2006-10-25 - 1:40 a.m.
A dear friend of mine, with whom I used to work at some production company or other, has married and given up the ambiguously pleasant vagaries of the business we love and call show. He was actually my boss for several years – a story editor at a quite prestigious company which was in turn controlled by a gigantic director of the type whose movies open at 60 million per 1000 screens. He was a fine and decent man, too, very kind and supportive and incredibly loyal. That he would not last in the movie biz was a given.
Most amusing about this fellow was that he developed a soft spot for the dear old Novel Café, that charmant bohemian coffeehouse which I have been known to inhabit and which is the muse for many of my moments of despair and inertia. The high point of our friendship is when we would meet up at the Novel at the end of the day, and he would gossip about the workings of the inner office, while I would slip him information about scripts that were being submitted to production companies other than his.
The low point came about seven years ago now, when he submitted a screenplay to Megalith, where I was working at the time, about wizards being reincarnated as dolphins. I was assigned to read the script and panned it mercilessly -- as well I might -- before realizing, after I hit the “send” button on my computer, that the name of that dolphin script’s author was AWFULLY familiar.
Well, the years have passed, like sands through the hourglass of time. My friend adroitly quit the studio life, founded a family, and moved to El Segundo, where he has a little house with a little garden. Occasionally, this chap, whom we can for convenience’s sake call “Bert,” comes into the Novel to work on his novel.
Aside from being what we in the trade rather snottily call “A Sunday Gentleman Writer,” what else is Bert doing these days, you ask? Well, Bert is in the lighting business. He sells lightbulbs. In consignment. In bulk, all over the country. Bert has told me before, quite often, that it is the most boring and dreary job known to man – a real DEATH OF A SALESMAN-type gig. Yet, he explains that he loves it. He makes a lot of good money and is able to effortlessly support his beloved wife and two kids.
Bert is happily married to the most beautiful, smiley-faced, and supportive blonde lady I have ever seen. I can’t remember what it is she does for a living, but it’s decent work, I believe. And she and Bert are the parents of a pair of charming and adorable tousell-haired twins. However, when Bert and his lovely bride drew me aside the other day, I was quite alarmed and saddened to learn that one of the two boys has recently been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. And, less appalling, but still remarkably unhappy-making, the condition has bloomed alongside yet another ailment of the brain – Tourette’s Syndrome.
It does indeed put one’s own problems into perspective – at least, I do not have an autistic son with Tourette’s Syndrome. I mean, I might have some things that I wish I could change a bit, but physically I am quite hale and hearty, and the real absolute worst thing in my life is that I have mild career issues which dance hand and hand with a manic depressive melancholy. Hardly the stuff to complain about, if I were not such a spoiled, Westside LA skank.
I found myself gaping at the horror stories Bert and his wife told me about their son, who is likely some day to require more assistance than they will be able to provide. Having a son with Tourette’s Syndrome, Bert and his wife told me, makes for a life that is full of awkward situations and possible danger. Any time they take the kid out, it is possible that he will start howling and yelling, throwing things around, and kicking and spitting.
“The thing is,” the wife explained to me. “There is no predicting it. And, you can just start to understand his behavior and be able to prepare for it – but then he changes. He might start by barking, but then the phases change – he will start shrieking. Or he will throw a plate of food. Or he’ll curse out someone at the next table. He shifts his behavior just as we are able to guess at what he’s going to do.”
When the son has one of his “meltdowns”, as Bert and his wife put it, the parents are often forced hand out business cards to people sitting at the tables around them. The business cards read, “My son is not behaving badly, he has Tourette’s Syndrome.”
Can you imagine how dreadful it would be to have to hand out “My son has Tourette’s Syndrome” business cards all the time? It would be deplorable! But, it’s funny, we are willing to give a certain amount of leeway to physical handicaps that we can see. If the handicap is on the inside of our heads, though, it is not so obvious, so people act like rude pigs.
For instance, I had returned to my laptop, leaving Bert and his family sipping their coffees and hot chocolates upstairs, when the little boy suddenly and abruptly had a “breakdown” and started screaming and howling! People all around me started looking up at the child with hateful glares.
“Pfft, that child needs a good beating, he does,” sneered a prune-like grad student, sitting at a nearby table.
“It just shouldn’t be allowed,” sniped the frosty haired bohemian at an opposite table.
Burt came racing downstairs, holding the child, who was kicking and screaming and spitting, and ran outside with him. The wife followed behind him, her arms full of the toys and books that the family had brought with them for their night out. It was rather sad, really.
Children have been on my mind a lot lately, but not in a good way. To make extra money these days, I have been putting some hours with a family friend, who works as a school teacher at an LA Junior High School. She teaches 11 year olds math and science, which strikes me as being just about the most horrible job in the world. The thing is, she took the job in her late 50s, and simply does not have the stamina to deal with the horrific urchins, whom she calls, “Little penises and pussies with heads.”
I have not seen the children, thank God, but have been employed at grading various papers and keeping track of the homework assignments. Boy is it dull work. And my goodness, it is so unlike anything in the movie business. I would not want to be a teacher for all the tea in China. My goodness – I just gape in horror at the things the poor lady has to do. If she gives a test of no more than 9 questions, she then must sit down and grade seventy copies of it. And, let’s face it – children are insane. I am not kidding. We forgive them for being insane, for their disjointed thought processes and for their erratic behavior, because they are young. But if they were not young, we would consider them nuts.
I do not find the experience of assisting a schoolteacher to be remotely heart warming. In fact, I must confess that I consider the children to be about as stupid as little apes. Trying to grade their papers is a ridiculous task, considering most of them can’t be bothered to write their entire names – and their organizational skills, the way they set up their answers, are non-existent. On a test, the teacher can ask the easiest, stupidest question, and about six of the brats will still get it wrong.
“But they are CHILDREN!” you reply. “The hope of our future!”
Well, I suppose you are correct. But you have to realize – most of the world is stupid beyond endurance. Yes, there are a couple of smarties, but the vast majority of them are as dumb as stoats. Why should an undifferentiated crowd of children be any different? Most of these kids are abysmally stupid. They will grow up to dance to Paris Hilton or whichever pop culture cow shall be the dish of the day 20 years hence, they will jerk off to Internet porn, they shall marry and breed equally stupid children.
One thing I am quite amazed by, though, is the amount of attention that is paid to stupid children, as opposed to the bright and more promising kids, who you can tell are basically left to their own devices. How does spending an inordinate amount of time on a stupid child going to help him or the future world? The attention should be paid to the smart kids, the ones who might actually some day invent a new miracle drug or write the Great American Novel. Instead, individual tutoring is offered to the dummies, who can’t write their own names and who get every problem wrong on their math tests.
Ironically, a guy I am boinking quite often these days – well, about three times, really, no more than that – is a young man who has just moved out here from New York and is out of work, while studying for his teaching credential. Oh, he’s so handsome – about 24, with short blonde hair, a hairy chest, and just a hint of a Bronx accent. He would totally benefit from this gig working for this teacher lady, and would be far better at it than I am. Yet, I am going to keep it for myself, and just slurp the fellow’s hose until he moans and moans. Otherwise, things are just starting to look up for me. But I shall keep how they are looking up a secret until next we meet.
