The Man Who Cancelled Himself Page 6

  “He seems to have no shortage of takers,” I observed.

  “Hey, most men are dull,” she explained. “If there’s one thing Lyle isn’t it’s dull. Plus he’s a star. And you do get a house.”

  I tugged at my ear. “A house?”

  “Yeah. When he breaks it off I’m, like, he feels so guilty he moves out and lets you stay. Other guys give jewelry or a car, maybe a mink. Lyle gives a house. The man must be broke. He’s given away millions in property. Fiona got their duplex on West Tenth Street. Worth over a mil. Marjorie got the penthouse on Riverside. Another mil, easy. Amber got the loft in Tribeca. Katrina’ll get that humongous dump out in East Hampton, guaranteed. She knows it, too. That’s why she doinked him in the first place. Not a bad gig, considering. But I’m, like, no way. He’s too terrible a person.”

  “In what way?”

  There was a rustling noise out in the hall. Annabelle shot a glance that way, instantly on alert. No relaxed place this. “So you do feelings, huh?”

  “Feelings,” I affirmed. “Nothing more than feelings.”

  “I’ve always admired feelings specialists,” she confessed. “Wouldn’t mind being one myself when I’m older. How’d you get there? By doing a lot of living? Having your heart stepped on a few dozen times?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you’re doing Lyle’s book, too.”

  “I am.”

  She lowered her voice. “We’ll have to do lunch today while The Boys are in rewrites. I’ll give you the straight dope on everybody. I can’t keep my mouth shut, in case you didn’t notice. Bobby’ll join us, too, if he gets here. He’s usually late on Mondays. You’ll like Bobby. He’s real perceptive.” She glanced down the hall again. “Ah, good. The Boys are here. Let’s go say hello. “C’mon, Lulu. Come meet The Boys.” Lulu stirred under the desk. “God, she’s so great!”

  “Careful,” I cautioned. “Her head swells easily.”

  “But, I mean, she looks so profound.”

  “Just a profound case of gas. Trust me, I know about these things.”

  “Because you’re a feelings specialist?”

  “Because she sleeps on my head.”

  The Boys’ office was a lot bigger than mine. Big enough for a pair of desks set back to back, a sofa, two chairs, a TV monitor, and a human skeleton, which hung from the ceiling with a gorilla mask over its head. The Boys were going over the script at their desks. Both of them were short. Both of them were clad in Ralph Lauren polo shirts, pleated khakis, and moccasins. Preppy-casual is the standard sitcom uniform. Has been since the heyday of Grant Tinker, who was half-hour television’s answer to Babe Paley. Muck and Meyer were not boys. They were in their forties. But comedy writing teams are always called The Boys. Have been since the first caveman delivered the first spit take. Just as young writers like Annabelle and the absent Bobby would always be The Kids, though I’d heard that that one was currently being edged out by the New Yids on the Block.

  “Say hello to Stewart Hoag,” Annabelle commanded them. “And be nice!”

  Marty Muck jumped to his feet and shook my hand, all smiles and geniality. He was tanned and fit and robust, with wiry black hair and even white teeth and a prosperous, contented air about him. Marty seemed very West Coast to me, possibly because he reminded me of a Beverly Hills dentist who once had both of his hands in my mouth. That guy never stopped smiling either. “Glad to have you, Stewy.”

  “Make it Hoagy,” I said.

  “As in Carmichael?” he asked.

  “As in the cheese steak.”

  “Cheese is a funny word,” he declared, veteran shticktician to novice. “You can always get a laugh with the word cheese. Also goulash, guacamole, spackle, argyle, and Rosemary Clooney. Say hello to my partner Tommy.”

  “Hello to my partner Tommy,” I said.

  “Now that particular gag,” Marty advised, “got a laugh all the time for Burns and Allen. But then Laugh-In used it a hundred times in three months and killed it stone dead.” He paused, pondering it. “Of course, that was twenty-five years ago. Maybe it’s coming back and you’re ahead of the curve.”

  “I generally am.”

  He turned to his partner. “What do you say, Tommy?”

  Tommy Meyer didn’t say anything. Or crack a smile. Or get up. Just slumped there in his chair, sizing me up with a suspicion that bordered on outright hostility. Tommy was a sour, cadaverous, dead fish of a fellow, his skin translucent and faintly bluish, as if he’d been left dead out in the snow for several days. He had chalky lips and limp gray hair with a vivid patch of white at the forelock, like a tuft of cotton. He looked uncommonly frail and brittle and ill-nourished next to his partner. It was as if one were feeding off of the flesh of the other—the writing partner of Dorian Gray. He gave me a brief nod, then turned stiffly back to his script, his joints creaking arthritically. “You’re helping Lyle with his book,” he said. More an accusation than a question.

  “That’s correct,” I said. “An examination of his life and career. His arrest, too, of course.” I tugged at my ear. “Lyle contends he was set up.”

  Tommy’s eyes flickered at me.

  Marty motioned for Annabelle to shut the door. She did. He said, “Set up how?”

  I sat on the sofa. Lulu explored. The skeleton she steered clear of. “He says someone called the police on him.”

  “I’m, like, who?” wondered Annabelle.

  “Someone who wanted to ruin him,” I replied. “Someone from the show, to be exact. Possibly even one of you.”

  The Boys exchanged a look. Marty shook his head sadly. “He’s lost it. The man has totally lost it.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Hoagy, no one purposely sets out to get their own show thrown off the air,” he reasoned. “No one wants to be unemployed. Christ, he can’t really think that’s what happened.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  “I think,” Tommy replied, “the man went to a dirty, disgusting movie that had a lot of dirty, disgusting people doing dirty, disgusting things to each other. I think that he got horny and pulled out his chicken so as to choke it and he got caught. Face it, he’s your basic skeegee guy. I ought to know—I’m your basic skeegee guy.” And drier than dry. The man was the Gobi Desert. He positively exuded bleakness. It was an odor not unlike stale beer.

  “He says he’s living clean now,” I mentioned.

  “When a comic says he’s living clean,” said Tommy, “he means he’s no longer injecting directly into the vein.”

  “He says he’s off coke.”

  “Hey, you’re not actually buying him, are you?” asked Marty, brow furrowing with concern.

  “No, he’s buying me. Though I prefer to think he’s renting me, month to month.”

  “Well, you jump in when you feel comfortable,” said Marty with a reassuring grin. “We’re all friends here.”

  “A common enemy will do that to an otherwise diverse group of people,” Tommy explained.

  “Tommy’s overselling a bit,” Marty apologized. “We’re actually kind of divided in our feelings about Lyle. Some of us dislike him—”

  “And the rest of us can’t stand him,” Tommy cracked. “A lot of writers just plain hate him on sight.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Saves time,” Tommy fired back bluntly.

  “One time,” recalled Annabelle, “I’m, like, he actually stuck a table draft down his pants and farted on it in front of the whole cast and crew.”

  “I still haven’t decided if that improved it or not,” muttered Tommy.

  “I suppose you feel sorry for him, Hoagy,” Marty suggested tactfully.

  “I don’t feel anything,” I said. Though I was starting to feel Marty overplaying the nice guy bit. “I’m here so I can get to know him.”

  “I wish you luck,” said Marty. “I don’t think anyone’s ever been able to know Lyle. Not really. You reach a point with him and he pushes
you away. Christ, I’ve known him, it must be twenty-two years, and he’s never been to my house. Never given me a birthday present. He doesn’t even know when my birthday is.”

  “Because he doesn’t care.” Tommy shifted in his chair, joints creaking. He sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies when he moved. He pointed a crooked finger at me. “You worry me.”

  “I worry myself.”

  “We tell you what we really think about Lyle and he’ll just use it against us. The man’s been known to pull some major vindictive shit on people.”

  “We can make it off the record.”

  “How do we know we can trust you?” Tommy demanded.

  “You don’t,” I replied. “But you can.”

  “Of course you can,” echoed Annabelle. “Would those eyes lie to you?”

  She was referring to Lulu’s eyes, not mine. But I’ll take support wherever I can get it.

  Tommy Meyer peered at me skeptically. I had expected this. Because I was one of them, but I wasn’t. An awkward role, no question.

  “Okay, wait, do we dish or don’t we?” Annabelle wondered.

  The partners made silent eye contact with each other. Before Tommy turned back to me and said, “Main thing you should know about our grand-high-exalted mystic ruler is that he’s big, he’s fat, and he turns everything into a major battle.”

  We do dish. I had expected this, too. Because when it comes to dishing I’ve found most people can’t help themselves.

  “It’s a battle you can never win,” Tommy continued. “It’s his ball, his court, and his game. Lyle always has to get his way. Always. He won’t listen to anybody else. He won’t take criticism—”

  “I’m like, he doesn’t even hear it,” said Annabelle. “He has this screen that filters out anything negative.”

  “He has to feel like he’s in total charge at all times,” said Tommy. “If he doesn’t, he feels threatened. And when Lyle feels threatened you’d better duck—he wigs out big-time. So nobody challenges him. Not ever.”

  “Not even you?” I asked.

  “We used to,” said Marty, a bit defensively. “First season. It bothered us the way he kept changing our scripts in rehearsal. He’d throw out half our gags, schlock everything up. So we’d fight.”

  “Creative differences,” Tommy recalled sourly. “We wanted to do something creative and he wanted to do something different.”

  “But the fight’s gone out of us,” admitted Marty. “We have zero clout. We can never change his mind. So what’s the point? Besides, who are we to tell the man he’s wrong? He has the top-rated show in America. We just give him what he wants and try to stay out of his way.”

  Tommy: “Think of us as master furniture makers laboring in a chair factory.”

  Marty: “Formica factory. Formica says fake. Plus it’s a funnier word.”

  Tommy: “You’re right. Formica factory it is.”

  Now here were two guys who had been writing together a long time. They even punched up each other’s conversations.

  “I’m, like, you guys are being so negative,” objected Annabelle.

  “Okay, okay, maybe we do sound like total cynical hacks,” acknowledged Marty. “But at least we have no illusions about what we’re doing here.”

  “Unlike Bobby.” Tommy sneered unpleasantly. “Where is the Bobster anyway? The Boston shuttle running late again?”

  “Naomi was looking for him,” said Annabelle.

  “Why, she need servicing?” he cracked.

  “No, the copier does,” Annabelle fired back. To me she said, “Bobby’s the only one around here who’s handy.”

  “Another thing you’re going to discover, Hoagy,” Marty went on, choosing his words carefully, “is that Lyle changes directions on you a lot. The man’s completely unpredictable. Which means a lot of our time is spent stabbing around in the dark—”

  “Or, if possible, in Lyle’s back,” chipped in Tommy.

  “For a gag that pleases him. And that’s a nonstop adventure, because what he says he loves one minute he may hate five minutes later. We never know why. We only know it’s out. So a lot of what we do is …”

  “Trial and terror?” I suggested.

  Marty nodded approvingly. “Not bad. You’re going to be okay.”

  “So I keep telling myself.”

  “Okay, wait, why’s she doing that?” wondered Annabelle, intently observing Lulu, who was snarfling at the wall next to the couch, tail thumping. “Is it a mouse?”

  “No, she’d be cowering between my legs if it were any form of rodent life.” Now Lulu was growling at the baseboard. “Offhand, I’d say there’s a person listening on the other side of the wall.”

  “Lyle,” Marty whispered. “He’s in Katrina’s office eavesdropping on us with his Super Ear. Some stupid James Bond gadget he bought at this spook supply shop on Madison Avenue. He can hear through walls with it. Show him, Tommy.”

  Tommy got up out of his chair and creaked over next to the wall. “Just remember, Hoagy,” he exclaimed, voice raised. “No matter what happens we know we can always count on Lyle to come in at the last minute and pull it out!”

  There was a brief moment of silence. Followed by a tremendous crash on the other side of the wall.

  “See?” chuckled Marty.

  “And so another Uncle Chubby mug bites the dust,” intoned Tommy, clipping off the words like David Brinkley. He bent and gave Lulu a pat on the head. “You, Lulu, are okay.”

  “I love her deadpan, too,” Marty observed, inspecting her. “Reminds me of Lady Macbeth.”

  “Marty’s first wife,” explained Tommy. “Actually, she looks a lot like Beth. Especially around the nose.”

  “She does,” Marty agreed. “Does she get PMS?”

  Lulu let out a low moan of outrage. She has a rather Victorian sense of propriety. Picked it up from her mommy. Or so I’d once believed.

  “Does Lyle often eavesdrop on you?”

  “One of his favorite hobbies,” Tommy confirmed with dry dismay. “The man likes to go through our trash, too. He thinks people are constantly plotting behind his back to overthrow him. We’re talking serious paranoia here.”

  I nodded. I wondered if that’s what all his talk about being set up at the Deuce was: paranoia. I wondered indeed.

  “Tommy and I also happen to be in the middle of a rather ugly contract dispute with him,” Marty confessed.

  “No way!” exclaimed Annabelle. “Not again!”

  “Stick around, Hoagy,” said Tommy. “You may be head writer within the hour.”

  “See, we found out last night from our agent that he’s trying to chisel us out of ten grand a week,” said Marty.

  I tugged at my ear. “I’m afraid that may be my doing, indirectly.”

  Tommy peered at me bleakly. “That what he’s paying you?”

  “It is,” I replied. “And, believe me, if I’d known it was coming out of your—”

  “Oh, hey, hey,” Marty cautioned me, with a raised hand. “Don’t you feel responsible, Hoagy. Not your doing. It’s her salary that’s killing us.”

  “Katrina,” said Tommy distastefully. “He’s paying her thirty grand a week this season to be his coexec producer. Christ, she was Leo’s runner last season, making three hundred a week. Now she gets to sit in on writers’ meetings. She even gets to speak.”

  “I hate, hate, hate this scene,” squeaked Annabelle. It was a drop-dead imitation. Her eye even drifted. “Where’s the irony, guys, comedically speaking?”

  “The woman,” said Marty, “has Lyle’s ear.”

  “In addition to various other parts of his disgustingly gross anatomy,” added Tommy.

  “The woman,” said Marty, “knows very little about comedy.”

  “The woman,” snapped Tommy, “is a stupid, nasty twat and we all hate her stupid, nasty fucking guts.”

  No one disagreed. Tommy’s designated role, it appeared, was to give voice to what the others were too afraid to say out loud.
It was a role he seemed to savor as much as he did his sourness.

  “You notice that rock on her finger? The show paid for it—twenty grand easy. She wanted a john for her office—the show paid for it. Hey, if it’s for us, no way. Nickels and dimes. He even charges us for our long-distance calls. But if it’s for him and his bim, the money’s there. Would you believe the show paid for all his coke last season? It was right there in the budget, under car and driver. Hell, the show pays for half a dozen extras every week who don’t even exist. He pockets their wages himself. He must pull in thirty grand a week under the table.”

  “And then he pockets the table,” Annabelle chimed in. “Him and Leo. I’m, like, one time last season our art director, Randy, needed to build a set, last minute, and discovered there was no money left for it in that week’s budget—even though he hadn’t even built one set! I’m, like, so he went out to the prop warehouse in New Jersey to see what he could beg and borrow and, guess what, he discovers an antique dining table and chairs being loaded onto a truck headed for Leo’s place in the Berkshires. Leo sells the stuff up there to dealers and then splits the proceeds with Lyle. They’re thick as thieves, those two.”

  “That’s why Lyle insists on personally supervising the entire production,” Tommy explained. “If there were a lot of lawyers and business affairs people around he’d never get away with all the shit he pulls. Or he’d have to cut them in on it. That’s also why he insists on doing the show here instead of in L.A. God and Jazzy Jeff are three thousand miles away. And with Marjorie he can play human bulldozer.”

  The office door suddenly burst open. And there stood the human bulldozer, filling the doorway shoulder to shoulder in his unbleached caftan. He wasn’t kidding about taking precautions against germs in the studio. Over his mouth and nose he wore a surgical mask, on his hands latex gloves. He looked like he was on his way to the O.R. to take out somebody’s spleen. The man was boiling. His face, what little of it showed, was a deep shade of crimson. His eyes were high beams of intense light, the whites huge. They looked like a pair of poached eggs. He slammed the door shut behind him, shaking the whole office. Papers flew from the desks. “Your agent is scum!” he raged at The Boys. “Your agent is filth. Your agent is—!”