He laughs. “The best unproduced scripts in town,” he says. “And the Blacker List is the even better scripts. Only like ten producers get the Blacker List and The Mess made it.”
“Cool,” I say, and I wonder if schoolteachers in LA ever try to instill modesty in their kids.
Forty tells me that The Mess is about a kidnapping.
“Wow,” I say. “I’ve been working on a kidnapping story too.”
“No shinola?” he asks. He’s trying so hard, all the time.
I tell him we should read each other’s stuff and he says this is an epic idea and forwards me The Mess and The Third Twin. I scroll through my own stories in my phone, the ones I write when I can’t sleep, when I think about her, about what the fuck happened, when I make like Alvy Singer and try to correct it all with my imagination. I tell Forty about one of my favorite Amy stories, where we go away together and use fake names. Only in this version, I catch her in the cage while she’s stealing the books. I lock her up in there and force her to become my slave.
Eventually she falls back in love with me and we keep using those fake names. We become friends with the people we ripped off in Little Compton, Noah & Pearl & Harry & Liam. Forty calls it Stockholm Syndrome but he’s wrong; she was hoping to get caught.
“Ah,” he says. “Naughty girl. Nice again.”
This is why people like writing. You visit old friends without having to go on Facebook and see what they’re up to and deal with what idiots called FOMO. You make them into what you want them to be, the people they could be if only they were braver, smarter.
“What’s this script called?” he asks.
“Fakers,” I say. “But at this point it’s really more of a description of a story than a story. I haven’t worked it all out.”
“Every story begins as a story,” he says, as if this makes any sense. Hollywood. He tells me to check out The Mess. “Great minds,” he says. “The Mess is very much on theme with your Fakers.”
“You want me to read it now?”
“Send me your Fakers,” he says. He pops a pill. “I’m in no rush to go back to the fucking Aisles. Believe me, we’re not missing anything.”
“Bueno,” I say, because that’s what a dickwad successful LA writer like Milo would say.
We read. We both agree that our respective works are genius. Forty is blown away by my vision in Fakers and I give it right back to him. I claim to be impressed by structure in The Mess even though The Mess is incoherent nonsense.
And this is when I know I’ve caught aspirations. Nothing good can come from them. I knew this before I moved here. Already, I have violated Mr. Mooney’s advice. I am not getting my dick sucked. I fucked an actress. I swam in a pool. But I also know the way it felt to see those words on the screen of Forty’s iPad: Written and Directed by Joe Goldberg.
I need Forty to get my foot in the door and show Milo how it’s done. I sure as hell need more than a cute Funny or Die video to put that pompous fucker in his place and I read enough acting manuals to know that you don’t get anywhere here unless you know someone. Now I do. I know Forty Quinn. I tell him we could combine The Mess and Fakers and his eyes bulge.
“Super script,” he says. “Fuck yes. The bones are there.”
“Let’s do it,” I proclaim.
“Should we get our agents on the horn?” he asks.
Instead of admitting I don’t have an agent, I tell him we should wait. “Let’s make sure we have something great first,” I say. “We only get one shot here.”
He slaps my back. “Wise move, Professor.”
We agree to wait until the scripts are in the hopper until we tell anyone, Love, agents, anyone, everyone. I don’t want anyone to tell Milo that I’m trying to do anything. I want to tell that fucker that I did something. Also, Hollywood is stupid, so if our scripts don’t sell, then it will be like we never failed.
Forty slaps my back and we head to the counter. “Make it real with a meal,” he says, and I take in the menu: Doritos Locos tacos, gorditas, something called a quesarito that was not concocted by an abuela in Mexico City but by a corporate scientist in the middle of America.
Forty starts talking chalupas with the stoner at the register. Then we go into the kitchen so he can introduce me to his amigo supremo, Chef Eduardo. Forty orders a ton of food—dos loaded potato grillers and tres gorditas, one beefy five-layer burrito, and all the fire sauce that you can spare. While we wait for the bill, he reaches into his pocket and takes a bump of blow and I am officially living in Less Than Zero.
The guy at the counter smiles. “That’s thirty-nine dollars and eighty-two cents.”
“Thanks, bro,” Forty responds. “Don’t forget our fire sauce.” He whistles. “Eduardo!” he hollers. “You gotta tell the brass that they need a tip option here. How am I supposed to tip you boys?”
Eduardo laughs. “You funny, Mr. Forty.”
Eduardo is probably Forty’s closest thing to a true friend and Forty takes out a hundred dollar bill and crumples it and pretends to sneeze and throws the hundred over the counter. The guy at the register has seen this before and he laughs and says what Eduardo said, what Forty likes to hear: “Thank you, Mr. Forty.”
Forty nods and we go back to our booth and treat The Third Twin like it’s redeemable even as I kill his ideas and re-create it from scratch.
“Take it to the desert,” I say. “The third twin is an interloper who shows up and fucks it all up for the twins.”
Forty nods, hooked. You can tell he goes back and forth between thinking of Milo and himself as the third twin and I am suddenly so happy I am an only child.
“Now, the twins have their lives set but this fucker messes with everything,” I go on. “He screws their women and messes with their jobs and yet it’s all fucked up because he betrays both twins and it turns out they’re not as close as they thought they were.”
“Ah,” he says. “Act Two.”
“And then eventually, the twins find a way to trust each other. They’re sure that it’s them, the originals, so they make a plan and they bring the third twin to Vegas.”
Forty pounds the table. “Location shoot. I love it.”
“But they don’t get there,” I tell him. Idiot. “They pull off the road and they knock out the third twin and leave him for dead.”
“Fuck,” he says. “That’s dark.”
“But then.” I grin. “Last shot of the movie, high above, you see the car pull over, and a body is thrown onto the side of the road.”
Forty’s eyes gleam. “The third twin fucked them both.”
I nod. “There’s your movie.”
Forty says this could work and he tears into a packet of fire sauce and squirts it into his mouth. “Next up,” he says. “The Mess.”
He thinks it’s Tarantino meets Nora Ephron in a classic kidnapping caper but I’ve read it and Forty isn’t a writer. He just likes to put names together. Of course it’s a Vegas story—Forty will do anything to go to Vegas—but the characters are all over the place and sometimes the kidnapper is the guy and sometimes it’s the girl and it jumps around. (Drugs.) But I can fix this; I’ll just replace it with my Fakers.