by Ray Succre
“Business as usual, right?” Emery said. Belmont’s laughter gained a brief hoot as he tried to control himself and settle down, finding that he could not.
“You- you sorry, old shit! Look at you!” Larry managed between outbursts. Emery groaned and shook his head, feigning disdain at Belmont taking so much humor in the show being cancelled. Holding back his tears was somewhat easier than holding back a laugh, but Emery failed to do either that afternoon, and soon both men were, for a short while, in another time and place entirely.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The year was Rebecca becoming fourteen and Vivian reaching nine. The year was Beth taking up the stately art of cooking Chinese food (which Emery more than enjoyed, having become enamored by it during his visit to Hong Kong), and then a minor interest in photography, and at one point, she had even learned how to replace a window the oldest daughter had shattered while stumbling with an empty mug. The year was Emery throwing scripts at every target he could spot, to no real result, the filming and releasing of his first Pacific Pictures story, and the slow recuperation (under pledges of respect and an end to foolishness) of his marriage. These were the months of mending and attention, and in them, the Ashers were waging a decent assault toward that nuclear family of which America was so fond. There was more, however. The year was also the haggard, soul-twisting witness of Larry’s dusting away, a fleet descent into the crippling, sanity-devouring smoke of a human being.
FADE OUT:
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FADE IN:
INT. ASHER STUDY - AFTERNOON
A mid-sized room in the Asher house with a window view. There are book-shelves everywhere, all of them packed and cluttered. He has two waste-bins, one on either side of an expensive-looking desk. In the desk’s middle is a typewriter and there is an ashtray off to the side, near a ream of blank paper. A cup of coffee sits on the typewriter’s other side, near a stack of paper that is no longer blank.
EMERY enters with his mail, sitting down at the desk. He opens a large manila envelope. From this, he withdraws a series of papers, about seven. Emery reads an attached, handwritten letter. As he reads to himself, we hear:
V.O. (Helen Belmont)
Emery, he wanted you to have a look at this. He’s under contract with MGM for a film, but there is no way he can do it. The extenuating circumstances of his illness are too severe for writing stories. I know you will not be able to do anything with this, but he was extremely pleased with the idea that he might send it to you, and I didn’t want to take that away from him. If you would, maybe you could tell him you were fond of it? He has so much respect for you. He’s been working on this every now and then, for months now. A compliment to your biggest fan would mean so much to him.
We see EMERY turn the manuscript and flip quickly through the pages. He seems confused at small number of pages. After scanning over them a moment, we get an ECU of the script’s first page, which is but a title in bold, two returns, and a byline:
Somebody Bet on the Nag
by Lawrence Belmont
EMERY looks over the page with mirth.
EMERY:
Lawrence, huh? Well, good for you.
EMERY turns the page, seeming impressed with what he’s reading. We cut back and forth between small segments of sentences and Emery’s moving eyes. He lights a cigarette, continues reading. We see him nod as he scans quickly through the second page. By the third page, he has lost his smile. Medium shot as he sets the manuscript down on the desk and gives a strong sigh. We hear a typewriter’s end-line bell and we hear the return carriage slide into place.
CUT TO:
The empty, dark study. The hours quiet. One in the morning was a still house. Beth and the girls had long been asleep. Emery sat in a tavern near his home, drinking and smoking and trying not to think about Larry. Banishing those thoughts was implausible, however. The manuscript, written over several months, was as if a perfect cross section of Larry’s deterioration. The loose collection of pages were pock-marked in typewriter fades, seeming to indicate that a small amount was written, then forgotten for days or more, before another section was written. Emery could follow Larry’s starts and stops with ease, and these had sent a chill through the older writer. The opening had been strong and well-wrought, but by the second page, the spelling had begun to falter and the grammar fell apart. By the fourth page, Larry had stopped using script format.
CUT TO:
INT. ASHER STUDY - DAWN
Beth enters the dim room and turns the light on. She discovers her husband asleep in the chair, his head down on the desk. She approaches and jostles him.
BETH:
(annoyed)
Honey, get up. Go to bed. You’re in the study.
EMERY:
Hmm?
BETH:
(suddenly frowning in disgust)
Oh, for the love of- Emery Asher, you reek like a bar. No, don’t go to the bed. Go sleep on the couch. I’ll bring you a blanket.
We see EMERY stand, a little puzzled and still seeming drunk. He makes his way clumsily from of the room. Beth remains, trying to piece together what is happening with her husband. After a moment, she reaches over and gets one of his cigarettes, lights it, lost in thought, standing in the study and smoking. After a beat, she glances down and sees Larry’s manuscript. She picks it up with interest and looks at the first page. We again hear a typewriter’s bell and return carriage.
CUT TO:
Medium shot of Emery’s typewriter, a Bader’s Slim Touch Electric, on the kitchen table. The device is on, and we can hear the electric hum. We slowly zoom toward the typewriter as we hear Larry Belmont’s voice reading a script. His voice begins strong, but soon disintegrates into gibberish and indecipherable noise. As we reach an ECU of the typewriter, Larry’s voice completely dissolves into the hum of the machine. The page in the typewriter has been crookedly inserted, and exhibits the single, unfinished line: “Dear Helen, please extend my congratulations to”. A third time, we hear a typewriter’s bell and return carriage.
CUT TO:
BETH in the study. She has finished the piece and now sets the manuscript back on the desk where she found it. She is no longer smoking and the cigarette butt is lightly smoldering in the ashtray, improperly snuffed. We hear the bell, the return carriage, and then the characteristic sound of a page being yanked from a typewriter.
LAP DISSOLVE TO:
The writing of a child. That was all that remained for him. Beth fetched a blanket from the cupboard near the bathroom and made her way into the living room. She found her foul-smelling husband drunkenly passed-out on the couch, lying on his stomach with one leg hanging over, resting on the floor. She knew him so well. She knew what hurt least and what hurt most, and while she did not understand where he went in his head, or where his troubles were kept, she most certainly understood why he went there, and she was best to leave these things be. She
had suspected Emery of falling back into bad behavior, that perhaps he had gone out late the previous night to meet a woman. She understood what had happened, now.
Whatever muse Larry Belmont had served was gone, as was most of the poor man’s mind. What remained was tragic and upsetting, an oblivious series of unconnected thoughts told in light breaths from the manger of senility. Beth decided, looking down at her disordered husband, that she would never question him about this odd night. She did not need to hear him explain what she knew. Emery had always seen the younger man as a writer, of course, but they knew one another best through what they wrote. Acts and conceits and characters and scenes... these made the sharp personality of Emery’s friend and protege, and much of the two writers’ friendship had taken place on page, not in the actual world. Larry’s final loss of ability, his deterioration, had frightened Emery intimately, reaching a unique and hidden sort of place in her husband. This was a raw and well-defended sort of interior where her husband’s hubris, conceitedness, and all of his personal horrors were conjured and fed. It was a fortification into which she would never go, nor want to; he was ugly when he was injured, no matter how deep or shallow the shrapnel went. Tragedy made him petulant and difficult.
Poor Helen. The woman must have been losing her mind being in that house. Beth would visit her later in the day, while the girls were in school. Perhaps Emery would come with her. No, she would make him come with her. Helen, who had been curt, at first, became a kind and warm person once she got to know someone. This took years, however. What would Helen do? When Larry was gone...
Beth wouldn’t have wished Larry’s illness on the most violent of enemies, and Helen deserved more than her present, better than her probable future. The woman deserved more of her good past. Poor Helen Belmont. The world was cruel. The world was so goddamned cruel.
CROSSFADE TO:
Letters of request. Letters from fans. The postman and his bag and his blasé smile. Emery spread out each day’s letters on the kitchen table and sorted them into groups. The first was quite small: Offers for work, and payments for services rendered. The second stack was larger: Letters of the fan variety. The third group was very small, if there was one, and consisted of personal mail from family or friends, while the last stack, usually meager, was more ominous: Bills and dues. His blue mailbox, despite being newly painted, was as if an old, barbed anemone into which he let his hand be drawn before pulling it back, always to disappointment. The fan mail lessened this disappointment, and in fact cheered him much, but those letters did not offer work. Emery was, as usual, being offered much in the way of advertisement, and as with his previous cancellations, he had begun to take these jobs with a form of repent, feeling as if these were a way to consolidate his worries into one simple device: Money. The more he focused on gaining those coveted checks that might reinforce his security, the less he needed to doubt his writing, and the less time he spent thinking about Larry.
Emery’s appearance might be used for little but money, at times, and this was one such span. Behind his face, however, were worries and stories. They fermented until he dashed them apart or got them down on page, typing in the late hours and once again relegating himself as a person with a foot in freelance. The hum of the electric typewriter was agitating and seemed as if a slight tease; he had been unsuccessful with his stories of late. Unlike his experience in the past cancellations, he was not being pitched on shows anymore, even bad ones. The number of rejections his stories were pulling in was equal only to that dire time before his career had truly launched. It was as if the previous ten years had been erased all but for randomly generated fans, and he was only now starting down the path of a writer. This might have been refreshing to some, in a soul-searching sense, but to Emery, the new rejection level was a massive setback. He did not want to start over; too much had happened, and was still happening. He simply felt to be no longer invited, and restarting his writing career from scratch was, in the personal sense, somewhat taboo to him. This was also the sort of undertaking that might prove impossible.
Several radio stations had contacted him for voice work, narrating small specials and the occasional commercial program. They felt his voice was versed, and would be recognizable enough that it might serve as an adequate representation of his appearance or waning celebrity. This gave him many ideas, and he had followed them with much heart, approaching various documentary producers and several production companies that created the new early-evening rage: Nature programs. Through this venturing, he had secured a short stint as narrator for an undersea show by the celebrated Rémy Desmarais, and was given the reigns to write and narrate introductions for two speculative one-offs. There was the Mars special to which he had given his voice, and a particularly interesting program dealing with feudal Japan. There was the two-part, much-hyped UFO “documentary”, and even a tale called The Voyage of the Beagle, which followed Charles Darwin’s travels while doing the research that would lead to his theory of evolution. This last was a narration job offered to Emery based on Passing of the Hand, his second movie with Pacific, which had now come out to horrid reviews, though seemed publicly to be a popular movie. While he didn’t want to propel his connection to the evolution theme, he needed the work.
His face and voice were a manner with which money could be made, and while using these made him feel vain, he could not shrug at his need for an income. Already he had accepted an offer to host a radio program, weekly, that would have him describing and orating true tales of the bizarre. He would function in this project as his own sort of Robert Ripley, should it last.
Emery surmised that doing more commercials and narrations would be a way to take care of certain business with television, and his old stomping grounds of radio, while reserving his true self for the new manuscripts he wrote to the week. His writing schedule had bloomed into a thing even he had once thought impossible. He wrote eight hours a day, with only the few necessary breaks to accommodate his body, a writing regiment he could have never gotten away with while actively working on a network show. His writing was getting better, he felt, and more subtle. He was now allowing certain darker roads to emerge in his narrative, something in the past he had pushed off in favor of a more friendly and concise style. Larry Belmont’s style had an influence in this.
Abstraction was making its way into his work, and he was discovering a certain longstanding romance with the surreal, a certain manner of metaphor and alternate ingenuity that he had previously only experienced with the occasional, on-page fling. He kept most of these devices to narrative, and had begun putting together a collection of short stories. This was difficult for him, but he was making it happen with a modicum of success. Many were transcribed from his rejected Other Side scripts, and some of these functioned very well in short fiction. There were stories he found himself frowning over, fresh from the typewriter, and still other scripts he found to be outright embarrassing, but this was the nature of writerly obsession. Silly story or not, a script or short story was not to be set aside until he had completed it. This benefitted the good scripts, and prepared him for them, while never worsening the bad ones beyond letting them have a final act and being loosed from his mind.
The hissing had begun, however. With his face bolted onto deodorant commercials and his voice narrating the corny specials on alien life and what-have-you, he was losing much of the respect he had known earlier in the decade. The sixties had started him out with an uncertain sense of failure, and, six years later, his troubles had only worsened. The final insult the public felt he had given them came with the release of The Passing of the Hand, which had been panned by every critic one could dig up.
Emery had written what he felt to be a strong script, based on a successful book with a novel idea. He had then re-written the script repeatedly at the behest of Pacific Pictures. They could not be satisfied, however, and in the end, he had finally been forced, contractually, to abandon his rewrite clause and let their shitty compositors work it over.
The result was a bizarre action romp in which a beefy man, a scientist only in the alleged sense, ran about a world populated by apes, shouting and making a general fool of himself until the apes decided he should be publicly put to death. Pacific Pictures had kept Emery’s slight hint at romance between the man and one of the ape women, but they had not portrayed any of the apes as being very intelligent. They seemed backward, barely able to feed themselves, living in dull huts and fighting with rifles, yet didn’t seem to have a world in which a foundry could have existed to make rifles. It made no sense.
The Passing of the Hand had originally taken place in a simian metropolis, but that script had been hacked to pieces. The silly, countryside locale that most of the movie took place in was more in line with a small commune than a civilized culture. This somewhat destroyed the premise and most of the continuity. A viewer’s disbelief could not be suspended, but utterly shoved aside so that action could be used, which the studio writers apparently felt would get the audience’s mind from noticing the incongruities, if the studio writers had even thought that far ahead.