Rick Moody - The Diviners

He has to be off to Wall Street. She asks if he took his medication.

Back at Omni Delivery, Spicer turns up, huffing and puffing, after taking the elevator, and Ivan Polanski whoops with joy at the forty dollars he’s about to collect. Spicer has no idea. Tyrone has no idea. Polanski has picked the right horse, an old windbag who trembles and who has a job because he needs something to do. Polanski tells him to take an extralong lunch. Their business will be extinct within a year, and they should all relax. Invest wisely. Buy on the dips. And then Polanski looks at the copy of the messenger form.

“Wait a second, Mr. Spicer. How come it says Michael Cohen on here?”

“I thought you said Michael Cohen. You always send me to Michael Cohen.”

“I didn’t say Michael Cohen. I said deliver to Means of Production.”

“What the heck is Means of Production?”

“What do you mean, what is Means of Production? It’s the address I gave you. I repeated it twice.”

“You didn’t repeat it twice. I asked you to repeat it twice. But you didn’t.”

Polanski throws up his hands. And Edwin (Sanchez) from Delancey Street makes ready to accept the US legal tender bills.

Vic Freese is at reception when the old guy comes in. Typical messenger. Why are the old messengers so challenged when it comes to shaving? Looks as though this one tried to shave with a rasp. Reddish scrapes where some follicles have been ripped out, and then some big neglected areas, mostly on his neck, where there is two or three days’ growth. In the nostrils, too, like stalactites protruding, like there’s wheat growing out of his brain. The guy is wearing double-knit slacks and he has belted these way up around the navel, the better to display the bold tartan of his socks. The old guy stinks. No amount of aftershave will conceal it, though he has liberally applied his aftershave nonetheless.

Vic admires and pities these messengers in equal amounts because he was once a mail room kid, like the majority of agents here at the Michael Cohen Agency. Good to stay busy. Good to know the city well enough, in advancing years, to be a messenger. Good to have people to talk to, places to go. But the old guy, because Vic is standing near to the console at reception, makes a beeline for him, and Vic’s pity ends immediately when the old guy draws close, because Sandra Konig is sitting right there at the desk, and the phone console hasn’t even started lighting up yet. It’s early. Vic points at Sandra, says nothing, and the old guy, and with him his noxious stink, moves laterally.

“Not the first time, you know,” the old guy says. “There was the one other election when the popular vote didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

Vic indicates, with the merest gestural signification, that he has no aptitude for politics. The Michael Cohen Agency is about entertainment. Everybody loves entertainment. Besides, Vic, with arms crossed, and wearing the conservative but stylish suit from a conservative but stylish British designer, is waiting for his new client. Due at ten, and now fifteen minutes late, the new client is his everything, the new client is the air he breathes, the food he eats, the water that slakes his thirst. Vic has his assistant poised at the phone to page him as soon as the call comes from the lobby downstairs, as soon as the limousine has pulled up. Vic has festooned his office with swags and balloons in order to welcome the new client to the Michael Cohen team. The new client was not ensnared by Vic, it is true, he did not sign the new client, and yet the new client has become his responsibility through the largesse of the music department in the Los Angeles office. This means scraps in terms of points because the signing percentage is the only percentage that matters at the end of the Michael Cohen year when the bonuses are handed out, and Vic did not sign the new client. The guy in the music department who did will take his piece of Vic’s action, and Vic will get the booking percentage instead of the signing percentage, which amounts to a percentage of a percentage. Still, just last week he was out there in Century City to shake hands with the manager of the new client. He still has the jet lag to prove that he will do what it takes.

And here is the bio. The new client records for that label in Belgium that packages singers with one name. The new client therefore has a single name, but Vic has a blockage about pronouncing the single name, since he knows, through due diligence, that the new client is actually called Tammy Gleick and that she was raised in Springfield, Illinois, until, in her teens, she moved to LA in pursuit of her big break. Her mother is the owner of a chain of hairdressing salons. The new client with one name has wanted to be a big star since she was a little girl. The new client is now twenty-two, and the new client drinks a lot, and the new client may also have a bit of a cocaine problem. This is well-known. Even Vic’s kids know this much about the new client.

Vic needs the new client. Thus, the streamers in his office. Thus, a brand-new leather handbag from Hermès. A gift item. The reason Vic Freese needs the new client is that Vic Freese is not really very good at his job and never has been. Vic Freese is the agent least likely to succeed. He doesn’t know why. He never tried to get other junior agents to quit when he was at the Mercury Agency, so that he could have their spots on the talent desk. He never had sex with the secretaries or the heads of departments. He never bought drugs for a client. Vic Freese has a wife and kids at home in Larchmont, and he doesn’t go out. Vic eats hamburgers and watches televised golf. These days, Vic tries to get home on the New Haven line as quickly as he can after whatever dinner or drink he’s supposed to have each day. He tries to see his son and daughter before they go to bed and he tries to read to them from rhyming books.

Senior agents in California have made clear that Vic Freese is operating on borrowed time. Vic has had his review with Mitch Adelstein, the head of television, who is a yeller, and Vic has been found wanting in every conceivable way, and now he has a brief few months left before he will have to move on to what would be his third agency in six years. He is the agent that other agents take great pride in leaving in the dust. Now the music department has thrown this booby-trapped new client in his lap, this handful who is unlikely to excel in television. She is five foot four inches of terror. Terror with a pierced navel. Terror in bottomless chaps. No one else wanted the new client and her delinquent past, and this was before she started snorting blow off the bars downtown. Luckily, the new client has a manager and a publicist and an agent in the music department in LA. Luckily, the new client has the label in Belgium to deal with her accidental overdoses and her diva scenes on airplanes. It is these other members of the team who must comment for the record on the inconstancy of the new client in the matter of her boyfriends.

The new client has shown no aptitude for acting whatsoever. She has never taken a lesson. When the new client did a cola endorsement two years ago, they required thirty-six takes to get her to say her one line. Then they hired a voice-over actress. It is not clear whether the new client can, in truth, read. A prominent celebrity magazine has already given coverage to her “Struggle with Learning Disabilities.” And, according to the celebrity magazine, her recent single “Please Don’t Send Me That Letter,” in which she asks a boyfriend not to send her a breakup note, is widely understood to be a compassionate plea on behalf of dyslexics everywhere. Her scripts are always sent to her handlers, and, in all likelihood, they read and respond to the scripts for her.