Selling Nostalgia

by Mathew Klickstein

  Knowing the drill when it came to dealing with Milt too, Louis quickly changed the subject. “Oh, hey, by the way, you guys need to make sure you’re all prepared for the heat wave out here.”

  “Heat wave? It’s almost winter,” Milt said. “They’re having snow storms destroying everything in parts of the country.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I think it’s related to the drought down there in SoCal or something. I dunno. Crazy world these days, ain’t it? Whatever it is, it’s going on, and old people are passing out in the streets, little kids are slipping into comas, and it’s just something you guys gotta be prepared for. Make sure there’s lots of water at the event and make sure you all have A/C in your hotel rooms and shit.”

  “Jesus,” Milt said. “2017! Woo-hoo!”

  “How you doing otherwise? You holding up?”

  “I guess,” Milt said, stepping up to one of the fatter, older guys in the smoking group. “Hey, man, could I bum a cigarette?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Rogen!” the man said, guffawing along with the rest of the group, handing Milt a Camel Light from his battered pack.

  “What was that?” Louis asked on the other end of the phone.

  Milt toddled away from the rollicking coven and pulled out an orange Bic lighter he had in his back jean pocket, lit his cigarette, and took a drag, exhaling before responding. “Some people outside the bar. They all think I look like Seth Rogen. Worth it for a cig. I can’t believe I’m smoking again.”

  “You do look like Seth Rogen!” Louis cracked up. “But aside from that indignity, you’re doing okay? Not jumping off any bridges or anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How’s the book you’re ghostwriting? It’s coming along while you’re doing all this other shit with the movie?”

  “For now.”

  “Laney?”

  “Still married.”

  “Hey, man. Then you’re good. And you’re gonna be fine.”

  “You sure about that?” Milt asked, sucking on his cigarette, exhaling his smoke, and watching someone screaming out of their car window at a motorcycle struggling to get going in front of him in the electric traffic parade a few feet away.

  “Yup,” Louis said. “Money-back guarantee. You just gotta remember that this is the life, you know? This is the industry you’re in, the one you chose to be a part of and work in. You gotta just deal. But it’s worth it in the end, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah…” Milt said, somewhat reluctantly. “Well, do what Vanilla would do and stay ‘cool as ice’ out there in the heat wave.”

  “Yeah,” Louis said, “I’m following Schwarzenegger’s advice in Batman & Robin.”

  At the same time, Louis and Milt said, “Chhhhillllll!”

  CHAPTER 13

  Milt Siegel wasn’t sure what he wanted, though he did know he wanted sleep.

  He thought of the Edgar Allen Poe quote—“Sleep / Those little slices of Death / How I loathe them”—that was used in not one but two Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

  He was lying there—recalling that a person “lies” and a thing “lays” (how to remember the grammar rule? people lie)—on Gabe’s couch, staring up at the cottage cheese ceiling. It had to have been 2:00 a.m. by now.

  There was no way he was getting to sleep tonight.

  He was grateful Frankly didn’t snore. This was something he had learned from the two years or thereabouts he had lived with the man back in his firebrand LA days. What had it been, ten years ago? How did it become that long? How was that possible? Milt flashed on Back to the Future.

  Milton Siegel was a pop culture guy. There was no getting around it. Maybe he was, deep down, a salivating fanboy. But couldn’t he be an executive fanboy? A la how the comedian/actor Eddie Izzard had in the past referred to himself as being an executive transvestite? Back when you were “allowed” to say such things? It had only been, what? oh, ten years. Again.

  As much as he wanted to divorce himself from that entire fandom scene, had he become one of them? He worried that, in analyzing and scrutinizing and observing his own Chernobyl here, he had accidentally found himself tainted by the fall-out radiation.

  You can’t get that close, he thought, without becoming part of it.

  Could you?

  Maybe he was on the autism spectrum. Maybe…maybe everyone was? Especially these days.

  He turned on his side and regarded the large, beautiful TV screen, immaculately onyx, bordered by polished silver trim. How was it that Gabe could have such a shitty apartment, so vile, and yet here in the middle of the squalor was this incredible, super-expensive television? What was wrong with that picture?

  And here was Milt lying on the scuzzy, scratchy couch. Who knew what material it had been made from…or what street Gabe had plucked it from?

  It was LA, where anything, unfortunately, was possible. Milt cringed at the “pregnant couch” his roommates and he had had back in their off-campus three-bedroom while he was finishing film school at UCLA.

  They called it the “pregnant couch” because, after dragging it in off the curb about a quarter mile up the street in an alleyway, they lugged it into their living room to discover that, though it was comfortable as all hell, it was so disgustingly squalid that even after wiping it down with every bit of cleaning product they had, they still determined that it remained so infested with grody-ness that if a girl were to lie on it naked, she’d likely get pregnant.

  Milt thought of these things, clenching his bowels, wanting to take a shit worse than anything he could imagine. But he would not. Not in Gabe’s bathroom. It was not safe. He was too coy to use the facilities here. The pregnant couch was one of his Corinthians 1:13 “childish things” that he had done away with on his way to becoming a man. Never again would Milt sit on something that could get a girl pregnant…or give him hives.

  He knew Laney would make fun of him about it. He didn’t care.

  His mind raced. And it was losing.

  Milt tried to recall a time in his life—it had to have been when he was a dumb kid, back in high school or maybe junior high school? Elementary school?—when he didn’t worry like this. When he wasn’t so tremblingly nervous about everything.

  MoneygirlsLaneyloveromanceEVERYTHINGAllThatthestufftheshowsBalloonGilGladlyGoodGollyGilGladlyShitsmelledSilvertseinThoseASSHOLESEVERYONEEVERYTHINGeverythingEVERYTHINGEverythingAllAtOnceTVShowsWHOCaredWHOCARESWhyAMIDOINGTHISGODDAMNITMONEYMONEYMONEYLaneyLaneyLaneyMarriageGettingOLDERThingsHurtA…LOTLoveRomanceMoneyThingsEVERYHINGALLATONCEAGAINGODDAMNITPLEASEGODHELPMEDoyoureallyexistatallSHOULDIPRAYTOANCESTORSWHOAREDEADANDMAYBEWATCHINGOVERMEOhGodIdon’tknowifI’mlyingaboutEVERYthing.

  This was the swirling folderol of thoughts in Milt’s mind that consumed him, wrapped around him like the smoky words from the Caterpillar’s hookah in Alice in Wonderland.

  Throughout it all, his stomach was begging him to please evacuate his bowels. He would not. No way. Gabe’s bathroom was a travesty. Talk about Chernobyl.

  Especially since Gabe’s roommate had been sick, there was no way Milt would touch anything in that den of evil.

  No. He could hold it in.

  Staring up at the ceiling, listening to Frankly on the chair next to him not snoring and the white noise of his fan, Milt realized that he should have used the bathroom at the Thai place up the street they’d all gone to after the bar and acerbic deconstruction of Blade Runner 2049 only a few hours earlier.

  He could feel the churning, burning feeling in his stomach. The shifting around of what felt like slugs set aflame moving about freely and without care in his guts. He worried about colon cancer. He thought of a friend of a friend only a few years older than he who had died of colon cancer about two years earlier. His mutual friend had sent out a group email to everyone he knew, proclaiming, “PLEASE, GET YOURSELF CHECKED OUT SO THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN TO YOU!”

  Oh, my God, Milt thought. Am I dying?

  He was getting so old. Things hurt. He remembered an older friend—upon Milt’
s thirtieth birthday, at which he twisted his ankle dancing at a party—patting him (hard) on the back and guffawing, “Welcome to thirty, motherfucker! Now everything will hurt! All the time!”

  Yikes and zounds.

  Oh, but if he could only afford medical insurance….

  What was he doing on this fucking tour? And why hadn’t he taken a shit at that goddamn Thai place they’d all gone to after the bar?

  The Thai place.

  It was only a few blocks up from Gabe’s place. It was a few hours after Meg’s bar that they ended up meeting with three of Gabe’s team members from his intramural beer-swilling softball league, grabbed a few more drinks at a different bar, then stopped in for a late-night snack at the aforementioned Thai restaurant by Gabe’s house.

  Milt didn’t remember much. He had had a lot of Wild Turkeys by the time they’d arrived at the spicy-sweet smelling exotic eatery.

  There were blurs of the very two-dimensional, pastel-colored Asian paintings framed cheaply on the walls. Sumo wrestlers, haunting wilderness nymphs, angry demons and beasts, some with feathers and some with wings. No dragons, but he got the idea without having to completely check out every single randomly-sized and randomly-shaped picture hanging on those off-white eggshell walls.

  The tables had been wood. Likely wood. Maybe wood? They had been a dark cherrywood color, hadn’t they? Milt couldn’t quite recall in his distrait, half-asleep mezzanine state staring up at Gabe’s ceiling.

  Next came muddled memories of some kind of peanut butter chicken noodles. Wasn’t that what they had been?

  The Thai place had not been too large or too loud. He was fairly certain he was the only person there along with Gabe, Frankly, and Gabe's three indistinguishable hangers-on pals.

  Milt was fairly certain Trucker Hat from Meg’s bar had joined them too, now that he thought about it. There was definitely something they had ordered and potentially eaten that had some kind of peanut-buttery goodness to it.

  There were the two girls—he remembered them—at the Thai place bar across from Milt’s gang’s table.

  Milt had no recollection of the music, if there had been any at all.

  But those girls at the bar. Neither of them could have been over twenty-eight. The perfect age. Young enough to be feisty and supple. Old enough to be experienced and knowledgeable. He loved twenty-eight-year-old girls.

  It had been all in good fun. Especially since he’d soon learn one of the girls was a lesbian. Perhaps both. That he’d never learn.

  What had happened was the two girls were there in a heated discussion with one another. It couldn’t have been much earlier than 11:30 p.m. Maybe after midnight.

  The girl on the right was likely younger than the one on the left. They straddled their stools like men. The left girl was darker, exotic. She had tousled brown hair, zits, and purple-rimmed glasses. She wore (pre-)ripped jeans and a silver rain slicker that seemed extremely inappropriate weather-wise for Southern California, even during the late fall. Her shirt under her slicker had the wording and logo for the show Daria watched on her eponymous cartoon, Sick, Sad World.

  Girl on the right was taller, larger, chubbier, more doll-like, with wavy dirty-blonde hair down to her shoulders. She had impressively large azure eyes, nervous wrinkles lining her forehead, and wore what appeared to be a reddish (diamond-studded?) jumpsuit that she had to have gotten from an old relative or wildly overpriced vintage shop on Sunset. The kind of outfit that looked like it was purloined from the trash but probably cost a minimum of $700. Pre-owned.

  She had, of course, dark-red Beatle boots on.

  She was, overall, a dead ringer for an older, funk-influenced version of Kirsten Dunst’s “Claudia” from Interview with the Vampire.

  The two girls were fighting (perhaps?) over something Dirty Blonde had said about breaking up with her latest girlfriend. The one on the left (who may not have been a lesbian) was upset that her friend was still pining after this bitch when she knew Dirty Blonde was better than that.

  They hot potato’d the conversation back and forth, and Milt, watching all along while Gabe and the guys were loudly laughing and carrying on about some kind of sporting something-or-other that Milt didn’t give a shit about, couldn’t help himself any longer. He had to break through the TV screen. He called out, “You girls having a good time? Because I almost am! But I’m surrounded by fucking dudes!”

  The girls turned to him and said nothing. At first.

  Then Dirty Blonde got into the circus act. “Oh, yeah?” she said, directing her Dunst doll eyes right at him, blinking amorously.

  Gabe and the guys curtailed their loud chatter and turned to the girls at the bar who they apparently hadn’t noticed until now. There were only two people working this late, likely the owner’s son and his wife, and they didn’t seem to care that customers were yelling across the restaurant to each other.

  “What do you know about what it’s like to get dumped by your girlfriend…on your birthday?” Dirty Blonde asked.

  “You think you chicks are the only ones who know what it’s like to have your heart fucked with like that?” Milt said, surprised that the words flowed out of his mouth so easily.

  Gabe laughed awkwardly as he tended to do, fucking up the whole thing. “Did you just say heart?”

  “Yeah!” Dirty Blonde and Milt had said at the same, looking at Gabe, before turning back to one another. Oh, shit, and now Dirty Blonde hopped off her stool (she was much shorter than she had appeared; maybe five-foot-two?) and advanced on Milt’s communal cherrywood (?) table.

  Everyone at the table was laughing loudly. Except for Milt, whose eyes were locked with Dirty Blonde’s.

  “You’re the asshole of the group, aren’t you?” Dirty Blonde said, walking right up to him. Milt would not turn his head. He would not look away. He was up for the challenge. He would WIN, goddamn it!

  She came closer to him as he replied, “We’re all assholes here, but I’m definitely the head.”

  “What’s that?” Dirty Blonde’s friend back on the stool asked. “You give good head?”

  “No, no,” Milt said shaking his head, smirking. “You guys are the requisite gays in the Hollywood late-night Thai place. Not we.”

  Oooooooh! It felt like they were back in elementary school, calling and responding to the girls’ table from the boys’ table.

  “You sure about that?” Frankly asked from the side of the table where he was sitting, smug and sardonic as always.

  “Well, I don’t know these three guys that well,” Milt said, pointing at Gabe’s softball teammates who were all cracking up, “but I’d think they’d dress a bit better if—”

  “Would it surprise you to know that my friend here is not gay?” Dirty Blonde said, pointing to her pal back at the stool.

  “Congratulations?” Milt said.

  Huge gales of laughter now, with Dirty Blonde’s face right in Milt’s. A game of Chicken now. Who would flinch first?

  She gazed into his eyes with the intensity of a Steve Jobs death-stare, but Milt was unmoved. He leaned back in his chair away from her as she lunged at him, grabbing him by the shoulders. She hugged him tightly, turning to everyone else at the table and her friend back at the stool. “I love this guy,” she said. “You’re my favorite.”

  Then she pecked him on the cheek.

  Reminiscing about this back on the couch in Gabe’s den of iniquity, Milt couldn’t help but wonder—Sex and the City style—if he had said something different (or at all) at this moment, if he had made some kind of move or maneuver, if he had kept the goofy bullshit going, or had maybe kissed her back on the cheek, if right now he’d be home with Dirty Blonde at her place, really proving to her and to himself that, indeed, sexuality was amorphous, that anyone could be anything they want to be, that labels really were for cans.…

  But no.

  That’s not what happened. Thankfully. He didn’t need to do that. There were any number of ways that could have gone bad. He enj
oyed flirting. He likely always would. Laney enjoyed flirting too. She also likely always would.

  But, goddamn it, they were married now. He couldn’t go flounce around with any random girl who happened to pay him some positive attention, no matter how much he craved it, particularly after a youthful existence of celibate nerdiness that led him wanting well up into his early twenties.

  Was this the story of everyone? he wondered, staring up at the wall, hearing Frankly not-snore but shift around in his puffy easy chair.

  Did a lot of people like Milton Siegel grow up with little or no sexual conquests to speak of, only to grow into a better, more improved person in his or her twenties, then suddenly go mad with lust once the attention started to pour in from the outside world at last?

  Milt thought about looking into this idea more. It seemed trite, like some kind of rom-com plotline he’d seen far too many times before. But perhaps he could put something together. Interview various “geek icons” out there about what their childhood was like compared to the successful adulthood they were now in, and perhaps talk with psychologists and neurologists and sexperts and….

  Then he shifted to his left side, lying on his left arm, which hurt his left shoulder as it always did, and stared at a purple stain on the couch (does anyone really drink grape juice anymore? Jesus Christ, Gabe!) and realized if he were any real writer, he would go off and try to put together some kind of well-researched thinkpiece on the topic.…

  But who was he kidding? He wouldn’t do that for any number of reasons, the least of which being he couldn’t put himself through the process of researching, reaching out to people, conducting interviews, transcribing the interviews, and putting it all together in a snappy, short piece that he’d then have to pitch around and talk with friends and editors at different outlets only to find out he’d get to have it published, but for little to no money. And not for months in the future.