Pocket Kings (18 page)

King of Kings of Hearts:
Keep doing it, Hist. Ohhhhh yeah. Mmmmmmm.

History Babe:
Th
en your wife surprises us and comes into the room and she's so excited by the sight of my tits and your dick inside me that she takes off her clothes and jumps in.

King of Kings of Hearts:
Hey, I dunno about this! Make her leave.

History Babe:
She starts licking my nipples while I fuck you. She's on fire. You're looking at your wife licking my tits and you get harder.

King of Kings of Hearts:
I don't know. I'm having second thoughts about this.

History Babe:
C'mon, King. Stop thinking and keep fucking me!

King of Kings of Hearts:
Oh, all right. I'm fucking you.

King of Kings of Hearts calls. History Babe shows two Jacks. King of Kings of Hearts shows two 4s. History Babe wins $1,200.

frankie-boy

maybe you're away for the summer? why you no answer my e-mails? let's go out. i need to talk.

lonnie

Artsy Painter Gal:
Do you think we'll ever meet?

Chip Zero:
I hope so. I think about it often but maybe it's best we not meet. I'm no Clooney, either George
or
Rosemary.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Just tell me: what's your best physical feature?

Chip Zero:
Hmm.
Th
at would be the void I leave behind me when I leave a room.

Artsy Painter Gal:
Zzzzzz. Listen . . . I'm going to be in the Bahamas over Labor Day weekend. Empyrean Island at the Nirvana Resort & Casino. Maybe you could just happen to be there too?

Chip Zero:
Yeah. A chance. But Victoria, my dear? I've Googled you. So I know.
Th
at you're married. And you have two kids. Sarah and Emily.

Artsy Painter Gal:
And I Googled you too, Sherlock Holmes, and found out you're married too. Cynthia. Works at an arch-support tri-quarterly or something. So there!

Chip Zero:
And your husband Aaron is a graduate of Yale, where he played lacrosse. He's a hot-shit investment banker. So I guess our mutual jigs are up, eh?

Artsy Painter Gal:
Just think about this Empyrean Island thing. I'll be there with Mr. Artsy Painter Gal and both Artsy Painter Gal Juniors. Now, even if it's only for a second at a poolside bar, blackjack table, a limbo contest or it's me “accidentally” knocking a banana daiquiri all over your skimpy Speedo, I'd like to meet you.
Th
ink about it? Okay?

Chip Zero:
I'll probably think of nothing else.

Frank Dixon

Hi, I'm glad we finally “met.”

Barbara Bennett is gonna be in NYC in early Sept and as it happens so am I.

I didn't read your book I'll admit it but Mickey Alba's Plague Boys screenplay is totally off the hook as I'm sure you know.
——
would fucking kill to be in the movie and I'd fucking kill to have him do it. I'm having lunch with
——
tomorrow. He hasn't read the script but his agent has. I'm going to hand the script to him and he'll read it. Is he perfect to play Benny or what?

I'm also thinking of
——
for Benny in case that falls through. He's very C List right now, I know, but he'd be excellent.

Let's have lunch you me and Barbara.

I just wrapped Breakthrough but after all the post-production shit I'm going to do everything I can to bring Plague Boys to the screen. It's gonna happen Frank.

Pacer

Pacer:

Sounds good.

FD

Frank:

Th
e latest . . .

——
is now officially out. He just signed to do two movies and one of them begins filming in three weeks. To be honest, his agent found
Plague Boy
way too dark.
——
himself never read the script. With the way his career is going, he needs to do more cheery romantic comedy Hugh Grant fluff. With him out that means we've also lost
——
too. So we're back to square one. Right now the script is with
——'s
agents right now. I think they'll like it.
Th
ey also rep
——
and the two of them would be fantastic although clearly not our first choices.

Pacer e-mailed me yesterday and can't make it to New York in September.

Barbara

Frank:

Please don't take this the WRONG way. You know I LOVE you very much. I found out recently that The Plague Boy is OUT OF PRINT now. Your second book DIDN'T DO TOO WELL either. I adored both books. Especially the 1st one. When both books came out I was so HAPPY that you remembered your Aunt Elaine and mentioned me in the acknowledgements. But even though I'm very OLD and SICK now I am wishing that if it's possible YOU COULD TAKE MY NAMES OUT OF BOTH BOOKS in future editions IF THERE ARE ANY. Thank you and much LOVE as always.

E.

Congratulations, Chip Zero, you have now won $100,000 on Poker Galaxy and are officially an ELITE PLAYER. Keep playing and good luck!

9

Fun in the Sun

I
have a great idea for a screenplay!” Harry Carver, calling from Los Angeles, yelled to me over the phone one day in late July. “And I need your help with it, Frankie.”

“Okay . . . uh . . . okay . . .” I said, with all the enthusiasm of someone offered top dollar to test out anthrax vaccines for a start-up pharmaceutical company. “Tell me more.”

Harry, I assumed right away, wanted me—the professional “writer”—to write it. It had been a long time since my former co­writer had put pen to paper other than to work on real estate contracts or property liens, and he dwelled so many income brackets above mine that by all rights we should have required interpreters simply to speak to each other. Harry and I wrote one-act plays, five-act plays, decologies of plays (“
Th
e 3rd Street and Avenue D Cycle”), movie and TV scripts, everything. Sadly, nothing that Harry and I had ever worked on together proved successful. As a matter of fact it was only after he moved as far away from me as possible, while still staying in the contiguous forty-eight states, that he succeeded in life. And, sort of, vice-versa.

I played poker on my laptop while Harry related to me his brainstorm. He had me hooked with the first sentence; by the second sentence I was ready to buy the latest version of Final Draft. It was a brilliant idea, the kind of thing that we, years before, could have knocked off in four weeks. He and I used to write at work, then write at his place or mine and in East Village bars and cafes, often spurred on by caffeine, Jack Daniel's, weed, coke. It was the Pre-Laptop Era, and we wrote on legal pads, index cards, the backs of our rent bills, and bar napkins. (One night Harry picked up a pink-mohawked punk-rocker chick at the Mudd Club, got an idea while performing cunnilingus on her kitchen counter on Ludlow Street, and wrote the idea down on her buttocks.) We were proud of the final product and we got depressed when it went nowhere.
Th
e only thing that could cheer us back up was getting started on our next foredoomed project.

After I told him his idea was great and after he told me he knew it was, I said: “You're offering this to me to write, but when I finish it, what would I do—”

“No, I'm not offering it. I want to write it
with
you, you ignorant bastard you. I'll come to New York. Or you could fly out here. Take a week or two off from work.” He had no idea that I
had
no work anymore. “You could kick it West Coast Style.”

I was at a table with Capt. Rehab and World's Slowest Human.
Th
e latter was living up to the moniker: every decision took a minute and I suspected he was consulting a fifteen-inch-thick poker manual between moves. I had pocket Jacks; the flop was a 3, a 5, and a 7, and he kept raising and I kept checking. Capt. Rehab folded.
Th
e thought of writing again with Harry was very tempting. Writing alone was my favorite thing to do in the world and was like meditation, but writing with another person was more fun. Jamming and psychotherapy all at once.

“Look,” Harry said, “I ran the idea by a Hollywood high mucky-muck last week—a very serious pooh-bah—and she got sopping wet just hearing it.”

“What are you doing talking to Hollywood mucky-mucks and pooh-bahs?”

Th
e turn card came up a Jack. Now I had three.

“A minor real estate matter. Okay, maybe not that minor. Hey! You know who it was?”

He told me who it was and, though the name meant nothing to me, I could tell by the way he said it that it should have. I acted, though, as if I'd been suitably impressed.

Th
e river card was a 10.

Harry said we could meet in Vegas and stay at the Bellagio or Mandalay Bay and write around the pool all day long and in our rooms at night. He'd pay, he said, for the hotel rooms. (He didn't know it but with just my winnings from the day before I could spring for us both.)

“Remember writing in Yankee Stadium?” I asked. “I completely missed that Mattingly grand slam 'cause I was so busy writing stuff down.”

Th
ere was about three grand in the pot now. I had three Jacks and raised and World's Slowest eventually reraised. Capt. Rehab said to World's Slowest: “Hurry the bleep up!”

Harry's movie idea was so great that I wished I'd come up with it. “It's
Metropolis
meets
Wedding Crashers
meets the lighter, funnier parts of
Shoah,”
he said, “and you and only you can help me write it.” He paused and asked me what I was presently working on.

“It's kind of a trilogy-type thing. It's about America during a totalitarian—”

“Wait. You began that fifteen years ago, didn't you? And didn't you finish it?”

“I'm, uh . . . I'm sorta like revisiting it, you know? It could be groundbreaking stuff.”

“You said that fifteen years ago too.”

I vowed that instant that when I hit the $150,000 mark on the Galaxy I'd forget about poker completely and devote myself to the
Trilogy.
Th
at amount would sustain me for the three years I needed to sharpen and polish my masterpiece. Ross F. Carpenter might not like
Dead on Arrival—
if he ever read it—but this, he and the public would flip for. When the
Trilogy
got published, it in itself would justify why there had been such a long gap since
Love
: because it had taken so long to write each complicated book of the Triad. Only a privileged few insiders would know there was another failed book in between. And they'd shut up about it.

And once the
American Nightmare
Trilogy
started winning prizes and was in its fifth printing, publishers would come begging for all my unpublished work, which I had a ton of.

Th
e Complete Short Stories of . . .
Th
e First Five Plays . . . Early Poems.

“You need a break,” Harry said, interrupting my reverie. “
Th
ink about it. We'll thaw out a bottle of the old creative juices and get them flowing again. It'll be a blast.”

Convinced of victory, I showed my three Jacks. World's Slowest had a pocket 4 and 6, giving him a 7-high straight and wiping me out. His manual had worked.

“Well . . .?” Harry asked.

Disgusted, stunned, I told him I'd think about his offer and would get back to him.

After Harry moved to L.A. to become a lawyer, I had decided that writing for the screen and for the theater was just not for me. I didn't even like movies and I pretty much loathed the theater and all the people involved with it, even though I'd barely met any of them. And television was just plain stupid.
Th
e fruit of ten years of futility now sits rotting in a bunch of cardboard boxes, along with some oils, pastels, and gouaches, in a dusty storage closet overlooking the Hudson River.
Th
at was it for me. Good-bye to all that.

With no idea for a novel in mind I merely took whatever was near the top of my stack of failed screenplays and began a novelization of it.

It took only a few days of lonely 6–8 a.m. and 8 p.m.–1 a.m. writing for me to realize that no simple six hundred-page double-spaced novel could contain this crazy behemoth. No, it had to be either a 2,100-page novel or . . . or
written in three parts!
Now, unless you're Tolstoy or Stephen King you're not going to get a 2,100-page novel published. Even I, ignorant then as I still am to the ways of publishing, knew that. So I would divvy it up into three smaller books.

Th
e ironic thing was that once all three novels were written and had hit the best-seller lists and won prizes and I was dividing my time between the Hamptons and London, some fat movie bigwig would want to turn the whole thing,
which originally had been a screenplay,
into a movie. I'd meet this imaginary sweaty producer at the Four Seasons in New York, he'd ply me with Chablis and Beluga, and during dessert he would say, “Frankie, I absolutely adore your trilogies. All three of 'em. Let's turn 'em into a movie!” And while I was swallowing the last glob of molten valhrona I'd whip out the screenplay I'd written before one single word of the books had ever been penned. “I've already got the script right here, Harvey-babe,” I'd say.

Freezing one fleeting moment of a life for all eternity, memory is the Natural History Museum of the soul. Eons and eons ago, some idiot Neanderthal with a long pointed stick protected his family from a bear just outside his cave; little did he know that ten millions years hence generations of school kids would gaze with mouths agape at this eyeblink of his life in a museum window diorama. Such a moment it was when I handed my screenplay over to Harvey. Picture the diorama yourself: my hand is out, my expression is confident, Harvey's tie is undone, three beads of sweat from his jowls hang over his crème brûlée, suspended in midair for all eternity; his gecko eyes pop out, his pockmarked jaw drops with astonishment. Frozen for posterity.

Priceless.

Except it never happened.

For seven years I devoted myself to the
Trilogy.
I wanted it to be good; I wanted to be good at something, for my own sanity. It was all I thought about from the second I woke up to the second I fell asleep, and my magnificent obsession even cost me a girlfriend.
Th
e diminutive Hethuh (Bay Ridge-born and bred, Heather could not pronounce her own name too well) and I went our separate ways because I wasn't paying, she claimed, enough attention to her needs. She was right. My life now was all about the project—that was what I lived for, it was what I was created to do.
Th
e history of baseball is unimaginable without Babe Ruth having played it, haystacks were only put in that field to be painted by Monet, four strangers
had
to meet and become the Beatles, and as surely as the New World waited for centuries to be conquered by Europeans, someone had to write the
Trilogy
and I just happened to be the one chosen to do it.

Twice a year I took unpaid two-week leaves of absence from work and went to London, settled into a seedy Paddington bed and breakfast and walled myself in from the outside world. I couldn't wait to take my seat and take out my pens and that day's legal pad at the library in Kensington where I wrote. And once I did so, it was as if I wasn't the writer at all but was merely the medium between some mystical force and the words I was penning onto yellow paper.
Th
e Muses needed a body, a scribe, some poor patsy with a Bic to bring the words down from the clouds onto Earth . . .
and they'd chosen me!

At the end of the first two weeks I had well over three hundred pages written. Half of Book 1, the first wheel of the mighty Troika.

When I returned to New York I entered what I'd written into my brand-new Commodore Amiga. I printed it out, pored over it again and again, made changes, some small, some vast. After months of tending to Book I, it was time to return to London and finish the first draft.

After the second sabbatical, the rough draft of Book I was just about done. Literary immortality had reached my doormat and was just about to ring my bell.

“So what do you think?” I asked petite Hethuh. She worked in a health food shop in the basement of a midtown skyscraper and made what were then called “health shakes” for business execs and their assistants, who were always too brusque or in too much of a hurry to thank her. She was four foot eleven, and it was this genetic slight that defined her existence and weighed down upon her taut 95-pound frame every second of her life.

“It's really, really good.
Th
is
has
to get published. Oh, by the way, my folks are coming into town next week, including my much taller younger sister. You're going to have to spend a lot of time with them. Also, I'm going to need you to . . .”

Her needs again. She had, I think, twice as many needs as I had pages.

Book I was done. Two more to go.

Never off my mind was:
Okay, so how do I get this monster published?