As Time Goes By

As Time Goes By

A Hollywood Story by Charles E.J. Moulton

***

"Wouldn′t it be good to be in your shoes
Even if it was for just one day?
Wouldn't it be good if we could wish ourselves away?
Wouldn′t it be good to be on your side?
The grass is always greener over there
Wouldn't it be good if we could live without a care?"

The barbecue was in full swing since about noon. Half of Hollywood was there, but this was no ordinary networking party. Ben had to admit he was hosting Big Fun. Even Barry Manilow and Kid Creole had to admit that. Andie Macdowell was swinging to the rhythm with George Clooney, playing on makeshift drums made up of beer cans. Brad Pitt was finally exchanging a few words with his ex-wife Angelina. Val Kilmer had slipped out of his recluse position in rehab and had settled down on lawn chairs with Brendan Frasier, who was happy to actually be accepted in the business again. Kate Winslet had been sitting with Leonardo DiCaprio for three hours now, getting wasted on beer among other things. But Ben was melancholic. Maybe it was a medical condition.

Benjamin Ingrosso's daughter had found the song in an old 80's compilation of her father's and fallen in love with it. The fact that it fit perfectly in with her father's life served as a sweet twist. Benjamin had always lived on the other side of the fence. And so, when he found himself living a perfect life in a perfect surrounding with an imperfect spouse, he tried his best to cope by telling a famous good friend what was on his mind. "Does my spouse understand me?"

He knew everyone personally. After all, he managed most of their finances. So, naturally, they were all there. "Mission accomplished," Tom Cruise grinned while Ben strolled toward his front terrace, pouting. Ben nodded, giving his wife Carla a kiss.
"What's the long face?" she giggled.
"I just had a short circuit," he joked.
"Stay in the middle, nature boy," she bubbled, tipsy, giving him a slap on his bottom.
She was in a good mood today and didn't let him notice her choleric explosion over the left over washcloths in the bathroom yesterday. How long would her good mood last? Who knew? Ben was sipping on his fifth beer and was trying to take it easy and not let it upset him. Her moods were almost diabetic.

And while his daughter sang songs at the barbecue with his band in his garden, a famous friend gave him a penny of his thoughts.
Antonio Banderas gazed across the valley, hoping to help his friend fix his marriage, remembering old loves, shades of Aldomovar and memories of Malaga inside bis spirit. The greying locks had taken their toll, but the award winner was still a child in his own heart. He seriously contemplated Ben's worry. It seemed to be a logical conclusion to a long life of expectations.

Maybe it was just the way Antonio answered his plea that helped Ben. Maybe it was just the simple fact that Ben really felt understood.

"Sometimes, our assignments give us hints where we should be going," the actor whispered in his soft Andalusian accent, bits of Philadelphia and Evita thrown in for good measure. "My current movie is about a French poet who spends his entire life blaming everyone in his life for his own misery. He only realizes that digging into his own traumatic wounds keeps him inside his misery. He regrets every decision he makes until his wife stands there one day telling him her bickering was only meant to make him strong. They are on the verge of splitting up, you see, and one day she stands there with her bag in hand, and suddenly he remembers who he used to be and how their love started. Their first kisses, the happy laughs, the sweet innocence and that his wild affairs only was a soul chasing the wind. He thought that every other woman he knew was a chance to kiss the angels and make love to something new that didn't exist. Ben, he was only searching for himself."

Antonio paused, looking over at the melancholic Ben, but as no reaction came, he continued.

"They say men and women can't be friends, only lovers, but that is because we haven't tried. The urge to kiss is only there because we forget that, energetically, we kiss everyone anyway. My character reads his wife the poem he wrote for their wedding vows. For the first time, she cries for she realizes they are ships sailing an ocean separately when she secretly knew they were travelling side by side all along. Their wounds got in the way until they realized they shared the same wounds. They just reacted differently to how the wounds felt. Men escape. Women face the truth. Don't let the wounds consume you. The more you scratch the wounds,  the more it bleeds."

When Ben revealed the kind of crisis he was in upon that Californian pateo, overthinking, overeating, overcompensating, ridden with guilt, turning every dime over and wondering if the universe wasn't plotting to kill him after all, taking every word seriously, his friend tried to find the right words to say that he knew would help him. Ben was heading for Brendan's figure, not only financially.

"Will you read me the poem, Antonio?"

Antonio nodded and began.

"Love is a river, time is a boat.
The art is just to keep the ship afloat.
God is the captain and the angels our crew.
So when I kiss you, I realize that I am you.

So join the officers, hawl with the crew.
Our magic riverdance will turn the old into new.
The art of life is to accept the wounds.
To live with the pain and what concludes.

When the oboe plays,
The phoenix climbs,
We see that among the gentle folk
A new dimension will rise.

All the women I know
Transcend the skies,
They are the true heroes
That make love grow.

If you know a woman,
Your angel's kiss,
Then treat her like a Godess
And you will experience bliss.

Answer her anger
With pure love,
For her rage only wants to
Reach the heavens above.

The stairway to heaven
Has one key
And women are the keepers
That make the blind men see.

So grab your fiddle
And dance your reel
The Irish rover
Will make you feel.

That is the object
Of every lass
To ask you to consider
What comes to pass.

So, all you soldiers,
Lay down your grenades,
There's another soldier
On the Everglades.

Her name is Justice
Her weapons caress
Her guns are kisses
And her missiles bless.

Scotland the brave
Will be dancing tonight
For when the bagpipes resound
The armies give up the fight.

We become the spirit
Of a thousand girls
For true femininity
Is a flagged unfurled.

The womb of the galaxies
Is our natural birthright,
And in reincarnation
Our souls shine bright.

Come down to Killkenny
And see our Mary dance
She's giving her Axel a wink
And Jesse a chance.

And Charles is laughing
Because he knows
His spirit is eternal
And his divinity grows.

We are the ship, we are the crew,
We are the ocean, the sky so blue,
We are the captain, we are the land,
We are the arrival upon sacred sand."

Ben's daughter was singing "On Top of the World" by Imagine Dragons and Ben seriously was wondering why he felt so down. It was the rollercoaster of his wife's moods, but should that have made a difference?

"We are the arrival upon sacred sand."

The voices of the people chatting in his garden served as a beautiful backdrop of heaven. Ben heard it as lovely happy chatter. Exuberant noise. Especially, though, he heard the female voices glittering above the rest. High voices exuberantly dancing like fairies among the dandruff, maternal voices, matrimonial voices, loving voices, the voices of rehabilitation. Suddenly, because Antonio Banderas was standing next to him on the terrace reciting a poem from his latest movie "Declaration of Love", it turned into magic stardust. Dandruff became stardust.

Benjamin heard small tidbits of recipes, chatter about children and the most beautiful sound in the world. Female laughter. And he realized what he had missed all these years.

"This is a rollercoaster," Ben smiled. "Like Ronan Keating sang, it's time I ride it."

Antonio nodded, his greying hair making him look like a wise Andalusian sage. "It doesn't matter, Ben, where you are or what you do, how much money you earn or if you're famous or not."

Now, Antonio gave his Zorro impression. The only thing missing was the cape.

"All that death is, is our souls walking into a dark room and turning the light on. We stand in the dark for a bit before the florescent bulb goes on, but we know enough about quantum physics to know that God turns the light on eventually. The rest is just faith. Let the angels do their job."

Now, Antonio leaned forward and for a moment Ben saw Puss in Boots, complete with dagger and hat. "And here's the secret, even our rage and sorrow is love. Your wife worries because she misses something in her life and she wants you to understand it."

Ben looked into his garden from the patio and saw Pierce Brosnan rocking to "Every Tear is a Waterfall" by Coldplay along with Daniel Craig. What had he worried about all these years?

And suddenly Ben looked across Beverly Hills, standing on the terrace of his house. He remembered the first kiss in college, his wife's blond hair waving in the wind, her lips tasting like cherries. Love felt like a warm wind making love to his soul. And Carla suddenly stood there behind Antonio and, looking at him with sad eyes.

"Why did it go wrong?" she said. "Melancholic?"

Ben smiled, his new awakening causing him to understand the universe better than he ever had. "So we could enjoy it more when it went right."

And the kiss tasted like the eons.

And Antonio smiled.

What Benjamin Ingrosso learned that summer reshaped his spirit. He had always been a spiritual man. One that thought with his heart. Society had, however, mislead him, like so many others, to think he had to be like others, fulfill the expectations, live a kind of streamlined life, have the perfect house, the perfect breakfast, the perfect job, the perfect friends, the perfect wife and the perfect family. The kind of life one would find in a soap commercial. But imperfection had its beauty. The fact that it was imperfect made it so valuable. So precious.

Yes, Ben lived in Beverly Hills in a house worth $ 10 million because he could count other people money and could count it well. He could afford to live luxuriously. But often he caught himself sitting next to a star and wondering if he was happier now than he had been as a poor student in college. Was he different now? He had become more complicated. But different? No. Was that a good thing? Not necessarily. As a young freshman in California, he imagined that once he became famous all his problems would vanish. But now he understood that the problems only made him fight for love more because he knew what love meant.

"Things are not what they seem. Sometimes, they are better." Antonio was so right. "My mistress is the heavens and our children are the stars. That's good enough."

And Ben remembered.

***

The sun was shining, the grass was green, the orange and palm trees swayed. There never had been such a day in Beverly Hills, L.A.

It wasn't Christmas, so he didn't wish for it to snow. In all other respects, the song by Irving Berlin pretty much described his life. The weather was gorgeous and everybody seemed to want to live where he lived.

"Call me Bing," he charmingly joked under the spotlights when joining amateur crooning events as the Crosby lookalike he was. And Benjamin bah-bah-bood himself through the hubbub of cutlery clanking seniors drooling spaghetti. He enjoyed it, amazingly enough, throwing old ladies kisses, so singing "Melakaliki Maka" to 90 year-olds was not like Kevin Kline complaining about playing Willy Loman to old farts eating meatloaf as Kevin did in the movie "Soap Dish". Bing always brought him joy.

Benjamin was happy he earned money on something else than acting and singing. Living on art and music in Hollywood coulf be harder than having a camel slip through the eye of a needle. A daytime job with gigs on the side was good enough for him. Greeting Eddie Murphy, Johnny Depp and Jack Nicholson on the way to work made him feel like a star. As a highly paid accountant, he got around. Counting other people's money was a Willy Wonka life.

It should have been reason to be happy. Benjamin had a steady job. He couldn't get fired. He lived in a big house. He could plan his own hours. On the side, he painted, wrote poems and played bass guitar in a REO Speedwagon cover band that even had performed at the Paramount Pictures Christmas party one year. Steve Martin had come up and sang with them in "I Can't Fight This Feeling", asking him what the hell he was doing working as an accountant in Hollywood and not being a star. Benjamin glanced over at Spielberg, also present at the party, asking him if he had any roles open in his next movie. Spielberg took his card and Zemeckis gave him a five, adding that perhaps a forth installment of "Back to the Future" was being made.

Looking at the cover of his life's book, the poster of his movie, it was a picture book life. Surfing on weekends and dining with the rich.

There was only one problem with his picture book California. His wife was a choleric narcissist unable to adjust to other people. A regular Joan Crawford, who ventured through life like a steamroller. If anybody was in her way, oops, not her problem. Shoot first. Ask questions later.
"No more wire hangers," Joan had screamed at her servants, throwing plates out the window like Mrs. Hardy bashed plates in her kitchen, telling Ollie they were moving out.
"I don't bargain," Tommy Lee Jones whispered into his deputy's deaf ear after shooting the criminal, firing his gun an inch from his assistant's hearing in "The Fugitive".

Living in Beverly Hills took its toll. Benjamin's life was a movie even when it sucked. The 12 stages of the Hero's Journey had acted as the model for 321 movies so far. The weird thing was that it seemed to fit his own life. Where was he now? In the journey toward the inmost cave or on the road back to resurrection?

Whatever the case, his wife was Joan Crawford, Kevin Kline and Tommy Lee Jones rolled into one. Throwing a bit of Frank Sinatra in for good measure, picking up Ava Gardner, spitting obseninities, kicking her out the hotel window.

Whenever other people were around, Benjamin's wife Carla was Miss Charming, toasting her sweet wine with funny anecdotes. In private, her extremely pedantic demands had her commanding him and their daughter Wendy around like the Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. "Do this, do that, why did you not do this, why did you not do that? Poor me, I have to clean up after you all day, I deserve some time for me, too. What did you say? I treat you like arrand boy? How dare you? Look at poor me. I cook, I bake, I sew, I vacuum, I clean up. You use the wrong washcloth. You left a stain in the toilet. Why do you use toilet paper to clean up the bathroom washbasin? Why do you dry the pots before the glasses? Every child knows that is wrong."
Whenever she got into her extreme, menopausal screaming, Benjamin's head exploded into massive extremity of toxic OCD and pancreas war.

Ohm, Benjamin thought, turning into Yax, the hippie lama guru in "Zootopia". When the brain emulated the extreme behavior of trigger providers, the angst of losing himself was imminent. So chakra cleaning was the only solution.

Then again, Benjamin should have been used to that. Everyone in his life had treated him as if he didn't know what he was doing. Everyone knew better. "No, don't do that. If I were you, I would do this." Well, Dad, he should have said, I am not you. But he loved his parents as he loved his wife and daughter. And they loved him. And got angry if he did something they did not agree with. Benjamin,  49 years old, was in a massive predicament. Feeling ashamed of his own feelings. "I can't think negative things about my family. I love them." Yes, of course he did. All the great things he did with them. Dancing. Watching movies. Making pizza. Doing Whodunit Detective Dinners with dress up and menus. Vacations. All that was great.

So, what was this? A lesson provided by the universe in order to find himself? Maybe. He had to be fair, though. He was doing alright. In spite of waking up every morning with massive headaches and chest aches, he always crawled up at least ten steps when falling down two. He had chickened out like Marty McFly in "Back to the Future" on many occasions in school. Maybe that was the reason why he liked the trilogy. Staying home from school even though he wasn't sick. When Carla yelled at him like Voldemort at his own Harry Potter, he felt the fear creeping up like Pennywise at the misfits.

"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Princess Leia's line in the original "Star Wars: A New Hope" spoke volumes as to one party becoming a tyrant and the other a victim. Still, in order to build a bridge it was necessary to be able to face a narcissist concentrating on herself with ease. Not jumping into addictions and remaining calm throughout.

"Critique is always a reflection of the critic, not of the performer," Benjamin's philosophy teacher Professor Liechtenstein had told him as a college freshman. Mozart wrote too many notes, Fred Astaire couldn't dance, Elvis fame was just a fad and the Beatles were adequate at best. But time would tell what music would last.

Benjamin enjoyed the family life, the dancing, the home movies, the vacations and the mutual cooking. He also knew that one man in a female household had little chance of showing his front feet. Those front feet somehow side stepped into success, letting his OCD dwindle away into gold in what had to be spiritual alchemy.

On July 4th, he arranged that barbecue for some of his clients, his 19 year-old daughter singing some songs with her band. The brightest people in Hollywood couldn't cheer him up just yet.

"You don't own me," his daughter Melanie sang and that old Lesley Gore tune rang well in his ear. He watched his successful colleagues networking like crazy, showing off their husbands and wives like trophies. He secretly wondered if these wannabe perfect marriages actually would last or be smattered across the tabloids like shit on a fan. "Come over here, Ben," Hugh Jackman waved his Gin Tonic, "let me introduce you to a new client. Colin Hanks. He needs an accountant for a new project." And Colin chatted with Benjamin for a bit while Jennifer Lopez joined Benjamin's daughter on stage to sing a new song of hers.

"You can't fight fire with fire," Albert Einstein once said and the song actually went down well. It included Socrates. The verse told about Socrates wife Xanthippe who threw pots down the balcony on him and threw water in his face while laughing. As a result, Socrates said if you get an angry partner, you become a philosopher. "You can't fight fire with fire, bro, and if the sisters of mercy are working to and fro, you better look at your own yo-yo 'cause otherwise your heading for a downtown blow." The song had the possibility for lots of hip-hop waving and Michael Bublé actually did most of the waving, but of course he was the most drunk.

Having laughed with Brad Pitt over Michael's intoxicated rapping, Benjamin walked out to the front porch, contemplating how everything fit together. The sun was indeed shining. The grass was indeed green. And with the orange and palm trees on either side of the doorway, one could believe that the guy in his Versace Shirt and his Ray-Bans was the new sought after James Bond. But he was just a rich accountant that wondered why fate had brought him together with a narcissist, who, by the way, definitely brought him closer to solving his karma of living his life through other people, being dependent on their mood swings to cope.

***

And so, before Carla returned and love again arose, Ben dwelled in mood swings while Melanie dwelled in groove strings.

As he gazed across the valley, drinking his Jack Daniels, tasting its crisp spiciness, Antonio Banderas came out and joined him on the terrace.

"How you doing, Ben?" he said in his sexy Andalusian accent, flashing his ivories freshly bleached by Dr. Smiths over on the Boulevard.

"Charming and suave," Benjamin winked, "not hurting, just ... philosophical."

"Women?" Antonio responded, very carefully.

"How'd you guess?" Ben wondered, sipping his drink, trying to find the answer in the sunshine.

"I came over to your house a month ago to get a financial overview," Antonio added, leaning against the railing, "and I remember Carla being there. I just knew her as the charming leading lady of 811 Hillcrest Road. As we were doing our math, so to speak, I saw a woman I did not recognize."

Ben felt as if he was listening to Che speak about Evita. That was admiration and exhaustion at the same time.

"She was commanding the household like ... what was her name ..." Antonio paused. "But women need to challenge you. They are your spiritual trainers. They teach you to stay centered when they become the grand divas of Hollywood bending steel wires."

"Joan Crawford?" Ben filled in.

"No more wire hangers, right?" Antonio mused.

"Yeah." Ben laughed sardonically.

"Kind of a Jekyll and Hyde thing," Antonio shrugged. "I am using her as an inspiration for a new part."

"You playing a chick?"

Antonio shook his head. "No. The charming softie and the hidden warrior. It is interesting. A poet."

Ben nodded thoughtfully. "So what do I do?"

"Let go of ownership," Antonio said,.walking over to the tray, pouring himself another triple barrel.

Confusion hit Ben. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he got it. It was that simple fact of a child's logic that accepted everyone as they were.

"You don't own her," Antonio smiled, pouring another bourbon into Ben's glass. "You are her husband and she's your wife and you have a pretty child together. But that doesn't mean you have to be her or she has to be you."

A blackbird sang in one of the palm trees. Its melody sounded like one of his daughter's songs. The visiting bird reminded Ben of the song by The Beatles. "Blackbird" had been a symbol for the black civil rights movement and the black girl waiting for this moment to arise. It was based on a lute suite by Bach. For Ben, a blackbird was always the sign of spiritual awakening. The Arapahoe Native Americans called the blackbird "the Messenger of Manitou", a power guide from the heavens that appeared when truth was told.

"That is the general problem with the world, " Antonio continued. "We think people with conflicting opinions want to hurt you. No. They just don't get you. You swing on different strings."

"Isn't that the problem with relationships in general?" Ben contemplated. "I mean, that people think once they come together, they claim ownership. I mean, we still stay who we are. Right?"

Nobody had seen George Lucas leaning against the doorframe behind them, probably listening to their conversations for quite a while.

"Luke," Antonio chuckled. "Run out of bourbon?"

"I go by Chewbacca nowadays," Lucas smiled, raising his bottle. "And I am sticking to Budweiser."

"Bottoms up, Kenobi," Ben grinned.

"If I had written him as an alcoholic," George Lucas laughed, "that would have been his nickname in Sifo-Dyas bar on the planet Kamino. Bottoms up, Kenobi."

Needless to say, Ben and Tony guffawed as the slightly soft spoken millionaire took another sip of his Bud and stepped up to the railing where the others were standing. A feeling of expectancy was there, both men looking at someone who had changed cinema history just standing there holding his breath to tell them a story.

"I overheard you speak just now about not owning anyone," he began. "That reminds me of a story I heard about the song 'As Time Goes By'. Herman Hupfield actually wrote it for a Broadway show called 'Everybody's Welcome' that opened on Halloween of 1931. The song itself was written on an old Brigham Larson piano in a small place called the Robin Hood Inn in Montclair, New Jersey, where Herman composed many of his songs. Couples came and went there on a regular basis. One girl especially caught his attention. She sat there completely alone for a long time, talking to no one. Finally, he asked her what she was doing there all alone for so long. She said she was waiting for her lost lover that had left her on a ship and never returned. This had been their favorite place. Herman told her she would find someone some day. She smiled and said that chances were slim. As fate would have it, there was a new bartender that was hired that June and Penny, that was her name, started talking to Bob. He always said 'A penny for your thoughts' and she answered 'Bob your head and I'll tell you'. One day, Bob said 'As time goes by, you will learn to forget your sailor'. Bob and Penny became good friends. So good friends, in fact, that Penny actually became communicative and started chatting with other people. When the two really did become a couple, Herman wrote a song about the line that had caused Penny to let go. As Time Goes By."

The warm wind caressed some beautiful cheeks that day as Irish tunes were being played on the stage in Ben's garden. He had no idea where the energy came from, if it was the water in his wine or the Californian earth under his feet or the fire in his heart, but after all these years of restless searching, Ben had learned to let go.

"Sharing is the ticket," George Lucas mumbled, sipping on his Chardonnay and munching on his hot dog, looking like Obi-Wan on morphine, "there is so much in my life that is so positive and so much I have learned. One of them is Charles Durnings words in 'Tootsie' about his wife Mary. Sharing is the ticket. It's about sharing. Realizing we are different. We have to be. We have to forgive our enemies. We have to be able to accept that we have different opinions. Then we can let go. Then we are not dependent on people agreeing with us. And somewhere in that beauty we find something that binds us together with someone. A held hand. A handshake. A smile. A song. A laugh. A shared evening. A movie on the couch with the family. An enthusiastic information about an amazing fact. A funny joke. Sharing. We know that in our hearts.
I have often said that marriage is an enormously noble thing. Two people that decide to live together and share their lives together. On the surface, in the Hollywood version of reality, Mr. Right and Miss Perfect find their perfect measurements together and live a picture book reality. The secret is that we don't have to have perfection to be happy. There can be quarrels. There can be differences. In fact, there should be differences. If we don't accept the differences, even the anger of the others, we have no right to expect tolerance when we make mistakes."

The three successful men looked across the fields of California that evening, feeling like a sunrise and Benjamin realized Carla completed him. He could be happy not only in bliss but also in strife.

They say that life is a reflection and love an image of the inner truth. If Ben realized that Carla completed him, she must've felt his emotions that day. For suddenly she was there beside him.

Wouldn't you know it if Carla came over and kissed Benjamin on the cheek? And so, finally, the four of them gazed across Hollywood, realizing that the angels now were singing "As Time Goes By" along with Penny and Bob and Herman in heaven.

"The heaven is my mistress and the stars are our children," George Lucas smiled. "I have to use that in a script."

And the whispering wind sang an Irish lullaby while Ben's daughter rocked "Uptown Funk". Wouldn't you know if Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig started a conga polonaise, marching up to the terrace, taking all the stars with him through the front lawn to Ben's Mercedes and back to the band. Everybody was stoned, Kate and Leo belched themselves through "Ghostbusters", even Brad and Angelina laughed, jiving with their kids. "Busting makes me feel good."

There, among the rich and famous, Jim Carrey flashing his ivories, sporting a Moses beard, Ben found himself, realizing he had been addicted to being a victim, understanding he didn't have to be famous to be happy. So he laughed.

And Antonio sighed.

Ben's daughter now sang "I'm a Believer" by Smash Mouth and that was the moment Ben and Carla kissed a tongue smooch so intense it would have fit into the end of any Bond movie.

George Lucas patted Antonio on the shoulder. "I didn't know you were a matchmaker as well."

"Come on, Bottoms-Up," Pierce Brosnan filled in. "He is the real James Bond. The real deal. All of us are carbon copies of Zorro."

Antonio giggled. "No. I'm just a Spy Kid."

That was good for any 007.

"Don't be so modest, Pierce," Indiana Jones mused. "I'm the real deal."

Harrison arrived, wearing his hat, and the crowd could have sworn they saw four horsemen riding into the sunset behind him. And they all sang "As Time Goes By" to the melody of Michael Jackson's "Liberian Girl".

"Romance is the stardust of the ages," Britney Spears sighed. And Robbie Williams couldn't agree more. And so, they kissed to the melody of "A Groovy Kind of Love."

Yes, love truly was a splendored thing.

Especially in Hollywood.

The evening ended in a spectacular finale with Carla and Ben singing a trio of "Rewrite the Stars" with Hugh Jackman. Beverly Hills had never been so alive.