NSFW: A Novel

ONE

The thing about Los Angeles is that it’s awful and I hate it, but when I’m there, nowhere else exists, and I can’t imagine leaving. It’s a difficult place to be old or sick or fat or poor or without a strong social media presence. It’s not an easy place to be young, either.

After college graduation, I postpone my return from Boston by one week, then two, cat sitting for a professor. It’s the second week that drives my mother over the edge. She calls, she emails, she accuses me of loving the professor’s cat more than her. She says don’t I know how hard she has been working, how lonely and depressed she has been, how she has been counting down the days until my return.

I get sick upon arrival, aching limbs at baggage claim blooming into a fever by the following day. Garden-variety virus, but it hits my mother’s sweet spot. You’re run-down, poor baby. I’ll take care of you, she says.

My father sends a welcome home text. Hope to see you for dinner soon, he writes. He doesn’t ask where I’ll be living or if I’d like to stay with him. I suspect he doesn’t want the infringement on his space, his freedom.

It’s strange being back in my mother’s house. She has just finished renovating, and it barely looks familiar, though somehow items from long ago—CD players, pants from GapKids—have resurfaced in the new version of my old bedroom. The sight of them is unsettling.

My parents divorced when I was ten, during the summer before fifth grade. They were civil, but it was terrible. My mother suggested we go on a diet together. It’ll be fun, she told me. You’ll look great for the start of the school year. She said she knew I had been overeating because I could tell she was unhappy in her marriage. This was news to me. She taught me all about calories and the places they hide. I dipped carrots in Dijon mustard while my friends at day camp traded Skittles and M&M’s, candy coatings melting in a rainbow smear on their palms.

My weeks were split between my parents. My father kept the house in the Hollywood Hills, and my mother moved to an apartment in Santa Monica, across the street from the beach. There was an infinity pool on the roof and towels were provided. She called it Heartbreak Hotel.

A few nights a week, I would ride my scooter to the Third Street Promenade with my mother and younger brother. While my brother browsed the toy store, I punished myself in the basement fitting rooms of GapKids, trying on jeans two sizes too small and watching my stomach pucker as I did up the button. I practiced sitting casually on the bench in the fitting room, as if I were on a playground bench at recess. I made believe I was talking about normal things with my classmates and kept an eye on my stomach in the mirror.

My mother moved several times over the next five years, a real tour du West LA, before landing back in Santa Monica, two miles east of Heartbreak Hotel. When I think back on those years, I remember a choking sensation. My father’s silence, my mother’s longing, my brother’s rage. My bottomless hunger. My psychiatrist kept increasing dosages, switching medications. Trial and error, she said. I would stare at the tapestry behind her head and say, week after week, I want to stop falling asleep in class.

The day my mother moved into this house was also the day I got drunk for the first time. Early evening, a bottle of Grey Goose on the kitchen counter, carton of orange juice next to it. I helped myself. If you drink that screwdriver, you can’t drive, my mother said. I said I didn’t care, and I drank that one and then another and another until the floor tilted. I was fifteen. I couldn’t drive at night on a learner’s permit anyway.

My parents were both from New England, high-achieving youngest children of long-suffering Jewish immigrant mothers. A perfect match on paper. My mother moved to Los Angeles for my father, a literary historian who moved for his research, wooed by a trove of archives acquired by USC. My mother often said that my father was the only person who would willingly relinquish tenure at Harvard. It took me a long time to understand the double-edged slice of that comment.

My mother never liked Los Angeles, but she also never left. She stayed for my brother and me, so that our lives would be stable and we could have a close, or closer, relationship with our father. She made do with what she believed to be a pale imitation of the career she imagined having in Boston, where her star was on the rise and her expertise—as a lawyer and legal activist doing groundbreaking work on victims’ rights and rape laws—was more highly valued.

Until I went to college, I didn’t know where my mother ended and I began, a lack of differentiation more common in toddlers than teenagers. It was a problem my mother didn’t recognize as such, which was of course part of the problem. Her life’s purpose was to sacrifice and provide for me, and mine was to make her feel sufficiently loved in return. What could possibly go wrong?

Growing up, I assumed I would become a lawyer, like her, or go into politics, become an advocate for issues affecting women. A public feminist, broadly conceived. But a Capitol Hill internship the summer after freshman year—when Democrat dreams of single-payer health care were shattered—disillusioned me about politics and I realized I didn’t actually want to be a lawyer.

I spent much of college trying to develop my own interests and a fundamental sense of self. The only thing that didn’t feel like a hand-me-down was my love of words, my belief in the power of storytelling. Before benzos and SSRIs, I had books and TV. I was never a movie person. I preferred ongoing narratives, parallel realities to dip into alongside my own. Different stories for different moods, like vitamins to address certain deficiencies. I became an English major. I read a lot of novels.

I liked Cambridge, the unfashionable bookish atmosphere, the red bricks and history. I considered academia. As a trial run, I took a graduate seminar on intertextuality, which involved endless discussions about the literary word as an intersection of textual surfaces and ‘textasy’ as the ‘release’ of the subject in a sexual or textual ‘coming.’

I spoke exclusively in fragments, stringing together phrases I barely understood. The professor was invariably pleased with my insights. She complimented my analytical clarity. So much performative nonsense, and to what end? All to spend a decade picking at the carcasses of my favorite books and competing for underpaid jobs in places I don’t want to live? I might as well work in television.

I grew up in the shadow of Hollywood, both figuratively and literally, the sign itself visible from the rooftop playground of my elementary school. I hid behind the role of Smart Girl, smug with intellectual superiority. I was meant for Harvard, not Hollywood.

But Harvard was its own Hollywood, I learned, just with different jargon and celebrities.

So, really, why not television?

It’s the golden age. Everyone’s talking about the quality of the writing, the power to catalyze social change, even. Prestige dramas are the new social novel, my thesis adviser assures me. The Wire is Middlemarch. Why write academic books about increasingly esoteric subjects for an audience of approximately twelve when I could be a part of this creative renaissance? It’s what I want—what I’ve always wanted. I ran in the other direction out of insecurity, not disinterest.

And so, though I am daunted by the prospect, I move back to LA.

That I get sick upon return is, in its way, a blessing. It helps me skip past the claustrophobia and panic that typically smother me upon arrival, a cling wrap that I have to claw my way through. Or maybe, I think, as I roll over in bed and wave my arms in search of a cool patch of sheet, mood softened by an Ambien-NyQuil haze, maybe I’ve grown.

As soon as my fever breaks and my head clears, I start job hunting. For what job, I’m not sure. I meet with everyone I know and everyone they know, shuttling from sleepy production company offices in the valley to crowded backlot bungalows to try-hard offices in Hollywood where I struggle to sit in a dignified position on the neon foam amoebas that someone deemed a step up from regular old chairs. I feel guilty about using connections, but there’s no apparent alternative. This is a town full of people with connections.

Most of the people I meet are producers. Few have produced anything of late.

Somebody advises me, early on, that when the assistant offers water, I should always accept. My car fills up with plastic bottles, rolling on the floor of the back seat. I have coffees, many coffees. I nod and smile until my cheeks hurt.

A writer whose daughter went to my elementary school and with whom my parents are friendly asks if I’ve thought about working in development. That’s where the power is, she says. Hollywood needs more smart executives. If you want to make change in a big, noticeable way, really impact how women are portrayed on television and what stories get told, you need power.

She tells me about a meeting she had that ended with her saying yes, she would be delighted to work on a network drama called Marsipan (logline: Decades after humankind has conquered the red planet, a diverse group of colonists form Mars’s first ‘Reduced-Gravity Bake-Off’).

I learn that development is the department in charge of coming up with new shows—television’s editorial department, so to speak. It’s a job with a real career path, a ladder of executive positions to climb. It sounds like something I could be good at, something I might enjoy.

Production companies have development departments, as do studios and networks. If she were me, the writer says, she’d want to be at a network. At a production company or a studio, you’re closer to the material, but you’re still a seller, you have no control over what ends up on air. But at a network, you’re in the buyer’s seat; you hold the keys to the castle.

Development. The idea takes root, the appeal obvious. I have an answer now, to the question of what I want to do.

MY BIGGEST BREAK comes in July in the form of a meeting, arranged by my mother, with her old friend Robert Baum, the longtime chairman of XBC. XBC is the youngest of the big broadcast networks, known for edgier programming than the older stalwarts. In advance of the meeting, I watch as many XBC shows as I can. I worry too much about what to wear. I read interviews with Robert, who is in his early seventies and comes across as charismatic and good humored. It’s often noted that he is the kind of boss who inspires great loyalty from his employees. He has been at the network for over twenty years and shepherded many of the biggest early-aughts hits to prime-time success, ambitious, character-driven shows that seemed risky at the time, better suited to cable. Now, after long runs, nearly all those shows are off-air, and, like the other broadcast networks, XBC is struggling to compete with digital and streaming services and cord-cutting millennials who don’t watch live TV. Robert’s a member of the old guard, but he’s not considered out of touch. He knows he’s part of a changing landscape, and he’s ready to change with it. Most important, my mother says, is the loyalty aspect: it shows he’s a good boss, that his top executives have been at the network so long.

Robert’s office is perched on the top floor of the executive building on XBC’s affiliated studio lot. I have been on a studio lot before, though only a few times, and I feel self-conscious and scrambled by the protocol. The building’s lobby is all white and polished marble and well-dressed people moving with purpose. Next to me in the elevator: a woman so thin, she looks flattened. Flawless blow-dry, icy-blue blazer, and a familiar face. Veronica Ross, I realize. President of XBC, a regular feature in various Women Who Are Changing Hollywood roundups. I’ve read about her. Have fantasized, tentatively, about becoming her. She does not make eye contact with me or appear to register my presence in any way. I look down at my feet, the toes pinched and aching in my mother’s heels, which are too tight even though we theoretically wear the same size. (So they’re a little tight; are you planning to run a marathon? my mother said after condemning all the shoes in my closet.)

Veronica strides ahead of me down the hall, into the waiting room outside Robert’s office, where two assistants sit at side-by-side desks.

Morning, Veronica, one of the assistants says. Veronica barely stops to nod.

I take a seat on the couch across from the assistants and pretend to check my email, to have somewhere to direct my eyes. Relax. Try to relax. You probably don’t look as dumpy or desperate as you feel.

Twenty minutes later, Veronica strides out, and shortly thereafter, one of the assistants tells me to go on in.

The office itself is huge. An imposing desk, two leather couches, and a handful of tastefully upholstered armchairs. A well-curated coffee table featuring carefully fanned copies of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, a signed football in a case, and two glass bottles in the shape of handguns, filled with golden liquid.

Tequila, Robert says. The only kind of guns I’m allowed to have in here.

He is shorter than I was expecting, based on his online headshots. What my mother would call a Jewish five-eight. Meaning five-six. His voice is what strikes me most. Deep, booming, and Boston accented. He sounds like my mother in a way few people in LA do. I remember my mother telling me that the first time she heard Robert speak, she went up to him and said, Are you by chance from Salem?

How did you know? he had asked.

You sound just like my father, and he was from Salem, my mother said.

Now, as I sit across from Robert and give him a little spiel about myself, he interrupts me. You sound just like your mother, he says. It’s wild.

Thanks, I say.

Do you get that a lot? he asks.

I do.

I don’t think the two of us sound that much alike, but there must be things I don’t notice. Inflections. Intonations. Also, I don’t really know what my own voice sounds like.

I love your mother, he says.

Join the club! I say, shifting my legs in a futile attempt to dislodge the underwear that has migrated uncomfortably from ass cheek to crack. And I love XBC, I add. I admire the way you built the brand and pushed the limits of what broadcast can do. I couldn’t sound more like an anonymous cover letter if I tried.

"So you want to polish brass on the Titanic, do you?" he says.

I hear it’s the fastest ship afloat.

He laughs, and I feel a quick flash of relief. If anyone avoids the iceberg, it’ll be us, he says. But only time will tell.

I have time.

Let me guess. You watch more cable than broadcast, right? That’s your profile. More shows every year full of young people getting naked and doing drugs, and that’s fine, some of them are very good, but all the fear-mongering articles fawning over premium cable and asking, ‘Is broadcast dead?’ Nobody mentions the numbers! Cable, you’re in the hundred thousands. And that’s a hit. Us? Millions. Not a competition! You want viewers? We’ve got viewers.

Where’s that story? I ask.

"You’re telling me! These cable honchos, they think it’s edgy to show people shtupping on screen. You know what’s edgy? Being provocative without cheap tricks. That’s what we’re about. I don’t want fluffy schlock or another CSI set in god knows where because they’re running out of good cities."

"I love Justice Served," I tell Robert. It’s XBC’s cop show, one of Robert’s biggest successes. For a show about violent crime, it’s strangely soothing to watch, in large part due to the formulaic structure of the episodes. You know the first suspect is a red herring and that there will be a big twist forty minutes in. Final scenes are always in the courtroom—justice is not necessarily served, because that would be too predictable, but things work out often enough to sustain hope. I’m not the only one who likes this show—it’s hugely popular, into its sixteenth season now. The chemistry between the two detectives, Newman and Coffey, is what keeps it going. It’s been will-they-or-won’t-they for years, but they haven’t so far, and there’s something commendable in that. Blake Peterson’s rugged, short-fused Detective Newman is the more popular of the two, but I’ve always liked Coffey best. The actress who plays her is muscular in both body and attitude. Alluring because of how much on-screen space she takes up, not how little. She’s nearly the same size as Blake Peterson. I get his appeal, I guess. I wouldn’t not fuck him. But I feel no desire to talk to him, no sense of an interesting person behind the part. Then again, I’ve always had the tendency to ascribe more dimension to women and to objectify men. Problematic, sure, but in this male-dominated hellscape of a world, what’s so wrong with a little overcorrection?

This I don’t say to Robert Baum, of course. I’m no fool. I tell him only how much I like the show and congratulate him on its recently celebrated milestone: fifteen years on air.

The little show that could, he says. Newman and Coffey are keeping XBC alive.

I tell Robert about my interest in development and, god help me, about how my undergraduate thesis on representations of gender-based oppression in the works of George Eliot furthered my belief in the social and political power of fictional narratives.

Over my head, Robert says, with a laugh. I was always a Hemingway fan myself.

I smile and nod, glance over at the tequila guns on the coffee table. Figures. He’s good too, I say. I’ve never liked Hemingway. All the tortured masculinity and bitch-goddess women, though yes, fine, the man could write a great sentence.

Robert goes on to explain that he isn’t kept apprised of all the comings and goings on the assistant level, but he knows there is fairly frequent turnover, and I sound like I have the drive that it takes to succeed. His cheeks pinken as he leans over to pick up the phone on a side table. Can you leave word from me for Diane in HR? he says, presumably to one of the assistants beyond the door. He returns the receiver to its cradle and presses a button on the wall. The door to the waiting room swings open, which I take as my cue to depart. I stand. You’re a good one, I can tell, he says, remaining seated. And if we don’t snap you up, someone else will.

The buoyancy lasts for a few days, until I go in for an HR meeting, which is in a different building with different parking and entrance instructions, so I arrive feeling just as frazzled as I did the first time. I meet with two women in HR, neither of whom are as encouraging as Robert. They both remind me that I am underqualified; they usually require agency experience. The first woman, Diane, an EVP with a large office, though not nearly as large as Robert’s, asks how I feel about doing personal tasks.

I’d prefer to do professional ones? I answer.

She nods, thinking.

Afterward, a lower-level executive with a smaller office and only one guest chair asks if I have experience booking travel and making reservations.

Yes? I say.

HR sends my résumé to an executive at the affiliated studio who is hiring an assistant, and I have a good meeting with him, though the oligarchic power structure through which this studio and XBC are intertwined but somehow independent remains opaque to me. The executive gives me a script to write coverage on, and I spend a long, careful time on it. The job goes to someone else, a friend of his current assistant.

There are more meetings that go nowhere, other leads I follow up on. Hours spent smiling and nodding and hearing people say, You sound great; you’re so impressive. Another assistant job that I get close on, two rounds of interviews, but it goes to someone with more