Chapter 6
I had never heard of the colleges until my guidance counselor turned to its page in that guidebook they all carried around like men of the cloth with their Bibles.
Why would you show me this? I had asked when I saw the sizable tuition number inside the small bubble graphic.
They offer a writing scholarship, she replied.
She asked if I had heard of a show that of course I had heard of.
The guy who made that show, she said, went to this college, and he created the scholarship in his name, and sometimes he even helped students attain jobs writing on his show after they graduated.
It was not a full ride but close, and if I got it, I would be permitted—obligated, actually—to focus on the thing I was good at for the next four years.
No more math or science swirling before my eyes. Is this for real? I had asked then too.
To apply, I was to pick my favorite film and come up with an idea for a sequel, write the first five pages of the script, and then outline the rest of the story in what was called a beat sheet.
I had never done that kind of writing before, but I was the star of my English class, a show-off summer reader, and my theater teacher supplied me with a volume of David Mamet classics to help me get a feel for formatting and stylistic f-bombing.
I pretended to be sick for two days so I could sit at home alone and perfect my application, to read my dialogue out loud without my meathead brothers around to harass me.
It sounded good. It felt good. Two months later, when I was invited to campus as a finalist, I can’t say I was surprised.
Call me obnoxious; it keeps me in business.
Campus was stupid beautiful: handsome Jacobean buildings knit tightly around plots of manicured green and an October sun that made a mirror of the lake and doubled the perimeter of fiery trees.
In PT’s creaky and enchanting office, I clocked pictures of him on various red carpets and even some kind of award for cowriting a short film in the nineties.
But it was the methodical way in which he assessed and then managed my parents that I tend to revisit in my mind.
Sometimes I marvel at my luck, to have been born into a family that simultaneously did not know how to love me and found a way, eventually, to find the value in my imagination.
The gash of that gives me something to nurse on the page, and without their sudden and supportive turnabout, I might have been too scared to try to make a go of it.
My mother was an accountant, my father did something with computers.
Neither of them were creative types. Later PT would tell me that when he met them and asked what they did for a living, he saw a kind of alchemy between their lines of work—my mother identifying places for financial opportunity, my father securing sensitive databases—and he spoke to that to get them to see that while my potential was foreign to them, it was a potential that should be safeguarded against superfluous drains on my energy nonetheless.
My parents couldn’t argue with a scholarship that subsidized nearly everything, but they were concerned I would miss out on a well-rounded education.
Did I not need, say, linear algebra and Introduction to Financial Accounting, and how about some Spanish if I wanted to graduate with any hope of finding a real job?
“Here’s the part no student likes to hear,” PT said, rather jovially for someone who was about to tell me something I was not going to want to hear.
We were sitting on one of the cracked leather couches in his office, and I was between my mother and father, like I was in trouble, which I often was with them.
“I cannot guarantee that a career as a writer will work out for Faye. For anyone. It has to do with talent, but it also has to do with an innate understanding of how to position oneself, as well as all the lightning-in-the-bottle stuff like right time, right place, et cetera, et cetera.” PT crossed his legs and clasped his hands around one knee.
It was an effeminate gesture, and his black T-shirt was snug, but PT was tall and built well, and I knew later my father wouldn’t stoop to the level of making a twinkle-toes joke.
“That being said,” he continued, “Hollywood is a big industry, filled with successful people behind the scenes who are still engaged creatively and are very much working real jobs. She could move into the development space at one of the studios, she could be a literary agent, a film editor, a publicist.”
“A publicist?” my father repeated as though it were the first time he’d ever heard the word.
“What is the trajectory of something like that?” my mother asked in a pleasant voice a decibel louder than usual.
At this volume I knew she was annoyed with my father.
Yes, a publicist, you fucking idiot. That was what she would have said were PT not there.
I might have cleared my throat, shifted my position on the couch, breathed differently than usual, I really can’t say, but PT’s eyes were suddenly at attention, on me, and in them I saw not just curiosity but hope.
In a couple of months he would issue me a writing assignment for the first time and it would be to compose this scene in the office.
I didn’t need a bad guy with a gun to create tension and stakes and drama.
It was all right there, between my mother, father, and me: an interior world with intricate and messy human dynamics.
Characters he didn’t necessarily like but did want to spend more time with and understand.
“Here is a great place to start,” PT said.
PT had us over for dinner, where my parents actually drank wine and got a little tipsy, and then we sat down and watched the first episode of Jonathan Granger’s new show.
There was a fuckton of cursing and simulated oral sex, and though my father promptly fell asleep, my mother took off her shoes, curled up, and got comfortable.
I sat on my side of the couch, stiff with terror the entire fifty-three minutes.
My parents were Catholics who never went to church.
They used religion to justify their discomfort around anything that stank of hot, hedonistic garbage but couldn’t quote a line of scripture to save their lives.
When the episode ended, my mother turned to me with saucer eyes and declared, I loved it.
To this day absolutely nothing has shocked me more.
My father roused himself as the credits rolled, in time to see PT point to the names of an associate producer and a marketing executive and explain that they were former Granger Scholars too, that Jonathan was known to take on recent graduates as assistants or to recommend them to others in the industry.
There were real careers to be had in Hollywood, with health insurance and not enough vacation days and communal kitchens where people labeled their food in the fridge and shamed you on mass email if you poured their almond milk in your coffee.
It wouldn’t be some fanciful indulgence, to sit in front of a computer and transcribe the imaginary world in my head for the next four years. I had neon.
Neon. That was PT’s word for it, a kind of naturally occurring talent. But neon doesn’t glow on its own. It needs an electrical current, and that’s what the scholarship was—a charge. Without that, without PT, I would not be standing here today, burning like a bar sign for a drunk.
While I’ve told this story, heavy granite clouds have banded together overhead.
Behind me, I can hear the agitation of the lake, smacking the underside of the dock.
A gentleman in the crowd suddenly caps his head with his hand and glances up at the sky warily.
I hurry to bring it to a close before we all get drenched.
“The strangest thing happened the last time I saw PT in person,” I say to the crowd, smaller today than it was yesterday, even some empty chairs.
The party atmosphere is gone, and it’s all so much sadder and so much more urgent that I leave them with this.
“It was three years ago and he was in Los Angeles and I invited him over for a drink. We had just bought our house and he wanted to see it. But when I opened the door, he walked right past me without so much as even saying hello. He went immediately into the living room and stood staring at this jagged crack in the brickwork of our fireplace. ‘You won’t believe this,’ he said.
” A few people are holding programs over their heads, the paper wilting with rain, and I’m reminded of the music they play at awards ceremonies to signal to the winner that their time is up.
I tightly time all my potential acceptance speeches so that I am never that person shouting into a cut microphone, but for some reason right now I keep going, I can’t stop until I finish this story, until everyone is as staggered by the synchronicity as I am.
“Our house was built in the fifties, and my husband and I had assumed the brickwork had cracked from age, but PT told me that during the time that he lived in Los Angeles in his twenties, he had been a PA on a film that was shot here, in our house, and that they were shooting the day of the Northridge earthquake and that was what caused this crack. He said that, during the editing process, they had problems with continuity because in some of the shots the fireplace wasn’t cracked and in others it was, and we stood staring at each other in disbelief because I knew this story, he always used it as an example in class when we covered elements of narrative, and then I had gone and unwittingly bought the earthquake house. ”