“I’ll put the phone up to my butt cheek the next time I feel one coming out, okay, Milty-Poo?” Melody chirped.
“Please don’t,” Milt said. “Hey, so are you going to be around when we’re in Portland for the tour? I’d really like to see you. We’ve got a screening at McMenamins.”
“Ohhh, we’ll see,” Melody answered, sounding adult, officious. It was as though she would have to “check her schedule” and maybe see about “fitting him in.” No irony, except of course, the dramatic kind.
How quickly she could vacillate between goofy neoteny and the cold harridan act, Milt thought, quietly proud of the observation and his mental use of the word “harridan.”
His neck was starting to hurt. He had completely stopped typing his email to Louis Bradley, his old friend and fellow filmmaker/writer helping him produce the upcoming Portland screening, which would be the terminus of their brief nationwide preview tour..
He switched ears before saying, “Look, I know you want to see me and I want to see you too. It’s been forever since we’ve hung out. You can grab some coffee or a dinner with me.”
“Are you paying?”
“Duh,” he said. “When have I ever not paid?”
“When we were still together,” Melody laughed. “You never had any money back then.”
“Yeah, because you were always making us go to sushi and shit, which costs a fucking fortune in New York!” Milt fired back.
“Oh, Milty-Poo,” Melody cooed.
“Eww,” Milt said.
“What?”
“That time I did hear you,” he said. “I heard a plunk. You’re sick.”
“You love me.”
“Yeah, yeah, just do what you can to be around when we have the screening at the end of the month, okay? It’ll be a way for you to escape your mom and sister after having to endure Thanksgiving with them.”
“Why do you want to see me so bad, anyway?” Melody asked, inevitably bringing up, “Aren’t you married now?”
“Laney knows I still talk to some of my exes. You’re not the only one.”
“Ohhhh,” Melody said. “I’m not? Holy macanoli!”
“Yeah, you can add that to your fucking blog,” he said. “Just make sure to add the only reason you know ‘Holy macanoli’ is because I forced you to watch all those episodes of Punky Brewster when we were still together.”
Melody laughed, and this time it did sound a bit like a cackle.
“I still have one of the VHS tapes you left at my apartment in Astoria,” Melody said. “You’re right, they’re better to watch all wonky and second-generation like that than the remastered episodes online or on DVD.”
“Totally,” Milt agreed. “Plus, you get the commercials that were on back then as an added bonus. The Slip ‘N Slide one is a classic.”
Milt thought it best to pull back. He knew that Melody was the kind of girl—courtesy of her rather tenebrous upbringing—who had a tendency to recoil from advances. She preferred those who played hard to get, whether friend or lover. Or, as Milt had noticed over the years, even parent. There was nothing that made Melody complain about her mom or divorced, mostly estranged father as when they would actually attempt to reach out to her in the rarely loving way.
She had presented a valid point, though. Milt had to admit that. Why was he so fixated on seeing Melody when he’d be out in Portland for the screening? He was married, sure. And though over the years they’d been broken-up (even while in other relationships) they’d messed around a bit when he’d be visiting Queens, she’d never let him actually fuck her anyway. Not really.
Damn it, he was married. No matter what had been going on between Laney and he, he needed to calm down about all of this.
And yet, there was also an element of not backing down. The same drive that made him so adept as a producer and hustler in the creative realm was that which throttled him forward to accomplish and complete whatever mission he was on, including getting an ex-girlfriend of his to meet up with him even if it was just for coffee…or whatever.
It was a sense of not wanting to be rejected by Melody. Or at least not feeling as though he was being rejected. Who was Melody Winston, after all? Some nutty girl he’d met while writing for a bullshit clickbait content farm back during one of his tempestuous stints in New York? Some girl he’d dated on and off through an even more tempestuous “relationship” of mostly drinking heavily, tracking down and doing coke, fighting, eating food way out of their price range, and fucking their brains out til all hours of the night?
That was who Melody Winston was. Wasn’t she?
And here Milt was, coming out to Portland—the Portland, like from the TV show!! Where the music came from!! Where everything was “craft” this and “artisanal” that!!—for a screening of his damn movie that he’d spent the last two years making through sheer panic and fervent will and calling in every single fucking favor from every single fucking person he’d ever met from all over the fucking country.
“Milty-Poooooooooo, where’d you go?”
“I was just thinking for a second,” Milt said.
“Me too.” Melody let out a loud, gut-wrenching fart, followed by a tremendous, truly impressive belch. “Fuck, I’m so gassy!”
“Yo, I really gotta finish up this email to Louis,” he said. “Just do what you can to meet up. Or not. I’d really like to see you and I’d really like you to see the film. But it’s up to you.”
“Ohhhhkay,” she practically sang. “I’ll do what I can. Say hi to Laney for me. Hey, why isn’t she coming?”
“We can’t afford it.”
“See?”
“I’m getting there,” Milt said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got stuff coming together.”
“Yeah, yeah, you always do,” Melody’s voice intoned from the phone, dripping with syrupy sarcasm.
“Okay, love you.”
“Love you too, byyyyye,” Melody said with a toddler-like burp.
Melody hung up and Milt went back to finishing his email to Louis Bradley, asking him if the two bands they had playing the after-party of the Portland screening needed anything else aside from the riders he’d received two weeks earlier.
Louis immediately emailed back that he was handling it all for now, everyone at McMenamins was very excited about the upcoming event, and asked if Gil knew if the local TV station that was going to be hosting the event and broadcasting a live feed from the screening, Q&A, after-party concert, and all was merely “sponsoring” the event in name only, or if they were actually going to be putting any money in.
“You know,” Louis had added at the end of his email, “so I can let the bands know if they’re going to be getting anything aside from a cut of the door.”
There was absolutely no way that Milt felt comfortable hitting up Gil Gladly about this right now. Despite the fact only Gil himself would know what the deal was here.
Then again, as Milt was getting used to throughout this whole quixotic enterprise, it was just as likely Gil didn’t know the answer to Louis’ question, even if he had been the one who had gotten WTDM involved in the event, courtesy one of his many former proteges who was now an assistant programming director there.
Either way, it was not something Milt wanted to deal with right now. Just as he did not want to deal with the fact that he had also seen an email come through from Ronnie Clark. The email had been sent to not only Milt, but to all the people involved in the CineRanchero screening, including Sally Miranda.
An email from Ronnie that could conceivably put a kibosh on the whole goddamn thing in Chicago.
Fuck!
For some reason, Ronnie had taken it upon himself to tell the folks at CineRanchero to provide him with all manner of props and assistance for a new “brilliant” idea he had had that would make the event that much more “spellbinding” and “fantastical for fans and newbies coming to the film alike.”
Oy.
Milt shook his head, called Ronnie, upbraided him appro-pri
ately without sounding too much like an asshole, and emailed everyone to say there had been a communication breach and that they of course did not need to suddenly revamp the entire event a few days in advance solely because one of the crew members on the film had some grand flight of fancy about a whole other direction it could take…that would also make the whole thing twice as expensive to produce than originally budgeted.
Milt went so far as to text Sally, apologizing to her for the email mistake. Much to his surprise, she texted him right back:
“NO WORRIES! SEE YOU IN CHICAGO!”
He exhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and wondered if this would be a good time to meditate. Or perhaps go to the gym in his mom’s Orwellian all-inclusive senior community. Or perhaps get some more much-needed work done on his ghostwriting project. His deadline was approaching before the holidays and he did need that next part of the advance that would come with delivery of draft one. And he needed it soon.
But no. He was exhausted.
He would do no more work. He would not go to the gym. He knew this to be true. He would head to the one bathroom his mom had in her one-story two-bedroom apartment, jerk off to Melody’s fabulous ass in his mind’s eye (without the farting…most likely), take a shower, and of course, get ready to go see Frankly, who was likely on his way from Costa Mesa even now.
Milt always loved jerking off to Melody’s fabulous ass, what with its delicious and pristine half-eaten red apple tattoo on its right side. Something about that tat. He had seen a broken heart on another girl’s ass he used to bang. He had seen the cliché cherry-red kissy lips in various porns before. But Melody’s half-eaten apple was…ripe.
Yes, after another in a long line of blurred, seemingly dreamlike days on the job, the adventure was at last about to truly commence. Milton Siegel knew exactly how he would spend a miniscule but essential tranche of that final, hard-earned Unemployment payment.
He couldn’t wait for Frankly to arrive and take him away for a night they’d both wholeheartedly enjoy.
CHAPTER 8
Milt shooed away the offering of an extravagantly well-formed lit joint in Frankly’s one hand while he drove his dented silver Honda Civic with the other. Milt was busy being an emotional punching bag for Gil Gladly’s fulminating venting on the other end of the cell phone wedged to his right ear.
“C-c-c-can you b-b-b-b-elieve it?” Gil erupted through the cell phone speaker.
Milt glanced over at Frankly, leaning back in his seat comfortably as though in a Hawaiian resort lounge chair, poolside. Frankly had one hand on the wheel, the other clutching the smoldering joint, the only light aside from the Matrix-green cockpit illumination of the car dashboard in the near darkness as they sped forth on the traffic-less 405 North.
Milt tried to lock eyes with Frankly, but his compatriot’s eyes were on the road and maybe veering off to somewhere else altogether. One never knew with Frankly, particularly when he was stoned.
“Yeah,” Milt finally answered back to Gil on the phone. “That totally sucks. I can’t believe they keep doing this to you. You’re right, Gil. Yup.”
“I m-m-m-mean, they call me up, they w-w-w-w-waste my time, they have m-m-m-m-m-m-m-me come all the f-f-f-f-f-f-fuck the w-w-w-w-way out to fucking New York, f-f-f-f-f-flake on the m-m-m-meeting…twice…and…and—th-th-th-then finally have the goddamn meeting, no one is there except for f-f-f-f-fucking Rollins, and I know h-h-h-h-h-he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s not l-l-l-l-l-l-like he can do anything at that fucking p-p-p-p-place anyway. They get me to consult on this new sh-sh-sh-sh-ow they’re trying to do which is basically just KidTalk all over again…and n-n-n-now they’re back to not answering my c-c-c-c-alls again when I ch-ch-ch-check in about it! Th-th-th-thanks for w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-wasting m-m-my f-f-f-f-fucking t-t-t-time, motherfuckers!”
Frankly looked over, somewhat interested, hearing bits and pieces of the rant, with Milt doing his best to communicate with his eyes, Please stop smoking the joint, you know how much it makes me freak out in the car on the freeway, to no avail. Instead of responding to Milt’s telepathic entreaty, Frankly looked back to the road, scrunching down in his seat to allow himself to lean back a little further as he drove on.
“I don’t really understand why you bother trying to deal with Balloon at all, Gil,” Milt said, trying to sound practical without being out of his depth. Gil had practically built Balloon back in the eighties during his long reign, and so who was Milt to consult on how the minor mogul should deal with his old employer and near lifetime frenemy?
“What the fuck is he talking about?” Frankly stage-whispered without turning his neck.
Milt shook his head violently—Please don’t talk, please don’t say anything, please don’t reveal that anyone else is with me right now while Gil Gladly friggin’ berates an entire billion-dollar global television network that, by the way, we all grew up on back when it was still good and the man practically ran the place.
Frankly smirked that Frankly smirk of his, shook his head subtly, had a hit of his joint, and applied more pressure to the accelerator.
The truth was that what Gil was talking about was nothing new. This kind of exchange had been happening on and off between Gil Gladly and Balloon throughout the entire time Milt had known him, which was going on seven years now.
Why did Gil do it to himself?
Milt had written about and interviewed countless people from the “old days” at Balloon, the earlier administration, executives, show creators, and stars. This was how he’d met Gil Gladly in the first place.
Milt knew things about Balloon that no one knew, one of those things being that the network was a very different place than what it had been when it first started.
It had at one time been an art haven of sorts. It was once a play place for creative, young, innovative, wild, crazy, cartoonish people…like Gil Gladly. A place where they could run amuck and do whatever they wanted, because there wasn’t much money, which meant there wasn’t much risk, but also that there was a whole lot of needful, resourceful innovation going on in those small offices and studio sets where people made desks out of cardboard boxes and props in the executive offices.
These factors colluded into the production of what many believed to be some of the most unique, vibrant, irreverent, and strange children’s programming ever seen…before, whoops, they accidentally did too well of a job and everyone who made the shit got bought off and rocketed off to their personal fortunes at larger, long-established “real” TV channels. No more kid stuff for them!
Meanwhile, back at Balloon, in came the new administration to fill in the staffing gap that was left, and by the mid-nineties, the channel had gone from being the “anti” to the “it.”
When Milt would get asked in interviews why he never bothered talking to people who worked at Balloon now, he always pivoted with his pat response: “That would be like writing about your favorite Chinese restaurant you used to go to all the time with your family when you were a kid thirty years later now that it’s an Italian restaurant. Same building, different owners, menu, and kitchen staff.”
And the owners, menu, and kitchen staff that came to Balloon over the span of its later years? They were not fun, were not innovative or strange or irreverent. They were business. They were scared of rocking the boat. They were scared of losing their jobs. They came up with saccharine, antiseptic programming that at best merely mirrored previous successes, like this show they were developing in part with Gil, sort of, that was basically a reboot of KidTalk. At worst, the later programming on Balloon was the kind of baffling pabulum that the network had been trying to countervail in its “classic” days.
Nothing new here.
Even as a kid, Milt was precocious enough to read the trades, biographies, and autobiographies. It wasn’t enough for him to watch Looney Tunes like the rest of the kids he knew. He had to read Chuck Amuck, the story of renowned series director Chuck Jones.
Milt had long understood how th
ese kinds of things went: once again that simple and inexorable cycle of pop culture entities like Balloon, punk rock, hip-hop, and Saturday Night Live.
For some reason Milt didn’t understand, Gil Gladly still thought he could fight the ineluctability here and find those at the current Balloon who would actually listen to what he had to say about remembering to make these shows special, weird, different. As though they cared about the content, and not just the commerciality. Gil was going off of tradition, gut feeling, and word of mouth.
Yet Balloon would never swerve from their hidebound analysis of paid-for stats and data. “According to Twitter…”
Milt thought of John Henry, the mythical folk hero who had tried to prove man could still defy machine, winning in the end but losing his life along the way.
Why was Gil still fighting so indignantly with the network to get back there? Gil knew what they had become.
Then again, Milt did know Gil, who often operated on a volatile cocktail of stubbornness and pride, hadn’t exactly endeared himself publicly to the current administration of Balloon.
A quick Google search of Gil led directly to two kinds of entries: those in which Gil horribly berated the network to anyone who would listen, and in which he was essentially begging the channel to bring back KidTalk.
This Chad Rollins character was the latest exec over there with whom Gil had been locking horns. Rollins was one of Balloon’s many new “development directors” (sometimes “programming supervisors,” sometimes “directors of programming/development”; the titles changed more frequently over there than the rapid turnover, as the channel continued to hemorrhage money for staff who were experienced as opposed to simply subsidized by Mom and Dad right out of NYU, UCLA, or USC).
The tenuous relationship Gil had with Rollins exemplified the bipolar love-hate relationship Gil had with the network as a whole. There were times when Gil really hated Rollins, and would make that hatred clear. A little too loudly in public places, Milt worried.
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