"Ah, hell."
Dan Harmon leaned back from the keyboard and glared at the text on the screen, re-reading what he’d just written.
BRODY
I say one of us should let himself be turned into a vampire. How cool would that be? I’ll bet it would be easy to find one in this crazy-ass city.
JEREMY
Brody, you are such an a-hole. They call this a ‘reality show’ for a reason.
(Shoots a look toward Camille.)
‘Course I wouldn’t mind sucking on Camie. Except her neck wouldn’t be what I’d suck on.
CAMILLE (Tank top shows major cleavage.)
Fuck you, Jeremy. The day I let you get that close to my tits will be the day after I’m dead. And don’t call me Camie.
BRODY
So you don’t think there’s such a thing as a vampire? Would you like to bet your life on it?
He hit the "off" switch on the monitor and swiveled his chair away from the desk. Tell me again why I’m doing this, said a whiney voice inside his head.
The answer, as usual, was, Don’t be ridiculous. You’re getting paid for this crap.
A buddy who was on the writing team for a reality show called “It’s a Bitch Being Rich” had come to him a month before with the proposal that Dan “ghost” a few episodes for him. He said the show was dying for new plot directions and he thought Dan had a style they’d like. Dan watched a couple of episodes and decided that the format involved pretty much any form of excess coupled with strident disharmony among the characters. He’d pitched the idea of working the supernatural into the story line, and the producers had loved it. He’d already given them a haunted house in Bel-Air and a two-part episode involving voodoo, and vampires always seemed to be in style.
Dan had sent the friend drafts of scripts, the friend had fine-tuned them to put them in the show’s “voice,” and he’d given Dan half of the five thousand per episode the show paid. “There’s no downside,” his friend had said. “You do a few shows, you get a little cushion in the old bank account, then you go back to writing what you want.”
Dan thought again about how things were going with “writing what he wanted.” After he’d graduated a few years back with an all-but-useless B.A. in Creative Writing, he’d seen three possibilities that made some degree of sense: take a credential and teach high school English – absolutely “no” to adolescent chaos; try to get into writing advertising – probably not; or get a job in a book store and work on becoming the next big name in supernatural fiction. Which had led to a pretty steady part-time career in book sales and four paranormal thrillers in the last eight years. He crafted each book with loving attention to credibility and a firm disdain for the sensational. His goal was to present readers with a version of the “unseen world” that seemed as if it could truly exist. But somehow, all the book agents he’d pitched them to seemed to feel that “we’re not quite the right fit for your work.” Self-publishing at least allowed him to see his name up on a couple of major websites, and royalties over the last couple of years had reached a level that let him cut back on hours in the bookstore. Maybe he needed to take a hint from “the rich” and write something with a lot of sex, non-stop bickering, and some variety of “undead” as the bad guys.
He looked back at the dark monitor and then at the wall behind his desk, where a rust-colored water stain marked the grayish white plaster. It had been there when he first rented the office nearly a year ago, and the building’s owner had been promising to “get to it” ever since. And he found himself trying one more time to imagine what it would feel like to pack it in, to say, “I gave it my best shot, and it’s time to get a steady job.”
If he were the only one involved in that decision, it would never happen. He loved the whole process of writing, of losing himself in landscapes of mystery and adventure, of watching his words form themselves into rich settings and characters who loved and hated, failed and found redemption. And as far as making a living, he didn’t spend a lot, he could sleep on the sofa in his office if he had to, and he still had a connection with the manager at his local book store to pick up hours when he needed them.
But he was definitely not the only one involved. The million dollar question was what it might do to him and Maggie over time.
Maggie Pope was his roommate, his muse, and the love of his life. Her given name was Morgana after the Arthurian witch Morgan le Fay, and she’d followed her namesake into the study of myth and magic. She was a graduate student in archaeology at the University who, according to Dan’s friends on campus, already had a national reputation for the originality of her work, possibly enhanced for some scholars by the gorgeous headshots that often appeared along with her work.
They’d met a year-and-a-half before at a campus lecture on the power of ritual magic in vodou ceremonies. She’d settled into a seat a few chairs down the row from Dan just after the lecture started and had dropped a book. Dan had glanced over with his “How dumb can you possibly be” glare and had immediately started thinking about the quickest way to end his life.
She was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. She had long, dark hair that fell in a thick tumble past her shoulders, a perfect oval face with a luscious “Cupid’s bow” mouth, large hazel green eyes, and light olive skin with a luster like satin. She’d been wearing a tight black tank top that showed just a hint of cleavage above a deliciously firm bust line, and her Levi’s showed off the kind of subtly curvaceous hips and thighs that could’ve come out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog.
When she offered a silent “Sorry” with that gorgeous mouth and settled into her chair without a second look, Dan decided he obviously hadn’t made enough of an impression to matter. The good news was, he didn’t have to kill himself. The bad news was that he was apparently a lower life form in the world of this ethereal creature.
But at the end of the lecture, she’d asked several questions about anthropological origins of the particular belief system, and Dan, trying to regain some dignity, had asked if the speaker had ever felt any kind of alien presence at any of the ceremonies he’d attended. The man had looked at him until Dan was ready to run for the back door and finally said, “Yes, yes, I have felt things on some occasions for which I have no explanation. That’s all I can tell you.”
She’d reached over to touch his arm and said, “Great question. I didn’t have the guts to ask it.” During the next hour or so, they’d sat and talked in the empty lecture hall, and they’d discovered a shared fascination with the paranormal, theories of magic, ghosts and goblins -- the “unseen world.” It had been the starting point for a relationship that grew from friends to lovers to its current stage which, for Dan, was basically, “What would I do without her?”
They’d moved in together about six months after that first conversation, and Dan had rented the office soon after that. She did the bulk of her research and writing at home, and it quickly became clear that it wasn’t workable for either of them to have him pecking at his keyboard in the next room, whether he was fighting through another draft for “the brats,” as he tended to think of them, or trying to put together thriller number five.
There was no doubt that she would be an academic star. His friends who were still on campus told him the History department had a faculty position waiting for her. Even in a field as remote as ancient history and archaeology, her combination of brilliance and beauty would draw the internet spotlight, the YouTube and social media fanatics, like a magnet, whether she wanted it or not. What then?
Dan stood up and stretched and crossed to the lone window in the room. From his second-floor office he had an unobstructed view down Santa Monica Boulevard to the ocean. The view was the one thing the building had going for it. Otherwise, it was a dump. Somewhere back in time, it had been an SRO apartment building with a couple of dozen single apartments -- “Fairmont Arms - Weekly/monthly rates” –- before the building owner decided there was more money and less turnover in office space. The guy hadn’t even bothered to clear out the old furniture. A broken down sleeper sofa sagged against one wall, and the worn brown carpet had probably been there since the building opened.
Dan thought about trying to do a little more with “the brats,” but he realized that, with the sun on its mid-Winter schedule, it was already set to do its nightly disappearing act into the Pacific. “Folks,” he told himself, “it’s Miller time.”
