Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  “Sorry, I was flossing. I said you ought to get back on the horse that threw you.”

  Of course. What else could he do? Turn tail and run?

  The word went forth that Perry Moss was “available.”

  That was the official designation of his situation within the Industry.

  It sounded more dignified than “unemployed” or “looking for a job” yet it still made Perry cringe. He felt like a woman who was being described as “easy,” or “looking for some action.”

  Anything.

  Well, that wasn’t the case, dammit.

  He was going to be particular. He should never have taken the job with Larman Kling in the first place. At least he had salvaged thirty grand from the psychic dog fiasco, and even though after he paid all his percentages and taxes that would come to around seventeen-five, that would carry him a few more months in his new, reduced Valley style of living.

  He made the rounds.

  Of course he was back to the world of television. There was no use trying the powerful producers of features again, not after having been fired off his first feature, but even though the word was out all over town, he was graciously welcomed to meetings by the people who produced television shows.

  He took his notebook and briefcase and he listened to their ideas. There were ideas based on popular songs, on magazine and even newspaper articles. There were ideas based on what a producer’s ten-year-old son had said at breakfast, or what happened to a network executive’s maiden aunt on her Jamaican holiday, or the childhood fears of a director’s TV repairman’s cousin’s plumber. There were ideas out there everywhere, like dust motes, as plentiful and also as ineffable as phantom butterflies or ghosts.

  He made a list of tag words of some of the ideas he’d been pitched: Gay, Geese, Gangs, Roller Derby, Rape, Circus, Camp, Cult.

  None of them grabbed him.

  He was going to keep looking.

  “What are you waiting for?” Ravenna asked, “the perfect wave?”

  Not even her gibes made him panic.

  He was going to wait, and in the meantime, he was not going to waste his time.

  He was going to try writing his own stuff again. You didn’t have to have an assignment from a studio or a network to write a short story. You didn’t even have to make a deal with a magazine. All you had to do was sit down and write the damn thing.

  So, between meetings, Perry tried to sit down and write some short stories.

  The trouble was, they kept coming out like scripts.

  Instead of being able to write a simple, descriptive sentence to begin a short story, like “The freckle-faced kid named Sammy walked out his front door and picked up the morning newspaper,” it came out like this:

  FADE IN

  EXT—SAMMY’S HOUSE—DAY

  A freckle-faced boy, SAMMY, walks out the front door of his family’s house, looks around, sees the morning paper, stoops down and picks it up.

  SAMMY

  (to himself)

  I wonder how the game came out?

  MOTHER

  (voice-over)

  Sammyl Come to breakfast, dear!

  And on and on.

  Except it didn’t go on and on.

  It stopped.

  At first Perry panicked because he couldn’t write stories any more. Then he realized he was simply in the wrong place. You wrote stories back East, where the sentences went all across the page. Perry was relieved. There was no sense in his trying to write prose on the Coast, where he’d come to write scripts. It was like trying to make himself ski on the desert or hike in the ocean. He stopped trying to do the impossible.

  The problem was what to do with his time. The time in between the meetings. The meetings were the peaks of the day, and the rest of the time was like an empty bowl that had to be filled.

  He tried to read books, but that was hard too. The look of a page of print seemed thick and crowded, like New York City, where everything was jammed together, buildings and people and cars. A printed page was like the East, the past. Out here in Los Angeles, in the future, everything was open, flowing, like the traffic on the freeways.

  This was not a place of words but of pictures. Pictures had space in them, they were not filled with black lines and dots. They had color and motion. Yes, out here, the pictures moved. It was a place of moving pictures. Perry put aside books—they seemed heavy and opaque, like bricks—and filled his mind with pictures, moving pictures.

  He went to movies and watched television. He watched everything—news and soaps and sitcoms and game shows. The only thing he didn’t like to watch was the morning talk shows. There were too many people on telling about their latest triumph—the hit movie or best-selling novel they had written or directed or starred in, the Meditation Cookbook that had just been sold to paperback for a million-five, the one-act play produced in a little theater in a small town in the Appalachians that was going to be produced as a feature film starring Jeremy Irons and Dolly Parton. He didn’t want to hear that stuff. Not now. Not till he had something going of his own, some slim thread that might lead to magnificence. Right now, he would even settle for sustenance.

  The other thing he couldn’t stand to see on the morning talk shows was the national weather map. It reminded him where he was, down there at the left-hand corner, and seeing that, envisioning his position on the map, now gave him a sense of dizziness, of being off balance. He sensed some deep interior pull, almost like magnetism, that made him feel he ought to be in the upper right-hand corner of the national map, the little part like an ear sticking up that was actually New England. That was nonsense of course, it was some kind of childish response like he had about wanting the rain to turn to snow, just because that’s the way he had always known it, but he simply solved this daily disturbance by not turning on the TV until nine o’clock, when the game shows began. If he woke early and wanted to watch something, he either found old reruns on UHF, or played a tape of an old movie.

  But after nine A.M. all television was good as far as Perry was concerned. It was moving pictures and gabble and applause and laugh tracks, and all that filled up his mind and stopped it from hurting. The problem was when the commercials came. Even though the commercials too had moving pictures, somehow they allowed other thoughts to creep in, let his mind slip off to regrets and mistakes and fears. He was trying hard not to do dope or drink during the day, so he had to find some way to plug up the leaks the commercials left in his mind.

  The answer was games. The little electronic jobs you plugged in and held in your hands and played by pushing a button. Football and basketball and hockey. The games made little bleep-bleep sounds that helped fill his mind during the commercial breaks. He held the games while he watched the tube and was safely plugged in and tuned out.

  Despite these ingenious efforts to relax, Perry couldn’t help noticing that his heart kept beating too fast. It wasn’t the coke, because he’d stopped doing it. He was only drinking wine and occasional brandies and smoking grass. The grass was supposed to calm him down. Still, he kept being aware of his heart pounding, as if it were trying to get his attention. He didn’t want to think about it, he figured it was part of his mental set, his anxiety, and if he just kept calm and cool it would slow down, just as he was trying to slow down.

  But it didn’t.

  He woke in the night with his heart pounding like a steam engine, as if he were a guy running the Boston Marathon and trying to make it up Heartbreak Hill. He was drenched in sweat.

  He figured he’d better see a doctor. He didn’t want to ask Ronnie, because he would recommend a doctor in the Valley who catered to starving actors. If something was really wrong with him he wanted to see the best. He didn’t want to ask Ravenna, either. After being turned down by her dentist, he didn’t want to suffer the humiliating possibility of being rejected by her doctor as well. More important, he didn’t want her to suspect anything was wrong with his health.

  Who wanted to represent an aging wr
iter with bad teeth who had been fired off a feature and had some kind of problem with his heart?

  He called the Vardemans. In a sense they were the last people in this town he wanted to see—for he didn’t want these powerful, successful friends to know of his overall plight—yet he knew they would be able to recommend a first-rate doctor. Even more importantly, perhaps, Perry had a deep longing, a crying need, to remind himself of his past, that he had a past, that he once was a bright, carefree, enthusiastic young grad student hanging out in Harvard Square. The Vees were at least a link to that time. Maybe he could get them to reminisce about the old days, not even talk about Hollywood at all except to recommend a good doctor.

  Vaughan finally returned his call after three days, and sounded jovial enough till Perry said he wanted to get together for lunch and mentioned he was “staying” out in the Valley for a while. As much as he hated to admit it, Perry felt it was too degrading to actually lie and pretend he was living someplace where he wasn’t. Vaughan put him on hold while he discussed it with Pru. He said Pru couldn’t make it right now, she was really tied up, but Vaughan could meet Perry the next afternoon at three o’clock at the Bob’s Big Boy in Studio City.

  Meeting at one of the chain of Bob’s Big Boy fast-food stops was even a cut below the hidden sushi bar in Playa del Rey, and three in the afternoon did not even come under the category of a late lunch, but Perry really had little choice. In fact he was grateful that Vaughan was making time to see him at all.

  Vaughan had come from lunch with the new head of Unified, having struck a two-picture distribution deal with that studio for “multi buckos,” and evidently the new success had stoked his hunger, for he ordered a double cheeseburger with french fries and onion rings and a double thick chocolate malt. He explained the lunch he had just come from was primarily ritual, consisting of “sparrow food at some fancy fern joint,” and so he was glad to be able to chow down. Perry, watching his diet, had coffee and fruit cup, and started reminiscing about Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage back in Harvard Square.

  Unfortunately, Vaughan didn’t seem in the mood for reminiscing about the good old days. Nor in fact did he ask Perry about what was going on with him now or what had brought him to be “staying” in the Valley. Once Vaughan finished his feast, he seemed nervous. Glancing at his watch, he said he had to be back at the fucking Polo Lounge for some shmoozing with a new young actress, a “hot little twat” from Argentina. On the way out, anyway, Perry got the name of his doctor, a “top internist” in Beverly Hills.

  “Good man,” said Vaughan, “especially if you picked up any rash or running sore in the general area of the gonads. No embarrassment. Mucho discreet.”

  Perry thanked him, and watched as his old pal got into his low-slung Trans Am and peeled away in a blaze of expensive rubber.

  That night Perry was shocked and a little suspicious when Ronnie told him Elena Allbright had invited them both to a dinner at her place the following evening.

  “Thanks,” Perry said, “but you really don’t have to drag me along.”

  “What does that mean?” Ronnie asked.

  “It means I can hang out here and do some burgundy and watch the tube.”

  “But Elena wants you to come. She got a part in a pilot, and she’s celebrating not being broke.”

  “Then I doubt she wants to have people around who remind her what it’s like being down on your luck.”

  Perry simply did not believe that the glamorous actress, once the embodiment of sex and power in the role of Ramona Selden, would invite an out-of-work writer who had just been fired off a picture. Especially now that she was working again herself.

  “Hey, are you being coy or something?” Ronnie asked.

  “Listen, I know you’re a good friend and a kind, sensitive man. I’m sure you probably asked Elena if she minded my tagging along, but to tell you the truth, I don’t want to feel like a social charity case.”

  “Old buddy, you’re letting this town get to you. Elena specifically asked me if I would bring you. She likes you. She likes your work. She wants you to come to her party.”

  Perry finally believed the hostess really wanted him. It was a concept he had forgotten—the feeling of being wanted, of being desired as company for others. It reminded him of the time, not all that long ago (though it now seemed another existence), when he took for granted that his presence at any function of literate people was a welcome addition. Why, back in Vermont—hell, even in some of the finest homes of Boston and New York—he was not just a plus for a hostess, he was a goddam plum.

  He was glad he went. There were buckets of fried chicken, bowls of potato salad, and lots of wine and beer. There was a crowd, forty or so, a nice crowd. Perry recognized a few of them as actors or actresses who had either played some part or come to read for some part on “The First Year,” and seeing them made him feel stronger, as if he had more substance, for they knew him from a time when he was somebody. He felt lighter, more buoyant, when he talked to the ones he had known through the show.

  Elena not only came over to give him her warmest smile and a comradely hug, she said there was someone there who had been a fan of “First Year” and wanted to meet its creator. Perry was pleased, of course, and when that someone turned out to be none other than Lynn Redgrave, one of his own favorite actresses, he was overwhelmed. There weren’t any other stars at the party, it wasn’t that kind of party, but it turned out Elena had once done a guest spot on the old “House Call” series that Lynn had starred in, and they became buddies. Evidently Lynn was one of the stars who would go to places just because she liked the person who had asked her. She seemed quite at home in this otherwise rather motley crew, and even with her splendid English accent she seemed what Perry thought of as a down-home kind of person. When she came over to express her enthusiasm about “The First Year’s the Hardest,” he was practically immobilized with awe and gratitude.

  “It was marvelous,” she said, giving him a firm, friendly handshake and making him feel energized and warmed by the aura of her natural vibrancy. “Please do more, won’t you?”

  “Well, sure, I mean, I hope I will—” he stammered.

  “You will,” she said. “You must, of course!”

  He almost believed he would for a moment; he felt if he could get a fix of that confidence and vigor of hers every day he really could, no matter what the odds.

  Back at Ronnie’s, he felt so grateful for having been invited, for having been paid attention to, he got almost maudlin.

  “I really want to thank you,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” Ronnie said. “I didn’t even invite you. I got points with Elena for bringing you.”

  “Well, I’m glad you got something for all you’ve done for me. I only wish I could really do something for you, too—I mean, to pay you back.”

  “You’re coming up with the rent, aren’t you? That’s the deal.”

  “Hell, I don’t mean that. I mean, everything’s trade-offs in this town, right? You scratch my back and I scratch yours?”

  “That’s how it works sometimes, sure.”

  “Well, I mean, the least I could do for you is make sure you got a part in something I got produced. I mean, I’d love to do that, it would really make me feel good to be able to do that.”

  “Great. You write a TV remake of Moby Dick, I want Ahab. None of this Ishmael shit. I’ve had it with doing Ishmael.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “OK. If something happens like that, it happens.”

  Perry took another slug of his brandy and then suddenly, unexpectedly, he burst out crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Ronnie asked.

  “I feel like a fraud,” Perry sobbed.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t really know if I’ll ever do it again. Have something on the air. I’m no damn good to you. I don’t even have any power. Nothing.”

  Ronnie got up and walked over so he was standing above Perry.

  “You got
to get off this,” he said. “I’m your friend.”

  He sat down beside Perry and put an arm on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Perry said, choking on the sobs.

  “Go ahead. Spill it out.”

  Perry put his head in his hands and just bawled.

  Ronnie sat beside him, patting him on the shoulder.

  Perry believed that Ronnie in fact was his friend, and that made him think of Al Cohen, and it made him bawl even more. He’d forgotten about friends. Forgotten about everything that mattered. Or used to matter.

  On his way to see Dr. Harlow Sampson a week later, Perry’s heart started pounding faster than ever as he began to worry not about his condition, whatever it was, but whether this top internist—no doubt an Internist of the Stars—would take on his case. What if, like the Beverly Hills dentist, the Beverly Hills doctor found that Perry’s heart was pounding too fast, that it was really an embarrassment, a sign of slovenly health care over the years, and he would have to go elsewhere and try to get into acceptable shape for being taken on by a really class doctor?

  Perry was relieved that at least Dr. Sampson was an older man, a courtly-looking, gentle man, with a tapered gray beard, the kind of man who might out of benevolence take on his case even if he weren’t in the best of health.

  “Your resting pulse is one-thirty,” Dr. Sampson told him over the consultation glass of Perrier in his office. “The top range of normal is eighty to a hundred. So you’re right. Your heart is beating too fast. But your EKG is fine. I take it you’re in the entertainment business?”

  “Yes. I’m a writer.”

  “Writer, actor, whatever. The business itself causes stress. That’s your only problem.”

  “Are you saying I should quit?”

  “People have to make a living. Many of my clients are in the business. I can prescribe something for you.”

  “What?”

  Dr. Sampson was making out a prescription.

  “It’s a beta blocker. It will keep your pulse down.”

  “Hey, thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  “Try to take it easy,” the kindly doctor said. “Next thing you know you’ll have a hit. That’s the best medicine.”