Stephen Cannell - At First Sight

When it was over, we lay in an exhausted embrace.

"What got into you?" Evelyn asked. "Man, you were pneumatic." "Did you just call me Mickey?" I asked, my voice flat with suspicion.

"Honestly, Chick, where do you come up with this shit?" Then she got out of bed to go to the bathroom and left me there. It pissed me off, but I didn't dwell on it, because I was more resolved than ever to get out of the marriage. One way or the other, I was determined to move on, to become Paige Ellis's lover.

How I was going to accomplish this still hadn't become clear. When it finally did, it took on a shape more devastating than I could have ever imagined.

The rest of the week we all hung out together.

Evelyn and I shared our power cabana with the Ellises. There were four chairs in there anyway, and after Melissa secured it each morning she disappeared. She told me she'd rather be staked out over an anthill than sit with us. My daughter, exercising her uncommon gift for colorful metaphor.

Evelyn actually got Paige into the workout room and started her on a light aerobic routine, using knowledge gained over years of Mickey D's training and my money to fashion a new body for a woman who could already stop traffic wearing a trench coat.

I let it happen, though, because I didn't think in four days Evelyn would be able to turn Paige's softness into the kind of anatomical gristle that she had struggled so hard to achieve for herself.

Now, just so you won't think that I was going over the falls in a barrel here, let me tell you that I really, really tried to put the brakes on my emotions, to rein myself in.

I kept saying what I'm sure you're saying: This is crazy. The woman adores her husband. You're much older, half as good looking. Your father didn't build downtown neighborhoods from Hispanic slums into architecturally renowned music centers, or city newspapers into global media empires. Your dad built opening-act comedians playing rathole dives like the Comedy Cabana into cheesy middle acts at transvestite clubs like the Cross Walk in North Hollywood. While Chandler Ellis was winning football games at Andover prep and then Georgetown, you were fighting for rectal purity in the Hawaiian state prison or throwing up in a Cost Plus wastebasket at rehab.

On every scale, the Chick Bests of the world didn't measure up against the Chandler Ellises.

I said all these things to myself.

I even locked myself behind the frosted, etched glass door in our bathroom, sat on the shitter, and wrote all of it down on a piece of hotel stationery.

Then I did something even more proactive: I started looking for flaws in Paige Ellis. I collected them, diving deep for each one like a bum in a supermarket Dumpster. I even cataloged her few physical imperfections.

For instance, she had a kind of goofy laugh, something between a squeal and a giggle. Of course, on further introspection, I found it irresistible.

She had a birthmark on her left calf that was almost the size of a quarter. The more I looked at that birthmark, the more I loved it.

She had an odd habit of constantly jiggling her foot when she was seated. I asked her about it, putting on my most friendly "you can tell the doctor" expression. She explained that she had suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder as a child. It's what first drew her to Chandler. They had that interest in common. She understood learning disabilities firsthand. She said that even though she had more or less grown out of it, she still found it difficult to sit completely still… hence the little foot jiggle. Adorable.

I found every one of these imperfections delightful.

After a week of constantly being with our new friends, Paige and Chandler, we had a farewell dinner at the hotel and promised to stay in touch. We all kissed each other goodbye. Our first kiss-only a cheek peck. But I swear, I almost fainted from ecstasy.

We exchanged digits and addresses, and under most circumstances, that would have been the end of it. We would have never seen each other again, except I was more hopelessly in love with her now than I had been in the beginning. I'm not just talking infatuation here, either. I'm talking deep, soul-defining devotion.

I was dreaming about her now almost every night, and every time I looked at Evelyn, I was shocked that I'd ended up with such coarseness when there were creatures like Paige in the breeding pool. I told myself if I'd married someone like Paige, Melissa wouldn't be as angry as she is, frowning with a face that had more holes than a pool-hall dartboard.

Of course, Melissa used our infatuation with the Ellises to get lost. During the week, I saw her now and again, usually at our changingof-the-guard ceremony under the poolside cabana each morning. She had taken up with a huge Hawaiian guy. A primo-warrior. Big, with lots of island tattoos. I cornered her once and asked her what was going on with him.

"Bite me," was her cute reply.

What do you do with kids when they won't listen to a thing you say, or care at all about any of the things you think are important?

We left Hawaii on January 8th and flew back to L. A. I reentered my nightmarish business fiasco. I was standing on the bridge of my fast-sinking Titanic, driving a leaking dot-corn straight to the bottom of a sea of bullshit.

The first couple of months back at work, I noticed that most of my executives were making new resumes and taking long lunches. Who could blame them?

A few weeks later, I took a walk through our warehouse. There had been a time, a few years ago, when I would walk through this acre-sized building and swell with pride, looking at shelves crammed full of studio movie DVDs and recording company CDs. I had been like a rancher surveying my livestock. Pallets piled high with American pop culture whizzed past on forklifts on their way to the loading dock, where twenty FedEx vans were parked, doors open, engines idling. Now, as I walked around the place, my own footsteps echoed in the emptiness. We had some old movies nobody wanted, a few Eagles CDs, some Steely Dan-all stuff that wasn't on the current hot list. As I said, none of the studios would trust us with product anymore, so we were imploding, crashing from the inside.

Then, as if watching years of my life dissolve like an Alka-Seltzer tablet wasn't a big enough load to carry, Melissa picked this exact time to get arrested.

We were called by the narc squad in the middle of the night and had to drive down to Juvenile Hall to talk to a vice detective. It seems she'd been caught in a Valley drug raid, arrested in a house full of crystal meth. She'd been sound asleep when the cops kicked in the door. The house was, of course, rented by Big Mac, but Melissa was the only one being held.

The way it was explained to us was our sixteen-year-old daughter was claiming that the forty or more bags of "Go Fast" the cops had recovered in Big Mac's house were hers alone… that Big Mac had nothing to do with it, didn't even know she'd hid it there.

It was pretty damned clear to everyone that Melissa was taking the rap for McKenna, but they weren't even holding him.

"That's nuts," I told the cops. "This guy is the president of the Devil's Disciples. They sell meth. That's their main business. It's obviously his stash."

"Yeah, that's what we think, too," the ropy black detective with prematurely gray hair said. "But what're we gonna do? He's saying be never saw it. She's saying it's hers."

"Can't you see she's trying to take the blame for him? She claims she loves him," I said, thinking these cops can't possibly be this blind. They can't let this tattooed asshole with a shaved head get away with this. "He probably threatened her to get her to say that," I reasoned. "It's duress or something:'

"If you can get her to change her story, we'll work with it," he said.