Selling Nostalgia

by Mathew Klickstein

  Milt had gotten used to these mood swings, the ups and downs of Gil Gladly’s mind.

  “Actually, Gil, I think the snowstorm might have something to do with all the fuck-ups CineRanchero has been having. I know the storm’s been hitting Chicago really hard and—”

  “W-w-w-ell, that’s no excuse for them to not get back to us w-w-whenever we’re trying to get in t-t-t-t-touch with th-th-them!” Gil fired back. “Just l-l-l-let me know the n-n-n-n-n-n-n-next time they contact you. Better be s-s-s-oon. This fucking tour is right around the fucking corner, and I haven’t slept a w-w-w-w-w-wink in weeks!”

  “Yup,” Milt said. “I’m on it. Say hi to Mandy, and talk to you later.”

  Gil hung up without saying goodbye, as per usual, and Milt went back inside, gliding past Shitsmelled, lost in his book and strings of hair. Milt’s phone vibrated nonstop in his pocket. Fucking Silverstein! He should just quit the job if he hated it so much, like everyone else had been doing.

  Milt sat back down at his laptop and stack of papers, and it dawned on him that the first screening was only right around the corner. The LA premiere would be at Latham Harrison’s specialty art house theater where all the Hollywood hipsters and a few people with familiar names would hang out for screenings and cinema-themed community events.

  He decided to check the theater’s website and make sure the documentary’s premiere was listed on the upcoming calendar. Even CineRanchero had done that much, despite having initially misspelled the title of the movie.

  Milt Googled “Latheatre” on his computer, then sat back against the cold, white wall underneath a framed abstract painting of a blurry yellow taxicab driving through what was probably supposed to be Manhattan on a rainy day.

  On the laptop’s screen was Google search entry after Google search entry with essentially the same clickbaitable headline about Latheatre and Latham himself.

  “Shit,” Milt whispered, shaking his head. He got up and opened the glass door, slinkered past Shitsmelled, who didn’t look up from his pink book, and marched over to the other side of the patio away from the other patrons.

  He called GOOD GOLLY GIL GLADLY on his phone, and held the device tight to his ear.

  “Yessir,” Gil said as though they hadn’t just talked two minutes earlier.

  “I know why we’re not hearing anything from Latham Harrison,” Milt said.

  “Okkaaaaayyy…”

  “Are you by a computer right now?”

  “Yesssssss…”

  “Google his theater,” Milt said, waiting.

  “What’s that one called again?”

  “Latheatre,” Milt said. “L-a-t-h-e-a-t-r-e.”

  “British, huh?”

  “No.”

  Four seconds of pregnant silence later, Gil came back with the inevitable, “Holy fuck.”

  “Yup, it’s all over the place. Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Huff Po. I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of minutes before it’s on BuzzFeed. It’s everywhere. That’s it. I have a feeling we’re not going to be hearing from Latham again.”

  “How do you know this guy again?” Gil asked, audibly typing away on his laptop on the other end.

  “When I was at UCLA, a bunch of us used to hang out at his bookstore over by the ArcLight and Amoeba,” Milt said. “He was sort of like our own personal Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.”

  “Mmm hmmm….”

  “With the help of some of his more high-profile regulars, he started his own theater maybe six or seven years ago. I’d always heard good things, though even back then he was kind of a jerk.”

  “So, exactly like Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons.”

  “Well, yeah, but his store was awesome and his theater has done a bunch of cool shit like what would’ve happened with the premiere of our documentary,” Milt said.

  “Okay, well, with all this sexual harassment stuff and his resigning as director of the theater, we obviously can’t have anything to do with this organization right now. So, just cancel LA. Fuck LA. We don’t need them.”

  Milt turned around again and looked out to the seated customers, who’d multiplied since he’d last come out only a few minutes earlier, and was almost certain Shitsmelled had looked up briefly, caught sight of him, and hid his face back into his book.

  Milt exhaled deeply. “Gil, we can’t cancel LA. There are too many important people who have already been invited and are definitely coming. There’s a bunch of your fans out there, and I know from all the social media nonsense that they want to come too. LA Weekly already did a blurb about it. It’d look terrible if we don’t go. Wallace was planning on going out there from Atlanta on his own dime because he has some business stuff out there to deal with around that time.”

  “Wallace is going? Shit,” Gil said. “I like that guy. Okay, I don’t care about that other junk, but if you really think we need to do LA…”

  “I do,” Milt confirmed. “I really do.”

  It wasn’t just about the “important people” allegedly coming out, nor about the fans and the bullshit online rep of the film to come. Milt wanted to make sure LA still happened because he did not want to be told he couldn’t do something. He didn’t want to know that something was out of his control, that something wouldn’t work out, particularly not a premiere he had been putting together for more than half a year, that had fallen apart only last minute because of that jerkoff Latham’s sticky fingers around his employees.

  Go to one of the infinite brothels in Tijuana for a night just two-and-a-half hours away! Why do it at WORK where everyone can SEE YOU and fuck up everyone’s lives?! Guhhhhhhdddd…!

  “We can’t just cancel screenings because of stupid shit like this,” Milt said, glowering at Shitsmelled sitting there in his little chair, reading his little pink book, fiddling with his little ginger man bun, and leaving Silverstein back at the office in the lurch.

  Milt knew what he needed to do, he had to needle Gil Gladly’s impulsive emotionality. Milt needed to crank it to eleven, Spinal Tap style. “We have to do LA just like we have to do Chicago. These things are already fucking set, even if we have to find a different theater to do it at in LA. Fuck Latham and fuck CineRanchero and fuck everyone and everything except for you, me, our families, the film, and everyone who worked on it.”

  “You’re crazy,” Gil laughed. “And I mean that in the best way.”

  “Yeah, I learned from the best, fuckface.” Milt beamed, secretly delighted that he could call the Gil Gladly a fuckface on the phone and actually make the guy laugh about it. Just in case, he quickly added, “I mean…fook-fah-shay. I always mispronounce that word.”

  “You miraculously made everything else happen, Milt,” Gil said without a stutter. “So, go make this happen too, fook-fah-shay.”

  “You got it,” Milt said. “See ya soon.”

  Gil hung up without a goodbye, and Milt went back into the coffee shop, purposely knocking Shitsmelled’s chair with his elbow and not bothering to turn back to see if the fucker noticed.

  The copyediting on his ghostwritten Phliphlop autobio would have to wait for now. Milton Siegel had work to do.

  At thirty-six, Milt was the same age his father had been when he was born. He was in a new, possibly precarious marriage with a woman he had eloped with only four months earlier. He had been putting on too much weight after years of remaining relatively fit. He was living off of financial fumes but surviving for now.

  And he had less than two months to set up an alternative to his full-fledged premiere in Los Angeles for the documentary he and his small team of filmmakers around the country had been killing themselves over for the past two years while dealing with all their real-life responsibilities and problems.

  As it would turn out, Milt would actually be able to accomplish just that, in less than three hours. Fuck yeah.

  CHAPTER 4

  That was how Milton Siegel had ended up in SoCal, visiting his mom for a few days before getting ready to head up to LA with Frankly act
ing as his Kato (Green Hornet, not Kaelin) for the premiere of his Gil Gladly documentary. They would be showing the film at the prestigious Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, where Milt had worked throughout his college years. He still had some supportive friends working there who had said, “A documentary about Gil Gladly, with Gil Gladly in person? You can have the space for free! Will he sign our KidTalk VHS tapes?”

  Milt agreed to let them keep the profits from the door, a deal he'd been getting reluctantly used to going along with when it came to locking down venues over the previous few months. Free meant free. All good, since he and his band of merry men could still have their premiere in LA. As long as the people who had bought tickets from Latheatre could transfer over to the Egyptian (they could; the Egyptian folks were very helpful with this), all would work out.

  Milt had even been able to convince popular YouTube star Astra Singh to host the Q&A after the screening. Astra was too young to have been around when KidTalk first aired but, as with so many other geeky YouTubers, brought in much of her traffic through the eighties/nineties nostalgia industry channels and often talked about Gil Gladly as one of her childhood heroes.

  The fact she still lived at home with her parents and thus didn’t need to be paid was helpful too. Milt found it strange that it seemed so many YouTube stars still lived at home, well into their twenties and thirties. Stranger still, their reasoning usually had something to do with their suffering from some form of agoraphobia, introversion, or social awkwardness, as they’d put it in countless interviews, despite being so eager to be interviewed or end up on stage at conferences, comic-cons, and other panels or live performance opportunities.

  The contradiction reminded Milt of how he’d felt when he first heard the term “ADD” as a fourth-grader. “It means I can’t focus,” said the pig-tailed platinum-blonde girl sitting next to him. When Milt asked how Blondie had trouble focusing when she was right then and there meticulously sketching an elaborate castle for a princess character she was always talking about in her short stories for class, the girl answered, “Well, I can focus on things I want to focus on.”

  Gil had cringed at the idea of having to explicitly promote a “YouTube Star,” a phrase which he had multiple times in the past referred to as an oxymoron. But it was a way to bring in a few more ticketholders and get word out about the film itself. After multiple all-caps texts and frantic phone messages from Gil upon landing and turning on his cell, Milt had looked into it to discover they had indeed sold-out the Egyptian premiere to come.

  The flight hadn’t been easy, what with Milt having to cope with his fellow passengers—be they badass bikers, blimps, birds, or bourgeoisie—not to mention a raging thirst from his drunken bacchanal earlier in the airport bar.

  Once down the escalator to the baggage claim, he texted his principle crew members and closest compatriots Wallace Connors and Ronnie Clark.

  “Landed in LA, boyyyysssss.” It was a riff on the rural doyenne of the place he had set up for them when they had spent a week in Gil’s boyhood town just outside of Missoula, Montana. Every morning, it had been a mellifluous sing-songy “Morning, boyyyssss” with her perfect, stately southern-belle countenance.

  That Montana was decidedly not in the south didn’t seem to matter much. But the woman sure could whip up some fantastic waffles. Milt never really cared for the cakey breakfast food, but Mrs. Cuthbert resoundingly changed his mind. And there were a lot of crucifixes around the house Milt had rented and shared with Wallace, Ronnie, and her for the week of Gil Gladly’s childhood interviews.

  Ronnie immediately texted back, “Have fun, boyyysssss.”

  Wallace didn’t respond until a few minutes later, while Milt was still wandering around trying to figure out which of the flashing numbers on the endless line of baggage claims was the one that matched his flight.

  “Good luck. Keep us updated. Love you, man.”

  It was rare and incongruous to the personality of the semi-portly, seven-foot-two Wallace whenever he ended a conversation with, “I love you, man.” But it was because of how upright he could otherwise often appear to be that when Wallace Connors said it, you knew he meant it. It wasn’t Hollywood bullshit.

  Which made sense, because Wallace had tried the scene for a few years back in his early twenties and had, as he himself claimed, run back to Atlanta with his tail between his legs. Thankfully. It led to his starting his own independent production company, focusing mainly on local promos, commercials, and the occasional wedding video. This allowed Wallace to buy a house at thirty and, around the same time as Milt, get married to a beautiful, equally religious Muslim girl. Her family had also converted from Mormonism when they had been on a different missionary mission when she was young.

  Wallace ended up not being able to come out for the premiere, both because of the flood of work he had to wrap up before the holidays, and because of the actual flood that was tearing up all parts of Atlanta and the southeastern states in general.

  Ronnie didn’t have the money to come out, and what with four kids to take care of and that snowstorm wrecking Denver, it just wouldn’t be happening this round. Milt was lucky to have been able to find a nonstop flight through the country’s irrational rash of natural disasters that had befallen the land on his way from Boston to Orange County where his mom lived in a senior community after divorcing husband number three, Milt’s step-father Dave.

  Teddy Miller, one of the many Gil Gladly fanboy hangers-on that Milt, Wallace, and Ronnie had to contend with, had posted on the film’s main Facebook page something along the lines of, “Good thing I didn’t work on this project; it seems cursed!” when Milt had posted: “Thoughts and prayers to our producer and his editing team Wallace Connors in Atlanta.”

  Ronnie had deleted Teddy’s comment without a word about it from Teddy. Which was pretty standard by now, after the boys had had to delete a few of Teddy’s other less appropriate and ill-timed posts on their film’s Facebook page. Milt had once asked Gil Gladly, who tertiarily knew Teddy from various conventions, whether or not Teddy might be autistic.

  “Why does everyone keep asking me th-th-that?” Gil had answered, chuckling.

  Milt had left it at that. He had at one point started asking Gil about his thoughts on a piece Milt wanted to do about the instances of autism in geek fandom circles, but Gil told him the whole idea weirded him out and he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. It was something Milt had spoken with a few of his other journalist friends about, and it turned out more than one had been considering writing about the same possible phenomenon. But, yes, better let it lie for now, they felt. No one wanted to get in trouble for saying the wrong thing about mental illness, interesting story or not.

  Wallace and Ronnie would be coming out to the Chicago event held by CineRanchero later in the month, if the company didn’t totally fuck the whole thing up, which Milt still wasn’t certain about. It would be the biggest of the screening events, with music, special guests, and a whole bunch of other crazy crap after the screening, so Wallace and Ronnie were definitely not missing that one. Besides, the one nice thing about working with a company like CineRanchero was that, even if they were disorganized as all hell, they were able to pay for flights and lodging for Gil, Milt, his small crew, and their wives.

  Originally, CineRanchero’s reps had said they were only bringing out Gil and Milt and wives, but Milt had thrown down the gauntlet, telling them they either brought out his guys who had worked their asses off on this thing too, or else his team would take the big event somewhere else. Milt still wasn’t sure that was the right way to handle the CineRanchero people, but he didn’t want to leave out Wallace and Ronnie.

  Meanwhile, Milt would be on his own in LA. He’d have support from old friends and colleagues like Frankly, but ultimately, he was here now in Orange County, about to spend a few days with his mom before heading up to the town that had broken him in half so many times in his early twenties before he'd literally left for greener pastur
es.

  No wonder Gil Gladly hated the place. They didn’t call it HelLA for nothing.

  While waiting for his baggage to come, Milt felt a twinge of discomfort at having left to California for an entire week so shortly after what had happened with Laney back in Boston.

  Before getting into the Lyft on his way to the airport in Boston, Laney had kissed him on the cheek, and her lips had felt frigid. Milt knew then that he might be making a terrible, terrible mistake leaving her behind so soon after—

  But goddamn it, he was here now, picking up his two pieces of luggage from off the swirling carousel flanked by a frenzied crowd of raggedy, pajama-wearing passengers.

  He received a text from Gil that read, “Looks online like they haven’t sold enough seats at the Portland screening. DISASTER.”

  Milt texted back, “Stop worrying about it. It’ll be fine. They’ve sold a fair amount, we’ve got plenty of time til that one, and the rest will come through via walk-in sales. Try to get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, right,” Gil immediately texted back. “Still haven’t slept a wink. CAN’T WAIT FOR THIS ALL TO BE OVER!”

  Luckily, the show that would be happening at the McMenamins Theater in Portland, Oregon would be the last fucking one, and it was Milt’s hope that they’d draw in some of the crowds of families that might need some reprieve after a busy and bustling Thanksgiving.

  Or not.

  Milt stopped, slowly breathed in-out, and began walking toward the outer area of the terminal where his mom would be picking him up. He couldn’t remember if she still had her white Sentra or not, but he’d find out soon enough.

  No email yet from CineRanchero, but now that his notifications were pushing through from the post-flight wave, he also saw—yesyesYES!—an email from Unemployment! Though only to say that his last wire deposit would be going through at week’s end, and that he’d have to attend one more of those ineffectual all-day “job training” seminars they had made him go to.