Voices in the Wardrobe by Marlys Millhiser
“We’re addicted too, aren’t we Mitch? Addicted to our work. Do you take medication?”
“Everybody does. I’m not on Viagra yet, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s not.” But they were both grinning. Charlie preferred to think of their connection as a friendship rather than a relationship, although there had been occasional steam. But the warmth of the sun, the smooth scotch, and the luxury of the leather sort of molding to fit her, relaxed the tension, dulled the ache in her neck, put out the fire in her gut. That and the fact most of their expression hid behind sunglasses now. “I suppose this drink is self-medicating, huh?”
The lap of the water under the dock, the “scree” of the seagulls—and the sudden jarring of amplified guitars …
Mitch Hilsten, superstar, swore, picked their drinks off the top of a fancy metal barrel-like table between them, handed her hers, and lifted the top to play with some buttons underneath. The guitars stopped, the lapping and screeing returned. “Thanks a lot, Stanley.”
“Who’s Stanley?”
“The steward. Maybe it’s Sidney.”
“Maybe he wants us to leave.”
“He’s just sharing.” But the result was the same and they were soon driving across the bridge to the club.
“Thanks. Despite Sidney the steward, the Motherfricker was beautiful, interesting, and relaxing. A good break.”
“Thought you were strung pretty tight there. And the evening’s not over. Crab is the special at the club tonight.”
At dinner they watched an older couple downing pill after pill from baggies filled with them, one by one with water between the main course and dessert.
“How do all those pills know where to go to do the job?” Charlie whispered. “What happens when they mix with the crab and the butter and the cocktails and the wine?”
“That’s why you take the little silver football before bed, Charlie. It takes care of the acid reflux, bloating, and headache so you can sleep. Of course, there are certain sexual side effects, but who cares if you can eat, drink, and be merry? Who needs sexual gratification? Almost every prescription drug on the market warns you not to mix them with alcohol. Only teetotalers pay any attention.”
“Don’t forget about dry mouth,” their waiter whispered, bending lower than necessary to refill their wine glasses. He was as tall as Kenny Cowper, but more willowy than muscular. He had a goatee and a shaved head with a five o’clock shadow. He finally hunkered down between them and squinted while rotating the raising of his brows. “Drugs, which include alcohol, are simple. Rule of thumb. If it makes you feel good, it’s bad. If it makes you feel nothing, it’s good. So sex is bad by definition, so you don’t need it anyway, but if you do there’s a blue pill. But if you do that you risk stroke so why should you worry about dry mouth?”
“What if it makes you feel bad?”
He left them with, “You’re overdosing.”
“Jesus, that was brilliant,” Mitch said. “He couldn’t be over fifteen.”
“More like twenty-five. Maybe he’s auditioning. Clean up your wine like a good boy. I’ve got to get back to Maggie. And you have to take us to the Islandia, if we can budge her.”
“Certain sexual side effects—that’s the clincher.”
“Mitch, what meds are you on?”
“Echinacea for colds, valerian root for anxiety, glucosamine/chondroitin for knee pain.”
“Those are alternative meds.”
“Right—don’t have to give up alcohol, sexual gratification, or a reasonably juicy mouth.”
Twelve
Charlie stepped off the elevator at the Hyatt Islandia weary, worried, sure she’d just made a whole lot of wrong decisions, and walked into a trap she should have seen coming when first invited to do this conference.
There are stories in the industry of waitresses handing superstars or producers complete scripts with the salad and seeing their baby become a hit film, of audacious manila envelope and/or CD attacks in elevators, subways, airplanes, bathrooms. Charlie, a mere agent, had an envelope dropped on her over a stall door at the Celebrity Pit during one of life’s least convenient moments. To her knowledge only one of these myths had any truth to it, but the pent-up frustration of all those dreams, the hunger for fame and fortune and redemption is second only to the fantasy of gaining star status as an actor or actress. It’s similar to the lure of publishing fiction and non-fiction, only many times worse because more people see films than actually read books. And now, with an Internet afloat in e-books, I-books, manuscripts, scripts and music—production companies, studios, stars, directors, and entertainment agencies were scuttling to maintain firewalls against unwanted submissions in order to carry on business at all, and this while battling to defend copyrights to published and produced properties.
Manila envelopes crowded against the molding of the hallway leading to Charlie’s room door, where they piled in front of it. She had her card-key out before the five or six smug guys noticed her, so engrossed were they in perfecting the dominant sneer. Probably all under thirty, they were silent—the posturing one of expression, stance, neck and shoulder stretching, shifting, rolling eyes, sighs.
Charlie could feel it—the air charged with a dangerous mix of hope, fear, insecurity, and a nearly pathological need. It came in waves scary and suffocating. “Art” and the longing for others to recognize yours can be a terrible thing.
“Excuse me, gentlemen.” Charlie edged between them, stabbed the plastic card in the slot.
“Miss Greene, could I speak to you a moment?”
“I have to fly back to New York on the red-eye so won’t be able to see you—”
“This script won the Los Angeles Universal Script Contest last year, Charlie Greene. You can’t tell me C & M wouldn’t even want to look at it.”
One stab induced the red light and Charlie knew panic as the eager “artists” closed in behind, jostling each other and bumping her against the door. She felt like a medic in a crowd of dying people pleading for help she couldn’t give them.
The second stab got a green light and she shoved the door open as the jostling, panicking, desperate aspirants shoved each other and in the process shoved her inside, all slipping and tripping and falling over piled manila envelopes at their feet. The pitches, self-introductions, pleas, swearing became a crescendo.
There’s always a crack under the door in hotel rooms so that your itemized bill can be slipped in on the last day of your stay and if it meets your approval you need only say so on the television checkout screen. But this time it left room to slip in still more manila envelopes and a few business sized envelopes that could hold short treatments and pitches.
“Please, Ms. Greene, it’ll only take a minute of your time and—”
“Out,” Charlie ordered in her tough-Hollywood-agent voice with what she hoped was a convincingly gutsy stare, more than a little aware of her vulnerability here and that when their frustration turned to anger her only salvation was that they were not at all united. Each was out for himself, dismissive of the talents of others.
“Bitch.”
Charlie slammed, locked, and hooked the door closed after them, kicked off her shoes and headed for the phone to call the desk and request maintenance, security, somebody—get up here and remove the envelope deluge outside her door. “Some got in under the door too and when you get here I’ll throw it out to you.”
“We’ve been trying to reach you, Miss Greene. There have been complaints from other guests in that hall, but we were assured by the Film Institute staff that you would want to see it all when you returned tonight. We’ve got security and an extra-large rolling laundry cart on its way. What should we do with that stuff?”
“There was a long table, maybe two, outside the largest of the conference rooms across the hall from the bar this morning for selling books, magazines, sample scripts, mugs, T-shirts, hats, software, whatever to suckers. You could leave it there.”
Charlie hadn’t
Charlie’s gut burned and she fished out the Pepto-Bismol tablets from her purse, called her hotel voice-mail box so the red light would quit blinking at her from the phones—two in the room and one next to the commode in the bathroom. Her box was full. Full of pitches, invitations to breakfast, lunch, dinner, incredible sex, more pitches, pleas. Nothing from the Sea Spa or Maggie.
When Charlie and Mitch had arrived at the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol Maggie Stutzman was in a serious hypno-meditation session. Against her better judgement, Charlie was persuaded to leave well enough alone and leave Maggie too. Caroline VanZant convinced Mitch Hilsten (who didn’t really know Maggie firsthand) that she was getting what she needed and should not be yanked away from her treatment.
Charlie’s cell was strangely empty of messages. But when the security officer arrived to pick up the offerings at and inside her door, he brought a gift basket of fruit and cheese—another of wine, chocolate, and a baguette. The fruit and cheese were compliments of the Institute responsible for this mess, the other from Keegan Monroe who got her into it. She’d earned them both just now. “Weren’t you worried some of this stuff could have contained bombs or anthrax or something?”
“We’ve hosted the Institute’s annual conference for the last five years and had a lot of this but nothing like now. Dr. Howard warned that there were some big names this year and it might get a little tricky. We had a bomb dog come in and sniff what was in the hall, didn’t realize some had come in under the door, but it figures. Mr. Monroe’s room got hit pretty hard too.”
Charlie crawled out of her tuxedo and into a hot shower to wash away the tingly sweat of fear. The shower here was the size of a large tub and there was no tub. Those guys were not that dangerous—it was the situation, the emotion, the anger and helplessness that might have made them so. One testosterone spark could have ignited something she didn’t want to consider. When she slid into her T-shirt and the Islandia’s robe she heard a swish at the door and watched another manila envelope slide into the room. After kicking it back out she stuffed her wet towel into the crack, tore a hunk off the baguette, poured a glass of wine, and took them and a handful of grapes outside to the balcony. The chill felt good.
Okay, let’s not blow all this out of proportion here.
Yeah, right.
You always get upset when things don’t go as you plan. Which is most of the time. Take a few hundred breaths.
Charlie took three and drew in the decaying-fish smell on the breeze and the incomparable yeasty scent of a freshly broken baguette. The grapes were juicy and the wine even better. Where was Luella Ridgeway? She’d left a terse message on Charlie’s cell that she had a lead on something and would get back to her tonight. And that Libby would too. About what she didn’t say and Charlie’s cell held no messages.
You can’t control everything. You’re a control freak. Settle down.
“Oh, shut up.”
Somewhere down in the waters around the marina below, a sea lion answered her with an “ork.” And the palm tree below her clapped its fronds. The bay splashed gently at the dock pilings, ruffled a line of captured boats. She could hear voices on other balconies, presumably talking to someone other than themselves. The balconies were triangles off each room and the building ribbed in such a way that you really couldn’t see anybody from your balcony.
“That’s what you get for being a star,” Kenny told her the next morning at breakfast on his balcony. His room was just a few doors down the hall.
“You saw what happened when I came back?”
“Yeah, you kicked ass out there, man.”
“Big guy like you didn’t even bother to help me out?”
“Hell, you scared me. I may be big, but I’m not dumb.” He dodged the half-peeled orange Charlie threw at him but caught the strawberry. “So how was dinner at the undisclosed, exclusive yacht club last night with that aging heartthrob?”
“Excellent, as a matter of fact. But how did you know?”
He held up the San Diego Union-Tribune. “Morning paper. But I scored the photo op this time, just like you promised.”
He folded a section of the paper in half and handed it to her. A roar and a rattling of their dishes and then a jet appeared to soar out of a palm tree to make the moment even more momentous. The San Diego airport was in town and it was always a wonder as you flew between buildings to land that no major disasters, to Charlie’s knowledge, had occurred. They took off rather briskly as well and in the morning they appeared to top this particular palm every few minutes.
The headline read, Hollywood as usual, ho-hum. Two photos side by side, one of Moira staring adoringly up at Mitch, the other of Charlie staring the same way, way-up at Kenny. Damn, she’d been thinking about the fact she’d probably sold his book to Pitman’s, was thinking triumph and ended up looking just as inane and silly as the Irish Jewish Bedouin princess. The caption under the pics read, Speculation is that Moira Moriarty has come between Mitch Hilsten and long-time girlfriend, agent Charlie Greene, who does not appear to be inconsolable.
The body of the article began with the fact that Mitch and Charlie were in San Diego for “supposedly” different reasons. She stopped there and put the paper down to pour herself more coffee and to find Kenny Cowper studying her.
“You didn’t wake up to CNN, I take it.”
“No, but to messages I should have gotten yesterday, after I thought to recharge my cellular. Why?”
He handed her the front page of the Union-Tribune and she nearly choked on hot coffee.
“They blew up the Celebrity Pit?”
“We could have made front page but for that, Charlie, you and me.”
Most of the casualties were drunks, addicts, homeless who snuck into the enclosures around the closed-down colossus for shelter, privacy, and “street stuff.” Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc. was only a few blocks away. That’s why Luella raced back to the office.
The meteoric rise and fall of the Celebrity Pit, due to the enormous expense of building and maintaining such a place that close to the real estate tax reality of Wilshire and Rodeo Drive, had been the talk of the world. There had been attempts afoot for several months to resurrect, restore, reconstitute the place just because of its outrageous theme and audacity and because in its way it was a tribute to Hollywood. It was a hit from the get-go—irreverent, stupid, and campy. It was fun. Reverent extremists consider unconcealed fun dangerous for the masses. Charlie loved it. “They bombed the Celebrity Pit.”
“Hey, tough agent lady,” Kenny reached for her hand over the small table holding the food and coffee, “innocent people died. And there was some major damage, but not much structural. Three bombs lobbed in from a pickup with a kludged backyard launcher—not dropped in the center from a plane or a nuclear missile from a ship at sea. Could have been worse.”
Built much like a coliseum, and inside laid out in circular tiers around a stage and an extravagant bar, the Pit was arranged so that all diners had a view of the open pit in the building’s center and whatever entertainment was provided below on the stage or staged shenanigans at the bar. They were given a table and level number upon entering from the street and took an elevator to the proper level. The wait staff all resembled entertainment celebrities and some “looka-likes,” salted among the tables, would eventually go down to the stage and entertain. It was so much fun that real celebs enjoyed showing up on their own, often joining their imitators on the stage or staging bar fights at the “interactive” bar. Johnny Depp might be sitting at the next table. Or he might not.
The Pit had bouncers to keep the star-struck in hand and special hidden getaway exits for the famous. Too bad “Film Institutes” provided no such amenity.
Thirteen
“Two winners in consecutive years—men, early twenties, kidnap promoter of screenwriting contest
The young man—early twenties—stood for a moment soaking up the silence in the crowded room behind him. Charlie guessed there to be a hundred fifty to two hundred people in here. He faced the panel of three agents, Keegan, and Dr. Howard. Behind them a screen showed the audience what the panel of judges saw.
The tables outside this conference room were piled with a plethora of screenwriting contest opportunities. Charlie wondered what had happened to all the unopened envelopes security took from her hallway and room last night. Did they end up in a Tuff Shed? Magazines for budding screenwriters devoted whole pages to listing these contests. The pitch had come with the title, Just Crime.
Charlie was the first to break the silence. “So what did the kidnappers use the stolen money for?”
“To start up their own contest.”
The other judges, even Keegan, were hard on this writer, Keegan admitting to having entered one of these contests, winning it, and never seeing any reward. But, he pontificated, it had been a good lesson. The other two agents and Dr. Howard were furious that anyone would suggest all such contests were out to swindle young hopefuls. Dr. Howard even offered, “What about the Sundance?”
“Which one?” The stalwart novice held his ground and his attitude.
As in most of the arts, entertainment, sports, modeling, publishing worlds more people make money on dreams than the “art” itself. It was no secret that the majority of voice trainers, writing, acting, locution, and dance instructors depended on “fees” from hopefuls who would never work in these dream fields. Charlie had always thought these classes added color to otherwise drab lives, until her daughter decided not to go to college next year.