by Brian Hodge
Door Number Three was up by now, and behind it sat a cage filled with aspiring starlets in identical red and white outfits. What a shame to have spent years hoping and dreaming for that big break, that shot on prime time TV, and miss out on the moment due to Thorazine. It had kicked in hard and heavy, leaving them as active as a basket of vegetables. Except for…
The audience was in, for them, a frenzy of excitement. Some were standing, arms waving like stalks of wheat in a summer breeze. Others stomped their feet to no apparent rhythm. DeadHead cued some new music, angry guitars and shouted vocals. The Dead Kennedys, maybe?
Except for…
Fang had amped up into a frenzy of his own, twitching in time with the music like a spastic in mid-seizure. His head bristled like a mace. Several of the earlier contestants wandered back onstage for the party atmosphere of the closing credits: Cynthia, with a good deal of Flight 901 smeared across her face; Shawn and his cooler of heads; Millicent, modeling her new arm. Fang twitched and slammed himself into Cynthia. An ear went sailing across the soundstage like a crinkled little Frisbee.
Yet Monty found himself unable to tear his gaze away from the girl he’d spoken with before the show. She clung to the front of the cage, swimming upstream against the current of a Thorazine haze while the rest of the starlets slumped in catatonic heaps. Her knuckles showed white against the steel bars.
She’s not supposed to do that! She’s supposed to be OUT of it!
She looked thin, painfully so, and no doubt it had been a good long while since her hair had been washed. Her lips trembled, and her eyes loomed huge against the pale of her face. Eyes that fixed, eyes that accused.
Eyes that started reconfiguring those internal switches. OFF went the smile, OFF went the juice.
“Help me, please,” she said, though over the racket onstage he couldn’t hear her, could only read her lips. “Everybody’s got a price — what’s yours? Is this it?”
In a pathetic attempt at seduction, she fumbled with one side of her sweater and tugged it upward. Ragged fingernails left red streaks on her skin. And there she stayed, holding the cage bar with one hand and her sweater in the other. Gauging his price.
Monty suddenly wanted to be sick. And not entirely from the prospect of her inevitable fate.
Everybody’s got a price — what’s yours?
In the absurd simplicity of her offer, she’d managed to show him a truth that had always eluded him before: Greed was the one thing death couldn’t conquer. Love would succumb before it, and loyalty. Friendship and honor. Morality and dignity and even humanity. But not greed. Greed had an immortality all its own, and would thrive in the stony soil that could kill the rest.
He gave her the first genuine smile he’d anyone given in years.
Monty reached beneath his jacket to finger the grip of the .38. At least it’ll be the merciful way out. And then a bullet for me, maybe?
He drew the gun, letting his arm hang by his side. The girl saw, and understood. And in pulling her sweater back down, accepted. Her glazed eyes shut and her face tilted toward an unseen sky. Make it quick, she seemed to be saying.
And then a bullet for me…? No, I can’t do that, can’t do that at all. Because God help me, I need this stage more.
But make it quick? Okay, that much he could do.
Except that by the time he raised the gun halfway, it was plucked cleanly from his hand.
Monty hadn’t noticed that Brad Bernerd had sidled over beside him. But now they stood face to rotten face. Bernerd was smarter than he looked, Monty knew that. Apparently he was stronger and quicker, as well.
Before Monty could move, Bernerd pointed the revolver’s muzzle at his lower thigh and pulled the trigger.
The thunderclap of gunpowder aside, the effect was much like getting clubbed with a brick. Monty felt his leg suddenly swatted from beneath him, and the next thing he knew he was on his side on the floor, tasting dust.
The gunshot brought everything to a half — the announcer’s closing voice-over, Fang’s slamdancing, Millicent’s preening. DeadHead even killed the music. Everything stopped except the silent scrolling of the credits on the monitors. Once again, Monty was the center of undivided attention. Struggling at the bottom of a sea of staring eyes.
He propped himself up on one elbow, grunting, chilly sweat trickling from his scalp. The lights didn’t feel quite so warm anymore. He gazed up into Bernerd’s runny eyes.
“It would’ve happened anyway,” Bernerd said. He slowly cocked his dented head toward Door Number Three. “She didn’t matter.”
Monty’s mouth gaped. He figured that his eyes must finally have been as blank and his brain as empty as everyone else’s around him. “Then why?” was all he could say.
“The ratings,” Bernerd said. “Time for a retooling. Your ratings are slipping.”
And as Monty pondered this great imponderable, Bernerd simply turned and walked away. The credits rolled on, and the rest of them began to move again, closing in as surely as the cameras. They mounted the stage from the amphitheater — by themselves, in pairs, as entire families. Converging on him with unblinking, unsated eyes.
My ratings? Slipping? SLIPPING? The thought was too great, and snapped his already fragile mind with pencil-thin ease.
He felt the first insistent tug at the bullet wound in his thigh, saw the cameras leering in.
But the eyes of the world are on me now! he thought. And its hands … and quite a few teeth…
Audience participation at its finest.
Past Tense
To say that our friendship was based on drinking would be, at best, a grave error. Sober or not, Kristen and I liked each other without reservation. But it seemed, nevertheless, that whenever we got together for a heart-to-heart session, the first crisis was what brand to order. And who shelled out for the leadoff round.
This evening it was Guinness on tap, and she drew first cash.
We had chosen this fern-infested Rush Street mecca because it was mutually inconvenient to both our workplaces. Comfortably full of furnishings as trendy as its clientele. At its epicenter sat a hollow rectangular bar, all mellow oak and brass, whose overhead racks sprouted rows of wine glasses hanging from their stems, like crystal stalactites. Satelliting the bar were tables and booths, packed with festive groups, quiet pairs, and lone strays trying to hide their hunger to become part of one or the other.
Kristen and I were fringe dwellers, as far removed from the mainstream as we could get, nestled into a brick corner at a table little bigger than a TV tray. Intimacy was a cardinal mandate.
When our drinks arrived, I held mine up to the light, unable to shine through the heavy brew. I ruminated about this, and after disposing of a foam moustache with a flick of her tongue, Kristen accused me of stalling. She was right, of course.
“You probably already know what I’m stalling about,” I said.
She nodded, wisdom in her eyes, coupled with amused patience. “Oh sure. You’ve lived with Lisa for, what, six months now?”
“Seven and a half.”
“Wow, you are overdue. I knew it had to be coming.”
“Another live-in love bites the dust,” I said softly.
“Poor Lisa. I liked her, I really did.” Her voice was light, without reproach. Only a slightly detectable seasoning of concern, as always. I think I might have preferred reproach this time, variety being the spice of life and all. “Does she know yet?”
I made a muscle with one arm and perched the glass of stout above it. “I was hoping to get psyched up for it first.”
Kristen gazed pensively out over the rest of the troops in the bar. As if to set eyes on the next eligible young lovely to set foot through the revolving door of my home and bed. Then she gave me a gray smile, perhaps wondering why her stability couldn’t be contagious.
Lisa and I had met in mid-December, an encounter of pure chance when I was reduced by emergency Porsche trouble to relying on public transportation. A bus, in this
case.
Maybe her tenure in my life was longer than the norm because we met differently. She wasn’t another in the parade of models and aspiring starlets I directed in TV commercials on Michigan Avenue.
It had been the frantic peak of the Christmas shopping season, and a 300-pound lummox bulled into her in his haste not to miss his stop. Sacks and gift-wrapped packages, behind which she had been effectively fortressed, went avalanching to a floor lubed with grimy slush. I helped her pick them up, no ulterior motive. Being on internal slowcook over my car, I hadn’t even noticed her looks until after help was offered and underway.
Her looks, her colors. Delicately pale porcelain face and rose cheeks, with shoulder-length wisps of hair shinier and blacker than a raven’s wing. I’d found the effect altogether enchanting.
We talked, had coffee. Later that week, lunch, followed by dinners and excursions to the theater. It wasn’t until I was already gold-medaling in the head-over-heels Olympics that I learned she was a millionaire-to-be, a department store heiress who kept an extremely low profile because the thought of all that money and its accompanying headaches actually made her feel guilty.
And so, after New Year’s, she was ready to move in and play at the domestic scene with a frustrated filmmaker who had sold out his dreams of substance and instead cranked out short-shorts in Chicago’s megabucks advertising milieu.
While I figured it would probably be prudent to first ask her predecessor, Meridy, to move out.
Kristen and I decided to switch to pitchers after the first round. Simpler, more economical. As well, the unspoken alarm had gone off to signify that this evening we were in for a long haul.
“Have you met someone else?” she asked. “Is somebody new going to be moving in?”
I twitched my head no. “Not this time. It just seems better off terminated, that’s all. More fair, or something.”
“Well, listen. You may be a hopeless satyr,” she said, reaching across the table to lightly touch my shoulder, “but I admire your integrity. Most guys’d hang onto Lisa because of the money factor.”
“Oh. Integrity.” I adjusted an imaginary halo. “Is that my one saving grace?”
We veered off-course awhile, a normal staple of our serious talks. Cover relevant ground until reaching a good breakaway point for trivia, until one or the other would steer us back on track. In the interim, we’d cover books, music, movies, politics; cabbages and kings.
We paused to watch a guy leave the bar, drink in hand, and maintain a dignified totter to approach a couple of secretarial types near our table. Head in the clouds — drifting smoke, actually. It’s a cruel world. They shot him down in fifteen seconds and he tottered back to the bar to wage war on his liver. Sad.
“I’ve settled on a diagnosis for your condition,” she said once the floorshow was over. Kristen always looked bright, healthy. With loose, uncomplicated dark blonde hair and an outdoorsy complexion, she looked as if she belonged on Colorado ski slopes. And now she was utterly radiant.
“Doctor,” I said. “Give it to me straight.”
“You, Derek, are subject to what we barroom therapists refer to as ‘serial monogamy.’” She flexed her long fingers, then studiously laced them together. “I mean, with a couple of exceptions, you’re not a habitual cheater. You’re a generally faithful guy. Just faithful in a never-ending succession. There’s always that greener pasture ahead for you, isn’t there?”
I pointed down toward my lap. “I always figured, to be honest, I’d have to admit I was led around by that.”
“Maybe. But you’re still not the worst pull-toy I’ve ever seen.” She paused to refill our glasses. Kristen was the one female friend I had found who could keep pace with me all evening. This was important, not to be lost. “And you know why that is? You honestly fall in love. You get shot through the heart every single time.”
I sent up semaphore code for another pitcher. “Yeah, you’re right on that. Sometimes it’s like I go into each new relationship with all the enthusiasm of a kamikaze pilot gunning for the S.S. Saratoga. Feels pretty glorious at the time, but it’s ultimately bad for everybody’s health.”
And I wondered, fleetingly, though not for the first time: Would things be different with Kristen? Would I finally achieve duration? I found it paradoxical that a large part of her appeal was precisely the same thing that kept us safe from each other. She was off-limits, in the horizontal sense of things. Her long-term love was a guy named Mark, a good friend of mine from the decade-past Dark Ages of college. But no wedding, no ring, and no plans for either thus far. So there still existed that unlikely but theoretical possibility of Kristen and me pairing off, slipping beyond the usual bounds of friendship. That one night we might drink just enough to erode the constraints and stoke the libidinal flames and, so sorry Mark, but nature has taken its irrevocable course and now we’re off to our future together. Hope you understand.
“Don’t even think it,” she said. But with a smile. One sharp observer, she was. There were times when I thought she could read my face through a ski mask at fifty paces. “I love you too much as a friend to end up hating you as an ex. And we would be exes after a while, you know that. We would.”
I looked up from the table, a semi-guilty glance, then nodded slowly. We both did, a strange sort of reaffirmation. A residual melancholy rode the crest of the moment, and I think it came from both sides. I’m sure she had entertained the same notions, at least once or twice. Looked at options, risks, probable outcomes. And decided it just wasn’t worth it.
“I have this dream sometimes,” I told her. “I’m living alone for a change. And one morning I wake up and every woman I’ve loved and messed up with and hurt … they’re all there waiting for me. It’s like there’s dozens of them, you know. All there at once. And they form two lines, facing each other, and I have to run the gauntlet. So I run between the rows and I duck and cover my head, but it doesn’t do much good, because there’s so many of them. They slug me in the face, kick me in the balls … just beat the living hell out of me. Except when I get to the end, see that latest love’s face and think it’s finally over, there are even more of them. Women I don’t know, future women, and it just never ever ends.”
If anything, that would be poetic justice, but Kristen didn’t let on if she felt that way. Her face screwed up, subtly, as if the dream had wormed its way beneath her skin and left a trace of the venom it routinely discharged into me on those mornings after.
The evening wore on, became night. Nothing was resolved, but then, nothing ever was. That was beyond even her capabilities. So we drank up, mutually voted down the idea of another pitcher. Walked out to the street together, where we hugged and swapped the briefest of platonic kisses, then went our opposite ways. As always. As expected. Safe and unentangled for another night.
I headed for my Porsche, mentally gearing up to go home and get into that terribly inevitable task of housecleaning. One more time.
The trip home was rife with memories, mental newsreels of past loves, loves that had withered and died after reaching the same temporal hallmark at which other couples were just hitting their stride. And I remembered one in particular, brought to mind by an otherwise throwaway comment Kristen had made earlier in the evening.
Steffy. Just one of the many whose ties to my life and heart existed solely in the past tense. She was another of the models I seemed to have such a proclivity for. Steffy of the throaty voice, the legs to inspire traffic accidents, and a pathological need to turn shopping into a marathon sport. I knew from Day One it wouldn’t last.
But that was okay. Because everything we did was done for laughs. The drinking. The parties. The drugs. The sex. The gold card sprees. The morning hangovers and their attempted cures. Everything, one four-month festival of yocks.
Except for the Omega Day I asked her to move out. Steffy was hurt and furious in equal measures. Somehow I managed to convince her that I’d not met anyone else; I’d had neither time nor energy f
or that. I just thought it was time for us both to get on with trying to be adults. Or at least as close as the two of us could come.
“You know what your problem is?” she’d said. “You can’t handle sticking with it after the fireworks settle down and get a little more normal. You always need that thrill of something new. You’re hooked on discovery.”
In that moment, Steffy displayed more depth and insight than she had during the entire four months. More, in fact, than I’d suspected was even there. It was a turn-on — uncharted territories, depths unplumbed. I was ready to change my mind and ask her to please please stay, but knew it was too late. One more bridge was raging in flames.
“And I’m sorry you don’t think my waters run deep enough.” She heaped on so much sarcasm I wasn’t sure if she truly meant that or not. But it didn’t matter, not when she was out the door ten minutes later.
I sat down then and wondered: What’s worse to do to someone? Which is more painful? Leaving them because you’ve met somebody new … or leaving them even though you haven’t?
I didn’t waste much time after I got home, getting the ugliness over with. Repetition breeds efficiency, if not exactly anesthesia. I was just used to the pain. Every time the axe fell, by my own hand, it lopped a chunk out of me, too. Amputations may be quick, but they’re never painless, never neat. So much emotional blood had been spilled in my home, the walls must have been as sodden as an abattoir.
Lisa sat in stunned silence until she reached back inside to find her voice. The scene was messy, ugly, with plenty of tears to go around. But I loved her, this was certain. Maybe that was the problem. I loved her — all of them — too much. Too much to stand idly by while those initial flames of passion at the beginning of any relationship started to sputter and dwindle into embers of mundanity. As I often did, I wondered: Why can’t every day be like Day One?
And damn my overstimulated soul for being dissatisfied with anything less than that. Because the cost was so high, as the sodden walls could so well attest.
Lisa packed a few things to get her through the night and the next day or two. She made a phone call. And then my department store heiress and her eventual millions went weeping out the door, toward a friend with a vacant guest room and an absorbent shoulder. The rest of her belongings could wait until I was elsewhere.