Untitled Document

1. MONDAY (worked)

Her hair was shorter than usual, a dark red skullcap, and her body, verging on anorexia, was a delight of wiry strength.

This was the first time in months that everything had worked out all right. We’d broken up in January. This was late April. I fucked her and she with the skill of sincerity was trying only faintly not to be fucked, just enough to remind me that all is an act, that even in love and hatred we are consensual heroes and villains, the roles that even in their darkest moments give us a sense of belonging. She was the prisoner, realizing her true self in shame, and I was the emptiness screaming out with all its potential at the limitless possibilities of silence.

This basic lack of sympathy expressed in its complicated ensuing attitudes was exactly what our relationship needed. I realized this then, David Letterman horse-laughing on the television set: Kris can only appreciate a man who does not care about her. And in sympathy, I realized I didn’t. I wanted Anna now, and the horror of that relationship was enough to blanch the few problems with Kris I had left.

Kris is the sort of woman who can sleep with your best friend and lie to you with a clear conscience. Anna is the type to sleep with your best friend, confess in a tearful heap on the floor begging your forgiveness, then run off with him the next day, stranding him in Vegas after convincing herself on the drive up that she really does love you after all. Anna is a whirlpool.

While Kris is a unicorn of sorts. She grew up with the rainbow sheet set, the photos of her horse tucked in the rim of her dresser mirror. She has the jagged ox-bow face of a female jockey and the hard body of an archeologist three years out in the field. All this I say in terms of dearest compliment. Kris was tired and lying on her stomach and the television coiled us both down to sleep with its soft incantations of inanity. We were muttering out our last things, still warm from the movement and not yet embarrassed by the formalities required of an old lover’s recidivism. Her body began its first round of twitches as the machinery closed up shop, her limbs falling dead one by one.

“Bullshit, Oliver,” she said. “I saw it. It was a dildo.”

“Excuse me?” She didn’t answer so I said it again. “Excuse me?”

“It was... “ Kris stopped and shook her head. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Yeah it’s me, Oliver. What’s this about a dildo?” I pulled her half-around to face me, half turned-on by the awkward position of her bony shoulders under my chin.

“I...” her voice squeaked, fighting off sleep. “It wasn’t anything. I was dreaming. Turn off the TV, Randy?”

“Not until you reveal to me this dildo business.” Her constant inevitable flirtations, as persistent as a bad cold, had drawled on through the nine months of our long dead relationship. They no longer bothered me. But I was curious, so I badgered her. Fingers help with this sort of thing; I poked her in the ribs.

“Did I say dildo? Ha!” She rolled back over: “I set the clock for seven.”

“Uh-uh. I’m not gonna let you say dildo to me, and then go running back off to Oliver-land.” I grabbed a nipple, ready to twist.

“Ha!” That’s exactly how she laughs, just like it’s spelled, a burst of air. “Listen to me—stop it! I saw a picture at the slide library today and there was a gold dildo in this man’s attic. Oliver didn’t believe me, so I was arguing with him... in my dream.”

“Your boss, the gay guy?”

“He felt he ought to stand up for men’s rights, or something , so he wouldn’t admit Jack Kane had a gold dildo in his living room.”

“The actor Jack Kane?”

“Oliver says he wasn’t gay. Oliver has the list of everyone in the entire world who’s gay, and this guy wasn’t on it.”

“That actor who was clubbed to death?”

“It was for tax purposes. The man’s ex-wife is the most self-pitying human being in the known universe. She left us eight shoe-boxes of worthless photographs. And I was given the wonderful task of cataloging it. That’s why I’m so tired.” Kris yawned for effect, bumping me with her head. “So turn David off would you; his laugh is like a cat dying.”

I sat up quietly for a moment while she wormed her way back under the sheets. Kris sighs constantly, so she did this a few times, ever softer. The vaguest scent floated up from her armpits, her hair was mashed flat like an old blanket. I watched her fondly.

“What’s it like?” I said, with a nudge.

“A dick.” She turned away.

“But it’s made of gold...? Or just gold-colored?”

I had to shake her again for an answer. Kris finally whirled back, in a sprawl of those angular red-freckled bones. “What do I know, Randy? I am not a dildo expert.”

“Not certified, no.”

“It was a polaroid of Jack Kane standing with some ‘actress’ in his rec room, and beside him on a shelf was a big gold dick... and, boy, did I get excited. I’m not sleeping with Oliver, okay?”

“No,” I said, “you can’t. He’s gay.”

“I could if I wanted.” She turned again with a grunt of finality, and quickly fell asleep.

And so it began, with young Kris snorting her way into slumberland, the ex-boyfriend—namely me—awake and quietly wondering.

Forty-five minutes passed, in one of those thought monsoons that come rolling in on the rare occasion when an idea starts to take hold. It was well past time for a new one.

Like a third of Los Angeles I want to be a writer (the other two-thirds being nascent directors and musicians), and to keep working from day to day in the “word processing division” of my local Copymat, I need a project in the works, a tiny kernel of hope. Two years ago I’d written a play on the Fatty Arbuckle story. This is the comedy star of the 1910’s whose career took a nose dive after he raped a young girl with the open end of a Coke bottle. Somehow I’d misjudged his commercial potential.

I was trying to write him up in the form of misunderstood hero. Instead of a rape, you see, he’d walked in afterwards. Arbuckle saw what had just gone down, his young lover beneath a train-load of hopeful producers, and he’s shocked, he’s horrified. He can’t imagine the sort of birth this girl might form from the reprobates he associates with, so Fatty makes the noble gesture that brings about his downfall: he remembers a folk remedy an ex-girlfriend had taught him, some white trash Alabama magic. Fatty pops a Coke, he shakes it up, and with hopeful naiveté and battle-shorn cynicism, he shoves it up into her, a spermicidal douche. The girl wakes, naturally; she sees Fatty with his soda up her twat—screams, police, epic downfall.

My play went from tragedy to comedy and then to the hands of a producer manqué, whose major professional accomplishment was the admittedly difficult role of Tortellini the Duck, in the big budget live-action film of the same name. His movie bombed, but my 4’ 10” producer had cash for the moment, and he decided to parlay this bankroll into another motion picture. Only later did I learn he’d decided to do this without spending any of his own money, wealth acting, in his eyes, as a sort of creative gravitational force in Hollywood.

I spent a year reworking the Fatty Arbuckle story into a filmscript, my producer staged readings and parties, we met with studios and agents, and Fatty! , as he titled it, was instantly and universally despised.

“The tender story of an impotent overweight rapist,” said one development boy, “let me get Brad Pitt on the line.”

Our final rebuke had come three weeks before this night with Kris, as a consortium of dentists from the Midwest pulled out of a tenuous financing deal to fund a pair of USC film students in pre-production on something called, Ivana: Revenge from the Whorehouse Irkutsk.

But along the way, I’d read up on the Hollywood scandals: the tens, the twenties, the thirties... Back then, in the days when innocence could still be raped without nostalgic ennui, there was a freshness to the shock, genuine fear in that titillation. And what caught my eye, apart from this Arbuckle passion play, was the story of Rudolf Valentino’s golden dildo.

This tale came from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, bible of glitz-sleaze aficionados everywhere, but lying in Kris’s bed, her body regressing through its slow twitch to nigh, only the bare bones of that story bumped tinkling in the closet of my mind.

Sometime in the sixties a failed leading man named Ramon Navarro was found dead, beaten and asphyxiated with a golden dildo, inscribed with a dedication from Rudolf Valentino himself. The dildo later disappeared and there the mystery remained, or so I could remember.

Could this be the same golden phallus perched in the attic of Jack Kane, second rate actor and a man later clubbed to death with an undiscovered blunt object?

It was too marvelously sordid not to be true. That was a story, and if it were true, or true enough to write about, then I knew I’d regain the sense of hope I’d lost with those philistine dentists from Kansas.

By this time Kris had begun to snore, her nasal snort of reprisal all too evident in that wheeze and twang. She’d rolled away, visions of best friends and prison guards dancing through her head.

Kris is a heavy sleeper unless there’s some form of noise in the room, and I knew I’d not join her for hours, so I gingerly gathered my soiled clothes from their huddle on the floor, crept over the hardwood to the door, slipped on my jeans and a t-shirt, then quietly, purposefully, strode out into the warm Los Angeles night. I had to go home and check my Kenneth Anger.

Kris lives about a mile from me in the Fairfax district, a chummy little mid-priced Jewish enclave of pita-crammed groceries and overpriced coffee shops. None of it was happening this early, just the vagrants, their shopping carts, the rumble of the odd car straggling home from a long night of adultery. So I walked down the gray porous sidewalk, hands in the air, breathing in the fresh night of a new hope. Writing projects are lottery tickets for me, momentary glimpses into a passionate fantasy future, and when unwritten they’re never more precious.

At my doorway on top of the stairs I reached into my pocket for the keys and found only a note, written on the back of a receipt from Victoria’s Secret. It said, “Nick!—853-8983, call me or beware the conciquences” (sic). Kris wears her pants a few sizes too baggy; I’d put on her jeans by mistake.

The door was locked, of course, and my keys lay a mile away on the floor of Kris’s apartment, next to this girl who dare not be awoken.

To complicate matters, I live in a four-plex over an extremely violent man whose only claim to fame was a stint as buttocks stand-in for a talented actor I can’t name whose posterior is covered in acne. It was important I sneak in quietly.

The front screen had been knocked out weeks earlier when my friend Daphne found a sudden need to vomit, so all I really had to do was climb out onto the front ledge and slide into the living room. Of course I had to open the window first, which entailed leaning out over the metal balustrade, nearly falling into my front yard or through the window of my neighbor, but I won’t try to dramatize here. I made it inside, breaking off a line of molding with my foot.

The lights in my room had burned out, so I rummaged through the stolen milk crates that serve me as a bookshelf, sat on the kitchen linoleum against the refrigerator, and got the low-down there at three a.m. on the long dead Ramon Novarro.

Unfortunately, my mind has a mind of its own. My heart slowly sank through the stages of denial until finally I slammed the paperback shut with a grimace, hope like a lottery ticket, fluttering away on the wind.

As it turns out, on Halloween night, 1968, a pair of incompetent male prostitutes, Paul and Tom Ferguson, beat the life from Ramon Novarro, shoving a heavy art-deco dildo into his mouth and rifling through his modest belongings, taking petty cash. The object in question came from Valentino, but the dildo was neither gold nor missing, and Jack Kane had nothing to do with it.

I sat for minutes in solid disappointment, wishing Anna were beside me, knowing that it wouldn’t matter if she were. The phallus in that polaroid was just some sex-crazed weirdo’s love-toy, and the death of Jack Kane would remain an unconnected historical footnote to this shock-proof age of death.

I tossed Hollywood Babylon into a corner with the dust bunnies and stalked off to my futon, slipping into a pitiful sleep, dreaming of prisoners and chocolate and the long held promise of need.

Thirty minutes later I woke from the screaming.

You never really know how to start off with these things; I was half awake by the time I dialed the cops. My neighbor down below, whose name I feel obliged to ellipse for the sake of my skin, was beating his depilatory technician common law wife something fierce.

She yelled back, egging him on, and he smashed around like a bumper car, glass or pottery punctuating their mindless bellowing with the odd clash and ting . The lady on the other end of the phone wanted my name and address. In a less fragile moment I would have been sensible, I would have hung up.

But sleep had her fingers in my hair; thoughts were muddled. What can I say? We all make mistakes. I gave her the information, hung up the phone, and put my ear to the floor.

“You fucking bitch! You just fucking better!” My neighbor yelled his inanities; the rest he held back on, so I couldn’t get a fix on the crux of the disagreement. He had a surprisingly high-pitched voice for a man so brawny; I guess that’s why he has to make his living as a pair of stand-in buttocks.

First he said bitch, then she said bitch in a different way, then there was the slap of a strong woman and the muffled punch of a man who’d missed and hit the wall. Silence after that, then thumping. I thought he was really beating her then and put my clothes back on to actually go down and do something about it.

But as I stepped to the doorway, the thumping, it changed. Oh no. I heard the unquestionable rhythm of that one argument that never does have a point. They’d made up. Perhaps they were in love.

Anyway, the police came to my door thirty minutes later—beating on the door, thumping, pounding on the door. I had my speech prepared.

“Look, officer,” I said. “I know I called about the guy downstairs...”

There were two cops. One was younger than me, but they both had the meaty cold-climate build that puts years on a nine to fiver. They both had mustaches, and they both gave off that taunting air of an authority figure who knows he’d have to squat to meet your expectations.

The young one was blond and had something to prove; the more experienced cop was Latino, with a gut like a vending machine. “You’re Randy Horton?” he said.

“That’s me; I called. Look...”

“I need to see some identification.”

“This is about the guy downstairs, right? He was beating up his wife...”

“Identification please.” The younger cop put his hands on his hips, looked to his partner, tapped the stock of his gun.

“I don’t have my wallet. I left it.”

“Social security number?” It was all business and effort, philanthropy for an ungrateful stranger. I grew more annoyed by the second. I told the cop my number, sidestepping to block the younger blond getting nosy in the doorway. There was stolen property in there, milk crates and street signs. But none of it mattered. They had come with a job to do.

“Good enough for me,” said the blond. “Let’s rock and roll.”

“I’m placing you under arrest, Mr. Horton.” The Latino held my eyes aggressively. “You read him his rights, Brendan.”

The blond turned away, feeling around for something. “What’d I do with the handcuffs?”

“Wait, wait...” I took a step back and the blond shook his head, giving me the Miranda mantra.

He grabbed me by the wrists, turned me to face the doorway. Handcuffs chaffed, click click click.

“What is this shit?!” I’m never brave; bravery is stupid. But sometimes I am stupid, when desperation begins to take hold, when I feel that last bit of hope melt away. I jerked my hands back, ready to do something, though who knows what. And in a very businesslike gesture, as if he were reaching for a cup of coffee, the Latino cop calmly hit me in the jaw. Things went white.

“It would be better if you didn’t talk,” he said. “Better I think all around.”

“What about the guy downstairs? His wife probably has a pair of black eyes by now! She looks like a raccoon.”

He faced me to the doorjamb, and the blond pulled me up by the chain of the cuffs, giving me a quick frisk, tightening my wrists with a snort. “Do you think we enjoy working on a Monday night?” he said softly.

Through my forehead on the wood of the doorway I felt the steady rhythm of the love session still in progress down below.

“What...?”

“The man told you to keep quiet.” They turned me to the stairs, closing my door in a very gentlemanly fashion. Then the blond wiped some mud from his shoe onto the steps.

“You said I had a right to remain silent—nobody said I had to.”

“That’s a nice one.” The Latino shook his head in disgust. I couldn’t imagine the emotion was real, he didn’t even know me.

“But what did I do?”

Turning around at the bottom of the steps, the Latino finally paused with the inevitable ready-cop gesture: hands on his hips in disappointment. He was the guilt-inducing mother of the urban jungle. “Let’s you and I make a deal,” he said. “Don’t try to make me laugh anymore, and I won’t perform a body cavity search.” So we drove in silence to the station.

It turns out my jaywalking ticket had gone to warrant.

To get to the heart of the karma here, we have to move back to the days when I’d first met Anna. Psychically speaking I realized, sitting on the floor of the cops’ cement cell, listening to a drunken businessman eat through the rotting onion skins of his personality, this whole ensuing pony show was just a spiritual retribution for the crime of falling in love.

We’d made the promise not to sleep together until she broke up with her boyfriend. I thought of the idea, and I say this now as an obvious attempt to curry favor. It didn’t last of course, but I felt good about myself for those two weeks before it happened. Of course the ulcer changed things. Anna thrives on trauma the way bacteria live in a fumarole. She’d been drinking all her life, like thirteen sailors on leave, and while she lied to herself about those nagging pains, the ulcer ate past her stomach to the pancreas. She finally collapsed in a heap during one of the usual parties, and the next morning after a harrowing series of painful blood-steeped vomits and nervous sips of flattened ginger ale I took her down to County Medical for a Tagamet prescription.

Drink and you will die, said the doctor; and she could feel for once it was real. Her life in that instant took a surprise zag left, and she was left without a spine to her existence. What is Anna without a glass in her hand? She didn’t know.

At any rate, desperately not wanting to hurt her boyfriend, she dragged him and me on through the muck of our mutually metastasizing lack of self-respect, neither rejecting nor accepting either one or herself, until one by one the three of us reached that state of paralyzed love-sick agony in which any move is bad, anything said is the wrong thing. I’d given up any shred of nobility the week before, but we still tried to keep things straight; we tried not to do it. Until that day when I showed her the handcuffs.

For the last month I’d been visiting Anna every other day, talking, mournfully reading her excerpts from the Fatty Arbuckle screenplay, listening to her journal. We had a few hours before she had to leave for work, and I came to visit for the usual carnivorous bullfight, each of us dancing around the question: would we or wouldn’t we grasp the excitement of denying our morals.

I knew what she’d do when I mentioned the cuffs; I can’t pretend. I had them in the trunk of my car, props left over from a staged reading of Fatty! weeks before. They were strong enough to get the job done, bought in a toy store for $7.98.

And naturally she wanted to see them.

So I went out for the cuffs, each step to the car a mating-dance. Soon she was down onto her elbows, wrists together, pants to her knees. We were fucking in that frenzied logarithmic two-step, fast then faster, while she indexed through the primordial denials: daughter, sister, sacred no.

But then there was a moment. There was a moment in the push when something came inside, something broke or popped. A snapping went through her body: peanut brittle and Quinine water. Anna collapsed and I stopped in a microsecond, poised like a hummingbird. Her moan rose up into the visual spectrum past ultrasound, and her stomach tensed and tensed and tensed like there was still me inside there, like a radiator hose ready to burst.

She begged me to take off the cuffs. I rolled onto the floor fell onto my back looking for the keys and couldn’t find them. Then one by one they broke off in the lock, keys snapping, Anna writhing, hula-hoop dancing, all the bad things, things that happen so seldom we don’t yet have the words. Her ulcer had gone bad; it was bleeding.

I couldn’t think; I kept turning those impotent lead keys in the hole, hoping good will would pull us through. I pictured this selfish tableau: lady over the shoulder like a potato sack, emergency room doctors in the press, expensive equipment electrically primed to cut . They would stare at the handcuffs, then to me. Tears streamed down Anna’s cheeks. Should I call an ambulance?

“No, no,” she gritted her teeth, “Doctors don’t do anything.” Finally I stumbled into her living room and found the Swiss Army knife given to her by the only man she’s ever loved. I dug at the handcuffs with the knife, pried and chucked one open, then the other while she tried not to whimper, stomach tensing, ripples small and sensitive, skin as soft as tissue.

Anna apologized like she does about everything, as a means of self-abuse, and the moments set that moment back, her new gray hairs like a spider web pulling them away.

So let me reiterate. I was sitting cross-legged in my cell. The police had taken me in and I’d realized that the ticket that went to warrant was the one I received on the day of Anna’s handcuff incident—after she’d finally stopped vibrating, when her stomach finally pulled in to shore, I took us out to breakfast.

She eats only rice, toast, and potatoes, so we had an unparticular meal, just food, mournful talk of love, and a parking ticket... She hobbled forward while I was still in the restaurant, grabbed it off the wiper and stuffed it into her scruffy little backpack. I’d paid for breakfast; she wanted to return the favor.

I ran after her just a moment too slow, just slow enough for the policeman to spot me. He gave me a jaywalking ticket to match the parking ticket, both of which Anna took from me promising to pay. And both of which, of course, she promptly forgot. Only the jaywalking ticket went to warrant; the other just tripled in cost.

I present this tale not in self-recrimination. I say these words in Anna’s care, with simple hope that if I am incapable of presenting her in Truth at least I can point to the wake she leaves behind. Anna is a great gaping maw, a cheerfully glum waif-like wad of gun-cotton sitting in a puddle of her own explosive urine. If I were a successful writer I could fake it, fit her up with those delightful turns of phrase—instead I must ask patience. She was a hitchhiking mermaid, that moment between gunfire and impact, and perhaps her lack of interest excited me most of all.

It felt romantic actually: imprisoned for love. I lay back on the jail cell floor, pulled my neck forward, vertebrae doing their snap snap snap, and I swelled up with remorse like a toad: the hopelessness of loving someone incapable of loving someone who loves them—a familiar story.

The businessman next to me babbled non sequiturs: “I’ll have you walking a beat in south central...” He seemed to think we lived in a fifties film, as if police in LA ever walked a beat.

Hours passed. Nothing happened.

And slowly I began to feel grim. It built up over the hours, a charcoal-seeped bitterness, a lack of good in the world from my heart on out—not hatred so much as a dark and methodical faithlessness. And in consequence, I began as I always do in these embarrassing moments, to reason...

Can you speak to a cynicism that denies all truth—the bang on the head with each passing day saying nothing, giving no answer but that bang on the head? where any thought or talk or movement is as good as any other because all are lies, where any hope or faith you invest is invested at random, on a passing whim, based on nothing but the sound of the words on your lips or the time of day this thought occurred to you? It burned and burned. The lights of the jail cells dimmed all down the hallway, an institutional twilight sending me low through this personal night:

The less than useless appendages of hope and faith, the mock of sincerity and the impossibility of honesty, I realized these are gifts in this world, gifts to be given out as you feel the need, experiences to be had for their own sake, so you can feel what belief is like, so you can experience hope—not because you actually believe, but because the experience of belief lives on. The momentary atavistic joy of faith or hope is still running through our gears, even if we’ve long since realized they have served whatever purpose they once had and are fading away through the generations, sucking back into themselves, appendixes of modern experience.

What I say is what I say; what I feel is what I feel—relationships between these moments of experience are transitory. In such a city melodrama may be appreciated without reservation, lies shall be coddled without suspending disbelief. In this city of the hyperconscious, words are sounds, sights are real in direct proportion to their lack of excitement, and the music of the billboards is the background of our soul.

It came as gentle grounding, this world of infinite possibility where the infinitely possible gives lie to all that is. But strange hope lay there, beyond it all, one step removed—a flipping of perspective. In a world made mute against the face of infinity nothing is possible. We grope the stark multiplicity of the vacuum. But in that absolute calm of the void lies infinite potential. I suddenly held a breath and touched the limitless possibilities of silence. In a world where nothing is possible anything can happen—absurdity can live in the soul.

Suddenly the cynicism burned through; the strings of a new project pulled taut. I’d given up on screenplays; on plays. It was time for something new. I’d create an absurd conspiracy around the death of Jack Kane, centered on that mysterious gold dildo in his den. I’d manufacture a death more sordid than reality, and admitting the lie to myself with the cruelty of absolute cynicism, I’d interview the men and women of his life—the hopeless friends and lovers of a two-bit celebrity. I’d watch and record as the spark of this magical lie caught fire in the minds of the hyper-conscious.

We believe in what we want after all; and we want what we cannot have. This I knew all too well from experience. But what came new on the floor of the holding cell was the final lock-step end to this reasoning—we believe in what we cannot have. So I would give them what they wanted, a conspiracy to grace their past with interest. I would pretend I had a mystery and interview the men and women of Jack Kane’s life, recording their real responses to a mythical plot—the gold dildo that killed him and its mysterious disappearance.

I would create a pseudo-docu-novel.

And as the Hollywood mysteries convoluted upon themselves, as my stories grew ever more bizarre, I would force these petty humans one by one to accept the facts—that belief was never more than belief, that in the end the only thing that matters is what you can touch, what you can hold and eat and breathe. It would be a tale of hopelessness, but only the hopelessness of thought, of words. For there is real hope in a breath, there is hope in a mouthful of food.

Everything felt so delicious and bad and new—an innocence repackaged, tarted up, I.D.’d, and ready to go.

In the end of course it all got turned around.