The Comedy Writer (5 page)

“Northwest or northeast?”

“There is no east or west here. The buildings are all on the north or south.”

“Is it east or west of Ocean?”

“East.”

“What's your name?”

“Henry Halloran.”

“Address?”

“I don't have one.”

“Are you homeless?”

“No.”

“What was your last permanent residence?”

“Boston.”

“Street?”

“What, are you kidding me? There's a lady about to kill herself and you want my resume?”

“I need
—
“

“Took, you better send someone in a hurry,” I said and I hung up.

I ran to get a better view. Still there, looking over the edge now. I burst into the lobby and told the security guard what was going on. He calmly thanked me and said it would be taken care of.

From the street the woman appeared to be having an animated conversation with herself, more frantic now than ever. A few joggers came by with Walkmans on, but no one looked up. I couldn't bear to watch, so I climbed in my car. I

kept the plastic flap of the sunroof shut so I couldn't see her. I flipped in a Kid Creole tape and prayed she wouldn't do it. Fifteen minutes later the cops still hadn't arrived. I peaked through the flap; she hadn't budged.

Back inside, I was stunned to see the security guard reading an automobile magazine. What are you doing?” I asked with a squint.

The man raised his eyebrows.

“I told you there's a woman on the building.”

“S'being taken care of” he said.

“Well, how come she's still up there?”

“Called my supervisor. He'll be here in a little while.”

“Why don't you just go up and get her yourself?”

“I'm not allowed to leave the desk. I promise you, sir, everything's being taken care of.”

I shook my head. “No, it's not. You could get the hell off your butt and go get her.”

The guard stood. “I'm going to have to ask you to leave
—
“

“Will you at least call the police? They must be lost. I already called them once.”

“This is a private building, sir. We supply our own security. Now you're going to have to leave.”

I did, for a moment. Then I said the hell with it. The guard was on the phone when I reentered the lobby. He noticed me just as the elevator doors were closing.

The wind was gusting hard up on the pebbled roof. At first I couldn't find her and feared she'd done it. I wasn't about to look over the side, though.

I stepped behind the raised stairwell and saw her sitting

at the precipice. She turned when I called out to her. The woman looked to be in her late thirties, her hair was pulled back tightly, and her bony frame was covered by a grimy peach sweatsuit.

“Everything okay?”

“Vine” she said.

For the first time, I noticed the view. Jesus, we were high; seemed a hundred stories, not sixteen. Despite the smog, I could see the entire coast, and even a couple islands.

“Sorry to bug you,” I said, “but are you sure you re okay?”

She threw me a confusing look
—
one I wouldn't begin to understand until later that night
—
then turned around.

“Huh?” I called.

“I'm just looking around.”

The woman leaned forward, downward.

“It's dangerous to sit at the edge like that,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “It's okay, though.”

“Listen, if there's something wrong, maybe we can go somewhere and have a cup of coffee or something, talk about it.”

“I don't drink coffee,” she said and she turned to me.

Her face looked pinched, tense, but her eyes were making contact and for a moment I thought maybe I really could help her.

“Come on, let's go downstairs.”

“I can't.”

I nodded at this.

“Then tell me what's wrong,” I said.

She managed a vague smile. “You're what's wrong,” she said.

The head tilted a hit, as if in the midst of some sudden realization.

“Sorry,” I said and then I watched as she leaned forward and suddenly she wasn't there anymore. All that remained was a plume of pearl-colored exhaust that the desert breeze had pushed out over the bay.

I stayed on the steps for a long time afterward. The Santa Anas had finally quit and as night fell a surprising chill settled over the L.A. basin. Back in my room, I drank a can of beer, then sat at the table and thought about how afraid I'd been on that roof, about how confrontational she'd been, about everything I'd left out.

I woke up one day and the cough was just there. This wasn't a cold, it was a cough. Everything else felt okay except for this dry hack. A smoker's hack. I didn't smoke cigarettes, but neither had Andy Kaufman and he died from lung cancer. And what about pot? I'd smoked my share of that. Bob Marley had smoked his share, too. Jesus, I was getting carried away. Nobody was dying. Weren't there usually warning signs? Then I remembered the dizzy spells. On and off for a couple weeks I'd had them, but hadn't given it much thought. Lack of sleep, I'd figured, maybe my blood sugar was off. Everything was clear. The sense of impending doom I'd been living with, the headaches, the recurring tightness in my throat when stuck in traffic. Good God, maybe throat cancer, too.

Then a break. A big break. Health insurance at work. I couldn't
believe it. My little job at Ernesto's was going to save my life. I thanked God they hadn't fired me after the lettuce disaster (having returned from the market with a dozen cabbages). Actually, Chef Louie
had
fired me, but I'd immediately gone to the owner and begged for another chance. I told him I was desperate and I didn't know much about restaurant work, but I was driven and responsible and would work twice as hard as anyone else. Joe was a middle-aged Italian guy from Jersey, and I looked him in the eye when I talked and I could tell he wanted to say no, but he had a heart and finally he caved. He'd try rrie as a waiter, he said—lunches only—and if I fucked up one more time, that was it, I was out of there, and he wasn't goin^ to listen to any more of my shit.

Dr. Hoffman's office was on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills above an old pharmacy. In the waiting room I sat with a
People
magazine on my lap, watched the bustle of nurses and assistants behind the fogged, sliding windows. Dr. Hoffman was a couple years older than me—maybe mid-thirties—and seemed genuinely pleased to have a new patient. When asked what I did for a living, I told him I was a writer. Usually I would say sales, just to avoid the next question (“Anything I would've heard of?”), but the doctor struck me as the type who'd be married to Cybill Shepherd or a Charlie's Angel, so I guess I was networking. He was good-looking and probably getting better with age. His hair was starting to gray, which highlighted his tan, and he had big bleached teeth and trendy blue glasses.

When Hoffman heard the cough, he seemed concerned. A chest X ray was ordered up. They did it right there, in his own lab. Excellent, I thought. This was the kind of efficiency that could save a lung, or at least part of one. I could live on part of a lung, I'd just
walk less. Or slower. The hell with that, Fd walk
more.
Maybe Fd even run! Fd stretch out that carved-up organ until it was as big as a normal lung. Fd been blessed by this early diagnosis, given a fighting chance; I was damn well going to take advantage of it.

Then a thought: Maybe she'd come back to me now. The deathbed scene, she returns, I pull through, we fuck a lot after. This cancer thing could be the break I was looking for!

No. If I did have it, Amanda was the last person Fd tell. She might blame herself. These things were caused by stress. She'd certainly caused me enough stress lately.

That cunt, she was killing me!

Dr. Hoffman appeared with the X rays. He dropped them into a wall panel and backlit them. Worse than I thought. The left lung had at least ten blotches on it, some as big as a quarter. When the doctor looked at me, I held my breath, what was left of it.

“Negative.”

“Negative what?”

Negative, I was clean.

“But the blotches?”

“Gas.”

“Gas?”

“Gas.”

“Gas?”

“Gas.”

“But what about the cough? I don't have a cold. Surely—”

“An allergy, probably to smog.”

“Whuh?”

Ten percent of Angelenos had it, he said. The filthy air caused the allergy, which caused postnasal drip, which got in my throat,
which made me cough. I should clean my nostrils with warm water every morning and night, maybe use a nasal spray, the cough would go away.

Was he certain? “Couldn't it be—”

“Get out of here.”

As happy as I was about keeping my lungs, I was also a little embarrassed. I'd gotten that from my father, who was a doctor and used to bitch about all the crackpots who'd call him in the middle of the night complaining about painful hiccups. I was going to live, though, and to celebrate my good fortune, I decided to stop at Johnny Rockets on the way home for a double cheeseburg and a chocolate shake. On little Santa Monica I saw an enormous woman coming out of a fitness center. She was stuffed into a shiny, metallic aerobics outfit that made her look like a fat robot. A block farther I saw a muscular man dressed ghoulishly in a black bodysuit, wearing a black bonnet, his face covered by a black scarf. He was doing pirouettes on roller skates in the middle of the intersection and he stared at me as I drove by, and he seemed like Death, and I'd just wriggled free of him, and he didn't look happy.

Something occurred to me: What if it wasn't gas in the X rays? Hoffman wasn't a radiologist. How could he be so sure? Besides, I knew, cancer didn't always show up on X rays. Only if it was in the advanced stages. Good God, what if the tumor was so big he didn't even notice it? What if he was looking for peas and staring at a melon? Then the shame again. Hoffman was a doctor, I was a fucking idiot.

I normally didn't do writerly things in public, such as taking a pad and pen to a coffeehouse, and I always felt a little embarrassed for those who did. It seemed pretentious and calculated and Hemingwayish
because, really, who the hell could do good work with twenty-five other pseudo-bohemians sitting around them using words like “masturbatory” and “bourgeois”? That said, it was midafternoon and I was the only one sitting at the Johnny Rockets counter, so I thought, What the hell? I ran out to the car and got my script and I started editing while I waited for my burger.

My server was a couple years younger than me and he was dressed in a fifties-style malt shop outfit complete with a white paper hat, straight out of an
Archie
comic book. I felt sorry for him. When he saw me editing, he asked if I was a writer, which was embarrassing because of what I just mentioned, but, as I said, he was standing there in a hamburg flipper uniform, so I fessed up.

“Anything I would've heard of?”

“No.”

“Kind of stuff?”

“Urn …”

“Film, TV?”

“Film.”

“Me too.”

This was depressing.

“Sold anything yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Me neither,” he said. “But I will. And when I do, I'm gonna kick ass. Know why?”

I lifted my chin.

“I've written
three
action spec scripts, and they all have the same lead character.”

“Same one.”

“See, if I could just sell the first one, I've got two sequels lined up back to back.”

I stared at this lunatic, my waiter.

“Could you please get me the mustard?”

He did, but hung around as I ate, telling me about his other four unsold spec scripts and asking if I knew anyone who would read them. He also rattled off some gory statistics that I'd been blissfully unaware of—like that only one of every thirty-five thousand screenplays ever got made—and he was starting to bug the hell out of me.

“I'm bugging you, aren't I?” he said.

“No, no.”

“A lot of people say I bug 'em because I push my stuff too much.”

He had his elbows on the counter and I caught that cologne-in-lieu-of-a-shower smell, like a prep school freshman's dorm room— sweaty, sticky,
semeny.

I waved him off. “Eh.”

“It's just that here I am in the middle of Beverly Hills and I'm serving movie people all day and, heck, if I don't push myself, no one else will do it for me, know what I mean?”

“Amen, brother.”

“You should work here, man—you wouldn't believe the people you meet. And they're hiring.”

“That right?”

“Uh-huh. That's how Spielberg got started, you know—blowing his own horn. He doesn't so much now, but he did then.”