by Karen Karbo
“Just don’t tell me these guys are getting their chance because it’s the appeal of the unknown,” said Ralph. “I’m unknown. I’m as fucking unknown as you can get.”
Ralph was desperate. Desperation clung to his clothes like the smell of the brushfires. It hung in his blue-gray eyes. He had been trying to get the same movie, Girls on Gaza, a musical comedy about the Palestinian situation, off the ground for over twelve years.
He had done all the right things, to no avail. He went to the right parties. Made the right contacts. Wrote treatments, screenplays, teleplays. Studied classic films. Read criticism, read theory: Eisenstein and Kuleshov. Made two short films, which he funded by letting his car insurance lapse. Entered them in festivals. Applied for grants. Snuck into workshops conducted by famous directors, by infamous studio executives and agents. Re-snuck into the same workshops the following year to meet the new famous directors conducting it, the new infamous studio executives and agents. He approached the famous and the infamous, thrust Girls on Gaza at them, tolerating their glazed expressions, their hardly hidden sneers. Oh God, not another screenplay!
But Ralph persevered. Invited them for coffee. Made thin jokes about picking their brains. Picked their brains. They told him Work Hard, Hard Work. They reminded him that Sylvester Stallone wrote fifteen scripts before he came up with Rocky.
Ralph said, “I’ve written sixteen.”
Mimi felt sorry for him. Sure, she was a drudge by day, too, but at least she’d done that thing with Bob Hope. She’d done something. In addition, she rationalized, while she was Solly’s secretary, she was not his slave.
Ralph had been with the same producer, Keddy Webb, for eight years. During that time Keddy had landed two Academy Awards, and the only change in Ralph’s life was the new word-processing program Keddy bought to help Ralph catalogue his wine collection. Keddy made Ralph pick up his dry cleaning and drive an hour across town during the lunchtime rush hour in the rain to pick up sushi from Keddy’s favorite restaurant. Keddy wouldn’t even let Ralph do coverage. Anyone could do coverage. Some of Solly’s producer clients had beautiful, hot-eyed Iranian assistants they’d hired because they liked the accent answering the telephone. These women, if they could read, read only Farsi, and they did coverage.
Mimi begged Ralph to quit, but he stayed on because Keddy held out the same old limp carrot that was dangling in front of the bent-out-of-shape nose of every drudge in town: Keddy promised to get Ralph a Deal.
And maybe someday he will, thought Mimi, begging Ralph to chill out and have a beer. Who knew? Mouse was getting married. Shirl got bopped on the head with a ceiling fan and lived. Something good might as well happen to Ralph.
After everyone arrived and sat down, Mimi brought out a tray of haute cheese and crackers. The cheese, which was runny and French, and smelled like a high school gym after a boys’ basketball game, was expensive for Mimi at $14.95 a pound. She had spent far more than she should have, considering her finances.
Carole got the drinks, flavored seltzer water and imported beers. The evening was smog-sticky and warm. It was October and there was no sign of anything resembling fall. Leaves dropped miserably off the trees like shriveled scabs. The front page of the Los Angeles Times kept running pictures of grandmothers in shorts fanning themselves in grocery store checkout lines with Halloween cards they were buying for their grandchildren who lived in less relentless climates.
Outside, a burst of Santa Ana wind blew the fronds of a palm tree into a telephone wire, sending off hot blue sparks and a sizzling zitz.
John Sather sat cross-legged on the floor, reading Ralph’s photocopy. To Mimi, he looked like the quintessential Greenwich Villager. He wore his straight brown hair combed straight back, kept his jaw in five o’clock shadow. He chain-smoked and listened to jazz. No one else Mimi knew listened to anything other than what they played in aerobics or on the car radio.
“Not more about People in Film,” Sather said, folding the article into a paper airplane.
“Would you please explain it to me?” said Ralph.
“As opposed to Film People,” said Darryl D’Ambrosia. Darryl was built like a wrestler, all bulging veins and muscles and fierce black hair. Testosterone gone mad.
“Ho ho,” said Sather. “People in Film and Film People, completely different animals.”
“People in Film actually make movies. They actually touch celluloid –” said Darryl.
“– projectionists don’t count –” said Sather.
“People in Film, on their income tax forms? No more than two words to describe what they do. Film Director. Screenwriter. Film Editor,” said Darryl.
“But Film People always have a lengthy explanation. ‘I’m a waiter and do some reading for Fox on the side, but I’m working on this development deal for a two-hour miniiseries –’” said Sather.
“– TV doesn’t count, this is only features –”
“– right, right –”
“You know you’re a Film Person if you avoid someone at a party who’s going to ask you what you do.”
“You see them coming and you run the other way.”
“Film People live in a state of perpetual humiliation. People in Film live in a state of perpetual self-congratulation.”
“Film People have been reduced –”
“– much to their chagrin –”
“– much to their chagrin, to making a career of trying to be a Person in Film!”
“People in Film send their children to Ivy League schools but can be reached at home in the middle of the afternoon,” said Ralph. “Film People can also be reached at home in the middle of the afternoon, but it’s because they’re unemployed.”
“By jove, I think he’s got it,” said Sather.
“You guys,” said Mimi, irritated.
She hated it when Sather and Darryl talked in code, like a clique of thirteen-year-old girls. She thought it was rude for them to leave everyone else out. Darryl and Sather and Ralph all shared a house in the Hollywood Hills. Ralph was the only one who had ever been married. They had a pool table in their living room instead of furniture. In the family room they had seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of stereo and video equipment and two straight-backed chairs with plastic upholstery, the style popular in the lobby of the Salvation Army. One of them did the cooking, one vacuumed, one scrubbed the bathrooms. Mimi and Carole were forever trying to set Darryl and Sather up, but the women were never thin enough, never mysterious enough, never successful enough, or else too thin, too mysterious, and too successful.
“But it gets tricky,” said Sather, “it gets tricky. Are you a Person in Film if you’re below-the-line talent but don’t have any higher aspirations?”
“Take Lisa,” said Ralph.
“Please don’t,” said Lisa. She twisted open the top of her beer with the bottom of her T-shirt. Lisa was a sound editor and Lithium addict. She had shoulder-length red hair and had made pleated linen shorts and French filterless cigarettes her trademark.
“Lisa is a Person in Film not only because she actually touches celluloid. She also doesn’t aspire to anything great. Not that cutting sound is not great, don’t get me wrong, Lisa.” Ralph smiled, revealing a gleaming set of expensive teeth. Like so many others in the business, he had made it a point to have the right teeth.
“How many Hollywood schmucks does it take to screw in a light bulb, Ralph?” said Lisa.
“We’ve pissed her off,” said Ralph.
“No,” said Lisa, leaning forward on the wicker ottoman, pointing her bottle at Ralph. “You piss me off.”
“I’ll get back to you,” said Sather. “That’s the punch line, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ Did you hear about the Polish actress who fucked a screenwriter to get ahead?”
“That’s an old one,” said Marty Phillips. Marty had heard every movie joke in town. He washed hair at a famous Beverly Hills salon. On the side, he had a tidy business selling locks of the stars’ hair he swept up off the f
loor. He sold a baggie full of Cher’s hair for $400. His screenplays always had hair images in them.
“Any chance we can have one meeting where we don’t discuss the business?” asked Carole.
“Yeah, like maybe we’ll even get around to talking about the book,” said Lisa, pulling her ragged copy of Lust for Life out of her shoulder bag.
“PMSed-out tonight?” said Sather. He and Lisa had once been an item.
“I’m about ready to slit my throat, all right? I cut one more car wreck and I don’t know what.”
People pitied Lisa but envied her paycheck. She made more money sound-editing than any three people Mimi knew put together. But sound editors were the least respected people in town. It was unglamorous, unsexy, boring brute labor. Lisa had once thought of directing or writing or even editing picture. But she hadn’t known what she’d wanted, really, so when she got offered a sound-cutting job she took it. She hated it. But sound-cutting was like drug dealing. You did it a few times because you needed a job and you got paid a fortune. You started getting used to the money and couldn’t bring yourself to quit. There were always sound-cutting jobs around because anyone who had the discipline to take less money to do something else, did. Lisa bought a new car every other year, and had an apartment in Brentwood. She worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day syncing up footsteps, thwoking tennis balls, high school boys playing the edge of their desks with number 2 pencils, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat. Every rat, every tat had to be there, and had to be in sync. Then, in the mix, the producer covered all of them with a song from the soundtrack album. It would have been a wonder if she wasn’t addicted to Lithium.
Mimi admired Lisa anyway. She was one of those women who felt no compulsion to be nice. Mimi felt that was her main problem: she was too nice.
“Film People go from being young and idealistic to old and jaded with no appreciable change in their résumé or level of experience,” said Ralph. He liked this game.
“Why don’t you just get out of film then, Ralph,” shot Lisa. “Jesus Christ.”
“I was just kidding,” said Ralph.
“The film industry is relieved,” said Darryl.
“Fuck you,” said Ralph.
“You guys!” said Mimi. Everyone was in a bad mood.
No one had really read the book. It was too sweltering all week. Luke, who was a runner at Paramount, said no one was even reading coverage, it was so hot. Also, there was the World Series, even though the Dodgers weren’t in it. And the new fall releases were out, so everyone was going to screenings. Mimi always read the book, heat wave or not. It was a point of pride with her. She sighed, rustled her blond bangs with her fingers.
“You know what’s different about us and van Gogh?” said Ralph. “At least he could practice his craft. At least he could paint. He had that kernel of satisfaction. We can’t even do that. I’m a producer but I’ve never produced, and I can’t practice producing unless someone gives me a million dollars.”
Everyone agreed.
“We’re the new underclass,” said Luke. “Perpetual aspirants. Middle-class hopefuls who never make it, yet refuse to give up.”
Mimi was suddenly worried. What if Mouse walked in the door and everyone was slouching around with long faces complaining about how they were nobodies? They were supposed to be having a literary discussion. She had made such a deal of telegraming Mouse. Can’t be at airport. Book group. Important meeting. Unable to cancel. She made it out to be one step below a summit meeting between the superpowers.
“We’re not middle class,” she said. “We’re artists.”
“Heh-heh-heh.” Luke’s laugh was the vocal equivalent of a sneer.
She would have done better picking up Mouse at the airport.
4.
IT WAS FIVE HOURS FROM NAIROBI TO CAIRO; FOUR and a half from Cairo to Paris; eight from Paris to New York; five more after that to L.A.
Nairobi to Cairo was a Boeing 737. A bus with wings. A flying, hollowed-out metal hot dog. Mouse and Tony were packed together, rubbing thighs. It was irritating, not erotic. Mouse loathed jet liners. She trusted only bush pilots in prop planes, grizzled, pidgin English-speaking men who could negotiate mountains half-drunk in the dark. Ten minutes after takeoff she was already homesick for every last one of them.
She spent the flight with her nose plastered against the dingy oval window, keeping the plane in the air. If she looked away for too long a wing might snap off, an engine plunge into the Nile.
This was what happened when you looked away. She had looked away. She had moved away. She never wrote or called.
Mouse and Tony had flown together only twice before. He was also a nervous flier. Mouse couldn’t help wondering why he always resisted the short painless flights around East Africa in conjunction with their films – he would drive, he would take the train, he would argue that the interview, the shot, the location wasn’t really necessary – but was delighted at the prospect of flying five hours to Cairo, four and a half to Paris, eight to New York, and five to Los Angeles.
During the first few stunned hours after Mimi’s phone call, sweating over mugs of warm beer in a crowded bar in Kisangani, Mouse begged Tony to stay in Nairobi. She would go home, see how things were. He would continue to work on Marriage Under Mobutu. She would call for him, or she would come back.
Tony was a talker, an aisle-sitting, martini-drinking talker. His way of coping was to pretend he wasn’t on a plane at all. Mouse found this to be somewhat cowardly. She was in favor of execution without a blindfold. She was a believer in staring at highway wrecks, revolting pictures in medical books, your own arm as blood is being extracted for a sample.
Tony chattered away about anything. About the evils of the Trilateral Commission. About who was the most talented Beatle. About the ten movies he would take with him if he was stuck in a submarine for a year. Klute, he said to the back of Mouse’s head, as she stared out the window at the yellow-washed sky, Sunday Bloody Sunday.
This is just one more way in which we are incompatible, Mouse thought. She tried to think of the other ways but couldn’t. Her thinking was fuzzy. She blamed it on the altitude. On dinner, which was a thin piece of beige meat, a triangle of sweaty cheese, two stale rolls which she planned on using as floats, one under each arm, in the much-touted unlikely event of a water landing.
Cairo to Paris. A DC-something-or-other, obscenely huge. Mouse and Tony wedged together in the middle section. Mouse thought that without access to a window it was quite possible that she would die, not in a crash, but of not having a window. Tony was able to sleep sitting up, and did. Mouse couldn’t, and didn’t even try.
The prospect of going home roused The Pink Fiend, who lived inside Mouse and whose sole function was to torment her. In Mouse’s mind she sat somewhere just under her sternum, her chubby white hands folded, swinging her feet. She was no modern little girl. She had long beribboned sausage curls, ankle socks trimmed with stiff lace, petticoats. She was impervious to both criticism and psychotherapy, as hardy as a cockroach. Mouse was not sure whether The Pink Fiend was in fact her girlhood self or just a brutish enforcer of feminine values that lurked in the gene pool, like the evil microorganisms living in African rivers, and was passed on, quite invisibly, from mother to daughter.
The Pink Fiend made herself invisible for long periods of time, when Mouse was filled with her usual confidence and sense of purpose. Like the good girl she was, The Pink Fiend sat quietly and listened, fingering her silky, beribboned curls. Mouse would forget she was there – the first mistake – or she would think finally, finally she was rid of her. Then Mouse blessed her years in Africa for toughening her up. She imagined that somehow The Pink Fiend had been baked out by the blistering heat, jounced out during a horrendous ride over a potholed road in a shock absorber-less Land Rover, driven out in the face of Mouse’s not unremarkable achievements: eight films in eight years; a credit card based on her earnings as a documentary film producer.
Bu
t The Pink Fiend never left her chair, there under Mouse’s sternum. She swung her feet. And waited.
She waited for the recurrence of self-doubt, which always seemed to have something to do with one of their docs. Was the idea workable? Was it fundable? Was it of remote interest to anyone anywhere?
The last screening Mouse and Tony had at the British Consulate before leaving Nairobi for Los Angeles drew eleven people; a few yawning aides from the Consulate, the rest self-deluding students from the University of Nairobi, interested in knowing how they too could make documentaries. Amidst the humiliating smatter of applause, The Pink Fiend cleared her throat. Mouse, depressed at the familiar sound, prepared for the onslaught. What did you honestly expect, Mouse? Who in his right mind would pay to see a film on a nun who runs a leper colony in Uganda? What normal woman would produce a film on a leper colony? What normal woman would produce a film? No normal woman. No good woman. No good girl. And any woman who is not a good girl gets exactly what she deserves. You know this. All things considered, Mouse, you should he thankful you didn’t contract a nice case of leprosy yourself.
The Pink Fiend was naturally delighted by Mimi’s phone call, the unhappy news that Shirl FitzHenry, who had been crushed by Mouse’s move to Africa, had been bonked on the head with a ceiling fan.
The mother whom Mouse rarely wrote.
The mother who loved Mouse More Than Life Itself.
And what about Mimi? The sister whose wedding Mouse spurned. The sister who loved Mouse At Least As Much As Life Itself.
As Mouse crouched in the telephone cubicle in the post office in Kisangani, bellowing across two continents and one ocean, she felt The Pink Fiend unlace her fat fingers and rub her sweet moist hands together.
Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy.
The Pink Fiend left Mouse alone while she packed and made travel arrangements – a good woman is a good organizer, The Pink Fiend admitted; at least you’ve got that going for you – and shipped books, film prints, videotapes ahead to the address Mimi gave her in West Hollywood and threw a hasty party for their few friends and carted their few sticks of furniture to the house Camisha, their housekeeper, shared with her family. Now, however, she had no sympathy.