I can hear his breathing.
My pitch is so scary, beyond edgy, that it would scandalize your grandmother, aunt, sister, cousin, and niece all in the first twenty seconds. They would plug their ears. It's like Lolita on crystal meth. I don't know if you know this but most erotic films are directed by women. I assume Shelly Kind does know this.
My mission, for three minutes, is to tell this man who has heard tens of thousands of stories in his life, a story that will make his balls shrink back up into his body and give him sights that he'll replay as he fucks his wife that night. That's my goal: I want to sneak into this man's brain so far that when he's fucking a Portia de Rossi lookalike he won't be able to think about her grand little pussy because he'll be thinking about my story. That's my mission.
Everything I ever learned in Glengarry Glen Ross springs to mind. Alec Baldwin telling me to sell them.
Every guy I ever sold a load of bullshit to—you know, telling him I'm 27 when really I'm 37. He knows it's not true, but it's the fantasy you're playing out together. Me and Shelly Kind were playing out that kind of fantasy. I wasn't supposed to be there. He wasn't supposed to listen to me. But together we put a few sticks and someone blew a spark and it became real. That's how it happens with seduction and that's what was happening between me and Shelly Kind in the mens' room at this ridiculous Hollywood party. I could feel him getting hard—not necessarily between his legs, but—in his mind. My voice became epic; I was using tones I had never used before. I let myself believe it—just like I let myself believe I was 27 when I was telling those boys I was 27. If I didn't believe it, how would they? If I didn't believe that this would be the next movie Shelly Kind would make, how would he?
So I spread it on thick—I spread it like jam. I showed Shelly images of female dignity skewered on cock—at times literally—and I spun him such a story of violence and manipulation and horror that I knew was unfilmable, unmarketable, unpalatable, unacceptable, and un- just about everything you can think of.
But I knew a little something about movies from my years of watching them. Basically: You can't edit Pulp Fiction. At some point you just have to say: We're going to make this monster. We're going to roll the dice and make Apocalypse Now. Life is the big game. Movies are the same. No one gets ahead without boldness. Have you ever heard of Miguel de Cervantes? He wrote Don Quixote, which is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. He wasn't playing the small game. You know what he said? In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd. That's not your neighborhood yoga teacher saying that—it's the man who wrote one of the first novels considered a novel. A great achiever. And that's how he dreamed. I think you'll find, if you canvass this world, that the most serious people are also the most unhinged, the most imaginative, and the most absurd.
I channeled the fuck out of Cervantes in that bathroom stall.
And you know what else I thought of? I thought of that piece of dialogue from Walk the Line, where Johnny Cash is playing shitty music and the DJ knows it's shitty and he says, If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song..one song that people would remember before you're dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth. One song that would sum you up. You tellin' me that's the song you'd sing? And then he goes further. He says: Or..would you sing somethin' different. Somethin' real. Somethin' you felt. Cause I'm telling you right now, that's the kind of song people want to hear. That's the kind of song that truly saves people. And then this DJ tells the great artist, It ain't got nothin to do with believin' in God, Mr. Cash. It has to do with believin' in yourself.
And there were a great many other pieces of wisdom I bolstered myself with, as I told that man my story—from Star Wars, The Matrix..Obi-Wan and Morpheus were right under my tongue as I pitched Shelly Kind.
And when I was done there was a long silence between us.
And my heart fluttered like it was my first kiss.
Then Shelly flushed the toilet and as he was wiping his ass he said, "I'll see you in my office Monday at 8am. I assume you can find it."
"I found you here," I say.
Kristi and I smoked and drank and laughed all night over that one. Shelly kind accepting a pitch meeting with an unknown from Portland while wiping his ass in a tuxedo.
"You have some solid brass neuticles," Kristi says.
"What do you mean?"
"You followed him into the mens' room??!!"
"You told me to do whatever it takes!!"
Kristi sips her Keystone Ice.
"Still," she says.
I look at her and giggle like I haven't since I was sixteen.
"You're not done yet," she says, sitting on the floor cross-legged with the tablet in her lap. "I've prepared a history of Mr. Kind and my advice to you is to slow down on that beer and study this shit before you end up in a room with that motherfucker because he's seen a lot of things and had experiences that you can only imagine and I think you would be wise to read some of the materials I've put together for you—"
"Ok," I say. "Two mods, though."
"What."
"One. I don't slow down on the beer."
Kristi laughs. "Ok."
"Two. You read me the research. I can't read while I'm drinking beer."
"Ok but pay attention. This is important. This is a one-shot business."
"I'm doing alright on that front," I say.
"Don't get cocky," says this 20 year old sitting on my carpet in her panties.
"Ok," I say, sitting across from her.
I delude myself that I can concentrate myself into sobering up.
"One thing you've got to know," Kristi says. "Is that you're dealing with an eccentric motherfucker. Some of these assholes have never left Los Angeles. This guy has hiked Machu Picchu. He sold paintings as a 30 something. Like sold paintings with Mary Boone in New York City. So he knows art. And he knows life. And he knows how to get inside the pants of waitresses from Portland."
"I doubt that. How many people has he slept with?"
"Sixty. Maybe seventy. I can't get an exact count. So watch out for that bastard. He might just take your screenplay for a penny and your tight little twitch for free."