Fiction Friday

This is from the first chapter of my will-see-the-light-of-day-sometime-soon novel "Goldberg Variations." This excerpt was published in an issue of New England Writers Network a couple years back. Hope you like it.

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With my union-allotted mid-morning break drawing to a close, I watched the last of one of my niftier smoke rings dissolve into the miasma of the Los Angeles basin. The act made me feel oddly magnanimous, having freed these poor trapped molecules of carbon monoxide so they could rendezvous with the mother ship. Like I was the only one who knew that they were truly alive, like that elephant in the Dr. Seuss book who found a universe in a dandelion. If I weren’t so hung over I probably would have remembered the elephant’s name.

“Catering!”

No, I pondered, working the now-exhausted butt underneath one Ferragamo slide while idly contemplating the well-developed torso on one of the grips. The elephant’s name wasn’t “Catering.” And that wasn’t my name, either, though certain parties in Hollywood seemed to think so. One of them appeared to be heading in my direction.

“You there! Catering!”

Barking at me was the producer’s Napoleonic spawn, a rough draft of a man with a Rolex rip-off and bad plugs. I sighed and looked at my watch. I had three minutes until I had to smile and dish out designer coffee and Krispy Kremes, so I ignored him. I was in no mood to salute this asshole’s flag a second early than required by my contract.

“Jesus, are you deaf?” he said.

My name wasn’t Jesus, either, and I was also pretty sure that while Jesus might have been a victim of a simple misunderstanding, his problems ran a little deeper than a hearing aide could have solved.

Little Producer Man opened his mouth a fourth time, bent on haranguing me further, no doubt, and would probably have kept haranguing me until I acknowledged his pathetic overprivileged existence, so I gave him a little smile and pointed to my chest. As if it were just a matter of not having heard him over the bustle and clatter of the back-end of a movie set.

“Yeah, you,” he said. “Cappuccino. Trailer three. Nonfat milk. Don’t screw it up.”

“I’m not going in there.” That was an assistant’s job. Besides, the last coffee jock who’d gone into Anastasia Cole’s trailer had exited wearing the cappuccino. Whole milk. Extra cinnamon. Then kept on walking. If either he or Miss Silicone Tits thought that a slew of forgettable teen horror flicks and one Oscar nomination—for supporting actress, in a slow year—earned her the right to swat the worker bees, then they both had another thing coming. I didn’t care that my teenaged nephew adored her and had seen all of her movies, some twice. Suddenly I wished I was a coffee jock—just so I could march into her trailer with a cup of tea and see how she damned well liked it.

The heir-apparent let out a long sigh. “OK. What’s it worth to you?”

“Excuse me?”

He pulled out his wallet. “Ten bucks?”

Ten bucks? I saw what that snot-nosed pisher drove onto the set. My parents hadn’t paid as much for their bed and breakfast. “Fifty. But if she throws it at me, I’m walking too. And I’ll take the entire catering unit with me.”
I had no authority to do so, but I’d been working with guys like this for years. It seemed like a safe bet that beyond his own imagined influence, he didn’t have a clue who was responsible for what.

A vein on his forehead bulged. “Christ. You’re as bad as the agents. Anastasia won’t do the nude scene, the other producers are that close to backing out and now the catering girl is shaking me down for a lousy cup of coffee.”

I straightened my spine, which probably didn’t make me any taller than my usual five-foot-five, sans moussed curls and impractical footwear, but made me feel more intimidating. “What did you call me?”

He got right up in my face. “Catering. Girl. No power.” He pointed to himself. “Producer. Power. Get the difference?”

I smiled sweetly at him. “Thank you for clearing that up for me. Now let me give you some advice. When Daddy makes you drive to McDonald’s to pick up dinner for the crew, don’t forget the french fries. Makes the union guys pissy.”

Then I turned and started toward my car. Forcing a cool, confident walk-away so he wouldn’t see that I was having a quiet nervous breakdown over what I’d just done. This crappy movie was probably going straight to video, but I needed this job bad. In the thirteen years since little Frankie Goldberg left the East Coast and the comfort of my mother’s brisket, the career as a famous movie star hadn’t panned out. Nor had I been doing very well as a fair-to-middling stand-up comedian. The only marketable skill I had left was a knack for cooking in large quantities, and at the moment I couldn’t afford to put my job on the line just to make a point. I had bills coming due, the Barracuda was on its last cylinder, and I owed my sister and her current husband, at her last accounting, six hundred and thirty two dollars and fifteen cents.

It was the fifteen cents that bothered me the most.

“All right,” he said. “Fifty. And I’ll talk to her first.”

I let out my breath. “Nonfat milk, you said?”