Rick Moody - The Diviners

Which reminds me, we’re trying to hire an intern again, and since Annabel had to go wear her Ann Taylor outfit out to see a lawyer, that only left me and Jeanine to do the interviewing for the interns, and they were all these boys who have to know everything, like one guy comes in and wants to talk about how horror movies from the fifties were like revolutionary texts or something, and Czech psychoanalysts, and The Crawling Eye and It Came from Within, this is supposed to impress me, but it doesn’t impress me at all. Thing is, the interns always want to direct, but they’d be a lot more interesting if they wanted to produce or they wanted to be marketing experts. Besides, all they’re going to do is messenger videotapes and file things, whatever, write coverage on scripts that somebody’s aunt sent to the office. I don’t give a shit if The Crawling Eye is meant to be an allegory, I just really don’t care.

Vanessa’s mom is rehabbing out in some hospital in Brooklyn, so Vanessa’s been even weirder than usual. Honestly, I don’t know where she thinks the company is going and if she even has it together enough to keep the company going. Of course, my mom is in the living room, drinking dessert wine and watching reports about politicians arguing in Florida, and that’s pretty good when you compare it to your mom being in some rehab in Brooklyn with skanky crackheads.

Anyway, in the afternoon, the Vanderbilt girls called, because they had finally gotten out of bed, and they said there’s going to be a righteous party on for when Mercurio launches his clothing line, which is going to be called PussyWhipped, already he has this logo that’s going to be on everything, it’s going to be the best logo ever, that’s what they were saying, and they tried to explain to me what the logo looked like, but come on. That’s just stupid. You can’t describe a logo over the phone. Logos are meant to be seen, not digitized. And making the logo before you make the clothes is like making the movie poster before you make the movie, but I guess a lot of movies do get made that way. In fact, I have been making little sketches of the bus poster for The Diviners, because I figure this will really help us. Okay, my idea is that the beginning of the show, the first episode, has to start with this big army sweeping down over some big plain. I mean, Mongolia, right, somewhere around there, it’s some country no one ever heard of, like what are the names of those countries over there? Like Uzbekistan or something. So the army is sweeping low down over some plain in Uzbekistan, I bet if there’s not a desert plain there, no one will know any better, and anyway they’re supposed to be Huns, so the Huns are sweeping down across the plain, pillaging and raping innocent girls, whatever it is that these armies do and the camera is sweeping above the army, like from a helicopter, above these men, just a ton of men, a whole bunch of men, and they’re all sweaty and wearing jerkins, right? I don’t care if the Huns didn’t wear jerkins, it doesn’t have to be historically accurate, it has to be sexy, and lots of the guys have bloody slices or cuts on their biceps and maybe on their faces, with just a little bit of blood, and that’s what’s going on down there with a lot of hacking and stuff and people are getting sliced. There are men on horses, but if you look up the hill toward the top, you see one general, I mean, did they have generals? Whoever their leaders are, one is riding down behind the marauders and one other man is turning the other way, and he’s got this bright light on him, and he’s raising this stick high above his head, could be a crutch from some old war injury, at first you’re not sure, but then you are, it’s not a crutch, it’s a diviner’s rod, and he’s raising it above, because it indicates that there’s another way to do things, and this guy, this really sexy guy with the divining rod, he’s raising it above everything, and he’s indicating that the diviner’s rod is the way of peace, or whatever you want to call it. And that’s my idea for the poster. It would look really good on buses. You know, buses have that big advertising space there. The Diviners: A New Mini-Series brought to you by UBC. Then some kind of marketing line: Love, famine, war, thirst, half-naked men, ethnic cleansing, the creation of Las Vegas. Produced by Means of Production, in association with UBC. Something like that.

Here’s the really strange thing I forgot to say. Lois never came in today. Never called or anything.

Okay, so let’s just say I had the greatest idea ever for the company, just the greatest idea ever, Madison writes, the pink vinyl journal in her lap, last curlicues of smoke from a stubbed-out joint hovering over her bedside table with its pile of unread scripts. The idea is so good that I should get my paw print in front of that theater in Hollywood, way ahead of Brad Pitt, who doesn’t bathe enough. Anyway, here’s the idea, which is about the intern problem. We have all these boys coming in, with their stupid ideas, like one boy comes in with the train station sequence from The Untouchables all storyboarded, like that’s supposed to impress me, because the point is that we’re a company that’s mostly women except for this one womanizing jerk I wouldn’t give the time of day to and an Indian TV wonk. We need a girl intern! So I’m invited to the program of student films at NYU, and I hate going to those things, because all the movies are about whether or not some French woman influenced Freud’s conception of the death drive, or whatever, Jesus, get a pedicure or something. Anyway, so I noticed that the screenwriter for one of the films was a student called Allison Maiser. You’d think everyone in New York City would have the idea I was having, the idea about seeing if this Maiser was related to that Maiser, you know, head of UBC programming — I think Vanessa pitched him over the weekend. So I did a little checking, stealth phone calling, or maybe I made Jeanine do a little of the checking up, and it turns out that it’s her, all right, only question is how can we get hold of her. So I call up the Vanderbilt girls, get them on the phone, they’re back to talking about PussyWhipped again, everything is PussyWhipped this and PussyWhipped that, I tell them to quit with PussyWhipped, because my pussy is not whipped, I say look I have to figure out how to find this girl, this Maiser girl, and they put me on hold, seems like it’s only five minutes, but I’m reading a script anyway, and that’s okay because I love a story when you can just sink into it like it’s the best boyfriend you ever had, which is what this script is like, seems like it’s only five minutes later, and they say, we know how to get to her, we have her number, but we have something we need to tell you, it’s really important. What’s that? I say. They’re interrupting each other. Are you sure you want to know? Of course I want to know. Well, she’s like so not your type of girl. Who isn’t? The Maiser girl. She might have her bottom lip pierced or something, or her tongue pierced. She’s like a girl version of Dennis Rodman. I say, Forget about it! Dennis Rodman is so nineties! I say, it doesn’t matter if Allison Maiser doesn’t have any arms and legs! Because we’ll put her to work licking stamps, even if we don’t have any of those licking stamps anymore. We’ll do that because as soon as she walks in the door, we can call her father and say, your daughter is the best intern! Your daughter makes all the interns seem like, I don’t know, bricks of cheese! The Vanderbilts are skeptical, because they are almost certain that Allison is not a blonde either, not even a dyed blonde. She might have blue hair or something. They’re giving me a warning. Who gives a shit, I don’t always have to listen to them.