Chapter 30
Here’s a story I would’ve probably told you this week if you didn’t need “space,” if you knew the definition of the word soon.
Once I saw Spike Lee in a Key Foods. I was in eighth grade, old enough to know that you’re not supposed to say hi to famous people, but young enough to realize that the city is an equalizer, a boss that sends us all underground and then up into places like Key Fucking Foods.
Anyway, I followed him around for a bit.
I watched him pick up a box of linguini and I tried to decide how to play it.
Did I tell him my name? Did I ask him to adopt me?
And then he turned around. I froze. Did he know I was following him? Was he freaking the fuck out? And then I blurted.
“I like the way you call it a Spike Lee joint.”
He laughed, and I thought I had this whole new life where Spike Lee was gonna teach me how to go fishing. “Thanks,” he said. “But I got bad news, little man. I’m not Spike Lee. I just look like him.”
I’ll never know if that was him, but it doesn’t matter, because the best part was the lead-up to the meetup, the part where I believed I met Spike Fucking Lee.
You’ve made it clear that you want to believe that I have a life.
I do have a life. I’m a slave 4 U because nothing compares 2 U.
But your heart wants what it wants, so here I am set up in a midtown fucking Starbucks.
I am here to produce A Joe Goldberg Joint.
As in I am producing my fucking life, the one you want me to have, the one you need me to have.
My first step is to build Jeremy’s blog.
The first entry is easy. Jeremy complains about his system crashing, how he lost his entire archive of his work.
The second entry is about the guilt that comes with leaving New York so soon after 9/11, and the third entry is about his heroes, the kings of September 11, as he calls them, David Letterman and Rudolph Giuliani.
My Coldmail heats up ten minutes after I send you the link: I loooove Jeremy and I can’t wait to meet him and you can relax, Cusack. Rudy G is too old for me, I like em young, as you know. Miss you.
I don’t fall for that. I don’t tell you I miss you, and I don’t nag you about getting together. But I do tell you that my boy Jeremy and his girlfriend are getting here on Thursday.
I’m a cool cat, I really am.
My next step is to write an open letter, a casting call:
WANTED: Male, early twenties. Jeremy Piven type. Good sense of humor. Solid and sober type to play “the best friend.” Woman, early twenties. Girl-next-door type. More Molly Shannon sidekick aura. Less Kate Beckinsale beauty queen. One day. Non-Union. Meals covered. A JG Joint production.
—
It’s Day One of casting and I am camped out in a midtown Starbucks.
I didn’t give out my full name. Actors scare me a little.
I’m a private person. I can’t imagine wanting everyone on the planet to know who I am, but here comes my first potential Jeremy, and he’s…
a bit of a letdown. The Alan Schweib in the headshot looked young and short, and this guy is a thirty-five-year-old beanpole.
I take his photo and résumé. Dinner theater in Delaware.
A Tide commercial two fucking years ago.
“All right,” he says, once he gets his Americano. “What are you shooting on?”
“Well, I’m not actually shooting.”
“So, it’s performance art?”
“You’ll be playing my buddy Jeremy.”
“Do you have a script?”
Stay in your lane, Alan. “It’s pretty simple. I’m the John Cusack, and you’d be the Jeremy Piven.”
Alan sighs like he’s the Cusack. “What’s the setup? Meaning what’s my motivation?”
“Well, my girlfriend wants to meet my buddy Jeremy, but he…” DOES NOT FUCKING EXIST. “He’s out of town and you’re, like, stepping in to play him.”
“And you’ve already cast your girlfriend?”
“No, my girlfriend is my girlfriend.”
“Meaning your girlfriend is playing your girlfriend….”
“Meaning my girlfriend in real life wants to meet Jeremy in the flesh. So you’ll, you know, you’ll be the Jeremy….” I save the best for last. “And you can pick your Sarah.”
He’s too snide to sell Tide, and he sneers. “Meaning this is not acting…. This is fraud.”
“Buddy, I’m just trying to make my girlfriend’s dream come true.”
“By lying.”
He snatches his headshot and goes off about his professionalism and tells me I’m gonna wind up behind bars.
I resist the urge to make a dig about dinner theater in Delaware, and Carrie Bradshaw was right, Vail.
It really is the end of love in Manhattan.
My next potential Jeremy is from South Jersey.
Too pretty, too tall, and, once again, too cynical.
I thought actors were short. I thought they were in the business of dreams, but after four rounds of You need help…
This is fraud…Will there be an orgy? I’m starting to panic.
I told you that Jeremy and Sarah arrive today and my buddy Craig is letting me down.
New York is letting me down. The fucking judgment.
A businesswoman in business attire glares at me. “Do you need that chair?”
Starbucks brings out the worst in people with a menu that encourages people to be really fucking picky and I should’ve done this downtown.
“Joe?”
Right off the bat, there’s something different about Carl Casey.
For one thing, he’s not taller than I am.
He’s a ginger, nervous, and a nice guy who thanks me for the opportunity.
And he’s Pivenish! Jumpy and caffeinated.
He had two lattes today and he has no résumé, not yet.
He’s doing extra work and improv classes.
I tell him I get it, and when I tell him about my production, he says the magic words.
“This is like something out of a movie. Talk about romantic!”
It’s been a rough day, so I’m still hesitant. “Yeah?”
“What can I say? I’m that guy…total sap. I love love. Rom-coms…Woody Allen…When Harry Met Sally. This is why people come here, to run in the rain and get the girl!”
“Thank you, Carl! You get it!”
“One day when you guys are old and gray, you tell her what you did, and she’ll think it’s the most romantic thing in the world.”
I did it, Vail! I found my Piven. Carl doesn’t judge me.
Carl doesn’t like Starbucks—he applied for a job, and they never called him back—and he has a friend who tends bar not far from here.
He says she’s the perfect Sarah and we’re on the move to check out the bartender slash actress when he stops short by a hot dog stand.
I ask him if he’s hungry. Producers do that kinda thing, they spring for lunch.
He smiles. “I’m good. When I was at NYU, before I dropped out, I had a crush on this girl…
. She was graduating, and she was a poet.
I showed up at her house with a tape recorder and told her I was an assistant at The New Yorker doing research for my boss Alice.
We didn’t stay together, but we did get together.
It’s Shakespeare, my man. All the world’s a stage…
. You gotta stop and smell the hot dogs. ”
And then we’re walking again. The potential Sarah slings J?germeister in a waiting-for-my-train, vaguely Irish tavern.
Carl’s “friend” is named Betty, and she is the perfect Sarah.
A smiley ginger in a tight white turtleneck who would totally stop and smell the hot dogs.
Her hair is in a bun, and her face is a blank canvas that breaks my heart a little.
I can already see her playing a corpse on Law & Order and failing to parlay it into a career as she realizes that she belongs with Carl.
Yes, it’s obvious. He has a thing for her, but that’s good with me.
I too love love. Maybe we’ll even visit Carl and Betty one day when they’re shacked up in Hoboken, running an Irish bar and popping out little gingers and… Gently, Joseph.
“Joe,” he says. “Meet the best actress in all of Manhattan.”
“And bartender,” she squeaks. “Don’t forget my other talent!”
By the third beer, it feels like I’ve known Carl and Betty my whole life.
Betty is from Wisconsin. She was Beth when she moved to New York, but she changed her name to Betty because she loves Bette Davis and all things retro.
They’ve been sort of seeing each other for a couple of weeks.
Carl came into the bar for six nights in a row to woo her.
Betty doesn’t like to give out her number, so it took some time.
Meaning they get it. Me. They don’t think I’m “playing with fire.” They don’t see me as a manipulative phony bound for prison.
“You’re trying to start the fire,” says Beth turned Betty. “It’s very Bruce Springsteen.”
I hire her on the spot and you call me—yes!
—and I send you to voicemail. See that, Vail?
I have a life. I wrap things up with my actors.
Tomorrow, they’ll begin their “research.” They’ll go to Mooney’s.
After all, that is where Jeremy and I met.
I’m high and maybe a little tipsy when I leave the bar, and it’s time for the first scene of Joe Goldberg Has a Life.
It’s okay to call you because you called me, and you pick up on the third ring. Trying so hard to be a lady. “Hello, hello! How’s Jeremy? Did they get here okay?”
“Great,” I say. “I really can’t wait for you to meet them!”
“I’m free tonight.”
“Oh, man, I would say yes, but Jeremy wants some catch-up time.”
“Totally get that. See, isn’t this better, Joe? We went out with my friends. We do our own thing for a bit, and now we’re gonna go out with your friends. I’m excited to meet them, but I’m even more excited that you guys got to catch up on your own, you know?”
Fuck no. “Yes, I do. And I gotta run. I’m finally going to Mooney’s to make things right and maybe get a slice of his wife’s famous meat loaf.”
“Really?”
No fucking way! The cage. The cage! “Yep!”
“Ooh, Joe, I meant to tell you that my friend at The View says it looks promising with that PA gig.”