Outside, we made out through the rest of the set. She was too hammered to notice my eleven fingers on her ass. When the band stopped, she said What’s your name? I said Paul.
We kissed again, I got carried away in my drunkenness and pulled her hair and she moaned. I let loose but she moaned again, No, pull my hair. The courtship was all of forty-one minutes.
A week later, I rang her number from her condominium guest entrance. Her voice mixed with static and the anonymous, implied plural that women living alone use on their answering machines: No one’s in to take your call, but if you can leave a message… The matchbook had her name (heart over the i), address, the date and time. Twenty-two minutes and three messages later, I left. One bourbon, phoned her once more from the bar, left a message. No one’s in to take your call… then, Hey, it’s Paul, gimme a ring when you get this and drove home.
She phoned two and a half hours later, blathering apologies but with no explanation.
“I completely forgot… I’m so sorry… I never do that… Let’s hook up tomorrow…” She suggested we meet at a place called Magnolia on Beverly Boulevard. The sign out front had letters cut with a plasma torch from a sheet of aluminum, backlit with pale neon. The décor inside, polished concrete, halogen lights and space age furniture, had been profiled in every Los Angeles magazine and newspaper. Her condo gate and Magnolia were the first indications that I was out of my league. Status symbols and invisibility are mutually exclusive.
———
The next night, Natalie showed up wearing a grey business suit, the skirt too short for business, the blazer both hinting at and flaunting her cleavage. The conversation wound down (I drove a truck, she was a publicist, I wasn’t listening) and she checked her Cartier—the circumference of a nickel—for the third time.
“How big did you think this place was?” she asked.
I spat an ice cube back into my glass. “Pardon?”
“Did you think we could just walk in here and pick a table? It’s Friday.”
“You’ve lost me, Natalie. What’s wrong?” I’m slow sometimes. I can’t hear between words like other people.
“What’s wrong is that it wouldn’t have killed you to make a reservation. We’ve waited for over half an hour. Jesus.”
“Twenty-eight minutes,” I said. I don’t own a watch. Then, “Fuck you,” and knocked back my last finger of bourbon. “You blow me off, then cop an attitude because I don’t know your debutante protocol.” Halfway into the drive to meet her, I realized I should have done a line or two, taken my edge off.
“What did you say to me?” She looked at me, her eyes and mouth locked open.
“I said twenty-eight minutes.”
“I mean after that.”
“I know what you meant. And I know you heard me.”
She slapped me. Her practiced force made a sharp leathery crack against my face.
Restaurants—crowded, Friday-night restaurants—go dog-whistle quiet when that happens. Stares assuming unheard, succulent details, waiting to see if I’ll hit her back (not my style). I ran it back through my head, tagging words with values trying to see what I missed, what didn’t equate, what didn’t add up—when she hit me again. Same cheek. My face blazed, the purple brightness on the edge of my eyes swelled and I dragged her by the wrist (an extra finger does miracles for my grip) out to Beverly Boulevard, to her car. In the parking lot of a nearby church, she wrapped around me—her clothes on the driver’s side floor—said Pull my hair. I watched St. Francis through her windshield, laughing to myself. True. True. True. True. True.
Natalie and I let our contrast speak for itself, watched nanosecond conclusions silently congeal behind eyes at cocktail parties (office birthdays, promotions, contract acquisition celebrations). I’d shake with my left hand, hold the grip for the small talk and watch someone’s fog of bewilderment envelop them, too nervous to look down and see what they were feeling. I’d prolong a post-Nice to meet you conversation for the pleasure of watching someone’s fake smile strain and collapse, and then tally their excuses—Doug just arrived. I should go say hello. There’s one of our new clients. Can you excuse me?
Natalie thought she was better than I was, that I drove a delivery truck because I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t tell her that I liked driving because I got to wear a uniform and look like a hundred other drivers and not have more than a few minutes of interaction with any given person on any given day. I didn’t tell her that I liked the paycheck and health coverage that gave me stability, anonymity.
At a birthday party for one of her co-workers, she introduced me as Paul, a truck driver. When someone said I thought you were a mechanic, I realized I wasn’t her first. We’ve got a job in our mailroom, if you’re interested, one guy said, and his buddies laughed. Fifteen years ago, I would have said or done any number of things in response, but I’d learned better. I looked at Natalie in her short denim skirt and tank top, her runner’s calves and firm belly, and kept my mouth shut.
I clocked wedding rings and accents and scars, felt for calluses when I shook hands, checked watches and shoes, measured weights at a glance, guessed ages and silently ran the equations I’d learned as a kid and had improved over time. What did they want most, what had they settled for and what were they compensating with?
I did polite. I did harmless and charming. I listened, nodded and smiled, broke and resumed eye contact at specific intervals. I mirrored postures and stances, repeated half-phrases of their own back to them while they spoke to me. They always said Exactly. You know what I’m talking about.
Most of the time I didn’t, but I just said something open-ended and let them keep talking.
Where did I just read about that?
Somebody mentioned that same company, earlier. I forgot his name…
Put on an empty look and they would fill in the blank for me.
Right, that was Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.
You mean Mike? He’s one of our freelancers.
Every time.
I lit nobody’s cigarette, paid no compliments. But I would listen, match their drink brand for brand, from the bottle or a glass, ate what they ate, chewed when they chewed. They loved me. Natalie told me so, later.
On her balcony that night, I kept her clothes on but pulled her panties down to her ankles, held her hair at the roots in a tight tangle around my left fingers and did her while she moaned.
We fast learned to skip the arguments. We took nights out on her dime, attended her social functions, had sex. Slapping, hair pulling, ripping and rending her DKNY office-fantasy, power-suits sex. I’d cut her bra straps with a broken shot glass and split her panty hose crotch with a stiletto heel. I could rip her thong away with a single pull (I’m right-handed, but my left is much stronger)—a half-twist at the seam of her left hip (never pull forward or backward, always against the bone) and tug with a full-body jerk like a reverse boxing punch and the right hip seam pops like a frayed shoelace.
She tore three of my necklaces from me, slicing me each time. Shredded my shirts and left Bruce Lee nail marks on my chest. She replaced everything with a vengeance. Armani, obsidian-black, single-breasted, four button. A Tag Heuer that looked like a submarine depth monitor and worth four and a half months of my salary, easy. On her floor, new nail marks, my boots on, work pants around my ankles, Natalie in nothing but stockings and heels, tortoiseshell comb snared midway down her waterfall of half-undone hair, bra, shredded skirt, and panties draped over her answering machine, ashtray and wine rack. Stay there, I have a present for you. She’d leave for her bedroom while I did a three-inch rail from her coffee table and then Here, try this on, followed by dinner. Four nights a week. I could set my watch by it.
Sex without that adrenaline was strictly a pre-shower, weekday-morning pressure release valve and not our first choice. Like anything else you put into your bloodstream again and again, we needed more, more, more for the same rush. She gave me a scar and I gave her one.
&nbs
p; ———
When I saw her next, it rained. The evening streets were shiny, wet, and grey. We met for a drink after work. Natalie was having her carpets cleaned and the condo association was spraying for bugs at the same time. She hadn’t mentioned renting a hotel room, so I’d spent the afternoon scouring and scrubbing my apartment. I’m clean to begin with, at least very organized but, in truth, I was nervous. In five months, she never once stayed at my apartment. Four nights a week at hers. I never had a key.
Portico was in Brentwood, had a marble bar, marble tables, a connoisseur’s scotch list, and leather booths that heaved a luxurious sigh beneath your weight. Normally not a place I’d go without Natalie, but weeknights were dead quiet and they didn’t care how I dressed so it was a good hiding spot. Then somebody at Paramount held a production wrap party there, and somebody at Universal held an opening night reception there a week later. Both events hit the fashion and entertainment magazines simultaneously and my quiet spot was gone. And this was where Natalie wanted to meet, in a crowded public place where she said We should talk.
I squeezed into an open space at the bar near a cluster of players—six guys, a year or two either side of my age with caramel-orange tans and halogen teeth. Four women, whippet-thin, their faces the plastic sheen from multiple surgeries, spaghetti straps pulled their cocktail dresses tight, stretching them across half their weight in subdermal silicone bags. Wallets out, rounds bought, key rings on the bar—Lexus, BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Jaguar.
My chest was still glowing from the last rails of blow I’d done in my car. I’d pulled into a dark residential street on the way, sucked up a line after fourteen days of nothing. Ray was in jail so I had gone elsewhere for my stuff. The guy had said Good shit, straight from Bakersfield, not cut with nothin’. Just ’cause I like you. And he was right, it was good shit, but I wasn’t going back. Guys who just like you for no reason will always want something later.
Natalie showed up. She’d assembled my accumulated belongings from her place into a brown leather duffel, another gift that I would have never bought for myself, set it beneath our feet at the bar. We finished our first round, she held out her hand and shook mine with a polite, firm, post-interview grip.
“I can’t see you anymore.” Thanks for your time. We’ll keep your application on file. We’ll definitely consider you should something open up in the near future. Please take a brochure on the way out and be sure to sign our mailing list.
“I don’t understand.” True. My fingers were cold. I couldn’t feel her grip. My left hand started cramping. It does that sometimes, from the mutant muscles configured for the extra digit.
“Paul… I love being with you. I do, honestly. But I need to grow up. I can’t explain, but I can’t do this anymore…”
I started to speak. She put her finger to my lips.
“Paul, you’re an Aries. So am I. It can’t work.”
She kept talking but my ears filled with a humming sound that muffled the music and bar noise. My hands grew colder, colder, colder, and my mouth dried out. I held my glass to the bartender, Bourbon, and when I turned back to her she leaned in and kissed me.
“I do love you. I’m sorry.”
I called Ray’s substitute—which I’d sworn not to do—from a pay phone. Left a message, said where I was, said Do you still have that girl’s phone number? Hung up and waited. He came by an hour later and palmed me two half-gram vials. I bought him a shot—clip, switch—set it down in front of him with a folded bill inside the napkin. He knocked back the shot, then another, feigned sympathy. Just when you think you know someone, he said.
Yeah, now leave me alone.
The coke faded, the light in my chest died and, eight ounces of bourbon later, the bottom of my brain started leaking, and my calm, focus and reason drained into the black hollow left by the waning rush. The mnemonic slide show—Mom, Dad, hospitals, Natalie, jail—started up, my own private lash. I thought of my sister who couldn’t have children and I had no idea what’s become of her and Dad who will never be a grandfather. Dad all alone without Mom, living on the street or dead for all I knew and his daughter by herself and a son nowhere to be found. I remembered, between the dead coke rush and the dull glow of the bourbon and claustrophobic heat of three hundred people with whom I have nothing in common, that this is why I hate crowds.
Weird. Shit, no. You ask him.
I’d been careless. My fingers were wrapped around my glass and I was two feet away but they acted like I couldn’t hear. Shouting at each other over the din and they thought they were whispering. Probably doesn’t… and I lost the rest, they started laughing, loud at first, and they tried to cover their mouths because they thought I hadn’t noticed.
Dude, how many fingers your hand got? The voice was familiar. Jocular and happy, secure in its ten digits and backup drinking crew, so it says whatever it wants.
The Players waited, muffling smirks behind martinis and spritzers.
“One for each of your mothers,” I said. The predictable followed—widened eyes, lowered drinks and a spokesman stepping forward.
“What did you say? I didn’t catch that.”
“You caught it,” I said. My old habits coming back.
He was tall with the spongy girth of an ex-high-school football player. His cologne burned my eyes. He squared off with me, gave me his best hard stare.
“You lookin’ for me to kick your ass?”
Physically, I was no match for him, not by a long shot. But it’s funny how guys with nice jobs and German company cars always want to kick your ass. Guys who can afford private gyms but have never thrown a real punch are going to kick your ass. Big tan white guys who lose their hair but hang onto their Alma Mater yearbooks will say they’re going to kick your ass.
Nobody ever got their ass kicked while I was in jail. They had filed-down chicken bones or sharpened toothbrushes punched between their ribs, jaws broken by socks full of gravel, corneas split by wet paperbacks tied inside of towels, faces and necks cut by the plastic soles of county-issue slippers sharpened on the concrete floor.
Guys who want to kick your ass don’t know the look in the eyes of somebody who knows how to seriously hurt you or worse, and who doesn’t have anything to lose from doing so. It’s a look you see in the eyes of a stray dog. Not a look of aggression because aggression is personal. It’s an assessment: Are you food? Are you a threat? The answers take half a second and if the answers are both no, then the dog keeps moving.
That’s what you see in the eyes of someone who can finish you off without a second thought. No face-off, no name-calling. Are you going to hurt me? Yes? Then can I kill you? and in the space of a heartbeat you, your life, your kids, your car, your job, and your bright promising future don’t matter dick. Pampered fraternity students who grow up to be six-figure-income advertising executives or luxury car accessory dealers or this guy in my face don’t have those eyes and have never seen them, but I have.
I felt my heart pounding, like I hadn’t for a very long time. The adrenaline burned through the liquor and blow like so much nothing and I was wide alert in my head but frost on the outside, my brain running the numbers in a fraction of the time Mr. Player needs to figure his next move. He was six-foot-two, two-fifteen and right-handed. His eyes told me he was on his third drink and his breath backed that up. He had no peripheral vision and poor balance and I had a foot of space behind me, the bar on my left, and twenty-three inches on my right.
Think. Bars hate fights, hate cops. Liquor licenses are expensive. They’ve got the police, the Fire Department, the ATF, and ABC watching them, so they want a low profile with the city and a high profile with the weekly club listings.
Think. This is not the way to be invisible.
I was holding a full gram, couldn’t afford to get searched, and if I was forced to do another change, soon, I’d need a driver’s license photo and passport photo and couldn’t wait for a broken nose to heal.
“Here,” I said, and I
fanned my fingers wide at his eye level, “check it out.”
He didn’t say anything, the others moved closer to gape. I kept talking, doing backing down.
“Look, I get sick of people talking about it,” I said. I flagged the bartender and paid for a round. “It’s on me. Have a pleasant evening.”
I heard them talking and laughing as I left, but I chased their words out of my head. Stomach burned, old aspirin damage flaring up, and the bile backed up to my neck and every boot-licking sir from two years in Youth Camp roared through my head.
Drove into Hollywood, did four shots at Boardner’s and then walked for a long time. Let the adrenaline run its course. Burned off the coke. Then did more.
At La Brea, where Hollywood arcs into Sunset. How did I get this far? I was past—long past—the calm centering of the first four blasts. My left hand twitched and I swatted imaginary bugs out of my eyes. Talking to myself but loud, floating like a hawk on the warm current of her memory, but at the same time a reservoir of hatred creaking seams and popping rivets. Bitch! at the thin air. Tourists, runaways and failed musicians stared, and no matter how well I was dressed I was going to get stopped and searched, cuffed and stuffed.
Legs hurt. I found my car down Cherokee, a block from Boardner’s. More hits during the walk back, miming calls in phone booths or lighting a smoke, cupping the vial cap for a snort while I do so. Screen and cuff. Mouth dry as dust and I couldn’t blink, my hands quivered like small angry dogs, and a thousand moments with Natalie blasted through my memory like a pillow torn open in a high wind.
I wasn’t cold anymore, but my hands were still shaking. Then I was in my car holding a medallion, elliptical with a four-centimeter shear along one edge, the rest of the key buried in the ignition and I hadn’t felt the snap. Dug in with my fingers but it was in there tight. Needle-nose pliers would get it. I had a pair, but not with me. My spare key was in the ashtray on the wine crate beside my front door. But which front door? Which door? Sorted through the apartments and names in my head, couldn’t remember where I lived or which name I was using. Paul sounded right, but I couldn’t remember my last name, only apartments. Paul Ridgecrest. Paul Los Feliz Gardens. Didn’t know, couldn’t remember. Felt for my wallet. It was in a brown leather bag with my clothes and toothbrush. I’d left it at the bar, but couldn’t remember which one. Which bar which bar which bar?