“I came from Utah,” Lundberg said.
“Boy, that’s a surprise.” I suddenly remembered one of Jack Varner’s routines and said: “Hey, they do a lot of nuclear testing in Utah. You know if there are any radioactive Mormons wandering around out there?”
The Mormons turned to each other with stone-hard faces … then abruptly burst out laughing! It was the first time they’d cracked a smile during the entire conversation. I wondered if they were laughing with me or at me.
“Elliot,” Lundberg said, “we really like you. This has been the first of six lectures. May we come back in two weeks to deliver the second lecture?”
“Sure, come the Sunday after next. Early in the morning.”
“Sunday would be rather unusual for us,” Fleetwood said, jotting down the appointment in a tiny black book, “but perhaps in this case we can make an exception. How early should we come?”
“As early as you want. If I’m not home feel free to deliver the lecture to my wife Heather. She loves talking about God at seven or eight-thirty in the morning.”
“Wonderful!” Lundberg said, shaking my hand. “I hope to see you then.”
From the bathroom I heard the sound of the shower shutting off. “Fine, fine,” I said quickly. “Nice chatting with you!” Lundberg and Fleetwood gave me a little wave, then began walking down the hall. At the last second I stuck my head into the hall and called out, “Oh, and by the way, if I don’t answer the door at first just keep knocking until I do. I’m a deep sleeper.” They nodded and waved again, then disappeared.
I closed the door and sat back down on the sofa, crossing one leg over the other, placing my hands on my knee, trying to look as nonchalant as possible. Only a few moments later Heather emerged from the bathroom, running a towel through her wet hair, her fluffy robe wrapped around her slender figure.
“Did I hear someone at the door?” she asked.
“Just salesmen.”
“Really? I wonder how they got into the building. What were they selling?”
“Jokes. I told them you didn’t need any because you were the master joke-writer of the universe.”
Her face darkened again. She threw the towel in my face and yelled, “I don’t need to be patronized!” then stormed off into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
I peeled the soaking towel off my head and dropped it on the coffee table. You couldn’t win with her. You insult her, she gets mad; you compliment her, she gets mad. You might as well insult her and have fun at least.
I glanced over at the bedroom door. What could she be doing in there? My mind began weaving horrible scenarios: I saw Heather bursting through the door, screaming Henny-Youngmanesque one-liners as she impaled me through the heart with the sharpened end of a bedpost. I crept over to the bedroom, pressed my ear up against the door, and listened. I could hear nothing. “Uh, are we still going over to Danny’s place?” I asked.
Heather’s muffled voice came floating through the door: “Will you leave me alone for one second? I have to get dressed, don’t I? What, you want me to go naked?”
“Not unless you want to frighten Danny into a paralytic state, then we’d never be able to talk to him.” Something heavy slammed into the door from the opposite side. The sharpened bedpost, perhaps? I retreated into the kitchen … where I soon began to feel guilty about the practical joke I had played on Heather with the Mormons. I considered jotting down on her calendar for the Sunday after next: “Mormons Coming At 7:00 a.m. HIDE!!!” Then I thought better of it.
I sat back down in the sofa and waited for Heather to emerge from the bedroom, wondering how Lundberg and Fleetwood would fare against her in hand-to-hand combat.
CHAPTER 5
Never Mind the Orangutan
(September 24, 2014)
Heather owned a fucked-up green Volkswagen Bug that her mother had given her a hundred years ago. It was held together with safety pins, Crazy Glue, and duct tape and was always breaking down on her, particularly on the freeway. I often told her she should just get rid of it and buy a motorcycle, but she wouldn’t hear of that. She said the car was “reliable.” I told her it was probably cursed or inhabited by the souls of dead Nazis or both. The car gave me bad vibes, but Heather insisted that this was just another excellent reason to keep it.
At any rate the car got us to Danny’s apartment in West Hollywood, an area inhabited by queers and junkies and hookers, as well as movie stars and businessmen with excess money to burn looking for varying combinations of the three. The area Danny lived in was pretty expensive. How he could afford to continue living there I had no idea. I know his dad’s pension covered the rent and some of the bills, but by no means all the expenses. I always assumed the two of them were just barely making it, which is no doubt one reason why the development deal was so important to Danny. Heather tried to convince me of exactly that as we parked outside the liquor store across from Danny’s apartment building. I told her the problem went far deeper. “Just watch,” I said, “you’ll see.”
We walked across the street toward the building, which was a weird, depressing kind of place above a Chinese restaurant where they had avant-garde poetry readings on Sunday nights. The building had always disturbed me, though for reasons that were mostly indefinable. One of the most peculiar aspects of the building was that it seemed to have been built for people no more than five feet tall. I’m almost six feet, and I constantly had to duck in order to squeeze through the doorways. I think the place was originally intended to be an office building; the hallways were too narrow, the windows too small, the apartments too close together. For some reason the pipes in the ceiling were exposed for all to see. At the top of each flight of stairs was a heavy door that had to be forced open. After you’d managed to slip through, it would swing shut behind you with a deafening slam like the entrance to an underground cell in an Alexandre Dumas novel. Perhaps worst of all, some rocket scientist had decided to paint every hallway in the building in a dull, bluish-gray color that was deadening to both the eyes and the human soul itself. As far as I knew Danny had lived in this building all his life. No wonder he was so screwed-up.
Danny lived at the end of a windowless hall on the third floor. Across from his apartment were a flight of stairs that led up to the laundry room on the roof. Late at night sometimes Danny went up there and practiced his act with only the stars and the clouds as an audience. He claimed that some of those shows were among his very best.
Heather and I paused outside Danny’s door, or at least what I thought was Danny’s door. I could hear loud music blaring from within; this disoriented me. For a second I thought I had somehow overshot his floor. Danny’s father had stopped listening to music roundabout 1963, and Danny rarely ever listened to music. He always seemed bored by it somehow. I don’t think any composer could ever match the dissonant cacophony going on inside his head. Nevertheless, rap music was now erupting from the apartment at such a deafening volume that it was causing the walls to vibrate.
Heather noticed the confusion in my face. “What’s wrong?” she said.
I didn’t respond. I checked the number on the door. No doubt about it, it was Danny’s apartment. I had to knock about eight or nine times before he finally opened the door.
“Elliot!” he said, an uncharacteristic Cheshire grin spreading across his face. He seemed happy to see me—ebullient, in fact. Only a week ago I couldn’t have imagined the word ebullient ever applying to Danny. “Come in Elliot, come in Heather, join the party!” It was as if our argument had never occurred.
He took me by the arm, leading me into the living room where Griffin sat on the sofa bending over a glass coffee table. Lines of white powder lay spread out atop the glass like even regiments of soldiers seen from very high in the air. A dozen of Griffin’s friends, the avant-garde posse that followed her around like rock ‘n roll groupies, stood around the table waiting their turn. I’d run into them several times before at Prospero’s and other clubs. A few of them were b
lack, but most were effete whites. They looked like a pack of genetically-engineered, hipster-Goth hybrids that had somehow managed to crawl, unbidden, out of a Daniel Clowes comic book adaptation of Walter Hill’s The Warriors. For some reason they seemed to be wearing Gothic dark clothes mixed with hipster accoutrements like bowler hats, suspenders, and adhesive walrus moustaches. Despite their clownish attire, these jokers never appeared to clown around. In fact, as far as I could tell they lacked the ability to discern the difference between a joke and a political slogan. Maybe that’s why they loved Griffin’s routines so much. Most of her act consisted of little more than angry tirades against right-wing politicians, which is probably why Heather couldn’t stand Griffin’s shtick. Heather despised soapbox sermons dressed up as standup comedy routines.
At the moment Griffin’s personality seemed to fill the entire room. A stereo system with huge speakers had been plugged into the wall socket behind the couch. Griffin’s updated rendition of “Fuck the Police” (in which the word “police” was replaced throughout with the names of almost every popular comedian on the L.A. circuit, recorded for a CD she had produced on her own that she often sold—or tried to sell—at her shows) was thundering out of the speakers. I suddenly flashed on a routine that Danny used to do a couple of years ago where he’d recite the words from “Fuck the Police” in a high-falutin’ voice as if it were a lyric poem by Shelley or Wordsworth. It was one of the funniest routines I’d ever seen on stage. Now Danny was shaking his hips to the rhythm as if he were actually getting into it; he wasn’t joking.
“Say hello to some of my good friends,” Danny said. “You already know Karen.” Griffin glanced up briefly. “Greetings, people of Earth,” she said as she craned her head back, held a finger over her right nostril, then snorted like a rhinoceros with a head cold; it was far from the most attractive sound in the world. A few seconds later she leaned over another white line, switching the two-inch long plastic straw to her right nostril.
By this time Danny had begun introducing some of the other people in the room. “This is VoidIndigo, TweeBoy19, Plumlight, and Po’Belly.”
“Jesus Christ,” Heather said, “it sounds like a law firm that only hires Bronies or pedophiles or both.”
They glared at her with bloodshot eyes ringed by baggy, purple shadows. Their porcelain-smooth faces seemed to have been untainted by a single laugh since the moment of their conception—perhaps even before.
“Tough room,” Heather muttered under her breath.
Danny continued as if Heather had never opened her mouth: “And over here is Count St. Germain, Exegesis, Memewire—” Before Danny could finish rattling off the rest of the Peanut Gallery (thank God), Griffin said, “Yo, Danny. Your turn.”
“Oh, okay, uh, hold on a second,” he said to me, then started walking toward the coffee table where Griffin was straightening out a line of coke with a razor blade.
I grabbed Danny by the elbow and whispered, “Can I speak to you for a second?”
An expression of utter distress swept over his face. “Can’t it wait?” he said, gesturing toward the coffee table.
“Nope. I’d say it’s pretty urgent.”
Danny sighed, rolling his eyes, then turned to Griffin and said, “Uh, save my place in line, okay?”
I dragged Danny into the bathroom under the disapproving stares of the Peanut Gallery. Before I shut the door behind us I saw Heather staring at me with wide, panicked eyes. “Don’t you dare leave me alone with these nutjobs!” her expression screamed. I felt bad for her, but could do nothing. Sacrifices must sometimes be made during wartime.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I said, backing Danny up against the sink.
“What do you mean?” He seemed genuinely confused.
“Since when the hell do you do coke?”
“Since … I don’t know, a little while ago. Karen gave me some. It’s cool, man.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Is your father here?”
“Of course not. I threw him some pocket change and told him to go to the track. He won’t be back for hours. You know him, he’d die at the horse races if he could.”
“What would he think about all of this?”
Danny stared at me for a long time, then laughed. “Since when did you become such a moralist?”
“I’m not being a moralist. I just don’t understand. Who goes from doing nothing to … to doing cocaine. It’s unheard of. That’s like going from diapers to winning a pissing contest in a week.”
“Listen, do you want some? If so, I can ask Karen—”
I almost slapped him upside the head. “No, I don’t want some! I can’t believe this. You get one development deal and you suddenly fall into every Hollywood cliché in existence—and maybe even managed to make up some new ones of your own. Who’re those trick-or-treaters out there? You used to make fun of these people, now you’re snorting lines with them. What’s next, celebrity orgies in Pacific Palisades?”
Danny just waved me away. “Whatever, man.”
“Whatever? Is that the best you can come up with? What happened to the quick-witted Danny Oswald? Jesus, how did you lose it so fast?”
“Lose what?”
“The truth is you never would’ve thought of doing this shit before you lost your sense of humor.”
“Are we back on that again? I think you’re just jealous. You don’t want to see me making new friends. You want me to be tied to you forever so you can ride my coattails to fame and fortune.”
“Is that what you think or is that what Griffin thinks?”
Danny just shrugged. Translation: “What Griffin thinks.”
“Have you been paying attention to the news lately?” I said.
“What’s to pay attention to? Nothing matters. The world’s a cesspool; it’s a fucking piece of rotting meat and we’re the maggots crawling around on its surface.”
“Well, make up your mind. First it’s a cesspool, then it’s a piece of rotting meat. Aren’t you mixing your metaphors just a tiny bit?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“There’s a plague going on out there.” I pointed out the bathroom window.
“I know, we’re it.”
“I’m not talking metaphorically, man. The CDC announced it today. They’ve discovered a virus that’s affecting people all over the world. It attacks the humor centers of the brain. Do you realize what that means?”
“Wait a minute, are you sure you’re not the one who’s been sniffing something funny? There are no ‘humor centers’ of the brain. Someone’s pulling your leg, man.”
“I heard it on the news!”
“Yeah, like the news never gets anything wrong.”
“The doctors went through the symptoms of the disease. They said that anyone who has it will feel just like they always do. They won’t realize they’re sick, that their sense of humor has been totally stripped away.”
“Well, that’s a pretty convenient disease, particularly for the CDC. ‘Hey, everybody, whip out your wallets to buy a vaccine for a disease you don’t even know you have!’ Can’t you recognize a scam when you see one?”
“They’re not offering a vaccine.”
“Of course not, it’s too early. First they’ll want funds to ‘develop’ it. Yeah, they’ll probably be able to welch off the government for a good ten years or so before people begin to get wise, just like with the whole AIDS thing. Damn, these CDC guys are clever, aren’t they? Right around the time people begin questioning the idea that AIDS even exists, the CDC makes up a whole new disease that you can’t prove is real. I mean, a sense of humor is a pretty subjective thing don’t you think? Who’s to say who has a sense of humor and who doesn’t? The CDC is filled with a bunch of fucking charlatans. Oh, man, I’m so glad I hooked up with Karen. She’s been giving me a crash course education during the past few days. Did you know that AIDS is really a chemical-biological warfare weapon created by the American government to wipe out blacks and gay
s? There’s this book called AIDS and the Doctors of Death that lays out all the hardcore evidence and—”
“Danny?”
“Yeah?”
“Just answer one question. How do you make a hormone?”
A blank stare. “What do you mean? You can’t ‘make’ a hormone. A hormone’s a chemical substance formed in the body.”
“Nope. You kick her in the stomach.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Good-bye, Danny.” I turned my back on him and reached for the doorknob. I didn’t even want to look at him. It was far too sad a sight.
I emerged from the bathroom to see Griffin offering a straw to Heather. “Sure you don’t want to do some?” Griffin said. “There’s plenty to go around.”
“You know, that reminds me,” Heather said, wagging her finger in the air. “The other day I was walking down the street and this scummy lookin’ dude comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, honey, you want to buy some crystal?’ Well, I hadn’t done amphetamines in a long time so I said, ‘Sure, let’s see it.’ The guy reaches into his coat and whips out a stack of clear crystal plates. I go, ‘What the hell’s that?’ And he goes, ‘This is the crystal. You want to buy some silverware with it?’ and pulls out a couple of shiny forks and knives. So I just told him I was on the wagon and walked away. I wasn’t in the mood for jokers, you understand.”
The Neo-Gothic Hipster Peanut Gallery stared at her with dead, empty expressions.
“So … is that a yes or a no?” Griffin said.
“Uh, that’s a no, I think,” Heather said.
I placed my hand on Heather’s shoulder. “We have to go now.”
“Aw, so soon?” Griffin said, trying (not so hard) to pretend that she was sad.
“Yes, it’s unfortunate I know, but they who play cannot stay.” I motioned for Heather to follow me toward the door. She was more than happy to do so. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Danny emerge from the bathroom. One of the Neo-Gothic revelers—Plumlight, I think—said, “Next time you must really stay longer. We hardly got to know each other.” His voice dripped with fey sarcasm. Something about the way he said it made me intensely paranoid. All of a sudden I imagined the pinheads attacking us en masse, sinking their teeth into our necks and drawing the humor out of our bodies pint by pint. I sensed I was in great danger, but then again I often feel that way—sometimes (I suppose) with no justification. This time I wasn’t taking a chance, however.
Until the Last Dog Dies Page 7