A Short History of My Life
The readers of this blog, both of them (old joke), tell me that the wit is unrelentingly caustic. “It’s the same Kevin Feingold, ranting away, just like in college,” says Mario. I try not to think about what a royal pain in the butt I was back then. Smoking a pack a day, a notorious drunk, your total pot head, I talked all the time. I talked in my sleep. I always talked during sex. My girlfriend Joanie used to ask, “Are we gonna do this or are you gonna talk the subject to death?” Growing up among neurotics and Russian Jews (“There’s a difference?” asks my mom) I was extremely articulate.
“Put a mike in front of that guy and you don’t need to worry about programming for a whole hour,” said the first college radio station manager I worked for.
Ouch!
The other d.j.’s called me “Mr. Papa Gayo” after the parrot of the same brand, evidence that I definitely was not first in the hearts of my countrymen.
I dropped out of college and got drafted, went into the Army, took the Vocational Aptitude Test and, surprise!, became a radioman, lugging a single sideband rig on my back, the whip antenna catching on every piece of foliage within a country mile. Between the whip antenna and the mosquitoes, I always found something to bitch about in Vietnam. “I’m melting in this heat!” Pant, pant!
Ricky Mains, M-60 machinegunner: “Put a cork in it, Feingold.”
“I’m dying!”
Terry Smithers, rifleman: “Promises, promises!”
Bobby Pepper, medic: “Go die on the next patrol, Feingold.”
Lieutenant Reese, my squad leader: “Hey, guys, this is cool. Imagine if Feingold here actually, you know, does die on the next patrol. The very next patrol! And we predict it. Intuitive precognition! How cool is that?!”
“Oh, thank you, Gary!” I replied. “I’ll try not to disappoint you. You’ll be able to write me up in your Paranormal Psychic Phenomena & UFO’s magazine.”
“Don’t knock it, there’s a lot of good stuff in there. ‘Distant viewing.’ Imagine if we could kill the V.C. simply by envisioning their deaths,” the Lieutenant suggested.
Terry Smithers, rifleman: “I could lug less ammunition, lieutenant!”
Ricky Mains, M-60 machinegunner: “Go fuck yo’self! What do you know about lugging ammo?”
“Well, now! Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, H. P. Lovecraft,” added our XO, an enormous black sergeant named Roget (“Ro Jay”) Bryant. Harking from the Dutch Antilles, he positively ate up paperback novels.
Ricky Mains: “Get a life!”
Kevin Feingold: “I would if there were any women in this Army!”
Lt. Reese: “Oh, boy, here we go again!”
Mains: “I told you, put a cork in it, Feingold!”
Bryant: “Now why don’t we all just cool it for awhile and concentrate on finding Charlie?”
Lt. Reese: “That’s what Uncle Sugar pays us for, grunts. Let’s do like the Sarge says!”
Feingold: “Thank you for those motivational words of wisdom, sir.”
This conversation played itself out in starts and stops over half a day in the pressure cooker green heat of the jungle, moist as a steam bath. Mostly, patrolling the bush, we focused on observing our surroundings— there’s an art to it— and watching where we put our feet.
I never experienced any lack of communication in the U.S. Army of the 1960’s. Everybody was in your face, all the time. No estrangement there. Nothing is worse than the stench of spray deodorant inside a two-man green canvas shelter, unless it’s the stink of rotting corpses by the side of the road. We had it all! Water buffalo dung. And Vietnam weren’t the end of it. After college, I went back, re-upped and made the Army my career. Breakfast of Champions, gentlemen!
I wouldn’t be normal if I wasn’t ranting. Caustically.
*
From 1973 to 1984, I wrote seven (7) novels, all excruciatingly bad. How is this possible? Well, a prerequisite of my creative process was to sit in the rec tent with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. I didn’t just smoke tobacco; when writing, I was so a-buzz on nicotine, it made me dizzy.
At the moment of inception, creating as I typed, the words poured forth from my tortured brain in a torrential downpour of thought. This resulted in many pages, yes, but also some very turgid novels. Fear not, I did write plot outlines and all. It was the actual written words that left something to be desired. At the time, I was sure the publishing industry was an Old Boys’ Club, where you only could get into print if you knew someone.
Three of my manuscripts still exist. I junked the other four as “of no redeeming merit.” When not dizzy on cigarettes, I would go back and read my verbiage. And become totally appalled. Atrocious writing can be a downer.
Case in point, my third novel, published in paperback by yours truly, a bit of “vanity publishing” popular among would-be, wannabe authors. For a fat chunk of cash, a glossy cover and words printed on pulp paper could be yours, based on an ms. that no self-respecting commercial publisher would touch with a barge pole. We’re talking radioactive prose here.
The cover is basic black with the end of a street illuminated in a cone of very bright white light. (Even describing this phenomenon, I find myself reverting to type!) In mint green italic block letters, all caps, the title: LIMELIGHT. In smaller type: by Kevin Feingold
So far, so good. You turn the book over and read the jacket blurb:
“Life is fraught with peril and things aren’t getting any
easier for our hero, Dirk Studley, who in this new book, Lamplight,
the second of the series, struggles through searing adventures
of such magnitude, only the reader can judge…”
Yada, yada, yada. Don’t you just love typos, especially when they come in the title of a finished product? Limelight, lamplight, at what point does poetic license begin to chafe? There is a reason why professional publishing houses employ a legion of editors to read, judge and burnish your stuff. Every successful published author I have ever heard speak at a Writers’ Workshop has sung the praises of his or her editor. After all, everyone isn’t Vladimir Nabokov or J.P. Donleavy. “One of the greatest people in the profession, Susan, my editor, pushed me far beyond anything I originally expected to do with this novel. Listen to your editor and work with him or her. Editors fill a major function, which is why they are such an integral part of the process!” says the published author.
(“Hey, mom, look at me! Relegated to writing a blog! If that doesn’t typify your ‘unsuccessful author,’ I don’t know what does!”)
On my own, lonely as a loon, Kevin Feingold writes with his right hand and edits with his left. At least my outpourings are exposed to some form of editing. Whether that will improve a verbal hand grenade like LAMPLIGHT is a second question! Dirk Studley, my ass.
*
Our receptionist— and erstwhile film cutter— Jacqueline sings in the punk band Explosive Plastic.
I, too, have sung! In a punk band!
You have sizable leisure time, down time, in the U.S. Army. You are expected to use this productively. No one can study languages all the time. In the 1980’s, I sang in the punk band Nevsky. (Not “Alexander Nevsky,” that was an actual Russky band.)
As soon as Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost, “openness,” Bon Jovi and all these other amerikanskii metal bands began making trips to the Soviet Union. The Communists thought that as long as they gave Soviet youth access to western culture, the kids would let the old codgers rule indefinitely. Boy, were they ever wrong!
So, we had this, um, band. When pushed to play a gig— “Blah, blah, you guys talk a lot, but how the fuck do you guys sound, anyway?!”— we dressed our lead guitarist Robbie in Red Army castoffs, glued a floppy moustache on his upper lip and claimed he was a Russian/Italian refugee, metalli musician Vincenzo Nevsky.
Girls bought this package, invariably disappointed when Robbie’s moustache fell off halfway through every gig.
As lead singer, I went under the name “Clyde.”
“And this is, uh, our lead singer, Clyde!” some bandmate would point out onstage.
“God, how can you people be up this early? What time is it, 1500? (Three o’clock in the afternoon.) Doesn’t anybody sleep around here? I’m, uh, Clyde, the, uh, lead singer in this here band. Wanna buy a mix tape of our greatest hits?”
Total amateurs, we massacred stuff by Pat Benatar, Lene Lovich and Culture Club. Pul-lease! Nevsky does Culture Club?
Between songs, we loved perpetrating mock attacks on the American system: “Down with McDonaldsky kapitalisky,” I’d rant. “Pommes frites rule!” This would be followed by a series of heavy metal hand signs, fingers splayed this way, fingers splayed that, ferociously angry, before launching into one of our own compositions, songs like “Willys Motors,” celebrating the indestructible quality of jeeps:
“I do her, I do her, I do her
Inna backa a Willys Motor.
I love her, I love her, I love her,
She my cheap, jeep baby!”
The 1980’s were a more innocent time.
*
What sets me off today—ask my neighbors—is living with my mom in my parents’ house. My dad thought he was the “Massah” of a southern plantation. Dead for 13 years, he left behind a legacy of landmines and booby traps. The English ivy, encroaching everywhere, rife with poison ivy. The paint flaking off the doors and ceiling of the carport. The strange bush—no one knows what it is—that has metamorphosed, after 40 years, into a Jack In the Beanstalk monster, entangled in the telephone wires. The Irish hedge— shades of Heathcliffe!—knobby enough to raise a welt on anyone unlucky enough to rub against it, daintily draped in poison oak. The gopher holes dotting the lawn, hidden by the grass, until one of them swallows your foot! The inexplicable hills and dales of Hell’s half-acre.
And, of course, the gray maple and the red maple. They started as the cutest little saplings in 1951. “Gosh, I hope they make it,” enthused my parents.
“What can we do about this monstrosity?” I asked an arborist. I was paying the man for an hour of consultation, just to know what he would do. “It’s 60 years old, the roots have risen to the surface, it is perpetually in a state of near-death, yet it dwarfs the house.”
“It’s a red maple.”
“I know what it is! What can we do to make it thrive?”
“Move it 400 miles north of here.”
Gardening this terrain makes my skin crawl. It sets my teeth on edge. It’s not like I’m battling old memories: “Yee-ha! Back in da jungle ag’in!” That ain’t my complaint. I’m older, I no longer enjoy the heat, the sweat. Gnats and mosquitoes swarm crazily as soon as they get a taste of chlorophyll, so the first sprig of ivy I trim, greetings, a bug fest!
I don’t like it.
My mom, bless her, has offered to throw money at the problem (“I can hire a gardening service!”). Stubborn, I figure some irritation is good for me. The Japanese say, “A certain number of fleas is good for a dog, otherwise he forgets he is a dog.” Also, is it really fair to expect my Latino compañeros to trim my bushes? They would love the work, but I feel I ought to take some responsibility, living here.
So, everyone agrees, Kevin Feingold should STOP GARDENING. It’s shortening his life, it leaves him angry all the time, his unintelligible screams of frustration drive everyone else nuts, and there are day laborers who would gladly take over.
Not happening.
Go figure.
*
The first to disappear were the private, little, mom-and-pop shops.
Then my lady friends at Hollywood Video went the way of the dodo bird. Never glamorous or beautiful, they shared my enjoyment of movies, my cinematic enthusiasm. Just seeing me renting foreign titles they knew nothing about (Tarkovsky’s Stalker) or films so arcane, I was the lone subscriber (The President’s Analyst with James Coburn) gave us an excuse for endless discussion. We love movies! Also, they kept their stock in pristine condition. When I went to buy titles they were selling off, the discs were usually as good as new.
Blockbuster rented out DVD’s that ran the gamut from squeaky clean to heavily scratched. When I bought excess stock from them for my personal film library, the clerks knew that I was going to be a pain in the ass. I would bring several copies to the counter and select the newest one to purchase and take home. With time, however, even they found my detailed knowledge and ribald take on Hollywood irresistible.
Since 2007, four days a week, when not otherwise incarcerated, I work as a Hollywood screenwriter with my full-time partner Bruce “Boopsie” Davis, out of a glass-fronted, converted clothing store on Rockville Pike in Maryland. Until recently, we too had a video boutique right next door. All gone.
This transition to streaming video is costing us money! You have to understand, a great deal of Hollywood product to which Boopsie and I contributed our screenwriting talent went directly to DVD. We needed those outlets: Your local video store where, desperate for diversion on a Friday night, you went the whole nine yards, buying boxes of chewy candy, packages of microwave popcorn, and rented two or three low-budget titles no one had ever heard of.
EXCEPT US! We had heard of those movies!! We did the writing!!!
How do you become a screenwriter? It’s like banging into a door. Nobody means to do it, yet occasionally it happens. You stub your toe, you break your nose, you hurt yourself. But when that’s over, you behold a new realm of possibilities. It also helps to be overqualified for almost every blue-collar job on the market. Virtually unemployable. A lifetime of experience doesn’t hurt, either.
*
My first job upon leaving the Army was working as a sales clerk in the bookstore of the Ethnicity Museum in Washington, D.C. We’re Russian Jews, you can’t get more ethnic than that. The job meant riding the Metro into town and home every day, but that came with the territory. The museum’s Mission Statement was relatively precise:
<< America is both the land of opportunity
and a land of immigrants. Except for
Native Americans, literally everyone
comes from somewhere else. The museum’s
goal is to show that people of all ethnic
persuasions can just get along on a
daily basis. >>
What a hotbed of discontent!
The Italians fought with the Jews who despised the Germans who feuded with the blacks who resented the Asians (“The yellow man keepin’ the black man down!”) who had trouble accepting the Hispanics who felt used by the whites who didn’t want to have anything to do with the rest of us.
Arguments, malicious gossip, sabotaged lockers in the changing room, food fights in the staff cafeteria, emails from management telling us to “please cool your tempers tomorrow, July 2nd, as a delegation from the House Budgetary Oversight Committee will be visiting inside the building. Misbehavior could jeopardize our funding, resulting in people losing their jobs. THIS MEANS YOU!”
I lasted a year and a half. The bookstore staff was Whitey Whitebread. The building security contractor hired only urban blacks for the guard force. Since the blacks ate in the cafeteria, the lilywhites from the bookstore were afraid to go in there. They ate lunch in a conference room on the second floor. By spending all my free time in the library or among the blacks, I managed to duck most— not all— of the constant bickering, backbiting and report-writing that took the place of ethnic cleansing on a grander scale.
“Why do all the best, most caring, most involved people leave?” the female, black sergeant— one of two— asked me on the day I gathered my stuff and resigned. Sure, I could have just walked out angry, but the blacks are my people. She was a good lady, so I made it a point to go to the Metro station by way of her surveillance kiosk. Not only did she have heart and brains, she was a dynamite looker, to boot! A knockout. So, of course, I was going to miss her.
“You tell me,” I said. “My eardrums still hurt from all the shouting.”
“Shouting matches never solve nothin’. Why can’ people just shut up?!” she suggested.
“There it is, honey chile! They should amend the Mission Statement! ‘Our goal is to show that people of all ethnic persuasions can just shut up on a daily basis.’”
“Y’all take care of yo’self! An’ come back to see us from time to time!”
“Oh, yeah!”
My second job was even weirder.
I became the American PR representative for Vasco da Gama Airlines, and I don’t even speak Portuguese. I was dating the Head of Sales, and she felt I ought to have a job within the company. Clannish, the staff clasped me to their collective bosom and welcomed me like a long-lost brother. I was in. Qualified, maybe no. But in the job.
Thinking back, I continue to be amazed. Appalled. I would never take a job like that today. The single greatest qualification was that one absolutely loved being around people. Crowds of people. Mobs. My job was to show up at the airport in each new city on our schedule with a complicated series of standup panels containing posters and descriptions of our routes and amenities. Plus half a ton of trinkets: hats, playing cards, T-shirts, key rings, coffee mugs, cigarette lighters, asthma inhalers, spatulas and tire irons, all containing the Vasco da Gama Airline logo.
Everybody loves a freebee. People would go totally nuts over this haul, storming the airline’s airport ticket counter, where the local manager and female staff in their purple and white uniforms would slowly, resolutely wither under the constant whining of our customers for ever more free stuff. “A one-way to San Diego gets me a T-shirt and a cap? How ‘bout if I buy a round trip? Do I get a tire iron and playing cards, too?!”
The airline industry runs on specific rules. Foreign carriers, for example, cannot fly domestic routes. All travel on a foreign airline must originate or end outside of the United States. This meant that you could take our airline from BWI-Marshall, outside Baltimore, to, say, Chicago, but you first must fly to Montreal, Canada. Fly across the continental U.S. with us! Surely! We offer several cuts of charbroiled meat no other airline would dream of serving. Our leather seats are real leather, smelling vaguely of cattle. Our goat cheese hors d’oeuvres smell of goats, with just a hint of manure in the aftertaste. Headphones are complimentary and our music selection includes Brazilian heavy metal bands. (“includes” in this instance means “all-inclusive.” It’s a language thing: All we play is Brazilian heavy metal. Period. Don’t ask for Sinatra. The closest we have is a Johnny Rotten imitator singing in Spanglish.)
There are a number of regional, smallish airports in Mexico who—accustomed to dealing almost entirely with drug cartels— hardly knew what to make of this Brazilian airline landing 727’s on decrepit runways, taxiing, making hot turnarounds— engines still running— and taking off again for points north, a cloth bag stuffed with cruzeiros plopped on the runway like so much dog poop. The Mexicans loved us.
When not on the road, I spent warehouse time signing for containers from China and sorting through the endless reams of ink pens, pencils, stationery, chewing gum, erasers, pencil sharpeners, staplers, squeeze toys, bobbleheads and— what else— plastic airplane models on fake mahogany stands, all featuring the airline colors, name and logo.
Officially, I was the head of the PR department, and I was. The department was staffed by a single employee. Me.
Not accustomed to people pulling at my clothes— I never attend rock concerts for this very reason— I would find myself, at the end of the day, barricading my hotel room, the furniture heaved up against the door, the telephone jack yanked from the wall. Standing in an alternately scalding and icy shower, I would search unsuccessfully for my core values.
Traveling salesmen know of what I speak. Too easily, you become a drunk or a sex maniac, in a vain attempt to relieve the pressure.
After three years of this monkey business, the airline tired of American regulations and decamped to routes entirely in Central and South America. My girlfriend Julia returned to Sao Paulo and I found myself between jobs.
Bruce “Boopsie” Davis worked as a web designer for Windmill Magazine, but he was a man with a past, specifically UCLA Film School. I went to Moosegrave and the Army, Bruce went to UCLA and Hollywood. Bruce knows people. Buddies since high school, we spent Saturday mornings in 2006 touring video shops, joking with one another about the titles. “Here’s another good one, a soft porno Japanese slasher movie!” he would shout happily from across the store and I’d reply “Sci-fi monster chick vampire western with a Giorgio Moroder-clone musical score! A must-see. Three stars.” The clerks— well-accustomed to crazed customers on Saturday mornings— would usually join us and make obscene suggestions.
Bruce wanted the two of us to open a rewrite shop, right there in Maryland. Screenplays. Telecommuting with Hollywood producers. I love to write. I knew I wanted to work with him when he complained about the deer eating all the flowers behind his mother’s house.
“Try wolf urine,” I suggested.
“Kevin,” he replied, “I would, but I have such a HARD TIME GETTING THE WOLVES TO PEE IN THE LITTLE PLASTIC BOTTLES!”
*
If you’re sitting at the multiplex— or one of the country’s 154 remaining Drive-Ins— and suddenly want to know if the pornographic oater you are about to suffer through has been penned by yours truly, I can save you the trouble of whipping out your smartphone. Just look for our trademark! If somewhere in the opening credits, you see the phrase
“Avec deux chansons romantiques,”
the chances are 99 and 99/100’s percent sure that this almost useless exercise in entertainment originated with us at Montevideo Films [Marca Registrada].
Never mind if the picture lacks any remnant of a musical score. Due to an error at Lefty Printing LLC, our entire stock of printed contract forms contains a clause that stipulates the studio must flash this information on the screen, in French, during the opening credits. Nowadays, preferably in 3D.
Or to put it in golfing terms—since my mom, at 90, is addicted to watching Tiger Woods and associates whenever weekend network programming includes a tournament,
“May the three-putt of Happiness double-bogey your life.”
*
We live in a moment when reality is way stranger than fiction. The U.S. on the verge of declaring bankruptcy? (“Sorry, guys! Ernie, who was head of cash flow, miscalculated by several digits.”) After everything that went awry in Vietnam, are we in another decades-long war? (Satirical newspaper The Onion called it. Finding ourselves in a “dysfunctional relationship,” we pack our bags and creep away from Afghanistan in dead of night!) Spaceship Earth has run low on water, fuel and oxygen, but the politicians refuse to acknowledge global warming. (It gets tiring to keep asking, “Is it hot out here in the sun or is it just me?”) We’re in a worldwide recession, but everyone keeps passing the collection plate, hoping the people in the next pew won’t notice the two pennies, one worn nickel and the blue plastic button lying at the bottom of the dish.
Once a day, network TV runs the local, “bizarro” news: The most recent body found decomposing in a basement. [You can’t make this stuff up!] The latest intruder tackled by the Secret Service on the White House lawn. The latest high-speed car chase “caught live,” and don’t tell me the carjackers aren’t watching themselves on iPhone! The fire in the attic that totally destroyed yet another local building, so anonymous that no one will ever miss it except the people who lived there. The visit by foreign royalty—my faves are the Prince and Princess of Albania! The spooky, lone bugler at Arlington Cemetery serenading a group of mourners at Section 60, where the American casualties from Afghanistan and Iraq are buried, a sequence which fills me with equal parts grief and rage. Which is the intended purpose of the news clip.
Who desires this over-the-top “news” and why sponsors will pay to advertise during this half-hour is a wonder, but they provide great material for potential bloggers, while making it more difficult to shock the public with fictional stories. With so many scandals, we are all becoming de-sensitized! The reality is already so amazingly peculiar. Granted, the world has always been somewhat wacko, the diff is that television now covers these repetitious yet individualistic stories. Oh, and the Salahis want a surrogate mother to carry their baby.
In the arts, I can’t even begin to compete with Lady Gaga who says things like, “I want to empower youth to liberate their art, free their inner zen and pump relevance into the stratosphere.” This is not a direct quote, hers are much better! And she’s a talker. I have an unopened 68-minute British CD, “LADY GAGA X-Posed,” full of interviews. Thus is love.
Write about what you know, but I’m no Kurt Vonnegut and Vietnam wasn’t the firebombing of Dresden. We dropped a lot of napalm, but on jungle, not cities. Bosnia was Bosnia, frustrating, pernicious, tough to love. People book vacations to Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. I see no listings for Banja Luka. Maybe next week.
When faced with a moral quandary, I ask myself, “What would Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee, do?” Then I discount half because, after all, he was a dope smoker.
As in the 1960’s, when life itself became overburdened with bad news, the mystical worlds of sorcerers, vampires, werewolves and jerks offer temporary refuge, an emotional respite. They call it “escapism” for a reason!
Barack Obama is upset because Michele Bachmann has appropriated the Jedi magic he once commanded. I envision the president spending the summer re-reading the entire Harry Potter series in search of incantations that will bring back the magic!
“It’s not fair,” I can imagine hearing him complain in that baritone of his. “My wife is named Michele. Why don’t we get any of the credit?”
Like Tiger Woods, Obama is elevated to a cosmic plane so far above the rest of us, we cannot even begin to comprehend how fantastic his presidency is! We think Tiger is off his game and the Prez is a clueless jerk, but— no, really— such is not the case! If we could only see reality through their eyes, everything is progressing winningly, according to plan. Troops out by the end of July, here it is August and, um, now let’s not overstate the situation. No one wins a blame game!
My suggested campaign slogan for 2012:
We Tried A Black, We May As Well Try A Mormon!
*
Hollywood is liberal. No one’s pariahs, my partner Bruce “Boopsie” Davis and I work closely with the American Rights Federation. Originally the American Rightwing Federation, even they have changed with the times, although their mission remains the same: To protect your first amendment right to express yourself, however outrageously, on film. Two of their first customers were Rin Tin Tin and Lassie.
“We are for the conservative what the ACLU is for liberals,” Federation President Randy Buchinsky explained by way of introduction in his plywood-paneled office on Santa Monica Boulevard. Listen, they paid our air fare, of course we wanted to visit them in California. Palm trees and oranges. Gwen Stefani.
“That’s all right,” Boopsie replied. “I went to UCLA.”
“UCLA?”
“Yeah. The Film School. Know those Joes?”
”I’m talking about the ACLU.”
“Also a good school, I’m sure,” Bruce replied breezily.
“He’s teasing you, Mr. Buchinsky,” I quickly interjected. “He’s a terrible tease, aren’t you, Bruce?”
“Oh, yeah!”— My partner may not know what’s going on, but he can keep a poker face.
“More coffee?” Mr. Buchinsky asked angrily.
“There’s never enough, is there?” Bruce answered philosophically.
The philistine meets the hippie!
Randy: “The American Civil Liberties Union—“
Kevin: “A bastion of liberals, I’m sure!”
Randy: (pleased) “— which is why we brook no shame over being a bastion of conservatives.”
Kevin: “Obviously a good thing!”
Randy: “Listen, in Hollywood, we’re the only thing. You can search with a lantern in this town and not find a conservative. We are it!”
Bruce: “Turned over any rocks?”
Why was he doing this??? He’s the one who comes out west to negotiate our film contracts. Never having accompanied him, I break out in a cold sweat at the thought that my partner might be a heavy-handed boob.
When we call him “Boopsie,” it’s supposed to be a joke.
Is this why we end up script-doctoring for the most sleezebag studios? Or is it that we can’t write?
Bruce: “Why do you serve dog biscuits to your guests?”
Kevin: “Those are Marie biscuits!”
Bruce: (to me) “I thought it was because they call themselves A.R.F.”
Kevin: (sweating profusely) “Abbott and Costello, Mr. B! We’re just demonstrating our creative process! Bob Hope and Gracie Allen!”
Randy: (helpfully) “You mean George Burns.”
Bruce: “Now that was a conservative. The man thought he was God.”
Randy Buchinsky and I burst out simultaneously, “That was a screenplay!”, but the damage was done. In the future, the Federation insists on dealing only with me.
I speak admiringly when I say their research library has one of the largest collections of Nazi memoranda and memorabilia to which I have ever had access. They have other stuff, too, but their Third Reich collection is the jewel in the crown. It is also where I met Margo Adolfsson. Yes, a Gwen Stefani look-alike.
I know, I know, Kevin and his blondes. It gets boring, but some of these ladies have a lot to offer!
The archive, of course, wasn’t in the same building as the A.R.F. offices. “You think we want to get burned to the ground?” Randy asked me, by way of explanation. “A good hog caller can stand outside our office door and order pizza from Watts without using the telephone!”
The archive was located in one of those tin warehouses on a threadbare, overcrowded commercial boulevard. A single black and white hi-top sneaker in the center of the road told me I’m in California. Next to greet me was a guy in a junky white sedan— but clean— leaning back in the driver’s seat, smoking an enormous brown cigar.
“Just checkin’ the location,” I told him through the open car window.
He nodded.
Inside, there was this very long white and brown speckled Formica counter top, a fussy middle-aged woman and a 14-year-old girl. They were coming out from behind the counter. “Let’s go, honey!”
Looking me over speculatively, the 14-year-old lisped, “We’re just leaving!”
God help me, my kind of meat! Blond hair everywhere. Skinny arms and curvaceous little legs. Raggedy ass summer sandals. A blue cotton shift that billowed with her every move. And was she moving! Dancing around the counter, front and back, eyeing me. “We’re just leaving!” she insisted, malingering.
“Pamela! Let’s go!” swore her mother.
Pamela! I liked her fleshy pink nose, her bushy yellow eyebrows, her striking blue eyes and amateurishly painted lashes, her pebble of a chin. She kept staring at me, widening her eyes, showing leg.
“Pamela!”
They finally left. A 23-year-old edition of the younger sister, in a black business suit, came clacking out on low heels from the back room.
“Is this the archive?” I asked stupidly.
“It was the last time I looked.”
“I’m Kevin Feingold.”
“Ugh! You’re not Jewish, are you!?” she snorted, holding a clipboard and bouncing a yellow pencil against her nose.
“I was the last time I looked.”
“Clever, clever,” she sighed. “Whadya want?”
I want you! I almost blurted, but caught myself in time. “…von Hindenburg appointing Hitler—“
“Aisle one, alcove three!”
The sign on the wall said “Attenti al cane,” but there wasn’t any dog.
“The Reichstag fire—“
“Aisle one, alcove seven. Come on, ask me a hard one.”
“Skorzeny.”
“Tch! Aisle three, alcoves one and two.”
“Sophie Scholl.”
“Awesome! A little anti-Nazi resistance action from the gang in the youth group White Rose! Aisle four, alcove three!”
Margo Adolfsson. She gave me coffee, sat me at a library table, provided me with ballpoint pens and yellow legal pads. “Just don’t palm any of our documents, okay?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Wouldn’t want to get you blackballed by the industry, right? Blind theft isn’t worth losing your lunch ticket.”
“No, no, no. Yes, yes. I won’t remove anything without your express knowledge, your permission, participation, whatever!” I babbled, enjoying every second of her luminous blue eyes, cute nose and pouty mouth. They ought to bottle this stuff, I thought.
“’Cause I have a Xerox place down the street who will make you copies of everything we have. For a nominal arm and a leg.”
“Okay.”
“It being Hollywood and all.”
“Okay.”
So I’m busy taking notes for an adaptation of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Margo comes clacking out of her office with a box of chocolate-covered donuts and offers me two. “I forgot.”
“I donut intend to refuse this fine offer.”
“They cannot seriously pay you for this 1920’s vaudeville gag routine, y’know? So last year! I plugged that shit in college. Life is a cabaret, mein Freund.”
“Peanuts. They pay me peanuts,” I admit.
“Rockin’ like Britney! At least you can eat peanuts. I wouldn’t pay you a Sacagawea dollar.”
“They’re the worst kind,” I tell her seriously, staring hungrily into her blue orbs.
“Did you see Jerry out front?”
It takes me a moment to focus, having shifted my attention to her ample bosom chastely ensconced inside her black linen suit jacket. She arches an eyebrow at me. “A fat guy smoking a cigar?” I ask. “In a late model white sedan?”
“What are you?” she laughs, showing slightly uneven but very white teeth. “Dashiell Hammett?”
I sit there, embarrassed.
“Yeah,” she says, “anyway, that’s the cretin. An unemployed studio tech. Says he’s loco for me!”
Uh oh, I think, here we go. Ego-trip time.
“Free up!” she spits. “He can go Harry Potter himself! Why should I have to get a restraining order? If he thinks so much of me, let him pay for the restraining order!” The whole time, she keeps pulling my ear, clucking her tongue and humming some Beatles song. “My breasts hurt.”
– – –
What did she just say? Her breasts hurt?
“Let Dr. Kevin take a look,” I suggest, blushing crimson. It’s not like she’s going to throw me out of the archive.
“Awesome! Come into my office.” Turning on her heels, she heads to the back of the building. “I put the front door on the time lock.”
Dumping everything— books, pens, legal pads— on the table in a heap, I don’t waste a second.
She locks the door and, smirking, stands still as a bronze statue while I unbutton her black linen jacket and remove it from her person. I start to hang it on the back of her chair. “Just fold it neatly on my desk,” she suggests off-handedly. “I really need your professional opinion regarding the firmness of my office sofa.”
“Soon,” I assure her. “First things first, a thorough examination of the breast complaint.” Carefully, I unbutton all the little white buttons on her blouse.
“There’s a catch in the back, for the bra,” she explains.
“Oh, I think I can handle it. Otherwise, I’ll ask.”
Liberating her breasts, I am not disappointed. Creamy pink and white skin, gorgeously shaped, firm, they seem to reach out to me. “May I begin?”
“Doctor, doctor, give me the news…” she sings softly, looking down at me through half-closed lashes.
I rise to the occasion, as do her nipples. “Excellent tactile response,” I inform her, busy with my tongue.
“It’s not like we are charging you for using our materials,” she says. “I looked you over and thought, ‘Screw the invoice, I’ll take it out in trade.’”
“That sounds fair,” I mumble, totally engrossed in making love to her breasts.
“You can be my love slave, Jew!”
I pause, hands cradling her breasts, and stand up straight. “Come again?”
“You’re Jewish. You can be my love slave,” she says, still smirking. “You dig my body, Liebling.”
“Sure, but I don’t see what—“
“Location, location, location! Look at where we squat, sweetie! I work in a Nazi archive. There are other office grinds available, you know. I chose this one ‘cause it interests me. What time is it?”
“What time is it?” I reply dumbly.
“Clock, watch, sundial! The time?!”
“It’s a quarter to four.”
“I have to get dressed,” she says, shooing me out of the office. “Listen, some skinheads are coming here at four. For God’s sake, don’t tell them you’re Jewish. Use a Christian name!”
In the interest of research, I hang around.
They come barging in through the front door at 4:15 p.m. and plop a six pack of Michelob on the counter top. There are three of them, shaven skulls, black leather vests, blue tattoos on their arms, young punks of no particular vehemence. “Who the fuck are you?” they ask.
“O’Connell, Jimmy J. – Catholic Archdiocese of Greater Los Angeles.”
“Oh, sorry, Father,” one of the boys stammers.
“I’m not ordained, I’m just a lawyer in the front office.”
“Hey, uh, sir, you want a brewski?” they offer and I really have to laugh.
Clack! Clack! Clack! Out comes the duchess, and I’m quick to explain that I’ve been telling the boys about my duties as a lawyer for the Archdiocese. “I was just about to explain my current mission: J.J. O’Connell to the rescue, getting a restraining order against the jerk out front.”
“He always jackrabbits when we arrive,” the youngest of the three pipes up. “We flash Yamahas. I think we scare the shit out of him.”
We all sit down in a conference room. They pop their beers and over the next half hour, with me taking notes— having promised complete confidentiality— they regale me with neo-Nazi tales of break-ins, muggings, knifings, drug use, drug busts, gang wars and the occasional minor race riot. “Hitler’s birthday, that kind of shit. We tear into Watts and stir things up. The Führer was born 122 years ago!”
“Do tell!” says Margo, sipping a Michelob from one of the boys. “1889 was such a good year for dictators!”
“Where do you gentlemen live?” I remember to ask. It doesn’t seem to surprise them that some fancy-pants lawyer from the Catholic Church moonlights as a screenwriter. Hollywood, everybody wears two hats!
“Barstow.”
“The epicenter of the So-Cal neo-Nazi movement,” Margo interjects in a voice heavy with sarcasm.
“And you come here to the American Rights Federation because— ?”
“It’s a free country, man!”
“She’s our Gauleiter.”
“Your area commander? Margo here?”
“I told you,” she laughs, “the subject interests me.”
Neo-Nazis, California, motorcycles, racial confrontations, gang wars. “I think we’ve got the makings of a new, modern Hells Angels On Wheels,” I inform them.
“Awesome! Not bad for an afternoon’s sweat!” Margo insists.
I take them all to dinner at In-N-Out, a hamburger emporium of opulent splendor. (It’s not, but the burgers are exceptional.)
Watching them peel away on their Yamahas into the inky black of a sultry California night, I tell Margo, “I’m going to have to call United and rebook my flight.”
“Oh?” she asks, looking at me over the top of her car.
“Yes. I want to stay and investigate that whole Jewish love slave thing.”
“Well, well, well,” she sneers. “Let’s stop by a Walgreen’s and pick you up some condoms!”
*
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