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You never know what's going to save you. Most of the time, salvation comes from the usual suspects -- god, pharmaceuticals, romance -- but occasionally, as in this case, it arrives entirely from left field.

I was living in a guesthouse, renting a single room even smaller than the bedroom I had slept in as a kid. The furnishings consisted of an undersized bed, which came with the room, a color television, and my father's large antique desk. Off to the side was a closet-like bathroom too foul for description and an even smaller kitchen whose sink was stacked high with moldy dishes. Several months before, when I had returned from a short surf trip up the coast, I ventured a look into the sink and was stunned to see some sort of small primordial life-forms with tiny little faces staring back at me from just beneath the water's surface. They seemed as surprised by my appearance as I was by theirs, and they quickly scattered back into the murky depths of a large casserole pot. At that point, I had decided to let the sink exist unmolested as its own self-contained ecosystem.

It was a scorching weekday in February when I answered the door to find my illustrious screenwriting partner, Teo, standing there, clutching what appeared to be an antique portable typewriter. Teo was in his early fifties and weighed somewhere around three hundred pounds. No matter the weather, he always wore a slightly frayed, blue blazer that looked like someone had hurled a combination pizza across the front. The two of us had been casual friends over the years, and after I graduated from a local film school, Teo asked me to team up with him on a ghostwriting job for his old friend and occasional bail provider, '70s action-film director Walter Hill. Teo and I existed on the fringes of the film industry like a world-weary screenwriting Abbott and Costello, barely scraping by and always believing we were just one phone call away from success and eternal happiness.

Teo spoke with a mumbling and somewhat faint accent from his upper-crust English boarding school days. "How's it going?" he asked, slightly out of breath, and then held up the typewriter. "It's Hemingway's typewriter. I thought perhaps we could sell it." I nodded and let him in. Having seen old black-and-white photographs of Teo's socialite expatriate parents arm in arm with a tanned and grinning Hemingway, I had every reason to believe him. On the other hand, Teo had recently used me as an unknowing middleman to sell a forged Andy Warhol Electric Chair painting to the bass player of a world-famous Los Angeles art-rock band. Even worse, Teo had intercepted my most recent paltry paycheck and cashed it to fund what I assumed to be the latest of his seemingly perpetual drug relapses. I hadn't seen him for several weeks, and I suppose the typewriter scheme was intended as some sort of misguided peace offering.

"Here, look at it," he said, "I discovered it in Spain after my parents died and I was going through their possessions." I took the typewriter from him and inspected it. It was housed in a worn leather case that had an old ocean-liner sticker on its side and a portion of the name Hemingway still quite visible. I glanced up at Teo's eyes to check his pupils, and they appeared normal. "I'm clean," he offered. "Two weeks this Saturday."

"You fucking owe me money," I said.

"I do and I'm really sorry. One doesn't do that to his writing partner, but I promise I'll get it all back to you. In the meantime, we can sell the typewriter and you can have most of the money."

I stared at him and said nothing.

"Also, I recently received a call from Krikes and Meerson about The Jack Artist," he continued, referring to our latest hard-boiled crime epic. "They want to take it to Quentin Tarantino's company. They have a good relationship there and really think they can sell it."

It should be noted that Teo survived for years in the drug netherworld around Hollywood Boulevard as a skillful, almost pathological manipulator. Like the equally rotund Kasper Gutman character in The Maltese Falcon, he had disarmed a plethora of thieves, dealers, pimps, and prostitutes with nothing more than some well-placed compliments. And true to form, just when I was ready to hurl the cheat out my front door, he slipped in that little tidbit about possibly selling our script, contingent, of course, on the two of us remaining a writing team, which, I had supposed, ruled out a sound beating in the front yard.

The phone rang, and after glaring at Teo some more, I picked it up. My friend Mike Coulter was on the other end, already in midsentence, "...it's totally coming together. It's gonna be fucking amazing."

"Um, yeah," I answered, as I clocked Teo lumbering through my narrow kitchen, toward the bathroom. I began to wave my arms in frantic protest, acutely aware of the apartment's lack of ventilation and anemic plumbing system, but he didn't look back. I slumped against the wall in defeat.

Mike was still babbling on about this baseball idea. Like everything else, it sounded like an overwhelming commitment. I figured that I should probably just come up with some bogus excuse -- a bent spine, cataracts, a severe case of gout -- and get off the phone as fast as possible. Oblivious to my reservations, Mike theorized that a lot of the guys we knew would never do anything like this: They would fancy themselves far too cool. But the two of us, we were way beyond that. "This will be something great," he expounded. "They'll see that later and wish they'd made such a bold fucking move. Trust me on this."

"You may be right," I replied. "Keep me posted." After hanging up, I realized that Teo had been in the bathroom for way too long, even for a man who considered cheese a health food, so I walked over and knocked on the door. There was a long pause, and then he answered through the closed door. "Would you please hold on?"

After another minute, I knocked harder. "Hey, what the fuck are you doing in there?" There was some serious shuffling about, and the door finally swung open. He stepped out, puffing a newly lit Pall Mall. I was always telling him not to smoke in my little apartment.

"Were you fucking getting high in there?" I asked.

He huffed, and puffed, and acted indignant, "I can't believe you would even ask me such a thing." But even as he said this, I spotted some blood drops on the floor, forming a little trail back into the bathroom. I shook my head. "Just get the fuck out."

"What the hell is your problem?" he demanded, so I gestured down at the blood. He appeared momentarily flustered but recovered quickly and announced that he must have simply cut himself while quite thoughtfully trying to open the bathroom window to air out the place. A nice effort, I had to admit, but then I noticed a steady stream of blood that had originated from inside his jacket arm and pooled about his wrist before dripping steadily onto my carpet. Teo noticed this as well and, without saying another word, started shuffling toward the front door. He stepped outside, wheeled around, and glared at me. "You know, you're not my father!"

I slammed the door in his face.

"You motherfucker!" he yelled from outside, furiously cursing me all the way to his car. I sat down on my bed, trembling with frustration. After a moment, I noticed Hemingway's typewriter next to me. I carried it over to and carefully placed it inside my closet, beside some rather heinous German porn videos and a seldom-worn pair of black dress shoes. Also there, sitting on a shelf amid all the useless debris of my recent life, was my Davey Lopes, circa 1975 model, baseball glove.

Copyright © 2005 by John Albert