The Road To Hollywood

Hello world!

I guess you're wondering where I've been.

Well, a whole lot has changed since I last had an internet connection. We had that storm back home--it more or less ripped up the whole house and in doing so unearthed all the dirty books that Uncle had stashed in the walls, sending pictures of buff sailors and soulful-looking firemen flying all over the property. It also left me homeless.

I was sleeping in a tent beside the remains of the house for a few weeks there, and let me tell you: sleeping in a tent beside the remains of a house is not a long-term survival solution. My back was always aching (even though I was sleeping on a mattress of super-soft Manitary Towels), I was cold, and I was troubled at night by dogs. Harrowed by dogs.

I didn't have much to do in the tent. I was living off the land, a diet of mainly tubers and shoots. When I wasn't looking for tubers or shoots or staving off the dogs I was reading and re-reading the few books that survived the storm. I would gather Uncle's magazines from the fields and ditches to make a fire, and I would spend my nights reading by the light of engorged 1970's penises. I had a cookbook, a self-help book about owning and cultivating your vital essence, a book on scriptwriting by the guy who wrote a critically-acclaimed sitcom called Under All That Weather that ran for two seasons in 1964-65, and an old fantasy paperback called When The Bloodwinds Blow Again (sequel to the far superior When The Bloodwinds Blow, which was sadly lost in the storm.)

The scriptwriting book soon became my favorite. There was a chapter on pitching a story that talked about all the important points--how to dress, the best place to get a shoe shine, how to talk clearly to get your points across, how you should masturbate twenty-five minutes before the meeting so as not to seem too eager, the disorder to fake in order to get a prescription for amphetamines, etc. Anyway--I was reading this chapter (burning my way through six crinkled, love-encrusted copies of Ass Monthly) what should blow into the tent but THE TATTERED COVER PAGE FOR MY ZOMBIE JESUS SCREENPLAY, FISHER OF BRAINS!

It was a sign.

Joe Galosh (writer of Under All That Weather, His Besmirching Love, Selling Stories For Cash and apparently an early treatment of Jurassic Park) wanted me to head West (and slightly South). He wanted me to follow in his footsteps. It's like he says in the book: once you have some kind of a story, all you need is a rich schmuck producer. You present yourself right, you keep yourself sharp but not too eager, you'll get your rich schmuck producer sooner or later. And remember--that talk of back-end pay is for schmucks and George goddamn too-good-to take-your-calls Lucas. You're neither, so get the money up front.

He says schmuck a lot, Joe Galosh. His book is padded out with scripts for all the episodes of Under All That Weather, and the people in that say schmuck a lot too. He also makes numerous allusions to George Lucas and how he's not taking his calls. Also Spielberg.

So I did it. I sold the land to our neighbor (the good people of the Tast-E-Feed corn syrup consortium.) I put half the money in a suitcase--more sage advice from Joe Galosh. I packed my tent and books and a bundle of nutritious tubers and I got on the next bus heading for a place where I might catch a bus that would take me to a bigger place where I could catch the bus for Los Angeles. Yes--I was going to Hollywood!

And here I am in LA with nothing but the clothes on my back and an astonishing aptitude for plot and characterization (also: a bundle of money, a new computer and an unsecured wireless network called 'default' in the apartment above). The place is okay but not very big, or clean, or secure, or close to any of the studios, or close to any of the places where other writers like to hang out. On the upside, it's not a tent, so I don't have to worry about the dogs and their endless circling.

Tomorrow I track down my mentor, my savior, my earthbound Christ, Joe Galosh.