To Live and Love In L.A.

by Ben Peller

  I was well equipped with several bottles of Vodkarade stuck in the pockets of my leather jacket, torn and almost shredded as a result of several seasons spent serving as shelter at a festival in the desert city of Blackrock. My jeans had strategic lacerations in tribute not only to zombie-like attire, but also 1980s glam rock bands.

  Also with me was my friend, Jack, who’d agreed to accompany me with his camera. He was a master photographer, and when I’d asked him to document my mission to root out zombies amongst the greater Los Angeles population, he’d given a hearty enough nod. Even though it did seem like he was rolling his eyes when he agreed to do so.

  Wading into the throng of parade goers, I found most of them startlingly approachable. Even as I moaned and shuffled along, they came up and stared curiously at me. Many of them posed for pictures with me*11. As I drank Vodkarade after Vodkarade, I began to wonder if all these people I was encountering weren’t zombies as well, who had just reanimated for this night. I’d already gnawed on the necks of three different people whose sex was, frankly, indeterminable under the circumstances.

  I managed to shuffle my way, moaning, past a security guard and up to a party on the rooftop of a hotel just off Santa Monica Boulevard. I’d lost my jacket somewhere in the night, and was wearing only a shirt bearing the logo which I’ve often contemplated represents my life.

  Being a zombie I was blessed not to have to worry about life anymore. I was shocked when I looked to my right and saw what appeared to be a fellow zombie. But an aware one. She had long brown stringy hair and was also attired in ripped clothes. Her eyes were vacant, but when she sniffed at me there was a degree of eagerness in her motion.

  I let out a soft moan, staring at the crack in her jeans that offered a generous view of her upper left thigh.

  She moaned back softly, then gripped my hand and led me away. I’d long since lost track of Jack, and allowed this fellow zombie to lead me to the elevator, which we took to the second floor before proceeding to shamble out of the elevator down the hall. By this time, the fantasy of this woman beside me being an actual zombie had begun to dissipate, if only because she smelled unreasonably good, an intoxicating flavor of mint crossed with lavender. Not to mention she was amazingly dexterous for an alleged zombie, as she had no problem extracting a hotel room card and slipping it into the door lock.

  She pushed open the door and the two of us staggered inside; either we were both still in character as zombies or really intoxicated. I was leaning toward the “intoxicated” possibility.

  She sat down on the bed and patted the space next to her. I weaved over and sank down.

  “So,” she said. “You remember me?”

  I moaned.

  “Oh, stop playing ‘zombie,’” she laughed. “I know who you are. What I’m asking is do you remember me?”

  I couldn’t tell her I’d moaned not to keep up my zombie act, but because questions like ‘do you remember me’ are like warning shots which, if not answered correctly, promise some serious return fire. Not to mention that I had absolutely no recollection of this woman.

  But she was beautiful, we were alone in a hotel room, so I figured the best way to answer was, “Of course, my dear. How could I forget?”

  “What’s my name?”

  “Ummm…”

  “Ha,” she laughed. “I knew it. You seemed pretty out there when we met.”

  “And where was this?” I challenged.

  “U.C.L.A. Medical Center. The Psych ward.”

  “Ah,” I nodded. “Before my location was outed and I had to take my leave.”

  She frowned quizzically. “Outed?” she suggested hesitantly.

  “By a writer I entrusted with a series of my stories,” I explained. “Peller.”

  The name had an immediate effect on her; she tensed and her head jerked around furtively. This was no zombie; zombies very rarely have memories, and fear nothing because they’ve already died. This woman seemed to have some significant trepidation as far as Peller was concerned.

  “What do you mean before ‘Peller’ outed you?” she asked slowly.

  “He wrote in his book about how I was at U.C.L.A.” I volunteered. “Medical Center, the Psych Ward, all that. I entrusted him with my stories and he actually did a half-decent job-“

  “Your name is Peller,” my former fellow zombie said quietly.

  This accusation struck me. “Ah, ha ha,” I laughed. “No. My name’s Shawn.”

  She shook her head, fake dried blood around her mouth from where she’d been snacking on fake flesh. “Your name is not Shawn Michals, and maybe your name isn’t even Ben Peller. Maybe you don’t know who you are. All I know is I was doing research for my abnormal psych thesis at U.C.L.A. and I visited the eighth floor and spent hours talking to you. You were hitting on me left and right, and we wound up in a bit of a compromised position in a linen closet. That right there taught me a good lesson; never get involved with mental patients. And for that I thank you…”

  She reached out and placed her hand against my cheek, and bizarrely, her flesh did feel cold. Like the touch of an honest-to-God zombie.

  “Shawn,” she whispered.

  I jumped up from the bed. “I’m not one of you!” I shouted. “I’m not really a zombie!”

  She nodded. “Neither am I. Zombies don’t exist. Part of my planned thesis dealt with how the theory of the walking dead is reflective on how so many of us are in fact just that. People go around ignoring their thoughts, their emotions, their pasts. They transform themselves into zombies, or they try and become other people. They splinter off into a thousand different directions. Whatever your name is, I think you need to go somewhere and confront yourself, to confront whoever you truly are. Embrace your potential as a…” here she paused, and looked around as if preparing for an attack of some kind. Then she sighed and settled on me. “A human being.”

  I wanted desperately to laugh madly at her. This woman was clearly out of her mind. After all, I reassured myself, she had been studying abnormal psychiatry.

  “So you’re an analyst,” I smiled. “Of sorts.”

  “No,” she shook her head. “After being with you in that linen closet, I decided that I’d never be able to be a proper analyst without getting too close to my clients. I dropped out of school,” she shrugged. “Now I’m a talent agent.”

  Finally, something that made sense. “Okay,” I nodded. Then out of habit I immediately took a shot from the Vodkarade in my hand.12

  “For whatever it’s worth,” she dangled these words before me as she wriggled in place. “You mentioned that you were going to soon be publishing a novel, and would one day inscribe a personal copy to me.”

  My head was spinning. Visuals ambushed me; I saw Shawn’s, Shawn’s apartment. But I knew now it hadn’t been Shawn Michals’ apartment. The red glow of Barney’s Beanery streamed through our shelter’s curtain like the hellish light of a tunnel’s end. As children we are often taught to lie to ourselves that Santa Claus is real, until the day comes when he’s suddenly not. The earth doesn’t split open, the world doesn’t end, and our minds don’t explode.

  Shawn Michals hadn’t been real, except for in my mind. His apartment had been mine. My hide-away, my bat-cave, where I unleashed my secret identity down on paper that declared no judgment while keeping selves untouchable to everyone including myself. All those times my wife had complained when I disappeared for days and I’d pleaded work, I’d been working, writing. Writing as Shawn Michals.

  Now I knew why that when I’d gone there, when I’d created and then assembled the notes that had become To Live and Drink In L.A., there had been no phone, no pictures of friends or family. I knew why in wrestling locker rooms people had looked strangely at me as I spoke to someone who hadn’t really existed. I’d created, more or less, another aspect of myself. I’d even emailed myself months ago, taunting my “normal” personality to go on another quest for my twisted and wildly creative one, the one who claimed to be crazy but
in reality had been scarred, wounded, too afraid to step beyond the shield of words.

  An insane notion; the person who’d become Shawn Michals had committed himself to not only a mental institution, but also to literature, at the expense of a wife and child. He’d then escaped from himself via art, like savagely hot raindrops set afire by spring air. Their very possibility of falling into such a completion caused my flesh to come alive, and I knew I had to face Shawn, and more frighteningly, myself, once again.

  “What’s your name?” I asked this zombie who’d revealed herself to be anything but.

  “It’s not important,” she said. “But when you sign a copy of your book, make it out to… well, just make it out to me. Maybe you could even write me a love poem.”

  I started to laugh absurdly, and she followed suit. But then she astounded me by pulling out a copy of my book from within her tattered “zombified” dress. She wagged it playfully, then placed it carefully on the dresser next to the bed. Heavens, I couldn’t help but think, a Bible was probably crouched in the drawer right beneath.

  “I knew there was a reason why I brought that along tonight,” she took my hand. “Don’t ask me why.”

  “Why?”

  We both started to laugh again. Her lips sang a melodic glee that I wanted to consume. But I thought the better of it. Just hearing her, seeing her, was enough.

  She seemed to feel the same way. “Let’s talk for a while,” she said, as she squeezed my hand. Just that contact was enough.

  We spoke throughout the night as Halloween turned into the Day of the Dead, and I was relieved to hear her story. She spoke of coming to Los Angeles from a small island, and of how much trouble and strife there was there. It was a place governed by dueling factions united only in keeping the island’s people locked in fear of one another’s differences and their own poverty.

  “Sounds horrible,” I commented.

  “No,” she shook her head. “You should see it there. It’s really beautiful. The people are, beneath their fear and ignorance, beautiful. They need someone…” her voice trailed off. “To show them how fantastical life can be.”

  “Sounds like they need a writer,” I proposed. “Someone to explain why we humans do what they do?”

  “Yep,” she yawned. “They need a writer, all right. They need the greatest writer in the world.”

  I cradled her in my arms, and did not think of sex or any type of physical exchange. Just looking into her eyes was as frightening a brace as looking into the sun. Or an alien planet that latest technology had proven could support something as fragile and violent as life. A final frontier, promising only eternal fire. “I love you,” I whispered in a sleepy voice – natural, effortless, and wholeheartedly unsure, given that I knew I’d be leaving in the morning. This admission of love was so helpless I couldn’t help but repeat it to her, this nameless being who was the first woman I’d ever met who I felt no need to penetrate. For the first time in so long it was as though I wasn’t waging war on the female population by trying to command a mission inside as many of them as possible. This was a person who, for reasons of her own, had become a zombie for one night and found me once again, after we’d shared a brief sexual encounter in a linen closet of all places, who was now making me feel as though we were joined together, dancing with one another, rather than as though I were some team plowing down opposing players while driving toward a goal line.

  I lay, wrapped within an embrace I’d always feared, until the thin rays of dawn seeped inside the room through the shades.

  When I awoke I was alone. But for the first time in so long, I felt anything but. I reached across the bed and instead of a sleeping body found a note. Went to get breakfast. Hope you like croissants.

  I actually didn’t like croissants. There on the dresser was my book, and within me was Shawn Michals, along with the rainbow of potentialities I’d explored, using his persona as a shield. That sonofabitch Shawn Michals, I thought, working myself into a wonderful agitation as I stood and grabbed a pen and began to scrawl…

  To Me,

  Through no searching were we found

  within this touch of liquid fingers.

  Smoky breath from your mouth

  scatters dust in my heart,

  scent of lingering cinnamon on lips

  forming words which turn my pages effortlessly

  penetrating the barriers of my thoughts

  making love to what’s left of my soul. Pieces

  come together

  with the soothing contact of your cheek

  upon mine. There is nothing here

  nothing at all

  except that which you make of me.

  Thank you. I hope we meet again soon.

  Love…

  Not exactly Shakespeare, but not bad for, I noted the hotel clock – 7:57 in the morning. I took another look at a poem to a woman who described herself as merely “me.” Then I closed the book, tucked it into the bed, rolled over and landed on my feet with a mission; find Shawn Michals.

  Damned if I didn’t know where he’d be.

  As I left I cast one quick glance around. Why is it in the morning hotel rooms usually look so flustered? Like a lover that, although you’ve enjoyed a time together that might be classified as special, can’t wait for you to leave.

  I let the door shut behind me. Its lock clicked rightfully into place.

  Then I was off, making my way toward an Inn by the Sea.

  Fin And Release At

  An Inn By The Sea

  The Bed and Breakfast in Santa Monica, as its sign advertises, is a second story building colored a fading aqua. Its upper balcony is lined with a tattered white fence of crossing diamonds that looks to be on the verge of collapse. Only the subdued red of the setting sun behind this dilapidated hideout lends a hue that would define it as a destination of sorts.

  I step up to the door I know now to be my own. Number 5C, first floor, three doors down from the Manager’s office. I’ve never actually met the Manager. An application over the Internet, then a neat envelope in the slot of the Manager’s office has been enough to keep my true name a shared nudge and smile for all this time.

  I find my key and unlock the door, then push it open.

  Inside is a neatly made bed, a table by its side. Nothing else. No sign that this room has ever been inhabited. A phantom would leave more traces of their presence. An upturned vase, a penny sitting on the bed’s pillow...

  Anything.

  A certain smell, one that mixes cologne and moisture, stirs a memory and this leads my steps to the lavatory. Flashes of the past day return to me. Fascinating. I keep swallowing, for if I can perform this physical action I can prove to myself that I am in fact alive. I gaze around the bathroom, its floor of neat white square tiles tinted with dusty age. The shower curtain a survivor of so many floods.

  You live here. I’m not sure if I speak the words out loud or if my thoughts are simply too loud to ignore.

  I remember yesterday. Seeing the medicine cabinet open for the first time in so long and greeting what was inside with laughter—

  I open it now, and what’s scrawled there in lipstick unleashes memories which ride my tide of laughter and fill the blank white spaces, those times I’d sought so valiantly to block. The painful love I’d exchanged with so many others. For good or ill, while inhaling innumerable cocktails, I’d loved as Shawn Michals. I’d lived as Shawn Michals.

  Not to mention committed several other acts that could forgivingly be described as mind expanding.

  So what now? After taking a picture of what’s on the inside door of the medicine cabinet for prosperity I slowly click it closed and face my reflection.

  “Where to from here?”

  “Wherever I may need to go.”

  “You know where you need to go,” he sounds euphoric, although intoxicated might be more accurate. I am, after all, holding an extremely enhanced Vodkarade in hand. “Go find the greatest writer in the world.”

/>   My reflection may as well have just offered a challenge to go find an extra-terrestrial to kiss. But this morning is different; I just spent the night with a zombie that helped me confront the zombie that I’d become all this time while wading the romantic waters of Los Angeles. Sometimes diving in headlong, sometimes paddling while gasping for breath, but all the while struggling to breathe while searching for a completion it now appears I may have to journey somewhere else to find. Reawakening to the potentialities, however wonderful and horrific they might be, of being one of the living now seems not only worthwhile but infinitely probable.

  “Goodbye, Shawn.” I say. “I am going.”

  “Good. Maybe it’s time we take a break from L.A.,”

  “Maybe it’s time we take a break from all of us,” I counter. “You, me and L.A.”

  Shawn shakes with laughter; for a moment I’m afraid he’s undergoing a seizure of sorts. But then he becomes abruptly still. “Isn’t this city one hell of a living, breathing organism?” he asks, wonder in his question. “Its only constant is just how so very different it can appear to so many. Ferocious bitch one minute, tender lover the next. But then, I suppose all places worth visiting are. Including this fantasy we call life.”

  “So life is a fantasy to you?”

  “Isn’t it to you?” There’s no wonder now. Only a challenge.

  I turn away, my eyes now shut. But as I walk toward whatever might be outside that small room I have more faith in my steps than I have in years, still lost in that vision I’ve just encountered. It remains, as does its voice.

  “You’re not turning away.” It’s impossible to tell whether this quiet observation comes from behind or ahead. Above or below. Or right next to me.

  “You don’t need me anymore,” the voice is louder now. “You’re capable of anything. Now go ahead and do it.”

  The door handle turns in my hand and then the sun in the sky welcomes me as I glance back and see a fading shadow winking at me before I close the door softly on Shawn Michals and my time in L.A. I’m on my way to prove myself capable of anything, to find an island where I may ponder this fantasy we call life and search for the greatest writer in the world.