Honor Your German Masters..

(Evan sits in the his bedroom's office chair, dutifully following a vocal score as a mediocre BBC Proms relay of Die Meistersinger comes through. Into his room without knocking walks Wagner, wearing a ten-gallon black hat with a giant pink feather, a ostentatiously double-breasted pin-striped black suit with white buttons, a black shirt and a solid white necktie, dark shades, rings with enormous fake diamonds, a necklace chain with an enormous dollar $ign on it, polished wingtips and a giant fur coat. On Wagner's left arm is an artificially pneumatic platinum blonde pouring out of an extremely low-cut red dress, in his right hand he holds a glass of Cutty Sark and a cigarette holder. In his mouth is a half-smoked blunt.)

Wagner: (Walks straight up to Evan's laptop and closes Evan's BBC i-player) Tucker, meet Cookie. Cookie, the men are gonna talk now. Go downstairs and wait in the car (pulls out a wad of cash) here's fifteen, go down to the 7/11 and buy yourself somethin' nice. (Cookie turns around to leave and Wagner slaps her on the ass, Cookie lets out a faux-shocked giggle.)

Evan: (to himself) Oh fuck. (to Wagner) Richyyy, long time no talk. Whatup?

Wagner: You tell me mothafucka, I'm here cuz you ain't returnin' no fucking calls of mine.

Evan: You called?

Wagner: Every two days the last six months yo.

Evan: I wouldn't read too much into it. Most days I don't know where my phone is.

Wagner: You tryin' not to answer my calls?

Evan: You and my father. He calls me every night from his bedroom.

Wagner: Shit man, this ain't no joke. I just got off the phone with Hindemith an hour ago and...

Evan: (interrupting) And he told you something that's worth interrupting Die Meistersinger?

Wagner: He says you don't like me no more.

Evan: Richy, this is Hindemith, the guy who wanted to make a new system of tonality based on fourths...

Wagner: So then I went over to Leverkuhn's, and he told me it was true.

Evan: Great, so now we're even believing fictional composers. What did Vinteuil have to say?

Wagner: Him and Proust won't tell me shit.

Evan: I always figured I'd like that guy. Any chance you can introduce us? Also, can you please put out that blunt? You know how much I hate that stuff.

Wagner: (takes a big puff and exhales in Evan's face) Man, you can't rely on nobody no more. Heppner's my only good heldentenor and his voice ain't what it used to be. I've got all these regietheater directors who don't respect none o' my stage instructions, and my best conductor is a fuckin' Israeli.

Evan: You still have Thielemann.

Wagner: Oh who gives a shit about Thielemann? If I wanted more Nazis in Bayreuth I wouldn't have smoked my grandson.

Evan: (slightly shocked) You killed Wolfgang?

Wagner: I just hid his unicorn blood.

Evan: That's harsh man.

Wagner: No shit, but what could I do? All that bitching and moaning about who controls Bayreuth's givin' Wagner a bad name.

Evan: You never did have much of a sense of irony.

Wagner: It was the 19th century, everybody was all mopey and shit.

Evan: Some good music though.

Wagner: Nah dawg. Jay-Z and Kanye all the way.

Evan: Not even yours?

Wagner: My music is a weapon. (lifts up elbow, holds up two fingers and a thumb) A means to an end.

Evan: What was the end?

Wagner: You.

Evan: Come on.

Wagner: Seriously man. Kids like you was always the end, because people like you don't have no fuckin' vision. When I was starving in Zurich...

Evan: (interrupting) Stop this. You never starved in your whole life.

Wagner: Whatever man. When I was in Zurich, all I dreamed of was an army of 18-year-olds who don't know shit about the world and always turn to the one guy who has all the answers. Me. Every one of them wanting to lay down their lives for my cause because I tell them that's why they're here. The whole fucking world marchin' to my tune. Music, dawg, it's more powerful than any gun.

Evan: Didn't this happen once already?

Wagner: Nah, it coulda been so much more.

Evan: (slightly astounded) You mean the Nazi's weren't enough for you?

Wagner: Fuck no! Dostoevsky screwed all that shit up.

Evan: (rolls eyes exasparatedly) Here we go....

Wagner: Seriously man. Fucking Fyodor. He stole my idea and then all those fucking Russians start wasting each other cuz they think that's what Father Zosima wanted. Shit man, Dostoevsky wasn't even that good a writer!

Evan: First of all, I'm pretty sure Dostoevsky wasn't any more interested in what you had to say than you were in him. Secondly, Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian who would have been horrified at Stalin even if he had visions of a Christian utopia. Thirdly, are you in any position to accuse anybody of being a bad writer?

Wagner: Hey man, no need for this shit. I always did right by you.

Evan: You did right by me because I figured out what a jackass you were early on and I watched my back.

Wagner: But imagine what you could have been if you followed me all the way man. You had so much potential, then you went to college and you got so fucking boring. We was gonna walk the earth together, wherever the wind moves. Now you sit on your ass out in the B-more 'burbs and it's all this Brahms and Chekhov and Woody Allen shit. What are you, a fucking bourgeois Jew?

Evan: Yes.

Wagner: Oh shit man. I didn't mean that. You know the anti-semitism was all an act.

Evan: Everything with you's an act.

Wagner: (hurt) C'mon dawg, you always loved Meistersinger.

Evan: It's as much an act as anything else you did. You wrote the most humane opera in music history just to show that you could do it. In the end Hans Sachs is still slapping David around and telling the people of Nuremberg to protect German purity from foreign invaders.

Wagner: But the music, man. The music can't be fascist, it's music.

Evan: It certainly can. What else do you call a five-hour comedy in which each act ends with a huge orchestra and loads of singers at full volume?

Wagner: (shocked) Mothafucka... you really don't like me.

Evan: You're a good guy, in small doses.

Wagner: So that's all I am to you? A German Rachmaninov?

Evan: Nah, Rachmaninov took more care with construction. More like a German Respighi.

Wagner: Shit man. That hurts, and I took so much care with construction.

Evan: Dude, we're not getting into leitmotifs tonight.

Wagner: After all we've been through together....

Evan: I've been through a lot with Respighi too.

(Knock on the door.)

Evan: It's open.

(In walks Giuseppe Verdi, with a bottle of Laphroaig in one hand and two glasses halfway filled with ice in the other.)

Evan: Joey! Have a seat, Richard was just leaving.

Wagner: Verdi? Why don't you just stab me through the fucking heart.

Verdi: Hello Richy. (looks around briefly) Still trying to get the band back together eh?

Wagner: (Gets up) You'll be back Tucker. You'll get bored and come crawling back ready for more! COOKIE LET'S GET OUT OF THIS SHITHOLE!

Verdi: She's out in the driveway talking business with Hans von Bulow.

Wagner: Shit!

(Wagner runs out of the room. Evan and Giuseppe Verdi sit down to listen to the Proms relay of Simon Boccanegra).