ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part Two, Chapter 64: Problems in the Plot
Joshua calls today. “Daddy’s watching over me. I know it.”
I flash to my man-in-the-moon experience. “Why do you say that?”
“Because KFC’s running a national commercial for its chunky chicken pot pie, and guess what? They’ve lifted my two lead characters from Cain and Abel.”
Cain and Abel is Joshua’s first feature film. Once, when he was stuck on the screenplay, he called Ernie. In that two-hour phone session, they worked out problems in the plot, and Joshua was off and running again.
“You mean your characters — Malcolm Cain and John Abel — are in the KFC commercial?”
“Dead-on look-alikes. A dark-skinned guy with a huge Afro — that’s Terrence playing Malcolm Cain. And a whitey with shades and sideburns — that’s me as John Abel. In the commercial, these two dudes pull up to a KFC restaurant in their muscle car — which looks like our muscle car — and order chunky chicken. Remember that scene in Cain and Abel when Terrence and I pull up to a Chicken and Waffle House? This is a ringer for that. They’ve stolen my work. All my friends are calling me about this. They say it’s a rip-off.”
“What’s your daddy have to do with it?”
“Copyright infringement. Daddy made sure I copyrighted Cain and Abel. I talked to an entertainment lawyer today, and his first question was: ‘Is your film copyrighted?’ His second question was: ‘Is your name on the copyright?’ Yes to both. Daddy would be all over this case. He’d be drooling.”
A memory comes to me. I think about not bringing it up, but I do.
“The only time I was in a KFC was in Indianapolis, remember? You and I were searching for mashed potatoes and gravy. Ernie thought maybe he could get down mashed potatoes and gravy. This was after his big surgery. Things were going downhill fast. We just didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I didn’t see it coming, not until the very end,” Joshua says.
We turn quiet. Sometimes on the phone with each other, whole minutes pass without our saying anything. Are we waiting for Ernie to say something? To help us work out problems in the plot of our lives?
He always did before.
