Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

by Brad Listi

  Robbins also made significant contributions to the world of psychology and intervention, having cofounded the Robbins-Madanes Center for Strategic Intervention, an organization dedicated to the creation of formalized training tools and programs for the therapeutic community.

  In addition, Robbins played a significant role in the inception of the presidential summit for America’s Promise, in which systems were designed to provide more than two million mentors for youngsters throughout the United States of America.

  Furthermore, Robbins had created the Anthony Robbins Foundation, which, among other things, was responsible for the annual holiday “Basket Brigade,” a charitable offering that fed more than one million people in nine countries and provided support to programs in 2,046 schools, 758 penitentiaries, and more than 100,000 health and human service organizations and homeless shelters.

  In addition, he was a black belt. He was also a licensed jet helicopter pilot. And he knew how to speed-read.

  At that point, he was forty years old.

  V.

  1.

  Los Angeles isn’t a typical American city. It has no center. It has no monorail. It doesn’t have much of a subway system. It doesn’t stand at attention. Instead, it reclines across the desert, languid and chaotic, a tangle of highways beside the rippling sea. It cooks in perpetual sunlight, under a rapidly deteriorating ozone layer, and waits for people to arrive.

  And people arrive.

  megalopolis n.

  1.) A very large city.

  2.) A region made up of several large cities and their surrounding areas in sufficient proximity to be considered a single urban complex.

  I’d arrived in town two weeks earlier. Flew from New York to Denver, gathered all of my personal effects, and drove eighteen hours straight to the coast without stopping.

  Now I was in thick traffic on the I-10, bumper to bumper at high noon. Thousands of human beings, going somewhere. And me, somewhere in the middle, heading east at a crawl, looking for the exit for La Cienega Boulevard. According to the directions I’d been given, the offices for White Light Films were somewhere to the north, in a 1950s-era office building on Beverly Boulevard. My meeting was scheduled for 1:00 p.m.

  The first draft of The Grandeur of Delusions was tucked inside my satchel, 118 pages long. I’d completed the draft in five days’ time, in a furious and unprecedented burst of creative energy. The week I’d spent in New York seemed to have functioned as some kind of fulcrum. Seeing my friends, wandering the city, the debacle on my birthday—all of it had sent me into a massive state of hyperactivity. Henry’s travails in particular had really struck a nerve. The meeting with his biological mother set off fireworks in my mind. The dramatics of the rendezvous, the intense sympathy I felt for everyone involved—it all provided me with a sense of urgency that had previously been lacking.

  Upon finishing the script, I immediately started making phone calls, hoping to get my work into the hands of someone who could actually do something with it. Naturally, this was difficult. The only real lead I received came from a guy named Howard Strahan, one of my old film professors at the University of Colorado. Strahan was kind enough to put me in touch with a man named Mitchell Baxter, the president of a small production company called White Light Films. Apparently, the two men knew each other through a friend of a friend. Baxter, in a gesture of goodwill, had agreed to meet with me for thirty minutes to discuss the project and lend me whatever advice and counsel he could.

  As a matter of self-amusement, I liked to blame my most recent series of rash decisions on Anthony Robbins. I’d wound up reading Awaken the Giant Within while nursing my birthday hangover at Lynch’s apartment in Chinatown. The preceding night, needless to say, had been a complete and total disaster. Lynch and Henry had come home from the bar only to find me passed out on the couch, bleeding from my nose and mouth, holding a teddy bear in my arms. They woke me up immediately and demanded a full explanation. I did what I could to give them one.

  The next morning, I woke up early, far too hung over to sleep. The apartment was silent and empty. Lynch had already left for work. Henry was gone too. I looked down at the floor and saw the book and the teddy bear sitting there. Memories came back to me in pieces. My head was pounding.

  I felt like an idiot. I fished my cigarettes out of my shirt pocket and lit one, then I looked at the bear and the book and laughed. Then I picked up the book, turned to the first page, and started reading. It was done on a lark, more out of curiosity than anything else. I was expecting crackpot schemes, positive thinking, and shameless quackery. But then something funny happened. The words on the pages started making sense to me—far more sense than I thought they would. I sat there entranced for the better part of five hours, and by the end of the day, I had read the entire book, start to finish. Furthermore, I had concocted a brand-new plan for my immediate future.

  I could only take this to mean that I was a deeply troubled individual.

  Lynch, of course, was completely incredulous. When he got home from work that night, I informed him that I’d just purchased a plane ticket to Denver. I told him about the book, picking it up off of the coffee table and waving it around. I proclaimed its genius, only half kidding, and ruminated about the possibility that the hands of fate had guided me to it. Lynch blanched. A look of terrible concern spread across his face.

  “I’m serious,” I said to him. “Forget the infomercials. Forget the fact that he looks like a Ken doll on steroids. This book is really good. This guy knows what he’s talking about. It’s a contemporary rendering of simple logic and ancient wisdoms.”

  “You poor, sad fool,” said Lynch.

  “I’m not kidding you,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if this guy becomes the president of the United States one day. This country could use a good shrink.”

  “Get well soon,” said Lynch.

  I bet him a hundred bucks that it would happen sometime within the next twenty years and that, when it did, it would be revolutionary. We shook on it.

  I shaved my beard that night.

  I boarded a plane to Denver sixteen hours later.

  It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.

  —Anthony Robbins

  * * *

  Within a week, I was in Los Angeles.

  My first four days in town, I stayed at a ratty old motel on Venice Boulevard. By day, I drove around the city, familiarizing myself with my new environs and searching for suitable accommodations. By night, I worked on The Grandeur of Delusions, logging nearly twenty-five pages per session. The story came out of me in a flood.

  In the end, I wound up renting a 500-square-foot studio apartment on Rose Avenue in Venice Beach, five blocks from the water. The apartment was tiny but functional. It had a kitchenette with a sink and a decent-size closet. I didn’t have to do my dishes in the bathtub, and I was ten pounds underweight.

  2.

  I parked my car at a meter on Beverly, near the intersection of Edinburgh, on the same side of the street as the White Light office building. There was nearly an hour to kill before the meeting, so I decided to get some food. I walked half a block to the west to a diner called Swingers. There were tables outside, all of which were full. The people at the tables appeared rumpled yet somehow remarkably fashionable, and the waitresses were dressed like cheerleaders. For some reason, I was wearing a coat and tie.

  I stepped inside, took a seat at the counter, and set my script in front of me as though it were a place mat. The girl working the counter walked up to me and smiled. She had a nose ring and bright blue eyes, her hair was jet-black and spiked (it could have been a wig), and her arms were covered in tattoos. Her name tag said ZÖE. She handed me silverware, a menu, and a napkin, then asked me what I’d like to drink. I told her I’d like a glass of ice water. She rapped her knuckles on the counter and told me that it was coming right up. I thanked her.

  After surveying the menu for a minute or two, I settled on the p
enne arrabiatta. From there, I began leafing through my screenplay, re-reading critical scenes, checking for spelling errors and typos. Everything, as far as I could tell, was in perfect working order. I felt particularly good about the end of the script, as it involved several quasi-philosophical exchanges between Malcolm Faltermeyer and Hansel Baird. In my opinion, these particular discourses contained some of the film’s finest accidental comedy and served well to illuminate its remarkable levels of sustained vapidity. Examples of such exchanges could be found throughout this section of the story, one of which went as follows:

  FALTERMEYER

  Gig’s up, Dr. Baird. You’ve made your last move. It’s done now. It’s over with. You want to go down alive, then you surrender peacefully. Go the other road, and things are gonna have to get messy.

  BAIRD

  Things have been messy for a long time, Malcolm. How quickly you seem to forget. Your obsession with masking the considerable fear in your heart is really starting to amuse me.

  FALTERMEYER

  Fear doesn’t scare me, Doctor. I’ve stared down the barrel of the worst feara man can know. The way I see it, fear has nothing on me. And it sure as hell doesn’t live in my heart.

  I left Swingers at 12:45 p.m., headed back over to the White Light office building, and took the elevator up to the third floor. I stepped into a fluorescently lit hallway and found my way to a men’s room, where I proceeded to wash my hands and talk to myself. I checked my teeth in the mirror, took a deep breath, and adjusted my necktie. I told myself to relax, relax, relax. And then I walked back out into the hall.

  The White Light receptionist was an overfriendly young debutante with platinum blond hair. She saw me walk in and set down a copy of Entertainment Weekly.

  “Wayne Fencer,” I told her. “Here for a one o’clock meeting with Mitch Baxter.”

  “Gloria,” she said to me, smiling widely. “One moment please, Wayne.”

  She glanced at her computer screen, smiled again, and told me to have a seat. I had a seat, trying to decide if her breasts were real. She picked up the telephone, buzzed Baxter’s office, and informed him that I’d arrived. Baxter said something in reply, but I was unable to make out what it was. Gloria then turned to me and asked if I would like anything to drink—a bottle of water or a soft drink. I told her that I was just fine, thank you. I settled into my seat, removed my script from my satchel, and pored over it once again, in an effort to appear professional.

  Ninety minutes later, Mitchell Baxter finally stepped out into the lobby to greet me. He was wearing blue jeans and a pale yellow oxford.

  “Wayne,” he said, smiling easily. “Mitch Baxter. Sorry I’m late.”

  I stood up and shook his outstretched hand.

  He was much smaller than I thought he’d be.

  3.

  Baxter wore eyeglasses with thick black frames and an expensive-looking silver wristwatch. His hair was black, sprinkled with flecks of gray, and his sleeves were rolled up halfway to his elbows. There was something slightly agitated about his demeanor, yet at the same time, he smiled no matter what he said.

  The walls of his office were adorned with movie posters, photographs, and a multitude of placards and awards. To my right hung a large color picture of a man standing atop the summit of a snowy mountain. A motivational poster. Below the photo was a caption. It read:

  Ambition

  Aspire to climb as high as you can dream.

  Baxter told me that he had founded White Light in 1987. He had been working as an executive producer for PBS in Washington, D.C., and decided to take his act to Hollywood. He was young, ambitious, and felt there was a lot of money to be made in cable television programming. He felt there was a void in the marketplace.

  “I surveyed the landscape,” he said to me. “Back then, TV was all sitcoms, all bad acting and canned laughter—but it was growing like a weed. There wasn’t nearly enough quality programming of an educational or documentary nature, but the opportunity was there. The need was there. And I was convinced that the audience was there. The network base was expanding. There were no guarantees, of course—never are in this business—but I felt strongly enough about it to take the chance. So I grabbed my cojones, rolled the dice, moved out here, and hung a shingle. The rest is history.”

  In the ensuing thirteen years, White Light had carved out a niche for itself producing one-hour documentary television programs revolving around the great outdoors. Last Legs, a twelve-part series on endangered species, had won the studio four Peabody Awards in the early 1990s. Other White Light programs had appeared on a wide variety of channels, including PBS, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and NBC. The company also produced educational programs, which were then sold directly to public school systems throughout the United States.

  “But now,” said Baxter, “we’re looking to expand our operations into the feature film game. We want to parlay what we’ve done into a whole new realm. You can’t stay static in this business. Stasis is death. We’re always on the lookout for new talent and new material. We have a nice little thing going right now, but we always want to get better. We’ve got great relationships with a lot of the major studios, and I think that, given the right project, we’ll get a deal done sometime in the next year.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “We’re pretty pleased with the way things are going,” said Baxter.

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  “We really think the sky’s the limit around here,” said Baxter.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “It’s been a good ride,” said Baxter.

  “Have you ever considered doing an action movie?” I said.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Baxter, “I’m working on a deal with CBS right now. They want a Saturday-night two-hour special, something that combines nature and thrills. We just finished pitching them a movie about a killer crocodile, a Jaws-on-the-Amazon kind of thing. It’s just a matter of getting the numbers right.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  I raised my script from my lap and mentioned that I envisioned The Grandeur of Delusions as a big-budget action movie.

  Baxter nodded and blinked once, slowly.

  “Do you mind if I give you some unsolicited fashion advice?” he said, changing the subject.

  “Fashion advice?”

  “Regarding your suit.”

  “My suit?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “This is Hollywood, my friend. You don’t have to wear a suit.”

  I felt myself blushing. “To be honest with you,” I said, “I wasn’t quite sure what to wear.”

  “Weddings, funerals, fund-raisers, and awards shows,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s business casual. And once you make your mark, you can wear whatever the fuck you want.”

  “Okay,” I said. I felt uncomfortable and loosened my tie.

  Sensing my discomfort, Baxter segued immediately. He asked me about my background. I told him about my course of study at the University of Colorado. I told him about my trip to Cuba, careful to leave out everything pertaining to Pamela. I talked about Old Havana, Hemingway’s Finca, the national park in Viñales. Baxter was particularly captivated by my trip to visit the Old Man. The moment I mentioned it, he shifted in his leather desk chair. His focus intensified.

  “My God,” he said. “That sounds like a movie right there.”

  “It was something,” I said. “The guy was ancient.”

  “The Old Man,” said Baxter.

  “The Old Man,” I said.

  “And what did he say to you?” he said.

  “Not much,” I said.

  “That must have knocked your socks off,” he said, smiling.

  “It did,” I said.

  bullshit n. (vulgar slang)

  1.) Foolish, deceitful, or boastful language.

  2.) Something worthless, deceptive, or insincere.

  3.) Insolent talk or behavior.

  I continued on with an extended anecdote abou
t my time on the Appalachian Trail, hoping it would cement my credibility. I figured it might play to Baxter’s seeming affinity for the great outdoors. I started in Georgia and worked forward chronologically. Baxter sat there making finger steeples with his hands, nodding his head, interjecting the words “Jesus” and “fuck” at regular, alternating intervals. I focused on the journey’s physical hardships, in an effort to heighten its dramatic effect. I told him about the bugs, the blisters, the parasites, and the staph infection. Baxter squinted at me. I couldn’t tell if he was disgusted or captivated.

  “You were out there all alone for almost two months?” he said to me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Do you have a screw loose?” said Baxter.

  I didn’t know quite what to say to that. Baxter appeared somewhat serious.

  “That sounds like a goddamned nightmare,” he said.

  I laughed, kind of.

  “At times, it was,” I said.

  “I’m not a camper,” said Baxter. “Gotta have a mattress and a hot shower. Don’t mind a day trip in the sticks, but come nightfall, I’m heading straight for the Four-fucking-Seasons.”

  Ha, he chuckled. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

  Ha, I chuckled. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

  A wave of fear rippled up my spinal cord.

  And then the phone rang.

  4.

  Mitch Baxter spooked me. He was precisely the kind of animal they warned you about, the one you were told to fear when you came out to Hollywood. There was something mechanical about him, something cold and hidden and passive-aggressive and soulless. I sat in his office for twenty minutes. We talked. Everything was remarkably cordial, but nothing much was said. More important, nothing whatsoever was said about my script. We never really got to it. Baxter never asked me about it. He avoided the topic seamlessly. He smiled and slid through the meeting with impeccable skill. I never really got the chance to bring it up. Then the phone rang, ending everything. Baxter picked up. Said a few words. Put his hand over the receiver. Smiled and claimed it was an urgent call. Told me to leave my script and my contact information with Gloria. He said he would have one of “his people” give it a read. The reader would be writing up a report on it and would mail it to me directly a few days down the road. If it really blew the reviewer away, he told me, we would continue our discussions in earnest. If the reviewer hated it, well, then I’d know that, too. And with that, we stood up and shook hands. I said thank you. Baxter told me to keep sending him scripts as I completed them.