Our Ecstatic Days (3 page)

When I can leave Kirk with
Valerie here in the hotel a few hours, I cobble together what jobs I can, including the one with Doc and the one for the writer down the hall….

… desperate over-the-hill novelist who checked in for a few days in order to finish this screenplay he saw as his last best chance to salvage a career … he wound up staying a week and then two and then a month and now he’s been here almost a year. The screenplay never gets finished and meanwhile his wife and daughter who live on the other side of the city come see him like relatives visiting an inmate. The little girl is about Kirk’s age, long gold hair, and sometimes when the reunion is over and there’s this tearful clutching between the writer and his wife, the little girl stands in the hallway staring at Kirk and he stares back at her. Two little kids, little boy and little girl, just stand there staring at each other wordlessly, they don’t play, they don’t fight. During these times I stay as inconspicuous as possible because I don’t want Mrs. Over-the-Hill-Novelist to get the wrong idea. “I miss my little girl,” he whispers later. Since it would seem he can check out of the hotel anytime he wants and go home, it’s hard to figure.

Day after day, night after night, he sits in his room gazing morosely at his blank computer screen drinking tequila and watching old movies stacked up in the corner. He stares out his window at the growing lake and talks about missing his little girl, and he never answers except to a secret knock, while bellmen slip notes under his door wondering when he’s going to check out. I’ve read some of his script and maybe I’m wrong but I’ve begun thinking the main character, a chick punk singer, sounds a little like me. It isn’t the best movie but I’m certain there have been worse. I think his big problem is he hasn’t the slightest idea how to write women characters, but he looks completely baffled when you try and tell him this. “What do you mean?” he says.

“What do I mean? I mean every female character is a stripper or porn star or sex slave.”

He’s thunderstruck. “Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure.”

He ponders this a while more. “What about Tara Spectaculara?”

“Tara Spectaculara? The amazonian motorcycle mistress with the huge tits? The one in the black leather jacket that’s … how did you put it?”—flipping through the script—“…‘unzipped so far it threatens the space-time continuum’?”

“Uh,” he’s thinking furiously, “well, these characters,” he finally clears his throat, “are just, uh, you know … they’re just the … forbidden iconography of the male psyche….”

“Oh, well then. In that case. ‘Forbidden iconography of the male psyche,’ that’s OK then. Stupid me, I thought this Tara was just your basic male wangle.”

“Male what?”

“Wangle.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Yes you do.” Talk about a point-misser! This guy is a serial point-misser. Anyway he got this idea of passing me off as the writer of the script, that’s the way his mind works, and an even better example of how his mind works is he’s saddled me with the
nom de plume “Lulu Blu,” who apparently was some kind of woman pornographer back in the Eighties—which you would think kind of proves my whole argument. He’s convinced Hollywood isn’t going to have any interest in failed literary-type novelists, better if a script filled with male wangies about motorcycle mistresses and rocker babes, submitted to guy-studio-execs with their own male-wangies, is written by a twenty-two-year-oldpunkette who would be expected to have special credibility on the subject of motorcycle mistresses and rocker babes since undoubtedly I live with a harem of them and we all have sex together all the time, which of course is the biggest male wangie of all. So for a while one of my jobs has been to run around town sitting sullenly in Century City offices listening to why I’m being turned down—which is to say why he’s being turned down—and I guess I have to admit on some level I must find this guy just pathetic enough to feel bad for him, since I keep doing it even though it’s obviously never going to pay me anything, my five percent of the script contingent on someone actually buying it….

I don’t know much about the movie business but it seems obvious to me they have a problem. “Looks like you have a problem,” I mumble to this one studio guy in his office one afternoon with the lake sloshing through the doorway. Throughout the whole floor they’ve set up little footbridges from this desk to that, and after a while the ultimate status power-move by a ruthless studio boss isn’t the lunchtime blowjob by the personal assistant of either gender but rather commanding an associate producer to swim to his suite on the double rather than walk the little planks now reserved for the elite of a Hollywood that no longer exists. “This?” the executive sneers, “this isn’t a problem. Are you kidding?
Sound
—now that was a problem.
Cinemascope. Television.
We survived all that,” this guy, maybe five years older than I tops, shakes his finger at me, “long before your time. What’s this? A little fucking water,” contemptuously waving his
hand at the tide lapping at the ankles of the anxious secretary in the corner.

At the beginning, the lake was banked on the north side of the Strip, but then the dam there broke and the water cut most of the city in two, and before they built the San Vicente Bridge all the east-west bus routes had to detour down to Venice Boulevard before turning back up the peninsula formed by the La Cienega and Crescent rivers. It screwed up my other part-time job and the couple of times I was late I could tell Doc was annoyed, which was mortifying given she’s a fount of patience, one of those people you never want to let down. Truth is I’ve never quite figured out what I contribute to her work except to take the patient’s various atmospheric readings and hand her whatever instruments she needs. Last time I think her irritation was aggravated by the fact that the diagnosis hadn’t gone so well and she was breaking the news to the habitants just as I got there, breathless from having run the half mile from the bus.

“It’s dying,” she had just told them … they were still standing on the front lawn arm in arm, looking at the terminal house stunned. I think because there’s something so calm and deep about Doc, people find this kind of bluntness easier to accept … there’s a manner about even her most ominous prognosis that says both: This is the way it is; and I’m sorry. The habitants can tell she feels for them and I can tell it too, watching her move through the sick house from room to room in a bubble of stillness, running her fingers along the walls and the doorframes and the windowsills, pressing the side of her face against the plaster listening. When she does this, her lined face glows with the flash of both twilight and dawn at the same time … OK, I’m getting carried away. OK, you can tell I’m a little in love with her. Her eyes older than her face and her smile younger, her hair lost between the auburn of yesterday and the silver of tomorrow, serenity woven in the air around her like a glistening web. Truth is, this job isn’t much more lucrative than trying to peddle
Jainlight’s script for him, but I do it because I covet my time with her. Sometimes at night, I dream she’s my mom I never knew.

There’s a sadness about Doc, something she brought with her when she came out to L.A. from New York a couple of years back, not long after the lake appeared. Or maybe it’s just from listening to all these sick buildings, however fatalistic she tries to be about it. She presses her face against the wall and closes her eyes, listening to the fading life of the house … I finally asked what it is she hears and that was when she told me about the music. Female voices singing, inside the walls, songs of … once I saw a tear run down her cheek. But, what makes a house die? I ask, and she shrugs, “Well,” in that voice you can sometimes barely make out, “as with people, it isn’t always easy to say. I just know it’s slipping away. I can hear it in the walls, it sings to me. I hear death spreading through the baseboards or in the ceilings, sometimes it’s just old age. Sometimes it’s something unbearably sad the house never recovers from, an untimely death, the end of a marriage, an act of violence, something only the house knows, something only the house has seen, a betrayal the house absorbs while shielding the habitants from it. Sometimes when a house dies, it’s an act of sacrifice.”

But what happens when the house can’t stand its secrets anymore? that’s what I want to know. What happens when the house starts telling the secrets back because it can’t bear to bear them. Maybe Jainlight down the hall can’t finish his script because the walls of the Hamblin constantly hum in his head the secrets of girlfriends and mistresses that producers and studio chiefs kept here back in the early part of the last century…. A few nights after Doc said this, Valerie was working a night shift and Parker was staying over, sleeping in Kirk’s room when I heard “Mama?” with that insistent question mark I can’t resist, emphatic as a period. There was something different about it this time, though, he was whispering it, and when it was obvious he wasn’t going to go back to sleep on his own, I went to him. He was standing in his crib in the dark, hair white in the moon through his
window. “Mama,” he whispered again, and pointed at Parker lying in the crib Valerie brought up from their apartment.

Flailing in the air, Parker’s hands formed strange half-patterns while there twitched in his sleeping face a whimper he couldn’t say. Alarmed in his three-year-old way, Kirk reached up his arms to me and I picked him up and held him a while, but then after watching Parker a few more minutes he strained to get down, so I set him on the floor and together we continued to watch Parker’s hands fluttering in the air before him.

I finally realized Parker was dreaming. He was “talking” in his sleep. I looked around at the dark room, shadows throbbing with secrets of abandonment. Kirk stood there with his hand in mine “listening” to Parker’s dream of lost daddies, before he went to Parker and placed his palm on the younger boy’s brow. Immediately calmed by Kirk’s touch, Parker dropped his arms to his sides and slept.

For a while Kierkegaard howls
on buses and in coffee shops, Owoooooh! like the coyotes we hear in the hills at night.
Owoooooh, owoooooh
over and over until it’s driving me nuts and I tell him to shut up with the howling already. But sometimes when I’m putting him to sleep, I howl with him very softly … he puts his ear against my tummy and listens to Bronte his sister still inside me and howls quietly to her, all our howls getting quieter until he howls himself to sleep.

He has his own way of seeing things, there’s no doubt about that, depending on whatever fantasia he lives in at the moment. Up on top of the Hamblin, as dark falls he explains how the clouds are flying igloos and the lights in the hills are the night-robots that come out when the day-robots go back in their cage in the sun. We ’re riding on the bus together looking out the window and I’m thinking about some meeting I’ve got that afternoon with a producer in my Lulu Blu incarnation and Kirk is driving me nuts with the howling and the endless questions he asks about this and that. It’s a strange overcast day and the
sunlight is shining through the clouds in a strange way and, out of the blue, my three-year-old says, “It’s the face of God.”

He has a toy he calls Monkeyman, a small plastic gorilla in a red spaceman suit and space helmet that he takes into the bath, to bed, on the bus, clutching it in his hand at all times. Sometimes hours go by and I see Kirk has had Monkeyman in his hand the whole time, has never let go of it even once, has never set it down anywhere for a second, has never even stuck it in his pocket. There’s even a song that goes with Monkeyman, an old rock and roll song from before I was born that we heard on the radio with a woman singing spacemonkey, it goes, sign of the time. At night Kirk clutches Monkeyman in his sleep like it’s this talisman-thing, and only after sleep has come over him does his hand slowly open and let go.

Then in the middle of the night he wakes and realizes he doesn’t have the monkey. He starts crying and I have to look through all the bedding and under the crib and around the floor. Or sometimes in the night if Kirk has a bad dream and I go get him from his crib and take him into my bed in the other room, he ’ll still be holding on to it, and I’ll hear this plop on the floor behind me as I’m carrying him from one room to the next and I’ll know he’s dropped it, and I go back and find it so I’ll have it to give to him when he wakes up wondering where it is. Not long ago Kirk named the red monkey Kirk, except when he says it, it comes out
Kulk.

I read him this book called
I Am a Little Monkey.
There’s one part where the mommy monkey cleans the little monkey by picking the bugs off him like monkeys do, and every time I get to that part I pinch him all over like I’m picking the bugs off him. Now whenever I get to that part of the book Kirk scampers to the other side of my bed with Kulk to get away, knowing what’s coming. Are you a monkey? I say and he says, “No I’m not a monkey!” Are you a boy? and he answers, “Yes I’m a boy!”
except last time. Last time I said, Are you a boy? and he said, “No please!” and puzzled I said then what are you? and he answered

I’m a Bright Light. What are the odds? I mean: ever, you know? what are the odds. Whole populations unleashed in a stream of semen, whole Indias exploding in my womb … so what are the odds what kind of kid you ’ll wind up with? How many millions of sperm are there in the white whisper of a cock, and if one happens to meet up with the waiting egg, it’s one kind of kid, and if another, then it’s another. Conceive at ten o’clock and you get a psycho. Conceive at 10:01 and you get a Bright Light.

He calls any darkness “night-time.” Goes into a dark room, it’s “night-time,” checks the apartment for pockets of night-time everywhere, peering into closets declaring “night-time” then moving onto the next. He goes through my desk, pulling open each drawer and gazing into it one after the other.
Night-time, night-time.
Watching over his shoulder and pondering Kulk’s silhouette on the wall behind him, he says, “God made Kulk,” dancing it in his fingers in front of my eyes for a while before adding, “but He made his shadow first.”