Mallory's Camera

I first met Carl six years ago when Maria Wilhelm imported me down to Los Angeles to oversee the dismantling of Brandon Tartikoff’s Internet legacy after America Online took it over. This was a wild and crazy time in my life, and I wish I’d taken better notes.

Entertainment Asylum was one of the first deep-pocketed corporate plays to go after digital mindshare. But early adopters often come to grief and EA was no exception. Tartikoff, the legendary NBC exec credited with transforming Thursday nights into must-see TV, had other things on his mind by the time I got there – like dying. He’d assembled a brilliant band of visionaries but they might as well have been practicing suttee on a great blazing pyre of Benjamins for all the return they harvested on a two-million-dollar-plus investment. That was real money in those days. The suits had decided to pull the plug. I was one of the suits.

I don’t know what Carl was doing there.

Maria had parceled out the three-day stretch into a series of meetings. Employees of various creative divisions paraded before us waving their chains, pleading for their jobs. It was horrifying. They were very good at what they did. But they were losing a shitload of cash for the same people who were paying me.

I refused to make eye contact with any of them. I kept scribbling notes on an oversized yellow legal pad. After a while the notes started being less about the ostensible agenda of the meetings and more about what our interrogation subjects were wearing, the condition of their hair and nails, how many times they interrupted their explanations with nervous body language or inappropriate laughter. I felt like a Nazi psychologist. I smoked my way through an entire carton of cigarettes.

I think it was on one of these smoking breaks that I first started talking to Carl. He was sitting in on meetings with the same group of people but in a different order.

“I hate this,” I said. “I feel like slitting my wrists.”

“Wanna borrow my knife?” he asked.

When the dust settled it was decided that Entertainment Asylum would not be dismantled – not quite yet. Everyone could be fired though, and the skeleton site would be run by a skeleton crew. Since I refused to relocate to LA, I was out of the running for one of the plum management assignments. Anyway, such as they are, my slim talents lie in multi-tasking. One of the things I do slightly less incompetently than others is writing. Thus, for six months I wrote a celebrity gossip column for Entertainment Asylum which ended up being syndicated throughout all the great dominions of AOL.

Now that was fun. Finally my National Enquirers were a tax write-off!

Carl did their movie reviews.

Every couple of weeks I’d drive down to LA to sit in on editorial meetings. Carl and I got into the habit of sneaking off for cigarette breaks together. We had hilarious conversations, one-liners rolling off the assembly line like The West Wing in its Aaron Sorkin glory days. There was a connection there, but it wasn’t attraction per se. I thought: this is someone with whom I could collaborate on movie scripts. Then Carl bailed to go work for one of Warner Bros Internet fiefdoms. Eventually AOL bought that one too and he was out on his ass.

We lost touch.

My own fortunes changed. For a couple of years I worked for ICM, the mega-entertainment agency whose Beverly Hills offices were housed in an I.M. Pei-designed glass tower on Wilshire Boulevard. When that was over, I decompressed for a year, writing a novel. Then I was over fifty, agents were telling me that the novel was well-written but not publishable as such. I took stock and realized I had no career arc to speak of – another side effect of multi-tasking; thus, my chances of being hired by anyone to do anything other than pump gas or sell ladies’ foundation undergarments were slim. I would simply have to hire myself. Or starve.

So I started the store.

Somewhere in the middle of that, Carl started emailing me.

Now I have to say I love messages in bottles. Epistolary connections are among my very favorite relationships. Carl and I would write back and forth every couple of weeks. I liked his style:

Yo Patrizia,
I am wearing my uniform, jaunty black beret and wire spectacles... I stride to the microphone to counter the vicious and outrageous lies of the invaders who FALSELY claim that their troops have surrounded my
studio/palace here in Papa's-Got-A-Brand-New Bag-hdad...

But I also knew he wasn’t a lifeline. He was floundering every inch as badly as I was with one critical difference – he had a guaranteed income (Daddy’s royalties); I did not.

It was good to see him when he materialized in my actual time-space continuum this past week but also poignant. It made me feel a little bit… well… sad. Not the first time, but the last time. He wouldn’t be lured from the Carmel Valley retreat of his mega-wealthy hosts, Ellen and Jim, and the sufferance of the ultra-rich always makes me uncomfortable. It’s too whimsical. You have to work too hard to channel that inner Mister Bojangles. Of course they loved me too but that’s because I performed a speed rap on Fast Food Nation and fawned over about a hundred photographs they had taken of the sandcastle contest in Carmel the weekend before. Jim is a Hollywood art director; Ellen, his wife, is the granddaughter of the guy who invented Pebble Beach. She’s the one who needed the pre-nup, though I have no idea whether they actually signed one.

Carl had traveled with a huge portfolio of drawings, a kind of visual diary he'd kept in the early nineties. In the rich people’s living room, he showed them to me. “I want to turn these into a graphic novel,” he said.

I leafed through the pictures, emulating thoughtfulness. They were all carefully encased in sheet protectors bearing the proud Staples emblem. Skeletons. More skeletons. Skeletons cleaning each others’ eye sockets and hip joints, skeletons meeting at restaurants (a menu proclaims the soupe du jour is maggot consommé), attending catacomb openings in designer shrouds. Vortices for eyes. Good stuff, God yes, Carl is multi-talented. But I hate-hate-hated them. A visceral reaction – even while I admired their aesthetics, they made my skin crawl.

Watching me from the sumptuous velvet sofa, Jim laughed. “You know, there’s boy art and girl art. I think this is boy art.”

“They’re great!” I lied heartily.

“I did them all in the period just before I first met you,” said Carl. “When life wasn’t quite so… continuous.”

A couple of years ago out of the blue, Carl had emailed me many megabytes of his writings. “I want to whip these into a novel,” he wrote in the accompanying note. “What do you think? Wanna help?”

What I’d thought was: man, this stuff is scary. All this gibberish about Germanic sex goddesses demanding cunnilingus interspersed with a strange calorie diary in which the nameless protagonist records every single thing he eats plus bowel movements. I’m not a big fan of Henry Miller or the Joycean cult of skidmark divination. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I was reading was autobiographical. I could only blink at my computer screen and hope that Carl would never follow up with me.

He didn’t.

But here was something just as bad.

“What’s the graphic novel going to be about?” I asked.

“Well, that’s the problem,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t have a storyline. Can you think of one?”

“Don’t you think it might be easier to come up with a storyline and do a new set of drawings?” I asked.

“That’s the girl talking!” said Jim.