Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (23 page)

“Babe,” I said, staring at desperate-faced Felicity on my TV screen. (I feel no bond to her and her collegiate whining. I never had a dorm room; I did the short haircut before she did. I'm a take-charge girl.) “I'm sitting here unemployed, eating a burrito on the floor of my rental, which is a converted suite in the garage of a Polish couple's house. I'm cool with shitholes. I'll be there next week.”

On my first night near the Yukon, we met up for dinner with some local hotshots at a weathered Outback Steakhouse. We wedged ourselves into a threadbare booth with the couple, who looked like Loni Anderson and Burt Reynolds.

James and Loni exchanged a bit of small talk, while I sat mesmerized by Burt's furry upper lip. His luxurious mustache reached out to embrace his nose hairs to form a nose/lip carpet of impressive proportions. I guessed he had to be at least 60 percent Greek. All of a sudden the carpet spoke.

“There were a couple of grizzlies playing with a bale of hay in my yard,” Burt said, fondling the edges of his lip hair. “They were tossin' it up and throwing it back and forth like it was a ball or something.”

“Wow.” I wrestled my gaze up to his eyes. “That's really so cool that you saw that.”

Burt turned to me like he hadn't noticed me at all before that moment. It was as if I'd just sat down at the table and I hadn't been sitting there through our bloomin' onion or potato skin appetizers.

“Actually,” he said, leaning across the table, “the last thing it was was
cool.
”

I gasped, almost audibly. He mocked my
cool
. God, that was mean.

James put his hand on my thigh to steady me. “So, what did you do?” he asked Burt.

“I fucking shot them. I just opened up the window and shot 'em.
Boom!
” Oh, he was mean. Not just harsh mean, but might-just-shoot-me-dead-right-there-at-the-table mean. I sat back in my seat, squinting in confusion at the spectacle.

James leaned forward. “What did you do with them after you shot them?”

“I left them there. Then the coyotes came, and I fucking shot them too.”

What?
I sat back in the booth, squinting even harder.

Burt stopped rubbing his mustache to emphasize the severity of his own personal martial law. Loni nodded to me, letting me know that Burt spoke the truth. I was horrified.

Steeling myself, I unclenched my hand from James's knee, leaned forward, and peeled a piece of the bloomin' onion off with my bare hands. I wanted Burt and Loni to see I could be a bit of a savage myself.

Loni twirled her Chardonnay. “Well, our neighbor's dog kept coming over, so I shot it.”

I laughed. Loni and Burt both gave me a stern look. My arm hung in midair, hand squeezing the oil from the onion.

“You didn't
seriously
kill all those animals?”

Loni sipped her white-lady wine, looking at me over the brim of her glass. After a long pause she said, low and slow, “It was an annoying dog.”

The next day I was on the couch watching
Rosie
at two thirty in the afternoon. The sun had just set as James rushed into our little apartment, out of breath.

“So I was out in the field today to check up on some excavation with Burt and Burt pulls up in his truck and he's like, ‘Hold on a second, I need you to help me,' and he pulls off into the bush. I follow him and when I get to the back he had fucking
dead coyotes
in the bed of the truck and I had to help him throw them into the bush and pretend I didn't give a fuck!”

I muted O'Donnell and faced him. He was half-laughing, half in shock. I was confused.

“What? Coyotes in the back of the truck?”

“He had a whole bunch of dead coyotes in the back of the truck.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“And he didn't tell me and he pulled over, all, ‘I need you to help me,' and he fucking opened the tailgate and there's all these dead coyotes and I had to throw them in the bush!”

“Oh. My. God.”

“I know. Then he starts asking about you as I am throwing dead coyotes into the bush. What do you do? Do you have a job here? And my head is just spinning because I've got dead coyote paws in my hands and we're talking about something
totally normal
. It was a weird and abrupt change in conversation, to go from dead animals to you. So I tell him you do odd jobs, but you're a writer and want to be a screenwriter, and he says he has a friend who works on a TV series in Vancouver who needs an assistant.”

“Burt has a friend in entertainment? What kind of entertainment? Rodeo?”

“The guy hunted with him or something. Anyhow, he wants you to meet him.”

“Cool. Way cooler than throwing dead animals into the bush.”

“Do you want to move to Vancouver?'

I did. I left James up north, we went back to our weekend rendezvous, and I headed down to Vancouver to meet Burt's friend, Harvey.

“Come on,” Harvey says. “Someone's got to write this shit down. This shit is brilliant.”

“Okay.” We're sitting in Harvey's Land Rover outside of a television executive's office building. Harvey's meeting started inside ten minutes ago.

“Picture a movie about a man who loses his leg to cancer, and then he finds out his arms are really strong; he has long arm muscles or something—longer than most arm muscles . . . He's much stronger than he thought, and he becomes a wheelchair racer. That'll get viewers going.”

Okay.

“Also? I was thinking about a story about an orphanage in Germany that sells kids to China. Everyone still hates those motherfuckers. You writing this down?”

I add it to my list, which now looks like this:

TO DO

1.   Pick up new Grand Cherokee

2.   Call Paul Zuker the
L
lawyer, weapons charge

3.   New arrows to kill things, or shoot at plastic deer

STORY IDEAS

1.   Leg cancer/mutant strong arm hero wheelchair man

2.   Bad German baby sellers to China

After I've finished my notes, we walk into the building, fifteen minutes late. I pretend I'm writing things down in my notebook and take my spot in the corner of the conference room, scanning the crowd. Harvey always takes me into meetings, to show off, but I actually love getting to see all the different aspects of television-making, like how these execs like to sit around and talk about nothing. He sits down across from Lois, an executive for a big-name cable company. Lois wears her hair tight and dark blond. She's about fifty, and her skirts are always slit up the middle. From the front, when her legs are together in the hole of the skirt, her bottom half looks like a giant naked vagina. She looks vaguely pleased. “Harvey, the show came in second last Sunday.”

“Second? We came in second? Okay, second is pretty good.” Harvey pulls a new toothpick from his shirt pocket and nods to me. The nod means nothing. It's just a thing he does to make himself look more important. I nod back and try to look busy. This is basically my first paid acting gig.

“Yes, well, you came in second to
The Sopranos
, so . . .” She laughs. The whole room laughs. I laugh too, and I'm shocked to realize I'm actually proud of Harvey. He is the executive producer of a TV show that came
second
in the ratings—after
THE SOPRANOS
.

Harvey says nothing, looks at me, looks at Lois. “What the fuck is
The Sopranos
?”

After the studio, Harvey tells me we have an important meeting and directs me to a house in West Vancouver. We pull up to the garage of a house that is perched on the side of a hill. It doesn't look like the right spot for an important meeting, but I sit in the driver's seat as Harvey opens his door and gets out of the Land Rover. “Don't look out the back window,” he says. “I need to change.”

Two minutes later, Harvey comes around my side of the car with his arms outstretched, like a mini Elton John displaying his outfit before his birthday party. He is now wearing a full Ferrari-red car-racing jumpsuit. Like a mechanic. His eyes look much less murdery and piercing than before, but they are still very, very sparkly.

“Let's roll,” he says.

He knocks three times and the garage door slowly opens to reveal a tiny, old Italian-looking man. (Dark hair, olive skin, spoke fluent Italian. He was at least 300 percent Italian.) Mr. Italy is also wearing a Ferrari jumpsuit, similar to Harvey's but definitely not more expensive.

“Heeeeeey!” says the old man, stretching his arms out to Harvey. They punch each other on the back mid-hug to remind themselves of how masculine they really are in their matching red jammies. The garage is walled with mirrors. And right in the middle sits a Ferrari. It was like a ballet studio, only instead of a ballerina there was a car.

Our important meeting was just Harvey getting in a jumpsuit to talk to his mechanic about his Ferrari for half an hour.

“Kelly, you see this??” Harvey points inside the hood, not really caring if I see anything.

“Yeah, I see it.” I raise my hand and point vaguely toward the car, as if I've spotted something under the hood.

Harvey looks satisfied. “What a life!” he says with a smile.

My job is to do everything Harvey is too lazy to do for himself. On set that afternoon, I do what I spend most of my on-set days doing: nothing. I roam around the huge fake Yukon town outside Vancouver waiting for him to ask me to find his keys, or just call me in to listen to him talk about the time he dated Liz Hurley. I eat a lot of craft service (mostly maple-dipped doughnuts). When I'm not doing that, I walk down to the stream and throw rocks into it. As much as I love to see Harvey praised for playing runner-up to
The Sopranos
, I would not want his version of his job.

When the boredom threatens to break me, I decide to visit Heather, the young female lead, in her room.

“Want to play Tetris?” I ask her. We play a lot of simultaneous Tetris while I pick her brain. Maybe I could learn to memorize lines. Actors really do make a lot of money per minute of actual work.

“Acting on camera is easy, right? I'm pretty sure I could do it.” We're sitting across from each other on her stiff chairs, staring at our Game Boys, our feet on the table.

“Oh, you could totally do it. You know, I get these massive panic attacks, and I do it every day. It isn't that big a deal at all. You just have to look natural when you say the lines.”

“You get panic attacks?” I peer over my Game Boy. Her round dollface betrays not a ripple of reaction.

She sighs. “I went to a club last night and froze. I panicked from all of the people. I peed my pants a little. Okay, a lot. But it was dark.”

“I get the pee thing. I get it. Doesn't the acting freak you out?”

“No.”

“And it's good money.”

“Great money, bad hours. But the hours are worth the money.”

I liked the idea of acting. I liked the idea of a lot of things.

“Harvey told me you're a writer,” she says. “Have you written a screenplay or something?”

I look up from the Game Boy and we make eye contact.

“Have you heard of Robert McKee?” I ask her. She shakes her curls no and reaches for her Master Cleanse cayenne juice, staring at me as she takes a gulp. I look up at the ceiling for effect, as if I'm collecting many important thoughts. “He's this big-time script doctor guy who does these traveling seminars about how to write a screenplay. Like the math of a screenplay? I went to his seminar and smoked cigarettes with him a lot. He had some good stuff to say.”

“Did you write a script?”

I sigh and look at her. “I have nothing to say yet. I tried. I don't have a story. I'm just putting these little stories on the Internet on my GeoCities page.” I didn't know how I was going to become a writer, professionally. At this point, I figured self-publishing was better than rejection letters. And I figured they'd all be rejection letters, because I didn't go to university.

“What's a GeoCities?” She looks confused, and I don't feel like explaining the Internet.

“Whatever. I'll write a screenplay one day.” We both sit there in silence, and then I start my game back up.

“Are you still living in the Travelodge with the rest of the crew? Is it okay?” she asks. I lie and nod yes. It's actually very boring and I'm very lonely. Last night I wrote about how I'm sure Britney Spears could be cognitively challenged and no one would know, because she wasn't in the regular school system (to post the next day from work, where I had Internet access); I made a sandwich on my new sandwich grill, which I set up beside the bed; and then I watched the first episode of
Malcolm in the Middle
. When it was over, I waited in the hall for someone to come out to talk to. It took five minutes, but finally a PA came out and he happened to have just watched the same show. We both agreed it was a great pilot, and then I went to bed. Just as glamorous as I'd hoped.

“It's great,” I say, smiling at my reflection in the Game Boy screen. “I have a maid and I make a thousand bucks a week. Couldn't ask for more.”

Midafternoon. I carry Harvey's grilled vegetables and meatballs into the field, where he is shooting arrows at a plastic deer. He usually gets a PA to remove the arrows and reposition the dummy deer. He says he couldn't bear to accidentally shoot an arrow into a woman. I've pulled a table and a few chairs for him out there, as a makeshift office in a field—which is great today, because Harvey isn't alone.

“Kelly!” Harvey slaps his thigh and puts his bow and arrows on his desk. He's standing with a man I've never seen before, a man who looks like a sixty-year-old red-haired Kevin Kline.

“This is Bryan. He wrote the episode we're shooting. Kelly's Jewish.”