April 11, 2012. Issue 36. The Late Issue.
We searched near the house first: behind the shed, in the brush around the apple trees, where I had built forts as a boy. Next, the water's edge, the shallow banks, the beds of limestone. Wherever she was, she was well hidden. The week before she left, we knew her time had come. She spent a night in the rain, on her side, breathing heavily, moving as little as possible. We picked her up and placed her somewhere warm, on my old bedspread in the garage, where she could lie more comfortably. By morning, she was gone.
I don't remember who spotted her first, me or my father. Her auburn fur was unmistakable. It was clear before we approached that the dog was no longer living. From a distance she looked like something pulled from a warehouse, a stiff oil rag or paint chipped wheelbarrow. He reached her first. Told me I shouldn't see it, but I insisted, her body separated, her anatomy scattered across the weeds. We hoped that death came before whatever destroyed her. We didn't speak after that. Not to one another, not even to her, no gods above us. Here, we understood nature, never questioned it. This was the course of things, a much harsher course than we'd expected, but one we had no control of. It was never damned. I thought we would leave her, that it was done. It wasn't.
My father understood what it meant to bring an animal into your family. It would not end like this. I returned home and he made sure I didn't follow him back to her place of rest. He collected every part of her in a garbage bag, with a shovel. In a bank beside the lake, he buried her. He finished at night by flashlight. We never talked of it, still don't. I learned that with manhood came more than the things most commonly spoken of. Things unexpected, things that must be done because a loved one had earned as much. Man, woman, or dog – even the dog, especially this dog. It didn't matter. This process wasn't one of beauty, your hands can not remain clean, but it's necessary. Necessary was the biggest piece of the puzzle, the rest never mattered without it. It wasn't about pride or honor, it was about giving what's due.
My mother has been in a committed relationship since I was 17 years old. While people staying together that long is an anomaly within itself these days, my mother is still with the woman she fell in love with when I was only 12 years old.
My life as it is today hasn't always been this way. I grew up in a traditional home, my father worked as a journalist and editor for the local paper and my mother worked various jobs as we moved around.
From an early age, however, I knew there was something different about my family.
My parents seemed like they weren't very happy most of my life. My father manifested this by becoming a working alcoholic at a young age and my mother, well my mother cried a lot. Things were pretty bleak but it was my family and all I knew so I assumed this was how all families were. Things went on like this up until I was about 12.
My mother was involved in community theater my entire life. Everywhere we went, she found the local theater and immediately got herself and my brother and I involved in it.
We were all in plays together and had a lot of fun.
My father wasn't interested in the least. He didn't come to our performances and was pretty annoyed when we sat around practicing lines or rehearsing.
We moved away from my hometown for awhile when I was 11 and when I was almost 12, my mother met Mary for the first time. We all met Mary. She worked the light board for most of the plays in the theater and was just generally talented in all things set design.
Mary and my mother soon became best friends. We often did things were her family and things slowly began to change. We went camping more, we went on little trips. My mom smiled more. Mary had a daughter around my age and a son around my brother's age and I thought her husband was hilarious. Mostly, I was just glad my mom had finally found a friend.
As I grew older, Mary and my mother grew closer and closer as my mother and father drifted apart. By the time I was 15, my father was drinking every day, especially so on the weekends, and just didn't really have anything to do with any of us. We continued to all hang out together as a family and sometimes my father joined us but most of the time he didn't.
When I was 16 almost 17, my mother told me that she had decided that she was going to divorce my father. We were going to move again and that's when I found out the secret that all of us KNEW but couldn't confirm.
My mother and Mary were in love.
To me as a 17 year old girl, this news was confusing, frightening, and exciting all at the same time. I knew my mother was happy with Mary but I didn't quite understand same-sex relationships yet. After two nasty divorces, my mother and Mary were free to be together and I was unsure what the future would hold.
I would come to learn over these many almost 19 years, however, that love is love and my mother deserved to be in a committed loving relationship no matter who it is with. When people ask me today what it was like when my mother came out, I tell them it was like the day the sun came out. Suddenly, everything was clear and bright and I understood things in a way I don't think many other people do at that age.
I have my two moms to thank for teaching me about real love and the sacrifices people make for it. The sun has never stopped shining for me, since. It may not be what most people believe but I know it is real and true and no one will ever be able to take that away from them.
Who brought the sun out for you?
In January 2009, I was unemployed. This is not an uncommon occurrence in the life of a writer or the life of a non-famous Hollywood toiler; and I am both. A former screenwriting student of mine was working as a production coordinator for the Screen Actors Guild Awards – one of the annual parade of red carpet rituals of self-adoration that climaxes every year at the Oscars.
He offered me a couple days' work – the first driving around town delivering tickets to corporate sponsors and the various contact points for celebrity attendees – mailboxes, boutique management firms, and the famously-discreet front desk of the Chateau Marmont. The second day I was at the Shrine Exposition Hall next to the Auditorium for just over 12 hours to staff the event itself. At the time I was working on a screenplay that takes place during a massive live television event, and so I could proclaim that this counted as behind-the-scenes research.
Really, though, all of life is behind-the-scenes research to a writer. Paychecks are rarer event; rarer than awards shows on the calendars of celebrities, truly. And since this one was put on by the actors themselves, it meant that the room had Famous and Beautiful spilling out the vents, and behind the scenes, rented dreamers like myself greasing the gears.
***
I am part of a posse of Production Assistants, all of them would-be producers or editors or actors or screenwriters or Awards Show Directors. For much of the time our presence is not required; we move tables and wardrobe racks around, or hump boxes of bottled water to workstations throughout the facility. Mostly we are the insurance policy, there in case Someone needs to run and do Something swiftly. We are there in case the one hour on the one day of the year where things go bananas falls during this show, so that said bananas do not spill catastrophically into range of the camera.
We spend most of the day in formal wear – it is required the way gated communities only allow certain breeds of grass on your lawn. I pity the girls in their evening dresses and heels, doing manual labor, but we have two hairstylists and a makeup artist retained for free makeovers throughout the day, so they are the most fabulous-looking muscle gang you will meet.
And we, for more than half the day, loiter and wait for responsibility of any size. Guild representatives must be on-hand in and around the production office, and they are usually at least semi-famous or formerly-famous, so the Coordinator has them sign things and then puts them on eBay. We are creative about supplementing our income out here – he doesn't even have to get up from his desk.
When bags full of hot breakfast arrive from McDonald's, no less than four PA's leap to the task of arranging them on the snack table, artfully fanning out the hash brown patties. The tasteful arrangement lasts only seconds before the crew dives on them like falcons. We wash the McGriddles down with Voss Bottled Water, from the pristine artesian wells of Norway. They are sponsoring the show.
There is so much food I am amazed we are not made to declare it as income for tax purposes. When I arrive there are two heaping baskets of bagels and a couple hundred Krispy Kreme donuts, along with boxed cereal, fruit, granola bars, and a full beverage complement. Then the McDonald's arrives, and all through the day assorted candies and gums and mints and snacks crowd the table. A PA is dispatched to Subway for two giant platters, and I grab a portion of roast beef plus a salad, only to discover that this particular feast is not actually lunch – it is the pre-lunch sandwich.
Lunch is handsomely catered, and I consume two chicken breast pieces along with mashed potatoes-with-some-skin-left-in, white pasta salad, and a slice of cheesecake. I wonder what might change in Hollywood if the amount spent fattening up support staff could instead be spent on guild-minimum options for just a couple more screenplays. As it is, the incentives in this town flow entirely towards the people who will decide to stay in Los Angeles for the parties. Meanwhile, so many people who want to stay for their creative dreams will, eventually, be starved by indifference.
***
In the afternoon they conduct a full run-through of the show. Professional stand-ins, dressed in suits and gowns, stride and twirl up the red carpet for the practicing cameras, signs around their necks identifying them as various celebrities they do not resemble at all. We watch the dumbshow on the monitors. "Anne Hathaway" is a middle-aged, five-foot-maybe Asian woman; she blows a kiss at the camera. "James Earl Jones" has white skin and white hair and wears a beret. Still, the cameras zoom and twirl around their figures, and graphics pop and music stings and you would be forgiven for suddenly finding these non-celebrities absolutely dazzling. We are professionals at this.
The stand-ins enter the theatre and sit at the banquet tables among giant white placards, which display the giant smiling pictures of the celebrities who will be seated there in a few hours. The stand-ins take the stage in ones and twos and pose as the celebrity presenters who will announce the nominees. They read all the Teleprompter jokes, often with better timing and enthusiasm than the celebrities themselves, because they are all actors treating this as a rehearsal for the moment when they will be nominated for real. Actors in LA don't need 10 Commandments; one suffices: You Never Know Who's Watching.
For every award announced, five cameras fan out for live shots of the "nominees", who scurry around the room taking the place of various smiling placards in a coordinated, Hollywood specific variant on Musical Chairs. In a single afternoon one man can be introduced as Frank Langella, Kevin Spacey, Hugh Laurie, and Steve Carell. Over and over again they joyously impersonate that look which the adulated perfect of not-in-a-million-years expecting to win and being stunned, yes, STUNNED, that they have actually won; or thrilled, yes, THRILLED, that someone else won.
They improvise acceptance speeches to simulate the elapsed time of an actual speech. Because so few winners out here ever deviate from the painstakingly defined shape of the speech – thanking representatives, thanking the co-stars, thanking the awarding body, gushing over the fellow nominees that make him/her feel so terribly unworthy, and, naturally, indulging in a few words about the life-changing experience of playing this character and What This Film or Television Series or Miniseries Means For Humankind – it is a simple matter to plug the right names into the script. And we must stay on-script.
It feels as polished and pompous and spangly and exciting as the real thing; the only reason this cannot be broadcast is that we do not yet have the real celebrities. These stand-ins are an amazingly dorky and interesting bunch, and I bet America would really like them if they ever got to know them. But when the fake show ends they are sent home, and I come to the conclusion that the bottom-line function of an Awards Show is to deliver to our televisions pictures of famous people clapping.
***
It's amazing how flimsy and temporary these show edifices look once you see the riggings. We live on illusion out here; if it looks real, it is real. Which is why, strategically deployed around the mezzanine level, boxy black fog machines hum and spit out a fine mist over the crowd, so the spotlights can catch the air and resemble gleaming shafts from heaven, and all those aging faces can look soft and glowing. A splendid suited man from the Wolfgang Puck Empire frets his way around the Hall floor, making sure that the plates for the dinner feast are placed in the precise position and orientation that has been determined to be the height of aesthetics for the occasion, and that no rogue entrées have slid and mingled with one another pre-mastication.
As afternoon wears along and the live show begins, quesadillas are marched into our office. Then, because we have not yet been fed enough, they bring on the pizzas. They are Papa John's pizzas, which gives me an instantly-poignant nostalgia, because they are just like the ones which we would feast on back at Bradley University Theatre after striking the set from the latest production. They were guarded just as fiercely; but we were hungrier then. A show is a show, the only real difference is scaling and budget.
***
Rumors swirl through the ranks of the PAs that consternation erupted when William Shatner requested a four-shot espresso, and was instead given four individual espressos. The words "Set phasers to Quick Pee Break" float through my mind. Porn star Ron Jeremy is reported to be trying to smuggle himself into the show as a +1 in order to get on-camera – the Guild considers him persona indignitatem, but this is apparently a perennial game which he plays with ingenuity.
My most difficult task of the day is moving the awards statues. I don't want to hear one more star giggle about how heavy these things are unless they have had to drag a cart stacked with forty of them. Two men, both named Steven, have the job of arranging the statues on a display table in proper numbered order, then distributing them as needed during the ceremony. The senior Steven has performed this task for the Screen Actors Guild Awards for 13 consecutive years. I never find out what he does for the rest of the year. Days like this make me reflect on the civilization of Los Angeles, where you can find a career niche with such peculiar variants on essentially remedial skills. These people had dreams when they reached LA. I wonder what they were.
I spend long stretches of the ceremony by one of those fog machines, gazing into the cavern of the blessed. Brad Pitt and some blonde woman are scrutinizing something written on a bar napkin, and it must be the writer in me that finds that more enticing than trying to stare down the back of Angelina Jolie's dress.
And at the end I wait on the floor just out of camera range for the room to clear so I can begin rescuing show programs from souvenir scavengers. The famous people, forced into slow-moving and often random throngs, brush by me in the dark. I hear snippets of talk. The cast of Entourage exits together, joshing and joking as they would on any given work day. Mickey Rourke, nominated for The Wrestler and the temporary, re-discovered toast of the town, is this glorious purple-and-silver blurp of impropriety at the center of it all, grinning behind sunglasses like the cat who fucked the canary before she was legal. It's like he knows he has earned the right to be as bad as Jack Nicholson for this one year, and he is going to make the most of it.
***
Our last task is the wine bottles. The bartenders opened every bottle of wine available, so they would always have a full one in arms' reach rather than make a celebrity wait ten seconds for their tipple. So the PAs and I set about consolidating all the hundreds of bottles, heedless of grape or year, pitching out empties and then re-corking the newly-full ones, so they can be wheeled into the after-party and gloriously opened again. Remember – if it looks real, it is real. We are professionals at this.
I do a slow lap around the after-party, one of the perks trickled down to us helpers. It is loud and crowded and filled with strangers. I might recognize them, but I don't know them. I have the urge to congratulate the cast members of Slumdog Millionaire, who all have dazed and disbelieving grins, genuinely shocked by their win of the evening's biggest prize. But more Important people than I am are jostling for that very privilege, because the It is coalescing around them, and Hollywood can smell and chase the It like a pig finds truffles.
I don't linger after my walk-around. It's been a long day, this isn't how I like to meet people, and I know what the wine is going to taste like.