by Daniel Price
The last time I decided to seek an outside life was in December 1997. At the time Titanic was causing millions of damp-eyed women to wonder if their own men would die of hypothermia for them. Gracie, as always, was ahead of the curve. Her heart had already gone on. It was my mother’s sudden departure that really shook me up.
On December 15, a ruptured cerebral aneurysm caused her to stroke out in her sleep. She was sixty-four. Prior to that, shed been perfectly healthy. At least physically. When my father lost his year-long battle with cancer, most of my mother died with him. She spent the last four years of her life reading, writing, waiting. Over Thanksgiving dinner, a mere three weeks before her death, she told me that her biggest nightmare was gathering dust for forty more years in some decrepit nursing home.
From that perspective, I was almost relieved for her. But from now on I’d only be sharing my turkeys with friends. I certainly didn’t lack for them (friends, not turkeys), but only if you went by the local definition. Los Angeles, appropriately enough, was the land of the fair-weather friend. Some of the people in my Rolodex required great weather to remain amicable. If the temperature ever dropped below fifty degrees, we’d probably all eat each other.
After my mother’s funeral, I decided to look for camaraderie outside the media world. I’d had enough of the border collies. It was time to get to know some sheep. Unfortunately, I was soon reminded that most sheep were incredibly dumb, especially in Los Angeles.
My haughty solution was Mensa, the high-IQ society. In order to get into this renowned club, I had to take a fun but challenging series of tests. They only accepted those at the top two percent of the national IQ scale. I barely squeaked in with a 135.
Most outsiders picture Mensans as big-domed nerds who sit around speaking Esperanto and plotting world domination. That isn’t entirely accurate. With the exception of a few annual theme gatherings, Mensa is mostly a network of special-interest groups (SIGs). There was a skiing SIG, a writers SIG, a Christian SIG, even a target-shooting SIG, which was no doubt safer than being around stupid people with guns.
The funniest group—a spin-off, actually—was the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, otherwise known as the Super High IQ Society. To get in, you had to retest and rank in the top 0.1 percent of IQ scores. I doubt these super-geniuses skied, prayed, or fired weapons any differently than the rest of us, but I suppose there’s a vain appeal in belonging to an organization where one can kick back and make fun of those idiots at Mensa.
Out of all the factions, I was only interested in the Young Ms. I saw their posting in the local Mensa newsletter (L.A. Mentary) and decided to drop in on their weekly game night at a Hollywood coffeehouse. They were indeed smart and pleasant people. Sadly, they were also—as Douglas Adams would say—aggressively uninteresting.
The only exception was Ira.
If there was ever a Super-Duper High IQ Society that only the top minds from the Super High IQ Society could qualify for, Ira would be one of them. And I’m equally sure that within thirty minutes, the other two members would want to see him mauled by a bear. It’s not that he lacked social skills. He just ignored them. He was an asshole savant, with the mind of da Vinci and the temperament of da Vinci after spending six hours in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Worse, his foul disposition had a way of sneaking up on people, masked as it was by a deceptively jovial appearance. He was a large, shaggy-haired man, a cross between Jeff Daniels from Dumb & Dumber and comedy writer Bruce Vilanch. Simply put, he looked like a fun guy to be around. He did indeed have a robust sense of humor, but it usually left people in the wrong kind of tears. His tongue was a chainsaw. He was the evil clown.
Classic example: Ira at the pharmacy. Late one evening he picked up his prescription allergy medication, signed for it, and then paid by credit card. The cute young clerk was supposed to check his billing signature against the handwriting on the back of his card. Instead, she checked it against the name he’d just scribbled on the pharmacy slip. Most of us would smirk at the innocent mistake and assume she was simply at the end of a long and tiresome day. Not Ira. He glared at her like she’d just taken a dump on his shoe.
“I can’t believe you just...do you even realize what you did? You took a signature I made five seconds ago and compared it to a signature I made ten seconds ago. What in God’s name were you hoping to verify? That I’m the same person who signed both receipts? I am. I haven’t left your field of vision. Or maybe you’re concerned that, in the five seconds between signatures, I was possessed by some demonic entity that was out to defraud both MasterCard and Walgreens. In any case, I really have to wonder if you’re fit to hand out lifesaving remedies. Don’t they screen people here? What’s the qualification standard? As long as you don’t drool on your shirt, you’re in? Jesus. I hope you accidentally gave me Zoloft, because people like you depress the hell out of me.”
By that point, the clerk was sniffling, crying. Her burly manager had caught the tail end of the cutdown and was fixing to pound Ira into chutney. Wisely, he fled.
Poor Ira. Yeah yeah, what about the poor clerk? Look, she was young and pretty. She probably went home and cried to her boyfriend, who held her, stroked her hair, told her she was beautiful, and then screwed her raw. Ira had no such solace.
I can only assume it was a desire for human connection that had brought him to that Young M event in the first place. Still, it took just one game of Pictionary to clear out the room. The Mensans were too polite to tell him to take his art critiques and shove them up his alimentary. They simply found excuses to go home early, no doubt praying for his absence at the next gathering.
Unlike the others, I stayed behind and talked with Ira until 3 a.m. Once he realized he couldn’t push me away, he retracted his quills. The thing about Ira was that he loved people as an entity. He was a chaos mathematician, a brilliant one. By the time he was twenty, he had five published papers. When I met him, he was twenty-seven and widely considered to be the wünderprick of his field.
Soon after graduate school, he began working his way through each of the Big Six (now Big Four) accounting firms as a top-level market analyst. The drill was always the same. He went out of his way to earn the contempt of his bosses and peers, but because his work was so revolutionary, they labored to put up with him. Inevitably, the commoners would unite to gather their torches and run him out of the village. By the time I met him, he had already been chased out of Deloitte & Touche and Arthur Andersen and was repeating the process at Price Waterhouse. He lasted only five months there.
The real tragedy was that he got painfully depressed every time he was banished. After the Price Waterhouse fallout, in which a manager actually throttled him, he visited my apartment for the first time. I was stunned to come home and find him literally crying at my doorstep.
“I feel like I was born without something,” he told me. “Something everyone else has. I just can’t bullshit people. I can’t ask them how their weekend was when I really don’t care. I can’t tell them that I like their outfit when I really don’t notice. And when they do something to screw up a project, my project, I can’t just sit back and say, ‘Hey, good work.’ I wasn’t built that way, and they all hate me for it. When did it become such a handicap to be honest?”
Once he was began his next job at Ernst & Young, he swore to amend his ways. His resolve lasted about a week. But this time his boss came up a clever way to handle him. They insisted he telecommute. This worked out beautifully for Ira. It also led to him discovering his next true love: the Ishtar.
That’s where I went late this morning, right after dropping off Miranda at the Claremont. After the sex, which we had both agreed was terrible, we simply held each other and talked. That made up for everything. If I had known the postcoital communion would be so pleasant, I would have suggested we skip the coitus altogether and spoon. To most men, that probably sounds as lame as drinking nonalcoholic beer at a game of touch football. Untrue. It was that
kind of intimacy I had missed more than sex. Her skin was smooth and warm. Her small fingers ran back and forth across my wrist. We spoke in tones so soft that the specters of Gracie and Jim took the hint and left. For all intents and purposes, it was the first time we’d ever truly been alone with each other.
“I think lifelong monogamy may be one of those myths that the human race is slowly catching on to,” she theorized, shortly before dawn. “I mean in these modern times, it’s presumptuous to assume that two people will continue evolving along the same path for the rest of their lives. You know what I’m saying?”
I held her from behind, nodding, enjoying.
“Conservatives keep freaking out about how more and more couples are getting divorced sooner. You know what I say? Good. That means more people are being honest with each other when it’s time to move on. I mean what’s the big deal? With one out of two couples getting divorced, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Fifty percent of companies fail within the first five years, even in a good economy. The bottom line is that things change. People grow apart. Why deny it? So we can justify all the flatware we got at our wedding? That’s bullshit. Don’t you think?”
After a few seconds of silence, she laughed and checked my wrist for a pulse.
“I’m still here,” I said. “Just listening.”
“Am I even making sense?”
“Yeah. Definitely. Your statistics are off, though.”
“What, about the companies?”
“Well, that too. But I was mostly referring to the divorce rate. Everyone throws that figure around all the time, but it’s just a media myth.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know the folks who started it. They’re an independent research group in Boston. Twelve years ago, they were hired by a Christian organization to get some hard numbers they could use. They said, ‘We don’t care how you get them, just get them.’ So the researchers spent six months raiding the public records of a hundred and fifty counties, tallying the number of approved marriage licenses and divorce papers signed in 1987. They discovered exactly half as many divorces.”
“So? That’s one out of two.”
“No it’s not. They were counting the divorces from all married couples, not just the ones who got married in 1987. Look, let’s say there are ten million married couples in those counties. One hundred thousand of them got married in 1987. Fifty thousand of them got divorced in 1987. Guess what? That’s fifty thousand out of ten million, not a hundred thousand. It was totally faulty reasoning, but the Christian group went all Chicken Little to the press anyway. Nobody ever stopped to question it.”
Miranda rolled over and eyed me in full skeptical journalist mode. “Scott, are you trying to tell me that the divorce rate is actually one half of one percent?”
“No. That’s just the same mistake reversed. My point is that you cant compare one year’s results to the whole pool. You have to take it year by year.”
“But in 1987 it was fifty percent.”
“In 1987 there were half as many divorces as there were weddings. In those counties.”
“But if that statistic matches up every year, then the divorce rate will still be fifty percent!”
“Yes, but that’s a very big if for such a small sample. Look at the stock market in 1987. One bad day turned it into a very abnormal year. Hell, if l only used this week as a sample, I could say that I have sex with a married woman at least once a week.”
She stared at me, stunned, and then turned the other way. I looked over her shoulder.
“Oh no. Did I upset you again?”
“I’m not upset,” she said. “I’m just... I’ll put it this way, Scott. You know just what to say to make a girl feel numb. Is it okay if I check my messages?”
She reached over me to use my phone, resting on top of my chest. I felt like apologizing, but I didn’t know why. I thought I was showing her respect by not subjecting her to any romantic clichés. I knew Miranda was strictly anti-sentiment. Then again, so was Gracie, until the day it suddenly occurred to her that if she stayed with me, she’d be numbed out of existence.
Later in the morning, outside the hotel, Miranda and I sat in awkward silence. She kissed me goodbye from the passenger seat. Not an eternal goodbye, of course, but it told me what I wanted to hear. The show was over. Brigadoon officially went back to being a grass field.
“You’re still an ass,” she said, getting out. “Get your car fixed.”
“Have fun exploiting the carnage.”
With a half-smile, she entered the hotel. It was 11:30. Over the past two days, I’d gotten a total of five hours sleep. And yet I felt fine. I was content.
________________
At 12:15, I reached Marina del Rey, where Ira greeted me from the dock of his floating home and sanctum. He looked like a proud slob in his untucked button-down shirt and black jeans. He carried a huge binder filled with data. He wasn’t big on self-maintenance, but he always kept his numbers pretty.
“Don’t even tell me to change,” he said without greeting me. “If this guy’s going to write me off just because he doesn’t like my wardrobe—”
“Relax. He wont care. He’ll just think you’re too brilliant to be stylish.”
“I don’t even know why I have to go.”
“Because it’s your project. I’m just helping you sell it.”
He locked up the yacht. The Ishtar was a 1984 Gibson Executive, fifty feet long. Fiberglass hull. Flush-mounted exterior deck and 385 square feet of living space, including full galley, salon, and two tiny state rooms. He had bought it two years before, for seventy five thousand dollars. The seller claimed to have purchased it straight from Warren Beatty, who apparently had a sense of humor about his previous flops.
I checked the story. It was crap. Warren may have a self-effacing wit, but he was never a yachtsman. Ira didn’t care. He just wanted respite from loud neighbors and evil landlords. He went through apartments like he went through jobs.
Half an hour later, we arrived at Lulu’s, a casual eatery on Beverly Boulevard. We had a lunch date with Keith Ullman. He was extremely late, of course. In Los Angeles, tardiness was treated as a sign of status and chic. Not only was it standard not to offer an explanation, it was considered rude to ask. I reminded Ira several times to hold his tongue when Keith finally did arrive.
“So what’s the name of this thing again?” he asked after fifteen minutes of idle banter.
“Move My Cheese,” I replied, sending Keith into a fit of puzzled laughter. He was a stylish, silver-haired player, part of Hollywood’s old guard. He held a diploma from the Robert Evans school of name-dropping. His favorite story, told ad nauseam, was how he had personally led Universal’s effort to make Jaws the first summer blockbuster to premiere nationwide. Oh, he met resistance from every one, especially Dick Zanuck, blah blah blah. There was simply no way to turn off his audio commentary.
As a silent partner in this burgeoning venture, I had advised Ira to act interested and to never ever disparage Spielberg in front of Keith. They were landsmen and (according to Keith) good friends. Ira, however, had harbored a mad-on for Spielberg ever since Jeff Goldblum’s offensively simplistic and incorrect portrayal of a chaotician in Jurassic Park. Whatever. All I cared about was selling Keith on Move My Cheese, a virtual paradigm that could revolutionize the movie industry. And that wasn’t just hype.
“Explain to me again how it works,” said Keith, through a mouthful of Chinese chicken salad.
Ira looked to me. His explanation usually caused massive bleeding from the ears.
“It’s simple data-fusion software,” I told him. “You plug all your movies in to a calendar. All your competitor’s movies. You add the number of screens, and presto. The Cheese chews it up and spits out the projected box-office totals for everything.”
Of course, it wasn’t really that simple. Keith was understandably skeptical. “Come on...”
“We’ve been testing it for fifteen mo
nths now. It has eighty-two percent accuracy in predicting first-weekend grosses, and seventy one percent accuracy for final domestic.”
“But not international,” said Keith.
“No,” said Ira, annoyed. “It doesn’t give you a blow job either.”
Keith laughed, assuming the joke was inclusive. “Then what the hell am I doing here?”
I opened Ira’s binder to an earmarked page. “Look, while everyone predicted that X-Men would open between twenty-eight and thirty-one million, our forecast said fifty-four-point-five. It opened at fifty-five point-one. Was it exact? No. But compared to everyone else, that’s like throwing a key in the keyhole.”
“But how can you be sure?”
“We’re only eighty-two percent sure,” I stressed. “But that’s still more than the NRG can give you.”
The National Research Group, the child of a Dutch media conglomerate, was the current prognosticator of choice for all the major studios. Their methods were ridiculously archaic. Three times a week they phoned a sample of four hundred people and bothered them with intrusive questions: How old are you? What’s your skin color? What’s your income? Have you heard of Battlefield: Earth? Okay. Do you think you’re, um, planning on seeing it in theaters? Why not?
What the pollsters who steer this country don’t want you to know is that phone surveys, by their very nature, suck. They rely on the feedback of two kinds of people: those who enjoy talking to telemarketers and those who enjoy lying to telemarketers. Neither group speaks well for the rest of us. To give the NRG credit, their system was created solely to measure audience awareness of upcoming films. But the studio suits, nervous about where to blow their last-minute ad budget, began using those four hundred participants/liars to project box-office numbers. The results were usually in the ballpark, if you include the parking lot, but the methods were piss poor when it came to predicting the tastes of kids, genre nerds, and African Americans.
For each future release, Move My Cheese employed over two hundred different variables, everything from box-office grosses of all the actors previous works to the number of cleavage shots used in trailers. But the real genius was in the calendar program, which factored in considerations like holiday trends, TV schedules, even local weather patterns. It retrieved much of this information off the Internet, automatically adjusting its math to fit vicissitudes. The NRG was a crude Magic 8-ball. The Cheese was just magic.