The Bones (4 page)

Frank told Lloyd about the detective novel he was writing featuring a character not-so-loosely based on himself, the band
he was going to hire to back him during his act (he did impressive impressions of popular singers), and how his father, Norman
Bronsky, a shoe-store owner given to bouts of depression, had came home from work one day, drunk a glass of milk, gone down
to the basement of their home in a Houston suburb, and blown his brains out. This last nugget, parceled out judiciously by
Frank and known to few people, emerged one day in Frank's Second Avenue apartment after a particularly long pull on a large
bong. Frank trusted Lloyd and asked him not to mention what he had told him in whatever article he was going to write and
was pleased that Lloyd complied.

When Lloyd first met Frank, Lloyd had been out of college a few years and was living with a melancholy, out-of-work actress
in a basement apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street so noisy he had to take the telephone into the hall to tell the bill collectors
the check was in the mall. The actress, whose name was Sonia Hopewell, would spend entire days in bed reading
Vogue
and eating Tiger's Milk carob bars, unable to face waiting tables and open casting calls where she would be forced to audition
with four hundred other ingenues who had seen the same ad in
Backstage.
She would rouse herself from her torpor long enough to engage in titanic battles with Lloyd, occasionally threatening to kill
herself before retreating back to her magazines, candy bars, and pervasive sense of woe. Lloyd's idea of a satisfying relationship
was something else entirely, and had he not been in her erotic thrall (the sex after their fights was incredible), it would
not have lasted the two years it did.

He told Frank about Sonia and her bleak moods; used it to connect with him, really, since he thought his girlfriend might
be clinically depressed and could end up doing what Frank's father had done. Frank advised Lloyd to jettison her and, when
Lloyd hinted he had nowhere to go if he bafled, generously offered his own stained couch as a temporary refuge. The desire
to bond with Frank was as strong as his need to leave Sonia, so shortly after Frank threw him the lifeline, Lloyd moved out
while she was at an audition for a student film (his escape planned so he would not have to face her wrath in person) and
spent a week in Frank's living room before finding his own place in deepest Brooklyn. They weren't friends exactly, their
cohabitation being mostly a matter of the exigencies of Lloyd's domestic situation, so Frank more or less ignored the young
journalist while he was his houseguest. Lloyd didn't mind, proximity to the Bones being its own reward at that point.

Lloyd checks his watch and again looks at the door. He's beginning to wonder if Frank is going to show. Slightly sick after
three cups of decaf, he ponders the distance he's traveled since his New York days. That he finds himself at the age of forty-two
as a writer of situation comedies in Los Angeles is a source of no little dismay. Lloyd has spent the last seven years working
on
The Fleishman Show,
which was spawned and run by the cranky misanthrope Phil Sheldon, with all of its scripts masterfully composed by the same
Phil Sheldon. The job of the overpaid writing staff essentially consisted of coming to work, eating lunch, avoiding Phil Sheldon,
and going home. Lloyd had had virtually nothing to do with the triumph of the endeavor.

This did not stop other television studios, desperate to re-create the otherworldly success of
The Fleishman Show
and not understanding it was sui generis, from throwing piles of money at
Fleishman Show
writers, whose primary, often sole, qualification was having been in a room with Phil Sheldon. Lloyd Melnick is one of those
people, like Rockefeller or Onassis offspring, a possessor of undeserved wealth. What is he doing fingering swatches of plush
fabric for a quintet of sofas, for it is five they are buying, that will cost more than his father, the comptroller of a medical
supplies company in Queens, has ever made in a year? How did he go from being a penurious print hack to well-remunerated television
one?

Lloyd had been eking out a living as a freelance writer in New York when he noticed his thirty-third birthday approaching
with alarming speed. The thirty-third year had always held a mystical aspect for Lloyd. He'd long been aware that Jesus, Alexander
the Great, and John Belushi all prematurely perished at thirty-three, and these were men who led lives of remarkable achievement.
Whenever Lloyd thought about his own modest accomplishments, he was often overcome by feelings of deep inadequacy. He'd had
the first chapter of an autobiographical novel in the desk drawer of his apartment for several years at that point, but never
seemed to find the time to write the second chapter, much less finish the book. Like virtually everyone of his generation
with literary aspirations, he'd written a screenplay, a romantic comedy about an actress and a playwright that stole so extensively
from Woody Allen, three of the people he showed it to told him he would be sued in the unlikely event it was produced.

Stacy, to whom he'd been married for two years at this point, was encouraging him to get a job as an advertising copywriter.
She had been working as a junior account executive at a downtown PR agency whose loftlike office seemed a beacon of cool capitalism,
and she thought Lloyd might thrive in a similar environment. Lloyd, however, wanted no part of the advertising business, believing
it to be the graveyard of literary ambition. Then one cold winter night he was invited to a party at Neil Levin's studio apartment
on West Eighty-sixth Street.

Lloyd played basketball with Neil Levin every Tuesday night in the tiny gym at PS 6 on the East Side. A comedy writer who
had spent a couple of years in Los Angeles, Neil had decided to leave that city after the riots in '92. Currently making peanuts
directing a series of shorts for a children's show on PBS, he told Lloyd there was much money to be made writing sitcoms in
L.A., if one could stand living there, Neil taking the point of view that civilization collapsed west of Hoboken, New Jersey.
Also participating in this conversation was Neil's friend Phil Sheldon, a stand-up comic who had starred in one of the shorts
Neil had directed. Phil didn't care particularly for either New York or Los Angeles. He was pretty much miserable wherever
he was. But that said, he was about to fly to L.A. to finish work on a pilot he had written and produced, and it seemed as
if he was going to emerge from the experience relatively unscathed. "It's all a shiny penny," Phil said. "A very shiny penny."

Phil told Lloyd to call him if he came to L.A.

Emboldened by his discussion with Neil and Phil, Lloyd told Stacy he wanted to move. Her agency was opening an L.A. office
at the time, and they were happy to transfer her out there. Three months after the party at Neil Levin's, the Melnicks were
ensconced in a Spanish-style courtyard apartment in the Fairfax district surrounded by a jumble of hipsters and Hasidim, who
would mingle on the sidewalks turning the sunbaked avenues of Lloyd and Stacy's new neighborhood into an MTV shtetl.

Lloyd didn't feel comfortable calling Phil Sheldon, selling himself in such a personal way not being his strong suit, so he
found himself writing a spec script for a show called
Friends,
which had debuted that year. Easily capturing the pseudo-hip urban banter that made that show so phenomenally popular, Lloyd
took less than a week, and the first agent he sent it to, Irv Drossman, an old-timer whose name he got from a Writers Guild
directory, was only too happy to sign him. Irv got Lloyd an entry-level gig as a writer on a sitcom starring an obese comedienne
with the personality of a scorpion, and by the time he was fired six weeks later for not pulling his weight in the writers'
room (a comedy abattoir, to be sure), he'd found the confidence to call Phil, whose project, now known as
The Fleishman Show,
had been picked up. Phil loathed talking to agents, which was the way most show-runners usually found writers, so Lloyd's
timing could not have been more propitious. He came in to meet with Phil, they talked about the New York Knicks for an hour,
and he was asked to join the staff the next day. Even Irv Drossman couldn't believe it.

From that moment, Lloyd's rise was so unimpeded, it was almost as if he were mocking those whose struggles were more Sisyphean.
Lloyd knew this and tried to be sensitive to it. He developed a line of self-deprecation people found winning, always careful
not to take credit for the success he'd experienced, ascribing it to a combination of luck and, well, luck.

It all seems rather silly to him as he contemplates Stacy's fabric samples.
If upmarket fabric samples have a consciousness,
he's thinking,
surely they would want to be with someone who deserves them more than I do.

This is the very thought preoccupying him as the door to Duke's opens and Frank enters, trailed by a young man with short
black hair, a soul patch, three earrings, and a video camera. The cameraman pans to Lloyd, catching him waving back, and Lloyd
thinks,
Is this a fan or does Frank have a personal videographer now, his life a perpetual bar mitzvah?

Frank walks over to Lloyd, who rises, smiling.

"Babe!" the universal greeting, familiar yet distancing. Frank embraces Lloyd, who, temporarily forgetting their positions
on the food chain have been reversed, feels flattered and embraces Frank.

"Bones!" Lloyd using the last name immediately, paradoxically more intimate than
Frank.

"You look rich," Frank says, letting Lloyd know he's been following his northerly career trajectory.

"Yeah, I'm all right." Lloyd tries to ignore the camera recording their every twitch, uncomfortable performing.

"The guy with the lens pointed in your face is Otto Duhamel." Lloyd looks at Otto, nodding. Otto fails to acknowledge the
introduction. "He's making a documentary. It's gonna be in Sundance," Frank hyperbolizes, unable to not blow smoke, referring
to the snowbound Utah film festival where Hollywood agents outnumber pinecones. "You can sign a release later, Babe, 'cause
you're in it."

That he's forty-five minutes late is never mentioned as Frank sits down and looks at the laminated menu, Lloyd following suit,
returning to his decaf. Otto lowers himself into a chair, continuing to videotape them. While Lloyd pretends to read the waffle
choices, he considers his relationship with Frank. They knew each other once, and as we have seen, there was a short interlude
when Lloyd planted himself in Frank's living room. Lloyd would have liked to maintain contact, but once he'd moved into his
own place and his article on Frank had been published, he found the Bones somewhat less available. So much less available,
in fact, that it had occurred to Lloyd perhaps Frank had played him. Not in a malicious way, certainly. Not in a way meant
to diminish Lloyd. Just in a way intended to maximize the benefit to Frank.

The false familiarity that is the lingua franca of the entertainment business would lead the casual observer who had watched
them greet each other to believe Frank and Lloyd were two old pals with a genuine fondness for each other. The truth is, they
have never been friends, just a couple of guys who knew each other during an earlier time in another city.

The aspiring celebrity whose job it is to serve them, black roots, pink Hp gloss, and a rose tattoo on her neck, places a
cup of coffee in front of Frank and takes their order, Otto getting it all on tape, including Frank's desultory flirtation.
She leaves; Frank turns to Lloyd and asks, "How's Phil?" Frank and Phil Sheldon had started together back in New York, and
whatever Frank thinks of toothy Charlie Fleishman, he respects Phil Sheldon, whose exacting standards are well-known to everyone
in the comedy universe.

"All I know is when the show went into syndication, the mint in Washington had to print extra money so there'd be enough to
pay him," Lloyd says, not wanting to get into a psychological exegesis of his former boss, a complicated man, going for the
reductive response.

"So, what's it been, like, ten years?" Frank asks.

"Longer, I think. We had that one dinner after I moved out here . . . " Lloyd trails off, remembering the night he and Frank
had met at a Japanese place up in the Hollywood Hills. The Melnicks had just moved to town and Frank was one of the only people
Lloyd knew. At the dinner, during which Lloyd consumed copious quantities of raw fish and saki as he listened to Frank discourse
on all things Bones, Frank told Lloyd he was going to do a set later that night at a club on Melrose. If Lloyd wanted to come,
he should shadow him in his car. After splitting the bill, Lloyd climbed into the first of several Saabs he would own in Los
Angeles and followed Frank, who lost him in traffic on Hollywood Boulevard. Lloyd was never sure whether Frank had done it
on purpose (Frank was lighting a large joint as he climbed into his car), but Lloyd had his suspicions. They ran into each
other a few times at the Comedy Shop in the ensuing years, but Frank was always about to go onstage or he had just come offstage;
he was never in the state of mind necessary to focus on someone else, and Lloyd, being older than he was when he'd first met
Frank in New York, was considerably less comfortable in the role of acolyte.

"So now you're the king of comedy," Frank says, smiling. Lloyd's facial muscles reflexively demur, but Frank continues, "I
saw the article in the trades."

The article to which Frank is referring appeared the previous week and read as follows:

Fleishman
Scribe Inks Multiyear Pact

Fleishman Show
scribe Lloyd Melnick, a veteran writer-producer on the eponymous hit skein, has inked a multiyear deal with the Lynx Network.
"We're very excited to have Lloyd aboard," said Lynx prexy Harvey Gornish.
^<(
His talent and vision will be a welcome addition to the Lynx family."