Read Who Stole the Funny? : A Novel of Hollywood for Free Online

but without judgment, “to me; to our son Jeremy.”
    Natasha gripped J.T.’s hand and led him from the sixth-floor elevator to the maternity ward. She took J.T. to the glass window where he had stood eight years prior, when their son Jeremy was born with a life-threatening kidney ailment. Nothing more needed to be said.
    Together, J.T. and Natasha stood and stared through the glass at the newborn babies for hours . . . well, until a nurse realized none of the babies belonged to them and had Security escort them out of the building. But—no trips to a shrink, no vacations at a spa, not a single pill was swallowed—only now, Natasha had given J.T. perspective. From that day on, Jeremy became their personal code, whether they were together or not. Whenever J.T. found himself dog-pad-dling in a pool of dementia, Natasha would appear at his shoul-
    der—in person or in his mind—and whisper, Jeremy.
    Show business began to leave J.T. behind.
    Natasha was the one person who had absolutely no hidden
    agenda and whose love for J.T. was unconditional. With his
    trademark childlike certainty, J.T. always maintained that his
    wife had to be either utterly right or utterly wrong. Faithful or unfaithful. Good or bad. So J.T. came to the logical conclusion that Natasha was a goddess. During J.T.’s sole attempt at psycho-therapy, the psychiatrist had unwisely suggested that J.T. might have what he referred to as the Madonna-whore syndrome. J.T.
    dove at the good doctor and knocked out two of his teeth.
    True story.
    It was Natasha who talked him down from a roof, made him
    R o b b y
    B e n s o n
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    promise that he’d never play with sharp objects, stopped the internal bleeding, and was the one who finally called the moving company and hauled her family out of Los Angeles, reasoning that J.T.
    couldn’t be that self-righteous and survive in La-La Land.
    They hightailed it, leaving Hollywood far behind. On the op-
    posite coast, actually: they bought a seven-acre farm in a remote area in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Not that J.T. knew anything about farming. He had accepted a job as a part-time professor of film at a local university.
    As Natasha had put it, “If you want future generations to un-
    derstand the old-fashioned way of doing things right, rather than just doing things, you ought to teach future generations the right way to do things and stop complaining about it.”
    “You’re right.”
    “Besides, sweetheart, the only ones who want to listen to your
    idealistic rants about filmmaking are college kids.”
    “Really?”
    “’Fraid so.”
    “Oh.”
    On the top of his (admittedly smallish) mountain, J.T. found elements of life he had seen in the movies or even shot as a director. But now he was no longer a spectator. Mother Earth quickly schooled J.T., showing him that there was actually a world outside of show business. There were no hyperkinetic edits pushing the
    day to move faster. J.T. was so accustomed to that former existence that it took a while for him to actually believe his new pet phrase:
    “This is the life!” After a time, though, the rhythms of his new life became hypnotic, symphonic. He could absorb the beauty as long
    as he wanted to without the fear that somebody would change his channel . He could see . . . forever.
    Damn, J.T. thought more than once, Mother Nature would’ve 3 4
    W H O S T O L E T H E F U N N Y ?
    made one helluva director. She can really bring it on! What the fuck am I saying?
    J.T. finally had a life.
    “Can you smell the—who the hell is smoking?! Why would
    anyone smoke with all of this clean air and the mountains and the trees!?”
    “J.T., sweetheart, we live in a tobacco state .”
    “Oh. Right.”
    J.T. learned to handle a tractor, and for Tasha’s forty-fifth birth-day he bush-hogged the shape of a giant heart in the cow pasture.
    She saw it every morning from up on the hill where their A-frame house jutted out into the clean, if a mite tobacco-y,