I’m Losing You (12 page)

“Hey, there.”

Eric was at the Sweets bar when Donny walked in.

“There he is,” said the agent.

“Here for dinner?”

“No—I was at Muse.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“Absolutely. Absolut.”

It was a Monday crowd—the place had become so hot that Monday was the only hip night left.

“Have you been to see her?”

“Yeah,” Donny lied. He hadn't visited once.

“Pretty horrible, huh.”

“Pretty horrible.”

“Do you believe—is it true about the root canal stuff?”

“Yeah, it's true.”

“Jesus. Phylliss was really freaked out.”

“A lot of people were.”

“She went over to see her.”

“To the hospital? You're kidding.”

“It
really
freaked her out.”

“What did she say? That she was rewriting the part for a quadriplegic?”

“Yeah, right!”

They laughed darkly and sipped their drinks.

“I heard your mother died,” Eric said. “I guess this hasn't been a great couple of weeks for a lot of people.”

Donny impulsively asked if he wanted to go somewhere else. The assistant was flattered and surprised. He ducked into the men's room while the agent waited for the valet. A few boisterous associates came and went, and Donny was grateful to have been standing there alone. Eric said he was parked on the street. They left his car and wound up at a club in Silverlake.

“I thought you were straight,” said Eric as they got out of the car.

“As an arrow.”

They drank and watched men dance. They were joined by a friend of Eric's named Quinn. Quinn had some coke, and ten minutes later, Donny actually found himself on the dance floor, two-stepping
with the boys. They had more drinks and more coke and he invited them back to Carcassonne Way. Quinn followed on his blue-and-white Harley.

Donny showed them around the house. When they got to the patio, Eric stripped off his things and jumped into the pool with a whoop. Donny asked Quinn if he was into cars, and they went to the garage.

The day Serena died, he brought the old Impala over and left it there, as if for a period of mourning—wild car of his youth back in the coop to pay its respects. Quinn ran a finger over the hood. Donny opened the door and climbed in. Quinn slid behind the wheel, shirtless. He asked if they could hear music and Donny handed him the key. Quinn turned the radio on then leaned over and kissed the agent on the mouth. His hand snaked into Donny's pants.

“You don't remember me, do you?”

“You're Quinn,” Donny said, blankly.

“You're married, right?”

“Uh, was.”

“Your wife has an angel tattooed on her butt, right?”

“Last time I looked.” The agent was curious now.

“I went home with you. You live in Laurel Canyon, right?”

“Jesus.”

“With the scarf, remember? That was pretty hot.”

“All in the family,” the agent said, unbuckling his pants. The old acquaintance got out a tiny tube of K-Y. Donny took it and greased Quinn's cock. Donny asked if he'd tested and Quinn said, Every three months. Donny just wanted it inside him. They did some coke and the agent leaned back against the door, legs up in the air. The windows fogged and the Senior Veepee winced. Is this what his mother felt? This kind of cancer…A shape appeared through the misty glass. Bracing with his body, wet from the pool, Eric carefully opened the door, so the agent wouldn't fall out. Donny arched, groaning as he rode up on Quinn. Eric braced Donny's back and neck while Quinn scooted back like an insect, taking the stuck agent with him. Eric put his knees against the seat and his balls in Donny's mouth. Donny twisted his head so that in his agony he could get at Eric's prick. The agent was stoned enough that the twisting nearly made him black out.

When his father first bought him the car, Donny took Serena for a ride. She sat in the back and he chauffeured her to Linney's, the deli on south Beverly Drive. When they got back home, she sat and wept. “You're all I have now, Donny.” It would be years before he learned what she meant.

Eric watched like a naturalist as Quinn began fucking faster. The agent conjured his mother, sitting in back, staring past them; a coliseum-sized roar as Serena was torn from the prow, a whirligig Ursula taking her place, with Tiffany in tow—mascara of dirt and tears, firecracker eyes. Donny jacked himself, hand crushed by Quinn's hard belly, Eric slowly pulling his own gummy head at the agent's crown like a deep sea geiger; Bernie and Calliope before him, agent close to puking now, two-step funhouse vertigo, father's B horror trailers—entrailers—blood hammering, hilarious vaudeville pneumatic sucking of Donny's asshole; Katherine, love of his life. Donny beside her on the Laurel Canyon bed, Quinn fucking both like a piston, cold Thai on the counter, forgiving her beloved, forgiving him everything, never a bigger love, never bigger than theirs, never could be, staring at each other, Bonnie and Clyde just before the bullets but senses dead, no Pop poetics, Donny holding back the tears, awareness searching like a snail's antennae for something to hold on to, something to hold him down, to ground him, he found it, the crazed wet smacking of the vinyl seat and the painful button at the small of his back kept him conscious. Then the beauty of the hood ornament glimpsed through mouth fog carried him over….

As soon as it was done, he could join his mother—wasn't he all that she had?—under the house.

On weekends, Les put in time at the Venice free clinic. The Medical Board asked for two hundred hours; the six months he spent there revitalized him. He felt like a real doctor again.

Obie remained paralyzed and there was no improvement in her speech. Still, he understood her better than anyone. He painstakingly assembled something of a secret language, until one day he gained fluent trespass to the sandcastle's sodden, crumbly rooms. Visitors and nurses alike marveled, though sometimes Obie's requests, as channeled through Dr. Trott, were filigreed enough to elicit unspoken derision. The day she asked him to kill her, he immediately
called Calliope. The psychiatrist warned of the consequences, legal and moral. Until he was able to separate Oberon from his mother, she said, his motives would be tainted. Luckily, Big Star pulled out of her depression—or seemed to, anyway. She stopped bringing it up.

He had a week of vivid dreams.

Most began at the Children with AIDS benefit but ended with the doctor on Sunset, standing over the familiar corpse. (The impingement of the carnival seemed to signal an end to the haunting of Les Trott.) At the pre-succubus open-air gala, the Duke of Dermis wandered through Big Star–manned booths, searching for Obie. The strange thing was, only civilians used a language Les could understand. Television actors spoke pidgin English unless they were cultural icons, which rendered them practically incomprehensible. Big Stars spoke “Catalan,” or its dream version—beyond translation. It was actually with relief that Les would find himself erased from that scene and propped in the middle of Sunset near the pink hotel, its refurbished, too-perfect grandeur and Disney World pastels suitable dressing for all manner of night terrors. As usual, the body lay ahead and relief turned to apprehension. Teeth shattered against curb and the demon seized upon him like always, fastening the cadaver to his back. Again, the instructions he'd heard time and again: burial before dawn in the yard of a house which of course, turned out to be his own. Les broke ground with the shovel, but this time was allowed to complete his chores before awakening. The body slid off him like a bangle into the grave.

It was Obie.

He floated up through inky waters, startled by his own sobs, his bed a set of dice, and then a lily pad. He was ravenous. He wolfed steak and eggs and began planning a cruise through the Suez to Safaga, on to Bombay and Colombo, Phuket and Penang, Kuala Lumpur. The Seychelles—the lagoons and atolls of the Indian Ocean, trade winds of an equatorial sky: Aldabra, Cosmoledo, Astove, Assumption. He'd invite a young man he met at the clinic. Thirty thousand apiece for Cunard's “Owner's Suite,” but Les could afford it. Calliope would think it a smashing idea.

Friday, the doctor was over-booked. He shot a lot of collagen and pimples, soothed a lot of Big Star egos. He worked late and went to a premiere. He came home around eleven, showered and threw himself
into bed. It was only minutes before sleep that Les realized he hadn't thought of her the entire day—not once. The feeling of the nightmare came back, but instead of fear he was suffused by a corny, esoteric nostalgia. He knew he'd never have that dream again.

All at once, it came to him. He would buy something for Obie before he left, something expensive, a brooch or diamond anklet. She'd love that. He smiled excitedly at the prospect. How fortunate he was, he thought, to be able to make such a kindness. He hugged a downy king-sized pillow and thought about where to shop. He was supposed to be in Santa Barbara tomorrow for a party at the Zemeckises'; the gift could wait till next week. He didn't want to be compulsive about it—that was the old Les, the Les that needed to be loved, right now, right away, at any cost. Something silky, maybe, or something soft, like those eight-thousand-dollar shahtoosh scarves in vogue with Big Stars these days. Well, he'd think about it; had to be right. Besides, he could always get something on the cruise—
that's
what he'd do. She'd miss him so while he was away. Les would have to break it gently, tell her the day before he put to sea. He'd give Edith-Esther exotic postcards with funny little messages from whimsical, imaginary ports of call, to read to her out loud. He'd buy Obie pearls—strands of duty-free black pearls. Docking in Long Beach at trip's end, he'd limo straight to the hospital. He'd kiss her cheek and say he had a surprise, putting the necklace in her hand, wrapping it around the wrist like a rosary. Edith-Esther would tell everyone “Dr. Les got her those” and no one would doubt his love.

 

You'll Never Eat Me During Lunch in This Town Again
by Phylliss Wolfe

Strange-ass developments at hand! Wound up on the red eye to New York with Katherine Grosseck's inamorata. (You haven't met her yet, have you Eric?
Very
talented writer along the Kathy Acker line. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it—Obie Mall used to say that about
everything
. Poor Obie.) The plane was totally, scarily empty. I drifted to coach at around thirty-two-thousand feet and we worked our way back to Business, tiny bottle by tiny bottle: high-larious! I did my whole “Let Me Entertain You” number and Vidra was laughing non-stop (she's really “Stocker Vidra” but everyone calls her Veed; can't quite bring myself to yet). I think I was a little nervous that maybe she was going to slip a finger in my twat so I kept the patter going. Just kidding—we had a great time. Turns out that not only does she write award-winning experimental “fictions”…
is
there such a thing anymore? I think prose is so endangered, any kind of fiction writing should
automatically
be called an experiment! Not only does she write but she's doing a three-month teaching stint in Ohio
and
she's a consulting editor at Grove. How she manages to eat pussy with a schedule like that::::::::::where was I? I have the bladder from hell. Bladder transplants are gonna be the new hip thing, just wait. Leaking to the press, ha ha. The long and short
of it is, Vidra says I should keep a journal or a whatever—wants to peddle my memoirs! I mean, she's
serious
, says Grove would buy it in a heartbeat. We futzed around with titles. I liked
Cry Wolfe!—Slouching Toward Sundance
but I'm a silly cunt, aren't I? You
know
you've got the fucking best job in the whole world, Eric. And if you show this to
anyone
, I'll hang you by your pierced tits (probably like that, huh). But I really do love you, E. You and the eighty-one T cells you rode in on. (Buh
dum
bum.) But I wanna tell ya…