You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  I so like women.

  Everything else wobbles like water in a glass, but women are such a good thing.

  They smell good, they feel good, they say things that make you want to be good. Their breasts and their legs and their stomachs and their saline cunts with the various kinds of coiffed hair around them and the mothers and the brothers behind them and the need, the need they have, and the love they need.

  Those five weeks, I write a fine screenplay, far too fine, I have little doubt, for my friends at Trident.

  October finds me in Palm Springs tanning by the pool at the Parker Meridian with a girl called Elana who edits an AMC series the name of which I cannot get straight which she, in turn, resents. Additionally, she is diagnosed with ADD, which means a Ritalin prescription, and young Elana turns out to be wholly game, now that Cuntmuscle: the Movie is done, to joining me in an exploration of the three-dimensional nexus between that substance and several others, depending on the night, and the strong narcotic of long, patient, practiced sex. When she goes back to work, I go briefly up to Monterey where, perhaps I never mentioned this, I am a fellow at the School of International Studies, not a bad gig for a person who writes about the Mideast—have I mentioned I am fluent in Arabic and Farsi, as well as Hebrew and various vernaculars of the above that are spoken in the gutter?—and try to get some work done. But all I really do is use the departmental printer to get a fair copy printed of my magnum suicidus on the Sinai Family. This I look at for a while, sitting on my desk, a pile of paper. Then I print a cover page, which gives an air of finality to it and accents its unlikelihood of ever being punished. Ha ha, see what I just did? I typed “punished” instead of “published.” Note the difference. For a few days I sit looking at it. Then I find and print out my grandfather’s obituary from the Times, and insert it as the frontispiece. That seems to help in some way. It helps a little more when I get the Times coverage of Sinai and Mimi’s arrests in there too.

  Communicating underlying historical context without losing your reader.

  The bane of a writer’s life.

  And perhaps I’d have gone on like that for weeks, months even, but in early November, the Times calls and asks me do I remember I have the final piece in my contract with them due? Of course, I tell them, injecting a slight edge of irritation into my voice for effect, though at the time of his call, I am sitting at the bar where they filmed Play Misty for Me drinking my fourth Miller Long Neck—yes yes, even dykes fall in love with that fantastic Clint Eastwood—of the afternoon. When am I leaving for Fort Benning? That’s a tough one. To answer it, I have to remember where Fort Benning is, why I am going there, and when whatever I’m going there for is happening. To be safe, I say that I am taking the redeye tonight. That, apparently, is the right answer, because I get transferred to some underling who tells me my car-reservation number in Atlanta—so now I know something about where Fort Benning is—and hotel in a place called Columbus and then a ton of details about travel.

  When I hang up, I jack in to my iData through my iPhone, planning how I’m going to iYell at Little iLincoln for letting this fucking iSlide, but of course I find that he’s done all the research, it’s I who have ignored it, and I remember now that I’m going to write for the Times about the School of the Americas Protest at the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, which is the longest-running act of dissent in American history—which when you think of it also makes it the most pointless. He also lined up the interviews, and sent me everything, along with rather a desperate email about why I haven’t been in touch in three weeks.

  There’s another note in there. It appears that Sinai has slipped an email by my spam filter by sending it to Little L., and Little L. has dutifully forwarded it, and because I am, after all, I am feeling like I’m clinging to a cloud, I make the mistake of reading the fucker.

  Bear in mind, Iz, that Muscogee County is prosecuting for civil disobedience, six months minimum, and that because you’re a second offender after your contempt term, you will undoubtedly be in medium security at least. You won’t like medium security. So, whatever you do down at Fort Benning, don’t get arrested, you dig?

  Do I dig? I dig that Little L. is fucking history is what I dig, and I tell him so, immediately, in a terse email.

  I also am hoping that you’ve made your decision about what you’re doing next. I’ll be moving down to Bedford Street next week and what can I say? I’m hoping that you’ll see your way to coming there to be with me for the next few months. We have unfinished business baby, and I hope, for your sake more than mine, that you won’t leave it that way.

  I delete Sinai’s email, then I power off the iPhone and then, of course, I feel bad. For yelling at Little Lincoln. Poor wee little fellow with his long, unshaven neck. How’s he supposed to know? But then I drink another Miller Long Neck—you have to drink them very fast, and very cold, and then slam them down on the bar and you feel just like Clint Eastwood—and a thousand violins begin to play. That amazing woman with the strange libido in his bed right up the road. She gets wet for Eastwood, but into that desire plays possession. Together, the two make you wet too, and I’m thinking that even if I can’t dig up a girl on campus, why, I can get to my room and indulge myself in a couple-three self-induced climaxes.

  But aren’t you just the little professional? It’s a bit like when you reach automatically for the alarm clock while you’re asleep. Without really registering what I’m doing, I’m already getting ready to leave. After all, making arrangements to leave somewhere is second nature to me. It’s making arrangements to stay that so fucks me up. I search and reserve a flight—there’s a San Jose–Atlanta redeye at midnight—and change the car—the Times has reserved a Corolla hybrid—to a Mustang convertible, which is the highest end sports car available at the airport, which seems rather to favor SUVs. And then I push myself up from the table, take a long, last look at Monterey Bay under afternoon sun and go to pack a bag.

  Midnight. Right back where I started. In a first-class seat, the warm throb of marijuana in my stomach. I loaded most of the twelve or so grams of incredibly hybridized Los Angeles pot I had left into a half-pack of Marlboro Lites, then ate the rest in a container of yoghurt—grass, unlike hash, you have to cook first, preferably in butter. By the time I get to the airport to turn in the Mitsu, look at me. I am as helpless as a kitten in a tree! High as a fucking kite, and not just high, but that stupid kind of high where you feel like you’ve lost half your IQ and the simplest deeds—returning a car, getting a boarding pass, navigating security, and finding the airport bar to order a straight shot of Red Breast and a Miller Long Neck and then another straight shot of Red Breast and a Miller Long Neck and then another straight shot of Red Breast and Miller Long Neck—still wandering through this wonderland alone, never knowing my right foot from my left or, indeed, my hat from my glove—and then find my way, lit like a Christmas light, into my first-class seat with my glass of champagne for the night flight—and this is the part I’m trying to avoid realizing—to an East Coast fall.

  See I’m too misty.

  And too much in love.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Isabel Montgomery

  November 19, 2011

  Fort Benning, Georgia

  1.

  On November 20, 2011, Isabel Montgomery, née Sinai, née Grant, touched down at Atlanta International Airport on the redeye from San Jose.

  She has been flying all night, but that’s not really the issue.

  She left San Jose drunk and high and is arriving drunk and high, and she has spent the flight staring out the window into, literally nothing.

  That’s not the issue either.

  The issue is that since, six years earlier, she earned a shockingly precocious Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and moved on after paying very few dues indeed to take a shockingly precocious byline at the Economist, the longest time she has spent without crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a redeye was a recent six-week assignm
ent for the Guardian Weekend Magazine in Saudi Arabia, from which she was unceremoniously expelled in early spring.

  And the issue is that since, ten years ago in Exminster College, she first titrated a glass of good scotch into her slim and strong little body, and felt it rise gently into her capacious brain, she, like her mother before her, knew immediately and with surety that she had just met a very, very important new friend.

  And when, shortly thereafter she introduced THC to her strong, lithe little lungs, and felt it enter her blood and go up to massage her brain like a hand inside her skull, she knew she had met another.

  And, as fine as those friends were, even they were upstaged in her affections when she met the loves of her life: cocaine, methamphetamine, Valium, Ritalin, Focalin. The glosses on her understanding, ever more, of bliss.

  And so the issue is that you cannot fly a hundred thousand miles a year and do so while ingesting a pharmacopeia that would kill an elephant and, along the way, producing a boatload of instantly disposable journalism—which, in fact, you could not have written without the aid of said pharmacopeia—without, sooner or later, hitting a wall.

  Okay, enough. Just note a couple-three last things.

  Firstly, that for all she has done to her lungs, her heart, her liver, her brain, these ten years and more, there is one thing Isabel Montgomery has never done.

  She has never taken an opiate.

  You know what that means?

  It means that for all her bullshit, Isabel Montgomery knows what addiction is, and how to avoid it. Which, in turn, means that Isabel Montgomery, woman of the runway and of the gutter, is a big fat phony. A well-brought-up, bourgeois, safe little phony.

  And there’s something else of note in an inventory of her little pharmacopeia. That is, what else is missing? Two key compounds. MDMA, and any psychedelics.

  Because those drugs lead to introspection. And Isabel, after her one experience revisiting her childhood on MDMA and acid, has never gone back there again.

  And why is that important? Well, it goes a long way to explaining something that has to be understood about Isabel Montgomery. It goes a long way to explaining why, despite all her accomplishments, despite her job that half the world would give their eye-teeth to have, despite her stunning, compact beauty—she so deeply, so completely, hates herself.

  And that, combined with a number of other realities of her life, most having to do with her childhood in which the most massive forces of the history of her century, from World War Two to Vietnam, conspired to punish her for when her father abandoned her in a financial-district hotel room in New York, she is now, and has been for a great long time, first a child, then a girl, and now a woman in despair.

  Notes from Isabel Montgomery’s drive into Fort Benning, Georgia, recorded into her iPhone.

  Interestingly, they don’t yet show how much trouble she’s in.

  Title Pawn, Commando Military Supply, Brake Tune-ups, Military Supplies: Buy Sell or Trade, Magnolia Gardens Apartment Homes, Days Inn: 39.95, Day Rates. Total Customizing, Hubcaps, Homer’s Lounge: “Welcome to Homer’s Lounge, come party with us.” Cars out front and it’s ten in the morning.

  Really, it’s not that she’s been up one night—that wouldn’t bother her. She’s up all night all the time. It’s that she was up the night before, too, and she’s on West Coast time. On the plus side, of course, that puts her about forty-five degrees of longitude closer to cocktail hour. This, perhaps, accounts for the swerve her Mustang convertible takes, as if of its own volition, toward Homer’s Lounge. Of course, it’s always cocktail hour somewhere. And of course, she’s high. Nonetheless she stops herself in the driveway to Homer’s Lounge, awkwardly enough to stall the Mustang, which is a standard. She says to herself, out loud: “What am I doing here? Georgia, for fuck’s sake. I am so far from home. And I am so alone.”

  Not three days ago she was walking hand in hand with an MIIS graduate student on Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur. Now, half-in, half-out of Homer’s driveway, it feels to her like she is, in fact, as alone here as she has ever been; that the town of Columbus, Georgia is as enigmatic and empty as the thousands of miles of California coastline; and that here, as there, her GPS is her only lifeline.

  Someone honks at her, impatient no doubt to get to the party at Homer’s, and Isabel pulls back out into the street, anxiously watching her GPS acquire its satellites and direct her right through the town, if it can be called a town rather than run-down strip mall, too bleak and depressed to have anything but off-brand fast food, and populated entirely by trailer-trash enlisted men and local blacks—the officers and gentlemen no doubt shop at some state-of-the art mall in Columbus. There is no sign of the single biggest protest action in America. And the strip, on either side of a four-lane road, seems to go on forever.

  Title Pawn. Pawnshop. Diamond Earrings, 8.95, Play Lotto Here. Uneeda Pawn. Checks Cashed. Checks cashed. Title Pawn. Ranger Joes, Subway, Tattoo Tommy’s, Cashwell.

  She slows here and looks closer. Her notes read:

  Cashwell Title Pawn, lower rates guaranteed. Ten o’clock and lowering, hazy clouds are coming in, a close sun fully risen. The fuck you going to grow a peach in this? And if you aren’t going to grow fucking peaches in Georgia, what the fuck is it good for.

  Finally, not able to bear it any longer, Isabel pulls over and googles “Title Pawn” on her iPhone, which gives her a site called www.franchisedoc.com. Title pawn, it turns out, is a way to borrow money on your car’s title, at incredibly high interest rates, a dozen points over prime, minimum. That makes it the perfect business for a military town, and in fact, franchisedoc.com describes it as “a much needed, high profit, service to the blue collar community.”

  A much needed service. To the blue collar community. She says to herself, “For fuck’s sake.” Clearly, the money they can raise on their cars can help to go party with them at Homer’s Lounge, or perhaps to memorialize that special evening at Tattoo Tommy’s. Then after they spend their money in Homer’s Lounge or Tattoo Tommy’s—saving $8.95 for some diamond earrings for the hooker they met there—then they can ship out to Afghanistan or Iraq and run a very reasonable chance of never needing the car again.

  She can’t write this. She knows already, deeply, that she cannot write this piece. It’s not that she hasn’t known that before. It’s that this time, it is true.

  She sits back and closes her eyes. For a moment she feels nothing.

  Exhaustion, alcohol, THC, and caffeine each on their own little subcutaneous channel running through her little veins.

  For a little moment the first wins and Isabel hears her father singing to her and sees the canopies of Molly’s maples, rich in green leaf, casting shadow and light over the lawn. In her sudden dream, she wonders why none of it makes her happy. It used to, but something has changed. She stirs, and then the GPS is singing, You made it there somehow. That makes her come to with a start.

  She puts the car in gear and follows her GPS down another road. Now there’s an off-brand supermarket, a barbershop, a Chinese restaurant, and sure enough after a few minutes, the GPS announces: You have arrived.

  But where?

  She actually asks the question aloud, and that she’s done so, suddenly sets a little alarm bell ringing inside her.

  An alarm telling her that making wry existential comments to her GPS is a very troubling sign.

  An alarm telling her, as she pulls into a parking lot where enterprising locals are charging ten dollars a day for SOA Demonstration Parking, and sees a busload of New School college students offloading, that this is risking to be quite a complicated experience indeed.

  And soon, her worry is confirmed. Because unless she is very much mistaken, watching those students climbing off the bus, having just driven a thousand miles from New York, in their sandals and T-shirts and shorts and jeans, unloading their protest signs—NO TRAINING FOR TORTURE; US OUT OF LATIN AMERICA; FREE LORI BERENSON—and their sleeping bags and their backpacks and their unsh
aved underarms and their wrinkled shirts and their Next Generation Phish T-shirts and their marijuana-leaf tattoos—that unless she is totally so unfamiliar with the feeling that she no longer really recognizes it, from somewhere entirely unexpected inside of her is the sudden faint echo of a twinge of an emotion she has not felt but twice in recent memory, once with Maggie, once with Molly, maybe not before that since that French girl who thought her too m’en fichiste walked out of her chambre de bonne onto the rue des Abbesses leaving her alone with herself on a November night in the middle of dark, scary, statuesque Paris—not feeling so proud anymore more, are you now? Not feeling like such a big girl now?—and it is unmistakably the desire, sudden and very demanding, to cry.

  2.

  But remember, this is Isabel Montgomery, girl reporter, consummate professional. Tintin, remember? International correspondent climbing out of her hotshot car and, a crowd of inbred southern fucks staring at her pretty self, walking decidedly toward her assignment. Nothing fazes Isabel Montgomery—never has, never will. Certainly not a crowd of hippies pointlessly protesting the evil of the whole wide world.

  And at first sight it appears quite a festive event. The demonstration is held along the approach to the front gate of Fort Benning, perhaps a quarter-mile of dilapidated suburban street where what appears to be a largely black set of residents live in houses of various states of desuetude set on lawns in various shades of drought. America.