by Eric Idle
Pangloss sued. Richard Hume was removed. Given temporary leave of absence due to sickness, which euphemism hid a full-blown nervous breakdown. He still believed there was a book. He probably believes Truman Capote has a final book somewhere too.
I didn’t go to jail. The judge was kind. I had after all been shot. I could either pay back the costs to Pangloss (quite considerable) or, and here I heaved a sigh of relief, I could turn in the book I owed them. He gave me six months. Reminding me of what else I could be doing. So no Bubba time for me in San Pedro. I pled no contest to a series of misdemeanors and was allowed home.
Most of the advance money was gone. When you’re hot you have a tendency to spend like you’ll always be in heat, and as for fame, well, in Hollywood that is notoriously evanescent. It melts faster than the snow on the Santa Monica mountains. Fifteen minutes were all we were promised. Once I was no longer famous I had plenty of time to write. To write this, actually. My confessions. I am hoping for final absolution. Part of the conditions the judge laid on me, when he let me off with a warning.
Of course no one would employ me anymore.
And of course no one wanted the book. Not even Pangloss, now part of a vast German conglomerate. Too embarrassing, they said, when Morty, bless him, tried.
Oprah wouldn’t even let me on to confess.
That’s harsh.
That’s her role.
They said I wasn’t well enough known.
Sam got his own series on HBO playing a bullshit TV writer people say is modelled on me. He lives with Tish in the Valley. I hear she’s pregnant. It wouldn’t have worked out with us. We both know far too much about me.
There were of course people who said they’d known all along I was lying. And oddly a few (bless you ladies) who absolutely denied that nothing had taken place between us and insisted that it had, when of course it hadn’t. That made me sought after for a while by a certain kind of single woman. But my heart wasn’t in it. I suppose you could say that in a way I had grown up. As you age there are other things to concern you and other things to console you. I think we’re an interesting species and redemption is our gospel.
Redemption through suffering.
Redemption through sin.
Redemption through sex?
Why not?
DNA makes a mockery of us all. We either desire our masters or master our desires. We become old and better or old and bitter. Which one will you choose? All we can hope for is a disgraceful youth and a grateful decline into age. So I’m not trapped in some poetic justice of a jungle in South America reading Dickens to a Chieftain. I don’t watch for the green light over the water at East Egg. I live day by day.
And this is my book, your Honor.
There is still talk that it is going to be a movie …
First published in United Kingdom in 2015 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Eric Idle, 2015
The moral right of Eric Idle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781910859247
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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