South on Highland: A Novel

by Liana Maeby

  But for one night, I felt better. After talking for hours, Mari and I curled up against one another in the master bed, still in our prom dresses, leaving the boys to make do with the disappointing familiarity of their own bodies.

  INT. HOSPITAL EXAM ROOM - DAY

  Leila vomits into the sink, then sits down on the exam table. Her hair is a mess, and her eye makeup smeared.

  A knock and then a FILIPINO DOCTOR enters. He immediately spots the mess in the sink and bites his lip.

  DOCTOR

  Okay, Miss Massey. What brought you here today?

  LEILA

  I keep throwing up. I can’t stop.

  DOCTOR

  How long has this been going on?

  LEILA

  Six hours. Maybe seven.

  The doctor looks Leila over.

  DOCTOR

  And what did you take?

  She pauses a moment.

  LEILA

  Um, I had a few beers. And a friend gave me a Vicodin, I think. Is that what they’re called? I didn’t realize the combination would make me so sick.

  DOCTOR

  Anything else in your system?

  LEILA

  No. It was a stupid mistake. No more of that for me.

  DOCTOR

  And can I ask where you consumed these substances?

  LEILA

  A party. At a friend’s house. We’re all going off to college, so it was a big celebration. I know better now, and I’ll never do it again.

  The doctor looks at Leila for another second and sighs. Then goes to his prescription pad and starts to scribble.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The fedora is a creased felt hat worn usually by men, sometimes by women. The name comes from an 1882 play by French dramatist Victorien Sardou—called, appropriately enough, Fédora—in which the female protagonist spent her stage time prancing about in a topper very similar to what is now labeled the “fedora.” Thus, a grand linguistic leap was made. The hat is often associated with the Prohibition era, the Depression era, private detectives in noir films, and young Hollywood assholes of two very distinct types.

  The first breed of fedora asshole is a nightlife dude who prowls Sunset Boulevard with a skinny blonde on his arm and a pair of scuffed boots with the laces undone on his feet. His fedora is designer. He might be a commercial director, or he might be a stylist at Rudy’s Barbershop who once produced a music video for a piano rock band. The second type of fedora douchebag pairs his hat, usually procured at Goodwill, with an oversized trench coat. He is pasty and doughy with stringy hair. He works at a niche video store and once wrote fan mail to Alfred Hitchcock’s granddaughter. How do I know so much about fedoras? I attended USC film school, which happens to boast a rare ecosystem where both kinds of fedora assholes coexist in equal numbers. The fedora, I learned, is the secret scale upon which Hollywood balances.

  USC also boasted such attractions as a sound design professor who used R2-D2 as a unit of measurement. As in “For the sound of the Apache chief’s arrow whizzing past our hero’s ear, the engineer recorded a Frisbee zooming over a gulch approximately as wide as ten R2-D2s.”

  There was an elderly French-Canadian screenwriting prof who’d forget what country he was in and occasionally trail off in a language no one understood. We were all pretty clear on the concept of the denouement, though—“class is over.”

  There was a grad student from a fancy Southern plantation family who used his thesis film to explore his own debilitating addiction to ’70s pornography. There was a fistfight over Truffaut versus Godard. (No one won.) There was a female cinematography instructor who used her own work on a lesbian erotica film to demonstrate a lighting technique. (No one came.)

  I was pursued by USC because of my sparkling glass table of a high-school academic record and my reputation as the teenage bard of Los Angeles. I was ceremoniously handed a partial scholarship. After a solid, responsible fifteen seconds of reflection, I decided to forgo a tiny shared room in the USC dorms, and I moved into an apartment in Silver Lake with Mari—who was taking a year off to find herself.

  “This place could work,” Mari said on the afternoon we went to check out the apartment. She stood in the living room and peered through the bars on the windows to get a look at the view.

  “Definitely,” I said, joining her at a window. The scenic highlight from the spot proved to be the signage on the liquor store down the street. “I mean, it’s pretty nice, right?”

  “Totally.” Mari nodded. “It’s amazing.”

  She was lying, of course. The place was a dump. The heat didn’t work, there were mouse droppings in the cabinets, and a layer of filth had settled on top of every surface. But it didn’t matter, because the place was ours. The first day I moved in, I hired a teenage graffiti artist named Carlos, the younger brother of one of my new neighbors, to paint a Virgen de Guadalupe mural on my bedroom wall—not a religious thing but an offering to my new home on the east side of LA. For years, the visage of this candy-colored mother of Christ was there to tuck me into bed as the sun came up, my nose swollen and running all over the books and scripts that shared my pillow. Later, she would haunt me as I made my first of many attempts to grapple with the demands of a rehab program.

  Like a lot of people who’ve been through twelve-step programs, I’ve always had trouble with the third step, the one that asks you to recognize the existence of a higher power into whose sticky hands you’re supposed to place your life. It’s not the sheer existence of a God-type thing I’ve had trouble conceiving—in fact, a pretty clear impression of this highest of beings comes to mind pretty quickly. But that’s the problem. I can, in fact, envision a fully formed God—which only means that I can’t imagine anyone so complicated giving half a shit about me and my problems.

  In my mind, God lives in regimented detachment from the world he created. He spends quiet mornings in the deepest recesses of nature (no way God hikes, though), then swoops down to the suburbs to catch a Little League game. He is stoic and introverted; he feels things deeply, but he is quite cautious. This God weeps thunderstorms in front of brick-red Rothkos, but he doesn’t interfere with the bloody noses of an amphetamine addict who once stole a bottle of Ritalin from the third grader she was supposed to be teaching to read Roald Dahl.

  Isn’t this how you’d behave if you were God? It’s how I would operate for sure, but maybe that’s why I’m the one with the debilitating addiction problem. In my experience, it has always been harder to watch suffering than to bear it, although perhaps that’s because the bearer is able to turn away. And after some-fraction-of-infinity years spent watching over suffering, after seeing the repetition of the same old shitty patterns, the same flaws begetting the same flaws, a God who was in fact perfect would start to turn his gaze toward other things.

  Folks often make use of the phrase “he’s only human” to describe the little foibles that make up our daily lives—lashing out at a coworker during a hard afternoon at the office (as if I’d know anything about office work); forgetting to attend a friend’s party; hiding copies of Barely Legal Whatever-Turns-You-On underneath the mattress. Implicit in the term “human” is contrast to the way a god would behave. So then God’s infinitely free, yet still infinitely patient and infinitely compassionate? I don’t buy it. Or rather, I give God a little more credit than that.

  Maybe my problem is that if I’m going to imagine a higher power at all, I can only conceive of him in human terms. In fact, he sounds like a lot of the people in my life. So perhaps my subconscious is telling me that it’s these folks I need to make peace with, to ask for help, and not God. But that’s the ninth step.

  Maybe my problem is that I’ve never been very good with order.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As much as I liked setting up mousetraps in my new apartment and gazing out at the word “Liquor,” most of my time was spent at school. My favorite spot on campus was the Marcia Lucas Post-Production Facility, which was truly my kind of joint. I
t was open all night and was a place where staring intently at one thing with Dyson-like focus for hours upon hours was actually encouraged.

  One Wednesday around midnight, I headed to the edit room to work on the expletive-only David Mamet parody I had to finish by the end of the week. I was tired, but the idea of sitting down and crafting this video until it was as close to perfect as possible really appealed to me. There were a few other students in the room—an exhausted girl who wouldn’t stop rubbing her eyes, a lanky guy who kept stepping outside to ingest Red Bulls, and Jed.

  Jed was always in the edit room. He was working on a shot-by-shot re-creation of Star Wars, and his goal was to make it exactly like the original. He’d been at the project, his master’s thesis, for two years. He waited for me to load my video up, then called me over. “Hey, Leila. What do you think of this Wookiee sound?”

  I put on Jed’s headphones, which were tight and sweaty, and a wild growl assaulted my skull. The effect didn’t sound un-Wookiee-like, but it was rather wetter than I would have expected. “Wow,” I said. “What is that?”

  “I ate an entire Meat Lover’s pizza and recorded myself vomiting into the toilet. What you’re hearing is actually that sound played backwards. I wanted something really guttural, you know?”

  “Well, it’s definitely guttural. Maybe add a little . . . reverb?”

  “Yeah. Reverb. Cool. Reverb.”

  I left Jed muttering and returned to my station. I liked him. Jed had idolized George Lucas his whole life, and in his mind, copying Lucas would make him just as good as Lucas. I didn’t think that was how it worked, but I admired the strategy nonetheless. Plus, it was always nice to spend a little time around a total weirdo. It helped keep my own life in perspective.

  The other thing I liked about Jed was that he knew about my drug problem and he didn’t give a shit. When we were the only two people in the room, I would snort up my powders right in front of him, and he did me the kindness of not even acknowledging it. We’d edit together until the sun rose outside our windowless South LA haven, and the regular people with their unfathomable normal hours started to show up. I liked Jed just about the best of anyone I’d met at school.

  That night, the two other kids in the room eventually shut down their computers and left for their beds. My drugs came out. I’d locked the picture on my Mamet thing but didn’t feel like going home yet. Jed was still there at his station, staring and clicking and nodding away. I watched him and snorted a bump off the edge of my car key.

  “Hey, Jed?” I said.

  Jed took off his headphones and swiveled his chair around to face me.

  “Are you a virgin?”

  I didn’t ask it to be mean—I was just curious, and Jed didn’t take offense, just like I knew he wouldn’t.

  “Yeah,” he said without shyness. “I got close once, with this pretty Leia from a convention, but that was a couple years ago.”

  I nodded and examined his expression, but I couldn’t read it. I was in the mood for a cigarette. Instead, I asked, “Would you like to not be a virgin?”

  It didn’t take long at all, and I didn’t even bother locking the door. Once we were finished, I kissed Jed on the top of his head and gathered up my stuff. He sat there very still, with that same undecipherable expression on his face, until he finally smiled at me. It was a very gentle grin and, again, not at all shy. I smirked back and did that thing where you separate your fingers V-like.

  “Live long and prosper,” he said. “That’s Star Trek, though.”

  “Oops.” I shrugged and headed out.

  The next day, I found myself staring at the mural that covered the handball court outside North Valley Middle School. A multiracial family held hands in front of a boxy house with a smoking chimney and a white picket fence. Above the house, a rainbow and a sun did their damnedest to invalidate all the lessons in proportion being taught on the other side of the high wall. The rainbow had only four colors, and the sun wore sunglasses—I couldn’t decide if that showed that the sun was overconfident or had low self-esteem. That was the question that plagued me as I waited for Jordan, my smart and charismatic new Adderall dealer, who happened to be twelve years old.

  Jordan was late, and I was impatient. He was a child actor I became acquainted with at a classmate’s barbecue, and the star of DracuLia, a hip and modern retelling of the Dracula story that airs on ABC Family. He played Lia’s half-vampire little brother, cursed with the catchphrase “Anyone want to fang out after school?” Jordan ran a hell of an impressive drug ring, selling off the overflow from the prescriptions of dozens of his hyperactive preteen buddies. He might have been a budding criminal mastermind, but at the moment he was just late.

  I checked my phone. There was a text from Mari asking me to pick up more rattraps and a missed call from my mother I wouldn’t be returning anytime soon. But nothing from Jordan. I settled on the idea that the sun can be arrogant and insecure at the same time.

  Finally, Jordan rounded the corner on his skateboard, wearing a Dodgers cap and bright-white sneakers. He nearly crashed into me before hopping off his board and giving me a big hug. “Sorry,” he said. “Math test.”

  “How’d you do?”

  “I think you mean how did Micah Goldberg, who sits in front of me, do?”

  I shook my head and thought about telling the kid not to cheat.

  Jordan looked around and pulled a stuffed animal from his backpack. The cloth monkey’s stomach had been hollowed out, and my drugs were nestled inside.

  “What’s this one’s name?” I asked.

  “Skeeter. My cousin won him shooting guns at a fair.”

  I put Skeeter in my purse. I could never bring myself to throw these stuffed animals away, so my bedroom had become a graveyard to Jordan’s childhood. I handed the kid a book, Huckleberry Finn this time. A wad of cash was taped to page sixty-seven.

  “Finished with On the Road yet?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I read it in, like, two days. It was awesome.”

  “You a Sal Paradise man or a Dean Moriarty man?”

  “Dean, obviously. He’s the one with the real balls. I want to take a trip like that when I turn sixteen.”

  I smiled.

  “Oh, hey, Leila—bad news. The Becker twins, these eighth graders who have thirty-mil scripts, got shipped off to some program for fuckups in Arizona. So I might be a little short next week.”

  “Okay, pal,” I said, though my brain was thinking, Shit, shit, shit.

  I wanted to tell the kid to study for his math tests, to stop dealing drugs, and, no matter what, to never, ever start taking them.

  But Jordan probably already did tons of drugs, and he probably already had straight A’s—it takes one to know one, after all. He was surely going to get into a great college and continue his career as a cute kid actor. And who was I to offer advice to anyone? It was eighty-five degrees out, and I was wearing leather. I felt chilly, yet sweat clung to my back like toxic seawater inside a wet suit. So instead of saying anything, I started to walk away. In my head, I was already inside my Prius, crushing up pills atop my Tom Waits CD case and inhaling a way through the rest of the day.

  “Hey, Leila,” Jordan said when I was halfway down the block. I turned back around. “Do you want to go to the spring formal with me?”

  I grinned and gave the kid a little salute.

  “It’s during lunch.”

  In my head, the drugs were already inside my body, and I was working harder and harder until I couldn’t feel anything at all.

  “See you next time,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I was in my second year of college when I met Harlan Brooks, the man who remains to this day my fair-weather agent. He called me up out of the blue one afternoon, saying he’d heard about this whiz-kid writer with a pen like Sam Shepard’s and a body like Samantha Mathis’s. And he wanted to know if I’d join him for dinner. I almost hung up, but I thought it might be my dealer, Angus, playing a dumb joke, and
I’d been having trouble tracking him down.

  “Angus?” I asked.

  “Who? No, this is Harlan Brooks, calling you from my sunny corner office on La Cienega—”

  “Come on, idiot, you haven’t seen the sun in a decade—”

  “Hey, take it easy. I’m calling to tell you that I think you’re the next big thing and—”

  “Seriously, Angus, would you knock it off?”

  Harlan took a breath. “Look, Leila, I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot. I shouldn’t have said that thing about Samantha Mathis. It’s an outdated reference for one. Someone like Rachel Bilson is probably a better choice. Anyway, I’m trying to tell you that I’ve been following your work for a few years—I’m kind of a theater buff, really. I mean, I played Tevye in high school. Anyway, I’d like to take you to dinner to talk about what I think you and I can do together. Does that sound like something you can work with?”

  I paused and asked weakly, “Are you sure you’re not Angus?”

  Harlan just laughed and hung up.

  I called my dealer to confirm that he was, in fact, a separate human, and when he picked up, I went over there. Angus was a seventh-year senior at UCLA who still lived in the dorms with his ferret, Angus. His door was double-padlocked from the inside, and when he opened it slightly to appraise me, I looked straight into a pair of wild, bloodshot eyes.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for days.”

  Angus let me into his room, and I sat down on a pile of books that had served as a makeshift chair for as long as I’d been coming here.