Marilyn was at their table, electrified. The runners-up, or, as Marilyn would say, “the losers,” formed a sparkling multicolored backdrop behind Susan.
The floor calmed.
All was silent.
Susan wondered how to be truthful without giving offense. She said, “Thanks all of you. Thanks so much. As we know, this is an important pageant, and winning means a great deal to me.” She paused here, looking for words. “And I think one of the traits we value most in any Miss USA Teen is honesty. So it’s only fair I be honest with you now.” She looked at Marilyn, and waited an extra few seconds for full impact. “The truth is that I’ve got my nose in the books these days—I got a C- average in high school and I know I can do better than that—I’m even thinking of applying for college. I simply won’t have the time to fulfill my duties as Miss USA Teen. To properly give justice to the role is a full-time job and requires a girl who can give it a thousand-percent dedication.” Susan was winging it now. “It’s only from winning that I can see how sacred the role of Miss USA Teen is. And so, in the spirit of truth and pageantry, with a clear head and a happy heart I pass the crown on to Karissa Palewski, Miss Arizona Teen and now, Miss USA Teen. Karissa?” She turned around and beckoned Karissa who, so recently awash in loser’s hormones, failed to immediately register her bounty. “Please come forward so I can pass along my crown to you.” The sound technicians sloppily cued up Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
Marilyn’s tortured “No!” was drowned out in the applause as emcee Ken shrugged and escorted Karissa to Susan for a transfer of the tiara, sash, scepter and roses. Mission accomplished. Susan hopped efficiently off the stage and said to Marilyn, “Sorry, Mom, but this is a jailbreak. I’m no longer your prisoner.” She left the banquet room while a confused Trish, justifiably wary of Marilyn’s wrath, darted after her.
A week passed in which Susan holed up at the home of Trish’s aunt.
Marilyn and Don were back in Cheyenne, where Don was making pay phone calls to Susan, as he didn’t want any telltale evidence of communiqués with Denver on the monthly phone bill. “I’ve gotta tell you, Sue, your mom’s pissed as a jar of hornets on this one.”
Susan could easily imagine Don fumbling with a roll of quarters in a booth beside a shoe store. She said, “You know, Don—what else is new? I mean, you’re married to her, I’m born to her. Neither of us has any illusions, and I just can’t take her anymore. I’m out of high school now. Do you really want me hanging around the house for weeks on end with nothing to do but bask in Mom’s loving glow?” There was silence on Don’s end, and a cash register kachinged in the background. “I thought so. For the time being I’m here with Trish and it’s a harmless enough life. I’ve got a job flipping dough at Pizza Slut. It’s a start.”
“Well, Sue, that sounds good to me.” Don possessed no initiative but considered any trace of it in others a good sign. “What else is new down there? I used to have a brother in Denver. He’s in Germany now, Patches Barracks, outside of Stuttgart.”
Susan said, “I hang out with Trish by the pool at the Y. She’s into numerology now. She’s changing her name to Dreama.” Susan could sense every fiber of Don’s body instantly spasm with boredom. “Not much else, I guess.”
“A guy called. From Los Angeles. An agent. Named Mortimer. Larry Mortimer. He says you should give him a call. He read about your chucking the pageant in the paper.” Susan took down the number and then she and Don exchanged polite good-byes, both happy to leave the business of what to do to calm Marilyn to some other call, another day.
A few hours later, Susan and Trish, armed with fake IDs and Trish’s aunt’s Honda Civic, whooped it up in keggery bars and hot spots, releasing sugary bursts of energy with the fervor and desperation of the young. The partying went on for two weeks, after which Trish’s aunt Barb suggested the two girls accompany her on a road trip to Los Angeles in her car. They could share in the driving duties.
And so they left, and yet again Susan saw and participated in the country’s landscape—hostile, cold and magnificent, dull and glowing. They pulled into Los Angeles around sunset, arriving in Rancho Palos Verdes on the coast just as a full moon pulled up over the Pacific. They were just in time for a dinner of sloppy joes at Barb’s friend’s house, and they watched the lights of Avalon over on Catalina sparkling in the distance. Dinner was almost ready and adults and teenagers scurried about. Susan found a quiet den and dialed Larry Mortimer’s number. She connected to a personal assistant and then a few breaths later, Larry was on the line. “Susan Colgate? You’re one brave woman to go and quit that pageant the way you did.”
Susan was flattered to be called a woman. “It wasn’t quitting, Larry. It was—well—there was no way around it. You go and do a hundred pageants and then write me a postcard. We’ll compare notes.”
“Such spark. You could really harness that—make it work for you.”
“I’m happy enough just having my mother off my back.”
“Have you ever acted before?”
“Have you ever been in a pageant with cramps before? Or the flu?”
“Touché. How old are you?”
“I’m out of high school, if that’s what you mean.”
“No—I meant—”
“With a beret and a kilt I look fourteen. With makeup, cruel lighting and two beers in me, I can pull off thirty. Easy.”
“What’s the most ridiculous pageant you ever did?”
“I was Miss Nuclear Energy three years ago. I had this little atom-shaped electric crown over my head. It was pretty, actually. But the pageant was dumb. It was organized by men, not women, and the only other thing they’d ever organized was a Thanksgiving turkey raffle. The whole thing was so—corny. Instead of sashes we had name tags.”
“We should meet. We should get together.”
Susan’s stomach made a dip, like cresting a roller coaster’s first and biggest hill. She was excited. She hadn’t expected this. “Why’s that?”
Barb passed by the door to tell Susan the sloppy joes were ready.
“You could really go places,” Larry said.
“Like where?”
“Movies. TV.”
“Be still my heart.”
“Come into town. Tomorrow.”
“We’re going to Disneyland tomorrow.”
“The day after then.”
Susan had the sensation that this was just another emcee calling her up onto some stage where she would be judged again. After a few weeks of freedom from pageantry, she felt old strings being tugged and that spooked her. Trish, now answering only to “Dreama,” called Susan to the table. “Dinner time, Larry. I ought to go.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“Sloppy joes.”
“I love sloppy joes.”
“It gives me cellulite.”
“Cellulite? You’re a child!”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Ooh. I’ll back off now.”
They were quiet.
Larry asked her, “Meet me?”
“What do you look like?” Susan asked.
“If I were in a movie, I’d be a sailor like back in the old days, with a sunburn and a duffel bag, and I’d be on shore leave wearing a cable knit sweater.”
Two days later Susan, Dreama and Barb met Larry for lunch at an outdoor café where the linen, china and flowers were white and the service was so good they didn’t even realize they were being served. Larry was late, and when Susan saw him rush toward the table, her heart did a cartwheel. Larry was older, curly-haired, gruff and in a glorious twist of fate, a clone of Eugene Lindsay, the winking judge.
Susan fell into a reverie. She hoped that Larry’s breath would smell like scotch. She realized that Larry was to be her devirginizer, and a wash of sexual energy and nervousness bordering on static cling came over her. She caught his eye as he approached, and sealing his fate with Susan, he winked.
“I’m late,” he said.
“You’re just in ti
me,” she said. Their eyes locked and they held each others’ hand a pulse too long. “Larry, this is my friend Dreama and her aunt Barb.” They shook hands, and Barb sized Larry up in a manner that was blatantly financial, embarrassing and amusing.
Lunch was a blur. Afterward, Susan left with Larry, ostensibly to test for a new TV show. Once inside his Jaguar, Aunt Barb and Dreama out of sight, Larry told Susan that the test was actually for the next day. He then looked up at the sky innocently. Susan wasn’t fazed. She told Larry this was pretty much what she’d figured. Oh God, she thought to herself, I’m a jaded harpy and I’m only seventeen. Mom did this to me. She’s gone and turned me into . . . her.
Larry asked, “So where do you think we might go now?”
Years later, with hindsight, Susan would find it appalling that Barb had left her so readily in the hands of an L.A. predator.
Later that night, after Susan and Larry had exhausted themselves in Larry’s bed, they would briefly chuckle over the clunky roving eye Aunt Barb had focused on Larry, then phone Barb and say, “Barb? Larry Mortimer here. We’re late like crazy. We didn’t even get a chance to audition. The tests were slowed down by a union walkout. It’ll have to be tomorrow. We’ll be back at your hotel in an hour. Here. Susan wants to speak with you.” He passed the phone over the sheets to Susan.
“Barb? Wasn’t lunch today a dream?”
The next day at the actual audition, Susan clarified in her own mind one of the larger lessons of her life so far, the one which states that the less you want something, the more likely you are to get it. As she uttered her very first line, “Dad, I think there’s something not quite right with Mom,” the character of Katie Bloom, two years younger than her, melted onto Susan Colgate’s soul, and as of 1987, the public and Susan herself would spend decades trying to separate the two. Katie Bloom was the youngest of four children, a distant fourth at that. Her three on-screen siblings were played by a trio of better-known TV actors who couldn’t seem to make the bridge into film, and they chafed madly at any suggestion that their Bloom work was “only TV.” Off-screen, the three were patronizing and aloof to Susan. On-screen they looked to their younger free-spirit sister Susan to give them a naive clarity into their problems, and as the years went on, their problems became almost endless.
When Susan emerged as the keystone star of the series, it was in the face of outright mutiny by her costars. At the beginning she thought their coldness was the angst of tormented actors. Then she realized it was essentially fucked-up bitterness, which was much easier to handle. Far more difficult to handle was the issue of Marilyn’s continued involvement in her life. The procedure, for insurance reasons, demanded that Susan live with a family member near the studio. The glimmer of TV fame quickly outshone the gloom of pageants lost. Marilyn and Don rented the upper floor of a terrifyingly blank faux-hacienda heap in deepest Encino. Susan did the easier thing and lived in Larry’s pied-à-terre in Westwood. Thus, Marilyn’s presence was minimized to that of a bookkeeping technicality.
Larry was like all of the pageant judges in the world rolled into one burly, considerate, suntanned package. He knew how the stoplights along Sunset Boulevard were synched and shifted his Porsche’s gears accordingly. He had a writer fired who called Susan an empty Pez dispenser to her face. He made sure she ate only excellent food and kept her Kelton Street apartment fully stocked with fresh pasta, ripe papayas and bottled water, all of which was overseen by a thrice-weekly maid. He lulled Susan to sleep singing “Goodnight, Irene,” and then, after he nipped home to sleep with his wife, Jenna, he arrived at work the next day and saw to it that Susan received plenty of prime TV and film offers.
When she thought about her new situation at all, it was with the blameless ingratitude of the very young. Her life’s trajectory was fated, inevitable. Why be a wind-up doll for a dozen years if not to become a TV star? Why not alter one’s body? Bodies were meant to photograph well. Mothers? They were meant to be Tasmanian devils—all the better reason to keep them penned up in Encino.
Every night she took two white pills to help her sleep. In the morning she took two orange pills to keep from feeling hungry. She loved the fact that life could be so easily controlled as that. Inasmuch as she had a say in the matter, she was going to keep the rest of her life as equally push-button and seamless. In the mornings when she woke up, she couldn’t remember her dreams.
Chapter Twenty-three
John, Vanessa and Ryan were driving from Vanessa’s house to Randy Montarelli’s out in the valley. The three were crammed into the front bench seat, Vanessa in the middle. John was sweaty and pulled a pack of cigarettes out from the car door’s side pocket and lit one.
“You smoke?” Vanessa asked. She made a serious, unscrutinizable face.
“As of now, I’ve started again. I’m worried about Susan. I can’t unstress.”
Once in the Valley, John pulled the Chrysler into an ARCO station for gas and gum. He went to pay at the till, and on returning to the car found Ryan and Vanessa in the front seat giggling like minks.
“Christ, you two.”
“We’re young and in love, John Johnson,” Vanessa teased.
“People like you were never young, Vanessa. People like you are born seventy-two, like soft pink surgeon generals.”
Driving along in the accordion-squeezed traffic of Ventura Boulevard, John said, “So, are you two wacky kids gonna get married or something?”
“Absolutely,” said Ryan. “We’ve even got our honeymoon planned.”
John considered this young couple he was driving with across the city. They were like rollicking puppies one moment, and Captain Kirk and Spock from Star Trek the next. Both seemed bent on discovering new universes. John thought that they were, in a way, the opposite of Ivan and Nylla, who he was convinced had married in order to compact the universe into something smaller, more manageable.
“Where are you two clowns going to honeymoon then, Library of Congress?”
“Chuckles ahoy, John,” Ryan replied. “We’re actually going to Prince Edward Island.”
“Huh? Where’s that—England?” John was driving at an annoyingly slow speed in order to torment a tailgater.
“No,” said Vanessa. “It’s in Canada. Back east—just north of Nova Scotia. It has a population of, like, three.”
“We’re going to dig potatoes.”
John put his hand to his forehead. “Dare I even ask . . .?”
“There’s this thing they have there,” said Ryan, “called the tobacco mosaic virus. It’s this harmless little virus that’s lolling about dormant inside the Prince Edward Island potato ecology, not doing much of anything.”
“Except,” said Vanessa, “it’s highly contagious, and if it comes in contact with tobacco plants, it turns them, basically, into sludge. So what we’re going to do is rent a van and fill it up with infected potatoes and then drive down to Virginia and Kentucky and lob them into tobacco fields.”
“We’re going to put Big Tobacco out of business,” said Ryan.
“Romantic,” said John, “but it does appeal to my Lodge pesticide genes.”
“Vanessa’s dad died of emphysema.”
“Don’t make me sound like a Dickensian waif, Ryan, but yes, Dad did hork his lungs out.”
“Vanessa likes to fuck things up with the information she finds,” said Ryan with a note of pride.
“You know what, Ryan? I have an easy time believing that. I’m also going to light up another cigarette. Sorry, Vanessa, but I’m flipping out here.”
Ryan shouted, “Hey—that’s Randy Montarelli’s street over there,” and John pulled into a leafy suburban avenue. The tailgater whizzed off in a huff. Randy’s wood-shingled house was pale blue and tall cypress tree sentinels were lit with colored floodlights.
“Well,” said Ryan as they parked across the street and peeked at the house. “We’re here.”
“We are,” said John. It was a quiet moment, like being on holiday, after flying the wh
ole day and navigating through cabs and crowds, arriving in the hotel room, shutting the room and taking a breath. What came next was unknown, and John realized he hadn’t given this moment much thought. He was stage-struck.
“I just saw somebody move inside a window,” said Ryan.
“We have to go down there,” said John.
“Ryan . . .” said Vanessa. “Maybe we should wait here. Maybe John should be alone for this.”
“No. Come, you guys—I need you.”
Like clueless trick-or-treaters, they headed to the front door. From inside the house they heard a TV blaring, feet pounding an uncarpeted floor and a door shutting. John rang the bell before he had a chance to change his mind. All interior sound stopped. Vanessa rang it again three times quickly. A minute passed and still nothing. Ryan tried the doorknob to see if it was open. It was.
“Shut the fucking door, Ryan,” said John.
“Just checking.”
“Hellooooo . . .?” Vanessa called into the crack in the door.
“Oh jeez,” said John.
“You are such a chickenshit, John.” Vanessa cooed into the house, “Hello—we’re from Unesco.”
Ryan turned to Vanessa: “Unesco?”
“It was the first thing that popped into my head.”
“Right,” said John, “like you’re Audrey Hepburn and ready to hand over a clod of Swiss dirt if they donate five bucks.”
From down the hallway came the sound of somebody tripping over a small heap of suitcases. A man appeared, pale as linguine, in a black bodysuit, a cell phone dangling from his right hand.
“Well, well, it’s the Mod Squad. I’m Randy. You’re John Johnson, aren’t you? What are you doing here?”
“Perhaps we could come in?” John asked.
“No. I—can’t. I mean, I know you’re famous and rich, but I don’t know you personally. And I don’t know these two here at all.”
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