The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) (8 page)

Jake can’t see me brushing my teeth!!!

Oh my god, he looks so flippin’ handsome!!!!!

I scrubbed my teeth double-good in case I wanted to whisper anything to him. Brush brush brush!! Suddenly, my mouth began to burn. No, really
on fire
burn.
What the hell!??!
My freaking escalated into a frenzy. I grabbed the tube of toothpaste—
OH MY GOD!! It wasn’t toothpaste at all!! It was Bengay!!
Seriously? I’d brushed my teeth with an analgesic heat rub used to relieve muscles and joint pain?!
Fuck!!
My mouth was on fire!! And my lips were crimson!

I was rinsing my mouth with cold water like a fool as fast as I could as Jake walked toward me.

I burst out laughing, probably drooling like a dog as I offered up the Bengay and toothbrush. He burst out laughing, and there we were, crying as the house was preparing to implode.

All senses were heightened: fear of the tornado; lust for the cowboy; burning Bengay mouth. And that was just the beginning.

The storm alert had turned into a full-blown tornado warning, and in Kansas that means air-raid sirens blaring and TV storm trackers shitting their pants trying to act calm.

“Get in the basement!!!” Mr. Aldritt yelled. The noise of the storm was deafening. All the Aldritt boys were sitting on their asses, listening to Stevie Nicks.

“Get in the damn basement!!!” Mr. Aldritt shouted. You didn’t have to tell me twice, I was scared shitless. I ran for the stairs!

“I’m getting the raccoons!” hollered Mike Aldritt.

“Forget the fucking raccoons,” Jim Aldritt bellowed.

“I’m not coming in the basement without the fucking raccoons,” Mike protested.

“Bring the damn raccoons,” Mr. Aldritt conceded.

“What about the dogs?!” Mike pleaded. “And the cats?”

“Okay, everybody grab a fucking animal and get down the damn stairs now!” Dick screamed at his brothers.

This gave me ample time to situate myself in the basement underneath the staircase and snuggle up against Jake. I was half freaking out for real and half feigning a starlet-movie freak-out. If I had spoken, which I didn’t, I would have said, “Rhett, don’t let me die in a cyclone . . . Rhett, I need you, I love you, this is a sign from God. Oh, Rhett, protect me from the dreadful storm!” And Rhett would have said, “Frankly Scarlett, I DO give a damn!! There is never tomorrow, only today . . . and there’s no place like home.” The frenzy was so vast that even Rhett had gotten his movie lines mashed together, but I didn’t care, I just didn’t care!!!!

No dialogue was needed in this scene. This performance began my acting career and would have won me an Oscar if cameras had been rolling. I was clutching Jake, who was wrapped around me like a tortilla on a burrito. There were raccoons flipping out, dogs barking, cats hissing, five brothers laughing, Carmen telling them to shut up, Don and Maxine wondering why they had so many kids, the wind droning like a train . . . and then, as quickly as it had come, it went. Dead calm.

It was nothing new to any of us Kansans—just another night in ITA (Wichita), the Air Capital of the World.

Noah’s ark, family, and friends danced up the basement steps to the kitchen. When a tornado doesn’t actually kill you, you suddenly feel like the Berlin Wall just came down: exhilarated. Fleetwood Mac was blasting from the living room—“you can go your own waaaaaay”—and that’s exactly what Jake and I did.

“Storm’s over, let’s go out by the pool to smoke a cigarette,” he said. There were those tan hands. There was that crisp white cotton shirt. There were those stick matches that Jake was striking on the zipper of his Levi’s jeans. He was holding the flame up to my smoke, and lordy lordy, it was all too much. I delayed a beat to let him light my cigarette, and the match went out. He leaned forward and kissed me hard on the mouth, and it was probably the most perfect, memorable kiss of my life. The “forbidden” kiss—and then it hit me:
I’ve kissed someone. I’m a married woman and I’ve kissed someone.

The next day I did more. As Jake lay on top of me for most of that Sunday afternoon, making out like teenagers after the prom, I thought,
Oh well, at least we didn’t have sex. We just parked our bodies face-to-face—and smooshed. Okay, okay, that’s not horribly horribly bad
 . . .

But as I got on the plane to leave Wichita the next day, I thought . . .
I am a whore . . . My mother was right. She raised a whore.
It left me but one choice—I had to get a divorce—which I did.

I took nothing; I was the bad one after all. To this day I cannot believe what a cold, callous, heartless ass I was to my husband. I didn’t just break his heart, I thrust my hand into his aorta and ripped it from his chest, something I’ve punished myself for a thousand times over, and something I’ve regretted my entire life.

All of my justifications came floating to the top:
Well, he cheated on ME and didn’t admit it until the day after we were married. Well, well, well, well, well
 . . .

It never really works to cause immense pain to another and then justify your actions. However, I didn’t learn that till much later in life . . . much later.

I became insane with long intervals of sanity.

—EDGAR ALLAN POE

The Art of
Wallpapering

I
F EVER there was a man who deserved the title of saint, it was Dean White. Not to imply he’s dead now; he’s very much alive and very much a part of my life.

When I moved in with Jake, before I was officially divorced, he suggested I decorate our duplex. Jake had money and I had talent. We made an appointment with Dean’s Designs, a fashionable interior design firm in Wichita. Jake and I were new in our relationship and were on the wavelength of newlyweds, although we were just shacking up.

Dean—“Deano” as his children call him—was the top man (owner). We made the appointment, and it was love at first sight.

Dean was a terrific guy, one of the most naturally funny people I’ve met. He showed us all the design books that met the description of what we wanted. I chose this and that fabric. Those pieces of furniture, carpeting, and lamps. I was having so much fun with Dean and Jake, just designing away.

Although I studied interior design in art school when I was a teenager, I was far from a pro. I only knew I had a knack for it and loved designing. At the end of our decorating sessions, about three weeks after our first encounter, Deano said, “You’re really good at this! You want a job?” I thought he was kidding but, yes, I did want a job as an interior designer.

I said, “I’m not trained, you know.”

He said, “Who cares? You’re good and I’ll train you in the bullshit of all of it.” We laughed, I said yes, and Monday morning I showed up for work as one of Deano’s new interior designers.

Of course I’d never ordered anything in my life. I had no knowledge about purchase orders or working with clients of legit interior design firms. Dean’s wife, Joyce, thought I was a lunatic and thought Deano was probably loony for hiring me, and she was right on both counts. What Dean and Joyce didn’t know was that I had a budding cocaine habit.

Deano and his secretary, Betty, set up a section of his large store as my “design office.” It was small, but wow, how did an idiot like me land this primo job in the first place? Dean immediately got me clients. It was crazy! I’d meet them at their homes and ask what they liked and tell them what I thought would be “lovely.” Then I’d go back in the store where Betty would help me order everything.

This was all going swimmingly, and I had five clients within a month. Joyce was not as suspect of my lunacy as she’d been the month before, and Dean was getting rave reports from my clients.

Then Dean gave me a client named Paul. Paul was a well-known, wealthy businessman who owned an enormous plumbing-supply store. When I first met Paul, I thought he was gay. When I next met with Paul, I knew he was a raging middle-aged cocaine addict. Paul remains on my top-ten-weirdest-people-I’ve-ever-known list. How he ran the biggest wholesale plumbing-supply house in Kansas, I’ll never know.

After meeting Paul I told Dean, “Paul is a total freak.” Dean replied that he already knew that and that I was the only one who could handle him.
Why Dean? Because I’m notorious for handling freaks?
I thought. Anyway, it was work and it was a client and he was rich and on good days he
was
coherent.

One day while I was having the drapery woman hang drapes in Paul’s bedroom, he took me aside, way aside, into his garage where he kept his Bentley and his Benz.

“You’re doing a great job on the house, Kirst.” Sweet Jesus, what a red flag it is when people call me Kirst. It culls them from the normal folk instantly. “You’re doing such a great job, Kirst, that I got you a little gift.” He handed me a crystal Art Nouveau box with an enamel lid. The box was double the size of a cigarette pack. It
was
stunning, and I’m sure it was the real thing, an antique.

He said, “Go ahead and open it. What’s inside is even prettier.” So I opened it. Probably five ounces of cocaine filled the lovely box to the brim. “I just had it flown in from California,” he said. “Do you like cocaine? Have you ever tried cocaine?”

And here’s where I broke my professional bond with Paul. “I’ve tried it a couple of times. It’s sorta fun.” I blushed. Jeez! I’d never seen five ounces of California cocaine! I bought my stash by the gram in little folded papers. “Thank you, Paul, would you like to do a bit with me?” I knew cocaine wasn’t called “bits,” it was called lines, rails, bumps, blow, etc.

“Yes,” cunning Paul said, “let’s do a ‘bit.’ ” We snorted a quarter of the Art Nouveau box—enough to kill us both twice.

The drapery lady finished up six hours before we were done. Paul ended up offering to have me design a yacht and his showroom by the time I left, but he never tried hitting on me or approaching me for sex. Although he said he wasn’t gay—he claimed he had sex with hookers—he was definitely a very twisted gay man. He also liked to seduce fairly innocent girls with drugs.

Another time the wallpaper guy didn’t show up at Paul’s house to wallpaper the kitchen. My friend Lucy and I were loaded when I got the call, both high as kites, and we went over to Paul’s to assess the situation. Now, I had wallpapered rooms when Bob and I were married and were living in the house we shared briefly in Redondo Beach, California. After assessing Paul’s kitchen, I decided it was a good idea that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and I do the job ourselves.

“Hell, Lucy, we don’t need to take down the old paper! Let’s just hang on top of it.” This sounded like a champion idea to Lucy as she dipped her little fingernail into a ziplock bag of cocaine.

This was supereasy wallpaper to hang. We didn’t even have to use wallpaper paste; it was prepasted. All we had to do was run the paper through water and hang it. Lucy and I went out and got all the right tools, brushes, sponges, straight-edged razors, and such. We snorted a few long lines of coke off the kitchen table, and we were ready to go. I’m a Kansas girl, a jack-of-all-trades, and that’s how we roll in Wichita.

Lucy pulled the paper through the water, and I hung it. Strip after strip we went. The cocaine added to the speed of the hanging. It only took about three hours. Hell, we were done by noon.

We grabbed ourselves a Diet Coke and sat down at the kitchen table to go about the business of a “job well done” coke-snorting frenzy. About 15 minutes into the coke-a-thon I noticed the paper behind the refrigerator had begun rolling down from the ceiling.

“We gotta glue that down up there. Damn preglued paper!” As I was Elmer-gluing the strip back up I heard a ripping sound, like the sound of tape being torn from a dispenser. Piece by piece the wallpaper began rolling from the top by the ceiling and peeling down until it lay on the kitchen floor. It was as astonishing as it was horrifying.

Two things occur when you’re high on blow. Everything is hysterical and everything makes you paranoid, usually in that order. Uncontrollable laughter could have been heard from Paul’s kitchen for upwards of an hour, followed by a paranoia rivaled only by a serial killer surrounded by the FBI.

We—I—had hung the prepasted paper over vinyl paper. It was ruined. This was a conundrum. It would take four weeks for the new paper to get to Kansas, and it was expensive. Paul could easily come home at any minute in a coke rage. Our hearts were pounding. We could see Paul driving into the garage. We were terrified.

Paul walked in and said, “What’s up, ladies?” I blurted out how stupid I was and what I had done. I waited for the explosion to ensue . . .

“Got any coke?” he calmly asked.

“Yeah, we have a lot of coke.”

Then . . .

“Let’s do some blow!” he cheerfully decreed. He could have cared less, and he never reported me to Dean. He just had me order more paper, which he insisted on paying for.

The real wallpaper guy took the old paper off and did the job correctly.

I learned one very important thing that day: if
you
are a cokehead, it’s good to have a cokehead for a client. And always keep blow handy for emergencies.

“How’s it going with Paul, Kirstie?” Dean would ask from time to time.

“It’s going great, Dean, but he has some wacky ideas about what he wants,” I replied.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Deano continued, “Paul wants his entire basement and boat done in red, white, and blue.”

“Red, white, and blue? Are you kidding me?! It will look like it’s been decorated by Uncle Sam, for Christ’s sake!” I was livid. My reputation was at stake. True, all that cocaine stuffed up my nose could have ruined my rep and put me in prison but I was willing to take that risk. I wasn’t willing to be known as a tasteless designer.

Dean said, “Clients know what they want, even if they want shit.” We laughed. “It’s your job to make them want what you want them to want.” And that became my new mantra. I became proficient at making people want what I wanted them to want. It works in more arenas than design!