“You go to any auditions this month?” he asked after a while.
I didn’t answer. He kept pushing me until I said, “The agent said I have no charisma.”
“But you’ve got character! That stupid bitch—” he started to fly into a rage again, but then looked around and saw nothing he could throw, but me.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he growled. “I would never hurt you. You’re a prince, and one day, my boy. . .” His arm trapped me, his other hand sweeping over the candy-colored panorama of the miniature golf course and the endless barrage of cars. “One day, all this will be yours. . .
“For one day.”
My island hadn’t changed as much as the rest of the Valley, but it felt different.
The little pocket forest tucked between the looping cloverleaf onramps of the 405 and the 101 had been overrun by invasive weeds and worse. Nasty parasitic wild cucumber vines and morning glory draped the eucalyptus and pine trees with such repulsive violence you could hear them growing and strangling their hosts. Spiky pods all over them burst as I shouldered past, spreading seeds.
The iodine colored light from the arc sodium lights made everything look like the bruised afterglow of a flashbulb explosion, filling the darkness with squirming life while hiding none of the trash choking the ivy and ailanthus undergrowth. But there was no tramp camp, and the view was still lovely; across the 101 West-to-405 North onramp lay the pastel pasteboard kingdom of the Camelot minigolf course, and beyond that, the fireman’s training tower and a graveyard of antique fire engines sprawled out like the abandoned toys of a happier childhood than mine.
I had a silver dollar in my pocket, but I had forgot my prybar. I always kept it in this bag, with a compact air mattress, a bunch of cereal and freeze dried backpacker food, a mess kit, a flashlight, binoculars, a can of pepper spray and an 8” survival knife. I dumped out the contents of my pack on the air mattress. I had also somehow managed to lose my pill caddy. I was nearly out of cigarettes.
I could not go home, not until I knew. I could hit the Mobil station and be back here long before high tide. But they would be looking. My plane had left without me. And I didn’t need my binoculars to see my apartment on the top floor of my building, because the lights were on. I had turned them off when I left.
I had enough snacks and dehydrated backpacker food for three days. All the landscaping fixtures on the island were reclaimed waste water, but the adjoining island was an oasis with tanbark to kill the undergrowth, king palm trees and an old sprinkler head that I could tap for water. I was prepared to live out here forever, but I wouldn’t last twelve hours without my meds, or half an hour without a smoke.
I don’t know how long I sat there, paralyzed. I had forgotten to put on a watch.
A car shot down the onramp honking wildly, like trying to spoil somebody’s putt on the Eiffel Tower hole. Something smashed through the branches of the sickly pine trees like a cannonball. I threw myself to the ground until I began to feel foolish. I crawled over to the Betty Boop backpack that the passing car had thrown onto the island. Before I unzipped it, a phone inside started to ring.
My pill caddy, an extra sweater, a foil space blanket, two rolls of toilet paper, a stack of tabloids and a carton of Newport Menthols. At the bottom, the disposable prepaid phone trilled like a cicada, making my fillings vibrate.
I answered, “Bueno.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
I sat down in a clump of ailanthus, choking on rancid peanut butter stench as I burst into tears. “Kelsey. . . thank you. Thank you. . . but you shouldn’t have gone to my apartment.”
“Nobody’s looking for you. Nobody else, anyway. . .”
“Listen, thanks, but you don’t know. . .”
“Is this about the show? Are you having the flashbacks again?”
See how kind she was? She called them flashbacks, not delusions. “Yes. . . but it’s. . .”
“You’re not on your meds, are you?”
“I took them this morning, but. . . I saw something. They sent it. They want me to know. . .” My jumbled mind stopped tumbling long enough to connect a thought. “You went back there. You saw it.”
“You left a mess. Nice job on the TV, by the way. I saw your pills on the counter.”
“You didn’t find the package on the table—”
“I didn’t see anything, but I could go back—”
“No! It’s not safe—”
“Are you hallucinating?”
“It’s bad. I can’t see faces.”
“Come again?”
“It’s not like LSD or psilocybin hallucinations, either, where everything weirds out in the corner of your eye, but when you really look, the veil rolls back. It’s more like ketamine, where looking only melts and burns it worse, and you start to think your perception is destroying reality. I can’t see anyone’s face, Kelsey. . .”
“You’re having a breakdown. It’s just paranoia. Nobody’s looking for you.”
“You figured it out pretty quick. They could have followed you—”
“I’m on my way to see The Reflecting Skin at the Coronet and eat alone at Dolores’, since you flaked out. Anyone following me or tapping the line is welcome to join me.”
“This is. . .” Screaming at her wasn’t going to convince her of anything. But I tried. “It’s real! I’m hallucinating because that’s what they make you do. . . that’s how they. . . they’ll kill you. . .”
A long pregnant pause, and then the squelched sound of sirens. “Jesus, the freeway is fucked up, they’re detouring all the traffic onto Sepulveda. . . Listen, the phone is good for another week, but as soon as you start feeling the least bit lucid, you need to cut short your camping trip and come back to LA.”
“OK. . .” I got up and walked around the bowl shaped island until my boots stubbed against a plug of concrete jutting a few inches out of the carpet of pine needles. “I’ll come back soon, I promise. But Kelsey. . .”
“What do you need?”
“There’s a True Value in Santa Monica that’s open all night—”
“For what?”
“Um. . . I swear I’ll come back and straighten out everything, but please just get me a crowbar and a sledgehammer.”
I had never seen her naked, but Kelsey was the great love of my life.
I met her when we were both on suicide watch at county. I attacked my therapy group because I had a narcissistic self-destructive complex, the doctors said, and not because the other patients had masks or slimy, membranous cauls covering their faces that flapped and fluttered when they talked. When things got really bad, she was the only one who still had a face.
It was how she carried herself, the way she occupied space, silently asserting her right to exist in a world that offered little or no reason to stay. What must they have done to raise a girl so utterly prepossessed, so sure of herself in spite of everything they’d done to her. I didn’t know until later her poise came from trying and failing to kill herself eight times.
Kelsey was a secret bastard. Her anonymous, unspeakably famous father had paid her quite handsomely to change her name and keep her mouth shut. He hadn’t paid her to become a 300-pound neurotic, and thus completely invisible in LA, but it would’ve been money well spent. Someone like Kelsey could sing until angels wept, and nobody around here would notice, unless she hid behind a supermodel when she did it.
She’d gotten a couple plus-size modeling jobs, but somebody at an agency always shitcanned it before the pics went out. It was almost like they kept her in a can and kept shaking it until she had no choice but to cremate his career with a pyrrhic tell-all book. She worked at her one-bedroom in Studio City, doing web maintenance for something called reputation.com. She adopted me because her mother never let her bring home stray dogs.
The day was one of those brilliant early winter LA days when the sun is a bright pale gold special effect, but the blue shadows are like hoarfrost and suck the heat out of yo
u through your feet. I woke up shivering in my space blanket, and couldn’t get up and around for an hour.
I’d had nightmares: the old recurring one, where Miss Iris ushers me into the closet. The dust and the cloying miasma of tea rose and sour sweat clamps over my nose like an ether soaked rag.
“I’m going to show you what you are,” she says, and I try not to look at her. But she orders me to look and opens her dress and everything spills out, crushing me against the wall.
I had this dream every night through puberty until I stopped talking to girls. I thought it was normal. I thought it meant I was gay. When that didn’t work out either, I was relieved I didn’t have to try to figure it out.
But nothing like that ever really happened to me. I was told I was using her to express my mother issues, my repulsion for the female archetype. I’d been through hypnotherapy and intensive psychic driving techniques to uncover repressed memories. Anything to help me understand why some colors and smells nauseated or terrified me, why I couldn’t bear the thought of being touched, why I constantly entertained waking nightmares about what everyone hid under their clothes.
I made my toilet in a castor bean bush and read Wodehouse and enjoyed the sounds of rush hour, so like the waves on a tropic beach. To rest in sylvan tranquility in a glade encircled by an endless circuit of steel and road rage was more soothing, somehow, than any real wilderness setting. I gorged on cereal and cooked a Salisbury steak for lunch, then napped until the tide turned, and spent the magic hour spying on my apartment.
My living room curtains were drawn. I was sure I’d left them open. Had Kelsey closed them? I don’t know what I expected to see, but I think I would’ve felt better if Sir Thanksalot or the Raggedy Man appeared to take a bow and confirm that I’d lost my last marble.
I had gone to sleep feeling blessedly relaxed but slightly foolish, and frittered away the day quite sure that I’d merely snapped again. Who the fuck were they, anyway?
The production company that put on the show had folded in 1974; the royalty checks were dispersed from an oblique, headless equity fund; and the non-union, half-amateur show ran no technical credits. The crew and the puppeteers also wore masks. If there was anyone above Miss Iris, we never saw them.
I had only known a few of my TV classmates by name. Had only seen a few of them without their masks. We were sharply discouraged from fraternizing outside the classroom, and I never saw any of them after the show wrapped in June, 1973. The show lasted in reruns until 1984 in Southern California, and by all accounts was still running somewhere in Canada. A couple of my classmates had been outed, but only after death. The last was a promising TV character who had just made the jump from TV to movies. When he died of a suspicious drug interaction, his obit identified him as Tommy, the teacher’s pet. Our records were somehow sealed against press and fans alike. Even against ourselves.
I tried for years to find the girl I sat next to when I wasn’t in the corner. She had bright new-penny copper hair in pigtails swept back behind the featureless white sweep of her mask, and her uniform was always spotless, but her pretty lightly freckled right hand had a faint scar around the heel of her palm and the base of her thumb. Oddly whorled and shiny like a doll’s skin even after they caked it with pancake makeup, she told me once, under her breath between takes, that a dog bit her, and that her real name was Regina.
Somehow, Miss Iris heard us talking and I knew I was in real trouble, not like the pretend trouble they trapped me in every other day. I used to dream of taking her by her scarred hand and crawling under our desks and through the little door in the corner to Carcosa or anywhere they’d never find us, but we always got caught. They did things to us that I remember more vividly than anything that happened to me when I was awake. I knew the nightmares were punishment, but I knew I’d be punished no matter what I did.
A week later, I persuaded a slow kid named Richard to switch masks with me, just for the morning sing-along and the visit from Queen Camilla. I felt like I was wearing somebody else’s glasses. Halfway through the song, Richard had a seizure. Miss Iris punished him for acting up, thinking it was me. The camera was on her and not me, but all the kids laughed when I took off Richard’s mask.
The nightmares got worse. I started wetting my bed and cutting myself. Soon after that, I guess, I poisoned Miss Iris’s tea.
That night, the nightmares stopped, and the next day, Miss Iris chose me to make a wish in the Wishing Well.
A few hours after night fell, I gave up reading by flashlight and began belatedly clearing a level patch of ground to bed down on, when I heard someone stalking through the bushes. Not walking or crashing around, but stealthily picking a path, waiting in silence before taking the next step.
Rush hour traffic had thinned, but now the night shift flew by on all sides, more than fast enough to kill a pedestrian. I played the flashlight over the shaggy walls of bottlebrush and vine-draped trees, but they got up behind me.
I jumped back, reaching into my backpack for my knife and strewing my food at my feet.
The tall, skinny black guy in a tracksuit looked like an ashy mummy. I was sure I’d seen him on TV. A fat white lady with straw for hair brandished an axe that looked like she’d made it out of the brake assembly from a motorcycle. She crinkled noisily and snarled to drive me away from my food. She wasn’t fat, but her clothes were stuffed with plastic shopping bags. The two Latin kids were stupefied by glue or grain alcohol. With matching Cholombian sideburns and pointy boots, they looked like they’d come to see a cockfight. Between them, they held up a guy who might somehow have been all of their offspring. Multiracial and covered in something that stank worse than sewage, he also looked to have been run over by one or more cars.
“Who d’ye think y’are?” the woman screeched. “Can’t camp here!”
“Gotta leave, man,” said the tracksuit mummy. “We need this, y’know what I mean?” His head bobbed and shook like it was trying to escape. His hand shot out like he thought he was juggling something.
“Fuck off, I pay taxes.” I finally found the knife. The pepper spray had gone off inside my backpack. My hand burned. “Your friend needs a hospital.”
The tracksuit mummy came over with his hands up. I let him approach. “He’s past that, man, he just wants to make a wish. I know why you’re here, for real, but my boy, he gonna die before the sun come up, and he just wants to settle up with the—”
The kids screamed and pointed at something in the trees. They turned and ran away, blundering through the tangled overgrowth with the dying man on their shoulders. The woman swung the axe whistling over her head, then threw a coin and spit on the concrete plug in the center of the island. Then she, too, ran off.
The mummy stared, eyes trying to set me on fire. Like he was trying to decide whether to run or drag me with him. I held out a fistful of cash, all I had left. He took it and ran away.
I turned around and tried to see what scared them. All I saw—all I thought I saw—was a sheet blowing in the wind, a wind I couldn’t feel, making it look like a weightless body hurled up out of the trees and wafting off over the northbound 405.
I couldn’t sleep until the sun came up, but they never came back. Around three, a car sped through the cloverleaf ramp on squealing bald tires and threw something heavy enough to break branches onto my island. Kelsey was better than anyone deserved. A canvas Whole Foods bag held a crowbar and a mallet.
In the morning, I turned my mental demolition derby into action of a sort. I played detective on the phone and read tabloids while making coffee and instant oatmeal.
I found the coin the old woman had dropped—a silver dollar with a weird mandala symbol scored into the tail side with a soldering iron. At second glance, the trash around the plugged wishing well was scattered offerings; food, unopened liquor, little bindles of drugs, candy, votive candles filled with dried blood.
At the spot where I thought I saw the sheet, the weeds and ice plant and eucalyptus saplings had tu
rned white, and crumbled and blew away at my touch.
Kelsey would be done with her morning support chat and working in her breakfast nook, squashing online slander with a cat on each knee.
She answered on the first ring. “You’ve been chain-smoking, haven’t you?”
“What’s it to you? You gave me the carton.”
“Your breathing sounds like somebody running in corduroy slacks.”
“Did you go back? Did you see the mask?”
“I went back, but everything was gone.”
“What? It was in the TV, which I was well within my rights to. . . It’s not such a big mess. . .”
“Listen. Everything is gone. Your apartment was cleaned out. It’s not your apartment anymore.”
I fairly screamed and ran into traffic, when she started cackling. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” I couldn’t stay angry at her when she laughed like that, and she didn’t stop until I joined in.
“I told you, didn’t I? They’re going to pluck me out of the world and bury every last trace—”
“Get your binoculars and look at your place.”
Still hyperventilating a little, I zeroed in on my window and saw her standing on my balcony, waving and drinking coffee out of my favorite mug. “Your grand delusion doesn’t hold up to much prodding. I did some research.”
“Leave them alone, they’ll get you, too. . .”
“Relax, I do this for a living. Now, understand, I’m not judging you. I love you for who you are, not who you think you are.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
I probably could’ve handled that better. Without missing a beat, she carried on. “I was able to find the payrolls for the production company. Your grand conspiracy is locked away in a media vault in North Hollywood. The manager let me poke around and scan documents for fifty bucks. They folded in 1975. Golden Class was the only show they produced.”
“Nothing we don’t know. . .”
“I found a class list.”
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