Brief

A 58-year-old white American man, asleep at the wheel of life and in an unhappy marriage, seeks comfort from cam girls while reflecting upon his life and the childhood sexual abuse that derailed it.

What We Liked

The protagonist David is an enigma waiting to be solved. Although not particularly likable, there is something fascinating about him and his image of himself in the world versus his possible lack of self-awareness. He would be a perfectly darkly mysterious protagonist in an arthouse or surrealist film in which reality is difficult to decipher; the audience splintered between true reality and David's perception of it. He's grotesque in how he views and treats women, either as sexual objects to be lusted over and discarded, or as a nagging sexually useless wife to resent and ignore. He seems quite narcissistic and self-pitying, but he experienced sexual abuse as a child and this knowledge, if given to the audience at the right time, would color their feelings about David to great effect. Ultimately, David is a man confused by the world and lost in it, seeking something to take his mind off his pain and allow him some peace.

Similar to the protagonists of many David Lynch films, David Cavanaugh is dark and mysterious and not particularly likable. A film in the surrealist style which obscures reality behind David's perception of it--and his perception of himself--could become a fascinating character study sure to draw many arthouse lovers to their favorite indie theater. Alternatively, a more straightforward biopic piece could be told chronicling David's life from the sexual abuse he experienced as a child up to his unhappy marriage at 58, which finds David relentlessly pursuing online sexual relationships with young female sex workers who David showers with money in return for sexual gratification and attention in an attempt to extract some meaning from his life.

Key points:
1) Fascinating protagonist
2) Compelling backstory
3) Creative format
4) Unique voice and style
5) Unlike anything else out there

Synopsis

DAVID CAVANAUGH is fifty-eight years old, married with two kids, asleep at the wheel of life, immature, melancholic, and aloof. He’s a cancer survivor and an alcoholic, sober thirty-four years. David has eight siblings. His father is a vaguely senile, ninety-four-year-old ex-cop. As a child, David’s family moved to Melville from Cambria Heights. He grew to like the place and made friends. When he was a child, David was sexually abused in a basement by a much older relative. He blacked out almost all of the memory but knows it happened. David writes poetry and short stories in his spare time. David was also an advocate for civil rights beginning in third grade; an anti-apartheid, anti-segregation college student; a human service worker with juvenile delinquents, emotionally disturbed children, battered women and their children, and schizophrenic adults.

“At fifty-eight years old, David had never fully matured. He found the mundane chores of life, paying bills, tidying a room, repairing a car, or listening to any of the numerous chains of language which passed appropriately in the lexicon as ‘small talk’ abysmal. He was an imposter, a married man with two children of his own, who fully understood the Talking Heads lyric, ‘This is not my beautiful wife, this is not my beautiful house…’ He saw his children as friends, erstwhile companions which made fidelity to his wife bearable. He was the exact opposite of the man his mother married seventy-one years ago in Brooklyn.”

“To David, there is little in life more beautiful than a dandelion, head bent, reverent, sacrificial, and happy in the sun. To a child, like David it is your first flower. The first bit of beauty your chubby hands can pull from the earth. Broken and milky at the stem, regal and ill-reputed at the crown, a clump of soil at the root, where it had been tethered like a kite against a bright blue sky.”

David’s wife IRMAIN is a medical tech. Their marriage is not going well. “David had never been unfaithful in body, unless you count his arm around the barmaid in the Myrtle Beach strip club...nor her hand on his thigh, nor the foot massage he gave her against protocol in the black vinyl booth. That was twelve years ago.” Irmain later discovered a receipt for flowers David had bought for the barmaid; Irmain feared David had slept with the woman, though he had not. This caused a huge argument. David and Irmain undertook marriage counselling, “Irmaain was eventually persuaded into restoring the marriage by David’s contrition and their marital bed and family unit was restored but dented. In time it would rust around the edges.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, David and siblings visit their dying mother in Saratoga. Alone in his hotel room, David chats with OnlyFans username AmberEvans1, a young British camgirl he is obsessed with, though he tells himself he loves his wife. Amber gives him the attention he needs, minus criticism.

Back at home, David chats secretly with AmberEvans1 while his wife is not looking. He pays for a video of AmberEvans1 stripping and he watches it secretly. David speaks with AmberEvans1 often, sending her large amounts of money per week (“there is nothing Amber sells that David does not buy”). He also messages Tara[heart emoji]22 and sends her lots of money as well.

Following the murder of George Floyd and ensuing global uproar, David writes a Facebook post in honor of Floyd, then walks alone from his high school in a largely white middle- to upper-class neighborhood to a largely Black impoverished area in the next town.

When he was a young man—handsome and muscular—David was suicidal and one day attempted to kill himself using his car. He was charged with property damage and sent to a tough prison for a short time.

In 1990, when David worked as a senior counselor at a homeless shelter for battered women in Huntington Station, he met a woman named NANCY seeking shelter for herself and her six children. Nancy and her three-year-old CRYSTAL are HIV positive, though Nancy’s twenty-two-month-old GIGI was spared the illness by a bloodless C-section. “People who were HIV positive were often isolated and abandoned. This was the year before Magic Johnson’s diagnosis, but having lost his five-year-old niece and God Daughter, to a tragic car accident four years earlier, David befriended the little girl and her family, in the same way she and they adopted him. If David was working, Crystal would knock on the door. Most days, they watched ET in the living room, which David always felt she chose to prepare. Before long David was coming in on his days off to take Crystal and as many of her siblings that wanted to go to the park. On one occasion he carried Crystal all the way to town for the Easter Parade.”

Six months later, David asks Nancy on a date. Against his parents’ advice, David begins a relationship with Nancy despite her diagnosis. “The unconventional romance flourished for a year or so, until a mandatory blood test for a catastrophic insurance policy, which turned out to be negative, had scared David straight. For a year it was either one of the most courageous things a young man had ever done, or the craziest or both. He buried Chrystal first, their two-year joint adoption, came as he knew it would, to a tragic end. The night before she died he walked the vinyl tiled halls of Stony Brook with Crystal as she had been on their first night, aloft on his shoulder, but this time in anguish from whatever it was that AIDS did to her little body, she could not be consoled, and she hollered into the night, ‘Daddy …’”

About The Author

Christopher J Galvin, born in 1960s New York, is a father to two incredible teenagers, a husband to a Chilean émigré, and a survivor of incest/sexual trauma, suicide, cancer, and Parkinson's disease.