Allie without warning.
She looked past my hand and eyelocked me with the knowingest wry smile. “The drunk test?” she said. “Really?”
And turned and walked away.
Okay, so maybe she wasn’t hitting on me after all.
I shrugged it off. In this business you shrug off a lot of false starts. I set down my drink and went looking for the misplaced displaced rag dolls. They had departed, but I noticed a clean-cut kid in hospital scrubs, wearing a stethoscope made of pens and a surgical cap fashioned from a Writers Guild of America bandanna. He carried a computer keyboard and a copy of Screenwriter magazine.
None of which caught my eye like his shoes.
I slid over and struck up a conversation—never hard at Halloween parties, because every conversation begins with Let me guess. “Let me guess,” I said. “Script doctor?”
“Got it in one,” he said. “Most people don’t.”
“Well,” I replied, “with all due false modesty, I’m smarter than everyone.” I filled in the space of his chuckle with the selection of an appropriate name. “Nick Rauchen,” I said. We shook hands. He introduced himself as Jason Dickson. “But you’re not really a writer, right?” He shook his head. “I think you’re …”
I love the look on people’s faces when you guess right. It’s not that hard, really. You just read the facts at hand. For starters, he had that Myth of the Perfect Party look in his eye, and even as he talked to me he was looking past me, as if there might be a better conversation, a hotter lead, a more compellingly life-changing contact waiting for him somewhere out there among the swarm of sexy kitten costumes and knights in aluminum armor. Thus this: not a writer—because writers know better than to buy into that myth—but interested in writers. And a white guy name. Not just white but deep-pockets and prep-school white. Harvard white. I recognized the vibe. But it was the shoes, really, that told the tale, for this Jason couldn’t resist wearing his status shoes to a costume party. Peeking out from under his scrubs, a pair of Tod’s Monk Straps, the exact kind you wear if you’re an earnest young striver at a first- or second-tier Hollywood talent agency where appearance is as important as competence or ability. For confirmation, I had checked out his fingernails, and, yep, they were manicured. Manicured. So then, in sum …
“An agent.”
He blinked. “How did you know?”
“I read minds.”
“What, you mean like professionally?”
Man, talk about a soft opening. Now I started to grind the grift in earnest, spinning a colorful yarn about my brief stint as a stage hypnotist and my board certification in something I invented on the spot called witness therapy. Eventually I worked around to my putative current profession, playwright and performance artist. I riffed on this theme for a while, and by the time I was done, he’d paid cash up front for VIP seats to the premiere of my utterly nonexistent one-man show, Come Up Pants, at the equally nonexistent NoHo Playhouse. He gave me his business card so I could mail him the tickets.
I don’t even consider this working.
It’s all about the want. Everyone has one. Identify the want of your fish and he’s halfway in your boat. Poor Jason the Agent Boy was clearly treasure hunting; I just had to convince him I was treasure, an undiscovered talent he could ride to high heights in his agency. And here’s the beauty part: Since he was looking for treasure in the first place, it was easy for him to see it in me.
People see what they want to see, and sometimes they hand you their money.
But after the snuke, I started to feel a little detached. I wandered around the party, not really measuring marks or anything, just floating. I caught a glimpse of Allie engaged in animated conversation with some guy in a bear suit. She was smoothing the nap of his fur. I felt an odd irk at that, quasi-queasy almost. We were the only two people at the party not in costume. Were we not made for each other, or each other’s company, at least? Meanwhile, everyone else at the party began to look quite transparent to me, their costumes no longer concealing them at all. I could tell who was drunk, horny, angry, resentful, frustrated, or bored, as if they wore their emotions like subtitles. I was familiar with this heightened awareness. It often comes after a score: a lingering presence in