Milt shook his head slowly, as though Sally Miranda could see him. Even though she obviously could not see him, Milt for some reason kept the nodding subtle.
Gil would see this as a biggie. A really big biggie. A total clusterfuck. One of many Milt and Gil had been dealing with when it came to the massive CineRanchero event set for Chicago later in the month.
Milt and Gil cared very deeply about how the tour came off, and now Sally was telling him that CineRanchero had indeed been doing such a piss-poor job promoting the event that there weren’t enough pre-sales to merit the back-to-back screenings Milt and Gil had already been advertising for more than six months.
To add fuel to the freak-out fire, Milt saw a second email had come from Sally while he was languishing over how he would explain the scheduling change to Gil who was already in disaster-preparation mode about screenings not coming together as smoothly as they’d hoped.
The second email explained that Sally would unfortunately not be able to be there after the screening to help run the various details of the live event aspect of the presentation. But, she promised, they would be in good hands with two volunteer interns from a local community college who would be filling in.
Milt closed his eyes. He did not want to make the call he’d inevitably need to make to Gil about this…and soon. He could hear Lady Gaga crying in the documentary onscreen that he’d earlier minimized while reading his emails.
Milt opened his eyes and read on about the “awesome” interns who would be helping out after the screening: “They’re both huge fans of Gil’s. Maybe even as big as you and me!” There followed a short PS about how bad Sally felt that she hadn’t gotten in touch with him sooner, but the fires in her area that had been raging all month after two freak tornadoes were making it difficult for her to be as focused as she wanted to be on this project.
Christ. What was he supposed to do with that information?
He was gobsmacked by the emotional conflict. Maybe it wasn’t Teddy Miller but he who was the autistic one.
Well, maybe there’s enough room on the spectrum for both me and Teddy Miller.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t Milt. Sally had been screwing up so much of how the event was coming together for months. There were times when he didn’t even understand what it was she was doing as “producer” that he wasn’t having to do himself. Yet, of the two of them, she was the one getting paid by CineRanchero!
Then again again, Sally’s neighborhood was on fire. So, how angry could he really be at her during this tragic time?
Before he could reconcile his combating thoughts and emotions, he saw an email from Dillon Rogers, with a subject heading in panicky caps, punctuated by an endless string of exclamation points.
Uh, oh.
“Turns out….” Dillon’s email began.
What “turned out” was the fact that Dillon hadn’t been receiving any of the emails that Milt had been sending to the budding rock star and musical collaborator on a small handful of pilots that Gil was always trying to help his younger colleagues get off the ground (without success; but Dillon had made for a terrific interviewee in the documentary).
The problem, Dillon went on to say, in not having received these emails was that he hadn’t bought his plane tickets to the CineRanchero show where he was supposed to be leading a local studio band for the promised live music segment of their event.
Dillon hadn’t realized that by agreeing to perform two of his songs that were starting to go viral on YouTube, his expenses would be reimbursed and not taken care of outright. And since it was clearly too late to buy plane tickets that would be cheap enough for him to purchase, he regrettably wouldn’t be able to make it.
He explained that he really, really, really, really wanted to come perform but that he didn’t have enough money to supplement what he was supposed to have already spent buying cheaper tickets three months earlier. He had just dumped his life savings into a new album he’d be dropping in the new year.
He apologized at the bottom of the email, and Milt immediately pulled out his phone to text Dillon back.
Like what seemed to be just about everyone else he was working with on the tour except for Gil and sometimes Wallace, Dillon would never answer a call. But he was a diligent text message responder. Most of the time.
“Hey, man, just got your email and gotta say that I’m really worried about this!” Milt texted to Dillon, who responded seconds later.
“Yeah, I know. It sucks.”
“If I somehow figure out a way to expand the budget a little, would you be able to make it?”
“No, sorry. Even a little wouldn’t make a difference. I’m actually a bit worried about how I am going to pay rent at the end of the month.”
“What about your song that’s blowing up on Spotify? I heard it sampled in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. That’s got to be good.”
“I’m not going to get paid anything for that project for another six months. Fucking lawyers, agents, and contracts, man!”
Milt slammed the table with his fist, jostling his computer screen and knocking over some of the papers he was going over for his ghostwriting project.
He leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and slowly let it out.
Okay. Let’s solve this problem.
Dillon and he kept texting back and forth, with Milt reminding Dillon that CineRanchero had already been advertising the event on their socials and main website and (hopefully?) in some kind of local press. In the advertisements, it was made clear that the up-and-coming Dillon Rogers was going to be playing a short set as part of the proceedings.
Dillon had to be there. There had to be something that could be done. Right?
Milt went so far as eviscerating any kind of personal sense of propriety he had here in dealing with someone he kind of admired, was slightly intimidated by, and that—most importantly—he didn’t really know very well, and asked Dillon if he could possibly hit up his old drummer who had been touring with Taylor Swift the last seven months for a small loan the production would pay back as soon as possible.
Dillon texted back that both Savion and he were in the poorest, most-nearly-bankrupt time of their entire lives. No matter what kind of modestly successful projects they were working on at that moment, neither was seeing a single penny. Not yet. Not for a while.
“Shit,” Milt texted finally, resigned to the reality that Dillon Rogers would not be playing the CineRanchero event and that this hiccup could so easily turn into perfect fodder for online assholes. That meant bad press for the film; and worse, Gil Gladly as a brand, which Milt had indirectly been put in charge of protecting for far too long now.
Sure, the outlets speaking about the tour and the film were few and far between. But Milt knew how that community worked. He had been a part of it himself from time to time, especially in his twenties when he could afford to do so, when he didn’t have quite the responsibilities he had now (read: Laney), and had to take on projects promising more substantial dividends.
As soon as something went wrong—something like a promised indie rocker not showing up after everyone paid way too much money for a ticket to a special screening of the Gil Gladly documentary—there’d be a deluge of so-called “articles” on what would be reported upon as a total mess, a disaster, with words like “backlash” in the clickbaitable titles. This would be punctuated by interviews with the hordes of fans who had planned on using the scant vacation time they had from work to fly out to Chicago and experience the full show as guaranteed.
Would these bloggers talk about the film and tour beforehand to help promote the goddamn thing and let the fans know what they could get in on seeing? No. Would the bloggers eagerly post about what a disaster the thing would be if Dillon Rogers didn’t show up as promised? Of course.
Welcome to “the future of journalism.”
It was time for Milt to hit up Gil Gladly, who was thankfully old enough to answer his phone.
Milt started dialing,
breathing deeply. He thought about how he had been doing his best to keep Gil guarded from clusterfucks like these as the tour continued to come together. Beyond Gil’s anxiety, the sexagenarian had his recent heart problems to keep under control, problems that Gil had had to keep out of the news for fear of appearing far too old and too frail to ever be brought back in front of the camera where he so desperately wanted to be again.
There it was again. The bulk of bloggers couldn’t care less that the man was touring around with a new film, something that he and a cadre of young, hardworking, creative people had actually produced; but as soon as the same online scavengers caught wind that the old dude might croak because of a heart problem, they’d be all over it.
Without so much as a hello, Gil picked up and told Milt that he only had five minutes. Milt timorously revealed the Dillon Rogers problem to Gil. Milt could hear Gil’s astonishment at the very idea Dillon was more or less broke. Milt did his best to sneak in something quick about how that was the kind of thing he himself and everyone in their bracket in the creative field were coping with these days, but Gil went right into how he didn’t really want Dillon to play the show anyway.
WHAT?
Milt calmed down for a second and stood up, pushing his chair back with his butt. He began pacing nervously, clutching the phone to his ear like it was a seashell whose plangent ocean sounds he was trying to more closely hear.
He did what he could to explain to Gil about the whole advertising and “backlash” concern to no avail. Gil had to go and, besides, he said, “They’re coming to see me, not Dillon. His head’s been getting a little too big since the Dunkin’ Donuts commercial anyway.”
Gil clicked off. Milt was fucked. He’d get blamed for this. Gil would forget he had said this, as would happen from time to time in such situations. When everyone started ruthlessly attacking the film and tour, Gil would be unspeakably pissed at Milt for allowing it to happen.
Milt was also growing slightly alarmed at the ease and frequency with which Gil could so matter-of-factly offer his clandestine, often snarky commentary on other people around him. For a brief moment, Milt wondered what Gil told people about him.
But no time for that now. Milt did have to admit the amount of dirt Gil claimed to have on Matthew Broderick (for whatever weird reason) was startlingly impressive.
There had to be a way to expand the budget and make it work. He called Sally Miranda. He needed to actually talk to her. They needed to exchange words, not emails. He needed her to pick up the goddamn phone.
Her voicemail was a cheery, typical greeting followed by a statement about being reached more easily over email and text.
Knowing it wouldn’t matter in the end, Milt didn’t bother leaving a voicemail and instead texted Sally to see if she could talk. To Milt’s great amazement and slowly ascending hope, Sally actually texted back. She claimed to be in a meeting and said they could text but not long. Milt asked if she could take a moment away from her meeting so they could actually talk; he’d keep it brief. Sally said she couldn’t and that he needed to just text her.
Milt told her about the Dillon Rogers kerfuffle and that they needed to work out some plan, especially since CineRanchero itself had already paid for the instrument rentals and engineer for the show. To do so right, he would need to talk with her one-on-one.
She suggested emailing her; she couldn’t keep texting because she was at the meeting and someone else was emailing her right then anyway and she had to answer that right away.
Sally ended the conversation by saying she would do her best to get back in touch with him soon. “I PROMISE this time,” she texted.
CHAPTER 7
“I’m pooing right now,” was what Milt heard Melody Winston say over the phone.
“Thank you for your brave honesty,” Milt said, his cell phone cradled between his right cheek and shoulder. “You’re a regular Lena Dunham.”
He was concurrently typing up an email and finishing a brief conversation with Melody, his ex-girlfriend.
Why his ex-girlfriend Melody would pick up the phone while she was shitting was a question he didn’t bother asking her. He knew Melody quite well; Melody did things like this.
She would sometimes pick up the phone at her work and whisper in conspiratorial concentration camp tones, “I can’t talk right now; I need to call you back later.”
In those instances, Milt would always ask himself why the hell she would bother picking up the phone at all. Why not just let the call roll over to voicemail? Why not just text back, “Sorry at work can’t talk hit me up later” like the rest of the people in her generation?
As was the case with a large number of interviewees he had spoken with over the years for his various articles and documentary projects (hence his relationship, such that it was, with Gil Gladly that had led to his nudging the man into allowing him to make a doc), Milt had a peculiar tendency of staying in touch with his ex-girlfriends.
Milt had visited Melody once or twice over the years when she lived in Queens with her four hateful roommates and one recalcitrant toilet. Milt would on occasion have some sort of business or the indication of business in New York City, and he would either stay with Melody or would somehow devise a way for her to stay with him in whatever apartment he’d find on Craigslist or, in more recent years, Airbnb.
They usually shared a good evening together.
“I really enjoy my poos,” Melody said, without a hint of childishness to her proclamation. She meant it.
“Ugh,” Milt said. “This just keeps getting worse and worse, the longer I stay on talking to you.”
Melody laughed uproariously on the other end. Though she never cackled, there was always something decidedly witchy about Melody’s laughter. He could see in his mind’s eye the uncannily wide smile on her face, eyes closed, and huge mouth laughing loudly. All this while she was on the shitter.
Melody had a kind of evil stepmother disposition. Something definitely prim and proper, almost sophisticated and patrician, yet with a twinge of malevolence about it. Like she was always getting ready to tsk you for some heinous wrong she believed you’d committed.
While Milt couldn’t quite put his finger on it, it made sense in this incident that she was seemingly getting off on announcing to him that she was defecating at the very same time they were having a conversation.
For some reason, he couldn’t get off the phone with her.
Melody was probably Milt’s favorite ex-girlfriend. The one he had talked to and seen the most over the years. His guidance was often needed to help Melody out with whatever melodramatic soap opera situation she had gotten herself into this time.
There was no question Melody was doing much better now that she was a little older. She was only five or six years younger than Milt, but up until maybe a year or two ago, he had long felt that she was far younger than that.
Melody was always getting herself into dramatic scenarios, a kind of kid sister who constantly needed rescuing, especially back in her days living in Astoria. It was a breeding ground for young people like Melody and Milt, creatives trying to find their way in New York City…but ending up in, yes, Astoria.
“Milty, two nights ago I woke up in the apartment of some guy I didn’t know, wearing his t-shirt,” Melody told him over coffee when he’d been out there producing a short film about talking mice a few years back. “I’m not sure what he did, but he was asleep next to me when I got up, and I ran out of there before he woke up. Should I take his shirt back to him?”
“Not again, Melody!”
He felt confident being able to talk to her this way, at this point being more like a snotty older brother who could make her laugh like a witch, but who could also speak with her bluntly and treat her like a full-grown adult often making indecorous choices.
Milt felt a strange, familial duty to be as forthright with Melody as possible, considering all she otherwise had was a tiny coterie of minor fair-weather friends at the time, none of whom wou
ld ever dare say such a thing to her for fear of seeming insensitive or potentially opening themselves up to some kind of nasty statement made about their callousness via Melody’s long-running blog, pieces of which would sometimes get picked up by lower-rank female millennial-oriented blogs.
This last idiosyncrasy was something Melody stopped engaging in right before she left New York in disgust about “the person I was becoming,” as she had phrased it. Part of which revelation involved one of her pieces being so summarily distorted by the, hmmm, “editors” at Univision-owned SweetiePies.net that she vowed from then on to keep her judgmental views on her dwindling group of friends to herself.
Since having left New York, Melody stopped blogging altogether and focused more on bettering herself and working on her career as a communications director for nonprofit organizations, like the one she had found a few hours outside of Portland, Oregon where her mom and sister separately lived, and where she had been raised in her broken, dysfunctional home that helped forge her into the fucked-up person she was trying not to be any longer upon entering her thirties.
“What are you doing right now, Milty?” Melody asked, this time purposely intoning a childish timbre to her voice. “Why aren’t you paying total attention to me?”
“I’m working,” Milt said. “I’m always working. I’m trying to get all this shit handled for the tour, and I can’t deal with some of these people much longer.”
“Awww, poor Milty…” Melody said. Then, “Whoops!”
“What?” Milt asked.
“I farted, and I thought you might have heard me,” she confessed.
“Christ, you really are disgusting,” Milt said. “Dunham has nothing on you!”
“Awww, no, you love me,” Melody said. “You love when I’m pooing and farting.”
“Oy, sick,” Milt said. “You’re the most revolting ex-girlfriend I have.”
Selling Nostalgia Page 6