by James Brown
In the visiting room there is a long counter divided by a sheet of thick glass with wire running through it. I sit on my father’s lap in a steel fold-out chair. My mother sits across from us on the other side in the same kind of chair, and she is thinner than I remembered, wearing a shapeless green smock. Her hair is cut short like a boy’s. Her fingernails are not painted, and she is without her makeup, no dark eyeliner, no lipstick or blush. You talk through phone receivers, only there isn’t any phone. As a child I find this strange.
“How’s my little Jimmy?” she says.
“Fine,” I say.
“You look so handsome,” she says. “All dressed up. How do you like school? You started first grade this year.”
“It’s okay.”
“Just okay?”
I hold up the present I made her.
“This is for you,” I say.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. “Did you get my present yet?”
It came in the mail a few days earlier, and on the back of the package she wrote: Don’t open until Christmas. Inside I found a handkerchief with a Viking ship embroidered across it. My name is stitched in the corner in flowing red letters.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I got it.”
“Don’t open it until Christmas.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” I say.
She smiles. I smile back. We talk a while longer. She wants to know about Barry and Marilyn, if everything is all right, if we’re all getting along, and soon, after a lull in the conversation, she tells me to put my father on.
“I love you, baby,” she says. “I love you.”
There’s a guard at the door on my mother’s side of the counter, standing with her hands behind her back. There’s a guard at the door on our side of the counter, too, and when the visit is over, when our time has run out, my father gives her the crepe-paper stocking to pass along to my mother. I don’t know exactly what happens to her after that. Or if seeing me has anything to do with it. But somewhere between Alviso and San Jose, while my father and I drive home in silence, my mother is placed in solitary confinement.
The story, as I heard from my father years later, goes something like this: She returns to her cell after we leave and all is as usual. Then her cellmate says something, or maybe she just looks at her the wrong way. I don’t know. I wasn’t there and my mother never liked to talk about it. But I’m not surprised. I know what she’s capable of if provoked, and fortunately her actions didn’t result in a longer sentence. From what I understand they got into it good and she bit the woman’s ear off. Clean through. To where the flesh joins the skull.
On the six o’clock news you see the motorcade moving slowly along a wide sunlit street in downtown Dallas. We are watching this, Barry, Marilyn and I, while our mother and father rage in the kitchen about his affair. She has been home now for several days, and as we watch the scene unfold on TV we try to block them out. It is old news by a week or better but the broadcasters continue to play it nightly: President Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, are riding in the backseat of a black Lincoln convertible. They are waving to the crowds on the sidewalks when he leans toward his wife as if he wants to whisper something in her ear and the side of his face explodes. Then you see Jackie rise from her seat. At first it looks as if she’s trying to climb out of the car, that she’s afraid for her own life. But really all she’s concerned about is gathering up the pieces of her husband that landed on the back of the trunk. Her impulse is to put him back together. Of course that’s impossible but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t beauty in the moment, in her desperateness to salvage what can’t be saved.
In the kitchen our parents continue to rage. They are drinking as they argue and the drinking only makes them more volatile. “It’s over,” she says. “I’m taking the kids and we’re going to Los Angeles where Barry can make something of himself. There’s nothing you can do about it,” she says. “You lost your rights when you fucked that woman.” I don’t remember our father’s response, though I’m sure he fought back. I know he loved us. But I also know about the insidiousness of guilt, how it distorts judgment and weakens your resolve. One of the last memories I have of that night is of our mother later passed out on the couch. The rest is pretty much a blur. But the next day our father makes a deal to remodel someone’s kitchen in exchange for an older Buick Special. That’s the car in the snapshot I keep pinned on my wall, the one showing my brother and sister and me squinting against the glare of the sun. In the background you can see the wide expanse of the Pacific. My sister is wearing a funny straw hat with a flower in the band. My mother’s hair is cut short, like a boy’s, since it hasn’t had time to grow out yet, and her lips are painted bright red. She is smiling pleasingly into the camera. My pants are rolled up to the knees because I’ve been in the water, and if I look closely I can make out faint trails of sand on my legs.
The photograph is taken at Pismo Beach when we pull off Highway 101, about halfway between San Jose and our destination. Sometimes, when I look at it, I imagine them as strangers: All I see are three children and a woman who could be their mother. I like to think that their father is there somewhere, maybe snapping the picture, that this is just another family on vacation. They are standing against the background of the ocean and they look small, almost fragile. It’s another boy, the one with his pants rolled up to the knees. It’s someone else’s mother. It’s someone else’s brother, someone else’s sister wearing the funny straw hat with the flower in the band, and their story, whatever happens to them, bears no connection to my own.
Spring 1995
DAILY RUSHES
I’m driving into Los Angeles again for another important meeting. Depending on traffic, Caltrans roadwork or wrecks, the trip takes anywhere from ninety minutes to three hours one way. It’s rarely less even if I speed, and occasionally it’s more. There have been days when all five lanes on the San Bernardino Freeway have literally come to a complete, seemingly final stop, and I’ve shut off the engine, climbed out of my car and smoked a cigarette between the dividing barriers. I’ve learned to be patient. I’ve learned to accept these delays as inevitable, as necessary, as something as basic to Southern California as its beaches, its earthquakes and its random drive-by shootings.
But the traffic is light this morning, no Sig-Alerts or Caltrans roadwork to back it up, and I get to Universal Studios a full hour early. This is a mistake. Because now I’m left with too much time to get nervous, and I’m already nervous. I want a drink but I’m not going to take one, at least not until this is over, and then it will be as a reward for having survived the day. I pull into the driveway and stop at the guard booth.
“I’m here for a meeting,” I say.
I give him my name. I give him the executive’s name and the guard checks his ledger. For a moment I worry that I might not be on the list. The executive’s assistant could’ve forgotten to phone down my pass. Or maybe we got our dates mixed up. Anything could happen.
“What time?” he says.
“Ten thirty,” I say.
He continues to scan the ledger, and now I’m feeling like some sort of impostor, that he thinks I’m trying to pull a fast one on him. I could be a desperate, overzealous actor attempting to lie my way into a casting office. I could be a crazed fan. Or an autograph hound. That I’m driving an older Toyota doesn’t help matters. Finally the guard comes up with my pass.
“You’re a little early,” he says.
And before I can explain about my long drive from the mountains of San Bernardino and the need to anticipate the unexpected, like wrecks or traffic or Caltrans problems, the gate rises and he waves me through. I doubt if he wanted to hear my story anyway. I know I wouldn’t have if I were him.
My meeting with the executive is in the Black Tower, a skyscraper of steel and glass, and to kill time I buy myself a cup of coffee, smoke four or five cigarettes, and walk in circles around the studio commissary.
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br /> Through a window in the waiting room on the tenth floor of the Black Tower I look out over the green rolling hills of Forest Lawn where my brother is buried. He was twenty-seven and alcoholic when he ended his life, and at this moment, in this place and time, I see myself in him, sitting here, waiting to meet with an executive. I imagine he once occupied this same space, if not this exact office then another in the building, and I imagine he felt as I do now. Anxious. In need of a drink. Maybe, like me, he questioned why he was here, if this was what he really wanted. If he belonged. Maybe, like me, he was both repelled and attracted to a business that is at least in part responsible for his destruction.
On a bookshelf nearby are rows and rows of screenplays, the pages of each loosely bound with brass brads. The titles are written in black felt pen along the spines. Some of the names I recognize. I’ve seen them on the big screen. Others, if they’ve been made, I’ve never heard of. Generally a script averages a hundred and twenty pages, but I’ve been told that the ideal length is about a hundred, and if you can whittle it down to ninety, that’s even better. Pages are time. Time is money. Exposition, all those words, all that ink on the page, or “black shit,” as a producer I once met referred to it, ought to be kept to a minimum.
“You want a fast read,” he said. “The story has to move like a rocket. All the pieces have to fit, exactly, down to the minute. Down to the dollar.”
And I listen.
Because I’m concerned about these things, the pieces and the pacing, how a story is put together. I’ve come to measure my life in pages, stories read and written, and as I get older I find myself more conscious of time, down to the minute, the mile and the dollar. My agent continues to believe in me, continues to set up these meetings, and I take them, always hoping. “All work,” my father used to tell us, “is noble—especially work that pays well.” And I wonder if this is why I find myself in Hollywood again, because I don’t make enough writing novels, if it’s just about money, if it’s that simple. I wonder, too, if my brother saw it this way, and if, at any point in his brief life, he considered it something of a mistake.
I’m leafing through a copy of Premiere when the executive’s assistant rises from his desk and walks up to me, this young man with his hair parted neatly down the middle, and asks if I’d like a cup of coffee, decaf or regular. Or bottled water. Maybe a diet Coke. At this point only twenty minutes have passed since the appointed time.
“It might be a while longer,” he says.
He smiles, and by the way he smiles—wry, knowing—he’s telling me that I’m in for a wait. Relax, he’s saying. The executive is a busy man.
I appreciate his gesture, this small kindness, but I pass on the coffee, decaf or regular, the bottled water and the diet Coke, and after he leaves I wonder how long it’ll be before he’s moved from the front desk into an office of his own, if he studied literature, art or film in college, or if it was business administration or law. Then I wonder if it matters, if I’m being narrow-minded, defensive for defensiveness’s sake, or if I’m just making up excuses to justify my own shortcomings. Good movies are put together by executives as frequently, or as rarely, as they are by anyone else in Hollywood.
Don’t prejudge, I tell myself.
Despite my misgivings, despite my ambivalence, I know I’m lucky to get this meeting. Most writers would kill for it.
Around me are other assistants and receptionists, and every now and then, while I wait, one of the office doors opens and someone steps out. An actor maybe. Another writer. And I think—there’s my competition. That woman shaking hands with the man in the suit. She’s smiling and her eyes look too bright, too excited. Because he probably loved her script. Now she’s only a phone call away from her agent who will nail down a deal for a million up front, plus points on the back end, gross not net, and next Sunday I’ll spot her picture in the “Calendar” section of the Los Angeles Times. Of course I’ll be jealous but I certainly won’t begrudge her victory. Until today she may have been waiting tables and worrying if she could make this month’s rent, and suddenly, after ten years of writing, she’s an overnight success.
Something similar happened to a friend of a friend of mine who wrote a movie that later won an Oscar nomination for best screenplay, only it took him closer to fifteen years to become an overnight success. Before that he worked a series of low-paying jobs, and he once confessed to me how it was a terrible strain on his marriage, trying to balance his dream of making it as a writer with the day-to-day realities of making a buck. Back then, just before his big break, he was writing oneliners for the miniature recorders that fit into the plastic cavities of Barbies and Kens.
“It was grueling,” he told me. “You rack your fucking brain for a couple hundred lines and then they only take two or three. But they still have to pay you, I mean even for the shit they don’t use.”
He smiled at me—wry, knowing—just like the executive’s assistant had.
“Actually,” he said, “it’s not bad training for a screenwriter.”
I’ve finished with Premiere. I’ve read Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter cover to cover, including the classifieds. It’s five after eleven and my anxiousness has given way to irritation. But I’m not about to voice it. I’m prepared to wait as long as it takes. Two or three hours. The whole day. My main concern is that the executive hasn’t forgotten about me, that I’m out here, that I exist in this room with this window overlooking Forest Lawn where my brother is buried. The assistant assures me that it won’t be much longer.
“He’s wrapping up a deal,” he says, “but it’s just details now. If he’s not done in a few more minutes, I’ll drag him out.”
Of course I’d like to hear about the deal and its details, even the smallest ones, but I know that it isn’t any of my business. So I don’t ask. I sit there and wait, and wait, and while I wait I go over my ideas, the ones I turned in to the executive two weeks before. This is the reason for our meeting: to do what’s called pitching, and for the executive to suggest which idea, if any, he’d like me to develop further. The same producer who warned me about putting too much ink on the page, all those words, that “black shit,” also advised me to keep my ideas short.
One line. Max.
“These guys,” he said, “don’t like to read.”
I have three ideas written in the style of TV Guide with its capsulated descriptions, and I’ve memorized each word for word. The first is a coming-of-age story about a father and son on the run from the law, beginning on the banks of the Willamette River in Oregon and ending in catastrophe in Las Vegas. The second is about a woman who, after fifty years in an abusive marriage, finally leaves her husband and starts a new life for herself at the age of seventy-one. The third idea is about a man who attempts to avenge the murder of his wife and ten-year-old daughter by changing his identity and taking a job as a guard in the maximum-security prison where the killer is incarcerated.
This last sounds the most commercial to me, but it’s also the least credible, and the one I’m least inspired to write. I call it Victims’ Rights, and I know the political and social climate is ripe for a story like it. The second idea isn’t thought out yet, although I see potential in the woman’s plight, and I believe I could write it with some sense of conviction, of passion. And the first idea, my favorite, is based on the last novel I wrote. Even it sounds crummy to me when reduced to one line, but I like to think that the other lines—all that black shit, over three hundred pages of it—make a difference.
I go over my ideas in my head, word for word, in case the executive hasn’t gotten around to reading them and I have to rattle them off.
“A good pitch shouldn’t take more than five minutes,” the producer told me. “Max. And cut it short if they start shifting in their seats.”
At eleven thirty-five the assistant asks if I’d like to reschedule my appointment. I’ve been waiting now for over an hour and my lower back aches from sitting too long. The muscles in my n
eck are tense, and I massage them from time to time, trying to keep them from knotting up. I need to stay calm. I need to relax.
“I’m really sorry about this,” he says.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I’m in no rush.”
The assistant rises from his desk.
“I’m going to run and pick up a hamburger before things get too crowded. Want me to get you anything?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
He shrugs and then disappears down the hall, the one leading to the elevators. I take a deep breath and tell myself to keep cool. Any second now the executive will step out of his office, smile and call me in. I have to be patient. I have to accept this delay as inevitable, as necessary, as something as basic to the business of moviemaking as gridlock is to the freeways of Los Angeles. It’s either that or lose my mind, and as a writer I’m already well on my way. So I take another deep breath. I continue to wait. And while I wait, here on the tenth floor of the Black Tower at Universal Studios, where ideas as ethereal as air are bought and sold for heavenly prices, one of the windows shatters like party ice.
Nobody thinks much of it at first.
Sure, it startles the other assistants and receptionists and myself, too, and the woman closest to this window is actually cut by a shard of glass. Fortunately it isn’t a bad cut, hardly a slice along the back of her hand, with no real blood to speak of.
She even shakes her head and laughs.
“Now,” she says, “now I can collect workers’ comp, since mental stress doesn’t seem to carry any weight around this goddamn place.”
That’s when another window blows out. It’s on a different floor, but this time we all hear it for what it is, like the backfire of a distant car, only more hollow sounding. All hell breaks loose after that. Some duck under their desks. Some run for the elevators or race ten flights down the emergency staircase while others crouch behind file cabinets or lock themselves in their offices. I just sit there.