Leading Man (16 page)

“How do you feel about composting?” an incredibly hot blonde asked me one night when I tried to chat her up at Bar Marmont on Sunset. She was wearing puffy hippie pants and a tight-fitting T-shirt with a vintage Mr. Bubble ad on it, but she was sucking her cocktail through a straw in a way that would make a porn star blush. “Because, you know, I could never go to bed with a man who didn’t compost.”

One of the reasons I wasn’t doing better with dating in LA, I figured, was that I didn’t know how to dress like a local. In New York, I wore a suit and a button-down shirt, no tie. It was the uniform of the Manhattan media drone, and I loved its Garanimals-like simplicity. Find matching pants and jacket, and you were done. But in LA, I discovered, only suits wore suits. And suits weren’t considered sexy. So I drove to Fred Segal in West Hollywood and bought two pairs of trendy Italian blue jeans and some simple black Tom Cruise-style T-shirts. That would be my new LA uniform. I was pretty pleased with myself until the salesgirl rang up my purchases. My new
jeans and tees cost me $1,100. It made me reconsider composting.

As a sign of commitment to my decision to move to LA, I resolved to donate all my old New York clothing to the Salvation Army. I made a big production out of it, chucking items out of my closet onto the floor in the middle of my loft, turning all the pockets inside out in case I happened to have left $1,100 in one of them. I found only about six bucks in change, but I did dig up theater ticket stubs and nightclub matchbooks and cocktail napkins—the flotsam of my old dating life in Manhattan. I also found—surprise!—a fat joint that one of the Harold brothers had given me back in the spring, when I’d visited the Brooklyn set of
Kush Street
, their latest stoner comedy. The sibling filmmakers were famous for shooting movies while totally high, and when I met them they didn’t disappoint. When they opened the door to their trailer, plumes of marijuana smoke wafted into the parking lot. Inside, the fumes were so thick I needed fog lights to find the sofa. I declined the joint they were passing around—I hardly needed it; just breathing the air made me hear sitar music—but after the interview Joey Harold insisted on slipping a souvenir cigarette into my jacket pocket. “To remember us by,” he said with a phlegmy laugh. Somehow, I’d forgotten all about it.

I lit up the joint and continued sorting through my clothing. The pot certainly made the chore more interesting. I studied a piece of lint as if it contained the secrets of the universe. I examined an old penny as if it were Michelangelo’s lost masterpiece, noticing for the first time how Lincoln’s beard curled up at the end, like a gnome’s.
Then, in the pocket of a tweed jacket, I found a scrap of paper with strange handwriting on it. The words weren’t English—“Misenka” and “Saska”—and there was a line of numbers underneath that didn’t make any sense. What the hell was this? I took another toke of pot and scratched my head. Somewhere in the slush of my gray matter, a synapse fired. This was the paper the Czech girl—Eliska, I remembered her name—had slipped me the night I had kissed her in Prague, now over a year ago. It was the address near the Charles Bridge where she had stood me up. And the long series of seemingly random digits—could that be a Czech phone number? Eliska’s number? I took another drag and realized what I had to do.

If it was eight p.m. in LA, what time was it in the Czech Republic? I remembered that it was a six-hour time difference. That would make it two in the afternoon in Prague. I took another hit and grabbed the phone. Why did Sammy get to be my one and only phone buddy? Maybe Eliska and I could have a telephonic relationship, too. The night we spent together drinking that Sternobased Czech aperitif and watching Death dance on the clock tower in Old Town Square—that had been the best date I’d had in years. True, the kiss hadn’t been received as warmly as I’d hoped, but Eliska didn’t slap me or call the cops. I was sure she’d be delighted to hear from me again. After carefully punching in the numbers, I waited as my call bounced off who knows how many communication satellites, and then heard the high-pitched purring of a European phone. I took one last hit and prepared to give Eliska the surprise of her life.

“Prosim … kdo je tam?”
Eliska’s voice sounded scratchy
and sleepy. Something was wrong. I stubbed the joint out on the bottom of my shoe, Sean Penn–style, and did some quick recalculating. To my horror, I instantly realized my mistake. It was a six-hour difference between New York and Prague; between LA and Prague, it was nine. And it wasn’t earlier in the Czech Republic, it was later. I’d surprised Eliska, all right, but by calling her at five in the morning her time.
“Kdo je to?”
she repeated into her phone, growing impatient.
“Je pet rano!”
I didn’t know what to say. So I hung up, slid the phone under my Crate & Barrel limited edition sofa pillow, and prayed they didn’t have caller ID in Central Europe.

“Where the hell are all the people?” Robin wanted to know. “How come the streets are so empty? It looks like a national emergency.”

We were touring LA in my Speedster on a balmy February afternoon in 2007. I drove past the mansions of Beverly Hills, slowing down to show Robin the one on Sunset with the life-size bronze statues of joggers on the front lawn. I steered into the steep, winding streets of Hollywood Hills, took in the million-dollar views for a while, then looped back down into sleepy Santa Monica, and finally followed the coastline up to Malibu. We didn’t see a single pedestrian the whole time. “This city is so alien,” Robin said as we sat down for lunch at Neptune’s Net, a bikers’ hangout on the Pacific Coast Highway that served the best fried clams west of Nantucket. “I might as well be visiting the surface of the moon. Are you going to eat that coleslaw?”

Robin wasn’t in LA just to see me. Thanks to the success of her plays, she’d been approached for a job as a staff writer
on
DINKs
, the hit cable-TV dramedy about four well-to-do childless couples—Dual Income No Kids—who lived in different parts of Los Angeles and came from different ethnic and generational groups, but somehow all managed to be friends. At first, Robin told her agent she wasn’t interested. She was a lifelong New Yorker. There was no way she would ever leave Manhattan to write for a crappy TV show, or even a pretty good one. Then her agent told her how much the gig paid, and she was on the next flight to LA.

I, of course, was delighted at the prospect of Robin moving to Los Angeles, and invited her to camp out on my sofa while she was in town interviewing with
DINKs
’s showrunners. If she took the job, I’d have my old wing-man back. With Robin’s help, in no time at all I’d be sleeping with scores of pretty young actresses again. In fact, there was one in particular on
DINKs
who I was hoping to meet, a sexy redhead improbably named Purity Love. She had a small but regular part as a new mom who was always rubbing her fertility in the other characters’ faces. But if Robin was to be the solution to my West Coast dating woes, I’d first have to convince her that Los Angeles wasn’t the lunar surface. “LA has a very vibrant lesbian community,” I told her, waving a clam for emphasis. “You’ve seen
The L Word
. There are cafés in this city that cater exclusively to beautiful gay girls …”

“Theater in LA is a joke,” Robin said, ignoring me. “How could I write plays in LA? It’d be like trying to toboggan in Tahiti.”

“How much do writers for
DINKs
get paid?” I asked. “What was that number again? It had so many zeros, I lost track …”

Robin, of course, accepted the job offer, and we agreed she would stay on my sofa in Venice until she could find an apartment of her own. It was the first time I had shared my home with a woman for longer than a one-night stand since Samantha and I lived together in Greenwich Village. I have to say, it was sort of fun, for the first week. I’d come home from a hard day interviewing celebrities and would find Robin in my kitchen, cremating vegetables in a stir-fry pan, or exploding packets of instant rice in my microwave. (Are all lesbians lousy cooks or was it just her?) While we picked at the charred bits of food on our plates, I tutored Robin in the vernacular she’d need to survive in her new city. “You don’t leave voice mail,” I explained, “you ‘leave word.’ And you don’t play phone tag—here it’s called ‘trading calls.’ And when you make lots of calls in a row, that’s called ‘rolling calls.’ ” Robin nodded and took mental notes.

After a couple of weeks, though, I began to wonder if Robin was ever going to leave. She’d started her new job writing for
DINKs
, had leased a gigantic SUV that she practically needed a ladder to climb into, but seemed to have made no progress at all in finding a place to live. Every once in a while, she’d inquire about a neighborhood. “How about Marina del Rey?” she’d ask. “Flight attendants and swingers,” I’d answered. “Hollywood Hills?” “Agents and other douchebags.” But there was no serious apartment hunt going on. And I was beginning to want my space back. It was driving me nuts that Robin would take at least two hours in my bathroom every morning. It was somehow extra exasperating that she would always emerge looking exactly the way she did when she went in.

And then I came home from work one day and Robin announced that she had found true love on the set of
DINKs
. With an actress named Purity Love. “Wait a sec—she’s gay?” I asked, stunned. “Gayer than Peppermint Patty at an Indigo Girls concert,” Robin chirped, dancing around my kitchen as she smelted a pot of angel hair pasta into sludge. “We’re going on a date on Saturday.
She
asked
me
out. Can you believe it? I’m really starting to like LA.”

I congratulated her on her new romance. If anyone deserved a little Love, it was Robin. Her dating life was almost as calamitous as my own, although her trouble was of a different sort. She fell in love too easily, then would inevitably get her heart smashed to bits. I’d nursed her through at least a dozen traumatic breakups. I was beginning to worry that Robin was losing hope. I was also worrying that Purity Love could do some serious damage if things didn’t work out. I didn’t say anything out loud, but I had some niggling suspicions.

Purity was not hugely famous.
DINKs
, in fact, was her first break, or at least her first since she was seventeen. Her only other credit on IMDb was in 1997, when she starred with three other teenagers in a Nickelodeon kiddie program called
Boogie Girls
. The reasons for Love’s abrupt departure from that show were cloudy—she either walked away in a huff or was fired—but one day thousands of toddlers turned on their TVs and saw a different redhead singing and dancing about sharing toys and making friends. Children’s television could be such a jungle. Now that she had bounced back with
DINKs
, though, I’d been seeing Love’s picture in the party pages of LA’s local
glossy magazines, always in a slinky, low-cut dress, and with her arm around some up-and-coming actor or hot young director. Exclusively of the male variety.

At least Robin’s love affair kept her out of my hair for the next couple of weeks. I could finally go to the bathroom in the morning again. She was out all night almost every night. Every couple of days Robin would come whirling back into the loft to collect some personal items, then rush off again. Sometimes she’d even have a minute for a quick conversation.

“How are things going with your new girlfriend?” I asked, watching Robin dig into my clothes dryer looking for clean underwear.

“It’s terrifying,” she said, laughing. “I really think she’s the one, Max, I really do. I’m so in love with this girl it’s disgusting. She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever been with …” She found a pair of freshly washed panties and looked up from the dryer. “But that’s what’s terrifying. What if it doesn’t work out? I don’t know if I could take that.”

“But what if it does?” I said. I’d been a little jealous of Robin, and I still had my suspicions about Purity, but I had to root for their love affair. I’d never seen Robin so happy. It was like a light had been switched on behind her eyes. I hadn’t yet met Purr, as Robin called her, but I was grateful to Love for what she was doing to my friend. I only wished I had somebody to do the same to me.

The phone rang at a quarter past eleven. I had a pretty good hunch who was calling. Where she was, it was a quarter past two.

“We’re at Mount Sinai,” Samantha said between sobs. “Johnny’s in the emergency room. All of a sudden he started having convulsions and couldn’t breathe. The doctors don’t know what’s going on. It’s terrible, Max. I think he’s dying.”

I caught the next plane to New York. It was an impulsive thing to do—if Robin had been on my sofa that night, she would have talked me out of it—but after Samantha hung up the phone to get back to her convulsing husband, all I could hear were her sobs. It cost seventy-five thousand frequent flyer miles—the only seat available on the last flight out of LA was in first class—but I didn’t care. When it came to rushing to Sammy’s side in her hour of need, I would pay any price.

No, I most certainly was not hoping for Johnny’s death. That would have made me a monster. Truthfully, as I flew to New York, I was crossing every finger that Mars would be okay. Not just for his sake, but for Sammy’s. I hated the idea of her suffering any sort of pain. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that in the lizard part of my brain, where evil thoughts slither and hiss, I did wonder what would happen if Mars happened to die. I know, it’s terrible, but I couldn’t help myself. I imagined soothing Samantha through her grief. Growing close with her again. And then, after an appropriate mourning period had passed, taking her back into my arms as the One once again. God, I hated myself.

When the plane landed at JFK at 10:30 a.m., I grabbed my overhead bag and headed for the taxi stand. I hadn’t called ahead for car service, or a hotel room, for that matter. I hadn’t even told Sammy I was coming. I didn’t want
her to try to dissuade me. As I waited for a cab to take me to Mount Sinai Hospital, I took out my cell phone to call
KNOW
’s travel department. They’d be able to arrange a room for me somewhere. I noticed I had a voice mail. “Hey Max, it’s Sammy. Everything is okay. Whew. Johnny is breathing normally and the convulsions have stopped. They’re going to release him later today. They think it was a reaction to one of the drugs the Koreans gave him. Jesus, was that scary! Anyway, thanks for taking my panic-stricken call last night and for being so sweet about it. You’re a great friend …”