Selling Nostalgia Read online

  Pressing onward through the airport mob madness, Milt was bumped into again on the right side in the inebriated swirl of chaos all around him on the way to Terminal…23. (No, wait. Terminal 25. Terminal 25 was where he was supposed to go.)

  “J-j-j-esus, again?” Gil’s voice fired out from the phone.

  “Definitely glad to be getting away from all these assholes here, that’s for sure,” Milt said, vying as he often would to stay on his pseudo-mentor’s level. “That’s why I’m so glad to be flying to LA.”

  This got a laugh from Gil, tinctured by a short wave of static.

  It always made Milt proud of himself when he could get Gil Gladly to laugh at something he said. Milt was no geeky fanboy; he was a filmmaker, or writer, or journalist, or whatever it was he felt most comfortable qualifying himself as, depending on the circumstance.

  But as with many celebrities—big or small, past their prime, or heading up the hallowed peak at that very moment in pop culture history—with whom he had interacted in his fifteen years or so since graduating from film school back in LA where he was about to head, Milt did get a special charge from knowing he was working with, friends with, and could make (thee) Gil Gladly laugh at something stupid he had said.

  Not that making fun of people who live in LA was that hard.

  Terminal 25. Finally.

  Milt bent slightly backward to slip off his backpack, making sure it didn’t drop that hard onto the seat next to him since his office (read: laptop) was in there. He collapsed into another chair and exhaled heavily, too drunk to care about taking up two seats in an overcrowded airport terminal.

  Milt couldn’t imagine how Gil coped with traveling as much as he did, particularly considering the man’s semi-celebrityhood and all. All those extra annoyances in situations like this.

  Then again, the guy probably didn’t get spotted or called out as much as he had back in the eighties and nineties. Besides, Gil was one of the few celebrities Milt knew who actually liked being hassled by fans running up to him for an autograph, brief chat, selfie, or occasional awkward hug.

  Gil knew that without his fans he’d still be in Jersey, emceeing wet t-shirt contests and hosting open mics for irritating comics and terrible singer-songwriters. Gil did love his fans. You had to give him that.

  When Gil asked again, “S-s-s-o d-d-d-id you s-s-s-see the interview?” he received no immediate response because Milt was too busy lusting after a young swain so stunning he wished he could give her a certificate.

  “Man,” Milt gushed, respiring slowly.

  “Wh-wh-what? Was it that b-b-bad? It was b-b-b-ad, wasn’t it?” Gil asked, truly anxious. It was easy to tell, even beyond his telltale stutter.

  Even though Milt wasn’t really paying attention, what with his being completely drunk by now and just as intoxicated with the vision of that girl standing over there looking like an out-of-time damsel who, if pixie wings were to suddenly sprout from her twee back, it wouldn’t have surprised Milt in the least.

  “No, it was fine, Gil,” Milt was able to get out. His eyes were locked on the girl in her gray peasant dress that might as well have been a loose, dishabille nightgown. It was semi-covered by a waist-length black button-up sweater, languidly revealing her right alabaster shoulder blade.

  Her light auburn hair was tied loosely into a long, thick braid that fell lazily down her flat chest, upon which a silver filigree necklace dangled. Two earrings sparkled from her tiny earlobes, matching a stud jutting out from the middle of her bottom pink lip. The slightest impression of black eyeliner sealed the deal for Milt.

  “Yeah, Susan always does her homework and knows how to talk to people on her show,” Gil said. “She’s a pro. But that new moron they have on there—I can’t even remember his name right now—he had no idea what the fuck was going on. The entire segment!”

  Milt was snapped back into the conversation with Gil Gladly on his phone, noticing at once that the man had stopped stuttering.

  Sometimes that was a clear sign that Gil was really upset. It was as though he couldn’t even be bothered by his own stutter in these instances. Or maybe he was just talking faster than he was thinking, which was so often the case with Gil Gladly, who, like Larry King, Winston Churchill, and the Micromachine Guy before him, talked for a living.

  “It was good, Gil, really,” Milt said comfortingly. “Actually, I was watching it in one of the airport lounges, and there was this old dude next to me who said his kids used to watch you on Balloon all the time when they were younger.”

  “Oh, y-y-y-eah?” Gil asked with the kind of gleeful innocence that Milt found so hopelessly endearing. After thirty years in the limelight (as dim as it would be from time to time, especially over the past decade), Gil still loved hearing that people, yes, knew who he was.

  Milt decided to leave out the whole dude-being-a-broken-down-crusty-fingered-degenerate-who-slipped-off-his-bar-stool aspect of the story.

  Milt felt his phone vibrate briefly, signaling a text message, but he assumed it was Silverstein. He didn’t have time for that right now, particularly while massaging Gil’s capricious self-confidence and trying to relocate the pixie girl he’d been scoping out through the ever-growing, rumbling crowd of fellow passengers, mostly overweight and slovenly, some who had given up altogether and simply wore pajamas.

  “What’d they say about your heart, Gil?” Milt asked, knowing bringing the conversation back to Something Real would help wrap things up.

  “Wh-wh-what? Oh, yeah.” (Faster now.) “Uhhh, I’ve either got six months or will live to be one-hundred and five. Depends on which doctor you talk to.”

  Milt was really paying attention now. He took the bait. “Wait, what?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gil spat out. “I gotta run.”

  “Who you doing next?” Milt asked, finding the girl and watching her scratch her ear with the sparkly, roseate diamond lodged in her perfect earlobe.

  “They’re gonna give me five minutes at the end of Bret’s show,” Gil said. “Can you b-b-b-b-b-bel-l-l-lieve th-th-th-that? Five fucking minutes! Th-th-th-that’s it. I made that guy’s career, and h-h-h-h-he g-g-g-g-gives me five minutes to talk about the movie t-t-t-tell-l-l-ling the s-s-s-s-story of m-m-m-m-m-my l-l-life! Nice friends in Hollywood, huh? It’s wh-wh-wh-why I’ve always h-h-h-hated LA.”

  Milt’s eyebrows furrowed and he caught a blessed glimpse of the girl’s bare ankle when she lifted up her dress to scratch that now too. (Dry weather?) “I mean…at least Bret’s having you on at all,” Milt tried, his heart not really in it. “Didn’t you say before you couldn’t get a hold of him now that his head was bigger than his ass?”

  “Ehhh, I g-g-g-guess he ch-ch-changed his mind,” Gil said. “S-s-s-see in y-y-y-y-you in LA.”

  Milt breathed in deeply. The airport aroma was that of greasy french fries and gritty exhaust.

  He checked the text message that had come in. It had been Silverstein, and the fucker was still sending screenshots of emails he’d received from his (and Milt’s former) editor at the paper Milt had “resigned” from earlier in the year.

  Silverstein wouldn’t stop sending these damned texts and leaving long, rambling, explosive voicemails, often while outlandishly drunk, on Milt’s phone. Milt knew it wasn’t worth texting back to say something along the lines of, “Kiddo, I love you and am proud of you for standing your ground at that hellhole. But I quit more than six months ago and your staying there is your own fault. If you want out, leave like everyone else has been doing. Stop being a battered housewife, and get out of there!”

  It wouldn’t be worth the time, especially since Milt had already sent almost the exact same text five other times over the past month alone.

  Besides, another text message had popped up, this time from Jessica Chen.

  Oy.

  Jessica Chen had been one of the child “stars” of another Balloon show that Milt had been too old to watch by the time it aired. Her show, KidTrek, was essentially a Sta
r Trek rip-off featuring a space crew manned by children. The telltale larger budget, glitzy special effects, and more conventional style of the show made for a noticeable break between the kind of weirder, irreverent, scrappily low-budget programming that had been airing on Balloon in the early days and what was to come.

  Actually, for the past two decades, there had been a contentious debate about the so-called “classic years” of the Balloon network—marked by the fancy-free, absurdist, sometimes sophomorically disgusting shows of the 1980s—versus series like Jessica Chen’s, which were glossier and appeared to be the brand of programming that belonged under the pristinely polished Disney aegis.

  It was around the time of Jessica Chen’s KidTrek, in fact, that Balloon started giving Disney a run for its money in the “children’s market,” rebranding itself as a contender that would eventually become the billion-dollar global juggernaut it became in the early 2000s.

  Balloon went through exactly the same process that other cultural touchstones from around the period underwent—Nickelodeon, punk rock, hip-hop, Saturday Night Live, MTV. What had started as a small, independently-minded, somewhat DIY affair erupted into the mainstream to become a massive, corporatized, worldwide moneymaker.

  Milt had never even talked to Jessica Chen before when he’d been doing all his research for the articles he’d written about Balloon’s scrappy eighties and early nineties programming. But ever since people got word of his documentary about Gil Gladly, Milt had been hearing regularly from former actors, actresses, and producers involved in other Balloon shows asking him if they could get tickets to the screenings happening all month around the country.

  Jessica Chen had been the most ambitious (a nice way to put it) in her barrage of texts and emails, some of which included her headshots, CV, and EPK, along with clips of her from various fanboy YouTube web series.

  Milt wouldn’t have bothered responding to her “Can’t wait to finally meet you in LA at the screening!” text. But Jessica Chen also happened to be one of the handful of Balloon alumni who were involved in their own documentaries about themselves along with the ever-flowing series of nostalgic pop culture docs allegedly coming out about both individual Balloon programs and the network itself.

  Best to be magnanimous and play into the “all for one” millennial Hollywood hype that fueled the cross-promotion of these projects burbling forth from the precarious soap bubble of the fan community that had frothed up over the past five years now that those who had grown up on these shows, like Milt, were old enough to start concocting said documentaries…and podcasts, articles, books, and other content detailing the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of the early Balloon years.

  Most of these upcoming documentaries promoted heavily on the entertainment blog circuit would rarely get past the Kickstarter phase. Many of the projects were produced by former or current publicists who were able to get their project heavily promoted through the contacts they had at all the big entertainment blogs even before their project had been fully funded or began shooting interview one. Milt, and a few other like-minded individuals who were actually paying attention to the dichotomy between the hype and reality of such endeavors, knew better.

  So, it was to Jessica Chen’s credit that her doc was in production—according to IMDb—and boasted interviews with eighties icons Julie Brown and Lea Thompson. Brown had guest-starred on a few episodes of KidTrek as a snarky, villainous alien queen, and Jessica Chen had been a recurring guest star on Thompson’s mid-nineties sitcom, Caroline in the City. Although these weren’t big names, per se, not in 2017, they were big enough to get Jessica Chen’s doc into a few of the medium-tiered festivals and most likely a coveted spot on Netflix’s tumescent lineup.

  Milt needed to play nice. Without swallowing too much of his pride or integrity, he sent a meme of Robert DeNiro’s heroic character from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil emblazoned with the large white text of, “Listen, kid, we’re all in it together” and thought that would be that until Jessica Chen’s next text or email, which would likely arrive while he’d be in the air with his phone thankfully off.

  He then texted his wife Laney, telling her he was about to take off and that he loved her. She texted back almost immediately to say he was a faggot…“but you’re MY faggot.” Which was about the best he could expect from a girl he lovingly described to friends as “a walking South Park episode.”

  Milt smiled, and in so doing, looked up to peer through the undulating crowd in which the pixie girl across the way was smiling back.

  It was a bit of a jolt, to be honest. Was she smiling at him?

  He was drunk, no doubt about it. He didn’t know this girl. Obviously. He was married. Uh-duh. Why did he still stare at and think about other girls? Was this normal? Was this what all newly married people did? Would this irrational craving dissipate after a few years?

  The announcement was made that boarding of Milt’s low-priority section of the plane had commenced, and the somnolent pajama’d cattle were prodded toward the inside of the terminal, with Milt himself being shoved diffidently by the mass of movement.

  He couldn’t believe he was actually going back to Los Angeles, his least favorite place on the planet. But off he was drifting, slowly, toward the gate, handing his thin paper boarding pass to the attendant, stopping halfway into the terminal tube along with everyone else, mostly on their phones, texting their own wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, parents, and looking up the latest news or into their social media feeds, playing Candy Crush.…

  The booze was back on his mind. Better put: At his mind, twirling the world around him alongside all the people he was being corralled with toward the plane, hoping he’d somehow be sat next to the pixie girl.

  He wished he’d get the email he’d been waiting on about his Unemployment. Why weren’t they depositing his final claim? Now what was the problem? Before he could complain aloud about the General State of Things, he was on the plane, and checking his ticket, and seeing that he was to sit—passing the pixie girl sitting down to his right—to his left.

  It was a middle seat. Fuck. Cross-country, from Boston to LA, nonstop. Fuck. With a selfishly obese man overloading the window seat and wearing the kind of oversized headphones that would normally make Milt laugh but now only scared him into realizing he’d be hearing explosive video game sounds and blaring electronic music for seven or eight hours of hellish torture. Oh, what had he done to deserve this fate? He was sorry! He was sorry for everything evil he had ever done, intentional or otherwise!

  Please, God, or whomever else: No!

  Milt deposited his beige canvas backpack into the miniscule legroom he’d never get to enjoy and lowered himself into his seat, leaning to his left away from the blob blasting electronic music to his right.

  He turned his head to his left farther and saw, across the cramped space of their aisle, the pixie girl sitting there, oblivious. She was also in the middle seat. Her window seat was empty and would end up remaining so. Her aisle seat was then filled with someone who looked virtually identical to Milt, another Seth Rogen type, and the two immediately began talking.

  The pixie girl laughed at whatever Milt’s doppelgänger was saying.

  Milt sighed heavily, moving his right arm away from the left arm of the gargantuan man to his right. A grizzled old biker with slicked back silver hair and matching goatee sat down in Milt’s aisle seat. The biker wore a Harley-Davidson shirt that read, “We do bad things to bad people.”

  Yikes.

  Milt ventured to ask the biker if he could have a little room on their shared armrest.

  “You kiddin’?” the biker asked rhetorically.

  Milt understood and scrunched himself further into the little bit of room he now had in his uncomfortable seat. He asked the passing, harried stewardess if he could have a blanket and a pillow.

  “We don’t have blankets or pillows on this flight,” she confessed apologetically, assisting a once-gorgeous soccer mom with a paedomorphic ponytai
l and skin-tight black yoga pants to her seat along with her screeching child and yapping Pomeranian. Right behind Milt.

  Fuck.

  The robotic stewardess shifted imperceptibly from apologetic to delighted, handing the soccer mom her squawking bird in a cage she’d been carrying. The biker turned around and said in his gravelly voice, “I had a bird like that once.” Then he ordered two Budweisers from the same stewardess who closed her eyes to smile wide like Janice the Muppet.

  The soccer mom laughed politely, juggling her bitch dog, her bastard kid, and her vicious bird. “Good thing I got all three seats to myself!”

  Milt sighed again, this time overheard by the biker who turned and groused at him, all but shoving Milt’s elbow off their shared armrest. There would be no armrest on either side for Milton Siegel on this particular cross-country flight.

  The announcement was made that all passengers needed to turn their phones to airplane mode, and Milt used the opportunity to text Laney again.

  “We’re off! Love you!”

  He waited. No response. He turned off his phone.

  He pressed his armrest button to lower his seat back, hoping he’d be able to sleep through the trip.

  “Sir,” Robo-Stewardess, now set to authoritarian mode, said, handing the biker his two beers, “you need to raise your seat up for take-off.”

  The fat man next to him turned up his music and Milt steadied himself for the flight to LA, and the premiere of his movie ahead.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Look at this fat motherfucker right here!” Frankly’s spiky-haired anime avatar shadow called out from beyond the darkness toward Milt, standing under a streetlamp’s white moon glow.

  “I was gonna say exactly the same fucking thing!” Milt called back to Frankly, emerging from the shadow and cobwebby tendrils of fog that cocooned them both around the corner from Milt’s mom’s two-bedroom apartment.