Giordano smelled conspiracy, so he made a rash decision to leave New York and go to the heart where stories were manufactured—Tinsel Town. The idea was to go large early in the investigation and whittle down the possibilities. So he snatched a copy of Nathanael West’s “The Day Of The Locust” off his bookshelf, caught a taxi, and hopped a red-eye out to the coast.
As soon as Giordano touched down in Los Angeles, he stumbled upon a haven for the lost and the hopeful—a fleabag hotel on Wilshire, where transients masqueraded as industry professionals, their dreams wrapped in hackneyed teleplays and decades-old headshots.
Tossing his suitcase onto a creaky bed, Giordano surveyed his dingy abode, a sanctuary for those with more ambition than sense. It was dinner time, and Giordano was jet-lagged, so he made his way to the tavern attached to the hotel, a dimly lit refuge for drink and greasy fare.
Seating himself at the bar, Giordano ordered a baseball steak and a beer, just the bare minimum to get himself through til morning. Just as his beer arrived, he felt the unwelcome presence of a shadow looming over him. He looked up to meet the gaze of Marlena, a platinum-blonde starlet whose innocence had long since been tarnished by the harsh glare of Hollywood’s spotlight.
“You a producer?” Marlena’s voice, a whisper laced with desperation and false hope, shattered the fragile illusion of anonymity that Giordano had sought in vain. “Producers hang out here, looking for unknowns,” she purred, leaning in closer and flashing him a smile as bright and empty as a Hollywood premiere, her words dripping with the honeyed venom of ambition.
“I’m a detective. Name’s Phil Giordano. You can call me Philly.”
“You’re not pulling my leg, are you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Producers use subterfuge to dissuade us nobodys from unsolicited advances. I’m Marlena, by the way. I’m an actress, just in case you are a producer. Do I detect a New York accent in your voice?”
“I suppose. That’s where I’m from.”
“Wow. A grape stomper from New York.”
“Grape stomper?”
“You know, eye-talian,” Marlena whispered as if sharing some inside information. “Some folks anglicize their names not to be a dead giveaway. If they’re looking to go places.”
“I’m here on official business.”
“Hm. What sort of official business?”
“I’m investigating a murder if you really must know.”
“A murder? Like I haven’t heard that one before,” Marlena said, unimpressed.
“What’d ya’ mean by that?”
“Look, I’m not one for small talk, so if you wanna be left alone, why don’t you just come out with it? The whole ‘Yo, Tony, I’m a Private Dick from New York investigating a murder’ routine isn’t very original.”
“No?”
“If you’re a producer and you don’t wanna sleep with me, I don’t want to sleep with you either, but I’d still like a part in your next picture. There! The ball’s in your court now.”
“I really am a detective. And I’m famished,” Giordano said as his baseball steak arrived.
“Ever hear of Thelma Todd?” Marlena continued. “There’s a murder for you to investigate. Dead at 29 from carbon monoxide poisoning. Under suspicious circumstances to boot. Hm. Coincidentally, she was married to a grape stomper.”
Giordano looked up at Marlena after cutting into his baseball steak. “Look, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay, so you don’t find my whole two-bit floozy routine sexy. Or is it because I’m sexy that you think I’m a two-bit floozy? Which is it, Mister? I’m not just some girl you can pick up in a dump like this and have your way with. Or am I? Look me up sometime if you ever decide to grow a thicker hide.” Marlena said, sliding away from the bar.
Giordano’s encounter with Marlena left him somewhat perplexed but mildly amused. On the other hand, he felt like he had just watched the first reel of some second-rate B-flick that got canned. On the other, he realized a man’s worth in this town was nothing if not to fulfill someone else’s dream.
The very next day, Giordano hit the streets and dove headfirst into the murky underbelly of America’s Dream Factory, where six criminal enterprises headed by “The Big Cheese,” a mafioso mouse, controlled all of the content and reduced storytelling to a simulacrum with no soul. Business was good, but morgues all over the city were overflowing with the corpses of screenwriters, most of whom expired well before their time. Gone were the intricate plots, the multi-dimensional characters, and the moral dilemmas that provoke thought and spark debate. In their place, nothing but pulp distractions—franchise films that regurgitated the same tired tropes, reveling in the glorification of violence that appealed to the lowest common denominator.
Giordano let his presence be known almost immediately as he strolled unannounced onto a motion picture studio lot and began asking questions. Being a stranger in town, he wasn’t accustomed to protocol, so he’d knock on any door without hesitation. Within minutes, he met with Yankowitz and Yankowitz, a couple of high-powered motion picture executives lounging about with nothing to do. They were well known for their sword and sandal epics, but when asked by Giordano who killed storytelling, they looked at each other and laughed. They told the New York detective they worked off something that resembled a blueprint rather than a script and that if he were looking for storytelling per se, they had a stack of abandoned scripts he could sift through. But they were sure he wouldn’t find what he was looking for there. Giordano thanked them and started toward the door, but before he could go, they stopped him.
“Wait a second, you might be just the fella we’re looking for,” one Yankowitz said.
“Turn around, give us a profile,” the other Yankowitz chimed in.
Bewildered, Giordano turned and gave the executive a good look at his profile. The Yankowitz pair nodded and smiled in agreement. A star was born! They offered Giordano a role in the picture without a screen test based on his classical Roman-Greco looks alone. He was perfect! One Yankowitz said Giordano had a Tony Curtis quality about him. The other Yankowitz said he looked like a young Victor Mature.
“You mean an immature Mature?” said the one.
“More like a premature Mature. Without the square jaw,” replied the other.
“A jawless Mature who'll mature before Mature himself matures. Hire him! Mature audiences will eat it up!”
Giordano was shocked and flattered and asked what the role in the motion picture entailed. Overjoyed with enthusiasm, the executives described the scene to Giordano, where he would play a Roman destined to meet his grisly demise at the jaws of a ravenous lion. They said they were looking for just the right actor to embody sheer terror while being torn limb from limb. And one who could shriek in agony on cue. They said they couldn’t pay him anything, but it was a lot of screen time and could be his big break. But Giordano, despite the allure of the silver screen, politely declined the role and went on his way.
Giordano took a long walk along the Walk of Fame on Sunset Boulevard, where he met up with Marlena, looking rather sallow after giving a quart of blood earlier in the day to pay her rent. She was aghast when Giordano told her he turned down the role of a lifetime. “Fed to lions?! That’s nothing! I just gave a quart of blood!” She told him no one has ever said “no” to either Yankowitz and lived to tell about it. “You’re done in this town, and you just got here yesterday! Nice going! Something to think about when you go back to your crummy day job. What was the fantasy job you conjured up for yourself again? Oh-yeah, Detective! Catch any murderers today?”
Giordano offered to take Marlena to get something to eat, but not before his eye caught sight of a billboard of “The Big Cheese” promoting a new animated feature starring a porcupine and a squirrel. Giordano asked Marlena, “Do you know how I can get in to see the Big Cheese?”
“Same way you got in to see Yankowitz and Yankowitz, I suppose,” Marlena countered. “I don’t know what the big deal over who killed storytelling is anyway. No one gives a hoot if it isn’t based on a true story. Besides, all the writers I know are suicidal!” she said before giving Giordano a sidelong glance.
“Anyway, I’ll take you up on your offer to buy me dinner. Then...I’ll invite you to my place." Her voice dropped an octave, more promise than tease now."I’ve got a harsh light you can shine in my eyes." She stepped back, her eyes glinting with playful menace. "Interrogate me all night long, if you like. Let’s see what kind of detective you really are."
“I’ll buy you dinner,” Giordano offered, “but I’m kind of sweet on a girl back home."
“Oh, you’re one of those weak-kneed sentimentalists. Just my luck. The last grape-stomper I was with couldn’t get enough of me.” Marlena said, throwing her hair back.
Giordano smirked, though deep down, he pitied Marlena—not that she’d ever accept anyone’s sympathy, least of all his. She was too jaded for that. She wore her charm like a mask, perfectly scripted, each laugh and lingering glance calibrated to keep people guessing. She was playing a role, and she expected Giordano to play along.
But Giordano wasn’t in the mood for games. He had only one thing in mind: tracking down The Big Cheese. And no dame, no matter how dazzling, would get in his way.
That resolve lasted about as long as the walk back to his dingy flop-house hotel. The second he reached his door, his instincts flared—something was off. A scrap of paper was taped crookedly to the peeling wood. Giordano’s smirk vanished as he tore the note free and read it:
"Get out of town if you don’t wanna end up on a slab of Gorgonzola. Signed, The Big Cheese."
The handwriting was jagged as if scrawled in haste or spite. He stared at it for a long moment, the weight of the words settling in. Word of his investigation had spread faster than he’d anticipated—and the capo di tutti capi had responded accordingly.
Giordano crumpled the note in his fist. They’d made their threat loud and clear. But there was one thing about Giordano they didn’t understand yet.
He wasn’t the kind of man who scared easy.
Before Giordano had the chance to enter his room, two men who’d been waiting in the hallway approached him from behind. One of them had a high-pitched cartoon-like voice and wore a pair of clown shoes, and the other one had a prosthetic nose and blubbered incomprehensible babble like a malfunctioning Speak & Spell. They told Giordano that if he needed any assistance understanding what the note they had just put on his door meant, they would gladly oblige. The one with the high-pitched voice then clubbed Giordano with an inflatable mallet while the other one ordered a cab for him to leave town.
“Schkip town, Schlub, on da double!”
Giordano collected his belongings from his room and did just that. As he got into the cab waiting to take him to the airport, Giordano got sick to his stomach and blew chunks of his dinner into a hanky. Giordano was no wimp; he was just shaken down by a couple of cartoon characters, which was probably the most unsettling experience of his life. Needless to say, it left a bad taste in his mouth.
On the cross-country flight home, Giordano picked up the Nathanael West novel to read but noticed the pages were blank. Identical to those found in Jane’s bookstore a week earlier. He quickly flipped through the book from front to back but found no trace of the narrative anywhere. The work of the killer, Giordano surmised. But words on a page there one day and gone the next couldn’t be attributed to the machinations of a lone individual, the scheming of a faceless corporation, or even the cold efficiency of a machine. A dawning realization crept over the seasoned Detective—a creeping suspicion that the culprit was not a “who” but a “what.” A pervasive zeitgeist, a collective malaise! Giordano’s mind took off in every direction. He asked for a double martini from a stewardess and downed it in one gulp once she delivered it. Giordano recalled his experiences in Hollywood, where he witnessed a pervasive pallor of apathy and cynicism, transforming storytellers into mere content creators and reducing avid readers and cinema enthusiasts to passive consumers. A post-literate world plagued by indifference! Could it be that the assassination of storytelling came at the cold hands of a collective complacency?
end of part 2
“Who Killed Storytelling?” Returns in two weeks with Part 3
“Who Killed Storytelling?” (Part 1)
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Welcome to Michael’s Newsletter. Writer of contemporary political/social commentary, parodies, parables, satire. Michael was born and raised in New York City and has a background in theater and film. His plays have been staged in New York, London, Boston, and Los Angeles.
Michael also writes short literary fiction. Below is a link to his first collection.
FLATIRON and other tall tales
“Storm The Beachhead, Little Bitch"
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