Callie was there, arm across her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, staring at her bare foot, thin and childlike, she had painted the toenails black two weeks ago, but it was all chipping off. Her foot looked strange to her, a thing, this odd-shaped thing attached to her. She wondered if she even knew how to move it, it was so stupid, it made no sense, this object, she had forgotten what it was for. Michael’s feet were elegant as hands, the long toes, she remembered the first time she’d put those toes in her mouth in the bathtub—how astonished he’d been, that she would think to do such a thing, to give him that pleasure. When she would have done anything.
They had been happy. If she forgot everything else in the world, she would remember that. She was the only one who could remember it now.
She and Callie mounted the modeling stand together. A two-model pose challenged the intermediate student, there were so many angles, so much foreshortening. Callie set the timer, and they found a good pose, Callie on the stool, Josie behind her with her hand on the older woman’s freckled shoulder. The softness of Callie’s flesh under her hand, its warmth. Not like Michael’s at the morgue. His living body turned into a thing. Cold, wooden. Intentional.
She felt Callie’s shoulder stir slightly. The body. That had been a source of so much joy. But in the end, it was just a hunk of cold chicken, wasn’t it? A weird flesh machine, that kept breathing in and out, mindlessly, digesting, shitting, Bosch on two legs. Good enough to carry you around for a few decades before things started to go wrong. No difference between this body and a load of dead animals carted out from the animal shelter. And there would be fifty years more of moving this puppet thing around, creating other puppet things to replace you. The thought was unbearable. She felt bluish white and raw, like an Egon Schiele woman—Michael’s favorite artist.
“He makes everyone ugly,” she once told him.
“He’s just not sentimental,” Michael said.
After class, Phil Baby stopped her before she left. “If I can do anything . . . anything at all.”
“Sure, Phil, thanks,” she said, and got out of there before he made her cry. She hurried into the dank courtyard with its monstrous rubbery plants, stopping to light a cigarette, but nobody was coming up to her with a cheese Danish with white raisins, and his aquarium eyes. She stepped out into the cold winter sun.
Then she saw it. The silver car, parked at the curb. Was it déjà vu? Was Michael going to come out, was it starting all over again? Her hand went unconsciously to her bruised throat. I could have you killed. I think it would be worth it. Wasn’t it enough that bitch had read his suicide note? That she hadn’t even let her say goodbye to Michael in peace? What would it have cost her? Fucking nothing. So what was next on the menu, shooting her outside Otis in the middle of the street? She thought of the school’s side entrance on Seventh Street. She knew she could duck in and make a quiet escape, but suddenly she didn’t care. Fuck Meredith Loewy. This was her territory—Otis, MacArthur Park, the Elks Club next door where the big punk concerts were, Carondelet. Meredith could go back to Los Feliz and her big moldy house and fuck herself.
She strode out onto the street, extending her arms in her yellow coat, she wasn’t normally one to provoke a scene, but she’d had enough. “What the fuck, Meredith? You gonna kill me right here? Run me over?” she yelled out. “Do it, right where everybody can see. Famous pianist murders son’s lover. Come on, what are you waiting for, reporters?”
She could feel Meredith watching her from behind those dark glasses as she came closer, walking on the yellow line right down the middle of Park View. A bum with a shopping cart full of cans stopped to watch. “You better do it,” she shouted, “’cause I’m gonna kick the shit out of you in about two point five seconds.”
She could see Meredith’s big hands, gripping the wheel now, her face edited by those sunglasses like a porn star. Josie kept her eyes trained right on those blanked-out ovals, and kept walking. When she was thirty feet away, the silver car started up and came toward her. Okay. Get it over with. She stood and waited for the impact, her arms out, but at the last minute Meredith swerved and drove past her. Dirt and trash blew up in her face. Meredith didn’t even turn to look at Josie, who stood in the middle of the street, giving her the finger.
7
Club Rat
Deep in the warehouse district, Pen found a parking place under the loading bay of a nut wholesaler. They hurried along in the unlit street, careful not to get their heels caught in the spaces between the paving blocks that dated from the turn of the century. The road stank of garbage from the produce market on San Pedro. They went in an unmarked door. At the tiny cash booth, a hatchet-faced ticket man eyed them foxily—Josie, heavy eyed with exhaustion in her yellow coat, Pen black lipped and assertive in her purple vinyl and handmade Iggy fan shirt. He wanted to see their IDs, then insisted on the ten bucks cover. Pen pushed in beside Josie, cigarette poised between patent-leather lips. “Don’t be an asshole. I’m with Puke. Pen Valadez, I’m on the list, fuckhead.” She smoked her Camel Straight like a con, half hiding it in her hand. She blew smoke in his face.
Ticketman looked down the list. “Have your friend give us a kiss and we’ll let you both in free.”
“Fuck yourself, dickhead.” Pen burned a hole in the Formica with her cigarette.
But Josie leaned in and kissed him. She was a girl with a dead boyfriend, what good were her kisses now? He was welcome to them, poisoned as they were.
He stamped their hands with the face of a boy who’d just eaten the head off an Easter bunny, let them pass through the black curtain, into the dark and the noise of Club Rat. It was just the end of the Weak Nellies set. Fire-limit punkers flung themselves around in the mosh pit—more and more skinheads, they were taking over the scene, even for an art band like Lola Lola. Somebody already had a bloody nose. The old floor groaned beneath the weight of the crowd. Little else had changed. She hadn’t been here since she broke up with Nick Nitro. His band, the Nitrogenics, played the Rat. She looked around, praying that at least that encounter would be spared her.
The black-painted woodwork and tinsel still yearned for arson, and tiny, sweating waitresses in corsets and heels pushed their way through the mass, trays held high over their tall sculptured hair. The drag bartender glanced at Josie’s ID and flicked it back across the battered bar. No scorn like the scorn of an aging queen for a pretty girl with a crap fake DL. Pen bought them tequilas and beer backs, began edging a place for them at the bar, first resting her drink, then an elbow, finally leaning in, turning sideways for Josie. Josie knocked back her tequila and set the glass on the bar, touched her lips to the back of her hand.
It was good to be here tonight. Nothing reminded her of Michael. He wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like the Rat. Not even dead, she thought, drinking her beer. He’d hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn’t handle the nakedness of the rage—his own was so well camouflaged, so sophisticated and finely tuned, he could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mike.
She shrugged off her coat in the bathhouse humidity. Her slight shoulders gleamed under a thin tank top, she looked both glamorous and implausible in a child’s pleated skirt worn over torn tights and a pair of red rubber cowboy boots. At the edges of her visual field, she could see the shapes of male faces turning toward her. Even now, when she was transparent as wet paper. She was so tired of herself. She felt irritated, restless, wolfish somehow. She remembered the first time she came here, how impressed she’d been, thinking how cool it all was, when it was just sweaty and crowded and deafening. She ordered another tequila.
“Make it two,” Pen said.
They held up their shots and grimly touched glasses. Pen’s heavily rimmed eyes regarded her briefly, then knew enough to look away. Pen Valadez, the very first person she’d met in LA. Josie had just come down with Luanne to see some guy her sister had met at the stock-car races, when she decided she wasn’
t going back to Bakersfield. There was nothing for her back there but more of the same. They’d picked a kid up hitching, a rockabilly goth who said he was an art student, it sounded cool. When they dropped him at Otis, Josie grabbed her bag and got out too. Some kids sitting on the steps told her about the house on Carondelet, to look for the rubber tree in the front yard. She’d found it easily, dark shingled, deep porched, the door unlocked, the downstairs stinking of garbage and cats and stale beer. And upstairs, this purple-haired Latina was taking a leak with the bathroom door open, panties around her ankles, brushing her teeth while she peed. “You looking for the room?” It was just an oversized closet, but it was only seventy-five dollars a month, and it wasn’t Bakersfield.
Pen started her modeling, took her to the clubs, introduced her around, got her going, clued her in, how to get into student films and make stuff to sell to the rich punk boutiques. She’d always been on Josie’s side. Until Josie fell in love with Michael. And yet she’d held her hand at the coroner’s, and never said a word, though she’d predicted disaster from the start. She’d kept her company, fed her, slept on the couch in the house to which she’d never been invited. Bullied her, made her live. He’s going to be dead a long time, Josie. You might as well get off the fucking couch.
Pen leaned against the bar, nodding to the music, the heel of her boot tucked in behind the bar rail, torn fishnets under the little vinyl skirt. “Did you hear, they just got a deal with Rhino.”
Josie noticed the backs of Pen’s hands. They were already wrinkled. Time streaming through them, all of them, like yarn. Her, and Pen, the bartender, the hatchet-faced man at the door. Life was just a factory of days and weeks and years, and for what, when you knew how the story turned out, what the product was at the end? She wouldn’t mind if the whole place went up in flames right this second. All of them immolated together, their ashes mingling in the smoldering aftermath. What if this ceiling fell in exactly two minutes from now, crushing them all like those layered tortas Michael used to make.
She looked around the club, the boys in the mosh pit, the waitresses in their corsets and tutus, Donnie Draino spewing beer from the stage. How right it would be to die, right here, right now, with all these people. Better than alone in a motel room in Twentynine Palms. The boy in the pompadour, the girl in the white plastic trench coat. The ceiling coming in, crushing them all like cockroaches. The screaming, the weight on top of you, too heavy to breathe, and then it would be over. Save her the problem of having to inhale and exhale, thousands of times a day. Every person, every cow, every dying dog, everyone on the planet, breathing this same tired old air. She wanted it all to stop.
Finally, the Nellies took their break, and Josie was surprised that nothing had happened, no earthquake, no fire. She realized she was disappointed.
Paul and Shirley K. were pushing their way through the crowd, Paul so pale he was almost albino, he practically glowed in the dim light of the Rat. Shirley’s glossy Japanese hair caught the lights with its intricate geometric wedges edged in blue. They both kissed her, Shirley touching Josie’s dank locks with a professional hand, arranging her hairline. Pen was right to have dragged her out, at home she just sank to the bottom. The Rat was loud and crowded and distracting, she could simply be.
“Allo.” A boy in a Sex Pistols T-shirt, the sleeves safety-pinned, his teeth bunched in a lopsided smile, pushed in next to her, ordered a pint of Newcastle, and introduced himself as something or other, from Leeds in England. It was good to meet someone new. Someone who didn’t know what had happened, someone to whom it was just another Tuesday night. It seemed Leeds was friends with the bass player for Lola Lola. He’d just moved here, worked at a print shop in Hollywood. His accent was so thick she could barely understand him. It was just as well, she didn’t really want to understand anybody. It was easier to nod and drink her beer. How well did anybody know anybody anyway? His hyperintellectual Harvardettes.
“Bet you’re an actress,” the boy from Leeds said.
“Waitress.” She turned to the bar, signaled for a third tequila. She didn’t like people who tried to impress you by fluffing up who they were. When she said actress or model, they got the wrong idea entirely, that she had ambitions, that she thought she was going to end up on a TV show. She didn’t care about any of that crap. That was her edge, her secret weapon. She didn’t give a shit. If you didn’t have anything truly great to offer, something truly amazing, then you should just shut the fuck up. Unless you were Michael Faraday, for instance. She raised the pale liquid in a mock toast, slugged it down.
“You could be a model,” the boy said. “You know, I know some people, they’re making videos, like of bands. You might could do that.”
She might could, but it only paid twenty a day tops, and she made more in two hours at Otis just standing still. But she didn’t give him a hard time, he was just trying to be nice. “So what’s Leeds like?”
“Like LA without palm trees,” he said.
She laughed. It was a surprise, that she still could. She wouldn’t have thought she could even rouse the shadow of a chuckle. She liked the way he talked, he said f instead of th. Wifout. Like a little kid. They watched the roadies set up for Lola Lola, props and instruments, a giant rubber sex doll. “See the bloke wif the green stripe in ’is hair?” Leeds said in her ear, pointing at a skinny boy in black eyeliner, a ruffled shirt. “He follows her everywhere, says she put a spell over ’im. All over the world. They’ll be in Japan and that little wanker’ll be there.”
A desperate fan. Just like John Lennon. Josie wondered if Meredith had fans like that. Followers. If she fucked any of them. Did Meredith Loewy even have a sex life? That cold beauty, a woman like that, she must still get offers, even at her age. She wondered what kind of man Meredith would pick for herself. She pictured a dark man, in a dark suit with a very white shirt, putting a fur coat around her shoulders for her, saying something quiet and witty. But she’d picked Cal, who wasn’t anything like that.
The lights went down and the band took the stage, began the opening number, slow and spooky. They were joined by an enigmatic figure in eye makeup like a mask, Raggedy Ann tights and a red yarn wig, dildos strapped to her skirt like tools from a carpenter’s belt. Lola Lola had been thrown out of East Germany for obscenity and incorrigibility. Josie shot a grateful look to Pen, who gave her a shove. Told you so.
The singer snarled and crooned over the heads of the crowd, weaving her spells, her black-magic curses, pumping the dildo that hung in front of her short puffy skirt, that fabulous growling voice, a whisper, then a huge burst of operatic sound. They were all a body now, the crowd, and Josie was part of it. She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant. Michael hated this, it was the worst thing he could imagine, disappearing into the mass—he didn’t know how to submerge himself, he was the puzzle piece that fit nowhere. Pen was right, this was the right place for her. To be no one. Nothing. The wanker with the green hair lurched and jerked as if he were being electrocuted.
Lola Lola sang the song “Heard You Laughing,” which Josie knew was for Ferdi Obst. They said Lola had been the one to find him, in her dressing room after the show, with the needle still in his arm. Josie wanted to meet her. Lola Lola would understand about Michael, she could tell her things she’d told no one, not even Pen. The stupid things you say in the rain, that can’t ever be washed away. Lola would not blame her, Lola would know just how bad it could get, even with someone you loved more than life.
The boy with the green streak in his hair was screaming, trying to jump onstage. Lola Lola kicked him down with her pointy lace-up boot as she patrolled the lip of the stage. Josie wondered what it would be like to be a star like that, arousing strangers in their deepest fantasies, fans trying to scramble onstage just
to touch her, how intense it all was, they just wanted to be near, worship her, and the darkness of that. John Lennon had settled down, that was his problem, people knew where to find him. Lola Lola wasn’t making that mistake, she’d been touring for years, living nowhere, like those magical birds born with no legs, who flew until they died, sleeping on the wind. It occurred to her that Lola Lola was a lot like Meredith Loewy, only with more drugs and shittier hotels and less practicing.
“There’s a party after the show,” Leeds yelled. “Why don’t you come? Your friends too.” That would be good, the party would go all night, she wouldn’t have to be home until sunup. It was easier to sleep in the daytime. And she might meet Lola Lola. Maybe the singer would ask Josie to go on the road with her, she could do Lola’s laundry, buy her drugs, and never, ever come back.
They piled into Pen’s red Impala, Josie and Leeds in back with Shirley and Paul, and in front, Shirley’s friend Ikuko and a guy Pen had picked up, a skinny caved-chest guy with a little goatee like Maynard G. Krebs. He worked for Tree People, teaching kids about nature. They stopped to buy some voddy and beer and drove up to Hollywood, past the lit-up pancake stack of Capitol Records, and off at Cahuenga. “Have you met her?” Ikuko asked from Maynard’s lap, her head crouched under the low roof.
“She’s fucking insane,” Leeds said. “But not totally. Like an act, but under the act it’s real. You’ll see. That’s it, coming up. Start looking for somewhere to park.”
It was an old Deco building right on Cahuenga, Josie had never noticed it before. She expected a fleabag, going in, if the rat-eaten lobby and the shuddering elevator were any indication of things to come, but the elevator opened right into the penthouse apartment, elegant in that Sunset Boulevard haunted way. It was pretty trashed out, had obviously seen many such parties—fine in low light, but depressing in daytime, cigarette burns on the furniture, the carpet filthy. But it had once really been something, back in the day. Pillows and bolsters floated like rafts on the big carpet, and empty bottles already crowded the tables. A vase of gargantuan paper roses stood under a pink light. People sat on pillows attacking guitars, doing “Anarchy in the UK.” The Hole had caravanned over, there was nobody left at the Hollywood Towers. She knew all these people. They stared at her, but when she looked back, they pretended they were busy talking to somebody or looking into the bottom of their drinks. Of course they all knew by now. Nobody knew what to say. Like she had cancer.