“No, no, please don’t—”
“Elliot, wait a second, I’m your agent, correct?”
“Correct.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means you get ten percent of my already meager salary by chatting away on the phone with your friends.”
“Yes, but besides that?”
“I give up, you’ve got me.”
“Elliot, I’m like a drill sergeant, a big brother, and a father/ confessor all rolled into one—”
“Jesus, it must get crowded over there in that broom closet you call an office.”
“—and right now it’s time for the drill sergeant to step into the fray. I’m telling you what’s best for you. I’m going to call Danny and straighten this mess out and you damn well better appreciate it. Now stay by the phone and wait for Danny’s call. Bye.”
“Wait—!” The dial tone mocked me with its incessant drone. I sighed and cradled the receiver. Defeated again. On the TV Bugs Bunny was digging a hole in the ground at super speed. I thought I might join him soon.
I continued to watch Bugs Bunny for the next twenty minutes. I suddenly realized that this was how long my act would have to be next Friday night. In my mind’s eye all I could see were a bunch of long-haired freaks holding up lighters and screaming at me to get my skinny ass off stage. Time, of course, is relative. While watching Bugs Bunny twenty minutes can seem like nothing. While attempting to entertain an auditorium filled with glueheads twenty minutes can seem like twenty fucking years. I hoped this upcoming experience would be mellower. The Brink was a much smaller venue than an auditorium, of course, but I didn’t know if that was more or less dangerous. It just meant your enemies had less of a space to cross if they wanted to kill you.
The phone rang as Porky Pig stuttered out, “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!” I considered this an ominous portent, a Jungian synchronicity of the most dire proportions. I picked up the receiver anyway. It isn’t possible to outrun fate, or “kismet” as Marsha might say (though no doubt in the wrong context).
“Hello?” I said.
A beat. “This is Danny.” His tone was very somber. “Marsha told me to call.”
“Yeah?”
Another beat. “Well … so I’m calling.”
“Am I supposed to get down on my knees and praise the Lord or something?”
A sigh. “Look, I’m sorry I accused you of trying to ride my coattails. I know that’s not true.”
“Then why would you say it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the deal did go to my head a bit. Marsha straightened me out.”
“Did she straighten out Griffin too, or is she just going to keep filling your head with this bullshit?”
“Look, man, don’t blame Karen. It was entirely my fault. I’m taking full responsibility.”
I’m taking full responsibility. Is that something the old Danny would’ve said even a week ago? I didn’t ask this question out loud, of course. Why ruin the moment? All I could do was hope that the old Danny figured out a way to come back somehow, somehow.
“All right,” I said. What else was there to say?
“Listen, there’s a Godzilla marathon playing at the New Beverly all month. You want to go catch Destroy All Monsters next week? It’s playing with King Kong vs. Godzilla.”
Besides the awkward shift in the conversation, this was something the old Danny would’ve suggested. Perhaps things were looking up. “Uh, sure,” I said.
“It’ll just be me and you. I’ll leave Karen at home.”
“All right.”
“I’ll call you before then.”
“All right.”
Danny hung up. So did I. A few feet away Elmer Fudd was threatening to shoot Bugs Bunny with a shotgun.
Didn’t these cartoons ever end? I thought as I shut off the TV with the remote and went back to sleep.
CHAPTER 7
The Dinah Shore Tea Party
(October 1, 2014)
About a week later, on Wednesday night, Heather called to tell me she’d finished her gig at the Holy City Asylum and was now off to play a couple of nights at some obscure lesbian club called The Dinah Shore Tea Party.
“Don’t you have to be a dyke to play there?” I said.
“No, you just have to harbor a deeply imbedded hostility toward all carbon-based lifeforms with male reproductive organs. I figure I’ve got that down pat, so I should fit right in.”
For the past six nights I had been wondering (at occasional points during the day the thought would invade my brain, I just couldn’t help it) if Heather had met anyone while in San Francisco, and more importantly if she was having sex with him. I was surprised that it concerned me so, but nonetheless it did.
In as humorous a manner as possible I said, “You mean you haven’t gotten lucky yet? Aren’t there plenty of comedy groupies wandering around up there?”
“Sure there are, but every single one’s as queer as a three-headed Pope.”
I was relieved, but tried not to show it. “Maybe you’ll get lucky at The Dinah Shore Tea Party.”
“Yeah, right, with who? Hell, I’d have sex with you before I fucked some motorcycle bulldyke with a hook for a hand.”
“Oh. Why, thank you. I guess.”
“No problem. Look, I’ve gotta go. Marsha set up a phone interview with one of these free newspaper rags, and they’re supposed to be calling any second. Now I’ve gotta recite all my routines to some stranger over the phone.”
“The littlest publicity helps.”
“So they tell me. Listen, I’ll talk to you later, okay? Good night.”
“’Night.” I cradled the receiver, imagining the journalist from the free newspaper rag being a huge Aryan with a leather fetish who seduces Heather with the mere sound of his voice, hypnotizing her into taking a cab to his dungeon lair in the Haight where he straps her down on a gynecological table, then approaches her steadily with a cat-o-nine-tails in one hand and a glowing hot branding iron in the other… .
What? Where the hell did that come from? I shook myself out of the daydream. I decided to force Heather from my mind, so I retired to my desk to write some new material for the show coming up Friday night. The humor needed to be perfect, just the right balance of sadomasochism and silliness, otherwise the testosterone-filled teenagers would drag me into the mosh pit and beat me to a pulp with deadly blunt objects, most notably their heads. Striking such a balance was not going to be easy. After about twenty minutes of intense work, during which I drew indecipherable doodles in the margins of my notebook paper, I released a frustrated sigh and threw my pen against the wall. Creating comedy in a vacuum wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. I needed real people to bounce ideas off of, people who understood my humor … people like Heather.
I leaned back in my chair and stared at the wall for what must have been a very long time.
CHAPTER 8
Destroy All Monsters
(October 2, 2014)
Except for my near death at the hands of a mad man, the next day was rather uneventful.
Danny called me around ten in the morning, the first I’d heard from him since our awkward conversation a week before.
“A bit early for you, isn’t it?” I said. He’d just roused me out of a deep sleep.
“Early? I haven’t gone to sleep yet.”
“Late night with Griffin?”
“Oh, you could say that. Listen, the movie starts tonight at six. So you doing anything or what?”
It took me a couple of seconds to remember what the hell he was talking about. “You mean Godzilla?”
“No, no, Destroy All Monsters. It’s the best one—you know, the one where Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra and the whole crew are confined on Monster Island, then they have to band together to fight Ghidrah who’s being controlled by those weird aliens on the moon? Is this ringing any bells?”
“Okay, wait a minute,” I said. “Is that the one where aliens take control of Godzilla and Mothra
to destroy the Earth, but then the military or whoever uses high-frequency sound waves to fuck up the alien mind control devices?”
“No, no,” Danny said. He sounded somewhat frustrated, as if he were attempting to teach advanced calculus to a four-year-old. “That’s Monster Zero, the sixth one.”
“It’s got Ghidrah and Planet X in it.”
“Right!” From the tone of his voice I could detect that Danny was pleased with the rapid ascent of my learning curve. “Destroy All Monsters takes place much later, in 1999. It’s directed by Ishiro Honda, who directed the very first Godzilla movie back in 1954.”
“Is that the one with that old fat guy who died of AIDS?” I said.
“Yeah, Perry Mason. But they just added that guy into the American version; he wasn’t in the original Japanese version.”
“So Perry Mason and Godzilla never actually shared a scene together?”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe that’s good, otherwise Godzilla might’ve caught the AIDS.”
Danny paused, no doubt contemplating this possibility, before replying, “Nah, I doubt it. If anyone’s protected against various errant sexual diseases, it’s Godzilla.”
“Jesus, I hope so. Can you imagine the size of the condom he’d have to use?”
“It’d be half the size of a football field, perhaps longer. Hell, Christo could make an art object out of it.”
I laughed aloud at that one. I thought, Maybe the old Danny isn’t dead after all.
For the next twenty minutes we chatted some more about equally nutty topics, then Danny told me he’d pick me up at around four-thirty.
“Pick me up? With what, a shopping cart?”
“Karen said I could use her car for the night.”
“Since when the hell do you drive?”
“Karen’s been teaching me.”
“How can you learn to drive in a week?”
“You’d be amazed at what Neuro-Linguistic Programming enables you to do.”
I rolled my eyes. Whatever, I thought. “I’ll be here with bells on,” I said. “And a crash helmet.”
Danny, infamous for his habitual tardiness, surprised me by arriving at 4:28 in Griffin’s Saab 900. It was strange seeing Danny behind a steering wheel, but I got used to it. It wasn’t as easy getting used to Danny’s appearance. He looked haggard. Always lanky, today he seemed even skinnier than usual. There was a slight yellowish tinge to his flesh, purplish rings under his eyes. It appeared as if he’d been up for five days straight.
“Before we head on over to the movie I have to stop somewhere first, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, shrugging.
Danny removed a Stooges CD from the glove compartment and slipped it into the player, then pulled away from the curb with jerky, stop-start motions. Somehow I knew it wasn’t going to be the most pleasant of rides.
We sped onto the 405 freeway toward the suburbs while listening to Iggy Pop sing “We Will Fall.” Halfway through the CD we had penetrated deep into the heart of Torrance, which in terms of its venal fascist ideology is worse even than Orange County, home of the John Birch Society. (Those poor souls unfortunate enough to dwell within Orange County referred to it as living “behind the Orange Curtain”—a term of endearment.)
We wound our way through the quiet, tree-lined streets. I stared at the linear square lawns and the empty birdbaths and the wizened garden gnomes and the precisely clipped hedges as if observing my past through a misty eyeglass, remembering all over again why I had tried my best to leave it far behind. Why was Danny dragging me back here? Though I didn’t recognize the neighborhood,—this was the north side of Torrance, rather far from the area where I had spent my oh-so-idyllic formative years—the resemblance was near enough to disturb me. I felt like a Vietnam vet who freaks out and falls into convulsions whenever he hears a helicopter flying too low.
“Why the hell are we here?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, this’ll just take a second. We won’t miss the movie, I promise.” Danny pulled up to a curb outside a little white house that looked like all the other little white houses surrounding it. The scene was perfect enough for the setting of a ’50s sitcom, where all was as right as toxic rain and no one ever seemed to hear the sound of the laugh-track behind them. “You want to wait out here?”
“Well, how long are you going to be?”
Danny chewed the inside of his cheek, something he always did when he was deep in thought. “I don’t know, this might take awhile.” He began climbing out of the car. “You might as well come in, I guess,” he said over his shoulder.
Before I could ask him what on earth we were doing, he slammed the door behind him. Grumbling to myself, I followed him up the driveway and onto the porch. A wooden bench,suspended from the roof of the porch by a pair of thin chains, swung back and forth as if ghostly young lovers were sitting there just a few feet away from me, holding hands, whispering sweet nothings into each other’s unseen ears.
Danny pounded on the door nine times in a row.
I said, “Jesus, what’re you trying to do, bring down the walls?”
“He won’t hear it otherwise.”
I sat down on the swing. “You mind telling me who we’re visiting?”
“Just a friend of Griffin’s. His name’s Mike, met him last week.”
The door creaked open slowly. The man who stood in the doorway appeared sluggish and sleepy-eyed. He wore nothing but a ripped black t-shirt and black shorts, which accentuated his pale skin and emaciated body. The faintest blue veins stood out against his flesh like a neon billboard in the L.A. night. A thick carpet of dark hair was sprouting up from his scalp, as if he’d been too lazy to shave it during the past few days. His icy blue eyes seemed to be filled with an all-encompassing sadness that stemmed from everything and nothing.
“Hey,” Danny said, giving him an awkward little wave. “Remember me from Saturday night? You know, at the party? Karen told me I should drop by.”
It seemed to take a few seconds for the man to focus on Danny; at last the light of recognition flared up in his eyes. “Oh yeah, hey, how you doing. C’mon in.” He wasn’t excited, nor was he sad. Just another diversion to fill up the hours, perhaps?
The interior of the house was the exact opposite of the picture-perfect surface outside. It was dark and depressing, totally devoid of furniture. The light was dim, the walls bare. The place smelled musty, like a pack of wet dogs. The only objects sitting upon the dull brown carpet were cardboard boxes filled with books. I ran my finger along the surface of a Time/Life book about cells, and it came away coated with dust.
Danny gestured toward me as if he were about to introduce me to the man. “Dr. Steinberg,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Dr. Steinberg.” Then he turned to me. “Dr. Steinberg, I’d like you to meet another Dr. Steinberg. And it just so happens by a very strange coincidence that I’m also Dr. Steinberg.” At that moment a wet Labrador retriever came padding into the room, sniffing the carpet for food. “And, uh, there’s Steinberg Jr.”
“A Day at the Races, MGM, 1937,” I said, identifying the source of Danny’s impromptu routine.
The man snapped his fingers and said, “Speaking of Groucho Marx, did you know that Groucho took LSD with—”
“Paul Krassner!” I said, beating him to the punch. He smiled (I think, though perhaps it was just a twitch) and nodded. I was impressed that he knew this rather obscure fact.
As the man led us into the hallway Danny said, “Mike, this is Elliot. Elliot, this is Mike.”
Mike turned and said, “Hey.”
In the cramped hallway, standing only a few feet away from Mike, I noticed that his skin was as smooth as porcelain. It was very hard to discern his age; he could’ve been anywhere from twenty to forty.
Mike led us into his bedroom. The walls were gray—not due to paint, but to dirt. From the ceiling hung a bright yellow buglight around which a halo of flies buzzed, the room’s only source of illumination. Posters
of ten year old punk bands lined the walls. Billowing cobwebs had consumed the corners of the room as well as the piles of trash and paperback books that lay in shadowy niches. The carpet, or what remained of it, was cluttered with books about serial killers and obscure rock ‘n roll magazines.
Mike plopped down on his bed, a thin mattress lying on the carpet. Above the bed hung a series of silk-screened photographs of various famous people. Most prominent were those of Nixon, Hitler and Henry Kissinger; each of the photos had rifle sights superimposed over them. Mike pressed his back against the wall and shut his eyes for a moment. “I just woke up, man.”
Danny sat down on the bed beside him. There was a wicker chair near the bed, but it was occupied at the moment by yet more books and magazines as well as an electric guitar with red rectangular “WARNING: FLAMMABLE” stickers plastered on almost every inch of it. I decided to stand rather than disrupt the pile. Who knew what was lurking beneath, ready to bite my hand off at the slightest disturbance?
I scanned the posters on the walls, tripping out on the names of some of the bands: Johnny Fistfucker & the Strap-ons, Flesh Eating Virus, Candy Jones & the Presidential Models, Lavender Brain Tumor, Frogfall, Psychic Dictatorship in the USA, The Bilderburgers, The Flaming Quakers, Mary Ferrie and the Monkey Virus, The Bigfoot Jazz Trio, The Trouble with Chinks, and (my favorite) Nazi Fuck Boys! Now that’s class.
When I glanced back at Danny to comment on the band names, I saw him slipping a needle out of his inside jacket pocket, followed by a plastic baggie filled with a dark, tar-like substance. Mike handed him a spoon, the bottom of which was blackened as if it had repeatedly been held over a flame. Danny placed some of the tar-like shit into the spoon, held a lighter under it until it liquefied. He soaked the liquid into a cotton ball, then drew the liquid into the needle. I watched all this, transfixed. I felt as if I had taken a turn into The Twilight Zone. I expected to see Rod Serling emerge from beneath the pile of books on the wicker chair and say, “Consider, if you will, Elliot Greeley: a small-time standup comedian, none too bright, lacking direction, adrift in the waters of life, suddenly plunged into the dark underbelly of the twisted narcotics underground, a grotesque wonderland of petty thieves, murderers and syphilitic junkie whores, a wonderland known in some quarters of the world as … The Twilight Zone.” Then I started hearing that freaky music in my head and knew I’d really gone over the deep-end.
Until the Last Dog Dies Page 9