The Bones (3 page)

"What's the premise?" Chilly.

"You're a dad. You've got a wife, two kids, and you live in the suburbs of Minneapolis."

"Me?"

"You like it?"

"Bobby, I'm not a dad, I'm the fuckin' Antichrist!"

"What do you think?"

"It's too early in the day. Is this a joke?"

"Yes."

"Funny."

"Okay, okay. They want to do a show that's going to cut through all the crap that's on, breakthrough television."

"They said that? 'Breakthrough television'?"

"Pam Penner said that, the head of development at Lynx, who loves you, by the way."

"She's gay, isn't she?"

"So?"

"So she doesn't love-love me."

"To get you to sign, she might."

"We'll see about that."

"Do you want to hear it?"

"And the premise is . . . ?"

"You're an Eskimo."

"An Eskimo?"

"Kind of a hip Eskimo."

The pain starts behind his eyes, a dark beast stretching thick muscles, heaving awake, still sleepy. Then it moves slowly,
lumbering, one giant foot, then the next, across the constricted tissue, until it lurches into the ocular nerve. Frank closes
his eyes hard and rubs his temples roughly with the tips of his index and middle fingers, inhaling deeply through his nose.
Unexpectedly, the beast retreats, glowering, awaiting further provocation.

"Are you fuckin' kidding me?"

"They're very high on this concept."

"Or they're just fuckin' high. They want me to play an Eskimo? Can the Bones have a little dignity?" Frank occasionally refers
to himself in the third person, particularly when trying to objectively discuss his career. Now he's warming up. "Would that
be possible? Could I retain an ink stain of self-esteem? Are you telling me I finally get my personal shot on TV and I'm going
to be dressed in animal skins bangin' a polar bear?"

Robert sits there, impassive, letting Frank vent.

"Why don't I play a priest?" he continues. "That'd make as much sense. I mean, who thought this was a good idea?"

"So I should tell them no?"

"I am not gonna play an Eskimo."

Now a Vesuvius of smoldering frustration, Frank gazes out the window, his brain lava boiling. Only by exercising the most
exquisite self-control is he able to keep from erupting and rendering the tasteful Nada offices a latter-day Pompeii. It's
the perceived disrespect that is unbearable. He wonders,
do they think I'm a clown?

Tentatively, Robert looks up at Frank, assessing his mood. His violent dissatisfaction is, to be fair, justified. Unfortunately,
this is the best offer Frank has had in a long time. In the parlance of his blinkered world, Frank has become a road monkey,
a wandering practitioner of the comedy arts making his bread and butter in places like Gigglemeister's and the Snicker Shack,
places that fizzed up like carbonation in a glass of happy-hour Budweiser across the American landscape in the early Reagan
era.

The problem with this career path in the fresh century is that comedy is over. Not over per se, but the boom of the eighties,
when someone dubbed comedy "the new rock," has ground to a halt, killed by the proliferation of cable television shows featuring
a brick wall and a microphone and the sheer number of bad comedians in the clubs. Guys like Frank can still get bookings in
most of the larger cities, but there just isn't the general interest anymore in comedy, its mainstream moment having passed,
and what remains is a young man's game. Frank is in his late forties now, looked upon by his contemporaries with a weird combination
of admiration and pity; admiration for having stayed true to his vision and pity for the exact same reason.

And why stay true to a vision? goes the reasoning of the successful television stars Frank came up with back east; guys with
whom Frank used to split cab fare between Catch A Rising Star and the Improv so they could do several sets in one night, and
now live in designer homes in the Hollywood Hills where they pretend to miss New York. Who needs a vision?

What the American public wants in a comedian is a toothy smile and a nice haircut. Cuddly. Bereft of genitalia. The rules
are different for black comics, but Frank could not, alas, trace his ancestry back to Africa. So "vision," well, that is not
necessarily a good thing.

Frank, however, is encumbered with a vision. He has a worldview, and it is, needless to say, dark. Simply: people are evil.
Straightforward. Hobbesian. Not that Frank had read Hobbes during his stint at a state college in Texas where he had briefly
enrolled, but that makes it no less so. If he were to elaborate, he would say people are also greedy, slothful, meretricious,
covetous, lustful, violent, and dumb, but evil pretty much covers the waterfront. Frank's point of view regarding humanity
makes him a direct lineal descendant of a cadre of bomb-throwers stretching from Juvenal to Ben Jonson to Lenny Bruce, but
in the world of network television, Lotto Pick 6 to Frank and his peers, these names carry no weight.

Frank is proud of his vision; it gives him an identity, something to cling to as others, to whom he perceives himself superior
in the talent department, outpace him in the race for public approbation and the pornographic amounts of money that now accompany
it. Yet, despite this, Frank is consumed by envy. Actually, he is not just consumed by envy; he has been chewed, devoured,
and excreted by it.

He once suspected if he toned his persona down, greater success might come. Along these lines, when starring in his own HBO
special, he had allowed Robert to talk him into wearing a red, crew-necked sweater and losing the sunglasses he always wears
so the audience could see his eyes and the network executives could see his potential to headline a series. But he had never
felt so ridiculous and, when the hoped-for series didn't materialize, vowed he would on no account ever again do something
so inexcusably lame. If his misanthropic outlook was going to get in the way of his success, then, fuck it, he'd rather be
true to his philosophical school.

That was seven years ago and Frank's career has been stuck in an increasingly disturbing neutral. In his view, the sun should
already have set on the era of cold pizza in Cincinnati after two shows at the local Comedy Casbah. Escape from the Island
of Touring Comics, where all one could look forward to were an endless series of one-nighters, life as a renter, and no health
insurance, came in a single form—a successful television series. Frank has hewed to the man he knew himself to be. It has
paid off. An offer is on the table.

But they want him to play an Eskimo.

"Will you at least take the meeting?" Robert asks.

"Can we sell them something else?"

"They're taking pitch meetings year-round. We can do whatever we want."

"Then let's make it about me."

Frank savors that thought a moment, the notion that he, Frank Bones, is a sought-after performer; a performer a television
network would allow, no,
encourage
to create a vehicle for himself; a show to let him finally claim his rightful place in the pantheon.

Robert bursts in on Frank's reverie by saying, "You mean like the
Fleishman
thing?"

The
Fleishman
thing to which Robert is referring is
The Fleishman Show,
which starred the popular comedian Charlie Fleishman (toothy, nonthreatening, bereft of genitalia). It is a show about a fictitious
version of the real Charlie Fleishman (a meta-Fleishman, if you will), a suburban dad with an attractive wife, two rascally
kids, and a well-remunerated job in television, and it has recently finished an extremely successful seven years on the front
page of the Zeitgeist. Although Frank could admit Charlie Fleishman was not entirely lacking in talent, he in no way considered
him to be in his own class. Fleishman's extraordinary success was the bête-est of bêtes noires for Frank, who took it as confirmation
of his worst suspicions about the Velveeta-like taste of the American public. So to compare what Frank is suggesting to anything
having to do with Charlie Fleishman is unwise.

"No, not like the
Fleishman
thing," Frank virtually explodes. "Why is it like that? I don't live in the burbs. I don't have kids. Bobby, you're comparing
Picasso to a guy who paints on velvet!"

"I'm not saying you're like Charlie," Robert says, backpedaling quickly. "I'm just saying he's a comic, you're a comic, certain
people might see some overlap." As Frank masticates on this, Robert leans back in his leather chair. Inhales slowly through
his nostrils.
How do I put this? How do I tell this man, this friend, this potential multiyear meal ticket, the likelihood of an American
television network finding sponsors for a show about the life of a middle-aged, perpetually high, beak-nosed comic in dark
glasses who has had significant legal trouble is, not to put too fine a point on it, nil?

Robert's answer to himself is
I don't.

He knows the Law of Capitalist Entropy, whereby virtually nothing happens unless someone with a far larger bank account than
yours wants it to, will combine with Frank's inherent sloth to produce the desired result.

"We can absolutely pitch a show about you," Robert says to Frank, coddling, massaging, misleading, knowing people hear what
they want. "Let's just give it a slightly different spin."

"Don't worry about the spin. No one's going to confuse me with Fleishman."

"You're absolutely right," Robert declares, and he's not lying.

Frank is so delighted when he leaves the meeting he doesn't even wait until the parking valet brings his tan '87 Cadillac
with the chipped paint before lighting up a joint.

Chapter 2

"Take the swatches with you, Lloyd."

The speaker is Stacy Melnick, running out the front door of a house in Mar Vista, a middle-class neighborhood in west Los
Angeles. Her husband, Lloyd, is backing his new Saab out of the driveway, cursing to himself and hitting the brakes as he
sees Stacy, wearing blue nylon sweatpants, a tight maroon Lycra top that clings to her small but well-formed breasts, and
a pair of Adidas cross-trainers, descend on the car brandishing a handful of fabric samples over her head like a soldier waving
a flag on the battlefield.

Their four-year-old son appears in the doorway, a tousled-headed moppet dressed in SpongeBob underpants and a red cape he
wore last Halloween. "I'm hungry," he announces, ignoring Lloyd's imminent departure. "When's lunch?"

"Honey, you had breakfast an hour ago," Stacy reminds him. "Now go inside and put some clothes on. Mommy'll be back in a minute."
Lloyd waves at his son, who ignores him and heads indoors.

It is a cool November morning, and the soft light, diffused through the palm trees lining their street, is flattering to Stacy.
Waxed and buffed, she is an agreeable-looking woman. In Des Moines she would inspire epic poetry, but this being Los Angeles,
world capital of female pulchritude, pleasant is what she rates. She has been successful at postponing middle-age droop, but
the sexual thoughts Lloyd often found himself having about his wife have recently been trumped by a desire not to be in her
presence. Oddly, for a man who had been married ten years, he masturbates to images of his spouse; it is actually having sex
with her that he no longer finds appealing.

Lloyd Melnick met Stacy Schiff on a rainy, black-and-white evening in New York City after having overcome his congenital shyness
and striking up a conversation with her at the P & G Bar on West Seventy-third Street, where she was waiting for a female
colleague. He told her he had just come from the birthday party of a friend who'd recently joined AA. In the Big Book tradition,
everyone had had too much coffee, no one could stop talking, and the whole thing had made him so nervous he had to go out
for a drink, which made her laugh, and explained his presence in the bar. She told him she'd been a dietitian but had recently
switched careers and now was a junior account executive at a public relations agency working on launching a new Swedish vodka
called Strindberg. He told her all vodkas were the same. She offered to buy one for him at the bar and give him a taste test.
He accepted, drank a Stoli and a Strindberg, couldn't tell the difference, but found himself drunkenly falling for this girl
when she confessed that she couldn't tell the difference either and touched his hand when she said it. When Stacy realized
she recognized his name from
Vanity Fair,
to which he had contributed a few short pieces, she was already selecting china patterns.

On their third date, driving from Manhattan to Coney Island in Lloyd's battered Toyota, she performed fellatio on him in the
front seat as they rolled across the Brooklyn Bridge. Stacy hadn't wanted to go to Coney Island. Dancing at some swanky nightclub
would have been far preferable, but she was thirty, unmarried, and Lloyd had all his limbs, no visible sores, and a highly
developed sense of humor, all qualities she found attractive. If she had to suffer through a few excursions to godforsaken
places like Coney Island as the price of standing in front of her family with a clergyman and Lloyd Melnick, then she would
grit her caps and persevere.

What Lloyd did not realize at the time, or willfully did not acknowledge, her proclivity for autoborne blow jobs aside, was
the degree to which Stacy hewed to convention, the beaten path, the middle of the middle of the road. This woman was the easy-listening
format personified. Stacy preferred American movies to foreign ones, swimming pools to the ocean, and she'd never wear sandals
if she hadn't had a pedicure in the last week. Lloyd's view of himself was more avant-garde, but every time he stared at her
ass encased in tight jeans, he became weak in the knees, so he overlooked the obvious and proposed.

Taking Lloyd's measure and mistakenly sensing a tabula rasa on which she could paint her own picture, Stacy also overlooked
the obvious and accepted. He might not be a big success right now, she reflected, but Lloyd was amusing, personable, and industrious—a
good horse on which to bet—and they were married a year after their first date. Having vowed to keep working after the nuptials,
the newly minted Mrs. Melnick faxed her resignation from the Bermuda Hilton on the third day of the honeymoon so she could
devote herself full-time to her new husband's temporal advancement. That his temporal advancement continued in a holding pattern
led her to beg for her job back six months later. Yet despite Lloyd's less than rapid progress, she continued to believe in
his talent.

They'd had a fissureless, vanilla marriage, but when Lloyd, at Stacy's urging, made the transition from struggling freelance
journalist to Hollywood comedy hack and then, through a series of fortuitous circumstances, to successful Hollywood comedy
hack, Stacy took the opportunity to transform from a New Jersey—bred dietitian/junior PR executive with Formica aspirations
into a Wife of an Important Guy who was going to live in a veined-marble world. Never mind Lloyd didn't see himself that way,
his Bronx-bred self-loathing not allowing for personal aggrandizement. To Stacy, he was Important, she was his wife, and they
needed to send out certain signals as a couple. Her chosen mode of transportation in Los Angeles was a Chevrolet Suburban,
a cross between an SUV and a tank, and she ranged over the city, ear glued to a cell phone, inspiring fear in everyone not
driving a military transport vehicle, as she craftily plotted their ascent. She insisted they give large amounts of money
to the pet charities of people with whom she aspired to socialize: Heal the Bay, Families in Crisis, Kids Need Art, etc.,
were among the myriad organizations receiving generous contributions from the ever-expanding coffers of Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd
Melnick.

When Lloyd began making serious television money, Stacy decreed they must live in a stately pleasure dome commensurate with
their new fiscal circumstances. To this end, she has recently purchased a lot in Brentwood, where they are erecting a Mediterranean
villa. AQ of this makes Lloyd vaguely nauseous. But only vaguely because he cannot pinpoint the cause of the disconnectedness
he is feeling, the sense of not actually being Lloyd Melnick but, rather, playing the part, since no one, save for some Marxist
spoilsport, could judge the accoutrements of his life, the pretty wife and attractive son, the big SUV and the soon-to-be-built
mansion, to be anything less than jake. Oh, he'd wanted a family, but these other things, things that seemed to multiply and
become more things in front of his eyes as larger amounts of money came in the door, aren't what he'd aspired to. He feels
guilty for liking them, something he is perversely pleased with since it lets him know the old Lloyd's heart is ticking in
there somewhere, but still, how can he not melt into life in a tub of butter? It is almost as if he is suffering from a form
of survivor's guilt. What has he done to deserve his good fortune? Not terribly much, in his mind. Lately, he finds himself
ruminating on the phrase
an embarrassment of riches,
never before having fully realized what it meant: the anxiety of affluence.

Lloyd hasn't stopped viewing himself as a journalist, even though the last time his name appeared in print was almost ten
years ago. He stays current culturally and politically, subscribing to the
New Republic,
the
New Yorker, Harper's,
the
Atlantic Monthly,
and the online rags
Slate
and
Salon.
He can hold his own at any local gathering of the intellectually inclined. But he is troubled by the notion that he has abandoned
the road of real life at the last rest stop. He senses something slightly ludicrous about his position. Then he wonders if
the feeling that something is ludicrous is actually what is ludicrous. Truly, what haunts Lloyd is the fear he is far more
conventional than he wants to admit, that he has entirely evolved out of his previous incarnation as a man to whom the bangles
and baubles that now surround him meant nothing and morphed into someone who is going to live in Brentwood and have to feign
being tortured about it.

Every time Stacy drags him to the construction site and he beholds the rising skeleton of an edifice more befitting a minor
prince in the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line than Lloyd Melnick, late of the Bronx, he wonders why his existence, seemingly so perfect,
feels so out of control.

Lloyd had set out to become an artist and has instead become rich. His ambivalence regarding this condition sparks inchoate
feelings of confusion manifesting themselves in an absence of interest in sex with his wife, whom he blames for his loss of
the platonic ideal of himself.

His lone act of rebellion is his wardrobe or, rather, lack thereof, since it consists entirely of baggy khakis, T-shirts,
and sweatshirts, all of which exist in varying states of degradation. In his one concession to fashion, however, Lloyd always
wears the latest Nike high-top basketball shoes to remind himself he used to play before he tore his ACL in a game at the
Hollywood YMCA and ended his athletic career.

Lloyd, dressed today in an ensemble that appears to have spent the previous two years in a desert sandstorm, accepts the fabric
samples—red paisleys, yellow velvets, blue linens, a carnival of colors and textures—from Stacy. She kisses him good-bye,
quickly, unsexually, on the proffered cheek.

He fakes a smile and backs his car into the road. Briefly considers heading to the 10 freeway and driving east to the desert,
to a motel where he could plan his descent into Mexico and eventual disappearance. But Frank Bones has called him, and not
having spoken to the man in years, Lloyd is curious what he wants. So, postponing the abandonment of a lifetime's worth of
obligations, he points his car north and heads for Sunset Boulevard.

Lloyd sits at one of the long Formica (the very material his wife was attempting to rise above!) tables in Duke's Coffee Shop
on Sunset, a few doors down from the Whiskey, nursing his third cup of decaf, wondering if Frank is going to show. Frank was
habitually on Stevie Wonder time, Lloyd recalls, and it was not unusual to wait over an hour after the agreed-upon moment
for him to arrive at a confab. They had known each other years ago in New York but hadn't communicated since Frank had moved
to Los Angeles, Frank not being one to send Christmas cards and Lloyd being preoccupied with Stacy and then the kid.

Back in New York, Lloyd had been a writer for the
SoHo Weekly News,
a so-called alternative paper featuring leftist politics and elitist arts coverage, read by the members of the south of Fourteenth
Street cognoscenti for whom the
Village Voice
was too mainstream. He had been doing a piece on young comedians (this was back when there was cultural significance in the
topic), and having seen Frank do fifteen inspired minutes one summer night at an East Side club riffing Charlie Parker-like
on the contents of a woman's purse he had purloined from an audience member, Lloyd realized Frank was the most talented drop
in the new wave. But more than that, Frank was so masterful, audacious, charming, and funny onstage that by the time he said
Thanks, you've been a great crowd. Please remember to tip your waitress,
Lloyd was smitten in a heterosexual way. So after writing the traditional "10 to Watch" piece about the freshest prop comics,
guys with guitars and mannish women, Lloyd approached Frank about doing a Boswell for an upscale glossy, Frank being the Dr.
Johnson in the equation.

Mostly, Lloyd wanted an excuse to hang out with him. Frank, needless to say, craved the media validation Lloyd promised, and
the two of them spent a series of afternoons and evenings together walking and talking, a pair of flâneurs drifting through
the teeming metropolis.

Lloyd envied Frank the life he embodied. Lloyd would have liked to have been able to climb on a stage at a time and place
not of his own choosing and make a group of strangers laugh (Frank's definition of a comedian, which Lloyd had duly quoted
in his article—
GQ,
January 1987), but he lacked the gene that prevented utter terror at the prospect. Instead, he watched with fascination and
then awe as Frank walked the tightrope each night at the showcase clubs, departing from his act at any provocation, searching
for laughs in topics as diverse as the role of Torquemada's eating habits during the Spanish Inquisition (his alleged taste
for gefilte fish creating suspicion on the part of his henchmen) or the proclivity of UFOs to appear in the American South
("Why do they always land where IQs are below shoe sizes?"), usually connecting them in a mad rush of cascading thought that
tumbled from his brain in seemingly random patterns—Torquemada's culinary intake leading to the paucity of UFO sightings in
medieval Spain, leading to the cuisine served on alien spacecraft, leading to the presumed taste for grits and ham hocks on
the part of UFO occupants (Did the spacecraft have fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror?), leading to their regular
visits to the American South, leading to the unpopularity of the pope in Alabama, leading, finally, back to Torquemada—a thrilling,
vertiginous ride for a nightclub audience that had been listening to other comics riff on airplane food or the difference
between New York and California.

What most impressed Lloyd about Frank's act, this ability to spontaneously detonate in front of a roomful of civilians and
rain shards of merriment everywhere, was its demonstration of Frank's ability to exist, no—thrive!—entirely in the present.
Frank didn't reflect, and
plan
was not a verb with which he was familiar. He was simply a forward-moving object, a jet-propelled, no-prisoners comedy machine
indifferent to whatever detritus, human or otherwise, wound up in the slipstream. Lloyd, on the other hand, was so conscious
of his own internal machinations it was as if he went through life with a personal heckler, a guy who sits in the third row
of his cerebral cortex saying things like
That didn't really just come out of your mouth, did it?