So 5 Minutes Ago Read Online Free

but not that much of a stretch. Playing a Gary Cooper type will also help solve Troy’s off-camera tendencies to blurt out whatever crosses his pot-addled brain.
    I’ve even gone so far as to work up a mock photo shoot: ranch, blue jeans, pickup truck, and lots of animals. Make that baby animals. Lose the girls in short cutoffs and their dazed “do me” gazes, and stick Troy on a hay bale holding a lamb or a calf. Might be a nightmare to actually shoot, but that isn’t my problem. If only Westerns were still hot. Still, it could work. Troy—the Classic American Hero.
    Hey, it worked for Tom Cruise—and talk about baggage.

2 . . . and Farther Down
                      I’m feeling very on my game when 4 P.M. and the BIG staff meeting rolls around. When Steven and I wander in at exactly four-ten, the room is packed. Amazing, since these command performances usually elicit a flood of no-shows. Suzanne and G are nowhere to be seen, but among the denizens there’s the usual flouncing of hair and nervous sidestepping of mules and the hissing sound of Diet Cokes being pried open. On the conference table there’s a giant sheet cake decorated like
Variety
’s front page with the headline BIG DEAL FOR BIG-DWP in black icing. At least there aren’t any balloons.
    “I forgot to wear my estrogen patch,” Steven hisses, scanning the crowd.
    “Be a good boy and work the room,” I say. “I’ll get you a Coke.”
    I thread my way to the table, murmuring the usual pleasantries as I squeeze between the bodies. Control Freak Sylphs and Earth Mother Endomorphs and almost all of them north of forty, which in Hollywood is a citable offense. I’m five-five, weigh 125, still have the same unruly brown hair God gave me (plus a few non-God-given highlights), and am at least a decade younger, so where I fall in this house of cards is anybody’s guess.
    “So, I hear ten years is the cutoff for equity positions,” Sandy says, right at my elbow, startling me so I spill my Diet Coke. Sandy’s one of the lifers. Blond, and radiates steely self-interest. I trust her as much as I trust Martha Stewart. I’m about to launch into my “synergy” speech when I hear another, friendlier voice at my back.
    “Howdy, stranger.”
    It’s male, straight, and not wholly unfamiliar. I try vainly to place it but, given my surroundings, I give up and turn in its direction with a smile plastered on my face.
    Charles.
Charles!
Jesus, what is he doing here, not that I don’t welcome a friendly face. A longtime DWP publicist out of the New York office, Charles is Stan Woolfe’s most trusted deputy and the office’s most senior agent after the founding partners. I met him during my first weeks at DWP when I worked out of the New York offices on West Broadway before moving to L.A. He seemed nice enough, but those weeks had been a blur and I can’t recall thinking much about him one way or another. I can’t even recall if he’s married, although given that he looks to be in his early forties with a few creases around his startling green eyes and some rather stylish streaks of gray in his dark brown hair, one would assume so. I haven’t seen him in almost three years and, frankly, have no memory that Charles was so . . . so . . . well,
comforting
-looking.
    “I see, Ms. Davidson, you’re one of the last to arrive. As usual,” Charles says with a grin as large as my own. “This won’t do. Not when there are BIG people waiting. So to speak.”
    Jesus. A good-looking straight male
and
a sense of irony. How could I have been so oblivious to Charles back in New York? Maybe it’s another Hollywood miracle. You become so inured to all the mutant males here you forget there are actually nice guys in the world. Nice guys who smile at you without it seeming like a come-on and whose starched blue shirt and soft brown herringbone jacket and green rep tie—Christ, a tie? When’s the last time I saw one of those?—make the world seem