This is like getting pulled over for not using your blinker and I could kill Calvin. I could kill Amy. I could kill everyone and put them in a blender and make them into a smoothie. Fast Five is on the TV and I watch Dominic Toretto and RIP Brian O’Conner assemble a team. My team fucking sucks.
“JoeBro,” Calvin says. “You got Tinder banged and you look all miserable and shit.”
“I rushed over here for the book.”
“Well, like, the screenplay is about the book, so, like, it’s kind of the book, only in different form, like the way iced coffee is still coffee even though it’s cold.”
I can’t help it. “Fuck off, Calvin,” I snap.
“Dude,” he says. “You need to chill.”
Toretto never chills because you don’t get anywhere in this world by being chill and Calvin is going on about a Flaming Lips LP and food trucks and Big Bear and bacon, about how wasted he was last night. I wish I had Cocaine Calvin. Pothead Calvin is impossible, a no-talent Duplass brother, smug and slow. His buds are texting. They’re at some fucking market downtown and they can bring us lunch and Calvin still doesn’t get that I don’t drink vegetables or care about dope food trucks in K-Town. I care about books.
I tell him I’m not hungry and he says I need to laugh and he gives me his iPad and commands me to watch a killer Henderson video. I tell him I don’t want to watch the video but he says that I have to. “Henderson is on,” he says. “He goes off on his new girlfriend and this dope is gold. This gold is dope. Genius.”
Everyone here calls everything genius. “Calvin.”
“JoeBro, you need to chill,” he says. “Watch. Chill. Be.”
But how can I be chill when Delilah is texting, clinging, and Calvin is yammering about pitching Ghost Food Truck to Comedy Central or IFC. He might get weird with it and go to Adult Swim and he’s banging the vaporizer that never works against the counter and his ego swells and Ghost Food Truck would actually be mellower on HBO and maybe you could even put John Cusack in that truck and maybe he would pick up girls and disappear and look for the girls and never find them, because like, it’s a Ghost Food Truck and he’s a ghost and he doesn’t know it. I give in and tell Calvin it’s genius and he texts his writing partner Slade and I would bet my nuts that Calvin and Slade will never write Ghost Food Truck the cartoon, the movie, or the HBO series. People in LA talk about writing but they don’t actually do it. It’s the LA equivalent of going to the Cloisters or the Met in New York. You say you’re going to do it but at the end of the day it’s Saturday or it’s too hot or it’s too cold or you could just as easily watch TV.
But then what the fuck makes me so superior? I can’t even find Amy.
“I’m popping next door for another kale smoothie,” he says. “You want?”
“No, thanks,” I say.
“JoeBro,” he says. “You got to get out of your head, brother. Watch the H man.”
“Calvin, I’m pretty beat.”
“The video is two minutes.”
“I actually hate Henderson.”
“Nobody hates Henderson,” he says. “You crack me up, JB.”
I give in again and I watch Henderson on F@#K Narcissism. He’s on his couch, in one of his trademark laugh-at-me T-shirts (#BOOBS), talking about a girl with a dirty vag. I don’t like that abbreviation; it’s a pussy or it’s a vagina but it’s not a vag. He calls the girl an organic pig who smears superfruits all over his sheets and her vag is hard to reach because of her bush. My hands start shaking and I turn up the volume.
“Blueberries,” Henderson rails. “I tell her to keep the blueberries in her vag and I think this is a reasonable request. I get hungry. I take a bite. But these sheets, my sheets, these are high thread count sheets, people. Okay, I’m sorry to be that asshole, but I did not just get a deal from Comedy Central. I got a deal from these idiots. So these sheets are not cheap. And she is gonna make it up to me, you know, a little lovin’, but then my show comes on and she wants to watch it. Do you believe this shit? So now I got blueberries, I got blue balls, and I’m my own cock block. You sit on your shitty futon in your shitty apartment and you dream about having the girl and the sheets and the money and then you get it and hello. Can I get laid in my own bed? Hell, no! I’m my own cock block!”
The crowd roars. He looks at someone in the audience. He shouts: “Love you, Amy baby. Super kisses, baby, it’s all good, right?”
My heart thumps and my throat closes. The camera does not pan over to Amy and I rewind the clip and he says it again—Love you, Amy baby. She’s sleeping with the enemy, my enemy, our enemy. Vile duplicitous cunt, and in Crimes and Misdemeanors, Mia Farrow pulls this shit on Woody Allen. They watch movies together and bond over their disgust for a television producer played by Alan Alda. Woody is smitten, sweet, noble, and in the end, Mia Farrow chooses to marry the producer. She tells Woody that he’s not so bad. When I wrap my hand around Amy’s cum-stained throat, she’ll say the same thing about Henderson, tell me to lighten up. In this moment, at the counter in the bookstore, having found Amy, I have to do something vile too. I have to text Calvin: This is genius.
Calvin rushes back, maybe he did a little Adderall, and he’s stoked that I have seen the light and join him in worshipping at the altar of Henderson, funnier than Richard Pryor, smarter than Jerry Seinfeld—Did you know he didn’t even go to Harvard? He never ran the Lampoon like Conan!—and yet Henderson is a genius—Literally, his IQ is like 10,000—and he deadlifts and he wrestles and the man can do anything. Right now he’s in Malibu, surfing and Instagramming while riding waves. I could go to Malibu and drown him and smash her head against rocks but with traffic and bus schedules, I wouldn’t make it by sundown.
“Does he live at the beach?” I ask.
“No, he lives up in the hills,” says Calvin. “He has these Friday night workouts where he fills the house with people and jams on new material, you know the way comics show up randomly, he likes to do it in his home.”
It’s Friday. My heart might explode with Rachael Ray knives. “Cool,” I say. “You wanna go?”
Calvin shrugs. “I don’t know, JoeBro. I’m, like, in the writing zone and I used to hang out with his crew. I mean I’ve met him, but, like, I’m trying to keep it all about the writing right now, you know, get back into the scene when my shit blows up instead of just hanging out and stuff.”
Oh, but Calvin, you’re never blowing up because you are never finishing anything. I breathe. I reason. “Well, that’s great, but sometimes, the thing you need is to get back in touch with people, you know. I bet if you told him about Ghost Food Truck he would go nuts.”
Calvin sighs. “True, but like, I feel like I’m entertained by him and I love him but he would just not be the right producer for GFT, you know?”
Because there is no such thing as GFT and I am going to move back to New York someday—I promise my brain, I will—but I say this:
“Honestly, Calvin, you are a funny dude. Like, GFT could be a one-hour, but picture Henderson and his people chomping at the bit for it and then you use that ammo to go to your one-hour places.”
I will sit here and tell lies all day long to get Calvin to commit to this party. Amy will be there. I need to be there. But I cannot show up alone. I cannot be that guy and I cannot bring Harvey because the only thing creepier than a guy alone at a party is a guy with an old guy at a party.
Calvin hesitates. “I don’t know the password.”