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To the Hollands and the Caytons and the Cayton-Hollands and the animals and all those people
PROLOGUE
I’m sitting in the glassed-in conference room of Amazon Studios, Sherman Oaks Galleria adjacent. Behind me, cars rip by on the 405 like an unflinching river. In front of me, dozens of sharply dressed millennials clack away at their keyboards, furiously expanding an insatiable empire. They pay me no mind, as I sit here in this aquarium with my bottle of sparkling water. They must see twenty of me a day.
The walls on either side of me are dry-erase boards, floorboards to ceiling. There’s a basket of markers on the table. They don’t expect me to draw something, do they? Am I supposed to diagram our show? I’m not up for that kind of effort. If they are expecting some sort of a performance here, these Amazonians will be sorely disappointed. I’ve got no razzmatazz in me, no showmanship.
I’m eight years into my stand-up comedy career, taking a huge development meeting; ostensibly this is the biggest moment of my young career, the one I’ve been waiting for. A childhood spent obsessing over everything comedy, those hours in the newspaper backroom cracking jokes, the long nights at the open mics, the endless road trips for a shit one-nighter in some heartbreaking town—it’s all led to this.
My two cohorts in the Denver comedy troupe the Grawlix and I have written a TV script called Those Who Can’t. It’s been making the rounds in Hollywood. We’ve pitched it to Comedy Central, Adult Swim, FX. There’s been interest but no bites. But it’s got “heat,” our people tell us, whatever that means. And word on the “heat” is Amazon is intrigued.
So here I sit, waving the flag for Team Grawlix, my partners-in-dick-jokes back home in Denver. Today it’s all on me.
I see the development duo make their way through the bullpen in front of me, a medley of business casual. There’s always two: one to do the work, the other to congratulate him. They enter. We shake hands. They offer me more water, coffee, whatever I need. We make small talk, the obligatory bullshitting in which creative people sit opposite noncreative people and laugh at the noncreative people’s bad jokes because they know there might be some money on the other end of the whole whorish exchange. Backgrounds, schooling, snapshots of lives that once mattered but now wither in the shadow of almighty Hollywood. Then we get down to business.
“So what’s up with Those Who Can’t?”
“Nothing,” I report. “A few networks are considering it but no one has committed. It’s available.”
“It’s such a funny script,” the Amazonian says.
“I know it is,” I say. “It’s the funniest script you’ll read all year. You should buy it.”
I’m not myself. I’m cocky, an arrogance born of total indifference. Normally I’d be polite, deferential even. They would comment on my manners after I’d left, that nice boy from one of those middle flyover states. But today I’m reckless.
None of this feels real. Just another incomprehensible turn in a recent flurry. Do I want to sell this thing? Of course. Do I care if I don’t? Not in the least. So what does it matter if these people throw me out of their office? Who cares if I punch the guy in the face and take a shit on the conference room table? What’s a development meeting mean in the grand scheme? What’s the point of making a fucking TV show? Suddenly this all feels so goddamned empty.
But my existential indifference, that cliché cache of a disaffected teen, is doing something else for me today. Suddenly, I’m talking their talk. I’m a goddamn shark in this aquarium. I’m becoming fluent in Hollywood asshole. And if there’s one thing an asshole can’t resist, it’s another asshole.
“We’d love to buy it,” he tells me, a bit taken aback by my audacity, no doubt, but also suddenly fully erect for the first time all quarter. “But we’re already developing another high school script.”
“Fuck that other script,” I blurt out, a little Ari Gold learning to fly. “Our script is better than that script.”
“Well, between you and me, they haven’t even finished their first draft,” he confesses.
“They haven’t even finished their first draft?! We’ve got a script ready to go!”
He looks at his partner seated next to him. His partner nods. Ego padded.
“Can you make a pilot in Denver for fifty thousand dollars” he asks.
“We can make five pilots in Denver for fifty thousand,” I say.
We shake hands. I leave. My manager calls me twenty minutes later.
“I don’t know what you said in there but they want to buy Those Who Can’t!”
“Really?!”
“Really!”
My manager laughs. I laugh. He says he’ll call me later with more details. He hangs up. I smile, proud of myself, happy for the adventure my friends and I are about to embark upon. I think about the countless shows we put on in those dive bars and DIY spaces and art galleries, the audiences growing with each new iteration. I think about all the hours we spent making sketch-videos for free on the weekends, how we started out so sloppy and amateurish, how we were always tweaking, never satisfied, always pushing forward. And now we get to make our own TV show.
Then I burst into tears. I cry all the way down Ventura, then the entire length of Cahuenga, from the Valley to my budget Ramada hotel room in West Hollywood. Big, choking, snotty sobs, the kind that steal your breath away. That suffocate you.
What a picture I must be: some sad, bearded bastard weeping in his economy rental, KDAY blasting nineties West Coast hip-hop on the radio. There’s probably thirty people doing the exact same thing within a two-mile radius of me.
But none of them just sold a script!
Then again, none of them found their little sister’s dead body ten days ago either, the gun in her hand, the trickle of blood down her blue lips, her tiny bird-bone body lying there in her bed, never to move again. My best friend, my little sister Lydia, gone. Just like that.
I’m a thirty-two-year-old stand-up comic from Denver who just sold his first Hollywood script.
I’ve never been more devastated.
THE CHILDREN WHO FELT THE WORLD
Lydia almost drowned when she was three. Slipped through her kiddie inner tube and shot to the bottom of the pool. We were supposed to be watching her, but my older sister Anna and I got distracted. I was seven. Anna was nine. It was bound to happen. When I turned around Lydia was gone. All I saw was a pastel inner tube bobbing on the surface. Then I looked down and saw Lydia flailing on the bottom of the pool, her little body warped and distorted through the water. Before I could act my mother, a nonswimmer, was in the pool, thrashing toward her youngest. She had been reading poolside. My mom fished Lydia out and lay her stomach-down on the hot concrete. She pounded on her tiny back until Lydia began coughing up mouthfuls of water, then came sputtering back to us. She was fine; scared, but alive. She began crying and my mom rocked her until she was calm.
It was an innocent mistake, but I blamed myself. I had been the one closest to Lydia in the pool. I nearly let my little sister drown. I wouldn’t have been able to go on living had that happened. None of us would have. Not in the same manner, anyway. We would be forever haunted by that day, by that death. We would have carried it with us like a festering wound, like a disease
that eventually overtakes you.
And while I was so grateful that Lydia was okay, that we were allowed to carry on unscathed, deep down, I was surprised. Secretly I had suspected things would go the other way. If not that day, then another. When I saw Lydia at the bottom of that pool it felt like a premonition. Here it is, I thought. Here is your tragedy. It confirmed my suspicions. That the world was full of injustice and cruelty and darkness. You could stave it off for a while, but it was only a matter of time before it came for you and everything that you loved. Eventually it would be your turn.
I vowed to never let anything like that happen to Lydia. I vowed never to let anything like that happen to any one of us. Still, I sensed the possibility.
We all did.
• • •
When I was four years old I had to go to a therapist because those Sally Struthers starving African commercials knocked me on my ass. The mere sight of the skeletal children with their sunken, hollow eyes was enough to level me. I may have only been in preschool, but my white-guilt was at a twelfth-grade level.
“Every year ten million third world children don’t live to see their first birthday,” Sally would say, voice quivering as she toured the slums in an oversized purple blazer.
As she continued to lobby for these children across my television screen, I became more and more stricken. Eventually I took on their suffering. These kids were fucked from the get-go. Their chances of survival were nil. If they couldn’t survive, I didn’t see why I should. Never mind that they lived in Africa and I lived in Denver, Colorado. That wasn’t the point. It wasn’t fair. So I stopped eating, stopped drinking water. I began drawing fucked-up pictures of starving bodies, dead children on the ground with distended bellies. My parents were understandably concerned. They took me to a child psychologist, which eventually broke the spell. I don’t remember much about the process, other than no part of me wanted to be there so I would just silently beat the shit out of one of those clown punching-dummies until it was time to leave. Eventually I didn’t have to go anymore. It seemed I was cured. Africa, not so much.
Then I learned about Martin Luther King Jr. in kindergarten and the anguish took hold yet again. In anticipation of the coming holiday our teacher read us a book about boycotts and German shepherds and fire hoses and Selma and I literally wailed at the injustice. My parents had to be called. They did their best to ground the conflict that night, to highlight the progress made since then by so many heroes, which brokered a delicate peace. But every time I sniffed even a hint of discrimination I would break out into “We Shall Overcome,” a little bowl-cut white child of the eighties crying as he belted out protest anthems at the top of his lungs. Had my teacher told us about Malcolm X, I would have stopped talking to white people all together.
The world affected me. Perhaps too deeply. How could it not? My father was a civil rights attorney; my mother was an investigative journalist. If you weren’t outraged, you weren’t paying attention. So you better channel that outrage to help fix things. That was the pervasive mind-set at Casa de Cayton-Holland anyway, one that my parents were proud of. Were we to produce a family crest it would be a picture of a child sobbing while he stabs the hegemon in the heart.
My father’s father was an art dealer to the stars, a Beverly Hills sophisticate who dealt in everything from Dutch masters to Picasso. He was also a hard-ass who barely paid any attention to his kids. So my dad was left to his own devices in an iconic Los Angeles before the sprawl. His was a childhood full of baseball and avocados, high school classes with movie stars and Christmas caroling with Ricky Nelson. He could have easily gone into the family business, a rich kid turned rich adult, but the sixties lit a fire under his ass, and as a young man he reemerged a disciple of the civil rights movement. He wrote his college thesis on the legal rights of conscientious objectors across American history. After graduating from UCLA Law he joined Legal Aid, where his marching orders, as he loved to remind us, were to “do good, raise hell, change laws.” He was assigned to Denver and left LA with his middle finger up; off to the Rocky Mountains with his long, black hippie hair blowing in the wind, off to raise some hell, do some good, change some motherfucking laws. Which is how he met my mom.
Linda Cayton was from the wrong side of the tracks, Richmond, Virginia. Poor white trash, she would say. Her father lied about his age so he could go off and fight in World War II at the age of sixteen. It fucked him up something fierce and he came back from the South Pacific drunk, abusive, and ready to start a family. He sobered up long before we were born, became a manager and father figure at a Richmond halfway home, but the damage was done. One heartbreaking story about my grandfather pissing on my mother’s homework loomed large in her Southern Gothic. In spite of that, she got herself into Mary Washington College. The Vietnam War was raging and she quickly became radicalized and began writing for the student newspaper. She was having fun, burning her bra, sowing feminist seeds that would later manifest in the hyphenation of her children’s last name, damning them to a lifetime of clerical confusion in the name of gender equality.
After college she snagged a gig with the College Press Service, a leftist group that operated as a sort of AP for student newspapers. They shipped her out to Denver. She filed hundreds of stories over the years and eventually began a series on the systemic corruption of nursing homes. Which was how she met my dad.
Criminally negligent behavior by nursing homes was nothing new: they had operated virtually unregulated since their inception, unchecked warehouses for the sick and dying. But people like my mom were spreading awareness via the fourth estate, as was my dad through law. It was personal for him. His mother had been put in a nursing home when she was dying. On one visit he leaned in for a hug and came away with wet hands. Her back was one enormous, festering bedsore. It shaped my dad’s career. Legally obliterating nursing homes became part of his life’s work, a calling card. His evidence became part of the landscape of our youth. In the era before digital photography, getting the latest roll of pictures back from the grocery store photomat was a horrifying, high-stakes game of nostalgia.
There’s Anna at the figure skating rink.
There’s Adam playing soccer.
There’s little Lydia on the piano.
BEDSORE! JESUS CHRIST! IT’S AS BIG AS A FIST! YOU CAN SEE THE BONE! THAT’S EVIDENCE! NEXT PICTURE!
We took it in stride. Without bedsores, we wouldn’t exist. Bedsores put me through college.
When my dad met my mom he was working on one of the signature cases of his career, Michael Patrick Smith v. Heckler, a landmark decision that eventually led to the national Nursing Home Reform Act. My mom included the case in her series, so my dad called her up.
“You’re going to win a Pulitzer if they don’t kill you first,” he said.
She liked the sound of his voice, found it authoritative and polished. She figured with a voice like that he had to be tall, dark, and handsome. He was a five-foot-eight Jew from Brentwood.
They had three kids. They wrote a clause in their will that said if any of those three kids puts them in a nursing home, none of us sees a dime. No bedsores for my mom and pop.
As take-charge as my parents were, they were also flower children of the sixties, overflowing with compassion and empathy. And that trickled down to us. Not only were we raised to rage against the injustices of the world, we were also taught to feel them deeply. For how could you possibly overcome injustice if you didn’t truly understand it?
The suffering of the world crept into our fabric early, but for the most part it was theoretical. Something to be saddened by and fought against, but something we managed to avoid. Until my dad’s best friend Wade Blank drowned attempting to save his son Lincoln—who also drowned—and the cruelty of the world took center stage. My parents had tried to protect us from it for as long as they could, but we learned that day that it was never really all that far away.
My dad met Wade on the Michael Patrick Smith case, the same one tha
t led my mom to my dad. Wade was the whistle-blower at the nursing home; he fed my father intel about the abuse going on inside, my dad sued the shit out of everybody. They made a TV movie about it: When You Remember Me, starring Fred Savage and Ellen Burstyn. Wade was a disabled-rights crusader; he went on to found the disabled-rights group ATLANTIS and help pass the Americans with Disabilities Act. He was a hero. And then one day he was just gone.
Wade took his family to Mexico on vacation and eight-year-old Lincoln got sucked out into the deep by the vicious Baja undertow. Wade jumped in to save his son, but neither one of them made it out alive. All Wade’s wife and daughter could do was stand there on the beach, watching.
I was twelve. Lydia was eight. We were deemed too young to go to the funeral so my parents dropped us off at a friend’s house. But it made the local news and we watched that. There was a balloon release for Lincoln in the parking lot; we picked out my mom and Anna in the crowd. There was a shot of my dad behind a lectern delivering a eulogy. I put my hand on Lydia’s back.
“You okay, Lee?” I asked, calling her by the nickname we all used. She and Lincoln were close, they played together all the time.
She didn’t say a word. She just sat there, trembling.
What kind of a fucking world was this? What kind of higher power would ever allow this?
No kiddie shrink this go-round, but my dad—momentarily tabling his grief—removed a large book of photographs from the shelf to show us. It was full of images from the Hubble Telescope. We sat together and studied vibrant photographs of comets and quasars and stars exploding brilliantly in the heavens. My father explained that this was a world we barely understood. We don’t know why any of it exists, he said, and yet here we were, getting to experience it. Getting to live in it, to marvel at the meaning and significance of it all. And how lucky were we to be able to do that, even if just for a brief moment in time?
Tragedy Plus Time Page 1