The Bones (17 page)

Seated in this Beverly Hills restaurant, Lloyd reasons that if the show goes forward, he will be tied to it like an indentured
servant for years, lashed to the mast and whipped with roiled-up copies of the Nielsen ratings as the
Happy Endings
schooner sails toward Syndication Bay. Whereas, if it sinks like the shipwreck he knows it could become with the comedically
impaired Pimento in the wheelhouse, he will be free to surreptitiously advance his other, higher agenda.

Welcome aboard, Bart!

"Lloyd . . . dude?

"I'm sorry. What?" Lloyd asks as he wrenches himself back into the present moment.

"About Jell-O and hot tubs. Am I right?"

"Absolutely."

The bill comes and Lloyd reaches for it, Bart still as statuary, having not picked up a check since . . . well, ever. The
two of them walk the Plexiglas path over the koi stream and out the door, Lloyd noticing that even a movie star on a downward
trajectory attracts eyeballs the way a diamond attracts light. As they're standing in front of the restaurant waiting for
their cars, Lloyd says, "I have to ask you, what's with the fur attack?"

Bart's laugh is a big, simple guffaw that almost makes Lloyd like him. But he really still has no idea how an adult can throw
paint on another adult for wearing a particular garment, unless it was made from the skins of humans.

"Dude, that was a trip! But, hey"—now the laughter mysteriously disappears and is replaced by the sincere tone of the failed
autodidact whose small mind can brook no contradiction—"I believe animals have souls and shouldn't be used for fur coats.
Simple as that."

"So you actually threw paint on some lady?"

"I sent her a check to pay for the cleaning. I'm not a complete dick."

Lloyd, cell phone pressed to his ear, heads through the Cahuenga pass on his way back to the lot after his lunch with Bart.

"Pam, it's Lloyd."

"How was lunch?"

"He'll be perfect."

"He will?"

"He's a very funny guy."

"Bart Pimento?"

"Tell Harvey I think we have a winner."

"Lloyd, what are you smoking?"

"Dust off your dress, dollface, we're going to the Emmys."

"What show did you talk about?"

"Happy Endings."

"You're going to write it?"

"I can't wait to get started."

Lloyd clicks the phone shut before the conversation can go any further, smiling to himself as the San Fernando Valley spreads
out before him beneath a sallow sky. It's a beautiful plan. Unfortunately, he can't share the idea with anyone since its ultimate
success lies in its insidiousness.

Frank drives home from his meeting with Orson Dubinsky like a man with an entirely new lease on life. It seems increasingly
likely that he will be playing an Eskimo on network television, and although this is not where he had seen his career heading
just a few weeks earlier, Orson Dubinsky appeared to be some kind of twisted visionary.

As the Caddy roils down La Cienega toward his West Hollywood home, he tries to concentrate on generating material for the
CD he wants to record and makes a mental inventory of areas he could reasonably mine for comedy. Concepts arrive and depart
like cumulonimbus clouds on a windy day: travel, drugs, Melnick, rave culture, suicide, Melnick, why black people shouldn't
get tattoos, birthdays, the failure of the public education system, Melnick? Why does Melnick's condescending face keep appearing
in Frank's mind's eye, popping up like a demonic sprite, taunting, razzing, throwing spitballs?

Back to the concepts: the mainstreaming of homosexuality, why white people shouldn't get nose rings, Melnick . . . Melnick
again? Christ! UFOs, pets, Civil War reenactors in Van Nuys, and none of it really sticking except Lloyd Melnick, whom Frank
is thinking about with a degree of antipathy he normally reserves for Nazi war criminals and comics who work with props. Had
Lloyd not spurned his entreaties to cowrite the Bones project, Frank is concluding, he'd be doing his own show rather than
appearing in the Dubinsky opus, not that the Dubinsky opus isn't good. It's just that Frank's ego requires he have his own
show based on his own life and that America love a character based specifically on him.

But Frank has rent to pay on the bungalow, the mortgage payment on Casa del Bones, and now there are Honey's new hood ornaments,
which cost a lot more at Cedars-Sinai than they would have at the Bodacious Body Plastic Surgery Clinic he had located in
the pages of the
L.A. Reader
when she first expressed an interest in breast augmentation.

Viewing himself as an artiste, Frank has always taken great pride in almost never having booked a gig purely for financial
reasons. Even when he's appeared on game shows, he would always be sure another comic more important than him had done the
show already, thereby allowing Frank to point to that guy and say, "Well, if he can do it . . ." But that is not the case
with
Kirkuk,
and in his view it is clearly Lloyd's fault he is in this situation. That it isn't entirely a bad situation does not register,
the ego being what it is.

Who does Melnick think he is, that second-rate little pissant of a Phil Sheldon wannabe, to turn down an opportunity to write
with Frank Bones?
goes Frank's thinking.
When Lloyd was a grubby little pauper of an ink-stained nobody and I was the cheese, I granted the little twerp hours, days
in my presence to talk to me, to write about me, to publish my desires and fears under his byline: my unique reflections on
existence. Who, exactly, does he think he is? When I'm poised to finally elevate, to get my shot (maybe my last one, I'm not
going to kid myself), Frank's Big Score, and collect at last? This Melnick, this worthless nonentity of a no-talent sycophant
who is too fuckin' happy to write for an American cheesedick like Charlie Fleishman but won't write for the Bones? Who, exactly,
does this cocksucking, motherfucking son-of-a-whore think he is?

Frank has worked himself into a righteous froth regarding Lloyd's disloyalty, and by the time he opens the door of the bungalow
and walks in, he is pondering sending him a live tarantula via UPS. If he can figure out a way to keep the hairy arachnid
alive while in transit, he schemes, Lloyd will open the package and the spider, driven mad by the darkness and confinement,
can be counted on to sink his poisonous pincers into him with great enthusiasm.
Yes,
Frank thinks as he opens the door, his mind clouded by purple thoughts of revenge,
that is what Melnick deserves.

"Who is Candi?"

Uh-oh.

This from Honey, now seated calmly on the living room sofa, dressed in black leggings and a belly shirt, glowering at a bouquet
of flowers arranged in a ceramic vase on the coffee table in front of her. The anti-inflammatory administered by Dr. Nasrut
Singh has done its job and she has descended a full cup size since last seen, but her anger, rather than waning with the dimension
of her chest, is clearly moving in the opposite direction. With a rapid motion, Honey rips the flowers out of the vase, choking
the stems with her hand, and brandishes them at Frank, as if it were they who had been caught in flagrante.

"She sent you these."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah? That's all you're gonna say? Yeah? The flower guy arrives with them and I think they're from you so I take them inside
and I open the card and I see this." Here she picks the guilty envelope off the coffee table, removing the card and holding
it with the tips of her fingers as if the very pulp of the paper is poisoned, and reads:

Dear Frank,

Thanks very much for the coaching session. It must have really helped because I got a callback. Let's do it again soon.

Hugs, Candi

"Hugs? Who signs a letter 'hugs'? How old is this one, Frank? Fifteen?"

Frank, who, mere moments before, was fantasizing about ways he could surreptitiously murder Lloyd, quickly has to refocus
on the more immediate problem.

"She's a grown-up," Frank lamely offers, a name, rank, and serial number answer.

"And what part, Frank? How were you coaching her? She got a callback?"

"This chick is a waitress at the Comedy Shop who was auditioning for a commercial and I gave her some acting tips," Frank
explains perfectly reasonably.

"Acting tips? Like what? 'Suck harder'?"

"Oh, please."

"All of a sudden you're Lee Strasberg?"

"It might be a surprise to you but there are people who value my advice in that area."

"Slutty young waitresses," Honey petulantly sniffs, looking away. When she realizes Frank isn't going to answer, but has walked
into the kitchen, she calls out to him, "What was she auditioning for anyway?"

"A douche commercial."

"Do you mean a feminine hygiene product?" Honey could be unpredictably prim for someone who had appeared unclothed in front
of a film crew.

"Yeah, exactly," Frank says as he emerges with a bottle of beer in his hand.

"Did you fuck her?" Ah, the old Honey is back. "I bet you fucked her, Frank, and I bet she has a cat, doesn't she? And it
was her fuckin' cat that scratched you, you fuckin' . . . " Here, after having unwittingly cracked the Case of the Concupiscent
Comedian, she loses her powers of articulation and finds herself at the departure gate boarding a flight to Illogic, staring
out the large terminal windows watching airborne fragments of lucid thought repeatedly circle the runway only to be denied
permission to land by the wild hormones who have taken over the control tower. Frank watches her silently, secretly impressed
with her powers of deduction and relieved that her emotions, which have bubbled completely out of control, will not allow
her to press her case to a conclusive end.

Having exhausted her verbal options, Honey reaches to the coffee table, picks up the vase the flowers had been in. Frank cringes
in anticipation, preparing to ward off the airborne pottery attack, but Honey heaves it against the wall, where, rather than
shattering into a million shards, it incongruously bounces off the Sheetrock and roils to the middle of the floor, coming
to a stop on the shag carpet.

"It's not enough some crazy-ass fan attacks me with a fork, but now I have to come home and watch you play dodgeball with
a vase? I don't need this shit," Frank says, a lifelong believer in the principle that the best defense is a good offense.
"And by the way, babe, Dr. Singh said no physical exertion or you'll rip out your stitches." As he moves easily from reinforcing
the mendacity of the fork story to professing genuine apprehension about Honey's postoperative condition, there is a pause
in battle.

Throwing the vase seems to have had a calming effect on Honey, and breathing deeply, lucid thought having landed and now taxiing
toward the terminal, it occurs to her a recalibrating of perceptions might be in order. She collects herself and asks, "If
you knew she was auditioning for a commercial, don't you think you maybe could have gotten me an audition?"

"You've got bigger fish to fry than an audition for a fresh-coochie commercial." This was a statement that implied the dawning
of an entirely new and possibly glorious era for Honey, since an audition for a gig like the one Candi Wyatt was up for would
have been the highlight of Honey's month, necessitating much additional taking of acting classes, experiments with new hair
colors, and reshooting of head shots, all on Frank's dime.

"I do?" Honey grabs on to Frank's implied encouragement like a dangling climber who is being offered a foothold in the rock
face.

"Way bigger fish." Frank making her wait.

"Really?"

"Orson Dubinsky wants to talk to you about being in
Kirkuk."

"Oh my god!" Frank nods in response, realizing with no little relief the immediate danger has passed. "As Borak?" she squeals,
instantly forgetting Frank's suspected betrayal.

"No, babe. As a seal."

"Frank!" Utter disbelief.

"Yes, as Borak. He's a fan of yours."

"He's seen my movie?"

"Seen it, has the DVD, the whole family watches it on Friday night . . ."

"He watches with his kids?"

"I don't know if he has kids, babe. I'm just making the point that Honey Call is a name to reckon with at Chez Dubinsky."

"Oh, baby," Honey purrs, putting her arms around his waist and hugging his hips tightly to her but leaning back to avoid pressure
on her breasts, which still hurt from the incisions. "I love you!"

We needn't go into what Honey means by "love" in this context, her behavior upon learning of her new career prospects making
that implicit. Suffice it to say she was willing to overlook certain behavior on Frank's part at this juncture in their relationship
if it meant she was going to be on television.

The cat scratch became a fork wound, Candi Wyatt simply a struggling, chaste young woman in need of some guidance from an
experienced member of the Screen Actors Guild, and Frank, well, he was just a wonderful guy, and talented, too, respected
by others who sought his wise counsel and then thoughtfully sent flowers in gratitude.

That night, Honey cooks dinner, an unusual event since they almost always ordered in from one of the myriad take-out joints
in the neighborhood. She makes a meat loaf with rice pilaf and cleans up the kitchen herself. Later, they sit in the living
room reading magazines, and when Frank goes off after ten o'clock to do a set at the Comedy Shop, she simply says, "Enjoy
yourself," and seems to mean it, not bothering to request he come home at a reasonable hour.

"Babe," Frank says to Candi as she walks past him with a tray of drinks. He's standing in the back of the Comedy Shop, the
area between the main room and the bar, where the comics hang out nervously awaiting the MC's summons to the stage. She stops
and smiles.

"How's your back?" Candi inquires with real concern.

"It's fine. Listen, I appreciate the thought but don't send anything else to my house, okay?"

"Are you busy later? Maybe I can take you out and thank you more, you know, personally," she says, trying seductiveness on
for size and sounding like a high school girl in the senior class play.