonia. He left work in the middle of the day for a chest X-ray and had the audacity to come back. Gil found him in his office, flushed and coughing, brainstorming a list of games for Alec Baldwin. Don’t be an idiot, Gil told him. People die of pneumonia all the time.
Hugo probably didn’t know any of this. He was insulated from office happenings by a trio of assistants who orbited him like satellites. Communication with him went through Gil, or through Gil and Laura, or through Gil, Laura, and the assistants. A game of telephone that inevitably distorted the message. But I guess he’d had enough interactions with Julian to pin him down. Julian was that openly neurotic. That known and that knowable. I envied it.
I said, “What do you want to do? What do you do when you’re alone here?”
Hugo shrugged. “Drink. Watch bad TV or an old movie. Google myself. Same as anybody.”
“That’s kind of funny,” I said. “As something to do. I’ll look you up and you look me up.”
We took out our phones, tapped at the screens.
“First five results,” said Hugo. He looked down and let out a low whistle. “Are you sure you want to hear these?”
“Give me the worst.”
“One: ‘June Bloom, Bloom and Associates Realtors. A fifty-five-year-old resident of Boca Raton with twenty-three years of full-time experience in real estate.’ Two: ‘Vancouver teacher June Bloom diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, an underrecognized tissue disorder.’ Three: It’s Boca June again. She also coaches a local girls’ basketball team. Busy lady. Four: Your IMDB page, thank God. You got a writing credit for the roast. Five: A humor piece about food you wrote for—I’m clicking through—some dated-looking website. No pictures or anything. Just text.”
“It’s not dated. It’s an antiaesthetic.”
“Looks low paying.”
“No paying, thank you very much.”
Hugo set his phone down on the counter. “Which joke was yours at the roast?”
Back in fall, the network had pressured Hugo to sit for a cable channel roast. He’d been fourth in the ratings for two years in a row, fourth of four, and they were trying anything to raise his profile. Nearly everyone on staff had been against the roast, including Hugo. In the writers’ room, Gil had remarked on how grotesque and unfunny these things had become. Except for Bony, none of Hugo’s real friends even wanted to participate. But the network prevailed in the end, and the writers were asked to contribute jokes. Hugo sat in the seat of honor in a tux. He was a good sport, too. He smiled the whole time, though his smile looked false to me. Like he held a piece of chalk on his tongue, like he’d been forced to hide it there, and it would be awhile before he could spit it out.
“The one about your pinstriped suit,” I said. “About it being hoisted battle torn above Fort McHenry.”
I’d given it to Julian and Julian had given it to Gil. It had been delivered by a pop star who’d just left his boy band to go solo. He seemed confused, as if he’d wandered into the wrong studio. His emphasis had been odd and he’d stumbled over battle torn. He’d pronounced it “battletron,” like the name of a nonexistent video game.
“Not bad,” said Hugo.
I shrugged. It was only the crowning achievement of my career.
“Do me,” said Hugo, nodding at my phone.
Hugo had the expected Internet presence. No Boca Realtors shared his name. I could go twenty pages deep and still not run out of think pieces, news items, video clips, all about him.
“One: your Wikipedia page. Two: your IMDB page. Three: network website. Four: Twenty-five years of Stay Up with Hugo Best in pictures. Five . . .” I hesitated.
“Go ahead,” said Hugo.
“ ‘Anatomy of a Downward Spiral: How Hugo Best Tanked His Career.’ ”
“Click through. I want to hear what it says.”
“Aren’t you supposed to not look at these things?”
Hugo raised an eyebrow. “You think I can’t take it?”
“I don’t know. That guy in the boutique today seemed to bug you.”
“Him? He d
idn’t bug me.”
“He did a little.”
“I’ve been doing this my entire life. You think I give a shit about some old-timer in a dress shop?”
I knew I wasn’t wrong. He’d minded. But I clicked through anyway. The site took a second to load. Spencer and Scotty trooped back into the kitchen without the girls. Scotty opened the freezer and retrieved a pint of ice cream.
“What are you doing?” Spencer said to me.
“I’m about to read this hit piece out loud to your dad.”
Spencer came around and peered at my screen, resting his hands on my shoulders. “Definitely don’t read that one.”
Scotty jammed a spoon into the mint chip. “Is that the downward spiral one from yesterday?”
“Even Scotty’s read it,” said Hugo.
“What do you mean, even Scotty?” said Spencer. “Scotty’s well informed. Scotty wants to be a journalism major.” He began to knead my trapezius muscle.
Hugo looked at Scotty. “Is that true?”
“Hell yeah, dude. Fourth estate,” said Scotty around a mouthful of ice cream. His eyes were bloodshot and he seemed on the verge of laughter.
“Bravo,” said Hugo. I thought he might turn to his son and remark on Scotty’s ambition. Instead he said to me, “Read it.”
“It’s like four thousand words long,” I muttered, scrolling down. “All right, here we go. ‘Anatomy of a Downward Spiral: How Hugo Best Tanked His Career. Late-night stalwart Stay Up with Hugo Best exits the airwaves this week with the conclusion of its twenty-fifth season. Once a ratings juggernaut, Stay Up struggled in recent years to maintain its audience. Was it the fractured TV landscape that finished off Best, or was it, as incoming Stay Up host Eric Marshall implied earlier this week, his inability to take advantage of the current zeitgeist—” I stopped. “This is mean.”
Spencer moved on to my neck and Hugo frowned at me. I wriggled forward in my seat until Spencer dropped his hands.
“Play the video,” said Hugo.
“How do you know there’s video?” I said.
We looked at each other. Over his shoulder I could see the pool and the backyard lit up by the pool lights. It would have been a good time for something distracting and magical to happen—a dryad emerging from the woods, a fawn bending her supple neck to drink from the pool—but all was still. Hugo had read the piece. Of course he had.
I played the clip. Eric Marshall was giving an interview in a suit and skinny tie. I always felt I knew Eric, though he was five or six years older than me and we had never met. He had grown up in South Carolina, too, in a place called Batesburg-Leesville, tracker and dip country, a cracker crumb on the state’s broad shirtfront. My own town on the coast was metropolitan by comparison. It had a couple of movie theaters, a sushi place. In his stand-up, Eric talked about growing up in central South Carolina, how everyone assumed that it was hell for him, a brainy biracial kid with two Yankee parents. But in fact, the town had treated him with the same sense of ownership and reverence that they would a local attraction. For instance, a quarry. Hey, been out to see the quarry? Damnedest thing, the quarry. We don’t know how it got here or exactly what it’s for, but it’s ours, by God. It’s ours.
Eric sat with his hands resting on his knees. He was answering a question about being a black guy hosting a network talk show.
“You’re the first,” said the interviewer.
“Come on,” said Eric. “Arsenio Hall? Okay, technically you’re right for a very obscure reason, which has to do with Paramount not being a network and the affiliates wanting to effectively—I can’t believe I’m being this boring on TV—program over Pat Sajak, who had a talk show on at the time.”
“Who could blame them?”
“Pat Sajak is Wheel of Fortune. Taking him out of that context and giving him a talk show was a bizarre idea. No disrespect to Wheel Wheel’s an American institution. It’s like the Liberty Bell. In a hundred years, schoolchildren will be singing songs about it.”
“I want to switch gears for a minute and ask you about Hugo Best,” said the interviewer.
“Obviously I’m a huge admirer. There would be no Stay Up without Hugo. He invented it. I loved his self-awareness, the way he made fun of his playboy image. How he’d fix a martini for his guest and fill the glass with ten or fifteen olives, until it was overflowing. Or wear a smoking jacket onstage and take it off halfway through the show to reveal a second smoking jacket underneath. Those are classic bits. At the same time, I think viewers today may be looking for something a little different. I think they want someone to engage with the political moment a bit more.”
“He’s not critical enough, is that what you’re saying?”
“I’ll put it this way: The world has changed. I don’t think anyone would deny that. The medium has to continue to evolve to meet it. Otherwise why would anyone keep watching?”
The video ended, and the only sound was Scotty scraping away at the sides of the ice cream carton. Female laughter drifted upstairs from the basement rec room.
“It wasn’t all bad,” I said finally.
“It was backhanded,” said Spencer.
“There were some compliments in there, too,” I said. “He’s a decent guy, Eric Marshall. A funny guy. He’s trying to get people to watch the show. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”
“What are you, in love with him?” said Spencer.
Hugo smiled meanly. “Just the normal amount. Anyway, it’s perfectly natural for young men to want to kill their fathers.” He glanced at Spencer. “So to speak.”
“And fuck their mothers,” added Scotty, accidentally spitting a hardened lump of ice cream onto the floor. He scooped it up with his hand and popped it back in his mouth.
“Is it about time for Scotty to head home?” asked Hugo.
“Nah,” said Spencer.
I thought that Hugo had made his point and we could move on to other things. I started to slip my phone into my pocket.
“We’re not done. Read on,” said Hugo.
“For real? I get it. Whatever you’re trying to prove. I get it. You can take criticism. You don’t care what people think. Fine. Why are we doing this? I could tell you what it says without even reading it.”
“Oh?” said Hugo. He made a gesture like I should continue. “By all means.”
I shifted in my seat. The right thing to do was demur. If I backed down I looked cowardly. If I didn’t back down, offense was almost guaranteed. I thought of how Julian would react if I told him what I was about to do. How he’d yank his glasses off his face, clean them irritably. Never tell people what you really think of them. Never. Even if they say they want you to. Even if they beg. Then again, Hugo hated Julian.
“It’s a breakdown of every mistake you’ve ever made in your career,” I said. “Probably with special emphasis on your personal indiscretions. Your arrest, et cetera.”
“He got community service,” said Spencer. “It was really not a big deal.”
I shrugged. “I’m guessing it also maps the decline of the quality of the show. How it had gotten stale. Lost its edge. How it hadn’t really been funny in ten years. How you seemed to give up after you lost eleven thirty, to not want to try anything, to not want to offend. Or lists all the ways you sold out. For instance, the time George W. Bush came on the show after he’d started a war under false pretenses. Just completely lied about WMDs. And everyone watching thought you were going to let him have it, but you didn’t, did you? You sat for him while he sketched you. You got him to sign it. You asked him what Dick Cheney’s favorite movie was and he said he didn’t know, but maybe it was Rudy. He sure did like Rudy himself. You did everything short of tousling his hair.”
I paused for a minute, remembering. I was omitting that the George W. Bush episode had been oddly charming. The president’s innocence had been irresistible. The twinkling eyes, the lipless, simian grin. Hugo was indulgent with him, even gentle. He’d held the drawing up to the camera and
it, too, was sweet. He’d captured something about Hugo, a downturn of the mouth, a worried crease at the bridge of his nose. The drawing wasn’t good, but Bush’s perception of him was. He’d seen Hugo’s longing and low-grade despair and he’d been able to render it, if crudely, on the page.
I went on. “Probably it finishes with a dissection of why the show ended. It seems thorough, so maybe there’s a chart of the ratings. A zigzag trending downward, flatlining over the last two years. Maybe they got an anonymous source to say that retirement wasn’t your idea. That it wasn’t voluntary, per se. These aren’t my opinions, of course.”
“Of course.”
“It’s just a dumb article on the Internet. Some quote-unquote content. They have to put up something so they can have ads there.”
“Much like television.”
“Much like television. The ads on this one are”—I looked back down at my screen—“a memory foam pillow and one of those meal-delivery services for lazy people.”
“They’ve got you pegged,” said Hugo.
I sat back in my chair and Hugo sat back in his.
“How’d I do? Could I write for the Internet?”
“You’re not cruel enough and you know your topic too well.”
“You missed the thing about Laura,” said Scotty. He opened the freezer to replace the pint.
“Just throw it out,” Hugo said to him. “It’s completely freezer burned.”
“I might want it the next time I’m here,” said Scotty.
“What thing about Laura?” I said.
“We’ll get more,” said Hugo. “We’ll get you any flavor you want. Just tell Ana.”
Scotty put the pint in the freezer and shut the door. “It doesn’t hurt to have a backup. In case it falls through with Ana.”
Hugo turned to Spencer. “You should be more like Scotty. He’s a new breed of ultraperson.”
We all looked at Scotty. He was skinny with a mop of floppy brown hair and a geeky, limb-swinging confidence. One second ago we had witnessed him spit food onto the floor and shovel it back into his mouth.
“Please,” said Spencer. “Scotty’s as normal as it gets. He had a bear named Bear when he was little. He’s on the soccer team. He loves his parents so much.”