Thrill-Bent (29 page)

“Life is short, but death is long. And that’s the title of this song!” Jamie shouts.

The ensuing number, their last, is a sweet and sad dirge about what will be missed in the afterlife: skipping, White Castle cheeseburgers, the many nefarious smells of Chinatown, love, and even debt.

Jamie sings in a surprisingly pretty falsetto, not fake pretty but really pretty, an unadorned attenuated cry that reminds me of a castrato. Only once do I catch him lapse into a carpish quaffing, snapping at the air between verses. His wide jaw is mesmerizing now, his face a squared-off globe of bronze moon peeking out from behind a curtain of clouds. He is beautiful, chewing his cud like that, watching a spot on the back wall like it’s sprouting Saturday morning cartoons.

I vow to talk to him at the secret crème-de-la-crème after-party, to lure him into the smallest crook of my personal space. I want to subtly let him know that I know that he knows that I know that he knows that I know.

The after-party crème-de-la-crème turns out to be pretty much anybody who bothered to stick around until the end of the show. Pussy Posse’s performance was painfully dirgelike and overdramatic, and drove all but the most dedicated to the back of the room and eventually out the door.

A raunchy 1950s B movie is showing on the back patio. Someone has hung a queen-sized bedsheet between two fig trees, and except for one small (menstrual?) stain, it makes a pretty good screen. The girl in the film has a tattoo on her back, some kind of segmented snake gnashing at its own tail, which is accentuated by her alternating halter/midriff/crop-top costumes. Probably not even a real tattoo—no, definitely a fake tattoo. I wonder if the makeup artist re-applied it every morning before the day’s shoot, or if it was done in some semi-indelible ink after the costume designer consulted with the art director who consulted with the publicist and the facile artifactual notion blossomed into a script change. I wonder if she was told not to wash.

I glance at Kevin, who looks like maybe he’s got a few fake tattoos of his own, as he drinks from his silver flask and chats up a group of women. I don’t like feeling manipulated by Hollywood leak-heads. “Eat me, Leo-licker,” I say out loud, but too softly for anyone but Betty to hear.

Someone mutes the movie’s sound and Jamie lifts an accordion from its ancient red leather case. There is something about the way his fingertips fit perfectly onto the mother-of-pearl buttons that is satisfyingly aggressive. Like punching the lock on a bathroom door. During a sex scene in the movie, he leans into the squeeze with a special cat-in-heat moan, milking the in-and-outs for all the polka laughs he can muster. Through the squeaky cacophony of sound, I can see the girl’s hips moving up and down the screen, the arch in her back spelling out a snag, the curve of her rear orbited by that crafty, stop-action snake.

“Sometimes the earth, like, stops dead in its tracks,” I tell Jamie later when we’re leaned up against the corrugated tin wall that separates the club’s patio from the next-door neighbor’s garden, a wall so flimsy that it does little more than provide the idea of a boundary.

We are standing close and I can feel his breath on my neck as he lifts his pinched fingers to my lips to share the last bit of a joint that is sticky with red-brown resin. I didn’t know anyone smoked joints anymore. I purse and suck, closing my eyes. He’s rocking gently against the wall, which emits a rhythmic creaking noise.

I want to tell Jamie everything. “It happens when I’m running around the reservoir in Central Park. I can feel my legs pumping, but then suddenly there’s nothing pushing against them, no wind pressure keeping me in line. It feels like I’m falling ... flying ... straight downhill, my arms waving hysterically, but all the time I know I’m on level ground.”

As we look around in the grainy night, the objects on the patio are transformed. The film, a different film now, this one featuring a girl motorcycle gang, casts shadows and throws silvery threads onto people’s hair and clothes. The long, geometric patterns flicker their way around the patio in time with the tin wall’s cadenced chirps and sensual moans. I haven’t seen Betty for a while.

Jamie stares into my left eyebrow intently, as though it is cueing him. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand, hard, and I can smell the satisfaction this gesture provides—an essence that emanates from his skin, a pall. After wiping his mouth a few times, he continues rocking, nudging my shoulder with a steady pulse.

“I pass this Asian lady and her dog,” I say, “and a jogger in a sweaty Yankees T-shirt. And it’s like they’re stuck in space, motionless, in some kind of blurred tableau. I think someone has set the earth’s rotation on pause.”

His gaze is still affixed to my eyebrow, not to seek answers but just to steady himself, I think. There is a stretch of time that could be a minute, or could be an hour.

I can’t bring myself to straight-out ask Jamie about his Tourette’s. Instead, I keep talking about myself, my own raptures and nonconcentric notions. I tell him about the Condor and how he banished his Tourettic demons. I ask him to hold my hand and help me eulogize the fearless, flapping thing that has been grounded. I say a prayer for Jackson, for my dad, for my own staggering, dancing-in-a-sweaty-crowd self. For all those who don’t eat with a knife and fork. The deeper I dive into my chimeric lagoon, the more laserlike is Jamie’s stare. And the more intense his stare gets, the more violently the fence trembles.

Down, down. All I want to do is follow the alcohol- and pot-soaked egg of my brain, the spongy orb that has been doused with Jamie’s laconic and beautiful ballet, down into a cozy, mossy cove where the mermaids play their guitars relentlessly, strumming in giant extravagant loops. I want to throw myself off the top of the towering track, follow the lean that my body can’t seem to resist, sea-level’s insistent pull—even though a voice in my head is strongly urging that I catch myself and scamper back upright, no matter the slapstick indignity that this might require.

Or perhaps the voice, that cautionary creak, is not in my head after all, but is the voice of the corrugated tin wall as it begins, with a metallic yowl, to give.

“Uh-oh,” Jamie says, and as we succumb to gravity I start laughing out loud at the sight of his horizontalizing face, that solemn square capsizing to become a rhombus.

“Mayday! Mayday!” I shout.

The pause has been consummated. I notice that we are both, for whatever misguided reason, clutching the sharp edge of the wobbly wall. It is only natural, I guess, to grab at whatever object looks like it ought to hold firm in a moment of imbalance, but our grasp only serves to topple the entire fence more forcefully than if we had clutched each other instead, or if we’d simply fallen like toy soldiers.

Evidently, the dozen others who have been leaning up and down the garden wall sensed this disaster coming on, because there seems to have been a collective effort at the last minute to stop the inevitable topple. An urgent, hand-held resistance greets our weight, but even so our bodies gradually go over, and we fall like a building that has been expertly dynamited. Slow-motion calamity.

Thankfully, the neighbor’s garden is a plush cushion of dirt and vines that bolsters us in spite of the oafish clang and thwump that rings out over the hushed patio.

Betty’s face suddenly floats above me. “What the hey?” she says, and reaches out for my hand. And then, like a peekabooing parent, her image is gone.

Then glossy black hair is everywhere, torrents of stick-straight hair covering my face and Jamie’s face and the carpet of tiny orange flowers I noticed as I hit the ground.

“Jamie, are you all right?” a raspy, adolescent voice asks, the voice of the redolent girl belonging to the blinding black hair. “My silly Jamestown! Did your monsters make you fall over?” The black hair sways, and then a large head turns in my direction.

“My baby’s okay,” says Malena, holding onto Jamie’s collar, her sinewy bicep cradling the wingspan of his jaw.

Jamie glances at me through the skein of hair with a grin smeared across his face. His eyes are my father’s eyes: they say what I already know is true, that we share the mystery, that we see the tiny, perpetual pinhole poked in the laws of physics. We are traveling toward each other through the tunnel that pinhole provides, clearly illuminated by the light of our riddle.

I
remember as a little kid getting the brilliant idea to run down our long, very steep driveway with an umbrella during a raging windstorm that tore all the branches off the elm tree in our front yard and sent the patio furniture into orbit. I wanted to fly, of course, like any kid sitting at a living-room picture window watching formerly gravity-bound objects soar through the air like unwieldy branch-and lounge-chair-shaped birds. The astonishing thing was, it worked! Somehow I was able to execute my plan—which could only mean that my dad wasn’t home, since his rapacious knowledge of my every move would have prevented my even getting my hands on an umbrella—and I’ll never forget that first running leap into oblivion. I’m sure the landing was less than comfortable or graceful, but in my memory the leap took me half a mile. I tried to be aerodynamic, leaning my body flatly away from the onrush of air like I’d seen kites do, diamonding my legs and holding my breath for optimum weightlessness. The umbrella was one of those big, cane-handled, Mary Poppins jobs with enough spokes to de-eye all the children in my neighborhood. I had often run fast down the driveway without an umbrella, but that had always been on regular, sunny, still Southern California afternoons when the sky was nothing more than a backdrop. This air-speed factor, this chance to use one of nature’s slap-aroundiest elements to my alar advantage had never before presented itself. For the first time, I was actually airborne! I learned something important that day: when thrill-seeking, it pays to be an opportunist. I’ve been obsessed with leaving the ground ever since.

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