chapter 2

It was September 1999, a season of fear-in three months the collapse of the worldwide computer grid was going to bring the century’s long party to a finish. Meanwhile, as the party waned, the hottest new format in radio was a thing called Jammin’ Oldies. Los Angeles ’s MEGA 100, recently reformatted (or in radio parlance, “flipped”) to the new trend, was playing in my cab-the song was War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”-as I instructed the driver to take me to the Universal Studios lot and we swung away from the LAX curbside, into palm-lined gray traffic. The trees looked thirsty to me.

San Francisco had a Jammin’ Oldies station too. All cities did, a tidal turning of my generation’s readiness to sentimentalize the chart toppers of its youth. Old divisions had been blurred in favor of the admission that disco hadn’t sucked so bad as all that, even the pretense that we’d adored it all along. The Kool & the Gang and Gap Band dance hits we’d struggled against as teens, trying to deny their pulse in our bodies, were now staples of weddings and lunch hours in all the land; the O’Jays and Manhattans and Barry White ballads we’d loathed were now, with well-mixed martinis or a good zinfandel, foundation elements in any reasonably competent seduction. From the evidence of the radio I might have come of age in a race-blind utopia. That on the other end of the dial hip-hop stations thumped away in dire quarantine, a sort of pre-incarceration, no matter. Not today, anyway, not for one borne in the backseat of a taxicab helmed by one Nicholas M. Brawley, through sun-blanched smog, toward a meeting with a Dreamworks development executive, nope.

“You like this song?” I asked Nicholas Brawley’s fortyish gray-coiled neck.

“It’s all right.”

“You know the Subtle Distinctions?”

“Now see that’s some real fine music.”

At the guard-post gates of the Universal lot was proof I was expected, so Brawley’s cab could be waved through, to wend past the curbed Jeeps and the long windowless hangars and the brick huts which appeared to have been thrown up just that morning. Dreamworks’ building resided what felt to be a mile or so inside the compound, behind a tree-sheltered parking lot requiring a special pass for entrance. None had been issued, so Brawley dropped me at the inner gate.

“You have a card?” I asked him. “I’ll need a ride out of here in, I don’t know-maybe an hour?”

He jotted a number on the back of the company’s card. “Call my cell phone.”

As I crossed the shade-spangled lot to the entrance a well-dressed lackey was just crossing it in the other direction, moving for a break in the eucalyptus trees. He carried an Oscar. Palms cupping the statuette’s base and shoulders, he appeared to be looking for someone to bestow it on. I wondered if his whole job was to cross this lot all day with the golden prize, back and forth, reminding any visitor of the local stakes.

Inside, I was directed upstairs, where I gave my name to a pretty girl with a headset. She fetched me a bottled water before abandoning me to a flotilla of couches and magazines. There I plopped my sad little overnight bag, hitched up my pants to cross my legs and tried not to look too demoralized beneath the smirk of framed posters. Time passed, phones rang, carpets sighed, someone whispered around a corner.

“Dylan?”

“Yes?”

I dropped Men’s Journal and a boy in a sharp-creased suit took my hand. “You’re the music guy-right?”

“Right.”

“I’m Mike. Great to see you. Jared’s just ending a call.”

We moved to Mike’s little office, an intermediate space, a staging area, apparently, for encounters with Jared. You had to meet Cats-in-the-Hat-A-through-Z before you got to the One True Cat. At least we were all on a first-name basis.

“Mike?” said an intercom voice.

“Yes.”

“I’m ready for Dylan.”

Mike gave me a thumbs-up endorsement to cross Jared’s threshold, and a wink for luck.

The room had earth tones to spare. No posters here, nothing jarring-it was like a shrink’s office. Sunlight sliced through a couple of potted rubber trees, to ornament the carpet. Jared launched from behind his desk. He was jacketless, blond, thick and soft and relaxed in his body, a gym junkie, I guessed. I’d have kicked his ass at stoopball, though.

A conclave with Jared Orthman was meant to be the next best thing to an audience with Geffenberg himself. A thousand or a million writers hungered for what I had today. I hoped not to blow it, not so much on their behalf as on that of my own shriveled prospects and swollen debt.

“Here, let’s sit here.” He guided me away from the desk, to a pair of facing love seats across the room, the pitch zone. I dropped my bag, which sagged like a Claes Oldenberg sculpture, seeming to stand for an artist’s impotence in corporate surroundings. I wished I’d packed my Discman and change of underwear in something more like a briefcase. We sat, smiled, crossed legs.

Jared frowned. “Did you get water? Did they give you water?” he asked anxiously.

“I left it outside.”

“Do you want something? Water?” He looked ready to provide the vital essence if he had to wring it from stones.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“So.” He smiled, frowned, widened his hands. We studied one another and tried to remain friendly. Jared and I were probably the same age but otherwise had traveled from opposite ends of the universe to this meeting. My black jeans were like a smudge of ash or daub of vomit in this cream-and-peach world.

“I’m a friend of Randolph ’s,” I reminded him. “From the Weekly.”

“Riiight.” He nodded, considering it. “Just… who is Randolph?”

“ Randolph Treadwell? The Weekly?”

He nodded. “I think I know who you mean.”

“Well, he, uh, set this up.”

“Okay. Okay. So, uh, what are you doing in my office?”

“Sorry?” The question was so bald. I was astonished as if he’d asked Why do I hold this job, as opposed to, say, anyone else? Can you explain that, please?

“Just a minute,” he said, holding up one finger and springing from the love seat. He leaned over his desk and pushed a button. “Mike?”

“Yes.”

“What’s Dylan doing in my office?”

“He’s the music guy.”

“The music guy.”

“You remember. He’s got a movie.”

“Ahhhh.” Now Jared turned and smiled at me. This was all pleasure. A movie! How perfectly unexpected. “Who’s Randy Treadmill or something?” he said to the intercom.

“He’s that guy you met when you were talking about the thing.” Click, buzz. “On the boat.”

“Ahhhh. Okay. Okay.” He released the intercom. There was a hierarchy of remembering here, I understood. Mike remembered for Jared the sort of things Jared had once remembered for someone else, on his way up through the ranks. Someday Mike would have someone remembering things for him as well, and be free to abandon the skill.

Jared returned to the love seat and again pointed a finger at me, but now it was a happier finger.

“You’ve got a movie,” he said warmly.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been wanting to hear this.” He didn’t know the first thing about it, I saw now. I could have offered him a comedy about a rookie vibraphonist for the Boston Pops, or a thriller about a spy who kills by ultrasonic whistle, any of the many things a music guy would be likely to concern himself with.

“I’m closing my eyes,” said Jared. “It means I’m listening.”

I was left to consider his tanned lids, immaculate desk, twin rubber tree plants. I was the ant who had to move them, apparently.

“Your movie is about-?” This was a just-because-my-eyes-are-closed-doesn’t-mean-there’s-no-hurry situation.

“A true story,” I said.

“Okay.”

“In Tennessee -”

“ Tennessee?” Jared opened his eyes.

“Yes.”