The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Have you read the papers this morning?”

  “I stopped reading newspapers when I came up here. What is it now?”

  “All right, this is a good news/bad news call. What do you want to hear first?”

  “The bad news, of course. But how bad is bad?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “How attached you are to your Emmy.”

  “The bastards want it back?”

  “That’s what’s happened. As reported in this morning’s LA Times, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences passed a motion last night to strip you of your Emmy on the grounds of—”

  “I know what the grounds are.”

  “I’m really sorry, David.”

  “Don’t be. It’s an ugly piece of tin. You collected the Emmy from the apartment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then ship it on back. Good riddance. So what’s the good news?”

  “Well, this was in the same LA Times report. It seems SATWA did pass a motion at their monthly meeting last night to censure you—”

  “That’s your idea of good news?”

  “Hear me out. They did censure you, but, by a two-to-one majority, they defeated a motion to recommend you being banned from work for any given amount of time.”

  “Big deal. The studios and every damn producer in town will do that for them, with or without a SATWA resolution.”

  “Look, I know I’m going to sound like some spin doctor, but the thing is, a censure is a slap on the wrist, nothing more. So we should take this as a good sign that, in professional writing circles, people are seeing this for what this really is: bullshit.”

  “Unlike the Emmy people.”

  “They’re just playing a public relations game. When you come back . . .”

  “I don’t believe in reincarnation. Anyway, don’t you remember what Scott Fitzgerald said, in one of his few sober moments toward the end? There are no second acts in American lives.”

  “I operate according to a different theory: life is short, but writing careers are curiously long. Try to get some sleep tonight. You sound like shit.”

  “I am shit.”

  Of course, I didn’t sleep . . . but instead watched all three parts of The Apu Trilogy (six hours of Hindi domestic life from the 1950s—brilliant, but only a manic insomniac would actually sit straight through it all). Eventually I staggered into bed, waking again to the sound of a ringing phone. What day was it? Wednesday? Thursday? Time had lost all value for me. In the recent past, my life had been one long workaday sprint—during which I crammed in so much: a couple hours of writing, a few production meetings, a few brainstorming sessions, endless phone calls, a business lunch, a business dinner, a screening here, a must-be-seen-at party there. Then there were the alternate weekends with Caitlin. On the weekends I was without her, I’d spend nine hours a day in front of the computer, grinding out part of a new episode or a section of my script, pushing, pushing, pushing. Because, as I knew so damn well, I was on a roll. And when you’re on a roll, you can’t afford to stop. For if you do . . .

  The phone kept ringing. I reached for it.

  “David, it’s Walter Dickerson. Did I wake you?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Around noon. Listen, I can call back.”

  “No, no, tell me—do you have news?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “And?”

  “It’s pretty reasonable news.”

  “By which you mean . . .”

  “Your ex-wife has agreed that you can have phone contact with Caitlin.”

  “That’s a step forward, I guess.”

  “Without question. However, she has insisted on a couple of conditions. You can only call every other day, with a maximum time limit of fifteen minutes.”

  “She actually set those terms?”

  “Absolutely. And according to her lawyer, it took some convincing to get her to agree to that limited amount of telephone access.”

  “When can I make my first phone call?”

  “Tonight. Your ex-wife suggested seven p.m. as the standard time for the call. Does that work for you?”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking: My schedule isn’t exactly full. “But Mr. Dickerson . . . Walter . . . how long do you think it’ll be before I’ll be able to actually see my daughter?”

  “The honest answer to that is: it depends upon your ex-wife. If she wants to keep busting your balls—excuse my French—this could drag on for months and months. If that happened—and if your pockets were deep enough—we could take her to court. But let’s hope that, once her temper cools down, she’ll be willing to negotiate some proper physical access. But like I said, it’s going to be a gradual process. I wish I had better news, but . . . as you’ve probably figured out by now, there is no such thing as an amicable divorce. And when there’s a child involved, the disagreements are endless. So, at least we’ve got you talking with Caitlin again. It’s a start.”

  As scheduled, I made that first call at seven p.m. that night. Lucy must have had Caitlin positioned by the phone, as she picked up immediately.

  “Daddy!” she said, sounding genuinely pleased to hear my voice. “Why have you disappeared?”

  “I had to go away to do some work,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to see me anymore?” she asked.

  I swallowed hard.

  “I’m desperate to see you,” I said. “It’s just . . . I can’t right now.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because . . . because . . . I’m far away, working.”

  “Mommy said you got into some trouble.”

  “That’s right, there was some trouble . . . but it’s better now.”

  “So you will be coming to see me?”

  “As soon as I can.” I took a deep breath and bit hard on my lower lip. “And meantime, we will talk all the time on the phone.”

  My composure cracked.

  “Daddy, what’s the matter?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, pulling myself back from the precipice. “Tell me what you’ve been doing at school.”

  For the next fourteen minutes, we talked about a wide variety of issues . . . from her role as an angel in her school’s upcoming Easter pageant to why she thought Big Bird was boring but Cookie Monster was cool, to her desire for a sleepover Barbie doll.

  I timed the call with my watch. Precisely fifteen minutes after Caitlin picked up, I heard Lucy’s voice in the background, saying: “Tell Daddy it’s time to stop.”

  “Daddy, it’s time to stop.”

  “Okay, my darling. I miss you terribly.”

  “I miss you too.”

  “And I’ll call you on Friday. Can I talk to your mother now?”

  “Mommy,” Caitlin said, “Daddy wants to speak with you. Bye, Daddy.”

  “Bye, darling.” Then I heard the phone being handed over to Lucy. But without uttering a word, she hung up on me.

  Naturally, this phone call took up my entire session with Matthew Sims the next day.

  “Lucy so despises me, she’ll never let me see Caitlin again.”

  “But she did let you talk to her . . . which is an improvement over where we were last week.”

  “I still brought this all on myself.”

  “David, when did you leave Lucy?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “From what you told me during our first session, you were incredibly generous as regards the division of property.”

  “She got the house—which I’d completely paid off.”

  “Since then, you’ve made all your support payments on time, you’ve been a good dad to Caitlin, and you haven’t done anything hostile or adverse toward your ex-wife.”

  “No.”

  “Well then, if she’s still harboring enmity toward you a full two years after the divorce, that is her problem, not yours. And if she’s using Caitlin as a weapon against you, she will soon be forced to confront the
fact that she is acting selfishly. Because your daughter will tell her so.”

  “I hope you’re right. But I’m still haunted by something . . .”

  “What?”

  “The fact that I should have never left them, that I made a terrible mistake.”

  “Would you really want to go back now?”

  “That would never happen. There’s too much crap under the bridge, too much bad blood. But . . . I still made a mistake. A terrible mistake.”

  “Have you ever told Lucy that?”

  When I called back on Friday, however, Lucy still wouldn’t speak to me—and instead instructed Caitlin to hang up the phone at the end of our allotted fifteen minutes. The same thing happened on Sunday—but, at least, I was able to give Caitlin my phone number at the cottage and asked her to tell Lucy that I would be staying at this number for the next few weeks.

  The decision to remain at Willard’s cottage had been an easy one to reach. I had few options—and as luck would have it, my need for longer-term accommodation coincided with Willard’s decision to stay on in London for an additional six months.

  “He’s got another big rewrite job, and he seems to like the gray gloom of that town, so it looks like you can stay up there until Christmas,” Alison said when she called me with the news. “More to the point, he’s happy to have you installed as caretaker . . . and he’s not going to charge you anything, except the utilities.”

  “Sounds fair to me.”

  “He also wanted me to tell you that he feels what’s happened to you has been totally over the top and wrong. He’s even written to the Emmy people to tell them that they’ve acted like a bunch of shitbirds.”

  “He actually used those words?”

  “An approximation.”

  “When you’re talking to him again, please tell him how grateful I am. It’s the first lucky break I’ve had in a while.”

  But my run of good luck was short-lived. The next day, a megaton bomb landed in my lap after I finally made contact with Bobby Barra.

  I rang him on his cellphone. He sounded more than a little hesitant when he heard my voice.

  “Hey guy, how’s it going?” he asked me.

  “I’ve had better months.”

  “Yeah, I heard things had been rough. Where you calling from right now?”

  I explained about Sally kicking me out and Alison finding me this coastal refuge.

  “Man, you have hit Shit City,” Bobby said.

  “Understatement of the year.”

  “Well listen, guy—sorry I haven’t been in touch, but you know I was over in Shanghai for this search engine startup. And I know you’re calling me to find out about how the IPO has shaken down.”

  An alarm bell went off between my ears.

  “What does that IPO have to do with me, Bobby?”

  “What does it have to do with you, guy? C’mon . . . you’re the one who told me to move your entire portfolio into this IPO.”

  “I never said that.”

  “The hell you didn’t. Remember that conversation we had when I called you a couple of months ago to tell you about your portfolio dividend for the last quarter?”

  “Yeah, I remember it . . .”

  “And what did I ask you?”

  He had asked me if I would like to be one of the privileged few who would be allowed to invest seriously in a surefire IPO for an Asian search engine . . . a search engine that was guaranteed to become the number one player in China and all of Southeast Asia. And—with my detailed memory for all grisly details—I remembered our entire conversation at the time.

  “This is like backing Yahoo with slopey eyes,” he said.

  “How politically correct of you, Bobby.”

  “Listen—we’re talking about the biggest untapped market in the world. And it’s the chance to get in at ground level. But I’ve got to know fast . . . you interested?”

  “You’ve never steered me wrong yet.”

  “Smart guy.”

  Shit. Shit. Shit. The guy thought that was a directive to sell.

  “Well, wasn’t it?” Bobby asked me. “I mean, I did ask you if you were interested. You did answer in the affirmative. So I took that to mean you wanted in.”

  “But I didn’t tell you to transfer my entire fucking portfolio . . .”

  “You didn’t say otherwise either. To me, ‘in’ means in.”

  “You had no right to transfer any shares of mine without my explicit written approval.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it. How the hell do you think the brokerage business works? By a polite exchange of paper? This is a game that alters every thirty seconds, so if someone tells me to sell—”

  “I didn’t tell you to sell.”

  “I made an offer to get you into the IPO, you accepted. And if you read the agreement you signed with my company when you became a client, you’ll see that there’s a clause authorizing us to buy or sell shares on your behalf with your verbal consent. But hey, if you want to take this to the SEC, go right ahead. They’ll laugh you out of court.”

  “I don’t believe this . . .”

  “Hey, it’s not the end of the world. Nine months from now, the share price is going to quadruple, which means that not only will you make up the initial fifty percent loss in share value . . .”

  Three alarm bells started going off between my ears.

  “What the fuck did you just say?”

  He remained calm. “I said: given the momentary downturn in technology stocks, the initial IPO didn’t go as well as expected . . . and about half the value of your shares was wiped out.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “What can I say, except it happens. Anyway, all this stuff is a gamble, right? I try to minimize your risk . . . but sometimes the market turns weird for a spell. The thing is: this is not a disaster. Far from it. Because by this time next year, I’m certain you’ll be seeing—”

  “Bobby, by this time next year, I’ll be in debtor’s jail. I owe the IRS around a quarter million, and FRT and Warners are about to start chasing me for, at best, the same amount of cash. Do you understand what’s happened to me? All my contracts have been canceled. I am a Hollywood untouchable. The only money I have in the world is the money I’ve invested with you. And now you tell me . . .”

  “What I’m telling you is to keep your nerve.”

  “And what I’m telling you is that I have seventeen days to pay that IRS bill. The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t adopt a grandfatherly approach to anyone who’s late with a big bill. They’re the biggest bastards on the planet.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Get me all my money back.”

  “You’re going to have to be patient for that.”

  “I can’t be fucking patient.”

  “Well, I can’t get you what you want. Not immediately anyway.”

  “So what can you get me immediately?”

  “Just the current value of your portfolio—which is around the quarter-mil mark.”

  “You’ve bankrupted me . . .”

  “I think it’s you who’ve bankrupted yourself. And as I have been trying to tell you, if you keep the money where it is for nine months—”

  “I don’t have nine fucking months. I have seventeen days. And once I pay off the feds, I’ll have nothing. You got that? Less than zero . . .”

  “What can I say? A gamble’s a gamble.”

  “If you had only been straight with me . . .”

  “I was straight with you, jerkoff,” he said, suddenly angry. “I mean, let’s face facts here. If you hadn’t gotten your ass thrown off your show for stealing people’s lines—”

  “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you—”

  “That’s it. We are done here. Literally and figuratively. I don’t want your business. I don’t want to deal with you.”

  “Of course you don’t now that you’ve screwed me . . .”

  “I am not continuing this dialogue. And I only have
one final question for you: do you want me to liquidate the stock?”

  “I have no choice.”

  “That’s an affirmative then?”

  “Yes—sell it all.”

  “Fine. Done. Expect the money in your account tomorrow. End of story.”

  “Never call me again,” I said.

  “Why would I do that?” Bobby said. “I don’t deal with losers.”

  Naturally, my session the next morning with Matthew Sims kicked off with a discussion of that last line.

  “Well, do you consider yourself a loser?” he asked me.

  “What do you think?”

  “You tell me, David.”

  “I’m not just a loser. I’m a disaster zone. Everything, everything, has been taken from me. And it’s all due to my own stupidity, my own self-absorption.”

  “There you go again, down the self-hatred track.”

  “What do you expect? I am now also heading toward financial collapse.”

  “And you don’t think you’re clever enough to get yourself out of this?”

  “How? Through suicide?”

  “That’s not the sort of joke you tell your therapist.”

  Nor, for that matter, was my accountant in jocular form when I explained the Bobby Barra debacle.

  “I don’t want to say ‘I told you so,’” Sandy Meyer said, “but I did warn you about centralizing your portfolio in the hands of one broker.”

  “The guy did so well for me up until now. And I was expecting to make such big bucks this year . . .”

  “I know, David. It’s a tough situation. But okay, here’s how I think we should play it. The two hundred fifty k in liquidated stock goes to pay off Uncle Sam. Your credit cards are maxed out right now at twenty-eight k . . . so the thirty k in your account goes to pay off that debt, leaving you two grand in cash. But Alison told me you’re living rent-free right now.”

  “Rent-free and cheap. If I spend two hundred a week, it’s an event.”

  “Then that two grand will buy you ten weeks. But there’s the problem of the eleven grand a month for Lucy and Caitlin. I spoke with Alison about this. She says you’ve got a tough new lawyer working your corner. I’m sure, given your considerably reduced circumstances, a court would agree to lower your monthly payment.”

  “I don’t want to do that. It’s not fair.”