“Who would believe her? Boo hoo, little me and the big, bad producer.” He started to put his pencil away, then stopped. “I hear Leon Greene fired Max Leslie within twenty-four hours of his taking the Fifth. Care to comment?”

“Would you like to quote me, Al?”

“Sure!”

“Then take this down. You and your kind are the enemas of the picture business.”

“And we always get our shit.”

I brushed past him and into Schwab’s. The place was smoke-laden as usual, never mind the overhead fans. When I’d first started at Rakoff/Holtz last winter, I used to come to Schwab’s for lunch just to hang out among the young writers. I always had a Coke and a ham sandwich and nursed the fantasy that someone would recognize me as a person with exquisite taste and terrific commercial instincts (knowing full well that those two things could cancel each other out). I daydreamed that a brilliant but unsung writer would come up to me and press into my hands a script that would turn out to be the next Casablanca. I liked to imagine that the story of how the script had come to me would itself become legend. Kind of like Swifty Lazar getting his name from Humphrey Bogart for having made him three deals in one day. That didn’t happen, of course, at least not yet. Anyway, now I was an independent, and the daydream shone all the brighter.

As I went up to the counter, people were popping in and out of the phone booths, jumping up, jostling one another, eager, noisy. Schwab’s, though an actual pharmacy and a soda fountain, is a de facto club, a regular rendezvous, a fish tank of sorts for enterprising, unemployed writers. There’s camaraderie here, but there’s competition too. You can all but taste it. Writers of all stripes and varieties are always on the lookout for someone to read their stuff, but mostly they come here to exchange gossip and ideas, to sniff out opportunities. The place percolates with ambition and energy. The mood at Schwab’s is always upbeat. If you’re down in the dumps, go someplace else and drink in the dark.

I ordered a Coke from the girl behind the counter, a beautiful girl with curled, cascading light brown hair, a red, voluptuous mouth, perfect teeth, and expectant blue eyes. Everywhere you look you see these perfect specimens of femininity, oozing Ava Gardner smolder or percolating Debbie Reynolds wholesomeness. It can be damned discouraging, having a face irredeemably marred in the world’s capital of beautiful women.