Mere Anarchy (5 page)

And so, clad in author’s tweeds with elbow patches and Connemara cap, I ascended to the Royal Suite of the Carlyle Hotel to rendezvous with the self-proclaimed titan E. Coli Biggs.

Biggs was a fubsy pudding of a character with a hairpiece that could only have been ordered by dialing 1-800-Toupees. A farrago of tics animated his face in unpredictable dots and dashes like Morse code. Clad in pajamas and the Carlyle’s terrycloth robe, he was accompanied by a miraculously fabricated blonde who doubled as secretary and masseuse, having apparently perfected some foolproof procedure to clear his chronically stuffed sinuses.

“I’ll come right to the point, Mealworm,” he said nodding toward the bedroom, where his zaftig protégée rose and weaved off to, pausing a mere two minutes to align the meridians of her garter belt.

“I know,” I said, descending from Venusburg. “You read
my
book, you’re taken with how visual my prose is, and you’d like me to create a scenario. Of course you realize even if we got copacetic on the math, I would have to insist on total artistic control.”

“Sure, sure,” Biggs mumbled, waving aside my ultimatum. “You know what a novelization is?” he asked, popping a Tums.

“Not really,” I replied.

“It’s when a movie does good numbers. The producer hires some zombie to make a book out of it. Y’know, an exploitation paperback—strictly for lowbrows. You’ve seen the chozzerai you find in the racks at airports or shopping malls.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, beginning to sense a lethal tightness making its deceptively benign introduction into my lumbar region.

“But me, I’m to the manor born. I don’t hondle with mere craftsmen. I meld exclusively with bona fides. Hence I’m here to report your latest tome caught my baby blues last week at a little country store. Actually I’d never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before. Not that I got through it, but the three pages I managed before narcolepsy set in told me I was in the presence of one of the most egregious wordsmiths since Papa Hemingway.”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’ve never heard of novelizations. My métier is serious literature. Joyce, Kafka, Proust. As for my first book, I’ll have you know the cultural editor of
The Barber’s Journal
—”

“Sure, sure, meanwhile every Shakespeare’s gotta eat lest he croak ere he mints his magnum opus.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I wonder if I might have just a little water. I’ve become rather dependent on these Xanax.”

“Believe me, kid,” Biggs said, raising his voice and intoning slowly. “All the Nobel laureates work for me. It’s how they set their table.” Poised in the wings, his stacked amanuensis pushed her head in and trilled, “E. Coli, García Márquez is on the phone. Claims his larder is bereft of all provender. Wants to know if you can possibly throw any more novelizations his way.”

“Tell Gabo I’ll get back to him, cupcake,” snapped the producer.

“And just what movie are you asking me to novelize?” I piped, gagging on the word. “Are we talking about a love story? Gangsters? Or is it action-adventure? I’m known as a facile man with description, particularly bucolic material à la Turgenev.”

“Tell me about the Russkies,” Biggs yelped. “I tried to make Stavrogin’s confession into a musical for Broadway last year, but all the backers suddenly got swine flu. Here’s the scam, tatellah. I happen to own the rights to a cinema classic starring the Three Stooges. Won it years ago playing tonk with Ray Stark at Cannes. It’s a real zany vehicle for our three most irrepressible meshoogs. I’ve fressed all the protein I can out of the print—movie houses, foreign and domestic TV—but I suspicion there’s still a little lagniappe to be bled from a novel.”

“Of the Three Stooges?” I asked, incredulous, my voice glissandoing directly into a fife’s octave.

“I don’t have to ask if you love ’em. They’re only an institution,” Biggs pitched.

“When I was eight,” I said, rising from my chair and slapping at my pockets to locate my emergency Fiorinal.

“Hold it, hold it. You didn’t hear the plot yet. It’s all about spending the night in a haunted house.”

“It’s OK,” I said, dollying toward the door. “I’m a little late—some friends are raising a barn—”

“I booked a projection room so I could screen it for you,” Biggs said, ignoring my resistance, which by now had morphed into sheer panic.

“No thanks. I may be down to my last can of StarKist,” I sputtered as the great man cut me off.

“Emmes, kid. If this is as lucrative as my proboscis signals, there’s copious zuzim to be stockpiled. Those three ditsy vilda chayas cut a million shorts. One e-mail could secure the novelization rights to the whole shooting match. And you’d be my main scribe. You could salt away enough mad money in six months to spend the rest of your days sausaging out art. Just give me a few sample pages to confirm my faith in your brilliance. Who knows, maybe in your hands novelization will finally come of age as an art form.”

That night I clashed fiercely with my self-image and required the emollient waters of the Cutty Sark distillery to beat back a waxing depression. Still, I would be disingenuous if I did not admit that I was palpated by the notion of vacuuming up enough scratch to allow the writing of another masterpiece without the onset of malnutrition. But it was not just
Mammon
crooning in my cochlea. There was also the chance Biggs’s nasal compass had located true north. Perhaps I was the Mahdi chosen to legitimize with depth and dignity this runt of the literary litter, the novelization.

In a frenzy of sudden euphoria I bolted to my processor, and irrigated with gallons of black coffee, I had by dawn broken the back of the challenging assignment and was champing at the bit to show it to my new benefactor.

Irritatingly, his Do Not Disturb did not come unglued till noon, when I finally rang through as he was masticating his morning fiber.

“Be here at three,” he bade. “And ask for Murray Zangwill. Word leaked of my quondam alias, and the joint’s awash with frenzied centerfolds panting for screen tests.” Pitying the man’s beleaguered existence, I spent the next hours honing several sentences to diamond perfection and at three entered his posh digs with my work retyped on a stylish vellum.

“Read it to me,” he commanded, biting off the tip of a contraband Cuban cigar and spitting it in the direction of the fake Utrillo.

“Read it to you?” I asked, taken aback over the prospect of presenting my writing orally. “Wouldn’t you rather read it yourself? That way the subtle verbal rhythms can resonate in your mind’s ear.”

“Naw, I’ll get a better feel this way. Plus I lost my reading glasses last night at Hooters. Commence,” ordered Biggs, putting his feet up on the coffee table.

“Oakvill, Kansas, lies on a particularly desolate stretch
across
the vast central plains,” I began. “What’s left of the area where farms once dotted the landscape is arid space now. At one time corn and wheat provided thriving livelihoods before agricultural subsidies had the opposite effect of enhancing prosperity.”

Biggs’s eyes began to glaze over. His head was wreathed in a thick nimbus of smoke from the vile cheroot.

“The dilapidated Ford pulled up before a deserted farmhouse,” I went on, “and three men emerged. Calmly and for no apparent reason the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle. A horrible grinding sound broke the silence of the Great Plains. ‘We suffer,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘O woe to the random violence of human existence.’

“Meanwhile Larry, the third man, had wandered into the house and had somehow managed to get his head caught inside an earthenware jar. Everything was suddenly terrifying and black as Larry groped blindly around the room. He wondered if there was a god or any purpose at all to life or any design behind the universe when suddenly the dark-haired man entered and, finding a large polo mallet, began to break the jar off his companion’s head. With pent-up fury that masked years of angst over the empty absurdity of man’s fate, the one named Moe smashed the crockery. ‘We are at least free to choose,’ wept Curly, the bald one. ‘Condemned to death but free to choose.’ And with that Moe poked his two fingers into Curly’s eyes. ‘Oooh, oooh, oooh,’ Curly wailed, ‘the cosmos
is
so devoid of any justice.’ He stuck an unpeeled banana in Moe’s mouth and shoved it all the way in.”

At this point Biggs abruptly emerged from his stupor. “Stop, go no further,” he said, standing at attention. “This is only magnificent. It’s Johnny Steinbeck, it’s Capote, it’s Sartre. I smell money, I see honors. It’s the kind of quality product yours truly made his rep on. Go home and pack. You’ll stay with me in Bel Air till more suitable quarters open up—something with a pool and perhaps a three-hole golf course. Or maybe Hef can put you up at the mansion for a while if you’d prefer. Meantime I’ll call my lawyer and lock up rights to the entire Stooge oeuvre. This is a memorable day in the annals of Gutenbergsville.”

Needless to say, that was the last I saw of E. Coli Biggs under that or any other alias. When I returned to the Carlyle, valise in hand, he had long left town for either the Italian Riviera or the Turkmenistan Film Festival or possibly to check out the bottom line in Guinea-Bissau—the desk clerk wasn’t sure. The point is, tracking down a mover and shaker who never uses his real name proved a far too daunting job for an ink-stained wretch named Mealworm, and I’m dead certain it would have been for Faulkner or Fitzgerald too.

C
ALISTHENICS,
P
OISON
I
VY
, F
INAL
C
UT

AS A HATCHLING
chloroformed and shanghaied each summer to various lakeside facilities bearing Indian names where I struggled to master the dog paddle under the baleful eyes of capos otherwise known as counselors, my attention was pinioned recently by something in the back pages of
The New York Times Magazine
. Amongst the usual dumping grounds where well-heeled parents might stash their sniveling issue and savor a comatose July and August were ads for such trendy modern specialties as basketball camp, magic camp, computer camp, jazz camp, and, perhaps the most glamorous of all, film camp.

Apparently somewhere amidst the crickets and ragweed a teenager with a yen for montage can idle away his sunny vacation learning to churn out Oscar-winning dialogue, proper camera angles, acting, editing, sound mixing, and, for all I know, the correct way to buy a home in Bel Air complete with valet parking. While less dream-weaving adolescents are busy foraging for arrowheads, a number of budding Von Stroheims actually get to make their own original movies, a far hipper
summer
project than, say, braiding a lanyard to dangle one’s skate key from.

This pricey inspiration seems a long way from Camp Melanoma, run by Moe and Elsie Varnishke in Loch Sheldrake, where I suffered the dog days of my fourteenth year playing dodgeball and keeping the calamine-lotion industry solvent. It was not easy to picture a mom-and-pop couple like the Varnishkes running anything resembling so chic a venue as film camp, and only the fumes of a smoked whitefish I was deconstructing at the Carnegie Deli induced sufficient hallucinatory molecules to conjure the following correspondence.

Dear Mr. Varnishke:

Now that fall has descended, gifting the foliage with her sublime palette of rust and amber, I must pause in the day’s occupation here on Wall and William to thank you for providing my cherished offspring Algae with a rich and productive summer at your traditional yet innovative rustic paradise. His tales of hiking and canoeing startle in their similarity to passages by Sir Edmund Hillary and Thor Heyerdahl. They add just the proper curry to the diligent and intense hours he spent with you acquiring the various techniques of filmmaking. That his eight-week movie turned out so accomplished and exciting that Miramax is offering us sixteen million dollars for the domestic rights is more than any parent could have dreamed of, although it was always clear to his mother and I that Algae was anointed by the muses.

What did surprise me for just a nanosecond, however, was the letter you wrote suggesting that 50 percent of the aforementioned distribution fee should somehow find its way into your pocket. How a sweet couple like you and Mrs. Varnishke could cobble together the psychotic mirage that you are somehow entitled to the faintest taste of my son’s creative fruits beggars all rationality. In short, let me assure you that despite the fact that his cinematic masterpiece took wing at the ramshackle little Hooverville represented in your brochure as Hollywood in the Catskills, you have absolutely zero tithe to any portion of my flesh and blood’s windfall. I guess what I am trying to find a nice way of saying is, you and that avaricious salamander that shares your bed whom I happen to know put you up to this mail-fisted shakedown should take a flying hike.

Cordially,

Winston Snell

Mine Dear Mr. Snell:

Thanking you so much for the prompt reply to mine note and the beautiful admission that your son’s motion picture owes its whole everything to our charming country resort described in what I guarantee will soon become Exhibit A as a Hooverville. Speaking, by the way, of Elsie, there never was a finer woman despite some smoker-car witticisms you passed when you came to visit, highlighting her varicose veins, which drew no laughs even from the busboys, who hate her like rat
poison.
You should know before you open up a mouth with the salamander jokes that my wife is a dedicated woman who suffers from a curse called Ménières, and believe me when I tell you she can’t get out of bed in the morning without she ricochets off the chifforobe. You should have such a malady—I’m sure you wouldn’t play tennis so fast every week at the Athletic Club with your cronies with the plaid pants, all waiting to be indicted. I personally don’t make six figures speculating with other people’s pensions. I run a nice honest film camp, which my wife and I started from pennies we saved from the candy-store days when maybe if we sold a few extra pairs of wax lips we could afford carp once a week.