Talking Horse : Where Tarantino meets ‘Twin Palms’ : PERMANENT MIDNIGHT: A Memoir, <i> By Jerry Stahl (Warner Books: $22.95; 371 pp.)</i>

If you wanted to make it in television, I sensed, you’d just have to roll up your sleeves.

--from “Permanent Midnight: A Memoir”

Jerry Stahl looms--floats--Bogosian-like (Seinfeldesque?), over the title of this coruscating, crazy-lantern, hellza(skin)poppin’ memoir of a skeevy, sweet-souled dope fiend who just happened to be a TV hack. Along the bleachy brick road, Stahl reveals a hophead’s lesser vanity--he has lousy teeth. Maybe he’s exaggerating. In said jacket photo, his mouth--window to the street junkie’s soul--settles handsomely, proprietarily, over what I fantasize to be a veritable unflossable ghost yard, a hideous MacCarthur Park of bleeding gums and tooth-fairy abandonment. I’m already jonesing for the candid mugs soon to come down the PR pike in the gentle wake of cherubim DiCaprio’s “Basketball Diaries”: Jerry Stahl smiling for “RayGun,” Mr. Stahl in the New York Times magazine, Jerry S. in “Bikini” and “Arena,” caught unawares, mouth agape, in one of those spic-and-span-modest-new-West-Hollywood-digs, starting-over spreads in “People”--just like that famous yawping Avedon of Oscar Levant: Jerry Stahl, aged Yuppie “Moonlighting” dialogist, “Alf” meister and occasional “Twin Peaks” scribe, showing his nerve-dead, battleworn choppers to the world, thereby rendering this movie-of-the weak Odyssey heartbitingly real, yanking us from the realm of kicky, kicking TV confessional to full-blown toxic funhouse horror show. This ain’t no Viper Room; this ain’t no foolin’ around.

It’s like one of those medieval books with poisoned text, with blood as the recurring theme--the fingers get syrupy as you turn the pages. Our beleaguered scribe wears hipster-black so his sleeves won’t stain from the noodlings of the harpoon; the filthy ichor spritzes onto bathroom ceilings during the endless geez, forever “zorroing” onto lavatory tiles--slam, bang, tang--where he mainlines “Mexican wonder-tar” before story conferences and pitch meetings. Hunkered in the “Stahl,” the spike does its thing while Ed Zwick stands at the nearby urinal, humming the theme from “Exodus.” He turns in scripts spattered with venous droppings and even ties off with the cord from his Smith Corona; habitually borrows alcohol from puzzled studio Xeroxers, saying it’s to clean his typer when he’s cleaning needles instead--a TV commissary “Naked Lunch.”

In a scene that would have made for one hellaciously memorable “thirtysomething” (yet now so perfect for “ER”!), Stahl zorroes the men’s room at Cedars while his wife is in labor, just making it to delivery in time for the nurse to force him into a sleeveless surgical smock. As baby Nina enters the world, a George Clooney-type cringes at the sight of blood running from the proud new father’s self-described “well-ventilated arms.” In another poignant episode (“Picket Fences”?), he flies back East to see Mom after her failed suicide. While she’s comatose in the hospital, he visits the condo; the shag carpet is fairly clotted. “The stench drew me to the bathroom, where what I saw burned into the very fibers of memory. Blood on the mirror, appearing, to my reeling senses, to form a single, crippling word: NO. Beneath it, droplets ran and solidified. Red and frozen tears.” A remorseful Brad Pitt, our sad vampire-in-arms, scours the walls of this mortifying womb with Comet.

Stahl has easy, loping, hepster story gifts (the Ohio stuff about working for Larry Flynt reminded me of Terry Southern’s “The Blood of a Wig”); there’s an upfront, doggedly refreshing ‘50s Freudianism throughout. His father, an inexpressive, hard-to-hug, all around civic paragon and former Pennsylvania attorney general, makes a telling appearance in one of Stahl’s daymares--like something out of a Czech animation fest, our author, needy, boyish horsehead that he is, literally shoots Dad up. Naturally, the dark, all-business Ozzie succeeded where skitzy Harriet failed--Stahl Senior gassed himself in the garage. The frisson comes when it’s noted that the family dog wriggled its way through a crack and perished in the noxious suburban sanctum. I loved that: One envisions the tail wagging down like a tired metronome as the pup waits for his perfect master to exit the Bonneville. Doesn’t Stahl himself somewhere say, “It’s the details that make human beings creatures of such irresistible freakishness?” Dad is in the details.

True to his “thirtysomething” aspirations, Stahl manages to keep appointments with the shrink, even after the wife’s thrown him from the house and he’s living out of his Acura--even when he’s cooking up his own rank saliva for a hit, scoring rock off a pedophile, standing on his head at the Chateau with a gob of opium up his rectum or taking his infant daughter on 4 a.m. Pico-Union jaunts to cop. (The crackheads diss him on that one.) Still, he enjoys the respect he gets from writing television. The recognition! The abstract yet so real adulation of the Nielsen brethren--a family, after all. He tenderly schmoozes his dealer’s teen-age son: “Sometimes I helped Miguel with his homework. Plucking the needle from my arm, I’d swab off and lean across the kitchen table to tackle a tricky multiplication problem or help compose a book report.” Big Brother and the holding company.

Stahl is a former magazine writer who drifted into a life of random television through his spouse, an exec at Bedford Falls, the production company whose very name references the ultimate Yup-womb bipolar nostalgiathon, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” (Like dueling Freemasons, the Castle Rock boys had originally wanted to call themselves Bedford Falls but the perspicacious Zwick/Herskovitz already had the drop.) As part of Stahl’s sentimental small-screen education, Jack Klugman’s grouper mouth cantankerously flecks him with pea soup: Producer Mark Frost humiliates him during a “Twin Peaks” story conference; Cybill Shepherd is gracious as hell. Through it all, like a magnificent abscess, came the ultimate connect-- the dealer CAA, hilariously steadfast in tracking our junksick hero down and getting him back on the prime time mainline. They could always find a vein.

You gotta admire the guy for hanging tough to the dream. He even kept his jogging up, feet swollen to 12 double Es by the end of the day from “excess fluids”: “My smile was genuine as I shared a little wave with my fellow concerned- enough- about- their- health- to- brave-irate- drivers- and- nose- level- exhaust types. This was healthy California, and I was just another healthy guy. Sure, I’d fixed a minute before dashing out the door. But hey!” One must still shop at Pavilions and lunch at the Ivy. I think of the upscaley ad, the one with the tawny young couple parsing a crossword on a lazy hazy Brentwood/Laura-Ashley/In Style morn, shabby Chic couches and Starbucks moments abounding--these are what memories are made of. At home with his pregnant wife, Stahl is convincingly rhapsodic: “I rest my head on her swollen middle, feeling the endless Sunday afternoon wrapped around us like the arms of a conventional God.” The sentence itself feels good. But it’s scrabble for the Stahl family, and the triple-worder his wife comes up with is Adjal-- Indonesian for “the hour of your death.”

After the recoveryspeak is spliced (cooked?) away (“It wasn’t that I couldn’t see the madness of what I was doing. It was that I could not let myself see it . . . Who wants to admit that the flaws that disgust us in others are really our own?”), we’re left with a compulsively readable cathode ray “Crash,” an eroto-accidental TV Guide. Stahl’s narco-encounter with an old black jazz player, “this Kreskin of the Tenderloin,” is unbearably word-perfect, and the book’s excre/hallucinatory finish is about the best reason I’ve come up with for the riots in L.A. (“They were there, committing true Los Angeles Revolution,” he says earlier, about the denizens of a Los Feliz coffeehouse, “they weren’t writing screenplays.”) The spookiest gag involves his little girl and Big Bird but we’ll leave it at that.

Uh, so . . . watch those witchy T cells and write another book. I mean, like, you know, fast. And when they read it and say “Midnight” was better, don’t reach for the fuhcocktuh harpoon. Just tell ‘em like the old TV joke says: “That was the pilot. This is the series.”