The Anomaly(11)

I just wasn’t any good. Or not good enough, anyway. I finally bailed on the industry after a year writing and rewriting a surefire winner. It was TV on this occasion, the long-cherished pet project of a guy near the top of Fox, and thus Totally Guaranteed to Get Made. Then one day he suddenly wasn’t there anymore, for reasons I never established—it was like he was abducted—and his successor followed the standard procedure of setting fire to any project that had consumed conspicuous resources before she arrived.

I took the meeting, was polite and professional and did not stab her with a pen, and walked out sanguinely considering which of my spec scripts I’d return to, phone in hand to inform my agent I was back in the ring and he should put me up for every open assignment in town. Then I stopped walking.

People tutted as I stood on the sidewalk and stared down at my trusty phone. It looked like an alien artifact, and I realized that the promising ideas on my laptop were destined to remain that way. Empty promises.

I shoved the phone back in my pocket and walked Pico Boulevard all the way to Santa Monica. This, in case you’re unfamiliar with the geography of LA, is a very long way.

By the time I got to the ocean I was hot and tired, perplexed and a little concerned to find my face wet with tears I hadn’t noticed shedding. I was exhausted, frustrated, and bored to death. I lay on the beach, trying to doggedly rekindle the phoenix of my mojo as I had so many times before, acknowledging that I should take a break—the Fox guy had been a smart producer but excessively focused, and I’d been working long, long days for a long, long time—but basically telling myself to get on with life as I knew it.

Neither of these things happened.

My soul was empty.

I was done.

When the light started to fade I called Kristy and she came and picked me up. We went out in our neighborhood and sat in a bar with our arms around each other and she told me how talented I was and how I’d find my thing eventually and everything would be great and that she loved me.

We were like that, then.



I became aware of footsteps approaching, and looked up to see Ken falling back to join me. The trail had temporarily widened enough for two people to walk abreast.

“So,” he said. “I’m pleased to report that morale up front is high. Pierre is getting good stuff, and that Feather girl turns out to be a cheerful little love who’s causing me no grief whatsoever. It’s all fabulous, basically, apart, I’m sensing, from within what passes for the soul of Nolan Moore.”

“I’m fine.”

“Bollocks you are. I overheard the closing stages of that little ‘interview’ up there. Voices got loud.”

“If you say that you told me so, I will slay you.”

“No need. And fuck it. I don’t say this often, because I don’t want to encourage you. But you’re good at what you do, Nolan. That’s nothing to do with talent, because you have none. But you find stuff worth saying and then you say it, nice and clearly. Whether you believe any of it doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does.”

“That’s because you’re a tosser. Bit of history for you, mate. As you know, the most successful movie I ever made was called The Undying Dead.”

“I…still haven’t seen it.”

“Good. It’s still a piece of crap. But it got great word of mouth and we were in profit before it even went to DVD. The Kenmobile came out of that movie. And the wife’s tits. Her choice—I was perfectly happy with the ones she had. Anyway. The movie was by-the-numbers vampire bollocks, and the director was the biggest wanker I ever had the misfortune of working with. Nick, his name was, Nick Golson. What a cunt. But I ran into him six months ago during a party at a horror convention down in San Diego—he’s churning out zombie shit for cable these days—and I joked with him about how fucking poor The Undying Dead was. He listened, and when I was done, he crooked his finger. I followed him across the party to this woman. He tells her I was the producer on Dead, and asked her to tell me what she’d just told him. I won’t bore you with the details but basically her mum died a month before the movie came out, and there was a chunk of dialogue—which I wrote, information that Golson was man enough to volunteer, amazingly—that helped her move on, come to terms, all that. Nearly twenty years later, she’s still grateful. Quoted the entire speech, word for word.”

“That’s nice.”

“It is. And so I did not tell her that I’d written most of it while taking a shit. My point is neither you nor I know what will matter to the audience in the long run. The truth? Who gives a fuck? The Bible’s full of utter cock and there are ten thousand wankers out there using it as an excuse to behave like total fucking arseholes. Same as the Koran and the Talmud and probably whatever the fuck it is that Buddhists get their spells out of. But on the other hand there’s been millions of people, over thousands of years, who’ve got through the day because of that bullshit, or had their heart lifted, or looked at the world differently for ten minutes.”

“The Anomaly Files is not a spiritual enterprise, Ken.”

“Isn’t it? You say one thing in each episode that makes someone see the universe as a bit less tedious, or makes them ask questions about the world, it’s job done, mate. Whether it’s ‘true’ or not, or what that snide Millennial bitch Gemma thinks…who cares? The truth is for teenagers and hippies. We’re too old and ugly for that crap. ‘Wake me up, make me think, or buy me a drink. Otherwise, fuck off.’”