by Trevor Eve
A life that had no handbrake, only an accelerator, a throttle, it was jammed and going in the wrong direction. Stop the race, it’s a life that needs no victory. God. Please. But no one listened to the torment and the pleading.
Aren’t there too many screaming, pleading people, all screaming and pleading at the same time? All the noise. All the chaos. Seven billion screams.
And so, the father crashed, so to speak, let go of the grip on his own life. The fatal final autonomous disintegration – all the worry over.
He would never be made any younger.
His canvas could bring no joy anymore.
Ever would be forever bereft.
Chapter Nine
Lomita Nairn lay on the crisp white cotton sheet, having thrown off her lilac quilt. There remained almost no indentation as she turned her body till her legs were dangling over the bed. She reached for the Oban and pulled at the stopper. How much longer will these hands be able to prise the plastic-topped cork out of the bottle, with a twist-requiring grip? It was something that would end one day. She sat up, excited by the decision to have another sip of the Oban. The drowsiness had not taken over with the pill, her brain was still telling her things she did not want to hear. She would change that and think about what she wanted to think about until her peace came.
These nights developed in thought but she would always try to force them back to something happy, sometimes to Bobby Layne.
She finished the sip with a cracking smile.
*
Her town in the 1950s, Pittsburgh, was hell with the lid off.
The steel industry produced the dense fog of pollution that had clouded the city, creating a darkness of apocalyptic gloom. Lomita had grown up with the demoralising legend of the ‘valuable man’ escaping the city for New York or Los Angeles because he could no longer face life in the grime. Running away: and the concept of a new life would grow from this seed planted in her brain.
She plumped her pillows and lay back with the memory of playing outside and running around, simple enough but the air was filthy from the coal-burning steel works. There was a wheeze in the chest, a sting in the eye, and that smell in the air. Still, the pollution that caused the infamous midday dullness very slowly gave way to brighter days as natural gas was pumped in to provide energy. Buildings were being sandblasted to remove the grime. The transformation had started.
A second chance. Everything deserves that, she thought. And everyone.
Duquesne, just outside city limits, was where they moved to, so that her father had easier access to the factory. That was his world. Work and steel.
Then the dark-haired, doughnut-cheeked image came to her. Standing on the podium at her school. Glasses, slow talking, extremely shy, instantly forgettable, yet she never forgot.
‘If you want go, go out and get it. Find a light and follow.’
Spoken in a monotone without the enthusiasm that the words implied.
He had only got to New York at this stage, drawing shoes for the manufacturer Israel Miller, but he had escaped. He was free. And he had brought with him some of his work that had been in an exhibition in New York. He had made it, broken away. His name was Andrew Warhola. He had attended her school, Schenley High School, and was now returning to speak as part of the ‘Everything Is Possible – Just try’ programme.
Then just a few years later he burst into prominence and covered his birthplace in glory. Although Heinz and its 57 varieties and the Steelers had been doing that for nearly half a century.
She did meet Andrew Warhola after the talk, along with a whole crowd of girls keen to be in the presence of someone who had escaped. He would soon morph into the silk-screen printing, flaxen-bewigged Andy Warhol and truly do Pittsburgh proud.
‘Drawing shoes.’
Lomita voiced to the room, still amazed at how people start and blossom, and wondering what kind of shoes Warhol would have produced had he continued.
This reflection made her sad, not about the missed career of a shoe designer, but about the idea of being allowed to blossom.
She took another sip, and then followed it with an inhalation of the malt aroma.
Two people, same place, with dreams of changing their lives.
But it hadn’t ended that well for him, for Andy, he was dead. Fifty-eight. Luck, that’s what you need.
Luck, her foulest four-letter word.
Her best friend at the time, Betsy, was moved away, along with hundreds of other impoverished families, to make way for redevelopment. The new city.
Lomita felt a guilt when she became aware that she was going to benefit from the removal of less fortunate people like Betsy. But this development enabled her to leave school and find employment at the newly built Carlton Hotel on Bigelow Boulevard.
It was either that or the Henry, both completed in the mid-fifties, but the Carlton won her over because she had read about the hotel of the same name in the South of France, in the magazines she scanned as quickly as she could at the news stand before the paper vendor complained about her lack of purchase.
She had seen pictures of the elegance of the film festival in Cannes, and she would close her eyes standing on the sidewalk. She, for that brief moment, became one of those women in a silk taffeta gown with curled hair, bobbing in the gentleness of the breeze while the cameras popped and people shouted for her to turn this way and that, and thank her for being her. Just for being her.
And anyway the name Henry reminded her of a spotty boy with a stomach problem who sat next to her on the bus on the way back from school, so there was really no contest; that, and the hour bus ride from Duquesne posed easier access as its drop-off point was on the corner of Grand Avenue, a two-minute walk from her place of work. Her decision was made – the Carlton Hotel.
It was the gem in a city that was witnessing wealth and sophistication. The molten steel solidifying into money.
Her employment was as a chambermaid and this, she felt, rather like an air stewardess, carried a new-style status, enabling contact with that amazing thing for the provincial dweller, the sophisticated out-of-towner.
There was, for her, one memorable visitor to the hotel, who had come from Los Angeles to watch the newly-merged Dons and Rams play the Pittsburgh Steelers; the Steelers won that game 27–26 in the last three minutes. Saved by an eighty-yard touchdown pass from the Steelers’ quarterback Bobby Layne.
And here we are, revelled Lomita. A gentle fist pump and the barely audible cry:
‘Bobby!’
The result, though still precisely recalled all these years later, had no real interest for Lomita; it was all about Bobby Layne, who she had a crush on – from a distance – a crushingly heavy one. Her first sense of weakness in the knees, pining and obsession. She had learnt all his statistics and scores just in case she ever met him. She got nervous in anticipation of the meeting and imagined the panic that would lead her to vomit forth all these facts just to show her interest in him and the game.
She now felt a laughing sigh of relief, and an amazement that she still remembered some of those useless facts.
Other than that, that particular game just meant she had to pull a double shift: the hotel was filled to capacity.
Until.
The biggest until of her life, well almost.
Bobby Layne standing waiting for the elevator on the second floor. Lomita was pushing her trolley towards the elevator and this 6’ 4”, thick-haired blond, parted on the right, blue eyes, turned towards her and actually spoke.
‘Good evening to you my dear.’
Lomita was now laughing out loud in her room and felt like she felt then, consumed in a fit of giggles. That was all she could do then and all she was doing now.
She couldn’t speak, he too started laughing as he walked into the elevator with a –
‘Bye now.’
She blurted,
‘I like you.’
I like you, she thought, what a strange thing to say. But she said it to Bobby,
a man she never knew. Bobby’s spell had been passed to her. When she arrived in room 412 for a turndown the Memorable Guest said,
‘Go ahead – I’m just leaving.’
Then at the door he turned to her and said,
‘With your beauty,’
He paused, took a breath and started again.
Lomita closed her eyes, clutching her heavy crystal tumbler, recalled the following words that became like an anthem for her.
‘With that ethereal beauty you should be in motion pictures, and if you are ever in the City of Angels, contact me.’
Bobby Layne had made this happen.
This was her dream.
She never forgot the word he used to qualify her beauty – ethereal – she had to make a special trip to the library to find out the meaning. No one she worked with knew what it meant either.
Lomita looked over at the cushion on the other side of the expanse of bed. The word ‘Ethereal’ was embroidered on it. Bold, flowing script, in red and green, with dashes of gold thread.
*
She still has the card that he gave her to this day.
Although she feels very differently about it now than she did then. Then, it represented a passport, a ticket, an escape from what she felt was grime and gloom.
Her childhood was coloured grey, she had been in a black and white movie; she always wanted it to be in Technicolor.
Her father would come back every day from the factory with the dirt on his face outlining where his goggles had been. He was grey, the eye protectors leaving a whiteness around his eyes like the area had never seen the sun. Clean and softer, almost baby-like, where the rest was cracked and lined. A mark and facial signature that was always there to her eye, however much he washed – she was embarrassed now at how much she made him wash. Wash and wash. So as not to give away, on their walks down the street to the newly opened department store, just to look around at all the expensive goods under one roof, never to buy, that he was a labourer. Just a welder.
She wanted him to be so much more. Something, at any rate, just a little bit special. He deserved it.
He welded metal beds for the military. His target was a hundred beds a day; his task was legs to frame; he prided himself that he never fell short.
But the work was hot, dull and dark; his spirit was as molten as the joints he welded hour after hour. An industrial boom time for the post-war economy, but the souls doing the work were only comforted by the food in their stomachs, and the football and the hockey and of course the baseball. Their brains were slowly softening, the steel taking all the strength.
‘The spirit is pouring out of us, dying on the factory floor.’
It was the most poetic thing she had ever heard her father say.
*
When her father’s health started to deteriorate, his increasing days off brought no pay and that is when she was forced to find work. She was only sixteen, and had never in any case been considered academic, but she knew that her physical perfection and charm gave her a charisma that made people see her as a little bit special. She had been voted Most Beautiful Girl in her school, a surprise which had led her to enter beauty competitions – pageants – making her own clothes, having watched her mother for hours, moving the materials through the jackhammering needle of the electric machine.
She eventually won the title of Miss Pittsburgh 1959, having won the Rib and Reef Beauty Challenge at the restaurant in town that provided her and her father with all the food they could eat as a victory prize.
But it was the Miss Pittsburgh title that killed her friendship with Joan Happenstance, who came second. It ended a lifetime relationship, albeit a short lifetime, that Lomita had cherished.
With the sweet comes the sting.
It’s lonely at the top.
This final triumph earned her father many free beers in the local bars, their choice not his: he never bragged about his daughter. He was a quiet man, a phased-out man. A man committed to a path for which he acknowledged there was no choice.
The card that she had been given two years earlier lay on top of the cupboard in her bedroom next to a framed picture of her mother sitting proudly behind her Singer sewing machine.
Her mother had done alterations and tailoring for a pittance. The idea of recreating that life was terrifying to Lomita. It made her shiver now at the thought of it, but she hoped she had never made her parents feel they weren’t good enough.
She didn’t want to change dirty sheets in hotel bedrooms anymore, she wanted to fulfil her dream of being on the silver screen. She had no knowledge of what to do if she was ever put on the silver screen, but that did not deter her.
Her mother had taken her own life when Lomita was eleven years old.
She didn’t want to stay with that memory, she wanted to go back to thoughts of Bobby and ethereal beauty.
But there it was for Lomita, clear as day in her mind, the Singer sewing machine, the only thing she owned; her mother left it for her, with a little note.
I hope you never need to use it.
To leave her father had been a trauma and she could only do it by telling him she would be gone for a short time and that she had booked a return ticket. With the money saved she took the Greyhound bus across country and arrived in Los Angeles in 1960, barely eighteen years old, with the calling card secured in her bag. A handbag, and a suitcase made from reconstituted cardboard, contained all that she owned in the world. All except the Singer sewing machine, which remained proudly on top of the cupboard in her bedroom in Duquesne.
She had, with the guilt of a lie, purchased a one-way ticket; the journey had taken the best part of three days.
Lomita returned her bedroom to darkness and laid her head on the pillow, realising her neck was still holding its weight. In forcing herself to relax the image of her standing at the bus station at 6th and Los Angeles Avenue came to mind.
She shed a tear at what she thought then.
The dream starts here.
She had felt, at the bus stop, like Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night.
And, one night, it would.
One day.
Chapter Ten
Ever woke as the sun was coming up.
A fly woke alongside him and darted from skin point to skin point, telling him to wake and supply some food. Or maybe it was just being annoying, but he liked to think everything had a purpose. Even a lonely fly. It was the perfect personal alarm clock.
His mind, he had moved inside to empty his bladder and hopefully relieve his liver of the Patrón, focused on his purpose for being in this city.
He chugged down half a litre of Fiji water as the shower started its slow journey from cold to hot. He stepped under the stream and then turned it to full cold for his daily two minutes. The one relief of warm climates like LA was that the cold never got really cold. A November shower in England was an exhilarating freeze that filled him with resentment until it was over and then he felt exonerated of all guilt. A hair shirt puritan, good for a few drinks at any rate. Through pain comes redemption.
He was building up to it. The visit. The day he would dress in his Cabazon Gucci outlet suit, shirt, no tie, to find the offices of the man who had prevented his father from achieving any success in the last seven years of his life.
An artistic drought for him that took away all that he lived for, stopped his breath from feeding his body, soul, blood and just every cell that needed the life-force to supply the charge that put creation in his hands and fire in his spirit.
A slow and cruel stifling of life.
For money.
For someone else’s uncaring, that word again, and unthought-out confiscation of talent. He was going to pay; when was not clearly set in Ever’s mind. But the surety of action was. Today was the start of that action. But that thought paled in the light of the practicalities that he must first tackle to put the reeling world into some kind of shape before he would take it apart.
With, he thought, a p
leasure.
*
After the brunch in the Parker Hotel in Palm Springs.
Anne, without very much more conversation, took him to her room and they had sex. That is really the only way to describe it. It was practical and seemed to serve as a physical relief, more on her side, really, than his.
The reveal of the complexion on her face, as skin massaged skin, proved sufficiently disturbing for Ever that he was forced to close his eyes to enable climax.
Her bumps, when the make-up was smudged off, swelled a bright red with a sense of fury at being on her face: he thought they must have been uncomfortable for her as his kisses moved from mouth to cheek and quickly back to mouth. The lingering on the face did not encourage him to lick or taste her skin to take the dew of salty sweat that had started its production from the glands as her motion and energy increased.
Her muscle tone was soft, the skin smooth on the body, but the muscle felt to the touch as if no exercise had flowed through its tissue allowing them just the slightest bit of tension to enable upright posture to be possible. She was, he supposed, really quite weak or he imagined if that was his own musculature, that he would feel weak. Incapable.
The aftermath of the coupling produced an increase in conversation, and during the what do you do and where are you from, a question that seems to obsess the pioneer DNA that carries the genetic instructions swirling in the American, his mind returned to earlier times.
He pondered, or more than pondered, he was profoundly moved, by the fact that this was the first intercourse he had had since his separation. He took in the updated 1930s sensation of the room, with its strange bedspread that now lay crumpled on the end of the bed. Striped, in what he understood to be candlewick, alternating with a smooth cotton in three-inch, he guessed, intervals. Chocolate brown, the candlewick, and cream, the cotton, a stark jolt in the dominantly white room. A terrace, potted with dwarf palmetto palms neighbouring the chairs, now received the fade of the sun, which shrouded the mountains in the distance, giving the feeling of space and an endless freedom. And luxury. Organisation and detail that spoke luxury, and allowed one to bask in that which takes effort and time.