The Special New Boy

In the autumn of 1985 I spent fifteen days on the British Isles, where I dedicated my youthful energies to complaining about the way the English did things. In London when I wasn’t carping I was staring at beautiful international women in the exact way I had always stared at beautiful American women—with a hopeless melancholy from afar. If my fellow traveler pointed out where Dickens had lived or where Samuel Johnson lunched, I might say, “Yes, but look over there. Could that be Phoebe Cates?”

He and I had planned to spend a couple fortnights in Britain, where at a minimum we hoped to discover if English girls kissed with an accent. Then we were to sail to the continent and give the Parisian women a break. But I never made it to France; I got physically exhausted in Ireland and returned to Kansas City. So, indeed, I did end up giving the Parisian women a break.

The more important reason I had gone to Europe was to acquire the kind of enlightenment that might benefit me as a writer. At twenty-two I had done just about nothing in life that would constitute “experience” or result in enlightenment. But all I returned with were a few pages of worthless journal notes.

Still, when I got home I was eager to write something, if only to confirm that my British adventures had christened me a writer. In the converted garage I occupied behind my parents’ house, I sat down to the electric typewriter and wiggled my fingers above the keyboard like a gunfighter wiggles his above a holster when he’s ready to take down the sheriff. I jiggled them some more, and then some more, until I realized the only thing keeping me from writing something meritorious was a word processor.

Soon my parents helped me buy one, from a place called Computer World at the Ward Parkway Mall, and from a cute salesgirl who really saw me coming. She was totally fascinated that I was a writer. When she recommended the Apple 2c and a really cool software called Bank Street Writer, I did not put up a fight.

At home the Apple 2c looked so sleek and pristine that I was almost afraid to use it, much the way we can be hesitant about cutting into an elegant birthday cake. The shells for the keyboard and monitor were a reassuring white. The screen was the size and shape of a dime novel held sideways, and it had a grim, dark color. The text on the screen was a fluorescent green that trembled against that grave background. The dot-matrix printer I also got was, of course, slow—slow even for 1985. It took longer to print many of my stories than it did for Raymond Carver to write his.

That first night, my eight fingers began a deceitful dance over the home row, each digit rising and falling but never touching the virginal keyboard. And that was when I realized I still had nothing of value to write.

Not long ago my mom unearthed the Apple 2c in her basement from among the boxes and the tubs and the bones of old furniture. She wondered if I wanted to resurrect it so my kids could play with it. Fifteen years had passed since I had seen the thing and now it looked like a museum relic. Nothing could have prepared me for its smallness.

When it was a big part of my life, the Apple 2c had never seemed small, especially when I had to move it. From 1985 to 1993 I changed addresses nine times, and each time I had to account for the 2c the way opposing basketball teams had to account for Michael Jordan. I’d lie awake at night in anguish, plotting how to best box up and transport the appliance, where to place it in the car, how to cushion it in case of an accident.

Gazing on it all these years later, I was almost convinced I could move it telepathically. I took a long, last look and then told my mom she could toss it.

Later, when I knew it was buried in a landfill somewhere, I got a little sentimental. The truth is, I had used it quite a lot throughout my twenties--too much, if you were to ask any of the slush-pile editors at The New Yorker.

I had used it to write dozens of short stories and humor pieces, as well as their query letters that were at once self-deprecating and boastful. In 1986 the 2c accompanied me to Columbia, Missouri, for graduate school, and on it I wrote a lot of term papers, most of them concerning novels and Middle English poetry I hadn’t read. I also used it to co-write a rollicking screenplay about some nutty caperings at a campus newspaper.

But what had the most sentimental impact was recalling the “spec” scripts I’d composed for television’s “The Wonder Years.”

Maybe you recall “The Wonder Years,” which debuted in January 1988. It was the kind of show your mother might have described as being “a cute story.” The youthful hero, Kevin Arnold, was also the not-so-youthful narrator. His voice and perspective were easy to mimic, and so one week in 1990, with nothing better to do, I wrote my first episode in just two or three sittings.

The plot was this: Kevin’s teacher announces that a “special” new boy will transfer to their school soon. The kids’ imaginations take off as they dissect the meaning of “special.” Kevin’s girlfriend, the adorable Winnie, becomes infatuated with this special new boy even though she knows nothing about him. Kevin gets frustrated and envious and their relationship is duly tested. In the end, this new boy never shows up, but Kevin and Winnie have learned some valuable lessons about life and whatnot.

Buoyed by the ease with which I’d written this script, I quickly pecked out another. In this one, the ornery older brother, Wayne, somehow lands an attractive girlfriend. When Kevin sees her, his eyes pop from his head and linger in mid-air, heart-shaped and throbbing. One thing leads to another, and by the second commercial break Kevin and the girl are smooching.

This script, I concluded, was even stronger than the first.

Like most of my peers, I had grown up in front of the television, memorizing syndicated reruns. That I might someday write for television was the kind of long-shot dream I had always kept at a safe distance. I knew that to make it in Hollywood one needed an ungodly amount of resilience, ambition, and luck—three things I lacked.

But with two scripts in tow, I took careful inventory of my connections in Hollywood and zeroed in on the only one—a most tenuous connection at that. I’ll call her Marie.

Marie was a television writer I’d met at a conference a year earlier. Well, I hadn’t officially met her: I had sat in a folding chair among thirty or forty others as she told a rags-to-riches story about her rise from a secretary to an actual screen writer.

Now, I’m the type of guy who’s almost too shy to phone my own brothers and sisters. I feel like an intruder when I attend a party I was invited to. I apologize to waitresses and mechanics even as I give them my business. So the thought of ambushing this stranger, even by mail, was terrifying.

Worse, though, was the thought of not giving it a try.

I sat at the Apple 2c and typed out a nice letter that struck all the right chords. I assured her I was just a nobody from the Midwest who’d been so inspired by her presentation that I had begun writing scripts. After dozens of missteps I finally believed my work was ready to showcase. Would she be so kind as to take a quick look?

A few weeks later a big manila envelope came in the mail, postmarked Burbank, California. Somehow just by looking at that folded envelope I knew it contained good news. So I secreted it to my bedroom and tore it open and read of how much she’d enjoyed the scripts. She suggested a few small revisions and then sought permission to pass them along to her agent.

I looked up. My eyes fixated on the Apple 2c and I wondered how in the world I’d ever get that thing to L.A. safely.

My next few weeks were like those spent by a young man preparing an elopement. There was a lightness to my step, and I wore the kind of silly grin that adults affect when they see a small boy in a tuxedo. But there were also plenty of butterflies in my belly as I dreaded the logistics of such a big life change.

Well, a month passed without any news from Burbank. And with each succeeding day the roundness of my smile deflated ever more so, like a tire with a slow leak. At the three-month mark I had to seriously consider the unthinkable: a follow-up letter.

With a heavy heart and heavier fingers I returned to the Apple 2c and tapped out a letter to Marie, asking for an update. This time her response was rapid. She said she’d had to get away from the business because of family issues. She had severed ties with her agent and had been out of the country for a while. Someday things would return to normal and maybe she could help me then.

The disappointment was profound; Marie had been my only conduit to a miracle. But I was still a young man with plenty of ideas, and I did have unfettered access to that Apple 2c, and there really wasn’t anything else in life I was good at. So I continued fighting the good fight, and before long I had composed a couple more scripts, for Chris Elliot’s “Get a Life” and for a chatty new show called “Seinfeld.”

One night that fall, in November of 1991, I had occasion to think of Marie again. The plot of a fresh episode of “The Wonder Years” mirrored one I had given her. In the show that aired, Wayne procures a cute girlfriend—played by the lovely Carla Gugino—whom Kevin ends up usurping. It had been months since I’d looked at my own script but it seemed every line the actors spoke was familiar to me. Had my script gotten out, after all?

I started making phone calls. Somebody I knew was friends with somebody who knew an entertainment lawyer, and with full-throated ease I assured this attorney that the show matched my own teleplay. He advised me to get my hands on a videotape of the episode and to compare it to my script.

Those days it was easy to find a neighbor or an in-law who routinely recorded “The Wonder Years,” and so I landed a tape and followed the attorney’s instructions. I discovered that while the plot was similar to mine, only two lines from the show were the same. Two lines would never constitute theft in a court of law. Besides, that week there were probably a dozen other spec writers like me who upon the advice of their attorneys were comparing their scripts to the one that aired.

But the incident did serve as a confidence booster. It seemed proof enough that I really could write for television.

For years I had weighed the pros and cons of moving to L.A., and I was finally tiring of the internal debate. I was pushing thirty and had no assets other than a Corolla and that Apple 2c. Everyone from my high-school class was earning more than I, including Father Greg. Clearly it was time to grow up, in some fashion or another. So the next spring I decided to go to L.A. for just a week to measure first-hand all the aggravations I’d have to put up with if I made the big move. And maybe if struck by a bolt of courage I’d look up Marie.

An old friend lived in Encino at the time, and he had what I needed: a spare couch to sleep on. I booked a flight for Sunday, May 3rd.

A couple days later the Rodney King verdicts were issued and L.A. caught fire. For three days and nights I watched the special reports from home and debated whether to make the trip. By Sunday the 3rd, most accounts claimed the tensions were easing, that some sense of normalcy had returned.

The car ride from the L.A. airport to Encino was not extraordinary, except for the presence of national guardsmen and armored vehicles. On Monday I kept a low profile to recover from the long flight and to catch up on some sleep. By Tuesday I was ready to get out of the house. At mid-day I caught a ride to an outfit on Reseda Boulevard, where I rented a Ford Festiva with the intention of sight-seeing.

The boulevards in the Valley were reassuringly congested. The weather was perfect, with the kinds of breezes that old men cannot help but comment on (“now she’s a nice one”). It was the kind of day where anything could happen. So I cruised back to my friend’s house and bundled a few scripts into a manila envelope and penned a letter to accompany them, in case Marie was not home. I got out my map and soon had the Festiva pointed toward Burbank.

Marie lived in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains. A vehicle sat in her driveway—a Range Rover or something like it. On her roof knelt a dark-skinned man, hammering incessantly. In either yard beside hers, lawn-care workers carried on with their mowing and edging, unaware of my private drama, unaware that in five minutes my life might never again be the same.

The entertainment magazines and gossip shows feast on stories of long-shots who overcame steep odds to make it in show biz. In these stories the heroes always benefit from a dramatic stroke of luck that borders on the paranormal—the kind of thing that happens only in the movies.

In my case it was magical enough that I knocked on her door.

Nobody answered.

So I left the package and returned to the Ford Festiva. But I was not ready to return to my lodgings in Encino, where the phone might ring for me at any moment with news I was not sure I wanted to hear.

I drove to the nearest parking lot and unfolded the map and spread it on the passenger seat. A radio dee-jay was telling us today was the first day that music sounded good to his ears once again. He played something upbeat by Marshall Crenshaw, and I spiked the volume.

A little while later I was in the Hills of Beverly, happily strolling the sidewalks of Rodeo Drive in my blue jeans and sneakers, looking a lot like the tourist that I was.