Paint It Black (8 page)

Lola Lola wasn’t there yet. In the kitchen, someone had filled the Sparkletts bottle with a Windex blue liquid. Pen and the others filled paper cups, but Josie passed. Whatever they’d put in the Windex blue wouldn’t do her any good tonight. What she needed was booze and some downers, the wine and bread of forgetting. They went out onto the rooftop. A spread had been laid, bean dip and crackers and wedges of cheese, little éclairs, the label must have splurged.

“Hey, Josie,” she heard behind her, a familiar voice, unwelcome as VD.

Nick Nitro lounged with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hand atop the low wall of the rooftop garden. Nausea overwhelmed her at the sight of his nervy body, the stringy blond hair. How had she missed him at the club? Or maybe he had skipped the gig and come straight to the party. “Hey, I heard what happened. That’s a drag. A lot of that going around.” He took a swig from the JD and screwed the cap back on. You wouldn’t want to fall down and spill your booze.

She held up her hand to ward off any attempt at false sympathy. Christ, what did Nick care about Michael? She hated the idea that they’d even lived in the same world. Pen tried not to meet Josie’s eyes, but in the end couldn’t avoid her, smiled and shrugged, good as confession. You could always count on Pen, if there was anything you wanted to keep private, she’d make sure it was broadcast on the AM band. You could pick it up in Hawaii. Pen had no sense that someone might want to keep her private life private. Privacy wasn’t even a concept. She’d never closed a bathroom door in her life.

“You can always crash with us at the Fuckhouse,” Nick said. “If ya get lonesome.”

If ya get lonesome.
To think, she had once been that lonesome. When she’d had Michael, but didn’t. She wished someone would just put a pin in her brain and stir it around, like they did to the frogs in her high-school physiology class. She tasted bile in the back of her throat. People were staring again, knowing she and Nick had been an item, hoping for some drama. “I’ll never be that lonesome.”

“Yeah, I believe that,” he said to Ritchie, his keyboardist, handing him the square bottle. “Josie without dick, yeah, what time is it?”

She flew at him then, but he was too fast, he ducked and then grabbed her wrist as she swung again. She struggled to get her hand free, struck him with her left.

“Hey, I said I was sorry he offed himself.” He was shouting at her, ducking her blows. “What’re ya hitting me for? I didn’t do shit but get you off royal. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

“Shut up, just shut the fuck up!” Hitting him until Pen dragged her off.

“Hey, Josie, it’s not Nick’s fault. Just stop it.”

She sat on the wall, crying right in front of everyone. Fuck them. She’d never deserved Michael. She didn’t know how to be with someone like that, how to take care of him.
I hope you find someone to meet your needs.
Nick knew who she was, how to treat her. Like the garbage she was.

“No fighting. Unless it’s me,” a deep, resonant German-accented voice boomed. Lola Lola made her entrance through the glass doors onto the terrace, posing in the doorway like Bette Davis in a long, red feathered coat. “Why is that girl crying?”

Nick shrugged. “Her boyfriend offed himself. Like it’s my fault.”

Josie twisted in Pen’s grip. “I hate your fucking guts.”

He grabbed his crotch at her. “Suck my cock, you do it so good.”

Lola Lola turned to Josie, her face right up close to Josie’s so she couldn’t see Nick anymore. Lola was tall, her yarn wig gone, hair sculptured in great red wings, her eyes painted, pupils dark as quarter notes. She took Josie’s hand. “What’s your name,
schätze?
”

The inside of her head roared with blood. “Josie.”

“Come inside, Josie. We’ve got some wonderful hashish, you like hashish? We bought it in San Francisco. Afghani. With opium. They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?”

Inside, the people around the hookah moved over so Lola could sit down, and she made room for Josie next to her. She felt tiny next to Lola, even smaller than usual. She was drunk and sad and her eye makeup was all smeared, her nose was running. Someone handed Lola Lola a hose. Josie felt like Alice in Wonderland. She had eaten from half the mushroom, she was shrinking, and a man who looked like Frank Zappa, in pink-rimmed spectacles, added shredded tobacco to the big bowl of the hookah, then tore hunks of hashish from a dark wad with his thumbnail, put it on top. They all bubbled together. Lola had lungs like an Olympic swimmer. They all stopped at the same time, holding their thumbs over the mouthpieces of the various hoses. Then passed to the next person. Lola offered her hose to Josie. Around the pipe sat a girl whose hair had been cropped and dyed like a leopard, a handsome dark boy in a Bags Band T-shirt, another man in a Sonny Bono haircut. They bubbled together, sharing a breath like a chorus. Josie started coming on immediately, like an elevator going up.

Lola took the hose back, toked, and passed it to her guitar player, who had settled on her left. The others around the circle bubbled on their hoses. It sounded like a children’s party, straws slurping. Lola removed her coat and sprawled against the pillow, and the stink of her postconcert body was as strong as the hash. Josie bubbled again. Lola spoke quickly, still on a manic high from the gig, the rush of words when someone was done with a performance. “They tried to arrest us in Santa Barbara, you heard this?” she asked Josie. Her eyes were black from the hash or whatever else she was on. “You’ve been to Santa Barbara? They are oh so proper there. No strip searches in Santa Barbara. When Eddie had it in his ass all the time.”

The Zappa guy nodded. “Anything for you, Lola dear.”

Josie thought it was odd to be smoking something that had been up this guy’s ass. It was not just the idea of it—most drugs came that way, probably, but usually it was the ass of someone you never met, someone in Burma or La Paz. But here was this guy with the pink glasses, tall and skinny. It made her wonder what else he had up his ass. Furniture maybe, antiques, gold-leafed icons. Human smuggling, illegal aliens up his ass. It made her laugh to herself. It was good to finally be high. This was exactly what she had been looking for.

“It lends an extra thrill, don’t you think?” Lola said in her raspy German-accented English, gesturing with the hookah hose. “We’re very attracted to shit, as a race. All animals are, of course, but the human being is more complex in this. We cannot admit we love it, our mothers will punish us, us nasty children, playing with our own shit, rubbing it on the wall. But tell me, what child doesn’t play with his shit? We love it, the smell, the texture,” Lola rubbed her hands together, as if mashing some clay. “It is the element of creation, no? But it shames us. So we pretend we hate this, when we adore it. Think of the toilet, the Western toilet, you see?”

Josie lay pulverized by the opiated hash, thinking how bizarre life was, how Fellini. Michael was dead, and she was sitting here talking to Lola Lola about toilets, when she wanted to have a real conversation about how to live. It was as if the world had been knocked off the little stand that kept it on the desk, and now it was rolling around on the floor.

Those red lips, her big singer’s gestures, calibrated for the back of the club. She was still performing. “Growing up in the East, of course, we had the Soviet model, absolutely Spartan, no good Communist should be fascinated with the individual product of the asshole. But in the West, the toilet has a viewing platform. For analysis of the health, or so we pretend. When it is a pedestal, for the admiration and worship of shit.” Her lips, smeary with old lipstick, rubbery red animals squirming on her face. “Americans insist on the superior shit, consuming acres of bran cereal, the better to have big attractive ones. Did you know that all the best perfume has a little bit of shit in it?”

Josie shook her head. A little turd floating in the Chanel No. 5.

“You don’t believe me?” Her black eyes opening wide in their mask of black. “It’s well known. Any perfumer will tell you the same. We find perfume missing that little excitement if it hasn’t just a touch of shit in it. Only cheap perfume has no shit, which is why it’s so boring. The great perfumes all have it, or something that smells like it. We’re the only animal that tries not to smell like one, we obliterate our own body’s odor and then add an artificial one, the scent of a flower or a plant. And yet, in the end, it doesn’t really make it for us unless it smells like shit. I think we’d be better off if we could just sniff each other’s asses. Dogs are much more secure, don’t you think?”

Josie lay on the pillows. She couldn’t keep her head up. She’d never smoked anything as strong as this Afghani hash. She wondered why it wasn’t affecting Lola like that. They must have done some coke or speed on the way over. She thought of people sniffing each other’s asses, but it led to thoughts of dogs, she did not want to think of dogs. Goddamn them all.

Lola shook Josie roughly by the shoulder. “It’s good? I told you it was good. You have any cigarettes?”

“Yeah, but I’m too high to get them. They’re in my purse.”

Lola dug through Josie’s red schoolbag purse. “Ooh, la la,” Lola said as she pulled out the pack of Gauloises and lit one with Josie’s lighter. Her father’s Ronson. That waft of butane. Josie lifted her hand slow as in a dream, and Lola put the lit cigarette between her fingers, fired another herself.

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” Lola said, settling back on the pillows. “The one who dies.”

How to sum him up. She couldn’t begin, she couldn’t find words. How to describe him, it would sound like four different people. His genius, his beauty. How maddening he was, how tender. How she never thought she would ever love someone so much, hadn’t even known she had it in her. And then how fucked up it got. She was sure, of all people, Lola Lola would understand, the one person who could. “He believed in a true world. A world behind this one, that shines through it, like a candle through a lampshade.”

“A true world,” Lola said. “That’s very beautiful.” Her eyes shiny black as a deaf-mute’s piano. Coke, Josie guessed. “How is this world?”

She thought about the true world, the times they had seen it—it was like light glinting on the surface of the river, that shimmering quality when you saw it. It wasn’t the thing itself. It was your own ability to see it. Like the nights they lay in bed listening to the mockingbirds sing. Or the time they knelt by the river, and the blue heron came walking out of the reeds. The feeling when time stopped, and you could stay there forever. “You see the beauty inside everything. It doesn’t last long—it’s either gone in a minute, you just caught it, or else maybe it’s something so big that you normally can’t get your head around it. Like the fog in your head clears out. The world stops being a puppet show and you see the real thing. It’s probably like that all the time, but you just can’t see it, except for those little glimpses.”

“A beautiful man,” Lola said, posing with her cigarette like Dietrich. “I wished I could have met.”

Josie dragged on her cigarette to ease her aching lungs, wiped at her face with the back of her hand. “But then he forgot how. He stopped being able to see it.”

She smelled burning cloth and saw Lola, burning holes in her stockings with the tip of her cigarette, holding the fabric out from the skin and piercing it with the cherry. The cloth stank as it burned. “And you?” she asked. “Do you believe in this true world?”

Josie gazed up at the ceiling with its intricate plasterwork, interlinking motifs of deer and palm fronds around what must have been a chandelier, but now was just a lightbulb in a red paper shade. Did she still believe in a true world? She didn’t know what she believed in. She didn’t have the energy to believe in very much. “I used to.”

“No. You must believe,” Lola said, propping herself on one elbow. She surprised Josie with her seriousness, the way she said it, not playing to the balcony, not talking to hear the grandeur of her own voice. “Don’t let them take it away. Promise me.” Josie could see the strip that held Lola’s false eyelashes on, her face was so close to hers. Her breath smelled of vodka.

How could she promise? The true world was a million light-years gone. She turned her head to exhale, so she wasn’t blowing the smoke into Lola’s face. “Why?”

Lola traced the design on the dark Deco print of the pillow with a finger, flower connected to flower by a path of vines. “Where I grew up, there was no such thing as a true world. Only the State and what was good for the State. You come to treasure a moment of great beauty, when the world is more . . . than this. It must still be there. It must be.” And Josie knew Lola wasn’t thinking of Michael, but of her own boyfriend, Ferdi Obst, in her dressing room in Paris.

Now Lola Lola was looking at her with those shining black eyes in the mask of black, like someone peering out from a cave. Josie pressed her head onto her hard knees, her pale legs in the child’s plaid skirt, the red cowboy boots. Trying not to remember her legs around Nick as he fucked her against the wall, while Michael sat at home staring at Bosch. She wished she could say she couldn’t remember, could blank it all out, but she remembered everything. It was in the body. Her body always remembered. Michael turning away from her. He was all she ever wanted. But if she couldn’t have him, she knew someone who would take her, no questions asked. Rolling around in shit, yes, to punish Michael for pushing her away. And to punish herself, for not being good enough for him, smart enough, interesting enough. Yes. She knew her level and could sink to it anytime. Revert to type. She had no right to even speak about the true world. She would stink it up even by thinking about it. There had been a true world, but the candle had gone out, and all she had left was a Chinese lampshade,
hecho en Mexico.

8

Christmas

S
he didn’t want a Holly Jolly. She didn’t want a Very Merry or a
Feliz Navidad.
It was only eight o’clock and she had the whole night to get through. All over the city, people were sitting down to turkey dinners and trimming trees and schlogging eggnog till they puked. She threaded her raw-mufflered Falcon up and down the hills and drops of Echo Park, of Silverlake and Angelino Heights, drinking and avoiding the house behind the house on Lemoyne Street where no one lived anymore, listening to a Germs tape on the tinny car stereo. They were doing “We Must Bleed.” She should have gone down to Fullerton with Pen and Shirley and Paul to the Black Flag show, but that scene was getting so ugly. Phil Baby invited her to a party at his place, it sounded like death on a TV tray—a bunch of art teachers in horn-rimmed glasses smoking J’s and getting swacked on hot wine with cinnamon sticks. There was nowhere she wanted to be, nothing to do but get blasted and drive around until her gas ran out.

She cruised Sunset, the families strolling along the broad sidewalks, the stores all decorated, windows spray-painted with snow and cartoon Santas,
Feliz Navidad.
She stopped at the Chinese market, the parking lot was jammed, people buying their last-minute fish and sponge cake. She pushed a cart around for a while, banging into people in the fluorescent light, down the long cold rows of vegetables and fruit. She decided to buy a weird huge fruit that looked like a porcupine, it weighed about twenty pounds and smelled like armpits. Michael would do something like that. There was no trace of Holly Jolly in here, God bless the Chinese. Men with huge cleavers hacked up chickens and hunks of pork behind the butcher case without a shred of tinsel or a single Santa hat. Two tiny withered grandmas stood over a metal sink full of little blue crabs scrambling over each other in a hopeless bid for escape. Maybe that was God. Peering over the edge of the sink as you tried to claw your way out, picking off this one and that one.

She carried her purchases out to the car, some of the bean cake Michael liked, and the stinking porcupine fruit, and started driving again, the half-pint of voddy between her knees. She couldn’t shake the feeling that any minute she would see him, walking along with his hands in the pockets of his tweed jacket, the collar up, striped knitted scarf around his neck. There by the newsstand. Or there, in front of Señor Reynaldo’s Escuela de Baile.

How many times before had she done exactly this, driven the streets until she saw him, walking along, coming home after work, digging the neighborhood, feeling it like music, and pulled over, pretending she was just a girl who’d seen something she liked, offering him a ride, maybe something else if he had a mind to. “Hey,” she’d call out. “Hey, baby, wanna date?”

The Pioneer Market lot still bristled with unsold Christmas trees. They had bought their own tree here, exactly twelve months ago. She could see them, walking together, arm in arm, the tall rumple-haired boy in the tweed jacket, collar raised against the cold, the girl in the yellow coat with the bleached hair. Laughing, spying on people, guessing who they could be, making up stories. The only fucking Christmas they would ever have. Driving home with the tree tied to the roof of the Falcon like a dead deer, carrying it down the steep stairs. They sat up all night making decorations for it, Michael twisting up an entire circus from pipe cleaners—horses with bareback riders, seals with balls on their noses, elephants, and dogs in tutus. The little ringmaster with his top hat and whip. Twisted strings of trapeze artists, pyramids of acrobats. And she made angels from Kleenex and sheep from cotton balls, and they drank eggnog with rum and danced to Piaf on the stereo.
La Vie en Rose.
Michael wrapped all around her, his cheek pressed into her hair.

She pulled into the parking lot, parked sloppily, trying to see through tears that stung like bleach. They had been happy, they had been. She got out and pushed her way between the trees, blindly, brushing their sticky needles with her hands, the smell overpowering, clinging to her arms. She wanted him desperately, fiercely. She wanted him back, now, right now, she didn’t think she could live one more moment. “Miss?” A pimply-faced box boy was peering at her through the branches. “Miss, are you all right?”

“Do I look all right to you?” she said, clutching at pine branches. Her hands smelling of pitch pine and loss. “Do I fucking look all right?”

She gave up and drove over to the Diazepam bakery, which was doing quite a business tonight,
pan dulce
and Valium. She put some fresh
pan dulce
on the tray and wrapped a twenty in a couple of ones, and the small, blank-faced Salvadoran put a little something extra in her bag.

All along Sunset, telephone poles and boarded-up windows were pasted thick with advertisements for
Club Bahía, Chicho Montoya y Gloria Núñez, Sábado
9
de Diciembre,
8
PM. La Laguna Azul con Brooke Shields.
A stoic young man in a hooded sweatshirt sold oranges on the corner at Alvarado. He would have to sell them all before he could go home, probably just a room hotbedded with three other migrants in Pico-Union. No better
Navidad
than hers. She rolled down her window and held out two bucks, he brought the sack over, a small corpse in his arms, she passed the money through and took the weight from him. She could smell it, saffron over sour green, it smelled better than the stink fruit in the back, she threw it onto the passenger seat, and tore open the bag, peeled one on the steering wheel as she drove. The rind was thick, the orange smaller than it should have been, cold and sour, but she ate it anyway, knowing somewhere there was a place where the oranges would be allowed to ripen all the way. They would fall off the trees before they were picked they were so ripe, the smell was only a promise. That’s where they should have moved, somewhere things were allowed to ripen all the way. Oranges there would be sweet as kisses in paradise.

On the side streets, Christmas lights festooned the houses, in the trees and across balconies, around barred windows. Little houses with their little families, getting ready for Christmas. Flickering lights at the rooflines, trees in the window. Why couldn’t they have stayed like that, her and Michael, the way they were last year? She tried to look into the windows of the houses. So pretty. So hopeful, that instinct for light in winter, believing, waiting for a miracle. While she was left with just this, a stinking fruit in the backseat, a bed of snow.

That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone. And you were just left with Bosch, crabs and grandmothers and fake snow,
Feliz Navidad.
And here were these tiny houses made beautiful by their lights. She knew that the true world was there somewhere. But not for her. This is how Michael had felt, when he looked out the windows at Bosch. He’d just passed it on, that son of a bitch.

She stopped at Gala’s and bought another half-pint of voddy and two packs of Gauloises, and ran out before Mrs. Ramirez could wish her a Merry Christmas. Two packs of ciggies and a pint of Smirny on Christmas Eve, couldn’t you read her life right there? She drove back along Sunset, her fingers sticky from the orange on the wheel of the car, while Darby screamed
no God to fear—no God to hear your cries . . .

People on foot pushed baby strollers, going into the 99¢ Store and Launderland. She wiped her tears on the back of her hand. How he’d loved that. Folding clothes hot from the dryer, just so. Not just cramming them into the duffel like she would have done, but snapping and folding, speaking Spanish to the ladies waiting for their own loads to be done. “This is real life,” he once said. “Not those middle-class assholes with their Whirlpools and all the conveniences of home.” When any woman there would have sold her soul for a Whirlpool and all the conveniences of home, not to have to drag her family’s weekly wash through the streets, each child carrying a part of it in a garbage bag or a box like a laundry parade. But Michael loved being in there, loved laundry done in public, learning what he could about ordinary lives. Nothing he hated more than a closed door, though he was adamant about his own secrets. Oh yes.

She passed El Tigre, and the little botanica with its herbs and saint candles. She should stop, buy him a candle, say a prayer. But what would she pray now?
Sleep well, asshole. Thanks for leaving me here all alone.
She considered the Valium in the bag with the bread, it would go well with the voddy, she’d have to pace it if it was going to last through the night.

She turned the Germs up to 9, all she wanted to hear was Darby screaming his voice raw, Pat Smear smashing away on his guitar,
fuck all of you assholes.
She passed Burrito King, passed the Guadalajara with its blacklight sombrero bar and the tiki bar by the TV station, where her fake ID was no good. She turned up Vermont, all done for Christmas, tinfoil and ribbons on the light posts in front of the Italian delis and bakeries, there was a crowd at the door of Sarno’s, where the waiters sang opera in between serving your lasagne, and sometimes a patron would stand up and sing. She wanted to stop, buy a cannoli or some spongy Italian cake flavored with wine, lean on the bakery counter and listen, just be in that warmth, the smells of the food and that surprising beauty pouring out of just plain people. But she knew she would feel like a hyena, a jackal, some ugly scavenger, and kept driving.

Half of LA crawled along Los Feliz Boulevard, gawking at mansions decked in vast seas of light, sucking up more power than a village could use in a year. Each one trying to outdo its neighbor. It was disgusting. It was not the true world. Not the same as the small houses with the lights. Just waste and arrogance. She opened her windows so they could hear what the Germs thought of them.

She turned up a side street, bore right and climbed. She knew where she was going. The last place she should. It was as if the car was going there of its own accord. Light emanated from the big houses, windows blazing, you could see into them like dollhouses. Why didn’t they pull their curtains? If it was up to her, she would install thick velvet drapes, no one would be able to look inside. How supremely confident you’d have to be to show off like that, when there were people in this city who would kill you for a leather jacket. Here was a Christmas tree, it must be fourteen feet high. That one had a fireplace, and lights reflecting in a tall gold-leaf mirror. One was having a party, there was a wreath on the door and people were arriving, their arms laden.

She drove higher, until the lights all disappeared. No more Christmas trees or fireplaces or white living rooms. She turned down the tape, and finally, turned it off. Now the houses retreated behind high walls and hedges. She recognized the gate, the Spanish house at the top of the drive.
Via Paloma.
Only the living-room window was lit, obscured but not completely hidden by the big deodar. Josie pulled over and parked opposite the lacy ironwork gate. Here was the hugeness and the darkness she wanted. The mushroom softness of the old stucco wall and the moldering sadness of the place, its abandonment, its smell of cedar and pittosporum. It was as if she had been circling this house since Michael died, moving in tighter and tighter orbits around this epicenter.

She rolled down the window to the cold, breathed in the night’s wintry freshness. There could be a frost, the stars bristled in the sky like white flecks on a black enameled roasting pan. A piano started, then stopped, started again, the same phrase over and over. She peeled another orange, throwing the peel out the window that she left rolled down for the fragrance of the pines and the music. You would not know it was Christmas up here. This house in its dignified mourning was out of reach of all festivity, any hope of salvation. From behind the palms and the spiky yuccas and the funereal cedars, the piano repeated the phrase, like a bad conscience playing in your head.

She took a Valium, washed it down with voddy, it didn’t burn anymore. She lit a Gauloise. As she watched the house, the gate, she could see the little boy standing there, looking out from between wrought-iron curlicues, his little hands wrapped around the bars. She had never met anyone as lonely as Michael. Lonely, and despising his own loneliness, disdaining the crowd while hoping for connection. For her, in childhood, loneliness had been a rumor, a distant country, an alpine place with rugged mountains jagged against the sky, the rarefied air fresh as snow. She would have given anything for such loneliness as a child, no one yelling or talking or taking stuff away from you, fighting or saying mean things about you because you were a Tyrell. Although Michael said loneliness was a terrible thing, she had only been able to imagine the quiet and the order of such a life. The words
only child
rang with overtones of luxury, attention, dreamy solitude.

The piano stopped, and she could see the dark-haired figure rising, leaving the lit arch of the window, moving into the half shade of the next one. A small lamp came on, illuminating Meredith’s face as she lifted the phone’s receiver, dialed. She waited and held the phone awhile, and Josie could almost hear the phone in her own house in Echo Park, ringing. How this woman despised her. Josie’s crime—loving her son, loving him, but not enough to save him.

The monstrosity of the idea, that she could have saved Michael. He tried to save her, she tried to save him, and neither one got their fucking wish.
You’re exactly what he needed.
Cal did seem like a clown now, self-serving in his idiocy.

Josie looked up at the two lit windows and wondered what it would have been like to have grown up in a place like that. It had always amazed her that Michael, who had come from all this, thought her life was more authentic than his, when in fact it was thin and paltry, all her glamour just a brave child playing make-believe. The awful precious moment of receiving her first new dress, store-bought, pink and stiff, with net that scratched her skin. She got it for Christmas when she was seven. Her mother was home from the hospital but she didn’t have a baby this time. “Your mother’s just tired,” her father said, when her mother wouldn’t come out of the bedroom, week after week. She’d been afraid to even sit down in that dress, wore it only twice before she outgrew it and handed it down to Corinne who got red punch on it that never did come out. She should have worn that dress. She should have worn it like hell, every day, to school and everything. Maybe her life would have turned out different.