The Comedy Writer (4 page)

“Hey,” I said.

“Henry!”

She smiled and I took a good gander and it was always better than Fd remembered, and of course I wasn't thinking about Amanda anymore, which was nice.

“Can I come in?”

“Honey, open your eyes, I'm not wearing nothing.”

“Oh yeah.”

“I'm starving,” she said. “You got anything chocolate?”

“Just a pan of brownies in the oven.”

“No way.”

“Yes way.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I have some?”

“Course.”

“Give me a sec, I'll be right over.”

“Make it fifteen minutes,” I said. “They're cooling.”

I threw my clubs in my room and raced to a chichi bakery on Robertson. I bought ten large brownies for seventeen dollars and fifty cents, then rushed back home and fit nine of the brownies next to each other in a pan. The extra brownie I crumbled up and spread around the rest of the pan. I put them in the oven on broil and this gave my apartment a rich chocolaty aroma.

While the brownies were getting blasted, I threw my dirty clothes in the closet and folded my murphy bed into the wall, then
thought better of it and pulled it back down and I sat on the bed and then I stood up. I was manic with lust and paced around the room thinking about how it would go. It wasn't the first time I'd thought about this. There had been opportunities to make some kind of move, of course, what with her always walking around with the pussy out, but something about her casualness had thrown off my rhythm and I'd been unable to segue from nakedness to sex, as if that were some great leap. She'd even come to my door in her bra and panties at 2 A.M., asking for popcorn, and I'd stood there like a bananahead, unable to even muster enough nerve to invite her in. But now it was going to happen, it
had
to happen, and I'd be an idiot if I didn't at least broach the subject because it was suddenly occurring to me that perhaps she wanted it as much as I.

When I heard her door open out in the hall, I ran into the kitchenette. There was a knock and I called out that the door was open, and I picked up the brownie pan using a T-shirt as a pot-holder. I heard her enter and I wondered if she'd still be buck naked, and I said, “Hot out of the oven.” As I came out of the kitchenette, a tall redheaded guy with an unbelievable build was standing in my apartment, nude except for a towel around his waist.

“All right,” he said and he took a big sniff. “Brownskis.”

“Urn … ?”

“I'm Tiff's friend. She's in the shower, so she sent me on a mission.”

The half-naked guy walked past me and I said, “Oh.”

I was sort of in shock and of course winded by all this, and before I knew it, this six-foot-four-inch fuckhead was walking out of my apartment with the whole pan of brownies and my potholder T-shirt and a carton of milk under his arm, and he said his name was
Herb Silverman and he'd see me around, and after I heard Tiffany's door shut again, I sat on my bed and all I could think was: Fucking shit, those brownies were expensive.

was what I'd learned from eating in them, and kitchen work was not one of those things. It was a job, though, and I was down to forty-three dollars and a jar full of change, so I took it. When I showed up at Ernesto's Ristorante on Melrose at nine in the morning, the chef handed me a bucket filled with a brown sauce. “Get rid of this,” he said. “I need the pot.”

As I was dumping it out in the sink, I noticed it smelled pretty good and thought it wasteful, but I figured there was some stupid health law whereby you had to throw everything out after a couple days. It was kind of nice to know the place had lofty standards. I scrubbed the pot, making sure to leave it squeaky clean. I was a kitchen helper now, and I wanted to be a good one. The chef, Louie, gave me a few bulbs of garlic to chop and half an hour later he asked for the duck sauce. I didn't know what he was talking about. “The duck sauce,” he repeated.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“How do I know? You're the one who took it.”

I squinted.

“In the pot I gave you to clean out,” he said.

Now, I'd been called a fucking asshole before, but never with such conviction. He had
me
convinced, especially when he got to the part about starting the sauce at home while seeing the kids off to school. I was relieved when Louie finally smoothed down his carotids,
ordered me out of his sight, and gave me twenty bucks to run out for some lettuce.

At a traffic light on Santa Monica Boulevard I saw a crumpled-up fast-food bag under a bus bench. I jumped out, tossed the bag in a metal basket, and hopped back in my car. In the process I noticed a woman bawling her eyes out. She was in an old Ford station wagon with wood on the side that was stopped right beside me.

After I put my seatbelt back on, I called out, “Excuse me! Are you okay?”

At first she didn't hear me, so I said,
“Hello!”

When she looked over, she grew embarrassed. I did, too, because she was stunning. Maybe twenty-five, earthy, straight blonde hair, a faceful of eyes.

I adjusted my hat. “You all right?”

She smiled, wiped her cheeks. “I'm listening to a book on my tape player.”

I smiled back. “Must be pretty sad.”

“Of Mice and Men”

“You at the end?”

“Yeah.”

“ 'Tell me about the rabbits, George.' “

“Exactly.”

She tilted her head and looked at me. Suddenly I was in that wagon with her, pulling away from a seaside chapel, a string of cans hanging from the bumper. The light turned green. She didn't touch the pedal.

I blurted it out: “Will you have a cup of coffee with me if I promise not to give away the ending?”

I watched her think about it. A man jogged by wearing a surgical
mask. A car behind us honked. Then she did what any smart, decent woman living in a dangerous big city would do. She pinched up her face and said no. I considered putting up an argument, but the bastard honked again, and anyway I knew our moment had passed. When she drove away, it wasn't cans I saw hanging from her bumper, but my heart.

I found a couple copies of my script sitting under my mailbox. Rejections, numbers nine and ten. I'd sent
How I Won Her Back
to several agencies a few weeks earlier and now I had two more form letters. One of them at least said they'd read the thing. The other claimed they didn't accept unsolicited scripts unless they came through an agent, which was a head-scratcher, seeing as I'd submitted it to them seeking agency representation. I got the hat trick when I noticed a letter from the
L.A. Times Magazine.
A senior editor named Julia Frick complimented me on a “nice read” but said the suicide story was a “St. Patrick's Day piece” and they were currently looking for articles with a summer flavor. I called Julia Frick's office. She wasn't in, but I told her assistant I'd received the note and thought it sucked.

“Calm down,” she said.

“No, I won't calm down! This isn't a fucking 'St. Patrick's Day
piece'!
It's a story about people and how the system can break down because nobody gives a shit anymore and something ought to be done, goddamn it!” I felt myself losing control, so I hung up and poured a glass of Stoly. I picked the phone up after ten determined rings.

“You're a tremendous asshole,” Julia Frick's assistant said, “but my boss is a bigger one, so I'm going to pass your story on to another editor.”

I listened to the woman catch her breath, but I was afraid to speak. The voice reminded me of my cousin Kristen, who could also be a pain in the ass.

“All right?”
she barked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

I reworked my script for a couple hours, then sat on the front steps and ate a can of sardines, which I chased with a glass of instant coffee. I watched the showroom cars drive by and envied the couples running into Carl's Market for the beverages that would start their evenings. It seemed as if the whole world traveled in twos. I felt that six o'clock feeling for a moment. It was a Saturday-only feeling, there was fun in the air. But I was staying home. There was a time when I'd gone years without staying in on a Saturday night. And now three straight.

I thought about the woman in the wooden station wagon, but the stab I'd felt earlier was gone. Those were the kinds of heartaches I could take. It was part of the game. I'd chased a lot of women in my life, but I didn't consider myself a womanizer. I was just looking for the right one, what was wrong with that? Besides, the vast majority had blown me off. They'd won. I couldn't help wondering: If I hadn't thrown the litter away, maybe I would've had more time to convince the station wagon woman to meet me. What the hell kind of karma was that?

I opened my notebook and reread the story I'd sent to the
L.A. Times:

It was a hot winter day. The Santa Ana winds had been recycling exhaust from the valleys for at least forty-eight hours
—
that's how long I'd been in L.A. Yd started apartment-hunting at nine and by noon my eyes were stinging from the web of filth that hung over the Westside. The neighborhoods I crisscrossed smelled like airports. I checked out a few places in Hollywood
—
dumps really
—
then decided to look closer to the beach. There were long waiting lists for rent-controlled apartments, I knew, but I was feeling lucky.

I swung onto Wilshire and headed into Westwood, passing a row of high-rise condos layered with bushy green balconies. Traffic slowed near an expanse of modern office buildings right up until I crossed under the 405 freeway. I hung a left and a right, stopped for frozen yogurt on Santa Monica Boulevard, then shot back down 26th Street to San Vicente. This was the nicest street Yd seen in L.A. There were no traffic lights over a two-mile stretch. I could finally go over thirty miles an hour. But there was no big rush now. Not with the colorful spandexed joggers making their way up the grassy divide beneath a row of coral trees. Even the drivers around here
—
sunglassed beauties in Range Rovers
—
even they had my attention. The air cooled discernibly as I approached the water and for a split second, life was good.

First I thought it was a worker, but the guy was too close to the edge and there wasn't a wall. The hell with this, I thought, and I blew right past the building. Hanging a left, I continued about a quarter mile on a cliff overlooking the Pacific; it was the first time Yd seen the Left Coast.

Nice.

Shit.

Just check it out, I thought to myself. Maybe it's nothing.

The maniac was still on top of the building. A woman. It was something, all right. She sat down, stood up, ran her fingers through her hair, paced back and forth. I was the only one around and hadn't had practice in this kind of thing. Should I call up to her, or would that be her cue to go?

For some reason, I counted the number of floors: sixteen. That'd do the trick. I looked around for help. No one.

Then, thank God, a phone booth.

“Someone's on top of a building at the end of San Vicente Boulevard,” I said after dialing 911. “Looks like she might go.”

“Where are you calling from?” a man asked.

“Across the street.”

“Can you see her from where you are?”

“No.”

“What's the address?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “It's at the corner of San Vicente and, uh, I don't know, there's only one street sign here. It's right at the ocean.”

“Ocean Avenue?”

“Yeah, that sounds right. Look, you better hurry. I got a feeling she's serious.”

“What side of the street is the building on?”

“It's the only high-rise here. You can't miss it.”

“What side of the street?” the man repeated.

I couldn't think clearly. “I don't know,” I said. “It's the only big one. The others are all low.”

No response. I concentrated and got my bearings. The ocean must be west. “It's north,” I said. “North side of the street.”