“Look, I think you should call Nadine.” The tall stranger picked up a piece of paper from a small, round, glass-topped coffee table. “Here.” He handed her the slip of paper. “The phone is over there.”
Mary Jean looked at the name and phone number on the note and recognized Nadine’s handwriting. At a loss of what to say, she walked across the room to the phone, dialed the number and let it ring. Four, five, six rings she counted as she spent the time looking around the room. It was her place, but it was different; the walls were freshly painted and the furniture, frail and cosmopolitan, certainly wasn’t the same. “Where are all my things?”
“Talk to Nadine.”
“Hello?” finally a groggy voice replaced the ringing.
“Nadine?”
“Mary Jean? Is that you?’
“It ain’t Queen Latifah.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m here at my apartment, standing here looking at somebody else’s furniture in my apartment, and some strange guy in my apartment, and I’m wondering how long I’m going to let you live if you pulled another one of your ”
“Look, I’m right around the corner. I’ll be right there. Don’t leave.”
“Right.” MJ hung up the receiver, and then looked across at the guy in the bright yellow robe standing near the open doorway.
“Is she coming over?”
Mary Jean nodded.
“Good. Mary, I ”
“It’s Mary Jean.”
“Mary Jean, I’m Eddie. Would you like some coffee? Some tea? It’s no trouble.”
“No! What I want is you out of my apartment.”
“This is my apartment, hon. I signed a lease for a year. I’ve been here over a week.” From the glass top of another small table he picked up a small, rectangular glass container with gold trim, opened the lid and offered a cigarette to Mary Jean. She declined; he shrugged, took a smoke and lit it. “I’ve always admired these apartments. I’ve been on a waiting list to get in here for almost a year.”
“Like I give a shit. You can wait another ten years for all I care, but you and all of your stuff better be out of here ”
“Oh, don’t be so huffy. I hate confrontation. I hate it, hate it, hate it. And anyways, this is between you and the landlord not you and me.”
Something was wrong. Thoughts were spinning through Mary Jean’s head, none of them connecting or forming cogent shapes. She moved a few steps to her right, while Eddie moved a few to his left; they circled in a dance of uncertainty and indecision, and she almost asked for that cup of coffee before she suddenly found herself standing next to her baggage out in the cold on the front porch.
“Look, honey,” Eddie said, “Nadine should be here any second. Talk to her, but I’ve really got to get back to bed, can’t miss my beauty sleep you know.”
The door shut, the deadbolt clicked, and Mary Jean was left staring blankly at the lion’s head doorknocker she’d taken for granted for so many years.
She came off the porch onto the sidewalk, still shaken and still in a daze, just as the morning calm was broken by the sight of Nadine swinging widely around the corner behind the wheel of Mary Jean’s cute powder blue 1964 Rambler with a crushed right fender, a missing headlight and the front bumper hanging down out of place.
“What have you done to my car?” Mary Jean was screaming before Nadine had even come to a complete halt. “Why are you driving my car?” she screamed as an afterthought just before Nadine, smiling, exited the vehicle to greet her friend.
“Mary Jean, I can explain everything.” She courteously took Mary Jean’s things and stored them in the backseat. “It really wasn’t my fault, I mean totally my fault, I mean things just ”
“What isn’t your fault? Wrecking my car or somehow getting me thrown out of my apartment?”
“Which do you want to hear about first?”
“I’m in no mood to prioritize, but just off the top of my head, why is that fruitcake sleeping in my apartment while I’m standing out here freezing and talking to you?”
“Well…I was a little late getting your rent check to your landlord.”
“A little late? Like how little is little?”
“About a month give or take. I ”
“A month! Nadine ”
“You see. I met this guy in the airport in L.A. We really hit it off. You should have seen him. He looked like a young George Hamilton, and he was going to Seattle, and I’ve never been to Seattle, and he offered to buy me a ticket, and well…I didn’t plan to stay that long, things just happened…Come on, you want to go get a drink? Uncle Tom’s still opens at six. We’ll go have a couple of drinks and you’ll feel better.”
“The very last thing I need right now is more alcohol. I need about two days of sleep and maybe a gun.”
“Don’t be suicidal.”
“Who’s suicidal? I want to shoot you. Several times.”
“You can crash at my new place. I’ve got this cute little garage apartment behind this old brick house just off Broadway just six or seven blocks from here.”
“And where’s all my stuff? My furniture? My art? My books?” The thought suddenly hit Mary Jean like a stiff slap in the face.
“I’ve got it all. I’ve got it stored in the garage below my new place. Your landlord was getting ready to dump it and have your car towed too.” Nadine smiled brightly. “I bailed you out on that one lady. I was there for you all the way.”
Mary Jean was suddenly struck mute by the irony of Nadine’s last remark.
“Come on Mary Jean, get some sleep. You’ll feel better.”
Mary Jean was in no shape to argue. “Do you have a place for me to sleep?”
“I’ve got your white couch in my living room.”
“Well then shut up and let’s go.” Though she trusted Nadine’s driving about as much as she trusted an orangutan to fly a plane, MJ took her place at shotgun and tried to get somewhat comfortable for the short ride.
About five minutes later they parked in front of a big, stately brick house in a shaky part of town which sixty years before had been the most fashionable part of town. They parked in the middle of a long driveway, walked another twenty feet to and up an outside wooden staircase, and into Nadine’s tiny new place.
Despite her hangover, Mary Jean was nervous and even a bit wired by all that had occurred since she had hit town. But after she fixed the bedding for her couch, just the sight of it made her tired enough that she didn’t need an Ativan as a hangover cure to help ease her into sleep. Of course a ten-milligram Valium did go down easy, and soon she was into that mysterious place called slumber where rarely does anything or anybody seem so terribly bad.
Mary Jean awoke from the horrible dream to find the horrible dream was real. She was on the couch in Nadine’s apartment, and all that terrible shit that had gone down some hours before was true. Her first thought was to start drinking heavily, but the feeling left quickly. She forced it to leave. This was not yet decision time, but there were things to do.
Mary Jean, the versed traveler, quickly found her things, found the tiny bathroom, and was brushing her teeth when Nadine, bent and foggy-eyed, stumbled into the bathroom and plopped down on the commode, looking like she’d been the one who had just experienced a two-thousand mile, raging, noxious trip into frustration, surprise and despair.
Soon Nadine, in the middle of answering nature’s call, broke the tense silence.
“Mary Jean, can you ever forgive me?”
“Has that ever bothered you before?” Mary Jean spit and rinsed. “Does it really bother you now?”
“Of course it does. You’re my best friend. I know I kinda screwed up.” She looked up then down, going for sympathy like a dog that had just been busted chewing up a shoe. “Gee whiz, boss, you still got one left”.
“I don’t know, Nadine, it’s just when I was younger I always pictured that by the time I was fifty I’d be on easy street not on the street.”
“Your landlord was a prick anyway. They were just looking for a reason to kick you out so they could bump the rent.”
“And you gave ‘em one.”
“They would have found something else. You know they’re charging Eddie two hundred more a month than you. Eight hundred dollars a month and all they did was paint, put in new drapes and a new refrigerator. The rents in the whole Pyramid District are going out of sight. That’s why I felt so lucky to find this place. It’s just on the border but still walking distance to everything.”
Mary Jean pulled her hair back into a ponytail and blinked twice at her reflection in the mirror. “Do you have any coffee?”
“Sure. Sure,” Nadine started to lead MJ on the ten or twelve foot trip to the tiny kitchen but stopped mid-journey and spread her arms to slowly make note of her cramped surroundings like a tour guide displaying the rapture of the Grand Canyon. “Isn’t this place great? Two hundred and fifty a month, you could move in and split the rent. I already asked Maggie. Think of the money we could save. We could stay in Mexico next year for six months.”
“I don’t know Nadine. I’m thinking of moving to Alaska. Summer up there, work in some tourist trap, save a bunch of money, and then winter in Tiempo. That might be just right.”
“What are you going to do with your furniture?”
“Don’t be picking my bones just yet. It’s only a thought.” Mary Jean looked around the room. “I see my couch, my tables, my television…”
“I’ve got cable, fifty-seven channels. It’s the first time I’ve personally had cable TV. I can’t believe all the stuff that’s on, I can’t believe all the stuff I’ve been missing all these years.”
“So where is the rest of my stuff?”
Nadine pointed to the floor. “Maggie let me store it in the garage below us. She’s so cool. Wait until you meet her. Your landlord had pushed your car out into the alley and crammed most of your stuff into the garage. What they couldn’t fit they just left out in the alley next to your car. Maggie let me use her truck, and Eddie and his boyfriend helped me move all the stuff over here. You know, Eddie really is a great guy. Him and his friend have a little two-person salon just around the corner from the Pyramid Theater. He knows just about every haircutter in town. He helped me get a job at Crazy Hair just two days after I got…” Nadine continued on with her monologue for at least another five minutes, but while Mary Jean was physically seated at the cute yellow-topped kitchen table she had received as a wedding gift from either her second or third marriage, drinking weak-tasting instant coffee from one of her Irish grandmother’s china tea cups, mentally she had left the room.
She was thinking about her immediate future, but this still was not really decision time. The next few steps in her life were no-brainers. First she would have to go down and get herself back on the schedule at Gene Burns Laugh-a lot Club. The place served lunch on weekdays, and on Friday and Saturday nights was the only comedy club in a radius of a hundred miles. Since people needed to laugh and had paid good money to be there, they were determined to laugh at just about any unfunny fool with guts enough to stand up on stage and talk into a mike; so the place always did well. Gene had stumbled into this gold mine through dumb luck and the death of his father-in-law who had owned the business. Because Gene enjoyed spending his time at his country club or Las Vegas or pursuing almost any activity that couldn’t be associated with the word work, he had progressed the condition of absentee club owner to an astounding new level, which made him easier to steal from than a blind clerk at a mini-mart. This made a lucrative job even more lucrative. Mary Jean swirled a few thoughts of figures through her head and speculated she would only have to put up living with Nadine in this tiny hovel for a short time. A couple of good weeks at the club, along with the money from her undelivered rent check, would give her enough cash to move into her own place, where life would go on.
After another cup of weak coffee, MJ and Nadine threw on sweat clothes, walked down the stairs and up to the main house so Mary Jean could meet Maggie, get the key to the garage, go through her things, and see what further wrath Nadine had bestowed on MJ’s world.
They went through the backdoor, a small entry area, and into the kitchen. The room was large but seemed small, it was so packed full of things: kitchen furniture, two large bookcases full of books, and three separate tall, free-standing, too-big-for-the-room cabinets which, like all available kitchen space, were jammed with knick-knacks and bric-a-brac.
“Maggie?” Nadine called out. Gaining no response she continued down a L-shaped hallway, past a large bedroom, a small bedroom and bathroom. Mary Jean followed, and during this short journey she noticed a continuation of the kitchen’s motif. Every room was packed with mismatched furniture, full bookcases, and large cardboard boxes stacked against the walls.
Just as they were about to pass through a wide doorway, a loud male voice came bellowing from the room. “Prozac?” The voice was full and dramatic. “Prozac doesn’t make anyone come to terms with anything. ‘I’m all right as long as I take my medication’. Bull! You’re not all right if you’re a walking zombie, and you don’t know that you’re a walking zombie. Have you ever seen anyone on Prozac? They’re too damn happy. They’re happy in traffic jams. They’re happy running the rat race. It’s mind control of the worse order…or the best depending what side you’re on and who’s running the show.”
Nadine and Mary Jean paused in the doorway.
“Reality can be a bitch sometimes, Dennis,” said a large woman seated in a large chair, finishing the sentence while grinning directly at Nadine and Mary Jean.
“Is there such a thing as reality? If there is I’m convinced the best way to approach it, to deal and cope with it is to immerse one’s self in fantasy not to contort or avoid reality, no, no, no, but to enrich it, to rise above the ordinary.” Dennis rose from his chair and stalked back and forth across the room with his arms fully extended toward the heavens. His T-shirt and jeans were both wrinkled; his shaggy hair and shaggy beard were both salt and pepper. “I’m immersed, Maggie. I’m immersed.” He sat back down.
“You’re just like John the Baptist himself. He was also a crazy so and so, nuts beyond belief.”
“Fantasy is more real to me than reality, because I live for the imagination. I live for the imagination and for the soul.”
“John was a crazy so and so, who also made it work for him, just like you, dearie.”
“And the irony! A nation of realists seeking sanity through prescribed delusions. Prozac, Lithium, Thorazine—pfui, who needs them? I strive to be crazier every day as a duty. Crazy, bizarre, unique The Divine Madness!”
The ball was batted back and forth in this metaphysical game of ping-pong for several more minutes, but Mary Jean had already shut down her listening skills. She was looking around the room, noticing all sorts of antiques packed into the large room, as she tried to remember where she had seen this unkempt nut who continued to run off at the mouth.
Finally the conversation crept to a halt. Nadine introduced Mary Jean to Maggie, and Maggie introduced the featured speaker now sitting to her left.
“This is Dr. Christian. He teaches film at the college and makes brilliant, esoteric movies ”
“Films!”
“Brilliant, esoteric films that no one ever gets to see.”
“When and if society is ever ready, they’ll get the chance but not a minute before.”
It was just at that instant Mary Jean’s memory brought a picture into focus and she realized where she’d seen this maniac. Her last husband had sponsored her return to college to finally finish up her degree, and this Dr. Christian was an almost daily attraction, roaming the campus, cutting across the lawns and through the flowerbeds, skulking down the peripheries of the hallways often vociferously ranting to no one in particular like a possessed preacher with no place to call home.
Dr. Christian looked Mary Jean up and down, then down and up as he extended his hand. “My
friends call me Dennis.” He held on to Mary Jean’s paw a little too long and forcefully before she pulled it away. “How would you like to be in my new film? Yes, yes you would be perfect. I’d definitely have a part for you. Would you be interested?”
Mary Jean knew immediately what part he was talking about. She flashed one of her radiant smiles. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, while thinking I’d rather be stabbed in the eye with a fork than spend five minutes around a lecherous asshole like you.
“Too bad. Well, if you change your mind let me know,” he said, still staring.
“Dennis is helping me organize a protest this Friday to keep them from tearing down the pyramid on top of the theater.” Maggie’s eyes looked huge and intense through the thick lenses of her black-framed glasses. She adjusted the large bun centered on top of her head. “We can’t let ‘em get away with it, we just can’t.”
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