Free The Comedy Writer by Peter Farrelly

the sports section, but was too anxious about meeting my new groupie to read. I kept glancing at the door when anyone entered. Finally she came in, made a quick sweep of the room, and called out, “Monkey!” I looked behind me, then squirmed as I realized I was the chimp she was referring to.
    “Have you been waiting long?”
    She kissed me on both cheeks, grabbed a chunk of my melon and stuffed it in her mouth.
    “Uh, no,” I said. “No.”
    I felt like running, but before I could, she'd asked a couple singles if they minded doubling up in order to open a table for us. She took my arm and suddenly I found myself at a little Formica table in the corner with her jammed in beside me screaming out her life story for all to hear.
    and she was from Livingston, New Jersey, not Tennessee, as the picnicky dress had indicated. She'd been in L.A. for almost two years now, having come out alone, then quickly meeting and moving in with a personal trainer from Germany named Honus. Colleen claimed to have once been “a figure-skating champion,” whatever that meant, which was why she had to leave high school early, and she was an actress now, struggling to attain her SAG card but getting by with the help of herwork in the Screen Extras Guild. Most big stars started as extras, she said, and for eighteen months she'd been buoyed by the hope that a sharp casting agent would pick her out of a crowd scene on the Temescal Canyon
Baywatch
beach or off the hallways of
90210
and offer her a leading role in a big movie. It happens, she said, and I said I didn't doubt it.
    While she told her story, I was thinking how wacky it was that she had called a total stranger “Monkey,” and that she'd kissed me, and I wondered why she'd needed to see me so badly that she'd rap on my door at dawn, and suddenly I heard her say, “I need a place to stay.”
    Like an angel, a young smiling Mexican man appeared. I ordered tortillas and scrambled eggs and Colleen asked for two eggs— “snotty”—and home fries. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and asked Colleen to order me a Sprite while I was gone. The bathroom was just to give me space—I didn't really have to go—so I washed my hands a couple times and hoped I was overestimating her nerve. Back at the table I changed the subject and started querying her about acting and Livingston, New Jersey—which apparently had a lot of ponds and rinks and was a figure-skating hotbed—and basically about everything I knew nothing about, and in the middle of a question about Brian Boitano, she said again, “I need a place to stay
tonight.”
    I paused and said, “Why?”
    “Because Honus threw me out yesterday. The big jerko said I didn't pay him the rent.”
    The waiter placed a cup of coffee in front of me.
    “No,” I said, “I ordered a Sprite.”
    The man looked at Colleen and she said, “They didn't have Sprite, Monkey, just ginger ale, so I ordered you a coffee, black.”
    “Really?” I said, but by then she was looking for a cigarette. I turned to the man and mouthed, “Ginger ale.” When he left, I said, “Well, did you?”
    “What?”
    “Pay the rent.”
    “Of course I paid him, but I was stupid and paid cash money and now I got no proof. Some birthday present, huh?”
    “Today's your birthday?”
    “No, next week. But he promised me we were gonna go somewhere. He knows I like to go somewhere on my birthday.”
    I threw her a commiserative nod.
    “He even kept Puffy.”
    “Animal?”
    She smiled. “My kitty.”
    The waiter appeared with our meals, and when he left I asked her where she'd slept the previous night.
    “I didn't. Hung out at Ben Franks'. Drank coffee all night and read the paper—that's where I read your article, in the paper. I mean it just blew me away, like you have no idea.”
    “Well, thanks.”
    “I mean it, seriously, you have
no idea.
Just the fact that I'd be at an all-time low point in my life, and to find that article … The chances are just …