The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 3: The Offer (Part Two)
Previous Chapter: Chapter Three (Part One)
I took the piece of paper and opened it. I stared at the lines on the paper but they didn’t make any sense. They were numbers, I was pretty sure they were numbers, but I couldn’t figure out how they related to each other. I looked to Humphrey, who was reclining confidently in his chair. Ten seconds passed. I looked down at the paper again. Twenty seconds passed. I looked up at Humphrey again, we were approaching a full minute of silence.
Humphrey began to fidget in his chair. I looked down at the number again. I finally decided these were not individual numbers, that it was one long unbroken number. I wasn’t sure of that at first, how could I be sure, Humphrey had scratched out an incomprehensible code to a better life and handed it to me on a golden piece of paper and I was supposed to decipher it. It felt like I should have to decipher it, that there had to be more work involved than simply saying ‘yes.’ But that’s all I had to do, my life could irrevocably change simply by reciting the number back to him like I was a second grader solving the simplest of math problems as I stood in the front of the classroom. (A math problem with a dollar sign at the end of it!)
Humphrey was leaning forward again, his elbows now on the marble desk, waiting for my inevitable, ‘yes.’ I looked deep into his eyes and tried to move my jaw and say that simple word, but my jaw wouldn’t move, it remained stuck, bottom lip stapled to top lip in pursed thoughtful posture. I brought my hand up to help it move, which probably made it look like I was thinking even harder about my answer since I was now unconsciously reenacting “The Thinker” pose when in actuality I was just trying to pry my own jaw open. Still, it wouldn’t move, locking tight in the delirious delirium of the confusion that accompanies good fortune.
Humphrey broke the impasse I had unwittingly created. “I’ll tell you what, Ben. You don’t mind if I call you, Ben, do you. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off to think it over, talk to the wife, to the girlfriend, to the boyfriend, whoever, make sure that Landmark is the right place for your screenplay.” He stood up and walked around his desk. My right hand was still unsuccessfully trying to open my mouth. Humphrey stood me up like a cornerman does with a boxer in the later rounds when the bell rings. “After all, you are part of the Landmark family. This is your home.” He smiled. I was unable to smile back. We walked to the door of his office. I think we shook hands. I think I walked out of his office, his reception area, his building, and into the street. I do remember standing on the sidewalk outside the Landmark Building clutching a golden piece of paper, the sweat from my fingers and palms smudging the gold numbers on that golden paper.
I wasn’t playing with him in there. I wasn’t negotiating, either. When he first slid me that piece of paper with all of those zeroes, all I could think about was all of the things I could do with all of that money. How I could buy anything I wanted. How I didn’t have to worry about next month’s rent or next month’s phone bill or next month’s water bill. The amount he offered probably didn’t mean anything to him, it was a fraction of his annual salary (not to mention stock options), but to me, to me it meant everything. I was going to accept the offer, I really was. I’m not a total idiot. But he took my silence as hesitation instead of the awe it was. To Humphrey’s mind my silence was about leverage and playing the odds and psychology. When he’s presented with an opening offer that looks too good these are the things he thinks about, so he only naturally assumed it’s what I was thinking during those seconds, minutes, when I couldn’t get my jaw to move.
I said, “yes,” to no one in the street. I said, “yes,” a second time and nodded emphatically as people in suits moved by me, around me, through me. But no one was listening now. I was five minutes too late. Humphrey was in his office probably in another meeting or on a conference call with London. I had missed my chance.
After saying my ‘yesses,’ my mouth froze again. This time into a smile, the ends of my mouth tearing into my cheeks, the muscles in my face burning from the intensity of my grin like they had just completed a triathlon without the help of the other muscles in my body.
I walked for miles with that Joker-sized smile on my face. I walked from the Landmark Building to Wilshire Boulevard, which runs from downtown all the way to the ocean. I didn’t make it to the ocean, but I walked down Wilshire quickly making it out of the skyscrapers and past the deteriorating neighborhoods west of downtown where I parked my car for $5 a day during my first week at Landmark before they gave me a permit to park in the building ramp. I walked through McArthur Park with a song in my head avoiding the homeless and drug dealers and student film shoots. I kept walking into Koreatown where I picked up a BubbleTea and some frozen yogurt and kept walking, picking up my pace, past the faded lime awning of the Wiltern Theatre where I had yet to see a concert, where I still have yet to see a concert, the streets got busier and the cars flowed like mice in a building that had been abandoned for many years and I saw 7-11s and Radio Shacks and the type of squeezed in strip malls that have Radio Shacks and 7-11s and food places that serve chicken and hamburgers and Chinese food and fish and pizza all out of the same kitchen that I’m sure I would never want to see the inside of.
There were bland office buildings and squeezed in houses that made the squeezed in strips malls look like Hampton-sized mansions. I ended up in the area they call Miracle Mile (I had read that somewhere, although I have never in my life heard anybody refer to it as such), which wasn’t very miraculous but more suburban or as suburban as L.A. gets, walking past the Koo Koo Roo to LACMA and the La Brea Tar pits, where I watched dinosaurs drown and saw art that looked like dinosaurs drowning, all the while the grin still on my face, the golden paper still held tightly between my two hands, dark splotches from my sweat now near completely obscuring the number I didn’t believe was real and now when I looked down maybe I could convince myself wasn’t real, maybe I had misread a zero or two.
I finally stopped near a dollar store on the other side of the art museum and caught my breath and looked around. I was underneath a billboard for Bakers Grocery Stores that occupied the northwest corner of Wilshire and Fairfax above a diner that wasn’t really a diner, that was only used by movie studios to pretend to be a diner so was vacant most of the time serving mainly as an additional parking lot for the very busy dollar store. There was a Bakers a few blocks back right before the tar pits and the Koo Koo Roo, my mouth had watered Pavlovianly as I passed, briefly thinking not about the gold in my hands but about one of their delicious deli sandwiches I could no longer afford.
Or could I? I looked down at the piece of paper again, the sweat stain now blotted out the number completely like an unhealthy bacterium that had overtaken a healthy cell. I looked up to the colorful billboard. It starred Bakers’ mascot, an aggressive smiling chimp who was holding a bag of potato chips and screaming the chain’s slogan of “Buy More Food!”
I had seen that chimp’s face on billboards and television commercials and heard him screaming on radio so many times since I had arrived in L.A. (they don’t have Bakers in Minnesota, their largest grocery chain is Bear Grocery, “The Home of Comfort”) that he was my second closest friend in the city, after Angel. I stared deeply into the face of that screaming chimpanzee trying to find the meaning of life. He blinked. So I did, too.
Frightened at what I saw, the meaning of life, I turned away and looked at the line of shops on the other side of Wilshire Boulevard. The shop directly across from me was The Truth, a clothing chain I had never had the courage to enter because I didn’t have enough confidence in my body image. Posters of several barely teen models lined the window posing in Roman or Greek inspired clothing. The chain’s tagline, “Don’t Judge Me By What I Wear” was emblazoned on the tops of each one of those posters in fire red block lettering of the type Bolsheviks used on their old posters during the Russian Revolution. The cries of the models briefly overtook the shouts from the Bakers’ chimpanzee, but then I could hear him again so I looked back up to the billboard and stared harder into the chimp’s soul. I could see my reflection.
And you know what? A funny thing happened as I stared at that monkey and tried not to judge those adolescent models of indistinguishable gender by what they were wearing. I thought. And kept thinking. And had my second epiphany. Here was this man, one of the most powerful people in the country, hell, on the planet, who shaped the opinions of millions, maybe billions, and I had something he desperately wanted.
A moment of Zen washed over me. It must be the way Buddhist monks feel before they start moving stones around with their minds. It was a powerful feeling. A feeling I didn’t want to lose.