Free Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice Page A

pangs of homophobia in some men, made uncomfortable with his particular brand of homosocial friendship, which a mutual acquaintance once called “armingly disarming.”) But as we kept talking into the night and next day, the expression’s real meaning began to emerge. “You angry at me?” he asked. No, I said, I just had to figure out a different roommate situation in L.A., was all.
    It wasn’t until years later that I began to suspect his reasons for getting disillusioned with Hollywood, or at least the Hollywood I’d presented to him. He had just begun agenting and tried to get me a job ghostwriting the memoir of Ken Aurora, that insufferable talk-show host with the veneer smile, called Don’t Spit on Superman’s Cape, Don’t Tug on the Wind: Lessons Learned on the Big Red Couch . “This is right up your alley,” he said, rather flatly. “ Hollywood Babylon –type stuff. Doesn’t have to be true.” At the time, however (this must have been around ’84 since for reasons I don’t understand I associate this period with watching Reagan/Mondale debates on TV), I was sevenor eight hundred pages into a first draft of Season of All Natures , which I thought would be my magnum opus, and I said I didn’t want to be distracted from my real writing. I also told him that if word of my involvement in Aurora’s egregious bit of pop pulp leaked once Season of All Natures was published, the Pulitzer committee would refuse to take me seriously. “Okay, then,” he said. Of course, Season of All Natures was not published, and I often mourn the money I could have made penning Aurora’s book of showbiz sycophancy, those countless-told (and surely apocryphal) tales of drinking with Peter O’Toole, of bedding Liz Taylor, of giving Johnny Carson the idea for the Carnac bit. But when I see that paperback available in airport bookstores, along with its follow-ups Talking Heads, Taking Beds: More Lessons from the Big Red Couch and Couch Surfing: Even More Lessons from the Big Red Couch , I still feel a pang of fear that Oliver’s offering me that job was his way of saying he knew how much of my showbiz tales—which he’d always responded to with rich laughter—I’d stolen from cheap Hollywood memoirs, how much of my life had effectively been ghostwritten. “Doesn’t have to be true.”
    Well, the talk with Chris did not go well. He and Julia are currently at the movie. But that just means I have more time to myself to get some writing done. The house is empty, free of distractions. My mind is clear and I’m ready to proceed with the task at hand. I am sitting here in the spare room, constellations of dust motes drifting through a shaft of early afternoon sunlight, the only sound the rubbery vroom of each passing car’s Doppler effect. (I suddenly feel obligated to admit that those last two clauses I’ve written before. They appeared in chapter 86 of Season of All Natures when the character of Gavin iswandering through his old childhood home, but they are still applicable here. Is it wrong that I’m now poaching descriptions from my decade-old unpublished novel? Is my guilt based in a fear that I cannot come up with something original, that my best writing is behind me, or that in stripping Season of All Natures for parts I’m finally admitting that it is officially—as Oliver told me it was—dead in the water? Or is my guilt based in my increasing awareness that this legal document is beginning to take on a novelistic form? Do I hope that you at New Wye True Crime are impressed enough with my wordsmithing that you will tell the literary guys down the hall to reconsider Rarer Monsters ? Sure, it’s only natural for that to be floating somewhere in the back of my mind, although I am fully aware that true crime editors are drawn to a, shall we say, louder style than are higher-brow editors