The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  “But David, Lucy is earning very good money now . . . and the initial alimony and child support payment was, in my opinion, sky high. I know you were pulling down a million a year. But even so, the level of payment struck me as so excessive as to be—if you don’t mind me saying so—guilt money.”

  “It was guilt money. It still is guilt money.”

  “Well, now you can no longer afford to feel guilty. Eleven grand a month is out of your league.”

  “I’ll sell the car . . . as you suggested. I should get forty grand for it.”

  “What are you going to drive?”

  “Something cheap and well under seven thousand bucks. With the remaining thirty-three grand, I can afford the next three months’ payments.”

  “And after that?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “You better talk to Alison about finding you some work.”

  “Alison is the best agent in town . . . but she won’t be finding me any work.”

  “With your permission, I’m going to give her a call,” Sandy said.

  “Why bother? I’m a lost cause.”

  A few days after Sandy’s call, Alison rang me and said, “Hello, Lost Cause.”

  “I see you’ve been talking to my esteemed accountant.”

  “Oh, I’ve been talking to lots of people,” she said. “Including FRT and Warner Brothers.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it’s another good news/bad news call. First I’m going to give you the bad news: both FRT and Warners are adamant that you pay back the fees.”

  “That’s me finished.”

  “Not so fast. The good news is that both companies have agreed to halve their demand—which means one hundred and twenty-five thousand each.”

  “I’m still ruined.”

  “Yeah—Sandy explained everything to me. But the other good news is that I have convinced them to let you pay it off on the installment plan, with no payment due for the first six months.”

  “Big deal. The fact is, I have no money to make these payments. And I’m out of work.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I found you some work.”

  “Writing work?”

  “Absolutely. It’s not particularly glamorous work, but it is work. And for the amount of time it’ll take you to do it, it’s well paid.”

  “So cut to the chase.”

  “Now I don’t want you to groan when I tell you . . .”

  “Just tell me, please.”

  “It’s a novelization.”

  I tried not to groan. A novelization was hack work—in which you took a screenplay of a forthcoming movie and turned it into a short, easy-to-read novel, which was generally sold at supermarket checkouts and all outlets of Kmart. Professionally speaking, it was the lowest of the lows—the sort of job you took because you either had low self-esteem or had hit the bottom of the barrel and were desperate for cash. I qualified on all fronts, so I swallowed my protestations and asked:

  “What’s the movie?”

  “Try not to groan again.”

  “I didn’t groan the first time.”

  “Well, you might now. It’s a new teen movie that New Line is releasing.”

  “Called?” I asked.

  “Losing It.”

  This time I did groan. “Let me guess . . . it’s about two pimply sixteen-year-olds who want to lose their virginity?”

  “My, my, you are clever,” Alison said. “Except that the kids are seventeen.”

  “Late starters.”

  “Hey, virginity is ‘in’ these days.”

  “What’s the name of our two protagonists?”

  “You’re going to love this: Chip and Chuck.”

  “Sounds like a pair of cartoon beavers. And the setting is somewhere deeply banal and suburban, like Van Nuys?”

  “Close: Orange County.”

  “And does one of the kids turn out to be a slasher?”

  “No—it’s not Scream. But there is a dazzling twist in the tail: it turns out that the gal whom Chip finally shtups is Chuck’s half sister . . .”

  “But Chuck doesn’t know of her existence?”

  “Bingo. It turns out that January . . .”

  “Her name is January?”

  “Hey, it’s that kind of movie.”

  “Clearly. And it sounds like total shit.”

  “That it is. But they are also offering twenty-five thousand for the novelization, on the condition that it’s delivered in two weeks.”

  “I’m in,” I said.

  The script arrived by FedEx the next morning. It was godawful: smug, full of smutty jokes about erections and clitorises and flatulence, with one-dimensional characters, the usual routine teen situations (including the requisite backseat blow job), the requisite slugfest between the two boys after Chuck discovers that he’s related to the girl Chip’s been sleeping with, and the requisite “growth” finale, in which Chip and Chuck reconcile, Chuck and his estranged father reconcile, and January reveals to Chip that he was her first lover too . . . and though she doesn’t want a “hot-and-heavy romance,” they’ll always be friends.

  I called Alison after I finished reading it.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Garbage,” I said.

  “So can you make the two-week deadline?”

  “No problem.”

  “Good. Now here are some ground rules that the publisher, Max Newton, asked me to give you. The length should be seventy-five thousand words maximum. And remember this is for the moron market, so keep it fast, keep it simple, keep it basic . . . but also make certain the sex scenes are—how did he put this?—‘hot, but not scorching.’ Does that make sense to you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “One final thing: the publisher knows that it’s you who’s writing the novelization.”

  “He didn’t object?”

  “He’s in New York. And he thinks what goes on out here is, at the best of times, stupid. But we both agreed that—to protect him and yourself—it was best if you used a pseudonym. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Are you kidding me? I don’t want my name attached to such crap.”

  “Then think up an assumed one.”

  “How about John Ford?”

  “Why the hell not? And David . . . one last thing: though you know it’s shit, and I know it’s shit, and even the publisher knows it’s shit—”

  “I know: be a pro.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  Starting tomorrow, I would have exactly thirteen working days to get the job done. So, before I even started mapping out a chapter-by-chapter outline for the book (today’s job), I did some simple arithmetic, dividing 75,000 by thirteen. This yielded a total of 5,770—which, in turn, became the daily quota of words I would have to write, if I was to make the deadline on time. Given that there are around 250 words per double-spaced typed page, this meant I would have to be churning out about twenty-three pages per day. An insane number of pages, save for the fact that the stuff I was dealing with deserved to be churned out fast, and without much in the way of deep thought.

  But a job is a job—especially when you find all other work possibilities in your chosen field closed off to you. So I took the work seriously, determined to do the best I could with this low-grade material, to give the novelization the appropriate professional sheen, and to make the deadline without fail.

  I devised a rigid schedule for myself and stuck to it. The two outside interruptions I’d allow myself would be my thrice-weekly phone call with Caitlin and my daily session with Matthew Sims.

  “You sound in better spirits,” Sims said about halfway through my work on the novel.

  “It’s work. Trashy work, but . . .”

  “You’re still doing it diligently, which is admirable.”

  “I need the money, and I also need to be filling the time with something constructive.”

  “In other words,
you’re being responsible, and you’re also demonstrating to yourself that you can go out and find work again.”

  “This is not exactly the sort of stuff I want to be doing.”

  “But it’s a start. And it’s reasonably well paid, isn’t it? So, why not be pleased about the fact that this could be considered a positive new beginning?”

  “Because writing a novelization is never a positive experience.”

  Still, I kept at it. I met my quota of words every day. I stuck to my schedule. I didn’t dumb down to deal with this dumb-down material. I did a good job. And I made the deadline . . . even getting it to the nearest FedEx depot a full hour before the last pickup of the day.

  I made three copies of the text, dispatching one each to the publisher in New York and to Alison, and keeping one for myself. Then I went out to an Italian joint in Santa Barbara (around forty minutes up the road) and treated myself to my first restaurant meal since decamping up here. But I felt I deserved a small indulgence after such a slog. And it did feel wonderful to be eating out—something I’d taken for granted over the past two years, but that now seemed like a rarefied pleasure. Afterward, I took a long moonlit walk on the beach, delighting in the simple fact that I’d gotten a job done on time and reasonably well.

  Or, as it turned out, more than reasonably well . . . as Alison called me three days later to tell me that the publisher in New York was enthusiastic about the end result.

  “Do you know what Max Newton told me? ‘This guy has taken bad shit and turned it into quality shit.’ He really was very impressed . . . not just with the smoothness of the writing, but also that you made the deadline without hassle. Believe me, that makes you the rarest damn writer on the planet. But the really good news is that Max publishes one of these novelizations a month. In the past, he’s assigned them as a one-off to a variety of writers—but that wasn’t a particularly satisfactory arrangement. So he’d like to offer you a six-novelization contract. The same money—twenty-five grand per novelization. The same timetable—a book a month . . .”

  “And I can keep using my pseudonym?”

  “Yes, John Ford—no problems with that name. More to the point, this book contract alone means you can just about kill one of the debts to either FRT or Warners.”

  “You’re forgetting about my alimony.”

  “Yeah—Sandy talked to me about that. You must get that monthly burden reduced. It’s crazy money. And Lucy can afford—”

  “Let’s not discuss this, please.”

  “Your call, David.”

  “But this is good news, Alison. Great news, in fact. I never thought I’d say that about a novelization, but . . .”

  “It’s a lot better than nothing,” Alison said.

  I slept well that night. I woke the next morning, feeling curiously rested and curiously sanguine about things. If Max Newton was pleased with the first six adaptations, maybe Alison could convince him to keep me on as his resident screenplay-into-novel hack. At the current rate of pay—taking into account Alison’s commission and tax—I could maintain my payments to Lucy and also manage to pay off the two debts to FRT and Warners in just over two years.

  “It’s great to hear you sounding so optimistic,” Matthew Sims said during our next session.

  “It’s great to be off my knees.”

  A week went by. The check from Max Newton arrived via Alison. I put it in the bank and immediately transferred the lot into Lucy’s account, sending her an e-mail that simply said:

  Two months’ maintenance payments should have reached your account today. It would be nice to talk with you sometime.

  The next night, when I was signing off on my conversation with Caitlin, I asked my daughter if I could speak with her mommy.

  “Sorry Daddy, she says she’s busy.”

  I didn’t press the matter further.

  Another few days went by without sign of the new screenplay from Max Newton. So I e-mailed Alison, wondering what was going on. She e-mailed me back, saying she’d spoken with Max yesterday and all was well. In fact, he told her that his legal department would FedEx the contract to her tomorrow.

  But when tomorrow arrived, there was a phone call from Alison, her voice brimming with “bad news” tremors.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this . . . ,” she said.

  I couldn’t bring myself to yet again ask: “What now?” So I stayed silent.

  “Max canceled the contract.”

  “He what?”

  “He canceled the contract.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Our old friend, Theo McCall . . .”

  “Not again . . .”

  “I’ll read you the item. It’s just a few lines:

  “Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Selling You creator David Armitage—sacked by FRT for stealing other writers’ lines (exposed first in this column), then publicly shamed for attacking a certain journalist (i.e., moi) in the NBC parking lot—has been reduced to the lowliest form of so-called ‘creative writing’: better known as ‘novelizations.’ According to an inside mole at Lionel Publishing in Nueva York, the onetime Emmy winner (recently stripped of his award by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) has been reduced to churning out instant book adaptations of forthcoming movies. And guess what film the onetime golden boy of television has just novelized: a grisly forthcoming New Line teen-flick, Losing It . . . which, rumor has it, makes American Pie look like late-period Bergman. Better yet is the pseudonym Armitage chose beneath which to hide: John Ford. Does he mean the great director of westerns . . . or the Jacobean playwright, who wrote ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore . . . though in Armitage’s case, the title could be: ’Tis Pity He’s a Plagiarist.”

  Long silence. I didn’t feel sick or shell-shocked or devastated . . . because I’d been through those assorted phases before. Now I simply felt numb—like a boxer who’d taken one blow to the head too many and could no longer feel anything.

  Alison finally spoke. “David, I cannot begin to tell you . . .”

  “So Max Newton read this and canceled the contract?” I said, my voice strangely calm.

  “Yes, that’s about it.”

  “Okay,” I said flatly.

  “Do understand, I am talking with a high-powered attorney I know about a possible defamation of character suit against McCall.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Please don’t say that, David.”

  “Look, I know when I’m defeated.”

  “We can easily fight this.”

  “No need. But listen, before I hang up, I just want to say this: you haven’t just been an agent extraordinaire . . . you’ve also been the best friend imaginable.”

  “David, what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing except . . .”

  “You’re not going to do something stupid, are you?”

  “You mean, like twist my Porsche around a tree? No—I wouldn’t give McCall the satisfaction. But I am giving up the fight.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I am saying it.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Whatever.”

  I put down the phone. I packed up my laptop and found all the ownership papers for my car, then made a call to a Porsche dealer in Santa Barbara I’d spoken with a week or so earlier. He said that he’d expect me within the hour.

  I drove north. At the dealership, the salesman came out to meet me. He offered me coffee. I declined. He said he’d have a full service report and a purchase price within two hours. I asked him to call me a cab. When it arrived, I told the driver to take me to the nearest pawnbrokers. He eyed me warily in the rearview mirror but did as I asked. When we reached the shop, I told him to wait. There was heavy-duty wiring on the window and a surveillance camera at the barred steel door. I was buzzed in and entered a tiny vestibule with scuffed linoleum, fluorescent lights, a window with bulletproof glass. This was a very nervous pawnbroker. An overweight guy around forty appea
red at the window. He was eating a sandwich while he talked to me.

  “So whatcha got?” he asked.

  “A top-of-the-line Toshiba Tecra Notebook. Bought new for forty-five hundred.”

  “Pass it through,” he said, lifting up the lower part of the window. He inspected it briefly, lifting it up, plugging it in, turning it on, gazing at the software application on the Windows desktop. Then he turned it off, shut it, and shrugged.

  “The thing about these things is this: six months after they’re released on the market, they’re outdated. And their retail value ain’t much. Four hundred bucks.”

  “A thousand.”

  “Six hundred.”

  “Sold.”

  When I got back to the Porsche dealership, the salesman had the full report ready and an offer price of $39,280.

  “I really was expecting forty-two, forty-three thousand,” I said.

  “Forty is the absolute tops I could go.”

  “Sold.”

  I asked him for a cashier’s check. Then I got him to call me another cab and had it bring me to the nearest branch of BankAmerica. I flashed a lot of ID. There was an extended phone call to my BankAmerica branch in West Hollywood. There were several forms to sign. But eventually they agreed to cash the $40,000 check and to forward the sum of $33,000 to Lucy’s account in Sausalito. I left the bank with $7,000 cash and took another cab to a used-car lot not far from the Porsche dealership. This operation only dealt with lower-end vehicles. Still, for $5,000 cash, I managed to buy a 1994 navy blue VW Golf with “only 98,000 miles on the clock” and a six-month service warranty. I used the dealer’s phone to call my insurer. He sounded a little shocked when I told him I had switched the Porsche for a seven-year-old Golf, value $5,000.

  “Well, you’ve still got another nine months to run on the Porsche insurance. But the Golf will only cost about a third of the price . . . which means there’s about five hundred left over.”

  “Send me a check, please.” And I gave him my address in Meredith.

  I drove my new old car to a cyber café. I bought a coffee and logged on to my server. I sent an e-mail to Lucy:

  The next three months’ maintenance payments have been transferred to your account. I am now paid up for five months. I still hope that, one day, we will be able to talk again. In the meantime, I do want you to know one thing: I was very wrong to do what I did. I realize that now . . . and I am sorry.