Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

He took a syringe from the drawer and injected the thing with cortisone. Les still ruled over the dermis — he would save his own skin, at all costs. He padded to the kitchen and sat under the bright lights. The hum of silver appliances and halogen allowed him to ponder what he had dreamed. He had been walking, or gliding, down the middle of Sunset Boulevard. No cars. Something lay in the road ahead. A body. His mother hovered over it — not his mother, but rather a succubus: the DEA inquisitor. When the demon said the body needed to be buried, Les laughed and fled. Next thing he knew the demon was upon him, hurling him face-down. Les’s teeth shattered on the asphalt. That was when the dermatologist felt the weight of the cadaver, its hands clinging to his neck. The demon forced him to stand with his burden, having strapped the body to Les’s back like a nidorous papoose. He was warned that this latest development was born of his attempting to run; if he didn’t obey, the consequences would be unimaginably worse. Les asked the demon its bidding. The demon said the body must be buried before dawn in the yard of a distant house. When he began to walk, the weight was almost insupportable, like trudging up a muddy hill carrying a two-hundred-pound man. He tried desperately to awaken. Then he found himself at the gates of a house. The succubus waited there with pick and shovel in hand. The gates opened slowly, as in a cheap horror film but with chilling effect: the house was his own.

Donny Ribkin sat at a table with Oberon Mall and the producer Phylliss Wolfe. They were lunching at Sweets, an ICM haunt on Beverly and Sweetzer. Phylliss really owed him for this. She’d been trying to put together an indie remake of Pasolini’s Teorema for years now, with an interesting spin: the Terence Stamp role of the libertine stranger would be played by a woman.

Phylliss Wolfe was lanky and elegant, with buttery hazel skin. She apotheosized all the New Yorkers Donny’d ever known — brusque and intimate all at once, quick to laugh and trigger-haired when it came to perceived affronts. Although she’d been a fixture on the independent scene for more than a decade, the last few years had been colorless; Phylliss hoped Teorema would change all that. She knew how difficult it must have been for the agent to have gotten Obie’s attention, let alone nailed down a lunch. The fact that Katherine Grosseck, his beloved ex, happened to be the writer on the project further martyred him.

“Did you go to the screening at Zev’s last night?” asked Donny.

Obie nodded, attacking the chef’s salad. “I have never laughed so hard in my life. I was hemorrhaging .”

“What movie?” Phylliss had a mouth full of onion rings.

“The new Batman. It was horrible.”

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Donny said. “Did you play Rim the Host?”

“He had the runs — how could we resist?” Phylliss laughed, and Obie lit up. “Can you smoke in here?”

“Can I ? No. Can you ? Probably.”

Just then, a waitress approached and said she’d have to put out her cigarette. Obie scowled at Donny while she stubbed it in a butter dish.

“Told you,” he said.

“Anyway, Moe — Trusskopf — started coming up with titles for porn movies. Mostly gay, of course.”

“This is so much more wholesome than I imagined.”

“There were all these categories and sub-genres…”

“She used the S word!” interjected Phylliss.

“The S-G word,” Donny added.

“We did movies: Sleepless in the Saddle …”

Phylliss submitted Forrest Rump . Obie practically spit onto her plate, gratifying the producer.

“We went on for hours ,” Obie said. “I wish I could remember — why didn’t I write them down? I am such a pig. We did this whole music thing. Mamas and Papas…‘California Reamin’—’”

“Now we know why all the leaves are brown,” volunteered the agent.

Obie guffawed and Phylliss took another shot: “‘Long Time Coming’?”

“That’s good,” said Obie, cordial and imperious, “but it’s the wrong group. You have to stay with the group .” The producer deflated.

“I have the best ,” Donny said, pausing dramatically. “Thirty Days in the Hole.”

Cachinations all around.

“I love that. Then we got literary .”

“A Hard Man Is Good to Find,” offered the producer. She knew she had a winner.

“Oh my God!” said Big Star. “That is so fantastic. ”

“Wait a minute,” said the agent, clinking a glass with his fork. “I have it. I have the ultimate .”

“Tell us.”

“Are you ready?”

“We’re ready! Tell us!”

“The Catcher in the Y.”

No one would top it. Obie exploded with glee.

“I don’t get it,” said Phylliss.

“You’re so unhip,” said Donny, disgruntled.

A handsome young man with five or six tiny hoops in each ear was led to their table — Phylliss’s assistant. He handed his boss a packet.

“Eric, you know Donny. Oberon, this is Eric, my guy Friday.”

Obie gave him the lech. “We should put him in Catcher in the Y. ”

“Been there, done that,” said Phylliss. “Right, Eric?”

“If you say so.” He smiled.

She turned to Obie. “You’re an icon to him.”

“It’s a dirty job,” said Big Star, “but someone has to do it.”

Phylliss raised an eyebrow at the loitering Eric, then sarcastically gave him his walking papers. “Well…we’d love it if you could stay but—”

Eric adored Phylliss, and was used to her public paddlings. He smiled shyly, bowed his head then left.

“Thank you, Eric!” Phylliss called out musically.

“Cute,” said Obie.

“Here’s the cassette,” said Phylliss, setting Teorema by Obie’s purse. “Latest draft’s in there too — the Grosseck draft.”

“Efficient little fuck,” said Obie, looking Donny’s way.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “But she is full-service.”

They gossiped about people who were dying. Phylliss mentioned a friend, a screenwriter with AIDS who recently took a turn for the worse. Suddenly, he was getting ghoulish e-mail: prayers and solicitations from a network of God freaks he called the Internuts.

Donny, the good agent, dutifully brought them back to Phylliss’s project. Obie said she’d recently screened Salò , and Phylliss was surprised to hear the filmmaker fascinated her enough that she’d once considered optioning a biography, Pasolini Requiem , with the intent to produce. Naturally, the idea of playing a young woman who becomes the sexual obsession of a suburban family appealed to her immensely; Obie’s instincts were always to shock. Though Phylliss knew Big Star was bold (most often for the wrong reasons), she cagily emphasized the commercial elements along with the avant-garde.

“It’s like a darker version of Boudu Sauvé des Eaux —the Renoir film.”

“Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

“Yes!”

“Then it’s a comedy?”

Phylliss scrunched her mouth up, a translator pondering nuances of an ideogram. “It is funny— unbelievably so. But I don’t think I’d call it a comedy.”

Donny laughed. “It’s definitely not a comedy.”

“Do you have a director?”

“We’re close.”

“Jane Campion would be so great.”

“I love Jane,” Phylliss said, “but I don’t think she’s available.”