Selling Nostalgia Read online

  A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

  ISBN: 978-1-68261-869-1

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-870-7

  Selling Nostalgia:

  A Neurotic Novel

  © 2019 by Mathew Klickstein

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Cody Corcoran

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Permuted Press, LLC

  New York • Nashville

  permutedpress.com

  Published in the United States of America

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  for

  Gnossos Pappadopoulis

  Nathan Zuckerman

  Riggan Thomson

  BoJack Horseman

  “When you’re young you think the world of adult services is reliable, proficient, and cost-effective. Then you grow up to a life of fatboys and four-eyes, bullies and bookworms, fudgers and smudgers.”

  —Martin Amis, Money

  “Idol worship is no more. There are no longer any gods and goddesses on the screen; just human beings of varying degrees of interest.”

  —Photoplay Magazine, November 1928

  “No one’s life is a sitcom.”

  —Brandon Tartikoff, The Last Great Ride

  “Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.”

  —Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

  CHAPTER 1

  “So, do you know who Gil Gladly is?” asked Milton Siegel, not expecting much of an answer.

  He didn’t receive one.

  The attractive young black chick mixing and serving drinks on the other side of the airport lounge bar had her back turned. She reached beyond her lavender-tipped fingernails up toward a bottle of crystal clear vodka above her head. Her matching lavender braids cascaded down her back.

  It wasn’t that she was ignoring his question, Milt reasoned. She’d probably not heard him, lost in her own world of business, the way he had been these past few weeks getting prepared for the month ahead.

  Jesus, he thought. The past few weeks? The past few months. Two years, maybe!

  He thought of all the work he’d put into this fucking thing.

  Milt had earlier exchanged some polite chit-chat with the bartender. She had smiled with her thin, fire-engine red lipstick-ed lips and her wide hazel eyes behind her matching red large-rimmed glasses. Along with her thin black tie, pinstriped white button-up shirt, and tight black apron hugging her svelte midsection, she could almost pass for an NYC hipster intellectual moonlighting in the service industry.

  Although she wasn’t exactly his typical flavor, Milt had found himself flirting immediately after she’d asked him, “What are we thinking about the menu?”

  “The paper’s a little thin,” Milt had said, folding up the corner slightly.

  She smiled with a subtle snort.

  “No,” she said, subtly eyeing three other customers who were sitting down at the end of the bar. “You want anything?”

  “Wild Turkey if you have it,” Milt said. “Maker’s, if not.” Too many places these days rarely had Turkey anymore, but they always had Maker’s Mark for some reason Milt couldn’t figure out.

  “Single or a double?”

  “You know what? I…better have a double,” Milt said. “Just in case.”

  “Just in case,” she repeated dutifully, with the upward lift of the right side of her mouth, which made for a magnificent smirk. The bartender turned to grab Milt’s second choice from the gleaming bottles of spirits that lined the wall behind her.

  Further conversation had followed between the two, as had a few more double Maker’s on the rocks.

  All the while, Milt sat on his bar stool turning his head toward the smudged and dusty floor-to-ceiling windows to his right, through which planes landed and took off from an elaborate network of runways, where terminal tubes stretched out in all directions, and where neon orange-vested laborers could be seen driving carts and hauling luggage in the mid-morning white light of heaven.

  The bartender had inevitably asked what Milt did for a living.

  As usual, he had—more than three doubles in by now—spurted out something protectively vague along the lines of, “Whatever pays the bills.”

  I’m a writer and a filmmaker, Milt always felt meant one of two equally pathetic possibilities. One: Having the audacity to directly state such a thing translated to, I work at a coffee shop. A teacher, maybe. Perhaps living at home with his parents. He certainly was not a professional writer and/or filmmaker.

  Two (worse): If you were—like Milt, for good or ill—an actual writer and sometimes filmmaker, someone who made his or her living as a writer, someone the IRS considered a writer, then what came next was the awkward Q&A period. You had to tell the person what you’d written, what outlet you’d written for, what TV show or movie you’d worked on.

  Which meant now it sounded as though you were bragging, you arrogant prick. Yeah, you don’t work in retail or live at your mom’s well into your thirties, but you are a douchebag.

  To make matters still worse, Milt was not flying off to LA for a writing project. He was going there to premiere his latest documentary as the first part of a preview tour around the country.

  He did have one trick up his sleeve. A way to state what he did for the time being, where he was going, and what he was doing without coming off as too much of an aforementioned prick-douchebag.

  Milt could talk about his documentary subject. He could ask the lovely bartender if she happened to know who Gil Gladly was, and from that he could build something more substantial.

  Because on the flip-side of all of this silly paranoia and neuroticism born of his genetic Jewishness, what Milt was doing was pretty cool. He was going on a tour with a documentary about someone most people had heard of before.

  Or a lot of people, at least.

  Some people?

  Not the bartender.

  When Milt, wobbly and emboldened by his six or ten Maker’s Marks, had again asked the bartender, “Hey, do you know who Gil Gladly is?” she finally came back down the bar toward him and from the other side of the slate-gray Formica bar asked, “Sorry, who?”

  “Gil Gladly. Did you ever watch KidTalk when you were growing up?”

  “No, sorry.” She spun around, her lavender braids whipping from left to right across her small shoulders, and plucked a generic looking bottle of gin from the sparkly mother lode wall.

  Turning back to him, she inquired, as she mixed whatever cocktail had been ordered, “Was it on Disney Channel or Nickelodeon?”

  “Neither. Balloon,” Milt said. “KidTalk was pretty much the show that made that whole channel happen back in the late eighties. Gil Gladly was the host for like ten years. He’s done a few other things since then, but mostly behind the cameras. He produces and consults a lot.”

  “Oh, cool,” she said, loudly shaking an urn-shaped ti
n, inside of which were ostensibly the fixings for a martini. “I don’t really watch TV. Mostly just look at stuff on YouTube. Sometimes Netflix, I guess. It’s kind of dumb, but on weekends or when I get home from work at night, I love sitting on the couch and vegging out on my laptop. Sometimes I can just play on my phone for hours. I know it’s stupid, but it’s a way for me to relax.”

  Maybe her parents couldn’t afford Balloon when she was younger. Perhaps that was why she never saw KidTalk. But more likely—yes, this had to be it—she was too young to have ever had the chance.

  Christ, age forty for him was getting closer all the time. Two of the last girls he had fucked before he met Laney had only been three or four when Kurt Cobain killed himself. That had been weird to realize.

  “KidTalk was basically an eighties version of Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Darndest Things,” Milt continued, not bothering to acknowledge the inanity of his trying to get a millennial to understand the format of an old show she’d never heard of before by referencing an even older show she definitely never heard of before.

  “Huh,” the bartender said. “I thought Bill Cosby did that show.”

  “Well, yeah,” Milt said, looking down at his drink abashedly. “But these days we try to, um…keep the comparison between Art Linkletter and Gil Gladly. You know.”

  “Yeah, I remember Gil Gladly.”

  Milt turned his head to the bedraggled old guy who had apparently at some point sat a few stools down to Milt’s right, blocking a bit of the hornet’s nest of planes landing and taking off.

  The bartender handed the fellow customer his martini. He nodded his white-haired head beneath his faded sunflower yellow trucker hat, sipped his drink, and pulled out a ten from his greasy denim shirt breast pocket, placing it on the Formica counter before setting his drink back down.

  “Mmm, now that’s something I don’t normally do,” he said without turning to Milt. “Normally I go for a Bud. But sometimes, brother, you need yourself a good, stiff gin martini. Know what I mean?”

  The bartender forced her crooked smirk as though he had been talking to her. She slipped off to go help two middle-aged patrons now entering from the blurry crush of passengers clogging the corridor outside the lounge to Milt’s left.

  Milt turned slightly on his stool toward the man on his right and got a better look at how tan and leathery he was, how broken-down and wrinkled. Not so much chubby as stocky.

  “You watched KidTalk?” Milt asked.

  “Nah, but my kids used to watch Balloon all the time when they were younger. All grown up now. I remember that Gil Gladly fella was on the TV a bunch when the kids would get home from school. They musta been playing that shit ten hours a day. Seems to me that guy was always on.”

  “They had to repeat a lot of their shows, because back then Balloon didn’t really have any money. It was early cable.”

  “Yeah, I know about that,” the old man said, sipping his martini, a simple act which made him more and more of an incongruous image. His fingernails were outrageously caked with oil or god-knew-what, Milt noticed. “I used to read the TV Guide a lot back then. Good material for the john.”

  Milt attempted a grin, nodding laconically.

  “I overheard you saying you’re traveling with some movie about him? Talking about it to that pretty girl you’ve been hitting on?” the man continued.

  As blitzed as he was, Milt was nevertheless relieved the bartender was on the other end of the bar and likely couldn’t hear the conversation he’d unwittingly become part of. It was a sobering statement, though only for a moment. Then the booze went right back to pickling his brain, and Milt felt that familiar arctic crispness wash over him in a rush. He smiled beatifically and enjoyed being drunk.

  “Yeah, well, you gotta use what you have,” Milt said, raising his glass, filled mostly with melted ice, up to the man who was still not turning his way.

  “Hey, that’s him there, right?” the man said, pointing to the muted TV Milt hadn’t been aware of until now. The screen was nestled into the rightmost side of the bejeweled wall of liquor bottles.

  The man was right.

  The bartender came back right on time, because there he was, Gil Gladly on whatever morning news show was playing soundlessly off the TV.

  “Is that him?” the bartender asked, hearing that last part and becoming visibily interested in Gil Gladly on TV.

  “Yeah, he’s been doing a lot of press for our film tour,” Milt said, trying to vaunt without being that arrogant douchebag.

  “Jesus Christ,” the man with the martini said. “How old is he now?”

  “Sixty-five,” Milt answered.

  The old man took a sip of his drink, shaking his head. “Am I crazy or does he look like Danny Bonaduce? The old Danny Bonaduce. The way Danny Bonaduce looks now. They could be twins, with the reddish, graying thin hair, the bloodshot eyes, and the ginger skin. All bulky with those big ol’ arms. Jesus, just like Danny Bonaduce.”

  “Who’s Danny Bonaduce?” asked the bartender.

  Milt and the old man answered at the same time, “Partridge Family.”

  They both looked at each other and smirked.

  “You’re into the old stuff, huh?” the man asked.

  “Yeah,” Milt said. “A lot of Nick-at-Nite when I was a kid. Read George Burns’ autobiography when I was in sixth grade. I was probably the only thirteen-year-old boy in 1994 who had an autographed photo of Phyllis Diller on my wall.”

  The old man, Milt, and the bartender turned back to the TV to take in Gil yammering away on mute to the cabal of hosts in their sumptuous gray suits, silver ties, daisy-colored dresses.…

  “Huh,” Milt said. “I never really noticed that before. But you’re right. He does look like Danny Bonaduce. They both have that same gleam in their eyes too.”

  “That’s right!” the old man said, snapping his fingers. “Two peas in a pod, my boy.”

  Noticing the man was now staring strangely at him, Milt asked, “What?”

  “I was just realizing, you kind of look like someone too.”

  “Hopefully myself.”

  “No, no,” the man said to Milt, waving over the bartender for another drink. “You look like…you know, that kid…from all those goofy movies…the Jewish guy. With the beard and glasses? The curly hair?”

  “A Jewish comedian with curly hair and glasses? Could you be a little more specific?“

  “The guy from that funny movie where he gets that angry uptight bitch pregnant. What’s-his-name.”

  “Seth Rogen,” said the bartender.

  “Yes!” The man clapped. “You look like that Seth Rogen kid. Jewish kid. Very funny.”

  “He’s definitely popular,” Milt said, trying not to reveal his disdain for the comparison that had been made at least once a month since 2007.

  “Hey, but you’re doing pretty good there too, guy, huh?” the old man was quick to say. “Making your own movie about Gil Gladly. Not bad. Not bad.”

  “It is pretty cool,” the bartender said, watching Gil on the TV screen. “And now you’re traveling around with it?” She turned around to Milt and at long last appeared to actually give a shit.

  “Yeah, you know, we’re—”

  “Hey, doesn’t he have something weird going on there? He’s got, like, a real bad stutter, right? In real life when he’s not on the TV?” interrupted the old man, who suddenly dropped his martini on the floor, shattering the glass loudly. In the confusion, the man cartoonishly spilled off from his stool, toppling over onto the one next to him. “Aw, fuck, my elbow!”

  Rushing around the countertop to the man, the bartender’s braids trailed behind her, and Milt had a joyful opportunity to see how petite and beautiful she really was.

  It was time for Milt to make his grand escape before he made any more of a fool of himself, like this guy who was now on the ground, clutching his elbow.

  Milt’s flight was about to board.

  And yes, Gil Gladly did have a s
tutter in real life. When agitated.

  CHAPTER 2

  “D-d-d-did you s-s-s-s-see the interv-v-v-v-iew?” Gil Gladly’s radio-friendly voice boomed from the other end of Milt’s cell phone speaker pressed to his ear.

  Milt, unsurprisingly tipsy, scrambled as best he could through the onslaught of what continued to be a blurring crowd of passengers pushing and shoving, careening off his right shoulder upon which one of his two beige backpack straps ran up and down.

  “Ooof, sorry,” Milt said to whomever it was who’d just bumped into him in the katzenjammer airport melee on his way to his terminal.

  “What the h-h-h-hell was th-th-th-that?” Gil barked.

  “Nothing, Gil,” Milt said, straightening his shoulders in mid-rush toward Terminal 24.

  Get it together, Milt.

  Knowing it was a mere sitcom trope but giving it a try anyway, Milt shook his head vigorously in a feeble attempt at sobering himself up. It didn’t work; this wasn’t a sitcom.

  “Jus’omeone bomping in’o me,” Milt mumbled back to Gil.

  “Assholes,” Gil growled. “They’re all assholes. Ev-ev-ev-eryone in those places. I hate airports. Assholes everywhere you look. L-l-l-l-like a pr-pr-pr-proctologist’s office.”

  Those years at the Ha Ha Hub back in Gil’s New Jersey of the 1970s had really boosted his repertoire of such Borscht Belt bon mots. Milt didn’t exactly tire of Gil’s endless string of dad jokes, but this was neither the time nor place for one. Milt’s mind was elsewhere, and still marinating in alcohol.

  There was something to be admired, if only on a historical level, about Gil’s comedic stylings, mimicking the masters of the old school—Henny Youngman, Groucho, and people of their ilk—“Take my wife, please….”

  Then there’d be those times when Milt would be walking with Gil, orbited by a gaggle of adoring fans, and the former television host would bust out an anachronistic relic like, “He wasn’t gay…but he was a near miss.” Milt would flinch, but immediately get over his fear in the realization that none of the besotted, star-dazed fans were actually paying attention to what the subject of their adoration was saying, and thus there was no real danger of any of these people, say, tweeting out whatever inappropriate thing Gil had just said.