Reflection and Reconciliation
The words hit Charlotte with a sucker gut punch. The kind of words
that shock a body. It lands in the throat and clogs it with a boulder
of emotion.
“Seriously, fired? I don’t understand. Why?” She could barely
hold the phone, trying to comprehend Jack’s words. Vomiting was
a definite possibility. “You’re my agent. Can’t you do something or
talk to somebody?” She pressed her hand to her breastplate to keep
her chest from exploding.
Thirty seconds ago, Charlotte DeBlane was relaxing on a flower-
print chaise lounge on her back deck—her garden in full bloom
with scents and color—while she applied a finishing polish to the
fourth episode as a senior staff writer on her current kid show, the
hit Bronco Studio production of Whizzy McTavish.
“Listen, Charlotte, I ain’t the God of Hollywood decisions. I’m
your champion and always have been. Remember when I held out
for you on Lana Cabana?”
“I know you went to the mat for me,” Charlotte remembered.
“Darn Skippy, I did. Right now, I got no choice but to be the
harbinger of crappy news.” His gravelly voice attempted to be
political and truthful, an oxymoron at best. “I tried to get a reason
from them, but you know showrunners, their strings, and balls
are tied to the studios. All I can say, without saying the obvious,
is look at your co-writers. What’s the age gap between them and
you?”
Being fired for the reasons Charlotte feared oddly made complete
sense. Still, she frothed. “That is bullshit, Jack. They think I’m
too old? I can sue for that.”
“You can, my sparkly scribe, but you won’t get anywhere. Listen,
they want fresh, electric, in-touch ideas. They don’t give a shit how
old you are as long as you keep bringing the goods: social media,
influencers, writers who read that language. If you ain’t connecting
with Gen Z, and more importantly now, Gen Alpha, then you ain’t
shit. That’s what the majors want to see, and frankly, Charlotte, that
ain’t you. You need to up your game. I booked a ton of writing gigs
for you, and you’re welcome very much, but the global media market
is making seismic shifts.”
Her happy place now hated everything and everyone. Charlotte
paced in bare feet around the deck. Pacing was her standard go-to
for intense conversations.
“Listen, Charlotte, honey, take a couple of weeks. Go to Hawaii,
swim, relax, get wasted, screw, if you like that sort of thing, and then
come home because paradise is an illusion, and dreams don’t pay
the bills. You ain’t broke for now, and it’ll give you some headspace.
Think about it, and we’ll talk later.”
The moment the call ended, her pressure valve blew.
“FUUUUCK,” expelled from her throat in a long breath. She threw
the phone at the lounge chair, which bounced off the foam cushion
and landed in a bed of agapanthus. Charlotte felt the heat radiating
from her face as she quelled the urge to race around the yard
screaming.
Fester the Pug cowered underneath the lounger.
Being impersonally fired through one’s agent was the norm in
Hollywood, but it was personal to Charlotte. Being on the “walk-ofshame”
around town was just like high school, when no amount of
makeup could mask how embarrassed she felt about her looks. But
this was about her image, which was far more fragile at this point
in her life.
She marched inside, rummaged through a kitchen cabinet, and
pulled out a special bottle of Tequila in a decorative blue and white
bottle. She saved this for particular moments when refined liquor
was needed to smooth life’s rough edges. She poured two fingers
into a glass and held it up. “Here’s to daytime drinking.” She downed
it.
A Hawaiian vacation sounded sweet, but being canned lit a
fire under Charlotte; she had to stoke it now. Her toast was more
about resolve than drinking; consecutive toasts helped bolster that
resolve.
She moved to the living room and gazed upon the giant Oak
Desk in her office alcove. She hadn’t interacted with it since arriving
from her old house of childhood horrors. The one with a schizophrenic
mother throwing tantrums and anything else she could get
her hands on. Coupled with a spineless father cringing behind the
massive beast, it did not make for the most nurturing childhood.
Yet this piece of furniture shielded her from her mother’s incoming
missiles. Violence marked every part of the old wooden gal with
scratches, stains, gashes, and slashes. Years later, a letter from her
father revealed her mother’s self-inflicted death. She shipped the
desk to California, but Charlotte had never reconciled with those
nightmares or feelings. She wouldn’t sit behind it or even open the
drawers. She’d let the desk sit there for several years, just a piece of
furniture she could pass by while going from room to room—a way
to get reacquainted.
But she knew—and figured this wooden beast knew, too—that
time was on its side.
Now…she stood looking at Oak Desk as if they were standing at
the opposite ends of a dusty street. She downed another drink and
snapped her head to one side, releasing a resounding crack. Her
eyes remained steely on her Oak opponent. “Okay,” she said. “We
both know this is about you and me. You hold all the memories
and the pain. For that matter, so do I, but that’s not the point. If
I can get those things out of us, then we can purge our crappy past
once and for all. I mean, you’re a ratty-ass piece of shit right now.
Well, so am I.”
Charlotte’s tequila-influenced vision now produced two desks.
“I’ll sit behind one of you, and you’ll release all those stories so I can
write a new show. I’ll even open the drawers. That’s the best I got. I
mean, you’re just a desk. A special one, I’ll grant you that.”
Oak Desk remained surprisingly stoic, immobile, and unfeeling.
Refusing to be intimidated.
“Then it’s a deal,” Charlotte slurred. “Not that your deadwood-
ass ever had a chance.” So, saying, she face-planted into the
overstuffed couch.
When her eyes opened to the morning light, she was greeted
with a splitting hangover. She felt pounding memories of vague commitments
she might have made to Oak Desk. Did I do that? Coffee
helped, and Acetaminophen was administered with haste. Her journey
to coherence was complete when she implemented a shower,
followed by food intake.
The desk was still there, only now whatever fog and interference
Charlotte experienced before had cleared. She approached it
with a focused mind. The fired, unemployed Charlotte DeBlane
sat behind the Oak monster, transferring her laptop, knick-knacks
from her shows, pictures, and memorabilia onto its damaged surface.
She was determined to negotiate a truce with this piece of
furniture.
“You can throw all this stuff off if you like, but if you do, it’s kind
of a deal breaker for me, and I swear you will meet the axe living in
my shed.” She squinted her eyes and waited a moment, alert for any
paranormal response that might occur. All remained normal.
Scents, flashbacks, and uncomfortable memories flooded from
the empty space when she opened the drawers. Her mother’s perfume,
father’s cologne, burning food, burning curtains, and the
twins rolled into one giant aroma ball that exploded in her head and
pounded through long-dormant neural pathways. She slammed the
drawer and pushed back in the chair, gripping the arms to stabilize
her spinning head. “Okay…You win this one.”
While Charlotte learned to laugh at the cruel absurdity of a
childhood gone wrong, she didn’t forget about Jack’s Gen Alpha
words. Hours of skimming online Tac-Tac videos and watching real
teen angst gave her a new outlook. Her past seemed tame on some
levels compared to the issues of the current generation. The only
accurate record of her wretched youth was in her mind; theirs was
recorded for all eternity.
Her brain scanned some of those memories. The time she’d left
her mother dozens of sticky notes with ‘I love you’ and heart drawings
that were never acknowledged. A complete set of embarrassments
from grade school to high school provided enough stories for
two seasons alone. Her asshole twin brothers, twelve years younger,
and the horrors she endured from them were at least a season’s
worth of episodes.
She learned to make it right, on the page, in her head, and hopefully,
reach Gen Alpha simultaneously. Charlotte tried whipping
one of the drawers open just enough to release a measured amount
of aroma to trigger a particular event. Which, in turn, sparked idea
after idea and story after story. Charlotte’s soul was in the zone with
a writer’s focus. Her fingers struggled to type fast enough and keep
pace with the words flowing from her brain. A temporary armistice
with her adolescence and the desk had been achieved.
Six weeks later, Charlotte stared at her laptop. The completed
pilot script and show bible for It’s Wanda’s World stared back at her,
and she felt freaking empowered. She chose that title to affirm control
over her life. She was Wanda, and this was her world.
Whatever it took, this would be Charlotte’s moment at the top of
the Hollywood sitcom food chain, and the tingle she felt deep inside
was all the proof she needed. She knew it was the same thing all writers
feel when they fall in love with their own words, and her brain tried to
rein in her ego with an old movie line: Don’t get cocky, kid. Screw you,
she thought. Now is precisely the time to get cocky! This time, the stars
would align—and if they didn’t, she would wrench them into place.
