Created By by Richard Matheson

goodbye, whispering something in his ear. Victor moved on, working the room; roaming for tactical blips.
    Jordan sighed. “… guy’s a fuckin’ vulva. Been trying to get in my pants for a year. Got no respect for that …”
    Alan knew that meant Jordan would find ways to make projects inaccessible to the guy unless the deals were huge. He could feel it; see it in his edgy expression. It was how Jordan manipulated people; punishing and rewarding. Among the devices of torture were unreturned phone calls and hot spec scripts withheld from voracious career hunger pangs; thrust under control-freak cuticlesby omission. Top agents like Jordan were experts in mind control; B. F. Skinner Wise Guys.
    “Tell you I’m thinking about leaving the agency? Maybe going back to Vermont. Make syrup for a living. I don’t know. Agents don’t talk film or life. They don’t talk art. Higher values. It’s all deals and pussy.”
    “Uh-huh.” Alan pointed. “Jord … butter.”
    “I mentioned Bertrand Russell to this guy in TV packaging the other day and he wanted to know if Russell worked in half hour or long form. Acidophilus has more live culture than this city. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been seduced and eroded by L.A.”
    “Maybe you should start carrying tanks of oxygen.”
    Jordan glanced at his Piaget. “So, he should be here any minute. He’s having some trouble with his kid, had to put her in a de-tox ranch up in Santa Barbara.”
    “Oh yeah?” Alan found it interesting. Sad; odd. He wanted more detail.
    “Kid’s thirteen and drilling both arms. Place costs ten a month. Hector’s ready to work. Timing’s good.”
    Alan watched Jordan eating, ahi sacrificing perfect Hawaiian contours to his quick mouth. He gathered perfectly measured cauliflower to one side of the plate and poked it like a cage of POWs. He looked good tormenting things.
    He’d started with ICM, right out of running a comedy club in Cancún that had been demolished in a storm, killing sixteen Mexican comics who were buried under rubble; the final 120-mile-an-hour heckle.
    Within two years, by the time he was twenty-eight, he’d grafted PAC-TEL to his ear and packaged four successfulsitcoms that in a better world would have been declared felonies. “Chunky Bill,” “Robot Dad,” “No Way, Jay,” and “Sayonara” strangled everything that came near without having to use both hands.
    Jordan quickly did a multizero skip to CAA when Ovitz started hearing about the stealth-savant who was restless for bigger body counts; bloodier waters.
    When CAA moved to their new I. M. Pei building on Wilshire, Jordan was given a chamber in the clout hive. He repped only the top directors and writer/producers. Anyone not leaving major smoke damage with their gifts was left out; Jordan was looking for asteroid momentum. By only signing a fleet of rising stars and transfer students from Andromeda, he could do little wrong.
    At the age of twenty-nine, he was a legendary deal-boa, renowned for being oversexed, charming, aggressive, tasteless, and generally undeterred by conscience. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Jordan was the major player in the business. People were afraid of him. People had contempt for him. But everybody wanted to be on his phone sheet.
    It had been his suggestion Alan meet with Hector Lee.
    Alan had fallen silent and stared at Jordan incredulously when the name came up. He’d heard Hector had committed suicide with his ever-present pistol, or was a carrot in some mental institution. But he wasn’t. Jordan was still representing him.
    Him and the Crips.

ugly gossip
    H ector had a mixed track record. A few hits: mostly cheap action pictures. A few films that were total body bags. The look was always there. But some of the nihilistic stuff was unendurable. Dreary, Bergmanesque two-hour funerals with doomed lovers and gray moods. Voices with rainy weather in them; Auschwitz faces.
    Critics had said
The Deer Hunter was