Likes: On the hunt for the perfect craft beer and the perfect girl to find it with. Do you like quests? Exploring this amazing city with both a purpose and no real reason at all except to enjoy the company you’re in? If so, drop me a line.
I finish with a flourish.
“Oh, that’s good,” Jude says. “That’s really good.”
“Thanks,” I say. “So, if you’re ready to sign up, I can e-mail you the contract and it’ll have instructions for changing the log-in passwords to your dating profiles so that you can give us access. FYI, nothing will be changed without your approval.”
“Right,” Jude says, nodding and taking a final swig from his cup. “What the hell? Let’s do it, right?” He smiles at me and offers his hand again.
“Great,” I say, shaking it. “And, listen, before you go, there’s a little game I like to play.” I take out my phone and click into the 24/7 app again. “Since I’m going to be helping you craft your voice, I like to try and see how well I get to know my clients just through the questionnaire. So, tell me, which five of these women would you pick as your matches?”
“Hmmm … okay,” Jude says, as he takes my phone and looks closer.
“Just jot down your answers,” I say, handing him my notepad and pen.
He has my phone for a long time. I actually start a game of KenKen on my laptop before I hear him clear his throat.
“All right. I think I’m ready.”
I look over his notepad. And then I grin, flipping it over to reveal the ones I had picked for him earlier. Of course, I maybe wouldn’t have shown him my answers if my results hadn’t been so good.
But they usually are.
Four out of five. Miles Ibrahim: Love Wordsmith is back.
CHAPTER 4
To: All the Baes
From: Clifford Jenkins
Re: GIFT CARDS ARE WORKING
Turns out the Beatles were wrong. Say whaaaat? You CAN buy love! Super psyched to report the gift card glitch sitch is under control. I also set it up so the default baseline starts at $299. Treat our gift carders like the royalty they are, ’cause they’ll be expecting a premium love match FAST. We’re talking crunch time, Cinnamon Toast–style.
(That said, if their first choices sizzle out, remind them the gift card has unlimited refills. With wedding season upon us, we’re going to be marketing DIRECTLY to brides and grooms. It’s the perfect thank-you gift from the hitched to the ditched when tension and emotions are through da roof.)
Wish I’d bought myself a gift card on the eve of a certain Save the Date event, but of course, they didn’t exist back then. Guess my loss is the world’s gain. #perspective
Reminder: Our next meeting will be Tuesday, May 12, and I’m renting out the back room at Porchlight, so prepare to get your drank on! Till then, enjoy these April showers.
Clifford
CEO, Sweet Nothings (NOW GIFT CARD CAPABLE)
P.S. If you understand blockchains, DM me.
ZOEY
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—’”
I threw an Undersea PEZ dispenser at her. “Okay, okay.”
The Undersea PEZ dispenser represented her former life as an actress. In the mid-eighties, before I was born, she had portrayed Duchess Quinnley in a sci-fi/fantasy film about intergalactic mermaids. An on-set injury the final week of filming stripped her of all enthusiasm for performing and she’d successfully sued her way out, bankrupting future productions before they could start. She’d been trying to live it down ever since; fans still blamed her for the abrupt end of what was intended to be a trilogy, while in other circles, her departure added to the cult appeal of the one film that had been made. At least this way, they argued, it couldn’t be “ruined” like other long-running franchises because it would never have an ending. Fan conventions and cosplay tournaments kept the cult alive, and invites to appear on panels still filled Mary’s inbox on a daily basis. One of my jobs was to delete them, unread, each morning.
Of the seemingly infinite collector’s items on eBay (toys, games, and action figures instilled with her likeness), the only one she owned was the PEZ dispenser, because it symbolized her current work as a script fixer: “People pay me to lift up my neck hinge and shoot out something tart and sweet on command, with ten more of equal quality lined up behind it.”
Seven weeks ago, she told me I was the best assistant she’d ever had, and that’s why she had to fire me. Instead of living my own life, I was living hers. I needed to throw myself into new situations if I was ever going to grow as a writer, as my own writer. I begged for another six months of time while I figured out where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do, and she said she’d sleep on it. The next morning, when I knocked on her door, she handed me a one-way ticket to New York, paperclipped to the address of an apartment she’d leased in my name. (I found out later she’d purchased the building in the mid-1980s with her Duchess Quinnley money. It was worth a fortune now, but she preferred to rent to starving artists and offer them merit-based discounts.)