Steven Bochco (10 page)

Now the Devil opens the last door, revealing a vast crowd of men, as far as the eye can see, all standing in shit up to their knees, drinking coffee. “Now, this doesn't look so bad,” the guy says, relieved. “I could see spending eternity in here.”

The Devil says, “You'd better be sure, because once you go in, it's forever, and forever means that when you've been dead
a hundred million years,
you'll have just
begun
to be dead.”

The guy says, “No problem. I'll take door three,” and he wades in. Someone hands him a cup of coffee, he's standing there in shit thinking, This isn't so bad, when a booming Voice comes over the loudspeakers: “All right, you guys, coffee break's over. Back on your heads!”

I mention the joke because under the circumstances, it's hard not to imagine Bobby Newman wading into a sea of shit up to his knees, thinking, This isn't so bad, only to discover, after it's too late, that it was just a coffee break.

CHAPTER 19

Monday morning, Dennis gets to work early and fires up a pot of coffee. Pouring himself a cup, he settles in at his desk to read the story Bobby gave him. It's called “First Dog,” and this is it . . .

You're probably not going to believe this. I don't know that I would, either. Sometimes I'm not sure I believe it even now. But it's true, even though I'm not going to swear on my mother's eyes or anything stupid like that. You can judge for yourself after I tell you the whole story.

My name is Ron Barkin, which might be vaguely familiar to you even if you can't exactly place where you heard of me. I'm the creator and executive producer of the hit television show
Sleeper.
We're in our fourth season, we've won three Best Show Emmys, and in addition, I've personally earned two Emmys for Best Dramatic Writing—one for the pilot episode and another for the season opener of year two.

If you're one of the nine or so people in America who don't own a TV set,
Sleeper
is about this college professor at a small Eastern campus who teaches English Lit. He's a genius—a brilliant professor, loved by his students, admired by his colleagues, tolerated by the administration—an amazing scholar, gifted in his ability to communicate, educate, and entertain, all in one package. His classes are always SRO. Complicating matters is the fact that the professor is a drunk and a degenerate gambler who, when loaded, becomes profoundly rude and antisocial, whether shooting out the lights of a squad car, losing a month's salary at the racetrack, or mooning the wife of the university president at a faculty-student tea. His escapades are legend, and only lend to the general aura of notoriety that surrounds him.

A slob who lives most of the time in his office, he has a habit of disappearing for several days on end, only to reappear hollow-eyed, unshaven, and rumpled—the classic post-binge, hangdog, guilt-ridden drunk, always forgiven by his students and colleagues because he's so brilliant, mesmerizing, charming, and self-effacing. In short, he's a lovable, bad-boy genius rogue.

Except here's the catch: it's an act. The professor's not a drunk at all, or a degenerate gambler, or an all-around world-class fuckup. What the professor really is, is a sleeper—a deep-cover CIA operative, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, who's called in periodically (like, say, once a week) to deal with (i.e., eliminate or neutralize) various domestic terror threats, be they Middle Eastern, American (à la Timothy McVeigh), or organized crime.

That's the basic idea.

Anyway, six years ago, I wasn't exactly a household name. I was a writer with a lousy marriage and a lousy job, working on a TV series I hated. I wasn't exactly phoning it in (the marriage or the job), but I had no passion for either.

I was in my middle forties, plugging along, out of shape and putting on weight, when I got a call from my mother in New York telling me my father had dropped dead on the sidewalk from a heart attack.

When I got back from the funeral, I did some quick math on my life and didn't like the bottom line. I'd been married for twenty-three years, and it had never been an easy marriage. Think about trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole and you have the idea. There were career ups and downs (both of us), weight ups and downs (hers, and they were mostly ups), there were anger issues (mutual), libido issues (more hers than mine, until the last couple of years), struggles with depression (also hers), and enough money spent on marriage counseling to fund a small third-world nation.

Finally, after our kids were pretty much grown and gone, the marriage went from strained to stale to stagnant, and I figured if I didn't do something about it right away, I never would. Truth is, scared as I was to change my life, I was so unhappy I thought if I didn't leave, I'd die. Literally. My blood pressure was going through the roof, I was having anxiety attacks, and when I finally went to this shrink a friend of mine recommended, I spilled my guts. I said, “I'm forty-six, I've been married half my fucking life, my kids are grown, I feel like shit, and life is too short to stay miserable any longer.” So this shrink says to me,
“
If life was short you wouldn't be here. Life is
long.”
Which hit me like a ton of bricks.

Life
is
long.

So five days later, I moved out. I rented a dark, damp, termite-ridden house in Mandeville Canyon and commenced my new life.

There was this woman I'd been friendly with for some time who was an independent producer at Paramount, where I worked. We hit it off almost immediately, and I would be lying if I told you I didn't have the occasional more than friendly feeling for her, though to be perfectly honest, I never did anything about it. I say that not to impress you with what a faithful husband I was (I wasn't, and neither was my ex-wife, for that matter) but by way of letting you know that I always felt that if I did get involved with this woman, there'd be nothing casual about it. And, of course, as things turned out, I was exactly right, because when we finally
did
get together, it got pretty intense pretty quickly. Her name then was Diana Cooper. It's Diana Barkin now, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Diana had this little house in Sherman Oaks, just south of Ventura Boulevard, up in the hills. It was small but really warm and cheerful, and in contrast to the dump I was living in, it was no contest. I wound up spending a lot of my nights there, and I can't remember a time in my entire life I was happier. I'm not going to embarrass Diana (who I used to call Lady Di, until that poor soul's unfortunate accident soured us both on the nickname) by telling you what a great lover she is, but I will tell you this: in my whole life, I never had sex with anyone like I had with her. First of all, she was beautiful. Tall, thin (but not skinny), with incredible legs, a gorgeous ass, and small, perfecto tits (which, like most women, she wishes were bigger but which I think are perfect just as is, having had my fill of ample breasts over the years).

She had bright blue eyes and soft blond hair, and she could take a punch. (I'm not kidding. She had a little detour on the bridge of her nose from the time her first husband took a swing at her and broke it. She dumped him the same day—she's definitely not one of those women who stick around to take a beating.)

Frankly, the fact that she was unattached amazed me: she was, as I said, very sexy, very bright, and very capable, having started her career as a lawyer in business affairs before sliding sideways into development. Plus, she made a hell of a good living.

Anyway, we'd been good friends for a couple of years, though my ex-wife, along with probably all of Diana's girlfriends, thought we were already fucking our brains out. Vicariously, their husbands probably hoped so. Anyway, I finally said to her, as long as we've been convicted of the crime, we may as well commit it, and that's what we did. And Jesus Christ—it was like a dam bursting or something. We couldn't get enough of each other, which was how I came to be spending more time at her house than my own (which never really felt like my own anyway, and which I got out of the second the lease was up).

Diana had this dog, a white Lab named Bob, who was about three years old when we started living together. Bob was a great dog. You'd throw a tennis ball, he'd be all over it. He'd bring it back to you, tail going a mile a minute, but then he wouldn't let go of it. So you'd have to throw a second ball, which he'd also stuff into his mouth—now he'd have two of 'em in there—so you could pull out the first one. He loved to play, he didn't have a mean bone in him, and other than chasing down tennis balls or any other goddamn thing you threw, he lived to eat. And I don't think it's disrespectful to say that by and large, sweet as Labs are, intellect isn't exactly their strong suit, though every time I'd suggest that Bob was a little, you know, dim, Diana'd get all over me, so I don't say it to her anymore.

One night, around two-thirty in the morning, I got up to pee, and I knew as soon as I got back into bed that I was shot for the night. There I was, lying in bed, wide awake, trying not to disturb Diana, who was fast asleep next to me. Bob was on the floor farting up a brown windstorm, and I finally figured I'd go down to the kitchen and work on a script I was writing—without much enthusiasm, I might add. Of course, when I got out of bed and went downstairs, Mr. Gasbag thought there'd be some food in it for him, so he followed me down. And because he really was a good dog and he had these big, chocolate brown eyes and this cute way of cocking his head whenever he thought he might score something to eat, I went into the cupboard and got him a pig's ear, which happened to be one of his major all-time faves.

So while he was crunching away, I sat down at the kitchen table with a legal pad and a couple of Berol 350s and started writing.

I want to digress for a minute and tell you something about writing. Every once in a while, you have an idea for something that's really exciting, that really means something to you. Maybe it's something of a thematic nature, maybe it's just a good story that you've found a quirky point of view on or a great character or whatever. But when that happens, writing is the most unbelievably satisfying thing you can do, and when you're not doing it, all you can think about is getting back to it. But then there are the times (most of the time, actually, at least for me) when writing is just a job. You're a hired gun on someone else's show, you're not emotionally invested in it, and the only thing you've really got to bring to the party is your pride in your craft and your work ethic, both of which really get challenged in the face of knowing that whatever you write is going to disappear down the rat hole of someone else's creative invention anyway. And if you can still maintain your spirit, your humor, and your goodwill toward the work in spite of that, then you can call yourself a pro.

I'd been working in television for over twenty years, and I'd always prided myself on being the consummate professional. In all those years, I'd created and produced several pilots, none of which sold, and I always tried to keep at bay the thought that I simply wasn't good enough to take that next step—to be one of the select few, like John Wells or Dick Wolf or David E. Kelley, who could walk into some network head's office, spin him a ten-minute yarn, and walk out of the room with a thirteen-episode on-air commitment.

Anyway, it's in the context of that commitment to professionalism that I found myself in Diana's kitchen at two-thirty in the morning, working on my script, when the weirdest thing that ever happened to me in my whole life occurred. I'm sitting at the table scribbling scenes longhand when Bob—this is the dog, remember—says to me, out loud, in English:

“What are you writing?”

Just like that. Startled, I looked down at Bob, and he looked back at me and said it again: “What are you writing?”

Jesus Christ. I almost jumped out of my skin. “Are you talking to me?” I say.

“Well, yeah,” he says, looking at me like I usually look at him, which is to say he's looking at me like I'm the dumbest creature in the room. “Who else is here?”

At this point, let me clarify what I mean when I say Bob spoke to me. His lips didn't move, like you see in those Disney movies where they animate the animals' mouths so they're actually talking, and the joke is that their lips are moving and forming words just like ours do, and it's so cute and goofy you can't help laughing, and your kids eat it up. This was different. It was more like telepathy. No lip movement whatsoever. But I swear—Bob looked at me, and there was something in his eyes I'd never seen before: a focus, an intelligence, an awareness that, coming from a dog, was the spookiest thing I'd ever experienced in my life. Nothing—I mean
nothing
—was even a close second to this, including the time I ran out of the Schuyler Theater on Columbus Avenue in the middle of a matinee showing of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
when I was eight years old and slept with a light on in my room for about three years.

Again: “What are you writing?”

“A TV script,” I say very quietly, hoping Diana won't wake up, come down to the kitchen, and see me talking to her dog.

“I have an idea for a movie,” Bob says. “Wanna hear it?”

Now I think I'm losing my mind. I can hear Bob talking to me like a human being, totally conversational, as if he does it all the time, except his lips aren't moving and he's a goddamn dog lying on the floor looking up at me. I figure, Okay, maybe I'm in some weird late-night zone or maybe it's one of those crazy dreams where you think you're awake but you're actually still in the dream and you don't know it, because it's so real. So I figure: That's what it is, and I'll go along with it. So in that spirit, I ask him a few questions back—like, how long has he been able to talk?

“I don't know,” Bob says. “Since I was about two maybe.”

“How come you never talked before?” I ask.

“I talk all the time,” Bob says. “It's just no one ever heard me before. This is the first time.”

“What about Diana, did you ever try talking to her?” I ask.

“All the time,” Bob says, “but she doesn't hear me.” Then he tells me again that he has an idea for a movie, and do I want to hear it?

Hey, it's a dream, right? So I say sure and put down my pad and pencil: Tell me. Now Bob lifts his head up off his paws and kind of leans against the kitchen cabinet, getting comfortable. And this is the story—paraphrased, obviously—he tells me . . .