by Byron Lane
Being a celebrity assistant is a lot like raising a child, or a puppy. Assistant Bible Verse 133: It helps to wear them out.
And so here we are, doing laps and walking in and out of stores.
“Relaxed yet?” I ask.
Kathi, looking sad with puppy-dog eyes, shakes her head no.
Some people shop by sight—what looks good—but Kathi Kannon shops (and lives) by touch—what feels good. She brushes her hands across a colorful sweater or scarf or sock, and if it’s soft, she’ll take it. She spends a quarter inch of cash on a snug sweater she may wear once and then gift to Agnes. She spends a half inch of cash on an Australian alpaca trench coat. “This seems pretty. Maybe for Benny,” Kathi says.
“I’m sure he has lots of use for it, living in your shed.”
“Cockring, what has this Australian alpaca coat ever done to you?” Her speech is slurred. We’re both exhausted.
“Time for my next pill?” she asks.
I look at my watch. “Yep. You sure are good at telling time.”
I fish the pill bottle from my purple backpack, open it, finger out a pill, and hand it over. She pops it immediately—I don’t even see her swallow. She winks.
I ask, “What’s next?”
She says, “I’m bored.”
* * *
“I hope we survive Japan,” Kathi says, looking down at Kyoto, its bright lights piercing through the night sky as we come in for a landing.
Snap: The limo that drives us to the hotel.
Snap: The finely groomed white-sand sculptures.
Snap: The boat that takes us to the lobby.
Hey, Siri, our hotel in Kyoto is accessible only by boat. The Hoshinoya is built along a river. It’s the kind of place tourists pay money to pass by and take photos. And we’re staying here, sharing a villa.
“Reservation for Aurora Borealis,” I say at check-in.
“How much to dress him as a geisha?” Kathi asks the front-desk clerk.
“I don’t want to,” I say.
“He’s very officious,” Kathi says to the clerk. “But I’m sure there’s a wild man in there who comes out at night, his testicles wrapped in a bright-yellow thong, cheeks of his buttocks red from a fresh walloping, right?”
Kathi turns and stares at me, daring me to react. I don’t budge. We both turn at the same time to look at the clerk to see if she reacts. She’s fucking confused. She doesn’t understand the brilliance of that moment, where an icon whips from molecules of space around us a twisted and erotic tale that’s so compelling you want to get high off it. I’m drunk with awe of how a human being like her can take the most ordinary of moments—checking in at a hotel—and turn it into an otherworldly memory, a thrill, an essential ingredient in what makes a life feel full.
Worn out from a day of airports, I get Kathi settled in her room and prepare to leave her for the night. I watch her. She tinkers with her phone, fiddles with her e-cigarette. She’s in a strange room and is just as comfortable as if in her own home, just as comfortable living her life with me staring at her as with me not staring at her, probably more. Kathi Kannon has never been alone. She’s been surrounded her whole existence with help, nannies, assistants, chefs, directors, doctors, enablers. She can sleep soundly with throngs of people around her, impervious to noise. Therapista says learning how to be alone with others is a key part of a healthy relationship.
“Well, good night,” I say.
“What is the meaning of it all, Cockring?” she asks.
“Of Japan?”
“Of life.” She looks up at me for an answer.
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you wake up in the morning?”
“I just wake up.”
“But what forces you from your slumber, what urge, what drive, compels you from your bed?” she asks.
I think for a minute while Kathi does her movie-star thing, her technique where she stays deadly still, letting the imaginary camera in the room capture the seconds of silence. In a film, this kind of blank space is where the audience can ascribe their own emotions and feelings to the moment. But, alas, this is a moment just between Kathi and me. She is motionless and open, not unlike her quiet poise when I first met her years ago—Kathi Kannon, film icon, waiting for me, loser, to speak up, to tell her why I want to work for her, and for her to pipe down, to listen, to see where her scene partner will take her next. And I’ve—we’ve—ended up here, across the world, me assigning to the quiet between us the role of “interest,” assigning to Kathi a curiosity about me, assigning to her the role of interviewer, for a change. And in the silence comes truth: I’m not prepared to be like her, to be an interviewee, to grab the microphone and profess some wise insight to the universe. Instead, I’m happy but it feels precarious, like I’m still bumbling around in the dark, taking baby steps to avoid tripping and falling, waving my hands and knocking things over, clumsy and inept, grossly unable to articulate any reason why I might actually have a true, tangible desire to be alive, what I have to live for, truly, besides her. My possible answers are stifled by confusion, dismay, and, I daresay, also a warm and surprising questioning of why she is asking about me at all, why she would even have any interest in lowly me—an assistant—and my egregious humiliation that I have no immediate answer for her, for what does get me out of bed in the morning? Really?
“I don’t know,” I say. “Is that sad?”
Kathi considers it for a moment. I wonder if she will stretch this time out, too, a great pizza dough spinning in the air until the inertia is too much and it becomes spotted, spoiled, unwhole. But she doesn’t. She takes the reins again, steering us, guiding us, though to where, I’m not sure either of us knows.
“It’s okay to not know. That’s genius mind,” she says. “Not knowing is what makes people discover great things, do great things.”
“You sound like the message in a fortune cookie. Or like the moral of some kids’ cartoon show.”
“Well, I am an action figure.”
“And so what forces Priestess Talara from her slumber?” I ask.
“Usually you do. Waking me up at all kinds of ungodly hours.”
“And when I’m not there?”
She pauses. “I don’t know,” she says.
Genius mind.
I look at Kathi Kannon with great fondness, my boss, my big, living, human action figure, fierce, strong, a fighter. I try to imagine how she would have fought back against my dad had she been there with me all those years ago, all those many moons ago when he yanked her plastic image and likeness from my hands. What a fitting replacement I’ve found in her actual presence in my life.
She says, “All I can think about right now is…”
And I guess: “Life? Death? Love?”
“A jar of peanut butter in my purse that I shoplifted today.”
“WHAT?!”
She stares at me, like she’s bracing for admonishment, then sits up straight, a smug look on her face. “Acting.”
I breathe a sigh of relief.
“I’m just fucking with you, Cockring. I paid for it.”
She looks at me over her glasses, a cue for me to grab the contraband. I fetch the jar of Jif peanut butter from her purse but then walk across the room, away from her.
“Hey!” she yells.
“Calm down!” I say, like a parent to a child, fishing two plastic spoons out of my backpack—this thing has everything. I walk back to her, hand her a spoon. I unscrew the top, peel back the foil, and give her the jar.
Kathi Kannon and I are eating Jif directly from the container and watching the film Baby Boom on a small TV tucked into a bamboo armoire. We’re catching the movie God knows where—the beginning, the end?—and no attempt is made to change the channel and find something else.
On television, it’s the scene where Diane Keaton’s character is talking to her doctor about sex and how she doesn’t enjoy it, but she’s still upset that she’s not having it.
Therapist
a says things missing from your life are not voids but gifts.
I think about Drew. About the happy picket-fenced life that I’m not living. I wonder if Kathi is feeling the same, the void of things in her life she dreamed she’d have at this point—marriage, independence from Miss Gracie, the kind of Teflon fame that transcends tabloid fodder. I’m thinking, At least we have each other.
Kathi reaches out to me. She grabs my hand, she turns from Diane Keaton on the television to look at me, staring me in the face, her eyes watering with either gratitude or dryness. Her grip tightens and mine does, too, me clinging to my star, on our cloud of hotel bedding, in our atmosphere of acknowledging each other, finding resolve in the fact that we aren’t alone, that we’re doing just fine on this journey. Kathi nods her head, purses her lips, and before I have a chance to blurt out my affection for her, she beats me to the podium:
“You must never quit working for me!” she says, an electricity flowing from her to me, and that mysterious energy that forces our hearts to beat is suddenly shared between us. Instantly, two electrical currents are connected, forcing a dollop of grace to pop in her and a lump of love to catch in my throat, my shoulders collapsing beneath the might of the biggest emotional hug I’ve ever received. “But if you do, you must promise to never leave me for someone like Diane fucking Keaton!”
I deflate but only slightly, wondering how the two of us could be on opposite pages. Me near tears at the promise of our pseudo-ethereal engagement to each other, and she talking about the earthly and disappointing semantics of my potential employment to, I guess, one of her competitors. I’m thinking platonic-relationship commitments, and it seems she’s thinking IMDB. But her gaze doesn’t leave mine, and her emotional connection to the point seems real, and I can’t help but think maybe this is as close as one can get with Kathi Kannon, measured not by our closeness but by my distance from Diane Keaton, and it still leaves me warm.
“I promise,” I say, now squeezing her hand.
Kathi smiles and taps her watch. “Time for another dose.”
* * *
In my room, I tuck myself in. I keep the thermostat set low so I can snuggle in every luxury Japanese sheet and blanket I can find—overdosing on it, since I won’t have these sheets or this air-conditioning (or any air-conditioning) when I get back to my apartment in L.A.
I leave my bedside lamp on until the last possible second I’m awake. The shade casts a shadow on the ceiling that looks like the spaceship from Nova Quest. How strange that this is my life. In some ways, the reality of my time with old Priestess Talara makes my childhood fantasies of her adventures seem silly. There’s a part of me that wishes someone would have pulled me aside and held those little plastic figurines up and told me all of their real names, told me all of their real stories, told me that they live in Los Angeles and have homes and interests and parents and problems. If someone had made it all more tangible, I think I would have a very different view of all that I’m experiencing around me now. That I’d be more chill and easy and accepting when things look human, flawed. Instead, I’m still looking into shadows, hoping the lights hit just right, that my childhood idolizations are still recognizable all these light-years later.
I check my phone one last time before ending the day, and still nothing from Drew. My mind races to fill in the blanks—he’s busy with work, his phone is dead, he’s hospitalized in a coma. My mind wants it to be anything but the possible truth: Maybe I’m not good enough for him.
I turn off the lamp.
On my nightstand, illuminated by the red light of the alarm clock, is the bottle of painkillers Kathi gave me to manage for her. It’s in the spot some people would put a photo of a loved one, a trophy, a souvenir. It’s our pact. It’s my proof that we’re on an adventure together, through Japan and Australia and Indonesia and through space-time, through addiction. This bottle of pills, it’s more and more empty, but it’s here.
* * *
Hey, Siri, we schlep to Kinkaku-ji—Temple of the Golden Pavilion—in the rain. A taxi drops us off and we carefully share our umbrella and walk the half mile down a muddy gravel road toward the sacred, iconic temple.
“Are you centering the umbrella on me or you?” Kathi asks.
“You.”
“Impossible. My ass is getting soaked.”
“Sorry,” I say, twisting and shoving the umbrella farther in her direction, my shoulder getting wet, our feet still shuffling along in slop, behind other tourists laughing and pretending they’re not in hell.
We turn a corner, and there it is. We lay eyes on this historic site, glistening from the glare of the rainy day, tourists all around us taking pictures, marching forward toward the masterpiece.
It’s a sweet, magical moment.
Snap: The Golden Temple. “Look how fucking famous it is!”
Kathi turns to me, I look at her, bracing for our touching exchange.
She says, “Okay, wow, let’s go.”
She turns and starts to trudge back to the waiting taxi. I lurch behind her, keeping her head safe from the rain.
“Wait. We’re not going to go in?”
“Nope,” she says, her back to me, her feet shuffling, shuffling toward the taxi.
“But we came all this way. In the rain. Shouldn’t we see what the inside looks like?”
“We can google it,” she says.
In the cab, she lets out a whoosh of air, an exhale of accomplishment, as if to say, We saw it, history, architecture, wonder. And then—
She says, “I’m bored.”
She says, “Time for another pill?”
I say, “You’re all out.”
Kathi locks eyes with me and says, “This changes your grade to a C.”
* * *
Dinner is a royal and gruesome affair.
Assistant Bible Verse 134: Always carry breath mints, cell-phone charger, puke bags.
Here at the Hoshinoya, the emperor’s chef heard that the Kathi Kannon wished to dine at the hotel, so he planned a special dinner for us in a private room off an enormous white-sand-and-stone garden raked to perfection. Kathi and I sit at a tiny table as two waitresses prepare the settings in front of us, each of them occasionally stealing a glance at my American celebrity boss and, every now and then, making eye contact with me, smiling as if to say, You’re so lucky to be eating here.
The waitresses bow and leave the room, and Kathi and I sit, visible boredom rising in her like a tide. “What the fuck is happening?” Kathi asks, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “I’m starving.”
Before I can answer, the waitresses return with two plates of lobster sashimi, except these crustaceans, on both Kathi’s plate and mine, are still alive, their guts exposed, waving their antennae at us, begging us for mercy. Kathi and I stare with eyes the size of tennis balls.
The waitresses put the plates on the table in front of us and then look at us, awaiting our reaction. The room is immediately and eerily silent, like someone accidentally hit the mute button on a war film.
“Oh, goodie,” Kathi says. “I can’t wait.”
“What?!” I whisper to her.
She leans in to me. “Acting.” Kathi looks up from the plate, back to the waitresses. “Wow,” she says, bowing. “Arigato gozaimasu.”
I follow her lead. I bow. “Arigato gozaimasu,” I say as the servers exit.
Kathi and I look at the living sushi, then at each other.
In my mind I hear only the voice of my father, screaming, EAT IT! That’s what he said when I was a child and I asked for spinach so I could be like Popeye. My sweet mother said I wouldn’t like it. She said spinach doesn’t taste good directly out of a can, how Popeye eats it. But she humored me, twisting, twisting, twisting the can opener, draining the water, lovingly putting a spoon of the spinach onto a plate. I had a taste; I didn’t like it.
“EAT IT!” my father shouted from across the table. “We don’t waste food in this family! She opened the can, now you open your mouth!” I grab
bed my fork, a child’s fork, with a thick plastic casing and dulled prongs. I stabbed the mound of spinach and put a leaf or two in my mouth. “EAT IT!” I threw up on my plate, my insides spilling out, my inner world now bile and rage in a puddle in front of him. This happened again a few years later over Brussels sprouts. And a couple years after that when I opened Oreo cookies, ate the cream filling from most of them, then threw away the chocolate cookie top and bottom. I buried them deep in the trash, but somehow he found them, of course. “DON’T WASTE FOOD!” he yelled, fishing the cookies out, soggy from coffee grounds and eggshells. “EAT IT! TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR LIFE!” Again, I barfed at our kitchen table. And every time I retched, the reaction was the same: He was disgusted not by the puke but by his son, his son’s weak stomach, weak everything. Each time he simply got up and left the table in a huff, leaving me alone to clean the plate full of my mess. I was too young to know that I actually won those three battles. That he retreated and I foiled his attempts to force me into spinach and Brussels sprouts and garbage Oreo cookies. Instead, at the time, I viewed his walking away as my own failure, my own lack of enough charm or appeal or worthiness to keep him at the table, to keep our family whole. And his searing scream still lingers with me.
EAT IT!
The creatures on the plates before us stir; they won’t be ignored.
“We have to get rid of them!” Kathi says.
EAT IT!
I’m looking at the lobster’s little pained face.
EAT IT!
I’m looking at its splayed intestines.
EAT IT!
I’m looking at its antennae.
EAT IT! EAT IT! EAT IT!
“Maybe we should eat it?” I ask.
“Are you fucking crazy?!”
“My dad always said to eat everything, kids are starving and stuff—”
“Your dad?” Kathi spits. “Who the fuck cares what your dad thinks? You’re an adult! Fuck him!”
And just like that, my dad’s screaming stops for a moment, a reprieve, my overbearing father reduced to breath from the mouth of Kathi Kannon, him suddenly powerless and emasculated, dying in that moment, squirming like our dinner before us.