“I’m really feeling a lot better,” she says. “I know it’s not good to overdo it, but I do need to start getting up and moving a little bit more or else I’m just going to have a harder time later on. You should start looking for a fill-in for me, though. What was it with the last guy?”
“He suggested that I try out to be on the cast of The Lion King on Broadway. He seemed convinced it was a brilliant idea,” I answer. “He was a moron.”
“You’ve got to figure something out,” she says. “You would be surprised how many people call for you and want you to do things. It really is a full-time job keeping track of it all.”
“I’m sure that whenever you’re feeling up to coming back,” I tell her, “that you’ll be able to pick it back up and get caught up in no time.”
“Oh hell no,” she says. “Whatever’s not getting done right now is simply not getting done. I’m not going to go back through every missed call to ask the person on the other end what they wanted. That’s amateur hour.”
“So you’re saying that right now, I’m basically functioning as if I don’t have an agent at all?” I ask.
“Pretty much,” she says, finally snatching the coffee from the top shelf.
“Just leave that out on the counter,” I tell her.
“Why?” she asks. “Is it because I’m too sick and weak to get it down otherwise?”
“No,” I answer.
“Usually, people explain their reasoning,” she says.
“You know,” I tell her, “if I’m getting along this well without an agent, maybe I should start saving that 15 percent. You know,” I continue, “have something for when I’m all old and disgusting and nobody wants to hire me because the only time I ever come up in conversation anymore is, ‘Hey, remember when Damian Jones didn’t look like a dumpster fire,’ and the other person says, ‘No,’ and they laugh about it—with what I’d save from not paying you, I could simply withdraw from public life completely and live in the mountains with a whiskey still and a shotgun.”
“That does sound like the dream,” she says, “but if I left your career in your hands, you wouldn’t have a career for me to put back together.”
“Your faith in me has always been inspiring,” I tell her.
“I care about people,” she says. “It’s what I do.”
Danna’s always been this way, whatever way one might say that is. It used to be that she was taking care of me, but that was a long time ago under very different circumstances.
Growing up in my house was a pretty rare thing from what I’m told. My parents loved each other and we were a relatively normal, happy family.
Dad and Mom were the classic romantics.
He met her after he came back from the war that she was protesting. He’d never really thought about whether or not the war was a just thing or an unjust thing; he’d simply been called to serve in the military, and so he went.
They ran into each other later in the afternoon that he walked by the big protest she’d organized and he recognized her.
The two of them told the story often enough that I can still remember how they said the conversation went.
She was in a diner that day and he
walked in and saw her. She was sitting at the counter eating blueberry waffles in a bowl. The bowl was necessary for the amount of syrup in which they were swimming.
“Hey, you were talking at that big anti-war rally today, weren’t you?” he asked.
She looked up with a spoonful of waffle and syrup and said, “Yeah. What they’re doing isn’t right.”
“I’m a soldier,” he said. “Does that mean that we’d never be able to get along?”
She looked him up and down and said, “I thought military guys knew how to shave.”
That’s the point in the story where my parents would always start laughing and squeezing each other a little bit.
They used to go out, every anniversary, and they’d have dinner at the same diner where they first met.
Then, one night when I was 15, they went out for their anniversary dinner and they didn’t come back.