Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

Also, I’m not alluding to my former wife, Mandy, whom you’ve no doubt heard of. She’s a bestselling author of diet books under the name of Mandine Osterwald Higby. Such titles as The Junk Food Diet and To Hell With Nutrition have been on every bestseller list in the land for endless months. Rumors in the publishing trade were that Mandy was working on a memoir to be entitled I Married an Asshole. My attorney charged me $500 to tell me she had a perfect right to do that.

I am, by the way, Tim Higby. I’m forty-one, eleven pounds overweight, and three inches too short. I make my living writing television comedies. I’m very fond of plaid shirts and was wearing one on that fateful night along with a venerable pair of khakis.

My most successful sitcom was Uncle Fred Is a Pain in the Butt, which ran from 2001 to 2003. Since then I haven’t had another hit. Finally, four months ago, I was hired as a writer on Nose Job. That’s the one about the wacky Hollywood plastic surgeon. It began plummeting in the ratings just after the first script I’d had a hand in aired. The show handler and the producers decided they need somebody younger to save Nose Job from extinction and, Lord knows, there are untold numbers of writers younger than I am in Greater Los Angeles.

So on the morning of June 13 I got an e-mail informing me I was no longer on the writing team. I’d been in the middle of writing a very funny script dealing with how this wacky Hollywood plastic surgeon misplaced the left ear of a patient.

As the day waned I was sitting in my living room, scene of many a seduction and many an orgy before my time of residence, and brooding over the fact that in addition to having to pay Mandy an enormous alimony each and every month, I was now going to be vilified in I Married an Asshole.

The cell phone, which I’d been able to keep up the payments on, played the opening notes of Thelonious Monk’s “Crepuscule With Nellie.”

I scratched at a sudden itch in my right palm, then picked it up. “Yeah?”

“Turn on the Gossip Channel.”

“Why, Hersh?”

It was Bernie Hersh, one of my few close friends and, even at the advanced age of forty-seven, still a very successful television writer. “Just do, old buddy. On my way out.” The call ended.

Putting down the phone, I scratched my hand yet again, and then grabbed up the remote to bring the Gossip Channel into view. There on the screen was my daughter, whose agent had christened her Mutiny Skylark last year, and then sold her to the Will Destry Channel to star in Posy Pickwick: Rock & Roll Detective.

Beth, her real first name, was sitting on a purple sofa, hands folded in her lap and looking contrite. Well, as contrite as you can look while wearing a very low-cut yellow tank top and very minimal shorts. “It seems to me,” she was saying to the stunning blonde interviewer, “that the executives at Destry, really wonderful people for the most part, Pam, have been excessive in this instance.”

“They’ve just dumped you from Posy Pickwick, which, as of this week, is the top-rated YA show in the world.”

“Except in Brazil,” said my redheaded daughter, crossing her legs. “I do believe, in all modesty, Pam, and not to detract from the wonderful contribution of the entire Posy team and all the wonderful kids who act on my show with me, that this nearly universal international success is pretty much due to me.”

“Sure thing, Mutiny. But the statement that Will Destry, Jr., released to the media just hours ago, states that you’re being severed from the show for ‘conduct unbecoming of a teenager and knocking over Charlie Chicken.’ ”

My daughter sighed. “I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit, you know, that I’m a little wild at times,” she said, uncrossing and recrossing her legs. “I’m still not sure how I managed to drive my new SUV into that wonderful statue of Will Destry’s most famous animated cartoon character. It makes me, you know, really sad, Pam.”

My left side was commencing to itch. I scratched it.

“You also drove your Jaguar into the front window of the New Trocadero on the Strip last month, Mutiny,” reminded Pam.

Beth held up her hand. “Let’s get our facts straight, Pam,” she said as she recrossed her legs. “I drove my Mercedes through the Troc window to avoid hitting a sweet little old lady tourist who’d fallen down in the crosswalk. My Jaguar I was using when I drove over Harlan Ellison’s foot in the parking lot of Mexicali Rose’s Hot Tamale Café, which was a very popular hangout for three weeks last March.”

I realized I was still holding the remote. Setting it down on the coffee table, I scratched my right hand with my left and then my left with my right. “What have I got now? Some rare skin disease?”

“Excuse my being so personal,” said Pam, leaning a bit forward. “But don’t you feel it’s time to stop your madcap ways, Mutiny?”

My enormously successful-until today-daughter began to sob quietly. Wiggling on the purple sofa, she tugged a petite pink hanky from a slit pocket of her crimson shorts. She dabbed at her eyes, sniffling. “As you and the majority of my wonderful fans around the world know, Pam, I’m the product of a broken home. I just know that if my parents got together again, it would work wonders for my overall deportment.”

“Wonderful.” I snatched up the remote to thumb the off button. Beth vanished.

The itch was spreading. I scratched at my right side, my left knee, my left buttock, and, as best I could, my upper back. “Jesus, maybe I’ve contracted some strange, highly dangerous Asian plague from eating Chinese imports.”

When I stood up, I felt extremely woozy. When I sat down again my entire skeleton didn’t feel right. I started to perspire, and as I wiped my itching palm across my forehead, I began to experience severe stomach cramps.

Apparently another symptom of this malady that was attacking me was drowsiness. I was getting very sleepy. As twilight began to close in outside, my eyelids fell shut. My attempt to open my eyes again failed, and in less than a minute, I fell deeply asleep.

Two things awakened me. One was the door chimes playing the first few bars of “ ’RoundMidnight”and the other was a loud animal howling.

“Nova Botsford,” I recalled.

Nova is the Associate Producer of that very successful new sitcom, Dump Truck. That’s the one about the wacky Hollywood garbage man. A handsome woman of forty-five or thereabouts, she’s been described by those who’ve worked with her as impossible, tyrannical, sadistic, offensive, and meanminded. For some reason, though, Nova and I have always gotten along, and when she heard I’d been tossed off Nose Job, she phoned to tell me she was dropping by that night to talk to me. I figured maybe she could get me on the Dump Truck writing staff. I’d already made a few notes on some pretty funny garbage gags.

My legs were still a bit wobbly, but the itching had subsided. Maybe I’d suffered from a speeded-up version of some kind of one-day flu.

En route to the front door, I stopped at a wall mirror to check my appearance.

“Holy Christ,” I observed, “haven’t I undergone enough crap for one day?”

Apparently not. Looking back at me from the mirror was a furry-faced wolf-man. I knew it was me because of the plaid shirt.

“No wonder I was itchy.” The fur had been starting to emerge just before I passed out.

Unbuttoning a couple of buttons of my shirt, I determined that my chest was covered with grey fur, too. So were my legs, I found after bending to pull up a trouser leg.

The door chimes sounded again, then Nova started knocking forcibly on the oaken door. “Tim, yoo-hoo. Are you in there, darling? I haven’t all the time in the world to commiserate with you.”