18% Gray. Zachary Karabashliev
is impossible. I was writing a script then. We met to discuss it.
“The idea is great,” he said, “but it’s hard to figure out whether it’s a comedy or a drama. What is it? You’ve got to clear that up.”
“Well, Elijah,” I countered, “is it really so important whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy or . . . ?”
“It’s important.”
“Elijah, it’s easy for you to say this is comic, that’s dramatic, and this . . . well, this is a tragedy. To me, man, everything I write is a giant jar of salsa: salty, sweet, sour, with a hot aftertaste!”
“So what I’m hearing is that you’re only interested in doing Great Things.” Well, it’s hard for me to say no to that. “Now me, I don’t have a single great idea, nothing even close, but I’ve finished seven romantic comedies and a dozen more short scripts. I have short stories and a complete novel. It’s better to have an average but completed idea than a great unstarted one!” Sometimes I want to strangle the guy. But now I call him from a pay phone.
I park on the street, under the blooming magnolia. Pacino, the dog, starts barking and Tara answers the door.
“Zack, how are ya?” She immediately notices my black eye but says nothing. I say “Hi” and hand her the bag with the bottle of wine. She and Steve like good wine. The other dog, I forget his name, licks my shoe. I go inside.
“Where’s Steve? Where’s Elijah?” I say.
Tara talks very fast and a lot. In fact, Tara talks fast precisely because she talks a lot. “Elijah is here, and Steve should be home any minute now. Where’s Stella? Why didn’t she come with you?” Without waiting for an answer, she goes on: “She’s probably busy. How are you guys anyway? You know what? Her painting, the one with the scorched trees that I saw at her show last year . . . I just can’t forget it. What with all these wild fires now . . .” On the TV screen there is a forest burning somewhere in Southern California. “I want to buy it. Can I buy it? How much would it be? But where can I put it here? No, no, no . . . it belongs in a gallery. It’s huge! How big is that painting, Zack? Seven, eight, nine feet? And black. It’s not black, actually. It’s dark, very dark, but not black. But it’s huge!” She whistles and waves her hands. “Big, it’s gigantic. Yes, Stella is amazing, amazing! Last year she painted burned forests, now we have wild fires all over the place. Hmm. How does that work, huh? It’s like she knew, it’s like she knew in advance. You’ll sleep here tonight, right?”
Here’s the story—Tara and Steve were theater actors in Boston, where they met Elijah. Ten years ago, they moved to Los Angeles to get into the film industry. They founded a theater company, started staging new plays, and did all kinds of things to survive. Now, Steve is a producer and Tara owns a casting agency and directs plays from time to time in small theaters, just for the heck of it. When Elijah later decided to storm Hollywood with his average screenplays, they offered him a place to crash until he found a job. He accepted the offer and four years later he’s still there. He occupies a tool shed crammed with mowers, junk, and boxes of books. At least it’s by the pool.
“Hey, Zack Attack!” I see his big orange head peek through the door. “Who gave you that black eye?” He grins.
“I fell down the stairs,” I say as I collapse on the couch. A Hummer parks outside, the dogs bark, and Steve opens the front door. He’s been shooting a commercial all day and is glad to see me. He grabs a bottle of scotch and offers ice. I say, “No, thanks, no ice.” He smiles and we lift our glasses for a toast.
Hours later, the four of us are standing around the bar in the kitchen, sipping wine and munching on cheese, ham, and grapes arranged on a pig-shaped cutting board. We talk about movies, theater, Hollywood, Europe . . . Steve tells a funny story about something that happened to him in South Africa while producing a stupid movie. Tara laughs loudly, throwing her head back. Her cheeks are already flushed. Elijah is gloomy. Elijah is always gloomy. Maybe because he doesn’t eat meat, drink, or smoke. I’ve never seen him with a girl, either. Elijah is not gloomy only when we talk about romantic comedies. Pacino, the dog, is sleeping at my feet. The other one, I still don’t remember his name, follows the fish in the tank with his amber eyes.
“Hey, guys,” I begin nonchalantly. “I want to meet with that Jamaican dude you introduced me to last year at Jeff’s party. Remember? What’s his name? The guy . . . with the turban?”
“Oh, you mean Chris?” Steve says.
“Yeah, that’s the guy.”
“You need some pot? We’ve got some here if you want.” He looks at Tara with that it’s ok to light a joint, right? glance.
“Pot,” I say, “is the last thing I need right now. I just wanted to talk with him about something.”
“He’s a little . . . you know,” Tara begins, “discrete. I’m not sure whether he’d like to . . .”
Steve jumps in. “A discrete guy.”
Chris is an enormous, muscular black man with a handsome, inspired face that radiates peace and wisdom. He wears white, free-flowing clothes and, sometimes, a colorful turban on his head. Last year I spent half an hour with him at a party and, while we were drinking (I—wine, he—orange juice) by the pool, we talked about inner peace, freedom of choice, inspiration, happiness, and all sorts of nonsense. The next few days I was in a cheerful mood. I was later told that he provided Steve and Tara with marijuana; they liked to smoke from time to time.
“I’m writing a novel,” I start lying through my teeth, detecting how Elijah instantly perks up, “in which the main character stumbles upon a bag of marijuana.” Elijah relaxes; a lame idea, nothing new. “So, I guess, my question is . . . what can my hero do with a bag of weed? Could he sell it, how much would it cost, stuff like that?”
“Don’t you know?” Steve asks.
“Well, if I did, why would I be looking for Chris?”
“And how does the story end?” Elijah says.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, how can you start writing something without knowing how it ends?” He almost snaps.
“Goddammit, Elijah, if I knew how it ended, why would I start writing it in the first place? That would be totally boring for me.”
“How can you reach the end when you don’t know where you’re going? The end is the most important part.”
“It’s no more important than the way there.”
“You have to know the end. Start at the end. Start there and go backwards, to the beginning.”
“Go backwards?”
“Sure! What does your hero want? That’s the question. What does he want? What drives him? What drives the story chapter after chapter after chapter?”
“A bag of weed.”
“A bag of weed can’t do that. What does your hero want to do with this bag of weed? Can he possibly achieve it? Or not? From there, you know whether you’ve got a tragedy or a comedy. But there’s another problem.” Elijah pauses. “Pot is too . . .” he gesticulates, “harmless. It doesn’t have that aura of . . . evil, so to speak. It doesn’t push people to do terrible things. On the contrary, it brings joy, relaxation, peace. Nobody kills somebody for a joint.” Pause. “Plus, it’s not expensive either. So the stakes are low. You should think of a different drug: heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, something like that. You should raise the stakes to the max—money or death!”
“Listen, my friend. This isn’t a script for a thriller. This is a story about . . .” I try to calm down and sound convincing. “Actually, this is not a story about drugs. This is a story about a guy who loses his talent . . .”
“His . . . what?” Elijah’s eyes narrow, puzzled.
“. . . loses his faith,”