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  ALSO BY NEAL POLLACK

  FICTION

  Jewball

  Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel

  Beneath the Axis of Evil

  The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature

  THE MATT BOLSTER YOGA MYSTERIES

  Open Your Heart

  Downward-Facing Death

  NONFICTION

  Stretch

  Alternadad

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Neal Pollack.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle.

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com Inc. or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477821336

  ISBN-10: 1477821333

  Cover design by theBookDesigners

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014915075

  For Regina and Elijah, until further notice.

  CONTENTS

  LOS ANGELES 2010

  CHICAGO 1970

  THE ’70S

  THE ’80S

  THE ’90S

  THE ’00S

  THE DAILY DOUBLE

  FEDS INVESTIGATE CONTROVERSIAL INVESTOR

  JULIET 1997

  THE MAN WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING

  THE NINETY-NINTH SERIES MYSORE, INDIA 1993

  AT LAST, THE FINAL CHAPTER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LOS ANGELES

  2010

  On the morning before his fortieth birthday, Brad Cohen woke up feeling bad. He imagined how this would be written up in the East Hills Beacon, the monthly neighborhood circular: “Another loser on the geographical and cultural fringes of Hollywood spent the morning feeling sorry for himself . . .” But then he stopped thinking that. Something wasn’t newsworthy when it happened every day. Brad rested on his daily slab of self-pity like a flabby Korean businessman getting soaped down in the basement of a cheap ethnic bathhouse on Wilshire. On this day, though, he felt vindicated in his wallow.

  If a man can’t feel like a loser at forty, Brad thought, then when can he?

  Brad opened his eyes, because eventually he had to do that. He was on his back, the best way to sleep according to the book of ayurvedic healing methods that his wife kept on the coffee table. Back sleeping, preferably done with the arms overhead, elbows clasped, opened up the nasal passages, improving airflow. But back sleeping also meant the first thing that Brad saw in the morning was his bedroom ceiling, dotted with little bright yellow stains. How had they gotten there? It looked like someone had flung around a paintbrush dipped in movie-theater popcorn butter. Most likely it was water damage, even though it only rained for about a week here in December and then not at all for the rest of the year. But Brad’s landlady hadn’t made any repairs to the place since Madonna was like a virgin. Unless the boiler blew up, and even then it was almost impossible to get her to take the ladder out of the shed.

  The glow creeping into the room hinted at another day of oppressively cheery Southern California sun. Juliet had hand-cut blackout shades from some dark, denim-style cloth she’d bought on remainder at Michaels. Their frayed edges gathered dust along the floorboards. The shades worked pretty well at dawn, but by 9:00 a.m. most days they were useless. The day’s relentlessly sunny demands threatened to drag Brad back from the self-imposed mud pit of his half-remembered career sorrows.

  But first he had to run through them one more time.

  Brad grew up in Chicago, in the Hyde Park neighborhood. He was the son of an activist and a professor, a combination possible in only about ten zip codes across the country. In those kinds of households, there were always magazines full of ideas and essays written by people with substantial biographies.

  Early on, Brad was reading the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, and several other magazines that were even more boring and had even fewer pictures. Brad didn’t really understand most of what he read, though he thought he did. But the New Century, the greatest of all American idea magazines, topped the list. Someday Brad would work at the New Century. Someday, he thought, I will shape the national conversation.

  It was a reasonable enough ambition for a Jewish pseudointellectual, and Brad was smart enough to make it happen. A solid high school newspaper career combined with internships. An easy acceptance to the University of Chicago, where his father taught, led to a position on a college newspaper. Then he started publishing counterintuitive essays about consumer culture in a start-up smarty-pants called the Waffler. One essay, titled “VH1 Stole My Milk Money,” actually got excerpted in Harper’s and Utne Reader, and Brad was on his way.

  He applied to be a junior editor at the New Century, just a summer gig—though not an internship either. They paid $250 a week. This was the rarest of opportunities, and Brad got it, beating out hundreds of other candidates. He moved to DC for the summer, ready to fulfill all his promise.

  When he got there, he found that he was no longer the smartest person in the room. In fact, he had no sources and no ideas—which was new to him, because he always had ideas. His entire output at the magazine consisted of a thousand-word piece about fifth-party weirdos running for president and a brief about how the police had railroaded Pee-wee Herman when they’d caught him jerking it in a movie theater. He left a week early, saying he had to get back to Chicago because his dad was ill. That was the end of his career in punditry, the only career he’d ever considered.

  The late ’90s found him a copywriter at a Chicago ad agency, making nearly $40,000, hardly a tragedy. He had health insurance and a modest pension and a decent amount of free time, which he used to write a novel, find an agent, and actually get the book published with a mainstream house. Called Going Nuclear, it was about employees at a Chicago ad agency who try to keep their business running after a terrifying industrial accident wipes out most of the Eastern seaboard. Going Nuclear was reviewed, mostly well, in the places where it needed to get reviewed. Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, called it a “darkly comic satire of the way we live now.” He was interviewed on Weekend Edition and profiled in the Chicago Tribune. A magazine (which no longer existed) that covered the book industry (which barely still existed) had named him “a writer to watch.” They wittily gave him an actual watch, a pretty good one, which Brad still had even though it had stopped running in 2008. Brad had gotten paid reasonably well. He intended to write another book and to proceed with his life, which, despite some early disappointments, had gone about as well as he could have ever hoped.

  And then Hollywood, as it likes to do, ruined everything.

  One day in the spring of 2000, when the world was innocent and young, the phone rang in Brad’s office.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Is this the Brad Cohen?” asked a voice, female, slightly slurry and slightly chirpy.

  “It’s a Brad Cohen.”

  There followed a streak of laughter that sounded like a madwoman cackling over a cauldron. If Brad had hung up the phone right there, which he considered, fate would have possibly spared him a decade of debt and humiliation. But instead he waited a bit.

  “Oh my God,” the voi
ce said. “You’re as funny as your book is.”

  Going Nuclear was certainly wry in places and definitely ironic throughout, but Brad hadn’t even laughed out loud while writing it, so this wasn’t a reaction he’d expected. Later, he learned that no one in Hollywood actually ever read anything, except for trade reviews, spec scripts, and gossipy blog posts. For now, though, Brad still lived in the Midwest, and therefore when he heard praise he thought it was sincere.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” said the voice.

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “My name is Alison Shreveport. I’m a literary manager for the Film Strip.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a company.”

  “But what does it do?”

  “Manages people.”

  “What kinds of people?”

  “Writers, directors. A lot of commercials. Spike Jonze was a client. Before he went into movies.”

  “OK,” Brad said.

  He thought she was talking about “Spike Jones,” who had written a bunch of novelty songs back in the ’40s, including “Der Fuehrer’s Face.”

  “So what do you want with me?” he said.

  “I want to manage you, silly,” she said.

  No one had ever offered to manage Brad before. He could barely even manage himself, so he was tempted by the prospect of having management. It sounded very adult.

  One month later he was on a United Airlines flight to LA. He checked into a motel across the street from CBS Television City and drove his rented Honda Civic to an office complex behind a refinery in West LA. The building was all slab concrete and exposed pipes, brightly painted. He got there at 4:00 p.m., right when he was scheduled to, and waited for half an hour, eating M&M’s out of a bowl and reading magazine stories about people who were better looking and more successful than him, an experience that would soon become more common for him than going to the bathroom.

  Finally, Alison Shreveport appeared. Great tits, great tan, great hair. She wore an all-white jumpsuit and a gold necklace that she couldn’t possibly have purchased for herself. She smelled like two glasses of wine.

  Brad stood up.

  “Is this the great Brad Cohen?” she asked.

  “It is,” Brad said.

  “Hiiiiiiiiii!” Alison said, and gave him a ridiculous hug that hurt his shoulders.

  Brad was now being managed.

  Alison’s office was small, but it was definitely there, with a door that closed, off an enormous bullpen of hustling young people, all of whom looked at Brad with a weird mixture of loathing, suspicion, envy, and pity. She introduced Brad around. “Nice to meet you,” Brad was soon to learn, was the phrase in Hollywood you could trust second least, right after “I’m a big fan.”

  “I’m a big fan,” Alison said to Brad as he sat down in an uncomfortable plastic chair on the other side of her desk. The office was decorated with three movie posters, one for a movie that Brad had actually seen, and an old head shot of Johnny Depp, autographed with a black lip-print. Alison also had a shelf of books, mostly low-end sci-fi and thrillers, which Brad assumed were part of her current client list. Obviously Alison wasn’t repping Stephen King or Neil Gaiman, but she was clearly at least in the game. It didn’t take a whole hell of a lot to be considered legit in LA. In the parlance of the town, it was an honor to be nominated.

  “I have some plans for you,” Alison said. “Assuming we’re going to be working together from now on. Are we?”

  “Sure,” Brad said, sealing himself into the tomb.

  “First, we need to send you around town to get people used to the idea of you.”

  “I didn’t know there was an idea of me.”

  “You’re funny,” she said. “I’ve been making some calls, and people love the sound of your book. I just want to put you in some rooms and see if you connect with anyone.”

  That, Brad soon learned, was the essence of the entertainment industry, an endlessly neurotic blind date arranged by an ever-shifting army of 10 percent yentas. He stayed in LA for a week and took forty meetings, including one with two men wearing identical navy blazers who had an office decorated with no less than seventeen African rubber plants, and one in a back office on the Warner Brothers lot with an impossibly tan guy whose eyes were wider than a five-year-old girl’s at a pony farm. The guy wore a bright pink Izod golf shirt with the collar up and told Brad that Matthew Perry really loves science fiction. Brad also met with one of the creators of Frasier, who was busy practicing his golf swing in the office. They made small talk for five minutes and then the guy said, refreshingly, “So why the fuck are you here, you idiot?”

  “I have no idea,” Brad said. “I just go where they tell me.”

  The guy laughed and gave Brad the week’s only truly genuine handshake. Brad never saw him again.

  He drove from Culver City up to Burbank and down to Santa Monica and then back to Universal City and across the Cahuenga Pass many times, until the backseat of his car was a pungent mess of In-N-Out Burger bags and taco wrappers, and he was very glad he’d rented a relatively fuel-efficient car.

  It was actually sort of incredible. He’d drive onto the lot of a movie studio, a place where they actually made movies, and would show a security guard his driver’s license. The guards checked their lists and asked, “Do you know where you’re going?” When Brad said no, they gave him a map and said, “They’re expecting you.” Then he’d go to a windowless office and someone about his age would give him a bottle of water, and then he’d have a chat with someone older than him, more than one of whom said “Alison knows a lot of people and has good taste,” and then he’d run to the bathroom and pee out the entire bottle of water, drive ten miles in one hour, and repeat the process. The sun felt so warm on his face all day.

  Brad once had cared about what was going on in the country and the wider world. He had aspired to be a serious person. But no more. This seemed like a nicer life. LA had weaved its dumbass spell over him.

  One night, far too late, he said to his wife on the phone, “I went to a bar and this guy from Mr. Show was playing the piano.”

  “What’s Mr. Show?” she said.

  Brad went home to Chicago and froze his ass for two months. One night he and Juliet went to a Colombian steakhouse on Lincoln Avenue to celebrate their first anniversary. They ordered the matrimonio, an incredibly delicious mixed grill of steak and shrimp served with grilled taro root and a side of homemade chimichurri and were happily in the middle of their second bottle of wine when Brad’s black Nokia phone, which he’d purchased reluctantly two months earlier, rang. The phone looked like a turd with a punch pad and a stubby penis antenna, but it had cool interchangeable faceplates and was proving increasingly useful. The LED readout showed an LA number.

  “You mind if I take this?” he asked Juliet.

  She waved him on, her mouth full of steak.

  It was Alison Shreveport. “How’s it going, Brad?” she asked.

  “It’s my anniversary and I’m out for dinner.”

  “CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!” she said, far too enthusiastically. “I was married once, but he was a crackhead, so we had to sell the house.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I have some exciting news,” Alison said.

  “Yes?”

  “Someone wants to option Going Nuclear.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He was a producer at Warner Brothers, but then he had an overall at Universal and also one at DreamWorks, but now he’s on his own but has a golden parachute at both places.”

  Brad had no idea what any of that meant, but he did sort of understand.

  “He loves your book and is willing to give you seventy-five for it.”

  “Seventy-five dollars?” Brad asked. “That’s not enough.�
�

  “No,” Alison said. “Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “What?”

  “We’ll see if we can give you first crack at the screenplay so I can get you into the Writers Guild. They have excellent health insurance.”

  “You’re not playing a joke on me?”

  “No, this actually happens to people sometimes.”

  “Do . . . do you need me out there?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” Alison said.

  “Am I supposed to thank you?”

  “That’s generally considered good manners.”

  And so Brad did, for several minutes. By the time he got back, his half of the matrimonio was cold, and Juliet was looking annoyed.

  “That better have been very important,” she said.

  “It was,” he said.

  Brad sat in silence for several seconds, staring at a pile of shrimp shells.

  “What, dude?” said his wife.

  “We have to move to Los Angeles,” he said.

  By that summer, they were there, living in an apartment in a scary white concrete building near Hollywood and Vine. The place had two stories, both of them completely disgusting, and it was kind of expensive, which meant they began to chew through their modest savings. Eventually Brad got his deal and his script, so they had a little bit more money, plus health insurance, which was good because Juliet got pregnant.

  They moved to a dumpy house in a pretty nice neighborhood, but then the script money started to run out too, so they moved to a slightly nicer house in a not-as-nice neighborhood. Going Nuclear, both the script and the option, went into turnaround, and soon the book was forgotten and Juliet was pregnant again. Brad got a job as a staff writer on a Canadian cartoon called Battlecats, which ran at 3:30 p.m. weekdays on the WB affiliate and featured a weird live-action turn by a Hungarian movie star playing the Clawmaster, the Battlecats’ archenemy, an evil half-cat, half-man druid who lived with a trio of goblin puppets in what looked like the basement of a steampunk distillery. It was a reboot of a franchise that had been popular in the ’80s, but the second go-around didn’t quite capture the cheesy magic of the original.