Great Kisser by David Evanier Page B

and my father’s monthly checks and his abuse until I left New York. Handing me my check, he smiled and said, “You’re busy as a cockroach with your writing, aren’t you?” And he smiled and waved the check at me, pulling it back when I reached for it, as he’d been doing for forty-seven years.
    And then I came back to show business, the world of the Catskills and the RKO Palace and Variety that I loved as a kid, in 1992 when I finally knew that books and writing were not enough, that literature didn’t make up for every possible failure, that spending ten years on a book was not a moral act if it meant partly living off Karen, and that those dark, enclosed New York rooms where I had celebrated the artist as loser, the writer as someone who sacrificed life for art—all that melancholy, self-righteous shit—could no longer save me.
    I came to Hollywood at 47 to make a living. I was given a fellowship by the “Marv and Mark Film Company,” which was sponsored by a studio. Marv and Mark were congenial guys in their late twenties with a lot of hair. Marv, always on the phone making deals, sat behind his desk, while Mark lay on his back on the couch with a beer. They were always “psyched,” projects were “huge,” and every writer was “great.” And nothing ever happened.
    Like so many other writers before me, in Hollywood I came to covet what I despised. I was tossed to and fro like a herring out of a barrel. Sitting on the Santa Monica pier beside a businessman reading Money Is My Friend , I thought, well fuck, yes. Look at all the degradation I’d gone through because I didn’t have it.
    California had been the place my father’s family had emigrated to from dark and sodden Roxbury in the 1950s when Jolson beckoned with “California Here I Come” and the family had gathered around the radio imagining Jack Benny and Rochester, Burns and Allen, Baby Snooks, Phil Harris and Alice Faye in Beverly Hills and Art Linkletter in “beautiful downtown Bur-bank,” which was supposed to be funny, but still they imagined a bunch of laughing Jews around their pools in the land of permanent sunshine and achievable desire.
    When I came to L.A., Uncle Phil, the last of my father’s brothers, was still there. He lived in a single room without a book. He had never known a woman, and almost never spoke. He had a handsome face, like my father’s untouched by human contact. At 80 he resented being called a senior citizen. He spent his days visiting other seniors in hospitals, and ate in the hospital cafeterias.
    I knew that Robert Greenberg lived in Venice, but I was ashamed to call him because of the story I’d published about him in 1985.
    I met mesmerizing characters who were in disguise: they claimed they were writers, or producers, or literary agents, or Nazi hunters, or foundation heads. Some of them had killed and castrated people and now they were sorry about it and wanted to become rich atoning and telling their stories in movies and becoming famous writers and producers and directors and enjoy the limelight all over again in the second or third acts of their lives. I sat down to talk with them, and found out that the writers couldn’t write, the producers couldn’t make a deal, and the agents couldn’t read. This was the Hollywood thing. There was Ron Fatino, the wiseguy who came to Hollywood with his crew and wrote scripts by the pool, flipping each page of creation to his crew members, who told him he was a fucking genius.
    Then I met Frank Silvestri, a trusted former associate of John Gotti. Frank had ratted on him and went into the witness protection program and was now a burgeoning unproduced screen-writer. Frank had delivered body parts in bags as a message to hoods in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, Manhattan and Jersey; castrated a man whose name he never knew; disemboweled a pimp in Harlem; robbed a