Two More Calls

Calling Gomez Glick


Harry studied the wide and loopy  handwriting scrawled on the back of the rumpled wedding seating-card. Hard to believe that it wasn't written by a teenage girl.  And what was with dotting the small 'i' with a smiley face? Harry sighed and dialed the phone number. He knew that eventually he'd rue the day he called Gomez Glick. Still, a contact was a contact.

"Hey there, Gomez! It's Harry Starr calling. We met at that wedding in Montreal."

"Yeah, Harry, of course. So when are you coming down to L.A.?" Gomez instinctively grabbed for the nail-clippers resting on the nightstand in the same place that he used to keep his pack of Marlboro Lights. He wished that he never quit smoking. Incessant nail-clipping wasn't anywhere nearly as satisfying as smoking. Those slow-poky nails took so long to grow.

"That's actually why I'm calling you. My script is ready and I'm looking to go down to LA.."

"Cool. Do you have a place to stay?"

"Umm, no. D'you know of any places? Reasonably priced of course."

Gomez thought hard for a few seconds while clipping the mangled yellowed nail of his baby toe. "Hmmm...I think I do, Harry. There's this girl, Wendy, who I was seeing for a while..."

'This girl I'm seeing.' 

Just another pretend girlfriend like that Joy chick he took to the wedding. Swishy Gomez Glick: Harry already  figured him out.  The girly handwriting, the fake girlfriends. Another Mr. Platonic. Home address - the closet.

"Wendy's renting out rooms in her big house in Santa  Monica. Big story there: Her father, who used to own this traveling carnival...did a killing with it...Anyhow he got arrested for fraud and tax evasion, so before the IRS confiscated all his assets, he bought Wendy this big crazy house in Santa Monica. Taking in boarders is the only cash flow her dad has these days," Gomez said while still working on the mangled nail of his baby toe.

Too much information, too much information.

"Aha," Harry mumbled while chewing on his thumb-nail.

"Wendy works as a PA on Sheza the Amazon Warrior -- whose tits are real by the way..."

"Whose tits?

Why is he telling me this?

Because guys like Gomez Glick love to keep people off balance by pumping out a constant mix of truth and bullshit. Like his name. The story he told: That his father, who owned a jazz club in Chicago, (true), named Gomez after the great trumpet player, Gomez Javier, (bullshit). Gomez Glick claimed that back in Chicago he was a corporate attorney for "some big-ass commodity trading consortium with headquarters in Luxembourg,"(bullshit - Gomez Glick nee Irwin Glickman, was actually a high school drama teacher who renamed himself when he moved to California after he broke up with his girlfriend of seven years, Sarah Tannenbaum, a movie critic for the Chicago Tribune,(bullshit, they were just good friends)). Yes, Gomez Glick was a true bullshit artist and he wasn't even from St. Clair.

"Sheza's tits, you big dummy. Don't you watch the show?"

"Never."

"Doesn't matter, neither do I. Anyhow I could speak to Wendy..." Gomez moved on to the next toe, this-little-piggy-number-four, always a breeze to clip compared to problematic baby toes.

"Sure."

An error in progress; Harry knew that it was a bad idea to get trapped into the Wonderful Bullshit World of Gomezland,  but he always had a soft spot for bullshitters. Unlike the straight-shooters, pathological liars were at least true to themselves.

For sure.

"I think she's charging like $350 a month?"

"Three hundred-and-fifty bucks a month?" Three hundred-fifty bucks more than he was paying for his basement pad in his parents' duplex.

"Maybe $400? That's still a great price for around here where there's practically nothing to rent, unless you want to stay in a hotel for like a gazillion bucks a night. And the house is in a great area, a couple blocks from the Starbucks on Montana. I saw Ted Danson there yesterday. He drives a black SUV and wears a rug."

"Ted Danson wears a rug?"

"You heard it here first."

"So getting back to Wendy...Can you speak to her?"

"Sure, we're going out for dinner tonight. Call me back tomorrow. Just a word of warning..."

Oh shit.

"Wendy's got like a bunch of dogs and cats, and maybe a ferret or something. And there are all these other boarders living there. So well...it is what it is.  A room in a cool place for a good price with lots of barking." On to this-little-piggy-number-three.

"Yeah..."

"Don't say I didn't warn you, Harry. There's dog shit all over the lawn."

"..."

"And ants. Lots of ants."

"I won't say anything, Gomez. By the way, how's your pilot, Leftovers, going?

This-little-piggies numbers three and two down, on to the juicy big toe. Gomez clipped away. Talk and clip, talk and clip. More satisfying than eating pistachio nuts. Gomez sighed. If only he had twenty fingers and twenty toes, he'd never miss smoking.

"Ouchie!" Gomez cried.

"What's wrong, Gomez? Are you okay?"

"No, it's okay,  just cut my big toe.  The corners of my toenails are just so hard to clip. God didn't bless me with straight toenails," he sighed. "I guess we can't have it all."

"I guess?"

"Leftovers? Aw you know, development hell, especially when you're dealing with washed-up stars. Duane Day dropped seventy pounds since his Feldman days and now he thinks he's gorgeous. Meanwhile he's just not funny if he ain't fat. So he dumps Cindy Saffron and elopes with the love of his life, his first cousin from Arkansas. He actually thinks it's cool that his mother-in-law is also his aunt. So now Miss Saffron, who hasn't worked in ten years if you don't count dinner theaters, wants to quit. Then there's Sonny Pinto who's  trying to get the movie made of Mr. Nanny, and will drop this project if that ever happens. At least Wenzday Wilson's still on board, even if he hates my guts because I asked him to pay me back the fifty bucks I lent him. I mean fifty bucks is fifty bucks, it's not like I've got this series in production where I'm taking home a hundred grand an episode. I only made twenty grand so far off this pilot and who knows when the next pay check will come. Meanwhile, I may have to take a job in telemarketing. But aside from that, everything is great."

"That's good, Gomez...I guess?"

"That's the biz, Harry. Get used to it."

"Yeah...So I'll call you back tomorrow, Gomez. Thanks."

"Oh fuckarama, my big toe is bleeding now."

And this little piggy went crying, "Wa wa wa," all the way home.


Calling Coach Slutsky


Call Teddy, call Teddy, everyone in St. Clair said. He's made it big now, doing stand-up and producing on the kiddie sitcom House Hubbies. Teddy will help you, everyone in St. Clair said. Everyone in St. Clair knew everything. No one in St. Clair knew shit. But the people there were always generous with free advice.

Teddy Slutsky, a St. Clair boy made good in Hollywood.

The same pimped-out Teddy Slutsky who was Harry's football coach from the old glory days. Harry could still picture Teddy with the fu manchu moustache, flowing silk shirts and gold-studded clogs barking outorders from the sidelines and sneaking out for smokes during time-outs.

Hollywood Teddy never answered his home phone, but the message on his answering machine attested that he was now a Hollywood insider, at least in his own mind:

"Hey there folks and strokes, I'm not in right now because I'm preparing my monologue for The Tonight Show. Leave a message and I'll have my buxom assistant, Brandy, call you back...Hee hee hee, Brandy. Knock it off, I'm recording a message..."

But this time Teddy picked up. He was waiting for a call back from his Thai escort who was running late.

"Hello Teddy, it's Harry Starr. You used to coach me on the St. Clair  Mustangs. how are you?"

"Oh man, St. Clair. That was in another lifetime. St. Clair."

"Yeah, I used to play quarterback. Remember we made it to the provincial finals two years in a row and got our asses kicked both times on those frozen fields?"

"Yeah, right the Mustangs. Were you the kid with the red hair and freckles who stuttered?"

"N-n-n-o, that was Shnorky Shipper. He played center."

"Shnorky Shipper, the orthodontist's kid?"

"No, that was Shlong Schwenger."

"Shlong Schwenger?! That shit-head who fucked my little sister?!"

Everyone in St. Clair fucked your little sister, "Open-Sesame."

"Really?"

"That fat little prick. I'm about to run out...What's your name again?"

"Harry. Harry Starr."

"Did your father sell ties?"

"No, but he once sold--"

"So what's up, Harry?  Make it quick, I gotta run for a taping."

"Well, I'm--"

"Can you call me back in a few days, kid? I really gotta run now. I'm late and I'm warming up the audience for Vets in Heat. Bye."

Click.

"I'm going down to..." Harry said to the dead air.