File Under: Does Anybody Sleep in L.A.?

Commando never makes an appointment to see me. Instead, she waits until she’s in a crisis, then sends up a flare. “I’m desperate, Charles!” she panted into the phone today. “Four of my clients are up for Emmys and I haven’t got a damn thing to wear. What’ll I do?”

This seemed an odd question for a successful agent to ask an acupuncturist. After all, she almost single-handedly (by her own grandiose estimate) keeps the primetime sit-com slate populated. “Why don’t you check with one of those assistants flitting around your office?” I said. “You’ve got quite a natty little group of go-to’s.”

“What, and give those twinks the upper hand?” she said. “No way!”

She had a point. Well-trounced minions must not be given a reason to feel needed. It disrupts the sacred hierarchy of abuse. How, after all, can you hurl your attributed-to-Brancusi bronze at the person who dressed and coifed you for the Emmys? Unfortunately for Commando, I didn’t have the time or talent for a fashion makeover so I sent her to Saks on Wilshire. I knew she wouldn’t be going onstage at the Nokia so she wouldn’t want to overdress, and Saks could be relied on to keep her from appearing overly off-the-rack.

On my way home from the office (where, by the way, I treated one of Commando’s clients, an chronically insomniac actress on an Emmy-likely sitcom. Does anybody sleep in L.A?), Commando called. “Charles,” she said, “guess what? Problem solved! I found the perfect get-up for the Emmys.”

“You went to Saks?” I said.

“Nope. I got in the car and started driving toward Saks but when I saw those mannequins in the window in those frilly-dilly outfits, I said to myself that ain’t my style. I’m not frilly-dilly. So I kept driving and ended up at the Army surplus.”

“At the what??” I said.

“Everything I needed, right there,” she said.

“You what?” I said. “How could you possibly--what do you mean--are you out of your--” Then I remembered. She didn’t find success by batting her eyelashes and swaying her hips. She leaves that to her assistants--her twinks. She’s Commando. Pretty is for pansies. And so, on Sunday evening, if the camera should swing across the Nokia and you glimpse a square jawed woman with a flattop, wearing a tux jacket and camouflage trousers, pushing people out of the way, don’t be too quick to judge. She populates your primetime viewing. And what she lacks in frilly-dilly she makes up for in Emmys.
       *********************************************************************
(Meet Commando: July 12, 2010 entry)

File under: Lapdog, Hand That Feeds You, Etc.

A welter of screen writers blew through my office this week, leaving behind a trail of flattened Red Bull cans and the cloying scent of “Why Me?” This wasn’t surprising: patients often move in herds. One week I may treat a half dozen producers from the Paramount lot and the next a swarm of deposed Bulgarian royalty and their jeweled lapdogs. You never know.

But this week it was writers. William the screenwriter pretty much crawled into my Westside treatment studio today, complaining of depression, shoulder pain, wrist pain and an overpowering sense of doom. He set his leather satchel on a chair and climbed onto the treatment table, folding his slender legs into half-lotus. His clothes were so threadbare and his shoes in such despair that I decided to give him his treatment free of charge. 

From under long, dark, curly, unwashed hair, William sent me a bloodshot, hound dog look. “I’m in an abusive relationship,” he said, sipping his energy drink.

“Oh?” I said, sanitizing my hands and opening a box of needles, then sanitizing my hands again.

“That’s right,“ he said. "But that‘s to be expected! Hollywood has always abused writers and it always will. It denigrates us and leaves us feeling worthless. We’re the lowest caste of society."

“So, what happened?” I asked.

“My agent destroyed my script! It was the beautiful story of a young mute girl in an Irish orphanage at the turn of the century, a girl with psychic abilities.”

“How did your agent destroy your work?” I said.

“She had me change the girl to a boy, switch Ireland to a ghetto in Brazil, and made me change her special talent to soccer. And for what?!”

“I understand your frustration,” I said.

“Do you?” he said.

“This kind of crap happens all the time in this town,” I said. “So now, after all your hard work, after all the concessions you’ve made, you’ve got nothing, not even a promise. You toil all day on your writing project, then you go to your waitering job in the evening, barely scratching out a living,

“Not exactly,” he said, sadly. “We sold the script. The movie’s being made. Big names attached. Would you like to see a picture of my new Lexus?”

"You mean you're crying about abuse even though you've sold the script, and probably sold it for a fortune?" I was getting irritated.

He shifted nervously.  "Well, yeah.  But I mean it's about the principle of the thing.  The way I see it, life is over in the barest blink of an eye, so we might as well be appreciated and compensated fairly for our talents, don't you agree?

"Now that you mention it," I said, "I guess you're right." And in the barest blink of an eye, my rate went back up.

File under: Fanny, Fishy, Kahlua, Calamity

Myron may have recovered his lost diamonds in time for the producers’ pow-wow but that didn’t leave him with a more positive outlook on life. Instead it served as a reminder that God can bestow calamity upon anybody and at any time.

“Why me?” whimpered Myron, curling up on his chrome Baleri Italia chaise and staring out at the afternoon ocean from the deck of his 2.3 million dollar pied a terre. “Why am I so unfortunate? And where is that girl with my drink?!”

His sullen Czechoslovakian maid, Fanny, wobbled out the door, carrying a tall, pink drink on a tiny silver tray. Fanny is a squat, grumpy woman in her sixties with doughy features and a wide, lumpy torso that resembles an engine block. She dresses herself in a black skirt, white blouse and a ruffled white apron with indelible yellow stains.  If you look hard enough, you might find a tiny white kerchief folded into the unruly tumbleweed of her coif.

“Here. Drink,” she wheezed, holding the tray under Myron's chin. “Thees might make you feel better, but probably not. Enjoy it, if you can! Ah, but you probably won’t. But try anyway. Vypit, Myron. That means drink up in my country. Vypit. Life is short. Drink up while you may. Tomorrow, who knows, eh? Tomorrow: boom!”

Myron sipped the drink, a frothy mix of vanilla Haagen-Dazs, Kahlua and Pepto-Bismol. Or as he calls it: dinner.

“Cheers,” I said, sipping an absinthe and lighting a new Camel from an old one.

“The most horrifying part of it all,” said Myron, “is that those diamonds were fake.”

“Agh!” said Fanny, who wasn’t supposed to be part of the conversation and didn’t even know what we were talking about. “Well, it figures, yah!”

“How did you find out, Myron?” I said.

“They told me when I showed up at the studio. There were execs and a couple of scary looking thug-types and they were all sitting around a big table. When I set the diamonds down, an exec picked one up and examined it. Then he said, ‘This is fake!’ Well, I nearly had a heart attack but then they all started laughing. You see, as it turns out, this job I did was a test. They wanted to see if I could be trusted! They’ve got new equity and new suppliers. There are new avenues for revenue and they want me to get more deeply involved.”

“You mean more dangerously involved,“ I said.

Fanny gurgled. “Don’t like the sound of it, Myron. Not good. Is shady.”

I hated to say it--so I didn’t--but Fanny was right.

File Under: Bendable Buddies, Blanche Du Bois

I was hoping to start this blog with an uplifting portrayal of my life and work, one that would inspire you--the reader--to go out and make the world a better place. But it ain't turning out that way! Especially not after Myron smuggled three uncut diamonds the size of pinecones across the Canadian border in my daughter’s lunch box. Now that those rocks have disappeared, he’s having a nervous fit. “Fifteen million dollars worth of diamonds, fifteen million,” Myron chants, pacing the floor on shaky legs, tearing his hair out. “I’m dead, I’m dead! When they find out I’ve lost them, I’m dead!”

Myron insists on calling himself an Investment Specialist to the Film Trade which, when you think of it, really does sound more appealing than Smuggler. Myron will also inform you--within two minutes of making your acquaintance--that he suffers from bunions, vertigo, anxiety, paranoia and obsessive compulsion, all of which is true. Most people bring their various medications in a bag when they visit their doctor; Myron uses a burro and a cart. In fact, were you to take all the pills in his medicine cabinet and string them end-to-end, they’d reach all the way to Betty Ford and back. And so, if it seems like Myron is a stubborn, strangely determined little weed sprouting from the crevice between symptoms and remedies, it’s only because he is.

As an Investment Specialist to the Film Trade, Myron connects major film projects to equity investors. The current economy has caused studios, in large part, to shy away from risky new endeavors in favor of remakes and rehashes. If a film project has no hope of reaching its apotheosis as a Bendable Buddy at MacDonald‘s, it’s considered an unacceptable risk. This is good news to Myron, who funnels funds to projects. Sometimes this requires transferring assets in unconventional ways such as the secreting of diamonds in my daughter’s lunch box as we drive over the border from Canada to the U.S. I didn’t even know Myron had taken possession of any diamonds, so when he insisted that driving across the border would be picturesque and quicker than dealing with airport customs, I agreed to rent a car.

And now the diamonds are missing. Apparently Nanny found them in little Merle’s lunch box when we got home, and set the dirty things out by the curb, where they disappeared.

As I sit here typing, poor Myron paces the floor, shaking pills out of a bottle into his sweaty palm. “What will I do?” he cries. “I’m meeting with those producers in two weeks. The sellers are waiting, the buyers are waiting! What’ll I do What‘ll I do?”

“It‘ll work out for the best,” I tell him, opening the drapes to the vista of the vast ocean. A sparrow dives into the window, bouncing off the glass with a thud. "You'll do fine, Myron. I have complete confidence in you.”

Merle, my five year-old foundling, is tugging at my pants leg. “Daddy,” she squeaks, “I memorized the whole monologue! Can I have my fifty dollars?” I named Merle after the most versatile actress in the Industry and I’m making her rehearse her audition monologues for Yale Drama School starting right now.

Little Merle clears her throat, tilts her head and clasps her hands to her tiny breast. Her big, dark eyes get even darker as she gazes nostalgically into the second balcony. “We danced the Varsouviana,” she moons, “but then, suddenly, in the middle of the dance the boy I had married broke away from me and ran out of the casino…”*

I smell Oscar!

* Blanche Du Bois, Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams