Thursday, November 10, 2011
West
Sometime West is the only answer. But how long can you keep moving till you end up back where you started? Our perspective is distant. When I think of you, it's all snake skin boots, and homemade tattoos, and broken bones, and innocence lost to colorful teenage rebellion. It's the cold north of home. Family secrets forged in alcohol, a death, a stroke, you in a dress, in some nocturnal, bloody, Gothic frenzy. Late night at Denny's, an orgy, or out on the Strip in the lost hours between 9pm and nowhere. A slip of a girl on your hip, a gamine, a Gisele, an ideal prop; a depository. Your powdered wig tucked into your back pocket, searching for Mozart on the sly. It's fun to break windows. To smash the crystal and have them put it on your tab. We may have nothing, but we rejoice in that -- dancing barefoot around the lead vault that is our indestructible, undeniable id. Our fingers on the keys -- ivory, plastic, notes, letters -- not a birthright exactly, something stolen from the primordial sandbox, the genetic lottery won. I accept that it's mine now. It's always been yours. So I look in the mirror, take a deep breath, and righteously declare to myself to "shut the fuck up." Good advice from a friend. Stubborn pragmatist. Renaissance fuck. I am the .04% and tonight I run West. Maybe just a block or two, but never unaware of who we are and what we aren't. Maybe I'll run West till I find myself on your back porch again, having traversed the globe, the physical pain dropping off somewhere around Jerusalem. Wouldn't that be something? I'd be covered in customs stamps -- not pretty. We would laugh about it, have a beer, and then you would walk me to my car.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
The Bobo and Margarita -- Part 4
It started months ago, during a hail storm. But first, picture this. It's Christmas and there hasn't been any snow. The sky is a teasing, slate-gray and the air is perfectly still and freezing cold. Imagine yourself sitting by the window in a perfectly ordinary suburban home. It's quiet. You are alone. You watch the sky but your focus keeps shifting from the outside to the glass where you can see the reflection of Christmas tree lights blinking on and off at a tiresome pace. All the lights on the tree are blue, which feels more cold then festive, and the ticking of the clock refuses to match their silent beat. Nothing about this scene is warm. You shiver. The house is empty and the emptiness sucks at you. It presses against every object in the room like it's fighting for more space, more emptiness. Then it starts to get dark. You consider moving but what would be the point? To relocate ones self in the emptiness would only serve to reset the awareness meter. For a moment things might seem different, lighter, but once your bulk settles again, the process would begin again and there you would be, still taking up the same amount of space within the emptiness. So you stay by the window and watch it get dark. You watch the street below. It must be cold. Freezing even. The kind of cold that is void of life. A clean cold. It would be mad to open the window but that's what you do. You like the idea of a clean cold. You want to feel it just for a moment, because, well, you are closer to it now then you are to anything warm. To make it to something warm would take energy and effort, but the cold is so close so cleansing. You open the window.
It all started months ago. During a hail storm. I was at church. I go to church sometimes, not for any reason other then to be there, which up until recently I felt made me a bad person, a liar. But on the day of the hail storm, I saw something new. The church I go to, went to anyway, was very much like the one I grew up going to. Built in the seventies, drywall mixed with stained glass, a wholly unsatisfying attempt at churchiness encased within what essentially amounted to a cardboard box. There's a mural I like, and some pleasing sconces, but the pale peach walls take me out of character. Much like an actor in a period theme park or a shoddily put together Renaissance Fair, no matter how hard you blur your eyes, it just doesn't cut the mustard because it can't. There will always be an electrical outlet, or a kiosk, or a plastic rock formation to take you out of it. And of course, the tourists. I like my churches to be churches, I would find myself musing through the reading from Saint Paul according to John. I want my senses to be enveloped fully in the atmosphere of what it was selling, not put off or distracted by crappy carpeting, fluorescent lighting, or puckered ceiling tiles. It's a wonder the church doesn't think more about these things. We could wear costumes. Robes. In lieu of the authentic, an art director might just be a worthy investment to dial up the needed intimidation factor as bit. Add a smoke machine, candle light, but hey-ho, I just missed the whole reading thinking about interior design. A thought that led to the original thought about me not deserving to be there. But this day was different. People seemed different. No they weren't wearing robes, quite the opposite. They were regular people, just like me. And somehow I knew that while they might not have been thinking about turning the place into one of the set pieces from "The Bells of Saint Mary", they were thinking that they didn't belong. I immediately chalked this up to the hail. You could hear it tap, tap, tapping against the stained glass, against the roof. It must have been God pelting handfuls of frozen tears at our unrepentant souls, giving us a little scare. It felt dark outside even though it was mid-afternoon and when the time came for Communion, a practice I have sat out of since the eighth grade, something compelled me to rise and get in line with everyone else, for everyone in that church on that unusually dark afternoon, took Communion. Every last wide-eyed, embarrassed cynic from the bowels of Hollywood. We all rose and systematically ingested the body of Christ. Amen.
So you wanna hear the fantasy? It's like this. I go up to the priest and hold out my tongue. He places the Communion wafer in my mouth and says, "Body of Christ", to which I reply, "Amen". I drink the wine, and presumably the backwash of my fellow absolved, and as I'm walking back to my pew, I'm overtaken with a feeling of intense nausea. My body starts to wretch and I can feel my gut sucking at my entrails like a vacuum cleaner, pulling the sin from my body, all the infection, all the years of self abuse, all the pollutants, all the disease, all the weight, all the evil from wicked thoughts, to bad memories, to bad decisions, all the shit from life, either manifested by me or imposed on to me, into a black ball of writhing slime that forms in my stomach. I fall to the ground and feel the cool of the tiles on the side of my face and open my mouth. I'm like a fish gasping for air. My mind holds a single thought, mercy, and I wonder if I deserve it. I wonder as I feel the blackness descending, and then, I cough. Several more times as my face turns crimson, as someone has run off to call an ambulance, as the priest looks on in knowing horror, as mothers hide their children's eyes from the sight of me. I cough and out it comes. I breathe and look down. On the cheap mismatched tiles is everything wretched, everything impure everything that has weighed me down and now, I am free. I am light. I am with God. For now, I believe.
This is what it would take. The hail was not enough. For any of us.
I think I go to church for this fantasy. It's also why I like a church to be a church. Such a scene deserves a great setting. I took the Communion and felt queasy. I hadn't eaten yet that day and the wine was cheap, probably from a box. It made me sick and for a moment, just a moment...
You open the window. It's still outside but the cold hits you like a stone wall. You can't remember a time when you felt such cold. It almost makes you giddy. How insane. How fortunate that we live in a time where such elements can be controlled and kept at bay by a thin pane of polished sand. It's humbling. We ascribe so much power to things that don't exist and walk around ignoring, and often disrespecting, the power that holds our lives in its very hands everyday. The cold is that kind of power. The cold is right there, you can feel it. This cold can kill you, but it can also, maybe, absolve you. You stand and go to the door. You open it. In just your slippers and a nightgown you make your way through what feels like needles across the frozen lawn to the blacktop of the deserted street. You can no longer feel your face. You lie down. The warm soft parts of you are instantly grabbed by the dead cold ground, which seems to suck at what warmth you have left, a devilish purification, but nonetheless, what is happening is real. It's as real as that cardboard church is not. You open your mouth. Nothing comes out but steam and perhaps a Rhinemaiden or two, maybe a laugh, and as the process intensifies, you look up and notice that the blue lights of the coldest Christmas tree in creation are still blinking in the empty house, and you promise yourself to add some red ones next year.
It all started months ago. During a hail storm. I was at church. I go to church sometimes, not for any reason other then to be there, which up until recently I felt made me a bad person, a liar. But on the day of the hail storm, I saw something new. The church I go to, went to anyway, was very much like the one I grew up going to. Built in the seventies, drywall mixed with stained glass, a wholly unsatisfying attempt at churchiness encased within what essentially amounted to a cardboard box. There's a mural I like, and some pleasing sconces, but the pale peach walls take me out of character. Much like an actor in a period theme park or a shoddily put together Renaissance Fair, no matter how hard you blur your eyes, it just doesn't cut the mustard because it can't. There will always be an electrical outlet, or a kiosk, or a plastic rock formation to take you out of it. And of course, the tourists. I like my churches to be churches, I would find myself musing through the reading from Saint Paul according to John. I want my senses to be enveloped fully in the atmosphere of what it was selling, not put off or distracted by crappy carpeting, fluorescent lighting, or puckered ceiling tiles. It's a wonder the church doesn't think more about these things. We could wear costumes. Robes. In lieu of the authentic, an art director might just be a worthy investment to dial up the needed intimidation factor as bit. Add a smoke machine, candle light, but hey-ho, I just missed the whole reading thinking about interior design. A thought that led to the original thought about me not deserving to be there. But this day was different. People seemed different. No they weren't wearing robes, quite the opposite. They were regular people, just like me. And somehow I knew that while they might not have been thinking about turning the place into one of the set pieces from "The Bells of Saint Mary", they were thinking that they didn't belong. I immediately chalked this up to the hail. You could hear it tap, tap, tapping against the stained glass, against the roof. It must have been God pelting handfuls of frozen tears at our unrepentant souls, giving us a little scare. It felt dark outside even though it was mid-afternoon and when the time came for Communion, a practice I have sat out of since the eighth grade, something compelled me to rise and get in line with everyone else, for everyone in that church on that unusually dark afternoon, took Communion. Every last wide-eyed, embarrassed cynic from the bowels of Hollywood. We all rose and systematically ingested the body of Christ. Amen.
So you wanna hear the fantasy? It's like this. I go up to the priest and hold out my tongue. He places the Communion wafer in my mouth and says, "Body of Christ", to which I reply, "Amen". I drink the wine, and presumably the backwash of my fellow absolved, and as I'm walking back to my pew, I'm overtaken with a feeling of intense nausea. My body starts to wretch and I can feel my gut sucking at my entrails like a vacuum cleaner, pulling the sin from my body, all the infection, all the years of self abuse, all the pollutants, all the disease, all the weight, all the evil from wicked thoughts, to bad memories, to bad decisions, all the shit from life, either manifested by me or imposed on to me, into a black ball of writhing slime that forms in my stomach. I fall to the ground and feel the cool of the tiles on the side of my face and open my mouth. I'm like a fish gasping for air. My mind holds a single thought, mercy, and I wonder if I deserve it. I wonder as I feel the blackness descending, and then, I cough. Several more times as my face turns crimson, as someone has run off to call an ambulance, as the priest looks on in knowing horror, as mothers hide their children's eyes from the sight of me. I cough and out it comes. I breathe and look down. On the cheap mismatched tiles is everything wretched, everything impure everything that has weighed me down and now, I am free. I am light. I am with God. For now, I believe.
This is what it would take. The hail was not enough. For any of us.
I think I go to church for this fantasy. It's also why I like a church to be a church. Such a scene deserves a great setting. I took the Communion and felt queasy. I hadn't eaten yet that day and the wine was cheap, probably from a box. It made me sick and for a moment, just a moment...
You open the window. It's still outside but the cold hits you like a stone wall. You can't remember a time when you felt such cold. It almost makes you giddy. How insane. How fortunate that we live in a time where such elements can be controlled and kept at bay by a thin pane of polished sand. It's humbling. We ascribe so much power to things that don't exist and walk around ignoring, and often disrespecting, the power that holds our lives in its very hands everyday. The cold is that kind of power. The cold is right there, you can feel it. This cold can kill you, but it can also, maybe, absolve you. You stand and go to the door. You open it. In just your slippers and a nightgown you make your way through what feels like needles across the frozen lawn to the blacktop of the deserted street. You can no longer feel your face. You lie down. The warm soft parts of you are instantly grabbed by the dead cold ground, which seems to suck at what warmth you have left, a devilish purification, but nonetheless, what is happening is real. It's as real as that cardboard church is not. You open your mouth. Nothing comes out but steam and perhaps a Rhinemaiden or two, maybe a laugh, and as the process intensifies, you look up and notice that the blue lights of the coldest Christmas tree in creation are still blinking in the empty house, and you promise yourself to add some red ones next year.
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Bobo and Margarita -- Part 3
Oh where, oh where can my Bobo be? Oh where, oh where can he be?
Sometimes levity can be found in desperation. A little song, a little dance. Is the pain in my foot fading or increasing? Is life getting harder, here in the land between, or is the place itself rendering such questions mute? I was having a hard time. I see that now. It bubbled to the surface like the black goo of the La Brea tar pits. My God. It's a sad day when you realize that life has snared you. That you have become all the things that you swore to yourself you would never be. That your inner child has gotten old and that you are still ten years behind. And other sad cliches. But then, one day you find yourself wrapped in a particularly lucid dream. A dream where the tree bark is made of fine flaky chocolate, and you say to yourself, at least I have this. At least the trees are made of chocolate, because if they weren't, I might be tempted to jump off this cliff.
She was confused. That's my eulogy. It's also in the eye of the beholder. And I agree. For most of it, before it ended, before the walls came crushing in, I was confused. And as I sat there, sit here, (I forget what tense I was/am in), I could see quite clearly the confused person I had grown into. What does confusion do? Nothing. It does nothing. It gets by. It sits still. Afraid to move in any direction for fear that it might be the wrong one. It lets things happen to it, instead of doing things, anythings, for itself. It builds a prison with pretty walls, and good smells, and old chairs, and comfy blankets, and it keeps out the world. It observes. And inevitably, it longs. (Oh God, does it long...) And inevitably, it dies.
I sat on the precipice, feet dangling into the abyss and had this thought -- I have too much blood. I could feel it pounding in my ears, in my veins, and pulsing, not in my heart, but in my foot. Without Bobo, I was sure the end was near so I comforted myself with thoughts of proposals past. I had been proposed to seven times. Of the seven, one was in person, two were in writing, one was by phone, and three were by text. I accepted the first, but never made it to the wedding. Confusion saw to that. Confusion is a death sentence. I inched a bit closer to the edge, attempting to see through the fog. It sparkled. Who tempts sirens to their end, I wondered? The ghosts of dead sailors coaxing them onto land? Do they shimmy on their fish tales, into taverns and sushi joints looking for love, only to find they have gone too far inland? Have I shimmied in too far? Are my gills drying out?
"Tell me what to do," I said to the sparkling abyss, "lead me now, out of confusion and deliver me from evil, or into evil, anywhere. Just deliver me. Just lead me. Give me a rule. Something to follow."
It is a dangerous thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Oh, God...
"You're pathetic."
I turned so quickly that I almost killed myself by accident, but his strong, gloved hand saved me. Saint Peter. How I envied his clarity. He had gotten a jump on life. They all had, all the Saint Peters I had known.
"Bobo is missing. Please..."
I was tearing up looking at him. He was standing over me in his dirty suit, lies drying on the pant legs. He told me so many times that I was his one and only. And I probably was, in my universe anyway.
"Bobo's fine. He went after a squassum."
"A what?"
"Body of a possum, tail of a squirrel. Or is it the other way around?"
"Why?"
"They're irresistible to cats." Fey, nonchalant, sexy, as if he was smoking, but not.
"No, why did you do this to me?"
"Dulcinea..."
He called me that from time to time. Dulcinea. The princess of La Mancha. 'Her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare.' But he said it with sadness and a tinge of irony, making the slice in my leg hurt less by comparison. His feet crunched over the blades of sugared grass. He sat, elbows resting on his knees, on a tortoise shell, sans tortoise.
"You betrayed me, and it took the clarity of pain to show you just how much. There is a lesson here. You can stay and learn it or you can go back to your prison. Your choice. But remember, when your time ends and your body is planted in the ground, when your marble bosoms fall away and turns to mulch, you will stand in judgment before Me. The abyss that tempted you will become your new prison. You will fall. And you will never stop falling."
"You loved me once. How could you be so cruel?"
Saint Peter helped me to my knees and pulled me close. With his ever-gloved hands he traced the lines of my face and neck, mumbling Cervantes under his breath. I could feel him falling into me, his passions rising, his breath quickening.
"Dulcinea..."
I put my hands on his chest, strong and elusive, with no sign of a heartbeat. I could feel the pulsing in my heel and imagined it was coming from him. I inched my fingers toward his collar and the perfectly placed tie, both spotted with trace stains of lipstick, saliva, and the faint commingling scent of hundreds, upon hundreds, of different perfumes, post coital cigarettes, and late night hotel menu items. My fingers slid to his neck and made contact, flesh on flesh, for the first time. But before the touch could become a feel, he seized my wrists and pried them off, holding me at arms length, a fire in his eyes. For a moment I was sure I had just kissed my other Achilles heel goodbye. But he didn't harm me. He spoke.
"I never said I loved you."
And with that he returned me to the sticky ground and vanished.
I dozed. I licked at the grass, which tasted like lime soda. A drooled a little and languished in my thoughts. Ah, sweet confusion. Could I perhaps make a little decision? One to trick myself into thinking I was on an upward path? A psychiatrist once told me to imagine a ladder in the desert. What did it look like? How may rungs did it have? Mine was made of aluminum. It had six, no seven, rungs. It magically stood at a forty-five degree angle though there was nothing holding it up. What did it mean? But my hour was up. My hour was up. Lick, lime soda. My hour was up. Lick, lime soda.
"What the hell? Did you go retard?"
"Monkey?!"
Oh God, he was back. I couldn't help myself, I grabbed him and cuddled his fur. I cuddled it like it was going out of style. My monkey. My chicken. My little love.
"Okay. OKAY." He jumped down and shook me off, and I could tell he had a little cock in his walk.
"Never. Never. Never do that again. You scared the crap out of me, Bobo."
"It was worth it though. Look at this, mom."
He hopped over the tortoise shell like a baby lamb, and after a bit of a scramble, dragged the ugliest amalgamation of possum and squirrel that had ever been set upon with human eyes.
"Oh... Bobo... You caught yourself a squassum. Good boy."
"I caught it for you. You appreciate it, right? You're gonna eat it, right?"
In our past life, the one in which I did all the talking, Bobo would bring me gifts from time to time. I never had the heart to tell him that what he found to be the purest gesture of love and respect, I found to be completely nauseating. And looking into his two-tone eyes, so full of pride, I knew that I would have to afford taking Bobo the same courtsey.
"I love it. And I'm really gonna enjoy eating it later on."
Bobo straightened up and gave his front paws a satisfied licking. I decided to let him have his moment and revel in it before telling him about my little talk with Saint Peter. I wanted him to be in a good mood when I told him that I'd passed up a one way ticket home in favor of a quest.
Sometimes levity can be found in desperation. A little song, a little dance. Is the pain in my foot fading or increasing? Is life getting harder, here in the land between, or is the place itself rendering such questions mute? I was having a hard time. I see that now. It bubbled to the surface like the black goo of the La Brea tar pits. My God. It's a sad day when you realize that life has snared you. That you have become all the things that you swore to yourself you would never be. That your inner child has gotten old and that you are still ten years behind. And other sad cliches. But then, one day you find yourself wrapped in a particularly lucid dream. A dream where the tree bark is made of fine flaky chocolate, and you say to yourself, at least I have this. At least the trees are made of chocolate, because if they weren't, I might be tempted to jump off this cliff.
She was confused. That's my eulogy. It's also in the eye of the beholder. And I agree. For most of it, before it ended, before the walls came crushing in, I was confused. And as I sat there, sit here, (I forget what tense I was/am in), I could see quite clearly the confused person I had grown into. What does confusion do? Nothing. It does nothing. It gets by. It sits still. Afraid to move in any direction for fear that it might be the wrong one. It lets things happen to it, instead of doing things, anythings, for itself. It builds a prison with pretty walls, and good smells, and old chairs, and comfy blankets, and it keeps out the world. It observes. And inevitably, it longs. (Oh God, does it long...) And inevitably, it dies.
I sat on the precipice, feet dangling into the abyss and had this thought -- I have too much blood. I could feel it pounding in my ears, in my veins, and pulsing, not in my heart, but in my foot. Without Bobo, I was sure the end was near so I comforted myself with thoughts of proposals past. I had been proposed to seven times. Of the seven, one was in person, two were in writing, one was by phone, and three were by text. I accepted the first, but never made it to the wedding. Confusion saw to that. Confusion is a death sentence. I inched a bit closer to the edge, attempting to see through the fog. It sparkled. Who tempts sirens to their end, I wondered? The ghosts of dead sailors coaxing them onto land? Do they shimmy on their fish tales, into taverns and sushi joints looking for love, only to find they have gone too far inland? Have I shimmied in too far? Are my gills drying out?
"Tell me what to do," I said to the sparkling abyss, "lead me now, out of confusion and deliver me from evil, or into evil, anywhere. Just deliver me. Just lead me. Give me a rule. Something to follow."
It is a dangerous thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Oh, God...
"You're pathetic."
I turned so quickly that I almost killed myself by accident, but his strong, gloved hand saved me. Saint Peter. How I envied his clarity. He had gotten a jump on life. They all had, all the Saint Peters I had known.
"Bobo is missing. Please..."
I was tearing up looking at him. He was standing over me in his dirty suit, lies drying on the pant legs. He told me so many times that I was his one and only. And I probably was, in my universe anyway.
"Bobo's fine. He went after a squassum."
"A what?"
"Body of a possum, tail of a squirrel. Or is it the other way around?"
"Why?"
"They're irresistible to cats." Fey, nonchalant, sexy, as if he was smoking, but not.
"No, why did you do this to me?"
"Dulcinea..."
He called me that from time to time. Dulcinea. The princess of La Mancha. 'Her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare.' But he said it with sadness and a tinge of irony, making the slice in my leg hurt less by comparison. His feet crunched over the blades of sugared grass. He sat, elbows resting on his knees, on a tortoise shell, sans tortoise.
"You betrayed me, and it took the clarity of pain to show you just how much. There is a lesson here. You can stay and learn it or you can go back to your prison. Your choice. But remember, when your time ends and your body is planted in the ground, when your marble bosoms fall away and turns to mulch, you will stand in judgment before Me. The abyss that tempted you will become your new prison. You will fall. And you will never stop falling."
"You loved me once. How could you be so cruel?"
Saint Peter helped me to my knees and pulled me close. With his ever-gloved hands he traced the lines of my face and neck, mumbling Cervantes under his breath. I could feel him falling into me, his passions rising, his breath quickening.
"Dulcinea..."
I put my hands on his chest, strong and elusive, with no sign of a heartbeat. I could feel the pulsing in my heel and imagined it was coming from him. I inched my fingers toward his collar and the perfectly placed tie, both spotted with trace stains of lipstick, saliva, and the faint commingling scent of hundreds, upon hundreds, of different perfumes, post coital cigarettes, and late night hotel menu items. My fingers slid to his neck and made contact, flesh on flesh, for the first time. But before the touch could become a feel, he seized my wrists and pried them off, holding me at arms length, a fire in his eyes. For a moment I was sure I had just kissed my other Achilles heel goodbye. But he didn't harm me. He spoke.
"I never said I loved you."
And with that he returned me to the sticky ground and vanished.
I dozed. I licked at the grass, which tasted like lime soda. A drooled a little and languished in my thoughts. Ah, sweet confusion. Could I perhaps make a little decision? One to trick myself into thinking I was on an upward path? A psychiatrist once told me to imagine a ladder in the desert. What did it look like? How may rungs did it have? Mine was made of aluminum. It had six, no seven, rungs. It magically stood at a forty-five degree angle though there was nothing holding it up. What did it mean? But my hour was up. My hour was up. Lick, lime soda. My hour was up. Lick, lime soda.
"What the hell? Did you go retard?"
"Monkey?!"
Oh God, he was back. I couldn't help myself, I grabbed him and cuddled his fur. I cuddled it like it was going out of style. My monkey. My chicken. My little love.
"Okay. OKAY." He jumped down and shook me off, and I could tell he had a little cock in his walk.
"Never. Never. Never do that again. You scared the crap out of me, Bobo."
"It was worth it though. Look at this, mom."
He hopped over the tortoise shell like a baby lamb, and after a bit of a scramble, dragged the ugliest amalgamation of possum and squirrel that had ever been set upon with human eyes.
"Oh... Bobo... You caught yourself a squassum. Good boy."
"I caught it for you. You appreciate it, right? You're gonna eat it, right?"
In our past life, the one in which I did all the talking, Bobo would bring me gifts from time to time. I never had the heart to tell him that what he found to be the purest gesture of love and respect, I found to be completely nauseating. And looking into his two-tone eyes, so full of pride, I knew that I would have to afford taking Bobo the same courtsey.
"I love it. And I'm really gonna enjoy eating it later on."
Bobo straightened up and gave his front paws a satisfied licking. I decided to let him have his moment and revel in it before telling him about my little talk with Saint Peter. I wanted him to be in a good mood when I told him that I'd passed up a one way ticket home in favor of a quest.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The Bobo and Margarita -- Part 2
In my dream, my foot was stuck in a crusher. I was on a conveyor belt with hundreds of beekless chicks. My foot, the bad foot, had jammed the machine but the conveyor was still operational, delivering a seemingly endless amount of fuzzy, yellow, baby chickens my way, and then, for some reason, doughnuts. I remember being happy as I watched in excruciating pain while the chicks nibbled on the doughnuts rather then meeting their violent end, ground up into God knows what, until I had the horrible realization that the doughnuts were made from the ground up chicks. Soilent Doughnut. It made no sense. It was pure horror, not reason. But terrifying nonetheless. I retched. I woke up. The purple sky was gone.
My heel still throbbed. It would for some time, I imagined. I tried to recall all I had learned about pain management from my days as an erotic pain management consultant, but nothing prepared me for this. This was not the kind of pain that could be managed. There would be no channeling this through my Kundalini. No pushing it down through my core into the pubic knot. No using it as an outlet for stifled emotions. No crying it out. No orgasming through it. No. This was the kind of pain that required the good drugs. This was a war injury. I was afraid to look at it. It felt as if the bottom of my calf muscle had begun to roll up towards my knee. I was sure that's what was happening, and expected to see a chambered nautilus made of muscle crawling slowly up the back of my leg, bone exposed in it's wake, a lost heel dangling somewhere below. But when I did look, all I saw was a foot, poorly wrapped in blood soaked paper towels, resting on a small hill of sand.
Where the hell was that cat? How had we gotten to a beach? I lifted my head again and scanned the sand for paw prints. There were several. And one fresh set leading towards the water. Bobo. I scanned the coastline for signs of him. Nothing. The mother in me worried. My baby pie, where was he? Then I saw something pink. He ran towards me at an alarming speed, shaking and cursing as he came.
"What's wrong with that water? Damn it. Damn it to hell."
Bobo sat in the sand and started licking himself, then he cursed again and made a funny cat-who-has-mistakenly-licked-the-peanut-butter face. He was pink, wet, and covered in sand. He looked hilariously adorable.
"What happened, Monks?"
"I was trying to wash the blood out of my fur, okay?"
I could see why he was tempted to try. The water was a crystal blue azure and calm as a mirror. If I hadn't been so thoroughly fucked, I would have run for it myself. The beach was hot, the sand scorching.
"But cat's hate water. Why didn't you just clean yourself like normal?"
"I thought I'd try something new. Is that such a crime?"
He was being pissy.
"Nope. Not a crime at all. I'm proud of you."
"Well, that water tastes terrible."
"It's salt water, Boo."
"Why the hell did they put salt in it? Jeez..."
He kept on with the licking and spitting. I guess talking Bobo, much like regular Bobo, hadn't ever been to the ocean.
"Listen, Monkey, how did we get here?"
"You passed out again. That little girl, the one in the party dress, she and her evil cohorts ran out of things to fling with that catapult and decided on us. I was too small to stop her, but gave her a few nice scratches for her effort before she counted down from three and sent us sailing. Look around."
The beach was indeed spotted with all my worldly possessions. My dresser, or parts of my dresser, was being gently lapped by the surf, and the ugly chair bobbed about thirty yards out to sea. My lamp had gotten tangled in a bright blue banana tree, and books, scripts, and papers occupied a fifty yard radius up the beach a ways like a an emergency library drop gone horribly awry.
"We fell from the sky?"
Bobo the independent, allowed me to wipe down his fur with my sweater, which I had taken off due to the increasing heat. He pretended not to enjoy it.
"That was the strange thing. We sailed through the air for a long while, but didn't quite land. The altitude knocked me out too, and when I came around, we were here. I found the kitchen stuff. There are cans, and some of your food seems to have made it too. I suggest you pull it together and pack a bag so we can get out of here."
"And go where?"
"To confront your lover, mother. Wherever he may be."
We needed a plan. The sun was rising in the sky making it next to impossible to think, but I managed to make a list of all the things I needed Bobo to find, the first being a small bottle of Vicodin. It took him at least a half an hour of nasty metaphors, but eventually he did find the pink striped bag in which I kept all my toiletries. The pill bottle was there, and though it only contained three precious Vicodin, it would be enough to get me through the day. I disinfected my wound with some peroxide and wrapped it up tightly with gauze. Bobo had to bite my arm to keep me from passing out again, but once the clean bandage was in place, and the drugs started to take hold, I felt ready to move, or wade rather, through the cottony haze of pharmaceutical bliss.
We packed a bag with cat food cans, power bars, water bottles, and bruised-by-catapult fruit. I took along a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, a book I had promised myself I'd finish reading before dying, which, by the looks of things could be sooner then I thought, a few more first aid supplies, and a half-empty bottle of vodka for when the Vicodin ran out. I threw in a tin of cat nip in case Bobo really started to get on my nerves, a few clean pairs of underwear, and a blanket with a poem about daughters knitted into it that my mother had given me for Christmas. A piece of drift wood served as a walking stick, and slowly, Bobo and I made for the wall of blue banana tress separating the beach from the technicolor jungle.
We walked for a while through a Dr. Seuss fantasy. A spongy, hot-pink ground sprouted with blue and orange trees, some of which grew upside down. Bobo, being color blind and not particularly interested in flora, couldn't care less, but I was on painkillers and found it all terribly entertaining.
"It makes so much sense now," I said to Bobo as we navigated a clearing of green flowers with yellow stems, "Saint Peter hid his whimsy. He didn't even bother to undress when he fucked me, remember that?"
"You think I'm watching, but I'm not," Bobo quipped in a tone that implied pity for my inebriated state.
"He didn't!" I could sense I was revealing too much, but felt helpless to stop myself. "He would let himself in while I was sleeping, pull back the covers, whip it out, and do me. It was that way every time, remember?"
"Nope."
"It was so sad. I mean it was hot, I found it hot, but now that I think about it, it was so... sad."
"LALALALALA..."
"I never felt his hands on my flesh. Or mine on his. He wore gloves, and had that dirty suit of his buttoned all the way up to his collar. I never dared touch his face. That would have been too intimate. I felt him inside me, but I never touched him. Isn't that sad? Then, when he was done (he was always so quiet when he came, like thunder rolling over a neighboring town when the afternoon is deathly still and humid), he would rumble, rumble above me while he shot into me. I know it wasn't normal. It didn't feel normal. It felt like knowledge. Like a liquid thought that had the ability to pass through the usual fleshy barriers and make its way to my spinal fluid. Then it would travel up into my brain and deposit a thought. 'You're mine', it would say, 'my possession, my property, my easy earth girl.' And I see it now. He did it all for me. What if all this weird beauty is really him and he was too afraid to show it? What if he appeared to me the way he did, all leathery and cool, because he wanted to make me happy? Bobo?"
I stopped under a blood red tree with Swarovski crystal leaves and scanned the area.
"Bobo!"
Ahead there was what looked to be another clearing and I made my way towards it screaming his name at the top of my lungs. What a mess, I thought. Just like me to spread my damage and confusion over a situation like spicy jalapeno jelly and alienate everyone I touch. But not Bobo. Not my pure little man. My sweet little guy, my innocent. The only living proof that I'm not a complete fuck up. Bobo; well behaved independent, polite, sweet, and gone.
I limped my way over fallen crystal leaves, which crushed under foot like thin panes of sugar towards the white hot sky. But it wasn't a clearing I found when I got there. It was a cliff. And below, for miles, there was nothing.
My heel still throbbed. It would for some time, I imagined. I tried to recall all I had learned about pain management from my days as an erotic pain management consultant, but nothing prepared me for this. This was not the kind of pain that could be managed. There would be no channeling this through my Kundalini. No pushing it down through my core into the pubic knot. No using it as an outlet for stifled emotions. No crying it out. No orgasming through it. No. This was the kind of pain that required the good drugs. This was a war injury. I was afraid to look at it. It felt as if the bottom of my calf muscle had begun to roll up towards my knee. I was sure that's what was happening, and expected to see a chambered nautilus made of muscle crawling slowly up the back of my leg, bone exposed in it's wake, a lost heel dangling somewhere below. But when I did look, all I saw was a foot, poorly wrapped in blood soaked paper towels, resting on a small hill of sand.
Where the hell was that cat? How had we gotten to a beach? I lifted my head again and scanned the sand for paw prints. There were several. And one fresh set leading towards the water. Bobo. I scanned the coastline for signs of him. Nothing. The mother in me worried. My baby pie, where was he? Then I saw something pink. He ran towards me at an alarming speed, shaking and cursing as he came.
"What's wrong with that water? Damn it. Damn it to hell."
Bobo sat in the sand and started licking himself, then he cursed again and made a funny cat-who-has-mistakenly-licked-the-peanut-butter face. He was pink, wet, and covered in sand. He looked hilariously adorable.
"What happened, Monks?"
"I was trying to wash the blood out of my fur, okay?"
I could see why he was tempted to try. The water was a crystal blue azure and calm as a mirror. If I hadn't been so thoroughly fucked, I would have run for it myself. The beach was hot, the sand scorching.
"But cat's hate water. Why didn't you just clean yourself like normal?"
"I thought I'd try something new. Is that such a crime?"
He was being pissy.
"Nope. Not a crime at all. I'm proud of you."
"Well, that water tastes terrible."
"It's salt water, Boo."
"Why the hell did they put salt in it? Jeez..."
He kept on with the licking and spitting. I guess talking Bobo, much like regular Bobo, hadn't ever been to the ocean.
"Listen, Monkey, how did we get here?"
"You passed out again. That little girl, the one in the party dress, she and her evil cohorts ran out of things to fling with that catapult and decided on us. I was too small to stop her, but gave her a few nice scratches for her effort before she counted down from three and sent us sailing. Look around."
The beach was indeed spotted with all my worldly possessions. My dresser, or parts of my dresser, was being gently lapped by the surf, and the ugly chair bobbed about thirty yards out to sea. My lamp had gotten tangled in a bright blue banana tree, and books, scripts, and papers occupied a fifty yard radius up the beach a ways like a an emergency library drop gone horribly awry.
"We fell from the sky?"
Bobo the independent, allowed me to wipe down his fur with my sweater, which I had taken off due to the increasing heat. He pretended not to enjoy it.
"That was the strange thing. We sailed through the air for a long while, but didn't quite land. The altitude knocked me out too, and when I came around, we were here. I found the kitchen stuff. There are cans, and some of your food seems to have made it too. I suggest you pull it together and pack a bag so we can get out of here."
"And go where?"
"To confront your lover, mother. Wherever he may be."
We needed a plan. The sun was rising in the sky making it next to impossible to think, but I managed to make a list of all the things I needed Bobo to find, the first being a small bottle of Vicodin. It took him at least a half an hour of nasty metaphors, but eventually he did find the pink striped bag in which I kept all my toiletries. The pill bottle was there, and though it only contained three precious Vicodin, it would be enough to get me through the day. I disinfected my wound with some peroxide and wrapped it up tightly with gauze. Bobo had to bite my arm to keep me from passing out again, but once the clean bandage was in place, and the drugs started to take hold, I felt ready to move, or wade rather, through the cottony haze of pharmaceutical bliss.
We packed a bag with cat food cans, power bars, water bottles, and bruised-by-catapult fruit. I took along a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, a book I had promised myself I'd finish reading before dying, which, by the looks of things could be sooner then I thought, a few more first aid supplies, and a half-empty bottle of vodka for when the Vicodin ran out. I threw in a tin of cat nip in case Bobo really started to get on my nerves, a few clean pairs of underwear, and a blanket with a poem about daughters knitted into it that my mother had given me for Christmas. A piece of drift wood served as a walking stick, and slowly, Bobo and I made for the wall of blue banana tress separating the beach from the technicolor jungle.
We walked for a while through a Dr. Seuss fantasy. A spongy, hot-pink ground sprouted with blue and orange trees, some of which grew upside down. Bobo, being color blind and not particularly interested in flora, couldn't care less, but I was on painkillers and found it all terribly entertaining.
"It makes so much sense now," I said to Bobo as we navigated a clearing of green flowers with yellow stems, "Saint Peter hid his whimsy. He didn't even bother to undress when he fucked me, remember that?"
"You think I'm watching, but I'm not," Bobo quipped in a tone that implied pity for my inebriated state.
"He didn't!" I could sense I was revealing too much, but felt helpless to stop myself. "He would let himself in while I was sleeping, pull back the covers, whip it out, and do me. It was that way every time, remember?"
"Nope."
"It was so sad. I mean it was hot, I found it hot, but now that I think about it, it was so... sad."
"LALALALALA..."
"I never felt his hands on my flesh. Or mine on his. He wore gloves, and had that dirty suit of his buttoned all the way up to his collar. I never dared touch his face. That would have been too intimate. I felt him inside me, but I never touched him. Isn't that sad? Then, when he was done (he was always so quiet when he came, like thunder rolling over a neighboring town when the afternoon is deathly still and humid), he would rumble, rumble above me while he shot into me. I know it wasn't normal. It didn't feel normal. It felt like knowledge. Like a liquid thought that had the ability to pass through the usual fleshy barriers and make its way to my spinal fluid. Then it would travel up into my brain and deposit a thought. 'You're mine', it would say, 'my possession, my property, my easy earth girl.' And I see it now. He did it all for me. What if all this weird beauty is really him and he was too afraid to show it? What if he appeared to me the way he did, all leathery and cool, because he wanted to make me happy? Bobo?"
I stopped under a blood red tree with Swarovski crystal leaves and scanned the area.
"Bobo!"
Ahead there was what looked to be another clearing and I made my way towards it screaming his name at the top of my lungs. What a mess, I thought. Just like me to spread my damage and confusion over a situation like spicy jalapeno jelly and alienate everyone I touch. But not Bobo. Not my pure little man. My sweet little guy, my innocent. The only living proof that I'm not a complete fuck up. Bobo; well behaved independent, polite, sweet, and gone.
I limped my way over fallen crystal leaves, which crushed under foot like thin panes of sugar towards the white hot sky. But it wasn't a clearing I found when I got there. It was a cliff. And below, for miles, there was nothing.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The Bobo and Margarita -- Part 1
In vile confirmation of all my worst fears, I seem to find myself, once again, in purgatory. This is not a metaphor. It is a whole truth that spans eons and stops only when the very basic parts of the thing start to break down. The cell walls of all involved would have to crack and spill their atoms and protons and neurons all over the floorboards in order to erase the truth of what I'm about to tell you. So bare with me as I relate to you this horror story with the fear and reverence it deserves, lest I shatter anymore bones, lest I pop my other Achilles' heel, for contrary to popular belief, pain and purgatory are not mutually exclusive. In fact, pain is increased seven-hundred fold in the land between. The moment of inception repeats over and over again, stuck mercilessly in a groove. Imagine stubbing your toe every five seconds for a billion years. Imagine drowning one-hundred times a day, forever. Imagine that while you listen to my tale.
I was sitting in my room in a large decorative chair that I bought for twenty-five dollars at the Salvation Army. When you enter my room, the smell is familiar. It smells of burnt corn tortilla shells and floral perfume. It smells of a leaky gas oven and of cigarette smoke, and occasionally of sex, cat hair, and basement. This conglomerate of smells gives it a sort of character. It's not the kind of place you'd want to spend any significant amount of time in due to its low ceiling and its oppressive, postage-stamp size. Sad that we found it charming once. Like a tomb of ancient Egypt it is stocked floor to oppressive ceiling, with cheap, worthless belongings. Neglect coats them in much the way that a greasy head leaning against a train window coats the glass with oil and sebum. In some cultures the objects inhabiting this room would be burnt for fuel or used to test catapults. The chair for example. The chair is a monstrosity. Probably liberated from a funeral home or the lobby of a motel or gentleman's club, half of its weight is most likey sweat and dust mites alone. And that was before the blood.
In it I sat, smoking a cigarette, blowing my exhale past the African Violets and out the window. That's where I was the night I got my last visit from Saint Peter. I can't exactly say I was happy to see him, or him me. Contrary to popular belief, Saint Peter isn't a kindly old man in a white robe with a ledger, he usually wears a black suit spotted with suspicious stains. His nose looks as if it has been broken several times over, and his skin is all leathery and scared. Still, he has a kind of animallistic charm that makes my heart flutter ever so slightly in it's ribby cage when he shows up in my room. This, in turn, makes my breasts swell and all the other pertinent parts of me light up like a ping-pong machine after a perfectly deployed ball. Sometimes we make love. He likes to talk dirty. But tonight he came by to snap my Achilles' tendon and send me to purgatory.
I knew it was coming. Usually, when acts of such intentional violence are coming at you with a scythe, you can narrow them down to a specific set of circumstances that put the whole bloody thing into motion. I was thinking about my transgressions as he leaned into me and reached down, grabbed me between the legs, and lifted my whole body onto the bed. For a second I thought he might want to be intimate, but with one quick move he grabbed my right leg out of its sock monkey slipper, hugged it to his chest and with a small, curved, silver blade, pressed with all his might against the rubbery tendon. I felt it sever and snap, and blacked out immediately from the pain. When I woke up he would be gone.
Bobo roused me what must have been just a few minutes later, because I was still bleeding profusely. He was doing his best to wrap my foot with paper towels, but without opposeable thumbs he's pretty much useless when it comes to first aid. His white fur was soaked with blood and the mother in me was immediately worried. What if Saint Peter had hurt him after I passed out.
"Monkey, are you okay?" I gasped through the most intense pain I have ever felt.
"I'm fine. Jesus. Why didn't you call me?"
"You're a cat. You never come when I call."
"Yes, not usually, because all you want to do is fuss over me. When it's important I know." He shook the bloody paper towel from his paw and wiped it on the bed. "This is madness, you know that right?"
"Maybe you should go get help. I'll be okay."
"Go where exactly?"
"I don't know, Giselle's house. Remember that time I sent you over to help her change that light bulb?"
Bobo rolled his eyes, jumped down off the bed, and pulled back the curtains using the top of his head.
"We're not in Echo Park anymore, ma."
I lifted my head and looked out the window. He was right. We weren't in Echo Park anymore. We were somewhere else. We were in a place that over the past few weeks Bobo and I have dubbed "Limbo."
"It looks like a Salvador Dail painting out there," I said, but I was just being pretentious. It looked more like Palm Springs. Or Mars.
Bobo jumped down and started pacing, leaving little bloody foot prints on the floor. I was going to tell him to watch the rug, but what did it matter now? The bed and the chair were soaked through and the pain in my leg was starting to send me off again into the soothing nothingness of the unconscious.
"Don't you pass out on me," Bobo snapped, "you know I can't open those cans myself."
"I'm bleeding to death and all you can think about is your stomach?"
He jumped up onto the kitchen counter.
"I can't turn the faucet on either and I'll be damned if I have to drink from that bowl, I swear to..."
He got all quiet for a moment.
"Are you thirsty?"
"I wasn't. I was just proving a point. But now that I'm up here... Yes. Sorta."
"I'm sorry, kid."
"Well, you should be. I knew you shouldn't have gotten mixed up with that guy. He was bad news from the start. You had me fixed when I was a kitten, maybe you should have taken some of your own genius advice and tied that mess up before it was too late."
"I didn't declaw you."
"If you had, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"We've never had a conversation. You're a cat. I'm assuming this is all a pain related hallucination."
He jumped down from the kitchen counter like a flash, up onto the bed, and perched on my chest.
"Listen to me and listen good. I'm all you got right now and I think we can get out of this but I need you to do exactly as I say, okay?"
"Sure."
"Don't be sarcastic."
"Yes. Sure. Okay," I said with enough conviction to get him off my case. "Why don't you ever sleep on my lap like a normal cat?"
"You smell weird."
"Fair enough."
"Now get your laptop out. I need you to set the cursor on scroll so I can go through all the emails you exchanged with Saint Peter just by pressing my paw on the mouse."
"You can read?"
"Just do it. Then do your best to wrap that foot as tight as you can. We're gonna have to leave here eventually and I need you mobile."
I did as I was told. I assumed without saying that the pain had caused my personality to split in two. The rational leader in me had taken refuge away from the pain and manifested itself in my cat Bobo, while the passive part of me stayed put and took orders. It sort of made sense. Now if I could only figure out why the sky outside was dripping purple, I would be one step closer to figuring a way out of this.
Bobo stared at the screen, pressing his little paw down every few seconds as months of emails with Saintpeter_101 went scrolling by.
"People amaze me," he mused as I carefully wrapped my foot, "he told you who he was. He told you what he would do to you if you told, but you did anyway. Why?"
"Um, I don't know Bobo, because there is no Angel of Death and cat's can't talk, maybe?"
"Maybe. He says here, that if you ever tell anyone what you know about him he will 'come to your house, hobble you,' which I assume is what has happened here, 'and throw you into the land between, which is neither death or living, just a sock hanging on a clothes line in the unfathomable infinite.'"
"I thought he was putting me on."
"How about when he says, 'this is real. I'm not putting you on. You don't know how lonely it can get being immortal, I have a hard time finding someone I can trust,' etc, etc, how about that?"
"Whatever. Now what?"
"Well, it's his realm and I don't think you can die... we have to go find him and you have to beg for forgiveness."
"He practically cut my foot off! And I have to beg forgiveness?"
Just then the walls started to shake and rattle like an earthquake. Glass began to break and plaster to crumble.
"Come on, we have to get out of here!"
Bobo lept out the bathroom window just as it collapsed in a pile of rubble. I dragged myself to the door and hopped up on my good leg to open it. The rush of blood to my foot sent my head reeling and I almost passed out again.
"Come on, mom! You can do it!" I looked out the glass panel in the door to see Bobo sitting on his hind legs waving me over. He looked so cute I wanted to wear his little face as a hat, so I reached my arm through the broken glass and opened the door from the outside, swinging my body around and hopping 10 or so feet to safety. I looked back and saw my room standing crypt-like sans the house it once was part of. It was being demolished by huge yellow trucks being operated by little girls in party dresses. One of them saw Bobo and approached with eager trepidation.
"Is he friendly," the little girl asked?
Bobo instinctively rolled onto his back, a move which seemed vulgar now that he could talk. The little girl took his cue and rubbed him to the point of purring.
"What's her name?"
"Bobo. He's a boy. Why are you and your friends destroying my house?"
"Uncle Peter told us to," Bobo was drooling now, off somewhere in kitty euphoria, the girl's words were lost on him. "And we need more stuff to test the catapult."
I was sitting in my room in a large decorative chair that I bought for twenty-five dollars at the Salvation Army. When you enter my room, the smell is familiar. It smells of burnt corn tortilla shells and floral perfume. It smells of a leaky gas oven and of cigarette smoke, and occasionally of sex, cat hair, and basement. This conglomerate of smells gives it a sort of character. It's not the kind of place you'd want to spend any significant amount of time in due to its low ceiling and its oppressive, postage-stamp size. Sad that we found it charming once. Like a tomb of ancient Egypt it is stocked floor to oppressive ceiling, with cheap, worthless belongings. Neglect coats them in much the way that a greasy head leaning against a train window coats the glass with oil and sebum. In some cultures the objects inhabiting this room would be burnt for fuel or used to test catapults. The chair for example. The chair is a monstrosity. Probably liberated from a funeral home or the lobby of a motel or gentleman's club, half of its weight is most likey sweat and dust mites alone. And that was before the blood.
In it I sat, smoking a cigarette, blowing my exhale past the African Violets and out the window. That's where I was the night I got my last visit from Saint Peter. I can't exactly say I was happy to see him, or him me. Contrary to popular belief, Saint Peter isn't a kindly old man in a white robe with a ledger, he usually wears a black suit spotted with suspicious stains. His nose looks as if it has been broken several times over, and his skin is all leathery and scared. Still, he has a kind of animallistic charm that makes my heart flutter ever so slightly in it's ribby cage when he shows up in my room. This, in turn, makes my breasts swell and all the other pertinent parts of me light up like a ping-pong machine after a perfectly deployed ball. Sometimes we make love. He likes to talk dirty. But tonight he came by to snap my Achilles' tendon and send me to purgatory.
I knew it was coming. Usually, when acts of such intentional violence are coming at you with a scythe, you can narrow them down to a specific set of circumstances that put the whole bloody thing into motion. I was thinking about my transgressions as he leaned into me and reached down, grabbed me between the legs, and lifted my whole body onto the bed. For a second I thought he might want to be intimate, but with one quick move he grabbed my right leg out of its sock monkey slipper, hugged it to his chest and with a small, curved, silver blade, pressed with all his might against the rubbery tendon. I felt it sever and snap, and blacked out immediately from the pain. When I woke up he would be gone.
Bobo roused me what must have been just a few minutes later, because I was still bleeding profusely. He was doing his best to wrap my foot with paper towels, but without opposeable thumbs he's pretty much useless when it comes to first aid. His white fur was soaked with blood and the mother in me was immediately worried. What if Saint Peter had hurt him after I passed out.
"Monkey, are you okay?" I gasped through the most intense pain I have ever felt.
"I'm fine. Jesus. Why didn't you call me?"
"You're a cat. You never come when I call."
"Yes, not usually, because all you want to do is fuss over me. When it's important I know." He shook the bloody paper towel from his paw and wiped it on the bed. "This is madness, you know that right?"
"Maybe you should go get help. I'll be okay."
"Go where exactly?"
"I don't know, Giselle's house. Remember that time I sent you over to help her change that light bulb?"
Bobo rolled his eyes, jumped down off the bed, and pulled back the curtains using the top of his head.
"We're not in Echo Park anymore, ma."
I lifted my head and looked out the window. He was right. We weren't in Echo Park anymore. We were somewhere else. We were in a place that over the past few weeks Bobo and I have dubbed "Limbo."
"It looks like a Salvador Dail painting out there," I said, but I was just being pretentious. It looked more like Palm Springs. Or Mars.
Bobo jumped down and started pacing, leaving little bloody foot prints on the floor. I was going to tell him to watch the rug, but what did it matter now? The bed and the chair were soaked through and the pain in my leg was starting to send me off again into the soothing nothingness of the unconscious.
"Don't you pass out on me," Bobo snapped, "you know I can't open those cans myself."
"I'm bleeding to death and all you can think about is your stomach?"
He jumped up onto the kitchen counter.
"I can't turn the faucet on either and I'll be damned if I have to drink from that bowl, I swear to..."
He got all quiet for a moment.
"Are you thirsty?"
"I wasn't. I was just proving a point. But now that I'm up here... Yes. Sorta."
"I'm sorry, kid."
"Well, you should be. I knew you shouldn't have gotten mixed up with that guy. He was bad news from the start. You had me fixed when I was a kitten, maybe you should have taken some of your own genius advice and tied that mess up before it was too late."
"I didn't declaw you."
"If you had, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"We've never had a conversation. You're a cat. I'm assuming this is all a pain related hallucination."
He jumped down from the kitchen counter like a flash, up onto the bed, and perched on my chest.
"Listen to me and listen good. I'm all you got right now and I think we can get out of this but I need you to do exactly as I say, okay?"
"Sure."
"Don't be sarcastic."
"Yes. Sure. Okay," I said with enough conviction to get him off my case. "Why don't you ever sleep on my lap like a normal cat?"
"You smell weird."
"Fair enough."
"Now get your laptop out. I need you to set the cursor on scroll so I can go through all the emails you exchanged with Saint Peter just by pressing my paw on the mouse."
"You can read?"
"Just do it. Then do your best to wrap that foot as tight as you can. We're gonna have to leave here eventually and I need you mobile."
I did as I was told. I assumed without saying that the pain had caused my personality to split in two. The rational leader in me had taken refuge away from the pain and manifested itself in my cat Bobo, while the passive part of me stayed put and took orders. It sort of made sense. Now if I could only figure out why the sky outside was dripping purple, I would be one step closer to figuring a way out of this.
Bobo stared at the screen, pressing his little paw down every few seconds as months of emails with Saintpeter_101 went scrolling by.
"People amaze me," he mused as I carefully wrapped my foot, "he told you who he was. He told you what he would do to you if you told, but you did anyway. Why?"
"Um, I don't know Bobo, because there is no Angel of Death and cat's can't talk, maybe?"
"Maybe. He says here, that if you ever tell anyone what you know about him he will 'come to your house, hobble you,' which I assume is what has happened here, 'and throw you into the land between, which is neither death or living, just a sock hanging on a clothes line in the unfathomable infinite.'"
"I thought he was putting me on."
"How about when he says, 'this is real. I'm not putting you on. You don't know how lonely it can get being immortal, I have a hard time finding someone I can trust,' etc, etc, how about that?"
"Whatever. Now what?"
"Well, it's his realm and I don't think you can die... we have to go find him and you have to beg for forgiveness."
"He practically cut my foot off! And I have to beg forgiveness?"
Just then the walls started to shake and rattle like an earthquake. Glass began to break and plaster to crumble.
"Come on, we have to get out of here!"
Bobo lept out the bathroom window just as it collapsed in a pile of rubble. I dragged myself to the door and hopped up on my good leg to open it. The rush of blood to my foot sent my head reeling and I almost passed out again.
"Come on, mom! You can do it!" I looked out the glass panel in the door to see Bobo sitting on his hind legs waving me over. He looked so cute I wanted to wear his little face as a hat, so I reached my arm through the broken glass and opened the door from the outside, swinging my body around and hopping 10 or so feet to safety. I looked back and saw my room standing crypt-like sans the house it once was part of. It was being demolished by huge yellow trucks being operated by little girls in party dresses. One of them saw Bobo and approached with eager trepidation.
"Is he friendly," the little girl asked?
Bobo instinctively rolled onto his back, a move which seemed vulgar now that he could talk. The little girl took his cue and rubbed him to the point of purring.
"What's her name?"
"Bobo. He's a boy. Why are you and your friends destroying my house?"
"Uncle Peter told us to," Bobo was drooling now, off somewhere in kitty euphoria, the girl's words were lost on him. "And we need more stuff to test the catapult."
Love Poem
I found my perfect lover, but there's something you should know.
He beats me every morning, and fills my boots with snow.
He locks me in the woodshed, rubs thistles in my hair,
He strips me of my garments, and leaves me naked bare.
He ties me to the bed post, feeds my dinner to the cat,
He tells me filthy stories, of an Irishman called Pat.
He's not what you'd call handsome, he's ugly as a stump.
But he holds me in the night, curled up heavy on my rump.
I found my perfect lover, this I know is true,
I found my perfect lover, O my lover, it is you.
He beats me every morning, and fills my boots with snow.
He locks me in the woodshed, rubs thistles in my hair,
He strips me of my garments, and leaves me naked bare.
He ties me to the bed post, feeds my dinner to the cat,
He tells me filthy stories, of an Irishman called Pat.
He's not what you'd call handsome, he's ugly as a stump.
But he holds me in the night, curled up heavy on my rump.
I found my perfect lover, this I know is true,
I found my perfect lover, O my lover, it is you.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles...
Fucking ellipses...
Happy daylight savings time to all, here and abroad. What does it mean? I'll tell you what it means. It means I have an hour to write to you before my regularly scheduled bedtime of 5am-ish. It's only 4 right now and until I'm used to it, I can kick back and enjoy the fall back in time. I don't like to diary-blog. It's boring, so I hardly ever do it. My brain moves faster then my fingers and I tend to just kind of toss my thoughts in a lumpy pile. That's an odd confession for a self-proclaimed writer, isn't it? To admit the fact that I don't write that often is sad, but I don't. Anymore. I remember a time when I would stay up all night perving around in the lizard brain like a scavenger in a junk yard, picking things from dirty piles and rearranging them to suit my needs. To decorate my cardboard box, or whatever project I happened to be working on at the moment, but not anymore. I dread The Stack, you see.
Under my broken TV with the disconnected cable box, behind the pile of random DVDs, and give-away CDs, a hole punch, and a ceramic cat, lies "The Stack". It's a wretched collection of pages about 20 inches in height. It is, give or take, everything I have ever written. I can't honestly say it's collecting dust, because dust doesn't really get back there. It's beyond the reach of dust, in a kind of vacuum.
I was at Target today PMSing my tits off. My body was coursing with organic chemicals, nasty, malevolent, baby making chemicals, that had me in the toy isle pawing at little girls Halloween costumes and holding back tears at the thought of my wasted eggs. May wasted chances to spawn and breed something that would look cute dressed as Snow White. I was a salmon, all of a sudden, fighting my way up stream. Past an isle of Transformers to the dreaded Barbie Dolls. I stood glass-eyed staring at their painted faces hermetically sealed behind plastic in their pretty dresses and thought to myself -- Fuck. Dust. Dust can't in. And then -- it's as if I were fisted in the uterus by the lubed up hand of fate. Something about action and character hit me all of a sudden. And how actions strung together make up character. What a sap I had been. Afraid of a stack? Bah! I needed to DO something.
I high tailed it to the electronics section an asked a borderline comatose sales clerk to point me in the direction of the vacuum sealers. After a series of confusing dead ends, and a bottle of shoplifted children's Triaminic in grape flavor to dull the edges, I was in the housewares section loading the very last vacuum sealer into my cart. It was made to seal meats and things for freezing, which conjured images I like -- one of my favorite words is "bounty" followed shortly by "pantry". It also reminded me that it was time to defrost my own freezer. As I skipped to the checkout I tried to remember what exactly was frozen in the block of ice hovering above my fridge. Maybe I could compose a 140 character pun about it on the ride home to post on Twitter, maybe. But for now I had more important fish to fry and when I was done with my new project the fridge itself might not even be necessary. So I got in the car and drove home.
I opened the fridge. I wanted the melted ice of the freezer to drip onto the floor and ruin things. I wanted to cook up the Trader Joe's vegetarian ribs that I knew were in there and see how they tasted after a year frozen in ice. But first I wanted to hermetically seal The Stack section by section and sail them one by one down the LA river.
It took me a while to figure out how to use the sealer, but once I got the hang of it the whole process was a breeze. I sealed whole feature scripts, nine of them. Ten short stories at a time. Plays in twos. Novels, in threes and fours. I went through drawers to make sure I wasn't missing anything, letters, postcards. I even sealed some books that I had made copious notes in, just so I wouldn't miss a word. And when I was done, I looked at them, all laid out on the bed, suffocating. They didn't put up much of a fight. They died the way they had lived, neglected, ignored. By the world? Maybe. By me? Definitely. My children, my babies. Created in a moment of passion, pooped out like dumpster babies at the prom, and stored away in the basement by a cruel mother suffering from Munchhausen's Bi-proxy. For a second I wanted to rip them open, to try and save them, but my second screenplay, The Parlor, being about suicide, had sputtered out early and I didn't think it fair to save some and not others. No, this was genocide on a pan-genre level. I ate the rubbery veggie rib while they all glared at me from under plastic with their contemptuous fonts. "The world won't miss you," I drooled through my tears, two-year-old barbecue sauce drying on my chin like blood. Fucking cannibal.
I cleaned up and decided to catch a movie. The Laemmle in Pasadena was playing a film that starred an ex-lover of mine. "A REAL movie," I told the plastic sheathed corpses as I stuffed them into my trunk alongside a sweaty yoga mat, some laundry bags, and -- fuck! Three copies of Code 98, my stage play about a post-apocalyptic whore house. I went back inside to fire up the sealer one more time...
Twenty minutes later I was standing on the Pasadena bridge flinging them into the inky darkness of the LA River. Plop. Plop. Plop...
The movie was lack lustre. My dead babies were so much better, I thought as I erased my hard drive, killed my e-mail accounts, and uninstalled Final Draft. It's all gone now and I feel, somehow, lighter. Anyways, that's my hour. Over an hour really. Wow, when I get started, let me tell you! I'm gonna have a cigarette now and go to sleep when I wake up I was thinking of getting rid of some more of my stuff starting with the refrigerator. I'll Twitter about it so you guys know what's up! Good night!!
xo,
Adria
Happy daylight savings time to all, here and abroad. What does it mean? I'll tell you what it means. It means I have an hour to write to you before my regularly scheduled bedtime of 5am-ish. It's only 4 right now and until I'm used to it, I can kick back and enjoy the fall back in time. I don't like to diary-blog. It's boring, so I hardly ever do it. My brain moves faster then my fingers and I tend to just kind of toss my thoughts in a lumpy pile. That's an odd confession for a self-proclaimed writer, isn't it? To admit the fact that I don't write that often is sad, but I don't. Anymore. I remember a time when I would stay up all night perving around in the lizard brain like a scavenger in a junk yard, picking things from dirty piles and rearranging them to suit my needs. To decorate my cardboard box, or whatever project I happened to be working on at the moment, but not anymore. I dread The Stack, you see.
Under my broken TV with the disconnected cable box, behind the pile of random DVDs, and give-away CDs, a hole punch, and a ceramic cat, lies "The Stack". It's a wretched collection of pages about 20 inches in height. It is, give or take, everything I have ever written. I can't honestly say it's collecting dust, because dust doesn't really get back there. It's beyond the reach of dust, in a kind of vacuum.
I was at Target today PMSing my tits off. My body was coursing with organic chemicals, nasty, malevolent, baby making chemicals, that had me in the toy isle pawing at little girls Halloween costumes and holding back tears at the thought of my wasted eggs. May wasted chances to spawn and breed something that would look cute dressed as Snow White. I was a salmon, all of a sudden, fighting my way up stream. Past an isle of Transformers to the dreaded Barbie Dolls. I stood glass-eyed staring at their painted faces hermetically sealed behind plastic in their pretty dresses and thought to myself -- Fuck. Dust. Dust can't in. And then -- it's as if I were fisted in the uterus by the lubed up hand of fate. Something about action and character hit me all of a sudden. And how actions strung together make up character. What a sap I had been. Afraid of a stack? Bah! I needed to DO something.
I high tailed it to the electronics section an asked a borderline comatose sales clerk to point me in the direction of the vacuum sealers. After a series of confusing dead ends, and a bottle of shoplifted children's Triaminic in grape flavor to dull the edges, I was in the housewares section loading the very last vacuum sealer into my cart. It was made to seal meats and things for freezing, which conjured images I like -- one of my favorite words is "bounty" followed shortly by "pantry". It also reminded me that it was time to defrost my own freezer. As I skipped to the checkout I tried to remember what exactly was frozen in the block of ice hovering above my fridge. Maybe I could compose a 140 character pun about it on the ride home to post on Twitter, maybe. But for now I had more important fish to fry and when I was done with my new project the fridge itself might not even be necessary. So I got in the car and drove home.
I opened the fridge. I wanted the melted ice of the freezer to drip onto the floor and ruin things. I wanted to cook up the Trader Joe's vegetarian ribs that I knew were in there and see how they tasted after a year frozen in ice. But first I wanted to hermetically seal The Stack section by section and sail them one by one down the LA river.
It took me a while to figure out how to use the sealer, but once I got the hang of it the whole process was a breeze. I sealed whole feature scripts, nine of them. Ten short stories at a time. Plays in twos. Novels, in threes and fours. I went through drawers to make sure I wasn't missing anything, letters, postcards. I even sealed some books that I had made copious notes in, just so I wouldn't miss a word. And when I was done, I looked at them, all laid out on the bed, suffocating. They didn't put up much of a fight. They died the way they had lived, neglected, ignored. By the world? Maybe. By me? Definitely. My children, my babies. Created in a moment of passion, pooped out like dumpster babies at the prom, and stored away in the basement by a cruel mother suffering from Munchhausen's Bi-proxy. For a second I wanted to rip them open, to try and save them, but my second screenplay, The Parlor, being about suicide, had sputtered out early and I didn't think it fair to save some and not others. No, this was genocide on a pan-genre level. I ate the rubbery veggie rib while they all glared at me from under plastic with their contemptuous fonts. "The world won't miss you," I drooled through my tears, two-year-old barbecue sauce drying on my chin like blood. Fucking cannibal.
I cleaned up and decided to catch a movie. The Laemmle in Pasadena was playing a film that starred an ex-lover of mine. "A REAL movie," I told the plastic sheathed corpses as I stuffed them into my trunk alongside a sweaty yoga mat, some laundry bags, and -- fuck! Three copies of Code 98, my stage play about a post-apocalyptic whore house. I went back inside to fire up the sealer one more time...
Twenty minutes later I was standing on the Pasadena bridge flinging them into the inky darkness of the LA River. Plop. Plop. Plop...
The movie was lack lustre. My dead babies were so much better, I thought as I erased my hard drive, killed my e-mail accounts, and uninstalled Final Draft. It's all gone now and I feel, somehow, lighter. Anyways, that's my hour. Over an hour really. Wow, when I get started, let me tell you! I'm gonna have a cigarette now and go to sleep when I wake up I was thinking of getting rid of some more of my stuff starting with the refrigerator. I'll Twitter about it so you guys know what's up! Good night!!
xo,
Adria
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Nonnie
Socrates said that “death may be the greatest of all human blessings.” And while I’m not so sure I agree, it was the one quote I found--after hours of searching the internet--that I could see Nonnie shaking her little hands in agreement to. She was not afraid to die, if anything she had a kind of on-going, one-sided, correspondence with death, as if it were a long lost relative who refused to visit for reasons unknown. The great beyond is never very far away in an Italian household. Jesus, Mary, the Saint’s, and our ancestors are located in various picture frames around the house so they can be accessed directly. And while Nonnie believed in heaven, she had a pretty good feeling it was located on her back porch, on warm summer afternoons, when the setting sun hit the wisteria vines just so and turned everything purple, green, and gold.
One of the most uniquely special things about my grandmother was her poet’s appreciation for the beauty of the world. I can recall so many times driving her to the Big Banana for example, she would point out the green of the trees along Long Beach Road, a street not known primarily for its flora. “Aren’t they beautiful?” She would say. They were, when you took a second to really see them. And of course, more obviously, her garden in all its incarnations, with string beans, tomatoes, zucchini, mint in the summer to go in the Orzata, and the African Violets on the windowsill, the Camellias, the Dahlias, all flourishing to an almost supernatural extreme.
Her beautiful garden was physical example of her capacity to nurture. Her amazing cooking, to nourish. The countless dresses she would sew for me until she was physically unable and even beyond--I would thread her needle the way she did for her grandmother. The home she kept, and the feeling it instilled in all who entered it, a feeling of security, safety, and love. A warm place with good smells. She was mother. She was nature.
The other day at the wake I was sitting alone thinking about how in the world I was going to write a eulogy for Nonnie, a task I have been dreading since she and my mother nominated me for the job a while back. I borrowed a pad and pen and tried in vain to scribble something coherent through my tears. I failed. The only thing that surfaced was the following sentence that I must have written at least ten times.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
Because how do you thank a person who has loved you unconditionally, beyond all measurable bounds of reason since before you can remember? A person who no matter what state of mind they’re in, (half asleep, headaches, dementia,) greets you with the most radiant of smiles the second they see your face. A person who from practically their deathbed wants to fix the drooping hem of your sweater so you look as nice and neat as possible? All we had to do was admire something of hers and she would offer it. Not to spoil or bribe, but for the sheer pleasure of making us smile. I don’t know if I have ever loved that purely, but I feel I am a better, kinder, and stronger person for having received hers.
Nonnie was at her core, a generous woman. She instilled that quality in her children and grandchildren. Brian the teacher, Kevin the protector, Darren and I, the writers and Christopher the healer. Her son who ushers life into the world, her youngest daughter who cares for creatures great and small, and especially in my mother, the caretaker, who gave more of herself then she had to give and was there for the long haul and till the very end. On that night Socrates was right, and death came in the form of a blessing. Under the full February moon, in the arms of her female descendents she stepped from a bodily vessel that had ceased to serve her, and pushed open the screen door onto her back porch, eternal summer, the magic of nature, and the loving embrace of the infinite.
I am grateful to have had her as such a huge part of my life for as long as I did and I will miss her with all my heart. We can honor her memory by passing on the family traditions, the stories, and the recipes, the generosity, and most of all by taking her most poignant piece of advice to heart. “Love yourself,” she would simply say. The longer version, as interpreted by yours truly, “love yourself the way I love you and you won’t be able to settle for anything less then the best.” Thank you, Nonnie. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you forever, and may you rest in peace. Xoxoxo.
One of the most uniquely special things about my grandmother was her poet’s appreciation for the beauty of the world. I can recall so many times driving her to the Big Banana for example, she would point out the green of the trees along Long Beach Road, a street not known primarily for its flora. “Aren’t they beautiful?” She would say. They were, when you took a second to really see them. And of course, more obviously, her garden in all its incarnations, with string beans, tomatoes, zucchini, mint in the summer to go in the Orzata, and the African Violets on the windowsill, the Camellias, the Dahlias, all flourishing to an almost supernatural extreme.
Her beautiful garden was physical example of her capacity to nurture. Her amazing cooking, to nourish. The countless dresses she would sew for me until she was physically unable and even beyond--I would thread her needle the way she did for her grandmother. The home she kept, and the feeling it instilled in all who entered it, a feeling of security, safety, and love. A warm place with good smells. She was mother. She was nature.
The other day at the wake I was sitting alone thinking about how in the world I was going to write a eulogy for Nonnie, a task I have been dreading since she and my mother nominated me for the job a while back. I borrowed a pad and pen and tried in vain to scribble something coherent through my tears. I failed. The only thing that surfaced was the following sentence that I must have written at least ten times.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
Because how do you thank a person who has loved you unconditionally, beyond all measurable bounds of reason since before you can remember? A person who no matter what state of mind they’re in, (half asleep, headaches, dementia,) greets you with the most radiant of smiles the second they see your face. A person who from practically their deathbed wants to fix the drooping hem of your sweater so you look as nice and neat as possible? All we had to do was admire something of hers and she would offer it. Not to spoil or bribe, but for the sheer pleasure of making us smile. I don’t know if I have ever loved that purely, but I feel I am a better, kinder, and stronger person for having received hers.
Nonnie was at her core, a generous woman. She instilled that quality in her children and grandchildren. Brian the teacher, Kevin the protector, Darren and I, the writers and Christopher the healer. Her son who ushers life into the world, her youngest daughter who cares for creatures great and small, and especially in my mother, the caretaker, who gave more of herself then she had to give and was there for the long haul and till the very end. On that night Socrates was right, and death came in the form of a blessing. Under the full February moon, in the arms of her female descendents she stepped from a bodily vessel that had ceased to serve her, and pushed open the screen door onto her back porch, eternal summer, the magic of nature, and the loving embrace of the infinite.
I am grateful to have had her as such a huge part of my life for as long as I did and I will miss her with all my heart. We can honor her memory by passing on the family traditions, the stories, and the recipes, the generosity, and most of all by taking her most poignant piece of advice to heart. “Love yourself,” she would simply say. The longer version, as interpreted by yours truly, “love yourself the way I love you and you won’t be able to settle for anything less then the best.” Thank you, Nonnie. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you forever, and may you rest in peace. Xoxoxo.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The Ivy (Apples and Oranges)
The Ivy
In a high-fashion magazine dated 1979, the year of her birth, she read that he often took an early lunch at The Ivy when he was in Los Angeles, so she began going there once and a while, not so much hoping to see him, it had been thirty years, but to indulgently bask in the possibility of seeing him, yet, in all honesty not so much that either. It had more to do with sharing his preference for the place, its sights, smells and tastes, and for a time, to let her mind wander, free from financial panic, the most coveted luxury (in her mind, anyway) of the rich and famous.
Ivy days, carefully worked into the monthly budget, were chosen at random with the help of two darts launched at the kitchen calendar on the first of each month while she sipped cold coffee from her unwieldy futon. Friends were neither informed of, nor invited along on her lunch dates (tenebrously labeled in crayon); the days were hers and hers alone. A rare escape that she afforded herself with much self-congratulation. “It sure beats therapy,” she would tell the mirror in the ladies room while practicing her disinterested face.
Her costume varied, but circled around central themes, classic, simple lines, vintage, sixties inspired, basically anything one of his leading ladies would have worn. Jackie-O sunglasses, silk scarves, pencil skirts, and occasionally a fitted angora/cashmere blend, pale-blue sweater with tiny rhinestone buttons along the dainty cuff. On cool days she featured a raw silk, knee-length, tailored coat with small blue, white and brown flowers, and in the pits of the summer she plucked her wardrobe from an ever-growing garden of simple cotton sundresses that had taken root in her tiny hall closet. Clean, tasteful, she never overdid it. For this was a covert exercise. Garnering attention was not the goal.
Once a young waiter asked after her profession. “I’m a perfectly cast extra in the drama that is Hollywood,” she replied, trying her dandiest to channel Audrey Hepburn, “I do nothing. I am no one.”
This simple comment brought with it a shroud of mystery she could not have paid for even if all the speculations that eventually grew around her were true. She became a haughty regular--her privacy, respected. She was promptly delivered a glass of 2004 Los Camaros, Benziger upon her every arrival. And all the waiters, even the new ones, knew to ask if she would be starting with the Heirloom Baratta salad.
This didn’t happen overnight of course. It took months of silence, generous tipping, and carefully selected reading material--The New Yorker, The Times, and occasionally just a notebook and pen, “So, you’re a writer?” “No, but I will have another glass of Chardonnay.” What fun it was to sojourn amongst the privileged. What a guilty little thrill to up her position in life simply by keeping silent and wrestling with an arrogant forced humbleness. How exhilarating to catch a look from a passing television star wondering behind his Christian Dior sunglasses, just who is she?
But these were merely the perks of investing one-fifth of her income into the Ivy lunches. The meat of the excursions was getting to spend time with him. Oh, sweet obsession, as indulgent as candy covered sex chocolate, she had always preferred ghosts in favor of the living. She had her fill of fleshy disappointments, expectations never met, sour smells and hangovers, dirty sheets and betrayal. The Ivy was the great purger, the eraser on the chalkboard of her soul, a place where all the ugliness in her life was unwelcome. It whimpered away from the hovering archangels of perfume, coffee and lobster bisque. It cowered at the infantry of celebrities, white-coated waiters, and fresh cut flowers. And like a cherry on top, sitting in the corner since 1979, engaging a table full of executives, or sometimes alone with The Times, he sat.
She’d seen every one of his films, three times, at least. Her favorite was a black and white picture from the late 50’s in which he played an artist. He wasn’t the star but he stole the show with ease. She loved his ease. The way he seemed far more comfortable on the screen than any other actor he worked with. How comedy was like breathing for him, drama, like eating a sandwich. He marveled her. His hand movements, his control, and a wry smile so intrinsically his he could have had it copyrighted. How she longed for one thimble full of his brilliance. Not that she wasn’t talented, she was. Albeit unmotivated at times, but that wasn’t her fault. Hollywood, she reasoned, was not a good place for the talented. The talented tended to get lost. To get correlated in giant piles that sat in corners of offices, collecting dust. Or on rare occasion, used to balance a shaky desk. No, there was only room for two kinds of people in Hollywood--the wildly attractive and the genius.
She dressed in front of the oscillating fan, pulling control top pantyhose up over her bony hips while gazing with disdain at her rectangular torso. A pink ribbon she had tied to the protective cage over the blades tickled her belly button, an outie that she vowed to make into an innie as soon as the casting directors who came to her acting class removed their heads from their respective asses and the money started rolling in. She had recently dyed her bobbed hair auburn, but hated the way it looked in the light. It’s purple, she thought. She had specifically asked the stylist not to give her plum tones, that she wanted warm, not cool. It’s just that he was so atrociously Alpha, and people like that easily intimidated her. She chose a green and white cotton dress that accentuated her A-cups, and flats because she was tall for a girl. Most movie stars are tiny, she had been told. Even her paramour was only five-nine, which gave her a three-inch disadvantage, he also tended toward curvier women: blondes in bullet bras, kitten-on-the-head, fountain dancing types with accents. So how did the fantasy play out? How did she win him twice a month, while staring blankly at the air above the corner table, mindlessly wrapping an anchovy around a soggy crouton to save for later? In what reality would he, could he, ever be hers?
Well, there was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the one where he looked at her and recognized a kindred soul. Then there was the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy, in which she knew his future and was able to offer him advice taken from the pages of his own worn autobiography. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, such as speaking seven languages or playing the mandolin, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation. Or maybe they were friends, close friends, until one night…
Such fantasies (intricate, lengthy and detailed) humiliated her, truth be told. She knew that only immature, stupid people obsess in such a way. That there was very little separating her from a teenage girl salivating over Lindsay Lohan in the latest issue of Tiger Beat. The very definition of “infatuate” is to make a fool of, so she kept it all very close to the chest, intellectualizing it. It was her escape, nothing more. Some people had tennis, hiking, yoga, religion; she had lunch that was all. Until the day he walked into the Ivy.
The last time she had laid eyes on him, the current him, the eighty-two-year-old him, was two weeks earlier on one of those Access Hollywood type shows. She was at a friend’s house, and the friend, knowing her to be a fan, turned up the volume on the television while commenting on how fortunate they were to have stumbled onto the program since he never has the TV on. She sat in the center of the couch with her legs tucked under her body sipping a glass of warm, two-dollar Cabernet, known to a certain set of Angelinos as two-buck Chuck. Horrified by the concept when it was first introduced to her a week or two after her west-coast relocation, it had inspired a sense of pity and repulsion, conjuring images of UCLA frat parties and washed-up, wine guzzling child-stars. But like so many things about Los Angeles that she had once found repellent, she now gulped, mindlessly, refilling her glass from the bottle, leaving rings on the Ikea coffee table.
Poor dear, he looked like a prune. It made her sad. Aging made her sad. His eyes seemed glazed over with a milky-white film. And his smile, oh that smile, it had cut her deep to the loins on so many occasions, and now? Wretchedly ironic, like hearing an out of date commercial jingle decades after the product has ceased to exist. It awoke that familiar twinge of embarrassment and she told her friend to switch it off.
But him in The Ivy: that she couldn’t turn off, that was unacceptable. She was contemplating escape when the waiter brought her wine. They were out of the Benziger, so would she please accept his choice, a glass of the Yulupa free of charge? But she was distracted and he could tell.
The waiter, an Abercrombie and Fitch model named Dylan, who while very kind, made her feel ugly, followed her glare to where the actor and his companion were settling. Not the corner table, but a simple booth, two booths down from hers.
“Oh, he comes in here all the time. Has been since, like, the eighties.”
She wanted to correct him. He had been coming since 1979. But she caught the impulse in her nerd-net, leaving Dylan unaware that he bastardized historical facts.
“Is that so?” she said, trying to seem as though she were pretending to be impressed rather than actually being impressed which, would have made her look weak somehow.
“But I waited on Britney, yesterday, so, ya know…” Dylan gave her that little look so intrinsic to the Hollywood waiter who has seen it all. A bored, quick, half-eye-roll, followed by a cute self-deprecating grin. Dylan was stunning. Too young for her of course, and he probably had some blonde surfy-thing who drank Malibu Rum and pineapple juice following him around. Oh sure, that might get boring, she thought. He might desire the learned arms of the slightly older woman, but she had no future with Dylan. She smiled and accepted the Yalupa, half expecting it to taste like it came from Taco Bell, and when (almost to her surprise) it did not, she drank the whole glass down in under five generous sips.
She couldn’t bring herself to look up. The actor was in her line of sight. She knew that, she could feel it. It was even possible that he had looked at her already. That her mousy image had bounced from his frosted corneas up to his exceptional brain and played there like an image in a slideshow. He might even, by now, be able to pick her out of a lineup. She tried to read, translation, eavesdrop on whatever conversation was happening between him and the younger man who shared his table. But lunchtime was rapidly picking up. It was impossible to hear.
She felt exposed suddenly. Alone. This had never been an issue at The Ivy before. Like a Christian in the throes of the Rapture, a question tortured her mind. Now what? She could have hit him with her desert spoon. There was no escaping this. She couldn’t leave; his gravitational pull was far too strong. The years of emotional energy expended left her ultimately exhausted, her mortification weighing her down, sticking her sweating calves to the banquet and trapping her there. She couldn’t even use her phone to call a sympathetic friend. What if he could read lips, or even worse, was offended by cell phone use in restaurants?
She glanced in his direction. Easy. Okay. He was wearing a jacket, dark, and a shirt, blue. No tie. His head looked like a ball of gray yarn with glasses, but she had only looked quickly. This was a catastrophe. His presence put her life up until that point into such stark perspective that she wouldn’t have been surprised if everyone in the restaurant broke out into rolling waves of laughter directed at her. So she sat and drank, for that was all she could do, and as mid-day turned into afternoon, and two glasses of wine turned into three, she decided that this would be her last trip to The Ivy.
Twenty minutes later, the wine having brought with it a heady sort of devil-may-care confidence, she willed her body towards the bathroom, sailing past his booth without so much as a peek at him. She did however look at the table. He was attempting to coax a particularly stubborn shrimp onto his fork with the aid of a butter knife, while his lunch companion, a younger man whose eyes she did meet (dark, familiar) was becoming increasingly irate.
“Why not?” he said, attempting to maintain control of himself. “I never heard of such a thing. She’s your daughter. You can’t just…”
In the bathroom she’d be quick, but not too quick, to powder her nose. She was hoping to catch a second act to put the scene she witnessed into context, but the ladies room was choked with chattering Barbies who took so long in the stalls you would have thought they were in there giving birth. Five minutes passed. He was probably gone by now. Seven. God!
Finally, the handicapped stall freed up. The seat looked as if it had been left out in a toxic rain and she was glad to have something to hold onto as she hovered drunkenly, pressing down on her abdomen to save time. She practically ran from the bathroom, not bothering with the hand dryer, wiping her hands on her skirt and turning the corner into the dining room just in time for the grand finale, hitting the brakes so hard she almost fell face first into Cesar salad.
The younger man was standing now, gathering his things. He was blocking the way back to her table.
“If that’s how you want it, then fine. You can go to hell. And when you die, she’ll sue us, get everything, and your grandson can go to community college.” He was red in the face. She’d never seen someone so angry in The Ivy before. And since she was, in a way, a captive audience, forced to wait while he finished his rant and stormed out, she felt it wouldn’t be out of line to steal a look at the old man taking the brunt of the rage. He seemed surprisingly emotionless.
“Are you going?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m going. I’m sorry I came.” The young man checked his cell phone and put it in his pocket. Then took out his wallet and threw two bills, a five and a ten, into the remains of his pasta primavera.
“Well, go then. You’re in this young lady’s way.” She inhaled and held it. The younger man left in a huff. And when he was gone, the aging movie star looked at her square in the face and smiled apologetically.
Her heart popped like a glitter filled balloon. Could he see the shimmers cascading down around her like magical silver snow? She smiled back, and gave him the same half-eye roll Dylan had graced her with earlier. And the Yalupa having beefed up her courage, yet without really thinking, she spoke to him.
“He owes you two dollars,” she said, regretting it immediately.
“What?”
“He left you fifteen. I know for a fact that pasta costs seventeen.”
“He owes me more than that,” said the actor, fishing the bills from their bed of penne and sun-dried tomatoes. She grinned politely, straining empathy, and moved off. She could live with that exchange. It was a good story to tell her friends. She had been witty and kind. And at no point did he try to have her thrown out. It was supposed to be over, but his voice stopped her, pulled her back till her hips were resting against her chair, making her aware of inappropriate parts of her body.
“And the hysterical part is that he drove me here. What kind of bastard leaves an old man stranded?” She felt for him, suddenly. Now that they were chatting, now that he had become a real person, it all seemed okay somehow. Her cover had not been blown. She was simply a fellow member of the human race having a casual encounter with an unfortunate soul.
“Let me ask the hostess to call you a car.”
“No, no. I can call my driver.” A withered hand lightly pet the cell phone sitting on the table beside him. He could sense that this embarrassed her. “Do you always eat alone?”
“I come here to get away,” she confessed, inching slowly back to the safety of her table.
“Here? You’re at The Ivy. People come here to see and be seen. Are you an actress?” But she had turned a frightening shade of crimson. She attempted the eye roll again but she could feel how desperate it must have looked.
“I’m trying. I take a class,” she whispered.
“Classes are for morons. Sit.” He gestured with his fingers as if he was conducting a very tiny orchestra. “Let’s have coffee.” And since it didn’t seem like she was being given a choice, she sat.
“My purse,”
“The waiter can get it. So…”
“Ava.”
“Really? You don’t look like an Ava.” And she didn’t, but no one had ever told her to her face before. “Where are you from?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Philadelphia?”
“Altoona.”
“Ah. Ava from Altoona. I was born in Athens.” He said, stressing all the A’s.
“Georgia. I know.” He seemed to ignore this minor revelation and flagged down a confused Dylan with the subtlest of twitches.
“The lady needs her purse and I need two cups of coffee.”
“Of course. Any dessert, sir?” The actor turned to his new lunch date.
“Ava?”
If it were possible to turn any redder, the look Dylan gave her would have likened her face to the chasse of a fire truck. It was as if he silently called her out. Nice going, Anna Nicole, his eyes accused with a smirk. “Oh, oh no. I’m fine. No dessert.”
With the waiter gone, the actor continued his interrogation.
“So, do you have an agent?”
“Not yet. I’ve only been here six months,” she said, trying to sound optimistic.
“How do you pay the rent? Do you have a boyfriend?” He was so still. His eyes so focused. It was impossible to lie to him.
“No. I, I wait tables.” He pondered this as the coffee arrived, delivered by a disinterested Mexican busboy.
“So you probably make about as much money as that bus boy, yet you lunch at The Ivy.”
“I come here to get away,” she repeated.
“So you said.”
“It’s a hard city when you’re just starting out. I can be someone else here. You must think that’s awfully foolish of me.”
“On the contrary, I find it fascinating.”
The remainder of lunch was, for lack of a better word, lovely. As they sipped their coffee the older actor inquired about nearly every facet of her life. And when the busboy came by to refill their cups, and he passed saying that coffee had stopped agreeing with him years ago, he encouraged her to indulge in a second round, commenting with a flick of his fingers that it would be his pleasure just to watch her drink it.
She never took her coffee black, but decided in this case she would. This woman from her acting class liked her coffee black and for some reason this had impressed Ava. That and the way she played her fingers nervously along the edge of the cup while engaging fully with her eyes. She hung on Ava’s every word but seemed fundamentally distracted, a tortured part of her locked away, inaccessible. It was viciously attractive so she mimicked it here for the benefit of her older actor friend while he carried on about the futility of organized acting classes.
“You may as well join a cult. Quit tomorrow. You’re throwing your money away. If you want to act, go out and act. Don’t pay someone to climb into your head and mess with your instincts.”
She defended Arrow, her acting teacher, by saying that he was simply an encouraging force, who helped his students focus on their goals. “We made a vision board last week--it’s a kind of collage--you take little pictures of all the things you want to realize in your life and stick them together on poster board and--”
But right in the middle of her explanation he picked up his cell phone and hit the speed dial.
“Alex, I’m at The Ivy…My ungrateful first born…Fine.” He put the phone down just as Dylan passed with the check. “Add whatever Ava had to this, will you?”
“Thank you,” she ventured. But things had changed between them. He stood and raised his eyebrows at her in a gesture that translated into the most unenthusiastic your welcome she had ever received. Was it disappointment? Has she offended him? Or was her time, simply, up?
Helpless, she watched him leave. Feeling her eyes well up, she pressed her fingernails into the palms of her hands. Vision board, what was she thinking? Of all the lame, pathetic uninteresting things to say, how sheltered, how positively Altoona of her. Maybe he was right, maybe acting classes were pointless and maybe by needing them she was hopeless. After all, by the time he was her age his career had already peeked, twice.
Down trodden and still too drunk to drive, she had the hostess call her a cab and stepped out into the bright afternoon to wait for it. She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, though she seldom smoked during the day, and lit up protecting the flame from the nonexistent breeze with her hand, and then tucked a pin-straight lock of purple hair behind her ear.
“You smoke like Charlotte Rampling,” he said. She turned to see the actor resting against the signature white picket fence. “It’s always a treat to watch a woman move when she thinks no one’s watching.”
Ava put her sunglasses on to hide yet another avalanche of emotion. “Was it something I said?” She took a drag and let it slowly out, the way she guessed Charlotte might.
“No, my dear. I’m an old man. Sometimes I forget myself.” There was an awkward moment of silence, which he kindly broke. “Do you live far?”
“Not very,” she lied. “But I think I’ve had one to many Yalupa’s to risk the drive home. My cab is on its way.” Just as the words were leaving her lips, a black town car pulled up and stopped at the curb in front of them.
“And mine has just arrived. Would you?” He raised his arm ever so slightly and she took it, helping him from his position and towards the town car. The driver, Alex, who seemed only a few years younger then the actor, had made his way around the car and opened the door for them without batting an eye at the tall young woman in the green dress.
“Alex this is Ava. We’re going to be taking her home.”
“Oh, that’s not at all necessary. I really will be fine.” She noticed for the first time that she had been speaking as if she’d just tripped off the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Something about being with him antiquated her speech. God, what a poser. Sometimes she thought herself less of an actress and more of a chameleon. Or what was the other one? A lemming.
The car reminded her immediately of the limousine she rode in on the way to her grandfather’s funeral, stale and depressing. She wondered if death started hanging around the old, waiting, bringing its along aura with it. He opened a hidden compartment in the armrest and took out a medium size pillbox, downing the contents with water from a visibly reused water bottle. She thought she might take this opportunity to tell him how much she loved his films, but she didn’t want to seem gushy in front of Alex, who was no doubt wondering who in the hell she was. She decided to listen and be grateful, playing herself off as possibly the child of an old acquaintance.
“How old are you, Ava,” he asked, without looking up.
“I’m twenty-five.” She had in fact, been twenty-nine for a solid two months.
“Well, you look younger. I have a daughter who’s about your age. I had no idea she existed until three weeks ago and now can you guess what she wants?”
Rhetorical?
“Money. She wants money. They all want money. I have two sons. Sons I raised, sons I afforded every possible luxury, toys, cars, the best schools…” He faded off for a moment only to start up again. “They hate me for it. I ruined them. Now one is married to a man and the other is a folk musician. Don’t ever have children, Ava.”
While she enjoyed how open he was being regarding his personal life, she hadn’t failed to notice that neither the actor, nor his driver, had inquired as to where she lived. It had been her plan to have them drop her at her friend Samantha’s place, for Samantha was in development and could actually afford a home worth looking at. Unlike her ghetto building in the heart of K-town, with its peppering of drug addicts and gang bangers. And though she tried with all her grace to find an opening in his monologue, it wasn’t long before the car hit an all to familiar forty-five-degree up slope probably entitled, Doheny, Larabee, Londonderry, Queens, Kings, or possibly Laurel Canyon, snaking its way up towards Mulholland. She couldn’t be sure exactly because to look out the window and away from him while he was so passionately engrossed would have been rude.
“I have been with some of the most beautiful women in the world, you know. Jane, Kim, Ava, not you of course, Ava Gar--” The car took a sharp turn to the right, the inertia sending his frail shoulder into her bare arm. “Pardon me,” he righted himself with the help of her left leg, “mountain roads,” and met her eyes with a sly grin.
“You know, this is going to seem awfully embarrassing,” she said crossing her legs away from him, “but I think we forgot to drop me off.”
“Did we?” He took a sip of water from the bottle. Some of it dripped down his chin but he didn’t bother to wipe it away.
“Yes. I think we did.”
“Well, he’s not psychic. He’s a driver but he’s not psychic,” the actor grumbled.
“I’m going to Fairfax and-”
“Well, it’s too late now. I have an urgent appointment with W.C. Crapper.”
In a more recent magazine article on his life, it was alluded to that the actor was known to be somewhat difficult in situations that weren’t going primarily in his way. He was also known to be a bit of a cad when it came to women, throwing tantrums, breaking all manner of furniture. Even one or two instances of domestic violence, though never prosecuted, tarnished his record. Ava wondered if it wasn’t a bit of this she sensed coming through now. She recalled a quote made by one of his co-stars, “He (the actor) could be very ornery at times. If something wasn’t living up to his expectations, he would throw a fit and storm off set only to return an hour later eating a chili-dog and going on about some girl he’d picked up.”
Ava hoped his mood would change soon so they could have a pleasant good bye before he had Alex drive her home, but for now she decided to sit quietly as they weaved their way farther up into the Hollywood Hills.
The car dipped through a tasteful gate and finally came to rest on a curvy driveway shaded by lush overgrowth and wild palm trees. She got out when the door was opened for her, but only to let him out. She intended to get right back in, and felt a twinge of nerves when Alex closed the door behind them. The air reeked of eucalyptus, it made her head spin, that, and the reality of where she was. Someone had pointed out the gate to her once on a tour through the hills, but being there was the stuff of fantasy, and dying with every passing moment.
“Charlie! Buster! Harpo!” The actor moved towards his impressively arched front door an opened it. In a tsunami of fur, three small yappy Pomeranians spilled out and danced around their master’s feet like desperate chorus girls. “Whose daddy’s little babies? Whose daddy’s little babies? You’re daddy’s babies. Yes you are. Yes you are…”
The blush returned to Ava’s cheeks as she searched the area frantically for Alex. She saw the driver, who for some odd reason she had assumed to be the saner of the two, kicking a rock mindlessly toward the three-car garage. As the actor continued his one sided dialogue with his dogs, the driver stopped, picked up the rock and tossed it defiantly into some bushes then disappeared around the back of the house and out of sight. Just as Ava was beginning to digest the reality that she might be stranded forever on the space her two feet occupied, the actor called to her.
“Hurry up girl, you’ll catch your death out there. Blizzard’s a comin’. Do you know how to boil a kettle?” He stood stone faced in the doorway.
“Why, yes. Are we having hot coco…?” But her words trailed off as nature willed him inside; her witty retort was lost to the tailored lawn flicked with playful puddles of diffused sunlight. Somewhere she could hear a water fountain. And since peace and tranquility was alien to her, and since she knew she wasn’t being observed, Ava ran towards the doorway, her heart turning over in her chest like a flipped coin. Out of habit she called it—heads—and pushed opened the door.
He had starred in a Technicolor musical, circa 1948. She owned the original soundtrack on vinyl and would listen to it during hazy afternoons while soaking her waitress weary feet in Epsom salts on her crabgrass veranda. There was a waltz in act two, her favorite. With a glass of sugary iced-tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she would let her head drop gently back against the stucco wall of her 3’ by 5’ patio and narrow her eyes, blocking out the dirty road and the street signs, so only blue sky and palm trees were visible in her sphere. The grand orchestrations transported her to a place, or more of a feeling really, of sublime perfection. Here, she suspected.
In the middle of the hall, wrapped with a grand staircase that seemed to unfurl like ribbon, stood an antique table adorned with disturbingly vibrant cut lilies. Their waxy heads nodded to the music, encouraging her to enter, reassuring. Nothing can harm you here, they seemed to say, in here everything is a waltz. The ceiling was vaulted and flawlessly framed a tasteful chandelier. A stained glass skylight dripped kaleidoscopic colors onto the curved walls, just kissing the tops of mysterious arched doorways that she imagined lead to parlors and morning rooms. But the real beauty of the house was evident to Ava only after she found the nerve to tiptoe past the lush floral arrangement. A pair of French doors, a jar, opened on a sunken living room and followed an expertly crafted architectural line to a row of three more French doors, the middle leading into the garden and the source of the water she had heard; a fountain worthy of Hearst Castle.
As the waltz in her mind was nearing its end, she had a crude thought about how the chandelier alone could probably pay her rent for two whole years, and stopped all together when one of his dogs found her, barking excitedly, scratching her stockings and finally peeing on her shoes.
“Buster?”
“He’s here. I have him.” Ava slipped out of her soggy flats and tried to encourage the dog away from its offending puddle as the actor came slowly into sight from the living room. “He got excited. Where do you keep the paper towels?”
The actor looked at her strangely as the dog continued his metronomic yap.
“Do I know you, Miss?” Her heart flipped again—tails.
“Ava… From the Ivy,” she ventured slowly.
But he grinned that half mouthed grin of his. “I’ve been waiting eighty-two years to use that joke. Towels are in the kitchen but just leave it, that’s what I pay Alex for.”
“Oh, okay. Thank you.”
He noticed her bare feet. “Did Buster have a piddle on your pumps?” The words piddle and pumps made Ava’s face hot.
“He mistook me for a fire hydrant, yes.”
“I have just the thing. Leave it all here and come with me.”
He led her down through the French Doors and into the living room. The furnishings were Fifties modern, yet not without warmth. Long low couches in what had once been rich navy blue, flanked a polished wood coffee table topped with yet another alien flower bouquet, its blooms ostensibly plucked from the Mesozoic Age. Placed with care all along the walls, were sleek Swedish cabinets below hovering works of modern art. Small black and white photographs dotted their surfaces drawing Ava’s eye. How she would love to pour over them, to see him again as a young man. But the actor didn’t give her the chance. Instead he led her out into the garden.
“Oh, how perfectly—intoxicating,” she gasped. Her hands covered her heart one at a time as she gazed on tens of thousands of white roses.
“There used to be order back here. Now it seems they’ve gotten the better of me.”
“They’re all white,” she whispered.
“My second wife was horrifying cunt, but she had a way with flowers.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“You can wash your feet if you like. The water’s quite warm.” The actor sat on the edge of his three-tiered stone fountain with his hands resting softly in his lap. Ava joined him at a distance, and without meeting his gaze reached up under her skirt and pulled off her torn pantyhose.
“Buster owes me new tights,” she grinned and lifted one long leg and then the other over the stone partition into the emerald green water made so by an ornate mosaic tile composition. He watched her legs, slender and youthful; materialize shyly from under the skirt she wore. Her toenails were painted black but he imagined them red.
“May I ask you a question?” she almost mumbled this.
“Is it personal?”
“No.”
“Too bad.” He didn’t smile for it seemed to send the girl into shivers. He wondered what would happen if he touched her?
“Why did you bring me here?” Her hazel eyes watched the surface of the water and her blush returned.
It was endearing, her innocence. It could have been a game but he doubted it. She seemed a perfect lamb, the kind that comes along once a season, if that. This tall, languid girl, playing dress up with herself, dreaming of this moment, of an escape…“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
It had been so long. And the older he got, the less inclined they were to hang around, even for the money. It dawned on him that he could have this blushing girl for free, he immediately regretted being crude with her earlier. But she was unshakeable and detached, a part of her locked away--viciously attractive. The thought gave him a slight rush. He knew to tread carefully. “You got in my car…” He wanted to touch her suddenly, but maintained his control. This, for him, was the sweetest part of the seduction. Is that what this was? “When you could have said something you didn’t…” Her legs kicked nervously at a floating twig causing a strand of brown hair to come loose and curve down meeting her lower lip. “I didn’t bring you here, Ava. You brought yourself. I’m the one who should be asking why.” In a daring move he lifted the stray strand of hair and brushed it away.
She lifted her head, her lips slightly parted. She looked like a child, a gamine. Nothing at all like the usual Hollywood fare, this girl was charming, skittish as a kitten, breakable.
His closeness scared her so he moved away.
“I don’t know why I came. It all happened so quickly and you, well you…”
If he had been thirty younger here is where he would have kissed her. He would have taken her in his arms and kissed her long and deep while she struggled to keep herself from sliding into the fountain. He would have unzipped her dress and run his hand down her thin white back, waiting until he knew he had her fully in his power. Then he would have whispered to her to stand, the water up to her thighs, her dress ruined, floating on the surface of the water like a lily pad. “Strip for me,” he would say, and once she was naked, he would stand back and study her. She did resemble Charlotte Rampling, and the sadness in her eyes held shadows of Louise Brooks. Some women, standing naked in his fountain (and there had been many), smiled and laughed but Ava, this Ava, would not. She would follow him with her pleading eyes. Demurely covering herself. And when he said the words, the words he always said, she would blush and lower herself into the water. She wouldn’t come up immediately, like some, she would float there, eyes opened, like Ophelia tangled in her lily pad dress. Only when her breath was tapped would she come up. Her eyes once again meeting his, he would kiss her and tell her to wait. The waiting game was his weakness. He would return a call, smoke a cigarette, or occasionally leave altogether for a meeting, or lunch at The Ivy. When he returned, sometimes they’d be gone, but not Ava. She would be there where he left her, fingers having turned to prunes. He would help her from the fountain; dry her, on his knees, kissing her legs and stomach and thighs all the while. Then he would lead her to the bedroom and draw the thick curtains. They would make love in the dark, safe from the omniscient California sun and when it was over, he would send her away forever.
“…It’s just, I love your work.” Ava sat staring at the actor, but he seemed detached. He’d gone off again. His eyes were in the fountain, searching, as if he had lost something. She placed three fingers briefly on his knee.
“Yes. Then you’ll want to see Oscar.”
He walked along the edge of the garden, the house on his left, a sea of roses on his right and down a narrow bridge that led to a wing of the house hanging off the hill, open to a hidden valley. Ava followed, her bare feet skirting the occasional rock or thorn, until they came to another French door, this one covered on the inside with long thick curtains. He held them back for her and she entered, as if hypnotized by roses or another one of his slight of finger tricks.
The bedroom was dark, better to hide her panic, and while she searched for the perfect words, ones that would let him down easily, he moved to a small glass cabinet and flipped the light switch illuminating its glorious contents.
“They send you the plaque in the mail. You have to glue it on yourself. As you can see I let my son do it. He was three at the time.” The little piece of gold plated metal bearing his name, the year, and the words Best Actor, was upside down and crooked. But the statue sat on a mirrored base so that when you looked down at the reflection it was upright.
“It’s amazing, really.” Ava’s feet sunk into the soft carpet, trapping her there like quicksand. “Still… I really should leave.”
“But you’ve come so far, Ava.” The actor took a step back hiding him self among the shadows of the dark room. “I know this isn’t what you want, how you want it. But here in the dark, it isn’t so bad. I want so desperately just to touch you.” From the shadows Ava sensed movement. One of his dogs was dozing in a corner. The room smelled heavy and wet, like dead flowers, mold and body odor. “I want to feel my hands on you, my lips, just for a moment, then you can go.”
“I don’t know if I can.” The actor moved around the perimeter of the room and switched off the Oscar light leaving them in darkness.
“You can. And I offer you nothing in return. I’m an old man, Ava. If I had one wish right now it would be to unbind this cloak of years and let it fall to the floor,” his fingers found her neck and traced her spine down to the zipper on her dress. Neither of them breathed as he lowered it all the way to the small of her back, “but I cannot.”
Ava turned, facing him. In the dark room there was still enough light to make out his silhouette. She lost track of the decade, of herself. “How did I get here?”
“You followed me home.”
“You brought me here.”
“You came here.”
She inhaled.
“You wanted this—me. A part of you did.”
“But not this way.”
“Then how?” In the dark he removed his glasses and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Forgive an old fool,” he whispered.
“For what?”
“My delusions.”
Ava slowly raised her hands to the thin straps of her dress and slid them off her shoulders. The dress collapsed to her waist. She took his hands and placed them on her sides just below the ribs.
“You’re forgiven.”
This is how they used to be, alive for him. Not the plastic wind up dolls Alex brought, but tortured, baptized in his fountain, loving him despite themselves. He had been tired at The Ivy, so tired. He felt tired again now, holding her, this lithe girl, in his hands.
“Put me to bed, Ava.” An unexpected hot breeze parted the heavy curtains and a shaft of light fell across her body, withering at his touch. The waltz began in earnest. Glitter filled balloons popped above them. The heat melted the glue so that Oscar could bend down and fix his plaque.
“I’m tired, Ava. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.”
He looked younger in the half-light. She had given him thirty years from her rib cage. He held it so softly, his hands not moving. He hadn’t noticed her gift it yet but he would. He would be fifty-two, still young, a prime of sorts. He would nap and when he woke he would know what she had done. His eyes, without their milky film would see her and know.
“Anything else, Miss?”
She would lie with him. Later, his son would find them, or Alex, it changed, but they would keep her secret. They’d have to, and from then on they would all age backwards like Merlin.
This was just another way that it worked out in her mind. Another way she won him. There was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation.
“Coffee? Tea? Amaretto?”
Or maybe he came into The Ivy as an old man and she followed him home. Maybe she waded in his fountain and walked among his roses. And maybe, in the dark of his room she placed his hands gently on her sides and gave him thirty years off her life. It all seemed so real, like you could touch it.
“Anything else, Miss?”
“Just the check, Dylan.”
“You’re not gonna tell me your name this time?”
“Just the check, Dylan,” and with a wry half-smile, she thanked him, paid it, and left The Ivy.
Adria Lang
September, 2008
In a high-fashion magazine dated 1979, the year of her birth, she read that he often took an early lunch at The Ivy when he was in Los Angeles, so she began going there once and a while, not so much hoping to see him, it had been thirty years, but to indulgently bask in the possibility of seeing him, yet, in all honesty not so much that either. It had more to do with sharing his preference for the place, its sights, smells and tastes, and for a time, to let her mind wander, free from financial panic, the most coveted luxury (in her mind, anyway) of the rich and famous.
Ivy days, carefully worked into the monthly budget, were chosen at random with the help of two darts launched at the kitchen calendar on the first of each month while she sipped cold coffee from her unwieldy futon. Friends were neither informed of, nor invited along on her lunch dates (tenebrously labeled in crayon); the days were hers and hers alone. A rare escape that she afforded herself with much self-congratulation. “It sure beats therapy,” she would tell the mirror in the ladies room while practicing her disinterested face.
Her costume varied, but circled around central themes, classic, simple lines, vintage, sixties inspired, basically anything one of his leading ladies would have worn. Jackie-O sunglasses, silk scarves, pencil skirts, and occasionally a fitted angora/cashmere blend, pale-blue sweater with tiny rhinestone buttons along the dainty cuff. On cool days she featured a raw silk, knee-length, tailored coat with small blue, white and brown flowers, and in the pits of the summer she plucked her wardrobe from an ever-growing garden of simple cotton sundresses that had taken root in her tiny hall closet. Clean, tasteful, she never overdid it. For this was a covert exercise. Garnering attention was not the goal.
Once a young waiter asked after her profession. “I’m a perfectly cast extra in the drama that is Hollywood,” she replied, trying her dandiest to channel Audrey Hepburn, “I do nothing. I am no one.”
This simple comment brought with it a shroud of mystery she could not have paid for even if all the speculations that eventually grew around her were true. She became a haughty regular--her privacy, respected. She was promptly delivered a glass of 2004 Los Camaros, Benziger upon her every arrival. And all the waiters, even the new ones, knew to ask if she would be starting with the Heirloom Baratta salad.
This didn’t happen overnight of course. It took months of silence, generous tipping, and carefully selected reading material--The New Yorker, The Times, and occasionally just a notebook and pen, “So, you’re a writer?” “No, but I will have another glass of Chardonnay.” What fun it was to sojourn amongst the privileged. What a guilty little thrill to up her position in life simply by keeping silent and wrestling with an arrogant forced humbleness. How exhilarating to catch a look from a passing television star wondering behind his Christian Dior sunglasses, just who is she?
But these were merely the perks of investing one-fifth of her income into the Ivy lunches. The meat of the excursions was getting to spend time with him. Oh, sweet obsession, as indulgent as candy covered sex chocolate, she had always preferred ghosts in favor of the living. She had her fill of fleshy disappointments, expectations never met, sour smells and hangovers, dirty sheets and betrayal. The Ivy was the great purger, the eraser on the chalkboard of her soul, a place where all the ugliness in her life was unwelcome. It whimpered away from the hovering archangels of perfume, coffee and lobster bisque. It cowered at the infantry of celebrities, white-coated waiters, and fresh cut flowers. And like a cherry on top, sitting in the corner since 1979, engaging a table full of executives, or sometimes alone with The Times, he sat.
She’d seen every one of his films, three times, at least. Her favorite was a black and white picture from the late 50’s in which he played an artist. He wasn’t the star but he stole the show with ease. She loved his ease. The way he seemed far more comfortable on the screen than any other actor he worked with. How comedy was like breathing for him, drama, like eating a sandwich. He marveled her. His hand movements, his control, and a wry smile so intrinsically his he could have had it copyrighted. How she longed for one thimble full of his brilliance. Not that she wasn’t talented, she was. Albeit unmotivated at times, but that wasn’t her fault. Hollywood, she reasoned, was not a good place for the talented. The talented tended to get lost. To get correlated in giant piles that sat in corners of offices, collecting dust. Or on rare occasion, used to balance a shaky desk. No, there was only room for two kinds of people in Hollywood--the wildly attractive and the genius.
She dressed in front of the oscillating fan, pulling control top pantyhose up over her bony hips while gazing with disdain at her rectangular torso. A pink ribbon she had tied to the protective cage over the blades tickled her belly button, an outie that she vowed to make into an innie as soon as the casting directors who came to her acting class removed their heads from their respective asses and the money started rolling in. She had recently dyed her bobbed hair auburn, but hated the way it looked in the light. It’s purple, she thought. She had specifically asked the stylist not to give her plum tones, that she wanted warm, not cool. It’s just that he was so atrociously Alpha, and people like that easily intimidated her. She chose a green and white cotton dress that accentuated her A-cups, and flats because she was tall for a girl. Most movie stars are tiny, she had been told. Even her paramour was only five-nine, which gave her a three-inch disadvantage, he also tended toward curvier women: blondes in bullet bras, kitten-on-the-head, fountain dancing types with accents. So how did the fantasy play out? How did she win him twice a month, while staring blankly at the air above the corner table, mindlessly wrapping an anchovy around a soggy crouton to save for later? In what reality would he, could he, ever be hers?
Well, there was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the one where he looked at her and recognized a kindred soul. Then there was the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy, in which she knew his future and was able to offer him advice taken from the pages of his own worn autobiography. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, such as speaking seven languages or playing the mandolin, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation. Or maybe they were friends, close friends, until one night…
Such fantasies (intricate, lengthy and detailed) humiliated her, truth be told. She knew that only immature, stupid people obsess in such a way. That there was very little separating her from a teenage girl salivating over Lindsay Lohan in the latest issue of Tiger Beat. The very definition of “infatuate” is to make a fool of, so she kept it all very close to the chest, intellectualizing it. It was her escape, nothing more. Some people had tennis, hiking, yoga, religion; she had lunch that was all. Until the day he walked into the Ivy.
The last time she had laid eyes on him, the current him, the eighty-two-year-old him, was two weeks earlier on one of those Access Hollywood type shows. She was at a friend’s house, and the friend, knowing her to be a fan, turned up the volume on the television while commenting on how fortunate they were to have stumbled onto the program since he never has the TV on. She sat in the center of the couch with her legs tucked under her body sipping a glass of warm, two-dollar Cabernet, known to a certain set of Angelinos as two-buck Chuck. Horrified by the concept when it was first introduced to her a week or two after her west-coast relocation, it had inspired a sense of pity and repulsion, conjuring images of UCLA frat parties and washed-up, wine guzzling child-stars. But like so many things about Los Angeles that she had once found repellent, she now gulped, mindlessly, refilling her glass from the bottle, leaving rings on the Ikea coffee table.
Poor dear, he looked like a prune. It made her sad. Aging made her sad. His eyes seemed glazed over with a milky-white film. And his smile, oh that smile, it had cut her deep to the loins on so many occasions, and now? Wretchedly ironic, like hearing an out of date commercial jingle decades after the product has ceased to exist. It awoke that familiar twinge of embarrassment and she told her friend to switch it off.
But him in The Ivy: that she couldn’t turn off, that was unacceptable. She was contemplating escape when the waiter brought her wine. They were out of the Benziger, so would she please accept his choice, a glass of the Yulupa free of charge? But she was distracted and he could tell.
The waiter, an Abercrombie and Fitch model named Dylan, who while very kind, made her feel ugly, followed her glare to where the actor and his companion were settling. Not the corner table, but a simple booth, two booths down from hers.
“Oh, he comes in here all the time. Has been since, like, the eighties.”
She wanted to correct him. He had been coming since 1979. But she caught the impulse in her nerd-net, leaving Dylan unaware that he bastardized historical facts.
“Is that so?” she said, trying to seem as though she were pretending to be impressed rather than actually being impressed which, would have made her look weak somehow.
“But I waited on Britney, yesterday, so, ya know…” Dylan gave her that little look so intrinsic to the Hollywood waiter who has seen it all. A bored, quick, half-eye-roll, followed by a cute self-deprecating grin. Dylan was stunning. Too young for her of course, and he probably had some blonde surfy-thing who drank Malibu Rum and pineapple juice following him around. Oh sure, that might get boring, she thought. He might desire the learned arms of the slightly older woman, but she had no future with Dylan. She smiled and accepted the Yalupa, half expecting it to taste like it came from Taco Bell, and when (almost to her surprise) it did not, she drank the whole glass down in under five generous sips.
She couldn’t bring herself to look up. The actor was in her line of sight. She knew that, she could feel it. It was even possible that he had looked at her already. That her mousy image had bounced from his frosted corneas up to his exceptional brain and played there like an image in a slideshow. He might even, by now, be able to pick her out of a lineup. She tried to read, translation, eavesdrop on whatever conversation was happening between him and the younger man who shared his table. But lunchtime was rapidly picking up. It was impossible to hear.
She felt exposed suddenly. Alone. This had never been an issue at The Ivy before. Like a Christian in the throes of the Rapture, a question tortured her mind. Now what? She could have hit him with her desert spoon. There was no escaping this. She couldn’t leave; his gravitational pull was far too strong. The years of emotional energy expended left her ultimately exhausted, her mortification weighing her down, sticking her sweating calves to the banquet and trapping her there. She couldn’t even use her phone to call a sympathetic friend. What if he could read lips, or even worse, was offended by cell phone use in restaurants?
She glanced in his direction. Easy. Okay. He was wearing a jacket, dark, and a shirt, blue. No tie. His head looked like a ball of gray yarn with glasses, but she had only looked quickly. This was a catastrophe. His presence put her life up until that point into such stark perspective that she wouldn’t have been surprised if everyone in the restaurant broke out into rolling waves of laughter directed at her. So she sat and drank, for that was all she could do, and as mid-day turned into afternoon, and two glasses of wine turned into three, she decided that this would be her last trip to The Ivy.
Twenty minutes later, the wine having brought with it a heady sort of devil-may-care confidence, she willed her body towards the bathroom, sailing past his booth without so much as a peek at him. She did however look at the table. He was attempting to coax a particularly stubborn shrimp onto his fork with the aid of a butter knife, while his lunch companion, a younger man whose eyes she did meet (dark, familiar) was becoming increasingly irate.
“Why not?” he said, attempting to maintain control of himself. “I never heard of such a thing. She’s your daughter. You can’t just…”
In the bathroom she’d be quick, but not too quick, to powder her nose. She was hoping to catch a second act to put the scene she witnessed into context, but the ladies room was choked with chattering Barbies who took so long in the stalls you would have thought they were in there giving birth. Five minutes passed. He was probably gone by now. Seven. God!
Finally, the handicapped stall freed up. The seat looked as if it had been left out in a toxic rain and she was glad to have something to hold onto as she hovered drunkenly, pressing down on her abdomen to save time. She practically ran from the bathroom, not bothering with the hand dryer, wiping her hands on her skirt and turning the corner into the dining room just in time for the grand finale, hitting the brakes so hard she almost fell face first into Cesar salad.
The younger man was standing now, gathering his things. He was blocking the way back to her table.
“If that’s how you want it, then fine. You can go to hell. And when you die, she’ll sue us, get everything, and your grandson can go to community college.” He was red in the face. She’d never seen someone so angry in The Ivy before. And since she was, in a way, a captive audience, forced to wait while he finished his rant and stormed out, she felt it wouldn’t be out of line to steal a look at the old man taking the brunt of the rage. He seemed surprisingly emotionless.
“Are you going?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m going. I’m sorry I came.” The young man checked his cell phone and put it in his pocket. Then took out his wallet and threw two bills, a five and a ten, into the remains of his pasta primavera.
“Well, go then. You’re in this young lady’s way.” She inhaled and held it. The younger man left in a huff. And when he was gone, the aging movie star looked at her square in the face and smiled apologetically.
Her heart popped like a glitter filled balloon. Could he see the shimmers cascading down around her like magical silver snow? She smiled back, and gave him the same half-eye roll Dylan had graced her with earlier. And the Yalupa having beefed up her courage, yet without really thinking, she spoke to him.
“He owes you two dollars,” she said, regretting it immediately.
“What?”
“He left you fifteen. I know for a fact that pasta costs seventeen.”
“He owes me more than that,” said the actor, fishing the bills from their bed of penne and sun-dried tomatoes. She grinned politely, straining empathy, and moved off. She could live with that exchange. It was a good story to tell her friends. She had been witty and kind. And at no point did he try to have her thrown out. It was supposed to be over, but his voice stopped her, pulled her back till her hips were resting against her chair, making her aware of inappropriate parts of her body.
“And the hysterical part is that he drove me here. What kind of bastard leaves an old man stranded?” She felt for him, suddenly. Now that they were chatting, now that he had become a real person, it all seemed okay somehow. Her cover had not been blown. She was simply a fellow member of the human race having a casual encounter with an unfortunate soul.
“Let me ask the hostess to call you a car.”
“No, no. I can call my driver.” A withered hand lightly pet the cell phone sitting on the table beside him. He could sense that this embarrassed her. “Do you always eat alone?”
“I come here to get away,” she confessed, inching slowly back to the safety of her table.
“Here? You’re at The Ivy. People come here to see and be seen. Are you an actress?” But she had turned a frightening shade of crimson. She attempted the eye roll again but she could feel how desperate it must have looked.
“I’m trying. I take a class,” she whispered.
“Classes are for morons. Sit.” He gestured with his fingers as if he was conducting a very tiny orchestra. “Let’s have coffee.” And since it didn’t seem like she was being given a choice, she sat.
“My purse,”
“The waiter can get it. So…”
“Ava.”
“Really? You don’t look like an Ava.” And she didn’t, but no one had ever told her to her face before. “Where are you from?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Philadelphia?”
“Altoona.”
“Ah. Ava from Altoona. I was born in Athens.” He said, stressing all the A’s.
“Georgia. I know.” He seemed to ignore this minor revelation and flagged down a confused Dylan with the subtlest of twitches.
“The lady needs her purse and I need two cups of coffee.”
“Of course. Any dessert, sir?” The actor turned to his new lunch date.
“Ava?”
If it were possible to turn any redder, the look Dylan gave her would have likened her face to the chasse of a fire truck. It was as if he silently called her out. Nice going, Anna Nicole, his eyes accused with a smirk. “Oh, oh no. I’m fine. No dessert.”
With the waiter gone, the actor continued his interrogation.
“So, do you have an agent?”
“Not yet. I’ve only been here six months,” she said, trying to sound optimistic.
“How do you pay the rent? Do you have a boyfriend?” He was so still. His eyes so focused. It was impossible to lie to him.
“No. I, I wait tables.” He pondered this as the coffee arrived, delivered by a disinterested Mexican busboy.
“So you probably make about as much money as that bus boy, yet you lunch at The Ivy.”
“I come here to get away,” she repeated.
“So you said.”
“It’s a hard city when you’re just starting out. I can be someone else here. You must think that’s awfully foolish of me.”
“On the contrary, I find it fascinating.”
The remainder of lunch was, for lack of a better word, lovely. As they sipped their coffee the older actor inquired about nearly every facet of her life. And when the busboy came by to refill their cups, and he passed saying that coffee had stopped agreeing with him years ago, he encouraged her to indulge in a second round, commenting with a flick of his fingers that it would be his pleasure just to watch her drink it.
She never took her coffee black, but decided in this case she would. This woman from her acting class liked her coffee black and for some reason this had impressed Ava. That and the way she played her fingers nervously along the edge of the cup while engaging fully with her eyes. She hung on Ava’s every word but seemed fundamentally distracted, a tortured part of her locked away, inaccessible. It was viciously attractive so she mimicked it here for the benefit of her older actor friend while he carried on about the futility of organized acting classes.
“You may as well join a cult. Quit tomorrow. You’re throwing your money away. If you want to act, go out and act. Don’t pay someone to climb into your head and mess with your instincts.”
She defended Arrow, her acting teacher, by saying that he was simply an encouraging force, who helped his students focus on their goals. “We made a vision board last week--it’s a kind of collage--you take little pictures of all the things you want to realize in your life and stick them together on poster board and--”
But right in the middle of her explanation he picked up his cell phone and hit the speed dial.
“Alex, I’m at The Ivy…My ungrateful first born…Fine.” He put the phone down just as Dylan passed with the check. “Add whatever Ava had to this, will you?”
“Thank you,” she ventured. But things had changed between them. He stood and raised his eyebrows at her in a gesture that translated into the most unenthusiastic your welcome she had ever received. Was it disappointment? Has she offended him? Or was her time, simply, up?
Helpless, she watched him leave. Feeling her eyes well up, she pressed her fingernails into the palms of her hands. Vision board, what was she thinking? Of all the lame, pathetic uninteresting things to say, how sheltered, how positively Altoona of her. Maybe he was right, maybe acting classes were pointless and maybe by needing them she was hopeless. After all, by the time he was her age his career had already peeked, twice.
Down trodden and still too drunk to drive, she had the hostess call her a cab and stepped out into the bright afternoon to wait for it. She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, though she seldom smoked during the day, and lit up protecting the flame from the nonexistent breeze with her hand, and then tucked a pin-straight lock of purple hair behind her ear.
“You smoke like Charlotte Rampling,” he said. She turned to see the actor resting against the signature white picket fence. “It’s always a treat to watch a woman move when she thinks no one’s watching.”
Ava put her sunglasses on to hide yet another avalanche of emotion. “Was it something I said?” She took a drag and let it slowly out, the way she guessed Charlotte might.
“No, my dear. I’m an old man. Sometimes I forget myself.” There was an awkward moment of silence, which he kindly broke. “Do you live far?”
“Not very,” she lied. “But I think I’ve had one to many Yalupa’s to risk the drive home. My cab is on its way.” Just as the words were leaving her lips, a black town car pulled up and stopped at the curb in front of them.
“And mine has just arrived. Would you?” He raised his arm ever so slightly and she took it, helping him from his position and towards the town car. The driver, Alex, who seemed only a few years younger then the actor, had made his way around the car and opened the door for them without batting an eye at the tall young woman in the green dress.
“Alex this is Ava. We’re going to be taking her home.”
“Oh, that’s not at all necessary. I really will be fine.” She noticed for the first time that she had been speaking as if she’d just tripped off the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Something about being with him antiquated her speech. God, what a poser. Sometimes she thought herself less of an actress and more of a chameleon. Or what was the other one? A lemming.
The car reminded her immediately of the limousine she rode in on the way to her grandfather’s funeral, stale and depressing. She wondered if death started hanging around the old, waiting, bringing its along aura with it. He opened a hidden compartment in the armrest and took out a medium size pillbox, downing the contents with water from a visibly reused water bottle. She thought she might take this opportunity to tell him how much she loved his films, but she didn’t want to seem gushy in front of Alex, who was no doubt wondering who in the hell she was. She decided to listen and be grateful, playing herself off as possibly the child of an old acquaintance.
“How old are you, Ava,” he asked, without looking up.
“I’m twenty-five.” She had in fact, been twenty-nine for a solid two months.
“Well, you look younger. I have a daughter who’s about your age. I had no idea she existed until three weeks ago and now can you guess what she wants?”
Rhetorical?
“Money. She wants money. They all want money. I have two sons. Sons I raised, sons I afforded every possible luxury, toys, cars, the best schools…” He faded off for a moment only to start up again. “They hate me for it. I ruined them. Now one is married to a man and the other is a folk musician. Don’t ever have children, Ava.”
While she enjoyed how open he was being regarding his personal life, she hadn’t failed to notice that neither the actor, nor his driver, had inquired as to where she lived. It had been her plan to have them drop her at her friend Samantha’s place, for Samantha was in development and could actually afford a home worth looking at. Unlike her ghetto building in the heart of K-town, with its peppering of drug addicts and gang bangers. And though she tried with all her grace to find an opening in his monologue, it wasn’t long before the car hit an all to familiar forty-five-degree up slope probably entitled, Doheny, Larabee, Londonderry, Queens, Kings, or possibly Laurel Canyon, snaking its way up towards Mulholland. She couldn’t be sure exactly because to look out the window and away from him while he was so passionately engrossed would have been rude.
“I have been with some of the most beautiful women in the world, you know. Jane, Kim, Ava, not you of course, Ava Gar--” The car took a sharp turn to the right, the inertia sending his frail shoulder into her bare arm. “Pardon me,” he righted himself with the help of her left leg, “mountain roads,” and met her eyes with a sly grin.
“You know, this is going to seem awfully embarrassing,” she said crossing her legs away from him, “but I think we forgot to drop me off.”
“Did we?” He took a sip of water from the bottle. Some of it dripped down his chin but he didn’t bother to wipe it away.
“Yes. I think we did.”
“Well, he’s not psychic. He’s a driver but he’s not psychic,” the actor grumbled.
“I’m going to Fairfax and-”
“Well, it’s too late now. I have an urgent appointment with W.C. Crapper.”
In a more recent magazine article on his life, it was alluded to that the actor was known to be somewhat difficult in situations that weren’t going primarily in his way. He was also known to be a bit of a cad when it came to women, throwing tantrums, breaking all manner of furniture. Even one or two instances of domestic violence, though never prosecuted, tarnished his record. Ava wondered if it wasn’t a bit of this she sensed coming through now. She recalled a quote made by one of his co-stars, “He (the actor) could be very ornery at times. If something wasn’t living up to his expectations, he would throw a fit and storm off set only to return an hour later eating a chili-dog and going on about some girl he’d picked up.”
Ava hoped his mood would change soon so they could have a pleasant good bye before he had Alex drive her home, but for now she decided to sit quietly as they weaved their way farther up into the Hollywood Hills.
The car dipped through a tasteful gate and finally came to rest on a curvy driveway shaded by lush overgrowth and wild palm trees. She got out when the door was opened for her, but only to let him out. She intended to get right back in, and felt a twinge of nerves when Alex closed the door behind them. The air reeked of eucalyptus, it made her head spin, that, and the reality of where she was. Someone had pointed out the gate to her once on a tour through the hills, but being there was the stuff of fantasy, and dying with every passing moment.
“Charlie! Buster! Harpo!” The actor moved towards his impressively arched front door an opened it. In a tsunami of fur, three small yappy Pomeranians spilled out and danced around their master’s feet like desperate chorus girls. “Whose daddy’s little babies? Whose daddy’s little babies? You’re daddy’s babies. Yes you are. Yes you are…”
The blush returned to Ava’s cheeks as she searched the area frantically for Alex. She saw the driver, who for some odd reason she had assumed to be the saner of the two, kicking a rock mindlessly toward the three-car garage. As the actor continued his one sided dialogue with his dogs, the driver stopped, picked up the rock and tossed it defiantly into some bushes then disappeared around the back of the house and out of sight. Just as Ava was beginning to digest the reality that she might be stranded forever on the space her two feet occupied, the actor called to her.
“Hurry up girl, you’ll catch your death out there. Blizzard’s a comin’. Do you know how to boil a kettle?” He stood stone faced in the doorway.
“Why, yes. Are we having hot coco…?” But her words trailed off as nature willed him inside; her witty retort was lost to the tailored lawn flicked with playful puddles of diffused sunlight. Somewhere she could hear a water fountain. And since peace and tranquility was alien to her, and since she knew she wasn’t being observed, Ava ran towards the doorway, her heart turning over in her chest like a flipped coin. Out of habit she called it—heads—and pushed opened the door.
He had starred in a Technicolor musical, circa 1948. She owned the original soundtrack on vinyl and would listen to it during hazy afternoons while soaking her waitress weary feet in Epsom salts on her crabgrass veranda. There was a waltz in act two, her favorite. With a glass of sugary iced-tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she would let her head drop gently back against the stucco wall of her 3’ by 5’ patio and narrow her eyes, blocking out the dirty road and the street signs, so only blue sky and palm trees were visible in her sphere. The grand orchestrations transported her to a place, or more of a feeling really, of sublime perfection. Here, she suspected.
In the middle of the hall, wrapped with a grand staircase that seemed to unfurl like ribbon, stood an antique table adorned with disturbingly vibrant cut lilies. Their waxy heads nodded to the music, encouraging her to enter, reassuring. Nothing can harm you here, they seemed to say, in here everything is a waltz. The ceiling was vaulted and flawlessly framed a tasteful chandelier. A stained glass skylight dripped kaleidoscopic colors onto the curved walls, just kissing the tops of mysterious arched doorways that she imagined lead to parlors and morning rooms. But the real beauty of the house was evident to Ava only after she found the nerve to tiptoe past the lush floral arrangement. A pair of French doors, a jar, opened on a sunken living room and followed an expertly crafted architectural line to a row of three more French doors, the middle leading into the garden and the source of the water she had heard; a fountain worthy of Hearst Castle.
As the waltz in her mind was nearing its end, she had a crude thought about how the chandelier alone could probably pay her rent for two whole years, and stopped all together when one of his dogs found her, barking excitedly, scratching her stockings and finally peeing on her shoes.
“Buster?”
“He’s here. I have him.” Ava slipped out of her soggy flats and tried to encourage the dog away from its offending puddle as the actor came slowly into sight from the living room. “He got excited. Where do you keep the paper towels?”
The actor looked at her strangely as the dog continued his metronomic yap.
“Do I know you, Miss?” Her heart flipped again—tails.
“Ava… From the Ivy,” she ventured slowly.
But he grinned that half mouthed grin of his. “I’ve been waiting eighty-two years to use that joke. Towels are in the kitchen but just leave it, that’s what I pay Alex for.”
“Oh, okay. Thank you.”
He noticed her bare feet. “Did Buster have a piddle on your pumps?” The words piddle and pumps made Ava’s face hot.
“He mistook me for a fire hydrant, yes.”
“I have just the thing. Leave it all here and come with me.”
He led her down through the French Doors and into the living room. The furnishings were Fifties modern, yet not without warmth. Long low couches in what had once been rich navy blue, flanked a polished wood coffee table topped with yet another alien flower bouquet, its blooms ostensibly plucked from the Mesozoic Age. Placed with care all along the walls, were sleek Swedish cabinets below hovering works of modern art. Small black and white photographs dotted their surfaces drawing Ava’s eye. How she would love to pour over them, to see him again as a young man. But the actor didn’t give her the chance. Instead he led her out into the garden.
“Oh, how perfectly—intoxicating,” she gasped. Her hands covered her heart one at a time as she gazed on tens of thousands of white roses.
“There used to be order back here. Now it seems they’ve gotten the better of me.”
“They’re all white,” she whispered.
“My second wife was horrifying cunt, but she had a way with flowers.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“You can wash your feet if you like. The water’s quite warm.” The actor sat on the edge of his three-tiered stone fountain with his hands resting softly in his lap. Ava joined him at a distance, and without meeting his gaze reached up under her skirt and pulled off her torn pantyhose.
“Buster owes me new tights,” she grinned and lifted one long leg and then the other over the stone partition into the emerald green water made so by an ornate mosaic tile composition. He watched her legs, slender and youthful; materialize shyly from under the skirt she wore. Her toenails were painted black but he imagined them red.
“May I ask you a question?” she almost mumbled this.
“Is it personal?”
“No.”
“Too bad.” He didn’t smile for it seemed to send the girl into shivers. He wondered what would happen if he touched her?
“Why did you bring me here?” Her hazel eyes watched the surface of the water and her blush returned.
It was endearing, her innocence. It could have been a game but he doubted it. She seemed a perfect lamb, the kind that comes along once a season, if that. This tall, languid girl, playing dress up with herself, dreaming of this moment, of an escape…“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
It had been so long. And the older he got, the less inclined they were to hang around, even for the money. It dawned on him that he could have this blushing girl for free, he immediately regretted being crude with her earlier. But she was unshakeable and detached, a part of her locked away--viciously attractive. The thought gave him a slight rush. He knew to tread carefully. “You got in my car…” He wanted to touch her suddenly, but maintained his control. This, for him, was the sweetest part of the seduction. Is that what this was? “When you could have said something you didn’t…” Her legs kicked nervously at a floating twig causing a strand of brown hair to come loose and curve down meeting her lower lip. “I didn’t bring you here, Ava. You brought yourself. I’m the one who should be asking why.” In a daring move he lifted the stray strand of hair and brushed it away.
She lifted her head, her lips slightly parted. She looked like a child, a gamine. Nothing at all like the usual Hollywood fare, this girl was charming, skittish as a kitten, breakable.
His closeness scared her so he moved away.
“I don’t know why I came. It all happened so quickly and you, well you…”
If he had been thirty younger here is where he would have kissed her. He would have taken her in his arms and kissed her long and deep while she struggled to keep herself from sliding into the fountain. He would have unzipped her dress and run his hand down her thin white back, waiting until he knew he had her fully in his power. Then he would have whispered to her to stand, the water up to her thighs, her dress ruined, floating on the surface of the water like a lily pad. “Strip for me,” he would say, and once she was naked, he would stand back and study her. She did resemble Charlotte Rampling, and the sadness in her eyes held shadows of Louise Brooks. Some women, standing naked in his fountain (and there had been many), smiled and laughed but Ava, this Ava, would not. She would follow him with her pleading eyes. Demurely covering herself. And when he said the words, the words he always said, she would blush and lower herself into the water. She wouldn’t come up immediately, like some, she would float there, eyes opened, like Ophelia tangled in her lily pad dress. Only when her breath was tapped would she come up. Her eyes once again meeting his, he would kiss her and tell her to wait. The waiting game was his weakness. He would return a call, smoke a cigarette, or occasionally leave altogether for a meeting, or lunch at The Ivy. When he returned, sometimes they’d be gone, but not Ava. She would be there where he left her, fingers having turned to prunes. He would help her from the fountain; dry her, on his knees, kissing her legs and stomach and thighs all the while. Then he would lead her to the bedroom and draw the thick curtains. They would make love in the dark, safe from the omniscient California sun and when it was over, he would send her away forever.
“…It’s just, I love your work.” Ava sat staring at the actor, but he seemed detached. He’d gone off again. His eyes were in the fountain, searching, as if he had lost something. She placed three fingers briefly on his knee.
“Yes. Then you’ll want to see Oscar.”
He walked along the edge of the garden, the house on his left, a sea of roses on his right and down a narrow bridge that led to a wing of the house hanging off the hill, open to a hidden valley. Ava followed, her bare feet skirting the occasional rock or thorn, until they came to another French door, this one covered on the inside with long thick curtains. He held them back for her and she entered, as if hypnotized by roses or another one of his slight of finger tricks.
The bedroom was dark, better to hide her panic, and while she searched for the perfect words, ones that would let him down easily, he moved to a small glass cabinet and flipped the light switch illuminating its glorious contents.
“They send you the plaque in the mail. You have to glue it on yourself. As you can see I let my son do it. He was three at the time.” The little piece of gold plated metal bearing his name, the year, and the words Best Actor, was upside down and crooked. But the statue sat on a mirrored base so that when you looked down at the reflection it was upright.
“It’s amazing, really.” Ava’s feet sunk into the soft carpet, trapping her there like quicksand. “Still… I really should leave.”
“But you’ve come so far, Ava.” The actor took a step back hiding him self among the shadows of the dark room. “I know this isn’t what you want, how you want it. But here in the dark, it isn’t so bad. I want so desperately just to touch you.” From the shadows Ava sensed movement. One of his dogs was dozing in a corner. The room smelled heavy and wet, like dead flowers, mold and body odor. “I want to feel my hands on you, my lips, just for a moment, then you can go.”
“I don’t know if I can.” The actor moved around the perimeter of the room and switched off the Oscar light leaving them in darkness.
“You can. And I offer you nothing in return. I’m an old man, Ava. If I had one wish right now it would be to unbind this cloak of years and let it fall to the floor,” his fingers found her neck and traced her spine down to the zipper on her dress. Neither of them breathed as he lowered it all the way to the small of her back, “but I cannot.”
Ava turned, facing him. In the dark room there was still enough light to make out his silhouette. She lost track of the decade, of herself. “How did I get here?”
“You followed me home.”
“You brought me here.”
“You came here.”
She inhaled.
“You wanted this—me. A part of you did.”
“But not this way.”
“Then how?” In the dark he removed his glasses and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Forgive an old fool,” he whispered.
“For what?”
“My delusions.”
Ava slowly raised her hands to the thin straps of her dress and slid them off her shoulders. The dress collapsed to her waist. She took his hands and placed them on her sides just below the ribs.
“You’re forgiven.”
This is how they used to be, alive for him. Not the plastic wind up dolls Alex brought, but tortured, baptized in his fountain, loving him despite themselves. He had been tired at The Ivy, so tired. He felt tired again now, holding her, this lithe girl, in his hands.
“Put me to bed, Ava.” An unexpected hot breeze parted the heavy curtains and a shaft of light fell across her body, withering at his touch. The waltz began in earnest. Glitter filled balloons popped above them. The heat melted the glue so that Oscar could bend down and fix his plaque.
“I’m tired, Ava. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.”
He looked younger in the half-light. She had given him thirty years from her rib cage. He held it so softly, his hands not moving. He hadn’t noticed her gift it yet but he would. He would be fifty-two, still young, a prime of sorts. He would nap and when he woke he would know what she had done. His eyes, without their milky film would see her and know.
“Anything else, Miss?”
She would lie with him. Later, his son would find them, or Alex, it changed, but they would keep her secret. They’d have to, and from then on they would all age backwards like Merlin.
This was just another way that it worked out in her mind. Another way she won him. There was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation.
“Coffee? Tea? Amaretto?”
Or maybe he came into The Ivy as an old man and she followed him home. Maybe she waded in his fountain and walked among his roses. And maybe, in the dark of his room she placed his hands gently on her sides and gave him thirty years off her life. It all seemed so real, like you could touch it.
“Anything else, Miss?”
“Just the check, Dylan.”
“You’re not gonna tell me your name this time?”
“Just the check, Dylan,” and with a wry half-smile, she thanked him, paid it, and left The Ivy.
Adria Lang
September, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
This is just to say...
This is just to say…
I figured out
your password
and changed it for you
now they will wonder
why you haven’t texted
them back
in a day or two you
will enter the name
of my cat and presto
it will be yours again
forgive me
I was full of mischief
your i-phone so
new and enticing
I figured out
your password
and changed it for you
now they will wonder
why you haven’t texted
them back
in a day or two you
will enter the name
of my cat and presto
it will be yours again
forgive me
I was full of mischief
your i-phone so
new and enticing
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