TYLER’S THIRD ACT
MICK GARRIS
IT HAD BEEN sneaking up on me since Entertainment went online, but I guess the beginning of my end came with the Writers Guild strike in 2007. Not that I was a total Luddite; I did all my script work on an iMac, browsed my e-mails over hot green tea every morning, watched a couple of the funny videos that some other writers had forwarded to me. But if they were more than a couple of minutes long, I just couldn’t pay attention to the little window on the monitor. It’s hard for me to enjoy movies in miniature.
Why had I shelled out over ten grand for a new Pioneer plasma screen, upgraded uncompressed sound, and the whole Blu-ray thing, anyway? So I could watch a YouTube home video of some pudgy, pimpled adolescent acting out his Jedi Knight fantasies, blown up to sixty inches of stuttering, cubist blocks?
No. I love movies, even if they’re on television; movies have scale and scope and an emotional investment in stories and characters. Yeah, yeah, I know all about that whole “convergence” thing, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not going to watch Lawrence of Arabia on my iPhone, thank you very much. Movies are made for the big screen, and if it can’t be a sixty-foot screen, sixty inches can still make due. Three point five won’t cut it for me.
All right, I tend to digress. I promise not to lecture a couple of generations who can’t pay attention to a film if it’s not in full, blazing color. If you can find joy in homegrown cell phone movies rather than the craftsmanship of the best of Hollywood’s greatest technicians, well, I feel sorry for you, but the planet keeps turning. If cavemen had developed camcorders before cave paintings, there never would have been a need to write or paint to communicate; they’d have sent video of their latest kills instead.
Bitter? Hell no, not me.
But after the strike ended in 2008, my world, if not the state of photographed drama, changed for good, and that was bad. The great unwashed, uneducated, undead masses discovered reality TV in greater numbers than ever before, and rushed like lemmings to leap from the cliff of scripted dramatic entertainment. They hibernated to their computers and PlayStations, evacuating the cinemas and home theaters, their eyes fluttering in unfixed attention-deficited fragmentation, Blackberried and text-messaged to the point of cranial vacuousness. If it required brainpower, it was abandoned for a quick barrage on a tiny, portable screen: a snack, a punchline in search of a joke.
But like I said, the world turns with or without me, spinning into oblivion, choking on its own dust. Ashes to ashes, and all that shit.
When we emerged at long last from the noble fight against the studios and the producers, our Nikes worn thin as we marched obediently across the studio entrances, the viewing public had lost interest in my line of work. Life before the strike was remunerative, if repetitive, going into the second season as a staff writer on Letting Blood, a medical procedural on NBC that reveled in the viscera of forensic investigation and the hot young personalities behind it. Okay, hard to make a case for art in the sea of commerce, but still … better than a YouTube video of a colonoscopy, right?
Regardless. Life as I had known it, when I was about to enter my first season as a producer on a series, was shattered by the strike. The series, like most others, was shut down and replaced by Dating Daddy, yet another reality show, this one featuring young women paired unknowingly with their oblivious fathers who had abandoned them in their youth, set up on blind dates, hidden cameras catching them when they unwittingly engaged in daddy-daughter sex. Dating Daddy, while dutifully scorned by the watchdog critical press, was embraced in record numbers by a drooling, knuckle-dragging populace hungry for all but the nudity and money shots, which were tastefully obscured with a digital blur. The uncensored DVDs and pirated downloads alike scored record numbers.
So Letting Blood was put to a painless death, and the Nielsen families had either adopted the babies of reality or abandoned network television, never to return. While the networks, panicking to find they’d been forsaken by the brood they had so abused, tried in vain to find the lowest possible denominator to reach out to them, they were as savvy to the ways of the modern world as the soon-to-be-retired idiot president from Texas, and they, too, found their world collapsing.
Scripted series were still produced, but they were broadcast to the vast darkness of outer space, perhaps to be viewed eons in the future by multi-eyed alien lifeforms with perplexed interest in life on the primitive third planet from the sun. Even the successful creators of series and their showrunners struck out repeatedly with their pitches; new series from the prophetic geniuses of seasons past crashed and burned with an industry that collapsed in an operatic prelude to the 2008 housing industry and financial markets.
Sure, basic cable had a measure of scripted successes, but their audiences, as well as their paychecks, were minuscule by comparison. Only the self-congratulatory Emmy Awards noticed them.
So when work was available at all, which was increasingly rare, it was at a greatly reduced rate. No one was making the big dollars of just a year or two before. Even the feature film business was teetering: illicit downloads and gaming took over from the box-office figures that only a year earlier had reached record levels. The only way to get your movie green-lit was to anchor it to a star … but even that was no guarantee. And the indie market that had so powerfully reawakened with Little Miss Sunshine and Juno and other low-cost, big-box office Cinderella stories had collapsed in narcoleptic slumber.
So here I sat, watching the number of incoming e-mails decline as the Viagra spam grew in direct proportion to my depression. The house I had bought to celebrate my newly acquired status of Letting Blood producer was already worth less than I owed on it, so I sold it at a loss of some three hundred grand and moved into an apartment on a shady street overlooking the Los Angeles River in Sherman Oaks. I know that sounds cozy, but if you’re not a local, you should know that the Los Angeles River is not what anyone from elsewhere could possibly define as a river: it’s a concrete trench that runs through the San Fernando Valley and overflows on the six days a year when it rains in Southern California but is otherwise a dry, baking cement gulf between nice homes and shitty little apartments. I now occupied the latter.
I went hat in hand to series I wouldn’t even consider watching to get a single script assignment. Working for scale looked mighty good to me at this point. I wrote spec pilots, a couple of feature scripts, and was even halfway through a novel as my savings account stayed on a binge-and-purge anorexic diet … without the bingeing. I pitched all the broadcast networks, the Turners, the pay cablers, even the chintzy little digital channels way up at the end of the channel guide on your satellite system. I got the thumbs-down all the way down to the Fine Living Channel.
A bunch of my wretched brethren had turned to the great god of the Internet for solace, creating shows they owned and producing them on a shoestring. Maybe one day they would find a way to make a living off it, but I just couldn’t get it up for that; that day, as sung by Ruby and the Romantics, was yet to come. I just didn’t see a home for drama until true convergence had taken place, where everything from broadcast networks to YouTube came through the same pipeline to your giant screen in high definition. And that wasn’t now.
Way back when, I’d had big dreams about writing movies, working my way up to directing my own original screenplays, a reflection of my own unique sensibilities. Of course, I never imagined creating blockbusters; I would be happy churning out my own Saylesian-Cronenbergian-delToronian-Allenian-Aronofskian indies that would find a small but devoted following that allowed me the freedom to do Work That Mattered. It wasn’t much to ask, but I was on my knees for years before the growing Pisan Tower of rejected spec scripts landed me an agent and a freelance episode of Charmed.
So, my career history in a nutshell: a no-name, personalityfree career bouncing from one television series to another, scripting for shows that someone watched, but no one I knew. The chapters of my existence were brief and relatively drama-free: a Writers Room Romance or two that never went anywhere, an expanding waistline and contracting imagination, and growing cold-pizza-induced carotid blockages. My bank account grew and life was predictably comfortable. I had coworkers and no real friends, could type a blazing fifty words a minute, and sat before my home cinema alone to appreciate the Blu-ray beauty of my John Ford collection.
And now, the rug of my life tugged out from underneath my unsteady feet, I was wedged alone into a Sherman Oaks two-bedroom-two-bath, with nothing but my movie collection at rest in the second boudoir. I felt like a mime in a shrinking-room routine.
It was getting scary; the residuals were shriveling and arriving less frequently. Most of the shows I’d worked on seldom lasted more than a year, and therefore were neither repeated nor syndicated. If I was lucky, they were bought by third-world nations learning about shitty television as they shuffled their way haltingly toward civilization, providing me with coffee money. Movies and television were all I knew; as the debtors grew more hostile in their collection techniques, it became clear that I needed a job. My agent was useless; he had more important clients than me breathing down his neck. My skills were limited, and, at the moment, had little commercial value. Movies and television turned a shoulder to me that was so cold it burned my fingers.
I sat in front of the twenty-four-inch screen of my iMac, fingers poised as if ready to pound out a polonaise, but there was no music. Fear and creative impotence froze me in the glare of the monitor, bathed in its icy blue glow, keyboard silently awaiting keystrokes that never came, daring me to unleash an unbroken flow of genius that would take me past the world of series television, to the toppermost of the poppermost, A-listing for the rest of my life, leaving the Conelrad Agency for CAA and the heady aroma of true success.
I was not up to the challenge. My psychic dick shriveled, pulled back, retreated, went to sleep. Failure curdled my guts and I broke out into a sweat. I could not pull my eyes from the monitor, magnetized as I was to its beckoning, held prisoner by its insistent presence in the otherwise darkened room. The plasma wall screen in the living room behind me was dark; the cell phone and Blackberry had been silent for days; the Arclight down the street offered nothing but popcorn and projected pabulum. No, it was this glowing, one-eyed monster that held my future. I was no longer a child of cinema, not even the son of television. That night, after two acts of pleasantly dull existence, the third and penultimate act of my life was about to begin.
I could never love this virtual world of virtual entertainment, but I would embrace it. If I fed this cyclopean monster the blood of my being, it would feed me. And I had just the idea for the first course.
It was time to create a website. There had never been a reason in the past: I was too busy to put together a MySpace or Face-book page, and even if I had, who would have been drawn to it? Well, beyond my mother, who is in a home and wouldn’t even recognize me if I stood right in front of her—and she has never used a computer in her life. The exes would just want to pelt me with nasty responses to my postings … if they were even that motivated. And there certainly were not any Tyler Sparrow fans out there clamoring for news on my work.
So I clicked on a Go Daddy ad on my Yahoo! homepage and registered TylersThirdAct.com before someone else beat me to it. Then I downloaded instructions on building a website and cobbled something together that actually was pretty attractive, filled with personal photos from my life’s initial chapters, with liberal use of shots from all the series I’d worked on as well as some candid shots of a couple of the C-list actresses I had badgered into going out with me, and created the plan.
I’d discovered long ago that the most voracious Internet audience seemed to be those attracted to the seamier side of life, the brutes looking for a taste of forbidden fruit, uncensored looks at anything a civilized society would normally be denied, whether it’s penetration shots of a famous but talent-challenged TV actress and her rock star boyfriend, or the beheading of a Middle Eastern hostage. The world is bloodthirsty, voracious in its appetite for the unappetizing, its collective stomach rumbling whenever scandal and viscera are about to be served. In a world where life was cheap and sanctity and decorum no longer existed, I was a self-appointed curator of the world zoo … and it was feeding time.
* * *
After clicking through my local Yellow Pages, I emerged from the destitute darkness of my humble San Fernando Valley abode into the scorching, relentless sun that shrank my underdeveloped pupils into pinholes. Sol’s glare was so white-hot that it took several minutes before my brain could process my surroundings. When the world around me had irised back into visibility, I climbed into the Beemer to do some shopping.
One benefit of being out of work: traffic was light as I made my way over Coldwater Canyon from the Valley to the Basin. Pico Boulevard was filling with the kosher lunch crowd at its numerous delis that punctuated the car repair lots, the used-book stores, the faded fabric shops, and the medical supply houses. I parked and pumped the meter with all the change I could round up, and found that it wasn’t the medical supply houses that offered what I was looking for, but surgical supplies I sought. I suppose Home Depot would have served my needs as well as what I was looking for here, but as a movie guy (okay, fine, television guy), the visual mattered to me. Well, normally the surgical supply houses were limited to those only within the medical profession, but after a couple of hours and a half-dozen triple soy latte espressos trolling the boulevard, I stepped into the dark, dusty, cobwebbed little den that proffered all I had hoped for and more.
Though the surroundings within the tiny Silver Elite Surgical Supply store were grimy and ill-attended at best, the displays of gleaming, hungry scalpels, cutters, and other flesh-rending devices were immaculate. They stopped the heart;, these challenged the gorgeous, horrific creations of the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers. As I stood alone in the shadowy, seemingly abandoned little shop, I felt the theatrical stillness rent by a ripple in the air and the shuffling of leather on the grimy floor.
“May I help you?” wheezed through the tiny shop, barely more voice than breath.
I looked up, then down to find the proprietor, a grizzled, hunched little man of indeterminate ancientness. His eyes, under the melting brow, were a pale ice blue beneath the milk of cataract, and peered out over the luggage of drooping lower lids. His liver-spotted scalp was studded with a few coarse white bristles pretending to be hairs, shellacked and pomaded across the cranium. He was bent over, a frail Quasimodo in the form of a permanent four-and-a-half-foot question mark. His surprising solicitous smile was toothless.
“I need some surgical instruments,” I told him.
“Hence your presence in a surgical supply shop.” But his sarcastic reply was delivered with such an ingratiating grin that I did not feel insulted. “Are you a member of the profession?”
“Well, I hope to be.”
“Ah. A student.”
“Exactly. A student.” I stood over the display case, taking in the instruments that gleamed in theatrical light. “These are beautiful.”
“Thank you. I’ve made them all since we opened, back in 1948.”
“Wait—you mean you actually craft these instruments yourself?”
He smiled again, and if there were blood coursing through his Paleolithic veins, he’d have blushed.
“The finest in the world, if you’ll forgive me the sin of pride.” He looked at me, though I doubted he could recognize me a second time. “What do you need?”
“I need a couple of scalpels and a nice pair of cutters.”
“Ribcage or smaller?”
“Um … digital? You know, fingers, toes?”
“It seems you have a very specific speciality.” Yes, he said the five-syllable version. I didn’t answer, and he went to the glass case and removed two gorgeous, gleaming scalpels and a pair of cutters that fit perfectly into the hand. Really beautiful craftsmanship, and I told him so.
“You’ll swell my head,” he replied. “So these will do?”
“Perfectly. What do I owe you?”
“Let’s see, that’s, oh, two thousand eight hundred fifty dollars.”
“Yikes! I had no idea they were so expensive!”
He looked at me with some curiosity. “These are not surgical steel, young man. They are bladed in solid silver. Cleanest cut in the industry. Quality has its price. I’m not making much of a profit on this, you know.” I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut. He peered at me in a face-rumpling squint. “Well, you are a student. I suppose we could call it twenty-five hundred and everybody goes home happy.”
Yeah, well, everybody but me.
“Of course, I could send you to some mail-order shop, where you can get the same instruments used by the hoi polloi. Naturally, your student identification and medical cards are up to date for the transactions, right?”
Well, money wasn’t going to mean much to me soon, anyway, was it? So the dregs of my savings weren’t doing any good just sitting in another collapsing bank, were they? Visa could cover it for now, and when the time comes, let the devil collect his due.
“Do you take plastic?”
He sighed. “It’s a plastic world now, and it breaks my heart.” He took my card, ran it through the manual reader, scrawled the amount, and handed it over for me to sign. I scribbled my signature as he gently swaddled his creations in soft, elegant black velvet. It was obvious I was getting my money’s worth. Transaction completed, I took the luxuriously bundled instruments under my arm as he shook my hand in his surprisingly soft one and bid me good-bye.
* * *
Ensconced in my meek little Sherman Oaks dorm, I sat in front of the iMac, seeking the sites that would most likely yield the quickest access to the Web’s sanguinary sippers. I put together a little ad with a Photo Booth shot of my feigned innocence under the title You want a piece of me? I will begin to remove my body parts live on webcam at 10 p.m. PDT Thursday at Tylers ThirdAct.com. The first one’s free!
After setting up a PayPal account that would be funneled to the home that lodged my demented mother, in the guilt-easing hopes that she could live out her waning and oblivious life in comfort and splendor, I purchased little animated spots on Fangoria, Bloody-Disgusting, Shock Till You Drop, Horror.com, Dread Central, Arrow Through the Head—all the horror sites—as well as the notably tawdry TMZ. This proved to be an auspicious and prescient choice. As soon as they began to run, literally within hours of them being posted, both Google and Yahoo! picked up the story and linked to my site, and the news went viral. Once CNN picked it up, there was no stopping the inferno that raged. Everyone assumed it was fake, of course; why wouldn’t they? But it didn’t keep them from checking it out. I did my best to exercise my constitutional right to privacy, so no one was going to track me down on this, not until I was ready. I was getting hundreds, then thousands of hits on the site … and it was only Saturday!
In five days, I fully intended to begin my own disassembly, my personal contribution to the world’s culture, blood of the lamb spattered all over the screens of the lions. Blood, sweat, and self-sacrifice are the backbone of success in Hollywood, according to all the screenplay books. But I’ll bet Syd Field didn’t have the guts, the true intestinal fortitude, to put his internal self on the screen the way I intended to.
I didn’t bother looking into the legality of this. I assume there are laws against suicide … but they must be pretty toothless, since if you succeed, prosecution would prove to be a problem. But I was only taking the modern primitivism of self-mutilation and skin art to my own personal level. It was artistic expression, damn it!
If you went to the site before its premiere on that fateful Thursday, you would have subjected yourself to a little dance of snapshots from my life to date, which gave way to a full screen with my face and hands taking the shape of a clock, ticking down the hours, minutes, and seconds until the first excision was to take place. Beneath my beaming countenance, a calendar clicked away the days. Other than that, nothing else, aside from the same words seen in the ads. In the upper right corner was a button to click to join, a $100 payment payable only through PayPal, refundable only up to the moment of the first shearing. The first removal, as promised, was to be free, but if you wanted to see more, well, open your wallet, pal. Nothing worth anything is free, especially my own Silver Diet. Its webcast would be live only, no video podcasts, no replay recordings available. Though I was sure there were hackers capable of capturing and rebroadcasting the events and posting them elsewhere, I thought there were enough of the famished, ghoulish public out there with enough disposable income to make it pay. It was a one-way site, clean and elegant: no postings or blogging from me and no comments from the peanut gallery. I had no interest in what they had to say anyway. It’s my life, and I’ll do what I want.
Thursday seemed endless, a train never to emerge from its tunnel. My guts were roiling in anticipation, and I was unable to eat a thing. I tried to go to a movie, just to get out of my little abattoir of an apartment and make the day pass before the ultimate curtain would be drawn. But I couldn’t concentrate on a thing. The Arclight was buzzing with midday customers—mostly the elderly and the Hollywood-unemployed—and as I passed through them, I could feel the occasional burn of recognition. Eyes surreptitiously tracked me out to the parking structure … unless it was opening-day nerves and paranoia I felt on the back of my neck. I guess I was useless out in the real world, as usual, so it was back into the Beemer and the too-brief ride back to Valleyheart Drive.
The apartment was choking on itself, closed up and fetid. The air conditioning had broken down—again—so I opened a window, and curdled, beige, airlike San Fernando Valley fumes reached inside to caress me.
I hung a purple velvet curtain behind the Aeron chair that faced the computer and artfully trained a light against it. I positioned another light directly over the chair, which threw me into a cone of illumination. For further creative effect, I added a sidelight. I didn’t want the audience to miss any of the salient details. A crystal bowl, which, at showtime, would be filled with ice, was placed on the desk right next to the hypodermic needle and attendant bottles of alcohol, anesthetic, and antiseptic. At the end of the row of implements, a George Foreman Sandwich Grill was plugged in and heating up. To give me strength and solace, a tall, unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s was placed close by, with a nice, clean glass.
So now, the only thing to do was wait for 10:00, and my first leading role.
I vacuumed the apartment, did the dishes, took out the trash, washed the windows, threw the newly acquired DVDs of the last few weeks into their alphabetical homes, whipped up a smoothie that I couldn’t drink, took a shower, shaved, made my bed, turned on CNN, wiped the plasma screen, checked my messages (zero), washed out the blender, took a sip of my smoothie, and watched the clock.
It was not even 5:00.
So I surfed. I lingered over YouTube, got sick of the amateur-hour spoofs, the mediocre music, the decidedly democratic and creativity-challenged cultural contributions of the unpaid and unwashed, and listened to my stomach howl in protest. I scoured the more obscure sites that offered up the terrorist videos of physical disengagement, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch. My stomach is tender when it comes to the real thing. Give me foam latex body parts and Karo syrup blood, and it’s giggles and grins; show me the real thing, and I’ve passed out on the floor. So this was going to be a real event.
I checked the counters: more than a half million visitors had gone to my site! So far, I had fifteen hundred paid subscribers—that was $150,000!—and it was sure to go up after tonight’s display. I could have quit now and suckered them, but making a profit for my incognizant Mommy—or even myself—was not the point. My meaning in life came in its disassembly.
It was now only half an hour or so before the curtain was to be drawn. I changed into my performance attire: a nice suit and a hand-painted Argentinean tie I had acquired on a trip to Buenos Aires. My fingers were uncluttered by jewelry, which would be important tonight. Running my hand through my thinning hair one last time, straightening my tie, I sat before the screen, counting down the seconds before activating the camera.
Finally, Act Two in the life of Tyler Sparrow had faded to black, and I typed, for the last time, “fade in.” My third act had begun.
By the time the webcam was switched on, there were over nine hundred thousand ravenous denizens waiting online. I hated them for their lust, their tawdry, base instincts, their witless, plotless, pointless lives, their vampiric need for my blood. But I didn’t have to like them, or even respect them. I could despise them, pander to them, and still fulfill my own destiny.
I did not speak. I did not perform. My face, hopefully expressionless, dispassionate, uninterested, stared back at me from the iMac as I took the hypodermic needle in hand, filled it with lidocaine, plunged it into the base of the little finger on my left hand, and depressed the plunger. Shooting holes all around the base of the spastic digit, I emptied the hypo and jammed my protesting finger into the bowl of ice. As I waited for the anesthetic to take full effect, I looked into the lens of the webcam, into the greedy eyes of my audience, without so much as a blink. I cleaned the cutter with alcohol and a soft cloth, and it gleamed a silver grin. My whole left hand was going numb, as dead as my heart, so it was clear the moment was near.
No words, no music. Silent drama in its purest form.
I held up my insensitive left hand, and it shook in nervous anticipation. My mouth went dry, and I couldn’t keep from repeatedly clearing the cotton from my throat. I splayed my fingers wide in front of my face and picked up the eager cutters in my right hand, which also betrayed me with nervous tremors. I swallowed, then drew the shining silver implement close and opened its rapacious maw. Perspiration besotted my brow and trickled down into my eyes, making them sting. I ignored it and drew the cutters closer. Now or never; the heat from the Foreman Grill broasted my right side.
I took a deep breath and …
Snip!
In a single cut, the shears clipped through flesh and bone, and my unappreciated left little finger plopped onto the small white satin pillow I had placed on the desk. It sat motionless in a crimson corona of my blood as the red stuff flowed mightily from the new stump at the end of my left hand.
Shock wrapped me in its shawl; there was no pain, only the dull throb of an accelerated heartbeat. Regardless, after holding it up on display for the voracious audience to prove to them that it was real, I brought it down to George’s jolly little Grill and stubbed out the bleeding with a cauterizing sizzle. I screamed reflexively and gagged on the smell of my own burning meat, gulped down a double dose of Jack Daniel’s, jammed my hand into the bowl of ice, and shut down the webcam.
* * *
I turned off the lights and sat in darkness, unable to stop the palsied shake that overtook my body. My hands shook most of all, and my heart was a rocket to the moon. Mission accomplished … its first chapter, at least. I took deep, ragged breaths, trying to bring down my pulse. Sweat broke out in a sheath over my body, cold and slippery, and I had to lie down on the couch. Still, there was no pain, though I knew it would come. Even pharmaceutically and alcoholically deadened, the thudding beat of my pulse was strong in my stump, and it felt as if it were trying to expand. So I swabbed it in antiseptic and wrapped it carefully in gauze and adhesive tape.
I lay staring at the cottage cheese ceiling, breathing deeply, not missing my useless finger, just trying to slow down my body’s panic. Calm down, fella; it’s over, it’s going to be okay, you did it, just breathe, breathe, slower, slower …
It started to work; my eyes began to regain their focus, my brain turned off the olfactory assault of my burning flesh, and my heart began to give up its sprint for a jog. One more long drink directly from Jack’s neck and I was nearing functionality again. When I was able to get to my feet, I returned to the beckoning eye of the iMac and woke it from its slumber.
Over one million six hundred thousand viewers had joined me for my little anatomical demonstration … and over two thousand of them had actually paid for the privilege! Which led to this realization: I had just been paid more to cut off my finger than I’d ever gotten for writing a script. I cogitated on that for a while, trying to put it all into perspective. That, however, proved impossible.
I had to get out of the apartment, which closed in on me, threatening to crush the life out of me. I stumbled to the carport and climbed into the Beemer, bouncing clumsily out onto the street and ultimately up Coldwater Canyon. The night atypically cool and the traffic thin. At the intersection of Coldwater and Mulholland Drive, I pulled haphazardly into the TreePeople lot and stepped out into the last expanse of nature in the center of Los Angeles. Though the park was closed, I made my way through the valley oaks and piles of dog shit until I reached an open clearing. The San Fernando Valley was laid out before me, a dying harridan choking on her final gasping breaths. The NBC Universal tower lorded over all it could see, a black obelisk of fortitude; lights twinkled and cars obliviously choked the Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood. The city lay open and exposed, an autopsy pinned wide open for me to inspect. I saw the corpse decomposing before me, and its rot was contagious. A piece of me had been removed, and the course of action to follow was laid out. I felt lightened, relieved, excused from gym class. The network piranhas had been taking bloodless bites out of me for years; my destiny was now in my own diminishing hands. The Southern California sky wrapped me in its arms and put me to sleep.
* * *
“Roger, no!”
I woke suddenly to a new dawn and a stream of hot wetness. My furry alarm was a Jack Russell terrier relieving himself all over my head, its horrified owner, two hundred fifty pounds of jogging jiggle stuffed into the finest lululemon athletic wear money could buy, screaming to wake the dead.
“No! Roger, bad dog! Get over here!”
I stood, hung over, my face dripping with Roger’s pee, and remembered where I was and what got me there.
“Oh, God, I am so sorry!” She pounded across the dirt path and chased the prankster terrier in a circle as he easily evaded her, laughing a maniacal doggie laugh. I stood, weaving, glaring through confused, bloodshot eyes as she handed me a towel from around her neck. “Roger!” She shot away in pursuit of her little urinating monster, never to return, and I wiped away its possessive piss, fully humiliated, before vomiting all over the ground.
I climbed into the Beemer and joined the sardines that choked the only artery into the Valley. Naturally there was rush hour construction on Coldwater, but again, there was no hurry to get home, was there? As it turned out, there was.
When I arrived, media trucks surrounded the Valley Vista Apartments. News crews were buzzing on Starbucks and scandal. I parked and was immediately engulfed by a ravenous cadre of cameras and slick, sexless Barbie and Ken news monkeys, each shoving their phallic microphones into my face for a multinetwork blowjob. They shouted at me, rolling tape and demanding my cooperation. I was not up for this impromptu press conference and shoved my way through them and into my apartment, locking the hollow plywood door behind me. Who had known I’d be so easily found?
This was not what I had expected.
Though I had sought the spotlight as an artist, I had grown accustomed to the relative comforts of anonymity, and resigned to being a meaningless cog in the entertainment wheel. Suddenly, the spotlight glared on me, and I sought the shadows. This is what it took to get their attention? My blood? Jesus, you guys are easy!
The thin door and single-paned windows did little to muffle the roar of the needy tabloidmeisters outside, but I pulled the curtains and threw the chain bolt and retreated to the comforting glow of the iMac. It awoke with a click and showed me a list of dozens of unexpected e-mails, mostly from unfamiliar addresses, and almost none of them Viagra spam. I guess I was not so difficult to track down: my e-mail address was tylersparrow@ymail.com after all. My answering machine blinked “full.” This lonely little hovel had suddenly overflowed with unexpected popularity. I had been elected King of the Prom! And all it took was the excision of a relatively useless digit (well, useful if you want to type A or Z or Q, but otherwise overrated).
The phone kept ringing and the knuckles rapping on my chamber door, but I blocked it all out. I disconnected the telephone, shut down the cell phone, and ignored the invaders until they at least quit knocking and shouting for me.
Muzzy-headed, with the remnants of Jack seeping out through overactive pores, I hovered over the iMac and scrolled through the messages. Most of them were from the anticipated crazies, a bunch of fundamentalist Christians spewing hateful fire and brimstone, print and website reporters looking for a quote from the Crazy Cutter, a few friends and coworkers from around the various writing tables I’d occupied over the years looking to have coffee and talk. As I had no family beyond my mother in the home, there were no outpourings of love and concern. Just more people who wanted something from me. Which is why I was where I was in the first place.
I opened my website and found a spike in the visitors. Five thousand people had now paid to see the continuing dismemberment! Tonight’s installment was an important second step. It was time to grow the audience, to bring eyeballs and open wallets to the site, to feed the chattering, nattering diners a second course to their virtual feast.
Ding!
The computer alerted me to more e-mail, and I returned to find a message on top of the new pile, with an attachment. The address caught my eye: piecemeal82@gmail.com. Surely a kindred spirit.
I clicked it open. The attachment was a photo of a young woman, very attractive but not in the obvious Hollywood manner of TV bimbo: no blond hair, no boob job, and slightly snaggled, imperfect teeth. She had dark bobbed hair, glasses, seemingly flawless skin, and a face and body that offered hidden promises that could be missed on first appraisal. Of course, this was only a still photo, but it looked like it had been snapped privately, certainly never retouched, and had a sense of very personal outreach. Her gold eyes looked directly into the lens, as if defying me to find her irresistible.
The message was simple: I admire what you’re doing. Want to videochat? Sally.
I stared at her picture, which stared back, expressionless. There was a trace of the Mona Lisa about her. Was that hint of a smile conspiratorial, a secret bond between us, or was she mocking me? I couldn’t take ridicule right now; I was feeling very vulnerable. What was it exactly that she admired?
I looked back into her inscrutable face.
What the hell? How many attractive young women actually go to the trouble to seek me out? My life was now a deck of cards cast to the wind; there was no structure, no timeline, no appointments (at least nothing before 10:00 tonight), no anything. So I hit Reply and wrote her back:
Sure, let’s chat. Where do you live? In LA? When would you like to webcam?
Her response was immediate.
You took my breath away last night. I’m in Ojai, but I feel much closer to you. Are you by your camera now?
My heart started pounding. I reeked; I was shrouded in Jack Russell pee and Jack Daniel’s vomit.
Give me half an hour, I typed.
Ignoring the mounting streamliner of e-mails and the scarlet flash of phone messages that pulsed beseechingly, I lurched into the bathroom, and after an endless strone of relief, submerged myself under the stinging nettles of a hot shower. Revived if not refreshed, I blew myself dry and climbed into presentable attire before taking my place before the computer. Breathing deeply to slow my heartbeat, I typed in her iChat address and activated my own.
Her face filled the screen, looking directly into mine. And she was lovely.
“Tyler,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s you!”
Her voice was husky, smoky, seductive. And Jesus … she couldn’t believe it was me!
“Yeah, it’s me,” I answered. “I can’t believe it’s you.”
She smiled, and I was delivered unto her. My heart was imprisoned in her cage from that first grin.
“You’re beautiful,” she said.
“You must be looking in a mirror,” I told her. “Did you watch last night, Sally?”
“I did. You’re very brave. It was quite a performance.” She paused and bit her lower lip before she went on. “It … excited me.” It was obvious; she was breathing more heavily, and her face betrayed a sudden flush of passion. Cutting off my finger excited her? What was I getting myself into?
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
She stared right into the webcam … and my face.
“Did it excite you?” she asked.
Hmm. To be honest, I had never considered the erotic possibilities of my own dismemberment. I find no pleasure in pain, nor have I ever found rendered flesh to be any kind of sexual stimulation, even in fantasy. My arousals seem to be much more catholic than that. Suddenly I felt square and prudish, but I didn’t want to appear so to this odd young woman.
“Um,” I began wittily, “not at the time.”
She seemed disappointed, which in turn disappointed me. I didn’t want to let her down.
“Oh” was her succinct reply.
There was more pounding on the front door, but I wasn’t home.
“Are you alone?” she asked me.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Do you live by yourself?”
“I do. How about you?”
“All alone.” Another long pause, then, “Are you lonely?”
It took me by surprise. A heavy, rotting ball of isolation started to expand within my chest, and I felt myself sinking under its weight. My mouth worked, but no words came out. Embarrassed, I could feel my eyes inexplicably filling with unspilled sadness. Lonely? Was I lonely? I hadn’t noticed … until now. Her face, calm in repose, watched me without judgment, and I shrank in embarrassment under her gaze. She waited patiently for my reply, and it became clear that I could tell her the truth.
“I guess maybe I am.”
She nodded. “Me too.”
It wasn’t possible that this beautiful, soft-spoken young woman could ever be allowed loneliness, and I told her so.
“The world is crowded,” she replied, “but I don’t walk among them.”
I knew how she felt, and she did not require an answer.
“Show me your hand,” she said.
I held it up to the camera.
“Can you take off the bandage?”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Caught in her hungry gaze, suddenly and inexplicably sprouting an erection hiding beneath the desk, I slowly unwrapped my hand, where the wound gaped, red and raw. She gasped.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not so much.”
“Hold it closer.”
Her breathing went deeper, and so did mine. I could feel my blood coursing hotly through my body, pulsing with an accelerating beat. She leaned closer.
“I wish I could kiss it better.”
My throat choked with emotion, and it took a moment before I could reply, “So do I.” And I did.
More pounding on the door by my adoring public.
“Will you do it again tonight?” she asked.
I nodded. “That’s the deal. You wouldn’t believe how many people have paid for me to do it.”
“Yes, I would.”
“Are you one of them?”
She nodded and smiled, revealing a slightly crooked canine that made her even sexier … despite her bloodlust.
“I didn’t think it was real. But it was worth the gamble.”
The doorbell kept ringing and voices kept piercing the thin walls and windows of my Sherman Oaks chalet. E-mails and IMs kept filling the background of my computer screen. Even my silent cell phone kept up a vibratory boogie over on the counter. I was under siege.
“What’s all that noise?”
I sighed. “I guess I’ve become very popular since last night.”
“Is there a crowd there?”
“Just turn on your television; I seem to be all over the place.” I spotted a videocamera peering between a gap in the curtains and rushed over to pull it shut.
“I don’t have a television,” she told me.
I liked her even more. She was oblivious to the expendable fruits of my labors. She had no idea that I had settled for a grasp that far exceeded my reach.
“Well, it seems to be time for a personal crucifixion. They’re all out there begging for it.”
She started to speak, then backed off a moment.
“What?”
She hesitated again, then continued. “If you want to get away from them, you can always come here.”
As the cry for my literal blood ratcheted up in the background, I considered her generous offer.
“Really?”
“Really.”
I looked at her peaceful, welcoming visage, and realized I’d never seen anyone with gold eyes before.
* * *
I needed to hide.
It didn’t take long to ditch the hounds of journalism, and within half an hour I felt free of their slavering jaws as the Beemer sped northward up the Ventura Freeway. Fish-scale clouds domed the browning San Fernando Valley, but they had thinned into a gleaming blue by the time I’d passed through Moorpark. As I cleared the final mountain that announced the citrus farms of the Ojai Valley in a dramatic opening-act reveal, I was stunned at how a ninety-minute drive could change the world so dramatically.
The car’s GPS led me through the tranquil little Old California farming town, now best known for its spas and weekend getaways, even while being hemmed in by endless groves of oranges. I passed through the two blocks of downtown, passed a dry but restful old cemetery, and wended my way around the outdoor ramshackle used stacks of Bart’s Books, eventually winding up a dirt road to a tiny little Craftsman bungalow, removed from its neighbors. Giant valley oaks cast a canopy of cool shade, their papery leaves rustling a welcome in the breeze. As the tires spat gravel and I coasted to a stop, a silhouette revealed itself behind the shutters.
My heart pounded a military tattoo as I cleared my throat and made my way to the door, not knowing exactly what to expect. I popped the trunk, climbed out of the car, and hefted my iMac to the door. She met me there, and we stood facing one another through the rusty screen door for a wordless eternity. Her oddly lovely face was unmapped by experience, smooth as a ten-year-old’s, a translucence seemingly never kissed by sun. Her face was framed in a bob of auburn hair, and her astonishing golden eyes were wide in expectation and glinting in the sun. She was tiny, much smaller than I’d expected: barely five feet. She wore jeans and a loose white cotton blouse under a sort of shawl, as simple and as unadorned as her face. But she was luscious, and her visage soon bloomed into a convivial smile as she held her arms under the shawl to ward off the chill.
“You made good time,” she said as she pushed open the screen with a creak.
I stepped into the cool time warp of her home and felt embraced by it. It was furnished mostly in Stickley—or very good copies. The burnished old Mission Oak style suited the house, the setting, and its occupant. It felt untrammeled by the present, save for the modest computer sitting in the comer, out of place on the old desk.
“Where should I put this?” I asked, hugging the iMac.
Limping slightly, she led me to the dining room table, and I set it down. There were no lights on inside; the house was illuminated only by the sunlight filtering through the oaks and the open windows. “Do you want something to drink?”
“What have you got?”
I watched her go into the kitchen and open the fridge.
“I’ve got water, um, beer, iced tea, Diet Coke.”
Beer sounded good, and she pointed me into the living room while she poured the Michelobs. I glimpsed into the bedroom on the way back, noticing a tidy and comfy lived-in quality as I passed. The bed was made, and there was silent-scream art on the walls of a darker nature than you would expect from that soft, sweet face. I sat on the overstuffed couch and took it all in. The place had a history, permanence, something that I lacked. I was a loose end, at sea in a riptide.
She walked into the room, the tray of beers on one hand, and I stood to take it from her, settling back on the couch once she sat. I was trying to understand her, loving the breadcrumb clues she offered.
“Thanks for letting me come up here,” I told her.
“Thanks for sharing it with me,” she replied.
“Why did you contact me?” As much as I appreciated it, I still didn’t understand.
“Because you did something bold and brave. And because I thought I recognized someone of a like mind, and I don’t see many of those. Was I wrong?”
“I hope not.”
With that, I reached tentatively to take her hand, and she let me. But I was greedy; I wanted both. So I reached with the right hand as well, and her breath caught in her throat. She stared into my eyes, searching, before she wordlessly drew her left arm from under the shawl. It ended halfway between elbow and wrist. I was only beginning to understand the erotic charge coursing through me. Gingerly, I reached out, knowing she wanted me to, and touched the end of her arm, held it gently in my hand. I wanted to kiss it.
My voice broke as I asked, “Did you have an accident?”
“Not exactly,” she replied.
“How did it happen?”
She scrutinized me again before deciding to tell.
“I work in a print shop. I was cutting and binding a big job, and as I watched the guillotine hacking off blocks of paper, over and over and over, it sort of cast a spell on me. It was so hypnotic. It kept cutting, chopping as new stacks of paper were fed into it, and it just drew me closer and closer into it.” She looked at me, deciding whether or not it was safe to go on. It was. She gripped my hand tighter. “I don’t know, I just couldn’t keep myself from feeding it. Before I knew it, I’d shoved my hand in and pulled away what was left of my arm, spurting blood all over the piles of paper. My life was all over the book.”
She looked at me for a reaction, and I stared back in bewilderment.
“Did it hurt?” I asked her.
“Maybe. But it made me come.”
When she said it, I almost did the same. I was raging underneath my jeans. She dropped her single hand into my lap, knowing what was going on down there. I leaned in to kiss her, and she hungrily sucked on my tongue.
I carried her into the tiny bedroom; she barely weighed anything. She was irresistibly petite, and her erotic appetite was completely at odds with her gentle demeanor. As we kissed, her eyes rolled back in her head, and her cries as her body became drenched in sweat were guttural, uninhibited, downright feral. When I laid her on the bed, she wouldn’t let me stand and look at her; she pulled me down into the bed with her and feverishly unbuttoned my shirt, willing me to do the same to her. I was happy to oblige.
Her skin was alabaster-new everywhere, practically aglow, as if lit from beneath. When I removed her blouse, the flesh beneath was almost as white as the fabric. She took my hand in hers, bringing it to her mouth, sucking on each of the fingers before settling on the new, raw wound. The wet heat of her mouth was as soothing as it was exciting.
I unfastened her pants, and she eagerly raised her hips to accommodate their removal. They caught as I’d drawn them halfway down, and I struggled with them to pull them all the way off as her breaths came hot and rapid. They had hung up on the straps of her prosthesis. Her leg below the knee was rubber and steel.
When she said, “Take it off,” I knew what she meant, and removed the artificial limb. Repelled yet hopelessly drawn to it like a moth to light, I kissed and tasted its fleshy sweetness. When I finally entered her, I did not last long.
* * *
I woke to darkness as an old mantel clock chimed eight times; the day had lost me in postorgasmic slumber. The spot on the bed next to me was empty but still warm. Moonlight reached in through the window with chilly fingers to touch me, and I felt vulnerable, dressed only in gooseflesh. I looked down the hallway to see Sally sitting in the dining room, illuminated by the cool light of the iMac. She had set it up while I slept. I slipped out of the bed and into my jeans.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” she said, and I was grateful for the rest. “I hope you don’t mind me setting it up; it was getting late.” I thanked her and sat next to her to sign on. She turned away while I entered the appropriate passwords to prepare for tonight’s performance. Once that business was attended to, she kissed me, running her tongue under my lips and over my teeth, fully waking me before watching me prepare for the night.
There were no more free samples on TylersThirdAct.com on Night Two. This was now an exclusive club for paid visitors only. Over three thousand of them by now. I could tell that Sally was impressed, but she did not speak as I opened a bag and set up the accoutrements of my public dismemberment: the bowl, the hypo, the anesthetic, the silver tools, the Foreman Grill, the white satin pillow. As they lay out in strict anal-retentive order, my hands began to shake again, and I turned to look up at her over my shoulder.
“Beautiful,” she sighed.
“Okay if I take a shower?” I asked, and she nodded.
So I did, shivering and convulsing as the shower washed the slime of my life down the drain. I vomited a thin, liquid gruel of my sins; that’s all that was left inside me. And now it had been cast out like a wicked demon.
When I had completed my toilette, I returned to the iMac, Sally, and my future. It was close to nine now: one hour from the next chapter.
“You look beautiful,” Sally told me, meaning it.
No. She was the beautiful one; all I could do was stare at her, take her in, worship her. If she thought I was beautiful, that made me happy. But I saw innocent, vulnerable beauty sitting before me, tiny and unprotected, and my heart sprung a leak. I took her face in my hands and kissed her, lovingly and lustlessly, gently pressing my coarse, stubbled cheek against the cream of hers.
“What will you remove tonight?” she asked me.
“I—I was thinking of another finger,” I stammered.
“Aren’t you …” She stopped.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Aren’t I what?”
“Just … aren’t you afraid of repetition? I mean, were you planning to just do a finger at a time, then maybe your toes?”
“Um … kinda, yeah.” Was there something wrong with that?
“I think your audience wants some, well, escalation. You don’t want to lose their interest.”
Escalation. For a moment, she sounded like a network executive. But I understood immediately that she was right.
“Like an ear?”
She took my hand in hers.
“Like a hand.” She kissed it and looked up into my eyes.
“A hand.” I swallowed. There was no turning back now. I had set my course of action, had outlined my final act, and had committed to its fulfillment. I had made a contract with myself.
It was quarter after nine. The clock on the wall ticked away the seconds ominously, stealthily, and I could swear that the speed accelerated. But that was probably just my heart.
“And after the hand?”
“Let’s think about after,” she said, “after the hand.”
“You’re right,” I told her, and she smiled, her golden eyes igniting. She kissed me deeply and at length.
“I don’t know if I have the right tools,” I said.
Her face still aglow, she said, “I do.” I didn’t doubt her. She left the room and returned with an oversized paper cutter. She set it gently on the table in front of the iMac and opened its heavy steel jaws. They gleamed in anticipation. I reached over and slammed the guillotine shut, and the hungry shing of stainless steel caressing itself sang me a lullaby.
I looked at the computer screen and saw e-mails and last-minute subscribers piling up. I turned to the clock and saw that it was 9:35.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked.
My soul and I had filed for divorce. I had sought resignation from the planet, solitary and insignificant, a single card misfiled among the millions. I looked into the eager eyes of another outcast, tiny and getting tinier. My worth came only in my diminution and eventual demise. So far, my audience had spent close to half a million dollars to watch my destruction, to witness a self-immolating soul cease to be. I found company, romance, and solace in the act of dismemberment, elements that had eluded me in life but burgeoned in the compressed time left.
“I think yes.”
I saw her eyes fill with joyful tears and welcomed her approval as she hugged me tight. I began to tremble again, utterly exposed and at her mercy. She pulled away and looked at me, holding a question behind her eyes as I quaked.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Do you want me to make the cut?” I could tell that was what she wanted; maybe it was what I wanted as well. When I nodded, the spasm within my body settled and calmed. I was truly in her hands.
“We’d better get ready,” she said. The clock’s synchronous symphony continued.
As practiced as a nurse, she injected the lidocaine all around my wrist. I could feel the tingle as it began to take effect. She put away the needle and massaged my arm, and I absorbed her heat.
“You got any Jack Daniel’s?” She had some Maker’s Mark, and I made do. As its burn was absorbed into my veins, I calmed even more. The seconds on the clock pounded ferociously by, a telltale heart counting down. Just minutes until showtime. She sat me in a chair right in front of the iMac and took her place on a chair just out of the camera’s range. Just before ten, she slipped on a simple, black Halloween mask.
“You ready?” she asked.
I was.
I turned on the webcam and faced the camera. Another three hundred paid subscribers had come online in the last few minutes, and their number kept ticking right up until ten.
I held my hands up to the camera, like a magician about to do a trick. Sally swabbed around my wrist with alcohol. I lay my sleeping arm on top of the paper cutter, and she helped me get it into position. The gleaming blade sparkled in wait. I tilted the screen of the computer so that the camera held my arm in a perfect frame. Then Sally took hold of the blade’s handle and, before I had a chance to object, slammed it down. My hand dropped to the satin pillow like a slaughtered starfish.
I jammed the stump of my wrist into the Foreman Grill and passed out.
* * *
It’s a hoary writer’s device to have the lead character lose consciousness and awaken to a new plot development with the passage of time. It’s cheap but effective, and I confess to adopting it numerous times, even within this account. Including now. As I had no idea of all the events that transpired during my disconnection from consciousness, all I can convey is my awakening, and the overwhelming aroma that accompanied it. It was the heady, meaty scent of cooking flesh.
My body was bent in an awkward, uncomfortable position, lying on a blanket that covered a hard metal surface. I opened my eyes and waited for them to focus, forgetting momentarily where I was. It was immediately apparent that I was not in my Sherman Oaks apartment. I was in Sally’s house, of course, but in a rusting metal enclosure. It was a cage of thick iron bars, barely four feet square. My head was muzzy and clouded, my vision tentative, my body in varying levels of discomfort. Then I realized that my mouth felt dead and swollen inside; there was merely a stump where my tongue used to lie.
I lifted my head to the direction of the kitchen, where a pot sputtered on the stove, delivering its beckoning bouquet. There were voices. I turned to see that Sally had company. Half a dozen visitors were seated around her dining table, each behind an elaborate place setting. Though they were of varying physical types—corpulent, slender, tall, diminutive, and of varying shades and ethnicity—they shared this trait: all were lacking in various body parts. Their flesh houses had been hacked away.
When Sally entered the room, carrying a steaming platter of meat on her single hand, she looked in surprise and delight to see that I was awake. When she said, “Good morning,” all eyes were on me, and backed me into a corner of my cage. It was then that I recognized some of them: one was Daniel Power, VP of dramatic programming at NBC; another was Carolyn Pfenster from Turner; a third was some low-level development guy from Universal, his name long forgotten after a failed pitch meeting last year. The others were unfamiliar to me.
Then I looked down to see that, aside from sitting naked before them, I was missing more than a hand. An entire leg had been removed as I slept, making my shrunken, dangling privates merely my second leg.
My stomach growled.
“Are you hungry?” Sally asked me. Everyone at the table answered in the affirmative, not realizing the question was not meant for them. I shook my head, denying the starvation that ravished me. I could not cry out for help.
The repast on the table before the gathered group was complete now. There may have been vegetables on the table, but I didn’t see them. All I could see was Filet of Sparrow laid out in mouth-watering fashion, and the group of diners tucked in to their delectable meal with relish. This show was no longer my own, I realized; the series I had created chronicling my own demise had been taken over; I’d been replaced as the showrunner. Tyler’s Third Act now ran on a new network, co-opted by the new owners and relegated to their own website.
Sally got up from the table with a dish and kneeled before me, just inches from the other side of the bars. Through an opening at the bottom of the cage, she slid in a small plate. My disembodied hand lay there like a pink tarantula, tender meat barely clinging to the bones. “Go ahead,” Sally urged me. “It’s really good.” Yeah, I thought. And so good for me. I couldn’t eat it.
* * *
That was two weeks ago. Needless to say, I have developed a taste for human flesh, or I would not be here today. Well, what’s left of me, anyway. My limbs are gone, and just about everything else. Nothing else could be removed without it being the end of my life; I look like home plate.
They say that it’s not how you die that matters, but how you live. I beg to differ. As someone whose life was lived in anonymous mediocrity, my impending death was all that was unique about me. Tonight will be my final dinner party at Sally’s. The only pain is in my heart, not my body. Existence is highly overrated. I will not miss it. And if your subscription is paid up, you will join me in my bon voyage party. Sally has gently bathed and groomed me for the wrap-up of my third act, and the webcam is about to be activated. I hope you’ll join me for this very special episode before I fade to black and the commercials run.