by Ben Peller
So attached is a list of addresses. Each has a part in my overall crusade for love in Los Angeles. All I request is that you go to these addresses, obtain the story that relates to each (provided the recipients haven’t thrown them away), then put them together in whatever order you think is appropriate while making any editorial changes you may deem necessary. But this time, give me BOTH BARRELS. Several of these actions in these pages I am, in retrospect, not particularly proud of. But I don’t want censorship in regards to either myself or the prose which I give my name to. Don’t screw this up, Peller. I’m counting on you.
And there’s also the matter of an ending. I don’t have one. Not yet. Something tells me you’ll be able to find one.
Cheers,
Shawn Michals
From: [email protected]
To: *77
Re: HELLO, YOU POMPOUS ASSHOLE
Hi Shawn,
Thanks for the (semi) kind words. It sounds marginally weird to be going on a scavenger hunt, but I’m game. And I like weird. I do hope you won’t mind if I record my encounters while tracking down this spirit of love you want me to follow. In the final book, my chronicles will be in italics, so people will be able to differentiate between your experiences and my experiences trailing you. Who knows? Before this is all said and done this may wind up as two stories about one.
One thing for certain: This time around, I’ll try to get it right. You want both barrels, tough guy, you’ve got it.
And as has been sung about love and its various incarnations, I have the feeling it’s gonna hurt.
See you soon.
Ben
Lovaholics Anonymous
My first stop takes me to Culver City. I get off a bus and find the address belongs to a pale light blue house with a tattered screen door. It’s right at the beginning of the block. The neighboring building that faces Venice Boulevard is an auto repair shop. The other side of the block, as far as I can see, is made up of a row of one-story houses on a street marked with low overhanging trees.
I knock on the screen door; it rattles belligerently.
Right away a woman answers; she’s large boned with rather immense breasts. Her dark hair is streaked with gray and tied behind her head. She’s clad in blue jeans and a t-shirt clinging tightly to her ample bosom that reads: “Keep staring: They might do a trick.”
“Yes?” she says in a surprisingly soft voice.
“I’m sorry,” I flick my eyes up from her breasts. “I’m here on behalf of someone.”
She turns vehement. “You tell that shitheel no-good crack-addict turd that he’s not worthy to mop the bathroom stall he was probably conceived in and that if he comes around waving that gun around again I’ll take it away from him, put it up his ass and blast away!”
I’m ready to flee and say to hell with this quest; let Shawn Michals sort out his tangled romances in Los Angeles on his lonesome. But then this lady peers at me and asks, “How do you know Buddy? You don’t look like the kind of guys he hangs out with.”
“I’m not here about Buddy,” I say. “I’m here about someone named Shawn. Shawn Michals.”
She bursts out laughing. “Oh him!” she says. “What a character! Yeah, he was well…” A roll of her eyes. “Friends with the woman who used to live here. Helena. I used to live in the apartment in back. My God, those two had quite a time together.”
“Really?” I ask. “It’s kind of complicated, but did Shawn maybe send something here? A letter or something?”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “By the way, sorry about the outburst. I’m like this before my third cup of coffee. You um… you want one?”
“No thanks.”
“My name’s Regina. Don’t worry about Buddy. I got a restraining order against him, and he hasn’t been around for at least a week now. I thought you were one of his friends coming to pick up his stuff. Now how about some coffee?”
She’s twirling her hair and looking at me in a way that says she might be up for a bit more than just a cup of java. But I’m already glancing around nervously, assuming that if Buddy is the kind of person one needs to take out a restraining order on he may also be the kind to stalk his ex in the middle of the day. “I don’t have time right now, Regina.” I manage a smile. “I’m kind of on a deadline.”
“Figures,” she shrugs. She turns her back and heads into the house. I think I hear a baby crying from somewhere within. Quickly she’s returned, manila envelope in hand. “Little Charles is in a mood. Haven’t breast fed him in a few days.”
Registering this overabundance of information, I take the envelope. “So did you ever meet Shawn?” I ask.
She laughs. “Honey, I was afraid to. He sounded like a real nutcase. I heard Helena and him from the other side of the wall. I couldn’t tell when they were having sex or when they were fighting… it all sounded the same. Buddy and I had our ups and downs, but Helena and Shawn were a whooole ‘nother story.”
“A stormy relationship?”
“Darling, that’s like saying an erupting volcano is a bunch of pretty colors.” Regina laughs. “Say that’s not bad, huh? I oughta write that down. I write poetry and shit like that. Your buddy Shawn was a writer, too, wasn’t he?”
I nod, trying to wrap my head around the proposal that this woman considers a relationship between herself and a crack-addicted gun-toting man she feels a need to file a restraining order against more stable than whatever was going on between Shawn and whoever Helena is.
Hopefully I’ll find the answers inside the envelope I now hold.
“Thanks, Regina.” I say. “Good luck with the poetry.”
“Thanks,” she nods.
“By the way, what happened to Helena?”
Regina lets her head dip and rise in a semi-circle while saying, “Don’t know. She moved away, heaven knows where. We didn’t really have that much to do with each other. Hell, she was nuts, too. She and that Shawn were probably committed to the same Psych Ward together.”
Before I can suggest that maybe they met in a Psych Ward, a pickup truck pulls up and out steps a stick-like man whose motions are jerky. “What the hell?” he shouts, his eyes twitching dangerously. “Who the hell’s this?”
“He’s a goddamn male escort, asshole.” Regina shouts at who I can only assume is Buddy. “I just paid him to fuck my brains out!”
Buddy shoots me a crazed glare. “You little piece of-“
That this man actually considers me good looking enough to be a male escort is clear enough evidence that he’s probably cracked out of his mind. I sprint to the end of the block and round the corner with him shouting in the background.
I stop at the first bar I can find and order a beer while tearing open the envelope. If Regina considered whatever’s chronicled within more volatile than what she went through with her beau, then I can’t wait to read it...
My name is Shawn, and I’m a lovaholic.
I first fell in love when I was eight years old. Her name was Georgette, and she was a beautiful orange tabby cat. Her fur came in a pattern of stripes, alternating from white to light peach to a fiery salmon. I thought of her as my pet tiger, of sorts. Sometimes when I’d had a particularly harsh day at school or when Mom was on one of her manic rampages, I’d hold Georgette and ask her softly, “Why?” Her purr was answer enough. These were the nights she would curl up with me at bedtime and purr me to sleep.
Georgette was definitely not an indoor cat and would sometimes disappear for up to three days at a time. We lived across the street from a forest preserve in a suburban village, so there was ample area for her to roam. Or, if my mom happened to be charging through one of her crazed episodes, to hide. About once a month Mom would coax Georgette into her arms and then glare at her before hurling Georgette across the room. At eight years old I was frightened that if I stepped in to protect Georgette, Mom would hurl me across the room. So I tried to pretend I didn’t see anything while Mom laughed and Georgette took a couple days vacation from the house.
These nights I cried myself to sleep, missing Georgette’s purr.
But Georgette always came back. Until a fall month, and I’m ashamed I don’t even remember exactly which one it was. A fucking cold one. October, November… it was a couple days after the latest toss, in which Mom had managed to throw Georgette what I assumed was a distance record, clear across the living room. Georgette had, true to cat’s legend, managed to land on her feet and hightail it through the hole she’d carved in the kitchen’s screen door. And after four days she still hadn’t returned. I took walks in the woods, looking for her, calling her name, even though I knew even at that age dogs were the ones that responded to calls while cats tended to take a message and come when they were damn well ready.
I even imagined, or maybe dreamt, that I heard her meowing outside my window on one of those nights. But I could never be sure if her cries were just ones I’d manufactured, caught between dreams and wakefulness. Either way, by the time I struggled into proper consciousness and threw open the window, there was nothing there but night.
The fourth day of Georgette’s absence I walked to the corner to wait for the school bus. There was a dead animal in the road. Nothing unusual. Possums, raccoons… they were always being run over. A car cruised by and ran over the carcass. The sound was a flat splash, kind of like a belly flop in a swimming pool. I began to make silent bets with myself if the next car would hit it. The animal had been run over so many times its body had been reduced to, from what I could see, nothing more than a pile of entrails. After two more cars went by, one of them running over the body and the other missing, a police car pulled up. An officer got out and opened his trunk, then removed a shovel and a large dark plastic bag. I began to wish fervently that the bus would come already, even though I couldn’t take my eyes off the vision of the officer pushing the shovel at the stream of guts. His taut motions reminded me of the same ones I made when I tried to chip away frozen snow from the porch every winter. Each scrape became a kind of cracked scream. I turned away and was ready to walk home when I heard from behind me, “Hey there!”
The words were friendly enough; they might as well have been inviting me out to play. But when I turned back I found the officer, shovel with stomach dripping from them in one hand and the black garbage bag in the other. “Want to give me some help here?” he asked.
Though I was pretty sure I wasn’t legally obligated to do so, Mom had always told me not to question officers of the law (“If you do, they’ll fuck you over good. Your rights don’t mean shit.” she’d assured me.)
So I numbly trotted over to the waiting officer, took the shady bag in hand (trying to ignore that I recognized it right off the bat as a Hefty Bag and thus that stupid theme thong – “Hefty hefty hefty – Wimpy wimpy WIMPY” began to play through my head) and winced as my new partner shoveled the spaghetti-like insides of what was once a living creature into the plastic opening between my trembling clenched fists. It wasn’t until he’d scooped up the last and was ready to dump that in as well when I caught a splash of color. Orange. Fur. And then I recognized the pattern. Light, medium, heavy. Georgette’s.
My first impulse was to somehow track down the murdering asshole who had killed Georgette. The second was to kill God, for making this stupid senseless death possible. Then I wanted to kill myself, so that being dead, I would never have to feel this way again.
Instead I just stood there, shaking more and more steadily, as the police officer shoveled what had once been Georgette, a beautiful cat who I’d loved, into a bag I now held. “You okay, sonny?” he asked, tapping the shovel on the street’s pavement.
I whipped the bag down at his feet. “She’s dead!” I shouted. “She’s dead and she’s not coming back!” I had no idea my scream could scare myself so much.
Then I was running back down the street. I ran all the way home and stormed inside. I heard my mom call out to me, but I didn’t dare respond. I was afraid that if I saw her I might hurt her, in revenge for what she’d done to Georgette. She’d driven Georgette from our home, forced her to live on the streets, streets which were teeming with automobiles, one of which had killed her and strewn her insides all over a black surface.
But was I much better? There I’d been, making bets on whether or not another car would run over the remains of a creature who’d once loved me. I didn’t deserve love, I now knew. And I sure as hell didn’t even want it. That night in bed, crying myself to sleep, I swore to never love anything or anyone ever again.
However, after discovering alcohol, and sharing a kiss with Julie Shin at Jason Goldberg’s Bar Mitzvah party, these parameters were altered. Then when I moved to Los Angeles, love in all its pitiless and bountiful incarnations were taken to a place that if survived promised both immortal and insane memories.
But Georgette, still… it doesn’t matter if the moon’s full or just blossoming, if I’m hungry or if I’ve just enjoyed a wonderful meal, whether or not I’ve made or lost money in the past twenty-four hours…
I miss you.
Back when I first arrived in Los Angeles and got it into my head I wanted to become a writer, I spent months scribbling notes. Eventually I had the crude making of a collection of stories. So I had ten copies of the thing bound at the local Kinko’s and read it with pride every night. It was a very rough draft, to say the least. Still and all, it was a book. Of sorts, at least.
Then came spring, and with this came the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Being a writer myself now, even though my manuscript was on 8 ½ X 11 paper and bound by nothing more than large staples, I thought it was appropriate I put in an appearance. So I packed together ten copies of my haphazardly bound manuscript, several Vodkarades (a combination of vodka and Gatorade with a healthy amount of water mixed in so as to prevent dehydration), and also a few rough flyers I’d drawn just the past week. They featured only the book’s title and an impressionistic picture of cocktail glasses and bloodshot eyes. Inspired by the flyers bands such as Guns N’ Roses had used to pass out on the Sunset Strip, the motto below the title read: “Tales of Extreme Madness.” A tribute to Bukowski.
Thus I was wandering around the Festival of Books, sipping from a Vodkarade, when I happened upon an empty booth right next to one occupied by the Los Angeles Downtown Library.
“Is this booth taken?” I asked one of the women in the neighboring booth.
“I suppose it is now,” she said. “Are you here to sell books?”
I hadn’t necessarily planned on it, but the sign above the empty booth read: A BOOK THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE. Perhaps whoever had rented the booth had got hung up in L.A. Saturday traffic. However, I reasoned with another sip, I could fill in until they got there. I quickly borrowed some tape from my new neighbors and taped my roughly drawn flyer above the booth’s awning. And there, with nothing but green grass behind me and 300 pages of sturdily stapled scrolls in hand, I began to dance.
It surprised me how quickly people began to come up to my booth. Many expressed surprise that I was there alone, no fancy banners, no flashy posters, not even a table or any chairs. Just me and my work.
Whether it was out of pity or amusement, people began to buy these copies for ten dollars apiece. Hell, they’d cost eight dollars per just to get printed and bound. I was making a total of two dollars per book and I was ecstatic. I was making my literary debut! That I was crashing a book festival and occupying a booth I hadn’t paid a dime for made it all the more representative of, at least in my self-forgiving mind, rebellion for the sake of art.
In all fairness, it wasn’t like I was making money on every book. One young woman came up to “my” booth and while thumbing through one of the copies said it looked fascinating. She introduced herself as Meredith, and mentioned she was a sophomore.
I asked what she was majoring in.
“A sophomore in high school,” she smiled.
Ye Gods, I thought, suddenly feeling staggeringly old. I’d wandered into an episode of Friends.1
I wanted t
o send her on her way but she seemed to have found something in my book that had seized her attention. With the respect a writer gives a reader I remained quiet and busied myself with downing the remainder of a Vodkarade. “I’d really like to buy a copy,” Meredith peered up at me. “But I’ve only got three dollars. I wasn’t really planning on buying anything today.”
“Why’d you come then?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I just like to be around books. They make good friends.”
I bit my lip. I’d felt the same way when I was her age. “Tell you what,” I said. “You came all this way out here on a Saturday to a festival that promotes reading and literature. It would be great to sell you a book for three dollars...” Now I paused. After all, the assembled pages this young woman held in her hands contained references to mental illness, suicide, masturbation, drag queens, and perhaps most horrifying of all, the Pitz Hotel in Marina Del Rey. Were they really appropriate for a high school sophomore?
As if reading my mind, Meredith turned my manuscript so the pages she’d just been reading now faced me. I recognized them immediately. They were about how I’d used professional wrestling to deal with my manic-depressive mother’s suicide. “My father killed himself last year,” Meredith told me quietly, in a tone I recognized too well.
Though I offered to give her a copy for free, she insisted on paying me three dollars. She didn’t need any money for bus fare or anything, being that she lived only a mile away from the campus. After I inscribed the manuscript and signed it for her, she gave me a hug and a very innocent kiss on the cheek.
I watched her walk away, melting into the crowd. Since I’d been in Los Angeles I’d flirted with a number of careers, but this was the first time I actually felt I’d taken a step in the direction of a path worth walking. If nobody else ever bought any of my books, I considered, it didn’t matter. I’d won something, and that prize was the possibility that maybe my writing could help a young person grapple with the complexities of life.