by William Smithy

Created on: September 28, 2009

The Nicest Man in Hollywood

This is a story of one of the nicest men in Hollywood. To be considered a nice man in Hollywood is a difficult task. One must fulfill many rites of passage and uphold their sterling pedigree. First of all, like all rich Americans, they must have a history of poverty so that they can relate to the rest of America. However, this story somehow has to coincide with the other story of how their grandfather went to Yale and sold steel for the war effort, not as a war profiteer as a patriot god dammit! They must also have a sister who brags of once downing a whole vial of liquid acid when Jerry died so that she could go on to be a Kindergarten teacher. Then, of course, you have to have the story of your mother leaving your looser jazz musician father for someone more stable who happens to be a doctor and be related to the mafia, who tend to steal his name and inheritance whenever it suits them. By the way, looser is rich people code for the broke guy they screwed over. Then, to be a nice guy in Hollywood, you must of course tread the precarious line of religious fanatic and atheist, something like a tight rope walker on stilts I'd imagine, or perhaps a Masonic platitude that's been overdone so much that the horse done died a very long time ago. Of course you must have some kind of royalty in your blood so that you can say you had the blood of kings in you. You can perhaps through in a dash of sweet old alchy gradma who happened to hang with lady bird Johnson back in the day and who later found prescription pills to her liking after being moved out to the west coast and compartmentalized as I like to put it. That's what nice people do in this society; they compartmentalize you into your proper place in the world. Nice people compartmentalize their grandmothers into retirement homes, their kids into boarding schools, their brothers and sisters into sanitariums. It's kind of what all those other nice people do after walking a pentagram blindfolded with a noose around their necks. I guess any kind of indoctrination of any sorts would probably make you nice, even wearing magic underwear might make you nice.

Of course, when people use the word nice they use it as a term to skirt around what they really think of someone. A sister might call her brother nice because he gives her 20,000 dollars to buy a new car and to possibly erase the memory of him bullying her when they were young. People might use the word nice to describe someone that they fear or maybe even someone whom they despise. But one thing is for certain, the nice people of Hollywood don't stay nice for long, for it is Hollywood's nature to turn on itself and its own kind, because nothing is as it seems in Hollywood. Deception is what it is banking off of and niceness is just another one of those deceptions.

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