Another Snippet

Marty Allegro was 62, and would admit to close friends and relatives (both of which there were few) that he was on the downward spiral career-wise. He had several decades of experience as a Hollywood agent, but his best days, when he was a highly successful agent with The Gersh Agency, were well over a decade ago. He formed TalentTown with a few other agents partly out of desire to retain more money for himself but also (and Marty wouldn’t admit this out loud at the time he conceived of the project, and quickly changed trains of thought faster than a lifelong New Yorker at the subway when the thought even entered his mind) because a small agency meant an end to the 80-90 hour work weeks a top agent’s job was demanding at the time. Plus, Marty’s second marriage, to an LA Times copy editor named Danielle, had been coasting comfortably for possibly too long (5 years) and had long ago surpassed his first marriage’s length (Danielle and Marty celebrated their 8th Anniversary the year before he quit Gersh, this was in 1991, and Marty was also starting to dread his upcoming 50th birthday—meanwhile Danielle, who had been 29 when they got married, was nonplussed at the big 4-0 being a few scant years away) and when the Agency hired Marissa, a fresh-from-USC film school grad with dark auburn hair the color of fine cognac and breasts that Marty thought conspired nightly to be even more perky and inviting in whatever décolletage-revealing outfit she wore daily, plus the light tan, with cute freckles and nearly freakishly green eyes—quite simply one of the Rarest Of Breeds in Martin Allegro’s personal Field Guide to North American Females: the ravingly attractive redhead; all the more rare given that A. redheads were not plentiful to begin with and B. most of them had the same complexion as milk going bad and that unsightly carrot-hued hair—this ravingly attractive nubile was brought on to be his—Marty’s—new assistant (while the Political Correctness movement was just getting underway the Agency frowned upon the term “Secretary” and paid accordingly for the difference: secretaries didn’t go to film school or take largely demeaning jobs where duties included phone answerage, faxing, copying, appointment setting and general gopher duty unless there was decent pay and the carrot-stick incentive that the whole less-than-desirable process was a stepping stone to a better job in the Industry) and after about a good solid week in which Marty found all of his onanistic fantasies were revolving around sexual trysts with the ravingly attractive (and single—don’t forget that—and the fact that she’d made it abundantly clear she didn’t have a boyfriend on Day 2 on the job, with a wink and a smile so coquettish it could’ve been plucked from a film noir temptress’s playbook, if such a thing existed) Marissa, Marty decided that he still really loved his wife, but couldn’t entirely trust his own dick, and starting his own agency (while magnanimously leaving the ravingly attractive and masturbatory-inducing Marissa to tend to and tempt the next best agent at Gersh) was truly, and logically, the best course of action. Danielle divorced Marty three years later when the New York Times came calling, and career won the battle royal bout between Loving Wife and Career Woman that neither party ever thought of attempting to reconcile as non-mutually exclusive.