This Nib for Hire

TRADING YOUR MUSE FOR A HOLLYWOOD HUSTLER IS WORSE THAN A POKE IN THE EYE

It is said Dostoyevsky wrote for money to sponsor his lust for the roulette tables of St. Petersburg. Faulkner and Fitzgerald too leased their gifts to ex-schmatte moguls who stacked the Garden of Allah with scriveners brought west to spitball box-office rev­eries. Apocryphal or not, the mollifying lore of geniuses who temporarily mortgaged their integrity gamboled around my cortex some months ago when the phone rang as I was adrift in my apartment, trying to tickle from my muse a wor­thy theme for that big book I must one day write.

"Mealworm?" the voice on the other end barked through lips clearly enveloping a panatela.

"Yes, this is Flanders Meal­worm. Who's calling?"

"E. Coli Biggs. Name mean anything to you?"

"Er, can't say it actually-----"

"No matter. I'm a film pro­ducer—and a big one. Christ, don't you read Variety? I got the number one grosser in Guinea-Bissau."

"The truth is I'm more con­versant with the literary land­scape," I confessed.

"Yeah, I know. I read The Hockfkisch Chronicles. That's on account of why I want we have a sit-down. Be at the Carlyle hotel 3:30 today. Royal Suite. (continued on page 140)

NIB FOR HIRE

(continued jmm page 76) I'm staying under the name of Ozyman-dias Hoon to stave oil the local wannabes from inundating me with scripts."

"How did you get my number?" I inquired. "It's unlisted."

"From the Internet. It's there along­side the X-rays of your colonoscopy. Just materialize on cue, Skeezix, and pretty soon we'll both be able to ladle beaucoup skins into our respective marmites." With thai he slammed the receiver into its cra­dle with sufficient velocity to buckle my eustachian tube.

It was not unthinkable that the name E. Coli Biggs would mean zilch to me. As I had made clear, my existence was not the glitzy whirlwind of film festivals and starlets but the spartan regimen of

the dedicated bard. Over the years, I had churned out several unpublished novels on lofty philosophical themes before finally being given a first printing by Shlock House. My book, in which a man travels back in time and hides King George's wig, thus hastening the Stamp Act, obviously ruffled establishment leath­ers with its bite. Still, I regarded myself as an emerging and uncompromising tal­ent, and mulling over Biggs's command to heel at the Carlyle made me chary of selling out to some philistine Holly­wood platypus. The idea that he might fantasize renting my inspiration to pen a screenplay at once disgusted me and piqued my ego. After all, if the progeni­tors of The Great GaLsby and The Sound and the Fury could warm their stoves courtesy of some prestige-hungry West Coast suits, why not Mrs. Mealworm's little bunting?

I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be bet­ter festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum. The notion ol taking a brief hiatus from my serious writing to amass a nest egg that could subsidize my War and Peace or Madame Boxiiry was not an unreasonable one to contend with.

And so, clad in author's tweeds with elbow patches and Connemara cap. 1 ascended to the Royal Suite of the Car-lyle hotel to rendezvous with the self-proclaimed titan t. Coli Biggs.

Biggs was a fubsy pudding of a char­acter with a hairpiece that could only have been ordered by dialing 1-800-tol'peks. A farrago of tics animated his face in unpredictable dots and dashes like Morse code. Clad in pajamas and the Carlyle's terry-cloth robe, he was accompanied by a miraculously fabri­cated blonde who doubled as secretary and masseuse, having apparently per­fected some foolproof procedure to clear his chronically stuffed sinuses.

"I'll come right to the point. Meal­worm," he said, nodding toward the bedroom, to which his zaftig protegee rose and weaved off, pausing a mere two minutes to align the meridians of her garter belt.

"I know," I said, descending from Venusburg. "You read my book, you're taken with how visual my prose is, and you'd like me to create a scenario. Of course you realize even if we got copa-cetic on the math, I would have to insist on total artistic control."

"Sure, sure," Biggs mumbled, waving aside my ultimatum. "You know what a novelization is?" he asked, popping a Turns.

"Not really," I replied.

"It's when a movie does good num­bers. The producer hires some zombie to make a book out of it. Y'know, an exploi­tation paperback—strictly for lowbrows. You've seen the chozzerai you find in the racks at airports and shopping malls."

"Uh-huh." I said, beginning to sense a lethal tightness making its decep­tively benign introduction into my lumbar region.

"But me, I'm to the manor born. I don't handle with mere craftsmen. I meld exclusively with bona fides. Hence I'm here to report your latest tome caught my baby blues last week at a little coun­try store. Actually I'd never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before. Not that I got through it, but the three pages I managed belbre narcolepsy set in told me I was in the presence of one of the most egregious wordsmiths since Papa Hemingway."

"To tell you the truth," I said, "I've never heard of novelizations. My metier is serious literature. Joyce, Kafka, Proust.

As for my first book. I'll have you know the cultural editor of The Barber's Journal------"

"Sure, sure, meanwhile every Shake­speare's gotta eat lest he croak ere he mints his magnum opus."

"Uh-huh," I said. "I wonder if I might have just a little water. I've become rather dependent on these Xanax."

"Believe me, kid," Biggs said, raising his voice and intoning slowly, "all the Nobel laureates work for me. It's how they set their table." Poised in the wings, his slacked amanuensis pushed her head in and trilled, "E. Coli, Garcia Marquez is on the phone. Claims his larder is bereft of all provender. Wants to know if you can possibly throw any more noveliza-tions his way."

¦'Tell Gabo I'll get back to him, cup­cake," snapped the producer.

"And just what movie are you asking me to novelize?" I piped, gagging on the word. "Are we talking about a love story? Gangsters? Or is it action-adven­ture? I'm known as a facile man with description, particularly bucolic mate­rial a la Turgenev."

"Tell me about the Russkies,' Biggs yelped. "I tried to make Stavrogin's confession into a musical for Broadway last year, but all the backers suddenly got swine flu. Here's the scam, tatellah. I happen to own the rights to a cinema classic starring the Three Stooges. Won it years ago playing tonk with Ray Stark at Cannes. It's a real zany vehicle for our three most irrepressible meshoogs. I've fressed all the protein I can out of the print—movie houses, foreign and domes­tic TV—but I suspicion there's still a little lagniappe to be bled from a novel."

"Of the Three Stooges?" I asked, incredulous, my voice glissandoing directly into a fife's octave.

"I don't have to ask if you love 'em. They're only an institution," Biggs pitched.

"When 1 was eight," I said, rising from my chair and slapping at my pockets to locate my emergency Fiorinal.

"Hold it, hold it. You didn't hear the plot yet. It's all about spending the night in a haunted house."

"It's okay," I said, dollying toward the door. "I'm a little late—some friends are raising a barn-----"

"I booked a projection room so I could screen it lor you," Biggs said, ignor­ing my resistance, which by now had morphed into sheer panic.

"No thanks. 1 may be down to my last

can of StarKist-----" I sputtered as the

great man cut me of I".

"Emmes, kid. If this is as lucrative as my proboscis signals, there's copious zuzim to be stockpiled. Those three ditsy vilda chayas cut a million shorts. One e-mail could secure the novelization rights to the whole shooting match. And you'd be my main scribe. You could salt away enough mad money in six months to

spend the rest of your days sausaging out art. Just give me a few sample pages to confirm my faith in your brilliance. Who knows, maybe in your hands novelization will finally come of age as an art form."

That night I clashed fiercely with my self-image and required the emollient waters of the Cutty Sark distillery to beat back a waxing depression. Still. I would be disingenuous if 1 did not admit that I was palpated by the notion of vacu­uming up enough scratch to allow the writing of another masterpiece without the onset of malnutrition. But it was not just Mammon crooning in my cochlea. There was also the chance Biggs's nasal compass had located true north. Perhaps I was the Mahdi chosen to legitimize with depth and dignity this runt of the liter­ary litter, the novelization.

In a frenzy of sudden euphoria I bolted to my processor, and irrigated with gallons of black coffee I had by dawn broken the back of the challenging assignment and was champing at the bit to show it to my new benefactor.

Irritatingly, his no not disturb did not come unglued till noon, when I finally rang through as he was masticating his morning fiber.

"Be here at three," he bade. "And ask for Murray Zangwill. Word leaked of my quondam alias, and the joint's awash with frenzied centerfolds pant­ing for screen tests." Pitying the man's beleaguered existence, I spent the next hours honing several sentences to dia­mond perfection and at three entered his posh digs with my work retyped on a stylish vellum.

"Read it to me," he commanded, bit­ing off the tip of a contraband Cuban cigar and spitting it in the direction of the fake Utrillo.

"Read it to you?" I asked, taken aback over the prospect of presenting my writing orally. "Wouldn't you rather read it yourself? That way the subtle verbal rhythms can resonate in your mind's ear."

"Naw, I'll get a better feel this way. Plus I lost my reading glasses last night at Hooters. Commence," ordered Biggs, putting his feet up on the coffee table.

"Oakville, Kansas lies on a particularly desolate stretch across the vast central plains," I began. "What's left of the area where farms once dotted the landscape is arid space now. At one time corn and wheat provided thriving livelihoods

before agricultural subsidies had the opposite effect of enhancing prosperity."

Biggs's eyes began to glaze over. His head was wreathed in a thick nimbus of smoke from the vile cheroot.

"The dilapidated Ford pulled up before a deserted farmhouse." I went on, "and three men emerged. Calmly and for no apparent reason the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle. A horrible grinding sound broke the silence of the Great Plains. 'We suffer,' the dark-haired man said. "O woe to the random violence of human existence.'

"Meanwhile Larry, the third man. had wandered into the house and had some­how managed to get his head caught inside an earthenware jar. Everything was suddenly terrifying and black as Larry groped blindly around the room. He wondered if there was a god or any purpose at all to life or any design behind the universe when suddenly the dark-haired man entered and. finding a large polo mallet, began to break the jar off his companion's head. With pent-up fury that masked years of angst over the empty absurdity of man's fate, the one named Moe smashed the crockery. "We are at least free to choose.' wept Curly, the bald one. 'Condemned to death but free to choose.' And with that, Moe poked his two lingers into Curly's eyes. 'Oooh, oooh, oooh,' Curly wailed, "the cosmos is so devoid of any justice.' He stuck an unpeeled banana in Moe's mouth and shoved it all the way in."

At this point Biggs abruptly emerged from his stupor. "Stop, go no further," he said, standing at attention. "This is only magnificent. It's Johnny Steinbeck, it's Capote, it's Sartre. I smell money, I see honors. It's the kind of quality product yours truly made his rep on. Go home and pack. You'll stay with me in Bel Air till more suitable quar­ters open up—something with a pool and perhaps a three-hole golf course. Or maybe Hef can put you up at the Mansion for a while, if you'd prefer. Meantime I'll call my lawyer and lock up rights to the entire Stooge oeuvre. This is a memorable day in the annals of Gutenbergsville."

Needless to say. that was the last I saw of E. Coli Biggs under that or any other alias. When 1 returned to the Carlyle, valise in hand, he had long since left town for either the Italian Riviera or the Turkmenistan Film Festival or possibly to check out the bottom line in Guinea-Bissau—the desk clerk wasn't sure. The point is, tracking down a mover and shaker who never uses his real name proved a far tot) daunting job lor an ink-stained wretch named Mealworm, and I'm dead certain it would have been for Faulkner and Fitzgerald, too.