The Eponymous Jonny Grind
“Damien di Savoia Underwood?” said the guy with tattooed arms. “Hell, I ought to know him. I helped him make up that name.”
Later, in a memo to his superiors at the Encore!!! Network, Casey Lasko would refer to the guy with tattooed arms as “the eponymous Jonny Grind”—for Jonny was the owner of Grind, a tiny espresso joint in a row of limestone storefronts on Walnut Avenue, a block away from the county courthouse in Bloomington, Indiana. Jonny had also given his eponym to the legendary (in some circles) punk-bluegrass band, Jonny Grind and the Jossers, which Casey had once been dragged to see by a cute hipster friend, about a year before either of them had come out, an episode Casey now remembered as one of his many failed attempts to adopt a non-boring persona.
Of course, when he was talking to Jonny, Casey left out the part about being dragged to the show, and instead channeled his old crush and played the role of a music nerd, rapturously discussing the exact date of the gig (was it December ’97 or January ’98?), the integrity of the venue (the Empty Bottle in Chicago), Jonny’s collection of mandolins and their resistance to beer and abuse, the necessity of giving up alcohol at a certain point in one’s journey, the superiority of caffeine, the excellence of this particular cappuccino, the sourcing of the coffee beans, the sustainability of the rainforest, the pleasures of settling down in Bloomington—what a great location! so close to the university, yet with the feel of a small town.... Eventually, Casey steered the conversation to the fax machine that Jonny used to provide for his customers—free for local, fifty cents a page for long distance—until everybody stopped sending faxes.
“Damiani was probably the last one to use it,” said Jonny. “Before I canceled the line. Maybe last November.”
“Damiani?” said Casey.
“Damien Underwood. The guy you’re looking for. His real name is Victor Damiani. Fat kid from Chicago. Great kid, smart and funny—one of my first customers when I opened this place. Back then, he was an undergrad working on some language major—he’d always come in here with three or four other people and they’d sit right there in that booth talking in whatever language they were learning—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalonian—fuck if I could tell the difference, but that’s why I picked a college town for this café—I wanted that kind of vibe. Hey, you wanna another? On me.”
With a lame joke about bouncing off the walls, Casey agreed to another cappuccino. Jonny called to the counter-person—a young woman, somewhat wholesome-looking for a place like this—to start making one. Then Jonny Grind continued the story of Victor Damiani, the smart, funny fat kid from Chicago.
“After a couple of years he goes to grad school, don’t know what program he was in, but now he’s always coming in here alone—no more multi-lingual social hours. Always alone, with a big pile of books, mostly in French—all that post-modern theory shit—it really seemed to get him down. Then he stops coming in altogether. Six months go by, I don’t see him at all, hey this is a college town, people move on, but one day he walks in with a manuscript, and he asks me to read it. What the fuck, I said, did you type this on a typewriter? Yeah, he said. What the fuck is it, a book? Well he didn’t know what it was. Did I mention that he’d gained a lot of weight? He was huge. Apparently he’d been watching a lot of telenovelas—those Spanish soap operas—a fuck of a lot of telenovelas, I gathered, and one day he took a breather and sat down at his old portable typewriter and wrote—well, he wrote this thing. So I took it home and that night I read it, and it was wild, it had this historical-action-girl-power vibe, and the next day I told him that out in L.A. they’d call this thing a treatment.”
Casey’s business card was still on the table, an awkward reminder of wary introductions and real purposes. Jonny picked up the card.
“Look, I don’t know much about your business, Mr. Casey Lasko of the Encore!!! Network.”
Jonny rapped the table three times, once for each exclamation point in the network’s registered trademark.
“Except one time on a trip to L.A. with the band, we had to fire our manager because he was spending all his time pitching screenplays and treatments to whom-fucking-ever and totally ruined two of our gigs from lack of attention to fucking detail. That’s how I know what a treatment is.”
The wholesome-looking counter-person brought Casey his cappuccino. “Thanks, Jessie,” said Jonny. They hardly looked at each other, but Casey knew they were sleeping together.
“But I’m not bitter about show business. No fucking way. In fact I told this kid Damiani he ought to pitch this thing he wrote to Hollywood. It took a minute, but the idea finally got through to him, and his eyes got big—I could tell he’s thinking of having his thing made into a movie or a TV show. How ’bout it? I said. Your writing is good—goddamn original. But then his eyes got all tiny again and he tells me he needs a new name—his professors want him to retain a binary relation to popular culture—he actually fucking said that. Binary fucking relation? I said, you mean like a critic? Yeah, he said, and giggled, like putting it in ordinary words was breaking some taboo.
“So I helped him make up a name. What kind of typewriter do you have? I said. Underwood, he said. That’s a great last name, I said. And we can turn your last name into a first name—Damien. How’s that? Damien Underwood. He liked it.”
“What about the middle name,” said Casey, “di Savoia...?”
“I dunno,” said Jonny. “He added that himself. A family thing, maybe. Anyway, Victor’s all excited and he goes home, and the next day he comes back with a new cover sheet and a fax blaster number he’d found on the Internet—you send your fax to one number, and it sends it to hundreds of top producers and agents—some bullshit like that. Since it was only one number, I let him send it for free.
“Tell you the truth, he was acting kind of crazy. I asked why a guy like him who was on the Internet all the time would do his writing on an old typewriter, and he said something about the spatial grammar of production. He was dead serious. That theory crap was really fucking with his head.”
Next episode: A Comfortable Silence
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