Why Not?

Fortunately there was still Finkie. All the old boys had left town, leaving St. Clair far behind their wake of self-imposed exile. Party over. Finkie, last friend standing. Finkie, Harry's gang of one.

Like Harry, Ronnie Finkelstein was mired in his own cultural, professional and spiritual wasteland. Twenty-seven and perpetually broke, still living at home, shooting wedding and bar mitzvah videos to an ever-dwindling clientele, Finkie was going nowhere. Unlike Mike Winikoff, his former classmate at film school, Finkie couldn't figure out how to leverage his degree towards the yellow brick road of fame and fortune. To his credit, Finkie didn't stop trying. He figured he'd keep pushing until he hit thirty, then he'd roll over and die.

The issue wasn't talent. As a cinematographer, Finkie was brilliant. Every frame, every film he shot, down to the two hundred buck surprise party gig was technically flawless. Taste and attitude though, had a tendency to muck things up.

Finkie had an eye for the grotesque, something he mistook as Fellini-inspired. Whatever the case, Finkie's artistic vision didn't cut it filming weddings and Sweet Sixteens.

Consider the Harris wedding with forty-two minutes of close-ups of men with bad toupees.

"Williard on balding heads. Would've killed at the box office!"

Consider the Schwartz bar mitzvah where he shot thirty-five minutes of the dwarf aunt.

"A dwarf dancing the cha cha? Golden, fucking golden!"

But the pièce de résistance had to be the Fenster Sweet Sixteen.

"Of course the father tried to run you over with his Lincoln, you took a bush-shot of his daughter at her own Sweet Sixteen!"

"That just happened..." he'd shrug.

"Just happened, Finkie? Just happened?! You shot that from under the table."

"An angle shot, that's all. It's not my fault the chick doesn't use Neat."

Finkie always had to have the last word. Yes, the stories were hysterical and Harry reveled in them. But they didn't help business. Finkie's delusion: that he was a true artiste, a hybrid of Fellini and Lenny Bruce.

So if his clients couldn't appreciate that, then, "They could all go fuck themselves."

And that became his new mantra. Before long, the only job that Finkie could get was working as a shipper in his Uncle Hershie's boot factory. Then one week he got a paycheck without overtime pay for a fifty hour week he put in to get out a special Sears order.

"I was a little tight with the cash flow," Hershie explained. "Family's gotta bite the bullet first, just till we get through this quarter."

"So you bite the fucking bullet, Uncle Hershie! You're living in Fernwood Hills, not me!"

"Listen Big Mouth, I only keep you as a favor to your mother with your father doing time. If you don't like it Ronnie, then leave."

Which Finkie did, but not before having an epiphany that he shared with Harry later that night.

"Fuck all this bullshit! We're going to write a Feldman spec script  together, then go down to L.A. and make it big like Mike Winikoff. Now he's writing for Brewski's, probably making three, four hundred grand a year."

True, true, true, Winikoff was making it big in L.A. Then again, he didn't find the yellow brick road by bushwhacking beaver shots at Sweet Sixteens. Winikoff meant business from Day One.

Still, Finkie's idea struck a chord with Harry: Making it big. And no matter how far-fetched it really was, it sounded a lot better than selling belts.

So Harry thought,"Why not?"