The one thing Milt had learned at the last all-day training was that Penny from The Big Bang Theory really knew how to handle herself during a job interview because she was “just being herself.” Evidently, this was the real trick to consider during such an exchange, according to the clip the—ahem—“instructor” showed Milt’s “class” three different times for analysis.
The same facilitator used the word “chubster” more than once to describe people she was talking about, and it was equally revelatory to Milt that such language was still considered acceptable in a professional/government setting. But hey, as long as that last check was finally coming through.…
Milt thought it ironic that dealing with the bureaucratic vicissitudes of Unemployment, something he had become used to over the years as a freelance writer and producer in need of financial supplement between more substantial gigs (hey, it was HIS money he had already paid into the system, right?), could often become a full-time job in and of itself. He wondered what people who had families and real lives and all that did to cope with the circuitous maze of paperwork, phone calls, emails, and training seminars. Milt supposed those people would get jobs and get off Unemployment as fast as possible.
Ronnie sent his text next, having made sure to send this one to Milt alone, knowing Wallace wouldn’t approve. It was a picture of some adorably hot geek girl he’d been scoping out through their film’s Instagram account followers, this time in scantily-clad lubricious Luigi from Mario Bros. cosplay.
Mentally rolling his eyes, Milt wondered if he should text Laney again since he hadn’t heard back from her after his last “I love you” before his plane took off from Boston.
Having collected his baggage—his black wheelie duffel bag with one wheel broken off that he basically had to drag—Milt made his way to the exit, through the crowd, which included the pixie girl from earlier, now hand in hand with the ersatz Seth Rogen. Milt saw throughout the rest of the crowd that there were in fact multiple young men who resembled the bearded, bespectacled, burly comic actor.
Welcome to LA.
The white Sentra pulled up. Milt locked smiles and eyes with his mom, and was glad he hadn’t brought any cigarettes with him for a post-flight smoke. Being the good Jewish mama’s boy that he was.
CHAPTER 5
Milton’s mom was one of the three most important people in his life, along with his uncle (her brother) and grandma (her mother). Whoops, he supposed nowadays also Laney, his wife. Better make that one of four most important people.
Milt loved, respected, and on occasion admired his father, especially when he was younger. But Dave Siegel had always been more of a…close friend. Or, to put it in Kurt Cobain parlance, Dave Siegel was less a father, more a dad.
Even when he was younger and still exuded that extra-special admiration a young boy has for his father, if he was being honest with himself, Milt really would go those four or five times a year for a weekend or school vacation to visit Dad’s new (and third, keeping up with Mom) wife, Marjorie.
Dad would stay in his office most of the time, working or playing the earliest wave of computer games back in the late eighties. Ten-year-old Milt would be left to his own devices, reading voluminously as he always had, or watching countless LaserDiscs courtesy of his dad’s setting him up in the living room before going back upstairs to the office.
Or, as was much more often the case, Milt would spend his visit with Marjorie, who would become like a second mother to him during his preteen years before they drifted apart once he left Southern California on his Steinbeckian cross-country journeying of the past few years prior to his settling down with Laney in Boston.
There was something important going on during those infrequent weekend visits to Dad’s. Supplementing ten-year-old Milt’s salubrious diet of old school Balloon, Dad’s choice in LaserDiscs tended to be wholly age-inappropriate ones like The Terminator, RoboCop, Total Recall, and various others that ensured Milton Siegel would never be able to embrace Star Wars, E.T., or the other ’80s sci-fi blockbusters that were so enjoyed by the rest of Milt’s screen-onboarded generation. Frankly, such a cinema diet set Milt up to always be a little…off from the bulk of his fellow Gen Y’ers.
Which in turn set Milt up as a wide-eyed observer, a seeker of the new and different.
Yes, Milt had made a documentary about a pop culture subject as conventional as could be imagined. But the doc was nevertheless strange. Milt had purposely put it together with the vision of something that would be unique in the nostalgia industry, perhaps to the detriment of marketability. Or perhaps not. Hopefully not.
Gil Gladly was never a typical talk show host. In its earlier days, Balloon had not been a typical television channel. They deserved an atypical doc, not the meandering series of pseudo-celebrity talking heads rambling on and on about the subject, punctuated with 8-bit videogame music throughout and a revelatory montage at the end; CREDITS. Milt wanted something different. The way he had been raised to see the world, if only indirectly, by his dad.
It was this contrarian mentality that led him to convincing Gil and the rest of Milt’s small crew that they should circumvent the traditional indie film festival circuit and establish their own specialized national tour around the country. Milt wanted every aspect of the process of the doc from soup to nuts to be unique. Special.
He just hoped his instincts were correct and all of this extra work and overthinking would make for a nice distribution sale in the end.
In fairness, all of this at times did seem a little crazy. Perhaps going against the grain was something better left behind in Milt’s fancy-free youth.
Dad never fully understood why Milt had chosen to leave LA, particularly at a time when he was making his way up the local media ladder at a relatively early age, to give in to his wanderlust and live all over the country. Milt once explained to the old man, “You set me up to seek out new frontiers, Dad.” Dad replied by blowing raspberries in Milt’s face, then suggested they go get some sushi.
“Your dad’s got a good heart,” Milt’s mom, Sara, said while they were enjoying their third drink each and discussing such history as they did so often when they met up every two years or so. “But he was in sales. Business was his life before he retired. He was good at it. It had its own ups and downs, but it was what got him up in the morning, and I think maybe sometimes he’s a little confused about what you’ve chosen to do with your life.”
Milt nodded vacantly, knowing she was right. Especially since it was almost the exact same thing she had said three or four hundred times before.
“It’s your life, Milt.”
Sara was seventy but could have passed for fifty-five. Maybe younger. Milt always joked that his athletic mom would outlive everyone, including himself, and she had in fact once taken a job over another opportunity simply because the first was closer to a park where she could go on walks and hikes during her lunch hour.
There was a point when he was a kid where it became far too clear that one after another of Milt’s friends had a crush on his mom. She wasn’t only pretty, but also probably the only single mom in the area.
Everyone else’s mom in Born Again Christian Southern Orange County was in a loveless marriage, most having long slept in separate bedrooms from their husbands, the tension in the houses palpable to all the kids who would come and visit for sleepovers and afternoon hangouts. Milt’s mom varied from her counterparts by being, well, liberated…and happy.
Milt’s dad and Sara had remained friendly after their early-on divorce. More importantly, they had been freed from a marriage that clearly didn’t work as well as what would prove to be a lifelong friendship. It was a proposition Milt’s childhood friends’ parents never allowed themselves to consider.
This had the effect of allowing Milt’s mom to be free and happy, his dad to quickly remarry, and Milt to live in a home that all the other kids wanted to come to far more often than their own.
Particularly those boys who had crushes on h
is mom, which was just about everyone. A factor that could at times be embarrassing. Like the time Milt, maybe around twelve, had to ask his mom if she could please stop wandering around the house in obscenely skimpy cut-off jean shorts and tight white baby t-shirts, both of which left far too little to the imagination, especially the imagination of those boys such as Milt’s friends, who were all way too imaginative.
Mom could meanwhile be rather aggravating in how encouraging she was no matter what Milt did or said. She was that breed of Jewish mother (and, as Milt would discover from friends as he grew older, Italian mother) who would support their little princes a little too fervently. No matter what.
This was probably one of the reasons Milt never learned to watch his mouth and why he would, then and now, get in trouble for the failure to do so. Especially these days, when he could on rare but steady occasion find himself in the public eye with his articles, books, and film and TV work. Even at the tiny level he was at, there were always blog interviews and podcasts he’d be nudged into doing, and it was becoming more and more difficult to watch what he said. Another “sign of the times,” as he would shrug it off as.
Ordering their fourth round of the night, Milt reflected on the fact that Mom had never been a big drinker in the past. But what the hell, they hadn’t seen in each other in far too long and they weren’t operating heavy machinery or driving anywhere in her “hip” senior community set up as a weirdly all-inclusive, Orwellian city of the future.
Round four arrived, and Sara asked why Milt was slowly shaking his head with a mischievous grin on his face.
“Oh, I was just remembering something funny about you,” Milt said. “That time I played a game with you over the phone about whether or not I should go to grad school. No matter what I said—”
“I know,” Milt’s mom smiled mischievously back. “I would tell you you were right. Go to grad school? Fantastic! You’d make a great academic. Not go to grad school? Yeah! You’re too busy and don’t have enough money to take that on.” Sara sipped her cosmopolitan, beaming. “That’s something we Jewish mothers do. When we’re not kvetching all the time.”
“Speaking of kvetching,” Milton said, “I just noticed they never brought us any water.”
Sara took another swig of her cosmopolitan, spilling a few drops on her chin. “The drought.”
“What drought?”
“The drought, Milt,” Sara said. “The drought this year’s been rough. They have to cut back on things like complimentary water at restaurants and bars. That we can kvetch about.”
“The drought or not being able to drink tap water?”
“Were we ever able to drink tap water in Southern California?”
Milt shook his head slightly and leaned back in his chair, looking out to his right to the perfectly tranquil verdant golf course spreading out all around them from the second story of the clubhouse where they enjoyed their nightcaps. The tranquility of the SoCal “winter” desert-y night air breezed over him, and that was when he suddenly sniffed and sat forward, whispering to his mom, “I think I smell pot.”
“Yeah,” Mom said. “Pretty much everyone smokes here. I told you it was a cool place to spend the last years of my life.”
“I think you kept saying ‘hip,’” Milt laughed. “But close enough.”
“Do you want some? I got some from my neighbor yesterday.”
“You’re smoking again now too?” Milt asked.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty much transitioning into retirement mode,” Milt’s mom said. “I’ve probably got another five years in me. With the money I’m getting from the divorce settlement with David,” (she always made sure to create a distinction between Milt’s dad, Dave, and Milt’s now-former step-father David), “I’ll probably only need to work at the rehab clinic until that time, then maybe travel or start my own practice. Who knows?”
She guzzled down the last of her cocktail, and Milt’s mind began reeling about the concept of doing a TV show or a movie about a senior community that defied convention, where everyone smoked weed, drank, and embraced life as some kind of Fellini-esque parade of la dolce vita.
This was how Milt’s mind worked. It was partly why he had so much trouble sleeping. Partly why he hated sleeping. It reminded him of a favorite quote of his from—who was it again?—either Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke. When asked in an interview how (let’s say Isaac) got so many ideas, the sci-fi pioneer had answered, “No, no. The real question is…how do you make them stop?”
A show about a “cool” senior community made sense, Milt reasoned. The hippies of yesteryear were now the senior citizens of today. The same ones gigglingly skulking around the dimly-lit AstroTurf green golf course over which he was looking at that very moment.
“Hmm, that’s a good idea,” Milt said to himself, slightly inebriated by now.
“What’s a good idea?” Sara asked.
“Nothing,” Milt answered. “Just thinking.”
His phone vibrated and, being programmed properly, he checked it immediately. He looked at the screen.
“Gil again?” Sara asked.
“Yup,” Milt said. “He’s pissed-off that some new article promoting the film online is focusing on his stutter rather than on his career. He really hates when they do that.”
“I thought that’s what a lot of the movie was about?” Mom asked. “Isn’t that a big part of his story? A guy who overcame his stutter to become a successful talk show host?”
Milt exhaled heavily and nodded as he texted Gil that he shouldn’t worry, no one reads that site anymore, and even the most moronic fanboy will see all the misspellings and misinformation on the post anyway. Besides, they should be happy anyone is talking about the film at all. They could use all the press they could get, especially since so few people seemed to care a new movie about Gil was being screened around the country.
“Get some sleep, Gil,” Milt texted.
“Yeah, right,” was the response as always. “Easy for YOU to say.”
“The stutter and some of the other things Gil has gone through over the years is a big part of the doc,” Milt said, his eyes still on his phone. “But Gil doesn’t want those kinds of things to be how he’s defined in the eyes of the media and his public, I guess. Sometimes he’s up to talk about it, and sometimes he’s not. It’s complicated. He’s…a complicated guy.”
“Guess that’s why you made a whole movie about him.”
Milt looked up, and there was a moment between the two that required no discussion. He turned his phone off and slipped it back into his pocket. “Sorry. It’s off. I’ll keep it off the rest of the night.”
“I bet you turn your phone right back on again in less than five minutes.” Milt’s mom smiled. “You can’t help it. Work comes first. You’re just like your father.”
CHAPTER 6
Milt smoked a joint with his mom when they got back to her apartment. The occasion marked the first time they had toked up together since she had gone back to grad school, back in the days when he would infrequently come home, surprised to see his former hippie flower-power mom was smoking again.
After Sara received her Master’s in psychology, she’d stopped for a while. Apparently, being at this hip senior community had changed her abstemious behavior once more.
Milt meandered to the guest bedroom, pulled out the bed from the couch, and laid down on the uncomfortable, noisy mattress, trying his best not to spook himself with fantasies about all the terrible things Laney could be doing while he was away for the week.
Regardless of the drinks, the weed, and the late-night neuroticism, Milt woke up at his usual time, 7:30 a.m. His body never seemed to be put off by the time difference when he traveled. He began his day with a breakfast courtesy of Mom (when had she learned to cook?) on her way out the door to work.
By 8:00 a.m., Milt was receiving texts and emails from everyone about the screenings ahead. There was also a litany of progressively degenerate, drunken ramblings from Silver
stein about how much he wanted to kill himself over how awful it was at the Boston Star.
Milt didn’t have too much trouble ignoring such histrionics, but was sincerely concerned about Silverstein’s nosebleeds from stress. Some of the pictures sent were pretty horrifying.
Lars von Trier, eat your heart out.
Between getting some more work done on his MC Phliphlop autobiography and watching the Lady Gaga documentary on Netflix (ugh, why not: part of the job to keep up with all the pop culture palaver), he answered his emails as swiftly as possible.
There had been one, at long last, from Sally Miranda over at CineRanchero.
Sally was the same age as Milt, thirty-six. But from her Facebook page, she looked a lot older. She looked like a mom. Not Milt’s mom. Sally Miranda had the face and body of a normal mom. Like the weathered, put-upon moms of the other kids Milt had grown up with in Southern Orange County.
It immediately made Milt uncomfortable for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on that from their early Skypes, it was clear Sally Miranda styled her hair in a way that (intentionally?) mimicked that of Daryl Hannah’s Pris in the immortal sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner, one of the many LaserDiscs Milt had watched over and over again in his precocious preteen years thanks to his father.
It was as though Sally was forever wearing a white fright wig that had been teased-out, almost like a female Andy Warhol or an albino version of young Uma Thurman’s Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction.
Milt had long been friends and worked with misfits, though, and certainly he wasn’t exactly a chiseled work of art himself. As with so much else over the year, he had shrugged Sally’s hairdo off as something not worth thinking about. Maybe, like him, she was the good kind of crazy.
As long as she got the work done.
“So, guess what?” Sally’s email began. She wrote her emails as though Milt and she were forever embroiled in an ongoing conversation. Her email style was in fact that of a “Hey, guys!!!” blogger. “Because they say pre-sales haven’t been as good as they had hoped, CineRanchero is cutting the budget. This means there will be only one show instead of the two back-to-back ones we had been planning. Not a biggie.”
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