We'll Always Have Parrots(9)
It always got a laugh, even though some of the crowd had heard it several times before.
But if Michael was disappointed at hearing the same old questions and tired of delivering the same punch lines, you couldn’t tell from his manner. That was part of his charm, I thought, with a sigh. Not only did he appear to be having the time of his life—he probably was. And he sounded better. The adrenaline boost he got from stepping in front of an audience had done the trick for his throat and nose, at least for now.
Of course he’d credit the gargling and the nose drops.
As ten o’clock approached, the Amazon came back to the microphone and reminded the audience that Michael would be signing autographs for the next two hours in the Innsmouth Room.
Two hours! Wonderful. His fans would get two hours of the cheerful, smiling public Michael. I’d get to hear about his writer’s cramp. I turned and headed for the door, hoping to beat the crowd who would disperse as soon as Michael disappeared.
“And don’t forget!” the Amazon chirped. “At noon, Blazing Sabers will be giving a stage combat demonstration, and at one o’clock, you can meet Ichabod Dilley, the creator of Porfiria, Queen of the Jungle! The man responsible for creating the wonderful fictional world we all know and love!”
“Balderdash!” exclaimed a voice behind me.
I glanced back to see a tall, gangly, fifty-something man, walking behind me toward the exit. His face looked vaguely familiar, though oddly naked. Probably because he was polishing rather than wearing his glasses, thick lenses set in thick, dark, retro-style plastic frames. When he replaced the glasses, recognition gelled—it was the show’s chief scriptwriter.
“Hello, Nate,” I said. “I see they let you away from the keyboard for the weekend.”
“Hey, Meg,” he said. “No, I brought the laptop along. Herself wanted to work on scripts for next season.”
I was astonished—not by his dedication to the job, but by the fact that he deigned to recognize me. Nate was a consummate snob with an unerringly acute sense of the show’s pecking order. The first time I’d visited the show’s set, Michael had been encouraged to find Nate actually talking to me. He’d interpreted it—accurately, it turned out—as a clue that they might want him back. If Nate now actually called me by name, that meant Michael’s position on the show was solid. Not a bad thing, since we could never afford the house we hoped to buy unless Michael continued plotting and conniving as Mephisto for at least another season.
“That’s too bad,” I said, as we escaped into the hallway.
“It’s not enough that I have to be at her beck and call, twenty-four seven,” he grumbled, falling into step beside me, “or that she has to mangle everything I write. But to sit there and hear some nitwit calling that stupid comic book writer the one responsible for creating the show! I’m the one responsible for the show! Every word of it!”
Except for the ones the QB mangled, I thought, and it seemed to me that the actors had more than a little to do with making it into a show instead of just a script. But I didn’t think he’d like hearing that.
“He did do the original comic book series,” I said instead.
“And who knocked that piece of junk into a working pilot?” Nate exclaimed. “Who keeps that heap of cardboard characters and clichés lurching along week after week?”
“You, of course,” I said.
“Damn right,” he said. “Do you know how hard it is to write an episode that lets Her Self-Centeredness think she’s the star while still giving the fans enough of what they want to see? Which is not her tired old mug, believe me.”
I made sympathetic noises. The first time I’d heard him raging about the QB I’d been flattered and a little worried that he’d be so indiscreet with a relative outsider. Now that I knew Nate better, I realized he wasn’t that disgruntled, just a recreational complainer. His griping never got him in trouble because everyone had stopped listening.
“Every time I need to introduce a new character, I go through ten, twelve different names before I get one that she thinks sounds like a real Amblyopian name. Real Amblyopian name! Who the hell knows what a real Amblyopian name is, anyway?”
“Maybe you should use the same method Ichabod Dilley did,” I suggested. “Haven’t you noticed that every one of the original comic book names came out of a medical dictionary?”
“A medical dictionary?” he echoed.
“Precisely,” I said. “Porphyria’s an obscure but serious blood disease. Maybe he thought no one would catch on if he misspelled it. Amblyopia’s an eye condition. All the original names were medical terms. You know the Duke of Urushiol, Porfiria’s arch-enemy? Urushiol’s the active ingredient in poison ivy; the oil that gets on your skin and causes the rash.”