My alarm splits the air at four a.m. and my hand flails around to shut off my clock and knock it to the floor, like I’m in the opening of a movie. I’ve lived here a month, but I still calculate what time it is on the West Coast (i.e., The Real Time). One a.m. sounds a lot better to me than four. One a.m. is fun and frivolous. It’s midnight showings of The Room at the Sunset Five. Ravenous trips to Pink’s Hot Dogs, or skinny-dipping in an infinity pool overlooking the Hollywood Hills. (I only did that once, but still. It could have conceivably happened every night.) One a.m. means trying to keep up with Mary’s extraordinary brain, Frank and me nipping at her heels while she paced in her kitchen. Frank is her emotional support ferret. I’m pretty sure he worked his magic on me, too. He’d ride on my shoulder while I transcribed her quips into dialogue for screenplays that needed a tune-up. Watching the sun rise outside her floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Studio City was the last time I remember feeling content with my place in the world.

Working for Mary wasn’t exactly calm, of course. It was the elevator drop at the Haunted Mansion; twists, turns, and sudden mood shifts, followed by gale forces of screaming laughter. Mary swept into rooms as though they were towns. She held no illusions about her “quirks,” and greeted me each morning with some variation of “Let’s spin the wheel on my personality!” Twice my age but with the soul of a college student, she dillydallied for weeks and then pulled all-nighters twelve hours before her doctored pages were due. I practically lived at her house, often staying overnight in the guest room with its own balcony and mini-fridge. Some days all she asked was for me to read her the latest celebrity blind items while she lay on the couch with cucumbers on her eyes and Frank sleeping on her feet. The next week we’d spend ten-hour days at the Museum of Television and Radio aka the Paley Center on Beverly Drive, bingeing old award shows from decades past for inspiration (she was occasionally hired to write introductions for one actor to say about another actor during the Golden Globes, Emmys, or Academy Awards).

The name of her script doctoring company was Mary, Fuck, Kill. I blushed every time I answered the phone, smooshing the words together so they’d be indistinguishable. “Mary Fuckle, how may I assist you?”

She’d chastise me, “They’re going to think I married some schmo named Fuckle. Enunciate.”

“Let them think that, then.”

“If you don’t say it properly, I’m going to change the company name to George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” she warned me. “Look, I’m filling out the paperwork now. ‘Shit, Piss—’ ”