Looking For Peter Mehlman, serialized, Pt. 1

Like most struggling New York writers, I'm far more interested in reading about other struggling writers who have somehow "made it" (ranging from landing a villa in Tuscany to landing a studio apartment with heat) than actually writing anything.

I’d read a lot about writers who had gone to LA and were suddenly being paid to write, which seemed like such a great idea, and I began experimenting with the idea of being not a New York writer but an LA writer, that is; someone who writes sitcoms. This means you have to write sitcoms of course, but more importantly, it means you have to include a third party into your solitary life: the “agent”.

As a matter of fact I’d been lucky enough to get not one, but two agents and fairly quickly; it’s just that they were perhaps unlucky to get me. The first one died shortly after she signed me (she was, I’d been told, a living legend in the business and then evidently decided to become just a legend) and then tragically, the next agent who agreed to represent me lost her husband in the World Trade Tower disaster and left the business. I felt a little depressed about these encounters and tried not to feel personally responsible, but another part of me wanted to avoid dragging someone else into this most personal endeavor, and so I decided to forgo the agent thing, and just keep writing and hoping someone read my stuff and liked it.

I knew this was in fact possible, having heard of the success of a once-struggling Manhattan-based writer who started out writing humor essays (like myself), and who had written one especially hilarious article that convinced Hollywood he was funny enough to let in the "We'll Pay You For This" Club. This tale was one that fledgling writers had been passing around for years and so, one day, I decided to track the apocryphal article down. What made this urban legend particularly intriguing was that the writer who had made it "really big" (meaning that now people write about him) was Peter Mehlman, one of the original writers of "Seinfeld".

Having exhausted by phone all of the tips that a fellow humorist had offered ("I think it was sometime between 1982 and 1988, in the 'New York Times Magazine'. No, it was the 'New Yorker'. No, no wait, it was the Op Ed page of the 'Times', that's where it was. No, wait a minute, now that I think of it...."), and unable to compose a concise or coherent question to submit to Google (I tried: “Peter/Mehlman/article/got/job/Seinfeld” and “Peter/Mehlman/hired/Seinfeld/basis/one/essay/funny” and got subjects ranging from admiralties on British ships to the entire oeuvre of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss.), and wanting to see if I could track down the actual article using the skills I’d learned watching “Law and Order”, I hit the street to begin my investigation.

I decided to start at the landfill for all written words in Manhattan: The New York Public Library.

Looking For Peter Mehlman, serialized, Pt. 6 (Finally!)

7:30pm (one week later)

I return to my apartment from yet another visit to the local Starbucks to see the telltale flashing light on my answering machine. I listen. Oh my God. It's Peter Mehlman. He's calling me, himself, to give me the date and the name of the article ("Star Trekking", The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 16, 1988). It’s like that scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when Indy just gets annoyed with all the flash and flourish of saber and knife combat and just shoots the guy. One quick call, and my search, my agonized, obsessive search, is over. Deus Ex Answering-machina.

He’s surprisingly relaxed and open for someone who is as famous as he, calling someone who is as not famous as me. Mensch that he is, he even left me his phone number. My hand is trembling as I fumble for a pencil to write it down. This phone call has me swearing that, down the line, I myself will call some other fledgling writer and do this pro bono gesture for them. If only I could become someone whom they’d actually care to hear from. I lean in and listen as each digit is offered.

“… 4-3-7 [beep]” “Beep”? BEEP? Wait a minute, “beep” on the 8th digit?? What have I ever done to my answering machine that it hates me so much it must cut off the last digits of Peter Mehlman’s phone number?

I become very still. Perhaps this is not my path. Perhaps I am not meant to write in the world of Hollywood where there are so many layers between the writer and the writing. Perhaps I should just be watching TV, perhaps “The Office” where this kind of stuff happens in a really hilarious way that ends up with some kind of gentle moral.

10:00pm:
Called it a typical day as a New York freelance writer. Turned on the TV. Finished wine. Tomorrow I’ll go back to work on my play, perhaps adding a scene wherein the woman with one too many cats finds a message on her answering machine from an old boyfriend, asking for her hand in marriage, only the last two digits of his number get cut off.

You gotta admit, it’s not a bad twist.

(Coda: I called Mehlman’s agent back, gave him my email address and Peter and I emailed for a while, and eventually actually met. We became friends of a sort; he’s a great guy by the way.)