by Byron Lane
To her back as we walk, I say, “Um, okay, well, I don’t have any fake limbs.”
“Are you at least open to having a fake limb?” she asks.
I hold my breath, then blurt, “Yes?”
“Onward,” she says, moving purposefully now, e-cigarette back in her mouth, held in place by her teeth, breathing it like it’s a ventilator keeping her alive. We walk across her patio to a gate with old brick steps up a hill leading to a little cottage-type structure. A giant pencil is poking out of the bushes. In the distance is a Native American teepee. A sculpture of a large black erect penis firmly resists falling over in the breeze.
“My mother,” Kathi says, coughing out the word mother, pointing to the cottage, “had the pool house up there converted to an ‘office,’ which basically means she paid fifty thousand dollars to have a fax machine put next to a toilet.”
“That must be a nice fax,” I say.
“You have a very long neck,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am—” I start, but then catch myself. “I mean, yeah, I do.” I grab my neck like I’m choking. “With this thing, you know, I’m a god in some cultures.”
“Me, too,” Kathi says with her best Priestess Talara pose.
“What’s your name again?” she asks.
I open my mouth but then she interrupts. “WAIT!” she says, facing me and grabbing my shoulders. I flinch, fearing she’s about to do a headbutt.
“Don’t tell me.” She stares at me, thinking, struggling to recall it. “Okay. What’s the first letter?”
I say, “C.”
She blurts, “Cockring!”
“Uh, nope.”
“Oh,” she says, disappointed.
I wait for a second guess, and when none comes, I say, “I’m Charlie.”
“Eek,” Kathi says. “No. I’m sorry, I can’t call you that,” she explains. “You look more like a … Samuel. Or a Jimmy. How’s that? Jimmy. Or … Cockring?”
“Between Cockring and Jimmy, I guess I’ll take Jim—”
“Come on, Cockring,” Kathi blurts.
She leads me up the hill, past the pool house, around a bend, passing twirling yard ornaments, statues of garden gnomes smoking weed, a fat Buddha with the face of that boy from Mad magazine. We walk past a pool surrounded by mountains and hills and trees and old Las Vegas–style neon signs that say DINOSAUR HOTEL and TOPLESS DANCERS. There’s an old-fashioned Coke machine and lawn chairs with bright umbrellas. This job, should it become real for me, beats the hell out of my piece-of-shit cubicle in the newsroom with oppressive fluorescent lighting in the middle of the night. In the distance, I see a man who I assume to be a gardener. He looks like he’s pretending to trim a small palm tree. He waves and I wave back like I belong there; I’m pretending, too.
Kathi leads me back into her home, into the red room with its fire and boats and floor pillows. She plops down on a cushion that looks like a Louis Vuitton toilet seat. I stand awkwardly nearby, considering my fate, wondering if I’m to be flushed.
Kathi grabs a TV remote and turns on a television behind me. Gone with the Wind is on, and Kathi turns up the volume. I’m not sure if we’re still in the job interview or if I should sit beside her and watch. I look back and forth between her and the television.
“Do you have any other questions for me?” I shout over the sound of a screaming Southern belle.
“I don’t know.” Kathi sighs. She mutes the TV and looks at me. “I don’t really care for this kind of thing. Hiring employees. I usually just pull people from wherever. I’ve never hired, like, a professional before. There’s the other guy I met yesterday, but he’s—I don’t know. He likes sports. You like sports?”
“What’s sports?”
Kathi smiles openly, naturally, for the first time, seemingly unguarded. Have I amused her?
I try to stay cool, but I’m thinking, The other guy? I try to hide the sting, the reminder that this job isn’t mine yet, there are other candidates, that I’m competing—something that usually doesn’t end well for me.
“Tell me about your award acceptance speech,” she says.
“My—?”
“Everyone has one in their head. The speech you’ll give if you win a big award. What’s your speech like?”
“Uh, you first?”
Kathi Kannon hops up in an instant and approaches an imaginary podium and adjusts an imaginary microphone, into which she says, “They always size these things for someone taller. And thinner.”
I look around, confused, unsure if she’s talking to me or the imaginary cameras or the imaginary crowd. Maybe all three.
Like a switch is flipped, she suddenly starts crying. Her body heaving, the magnitude of the fantastic moment upon her just as real as the oxygen in the room, like a tonnage too heavy to bear. She clutches her heart, as if to find and hold a beat to prove that her body is still there. She turns, takes an imaginary award from an imaginary presenter, they exchange a real moment, whispers, a chuckle, she takes a breath. She reclaims her footing at the nonexistent podium. She looks right at me. She’s locked onto me, onto her target, ready to launch. She’s a goddess. I’m the audience, I’m the world, I’m a million viewers at home.
“My God,” she says, sobbing into the imaginary mic. “This. Wow. Come on, words.” I laugh quietly; she controls the room. She controls the world she just built around me in an easy instant. She’s in my head, in my consciousness. How am I here with her?
She says, “This is the best moment of my life. Thank you.”
As she steps away from the microphone, I applaud. She turns back to me and raises her eyebrows and picks at a piece of something stuck in her teeth, and the illusion is lost.
“Acting,” she says.
My applause simmers awkwardly to a few little claps.
She says, “Now you do it.”
“What? I’m not really prepared for that.”
“Well, that’s a good start,” she says. “Start with that.”
I awkwardly walk to the imaginary podium, to the place where she stood seconds ago. “Uhh,” I say into her imaginary mic. “Is this thing on?”
Kathi rolls her eyes. “We’ll work on it,” she says, and sits back on the toilet cushion.
I feel our time is ending, so I step up. “Can I say something, in case I never see you again?” I say boldly, my face already turning red.
She stares at me, eyebrows raised.
“I just want to say I loved you in…” And I pause. This is the part Bruce did warn me about. “Don’t tell her about the action figures,” he said. “Don’t tell her that you loved her space films,” he said. “Don’t make a fool of yourself and act like a fan,” he said.
With Kathi waiting for me to spit it out, I continue, “I loved you in…”
Don’t do it.
“… Mork and Mindy.”
Kathi stares at me with the kind of comfort that only comes from a person used to being stared at. “Was I in that?” she asks, her expression not betraying whether she’s joking or having actual memory failure.
“Yes! You were a guest star. It must have been one of your first acting jobs. It was one of the only shows my dad let me watch.”
She stares at me intensely, like an old-timey actress staring at the silver-screen heartthrob who’s going to break her heart. Her eyes narrow, squinting as if to put me in better focus. “You have a rich inner life I know nothing about.”
“Thank you,” I say, looking away briefly, avoiding the scrutiny, unsure how to respond, wondering if this is a moment calling for truth on my part—she can get to know me if she wants to, if she hires me—or a moment of uncertainty on her part, calling out the holes in my life and job history, which I know are technically vacant of the specific experience of being a celebrity assistant.
An awkward pause hangs in the air, and she’s done. With a big exhale, she wiggles into a more comfortable position on her cushion and says, “Well, you seem groovy. Nice to meet you and all that.”
Kathi turns back to her television, switches the sound back on, and I know I’ve lost her.
I put my half-nursed Coke Zero down on her bar.
I smile and turn and leave her, the Southern belle on TV screaming again about fire or food or God knows what.
And I leave that mansion, past the moose and the Chinese emperors.
And I leave that property, past the ball-sac door knocker and floating porpoise.
And I leave that fantasy, that other life, my limbs still fully intact, for now.
3
My screen saver is fucking with me. It’s cycling through exotic, peaceful, lush locations while I’m stuck at my dank desk, back at my news-writer job, stressed the hell out, not because of the workload but because it has been three days since I met Kathi Kannon and I’ve heard nothing.
I’m clutching my cell phone 24/7, in bathrooms, in movie theaters, in desperation, hoping to hear from her. What’s taking her so long to decide? Maybe she has decided. Maybe I’m not good enough. Still, I want her to call. I want to hear that I’m rejected, feel my ear vibrate with the words. I want to feel the pain, my old friend.
My screen saver is showing me the Maldives and Bora Bora.
I’m seeing Fiji.
I’m seeing Tahiti.
I’m seeing Cape Town.
I know I’m deep in the muck of my misery when he comes to mind: Bruce. I pull out my cell phone, scroll to—ugh—his name, and smash the call button with such force I’m certain Siri feels assaulted.
“Go!” Bruce shouts. Or maybe “Yo.” I don’t know. I just can’t with him.
“It’s Charlie,” I mumble, unsure if he already knows it’s me, unsure if my name is even worthy of ever having been saved in his cell phone.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Frodo, right?”
“No,” I correct him, listlessly, pointlessly. “Charlie. What’s the latest on the Kathi Kannon job?”
“Dunno, bro,” he says, chewing on something. “I heard your interview was fine, that it happened, you know?”
“That’s it?” I ask. “It happened?”
“You have to wait. We’re on her time now.”
“Can you, like, ask her?”
“Ask Kathi? Are you fucking crazy? No. Not how it’s done. These things—interacting with celebrities—these things are fucking serious. Surgical. Like, you know, don’t spit on the queen and that kind of shit. And who else am I gonna ask, bro? Her maid? Kathi doesn’t have an assistant to ask. That’s the whole point of interviewing you people, right?”
“Right. Okay.”
“If you don’t get this job, maybe another will open up,” Bruce says. “I hope to get promoted soon, and maybe you can apply for my job. Although, I’m an executive assistant, not to be confused with a personal assistant, of course. Executive is better. The executive assistant is like a mountain, like the sturdy mound that protects our boss from wind and invasion and guides him home in a storm. The personal assistant is like the valley. They collect the silt. Right?”
“Do you mean sediment?”
“What?” Bruce asks, putting another forkful of something in his mouth, in my ear.
“Don’t you mean sediment instead of silt?” I ask. “I mean, silt requires flowing water, and sediment is actually critical to the environment and—”
“Huh?” Bruce asks, but I’m too dejected, too exhausted, to even say anything else. And the more he chews in my ear, the less hunger I have for answers, for continuing.
“Gotta jet!” he barks mercifully. “Have a blessed day!” he shouts, a toilet flushing in the background as he hangs up. What the fuck is he doing? God, I hate him.
I’m certain that I’m not going to get the job. This all feels like another in my life’s long list of failures, just like my current employment. I’m a TV news writer because I’m not good enough to be a TV news reporter. I wanted to be seen in this life, to be one of the handsome guys on TV who tells everyone about the world, to be one of the people everyone else has to see the world through, to be a gatekeeper. Was my longing to be a TV newscaster rooted in vanity? Was it rooted in survival—a desperation to be validated, heard? Look at me, the boy with acne, all grown up. Look at me, the fag bullied in the lunchroom, now pontificating about politics, traffic, weather. Was it simple psychology? Was Hannibal Lecter right, we covet what we see? Did I simply covet the newscasters who had my asshole father’s undivided attention every night at five, six, and ten?
My father: I picture him as if he’s in front of me now, heavy and melted into his forest-green fake Microsuede recliner, the fabric on the arms dark and smashed where his thick, oily hands have gripped tightly, nightly, repeatedly, while raging at Tom Brokaw during stories about war and economics and environmentalism. My childhood memories are dog-eared not in photo albums but by news events that drew his ire.
“FUCK THEM!” he would yell about Democrats.
“FUCK THEM, TOO!” he would yell about Republicans.
“FUCK THEM ALL AND FUCK THEM TWICE AGAIN!” he would yell at the kicker—the last story in the newscast. Sometimes it was a waterskiing squirrel. Sometimes it was a dog that saved a family from a fire. Sometimes it was a kid who won a spelling bee. The networks all do it. They end on a positive story so you forget that you can’t pay your mortgage, that tap water is poison, that your kids are brainwashed bisexuals.
“WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT A SPELLING BEE? QUIT WASTING MY TAX DOLLARS!” he would shout at the TV, as if the news is tax-funded. His yelling, his own personal kicker each night. The bottom right corner of our living room TV screen was eternally clouded after bits of his spittle caked it during a particularly passionate night of news viewing. No one ever cared to clean it.
If ever something captured my father’s imagination, caught his attention to the point of a near medical emergency, it was TV news. Everything else—eating dinner, commercials, me—were all simple distractions from what I suspect he really wanted each night in that recliner: to see the world but not be a part of it, to force his rule upon a kingdom behind glass, to watch with gross fascination a universe he couldn’t really access. All those things he felt from watching TV, all that separation and frustration and longing to be seen, those are all the things I felt about him, sitting behind him, his only son, young and quiet and watching him profoundly interested in, well, not me. And it all got worse after Mom died. When it was finally just him and me, it felt like just him.
I could never get in front of my father, not in our living room and, years later, not from behind the coveted glass of his TV. I never made it as a TV news reporter. Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe I didn’t have the talent or the right look. Maybe it was bad Louisiana genes, after all. The best I could muster was this middle-of-the-night news-writer job. And right here in the newsroom, reporters and anchors milling about, their very presence taunting my failure, I open the Notes app on my phone to compose a suicide note, but I’m too exhausted to finish.
I want to quit this job. To tell my boss to fuck off. I want to stand up and wave my arms and shout that I’m tired of these hours, these depressing news stories about corruption, death, and disease. I want to say I’m leaving for better things. I want to check out. Instead, I clock out.
I get in my trusty old Nissan, its frame bent and breaking but loved anew, appreciated just a little more after sharing in the Kathi Kannon experience with me. My Nissan, it was a witness to my close call, my almost moment into Kathi’s world. I’m thinking, Just get me home.
My phone in hand—Please call me, Kathi Kannon—I’m feeling busted, feeling at one with the steering wheel, with the console, with the check-engine light, burned out because it was on so much, too weary from asking for help, too tired to keep going, too spent from being ignored. In this car, I have to actually hit potholes on purpose to rattle wires to make the radio work. You can’t open the glove compartment without the whole thing comi
ng off in your hand. The horn is dislodged, so when I honk, the speaker blares at me inside the car. I’m only ever honking at myself.
My shit car and my shit job match my shit apartment—three hundred square feet of warm darkness, the sunlight rebuked by my blackout curtains, no AC, my neighbor’s relentless cigarette smoke wafting under the crack in the front door. I needed Kathi, I needed a change, I needed a course correction. Alas.
I sleep.
I wake.
What’s Kathi Kannon doing right now?
When I was a kid, I would play a game called What’s Madonna Doing Right Now? I would close my eyes and imagine at that very second where Madonna could be on earth and what she was doing. There was something special about imagining Madonna heating a Hot Pocket or using the bathroom.
What’s Madonna doing right now? What’s Kathi Kannon doing right now? I close my eyes. Is Kathi on the phone with Michelle Pfeiffer or Goldie Hawn? Is she making her bed? Is she putting on jewelry? Is she in her bedroom? Her red room? Her living room with Mateo the Moose? Is she watching TV? Is she planning her next book or her next adventure around the world? Is she smoking e-cigarettes with her new assistant, the one who must have stolen the job from me, who’s better than me, more charming, more clever, more apt—even if he does like sports? Is she laughing and waxing about meeting me, the other guy—groovy, unqualified, “a little odd”?
I spent hours of childhood lost in imagination, play, dance—any and every fantasy that could one day get me on my father’s television. When I was thirteen, I choreographed an entire routine I fantasized would be my audition for Ed McMahon’s Star Search. I was dancing to the 1961 song “Mother-in-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. (My dad only let me listen to oldies, which were part of a collection of cassette tapes in a plastic case shaped like a jukebox.) I wanted a costume with a pop of flair, so I wore a black sweatshirt and black sweatpants and a pair of my mother’s pink socks. She had been dead a year by this point, but her clothing was still in her dresser, everything like she left it except for the few things I dared disturb, sometimes just to smell them, to remember her.