But it was Corea.
It was hard to hear him. Alan was sure it was the tropic breezes flowing into the mouthpiece. Or the crashing surf. But it was neither.
“Alan … I just got word from your agent.” The voice was a hoarse whisper.
Alan was amazed at how quickly news traveled in Hollywood. The speed of light would’ve gotten lapped if it tried to survive in L.A.
“Can you believe it?” answered Alan.
There was no answer.
Just the sound of three thousand miles sitting in his ear.
“I said, isn’t it amazing?!” Alan was almost shouting.
The voice was slow, as if sick; weak.
“Alan … thank you for creating me.”
“Hey, thank you for doing such a great job, man …” He didn’t like the way Corea sounded. Was he drunk? Overwrought? Something was really wrong but Alan didn’t know how to bring it up. “You okay?”
Again, silence. Nothing. Maybe the sound of breathing. Maybe just Alan’s imagination.
“… thank you for creating me. Thank you for creating me.” And then he said, “You won’t be sorry.”
Alan felt his stomach tighten. Erica was waving to him from the meringue surf and Corea kept thanking him for creating him. Saying he wouldn’t be sorry. Thanking him for creating him. Telling him he wouldn’t be sorry. Thanking him for …
Alan suddenly saw Mimi in his mind, holding his hand, warning him. As he waved back to Erica and tried to look happy, he felt his smile losing life, going rigid.
Around him, hang gliders landed like the flying monkeys, in Wizard of Oz, coming to take Dorothy away and Corea’s voice got more faint.
go - ahead
What Hollywood is all about is transformation. People in this town love the whole concept. In less sophisticated places in the world, transformation is called magic.” Feiffer shrugged. “Way I see it, transformation is the more understandable version. Sound like bullshit?”
It was just after eight and the Polo Lounge was filling with agents and studio and network executives who met for breakfast at perfectly set tables. To pull strings, cut strings; wrap them around throats.
At lesser tables, rising producers took pitches from writers who’d driven Jap cars in from the valley, obsessing all the way over Coldwater. Every few tables, lives were bankrupting and hearts clogging as croissants withered and box office performances the previous weekend were examined like colon X rays.
“We are simply and ultimately, aboriginals who use designer tools and swing on slicker vines.”
“Very interesting, Jack.” Alan felt a yawn tunneling out, still half asleep.
“I was a philosophy major.”
“Uh-huh.”
Feiffer was carefully sectioning his grapefruit; a calibrated violence. Alan kept thinking about how the man had ruined people’s lives. Stripped them of dignity and meaning and called it a productive day. Yet here he sat, like Will fucking Durant, discoursing and scooping fruit. A sociopath, figured Alan, as Feiffer bit into a piece of toast, breaking its back, sweeping vertebral remains off the table, with a palm edge.
“Films are about transformation. Let me illustrate.”
Alan tried to concentrate; shed the pajama-head.
Feiffer drew on the tablecloth with a fingertip.
“An idea becomes a concept which in turn becomes a script which in turn becomes a film. A character’s arc within a dramatic structure is nothing more than a description of the form of transformation. The curve of the change, if you will.”
“So, it’s the … form the magic took?” Alan was barely awake, mostly lost.
Feiffer’s jaw worked, thinking that one over, his beard moving as thoughts and food were crushed in his powerful mouth.
“Yes.”
“And in a way,” Alan was getting into it, starting to wake up, “deals are the ushers who bring us in to behold the incantation. To witness the miracle?” Total bullshit.
Feiffer nodded. “To enable us to believe.”
The two continued to eat and Alan began to wonder if Feiffer had been misconstrued; guillotined and mythologized. He seemed to have a need to talk. To extend. There was a seismic charm about him. Like Idi Amin with a liberal arts degree.
Feiffer took a fast call the waiter brought. Listened. Said yes, once. No, five times. Hung up. Had the phone removed like a slain animal. Resumed his thoughts.
“Of course, the business has gotten such a bad name.” Feiffer sipped coffee.
“So much has changed since I started. Now it’s all about these damn Siamese-twin profits. The studios get together with the big agencies and make one bomb after another. And the stars are their plutonium.” He gestured, discreetly. “Look around this room: Tong Wars at every table. Programming emperors and agency mikados breaking bread. So desperate.”
He nodded to various tables; the chic gloom of the dining room. Bleeding bodies lurked behind sunny smiles. Several of the majors had cooked their war chests on action blockbusters targeted for summer and found they had an hour and a half of dick, with a soundtrack that might spurt one top-ten cut.
Garbage movies, with ten-million-dollar box office, in full release, put everybody except the competition in a bad mood. It brought out the worst in people when major players in town were losing money. Nobody wanted to take chances when the box-office flu hit.
Feiffer smiled and Alan wondered what was really on his mind. This breakfast was starting to feel like a complex version of the dancing bears from Russia; all show and distraction. The man was too busy and too important to be sitting here giving book reports.
“ ’Course things have become so punitive … so Sicilian. Your film or show does badly, you become one of the walking dead. Nothing happens to you anymore.” He nodded at the roomful of voltage bullys. “No one calls except friends who call your machine, calculating exactly when you’ll be out, to say hi … the conversational equivalent of leaving black roses on your grave.”
Alan glanced up. Feiffer was looking right at him; into him.
“But they never actually call when you’re in, for fear of making actual contact and resuming a relationship with a plague statistic.” He smiled, emptily. “You want sentimentality, go to a Manilow concert. You smell flowers, look around for a coffin.”
Alan finally got it.
Why Feiffer was sitting here. Why he’d brought his troubling inventory of deductions and inverted meanings. Why he wasn’t talking about the show. Why he was so determined to make Alan feel the blood supply had been endangered and the horizon was crooked.
It was one more warning.
He knew that if the show didn’t continue to do well, he would be shaken off the Etch-A-Sketch; a momentary life-form. And if the press and public crucified it, Alan would take the heat.
But it was actually worse than that.
“We do need to talk about one thing … just the network looking out for all of us. We’re going ahead with this series, full order. But with one conditional thing. Minor technicality. If FCC doesn’t appreciate what we’re doing and takes this into any kind of litigation—which it won’t, I can promise you—we can’t indemnify you. It could become prohibitive. Any problem with that?”
Alan thought it over. They both agreed things would never come to that and if they did, Alan would be rich anyway, and they laughed, pretending it was a darkly hip subject. Alan agreed to it and Feiffer said he’d have his legal people draw up papers and for Alan’s people to take a look.
But without the agreement, Feiffer emphasized the show couldn’t go forward with Alan as executive producer. Not given the controversial nature of what they were about to do. Alan nodded, sipping French roast.
“Good,” said Feiffer. “We’ll be fine. I wanted to bring it up with you myself, not let some lawyer scare you. They’re all a tribe of fucking ‘sue-warriors.’ “He grinned and it made him look ominous. “Besides, FCC has better things to do than make an enemy of me.”
He touch
ed Alan’s arm, trying to make it feel like they were friends. “Anyway, I always get ponderous and boring in the morning. We’re here to talk about what a genius you are and how you’re going to save the network.”
No, we’re not, thought Alan. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here for you to deliver a death threat.
Inspiration
It was four A.M. when Alan first heard the Mercenary’s voice.
He’d been writing the fourth episode and dozed off after describing a sequence in which Barek was in Saigon, in bed with a twenty-year-old Cambodian dancer. As written, the camera would see her breasts and pubic hair and hear her screaming orgasm as they fucked. Her climaxing face and clawing nails would be quickly intercut with the bloodied, screaming face of the Laotian pimp she worked for as Barek beat him to death in a savage fist fight. Back and forth it would go, between orgasm and death. Agony and delirium.
It wasn’t “McGyver.”
“Alan. Wake-up!” It was Barek, frantically whispering.
Alan’s eyes slowly opened and he could hear Malibu crashing, Bart snoring. He listened. Heard Barek, again. But not in the house. In his mind. Talking to him, as if from ten feet away.
“You have to stay awake. You have work to do. I know you think you’re dreaming this. I know you think you made me up. But I fucking exist. I was in the Army in Nam. I had a cover in the CIA. Alan … I want this show to succeed.”
His brain was bullshitting him and he ignored it, closing eyes, again.
Barek’s voice shook him awake.
“Alan! Don’t fall asleep! I’ve got ideas to help this script! You have to stay awake and listen to me! You have to stay awake and keep writing, goddamnit! Make more coffee! And do what I fucking tell you!”
Alan finally put on sweatpants and a T-shirt and stumbled to the kitchen. Began to grind beans. His eyes widened at deafening caffeine-munch. He yawned, slicked hair back with palms wetted under kitchen faucet. Smiled, amazed by the creative process. He’d had conversations before, in his dreams, with characters from various series he’d written for. Now and then, they’d spoken. Weird little chats with the subconscious that made the scripts feel like they were writing themselves weren’t uncommon.
But this time, the main character of his dream was claiming to exist. Claiming to have the exact background he’d given it, in the pilot. And this time, he’d created the show himself. He wasn’t just writing somebody else’s creative vision.
Something he’d created had awakened him and was telling him exactly what it wanted him to write. It was telling him exactly how the Mercenary should blind an opponent with gouging knuckles; move for move, in vicious, colorized detail. And though he was half-convinced he was asleep, dreaming the whole thing, when he awoke in the morning, the fourth script was done.
sympathetic
character
I loved Eddy. I know everyone here did.”
Alan looked down at notes; couldn’t keep his mind straight without them. The pain would rush in, start to rise. Erica and Alan’s father, Burt, were sitting together with Jordan, several network Scuds, and an immaculately dressed Andy Singer who’d cancelled a workout with his private trainer to make it.
When Jordan spotted Andy climbing out of the network limo, sad little face creped perfectly, buffed nails catching the gloomy sky, he told Alan that Andy was there to network. And to show Alan he cared, even though, Jordan assured him, he didn’t.
Eddy seemed asleep.
Over in the buffed mahogany box Alan had bought, hands folded, skin fluffed by the mortuary. Alan sensed Eddy was listening to every word. Probably checking for grammatical imprecisions.
For Alan, it all felt disturbingly like his mother’s funeral. He could remember it so well, though it was a lifetime ago. He could close his eyes and still see a sunny day shrouded by bowed heads; confused children. A ceremony of abandonment.
“He gave me my start as a writer. He took time to care.”
He’d loved one of Eddy’s old CBS action series, written a spec script while still at Cornell and mailed it to Eddy’s production offices in Hollywood, instantly regretting the boldness. But to his stunned reaction, Eddy’s assistant had passed it on and Eddy had detected an arresting voice somewhere in the amateur soup of plot and dialogue. He wrote back to Alan with a systematic autopsy of the work, told him he had some talent, and encouraged him to try again. It was all Alan needed.
He began to write constantly, sending one script after another to Eddy, out in California.
After two years and the completion of his twentieth spec, Eddy told him it was time to consider coming out to the citrus bedlam and giving it a try for real. He’d even offered to let Alan stay in his guest house in Bel Air until he got on his feet. Alan had been floored by the generosity and ended up working on one of Eddy’s later ABC series “Rogues.”
He came to adore Eddy and the bottomless top hat of his mind. He was a scarred and difficult man who immobilized others with napalm moods; jarring candor. But working with Eddy got people Emmys as much as colitis, and Alan always saw past the exacting armor. Maybe it was because Eddy was a bit like Alan’s own father, Burt. Maybe it was because Eddy was like Alan himself. A version that said what it thought, rather than finding the right fabric to cover it.
“… when I first met him, to tell you the truth, he scared the living hell out of me.”
Sweet smiles. Hands taking hands.
“He was … intimidating. Tall, strong.” Alan was looking at Eddy, speaking directly to him. The body was frail, like a dead child’s.
“… when he looked at you, he saw what was inside … who you were.”
A poignant still.
“When I met him, I was new to writing and insecure. I don’t think I was ready to be looked at.”
“After a few thousand bad scripts, I … finally felt like I earned it. Eddy looking me in the eye … it’s one of my proudest possessions.”
A wind came up and the weeping crowd looked up at trembling leaves; soft castanets. As if Eddy whispered greeting. Everyone seemed to feel it.
Alan looked at swaying treetops. The wind was blowing harder; moaning. Squirrels scrambled up trunks and across limbs, scared. On the many folding chairs, black clothing fluttered; sad sails. Faces seemed unnerved by the incoming storm and bodies huddled closer. Drops of rain fell. Alan grinned a little, held palms up.
“Bet you anything this was his idea. He hated funerals.”
A bit of laughter; human music. It sounded happy and alive, roving past inscribed stone; indexed death.
“You know, the truth is, I wouldn’t have become a writer if I’d never met Eddy. Whatever talent I have, I have because he showed me what to do …”
He looked over at the body, as raindrops began to run down Eddy’s face like tears. He seemed for a moment, truly alive; understanding all these friends and family had come to say goodbye. To wish him a safe journey. To let him know how much they loved him.
Alan looked at the sky, the leaking clouds.
“I love you, Ed … wherever you are, keep them in line till we get there.”
Alan wiped tears, stepped down, and joined the line of bereaved who waited to walk by the damp coffin and bid farewell. Several spoke to him and said how they’d liked what he said. He didn’t hear them say how thin they thought he looked. How exhausted. Someone said they’d heard he’d been nervous and overworked. Another said he was sick. No one really questioned it.
Andy Singer left directly after the eulogy.
“He was a genius …” was all Andy could manage, before floating away in the limo, to get to a lunch with Howie Mandel.
Eddy’s widow was at the casket, talking to Eddy, and Alan waited. She and Alan had spent many days and nights together in the last year, in Eddy’s room at Cedars, listening to priceless hours close weak eyes; never wake again.
Sometimes, after they’d both read to Eddy and he’d finally drifted off, she’d sweetly thank Alan again for taking care of
everything. When there was no money, no more insurance. Only sorrow and doubt.
“It was a beautiful eulogy,” she said to Alan, after kissing Eddy’s cheek and being led to a waiting car. Alan loved her and worried what the months ahead would bring. She was so old, so dedicated to Eddy. So lost and childlike without him. Alan swore to himself he’d see to everything she needed.
He was next in line.
He leaned over the rain-spotted casket and stared numbly at the shiny skin and the reddish lips that tried to mimic blood; life. The hair was dyed, immaculately parted. He looked young; rewound twenty years by the ironing and glazes.
Rain fell and Alan wiped Eddy’s face with a handkerchief. The skin felt hard and artificial and Alan soaked up the rain drops that gathered beneath Eddy’s eyes.
“I love you …,” he whispered.
And as the others waited, Alan began to scream.
He grabbed strickenly onto the casket’s open edge and it teetered, rocking Eddy. It fell under Alan’s weight and Eddy’s body dropped out, white suit soaking in mud. Alan went pale and as mortuary workers replaced the body in its casket, he kept swearing the corpse had spoken to him; that the eyes had opened and Eddy had looked right at him. Alan was helped away by his father, Erica and Jordan.
The mortuary explained rain had loosened the epoxy, causing the eyes to open. But no one could explain the voice Alan said he’d heard. Most just said he was so overcome by the loss, he’d imagined the whole thing.
Wishing and hoping. Missing his mentor.
That night, as Alan tried to sleep, listening to restless tide stirring like adrenal fluid, he could still hear Eddy’s voice. The lifeless rasp, the little grin of dead teeth staring up at him from his satin bed. Amused and warning, breath full of preserving chemicals.
“You went too far,” he had said. Then, he told Alan to make it stop. Exactly what the old man at the hospital had said when Alan had visited Eddy.
Word for word.
close-up
Alan leaned on Erica and wept.
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