by Del Howison
So here I sat, watching the number of incoming e-mails decline as the Viagra spam grew in direct proportion to my depression. The house I had bought to celebrate my newly acquired status of Letting Blood producer was already worth less than I owed on it, so I sold it at a loss of some three hundred grand and moved into an apartment on a shady street overlooking the Los Angeles River in Sherman Oaks. I know that sounds cozy, but if you’re not a local, you should know that the Los Angeles River is not what anyone from elsewhere could possibly define as a river: it’s a concrete trench that runs through the San Fernando Valley and overflows on the six days a year when it rains in Southern California but is otherwise a dry, baking cement gulf between nice homes and shitty little apartments. I now occupied the latter.
I went hat in hand to series I wouldn’t even consider watching to get a single script assignment. Working for scale looked mighty good to me at this point. I wrote spec pilots, a couple of feature scripts, and was even halfway through a novel as my savings account stayed on a binge-and-purge anorexic diet … without the bingeing. I pitched all the broadcast networks, the Turners, the pay cablers, even the chintzy little digital channels way up at the end of the channel guide on your satellite system. I got the thumbs-down all the way down to the Fine Living Channel.
A bunch of my wretched brethren had turned to the great god of the Internet for solace, creating shows they owned and producing them on a shoestring. Maybe one day they would find a way to make a living off it, but I just couldn’t get it up for that; that day, as sung by Ruby and the Romantics, was yet to come. I just didn’t see a home for drama until true convergence had taken place, where everything from broadcast networks to YouTube came through the same pipeline to your giant screen in high definition. And that wasn’t now.
Way back when, I’d had big dreams about writing movies, working my way up to directing my own original screenplays, a reflection of my own unique sensibilities. Of course, I never imagined creating blockbusters; I would be happy churning out my own Saylesian-Cronenbergian-delToronian-Allenian-Aronofskian indies that would find a small but devoted following that allowed me the freedom to do Work That Mattered. It wasn’t much to ask, but I was on my knees for years before the growing Pisan Tower of rejected spec scripts landed me an agent and a freelance episode of Charmed.
So, my career history in a nutshell: a no-name, personalityfree career bouncing from one television series to another, scripting for shows that someone watched, but no one I knew. The chapters of my existence were brief and relatively drama-free: a Writers Room Romance or two that never went anywhere, an expanding waistline and contracting imagination, and growing cold-pizza-induced carotid blockages. My bank account grew and life was predictably comfortable. I had coworkers and no real friends, could type a blazing fifty words a minute, and sat before my home cinema alone to appreciate the Blu-ray beauty of my John Ford collection.
And now, the rug of my life tugged out from underneath my unsteady feet, I was wedged alone into a Sherman Oaks two-bedroom-two-bath, with nothing but my movie collection at rest in the second boudoir. I felt like a mime in a shrinking-room routine.
It was getting scary; the residuals were shriveling and arriving less frequently. Most of the shows I’d worked on seldom lasted more than a year, and therefore were neither repeated nor syndicated. If I was lucky, they were bought by third-world nations learning about shitty television as they shuffled their way haltingly toward civilization, providing me with coffee money. Movies and television were all I knew; as the debtors grew more hostile in their collection techniques, it became clear that I needed a job. My agent was useless; he had more important clients than me breathing down his neck. My skills were limited, and, at the moment, had little commercial value. Movies and television turned a shoulder to me that was so cold it burned my fingers.
I sat in front of the twenty-four-inch screen of my iMac, fingers poised as if ready to pound out a polonaise, but there was no music. Fear and creative impotence froze me in the glare of the monitor, bathed in its icy blue glow, keyboard silently awaiting keystrokes that never came, daring me to unleash an unbroken flow of genius that would take me past the world of series television, to the toppermost of the poppermost, A-listing for the rest of my life, leaving the Conelrad Agency for CAA and the heady aroma of true success.
I was not up to the challenge. My psychic dick shriveled, pulled back, retreated, went to sleep. Failure curdled my guts and I broke out into a sweat. I could not pull my eyes from the monitor, magnetized as I was to its beckoning, held prisoner by its insistent presence in the otherwise darkened room. The plasma wall screen in the living room behind me was dark; the cell phone and Blackberry had been silent for days; the Arclight down the street offered nothing but popcorn and projected pabulum. No, it was this glowing, one-eyed monster that held my future. I was no longer a child of cinema, not even the son of television. That night, after two acts of pleasantly dull existence, the third and penultimate act of my life was about to begin.
I could never love this virtual world of virtual entertainment, but I would embrace it. If I fed this cyclopean monster the blood of my being, it would feed me. And I had just the idea for the first course.
It was time to create a website. There had never been a reason in the past: I was too busy to put together a MySpace or Face-book page, and even if I had, who would have been drawn to it? Well, beyond my mother, who is in a home and wouldn’t even recognize me if I stood right in front of her—and she has never used a computer in her life. The exes would just want to pelt me with nasty responses to my postings … if they were even that motivated. And there certainly were not any Tyler Sparrow fans out there clamoring for news on my work.
So I clicked on a Go Daddy ad on my Yahoo! homepage and registered TylersThirdAct.com before someone else beat me to it. Then I downloaded instructions on building a website and cobbled something together that actually was pretty attractive, filled with personal photos from my life’s initial chapters, with liberal use of shots from all the series I’d worked on as well as some candid shots of a couple of the C-list actresses I had badgered into going out with me, and created the plan.
I’d discovered long ago that the most voracious Internet audience seemed to be those attracted to the seamier side of life, the brutes looking for a taste of forbidden fruit, uncensored looks at anything a civilized society would normally be denied, whether it’s penetration shots of a famous but talent-challenged TV actress and her rock star boyfriend, or the beheading of a Middle Eastern hostage. The world is bloodthirsty, voracious in its appetite for the unappetizing, its collective stomach rumbling whenever scandal and viscera are about to be served. In a world where life was cheap and sanctity and decorum no longer existed, I was a self-appointed curator of the world zoo … and it was feeding time.
* * *
After clicking through my local Yellow Pages, I emerged from the destitute darkness of my humble San Fernando Valley abode into the scorching, relentless sun that shrank my underdeveloped pupils into pinholes. Sol’s glare was so white-hot that it took several minutes before my brain could process my surroundings. When the world around me had irised back into visibility, I climbed into the Beemer to do some shopping.
One benefit of being out of work: traffic was light as I made my way over Coldwater Canyon from the Valley to the Basin. Pico Boulevard was filling with the kosher lunch crowd at its numerous delis that punctuated the car repair lots, the used-book stores, the faded fabric shops, and the medical supply houses. I parked and pumped the meter with all the change I could round up, and found that it wasn’t the medical supply houses that offered what I was looking for, but surgical supplies I sought. I suppose Home Depot would have served my needs as well as what I was looking for here, but as a movie guy (okay, fine, television guy), the visual mattered to me. Well, normally the surgical supply houses were limited to those only within the medical profession, but after a couple of hours and a half-dozen triple soy latte espressos
trolling the boulevard, I stepped into the dark, dusty, cobwebbed little den that proffered all I had hoped for and more.
Though the surroundings within the tiny Silver Elite Surgical Supply store were grimy and ill-attended at best, the displays of gleaming, hungry scalpels, cutters, and other flesh-rending devices were immaculate. They stopped the heart;, these challenged the gorgeous, horrific creations of the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers. As I stood alone in the shadowy, seemingly abandoned little shop, I felt the theatrical stillness rent by a ripple in the air and the shuffling of leather on the grimy floor.
“May I help you?” wheezed through the tiny shop, barely more voice than breath.
I looked up, then down to find the proprietor, a grizzled, hunched little man of indeterminate ancientness. His eyes, under the melting brow, were a pale ice blue beneath the milk of cataract, and peered out over the luggage of drooping lower lids. His liver-spotted scalp was studded with a few coarse white bristles pretending to be hairs, shellacked and pomaded across the cranium. He was bent over, a frail Quasimodo in the form of a permanent four-and-a-half-foot question mark. His surprising solicitous smile was toothless.
“I need some surgical instruments,” I told him.
“Hence your presence in a surgical supply shop.” But his sarcastic reply was delivered with such an ingratiating grin that I did not feel insulted. “Are you a member of the profession?”
“Well, I hope to be.”
“Ah. A student.”
“Exactly. A student.” I stood over the display case, taking in the instruments that gleamed in theatrical light. “These are beautiful.”
“Thank you. I’ve made them all since we opened, back in 1948.”
“Wait—you mean you actually craft these instruments yourself?”
He smiled again, and if there were blood coursing through his Paleolithic veins, he’d have blushed.
“The finest in the world, if you’ll forgive me the sin of pride.” He looked at me, though I doubted he could recognize me a second time. “What do you need?”
“I need a couple of scalpels and a nice pair of cutters.”
“Ribcage or smaller?”
“Um … digital? You know, fingers, toes?”
“It seems you have a very specific speciality.” Yes, he said the five-syllable version. I didn’t answer, and he went to the glass case and removed two gorgeous, gleaming scalpels and a pair of cutters that fit perfectly into the hand. Really beautiful craftsmanship, and I told him so.
“You’ll swell my head,” he replied. “So these will do?”
“Perfectly. What do I owe you?”
“Let’s see, that’s, oh, two thousand eight hundred fifty dollars.”
“Yikes! I had no idea they were so expensive!”
He looked at me with some curiosity. “These are not surgical steel, young man. They are bladed in solid silver. Cleanest cut in the industry. Quality has its price. I’m not making much of a profit on this, you know.” I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut. He peered at me in a face-rumpling squint. “Well, you are a student. I suppose we could call it twenty-five hundred and everybody goes home happy.”
Yeah, well, everybody but me.
“Of course, I could send you to some mail-order shop, where you can get the same instruments used by the hoi polloi. Naturally, your student identification and medical cards are up to date for the transactions, right?”
Well, money wasn’t going to mean much to me soon, anyway, was it? So the dregs of my savings weren’t doing any good just sitting in another collapsing bank, were they? Visa could cover it for now, and when the time comes, let the devil collect his due.
“Do you take plastic?”
He sighed. “It’s a plastic world now, and it breaks my heart.” He took my card, ran it through the manual reader, scrawled the amount, and handed it over for me to sign. I scribbled my signature as he gently swaddled his creations in soft, elegant black velvet. It was obvious I was getting my money’s worth. Transaction completed, I took the luxuriously bundled instruments under my arm as he shook my hand in his surprisingly soft one and bid me good-bye.
* * *
Ensconced in my meek little Sherman Oaks dorm, I sat in front of the iMac, seeking the sites that would most likely yield the quickest access to the Web’s sanguinary sippers. I put together a little ad with a Photo Booth shot of my feigned innocence under the title You want a piece of me? I will begin to remove my body parts live on webcam at 10 p.m. PDT Thursday at Tylers ThirdAct.com. The first one’s free!
After setting up a PayPal account that would be funneled to the home that lodged my demented mother, in the guilt-easing hopes that she could live out her waning and oblivious life in comfort and splendor, I purchased little animated spots on Fangoria, Bloody-Disgusting, Shock Till You Drop, Horror.com, Dread Central, Arrow Through the Head—all the horror sites—as well as the notably tawdry TMZ. This proved to be an auspicious and prescient choice. As soon as they began to run, literally within hours of them being posted, both Google and Yahoo! picked up the story and linked to my site, and the news went viral. Once CNN picked it up, there was no stopping the inferno that raged. Everyone assumed it was fake, of course; why wouldn’t they? But it didn’t keep them from checking it out. I did my best to exercise my constitutional right to privacy, so no one was going to track me down on this, not until I was ready. I was getting hundreds, then thousands of hits on the site … and it was only Saturday!
In five days, I fully intended to begin my own disassembly, my personal contribution to the world’s culture, blood of the lamb spattered all over the screens of the lions. Blood, sweat, and self-sacrifice are the backbone of success in Hollywood, according to all the screenplay books. But I’ll bet Syd Field didn’t have the guts, the true intestinal fortitude, to put his internal self on the screen the way I intended to.
I didn’t bother looking into the legality of this. I assume there are laws against suicide … but they must be pretty toothless, since if you succeed, prosecution would prove to be a problem. But I was only taking the modern primitivism of self-mutilation and skin art to my own personal level. It was artistic expression, damn it!
If you went to the site before its premiere on that fateful Thursday, you would have subjected yourself to a little dance of snapshots from my life to date, which gave way to a full screen with my face and hands taking the shape of a clock, ticking down the hours, minutes, and seconds until the first excision was to take place. Beneath my beaming countenance, a calendar clicked away the days. Other than that, nothing else, aside from the same words seen in the ads. In the upper right corner was a button to click to join, a $100 payment payable only through PayPal, refundable only up to the moment of the first shearing. The first removal, as promised, was to be free, but if you wanted to see more, well, open your wallet, pal. Nothing worth anything is free, especially my own Silver Diet. Its webcast would be live only, no video podcasts, no replay recordings available. Though I was sure there were hackers capable of capturing and rebroadcasting the events and posting them elsewhere, I thought there were enough of the famished, ghoulish public out there with enough disposable income to make it pay. It was a one-way site, clean and elegant: no postings or blogging from me and no comments from the peanut gallery. I had no interest in what they had to say anyway. It’s my life, and I’ll do what I want.
Thursday seemed endless, a train never to emerge from its tunnel. My guts were roiling in anticipation, and I was unable to eat a thing. I tried to go to a movie, just to get out of my little abattoir of an apartment and make the day pass before the ultimate curtain would be drawn. But I couldn’t concentrate on a thing. The Arclight was buzzing with midday customers—mostly the elderly and the Hollywood-unemployed—and as I passed through them, I could feel the occasional burn of recognition. Eyes surreptitiously tracked me out to the parking structure … unless it was opening-day nerves and paranoia I felt on the back of my neck. I guess I was useless out in t
he real world, as usual, so it was back into the Beemer and the too-brief ride back to Valleyheart Drive.
The apartment was choking on itself, closed up and fetid. The air conditioning had broken down—again—so I opened a window, and curdled, beige, airlike San Fernando Valley fumes reached inside to caress me.
I hung a purple velvet curtain behind the Aeron chair that faced the computer and artfully trained a light against it. I positioned another light directly over the chair, which threw me into a cone of illumination. For further creative effect, I added a sidelight. I didn’t want the audience to miss any of the salient details. A crystal bowl, which, at showtime, would be filled with ice, was placed on the desk right next to the hypodermic needle and attendant bottles of alcohol, anesthetic, and antiseptic. At the end of the row of implements, a George Foreman Sandwich Grill was plugged in and heating up. To give me strength and solace, a tall, unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s was placed close by, with a nice, clean glass.
So now, the only thing to do was wait for 10:00, and my first leading role.
I vacuumed the apartment, did the dishes, took out the trash, washed the windows, threw the newly acquired DVDs of the last few weeks into their alphabetical homes, whipped up a smoothie that I couldn’t drink, took a shower, shaved, made my bed, turned on CNN, wiped the plasma screen, checked my messages (zero), washed out the blender, took a sip of my smoothie, and watched the clock.
It was not even 5:00.
So I surfed. I lingered over YouTube, got sick of the amateur-hour spoofs, the mediocre music, the decidedly democratic and creativity-challenged cultural contributions of the unpaid and unwashed, and listened to my stomach howl in protest. I scoured the more obscure sites that offered up the terrorist videos of physical disengagement, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch. My stomach is tender when it comes to the real thing. Give me foam latex body parts and Karo syrup blood, and it’s giggles and grins; show me the real thing, and I’ve passed out on the floor. So this was going to be a real event.