Read Online Orchard Grove by Vincent Zandri - Free Book Online
Authors: Vincent Zandri
Tags: General Fiction
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danger he posed, the obsession would take a back seat to my writing, even if for only a little while.
Sitting myself down at the typewriter, I leaned the crutches against the table beside me, easy access, and then I placed a fresh sheet of white paper into the spool. For a beat, I stared at the white paper hoping that suddenly, I would somehow hear the familiar clickety-clack of typewriter keys and magically see words appear on the page.
But today my luck was bad. Thus far anyway.
The muse wasn’t there for me or, at the very least, she was being stubborn. I felt empty inside. I had no story to tell at a time when I was desperate for one. As I sat there staring at the stark whiteness of the page, I not only felt like the words wouldn’t come, I felt exhausted at the thought of writing anything.
Back when Susan and I first met, nothing could have been further from the truth. I was newly divorced from my then wife of ten years and had just moved from Hollywood to upstate New York and a one bedroom apartment in the north end of downtown Albany. Up to that point in my life, I’d been lucky. I’d moved to LA fresh out of writing school to stake my claim and at thirty-four years old, managed to nab some gross deals on a few big budget films right out of the gate. I was making more money in a single month than my dad was making in a single year running his dry cleaning business. But it all went bad in the worst kind of clichéd way possible when my wife started sleeping with her personal trainer… a situation that was so common in West Hollywood as to be considered an almost right of passage.
Naturally we divorced, but when it comes to right-is-right in the California divorce courts, it doesn’t really matter who beds down with whom since it’s usually the one who has the most money who pays. In my case anyway, my wife’s lawyer was able to prove she gave up her best years to support her down and out scriptwriter husband while he struggled through writing school, full-time. When I showed up in court drunk as a skunk and, at the same time, threatened to kick said lawyer in the nuts (that is, when they weren’t stuffed in her mouth), the female judge saw fit to award my ex not the standard fifty percent of my estate but seventy-five, plus ninety-percent of the gross points I retained for the perpetual video sales of my films. She then ordered me behind bars for ninety days on behalf of making a mockery of her court.
Not my finest hour.
In the end, no studios would touch me after that incident and what money I had left, I wasted on lawyers, booze, and a plane ticket back east so that by the time I met Susan at a local west-end gin mill called Ralphs, my fortune had dwindled to a fraction of its former glory. But what I did still possess was relative youth and ambition, and no one… not my ex, not a black-robed judge, not the money changers at the big Hollywood studios… were going to prevent me from pulling myself back up from my bootstraps and making another three or four million.
That’s pretty much the way I put it to Susan not long after I slipped onto the stool beside her at the otherwise empty bar. She was a few years younger than me, not yet thirty. She had shoulder-length black hair and a tall, but not skinny build that I found sexy and attractive. Her jeans had tears in the knees and fit her snuggly, accentuating a perfect heart-shaped bottom. She wore a white V-neck T-shirt that showed off enough of her breasts to keep me interested long after the first couple of drinks were history. Although she was still in grad school to become a certified kindergarten teacher, she told me she’d always been fascinated with screenwriting and, of course she loved the movies. Would I perhaps be interested in giving her some writing lessons?
“I’ll pay,” she said, shooting me a smile and a wink.
“How?” I said, winking back at her.
“Money of course, silly.”
That’s when I suggested she pay me in
Sitting myself down at the typewriter, I leaned the crutches against the table beside me, easy access, and then I placed a fresh sheet of white paper into the spool. For a beat, I stared at the white paper hoping that suddenly, I would somehow hear the familiar clickety-clack of typewriter keys and magically see words appear on the page.
But today my luck was bad. Thus far anyway.
The muse wasn’t there for me or, at the very least, she was being stubborn. I felt empty inside. I had no story to tell at a time when I was desperate for one. As I sat there staring at the stark whiteness of the page, I not only felt like the words wouldn’t come, I felt exhausted at the thought of writing anything.
Back when Susan and I first met, nothing could have been further from the truth. I was newly divorced from my then wife of ten years and had just moved from Hollywood to upstate New York and a one bedroom apartment in the north end of downtown Albany. Up to that point in my life, I’d been lucky. I’d moved to LA fresh out of writing school to stake my claim and at thirty-four years old, managed to nab some gross deals on a few big budget films right out of the gate. I was making more money in a single month than my dad was making in a single year running his dry cleaning business. But it all went bad in the worst kind of clichéd way possible when my wife started sleeping with her personal trainer… a situation that was so common in West Hollywood as to be considered an almost right of passage.
Naturally we divorced, but when it comes to right-is-right in the California divorce courts, it doesn’t really matter who beds down with whom since it’s usually the one who has the most money who pays. In my case anyway, my wife’s lawyer was able to prove she gave up her best years to support her down and out scriptwriter husband while he struggled through writing school, full-time. When I showed up in court drunk as a skunk and, at the same time, threatened to kick said lawyer in the nuts (that is, when they weren’t stuffed in her mouth), the female judge saw fit to award my ex not the standard fifty percent of my estate but seventy-five, plus ninety-percent of the gross points I retained for the perpetual video sales of my films. She then ordered me behind bars for ninety days on behalf of making a mockery of her court.
Not my finest hour.
In the end, no studios would touch me after that incident and what money I had left, I wasted on lawyers, booze, and a plane ticket back east so that by the time I met Susan at a local west-end gin mill called Ralphs, my fortune had dwindled to a fraction of its former glory. But what I did still possess was relative youth and ambition, and no one… not my ex, not a black-robed judge, not the money changers at the big Hollywood studios… were going to prevent me from pulling myself back up from my bootstraps and making another three or four million.
That’s pretty much the way I put it to Susan not long after I slipped onto the stool beside her at the otherwise empty bar. She was a few years younger than me, not yet thirty. She had shoulder-length black hair and a tall, but not skinny build that I found sexy and attractive. Her jeans had tears in the knees and fit her snuggly, accentuating a perfect heart-shaped bottom. She wore a white V-neck T-shirt that showed off enough of her breasts to keep me interested long after the first couple of drinks were history. Although she was still in grad school to become a certified kindergarten teacher, she told me she’d always been fascinated with screenwriting and, of course she loved the movies. Would I perhaps be interested in giving her some writing lessons?
“I’ll pay,” she said, shooting me a smile and a wink.
“How?” I said, winking back at her.
“Money of course, silly.”
That’s when I suggested she pay me in
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