Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

. .

He had a nice conversation with Keira Thompson, head of development at Ooh Baby. She was glad to hear Bud was leaning in the comedy direction on the problematic Biggie project, and happy to be brought into his confidence. He even shared about having some conversations with Tolkin about it. No harm.

He’d read a few articles about the Brainards online, and become curious about the source of their wealth. When they finished with the business side, Bud kind of circled the topic. Keira wasn’t skittish about it at all. She said the dad was a genius who found a way to patent “concepts.”

“Brando said one of the big things his father came up with was the idea of asking people for the last four digits of their social. Prior to that, people were reluctant to give their whole number over the phone. It made them feel vulnerable. The consequence was that merchants and banks lost billions of dollars a year in sales because people refused to verify. Most of this was before the Internet, Paypal and eBay and what have you, now people give all kinds of personal information to their computers, I know I do. Anyway, Brando said his dad told the banks (and they told the merchants) to have the person on the phone just ask the consumer for the last four digits— psychologically, that made all the difference. People didn’t hesitate to ID themselves anymore. He still gets royalties off that idea! And there was another weird benefit. Brando said the cumulative time saved by having people repeat four numbers instead of twelve was like HUGE — like, at the end of the year it added up to hundreds of thousands of man hours. So they saved all those salaries too! The ones they would have had to pay to have more people working the phones.”

. .

Bud unobtrusively recuperated in his very own apartment for infirm monks. Marta did heroic double duty, performing all the functions of an LVN. If the pain was particularly bad, he wasn’t shy about using the bedpan. His door had no lock — no way to control the comings and goings of a sleepless, nomadic mother.

One night he awakened from a sedative-induced sleep to Dolly giving him a sponge bath.

“Once you pass 80, it’s time to go,” she said, in media res . He was too groggy to question the surreal scene. “The people who get sick, refuse treatment, then die a few days later — those are the ones who got it right.”

“Mom… what are you doing?”

“ Sponging you. What does it look like I’m doing? What a chin you have! And what handsome shoulders . I look at you and see your father . You know what kept us together? The sex . The sex was all we had. You know, you’re handsome. You’re handsome and you know it. Everybody knows it — they say, ‘Here he comes! Here comes Handsome Bud Wiggins!’”

. .

He put down the novel — alas, the courage to say he was done.

He’d been working on it for years. Finally, he could freely admit he had absolutely nothing to show for it. He used to fantasize about being a literary man, but the literary era was over. When he was a boy, the scene was vibrant. Mailer stabbed his wife and duked it out with Vidal, Capote was a sacred monster, Styron a nasty drunk, Cheever a nasty drunken fag. Now there were only aging wonderboys like Do-Gooder Eggers, Vegemitey Mouse Foer, & Franzen, the King Rat who preened about spreading Big Brain’s ashes in some bandana republic before snitching off his BFF’s minuscule frauds of reportage. In one of those phoney New Yorker tell-alls masquerading as elegant meditations , he diddled himself — with precious, casually trenchant reflections on Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson & the Novel; on islands & isolation; on the special agonies of bestselling literary men, and the very special agony of loving his Hideous Friend — before getting to the cumshot of how much I loved and invested in him and how much he betrayed me and his wife . Bud thought it would have been far more interesting if Franzen had fucked the widow, which the essay actually wound up doing. It was a bitchy, addled Psychology Today- level treatise that literally posited that D. Footnote Wallace hanged himself as a career move! “In a sense, the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill.” Bud said outloud, Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? As Fran Lebowitz might jest, “If you think you can write Saint Genet but you aren’t Sartre— don’t even try .”

How many copies did Freedom sell, anyway?

Like five fucking million—––—

I’m done, he said.

The dream is over…

His phone rang.

“Bud?”

“Oh, hi Tolkin.”

“How’s the hip, kiddo?”

“On the mend.”

“Listen, I’ve got some good news.”

“Jesus, Michael, you’re like the fuckin tooth fairy, it never stops. I love you, man.”

“Remember the David Simon meeting you took?”

“Sure. The Wire guy.”

“Right… they’re going into production — on the Hollywood project. David told me he lifted a section from one of your stories.”

“What stories?”

“What do you mean, what stories . From Force Majeure! ”

“Really? Wouldn’t I have heard about that?”

“You’re hearing about it now . Listen. They’re giving you a ‘story by’ credit — which is a good thing. You’ll even get paid for it, which is a very good thing. Not a lot, but it’s WGA minimum. For shared story credit.”

“Wow. Cool!”

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

“Tell me.”

“Remember how he called The Wire a novel?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, David’s calling the new series a novel too.”

“Okay.”

Bud wasn’t following.

“David said that his staff is engaged in writing another novel that just so happens to be in the form of a TV series.”

“So?”

“So you don’t have to finish your book.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because it’s already happened .”

“ What has?”

“Bud, you are now a published novelist! Or will be, once your episode airs.”

“For real?” he answered.

He couldn’t figure out if Michael was joking. He felt dizzy, and his breath was shallow; he’d need to do a round with the nebulizer once he was off the phone.

“Well, by the Simon definition you are — which I suppose is as valid as anyone else’s. So, pour yourself a glass of champagne and give yourself a toast. To Bud Wiggins, on the occasion of the publication of his first novel….

“May there be many more to come!”

Hard Time

He

got 36 months, but would do half that if he kept his nose clean. When Tom-squared got busted for distribution, it was her 3rd strike. She gave him up & pled out. He didn’t hold it against her.

The scam was simple. They targeted widows in affluent neighborhoods. T 2found em on the internet, starting with the hubby obits & working her way back to the wife. She even got their phone numbers & called em up, bogusly wrestling her way into their geriatr. semi-infarcted s. It blew his mind what she could do. The onlys she had trouble with were old ladies who’d already been tapped by the internet-crying Nigger-ians who pretended they were royalty in need.

T would put on a pantsuit & tap on the door and thank them so much for being friend & patron of The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers . Of course they’d say you must be mistaken but Rikki would be standing there in one of those purposefully ill-fitting Salv Army — looking sport jackets. When the grieving geezers protested, a bewildered Tom-Tom whipped out proof in the form of a doctored letter signed by them in which they had agreed to house Rikki during his peacemaking trip to America. He came all the way from Sudan! Tom-Tom’s bewilderment would become exasperation & then anger at the ineptness of her organization’s volunteeers. “I hate to do it, but some people are going to be fired over this,” she’d say, and by the sad old confused cunt’s reaction, she’d know pretty much how well they were going to score.