The Comedy Writer by Peter Farrelly Read Free Book Online Page A

this, Hal, but I was wondering if you could just take a look at my script when you get a chance.”
    I held it out and Markey took the script, but from the look on his face I don't think he was aware of that fact.
    “I'm sorry,” he said, “your father is … ?”
    “Bob.”
    “Bob who?”
    “Halloran.”
    Markey looked at the other man, then back at me, and said, “Bob Halloran … ? How do I know Bob Halloran?”
    “I don't think you do. He lives in Rhode Island.”
    “Well … why did you say … ?”
    “Just a point of reference,” I offered weakly.
    Adam Levine coughed up a laugh and suddenly Markey got it and he wasn't coughing up anything, and if he had he probably would have let it fly in my face.
    “Get the fuck out of here, you fucking idiot.”
    He picked up the phone and I picked up my feet. I was out the front door and walking very fast beside some shrubs when I saw the golf carts careening toward the building. A woman security guard shot me a look as I headed out the main gate, but she didn't give chase. I jumped in my car and tore back up the hill toward the highway feeling dumb and sweaty and humiliated, and much more like Rupert Pupkin than Steven Spielberg.
    When I got home, I felt tremendously creepy, like a stalker or something. I lay on my bed, stared at the ceiling. I worried what everyone must be saying back in Boston. I pictured the guys at U.S. Lines picking up their bonuses and gossiping about me. Hear about Halloran? He's nuts, he's lost it, he's delusional, he thinks he's fucking
Hemingway!
They weren't supposed to know about my writing, but I feared that word had leaked. And what must my parents be thinking? I thought of Amanda, about how good she must be feeling about her decision. A couple beers later I was really wallowing in it, and to make things worse I found a good bra ad, spread it out on the floor, then hung my head off the bed and fucked my pillow missionary-style, all of which wouldn't normally bother me, except itwas four in the afternoon and I was in a crummy little apartment and there were newspapers and soiled socks and underwear on the floor, and I didn't have a real job and I didn't have a girlfriend and I was thirty-three years old and I could hear the world passing me by outside and nothing in the universe seemed to be going my way.
    I fell asleep and the phone woke me up. It was a man from the
Los Angeles Times
and he said they were going to publish my story.
    and hackeysack and cook-outs on the beach. She loved her parents and visited them each Sunday, and girls liked her as much as guys. She was a Big Sister to a fifteen-year-old autistic kid. She rode her bike everywhere in the summer and had frizzy brown hair and soft blue eyes. She was shy around strangers and hardly ever wore makeup and she had a great body, and she laughed when someone suggested she model and everyone's mother loved her. But she was no priss. She could run like a guy, drink beer like one, too. She was sweet, but wouldn't let herself be pushed around. She fucked like a porn star.
    The night I met Amanda I was on mushrooms. I'd eaten them for old times' sake with my former college friends and the six of us ended up at a Boston College mixer following a football game. We were all out of our minds and stuck in the middle of a throng of people when I turned around for what seemed an instant but was probably twenty minutes and suddenly all my stoner friends were gone. I began to panic and hyperventilate, and then I saw a hip-pieish woman in a hippieish skirt and I grabbed her arm.
    “Have you ever tripped?” I asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, I'm doing mushrooms right now and I lost my friends and I need you to get me out of here.”
    Amanda pulled me through the crowd and calmed my nerves outside and when my buzz had peaked and I knew I wasn't going to get any higher, I started loosening up. She was twenty-three years old and worked for Shearson/Lehman Brothers; I was a twenty-seven-year-old