by Byron Lane
“Mommy will fix it. Problem solved!” Kathi shouts as I enter her bedroom. She’s getting dressed to go out.
“Not really,” I say. “What kind of drugs are we talking about here, Kathi? What’s happening?”
“It’s like nothing,” Kathi says, growing impatient. “Jesus, it’s not crack or something. It’s just medications. I’m just supplementing.”
“Supplementing? Supplementing what? A doctor should make adjustments to your meds if that’s what you need.”
“Who needs doctors? I once played one on TV,” she says, mocking her mother, making knowing eye contact with me, a star’s attempt to reassure me, her audience, though it’s not working, not this time.
“I’m going to Veg—” she says, pausing and restarting. “I’m going out.” She storms into her bathroom and slams the door behind her.
“No, you’re not! We have to have a big fight about this!” I yell to the bathroom door.
Roy hops off her bed and sits by the bathroom door, angry he’s been shut out. He’s glaring at me, willing me to open the door for him, begging me to help him. I say quietly to Roy, “I can’t save you.”
Suddenly, Kathi opens the bathroom door and looks at me, mistaking my comment to Roy as a comment to her. She says to me, “I don’t need you to save me!”
Roy trots inside, and Kathi closes the door again, safe and sealed off from the rest of the wild world, with its silly standards of health and wellness and responsibility.
I don’t need you to save me.
I’m thinking, Maybe you do.
I’m thinking, What are people going to think of her?
I’m thinking, What are people going to think of me?
* * *
Date night should be a grand distraction from the fits and starts of life with Kathi Kannon, but I can’t get in touch with Drew. Texts have gone unanswered for a couple of days. I’m sure he’s busy. I’m sure life is hectic. I don’t want to be a pest.
I decide to reach out in a different way.
I stop at the grocery to buy him a little oak tree in a cute, industrial-styled vase that’ll be a perfect match to the décor in his loft. I’m pretty sure this “tree” is just a trash plant, but it’s the closest thing I could get to an oak sapling, a nice way (I hope) to show my affection, and a bribe to fill in the space between us when I’m out of town and unavailable because of my job. It’s also a way to soften what might be a weird day, seeing the guy you’re dating photographed in a tabloid beside an accused drug addict/film icon.
Hey, Siri, I want this to work out.
I park outside of his apartment building and make the journey up. I approach his door and wonder if I should knock. I lean forward and listen to see if I hear anything inside, but there’s only the same thing I’ve heard from him of late: silence.
I put the oak tree on his door’s welcome mat, along with a little note I scribbled: “Thinking of you. Hope all is well. All good with me. Miss ya. xo Oak.”
Back at home, I’m starting to feel crowded by my own filth. I’m still not caught up with laundry and housekeeping after all my travel with Kathi. My luggage is still on the floor, plus all of the boxes Dad sent—I legit look like a hoarder.
Despite Dad’s protests, I have yet to open Mom’s boxes. It’s my small victory over him, my baby step in usurping his authority, his demands.
Fuck him.
I wonder what Mom would think, me using her stuff as a coffee table, eating my TV dinners on her old boxes of—what? I assume old clothes and books and kitchen utensils. I can’t help but also wonder what else I’m avoiding, what else I’m not unpacking.
I fall in and out of sleep on my sofa, me with my phone in hand, no response all night from Drew, and my last text to Kathi, also unanswered:
ME: You okay?
13
A scrappy firing squad is assembled, waiting for our target: Kathi Kannon, film icon. She’s expected at any moment from a jaunt out to run “errands.” Of course, Kathi Kannon doesn’t run any real errands on her own. Errands might be the new code for Vegas.
Seated in the circle of imported leather emperors, animated by the twirling bits of sunlight reflected from the dangling disco ball, is the team of assassins: me, Miss Gracie, Roger, Agnes, and Benny.
“How much longer?” Miss Gracie yells. “All this waiting is giving me arthritis.” Roger immediately takes her hand from her lap and starts to massage it.
“She’s on her way,” I say.
“This is important,” I say.
“This is for the best,” I say.
Hey, Siri, I want Kathi Kannon to live a long, happy life. Or at least long.
The front door swings open, and Kathi Kannon is there, backlit by Beverly Hills. She’s not the least bit startled or worried to see everyone encircled in front of her, silent and waiting in her living room.
“Oh, God,” she says wryly. “You guys need to get out more.”
“Kathi,” I say. “We need to talk to you. This is an intervention.”
“An intervention?!” Miss Gracie pipes up. “No. I’m not dressed for that.” She stands and motions for Roger to help her exit. Roger jumps up and Miss Gracie admonishes him, “You told me Kathi had an announcement.”
“That’s what he told me,” Roger says, pointing to me.
Glaring at me, Miss Gracie shouts, “Him! He can’t be trusted!”
I catch a glimpse of enjoyment on Kathi’s face, a reveling in the discord.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “Calm down. Please stay. I really want to have an honest and helpful chat about recent issues.”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Kathi says. “That tabloid story was nothing, not true.”
“That’s not what you told me in private.” I turn to my tepid teammates. “She said she was using but barely.”
I’m surprised by the faces absorbing this news: Agnes looks at me with almost a cringe, pity, sorrow, like I’m the one getting bad news; Benny is detached; Roger is focused on Miss Gracie, who is exasperated; and Kathi is stoic, practically daring me to continue. “I think we should discuss whether Kathi’s prior manic episodes were from doctor meds or Vegas meds.”
“Cockring, I’m telling you, that’s all over, okay?” Kathi says, looking around the room. “Are we done now? I feel good about this.”
“Sounds good to me, boss,” Agnes says, waving goodbye.
“Me, too,” Benny says.
“Call me later, dear,” Miss Gracie says, now arm in arm with Roger and heading to the front door.
“No, no, no,” I say. “This is an opportunity to effect real change and start exploring root causes of … things. And to set boundaries and expectations and hope and all that, right?”
“I’m too old for hope,” Miss Gracie says, clinging to Roger and walking out the front door. Agnes is gone, too. So is Benny. Even little Roy, his butt shaking with the excitement of the moment, dashes away toward Kathi’s bedroom, no doubt to snuggle in bed, leaving the room empty except for Kathi and me.
Kathi approaches me slowly, skillfully, fiery determination in her eyes. I feel flames of hell at my feet, rising as she approaches, heat from my toes to my knees—she’s getting closer—fire burning my stomach, my chest, my face, as Kathi stops in her tracks in front of me and says calmly, flippantly, “This was the worst intervention I’ve ever seen.”
“Thanks,” I say, my arms waving up and flopping back to my sides.
“I mean, this was the worst, and I’ve been in, like, a thousand of them.”
“I’m trying because I love you,” I say.
“I love you, too, Cockring. But you have to stop with this.”
Standing in that empty living room, I’m thinking, I’m alone here.
I’m thinking, Her sobriety is up to me.
I’m thinking, Better luck next time.
Exasperated, I ask, “So, like, do you have any tips for the next intervention? In case I have to ever do this again?”
“First,
I’ve noticed snacks always help,” she says, turning her back on me and walking to the bar in the red room. I follow.
“Okay, so catering. What else?”
Kathi fixes herself a Coke Zero. She doesn’t offer me one. “Sometimes people write letters ahead of time and read those, so that’s really fun and painful. Mostly I would say get more people in here and make it more dramatic, but the truth is, these haven’t really worked well for me. I prefer rehab or psychiatric lockdown.”
Hey, Siri, make a note of these preferences.
Kathi turns and heads to her bedroom. “Or a sober coach.”
“What’s that? Is that what I think it is?”
“Yeah. Someone who comes here and lives here with me and stays with me twenty-four/seven, even in the bathroom, to make sure I don’t … stray.”
I trot behind her, just like Roy. Just like a follower. Just like I nurse at her tit, just like my fellow assistants accused. But I push the thought aside. “Great,” I say. “Do you have someone you’d like to work with again?”
“There was a guy once named like Rick Sommers or something, and he was so helpful and he had the biggest cock—”
“Okay. Very funny.”
“It’s not a joke! We made so much love I didn’t need drugs. Then we both relapsed and I gained a ton of weight and he’s brain-dead in a nursing home in Dayton.”
Therapista says you can’t help someone unless they want to help themselves.
Kathi enters her room and walks into her bathroom and closes the door.
“I just want to know how I can help you, Kathi,” I shout through the door.
“I don’t need your help, Nesbit Twelp.”
I look at Roy on Kathi’s bed, sleeping soundly, not a care in the world, reveling in the unknown of what’s going to happen next, faithful that whatever it is will be a gift from a kind universe. If only we all lived with such optimism.
I sit on the bed beside Roy, my back against Kathi’s headboard, my feet stretched in front of me. I’m looking at her bedroom door. I’m looking out into that hallway where it seems like just a sunrise ago I was younger and more innocent, standing there, about to enter her life for the first time, my first morning as her assistant. Everything was so new and interesting and shocking—I’m here with a childhood icon! There’s her bathroom, her clothes, her bad habits! I’m thinking maybe if I called Diane Keaton, maybe if she was hiring, I could have that rush of feelings again.
Kathi walks out of the bathroom, Tom Ford Amber Absolute electrifying the air behind her, fresh glitter sparkling on her eyelids, an e-cigarette in her mouth. She paces, typing on her phone.
“I’ll never drive you there again,” I say.
“Where?” Kathi says.
“To Vegas.”
“Oh, God, of course not,” Kathi says, taking a deep breath, too deep. “You can’t anyway. If we went there again, it would look really bad.”
I throw my hands up. “Not the point.”
“Look,” Kathi says, her steely exterior starting to crack. “Do you really think I enjoy going to fucking Vegas? That I enjoy all this?!” She takes the e-cigarette out of her mouth. She lets her hands drop to her sides, her cell phone falling until the lanyard catches it, the lanyard breaking the fall, the lanyard I made her, to prevent the phone, at least, from bottoming out.
Kathi’s head drops; she sits. She starts to cry, where tears just fall off of your face, where you gasp for breath and don’t even care that you can’t breathe through the heaving, don’t even care that you can’t see through the tears. “I’m trying, okay? I just don’t want you … I don’t want anyone to think badly of me.”
Kathi Kannon doesn’t always look like her action figure. In certain light, I see the star, I see the priestess, I see her royalty in both this world and the imaginary one. But here, now, in the dim light of her bedroom, I just see a woman struggling, crushed under the weight of her body, her age, her feeling that options are limited, fearing that her fantastic life is suddenly a fraudulent one. She’s tired. I’m tired. Maybe I’ve been struggling under the weight of her, too.
A million griefs bubble up in the room, in her, in me. My feelings want to spill out of me like the bleeding red clay of my dad’s driveway in Perris, helpless in my father’s house, helpless in Kathi Kannon’s. EVERYONE WILL DISAPPOINT YOU! I fear Dad may be right. What have I gotten myself into? Have I put my friend, my movie star, my action figure, in danger? Have I contributed to the unspeakable?
I take a deep breath, trying to keep it together.
Assistant Bible Verse 137: Maintain a professional demeanor at all times.
I suck it up, like tugging at my sweatpants to hide my pink socks.
Therapista says everything comes to light eventually.
Therapista says all things have ups and, most notably, all things have downs.
Therapista says the moment you attach to something or someone outside of yourself is the moment suffering begins.
“I don’t think badly of you,” I say, my voice quivering.
Kathi looks up at me slowly, notices my emotion, and almost angrily asks, “Now why are you crying?”
“Are you getting too close to the sun?” I ask, my own sobbing beginning.
“What?”
I take deep breaths. I’m thinking, This is just a job. I’m thinking, This is not my life on the line here. I’m thinking, Why do I care so much?
I say, “Miss Gracie told me this thing about a guy with wax feet or something and he flew too close to the sun and his feet melted or something and he crashed.”
“That’s one of her Bible stories,” Kathi says.
“It’s not from the Bible.”
“From wherever!” Kathi yells.
“Maybe from her life. Her story, from her experience. From her experience of you. From my experience of you.”
“What the fuck are you rambling about?”
“You know addiction is an incurable disease—”
“Ugh. Don’t worry about it, Cockring.”
“You have to quit. This can’t last forever,” I say.
“I know that! It’s not like it consumes me. You never even brought it up until the damn tabloid.”
The comment pierces my heart, the truth hurting. “I don’t know what I’m doing, okay?”
Agnes pops in, notices the drama, the tears. Her eyes widen. Kathi and I both feel her in the room—our senses at peak levels, reading every atom and molecule of the air carrying our words, our wishes, our jabs. Agnes observes the scene for only a beat, the quiet, the tension, and immediately and without comment turns and exits.
Kathi continues, “What do you want me to tell you? Do you want me to tell you it’s not what you think?”
I nod. Yes. I’m thinking, That’s exactly what I want. I’m thinking, And I want it to be true.
Kathi Kannon, film icon, smiles sweetly, stands, walks up to my side of her bed, touches my arm. “Darling,” she says, warm kindness radiating from her body to mine and a rote sincerity in her voice. “It’s not what you think.”
Kathi takes her hand away and brushes her bangs out of her face, offering that rare glimpse of a human being underneath all the Beverly Hills highlights and lowlights and makeup and glitter and fame and wealth and their disgusting, addicting draw.
“There’s nothing further for us to discuss. I’ll prove it to you, okay? You’re an A-plus-plus assistant. Or at the very least a B-plus.”
“I’m going to start grading you on your sobriety,” I say.
“You have no idea about my sobriety,” she snaps.
“Then I’ll just guess!” I yell.
“Fine. I’ll start,” she shouts. “I’ll grade myself! Right now, I’m probably a D, okay?”
“Not okay. I don’t want you to die!”
Kathi doesn’t respond. She walks out to the back patio, alone, with only her phone and the mysteries of whoever she’s texting.
My head heavy, my shoulders slumped, I walk to th
e kitchen to get a drink.
“What was that all about?” Agnes asks from her station at the breakfast nook. “Back in the bedroom?”
“I was out of bounds, I think. I shouldn’t have said all that.”
“I thought you were reading a script for a movie. It felt so … I don’t know. Intense.”
“I feel bad.”
“Don’t. Someone had to say it to her. Someone should have said it to her a long time ago.”
I take a deep breath and hold in a guffaw, one of those awkward laugh-turns-to-tears moments, where breath and life want to punch out of your guts like the creature in Alien. I suck in the outburst and will the tears away. I don’t blink. I hold my breath. I smile slowly so Agnes can’t see any quiver in my lip, any clue that I just hosted what feels like a test and I failed. I didn’t move any goalpost; I didn’t crack any hard outer shell; I haven’t changed a thing; I’m not a good example. At what point does fault break the bow of intent, of character, of principle—or a lack of it?
“Agnes, do you know where Kathi keeps her drugs?”
Agnes pauses, averts eye contact; several painful moments pass. Then, slow and unsteady, wobbly in her baby-blue-colored socks on the slippery, shiny hardwood floors, or maybe wobbly from the uncertainty of the upcoming betrayal of her longtime employer, Agnes leads me through the mansion. We walk past the French doors looking out into the backyard. We see Kathi out there pacing, smoking an e-cigarette like it’s her last, texting someone, some figure in a secret life.
We glide into Kathi’s room, then into Kathi’s bathroom. Agnes steps to the vanity, where Kathi’s purse is open, contents spilling out like a Thanksgiving cornucopia, Mom’s locket right there in the thick of the crime scene, now tarnished with a new scar—my mother’s spirit, like me, bearing witness, aiding and abetting.
I’m thinking, Mom, what have I gotten you into? I’m thinking, Mom, save us.
Agnes reaches into the purse, unzips an inside pocket, and pulls out one of the pale-blue pill cases I give Kathi each day. She shakes it and the meds inside rattle. Agnes holds it out for me to take from her.