The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) (16 page)

"Wait," I said. "What about the screenwriter?"

"What about her?" Vernie said.

"Well, isn't she one of the main forces too?" I made a point to use the "she" pronoun for Vernie's benefit.

"Oh, you dear sweet boy."

"What?"

"Screenwriters don't have any power in Hollywood. None. We're the lowest of the low, at least once we've signed the contract. They ignore you, fire you, rewrite you. In Hollywood, you actually have to have them write it into your contract that they invite you to the premiere, because otherwise they won't. The writer is just that much of an afterthought."

"But if not for the writer, there wouldn't even be a movie in the first place."

"You're preaching to the choir, Chickadee. But that's not the way they see it. It's just not. Which isn't really funny, because the writer is the one person who's most concerned with story—the person who wants it to all hang together. To have a point. Not a point-point, like a lecture, but an
emotional
point. To have an ending that's totally unexpected, yet completely inevitable."

"What does that mean?"

She thought for a second. "A screenplay needs to build. Everything is there for a reason, and the reason is usually the ending. It makes everything that came before it make sense. But at the same time, it can't be predictable or it'll be boring. So the writer has to be one step ahead of the audience—she has to give them something fresh and different and unexpected. Or she can rely on gimmicks—clever slang, or explosions, or chase scenes, or gratuitous sex. Being shocking in some new way works too." She gave me an exaggerated once-over. "You should be writing this down—this is good stuff!"

I smiled, but part of me knew she was telling the truth. "It sounds like it was also hard to be a woman."

"Are you kidding? Hollywood is the town that finally figured out a way to make romantic comedies without women—with only straight men. All those 'bromance' movies a few years back? I couldn't believe it. Or that Muppets
movie reboot not long ago? There are something like twenty-five male Muppets and two female ones. The rebooted movie made a big deal about adding a brand new Muppet. So who was it? Of course it was another male. And the really weird thing was, no one even noticed. No one said one word. And you're thinking, 'It's just the Muppets, so what?' But imagine a children's movie with twenty-five female characters and two male ones. Or
any
movie. How do you think men would react to that kind of casual indifference?"

I raised an eyebrow. I hadn't thought about Hollywood like that before, but I couldn't really disagree.

"It's not that the men in Hollywood are bad people—some of them are perfectly fine, very decent. They just only ever see things
their
way, from
their
perspective. They claim they're in charge because they know how to make the money. Well, the big irony is that having more diverse voices in Hollywood would actually make them
more
money. But they'd also have to give up control, they'd have to give someone else access to the cash, and
that's
not going to happen any time soon. Take the movie today. A woman whose secret desire is to be a prostitute? That's really what they think women wanna see? For the sixty zillionth time?"

"So you didn't like it either?"

"The movie? I agreed with every single word you said before."

"But it's getting such good reviews."

"Well, keep in mind that I'm the writer who thought that
Pretty Woman
shouldn't be a romantic fantasy. I have no idea what I'm talking about. After all, nobody knows anything."

"They don't?"

"That's a famous quote by a screenwriter named William Goldman. He said that about Hollywood—'nobody knows anything.' He meant that everyone talks like screenwriting is a science, that there's some rhyme and reason to the business of making movies. But there really isn't. No one knows beforehand what the audience is going to respond to. But I've always thought it applied to
everything
about screenwriting. Everyone always talks like they're experts, like they know what the hell they're talking about. I did, just now. But we're all just winging it, making it up as we go along. Some of us are just a lot better at sounding confident. Or we're too stupid to realize that art is all just opinion. Completely subjective."

"That's kind of scary," I said.

"Is it? I think it's liberating. We do our best, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and then we move on."

Was Vernie talking about her kids again? I wasn't sure, but I decided not to chance it, even though I'd been waiting for an opportunity to ask her about her weekends with Warren and Goldie.

I sipped my coffee. Sure enough, it was already lukewarm, and I hadn't even drunk half. But I was having a good time, and I didn't want this coffee date to end. So I said, "Did you like it? Working in Hollywood?"

Vernie turned and looked out the window. In the building across from us, someone was sitting at a window drinking coffee and staring over at us. Down on Elliott Bay, a second ferry was leaving, to Bremerton this time.

When Vernie didn't say anything, I looked back at her. She wasn't looking out at downtown Seattle anymore—she was back to staring at me, her lips twitching now.

"What?" I said. It was like she'd been whispered the most delightful secret.

"Working in Hollywood was annoying, frustrating, depressing, infuriating, and completely soul-deadening." She hesitated for the perfect amount of time and gave me another one of her trademark grins. "And I absolutely loved every minute of it!"

CHAPTER TWELVE

That weekend, Gunnar was visiting his parents, so I decided to catch a ride down with him on Saturday morning and stay with my own parents for the night. I'd have to take a bus back home Sunday morning in order to get to my job at Green Lake by noon, but it had been a while since I'd seen my parents, and I knew they'd be happy to see me.

Besides, there was something to be said for getting out of the rut where my life was basically alternating between going to work and obsessing about Kevin. I also figured it would give me a chance to spend some quality time with Gunnar. His and my hometown—the place where we went to high school together—is about an hour south of Seattle, so we had lots of time to talk.

"Grover Krantz was one of the only traditional scientists to take the study of Bigfoot seriously," Gunnar said at one point. "He died in 2002, but he spent a lot of his career studying Bigfoot footprints—casts and stuff like that. Most of them were hoaxes, but he was convinced that some of them would have been almost impossible to fake—that they'd require an incredible knowledge of human anatomy and physical design. For example, the Bossburg casts show evidence of a foot with an old bone injury. And also spreading of the toes. Krantz theorized that Bigfoot might be an undiscovered remnant population of a species of giant ape that was thought to have gone extinct three hundred thousand years ago—the largest ape that ever lived. They lived in Asia, but Krantz said they could have crossed over on the Bering Land Bridge that was later used by humans to populate North America."

So much for spending quality time with Gunnar,
I thought.

I'd never been annoyed by Gunnar's obsessions before—not seriously annoyed. On the contrary, they were one of the things that made me like him. So why did this stupid Bigfoot thing feel so different? Was it just because I was discovering that I didn't have any real passions in my own life—or anything that I even really cared all that much about? Was I jealous?

When we got close to town, I said, "Why don't we just go straight to your house?" It was only about a fifteen minute walk from his parents' house to mine, and I figured it would be nice to see the old neighborhood. "Besides, then I can stop in and say hi to your parents."

"Nah," Gunnar said. "I'll drive you home."

"It's okay, I'm actually looking forward—"

"I'll take you home!" Gunnar said, and I looked at his white knuckles as he clenched the steering wheel.

I decided then and there that whatever the hell was going on with him, it was a remnant population of giant apes that I had no interest in disturbing.

*   *   *

It's a cliché to come home to your childhood house, look at your bedroom, and realize how much you've changed. But it's a cliché for a reason. People grow up and become different. But assuming you move out of the house at some point, which not all people my age do, your bedroom doesn't change. It stays the same, exactly the way you were in high school. It's like this wormhole to the past.

I stared around the room, at my swimming trophies and my collection of plastic collectibles from animated Disney movies. In the shelf on the bottom of the bedstand was a book,
Eight Plays
by Tennessee Williams. I'd found it on my parents' bookshelves my freshman year in high school. I have no idea why I'd started reading it—had I heard somewhere that the playwright was gay? But I'd loved it. It had all of his most famous plays—
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
,
Summer and Smoke
,
Sweet Bird of Youth
, and, yes,
A Streetcar Named Desire
. But the one I liked the most (by far) was
The Glass Menagerie
. It struck me as the gayest thing ever written, even though it never once says the word "gay." And it isn't gay because Amanda is campy, or because the metaphor of Laura's delicate, fragile glass menagerie is so romantic and beautiful. It's because of the narrator, Tom.

Tom is telling the audience a story from his past, something that clearly still haunts him. It turns out to be about his overbearing mother, Amanda, and Laura, his timid dreamer of a sister. Tom wants to be a writer, but he has to work at a job he hates in order to support his mother and sister. But over the course of the play, it becomes clear that Tom is also gay (although this is never stated outright—that's sort of the whole point, that it
can't
be stated outright, especially not in the 1930s when the play is set). Tom resents that he can't be himself, and also how much his mother and sister rely on him—they're too damaged and delusional to survive on their own. In the end (spoiler alert!), he grows so stifled and frustrated that he just leaves, even though he knows it will destroy them both. Just like the glass menagerie, the illusions of Amanda and Laura and even Tom are too fragile to survive, so everything breaks. But afterward Tom feels so guilty about what he's done that it basically destroys him too.

I later learned that Tennessee Williams' real name was Tom, and that he had a sister like Laura who was eventually institutionalized, and a mom like Amanda, and that he was a tortured alcoholic. Which makes perfect sense. Tennessee Williams' other plays have bigger themes and are more ambitious—especially
A Streetcar Named Desire
. But before
The Glass Menagerie
, I'd never before read anything that felt so personal (I still haven't). It was like Tennessee Williams was inviting you into his deepest, most personal, most painful memory. Was Tom an asshole? Well, yeah, I guess, maybe, depending on your point of view. But it's mostly just stupid to ask the question, because the whole play seems so real and heartbreaking and sad. It's impossible to judge Tom (or Amanda, or Laura), because you totally understand them, and they're caught in an impossible situation with no good choices, and they're all doing the best they can just to survive. The play doesn't have a fake, feel-good happy ending like
Pretty Woman
. You know in your gut the story has to end exactly the way it does.

Maybe this was what Vernie meant about how a good ending to a story is both completely inevitable and yet somehow still totally surprising.

*   *   *

Later, my parents took me out to dinner at the golf club. My parents aren't particularly rich, and they don't actually play golf—they're just "social" members of the club, so my mom can play in the bridge tournament, and we can eat in the restaurant. Which tells you a lot about my parents—basically, that they care a whole lot about social status (especially my mom). This came into play big-time when they learned about my being gay, especially since it was 2007, before most of Middle America had decided being gay
wasn't
actually a Big Screaming Deal That Makes Your Head Explode.

For a sixteen-year-old, this was traumatic, and I confess I was still a little bitter, even seven years later. My parents met Kevin Land a few times, but they never even knew he and I were together (they never asked, and I never told). I'd never brought a boyfriend home from college either, mostly because my parents never asked if I had one.

I used to say that all I had in common with my parents was a house and some DNA. But now there wasn't even the house.

On the other hand, DNA isn't nothing. Neither is the fact that they loved me. And I loved them. My parents were good people. Like Tom and Amanda and Laura, they were just doing the best they could under the circumstances.

The point is, it was actually nice to see them.

"So, Russel," my dad said, slurping his chowder at the golf club restaurant. "How's life?"

I thought about the question, about just how much truth I could tell my parents without turning their world upside down. That I'd thought I'd had a new fuck buddy in the form of Boston, the hot mechanic, but then he'd told me he was on PrEP and so he wanted to start barebacking? Um, no, that was out. The fact that my bisexual best friend Min had just recently come out to me as possibly polyamorous, and that she was currently dating both a guy and a girl? No, I was pretty sure that was out too.

"Good," I said, nodding to the waiter that yes, I wanted ground pepper on my salad. "It's going good."

"'Well'," my mom said. She was correcting my grammar—it was going "well" in my life, which is grammatically correct, not "good." She'd been an English major in college.

I just smiled, doing everything I could not to grab that pepper grinder and jam it down her throat. Suddenly it was
extremely
hard to remember that she was just doing the best she could under the circumstances. Seriously, is there anything more off-putting than someone correcting your grammar? Vernie never did that.

But that reminded me of something. I said, "I saved someone from drowning at Green Lake."

"Really?" my mom said. "That's fantastic. Tell us all about it."

And so I did. Until I got to the part where Vernie invited me over to her house for dinner, and I'd gone alone, and she'd told me that my drink was a whiskey sour, and how I'd decided she wasn't Stifler's Mom, but more like Kathy Griffin, except better. Somehow I didn't think they'd understand any of that either.

My parents smiled and nodded and congratulated me, and then they went on talking about their lives, about how my mom's book club was reading
Water For Elephants
, and about how my dad's new office had been built with some European design that was supposed to keep it warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but that the architect had failed to account for all the computer monitors, so now they had to install air conditioners.

Were they telling
me
the whole truth about their lives? Did they have anything they couldn't share with me, for fear that I couldn't really handle or understand it, the way I did with them? You can't ever be certain about the private lives of other people—hey, maybe my parents were swingers, and they'd just never gotten up the nerve to tell me.

I doubted it. I think I understood my parents pretty well, their faults, their strengths, but mostly their real selves—or as "real" as anyone ever is. If our family life was a play, I'd already sat through thousands of performances, and I knew all the subtext.

But just like Amanda and Laura didn't know Tom, not really, my parents didn't know me—maybe not at all. Yeah, I know that's what every kid thinks about his or her parents—that's what kids have
always
thought about their parents, and a lot of them are wrong, because adults aren't as clueless as you think. (Sadly, mine are.)

But that's not even the part I was focusing on as we had our soup and salad course in that restaurant at the golf club. It was more about how different their lives were from mine—how different they must have been even when they were my age.

My dad was an accountant. His dad was an accountant too, and he'd gone to school in order to take on the family business. Did my dad resent that? Probably a little. But he'd done it. And if I'd had to guess, knowing my dad the way I thought I did, I'd say he never really thought about it all that much. There had been a pathway laid out for him—a level, paved pathway lined with fashionable recessed lighting and well-trimmed shrubbery—and he'd taken it. And he loved my mom—I never doubted that either.

Meanwhile, my mom loved my dad. And she seemed to like her job as an office manager. If I'd had to guess, I'd say she'd liked raising me too—at least until her precious son had come out as gay, which had admittedly been a big meteor in the middle of her own shrubbery-lined pathway.

Did my parents have Unstoppable Career Drive or Passionate Aimlessness? Even asking the question about them just seemed sort of ridiculous. Maybe things were different when they were in their twenties (of course they were). They had to have asked
some
of the same questions I'd been asking myself. They'd just answered them already, so there was no point in asking them anymore. Vernie had told me that people had
always
wrestled with these same questions. And I definitely don't want to say that my parents' lives were easier than mine. Who knew what struggles they went through? I know my mom had problems with anxiety (she took Xanax), and my dad had these migrating skin rashes.

But things
did
seem different now, and not just because of gay people, and fuck buddies, and polyamorous triads. These days, it seemed like everyone my age wanted to be Outrageously Happy, not Merely Content (like the previous generation). Which was ironic, because so much in life—a decent education, a reasonably good job, a nice house—seemed so much harder than it had been for the generation before.

Needless to say, I wasn't Outrageously Happy. I wasn't even Merely Content. And the really scary thing was, I was starting to think I never would be.

*   *   *

When we got home from dinner that night, I had planned on watching some TV in my bedroom. I'd been binge-watching old episodes of
Supernatural
on Netflix. (Who is hotter, Jensen Ackles or Jared Padalecki? The age-old debate continues!)

But then I checked Facebook and happened to see a post from Kevin. After we'd reconnected, I'd un-unfriended him, and I forgotten to unfriend him again (un-un-unfriend?).