Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  “Darling, this is a rewrite.”

  “But it’s a rewrite of a feature—and besides, it’s not really a rewrite. Kling told me he wanted me to read the first script and then throw it away. Do what I want.”

  “Darling?”

  It was Ravenna’s patient, instructive tone.

  “Yes.”

  “A rewrite is a rewrite is a rewrite.”

  “You sound just like Larman Kling.”

  There was some other successful person who said things in threes also, wasn’t there? Oh—sure. Gertrude Stein. Perry had almost forgotten about her.

  “I guess I have no choice,” Perry said.

  “This is going to turn things around for you, sweets.”

  “All right. I’ll do it.”

  Ravenna blew him a kiss through the phone.

  Earlier, when Perry thought he was going to make at least a hundred grand on this, he had called Liz Caddigan and asked her to dinner. Now he called back and canceled. He figured under the circumstances he would only be thirty-seven-and-a-half-percent effective. Liz would probably be able to ascertain the exact figures of his new deal.

  He called Ronnie Banks. Maybe a little hit of coke would bring him up again.

  XIV

  He didn’t tell anyone but his agent he was moving to the Valley.

  Before he came to Los Angeles that name always conjured up in his mind bucolic scenes from the lovely old movie How Green Was My Valley, and the lilting folk song “Down in the Valley”—gentle meadows and babbling brooks, heather and fern and sparkling pond. But here it meant the San Fernando Valley, a flat, featureless, anonymous expanse of sun-baked tracts, a grid of endless, seemingly identical streets of Dairy Queens and dry cleaners, used-car lots and Laundromats, storefronts with secondhand furniture sitting out front on the sidewalk, cement-block bars with slits for windows.

  Of course there were nice places in the Valley, expensive places.

  “The Valley is really coming up these days,” Ravenna said encouragingly. “Have you seen the new boutiques on Ventura Boulevard?”

  Perry couldn’t help thinking of the Vardemans’ snide references to the Valley, locating it on their own social map.

  Pru said the Valley was where one went to get inexpensive maids and baby-sitters. It was silly to seek such help in Beverly Hills when the rates were so much better in the Valley.

  Vaughan had dismissed a novel once that was being promoted as “an inside peek at Hollywood” by protesting, “that’s not about Hollywood, for God sake, it’s about failed television writers who live in the Valley.”

  Perry wasn’t really living there, of course, he was simply staying with Ronnie Banks while he put his condo on the market. He was renting it out at a loss—there was no way he could get the three grand a month that the mortgage cost—but he couldn’t concentrate on writing while realtors and prospective buyers roamed in and out. Ronnie invited him to come out and split the modest rent of $400 a month, using the fold-out bed in the living room, and it worked out fine.

  It was good for Perry, not being alone right now. He and Ronnie had become real pals. They went out for pizza or Chinese food at night, drank, smoked some grass, occasionally did a line or so of coke, talked about the theater, women, art, you name it.

  The only problem was the goddam script.

  “So how is it going, are you into the flow, can you feel the flow, do you know?”

  “Larman, great to talk to you!” Perry said, pressing his hand on his temples as if that might help force out a positive, upbeat response. He glanced at his typewriter and the card table set up beside it with his paper and what there was of the script so far. Then he turned away, as if not actually looking at the script while he spoke would make it easier to tell the necessary lies.

  The fact was he only had three pages.

  He had worked every day for two weeks and he only had three pages. Oh, he had written many more but he had torn them all up. After a fabulous start, it seemed as if the whole thing had shut down on him, like an iron gate.

  “It’s going great!” he shouted into the phone. “Yeah, the flow is flowing, I mean it’s growing, growing every day, I just can’t stop it flowing!”

  “I can’t wait to see, when can I see, can you bring some pages up to me?”

  “Oh, well yes, hell yes, just give me about a week, another week, to put what I got together and get some more!”

  What the hell else could he say?

  Larman Kling’s secretary came on the line and made an appointment for Perry to come up the following Wednesday at ten in the morning. Larman wanted to read the pages while Perry was right there with him.

  Holy God.

  He had to do something. He had to get words on paper by a week from tomorrow. Whatever he had to do to make that happen, he would do it.

  FADE IN

  EXT—JOHNSON HOUSE—DAY

  A small yellow frame house on an ordinary block in an ordinary American midwestern town. There is an elm tree in the front yard. A toy red wagon is sitting beside it. DANNY, a boy about ten years old, freckle-faced and natural in muddy jeans and a St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt and Little League baseball cap worn backwards, comes out of the house, looks around, puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles. There is no response, and DANNY now cups his hands to his mouth, closes his eyes, and tilts his head back, calling as loud as he can.

  DANNY

  Here Spot, here Spot, here Spot!

  Perry read the page over, smiling. He stood up, clapped his hands, and stuck a clenched fist in the air, triumphant.

  He felt like a Rocky of writing!

  The chips were down, but he was going to come through to glorious victory, he was going to win in the end, against all the odds. On the verge of being broke, abandoned by his wife (she had become increasingly villainous in his self-explanation of their separation, a deserter who left the ship at the first signs of a leak), the great but unappreciated literary man was relegated by the crass commercial creeps of Hollywood to a low-paying rewrite of a turkey script about a psychic dog, conceived by a hysterical producer who seemed to be a mad combination of the Marx Brothers and Gertrude Stein.

  Did the great writer despair and throw in the towel, slinking back East in defeat with his tail between his legs and his pride dragging behind him like a leash?

  No way, José!

  The coke had worked.

  It acted like a jolt on his imagination, enabling him to break through and write the story of the ordinary family and their psychic dog! Well, not all of it yet, but twenty-five pages of it—enough to show Larman Kling.

  When he was high, it seemed fabulous.

  Well, he was no fool, he realized part of that response was due to the drug, and when he’d read the stuff he’d written when he’d come down and was straight, it didn’t seem nearly as wonderful. In fact it didn’t seem wonderful at all.

  “Run, Spot, run.”

  Holy Mother of God.

  A grown man had written that line. A professional writer, one whose short stories had been published in distinguished magazines and won prestigious prizes.

  “Run, Spot, run.”

  Hey, wait a minute. Who the hell said a rewrite of a script about a psychic dog was supposed to be a great work of art, anyway?

  Perry had a glass of wine and read over the pages again.

  Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

  It was better than nothing.

  It was worth the $100 a day it cost in coke to keep the pages coming out.

  Perry figured that was a business expense.

  Larman Kling was pacing the room as he read, dropping the pages as he finished them, casting them away like leaves that wafted down through the air to settle on the floor or on one of the many mattresses or water beds. Perry had no idea if this shedding process meant that the eccentric producer didn’t like what he saw or was so engrossed in the script, so totally transported by the story, that he didn’t even want to be bothered by putting
back the pages, perhaps wasn’t even aware that he was spilling them all across the room.

  Perry could feel his heart pounding. Just before coming up he had slipped into a men’s room of one of the restaurants on the ground floor of the building, and had a hit of coke. It was already wearing off, and as Larman Kling kept pacing and tossing off pages and mumbling without really uttering any words, Perry’s panic began to rise. He also had a stabbing headache that wasn’t helped by the sunlight blasting through the glass walls of the enormous room, striking Perry’s eyes like a fist.

  Larman Kling tossed away the last page and continued to pace, fiercely rubbing his head now with his knuckles, then suddenly turned to Perry and started to bark. Like a dog. The sound came out in sharp, staccato sounds—“Erf! Erf! Erf!” Perry didn’t know if he was supposed to bark back, so he simply nodded, wanting to make some response, some acknowledgment.

  The worst part was that Perry had no idea if Kling’s outburst of barking meant that the script was so wonderfully real he felt exactly like Spot, the heroic dog, or whether he thought the script itself was a dog. Was he barking in praise or complaint?

  As Perry was trying to decipher the riddle of Kling’s behavior, the producer suddenly went down on his hands and knees, barking louder, starting to growl, and walking toward Perry on all fours. Perry sat frozen, not speaking or moving, feeling he was locked in a nightmare.

  As Kling came closer, panting now and wagging his tongue, Perry prayed that the imaginative producer would not for any reason lift one of his legs and spray.

  “You haven’t got the dog, that psychic dog, or any kind of dog, or anyone or anything else,” said Kling, staring up into Perry’s eyes.

  Perry’s heart accelerated, feeling both fear and anger. What was he doing, sitting on a mattress in a high-rise penthouse in Los Angeles, while a man on all fours criticized his work?

  “You didn’t like anything?” he asked.

  Kling stood up, brushing himself off.

  “That’s all in the past, the distant past, over and done and past now,” he said. “But I don’t give up on a good man, no. We start now. The dog is the start, the key, the open sesame, we get you knowing the dog, the rest will come, oh yes, you’ll see—come with me!”

  They went in Larman Kling’s private limo.

  “The Arvendale Kennels!” he told his driver.

  “Where’s that?” Perry asked.

  “Inglewood. Near the Forum. You like basketball? The Lakers? Speed, finesse, speed.”

  “Yes,” Perry said. “Absolutely.”

  Kling pulled down a panel that brought forward a miniature bar. For a moment Perry’s heart leaped, hoping they could have some champagne, or at least a little wine. He could use something.

  “Take your pick, select, everything chilled,” Kling said.

  Perry leaned forward and saw to his dismay that the bar contained only an array of vegetable juices. He selected a can of V-8, figuring he could at least pretend it was a Bloody Mary.

  Kling took a papaya juice, shut the bar, and slipped a tape in the stereo deck. Perry braced himself, praying it was nothing jarring, no heavy metal rock or angry punk. He couldn’t even have stood a Beethoven symphony.

  Thankfully, the tape wasn’t even music.

  It was surf sounds.

  Kling took two black masks from a kind of pocket below the bar and handed one to Perry. What the hell, were they going to commit a crime? Perhaps steal a psychic dog from the Arvendale Kennels? Evidently not, for the mask had no eyeholes. Kling slipped his down over his head so it covered his eyes, then leaned back in the seat, motioning Perry to do the same.

  “Relax,” he said. “Clears the head, empties the mind, prepares for new absorbing.”

  Perry did as he was told. Except that he couldn’t empty his mind. Everything indeed was black now and there was only the sound of surf, which was supposed to be soothing, but Perry kept picturing scenes of past mistakes, embarrassments. If only he had stuck with Ned Gurney he might be sharing the benefits of his being hot now, might be working on a class picture, writing a quality script, and conferring daily with a civilized man. Instead he was in the back seat of Larman Kling’s limo, masked, sipping V-8 juice, listening to surf sounds, and speeding toward a dog kennel in Inglewood for what incredible purpose he didn’t even want to guess.

  “Come down, down here, with us!” Larman Kling called.

  He was on all fours, nose to nose with an Airedale. He was sniffing the dogs, rubbing up against them, barking at them.

  “Got to learn their language, how they speak, think!” he explained.

  Perry did what he was told. He got down on his hands and knees and tried to talk to the dogs. A menacing-looking Great Dane growled at him.

  Perry flinched and moved on to a friendly terrier who licked his face.

  “Speak!” Kling ordered.

  Perry barked.

  The terrier barked back.

  Kling, smiling, urged him on, barking himself.

  Is this what I was born to do? Perry wondered. Is this where I’m supposed to be, in my life? This was not even a story he would want to recount at faculty cocktail parties. For a moment he wanted to crawl over and bite Larman Kling, severing an artery and rendering the mad producer blessedly unconscious. He looked over at Kling, who was barking now even more enthusiastically, gathering a whole pack of dogs around him, waving to Perry to come and join in the canine conference. Perry understood of course that Kling was doing all this to try to help him get into the script, to be able to write the part of the dog. He realized, with a powerful, disorienting mixture of appreciation and revulsion, this man is trying to help me.

  Kling went even further in his effort to do all he could to aid Perry’s blighted attempts at writing the psychic dog script. He got him an office to work in. Kling had another picture in preproduction on the Unified lot, and he secured a room in one of the barrackslike buildings for Perry to work in. He even arranged for Perry to pick out his own furniture from the constantly shifting pieces in the studio warehouse.

  Perry lay on the soiled red couch, trying to think through a scene. The couch, a straight-backed wooden chair, and one of those mammoth old-fashioned desks were the only objects in Perry’s new office. He did not try to spruce it up or personalize it with any pictures or posters on the wall. That stuff was for hicks who didn’t understand the fleeting nature of the business. He was a veteran now. Or becoming one fast.

  He did not use the coke any more, simply because it hadn’t worked. It only gave the illusion it worked, and that was finally worse than the blank piece of paper. Perry was so pissed off at having fallen for the coke he even stopped using it at night, for fun. He simply drank wine and smoked grass, but he didn’t do those at work, not while he was trying to write.

  He was doing the script cold turkey.

  Or trying.

  Larman was trying to help. He was dropping in every day and trying to inject his own ideas into Perry’s blank brain.

  Perry sat at the typewriter and made himself write. After a while, exhausted, he would have to lie down on the soiled red couch. He tried to think about what he was doing, tried to understand why the hell it was so damn hard.

  He was being paid to spread his mind, to force it to open against its own instinct, to accept the entry of an alien idea.

  This hurt.

  Well, what the hell did he expect, hadn’t he read about it all his life, wasn’t it one of the oldest cliches in the book, the hoariest and the whoriest? Ha. But it wasn’t so funny now, not so glib and easy as it was in jokes and objective journalism, for now it was happening to him. This ache was not academic, it was—ugh—ugly, radiating real pain that spread and burned to the core, the private center, the self.

  The pulsating pain was all the worse because Perry knew he himself had caused it. He had sought this violation, had invited, for pay, the intrusion of a foreign mental object (the dog of a script) into the very inner sanctum of the psyche, the
delicate creative part of it. Of course it would hurt, he knew all along it would hurt. He expected the pain, was ready for it. He planned to do simply what people have done in such situations for centuries—close his eyes and brace himself, grit his teeth and think of the reward, the blessed benison, the life-sustaining money.

  But you don’t get paid just for closing your eyes and letting them shove their merchandise up your mind.

  Once they stick it in you, you have to nurture and feed their seed, shape it and make it grow as if it were your very own—but you have to make sure it comes out according to their image, the specifications of what they want, what they are paying you to deliver.

  Perry understood this, he knew the rules of the game and had every intention of obeying, yet now in the very act, he was struck by the fear that he might not be capable of carrying it out, of completing his part of the bargain.

  Dizzy with fear, he got up from the couch and forced himself back to the typewriter.

  Failed television writers who live in the Valley.

  He tried not to think.

  He made himself write. After two more weeks of this he handed in twenty new pages. He waited. Waited for the phone to ring. Waited for Larman Kling to knock at the door. On the fourth day of waiting he went in to the studio, started up the stairs to his second-floor cubicle, and was pushed out of the way, pressed against the wall by two moving men.

  They were carrying out the soiled red couch.

  “Hey, that’s mine!” Perry protested.

  “You in room two-twenty-seven?” one of the movers asked.

  “Yes! I’m working for Mr. Larman Kling—you better call his office and get this straightened out.”

  “His office is who called us,” the other mover said. “Told us they wouldn’t be needing that space any more.”

  That’s how Perry found out he was fired.

  They took away the furniture.

  Of course Kling’s business affairs people settled up with Ravenna, paying almost the full price of the aborted script.

  “What the hell do I do now?” Perry asked.

  “’et back on the ’orse,” Ravenna said.

  “What? I can’t understand you.”