"Sally Field is STILL whining about Chasen's closing down. I say she should show more concern for her stranded career," Loweman said, slurring most of his words.
"That is...interesting," I said, not interested.
"And speaking of 'has-beens'; I saw Peter Scolari at the Westside Pavilion last weekend, and when I offered the perfunctory 'what up', the motherfucker ignored me! Can you believe that? He ignores me! My father handed him Bosom Buddies and Newhart on a goddamn silver platter! The bastard treats me like I'm to blame for his miserable run of luck. Well...you know what I always say--"
"Your career is what you make of it," I finished for him. "Yes. I know."
"Your career is whatever the fuck you make of it," Loweman said, swaying drunkenly.
I turned away from Loweman and looked out the window, and I barely saw the top of a billboard advertisement of a film I produced this past summer, which provided me with insane relief for some reason. It made me feel...viable. Was that the word that best matched my emotion?
"Whatever," Loweman continued. "I'm over it."
"When Corey Feldman and the cast of Head of the Class stop returning your phone calls, then you've got real problems," I said, dryly. Loweman laughed too loud and a couple of young agents from CAA look over at us.
Loweman's party was still going strong, even after 3am. A TV glowed in a corner of the room. It was a story about the little girl in West Covina who had been missing since last Thursday. Some mexican roadside fruit merchant found her body yesterday in a drainage system near Walmerado Park. The fruit merchant called the police after he saw what was left of her small body emerging from the open end of a culvert. She and her younger brother had been playing together the week before when she fell into a ditch and broke her neck. Her brother ran, but did not get help. It is believed that coyotes (or vampires) may be responsible for the severe mutilation.
I began looking around the room at everyone, bored, comparing salaries and gross percentages. Kevin Bacon was talking to Taylor (Taylor is directing Kevin in his next film, otherwise Kevin wouldn't have been invited last night). Jack White and Vince Vaughn arrived shortly after Scarlett Johansson began talking to some prick agent at the bar. One of the animators from Pixar was snorting cocaine off the coffee table with Dakota Fanning. Nearby, Seth Rogan and Heather Graham began talking about "filial piety" in film and I wished I had a gun to blow my fucking brains out with. Lil Wayne waved at me when he came out of the bathroom, and I suddenly remembered some of the things he said about me in Variety, so I ignored him.
Loweman left me to go chat with Vince Vaughn, who was hanging all over some pretty actress whose name I didn't know. I moved over to the bar to freshen my Balvenie.
"Loved your last film," the prick agent said to me as I stood next to him.
"Ditto," I said. The prick agent didn't know how to respond to this, so he went back to his vapid conversation with Scarlett, who couldn't keep her eyes off of me. I wandered back into one of the bedrooms and found Mark Brucer fucking a beautiful girl who came to the party with Jack White. Mark looked over his shoulder and smiled at me, but he didn't stop fucking Jack's girlfriend, so I moved back out into the living room, searching for an escape. When Taylor asked me if I wanted to go to Zole's Hole, I couldn't say 'yes' fast enough.
WHAT I REMEMBER FROM ZOLE'S HOLE:
Televisions. Too many televisions; mounted on the walls of Zole's Hole like hundreds of security monitors. Televisions. Flashing their surreal and violent images, synched to whatever the club DJ happened to be playing. Too many televisions; shrouded in plumes of dry-ice smoke that fell and settled in patches below the staircases and catwalks where there were still more televisions. The confetti-maker spewed tiny shreds of mylar from a vibrating hose over the dancing crowd on the main floor, and everyone not dancing moved through shadows with cocktail glasses and beers and shots, and everyone had to talk loud against the music and the roar of conversation, and the laughter made it seem like everyone was SCREAMING AT ONCE. But everyone looked good and smelled good and talked good and there was nothing real about the setting at all, but it seemed like the most natural and only thing in the world while it was happening.
This was where Taylor and I went last night. Zole's Hole in Hollywood. 16,000 square feet filled with a sea of depthless clubland-seeking vampires. Taylor ran into an old Harvard friend of ours called M.W.; Some young, slick, well-manicured, capped teeth blowhard. CEO. Mover. Shaker. StarMaker. Exactly like the rest of us, and by "rest of us" I mean "everyone". We had to endure every trendy word of conversation with this punk. Apparently--from what I could gather from his coked-up-mile-a-minute barrage of meaningless words--he had just bought a Wii.
Our place at Zole's Hole was the corner booth with a direct view of the long bar and the busy dance floor. The primo spot in the club. Funny, but I couldn't stop glancing up at the televisions above our table. And there was one instance, one brief moment last night, when the image on all screens was that of the bridge exploding from the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, and then the bridge was gone, and new, separate images occurred; flashing words and numbers; different sequences on each screen and then suddenly all of the screens read: THIS IS THE DAY THAT THE LORD HATH MADE; the words flashing momentarily, and cartoon blood began to seep down from the top of the screen, covering all but five letters: D-E-A-T-H. And those letters came together, forming the word, flashing over and over and over on every television. And then all of the screens went dark and the dancing crowd cheered, and I just couldn't fucking take it anymore, and I realized that I was having a panic attack. I got out of the booth without saying a word to Taylor or M.W., and walking on weak legs, I stumbled around people as I made my way to the bar to pay my tab, and there was a moment, as I made my way to towards the big mirrored double doors on my way out into the night, where I honestly believed that if I had looked up at the televisions at that exact moment, I would have seen my life flashing before my eyes; separate, graphic images on each and every one of the the 36 inch screens.
PHONE MESSAGES IN MY VOICE MAIL LAST NIGHT:
--Mark Brucer called to let me know that he and his wife would like to have dinner with me tonight.
--Hyacinth called to tell me about the nightmare she had last night: She dreamt she couldn't find anything on sale at the Century City shopping mall.
--Someone keeps leaving me 90 second clips on my voicemail. Last night it was "Every Day Is Like Sunday" by Morrissey.
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