1001 Nights Cast

Conrad Howe hadn’t worked in years. Six years and four months, give or take a couple of weeks. Residuals from ‘Chicago Cops’ still trickled in steadily enough to keep Trixie in dog food and him in black bean burgers. He would soon have to find a smaller house in the Valley, but at least he’d never married, which his agent Marty said would really pay off now.

‘Rodney Shields was crippled with alimony, you know,’ Marty said. Marty, along with every casting director Conrad had ever met, always compared him to Rodney Shields. Oddly enough, Rodney Shields apparently was aware of Conrad’s existence. He’d described a role he was doing to some reporter as ‘Officer Paulowski with a Ph.D.’

It was the television special that sucked him in again. This cable channel called ‘Verve’ wanted to put it together: a sort of nostalgic retrospective including interviews, Marty explained over the phone.

Conrad stood at the open refrigerator door in his undershirt, carton of orange juice in one hand, cordless crooked between his ear and shoulder. He looked down at the reflection of his gnarly feet, white hairs sproinging from each toe-knuckle. At least they were tan and thin. ‘I’m an old man,’ he said.

‘That’s exactly what people want,’ said Marty. "'What do they look like now?’ That’s the worst kind of itch there is. The curiosity is overwhelming.’

‘Well, all right,’ Conrad answered after a good full minute of stealth drumming on the freezer door with his free hand. ‘Guess I should do it if you think I should do it.’

After Conrad hung up the phone, he wandered into the bathroom. The face staring back at him from the medicine cabinet blinked stupidly like a mole in the early-afternoon sunlight. Sober, trustworthy…he mentally ran off the list in Officer Paulowski’s character description. Handsome…handsome? Conrad spent the next 45 minutes tweezing nosehairs.

Without telling anyone, he hired a personal trainer. He drove out to an anonymous mall in Bellflower and bought five pairs of jeans, five pairs of button-down shirts. Nothing custom, nothing ostentatious. Just enough, along with a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots. Since he had a few months, Conrad figured it wouldn’t hurt to visit a plastic surgeon. A payment plan and two different credit cards’ worth. He remembered the words of his first agent: Sometimes you have to spend up to end up.

Two weeks after the show aired, Marty called again.

‘What’s going on?’ laughed Conrad, rapid-firing a beat on the arm of his chair.

‘I think you should audition for this Tylenol spot,’ Marty said.

They went with Conrad for the voiceover. Not bad, he supposed, since bills for ‘the new Conrad Howe’ were starting to pour in. Then a dog food commercial where he got to spend take after take romping on a vast green lawn with a couple of dogs that looked a lot like Trixie. He leaned over a metal dish and spoke sincerely into the camera about Fita-Mix’s pure ingredients. They gave him a sizeable free supply but Trixie turned her nose up at the stuff.

But things started to go downhill from there. Marty next called with an offer for Gas-X, in which Conrad had to look into the camera with that same knowledgeable, concerned expression that strained the muscle between his eyes, and discuss ‘bloating, fullness and pressure.’ Meanwhile, he couldn’t turn a single offer down. Otherwise he’d have to sell the house and then some to get out from under all this debt he suddenly had.

He thought being yelled at for being late to work on the children’s show was humiliating, but the final straw came after a few nose-hair-plucking months of silence.

‘There’s this show,’ said Marty, ‘and I want you to hear me out before you get upset. I don’t know how to put this any other way—but there’s this show called ‘Celebrity Bum Fights’…

‘I’ve seen it,’ snapped Conrad. ‘They couldn’t get Tanya Harding to do it.’

‘You’re just playing ‘that guy from ‘Chicago Cops’’. It’s not Officer Paulowski, and it’s most definitely not really you. You can do this.’

He could, and Marty knew he would. That wasn’t the issue.

Conrad whistled for Trixie and she came pattering into the kitchen. He grabbed his keys off the hook by the door and jingled them, which always drove her wild. They ran out to the car; Conrad opened the back door and Trixie leapt in. On the road it occurred to him that besides Trixie, he’d brought nothing with him except the clothes he wore. By now they were out in the desert, passing a wind farm. Seemed like a good sign to get off at the next exit.

For decades Conrad had been living in California, and he had never ventured here. Turned out he was entering an Indian casino, which he hadn’t seen from the road. He turned into a huge, flat parking lot marked off by lamp posts with different suits and numbers of cards painted on each, so people could find where they’d left their cars.

Conrad parked all the way at the far end, where the pterodactyl arms of the windmills loomed largest. He walked across the lot with Trixie in tow, a dry breeze against his neck.

Next to the wide casino entrance was a smaller, Hobbit-shaped door with ‘Golden Feather Inn’ painted across the glass. Conrad lingered between the entrances. Trixie looked up at him, blinking.

Conrad strode into the hotel, where the toothless clerk seemed to have been waiting for him. ‘I hate to impose, and I never would ask this normally, but I really need a place to spend the night and I can’t leave my dog out. I’ll pay extra.’

The woman smiled broadly, and the vertical lines all over her cheeks turned to chasms. ‘For you, don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘I love your show.’