Chapter Three
Clichéd and Obvious

"I've been doing a lot of thinking about my name recently," I explained in monotone. "People always ask me what my parents were thinking when they gave it to me."

Stern and attentive, Dr. Florence Macy leisurely crossed her legs and chewed for a bit on the end of her pencil. "Any ideas?" she inquired leadingly.

"I don't know. Maybe they wanted to challenge me, to give me something to shoot for—or maybe they wanted to encourage me to stand up for myself, to overcome it someday."

"Of course, your parents were killed long before you had the chance to ask them yourself."

I nodded, thoroughly impressed at how quickly she was able to gloss over such a dark, aching memory without so much as a break in her sentence. She knew me all too well, I thought. To her, my brain was an enormous, hacker-proof, titanium bank vault to which only she and I held the keys.

"Do you think you've done it, then?" she asked. "Overcome its true definition, I mean?"

She was an expert at posing questions I didn't fully wish to answer. At first, I stalled; however, her stony, persuasive gaze had already gotten the best of me.

"No," I said at last. "Daffy's still daffy in my world."

"But that doesn't bother you," she concluded mechanically. "That's never bothered you, and it never will, not as long as you're you. You don't care what other people think, so anything your parents might've desired for you is irrelevant. No, that's not what's chapped your hide this week. It's something else, something different, something more… important to you…"

My eyes grew wide around the edges; my heart fluttered uneasily. She was getting closer, always closer, picking me apart piece-by-piece like a model airplane. I cleared my throat, tried to relax. This was good for me, I shakily reassured myself. This was exactly what I needed, exactly what I'd always needed.

"I haven't even asked you yet," she drove on fearlessly, "how'd your meeting go yesterday with Wile E?"

I hesitated. "Well, it—it wasn't exactly a meeting, per se," I stammered profusely. "We went out and—and got brunch with an old friend of his, and after he—after his friend left, we—we started to talk about my script and…"

I trailed off. A knowing smile crossed her face.

"I thought so," she observed slyly. "What did he say?"

Slowly, I shut my eyes and leaned back in my seat as though an invisible blow to the head had suddenly knocked me unconscious.

"He said," I murmured reluctantly, "he said they weren't going to credit me for writing it. They were going to keep my name out of it."

The explanation appeared to catch her off-guard for she immediately stopped scratching at her legal pad and glanced up at me.

Neither of us spoke for several minutes after that, only the metronomic tick of the circular wall clock poking pin-sized holes in the arduous silence. I exhaled deeply. Remove my name, remove my name—the words kept repeating themselves over and over inside my head. I had barely come to terms with the situation myself; nonetheless, it felt good to get it off my chest, to put it under the microscope, if even for a moment.

"Did he say why?" she wondered aloud.

"Yeah," I nodded. "He said my name was… synonymous with failure."

"Synonymous with failure," she repeated softly, staring deeply into my eyes. "Well, at least we know he isn't trying to make my job any easier."

I chuckled politely, hoping to ease some of the tension. It didn't work.

"How do you feel about what he said?"

I glanced at the floor, started playing footsie nervously with the ottoman in front of me. "How do I feel about it?" My voice was small and shaky, like a helpless housefly begging for its life in a room full of rolled-up newspapers. "I—I guess I feel… disappointed."

"Do you think he was telling the truth?"

"No." Even I was surprised at how blatantly dishonest my answer sounded. "Well, maybe—maybe a little."

"What about your script? Did you leave it on the table? Is there still room to negotiate? Are the two of you still on good terms?"

Slowly, I shook my head. "I didn't want to hear what he had to offer. Besides, I don't see how I could negotiate with someone who thinks that lowly of me."

She pursed her lips, a perplexed look coming over her face. "Why is it that you care what he has to say?"

I wasn't certain how to respond. My reaction to Wile E's words—emotionally, at least—had seemed so natural and frank at the time, so instinctive and unconscious; was she actually suggesting that it hadn't been?

"I don't know. Maybe it was the circumstances."

"What circumstances?"

Here it comes.

"They weren't just going to take off my name," I explained hesitantly, "they were going to replace it."

"Replace it? With what?"

"With—" (I took a deep breath and exhaled.) "—with Bugs's name."

She wasted no time in her assessment, not missing the point, but expanding upon it. "So you feel as though you're being unjustly compared to Bugs." Her eyes were unwavering. "You haven't been judged fairly, based on your own merits, because everyone refuses to separate you from Bugs and Bugs from you." She paused, allowing me to mull it over for a moment. "Reasonable?"

I nodded, unable to form a more appropriate explanation of my own. "Everything's always come easier to him." My words were blunt and dry, pitiless towards everyone but myself. "I don't trust him."

"Isn't he your friend?" Her question was rhetorical. "Shouldn't friends be trustworthy?"

"Of course they should be," I replied distastefully, "but he is my friend, and I don't trust him. He would've stolen my work if I hadn't stood in his way."

"So, then," her voice dropped to a low, undercutting murmur, "is he really your friend?"

Suddenly I couldn't help but wonder. The way I'd been talking about him like this, it seemed more in keeping in line with the roles we'd played as performers over the years than with the relationship we'd built as friends. There was so much bitterness in my speech, more than there should've been, more than I wanted there to be, yet I couldn't seem to quell it, and Dr. Florence Macy appeared to be savoring every moment of it.

Her dark eyes surveyed my features once more, slowly, calculatingly. Briefly, I met her gaze and felt the sting of her wildest judgments entering my brain with the brilliant suddenness of telepathy. It was as if her gaze alone had somehow managed to convey all her thoughts, all her conclusions, all her assumptions, directly to me without abridgment.

She didn't much care for Bugs it seemed, at least the version of him I'd depicted to her, and she didn't much care for my willingness to defend him either. To her, our friendship was the type which should have been relegated purely to long-distance phone calls, where Bugs's charm and persuasiveness would be all but useless, where he would no longer be able to use me in the way she undoubtedly perceived that he had.

Unfortunately, as she well knew, distancing the two of us from one another was simply not an option. It never would be. We were actors, and actors lived in L.A. Instead, she would revert to plan B. She would ask me to confront him, and I would agree wholeheartedly, or risk dropping into another long, unfulfilling pattern of submission which would inevitably lead me nowhere, except directly under Bugs's thumb.

"You and Bugs went golfing the other day," she stated plainly. "Tell me about it."

Her candor startled me.

"There's not much to tell," I replied weakly. "We played for a little while, then it started to rain." A short pause punctuated my explanation. "He asked me to take care of his wife for a week next month."

I had hoped that if I were to glaze over that last detail without showing much emotion she wouldn't have bothered to make an issue of it. I should've known better.

"So now you're doing favors for a friend you barely trust?" She kept her tone in check, her words in a rhythm, her demeanor as far from accusatory as possible.

"I—I couldn't help it," I protested. "He shamed me into it."

She frowned at that, gnawing on the tip of her pencil like an anxious gerbil. "How well do you know his wife?"

I shook my head. "Not well."

Her frown grew steadily wider. "Daffy," she said quietly, "do you ever intend on standing up to him?"

"Standing up to him?" Somehow the task seemed terribly daunting at the moment. "I—I'm not very good at that," I remarked unfortunately. "I've tried; it never seems to go anywhere."

Her stoic expression beckoned me to continue. Reluctantly, a deep sigh escaping my lungs, I obliged.

"When Bugs and I first moved to Los Angeles, we didn't have much money, so when our checks started coming in regularly, we would always go out and celebrate on payday." I had already said too much, I thought, my mind and my bill unpleasantly detached. "One night there was this big party in the green room at Warner Bros. Everyone who was anyone in showbiz turned out for it. Naturally, there was a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking; not much order to the thing. I wasn't so eager to get my toes wet so early in my career, but Bugs—well, he had more guts and a better attitude than I ever did. He was from the 'life is worth living' school of thought, and I could never seem to comprehend that."

"So you didn't participate?"

"No, I—I did my fair share. There was certainly enough to go around. In fact, if it hadn't been for that night, I probably wouldn't have started smoking; I wouldn't have had to go through all the trouble to quit." The urge to smile suddenly overwhelmed me, but my face refused to reveal the slightest emotion, settling into a cold, inexpressive stare, gazing blankly past her, beyond her.

"Bugs was a different story," I went on. "Like I said, he was never afraid to try anything once. He met his attorney there—only, the guy wasn't so clean back then—and, well," my voice faded and crackled somberly, recalling the incident with bitter clarity, "he did something he shouldn't have."

Macy was on the edge of her seat, yet her subtlety and coolness of demeanor could have easily fooled me into thinking otherwise.

"Drugs," I stated flatly, with such grim finality that the words themselves could have clattered noisily upon the table in front of me and not have seemed the least bit out-of-line. The doctor's face, too, had sunken in kind. She wore a look of pity, disillusionment, and utter incredulity, yet appeared to blame me for none of it. Hadn't I been obligated to steer my best friend clear of such extreme circumstances?

"The guy had a bag of white powder with him," I explained dully, "cocaine, I'm pretty sure. And Bugs, he… I guess you could say he got caught up in the moment."

"But you stood up to him?"

"Well, I wasn't really in any condition to do it that night," I snorted, "but the next day, I—I tried to. I reminded him that we didn't come all the way out to Hollywood just to burn out in the first three years."

"And how did he take it?"

"He agreed with me—and that was it."

"So he dismissed your point of view by pretending to sympathize with it." A statement, not a question.

"That's the way it always works." My reply was equally straight-faced. "I never got through to him. About a week later he was giving me a ride home when…"

The sauna came to mind—that slimy, sudsy, snow-colored smear silently suffocating his silver fur. I still didn't want to believe it.

"There was this white stuff on his arm," I continued, "like soap suds, in his sweat. Of course, I can't presume to know what was really going on inside his body—an allergic reaction, a skin condition, chicken pox, whatever—but I always knew it had something to do with that night. I think he knew it, too."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I just saw it again the other day." My head fell to my chest, completely open and defenseless. "After we finished golfing he started sweating it out again, just like he had before."

"Did he say anything?"

"Just that it wasn't a habit. He must've known I wouldn't forget."

She offered only a concurrent nod, her pen flicking sporadically across her legal pad, her eyes effectively avoiding mine for the first time all session. At last, she looked up, removed her rimmed glasses, and let out a long, exhausted sigh.

"You've got some things to accomplish before our next meeting, Daffy," she began dryly, eyebrows raised. "First and foremost, I want you to go to Bugs, sit down with him, talk to him; don't be afraid of him. You need to let him know what's on your mind—everything we talked about here today. Can you do that for me?"

Slowly, my head rose from my chest. She wasn't going to back down until I agreed to her terms. I decided to save her the effort of convincing me.

"Yes." My lisp effectively killed any seriousness which may have strengthened the sincerity of my response, yet she accepted it readily, without argument.

She went on for a while after that, but my attention had already been diverted, buried under a mountain of spineless anticipation. I didn't really have to do any of this, I didn't really have to listen to her at all, but I knew that it was in my best interests to do so.

That couldn't possibly be a good sign—not for me.

You have no idea
what you're getting yourself into.