Authors: Seth Greenland
The Bones (26 page)
Despite intermittent bouts of therapy taking place over years and years, Frank has never been able to forgive his father.
Until tonight. He has spent the last five years rebuilding his career from the ashes of that catastrophic gig in Cleveland.
A major network finally decided he had redeemed himself and determined he could be trusted with a lead role in a prime-time
show. But it has all come to naught and the feeling of futility is utterly overwhelming.
Putting the Hummer in gear, he pulls out of his parking space and heads north on Sepulveda back toward town. As Frank passes
through Culver City, he gets the idea that maybe he won't go home because other than Honey, who is not going to be pleased
about his absence this evening, what is there for him other than a reminder that his little bungalow is the only local real
estate he can afford in a neighborhood that isn't gang-infested?
He is clearheaded enough to realize lying down and trying to sleep only to be overtaken by a restless, dehydrated slumber
that will result in another paralyzing hangover is a bad idea, a whimpering abdication of his self-appointed role as prankster
and provocateur. If it really was over for Frank and he had missed the opportunity for a grand-exit gesture at the SOAP dinner,
what is left for him in the way of making an impression, some last bit of sparkling, pointless Dada by which to be remembered?
As he drives north across Santa Monica Boulevard ruminating on the nihilistic possibilities available to him, he passes through
a red light. A police cruiser heading in the opposite direction does a U-turn and puts the siren on. Lost in his darkest thoughts,
Frank hears through a loudspeaker, "YOU IN THE HUMMER! PULL OVER!" His response, to the great aggravation of the officers
in the car, is to keep driving, making a left on Wilshire as the rain continues to flood from the sky, forming slick, greasy
puddles on the hard asphalt. "YOU IN THE HUMMER!" Again, angrier. "PULL OVER NOW!"
When Frank disobeys the third time, the cops send out a radio alert and another cruiser heads north on Twenty-sixth Street
to join the pursuit. Frank is now speeding west on San Vincente Boulevard, the first cruiser tailgating him, the cops cursing
the arrogance of the people who buy these military assault vehicles. The second cruiser is now heading east on the same road
barreling past the Brentwood Golf Club. In the distance the cop at the wheel of the second car sees the first cruiser right
behind the Hummer. Slowing down to make the turn that will enable him to join the chase, the cop in the second car then floors
it across the median divider just as Frank pulls a hard right onto Carmelina.
Carmeliiina!
Frank watches in his rearview mirror as the second patrol car smashes bang into the first one as if they were a couple of
good old boys in a Burt Reynolds movie.
Not bad,
he thinks.
Frank slows down now, getting his bearings. This neighborhood between Sunset and San Vincente is a magnificent effusion of
abundant flora, which creates an awning that slows the rain on the side of the roads, allowing Frank to better read the house
numbers.
This is it, the climax, the finale, the end in one incandescently stupid, futile gesture.
The hard rain beats a bleak tattoo against the bedroom window as Stacy pulls the comforter up to her chin. Having lain in
bed in lace panties and a teddy for the last twenty minutes, her hopes that Lloyd would take the hint are vanishing. Lloyd,
meanwhile, has been reading
The Great Gatsby
(the well-known novel in which a circumspect man attempts to plumb the depths of an audacious one) and making notes in the
margins with the gold pen given by his friends at Lynx. When he closes the book, turns off the bedside lamp, and says good-night,
her hopes rally, but are again dashed when moments later nothing untoward has occurred. Lloyd, for his part, has been staring
at the celling wondering what Phil Sheldon had meant when he told him it was all a shiny penny.
"Lloyd?"
"Hmm?"
"Did you enjoy yourself tonight?"
"I don't like those kind of things."
"It was important to me."
"Fine. I hope you had a good time."
"I did."
"Good."
Silence ensues. Stacy searches for a conversational topic that Lloyd will warm to while he closes his eyes and hopes she will
go to sleep.
A violent shuddering of the house shaking the struts and beams to their very foundations causes Stacy to yelp in fright, suddenly
interrupting this moment of marital bedtime banality. They feel the bed move and hear the sound of glass breaking. Then a
second impact jolts the house.
"It's an earthquake!" Stacy exclaims, when her breath returns. "Go get Dustin!"
The two of them leap out of bed and, terrified, head for their son's room. Arriaving in that incongruously peaceful precinct,
they see the sleeping boy and heave a sigh of great relief. Stroking Dustin's hot cheek, Stacy turns to Lloyd and says, "Go
downstairs and make sure everything's all right."
Lloyd crosses the airy second-floor hallway, heads for the stairs, and quickly descends to the marble foyer, which is surprisingly
drafty. The marble feels cool beneath his bare feet as he crosses to the living room, where he sees a yellow Hummer that destroyed
a hedge, drove over the well-tended front lawn, burst through the French windows launching shards of glass in all directions,
muddied a Persian rug before crushing the coffee table and the huge cellophane-wrapped gift basket sitting on it, obliterated
a damask sofa, and then crashed into a wall, sending its occupant through the windshield and leaving him lying on the hood,
bleeding from the head. When Lloyd recovers from his initial shock, he walks over to the man whose identity he quickly grasps.
"Frank . . . Jesus, are you okay?"
Frank moves his lips but nothing audible is emitted other than the popping of a pink bubble of blood, indicating internal
bleeding. Lloyd leans closer, realizing he could be listening to the last words of Frank Bones. Frank's cheeks billow slightly
and his head has a tremor. Air comes up through his throat and his mouth moves, trying to form a word through the blood.
"P-patronize m-me . . .," he says, exhausted at the struggle, putting his lips together for one last try. "M-more . . . "
Here he looks up at Lloyd, the light and the life leaving his eyes, and with one final effort manages to say, "Babe," before
losing consciousness.
Thus does the story for which Lloyd has been so assiduously searching begin to present itself.
Killer Bones
In the early 1980s, after having graduated from college with a degree in English and a desire to direct films, I found myself
writing for a downtown rag called the
SoHo Weekly News.
I
was living in a roach-infested basement apartment equipped with a shower in the kitchen and a depressed girlfriend in the
bedroom. Her name was Sonia and she was constantly threatening to kill herself, which kept me continually generating reasons
to leave the apartment so I wouldn't have to be there should she actually follow through. It was on one of those excursions
that I encountered Frank Bones for the first time. In desperate need of laughs, which were in very short supply where I was
living, I and a friend went to a comedy club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Frank was working as the emcee and he was
. . .
"Lloyd, they need you on the set."
Lloyd sees Tai Chi standing at the door to his office. It is the middle of August and Lloyd has been working on
Happy Endings,
which Lynx intends to display to the American public with much promotional fanfare at the end of September. Returning to his
computer screen, he considers words like
revelatory, amazing, extraordinary,
and is unable to come up with something that doesn't sound like a hackneyed encomium lifted whole from a newspaper ad for
a movie.
"Lloyd?" Tai Chi again.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," he says impatiently, hitting the SAVE key and committing his labors to the hard drive. After much internal
struggle, Lloyd has reluctantly abandoned the idea of writing a novel and concluded perhaps his literary talents are better
suited to nonfiction. With this in mind, he has, for the past several weeks, been trying to find a way into Frank's story
and had lit upon the idea of a memoir. What Lloyd thought he could do was a kind
of Frank and Me
book, only with a more felicitous title, which he promised himself he would come up with before submitting his effort to a
publisher.
The geometric manner in which Frank's life intersected with Lloyd's provided a natural architecture for ruminations on the
subjects of envy, success, and money, key themes identified by the hopeful author in the tale he intended to tell. The reversal
of their positions had a symmetrical aspect to it that lent a tidy structure to the story, and Frank's decline and fall provided
a sordid touch that did nothing to lessen the project's appeal in a society ravenous for factual elucidations of bad behavior
engaged in by the famous and near-famous. If by some chance Lloyd could not elevate his prose above the commonplace, he believed
people would still clamor to read the story of how a well-known comedian smoked a bonfire of crack and then drove a military
assault vehicle over a well-tended suburban hedge, through a set of French windows, and into a media hallstorm. Told with
the right flair, Lloyd believed, there would always be a market for that kind of thing.
As for the a forementioned media hallstorm, anyone expecting a squalid carnival of cheap moralizing within the extensive coverage
by cable news channels and supermarket tabloids was not disappointed. Since there were no international crises that week and
no attractive white women had been mislaid by their families, the lurid saga of the Frank Bones meltdown was given far larger
play than it deserved. Pundits on the shouting shows railed about the immorality of an entertainment world that allowed a
decadent creature like Frank to exist in its dim corners. Frank's picture graced the covers of sleek magazines and pulpish
newspapers, his unsmiling visage hinting at an unspoken and terrifying inner darkness, the kind that makes people plunk down
several dollars so they can read about it. Honey gave dozens of interviews and sold pictures of Frank and her to a tabloid
that usually trafficked in aliens and fad diets, for enough money to lease a starter Mercedes, which she promptly did.
Lloyd was the subject of much speculation in the mainstream media and was quoted cryptically in an Associated Press story
saying, "We've known each other for a long time but I had never had him over to the house." The lack of ire in his tone was
notable perhaps because he already knew he was going to be writing about Frank's life and didn't want to carelessly feed valuable
material into the bottomless maw of the daily press as if it were simply tawdry gossip and sentimental reminiscence rather
than the raw material for the spun gold he hoped it to be.
The fountain of vituperation in the Melnick household was Stacy, who was so incensed at what the Hummer had done to her meticulously
designed home environment that much of what she had to say on the subject was unprintable in family newspapers, thereby rendering
her role in the voluminous press coverage minimal.
And then there was the larger question, which was never satisfactorily answered in any of the thousands of words expended
in the exploitation of the episode by the journalists whose job it was to explicate these things: Was it an accident? We know
the answer, of course. But as it was masticated over in the diners and four-star restaurants of the town, opinion was divided.
During their weekly lunch at the famous Nate & Al's deli in Beverly Hills, Robert Hyler and Jolly De Meo discussed the question
over bowls of beet soup. "Accident-schmaccident," Jolly said. He was of the opinion that good riddance was the order of the
day. "I feel terrible about what happened but not terrible-terrible. He doesn't bring in enough commissions to feel terrible-terrible,
and he was a pain in the ass, to boot."
Robert took a more emotional point of view saying, "A man so talented, it shouldn't have come to this," but he was pretty
angry about what had occurred that evening, too, and relatively certain Frank had been using the Hummer as a weapon.
Somewhere high in the Santa Monica Mountains, several days after the event, Daryl Hyler, who shared her husband's suspicions,
was saying, "If the legislation I'm busting my ass to get enacted, where everyone's gonna have to drive electric cars no matter
what, if that becomes law, there's no way Frank commits this act. You can't drive through someone's house in a Sunsation."
Then she looked over at the panting Stacy, with whom she was hiking, and said, "Anyway, I'm never gonna forgive him for blowing
off the SOAP benefit. I don't care that my husband's been carrying him for nearly twenty years. Frank Bones"—here she made
a face and a gesture that were so infernally dismissive the crow gliding above her changed its flight pattern in fright—"is
a man I have absolutely no use for, hon. You accumulate people as you move along in this town," Daryl lectured her disciple
as the crow flew away, its tiny adrenal glands surging. "The ones that can help you, you hang on to them with your life, but
the others . . . that's when the red pen comes out. You take out the red pen"—she made a sweeping motion with her hand—"and
you get rid of 'em." Stacy was familiar with the red-pen concept, having exercised it with Marisa and Jonathan Pinsker, whom
she hadn't spoken to in several months. Now she wanted to talk about getting Dustin into the Horizon School, something with
which Daryl had promised to help, but Stacy knew it was useless to interject when her mentor was on a roil. "Robert is too
nice sometimes. He doesn't understand the red pen."
This was the background against which Lloyd had commenced his literary labors in earnest. He would work late in the evenings
at home and during the moments between crises while at the studio. In three months he had produced roughly thirty double-spaced
pages, which he found meager if not pathetic. He had given up the legal pads for this project since he associated them with
his television work, and this tome about Frank and him, this labor of love,
Dem Bones
or whatever its title would be, was meant to transcend that meretricious world. He wanted to believe the paucity of his output
could be ascribed to the mode with which he was writing, that he would be cranking out the pages if he would go back to the
legal pads.
But Lloyd knew this to be a self-serving canard. The reason he had only produced thirty pages, he realized, had much more
to do with an absence of things to say that did not sound either like a quickie downmarket paperback biography of Frank or
a pretentious rumination on the state of the entertainment business. This usually left him with his head in his hands staring
into the soft glow of the computer screen, rousing himself only long enough to check his e-mail eight times an hour.
Lloyd's frustration was kept moderately in check by the whirlwind of responsibilities distracting him during the days and
leaving him exhausted in the evenings. He would routinely find himself driving the freeways at four A.M. turbulently digesting
pizza and M&M's after late-night, fluorescent- Ht sessions with the writing staff, where forty-five minutes could be expended
debating whether Bart Pimento's character would, when referring to a jockstrap, use a word like
carapace
or simply say
jockstrap.
As he lay tossing in bed, trying to settle down so he could gain a few hours of precious slumber before fighting through the
traffic back to the studio to do it all again, he would try to work through the book in his head. Would he be served by alternating
chapters, one about Frank followed by one about himself, or was it an act of inestimable hubris to think anyone would remotely
care about the pampered, yet tortured and indescribably small life of Lloyd Melnick? If that were true, and who could doubt
but it was, he considered the possibility of simply and poetically reflecting on Frank's existence, its meaning within the
larger context of American life and its metaphoric resonance for true artists in a mercantile society. But Lloyd knew himself
to be no poet, and certainly his nirninations on the artist's role in anything would be of no use to anyone.
One late-summer night, in a rare moment of clarity that descended upon him as he was drifting into a disturbed sleep, Lloyd
realized his nascent book lacked a defining event, at least an event that he could use as a defining event, given what he
was beginning to suspect were his limited descriptive capabilities. Whereas others of a more literary bent could perhaps tease
two hundred and fifty or three hundred pages from a story of parallel lives culminating in a dramatic car wreck, examine the
depths of the characters in forensic detail, seek telling psychological tidbits to be gathered and stitched together to form
a pleasing and satisfying whole, it was becoming increasingly clear Lloyd was not up to the task.
He had tried to describe Frank's shattered face, the red blood blending with the bright yellow of the Hummer to create some
kind of horrifying tequila sunrise on his Persian rug, but after several false starts, he knew he couldn't do it for the simple
reason that it made no sense to him; he just was not able to put the pieces together, to structure them into a coherent pattern.
He tried to comfort himself with the notion that this could change with time, and as the events themselves receded, a deeper
understanding might begin to form and resolve into something clearer and more comprehensible, much as a photograph comes into
focus in the developing bath.
But it was a sad realization nevertheless and made all the more enervating with the approach of first light and the anticipation
of the constant demands that would be made upon him from the moment he arrived at the studio. This grim awakening arrived
around four-thirty A.M. and caused Lloyd to leave his bed and retrieve his slender manuscript from his office, take it back
into the house, place it in the fireplace, and put a match to it. Then he sat on the damask sofa, which Stacy had had reconstructed
at great expense, and gloomily watched the pages burn as the first rays of depressing dawn asserted themselves in the sullen
sky.
What had happened the night Frank Bones paid a call on the Melnicks?
Lloyd was standing at the linen closet grabbing a towel when Stacy let out a screech that made the hair on his neck stand
up. He knew instantly that was the moment when she beheld her ruined living room, and whether her shock was motivated by the
sight of a prostrate bloody man who appeared to be negotiating the transition from breathing human being to corpse under her
roof or by the great gash his vehicle had torn in her perfect house, Lloyd would never know. The wound on the crown of Frank's
head was leaking blood, and the glass from the windshield of the Hummer had carved his face like a Thanksgiving turkey, leaving
it a suppurating pulp. Lloyd had run upstairs to get towels to stanch the bleeding, praying Frank would at least hold on until
he got to the hospital, where he could expire under the watchful eye of an ER doctor.
Stacy came to her senses as soon as Lloyd reappeared laden with thick towels in a shade of cerulean she had painstakingly
matched with the Italian tiles of the master bathroom. She ordered him to the kitchen to get the dish towels instead. This
he dutifully did, quickly returning to Frank and gently tamping their less luxurious but still one hundred percent cotton
terry-cloth softness over the terrible wounds and looking for signs of life in Frank's motionless features.
Lloyd tried to take Frank's pulse but had no idea what he was doing and then absurdly flashed on Groucho Marx, who, finding
himself in a similar situation, had so famously said, "Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped." Stacy cowered in
the corner, alternately poleaxed by the thought of death's chilly presence making a surprise visitation to her wonderful world
and trying to remember whether she had removed the name of Garrett Quickly, her builder, from the speed dial and how late
was too late to call him.
The grip of terror Lloyd had felt at the sight of Frank's bloody body had begun to ease because the second thought he had,
the one arriving immediately on the heels of
Christ! Someone's driven a truck into my living room,
was
He came here to kill me.
Lloyd knew Frank to have violent proclivities; he'd been with him on a gun range and seen Frank handle pistols with the airy
casualness of an NRA member. And there was the little matter of Frank having pulled the gun in Lloyd's office. He was familiar
with the rage that underpinned much of Frank's comedy, the deep well of brooding acrimony from which he drank and the long-term
ramifications of those feelings. Frank had needed Lloyd to do him a favor, Lloyd had not heeded the call, the situation had
imploded; a more stable mind than Frank's could draw a line between these events allowing blame to be apportioned accordingly.