Hollywood, CA

            Eeeegads, I am back, just like I swore I’d be.  When did I take that solemn oath anyway…last spring?  Last summer?  Two summers ago?  I’ll get around to figuring that out in due course, but right now it’s important to know that I took my vow as I should have, on the beach.  I was standing there at sunset right across the road from Ventura Raceway with a kite string in one hand and the damp little palm of my son in the other and the waves of the Pacific lapping the shore when as loudly as I could, so as to be heard above the snappish 7,500 rpm scream of about a dozen 360 sprint cars running 120 mile an hour laps sideways around a ¼ mile dirt track less than 50 yards away, I looked down at my son and uttered the narcissistic ego-drenched oath sworn by all dimwitted aging hack generals bedecked in uniform caps sporting custom-woven suck-ass ill-gotten stars:     I shall return.  To tell you the truth, at that moment I had not yet been promoted from Second Lieutenant (Ret.) to General Bongo, but we will get to that in due course as well.  Leaving aside rank for the moment, suffice to say that the epithets immediately preceding the word “generals” applied to me even then, as would the description immediately following soon enough, and richly so.

            Even after my promotion, however, I did not return, like certain other generals, to wade prosaically through a gentle surf and stride purposefully across silken sands and polished rocks of the beach whence I swore I would return, but rather to my writing room, which is located – here’s the prosaic part – in the former servant’s quarters of our house in the Hollywood Hills.  It’s a room about 10 feet square with a closet the size of a New York kitchen – hey, this is California, after all  – lacking even such usual amenities as heat, much less air conditioning.  In other words, the ideal cell-like containment for a writer under contract.  This house was one of the first built in the hills above Hollywood and Vine in the early 1920’s, when it cost what was then an astounding $40,000.  It’s a Golden Age Spanish style manse with a tile roof and a turreted entrance and several stained glass windows.  Inside, there are decorative-tile floors, rough-hewn Douglas fir beams, several hand-painted murals, and even a small, octagonal chapel complete with a nook for a statue of the Virgin Mary designed for the Catholic family that were the first owners.  The house began a steep descent when they moved out, however.  There is evidence in the remnants of  a very elaborate telephone system with wiring for a switchboard and more than a dozen outside lines that it was in use not too many years ago as the operations center of what used to be known as an out-call service, but which is today known by police and philandering governors alike as an escort business.  And downward the old place spiraled until it reached its present condition, with its servants quarters having been reduced to the status of writing room. 

            I have been writing under one kind of hellish contract or another for going on 40 years now, and during that time I have been confined in spaces far smaller and on rare occasions even larger.  I once wrote a story longhand in very small letters in my reporter’s notebook while crouched behind a pillar in the boiler room of a pension in Beirut as artillery rounds thundered to earth nearby and terrorists exploded car bombs down the street.  But I also toiled in some pretty fabulous hotel suites while working for magazines in those halcyon days of yore, before they decided that paying 1970’s story fees would be a hell of good idea in the Twenty-First Century and $39.95 rooms in the Comfort Inn and their tiny little desks served the same purpose as a high-end copy of an 1840 partners’ desk at the Drake in Chicago or a marble slab the size of an autopsy table at Campton Place in San Francisco.

            Being under contract is a nasty business in the writing game and should be avoided if at all possible.  What used to happen was, you signed this lengthy document of many paragraphs…referred to quaintly as “clauses” -- by which you surrendered pretty much everything deriving from the fruit of your labors other than your by-line, which the employer reserved the right to fuck-up in every way up to and including misspelling it, and then you went into a room and you closed the door, and you were allowed out when you are able to carry, depending on the nature of the contract, 30, or 120, or 800 pages of manuscript, which you would then deliver by hand or dispatch by mail to the employer in question.  Today you are instructed to send the same numbers of pages with clicks of a mouse, but otherwise, the task expected and the toil extracted and the rights surrendered by the resident of the writing room – whomever he or she may be -- remain the same.  Then at the leisure of the employer, some weeks or even months in the future, they send you a check for an amount which will buy you significantly less beans and rice than the same amount would have when you first entered the writing room and began the work which earned the paycheck.  And then they send you back into the writing room so that days or weeks or months from now you will come out with even more fucking pages, and they send you another fucking check at their fucking leisure that will buy even less beans and rice than before, and so you go back into the writing room in order to maintain some fractional modicum of hope that you will be able to keep yourself and your family in beans and rice until…well, until when exactly?  Until you reach retirement age? What fucking retirement age?  In his 80’s, Gore Vidal is still lashed to a chair in his writing room and they had to pry Norman Mailer’s fingers from his pencil the day he was found dead at age 84 and when Philip Roth finally goes into the ground his publisher will send out a crew of interns to dig up his corpse and tie 14 gauge wire to his big toes and put a zillion watts into him hoping that he’ll rise from the dead and crank out another masterpiece and get another chance at the Nobel and thus double or triple or maybe even quadruple profits from his final masterpiece and then there’s the explosion of earnings to be gleaned from reprinting his backlist with the goddamned Nobel emblazoned on the cover bigger than his name….

            These are bleak, even ugly truths to which I can attest from long experience and because right now I am sitting at my desk in my writing room and through my window I can see several jet-black Sikorsky S-76 model C helicopters circling above, pitching from side to side in the arid updrafts rising from flash-fried brush and baked asphalt pock-marking these micro-waved hills, circling, ever circling, and I know who is in those helicopters, yes indeed.  Seated on plush rolled and pleated cushions upholstered with ultra-supple hides of rare endangered baby Odawallas are representatives of several corporations to which I am under contract:  a studio business affairs vice president, one magazine editor and the owner of its magazine holding company, and the President of at least one major publishing “group.” As usual, next to them are a collection of masseuses and nail-technicians and surgeons assisted by leggy, big-breasted medical nurses sporting $750 cut-and-color jobs and bi-focal wearing anesthesiologists wielding titanium needles filled with the very latest in local anesthesia, because as executives of major corporations, we can’t risk losing consciousness even for a moment, can we?  I mean, we don’t want to miss a call, or a bloody text message, or the dulcet tones of a Blackberry with news of a deal, or an offer, or the firing of a rival, do we?   Huh?  Well fucking do we? 

            Right now, at this very moment, as these highly alert mondo-anesthetically-enhanced executives train their $1500 Nikon binoculars on the windows of my writing room and have their nails polished and their incisors honed with special high-tensile steel Swiss military files, tiny scalpels are being wielded by expert surgeons, executing tiny slices into which fuzzy follicles removed only hours previously from newborns in the deep Valley are stitched atop bald pates, while down below, mobile-laser-liposuction instruments suck raw red meat protein from necks sans-wrinkles and abs-sans-fat, prophylactic measures you understand, because god help you if you’re caught with even a haze of a fucking shadow of a wrinkle at the Palm or the Ivy or even in the drop-off lane of your five-year-old daughter’s private school where she attends a $27,000 a year Kindergarten class which goes up to $30,000 after she’s learned her ABC’s, because then it might look like you’re…gasp…getting old, and what manner of vicious hell would be wreaked upon you and your contract if that got out?

            I state this fully realizing that I sound like what the French call a geezier, but what do I care?  I have recently been promoted, and besides there’s no percentage in lying these days, even if all you’re doing is telling a little fib about your age, what with Google and whatever versions of the “facts” those freedom loving free-information freaks are pushing at the moment.  Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose, huh, Kris? Wake up, you old coot.  Freedom’s just another word for having nothin’ left to give up, is more like it these days. 

            I see that I have digressed…no, I’m not digressing, I’m giving you the grim facts, and listen-up, here's another one:  go ahead and be a sucker and live your life like you're riding a tractor and wearing an oil-stained cap, but you had better avail yourself of the kinds of medical treatments and cosmetic services being administered at this very moment to the executives circling in their Sikorskys outside my window, or you’ll get dusted by their prop-wash, that’s what will happen to your sorry ass. You'd better believe that I know what I'm talking about on this and many other subjects, because the years I’ve spent in my writing room have left me old and distinguished and loaded down with wisdom.  As I contemplate the enormity of the task ahead, it therefore gives me no pleasure to announce that I have returned to shift as much of the weight of my wisdom as I possibly can onto your shoulders so that I can traipse off into my Golden Years light of foot and free of mind, burdened only by one wife, three children, ninety-five chickens, eight roosters, two peacocks, two Dachsunds, five cats and three unfulfilled contracts.