by Bruce Wagner
The afternoon ended with everyone chanting Hu. “Gather your attention in the third eye,” whispered Ursula to the ragged boy. “Hold on to your contemplation seed.”
That night, Tiffany stayed with Phylliss. Ursula turned around and picked Taj up at the place she said she would, over by the Center. He was waiting there like a kid, after school.
They went to Bob Burns and listened to jazz. Taj ate some more. He’d pretty much been homeless the last few months, he said, begging for change outside Starbucks and the twenty-four-hour Ralph’s. She brought him back to United States Island and plunked him in a bubble bath. Then she lit the candle of her earthquake preparedness kit, slipped into a robe and put on Gladys Knight. Taj came to bed sopping wet, and she ran to get a towel to dry him off. He seemed perplexed, a dreamy colt, sweet and wobbly. He let her roll on a condom. She got on top, and when they were done, Ursula started to cry; she was thinking of Donny and everything, wanting out of her own skin. Taj got flustered. He said she was crying because of the transmitters in his mouth that made people sad when they kissed him. That scared her, but he laughed his bright laugh and she punched him. They wrestled awhile, then chanted Hu.
They lay side by side, listening to the carp of a cricket, close by. Suddenly, she was looking down, watching his tongue dig at her as she squirmed, arching back, hands trembling on the pommel of his head. The cricket was an omen that confirmed the fatefulness of this moment: just that day she heard Sri Harold talk on tape about the Music of God manifesting itself as flutes, chimes, buzzing bees—and crickets. Ursula was certain she’d met this boy in a past life. Sara and Phyll had a whole Victorian thing going, but Ursula sensed she and Taj went back much further. It would take some hard work on the Inner to find out just how far, but at least now the path was marked.
She shivered, lifting the boy onto her.
Severin Welch
Severin never strayed far from the Radio Shack scanner and its Voices. He picked his way through mines of static, listening to the agents and execs en route to power lunches; after midnight, pimps and drug dealers ruled. The choicer bits were duly recorded, then transcribed by his daughter, who still lived in the Mount Olympus wedding house on Hermes Drive. Lavinia made a meager living typing screenplays, and Severin was happy to throw some dollars her way.
The transcripts were returned and Severin pored over them, ruminating, sonic editor on high, scaling heights of cellular Babel, ducking into rooms of verbiage, corroded, dank, dead end—then a sudden treasure, odd heirloom, dialogue hung like chandeliers, illuminated. He held the sheaves to his ear and heard the dull, perilous world of Voices—the workday ended, seat-belted warriors homeward bound. All was well. Whereabouts were noted, ETAs demanded and logged, coordinates eroticized; half the world wanted to know just exactly when the other half thought it might be coming home. On the one-ten—kids there yet?—called you before—love you so much!—trying to reach—taking the Canyon—couldn’t get through—losing you…
Severin thought he recognized Dee Bruchner amid the welter. You tell that nigger, said the Voice, he closes at the agreed four million or I will spray shit in his burrhead baby’s mouth.
Had they always talked that way? He couldn’t imagine Mr. Bluhdorn coming on like Mark Fuhrman. Not to worry—he’d use it all to stitch one hell of an American Quilt. These were the Voices of a dying world, no doubt. They needed a script to haunt, and Dead Souls was just the place.
“You look awful,” she said, treading the doorway in a flowery perspiration-stained muumuu. Lavinia’s skin was oily white, an occasional pimple pitched like a nomad’s pink tent. She was turning fifty-three and wore a knee brace; the year had already added thirty pounds.
“Do you have my pages?”
“Do you have my pages! Do you have my pages! Don’t you say hello anymore?”
“Hullo, hullo!” He stood and did a jig. “Hul-lo, hul-lo—a-nuh-ther opening of a-nuh-ther show!”
She scowled, lumbering to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. Thank God Diantha wasn’t around for this. His wife had been so fastidious in her person, so immaculate—proprietary of her daughter’s fading beauty.
“Have you heard from Molly?” He risked a diatribe but couldn’t help himself. It was a year since he’d seen his granddaughter. Her birthday was coming up.
“Molly died, Father, remember? Molly died and Jabba took her place. That’s what she calls herself now—Jabba the Whore!”
He took the transcript from the counter and sat back down with an old man’s sigh. “Such a tragedy.”
“Since when is it a tragedy to be a whore?”
“Don’t, Lavinia. Don’t talk like—!”
“A whore and a doper. A jailbird, Father! She should die in prison, with AIDS!”
“Lavinia, she’s a sick girl.”
“I’m a sick girl! I’m a sick girl!” She pointed to a purplish knee.
“I’m in pain, Father, twenty-four hours a day. I didn’t choose that! Jabba the Whore lives in a world of her own choosing.”
“So do we all.”
“So do we all! So do we all!”
“That knee of yours is in bad shape because of the weight.”
“Oh, that is a lie and if you want to talk to my chiropractor, Father, he will tell you. So do we all, so do we all! Would you like me to call him?” Severin wearily shook his head. “You can talk to my acupuncturist too. And if you really want to know, which I’m sure you don’t, the weight on my knee is a cushion—”
“All right, Lavinia. It’s a cushion.”
“And the moral is! If you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, don’t offer opinions! The great So Do We All has so many important opinions! God, do I hate that.”
They moved to Los Angeles in ‘forty-three and Severin bused tables at Chasen’s, working up to waiter. A quick, funny, ingratiating kid. He made his connections and eventually scored with the regulars, free-lancing bits for Red Buttons and Sammy Kaye. Then he met Hope and sold a few gags to the weekly radio show. They signed him full-time—but he’d always have Chasen’s. Took Lavinia there on her tenth birthday, still had the snapshot: slender girl in a party dress wedged between him and Diantha, George the maître d’ in his monkey suit on one side, Maude and Dave sidling in on the other, smiling from the blood-red booth like royalty. One of his old customers wheeled in the cake on a copper table—Irwin Shaw. He respected Shaw, a real writer, a book writer, that’s what Severin wanted to be in his heart of hearts. He tried and failed a dozen times before deciding to do the next best thing; adapt a classic for the screen. A novelist by proxy.
“And don’t you forget: Jabba the Whore was made from his seed.”
“Who?” he asked, riffling pages, not really listening. Severin tensed; too late—fell for it again. He was a player in a grim sitcom, a straight man in Lavinia’s little shop of horrors.
“Who! Chet Stoddard, that’s who!”
“Oh Christ—”
“Don’t you oh Christ, don’t you dare! For what that man put me through? Did you know that my jaw will never mend? Never mend: do you even know what that means?”
“It’s a long time ago.”
“Tell it to my jaw! Tell my jaw how long it’s been! I go to Vegas to rescue him and that piece of shit punches me out! At Sahara’s, right in the casino, hundreds of people!”
“All right, Lavinia—”
“Don’t all right me and don’t Oh Christ! The bone could have gone to my brain. Do you know what kind of headaches it has caused me? The migraines, Father? Do you understand how demeaning?” She began to weep. “With the pain and the police…the humiliation in that desert town. And not even jail, they dried him out in a luxury hospital, flew him back first class! If it wasn’t for me, his show would have gone off months before it did! I schmoozed for that man! With Saul Frake pawing me, his tongue in my mouth, I could vomit. Father? Would you please give me the courtesy of an answer?”
Severin poured himself a drink at the wet bar. He
felt like an actor doing a bit of business.
“I’m a good person! Why has this happened to me? What has happened to my life? Why me, Father? Why! Why! Why!” She went to the bathroom and blew her nose while Severin sat down again to surf the bands. Lavinia re-emerged, waddling toward him with a fat rusty tube in her hand. “I took this from the drawer,” she said meekly. “Okay?” Some forgotten Coppertone cream. She seized the typed pages from his hand, brandishing them. He turned up the volume of the scanner. “What are you going to do with this? Your eyes are so bad you can’t even read. What are you going to do?”
“What do you care? You get paid.”
“People pay me to type for a reason, they have scripts, they have jobs, they’re writing books. I don’t understand your reasons—you’re just eavesdropping on people’s lives! People have a right to their privacy—”
“What are you, ACLU? You get paid to type. Period.”
“I’d love to hear what Chet Stoddard, the Larry King of his time, has to say—maybe you could listen to him. But he probably can’t afford a car phone. I hope he can’t afford a car or if he can, he’s living in it.” Her face lit up like a battered jack-o’-lantern as she threw down the pages and backed toward the door, Baggied sandwich in hand. “If anyone ever finds out you’re doing this—illegally eavesdropping—I want you to say you typed it yourself. Not that anyone would believe it. Just tell them you found someone else, not me, okay? All right, Father? Because I do not want to be drawn in.”
Free to listen to Voices again—shouting from canyons and on-ramps and driveways without letup, bungling into digital potholes on Olympic, dead spots on Sunset—shpritzing from palmy transformer-lined Barrington…Sepulveda…Overland…crying from electrical voids on nefarious far-flung PCH, dodging wormholes and power poles, festinating to beat devil’s odds of tunnel and subterranean garage as one tries to beat a train across a track—prayers and incense to ROAM (where all roads lead)—trying to beat the ether. A blizzard of Voices fell from range, chagrined, avalancheburied spouses in flip phone crevasse, electromagnetic wasteland of tonal debris. Neither Alpine nor Audio Vox nor Mitsubishi-Motorola could defend against unnerving fast food airwave static: recrudescent, viral, sudden and traumatic—words dropped, then whole thoughts, pledges, pacts, pleas and whispers, jeremiads—maddening overlap, commingling barked-staccato promises to reconnect swiftly decapitated: Westside loved ones morfed to scary downtown Mex, collision of phantom couples in hissing carnival bumper cars, technology cursed, torturous redial buttons pressed like doorbells during witching hour—hullo? hullo? can you hear me?—symphony of hungry ghosts begging to be let in.
I’m losing you.
Rachel Krohn
She sat in the lobby of the storefront mortuary, nervously thumbing a Fairfax throwaway. An ad within offered membership:
ONLY $18.00 A YEAR
· Free Teharoh (washing of body)
· Free Electric Yartzeit Candle
· Recitation of Kaddish on day of Yartzeit
Rabbinical-types in white short-sleeved shirts came and went without acknowledging her; she wondered if they were apprentices. A smiling Birdie brought her back to the cluttered office.
“Your father was not murdered.”
The old woman said it without preamble, like a teacher delivering a Fail.
“What are you saying?”
“Forgive me—but something in my heart told me it wasn’t right to hide what I know. I thought it was God putting me next to you at the seder.”
Rachel was dumbfounded. For a moment, she wondered if Birdie was someone in the grip of a religious psychosis. “What do you know? What happened to my father?”
“Your father took his own life.”
Rachel let out a great sob. The old woman touched her, then withdrew. She handed her Kleenex and a cup of water, then calmly spoke of Sy Krohn’s affair with a congregant—how the “lady friend” gave him a disease (“nothing by today’s standards!”); how the cantor, realizing he’d passed the infection to Rachel’s mother, chose to die.
“You said…your husband was there?” She spoke as if reading a script from a radio show. Your father was not murdered—Orthodox film noir. “You said at the seder—”
“Here—the body was flown back. But you know that.”
“But your husband…”
“He performed the taharah.”
“May I talk to him?”
“He will not speak to you. He was opposed to me telling what I knew.”
“Was it here that he—” The old woman nodded, and Rachel thought she would faint; this is where the body had lain. She stood, as if to go. “You said those who do the…purification—are volunteers. Is that something I could do?”
“It’s not for everyone.”
Rachel shook, flinching back tears. “But it’s for me!” The words came savagely, humbling the shomer. Rachel composed herself and said again, softly: “It’s for me.”
Birdie walked her to the sidewalk.
“You’ll call?”
The old woman nodded. “I will.”
“There’s just one other thing I wanted to know. My father’s buried at Hillside. How is it—I thought if a Jew killed himself, he couldn’t—”
“There are ways around that. It was simply said your father was not in his right mind. Which he was not.”
As she reached her car, Rachel imagined a string of women in the lobby, pending on Birdie—each with a revelation waiting, custom-made.
Sy Krohn was buried in the Mount of Olives on the outskirts of the park, across from a large apartment complex. On her way to the plot, Rachel tried remembering details—but that was thirty years ago. A worker on a tractor respectfully cut his engine as she stood over the stone. She was certain it was park policy; he even seemed to hang his head. BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER was all it said.
Rachel wasn’t ready to confront her mother, so she drove to the mansion overlooking the necropolis. That’s where the rich were interred—far away from the syphed-out cantor-suicides. Al Jolson’s sarcophagus adorned the entrance. “The Sweet Singer of Israel” knelt Mammy-style while a mosaic Moses held tablets in the canopy above. Mark Goodson, game show producer, was across the way, the outline of a television screen around his name.
No one was inside but the dead. Scaffolding stood here and there in the hallways, as if the artists painting the ceilings were on lunch break. Small rooms off the main drags were filled with stacks of thin green vases. A few employees loitered outside, tastefully—they seemed aware of her browsing, and again, she wondered if by policy they’d left their workaday posts, awaiting completion of her tour. She entered an elevator as if it were a tomb and rode to the second floor. More couches and vases and yarmulkes and emptiness. She took the stairs down, past the David Janssen crypt. There were flowers and a big birthday card signed Liverpool, England. “We cry ourselves to sleep at night,” it said. “We will never forget you.” She passed vaults of “non-pros” with strangely comic epitaphs: HIS LIFE WAS A SUCCESS; SHE LIVED FOR OTHERS. Then came Jack and Mary Benny, and Michael Landon. “Little Joe” had a room to himself, with a small marble bench. The entrance had a glass door, but it wasn’t locked. Anyone could go in.
“Who told you this?”
They stood in the hot, bright kitchen. The psychiatrist was between clients.
“What difference does it make? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I planned to,” said Calliope. “At the time, there were so many other things…I was going to wait until you were a little older, but then—”
“Well, now I am!” A mocking kabuki mask, glazed with tears.
“Do you really think you would have wanted all the details, Rachel? Could you have handled them? Can you handle them now?”
“Don’t insult me, Mother.”
“Is it any better now that you know?”
“I’m glad I know the truth.” A door opened outside. Mitch and a patient said goodbyes. “It’s so…classically hypocri
tical! The old cliché, isn’t it? The psychiatrist who tells her patients that secrets kill—and here we are, all these years, living a lie! Can’t you see how insane that is?”
Calliope whitened, trembling. “Your father was the hypocrite, not I! What I did, I did for you, Rachel, to protect you, you and Simon. If we had stayed here, believe me you would have been hurt. So don’t talk to me about hypocrisy.”
They heard footsteps. Mitch returned to his office. The women caught their breath, and Rachel resumed in subdued tones.
“Do you—do you know who the woman was? Is she still…”
“Serena Ribkin. She died last year. She happened to be the mother of a client, strangely enough.” She sat in the banquette, limp. “There: now you even have a name.”
“Was…was my father in love with her?”
“I imagine. Such as love is—though I doubt it would have lasted. But what the hell do I know? Maybe they were Tracy and Hep.” She stood, energized again; her mother was always a quick recovery. “Rachel, I have to get back. Why don’t we have a nice dinner over the weekend—we need that. We can go to that fabulous sushi place on Sawtelle.”
“All right, Mama.”
She fell into Calliope’s arms and wept. Mitch was suddenly at the back door, but the psychiatrist sent him away with a shake of the head.