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 ex
citement 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
She 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.
&nbs
p; 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.